Petite ligne de la bouche?
Soulful people, especially women, have hitherto only loved partially. But when sensuousness—in alliance with the mission of the race—regains its ancient dignity, then the power of giving erotic rapture will not be the monopoly of him who is inhuman in his love. The wise virgins’ deadly sin against love is that they disdained to learn of the foolish ones the secret of fascination; that they would know none of the thousand things that bind a man’s senses or lay hold on his soul; that they regarded the power to please as equivalent to the will to betray. When all women who can love are also able to make goodness fascinating and completeness of personality intoxicating, then Imogen will conquer Cleopatra.
As yet the charming ones are not always good, the good not always charming, and the majority neither good nor charming. During this transition between an old and a new womanliness it is natural that she should be strongest who unites in herself
Ève, Joconde, et Delila.
From observation of love’s realisation in marriage—as it is still realised in the majority of cases—young women have been more and more possessed by a disinclination to wed. They wish for the love of their dreams or none at all. A lower claim, a poorer gift of love has for them no value which can be compared with their free personal life. To the man who only seeks her lips but does not listen to the words from them, who longs for her embrace but smiles or frowns when she reveals the nature of her soul, such a woman has nothing to give. Her love is now filled with the whole nourishing force of her human nature, replete with the whole sap of her woman’s nature, and she desires that the sacrament she thus dispenses shall be received with devotion.
She will no longer be captured like a fortress or hunted like a quarry; nor will she like a placid lake await the stream that seeks its way to her embrace. A stream herself, she will go her own way to meet the other stream.
We live in a period of spiritual reformation of immense importance in the history of the world. Every human being who himself has soul is being more and more penetrated by the sense of the mysterious effects of elective affinities; of sympathetic and antipathetic influences; of subconscious powers, above all in the erotic sphere. Sensations of the erotically dæmonic are not new. But they were formerly condemned to as great an extent as they are now recognised and indeed sometimes assisted. It is this exquisite sensitiveness, these vibrating nerves, these changing moods, this irritability of sensation that the woman—like the man—of the present day has acquired as her superiority, her gain through culture, her right of precedence before any other generation. But this new wealth involves innumerable new conflicts. The senses go their own way and are attracted where the soul is estranged, or repelled although the heart is filled with tenderness. Until the physiology and psychology of loathing are understood, we shall not have gone far towards the solution of the erotic problem. Every day—and night—these innumerable influences, conscious or unconscious, are at work transforming the feelings of married people and lovers. And although our time is becoming increasingly conscious of this, it does not yet understand either how to counteract the dangerous or encourage the favourable influence of the important trifles of married life.
Only the foremost of women with a genius for love have arrived at that degree of sensitiveness which makes it impossible for them to give or receive anything in love without the feeling which one of Charlotte Brontë’s women expresses in the words: You fit me into the finest fibre of my being.
Every developed modern woman wishes to be loved not en mâle but en artiste. Only a man whom she feels to possess an artist’s joy in her, and who shows this joy in discreet and delicate contact with her soul as with her body, can retain the love of the modern woman. She will belong only to a man who longs for her always, even when he holds her in his arms. And when such a woman exclaims: “You desire me, but you cannot caress, you cannot listen ...” then that man is doomed.
Modern woman’s love differs from that of older times by, amongst other things, the insatiability of its demand for completeness and perfection in itself, and for corresponding completeness and perfection in the feeling of the man.