Though it is man’s duty and destiny to get married, yet the concurrent
testimony of several famous authors appears to indicate that there is
one thing which excuses celibacy, and may even make it a virtue—and that
thing is the possession of Genius. Bacon claims that “certainly the best
works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the
unmarried or childless men.” A more modern philosopher, Schopenhauer,
expresses himself to the same effect: “For men of higher intellectual
avocation, for poets, philosophers, for all those, in general, who
devote themselves to science and art, celibacy is preferable to married
life, because the conjugal yoke prevents them from creating great
works.”
The same counsel is indirectly given in Moore’s _Life of Byron_, where
he argues that “In looking back through the lives of the most
illustrious poets—the class of intellect in which the characteristic
features of genius are, perhaps, most strongly marked—we shall find that
with scarcely one exception, from Homer down to Lord Byron, they have
been, in their several degrees, restless and solitary spirits, with
minds wrapped up, like silkworms, in their own tasks, either strangers
or rebels to domestic ties, and bearing about with them a deposit for
posterity in their souls, to the jealous watching and enriching of which
almost all other thoughts and considerations have been sacrificed.”
“Either strangers or rebels to domestic ties.” Among the strangers,
Moore names Newton, Gassendi, Galileo, Descartes, Bayle, Locke,
Leibnitz, and Hume, to whom may be added Kant, Schopenhauer, Handel,
Beethoven, Schubert, Plato, and many others.
Quite as large is the list of “rebels to domestic ties” among men of
poetic genius. Says Moore: “The coincidence is no less striking than
saddening that, on the list of married poets who have been unhappy in
their homes, there should already be found four such illustrious names
as Dante, Milton, Shakspere, and Dryden.” “The poet Dante, a wanderer
away from wife and children, passed the whole of a restless life in
nursing his immortal dream of Beatrice.” “The dates of the birth of his
[Shakspere’s] children, compared with that of his removal from
Stratford, the total omission of his wife’s name in the first draft of
his will, and the bitter sarcasm of the bequest by which he remembers
her afterwards—all prove beyond a doubt his separation from the lady
early in life, and his unfriendly feeling towards her at the close.”
“Milton’s first wife, it is well known, ran away from him within a month
after their marriage, ‘disgusted,’ says Phillips, ‘with his spare diet
and hard study,’ and his later domestic misery is universally known.”
“The poet Young, with all his parade of domestic sorrows, was, it
appears, a neglectful husband and a harsh father.”
Sir Walter Scott remarks, in his _Life of Dryden_: “The wife of one who
is to gain his livelihood by poetry, or by any labour (if any there be)
equally exhausting, must either have taste enough to relish her
husband’s performances, or good-nature sufficiently to pardon his
infirmities. It was Dryden’s misfortune that Lady Elizabeth had neither
the one nor the other; and I dismiss the disagreeable subject by
observing, that on no one occasion when a sarcasm against matrimony
could be introduced, has our author failed to season it with such
bitterness, as spoke of an inward consciousness of domestic misery.”
Richard Wagner when a young man married an actress, “pretty as a
picture”; but she appears to have had little sympathy with his
ambitions, so he lived apart from her. Subsequently he was very happy
with Cosima, the daughter of Liszt, who _did_ appreciate his genius.
Liszt himself, after living some years with the Countess D’Agoult in
Italy, separated from her. The girl whom Haydn married soon turned out a
shrew, who had no sympathy whatever with his musical genius. Berlioz was
one of the most passionate of lovers: “Oh, that I could find her, the
Juliet, the Ophelia that my heart calls to. That I could drink in the
intoxication of that mingled joy and sadness that only true love knows!
Could I but rest in her arms one autumn evening, rocked by the north
wind on some wild heath, and sleeping my last, sad sleep.” A few years
after these rapturous effusions he arranged a _séparation à l’aimable_
from his wife, his former flame, and left her to die in solitude and
misery.
Handel, after all, was the wisest of the composers. He was never in
Love, and had an aversion to marriage. In 1707 he went to Lübeck to
compete for the place of successor to the famous organist Buxtehude; but
when he found that one of the conditions of obtaining the place was the
compulsory privilege of marrying the daughter of his predecessor, he got
alarmed and fled precipitately.
