Perhaps the most unique trait in the love of men of genius is the
apparent occasional absence of the element of Monopoly. It was Ovid who
first discussed the question whether a man could love two women at once.
His friend Græcinus denied the possibility of such a thing; but in one
of his _Elegies_ Ovid refutes him by citing his own case of a double
simultaneous infatuation. He hesitates which of the two to choose,
chides Venus for torturing him with double love—for adding leaves to the
trees, stars to the heavens, water to the ocean.
Of modern authors not a few appear to have followed in Ovid’s footsteps.
We have seen how madly Heine was in love for a long time with his cousin
Amalie. Yet, as one of his biographers, Robert Proelsz, remarks, this
ardent though hopeless infatuation saved him neither at Hamburg nor at
Bonn, nor at Hanover or Berlin, from a number of love-affairs, some of
which are vaguely commemorated in his writings. Another German poet,
Wieland, after various romantic adventures, fell in love with Julia
Bondeli, a pupil of Rousseau’s, and asked for her heart and hand; but
she mistrusted him, and asked the pertinent question, “Tell me, will you
never be able to love another besides me?” “Never!” he replied, “that is
impossible.... Yet it might be possible for a moment, if I should chance
to see a more beautiful woman than you who is at the same time very
unhappy and very virtuous.” “Poor Wieland,” Scherr continues, “who
subsequently understood the anatomy of the female heart so well, appears
not to have known then that _no_ woman pardons in her lover the thought
that he might find another more beautiful than her. Julia knew what she
had to do, and with deeply-wounded heart allowed the poet to depart.”
Of Burns his brother Gilbert says, “When he selected any one out of the
sovereignty of his good pleasure, to whom he should pay his particular
attention, she was instantly invested with a sufficient stock of charms
out of the plentiful stores of his own imagination; and there was often
a great disparity between his fair captivator and her attributes. One
generally reigned paramount in his affections; but as Yorick’s
affections flowed out toward Madame de L—— at the remise door, while the
eternal vows of Eliza were upon him, so Robert was frequently
encountering other attractions, which formed _so many under-plots in the
drama of his love_.”
In Goethe’s life these “under-plots” played a like prominent part. “He
always needed a number of feminine hearts of more or less personal
interest, in which to mirror himself,” we read; and he himself told his
Charlotte (in 1777) that her love was “the thread by which all his other
little passions, pastimes, and flirtations hung.”
So that, after all, it seems possible to love two at a time; but it
_takes genius to do it_!
Yet even with men of genius it is only possible in ordinary
love-affairs. A supreme love-affair allows but one goddess under any
circumstances.
Schumann was one of the most multitudinous lovers on record. Apparently
his first love was Nanni, his “guardian angel,” who saved him from the
perils of the world, and hovered before his vision like a saint. “I feel
that I could kneel before her and adore her like a Madonna,” he says in
a letter. But Nanni had a dangerous rival in Liddy. Not long, however,
for he found Liddy silly, cold as marble, and—fatal defect! she could
not sympathise with him regarding Jean Paul. “The exalted image of my
ideal disappears when I think of the remarks she made about Jean Paul.
Let the dead rest in peace.” Curiously enough, there are references to
both these girls at various dates, showing that, like Ovid, he
vacillated between the two. He had a number of other flames, and after
his engagement to Clara Wieck gave her warning that he had the “very
mischievous habit” of being a great admirer of lovely women. “They make
me positively smirk, and I swim in panegyrics on your sex. Consequently,
if at some future time we walk along the streets of Vienna and meet a
beauty, and I exclaim, ‘Oh Clara! see this heavenly vision!’ or
something of the sort, you must not be alarmed nor scold me.”
But the most enterprising lover ever known to the world was Alfieri; for
his first Love seems to have _embraced a whole female seminary_! In his
_Mémoires_, at any rate, he uses the plural in speaking of the object of
his first passion. He was indeed only nine years old, which may excuse
this amorous anomaly. He had seen in church a number of young novices,
and thus describes his feelings (the italics are mine): “My innocent
attraction towards _these_ novices became so strong that I thought of
them and their doings incessantly. At one moment my imagination painted
_them_ holding their candles in their hands, serving mass with an air of
angelic submission, and again raising the smoke of incense at the foot
of the altar; and, entirely absorbed in these images, I neglected my
studies; every occupation and all companionship bored me.”