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.”