The Natural Philosophy of Love

by Remy de Gourmont

Is modesty an aberration? Indulgent observers have believed that they noticed it in elephants as well as in rabbits. The modesty of the elephant is a popular maxim which makes right-minded women cast sheep's eyes, in circuses, at the great beast who hides for her amours. During copulation, says a celebrated rabbit-raiser[1] "the male and female should be alone, in demi-obscurity. This solitude and obscurity are more necessary in view of the fact that certain females show signs of modesty." The modesty of animals is a fancy. Like modesty among humans, it is merely the mask of fear, the crystallization of timorous habits, necessitated by the animals being unarmed during coupling. This is very well known and needs no explanation. But the need of reproduction is so tyrannic that, even among the most timid animals, it does not always leave them presence of mind enough to hide themselves during the amour. The most domesticated of animals, one knows it only too well, shows at this moment neither fear nor shame.

In man, among the civilized and among the uncivilized, sexual fear, shame, has taken a thousand forms which, for the most part, seem to have no longer any relation to the original feeling whence they are derived. One notices however that if the milieu where the couple finds itself is such that no attack, no ridicule is to be feared, shame vanishes, in part, or entirely, according to the degree of security, and the degree of excitement. For a crowd of populace on a fete night there is hardly any modesty save "legal modesty"; the example of one bolder couple is enough, if there is no authority to be feared, to set loose all the appetites, and one then sees clearly that man who does not hide in order to eat, only hides to make love under pressure of usage.

From the genital act, modesty is stretched over the exterior sexual organs by a mechanism very simple and very logical. But here, I think, one must distinguish between genital modesty bred from the custom of clothing the whole body, and that which has led men to cover only a particular part. Heat, cold, rain, insects explain clothing, but not the savage's cotton drawers or the fig leaf; especially when the leaf, imposed on married women, for example, is forbidden to virgins, or when this symbolic leaf is so reduced that it serves no purpose, save that of a sign. In this last case, it has not even any direct relation to genital modesty; it is only a matrimonial ornament, analogous to the ring or the collar, a sign, indeed indicating a condition. It is possible also, that among certain peoples where the men go entirely naked, the women wear an apron merely to keep off flies, gad-flies, rather as a peasant drapes his horse's muzzle with grass and leaves. Quite often, however, one is forced to recognize in these customs, the proof of a particular genital sensibility, analogous to civilized modesty. An English sailor, at the time of the first explorations got himself rejected by the Maori women not because he appeared without clothing, a state which custom required, but because he appeared with his organ unsheathed. This detail shocked them extremely. A curious example of the localization of shame: all parts of the body could and should show themselves, all save this small surface. On reflection, the modesty of Europeans at a ball or on the beach is almost as absurd as that of the Maoris, or as that of the fellaheen women who at the approach of a stranger remove their shirts, their sole garments, in order to cover their faces.

Sexual modesty, as one observes it today, among the most various peoples, is utterly artificial. Livingstone assures us that he developed modesty in little Kaffir girls by clothing them. Surprised in neglige, they covered their breasts—and this in a race where the women go wholly naked, save for a string round the middle, from which another string hangs. Clothing is only one of the causes of modesty, or of customs which give us the illusion of it, and the sentiment of fear associated with the sexual act does not explain all the rest. There is a shame particular to the female, an ensemble of movements, which one can assimilate to nothing, which one can attach to nothing. The gesture of Venus modest is not purely a woman's gesture; nearly all females, especially mammifers, have it; the female, who refuses, lowers her tail and clamps it between her legs; there is here, evidently, the origin of one of the particular forms of modesty. We have given characteristic examples in an earlier chapter.

Man is un-get-at-able; the slightest of his habitual sentiments has multiple and contradictory roots in a sensibility variable and always excessive. He is the least poised and the least reasonable of all animals, although the only one who has been able to construct for himself an idea of reason; he is an animal lunatic, that is to say one who flows out on all sides, who unravels everything in theory, and tangles up everything in fact, who desires and wills so many things, who throws his muscles into so many divers activities that his acts are at once the most sensible and the most absurd, the most conforming and the most opposed to the logical development of life. But he profits even by error, especially by the error fatal to all animals, and that constitutes his originality, as Pascal noted, and as Nietzsche repeats.

