In the Apollo room in the Vatican you will see an ancient bas-relief representing two bacchantes with the Dionysian thyrsus; one is standing, while the heat of voluptuousness is flaming within her; she bears the thyrsus, lust transpires on her face, and a bull is beating his horns against her legs; the other falls exhausted from intoxication. These are two moments of the voluptuousness of love, but they are also the two most elementary forms of the sentiment that bind man to woman. Now an ardent energy, then calm possession; now struggle that conquers, then affectionate blandishment that restrains. The most sublime, most constant, most perfect love that a man of superior race can desire or dream of, is a hot, bright flame, lasting as long as life, and at which, from time to time, are kindled the sparks of a desire that flares up, wavers and disappears.

Love, in comparison with all other sentiments, is such a thing that, when it comes in contact with them, it rules, attracts and draws them into the orbit of its movements, like a small fragment of cosmic matter which, having come too near to the sun, is attracted and devoured by that body. The sentiments are forces, each controlled by certain laws in its own sphere; when they come together, they conglomerate or eliminate each other, or exercise a mutual influence which causes them to deviate from the line followed by them a moment before. When an affection approaches love it is so powerfully influenced by it as to seem to disappear from the sight of the common people, while neither matter nor force can ever be destroyed, but can only change in form.

On this subject many fallacious arguments are advanced every day. It is said, for instance, that love is the most egotistic of sentiments, because we seek in it the greatest voluptuousness; but love and egotism are two affections that follow very different orbits, since the former causes us to love another creature and has as its object the preservation of the species, while the latter makes us love ourselves and tends to preserve the individual. If by egotism we mean the desire of satisfying a need, then all the sentiments, even the most generous ones, could be considered as forms of egotism, since even the martyr satisfies a very high need of a generous sentiment.

Love is, on the contrary, at perpetual war with egotism; and although the latter is a gigantic affection, yet it pales before the brilliant light of the Titan of the Affections. Many animals prefer death to abandoning the faithful companion. Even the toad suffers himself to be tortured, burned, to have his limbs amputated, his eyes gouged; but as long as he has one limb intact, he uses it to embrace the female in an amorous clasp. And do we not, too, offer as holocaust to love wealth, glory, science? Does not woman offer to love the long illness of gestation, the tortures of childbirth, the pains of nursing, the anxious cares of domestic and educational struggles? And how many think, in the intoxication of love, of the bitterness and the thorns which they are sowing in that moment; the history of sorrow which, perhaps, by an inexorable law, they are preparing for themselves?

Even the most perfect egotist, if he be a healthy man, desires and loves a woman. Apart from a few elect creatures to whom the supreme joys of the creations of thought are permitted, love represents the greatest of energies, the crowning of every edifice. We may thirst for wealth and glory as the greatest of joys, but in the background we behold the outline of a feminine creature at whose feet the trophies of victory must be laid. I do not speak of woman, because, for her, every satisfied vanity, every hoped for glory, all riches desired, every flower and every fruit of the garden of life must be laid at the feet of somebody, and this somebody is always a man. The fireworks with which every festivity of life ends must always be a woman; at the bottom of every vulgar revelry and on the horizon of every sublime glory there is ever an Eve. To love and to be loved is of all human things the best; and even in the world of the suprasensible, the religions of every country have always promised to the good and the believer an eternity of love in the harem of voluptuousness, or in a mystic but amorous ecstasy. Read the burning pages of the mystic writers, and you will be able to tell me if all that fantastic world is not, too, a transubstantiation of love. The gods of every Olympus also have a sexual form, and there are feminine forms for the males and masculine forms for the females. From the cradle to the grave, love is for all and always the highest promise. Between the automatic lust of adolescence and the studied and covetous lecheries of old age, we pass, through the feverish hysteria of early youth, to the deep passions of virility; but for every age love is the sweetest joy. The tocsin of old age begins to sound when, with the first white hairs, we fear that we are no longer able to love; and every one ardently, anxiously hopes that the hour, the minute will never come for him in which he shall be compelled to say the tremendous words: "I cannot."

