<h3><SPAN name="VI" id="VI"></SPAN>VI</h3>
<h2>LOVE</h2>
<p>Love, in fact, is the unseen and perennial source of this novel
courtesy. The capital importance it has assumed, the strange forms it
has worn, the unexpected heights to which it has risen, are perhaps the
most significant characteristics of our civilisation. In the glittering
and superficial epochs, age of paper and electro-plating, which
immediately preceded our present era, love was held in check by a
thousand childish needs, by the contagious mono-mania of unsightly and
cumbersome luxury or of ceaseless globe-trotting, and by that other form
of madness which has now disappeared, the so-called political ambition.
It suffered accordingly an immense decline, relatively speaking. To-day
it benefits from the destruction or gradual diminution of all the other
principal impulses of the heart which have taken refuge and concentrated
themselves in it as banished mankind has done in the warm bosom of the
earth. Patriotism is dead, since there is no longer any native land, but
only a native grot. Moreover the guilds which we enter as we please
according to our vocations have taken the place of Fatherlands.
Corporate spirit has exterminated patriotism. In the same fashion the
school is on the road not to exterminate but to transform the family,
which is only right and proper. The best that can be said for the
parents of old was that they were compulsory and not always cost-free
friends. One was not wrong in preferring in general to them friends who
are a species of optional and unselfish relations. Maternal love itself
has undergone a good many transformations among our women artists, and
one must admit, sundry partial set backs.</p>
<p>But love is left to us. Or rather, be it said without vanity, it is we
who discovered and introduced it. Its name has preceded it by a good
many centuries. Our ancestors gave it its name, but they spoke of it as
the Hebrews spoke of the Messiah. It has revealed itself in our day. In
our day it has become incarnate, it has founded the true religion,
universal and enduring, that pure and austere moral which is
indistinguishable from art. It has been favoured at the outset, beyond
all doubt and beyond all expectation by the charm and beauty of our
women, who are all differently yet almost equally accomplished. There is
nothing <i>natural</i> left in our world below if it be not they. But it
appears they have always been the most beautiful thing in nature even in
the most unfavourable and ill-favoured ages. For we are assured that
never was the graceful curve of hill or stream, of wave or rippling
cornfield, that never was the hue of the dawn or of the Mediterranean
equal in sweetness, in strength, in richness of visible music and
harmony to the female form. There must therefore have been a special
instinct which is quite incomprehensible which formerly retained the
poor beside their natal river or rock and prevented their emigrating to
the big towns, where they might well have hoped to admire at their ease
tints and outlines of beauty assuredly far superior to the charm of the
locality to whose attractions they fell a victim. At present there is no
other country than the woman of one's affections; there is no other
home-sickness than that caused by her absence.</p>
<p>But the foregoing is insufficient to explain the unparalleled power and
persistence of our love which time intensifies more than it wears out,
and consummates as it consumes it. Love, we now at last know, is like
air, essential to life; we must look to it for health and not for mere
nourishment. It is as the sun once was, we must use it to give us light,
not allow it to dazzle us. It resembles that imposing temple that the
fervour of our fathers raised in its honour when they worshipped it,
unwittingly, at the Paris Opera-house. The most beautiful part of it is
the staircase—when one mounts it. We have therefore attempted to make
the staircase monopolise the whole edifice without leaving the tiniest
room for the hall. The wise man, an ancient writer has said, is to the
woman what the asymptote is to the curve, it draws ever nearer but never
touches. It was a half crazy fellow named Rousseau who uttered this
splendid aphorism and our society flatters itself that it has practised
it far better than he. All the same the ideal thus outlined, we are
compelled to confess, is rarely attained in all its entity. This degree
of perfection is reserved for the most saintly souls, the ascetics, men
and women, who wander together, two and two, in the most marvellous
cloisters, in the most Raphaelesque cells in the city of painters, in a
sort of artificial dusk produced by a coloured twilight in the midst of
a throng of similar couples, and on the banks of a stream so to say of
audacious and splendid revelations of the nude. They pass their life in
feasting their eyes on these waves of beauty, the living bank of which
is their own passion. Together they climb the fiery steps of the
heavenly staircase to the very summit on which they halt. Then supremely
inspired they set to work and produce masterpieces. Heroic lovers are
they whose whole pleasure in love consists in the sublime joy of feeling
their love growing within them, blissful because it is shared, inspiring
because it is chaste.</p>
<p>But for the greater number of us it has been necessary to come down to
the level of the insurmountable weakness of the old Adam. None the less
the inelastic limits of our food supplies have made it a duty for us
rigorously to guard against a possible excess in our population which
has reached to-day fifty millions, a figure it can never exceed without
danger. We have been obliged to forbid in general under the most severe
penalties a practice which apparently was very common and indulged in
<i>ad libitum</i> by our forefathers. Is it possible that after manufacturing
the rubbish heaps of law with which our libraries are lumbered up, they
precisely omitted to regulate the only matter considered worthy to-day
of regulation? Can we conceive that it could ever have been permissible
to the first comer without due authorisation to expose society to the
arrival of a new hungry and wailing member—above all at a time when it
was not possible to kill a partridge without a game licence, or to
import a sack of corn without paying duty? Wiser and more far-sighted,
we degrade, and in case of a second offence we condemn to be thrown into
a lake of petroleum, whoever allows himself to infringe our
constitutional law on this point, or rather we should say, should allow
himself, for the force of public opinion has got the better of the crime
and has rendered our penalties unnecessary. We sometimes, nay very
often, see lovers who go mad from love and die in consequence. Others
courageously get themselves hoisted by a lift to the gaping mouth of an
extinct volcano and reach the outer air which in a moment freezes them
to death. They have scarcely time to regard the azure sky—a magnificent
spectacle, so they say—and the twilight hues of the still dying sun or
the vast and unstudied disorder of the stars; then locked in each
other's arms they fall dead upon the ice! The summit of their favourite
volcano is completely crowned with their corpses which are admirably
preserved always in twos, stark and livid, a living image still of love
and agony, of despair and frenzy, but more often of ecstatic repose.
