Modesty is one of the psychical phenomena the physiological study of which is more difficult because that phenomenon is very indistinct and vague, although prepotent and most exacting in some of its forms; because it is very variable in the different races; and because, though a part of the energies which develop in the reciprocal approaching of the sexes, it seems to keep them apart, and, born of love, seems to have a tendency to frustrate its supreme end.
I, too,—I must admit it,—through the various periods of life, have changed the idea I first had of modesty. At first it seemed to me a sentiment that rises within us in childhood and during adolescence, as spontaneous as egotism, self-esteem and love; but, later, I became convinced that modesty is taught first and learned afterward; therefore, it is one of those sentiments which I termacquiredorsecondary.
Modesty is anextra-currentof love, and has its principal source in those powerful energies which, through a battle or a choice, must relight the torch of life. Animals demonstrate to us some rudimentary forms originating from modesty. Many of them conceal themselves when offering a sacrifice to voluptuousness; very many females, sought by the male, begin by fleeing, resisting, hiding that which they desire to concede. And this is probably an irreflective, automatic act; it is, perhaps, a form of fear which rises before the aggressive demands of the male; but the aim of these resistances, of these pretenses of modesty is to excite the male as much as the female and to make the ground better fitted for fecundation. It is possible that animals concealtheir loves from our sight to protect themselves from danger, knowing that in those supreme moments they are exposed to every attack; but until the psychology of brutes is so limited we will be allowed to assume that among them also the first light of modesty has penetrated. If this be so, then we will find justification in the fact that, in superior animals also, this sentiment appears first in the female, for whom the anatomy of the organs and the defensive mission in the battles of love make the actions of modesty more spontaneous and natural. And to the human female, too, nature has assigned the same mission, making her characteristically a hundred times more modest than the male.
The first hand brought by woman to cover parts which the male wished to see gave origin to the first energies of the sentiment of modesty, which arose, therefore, at the same time as the first forms of coquetry. Man and woman, then living together in the family or in the tribe, were naturally forced to become, independently of their greater psychical development, the most modest animals, because woman is subject to repulsive periodical infirmities and man shows other genital phenomena which, if not concealed, would attract too much attention from all and excite perturbation in males and in females. It is therefore natural that almost all, not to say all, races of the earth present some form of modesty, and that also in the human race the female should be more modest than the male, because the aggressive mission, which is reserved to him by nature, makes modesty dangerous and almost impossible, at least in the last battles.
Modesty, born in this way, is taught, together with many other things, by men to children, as the latter cannot, until they reach puberty, distinguish the special importance of copulative organs, or the aggressive mission of the male, or the thousand offensive and defensive vicissitudes of love. Modesty, however, is perhaps born spontaneously, or, to use a better expression, by heredity in the more perfect and elevated natures. Hence modesty is taught to those who, of themselves, would not know it, and we determine its limits in such a way as to circumscribe it within the purely genitalfield or to widen it beyond the amorous boundaries. The Sherihat prescribes that Turkish women should cover the back of the hand, but permits them to expose the palm. The Armenian women of the population of southern India cover their mouths wherever they happen to be, even in their own homes, and when they go out they wrap themselves in a white cloth. The married women live in strict seclusion, and for many years they cannot see their male relatives, hiding their faces even from the father-in-law and the mother-in-law. And these two examples, selected from a thousand that might be quoted, should be sufficient to persuade us that accessory and conventional elements often accompany true modesty, to which, physiologically, they do not belong. We, ourselves, in our own countries, find that the boundaries of modesty are, in many places, marked by the various fashions of dress, and that they stop from the knees down or from the breast up and not according to the national mode of dress. He who mistook these conventional elements for modesty could write the great psychological heresy, that this sentiment had its origin in the custom of covering the body.
We must not confound with true modesty those other esthetic needs which compel us to conceal some repulsive actions of our animal life. The true sentiment of modesty defends from profane eyes the organs and the mysteries of love and those parts of the body that are directly or indirectly related to it. We behold almost all races conceal first the genitals, afterward the sides, the breast, the legs, the arms, then the entire trunk, and finally the head; but here modesty yields the place to the requirements of social intercourse or of jealousy.
The sentiment of modesty is among the most changeable in form and degree. Its ethnical history is written in the volume which I have dedicated to the ethnology of love. It will suffice here to point out that I divide the nations into immodest, semi-modest and modest, according to the traces of modesty and the greater or less development of this sentiment. Modesty is unlike intelligence, or the sentiment of the beautiful, or other psychical phenomena, which show anascending and regular progress as we gradually proceed from the lowest races to the highest; therefore, it cannot be considered alone as a dynamometer of progress. The Tehuelches of South America bathe very often, generally before dawn: but the men go into the water separately from the women; they are very modest people who never, in any case, take off theirchirípas. And the Japanese, with a civilization a hundred times superior to that of the Tehuelches, are much inferior to them in the matter of modesty. The Malaysians are very modest, but the Greeks and the Romans were none too much so. Without leaving our own race and times, we have women who would die rather than subject themselves to an examination with the speculum, while men of great intelligence and lofty passions admit that they hardly feel a shadow of modesty.
In the higher races, however, if we neglect a few exceptions and take human groups in great masses, we may say that modesty, like all psychical phenomena of a high order, grows, refines and presents more delicate forms proportionately to the growth of the moral and intellectual importance of a people. The nations which are the most advanced in civilization and morality are also the most modest. Modesty is one of the most elect forms of the seductions and the reticences of love; an extra-current of the great fundamental phenomena of generation; a physical self-respect; one of the psychical phenomena of the highest order. Faithful companion of love, it is a sentiment which in superior natures possesses infinite mysteries, ineffable delicacies, gestures deserving a virtue prize, glances which are a paradise, words and sighs which deserve to be immortalized by the pen of an artist. He who possesses the immodest or semi-modest nature of the Fuegian or the Japanese loses more than half of the treasures of love, and is like a man who, deprived of the olfactory sense, admires the flowers of a garden.
