CHAPTER VIII THE DEPTHS AND THE HEIGHTS OF LOVE
Whenever I see a flower that opens and shows its cheerful petals on the border of an abyss, the same thought ever recurs to my mind: there is love, which always seems to live between two infinities, height and depth. While its aspirations carry it aloft, while it seems to ask of heaven space and light, it projects its roots into the most intricate mazes of the rocks, into the most somber mysteries of the abyss. Star that glitters in the infinity of the ideal, root that dissolves the stones in the infinity of depth, it reaches all altitudes and all profundities, is the most human of passions and always placed among the divine passions; it is inmost in us and the most ethereal. Thought on the summit of a mountain, strength in the valley below, it guides the poet when he ascends to paradise, accompanies man when he plunges into the hot sea of sensuality; virgin and father in heaven, lover and spouse on earth. If to live means to exist in the most beautiful form of life, then love is richness, luxury, splendor of life; love is whatever is divine in human beings.
No one will ever be able to say where love penetrates when it lifts the bottom of human nature, where pearls and corals are intermixed with mud. It is a diver that brings to light strange and unknown things and reveals to the astonished eye of the observer new things never before conceived; it is the most daring and the most fortunate of excavators. How many simple natures of young girls, how many vulgar talents of men are perturbed, agitated and renovated by the contact of the new god, who seems to evoke from the abysses all silent passions, all dormant ideas, all the phantoms of heart and thought! The deep simmering of psychical elements at the contact with love almost always announces the birth of a second moral nature and, revivifying life, marks a new era in it. Of our birth we are always ignorant, and of our death almost always unconscious; between the "to be" and the "not to be" only one third and great thing is possible—"to love." While the common people judge from the hair on the face and from the deepened voice that a boy has become a man, a tremendous profound earthquake warns him that he must love, that he already loves; and while mothers behold with affectionate trepidation the rounding of their daughters' form to womanhood, another profound earthquake warns the girl that she must love, that she already loves.
In the loving season many animals change color and shape, adorn themselves with new feathers, or arm themselves with new weapons; with the nuptial robe they assume different habits and singular abilities; mutes, they become clever singers; obtuse, they are transformed into skilled architects; granivorous, they become carnivorous; if the earth is their habitat, they become winged messengers of the skies; if caterpillars, they are metamorphosed into butterflies. So it is with man, although such transmutation hardly affects his epidermis, but sinks into the veins and the meanders of his physical nature. The phase of puberty deserves to be dealt with separately; it will suffice here to remark that every force redoubles, every vigor refines, and while, with our growing to manhood, forces and energies prepare and grow, love calls forces and energies into action. Puberty declares us in a state of war; love calls us to the battle. Defenseless if we have not reached puberty, we are armed if we have reached it; armed and combative if we have reached it and are in love.
Not all human forces are good, not all the resources of mind are beneficial to the good, and, therefore, love calls into action bad elements as well, which had not been seen before. For the first time, from the deep abysses of the moral man, specters of crime and vice, phantoms of revelry and prison appear. In defective organisms, predestined for the prison or the madhouse, together with first love often the first crime or the first mania reveals itself. To the great summoner of profundity and sublimity every human element answers, "Present"; and the sudden anger in natures erstwhile mild, the first tears on faces till then smiling, the first poetic outburst in natures hitherto utterly prosaic, the first hysterical paroxysms in a body that seemed to have no nerves, the first ambitions in the most timid youth, the first meditations at the mirror, the first impulses, the first war declared against an invisible enemy, the first follies, the first flashes of genius, the first lies and the first heroisms, are all new specters called from the abysses by the magic wand of the sorcerer among sorcerers, by the greatest conjurer of spirits that the blessed age of wizards and exorcisms might have boasted of.
The man who loves is twice a man, because for the first time he feels not only that he is alive, but also that he has the power of creating living beings, of procreating. Nor is woman the sole generator, because in man's blood is half of a future creature, and the seed of a second existence within us doubles us and makes us almost as proud as the ancient prophets, to whom God entrusted, as to a tabernacle, the supreme truth, the prophecy of future events. A man who loves has within him a part of that which will live in the future, the fruitful germs of a new generation.
