Though it is man’s duty and destiny to get married, yet the concurrent testimony of several famous authors appears to indicate that there is one thing which excuses celibacy, and may even make it a virtue—and that thing is the possession of Genius. Bacon claims that “certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men.” A more modern philosopher, Schopenhauer, expresses himself to the same effect: “For men of higher intellectual avocation, for poets, philosophers, for all those, in general, who devote themselves to science and art, celibacy is preferable to married life, because the conjugal yoke prevents them from creating great works.”

The same counsel is indirectly given in Moore’s Life of Byron, where he argues that “In looking back through the lives of the most illustrious poets—the class of intellect in which the characteristic features of genius are, perhaps, most strongly marked—we shall find that with scarcely one exception, from Homer down to Lord Byron, they have been, in their several degrees, restless and solitary spirits, with minds wrapped up, like silkworms, in their own tasks, either strangers or rebels to domestic ties, and bearing about with them a deposit for posterity in their souls, to the jealous watching and enriching of which almost all other thoughts and considerations have been sacrificed.”

“Either strangers or rebels to domestic ties.” Among the strangers, Moore names Newton, Gassendi, Galileo, Descartes, Bayle, Locke, Leibnitz, and Hume, to whom may be added Kant, Schopenhauer, Handel, Beethoven, Schubert, Plato, and many others.

Quite as large is the list of “rebels to domestic ties” among men of poetic genius. Says Moore: “The coincidence is no less striking than saddening that, on the list of married poets who have been unhappy in their homes, there should already be found four such illustrious names as Dante, Milton, Shakspere, and Dryden.” “The poet Dante, a wanderer away from wife and children, passed the whole of a restless life in nursing his immortal dream of Beatrice.” “The dates of the birth of his [Shakspere’s] children, compared with that of his removal from Stratford, the total omission of his wife’s name in the first draft of his will, and the bitter sarcasm of the bequest by which he remembers her afterwards—all prove beyond a doubt his separation from the lady early in life, and his unfriendly feeling towards her at the close.” “Milton’s first wife, it is well known, ran away from him within a month after their marriage, ‘disgusted,’ says Phillips, ‘with his spare diet and hard study,’ and his later domestic misery is universally known.” “The poet Young, with all his parade of domestic sorrows, was, it appears, a neglectful husband and a harsh father.”

Sir Walter Scott remarks, in his Life of Dryden: “The wife of one who is to gain his livelihood by poetry, or by any labour (if any there be) equally exhausting, must either have taste enough to relish her husband’s performances, or good-nature sufficiently to pardon his infirmities. It was Dryden’s misfortune that Lady Elizabeth had neither the one nor the other; and I dismiss the disagreeable subject by observing, that on no one occasion when a sarcasm against matrimony could be introduced, has our author failed to season it with such bitterness, as spoke of an inward consciousness of domestic misery.”

Richard Wagner when a young man married an actress, “pretty as a picture”; but she appears to have had little sympathy with his ambitions, so he lived apart from her. Subsequently he was very happy with Cosima, the daughter of Liszt, who did appreciate his genius. Liszt himself, after living some years with the Countess D’Agoult in Italy, separated from her. The girl whom Haydn married soon turned out a shrew, who had no sympathy whatever with his musical genius. Berlioz was one of the most passionate of lovers: “Oh, that I could find her, the Juliet, the Ophelia that my heart calls to. That I could drink in the intoxication of that mingled joy and sadness that only true love knows! Could I but rest in her arms one autumn evening, rocked by the north wind on some wild heath, and sleeping my last, sad sleep.” A few years after these rapturous effusions he arranged a sÉparation À l’aimable from his wife, his former flame, and left her to die in solitude and misery.

Handel, after all, was the wisest of the composers. He was never in Love, and had an aversion to marriage. In 1707 he went to LÜbeck to compete for the place of successor to the famous organist Buxtehude; but when he found that one of the conditions of obtaining the place was the compulsory privilege of marrying the daughter of his predecessor, he got alarmed and fled precipitately.

