Part 25

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.”

II.—ARDOUR

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—

“‘The devil take my soul, My body be the sheriff’s, Yet I for me alone Select the loveliest woman.’

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_.”

III.—FICKLENESS

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—

“Cynthia, facundi carmen juvenile Properti, Accepit famam nec minus ilia dedit,”

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

"Du bist wie eine Blume So hold und schön und rein; Ich schau’ dich an, und Wehmuth Schleicht mir ins Herz hinein.

“Mir ist, als ob ich die Hände Aufs Haupt dir legen sollt‘, Betend, dass Gott dich erhalte So rein und schön und hold.”

In quite a different kind of a poem Heine bluntly announces to his “Queen Mary IV.” his declaration of independence, and informs her that not a few who ruled before her have been unceremoniously deposed—

“Manche die vor dir regierte Wurde schmählich abgesetzt.”

And in his narrative of the sheriff’s daughter he says, “I shall not describe my love for Josepha in detail. This, however, I will confess, that it was after all only a prelude to the great tragedies of my riper years. Thus does Romeo become infatuated with Rosaline before he finds his Juliet.”

Byron’s confession, in speaking of an early love, that he had been “attached fifty times since” has been referred to already; and although Byron loved to exaggerate his foibles, his record in this case does not belie his words. Of Burns, Principal Shairp writes that “There was not a comely girl in Tarbolton on whom he did not compose a song, and then he made one which included them all.” Burns himself confesses, “In my conscience, I believe that my heart has been so often on fire that it has been vitrified.” And Washington Irving remarks on Goldsmith’s first love as “a passion of that transient kind which grows up in idleness and exhales itself in poetry.”

Of this kind were two passions of Lamb, concerning which a biographer says, “A youthful passion, which lasted only a few months, and which he afterwards attempted to regard lightly as a folly past, inspired a few sonnets of very delicate feeling and exquisite music.” And of his second flame, “His stay at Pentonville is remarkable for the fugitive passion conceived by Lamb for a young Quakeress named Hester Savory, which he has enshrined and immortalised in the little poem of _Hester_.”

Goethe has the reputation of having been of all famous lovers the most fickle. Like Byron, Goethe appears to have endeavoured to make himself appear more frivolous than he was. His amorous Roman _Elegies_, which have given so much offence, were in reality written in Thuringia, after his return from Italy; and their heroine was no one but the girl who subsequently became his wife.

It remained for a Scotchman to write the best apology for Goethe’s love-affairs. “To Goethe,” says Professor Blackie, “the sight of any beautiful object was like delicate music to the ear of a cunning musician; he was carried away by it, and floated in its element joyously, as a swallow in the summer air, or a sea-mew on the buoyant wave. Hence the rich story of Goethe’s loves, with which scandal, of course, and prudery have made their market, but which, when looked into carefully, were just as much part of his genius as _Faust_ or _Iphigenia_—a part, indeed, without which neither _Faust_ nor _Iphigenia_ could have been written.... Let no one, therefore, take offence when I say that Goethe was always falling in love, and that I consider this a great virtue in his character.”

One more case: “Beethoven constantly had his love-affairs,” says Wegeler. His first love was a Cologne beauty, who coquetted with him and another man till both discovered she was engaged to a _third_! Several times Beethoven made up his mind to marry; he made two definite proposals, both of which were refused. One fatal objection was his habit of falling in love with women above him in “rank.” “It is a frightful thing,” he once wrote, “to make the acquaintance of such a sweet creature and to lose her immediately; and nothing is more insupportable than thus to have to confess one’s own foolishness.” One of his flames, an opera singer, gave as a reason why she refused him that he was “so ugly and half-cracked!”

IV.—MULTIPLICITY

Perhaps the most unique trait in the love of men of genius is the apparent occasional absence of the element of Monopoly. It was Ovid who first discussed the question whether a man could love two women at once. His friend Græcinus denied the possibility of such a thing; but in one of his _Elegies_ Ovid refutes him by citing his own case of a double simultaneous infatuation. He hesitates which of the two to choose, chides Venus for torturing him with double love—for adding leaves to the trees, stars to the heavens, water to the ocean.

Of modern authors not a few appear to have followed in Ovid’s footsteps. We have seen how madly Heine was in love for a long time with his cousin Amalie. Yet, as one of his biographers, Robert Proelsz, remarks, this ardent though hopeless infatuation saved him neither at Hamburg nor at Bonn, nor at Hanover or Berlin, from a number of love-affairs, some of which are vaguely commemorated in his writings. Another German poet, Wieland, after various romantic adventures, fell in love with Julia Bondeli, a pupil of Rousseau’s, and asked for her heart and hand; but she mistrusted him, and asked the pertinent question, “Tell me, will you never be able to love another besides me?” “Never!” he replied, “that is impossible.... Yet it might be possible for a moment, if I should chance to see a more beautiful woman than you who is at the same time very unhappy and very virtuous.” “Poor Wieland,” Scherr continues, “who subsequently understood the anatomy of the female heart so well, appears not to have known then that _no_ woman pardons in her lover the thought that he might find another more beautiful than her. Julia knew what she had to do, and with deeply-wounded heart allowed the poet to depart.”

