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.