Besides the disposition to wrap up their minds, like silkworms, in their
own tasks, Poverty and the extreme difficulty of finding congenial
companions appear to be the principal causes that have tended to make
men of genius strangers or rebels to domestic ties.
There is an old saying that if Poverty comes in by one window, Love goes
out by another. But Poverty, unfortunately, seems to be an almost
necessary companion of Genius, at least in the early stages of its
career, till the inertia natural to the human brain has been overcome.
It is so much easier for the richest soils to grow a luxuriant crop of
weeds than a useful crop which needs constant care, that there can be no
doubt that wealth is responsible for the loss of much Genius to the
world. There have been men of genius in whom the creative impulse was so
strong, and the pleasure of creating so sweet—Goethe, Schopenhauer,
Byron, etc.—that they needed not the goad of hunger; but as a rule a
well-filled pocketbook does not encourage the habit of “infinite
painstaking,” which is essential to Genius. But if a genius marries
while he is poor, he will have to waste his time on rapid, ephemeral
work to support his family; which will leave him neither leisure nor
energy for work of enduring value. Hence he should either not marry at
all or wait till he has an assured income. If money-marriages are ever
justifiable, they are in such cases; and rich girls should make it the
one object of life to capture a man of Genius, so as to give him leisure
for immortal work. It appears, indeed, as if a sort of Conjugal Pride of
this description were becoming fashionable; for one hears every month of
some author or artist marrying an heiress. This is certainly the easiest
way for a woman to become immortal; and what is a coquette’s gratified
ephemeral vanity, compared with the proud consciousness of passing down
to posterity linked with an immortal name, and of having helped to make
that name immortal by removing the necessity for bread-winning drudgery!
Furthermore, there can be no doubt that the number of persons able to
read a work of genius _at sight_, as it were, is growing larger every
year. Great men do not have to wait for recognition so long as formerly,
and this enables them to neglect ephemeral drudgery in favour of
creative work.
As there has been an unparalleled unfolding and increase in feminine
charms, both of body and mind, within the last half-century, it is not
too optimistic to hope that the other source of domestic difficulties
among men of genius—the extreme difficulty of finding a congenial
companion—will also be removed, in course of time. Men of genius, as
Moore remarks, have such rich resources of thinking within themselves,
that “the society of those less gifted than themselves becomes often a
restraint and burden to which not all the charms of friendship or even
love can reconcile them.” To be completely happy a Genius should
accordingly have a wife as remarkable among women for the womanly
qualities of receptivity, grace, and sympathy, as he is among men for
the manly quality of creative energy. Yet if it is so difficult for an
ordinary man to meet his ordinary Juliet, how much more so will it ever
be for an extraordinary man to find an extraordinary Juliet!
Thanks to their passion for Beauty, men of Genius are too prone to
follow the impulse of the moment and marry a pretty doll, in the hope of
being able to educate her into an attractive companion. Unluckily it
rarely happens that the minds of these beauties are “wax to receive and
marble to retain.” Pretty girls are commonly lazy—spoiled by the thought
that their beauty atones for everything, and regardless of the future
when this apology for indolence will have lost its persuasiveness.
Among the objections to the celibacy of Genius, the strongest is
supplied by the laws of heredity—the desirability of having their
superior mental qualities—often associated with corresponding physical
beauty—transmitted to the next generation. Genius, it is true, depends
on so many fortuitous circumstances that cases of direct transmission
from father to son are rare enough; and Mr. Galton’s researches show
that “the ablest child of one gifted pair is not likely to be as gifted
as the ablest of all the children of very many mediocre pairs;” and that
“the more exceptional the gift, the more exceptional will be the good
fortune of a parent who has a son who equals, and still more if he has a
son who overpasses him.” Nevertheless, it remains true that “the
children of a gifted pair are much more likely to be gifted than the
children of a mediocre pair.” Just as a professor’s son is born with a
brain naturally more plastic and receptive than that of a young savage
or peasant, so the children of a Genius who has not shattered his health
by overwork or dissipation are likely to be of a mental calibre superior
to that of an ordinary professor’s son. So that it is the duty of a man
of genius to get married even at a sacrifice of personal
happiness—provided that sacrifice is not so great as to interfere with
his intellectual duties.