I do not deny that in some human monsters egotism, as a sacrifice made to the god "Myself," is so powerful as to exclude love; but such cases are very rare if they last the whole life, rare when they last for a shorter period. It often occurs that a man, trained to and living in the most sordid egotism, falls in love when old with a poor young girl, and becomes expansive with her, generous, prodigal, perhaps; and he too pays, at one time and in a very ridiculous way, the debt which nature in vain claimed from him during his young and mature age.

Great egotists also love, but in a selfish manner, denying the most prodigal and most splendid of the passions that tribute which they cannot refuse to themselves. They are ignorant of the most sublime joys, of the most inebriating enthusiasms of love, of the holy voluptuousness of loving a woman more than oneself; but they also love, they love in their own way. If you wish to study the physiognomy of egotistical love, compare man's with woman's love and you will find it easy to penetrate into the mysteries of this part of psychology; and if you desire a more striking contrast, that the differences may be represented in a bolder relief, compare the love of an old man with that of a young woman: you will have in the former an egotistical type of love, in the latter a generous one.

More complex are the influences which the sentiment of possession and that of self-esteem exercise upon love, and the importance given to jealousy is sufficient to prove this.

The physiological study of jealousy would be sufficient, if it were still needed, to demonstrate the queer confusion of language in relation to psychical facts. One would say that it is the language of the alchemists, employed to express the chemical composition of bodies; one would believe that we are still dealing with the "nothing white," the "philosophic wool" and the "tetrascelitetraoxicoquindodeca" of our good ancestors.

Jealousy really signifies a pain of the sentiment of love, or, to be more specific, the sentiment caused by the offense done us through the infidelity of the person we love. This pain is natural in all men, in all times and in almost all races. It is the injury to our property applied to love. The child scratches and bites him who touches or spoils its fruits or its toy; it grieves us to be robbed of our books, of the flowers of our garden. It is natural, then, that he who touches our sweetheart, our dearest thing, should be hated. And, in fact, this jealousy is but a form of hatred, the most natural, the most legitimate of all hatreds. It is not necessary to create a new energy or a new word to express this hatred. We may beat or kill a man because he has brutally offended our son, our father, our friend, our country, our sweetheart; five offenses given to five different sentiments, but always hatred aroused by grief, energy developed by the same mechanism. The paternal, the filial, the friendly sentiment, the devotion to our country, love have been offended in us, and we have responded with a centrifugal hatred, with blows or death. But in these various cases, was the presence of a new sentiment deemed necessary in order that the crime might be committed? Certainly not. It was said that the paternal affection, injured, had aroused such distress in us as to lead to assault or assassination; it was simply asserted that an insult to the flag of our country had rendered us blind and led us to commit violence; and why, then, when love is offended, should we create a new sentiment—jealousy? All sentiments, when satisfied, lead us to close friendships, to endearments, to be of assistance to those who have given us these satisfactions. All injured sentiments lead us, on the contrary, to repel those who have offended them, to harm those from whom we have received that pain.

Is it jealousy, then, the hatred that an animal manifests toward any creature which interrupts it in its loves? Well, for many savages, to whom love is nothing but sexual intercourse, all the phenomena of jealousy are reduced to this single form. When the instinct is satisfied, as the unions are promiscuous and woman is considered common property, there can be no jealousy. If woman is a cup out of which every one may drink, why should there be jealousy? A Bolivian woman once cynically told me: "Woman is the water of a stream. Throw a stone into it: will you be able to tell me a minute afterward where the stone broke that water? You are very foolish, you man, to make distinctions between identical things!"

