The Book of Love

by Paolo Mantegazza

Love ceases to be an impulse for thought and becomes its first assassin, not only when it is unhappy, but also when it sinks into the mud of lust. Chastity is an almost entirely hygienic question, and here we should mark the place where the hygienic branch shoots out from the great trunk of physiology. No embrace has ever debased thought when voluptuousness was only love; but when lasciviousness is stronger than sentiment and the animal man regrets having given too much of himself to the future, then the individual rebels against the excessive tribute paid to the preservation of the species. Then the animal man is diseased and the moral man has fallen into libertinism. No; nature never punishes him who wisely obeys its laws, and after the sacrifice of love man is as happy and intelligent as before, since, in the blessed languor of a brief repose, nature stills even the pain of weariness.

"Lay waste the entire forest of concupiscence, not one tree alone. When you shall have felled every tree, cut every branch, you can then pronounce yourselves free, pure, virtuous," exclaims the Dhammapada, and science utters the same cry, but instead of the word "concupiscence" it writes the more precise term "lust." In our organism every function is so well regulated that we, like the citron, can always bear leaves, flowers and fruits, provided we do not sacrifice the fruit to the flower and do not imitate the monstrous flowers with over-expanded petals or seedless fruits. Wise chastity is the ablest administrator of vital harmonies and energies; love and labor do not oppose each other, as many too exacting or hypercritical moralists are continually repeating with too rigid severity.

I have previously stated that the influence of love over thought is twofold, and we have still to study its second manifestation, namely, the influence exerted by the psychical nature of the person loved. Two creatures who love each other are two bodies differently electrified, continually exchanging currents of energy in order to reëstablish the equilibrium of forces and obey the law of universal affinity. But, since no two identical creatures, no two identical brains, no two identical sentiments ever exist in nature, it follows that, of the two thoughts brought face to face by love, one exercises an influence of attraction greater than the other, and consequently one of the two gives more than it receives. Generally the stronger mind exercises a greater fascination; and as the mind of man is oftener greater than that of woman, the latter more easily follows the ideas, the theories, the intellectual tastes of man. It is not always true, however, that a greater attraction betokens a greater mental force, since some peculiar characteristics of certain intellects render them more fascinating, their contact more dangerous and richer in elective affinity. Thought may be robust, original; but if rigid, rude and without any weapon of conquest, it lives alone, in solitary loftiness, and the person loved contemplates it with admiration, but feels no attraction. It is like a star, too cold and too distant for us to desire. Some other talents, on the contrary, seem to be magnetized, so strongly do they adhere to men and things; and when we approach them, we feel ourselves absorbed and, after their contact, carry away some influence of contagion, of fascination, of imitation. These magnetic brains combine with the other amorous seductions another and most powerful one, that of subjugating and bending the mind of the person loved, so that to the sweet chain of affection is added the chain of thought.

A most peculiar and little studied influence of fascinating talents is seen in some women, who add to their other admirable qualities the power of conquering the thought of men whose minds are stronger and swifter than theirs. Living with them, breathing their moral atmosphere, it becomes impossible, even for the most tenacious opposers of the ideas of others, not to think as they think, not to write as they write, not to acquire certain psychical tastes which constitute their delight. The style of certain writers, the manner of certain painters have unconsciously yielded to these slow and mysterious influences; and the masses, investigating the origin of these esthetic mutations, seek it in mysterious causes and in evolutions of art and science, while, instead, they have a humbler but more natural source. The style and manner changed when the head was resting on the bosom of a blonde friend, or the hand playing among the curly labyrinths of raven hair. In the history of arts and of literature, mention of these influences is nearly always omitted because nearly always they are unknown to the biographer, and often unknown to the artist and the poet who was subject to them. Woman always confesses, and frequently with pride, that she has moulded her thought on that of her friend; man hardly acknowledges this, and if warned by criticism, rebels and feels hurt by such an odd accusation. How and when should the king of the universe ever change the style and the direction of his thought through the influence of a kiss or a caress? "Mine, and only mine!" exclaims the man who loves. "His, and only his!" always sighs the woman who loves; and I must, although with different words, have frequently said the same thing in this book.

