“Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind,
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind,”
suggests another reason why men of Genius are eternally involved in
Love-affairs. The lover becomes infatuated not with the girl he sees but
with the girl he imagines, using her features as a mere sketch to be
filled up _ad libitum_—
“Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear!”
To imagine a feeling is to entertain it; for an imagined impression
revives the same cerebral processes that were aroused by the original
sense impression. In ordinary minds the remembered image of a girl’s
lovely features, the echo of her sweet voice, are much fainter than the
original sight and sound; whereas the imagination of genius paints a
face and recalls a voice as vividly as if they were present: so that
here _to think of Love is to be in Love_—_pro tempore_.
Besides his refined taste and vivid imagination—which retouches every
defective negative—it is the natural depth of his emotions that urges a
Genius to fall in Love with every lovely woman. Passions are like dogs:
the big ones need more food than the little ones. A peasant cannot
experience the subtle and multitudinous emotions that fill the heart of
an artist, a statesman, a scientific discoverer; much less the complex
group of ethereal emotions that make up Romantic Love. The higher we
rise in the intellectual scale, the more varied, complex, and deep are
the emotional groups which delight and torment the soul. As Genius
represents the climax of intellectual power, Love the climax of
emotional intensity, is it wonderful that there should be an affinity
between the two? The higher a mountain peak the more does it attract
every passing cloud and clasp it to its breast—hoping—vainly hoping—to
warm a heart chilled by its isolation above the rest of the world.
As men of genius are more prone to love than common sluggish minds, it
is a lucky fact, for the future growth of Romantic Love, that Genius
grows more and more abundant—_pace_ the _laudatores temporis acti_ who
ignorantly compare the number of living geniuses with all those that
have ever been—as if they had all lived at one epoch. It may even be
granted that there have been epochs that had more geniuses than we have
at present; but of genius there is more to-day than ever in the world’s
history. We see almost daily in ephemeral periodicals lines and epigrams
worthy of the highest genius, written by men whose names perhaps will
never be known. Shaksperes, indeed, will always tower Mont Blanc-like
over all other peaks; but if summits of the second magnitude seem less
imposing to-day than formerly, it is because the general level of
creativeness has been raised a few thousand feet. The mountains that
enclose the Engadine valley, though 10,000 to 12,000 feet in height,
seem only half as high, because the valley from which you see them lies
at an altitude of 6000 feet.