A STUDY OF BRITISH GENIUS. 209 



A STUDY OF BRITISH GENIUS. 



By HAVELOCK EI,LIS. 

 VI. MAEEIAGE AND FAMILY. 



THE tendency to celibacy among men of preeminent intellectual 

 ability has frequently been emphasized by Lombroso and others. 

 It is well illustrated by British men of genius. We may probably 

 assume that by the age of fifty scarcely more than 10 per cent, of the 

 male population remain bachelors, if we take the whole population 

 into consideration. (This is the case in Hungary, and it can not be 

 very far from the truth, so far as Great Britain is concerned.) It is 

 true that, as Korosi and others have shown, among the well-to-do 

 classes men marry both later and seldomer, and that the subjects under 

 jconsideration largely belong to those classes. We can, however, well 

 afford to leave a margin on this account. We have information con- 

 cerning the status as regards marriage of 819 of the preeminent men 

 in our list; of these, seventy-two, being Catholic priests or monks (ten 

 of them since the Eeformation), were vowed celibates, and 160 others 

 never married. We thus find that 28 per cent, never married, and 

 even if we exclude the vowed celibates, 21 per cent. It must, of 

 course, be remembered that a certain, though not considerable, pro- 

 portion of the unmarried were under fifty at death, and some of these 

 would certainly have married had they survived. It may be added 

 that about two-thirds of the women were married, though several of 

 those (especially actresses) belonging to the immarried third formed 

 liaisons of a more or less public character, and in a few cases had several 

 children. 



It must not be supposed that all these eminent men who lived 

 long lives in celibacy were always so absorbed in intellectual pursuits 

 that the idea of matrimony never occurred to them. This was not 

 always the case. Thus we are told of Dalton, that the idea had 

 crossed his mind, but he put it aside because, he said, he "^never had 

 time.' In several cases, as in that of Cowley, the eminent man appears 

 really to have been in love, but was too shy to avow this fact to the 

 object of his affections. Reynolds is supposed only once to have been 

 in love, with Angelica Kauffmann; the lady waited long and patiently 

 for a declaration, but none arrived, and she finally married another; 

 Reynolds does not appear to have been overmuch distressed, and they 

 remained good friends. These cases seem to be fairly typical of a 

 certain group of the celibates in our list; a passionate devotion to in- 

 tellectual pursuits seems often to be associated with a lack of passion 



TOL. LIX.— 14 



