Thought may, for very different reasons, now be an ally and now a victim of love. First instrument of seduction, next to the external form of the body, thought revives, flares up in contact with the new sentiment, as occurs with every other energy condensed in our brain; and while it becomes purer, it strengthens itself, exhibiting some of its rarest, most exquisite fruits. Many torpid intellects do not awake except by the kiss of love, and then only to fall back into the previous lethargy the moment they are left without the stimulus of desire; but healthier brains, too, rise above themselves when called upon to offer an unusual tribute on the new altar. For very many, poetry is the song of spring, and, prosaic and mute before having loved, they return to their prose and taciturnity when the season of loves is past. As they are men, they may continue to possess a woman; but being poor in moral energy, in the May of their life they have only a smile of poetry, lasting as long as the petals of a rose. Their cold and indolent imagination indulges in a little flight among the bushes of the garden or the orchard; emits its feeble trill, then falls wingless on the highroad, plodding until death. How often a woman, who has been loved by one of these spring lovers and who remembers having once seen him, an ardent creature, full of imagination, finds it very difficult to persuade herself that the man who today is all prose, from head to foot, living between his chocolate and his nightcap, wearing seven varieties of flannels, and using ten different kinds of lozenges, once wrote verses and fell on his knees at her feet, which he covered with bitter tears!

More fortunate men, instead, derive from their loves a continual and powerful stimulus to the works of thought, which seems to reshape and renew itself at each different phase of passion, at each change of love. These influences upon the lives of many artists, poets, and even statesmen can be studied in their works, and have a stronger power when the artist, the poet, the head of the state is a woman.

The influence of love upon the forces and forms of thought is twofold, and is derived from self-love and from the psychical nature of the person loved. Being a sentiment born during youth or rejuvenated during old age, it especially excites the imagination and refines the aptitude for reproducing the beautiful; in a few words, it warms those mental aptitudes that generally reach their climax at the same age when love manifests its greatest energies. Very rarely a man can be a poet or a great artist without having loved intensely, without having had at least a great capacity for loving. Chastity, forced or voluntary, may conceal love; but down in the depths of the heart some images, resembling an angel more than a woman, have sway, rising at every inspiration of genius, at every song of the lyre, at every touch of the brush, and reviving or kindling the sacred fire of art. The genius of many among the greatest poets, artists and writers of the world had love as its first companion and supreme inspirer; and without this sentiment their names might be totally unknown to us. The love that is born in a sublime brain accumulates gigantic forces, and chastity, always imposed by great passions in their first stage, refines and intensifies them; so that love seems to transform into genius, and genius dyes with splendid hues every amorous manifestation. A chaste genius which loves is a legion of fighting forces, a whole host of winged geniuses, and therefore no difficult question, no irresistible force can oppose it. Thought, when the companion of love, offers to it the richest tributes of its energy, just as the enamored bird sings its most harmonious notes for its companion, the flower condenses all its perfumes and the fascination of its most beautiful colors around the nest in which plants love. And with thought, intensified, transformed, adorned with all its splendors, goes the stimulus of self-esteem, which in the satisfaction of pride of the person loved finds always new incitement and new incentive to work. Nor does the creature loved receive only the tribute, but from the enthusiastic eloquence with which gratitude is expressed by that creature, it is manifest that the latter also feels the same inciting influence, and the most modest and stillest tongue finds splendors of form and savoriness of style unknown to that day.

A long experience in every country of the world demonstrates the superiority of woman over man in the epistolary style and especially in love-letter writing, which is the effect not only of the peculiar nature of the feminine mind but also of the powerful excitement created in woman by the stimulus of love. A letter is nearly always an exchange of affections, and woman more than man feels the intimate relations between two affections; she loves more and better than we. Man has a hundred different ways of exerting his talents when excited by love; art, ambition, science open to him a thousand avenues to manifest his new energies; to woman, on the contrary, no literary path is open other than amorous correspondence, and she uses and abuses it in a surprising manner. In the numberless hecatombs, in the daily pyres of many perfumed letters, real treasures of art are being destroyed, which should be saved from the conflagration that consumes so many volumes of words and phrases; for the commonplace always dominates every field of good and evil, and commonplace, like all things human, are most loves. Was it not Balzac who said: "It is recognized that in love all women have some 'esprit'"?

The eloquence of love, a real song of a gifted mind in love, is not contradicted by the timid and often dull silence which invariably accompanies the first declarations, the first skirmishes. Fear in all its forms desiccates the mouth and the pharynx, suspends nearly instantaneously the secretions of mucus and saliva, and many are made physically unable to speak, in the same manner as when a violent mental perturbation disconcerts ideas and words, so that eloquence is reduced to an absolute silence, possibly interrupted only by disconnected phrases. That man so mute in love, however, has hardly returned to the quiet of his solitary room when he suddenly becomes a new Demosthenes, and pours out into space or on paper the rivers of a fiery eloquence, which a few moments before would have proved so opportune and so beautiful. Happy love, in the stage of attainment, raises all brains above medium temperature, continually infusing new energies into them. Even during the intoxication, the thyrsus of the dithyramb never falls from the hand of the happy mortal who loves or hopes to be loved. When, on the contrary, our affection vibrates with the notes of sorrow, a sublime elegy may be produced as the outburst of thought; one can become poet or insane. Brains better organized are cured of the great sorrows of the heart with a book, or a musical creation, or a picture; but many human brains submerge in the hurricane of an unhappy love, and the statistics of the hospitals for the insane always show a large number of cases of insanity produced by love, while in the secrecy of the domestic walls are concealed many other brains withered or fallen into lethargy through unfortunate loves.

