CHAPTER XVI LOVE IN RELATION TO TEMPERAMENTS—OF THE WAYS OF LOVING
I shall not repeat in these pages for the hundredth time the criticism of temperaments as they were described by the ancient schools, and which I have expounded in many of my works, small and large. Not everybody has accepted my standards of classification, but all agree with me in the belief that temperaments have had their time, and that hygiene, medicine, psychology await from the progress of modern physiology the elements to determine, as science requires, the physical and moral characteristics of a human individual. Against this impotency of modern physiology I have protested, changing the name of "temperament" to that of "individual constitution": innocent revenge of all men who, when powerless to change a thing, satisfy their rage by changing its name.
Every man loves in his own way and, as we bring to love the greatest possible tribute of psychical elements, it follows that human loves differ more than hatreds, more than the manners of eating, of motion, of will. The lower we descend from the branches to the trunk, the more human elements resemble each other; the higher we ascend to the loftiest branches of the tree, the more the elements diverge and differ. Ask a woman of easy virtue, or a Don Juan, how many are the methods of loving, and they both not only will answer that every one loves in a different manner, but will add that the manners themselves are so extraordinarily different that calling all these most variform ways of loving by the one name of the same sentiment excites repugnance.
It is true that some authors have amused themselves by describing a "sanguine love," a "nervous love," a "lymphatic love," a "hepatic love"; but these pictures are innocent pastimes, arabesques traced on the epidermis of human nature, and the schools of psychology and literature, which succeed each other, so completely obliterate these arabesques that not the least trace of them is left. Even when, instead of the caricatures of temperaments, we should succeed in delineating a true family of human constitutions, it would be very difficult to class under it all forms of love. The thousands and thousands of color cases of the Roman mosaic-maker are sufficient to classify the innumerable tints that an expert eye succeeds in discerning; but who will give me a palette so gigantic that I may spread on it all the polychromic mixtures, all the simple and compound colors, all the proteiform iridescences offered by the human light when it strikes the powerful prism of love?
The question as to the quantity of love which an individual may feel is the easiest to solve; but it is also one of the most important. In every psychological problem there is an element of quantity; and as it is the simplest, it is also the most visible. It is, I would almost say, the skeleton of the phenomenon and we should grasp it eagerly, as the thread which guides us through the labyrinth of these studies.
Many men, even if possessing a lofty mind and a gentle heart, have asked themselves seriously, and more than once, whether they were capable of loving, unacquainted as they were with all that world of mysteries and passions which they found described in many books and heard from the mouths of some enamored friends. To those men my book, although I have striven to contain it within the limits of a physiological study, may seem an exaggeration, a caricature of nature. Now, all those men are petty and weak lovers. To them love is an intermittent prurience that begins at eighteen years and ends, perhaps, at forty, or fifty at the latest; a prurience that stands somewhere between pleasure and bother and which can be morally cured by only one medicine, woman. This medicine, so they say, is sometimes worse than the disease, and it is necessary to reflect at length and with great care whether preference should be given to that prurience which poets call "love," or to that other load which naturalists call "the female of man" and the courteous dictionaries "woman." When these eunuchs of the sentiment of love prefer the woman, they may find that this animated object, so like ourselves, is also tolerably pleasing and congenial, and a sweet and tender habit of benevolence may tie them to this companion whom they love, and truly love, in their own way, that is, calmly, prudently, suavely. These unhappy creatures have more than one reason to ask of themselves whether what they feel is love, and a thousand reasons to inquire of true lovers: "But tell me now, will you explain to me what this love is!" The moon radiates heat; frogs, too, develop heat: well, then, these gentlemen, too, do love!
Peaceful love, petty or cold love (call it what you will) does not exclusively belong to the male; but, on the contrary, it offers, although more rarely, its most perfect forms in woman. Man, however weak a lover he may be, cannot renounce the mission of sex, which compels him to attack, assault, declare that war which must lead him to conquest. Woman, on the contrary, if she be born a eunuch, need not attack her companion in the slightest way; she can, if she so wishes, avoid the trouble of directing her gaze toward her lover or opening her lips to say "yes." To let herself be loved will be enough. How many romantic delights in these few words! To let herself be loved; to leave to others every labor of conquered timidity, of injured modesty; every strategy, every tactic of moral violence; to let the others struggle and reserve for herself alone the voluptuousness of slightly opening the door or even letting others open it! To let herself be loved! What esthetic, heavenly beatitude, what voluptuousness of soft undulations and carnal prurience, what wonderful warmth of sweet caresses! And, then, no responsibility for the future of a passion which has never been confessed; no storm; a calm lake without tempest, without tides. And if the heart, full of sentiment, would take the liberty of a restless throb, to apply then and there a cataplasm to bring it back to its duty, and modesty to justify the perpetual ice, and virtue to apologize for the absence of aroma. Oh, why did not heaven make us out of this blessed, soft, sweet paste? Oh, why can we not reduce love to a problem of hygiene and régime?
