Love, being the most powerful agitator of human elements that was ever known, stirs the slime which is always found even in the noblest natures; while in men whose souls have been kneaded with sludge it becomes the greatest coefficient of vice and crime. Love, like all other sentiments, has a pathology of its own, a superior pathology, because it so widens its sphere of action as to enclose a larger field and has more prepotent needs to satisfy. A man incapable of a base deed even though dying of hunger, even though about to lose all that he holds most dear, may compromise with his conscience when a question of love arises, and many, many blemishes stain the texture of the noblest and loftiest natures. Love wants to possess us bound hands and feet, and this is an inexhaustible source of disgrace, guilt, mean cowardice and great crimes.
The degradations of love are as numberless as the grains of sand in the sea, as many as love's own delights; they are of every size and adapt themselves to the infinite degrees of human baseness. It seems to me, however, that in a general study of physiology they can be reduced to two principal forms, that is to say,impotencyandprostitution.
Impotency is not only a disease that should receive the care of the physician or the hygienist; it is not only a case which requires the attention of the legislator: but it is a moral shame that must be thoroughly studied by the psychologist who endeavors to outline the natural story of love.
In the very simplest organism of inferior animals every desire of love ceases when age, disease or a wound has exhausted the energy of the genital organs. In man, instead,the most irresistible and bestial needs are so teeming with psychical elements of the moral and the intellectual world as to survive the disease of the organ. An innocent man loves even without being aware of his manhood, and a woman can die of love although knowing nothing of the existence of the womb. True it is, no amorous note arises in the eunuch, or if the phantoms of a strange lasciviousness are noticed wandering here and there, they are specters that belong to the limbo of the most transcendent pathology. These poor pariahs of nature are, however, very rare; while our rachitic civilization makes by hundreds the semi-eunuchs who fill with cuckoldly ornaments the sanctuary of the family and the low world of wandering loves. Statistics, fortunately, cannot obtain the exact number of these "half-men" and consign them to their inexorable files; be it enough for us to know that they are many, very many, much more numerous than feminine virtue and patience could tolerate.
Nature's whole love, true love, nude but innocent love, is not all sentiment or thought, but also a function of reproductive life, a need of the senses. Martyrs and saints could mutilate themselves and die in the beatitude of their mutilations; but the majority of men does not consist of saints or martyrs. Every mutilation of love is a shame and the most fecund generator of many other minor shames. In the chaste and cool dawn of early youth, more than one woman consented unwittingly to an infamous compact by which a man offered her a great name and great wealth in exchange for a "yes." The wretched man loved her, desired her, but could not possess her as nature commanded man to possess woman; he wished to own the temple and feel the emotion of owning it without having the right to enter it. Sometimes the eunuch was not an abject being and did confess his shame before his betrayal, but the innocent maiden did not understand and accepted the compact. And who does not believe himself a hero or a martyr at that age? And the eunuch embraced his precious prey, inundated her with sterile kisses, and endeavored to warm her with his impotent caresses; and the marmoreal statue of adolescent virginitytrembled with new and, to her, incomprehensible emotions. Later on, the virgin realized that she was a woman, that in vain she was a woman, and love attacked and seized virtue, and felled it despairing and imploring, and the covenant sworn in good faith was broken by the most powerful of affections. How many domestic misfortunes, what a fruitful stream of bastards, how many brigands spring from this contaminated source!
O you, real eunuchs, half-eunuchs, quarter-eunuchs, do not hope to be loved by a woman on whom you have imposed an infamous contract! No virtue, no oath can resist the sacred laws of love; nobody is stronger than nature. And if you have found a heroine, why make a martyr of her? Do you want to be the executioner of her whom you say you love?
And you, generous women, noble women, who can elevate to the highest regions even the lowest passion, do not accept any compact involving a mutilation of love. You, teachers of every kind of sacrifice, you think that you will make happy an outcast of nature, you impose upon yourselves, smiling perhaps, the sublime mission of redeeming a desperate man: but I assure you that neither virtue nor sacrifice nor heroism can stifle that formidable cry of the universe of the living that wants you to be wives and mothers. While the martyr, with the palm of sacrifice tightly pressed to her bosom, will try to smile, a cruel, deep, painful stab in her heart will warn her: "You, Eve and daughter of Eve, will become a mother only through a crime, will enter the sanctuary of sanctuaries, the tabernacle of maternity, only through the door of domestic treason."
No; love is not all senses and all lust. Sentiment can be such a great part of it as to conceal voluptuousness in the most secluded recess of a hidden region. No; woman can be happy even without voluptuousness if she only feels herself loved: but she wishes to love, and should love, "a man." I appeal to all the daughters of Eve, and, to be spared blushing, they may reply with a nod of the head and without moving their lips: Is it not true that you would prefer ahundred times to be loved by a "real man," even with a vow of chastity, rather than to be profaned and satiated with lust at the hands of a eunuch? Is it not true that above all you want to have for support that firm column called "an honorable man"? And certainly he is not an honorable man who claims the possession of a woman and demands to be loved by her when he is not a man.
The half-men who at forty, at fifty years of age aspire to have a family, after having dragged their half-virility through the lasciviousness of prostitution and the dainties of the erotic kitchen, should never suppose that lechery can take the place of true love in a woman. They can prostitute their spouse, but they can never make her love them earnestly and deeply. They are foredoomed by the inexorable laws of nature to figure largely in the population of cuckoldom.
When impotency falls like a thunderbolt on the head of two happy lovers, it is only a disease, a misfortune that concerns the physician and the pharmacist; but when it precedes love, it is cowardice, degradation, infamy. The honest man should never attempt to conceal it from himself or justify it; he should either courageously renounce love, a thing that does not concern him, or expose the sore and ask the armed hand of the surgeon to cut and cauterize it. Let him become a man again, and then see if he can aspire to the delights of sentiment. Before becoming a farmer, he should possess a farm.
The complicated mechanism of our social organism, in the same manner as it offers to the thirst of ardent youth voluptuousness without love, imposes on many lovers, with a more cruel amputation, love without voluptuousness. Here we have the two chief sources of the thousand sorrows which human society prepares for those who love: "Voluptuousness without love," that is, all the degradations and shames of prostitution; "Love without voluptuousness," that is, all the tortures of enforced chastity. Between these two hells the enamored youth remains a long time suspended, until, to avoid death, he takes lechery and imagination into a somber old boat and flees away with them to hide in the reedymarshes and among the miasmas of self-abuse—the lowest of the degradations of love, and one which occupies a proper place between impotency and prostitution. Yes; as man enjoys all the Olympus of love, he must also submit to all its degradations.
In the book which I will dedicate to the hygiene of love this problem will be thoroughly studied. Here I shall refer to it only so far as it concerns the physiology of sentiment. It is painful to admit it, but it is true: our modern society has rendered love so difficult to many unhappy creatures as to make them pass under the Caudine Forks of this cruel dilemma: either to buy voluptuousness and counterfeit love with it, or dream of love in the mire of solitary lasciviousness. In one way or the other, we are forced to become counterfeiters and to blush for ourselves at the manner in which we satisfy the most powerful of human needs.
