Paolo Mantegazza

“ It must be an intelligent and tender acclimation to surroundings, tastes, and habits, so that the rebellious sprig may be bent without pain or breaking, so that the vine leaves may seem pleased at their connection [Pg 152] with the pollard [4] which supports them, and the bright and ruddy bunches of grapes seem to smile with joy on foliage and pollard alike. Happiness, too, is a tree which requires a wise and loving cultivation. We men are the pollards; the vine is our companion who leans upon us, bound there by the withes of love and of reciprocal indulgence. ”

“ Who will dare to throw the first stone at that poor woman, the pitiable mother? Who would dare ill treat her if she asked [Pg 199] as a charity the favour that her daughter’s new home should be near hers, if she implored you to allow her to visit her often? Man is egotistic and feels paternity less than woman, but even if only in a slight degree he ought to understand the hidden hell of a mother-in-law who has to watch her daughter leave her own nest.
The marriage of a loved daughter is an event expected and desired, but it is like a birth, a blessing accompanied by tremendous pain. ”

“ I do not pretend to teach him how to make marriage a paradise on earth. He will continue to seek a golden dowry, and if he has a great coat of arms and an empty purse he will put the first up at auction in order to fill the second; and if the game should succeed he will carry his wife’s money to the gaming table, the turf, or to the cabinet of the cocotte, and feel himself happy to have gained in one day that which others cannot obtain with all the hard work of a laborious and pure life. ”

“ We row upon the tranquil waters of matrimony, and yet glide so near to the shores of venal love that we can grasp the flowers and gather the shells and precious pearls which lie there. We sail with the wind over the more tempestuous sea of seduction, but all the while we coast the island of poetic, faithful, and constant love; thus, vice, adultery, and domestic peace, debauchery and eternal vows, angels and beasts, find themselves guests at the same table, without false modesty, and without remorse. ”

“ Time is a valuable element to add weight to our choice; it is one of the best gauges of comparison by which to distinguish true love from carnal excitement. It is an old axiom, confirmed by universal experience, that time cools and extinguishes the small attacks of love, but strengthens and invigorates the more serious ones. The fatal brevity of our lives, the natural impatience of all those in love, conspire together to hasten marriage, but as far as I know and am able, I recommend men and women to acquire the sainted virtue of patience. ”

“ All these people, differing in age, condition, and intellect, unite in the same merriment, which they seem to have drawn from the sea, the father of planetary life, the dispenser of spirit and energy; and all the while the golden rays of the sun shine through the vine leaves, the ivy, and convolvulus, painting with the shade and penumbra of the leaves the tablecloth, the dresses of the women, and the rosy faces of the children, throwing patches, half shades, and glistening spots on the garden sand. ”

“ However, for the honour of humanity, such unions are exceedingly rare: those who buy and sell and are satisfied with a clandestine concubinage, hide the sin in the deep folds of our modern hypocrisy.
Maintained, yes; a husband, no!
A woman, on the contrary, always desires marriage, because she has the pride of proclaiming to all the world, that, notwithstanding her many years and innumerable wrinkles, the wreck of her form which assails her on all sides, she has known how to find a companion at bed and board, who makes her happy. ”

“ This is one of the most fruitful sources of the deceptions of matrimony, and it must be prevented. We ought to discover the real truth, under all the coquetry of the sex, and to know what metal lies beneath the varnish and polish. This artificial [Pg 128] beautifying of man and woman who woo is not hypocrisy, but a natural and irresistible desire of showing our best to the person we love, and hiding from him our worst. But from this innocent desire we mount a flight of many steps, until we come to the blackest hypocrisy, which transmutes brass into gold, glass into diamond, demon into angel. ”

“ Love is the strongest, the most irresistible, the most fatal of chemical affinities, and if potassium can extract oxygen from water, unite with it, light it, and make it burn with a bright flame and conflagration, consider the case of a man who first sees a woman and feels that she is precisely the atom with whom it is his irresistible destiny to unite, in order to kindle the flame of life. ”

“ Six years are still wanting till this numerical cataclysm. Who knows how many books will be written on the century dying out, how many prophecies on the century following it; what torrents of philosophy and ink to discuss the passing of the number 19 to that of 20?
Yet centuries only exist on paper, and after having made them ourselves, we adore and freely elect them to be our tyrants; only to deride the poor savages who, like us, make their own gods of wood and stone, fall on their knees before them and fear them. ”

“ If in an orchestra two instruments do not strike the [Pg 59] right notes, or if one goes too fast and the other too slow, it is a very small matter, and ends in a grimace upon the brow of the few who understand music.
But in marriage the slight discord is a wound in the heart of two beings, who had joined hands for a happy life; and there is always a cicatrix left, which, like the wounds of veterans, acts as a barometer to the least change of temperature, of moisture, or of an atmosphere charged with electricity. ”