I am writing in these pages a modest essay of general physiology, or, as it is usually termed, psychology, and have neither the right nor the strength to undertake the work of literary critic, which still remains to be done, notwithstanding the very beautiful things written by many upon the influence of love in art. Not only has every poet and every artist (and I consider the writer the greatest of all) left in his works the imprint of his loves, but he has felt and interpreted love in a way entirely his own, and which in some cases became the style of a school or an epoch. The woman loved by Byron is quite different from the woman loved by Burns; Laura is not Beatrice, and the woman dimly discerned by Leopardi is not Vittoria Colonna. To study the influences of the times and the mind over the particular mouldings of the loves of great men—in a few words, to draw the comparative psychology of celebrated loves and of the amorous types of art—is a gigantic labor, in which the artist, the psychologist and the literary man should join hands in order to produce a work worthy of the subject. For me it will suffice to have prepared in the present essay some materials for this work of the future.

Love ceases to be an impulse for thought and becomes its first assassin, not only when it is unhappy, but also when it sinks into the mud of lust. Chastity is an almost entirely hygienic question, and here we should mark the place where the hygienic branch shoots out from the great trunk of physiology. No embrace has ever debased thought when voluptuousness was only love; but when lasciviousness is stronger than sentiment and the animal man regrets having given too much of himself to the future, then the individual rebels against the excessive tribute paid to the preservation of the species. Then the animal man is diseased and the moral man has fallen into libertinism. No; nature never punishes him who wisely obeys its laws, and after the sacrifice of love man is as happy and intelligent as before, since, in the blessed languor of a brief repose, nature stills even the pain of weariness.

"Lay waste the entire forest of concupiscence, not one tree alone. When you shall have felled every tree, cut every branch, you can then pronounce yourselves free, pure, virtuous," exclaims the Dhammapada, and science utters the same cry, but instead of the word "concupiscence" it writes the more precise term "lust." In our organism every function is so well regulated that we, like the citron, can always bear leaves, flowers and fruits, provided we do not sacrifice the fruit to the flower and do not imitate the monstrous flowers with over-expanded petals or seedless fruits. Wise chastity is the ablest administrator of vital harmonies and energies; love and labor do not oppose each other, as many too exacting or hypercritical moralists are continually repeating with too rigid severity.

I have previously stated that the influence of love over thought is twofold, and we have still to study its second manifestation, namely, the influence exerted by the psychical nature of the person loved. Two creatures who love each other are two bodies differently electrified, continually exchanging currents of energy in order to reËstablish the equilibrium of forces and obey the law of universal affinity. But, since no two identical creatures, no two identical brains, no two identical sentiments ever exist in nature, it follows that, of the two thoughts brought face to face by love, one exercises an influence of attraction greater than the other, and consequently one of the two gives more than it receives. Generally the stronger mind exercises a greater fascination; and as the mind of man is oftener greater than that of woman, the latter more easily follows the ideas, the theories, the intellectual tastes of man. It is not always true, however, that a greater attraction betokens a greater mental force, since some peculiar characteristics of certain intellects render them more fascinating, their contact more dangerous and richer in elective affinity. Thought may be robust, original; but if rigid, rude and without any weapon of conquest, it lives alone, in solitary loftiness, and the person loved contemplates it with admiration, but feels no attraction. It is like a star, too cold and too distant for us to desire. Some other talents, on the contrary, seem to be magnetized, so strongly do they adhere to men and things; and when we approach them, we feel ourselves absorbed and, after their contact, carry away some influence of contagion, of fascination, of imitation. These magnetic brains combine with the other amorous seductions another and most powerful one, that of subjugating and bending the mind of the person loved, so that to the sweet chain of affection is added the chain of thought.

A most peculiar and little studied influence of fascinating talents is seen in some women, who add to their other admirable qualities the power of conquering the thought of men whose minds are stronger and swifter than theirs. Living with them, breathing their moral atmosphere, it becomes impossible, even for the most tenacious opposers of the ideas of others, not to think as they think, not to write as they write, not to acquire certain psychical tastes which constitute their delight. The style of certain writers, the manner of certain painters have unconsciously yielded to these slow and mysterious influences; and the masses, investigating the origin of these esthetic mutations, seek it in mysterious causes and in evolutions of art and science, while, instead, they have a humbler but more natural source. The style and manner changed when the head was resting on the bosom of a blonde friend, or the hand playing among the curly labyrinths of raven hair. In the history of arts and of literature, mention of these influences is nearly always omitted because nearly always they are unknown to the biographer, and often unknown to the artist and the poet who was subject to them. Woman always confesses, and frequently with pride, that she has moulded her thought on that of her friend; man hardly acknowledges this, and if warned by criticism, rebels and feels hurt by such an odd accusation. How and when should the king of the universe ever change the style and the direction of his thought through the influence of a kiss or a caress? "Mine, and only mine!" exclaims the man who loves. "His, and only his!" always sighs the woman who loves; and I must, although with different words, have frequently said the same thing in this book.