Solitary love is not only a sin against hygiene, and one which kills health and vigor, but it is also an offense against morals, a poison of happiness. He who repeatedly falls into the crime and is frequently obliged to blush, tarnishes more every day the limpid purity of his own dignity, weakens the strong spring of virile resolutions and becomes a greater coward in all the battles of life. While he blushes for himself and curses himself and the love that condemns him to a continuous debasement, he blushes more than ever in the presence of the woman of whom he does not feel worthy and of whom he becomes less worthy at each fall. He poisons the wave of love at its very first source and, even when he later succeeds in loving, has spoiled the purity of his tastes and his aspirations and in the arms of a woman who loves him complains of the solitary twinges of a morbid voluptuousness, like one who, having burned his mouth with the pungent tastes of pipe and brandy, can no longer relish the flavors of pineapple and strawberry.
Love is the greatest of conquests, the sweetest of delights, the joy of joys; to renounce it in order to replace it with degradation is worse than a crime, it is an infamy. Better a hundred times chastity with its sublime tortures,prostitution with its filth. True and complete love is a splendid banquet under the fragrant trees of a garden, amidst the glittering of the chalices, the harmonies of music and the witty jests of friends; solitary love is a furtive meal with a bone picked up in the fetidness of a dunghill and gnawed in the dark.
Prostitution is, after solitary abuse, the greatest degradation of love, and, what is worse,—it should be said at once,—a necessary one in modern society. Tibullus hurls at it a splendid malediction:
"Jam tua qui Venerem docuisti vendere primusQuisquis es, infelix urgeat ossa lapis!"
"Jam tua qui Venerem docuisti vendere primusQuisquis es, infelix urgeat ossa lapis!"
"Jam tua qui Venerem docuisti vendere primusQuisquis es, infelix urgeat ossa lapis!"
"Jam tua qui Venerem docuisti vendere primus
Quisquis es, infelix urgeat ossa lapis!"
("Whoever thou art who first hast taught to sell the pleasures of love, may an ill-boding stone crush thy bones!")
("Whoever thou art who first hast taught to sell the pleasures of love, may an ill-boding stone crush thy bones!")
This imprecation, repeated by all moralists of every succeeding age, could not prevent for one day the sale of love, and universal experience demonstrates that St. Augustine was a sounder philosopher when he wrote:
"Aufer meretrices de rebus humanis, turbaveris omnia libidinibus; constitue matronarum loco, labe ac dedecore dehonestaveris."
"Aufer meretrices de rebus humanis, turbaveris omnia libidinibus; constitue matronarum loco, labe ac dedecore dehonestaveris."
("Take the prostitutes out of human things, and you will disturb the whole world with lust; put them in the place of wives, and you will defile home with disease and dishonor.")
("Take the prostitutes out of human things, and you will disturb the whole world with lust; put them in the place of wives, and you will defile home with disease and dishonor.")
If St. Augustine had written but this sentence, I would proclaim him a great psychologist; in a few words he has shown all the sides of the tremendous problem, given a lesson of toleration to the intolerant, of social science to economists, and today, after so many centuries, his words are as true, profound, inexorable as when he addressed them to a world so different from ours.
Difficult problems are not solved by fleeing from or byconcealing them; and yet many physicians, many philosophers attempt to solve the most burning questions of modern society after the manner of a child who by closing his eyes believes that he is fleeing from the dog that threatens him. To Dr. Monlau in Spain and Dr. Bergeret in France, who thought that they would be able to save society by abolishing prostitution, I replied in a few words which I wish to save from the shipwreck of the newspapers in order to gather them in the shadow of this book:
"I have never wondered at finding philosophers who study man in Fichte or in Kant without having ever touched his palpitating body, or examined any of his fibers with the microscope; who advise the legislator to destroy in the social organism, with iron and fire, that livid and cancerous spot called prostitution; neither have I given the alarm or extolled it as a miracle when I heard theauto-da-féinvoked against the houses of ill fame by moralists who have had the rare fortune of having been born without the sixth sense, or the still rarer merit of smothering it with the extinguisher of an iron will. But when I hear these intolerant cries from the mouth of a physician, I shake my head diffidently, and with a compassionate voice I ask myself: 'Is he really a physician? Has this moralist actually seen a man in convulsive delirium and cut into his cold and rigid flesh on the chilly marble slab of the anatomical cabinet? He who hurls the anathema at prostitution, is he really the physician who should act as a kind link between the legislator, who in man sees only a defendant to punish, and the philanthropist, who in him considers only an unhappy creature to heal and help?'"These and other questions I addressed to the illustrious Spanish physician Monlau when he proposed to his government the absolute suppression of the houses of ill fame; and then I had the pleasure of seeing my poor words printed in the progressive Spanish medical journals. Now I make the same reproach to Dr. Bergeret, who, inone of his memoirs on prostitution in the country places and small towns of France, went so far as to fling the anathema against that caustic wound which civilization has opened in the diseased flesh of the modern social organism; and I, with a sad air, repeat to the French physician a melancholy: 'Tu quoque, fili mi?'"Bergeret lost much of his time and ink in narrating lurid stories of what occurred in some villages of France. And who does not know similar stories? We have them in Italy, in Germany; we can find them in every country where humanity loves and suffers, gets drunk and prostitutes itself; wherever the eyes of the authorities cannot penetrate into the most secret fissures of the social edifice where lie concealed the lurid parasites that sting and devour us. But between deploring the evils that are the results of clandestine prostitution and destroying all toleration on this ground there is an abyss over which the physician and the legislator should not pass on the waxen wings of an Arcadian flight, but which should be crossed over the solid bridge of a wise criticism."Then, my dear moralist, my dear theorist, you say that men learn vice in the houses of ill fame; but, then, without taverns would there be no assassins, without pharmacists would there be no poisoners, without manufacturers of gunpowder and bayonets would there be no wars? And who, pray, is the cause of the existence of houses of ill fame, taverns, daggers, poisons, firearms, if not man himself, that man whom you ought to be able to understand if it is true that you also are made of the same dough? Your morals are those of the inquisitor who burns the sinner whom he cannot convert; they are as false and coarse as those of the legislator who has only the prison and the scaffold for the education of the guilty; as those of the surgeon who barbarously amputates the member which, with a wiser and more merciful science, he should preserve. Modern civilization substitutes the school for the inquisitor's stake, has more faith in books than in prisons and halters, more in preservative medicinethan in the surgeon's knife. And as long as the social organism is diseased, as long as it is a poor creature imbued with evil humors, with many curious bones and many scrofulous tumors, we will kindly cauterize its flesh to keep it alive, to divert into more ignoble parts those acrid humors that would poison the sources of life, until we shall succeed with the tonic cure of education in renewing the blood in the veins of this old invalid and in pouring this new blood into his flesh, his bones and his nerves, to rebuild them."This is why we still preserve the cautery of prostitution, and we wish to guard it with the same jealous care with which a physician keeps a precious wound open to save the life of a diseased organism."And believe me, O egregious colleague of the country beyond the Alps, when life shall be no longer threatened and the organism shall have new blood, then we will close this wound, too, together with many other ones which are still bleeding. We will close the house of voluptuousness when every man will have his nest and love will not be considered a crime any longer."
