THE DEGRADATIONS OF LOVE
Love, being the most powerful agitator of human elements that was ever known, stirs the slime which is always found even in the noblest natures; while in men whose souls have been kneaded with sludge it becomes the greatest coefficient of vice and crime. Love, like all other sentiments, has a pathology of its own, a superior pathology, because it so widens its sphere of action as to enclose a larger field and has more prepotent needs to satisfy. A man incapable of a base deed even though dying of hunger, even though about to lose all that he holds most dear, may compromise with his conscience when a question of love arises, and many, many blemishes stain the texture of the noblest and loftiest natures. Love wants to possess us bound hands and feet, and this is an inexhaustible source of disgrace, guilt, mean cowardice and great crimes.
The degradations of love are as numberless as the grains of sand in the sea, as many as love's own delights; they are of every size and adapt themselves to the infinite degrees of human baseness. It seems to me, however, that in a general study of physiology they can be reduced to two principal forms, that is to say, impotency and prostitution.
Impotency is not only a disease that should receive the care of the physician or the hygienist; it is not only a case which requires the attention of the legislator: but it is a moral shame that must be thoroughly studied by the psychologist who endeavors to outline the natural story of love.
In the very simplest organism of inferior animals every desire of love ceases when age, disease or a wound has exhausted the energy of the genital organs. In man, instead,[Pg 199] the most irresistible and bestial needs are so teeming with psychical elements of the moral and the intellectual world as to survive the disease of the organ. An innocent man loves even without being aware of his manhood, and a woman can die of love although knowing nothing of the existence of the womb. True it is, no amorous note arises in the eunuch, or if the phantoms of a strange lasciviousness are noticed wandering here and there, they are specters that belong to the limbo of the most transcendent pathology. These poor pariahs of nature are, however, very rare; while our rachitic civilization makes by hundreds the semi-eunuchs who fill with cuckoldly ornaments the sanctuary of the family and the low world of wandering loves. Statistics, fortunately, cannot obtain the exact number of these "half-men" and consign them to their inexorable files; be it enough for us to know that they are many, very many, much more numerous than feminine virtue and patience could tolerate.
Nature's whole love, true love, nude but innocent love, is not all sentiment or thought, but also a function of reproductive life, a need of the senses. Martyrs and saints could mutilate themselves and die in the beatitude of their mutilations; but the majority of men does not consist of saints or martyrs. Every mutilation of love is a shame and the most fecund generator of many other minor shames. In the chaste and cool dawn of early youth, more than one woman consented unwittingly to an infamous compact by which a man offered her a great name and great wealth in exchange for a "yes." The wretched man loved her, desired her, but could not possess her as nature commanded man to possess woman; he wished to own the temple and feel the emotion of owning it without having the right to enter it. Sometimes the eunuch was not an abject being and did confess his shame before his betrayal, but the innocent maiden did not understand and accepted the compact. And who does not believe himself a hero or a martyr at that age? And the eunuch embraced his precious prey, inundated her with sterile kisses, and endeavored to warm her with his impotent caresses; and the marmoreal statue of adolescent virginity[Pg 200] trembled with new and, to her, incomprehensible emotions. Later on, the virgin realized that she was a woman, that in vain she was a woman, and love attacked and seized virtue, and felled it despairing and imploring, and the covenant sworn in good faith was broken by the most powerful of affections. How many domestic misfortunes, what a fruitful stream of bastards, how many brigands spring from this contaminated source!
O you, real eunuchs, half-eunuchs, quarter-eunuchs, do not hope to be loved by a woman on whom you have imposed an infamous contract! No virtue, no oath can resist the sacred laws of love; nobody is stronger than nature. And if you have found a heroine, why make a martyr of her? Do you want to be the executioner of her whom you say you love?
And you, generous women, noble women, who can elevate to the highest regions even the lowest passion, do not accept any compact involving a mutilation of love. You, teachers of every kind of sacrifice, you think that you will make happy an outcast of nature, you impose upon yourselves, smiling perhaps, the sublime mission of redeeming a desperate man: but I assure you that neither virtue nor sacrifice nor heroism can stifle that formidable cry of the universe of the living that wants you to be wives and mothers. While the martyr, with the palm of sacrifice tightly pressed to her bosom, will try to smile, a cruel, deep, painful stab in her heart will warn her: "You, Eve and daughter of Eve, will become a mother only through a crime, will enter the sanctuary of sanctuaries, the tabernacle of maternity, only through the door of domestic treason."
No; love is not all senses and all lust. Sentiment can be such a great part of it as to conceal voluptuousness in the most secluded recess of a hidden region. No; woman can be happy even without voluptuousness if she only feels herself loved: but she wishes to love, and should love, "a man." I appeal to all the daughters of Eve, and, to be spared blushing, they may reply with a nod of the head and without moving their lips: Is it not true that you would prefer a[Pg 201] hundred times to be loved by a "real man," even with a vow of chastity, rather than to be profaned and satiated with lust at the hands of a eunuch? Is it not true that above all you want to have for support that firm column called "an honorable man"? And certainly he is not an honorable man who claims the possession of a woman and demands to be loved by her when he is not a man.
