The Book of Love

by Paolo Mantegazza

The maiden in her dreams, by looking at the pictures in the church and within the domestic walls, had fancied a winged man with nothing earthly and material but two lips to kiss. The object desired by her was an angel, all love and all ether, who would gather under his large folded wings the soul of the young girl and carry it away, through the space of heaven, to a golden region, all light and warmth. The quivering of the wings and the velvet of a kiss were all the voluptuousness which the chaste virgin ever thought of dreaming; and beyond it, an obscure and infinite mystery of which she knew neither name, nor confines, nor form. And instead of this angel, she beholds a man in trousers, with mustaches, who smokes much and slanders women; perhaps his hair is already turning gray, already he may be a husband and a father—but he is a man.

And the youth, too, had dreamed of his angel. She should have been all eyes, all locks of hair; divinely slender, with feet which would hardly touch the earth, eternal smile wreathed in an aureole of light, a soul ardent as fire and an innocence as pure as the snow that falls upon the summits of the Jungfrau. And, instead, she who wakes us from the dream of the night is the provocative, stout maid-servant who by her contours only, distinct and strong as they are, shows nothing but that she is much of a woman, and instead of wings she has two sinewy arms and two hands hardened from the use of pot and broom; and, far from having winged feet, she pounds the floor with pattens that seem to be soled with iron—but she is a woman.

Anything is good and enough for a first love, which is nearly always a million of hunger and a penny of bread. How vulgar is the object of that enamored young girl's thoughts! The heart of a grocer in the body of a porter! But he is pallid, and the hebetude of his stare seems sentimental languor to her; he is ill, and to her his illness appears poetic; he is robust, and for her he is the god of strength; he is arrogant, but to her he is passionate; he is an egotist, and so much the better, for he will love but her, who alone will know how to make him happy. How much poetry that ardent youth has launched to the skies, when he sang the exciting form of a strong peasant woman! How many elegies has he not wept, thinking of the bluish paleness of a cholerotic working-woman! Woe, if seduction accompanies all this texture of lies with which too often the first love builds its nest! Woe, if to the inexperienced maiden the aged libertine says, with the accent acquired from long practice: "I love you!" Woe, if the lascivious old woman, satisfying her old appetite with unripe fruit, knows how to warm the innocent youth at the fire of new voluptuousness! Then the fire is kindled, the flames spread, and the first object loved is placed on the altar with vows of eternal fealty, and perfumed with the incense of the maddest, most unrestrained idolatry.

The first love is not always born so evilly, but it too closely resembles, alas! these first loves which I have just described. Let us be sincere from the very first steps in our studies, for hypocrisy is the wood-worm that in modern society cuts into and corrodes the highest and strongest tree in the garden of life. The original sin of love appears to us with its first cry, and even when we have been forced to use all the artifices of the galvanoplastic to gild our idol, even when the bellows of imagination have worked to inflame the first love, the very first thing we say is a lie: "I love you above everything in this world; I shall love you forever. You are my first love, and one can love but once." And a second vow answers the first, perhaps more sacred and more ardent; and in a kiss, that is often the sum of two lies, the first hypocrisy is sealed, which down to the last generation of the loves of those two beings will seal with an everlasting mark all the expressions of affection, all the cravings of the heart.

Be sincere with the first kiss, if you desire love to be the chief joy of life, not a shameful trade of voluptuous lies. Yes, yours is the first love, but because it is the first it is neither true nor just nor natural that it should be the greatest, the one, the only love. Do not swear falsely, do not perjure yourselves before you know what truth is. To the eternity of your vows, the indifference of tomorrow will answer with a sardonic, mocking grin. Before you have really loved, you will sing in every tune that virtue does not exist, that love is a dream, and, children and elders at the same time, you will forswear a god whose temple you have never seen.

