The Book of Love

by Paolo Mantegazza

CHAPTER II MORNING CREPUSCULES OF LOVE—THE GOOD AND EVIL SOURCES OF LOVE

A human being of a low order or of a simple nature does not feel the energy of that new sentiment called love rise within him until the development of the germinative glands has marked in him the character of the sex and made of that being a man or a woman. On the other hand, in rich and powerful natures, many years before sex has impressed its deep mark on the organism, a vague, mysterious and chaste sympathy attracts the young boy toward the young girl. There, where the sun of the infinite azure of the skies is to rise, one notices a rosy tint lightly projected on the horizon, but sufficient to warn us: "There must the greatest star shine some day, the father of all light." The sun is ever the most beautiful among all the beautiful things of the skies, and I have studied with warm and constant affection, watched with religious attention the first crepuscules of that other sun which we are now studying in this book. They appear without being invited by the precocious corruption of books and of neighbors, they rise spontaneously in the heart of the most unconscious innocence; they shine like serene and calm rays of a light that later will be ardent and fascinating. They appear and disappear, like flashes of lightning, flashes which noiselessly illuminate the clouds and then leave them darker than before. A vulgar and coarse malignity repeats a blasphemy every day when it asserts that no child is ignorant of the secrets of love. The innocence of childhood is truer, more sincere and deeper than is supposed, and lasts limpid and adamantine even when it has been splashed with the mud of social corruption. The rosy lips of a child may repeat, with an expression of lascivious malice, a jest learned by chance from a maid-servant or from a libertine, but that stain does not penetrate into the crystalline nature of the child, and the spray of a fountain will be sufficient to wash the trace away. The malignant rabble is wont to doubt of the innocence of others, just as the wicked is to deny all virtue.

In the infantile songs, in the noisy and turbulent games which form the delight of the first age, suddenly a young boy beholds a little girl among a hundred, among a thousand; and an instantaneous sympathy ties the rosy knot of a nameless affection, of an innocent, unwitting love, which may seem at the same time the caricature and the miniature of a sublime picture. I remember having seen an angelic little girl, blonde as an ear of wheat and rosy as the aurora, throw her arms around the neck of a little boy as haughty as a brigand and as dark as a pirate. And the impudent little thing would cover him with kisses, and he would disdain and resent these cajoleries; and she would tell him that she loved him very much, that she wanted to make of him her little bridegroom. A reversed world, a microscopic scene of a chaste Joseph who did not know what woman was, and a Lilliputian woman who, in the innocent ardors of a childish embrace, seemed to be the wife of Potiphar and was nothing but an angel. However, this sudden movement of affection between two children of different sex conceals sometimes a true and real passion which has haughty jealousies, tears and sighs, delirious joys, a history, a future.

The beautiful young girls whom a kind or a cruel nature has destined to arouse at every step of life a desire or a sigh, often ignore the fact that in the multitude of their adorers there are boys so small as to seem babies and who kiss in secret the flowers that have fallen from their bosoms; who furtively and mysteriously, like domestic thieves, steal into the little room that shelters their angel to kiss her bed, to kneel on the carpet which that woman treads—that woman whom they already distinguish above all the creatures in the world, whom they dare already to place on the same level as their mother. And how often a woman who playfully runs her fingers through the locks of a boy laying his head upon her knees, is unconscious of a little heart that beats loudly, loudly, under those caresses; unconscious, when the child raises his curly head, of the cause of his flush, which does not come from congestion, but from burning with a fire of which he himself is ignorant, but which is love.

