Of all the brutes enumerated in the human branch of zoology the deliberate bachelor is the most unreasonable and selfish. Unreasonable, because he voluntarily deprives himself of connubial bliss, domestic comforts, and the prospect of being cheered and cared for in his old age by a family of loving children. Selfish, because at present the bread-winning arrangements are almost entirely framed for man’s convenience alone, wherefore it is his duty to support a wife.
Masculine selfishness, however, is not exclusively responsible for the rapid increase of bachelordom. The women themselves are largely at fault—in two ways. The modern tendency of concentrating population in large cities makes domestic life a much more expensive affair than it is in smaller towns or in rural districts; and at the same time women are gradually invading every sphere of masculine employment, thus reducing wages by competition and making it more and more difficult for a man to earn an income which allows him to marry. This aspect of the question, once before alluded to, is one which the advocates of Woman’s Rights are too apt to ignore. For the benefit of poor young girls, and widows, and old maids, it is, indeed, but just that various employments adapted to female hands should be thrown open to them and properly remunerated; but if the effect of this is simply and constantly to increase the number of single poor women, by making marriage impossible, what is gained by the change? A certain amount of misery is inevitable in the world; and it seems better that it should be distributed where it will not imperil the popularity and possibility of marriage.
After all, self-supporting women must always be the exception, not the rule; for it is the destiny of the vast majority of women to be wives; and regarding these even Mr. Mill admits “it is not ... a desirable custom that the wife should contribute by her labour to the income of the family.” Now surely it would be most absurd, as some “strong-minded” women are trying to do, to arrange the educational scheme of all women so as to benefit the exceptional women who are excluded from matrimony. A thousand times more important is it to change woman’s education so as to enable her to look after her household affairs. It is by neglecting to do this that women supply the second cause for the increasing prevalence of Bachelors. Every man is expected to learn his trade properly before marriage; but woman’s proper occupation—the art of taking care of home and making it a paradise, is commonly supposed to be a thing that can be learned easily enough after marriage. Even when a woman is so wealthy that she is not obliged to do any housework at all, she should, like a ship’s captain, learn all about the duties of subordinates, else she will be unable to command them properly. A captain who displayed ignorance on any point before his sailors would lose their respect and attitude of prompt obedience; and it has been suggested that one reason why American women, especially, have so much trouble with their servants, is because they know so little about domestic economy that the servants, ignorant as they are, become arrogant because of their superior knowledge.
On the subject of woman’s sphere, Herbert Spencer has written words which should be hung in golden letters in every schoolroom: “When we remember that up from the lowest savagery civilisation has, among other results, brought about an increasing exemption of women from bread-winning labour, and in the highest societies they have become most restricted to domestic duties and the rearing of children; we may be struck by the anomaly that at the present time restriction to indoor occupations has come to be regarded as a grievance, and a claim is made to free competition with men in all outdoor occupations.... Any extensive change in the education of women, made with the view of fitting them for business and professions, would be mischievous. If women comprehended all that is contained in the domestic sphere, they would ask no other. If they could see all that is implied in the right education of children, to a full conception of which no man has yet risen, much less any woman, they would seek no higher function” (Principles of Sociology, vol. i. § 340).
When every woman has learned how to cultivate flowers and vegetables in her domestic garden at the same time, the millennium will have arrived, and the word Bachelor be found only in Dictionaries of Antiquities.
Women are sometimes held responsible in still another way for the continuance of Bachelors in single boredom, viz. by refusing their Love and breaking their hearts. But surely, as the shepherdess in Don Quixote has so eloquently shown, it does not at all follow that if a man falls in Love with a woman, she must necessarily fall in Love with him; and if she does not love him, it is her duty not to marry him.
Besides, a broken heart is a very rare article in this world, and every nation has discovered a peculiar local remedy for it: the Spaniards by stabbing the girl who broke it; the Italians by annihilating the rival; the Germans by soaking the fragments in Rhine wine; the Englishmen by a change of air; and ultimately they all follow the example of the Frenchman who, on the day following the catastrophe, casts his eyes about for a new charmer; or, if they do not, but like a snail withdraw into their shell for the rest of their life, abusing all women as heartless, they are bigger fools than they look. What would you say of a fisherman who went out for a day’s sport and returned after an hour because the first trout that nibbled at the bait escaped?
