“‘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.”
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.”