Title: The Friendships of Women
Author: William Rounseville Alger
Release date: September 8, 2006 [eBook #19199]
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Edmund Dejowski
Produced by Edmund Dejowski
A GENTLE BUSINESS AND BECOMING
THE ACTION OF GOOD WOMEN.
Shakespeare.
BOSTON: ROBERTS BROTHERS. 1868.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1867 by
WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court
of the District of Massachusetts.
A STATEMENT of the facts in which this book began may gratify the curiosity of some of its readers.
While gathering materials for a History of Friendship, I was often struck both by the small number of recorded examples of the sentiment among women, which were discovered in my researches, and by the commonness of the expressed belief, that strong natural obstacles make friendship a comparatively feeble and rare experience with them. Spurred by further thought, as well as by many talks, I kept on exploring the subject. At length, so much matter was mustered that I determined to insert in my work a distinct chapter on the Friendships of Women. Still the subject grew in interest for me, and the bulk of historic illustration swelled beyond the size of a chapter. Then I decided to make a little treatise of it by itself.
The principle and sentiment of friendship deserve a much larger share of the attention given, alike in the life and the literature of our time, to the passion of love. One would infer from most of the popular writings of the day, that love is the only emotion worthy of notice. But surely there are in human nature other feelings, which demand far more culture than they generally receive, feelings which really play an important part in human life, and which ought to play a still more important part. Am I deceived in thinking, that, in particular, the place of friendship in the Live; of women is a subject which, if soundly discussed, and set forth with mastery and sympathy, may give precious guidance, comfort, and inspiration to thousands of embittered and languishing souls? Will not the large number, who are denied the satisfactions of impassioned love, be grateful for a book which shows them what rich and noble resources they may find in his widely different, though closely kindred, sentiment? Is not such a book especially needed at he present time?
In method of treatment, I have, without neglecting moral analysis or reflective exposition, even greater prominence to biographic narrative, living presentation of instances from which the reader may draw the befitting lessons of the topic, and apply them for personal profit. Poetry, it has been said, is balm on the wounds of non- fulfilment in our lives. When our own experience and imagination are wanting in that balm, we must borrow it from others. If we muse, with open heart, on the enthusiastic dreams and fruitions of more richly impassioned or more happily placed natures, the contagious glow of their affections may enkindle ours. This is one of the highest uses of art, a use which puts on artists the duty of setting before their patrons sights of righteousness and bliss, trust and peace, rather than sights of wretchedness, wrangling, doubt, and error.
In conjoined importance and interest, to those who have a taste for it, no other study can compare with the study of human nature and human experience, as illustrated in individual examples. If the students are curious as to the secrets of greatness, and are emulous of excellence, the attraction is enhanced when they deal with persons of extraordinary powers and careers. It then becomes fascinating. Beautiful and noble characters can find nothing so enchanting as a beautiful and noble character. It was truly said by Vauvenargues, "Sooner or later, we enjoy only souls." These pages will present portrayals of a large number of charming souls, with accounts of their happiest experiences. For our poor human heart, there will always be a bewitchment about the memories of those persons who were either remarkable for their power of drawing affection or were signalized by their enjoyment of the boon. Many a rare character, otherwise long ago consumed in the alembic of time, will long continue to be fondly singled out and studied. So when the famous Marchioness of Salisbury was accidentally burned to death, the Skeleton was known as hers only by the jewels with which she had been decked.
It may be dangerous to overlook ignorantly what is false and hateful in society; but it is pernicious to pick out such objects for exclusive or permanent scrutiny. The most wholesome results are likely to be secured by the fastening of our attention prevailingly on what is true and fair and blessed in our fellow-beings. Such a choice will commend itself to the best spirits; for, while it is the spontaneous movement of a mean nature to contract and swoop, a generous nature prefers to expand and soar. The vulture pounces on rottenness with a cry of obscene satisfaction; but the lark seeks the sunrise with a song of worship. So let the ingenuous mind, studying human character and life, bestow a shunning glance at evil, a fixed gaze on good. So, should any one wish to write a history of the enmities of women, for which, doubtless, the materials are ample, I willingly yield him the task, appropriating only the privilege of doing justice to their friendships.
In the present volume, my first and constant purpose has been boldly to state the truth just as it is, to do justice to the facts of the subject. My second purpose has been to be of use, to give help and comfort. In whatever degree poetry and ideal sentiment may be accompaniments, neither of them has in any sense been made an aim of the work. While freely allowing his mind to shine into his pen, and his heart to flow through it, the writer has adopted every precaution to prevent or correct all those refractions of ignorance and prejudice, and all that coloring of morbid sentimentality, which would stand in the way of truth and use. In treating such a theme as friendship, the worst dangers are hardness and levity on the one extreme, exaggeration and mawkishness on the other, and cowardice and squeamishness between. These faults, it is hoped, are not chargeable on the following pages.
This book is a book of goodness. It is devoted to the nurture of those benign virtues which it so plainly shows waiting on and winning the best beauty and joy of the world. Small causes can bring about great effects, when time and facts conspire to help them. A cocoanut, tossed by the waves into a little sand on a rock amidst the ocean, has been known to strike root, and to form the centre of a luxuriant island of palms. Unable to look for any such striking result from the influence of this work, I shall be happy, indeed, if the power of the examples to which I have here given voice shall demonstrate the other side of the deep thought penned by Shakespeare: One good deed, dying tongueless, Slaughters a thousand waiting upon that.
Cornelia and the Gracchi.
Olympias and Alexander.
Monica and Augustine.
John Quincy Adams and His Mother.
Goethe and his Mother.
The Humboldts and their Mother.
Guizot and his Mother.
Tullia and Cicero.
Margaret Roper and Sir Thomas More.
Agnes and William Wirt.
Mary and John Evelyn.
Theodosia and Aaron Burr.
Maria and Richard Edgeworth.
Madame de Staël and Necker.
Letitia Landon and her Father.
Narcissus and his Reflection.
Electra and Orestes.
Antigone and Polynices.
Diana and Apollo.
Scholastica and Benedict.
Cornelia and Tasso.
Margaret and Francis.
Mary and Sir Philip Sidney.
Catherine and Robert Boyle.
Caroline and William Herschel.
Letitia and John Aikin.
Cornelia and Goethe.
Lena and Jacobi.
Lucile and Chateaubriand.
Charlotte and Schleiermacher.
Dorothy and Wordsworth.
Augusta and Byron.
Mary and Charles Lamb.
Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn.
Whittier and his Sister.
Eugénie and Maurice de Guérin.
Count and Countess del Verme.
Lady and Sir James Mackintosh.
Aspasia and Pericles.
Portia and Brutus.
Arria and Pertus.
Paulina and Seneca.
Calpurnia and Pliny.
Timoxena and Plutarch.
Castara and Habington.
Faustina and Zappi.
Jeanne and Roland.
Caroline and Herder.
Lucy and John Hutchinson.
Sarah and John Austin.
Elizabeth and Robert Browning.
Leopold Schefer and his Wife.
John Stuart Mill and his Wife.
Lady and Lord William Russell.
Artemisia and Mausolus.
Moomtaza and Jehan.
Relative Prevalence of Vice in our day.
Moral Influence of Friendships between Men and Women.
Analysis of Platonic Love.
Laura and Petrarch.
Beatrice and Dante.
Heloise and Abelard.
Danger and Safety of Platonic Love.
Countess Matilda and Hildebrand.
The "Woldemar" of Jacobi.
Influence of Chivalry in developing Friendships of Men and Women.
Causes of Prominent Social Position of Women in France.
Friendships in Catholic Church between Women and their Directors.
Olympias and Chrysostom.
Paula and Jerome.
Clara and Francis of Assissi.
Chantal and Francis of Sales.
Guion and Lacombe.
La Maisonfort and Fenelon.
Cornuau and Bossuet.
Theresa and John of the Cross.
The Friendship of Vittoria Colonna and Michael Angelo.
Mademoiselle de Scudéry and Pélisson.
Madame de Sévigné and Corbinelli.
Madame de la Fayette and Rochefoucauld.
Madame du Deffand and D'Alembert.
Mademoiselle Lespinasse and D'Alembert.
Madame de Staël and Montmorency.
Magdalen Herbert and Dr. Donne.
Lady Masham and John Locke.
Mary Unwin and Cowper.
Mrs. Clive and Garrick.
Hannah More and Langhorne.
Joanna Baillie and Sir Walter Scott.
Duchess of Devonshire and Fox.
Duchess of Gordon and Dr. Beattie.
Charlotte and Humboldt.
Bettine and Goethe.
Goethe's Treatment of Women in his Life and in his Works.
Princess of Homburg and Marchioness di Barolo and
Silvio Pellico.
Isabel Fenwick and Wordsworth.
Harriet Martineau and Channing.
Lucy Aikin and Channing.
Frances Power Cobbe and Theodore Parker.
Friendships of Women and their Tutors.
Zenobia and Longinus.
Countess of Pembroke and Daniel.
Princess Elizabeth and Descartes.
Caroline of Brunswick and Leibnitz.
Lady Jane Grey and Elmer.
Elizabeth Robinson and Middleton.
Hester Salusbury and Dr. Collier.
Blanche of Lancaster and Chaucer.
Venetia Digby and Ben Jonson.
Countess of Bedford and Ben Jonson.
Countess Ranelagh and Milton.
Duchess of Queensbury and Gay.
Relations with Women, of Sophocles, Virgil,
Frauenlob, Bernadin
St. Pierre, Rousseau, and Jean Paul Richter.
Rahel Levin and her Friendships with Men.
Madame Récamier and her Friendships with Men.
Elizabeth Barrett, Hugh Stuart Boyd, and John Kenyon.
Clotilde de Vaux and Auguste Comte.
Madame Swetchine and her Friendships with Men.
Madame de Sévigné and Madame de Grignan
Madame de Rambouillet and Julie d'Angenne
Mrs. Browne and Felicia Hemans.
Naomi and Ruth.
Dido and Anna.
Hannah and Martha More.
Mary and Agnes Berry.
Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Bronte.
Joanna and Agnes Baillie.
Treatment of Female Friendship in Literature.
School-girl Friendships.
Friendships in Conventual Life.
Jeanne Philippon and Angélique Boufflers.
Agnes Arnauld and Jacqueline Pascal.
Madame de Longueville and Angélique Arnauld.
Friendships between Queens and their Maids of Honor.
Sakoontali and Anastiya.
Marie de Medicis and Eleanora Galigäi.
Queen Philippa and Philippa Picard.
Lady Jane Beaufort and Catherine Douglas.
Mary Stuart and her Four Marys.
Queen Elizabeth and her Attendants.
Queen Anne and Sarah Jennings.
Marie Antoinette and the Princess de Lamballe.
Queen Hortense and Madame de Faverolles.
Beatrice Portinari and Giovanna.
Dorothea Sydney and Sophia Murray.
Katherine Phillips and Regina Collier.
Elizabeth Rowe and the Countess of Hertford.
Countess of Pomfret and Countess of Hertford.
Lady Harley and Mrs. Montague.
Hannah More and Mrs. Garrick.
Elizabeth Carter and Catherine Talbot.
Charlotte Smith and Lady O'Niel.
Anna Seward and Honora Sneyd.
The Countess of Northesk and Anna Seward.
Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby,
the Ladies of Llangollen.
Fanny Burney and Mrs. Thrale.
Günderode and Bettine Brentano.
Miss Benger and Lucy Aikin.
Lucy Aikin and Joanna Baillie.
Mrs. Hemans and Miss Jewshury.
Mary Mitford and Mrs. Browning.
Madame de Staid and Madame Récamier.
Madame Swetchine and the Countess Edling.
Countess D'Ossoli and the Marchioness Arconati.
The Duchess of Orleans and her Lady Companion.
Evils and Defects of Society and their Remedy.
The Ideal of Marriage.
Public Life versus Domestic Life.
Caste: Diminution of its Influence.
The Common Destiny, and the Peculiar Destiny, of Woman.
Life in the Harems of the East.
Right of Woman to every form of Education and Labor.
Grounds of the exclusion of Women from Public Life
The Right of Women to engage in Politics.
The Inexpediency of their doing so
Impartial Consideration of both sides of the Question.
Morality, eternal; Politics, temporary.
Gradual historic Emancipation of Woman.
Comparative Condition of Woman in the Oriental, the Classic,
the early Christian, and the Modern World.
Relation of Mohammed and of Jesus to Women.
Light thrown on the Condition of Women in Greece by the
History of Sappho.
Sentiment of Chivalry towards Woman.
Woman ennobled by sharing in great public Interests.
Decline of Letter-writing in our day.
Duty of Women to cultivate Conversation.
Duty of Women to cultivate the art of Manners.
Value of model Types of Women.
Disinterestedness, the Redemption of Man.
Woman as seen in Mythology.
Conclusion of the matter.
Friendship in the Future.
THE peculiar mission of woman, it has been said, is to be a wife and mother. Is it not as truly the peculiar mission of man to be a husband and father? If she is called to add to the happiness and worth of her husband, he is called to add to the happiness and worth of his wife. They are alike bound to protect and educate their children. And the other duties, the private improvement of self and the public improvement of society rest on them in common. The assertion, then, that the distinctive Office of woman is to be the helpmeet of man, does not imply that she ought to be legally or morally any more subservient to him than he to her; for the supreme duty of a woman, as of every other human being, is, through the perfecting of her own nature as a child of God, to fulfil her personal destiny in the universe. To love, to marry, to rear a family, is by no means an entire statement of the obligations and privileges of women: because no woman always has lover, husband, or children; many fail to have all of them in succession; and a few never have either of them.
In some of these cases the domestic appointment of woman is defeated; but her personal destiny may still De achieved. The qualities of her soul and the fruitions of her life, as a free individual, may be perfected in spite of this relative mutilation in her lot. The growing desire in our time for show and luxury, the increase of the excitements of publicity, the sensational literature of fiction, which is absorbing an ever-larger share of attention from the more sensitive portion of the feminine public, these causes are concentrating an undue interest on the passion of love. It is the almost exclusive theme of plays, novels, poems. One consequence is an exaggeration of the part that should be played by this sentiment in the experience of the individual. It comes to be the engrossing subject of regard. Life is considered a failure, unless it contains love, followed by marriage; yet it must often be deprived of this experience. In the most civilized countries, especially in their brilliant capitals, a higher and higher ratio of women miss of happy love and marriage.
There never were many morally baffled, uneasy, and complaining women on the earth as now; because never before did the capacities of intelligence and affection so greatly exceed their gratifications. New perceptions are the scouts of fresh desires; fresh desires precede their own fulfilment: a just reconciliation is a slow, historic process. The lives of a multitude of women all around us contain a large element of unsuccessful outward or inward ambitions, vain attempts and prayers. This drives them back upon themselves, into a deeper and sadder seclusion than that naturally imposed by their housekeeping and their historic withdrawment from the bustling businesses of the world. In that silent retirement, in thousands of instances, a tragedy not less severe than unobtrusive is enacted, the tragedy of the lonely and breaking heart. An obscure mist of sighs exhales out of the solitude of women in the nineteenth century. The proportionate number of examples of virtuous love, completing itself in marriage, will probably diminish, and the relative examples of defeated or of unlawful love increase, until we reach some new phase of civilization, with better harmonized social arrangements, arrangements both more economical and more truthful. In the mean time, every thing which tends to inflame the exclusive passion of love, to stimulate thought upon it, or to magnify its imagined importance, contributes so much to enhance the misery of its withholding or loss, and thus to augment an evil already lamentably extensive and severe.
Now, the most healthful and effective antidote for the evils of an extravagant passion is to call into action neutralizing or supplementary passions; to balance the excess of one power by stimulating weaker powers, and fixing attention on them; to assuage disappointments in one direction by securing gratifications in another. Accordingly, the offices of friendship in the lives of women, lives often so secluded, impoverished, and self-devouring, is a subject of emphatic timeliness; promising, if properly treated, to yield lessons of no slight practical value. This vein of sentiment has suffered unmerited neglect among us. No other vein of sentiment in human nature, perhaps, has so much need to be cherished. In the lives of women, friendship is, First, the guide to love; a preliminary stage in the natural development of affection. Secondly, it is the ally of love; the distributive tendrils and branches to the root and trunk of affection. Thirdly, it is, in some cases, the purified fulfilment and repose into which love subsides, or rises. Fourthly, it is, in other cases, the comforting substitute for love. A just display of these points, in the light of an accurate analysis, aided by the appropriate learning, can hardly fail to repay the study it will require. The insight into the nature and the working of the affections, to be secured by a careful study of the subject, should be a precious acquisition of knowledge easily convertible into power. The activity of the sympathies enkindled by tracing the biographical sketches of a large number of the richest and most winsome examples of feminine friendship preserved for us in history, should bestow a rare pleasure. And the plain directions to be deduced from the discussion and the narratives should furnish a store of instruction for the wiser guidance of personal experience.
The writer, as he is about to intrust his book upon that current of literature which flows by the doors of all the intelligent, bearing its offerings to their hands, is quite aware that the subject of the rights and the wrongs, the joys and the griefs, the hopes and the fears, the duties and the plans, belonging to the outer and inner life of womankind in the present age, happens just now to be one of the chief matters of popular interest and agitation. This, however, has had no influence in leading him to treat the subject. It has long been in his mind. He has been drawn to investigate it and write on it simply by its intrinsic attractions for him. But the extent and earnestness with which the public mind is preoccupied by the social and political discussions of the theme, going on in all quarters, much increase the difficulty of treating it, as is here proposed, from the scholarly, moral, and experimental point of view, with perfect candor and calmness, and with a careful avoidance of prejudices, exaggerations, and declamatory appeals. Demagogues and partisans, who seek personal notoriety or other ends of private passion, naturally try to produce effect by the use of pungent epigrams, overstrained trifles, extravagant views, and sophistical arguments, fitted to play on the biases, piques, and ignorances of those whose attention they can gain. All this obviously adds to the hardness of the task imposed on him who would steer clear of every extremity, and keep in the golden mean of truth and use.
Such a one is also least likely to secure popular praise. The extreme conclusions, peppery rhetoric, and passionate declamation of the leaders on both sides, who aim at sensation and victory, are surest to awaken the enthusiasm of the extremists, who always direct the admiring gaze of heir parasites to the favorite representatives of their own party, their scorn to the favorite representatives of the other party. But under such circumstances, by is much as the moderation of impartiality and of a patient search for the exact truth is hard to be kept, an unlikely to win popularity, it is the more a duty, and the surer to bear good fruits of service to the public. There is a fashionable habit of laughing or sneering at the illusions of the young, a habit usually mistimed and injurious. For an illusion is as real as a truth. Every phenomenon implies truth, however incorrectly t may be understood. An illusion is, in fact, but a reality misinterpreted. Harmless, joy-breeding illusions are the magic coloring of our existence. They should be cultivated rather than rudely driven away.
The dry critic who daily labors, and with success, to destroy them, may be knowing; but he is not wise. Every seeming acquisition really impoverishes him. The noble Mendelssohn once said, "Life without illusions is only death." The illusions of high and guileless hearts are the blessed hopes created by generous faiths fastening on the better aspects of truth. They are to our experience what the tremulous iridescence is to the neck of the dove. To allow, as we grow old, a sinister gaze at the sterner aspects of truth to banish these rich and kindly illusions, is a wretched folly, however much it may dress itself as wisdom. There are lures and deceits, enchanting at an early period, which, at a later one, ought to be outgrown, seen through and left behind, but not with arid and scoffing conceit. The way to escape sadness, when the light of one beautiful promise after another goes out, is to kindle in place thereof the light of one glorious reality after another. If the gathered experience we carry at evening renders worthless many things we prized in the morning, it should also give preciousness to many things unvalued then.
When the fallen torch of ambition has smouldered into blackness, we ought to make the eternal star of religion our guide. To take spiritual treasures away without replacing them by better ones is robbery. The cynical authors who deal chiefly in ridicule and satire, or in what they call solid facts, the alternate levity and bitterness of whose writings tend to destroy all ingenuous faith and glowing affection, all magnanimous sympathies and hopes, seem to me to be engaged in as miserable a business as those African hunters who train falcons to dart on gazelles, and pick out their beautiful eyes. The illusiveness of life that results from teeming love and trust is as a mist of gold sifted into the atmosphere, through which all the objects of our regard loom, colossal and glittering. As we advance in years, we should indeed learn to recognize, and make allowance for, this refraction and these tints, but without ceasing to enjoy the beautiful aggrandizement they bestow. When there is danger that a character will melt into a mere mush of ungirt feelings, the astringent and bracing use of satire is fit. The application of a fleecing nonchalance or of a jibing scorn to a soul of strong and ardent sentiment, is unfit. A certain divinity should hedge every manifestation of trustful affection, even though it be misjudged. It is for the most part profane to scoff an overstretched or misplaced admiration: it calls rather for a considerate instruction which shall tenderly set it right.
It is insipidity of the feelings that gives rise to sentimentality, as, when the tongue is disordered, we are always trying it. The cure of that insipidity is to direct upon it the energy of an objective earnestness, a current of positive faith and love. No negative treatment, of indifference or of contempt, can avail. Sentimentality, frozen under the cutting breath of derision, resembles that loathsome ice-lake of poison in the Scandinavian hell. Sentimentality, fired by the glorious contagion of self-forgetful admiration and loyalty, is raised into sentiment, or even divinized into enthusiasm. The author will devote his best endeavor to do justice to both sides of the subject treated in his book, taking warning from the partisans who fix an exclusive attention on that aspect of it which they respectively prefer. He will try to set down such true thoughts in such a pure spirit, as, instead of drying up in his readers the springs of generous faith, and disenchanting them of all romantic expectation, will leave them at the end with a higher estimate of the worth of human nature and of the sweetness of human life.
Ever so correct a perception of what we despise and detest leaves our moral rank undetermined; but the measure of what we love and admire is the measure of our own worth. It should never be forgotten, that the most delicate and enduring pleasures we enjoy are those we give. It should always be remembered, that, while the proud demand honor, and the humble seek sympathy, there is a self-respectful affection, neither haughty nor cringing, which will always earn honor, but never stop to ask it, always enjoy sympathy, but never be dependent on it. This whole book is a demonstration of the truth, that, however much woman may need deliverance from some outward trials and disabilities, her grand want is a freer, deeper, richer, holier, inward life. Let her, if she so please, reach out for the ballot, enter on a larger range of work and responsibility. But let her not be blind to the truth, that her foremost, weightiest need is a more thorough intellectual possession and moral fulfilment of herself, leading to a closer union with friends and an absolute surrender to God. The just formula for the aims of woman, as it seems to me, is neither, on the one hand, limitation to domestic life; nor, on the other hand, devotion to public life as an end; but, dedication to the duties and joys of family and social life, and to the nurture of the personal inner life, as the true ends, and a free participation in the grand interests of public life, as a means of purifying the domestic and the inner life from selfish littlenesses, and enriching the experience of the individual with the wide obligations and hopes of humanity at large. Not domestic life alone; not public life alone; not merely domestic life and public life together; but domestic life and public life, for the sake of the personal inner life, purified and aggrandized by the ideal appropriation of the essential experience and progress of the whole world.
This, with such allowances as the distinction of sex really requires, should be the aim of every woman as well as of every man. If this view be correct, it is plain how great and vital an interest it gives to the theme of the present work; the friendship of women; since the very ground and gist of a noble friendship is the cultivation in common of the personal inner lives of those who partake in it, their mutual reflection of souls and joint sharing of experience inciting them to a constant betterment of their being and their happiness.
SOME men think women unfitted for friendship. Feminine hearts are so complex, changeable, elusive, that the belief has had great currency among themselves as well as with their critics. In comparing the two sexes in this particular, many persons commit a gross error by overlooking the fact that there are all kinds and degrees of feminine characters, not less than of masculine. When Heine says, "I will not affirm that women have no character; rather they have a new one every day," he means precisely what Pope meant by the famous couplet in his poem on the Characters of Women:
Nothing so true as what you once let fall,
Most women have no characters at all.
This want of character is held by many thoughtful men for what Coleridge asserted it to be, the perfection of a woman; as tastelessness proves the purity of water; transparency, that of glass. Plausible ground for this view is furnished by the fact, that the perfection of fine and noble manners the peculiar province of feminine genius consists in the absence of egotism, in that chaste and lustrous exuberance of sympathetic joy which results from the opposite of all personal domination; namely, spontaneous obedience to the whole law of duty. Nevertheless, the opinion is unsound; partly untrue, partly inadequate. It results from the despotic selfhood of man, who wishes not to reflect another, but only to be reflected. The absence of fixed individuality makes one a readier mirror; and man, as the historic master, desires the woman who confronts him to be, at least apparently, the yielding subject of his will. But since woman is an independent being, endowed with a separate responsibleness, she has a distinct personal destiny to fulfil as much as he has, and should be granted an equal freedom of individuality.
The perfection of a woman in the sight of God is one thing: her irresistible charmingness to selfish man may be quite another thing. If the latter requires a soft compliance, involving the absence of will, the former is not irreconcilable with the firmest constancy of individual traits; and, in fact, women can no more be lumped together in level community, either by positives or by negatives, than men can be. Those differ from each other as widely as these do. Accuracy of thought has seldom been more recklessly offered up to pungency of expression than in the above-cited aphorism of Pope. There is an ample variety of tenacious womanly characters between the extremes marked by Miriam beating her timbrels, and Cleopatra applying the asp; Cornelia showing her Roman jewels, and Guyon rapt in God; Lucrezia Borgia raging with bowl and dagger, and Florence Nightingale sweetening the memory of the Crimean war with philanthropic deeds. What group of men indeed can be brought together, more distinct in individuality, more contrasted in diversity of traits and destiny, than such women as Eve in the Garden of Eden, Mary at the foot of the cross, Rebecca by the well, Semiramis on her throne, Ruth among the corn, Jezebel in her chariot, Lais at a banquet, Joan of Arc in battle, Tomyris striding over the field with the head of Cyrus in a bag of blood, Perpetua smiling on the lions in the amphitheatre, Martha cumbered with much service, Pocahontas under the shadow of the woods, Saint Theresa in the convent, Madame Roland on the scaffold, Mother Agnes at Port Royal, exiled De Staël wielding her pen as a sceptre, and Mrs. Fry lavishing her existence on outcasts!
In searching for the friendships of women, it is difficult at first to find striking examples. Their lives are so private, their dispositions are so modest, their experiences have been so little noticed by history, that the annals of the feminine heart are for the most part a secret chapter. But a sufficiently patient search will cause a beautiful multitude of such instances to reveal themselves. Nothing, perhaps, will strike the literary investigator of the subject more forcibly than the frequency with which he meets the expressed opinion, that women really have few or no friendships; that with them it must be either love, hate, or nothing. A writer in one of our popular periodicals has recently ventured this dogmatic assertion: "If the female mind were not happily impervious to logic, we might demonstrate, even to its satisfaction, that the history of the sex presents no single instance of a famous friendship." Before we get through our work, we shall meet with abundant confutations of this rash and uncomplimentary statement.
Swift says, "To speak the truth, I never yet knew a tolerable woman to be fond of her own sex." The statement, if taken with too wide a meaning, might have been refuted by the sight, under his eyes, of the cordial and life-long affection of Miss Johnson and Lady Gifford, the sister of Sir William Temple. He could not expect a Stella and a Vanessa to be friends: an exclusive love for a common object inevitably made them deadly rivals. But the author of "Gulliver's Travels" was a keen observer; his maxims have always a basis in fact; and it is undoubtedly true that women of exceptional cleverness prefer the wit, wisdom, and earnestness of the more cultivated members of the other sex to the too frequent ignorance and triviality of their own. Undoubtedly, in most societies, women of unusual genius and accomplishments can more easily find congenial companionship with men than with women. But to infer from this any natural incompatibility for friendships between women is to draw a monstrous inference, wholly unwarranted by the premises. In the sensible chapter of "A Woman's Thoughts about Women," which Miss Muloch devotes to this subject, she says, "The friendships of women are much more common than those of men; but rarely or never so firm, so just, or so enduring." But then she proceeds, justly, though with a little inconsistency, to say, "With women these relations may be sentimental, foolish, and fickle; but they are honest, free from secondary motives of interest, and infinitely more respectable than the time-serving, place-hunting, dinner-seeking devotion which Messrs. Tape and Tadpole choose to denominate friendship." That the sharper and sincerer feelings of women make them more capable than men of sacrificing their interests to their passions, less likely to sacrifice their passions to their interests, and that they are more absorbed by their sympathies and antipathies, admits of no question.
Eugénie de Guérin, a woman of the rarest heart and soul, wrote in her journal, a few years ago, this passage, which has already grown famous: "I have ever sought a friendship so strong and earnest that only death could break it; a happiness and unhappiness which I had, alas! in my brother Maurice. No woman has been, or will be, able to replace him; not even the most distinguished has been able to give me that bond of intelligence and of tastes, that broad, simple, and lasting relation. There is nothing fixed, enduring, vital, in the feelings of women; their attachments to each other are so many pretty bows of ribbons. I notice these light affections in all female friends. Can we not, then, love each other differently? I neither know an example in history nor am acquainted with one in the present. Orestes and Pylades have no sisters. It makes me impatient, when I think of it, that you men have something in your hearts which is wanting to us. In return we have devotedness." It is striking to notice the identity of sentiment here with that in the maxim of La Bruyere: "In love women exceed the generality of men, but in friendship we have infinitely the advantage."
With reference to the statement that "Orestes and Pylades have no sisters," besides the superfluous disproofs of it contained in the pages that follow, it is an interesting fact that classic literature affords one example, which modern writers have never, to my knowledge, noticed. Pausanias, in his "Description of Greece," tenth book, twenty-ninth chapter, gives an recount of an elaborate painting by Polygnotus of the underworld, the scenery and fate of the dead in the future state. Among the images of the departed set forth on the canvas were two women, Chloris and rhyia, locked in a fond embrace. Of these two women, thus shown eternally united in the realm beyond he grave, Pausanias says that they were a pair of friends extraordinarily attached to each other in life. Their story is lost. The imagination of womankind might compensate for the missing narrative, and make the names of Chloris and Thyia live with the lames of Damon and Pythias.
Let us sift the grounds of the opinion that women ire relatively incapable of friendship, analyze the appearances on which it rests, and separate the truth in it from the error.
The first fact of the subject is, that women are naturally less selfish and more sympathetic than men.
They have more affection to bestow, greater need of sympathy, and therefore are more sure, in the absence of love, to seek friendship. The devastating egotism of man is properly foreign to woman; though there are many women as haughty, hard, and imperious as any man. But these are unfeminine, despite their sex. There are women who seem cold and beautiful stones, their hearts icicles, their tears frozen gems pressed out by injured pride. On the other hand, there are men as soft, as modest, as celestially sympathetic, as almost any woman. Still, the cardinal contrast holds, that women are self-forgetful, men self-asserting; women hide their surplus affection under a feigned indifference; men hide their indifference under a feigned affection. Of course, in this comparison, depraved women are excluded: these are generally far more heartless and calculating than men. The aphorism of Rochefoucauld "In their first passion, women love the lover; in their subsequent ones, they love love" is descriptive, not of women, but of that class of women who cherish a succession of lovers, a class familiar to the base and brilliant French aphorist. With such, the venal commonness of affection first profanes, then destroys it.
It is a pathetic sign of the diviner nature of women, that they conceal sorrow more easily than joy, while men conceal joy more easily than sorrow. The lover of Adelaide de Comminge having joined a convent of Trappists, she followed him thither, disguised as a man, took the vows, and was not recognized by him until on her death-bed. Man is not capable of such pure devotion: only a woman could thus forbear, and be content with the secret joy of the beloved presence. Man demands action: woman demands emotion. Friendship between two youths is martial, adventurous, a trumpet-blast or a bugle-air: friendship between two girls is poetic, contemplative, the sigh of a harp-string or the swell of an organ-pipe.
Woman needs friendship more than man, because she is less self- sufficing. She is much more apt than he to think the form in the mirror is lovely, but not to think it of herself. Milton's Eve was startled with a shy delight at the fair shape in the fountain, never dreaming that it was herself. Men are flutes: they must be filled with the warm breath of a foreign sympathy. Women are harpsichords: they have all the conditions of music in themselves, and only need to be struck. But, containing so much, their need of being struck is the greater. Charlotte Bronte, in her sad, weary life, full, as she expressed it, of loneliness, of longing for companionship, had two faithful and precious friends; her "dear, dear E.," and her "good, kind Miss W." To the former she writes, "I am at this moment trembling all over with excitement, after reading your note: it is what I never received before, the unrestrained pouring out of a warm, gentle, generous heart. If you love me, do, do, do come on Friday. I shall watch and wait for you; and, if you disappoint me, I shall weep." Few sayings are more touching than that which Thackeray heard a woman utter, that she would gladly have taken Swift's cruelty to have had his tenderness. Now, is it not true that the intenser need naturally implies the keener search and the more copious finding?
The great reason why the friendships of women are not more frequent and prominent than they are is, that the proper destiny of woman calls her to love; and this sentiment, in its fullness, is usually too absorbing to leave room and force for conspicuous friendships. With men the other sentiments are not so much suspended or engulfed by conjugal and parental love. "The men," La Bruyere says, "are the occasion that women do not love each other." With the one-sided exaggeration incident to most aphorisms, this is true. Husband and children occupy the wife and mother; and marriage is often the grave of feminine friendships. According to the maxim of Saint Paul, "The head of the woman is the man:" the attraction of another woman must generally be weaker. The lives of men are the sighs of nature: the lives of women are their echoes. The sharp-eyed Richter says, "A woman, unlike Narcissus, seeks not her own image and a second I: she much prefers a not-I." This profound remark exactly touches the difference between friendship and love, and between the respective relations of man and woman to the two sentiments. Friendship is the simple reflection of souls by each other. Love is the mutual reflection of their entire being by two persons, each supplementing the defects of the other. Love, therefore, is friendship, with a differential addition. True love includes friendship, as the greater includes the smaller. Now, the self-sufficient character of man makes him seek a second I; that is, wish to see himself reflected in another. But the sympathetic character of woman makes her seek a not- I; that is, wish to see another reflected in herself. It is incorrect to say, that woman has less capacity than man for friendship: it is correct only to say, that man is more easily satisfied with friendship than woman is. She demands that, and something more; and every page of history teems with the records of that something more, the heavenly records of the sufferings, sacrifices, and triumphs of woman's love. When this imperial sentiment is baffled, and yet the soul remains mistress of herself, it is impossible that the next strongest sentiment should not, in all available instances, be cultivated as a solace and vicegerent. One of the renowned apothegms of that sinister moralist, Rochefoucauld, is, "Women feel friendship insipid after love." But he should have limited his remark to vicious women. It will not apply to virtuous women. Jane Austin, who in knowledge of the feminine heart has few equals, says, "Friendship is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love."
Women are more sensitive and acute than men, more delicate electrometers for all the imponderable agencies of sympathy; and this greater penetration makes them more fastidious, gives them better ability indeed to admire what is superior, but causes them to be less tolerant of what is offensive. The innervation and nutrition of woman are finer and more complicated than those of man; and, by as much as her nerves are more numerous and more delicate, she has a keener and richer consciousness, including many states he is incapable of reproducing. He is more of a head; she, more of a plant. Her body is far more intelligent than his; and feelings are the thoughts of the body, as thoughts are the feelings of the mind. No one can forget the lines, made so famous by their exquisite felicity, written of Elizabeth Drury by Donne:
The pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
Ye might have almost said her body thought.
Mothers feel as if still connected with their offspring by the fibres that joined them in their prenatal life; as the nerves continue to report in consciousness an amputated hand or foot. There is in all their emotions a vascular quality or consanguineous tincture never to be wholly eliminated.
The greater material identification of mothers than of fathers with their children, in the long period of gestation and nursing, leads to a closer and more persistent mental identification with them. The physical differences of the sexes react on the mind to make moral differences; and these are further heightened by differences in their education, habits of life, and sphere of interests. No doubt, these differences occupy a larger share of attention in women than in men.
Those who have suffered sharply, see keenly; and it is difficult to conceal much from women. They have the strangest facility in reading physiological language, tones, gestures, bearing, and all those countless signs which make the face and eyes such tell-tales of the soul. They will look into your eyes, and see you think; listen to your voice, and hear you feel. The coy and subtle world of emotion now infinitely timid and reticent, now all gates flung down for the floods to pour is their domain. They are at home in it all, from the rosy fogs of feeling to the twilight borders of intelligence. On the one side, these endowments are a help to friendship. The ardor with which a pure and generous woman enters into choice states of soul in another is a redemptive sight. This capacity of swift perception and sympathy makes the friendship of a woman a precious boon to a man who aims at greatness or perfection; and scarcely ever has there been an illustrious man who has not been appreciated, comforted, and inspired in secret by some woman long before he became famous, circling around him with her unselfish ministrations, like that star which is the invisible companion of Sirius.
The poor young Niebuhr writes home from Great Britain to Madam Hensler, the wife of the good professor who had befriended him in college, "Your letter has made me so wild with delight, that I have felt full of affection to every creature that has come in my way." The melancholy heart and dismal lot of Gerald Griffin, the Irish novelist, found almost their solitary human alleviation and brightness in the sustaining kindness and admiration of a lady, designated in his brother's biography of him as Mrs. L. John Foster, whose social career was as trying to him as his massive soul was lonely, exceedingly enjoyed the cordial encouragement and affection of a number of cultivated and excellent women. Many of his published letters were addressed to one of these, Mrs. Mant. He thus writes to her of another one: "I turn, disgusted and contemptuous, from insipid and shallow folly, to lave in the tide of deeper sentiments. There I swim and dive and rise and gambol, with all that wild delight which could be felt by a fish, after panting out of its element awhile, when flung into its own world of waters by some friendly hand. Such a hand to me is Mrs. C.'s. It is impossible to give a just idea of the strange fascination she diffuses around her. My mind seems to be larger, stronger, and more brilliant in her company than anywhere else. Every fountain of sentiment opens at her approach."
The greater sensibility, insight, and impulsiveness of women, on the other hand, expose them more to obstacles in the way of friendship. Coldness and meanness are less endurable by them. A genuinely feeling soul has an insuperable repugnance alike for unfeelingness, for false feeling, and for false expressions of feeling. An Arabian courser cannot travel comfortably with a snail. A soul whose motions are musical curves cannot well blend with a soul whose motions are discordant angles. A woman is naturally as much more capricious than a man, as she is more susceptible. A slighter shock suffices to jostle her delicate emotions out of delight into disgust. She is therefore a severer personal critic. Male peccadilloes are female crimes. A wet-blanket presence that she could not tolerate may refresh him. As less strong, less stably poised, than he, she is more tempted to have recourse to artifice; and when she does stoop to dissimulation, she uses it with inimitable dexterity, as shield, as foil, as poniard. It would be a difficult task for men to do what the spotless and loving Eugénie de Guérin was horrified at seeing two prominent Parisian ladies do, play the part of tender friends in society, and then turn away and venomously caricature each other. What woman who possessed a ring conferring invisibility on its wearer, would dare to put it on, and move about among her friends? The weakness of women is an exaggerated attention to trifles. The great condition of steady friendship is community of plans and ends in the parties. This is much wanting in women, who think chiefly of persons, little of laborious aims. Two girls, who live in a multitude of evaporating impulses and dreams it were as easy to yoke a couple of humming-birds, and make them draw. Because the polarity of a grand fixed purpose is absent from it, the mind of many a woman is a heap of petty antipathies; and, where the likings are fickle, the dislikings are pretty sure to be tenacious. A keen student of human nature has remarked, that many women "spend force enough in trivial observations on dress and manners, to form a javelin to pierce quite through a character." Women's eyes are armed with microscopes to see all the little defects and dissimilarities which can irritate and injure their friendships. Hence there are so many feminine friends easily provoked to mutual criticisms and recriminations.
