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"PROFANE LOVE" By Caravaggio The Book of Love By Prof. Dr. Paolo Mantegazza Professor of Anthropology and General Pathology, Founder of the first Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in Italy, Senator of the Kingdom of Italy A translation of The Physiology of Love from the Italian text [Pg 1] American-Neo-latin Library New York, N. Y. PAOLO MANTEGAZZA, Italian physiologist and anthropologist, was born at Monza in 1831. He travelled extensively in Europe, India and America. He was appointed surgeon at Milan Hospital and Professor of General Pathology at Pavia. In 1870 he was nominated Professor of Anthropology at the Istituto di Studii Superiori, Florence. He founded the first Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in Italy, and the Italian Anthropological Society. He was deputy for Monza in the Italian Parliament from 1865 to 1876, subsequently being elected to the Senate. He is the author of many well known works, as "The Physiology of Sorrow," "The Physiology of Pleasure," "Elements of Hygiene," "Pictures of Human Nature," "Human Ecstasies," "Head," etc. His books are most popular in Europe, where they have been translated into almost every language and have reached an enormous circulation. Paolo Mantegazza ranks with the greatest European medical authorities and the most brilliant Italian writers. Copyright, 1917, by The American—Neo-latin Library CONTENTS PAGE Introduction: General Physiology of Love 13 CHAPTER I Love in Plants and Animals 29 II Morning Crepuscules of Love—The Good and Evil Sources of Love 41 III The First Weapons of Love—Courtship 64 IV Modesty 72 V The Virgin 79 VI Conquest and Voluptuousness 89 VII How Love is Preserved and How It Dies 94 VIII The Depths and the Heights of Love 107 IX Sublime Puerilities of Love 118 X Boundaries of Love—Their Relations to the Senses 122 XI Boundaries of Love—Their Relations to Other Sentiments—Jealousy 133 XII Boundaries of Love—Their Relations to Thought 145 XIII Chastity in its Relations to Love 155 XIV Love in Sex 158 XV Love and Age 165 XVI Love in Relation to Temperaments—of the Ways of Loving 175 XVII The Hell of Love 186 XVIII The Degradations of Love 198 XIX The Faults and Crimes of Love 211 XX The Rights and Duties of Love 219 XXI The Covenants of Love 227 FOREWORD [Pg 2] [Pg 3] [Pg 4] [Pg 5] Mantegazza is to Physiology what Flammarion is to Astronomy. The two great masters head a brilliant galaxy of modern writers on natural phenomena who draw their material from science and mould it in an esthetic form. After the most skilful analysis of the scientific elements to their minutest components, they proceed to an ideal synthesis in which the various elements retain their substance, yet change their outward appearance. It seems as if these elect minds, having once satisfied their scientific curiosity as to physical and human phenomena, had been fascinated and inspired by an irresistible love of creation, and rising above the facts and laws of nature to the evanescent and melodious world of imagination, they offer us their work in a harmonious unity of two seemingly opposite and irreconcilable elements—the real and the ideal, Science and Poetry. And thus, I dare say, it is as if, by a generous law of reaction and equilibrium, while our generation seems to gravitate toward a life of facts and order, barren of idealism, Science would teach us that she herself does not benumb or kill sentiment, but, on the contrary, discloses to the minds of the elect the flowery slopes of an unknown and infinite world of wonders and sentiment. So it must be that those who have attained a high place in intellectual life will gladly replace the old conception of physical and human phenomena with a new and more intense representation, which, measured in the finitude of our reason, is loved in the infinity of our sentiment. To the uninitiated mind most beautiful is the representation of the sun in the image of Phœbus crossing the heavens in his flaming chariot drawn by fiery horses; but still more beautiful for the intellectual mind is it to think of the immense body of fire, of the energy darting from a star more than a hundred million miles distant from our planet, more than a hundred million times larger than the earth, and yet a star millions of times smaller than millions of other celestial bodies to our naked eye unknown, unknown to our most powerful telescopes, and whose existence and fantastic speed in the space of the heavens are divined only by the abstraction of our faculties in an infinite representation of the laws of physics. Poetical is the vision of a goddess of Olympus descending to earth and carrying to a man asleep the message or the image of a dear, distant person; but immensely more poetical is the conception of a telepathic force within us, made of us, consciously or unconsciously created by us, an integral part of our psychical organism, and by which we instantly communicate over hills and dales, mountains and valleys, oceans and deserts, with another human being whose spirit is harmoniously attuned to ours. The impersonation of hatred and love by Fury and Cupid is much less poetical than the conception of an explosion of psychical forces, powerful and antagonistic, in millions of men at the same time. The task of dealing with the natural history, the origin and the development of the sentiment which underlies the principal phenomena of human existence, which came into being with the first twilight of organic life, and which indissolubly binds together the individuals and the generations, seems to have been reserved to the genius of Paolo Mantegazza, and with this great subject he dealt in a masterly way, in a way unimitated and inimitable. He has snatched Love from the Olympus of the gods of old, from the clutches of classic literature, stripped him of all his tinsel and garments, and revealed him as part—flesh and blood of man. By a new conception of love, more rational, more human and yet no less poetical than the classic representations to which we have been