From this zero of the amatory scale we gradually rise to the maximum degree of the pyrometer, where every metal is melted and volatilized and the entire human organism is transformed into a red and incandescent vapor that burns everything it touches. There are tremendous lovers, who have loved before they were men, who will love, too, when they are men no longer; there are women who have loved, perhaps, since they were closed in the maternal womb, and will love even the sexton who will nail down the cover on the cold coffin which contains their morbid flesh; there are men and women in whom every affection takes a sensual form and love absorbs them like a sponge born, grown and dead in the saline depths of a tropical sea. Having neither time nor patience to wait, they love the first comer, to whom they lend their affections and their imagination; then, discouraged but not wearied, they love the next comer and, always loving more than they are loved, they remain with their thirst forever unquenched. Happy they are when they succeed, although rarely, in being satisfied with consecutive loves; but oftener they precipitate quickly into polygamy, where, through sophisms, reticences and compromises with conscience, they love this one with the heart, that other one with the mind, and all of them with the senses. They have a first love, an only love, a true love; but too frequently they forget the names of such loves and use them to designate too many different lovers, and, like the octopus, they stretch forth their numerous, avid, sucking arms to reach the hot, succulent flesh of the feminine cosmos. Among these polygamists there are some who love only with the heart, others only with the senses; while to a few giants nature concedes the sad gift of a twofold thirst for affection and voluptuousness.
Between these two poles, which mark the extreme degrees of amatory intensity, plods the innumerable mass of those men who are neither Don Juans nor chaste Josephs; the numberless women who are neither Messalinas nor Joans of Arc.
Besides the variform force of amorous needs, the sentiment which we are now studying together assumes a different character, according to the passion which predominates in the individual and by which love is marked as proud, humble, egotistical, vain, furious, jealous. And around these binary compounds of love and pride, of love and egotism, of love and vanity, there are grouped many other minor elements, which, although with less energetic affinity, still form a homogeneous whole that might be called a "temperament of love" or a "constitutional form of love." I shall try to sketch some of them from nature.
Tender Love.—This love is more frequently felt by men of mild and gentle character; it has shaded outlines and little relief. Emotion surprises them for the slightest cause; tears are always ready to gush forth at the first impulse of joy or sorrow; a perennial compassion and an inexhaustible tenderness drown declarations of love, ardors of voluptuousness and outbursts of affection in a most sweet sea of milk and honey. Tender love is suppliant, lachrymose and faithful; it often touches the boundaries of sensual love, but never enters that sea under full sail. It is a love that is frequently constant and trustworthy, almost as immutable as an old and serene friendship; it has, however, a tendency to being disconsolate and mournful, if not querulous, and it sighs, sobs or weeps too often. Nevertheless, it is capable of wonderful expansiveness which, however interminable, is pregnant with intense joy and sweet solace and predisposes us to universal benevolence, to philanthropy, to forgiveness. It is a Christian, evangelical love that delights more in a caress than in a kiss, and in lingering kisses more than in sudden battles. Its most esthetic forms are found in the woman, whom we readily exculpate from a certain weakness and who may even swoon without making herself ridiculous. Persons with fair complexion, Germans and lymphatic creatures love in this way.
Contemplative Love.—A high, esthetic sense, an irresistible tendency to inertness and limited genital needs constitute the soil in which germinate and grow the various forms of contemplative love. It is a lofty love—too lofty; it has something of the mystic and the supernatural; the lover places his idol very high and prostrates himself before it, lavishing upon it every kind of adoration and incense. Contemplative love is situated in the anterior lobes of the brain; it affects but slightly the somber depths of the heart and hardly skims over the warm wave of voluptuousness; it lives on ecstasies and contemplations and, making of the creature it loves a god or a goddess, it forgets too frequently that the god comprehends a human male, the goddess a human female. This sublime forgetfulness makes of this love the greatest cuckold ever known, because nature can neither be forgotten nor offended with impunity; and while one adores and is absorbed in admiration in the temple, the warlike and rapacious love profanes the tabernacle and carries off the god. Contemplative love lives on the frontiers of pathology, and properly belongs to Arcadic, fanatic and mystic persons. Disillusioned and betrayed, they accuse love of simony and falsehood, when they themselves are only too guilty of having caused their own sorrows and their own bitter disappointments.