It is not only the robust and attracting nature of human brains that measures their various influences in the struggles and the caresses of love, but it is the degree that causes the high influences of thought to be differently felt. The more one loves, the more one yields to the fascination of another's talent; the more one loves, the more one is disposed to abdicate one's own ideas and esthetic tastes in order to assume the ideas and the tastes of the person loved. Man, proudly awkward, constantly repeats in every tone that in politics, morality, religion, woman thinks always like her lover; and by this he deludes himself into believing that he affirms with the most eloquent proof the uncontrasted superiority of his mind. However, in our case he fails to mention a reason, most honorable for woman and little for us: woman generally feels more deeply the influence of a virile thought, not only because she is weaker than we, but because she loves us much more than we ever could love. She sacrifices instantly and willingly even self-pride to love; man rarely and with difficulty makes this sacrifice. "She is silly, but beautiful," we say, feeling very happy. Woman, on the contrary, says oftener than we: "How can Democracy be respectable if he insults it every day? And how cannot Socialism be a sacred thing if it is his religion?" Man is always right for the woman who loves him, because she can seldom love without esteem. We, indeed, allow ourselves to love with all our senses a woman whom we cannot or must not hold in estimation. This difference would be sufficient to demonstrate that, in the psychical evolution of the two sexes, woman is ahead of us in the esthetic of sentiment, as we outrun her in intellectual development. Woman has already attained perfect love, which is the fusion of all human elements, the selection of selections; we see the concubine even in the sweetheart and in the wife; and the highest talent does not disdain to pour out the molten metal of its thoughts into the mould of a Venus who hardly could be called heavenly. In matters of love we are disciples oftener than masters on the field of sentiment.

Whatever be the reason for which a brain in love bends its love companion with a larger power of influence, the tyrant, too, undergoes the influence of the victim. Two thoughts cannot impunely be enclosed in the same atmosphere, they cannot follow the orbit of the same planetary system. The one gives much, and the other gives little; the one receives more than it gives, the other gives more than it receives; but they both alter and exchange influences and energies. This is a consequence of the most elementary laws of physics: two loves and two brains are two systems of forces; and, however powerful one may be in comparison with the other, they both must undergo, in their contacts, a molecular modification of their movements. To the direct influence of love add the automatic power of imitation, the tyranny of habit, the epicurism of the compromise of ideas and of conscience, and many other minor causes, and you will see how inexorably thought must change when we think in two.

Not all intellectual phenomena undergo the influence of love in equal measure, but those feel it most who by contacts and origins are nearer to the energies of sentiment or are interwoven with them, constituting binary bodies, composed of affection and thought. Religion and morality are more easily modified than esthetic tastes, and these change more frequently than philosophical theories or the method of study. There is a certain architecture in our brains that constitutes their framework and can be destroyed only by death or insanity. Against it love is powerless; furthermore, certain intellectual antitheses between a man and a woman are enough to render love impossible, even when the sympathy of forms and a certain community of affections violently rouse the sovereign of sentiments.

To scorn influences of love over thought may be the fruit of pride, but it is also, more frequently, an incontrovertible proof of crass ignorance,—pride and ignorance which we shall bitterly expiate, because, if we today may be contented with the beauty of form, and if robust youth, comforted later by coquetry, may prolong the life of love founded on voluptuousness only, the day will come, sooner or later, in which, when the great disparity of brains shall destroy every hope of common intelligence, we shall find ourselves in the presence of this horned dilemma: either to renounce dual thought—horrible amputation of intellectual life—or lower ourselves more every day in order that the voice of a person who speaks in a subdued tone may reach our ear. Hence a continual toil, a weary and sad exertion, the impairment of lofty intellects and the disorders of weak brains; hence the inevitable death of a love which should have submerged only with the last plank of shipwrecked beauty; hence the veiled polygamy of our modern society, profoundly hypocritical, because it is so impatient that it wants to run, when it has only the strength to walk slowly; because it is so petulant that it wants to jump while its legs are still tied by the sacred straps of the middle ages.

We must all inexorably yield to the influence of thought in love. If our robust brain can elevate in some little measure the smaller one of the person we love, we must always descend from our lofty plane, lowering the level of our thought and wasting many of the nobler forces of human progress. A certain disparity of levels is inevitable, but it should never be excessive, because, in the continual efforts to equalize them, in the sorrowful struggles to reach them, a great part of love may be wretchedly dissolved.