The Book of Love

by Paolo Mantegazza

The fortunate young man who has not subjected his love to the process of decomposition we have described loves ardently, recklessly, splendidly. His love is a sunny day in May, without clouds, without chills, without sorrows; it is a feast where weariness, fatigue and delusions are unknown. He lives because he loves, and he loves because he lives. He burns his incense to the goddess, but he is chaste and knows very little of lasciviousness. He is sometimes so pure as to call a blush on the face of a woman who, being in her thirties, already loves too knowingly. He neither measures nor weighs; and who has ever dared to reduce to a mathematical formula the force of a thunderbolt or the kilogrammeters of an earthquake? And the loves of a young man are thunderbolts or earthquakes. A young man is not very jealous; he is less so, in any case, than the adult and the old; he is too confident, too happy to doubt; and, besides, he has no time! His lips are wreathed in a perpetual smile; a golden ray of sunlight rests on his brow like a halo of bliss. There is no tomorrow for him except under the form of a continuation of the happiness of today; he does not remember the past, and in good faith believes himself to have always loved his goddess, even when he did not know her. He believes in inborn loves, as the philosopher of old used to believe in congenital ideas. O happy youth!

If the young man is the most powerful, the most ardent lover, the adult is the most skillful. The use and abuse of life have somewhat dulled his spirit, almost extinguished the flames of passion; but no excessive impatience, no needless timidity, no sudden explosions of desire oppose any obstacle to the blissful perfection of his loves. He loves with shrewdness, with passion, with a most subtle art; he is a hundred times more libertine than the youth, but also more delicate, richer in exquisite tastes belonging to the world of thought. The youthful lover is a nude and often ferocious savage; the adult has become civilized from long experience and is clothed with the blandishments of his art. His most spontaneous sympathies are for unripe fruit, for the flowers still enclosed within the untouched and thorny calyx of innocence and ignorance; but he likes to love the independent woman as well, the widow and the matron; he is essentially eclectic. His joys are scarcer than in the days of youth, but they are more precious, because rendered more savory by a certain economy almost verging on avarice. He knows that his hours are numbered and follows with a caress every coin he spends; before parting with it, he bestows upon it a look of affection and regret. Rich in memories, but poor in hopes, he concentrates all his cares, patience and attention on the present. He is the ablest, the wisest master of love; and when health and freshness of heart do not desert him, he can awaken ardent and lasting passions and preserve them for a long time. Woman much less than man is bent on inquiring about white hair and birth certificates; and if she only feels that she is loved deeply and ardently, she willingly forgets half a score of years, and more, of the age of her companion.

In the love of the adult man for the young woman one feels always a benevolent and sympathetic protection, an almost paternal affection, full of tenderness and generous impulses. This characteristic tends to deprive mature love of some of the warmest and most voluptuous expansions, to cool down the volcanic explosions of youthful love; but the paternal affection, which might easily tend to become authority and eliminate the perfect equality between the two lovers, is tempered in adult man by a deep and hidden mistrust of himself.

The young man asks for love on his knees, but knows that he is legitimately entitled to it, and often from the humble position of a beggar of alms, prostrated in the dust, he leaps to his feet, demanding with the force of beauty, genius, passion, that which he could not obtain by humility. A mature man, on the contrary, has lost many rights, and his requests are made with greater constraint, with a reserve full of grace and delicacy; he often implores with a tenderness so ardent and a tone so supplicatory that it is difficult to answer with a refusal. The continual alternation of an authority that teaches and an authority that implores gives the adult love the most characteristic hue, the most conspicuous mark. And when poor nature, medicated by art, has succeeded in attaining love, the precious affection firmly fixes itself on it and thrusts its roots into the deepest recesses of the heart. The adult has tenacious passions, and none is more faithful in love than he; often, conditions being equal, he is the best husband, and not only through egotism does the bridegroom seek a bride a few years younger than himself. Man grows old later than woman, and two ignorant and very young people seldom wed without exposing themselves to the most serious dangers.

The woman of thirty, also, loves with modesty, with deep tenderness, with religious fidelity, with avaricious sagacity.

The man who is growing old is the trunk of a tree on which every day a branch withers, and from which every gust of wind detaches a handful of yellow leaves. When the entire tree is dead, then upon the ruins of love rises an implacable hatred for those who love and are loved; the cruel domestic inquisitions and a posthumous, ridiculous ostentation of forced continence or mummified modesty will then poison the existence of the intolerant old man, who avenges himself upon the young people for his misfortune in not being longer able to love. It is an inexorable law which condemns those old men to mystic and wrathful meditations, because in all times and in all countries the last spark of lust serves to light the bilious taper on the altar of superstition. Most unfortunate is the poor young girl who must have as a confidante of her first loves an irascible and bigoted old woman, to whom love is a synonym of lechery and affection a sin. Less monstrous and less cruel is the deformity of a Chinese foot than the contortions which a youthful love must undergo in the hooked and yellow clutches of intolerant bigotry.

Man, however, is a tree so robust and vigorous that it rarely dies all at once, and in the old man there often remains flourishing the only branch of lust. It is then that the economy of the adult turns into real avarice, lust becomes lasciviousness, and love assumes unheard-of forms, worthy of Tiberius and Caligula. The lust of the old man, warmed by the stifling atmosphere of vice, is like a mushroom produced by the fetid artifices of horticulture and bears fruits which give out in the distance the stench of the manure in which they were raised. Nor can the name of love be given to those lusts, but they should be given that of erotic mercature, of prostitution of innocence to the calculus of probability of life, or to the expectation of an inheritance. And yet some powerful lovers maintain ghosts of desire until their extreme decrepitude and, like eels, go on rubbing their frothy paunches in the hot mire of the lowest social strata; to their last breath, with their ossified hands they strip of leaves the rosebushes and purchase at fabulous prices an "I love you" icier than snow, more deceitful than Tartufe.

The man of high type, too, can love until old age; but then, lust being spent, every right of conquest having been abandoned, love soars to the highest spheres of the ideal world and becomes a sublime contemplation of feminine beauty. Whether before the maiden and heroic greatness of Joan of Arc, or the startling sensuality of the statue of Phryne by Barzaghi, hearing the lively prattling of a girl of fourteen or at the side of a calm and plump matron, even a venerable old man, without any offense in words or acts, feels moved; and, perhaps, under the childlike or compassionate caresses of a woman, his eyes will fill with tears and, if he is a believer, he will invoke the benedictions of Heaven on the most beautiful half of the human family.

If even the old man can love a young woman, the old woman also can love a young man; but their love should be a serene contemplation of the beautiful, a suave remembrance of joys possessed for a long time and ardent aspirations for an ideal which is ever loved, because it is never attained. Even the white-haired old man can, without offending the modesty of her who cannot be his any more, caress with paternal affection the curls of Eve, adore in her the most splendid manifestation of the esthetic forces of nature, warm his cold imagination again at the ardent fire of others' loves; and, without envy and without regrets, but with sweet satisfaction he can say: "I, too, have done my duty; do yours now. I, too, have loved without sowing the seeds of remorse for my old age; try you, and follow my example!"