Woman is the vestal of modesty, the queen of its most elect forms, and, when a virgin and as pure as crystal, she possesses intact the entire treasure of the most exquisite chastity. Wandering through the garden of love, she loses someof its gems, and she loses more if her companion helps her to disperse the treasure. It very rarely happens, however, that a woman, even in the exciting and wearing races of a thousand loves, loses all the wealth of modesty with which nature has enriched her. Even in the most gay and libertine life, even in the filth of libertinism, we see with infinite wonder some diamonds flash, which the fire of lust was incapable of destroying and the mud of amorous simony could not soil. We remain astonished and moved at such a power of resistance in a sentiment that seems so fragile and delicate. And as long as a corner of sacred earth remains to woman upon which a humble flower of modesty grows, virtue is not all dead and resurrection is still possible. Bow your head before this flower, you, jeering deniers of every feminine virtue! you, insatiable tormentors of lust. Respect that clod of sacred earth; do not pluck that humble and last flower of a garden, which you so brutally have stripped of all leaves and reduced to desolation!
Modesty is never excessive when it is sincere; it is never too exacting when it rises spontaneously from the heart of a lofty nature; it is a sentiment that can inspire only noble things and prepare us for sublime joys. Modesty has such power that it can elevate ignorance and simplicity to the highest spheres and encircle with a halo the most common loves as well as the most exalted; it is possessed of such esthetic energies as to smother with flowers the most bestial roar of the most brazen man and hide with an impenetrable veil the most immodest secrets of the animal man. Without any need of cloth or garments, this sublime wizard will cover a nude body with a mantle that will make it invisible and impenetrable to lust. Guardian and priest of love, it follows it at every step and defends it from the mire and from the fire, and, causing it to direct its eyes upward, elevates and sanctifies it. Parsimonious trainer of the forces of love, it preserves them always fresh and always young; and when the first kiss causes the first virgin flower to fall from the brow of a woman, modesty brings forth new and ever virgin flowers before the steps of the two lovers. Texture thatconceals, glass that covers, balsam that stops every putrescence, modesty is the most powerful preserver of the affections; and, perhaps, more loves are killed by immodesty than by infidelity.
If the sentiment of modesty were not a great virtue, it would be the most faithful companion of voluptuousness, the greatest generator of exquisite joys. An ardent thirst and an inebriating cup! What joy, but what danger of satiety! Now the cup is full, foaming with lust; the lips are burning and half open to the most voluptuous kisses of the sweet liquor; but the cup is held by the hands of modesty, who with the suavest art satisfies the thirst and renews it, so that the lips eternally remain half open and thirsty, and in the chalice the liquor will last forever. Admirable prodigy of an immense wealth, which finds in itself the sources of renovation and perpetuation; stupendous spectacle of the most gigantic of forces confided to the hands of a child who guides and governs it!
We should teach modesty to our children, and above all to our little girls, as clearly as possible, and refine it, so that it may be all sincerity and delicacy, and not a conventional hypocrisy.
We may be chastely nude, and we may be cynically immodest with the body as fully covered as an onion. We teach our young girls to lower their eyes before the glance of him who seeks and desires them, and then we take them to the theater, where the ballet-dancers are more than nude from the waist down and the ladies are nude from the waist up; so that, adding together the two immodest halves of the two very different classes of women, we may easily have one woman, all nude and all immodest. We teach our daughters to conceal even the foot from the eager eyes of man, and then we trust them to the hands of the dressmaker, that she may perfect with her sartorial art the too modest curves allotted by nature, and mould in an alluring way the contours which innocent youth still left chaste and modest. True Tartufes on a reduced scale, with one hand we hide our face, while with the other we go on exploring lasciviousness. Aslong as this profound hypocrisy continues to penetrate into the marrow of our modern society, modesty, too, will not be very sincere or will be able to exercise only the weakest influence toward elevating and refining our loves; nor do I know whether, with all the unchaste chastity that forms our distinction, we are entitled to class ourselves proudly among the modest nations. If it be true that hypocrisy is a homage paid to virtue, let us wait until the epoch of transition is past, and we shall then feel that we really are as virtuous as we pretend to be.
Since, according to the grammar, adjectives may be either masculine or feminine, it consequently follows that man also can be virgin; but between his and woman's virginity there is an abyss which we in vain try to sound. A virgin male is a man who does not know the mysteries of the embrace; but of this innocence, or of this ignorance, he bears no trace in his body and often neither in his heart nor in his mind, since vice with its thousand subterfuges and Nature with her thousand pitfalls may have made him more impure than a courtesan, although he may boast of having never violated a vow made to a caste, to a prejudice, or to any of the many tyrannies of the will. The virgin female, on the contrary, is an entire world; she is a temple to which peoples from all parts of the world bear the tribute of their religion, their follies and their adoration; so that to write its story is to write the greater part of the ethnography of love. In this book, however, we will confine ourselves to consider the virgin, just as nature has carved her in the secrets of the maternal bosom, and as the civilization of our times sacrifices her on the altars of greed, of love, or of lust.
