The Natural Philosophy of Love

by Remy de Gourmont

It is rare for a female to assist the male in his work, but there remains the obstacle of the other males. Contrary to what one might think, there is no relation between the male's social character and his amorous character. Ferocious animals show themselves at the moment of love-making much more placid than gentle or even timid animals. The scary rabbit is an impetuous, tyrannous and jealous lover. If the female does not accede to his first desire, he rages. She is, moreover, very lascivious and gestation in no way interrupts her amours. The hare, who does not pass for audacious, is an ardent and heady lover; he fights furiously with his peers for the possession of a female. They are animals very well equipped for love, the penis greatly developed, clitoris almost as large. The males make real voyages, run for entire nights in search of the doe-hare who is sedentary: like the doe-rabbit, she never refuses, even when pregnant.

Martins, polecats, sables, rats fight violently during the rutting season. Rats accompany their fights with sharp cries. Stags and wildboars, and a great number of other species fight to the death for the possession of females; a practice not unknown to humanity. Even heavy tortoises feel exasperation from love; the defeated male is tilted onto his back.

Finer, destined perhaps for a superior and charming civilization, the birds like combat; sometimes the duel is serious, as in gallinaceæ, cock-fights, often it is a courtesy, a mimicry. The female of the rock-cock of Brazil is tawny and without beauty, the male is yellow-orange, with crest bordered in deep red, the long wing feathers and tail feathers are red-brown. One sees the females ranged in a circle as a crowd about jugglers, the males are strutting, cutting capers, moving their colour-shot feathers, getting themselves admired and desired. From time to time a female admits that she is moved, a couple is formed. But the tetras, heather-cocks of North America, have still more curious customs. Their fights have become exactly what they have with us, that is, dances. It is no longer the tourney, it is the tour-de-valse. What completes the proof that these parades are a survival, a transformation, is that the males, being amused by them, perform them not only before but after coupling. They even practice them for diversion while the females are sitting on the eggs, absorbed in maternal duty. Travellers thus describe the tetras' dance (Milton and Cheaddle, "Atlantic to Pacific," p. 171 of the French translation): "They gather, twenty or thirty in a chosen place, and begin to dance like mad. Opening their wings, they draw together their feet, like men doing the danse du sac. Then they advance toward each other, do a waltz turn, pass to a second partner, and so on. This contre-danse of prairie chickens is very amusing. They become so absorbed in it that one can approach quite near."

Birds of Australia and New Guinea[1] make love with a charming ceremony. To attract his mistress the male makes a veritable country-house, or, if he is less skilful, a rustic bower of greenery. He plants rushes, green sprigs, for he is small, about the size of a blackbird; he bends them into a vault, often a metre long. He strews the floor with leaves, flowers, red fruits, white bits of bone, bright pebbles, bits of metal, jewels stolen in the neighbourhood. They say that when Australians miss a ring or a pair of scissors, they search these green tents. Our magpie shows a certain taste for bright objects: people tell tales about him. The "gardener-bird" of New Guinea is still more ingenious, to such a degree that his work is mistaken for human work and people are deceived thereby. With his beak and claws he manages as well and better than peasants, often showing a decorative taste which they lack. People search for the "origin of art": there you have it, in the sexual game of a bird. Our æsthetic manifestations are but a development of this same instinct to please which, in one specie over-excites the male, in another moves the female. If there is a surplus it will be spent aimlessly, for pure pleasure: that is human art; its origin is that of the art of birds and insects.

The Grande Encyclopédie has given a picture of the gardener-bird's pleasure house. He is called in most scholarly parlance the Amblyornis inornata, because he is lacking in personal beauty. One would take his house for the work of some intelligent delicate pygmy. We find the description of it, after the Italian traveller M. O. Beccari[2] "In crossing a magnificent forest M. Beccari found himself suddenly in the presence of a little conical cabin, in front of which was a lawn strewn with flowers; he at once recognized the sort of hut which M. Bruijn's huntsmen had described to him as the work of a dark bird somewhat larger than a blackbird. He made a very exact sketch of it, and verifying the native's tales by his own observation, he found out how the bird makes this building which is not so much a nest as a pleasure house. The amblyornis chooses a little clearing with unbroken lawn and a small tree in the middle. Around this tree or bush which serves as axis, the bird places a little moss, then he plants slantwise the branches of a plant which will continue to grow for some time; juxtaposition of branches form the inclined walls of the hut. On one side they are left open to make a doorway, before which is the garden whose elements are gathered with difficulty, tuft by tuft, at some distance. After having carefully cleaned the lawn, the amblyornis sows it with flowers and fruits which he collects in the neighbourhood, and which he renews from time to time." This primitive gardener belongs to the bird of paradise family, remarkable for the beauty of their plumage. It seems that not being able to dress himself, he has exteriorized his instinct. According to travellers, these cabins are true houses of rendezvous, the country-boxes of the seventeenth century, the "follies" of the XVIIIth. The gallant bird ornaments it with everything that might please the invited female; if she is satisfied, it is the abode of love, after having been that of declarations. I do not know whether these oddities have been given the importance which they should have been, in the history of birds and of humanity. The scholar, the only person knowing such details, usually fails utterly to understand them. One savant whom I read, thinks of the thieving magpie, and adds, these traits which are common to them ally them closely to birds of paradise and corvida. Doubtless, but that is not very important. The grave fact is the gathering of the first flower. The useful fact explains animality; the useless fact explains man. Now, it is of capital importance to show that the useless fact is not peculiar to man alone.

