Have we lost our old sense of love -- the brilliant, obsessive, moth-in-the-flame sense of love -- and has this archetype of the lover been replaced, in western culture, by the creative genius?

If so is there any essential humanness lost by replacing the ideal love, however distant it might be from the lover's person, with love of the ideal?

(I thought it would be best to begin with the question.)  By way of context, I've been reading Lionel Trilling's remarkable essay about Lolita, "The Last Lover." He takes such care to craft an essay that it's almost a shame to excerpt. Still, for the purposes of this post, here is what happens in section four:

"But I think that the real reason why Mr Nabokov chose his outrageous subject matter is that he wanted to write a story about love."

"...This makes it unique in my experience of contemporary novels. If our fiction gives accurate testimony, love has disappeared from the Western world, just as Denis de Rougemont said it should. The contemporary novel can tell us about sex, and about sexual communion and about mutuality, and about the strong fine relationships that grow up between men and women; and it can tell us about marriage. But about love, which was once one of its chief preoccupations, it can tell us nothing at all.

"...The condition toward which such [a modern] marriage aspires is health -- a marriage is praised by being called a healthy marriage. This will suggest how far the modern ideal of love is from passion-love. The literal meaning of the word "passion" will indicate the distance. Nowadays we use the word chiefly to mean an intense feeling, forgetting the old distinction between a passion and an emotion, the former being an emotion before which we are helpless, which we have to suffer, in whose grip we are passive. The passion-lover was a sick man, a patient. It was the convention for him to say that he was sick and to make a show of his physical and mental derangement. And indeed by any modern standard of emotional health what he was expected to display in the way of obsessional conduct and masochism would make his condition deserve some sort of pretty grave name. His passion filled his whole mind to the exclusion of everything else; he submitted himself to his mistress as her servant, even her slave, he gloried in her power over him and expected that she would make him suffer, that she would be cruel.

"Obviously I am dealing with a convention of literature, not describing the actual relationship between men and women. But it was a convention of a peculiar explicitness and force and it exerted an influence upon the management of the emotions down through the nineteenth century. At that time, it may be observed, the creative genius took over some of the characteristics of the lover: his obsessiveness, his masochism, his noble subservience to an ideal, and his antagonism to the social conventions, his propensity for making a scandal..."

By genius I would understand the artist, the writer, the scientist. It's such a curious twist, a green island in the midst of his argument for Lolita which surges on. But I want to rest a moment on this island. What a strange displacement -- what are we to make of it?

For those curious how the argument continues:

"If a novelist wanted, for whatever strange reason, to write a novel about the old kind of love, how would he go about it? How would he find or contrive the elements that make love possible?"