Nature, in creating the human virgin, has left to the torment of our meditations one of the most obscure and tremendous problems. It was not enough that sixteen long years should be required to turn a child into a woman; not enough that all moral bulwarks which keep us far from the temple of love should fall only through long and cruel battles; strategy and tactics of defense, the impenetrable veils of modesty, were deemed insufficient to push to folly the impatience of desire. All this still seemed little to avariciousand cruel nature; and when your "yes" is answered by another "yes," when barricades and bulwarks fall, when the long coquetry of refusal is wearied and modesty blushingly withdraws to a corner to relish the delights of an anxiously hoped for defeat,—there, just there, at the doors of the sacred temple, a terrible angel with a sword of fire bars the entrance and says to you: "There is a virgin here!" The rose is near to your lips, closed, it is true, but beautiful and fragrant as the dawn of spring, all collected in the chaste involutions of its hundred small leaves; but to impress a kiss on it, you must let your lips bleed, becausethe virgin is the thorn of a rose. Profound mystery! There, at that threshold, two natures widely different, and yet so ardently enamored, have arrived through a thousand obstacles and a thousand battles: there was their rendezvous, for them to empty together the cup of voluptuousness; but there, on that very threshold, they find the angel of sorrow, and through a wound, through a torture, they must attain joy. Cruel mystery! The poor creature who shall be a mother and the nurse and vestal of the temple of the family, the woman who in the long sleepless nights of adolescence had imagined love as the most fragrant flower, as the sweetest fruit in the orchards of life, must reach the goal of her desires through pain, as though nature from the first kiss had reminded her: "Daughter of Eve, you will love and be a mother with great pain!" And happy because she belongs to one man, happy because she is possessed and does possess, she must behold in her bleeding hands the delicate petals of the first flower which she picked in the garden of voluptuousness.
And yet there, among those torn petals, warm with innocent blood, man has erected a temple where the three most formidable passions of the human heart receive adoration, and there he has accumulated as many elements of idolatry, passion, fury, virtue, as his brain could comprehend. There self-pride, love and the sense of ownership have found themselves bound together to conspire against human happiness and at the same time to prepare the most ardent voluptuousness. "Mine!—mine for the first time!—mine forever!"Three cries, one more formidable than the other, which love, pride and the sense of ownership utter in unison, in the apotheosis of delirium and in the quivering of the flesh.
There is a unit for all the series, there is a virgin for all human things: to be the first means to be vastly different from being the second. Now, nature wished to consecrate anatomically the first kiss, the first embrace; to incarnate in a physical fact that tremendous unit which is called the first love. And civilized man, suspicious, jealous, avaricious, gives thanks to Nature for having come and borne testimony to the purity of a woman, and blesses her for having known how to bind a covenant of faith which no one can ever violate with impunity. The Longobards used to give themorgincapto the bride immediately after the first night of matrimony; and this famous gift, the prize of virginity, often equaled the fourth part of the husband's estate. Some shrewd spouses (adds the malicious historian) had the good sense of stipulating beforehand the conditions of a gift which they were too sure of not deserving. However, although we are not Longobards, we promise to all our young girls amorgincapto induce them to guard intact, until the supreme day of the official first love, the sacred will. Thismorgincapis a husband; it is the esteem, the veneration, the adoration of all. With that veil intact, you are a saint, a virgin, an angel; the goal of all desires; you may entertain the most foolish ambitions; you may become a queen tomorrow. If that flimsy veil is rent, you are young, beautiful, perhaps, as pure as you were yesterday, but you are nothing more than a human female. The temple has been violated, the idol overthrown, the priests have fled, hurling anathemas and invoking the vengeance of their god upon the head of the victim. What a tangle of mysteries and injustices! I really feel as if I were in the world of exorcism and necromancy!
The poet finds not one, but a thousand theories to explain the virgin. The thorn beside the rose, the temple guarded by the wings of an angel, the first voluptuousness consecrated by a first pain, the destinies of the lives of futurebeings marked from the first kiss, all spasm and sweetness; and an infinite mystery which covers with its crepuscules one of the grandest and most beautiful scenes of the human world: such is the virgin of the poet.
And the moralist, too, finds in his theological theories a hundred reasons for the explanation of the virgin. The protection of virtue consecrated by a material defense, a kind admonition that love will lead us to a thousand sorrows, a sure guarantee of the honesty of the bride given to the bridegroom in the most solemn manner, a precious pledge of future faith, of everlasting domestic happiness,—there is the virgin of the theologian.
But the naturalist shakes his head and rejects the virgin of the poet and scoffs at the virgin of the theologian. Every organ must have its function; every effect must have its cause; every "why" must be answered by a "because." The virgin is for me an inceptive angel; she is the first shadow of a future separation of two things which are still brutally coupled in us: the organs of love and the organs of a bodily function. The more the living beings elevate themselves, the more they subdivide their labors; and in a creature higher than we, love will certainly have a determined and reserved ground. From the "cloaca maxima" we have arrived at two smaller ones; a step further, and we shall have three organs and three apparatus; one of the greatest physical disgraces of our body will be eliminated.
A virgin is a creature who does a great deal more of good than evil, and very few among the men, if asked to vote for or against her, would blackball her. I do not know whether all women would vote with us, but I believe that the best, the most virtuous, the most beautiful, the most poetical of them would side with us. Open temples are always less sacred than closed ones, and a mystery and asanctum sanctorumhelp to elevate and revive idolatry. And is not love the greatest of idolatries?