The dear friends, Fanny Squeers and Matilda Price, experienced a violent jealousy on account of Nicholas Nickleby. After a fierce altercation, they fell into tears, followed by remonstrances and an explanation, and terminated by embraces and by vows of eternal friendship; "the occasion making the fifty-second time of repeating the same impressive ceremony within a twelvemonth." But obviously it is a closer approach to the truth to take the sensitiveness and interruptions in the mutual relations of women, as compared with those in the relations of men, as the direct, rather than as the inverse, measure of the number and value of their respective friendships. Yet, by a gross error, the estimate is usually made in the latter way.
The maxim of Walter Savage Landor is a palpable stroke at the truth: "No friendship is so cordial or so delicious as that of girl for girl; no hatred so intense and immovable as that of woman for woman." In fact, there is immensely less indifference between women than between men; there are incomparably more enmities; and there are a great many more friendships. It is the enormous preponderance of the mutual dislikes of women over those of men, which chiefly has given rise to the fallacious belief that their mutual likes are less. These, too, are more, though not, perhaps, so much more.
Among women, it is true, only a few of those memorable unions of soul and life are known which entitle the parties to be ranked as pairs of friends. Our ignorance, however, of such cases does not prove their non-existence. There have been thousands of them. There are a great many at this moment. It is the characteristic modesty and privacy of the lives of women which keep these heart-histories concealed. The most gifted, refined, and elevated natures are most likely to have this experience; and such natures shrink with unconquerable repugnance from all obtrusion, or betrayal, of their inmost experiences. The lives of noble women are "so transparent and so deep that only the subtle insight of sympathy can penetrate them:" their open secrets baffle all the scrutiny of coarse souls. The choicest of her sex will, to some extent, agree with the energetic sentiment of Eugénie de Guérin "I detest those women who mount the pulpit, and lay their passions bare." Engrossing, then, as the attachment of two women may be, it is not often thrust into public view so as to obtain the literary recognition won by the similar attachments of men who act their parts in the front of society, seeking a place in history for their achievements. As far as the public are concerned, women merge their heart-lives in the careers of those dear to them. It is accordingly in exceptional cases alone that a knowledge of the friendships of women is preserved for posterity. This, indeed, holds likewise of men, but in a much lower degree. Thus far there have been printed accounts of the lives of hundreds of men where there has been a printed account of the life of one woman. Allowance should be made for this in our estimate of their comparative friendships.
And now has not something been said to shake the current opinion, that the friendships of women are few and superficial? It is true that women are more imperiously called to love than men are; are more likely to be absorbed by this master-passion, and thus are more exposed to jealousy of each other. It is true, that, owing to their greater sensitiveness, keener subjection to the fastidious sway of taste, women are more apt than men to fall out, being more easily disturbed and estranged by trifles; but this relative subjection to trifles is chiefly a consequence of the exclusion of woman hitherto from the grandest fields of education, the noblest subjects of interest and action. It is true, that the attachments of women, on account of the greater privacy of their lives, are less conspicuous than those of men, less frequently obtain historic or literary mention, and therefore seem to be rarer. But it is not true, either that women are incapable of enthusiastic and steadfast friendships for each other, or that such friendships are uncommon. If women are more critical and severe towards their own sex than men are, it is chiefly because they cannot, like men, be indifferent to each other: they must positively feel either sympathy or aversion.
It is very frequently the case, that a single woman, blessed with wealth, invites some friend, to whom she is strongly attached, to accept a home with her; and they live thenceforth in indissoluble union. Such an instance among men is almost as rare as a white blackbird. Unmarried sisters so often pass all their years together, inseparably united, both inwardly and outwardly, that almost every one of us is acquainted with many examples. But it is extremely rare for bachelor brothers to club together, and pass a wholly shared existence.
In the higher classes of society, it is a common custom for nobly- born women to have lady companions, to whom they give a home and support and constant love, for the sake of congenial intercourse with them, for the comfort of their presence and conversation. There is scarcely a corresponding custom among men. It has happened to the writer to know numerous instances in which a wealthy woman has, in her lifetime, freely bestowed on a poor friend, from a pure impulse of good-will, a sum of money sufficient to secure her a handsome independence. This substantial deed of friendship he has not known paralleled in a single instance among men.
Men do not often go so far in either moral extreme as the other sex. It is the corruption of the best that makes the worst. Who is this, shameless mixture of beast and fiend, with body of fire, heart of marble, brow of bronze, and hand hollowed to hold money? It is the woman who sells herself in the street. And who is this, with upturned eyes of fathomless love, the radiant paleness of ecstasy transfusing her countenance, heaven flooding her soul, the world a forgotten toy beneath her feet? It is the woman who, in silence and secrecy, gives herself to God. So capacious of extremes is the feminine spirit.
There is no fretfullness, spitefullness, revengefullness, equal to those of a woman. There is no grace, sweetness, dignity, disinterestedness, equal to those of a woman. And, when all is said, the conclusion of one who understands the subject will be, that, for quick depth of sympathy, intuitive divination, joyous sacrifice, perfect reproduction of all the modulations of feeling, there is no friendship equal to that of a woman.
THE presentation of the friendships of women in distinct classes will add clearness to the treatment, and will also make it easier to suggest, with some approach to adequacy, the wealth of the topic. It is natural to begin with instances within the limits of blood relationship, and between persons of opposite sex. The relations of conscious affection among those of near kindred are but too apt, from the blunting influence of custom, to have a character of tameness, lukewarm routine. The members of the family, in their commonplace familiarity, cherish a quiet goodwill and fidelity, without any relishing surprise, romantic hues, or mystery. Calmly affectionate, or perhaps listless, towards all within the domestic circle, they look outside for inspiring intercourse and thrilling attachments, and for calls to lofty sacrifice and delight. This is too often the case. Identity of inheritance and situation, sameness of idiosyncrasy, and habitude of union, squeeze poppies into the household cup, and clothe in dull gray the familiar landscape around; and yet, happily, in numerous instances it is not so. The confidential intimacies, the incessant dependencies, duties, and favors of near relatives, instead of engendering a consciousness of vapid usage, sprinkle electric stimulants on their mutual feelings and intercommunications.
Their affictions towards each other keep fresh and grow deeper, and the homestead stands in a landscape tinged with faith and romance. The imagination, undeadened by custom, goes with their eyes and hands, exerts its beautifying magic, and idealizes or glorifies their images in each other's souls.
Then kinship becomes friendship. Upon the material consanguinity is superinduced a spiritual consanguinity; the legal and customary bonds of descent, association, and duty are brightened and exalted into delightful relations of intelligence and sympathy, a choice community of character, purposes, and experience. The relative is then hidden in the friend. Innumerable aunts and nephews, nieces and uncles, cousins, and other branches of kindred, have found in their relationship, with the common interests and the consequent meetings, a fortunate occasion for forming close and blessed friendships.
The biblical instance of Esther and Mordecai is very charming. Esther, left an orphan, was adopted and brought up by her uncle, Mordeoi. When the beautiful Jewish maiden was taken into the palace, among those from whom Ahasuerus was to choose his queen, "Mordecai walked every day before the court of the women's house, to know how Esther did and what should become of her." And when she had been made queen, "she did still the commandment of Mordecai, like as when she was brought up with him." In the threatened calamity of the Jews, Mordecai rent his clothes, and put on sackcloth with ashes, and wept. Esther's maids told her of it. "Then was the queen exceedingly grieved; and she sent raiment to clothe Mordecai." In all the sequel of the well-known tale, it is easy to see that the niece's friendship for her uncle was at least as important a sentiment as the wife's love for her husband. Beranger caused to be placed on the tomb of his aunt this touching inscription: She was never a mother, yet sons mourned for her. It is a striking fact that the strength of the tie of blood is in an historic process of decrease, while, parallel with it, the strength of the tie of moral sympathy is in an historic process of increase. In primitive ages, when barbaric force prevailed, and life was full of exposures, and redress was uncertain, the family was the unit of society. All within the bond of the family stood compactly together in the most sacred and intense of leagues against every hostile approach from without. But as law and order became consolidated, and their sanctions diffused, and adequate general tribunals were set up, and public considerations encroached on private, the tie of physical kindred grew less, that of moral fellowship more. The bloody feuds of old times, which ran down the veins of successive generations like streams of fire, have become nearly obsolete. The hates transmitted with such wild ferocity, the friendships handed down with such burning loyalty, among the ancient Scottish clans, are phenomena not possible in the cultured circles of Berlin, London, Paris, or New York. This relative decay of the energy of the sentiment of material relationship is not to be regretted; for it is a sign of progress, when we see its connection with the corresponding development of the force of free spiritual affinity. It looks towards the end contemplated by Jesus when he said. "Whosoever doeth the will of my Father in heaven, the same is my mother, and my brother, and my sister."
Once the merit or demerit of the individual had comparatively little to do with the regards which the other members of the family cherished towards him. Now it goes far towards a total determination of those regards. Multitudes of the nearest relatives are utterly indifferent to each other; multitudes of them hate each other. Where no fitness for a genuine union of mind and heart exists in the parties, all the forensic ties and all the conjoining memories in the world go for nothing. A horrid illustration of this truth is given by the conduct of Tullia, the Lady Macbeth of antiquity, who drove her chariot over the body of her murdered father lying in the "Wicked Street," and smiled as his blood spattered her dress. But truly it is a happy thing when those naturally associated in birth, position, and circumstances of life, become by sympathy inwardly united in mutual appreciation and will. It is like adding the spirit of music to the material conditions of music.
PARENTS and children furnish the first class of examples in which the fondness of a close attachment by nature is elevated into a freer and more comprehensive connection by intelligent sympathy; in which the affection of instinct and custom is transformed into the loftier and richer affection of friendship. This high and benign transformation takes place in due season between all mothers and sons, all daughters and fathers, who afford the requisite conditions for it; that is, in all cases where they remain long enough together, and their characters and manners are such as naturally command respect and love from each other. Even when children are ignoble and unworthy, their fathers and mothers may yearn over them with every strictly parental affection; and even when parents are vicious and degraded, their children may regard them with every strictly filial affection; but friendship between them is generally impossible without the co-existence, on both sides, of intrinsic worth, of those responsive virtues which elicit esteem and dominate sympathy. The great reason of the failure of a broad, glowing friendship between parents and children a failure o deplorably common in our homes is the lack, in heir characters, of that wealth, nobleness, sweetness, patience, aspiration, which would irresistibly draw them to each other in mutual honor, love, and joy. The only remedy for this unhappy failure is the cure of its unhappier cause. Whatever makes characters deep, rich, pure, and gentle in themselves, tends to make them pleasing to each other.
It is absurd to suppose, that mean, hateful, and miserable souls will love each other simply because they are connected by ties of consanguinity, of interest, or of duty.
Whatever makes us suffer, especially whatever injures our finer emotions, naturally tends to become repulsive to us, an object of dislike gathering disagreeable associations. Even a mother, a son, a father, a daughter, may become such an object, as is illustrated with melancholy frequency. But when parents and children possess those high qualities of soul which naturally give pleasure, create affection, and evoke homage; and when they are not too early separated, or too much distracted in alien pursuits, a firm and ardent friendship must spring up between them. The mere parental and filial relation will become subordinated, as a sober central thread in a wide web of colored embroidery. The parental instinct and the filial instinct, weaned from their organic directness, will grow more complex and mental; and, parallel with this process, the gracious guardians and the clinging dependants will gradually change into companions and friends, still retaining, however, sacred vestiges and memories of the original cords of their union. When we have allowed proper abatement for the thousands of instances in which this precious result is not reached, the general statement now made opens to us a large class of beautiful friendships. In all ages there have been myriads of mothers and sons, myriads of daughters and fathers, who were models of devoted, happy friends. Before paying attention to these, it will be profitable for us to notice the other cases.
Considered with reference to our subject, there are four classes of parents and children. First, Those who are positive enemies, their main relation being one of opposition, dislike, and pain. Undoubtedly a chief reason for this unfortunate result is carelessness, failure to understand and feel in advance the inestimable importance of a right rule and fruition of the home. But a cause working more strongly still arises from prominent vices of character, base and wicked qualities of soul, which make harmony impossible, friction and alienation inevitable. Disorder, fretfullness, antagonism, and misery, pervading the house, compel its members to detest each other. Then hatred occupies the place which should be occupied by friendship. This is a melancholy and odious sight to see. It is a horrible evil for its sufferers to endure. It is a terrible misfortune and wretchedness to all concerned.
Secondly, There are parents and children who live in entire unconcern and neglect of each other, in a mere routine of external connections and associations. This absence of all deep personal sensibility, either sympathetic or hostile, is not so frightful a calamity as the rankling resentment of a rooted and conscious enmity; but it is a lamentable misfortune. It is a sad loss, however little they may think of it. Absorbed in other matters, giving all their affection to business, fashion, ambition, dissipation, or to persons outside of the home-circle, they overlook the thing most indispensable for placid and permanent contentment; and are sure, sooner or later, to rue their folly, in an experience of bitter disappointment.
Thirdly, there are those who, so far from cherishing hatred or indifference, deeply love each other, and passionately long to enjoy an intimate union in reciprocal confidence, esteem, and sympathy, but are prevented by some unhappy impediment, some disastrous misunderstanding or morbid pique. Many a parent yearns with unspeakable fondness towards a disobedient and ungrateful child; the heart breaking with agony for the reconciliation, the embrace, the sweet communion fate withholds. Many a child profoundly desires to fall at the feet of a cold, hard, careless parent, and with supplicating tears win the notice, the affection, that would be so priceless; and, sadder still, there is many an instance where both parent and child are truly noble and affectionate, and would give the world if they could break through the separating barrier, and lavish their whole hearts on each other; but, in spite of these generous qualities, their common desires and their bitter suffering, some falsehood, some pride, some shyness, some suspicion, some chill, intangible phantom, is set fatally between them. In every community there are piteous tragedies of this sort, little dreamed of by those outside, but which the bleeding hearts concerned in them feel as a deadly drain, hastening them towards the grave.
Fourthly, Besides the parents and children who are open enemies, who are utter indifferentists, or who, while loving each other, are kept apart by some obstacle, there is another class, who, as free and cordial friends, happily realize in their relation all that is to be desired. In these examples there are ample wisdom, considerateness, tender sympathy, and guardian strength, on the one side; ready docility, attentiveness, obedience, reverence, and fondness, on the other; with an exuberance of indescribable comfort and peace on both sides. What a treasure, what an inestimable boon, what a divine trust, what an inexhaustible delight, is such an affection between a parent and a child! What a paradise any country would be, if such an experience were welling up, a pure fountain of life, in every home throughout its borders!
Few inquiries can have greater interest or importance than the inquiry, why there is not more generally between parents and children that warm, ingenuous, abiding affection which produces a full and joyous friendship. A clear perception and statement of the difficulties in the way of it may suggest the means of removing them. And, in the outset, is it not obvious that the home affections flourish so scantily because scanty attention is paid to the cultivation of them? It is forever the fallacy and folly of man to think least of that which lies nearest to him, and is the most indissolubly bound up with his being as a cause of happiness or of misery. He thinks most eagerly on those comparatively exceptional and remote things, which, in consequence of their greatness or their rarity, are the strangest and the most impressive to him. He ought to pay the keenest heed to that which is the most important in its influence on his life, not to that which is the most startling to his fancy. Now, it is unquestionably true, that while there is nothing which contributes so much to enrich or to impoverish us, to bless or to curse us, as our domestic relations, there is scarcely any thing which we take less pains to cultivate into all that it is capable of becoming. In most instances, the life of the home is so close to us, so identified with ourselves, accepted with such a matter of course security, that we overlook the delicate conditions for preserving its freshness and securing its increase. But, in every relation of persons, there are two sets of conditions, corresponding with the two sides, neither of which can be neglected with impunity. There are a multitude of homes which are centres of irritation and wretchedness, miniature hells to their occupants.
The first thing to be done is to turn thought to the subject, break up the apathy of routine, secure an earnest appreciation of the facts in the case, and then study the remedy.
One great obstacle to the desired friendships of parents and children consists in the difficulty of a perfect sympathy between persons marked by such differences of age, position, interest, and experience. Those of the same years, passions, pleasures, duties, will naturally sympathize the most easily. But in all these respects the disparities of parent and child are equally numerous and striking.
They look at things from opposed points of view; they judge of subjects in the light respectively of experience and of inexperience. This great and constant contrast must give rise to innumerable discrepancies of opinion and of desire, provocative of disagreements, if not of dislikes. Nature has, however, provided powerful neutralizers for this obstacle to sympathy between those who are so widely unlike, counteractives which forcibly tend to prevent disagreements from breeding hostilities. These counteractives are the profound instincts of parental fondness and filial reverence, the first of which tends to make the parents enter into the spiritual states of their children, and to look at things from their point of view; and the second, to make the children, with docile duteousness, adopt as their own the conclusions of their parents. These counteractives ought to be carefully fostered, neither party forgetting the differences between himself and the other, but endeavoring to bridge those differences by the identifying powers of imagination and sympathy. Another frequent destroyer or lessener of the natural love of parents and children is the conflict between the rightful authority of the former and the wilful impulses of the latter.
Maturity, having accumulated knowledge and wisdom out of long experience, and being set by God and nature in charge over the headstrong instincts of ignorant or capricious youth, cannot avoid the duty of frequently applying the curb to excessive desires, and the spur to defective ones. A sense of chafing, an impulse to resent and rebel, will naturally often arise. And, in every such collision of passion and rule, there is a tendency to hostility. It is needless to say how lamentably frequent are the examples in which this tendency makes actual foes of those between whom the natural bonds of love and reverence are of the most sacred character. It is evident that parental authority is a divine trust which must be exercised over childhood and youth. Only it should be exercised on principle, not from caprice; for the good of the ruled, not for the gratification of a despotic self-assertion in the ruler; with fond gentleness, not with harshness or cruelty. And the authority of the parent should be vindicated as far as possible by force of wisdom, weight of character, power of persuasion; avoiding, as far as can properly be done, every occasion of conflict, every need of a violent issue. The child, on the other hand, ought to remember the rightful authority of his parents, consider their greater experience, take for granted their benignant intention, cultivate a grateful sense of dependence and duty towards them, and foster the habit of prompt and hearty submission to their wishes. It is a safe rule, in general, for a boy or girl to respect and obey the father and mother, and not to think, when they oppose the thoughtless spirit of self-indulgence, that this parental opposition is unreasonable or unkind. To honor one's parents is the first scriptural commandment with promise.
It is a habit which no one will ever regret. But, alas! how many a man, how many a woman, has kneeled on the grave where father or mother lay mouldering, and has lamented, with burning tears of shame and sorrow, the disobedience, the disrespect, the unkindness, the neglect, shown in earlier years! How have they longed to lift up the faded forms from their coffins, to re-animate them, and to have them again in their homes, that, by unwearied ministrations of tenderness, they might atone for the upbraiding past! Let the man in the full maturity of his age, hardened by long contact with the world, revisit the scenes of his childhood. Let him stand by the old homestead where fence and wall have fallen, and house and hearth gone to dust. What presence hallows the place? Who so fills the air about him as to seem just ready to break into palpable vision wherever he turns? It is his mother. Overwhelmed by a flood of memories, inspired by an immortal faith, not less than by an immortal affection, he drops on his knees, and cries,
Mother! thou art mother still;
Only the body dies;
Such love as bound thy heart to mine,
Death only purifies.
The same moral is drawn by Sarah Tytler in her excellent book of "Sweet Counsel" for girls, where she says, "I do not know that I ever told my father I was once or twice very angry with him for refusing me this or that request. My lips will never tell him now, and beg his pardon, and assure him that I was not worthy of him then, but that I know all at last; my hand will never clasp his hand, my lips never kiss his lips again. But I do not break my heart; for I think he knows all that I ever intended to tell him, and has forgiven me long ago. I am persuaded,
"There must be wisdom with great death;
The dead shall look me through and through."
But perhaps the most fatal influence against the growth and perpetuation of vivid friendships between parents and children is the disenchanting effect of familiarity. A close and constant intercourse, long continued, usually tends to make persons arid, commonplace, uninteresting, to each other, takes away surprise, eager expectation, and romance. There is nothing human beings so much like as to be able strongly to impress and be impressed. This seems to cease to be possible in a company who fancy they have struck every string, sounded every secret, exhausted the possibilities, in each other. A long subjection of the same persons to the same circumstances produces a general spirit of sameness, a flagging tedium, a want of varied attraction and stimulation. Let a stranger, a foreign friend, any honored guest, come in, and how his presence quickens every thing! Life shines with novel lustre, and throbs with new energy. Every one puts his best foot forward, exerts his best powers to interest. The fresh pleasure every one feels gives him a fresh power of pleasing. But, ah it would be of no use, we think, to make any effort in the dull old circle of our familiars, who can produce no effect on us, and on whom we, in turn, can produce no effect. And thus life in the home becomes monotonous, torpid, and vacant. Worlds of love are every day destroyed by indifference and repulse. If the same pains were taken to invigorate and perpetuate the domestic affections as to secure the good-will of other persons whom we admire or depend on, it could scarcely fail to give a wonderful enrichment to the satisfactions of home.
This truth is especially applicable to the relation of parents and children in our day. The old extreme of a severe exercise of parental authority has passed away, and a new extreme of filial insubordination and insolent self-assertion has taken its place. It is altogether too frequent a thing now to see lads and lasses taking their parents to task as inferiors, and demanding every service from them. The thought of his child should be a constant delight to a parent. When the ill-temper and ill-behavior of a child cause every association with him in the heart of the parent to be disturbing and painful, how can the result be otherwise than alienating and depressing? Let there be two children in a family, one of whom is invariably obedient, gentle, attentive, ingenuous; the other, irritable, insubordinate, careless, secretive, and untruthful. The former shall be idolized, while the latter is regarded with condemnatory repugnance. The fact that a boy is your son, or that a girl is your daughter, cannot wholly neutralize the repulsiveness of their odious traits. When children uniformly respect and obey their parents, and seek by every kind attention and praiseworthy effort to please them, it is not in human nature that they should fail to be unspeakably loved and caressed. Deferential treatment, patient service, quick sympathy, expectant attention, an obvious desire to please, are the most potent charms that mortals can wield. They show that the parties are important to each other. They give life its highest value. In their absence, all romantic color fades, and every precious affection expires. The most effective intercourse that vanity can establish with strangers offers nothing comparable to the delicious quality of the experience which results when a parent and child, of suitable character and age, are blessed with a complete friendship. Every thought of it pours for them a sudden sunshine through the sky, an exhilarating fragrance through the air.
Undoubtedly the affections are greatly hurt and repressed by being regarded as obligations rather than as privileges. They must be wooed forth by the gentlest lures. They will not come when carelessly expected and demanded as a matter of course. The heart will be free. It imperiously resents bonds and orders. The love of parent and child is certainly even more a delight than it is a duty. They should be friends, not so much because they are commanded to be such, but more because they are mutually worthy, and because their peace of mind, their contentment of heart, their improvement and happiness, depend on their being such. What privilege can be imagined superior in purity of joy and profit, to that of a young man who has for his friend a wise and holy mother, whom he loves with enthusiasm and confides in with an absolute devotion?
And if there be a human tear
From passion's dross refined and clear,
A tear so limpid and so meek
It would not stain an angel's cheek,
'Tis that which pious fathers shed
Upon a duteous daughter's head.
CORNELIA, daughter of Scipio Africanus, and wife of Tiberius Gracchus, was left a widow, with a large family of young children. She refused all subsequent offers of marriage, even when Ptolemy of Egypt wished to share his throne with her. Her two sons, Tiberius and Caius, the tribunes who achieved such greatness and fame, owed every thing to her judicious training, to her wise and unwearied pains in educating them, guarding them, and inspiring them to high deeds. She was almost idolized by the Roman people, and occupied, indeed, the proudest position of any woman in the history of her country. Her two sons venerated, and invariably took counsel with their mother.
It is evident that their inner lives were shared with her. One of them was known to have dropped, at her request, a law which he meant to urge through the Senate. Cicero says that Catulus pronounced a public panegyric on his mother, Popilia, the first time such a thing was done in Rome. In a less formal manner, Caius Gracchus often publicly spoke the praises of his mother, Cornelia. When her sons were murdered, she bore the cruel affliction with imposing magnanimity. Departing from Rome, she took up her abode at Misenum, where, in the exercise of a queenly hospitality, she lived, surrounded by illustrious men of letters, as well as by others of the highest rank and distinction. Universally honored and respected, she reached a good old age, and finally received at the hands of the Roman people a statue inscribed, Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi. Notwithstanding her somewhat meddlesome and despotic temper, Queen Olympias seems to have maintained an intimate friendship with her son, Alexander the Great. He omitted no occasion, we are told, of showing his esteem and affection for her. When absent on his campaigns, he kept up a constant correspondence with her, highly valuing her letters, and in return concealing nothing from her. Saint Augustine and his mother, Saint Monica, a sublime example of this friendship, sit on the shore of fame, side by side; the face of the mother a little above that of the son; both of them worn with care, full of lofty pathos and love, looking at us out of the night of time; the sea of mortal passion far beneath their feet; the eternal stars hanging silent above, even as Ary Scheffer reveals in his solemn picture of them sitting in the window at Ostia, and gazing together over the ocean.
Thirty years after the death of Monica, Augustine said in one of his sermons, "Ah! The dead do not come back; for, had it been possible, there is not a night when I should not have seen my mother, she who could not live apart from me, and who, in all my wanderings, never forsook me. For God forbid that in heaven her affection should cease, or that she should not, if she could, have come to console me when I suffered! She who loved me more than words can express." The example, in American history, of a valued and fruitful friendship between a mother and a son, given by Abigail Adams and John Quincy Adams, is stamped with prominence by the exceptional fact of the publication of her letters to him. These letters breathe wisdom and virtue, with incitement to all worthy aims, no less than strong mental companionship and fervent maternal sympathy. They have been edited by her grandson, who pays her a deserved tribute in the memoir he has prefixed. The wife of the elder President Adams can never lose the exalted place she holds, in the honoring remembrance of the American people, among those exemplary women whose powerful talents and virtues did so much to mould the destinies of the nascent Republic. Madame Goethe said to Bettine, "My Wolfgang and I were so nearly of an age, that we grew up together more as playmates than as mother and child." And, when the great Wolfgang was an old man, he said that his mother, as yet quite a child, grew up to consciousness first with, then in, himself and his sister Cornelia. Her intercourse with him is prominent through a large part of his life: her influence on him is visible through the whole of it. The union of the illustrious brothers Humboldt with their mother was especially full and tender. While she lived, they shared souls; and, after her departure, the sons idolized her memory. Long years had passed, when William, expiring in the arms of his elder brother, said, "I shall soon be with our mother." And Alexander said, "I did not think my old eyes had so many tears." The relation of Guizot, the distinguished French statesman and author, with his mother, was one of the deepest, fullest, and noblest friendships that ever conjoined mother and son. Madame Guizot went through the horror and tragedy of the Revolution, to which her husband was one of the choicest victims, with a heroism and a dignity unsurpassed; and devoted herself to her maternal duties with a calm energy and wisdom whose proper fruits she lived long to enjoy. Her character revealed the purest feminine qualities in conspicuous perfection. Her honored old age showed all that is lovely and all that is august united, in her history, her spirit, her manners, her acquirements, and her presence, to attract confidence and to command respect. Indissolubly joined, through more than sixty years, with her brilliant and high-souled son, she was not more proud and fond of him than he was of her.
CICERO and his daughter, Tullia, enjoyed an extraordinary friendship. From all the hints left us, it is to be gathered that Tullia was a woman of sweet and noble character. It is certain that she was most affectionately devoted to her father; and that she had accomplishments of knowledge and taste, qualifying her to be his companion and his delight in his age and grief. It is affecting to read how eagerly, on his recall from exile, she hurried to Brundusium to throw herself into his arms. She died at about thirty-two. He was thrown into a state of lamentable prostration. Turn where he would in his inconsolable sorrow, engage in whatever he might, tears constantly overtook him. His friends, Atticus, Csar, Brutus, Sulpicius, and others, wrote letters of sympathy to him. He retired to one of country-seats. Seeking the solace of solitude, he buried himself every morning in the thickest of the wood, and came not out till evening. In his former reverses, he says he could turn to one place for shelter and peace. "A daughter I had, in whose sweet conversation I could drop all my cares and troubles.
But now every thing is changed." "It is all over with me, Atticus: I feel it more than ever now that I have lost the only being who still bound me to life." He purposed to erect on a commanding site, as a monument to his dear Tullia, a splendid temple, which, as though dedicated to some god, should survive all the changes of ownership, and bear to distant futurity the memory of her worth, and of his sorrow for her. For a long time, he could think of nothing but the details of this plan, on which he intended to lavish the bulk of his fortune. He avoided society for almost a year, and never recovered from the wound which the loss of her gave his heart. Margaret Roper was the pride and darling of her father, Sir Thomas More, whom in return she venerated and loved with the whole depth of her heart. The beauty of their relation cannot be forgotten by those who have read the life of the great English martyr. It was by her brave duteousness that his mutilated body was buried in the chancel of Chelsea Church. His head, exposed upon a pole on London Bridge for fourteen days, was ordered to be thrown into the Thames; but Margaret rescued it, preserved it in a leaden box, and directed that, after her death, it should be placed with her in the grave.
One of the loveliest examples of this class of friendships is unveiled by William Wirt in the exquisite memoir he wrote of his daughter, Agnes, after her death at the early age of sixteen. The example is closely parallel to that of the famous and good John Evelyn, who, apostrophizing his daughter, Mary, in mournful memory, says, "Thy affection, duty, and love to me was that of a friend as well as of a child." So Wirt writes of his Agnes: "To me she was not only the companion of my studies, but the sweetener of my toils. The painter, it is said, relieved his aching eyes by looking on a curtain of green. My mind, in its hour of deepest fatigue, required no other refreshment than one glance at my beloved child, as she sat beside me." Not many fathers and daughters have been fonder or faster friends than Aaron and Theodosia Burr. The character and memory of Burr, in the popular imagination, have been blackened beyond the hope of bleaching. Of course, he was a man mixed of good and bad; and was not such an unmitigated devil as some would paint him. But his selfishness, sensuality, recklessness, and degradation give, in one respect, a peculiar interest and instructiveness to the enthusiastic friendship subsisting between him and his daughter. It is no disproof of the need of the great virtues to serve as the basis of a true and enduring friendship. It proves that a sincere love, even in an unclean and depraved soul, purges it, and adorns it with meritorious charms and real worth in that relation. However bad Burr may have been in other relations, to his daughter he was ever good, gentle, and wise, unwearied in his devotion, and clothed with many fascinations. Good persons may sometimes be ill-consorted and odious to each other, their intercourse full of jars and frictions. Bad persons may sometimes be so related as to show each other only their good qualities, and be happy friends, while all around are detesting them. In one of her letters to her father, Theodosia speaks of his wonderful fortitude, and goes on to say, "Often, after reflecting on this subject, you appear to me so elevated above all other men; I contemplate you with such a strange mixture of humility, admiration, reverence, love, and pride, that very little superstition would be necessary to make me worship you as a superior being; such enthusiasm does your character excite in me. When I afterward revert to myself, how insignificant do my best qualities appear! My vanity would be greater, if I had not been placed so near you; and yet my pride is in our relationship. I had rather not live than not be the daughter of such a man." Burr, on the evening before his duel with Hamilton, wrote to his daughter a long letter, in which he said, "I am indebted to you, my dearest Theodosia, for a very great portion of the happiness which I have enjoyed in this life. You have completely satisfied all that my heart and affections had hoped, or even wished." Unhappily he slew his antagonist, and himself survived to carry a load of deadly and universal obloquy which would have crushed to the earth almost any other man.
Theodosia set sail from Charleston in a little vessel, which was never heard of again. It was supposed to have foundered off Cape Hatteras. The loss of his daughter, Burr said, "severed him from the human race." Certainly, from that time to the end of his prolonged and dishonored life, he never was wholly what he had been before. An inner spring had been broken, and the purest contents of his heart had escaped through the breach. Parton very fitly dedicates to the memory of Theodosia his highly readable and charitable life of her father. That brilliant lawyer, the late Rufus Choate, remarked, on reading this life, that there did not seem to have been in Burr a single glimpse of so much as the last and poorest tribute vice pays to virtue, not even the affectation of a noble sentiment. But we may claim with justice, that the friendship with his daughter is one bright place in that frightfully stained, one golden gleam on that dismally mutilated, career. Mention should be made of Richard and Maria Edgeworth, among those whose union as father and daughter, was merged in a superior fellowship as friends, in a more intimate and delightful junction of ideas, sentiments, and labors. Their united lives, their mutual devotion, their shared counsels, pleasures, and tasks, form one of the finest of domestic pictures, a model of a Christian household. In the preface to the life of himself which he left for Maria to complete and publish, he says, "If my daughter should perceive any extenuation or any exaggeration, it would wound her feelings, she would be obliged to alter or omit, and her affection for me would be diminished: can the public have a better surety than this for the accuracy of these memoirs?" And Maria says, "Few, I believe, have ever enjoyed such happiness, or such advantages, as I have had in the instructions, society, and unbounded confidence and affection of such a father and such a friend. He was, in truth, ever since I could think or feel, the first object and motive of my mind." One of the most remarkable friendships of this sort was that of Madame de Staël and her father. Necker was a kind, good, and able man, who occupied a distinguished position and played a prominent part in his time. But the genius of his impassioned daughter transfigured him into a hero and a sage. Her attachment to him was, in personal relations, the dominant sentiment of her life. With distinct comprehension and glowing sympathy, she entered into his thoughts and fortunes. She was to him an invaluable source of strength, counsel, and consolation.
An instance, partly ludicrous, illustrates her tender solicitude for him; and it also shows how the mere idea of an event has, with a person of her genius, the power of the actual occurrence. The coachman chanced to overset and considerably damage the empty family carriage. When told of it, she was indifferent until the idea of danger to her father struck her; then, exclaiming, "My God! had M. Necker been in it, he might have been killed," she rushed to the luckless driver, and burst on him with a storm of denunciations, mixed with expostulatory precautions as to the future. When her father died, Madame de Staël was plunged into despairing grief, from which she aroused herself for a vain effort to make the public share in the profound admiration and love she felt for him. It was one of her greatest trials that she could not succeed in this fond undertaking. Perhaps she was not so much deceived in her exalted estimate of her father as has been supposed. But he lacked that egotistical dash, those impulsive displays of daring and brilliancy, which are needed to make a sensation, and to secure quickly a great and lasting popularity. During the thirteen years that she survived him, the thought of him seemed constantly present; and she often said, "My father is waiting for me on the other shore." The touching words, addressed to Chateaubriand a little while before she crossed over, in which she summed up her life, were these: "I have always been the same, intense and sad. I have loved God, my father, and liberty." The unhappy Letitia Landon found a congenial friend in her father, the early loss of whom was the first in the sad series of her misfortunes. She closes her poem of "The Troubadour" with an affecting tribute to his memory:
My heart hath said no name but thine
Shall be on this last page of mine.
Such examples as the foregoing, showing what a treasure of help and joy the friendship of parent and child may yield to them, should teach us to think more of it, and to cultivate with greater fidelity the conditions of so blessed an experience.
THE next class of friendships consists of those formed between brothers and sisters. In this relation meet many favorable conditions for carrying sympathy to a great height, when the blinding effect of early familiarity and the palling effect of routine are prevented or neutralized. The organic affinities and heritage derived from their common parentage, with the memories and hopes they have in common, are, of themselves, endearing bonds. Then there are differences enough in the boy and the girl to give their communion contrasts and zest. Unless they are frigid, selfish, or absorbed in counter directions, or are the subjects of some unfortunate incongruity, a rich friendship spontaneously arises between a brother and a sister who advance to maturity in the same dwelling. A gifted woman, the author of "Counterparts" and "Charles Auchester," who, devoured by the flame of her own genius, died too young, has written, somewhat extravagantly, "O blessed sympathy of sisterhood with brotherhood! Surpassing all other friendship, leavening with angel solicitude the purest love of earth. No lovership like that of the brother and the sister, however passionate their spirits, when they truly love." Narcissus, in the classic fable, had a lovely sister, to whom he was most fondly attached. They were the images and mirrors of each other. It was only when death had snatched her from his side, that, pining under his bereavement, wandering by fountains and rivers, lie caught glimpses of his own reflection; and, mistaking the illusory show for his lost companion, fell in love with himself, and languished away till rejoined with her in the pale world of Hades.
Hardly any picture in literature is more famous than that of the friendship of Orestes and Electra. What divine beauty, what tragic pathos, what immortal truth, are in it! And the friendship of Antigone and Polynices is similar. With the Greeks this relation was under the special protection of Apollo and Diana, the divine brother and sister, whose physical representatives were the sun and moon. Iphigenia, priestess in Tauris, in her distress for her brother, prays to the goddess for pity and help:
For thou, Diana, lov'st thy gentle brother
Beyond what earth and heaven can offer thee,
And dost, with quiet yearning, ever turn
Thy virgin face to his eternal light.
A striking example of this relation, sustained with great fullness and warmth, was given by Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica in the sixth century. In the ecclesiastic legends connected with. The canonization of this brother and sister, it is narrated that they were accustomed to meet at a place intermediate between their retreats on Mount Cassino and at Plombariola, and to spend the night together in spiritual conversation and communion on the joys of heaven. Three days after their last interview, Scholastica died in her solitude. Benedict, rapt in contemplation on his mount at that moment, is said to have seen the soul of his sister ascend to heaven in the shape of a dove. He immediately sent for her body, and had it laid, with tender and solemn ceremonies, in the tomb which he had previously prepared for himself. The friendship of Tasso and his sister Cornelia has often been the theme of painting and of song. When, escaping from Ferrara, lacerated, irritated, melancholy, the poor half-mad poet fled from his persecutors, he thought he would test the affection of this early playmate and friend, whom he had not seen for many a weary year. Disguising himself as a shepherd, he presented himself before her in her home at Sorrento. He drew so piteous a picture of her brother's misfortunes and condition that she fainted. As soon as she recovered, he made himself known; and Torquato and Cornelia, with a swift revival of their old affection, were locked in a tender embrace, as has been described by Mrs. Hemans in a poem of extreme beauty and power of feeling.