Crickets also have courting fights, but perhaps for a different reason: the feebleness of their offensive weapons, and the solidity of their armour. There is, however, a winner and loser. The loser decamps, the conqueror sings. Then he shines himself, stamps, seems nervous. Fabre says that emotion often renders him mute; his elytra (wing-shells) shake without giving a sound. The female cricket, witness of the duel, runs to hide under a leaf as soon as it is over. "She draws back the curtain a little, and looks out, and wants to be seen." After this play, she shows herself completely, the cricket rushes forward, makes a half-turn, rears up and slides under her belly. The work finished, he gets away as fast as possible, for we are before an enigmatic orthopter, the female is quite ready to eat him. It is the male's song which attracts the female cricket. When she hears it, she listens, takes her bearings, obeys the call. It is the same with cicadas, even though the two sexes usually live side by side. By imitating the sound of the male, one can deceive the females and make them come to one.

Sometimes sight, sometimes smell guides the male. Many hymenoptera, furnished with a powerful visual organ keep watch for the females, spying the vicinity. Thus also many day butterflies. When the male notices a female, he pursues, but in order to get in front of her, to be seen, and he seems to tempt her with slow waving of his wings. This display lasts often quite a long time. Finally their antennæ touch, their wings stroke each other, and they fly off in company. The coupling often takes place in the air; thus among pierides. In certain species, bombyx for example, the females are heavy and even aptera, the male who is in contrast lively, fecundates several, going from one to the other, which is doubtless what gives butterflies their reputation for inconstancy. They live too short a time to deserve it: many born in the morning do not see the next day's sun. One might rather make them a symbol for pure thought. There are some who do not eat, and among those who do not eat there are some whom nature has vowed to virginity. Hermaphrodites of a singular sort, male on the right side, female on the left, they seem to be two sexual halves welded together along the medial line. The organs whose centre is cut by this line are but demi-organs good for nothing save the entertainment of observers. Hybrid butterflies, produced by crossing of two species, are not very rare; they also are incapable of reproduction.

The coupling of day butterflies lasts only a few minutes, among night butterflies it is often prolonged for a day and a night, as in sphinx, phalenes, noctuelles. If it is a reward, it is due to their long courageous voyages in quest of the female whom they have divined. The great-peacock moth covers several leagues of country in the attempt to satisfy his desire. Blanchard tells of a naturalist who having caught a female bombyx and put her in his pocket, returned home escorted by a cloud of over two hundred males. In spring, in a place where the great-peacock is so rare that one with difficulty finds one or two per year, the presence of a caged female will draw a hundred males, as Fabre has shown by experiment. These feverish males are endowed with very brief ardour. Whether or no they have touched a female, they live but two or three days. Enormous insects, larger than a humming-bird, they do not eat; their bocal pieces are merely an ornament, a decor: they are bora to reproduce and to die. The males seem infinitely more numerous than the females, and it is probable that not more than one in an hundred can accomplish his destiny. He who misses the pursued female, who arrives too late, is lost: his life is so short that it would be very difficult for him to discover a second. It is true that in normal circumstances the female should stop emitting her sexual odour as soon as she has been ridden; the males are thus attracted by the same female through a proportionately shorter time and there is this much less chance of their searches being unfruitful. Is it their sense of smell alone that guides them?

At 8 a. m. at Fabre's place in Serignan, one saw the cocoon of a lesser-peacock moth open; a female emerged and was immediately imprisoned in a wire cage. At noon a male arrived, the first that Fabre, who had lived there all his life, had ever seen. The wind was blowing from the north. The male came from the north, that is to say, against the scent. At two o'clock ten had arrived. Having come as far as the house without hesitation, they were troubled, got the wrong window, wandered from room to room, never went directly toward the female. One would say that at this point they should have used another sense, perhaps sight, despite their being crepuscular creatures, or that the cage bothered them. Perhaps also it is the custom for the female to come and play before them? It is, in any case, evident that sense of smell plays an important rôle; the mystery would not be less great if one supposed the bringing into play of a special sense, that of sexual orientation. Fabre has obtained equal success with the female of a very rare butterfly, the oak bombyx, or banded minime: in one morning sixty males arrived, turning about the prisoner. One has observed analogous if not identical things in certain serpents, in mammifera: everyone has seen dogs in the country, drawn by a female in heat, coming from a considerable distance, nearly a league, without one's being able to say how their organism had got the news.

Explanations are vain in these matters. They divert the curiosity without satisfying the reason. What one sees clearly is a necessity: the act must be accomplished, to this end, all obstacles, whatever they are, will be overcome. Neither distance, nor the difficulty of the voyage, nor the danger of the approach can drive back the instinct. In man, who has sometimes the power to escape the sexual commandments, disobedience may have happy results. Chastity, as a transmuter, may change unused sexual energy into intellectual or social energy; in animals this transmutation of physical values is impossible. The compass needle remains in one immutable position, obedience is unescapable. That is why there is so deep a rumble in nature when the spring orders are posted. Vegetable flowers are not the only ones to open: sexes of flesh also flower. Birds, fish take on new and more vivid colours. There are songs, plays, pilgrimages. Salmon who live quietly at the river-mouths, must gather, depart, climb the streams, pass weirs, scrabble against rocks which form the dams and cataracts, wear themselves out leaping as arrows against all human and natural obstacles. Males and females arrive worn out at the end of their journey, the frayère of fine sand where they are to lay their eggs, and the males heroically to spend the milt distilled from their blood.