“All love is sweet,
Given or returned....
They who inspire it most are fortunate
As I am now; but those who feel it most, are happier still.”
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.”
GENIUS AND MARRIAGE
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.”