These ladies and gentlemen write to say that
they also, like Latour, cannot understand how it is that
they are not able to feel any experience of tender passion
which they read about so much in novels, and hear about in
actual life."
At the same time there are not a few men of genius, too, who never
felt true love in their own hearts. Herder believed that Goethe was
not capable of genuine love, and Grimm, too, thought that Goethe had
never experienced a self-absorbing passion. Tolstoi must have been
ever a stranger to genuine love, for to him it seems a degrading thing
even in marriage. A suggestive and frank confession may be found in
the literary memoirs of Goncourt.[122] At a small gathering of men of
letters Goncourt remarked that hitherto love had not been studied
scientifically in novels. Zola thereupon declared that love was not a
specific emotion; that it does not affect persons so absolutely as the
writers say; that the phenomena characterizing it are also found in
friendship, in patriotism, and that the intensity of this emotion is
due entirely to the anticipation of carnal enjoyment. Turgenieff
objected to these views; in his opinion love is a sentiment which has
a unique color of its own--a quality differentiating it from all other
sentiments--eliminating the lover's own personality, as it were.
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