It is the happy privilege of every Bachelor to have loved fully and deeply once in his life; but if his passion is not appreciated, it is his duty to try again; for, even as a stolen kiss is not a real kiss because it lacks the thrill of mutuality, so Love is not Love
True, La Rochefoucauld says that “The pleasure of love is in loving;” and Shelley echoes the same sentiment in his Prometheus—
Yet neither the English poet nor the French essayist appears to have fathomed the full depth of the problem. It is as incorrect to say, “the pleasure of love is in loving,” as to say, the pleasure of Love is in being loved. To be loved by one I do not love is a matter of complete indifference, except so far as my Pride or Pity may be involved. To love where I am not loved, or am left in uncertainty, is more of anguish than of delight. To attain the highest ecstacy of Love I must both be in Love and able to say at the same time, “she loves me.” Reciprocity is not only “that which alone gives stability to love,” as Coleridge remarks, but that without which consummate Love is impossible.
Apparent exceptions occur only when the illusion of being loved is so vividly kept up by the imagination as to counterfeit reality; as in the case of Eleonore, who “became so intoxicated with her Love that she saw it double and mistook her own feeling for that of both” (Dr. Brandes).
Therefore a Bachelor who has been unsuccessful in his first or second Love has never enjoyed the highest bliss a human soul can attain, and is bound to try again. Nor need he ever despair. There are a thousand Juliets in the world for every man, and all he needs is the good luck to meet the one adapted to him: for she is his as soon as found; though she may at first have the “cunning to be strange.”
Though it is man’s duty and destiny to get married, yet the concurrent testimony of several famous authors appears to indicate that there is one thing which excuses celibacy, and may even make it a virtue—and that thing is the possession of Genius. Bacon claims that “certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men.” A more modern philosopher, Schopenhauer, expresses himself to the same effect: “For men of higher intellectual avocation, for poets, philosophers, for all those, in general, who devote themselves to science and art, celibacy is preferable to married life, because the conjugal yoke prevents them from creating great works.”
The same counsel is indirectly given in Moore’s Life of Byron, where he argues that “In looking back through the lives of the most illustrious poets—the class of intellect in which the characteristic features of genius are, perhaps, most strongly marked—we shall find that with scarcely one exception, from Homer down to Lord Byron, they have been, in their several degrees, restless and solitary spirits, with minds wrapped up, like silkworms, in their own tasks, either strangers or rebels to domestic ties, and bearing about with them a deposit for posterity in their souls, to the jealous watching and enriching of which almost all other thoughts and considerations have been sacrificed.”
“Either strangers or rebels to domestic ties.” Among the strangers, Moore names Newton, Gassendi, Galileo, Descartes, Bayle, Locke, Leibnitz, and Hume, to whom may be added Kant, Schopenhauer, Handel, Beethoven, Schubert, Plato, and many others.
Quite as large is the list of “rebels to domestic ties” among men of poetic genius. Says Moore: “The coincidence is no less striking than saddening that, on the list of married poets who have been unhappy in their homes, there should already be found four such illustrious names as Dante, Milton, Shakspere, and Dryden.” “The poet Dante, a wanderer away from wife and children, passed the whole of a restless life in nursing his immortal dream of Beatrice.” “The dates of the birth of his [Shakspere’s] children, compared with that of his removal from Stratford, the total omission of his wife’s name in the first draft of his will, and the bitter sarcasm of the bequest by which he remembers her afterwards—all prove beyond a doubt his separation from the lady early in life, and his unfriendly feeling towards her at the close.” “Milton’s first wife, it is well known, ran away from him within a month after their marriage, ‘disgusted,’ says Phillips, ‘with his spare diet and hard study,’ and his later domestic misery is universally known.” “The poet Young, with all his parade of domestic sorrows, was, it appears, a neglectful husband and a harsh father.”