"I have never wondered at finding philosophers who study man in Fichte or in Kant without having ever touched his palpitating body, or examined any of his fibers with the microscope; who advise the legislator to destroy in the social organism, with iron and fire, that livid and cancerous spot called prostitution; neither have I given the alarm or extolled it as a miracle when I heard theauto-da-féinvoked against the houses of ill fame by moralists who have had the rare fortune of having been born without the sixth sense, or the still rarer merit of smothering it with the extinguisher of an iron will. But when I hear these intolerant cries from the mouth of a physician, I shake my head diffidently, and with a compassionate voice I ask myself: 'Is he really a physician? Has this moralist actually seen a man in convulsive delirium and cut into his cold and rigid flesh on the chilly marble slab of the anatomical cabinet? He who hurls the anathema at prostitution, is he really the physician who should act as a kind link between the legislator, who in man sees only a defendant to punish, and the philanthropist, who in him considers only an unhappy creature to heal and help?'
"These and other questions I addressed to the illustrious Spanish physician Monlau when he proposed to his government the absolute suppression of the houses of ill fame; and then I had the pleasure of seeing my poor words printed in the progressive Spanish medical journals. Now I make the same reproach to Dr. Bergeret, who, inone of his memoirs on prostitution in the country places and small towns of France, went so far as to fling the anathema against that caustic wound which civilization has opened in the diseased flesh of the modern social organism; and I, with a sad air, repeat to the French physician a melancholy: 'Tu quoque, fili mi?'
"Bergeret lost much of his time and ink in narrating lurid stories of what occurred in some villages of France. And who does not know similar stories? We have them in Italy, in Germany; we can find them in every country where humanity loves and suffers, gets drunk and prostitutes itself; wherever the eyes of the authorities cannot penetrate into the most secret fissures of the social edifice where lie concealed the lurid parasites that sting and devour us. But between deploring the evils that are the results of clandestine prostitution and destroying all toleration on this ground there is an abyss over which the physician and the legislator should not pass on the waxen wings of an Arcadian flight, but which should be crossed over the solid bridge of a wise criticism.
"Then, my dear moralist, my dear theorist, you say that men learn vice in the houses of ill fame; but, then, without taverns would there be no assassins, without pharmacists would there be no poisoners, without manufacturers of gunpowder and bayonets would there be no wars? And who, pray, is the cause of the existence of houses of ill fame, taverns, daggers, poisons, firearms, if not man himself, that man whom you ought to be able to understand if it is true that you also are made of the same dough? Your morals are those of the inquisitor who burns the sinner whom he cannot convert; they are as false and coarse as those of the legislator who has only the prison and the scaffold for the education of the guilty; as those of the surgeon who barbarously amputates the member which, with a wiser and more merciful science, he should preserve. Modern civilization substitutes the school for the inquisitor's stake, has more faith in books than in prisons and halters, more in preservative medicinethan in the surgeon's knife. And as long as the social organism is diseased, as long as it is a poor creature imbued with evil humors, with many curious bones and many scrofulous tumors, we will kindly cauterize its flesh to keep it alive, to divert into more ignoble parts those acrid humors that would poison the sources of life, until we shall succeed with the tonic cure of education in renewing the blood in the veins of this old invalid and in pouring this new blood into his flesh, his bones and his nerves, to rebuild them.
"This is why we still preserve the cautery of prostitution, and we wish to guard it with the same jealous care with which a physician keeps a precious wound open to save the life of a diseased organism.
"And believe me, O egregious colleague of the country beyond the Alps, when life shall be no longer threatened and the organism shall have new blood, then we will close this wound, too, together with many other ones which are still bleeding. We will close the house of voluptuousness when every man will have his nest and love will not be considered a crime any longer."
There are some savage races among which prostitution is unknown, while no civilized nation is without prostitutes; on the contrary, every country, even the most moral, has the high prostitutes and the very high, the low and the very low. Not in all countries are prostitutes cynically named according to the price they ask for their favors, as in Persia, where they are termed "the fiftytomani," "the twentytomani," etc.; but everywhere a tariff is the index of the hierarchy of vice and a scale of lechery. Alexander Severus did not want the money collected through taxes on houses of prostitution to be paid into the treasury; and Ulpian, his minister, used it for the maintenance of the theaters and the public health. With Juvenalian sagacity, the government of Brazil devotes to the regulation of vice the money received from the sale of decorations and titles of nobility. We find everywhere women who sell themselves, but we also find,to our honor, that society is everywhere ashamed of this stain, conceals and does not mention it, and a mysterious mephitic air hangs heavily over the simony of love.
A thousand muddy streamlets carry their tributes to prostitution; but at the first source the cause is one and powerful: in man an imperious appetite for voluptuousness, in woman an imperious want of bread or licentiousness, or licentiousness and bread at the same time. Unfortunately woman can always sell five minutes of voluptuousness without love, without desire; she can sell herself with disgust in her heart and hatred on her lips. And the joy she sells is paid for according to the requirements of beauty, luxury, fashion, according to the infamous art with which she knows how to feign pleasure and counterfeit love. Procurers and procuresses hasten to the market of lechery to test the flesh of the precious victims, to fatten the lean and buy the plump for the higher bidder; and panders and bawds, keeping within the shadow of the law, conceal in the lurid or gilded prisons of prostitution that quivering herd of youth and shame. And prisoners in the same gloomy atmosphere are martyrs of love and nymphomaniacs; victims of hunger and of ignorance; fallen angels and foul demons; all the lowest strata of feminine society, all the bloody carrions of the great social battles.
There, in those dark haunts of licentiousness, man forgets how to love, loses the holy poetry of the heart and the mysterious quivers of sentiment, prostitutes the most gigantic forces of thought and affection. Without hunger, he partakes of savory food; thirstless, he becomes intoxicated; without the necessity of overcoming modesty, he obtains everything, and money levels all virtues and concedes the maddest polygamy; and there one sees the nude and chaste statue of Love dragged in the fetid bog by a frolicsome tipsy crowd. Such is the love that modern civilization offers to all those hundred thousand pariahs who cannot find the straw to weave the chaste nest of the family, to all those who cannot make a vow of chastity and do not wish to deceive an innocent maiden or steal another man's woman.
Our civilized society can really be proud of this; the philanthropists with their tearful dirges, the economists with their wise reflections, the legislators with their elaborate codes, can join in a chorus to sing hosannas to this stupendous solution of the problem. Either a starving family or prostitution; either children cast into the depth of misery or faith betrayed in the house of a friend; proletariate or infamy; degradation or crime. Stupendous dilemmas that crown our society with numberless horns and sow deception, hunger and corruption everywhere. If a thick bark of hypocrisy did not cover the rotten trunk of our modern civilization, what a horrible spectacle should we behold! And when a sincere moralist or a true philosopher attempts to cut the bark away and show to us through a little fissure how deep the decay is, then we flee horrified and clamor against such impudence, such sacrilege!