“ I know very well that the most hateful and disagreeable problem of matrimony is the economic, but we cannot avoid nor solve it by shutting our eyes and disregarding it.
To love and be loved, to feel that our life is doubled and the horizons of the future enlarged, to drink from the eyes of a woman who is a perfect fountain of delight, to feel the doors of [Pg 176] paradise opened to us by her lips; and then all at once to be obliged to speak of income and dowry amidst such intoxicating pleasures ”

“ Love is centred in a most serious moment, one most pregnant with consequences to our whole lives, and a month or two more will only increase the dignity of the choice, and be a guarantee for the future. The honeymoon will shine all the longer above our horizon, the more we wait for it, with the poetry of desire and the ideality of hope. ”

“ But why among these mute and dead numbers do we find the extremes of human misery and blessedness? Why do we see the most noble sacrifices and meannesses, the most ignoble baseness and the highest ideality, bound together, with a cruel irony, by a malignant fate; why do we see angels and demons dancing together as though enchanted by some fantastic waltz?
For a very simple reason.
Because the happiness of marriage between an old man and a young [Pg 72] woman is nothing but an unstable and difficult balance granted to few. ”

“ The possibilities of misfortune are a hundred times greater for the woman than for the man, for she is always more ignorant of things genital than we are, and goes to the altar or municipality ignorant of all, dragged like a lamb to the slaughter-house.
At the present day, under the customs to which our society conforms, the only profession of woman is that of wife and mother; and to this calling she is instructed from infancy, not to be an exemplary wife or perfect mother, but, if possible, to find a husband, and that an ideal one, one who is handsome, young, and above all rich. ”

“ Those terrible energies, the fruit of the most intricate and sublime mechanism of our brains and nerves; into what do they transport themselves when they produce neither words, tears, lust, crime, matrimony, nor sin?
And yet these desires are many; they meet day and night in the crowded streets, in the whirl of railway carriages, in the dense crowd, in the solitary mountain paths; they plough through space, and if we were able to see them we should see the air lighted up by them as by the convulsive lightning of a tropical tempest. ”

“ What does it matter if such a man has no fortune, nor even a dowry with her whom he loves? He has faith in himself founded not upon pride, but upon the consciousness of knowledge and power; and this is more than a patrimony, for neither phylloxera, bank failures, nor shipwreck can assail it. It will last as long as life itself, and its results still longer.
But how many such men are there? With the experience of more than half a century I recommend all others [Pg 178] to use such foresight as is near akin to fear. ”

“ So each wrong has an echo, and the echo is doubled and increased a hundredfold, until the whole life becomes a torment, as if every nerve had tetanus, and every organ of body and soul was transformed into a tooth suffering spasms of pain. ”

“ If, in the first choice of love, [Pg 106] the man and woman do not approach each other with a tremor of holy fear; if their hands do not meet each other intoxicated with the touch; if the first kiss be not a passion, the first embrace a delirium, renounce forever the sweet and fond blessedness of the dual life.
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The physical sympathy between a man and woman is a road which may lead to paradise, but how often may one lose one’s self on the road before entering the field of affection and thought. ”

“ How unequal the comparison between those who live on an income of one thousand and three thousand francs! And, from the ever increasing fever of desires, the gnawing of all vanities, and the vanity of the classes, how these figures increase daily until they reach to ten, twenty, or thirty thousand francs!
And this is the reason that whilst [Pg 17] love alone should prompt to marriage, it is nearly always the last party in the contract, in which money judges and directs according to the need of it, with all the imperiousness of one who knows himself to be unconquerable. ”

“ No one, for 10 is a great tyrant, and 100 greater than 10.
Who has never felt the yoke of numbers one thousand and one hundred thousand? who is never in subjection to the tyranny of the million, both in language and mode of life? ”

“ And even if the long training in cynicism succeeds in silencing the cry of repressed dignity, there will come a day of domestic discord, of duels fought between husband and wife, with the weapon of bitter smiles, cruel compliments, and insinuations full of perfidy and venom, a day when the wife, striking her fan on the arm-chair with little convulsive blows, will cry: But in short, my good fellow, I keep you.... ”

“ Instead, we have repaired this great forgetfulness of the Creator, by placing numbers above everything else, and making them our masters in the world of living things and dead; we allow them to tyrannize over us in every act of our humble daily life, as well as in the pages of history and in dogmas of philosophy. If there have been sanguinary revolutions in order to obtain the liberty of the press, why as yet has no one rebelled against the tyranny of numbers? ”

“ In that monstrous pairing of the deer with the tortoise, the horse with the ox, the swallow with the goose, only locomotion is treated of; but for the race that a man and a woman must take through life it is a matter not only of velocity, but of environment and measure; of all that can modify senses, sentiments, and thoughts. To find a comparison which at all suits or pictures truthfully the tortures of two badly matched individuals who must live together, I can only take that of a fish and a bird condemned to live together. ”