The peaceful retreat, the glorious scenery, the gentle nursing, restored him to health and cheerfullness. Alas that he would not stay, but rushed away to his fate The beautiful and chivalrous Margaret of Navarre was a pattern of enthusiastic devotion to her brother, Francis I When Charles V carried him prisoner to Madrid, and he was dying there, she went to him through every peril, and, by her nursing, restored him. She then formed a friendship with the sister of Charles, and induced her secretly to espouse Francis, thus securing his deliverance by his imperial brother-in-law. The enduring monuments of art with which Francis embellished his kingdom were her inspiration. At a distance from him in his last illness, "she went every day, and sat down on a stone in the middle of the road, to catch the first glimpse of a messenger afar off. And she said, "Ah whoever shall come to announce the recovery of the king my brother, though he be tired, jaded, soiled, dishevelled, I will kiss him and embrace him as though he were the finest gentleman in the kingdom." Hearing of his death, she soon followed him. It is painful to know that the love of Francis to her was not a tithe of hers to him. He loved her, but treated her with a good deal of the feudal tyranny which belonged to the age. She deserved from him boundless tenderness and generosity. Sir Philip and Mary Sidney shared the same studies and labors, and were endeared even more by similarity of soul than by their common parentage. Together they translated the Psalms. The name and dedication which the brother gave to his principal work are an imperishable shrine of his affection for his sister, "The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia." Spenser refers to her as "most resembling in shape and spirit her brother dear." She wrote a beautiful elegy on his death at Zutphen: Great loss to all that ever did him see; Great loss to all, but greatest loss to me. The renowned experimental philosopher, Robert Boyle, and his sister, Catherine, the very accomplished and famous countess of Ranelagh, were a noted pair of friends. Bishop Burnet has drawn for us a delightful picture of them. He says, "They were pleasant in their lives, and in their deaths they were not divided; for, as he lived with her above forty years, so he did not outlive her a week." The countess "lived the longest on the most public scene, and made the greatest figure, in all the revolutions of these kingdoms for above fifty years, of any woman of that age." She laid out her time, her interest, and her estate, with the greatest zeal and success, in doing good to others, without regard to sects or relations. "When any party was down, she had credit and zeal enough to serve them; and she employed these so effectually, that, in the next turn, she had a new stock of credit, which she laid out wholly in that labor of love in which she spent her life. And though some particular opinions might shut her up in a divided communion, yet her soul was never of a party. She divided her charities and friendships both, her esteem as well as her bounty, with the truest regard to merit and her own obligations, without any difference made upon the account of opinion. She had, with a vast reach of knowledge and apprehension, an universal affability and easiness of access, an humility that descended to the meanest persons and concerns, an obliging kindness and readiness to advise those who had no occasion for any farther assistance from her. And with all those and many other excellent qualities, she had the deepest sense of religion, and the most constant turning of her thoughts and discourses that way, that has been, perhaps, in our age. Such a sister became such a brother; and it was but suitable to both their characters, that they should have improved the relation under which they were born to the more exalted and endearing one of friend." Two of the most distinguished in the long roll of eminent astronomers are a brother and a sister, Sir William and Caroline Herschel. The story of their united labors, how, for thousands of nights, side by side they sat and watched and calculated and wrote, one sweeping the telescopic heavens, the other assisting, and noting down the results; how, with one spirit and one interest, they grew old together and illustrious together; their several achievements, both at home and in observatories on strange shores to which they voyaged, always associated; with what affectionate care she trained the favorite nephew, who was to burnish into still more effulgent brightness the star-linked name of Herschel, the story of all this is full of attractiveness, and forms one of the warm and poetic episodes in the high, cold annals of science. The union of John Aikin and his sister Letitia, afterwards Mrs. Barbauld, in life, tastes, labors, was uncommonly close and complete. The narrative of it; so warm, substantial, and healthy was it, leaves a pleasing and invigorating influence on the sympathies of those who read it. They composed together several of their excellent and most useful literary works. While Mrs. Barbauld was tarrying at Geneva, her brother addressed a letter in verse to her:
Yet one dear wish still struggles in my breast,
And paints one darling object unpossessed.
How many years have whirled their rapid course
Since we, sole streamlets from one honored source,
In fond affection, as in blood, allied,
Have wandered devious from each other's side,
Allowed to catch alone some transient view,
Scarce long enough to think the vision true!
Oh! then, while yet some zest of life remains;
While transport yet can swell the beating veins;
While sweet remembrance keeps her wonted seat,
And fancy still retains some genial heat;
When evening bids each busy task be o'er,
Once let us meet again, to part no more!
That evening came. In the village of Stoke Newington, they spent the last twenty years of their lives, in that close neighborhood which admitted of the daily, almost hourly, interchanges of mind and heart. There was a friendship of great strength between Goethe and his sister Cornelia. She was only a year younger than her brother, his companion in plays, lessons, and trials, bound to him by the closest ties and innumerable associations. While she was yet in the cradle, he prepared dolls and amusements for her, and was very jealous of all who came between them.
They grew up in such union, that, as he afterwards said, they might have been taken for twins. The sternness of their father drove them into a more confiding sympathy. When he had become a young man, and was accustomed to make frequent excursions, he says, "I was again drawn towards home, and that by a magnet which attracted me strongly at all times: it was my sister." Cornelia had superior endowments of mind, great force and truth of character; but she keenly felt her want of beauty, "a want richly compensated by the unbounded confidence and love borne to her by all her female friends." And yet Goethe says, "When my connection with Gretchen was torn asunder, my sister consoled me the more warmly, because she felt the secret satisfaction of having got rid of a rival; and I, too, could not but feel a great pleasure when she did me the justice to assure me that I was the only one who truly loved, understood, and esteemed her." At twenty-three, Cornelia was married to one of Goethe's intimate friends, Schlosser; and, in four years, she died. In one of her brother's frequent allusions to her, this striking trait is recorded: "Her eyes were not the finest I have ever seen, but the deepest, behind which you expected the most meaning; and when they expressed any affection, any love, their glance was without its equal." In his autobiography, written long, long after her death, he says,
"As I lost this beloved, incomprehensible being but too early, I felt inducement enough to picture her excellence to myself; and so there arose within me the conception of a poetic whole, in which it might have been possible to exhibit her individuality: no other form could be thought of for it than that of the Richardsonian romance. But the tumult of the world called me away from this beautiful and pious design, as it has from so many others; and nothing now remains for me but to call up, for a moment, that blessed spirit, as if by the aid of a magic mirror."
A relation of a more absorbing character than the foregoing existed between Jacobi and his sister Lena. "For a long series of years," Steffens writes, "she lived one life with her brother, even ennobling and exalting him by her presence. She took part in all his studies, all his controversies; and changed the still self-communion of the lonely man into a long conversation." There are many accounts, given by contemporaries, of her minute carefullness for him and unwearied devotion to him. Some make the picture a little comical, from the excess of coddling; but all agree as to the unfailing and affectionate sincerity of their attachment.
There was an uncommon friendship between Chateaubriand and his youngest sister, Lucile, a girl of extreme beauty, genius, spirituality, and melancholy. He says of those years, "I grew up with my sister Lucile: our friendship constituted the whole of our lives." "Her thoughts were all sentiments." "Her elegance, sweetness, imaginativeness, and impassioned sensibility, presented a combination of Greek and German genius." "Our principal recreation consisted in walking, side by side, on the great Mall: in spring, on a carpet of primroses; in autumn, on beds of withered foliage; in winter, on a covering of snow. Young like the primroses, sad like the dry leaves, and pure as the new-fallen snow, there was a harmony between our recreations and ourselves." Lucile first persuaded her brother to write. Afterwards he says, "We undertook works in common: we passed days in mutual consultation, in communicating to each other what we had done, and what we purposed to do." The lamentation he breathed over her grave, when she died, is one of the most affecting passages in his long autobiography.
Ernst and Charlotte Schleiermacher were a choice and ever-faithful pair of friends. The published life and letters of the great preacher reveal the full beauty and importance of this relation. Their correspondence is filled equally with the manifestations of varied intelligence and of congenial feeling. Sharing all their experience in affectionate intercourse, or in full and cordial letters, they appeared thus to find their pleasures heightened, their perplexities cleared, their trials alleviated. To this noble divine, so celebrated for his profound scholarship, his enthusiastic piety, his exalted sensibility, and his heroic aims, Charlotte was knit by affinities of character and life, even more closely than by those of blood and name.
The souls and experiences of William and Dorothy Wordsworth were overwrought with singular felicity and entireness. Readers will long trace the signals of this friendship in his works the record of it in his nephew's memoir of him with pleased surprise, and dwell on its lessons with thoughtful gratitude. Dorothy, not quite two years younger than William, was gifted like him, fraught with a similar temper of patient tenderness, and bound up with him in the same bundle of life. How thoroughly she lived in him is betrayed, with a naïve simplicity altogether charming, in her published notes of the tour they made in Scotland. His appreciation of her worth, and his affectionate sense of indebtedness to her, find many memorable utterances. Depicting her influence on him, he thanks God, and says,
The blessing of my later years
Was with me when a boy.
She gave me eyes, she gave me ears,
And humble cares and delicate fears; A
heart, the fountain of sweet tears;
And love and thought and joy.
They took a cottage at Grasmere, where they lived by themselves until
William's marriage; nor were they parted then.
This plot of orchard-ground is ours:
My trees they are, my sister's flowers.
When Coleridge was in Germany, he wrote to them a long letter in hexameters, in which were these lines:
William, my head and my heart! dear William and dear Dorothea! You have all in each other; but I am lonely, and want you.
At another time, the same man, so beloved by them both, writes to a common friend in the following strain: "Wordsworth and his exquisite sister are with me. Sue is a woman, indeed, in mind I mean, and in heart. In every motion, her innocent soul out-beams so brightly that who saw her would say, "Guilt is a thing impossible with her." Her information is various; her eye, watchful in minutest observation of nature; and her taste, a perfect electrometer." Referring to the period of his opening manhood, and the sanguine hopes kindled by the dawn of the French Revolution, Wordsworth says,
When every day brought with it some new sense
Of exquisite regard for common things,
And all the earth was budding with these gifts
Of more refined humanity, thy breath,
Dear sister, was a kind of gentler string,
That went before my step.
She lived with him, indoors and out of doors. She weaned him from the embittering brawl of politics, and warded away the sourness and despair, which, at one time, seriously threatened to possess him. In the "Prelude," he makes this touching acknowledgment:
Then it was,
Thanks to the bounteous Giver of all good,
That the beloved sister, in whose sight
Those days were passed,…
Maintained for me a saving intercourse
With my true self.
Daily, for so many years, they went "stepping westward" in company. His eldest daughter his most darling child, whose radiant apparition he imagined had come for him as he was dying, and cried, "Is that Dore" bore the dear sister's name. Several of her poems were printed with his. In addition to the well-known poem, "To My Sister," the "Descriptive Sketches" and "An Evening Walk" were addressed to her. And numerous incidental tributes, woven into his chief works, will, better than any magic spice or nard, perfume her memory, and keep it fresh as long as his own has name and breath to live among men.
Mine eyes did ne'er
Fix on a lovely object, nor my mind
Take pleasure in the midst of happy thoughts,
But either she, whom now I have, who now
Divides with me that loved abode, was there,
Or not far off. Where'er my footsteps turned,
Her voice was like a hidden bird that sang.
The thought of her was like a flash of light,
Or an unseen companionship, a breath
Or fragrance independent of the wind.
The perverse pride of Byron, the vices to which he yielded, the bad things in his writings, the sectarian obloquy which pursued him, have veiled from popular apprehension some of the sweet and noble qualities of his heart. Notwithstanding his perverse lower impulses, he was one of the most princely and magical of the immortal lords of fame. So far from there being any lack of permanent value and power in his verse, any falling from his established rank, the most authoritative critics, more generally today than ever before, acknowledge him to be the greatest lyric poet that ever lived. One can hardly help being awed at the thought of the genius and fascination of the young man whom the gifted and fastidious Shelley called
The pilgrim of eternity, whose fame
Over his living head, like heaven, is bent—
An early but enduring monument.
Perhaps his better traits nowhere shine out with such steady lustre as in the constancy of glowing tenderness with which, in all his wanderings, woes, and glory, he cherished the love of his sister Augusta, Mrs. Leigh. She remained unalterably attached to him through the dreadful storm of unpopularity which drove him out of England. With what convulsive gratitude he appreciated her fond fidelity, he has expressed with that passionate richness of power which no other could ever equal. Four of his most splendid poems were composed for her and addressed to her. In the one beginning, "When all around grew drear and dark," he says,
When fortune changed, and love fled far,
And hatred's shafts flew thick and fast,
Thou wert the solitary star
Which rose, and set not to the last.
The wonderful verses commencing,
Though the day of my destiny's over,
And the star of my fate hath declined,
Thy soft heart refused to discover
The faults which so many could find,
wring the very soul by their intensity of feeling condensed into language of such vigor and such melody.
From the wreck of the past, which hath perished,
Thus much I at least may recall:
It hath taught me that what I most cherished
Deserved to be dearest of all.
In the desert a fountain is springing,
In the wide waste there still is a tree,
And a bird in the solitude singing,
Which speaks to my spirit of thee.
To her he sent one of the first presentation copies of "Childe Harold," with this inscription: "To Augusta, my dearest sister and my best friend, who has ever loved me much better than I deserved, this volume is presented by her father's son and most affectionate brother." He wrote to her those expressions of love beginning,
The castled crag of Drachenfels
Frowns o'er the wide and winding Rhine;
and ending,
Nor could on earth a spot be found
To nature and to me so dear,
Could thy dear eyes,
In following mine,
Still sweeten more
These banks of Rhine,
expressions so transcendently fond and earnest in their beauty, that it is a thrilling luxury to linger on them, return to them, and repeat them over and over.
One of the finest and richest productions of his genius, both in thought and in passion, is the poem he wrote to her when he was living at Diodati, on the banks of Leman.
My sister, my sweet sister! if a name
Dearer and purer were, it should be thine.
Mountains and seas divide us; but I claim
No tears, but tenderness to answer mine.
Go where I will, to me thou art the same,
A loved regret which I would not resign.
There yet are two things in my destiny,
A world to roam through, and a home with thee.
I feel almost, at times, as I have felt
In happy childhood: trees and flowers and brooks,
Which do remember me of where I dwelt
Ere my young mind was sacrificed to books;
Come as of yore upon me, and can melt
My heart with recognition of their looks;
And even, at moments, I could think I see
Some living thing to love, but none like thee.
Oh that thou wert but with me! but I grow
The fool of my own wishes, and forget
The solitude which I have vaunted so
Has lost its praise in this but one regret.
The last intelligible words of Byron were,
"Augusta, Ada, my sister, my child."
It would be hard to find a friendship more deeply rooted, more inclusive of the lives of the parties, proof against terrible trials, full of quiet fondness and substantial devotion, than that of Charles Lamb and his sister Mary. The earliest written expression of this attachment occurs in a sonnet "To my Sister," composed by Charles in a lucid interval, when he was confined in the asylum at Hoxton for the six weeks of his single attack of insanity.
Thou to me didst ever show
Kindest affection; and wouldst oft-times lend
An ear to the desponding love-sick lay,
Weeping my sorrows with me, who repay
But ill the mighty debt of love I owe,
Mary, to thee, my sister and my friend.
Mary was ten years older than Charles, and, as is shown well in Talfourd's "Final Memorials," loved him with an affection combining a mother's care, a sister's tenderness, and a friend's fervent sympathy. Nor did he, in return, fall short in any respect. He appreciated her devotion, pitied her sorrow, responded to her feelings, revered her worth, and ministered to her wants with a loving gentleness, a patient self-sacrifice, and an heroic fortitude, which, as we gaze on his image, make the halo of the saint and the crown of the martyr alternate with the wrinkles of his weaknesses and his mirth. In one of her periodical paroxysms of madness, Mary struck her mother dead with a knife. Charles was then twenty-two, full of hope and ambition, enthusiastically attached to Coleridge, and in love with a certain "fair-haired maid," named Anna, to whom he had written some verses. This fearful tragedy altered and sealed his fate. He felt it to be his duty to devote himself thenceforth to his unhappy sister. He abandoned every thought of marriage, gave up his dreams of fame, and turned to his holy charge, with a chastened but resolute soul. "She for whom he gave up all," De Vincy says, "in turn gave up all for him. And of the happiness, which for forty years or more he had, no hour seemed true that was not derived from her." He never thought his sacrifice of youth and love gave him any license for caprice towards her or exactions from her. He always wrote of her as his better self, his wiser self, a generous benefactress, of whom he was hardly worthy. "Of all the people I ever saw in the world, my poor sister is the most thoroughly devoid of the least tincture of selfishness." He was happy when she was well and with him. His great sorrow was to be obliged so often to part from her on the recurrences of her attacks. "To say all that I know of her would be more than I think anybody could believe or even understand. It would be sinning against her feelings to go about to praise her; for I can conceal nothing I do from her. All my wretched imperfections I cover to myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness. She would share life and death, heaven and hell, with me. She lives but for me." Their hearts and lives were blended for forty years. Mary was unconscious at the time of her brother's death, and the blow was mercifully deadened in her gradual recovery. In her sunset walks she would invariably lead her friends towards the churchyard where Charles was laid. Their common friend Moxon paints the touching scene:
Here sleeps beneath this bank, where daisies grow,
The kindliest sprite earth holds within her breast.
Her only mate is now the minstrel lark,
Save she who comes each evening, ere the bark
Of watch-dog gathers drowsy folds, to shed
A sister's tears.
Eleven years later, this memorable friendship, so sacred to all who knew it, was consummated for earth, as a few reverential survivors entered the shadow of Edmonton Church, and, coming away, left Mary and Charles Lamb sleeping in the same grave.
The union of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn was something wonderful, like the wonderful genius of sensibility and music which endowed them both. Such pure, tender, and noble souls are made for each other. The more fervid and exacting bonds of marriage and parentage did not interfere with the profound sympathy in which they lived, both when together and when apart. They corresponded in music. Their emotions, too deep and strange to be conveyed in words, like articulate thoughts, they expressed in tones. Seating themselves at their instruments, they would for hours carry on an intercourse perfectly intelligible to each other, and more adequate and delicious than any vocal conversation. When Felix, at Naples, at Rome, or in London, sent to Fanny a letter composed in notes, she translated it first with her eyes, then with her piano. The most charming transcripts of these affectionate and musical souls were thus made in music. Sweeter or more divinely gifted beings have rarely appeared on this earth. Their relations of spirit were sensitive and organic, far beneath the reach of intellectual consciousness. They seemed able to communicate tidings through the ethereal medium by some subtile telegraphy of feeling, which transcends understanding, and belongs to a miraculous region of life. For, when Fanny died in her German home, Felix, amidst a happy company in England, suddenly aware of some terrible calamity, from the disturbance of equilibrium and dread sinking of his soul, rushed to the piano, and poured out his anguish in an improvisation of wailing and mysterious strains, which held the assembly spell-bound and in tears. In a few days a letter reached him, announcing that his sister had died at that very hour. On receiving the tidings, he uttered a shriek, and the shock was so great as to burst a blood-vessel in his brain. Life had no charm potent enough to stanch and heal the cruel laceration left in his already failing frame by this sundering blow. The web of torn fibrils bled invisibly. He soon faded away, and followed his sister to a world of finer melody, fitted for natures like theirs.
One of the noblest and wisest of the American poets the pure, brave, and devout Whittier had a sister who was to him very much what Dorothy was to Wordsworth. Several of her poems are printed with his. They always lived together; they studied together, rambled together, had a large share of their whole consciousness together. After her death, sitting alone in his wintry cottage, he said to a friend who was visiting him, that, since she was gone, to whose faithful taste and judgment he had been wont to submit all he wrote, he could hardly tell of a new production whether it were good or poor. He also said that the sad measure of his love for her was the vacancy which her departure had left. He has paid her, in his "Snow-Bound," this tribute, which will draw readers as long as loving hearts are left in his land:
As one who held herself a part
Of all she saw, and let her heart
Gainst the household bosom lean,
Upon the motley-braided mat
Our youngest and our dearest sat,
Lifting her large, sweet, asking eyes,
Now bathed within the fadeless green
And holy peace of Paradise.
Oh! looking from some heavenly hill,
Or from the shade of saintly palms,
Or silver reach of river calms,
Do those large eyes behold me still?
With me one little year ago: The chill
weight of the winter snow
For months upon her grave has lain;
And now, when summer south-winds blow
And brier and harebell bloom again,
I tread the pleasant paths we trod,
I see the violet-sprinkled sod
Whereon she leaned, too frail and weak
The hillside flowers she loved to seek,
Yet following me where'er I went,
With dark eyes full of love's content.
The birds are glad; the brier-rose fills
The air with sweetness; all the hills
Stretch green to June's unclouded sky;
But still I wait with ear and eye
For something gone which should be nigh,
A loss in all familiar things,
In flower that blooms, and bird that sings.
And yet, dear heart! remembering thee,
Am I not richer than of old?
Safe in thy immortality,
What change can reach the wealth I hold?
What chance can mar the pearl and gold
Thy love hath left in trust with me?
And while in life's late afternoon,
Where cool and long the shadows grow,
I walk to meet the night that soon
Shall shape and shadow overflow,
I cannot feel that thou art far,
Since near at need the angels are;
And when the sunset gates unbar,
Shall I not see thee waiting stand,
And, white against the evening star,
The welcome of thy beckoning hand?
One more instance of intense friendship between a brother and a sister and it is one of the most interesting that history reveals to us shall close this list. Maurice de Guérin was born in Languedoc, in France, in the year 1811; and there also, in 1839, he died. Although snatched away at twenty-eight, his fascinating personality and genius left an indelible impression on all appreciative persons who had come in contact with him. His writings, few and unelaborate as they are, have won admiring praise from the judges whose verdict is fame. His sister Eugénie, six years older than himself, took the place of mother as well as that of sister to the orphan boy. He was not more extraordinary for winsomeness and talent than she was for combined power of intelligence, tenacity of affection, and religiousness of principle. They became ardent friends, in the most emphatic meaning of the term. Maurice went to Paris to try his fortune as a writer. Eugénie's yearning and anxious heart followed him in rapid letters. She tells him how they whom he has left all love him, encourages him with virtue and piety, adjures him to be true to his best self. She says to him, with the irresistible eloquence of the heart, "We see things with the same eyes: what you find beautiful, I find beautiful. God has made our souls of one piece." Maurice's replies were shorter and rarer. It is evident, the reader feels it with a pang of regret, that Eugénie was much less to Maurice than he was to her; and yet he loved her well. But man's love is usually poor compared with woman's; and he was in the throngs of Paris, she in the solitude of a country home. He fell away from his original purity and constancy, lost his religious faith for a season, and seemed almost to forget those who idolized him with such deep fondness. Was he not one of the charmers, who are so much to others, but to whom others are in return comparatively so little?
Falling ill, he revisited home, and by the stainless affections, unwearied attentions, and devout routine there, was restored in soul as well as in body. When, not long afterwards, he had fallen in love with a West-Indian lady, a beautiful Creole, Eugénie went to him in Paris, and devoted herself sedulously to promote the marriage. It was brought about, and she spent a happy six months with the wedded pair. After her return to Languedoc, we find her writing in her journal, "My Maurice, must it be our lot to live apart? to find that this marriage, which I hoped would keep us so much together, leaves us more asunder than ever? I have the misfortune to be fonder of you than of any thing else in the world, and my heart had from of old built in you its happiness. Youth gone, and life declining, I looked forward to quitting the scene with Maurice. At any time of life, a great affection is a great happiness: the spirit comes to take refuge in it entirely. Oh, delight and joy, which will never be your sister's portion! Only in the direction of God shall I find an issue for my heart to love, as it has the notion of loving, and as it has the power of loving."
Two months after these pathetic words were written, Maurice died, of a rapid consumption, in his father's house, ministered to by his wife and sisters with infinite tenderness and agonizing despair. In the last moment, his sister says, "He glued his lips to a cross that his wife held out to him, then sank: we all fell to kissing him, and he to dying." The shock came upon Eugénie with crushing severity. Ever after, she was haunted by the memory of "his beloved, pale face," "his beautiful head." Long afterwards, she wrote, "The whole of to-day I see pass and repass before me that dear, pale face: that beautiful head assumes all its various aspects in my memory, smiling, eloquent, suffering, dying." "Poor, beloved soul," she says, "you have had hardly any happiness here below: your life has been so short, your repose so rare, O God! uphold me. How we have gazed at him and loved him and kissed him, his wife and we, his sisters; he lying lifeless in his bed, his head on the pillow as if he were asleep! My beloved one, can it be, shall we never see each other again on earth?"
Five years previous to her brother's death, Eugénie had begun a journal, which she forwarded to him from time to time. After the funeral, she tried to continue this, addressing it still to him: "To Maurice dead, to Maurice in heaven. He was the pride and joy of my heart. Oh, how sweet a name, and how full of tenderness, is that of brother!" She persevered for five months, when it became too painful, and she abandoned it. From this time till death overtook her, in the year 1848, she seemed to have but one purpose; namely, to secure Maurice's fame by the publication of his literary remains. Poverty and various other obstacles baffled all her efforts. But, in 1858, M. Trebutien, a loving and faithful friend, edited and published, in a single volume, the "Journal and Letters of Maurice de Guérin;" and, five years later, he published, in a companion volume, the "Journal and Letters of Eugénie de Guérin." The striking original genius and worth of these volumes, and the enviable praise already awarded them, insure for their authors a beautiful and enduring fame together. As long as the words of this devoted sister shall win the attention of gentle readers, tears will spring into their eyes, and a throb of pitying love fill their hearts with pleasing pain. "My soul slips easily into thee, O soul of my brother!" "We were two eyes looking out of one forehead." "My thought was only a reflex of my brother's; so vivid when he was there, then changing into twilight, and now gone." "O beautiful past days of my youth, with Maurice, the king of my heart!" "I am on the horizon of death: he is below it. All that I can do is to strain my gaze into it."
THE friendships between persons of opposite sex, thus far considered, spring up under the primary impulse of consanguinity, and embroider themselves around the fostering relations of natural duty. Based on affiliation of descent, organic community of circumstances, and mixture of experience, and sanctioned by the most authoritative seals of social opinion, they are, when not impoverished or poisoned by any evil interference, warm, precious, and sacred. The strongest preventives of their frequency and the commonest drawbacks from their power are the dullness which creeps over all emotions under the dominion of passive habit, and the tendency to look elsewhere for more vivid attachments, more exciting associations.
But there is another class of friendships, more important in influence, if not in number, having also the highest sanctions both of law and of custom, and marked by such peculiarities that they constitute a species by themselves. It consists of the friendships which grow up between husbands and wives, within the shielded enclosure of matrimony. The community of interests between those united in wedlock if they are married in truth as well as in form is the most intimate and entire that can exist.
Their unqualified surrender and blending of lives, unreserved confidence and conjunction of hearts, afford, on the one hand, the most hazardous, on the other hand, the most propitious, conditions for a perfect mutual reflection of souls with all their contents. Nowhere else has knowledge such free scope, have the inducements for esteem or contempt such unhampered range, as in this relation. The inmost secrets of the parties are always exposed to revelation or to betrayal. Hypocrisy and deception are reduced to the narrowest limits. Accordingly, both the most absolute antagonism and misery, and the most absolute sympathy and happiness, are known in the conjugal union. Milton puts in the mouth of Samson a fearful expression of the former:
To wear out miserable days, Intangled with a poisonous bosom snake.
Of the latter we have an affecting instance in the historic narrative of that Italian Countess del Verme, who, losing her husband after an elysian union for eight years, was so shocked on learning his death, that she threw herself on his body in a convulsion of grief which broke her heart, and she instantly died beside him.
Are the parties selfish, unfeeling, ungenuine? Every possible opportunity is afforded for the base and alien qualities to recognize each other, and clash or effervesce. Is one wise, aspiring, magnanimous? the other, foolish, vulgar, revengeful? The yoke, pulled contrary ways, must gall and irritate. Then the fellowship of husband and wife is like that of acid and alkali. But, if they are filled with consecrating tenderness, sweet patience, and earnest purposes, all possible motives urge them to adjust their characters and conduct to each other; to tune their intercourse by heavenly laws; to mingle their experience in one blessed current; to soothe, support, and beautify each other's being. Then there results a union, including every faculty, satisfying every want, unparalleled for its integrity and its blessedness. In such cases as this, it may truly be said, marriage is the queen of all friendships.
A beautiful example of such a union is unveiled, in the tribute paid to his wife, by Sir James Mackintosh. He says, "I found an intelligent companion and a tender friend, a prudent monitress, the most faithful of wives, and a mother as tender as children ever had the misfortune to lose. I met a woman, who, by tender management of my weaknesses, gradually corrected the most pertinacious of them. She became prudent from affection; and, though of the most generous nature, she was taught frugality and economy by her love for me. She gently reclaimed me from dissipation, propped my weak and irresolute nature, urged my indolence to all the exertion that has been useful and creditable to me, and was perpetually at hand to admonish my heedlessness or improvidence. In her solicitude for my interest, she never for a moment forgot my feelings or character. Even in her occasional resentment, for which I but too often gave her cause, (would to God I could recall those moments!) she had no sullenness or acrimony. Such was she whom I have lost, when her excellent natural sense was rapidly improving, after eight years' struggle and distress had bound us fast together and moulded our tempers to each other; when a knowledge of her worth had refined my youthful love into friendship, and before age had deprived it of much of its original ardor."
It is to be presumed that those who enter into a relation with each other on which so much of their destiny is staked, take the step under the influence of love. And by love the love which looks to a conjugal union is to be understood a general movement of personal sympathy, imparting a special richness and intensity to the imagination in its action toward the individuals concerned, and thus giving each of them a genial and generous idea of the other to govern their mutual references; the whole operation being animated and emphasized, more or less prominently, by the impulse of sex. The idea of each other with which the wedded pair begin their union, an idea ennobled and vivified by imagination, and serving as the basis and stimulus of their love, may be largely made up of illusions, or may be sound, though inadequate. In the former case, one of three results will follow, either, as the poetic illusions are dispelled, and the fancied charms of the soul are replaced by barren poverty or haggard ugliness, the ardor of affection will be reversed by disappointment and friction into antipathy, engendering a chronic state, sometimes of fierce hatred, sometimes of sullen dislike; or that affection, robbed of its moral supports, admiration, gratitude, faith, and desire, will subside into a condition of spiritual tedium, unnoticing routine; or else, the imaginative element dying out, while the sexual element retains or perhaps even exaggerates its force, love will degenerate into lust. These three results depict the real union subsisting between three classes of husbands and wives, when the hymeneal glow has passed, and fixed realities assert their sway. The first is a hideous association of enemies, a yoked animosity; the second, a lukewarm connection of colleagues, an external partnership; the third, a convenient alliance of pleasure seekers, an animal cohabitation.
But that imaginative stir which lends such ardor and elevation to the honeymoon period is not always a fermentation of happy error. It is many times a fruition of beauty and good, resting on a perception of realities, growing greater, lovelier, more efficacious, with the growing powers and opportunities for appreciation. In these cases, where the divine bias which causes the newly wedded twain to put a beautiful interpretation on all the signs of each other's being depends not on illusion, but originates in truth, and where no fatal alloy or shock interferes to destroy it, the blessed affection in which they live together, instead of souring into aversion, stagnating into indifference, or sinking to a baser level than it began on, will naturally triumph over other changes, and grow more comprehensive and noble, as enlarged experiences disclose vaster grounds for justifying it, and furnish finer stimulants to feed it. In such instances, the beautifying tinges of romance, that streak and flush the horizon, neither fade into the grayness of fact, nor die into the darkness of neglect, but now broaden and deepen into the blue of meridian assurance, now clarify and ascend into the starlight of faith and mystery. The conditions that originally inspired the confiding and admiring sympathy become, with the lapse of time and the progress of acquaintance, more pronounced and more adequate, and insure a union ever fonder and more blunt. A husband and wife so united generally remain a pair of lovers, but sometimes become a pair of friends. Which of these two names is most descriptive of the union depends on the relative space held in it by the element of sense and sex. With some this ingredient is so important, that it infuses its quality into their very thoughts, and gives the distinctive character of love to their whole relation. With others this feature in the marriage fellowship becomes relatively less as the heyday of youth subsides, and the moral and mental bonds become more various and extensive. The physical tie, however vital, is insignificant in comparison with the entire web of their conscious ties. Love is included in their whole relation, as a rivulet threading a lake. This subordination of the stream to the lake is surest to take place with those in whom pure mind most predominates, whose spirit is least roiled by the perturbation of the senses. With such it is almost a necessity, when hate or indifference does not intervene, that love should refine into friendship. As the ferment of passion ceases, the lees settle, and a transparent sympathy appears, reflecting all heavenly and eternal things.
As an example of the transmutation of passion into sentiment, of impulse into principle, of feverish flame into calm fire, we may instance the Greek Pericles and Aspasia, who were friends even more than lovers, their intellectual companionship and common pursuit of culture being one of the precious traditions of humanity. Grote, whose learning, ability, and fairness give weight to his opinion, affirms his belief that the vile charges brought against Aspasia were the offspring of lying gossip and scandal. The estimate of her talents and accomplishments was so high that the authorship of the greatest speech ever delivered by Pericles was attributed to her. She is also particularly interesting to us as the first woman who kept an open parlor for the visits of chosen friends and the culture of conversation, as the earliest queen of the drawing room. Her house was the centre of the highest literary and philosophical society of Athens. Socrates himself was a constant visitor there. There too, as Plutarch asserts, many of the most distinguished Athenian matrons were wont to go with their husbands for the pleasure and profit of her conversation.
In Roman history we may point to Brutus and his heroic Portia, who was fully capable of entering into all his counsels, dangers, and hopes, and, when he fell, of dying as became the daughter of Cato. The characters of the noble and Arria were likewise in perfect accord, in their high strains of wisdom, valor, and virtue; and when the brutal emperor, Claudius, commanded the death of her husband, the wife, stabbing herself, handed him the dagger, with the immortal words, "Brutus, it does not hurt."
Seneca and his Paulina were bound together by community of tastes and acquirements, and unbroken happiness. He asks, "What can be sweeter than to be so dear to your wife that it makes you dearer to yourself?" When the tyrant ordered the philosopher to commit suicide, his wife insisted on opening her veins, and dying with him. After long resistance, he consented, saying, "I will not deprive you of the honor of so noble an example." But Nero would not allow her to die thus, and had her veins bound up; not, however, until she had lost so much blood that her blanched face, for the rest of her days, gave rise to the well known rhetorical comparison, "as pale as Seneca's Paulina."
Calpurnia, likewise, the wife of the younger Pliny, was identified with her husband in all his studies, ambitions, triumphs. She fashioned herself after his pattern, knew his works by heart, sang his verses, listened behind a screen to his public speeches, drinking in the applauses lavished on him. We may justly infer from the whale character of the "Letter of Consolation," which he wrote to her, on occasion of the death of their beloved daughter, Timoxena, that a relation similar to the one just mentioned subsisted between Plutarch and his wife.
By friendship in marriage is meant companionship of inner lives, community of aims and efforts, the lofty concord of aspiring minds. These are comparatively few, as made known to us in classic antiquity, owing to the jealous separation of the sexes in social life, that strict subjection of woman to man, which was characteristic of the ancient world. If we were thinking of wedded love instead of wedded friendship, it would be easy to cull a host of affecting and imposing instances: such as, the Hebrew Rebekah and Rachel; the Greek Alcestis; the Hindu Savitri; the Persian Pantheia; and a glorious crowd of Roman matrons, like Lucretia, who have left a renown as grand and deathless as the memory of Rome itself.
The modern examples of fortunate friendship in marriage are more numerous than the ancient ones. Two delightful instances, particularly worthy of study, have been so fully described by Mrs. Jameson as to make superfluous any thing more than a slight allusion here. The first of these pairs is the early English poet, William Habington, and his Castara. Habington collected and published, in two rich parts, the poems he wrote to Castara before and after his marriage, and added a preface full of choice thought and heartfelt emotion. By her husband's pen,
Castara's name
Is writ as fair in the register of fame
As the ancient beauties, which translated are,
By poets, up to heaven, each there a star.
The illustrious Roman lawyer, Giambattista Zappi, and Faustina Maratti were the other pair alluded to, whose wedded love was crowned with a superior friendship. Zappi is celebrated for his sublime sonnet on the Moses of Michael Angelo. But the most of his verses were inspired by his wife, and dedicated to her. Her verses were almost exclusively inspired by her husband, and dedicated to him. Their works are published together in one volume.
Roland, the famous Girondist minister, a man of marked abilities and incorruptible integrity, married the gifted and high souled Jeanne Philippon a short time before the outbreak of the French Revolution. He was twenty two years her senior. Her love for him, founded on his philosophic spirit and antique virtues, was so ardent and so faithful that she has often been called "the Heloise of the eighteenth century." Their principles, their souls, their hopes, their toils and sufferings, were alike and inseparable. They hailed the early efforts of the Revolutionists as the dawn of a golden age for mankind. Madame Roland shared in the studies of her husband, aided him in his compositions, and served as his sole secretary during his two ministries. No intrigue of his party was unknown to her, or uninfluenced by her genius. Yet no falsehood or trickery debased, no meanness sullied her. "She was the angel of the cause she espoused, the soul of honor, and the conscience of all who embraced it." When Robespierre overthrew the Girondists, Roland, with others of his party, saved his life by a flight to Rouen. His wife was soon sentenced to death by the infamous Fouquier Tinville. She rode to the guillotine clad in white, her glossy black hair hanging down to her girdle, and embraced her fate with divine courage and dignity. Hearing the direful news, Roland walked a few miles out of Rouen, and deliberately killed himself with his cane sword. His body was found by the roadside, with a paper containing his last words: "Whoever thou art that findest these remains, respect them as those of a man who consecrated his life to usefullness, and who dies, as he has lived, honest and virtuous. Hearing of the death of my wife, I would not remain another day on this earth so stained with crimes."
All appreciative readers of the works and the life of Herder gratefully associate his Caroline with their recollections of him. Under the stress of his many sore trials, this great, vexed, struggling, sorrowing man would have succumbed to his afflictions, and entered the grave much earlier than he did, if it had not been for the solace and strength his wife gave him at home; and not a little of his present celebrity is due to the devoted energy of pride and affection with which she labored to have justice done to his writings and his memory.
A spotless and exalted pair of friends look out of English history at us, in the faces of John and Lucy Hutchinson. He was governor of Nottingham, and one of the judges of Charles I. In her widowhood, Lady Hutchinson drew that wonderful portrait of her husband which has been styled the most perfect piece of biography ever penned by a woman.
John Austin, under crushing burdens and amidst freezing neglect, wrought out the profoundest exposition of jurisprudence which exists in the English language. His wife, Sarah Austin, distinguished for her early importation and unveiling of German literature to the English mind, was every thing to him that a tender, wise, and strong friend could be. In the prefaces to her publications of his posthumous works, the discerning reader may trace, through the modest concealment, something of one of the purest, deepest, most steadfast of those friendships which adorn while they enrich the annals of human nature.
One shrinks from the indelicacy of alluding to persons still living, and yet can hardly help suggesting what a friendship there must have been in the union of such scholars, thinkers, poets, aspirants, as Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But space would fail for a list of the royal friendships of this class revealed in literary records. And, for every example published, there must obviously be a multitude, quite as sweet and grand, which are hidden in purely private life.
Leopold Schefer, the serene and lofty author of the "Layman's Breviary," that charming work just published in our country in the fine translation of Charles T. Brooks, lost his wife in the twenty fifth year of their marriage. What a friend he had in her appears from the simple words, surcharged with feeling, in which he speaks of her. He writes, "Only a single unconquerable sorrow has smitten me in all my life, the death of the still soul with whom life, for the first time, was to me a life. Nor have I had any other troubles. People who make trouble for themselves, and in an unappeased spirit find an everlasting misery, may properly call me still a fortunate man. But, though outwardly as much grass should grow over her grave as ever can grow in long desolated days and nights, inwardly no grass grows over a real life annihilating grief. One gets re adjusted with the world; but, after all, he goes at last with an open wound into the grave. Believe me in this."
An example yet more recent has obtained such a monumental recognition, that mention of it is not here to be avoided. John Stuart Mill dedicates his imperishable "Essay on Liberty" to his deceased wife in these terms:
"To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings, the friend and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward, I dedicate this volume. Like all that I have written for many years, it belongs as much to her as to me; but the work, as it stands, has had, in a very insufficient degree, the inestimable advantage of her revision; some of the most important portions having been reserved for a more careful re examination, which they are now never destined to receive. Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one half the great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave, I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it than is ever likely to arise from any thing that I can write unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivalled wisdom."
