248 THE LOVES OF THE PEOPLE. predominate in love, to prevent the exclusive influence of the material principle or lust, which, when it dominates by itself in love, degrades the human species, and debases it to the level of the brutes—below many of them. This vice is very frequent in civilized loves, especially in those of marriage, most of which, at the end of a few months, and perhaps even from the second day, sink into pure brutality, chances of copulation, excited by the domestic bond, without any illusion either of mind or hearta state very common among the mass of the people, where the married couple, cloyed, peevish, and quarreling through the day, are obliged to make it up in bed, because they are too poor and cramped to make separate arrangements, and because the brute spur of the senses triumphs a moment over conjugal satiety. Such is, however, the snare upon which philosophy speculates, in order to transform the most gracious of passions into a source of political deceptions, to excite the pullulation of the populace, and to drive poor men to labor by the sight of their ragged, hungry children. What a noble part is here accorded to love in exchange for the liberty of which they deprive it! Among the civilizees it is made a provider of cannon fodder, and among the barbarians, a persecutor of the weaker half of the human race; behold, under the names of seraglio and of marriage, the honorable functions assigned to love by our pretended lovers of liberty. Confounded by the vices of their amorous policy, they repel all idea of calculation upon the properties of free love. Ignorant and deluded about the proper employment of liberty, they wish it unlimited in commerce, whose crimes and frauds (elsewhere exposed) call on all sides for the curb of laws, and they deprive of all liberty, love, whose vast development in passional series would conduct to all virtues and marvels in social policy. What an unfortunate science are these theories of civilized liberties! what an instinct of opposition to every aim of nature and of truth! CHAPTER XX. EXTINCTION OF JEALOUSY BY THE CONDITIONS OF PHALANSTERIAN ASSOCIATION, IN CONNECTION WITH THE FREEDOM OF LOVE. "But jealousy has fled; his bars, his bolts, His withered sentinel, duenna sage! And all whereat the generous soul revolts, Which the stern dotard deemed he could engage, HEREUPON Some ferocious moralist, some New York editor, for instance, of a pious or political daily, living in scortatory amours with all the pretty women he can obtain, exclaims, Monstrous! Jealousy is the safeguard of faithful love; its torments are the just and inevitable punishment of the violated sanctity of the marriage bed. A love that is not subject to jealousy can be no other than mere lust, than the relation which the libertine sustains with the prostitute. No doubt, in those dens of public prostitution, in those Phalanxes where you wish to revive the orgies of Otaheite, jealousy will be extinguished for want of any virtue to be jealous of. Where all the women are unchaste, and the men glory in their lewdness, society will be polluted below the point where jealousy is possible. You need not construct your Phalanxes to see that. You may witness it already at the Five Points. That will do I think. I have never spoken with the gentlemen in question, but I dare say that either of them, or any other civilized moralist, will endorse the above, the name "Phalanx," perhaps omitted in this connection, for there are some who would have a moral and Puritan Phalanx. It is doubtless possible to create this as well as other moralities, whose beautiful operation civilization exhibits. 250 ANALYSIS OF JEALOUSY. The line of demarkation must be drawn between the Phalansterian, and the civilized Moralist, who has not comprehended the first principle of social science, to wit, Spontaneity versus Compression. I do not wish to brand men with hypocrisy because they happen to be unfortunately educated, gangrened with prejudices, stupid, or sick; I have no personal enmities among associationists, but I wish to clear away that confusion of opinions and of action which has hitherto compromised the efficiency of our propagandism and of our practical efforts; to reveal men to themselves and to each other, and to lead those who comprehend the essential divinity of the passions, and the supreme order and harmony resulting from their full development through all the degrees of their scale in the passional series; to find each other out, and to take whatever steps are now possible toward the realization of the Phalanx. I take pleasure in acknowledging the substantial integrity of the writings of Henry James, of John S. Dwight, of Albert Brisbane, and Dr. C. J. Hempel among our American friends, although considerations entirely personal may prevent them from taking openly the same ground as myself. Let us answer the defense of jealousy ascribed to some champions of civilized morality. Jealousy, so far from being the safeguard of pure love, reveals the impure, selfish, and tyrannical character of that love. It implies, 1. a distrust of the person beloved. 