Love is a chemical affinity; and its composition is proportionately stronger the more widely different are the elements in the combination. The ideal of perfect marriage is the combination of a man thoroughly a man, exceedingly so, and a woman thoroughly a woman, exceedingly so. Whenever a man acquires a feminine tendency of character and a woman a virile one the chemical affinity diminishes in intensity, the combination alters at the least touch or first contact of a third body which comes near and has a greater affinity for one or the other of the two elements.
A very intelligent woman and a man of less than mediocre intellect are combinations of bodies which can only have an exceedingly weak affinity between them. The first has a mode of thought which is virile, and the second has a feminine one. And only too often the third element comes to correct the elective affinity, and the literary woman takes a man of genius, who rules her, for a lover, or a robust man, who calms her; and the husband of small intellect comforts himself in making love to an illiterate peasant woman, or a maid without grammar, with whom he can show his intellectual pre-eminence and revenge himself on the superiority of his wife.
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I ask pardon (on my knees if necessary, for I know that my sin is great) for treating of a more and a less in the measure of thought.
This is really an infantile or Australasian psychology; but the much or the little are always the first approximations to the solution of every problem, and the how much always goes before the when and the how.
I admit, then, that in the harmony of thought between the man and woman the amount must always be greater on the man’s side. The culture of the man is always progressing, and with it inevitably that of the woman also, but this ought always to remain a step below ours, not because we do not wish to lose the pre-eminence of potency, but because the labour of the brain is more difficult and perilous in the woman’s case than in the man’s, and her energy naturally less.
Look around without leaving Italy and tell me how many normal women, how many healthy and perfect women, there are in our literary circle. I will not continue on this theme lest I draw upon myself a shower of poisoned darts. Several are my venerated and admired friends, and I wish to keep their friendship until my last breath. But if I should say that many of them are sterile, and many very nervous, ought they to feel themselves offended? I esteem them too much to believe it! Man is so accustomed to consider himself superior to the woman in the world of thought that if he finds an error in the orthography of a lady’s letter he is as pleased as if he had found a diamond in the sand of a river. That little error, which was made in the hysterical haste of a moment of love’s expansion, is really a diamond, because it confirms and assures us of our intellectual superiority, and shows us all at once the feminine and seductive grace of the being we love. An error of orthography or even of grammar in a feminine handwriting is a wayward little foot, which peeps out from under the skirt of the dress, and hints to us the glories of the sex, the inexhaustible delights of voluptuousness. It is a coquettish curve which in spite of the thick clothing whispers in the ear palpitating with desire: Eve lies underneath, Eve who is awaiting Adam—and desires him.
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Harmony of thought between the sexes ought to spring from the agreement of the unlike, and in such a way that no pride should be offended, and each one be satisfied to make a sum instead of a subtraction.
A scientific man and a female artist can form a delightful harmony upon two notes; a naturalist also and a woman who adores music; a psychologist, an inexorable analyst, and a woman who sees the comic side of things at once; and thus there are a hundred other combinations of different intellectual values, which, summed up, leave each one contented with his own. Besides special fitness, there is a sexual character which impresses itself upon the thought of the man and woman. Man discovers, finds, creates; woman divines, distinguishes, analyses. Man reaps, woman gleans. Man with too great haste, often with too great pride, grasps too much and lets it fall from its hands; woman walks behind and gathers up what he has lost.