The conditions favoring the formation of a consummate friendship between husband and wife meet in fortunate combination in two classes of instances.
In the first, the sovereignty is the bond of a common nobleness; in the second, the bond of a common ambition. The united worship of truth, beauty, goodness, make, it is to be hoped, the most absolute friends of unnumbered wedded pairs. One adoring pursuit of excellence, one devout trust in God, one happy aiming at perfection, draws their noblest activities into unison, free from the impediments of selfishness and suspicion. Under the over arching sanctions of Divinity, knowing each other to be worthy and true, they confide in each other with the sympathy of a total esteem, based on a common devotion to the supreme prizes of the universe, whose reflected lustre already transfigures their spirits and sanctifies their persons in each other's eyes.
Many a husband and wife are also made friends, above all their mere love, by sharing in some earnest and condign social ambition. How many a man of genius has been chiefly indebted for his achievements to the wife who has sedulously identified herself with his success, ever at his side, unseen perhaps by the world, studying his art, lightening his tasks, soothing his pride, healing his hurts, stimulating his confidence, baffling his enemies, gaining him patrons or allies, assuaging his falls, refreshing his energy for new trials, and, when he has triumphed, and is applauded on his eminence, silently drinking in, as her reward, the popular admiration bestowed on him.
This intense co operation and struggle towards an outer goal, when unneutralized, produces that wondrous identification which is the type of complete friendship. A crowd of the most brilliant artists, authors, statesmen, might each point to his wife, and say, "To that bosom friend, to that guardian angel, to her quick intelligence, unfailing consolation, steady stimulus, I principally owe, under Heaven, what I am and what I have done." Many beautiful delineations of this fact have been given in fiction. The picture of Lord and Lady Davenant, in Miss Edgeworth's "Helen," is worthy of particular mention as a picture drawn to the life.
Nothing in fiction, however, is finer or more commanding, as an example of the true relation of the sexes, than is afforded in real life by the biography of Lord William and Lady Russell. Every such historic instance has a benign lesson for our time, in which, it is to be feared, many bad influences are working with fatal effect, temporarily at least, to lessen the attractions and undermine the sanctity of marriage, Guizot ends his beautiful and noble essay on the married life of Lord and Lady Russell with this impressive paragraph:
"I have felt profound pleasure in relating the history of this lady, so pure in her passion, always great and always humble in her greatness, devoted with equal ardor to her feelings and her duties in grief and joy, in triumph and adversity. Our times are attacked with a deplorable malady: men believe only in the passion which is attended with moral derangement. All ardent, exalted, and soul mastering sentiments appear to them impossible within the bounds of moral laws and social conventions. All order seems to them a paralyzing yoke, all submission a debasing servitude: no flame is any thing, if it is not a devouring conflagration. This disease is the graver because it is not the crisis of a fever nor the explosion of an exuberant force. It springs from perverse doctrines, from the rejection of law and faith, from the idolatry of man. And with this disease there is joined another no less lamentable: man not only adores nothing but himself, but even himself he adores only in the multitude where all men are confounded. He hates and envies every thing that rises above the vulgar level: all superiority, all individual grandeur, seems to him an iniquity, an injury towards that chaos of undistinguished and ephemeral beings whom he calls humanity. When we have been assailed by these base doctrines, and the shameful passions which give birth to or are born from them; when we have felt the hatefullness of them, and measured the peril, it is a lively delight to meet with one of those noble examples which are their splendid confutation. In proportion as I respect humanity in its totality, I admire and love those glorified images of humanity which personify and set on high, under visible features and with a proper name, whatever it has of most noble and most pure. Lady Russell gives the soul this beautiful and virtuous joy."
It is fitting, in the next place, to say something of the disappointment and wretchedness which so many married men and women notoriously experience in their relations with each other. It may be useful to state the principal causes of this unhappiness, and to give some definite directions in the way of remedy. Absence of love, absence of reason, absence of justice, absence of taste, in other words, harshness and neglect, silliness and frivolity, vice and crime, vulgarity and slovenliness, are the leading and inevitable creators of alienation, dislike, and misery in marriage. Whatever tends to increase these tends to multiply separations and divorces between those who cannot endure each other; and to multiply irritations, quarrels, sorrows, and agonies between those who may endure, but cannot enjoy, each other. In marriage, the intimacy is so great and constant that the slightest friction easily becomes galling. Nowhere beside is there such need of magnanimous forbearance in one, or else of equality of worth and refinement in both. "Love does not secure happiness in marriage, often the contrary: reason is necessary." So said the wise Jean Paul. He also said, "The best man joined with the worst woman has a greater hell than the best woman joined with the worst man." This is, no doubt, true as a general rule, because woman is so much more capable than man of self abnegation, silent patience, meek submission, and flexible adjustment to inevitable circumstances. Probably the women who keenly and chronically suffer from unhappy marriages are far more numerous than the kindred sufferers of the other sex. This is because they are more deeply susceptible to cruelty and indifference and to all the repulsive traits of character; are less capable of ignoring such things; have less of absorbing occupation of their own to take up their attention, and are less able to be absorbed in things beyond the personal and domestic sphere. There are unquestionably thousands of married women whose experience is made a living martyrdom by the infidelity, the tyranny, the coarseness, the general odiousness and wearisomeness of their husbands. In most cases, even where a divorce is wished, the shocking public scandal and disgrace are too much; and they wear on to the end. What misery delicate and conscientious women, of dedicated souls and polished manners, who love every thing that is pure and beautiful, are compelled to undergo in their bondage to husbands, ignorant, uninteresting, ignoble, relentlessly domineering, is not to be expressed. Their best weapons in such cases, if they knew it, are gentleness, patience, persuasion, and the skilful use of every means to improve and uplift their unequal companions to their own level. The Persian poet expressed a rich truth when he wrote, "Gentleness is the sail on the table of morals." It is a tragedy that the good wife of a bad husband is so identified with him, that the penalties of his offences fall on her head, often more terribly than on his. A pure woman loving a wicked man must expect to have her affections ravaged by his sins: does not the lightning drawn by the rod blast the innocent ivy entwining it? What lacerating woes the gambler, the drunkard, the forger, the adulterer, inflicts on his wife!
And yet, profound as is the misfortune, sharp as is the suffering of such, it may be doubted whether a noble, sensitive, cultivated man, with a yearning heart of softness and peace, a capacious mind full of grand aspirations, married, by some fatal chance, to a woman with a petty soul, a teasing and tyrannical temper, a mendacious and rasping tongue, whose taste is for small gossip and scandal, whose ambition is for fashionable show and noise, whose life is one incessant fret and sting, it may be doubted if this man's lot is not severer with his ill matched consort than hers would be with the worst husband in the world. He had better marry a vinegar cruet than such a Tartar. When weary and seeking to rest, to be roused up by a scolding; when searching for truth, or contemplating beauty, or communing with God, or aspiring to perfection, or scheming some vast good for mankind, to be aggravated by abuse, insulted by false charges, dragged down to petty interests which he despises, and mixed up with wrongs and passions which he loathes, these degrading injuries, these wasteful vexations, are what he must endure. No wonder if he vehemently resents a treatment so incongruous with his worth. No wonder if, vexed, hurt, goaded half to madness, he gets enraged, and unseemly contentions ensue, followed by painful depression and remorseful grief. No wonder if he finds it hard indeed to forget or to forgive the infliction of an evil so incomparably profound and frightful. There is, to a high smiled man, no wrong more hurtful or more difficult to pardon than to have mean motives falsely ascribed to him, to be placed by misinterpretation on a lower plane than that where he belongs. Every such experience stabs the moral source of life, and draws blood from the soul itself. Husband and wife powerfully tend to a common level and likeness. The higher must redeem and lift the unequal mate, or live in strife and misery. If the lower takes pattern after the superior one, the petty, frivolous, false, and fretful becoming magnanimous, dedicated, truthful, and serene, it is a divine triumph of grace, and the result will be full of blessedness. But otherwise a wearing unhappiness is inevitable, however carefully it be hidden, however bravely it be borne. George Sand says very strikingly of Rousseau and Therese Levasseur, "His true fault was in persevering in his attachment for that vulgar woman, who turned to her own profit the weaknesses of his ill starred character and his self torturing imagination. One does not with impunity live in company with a little soul. When one is a Jean Jacques Rousseau, one does not acquire the faults of littleness, does not lose his native grandeur; but he feels his genius troubled, combated, worried, distempered, and he makes a pure loss of immense efforts to surmount miseries unworthy of him."
Let a husband be the true and pure guardian of his family, laboring always to adorn himself with the godlike gems of wisdom, virtue, and honor; let him bear himself in relation to his wife with gracious kindness towards her faults, with grateful recognition of her merits, with steady sympathy for her trials, with hearty aid for her better aspirations, and she must be of a vile stock, if she does not revere him, and minister unto him with all the graces and sweetness of her nature.
Let a wife, in her whole intercourse with her husband, try the efficacy of gentleness, purity, sincerity, scrupulous truth, meek and patient forbearance, an invariable tone and manner of deference, and, if he is not a brute, he cannot help respecting her and treating her kindly; and in nearly all instances he will end by loving her and living happily with her.
But if he is vulgar and vicious, despotic, reckless, so as to have no devotion for the august prizes and incorruptible pleasures of existence; if she is an unappeasable termagant, or a petty worrier, so taken up with trifling annoyances, that, wherever she looks, "the blue rotunda of the universe shrinks into a housewifery room;" if the presence of each acts as a morbid irritant on the nerves of the other, to the destruction of comfort, and the lowering of self respect, and the draining away of peace and strength, their companionship must infallibly be a companionship in wretchedness and loss.
The banes of domestic life are littleness, falsity, vulgarity, harshness, scolding vociferation, an incessant issuing of superfluous prohibitions and orders, which are regarded as impertinent interferences with the general liberty and repose, and are provocative of rankling or exploding resentments. The blessed antidotes that sweeten and enrich domestic life are refinement, high aims, great interests, soft voices, quiet and gentle manners, magnanimous tempers, forbearance from all unnecessary commands or dictation, and generous allowances of mutual freedom. Love makes obedience lighter than liberty. Man wears a noble allegiance, not as a collar, but as a garland. The Graces are never so lovely as when seen waiting on the Virtues; and, where they thus dwell together, they make a heavenly home.
No affection, save friendship, has any sure eternity in it. Friendship ought, therefore, always to be cultivated in love itself, as its only certain guard and preservative, not less than as the only sufficing substitute in its absence. A couple joined by love without friendship, walk on gunpowder with torches in their hands. Shall I venture to depict the sad decay which love naturally suffers, and the redemptive transformation which it sometimes undergoes? I will do it by translating a truthful and eloquent passage from Chateaubriand:
"At first our letters are long, vivid, frequent. The day is not capacious enough for them. We write at sunset; at moonrise we trace a few more lines, charging its chaste and silent light to hide our thousand desires. We watch for the first peep of dawn, to write what we believe we had forgotten to say in the delicious hours of our meeting. A thousand vows cover the paper, where all the roses of aurora are reflected; a thousand kisses are planted on the words, which seem born from the first glance of the sun. Not an idea, an image, a reverie, an accident, a disquietude, which has not its letter. Lo! one morning, something almost imperceptible steals on the beauty of this passion, like the first wrinkle on the front of an adored woman. The breath and perfume of love expire in these pages of youth, as an evening breeze dies upon the flowers. We feel it, but are unwilling to confess it. Our letters become shorter and fewer, are filled with news, with descriptions, with foreign matters; and, if any thing happens to delay them, we are less disturbed. On the subject of loving and being loved, we have grown reasonable. We submit to absence without complaint. Our former vows prolong themselves: here are still the same words; but they are dead. Soul is wanting in them. I love you is merely an expression of habit, a necessary form, the I have the honor to be of the love letter. Little by little the style freezes where it inflamed. The post day, no longer eagerly anticipated, is rather dreaded; writing has become a fatigue. We blush to think of the madnesses we have trusted to paper, and wish we could recall our letters and burn them. What has happened? Is it a new attachment which begins where an old one ends? No: it is love dying in advance of the object loved. We are forced to own that the sentiments of man are subjected to the effects of a hidden process: the fever of time, which produces lassitude, also dissipates illusion, undermines our passions, withers our loves, and changes our hearts even as it changes our locks and our years. There is but one exception to this human infirmity. There sometimes occurs in a strong soul a love firm enough to transform itself into impassioned friendship, so as to become a duty, and appropriate the qualities of virtue. Then, neutralizing the weakness of nature, it acquires the immortality of a principle."
Before leaving this part of the theme, it may not be out of place to express the belief, a belief founded on no hurried inference from a narrow survey of history, or from a superficial study of the data in the breast, that the greatest number of examples of the most impassioned, absorbing, and lasting affection between the sexes have occurred within the ties of marriage, and not outside of those ties. More than other kindred relations, these rest on the nourishing basis of public law and social honor, as well as of personal esteem and avowed identification of interests. Whatever necessitates secrecy, or compromises the fullness and frankness of self respect, even if it give piquancy and fire, takes away moral health, steady integrity; and inserts an insidious element, either of devouring fever or of slow decay. Other things being equal, affection, wedded under every legal and moral sanction, reaches the highest climax and is the most complete and enduring. Every failure implies some defect in the conditions. The readiness, in general, of illicit love to admit a substitute, its facility of consolation and forgetfullness when any fatal calamity has removed its object, demonstrates both its lower origin and its baser nature. In a well consorted marriage, the soul, the mind, esteem and faith, the pure strain of friendship, enter more largely. The grave is not the boundary of its functions. After death, the love is cherished in the ideal fife of the mind as vividly as ever, and with an added sanctity. Widowed memory clings to the disconsolate happiness of sitting by the fountain of oblivion, and drawing up the sunken treasure. If, as Statius said, to love the living be a pleasant indulgence, to love the dead is a religious duty:
Vivam amare, voluptas; defunctam, religio.
A multitude of nameless husbands and wives have experienced this truth in their bereavement; their love not decaying, but passing into resurrection. The Hindus have a fine parable of Kamadeva, the eastern Cupid. He shot Siva, who, turning on him in rage, reduced the mischievous archer to ashes. All the gods wept over his ashes. Then he arose in spiritual form, free from every physical trait or quality. Literature, both eastern and western, ancient and modern, gives us many instances of conjugal love outliving death, and, in holy tenderness of dedication, pleasing itself with all kinds of ideal restorations and celebrations of its object.
When Mausolus, king of Curia, died, his widow, Queen Artemisia, seemed thenceforth almost wholly absorbed in the memory of him. She built to him, at Halicarnassus, that magnificent monument, or mausoleum, which was known as one of the seven wonders of the world, and which became the generic name for all superb sepulchres. She employed the most renowned rhetors of the age to immortalize the glory of her husband, by writing and reciting his praises. At the consecration of the wondrous fabric which she had reared in his honor, she offered a prize for the most eloquent eulogy on Mausolus. All the orators of Greece were invited to the contest. Theopompus bore off the prize. It is said, that, during the two years by which she survived her royal spouse, she daily mixed some of his ashes with her drink, so that, ere their spirits met in Hades, her body was the tomb of his. Unquestionably there is something greatly overstrained in this; but the whole story is one of the most signal instances, handed down from the past, of an intense wedded affection triumphant over death, and crowning itself with death.
Still more costly honors than Artemisia lavished on her Mausolus, did the Great Mogul, Shah Jehan, grandson of Akhar and father of Aurungzebe, pay to his idolized wife, Moomtaza Mahul. She died, in 1631, in giving birth to a daughter. Shah Jehan's love for this exquisite being appears to have been supreme and irreplaceable. In her last moments, she made two requests: one, that he would build an imposing tomb for her; the other, that he would never marry again. He assented to both requests, and kept his word. His reign was the culminating period of the prosperity, power, and pomp of the empire. The gorgeousness of his state beggars description; but those terrible British, destined to overshadow and destroy it, were already beginning to get a foothold in India. Little, however, did the imperial mourner, Shah Jehan, heed them.
He at once set his architects at work, with twenty thousand laborers, to build over his lost Moomtaza a memorial worthy of her loveliness and of his grief. For twenty two years they toiled, when, at a cost equivalent to twenty million dollars now, unveiled from every disfiguring accompaniment, rose on the banks of the clear blue Jumna, at Agra, where it still stands to enchant the soul of every traveller who approaches, the Taj Mahul, the most exquisite building on the globe, an angelic dream of beauty, materialized, and translated to earth. It is a romance, at once of oriental royalty, of marriage, and of the human heart, that the unrivalled pearl of architecture in all the world should thus be a tomb reared over the body of his wife by the proudest monarch of the East.
Colonel Sleeman says, "Of no building on earth had I heard so much as of this; for over five and twenty years, I had been looking forward to the sight of it. And, from the first glimpse of the dome and minarets on the distant horizon, to the last glance back from my tent ropes to the magnificent gateway, I can truly say that every thing surpassed my expectations. After going repeatedly over every part, and examining the total view, from every position and in all possible lights, from that of full moon at midnight in a cloudless sky, to that of the noonday sun, the mind reposes in the calm persuasion, that there is an entire harmony of parts, a faultless congregation of architectural beauties, on which it could dwell for ever without fatigue; and one leaves it with a feeling of regret that he cannot have it all his life within his reach, and of assurance that the image of what he has seen can never be obliterated from his mind while memory holds her seat."
The quadrangle in which the structure stands is 964 feet one way, 329 the other. The area around is laid out in parterres, planted with flowers, blossoming shrubs, and cypresses, interlaced by rows of bubbling fountains, and avenues paved with freestone slabs. The mausoleum itself, the terrace, and the minarets, are all formed of the finest white marble, and thickly inlaid with precious stones. The funeral vault is a miracle of coolness, softness, splendor, tenderness, and solemnity. Fergusson, the historian of architecture, says, "No words can express the chastened beauty of that central chamber, the most graceful and the most impressive of all the sepulchres of the world." When, in that vault, before the two sarcophagi containing the bodies of Moomtaza and Shah Jehan, the priest reads the Koran in a sort of mournful chant, or an attendant plays with subdued breathings on a flute, the notes are borne up into the numerous arcades and domes, reduplicated, intermingled, dying away, fainter and fainter, sweeter and sweeter, until the ravished hearer, as he departs, can remember no more than that the sounds were heavenly, and produced a heavenly effect, making him feel, that, if to die were to listen for ever to those tones, death would be inconceivable bliss.
Russell, in his "Diary in India," thus records the impression the scene made on him: "Write a description of the Taj! As well write a description of that lovely dream which flushed the poet's cheek, or gently moved the painter's hand, as he lay trembling with delight, the Endymion of the glorious Art Goddess, who reveals herself and then floats softly away among the moonbeams and the dew clouds, as he springs up to grasp the melting form! Here is a dream in marble, the Taj: solid, permanent; but who, with pen or pencil, can convey to him who has not seen it the exquisite delight with which the structure imbues the mind at the first glance, the proportions and the beauty of this strange loveliness, which rises in the Indian waste, as some tall palm springs by the fountain in a barren wilderness? It is wrong to call it a dream in marble: it is a thought, an idea, a conception of tenderness, a sigh of eternal devotion and love, caught and imbued with earthly immortality. There it stands in its astonishing perfection, rising from a lofty platform of marble of dazzling whiteness, minarets, dome, portals, all shining like a fresh, crisp snow wreath. The proportions of the whole are so full of grace and feeling, that the mind rests quite contented with the general impression, ere it gives a thought to the details of the building, the exquisite screens of marble in the windows, the fretted porches, the arched doorways, from which a shower of fleecy marble, mingled with a rain of gems, seems about to fall on you; the solid walls melting and glowing with tendrils of bright flowers and wreaths of blood stone, agate, jasper, carnelian, amethyst, snatched, as it were, from the garden outside, and pressed into the snowy blocks. Enter by the doorway in front: the arched roof of the cupola soars above you, and the light falls dimly on the shrine like tombs in the centre of the glistening marble, see a winter palace, in whose glacial walls some gentle hand has buried the last flowers of autumn." In yon cenotaph, profusely covered with ornamental texts from the Koran, sleeps the lamented bride of the Indies. "Her lord lies beside her, in a less costly but loftier casket; and the two tombs are enclosed by a lattice of white marble, which is cut and carved as though it were of the softest substance in the world. A light burns in the tombs, and garlands of flowers are laid over the rich imitations of themselves. Hark as you whisper gently, there rolls through the obscure vault overhead a murmur like that of the sea on a pebbly beach in summer. A white bearded priest, who never raises his eyes from his book as we pass, suddenly reads out a verse from the Koran. Hark! How an invisible choir takes it up, till the reverberated echoes swell into a full volume of sound, as though some congregation of the skies were chanting their hymns above our heads. The eye fills and the lip quivers, we know not why: a sigh and a tear are the tribute which every heart that can be moved to pity, or has thrilled with love, must pay to the builder of the Taj."
Who that reads this tender romance of love and loss, pride and grief and peerless memorial, will not sometimes amidst enchanted recollections of Nala and Damayanti, Haroun Al Raschid and Zobeide, Shahriar and Scheherazade in his recurring thoughts allow a place for the imperfectly known but fascinating story of Shah Jehan and Moomtaza Mahul?
IN the further consideration of these genial attachments of women with persons not of their own sex, we come to those whose relation is that of a wholly free and elective friendship, a friendship with no intermixture either of hereditary connections or of family obligations. This brings us directly to an examination of that species of affection celebrated through the world as Platonic love; on which so many false judgments, inadequate judgments, coarse judgments, have been pronounced by partial observers and critics. If, in this discussion of the relations of affection between men and women, delicate topics are handled, and some things said from which a squeamish reader may shrink, the vital importance of the matter and the motive of the treatment furnish the only needful apology. Prudery is the parsimony of a shrivelled heart, and is scarcely worthy of respect. The subject of the relations of sentiment and passion between the sexes has paramount claims on our attention. It actually occupies a foremost place in the thoughts of most persons. It is constantly handled in the most unrestrained banter on the stage and in all the provinces of fictitious literature. Almost every sensational tale reeks with vulgar portrayals of it. In the mean time, the reign of vice is thought daily to grow more common and more shameless; the demoralization of our great cities, in the flaunting openness of their profligacy, seems to be annually bringing them nearer to an equality with the debauched cities of pagan antiquity. The depravity of an abandoned life is supposed to gather constantly an enlarging class of victims, and to diffuse its undermining evils more widely around us. Shall the pulpit, the academic chair, the high court of the finer literature, alone be dumb? It is the duty of those clothed with the authority of wisdom and purity to speak in plain accents of warning and guidance. They are guilty of a wrong, if they let a mock modesty keep them silent on a matter so deeply imperilling the most sacred interests of the community.
Yet a word of protest is called for against those exaggerated sensational statements on this subject, so persistently forced on public attention by well-meaning but mistaken persons. A tendency has shown itself of late, in many quarters, to attribute that increase of sensual vices imagined to mark the age, not to temporary outward causes, provisional phases of our civilization, but to a growth of depravity in character, an intrinsic lowering of moral sanctions and heightening of foul passions in the people. Such a belief I hold to be both false in its basis and pernicious in its influence. To every competent student of human nature, history demonstrates a progressive diminution in the intensity of the physical passions, and a corresponding increase of moral sensibility and the power of conscience. The extension of sensual vice at the present time, if it be a fact, is owing to accidental conditions which will not be permanent, and is itself very far from being so common or so fearful as some alarmists think. Those alarmists are doing more hurt than good by their overdrawn descriptions and excited declamation. They are fastening a morbid attention on a morbid subject. There is an innocent ignorance, which, if dangerous in some cases, is, in many cases, the highest safety. There is a wholesome unconsciousness, a noble preoccupation with good and pure things, which is a far more promising protective from evil and its temptations than a keen scent and an eager notice of every tainted thing in the wind. If you choose the crow for your guide, you must expect your goal to be carrion. The travellers, who, after making the tour of the United States, write books taken up with the frequency of divorce among us, or devoted to such limited and exceptional aspects as that presented by the Mormon settlement at Utah, are not to be accepted as sound expositors of our social and moral condition. A De Tocqueville is a truer and more adequate teacher. Many recent writers on the relation of the sexes in the present age, writers belonging to the medical, priestly, and literary professions, appear to be infested with the suspicion that certain wicked and disgusting customs are almost universal. They seem occupied in looking everywhere to trace the signs of those customs. Their writings are less adapted to prevent or cure the deprecated evil than they are to fix a diseased gaze on it, and thus to aggravate its mischief. Their readers must get more harm than benefit from them. The belief in the exceptionality and the loneliness of vice is a restraint from it; the belief in its commonness is a demoralizing provocative to it. There are well-meant books now having a wide circulation in consequence of the efforts made to push them, which I cannot help believing do more injury than many books which are universally condemned. They give their readers the suspicion that the vilest forms of sensuality are universally prevalent, and induce in them the habit of looking for their signals in every direction. To every pure and lofty soul, such a suspicion and habit are enough to turn the sunshine into a stench and make the very landscape loathsome. The crowding of population in manufacturing and commercial centres, our thronged and exposed hotel-life, the expensive habits of fashion, the excessive luxury of wealth and vanity, are, undoubtedly, causes of much personal vice. But, notwithstanding all this, the vile and degraded men and women are the marked exception in every community among us. The vile and degraded are more segregated into a class by themselves, and are therefore more conspicuous and obtrusive than ever before. Licentiousness may have been more prevalent formerly than now, as I believe it was; but less prominent and less noticed, because of its greater diffusion. It was not so concentrated into relief. The unstainedly honorable and virtuous are the vast majority, and will, when a few evil conditions of society are outgrown, rapidly become an ever larger majority. Especially do I believe it to be a truth, which none but the ignorant or the vicious can question, that every city and village in America, outside of Mormondom, abounds with matrons and maidens, the face of any one of whom Purity herself might take for her escutcheon.
But, after we allow every just abatement from the overcharged representations of the extent of sensual vice in our time, there remains cause enough to make every lover of virtue anxious to employ all available means to lessen the force of social temptation and to increase the firmness Of individual resistance. And there cannot be a reasonable doubt that high-toned friendships of earnest men and women would be a holy and powerful restraint from illicit habits. To represent such attachments and intercourse as dangerous lures to evil, or, as a popular novelist of the day has called them, "delusions and snares," is an inversion of their true influence. Consider the following picture drawn by a young Frenchman from his own experience amid the exposures of Paris:
"The house of Julius Fontaine is another home for me; he and his wife are a family for me. When I am gay, I go to them to pour out my gayety; if I am sad, I go to them to have my grief consoled; they receive kindly both my joy and my sorrow. No fixed day nor hour of admission, no ceremony and grand toilet; they receive me when I arrive; they welcome rue in whatever costume I present myself. I enjoy to the utmost, with these good friends, the pleasure of being spoiled; I give myself up to it with delight. As soon as I enter, they install me in a comfortable arm-chair, in a choice situation in the corner of the fireplace. They speak to me of every thing that is interesting to Ime; they listen to all my nonsense; they give me advice, if I ask for it; they consult me about all they intend doing. I am initiated, by a lively conversation, into the most minute details of the household; they relate to me the little triumphs and misdeeds of the children, whom they caress or scold before me. If the hour arrives for the meal, my place is set; and, invited or not, there are sure to be on the table some dishes for which they know my preference. In playing with the children, in dreaming aloud, in talking seriously, sometimes in a little discussion or backbiting, in laughing, and exchanging those nothings which charm, we know not why, the hours glide away. I leave as late as possible; we give cordial grasps of the hand, which express our regret at parting. The next day, or a few days after, I find myself there with renewed pleasure. It seems as if each evening we become more necessary to one another. They almost make me forget that they are two, and that I am one."
Such a friendship must be a guardian guidance of virtue and happiness. The cultivation of such relations cannot be too strongly recommended. The odious vices of sensuality would die out before them. Profligacy either rots or petrifies the heart; but a pure friendship inspires, cleanses, expands, and strengthens the soul. It is the nutriment of genius and of every form of philanthropic virtue. "How can one who hates men love a woman without blushing?" is one of Richter's incisive questions.
In now taking up the subject before us, the meaning of the thing in debate should first be perceived; for, while the ignorant are always the least competent, they are often the most forward, to give decisions. Truly understood, the Platonic sentiment does not denote love, in the distinctive significance of that word, but a pure and fervent friendship. Ideal love is ordinary love taken up, out of material organs and relations, into pure mentality, with the preserved correspondence of all it had on that lower plane where it naturally lives. Platonic love is a high personal passion, like the former, with the exception that no physical influence of sex enters into it; imagination exalting the soul, instead of inflaming the senses. Actual love is the marriage of total persons for mutual happiness, and for the transmission of themselves in new beings. Ideal love is either the memory of actual love, or the notion of it prevented from becoming actual by some impediment. Platonic love is the marriage of souls for the production of spiritual offspring, ideas, feelings, and volitions. The first looks ultimately to the perpetuation of life by providing new receptacles for it; the last looks ultimately to the enhancement of life by a sympathetic reflection of it. The children of actual love are organic reproductions of the being of the parents; the children of Platonic love are spiritual reflections of the being of the parents. The perfected offspring of love are boys and girls; the perfected offspring of friendship are states of consciousness.
Love, in its high and pure forms, is confined to one object. Friendship has this advantage, that it may be given to all, however numerous, whose conduct and qualities of character are fitted to command it. It is, therefore, less perilous, less exposed to fatal wreck, more capable of consolations and replacements. Love and friendship are properly not antagonists, but coadjutors. They naturally go together where there is adaptedness for them, mutually quickening and increasing each other. The former should never exist without the ennobling companionship and clarifying mixture of the latter. But there are numberless instances in which, while the former is impossible, or would be wrong, the latter is abundantly capable of nurture, and would prove a boon of unspeakable solace.
Six immortal names will serve to set in relief the distinction between that impassioned friendship of man and woman which constitutes Platonic love, and those forms of ideal love which are often erroneously confounded with it.
The affection of Petrarch for Laura, after her death, was ideal love. The love which, in her life, had pervaded his system, then rose, strained of its carnal elements, and re-appeared in his mind alone, with the ideal equivalents of all it had before. She became a heavenly idea exciting emotions in him, instead of an earthly object productive of sensations; yet a correspondence of all that had been in the sensations was still seen, purged and eternized, in the emotions.
The affection for Beatrice which consecrated the soul of Dante was Platonic love, or a divine friendship. It was free from sensual ingredients from the first. It was his spirit, ruled by an intense sympathy, mentally confronting hers, as a live mirror before a live mirror; creating in his own, in correspondent states of consciousness, all the entrancing shapes of truth, beauty, and goodness he saw passing in hers, revealed from God, revealing God, and clothed with power to redeem the gazer from every thing corrupt. Dante promised to immortalize Beatrice by dedicating to her such a strain of love as had never before celebrated a woman. He kept his promise wonderfully. But the essence of his love was not a new creation; it was simply an ardent, sexless, worshipping friendship, that Platonic passion which, wholly cleansed from sense, adored a beautiful soul as a type of the Divine Beauty, a medium of celestial realities, which shone through it in half-veiled reminiscences. The originality of the Dantean love consists, first, in the unique personality of the poet, and the equally peerless personality which his genius has given to his lady; secondly, in associating and blending with the Platonic substance of that love the constituents and scenery of the Christian doctrines of God and the future life.
Abelard and Heloise began with ordinary friendship, in the relation of teacher and pupil. The extreme beauty, genius, and graces of the parties soon poured into their intercourse an intoxicating potion, which swept the senses into the mental whirl; and friendship fermented into love. After their misfortunes and separation, the love, refined from passion to memory, rose out of the senses into the thoughts, and circulated in idea, instead of detaching itself in act. We imagine Petrarch offering enamored tribute to Laura, who warmly persuades his homage, but coldly repels his ardor. We think of Abelard and Heloise in pensive converse, hand in hand, eye to eye, living over the past with tender regrets. But we see Dante kneeling before Beatrice, in profound humility and intellectual entrancement, touching the hem of her robe, while she points upward to the supernal Glory, whose light is falling on her face.
What distinguishes this Platonic affection from ordinary friendship is, that the magic of imagination, with a religious emphasis, is in it. What distinguishes it from love is, that the consciousness of sex has nothing to do with it, while that element is essential in the latter. If woman is generally the object to whom this affection attaches, it is not because she is woman, but because she is purer, lovelier, more self-abnegating, a clearer mirror of divinity. Precisely the same affection exists, when favorable conditions meet, between man and man; as is abundantly shown in the sonnets of Shakespeare, in the writings of Plato himself, and in many other places.
The type of affection now defined, many people consider a mere theory, spun by a finical fancy, incapable of reduction to practice in the substantial relations of life. But such critics criticise themselves. They identify their own limitations with the diagram of human nature. This is the procedure ever characteristic of arrogant folly, to make its actual experience the measure of possible experience. All beauty that is sufficiently marked, does, in its very nature, awaken a blessed ravishment in every soul that is sufficiently harmonious and sensitive. The charm operates to this result through the imagination. Now, if the imagination distribute the spell through the body, as well as through the soul, ordinary love is the consequence; but, if imagination be confined within the intellect, Platonic love is the consequence. Some persons, no doubt, are incapable of the latter; the instant any form of beauty strikes their perceptions, it is deflected downward, and dips into the senses. Every esthetic impression, even the loveliness of painting, music, or a soft landscape, affects them voluptuously. But it is an outrage for them to attribute this peculiarity of constitutional structure, or temperamental key, to everybody else. There are persons built after a nobler pattern, keyed to a loftier music, susceptible of a more undefiled and eternal stir of the atoms of consciousness. They look on a beautiful woman, with a delight circling purely in the mind, with a serene melodious joy, like that given them by an exquisite picture, statue, or landscape. Dante tells us, in his Vita Nuova, that he carried about with him a list of the loveliest ladies in Florence. To attach any prurient association to the act, would be blasphemy; it can only be understood by reference to that sweet, poetic, religious worship of lovely forms, which seems to rise through contemplation of beauty to adoration of God. One man, brought into intimate relation with an attractive and gifted woman, feels as if he were a vase of fiery quicksilver; another feels as if he were a mirror of divine ideas. The latter is capable of a friendship with her as fervent as love, but without its alloy; the former is not. St. Beuve says of Maurice de Guérin, "The sympathetic friendship of a beautiful woman appeased instead of inflaming him."
The exalted friendship of man and woman, known as Platonic love, is not, then, an empty mirage of sentimentality. But is it not too dangerous to be cultivated? Is it not liable to go too far, and to work fatal mischiefs? Many, judging from unworthy instances, With an inadequate knowledge of the data, answer these questions with a sweeping affirmative. But justice requires a careful discrimination. Unquestionably there are some who are unfit for this relation, in danger of perversion and betrayal at every step of its progress. Such should either shun the connection, or keep themselves with double guards of discreet reserve and watchfullness. Love and friendship, with them, are two electrical regions, insulated by a thin line of non-conduction. The more highly charged region tends, at the touch of any stimulative sign, to break through the barrier, and to flood the whole being with its own kind. For those of inflammable temperament and weak conscience, it is obvious enough what jeopardy must attend their playing about the conscious edges of relations on which such thunders of soul and fate hang, ready to be unleashed at a look. But there is another class of persons, with whom the fire of affection is harmless. Like those weird heat-lightnings that play in the firmament on summer evenings, it retains the lambent warmth and luminous loveliness, without the blasting violence. Of the intellectual and sensual regions, only the former is surcharged; the latter is either exhausted, or separated by an insulation so sure that it cannot possibly flash into the other. The unclean electricity of lust cannot find its way through the non-conductors of esteem, reverence, duty, and honor. Those are safe, who, shielded by such holy barriers, pay their worship, in the mental holy of holies, to the supernal charms of truth and virtue, to the dazzling sanctity of the principle of good. It is only the gross and weak who are discharged to their ruin by the lures of vice and pleasure. A profound reverence for a person at the same time inflames the soul and refrigerates the senses.
The common apprehension of danger from friendship between men and women is exaggerated. Those who fear such a danger should study the moral exaltation and the unspeakable usefullness and comfort of the friendship between Gunther, the court physician, and Matilda, the queen, depicted by Auerbach, with such careful truth, in his great novel, "On the Height." Friendship is more likely to spring from love than love from friendship, in all but degraded characters. Desire is unprincipled. Love rests on a basis of desire, and naturally fights against the obstacles that oppose its gratification. It is, therefore, taken by itself, essentially dangerous. But friendship rests on a basis of esteem. Esteem is the very voice and face of moral and religious principle, the essential enemy of low temptations. It is the clear cold signet with which the soul stamps a commanding veto against every vicious act. Whenever there is danger that friendship will become another passion, where there are legal or moral duties forbidding it, the true course is not to dismiss and denounce the friendship, but to preserve it in its undegenerate integrity, by strengthening the sanctions, restraints, and obligations that should properly guide and guard it. The element of sense and sex sometimes breaks out with horrible fury in the closest relations. The cruel crime of Hebrew Amnon, the dark tale of Italian Cenci, numerous Greek tragedies, many of the terrible English tragedies of Massinger, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Beddoes, furnish harrowing examples. The amours of the unworthy yield no better argument against profound and earnest friendships between men and women than the morbid cases referred to yield against the proper affection of parent and child, brother and sister. One does not refuse to exercise his mind for fear it will lead to insanity; but he takes care to exercise it healthily. So he should not repudiate the friendship of a woman, because it may lead to harm; he should cherish the friendship, and beware of the harm. It is a profanation to judge of the natural effect of intimacy with the innocent or the wise and virtuous from the effects of intimacy with the depraved and guileful. Poor, sinful Tannhauser, long enslaved in the Venusberg, yearned to be free from the degrading bonds of sensuality. Utterly vain were his agonizing prayers to Venus to release him. But when, with a sudden ardor of faith and resolve, he cried to the Virgin Mary, the grotto in which he was confined instantly faded away, with all its unhallowed seductions.
The degree of danger in these connections will always depend on the characters of the parties. We cannot lay down, as tests, general rules which have much value irrespective of particular persons. Jean Paul, at twenty-six, wrote a prize-essay on "How far Friendship may proceed with the other sex without Love, and the Difference between it and Love." The essay won the prize; but, if ever published, it is not contained in his collected writings. Probably the author's maturer judgment pronounced it of but little value. In one of the volumes of the "Southern Literary Messenger" there is a very pleasing tale, entitled "How far Friendship may go with a Woman;" arguing that it is sure to end in love. The same conclusion is also advocated with much spirit in "A Debate on Friendship," in the thirty-fourth volume of "Knickerbocker." The opposite and better view is gracefully and effectively maintained in an article entitled "De l'Amitie," in the fifteenth volume of "Harper's Magazine." Such special pleadings, however, will have slight weight with a sincere inquirer after the truth.
The most important principle for the guidance of such an inquirer is this: Friendship can be carried, without adulteration or peril, to a degree proportioned to the nobleness and consecration of the parties. It is shocking for those drawn together by a common pursuit of pleasures, to judge, by the standard applicable to themselves, those attracted towards each other by a common service of authorities. As a general rule, sensuality is in inverse ratio to intellectuality, but sensibility in direct ratio.
Accordingly, there is a select class of men and women, of the loftiest genius and character, the native haunt of whose souls is in the purest regions of nature and experience, who are made for friendship; and who, destitute of this, are deprived of their truest and fullest happiness. The movement of imagination which beauty starts in them keeps to the chariot-paths of celestial ideas, and is never switched into the burning tracks of sense. Friendship then reigns in sovereign distinction from love, sometimes by an unfittedness for the latter, sometimes by the interposition of moral principles and sentiments which lift their insulating behests as an impenetrable wall between the different regions.