While all the psychical forces are still confused and indistinct at first contact with the new sentiment, Love will march them in procession and muster them under his orders. Every beauty must transmute itself into flowers for a garland, every passion must lend its fire, every energy must don the livery of a servant or a slave. Many to serve, one to command; many strong, but only one supremely strong; many subjects, but only one tyrant. No objection, no discussion; where love is present, who would give suggestions or counsel? O virgin and rising forces of youth, bow your head before your god; splendid beauties of human nature, lay your tributes upon the new altars. Are you not satisfied with the glory of doing homage to love? Rarely does avarice find place in the first and deep meditations of a heart in love, but the question is continually repeated: "Have I something else, something better, to offer? Have I really given my whole self to my king?"
A most singular and heartrending voluptuousness of love is to feel that everything leaves us and that we no longer belong to ourselves. It seems as though we were witnessing a satanic phantasmagoria in which we behold limbs, organs, senses, affections, thoughts fleeing from us, running madly toward a new center, where a new organism is being moulded with our remains. Even time appears to be ours no longer, since it is no longer measured by the watch, but by the impatience of desire or the flashes of voluptuousness; thought, too, no longer belongs to us, as it is tyrannically ruled by one image alone. To find ourselves again, to remember that we have still intimate relations with the man of yesterday, we must go and seek another creature who has robbed us of everything. Hence a vague unrest which invades the body, the senses and the thoughts of every lover; hence the undertaking, most difficult even for the ablest dissembler, to conceal the new god who invades and penetrates every part of us. Every hair, every pore, every nerve, every part of the epidermis of the man who loves sings and says to the universe of the living: "I love, and who loves me?" Day and night, in the calm and in the storm, all the nature of a lover sings its note until another song responds in the same tone. Not a moment of peace, not an instant of truce, until the new energy has found a sister energy. Love is like the sea: here it is as calm as the surface of an Alpine lake, still and smooth as a sheet of lead; but there, among the rocks or upon the coast, it is eternally in motion, and, roaring or sighing, howling or caressing, agitates with incessant motion the land it kisses. Man and woman who meet and love are the sea and the land, which are perpetually at war—a war in turn sweet and bitter, tender and cruel, voluptuous and merciless.
Look at that young girl seated at the window, bending over a piece of white linen which she is sewing. How attentive she is to her work! She seems, between one stitch and another, to be meditating on the solution of the quadrature of the circle, so absorbed is she in her arduous task. But if I only could write the volume of thoughts that pass through her brain between two stitches! She is fishing in the deep abysses of love.
And at a short distance thence, she unaware of it, a young man, too, is at the window, his hair disheveled, his hands firmly thrust into his pockets, his breast swelling as by a threat. He has been staring at the sky for the last hour. Is he meditating, perhaps, upon the tremendous problem of the proletariate or on that of human liberty? Is he, perhaps, dreaming of glory, of wealth? No; he, too, is fishing in the deep abysses of love.
Woman more than man dives deeper and soars higher in the regions of love; society generally withholds her from the field of action, and an infinite time is left to her for penetrating into the abysses of the heart. How often an innocent young girl, who, perhaps, hardly knows how to write, for many long hours feels in her imagination the sweetness of a kiss which lasted but a second; how often she is tortured during a whole night by the bitterness of a cold salute or of a rude word! Here is a deepness of sense which, nevertheless, is nothing in comparison with the queer and transubstantial process of sentimental analysis with which woman pulverizes, analyzes, distills a look, a word, a gesture. Hide, O chemists, your ignorance before the profundity of the analytical art of an enamored woman; to her the spectroscope is a coarse instrument of prehistoric science; homœopathic draughts are poisons; atoms are worlds; she has measured them many centuries before Thomson. A billionth part of a milligram of rancor diluted in an ocean of voluptuousness is detected by her process of analysis; an atom of indifference in the lava of desire is instantaneously traced by the thermo-electric apparatus which she uses in her laboratory. She is a priestess of the ideal, of the infinite, of the incommensurable, and will continue to be religious many centuries after man will have buried the last god. Even in love, the infinite is insufficient for her.
