The Book of Love

by Paolo Mantegazza

Woman, however, sometimes concedes love, together with voluptuousness, to him who weeps, sighs and suffers for her. Compassion is the benevolent chord which vibrates even in natures brutally egotistical; while in woman, rich in so many affections, it can vibrate until it tortures her. This sentiment, however, is, of its own nature, tender and mild, and by placing a hand on him who suffers, keeps him always in a state of subjection, so that true equality can never exist between the one who inspires compassion and the one who feels it. This is the essential character of compassion; and even when, by narrow, long and thorny paths, it leads us to love, this is always under the influence of its bastardly origin. All loves out of compassion are forms of affectionate commiseration, of benign protection, and lack the highest notes of passion. They strongly resemble the verses of him who is not a poet; the god of fire does not pervade, does not inflame them; they do not know the sacred agitation of the sibyl; and if they can live long in a mild climate, they can, however, be suddenly overthrown by the appearance of the true god, who demands his rights, his tributes of blood and of ardors. The woman who, unfortunately, has not yet experienced any love other than that inspired in her by compassion, may deceive herself, may believe that she loves truly and deeply; but woe to her, if a real and warm sympathy should awake in her heart, that she may make a comparison between the true love and the false one! The weak little plant of an affection long guarded by commiseration will fall and be carried away by the fury of the impetuous stream, and the poor creature, who really loves for the first time, may suffer the most excruciating pain, and be made to fight the bloodiest struggles between duty and passion, between commiseration and love. I know only too well that among the thousand forms of cowardly love there is also the cowardice which begs love on bended knees, but I would prefer to be loved by caprice, revenge or lechery, rather than by compassion. The woman who loves us in that way has always her heel on our heads; and although the sweet pressure of a woman's little foot may be as dear as the caress of her hand, in the face of nature we commit an act of cowardice and invert the most elementary laws of the physiology of the sexes. The man who waives the primacy of conquest is a lion that allows his mane to be shorn, a Samson with clipped hair, always a mild and disguised form of eunuch. May fortune protect you all from love out of compassion!

A still more turbid source of love is vanity; to hear that a woman is very beautiful and chaste, that she has never permitted herself to be loved, is an immediate stimulus of sudden ambition to the man who knows that he is strong and adores the daughters of Eve. And the daughters of Eve, in turn, very willingly persist in throwing the baited hook to catch the cold, lonely fish who lives in the most dark recesses of solitude and chastity. Hence many challenges sent and taken which lead oftener to a conquest of bodies than to true love. The great woman-lovers, who have long since renounced the virtue of sublime love, are accustomed to conquer all the conquerable solely for vanity's sake, solely to tie with amorous chains to their triumphal chariot a new slave and a new victim. They nearly always like to conquer the most difficult and different characters, and you may find them ardently wishing to give the first lesson in voluptuousness to the innocent as well as to subjugate the most cunning and oldest libertines. Besides vanity, the goad of morbid curiosity has its share in this choice of victims, as curiosity is one of the strongest threads in the psychological web of woman. A tart, wild fruit may stimulate the appetite of a palate too dull, as would the mordant pungency of cheese too old; the frivolous woman is passionately fond of this alternating of sour and burning tastes, of this succession of men inexperienced in love and men only too well versed in it; and lechery may go so far in these natures as to cause them to love through mere curiosity of the unknown, even excluding lust, which is not always necessary in these pathological tastes. At any rate, even when vanity alone has brought a man and a woman together, a posthumous sympathy may awaken a real love with healthy members and a long life. It is, however, always a love that resembles the rich man who was born a peasant and, true upstart that he is, may, in the midst of luxury and pleasure and in the most courteous manner, kick you out of his presence when you least can afford it. To be born well is really the first problem of life in all cases, and democracy itself cannot succeed in overthrowing the ancient aristocracy unless it can boast of a legitimate and noble birth.

Man, who daily accuses of vanity his female companion, shows oftener than the latter the most grotesque and clownish forms of that sentiment; and we rarely see him renounce the puerile ostentation of those of his loves which had the bastardly origin of vanity. How often has he reached the lowest stage of cowardice by casting up to the woman who blessed him with love, that he sought her love only to adorn with another trophy his triumphal chariot! Woman, instead, almost always, even when she has desired to be loved out of vanity alone, even when she is about to dismiss the servant who has wearied her, will give him a testimonial which makes him happy, does not humiliate him, and will satisfy him that he pleased—for a day, a month, a year—the woman who, perhaps, feigned to love him, or loved him very blandly. No man feels humiliated in thinking that he was the sweet victim of a caprice; all feel dejected if made the target of a vainglorious speculation. And many other times, woman, with a very refined and generous tact, pretends not to understand that she is desired and loved solely out of vanity, and gradually succeeds in making men love her for herself, and for herself alone. The friendly enemy not perceiving it, she succeeds with subtle art in substituting a sincere and warm passion for the narrow ambition that had inspired the attack and the conquest: one of the thousand proofs that woman is superior to us in sentiment in the same degree as we are superior to her in mental strength; one of the thousand proofs that woman always endeavors to elevate even the basest loves, while we so often want to force under the Caudine Forks of voluptuousness even those loves which, like the eagles, were born on the highest rocks of psychology.

