But true love is only possible if the natural development has not been disturbed nor the natural course interrupted, and the young people have been given the opportunity to develop their ideals. If the development is arrested, if the growth of the erotic instinct is disturbed, at the time of restlessness and nerve-irritability, then the image of the ideal in the mind is confused and the discovery of its organic counterpart is impossible. Now, the whole nervous system is under great tension during the formation period. Inquietude, vague unrest and dissatisfaction disturbs the boy’s equanimity. His heart is tremulous with emotion and represents a volcano of agitation in perpetual eruption. He exudes intense feeling and passion. The mind of the girl is confused with vague dissatisfaction and vaguer desires which she vainly endeavors to define even to herself. Her heart is wildly stirred and issues from its chrysalis to renewed dreams of chimerical bliss. Joy and sorrow, exultation and depression alternate like dawn and dusk. All the complex subtleties of the feminine heart give rein to a single emotion. She lives in the realm of romance, her soul keeps soaring in the land of glamor. Hence the least disturbance will be fatal to the development of a clear and distinct image of the ideal.
Such disturbances are ever present in our advanced civilization. The early intimate association with the other sex, among the poorer classes, gives palpable suggestions of the libido connected with the functions of reproduction, at a time when mystery ought to shroud its object. Animal passion, especially in great cities, obtrudes itself upon the attention of young children, and they become conscious of the greatest of all human needs through the desire of the flesh, and not by a gradual growing sympathy for a noble being, possessing lasting gifts of sentiment and thought. The sentiments are, therefore, not of true love but of lust; and to transform lust into love is a difficult task.
Besides the unfavorable environment, certain radical doctrines, widely spread among the laboring classes, also prevent true love from taking root. In the literature, often read by these classes, excuses are readily made for the supremacy of the passions. Dithyrambs are sung upon the crudest emotions. The rational ethics of these radical moralists teach that “love worketh no evil.” True love may really do no evil, but gross passion, which these teachers of the new sex-morality call love, is capable to do all the harm in the world. Temporary sexual attraction, which is sensuality pure and simple, is called by the name of love and is made the basis of the new morality. The name of the sublimest emotion which appeals to the grandest impulses, to the noblest sentiments of men and women, which makes chivalrous, gentle, refined and helpful all who are touched by its magic wand, which informs its disciples with the spirit of honor (Walker), the name of this noble emotion is conferred upon the coarse emotion of sensuality, as if sensuality ever possessed all these ennobling qualities. The greater part of humanity is declared to be polygamous in nature. According to these radical doctrines only few men and women possess the instinct of exclusiveness, all other are naturally varietists. Consequently promiscuity is the ordained order of nature, and the monogamic marriage is decried as forced upon humanity by priest and tyrant.[AM]
Among the cultured and exclusive classes there is another danger lurking to the development of true sentimental love. It is the literary fiction of our time which is thoroughly imbued with the most unwholesome forms of love. The first knowledge of the world and of life is usually derived by the children of these classes from novels, and these novels deal from the first line to the last with nothing but love. The heroes and heroines in these novels are usually the creations of pathological brains, in different stages of degeneration, and are represented as worthy of emulation. These heroes change with every novel, and the children admire every day another ideal, imposed upon them from without, before their imaginations had the time for the conception of an ideal from the mysterious depths of the cells of the growing centre of generation. Besides, the authors of these novels are, as a rule, dealing with a perverted kind of love, which they call holy, beneficent, infallible, and which they consider above all laws. Their teachings are to obey the impulse of love with a fanaticism that disregards all bounds and barriers, codes and warnings of the sages. All obstacles, such as duty, modesty, honor, respect for the family and the rights of fellow men, that weave around everyone of us a firm and massy weft, all of them are treated like cobwebs that love tears away and treads upon to gain its end.
The eroding operations carried on by these mongrel degenerated brains cannot help but have a poisonous effect, especially upon the minds of young girls. While in the literature of half a century ago the heroine represented the fundamental type of woman, who is a mother of men, calling out men’s sacrifice and sacrificing herself for them, without calculation or barter, the heroine of the contemporary novel gives herself up to voluptuous excesses. The absence of chastity is considered a sign of the warmth of her feeling, moral decrepitude is called by the doubtful name “self-assertion,” and the exaggerated taste for self-indulgence is termed “self-expression.” Feminine selfishness is represented as an enviable instead of a base quality. Under such circumstances true love must, indeed, be a rare occurrence.
More fatal even to true love are the activities of the immoral plays, because they are so deceptive and disingenuous and sail under the guise of moral reforms. There are first the comic plays, nowadays filling most of the stages, which treat immorality as a subject for jocularity, and where an unchaste situation is made the subject of a jest. Then there are some serious plays where sin and the life of immorality are idealized. The career of the courtesan is pictured as a life of gentleness, refinement and renunciation. (La Dame aux Camélias.) In recent times a third kind of immoral plays has made its appearance upon the stage where immoral situations are portrayed, without regard to time-honored conventionalities, with such exactness that the warnings against the evils fail to fulfill their purpose.