Love always elevates the lover above the average man; and as his increased strength makes him capable of greater undertakings, the horizon widens before him more and more because he sees men and things from a greater height. Each one of us has a different capacity of soaring to the regions of the ideal; but rabble and genius, prose and poetry, always raise themselves, by the action of love, to a world which is nobler, more beautiful, more serene than that in which we drag out our daily uneventful existence. How many vulgar, despicable natures are redeemed by the action of love; how many inert intellects are guided through the paths to glory; how many of the vulgar herd reach the height of the Olympus of thoughts with the aid of a loving hand! And still the ignoble proverb is daily repeated, that science and glory must guard against love as against a bitter enemy, and the examples are pedantically quoted of great men who loved but art and to chastity alone owed their greatness. Strange disorder of ideas, in which hygiene is confused with morality, chastity with the incapacity of loving; but a man healthy in sense and sentiment will always be elevated by love, if he does not make an unworthy creature the object of his affection, if he does not confound love with lust. For one genius killed by love, you have a hundred who owe to love their greatest inspirations, who drew from it the strength to live, who blessed it as superior to glory, who in it alone found the fresh wave that tempered the burning ardor of enthusiasm and passion. It is an old habit of the human beast to trample under its feet the rind of the fruit from which it has just sucked the last drop of juice!
If love does not work in all creatures the same miracles which we expect, if it is not always a virtue that elevates and refines, it is because we have lowered woman to the level of our lasciviousness, because even we, civilized men, feel for her more desire than esteem, more lust than love. And yet woman thirsts more than man for the ideal, and, like all oppressed creatures, looks upward with more faith. Her exquisitely sensitive nature, open to the raptures of enthusiasm, easily inflamed by the warmth of poetry, attracts her irresistibly to higher and higher altitudes, and she would have helped us also to soar if we had not made of her a sweet concubine or a good housewife. Woman feels the ideal, aspires to every sublimity, but she has neither courage nor strength to ascend; and if she is not supported by the robust arm of her lover, she will become easily prostrated and sit down to rest on the path that leads upward. To her nature has assigned the task of indicating the high aim, to us the duty of accompanying and sustaining her. In a magnificent painting by Schoeffer, Dante is standing below, Beatrice above. Dante gazes at her, contemplates her and is inspired by her; and Beatrice, her eyes turned to heaven, seems to say to him: "Upward, upward! There it is where we shall go together!" Nothing is more contagious than enthusiasm; nothing more fascinating, more irresistible than the enthusiasm of woman. Without arguments that induce one to believe, without the strength of hoping, sustained only by love, she is always full of faith in great and beautiful things, and at every step of life, now handsome by her sublime imprudence, now affecting by her youthful enthusiasm, seems to say to us: "Onward, onward!" And with her tender little hands she draws us upward, guides us and lends us her ever fresh strength, even when she would appear fatigued.
When Christ made faith the corner-stone of his religion, when he said that with faith we could move the mountains, he was inspired, perhaps, by that ardent faith which woman is possessed of and which makes her strong in her weakness. Woe to us, if before preparing for an undertaking we should be obliged to weigh with mathematical precision all favorable and unfavorable probabilities; woe to us, if we were to launch only into those enterprises of which we are sure! More than three-fourths of the great achievements would never have been performed. There is always an element which evades calculation, and it is in the capricious hands of destiny; it is the lacuna which must be filled by faith, by that faith which lifts the mountains, and which woman so deeply feels and so tenderly infuses into our hearts. You may point at the most celebrated eunuchs of the heart, who, without the aid of woman, reached the prodigious heights of fame; but I most solemnly affirm that, had they been guided by a loving hand, they would have soared still higher. Love is a second sight, and woman sees things from a point of view which nearly always escapes the synthetic survey of man; she discovers many hidden elements of things which we, through excessive haste or excessive pride, do not see; and helping us with the light of love, she assists us in penetrating more deeply into the substance of every problem and, above all, into the knowledge of human nature. In small and great things, after having consulted science and art, experience and imagination, after having read the book of history and the book of the human heart, you should never fail to consult the woman who loves you; whether about a book, or a law, or a work of art, or commerce, or industry, or poetry, woman will always have something new to tell you, she will always have her revelations, and through the action of love you will feel elevated.