accustomed from times immemorial, Mantegazza gives us a work in which the scientific foundation and the poetical conceptions are united in such wealth of colors and harmonies that its reading, rich with true and romantic charm, is incomparably superior to our best fiction. It is a daring deed, both in the literary and the philosophical field, and it opens a new horizon to the idealization of human feelings, discoveries and events. Mantegazza, unlike countless love writers and poets, approaches his field not with a hoe or a plow to scratch the surface of the ground, but with a powerful drill that penetrates into the lowest strata of the earth and reveals its deepest terrestrial composition. In the pursuit of his aim, carried by enthusiasm in the innermost research of facts and by admiration for the beauty of his subject, Mantegazza has used all the wealth of his literary training, skilfully and lavishly drawing upon all the resources of the Italian language. The task of the translator has thus been made doubly difficult, as the original language of the book has more subtlety and artistic abandon than the English language would allow. Rather than run the risk of betraying either the substance or the representation of the author's idea, often it has been preferred to sacrifice the turn of the English phrase to that of the corresponding Italian, and possibly incur the imputation of exoticism. Such is the translation of a beautiful Book of Love offered to the American public at a time when all the evil passions and degradations of hatred are unleashed over the world. In striking contrast with the trend of the human mind today, what a meager chance is awaiting the contemplation of a sentiment whose mission is to tie all humanity with a bond of affection! And yet, while time and evolution relegate the memory of the most fearful cataclysms of the human race to the icy page of history, the fundamental elements constituting human life cannot be changed or destroyed. Love will continue to exist as long as the laws of affinity and procreation seize the human being at his birth and by the evolution of matter dominate him even after his death. The struggle for life may become intensified or disappear from the world; hatred among classes, nations, races may deepen, expand or be altogether eliminated; passions may gain further ascendancy over humanity, or humanity may learn to control them; and, in the words of Shelley, "Fate, Time, Occasion, Chance and Change, to these All things are subject but eternal Love." [Pg 6] [Pg 7] [Pg 8] At the feet of him, procreator and prince of all affections, at once proud, generous, kind, fair, and weak, avaricious, cruel, deceitful, in all virtues rich and in all sins, a king and a miser, we shall always lay, proudly or in shame, the innermost throbs of our heart, our tears and our joys, the highest aspirations of our mind, the sweetest ecstasies of our soul, our convulsions, our despairs, our crimes, up to the very threshold of the great oblivion, when, in the words of the poet, of the extenuated race one lone man and one woman, among the ruins of the mountains and of the dead woods, in the wake of the departing warmth, clasped together in the supreme fate of creation, livid, with glassy eyes shall see the last sun descend forever. Er. Be. TO THE READER I have conceived love to be the most powerful and at the same time the least studied of human affections. Surrounded by a triple forest of prejudice, mystery and hypocrisy, civilized men know it too often only through stealth and shame. Poets, artists, philosophers, legislators, snatch a morsel now and then from the flesh of the great god, and hurry away to conceal it as a precious booty of forbidden fruit. To study love as a phenomenon of life, as a gigantic power which moulds itself in a thousand ways among various races and in various epochs, and as an element of health for the individual and for the generations, has appealed to me as a great and worthy undertaking. The Author. THE BOOK OF LOVE ". . . this precious jewel Upon the which is every virtue founded." —Dante. INTRODUCTION GENERAL PHYSIOLOGY OF LOVE Many years ago I wrote that to live means nutrition and generation, and the deeper I cast the sounding-line into the dark abysses of life, the more I am convinced that this definition faithfully depicts the most striking characteristics of all creatures which, from bacteria to man, come to life, grow and die on the face of our planet. If, however, I wished still further to simplify my idea, reducing life to its simplest and most essential form, I would say without fear of betraying the truth, that to live means to generate. Every living body is perishable, but before dying it has the power of reproducing the form that has made it capable of living; and that whirlwind which absorbs and rejects, which assimilates new atoms and repels old ones, and which so clearly represents the eternal picture of life in all its manifestations, is also the most faithful representation of every form of generation. Nutrition is a real genesis, and in the great chemical laboratory of living beings we have at all times before our eyes the reproduction of histological elements of organs and individuals. We lose hair, epithelia, white corpuscles every day; and yet every day we generate hair, epithelia and leucocytes: this is an every-day generation in the body of man. A nail falls off, a new one takes its place: this is the reproduction of an organ. We generate children similar to ourselves: this is the reproduction of an entire organism, the true generation. But in one of our offspring we see re-repeated a mole which is on our nose: this is the reproduction of an organ within an organism. On the other hand, one race generates another race, one species another species; and here we see a broader genesis by which from the reproduction of a cell through another cell we gradually pass to the generating of an organ, of an individual, of a race, of a species. The world of living beings is a gigantic tree and from its trunk shoot forth the branches of