A virgin is ours a thousand times more than any other woman; she must love us much, or at least she must desire an embrace much, to descend from the pedestal of the idoland come to us; to descend from the altar and tread the vulgar ground of earthly life. And the mystery of the unknown, and the fascination of primitiæ, and of being the first teacher of the art of love, centuplicate for us the sweet joys of a first embrace. Even the dreadful trepidation of finding the temple violated holds us suspended over the abysses of desperation and voluptuousness, of which, at very short intervals, we sound the somber sorrows, the ineffable delights. And a woman, too, who knows that she is a virgin will fathom the immensity of her sacrifice, and if she has the fortune of finding it equal to the immensity of her affection she feels one of the greatest ecstasies that can vibrate simultaneously nerves and thoughts, senses and sentiments. She had already given her heart and all her affections to her god; today she gives him the seal which attests the possession of her entire self; and divides with her companion all that she has, all that she feels, all that she desires. An angel yesterday, she allows her lover to tear away her wings and becomes again a woman in order to be a wife, a friend, a mother. Priestess of a temple, she burns on the altar of love the niveous robe of the vestal and cries, sobbing with joy and sorrow: "I am thine, all thine! Is there anything more that I can give thee? Tell me and I will give it to thee. I have clipped my wings, that thou mayst carry me aloft on the wings of thy genius; I have burned my temple, that I may live only in the temple of thy heart; I have forsworn the religion of my dreams, that I may be nothing but thy companion. Do not deceive me; I was thy virgin, and I shall be only thy wife. Have an immense love, an immense sympathy for me!"
And yet, we must say it to cause some one who will read these pages to turn pale with animosity, there are men who dare accept the sacrifice of the virgin without any right to be priests of love. And there are men who bite and defile her with the slime of the viper. Miserable, a hundred times miserable wretches! Amidst tears of shame and humiliation, may the woman dream of an infinite adultery; may human dignity, insulted, avenge itself by making the man a cuckolda thousand times; may the profaned virgin reascend to heaven, hurling anathema at the sacrilegious profaner of the temple; may the jury of entire humanity rise with the full majesty of its omnipotence and spit in the face of the enervated who has dared to ask of heaven an angel and of man a virgin, and may a horde of sneering demons scourge him, tie him to the great pillory of ridicule and, in the loudest voice, proclaim him the most dastardly, the last among men!
The anatomical fact which constitutes virginity has, however, the great inconvenience of being understood by all, so that the mass of the people, proud and happy to be able to solve a question of virtue with the eyes and with the hands, brutally throw upon the most delicate scales of the world the sword of Brennus. Let philosophers and sentimentalists prattle at will about purity of heart and the frontiers of virtue; for the common people there are but virgin women or violated women; and physics, with its resistances of elasticity, and geometry with its diameters, solve a problem over which the minds of many thinkers were hard at work. And from this point of view, a large part of civilized men are common people, and many who weep through tenderness of heart and soar very high, stop wondering in the presence of the brutality of a fact, acknowledge defeat and empoison their own lives, thinking that the woman whom they have chosen for their companion had already sacrificed at the altar of love.
Science openly affirms that virginity, even anatomically, has many varied forms, and may be lacking in women who never felt the breath of man. In my medical capacity, I have myself seen, with my own eyes, some little girls who were lacking that seal with which nature seems to consecrate the virgin; and as I contemplated the little creatures I was distressed by the thought that, though having kept virtuous and innocent, virtue would some day be unavailing for them in the presence of an ignorant and brutal man. In vain these poor girls will some day be as pure as an angel. And even when anatomy does not practise such an imposition upon a woman, a fall, a blow, a contortion may, in the mostinnocent way, break the fragile seal which for many is the only and secure guarantee of virtue and purity. Nor is this all. Often, in early childhood, when vice and libertinism are words unknown in the dictionary of a little girl, the lascivious jest of a too precocious boy, or the posthumous lechery of a wretched old man, may violate the palladium of anatomical virginity without dimming in the slightest degree the mirror of the heart; and later, when the mysteries of love shall be unveiled, the still chaste maiden may feel pure and proud of herself and raise her head high, not knowing that she does not possess the star of physical purity. How many domestic misfortunes have happened in this way! How many first nights of love have become infernal nights, and how many ties have been dissolved by a prejudice, a suspicion, a calumny, when they should have been a garland of the purest and most sublime joys!
How many existences have been cruelly empoisoned through the elasticity of a veil more fleeting than the cloudlet that dissolves under the first rays of the sun!
And all of you, jurors of feminine honesty, who with so much assurance and brutality pass your judgment upon hearts and virginity, have you ever thought of the thousand and one aggressions which a young, beautiful and courted woman must pass through, and that, before becoming a bride, she must struggle with her own ignorance and others' lechery, with the surprises of the senses and with the cunning artifices of lust? A moment of weakness, an instant of morbid curiosity, may dim but not stain the virtue of a woman who can be, before and after, as pure as rock-crystal. No; virginity is a great thing, it is the largest diamond in the crown of youthful virtue; but it is not all the woman, it is not all the virtue.
How many wretched women were never pure except in the maternal womb, and yet with studied lasciviousness and infinite art preserved intact the physical seal of virtue, through the lechery of a hundred lovers, and, full of profound wisdom and prudent libertinage and weary of carnal lust, carried their virginity to the altar of the official firstlove! Beautiful treasure, indeed! A diamond fallen a hundred times into the mud and a hundred times picked up and washed! Beautiful gem! A piece of flesh preserved pure in a prostituted body; a flower grown on a clod of earth in the midst of a fetid marsh! And men often picked that flower with sacred devotion and kissed it and adored it, perhaps after having hurled an insult at the pure and virtuous girl who lacked only a seal, like a registered letter refused by the post-office clerk because it lacked a drop of sealing-wax. How often have I wept in wrath, listening to mothers teaching their daughters this one dogma of virtue: "Preserve physical virginity!" How often have I cursed modern morals which teach the bride: "Above all, no scandal!" These, then, are the morals of this hypocritical century: "Virgin first, prudent afterward." There is the virtue of woman! An eye on the seal first, an eye to the keyhole later on: such is the perfect woman of our times!