The half-men who at forty, at fifty years of age aspire to have a family, after having dragged their half-virility through the lasciviousness of prostitution and the dainties of the erotic kitchen, should never suppose that lechery can take the place of true love in a woman. They can prostitute their spouse, but they can never make her love them earnestly and deeply. They are foredoomed by the inexorable laws of nature to figure largely in the population of cuckoldom.
When impotency falls like a thunderbolt on the head of two happy lovers, it is only a disease, a misfortune that concerns the physician and the pharmacist; but when it precedes love, it is cowardice, degradation, infamy. The honest man should never attempt to conceal it from himself or justify it; he should either courageously renounce love, a thing that does not concern him, or expose the sore and ask the armed hand of the surgeon to cut and cauterize it. Let him become a man again, and then see if he can aspire to the delights of sentiment. Before becoming a farmer, he should possess a farm.
The complicated mechanism of our social organism, in the same manner as it offers to the thirst of ardent youth voluptuousness without love, imposes on many lovers, with a more cruel amputation, love without voluptuousness. Here we have the two chief sources of the thousand sorrows which human society prepares for those who love: "Voluptuousness without love," that is, all the degradations and shames of prostitution; "Love without voluptuousness," that is, all the tortures of enforced chastity. Between these two hells the enamored youth remains a long time suspended, until, to avoid death, he takes lechery and imagination into a somber old boat and flees away with them to hide in the reedy[Pg 202] marshes and among the miasmas of self-abuse—the lowest of the degradations of love, and one which occupies a proper place between impotency and prostitution. Yes; as man enjoys all the Olympus of love, he must also submit to all its degradations.
In the book which I will dedicate to the hygiene of love this problem will be thoroughly studied. Here I shall refer to it only so far as it concerns the physiology of sentiment. It is painful to admit it, but it is true: our modern society has rendered love so difficult to many unhappy creatures as to make them pass under the Caudine Forks of this cruel dilemma: either to buy voluptuousness and counterfeit love with it, or dream of love in the mire of solitary lasciviousness. In one way or the other, we are forced to become counterfeiters and to blush for ourselves at the manner in which we satisfy the most powerful of human needs.
Solitary love is not only a sin against hygiene, and one which kills health and vigor, but it is also an offense against morals, a poison of happiness. He who repeatedly falls into the crime and is frequently obliged to blush, tarnishes more every day the limpid purity of his own dignity, weakens the strong spring of virile resolutions and becomes a greater coward in all the battles of life. While he blushes for himself and curses himself and the love that condemns him to a continuous debasement, he blushes more than ever in the presence of the woman of whom he does not feel worthy and of whom he becomes less worthy at each fall. He poisons the wave of love at its very first source and, even when he later succeeds in loving, has spoiled the purity of his tastes and his aspirations and in the arms of a woman who loves him complains of the solitary twinges of a morbid voluptuousness, like one who, having burned his mouth with the pungent tastes of pipe and brandy, can no longer relish the flavors of pineapple and strawberry.
Love is the greatest of conquests, the sweetest of delights, the joy of joys; to renounce it in order to replace it with degradation is worse than a crime, it is an infamy. Better a hundred times chastity with its sublime tortures, [Pg 203]prostitution with its filth. True and complete love is a splendid banquet under the fragrant trees of a garden, amidst the glittering of the chalices, the harmonies of music and the witty jests of friends; solitary love is a furtive meal with a bone picked up in the fetidness of a dunghill and gnawed in the dark.
Prostitution is, after solitary abuse, the greatest degradation of love, and, what is worse,—it should be said at once,—a necessary one in modern society. Tibullus hurls at it a splendid malediction:
"Jam tua qui Venerem docuisti vendere primus
Quisquis es, infelix urgeat ossa lapis!"
("Whoever thou art who first hast taught to sell the pleasures of love, may an ill-boding stone crush thy bones!")
This imprecation, repeated by all moralists of every succeeding age, could not prevent for one day the sale of love, and universal experience demonstrates that St. Augustine was a sounder philosopher when he wrote:
"Aufer meretrices de rebus humanis, turbaveris omnia libidinibus; constitue matronarum loco, labe ac dedecore dehonestaveris."
("Take the prostitutes out of human things, and you will disturb the whole world with lust; put them in the place of wives, and you will defile home with disease and dishonor.")
If St. Augustine had written but this sentence, I would proclaim him a great psychologist; in a few words he has shown all the sides of the tremendous problem, given a lesson of toleration to the intolerant, of social science to economists, and today, after so many centuries, his words are as true, profound, inexorable as when he addressed them to a world so different from ours.
Difficult problems are not solved by fleeing from or by[Pg 204] concealing them; and yet many physicians, many philosophers attempt to solve the most burning questions of modern society after the manner of a child who by closing his eyes believes that he is fleeing from the dog that threatens him. To Dr. Monlau in Spain and Dr. Bergeret in France, who thought that they would be able to save society by abolishing prostitution, I replied in a few words which I wish to save from the shipwreck of the newspapers in order to gather them in the shadow of this book:
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