Another blow fatal to true love, caused by the reading of contemporary literature, is the increase of the young girl’s natural vanity.[AN] The constant descriptions in most modern novels of the struggle over women and the enthusiasm felt at gaining her, says Nordau, increase her natural tendency to regard love as the single aim and substance of the life of human beings and intensify her natural partiality for herself to the degree of ambitious mania and self-deification. She actually imagines that the possession of her would be providential of more than earthly bliss. The pampered overcivilized modern woman finds in this pseudo-literature only lovers who are sacrificing to the divinity of beauty and who are constantly listening to the music of the stars, and she imagines that she also ought to be wooed by gods and spend her life in an earthly paradise. When after the wedding the mirage, she once thought was the eternal land of promise, has faded, she remains permanently shocked at finding only a man where she was looking for an angel as mate. When the longing for sensual satisfaction has been appeased, both lovers find that they have no more to discover and grow fickle and hunger for a change.
Another part of contemporary literature which is continually undermining the foundation of true love is the feministic branch. These writers are not satisfied to preach equality of the sexes. They constantly emphasize the superiority of the female sex. From this notion to the sermon of sex-antagonism is only one step, and this has been quickly enough made. Mutual admiration, trust and love have given place to the duel of the sexes. Even the father has been thrown overboard. These modern daughters act as if they had come to this world by the way of parthenogenesis. The sermon of the enmity of the sexes thus destroys not only true love, but the entire conception of the family and serves to blight the brightest and sweetest flowers, springing in the garden of the human heart. No wonder that the girl who has been influenced by such ideas has been made unfit for true love. Her judgment has become confused by overestimating her own worth and valuing the man solely for his capacity to supply the luxuries of life and to satisfy sensual desires. She has little love even for the man of her choice, and is not reluctant to show it on every occasion. A bride objecting to the word “obey” in the wedding ceremony—even granted that such a word does not and never did belong there—reveals at once her lack of true love. A girl truly in love with the man laughs at the word, because she feels that she would rather be his slave than any other man’s queen. To the lover the bride’s promise to obey seems mere folly, for he is determined that she should always remain the autocratic queen of his heart and actions. But when love is absent, and the wedding represents nothing more than a contract to legalize sensuality, which is otherwise considered immoral, every objection to the wording of the contract is justified and perfectly natural.
The female sex, says Kant, may be characterized by two inclinations, the desire to dominate, and the desire for pleasure. These two tendencies may be mitigated by true love. The truly loving woman will gladly and voluntarily share material misfortune and social degradation with her lover. She will overcome her egotism, she will labor hard to overcome her old faults and cheerfully give up what she once looked upon as necessaries for the love of a true man. But the modern woman looks upon the man only as a slave to provide for her, and as a thing affording her enjoyment. Hence she regards the miserable weakling, whose imbecile brain has not the power of resistance, as touching and charming, while vigorous strength of character, which is schooled in self-control and which places as high a value on the affection afforded as on that received, seems to her repulsive roughness. This blending of her judgment becomes fatal to her love, so important to the female heart.
Love, in its ideal form, must be founded on mental qualities. In man the mental qualities are of the greatest value. The supreme survival value for man is his intelligence. The possessors of artistic or literary composition, of mechanical skill, of calculating ability, of energy or general mental ability are seldom or never endowed at the same time with physical qualities. It was brain not brawn that saved man in his struggle for existence. The cult of the muscle as against intelligence would destroy man. The physically fittest is not always the best of men. Even the animals, in their natural surroundings, live by their wits rather than by force of bone and muscle; and it was man’s wits and will that enabled him to increase and multiply as no other animal. Physical weapons of defense and offense have disappeared in man because his intelligence makes them superfluous. In the human species mind is master of matter. Man has staked his all upon mind. The emergence and dominance of mind have enabled the human species to ascend through struggle and internecine war to the highest scale of animal life, although it is physically one of the feeblest among the species of the higher animals. The increasing dominance of mind over matter is the reason that nowadays mental qualities dominate all else in man’s living activities. Hence ideal love must also be based upon mental qualities. Then it will be everlasting. The soul once allied with its mate can change no more. One of the mysteries of true love is the absolute impossibility to duplicate the lover. The soul is thus the essential part in true love. But when in the selection of the mates the physical factors only, such as stature, beauty, strength and health, play the most important rôle, when the senses form the chief part of the compound feeling, love will not long survive possession, and matrimonial happiness, founded upon monetary or social considerations, will pass like a shadow. The idol is soon destroyed. When, thereupon, the heart is disillusioned by the contact with the grim realities of existence, when it is deadened by the habitude of a fixed affection, coupled with incompatibility of tastes, when hardened by experience with the meanness of the world, then men and women attempt to find elsewhere a soul which they hope will desire to know more of their own, and in which they trust to discover a greater and more lasting happiness. But not being able to ask their own hearts, and guided only by the contradictory ideals they have been imbued with in their youth, the second choice and all the others, following the same, will generally turn out to be also delusions in which the perfect communion of hearts will again be absent. Men will then try to bury their unsatisfied longing for true affection in the exaggerated occupation with business or to drown their vehement unrequited love-yearnings in drink and other narcotics. The fate of the woman is even more tragic. Woman’s idea of happiness is a sort of ecstatic bliss. She is looking for perennial joy and beauty, for a joy as only the angels know. Hence when she learns to know the illusory nature of the heart’s greatest desire, when she makes the discovery of the futility of this desire, the wine of life grows sour. She becomes self-centered and selfish. The fountain ordained to yield such perennial sweets is soon drained and she bestows all her feminine faculties upon mere inanities. Hence the astonishing aspect of restlessness, and agitation which we now behold in her mania for dress, her indulgence in drink and nerve-deadening drugs, and in her quest of other vain luxuries in which she desires to drown the emptiness of her heart and her spiritual isolation.