The excessive, brutal and bestial importance given to virginity by modern society has created the infamous art of manufacturing virgins; and many times virginity has had two, five, ten different editions, not all improved, but always correct and revised, while the idiotic mass of husbands and lovers have been tricked into applauding the new virtue, the purest virtue, heaven knows how acquired!
The debasement of this hypocritical time could not be more cynically avenged. Of the virtue of a woman you have an idea utterly physical and chemical. Now, this advanced civilization is all at your service; it manufactures a chemical and physical virginity for your convenience, and calls to its aid some acrobatism, hocus-pocus and natural magic.Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.Curse, then, the pure and holy woman whose heart is virgin, who never has loved, but to whom the Longobards could never have awarded the prize of themorgincap!
Virginity exists; it exists in the physical nature of the human female, it exists in the sanctuary of civil morals, but it does not begin and end with an anatomical condition: it is also virtue. The anatomical fact must be accompanied bythe moral fact; with the purity of which the senses are the judges, we want purity of heart, the adamantine transparency of character. The human virgin, the virgin of the civilized man, is not the virgin of the savage, an oyster that can be opened only with a knife. She is a creature whom no social mud has ever soiled; she is a woman who was loved, perhaps, and desired by many, but who never belonged to any man. She knows no lasciviousness, no art of hiding vice under a shining varnish of virtue; she blushes at an impure word, at a too ardent gesture, at an impertinent pressure of the hand. The virgin knows that she is all intact, because she, too, has had longings and desires, but has never given her heart to any man; she knows that she is pure, because no profane hand has ever penetrated into the sanctuary of her purity. She has not opened any part of her robe, any fissure of her heart, any tabernacle of her treasures. She is white as the snow of the Alps, on which no foot of marten and no wing of insect have ever rested; she is pure as the water which spouts from the granite in a cave never explored by human foot; she knows everything, or is ignorant of everything, but she blushes for wisdom as well as for ignorance, if only her heart pulsates faster at the sight of a man. She is a virgin because she is modest; she is modest because she is a virgin; she is a virgin and modest because she is a woman.
And you, mothers, who were virgins, when you teach your daughters what a treasure virginal purity is, give them, together with a lesson of anatomy and physiology, which perhaps they need, a lesson of high morals. Tell them that to the man they love they should give everything; to the man they do not love, nothing; tell them that a woman can be physically a virgin and a prostitute morally; tell them that to the first kiss they owe all their treasures untouched, not one gem only, and that the future of their love will depend on the preservation of the centuple virginity enclosed in the one virgin as the masses conceive her. If nature, with a sad mystery, has prescribed that woman should love her first love with much pain, it is incumbent on us to crown thevirgin with so many flowers of virtue, to scent her with so many perfumes of grace, as to turn a martyr into a happy spouse. It is our task to elevate the physical virgin to a very high region of purity and grandeur, so that she may appear to us like an angel of Beato Angelico, all illumined by the iridescent light of the rainbow, where, amidst tears of a first defeat, should shine the light of the sun of love; and that after the hurricane of conquest there may be announced the bright calm of a day all beauty and delight. The Christian religion, in offering to man a virgin-mother to worship, wished, perhaps, to consecrate the purity of the virgin with the affections of the bride; to create an ideal of perfection in which the two chief virtues of woman should shine; to suggest, perhaps, that one can be a virgin and a mother, as another can be a virgin and a courtesan. That this ideal creature has been a sublime creation of the human mind, and not a riddle or a myth, will be clearly proved by the influence which she has exercised upon Christian art, by gazing at the Madonnas of Raphael, of Murillo and of Correggio.
If man elevates his loves to the highest spheres of the ideal; if he can be called the most sublime lover on the terrestrial planet, he can boast of having had from nature the largest cup at the banquet of voluptuousness; he can also boast of being able, alone among the living creatures, to die of pleasure and to end his life with lasciviousness. Certainly, a tremendous thing is the embrace of a man and a woman who love each other! So tremendous that, before this hurricane of the senses, the painter lets the brush fall from his hand, the physiologist loses the thread of analysis, and the philosopher is bewildered by the ferocious grandeur and the brutish sublimity of that act, in which every human force seems to be offered as a holocaust to animal fecundation. The avowed or secret aim of every love, the dream of every virgin and rage of every lust, the torment and delight of every man, voluptuousness is the greatest pleasure of the senses; but it is also the deepest abyss into which vulgar loves fall at every step, and where the great ones too are submerged. Voluptuousness! Tremendous word that recalls the most ardent scene of life and the greatest chaos, which concentrates wherever an organism is born or destroyed; formless chaos, from which flashes radiate and where elements quiver and earthquakes rumble and thunder; chaos in which good and evil are so near as to mingle, confuse and melt together; chaos in which angel and brute join in close embrace, and human individuality vanishes for a moment to give way to a fantastic monster, half man and half woman, half god and half demon; chaos from which a man is born,just as from another chaos arose the cry that generated light. I open the book of human deeds and read:
"In Sardinia the San Luri belle killed with her exuberance of carnality the young King Martin II. of Sicily, of the House of Aragon, him who gave the last blow to the independence of Sardinia, subjecting to his dynasty that part of the island which was still free. In 1409 he had gained a splendid victory over Brancaleone Doria and the Viscount of Narbonne, when he himself was defeated in turn by the belle of San Luri, who, modern Judith, killed the Aragonese king with the fury of her kisses." ("La Marmora, Itinerario in Sardegna," etc., p. 270.)
