POETS’ LOVES.
Reading edition
“Never did poet touch a pen to write, Until his ink were tempered with love’s sighs.”
Poets seldom make good lovers, except on paper: there is no serving God and mammon. The concentration of thought which goes to the higher flights of composition, allows the feeling but little play. There has been much dispute, whether great actors are the dupes of their own art; but the great actors themselves have honestly avowed that they owe their successes to their coolness and self possession; and the poets, if they were equally candid, would own themselves in the same predicament. They are not, however, often inclined to make the confession. Horace says, “we must weep ourselves, before we can make our readers weep;” and Pope’s, “He best can paint them, who shall feel them most,” goes very nearly to the same tune.
Passion, though eloquent, is not descriptive; and delights not in those details which make the essence of impressive writing. Dr. Johnson, who loved, or fancied he loved, his she-bear, and was, therefore, (good bruin!) the better authority on the subject, has said, that “he who woos his mistress in verse, deserves to lose her;” and there is no woman of sense, who would not come to the same conclusion. I have heard an odd, paradoxical person assign a physiological reason for this. When one great organ, he says, is much and permanently excited, the development is at the expense of all the other functions. Head workers in particular, have uniformly bad digestions; and how can a man be heroically in love with a feeble stomach? I, who am no physiologist, can only appeal to facts. Pope, Dryden, Swift, Racine, Boileau, La Fontaine, were none of them famous as lovers; they had no ‘great passion,’ and excited none; some of them were absolutely insensible to female charms, and were sceptics to their influence. La Fontaine, with all his naïveté (which is generally so indicative of passion) was as cold as an icicle. “Je doute,” says Ninon, his friend, “qu’il y ait un filtre amoureux pour La Fontaine. Il n’a guère aimé les femmes.” I have some doubts of the sensibility even of the divine Petrarch, notwithstanding his thousand and one sonnets, which made so little impression on Laura. As to Ovid, his conceits are the antipodes of passion and feeling; and Anacreon was so mere a roué, that I should as soon take Don Juan for a martyr to the belle passion, as he. Cowley, who wrote so much upon love, was an anchorite. Prior, who wrote so freely on it, was a rake; and Rousseau, a poet in prose, wrote “Julie,” and lived with Thérèse, who, besides being an imbécille, was neither chaste nor sober, and was “all for love, and a little for the bottle.” When Doctor de Pruli chided Rousseau, a few days before his death, for exposing himself, in his weak health, by going to the cellar, Rousseau, pointing to Thérèse, observed, “Que voulez-vous? quand elle y va, elle y reste.”[3]
À propos to St. Preux and his Julie: nobody thought of visiting Switzerland for its picturesque scenery, till Rousseau brought it into fashion. Now every body goes to drop a sentimental tear at his “rochers de Meillerie,” and to visit Mont Blanc. It is well for les rochers that this lachrymal humour has not the properties of Hannibal’s vinegar! What would our magazines do but for these visitors to the mountains! I never see an article headed “Journey to Mont Blanc,” without being tempted to wish, that its author had done as Thérèse did by the wine cellar.