classes, orders, species. On the branches leaves grow, which are the individuals; but each one of these small individuals generates within itself many cells, true organisms within greater ones. The world of living beings is but a great laboratory of prolific, incessant generation. Cells generate cells; organs, organs; species, species. An intimate brotherhood makes us members of one great organism—the placenta of living beings; and among ourselves we exchange the same matter which each of us in [Pg 9] [Pg 11] [Pg 12] [Pg 13] [Pg 14] turn contributes to the work of apparent destruction, called nutrition, and to that of reproduction, designated as generation. To feed themselves and to generate, living beings are continually exchanging with each other a part of their own matter which, passing from one organism to another, seems to acquire new energy and new life. On the one hand, seaweeds live on mushrooms, carnivorous animals devour herbivorous, herbivorous feed on herbs, and man, the highest branch of the tree of living beings, partakes of all. On the other hand, males and females in continuous succession interchange part of their matter, remoulding their primitive forms. The most elementary form of life is not, however, the cell, since at a lower stage we find the protoplasm, the true primum vivens which, by scission, generates the individual; and, by nourishing itself, nobody can tell what mysterious genesis of atoms it induces within its own most simple organism. The protoplasm cannot live without a continual exchange of matter, so that the live molecules of yesterday are dead today; and those which are alive today will be dead tomorrow; therefore nutrition also, in the last analysis, is an intimate and very mysterious generation. Evanescence of forms is one of the most essential characteristics of living beings, and we give the name of death to the falling of every leaf from the tree of life. Man, also, drops some of these leaves every day—hair, epithelia, cells, which often produce a secretive substance and fall with it. Before dying, a part of the preëxisting form remains to re-animate the dead form and follows in its turn the parabolical cycle through which the mother form has passed. This is the most general principle and includes all possible kinds of generation, from that of scission to the highest form of sexual genesis. One would say that the life of an individual is only a moment of the great life of the species, of the classes, of the kingdoms of living beings; it is a spark which shoots off intermittently, passing from one organism to another. Powerful and irresistible is the tendency to generate; in a great many cases the individual sacrifices himself consciously, or is unwittingly sacrificed by the laws of nature, provided that before death he transmit life to others. "Let the individual perish, if this preserve the species!" Such is the eternal cry of nature, which men and infusoria, oaks and mushrooms alike must obey. If the individual is protected and possesses preservative instincts and defensive organs, the species has a hundred bulwarks, a thousand manners of safeguard, more means of protection than are needed. In fact, living beings generate so profusely that one species alone would pervade the earth if the various circles of expansion, falling in with each other, did not struggle among themselves, like the circles caused on the smooth surface of a lake by a handful of sand thrown upon it by a child. Apart from the manner in which life is transmitted, there is an amount of life which passes away, there is a certain amount of fecundity, and this may seem, at first glance, most whimsical, while it is governed by the laws of preservation. To be born and to die—fecundity and mortality—are so closely connected with each other that we can consider them as different aspects of the same phenomenon, as the action and reaction of life. When reproduction increases beyond measure, the dangers for the individuals generated increase at the same time, and destruction mows down the excessive number of those which are born. Now it is food that is no longer proportionate to the new-born; then parasites and enemies of the over-expanded species, which, increasing in turn, reëstablish the equilibrium. The destructive forces and the protective balance mutually, as happens with many other forces, simpler and better known. The Malthusian problem, however, is much more intricate. If all species were equally prolific and had a life of equal length, the problem would, in fact, be reduced to a question of space and food; but, on the contrary, the duration of life and the various degrees of fecundity serve in turn to reëstablish the equilibrium by other ways. If the reproduction of mice were as slow as that of man, they would all be destroyed before another generation could be born; and even if they could live fifteen or sixteen years, not one of them, perhaps, would ever attain that age, surviving all dangers. And on the other hand, should oxen multiply in the same proportion as infusoria, the entire species would die of hunger in a week. In order that an organic form be preserved, the individual must preserve itself and generate other individuals. Now these forces must vary inversely. If the individual, through its simple organization, is little fit to resist danger, it must countervail this weakness with reaction, generating intensely. If, on the contrary, high qualities give it a great capacity for self- protection, it should then diminish its fecundity proportionately. If danger is reckoned as a constant quantity, inasmuch as capacity for resistance should be equal in all species, and does consist of two factors (faculty to maintain individual life and power to multiply it), these factors cannot but vary in opposite directions. This most simple and sublime law, which Herbert Spencer read in the great book of nature, is one of those that rule with the most inflexible tyranny the elementary phenomena of reproduction, as well as the highest and most complex phenomena of human love. In the Diatomaceæ the fecundity by