"In Sardinia the San Luri belle killed with her exuberance of carnality the young King Martin II. of Sicily, of the House of Aragon, him who gave the last blow to the independence of Sardinia, subjecting to his dynasty that part of the island which was still free. In 1409 he had gained a splendid victory over Brancaleone Doria and the Viscount of Narbonne, when he himself was defeated in turn by the belle of San Luri, who, modern Judith, killed the Aragonese king with the fury of her kisses." ("La Marmora, Itinerario in Sardegna," etc., p. 270.)
"The Empress Theodora was the source of such exquisite delight that it was said that painting and poetry were incapable of delineating the matchless excellence of her form. The satirical historian has not blushed to describe the naked scenes which Theodora was not ashamed to exhibit in the theatre. After the mention of a narrow girdle, which she wore, as none could appear stark naked in the theatre, Procopius adds: ἁναπεπτωκυἱα [Greek: anapeptôkuia]. After exhausting the arts of sensual pleasure, she most ungratefully murmured against the parsimony of nature, wishing afourth altar, on which she might pour libations to the god of love. After having been possessed by everybody, she seduced Justinian, who made her his wife and called hera gift of the Deity." (Gibbon, "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.")
"The Empress Theodora was the source of such exquisite delight that it was said that painting and poetry were incapable of delineating the matchless excellence of her form. The satirical historian has not blushed to describe the naked scenes which Theodora was not ashamed to exhibit in the theatre. After the mention of a narrow girdle, which she wore, as none could appear stark naked in the theatre, Procopius adds: ἁναπεπτωκυἱα [Greek: anapeptôkuia]. After exhausting the arts of sensual pleasure, she most ungratefully murmured against the parsimony of nature, wishing afourth altar, on which she might pour libations to the god of love. After having been possessed by everybody, she seduced Justinian, who made her his wife and called hera gift of the Deity." (Gibbon, "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.")
"The old age of David was warmed by the young Shunammite, and Hermippus lived to be one hundred and five years old, sustained by the spirit of many young women." (Bible.)
"The old age of David was warmed by the young Shunammite, and Hermippus lived to be one hundred and five years old, sustained by the spirit of many young women." (Bible.)
These few examples will be sufficient to delineate in a general way the frontiers within which human voluptuousness struggles, an insatiable author of so much good and somuch evil. And yet, in the eyes of science it is nothing but "the most powerful of chemical affinities comprehended by the most perfect of living brains." Prepared in the slow laboratory of a man and a woman, the gemmulæ of life intensely seek each other and are reciprocally attracted; and when love gathers them by millions and millions, they kiss and join and, quivering, restore one of the most prodigious equilibriums of nature and generate a man.
If it is true that at every second a leaf detaches itself and falls from the human tree, it is most true that in the same unit of time ten existences at least are fused in order to relight the torch of life; and if all the gigantic forces which are condensed in those aggregations could be summed up, they would certainly be sufficient to send the world through infinite space without the aid of the laws of Newton. In the hut of the savage and in the gilded halls of the prince, on the soft cushions of new-mown hay and on the glaciers of the Sorata; on the swift train and on two camels crossing the desert, within the damp walls of the prison and in the deep mines where the rays of the sun never penetrate, in the forest and on the sands of the sea-shore, wherever a man and a woman find themselves near and can desire each other, voluptuousness wreathes its garlands and says to the man and the woman: "Be gods for an instant!"
There is no love without voluptuousness, but voluptuousness alone is not love, as that is not love which is ridiculously termed platonic. Lust and platonic love are maladies or monsters of love and are possible, nay, even too prevalent, like the deaf-mutes, the lame, the deformed, the giants and the dwarfs.
There is no conquest without possession of the thing conquered, just as there can be no love without voluptuousness. Take the flower from the tree, the fruit from the flower, and you will have a faithful image of all those amorous reticences which hypocritically stop at the threshold of the temple and, incapable alike of chastity and courage, of vice and virtue, drag a wretched existence in the limbo of bastardly affections. Often duty must be stronger than love,and, the principles of honesty forbidding, love must be conquered with a cruel and incredible torture; but it is better to be heroes of duty than brigands acquitted for lack of proofs, often despised, despicable always. If you truly love, if you can love, then love in the name of the most powerful of the gods of Olympus, love in the name of nature, in the name of the most sacred of rights. Leave aside all amorous casuistry, the worst of human hypocrisies; leave aside the hope of winning with your reticences and your compromises with conscience the Goliath of the sentiments. How many have I beheld, after long sentimental tirades on platonic love, and after bitter tears and vows of virtue, sink from hypocrisy into hypocrisy and down to lasciviousness! How many guilty lovers did not wish sin and had vice, did not wish guilt and had prostitution! All or nothing: such is love's command. Break down the tree that you cannot cultivate, be everything to somebody; demand to be everything to your companion; do not try to divide the indivisible; do not attempt to overthrow the omnipotent, to win over the invincible. With love you cannot jest; any compromise is impossible.
Voluptuousness, even in its purest and simplest forms, without love is always lasciviousness; it is immoral even when it seems hygienic. With love, even lust is virtue; and the studied casuistry of theologians is more immodest than the most ardent kiss ever exchanged between two lovers educated by a long experience of embraces. Voluptuousness is as penetrating as light, as inexhaustible as the sun, and, enclosed between two infinities, one of desire and the other of languor, it will never be all known by the human family, were it to live for millions of centuries. All forms of the beautiful are conquered by the blandishments of art; all forms of virtue are the delight of the sentiment of the good; every great and true idea is the joy of our thought; but voluptuousness relishes simultaneously all the joys of the senses, of sentiment and of intellect, calms all morbosities, extinguishes all fires, intoxicates itself with all inebriations, high and low, with all languors, all human flashes.Voluptuousness is a light which gilds every object it strikes and encircles it with a halo of celestial iridescence. Nor is the embrace of love alone voluptuous; for voluptuousness is in every contact of quivering robes, of glossy hair; voluptuousness is in every quiver of the skin, in every shock of the nerves, in every kiss of the flesh. Unfortunate he who has tasted voluptuousness only out of the one cup of Venus! Let him take lessons of woman, wisest teacher of every exquisite and sublime sensuality. A Bœotian in art, let him go to Athens and study the beautiful. There is no worse enemy of voluptuousness than lust, no sister more faithful than chastity. If the poet, the painter, the sculptor could conceive this divine group, "the joy of Love guided by the hand of Chastity," that representation, whether due to pen, brush or chisel, would be as holy a thing as an altar, a lesson in virtue and a great work of art; fire enclosed in alabaster, the sun abducted by the wave, enamored and jealous; Hercules led by a child!