Some men of talent lack the coefficient of ambition to ascend, and you will often see them die before producing the fruit of their gigantic forces; only woman and love can give them that energy which they cannot obtain from the stimulus of self-love. Eve knows how to infuse faith into the skeptic, ambition into the disheartened, strength to all; unaspiring for herself, she is intensely ambitious, haughty, proud, if necessary, for the man she loves; and thrones and political power, civil and martial crowns, glories of art and science, were won through the ambition lent or inspired by a beloved woman. In heroic and chivalrous ages this was publicly proclaimed and boasted of; today, when women are sold in houses of prostitution or at the counter of matrimony, it has become fashionable to blush at owing one's glory to a woman, and the chivalrous element, alas! sank and perished together with many other evil things which we would not like to see come back again. Chivalrous love vanished and its place was taken by the cicisbeism of our great-grandfathers, while today in the limbo of a new rising generation we feel that we begin to discern the germs of a more beautiful epoch for the amorous life of man.
The more ballast love throws away which keeps it near to the ground, the higher we soar in the regions of the ideal. This ballast consists all of lust and self-pride, and it is woman's duty to help us throw it out of our car. She should not assist with her lasciviousness and her vanity in further debasing man's loves, already so brutish and vulgar. In the rapture we feel when inhaling the pure air of the loftiest mountains, we may sometimes forget that night is drawing near and home is far away; and thus in love we may feel so carried away by the fascination of the ideal as to desire a love without contact, the spirit without the matter. These are sublime derangements of the brain, only too rare, but reaching the extreme limits of human possibilities; they lead to delirium, to self-sacrifice; they drag us to folly or to martyrdom. If a desire continues durable and pure upon the highest summits of human love and is not perturbed by the contact of matter, men from beneath will contemplate that statue as a fantastic monument erected by the morning clouds of the mountain. Not knowing whether it is an effect of the mist or the imagery of a dream, they contemplate and admire.
The pure and intimate communion of thought and sentiment, with nothing of the senses but two clasping hands and two pairs of eyes which blend together, is certainly a voluptuousness among the greatest of the sexual world; and without any need of platonic love, it may so happen that two creatures in that moment will forget that one of them is a man and the other a woman. Then feminine nature shines with all the halo of its celestial light; from that source of poetry, genius may draw its greatest energies. Then coarse natures undergo the influence of refinement in that pure air, social scrofula disappears and all human soil is washed off. Women, you should take advantage of those fleeting instants to regenerate the human family and urge it on to higher destinies! The influence of the ecstasy of sentiment on man is of shorter duration than on woman, and your angel will soon fall at your feet, imploring of you the kiss of the terrestrial creature. You are omnipotent then, for you have the lion at your feet; and if man is strong, you are stronger still, since his strength is all for you. Guide it toward the good and the better; direct it to the beautiful. In that lion which roars with a subdued voice at your feet there is still much of the beast; in that conquered Hercules there is still much of the human brute. Silence the beast by running your slender fingers through his disheveled mane, summon forth from the depths holy energies, noble inspirations and a thirst for the ideal. We wish to be great for your sake; we wish to be strong in order to give you all our strength; we desire the conquest, but only to place it at your feet. To every kiss of yours may the human family owe a great attainment; to every endearment of yours, a useful deed! May your love be the highest and dearest prize to every ambition! True, you are weak; but when you are desired you are very strong. Who dares assert that he is stronger than the "no" of a woman? What phalanx attempts to advance when the finger of woman threatens and commands: "Stand back!"?
Woman sins at least four times less than man; she fears crime, she is horrified at the very thought of crime. Let us, then, disarm the man who too often wounds or strikes; let the coward find no woman who loves him, let him have no cup but that of the coarsest voluptuousness; let the ignorant, the debased, the social parasites, all the fiends of the moral world, find no bosom of woman on which to rest their heads! As the Church once would banish excommunicated persons, so that they could find no bread, no shelter, it should so be with moral monsters: let them be banished from the region of love! And the elect women, whom nature favored with the fateful gift of beauty, should preserve their treasures for the strong and the immortal; their smiles should be the crown of triumphing genius and magnanimous heart, for genius and beauty are the most sublime interlacement of human forces, one of the most splendid pictures of the nature of living beings.
Love, after having spread the minute fibrils of its tiny roots into all the deep fissures of the human world and absorbed every drop of liquor, every throb of energy, sends up to the branches of the robust tree every sap and every energy; and there, high in the air, leaves, flowers, and fruits drink from the rays of the sun the sweetest and most inebriating voluptuousness. There, in those regions full of light and heat, and which no worm of the soil, no atom of dust, no miasmatic exhalation ever attain, profundity becomes sublimity, and man and woman, blended in the ecstasy of an ardent contemplation of the beautiful and the good, ask of themselves: "And what is God?"