scission is gigantic: Smith reckoned that a single gnat could create a thousand million individuals in one month. A young Gonium, capable of scission after twenty-four hours, can produce in a week 268,435,456 individuals equal to itself. In other cases, the process of multiplication is not scissiparous, but endogenous, as with the Volvox; but the reproduction is always extraordinary. If all the individuals generated should survive, a Paramecium would, by scission, produce in the course of a month 268,000,000 individuals. Another microscopic animal can produce 170,000,000,000 individuals in four days. The Gordius—the entozoön of an insect—lays 8,000,000 eggs in less than a day. An African termite lays 80,000 eggs in twenty-four hours, and Eschricht reckoned at 64,000,000 the number of eggs in the adult female of an Ascaris lumbricoides. If, from the minute microscopic creatures exposed to every danger and which consume very little matter—if, from these living atoms of which you could gather as many in your hands as there are men on earth, you pass to the elephant, you have there a giant of flesh that requires thirty years of its life to become fecund, and then, after a long gestation, [Pg 15] [Pg 16] [Pg 17] produces but one offspring. And above the elephant you find a giant of thought, Man, who requires the third part of his average life to reproduce himself, and after nine long months generates one child only; and, what is worse, he sees half of his offspring mowed down before they are able to bear flower and seed. The methods of transmitting life are manifold, since nature in no other function has been so inexhaustibly rich with forms as in generation; but we, dealing here with the general physiology of love, will reduce all the various generative forms to these few: Separation or Scission.—The individual dissevers into two parts, and each of these, made independent, reproduces the generator. This is the most simple form of genesis, in which the function of reproduction is not distinct from the other functions, but merges into them. Endogenesis.—Within an individual many other individuals are formed; the parent opens, and, destroying its own individuality, dissolves in its offspring. The individual by itself alone generates other individuals.—The parent generates through special organs and without dissolving in its offspring. The individuals generated and separated from the generator are eggs, seeds, perfect organisms; but in every case these are always elements evolved within the generator through special organs. The generative function is already marked and distinct in a laboratory which detaches and prepares some of the elements of the individual, so that they may reproduce it. Monœcious Sexual Generation.—A step higher, the generative laboratory becomes complicated and divides into two parts, one of which brings forth the egg, the other the fecundating element. Each, for its own account, prepares the element destined for the reproduction of the individual; but if both do not come in contact, the new being is not generated. We have the sexes quite distinct, but enclosed within a single individual. Strange to observe, however, we behold an individual that generates an egg which cannot be fecundated by that individual's seed; or an individual that produces a seed which cannot be of any service to the egg. A duplex embrace of two hermaphrodites which interlace a quadruple love, and the appearance of winds, insects, or birds, as fecundatory paranymphs, resolves these problems of a most singular generation. Diœcious Sexual Generation.—Finally, the generating organs, too, separate and fix themselves each upon a single individual, which is sterile in itself, produces but one of the generating elements, and, therefore, must combine with the other; and by such union they may produce the new creature: the sum of two individualities, the male and the female, the father and the mother. Man loves in twain; but although, like the other superior animals akin to him, he presents a diœcious sexual generation, yet in his inmost tissues he also possesses the endogenous genesis and the genesis by scission, and presents in this regard the remains also of the elementary forms of life enclosed within him. In this rapid course through all the forms of generation we see delineated the same laws by which nature rules the other functions. Gradually new forces appear and new organs are brought forth to represent the subdivision of work. First, it is the whole individual that generates, then an organ of the individual, then again two organs in the same individual, and again two organs in separate individuals. In the many forms of genesis, the unity of the plan is more than ever manifest, and we, the highest of all living creatures, while, like the amœba, we have in our protoplasm and scattered all through the mass of our body the faculty to generate, recognize in man and woman the two distinct laboratories which prepare the seed and the human egg. While the pathology of love, in many cases of lasciviousness, shows the last declining remains of a promiscuous hermaphroditism, imagination, a forerunner of science, causes us to divine that in more complex creatures sexes may be more than two, and generation presents a deeper subdivision of work, in the same manner as in the cynical or skeptical distinctions between platonic and sensual loves and in the most daring polygamies of soul and senses we perceive in the distance other lights which disclose to us the horizon of new and monstrous generative possibilities, some of them reaching the suprasensible and some as base and brutal as the most repelling atavic regressions. When the science of the future will permit our posterity to connect all the phenomena of nature, from the most elementary to the most complex, from the simplest motion of a molecule to the flash of the most sublime genius, in an uninterrupted chain of facts, then perhaps the first origins of love will be sought in the elementary physics of dissimilar atoms which endeavor to find each other and combine, and with opposite