These rosy phantoms, which gild some of the most beautiful hours of our child-life, seem to last only as long as the morning twilight; and certainly the battles of youth often cause them to be forgotten. And many, with slippery memories and skeptical hearts, when they hear them mentioned have only words of contempt and gestures of pity for what they are pleased to term infantile lullabies to be relegated among the horrors of the witches and the caresses of the nurse. And yet how often these fleeting phantoms announce the storms of the future, reveal a deeply enamored nature and weave the first threads of a long fabric of delirious joys and torments! Some very, very fortunate mortal, on his death-bed, could press the hand of the only woman he had ever loved, whom he had loved when still a child, before he even knew she was a woman. The trembling lips of the dying man could link the last kiss of life with the first noisy, insolent, clumsy kiss on the soft cheek of a ten-year-old girl. And without trying to reach this loftiest sphere of an ideal too far removed from our existence, how often, after a long life hardened by the tortures of a hundred passions, after having lost faith and love, in the dusk of the early evening a last rosy flash of sunset awakened a dear memory, buried many years since, and the heart of an old man throbbed and a tear ran down his wrinkled face! Before the weary eyes a little straw hat had passed, with two blue streamers, but in the depths of the heart what an abyss of dear memories had opened in an instant! In the night of the past, a limpid ray of light had illumined a picture all life and all beauty; an antique cameo had appeared under the pick of the gravedigger, among ruins and dust! And that picture was a childish love, a flower carried away by the turbid torrent of a storm, but preserved by the friendly hand of memory, which, after all, is not always ungrateful or cruel.

If you ask a boy why he loves a little girl, he will blush and run away; if you ask the little girl, her face will flush and she will answer with a sublime impertinence. They love—and they know not why! Ask a precocious rosebud why it wanted to bloom in March, instead of awaiting the warm and voluptuous air of May; ask a July cyclamen why it did not await the cool breezes of September to perfume the mossy bed in which it had made its nest. They love, and they know not why! In passionate men the first light of love appears sooner, because Nature, fruitful and impatient, longs to give her flowers, and an entire life will be for them too short a day to satisfy the intense thirst of love which consumes them. They love soon because they love much; as men of genius, at ten years of age, often conceive that which the masses will never conceive at thirty.

And why, my boy, do you prefer that little girl to all the others? And why, my pretty girl, do you allow yourself to be kissed only by the lips of that dark, impertinent little beau? Because that little girl differs from all the others; because that dark lad is unlike any other boy. Love, from its first and most indistinct appearance, is selection, a deep and irresistible sympathy of different natures, the recomposition of discomposed forces, the equilibrium of opposites, the complement of dissociated things; the harmony of harmonies; the most gigantic, the most prepotent of the affinities ties of attraction!

Aside from the precursory crepuscules of natures most powerful in love, this sentiment, in ordinary men, rises when a new want springs forth under the rod of that magical transformer which is puberty. At that time, on the smooth, pubescent, roundish surface of the infantile nature, a deep crevice opens; a void is formed which woman alone can fill; then, that little, round, smooth fruit called little girl also sheds its childish skin, disclosing the juicy and delicate flesh of the fruit which was hidden in it. Then, from every developed muscle of the virile organism, from every sound of its strengthened voice, from every hair that makes its skin hirsute, there rises a powerful cry which demands in the loudest tone: A woman! And from every flexuous limb of the girl who has become a woman, from every quiver of the hair which makes her proud, from every pore of the young girl who has become a crater of burning desires, arises a cry which demands: A man!

The passage of the fatal bridge that separates adolescence from youth is one of the epochs most burdened with anxieties, most merry with convulsive joys, and for this I call it the hysterical period of life. I shall illustrate it, perhaps, some day, in a work which I am preparing on the ages of man. I shall here describe with few, wide strokes of the pen how the necessity of loving makes itself felt to most men. And if I have referred to woman most of the time, it is because she, more chaste, more reserved, and yet a hundred times more in need of love, feels more deeply the shudder which announces to her the appearance of the new god; more innocent than we are, she does not know his nature; more timid, she has a greater fear of him. Nature conceded to man common resources almost unknown to woman, and only too often precocious vice makes him acquainted sooner with voluptuousness than with love. When he is chaste, virtuous and impassioned, he also feels the same raging tumult, which stirs his soul; he too, somber, melancholy, frantic, demands of nature, with the accents of wrath and plaintive lamentations: A woman!

To this cry answers, alas! only too often, the first comer. It is impossible for certain natures to resist a long time the tortures of robust and vigorous chastity: the frail human shell would fall to pieces if it persisted in keeping imprisoned an accumulation of forces, all gigantic, all fresh, all ready for the battle. The first love is not slow to appear; and if the neophyte who appears on the horizon lacks more than two-thirds of the desired virtues, Love is such a magician that he can create them and transform a worm into a god.