Sir Walter Scott remarks, in his Life of Dryden: “The wife of one who is to gain his livelihood by poetry, or by any labour (if any there be) equally exhausting, must either have taste enough to relish her husband’s performances, or good-nature sufficiently to pardon his infirmities. It was Dryden’s misfortune that Lady Elizabeth had neither the one nor the other; and I dismiss the disagreeable subject by observing, that on no one occasion when a sarcasm against matrimony could be introduced, has our author failed to season it with such bitterness, as spoke of an inward consciousness of domestic misery.”
Richard Wagner when a young man married an actress, “pretty as a picture”; but she appears to have had little sympathy with his ambitions, so he lived apart from her. Subsequently he was very happy with Cosima, the daughter of Liszt, who did appreciate his genius. Liszt himself, after living some years with the Countess D’Agoult in Italy, separated from her. The girl whom Haydn married soon turned out a shrew, who had no sympathy whatever with his musical genius. Berlioz was one of the most passionate of lovers: “Oh, that I could find her, the Juliet, the Ophelia that my heart calls to. That I could drink in the intoxication of that mingled joy and sadness that only true love knows! Could I but rest in her arms one autumn evening, rocked by the north wind on some wild heath, and sleeping my last, sad sleep.” A few years after these rapturous effusions he arranged a séparation à l’aimable from his wife, his former flame, and left her to die in solitude and misery.
Handel, after all, was the wisest of the composers. He was never in Love, and had an aversion to marriage. In 1707 he went to Lübeck to compete for the place of successor to the famous organist Buxtehude; but when he found that one of the conditions of obtaining the place was the compulsory privilege of marrying the daughter of his predecessor, he got alarmed and fled precipitately.
Besides the disposition to wrap up their minds, like silkworms, in their own tasks, Poverty and the extreme difficulty of finding congenial companions appear to be the principal causes that have tended to make men of genius strangers or rebels to domestic ties.
There is an old saying that if Poverty comes in by one window, Love goes out by another. But Poverty, unfortunately, seems to be an almost necessary companion of Genius, at least in the early stages of its career, till the inertia natural to the human brain has been overcome. It is so much easier for the richest soils to grow a luxuriant crop of weeds than a useful crop which needs constant care, that there can be no doubt that wealth is responsible for the loss of much Genius to the world. There have been men of genius in whom the creative impulse was so strong, and the pleasure of creating so sweet—Goethe, Schopenhauer, Byron, etc.—that they needed not the goad of hunger; but as a rule a well-filled pocketbook does not encourage the habit of “infinite painstaking,” which is essential to Genius. But if a genius marries while he is poor, he will have to waste his time on rapid, ephemeral work to support his family; which will leave him neither leisure nor energy for work of enduring value. Hence he should either not marry at all or wait till he has an assured income. If money-marriages are ever justifiable, they are in such cases; and rich girls should make it the one object of life to capture a man of Genius, so as to give him leisure for immortal work. It appears, indeed, as if a sort of Conjugal Pride of this description were becoming fashionable; for one hears every month of some author or artist marrying an heiress. This is certainly the easiest way for a woman to become immortal; and what is a coquette’s gratified ephemeral vanity, compared with the proud consciousness of passing down to posterity linked with an immortal name, and of having helped to make that name immortal by removing the necessity for bread-winning drudgery!
Furthermore, there can be no doubt that the number of persons able to read a work of genius at sight, as it were, is growing larger every year. Great men do not have to wait for recognition so long as formerly, and this enables them to neglect ephemeral drudgery in favour of creative work.
As there has been an unparalleled unfolding and increase in feminine charms, both of body and mind, within the last half-century, it is not too optimistic to hope that the other source of domestic difficulties among men of genius—the extreme difficulty of finding a congenial companion—will also be removed, in course of time. Men of genius, as Moore remarks, have such rich resources of thinking within themselves, that “the society of those less gifted than themselves becomes often a restraint and burden to which not all the charms of friendship or even love can reconcile them.” To be completely happy a Genius should accordingly have a wife as remarkable among women for the womanly qualities of receptivity, grace, and sympathy, as he is among men for the manly quality of creative energy. Yet if it is so difficult for an ordinary man to meet his ordinary Juliet, how much more so will it ever be for an extraordinary man to find an extraordinary Juliet!