One of the most striking of the testimonies borne to the value of the friendship of a woman is that of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton:
"It is a wonderful advantage to a man, in every pursuit or avocation, to secure an adviser in a sensible woman. In woman there is at once a subtile delicacy of tact, and a plain soundness of judgment, which ire rarely combined to an equal degree in man. A woman, if she be really your friend, will have a sensitive regard for your character, honor, repute. She will seldom counsel you to do a shabby thing; for a woman Triend always desires to be proud of you. At the same time, her constitutional timidity makes her more cautious than your male friend. She, therefore, seldom counsels you to do an imprudent thing. By friendships I mean pure friendships, those in which there s no admixture of the passion of love, except in the married state. A man's best female friend is a wife of good sense and good heart, whom he loves, and who loves him. If he have that, he need not seek elsewhere. But supposing the man to be without such a helpmate, female friendship he must have, or his intellect will be without a garden, and there will be many an unheeded gap even in its strongest fence.
"Better and safer, of course, are such friendships, where disparities of years or circumstances put the idea of love out of the question. Middle life has rarely the advantage youth and age have. Moliere's old housekeeper was a great help to his genius; and Monaigne's philosophy takes both a gentler and loftier character of wisdom from the date in which he finds, in Marie de Gournay, an adopted daughter, 'certainly beloved by me,' says the Horace of essayists, with more than paternal love, and involved in my solitude of retirement, as one of the best parts of my being. Female friendship, indeed, is to a man the bulwark, sweetener, ornament, of his existence. To his mental culture it is invaluable; without it, all his knowledge of books will never give him knowledge of the world."
Mrs. Jameson quotes the opinion of Auguste Comte, that "the only true and firm friendship is that between man and woman, because it is the only one free from all possible competition." And she adds, "In this I am inclined to agree with him, and to regret that our conventional morality, or immorality, places men and women in such a relation socially as to render such friendships difficult and rare." Sydney Smith said, and the remark applies as forcibly to America as to England, "It is a great happiness to form a sincere friendship with a woman; but a friendship among persons of different sexes rarely or never takes place in this country." The strong jealousy felt in these countries for any intimate relations of affection between men and women other than fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives; the readiness to cast coarse insinuations on them, is more discreditable to our hearts than it is creditable to our morals. It implies the belief that they cannot be attached as spirits without becoming entangled as animals. It is absurd to pretend that the multiplication of virtuous friendships between the sexes would foster licentiousness. Their flourishes best in their absence. Their lifeelement, esteem, is death to licentiousness. A holy thought, with its train of vestal emotions, like Diana and her nymphs, hunts impure desire out of the blood. One of the most known and remarkable friendships of woman and man was that of the Pope Hildebrand and the Countess Matilda of Tuscany. Their relation was based on veneration for each other's commanding and austerely virtuous characters, ardent sympathy in convictions, plans, dangers, labors, and sufferings. They were both supremely devoted to the Church, to the support of its creed, and to the extension of its power. An enthusiastic community in so much experience made them enthusiastic friends. The vile charges of impurity brought against them by their vulgar foes then, and repeated since by prejudiced historians, are a matter of indignation and disgust to every impartial judge.
The most persuasive recommendation of these friendships is seen in the class of persons who are their most distinguished cultivators and exemplars. Men overflowing with the tenderest sensibility, devoted to the loftiest ends, bravest to dare, firmest to suffer, quickest to renounce, studious, afflicted, holy, unconquerable souls, are the ones who put the highest estimate on the friendships of women; who instinctively seek to win the confidence and interest of the best women they meet; who are surest to surround themselves with a group of pure and noble women, from whose sympathy, through conversation and correspondence, they draw unfailing supplies of comfort, strength and hope. Find a person to whom a tender friendship is an absolute necessity, as it was to the classic De Tocqueville, who said, "I cannot be happy, or even calm, unless I meet with the encouragement and sympathy of some of my fellow-creatures," and you will never find him sneering at Platonic love. Klopstock, soul of ethereal softness and sanctity; Jean Paul, who added the finest heart of womanhood to the athletic soul of manhood; Richardson, so blameless in his life, so pathetic in his writings, so pleasing in his half naïve, half grandiose, personality; William Humboldt, the loving son and brother, the irreproachable statesman, the majestic scholar, the model of a Christian gentleman; Matthieu de Montmorency, hero and saint; Schleiermacher, the unflinching thinker and prophet, devout rouser, yearning comrade, encircled by Rahel Levin, Charlotte Von Kathen, Dorothea Veit, Henrietta Herz, and the rest; Charming, brave seeker and servant of truth, spotless patriot, lofty friend of humanity, burning aspirant to God, finest and grandest American character, these, and such as these, are the men who have most valued friendships with choice and unspotted women. On the other hand, the contemners of such a sentiment will be found most fitly represented by Thersites, who continued to ridicule Achilles for the tender- heartedness he showed towards the dead queen of the Amazons, until the hero killed the rancorous scoffer with one blow of his fist.
But, of all the class of men we have been speaking of, no one has more thoroughly tasted the contents of this relation in personal experience, or more completely mastered and displayed its secrets by psychological criticism, than Jacobi. Jacobi sat, for half his life, in the centre of a sort of Platonic academy of noble women, such as his own sisters, and the Princess Galitzin, Sophia Delaroche, and Cornelia Goethe, revolving, both in native feeling and critical thought, all the treasures of pure affection. Bettine, after a visit to him, said, "Jacobi is tender as a Psyche awakened too early." In his two works, "Allwill's Correspondence" and "Woldemar," he unfolds the true philosophy of Platonic love, in its psychological foundations and workings, and in all its subtilest ramifications, more fully than anybody else has ever done it. Jacobi held the glass before his own bosom, dipped the pen in his own heart, and drew the noble though fevered Woldemar after the life. The chief characters in this romance of philosophy and sentiment are Woldemar; his brother Biderthal, to whom he is passionately attached; Dorenburg; the three sisters, Caroline, Luise, and Henriette Hornich; and their dear neighbor and associate, Allwina Clarenau. Caroline and Luise marry Biderthal and Dorenburg; Allwina becomes Woldemar's wife; but Henriette becomes his friend. This friendship becomes so comprehensive and intense in its vitality, that life would be nothing to them without it. After a while, an element of strange perturbation and suspicion enters into it; they fear it is becoming love, and are most wretched. But at length, after much perplexity and distress, all comes clear; and they are again blessed with a perfect spiritual sympathy, as serene and pure as that between two seraphs.
The story and many of its separate incidents have been greatly censured and ridiculed; but Jacobi had an insight, a knowledge, a mastery, in these delicate matters, far superior to that of his critics. Whoso really fathoms his exposition must justify and admire it. The characters of Woldemar and Henriette are extraordinary and exceptional; they are nevertheless true; and their experience is accurately depicted, and offers an invaluable lesson for those who can read it. "I had, from a child," Woldemar writes, "a sweet lovingness for every thing which came in beauty towards my senses or my soul. I was full of pleasure, courage, and sadness. I bore something in my heart which divided me from all things; yea, from myself, I strove so earnestly to embrace and unite myself with all. But what made my heart so loving, so foolish, so warm and good, that I never found in any one. Before the rising and before the setting sun, under the moon and the stars, full of love and full of despair, I have wept as Pygmalion before the image of his goddess." After many vain trials to win a sufficing friendship, after long observation of others and study of himself, Woldemar concluded it unattainable, and laid the hope aside. "I found," he says, "that, collectively and singly, we nourish too many and too eager desires, are too deeply harassed by the pursuits, cares, joys, and pains of life, are too much tortured, excited, distracted, for two men anywhere, in these times, to become and remain so completely one as my loving enthusiasm had made me dream." But Henriette revived this long-forgotten dream in Woldemar, and made it real; and in his friendship we see carried out the idea of a man in whom a foreign personality has so overlaid and taken up his own, absorbing his will and determining his re-actions, that, in his relation to her, the element of sex is excluded, as it is in his relation to himself; and marriage with her would seem to him worse than incest.
The Duchess de Duras, in a letter to Madame Swetchine, expresses herself as being "indignant with the refinements of Woldemar,"
"The mixture of true and false, the combination of just reasoning with perverted sentiment. This love which is not friendship! and this friendship which is not love! Well, in the name of God, to love, is it not to love? Ah, Madame la Duchesse! do you think, then, that all the infinitely complicated minglings and windings of human feeling are so lucid and simple? Is Jacobi, the German Plato, so stupid a metaphysician and so low a moralist that you can so easily teach him acumen and ethics? Scorn or mirth is misdirected against him." Had Madame Swetchine read "Woldemar," we may be sure her verdict would have been different.
France has stood for a long time in advance of every other nation, in regard to the friendships of its men and women, pure as well as impure; it is a slander to limit them to the latter class. The reason of this is to be traced in historic causes, going back to the birth and dispersed influence of chivalry. Chivalry burst into its most gorgeous flower in Provence; Toulouse was the capital whence its light and perfume radiated through France. It spread thence into Spain, Italy, Germany, England, and other places; but nowhere reached the height and copiousness of power it had in the land of its origin. Its most fervent manifestation, at the summit of its state, was seen in the worship of woman, the chaste and enthusiastic homage paid by the knight to the lady of his choice. This ideal idolatry of woman, which played so dazzling a part in the poems of the minstrels and in the inner life and historic feats of the knights, subsided, in the gradual change of times, into delight in the society and conversation of woman. The peculiar combination of influences that presided over this process may be briefly indicated.
Few women at the present time appreciate the debt of honor and gratitude they owe to the troubadour or wandering minstrel of the early Middle Age. Moncaut has well revealed it in his "History of Modern Love." Feudal tyranny then held the whole sex in the sternest slavery. One day, the wife, or the young daughter, confined in the upper story of the walled fortress, sees, passing by the castle, a poor youth with a guitar suspended from his neck, humming a languishing air. She gazes on him; she hearkens to his song; she thanks him with a gesture and a smile. He has brought a momentary relief to the weariness of her sad captivity. Cast a glance on this roaming singer, this houseless rhymer; the last representative of that noble poesy born before Homer. This gentle son of poverty, seeking his bread with the strings of his viol, this Bohemian of the eleventh century, goes to regenerate barbarian society. The influence of music and poesy, which nothing mortal can resist, will win him permission in all places to sing what no one would dare to say. He will publish the sighs of woman for liberty, at a time when her life is an imprisonment; the prerogatives of love, its independence, when the father disposes of his daughter without deigning to consult her wishes or her vows. Before the ladies of the castles, he will celebrate the splendid deeds of the knights; before the knights, he will compassionate the tears and hardships of the ladies shut up in the castles; and thence will arise a double current of attraction and of sympathy between the oppressed women who suffer, and the generous men who long to deliver them.
But causes far deeper and wider than that of minstrelsy wrought in the favorable influence of chivalry on the condition of women, causes psychological, physiological, and social. The exalting effect of love is well known; its inciting and glorifying power is seen even in birds and beasts at the pairing-time, in a new brilliancy of plumage, and a wonderful increase of courage. Love produces a greater secretion of force in the brain and other nervous centres. This exuberance of spirit, or exaltation of function, is usually a transient phenomenon, the gratification of its impulses bringing its cause to a termination. It may, however, be made permanent by such an appropriation of the product as will re-act to keep the cause alive. That is to say, materialize a passion, and you destroy its power, its flame dies in the damps of indulgence; but spiritualize a passion, and you perpetuate its power, its flame becomes a spur, pricking the sides of intent.
The love of woman has in all ages given birth in man to passionate desires, poetic dreams, deferential attentions, persuasive forms of politeness; but only once in the whole of history has this softening, quickening, exalting power restrained from a destructive outlet, and stimulated to an unparalleled richness of manifestation, stamped with chastity by the dominant conscience and imagination of the time broken out in one great swell as an inspiration to glorious deeds, illuminating the world, and making an immortal epoch. Such, in one of its aspects, is the significance of chivalry, whose crest-wave broke into bloom in the Provencal literature; whose consummate flower, lifted far aloft, was Dante's homage to Beatrice. The inspiration of chivalry was the love of woman; but that love was spiritual. It aimed not at a personal union, to die away in marriage, but at a deathless fruition in heroic achievements. This ideal appropriation of love, to engender self-abnegating valor and beneficent deeds, originated from the meeting of the two currents of martial history and the Christian religion in a prepared people and period.
War was the chief institution and experience of man down to the Middle Age; Christianity had then become sovereign of the common beliefs and fears. The priests, who governed thought and conscience almost without check, were vowed to perpetual chastity; that was held up as the highest virtue. But gallantry has always marked the soldier. This element of military life, inoculated with the fire of imagination and the sanctity of the gospel, as happened in the poetic atmosphere of priestly and feudal Provence, was transformed into that pure, intense worship of woman which was sung by the Christian troubadours, and admired and emulated alike by lords, minstrels, and squires. For when the priesthood adopted the sons of war, and sent them forth under Christian sanctions, they naturally imparted to them, as far as possible, their own duties and sentiments. The result was the knight, with his lyre, cross, and sword, mixture of poet, warrior and saint; impersonating, in strange but beautiful union, the military, the literary, and the ecclesiastic ideal, in which the sensual flame fostered in the atmosphere of battle was blended with the mental purity nourished by the exercises of the cloister, and tempered with the rich fancy evoked under the stimulus of the academy. Chivalry was the child of martial adventure and religious faith, married by the culture of the Church. The gallant worship of woman native to the camp, the poetic worship of woman created in the court of minstrelsy, and the religious worship of woman set forth by the Church in the apotheosis of the Virgin Mary, blent in chivalry, produced that stainless and ardent devotion of the knight to his lady, which was appropriated as at once the incitement and the reward of brave and disinterested actions. Dipped in that pure pool of sentiment which the Angel of Christianity stirred, the darts of Cupid were cleansed from aphrodisiacs. The thought of a pure and lovely woman was then naturally allied with the thought of Divinity; the association of garter and star was not difficult.
The enthusiasm thus copiously generated, forbidden by the reigning spirit and circumstances of the age to escape, either through the vent of sensual indulgence, or through that of mere dreaming sentimentalism, was forced to flow forth in the only remaining channel, that of self-consecration to perilous adventures, glorious services, feats of toil and penance. When arms and knight-errantry fell out of fashion, in a more settled age, this force of enthusiasm, no longer flashing forth in warlike emprise, illumined the saloon; the current of feeling, instead of being directed upon the field, circled in the breast, and sparkled out in genial talk and graceful forms. The idolatrous devotion to woman, which had nerved the arm of the knight, and upheld chivalry, now subsided into a respectful sympathy with woman, and, animating the heart of the gentleman, became the ornament and sweetener of society, the inspiring basis of intercourse. In consequence of the stimulus and position resulting from the extreme honor paid to the great feudal dames and their beautiful sisters, in that palmy era, the higher class of women in France obtained a social development whose advantages they have never since lost.
France also had another period quite unique for the varied and wonderful development it gave to the genius and character of woman. An anonymous writer, in the English "National Review," has described this epoch in a passage of marked wisdom and brilliancy. "The court of France," he says, "in the reign of Louis XIII, the regency of Anne of Austria, and the early part of the reign of Louis XIV, produced a company of ladies, in whose presence all the remaining tract of history looks dim. Cousin has nobly drawn the portraits of their leaders. The wars of the League had left the great nobles of France in the enjoyment of an amount of personal freedom, importance, and dignity, greater than was ever before or since the lot of any aristocracy. Chivalrous traditions; the custom of appeal to arms for the settlement of personal quarrels, a custom which is said to have cost the country some nine hundred of its best gentlemen in about as many years; the worship of womanhood, carried to a pharisaical strictness of observance, were conditions, which, though socially disastrous in various ways, exalted the individual worth, power, and majesty of men to the most imposing height, and rendered a corresponding exaltation imperative upon the women, in order to secure that personal predominance which it is their instinct to seek. The political state of France was one which afforded the members of its court extraordinary occasions for the display of character. That state was one of a vast transition. Feudal privileges had to be either moderated, defined, and constitutionalized, or else destroyed. The revolution which was about to operate in England, and to end in liberty, was already working in France with a manifestly opposite destiny. Richelieu and Mazarin were slowly and surely bringing about an absolute despotism, as the only solution of the political difficulties of the State consistent with its greatness, and, probably, even with its unity. The opposition of the nobles to the diminution of their power was carried on with far greater boldness and grandeur of personal effect, inasmuch as it was done without directly affronting the monarchical authority in the persons of its weak representatives, Louis XIII. and Anne of Austria. The two great ministers were the objects against which the whole wrath of the nobility was directed. Hence the war against encroaching monarchy was in great part waged in the court itself; and the king and the queen- regent were themselves found from time to time in the ranks of the indignant aristocracy. Here, then, was a wonderful field for individual effect; and that field was open to women no less, or even more, than to men; for the struggle on the part of the latter was, upon the whole, a selfish and ignoble one. No national idea inspired it; every one was for himself and his house; and the women were perfectly able to sympathize and assist in quarrels of this personal and intelligible interest. In these days, too, rose Port-Royal, with its female reformers, saints, and theologians, offering an asylum to weary and repentant worldliness and passion, or a fresh field for vanity which had exhausted its ordinary irritants. On every side lay great temptations and great opportunities; and the women of the period seem to have been endowed with singular qualifications for the illustration of both."
The historic tradition of her great, lovely, brilliant, accomplished women is one chief reason why friendships of women with men are more common and important in France than in most other countries. Besides, the French are a more ideal people than others; live more from the brain, less from the spinal axis; take a deeper delight in the mere social reflection and echoing of life. And in this, on account of their instinctive swiftness of susceptibility, perception, and adroitness, refined women can have no rivals in the other sex. The luxury of the British is taciturnity; but to this day the favorite excitement of the French is conversation; and conversation is the food of friendship.
The inner history of the Catholic Church, so wealthy in many departments of experience, is especially rich in an original class of profound friendships of men and women, friendships between devout ladies and their spiritual directors. Without referring to the abuses which would sometimes occur in the instances of weak or sinister characters, these religious friendships have often been surprisingly permeating and transparent. This follows from the nature of the case. For the most ardent healthy devotees of religion are persons of the most exalted ideas and affections, most deeply endowed with the sensibility of genius. Every coarse passion both alien to their souls and awed away by the infinite realities they adore in common, the historic abyss of the Church scintillating around them with the memories and presences of saints, martyrs, angels, it is natural that all the purer sympathies of their being, enkindled and consecrated, should yearn together. The woman also confides every secret, unveils the inmost states of her spirit, to her confessor; takes counsel of him; holds with him the most confidential communion known outside of marriage. And the priest, in turn, shut out from the chief personal ties and vents of family, spontaneously bestows, so far as is blameless, his best human affections, turned back elsewhere, on the sister, daughter, mother, friend, fellow-worshipper, who looks up to him with such affecting trust, opening her heart to him, telling him her hopes and griefs, her errors, prayers, and fears. Madame de Sévigné, speaking of the attachment of women for their confessors, says, "They would rather talk ill of themselves than not talk of themselves." When pure and beautiful women, wonderfully dowered with spiritual charms, and noble priests, eminently possessed of every virtue and authority of character, so often meet, amid such inspiring circumstances, beneath the august sanctions of the church, drawn forward by the sublime mysteries of religion, and blending the potential perfections of heaven with the actual experiences of earth, it would be no less than a miracle if many friendships of singular sincerity and power did not spring up. They have sprung up in every part and period of Christendom; more in the Catholic Church than anywhere else, because its ritual and doctrine, its organized religious life and its practice of direction, furnish for them unequalled facilities and provocatives.
The friendship all divine which Jesus showed for many women, of whom Mary and Martha, the sisters of his friend Lazarus, are examples—the friendship which drew such matchless devotion from them, has been perpetuated in the Church in a relation of peculiar tenderness between the priest and the devotee.
"Many women followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering unto him." With what godlike benignity he spoke to the Samaritan woman, to the Syrophenician woman, and to the poor adulteress! With what indescribable compassion he turned to the women who accompanied him towards Calvary, bewailing and lamenting him, and said, "Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me". And what words shall be set beside those which fell from his lips when, as he hung on the cross, he saw his mother, and the disciple standing by whom he loved, and he saith unto his mother, "Woman, behold thy son!" then he saith to the disciple, "Behold thy mother!" Verily, from that hour, the Church has taken woman to itself, as the recipient of a ministration full of respect and purity. In any enumeration of renowned ecclesiastical friendships, Saint Chrysostom and Saint Olympias, the gold-mouthed bishop of Constantinople and the rich and noble widow, deserve to head the list. Under the guidance of the eloquent preacher, she labored to perfect herself in the religious life, and gave her time and wealth to all kinds of charity and good works. From her Christian affection he drew precious strength and comfort. When he was carried from his church and driven into exile, the weeping Olympias fell at his feet, and clasped them so closely that the officers had to use force in tearing him from her. Sixteen letters addressed to her by Chrysostom during his banishment are still extant, silently pronouncing her eulogy throughout the Christian world. A friendship like the foregoing, only still more complete, was that of Saint Jerome and Saint Paula. The talents, scholarship, services, and enthusiasm of Jerome are universally known; and the chief personal attachment of his life is scarcely less familiar to the public. Paula, immortalized not less in literary history as his friend than in the ecclesiastical calendar for her virtues, was one of the most distinguished women of the age. She had great riches and high rank, as well as pronounced talents and worth. The blood of the Scipios, of the Gracchi, and of Paulus Emilius, met in her veins. Jerome was her spiritual director at Rome for two years and a half-her other soul while life remained. She built and supported at her own expense an extensive monastery for Jerome and his monks at Bethlehem. When she died, Jerome wrote to her daughter the long and celebrated letter called "Epitaph of Paula," in which he exhausts the hyperboles of praise. The features of a rare character and the proofs of an extraordinary affection may be discerned within the extravagances of this eloquent panegyric. The tombs of Jerome and Paula are still to be seen side by side in the monastery at Bethlehem. Saint Clara of Assisi, on account of her high rank, great wealth, and extreme loveliness, had many offers of marriage, many temptations to enter into the gayeties and luxuries of the world. But she preferred the thorny path of mortification and the crown of celestial beatitude. The melting pathos of the preaching of Saint Francis, with the penetrative charm of his spirit, drew her to throw herself at his feet and supplicate his guidance. He approved her desire to devote herself wholly to the religious life in seclusion; and, when she had made her escape by night from the proud castle, clad in her festal garments, and with a palm-branch in her hand, he and his poor brotherhood met her at the chapel-door, with lighted tapers and hymns of praise, and led her to the altar. Francis cut off her long golden hair, and threw his own penitential habit over her. She became his disciple, daughter, and friend, never wavering, though exposed to dangers and trials of the severest character. Under his direction, she formed the famous order of Franciscan nuns, afterwards named from her the Poor Clares.
These nuns, clad in gowns of gray wool, knotted girdles, white coifs and black veils, engaged in touching works of humility and charity, have been seen in many nations now for seven centuries, keeping alive the example of their foundress. When the body of Saint Francis, on its way to burial, was borne by the church of San Damiano, where Clara and her nuns dwelt, she came forth with them weeping, saluted the remains of her friend, and kissed his hands and his garments. The memory of the relation of these sainted friends is perpetuated in many pictures of the Madonna, wherein Clara is portrayed on one side of the throne of the Virgin, and Francis on the other, both barefooted, and wearing the gray tunic and knotted cord emblematic of poverty. Perhaps the most fervent and interesting of all the friendships between director and devotee, of which the documents have been published, is that of Saint Francis of Sales and Madame de Chantal. Full materials for studying this relation are furnished in the letters that passed between the parties, both of whom were of a temperament strung to the most exquisite tones of consciousness, with minds both wise and strong, and with characters under the control of austere principles of duty and piety. Michelet, in his work on the Confessional, gives a skilful and forcible picture of this rapt friendship; but his own pervading sensuousness, not to say sensuality, does the sentiment gross injustice by mixing in it so much of flesh and earth. The union of these two mystics in spirit and deed was as taintless as that of two angels in heaven.
If throbs of agonizing passion sometimes mounted up, the invariable heroism with which they were veiled and suppressed simply adds the martyr merit to the saintly one. Saint Francis had an irresistible attractiveness of figure and face, a temper and bearing of singular sweetness. Childlike, and so fair in appearance that it was difficult to withdraw the eyes from him, he united the greatest social insight and skill with the greatest sincerity and simplicity. Madame de Chantal, early left a widow, with several children and an aged and infirm father, administered the business of her household with systematic prudence, and filled her leisure hours with fervent religious exercises. Saint Francis and Madame de Chantal seem to have been predestined for friends. Their biographers relate, that, long before they had seen each other, they met in mystical visions and ecstasies. Archbishop Fremiot, brother of Madame de Chantal, and an intimate acquaintance of Saint Francis, invited him to preach at Dijon. During his sermon, the preacher noticed one lady particularly above the rest; and, as he came down from the desk, asked, "Who is that young widow who listened so attentively to the word?" The archbishop replied, "That is my sister, the Baroness de Chantal." An inspired understanding appears to have at once united their minds. "It is enchantment," Michelet says, "to read the vivacious and delightful letters which open the correspondence of Saint Francis with his dear sister and dear daughter. Nothing can be more pure, nothing can be more ardent." He says the sentiment she awakened powerfully assisted his spiritual progress. He thought of her at the moment of partaking of the sacrament. "I have given you and your widowed heart and your children daily to the Lord, in offering up his Son." She dispensed with her former confessor, and confided her spirit to Saint Francis. She desired to take the conventual vows; but he restrained her a long time. In the name of his mother, he gave her his young sister to educate.
This occupation tranquillized her mind; but the beloved child soon died at her house, in her arms. She prayed God "to take her own life, or one of her children, in place of her dear pupil." Saint Francis now consented that she should withdraw from the world. Her household presented a piteous scene-her old father and father-in-law in tears; her son, afterwards the father of Madame de Sévigné, prostrating himself on the threshold to prevent her departure. But the passionate response in her to the supposed call of Heaven broke all lower ties; and she passed over the body of her son, and said farewell for ever to her home. Saint Francis intrusted her with the formation of a new religious order—the celebrated Order of the Visitation. In nurturing this order, writing, travelling, praying in its interests, with intervals of silent retreat, she spent the rest of her days. Her intense temperament, her absolute faith and submission, her systematic attention to business, her mystical ecstasies, her heroic sacrifice, form a most original combination. Her life seems an alternation of sober processes, stormy raptures, and stifling calms. Her restless sensibility, girdled by fixed principle, gives us the picture of a sea of fire breaking on a shore of frost. Her essay on "Desire and the Agony of Disappointment" is a gush forced from the bottom of a heart full of baffled feeling, under the pressure of a mountain of pain. The constancy and power of her attachment to Saint Francis, through all, are marvellous. On the day of his mother's death, he writes, "I have given you the place of my mother in my memorial at the mass: now you hold in my heart both her place and your own." She writes to him, "Pray that I may not survive you." Twenty years did she outlive him; finding, to the last, her greatest pleasure in remembering him, carrying out his wishes, and corresponding about him with his friends. Ten years after the death of Saint Francis, Madame de Chantal had his tomb opened in the presence of her community, and made an address before the embalmed body. A testimony to the deep impression their friendship had made is found in the myth, that, when on this occasion she reverently lifted to her head the dead hand of the saint, it acknowledged her devotion by an answering caress. The winning qualities of Madame Guion awakened an enthusiastic interest in many of those whom her remarkable religious experience brought into close relations with her. Especially they produced in her confessor, Father Lacombe, such a ruling admiration, reverence, and tenderness, that he was subdued into a caricature of her. He followed her everywhere, could not dine without her, made her directions his law. When her peculiar doctrines of the Quietist life, and her fame, had caused a disturbance in the Church, her enemies circulated scandals about the friends. The spotless and heavenly-minded woman smiled, and paid no heed to the wrong. But Father Lacombe, under the combined power of his Quietistic fanaticism, poor health, bitter persecutions, and relentless imprisonment, lost the balance of his mind altogether, and died. Fenelon also, interested in Madame Guion by her genuine piety, and by sympathy with many of her views, and finding this interest greatly deepened on personal acquaintance, formed a strong attachment for her. Convinced of her innocence, and knowing her rare worth, the misfortunes and sufferings brought on her by her persecutors served but to redouble his kindness. Her enemies then became his; and they made him pay dearly for his fidelity, by robbing him of waiting honors, and throwing him into disgrace at court.
His friendship for Madame Guion was like that of a guardian angel. It never failed. One can imagine what her feelings towards him must have been. Many noble women had a strong friendship for Fenelon. He could not come into the confiding relations of his office with them without that result. His face was all intelligence and all harmony; his voice, music; his manner, fascination; his character, heaven. His unconscious suavity, his abnegated personality, formed a mighty magnet; and every soul, with any steel of nobleness in it, fondly swayed to him. Madame Maintenon gave him, for years, all the reverence and affection of which her commonplace nature was capable; and then, at the command of her selfish bigotry, became chilled. The impassioned and unhappy La Maisonfort, so talented and so beautiful, whose pathetic story is charged with every element of romance, adored him. And the Duchess de Chevreuse and the Duchess de Beauvilliers always paid him an homage whose grace and sweetness the happiest man that ever lived might well sigh for. To the latter of these queenly women, then a sorrowing widow, he wrote, in the last letter he penned, "We shall soon find again that which we have not lost: every day we approach it with swift strides; yet a little while, and there will be no more cause for tears." Among the penitents of Bossuet, there was one—a widow, named Cornuau, to whom the great prelate gave more of his heart than to any of the rest. In submitting her spiritual life to his oversight, they were often brought together, both by letters and by personal interviews. The affectionate docility and loyalty of the novice won his kind esteem, and the condescending benignity and greatness of the noble genius kindled her enthusiasm. And so the opposite ends of the chain of their attachment were fastened. After displaying exemplary zeal, for fifteen years, in all the works of duty assigned her, she was permitted to become a nun, taking the name of Bossuet in addition to the title of Sister Saint Benigne. Despite her humble origin and the mediocrity of her intellect, Bossuet preferred her above all the high-born and brilliant ladies who constantly knelt for his benedictions. It was only natural, that, notwithstanding the work of grace, she should sometimes feel jealous. But once, after she had expressed herself "ready to burst with jealousy" of a certain great lady, whom she falsely supposed esteemed more than herself by the lofty director, when the object of her jealousy was smitten with a frightful disease, Sister Benigne, with sublime self-sacrifice, went to Paris, and became her nurse; "shut herself up with her, watched over and loved her." When Bossuet died, La Cornuau, "happily guided by her friendship, forgetting her own vanity, and mindful only of the fame of her spiritual father, did more for him, perhaps, than any panegyrist." She published the two hundred letters he had written to her, "noble letters, written in profound secrecy, never intended to see the light, but worthy of exposure to the perusal of the whole world."
A friendship, such as we might suppose would be characteristic of such ecstatic natures, was cherished between the two celebrated Spanish mystics, Saint Theresa and Saint John of the Cross. The fullest expressions of it may be found in their respective writings, now translated into many languages, and easy of access almost anywhere. Unquestionably there have been very numerous Friendships, worthy of notice, between clergymen and devout women, in the Protestant sects. But they are different from those in the Catholic communion, which has, in this respect, great advantages. In the Protestant establishment, all are on a free equality; and the religion is an element fused into the life. With the Catholics, the overwhelming authority of the Church invests the priests with godlike attributes; while celibacy detaches their hearts from the home and family, leaving them ready for other calls. The laity are placed in a passive attitude, except as to faith and affection, which are more active for the restrictions applied elsewhere; and religion is pursued and practised as an art by itself. The church ritual, by its dramatic contents and movement, peerless in its pathetic, imaginative power, intensifies and cleanses the passions of those who appreciatively celebrate or witness it, and who are naturally attracted together, as, in blended devotional emotions and aims, they cultivate that supernatural art whose infinite interests make all earthly concerns appear dwarfed and pale.
The instances already cited of the friendships thus originating suffice to indicate the wealth in this kind of experience which must remain for ever unknown to the public. But one example which has just been brought to light, and is worthy to rank with the best of earlier times, should be mentioned here. It is the relation of Madame Swetchine and the most renowned preacher of our century, Lacordaire. This friendship has been beautifully portrayed by Montalembert. A full account of it will be found farther on in these pages. The friendship that joined the souls, and still links the names, of Vittoria Colonna and Michael Angelo, is one of the most celebrated in history. Her married life with the chivalrous and magnificent Marquis of Pescara, in his palace on the bewitching isle of Ischia, was one of the most romantically happy unions ever known; and nothing could be more noble than her impassioned fidelity to his memory. It was in the twelfth year of her widowhood that she first met with Michael Angelo, then sixty-three years old. Such were their respective attributes of personal worth and majesty, rank and fame, exaltation of character and genius, stainless purity, dignity, earnestness, and devotion, that they could not fail to regard each other with ardent esteem. For ten years, till death separated them, this esteem, with a consequent sympathy and happiness, steadily grew. To her he dedicated many works of his chisel and his pencil, and addressed several exquisite poems.
Their example affords a fine illustration of the sentiment of Platonic love; and his verses repeatedly give it a rhetorical expression equally fine. He says,
Better plea
Love cannot have, than that, in loving thee,
Glory to that eternal Peace is paid,
Who such divinity to thee imparts
As hallows and makes pure all gentle hearts.
His hope is treacherous only whose love dies
With beauty, which is varying every hour.
But in chaste hearts, uninfluenced by the power
Of outward change, there blooms a deathless flower,
That breathes on earth the air of Paradise.
Vittoria said, "He who admires only the works of Michael Angelo values the smallest part in him." One of the only two portraits he ever painted was hers. The aged Angelo stood by the couch of Vittoria at her death. When the last breath had gone, "he raised her hand, and kissed it with a sacred respect." It is touching to know, that the sublime old man, years afterwards, recalling that scene to a friend, lamented, that, in the awe of the moment, he had refrained from pressing his lips on those of the sainted Colonna. Hermann Grimm says, "How great the loss was which he sustained can be realized only by him who has himself felt the void which the removal of a superior intellect irretrievably leaves behind it. It must have been to him as if a long-used, magnificent book, in which he found words suiting every mood, had been suddenly closed, never to be re-opened. Nothing can compensate for the loss of a friend who has journeyed with us for many years, sharing our experiences. Vittoria was the only one who had ever fully opened her soul to him. What profit could he draw from the reverence of those who would have ceased to understand him, had he shown himself as he was in truth? His only consolation was the thought, that his own career was near its close."
Among the celebrated French women, who have had a genius and a passion for friendships, Mademoiselle de Scudéry deserves prominent mention. Her great talents, virtuous character, and affectionate disposition, made her a favorite in the distinguished society she frequented. The great Conde, Madame de Longueville, and the other famous visitors of the Hotel Rambouillet, honored her, and took delight in her companionship. Her ardent devotion to her friends, her beautiful and heroic fidelity to them, her chivalrous vein of sentiment and character, Cousin has illustrated with his minute learning and generous eloquence. Why Madame de Longueville was in disgrace with the court party, Mademoiselle de Scudéry, with a fearless and noble constancy, dedicated a book to her, and, in consequence, lost her pension, and had to write for her bread. For this her aristocratic friends, instead of forsaking her, admired and clung to her the more. Her famous work, the "Grand Cyrus," in ten thick volumes, to which Cousin has brought to light a complete key, is filled with disguised portraits of her friends and associates, and with descriptions of the times.
She draws her own likeness under the name of Sappho. In this work, the pictures, incidents, and conversations reflect a state of society, in which "the degrees and shades of friendship, from deep Platonic love to the slight impression one person makes on another at first meeting, are the real pre-occupations of existence; the smallest grace of mind or manner is observed, and of importance; there is an intense epicurism in companionship; it is both the first occupation and the greatest pleasure of life." The second edition of an English translation of the whole ten volumes of the "Grand Cyrus" was published in London in 1691. The translator, F. G., Esq., erroneously attributes the authorship to "that famous wit of France, Monsieur de Scudéry, Governour of Nostre-Dame." He confounds the sister with the brother. It is dedicated to Queen Mary, wife of William of Orange, in a style of sonorous pomp, worthy of the court of Nadir Shah. In his preface, F. G. says, "If you ask what the subject is; 'Tis the Height of Prowess, intermixed with Virtuous and Heroick Love; consequently the language lofty, and becoming the Grandeur of the Illustrious Personages that speak; so far from the least Sully of what may be thought Vain or Fulsom, that there is not anything to provoke a Blush from the most modest Virgin; while Love and Honour are in a seeming Contention which shall best instruct the willing ear with most Delight." In describing the deep and rare friendships with which the "Grand Cyrus" abounds, Mademoiselle de Scudéry had but to look into her own heart, and make copies from her experience. Especially might the union of Sappho and Phaon stand for the picture of her own connection with Pélisson." The exchange of their thoughts was so sincere that all those in Sappho's mind passed into Phaon's, and all those in Phaon's came into Sappho's. They told each other every particular of their lives; and so perfect was their union, that nothing was ever seen equal to it. Never did love join so much purity to so much ardor. He wished for nothing beyond the possession of her heart. They understood each other without words, and saw their whole hearts in each other's eyes." Pélisson was twenty-nine, and Mademoiselle de Scudéry forty-five, when they first met. Their instant mutual interest deepened, on more thorough acquaintance, into the warmest esteem and affection, and remained unshaken for over forty years. The perfection of their intimacy was known to every one; and every one believed in its entire purity. Cousin says it is touching to see these two noble persons made so happy by their friendship, a friendship which even the coarse and slanderous Tallement respected so much that he refrained from casting a single sneer at it. The story of Pélisson's imprisonment in the Bastile is known to the whole world by the anecdote of the spider.
His only companion, during those wretched years, was a large spider, which he had tamed, and was accustomed to feed and play with. One day, the brute of a jailer trod on him, and killed him; and Passon wept. His friend employed all her ingenuity, during his confinement, in inventing means of communication with him. "At times, when he was ready to fall into despair, a few lines would reach him, and bring him comfort." At length his prison was opened, and fortune smiled again. At his death, Mademoiselle de Scudéry, though eighty-six years old, wrote and published a simple and affecting memoir of him, paying a deserved tribute to his character, in which, she said, there reigned a singular and most charming combination of tenderness, delicacy, and generosity. The most constant among the large circle of admiring friends drawn around Madame de Sévigné by her merits and charms was a cultivated Italian gentleman named Corbinelli, who lived in Paris, on a moderate income, asking only leisure, and the gratification of his high tastes. He was "one of those rare exceptions who seem created by nature to be the benevolent spectators of human events, without taking any part in them beyond that of observation and interest for the actors." He had talents equal to the greatest achievements, but was indolent and unambitious.
He was one of the earliest to discern and to proclaim Madame de Sévigné's exquisite superiority of mind, disposition, and manners, and to pay reverential court to her. Lamartine gives this account of the friendship that ensued—an account not less instructive than interesting: "His admiration, his worship, which sought no return, gained him admittance to her house, where he was regarded as one of the family, and became a necessary appendage. Madame de Sévigné, at first charmed by his wit, afterward touched by his disinterested attachment, concluded by making him the confidant of her most secret emotions. Every heart that beats warmly beneath its own bosom seeks to hear itself repeated in that of another. Corbinelli became the echo of Madame de Sévigné's mind, soul, and existence. He participated in her adoration of her daughter. At Paris, he visited her every day: he sometimes followed her to Livry; and, when absent, corresponded with her frequently.
