When love begins we may entertain some doubts as to the reality of the passion before our eyes. The heart beats more quickly than usual, and in the serene sky some clouds pass and evanesce in the deep azure; perhaps in the distant mist we behold, at times, a lightning flash; but will we have a storm or fine weather? If the heart is forced to answer, it may, in these cases, make the same solemn mistakes as the meteorologists in their almanacs or from the university chair. Embryos in their first stage are all similar, and even the most powerful microscope cannot distinguish today the egg of the lion from that of the rabbit. Incipient sympathies, growing friendships, affinities about to become loves, are all crepuscular things faintly delineated on the gray horizon, and the human eye may be easily deceived; but we cannot cast any blame upon it. And love, too, assumes so manifold and varied disguises as to render it difficult for us to make a good diagnosis in many cases. However, it is always easier to recognize love in our own home than in that of others, notwithstanding the fact that it is much more important for our happiness to know whether we are loved than to realize that we really are in love. To distinguish in others the true love from the mendacious, you may be helped by this physio-psychological essay, while in order to explore your own heart scant attention to the phase of your sentiments will suffice.
One truly loves when to the agonizing cry: "A man!—A woman!" a friendly distant voice replies: "Do not weep; I am here!" One loves when, after hearing that voice, the cry subsides and the deep void of desire is filled. One loves when the desire of the beloved is placed above everything else. One loves when one suddenly blushes or pales if he hears a name or the familiar swish of a garment that approaches. One loves when one involuntarily has on one's lips one name only a hundred times in a day, or when one ceases to pronounce a word which one was pronouncing a hundred times before. One loves when one's eyes are always fixed on one point of the star-map where the creature dwells who has become half of ourselves. One loves when one hurries to the mirror at every instant to ask of oneself, "Am I beautiful enough?" and when one restlessly explores the abyss of one's own conscience with the query, "Can I be loved?" One loves when in every fiber of the heart, in every atom of the organism, the sap of life is stirred and rushes through every vein and every nerve, so that an intimate, penetrating, deep commotion warns us with thrilling voice that something great and unusual is in us, as though God had visited us. This is the true love, that is not appeased by lust, nor quieted by ambition, nor cooled by distance, that does not even lose itself in the dreams of the night; the love that, to abandon us, must carry away with itself a large piece of bleeding flesh and tortured nerves.
CHAPTER III THE FIRST WEAPONS OF LOVE—COURTSHIP
How subtle and mysterious must that high chemistry be which unites the germinative elements of two organisms of different sex to renew life and generate a new organism! It does not suffice that in the calm and long silence of thirty or forty years, half lived by a man and half by a woman, the gemmulæ have prepared and made ready to call and attract each other; it does not suffice that the powerful energies of sexual affinities have accumulated; it still does not suffice that a sudden sympathy shall prepare the spark and the conflagration. All this long activity of nature has prepared things in order that the great phenomenon may occur; but the atoms that seek each other and ardently desire to unite must long oppose each other in order to rekindle the ardors and centuplicate the energies. To the human male the aggressive mission has been assigned; to the human female, the difficult task of defending herself. The part assigned to man is simple and requires only strength, physical or moral, intellectual or made complex by many elements; yet always an energy of attack and seduction, to assail and overthrow, one after the other, curtain-walls and ramparts, barricades and lunettes, all the intricate system of fortifications which woman erects against man to defend herself; or rather, to let herself be defeated slowly and chastely.
To woman, on the other hand, nature has assigned a task much more difficult and cruel. She must repudiate what she desires; she must struggle against the voluptuousness which invades her, repel him whom she loves, exact sacrifices when she would ask only for kisses, be avaricious when everything urges her to be generous. She must collect all her meager strength to defend a gate vigorously attacked, and cry out aloud, "Wait!" to him whom she would like to press sweetly to her bosom.
The battles of desire and coquetry, of ardor and modesty, impatience and reticence are fought in the various countries and in the various epochs with widely different strategy and tactics, but all may be reduced to this general formula. Even when the sweet chain of sympathy prepares a sure love for two lovers, the one says, "Immediately," and the other answers "Later." When the sexes exchange their strategy and tactics, and invert their amorous missions, there invariably arises a violent disorder, and virtue and esthetics are submerged in the same shipwreck.
In Paraguay, where laxity of customs prevails, a most impatient young man, who had reasons to believe himself loved, would repeat in every key, from the most tender to the most impassioned, with sobbing voice and tyrannical accent, this one word: "Today!" And the beautiful Creole, who knew nothing of Darwin and sexual selection, would reply smilingly: "But why today? You have known me for ten days only; in two months, perhaps." In this artless reply that Paraguayan girl was evolving the philosophy of seduction and coquetry, the fundamental lines of the physiology of the sexes.
Every day the most beautiful half of the human race throws in our faces the rude accusation that we are much less exacting in our tastes, and that, satisfied with the external forms, we rarely seek to determine the substance. And it is natural that it should happen this way; the different missions assigned to each of the two sexes in the amorous strategy require that this should be done. If certain contours exercise so great and immediate a sway over us, it is because we seek in them, unwittingly and involuntarily, the good mother and the good nurse; and, more than it seems, voluptuousness prepares the future generations for the good and the better. To fructify a human female, who shall become a good mother and a good nurse, the flash of a desire and the instantaneous ardor of a battle will suffice; but woman does not seek a fecundator only; she wants her companion to be the defender of her future children, the protector of her weakness; she wants to assure herself as to the deep energy of the passion of him who says he loves her; she wants to sound the abysses of heart and mind. The man shall build the nest: is he an architect? He shall defend it from rapacious animals: is he courageous? He shall train and enrich his children: has he talent, ambition, tenacity of purpose? He must know all this. For some time she has been aware that she is young and beautiful; many a time the ardent rays of a thousand desires have showered upon her; at her command numerous adorers would fall at her feet, all young, perhaps, handsome and robust; but she does not want a man; she wants the man who will be lastingly, powerfully and ardently hers. This is how, in the initial web of love, we read the inexorable laws which govern it; how clearly nature explains to us the inevitable fickleness of human males, their polygamic wanderings and their unreasonable requirements; just as modesty, chastity and the sublime reticence of woman are the faithful guardians of the destinies of the future family. Much of this elementary strategy was lost in the stormy vicissitudes of modern civilization; it is necessary to scrape off much varnish and snatch away many rags in order to touch the robust members of the primitive passions; nevertheless, through multiform hypocrisy, we succeed in finding the kernel of the thing.