Lust is the prolific mother of most vulgar loves; nay, this sentiment is to many only the necessity of drinking at a spring found to be sweeter than any other. Nude love, without the splendid garments of imagination and heart, stripped even of the robust flesh lent to it by the sentiment of the beautiful, is reduced to a skeleton which is lust and which for very many is all they think of love. What a poor, wretched thing! A practice of lasciviousness! Woman converted into a cup which we prefer to any other because we have long been accustomed to satiate our thirst out of it. To have possessed before having loved, to have been possessed before having given the kiss of love! What ignominy! What baseness! And yet love is such a magician that, at times, it can perform the prodigy of being born of lechery.

Loves born of lust are the most difficult to preserve, and every day of their life is a difficult and rare conquest. Even the most perfidious cunning of the arts of pleasing blunts against insurmountable difficulties, and woman, after having brought into play all the witchery of body and heart, may see her victim snatched away from her by the first comer. Love may be warm, ardent, thirsty, but the glass that satisfies it is always made of the most fragile crystal and may at any moment fall and be shattered into a hundred pieces.

Revenge, which is a form of hatred, may, by incestuous nuptials, become a mother, or better, a stepmother of love. To be deceived and to know it, to wish to humiliate the guilty by flaunting in the latter's face a new love, to seek it, finding it in one day: there is the source of love out of revenge. The unfortunate paranymph who acts as the call-bird of a degraded passion does not always perceive the trap, allows himself to be loved, loves, and often amuses the person who pretends to love him and those who unconcernedly witness the shameful spectacle. Vanity makes us blind, and it does not permit us to see that, perhaps, in the period of a day we have been seen, desired, conquered; and while, inflated with pride, we display our feathers like a peacock, we do not realize that we are actors in a comedy staged to humiliate him or her who is loved always and more than ever. In some very humiliating cases we serve as rubefacient and sink so low as to be placed on a level with a mustard poultice or a leech; and the cure effected at our expense is so quick and perfect that we are immediately dismissed, like a physician who is impatiently paid and impatiently taken leave of because his services are no longer required.

These, however, are the most unfortunate cases, and belong to the ugliest pathology of the human heart; in other instances love out of revenge becomes, through the virtue of either or both of the lovers, a true and real love which cures the old wound and opens a wide horizon of happiness to the man and to the woman who have become acquainted in such a strange manner, and it may then be said that he who was to be the revengeful executioner, the unconscious minister of the justice of love, becomes, instead, first the physician and afterward the lover of the offended, and a new love arises on the ruins of the old one.

I certainly do not claim to have studied all the pure and impure sources of love, but I would feel satisfied if I had touched upon the most important ones, and outlined the genealogy of this sentiment. In an analytical work, however great may be the care exercised in order not to detach adherent things, it is next to impossible to avoid breaking some fiber or destroying anything. It frequently occurs that the source of love is not one, but double, or is formed by the collecting of various streamlets, so that it would be difficult to state whether the new-born is a legitimate son or a bastard. A slight but sincere sympathy may be associated with great vanity, but the desire for revenge may, fortunately for us, fall in with a warm and violent affection. Thus, lust, vanity, compassion, gratitude, may meet at the same time and fecundate a love which later may flow limpid and pure in its bed, although its source was an impure, muddy stream.

Sometimes a human being loves another not for the latter's sake, but out of a strange resemblance which the latter bears to a person long loved and, perhaps, already lost; thus it happens that one may love the daughter after having loved the mother; and there have been cases in which one has loved even three successive generations. The excessive disproportion in the age of the lovers, a certain mummy effluvium exhaled even by the most carefully embalmed bodies, gives to those loves a character that induces me to place them at least on the frontiers that separate physiology from pathology; I would, therefore, term them "physio-pathological."

Loves of mixed origin are the purer and warmer, the larger the part played in them by sympathy, and this element alone would suffice to allot a place to them in the hierarchical scale of nobility. The influence which the first origin exercises over love is so lasting and so prepotent that more than once affections suffering from a dangerous illness recovered suddenly at the tender remembrance of these thoughts: "You really loved me one day of your life." "You are mine by love and nothing else." "And yet I loved you!" Often a man born in the highest place and of noblest blood sinks gradually into the mire, loses his dignity, his fortune, even the most superficial appearance of manners and behavior; yet if you observe him attentively you will certainly find in the nobility of some gesture, in the majestic tone of his voice, in some refined taste, such traces of his ancient origin as may have survived the shipwreck. And so it happens with a well-born love. I have seen passions dragged in the mire of abjection, tattered and foul, like a velvet rag picked up in the gutter; I have seen loves sold and bought again, and passed through the hands of a hundred hucksters at the public auction of vice and infamy; but in those poor shreds I have always found something that had remained intact and revealed its ancient and noble origin; and with my own eyes I have witnessed fabulous resurrections that seemed miracles, and redemptions that caused me to think of the divine intervention and of the galley-slaves too arcadically rehabilitated through the rose-water bath of our modern philanthropists.