Thanks to their passion for Beauty, men of Genius are too prone to follow the impulse of the moment and marry a pretty doll, in the hope of being able to educate her into an attractive companion. Unluckily it rarely happens that the minds of these beauties are “wax to receive and marble to retain.” Pretty girls are commonly lazy—spoiled by the thought that their beauty atones for everything, and regardless of the future when this apology for indolence will have lost its persuasiveness.
Among the objections to the celibacy of Genius, the strongest is supplied by the laws of heredity—the desirability of having their superior mental qualities—often associated with corresponding physical beauty—transmitted to the next generation. Genius, it is true, depends on so many fortuitous circumstances that cases of direct transmission from father to son are rare enough; and Mr. Galton’s researches show that “the ablest child of one gifted pair is not likely to be as gifted as the ablest of all the children of very many mediocre pairs;” and that “the more exceptional the gift, the more exceptional will be the good fortune of a parent who has a son who equals, and still more if he has a son who overpasses him.” Nevertheless, it remains true that “the children of a gifted pair are much more likely to be gifted than the children of a mediocre pair.” Just as a professor’s son is born with a brain naturally more plastic and receptive than that of a young savage or peasant, so the children of a Genius who has not shattered his health by overwork or dissipation are likely to be of a mental calibre superior to that of an ordinary professor’s son. So that it is the duty of a man of genius to get married even at a sacrifice of personal happiness—provided that sacrifice is not so great as to interfere with his intellectual duties.
If we take the word Genius in the Kantian, imaginative, or æsthetic sense, it may be said that all Geniuses are amorous; and that the degree of their greatness may as a rule be measured by their susceptibility to feminine charms. The most poetic part of the Scriptures is the Song of Solomon with its glowing pictures of feminine charms. Homer, though he lived long before the age of Romantic Love, spent his life in describing the mischief caused by Helen’s beauty. Among the Roman poets the most original was also the most amorous. As Professor Sellar remarks of Ovid, “In the most creative periods of English literature he seems to have been more read than any other ancient poet, not even excepting Virgil; and it was on the most creative minds, such as those of Marlowe, Spenser, Shakspere, Milton, and Dryden, that be acted most powerfully ... and although the spirit of antiquity is better understood now than it was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, yet in the capacity of appreciating works of brilliant fancy we can claim no superiority over the centuries which produced Spenser, Shakspere, and Milton, nor over those which produced the great Italian, French, and Flemish painters,” to whom Ovid supplied such abundant material.
Coming to more recent times, we have seen that Dante, the first modern poet, was also the first modern lover, rarely if ever surpassed in rapturous adoration. How the greatest of the Spanish bards was influenced by feminine beauty may be inferred from the glowing descriptions of it and its influence in Don Quixote; and as for Shakspere, even had he not written Romeo and Juliet, his early poems alone would prove him to have been in his youth every inch a lover; for no one, not even with Shakspere’s imagination, could have painted such unique feelings with his realistic and infallible touch, unless he had felt them more than once and had them indelibly branded on his heart’s memory.
In the galaxy of German poets Goethe ranks first, owing to his manysidedness. Yet he lacked the very highest of literary gifts—wit; and in this respect as well as through his deeper insight into Modern Love, Heine must be rated higher than Goethe. Heine’s personal loves are but thinly covered over by the clear amber of his lyrics, in which they are imbedded. Goethe’s loves have become proverbial for their number—Kätchen, Friederike, Lili, Charlotte, Christiane, etc. Schiller, Wieland, Bürger, Bodenstedt, and the lesser lights might all have appended a D.L., or Doctor of Love, to their names.
Shelley, Mr. Hamilton tells us, “had an irresistible natural tendency to fall in love”; and Byron, speaking of one of his loves, says, “I had and have been attached fifty times since, yet I recollect all we said to each other, all our caresses, her features, my restlessness, sleeplessness,” etc. And in the next chapter on “Genius in Love,” we shall meet with numerous similar cases of English, German, and French men of genius constantly in Love.