The government should, therefore, deal with prostitution as a malady to be treated, not because there is any hope of cure, but because society owes to every sick person a physician and a bed. It should not be permitted to grow, to spread, to parade its lurid sores, to cover itself with tinsel and paint; but it should be watched tenderly as in a hospital, so that in the passer-by it may awaken compassion rather than lechery.
And while the state keeps a good vigil, writers and teachers should raise the level of general culture and teach the elect the paradise of chastity, which contains a treasure of delights for the future of him who waits (this, alas! the libertine will never be able to understand), and preserves for true love, which all may hope to attain, the infinite joys of a virgin voluptuousness. The sale of love should neither be proclaimed as a feast of the human family, nor officially suppressed, because it then overflows and inundates all the paths of society; it should be tolerated and pitied, as we already tolerate and pity many other maladies of our social organism.
To reach this sublime goal, to hope at least to attain it, we must above all scrape off from modern love the hundredcoats of hypocrisy; we must not have our children learn love as a crime in the house of vice; but immediately, at the first dawn of youth, they should be taught that it is a sublime delight conceded to the good and the noble and is to be conquered in the same manner as glory and wealth. Not the chambermaid or the prostitute, but a modest and pure girl should be the first teacher of love; a woman who should teach us love before voluptuousness, to be chaste in our desires in order to possess her some day.
We conceal and believe that we are able with silence to suppress the passions and suffocate the desires; but we have concealed too much and have been silent too long. In the most puritanical country in the world, England, one of the most honest and wisest physicians of London published a book—that has already reached the ninth edition—in which he frankly dared assert that free love, without fecundation, is the only remedy against the proteiform corruption that invades modern society, because of the impossibility for most of the people of morally satisfying one of the most powerful needs. This book was a distressing surprise to me. When they can write such a book as this in England and devour nine editions, when an honest physician can calmly discusspreventive intercourse, when Malthus finds such an eloquent and daring commentator who brings his theory from the field of economy into that of morality, of hygiene and even of religion, I believe it my duty to affirm that society is thoroughly diseased and (I say it loudly) should be cured.
Yes; modern society, infected with so much prostitution and adultery, and incessantly proclaiming itself monogamous while it is largely polygamous, demands a physician to cure its sores, to cleanse it from so much degradation, to concede loves virtuous and more free, or at least less soiled with filth and lies. And this physician must be a less hypercritical and less exacting morality, but at the same time more exalted, because more human; a morality that should teach us never to separate voluptuousness from love, and that chastity is the most beautiful and holiest of joys and the most watchful guardian of love.
The elect never prostitute themselves, not even in these times, because they love, and because, having once entered the paradise of love, they feel too great repugnance to descend to the mire of the simony of voluptuousness. They should exert all their faculties with all their strength in order that the masses, too, may elevate themselves to the high spheres in which they dwell, and where they breathe a purer air and cull the most delicate and beautiful flowers.
If you ask a hundred women what is the most common fault of love, probably the same reply will be repeated a hundred times: "Love is inconstant; love is a liar." If, on the other hand, you consult the gloomy volumes in which man gathers the statistics of his crimes, you will find several columns bristling with figures indicating the large number of suicides and homicides for love; you will find no records of inconstancy, and but rarely, scattered here and there, some cases of adultery. The jurymen, then, that amorphous and chaotic mass in which every idea of right and wrong dissolves and vanishes, always deal very leniently with crimes for which the code would send the culprit to death or to prison for life, and they often acquit the man who has turned murderer for love.
In none of the human institutions is such impenetrable darkness as in the field of love, where an intricate mass of reticences, contradictions, tolerations and cruelties causes common sense to stumble at every step and, what is worse, offends and wounds the sentiment of justice. It is a written law that adultery is a crime to be punished with the gravest penalties, but in actual life adultery is the most common and most venial sin ever known; it is not only tolerated, but fêted and almost accepted as a social institution. The incitement to prostitution is considered a very serious crime, but many legislators sell their daughters to a rich husband who cannot love her, never will love her and will drive her to adultery with the force of irresistible necessity. And is this not prostitution? Man is either not worthy of the laws which he has imposed on himself, or he is rambling in alabyrinth of maniacal vertigo; he is either an arrogant blockhead or a shameless liar.
Man is a little of all this, but he is chiefly a hypocrite. He proclaims solemnly to the four winds that he is a son of God and that he inhabits the earth by chance and temporarily; born in Olympus, he will return there soon and forever. He is a god on vacation who condescends to play and eat with the peasants, but he is winged and lives only on ideals. A moment later he forgets his proclamations, his braggardism and shows more than ever that he is an animal of the soil; he sees the painful contrast between what he has said and what he has done, covers himself and goes into hiding. Such is the eternal formula of his eternal contradictions. In love he lies more frequently and more brazenly than in any other case. He has supposed for a moment that love, too, could be just and hence measured on the same scale as the other sentiments, and above all leveled by the common yoke of the other affections. And yet love may possess all virtues; it may be merciful, heroic, kind, generous, but it can never be just; born in injustice, it lives on injustice and dies of injustice; it has but one right—strength; it possesses only one weapon—arrogance.
When deceived love arms itself with an homicidal knife, I class that crime among the most inevitable effects of instantaneous hatred and natural revenge; when love is imposed as a duty on a girl, and instead of love hatred is born, instead of affection contempt springs up, I remark that love cannot be ordered for a fixed hour like a dinner, and that, if infamies and bastards are born from the obscene nuptials of gold and vanity, love has nothing to do with it, because love was absent, and he who can prove an alibi is at once acquitted by the most cruel and most stubborn of public prosecutors. When I see love kill dignity, friendship, the holiest affections of the heart; when I see it breaking with furious rage the iron bars of the cage in which a cruel code of laws has imprisoned it, I acquit it instantly because love is not a wild beast that can be shut up in a menagerie, but a creature as free as air, that lives on bright light andburning suns, on the aroma of the forest and the fragrance of the meadows. You have made it hydrophobic with hunger and thirst; you have made it furious with your own violence; and you complain because the mad creature bites and kills? This is admitted to be true by universal consent; and as there is an immense inequality between what the laws require and that of which human loves are capable, men shrug their shoulders and forgive, forgive always, forgive all, even where human justice should rise in all the solemn grandeur of its majesty to protect the most sacred rights of family and society. In the codes, love is often a crime; in the paths of life, for the most rigorous individuals, it is at most a weakness—a dear, a sympathetic weakness.
For me hypocrisy is a chain that ties and chokes love in modern society, and I dare affirm that the only fault, the only crime which this sentiment can commit is falsehood. Let us begin by freeing it from the leprosy which infects, devours, disgraces it, and then we shall see what remains sound beneath in that dear, nude and virginal love that Mother Nature has conceded us. Let us first save the life of this poor creature, and then we shall attend to the rest; we shall find out whether it has other misfortunes, whether it can commit other crimes besides that of lying.
