Читать книгу The Physical Life of Woman: Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother - George H. Napheys - Страница 28

Table of Contents

It has a divided nature. As we have an immortal soul, but a body of clay; as the plant roots itself in decaying earth, but spreads its flowers in glorious sunlight—so love has a physiological and a moral nature. It is rooted in that unconscious law of life which bids us perpetuate our kind; which guards over the conservation of life; which enforces, with ceaseless admonition, that first precept which God gave to man before the gates of Eden had been closed upon him: 'Be thou fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.' Nothing but a spurious delicacy, or an ignorance of facts, can prevent our full recognition that love looks to marriage, and marriage to offspring, as a natural sequence.

Do we ask proofs of this? We have them in abundance. Those unfortunate beings who are chosen by Oriental custom to guard the seraglios undergo a mutilation which disqualifies them from becoming parents. Soon all traces of passion, all regard for the other sex, all sentiments of love, totally disappear. The records of medicine contain not a few cases where disease had rendered it necessary to remove the ovaries from women. At once a change took place in voice, appearance, and mind. They spoke like men, a slender beard commenced on their faces, a masculine manner was conspicuous in all their motions, and every thought of sexual love passed away for ever. These are the results in every case. What do they signify? Undoubtedly that the passion of love is dependent upon the capacity of having offspring, and that such was the intention of Nature in implanting in our bosom this all-powerful sentiment.

But this is not all. Nature, as beneficent to those who obey her precepts as she is merciless to those who disregard them, has added to this sentiment of love a physical pleasure in its gratification—an honourable and proper pleasure, which none but the hypocrite or the ascetic will affect to condemn, none but the coarse or the lewd will regard as the object of love. There is, indeed, a passion which is the love of the body. We call it by its proper name of lust. There is another emotion, for which the rich tongue of the ancient Greeks had a word, to which we have nothing to correspond. Call it, if you will, Platonic love, and define it to be an exalted friendship. But understand that neither the one nor the other is love, in the true sense of the word, and that both are inferior to it.

Does the father, watching, with moistened eyes, his child at its mother's breast; does the husband, bending with solicitude over the sick-bed of his wife; does the wife, clinging to her husband through evil report and good report, through broken fortunes and failing health, indicate no loftier emotion than lust, no warmer sentiment than friendship? What ignorance, what perversity is so gross as not to perceive something here nobler than either? Do you say that such scenes are, alas, rare? We deny it. We see them daily in the streets; we meet them daily in our rounds. Admitted, by our calling, to the sacred precincts of many houses in the trying hours of sickness and death, we speak advisedly, and know that this is the prevailing meaning of love in domestic life.

A warm, rich affection blesses the one who gives and the one who receives. Character developes under it as the plant beneath the sunlight. Happiness is an unknown word without it. Love and marriage are the only normal conditions of life. Without them, both man and woman for ever miss the best part of themselves. They suffer more, they sin more, they perish sooner. These are not hasty assertions. As a social law, let it be well understood that science pronounces that