To account for this amorous propensity of Genius is easy enough. Genius means creative power allied with a taste for the Beautiful. This taste may be gratified by the contemplation of the beauties of Nature—the creative power by reproducing them on canvas or manuscript. But Nature’s masterpiece is lovely woman, who not only yields the highest gratification of artistic taste, but inspires Love: and what is Love but a creative impulse—a desire to link one’s name and personality, in future generations, with this embodiment of consummate human beauty?
Shakspere’s
suggests another reason why men of Genius are eternally involved in Love-affairs. The lover becomes infatuated not with the girl he sees but with the girl he imagines, using her features as a mere sketch to be filled up ad libitum—
To imagine a feeling is to entertain it; for an imagined impression revives the same cerebral processes that were aroused by the original sense impression. In ordinary minds the remembered image of a girl’s lovely features, the echo of her sweet voice, are much fainter than the original sight and sound; whereas the imagination of genius paints a face and recalls a voice as vividly as if they were present: so that here to think of Love is to be in Love—pro tempore.
Besides his refined taste and vivid imagination—which retouches every defective negative—it is the natural depth of his emotions that urges a Genius to fall in Love with every lovely woman. Passions are like dogs: the big ones need more food than the little ones. A peasant cannot experience the subtle and multitudinous emotions that fill the heart of an artist, a statesman, a scientific discoverer; much less the complex group of ethereal emotions that make up Romantic Love. The higher we rise in the intellectual scale, the more varied, complex, and deep are the emotional groups which delight and torment the soul. As Genius represents the climax of intellectual power, Love the climax of emotional intensity, is it wonderful that there should be an affinity between the two? The higher a mountain peak the more does it attract every passing cloud and clasp it to its breast—hoping—vainly hoping—to warm a heart chilled by its isolation above the rest of the world.
As men of genius are more prone to love than common sluggish minds, it is a lucky fact, for the future growth of Romantic Love, that Genius grows more and more abundant—pace the laudatores temporis acti who ignorantly compare the number of living geniuses with all those that have ever been—as if they had all lived at one epoch. It may even be granted that there have been epochs that had more geniuses than we have at present; but of genius there is more to-day than ever in the world’s history. We see almost daily in ephemeral periodicals lines and epigrams worthy of the highest genius, written by men whose names perhaps will never be known. Shaksperes, indeed, will always tower Mont Blanc-like over all other peaks; but if summits of the second magnitude seem less imposing to-day than formerly, it is because the general level of creativeness has been raised a few thousand feet. The mountains that enclose the Engadine valley, though 10,000 to 12,000 feet in height, seem only half as high, because the valley from which you see them lies at an altitude of 6000 feet.
Were there not a natural affinity between Genius and Love, authors and artists would cultivate Love as the source of their deepest inspiration. For if it makes a temporary poet of every peasant, what must be its effect in exalting the poet’s inborn power!
Love
and first
The Love of men of Genius, as distinguished from that of ordinary mortals, is characterised by five traits—Precocity, Extravagant Ardour, Fickleness, Multiplicity, and Fictitiousness—which must be briefly considered in succession.
Turgenieff makes the narrator of one of his novelettes speak of his first Love as having been experienced at the age of six. That this is not a poetic license is abundantly proved by historic facts. “Dante, we know, was but nine years old,” says Moore, “when, at a May-day festival, he saw and fell in love with Beatrice; and Alfieri, who was himself a precocious lover, considers such early sensibility to be an unerring sign of a soul formed for the fine arts.... Canova used to say that he perfectly well remembered having been in love when but five years old.”
Byron’s first Love was at the age of eight. Concerning this he wrote at twenty-five: “How the deuce did all this occur so early? Where could it originate? I certainly had no sexual ideas for years afterwards; and yet my misery, my love for that girl [Mary Duff] were so violent that I sometimes wonder if I have ever been really attached since.’”since.’” Of his second Love-affair Byron says: “My first dash into poetry was as early as 1800. It was the ebullition of a passion for my first cousin, Margaret Parker, one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings. I have long forgotten the verses, but it would be difficult for me to forget her—her dark eyes [Byron had a passion for black eyes]—her long eyelashes—her completely Greek cast of face and figure. I was then about twelve—she rather older, perhaps a year. She died about a year or two afterwards.”