In my opinion, love is today a liar from head to foot; a liar when it swears and when it forswears; a liar when, a hundred times a day, it pronounces the wordseternal,eternity,eternally; it is a liar in law and in life; it is unfaithful, a thief, a traitor, solely because it is a liar. I may have aScipionian mania, the fixed idea of adelenda Carthago; but if I should have to answer the questions: "Which are the true, the great loves?" "Which are the happy loves?" I would reply without hesitation: "The sincere." All the faults of love are all lies; almost all the misfortunes of love are the offspring of untruth; and, finally, adultery is nothing but the most infamous of love's lies. "What is," I will ask in turn, "the only remedy for unhappy loves, the only anchor of salvation for betrayed loves?" "Sincerity, sincerity, nothing but sincerity."
At the risk of seeing many disciples and many masters of love smile skeptically, I will say at once that woman, from the first day she loves, lies less than we do, and during the life of love she is less unfaithful than we are. Man, in his first declaration, even when quite sure that he loves, swears instantly, swears an eternity of infinite affection; while woman, more modest, more timid, more reserved, answers that she does not love yet; that she has not yet consulted her heart; that, perhaps, she will love. The less one swears, the less one forswears; and if a holy horror may deprive speech of some fiery accent and some amorous expansion of inebriating expressions, it nevertheless stamps it with virile dignity which makes it blessed among women, while it gives the sexual relations a character of tender reserve and delicate serenity. Man often uses the "eternal oaths" as weapons of seduction, and parades them at every hour as a measure of the bottomless depths of his love; but sometimes he swears sincerely, honestly, because nothing so boldly generates eternity and infinity as does armed desire. It is only too true, however, that the hasty and imprudent vow is a fruitful father of lies and most fruitful grandparent of infidelity.
Very few are the eternal loves, as are geniuses, Venuses, and Apollos. We all anxiously climb the mountain of the ideal, but few can get a branch or a leaf of the sacred tree. Some loves of the lower orders last years; others, months; some of them are as transient as the ephemera, for which long is the life of a day. Now, frankness can give all loves the baptism of honesty, and even a frivolous man can die without amorous remorse if his loves were all honest. He has loved much and fleetingly, but he has never lied, never betrayed anybody, never perjured himself.
Sometimes lies are told through compassion, and woman, more frequently than we, striving in vain to keep alive a dying love, is loath to inflict a cruel wound on the companion who still loves her, and endeavors with a mighty effort to deceive herself and him, until through habit of hypocrisy she succeeds in feigning a love that no longer exists; andfrom lie to betrayal the road is short and slippery. The lie at first was merciful, then it grew into a habit, and at last became transformed into a crime.
No; lovers or husbands, companions of voluptuousness or vestals of the family, never tell an untruth, even when it is suggested to you by pity. It is hard, cruel, to see the blooming tree of a happy passion felled by a sudden hurricane; tremendous is the rending of a heart that breaks in a day under the shock of an atrocious blight; but these sorrows do not debase us, and, although capable of killing, do not humiliate us. Love killed by violence remains stretched on the ground as beautiful as a thunderstruck angel, and memory weaves a wreath for him and with the most precious aromas and balsams preserves him from putrefaction. Love killed by the lingering tabes of a secret betrayal, is a leper who dies in the fetidness of a hospital, a horror to himself and to the others; a corpse slowly corroded by phthisis and scrofula, leaving no trace whatever of the time when he, too, was a young and robust organism.
False and cruel is the pity that causes us to simulate a love which no longer exists. No sorrow is greater than that which deception inflicts upon us; love, self-esteem, self-love, love of ownership, all the warmest and most powerful of human affections, are pierced with a hundred stabs at the same time, and the pain is so intense that it poisons all our life with wormwood and gall. How beautiful, instead, how sublime is a love that, without swearing eternity or infinity, lasts eternal and infinite as long as two human hearts throb together; how beautiful is a love that needs no chains and lives on faith and liberty!
To love means to be all of another; to be loved means to have become a living part of another: the lie begins when, with cynical licentiousness, the man or the woman is divided in two parts, and the body is given to one, the soul, as it were, to the other. Love is a whole that cannot be divided without being killed, and, unless voluptuousness is reduced to a plain question of hygiene, one cannot love two human creatures at the same time with that sentiment whichfor its superiority over all other affections is called love, without betraying both. I hold in much higher estimation a woman who, after a long career of facile loves, can say, "I have never loved two men at the same time," than a bigoted matron who boasts of having never betrayed her duties as a spouse because with wise and cautious lechery she knows how to sell voluptuousness without seriously compromising the property reserved for the husband.
Lies are all infamous; but in love there are some venial and some perfidious: it is one thing to deceive an old libertine and another to betray a faithful husband; one to lie to a frivolous coquette, another to deceive a virtuous woman. Further on we shall outline the rights and duties of love; but here we must point out the stem from which they hang, like the grapes from their stalk. Woman belongs to man, man belongs to woman; Love is the son of the most free selection; it is born when it wants and as it wants; it appears on the plains or on the summit of the mountains; it is born nude and as free as the air; it does not ask for passports, because it passes with impunity through all the police lines.
Men and women, free and pure, you should seek and love each other; study true love, and consecrate it with the only vow that love should make when it would close itself in the temple of the family. If you truly love, if you are worthy of each other, if your love offends no superior duty, no human force can oppose your powerful attraction, and nature and men will bless your selection. Read and read again all that I have written on the first loves; swear seldom; never swear if you possess this virtue; at most swear but once, the first and last oath that will unite you in wedlock. The compact violated in the first steps of the life of love is a murder and prepares the career of a brigand tolerated by civilization. To betray a virgin is, in so far as the law is concerned, a question for the public prosecutor or for the mayor of your town; to betray her without dishonoring her is an anonymous infamy that poisons two existences and two loves, that leaves in you an eternal bitterness, in thewoman an eternal rancor. Love, seek, study each other, but never swear, never lie to the maiden who at the dawn of youth demands of the first sun a ray to enlighten and warm her.
There is, however, a lie in love that excels all lies, a betrayal that surpasses all others; there is a perfidiousness that outclasses every assassination, every homicide, every rape: love with the wife of another, a crime which, protected by the law, cherished by consuetudes, fêted by our infamously hypocritical customs, avoids prison and scaffold only because it takes the simple and easy precaution not to be termed adultery. To introduce ourselves into the sanctuary of a happy family, to become a friend to him whom we wish to betray, to cover him with the mantle of our benevolent protection; to seduce slowly and pitilessly the wife of another; with surprise, with the thousand pitfalls of moral violence to open for her an abyss into which she will fall; to acquire with the first conquest the impunity of a long series of crimes and open in the family a large spring of gall that will poison two or three generations: to do all this without expense and without danger,—these in our century are termed the deeds of astute men, the consolation of unhappy wives; and it can be done once, twice, ten times without the perpetrators losing either the love of women or the esteem of men.
