Is it jealousy, then, the hatred that an animal manifests toward any creature which interrupts it in its loves? Well, for many savages, to whom love is nothing but sexual intercourse, all the phenomena of jealousy are reduced to this single form. When the instinct is satisfied, as the unions are promiscuous and woman is considered common property, there can be no jealousy. If woman is a cup out of which every one may drink, why should there be jealousy? A Bolivian woman once cynically told me: "Woman is the water of a stream. Throw a stone into it: will you be able to tell me a minute afterward where the stone broke that water? You are very foolish, you man, to make distinctions between identical things!"
In polygamous races, man only can be jealous; in polyandric ones, woman alone can be jealous legally. With various nations, woman is a property like any other; hence she can be voluntarily offered to the friend or to the guest, like a horse or a dog. They do not want anybody to steal her, but she can be given away without either disgrace or jealousy. Only in the higher and monogamous races the sentiments of love, self-esteem and property, forming a triple armor around our woman, incite us to defend her "with claws and beak"; and to this unyielding body, consisting of the union of three sentiments, we give the name of "jealousy"; and here we have a second psychical form, another thing called by the same name.
But, as though such confusion were not already excessive, we have called jealousy a special psychical individual organization by which we become suspicious and tyrannical toward the person we love and whom we offend without any reason and from whom we withhold all legitimate liberty. And after having confused three different things, that is to say, the grief of injured love, the triple combination of three sentiments—love, self-pride, possession—and a pathological irritability of suspicion, we discuss at length, and always in vain, in order to decide whether all men are jealous and whether jealousy measures love with an exact ruler and whether anyone can love without being jealous: vain, not to say puerile, discussions, which would not take place if words were previously defined. If by jealousy you mean the sorrow caused by not being loved or by being deceived, then every heart that loves must be jealous; thus, whoever loves country, mother, son, cannot witness without sorrow an offense offered to son, mother, country. But if by jealousy you mean that form of tyrannical suspicion which tortures the person possessed by it, then I shall tell you that we very well can and should love without ever feeling that jealousy, and that we can be jealous even without loving. Let us proceed to an elementary analysis, and we shall understand each other. Under the name of a single sentiment, of a single effective energy, the most dissimilar phenomena are grouped, to wit:
(1) The sorrow caused by a love offense;
(2) The sorrow for an injury to property;
(3) A sorrow born of the sentiment of self-esteem;
(4) An habitual, constitutional suspicion, which centers on the person beloved or possessed.
The only common ties among these psychical phenomena are these: that all apply to a love offended, or alleged to be offended, and that they are all accompanied by grief. Such an empiricism, such a coarse empiricism! Is this not actual alchemy, that which called all volatile bodies "spirits," and the oxide of zinc "philosophic wool"!
As jealousy is not an elementary psychical phenomenon, but simply an empirical mixture, it has many and varied ethnical forms, and becomes necessary in all countries where polygamy prevents man from physically and morally satisfying a woman, and where the husband, merely because he is rich and powerful, selects his wife and forces his love upon her. The jealousy of many Oriental nations is proverbial, and perhaps monogamous peoples become jealous through contact with polygamous ones, as in Sicily and in certain parts of Spain. It seems to me, however, that in some cases jealousy has not a clear historical origin, but assumes an ethnical character, according to the special constitution of a race. In any case, in Europe, Italians, Spaniards, and, above all, Portuguese are very jealous; and, as I learned, in America the most jealous of all are the Brazilians.
The common people will certainly not be persuaded by my psychological analysis, and will continue to measure the force of love by the unreasonableness of suspicion; and many dear and lovely women will continue, heaven knows for how many centuries, to taunt their lovers with this foolish plaint: "You do not love me because you are not jealous. How can you love me if you do not feel for me the slightest jealousy?" Foolish lamentations, often uttered by happy creatures who, perhaps, finding it strange and against nature to be too happy, look for some occasion of sorrow and regret. Can anyone love anybody on earth more deeply than one's own children? Certainly not; and yet we are not jealous when others love them, and father and mother sublimely vie with each other in adoring and fondling them. You should love your companion in love in the same manner; and if you fear to lose him, that fear must not be the wrath of the inquisitor nor the clutch of the miser. Vain counsels! Words thrown to the winds! Jealousy is one of the most constitutional psychological maladies, and, if one is born with it, it is very difficult to cure. May a benign fate keep it from you! It poisons the dearest joys of life; penetrates every pore of the skin; pours its gall into every drop of water, into every mouthful of bread; it transforms the man who loves into a policeman, always armed, with alert ear and prying eyes. And the jealous man is always spying, doubting, suffering; he investigates the past, the present and the future; he seeks the lie in a caress, indifference in a kiss; in love he always fears hypocrisy. What a hellish life! It is a hundred times better not to love than to love in this way. The punishment of the few jealous men with exquisitely gentle heart should be this: to know that those who are as jealous as they generally entertain more self-love than love, and that the highest and noblest creatures have always loved without jealousy. The day when we perceive that we are no longer loved, when we are deceived, let love die without replacing it with jealousy. From suspicion to condemnation or acquittal, between sincere lovers, the path cannot and must not be a long one; to a frank question, a frank answer; let suspicion or love die, but they should die in a hurricane or in a battle, die a violent death; they should not drag a miserable existence between the courts and the prisons. A hundred times better a lightning that kills us than the feverish jaundice which consumes the stamina of our lives, poisons all sources of our joy.
Jealousy, besides, as it has already largely declined in monogamous society, will continue to decrease in the future, when matrimony shall be but the sanctification of love, when the choice shall be always reciprocal, when in the moral relations between the two sexes all trace of hypocrisy shall have disappeared. To know that we are loved, esteemed, and to love and esteem our companion, deeply and sincerely, is the surest guarantee of defense against that sordid parasite, that wood-worm of love which is jealousy. Let woman cease to be a slave or a freedwoman, let the husband or lover cease to be the proprietor of a woman, and all those lepers of love, the jealousy-mad, will disappear at once.
Self-esteem, independent of jealousy, has many legitimate relations to love, of which it enriches the treasures. No man, no woman in the world, knowing that he or she is loved by a most noble creature, can help feeling proud; and if a delicate reserve prohibits our heralding our good fortune, we can, however, relish the secret joy of knowing that the world envies us. It is almost always beyond human strength to renounce these joys, which can be delighted in without humiliating others and without any shadow of rancor. Woman, especially, with admirable art, knows how to say countless things silently; and when she is proud of a noble love, she radiates such an aureole of light as to dazzle the adorer and the apathetic. With the majesty of a queen and the reserve of a woman, and without opening her lips, she can say to all: "Envy me; I am loved!" Holy and just and chaste pride, which I wish all the daughters of Eve who shall have deserved love should feel.
Lovers and sweethearts, choirs of adorers and famous beauties may be objects of luxury, as are horses and palaces; and it is natural for human vanity to seek those things and to appreciate and utilize them to humiliate those who have them not. Vanity uses love, then, as a pretext; and many women, incapable of loving, may conquer men solely as trophies of war, just as men oftener than women may, through pure vanity, undertake a war of conquest. All these facts, however, belong to the history of pride and vanity, and we have already dealt with them in our study on the sources of love.