Burns was somewhat older when Love and poetry were born in his soul simultaneously: “You know our country custom,” he writes, “of coupling a man and woman together as partners in the labours of the harvest. In my fifteenth summer my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger than myself. My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her justice in that language, but you know the Scottish idiom. She was a bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass. In short, she, altogether unwittingly to herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which, in spite of acid disappointment, gin-horse prudence, and bookworm philosophy, I hold to be the first of human joys here below.”
Heine’s first boyish love appears to have been a girl who died as a child, and is alluded to in his Pictures of Travel as the “little Veronica.” His second love was a most extraordinary case of Love at Sight. It was at a school examination, Robert Proelsz relates, “and Harry was just declaiming Schiller’s Taucher, when the lovely girl entered the room by the side of her father, who was one of the inspectors. The boy stuttered, gazed with large eyes on the beautiful figure, mechanically repeated the verse he had just recited—‘And the King his lovely daughter beckoned’—and was unable to proceed. In vain the teacher prompted him, the poor fellow’s senses failed him, and he fell on the floor in a swoon.”
Of another early visitation of sudden Love he gives an account in his posthumous memoirs. The girl on this occasion was the red-haired Sefchen, the sheriff’s daughter, who, when she was only eight years old, had witnessed the mysterious burial of her grandfather’s sword, which had done its duty a hundred times, and which some years later her aunt had dug out and secreted in the garret. “One day, when we were alone, I begged Sefchen to show me that curiosity. She willingly complied, went into the room, and soon came out with an enormous sword, which she swung vigorously despite her weak arms, while with a roguish, threatening tone she sang—
I replied in the same tone, ‘I will not kiss the naked sword, I will kiss the red-haired Sefchen;’ and as she could not defend herself, for fear of hurting me with the fatal steel, she had to let me boldly put my arms round her slender waist and kiss her defiant lips.”
Berlioz had his first passion at twelve, Rousseau at eleven. “When I saw Mlle. Goton,” writes Rousseau, “I could see nothing else, all my senses were in confusion.... In her presence I was agitated, and trembled.... If Mlle. Goton had ordered me to throw myself into the fire, I believe I would have obeyed her instantly.”
As old age is in many respects a second childhood, it seems natural that men of genius should appear “precocious” in this belated sense too. The case of Berlioz is one of the most extraordinary on record. The girl who was his first love at twelve he saw again at sixty-one: “I recognised the divine stateliness of her step; but, oh heavens! how changed she was! her complexion faded, her hair gray. And yet at the sight of her my heart did not feel one moment’s indecision; my whole soul went out to its idol, as though she were still in her dazzling loveliness.... Balzac, nay, Shakspere himself, the great painter of the passions, never dreamt of such a thing.” And in a letter to her he writes, “I have loved you, I still love you, I shall always love you. And yet I am sixty-one years of age.... Oh, madame, madame, I have but one aim left in the world—that of obtaining your affection.”
Another composer who had a passion at sixty was “Papa” Haydn—poor Haydn, whose wife led him such a terrible life, and used his manuscripts for curl-papers. Concerning her he wrote, “She is always in a bad temper, and does not care whether I am a shoemaker or an artist.” Indeed, she had never been his true Love, but was only taken in lieu of her younger sister, whom Haydn adored, but who refused him and became a nun. At sixty, however, in London, he had the fortune, or misfortune, to fall in Love again, with a widow named Schrolter, concerning whom he wrote, “She was a very attractive woman, and still handsome, though over sixty; and had I been free I should certainly have married her.”
Goethe, in his old days, fell in Love with Minna Herzlieb, a bookseller’s daughter. “In the sonnets addressed to her,” says Lewes, “and in the novel of Elective Affinities, may be read the fervour of his passion, and the strength with which he resisted.”
