The Book of Love

by Paolo Mantegazza

No sooner has sex made its appearance than the male quickly distinguishes himself by his aggressive character. With few exceptions, it is the male that seeks, conquers, keeps the prey. Glance over the pages of Darwin's work on sexual selection and you will see how many weapons nature has given to males to conquer and keep their mates. Even in plants, it is the pollen that goes in search of the ovulum, the ovulum that awaits the spark that is to fecundate it. In the most simple of animal forms, where the male and female live and die fettered to the spot that saw their birth, it is the virile element that is always carried there, where the germ awaits it. This is the first dogma that governs the religion of love in the entire world of the living; and when all high races look with contempt upon the woman who attacks and the man who flees, they only protest against the violation of one of the most tyrannical laws which men and mollusks, women and pistils, cannot evade.

Man summarizes all the forms of the living nature; so that we are frequently tempted to affirm that whatever of human is in him is the greatest synthesis of all the minor forms of the living, and that he is precisely the first because under the bark of his individuality all the forces are gathered within him, from the secondary to the last; and the same phenomenon we observe in the psychical elements of his loves.

Pigeons, even when intermingled with the most varied breeds, are seldom unfaithful to their mates; and although the male, in a rare whim, may break the vow of fidelity, he quickly returns to the dear nuptial bed of his spouse. Darwin kept some pigeons of different breeds shut up in the same place for a long time, and there was never a bastard among them. Do we not also find among men splendid examples of the most faithful monogamy and do you not recognize it as the social basis in almost all the superior races?

The antelope of South Africa has up to a dozen mates, and the Antilope saiga of Asia more than a hundred. But have we not the small and hypocritical polygamies of modern society, and those, most splendid and impudent, of the Orientals? Have we not in man, as in very many animals, females who submit to love as to a duty, and males on whom love must be imposed? Have we not libertinism at the very side of chastity? Have we not in the world of man all the lasciviousness, all the ardors, all the possibilities of lewdness of the animals' world?

Several fulmineous forms of love which last no longer than the flash of the lightning not infrequently occur among men, as the cold, long-lasting kisses of many insects are an amorous practice of various human temperaments. And fiery, cruel jealousies and bloody battles are scenes common to men and brutes; nor is death for love an exclusive privilege of man. The few and coarse passions of animals are all carried as a holocaust to the altar of generation, while man carries to it all the ardors of his rich nature, all the infinite forces which he has drawn from the great womb of the living beings and which he has centuplicated with the accumulations of his hundred civilizations. The chaffinch, in the contests of amorous song, more than once falls from the tree on which he is singing his erotic hymn, smothered by pulmonary apoplexy; just as many a poet beholds the lyre of his genius and the chords of his life break at the feet of a woman. In the silence of the shady thickets, the nightingale, exhausted, swoons with love and fatigue, and dies for having been unable to vanquish a more fortunate rival in melody and strength of notes; and hundreds and hundreds of times, in the somber labyrinths of life, the human lover dies in the battles of an unhappy love, and he too dies because he could not sing louder and sweeter than his rival. Nor is coquetry peculiar to the human female only; no woman in the world will ever be the equal of a female canary in the wicked art with which she resists the impatient ardors of her companion; and the thousand travesties with which in the feminine world a "yes" is concealed under a "no" are but pallid imitations of the refined coquetry, the simulated flights, the amorous bitings and the hundred thousand cajoleries of the world of animals.

As to the esthetic elements which nature has lavished upon the loves of living beings, they are such and so many that the richest palette would be insufficient to depict them or the poet's words to describe them. Here are two pictures from my meager collection.

I

I am in the garden, lying down upon a wall so low that I can voluptuously scent the soft aroma of the earth damped by a storm; I have no rugs under my body or pillows under my head; a slate, furrowed and shining, is my bed. With one hand extended above the wall, I am nipping the petals of a lemon flower, while with the other I am frightening the ants which hustle about in the sandy path. All at once, two little shadows, two brown sprites, pass before my eyes and alight, facing me, in the middle of the path. They are two children of heaven, all wings and all beauty; the organs of terrestrial life are reduced to a thread, but a thread that sucks the nectar from the flowers, and four gigantic wings to conquer the skies. Their hours are numbered; they must love and die, and nature made them warm and swift for intense love: organs of sense greater than the venter, organs of beauty greater than the entrails. They are butterflies, but I know not their names, and I feel disappointed. I look around in vain for an entomologist to name them for me: man does not feel that he possesses a creature unless he has sprinkled it with the ink of his dictionaries. They will die, as far as I am concerned, nameless; and in vain will they knock at the gates of paradise, to enter the place where dear and beloved things are remembered. Can you imagine ever having loved a woman whose name you know not? As in religion, so it is in love: baptism is the first and holiest of sacraments.

But these butterflies love each other without baptism; they are frolicking on the pebbles of the path, and running after each other. They do not suspect that the greatest tiger of our planet is watching them, and that a great lizard is creeping down slowly from the little wall and turns its head to left and right sullenly, licking its own lips with its forked tongue and anticipating the savory taste of the delicate flesh of those pretty creatures. They are too happy to think of enemies that surround them; and life and love are flowers which are picked in the midst of hurricanes and battles. They have found a stalk of withered grass which, under the footsteps of many pedestrians and in the sand strewn by the gardener, has succeeded in living and blossoming. That microscopic bush is an entire world for those two lovers, and the little female resorts to it as to a defense against her sweet assailant and runs around it like a child who flees from blows by running around a table. But, after a few impatient circumvolutions, the lover jumps over that little tree and with his wings shakes those of his companion. A pinch of golden dust spreads through the air, and a slightly spiteful shrug, a rebuff and a voluptuous quiver close that first scene of love. At times the little female seems about to yield to the impatient embraces of her companion; and when he, with the trepid anxiety of him who is about to grasp happiness, is very close to her and on the point of touching with his pubescent and loving antennæ the velvety body of his beloved one, she flies two yards away, and he after her and again and again is met with mockery and cajoleries. The heat increases and the surcharged desire has become as ardent as the sun. The coquette has turned her back to her pursuer and opens her wings slowly in order to show the splendor of her gems, her silver, her velvet, in all their pomp; and having shown them, she folds and raises her wings and instantly hides all the most splendid dress with which nature has made her so beautiful. Nor is the male less of a seducer, as with a little bound, which resembles a flight, he places himself in front of his companion, and in turn opens his wings, showing his thousand colors and the charm of his golden eyes. But too restless is the impatience of those two lovers who exchange their first kisses. Whoever has witnessed but once the caresses of two butterflies can certainly imagine how the angels love; but does any planet shelter a human creature that lives with wings also in heaven?

Now those two butterflies come near to each other, so near as to touch, to kiss with their antennæ; then in a wink one bounds upon the other and with a leisurely, sweet, prolonged caress, fondly they kiss each other with their wings. And then they repose, as though they wished to relish the sweetness of that grand and voluptuous caress, in which the wing of the one softly and slowly kisses the silk and velvet of his companion. How sweet, how sensual must be the caress of two wings which with a thousand scintillating papillæ touch each other in a perfect juxtaposition, and yet in this intermingling of nerves and velvet do not lose one single speck of that golden dust which adorns them!