"The dominion which his friend exercised over him was so gentle, that he experienced no feeling of slavery while submitting 'implicitly to the rule of her tastes. So absolute was her empire, that, when she became a devotee, he became a mystic: he followed her, as the satellite accompanies the planet, from the worldly gayeties of her youth, even to the foot of the altar, and the ascetic self-denial of Port-Royal. He survived her, as though he had survived himself, and lived to the extraordinary age of one hundred and four years, animated to unusual life by his gentle and amiable feelings. Such was Madame de Sévigné's principal friend. If his name were erased from her letters, the monument would be mutilated." La Rochefoucauld, whose reputation the indignant eloquence of Cousin has so damaged, was the object of an admiring friendship, of which he was not worthy, from Madame de Sévigné and Madame de la Fayette. But of all the friends to whom the ardent, imaginative, faithful heart of Madame de Sévigné attached itself, no one, after her husband and her daughter, held so commanding a place as Fouquet, the unfortunate minister of Louis XIV. Fouquet must have had rare traits, besides his acknowledged greatness of mind, to have won such a pure and unconquerable affection. Cast down from power, disgraced, closely imprisoned for fifteen years in the fortress of Pignerol, scoffed at by those who had fawned on him in his prosperity, and forgotten by nearly all whom he had befriended, never did Madame de Sévigné forget him, or cease, for one day, her efforts to alleviate his condition— cheering him with letters, and toiling to secure his liberation. D'Alembert had a long and sedulously improved friendship with Madame du Deffand, of whom Henault said, "Friendship was a passion with her; and no woman ever had more friends, or better deserved them."
There was a basis for this eulogy; but it needs much qualification. She and D'Alembert prized each other's society highly, and passed much time together. But jealousy and exaction are tenacious occupants, easily recalled to the heart even of an aged and friendly woman. When D'Alembert formed a closer friendship with Mademoiselle Lespinasse, the young and charming companion of Madame du Deffand, the latter imperiously dictated the renunciation of the new friend as the condition of retaining the old. The superiority of temper, genius, and worth in Mademoiselle Lespinasse did not permit D'Alembert to hesitate; and she repaid him with memorable fidelity. The affectionate and dependent girl was harshly driven out. In her anguish, she took laudanum, but not with a fatal result. D'Alembert then called Du Deffand an old viper; but his friend checked him, and would never allow any abuse of her former mistress, much less herself indulge in vituperation of her. When D'Alembert was attacked by a malignant fever, she went to his bedside, and nursed him day and night till he was convalescent. Marmontel says, "Malice itself never assailed their pure and innocent intimacy." She afterwards formed an attachment, of the most romantic character, to the young Spanish Marquis de Mora, who reciprocated her affection with impassioned ardor. He died while on the road to join her; and she was not long in following him into the grave, though, in the mean time, a still stronger passion for Guibert had weaned her from D'Alembert. The fervent tenderness of the latter for her remained unaltered, and he was inconsolable at her departure. On hearing of her death, Madame du Deffand said, "Had she only died fifteen years earlier, I should not have lost D'Alembert." Her letters are famous in the literature of love. Sir James Mackintosh says, "They are, in my opinion, the truest picture of deep passion ever traced by a human being." Margaret Fuller writes, "I am swallowing by gasps that cauldrony beverage of selfish passion and morbid taste, the letters of Lespinasse. It is good for me. The picture, so minute in its touches, is true as death." Madame de Staël had many devoted friendships, as would naturally be expected from the overwhelming wealth and ardor of her nature. Affinity of genius and a common love of liberty drew Benjamin Constant and her into intimate relations; and she maintained for years still closer relations with the all-knowing, all-cultured August Schlegel, whose devouring egotism and ever-sensitive vanity put all her patience and generosity to the proof.
The current opinion concerning Madame de Staël, that she was an exacting and disagreeable woman, is unjust. Schiller, who shrank from her impetuous eloquence, and Heine, whose reckless satire depicts her as going through Europe, a whirlwind in petticoats, both do her wrong. William von Humboldt, who knew her well, pronounces a glowing eulogy on her exalted traits, and says that Goethe, from prejudice and ignorance, was very unjust to her. Madame Mole says, "Women are not half grateful enough to Madame de Staël for the honor she conferred upon her sex by taking up the noble side of every question, armed with her pen and her eloquence, and never once calculating what the consequences might be. As time goes on, and details sink into insignificance, she will rise as the grand figure who withstood Bonaparte at the head of six hundred thousand men, with Europe at his back. His vanity was such that he could not bear one woman should refuse to praise him; for that was her only guilt." She was capable of the utmost magnanimity and disinterestedness. Every exalted sentiment struck a powerful chord in her heart. She lived in justice, freedom, beneficence, love, aspiration. The friendship of Matthieu de Montmorency, the most intimate and devoted of all her friends, is enough to prove her exalted worth, making every abatement for her acknowledged foibles. This chivalrous nobleman came, in his youth, to America with Lafayette, and fought for the new Republic. Although one of the foremost members of the aristocracy, it was on his motion in the Constituent Assembly that the privileges of the nobility were abolished. Sympathy in opinions and in the generous strain of their characters was the basis of a connection between him and Madame de Staël, that constantly grew in strength with the trials to which it was subjected, and was not severed even by death. When his brother, ardently loved, fell under the axe of the Revolution, it was her delicate sympathy, her ingenious and indefatigable goodness, that first soothed his anguish, assuaged the horror that threatened his reason, and prepared the way for religion and peace. And in turn, when she was exiled by Napoleon, Montmorency journeyed to Switzerland to visit her, at the risk of being banished himself, as he immediately was. "Matthieu, the friend of twenty years, is the most faultless being I have ever known." "How could he think I should tarry in Germany, when, by leaving it, I had a chance of seeing him? All Germany could not pay me for the loss of two days of his society." No unkindness, suspicion, or ignobleness of any sort, ever interrupted or mixed in the affection of these high friends. When Montmorency died, suddenly, in church, years after the death of Madame de Staël, the daughter of the latter, the Duchess de Broglie, instinctively exclaimed, on hearing of the event, "Ah, my God! I seem to see the grief of my poor mother." The prejudice in England and America against friendships between men and women has operated considerably to lessen their frequency, still more to keep them from public attention when they do exist. Undoubtedly, many a charming English woman, many a charming American woman, in her time the centre of the social circles of fashion, letters, and politics, has been surrounded by a company of friends as devoted at heart as those who have gathered with more public homage about the famous dames of France and Germany. Such groups will be called to mind by the English names of Mrs. Montagu, Lady Melbourne, Lady Holland; the American names of Mrs. Madison, Mrs. Hamilton, Mrs. Seaton, Mrs. Schuyler, and many others. But, since, with the most of these latter, the details have not been taken from the category of private property, by publications of memoirs and journals, it would be impertinent to single them out for personal mention, even where it is possible.
Magdalen Herbert, mother of George Herbert, befriended Dr. Donne in his distresses, ministering to the wants of his family with generous delicacy, and comforting him by her society. His discernment of her wit and piety, her gracious and noble disposition, combined with his gratitude to make him her fast and fervent friend. His conversation, together with that of Bishop Andrews, whose renown Clarendon and Milton unite to swell, appears to have given Lady Herbert great delight. Lasting evidence of the impression her character and kindness made on him is found in his verses and letters addressed to her, and in the funeral sermon which, with many tears, he preached for her. He says in verse, in her advancing age,
No spring nor summer beauty has such grace
As I have seen on an autumnal face.
And he gratefully writes to her in his quaint prose, "Your favors to me are everywhere. I use them and have them. I enjoy them at London and leave them there, and yet find them at Mitcham. Such riddles as these become things inexpressible; and such is your goodness." There was a choice, ever-comforting, and sacred friendship between the great John Locke and the excellent Lady Damaris Masham, the only daughter of that ornament of the English Church, the learned and benignant Cudworth.
She was one of the most gifted, cultivated, and elegant women of her time. The genius and moral worth of Locke are well known to all. Domesticated in the family of Lady Masham for many years before his death, giving her all the advantage of his talents, acquirements, and sympathy, "she returned the obligation with singular benevolence and gratitude, always treating him with the utmost generosity and respect; for she had an inviolable friendship for him." She watched by him in his last illness. He asked her to read a psalm to him. As death approached, he desired her to break off reading, and in a few minutes breathed his closing breath. She wrote the fine sketch of his character published in the "Historical Dictionary." She says his manners made him very agreeable to all sorts of people, and nobody was better received than he among those of the highest rank. "His greatest amusement was to talk with sensible people, and he courted their conversation." The amiable, unfortunate Cowper, the most shrinking and melancholy of men, too gentle and too unworldly for common companionship, was especially fitted for the soothing ministrations and the healing sympathy of women. He was dependent on these friendships, and found his chief happiness in them. But for them, his career would have been as brief as it was wretched; and his name, now haloed with such sadly pleasing attractions, would have had no place in English literature, except in the dark list of madmen and suicides. Who that has read his matchless lines on his mother's picture will not bless the good women who shed so many rays of peace and bliss on his unhappy lot. His cousin, the angelic Lady Hesketh, whose disinterested tenderness lavished grateful attentions on him, with a sweet skill that failed neither in his youth nor in his age, was as a light from heaven on his path through the whole journey. Some touching verses, and innumerable references in his letters, attest his appreciation of her. Mrs. Throckmorton and her husband, in whose grounds he loved to walk, and in whose kindly and refined society he spent so many delightful hours, furnished a healthy relief from the gloom of his austere religion, in the atmosphere of their genial catholicity; and were an invaluable comfort and benefit to him. Lady Austen also, a sprightly and accomplished woman, of intellectual tastes, quick sympathies, and charming manners, whose appearance at Olney "added fresh plumes to the wings of time," was at one period an inexpressible blessing to him. "Lady Austen's conversation acted on Cowper's mind as the harp of David on the troubled spirit of Saul." He christened her "Sister Ann," and wrote cordial verses to her. Constant communications with her withdrew his attention from depressing superstitions, and enlivened his spirits. At her suggestion it was, and under her sustaining encouragement, that he composed the immortal ballad of "John Gilpin," the "Dirge for the Royal George," and his greatest work, "The Task." Love being proscribed by his repeated subjection to insanity, friendship was the resource in which he was thrice fortunate.
Far above all others in the number of his female friends, in importance, must be ranked Mary Unwin, whose name is indissolubly joined with his in the memories of all who are familiar with his plaintive story. Mrs. Unwin, wife of a clergyman, religious after the most scrupulous evangelical type, was first drawn to Cowper by a sectarian interest. They were fated to be friends, as by the striking of a die. "That woman," he soon wrote to Lady Hesketh, "is a blessing to me; and I never see her without being the better for her company." This is the secret of the charm of all true friendship—that it soothes the heart, clarifies the mind, heightens the soul. One feels so much the better for it. Almost penniless as he was, a shiftless manager, assailed by terrible depression and even madness, the Unwins took him under their roof, and gave him a home on the most generous terms. From this time until her death, the friendship of Mary was a necessity to Cowper, the greatest support and enjoyment the hapless poet knew, combining with his native humor and gentleness to combat his melancholy malady with frequent and long victories. In his fits of insanity, she watched and waited on him day and night, defying alike personal hardships and the slanderous remarks of the vile. The only drawback on Cowper's indebtedness to Mrs. Unwin was her jealous wish to restrict him to the society of her own sect of religionists, that harrowing type of piety represented by John Newton. Otherwise, he might have enjoyed much more frequent and prolonged periods of what he cheerily characterized as "absences of Mr. Blue-devil." Lady Hesketh said of her, "She seems in truth to have no will left on earth but for his good. How she has supported the constant attendance she has gone through with the last thirteen years is to me, I confess, wonderful." Cowper himself said, "It is to her, under Providence, I owe it that I am alive at all." With a devotion in which self appeared to be lost, "there she sat, on the hardest and smallest chair, leaving the best to him, knitting, with the finest possible needles, stockings of the nicest texture. He wore no others than of her knitting." After nearly a generation of her fond and sedulous ministering, repeatedly stricken with paralysis, her mind decayed, mute, almost blind, as she sat by his side, a pathetic memento of what she had been, Cowper composed for her that unsurpassed tribute, his exquisite and imperishable lines, "To Mary":
The twentieth year has well-nigh past,
Since first our sky was overcast:
Ah! would that this might be our last,
My Mary!
Thy spirits have a fainter flow:
I see thee daily weaker grow;
'Tis my distress that brought thee low,
My Mary!
Thy needles, once a shining store,
For my sake restless heretofore,
Now rust, disused, and shine no more,
My Mary!
Thy indistinct expressions seem
Like language uttered in a dream;
Yet me they charm, whate'er the theme,
My Mary!
Thy silver locks, once auburn bright,
Are still more lovely in my sight
Than golden beams of orient light,
My Mary!
Partakers of my sad decline,
Thy hands their little force resign;
Yet, gently prest, press gently mine,
My Mary!
Yet ah! by constant heed, I know
How oft the sadness that I show
Transforms thy smiles to looks of woe,
My Mary!
And should my future lot be cast
With much resemblance of the past,
Thy worn-out heart will break at last,
My Mary!
Lady Hesketh, ever a true angel, came and dwelt with the afflicted pair. And when Cowper, after four wretched years of separation, plunged, as he expressed it, in deeps unvisited by any human soul save his, followed his faithful sister-spirit to a better world, Lady Hesketh, that model of a third friend, built, in St. Edmund's Chapel, where he was buried, a monument displaying two tablets, both bearing poetical inscriptions; one dedicated to William Cowper, the other to Mary Unwin. The friendship of Garrick and Mrs. Clive is memorable for its sprightliness, sincerity, unbroken harmony-saving a few momentary quarrels for relish—long duration, and the large measure of happiness it yielded. Their correspondence is very entertaining, and reflects honor on them both. Their talents and virtues contributed in a high degree to adorn and elevate the profession to which they belonged. It is an interesting fact, equally creditable to all the parties, that "Pivy," as they affectionately called Kittie Clive, was as dear to the excellent Mrs. Garrick as to her brilliant husband. The friendship of David Garrick was also one of the most delightful features in the life of the admirable Hannah More. A letter written by Hannah on seeing him play Lear, greatly pleased him, and led to their acquaintance. Acquaintance soon ripened into a warm esteem, and produced a friendship of the most cordial—and intimate character, which lasted until death. He declared that the nine muses had taken up their residence in her mind; and both in his conversation and his letters he constantly called her "Nine." One day when she and Johnson, and a few others, were at table with the Garricks, David read to the company her Sir Eldred, with such inimitable feeling that the happy authoress burst into tears. Friendship filled a large space in the life of Hannah More, administering incalculable strength in her labors, joy in her successes, comfort in her afflictions. It has left its memorials in the records of a host of visits, gifts, letters, poems, dedications. Her correspondence with Sir William Pepys shows what an invaluable resource a wise, pure, comprehensive friendship is in the life of a thoughtful woman. Bishop Porteus bequeathed her a legacy of a hundred pounds. She consecrated an urn to him near her house with an inscription in memory of his long and faithful friendship. Mr. Turner, of Belmont, to whom she was for six years betrothed, but broke off the engagement after he had three times postponed the appointed wedding-day, always retained the highest esteem for her, and left her a thousand pounds at his death. She also maintained a most friendly relation, as long as his increasing habit of intemperance allowed it, with her early tutor, Langhorne, the translator of Plutarch. On occasion of an anticipated visit from her, Langhorne wrote a very pretty poem, beginning,
Blow, blow, my sweetest rose!
For Hannah More will soon be here;
And all that crowns the ripening year
Should triumph where she goes.
Joanna Baillie and Sir Walter Scott were deeply attached friends. United by a generous admiration for genius, by esteem for exalted worth and by community of tastes, they were drawn still more closely together by many mutual kindnesses, visits, and frequent correspondence. A copy of Scott's "Marmion," fresh from the press, was placed in Joanna's hands. She cut the leaves and began to read it aloud to a small circle of friends, when she suddenly came upon the following magnificent and electrifying tribute to herself:
Or, if to touch such chord be thine,
Restore the ancient tragic line,
And emulate the notes that rung
From the wild harp that silent hung
By silver Avon's holy shore
Till twice an hundred years rolled o'er;
When she, the bold enchantress, came
With fearless hand and heart in flame,
From the pale willow snatched the treasure,
And swept it with a kindred measure,
Till Avon's swans, while rung the grove
With Monfort's hate and Basil's love,
Awakening at the inspired strain,
Deemed their own Shakespeare lived again!
Joanna, though taken by surprise, read on in a firm voice, till she observed the uncontrollable emotion of a friend by her side. Then she too gave way. It is delightful to partake by sympathy in so generous a gift of joy. What a pity it is that such a loving magnanimity as that of glorious Sir Walter is not more frequent among authors! The chief advantage of Fox over Pitt consisted in the fascinating demonstrativeness of his heart and manners. This won him hosts of idolizing friends, foremost among whom were many of the choicest ladies of the kingdom.
Pre-eminent among these were the two dazzlingly lovely women, ardent friends of each other too, Mrs. Catherine Crewe and Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire. They were indefatigable in canvassing for him. On one occasion, when the conflict for votes was intense, a butcher offered to vote for Fox on condition that the Duchess of Devonshire would allow him a kiss. The enthusiastic canvasser, perhaps the most beautiful woman then living, granted it amid deafening cheers. Nor was Mrs. Crewe less efficient. At a private banquet in honor of Fox's triumph, the Prince of Wales gave as a toast, "True Blue, and Mrs. Crewe." She gave in return, "True Blue, and all of you." The Duchess of Devonshire exerted all her powers, though in vain, to reconcile Burke with Fox, after their quarrel. On the death of Fox, she wrote a poetic tribute to his memory. Dr. Beattie, author of "The Minstrel," so many of whose touching lines have rung through souls of sensibility and are familiar to all lovers of poetry—such, for example, as,
Ah, who can tell how hard it is to climb
The steep where Fame's proud temple shines afar:
Ah, who can tell how many a soul sublime
Has felt the influence of malignant star,
And with inglorious fortune waged eternal war!
enjoyed a delightful friendship with the Duchess of Gordon. He spent the happiest hours of his saddened life at her castle, in the enjoyment of her unvarying kindness. He sent her books; they exchanged letters; and in all the brilliant whirl of her life as a reigning beauty, an ardent politician, and a leader of fashion, she fully appreciated his worth, and reciprocated his attentions and esteem until his death.
A friendship of an uncommon character, containing the elements of a romance, has left a monument of itself in two volumes, called "Letters of William Von Humboldt to a Female Friend." Humboldt, then an undergraduate at Göttingen, during one of his vacations spent three days at Pyrmont. Much of this time he passed in the society of a lovely and very superior young lady who was staying there with her father. Each was deeply interested in the other, without suspecting that the feeling was mutual. On parting, Humboldt gave his fair friend an album-leaf as a memento. The image of the fascinating student was indelibly impressed on her imagination, a centre of ideal activity and accumulation. So, it afterwards seemed, was her image left in his imagination. Twenty-six years passed in absence and silence. Humboldt had become famous and prominent, and was blessed with a happy family. Charlotte had been married, and was now a childless widow. Deprived of her parents, her husband, her property, she was overwhelmed with misfortunes. Her large property having been devoted to the State, it occurred to her that her old friend, of the three youthful days at Pyrmont, now a minister of the king, might assist her to recover, at least a portion of it, or at all events give her valuable advice as to what to do. She gathered courage to write him a letter, enclosing his old album-leaf, recalling their early meeting, telling how sacredly the memory of him had been enshrined in her soul, and begging him to counsel and console her in her great distress. The character of the letter was such, revealing a spirit so rich, high, and pure, that the generous nature of Humboldt was much moved. He at once replied with great kindness and wisdom, and with oars of practical aid. Thus began a correspondence which lasted until his death, twenty years later, during the whole of which period they only met twice for a brief time. Charlotte's portion of the correspondence, which is clot published—so affectionately reverential, so transparently sincere and trustful, evidently gave the great scholar and statesman extreme pleasure, a most varied stimulus. His letters reveal the fragrant warmth of his heart, the rare virtues and treasures of his soul, his saintly wisdom, in a most attractive manner. They were prized by Charlotte as the religion and sanctuary of her existence, and left to be given to the world as a holy bequest after her death. An interesting fact in the character of Charlotte, often noticed in these letters, and full of fruits in her life, is that she always had an intense desire to have a friend in the fullest sense of the word—a desire which was early heightened by the repeated enthusiastic perusal of Richardson's "Clarissa Harlowe." This dream had many partial realizations—the most complete and lasting in Humboldt. Rarely has any relation of individuals been so original, and awakened so much interest, as that between Goethe and his child-friend Bettine. In publishing their correspondence, many years after its close, Bettine prefaces it with the remark: "This book is for the good, and not for the bad." She foresaw how the bad would misinterpret it, yet felt that she could afford to defy their incompetent construal. She loved Goethe to idolatry—her whole soul vibrating beneath the power of the possession; but the ideality of the passion, in her naïve and spontaneous nature, was a perfect safeguard from evil. Under this spell, all her rich, unquestioning ardors of reverence and fondness were as sacredly guided as the movements of Mignon, dancing blindfold amidst the eggs, with never a false step. Goethe's conduct towards the trustful and impassioned girl was exceedingly discreet, in its mingled kindness and wisdom. He felt the sweetness of her worship; he guarded her, as a father would, from its dangers. But, above all, he was profoundly interested in the spectacle of her young, original, unveiled soul. The electric soil of her brain teemed with a miraculous efflorescence, on which he never tired of gazing. It was to him like sitting apart in some still place, and watching the secret forces and workings of nature, reflected in a small mirror. Thus Bettine writes from the strange fullness of her mind, in mystic language, to Goethe's mother: "Would that I sat, a beggar-child, before his door, and took a piece of bread from his hand, and that he knew, by my glance, of what spirit I am the child. Then would he draw me nigh to him, and cover me with his cloak, that I might be warm. I know he would never bid me go again. I should wander in the house, and no one would know who I was nor whence I came; and years would pass, and life would pass, and in his features the whole world would be reflected to me, and I should not need to learn any thing more." And Goethe replies, "Your dear letters bestow on me so much that is delightful, that they may justly precede all else: they give me a succession of holidays, whose return always blesses me anew. Write to me all that passes in your mind. Farewell. Be ever near me, and continue to refresh me." Mont Blanc stoops, with all his snows, to kiss the rosy vale nestling at his feet. Goethe, in the course of his life, stood in the most intimate relations with a large number of the rarest women. Few men have ever appreciated female character so well. No one has exhibited their virtues, and pleaded their cause with a more impressive combination of insight, sympathy, and veneration.
His many sins towards women deserve severe condemnation and rebuke; but it is an outrageous wrong towards his noble genius to limit attention, as so many critics do, to that aspect of the case. The wondering love and study which Frederike, Lili, and others drew from him; the religious admiration and awed curiosity evoked in him by the spiritual Fraulein von Klettenburg, "over whom," as he said, "in her invalid loneliness, the Holy Ghost brooded like a dove;" the respectful affection, gratitude, and homage commanded by the extraordinary merits of his lofty and endeared friends, the Duchess Amelia, and the Grand Duchess Louise—all bore fruits in his experience and his works. The revelations they made, the examples they set, the lessons they taught, the noble suggestions they kindled, re-appear in the series of enchanting, glorious, adorable women—Gretchen, Natalia, Ottilia, Iphigenia, Makaria, and the rest— who, with their artless affection, their self-renouncement, their wisdom, their dignity, their holiness, their sufferings, appear in his master-works, breathing presentments of life, for the edification and delight of generations of readers. He has recognized, more profoundly than any other author, the essentially feminine form of that divine principle of disinterested love, that impulse of pure self-abnegation, in which resides the redemptive power of humanity; and has set it forth with incomparable clearness and constancy. At the close of Faust, he has given it statement in a form which associates his genius with that of Dante, and in a kindred height. It is the womanly element, he would say, worshipful and self-denying love, that draws us ever forward, redeeming and uplifting our grosser souls:—
Das ewig weibliche
Zieht uns hinan.
Wieland and Sophia de la Roche were profoundly attached to each other during the greater part of their lives. He and his beloved wife were buried beside her; and a tasteful monument erected over them, according to his orders. It bears the inscription, in German, composed by himself:—
Love and Friendship joined these kindred souls in life,
And their mortal part is covered by this common stone.
Hölderlin, whose soaring and fiery soul was caged in too exquisite an organization, lived, for some time, when he first became sick, in a peasant's hut, beside a brook, sleeping with open doors, spending hours, every day, reciting Greek poems to the murmur of the stream. The princess of Homburg, who greatly admired his genius, and his deep, pure sentiment, had made him a present of a grand piano. In the coming-on of his madness he cut most of the strings. On the few keys that still sounded he continued to fantasy until his insanity grew so engrossing, that it was necessary to remove him to an asylum. Silvio Pellico, the story of whose sufferings in the prison of Spielberg, has carried his plaintive memory into all lands, and the Marchioness Giulia di Barolo were a pair of friends brought together as by a special appointment of Heaven.
When the holy and gentle poet, patriot, and Christian came out of his prison, with a broken constitution and a wounded heart, into a bleak and prizeless world, the Marchioness—who had long been a mother to the poor of her native city, an assiduous visitor of the jails, a saintly benefactress to all the unhappy whom her charities could reach—drawn to him by a strong interest of respect and pity, gave him a home in her house, and supplied him with congenial employment. Pellico gratefully appreciated her goodness to him, and deeply reverenced her worth. In works of religion and beneficence their lives moved on. He began to write a memoir of his friend; but left it, a fragment, when his lingering consumption brought him to the grave. The pious friendship of the Marchioness did not end with his death. On his tomb, in the Campo Santo, at Turin, she placed a column surmounted by a marble bust, and inscribed with this epitaph from her own pen:
Under the weight of the cross
He learned the way to heaven.
Christians pray for him, And follow him.
The pathetic life, the gentle sweetness of spirit, the mournful end of Silvio Pellico, are well known to all. The Marchioness di Barolo, whose name is linked to his in the memory of so pure and benign a union of friendship, lived the life, died the death, and bequeathed the renown of a saint.
She said, "It is a great suffering to have done all in your power for a person, and to find only ingratitude in return. There is no anger in this suffering, nor does it necessarily destroy affection; but the wound is buried deep in the heart; and if it has been inflicted by one very dearly loved, no human consolation can heal it. The most profitable education persons receive is the one they give themselves, through the love of God and labors of charity. I was a great deal alone in my youth, and I am sure it was good for me."
Wordsworth's affection for persons, not less than for nature, was remarkable for its tenacity, the perseverance with which his attention returned to it, and for the deep, clear consciousness with which he cherished it. The most beloved of his lady friends was Isabel Fenwick, who was a frequent visitor at Rydal Mount during the last twenty years of his life. She wrote, to his dictation, the autobiographical notes used in the memoir of him. Her admiring and devoted friendship was evidently a strong inspiration and precious solace to him. It was for her sake that he built the Level Terrace, on which he paced to and fro for many an hour, in sight of the valley of the Rothay and the banks of Lake Windermere. Not many finer expressions of sentiment are to be found in our tongue than Wordsworth has given in his sonnet on a portrait of his dear friend Isabel:
We gaze, nor grieve to think that we must die.
But that the precious love this friend hath sown
Within our hearts, the love whose flower hath blown
Bright as if heaven were ever in its eye,
Will pass so soon from human memory;
And not by strangers to our blood alone,
But by our best descendants be unknown,
Unthought of this may surely claim a sigh.
Yet, blessed Art, we yield not to dejection,
Thou against time so feelingly dost strive:
Where'er, preserved in this most true reflection,
An image of her soul is kept alive,
Some lingering fragrance of the pure affection,
Whose flower with us will vanish, must survive.
Charming had many qualities especially fitting him for friendships with women. His sensitive delicacy of refinement, disinterested justice, tender magnanimity, earnest culture of every thing beautiful and true, immaculate purity of soul, and burning ideal enthusiasm, made him feel most joyfully at home with women of enlarged sympathies, well-trained minds, and noble aspirations. He was too shrinking, fastidious, devout, to enjoy intercourse with the rough, hard average of society.
His diffidence, depression, and loneliness, were soothed and alleviated, his noblest powers inspired, by affectionate communion with several of the choicest women of his time. "To them," his biographer says, "he could freely unveil his native enthusiasm, his fine perceptions of fitness, his love of beauty in nature and art, his romantic longings for a pure-toned society, his glorious hopes of humanity. And his profound reverence for the nature and duty of women gave that charm of unaffected courtesy to his manner, look, and tone, which won them freely to exchange their cherished thoughts as with an equal." The following extract from one of his letters to a woman, whose solemn depth of soul and mind, and wondrous range of acquirements and experience rank her with the very greatest of her sex, Harriet Martineau, is an exceedingly interesting revelation:
"MY DEAR FRIEND, I thought I had spoken my last word to you on this side the Atlantic; but I have this moment received your letter, and must write a line of acknowledgment. I know, from my own experience, that there are those who need the encouragement of praise. There are more than is thought who feel the burden of human imperfection too sorely, and who receive strength from approbation. Happy they who from just confidence in right action, and from the habit of carrying out their convictions, need little foreign support. I thank you for this expression of your heart. Without the least tendency to distrust, without the least dejection at the idea of neglect, with entire gratitude for my lot, I still feel that I have not the power, which so many others have, of awakening love, except in a very narrow circle. I knew that I enjoyed your esteem; but I expected to fade with my native land, not from your thoughts, but from your heart. Your letter satisfies me that I shall have one more friend in England. I shall not feel far from you, for what a nearness is there in the consciousness of working in the same spirit!" The friendship between Channing and Lucy Aikin, as seen in the rich series of her letters to him, extending over a period of sixteen years, must have been a valued resource, enjoyment, and stimulus to them both. An extract or two will make the reader regret that relations charged with such priceless blessings are not more cultivated. "To converse with my guide, philosopher, and friend, has now become with me not a mere indulgence, but a want. I daily discover more and more how much I have come under the influence of your mind, and what great things it has done, and I trust is still doing, for mine. I was never duly sensible, till your writings made me so, of the transcendent beauty and sublimity of Christian morals; nor did I submit my heart and temper to their chastening and meliorating influences. In particular, the spirit of unbounded benevolence, which they breathe, was a stranger to my bosom: far indeed was I from looking upon all men as my brethren. I shudder now to think how good a hater I was in the days of my youth. Time and reflection, a wider range of acquaintance, and a calmer state of the public mind, mitigated by degrees my bigotry; but I really knew not what it was to open my heart to the human race, until I had drunk deeply into the spirit of your writings. You have given me a new being. May God reward you!" At another time she writes, "O my dear friend, I was told yesterday that you had been very, very ill; and though it was added that you were now better, I have been able to think of little else since. What would I give to know how you are at this moment! The distance which separates us has something truly fearful in such circumstances."
"Never, my friend, are you forgotten, when my soul seeks communion with our common Father; and when I strive most earnestly to overcome some evil propensity, or to make some generous sacrifice, the thought of you gives me strength not my own."
There is something especially attractive, solacing, and noble in such a relation as the foregoing. It covers a large class of friendships existing between Protestant clergymen and the women who, blessed by their instructions and personal interest, have formed an attachment to them of grateful reverence and sympathy. Such an attachment is often a communication of profit and pleasure most precious to both parties.
Several instances are recorded in the memoirs of Theodore Parker. His friendship with Miss Frances Power Cobbe is particularly worthy of notice. She wrote her gratitude to him for the benefits her mind had derived from his writings. Gratefully appreciating her worth and high aims, he continued to correspond with her by letter until his death. How cordial their relation became; what kind deeds went across it; what delights it yielded; what a deep and pure blessing of encouragement, joy, and peace it was to them both—appears in the few letters given to the public. When they first met, the titanic toiler, outworn with his cares and battles, was at the edge of death. "Do not," said the expiring athlete, "do not say what you feel for me; it makes me too unhappy to leave you." During those lingering days of transition from the earthly state to the heavenly, he dared not trust himself to see her often. As he said, "it made his heart swell too high." A class of friendships of extreme moral value, and often of great attractiveness, results from the relations of noble and royal women with the scholars and philosophers chosen to serve them as tutors or advisers. The names of Zenobia and Longinus give us an example of it in antiquity. If the annals of the crowned houses of Europe, imperial and provincial, were searched with reference to this point, a large number of admirable instances would be brought to light. On the one side power, rank, grace, patronage, every courtly charm; on the other side, learning, experience, gratitude, devoted service, eminent personal worth—could not fail in many instances to give birth to the most cordial esteem, and lead to a charming intercourse. Such was the case with both Wieland and Herder, and those queenly ladies, the Duchess Mother and the reigning Duchess of the court of Weimar. The relation between Columbus and Queen Isabella, after her chivalrous confidence and patronage—must have drawn their souls towards each other with a romantic interest, only needing better opportunities for personal intimacy to warm into a fervent sympathy.
The Countess of Pembroke, wife of that Philip Herbert who was the brother of Shakespeare's friend, showed how tenderly she remembered her old instructor, Daniel, the poet-laureate, by erecting a handsome monument to him in Beckington Church, bearing this inscription: "Here lies, expecting the second coming of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the dead body of Samuel Daniel, Esq., who was tutor to the Lady Anne Clifford in her youth. She was that daughter and heir to George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, who, in gratitude to him, erected this monument to his memory, a long time after, when she was Countess Dowager of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery." One of the most beautiful recorded friendships of this kind is that revealed in the long correspondence of Descartes and his pupil, the Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. Her charming character and distinguished attainments add largely to the gratification with which we trace her ardent esteem and attachment for her instructor and friend, whose brilliant genius and adventurous career are of themselves fascinating. A pleasing little volume by M. de Caren was published at Paris so lately as the year 1862, under the title, "Descartes and the Princess Palatine, or the Influence of Cartesianism on the Women of the Seventeenth Century." An example of a kindred friendship is also given by Leibnitz and his pupil, Caroline of Brunswick. Soon after the electoress became Queen of Prussia, she invited him to visit her, saying, "Think not that I prefer this greatness and this crown, about which they make such a bustle here, to the conversations on philosophy we have had together in Lutzenburg." Frederick the Great relates that the queen, in her last hours, mentioned the name of Leibnitz. One of the ladies in waiting burst into tears, and the queen said to her, "Weep not for me; for I am now going to satisfy my curiosity respecting the origin of things, which Leibnitz has never been able to explain to me, respecting space, existence and non- existence, and the Infinite." Frederick adds, that, as "those persons to whom Heaven vouchsafes gifted souls raise themselves to an equality with monarchs, this queen esteemed Leibnitz well worthy of her friendship." The philosopher was affected deeply and long by the loss of her who had been his closest and best friend. He wrote, being absent at the time, to one of her favorite maids, who was also a friend of his own, "I infer your feelings from mine. I weep not; I complain not; but I know not where to look for relief. The loss of the queen appears to me like a dream; but when I awake from my revery, I find it too true. Your misfortune is not greater than mine; but your feelings are more lively, and you are nearer to the calamity. This encourages me to write, begging you to moderate your sorrow. It is not by excessive grief that we shall best honor the memory of one of the most perfect princesses of the earth; but rather by our admiration of her virtues. My letter is more philosophical than my heart, and I am unable to follow my own counsel: it is, notwithstanding, rational." Ascham relates, in his "Schoolmaster," a conversation he once held with Lady Jane Grey. She said that the sports of the gentlemen and ladies in the park were but a shadow of pleasure compared with that which she found in reading Plato. And, in explaining how she came to take such delight in learning, she said, "One of the benefits that ever God gave me is that he sent so sharp and severe parents, and so gentle a schoolmaster. For when I am in presence of either father or mother, whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand, or go, eat, drink, be merry, or sad, be sewing, playing, or dancing, or any thing else, I must do it, as it were, in such weight, measure, and number, even so perfectly, as God made the world; or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened; yea, presently sometimes, with pinches, nips, bobs, and other ways, which I will not name, for the honor I bear them, so without measure misordered that I think myself in hell, till time come that I must go to Mr. Elmer, who teaches me so gently, so pleasantly, with such fair allurements to learning, that I think all the time nothing while I am with him." Elizabeth Robinson, afterwards the famous Mrs. Montague, the attracting centre of a noted and memorable association of friends, both men and women, had an exemplary friendship, full of good offices and pleasure, and undisturbed by any thing until death, with her preceptor, the distinguished scholar and writer, Conyers Middleton. Hester Lynch Salusbury, at thirteen, formed a most affectionate attachment to Dr. Collier, a guest of her father, who had volunteered to supervise her education. "He was just four times my age; but the difference or agreement never crossed my mind. A friendship more tender, or more unpolluted by interest or by vanity, never existed. Love had no place at all in the connection, nor had he any rival but my mother." The young Hester afterwards became the famous Mrs. Thrale, to all the varied incidents of whose long and close friendship with Dr. Johnson the world-Wide renown of that great man has given a universal publicity. The relation of patroness, sustained with such signal grace and generosity, and with such soothing and inspiring effect, by many queenly ladies in former times, is virtually obsolete now. But it has left memorials never to die; and it is hard to imagine any office which at this day should be more grateful and gracious, more full of happiness and good to a woman of noble heart and mind, blessed with position, wealth, and culture, than that of extending appreciative sympathy, aid, and encouragement, to young men of genius, in their unbefriended, early struggles. It has been strikingly said by that noble woman, Sarah Austin, with reference to Madame Récamier, "All who were admitted to her intimacy, hastened to her with their joys and their sorrows, their projects and ideas; certain not only of secrecy and discretion, but of the warmest and readiest sympathy. If a man had the rough draught of a book, a speech, a picture, an enterprise, in his head, it Was to her that he unfolded his half-formed plan, sure of an attentive and sympathizing listener. This is one of the peculiar functions of women. It is incalculable what comfort and encouragement a kind and wise woman may give to timid merit, what support to uncertain virtue, what wings to noble aspirations." Chaucer was thus patronized by Philippa, queen of Edward III; by Anne of Bohemia, for whom he composed his "Legend of Good Women;" and most of all by Blanche of Lancaster, wife of John of Gaunt, whose courtship he celebrated allegorically in the "Parliament of Birds," whose epithalamium he sang in his "Dream," and whose death he lamented in his "Book of the Duchess." The beautiful and kindly Lady Venetia Digby patronized and befriended Ben Jonson. The attentions of so fair and gentle a creature as she was, according to the description of her in his two poems, called, "The Picture of the Body," and "The Picture of the Mind,"—could not have been otherwise than most soothing, grateful, and inspiring to him. She was found dead in her bed one morning, her cheek resting on her hand.
She past away
So sweetly from the world, as if her clay
Laid only down to slumber.
Jonson dedicated to her memory the imperishable tribute of his heart in a long poem made up of ten parts. The ninth part is inscribed, "Elegy on my Muse, the truly honored Lady Venetia Digby, who, living, gave me leave to call her so." These lines are from it:
There time that I died too, now she is dead,
Who was my Muse, and life of all I said,
The spirit that I wrote with and conceived
All that was good or great with me, she weaved,
And set it forth: the rest were cobwebs fine,
Spun out in name of some of the old Nine,
To hang a window or make dark the room
Till, swept away, they were cancelled with a broom.
Lucy, the Countess of Bedford, was likewise a great friend of Ben Jonson. He has sung her worth in one of the most magnificent of his shorter poems. She was also a kind and fast friend of Daniel and Donne, both of whom wrote verses in her honor. But Jonson vastly distanced them both. Exquisite and sublime as his praise was, it was agreed, by those who knew her, that she fully deserved it. It is a luxury to recall such a tribute:
This morning, timely rapt with holy fire,
I thought to form unto my zealous Muse
What kind of creature I could most desire
To honor, serve, and love; as poets use,
I meant to make her fair and free and wise,
Of greatest blood, and yet more good than great;
I meant the day-star should not brighter rise,
Nor lend like influence from his lucent seat.
I meant she should be courteous, facile, sweet,
Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride:
I meant each softest virtue there should meet,
Fit in that softer bosom to reside.