2. Fear or hatred of the party suspected of sharing his or her love. 3. The ignoble feeling of holding the person beloved as a chattel or subject of material property. 4. The selfishness of desiring to retain this property exclusively, at the expense of the freedom of its subject, by the sacrifice of his or her passional affinities and the restriction of his or her development and happiness thereby, to the single point of affinity which the person jealous can supply. 5. Want of self-respect, or of the conscious spiritual power to retain the affection of the other person, which alone confers the right to use his or her body. One who is jealous is prepared for real swindling, or open theft, and kidnapping of the worst sort, since it invades not VARIETY EVERY WHERE NECESSARY. 251 merely the property, but the personality, or spontaneity of another. 6. Fundamental ignorance of the spiritual or natural law of reaction, which teaches that any control or compression of the elastic spontaneity of passion, determines in that passion an opposite tendency or impulse. Hence, many lovers have, through the tyranny and constraint which jealousy prompts, lost that affection which they might otherwise have retained. 7. Ignorance of the spiritual or natural fact, that individual beings, by that very difference which constitutes their individuality, cannot come into conflict with each others' spiritual rights. "True love in this differs from gold and clay, That to divide is not to take away." The loves with which two persons are beloved by a third are different as the characters and temperaments of these two persons. The love and understanding of one may reflect a light upon the nature of the other, but if this other be also a subject of passional affinity, that affinity will be strengthened rather than weakened by the relations of analogy or of contrast which it may bear to the other. Love, like the other faculties of the soul, requires for its vigor and permanence in action, the charm of variety, the alternation of its objects; the eye is fatigued with resting constantly, even on green, and the most fascinating volume becomes a stupid bore, if we must keep reading it always, instead of frequently distracting our thoughts by other books and objects of interest. Hence, monotony, monogamy, or exclusive constancy, are for love a true suicide, and could be endured by no one, were it not for the long absences and passional calms in which love sleeps, and the beloved person becomes nearly indifferent or irksome in the ordinary civilized marriage and isolated household. Variety is indeed less essential to the heart than to the mind and the senses. It is true that the blue of the firmament, and the green of vegetation never weary the eye, nor the murmurs of the forest and of the waters our ear; and that nature is so admirably adapted to us that some are well content to remain for life in the valley that saw their birth, while others lose all 252 CONSTANCY SUSTAINED BY ALTERNATIONS. perception of what has once been lovely to them unless their passional dominant of variety be gratified, when the same creation under new aspects reveals its pristine splendor. The filial, the parental, the conjugial, and even the friendly affection of the heart, may, even in the most restless organizations, remain ever warm for the same persons. I see each evening, with the same pleasure as at first, my sweet little cousin Caroline nestle in her mother's lap by the fireside, while the most gorgeous papering, or splendid service of plate, soon meets my eye unregarded and indifferent, and the wittiest pleasantry or most profound truth, would become insufferably tedious if thus repeated. Wherever affection rules, magnetic circuits are formed between beings, from each of whose personalities the infinite life is mirrored under a new aspect. It is God that we love in them, therefore, they do not weary us, but the more we love them the more we are enriched by love. While we thus gratefully confess the basis of constant attachments, let us not forget that even the heart, though less indebted than the mind and the senses to opportune changes, is no less grateful for them and returns with fresh ardor to its pivotal objects after temporary absence and diversion. The constancy of love is after all really a periodicity. Were it not for the tacit admission of many transient spiritual infidelities, monogamy would be so universally intolerable as to find no partisans. So far from fearing that the place I have earned and hold by right of spiritual affinity in another's heart, can be taken away from me by the occupation of another, I spontaneously welcome with friendliest sympathy, with the prophetic instinct of some noble and divine qualities-another man, toward whom I see the affection of the woman I love and who loves me, extend itself. So feels the unsophisticated Indian: far from vile jealousy of merit, he invites to share the bed of his favorite spouse, the man whose noble acts and bearing win his admiration. It is not nature that makes us afraid to lose the love we possess by the development of new affinities in the person beloved; it is not nature, it is the false |