Rousseau’s last Love forms one of the most romantic episodes in his life, concerning which nothing was known until a few years ago when the French historian, R. Chantslauze, discovered in a bookstall the MS. of a letter by Rousseau to Lady Cecile Hobart, dated 1770, when Rousseau was almost sixty years of age. He appears to have met this lady in England at the time when he was writing his Confessions. She had first won his affection by her admiration of his works; and in course of his long and hyper-sentimental letter he remarks, “Why is it that I have never felt any other true love but that for the products of my own fancy? Wherein lies the reason, Cecile? In these fancied beings themselves; they made me dissatisfied with everything else. For forty years I have carried in my mind the image of her I adore. I love her with a constancy, an ecstasy inexpressible.... I had no hope of ever meeting her, had given up the eager search for her, when you appeared before me. It was folly, infatuation, if you like, that made me surrender myself for a moment to the magic of your sight; but I could not but say to myself: There she is! No other woman ever inspired that thought in me. And stranger still is it that I could hear you speak without changing my opinion. What the ideal of my heart thought, you spoke it to my ears.”
If Bacon did not write the plays of Shakspere, it was the biggest mistake of his life. Second among his mistakes must rank the opinion expressed in the following sentence: “You may observe that amongst all the great and worthy persons (whereof the memory remaineth, either ancient or modern), there is not one that hath been transported to the mad degree of love.”
If the advocates of the Baconian theory had as much sense of humour as they stimulate in other people, they would see that such a sentence—and there are others like it in Bacon—could not by any possibility have been penned by the author of As You Like It, Venus and Adonis, or Romeo and Juliet.
Dante was by no means the only “great and worthy person” before Bacon’s day who had been “transported to the mad degree of love”; and since Bacon’s day the word Genius has become almost synonymous with the capacity for lovers’ madness.
Yet there is a grain of truth in Bacon’s sentence as it stands. He evidently had in mind chiefly the ancient “great and worthy persons”; and of these, as we have seen, but one or two had even a vague presentiment of what was to be some day the moral lever of the universe. Bacon probably had a dim perception of the fact that the ancients knew nothing of passionate Love, of the imaginative type; but he did not quite succeed in grasping the idea.
As regards Modern Genius, Bacon’s assertion is so far from the truth, that it is quite safe to reverse it and say that it is doubtful whether any one but a man of genius is capable of that intense ardour of feeling which marks the climax of Love; doubtful whether even Romeo at his age could have felt a passion such as Shakspere’s glowing imagination painted. Love is based, not on what a man sees with his eyes, but on the mental image retouched by the imagination; and a man of genius, being a virtuoso of the imagination, can adorn his ideal of love with ornaments unknown to ordinary mortals; whence it follows that the passion inspired by his more vivid and beautiful image must be more intense than the passion inspired by less perfect visions in common, sluggish brains. And since artistic thought can no more crystallise into verse or epigram without the warm glow of emotion than a flower can grow into a thing of beauty without its daily bath of warm sunshine, it is fortunate that Genius implies a natural susceptibility to the æsthetic passion of Love.
Fortunate also for the prospects of Romantic Love is the fact that Genius is king in its realms. Had not the sacred mysteries of Love been revealed to the world in the glowing language of poetry, it would probably have remained a thing unknown to ordinary mortals for centuries to come; even as the beauties of Nature, for which common minds have no eyes, would have remained undetected, had not the poets and artists disclosed the bonds that connect them with human sympathies.
As all the quotations from poets given in this chapter (and in that on Hyperbole) practically bear witness to the exceptional ardour of Love in men of genius, only two cases need be cited as specimens—those of Burns and Heine. Gilbert Burns, the brother of the poet, writes that the latter “was constantly the victim of some fair enslaver. The symptoms of his passion were often such as nearly to equal those of the celebrated Sappho. I never, indeed, knew that he ‘fainted, sunk, and died away’; but the agitations of his mind and body exceeded anything of the kind I ever knew in real life.”