Sensual Love.—This is one of the most ardent, most inebriating, most tenacious of loves, because it springs from the most fruitful and spontaneous source of sensual affections. It is the most sincere and most powerful of loves, because it satisfies one of the most natural and most irresistible needs of man; but its foundation rests on a shifting ground: beauty; and its ardors are indicated by too deep a note: desire. It never lies; it does not wrap itself in the hundred cloaks of amorous hypocrisy, but is nude, entirely nude and, in its nudity, often modest. Brazen or tender, insatiable or satisfied, rash to the point of insolence, it is, however, always itself: the tremendous attraction of two great and opposite organic units; a burning thirst that seeks the cool water of the Alpine spring; the most vigorous clash of the two most gigantic forces in the world of the living. From voluptuousness to voluptuousness, if youthful strength does not accompany it, it usually slides into lasciviousness, where it sinks deeper each day that passes and with the decline of each force; and down, down it plunges until it reaches the filth of domestic libertinism or that of the wandering Venus. It is inexhaustible in discoveries and inventions, indefatigable in voluptuousness; it is also a sublime artist; it may emit high musical notes of tenderness and show warm and fascinating tints. Born in the lowest depths of the animal man, it rarely rises to the high spheres of the ideal and knows no dignity, no delicacy, no heroism; rather, it is often suppliant to the point of baseness, impure to nausea. It accepts a bone to gnaw, just as it accepts voluptuousness without love. It does not matter to sensual love whether voluptuousness is reached by the sole moral path of love, but it accepts it also through this way, it seeks it by all possible ways. And it conquers, steals, buys love; it goes even so far as to borrow it, to commit forgery, provided it gets it. Let its insatiable prurience be but appeased and sensual love will act as mediator or pander for the loves of others, become usurer, thief and forger with the same callousness. This love is generally masculine: in women, even licentiousness always dons a splendid robe of sentiment and hides its too insolent nudity.
Ferocious Love.—Perhaps the term which is applied to this love is stronger than it should be; but in painting a psychical picture one is irresistibly inclined to exaggerate the coloring or the outlines and give the subject more relief than it has in nature. Abnormal development of the sense of ownership, amplified by conceit and joined to a certain impetuosity of character: such is the most natural source of all those violent loves which I class under the common name of "ferocious love." Its birth is nearly always like the eruption of a volcano and accompanied by so many storms and fits of affection and such clashing of energies that one would suppose that, instead of a love, a hatred had come into existence. And this original sin follows it through life, and ends only with death. We see this love distribute handshakes with such strength that we say they are tetanic convulsions, kisses that seem bites, embraces that look like homicides; and we behold it as a tyrant without jealousy, a fury without anger, insatiable even after possession, because voluptuousness does not calm nor fidelity always satisfy it. Venus triumphant and not disarmed would represent this love in all the sublime greatness of its forces. If kindness of habits or the patient file of education does not succeed in smoothing its angles, it often becomes rugged and even brutal. So must have loved our most remote ancestors of the caves and the palisades, who continuously bathed in the blood of hunt and war and stained their hands with blood in love as well, as woman also was the prey belonging to the strongest and most audacious. As it is easy to imagine, man generally is the one who loves ferociously; but woman, too, occasionally feels this cruel form of love; and the more attached she is to her lover, the more she torments him and the deeper she plunges the claws of her passion into the depths of his body to feel its heat and to say with voluptuous fury: "This, too, is mine!"
