I.—PRECOCITY
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—
“‘Will you kiss the naked sword
Which the Lord has given us?’
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.”