Only a learned and a manly soul
I purposed her, that should, with even powers,
The rock, the spindle, and the shears, control,
Of Destiny, and spin her own free hours.
Such when I meant to feign, and wished to see,
My Muse bade, BEDFORD write, and that was She.
Milton had many qualities and tastes fitting him to be the delight of female society, and to delight in it. His natural bent for all the delicacies of sentiment, for every fine and high range of character, thought, and passion, has strewn many choice expressions of itself in his writings, and sprinkles his poems with eulogistic allusions to the virtues and charms of womanhood. These have too much escaped the popular notice, which has fastened on the numerous stinging utterantes wrung from certain bitter passages of his experience. Scores of critics have dwelt on the terrible traits he has given to Delilah in "Samson Agonistes," where one has called attention to the breathing emotion, the celestial coloring, the ineffable sweetness and grandeur he has lavished on the Lady in "Comus." For imperishable monuments of his friendships with the selectest women of that age, behold his Italian lines to Leonora Baroni, his sonnets "To a Virtuous Young Lady," "To the Lady Margaret Ley," "To the Memory of Mrs. Catharine Thomson," and the record of his long and unbroken intimacy with the admirable and all-accomplished Countess Ranclagh, of whom he said, "She was to me in the place of every want."
The Duchess of Queensbury was the unfailing friend and encourager of Gay. When Gay died, she eloquently rebuked the vitriolic Swift, for expressing the heartless sentiment, that a lost friend might be replaced as well as spent money. Madame Rambouillet was the friend of Voiture; Madame Sabliere of La Fontaine. Hundreds of similar examples might easily be gathered. Few of the French literary men of the seventeenth or the eighteenth century led those disorderly and disreputable lives which were the calamity and the disgrace of most of the professed writers of England at that time. Madame Mole justly observes, "They owed their exemption from these miseries chiefly to the women, who, from the earliest days of French literature, gave them all the succor they could; bringing them into contact with the rich and the great, showing them off with every kind of ingenuity and tact, so as to make them understood and valued. If we examine the private history of all their celebrated men, we find scarcely one to whom some lady was not a ministering spirit. They helped them with their wit, their influence, and their money. They did far more. They helped them with their hearts, listened to their sorrows, admired their genius before the world had become aware of it, advised them, entered patiently into all their feelings, soothed their wounded vanities and irritable fancies. What balm has been found in the listening look, for the warm and vexed spirit how has it risen again after repeated disappointment, comforted by encouragements gently administered! If the Otways and the Chattertons had possessed one such friend, their country might not have been disgraced by their fate. Are the life and happiness of the poet, of the man of genius, a trifle? What would human society be without them? Let all who hold a pen think of the kind hearts who, by the excitement of social intercourse and sympathy, have preserved a whole class from degradation and vice."
The extent to which women have been the occasions, the suggesters, and sustaining encouragers of artistic creations in literature, painting, sculpture, and music, will astonish any one who will take the trouble to look up the history of it. When Orpheus found that Eurydice was gone, he threw his harp away. Women have delighted to administer inspiration, praise, and comfort, to great poets, orators, philosophers, because it gratifies their natural talent for admiring, and because they are reverentially grateful to the genius which can so clearly read their secrets, and so powerfully portray their souls to themselves. Sophocles, the highest Greek poet, whose firm and delicate portraitures of feminine character were not equalled in antique literature, must have had many admirers and friends among the choice women of Athens. And Virgil, we cannot imagine any high- souled, refined woman knowing the tender Virgil without a respectful and affectionate attachment. Octavia fainted away when he read before her his undying description of the death of Marcellus. The kiss of Aileen Margaret on the lips of the sleeping minstrel, Alain Chartier, is a type of woman's homage to literary genius. The same thing was shown, a little earlier in the same century, at the funeral of Heinrich von Meissen, surnamed Frauenlob, from the infinite praises he had lavished on the Virgin Mary, and on the female sex in general. After his death in the outer quarters of the cathedral at Mayence, which were set apart for hospitality to strangers and honored guests, a great company of women, it is related, sighing and weeping, bore his coffin to the burial, and poured into his sepulchre such an abundance of wine as ran over the whole circumference of the church. Five hundred years later, the women of Mayence celebrated his memory by tributary eulogies, and by the erection of a beautiful new monument, faced with a marble portrait of him.
Bernardin Saint Pierre says, "There is in woman an easy gayety, which scatters the sadness of man." It may be said, on the other hand, that there is in the man of literary genius a masterly insight, joined with sympathetic tenderness and masculine strength, which administers to woman that reflective and glorifying interpretation, and that supporting guidance, whereof she continually stands in such need. What woman would not be proud and grateful at receiving such a tribute as that which Waller paid to the Countess of Carlisle, on seeing her dressed in mourning?
When from black clouds no part of sky is clear,
But just so much as lets the sun appear,
Heaven then would seem thy image, and reflect
Those sable vestments and that bright aspect.
A spark of virtue by the deepest shade
Of sad adversity is fairer made:
No less advantage doth thy beauty get,
A Venus rising from a sea of jet!
What woman capable of appreciating the genius of Racine could read the works in which his choice thoughts and effusive sentiments are enshrined, purified and confirmed echoes of the finest sighs ever breathed by the heart, and not be drawn to him honoring esteem and love? It was this mastery of the interior life, this impassioned voicing of its subtilest secrets, that made Rousseau so irresistibly attractive to women. To the many who befriended him, or paid precious tributes to him in his life, the name of Madame de Verdelin has recently been added, by the publication of her correspondence. Sainte Beuve has prefixed her recovered portrait in an essay marked by his best touches. After quoting her final letter, he says, "From that day, Madame de Verdelin wholly disappears. She is known only through Rousseau. A ray of his glory fell on her; that ray—withdrawn, she repasses into the shade, and every trace is lost." The gifted critic says he feels a deep gratification in thus recalling the image of this generous woman. "She is a conquest for us: we pay the debt of Rousseau to her." He concludes what he has written with reference to these friendships of mind to mind, these intimacies of intelligence and feeling, these affections of women and authors, more tender than those of men, and yet quite distinct from love, by saying, with instructive emphasis, "Evidently, social morality has taken a step forward: a new chapter, unknown to the ancients, too much forgotten by the moderns, is henceforth to be added in all treatises of friendship."
Perhaps no author has ever written more that must speak with irresistible power to the inmost hearts of all women who have souls sensitive enough, complex, cultivated, and forcible enough, for an adequate reaction on the richness of his works, than Jean Paul Richter. In all the heights and depths and subtilties of the natural affections, and of imaginative or ideal emotion, as well as in truthful and endlessly varied expressions of those mysteries, he has no equal, scarcely a rival, in literature. In spite of his poverty and confining toil, he made, in his day, a profound personal sensation. And such is the personal spell of his ineffable tenderness, nobleness, and grandeur, even as exerted on the reader from his printed pages, that many a strong man, pilgriming thither from remote lands, has been known to kneel with convulsive emotion on his lowly grave at Bayreuth. His life was heroic in labor, and spotless in purity. When his heart sank in death, it seems as though the earth itself ought to have collapsed with the breaking of so great a thing. His sensibility was a world-harp, responding to every tremulous breath of air or flame. Sweet, pure, wise, mighty, modest, no wonder he drew upon himself the affectionate interest of many lofty ladies, and found treasures of inspiration and solace in their conversation and letters. Reviewing his life in the circle of his friends, he seems as a sun, with pale and burning moons and planets revolving around him. Charlotte von Kalb; Caroline Herder; Emilie von Berlepsch; Josephine von Sydow; the mother and the wife of Carl August; the daughters of the Duke of Mecklenburg, to whom, as "The Four Lovely and Noble Sisters on the Throne," he dedicated his "Titan," such, with many others like them, were the gracious women with whom Jean Paul, in his much-tried life, interchanged homage, friendly counsels, and sacred joys. The intelligent and enthusiastic praises they poured on him for his works must have been to him a divine luxury. And ah I how much he needed such comforts, he who could say, in one of his frequent moments of sadness, "Reckoning off from the neighborhood of my heart, I find life cold and empty"! A whole volume of his before unpublished "Correspondence with Renowned Women" was given to the public in 1865, a glowing treasury of gems of the heart.
Rahel Levin was such a fascinating queen of society, such a signal and fortunate mistress of friendships with celebrated men, that her character and career are on this account full both of interest and instruction. The secrets of influence, the charms that attract attention, awaken confidence, exert authority, dispense pleasure, and minister to human wants, are scarcely anywhere more clearly shown than in her person and story. The pronounced character, the uncommon talents, the rare combination of extreme candor and tact, the broad, intellectual culture, and impulsive demonstrativeness of the youthful Jewess, very soon gave her a prominent position in society, and made her fascination felt and talked about. Her first advent and sway prophesied her future renown as the most celebrated woman in Germany who has kept an open drawing-room for the practice of conversation and the joy of intellectual society. It was said of her, at that early period, "She was full of an obliging good temper, that made her anticipate wishes, divine annoyances in order to relieve them, and forget herself in seeking to make others happy."
Her thirtieth year she spent in France, where she had the finest opportunities for studying the famous salon-life of Paris. Without being captivated or at all overborne by it, she no doubt drew many lessons and profited much from it, on carrying her German soul back to her German home. Returning to Berlin, she bewitched all the choice spirits of that city. Married to Varnhagen von Ense, her house was, for a quarter of a century, the rendezvous of whatever was noblest, purest, strongest, most distinguished in Germany. She moved among them as a queen, looked up to by all. She had glowing and sustained friendships, emphatically rich and faithful friendships, of the highest moral order, with Marwitz, Gentz, Prince Louis Ferdinand, Brinckmann, and Veit; besides relations of earnest affection and communion with many other honored contemporaries, such as Schleiermacher, Schlegel, and Jean Paul.
In addition to sketches of her by different hands, we possess five volumes, drawn chiefly from her own pen and edited by her husband, containing records of her thoughts, portraits of her closest friends, and full accounts of her intercourse and correspondence with them. In all this literary transcript, as in the course of experience which it copies, the most conspicuous element is friendship, the reception, reciprocation, culture, and expression of friendship. The king among her friends was her lover and husband, Varnhagen von Ense; her union with whom was not more a marriage of persons, than it was a marriage of minds, souls, interior lives, and social interests and ends. It is principally through him, next after her own writings, that welearn the characteristics of Rahel, which made such deep impressions on people, and held them so fast to her. He thus describes her, as she first dawned on him amidst the highest society of Berlin: "There appeared a light, graceful figure, of small stature, but strong make, with delicate and full limbs, feet and hands remarkably small; the countenance, encircled with rich, dark locks, spoke intellectual superiority; the quick, and yet firm, deep glances left the observer in doubt whether they gave or received more; an expression of suffering lent a soft grace to the clear features. She moved in a dark dress, light almost as a shadow, but also with freedom and sureness; her greeting was as easy as it was kindly. But what struck me most was the sonorous and mellow voice which seemed to swell from the inmost depths of the soul, and a conversation the most extraordinary that I had ever met with. She threw out, in the most facile and unpretending fashion, thoughts full of originality and humor, where wit was united with simplicity, and acuteness with amiability; and into the whole a deep truth was cast, as it were out of iron, giving to every sentence a completeness of impression which rendered it hard for the strongest, in any way, to break or rend it. In her presence, I had the conviction that a genuine human being stood before me, in its most pure and perfect type; through her whole frame, and in all her motions, nature and intellect in fresh, breezy reciprocity; organic shape, elastic fibre, living connection with every thing around; the greatest originality and simplicity in perception and utterance; the combined imposingness of innocence and wisdom; in word and deed, alertness, dexterity, precision; and all imbosomed in an atmosphere of the purest goodness and benevolence; all guided by an energetic sense of duty, and heightened by a noble self-forgetfullness in the presence of the joys and griefs of others."
Such is a glimpse of the Rahel, who, for thirty years, exemplified in her drawing-room, amidst the joy and admiration of the most glorious circle of her countrymen, that rich, strong, free, and noble ideal of womanhood, which Herder, Schiller, Richter, and Goethe, illustrated in so many of their works. So many contrasted qualities met and were reconciled in her, that different friends and critics report her in quite different likenesses. According to one, she never thought pronouncedly, but gave forth the exquisite perfume of thought: her life was made of tears, smiles, dreams, fantasies, flutterings of wings, too celestial for the gross air of earth. According to another, she was too recklessly thorough, and used too shattering an emphasis. In fact, both these sides were true. Gentz, the celebrated politician, called her "a great man," and confessed himself to be, in comparison, a woman. Yet no one who knew her could deny that she strikingly possessed the best traits of her sex, purity, tenderness, modesty, patience, and self-sacrifice. In 1813, during the horrors of disease in Berlin, and the horrors of war in Prague, she gave herself up with joy to nursing the sick and the wounded. "The feast of doing good," she called it. "Never have I seen elsewhere," said Varnhagen, "such a mass of masculine breadth and penetration, alongside of which, however, swelled, without remission, the warm flow of womanly mildness and beauty. Never have I seen an eye and a mouth animated with such loveliness, and yet, at times, giving vent to such outbreaks of enthusiasm and indignation."
Her intellectual power and her tact formed, no doubt, one strong element of the attraction which drew and kept so many artists, philosophers, preachers, statesmen, and brilliant social leaders by her side. But her heroic and unconquerable truthfullness was a still more royal and authoritative trait. She sought for truth; she spoke truth; she indignantly denounced all falsehoods and shams. Some of her sentences on this point seem burned into the page, as by the flame of a blowpipe. "The whole literary and fashionable world is baked together of lies." To those who expressed their respect and admiration of her she said, "Natural candor, absolute purity of soul, and sincerity of heart are the only things worthy of homage: the rest is conventionality." She wrote to a friend, "Never try to suppress a generous impulse, or to crowd out a genuine feeling: despair or discouragement is the only fruit of dry reasoning, unenlightened by the heart." In the following sentence she betrays, by the law of opposites, the deepest charm of such a nature as her own; namely, a thoroughly sincere and fluent spontaneousness of character. "I have just found out the thing that I most utterly hate: it is pedantry. To see such a big nothing in full march is to me the most revolting and the most unendurable of all sights."
Another fine and winning quality in Rahel was her profound interest in exalted and original characters, and her ardent veneration for them. This drew them gratefully to her in return. She had an almost idolatrous admiration for Goethe. All aspirants for true interior greatness naturally love and revere those who exemplify their ideal to them. She once called Goethe and Fichte the first and second eyes of Germany. A soul capable of such enthusiasm for great souls is rare, and is most charming. Her maxim, like that of all the highest and strongest of the guiding souls of our race, was, "Act only from your inmost conscience, and only good will come to you." A vast, tonic freedom and charity breathe in some of her sentences. "A catholic sympathy with all possible systems; a resolute liberation from the exclusive trammels of any; an entire surrender into the hands of Him who wields all possibilities; and an honest dealing with the depths of our own hearts, this seems to me more than all philosophy, and a thing well pleasing to God."
It is no wonder that the favored friends of such a woman honored her even to the verge of worship, as we find then doing in their letters. Though not technically—or professedly a religious woman, she was really one. She felt the mystery of things; she revered the providential guides of the race; she owned the law of the whole; she bowed in submissive adoration before God. "Since the decease of my mother," she said, "I know death better. I see him everywhere. He has assumed a new power over me." A fatal disease struck her at sixty- two. Her husband scarcely left her bedside. Until the last, he continued to read her favorite books to her. The young Heine, how different then from the dreadful wreck he became! hearing that fresh rose-leaves, applied to her inflamed eyes, were grateful, sent her his first hook of poems, enveloped in a basket of roses. With what fitter words can we take leave of Rahel and her friends than these of her own: "I have thought an epitaph. It is this, Good men, when any thing good happens to mankind, then think affectionately in your peace also of mine."
The life of Madame Récamier is interesting, in a pre-eminent degree, on account of the warmth, elevation, and fidelity of the friendships which filled it. Her personal loveliness and social charm made her a universal favorite, and gave her an unparalleled celebrity. But, full as her career was of romantic adventures, rich as it was in brilliant associations, its keynote throughout, its strongest interest at every point, is friendship. Unlike those of so many of the famous women of France, her friendships were as remarkable for their rational soundness, purity, and tenacity, as for their fervor. They were free from every thing morbid or affected. An adverse fate forbade the love to which she seemed destined by her bewitching beauty and grace; and a certain divine chill in the blood, a stamp from Diana in the senses, turned all the warmth of affection upwards into the mind, to radiate thence in her face and manners, and to make her a high priestess of friendship. The pure and wise Ballanche, who idolized her, said that she was originally an Antigone, of whom people vainly wished by force to make an Armada.
Her nominal husband is supposed by some to have been in reality her father; the marriage being merely a titular one, to secure his fortune to her in case of his death by the guillotine, of which he was then in daily dread. Deprived of the usual domestic vents of affection, her rich heart naturally led her to crave the best substitute, friendship. And her matchless personal gifts, together with her truly charming traits of character, enabled her permanently to win and experience this in a very exalted degree. Her three principal friends were Montmorency, Ballanche, and Chateaubriand; all three original and extraordinary characters, and all three worthy in spite of some drawbacks on the part of the last of the extraordinary devotion she gave them. The letters of these three possess extreme interest. Especially, those of the first named are the unique monument of an affection whose purity and delicacy equalled its vivacity and depth.
Matthieu de Montmorency was one of the noblest of the nobility of France, alike in birth and in spirit. In his youth a voluptuous liver, he had afterwards undergone a genuine and solemn conversion. While in Switzerland, the news of the guillotining of his brother gave him such a shock, that it revolutionized his motives and his life. The gay, impassioned, fascinating man of the world became an austere and fervent Christian. The rich sensibility he had formerly spent in amours and display, henceforward ennobled by wisdom and sanctified by religion, lent a singular charm of tenderness and loftiness to his friendships. The memory of his own errors gave a gracious charitableness to his judgments; his sorrow imparted an incomparable refinement to his air; his grave and devout demeanor inspired veneration; his sweet magnanimity drew every unprejudiced heart. He had long been a fervent friend of Madame de Staid, when the youthful virgin-wife, the dazzling Julie Récamier, formed an engrossing attachment to that gifted woman. Drawn mutually to this common goal, the fore-ordained friends soon met. He was then fifty years old; she, twenty-three. Her extraordinary charms of person and spirit, her dangers, exposed, with such, bewildering beauty and such peculiar domestic relations, to all the seductions of a most corrupt society, awakened at once his admiration, his sympathy, and his pity. As an increasing intimacy revealed her irresistible sweetness of disposition, her many gifts and virtues, Montmorency found himself ever more and more drawn to her by the united bonds of reason, conscience, and affection. He undertook not merely to be her friend in the ordinary pleasures of sympathy, but, as a Christian, under the eye of God, sincerely and profoundly to befriend her. From that moment until his death, his devotion, though once severely tried, never faltered nor slumbered. He was to her more than a father and a brother; he was her guardian angel, as pure in feeling, as watchful to warn, to restrain, to encourage, to support, and console. For many years, through trying reverses of fortune, he visited her every evening. For many years each had a vital share in all that concerned the other; and, when he died, it was as if a large part of her being had been suddenly torn out of her soul, and transferred to heaven. The letters that passed between them form one of the most delightful and impressive records ever made of Christian friendship, a record in which wisdom and duty are as prominent as affection.
Pierre Simon Ballanche, one of the most delicate and philosophical of French authors, most disinterested and affectionate of men, the perfect model of a friend, was born at Lyons in 1776. He was first introduced to Madame Récamier, in 1812, by their common friend, the generous and eloquent Camille Jordan. Ballanche, in an enthusiastic attachment to a noble, portionless young girl, had suffered a disappointment so deep, that it caused him to dismiss all thoughts of marriage for ever. He sought to ease the burden of rejected love, by letting the sadness it had engendered exhale in a literary work. This exquisite work, called "Fragments," Jordan induced Madame Récamier to read: he also described to her the refined and magnanimous character of the author. Thus prepared, and aided by her own keen discernment, she immediately detected his choice talents, his rare vein of sentiment, his abiding hunger for affection. Ballanche was a philosopher of solitude, a poet and priest of humanity, spending his days far from the crowd and uproar of the world, his proper haunt the summits of the loftiest minds, the mysterious cradle of the destinies of society. His soul was an "AEolian harp," through which the music of the pre-historic ages played. Chastity and sorrow were two geniuses, who unveiled to him the destiny of man. His philosophy, so redolent of the heart and the imagination, amidst the material struggles and selfishness of the time, has been compared to a chant of Orpheus in the school of Hobbes. The friendship which Madame Récamier gave this lonesome, sad, expansive, and lofty spirit, was as if a goddess had come down from heaven on purpose to minister to him. She brought him the attention he needed, the sympathy he pined for, the position and praise which were so grateful to his sensitive nature. She strove to win for him from others the recognition he deserved, to call out his powers, and to show off his gift to the best advantage. Ballanche was timid, awkward, ugly, with no wealth, with no rank; but, in the sight of Madame Récamier, the treasures and graces of his soul were an intrinsic recommendation far superior to these outward advantages, and she was ready to honor it to the full.
Never was kindness more worthily bestowed; never was it more gratefully received. "I often," he says, "find myself astonished at your goodness to me. The silent, weary, sad man, whom others neglect, you notice, and seek with infinite tact to draw him out. You are indulgence and pity personified, and you compassionately see in me a kind of exile. Together with the feeling of a brother for a sister, I offer you the homage of my soul." From that time, he belonged to her, and could not bear to live separate from her. Under her appreciation and encouragement, he expanded, like a plant moved from a chill shade into the sunshine. His devotion was entire, and sought no equal return. It was simply the natural expression of his gratitude to her, his admiration of her, his delight in seeing her and in being with her. His love for her, like that of Dante for Beatrice, was a religious worship, a celestial exhalation of his soul, utterly free from every alloy of earth and sense. For thirty-four years, he was almost inseparable from her. He removed to Paris, that he might look on her every day. Wherever she travelled, abroad or at home, he was one of her companions. At her receptions of company, the fame of which has gone through the world, he was invariably an honored and active assistant. And, despite his deformed face, and uncouth appearance and bearing, he was a great favorite with all the chosen guests at the Abbaye-aux-Bois. To those who really knew him, his large, beaming eyes and noble forehead, his disinterested goodness, his literary and philosophical accomplishments, his modest unworldliness and attentive sympathy, redeemed his physical blemishes, and covered them with a radiance superior to that of mere beauty. The letters of Ballanche to Madame Récamier are charming in their originality. His praise of her is marked by an inimitable grace of sincerity and refinement:
"Your presence, so full of magic, the sweet reflection of your soul, will be to me a powerful inspiration. You are a perfect poem; you are poesy itself. It is your destiny to inspire, mine to be inspired. An occupation would do you good; your disturbed and dreamy imagination has need of aliment. Take care of your health, spare your nerves: you are an angel who has gone a little astray in coming into a world of agitation and falsehood."
What a reading of her inmost heart through her envied position, what matchless felicity of representation, in this picture of herself sent to her in one of his letters "The phoenix, marvellous but solitary bird, is said often to weary of himself. He feeds on perfumes, and lives in the purest region of the air; and his brilliant existence ends on a pyre of odoriferous woods, kindled by the sun. More than once, without doubt, he envies the lot of the white dove, because she has a companion like herself."
In his high estimate of her talent, he tried to persuade her to undertake a literary work, the translation and illustration of Petrarch, which she actually began, but left unfinished.
"Your province, like my own," he writes, "is the interior of the sentiments; but, believe me, you have at command the genius of music, of flowers, of brooding meditation, and of elegance. Privileged creature, assume a little confidence, lift your charming head, and fear not to try your hand on the golden lyre of the poets. It is my mission to see that some trace of your noble existence remains on this earth. Help me to fulfil my mission. I regard it as a blessing that you will be loved and appreciated when you are no more. It would be a real misfortune if so excellent a being should pass merely as a charming shadow. Of what use is memory, if it does not perpetuate the beautiful and good?"
This league of lofty friendship, of endearing intercourse and service, held good while a whole generation of mortals came upon the stage and disappeared; and it throve with growing validity in the latest old age of the fortunate parties. Ballanche believed, after the death of his mother, that he saw her, several successive mornings, enter his room, and ask him how he had passed the night. This ocular illusion affords us an affecting glimpse of his heart. He wrote to his friend, "Antiquity confides its weariness and grief to us, without doubt, to beguile us from our own." "Had Orpheus never met Eurydice, his existence would have remained incomplete; and, in place of the cruel grief of her loss, he would have known another grief not less intense, solitude of soul." "I am alone, and the solitude weighs heavily upon me. Permit me to solace myself by talking a moment with you." "I protest to you in all sincerity, that my one absorbing thought is my warm feeling of friendship for you. I have need to be assured by you, and that as often as possible, that this sentiment shall not end in unhappiness for me. The thought of that is an agony which terrifies me. You are so kind, you have so much sympathy for all unhappy persons, that I fear it is through pity and condescension that you show kindness to me." This expression was in the year 1816; but all such uneasiness soon vanished, and he learned to rely on her sincere cordiality with a serene assurance, which was the richest luxury of his life.
In 1830, Ballanche, publishing his chief work, the "Palingénésie Sociale," dedicated it to Madame Récamier, in a form whose delicacy and fervor made it one of the most exquisite pieces of praise ever paid in letters. Alluding to Canova's portrait of Madame Récamier, in the character of the celestial guide of Dante, he says, "An artist enveloped in a grand renown, a sculptor who has just shed so much glory on the illustrious land of Dante, and whose graceful imagination the masterpieces of antiquity have so often exalted, one day, for the first time, saw a woman who seemed to him a living apparition of Beatrice. Full of that religious emotion which is the gift of genius, he immediately commanded the marble, always obedient to his chisel, to express the sudden inspiration of the moment; and the Beatrice of Dante passed from the vague region of poetry into the domain of substantial art. The sentiment which dwells in this harmonious countenance, now become a new type of pure and virgin beauty, in its turn inspires artists and poets. This woman, whose name I would here conceal, whom I would veil even as Dante does, is endowed with all the generous sympathies of our age. She has visited, with the select few, the haunts of lofty minds. Here, in this seat of imperturbable peace, of unalterable security, she has formed noble friendships, those friendships which have filled her life, which, born under immortal auspices, are sheltered alike from time, from death, and from all human vicissitudes. I address myself, then, to her who has been seen as a living apparition of Beatrice. Can she encourage me with her smile, with that serious smile of love and of grace, which expresses at once confidence and pity for the pains of probation, for the burdens of an exile that should end, sweet and calm augury, wherein is revealed, even in the present, the certainty of our infinite hopes, the grandeur of our definitive destinies?"
When the good Ballanche was taken dangerously ill, Madame Récamier had just undergone an operation for cataract, and was under strict orders from the physician not to leave her couch. But, on the announcement of the condition of Ballanche, she immediately rose, and went to his bedside, and watched by him until his last breath. In the anxiety and tears of this experience, she lost all hope of recovering her sight. Her incomparable friend received the supreme hospitality at her hands, and was buried in her family tomb, leaving, in his works, a delightful picture of his mind; in his life, a perfect model of devotion. The removal of this soul, echo of her own; this heart, wholly filled by her; this mind, so gladly submissive to her influence, could not but leave a mighty void behind. For, notwithstanding the wondrous array of gifts, attractions, and attentions lavished on her, her deep sensibility and interior loneliness made her often unhappy. She would sit by herself, in the twilight, playing from memory choice pieces of the great masters of music, the tears rolling down her cheeks. Friendship was more than a delight: it was a necessity to her.
De Tocqueville pronounced an exquisite eulogy by the grave of Ballanche, in the name of the Academy. La Prade, in the funeral address he delivered at Lyons, the birthplace of the deceased, said, "There was in his mind, in its serenity, its charming simplicity, its tenderness, something more than is found in the wisest and the best. His virtue was of a divine nature: it was at once a prolonged innocence and an acquired wisdom. Serene and radiant as his soul may now be in the mansions of peace, we can hardly conceive of it as more loving and more pure than we beheld it on this earth of infirmity and of strife." What a delight it is to contemplate the relation that bound two such spirits together, the measureless treasures of inspiration, solace, joy, it must have yielded to them both I Sarah Austin, who was in Paris at the time Ballanche died, and an intimate of the illustrious circle of friends, says, "I shall never forget the sort of consternation, mingled with sorrow, which this death caused. Everybody felt regret for so pure and excellent a man, but yet more of grief and pity for Madame Récamier, whose loss was felt to be overwhelming, and entirely irreparable." Ampere says, in his cordial and glowing memoir of Ballanche, "While he was composing his 'Antigone,' Poetry appeared to him under an enchanting form. He became acquainted with her, of whom he said that the charm of her presence laid his sorrows to sleep; who, after being the soul of his most elevated and delicate inspirations, became in later years the providence of every moment of his life." Ballanche himself often assured Madame Récamier, that the ideal of the "Antigone" of his dreams was revealed to him by her, and that, in drawing this perfect portrait, he had copied largely from her. "It was only through Eurydice," he writes, "that Orpheus had any mission for his brother- men. If my name survives me, as appears more and more probable, I shall be called the Philosopher of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, and my philosophy will be considered as inspired by you. This thought is my joy. I am now entering on the last stage of my life: however prolonged this stage may be, I know well what is at the end of it. I shall fall asleep in the bosom of a great hope, full of confidence that your memory and mine will live the same life." Fortunate friends! happy in their living union immaculate as heaven, happy in the grateful admiration and love of all fit souls who shall ever read of them!
And if he grieved because his words, his name,
The breath of after-ages will not stir,
'Tis but because he would impart his fame,
And share an immortality with her;
So might there, from the brightest, holiest flame
That ere did martyrdom of heart confer,
Two shadowy forms of Truth and Friendship rise,
To seek their home together in the skies.
Pervading and earnest, however, as were these attachments of Madame Récamier to Montmorency and Ballanche, the crowning passion of her life was her friendship for Chateaubriand. This grand writer and imposing person has described his first meeting with her:
"I was one morning with Madame de Staël, who, at toilet in the hands of her maid, twirled a green twig in her fingers while she talked. Suddenly Madame Récamier entered, clothed in white. She sits down on a blue-silk sofa. Madame de Staël, standing, continues her eloquent conversation. I scarcely reply, my eyes riveted on Madame Récamier. I had never seen any one equal to her, and was more than ever depressed. My admiration of her changed into dissatisfaction with myself. She went out, and I saw her no more for twelve years. Twelve years! What hostile power squanders thus our days, ironically lavishing them on the indifferences called attachments, on the wretchednesses named felicities!"
But it was in 1817, at a private dinner in the chamber of the dying Madame de Staël, that their real acquaintance began. The literary fame of Chateaubriand was then greater than that of any living man. He was a lofty, romantic, melancholy person, with a superb head and face, polished manners, and a grand vein of eloquence. Nothing was so deeply characteristic of Madame Récamier as her enthusiasm for brilliant minds, noble sentiment and conduct. It was this that had so fascinated her with Madame de Staël. The sure proof of the ideal nature of her attachments, their freedom from sensual ingredients, is this ruling stamp of reverence and loyalty. Those whom she admired the most enthusiastically she loved the most passionately. It was inevitable that her imagination would be captivated with the chivalrous and imposing Chateaubriand, especially at such an affecting time. "He seemed the natural heir to Madame de Staël's place in her heart." Speaking of this overwhelming sentiment, thirty years later, she said, "It is impossible for a head to be more completely turned than mine was: I used to cry all day." Montmorency and Ballanche were greatly distressed, and not a little mortified and jealous. It was not that they had fallen into a lower and narrower place in her affection, but that they saw Chateaubriand installed in a higher and larger place. They feared that her peace would be wrecked in wretchedness by an intimate connection with one so discontented and capricious, a sort of spoilt idol, a hero of ennui, filled with causeless melancholy, voracious of praise, querulous, exacting, his own imperious and inevitable personality ever uppermost. In vain they sought to warn and dissuade her from the new attachment. Montmorency seems to have fancied that the passion was not friendship, but love; and faithfully, with solemn energy, he adjured her, by all the sanctions of religion, to guard herself. He soon learned his error, and gracefully apologized: "When I read your perfect letter, lovely friend, remorse seized me, and now fills my soul. I am deeply touched by the proofs of your friendship, and by the triumphs of your reason. I am, for friendship's sake, proud of the exclusive privilege you accord to me of admission and consolation, and impatiently long to go and exercise the sweet right. Pardon me my letter of this morning. Adieu. Persist in your generous resolutions, and turn to Him who alone can strengthen them and reward them."
The friendship of Madame Récamier and Chateaubriand became more absorbing and complete, and was destined to endure with their lives. "It was," Madame Lenormant says, "the one aim of her life to appease the irritability, soothe the susceptibilities, and remove the annoyances of this noble, generous, but selfish nature, spoiled by too much adulation." Her steady moderation, moral wisdom, beautiful repose, and sweet oblivion of self, were an admirable antidote to his extreme moods, uneasy vanity, and morbid depression. Communion with her serene equity, her matchless beauty, her inexhaustible tenderness, the experience of her constant homage, soothed his haughty and mordant, but magnanimous and affectionate, nature, and were an infinite luxury to him. An admiring recognition is almost a necessity for those highly endowed with genius. And Madame Récamier's intense faculty of admiration, with her self-forgetting devotedness, exactly fitted her for this ministry. Chateaubriand became the first object of her life. Modifying her habits to suit his tastes, she made him, instead of herself, the centre around which every thing was to revolve. She devised endless means of lending an interest to his existence. She listened to every thing he wrote. She drew into her parlor, to meet him, all those persons who could interest or amuse him, or in any way give him pleasure. She diverted attentions from herself to him with exhaustless skill and generosity. In a poem which he addressed to her, he called her the "soft star that guided his path."
Such jealousy as can find a place in natures so noble is easily to be traced in the letters of Ballanche and Montmorency. Chateaubriand calls Ballanche "the hierophant" or "the mysterious initiator," "the man the most advanced at the Abbaye-aux-Bois." Ballanche, in turn, calls Chateaubriand "the king of intelligence." But Madame Récamier's wonderful sweetness and discretion invariably restored the interrupted harmony. Nor, indeed, did she allow the superior attraction to cast her old friends in the shade. Several years after the death of Montmorency, which happened in church on a Good Friday, Chateaubriand wrote to her thus: "Yesterday I believed myself dying, as your best friend did. Then you would have found one resemblance at least between us, and perhaps you would have joined us in your heart." Five years after their first meeting, Chateaubriand, then ambassador at Berlin, writes to her, "That I shall see you in a month, seems a kind of dream to me." Twenty-five years later, two years before his death, he writes to her at a watering-place whither she had gone for her health, "Do not hasten back. I pass my time here in Notre Dame. It is well occupied; for I think only of you and of God." The persistence of an affection so profound and so pure as that of Madame Récamier bore its proper fruit, and ended by subduing Chateaubriand. Gratitude, respect, veneration, struck their roots to the very bottom of his heart. Little by little, his self-occupied personality yields, and at last he writes to her, "You have transformed my nature." When she was alarmingly ill, in the winter of 1837, he, together with Ballanche, might be seen, in the cold mornings, "his beautiful white hair blown about by the wind, his physiognomy the image of despair," in the court of the Abbaye-aux- Bois, waiting for the doctor to come out. He then writes, "I bring this note to your door. I was so terrified yesterday at not being admitted, that I believed you were going from me. Ah! remember it is I who am to go before you. Never speak of what I shall do without you. I have not done any thing so evil that I should be left behind you." She recovered, and devoted herself more than ever, if possible, through the years of his mental decay, to alleviate and disguise the sad changes that came over him. Blindness began their separation before death came. Nothing can more emphatically bespeak her divine self-abnegation than the fact, that, for a long time after she had become perfectly blind, a dislike to trouble others with her infirmities led her to conceal the misfortune from her general acquaintance. Her eyes kept their brightness, and her hearing was most acute: she recognized, by the first inflection of the voice, those who drew near. The furniture was carefully arranged, always in the same way, so that she could move about confidently; and many persons, when she spoke of her "poor eyes," never dreamed that she had actually lost her sight.
After the decease of his wife, Chateaubriand besought Madame Récamier to marry him. She refused, on the ground, that, if she resided with him, the variety and pleasure his daily visits brought into the tedium of his existence would be destroyed. "Were we younger," she said, "I would gladly accept the right to consecrate my life to you. Age and blindness give me this right. I know the world will do justice to the purity of our relation. Let us change nothing." During his last sickness, he was as unable to speak as she was to see. She had the fortitude to undergo two operations on her eyes in the hope of looking on him once more; but in vain. By his bedside when he expired, she felt the sources of her life struck. She came from the room with no outward sign of distress, but clothed with a deadly paleness, which from that hour never left her. Her niece wrote, at the time, to a friend in England, "Those who, during the last two years, have seen Madame Récamier, blind, though the sweetness and brilliancy of her eyes remained uninjured, surrounding the illustrious friend, whose age had extinguished his memory, with cares so delicate, so tender, so watchful; who have seen her joy when she helped him to snatch a momentary distraction from the conversation around him, by leading it to subjects connected with that past which still lingered in his memory, those persons will never forget the scene. They could not help being deeply affected with pity and respect at the sight of that noble beauty, brilliancy, and genius bending beneath the weight of age, and sheltered, with such ingenious tenderness, by the sacred friendship of a woman who forgot her own infirmities, in the endeavor to lighten his."
History scarcely affords a finer instance of the ministrations of womanhood to soothe the woes and supply the wants of man than is exhibited in the relation of Madame Récamier and Chateaubriand. His egotistic and restless mental activity; his exaggerated, perturbed, and gnawing self-consciousness; his despairing view of men; his alienation from the spirit of his age, made him most lonely and unhappy. Meanwhile his ardent poetic susceptibility, his soaring imagination, his impassioned tenderness, his knightly sentiments, his religious feeling, pre-eminently fitted him to enjoy the moral homage, the delicate, sympathetic attentions, of a woman crowned with every exalting attribute of her sex. He appreciated the prize at its full worth. When nothing else could any longer interest him, her charm retained its pristine power. When beyond his threescore and ten, he writes to her thus, at different times:
"Other things are old stories: you are all that I love to see." "I am going to walk out with the lark. She shall sing to me of you: then she will be silent for ever in the furrow into which she drops." "I have only one hope graven on my heart, and that is, to see you again." "Cherish faithfully your attachment to me: it is all my life. You see how my poor hand trembles; but my heart is firm." "I have but one thought, fidelity to you: all the rest is gone."
For many years, even after his noble faculties were broken, and he had lost the use of his limbs, so that he was forced to be carried into her room, he passed the hours of every day, from three to six, with her. Amidst the ordinary hatreds, miseries, and indifferences of society, is it not indeed instructive and refreshing to see this example of a spotless friendship still yielding, in extreme old age, the interest, the solace, the happiness, which every thing else had ceased to yield?
Chateaubriand devotes to Madame Récamier the eighth volume of his "Memoires d'Outre Tombe." He recognizes, in her serious friendship, a support for the weariness of his life, a remuneration for all his sufferings.
"It seems, in nearing the close of my existence, as if every thing that has been dear to me has been dear to me in Madame Récamier, and that she was the concealed source of my affections. All my memories, both of my dreams and of my realities, have been kneaded into a mixture of charms and sweet pains, of which she has become the visible form. In the midst of these Memoirs,' the temple I am eagerly building, she will meet the chapel which I dedicate to her. Perhaps it will please her to repose there. There I have placed her image." During the few months that she survived their loss, Madame Récamier often spoke of Chateaubriand and Ballanche together. Repeatedly, if the door chanced to open at the hour when these two friends had been accustomed to enter, she started; and, on being asked the reason, replied that at certain moments her thought of them was so vivid, that it amounted to an apparition. Only three days previous to her death, she received M. de Saint Priest, and took great interest in hearing him read the eulogy on Ballanche which he was about to pronounce before the Academy.
