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,