If Bacon did not write the plays of Shakspere, it was the biggest
mistake of his life. Second among his mistakes must rank the opinion
expressed in the following sentence: “You may observe that amongst all
the great and worthy persons (whereof the memory remaineth, either
ancient or modern), there is not one that hath been transported to the
mad degree of love.”
If the advocates of the Baconian theory had as much sense of humour as
they stimulate in other people, they would see that such a sentence—and
there are others like it in Bacon—could not by any possibility have been
penned by the author of _As You Like It_, _Venus and Adonis_, or _Romeo
and Juliet_.
Dante was by no means the only “great and worthy person” before Bacon’s
day who had been “transported to the mad degree of love”; and since
Bacon’s day the word Genius has become almost synonymous with the
capacity for lovers’ madness.
Yet there is a grain of truth in Bacon’s sentence as it stands. He
evidently had in mind chiefly the _ancient_ “great and worthy persons”;
and of these, as we have seen, but one or two had even a vague
presentiment of what was to be some day the moral lever of the universe.
Bacon probably had a dim perception of the fact that the ancients knew
nothing of passionate Love, of the imaginative type; but he did not
quite succeed in grasping the idea.
As regards Modern Genius, Bacon’s assertion is so far from the truth,
that it is quite safe to reverse it and say that it is doubtful whether
any one but a man of genius is capable of that intense ardour of feeling
which marks the climax of Love; doubtful whether even Romeo at his age
could have felt a passion such as Shakspere’s glowing imagination
painted. Love is based, not on what a man sees with his eyes, but on the
mental image retouched by the imagination; and a man of genius, being a
_virtuoso of the imagination_, can adorn his ideal of love with
ornaments unknown to ordinary mortals; whence it follows that the
passion inspired by his more vivid and beautiful image must be more
intense than the passion inspired by less perfect visions in common,
sluggish brains. And since artistic thought can no more crystallise into
verse or epigram without the warm glow of emotion than a flower can grow
into a thing of beauty without its daily bath of warm sunshine, it is
fortunate that Genius implies a natural susceptibility to the æsthetic
passion of Love.
Fortunate also for the prospects of Romantic Love is the fact that
Genius is king in its realms. Had not the sacred mysteries of Love been
revealed to the world in the glowing language of poetry, it would
probably have remained a thing unknown to ordinary mortals for centuries
to come; even as the beauties of Nature, for which common minds have no
eyes, would have remained undetected, had not the poets and artists
disclosed the bonds that connect them with human sympathies.
As all the quotations from poets given in this chapter (and in that on
Hyperbole) practically bear witness to the exceptional ardour of Love in
men of genius, only two cases need be cited as specimens—those of Burns
and Heine. Gilbert Burns, the brother of the poet, writes that the
latter “was constantly the victim of some fair enslaver. The symptoms of
his passion were often such as nearly to equal those of the celebrated
Sappho. I never, indeed, knew that he ‘fainted, sunk, and died away’;
but the agitations of his mind and body exceeded anything of the kind I
ever knew in real life.”
Heine has given evidence in his letters as well as his poems that few
even of his equals have ever felt the power of love so profoundly. It is
well to emphasise this fact; for there are not a few who fancy that,
like Petrarch, Heine embodied in his songs not the real feelings of his
heart but fictitious emotions depicted to gratify poetic ambition. He
did no such thing. His Love-poetry is the echo of real passion, of his
first and only true Love, which cast a shadow over his whole life, and
goaded him into bitter reflections more than a decade after its sad
ending. He loved his cousin Molly, and writes to a friend, after an
absence from home: “Rejoice with me! rejoice with me! in four weeks I
shall see Molly. With her my muse will also return.” The muse did
return, but in a different way from that which he had anticipated; with
a smile in her face of cynicism, mockery, melancholy, which never again
left her. “She loves me _not_!” he writes, in 1816. “Softly, dear
Christian, pronounce that last word softly. In the first words lies the
eternal living heaven, but in the last lies eternal living hell. If you
could only see your friend’s countenance, how pale he looks, how
bewildered, how insane, your righteous indignation at my long silence
would vanish soon; better still were it if you could have one glance at
my soul—then would you really learn to love me.” “I have seen her again—
“‘The devil take my soul,
My body be the sheriff’s,
Yet I for me alone
Select the loveliest woman.’
Hui! do you not shudder, Christian! Well may you shudder even as I do.
Burn the letter, the Lord have mercy on my soul. I did not write these
words. There on my chair sits a pale man; he wrote them. And this
because it is midnight. Oh heavens! Madness cannot sin!”
“There, there, do not breathe so heavily, there I have just built a
lovely card-house, and on the top of it I stand and hold her in my
arms!... But indeed you can hardly fancy, dear Christian, how
delightful, how lovely my ruin appears. Far from her, to carry burning
desires in my heart for years, is torture infernal; but to be near her
and yet oft sigh in vain, whole endless weeks, for my only delight, the
sight of her and—and—O! O! O! Christian! that is enough to make the
purest, most pious soul flare up in wild, delirious ungodliness!”
And the object of this passion, who might have saved a poet’s soul and
changed him from a negative ferment into a positive agent of culture?
She was the daughter of a millionaire, who, of course, in German
fashion, had to marry into another rich family. To marry a poor poet
would have been deemed a terrible _mésalliance_. Yet was he not a
millionaire too—of ideas, as she was in beauty, her father in money? But
that is reasoning _à la_ Millennium.
What a comedy it will be to future generations, entirely emancipated
from mediæval puerilities, to read that two such _Kings_ in the realm of
Genius as Schubert and Beethoven, could not marry their true loves on
account of differences in social position—rank and money!
We are accustomed to look down on China and Chinese culture. But China
anticipated Europe by several centuries in the discovery of gunpowder;
and there is another thing in which that country is centuries ahead of
Europe. “In China there is no aristocracy of birth or money. The
aristocracy which here ranks socially above the other classes is solely
and only that of the _Intellect_.”