To be seized by a vertigo of the senses, to embrace publicly the wife of another, or to let oneself be seen by her husband, is called adultery, and, according to the circumstances and, above all, the gravity of the scandal, it means a journey to prison or to some other rigorous penal institution; it means disgrace to one's name and to that of one's children. Modern society particularly recommends prudence; it does not want any scandal; it does not want to be disturbed in its loves so amply polygamous, but so piously cautious; modern civilization does not wish to behold publicly any nudity whatever; it wishes to be believed moral, respectful and respected. It matters little and is none of its concern if an astute libertine spends his youth in filling families withbastards, awaiting the day when he can abandon the betrayed wives for a convenient marriage. It is a private affair with which husbands and wives should occupy themselves individually. It is recommended to do things nicely, to make no noise, to take good care of the keyholes and listen attentively to the footsteps of those who walk in the apartments. The meshes of the law are wide, very wide; he must be more than an idiot who falls into them and cannot extricate himself. The flag of matrimony covers all contraband; to try to establish one's paternity is prohibited; the sons born of a legitimate couple are legitimate. Onward, onward! For heaven's sake do not bother with your whims and your embarrassing declarations of foreign merchandise. The customs, officers close their eyes and do not see, shut their ears and do not hear; why are you such an idiotic crowd as to wish to awaken them with your imprudent cries? Onward, onward! The meshes of the law are wide. Bastardize families, falsify names and surnames, spread mendacity and sow deception in all the paths of social and civil life! Disseminate lies and scatter deceptions everywhere! See to it that there shall be no wall against which to lean, no road that can be trod without injuring the foot with a sharp stone or a piece of poisoned glass! Make the name of father a senseless word, that of mother a blasphemy!
"Love me! You must love me!" This is a cry of sorrow that often man utters, and oftener a forsaken woman; but it generally is a vain cry. To demand love as a right is one of the greatest follies; it is like asking poetry of the slave of thought, or expecting to find the perfumes of the rose and the cedar in the frigid zones that glaciate the head and the feet of our planet. Lovers, however, have always the right to hurl into space another cry of sorrow: "You must not betray me!" Better to snatch from one's hand the cup of love and shatter it into a thousand pieces than stealthily to pour into it the poison of betrayal or the wormwood of indifference. Love bursts forth spontaneously from the human heart, and draws all its beauty and strength from the infinite freedom of the horizon in which it moves. The laws that govern it are as simple as the simplest law of elementary physics: to attract, to unite, to render love for love, sweetness for sweetness, to give joy to those who give us so much joy, make happy those who make us happy: such is its law. If love were only a contact of hearts and thoughts; if, having ascended to heaven, you have descended from it without an angel; if in your embraces you have not rekindled the torch of life, greet each other as friends, bless the happy hours that your love has conceded you, and preserve in the most precious casket and among the dearest things the memory of the time that is no more. Never close a day of paradise with a blasphemy or a remorse; the tears of regret for what you have lost can be the dew of a summer night that tempers the ardor of the enamored corollas; but your tears should not be cursed by a lie, a betrayal, an insult.
The only right—that of not being deceived—has its counterpart in a very simple duty—that of making oneself beloved. You cannot command love, but through beauty of form, quickness of mind, voluptuous grace of movements or virtues of the heart you have awakened the affection of affections; if you know how to preserve it, you will be loved forever. On the very first page of every code of love, at the beginning of every gospel of two lovers, I would always write this sentence: "Not to be loved is always a great fault." And you will find this sentence written in a hundred different forms in the pages of my book.
Ask the most fortunate of women if she has not often felt impelled to reconquer a love that threatened to fly away. She jealously conceals the numberless stratagems with which she warmed the tepid, aroused the sleeping, caused the wearied to smile, made hungry and thirsty him who had the happy misfortune of overgorging himself at the banquet of voluptuousness. Man is, by nature, polygamous, more unfaithful, more brutal, more capricious, more licentious than woman, and it is her duty to make him monogamous, faithful, constantly tender and modestly virile. If it is true that man attacks and conquers, it is also very true that nature assigns to woman the more difficult task of keeping the conquest, of being the vestal of that fire which man has nearly always been the first to kindle. This is perhaps the most common formula that expresses the different missions which man and woman have in love. To us to kindle the fire, to our companion to keep it burning.
By all that you hold most sacred on earth, do not be so brutal as to record the embrace among the rights and duties of love. This is written in the code, and is daily repeated by those Bœotians for whom love is but the union of male and female. Voluptuousness should be inebriating foam that floats on the quivering wave of passion and overflows and falls irresistibly into those abysses where man loses the consciousness of existence and believes in the infinite; it cannot be a feast ordered for a stated hour, much less a tribute exacted with the rudeness of a tax collector. How manydelicate loves were extinguished by the sacrilegious hand of an arrogant desire, which would assume the air of command and tread the ground with the iron boot of an alleged right! No; the embrace is not a right and much less a duty: it is a unanimous consent of two powerful energies that seek each other through infinite space and, suavely struggling against each other, die together in an ocean of sweetness.
Sincerity and fidelity, which are after all an identical thing and constitute the entire code of love, should never be on the lips of two lovers, and the wordsrightanddutyshould be debarred from the amorous vocabulary. Who ever loses his time in discussing the beauties of the sun? Who doubts that air is necessary to live? When certain things begin to be discussed, they are already in serious danger of being lost; and if a continuous, vexatious investigation should at every hour cast the shadow of doubt upon the faithfulness of one's companion, the latter would have the right of feeling wretchedly loved or at least cruelly loved. I do not fear sudden anger between two lovers, or the querulous and tender lamentations; but I have a deep horror of every question about right and duty. When these discourses appear on the horizon, I always see at the same time dark clouds massing; I see looming up the horns of Balzac's tawny moon.
Are the rights of love equal in man and woman? No! a thousand times no! I say so in a loud voice and after the first white hairs and a wide experience permit me to believe that I speak without anger or love. No; the sin of infidelity is not the same in Adam and in Eve: in the latter it is a hundred times greater. As a right and before the courts all parties are equal, but man and woman differ too greatly to be punished in the same measure. If the code is one, the jurors are a thousand; many are the accusers, many the lawyers; and the sentence of amorous betrayal has already been pronounced by all civilized nations and always in the same manner. This unanimous consent was not imposed by the arrogance of men, who alone were the legislators before the courts and judges in the forum of public opinion. No;this unanimous consent was dictated by a deep consciousness of social necessities, by a more profound and subtler justice that descends into the inmost recess of things to find the roots of that awkward and superficial justice which asserts that all men are equal before the law. How false this dogma is can be sufficiently proved by the history of the jury system, one of the institutions on which our century seems to pride itself.
From man society exacts a hundred different and difficult virtues: he must give his blood for his country and the sweat of his brow for his family and for society; he must be strong, ambitious; he must not allow himself to be corrupted by gold or the seductions of vanity. A physician, he must throw himself into the inglorious and tremendous battle of epidemic; a soldier, he must hold his head high in the face of murderous fire; a lawyer, he must resist the temptations of gold and ambition; a statesman, he must fight against himself, against his family, for the welfare of his country. Defender of the weak, of the shipwrecked, of the poor, natural defender of the female half of the human species and of all the individuals who are of no value to society, he is a warrior perpetually under arms, and should he neglect one of his duties, he is branded as a coward; society despises him, woman does not want him, everyone ignores him.