Heine has given evidence in his letters as well as his poems that few even of his equals have ever felt the power of love so profoundly. It is well to emphasise this fact; for there are not a few who fancy that, like Petrarch, Heine embodied in his songs not the real feelings of his heart but fictitious emotions depicted to gratify poetic ambition. He did no such thing. His Love-poetry is the echo of real passion, of his first and only true Love, which cast a shadow over his whole life, and goaded him into bitter reflections more than a decade after its sad ending. He loved his cousin Molly, and writes to a friend, after an absence from home: “Rejoice with me! rejoice with me! in four weeks I shall see Molly. With her my muse will also return.” The muse did return, but in a different way from that which he had anticipated; with a smile in her face of cynicism, mockery, melancholy, which never again left her. “She loves me not!” he writes, in 1816. “Softly, dear Christian, pronounce that last word softly. In the first words lies the eternal living heaven, but in the last lies eternal living hell. If you could only see your friend’s countenance, how pale he looks, how bewildered, how insane, your righteous indignation at my long silence would vanish soon; better still were it if you could have one glance at my soul—then would you really learn to love me.” “I have seen her again—
Hui! do you not shudder, Christian! Well may you shudder even as I do. Burn the letter, the Lord have mercy on my soul. I did not write these words. There on my chair sits a pale man; he wrote them. And this because it is midnight. Oh heavens! Madness cannot sin!”
“There, there, do not breathe so heavily, there I have just built a lovely card-house, and on the top of it I stand and hold her in my arms!... But indeed you can hardly fancy, dear Christian, how delightful, how lovely my ruin appears. Far from her, to carry burning desires in my heart for years, is torture infernal; but to be near her and yet oft sigh in vain, whole endless weeks, for my only delight, the sight of her and—and—O! O! O! Christian! that is enough to make the purest, most pious soul flare up in wild, delirious ungodliness!”
And the object of this passion, who might have saved a poet’s soul and changed him from a negative ferment into a positive agent of culture? She was the daughter of a millionaire, who, of course, in German fashion, had to marry into another rich family. To marry a poor poet would have been deemed a terrible mésalliance. Yet was he not a millionaire too—of ideas, as she was in beauty, her father in money? But that is reasoning à la Millennium.
What a comedy it will be to future generations, entirely emancipated from mediæval puerilities, to read that two such Kings in the realm of Genius as Schubert and Beethoven, could not marry their true loves on account of differences in social position—rank and money!
We are accustomed to look down on China and Chinese culture. But China anticipated Europe by several centuries in the discovery of gunpowder; and there is another thing in which that country is centuries ahead of Europe. “In China there is no aristocracy of birth or money. The aristocracy which here ranks socially above the other classes is solely and only that of the Intellect.”
Love is a tissue of paradoxes. The very ardour of their passion inclines men of genius to fickleness. “Love me little love me long” is a short way of saying that whereas a blazing, roaring fire consumes itself in an hour, the quiet, glowing coals covered with ashes will outlast the night.
Lamartine’s “heureuse la beauté que le poète adore”—happy the beauty whom the poet adores—may be endorsed by a maiden who is willing to become the secondary wife of a poetic polygamist already wedded to a muse, for the sake of having it said in his biography that she inspired him with some of his prettiest conceits—
as Martial says of a Roman beauty. Others will hesitate on reading the following, from London Society:—
“Lord Byron has said that nothing can inflict greater torture upon a woman than the mere fact of loving a poet; and though Lamartine calls it a glory to be the object of immortal songs, we half-suspect that the English bard is right, and that it would be impossible to describe the moral sufferings of those frail beings who seem to be the mere toys of an hour. The world may be indebted to them for some great poem which their love has had the power to inspire, but they themselves were probably no more thought of by the poet than the daisy he might tread on as he passed by.”
Here is a case in point: “Swift,” says Byron, “when neither young nor handsome, nor rich nor even amiable, inspired two of the most extraordinary passions on record—Vanessa’s and Stella’s.... He requited them bitterly, for he seems to have broken the heart of the one and worn out that of the other; and he had his reward, for he died a solitary idiot in the hands of servants.”
It would be unjust, however, in all cases to trace poetic fickleness to heartless or deliberate cruelty. May not the poet and the artist be regarded as martyrs to art and science—students of beauty, obliged to take a purely æsthetic, disinterested interest in feminine charms—as they do in a picture or a landscape—without any desire of exclusive possession? They flirt, apparently, not to break hearts, but merely to educate their sense of beauty. For is not a woman’s face the compendium of all beauty in the world? and a woman’s eyes, expressing incipient Love, are they not so exquisitely beautiful that an epicure of Love could for ever be contented with that expression alone, feeling that marriage, which might alter it, if ever so little, would be a bétise? Perhaps some similar thought was in Heine’s mind when he wrote his famous