Proud Love.—This form is a binary combination of one part of love and ten parts of self-love. When proud love is satisfied, when it is in all the pomp of its happiness, it may appear as a pure, great, sublime love; but as soon as self-love suffers a sting it froths and swells like a snail or a basilisk and shows the dual nature of its energy in all its nudity. Even in the few moments when this affection is entirely happy, it never betokens it nor does it abandon itself to an unrestrained confession of beatitude or bliss, for the same reason that the rustic never admits that he admires new and great things. Proud love thinks more of being loved than of loving; it always speaks of rights and often does not know of duties. Rich in exactions and poor in consideration, it swells up with pride if fortunate, and murmurs at the slightest suspicion; it is the most jealous of loves and among the most unhappy, among the poorest in sweet abandonments and ingenuous voluptuousness. Even in the most secret intimacy it never unfolds its thoughts for fear of ridicule or of spoiling a crease of the starched paludament in which it has wrapped itself; it is never the first to concede a caress, but expects it as a right and a duty. It is a love which, to be approached, requires infinite attentions, ceremonies, formalities; which quickly becomes tiresome and often disgusting. It exacts fidelity, not as a dear reciprocation of affection, but as a right of its own dignity, and easily pardons such sins as the world does not become aware of. It is a sterile, barren, sickly love.
Excoriated Love.—Because of its origins, this form of love is often confounded with the preceding; but it is still more unhappy and rightfully belongs to the pathology of the heart. It is a love that can be sincere, tender and passionate; but it is so irritable and such a grumbler that a mosquito would annoy it and a pebble in its path cause it to cry against misfortune and treachery. Like the Epicurean of old, it cannot sleep unless a folded rose-leaf is placed in its bed. It also seeks, like all human affections, the goal of its aspirations; but never reaches it, because suspicion, susceptibility and fear stop it at every step, freeze the words on its lips, weaken its arms in the embrace, extinguish its flame when hardly lighted. I compare this affection with a St. Bartholomew obliged to walk among brambles and over rocks bristling with points, and for this reason I have given it the strange and new name of excoriated love; the French would call it un amour mauvais coucheur. It is perhaps the most wretched of loves, because, besides the natural misfortunes which are the inevitable lot of every daughter of Eve and every son of Adam, it creates its own troubles and enlarges them with the lens of the most unhappy imagination. Excoriated love is a fatal still which transforms rose-petals into poison-ivy, honey into wormwood, aroma into fetidness, nourishment into venom. If kissed, it murmurs because the kiss was too violent or too cold; if caressed, it suspects that the caress may have had a second end in view. Even in the ecstasies of creation it would ask of the Creator why He had made the light so soon or so late. Whoever is loved by these unfortunates has always the right to address them with the words of the courtesan of Venice to the unhappy and mad philosopher of Geneva: "Zaneto, Zaneto, ti non ti xe fato per far a l'amor!" ("Johnny, Johnny, you are not made to make love!") And yet these unfortunate creatures love, and love deeply; and it is the enviable glory of powerful lovers to cure and win them over to the point of making them confess that at least once in their lives they were truly, faithfully and passionately loved. It is one of the most admirable triumphs of the amatory art to find a fabric so fine that it can touch the excoriated flesh of those poor unfortunates, and create for them an artificial atmosphere, in which they may be able to move without groaning, breathe without coughing, and live without cursing life.
These forms of love, which I have poorly outlined, are but rarely found in nature in a simple state, but are complicated and interwoven with each other, forming a thousand pictures: a real mine of resources for art, a veritable treasure of torments for the psychological thinker.
No man loves like another and no man loves perfectly, in the manner in which the type of a sublime love can be idealized in the regions of thought of our brain.
The perfect harmony of one love lacks a note of sensuality, that of another a tone of energy; one is too restless, another too languid, a third too violent. Even the most fortunate creatures, those who possess a just measure of voluptuousness, of sentiment and of poetry,—even those, who know they are loved ardently and faithfully, aspire to a love more perfect than that which they feel and better than that which they receive; and when this thirst for the ideal does not induce us to violate the compact of fidelity, we should not complain, because love, too, must obey the common law, which compels us ever to aspire to purer regions, richer in splendors and warmer with ardors. At early dawn love awaits the promise of a warm noon, and in the burning sultriness looks forward with eager anticipation to the cool twilight of the evening; it is spurred by that impulse which drives forward men and things, matter and force, and the bliss of today expects a more intense voluptuousness for tomorrow. If this unquenchable thirst for the better should cease in us, it would be simply because life is spent in us; if the irresistible desire for a higher love should cease, it would be simply because, as light to the blind, the heavenly regions of the ideal—those regions where numberless targets are gathered at which are aimed the glances and the arrows of the human family—have all at once been closed to us.