If Shakspere could identify woman with frailty, one might with equal
propriety exclaim, Vanity, thy name is man! Clever men have a habit of
paying pretty girls neat compliments, less to please the girls than to
show off their wit. And clever women, though they may not accept these
remarks literally, still have cause to be gratified with them, in
proportion to the excellence of the wit; for ugliness or inferior beauty
never inspires a happy thought in a clever man.
Poets represent the climax of masculine vanity. Though their first
Love-poems may be the embodiment of real passion, in subsequent efforts
the purely literary origin is too often apparent. Since poetic
composition is in itself a mingled agony and delight, very like Love
itself, nothing so facilitates its progress as exciting Love-memories.
Hence poets are for ever urged on to compose Love ditties in which they
endeavour to out-Romeo Romeo, to out-hyperbolise one another, as women
try to out-dress one another. This is one aspect of their vanity; the
other lies in their desire for sympathetic admiration. So, whenever a
poet meets a damsel who comes within half a mile of his ideal, he
forthwith unfolds before her eyes his gaudy dithyrambs and sonnets, and
indulges in various Love-antics, very much like an infatuated peacock.
Even the great Dante is not free from the reproach of having used his
true love for mere literary purposes. Beatrice became to him gradually
an abstraction, an allegory, a name for woman in general. But it is in
his countryman Petrarch that the tendency to use a sweetheart for purely
ornamental purposes, as if she were a feather to be stuck in one’s hat,
is most vividly illustrated. Petrarch is a conspicuous illustration of
the fact that a poetic reputation once established will live on for
ever, for the simple reason that very few people ever take the trouble
to read and judge for themselves; so that an undeserved reputation, like
a disease, is inherited by generation after generation.
No one, of course, can question Petrarch’s learning and his influence on
the progress of modern culture. I speak of him only as a love-poet; and
as such he occupies a wofully low rank. I have read and reread his
sonnets, and have found them one of the dreariest deserts the quest for
information has ever driven me into. To say with Mr. Symonds, in the
_Encyclopædia Britannica_, that “he was far from approaching the
analysis of emotion with the directness of a Heine or De Musset,” is
putting it very mildly indeed. Professor Scherr points out his lack of
poetic imagination in these words: “Though he took so much trouble to
hand down the beauty of his Laura to posterity, yet (he) never gets
beyond a tedious enumeration of her charms. Petrarch never gives us a
clear portrait of his lady.” “The poems of her lover,” says Mr. Symonds,
“demonstrate that she was a _married woman_, with whom he enjoyed a
respectful and not very intimate friendship.” Moore refers to Petrarch
as one “who would not suffer his only daughter to reside beneath his
roof, [but] expended thirty-two years of poetry and passion on an
idealised love.” Schopenhauer naïvely accepted the reality of Petrarch’s
passion, which the poor fellow had to drag through life “like a
prisoner’s chain,” because the case suited his argument; but Mr.
Macaulay more justly remarks that “to readers of our time, the love of
Petrarch seems to have been of that kind which breaks no hearts.”
Finally Professor Scherr’s opinion may be cited, which agrees with the
view here taken.
In 1327 Petrarch “made the acquaintance of Laura, the wife of Hugo de
Sade, who has become famous through him, and whom during twenty-one
years he continued to love, or at least to celebrate in song; for one
feels somewhat uncertain regarding this love, and is very much tempted
to regard it more as a matter of the head than of the heart and the
senses—more as a welcome theme for his troubadour art and Provençal
amorous subtlety than as a genuine, true passion. Petrarch’s qualities
in general, both as a man and as a poet, are tainted by an appearance of
hollowness, a want of substance and character. He lacked genuine
originality, the power of spontaneous creation.”
Petrarch, it is true, was an extreme case of the poet’s inclination to
give Love a fictitious permanence and depth; and he lived, moreover, at
a time when the novelty of the spiritual aspect of Love naturally
inclined the mind to exaggeration in that direction. In the case of
modern poets, much less allowance has to be commonly made for motives of
purely poetic or literary origin.