motion generate the equilibrium. The positive electric body seeks the negative, the acid seeks the base, and in these conjunctions, with great development of light, heat and electricity, new bodies are formed, new equilibriums obtained; it seems that Nature renews her forces and, rejuvenescing, prepares herself for new combinations and new loves. And is not love perhaps the combination of two dissimilar atoms which seek each other and combine, notwithstanding all the adverse forces of heaven and earth? And in the same manner as the molecule of potassium snatches the oxygen away from water with a great development of light and heat, is not the union of those two molecules, which we call man [Pg 18] [Pg 19] [Pg 20] and woman, accompanied by a hurricane of passion, by flashes of genius, by infinite glittering of flames and ardor? Do we not perceive a pandemonium of physical and psychical forces accumulating, battling and equilibrating around that point where a man and a woman are attracted toward each other, to rejuvenate the human matter and rekindle the torch of life? A particular motion, originated in the ovary and in the testis, accumulates such energy in the nervous centers as eventually to bring the masculine element in contact with the feminine, so that the generative gemmulæ produced in the slow laboratory of two different organisms reunite in that nest which is the maternal womb and where the fecundated egg must transform into a human being. The poet and the metaphysician may define love in whatever manner they choose. There is only one definition for science: Love is the energy which must bring in contact the egg with the seed; without ovary and without testis there can be no love. That forward movement which is called generation is so powerful as to oppose and even destroy the minor motion, that is, the preservation of the individual; and while each individual rotates, it is carried forward with a movement a hundred times more irresistible and powerful through space and time. The first motion represents the narrow life of the individual and is protected by egotism; the second is the great life of the species, and love defends it. The most superficial study of the generative function is sufficient to convince us that love is always a phenomenon of high chemistry, in which the generating atoms, in order to combine, must be neither too similar nor too dissimilar. No sooner has sex manifested itself in animals than we have in the same individual, but in two distinct laboratories, the formation of two generative elements. Sex, which, at first thought, appears to us as one of the deepest mysteries of life, is nothing but a laboratory which attracts the elements generated by every element of the organism, and encloses and preserves them in itself in order to pour them into the bosom of other elements, similar but not equal, generated in another laboratory, that is, the opposite sex. When the two generative laboratories are separated in two distinct organisms, it is probable that the diversity of their gemmulæ is greater. If in individuals closely resembling each other, but of different races, we combine the generative elements, we still will probably have fecundity; while, if we pass to different species, fecundity will be more difficult; if we pass to different genera it will in most cases become impossible. But let us set aside the words species and genera, which, in nature, have not the same value as we assign to them in our museums and in our books, and let us, instead, take from the world of the living a handful of animals, haphazard, so that we may gather together brothers, cousins, nephews, individuals of the same or affinitive classes, genera, orders, and let us place them in line, in the order of their degrees of similarity. Should we try to couple them, or study their spontaneous loves, we would find cases of sterility in beings too similar and in beings too dissimilar; therefore, generation moves between these two opposite poles, too great similarity and too great dissimilarity. That is the reason why we may see a woman with a mustache, atrophied breasts and deep voice remain sterile with a robust man: they do not generate because they have too close a resemblance. That is the reason why a dog and a cat are sterile: they do not generate, because they are too dissimilar. Nature said to living beings: "If you wish to love, be neither too similar nor too dissimilar." Let us try and discover the reason of this law. Germs that are too similar cannot concur in fecundation, or fecundate unsatisfactorily, perhaps through the same laws of elementary physics and chemistry which cause bodies to repel other bodies equally electrified or with which they have too close a resemblance in their physico-chemical characteristics. Try the combination of sulphur with phosphorus, of iodine with bromine, and, on the other hand, observe the ardent loves of chlorine and hydrogen, of potassium and oxygen. The fecundity of two different organisms is, besides, an energy bearing in one direction; it is the sum of resistances all of them equal, while two quantities, different but susceptible of being summed, give a greater number of diverse resistances and have, therefore, a greater possibility of living and resisting external enemies. An individual is the sum of many victories over exterior elements, the result of many and infinite adaptations to the ambient which surrounds it. Two individuals dissimilar, but not enough to impede generation, will bring together those adaptations and those victories through which the new creature enjoys the possibility of resistance and will meet with fewer dangers. It is much easier to explain why forms too dissimilar cannot love each other. This impossibility is one of the most powerful means of preserving the living forms, extremely varied, in those conditions which are useful to their existence. When a living being has come out of the struggles of life, when it has yielded to external agents and enemies in a certain way, it transmits itself to future generations in that form and nature