Lovers who love and possess each other, lovers whom voluptuousness inebriates every hour, if you still have an instant to devote to prudence, remember that voluptuousness should not be the bread but the wine of love; that if you wish that your lips be eternally thirsty, your voluptuousness must be chaste and modest; you must swim, but not drown; you must quiver, but not fall into convulsions; you must be in the grasp of death, but not dead. Modest voluptuousness, this priceless treasure, was given by nature to woman, that she may restore it to you with unbounded joys; and you should respect it as a palladium of domestic happiness and nurture it in your daughters, because verily I say unto you that in modern society there is often more pudicity in the lowest of courtesans than in some married women whose nuptial education has been imparted by an aged and libertine husband.
The man who, through fault of the trees he sprang from or through his own, lives on the bestial frontiers of the human kingdom, is like the brute for which love is a desire that rises, is satisfied and falls asleep. If his affection for woman is not a passion of spring or autumn, it is always an erotic and intermittent love which dies every time a need is satisfied and revives with every renewed desire. The stimulus of the flesh announces in him the dawning of sentiment, and the obesity of the flesh puts an end to the passion of love. The new desire may have the same person or another as its object: this is for him a secondary and merely accidental question, and, according to the manner in which circumstances force him to solve it, he will be a monogamist or a polygamist, a virtuous man through habit or a libertine through caprice. Oftener than it seems this is the way in which many dark-skinned nations love, as well as many white-skinned men, who nevertheless believe that they faithfully love one woman at a time. The history of their love is a necklace of Venetian beads, to which a new bead is added for every desire satisfied; and if the hues of the glass corpuscles are not too diverse, one may have before his eyes a pretty ornament that may spangle the neck of a decent virtue and an honest passion. Between the desire that dies and another that is born, you can set a gentle remembrance of gratitude for the pleasure enjoyed, a sweet hope of a greater joy for the future; and the garland of your passion will then acquire greater beauty and new flowers and perhaps stimulate a true and great love. The most sublime heights of sentiment, the summits of thought, are reached by few; while hundreds andhundreds of lowly sheep ruminate on the plains, where thousands and thousands of bees are buzzing, and millions and millions of ants are swarming. Upon the sapphire summits of the Alps two lone eagles represent the world of the living.
Love, although a most powerful affection, always follows the laws of elementary physics, which govern all the energies accumulated in our nervous centers and which we call sentiments. As long as passion remains in a condition of desire, that is to say, as long as force is potential and is not turned into a product, energy lasts and sentiment lives, vigorous and ardent. All the art of preserving love is, therefore, reduced to this alone: to preserve desire and to cause it to spring up again almost immediately after it is spent. And as even love, with all its omnipotence, cannot evade the physical laws, and every spark that springs forth must always be followed by a period of repose, it is indispensable to act in such a way that while a part of the force is transformed into labor, another be accumulated, preparing a new spark in such a short time that it should be nearly impossible to perceive any interval between the two sparks. To transform the intermittent electric current into a continuous one constitutes the great secret of protracting the existence of love.
As long as desire is not satisfied, and the struggle has not become a conquest, love is not only preserved but increased; and not in vain does woman provide for her happiness in asking for time and prolonging the battle. A love must be either very weak or very brutal if it withdraws from the struggle before victory; and as it happens very seldom that a woman yields everything at once, the small and great favors which from time to time she concedes to the conqueror mark a continual renewal of ever ardent desires and a continuous revivification of love. Finally, sooner or later, the day of the wished-for victory arrives, and one embrace makes two lives one, melts in a single crucible two volcanic rocks and two feelings of voluptuousness. However, even when love is so base as to be only a thirst for pleasure, it seldom dies with the first embrace. And who can say that he has possessed a woman entirely in one night of love?Human charms are such and so many, and our esthetic needs so exquisite and ardent, that even the acquisition of voluptuousness alone is, fortunately, very slow, and in the sweet occupation of new provinces love is preserved or revivified. The various treasures of beauty and sensuality of two lovers, the art of loving, so neglected even after Ovidius' times, mark the limit of duration of those loves that derive their energies only from the worship of form or from the ardor of voluptuousness; and if in some cases that duration is long-lasting, it never is infinite. The hour comes when, alas! the wing of time smites the fresh cheeks of youth, and the northern winds wrinkle them, and the storm scatters over the ground the rosy petals of human beauty; the hour comes when the cup of lust no longer contains a drop of nectar, and then, if nothing is left, love is dying, and no miracle in the world can save it from a certain death. The energy of passion had its only source in voluptuousness and beauty; one has vanished, the other one is withered and the strength is spent. No force in the world is produced without the transmutation of matter; no energy is increased without transformations of equilibrium and decompositions of affinities. If man and woman do not revive an affinity of sympathy, no combination can take place; no light, no heat can spring forth from their contact. Let them sing the psalms of death and together bury the remains of a love which, kept alive by voluptuousness alone, was inexorably to perish with it.
