The Book of Love

by Paolo Mantegazza

The eyes of love have all the virtue of the telescope and the microscope, and while not a single curve of the thousand labyrinths through which the mobile feminine beauty seems to flutter and flicker can escape them, they also attain the most sublime summits of ideal beauty. When the eye admires and conquers, it invites to the picture which it draws from nature all senses, all passions, all thought, all psychical energies of man. No other sense possesses this gigantic faculty of elevating us to the highest regions of the ideal, compelling the minor senses, the animal instincts and the lower passions to contemplate its panoramas. The eye is the first minister of the mind, and while it refines desire and frees passion from the coarsest lasciviousness, it elevates the man and woman who love to the highest spheres of human possibility. Touch likes to remove the veils that cover the beautiful; sight need not divest the object it contemplates, for its light illumines every shade, penetrates through opaque bodies and makes them transparent, threads its way through the most intricate folds, and while it sees it also surmises, inspects, divines, analyzes, measures, compares and controls with incredible agility all the elements of the esthetic world.

The eye which rests the rays of its light on a loving eye illumines it, is illumined in turn and shows to us the phenomenon of two brilliant stars exchanging their lights and rendering themselves more beautiful. If one does not lower the chaste eyelids, it may so happen that the fire will spread from the high spheres of the esthetic ideal down to the vile and brutish instincts. This, in fact, happens in all men of a base type; every emotion of love is rapidly transferred to the regions of touch. In elect natures, on the contrary, sight has ever some beauty to discover, a region to explore, a world to conquer. The richest man in the world can always count the dollars and the stocks he possesses; the most powerful king can always know the extent in square miles of his dominions: but he who loves a beautiful creature dies without having seen, contemplated or admired all. In the last day of his life there is always some "unknown land" which the eye has not yet discovered or sufficiently explored. And this is just the intimate difference which distinguishes touch from sight. While the former has well determined boundaries and a definite task, the latter widens the limits of its dominions to include a number infinitely greater in esthetic combinations. In a flash of the eye you have seen a beautiful being and immediately said: "Oh, the angelic creature!" A chaos of sensations, a world of beautiful things have surprised, enraptured, enamored you; but how many days, how many months, how many years will be required for your eyes to roam through the thousand paths of that garden, to study every flower, every petal of each flower. What intensity of voluptuous analysis, how many poems of delight, in order to say again, five or ten years after: "Oh, the angelic creature!"

Nature was very generous in distributing attractions in the bodies of man and woman, and the short, sad day of our life always vanishes before we have been enabled to see all the forms of human beauty. But to the esthetic treasures of nature, man succeeded in adding those of art; and with the thousand artifices of garment and ornaments, we have added to our forms such and so many beauties that it is easier to imagine than to enumerate them. Perhaps I will some day attempt to write a "Physiology of Beauty," in which, if I do, I intend to point out the general laws which govern the esthetic world. Here I must only describe the confines where love and beauty meet and, in turn, kiss and fecundate each other. When the eye has love for a companion it finds a new world to contemplate in the cerulean star-thistle which our sweetheart interweaves for the first time in her golden hair, or in the crimson geranium which gives a magnificent relief to her raven locks; a naughty little muslin apron may become a new continent, and a glove, which too cruelly and too tightly squeezes a rosy little hand, may enclose in the nest of its little buttons of mother of pearl so many new beauties as to stir our senses or infuse an unknown voluptuousness into us. The man who loves a beautiful woman laughs compassionately at the polygamist pasha who needs a hundred women to find the hundred beauties of the human Venus; and the beautiful woman, in the arsenal of her garments, in the variety of her smiles, in the thousand undulations of her flexuous body, evokes before the eyes of her lover not a hundred, but a thousand women, all beautiful with a different beauty.

Sight is the only sense which, in love, proceeds to effect moral and intellectual discoveries in the person beloved; and we not only contemplate to admire and to enjoy, but also to discover, by the flash of the eye and the throbbing of the facial muscles, how many affections, how many thoughts we can find in the one whom we intend to make ours forever. However, beauty is such a powerful tyrant in love that it forces us under its yoke and usurps the rights of the highest needs. A beautiful woman who is desired seldom seems to us frivolous and heartless, and the fascination of beauty may impel us to pardon every crime, to accept the most shameful compromises with our conscience, and may cause in us the most ridiculous and farcical hallucinations. However, this fault is not of the eyes, that see, but of the senses, that desire too ardently; and, above all, of nature, which has such a loving care of the forms in which germs are moulded into living bodies. Nature defends and protects the beautiful above everything else, perhaps because it is the crucible in which the good and the true are melted together.

If I wished to indicate by an ideographic sign all the varied and essential parts which the sense of sight assumes in love, I would use the figure of a winged messenger, a sort of Mercury, with the left hand leading Voluptuousness on the earth, and with the right directing our gaze toward the highest regions of the ideal, where in holiest and most tender company live the good and the beautiful, the true and the sublime, where are preserved all the variform archetypes of sublimity.

Hearing has a small but interesting part in the story of love, if we set aside the prominent part it has as an instrument of thought. We are not to discuss here music or the value of ideas communicated through words, but the purely sensual influence of the ear in amorous phenomena.

Hearing yields some pleasures almost tactile, and always very sensual, such as are brought to us by some sounds which may be termed lascivious (the swish of a silk gown, the warbling of some birds, the murmur of certain waves, etc.); but beyond these rare exceptions, hearing has a tender, affectionate part. We would say that it stirs affections, predisposing them to vibrate with the sweetest, most impassioned notes. Man and woman have each a peculiar voice, and the sexual character of the feminine voice affects man, while the virile timbre of his voice causes woman's heart to throb with the most deeply sexual desires. There are some feminine voices that cannot be heard with impunity, so suavely do their notes penetrate into the greatest depths of the heart, which throbs with excitement and emotion. The voice of some women resembles a caress by the wing of a swan; and while it delights us, it perturbs and confuses us, affects us deeply and lastingly. Man and woman, through the notes of their voices, chastely reveal their sex, and the heart palpitates violently, as that of a girl bathing, who, before trusting her little foot to the wave, looks around as though frightened by the rustle of the leaves.

The sound of the voice, beyond the idea it represents, cannot say, "I am beautiful, I am intelligent," but it can say, alone, many other sweet things: "I am a woman, I am very much of a woman, I desire much, I am languishing with love, I am alone, I want you at once, I await you ardently," etc.

The seduction of the voice has some of the characteristics attributed to ancient sorcery; it surprises, fascinates and conquers us, and we are unable to discover the cause of such a storm roused by a few sounds, a few words. We feel ourselves almost humiliated at being vanquished without a battle, carried off without our consent; and the fascination of a voice seems to us the work of a witch. More than once we have resisted the seductions of sight, the violence of touch; but the voice conquers us, delivers us, bound, hand and foot, into the arms of a mysterious power which demands from us the blindest submission, against which rebellion is impossible. And this influence of the voice lasts a long time, is never forgotten, often survives love itself.