You are two: a man and a woman; and you say that you love each other, and perhaps it is first love for both. Well, then, during the first days do not swear, if you still value the word of an honest man, and if perjury still has terrors for you. Rarely is the first love true love, as the first book of an author rarely is the true expression of his genius. One is weak from excessive youth as from old age; and the one and first and only love, like many other dogmatic formulas which delight so much that pedantic and hypocritical biped called man, has made more victims in modern society than many crimes and many maladies of body and mind ever did. If your love is the first, so much the better; with hands chastely clasped and lips modestly conjoined, do not pronounce any other words but these: "Let us love each other!" If you are among the few and happy mortals who will love but once; if you are among the very few who, in the first woman or in the first man, have found the angel seen in their first dreams of youth, thousand and thousand times blessed! The fidelity of the future will cement for life the virtues of your souls. As for myself, if the increased progress of true and healthy democracy should eliminate from juridical institutions the formula of the oath, I would wish that the man and the woman who love each other should never swear. An adjuration less and a caress more, what a delight! An eternity less, and a longer caress, what voluptuousness! Nor should chaste and chosen souls throw my book away, feeling hurt by my cynic advice. If they will read the pages that follow, they will clearly see that no one more than I intends to elevate love to the most serene regions of the ideal, and that, however high sentiment can ascend, I, also, feel the strength to follow it. The triple and thick skin of hypocrisy that enwraps us from infancy, the Arcadic varnish which makes us look polished and brilliant, nearly always forbid us to see the true nature of things, and in love we are all unmistakably counterfeiters. The greatest liberty, the greatest sincerity alone can cure us of this malady, which is civil rather than national, because it penetrates every race, every social class; it does not spare the highest and strongest natures; it has become an integral part of every fiber of our hearts, of the framework of all our institutions.

Which are the true sources of love? Which are the paths that lead to the sacred temple? There should be an only source, an only path, but so many are those who throng and crowd to enter there, where all expect the greatest joy, that not all enter by the great highway of nature, but through secret gates and oblique ways reach their aim; they are unhappy because the original sin of their loves condemns them to a dangerous life sown with despondency and bitterness.

All the natural flows of the true and great love collect in one source. They are drops which slowly trickle into the depths of our body, and there they gather and form rivulets and streamlets that, in turn, collect in the channel of our veins until they effuse as the warm, quivering wave of sympathy.

Sympathy is the only and true source of love. Sympathy, most beautiful among the beautiful words of human speech! To suffer together, a melancholy vaticination of life lived in two; but better still, to feel, laugh and weep together! Two organisms, but one sense; two exterior worlds, but which unite around a unique center; two nerves that by various ways carry various sensations, but which interweave and run together in one heart. To see, to gaze at, to desire each other. A spark shoots forth from the contact of two desires: such is the first fact of love. Two solitary ships in the desert of the ocean were plowing through the waves, unknown to each other; the wind propelled one near to the other; a shiver of sympathy ran through the sails and the shrouds and caused them to creak simultaneously; they felt pressed by a common need, and cast out a hawser which should tie them together. From that moment they shall plow the same waters, expose themselves to the same dangers, and long and sigh for the same land.

The most rapid and ardent sympathies have their sources in the admiration of form, that is to say, in the sentiment of the beautiful which is satisfied by the object which we desire and are about to love. Among the four definitions of love that Tasso was wont to discuss, there are three which express or suggest this idea: "Love is a desire of beauty; Love is the cupidity of embrace for the pleasure of those who covet a particular beauty; Love is the union through pleasure of beauty." And, in fact, what is love if not the choice of the better forms in order to perpetuate them? What is love if not the selection of the best in order that it may triumph over the mediocre, a selection of youth and strength in order that it may survive the old and weak elements? Woman, the custodian of germs, the vestal of life, must be more beautiful than we, and man loves in her the form above all other things; and mediocre forms can, if elevated by a gigantic genius and an impassioned heart, still excite ardent passions. But these are always unstable sympathies, and where a real deformity appears, love is dead, or lives only as a prodigy of heroism, or as an esthetic malady. Woman also is immediately affected by the beauty of virile forms and can love a man merely because he is handsome; but in her the field of sympathy expands and is much higher, and character and genius will seduce her more frequently than is the case with men. The ugliest men enjoyed the superhuman voluptuousness of being loved; but in the attitude of their characters, in the power of their genius, in the greatness of their position, they possessed a fascination which belonged, nevertheless, to the world of beauty. Woman has within herself such a power of transmission of the germinative elements and such an accumulation of beauty as to be capable of doing without the power and the beauty of her companion; but she wants to feel conquered by a superior force, fascinated by something that shines or flashes or thunders.