which are the fruit of a long and successful battle. Precisely for the same reason, an herbivorous animal, which is the offspring of another that has gained its flesh with herbs, cannot grow and multiply except by feeding on herbs. Imagine for a moment that organs and tissues feeding on meat should be grafted on to the organs and tissues of an herbivorous animal. What disorders would not arise! A fragment of carnivorous animal closed up in an organism which has teeth to chew herbs, gastric juice to digest herbs, intestinal tube to assimilate herbs, and olfactory nerves which find leaves and flowers delectable! The apparent stability of the species, which in fact resolves itself in a slow mutation, is nothing therefore but the unavoidable necessity for male and female to pour into the crucible of generation elements that can combine, metals that can fuse, forming a homogeneous and compact alloy. From the elementary physics of generation you may jump to the most ardent sympathies, to the juxtaposition of human characters in the nest of love, and you will see that the same law rules all and each of these facts. Neither too similar [Pg 21] [Pg 22] [Pg 23] nor too dissimilar. Love is the sum of analogous but not identical forces; it is the complement of complements; it is the square of squares; it tolerates neither subtractions nor divisions. We shall see at every step of our studies the same laws which govern generation, or the so-called physical love, re- appear in the high spheres of love. For us, love is simply one function which, to be understood, must not be barbarously mutilated and disrupted so as to have one part of its limbs sent to the laboratory of physiology, and the other left in the library of the philosopher. Love is such energy that from the lowest grades of the most automatic instinct it ascends to the highest regions of the suprasensible, and perhaps no other psychical element reaches to more distant poles. Think of the shepherd of the high Apennines who loves a goat, and of Heine, who in the clutches of death wants to be brought to the Louvre to see the Venus of Milo once more, and you will have a pallid idea of the frontiers which this ardent, tenacious, violent, multiform passion called love seeks to conquer. While in the field of chemical facts generation marks the highest point of molecular chemistry, in the psychological field love reaches the loftiest summits of the ideal. Love is the force of forces; it makes its appearance when man is strongest; it vanishes when age has weakened him. Love is the joy of joys, it is at the bottom of every desire, of all riches, on every horizon of pleasure; it is always the highest aim. If we except men who were born without gentle feelings, in every human sky love is the brightest star; it is the sun of every firmament. It is the strongest, the most human, the richest of passions. In all forms of generation, whether agamous or sexual, by scission or by endogenesis, whether we consider the son in comparison with the father, or with far Adam, we behold the generated preserve a part of the last or of the first generator, so that the motion communicated from the first to the last generation is transmitted without interruption. Take as the starting-point the Adam of the Bible or the Adam of progressive evolution, the clay breathed into by a God or the Darwinian ascidia: each one of us has still within himself a material part belonging to the first man or first father of all men, so that an immense brotherhood unites all living beings. To the divination of the poet who, beholding the flowery meadows, the forests, the swarming of animals, cries out with emotion: "O Mother Nature!" science answers in accord, as it contemplates a quantity of matter and a quantity of life pass from one to the other of those organisms called individuals. For every life extinguished a new life is born, and within us, who occupy the loftiest place among all the living beings on this planet, quiver and vibrate the molecules which have passed through thousands and thousands of existences and thousands and thousands of loves. If love is the warmest and the most human of passions, it is also the richest. To its altar every faculty of the mind carries its tributes, every throb of the heart carries its fire. Every vice and every virtue, every shame and every heroism, every martyrdom and every lewdness, every flower and every fruit, every balm and every poison may be brought to the temple of love. Everything human can be carried away in the whirlwind of love; and more than once man regrets that he possesses but one life to offer as a holocaust to this god. And yet this gigantic force is the least governed of all the passions. It would seem that before it man feels too small and too weak; and just as the savage falls on his knees before the lightning and weeps, or flees, the civilized man, even today, is terrified before the unexplored hurricane of this sovereign force, and acknowledges his powerlessness and his ignorance. In the delirium of voluptuousness and in the storm of desperation, he lets himself be carried away by a force which he considers superior to reason, too powerful in comparison with his weakness. In his codes he writes, timidly, laws which he violates every day; opprobrious punishments which the juries always cancel; and a dense fog of ignorance surrounds the temple of love, which he enters nearly always as a thief and from which he emerges nearly always as an outcast. Our legislation on love is a wretched connubiality of hypocrisy and lechery, and as we know not how to look love in the face, we disguise it with the garments of the buffoon and the prostitute. Our laws are so perfect that many must not love, and very many cannot love; and while we all weep over the few victims of hunger, we shrug our shoulders at the hundreds of thousands who die in celibacy for not having been able to gather the straw for their nests, and we laugh at the millions of celibates who know nothing of love save masturbation and prostitution. In the presence of love we are still more or less