It is not only the robust and attracting nature of human brains that measures their various influences in the struggles and the caresses of love, but it is the degree that causes the high influences of thought to be differently felt. The more one loves, the more one yields to the fascination of another's talent; the more one loves, the more one is disposed to abdicate one's own ideas and esthetic tastes in order to assume the ideas and the tastes of the person loved. Man, proudly awkward, constantly repeats in every tone that in politics, morality, religion, woman thinks always like her lover; and by this he deludes himself into believing that he affirms with the most eloquent proof the uncontrasted superiority of his mind. However, in our case he fails to mention a reason, most honorable for woman and little for us: woman generally feels more deeply the influence of a virile thought, not only because she is weaker than we, but because she loves us much more than we ever could love. She sacrifices instantly and willingly even self-pride to love; man rarely and with difficulty makes this sacrifice. "She is silly, but beautiful," we say, feeling very happy. Woman, on the contrary, says oftener than we: "How can Democracy be respectable if he insults it every day? And how cannot Socialism be a sacred thing if it is his religion?" Man is always right for the woman who loves him, because she can seldom love without esteem. We, indeed, allow ourselves to love with all our senses a woman whom we cannot or must not hold in estimation. This difference would be sufficient to demonstrate that, in the psychical evolution of the two sexes, woman is ahead of us in the esthetic of sentiment, as we outrun her in intellectual development. Woman has already attained perfect love, which is the fusion of all human elements, the selection of selections; we see the concubine even in the sweetheart and in the wife; and the highest talent does not disdain to pour out the molten metal of its thoughts into the mould of a Venus who hardly could be called heavenly. In matters of love we are disciples oftener than masters on the field of sentiment.

Whatever be the reason for which a brain in love bends its love companion with a larger power of influence, the tyrant, too, undergoes the influence of the victim. Two thoughts cannot impunely be enclosed in the same atmosphere, they cannot follow the orbit of the same planetary system. The one gives much, and the other gives little; the one receives more than it gives, the other gives more than it receives; but they both alter and exchange influences and energies. This is a consequence of the most elementary laws of physics: two loves and two brains are two systems of forces; and, however powerful one may be in comparison with the other, they both must undergo, in their contacts, a molecular modification of their movements. To the direct influence of love add the automatic power of imitation, the tyranny of habit, the epicurism of the compromise of ideas and of conscience, and many other minor causes, and you will see how inexorably thought must change when we think in two.

Not all intellectual phenomena undergo the influence of love in equal measure, but those feel it most who by contacts and origins are nearer to the energies of sentiment or are interwoven with them, constituting binary bodies, composed of affection and thought. Religion and morality are more easily modified than esthetic tastes, and these change more frequently than philosophical theories or the method of study. There is a certain architecture in our brains that constitutes their framework and can be destroyed only by death or insanity. Against it love is powerless; furthermore, certain intellectual antitheses between a man and a woman are enough to render love impossible, even when the sympathy of forms and a certain community of affections violently rouse the sovereign of sentiments.

To scorn influences of love over thought may be the fruit of pride, but it is also, more frequently, an incontrovertible proof of crass ignorance,—pride and ignorance which we shall bitterly expiate, because, if we today may be contented with the beauty of form, and if robust youth, comforted later by coquetry, may prolong the life of love founded on voluptuousness only, the day will come, sooner or later, in which, when the great disparity of brains shall destroy every hope of common intelligence, we shall find ourselves in the presence of this horned dilemma: either to renounce dual thought—horrible amputation of intellectual life—or lower ourselves more every day in order that the voice of a person who speaks in a subdued tone may reach our ear. Hence a continual toil, a weary and sad exertion, the impairment of lofty intellects and the disorders of weak brains; hence the inevitable death of a love which should have submerged only with the last plank of shipwrecked beauty; hence the veiled polygamy of our modern society, profoundly hypocritical, because it is so impatient that it wants to run, when it has only the strength to walk slowly; because it is so petulant that it wants to jump while its legs are still tied by the sacred straps of the middle ages.

We must all inexorably yield to the influence of thought in love. If our robust brain can elevate in some little measure the smaller one of the person we love, we must always descend from our lofty plane, lowering the level of our thought and wasting many of the nobler forces of human progress. A certain disparity of levels is inevitable, but it should never be excessive, because, in the continual efforts to equalize them, in the sorrowful struggles to reach them, a great part of love may be wretchedly dissolved.