In polygamous races, man only can be jealous; in polyandric ones, woman alone can be jealous legally. With various nations, woman is a property like any other; hence she can be voluntarily offered to the friend or to the guest, like a horse or a dog. They do not want anybody to steal her, but she can be given away without either disgrace or jealousy. Only in the higher and monogamous races the sentiments of love, self-esteem and property, forming a triple armor around our woman, incite us to defend her "with claws and beak"; and to this unyielding body, consisting of the union of three sentiments, we give the name of "jealousy"; and here we have a second psychical form, another thing called by the same name.

But, as though such confusion were not already excessive, we have called jealousy a special psychical individual organization by which we become suspicious and tyrannical toward the person we love and whom we offend without any reason and from whom we withhold all legitimate liberty. And after having confused three different things, that is to say, the grief of injured love, the triple combination of three sentiments—love, self-pride, possession—and a pathological irritability of suspicion, we discuss at length, and always in vain, in order to decide whether all men are jealous and whether jealousy measures love with an exact ruler and whether anyone can love without being jealous: vain, not to say puerile, discussions, which would not take place if words were previously defined. If by jealousy you mean the sorrow caused by not being loved or by being deceived, then every heart that loves must be jealous; thus, whoever loves country, mother, son, cannot witness without sorrow an offense offered to son, mother, country. But if by jealousy you mean that form of tyrannical suspicion which tortures the person possessed by it, then I shall tell you that we very well can and should love without ever feeling that jealousy, and that we can be jealous even without loving. Let us proceed to an elementary analysis, and we shall understand each other. Under the name of a single sentiment, of a single effective energy, the most dissimilar phenomena are grouped, to wit:

(1) The sorrow caused by a love offense;

(2) The sorrow for an injury to property;

(3) A sorrow born of the sentiment of self-esteem;

(4) An habitual, constitutional suspicion, which centers on the person beloved or possessed.

The only common ties among these psychical phenomena are these: that all apply to a love offended, or alleged to be offended, and that they are all accompanied by grief. Such an empiricism, such a coarse empiricism! Is this not actual alchemy, that which called all volatile bodies "spirits," and the oxide of zinc "philosophic wool"!

As jealousy is not an elementary psychical phenomenon, but simply an empirical mixture, it has many and varied ethnical forms, and becomes necessary in all countries where polygamy prevents man from physically and morally satisfying a woman, and where the husband, merely because he is rich and powerful, selects his wife and forces his love upon her. The jealousy of many Oriental nations is proverbial, and perhaps monogamous peoples become jealous through contact with polygamous ones, as in Sicily and in certain parts of Spain. It seems to me, however, that in some cases jealousy has not a clear historical origin, but assumes an ethnical character, according to the special constitution of a race. In any case, in Europe, Italians, Spaniards, and, above all, Portuguese are very jealous; and, as I learned, in America the most jealous of all are the Brazilians.

The common people will certainly not be persuaded by my psychological analysis, and will continue to measure the force of love by the unreasonableness of suspicion; and many dear and lovely women will continue, heaven knows for how many centuries, to taunt their lovers with this foolish plaint: "You do not love me because you are not jealous. How can you love me if you do not feel for me the slightest jealousy?" Foolish lamentations, often uttered by happy creatures who, perhaps, finding it strange and against nature to be too happy, look for some occasion of sorrow and regret. Can anyone love anybody on earth more deeply than one's own children? Certainly not; and yet we are not jealous when others love them, and father and mother sublimely vie with each other in adoring and fondling them. You should love your companion in love in the same manner; and if you fear to lose him, that fear must not be the wrath of the inquisitor nor the clutch of the miser. Vain counsels! Words thrown to the winds! Jealousy is one of the most constitutional psychological maladies, and, if one is born with it, it is very difficult to cure. May a benign fate keep it from you! It poisons the dearest joys of life; penetrates every pore of the skin; pours its gall into every drop of water, into every mouthful of bread; it transforms the man who loves into a policeman, always armed, with alert ear and prying eyes. And the jealous man is always spying, doubting, suffering; he investigates the past, the present and the future; he seeks the lie in a caress, indifference in a kiss; in love he always fears hypocrisy. What a hellish life! It is a hundred times better not to love than to love in this way. The punishment of the few jealous men with exquisitely gentle heart should be this: to know that those who are as jealous as they generally entertain more self-love than love, and that the highest and noblest creatures have always loved without jealousy. The day when we perceive that we are no longer loved, when we are deceived, let love die without replacing it with jealousy. From suspicion to condemnation or acquittal, between sincere lovers, the path cannot and must not be a long one; to a frank question, a frank answer; let suspicion or love die, but they should die in a hurricane or in a battle, die a violent death; they should not drag a miserable existence between the courts and the prisons. A hundred times better a lightning that kills us than the feverish jaundice which consumes the stamina of our lives, poisons all sources of our joy.