Besides the disposition to wrap up their minds, like silkworms, in their own tasks, Poverty and the extreme difficulty of finding congenial companions appear to be the principal causes that have tended to make men of genius strangers or rebels to domestic ties.

There is an old saying that if Poverty comes in by one window, Love goes out by another. But Poverty, unfortunately, seems to be an almost necessary companion of Genius, at least in the early stages of its career, till the inertia natural to the human brain has been overcome. It is so much easier for the richest soils to grow a luxuriant crop of weeds than a useful crop which needs constant care, that there can be no doubt that wealth is responsible for the loss of much Genius to the world. There have been men of genius in whom the creative impulse was so strong, and the pleasure of creating so sweet—Goethe, Schopenhauer, Byron, etc.—that they needed not the goad of hunger; but as a rule a well-filled pocketbook does not encourage the habit of “infinite painstaking,” which is essential to Genius. But if a genius marries while he is poor, he will have to waste his time on rapid, ephemeral work to support his family; which will leave him neither leisure nor energy for work of enduring value. Hence he should either not marry at all or wait till he has an assured income. If money-marriages are ever justifiable, they are in such cases; and rich girls should make it the one object of life to capture a man of Genius, so as to give him leisure for immortal work. It appears, indeed, as if a sort of Conjugal Pride of this description were becoming fashionable; for one hears every month of some author or artist marrying an heiress. This is certainly the easiest way for a woman to become immortal; and what is a coquette’s gratified ephemeral vanity, compared with the proud consciousness of passing down to posterity linked with an immortal name, and of having helped to make that name immortal by removing the necessity for bread-winning drudgery!

Furthermore, there can be no doubt that the number of persons able to read a work of genius at sight, as it were, is growing larger every year. Great men do not have to wait for recognition so long as formerly, and this enables them to neglect ephemeral drudgery in favour of creative work.

As there has been an unparalleled unfolding and increase in feminine charms, both of body and mind, within the last half-century, it is not too optimistic to hope that the other source of domestic difficulties among men of genius—the extreme difficulty of finding a congenial companion—will also be removed, in course of time. Men of genius, as Moore remarks, have such rich resources of thinking within themselves, that “the society of those less gifted than themselves becomes often a restraint and burden to which not all the charms of friendship or even love can reconcile them.” To be completely happy a Genius should accordingly have a wife as remarkable among women for the womanly qualities of receptivity, grace, and sympathy, as he is among men for the manly quality of creative energy. Yet if it is so difficult for an ordinary man to meet his ordinary Juliet, how much more so will it ever be for an extraordinary man to find an extraordinary Juliet!

Thanks to their passion for Beauty, men of Genius are too prone to follow the impulse of the moment and marry a pretty doll, in the hope of being able to educate her into an attractive companion. Unluckily it rarely happens that the minds of these beauties are “wax to receive and marble to retain.” Pretty girls are commonly lazy—spoiled by the thought that their beauty atones for everything, and regardless of the future when this apology for indolence will have lost its persuasiveness.

Among the objections to the celibacy of Genius, the strongest is supplied by the laws of heredity—the desirability of having their superior mental qualities—often associated with corresponding physical beauty—transmitted to the next generation. Genius, it is true, depends on so many fortuitous circumstances that cases of direct transmission from father to son are rare enough; and Mr. Galton’s researches show that “the ablest child of one gifted pair is not likely to be as gifted as the ablest of all the children of very many mediocre pairs;” and that “the more exceptional the gift, the more exceptional will be the good fortune of a parent who has a son who equals, and still more if he has a son who overpasses him.” Nevertheless, it remains true that “the children of a gifted pair are much more likely to be gifted than the children of a mediocre pair.” Just as a professor’s son is born with a brain naturally more plastic and receptive than that of a young savage or peasant, so the children of a Genius who has not shattered his health by overwork or dissipation are likely to be of a mental calibre superior to that of an ordinary professor’s son. So that it is the duty of a man of genius to get married even at a sacrifice of personal happiness—provided that sacrifice is not so great as to interfere with his intellectual duties.