savage—the basest brutishness before the most powerful of human forces! Yet love also should be conquered like all other forces of nature; and without losing a fraction of its energy, or a flower of its garden, it also must be governed by science, which understands and directs all things. The lightning which prostrates the savage in the dust of fear is guided by us on the small wire of the conductor, gilds the ornaments of our women and transmits our thoughts from one hemisphere to the other. This other lightning, also, which, more powerful and more dangerous, explodes in the hurricanes of the human heart, must be studied, guided and reduced to a live force that can be measured, weighed and governed. Love should be the dearest, the most precious, the most powerful of civilized forces. No other passion can claim supremacy where it appears; no other can solve the sublime problem of combining the greatest voluptuousness with the greatest virtue, of generating the good of future beings through the joy of the living ones, of transmitting civilization to posterity in the spasm of an embrace. LOVE IN PLANTS AND ANIMALS [Pg 24] [Pg 25] [Pg 26] [Pg 27] CHAPTER I LOVE IN PLANTS AND ANIMALS Arcadians, metaphysicians, and all adorers of the past are cursing every day and every hour the modern mania of comparing human things to living beings and call for anathemas against this absurd and sacrilegious profanation of the man-God. Comparative anatomy, physiology and psychology are for these gentlemen nothing but different forms of a strange aberration of the human mind; something capricious and morbid which, by the continual comparison of man and beast, brutalizes us, prostitutes us, and sends us back with a new insanity to the bestial Olympus of men with animal members and of human grafts set on the flesh of the son of God. According to those most exalted and supercilious gentlemen, these are psychic maladies not to be discussed, but cured by contempt and ridicule; they are the hysterics of thought, which disappear with the generation that has seen them rise from the corrupt entrails of the human family. But man does not lower himself by comparing himself with beings that are the matrix from which he came; he does not degrade himself by scenting the earth from which you, also you, O super-gentlemen, say we have been moulded and which is ever the frame supporting us. The true metaphysics, if this word has still any meaning, was created by modern science, which, by the boldest comparisons of the simplest things with the most complex, of the smallest with the greatest, extracts the subtile from the subtile, and under the motley appearance of the form reveals the only law that governs them. We are going to seek in the limbus of living beings the crepuscules of the highest human things. Bowing our head modestly before the simplicity of laws which govern and control such a wealth of forms, let us return to the reality of things, feeling neither dejected nor ashamed of ourselves, but satisfied with having known how to read the notes of harmony written in the world of dwarfs and giants. Our pride will find sufficient satisfaction, after so many comparisons, in realizing that we are first among all living beings. No spectacle of nature is more splendid, more admirable than that of the loves of plants and of animals. Nature could not write more fascinating music with a less number of notes, and no other phenomenon of life can resemble that of generation in profusion of forms, lavishness of artifices, inexhaustible conception of mechanisms. One would say that where the reproductive gemmulæ are attracted, where life reconcentrates its best part to renovate itself with a new impetus, there new and strange energies are developed, and the forces of nature appear with the most gigantic pomp, the most gorgeous luxury. In every other function, Nature, like an economical housewife, seeks the useful and often is satisfied with the necessary; she simplifies the mechanisms, removes the attritions and through the simplest ways attains her aim. But she is not content with the good and the true for generation, and, surrounding the nest of love with a large profusion of esthetic elements, she exhausts every resource to prepare a feast for the life which renews itself. It is around the flower that, nearly always, the most exquisite beauty of form, the most inebriating seductions of perfume, the most varied tints of the painter's palette are interwoven. How many treasures of esthetic force in a lily and in a rose! And all that luxury to do honor to the love of a day, the love of an hour; and all the splendor of a nuptial robe, a thousand times more beautiful than human industry could produce, to screen the virginal kiss of an anther and a pistil! And jumping from the lily and the rose to the summits of the animal world, how many splendors of fancy, how many flashes of passion, what an interlacement of elements, to make a garland for the kiss of a man and a woman. Run, fly, on a spring day, among the blossoming beds of a garden, among the thousand amorous corollas of the flowers; shake the severe boughs of the cypress and of the pine; plunge your feet into the soft, wet carpet of vallisnerias; let your eyes penetrate into the humid recesses of the barks and the mossy labyrinths of the granite; and everywhere a warm circumfusion of pollen, spores and antheridia will tell your flaming heart that in the world of plants, among the perfumes of the corollas and the emeralds of the seaweeds, love exists in a thousand ways, and the atmosphere is all pervaded with the warm, inebriating sparks which, on the wings of the winds and of the insects and in the rays of the sun, diffuse everywhere an amorous, voluptuous wave. The love of flowers is mute in the soft perfume of their corollas, but in many of them silence does not prevent tender blandishments and fervent embraces; many plants, always immovable, have convulsions in their flowers; always cold, they flame up in the calyx of their loves. Often they love only once a year; but what a profusion of embraces, what