Of Burns his brother Gilbert says, “When he selected any one out of the sovereignty of his good pleasure, to whom he should pay his particular attention, she was instantly invested with a sufficient stock of charms out of the plentiful stores of his own imagination; and there was often a great disparity between his fair captivator and her attributes. One generally reigned paramount in his affections; but as Yorick’s affections flowed out toward Madame de L—— at the remise door, while the eternal vows of Eliza were upon him, so Robert was frequently encountering other attractions, which formed _so many under-plots in the drama of his love_.”

In Goethe’s life these “under-plots” played a like prominent part. “He always needed a number of feminine hearts of more or less personal interest, in which to mirror himself,” we read; and he himself told his Charlotte (in 1777) that her love was “the thread by which all his other little passions, pastimes, and flirtations hung.”

So that, after all, it seems possible to love two at a time; but it _takes genius to do it_!

Yet even with men of genius it is only possible in ordinary love-affairs. A supreme love-affair allows but one goddess under any circumstances.

Schumann was one of the most multitudinous lovers on record. Apparently his first love was Nanni, his “guardian angel,” who saved him from the perils of the world, and hovered before his vision like a saint. “I feel that I could kneel before her and adore her like a Madonna,” he says in a letter. But Nanni had a dangerous rival in Liddy. Not long, however, for he found Liddy silly, cold as marble, and—fatal defect! she could not sympathise with him regarding Jean Paul. “The exalted image of my ideal disappears when I think of the remarks she made about Jean Paul. Let the dead rest in peace.” Curiously enough, there are references to both these girls at various dates, showing that, like Ovid, he vacillated between the two. He had a number of other flames, and after his engagement to Clara Wieck gave her warning that he had the “very mischievous habit” of being a great admirer of lovely women. “They make me positively smirk, and I swim in panegyrics on your sex. Consequently, if at some future time we walk along the streets of Vienna and meet a beauty, and I exclaim, ‘Oh Clara! see this heavenly vision!’ or something of the sort, you must not be alarmed nor scold me.”

But the most enterprising lover ever known to the world was Alfieri; for his first Love seems to have _embraced a whole female seminary_! In his _Mémoires_, at any rate, he uses the plural in speaking of the object of his first passion. He was indeed only nine years old, which may excuse this amorous anomaly. He had seen in church a number of young novices, and thus describes his feelings (the italics are mine): “My innocent attraction towards _these_ novices became so strong that I thought of them and their doings incessantly. At one moment my imagination painted _them_ holding their candles in their hands, serving mass with an air of angelic submission, and again raising the smoke of incense at the foot of the altar; and, entirely absorbed in these images, I neglected my studies; every occupation and all companionship bored me.”

V.—FICTITIOUSNESS

If Shakspere could identify woman with frailty, one might with equal propriety exclaim, Vanity, thy name is man! Clever men have a habit of paying pretty girls neat compliments, less to please the girls than to show off their wit. And clever women, though they may not accept these remarks literally, still have cause to be gratified with them, in proportion to the excellence of the wit; for ugliness or inferior beauty never inspires a happy thought in a clever man.

Poets represent the climax of masculine vanity. Though their first Love-poems may be the embodiment of real passion, in subsequent efforts the purely literary origin is too often apparent. Since poetic composition is in itself a mingled agony and delight, very like Love itself, nothing so facilitates its progress as exciting Love-memories. Hence poets are for ever urged on to compose Love ditties in which they endeavour to out-Romeo Romeo, to out-hyperbolise one another, as women try to out-dress one another. This is one aspect of their vanity; the other lies in their desire for sympathetic admiration. So, whenever a poet meets a damsel who comes within half a mile of his ideal, he forthwith unfolds before her eyes his gaudy dithyrambs and sonnets, and indulges in various Love-antics, very much like an infatuated peacock.

Even the great Dante is not free from the reproach of having used his true love for mere literary purposes. Beatrice became to him gradually an abstraction, an allegory, a name for woman in general. But it is in his countryman Petrarch that the tendency to use a sweetheart for purely ornamental purposes, as if she were a feather to be stuck in one’s hat, is most vividly illustrated. Petrarch is a conspicuous illustration of the fact that a poetic reputation once established will live on for ever, for the simple reason that very few people ever take the trouble to read and judge for themselves; so that an undeserved reputation, like a disease, is inherited by generation after generation.

No one, of course, can question Petrarch’s learning and his influence on the progress of modern culture. I speak of him only as a love-poet; and as such he occupies a wofully low rank. I have read and reread his sonnets, and have found them one of the dreariest deserts the quest for information has ever driven me into. To say with Mr. Symonds, in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, that “he was far from approaching the analysis of emotion with the directness of a Heine or De Musset,” is putting it very mildly indeed. Professor Scherr points out his lack of poetic imagination in these words: “Though he took so much trouble to hand down the beauty of his Laura to posterity, yet (he) never gets beyond a tedious enumeration of her charms. Petrarch never gives us a clear portrait of his lady.” “The poems of her lover,” says Mr. Symonds, “demonstrate that she was a _married woman_, with whom he enjoyed a respectful and not very intimate friendship.” Moore refers to Petrarch as one “who would not suffer his only daughter to reside beneath his roof, [but] expended thirty-two years of poetry and passion on an idealised love.” Schopenhauer naïvely accepted the reality of Petrarch’s passion, which the poor fellow had to drag through life “like a prisoner’s chain,” because the case suited his argument; but Mr. Macaulay more justly remarks that “to readers of our time, the love of Petrarch seems to have been of that kind which breaks no hearts.” Finally Professor Scherr’s opinion may be cited, which agrees with the view here taken.