FAULTS AND CRIMES OF LOVE
If you ask a hundred women what is the most common fault of love, probably the same reply will be repeated a hundred times: "Love is inconstant; love is a liar." If, on the other hand, you consult the gloomy volumes in which man gathers the statistics of his crimes, you will find several columns bristling with figures indicating the large number of suicides and homicides for love; you will find no records of inconstancy, and but rarely, scattered here and there, some cases of adultery. The jurymen, then, that amorphous and chaotic mass in which every idea of right and wrong dissolves and vanishes, always deal very leniently with crimes for which the code would send the culprit to death or to prison for life, and they often acquit the man who has turned murderer for love.
In none of the human institutions is such impenetrable darkness as in the field of love, where an intricate mass of reticences, contradictions, tolerations and cruelties causes common sense to stumble at every step and, what is worse, offends and wounds the sentiment of justice. It is a written law that adultery is a crime to be punished with the gravest penalties, but in actual life adultery is the most common and most venial sin ever known; it is not only tolerated, but fêted and almost accepted as a social institution. The incitement to prostitution is considered a very serious crime, but many legislators sell their daughters to a rich husband who cannot love her, never will love her and will drive her to adultery with the force of irresistible necessity. And is this not prostitution? Man is either not worthy of the laws which he has imposed on himself, or he is rambling in a[Pg 212] labyrinth of maniacal vertigo; he is either an arrogant blockhead or a shameless liar.
Man is a little of all this, but he is chiefly a hypocrite. He proclaims solemnly to the four winds that he is a son of God and that he inhabits the earth by chance and temporarily; born in Olympus, he will return there soon and forever. He is a god on vacation who condescends to play and eat with the peasants, but he is winged and lives only on ideals. A moment later he forgets his proclamations, his braggardism and shows more than ever that he is an animal of the soil; he sees the painful contrast between what he has said and what he has done, covers himself and goes into hiding. Such is the eternal formula of his eternal contradictions. In love he lies more frequently and more brazenly than in any other case. He has supposed for a moment that love, too, could be just and hence measured on the same scale as the other sentiments, and above all leveled by the common yoke of the other affections. And yet love may possess all virtues; it may be merciful, heroic, kind, generous, but it can never be just; born in injustice, it lives on injustice and dies of injustice; it has but one right—strength; it possesses only one weapon—arrogance.
When deceived love arms itself with an homicidal knife, I class that crime among the most inevitable effects of instantaneous hatred and natural revenge; when love is imposed as a duty on a girl, and instead of love hatred is born, instead of affection contempt springs up, I remark that love cannot be ordered for a fixed hour like a dinner, and that, if infamies and bastards are born from the obscene nuptials of gold and vanity, love has nothing to do with it, because love was absent, and he who can prove an alibi is at once acquitted by the most cruel and most stubborn of public prosecutors. When I see love kill dignity, friendship, the holiest affections of the heart; when I see it breaking with furious rage the iron bars of the cage in which a cruel code of laws has imprisoned it, I acquit it instantly because love is not a wild beast that can be shut up in a menagerie, but a creature as free as air, that lives on bright light and[Pg 213] burning suns, on the aroma of the forest and the fragrance of the meadows. You have made it hydrophobic with hunger and thirst; you have made it furious with your own violence; and you complain because the mad creature bites and kills? This is admitted to be true by universal consent; and as there is an immense inequality between what the laws require and that of which human loves are capable, men shrug their shoulders and forgive, forgive always, forgive all, even where human justice should rise in all the solemn grandeur of its majesty to protect the most sacred rights of family and society. In the codes, love is often a crime; in the paths of life, for the most rigorous individuals, it is at most a weakness—a dear, a sympathetic weakness.
For me hypocrisy is a chain that ties and chokes love in modern society, and I dare affirm that the only fault, the only crime which this sentiment can commit is falsehood. Let us begin by freeing it from the leprosy which infects, devours, disgraces it, and then we shall see what remains sound beneath in that dear, nude and virginal love that Mother Nature has conceded us. Let us first save the life of this poor creature, and then we shall attend to the rest; we shall find out whether it has other misfortunes, whether it can commit other crimes besides that of lying.
In my opinion, love is today a liar from head to foot; a liar when it swears and when it forswears; a liar when, a hundred times a day, it pronounces the words eternal, eternity, eternally; it is a liar in law and in life; it is unfaithful, a thief, a traitor, solely because it is a liar. I may have a Scipionian mania, the fixed idea of a delenda Carthago; but if I should have to answer the questions: "Which are the true, the great loves?" "Which are the happy loves?" I would reply without hesitation: "The sincere." All the faults of love are all lies; almost all the misfortunes of love are the offspring of untruth; and, finally, adultery is nothing but the most infamous of love's lies. "What is," I will ask in turn, "the only remedy for unhappy loves, the only anchor of salvation for betrayed loves?" "Sincerity, sincerity, nothing but sincerity."
At the risk of seeing many disciples and many masters of love smile skeptically, I will say at once that woman, from the first day she loves, lies less than we do, and during the life of love she is less unfaithful than we are. Man, in his first declaration, even when quite sure that he loves, swears instantly, swears an eternity of infinite affection; while woman, more modest, more timid, more reserved, answers that she does not love yet; that she has not yet consulted her heart; that, perhaps, she will love. The less one swears, the less one forswears; and if a holy horror may deprive speech of some fiery accent and some amorous expansion of inebriating expressions, it nevertheless stamps it with virile dignity which makes it blessed among women, while it gives the sexual relations a character of tender reserve and delicate serenity. Man often uses the "eternal oaths" as weapons of seduction, and parades them at every hour as a measure of the bottomless depths of his love; but sometimes he swears sincerely, honestly, because nothing so boldly generates eternity and infinity as does armed desire. It is only too true, however, that the hasty and imprudent vow is a fruitful father of lies and most fruitful grandparent of infidelity.
Very few are the eternal loves, as are geniuses, Venuses, and Apollos. We all anxiously climb the mountain of the ideal, but few can get a branch or a leaf of the sacred tree. Some loves of the lower orders last years; others, months; some of them are as transient as the ephemera, for which long is the life of a day. Now, frankness can give all loves the baptism of honesty, and even a frivolous man can die without amorous remorse if his loves were all honest. He has loved much and fleetingly, but he has never lied, never betrayed anybody, never perjured himself.
Sometimes lies are told through compassion, and woman, more frequently than we, striving in vain to keep alive............