But the most enterprising lover ever known to the world was Alfieri; for his first Love seems to have embraced a whole female seminary! In his Mémoires, at any rate, he uses the plural in speaking of the object of his first passion. He was indeed only nine years old, which may excuse this amorous anomaly. He had seen in church a number of young novices, and thus describes his feelings (the italics are mine): “My innocent attraction towards these novices became so strong that I thought of them and their doings incessantly. At one moment my imagination painted them holding their candles in their hands, serving mass with an air of angelic submission, and again raising the smoke of incense at the foot of the altar; and, entirely absorbed in these images, I neglected my studies; every occupation and all companionship bored me.”
V.—FICTITIOUSNESS
If Shakspere could identify woman with frailty, one might with equal propriety exclaim, Vanity, thy name is man! Clever men have a habit of paying pretty girls neat compliments, less to please the girls than to show off their wit. And clever women, though they may not accept these remarks literally, still have cause to be gratified with them, in proportion to the excellence of the wit; for ugliness or inferior beauty never inspires a happy thought in a clever man.
Poets represent the climax of masculine vanity. Though their first Love-poems may be the embodiment of real passion, in subsequent efforts the purely literary origin is too often apparent. Since poetic composition is in itself a mingled agony and delight, very like Love itself, nothing so facilitates its progress as exciting Love-memories. Hence poets are for ever urged on to compose Love ditties in which they endeavour to out-Romeo Romeo, to out-hyperbolise one another, as women try to out-dress one another. This is one aspect of their vanity; the other lies in their desire for sympathetic admiration. So, whenever a poet meets a damsel who comes within half a mile of his ideal, he forthwith unfolds before her eyes his gaudy dithyrambs and sonnets, and indulges in various Love-antics, very much like an infatuated peacock.
Even the great Dante is not free from the reproach of having used his true love for mere literary purposes. Beatrice became to him gradually an abstraction, an allegory, a name for woman in general. But it is in his countryman Petrarch that the tendency to use a sweetheart for purely ornamental purposes, as if she were a feather to be stuck in one’s hat, is most vividly illustrated. Petrarch is a conspicuous illustration of the fact that a poetic reputation once established will live on for ever, for the simple reason that very few people ever take the trouble to read and judge for themselves; so that an undeserved reputation, like a disease, is inherited by generation after generation.
No one, of course, can question Petrarch’s learning and his influence on the progress of modern culture. I speak of him only as a love-poet; and as such he occupies a wofully low rank. I have read and reread his sonnets, and have found them one of the dreariest deserts the quest for information has ever driven me into. To say with Mr. Symonds, in the Encyclopædia Britannica, that “he was far from approaching the analysis of emotion with the directness of a Heine or De Musset,” is putting it very mildly indeed. Professor Scherr points out his lack of poetic imagination in these words: “Though he took so much trouble to hand down the beauty of his Laura to posterity, yet (he) never gets beyond a tedious enumeration of her charms. Petrarch never gives us a clear portrait of his lady.” “The poems of her lover,” says Mr. Symonds, “demonstrate that she was a married woman, with whom he enjoyed a respectful and not very intimate friendship.” Moore refers to Petrarch as one “who would not suffer his only daughter to reside beneath his roof, [but] expended thirty-two years of poetry and passion on an idealised love.” Schopenhauer naïvely accepted the reality of Petrarch’s passion, which the poor fellow had to drag through life “like a prisoner’s chain,” because the case suited his argument; but Mr. Macaulay more justly remarks that “to readers of our time, the love of Petrarch seems to have been of that kind which breaks no hearts.” Finally Professor Scherr’s opinion may be cited, which agrees with the view here taken.
In 1327 Petrarch “made the acquaintance of Laura, the wife of Hugo de Sade, who has become famous through him, and whom during twenty-one years he continued to love, or at least to celebrate in song; for one feels somewhat uncertain regarding this love, and is very much tempted to regard it more as a matter of the head than of the heart and the senses—more as a welcome theme for his troubadour art and Provençal amorous subtlety than as a genuine, true passion. Petrarch’s qualities in general, both as a man and as a poet, are tainted by an appearance of hollowness, a want of substance and character. He lacked genuine originality, the power of spontaneous creation.”
Petrarch, it is true, was an extreme case of the poet’s inclination to give Love a fictitious permanence and depth; and he lived, moreover, at a time when the novelty of the spiritual aspect of Love naturally inclined the mind to exaggeration in that direction. In the case of modern poets, much less allowance has to be commonly made for motives of purely poetic or literary origin.
Such being the leading characteristics of Love in men of genius, and such men being emotionally a few centuries ahead of others, the questions arise, “Is it likely that the Love of ordinary mortals will gradually assume those traits? and is it desirable that it should?”
There seems no immediate danger that the world will be peopled largely by geniuses, though there is a rapid and steady advance in culture, which in a thousand years may greatly lessen the difference between men of genius and average men of the future as compared with those of to-day. When that millennium arrives the man of genius may have advanced another step, but not so great, perhaps, as that which now raises him above the common herd. He will not then be so great an anomaly, and will find society less willing than in the past to make allowance for his irregularities, such as his fickleness and multiplicity of Love-affairs.