The Book of Love

by Paolo Mantegazza

I feel very sure that many who weep for love, either because their love is not returned or because they fear deception—if they have not already been deceived—or because of their bitter disappointment when they found that they had burned their incense to an idol of clay or a statue of marble, will repute my description exaggerated, yet it is nevertheless a pallid picture of a sorrow which pen of man will never be able to portray from nature, but succeed only in divining from afar. To many death, the absolute evil, in the presence of which every hope perishes, seems preferable to the torture that threatens life yet does not kill, which opens the wounds and hinders the work done by nature to heal them. I wish that these gentlemen may never have the opportunity of making the cruel comparison for themselves, of experiencing the effects of an assimilated anatomy of two great sorrows, one of which is termed death, the other desperation. If they truly love, may they die earlier than their beloved! This is the sweetest blessing that I can offer them from the pages of my book.

Love is a passion so fervid and so deep that we must not wonder if it has abrupt convulsions and sudden swoons. Accustomed to dwell always in lofty regions, to have but extreme voluptuousness for nourishment, to vibrate with the highest notes of sentiment and the delirium of the senses, it may instantaneously become possessed, when it least expects it, by unreasonable fears, idiotic suspicions, inexplicable restlessness. By this I do not mean diffidence, jealousy, disgust, weary libertinism, or bitter disappointments, but a vague and shapeless fog that invades the heart which, by feeling too deeply, has become languid and congeals the nerves exhausted from excessive quivering. It is an indefinable hysteria which from a slight disorder may develop into a most intense bitterness.

An immense love, whatever the source of the heart from which it springs forth, is always followed by the shadow of an infinite fear. You adore your child; you have left him for five minutes on the lawn or in your garden, intent on filling his little cart with sand; he was as rosy and fresh as the flowers near him; as bright as the sun that gilded his curly locks. Now, while you are seated at your table, you have wished to call him, I know not why, perhaps to hear the sweet sound of his silvery voice; and he does not answer you. You call him again, and again silence. He is utterly absorbed in the ponderous care of his wagon; but you, flying in a few seconds over a thousand miles of thought, have imagined that he was dead, that a snake had bitten him, that he had fallen in a swoon—who knows the fantastic visions that have passed through your mind! With your heart throbbing, your skin in a perspiration, you are afraid to rise and wish to defer for a moment the spectacle of a cruel loss. Of these and greater follies we are given a sad spectacle every day by that love of loves which alone was called by this name as the prince and god of all the amorous sentiments.

Neither the most patient and long observation of human phenomena nor the most lively imagination could enable us to divine all the petty tortures that lovers inflict upon themselves, perhaps to obey that cruel law which, according to some persons, has decreed that no one shall be happy on this planet.

In this field of evil, temperament is everything; to some individuals the phrase of Linnæus concerning the loves of the cat may be applied: "Clamando misere amat." For these unfortunates (we have already described them) love is imbued with so much bitterness and surrounded by so many nettles that it actually resembles a bramble, all thorns and wormwood. Suspicious, fastidious, melancholy, they fear everything, scrutinize everything; they pass everything through the sieve, they pulverize everything, looking for the mite or the poison. In the kiss they suspect ice, in the caress indifference; of the impulses they feel only the shock, only the blows. And then, even that little honey that love has for all they wish to keep under watch in so many tabernacles and under so many seals that they are very fortunate when they can find and relish it! From a jealous jeremiad they fall into an hysterical soliloquy, and have hardly emerged from a gloomy meditation on the infidelity of man when they fall into the autopsy of a love-letter. These creatures were certainly born under an unlucky star, and even if nature should make them a gift of a Venus draped by the Graces, or an Apollo with the brain of Jupiter, they would still be always unhappy, because bitterness is on their lips and not in the cup of love.

There is perhaps no greater torture than that which a woman must suffer when compelled to submit to the caress of a man whom she does not love. I do not mean by this the brutal violence that assimilates an embrace to homicide, and relegates it to the criminal code and the prison. In this case we would have a human beast that strikes, bites, sheds the blood of a poor creature who swoons with terror or struggles powerlessly in the clutches of a tiger: they are sorrows which belong to the story of terror, to the bloodiest pages of supreme tortures. I intend to speak here of the caresses that a woman must accord to a man because law, money or a surprise of the senses has sold her to him without love; I intend to speak of torture bitter, somber, deep as infinity, and which assimilates the prostitute to the martyr.

These sorrows, among the greatest that the human heart can suffer, were by a cruel nature almost exclusively reserved for woman. Man, by the special nature of his aggressive sex, must be spurred to the embrace by a sudden enthusiasm; his senses must be clouded by intense lust. In him voluptuousness can do without love, and physical love has a joy that is sufficient to conceal mercifully all his lack of sentiment and passion. For if indifference, hatred, contempt permeate him entirely, invading even the last intrenchments of love, then no caress in the world can revive it, no law, human or divine, can force him to accept a caress which to him is repugnant. There is no case in which the ancient theory of freedom of the will shows its ridiculous falsity as plainly as in this.

Woman, however, may be as cold as ice, feel chilly shivers of aversion and loathing run through her entire body, hate a man to the desire of death, despise to abhorrence a man who is near to her; and yet in many cases she can, and in very many she must, submit to his caress. Frigid, with grief in her heart and hatred on her lips, she beholds the ardor of that man which burns but does not warm her; she looks on the sublimity of enthusiasm only as the culmination of ridicule; she discerns passion, but finds it simply grotesque; she perceives impetuosity, and for her it is nothing but violence; instead of love, with its flashes, its light, its perfumes, she sees, smells, touches simply a brutal force which debases, prostitutes, pollutes her; an infinity of repugnance in an ocean of nausea!

When woman has fallen into that mire through her own fault, she cannot be more cruelly punished. The immensity of prostitution is avenged with an infinity of outrage; the holiest thing is plunged into the most fetid mud; the greatest joy gives place to the greatest shame. But when, on the contrary, the daughter of Eve is brought to this sacrifice of the body by the tyranny of the law, by the perverted tendencies of our moral education, when she finds herself led to that cruel misfortune through ignorance or through the fault of others,—then, if she does not yet possess that skepticism which heals the heart or that cynicism which shields it, if she still knows what modesty is, if she still remembers the trepidations of love, then that poor woman drinks drop by drop the most cruel torture that any creature can endure; then she passes through a long and merciless agony.

To have dreamed for years and years of the promised land of love, to have conquered it, inch by inch, through the reveries of childhood and the rosy aurora of adolescence; to have felt an immense, horrible fear of dying before having loved; to have loved and to love, to be aware of a volcano in the heart, to be at the gates of paradise and inhale through the portal its inebriating perfumes—and then, after all this, to become conscious of having been transformed into a vessel which satisfies the thirst, to feel in the bosom a roaring beast—to be a part of the régime of a man, like magnesia or leeches—truly this is more cruel torture than the inquisitors ever invented; it is really too great a sorrow for a lonely weak creature!