Such being the leading characteristics of Love in men of genius, and
such men being emotionally a few centuries ahead of others, the
questions arise, “Is it likely that the Love of ordinary mortals will
gradually assume those traits? and is it desirable that it should?”
There seems no immediate danger that the world will be peopled largely
by geniuses, though there is a rapid and steady advance in culture,
which in a thousand years may greatly lessen the difference between men
of genius and average men of the future as compared with those of
to-day. When that millennium arrives the man of genius may have advanced
another step, but not so great, perhaps, as that which now raises him
above the common herd. He will not then be so great an anomaly, and will
find society less willing than in the past to make allowance for his
irregularities, such as his fickleness and multiplicity of Love-affairs.
Yet, after all, these great men are only partly to blame for their
fickleness. Beethoven once boasted of having loved one woman for _seven
months_ as something unusual. But had Beethoven been so fortunate as to
meet and marry a woman having those qualities which Sir Walter Scott
says the wife of a genius should have—either “taste enough to relish her
husband’s performances, or good nature enough to pardon his
infirmities,”—he might have been blessed with a love not of seven
months, but of seven times seven years. Of Shelley, Mr. Symonds tells us
that, “In his own words, he had loved Antigone before he visited this
earth: and no one woman could probably have made him happy, because he
was for ever demanding more from love than it can give in the mixed
circumstances of mortal life.”
Mr. Galton, who has made such a careful study of the phenomena of genius
and marriage (_Hereditary Genius_), remarks on the “great fact ... that
able men take pleasure in the society of intelligent women, and, if they
can find such as would in other respects be suitable, they will marry
them in preference to mediocrities.” Unfortunately, as before dwelt on,
great beauty and great intellect, or amiability, do not always coincide,
owing to the fact that pretty girls do not feel the necessity of
cultivating their minds. But in men of genius their own store of
intellect is so great, and their admiration for Beauty so intense, that
they are constantly liable to marry silly girls; or before marriage to
flirt with one beauty after another without finding satisfaction. In a
few generations, however, there will doubtless be many more women than
now or in the past who will be intelligent, amiable, and beautiful at
the same time; and such women will be able to fetter even the erratic
love of geniuses with adamantine chains, impervious to rust and
alteration, and thus cure them of their Fickleness and their constant
effort to love more than one at a time.
Poetic Fictitiousness, of course, is a trait which does no one any harm,
and often enriches literature with charming fancies. And as for the two
remaining characters of genius-Love—Ardour and Precocity—it is evident
that there cannot be too much of them in the world. The dawn of Love is
always the dawn of so much refinement of the soul, the awakening of so
much ambition, that it cannot be too precocious; and the more ardent it
is the more thoroughgoing will be its results. Nor need a big fire go
out sooner than a small one, provided there is a constant supply of
fresh fuel—a point which Balzac has discussed with much eloquence in his
_Physiologie du Mariage_.
Coleridge says “It is the business of virtue to give a feeling and a
passion to our purer intellect, and to intellectualise our feelings and
passions.” Now this is precisely what is done by Romantic Love, which
first originated in the minds of men of genius.
“The might of one fair face sublimes my love,
For it hath weaned my heart from low desires.”
“Sublimes my love.” These three words of Michael Angelo contain the
whole philosophy of our subject. And what is it that sublimes Love
chiefly? “The might of one fair face”—the magic effect of Personal
Beauty. Perhaps, after all, the greatest difference between the Love of
a genius and an ordinary mortal is that in the former the æsthetic
element—the Admiration of Beauty—is so much stronger, making up
two-thirds of the whole passion. And as a taste for the beautiful in art
and nature becomes more common, the Love of common mortals, in
approaching that of genius, will more and more partake of this æsthetic
refinement—this worship of Personal Beauty for the sake of the higher
gratifications it yields to the imagination.