CHAPTER XIV LOVE IN SEX
Man and woman can love with the same degree of force, but they will never love in the same manner, since to the altar of their passion they carry two greatly different natures beside their different genetic missions. As long as there shall live on our planet a man and a woman, they will eternally exchange and counterchange this innocent reproach: "Ah, you do not love me as I love you!" And the lament will be forever true, because woman will never love like man, and man will never be capable of loving like woman. In a complete essay on the comparative psychology of the two sexes we could delineate the distinctive characteristics of virile love and feminine love, and I may try it some day; be it sufficient for me here to sketch in a general way the two figures of passion, one in essence, but rendered so variform by the two different natures called Adam and Eve.
Listen to two spontaneous cries, uttered by two nations very distant and well-nigh uncivilized, and you will find the first lines of a physiology of the sexual characters of love. The Munda-Kols of Chota Nagpur have some popular songs which express the psychical difference between man and woman. The women sing:
"Singbonga from the beginning has made us smaller than you, therefore we obey you. Even if it were not so and from the beginning we had overburdened you with work, still we would not be your equals. To you God has given with two hands, to us with one; and for this we do not plough the ground."
And the men sing to the women:
"As God has given us with two hands, so has He made us bigger than you. Have we made ourselves big? He Himself has divided us into big and small. If you do not obey now the word of man, you certainly disobey the word of God. He himself has made us bigger than you."
And flying to a very distant land, we find a Kabyle song, in which a chorus of young women alternates with a chorus of sturdy youths.
The women: "Let him who wants to be loved by a woman march with his weapons; let him put the butt-end of the gun to his cheek and cry: 'Come to me, O maidens!'"
The men: "You do well to love us. God sends us war and we will die, and keep at least the memory of the happiness that you have given us."