If we take the word Genius in the Kantian, imaginative, or Æsthetic sense, it may be said that all Geniuses are amorous; and that the degree of their greatness may as a rule be measured by their susceptibility to feminine charms. The most poetic part of the Scriptures is the Song of Solomon with its glowing pictures of feminine charms. Homer, though he lived long before the age of Romantic Love, spent his life in describing the mischief caused by Helen’s beauty. Among the Roman poets the most original was also the most amorous. As Professor Sellar remarks of Ovid, “In the most creative periods of English literature he seems to have been more read than any other ancient poet, not even excepting Virgil; and it was on the most creative minds, such as those of Marlowe, Spenser, Shakspere, Milton, and Dryden, that be acted most powerfully ... and although the spirit of antiquity is better understood now than it was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, yet in the capacity of appreciating works of brilliant fancy we can claim no superiority over the centuries which produced Spenser, Shakspere, and Milton, nor over those which produced the great Italian, French, and Flemish painters,” to whom Ovid supplied such abundant material.

Coming to more recent times, we have seen that Dante, the first modern poet, was also the first modern lover, rarely if ever surpassed in rapturous adoration. How the greatest of the Spanish bards was influenced by feminine beauty may be inferred from the glowing descriptions of it and its influence in Don Quixote; and as for Shakspere, even had he not written Romeo and Juliet, his early poems alone would prove him to have been in his youth every inch a lover; for no one, not even with Shakspere’s imagination, could have painted such unique feelings with his realistic and infallible touch, unless he had felt them more than once and had them indelibly branded on his heart’s memory.

In the galaxy of German poets Goethe ranks first, owing to his manysidedness. Yet he lacked the very highest of literary gifts—wit; and in this respect as well as through his deeper insight into Modern Love, Heine must be rated higher than Goethe. Heine’s personal loves are but thinly covered over by the clear amber of his lyrics, in which they are imbedded. Goethe’s loves have become proverbial for their number—KÄtchen, Friederike, Lili, Charlotte, Christiane, etc. Schiller, Wieland, BÜrger, Bodenstedt, and the lesser lights might all have appended a D.L., or Doctor of Love, to their names.

Shelley, Mr. Hamilton tells us, “had an irresistible natural tendency to fall in love”; and Byron, speaking of one of his loves, says, “I had and have been attached fifty times since, yet I recollect all we said to each other, all our caresses, her features, my restlessness, sleeplessness,” etc. And in the next chapter on “Genius in Love,” we shall meet with numerous similar cases of English, German, and French men of genius constantly in Love.

To account for this amorous propensity of Genius is easy enough. Genius means creative power allied with a taste for the Beautiful. This taste may be gratified by the contemplation of the beauties of Nature—the creative power by reproducing them on canvas or manuscript. But Nature’s masterpiece is lovely woman, who not only yields the highest gratification of artistic taste, but inspires Love: and what is Love but a creative impulse—a desire to link one’s name and personality, in future generations, with this embodiment of consummate human beauty?

Shakspere’s

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—

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.