Jealousy, besides, as it has already largely declined in monogamous society, will continue to decrease in the future, when matrimony shall be but the sanctification of love, when the choice shall be always reciprocal, when in the moral relations between the two sexes all trace of hypocrisy shall have disappeared. To know that we are loved, esteemed, and to love and esteem our companion, deeply and sincerely, is the surest guarantee of defense against that sordid parasite, that wood-worm of love which is jealousy. Let woman cease to be a slave or a freedwoman, let the husband or lover cease to be the proprietor of a woman, and all those lepers of love, the jealousy-mad, will disappear at once.

Self-esteem, independent of jealousy, has many legitimate relations to love, of which it enriches the treasures. No man, no woman in the world, knowing that he or she is loved by a most noble creature, can help feeling proud; and if a delicate reserve prohibits our heralding our good fortune, we can, however, relish the secret joy of knowing that the world envies us. It is almost always beyond human strength to renounce these joys, which can be delighted in without humiliating others and without any shadow of rancor. Woman, especially, with admirable art, knows how to say countless things silently; and when she is proud of a noble love, she radiates such an aureole of light as to dazzle the adorer and the apathetic. With the majesty of a queen and the reserve of a woman, and without opening her lips, she can say to all: "Envy me; I am loved!" Holy and just and chaste pride, which I wish all the daughters of Eve who shall have deserved love should feel.

Lovers and sweethearts, choirs of adorers and famous beauties may be objects of luxury, as are horses and palaces; and it is natural for human vanity to seek those things and to appreciate and utilize them to humiliate those who have them not. Vanity uses love, then, as a pretext; and many women, incapable of loving, may conquer men solely as trophies of war, just as men oftener than women may, through pure vanity, undertake a war of conquest. All these facts, however, belong to the history of pride and vanity, and we have already dealt with them in our study on the sources of love.

In that study we have seen by what paths one is led to love, and we were therefore obliged to consider friendship, compassion and many other sentiments as sources of love. But all endearing sentiments may have relation to the Prince of Affections; that is to say, take the place of love that wanes. When the sun shines in the heavens, the light of the moon and that of the minor stars are invisible; and in the same way, when love glows above the horizon of life, friendship, compassion, and all other tender affections can no longer be seen or felt; but when love disappears we can see the minor sentiments take its place.

Esteem, veneration and all other analogous sentiments may be companions of love; but only too often they are bestowed upon a creature who little deserves them. Love is a wizard that transforms and beautifies and magnifies everything he touches; and we can have immense esteem and deep veneration for the most despicable man, for the most abject, most wicked woman. It does not reflect much honor upon us, but it is true. No brigand ever stood in need of loves, often deep and ardent, and no beautiful courtesan ever lacked illustrious lovers. What does it matter if the object of love is a disgrace in everybody's eyes, spat upon by public contempt, set in the pillory of universal hatred?

We love him, we love her; that is enough. And why do we love him? Why do we love her? Because it pleases us. Before the inappellable rudeness of this explanation what can science say, what can morality suggest?