Woman, on the contrary, can be a coward in the face of fire, of work, of contagion, and of all the battles of life; she can be ignorant and timorous and still be loved and esteemed by all; for in her weakness approaches grace, and it is so sweet to us to take the faint-hearted dove to our bosom and comfort her with our courage, defend her with our strength!
And even blunders are amusing when pronounced by the beautiful lips of a beloved woman! We forgive her if she very rarely reaches the height of genius and more rarely than we attains the average height of the great intellectual minds; we forgive her if she has no profession, if she does not earn her bread with work. Of her we ask only one thing:fidelity; from her we exact only one virtue:fidelity! Pray,O most gentle and divine companions, on what side does the scale of the balance fall? Certainly not our side.
Woman may be humble, ignorant, tremble at every leaf that quivers, at every wing that vibrates in the air; but she should be faithful to him who loves her. She may yield to everything, but must resist the seductions of defiant glances and the corruptions of gold and vanity; she should be the heroine of sentiment, as we are the heroes of all the battles of life. She is the vestal of our heart and blood. While we are fighting in one field for her, for the name she bears, for the honor of our children, she should assiduously and faithfully watch the sacred fire of fidelity, that it may not die out through neglect or be overthrown and extinguished by the hurricane. This virtue only we ask of her; is it, perhaps, too much? What is her duty, then? What is the difficult struggle that shall give her also the mark of character and make her equal to us, worthy to be our companion? If she is beautiful, we are strong; if she is graceful, we are gifted. For her we have conquered our planet, subdued the lightning, destroyed the beasts of prey, invented arts, created sciences. But neither beauty nor grace nor wit is sufficient for a man to deem himself civilized; there are imposed on us a thousand dangers, on her but one: that of seduction. We are dragged into a hundred battles; she has only to gain victory over the senses. From us the world expects a hundred virtues; from her but one:faith. Are we, then, tyrants? Are we too exacting with her whom we love so much, for whom we do everything, to whom we dedicate all our thoughts, our glories, our dreams and our labors?
But there is another powerful reason for which the duties of love are differently distributed between man and woman. Man, by the special mission which his sex imposes on him, is a sudden aggressor and has organic necessities which are unknown to woman, and which he can satisfy with the rapidity of lightning. Without losing his love, he may have a caprice more fleeting than the lightning flash, and which, once vanished, leaves behind not even a pinch of ashes. I neither praise nor justify these sudden surprises of thesenses, these passing infidelities; but I describe them because I find them frequently in the aggressive and petulant nature of the virile sex. Woman, instead, must defend herself. Man loses a great part of energy in the tooth that bites and in the claws that firmly hold the prey. Woman draws in her horns, like the snail does in the spires of its labyrinth, and, languidly and voluptuously concealed in the foam of her shell of love, allows herself to be caressed. She loses nothing in the struggle for conquest, and she is wholly consumed in the delights of letting herself be loved. Woman also may have caprices of the senses, but they are light clouds which no sooner appear than they are dissolved in the deep azure of the skies, and do not become ardent desires until the human claws press and condense them. Woman is silent even when she desires. Very weak in the attack, she is formidable in the defense, and has in herself so much energy as to stop and disarm a legion of combatants. With much shrewdness she defends her weakness every day, telling us that seductions wage war upon her from all quarters, while we are the first to seek the opportunities of sin. This is one of the most insidious sophisms, but it is also one of the weakest arguments of defense. Man attacks and assails simply because he is a man and could not wait for the seductions to come to him without condemning himself to be a eunuch and without inverting the most elementary and most inexorable laws of nature. Nor would a woman commit less of a sacrilege in turning from the defensive to the offensive, profaning her sex and violating nature in that which it holds most sacred and immutable.
Not in vain has nature made the human female a virgin, and denied us the sorrowful virtue of virginity. The woman who yields to the first amorous pruriency is a Messalina; the man who darts the first arrow of love is a warrior who with wise prudence prepares the weapons for the long battle that awaits him. Man begins with "yes" and "I will"; woman begins and ends with "no" and "I will not." The sudden caprice of the senses is in her harassed by so many physical, social and religious impediments that she must really bemore than an Amazon to overthrow them in a single dash. Everything incites man to a swift assault which perhaps does not even bruise the epidermis of his heart; everything defends woman from these caprices. To yield she must have had a long struggle against nature and society; laws and religions offer her a thousand allies for defense, and not once in a hundred times she can say without touching the frontiers of prostitution: "I had a caprice." No one believes in the efficiency of overbearingness, much less woman herself, unless she should need this faith to justify her own sin. In love every fault, every crime, even patricide and incest, are possible—but not theft. Let woman never profane herself nor spoil the cause, often very just, which she defends, by speaking of seduction and violence. Let her rather speak of the irresistible impulse of vengeance, of the law of retaliation; let her discuss the natural right, because there she is on the ground of truth and justice; let her complain aloud because in the human organism she is the left side, the weakest, the least honored and the most oppressed. Let her demand the right to love and to be loved, but never ask equality of punishment for sins too disparate.
Nor does society measure human guilt only according to the reckoning of the natural right; but the more sorrow a crime generates and the more it offends human needs, the more severe the punishment inflicted by society. Have you ever thought of the various consequences of a caprice of infidelity, according as a man or a woman is guilty? For man the caprice of an hour is a stain that tarnishes the bright mirror of a sworn faith, of an immaculate and sublime love; but a few moments afterward a new kiss, more ardent and pregnant with the pungent aroma of remorse, revives love perhaps more intensely and makes impossible for long years, perhaps forever, another sudden infidelity. The amorous caprice may be a blasphemy that breaks forth from the lips of a saint, but which is immediately deterged by a wave of holy prayer; it is the weakness of a robust runner who stumbles against a stone, but proudly resumes his way and with energetic steps recovers the space lost a hundredfold.The amorous caprice of a woman may in a single instant procreate a bastard, poison the wave of milk and honey of an entire family, sow a generation of fraternal hatreds, of infinite sorrows, overflow into a vast field, inundating everything with wormwood and gall. In man such a caprice is a stain, in woman a gangrene; in man a wound by a pin, in woman the caries of a bone; in man a leaf that falls, in woman a hurricane that fells a whole forest; in man a misdemeanor, in woman a felony; in man the remorse of an hour, in woman a monument of infamy that time will never efface.
Love is not only a voluptuousness given and returned, the interweaving and untying of instantaneous knots, but a compact between two creatures who, after having given themselves to each other, may in a single instant have created a family, perhaps a nation. In man, love is fecundation as well, but is, above all, the interweaving of two existences, a combination of new relations, a deep modification of the manner of existence for a man and a woman.
Even in the lowest races, even where morality is only interest defended by strength and sacrifice is a folly, where phantoms of religious sentiment scarcely exist, where they bury the old mother alive, or celebrate victories and vintage with a sea of blood; even there love is bound by a compact, silent or sworn. Prostitution also is a compact that may last an hour or a minute, but is always a compact. In any case, the sale and purchase of voluptuousness cannot found a family, a tribe, a people; and even the loosest libertine and the wildest savage feel other needs than that of fecundating a female: they feel the necessity of loving a woman. And to love does not mean to unite the members of two bodies in a single knot, but to possess each other a long time, and to desire, to defend, to protect each other; it means to hold oneself responsible to nature for the weakness of one creature and the violence of another, for the future of the being whom we have procreated together and brought into the world.
