Turgenieff makes the narrator of one of his novelettes speak of his
first Love as having been experienced at the age of six. That this is
not a poetic license is abundantly proved by historic facts. “Dante, we
know, was but nine years old,” says Moore, “when, at a May-day festival,
he saw and fell in love with Beatrice; and Alfieri, who was himself a
precocious lover, considers such early sensibility to be an unerring
sign of a soul formed for the fine arts.... Canova used to say that he
perfectly well remembered having been in love when but five years old.”
Byron’s first Love was at the age of eight. Concerning this he wrote at
twenty-five: “How the deuce did all this occur so early? Where could it
originate? I certainly had no sexual ideas for years afterwards; and yet
my misery, my love for that girl [Mary Duff] were so violent that I
sometimes wonder if I have ever been really attached since.’” Of his
second Love-affair Byron says: “My first dash into poetry was as early
as 1800. It was the ebullition of a passion for my first cousin,
Margaret Parker, one of the most beautiful of evanescent beings. I have
long forgotten the verses, but it would be difficult for me to forget
her—her dark eyes [Byron had a passion for black eyes]—her long
eyelashes—her completely Greek cast of face and figure. I was then about
twelve—she rather older, perhaps a year. She died about a year or two
afterwards.”
Burns was somewhat older when Love and poetry were born in his soul
simultaneously: “You know our country custom,” he writes, “of coupling a
man and woman together as partners in the labours of the harvest. In my
fifteenth summer my partner was a bewitching creature, a year younger
than myself. My scarcity of English denies me the power of doing her
justice in that language, but you know the Scottish idiom. She was a
bonnie, sweet, sonsie lass. In short, she, altogether unwittingly to
herself, initiated me in that delicious passion, which, in spite of acid
disappointment, gin-horse prudence, and bookworm philosophy, I hold to
be the first of human joys here below.”
Heine’s first boyish love appears to have been a girl who died as a
child, and is alluded to in his _Pictures of Travel_ as the “little
Veronica.” His second love was a most extraordinary case of Love at
Sight. It was at a school examination, Robert Proelsz relates, “and
Harry was just declaiming Schiller’s _Taucher_, when the lovely girl
entered the room by the side of her father, who was one of the
inspectors. The boy stuttered, gazed with large eyes on the beautiful
figure, mechanically repeated the verse he had just recited—‘And the
King his lovely daughter beckoned’—and was unable to proceed. In vain
the teacher prompted him, the poor fellow’s senses failed him, and he
fell on the floor in a swoon.”
Of another early visitation of sudden Love he gives an account in his
posthumous memoirs. The girl on this occasion was the red-haired
Sefchen, the sheriff’s daughter, who, when she was only eight years old,
had witnessed the mysterious burial of her grandfather’s sword, which
had done its duty a hundred times, and which some years later her aunt
had dug out and secreted in the garret. “One day, when we were alone, I
begged Sefchen to show me that curiosity. She willingly complied, went
into the room, and soon came out with an enormous sword, which she swung
vigorously despite her weak arms, while with a roguish, threatening tone
she sang—
“‘Will you kiss the naked sword
Which the Lord has given us?’
I replied in the same tone, ‘I will not kiss the naked sword, I will
kiss the red-haired Sefchen;’ and as she could not defend herself, for
fear of hurting me with the fatal steel, she had to let me boldly put my
arms round her slender waist and kiss her defiant lips.”
Berlioz had his first passion at twelve, Rousseau at eleven. “When I saw
Mlle. Goton,” writes Rousseau, “I could see nothing else, all my senses
were in confusion.... In her presence I was agitated, and trembled....
If Mlle. Goton had ordered me to throw myself into the fire, I believe I
would have obeyed her instantly.”
As old age is in many respects a second childhood, it seems natural that
men of genius should appear “precocious” in this belated sense too. The
case of Berlioz is one of the most extraordinary on record. The girl who
was his first love at twelve he saw again at sixty-one: “I recognised
the divine stateliness of her step; but, oh heavens! how changed she
was! her complexion faded, her hair gray. And yet at the sight of her my
heart did not feel one moment’s indecision; my whole soul went out to
its idol, as though she were still in her dazzling loveliness....
Balzac, nay, Shakspere himself, the great painter of the passions, never
dreamt of such a thing.” And in a letter to her he writes, “I have loved
you, I still love you, I shall always love you. And yet I am sixty-one
years of age.... Oh, madame, madame, I have but one aim left in the
world—that of obtaining your affection.”
Another composer who had a passion at sixty was “Papa” Haydn—poor Haydn,
whose wife led him such a terrible life, and used his manuscripts for
curl-papers. Concerning her he wrote, “She is always in a bad temper,
and does not care whether I am a shoemaker or an artist.” Indeed, she
had never been his true Love, but was only taken in lieu of her younger
sister, whom Haydn adored, but who refused him and became a nun. At
sixty, however, in London, he had the fortune, or misfortune, to fall in
Love again, with a widow named Schrolter, concerning whom he wrote, “She
was a very attractive woman, and still handsome, though over sixty; and
had I been free I should certainly have married her.”
Goethe, in his old days, fell in Love with Minna Herzlieb, a
bookseller’s daughter. “In the sonnets addressed to her,” says Lewes,
“and in the novel of _Elective Affinities_, may be read the fervour of
his passion, and the strength with which he resisted.”
Rousseau’s last Love forms one of the most romantic episodes in his
life, concerning which nothing was known until a few years ago when the
French historian, R. Chantslauze, discovered in a bookstall the MS. of a
letter by Rousseau to Lady Cecile Hobart, dated 1770, when Rousseau was
almost sixty years of age. He appears to have met this lady in England
at the time when he was writing his _Confessions_. She had first won his
affection by her admiration of his works; and in course of his long and
hyper-sentimental letter he remarks, “Why is it that I have never felt
any other true love but that for the products of my own fancy? Wherein
lies the reason, Cecile? In these fancied beings themselves; they made
me dissatisfied with everything else. For forty years I have carried in
my mind the image of her I adore. I love her with a constancy, an
ecstasy inexpressible.... I had no hope of ever meeting her, had given
up the eager search for her, when you appeared before me. It was folly,
infatuation, if you like, that made me surrender myself for a moment to
the magic of your sight; but I could not but say to myself: There she
is! No other woman ever inspired that thought in me. And stranger still
is it that I could hear you speak without changing my opinion. What the
ideal of my heart thought, you spoke it to my ears.”