If the word modesty (pudeur) is not exact, when applied to animals, although one finds in their habits the distant origin of this complex and refined sentiment, the word cruelty, is not so either, when applied to their natural acts of defence or nutrition. Human cruelty is often an aberration; the cruelty of beasts is a necessity, a normal fact, often the very condition of their existence. An anarchist philosopher, ardent and naive disciple of Jean-Jacques believed that he traced an universal altruism in nature; he has redone with other words and another spirit, and a few new examples, the infantile works of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and has abused, under pretext of inclining mankind to kindness, the right which one has to promenade about nature without seeing and without understanding her. Nature is neither good, nor evil, nor altruist, nor egoist; she is an ensemble of forces whereof none cedes save under superior pressure. Her conscience is that of a balance; being of a perfect indifference, it is of an absolute equity. But the sensibility of a balance is of a single order, single dimension; the sensibility of nature is infinite, to all actions and reactions. Whether the strong devour the weak, or the weak the strong, there is no compensation save in our human illusion; in reality one life is enlarged at the expense of another life, in one case as in the other, the total energy has been neither diminished nor augmented. There is neither strong, nor weak, there is a level which tends to remain constant. Our sentimentalism makes us see dramas where nothing occurs more disturbing than the general facts of nutrition. One may however look at these facts a little more closely, and then the parity of animal organism and the human organism will lead us to qualify as cruel, certain acts which would deserve this title if committed by man. One must say cruelty in order to understand it oneself; it is also necessary to remember that this cruelty is unconscious, that it is not felt by the devouring animal, that no element of ill-will enters into its act, and that man himself, the judge, in no way deprives himself of eating live creatures when they are better raw than cooked, living than dead.

A philanthe, sort of wasp, catches a bee to feed its larvæ; while carrying the prey to his nest, he presses the belly, sucks the bee, empties it of all its honey. But at the entrance of the nest a mantis is waiting, its double-saw of an arm is unfolded, the philanthe is nipped in passing. And one sees the mantis gnawing the belly of the philanthe while the philanthe continues sucking the bee's belly. And the mantis is so voracious that you can cut her in two without making her let go; a chain, truly, of carnage.

The larvæ of the sphex, another wasp, are fed on live crickets that have been paralyzed by a stab. As soon as it hatches the larva attacks the cricket in the belly at the chosen spot where the egg has been layed. The poor insect protests by feeble movements of antennæ, and mandibles: in vain; he is eaten alive, fibre by fibre, by a great worm which gnaws his entrails, and with so great a skill that it begins on the parts not essential to life, and thus keeps the prey fresh and tasty to the last. Such is the gentleness of nature, the good mother.

The carabes are fine coleoptera, violet, purple, and golden. They feed only on living prey, which they chew slowly, beginning at the belly, and boring slowly into the palpitating cavity. Helices, and slugs are thus tom apart by bands of carabes who dig them up and dissect them in a boiling of saliva.

Such are theft and murder, in nature. These are the normal acts. Herbivorous species alone are innocent perhaps from imbecility; always occupied in eating, because their food is so unsubstantial, they have not time to develop their powers: they are the inevitable prey, a sort of superior grass which will be browsed at the first opportunity. But the carnivora are in the same way eaten by their stronger and more adroit fellow-boarders. Very few beasts have a quiet death. The geotrupes, scarabs, necrophores their work finished, the egg-laying accomplished, devour each other to pass the time, perhaps, to lend a little gaiety to their last moments. Animals are of but two sorts, hunters and game, but there is scarcely a hunter who is not game in his turn. One does not find in nature the purely human invention of breeding for slaughter, or the more extraordinary one of breeding for hunting. Ants know how to milk their cows, the plant-lice, or their goats the staphylins; they do not know how to fatten them and to slit their gullets.