Woman, when fecundated, is for nine months weaker and more vulnerable; the woman who is in travail is a wounded creature; the woman who nurses can neither flee nor defendherself, and the man-child is for a long time defenseless and very weak. The man, then, who has loved a companion even for one day becomes for a long time her friend and protector without ceasing to be her lover. This is the simplest form of the nuptial compact, which is found in many of the lower nations. While the savage female leans affectionately and confidingly on the male who has made her fruitful, he often finds himself to be a man when his companion cannot be a woman, and he then fecundates other females, who are added to his possessions and whom he protects with the same devotion and affection with which he protects and defends the first woman who was his. The very weak man can have but one female, or he must often do without her, because the strong men have more than one and the very strong have many, who often dwell merrily under one roof without being in the least jealous of one another. A polygamy limited to a few females is the most common form of human society in the lower races, and our organism is so imbued with this custom that even in the highest forms of civilization, where morality and religion do not lend their valid support, monogamy slips and falls, to give place to a polygamy more or less acknowledged or concealed.
We, however, must occupy ourselves only with our own society, where the compact of love has but one moral form:matrimony; while it has various forms that belong to the world of pathology, namely,prostitution,rape,concubinage.
We have already studied prostitution. It is the sale of voluptuousness, the possession of bodies without love, the swindling and deceiving of nature; and if nature, only too often cruel, causes a new creature to be generated through a purchased embrace, that creature will enter the world with the mark of infamy on its brow, and, anonymous child of vice, will be cast by society into the most obscure corner of the social vaults, where the things lie which we wish to efface, forget and allow to die. Prostitution is a safety-valve only too necessary in our immoral and hypocritical society, wretchedly constituted, and it exists to prove with mostcruel eloquence that many men cannot love, that very many men should not love.
We have also dealt with rape in the house of others. Even this greatest of the crimes of love we have been compelled to discuss: secret agreement of two traitors who, in the shadow of a social and holy compact, violate the faith of the family and bastardize the world; vile contract of the thief with the procurer, who assassinate in the dark and conceal the victim in the wide folds or the deep fissures of our written codes.
Concubinage in many imperfect societies, and even among us, is a form of matrimony which lacks only religious and civil consecration. It is more despicable for its origin than for the nature of the compact that binds it, because if it lasted eternally, supported only by the word of honor of two creatures who love each other, it would be a true and proper marriage, sealed by the faith of two lovers. Only too often, however, concubinage has an obscure and even shameful origin: it is domestic lechery which has become a habit; it is a vulgar custom that has a periodical type: mustiness of the kitchen or stench of the hospital. Born between the Turkish babooshes and the nightcaps, between the after-dinner yawns and the advices of the hygienist, it has a tinge of prostitution and rape, but knows neither the inebriation of the one nor the pungent remorse of the other. It is a vulgar pickpocket, who begs pardon of the public and is ashamed of himself and weeps when caught in the act; it is something low, plebeian and shameful, that does not admit of public confession, and hides like a wound in the leg or a false tooth; it debases love to pygmy proportions, lowers the level of the spouse and elevates that of the chambermaid. It is an upstart who can dress well, but smells of the stable; a despicable, often even ridiculous creature, who is merely tolerated.
When one refrains from assuming all moral responsibility; when, through sluggishness, ignorance or skepticism, or for all these reasons, one abdicates the supreme primacy of husband and father, a right which not even the nudecannibal will relinquish, one becomes in modern society a sort of convict freed on parole, to whom liberty is granted on condition that he will regularly report to the police; a sort of brigand allowed at large, who, for lack of proof, cannot be sentenced to prison. A hundred times better, prostitution with its degradations and vile infirmities! Public opinion, laws, books should scourge and place in the pillory of ridicule and opprobrium this bastard compact of concubinage, denying it all assent, consent and toleration. And women too, who, more than the laws, can be the avengers of these social degradations, should flagellate these amphibia of love, denying them caresses and esteem, and showing to them at every hour, with cruel art, how different are the voluptuous aromas of true love from the daily slop of domestic concubinage.
The man of a high race, who aspires to be called a civilized man, should be monogamous, and cannot consecrate his love with any other compact than matrimony.
Matrimony should be a free, a very free selection, for the woman as much as for the man; it should be the selection of selections, the typical selection.
As long as we deny the young woman a free and wise education so that she may choose well; as long as we deny her the same right of selection as man possesses, we never will be able to elevate matrimony. The common consciousness in two creatures that they have chosen each other freely and that they love each other without any bond of interest, any pressure of authority, of prejudice, of ambition, is the sacred corner-stone on which the most splendid temples of conjugal happiness are erected, and it has sufficient power to preserve that happiness amidst the greatest domestic storms.
Neither do I believe in sudden and irresistible loves, nor in the future happiness of a married couple who, without straw to weave the nest, in the open country, amid the frosts of misery, wish to erect a temple to Love. No; matrimony is love and should be nothing except love. But love is nude and wants to be clothed; love is delicate, and wants to be nourished and protected from the winds and the frosts; loveis fruitful, and should have bread and wine to keep alive the little angels that will bloom in its garden. All this should be known by our young girls; our authority should go no further than temporizing; we should never impose anything on lovers except patience; and this in itself is sufficient to cause many transient desires to vanish, while it invigorates true loves. But in any case, and always, selection should be free, and to prepare for it the education of our daughters should be more sincere, more frank, less hypocritical, less false. Teach your child modesty and personal dignity, and you will see that with such sentiments the fortress you wish to guard will very rarely capitulate. Perpetual diffidence rouses many false alarms, stirs up in many frivolous and touchy natures the desire for spite and revenge. Diffidence always in arms gives one a pessimistic idea of the virtues of mothers; perhaps they remember how weakly they resisted temptation and they try by every art to avoid it, instead of strengthening the forces that should defend virtue.
The free selection of woman is much more important in our society, because she is not ignorant of the fact that in marriage she will find an immense liberty; perhaps she also divines that, even though she should not love the official spouse, she can still love and be loved. When a society is entirely saturated with adultery and hypocrisy, even the chaste and ingenuous maiden is dimly prescient of certain things which she dares not acknowledge to herself. Without leaving the domestic nest, she may perhaps know with what infamy a family may become sullied; she has, perhaps, more than once repeated to herself: "I will not sin, but—I, too, could sin with impunity."
Free selection is the best guarantee of faith; it is the only touchstone by which the true natural rights of mutual fidelity are tried. No one has the right to cast the first stone at the adulteress if she, ignorant, was dragged to the altar; no wife can be condemned if she was forced to sign the compact like a victim and a slave instead of as a woman and a lover.
All these reforms which must elevate matrimony will bebut slowly secured through the progress of education and customs, through morality strengthened by science and not by fear, through greater respect for the liberty of woman, who must be raised from the low level where modern society has still left her.
THE END