Woman more than man dives deeper and soars higher in the regions of
love; society generally withholds her from the field of action, and an
infinite time is left to her for penetrating into the abysses of the
heart. How often an innocent young girl, who, perhaps, hardly knows how
to write, for many long hours feels in her imagination the sweetness of
a kiss which lasted but a second; how often she is tortured during a
whole night by the bitterness of a cold salute or of a rude word! Here
is a deepness of sense which, nevertheless, is nothing in comparison
with the queer and transubstantial process of sentimental analysis with
which woman pulverizes, analyzes, distills a look, a word, a gesture.
Hide, O chemists, your ignorance before the profundity of the analytical
art of an enamored woman; to her the spectroscope is a coarse instrument
of prehistoric science; homoeopathic draughts are poisons; atoms are
worlds; she has measured them many centuries before Thomson. A billionth
part of a milligram of rancor diluted in an ocean of voluptuousness is
detected by her process of analysis; an atom of indifference in the lava
of desire is instantaneously traced by the thermo-electric apparatus
which she uses in her laboratory. She is a priestess of the ideal, of
the infinite, of the incommensurable, and will continue to be religious
many centuries after man will have buried the last god. Even in love,
the infinite is insufficient for her.
Love always elevates the lover above the average man; and as his
increased strength makes him capable of greater undertakings, the
horizon widens before him more and more because he sees men and things
from a greater height. Each one of us has a different capacity of
soaring to the regions of the ideal; but rabble and genius, prose and
poetry, always raise themselves, by the action of love, to a world which
is nobler, more beautiful, more serene than that in which we drag out
our daily uneventful existence. How many vulgar, despicable natures are
redeemed by the action of love; how many inert intellects are guided
through the paths to glory; how many of the vulgar herd reach the height
of the Olympus of thoughts with the aid of a loving hand! And still the
ignoble proverb is daily repeated, that science and glory must guard
against love as against a bitter enemy, and the examples are
pedantically quoted of great men who loved but art and to chastity alone
owed their greatness. Strange disorder of ideas, in which hygiene is
confused with morality, chastity with the incapacity of loving; but a
man healthy in sense and sentiment will always be elevated by love, if
he does not make an unworthy creature the object of his affection, if he
does not confound love with lust. For one genius killed by love, you
have a hundred who owe to love their greatest inspirations, who drew
from it the strength to live, who blessed it as superior to glory, who
in it alone found the fresh wave that tempered the burning ardor of
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