a fecundity of pollen and seed! Shake with your hand a single branch of the juniper or of the blossoming pine, and you will immediately see the air darken with a cloud of fruitful dust; entire forests love at one time, and for miles and miles they fill the air with voluptuous murmurs; more than once do the winds carry clouds of pollen, and the wanton rain washes and purifies the atmosphere, and tinges itself all with the amorous dust. And without jealousy or rancors, in the shade of the blossoming pines, and among the stamens of the enamored flowers, in every clod of grass, in every cavern of mountain, in every fissure of rock, in every bed of seaweeds, in the deep waves of the ocean, and in the drops of water oozing from the glaciers, in the somberest darkness of mines and in the infinite sky, the animals interweave their loves; so that in every part of the globe, and in every hour of the day and of the night, every ray of the sun warms and contemplates millions of embraces, while every ray of the moon guides the nocturnal lovers to a thousand more intimate blandishments. If it is true that a leaf falls from the tree of life every second and dies, then at every moment a new gemma is born, and for every gemma how many embraces, for every new-born how many loves! The flowers planted in the ground of a cemetery appeal to me as the noblest form of the cult of the dead; for, if our planet is a vast cemetery, where every atom of time buries an atom that was living once, this earth is all a nest of love, in which every zephyr carries to our ear a sigh of voluptuousness, and the harmony of the ether, a dream [Pg 29] [Pg 30] [Pg 31] [Pg 32] of the ancient poets, is nothing, perhaps, but the sum of all the kisses exchanged among the living creatures. If the anatomist and the physiologist discover in the study of generation in the various animals some precious materials to mark the highest laws of the morphology of the living beings, the psychologist finds in the loves of brutes sketched nearly all the elements that man has gathered under his robust wings. No function is more adapted than love to contemplate the unique type and the infinite legion of its forms, to admire a unique conception developed in a thousand different tongues. No sooner has sex made its appearance than the male quickly distinguishes himself by his aggressive character. With few exceptions, it is the male that seeks, conquers, keeps the prey. Glance over the pages of Darwin's work on sexual selection and you will see how many weapons nature has given to males to conquer and keep their mates. Even in plants, it is the pollen that goes in search of the ovulum, the ovulum that awaits the spark that is to fecundate it. In the most simple of animal forms, where the male and female live and die fettered to the spot that saw their birth, it is the virile element that is always carried there, where the germ awaits it. This is the first dogma that governs the religion of love in the entire world of the living; and when all high races look with contempt upon the woman who attacks and the man who flees, they only protest against the violation of one of the most tyrannical laws which men and mollusks, women and pistils, cannot evade. Man summarizes all the forms of the living nature; so that we are frequently tempted to affirm that whatever of human is in him is the greatest synthesis of all the minor forms of the living, and that he is precisely the first because under the bark of his individuality all the forces are gathered within him, from the secondary to the last; and the same phenomenon we observe in the psychical elements of his loves. Pigeons, even when intermingled with the most varied breeds, are seldom unfaithful to their mates; and although the male, in a rare whim, may break the vow of fidelity, he quickly returns to the dear nuptial bed of his spouse. Darwin kept some pigeons of different breeds shut up in the same place for a long time, and there was never a bastard among them. Do we not also find among men splendid examples of the most faithful monogamy and do you not recognize it as the social basis in almost all the superior races? The antelope of South Africa has up to a dozen mates, and the Antilope saiga of Asia more than a hundred. But have we not the small and hypocritical polygamies of modern society, and those, most splendid and impudent, of the Orientals? Have we not in man, as in very many animals, females who submit to love as to a duty, and males on whom love must be imposed? Have we not libertinism at the very side of chastity? Have we not in the world of man all the lasciviousness, all the ardors, all the possibilities of lewdness of the animals' world? Several fulmineous forms of love which last no longer than the flash of the lightning not infrequently occur among men, as the cold, long-lasting kisses of many insects are an amorous practice of various human temperaments. And fiery, cruel jealousies and bloody battles are scenes common to men and brutes; nor is death for love an exclusive privilege of man. The few and coarse passions of animals are all carried as a holocaust to the altar of generation, while man carries to it all the ardors of his rich nature, all the infinite forces which he has drawn from the great womb of the living beings and which he has centuplicated with the accumulations of his hundred civilizations. The chaffinch, in the contests of amorous song, more than once falls from the tree on which he is singing his erotic hymn, smothered by pulmonary apoplexy; just as many a poet beholds the lyre of his genius and the chords of his life break at the feet of a woman. In the silence of the shady thickets, the nightingale, exhausted, swoons with love and fatigue, and dies for having been unable to vanquish a more fortunate rival in melody and strength of notes; and hundreds and hundreds of times, in the somber labyrinths of life, the human lover dies in the battles of an unhappy love, and he too dies because he could not sing louder and sweeter than his rival. Nor is coquetry peculiar to the human female o...