Yet, after all, these great men are only partly to blame for their fickleness. Beethoven once boasted of having loved one woman for seven months as something unusual. But had Beethoven been so fortunate as to meet and marry a woman having those qualities which Sir Walter Scott says the wife of a genius should have—either “taste enough to relish her husband’s performances, or good nature enough to pardon his infirmities,”—he might have been blessed with a love not of seven months, but of seven times seven years. Of Shelley, Mr. Symonds tells us that, “In his own words, he had loved Antigone before he visited this earth: and no one woman could probably have made him happy, because he was for ever demanding more from love than it can give in the mixed circumstances of mortal life.”
Mr. Galton, who has made such a careful study of the phenomena of genius and marriage (Hereditary Genius), remarks on the “great fact ... that able men take pleasure in the society of intelligent women, and, if they can find such as would in other respects be suitable, they will marry them in preference to mediocrities.” Unfortunately, as before dwelt on, great beauty and great intellect, or amiability, do not always coincide, owing to the fact that pretty girls do not feel the necessity of cultivating their minds. But in men of genius their own store of intellect is so great, and their admiration for Beauty so intense, that they are constantly liable to marry silly girls; or before marriage to flirt with one beauty after another without finding satisfaction. In a few generations, however, there will doubtless be many more women than now or in the past who will be intelligent, amiable, and beautiful at the same time; and such women will be able to fetter even the erratic love of geniuses with adamantine chains, impervious to rust and alteration, and thus cure them of their Fickleness and their constant effort to love more than one at a time.
Poetic Fictitiousness, of course, is a trait which does no one any harm, and often enriches literature with charming fancies. And as for the two remaining characters of genius-Love—Ardour and Precocity—it is evident that there cannot be too much of them in the world. The dawn of Love is always the dawn of so much refinement of the soul, the awakening of so much ambition, that it cannot be too precocious; and the more ardent it is the more thoroughgoing will be its results. Nor need a big fire go out sooner than a small one, provided there is a constant supply of fresh fuel—a point which Balzac has discussed with much eloquence in his Physiologie du Mariage.
Coleridge says “It is the business of virtue to give a feeling and a passion to our purer intellect, and to intellectualise our feelings and passions.” Now this is precisely what is done by Romantic Love, which first originated in the minds of men of genius.
“The might of one fair face sublimes my love,
For it hath weaned my heart from low desires.”
“Sublimes my love.” These three words of Michael Angelo contain the whole philosophy of our subject. And what is it that sublimes Love chiefly? “The might of one fair face”—the magic effect of Personal Beauty. Perhaps, after all, the greatest difference between the Love of a genius and an ordinary mortal is that in the former the æsthetic element—the Admiration of Beauty—is so much stronger, making up two-thirds of the whole passion. And as a taste for the beautiful in art and nature becomes more common, the Love of common mortals, in approaching that of genius, will more and more partake of this æsthetic refinement—this worship of Personal Beauty for the sake of the higher gratifications it yields to the imagination.
INSANITY AND LOVE
ANALOGIES
The poets, who have in all ages insisted on the analogies between genius and insanity, have also long since discovered a general resemblance between Love and Insanity. Indeed, the notion that Love is a sort of madness is as old as Plato. Love, as understood by him—that is, man’s “worship of youthful masculine beauty”—is, he says, mad, irrational, superseding reason and prudence in the individual mind. And the Stoics, who regarded all affections as maladies, looked upon the severest of the passions as a grave mental disease.