This is the most general way in which vulgar loves die, and the duration of their life can be calculated with fair precision by weighing the beauty of the two lovers, their youth, their lust, their art of loving. Those loves may last an hour, a day, a month, a year, ten years; they may, in rare cases, last for the entire period of human youth. Men, and especially women, do not fall without a struggle under the blows of time, and with incredible art repair the ravages of age; and not only are forms daily adulterated, denatured and counterfeited, but into the cup of love, as well, spices and drugs and philters are poured, that the silent hungermay receive the stimulus of an artificial appetite, and soft blandishments and morbid temptations of the flesh substitute the ardor and impetus of passion. Long lasts the battle before defeat is acknowledged and love changes its nature but still lives. It was a volcano, it is now a Bengal light; it was as nude and chaste as an Uranian Venus, it is now as clothed and immodest as a courtesan; it was love of every hour, it is now periodical, intermittent, like the tertian or the quartan; it impunely defied the rays of the sun at midday, it now prefers the twilight; but, when all is said, in spite of so much reticence and so much tinkering, it is still and always love. Women, you who behold with horror the gradual extinction of that fire which for so many years has warmed your enamored members, if you were happy through beauty alone, remember that that fire will be extinguished with the withering of the last attraction of your body; and when the heartrending cry which invokes the stimulus of a desire will not be answered, prepare for the funeral psalmody. As long as you can, with the galvanism of lust, arouse a desire in the flaccid flesh of your lover, love will not be dead. You see, then, to what a low level the art of preserving love has sunk, when love has its origin only in the desire of bodily form: it sinks to a question of hygiene; I would nearly say, it transforms itself into a problem of taxidermy and preservation by chemical process! It is necessary to study the antiseptic virtue of deliberate refusals and libertine reticence; to submit lust to a chemical research and fatigue to a physiological investigation; to meditate upon the economy of energies and visit the pharmacy for the purpose of discovering the aphrodisiacal virtues of the various silken fabrics, of the various smiles, and of the sensual movements of the body. To these basest studies we have lowered the woman who would so gladly have wished to soar aloft with us through the numberless spheres of the beautiful and not only embrace the world of exterior forms, but also the infinite worlds of sentiment and thought.
You will tell me, perhaps, that I aspire to an ideal love, impossible, therefore, to reach; you will tell me that a manwith a good constitution can be handsome for forty years of his life, and that woman, too, is entitled to thirty years of beauty and ten more years of gracefulness; so that a love which should last but these thirty or forty years would still be a most beautiful and most enviable thing. A spring and a summer of forty years, ending with a mild autumn, in which a sweet remembrance, a suave reciprocal gratitude, and an intimate friendship prepare the last twilight of old age, may seem to us a worthy triumph of a long and splendid life of love. And I am with you if you mean the common loves of the common people; but we must have a high, a very high aim, and we all should desire a love lasting as long as life and which shall be buried alone in its grave. And then every healthy man can offer to woman the thyrsus of love, and every healthy woman can offer the cup of voluptuousness to man; but how many men are handsome, how many women can be called beautiful? Perhaps not ten in a hundred; and all the others who in various degrees are removed from the type of perfection of form, shall they not love, can they not be loved? Certainly.
In man, rich in so many physical elements, the beautiful does not end with the exterior form, nor should love spring from the source of voluptuousness alone. No deformity, no disease in him who would procreate men: this is hygiene; but the hundred forms of moral and intellectual beauty, relieved only by a soft shade of sex, can and should awaken ardent and tenacious passions that do not vanish with the sun of youth. Thus, while love can dispense its delights to every man and every woman, perfect love should be born of the contemplation and adoration of every type of beauty; and when that of the form begins to fade, let moral beauty shine in all its power, and, later still, let the beauty of thought appear to us in all its brilliant majesty, so that while one star disappears, another twinkles, and from the slumbering desires of the senses we feel a stronger yearning awaken, the yearning for possessing the treasures of sentiment and thought of a creature who is all ours, and whom, if we suddenly loved her for the beauty of form, we now love andwill continue to love for her beauty of kindness, culture, ideas, and everything that a human being can boast of beauty and greatness. Even character and thought have a profoundly sexual type, and feminine kindness can be adored by us, just as virile courage is admired by the sweet and tender nature of woman. When we have loved in a woman not only the beautiful female, but a whole nature imbued with all the beauties and graces of the human Eve, the longest life will not suffice to satisfy our desires of possession, and at the last hour of extreme old age we have still some new conquest to make, and some desire is reawakened, while the accumulation of most sweet memories fills the void which youth, by fleeing, has left behind itself. Sublime triumph of human nature, in which love survives the senses exhausted, voluptuousness which is mute, the beauty of forms which is buried, while a warm ray of light shines on the silvery heads of two old beings who still love each other because they still desire each other and because heart and mind unite in an embrace, sexual by origin, but ideal for the heights attained. Our study on love in old age will complete this picture, certainly one of the most beautiful and seductive in the great museum of love: a picture which we should all desire to represent in the late years of our life.
When the sources of love are many, while one dries up another swells so that love never lacks a flow of water to quench its insatiable thirst. All passions follow in their movements a parabolic line, and those that have risen the highest descend the most rapidly; hence the weariness so close to strength; the tediousness that follows enthusiasm; the thousand dangers of the death of sentiment. More than any other passion, love presents these phenomena and dangers, and it is impossible for all to make voluptuousness, ecstasy and apotheosis last beyond a very short flash of a few instants. Intermittence is one of the most inexorable laws of the nervous system, and he who would increase enthusiasm and