Science recognizes the fact and explains it. A creature despicable in every respect must please us very much to inspire us with love; and this sentiment must be really gigantic if it conquers human conventionalities, vulgar prejudices and the most persistent habits. It has been said with much truth that no woman was more ardently loved than a homely woman; and the same may be said of a brutal or criminal man, a woman of the street or abject for any reason. A great man, if accused of loving a debased or silly woman, could often, blushing with shame, strip her before the world, like ancient Phryne, saying: "Let him dare throw the first stone at me, who feels himself incapable of loving this beautiful creature!" And the man who, through crime or baseness, has been banned from civilized society, has in his heart, for the woman who loves him, some pure and virgin oasis in which his love is lying; he still has some untainted place reserved in his soul for the beloved one; and this love, concealed and bitter, possesses, for certain natures, all the perilous seductions of strong aromas and intoxicating poisons. No man in the world is entirely wicked; and some of the ferocious kindnesses of the assassin, some of the generous impulses of the thief are preserved for the companion of love. Such is the omnipotence of this sentiment, which, like an ancient alchemist, transmutes the vilest metals into liquid gold and discovers the only diamond buried in the sand of a great alluvium! Science, then, admits loves without esteem, and, bowing its head with a blush of shame, acknowledges that they are only too frequent.

Where science is still and humiliates itself, morality erects its head and flagellates. Love without esteem is a crime—and a crime which breeds other crimes. Woe to us when, bold avengers of public contempt, we dare boast of loving a vile creature, and impudently parade such love, as though intending by our arrogance to impose silence on indignant decency, or by our insolence to act as pedestal for the offended paramour! Liars in our own eyes, we defy, alone, the holiest and most inviolable laws of beauty and honesty; and proud, first, then bold and insolent, we end by becoming truly ribalds, and all encircled and hidden by mire, we permit no gentle creature to approach us who could inspire us with a pure and noble affection. Human passions may try many stunts and tricks, but, in the end, natural sentiments, like normal situations, are the healthiest and most enjoyable. We can raise, for an instant, the vilest creatures on the shield of pride, but our arms will tire and we will roll into the mire, together with our idol of a day.

The woman we love must not only be the companion of our voluptuousness, but also the mother of our children; the man a woman loves must be the husband and the father of the family. We should not consecrate the blush of our face in that of our children, who will curse our wicked loves, and will, perhaps, execrate the name of the father or the memory of the mother. When pride has lost its keenness, and the hour of revenge has passed, woe to us if we shall find ourselves alone with a creature whom we cannot hold in estimation!

If Love is really the holiest thing of life, the most ardent affection, the most voluptuous joy, we must erect a temple to him, with our own hands, and with our most sublime sentiments decorate his tabernacle, in which we can worthily adore him as a god. Love born among crimes and turpitudes is a nest woven with thorny shrubs and thistles, while we should weave it with the most aromatic leaves and the most beautiful flowers. Men and women, we should vie with each other in gleaning fields and gardens and in bearing to love every gentle affection, every noble aspiration, every impulse of lofty ambition. Lust and pride, when coupled, become the step-parents of every love without esteem, which, like every organism born of evil, lives a scrofulous and rachitic life, full of sorrows and calamities.

If love is really the most precious gem, we should enclose it in a casket which, for richness of material, artistic skill and inimitable esthetic conception, should be worthy of its contents. Nothing but noblest things should touch it; no breath, unless perfumed with sandalwood and roses, should be exhaled near it; no hand but that of an angel should caress it; no heat should warm it but that of the kisses of two loving lips.

If woman should concede her love only to the honest and industrious man, if it were possible that man loved no woman but a modest one, we would see the human family regenerated in the course of a generation, we would see men educated through voluptuousness. For the prison that terrifies, for the hell that threatens, we would then substitute the caresses of a woman, the kisses of a man, as educative energies. Shall this eternally be a dream? Shall we always threaten and assault men to make them better? Shall we not have a medicine less cruel than sorrow to cure men of vice and crime?