They recently made an indelible impression on a celebrated traveller who
was bold enough to make the ascent in order to get a glimpse of them. We
all know how he has since died from the effects.</p>
<p>But what is unheard of and unexampled in our day is for a woman in love
to abandon herself to her lover before the latter has under her
inspiration produced a masterpiece which is adjudged and proclaimed as
such by his rivals. For here we have the indispensable condition to
which legitimate marriage is subordinated. The right to have children is
the monopoly and supreme recompense of genius. It is besides a powerful
lever for the uplifting and exaltation of the race. Futhermore a man can
only exercise it exactly the same number of times as he produces works
worthy of a master. But in this respect some indulgence is shown. It
even happens pretty frequently that touched by pity for some grand
passion that disposes only of a mediocre talent, the affected admiration
of the public partly from sympathy and partly from condescension accords
a favourable verdict to works of no intrinsic value. Perhaps there are
also (in fact there is no doubt about it) for common use other methods
of getting round the law.</p>
<p>Ancient society reposed on the fear of punishment, on a penal system
which has had its day. Ours, it is clear, is based on the expectation of
happiness. The enthusiasm and creative fire aroused by such a
perspective are attested by our exhibitions, and borne witness to by the
rich luxuriance of our annual art harvests. When we think of the
precisely opposite effects of ancient marriage, that institution of our
ancestors, more ridiculous still than their umbrellas, one can measure
the distance between this excessive and pretended exclusive <i>debitum
conjugale</i> and our mode of union, at once free and regulated, energetic
and intermittent, passionate and restrained, the true corner-stone of
our regenerated humanity. The sufferings it imposes on those who are
sacrificed, the unsuccessful artists, is not for the latter a cause of
complaint. Their despair itself is dear to the desperate; for if they do
not die of it, they draw life and immortality from it and from the
bottomless pit of their inner depth of woe, they gather deathless
flowers, flowers of art or poesy for some, mystic roses for others. To
the latter perhaps is given at that moment, as they grope in their
inward darkness to touch most nearly the essence of things, and these
delights are so vivid that our artists and our metaphysical mystics
wonder whether art and philosophy were made to console love or if the
sole reason for love's existence is not to inspire art and the pursuit
of ultimate truth. This last opinion has generally prevailed.</p>
<p>The extent to which love has refined our habits, and to which our
civilisation based on love is superior in morality to the former
civilisation based on ambition and covetousness, was proved at the time
of the great discovery which took place in the Year of Salvation 194.
Guided by some mysterious inkling, some electric sense of direction, a
bold sapper by dint of forcing his way through the flanks of the earth
beyond the ordinary galleries suddenly penetrated into a strange open
space buzzing with human voices and swarming with human faces. But what
squeaky voices! What sallow complexions! What an impossible language
with no connection with our Greek! It was, without doubt, a veritable
underground America, quite as vast and still more curious. It was the
work of a little tribe of burrowing Chinese who had had, one imagines,
the same idea as our Miltiades. Much more practical than he, they had
hastily crawled underground without encumbering themselves with museums
and libraries, and there they had multiplied enormously. Instead of
confining themselves as we to turning to account the deposits of animal
carcasses, they had shamelessly given themselves up to ancestral
cannibalism. They were thus enabled, seeing the thousand of millions of
Chinese destroyed and buried beneath the snow, to give full vent to
their prolific instincts. Alas! who knows if our own descendants will
not one day be reduced to this extremity? In what promiscuity, in what a
slough of greed, falsehood and robbery were these unfortunates living!
The words of our language refuse to depict their filth and coarseness.
With infinite pains they raised underground diminutive vegetables in
diminutive beds of soil they had brought thither together with
diminutive pigs and dogs.... These ancient servants of mankind appeared
very disgusting to our new Christopher Columbus. These degraded beings
(I speak of the masters and not of the animals, for the latter belong to
a breed that has been much improved by those who raised them) had lost
all recollection of the Middle Empire and even of the surface of the
earth. They heartily laughed when some of our <i>savants</i> sent on a
mission to them spoke to them of the firmament, the sun, the moon and
the stars.... They listened, however, to the end of these accounts, then
in an ironical tone they asked our envoys: "Have you seen all that?" And
the latter unfortunately could not reply to the question, since no one
among us has seen the sky except the lovers who go to die together.</p>
<p>Now, what did our settlers do at the sight of such cerebral atrophy?
Several proposed, it is true, to exterminate these savages who might
well become dangerous owing to their cunning and to their numbers, and
to appropriate their dwelling-place after a certain amount of cleaning
and painting and the removal of numerous little bells. Others proposed
to reduce them to the status of slaves or servants in order to shift on
to them all our menial work. But these two proposals were rejected. An
attempt was made to civilize and to render less savage these poor
cousins, and once the impossibility of any success in that direction had
been ascertained the partition was carefully blocked up.</p>
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