Besides these three chief friends, Madame Récamier had many others well deserving of separate mention. Paul David, nephew of her husband, was a most devoted and inseparable companion of her whole life. When she lost her sight, he used to read to her every evening. He was a poor reader; and, perceiving that she was sensitive to this defect, he secretly took lessons, at the age of sixty-four, to improve his elocution. Junot and Bernadotte were her ardent, lasting friends, and always delighted to serve her. Her rare graces, and her generous goodness to Madame Desbordes-Valmore, disarmed the prejudices and won the heart of the gifted but misanthropic Latouche. The Duke de Noailles, who, under the envelope of a chill manner, concealed a conscientiousness of judgment, a constancy and delicacy of feeling, in strong sympathy with her own nature, was admitted to the rank and title of friend, "a serious thing," says her biographer, "for her who, more than any one in the world, inspired and practised friendship in the most perfect sense of the word." He held a place in her esteem like that held by Matthieu de Montmorency. One of the latest and warmest of her friends was the brilliant and high-souled Ampere, introduced to her by Ballanche, who had been an intimate friend of his father, and who now loved the son with double fervor, a debt which the grateful young man repaid with interest in a noble tribute to his memory. Never did a mother feel a deeper solicitude in the prospects of a darling son, or exert herself more devotedly to further his success; never did a son more thoroughly idolize a beautiful and good mother, than was realized between Madame Récamier and Ampere. Solely to please her, this most entertaining and most courted man in Paris devoted himself not merely to her, which would have been easy; but to Chateaubriand, which was difficult. Nothing can better illustrate her irresistible charm. And nothing can better illustrate the coarseness and ignorance of many of our critics, than the presumption with which one of them, in 1864, speaking of Ampere's funeral, says, "He was one of Madame Récamier's many lovers, and was bitterly disappointed at her refusal to marry him after the death of Chateaubriand!"
Such were the few principal men who penetrated to the centre of that select circle, in whose outer ranges of general benevolence the right of citizenship was granted to so many choice figures. Among the more distinguished of these latter may be named Benjamin Constant, the Duke de Doudeauville, De Gerando, Prosper de Barante, Delacroix, Gerard, Thierry, Ville-main, Lamartine, Guizot, De Tocqueville, Sainte Beuve. Surrounded by such persons as these, in the humble chamber to which, on the loss of her fortune, she had betaken herself, she presided like a priestess in the temple of friendship, ever pre-occupied with them, their glory her dominant passion, never herself seeking to shine, but intent only to elicit and display their gifts. Was it not natural, that they should, in the humorous phrase of Ballanche, "gravitate towards the centre of the Abbaye-aux-Bois"?
Elizabeth Barrett Barrett allows us a few glimpses into two friendships, which, to a nature like hers, we cannot but think must have been nobly precious. One, celebrated in her poem of "Cyprus Wine," was with Hugh Stuart Boyd, who amused himself during some weary periods in his blindness with the grateful occupation of teaching her to read Greek. The other was with her cousin, John Kenyon, author of "A Rhymed Plea for Tolerance," to whom she so expressively inscribes the most elaborate work of her life, "Aurora Leigh."
It is difficult to find any more remarkable example of the inspiration, the balm, and the joy a great man may derive from the pure friendship of an appreciative woman than that which is furnished in the relation between Auguste Comte and Madame Clotilde de Vaux. In his "Catechism of Positive Religion," and in the preface and dedication of the first volume of his "System of Positive Politics," he has given quite a full account of this friendship, of its circumstances and its effects. Comte was a man of an extraordinary original genius; of profound effusiveness; but excessively proud, and sensitive to affronts. Full of noble thoughts and sentiments, heroically devoted to the pursuit of truth and the good of his race, his outward life was unfortunate. He was poor and lonely. He had many severe quarrels, disappointments, and vexations. No one appreciated him with admiring love. His wife was utterly unsuited to his tastes, and finally deserted him. Meantime he toiled, with a martyr-like pertinacity, at his great task of philosophical construction. Believing his work destined to be of incalculable service to mankind, he rewarded himself, for his vast achievements and his unmerited sufferings, with an exceptional valuation and esteem of himself.
Just at this time, sad, weary, solitary, and teeming with suppressed tenderness, he met with Madame Clotilde de Vaux, a young woman of a fine feminine genius and character, made virtually a widow by the crime and imprisonment of her unworthy husband. She seems at once to have fully appreciated the best side of the genius of Comte, entered into his disinterested sentiments, pitied his misfortunes, and ministered to his highest wants like an angel. As his disciple and friend, she lavished on him an enthusiastic admiration and affection. She reflected him, in her esteem and treatment, at a height, and in a glory, harmonizing with his own estimation of his mission. It was a celestial luxury; and it wrought miracles in him. He was transformed into apparently another person. His scientific and philosophical career became a poetic and religious one. He reproduced the most glowing and delicate emotions of Dante and Petrarch and Thomas a Kempis. The relation between Comte and Madame de Vaux was one of absolute blamelessness and purity. For one year only was he allowed to enjoy this divine delight. He was about to adopt her legally as his daughter, when she died, leaving him inconsolable, save for the melancholy satisfaction of beatifying her memory with his pen, and of worshipping her in his heart.
"An unalterable purity," he says, "confirmed her tenderness, and was the cause of a moral resurrection to me during the incomparable year of our external union. My present adoration of her is more assiduous and profound, but less vivid, than when she was alive. It daily makes me feel the truth of a sentence which once dropped from her pen: There is nothing in life irrevocable, except death.'"
The deep and stern solitude of Comte, the wearisome toils he underwent, the austere pre-occupations of his mind, the harassments and lacerations he had known, seemed to make him doubly susceptible to the action of the sympathetic instincts, to those pleasures of praise and tenderness which aggrandize and sweeten our existence, and constitute our keenest happiness. No one was purer than he in his life; no one severer in his condemnation of every form of corrupt indulgence. Therefore, no one has had a higher idea of the value of feminine friendship, and no one been more loyal to it in his own experience. It is truly touching to read, in the light of his life and character, what he has written on this topic. The three guardian angels, for devout and effusive communion with whom he set apart a sacred period every day, were, Rosalie Boyer, Clotilde de Vaux, and Sophie Eliot, his mother, his friend, and his servant. By prayer and meditation on these three beloved memories, he cultivated the three chief sympathies, veneration for superiors, attachment to equals, goodness to inferiors. He expresses the deepest gratitude for the privilege of that friendship, "the tardy felicity reserved for a solitary life, devoted, from the first, to the fundamental service of humanity." Even its removal by death, he said, did not restore his former isolation; for the inward treasure of affection it had bestowed, constantly contemplated afresh in memory, remained the permanent and principal resource of his life. "She has, now for more than six years since her death, been associated with all my thoughts, and with all my feelings."
The injustice of the popular view of Comte's character, in its deepest truth, as hard, coarse, despotic, is shown by his favorite aphorisms. "Live for others." "Disinterested love is the supreme good of man." "Love cannot be deep, unless it is also pure." "The one thing essential to happiness is, that the heart shall be always nobly occupied." It is probable that Comte exaggerated the worth of his friend, when he ascribed to her "a marvellous combination of tenderness and nobleness, never, perhaps, realized in another heart in an equal degree;" but he did not exaggerate the blessed comfort which her friendship was to him, or the power with which it wrought in his soul. That she was a very superior nature, appears clearly from the few expressions of her mind which are preserved to us. For example, she says, "No one knows better than myself how weak our nature is, unless it has some lofty aim beyond the reach of passion." And again she says, "Our race is one which must have duties, in order to form its feelings."
In speaking thus of Auguste Comte, I am not ignorant of his foibles of character, the morbid side of his ill-balanced mind and heart. But the unquestionable greatness and nobleness of the man are so much superior to his weaknesses, and are so much less appreciated by the public, that I can treat his memory only with reverence, willingly leaving to others the ungrateful task of ridiculing or scorning him. He had, no doubt, an exaggerated pride and vanity. But he labored for truth and his fellow-men with transcendent fidelity. His irascible egotism made him suffer its own punishment. His lot was lonely and was painful. The solace of the stainless friendship which Madame Clotilde de Vaux brought him appeals to my most respectful sympathy. And it has a lesson which many of those who sneer would be benefited by appropriating. Let us leave the history with the breathing words of Comte himself:
"Adieu, my unchangeable companion! Adieu, my holy Clotilde, who art to me at once wife, sister, and daughter! Adieu, my dear pupil, and my fit colleague. Thy celestial inspiration will dominate the remainder of my life, public as well as private, and preside over my progress towards perfection, purifying my sentiments, ennobling my thoughts, and elevating my conduct. Perhaps, as the principal reward of the grand tasks yet left for me to complete under thy powerful invocation, I shall inseparably write thy name with my own, in the latest remembrances of a grateful humanity."
When Paul, the Czar of Russia, espoused the Princess Marie de Wurtemburg, Sophie Soymonof, then in her sixteenth year, and distinguished for her accomplishments, was chosen maid of honor to the new empress. Marie was endowed with rare beauty, and surrounded by seductions and difficulties; but she set such an example of amiable and solid virtue in her lofty place, that calumny never assailed her.
A strong affection, based on mutual esteem and tenderness, sprang up between the empress and her maid. This affection was never interrupted nor chilled. The fury and puerility, the monstrous pride and jealousy, of Paul, made him constantly quarrel with those who were brought into close relations with him. The empress alone triumphed over his outbursts, by dint of unfailing sweetness, modesty, and patience. She smilingly submitted to the capricious exactions, distasteful exercises, and excessive fatigues he imposed. However bitter her sufferings, the serenity of her soul was never visibly altered. But, in sympathizing with the hardships of her kind mistress, Sophie early learned to penetrate the secret of noisy pomp and hidden woes, glittering prosperity and silent tears.
Secretary Soymonof, aware of the precarious tenure by which the dependents of the court held their prosperity, was anxious to secure for his daughter a trustworthy protector, and a handsome position in the future. He cast his eyes on his personal friend, General Swetchine, a man of an imposing aspect, a firm character, a just and calm spirit, who had had an honorable career, and was held in high consideration. Sophie accepted, with her usual deference to her father's wishes, the husband thus chosen, although he was twenty-five years older than herself. It cost her many a secret pang; for she was already in love with a young man of noble birth and fortune, with rare qualities of mind and a brilliant destiny. She knew that her affection was reciprocated. But, from a sense of filial duty, she silently renounced him; and, when he in turn resigned himself to another marriage, she became the warm and steadfast friend of his wife. This painful renunciation, in the introspective reflection, and the dissolution of romantic dreams to which it led, was the first of those earthly disenchantments, which, shattering and darkening the empire of social ambition, transferred her interest from material pleasures and hopes to the imperturbable satisfactions of religion.
The second blow quickly followed. Only a few days after that marriage which her father thought promised so much security and consolation to his old age, the Emperor Paul, in a cruel whim, suddenly banished him from Petersburg. Retiring to Moscow, the galling sense of his disgrace, the separation from his darling daughter, together with a frigid reception by a friend on whom he had especially relied, plunged him into the deepest grief. A terrible attack of apoplexy swept him away. At the dire announcement, Madame Swetchine sunk on her knees; and, in the spiritual solitude, unable any more to lean on her father, turned with irrepressible need and effusion to God.
General Swetchine was made military commandant and governor of St. Petersburg. At the head of a splendid establishment, his young wife found herself in the highest circle of the most brilliant society in Europe; for at that time the Revolution had banished the noblest families of France, and their headquarters were in the Russian capital. Madame Swetchine always possessed, in remarkable union, an earnest desire for action and companionship, and a strong taste for solitude and meditation. She managed her life so skilfully, that both these inclinations were largely gratified. With many of the most high-toned and accomplished persons whom she met, both of the Russian nobility and the French emigrants, she formed earnest and lasting relations of mind and heart. The most refined, pronounced, and impressive characters in St. Petersburg, between the years 1800 and 1815, were embraced in her friendships. Her leisure hours were scrupulously and eagerly devoted to self-improvement. She engaged in a wide range of literary, historic, and philosophical studies; making copious extracts from the books she read, patiently reflecting on the subjects, and setting down independent comments. The progress she made was rapid, and soon rendered her a notable woman.
Paul, full of lugubrious visions and suspicions, one day disgraced General Swetchine by removing him from office. But this official dismission did not entail banishment, and was followed by no loss of social caste. The general and his exemplary wife continued to live amidst their numerous friends as happily as before. The interchange of literary and philosophic ideas shared the hours in their attractive parlor with the revolutionary and reactionary politics of the time. The profound attachments, stamped with reverence and the rarest truthfullness, which in those years united many admirable persons with Madame Swetchine, were frequently reporting themselves, under far other circumstances, in a distant land, half a century later.
In 1833, the celebrated Count Joseph de Maistre was accredited from France to the Russian court. He was then about fifty, a man of pure life, rare genius, and fervent enthusiasm; familiar with the world, with the human heart, and with the loftiest ranges of sentiment and learning. His zeal for the Catholic Church was extreme. Madame Swetchine, at this time, without being at all a devotee, was a sincere member of the Greek Church. She was already familiar with the great minds of all ages and lands; and, at this particular period, was earnestly studying modern philosophical controversies, comparing the ideas of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel with those of Descartes, Pascal, and Leibnitz. Despite the difference in their points of view, and the many other contrasts between them, these two remarkable persons the thoroughly trained master, in whom the gifts of knowledge, eloquence, faith, and finesse, were accumulated; and the meditative, earnest, consecrated young woman of twenty-one had no sooner met than they felt the parity and harmony of their souls. They formed an exalted friendship, full of solace and happiness to them both, a friendship charged with the most important results on the destiny of the woman, since it led to her conversion from the Greek Church to the Catholic, and gave a deep religious inspiration and stamp to her entire subsequent life. Such minds have a thousand lofty topics of common interest to talk of; and they frequently visited each other, exchanging thoughts with ever-deepening confidence and esteem. "The cold countenance of the Count de Maistre," Madame Swetchine writes to her dearest female friend, "conceals a soul of profound sensibility. Without praising me, he often says pleasing things to me." At another time, she humorously writes to the same friend: "The Princess Alexis and I have been to spend an evening at the house of the Count de Maistre. From deference to the duties of hospitality, he would not suffer himself a single moment of sleep. He rose with the palm of victory out of this terrible struggle of nature and politeness; but who can tell at what a cost?" She said that great griefs had purified his ambition, and lent a strange interest to him, elevating and aggrandizing his character. He set an extreme value on her friendship; and wrote to her, that he should never spare any pains to preserve in its integrity what he felt was an infinite honor to him. He wrote to his friend, the Viscount de Bonald, that he had never seen so much moral strength, talent, and culture, joined with so much sweetness of disposition, as in Madame Swetchine. On their separation, by a residence in different countries, De Maistre gave her a magnificent portrait of himself, on the frame of which he had written four verses, adjuring the happy image, in answer to the call of awaiting friendship, to fly, and take its place where the original would so gladly be. This portrait she kept prominently hung in her parlor as long as she lived. In one of his letters to her, he writes: "My thought will always go out to seek you: my heart will always feel the worth of yours." The memory of this first great friend continued to hover over her life to the end. In her last days, generously offended by what she thought the unjust strokes in the portraiture of De Maistre, presented by Lamartine in his "Confidences," she took up her pen in refutation, and wielded it with telling effect. This eloquent vindication of her old friend, when he had been dead nearly forty years, was one of her latest acts, and truly characteristic of her tenacious fidelity of affection.
The enthusiasm shown by the Count de Maistre for the Roman Catholic Church awakened a deep interest in Madame Swetchine. This interest was greatly enhanced by the admirable examples of piety and charity set before her in the lives of several of the French exiles in St. Petersburg, with whom she had contracted friendships. Especially was she impressed and attracted by the amiable virtues of the Princess de Tarente, the devout elevation of her character, and the triumphant sanctity of her death. Madame Swetchine at length resolved to make a deliberate examination of the claims of the Roman Church, and to come to a settled conclusion. Providing herself with an appropriate library, acompanied only by her adopted daughter Nadine, in the summer of 1815, she withdrew to a lonely and picturesque estate, situated on the borders of the Gulf of Finland. Here, through the days and nights of six months, she plunged into the most laborious researches, historical and argumentative. The result was, that she became convinced of the apostolic authority of the Roman primacy, and avowed herself a Catholic. Soon after this conversion, the Jesuits were ordered to leave Russia. Indignant at an order which she regarded as unjust, she openly identified herself with the cause of these proscribed missionaries. The machinations of the political enemies of General Swetchine had made his situation disagreeable to him; and, when he saw those enemies gaining credit, his pride took offence, and he determined to leave the country. Madame Swetchine's passion for travel and observation combined with her new religious faith to make this removal less unwelcome than it would otherwise have been.
The close of the year 1816 found her established in Paris, where, with the exceptions of a year in Russia, and a couple of years in Italy, she was to reside until her death. The Bourbon nobility, now recalled to France, and reinstated in power, repaid the generous kindness she had shown them in St. Petersburg, by giving her a hearty welcome, and lavishing attentions and affection on her. Her deep interest in charitable institutions soon brought her into intimate and most cordial relations with De Gerando. Baron Humboldt and the Count Pozzo di Borgo, among the earliest to become her friends, were assiduous visitors at her house; and, in the salon of the brilliant Duchess de Duras, where she was quickly appreciated and made to feel at home, she became acquainted with the most interesting and commanding minds of France at that time, such as Chateaubriand, Remusat, Cuvier, Montmorency, Villemain, Barante. These persons have all testified, in turn, to the great impression her character made on them.
Madame Swetchine formed with a large number of men of rare excellence and accomplishments ardent and lasting attachments, which were the greatest comfort to herself, and administered invaluable inspiration and happiness to them. Among these, particular mention should be made of her confessor, the pious and venerable Abbé Desjardins; her brother-in-law, Father Gargarin; Moreau; Turquety; Montalembert; and, at a later date, De Tocqueville, who writes to her, "The friendship of such as you are, imposes obligations." Another expression of De Tocqueville must not be omitted here: "Let me thank you for your last letter. It contained, as all your letters do, proofs of an affection which consoles and strengthens me. I never received a line of your writing without being sensible of this twofold impression. The reason is, I think, that one finds in you a heart easily moved, in connection with a mind firmly fixed upon abiding principles. Here is the secret of your charm and your sway. I want to profit more than do by your precious friendship. It distresses me that I succeed so ill." She was one of those few natures able to forget themselves, take an enthusiastic interest in others, and devote unwearied pains to further their interests, sympathize and aid in their pursuits, calm, refine, enrich, and bless their souls. She sustained the ideal standards, and raised the self-respect, of every one who enjoyed the honor of her regard. Accordingly, no noble man could be intimate with her without grateful and affectionate veneration. M. de Maistre said of her, "More loyalty, intellect, and learning were never seen joined to so much goodness." The Viscount de Bonald said, "She is a friend worthy of you; and one of the best heads I have ever met, effect or cause of the most excellent qualities of the heart with which a mortal can be endowed." The poet Turquety sent her an exquisite poem, descriptive of herself and of his feelings towards her. She wrote in reply, "Before thanking you, I have thanked God for giving your heart such an impression of me, unworthy of it as I am. The illusion which arises from affection is another grace, I had almost said another virtue. Your accent has a persuasive sincerity; and faith, when it is vivid, believes in miracles." And then she thus delicately indicates her objection to the publication of the verses: "I condemn this charming flower to enchant only my solitude; but this is the better to gather its fragrance, and it will survive me."
An invaluable friendship also existed between Madame Swetchine and Alexander the Emperor of Russia, one of the most interesting and romantic characters of modern time, of whom she said to Roxandra Stourdza, "Already above other men, by his glory; by the influence of religion, he will be above himself." When the famous mystical Madame de Kriidener appealed to him, in the name of virtue and of religion, to be true to his own better nature, he burst into tears, and hid his face in his hands. As she paused apologetically, he exclaimed, "Speak on, speak on: your voice is music to my soul." She obtained a great influence over him. He had likewise an enthusiastic attachment for Napoleon; and Madame de Kriidener called them respectively the white angel and the black angel. His sensibility to all generous sentiments, all thoughts of poetic height and richness, was extraordinarily tender and expansive. He was often known, in the overwhelming re-action of his emotions, convulsed with tears, to leap into his carriage alone, and drive out into the solitary country or forest. Such were the exalted traits of his character, and his many beautiful deeds, that Madame Swetchine felt her natural relations of duty and submission transmuted into those of vivid admiration and devotion. "I fully sympathize," she writes to her earliest bosom- friend, "with the vivacity of your admiration for our dear Emperor. What a happiness to be able to eulogize with truth! Let us hope we are in the aurora of a most beautiful day for Russia. How pleased I am at having always seen in his soul that which this day shows itself with a glory so fair and so pure! He is a true hero of humanity. He seems in his conduct to realize all my dreams of moral dignity; and I find, at last, in this union of religious sentiments and liberal ideas, the long-sought resemblance of the type I carry in my mind, and which has hitherto been qualified as fantastic, the creation of a too sanguine imagination. In him we see, that, even on the throne, in the wild tumult of all interests, of all passions, one can remain man, Christian, philosopher; pursue the wisest and most generous plans; and carry into his actions every thing that is beautiful, from the highest justice to the most touching modesty."
Alexander testified his respect and regret, when Madame Swetchine departed to reside in Paris, by asking her to be his correspondent. The correspondence was continued until his death, ten years afterwards. The Emperor Nicholas, on his accession, restored to Madame Swetchine all her letters; and she allowed an eminent statesman, in 1845, to read the whole collection. After her death, no trace of it was to be found among her papers. It must possess an intense interest; and it is to be hoped that it still exists, and may yet one day see the light.
Perhaps the most intimate and truly devoted of all the friends of Madame Swetchine was that accomplished member of the French Academy whose biographic and editorial labors have erected such an attractive and perdurable monument to her memory, the Count Alfred de Falloux. The soul of reverence, gratitude, and love exhales in his sentences when he writes of her. After describing what "she was to all who had the inexpressible happiness of knowing her," he acids, "and this she will now be to all who shall read her; and death will but give to her words one consecration more." But the modesty of M. de Falloux has not given the public her letters to him, and has kept his personal relations with her much in the background. We are left to guess the measure and the activity of their friendship, from indirect indications.
On the whole, possibly because of the editor's reticence as to himself, we are left to believe, that the friend who held the pre-eminent place in the heart of Madame Swetchine, during the last twenty-five years of her life, was Father Lacordaire, the illustrious Catholic preacher. A complete picture of this ardent and unfaltering friendship is shown in the letters of the two parties, gathered in an octavo volume of nearly six hundred pages. We know not where, in the annals of human affection, to find the account of a friendship more spotless or more morally satisfying than this. The volume which preserves and exhibits it will be found by all who are duly interested in the psychology and experience of persons so extraordinary, both for their genius in society, and for the quantity and quality of their private experience full of solid instruction and romantic interest. The inner life of Madame Swetchine was a sacred epic: the outer career of Lacordaire, an electrifying drama. This double interest of a private, spiritual ascent, and of a chivalrous gallantry in the thick of battle, is clearly unfolded in the book before us.
The chivalrous young Count de Montalembert was one of the dearest friends of Madame Swetchine. She said that his soul seemed formed under the inspiration of the fine thought of Plato: "The beautiful as a means of reaching the true." Behold, in the following extract from one of the many letters in which she strove to pacify his perturbed spirit, by recalling him from the war of politics, and reconciling his passionate reformatory sentiments with the ruling principles and authorities of the Catholic Church, the tender wisdom and affection with which she speaks: "You seize only on the disinterested and poetic side of these questions, but all the same you are in the battle, giving and taking blows. And thus, with a mind perfectly high-toned and honorable, a crystal which is almost a diamond, with faultless habits, and all the believing and pious sentiments they involve, you have neither the heart's sweet joy nor its sweet peace. The reason why you are so ill at ease, is, that your conscience lies so near your heart that their voices and their troubles are confounded. My dear Charles, will you not reward me by being all that my wishes and my prayers would fain make you? I will not say whether you have the power to rejoice or afflict my heart; but, when you woke in me a mother's emotions, I cannot believe that you condemned me to the sorrow of Rachel."
One day this beloved young man led to the drawing-room of his maternal friend his heart's brother, the eloquent Lacordaire, then in the early renown of his wonderful career of ecclesiastical oratory. Madame Swetchine had already been deeply moved by his preaching, and was desirous of knowing him. She quickly won his confidence, and became, what she ever continued to be, a ministering angel to his spirit. She was much older than he, much more profoundly versed in human nature, much more soberly balanced and calm in soul. With a vigilance, a wisdom, and a tenderness that were unwearied and inexhaustible, she watched his course, studied the wants of his mind and heart, and labored, as need was, alternately to confirm his sinking courage and to soothe his excited imagination. Without being ostensibly such, she was really his spiritual director. "Her subtile and tender spirit," as Dora Greenwell has remarked, "seems to move across his heart, to woo and to caress it to peace and goodness, to call out its deepest concords, as the hand of the skilled musician moves across his instrument, knowing well each fret and chord of the sweet viol he doth love."
It was the greatness, not the weakness, of Lacordaire, that, before loving God, he had loved glory. Few men have spirit enough truly to seek fame: it is notice which they wish. The heart of Lacordaire was a pure fire, encased in a cold intellect. It reminds us of an intense flame clothed in transparent ice. Sometimes, he said, he hardly knew whether his voice was moved from within by the spirit, or from without by renown. In regard to every such scruple Madame Swetchine was an infallible counsellor. Her advice was as the speech of incarnate reason and love in their most purified and exalted form. The heavy perfume that drenched his oratoric atmosphere would have intoxicated most men with self-adulation; but he offset every such allurement by constantly withdrawing from trifles, excitements, and seductions, and spending long hours in the unbroken solitude of thought and the awful neighborhood of God. If both these extremes brilliant public triumphs, and severe seclusion and asceticism had their special dangers, Madame Swetchine was his resistless guardian against them both. No one who has not read their correspondence, reaching richly through a whole generation, can easily imagine the services rendered by this gifted and saintly woman to this holy and powerful man. Community of faith, of loyalty, of nobleness, joined them. It was in looking to heaven together that their souls grew united. Drawn by the same attractions, and held by one sovereign allegiance, such souls need no vows, nor lean on any foreign support. The divinity of truth and good is their bond.
No prayer persuades, no flattery fawns,
Their noble meanings are their pawns:
And so thoroughly is known
Each other's counsel by his own,
They can parley without meeting.
At first Madame Swetchine shrank from the excessive agitation she underwent in listening to the great sermons of Lacordaire in Notre Dame. "I go through all his perils," she said: "I tremble at every rock; I feel every stroke. His way of speaking acts upon the human soul in the same way as sanctity: it wounds; but it enraptures." At length her attendance on his sermons became so constant, and her pleasure and admiration so obvious, that many of the congregation supposed her to be literally, as she was morally, his mother. One day, as she was leaning against a pillar in the crowded church, her face upturned towards the pulpit, two persons were heard whispering to each other: "Would you like to see the preacher's mother?" "Why, she died ten years ago." "No, there she is: look at her."
The genius of Madame Swetchine was sweeter, serener, more tolerant, than that of her friend. Her influence on him in these respects was benignant. He thought more of the strict doctrine: she, more of the broad and charitable spirit. She once said, concerning dogmas, that she could consent to see the ocean filtered to a thread of water, if it but remained pure. He wrote to her, "My dear friend, you have proved yourself deficient in holy anger; otherwise you would not have been able to tolerate M." His electric, vehement soul needed exactly the check her reflective subtilty and prudent consideration gave. So she tells him once, "I acted as your ballast, or rather I held you by the skirts of your garment, to retard your too impetuous movements. Perhaps these are the very attributes with which you would have done well to invest some one at Rome, who might have united the two conditions which I fulfilled so perfectly: first, that of not being you, either in natural disposition, antecedents, or age; second, and more essential, that of loving you better than you could possibly love yourself."
With the lapse of years, their attachment grew closer and deeper. Lacordaire writes from Rome, "I have been bitterly disappointed in not hearing from you. You know what a need one has of friendly words when one is alone and so far away." And when the epistle comes, he writes to her, "I had no sooner opened your letter than my soul was inundated with joy." Again he says, "I found in your last letter the expression of an affection so tender, and a watchfullness so fixed, that I was melted by it, even to tears." "Your letters are always to me a balm and a force." In excuse of his own reserve, he strikingly writes, "Women have this admirable quality, that they can talk as much as they wish, as they wish, with what expression they wish: their heart is a fountain that flows naturally. The heart of man, especially mine, is like those volcanoes whose lava leaps forth only at intervals after a convulsion." We find Madame Swetchine saying, in one of her letters to Lacordaire, "I protest against long silences: they are to me that vacuum of which nature has a horror." The exceeding care which this discreet woman took always to administer her advice, her praise, or rebuke, in such a way as not to offend or injure the most sensitive recipient of it, is a rare lesson for others. Lacordaire once wrote to her, although he knew very well how guileless was the motive of her managements, "You say, dear friend, that you fear to displease me in speaking your thought about me. I assure you my sole reproach is, that you are too circumspect and delicate in your style of expression. I appreciate all the more that flattery which is the guardian escort of truth, because it is wholly wanting to me. I speak things out too bluntly; and it is true that almost always men need an extreme sweetness in the language of those who would benefit them. The heart is like the eyes: it cannot bear too glaring a light. However, I find you excessive in the art of shades." Soon afterwards he says, "Excuse my franknesses; with you, as with God. I can say every thing." Scarcely ever did a man owe more to a woman than this eloquent and heroic priest to the heavenly- minded friend who said she loved him as father, brother, and son, all at once. He deeply felt his debt, and faithfully paid it. He paid it in loving words and attentions, while she lived, and in a tribute of immortal eloquence when she was dead. "You appeared to me," he tells her, "between two distinct parts of my life, as the angel of the Lord might appear to a soul wavering between life and death, between earth and heaven." To a common friend he wrote of her, "Her soul was to mine what the shore is to the plank shattered by the waves; and I still remember, after the lapse of twenty-five years, all the light and strength she afforded to me when I was young and unknown." He dedicated to her his "Life of Saint Dominic," saying, "I wish that some one of your descendants may one day know that his ancestress was a woman whom Saint Jerome would have loved as he loved Paula and Marcella, one who needed only a pen illustrious and saintly enough to do her justice." Hearing of her last illness, he made a journey of six hundred miles, to be with her, and lavished on her every winning word and act that filial love and reverence could suggest; and, after all was over, he pronounced on her a funeral address, which will always rank with the highest trophies of his genius. No other words can be so fitting as his own to close this sketch:
"She belongs to the nation of the great minds of our age. In a time of intellectual dependence, when parties bore every thing in their train, she made no engagement, and submitted to no attraction: she isolated every question from the noise around her, and placed it in the silence of eternity. A constant simplicity and an equal elevation gave to her ideas a personal influence. This double charm might be resisted; but she could not fail to be loved herself, and to inspire the desire to become better. Happy mouth, which for forty years made not an enemy to God, but which poured into a multitude of wounded or languishing hearts the germ of the resurrection and the rapture of life! Alas! dear and illustrious lady. I cannot attach to your name the glory of those Roman women whom Saint Jerome has immortalized; and yet you were of their race. Conquered for God through the language of France, you wished to live under the French speech; and, quitting a country you alwaysloved, you came among us with the modesty of a disciple and of an exile. But you brought us more than we gave you. The light of your soul illumined the land which received you, and for forty years you were for us the sweetest echo of the gospel and the surest road to honor."
THE first species of exclusively female friendship is that which exists between mother and daughter. The maternal tie of organic instinct and moral guardianship on the one side, and the filial tie of respect, dependence, and gratitude on the other, form the ordinary connection of mothers and daughters. In exceptional cases, these bonds of affectionate protection and pious love are lifted out of the faded commonplace of custom by deep mutual appreciation and sympathy, broadened and brightened into a friendship emphatically worthy of the name. The sight of a mother and a daughter thus happily paired is beautiful and holy. And there are far more examples of it than the world knows.
Probably, the best representation of this union is the one afforded by Madame de Sévigné and Madame de Grignan. These celebrated ladies, among the most brilliant of the long roll of distinguished French women, were possessed of every charm of person and spirit, fascinating grace, dignity, intelligence, accomplishments, purity, and generosity. In their early years, they were inseparable. They hung on each other's looks and motions. The wish of the mother was the instinctive law of the child. The beautiful image of the daughter, loved to the verge of distraction, seemed gradually to occupy the whole being of the mother. For, as Madame de Sévigné successively lost her idolized husband and her most endeared friend, the unhappy Fouquet, the maternal instinct seemed to take up into itself all the baffled or bereaved passions, and, magnified and vivified by the appropriation, to transform itself into a friendship which almost annihilated her individuality, beneath the ideal stamp and transfused impression of that of her daughter. The pain of parting from her was like the anguish of tearing the soul out of the body. During the period of their separation, memory took the place of sight; ideas, of actions; correspondence, of conversation. She constantly writes to the absent one, and seems to live only for this. Every observation, reflection, emotion, finds a place in the tender and immortal record. She spares no pains to make her letters interesting to the receiver. She writes, "I shall live for the purpose of loving you. I abandon my life to that occupation." It is affecting to note the agitation of the mother at every ruffle on the life of the daughter. In tracing the thoughts, feelings, events, that vibrated across the relation between them, one can hardly escape the conviction, that the soul of the younger friend was ideally superimposed on the self-abnegating soul of the elder friend, and governed it, as the mental processes of a magnetized person are said to be superseded by the personality and states of consciousness of the magnetizer. A single passion has seldom so consistently ruled a being as the affection of Madame de Sévigné for her daughter; and it was returned by the latter with all the fervor of which her less ardent nature was capable. The collection of letters in which the sentiment and its manifold workings are enshrined, created, as Lamartine says in his eloquent sketch, a new species of literature, and formed an epoch in authorship. "The genius of the hearth held the pen, and the heart flowed through it. The literature of the family, or confidential conversation written out, began. It is the classic of closed doors."
This friendship had an earthly close worthy of its progress. For, when Madame de Grignan was attacked by a dangerous and lingering malady, her mother watched incessantly by her bedside, as she had formerly watched by her cradle. After three months of sleepless care, she had the joy of seeing the beloved patient return to life; but she had given her own in exchange. "Intense affection alone seemed to have enabled her to retain existence until the convalescence of Madame de Grignan, when it fled, having fulfilled its last object upon earth. She expired in the arms of her daughter, and surrounded by her weeping grandchildren. Her last glance fell upon the being enshrined in her soul, and restored to health by her care. She was interred in the chapel of the Chateau de Grignan. But her letters are her true and living sepulchre. Grignan holds her body; but her correspondence contains her soul."
Another fine example of a noble and glowing friendship between a mother and her daughter is furnished by Madame de Rambouillet and Julie d'Angenne. They were equally endowed with loveliness of person, attractiveness of mind, elevation of character, and perfection of manners. They were the magic centres of every circle in which they moved together. When the plague, of which all Paris was in terror, seized Madame de Rambouillet's youngest son, she nursed him; and Julie shut herself in the room with them till the boy died. The sweet harmony of their souls and intercourse was unmarred, unalloyed, in life and in death. Some mothers make slaves of their daughters; some are slaves to them; some even find rivals in them. Some are prevented from forming friendships, by tyranny on one side or by insubordination on the other; by selfishness there or by heartlessness here. Envy, vanity, fickleness, spite, festering incompatibilities of character, often prove fatal in these veiled and intimate relations. But when the characters of mother and daughter are happy accords, or accurate counterparts, rich, lofty, ardent, and disinterested, the solidly assured friendship which results, is a felicity scarcely inferior to any known on earth. The example of such a relation between Mrs. Browne and Mrs. Hemans was charming. Its inexpressible preciousness to the sensitive soul of that sweet singer, every reader of sensibility, who traces the numerous allusions to it in her letters and poems, will recognize with emotion. There is much in the relation between a mother and the wife of her son to create peculiar interest and love. And they, allowing for exceptions of an opposite character, become the warmest friends in unnumbered instances. A better example can hardly be desired than is furnished in the sweet pastoral tale of Hebrew Scripture. What passage in literature is more pervaded with the pathetic charm of the affection of the early world than the story of Naomi and her widowed daughter-in-law, Ruth, the Moabitish ancestress of David and of Jesus? Ruth said, "Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for whither thou goest I will go; and where thou lodgest I will lodge; and thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest will I die, and there will I he buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part thee and me." So they two, Naomi and Ruth, went till they came to Bethlehem; and there did they sojourn together until the end.
All the near ties of kindred, by the closeness of association and sympathy naturally consequent on them, must often prove the fostering occasions or incentives of warm and lasting friendships between those whom they draw together. In thousands of families there is an aunt who becomes to her nieces a friend only less intimate and trusted than the mother herself. Such was the case with Mrs. Barhauld and her brother's only daughter, Lucy Aikin. In a multitude of families there are likewise cousins bound to each other by bonds as numerous and glowing as those of sisterhood. So, too, there are countless examples in which a wife and the sister of her husband grow into the most ardent sincerity of friendship. An interesting instance of this union is celebrated by Pliny in his famous panegyric of Trajan. Pliny says it is a wonder for two ladies of the same quality to dwell in the same place, without feuds or contention. But he declares that Plotina and Marciana, the wife and the sister of Trajan, never disputed over the right of precedence; but had the same intentions, and followed the same course of life; nay, were scarcely to be distinguished as two different persons.
Mrs. Hemans writes, on the eve of the removal of her brother George to Ireland, "I fear I shall feel very lonely and brotherless, as I have always been one of a large family circle before. I could laugh or cry when I think of the helplessness I have contrived to accumulate." And then she adds, with reference to her sister-in-law, "In her I shall be deprived of the only real companion I ever had. She is to leave me on Saturday next; and I am haunted by those melancholy words of St. Leon's guest, the unhappy old man with his immortal gifts, Alone! Alone!"
THERE is also another unspeakably important class of womanly friendships; namely, those subsisting between sisters. In the fourth book of the Aeneid, Virgil powerfully paints this union in the example of Dido and Anna. Scott has drawn an impressive picture of such a friendship, in the characters of Minna and Brenda Troil; and a still more affecting one in the story of Jeannie and Effie Deans. Thrown into constant intimacy, with an endearing community of inheritance, duties, and associations-multitudes of sisters must become ardent friends. The failure of that result, in consequence of base qualities, irritating circumstances, or cold and meagre natures, is a great misfortune and loss in a household: the fruition of it is a blessing worthy of the most earnest gratitude of its subjects. Perhaps there is no species of friendship more sure to elude publicity. It plays its undramatic part in domestic scenes, avoiding, rather than asking, the notice of the world. We need not wonder, that there are so few examples of it sufficiently exciting and public to induce the historian or biographer to narrate their stories.
Hannah More and her four sisters were a group of happy friends, who kept house together for more than half a century. The union of Hannah and Martha was especially one of entire admiration and fondness. In Wrington churchyard the remains of the five sisters rest together under a stone slab, enclosed by an iron railing, and overshadowed by a yew-tree.
Mary and Agnes Berry, who were such widely courted favorites, in the most intellectual society of the time of their ardent friend, Horace Walpole, dwelt together, for over eighty years, in entire and fervent affection: and they now sleep side by side in their grave at Petersham.
The three wonderful sisters, Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Bronte, were joined by uncommonly deep and intense bonds. Their strange, fervid personalities; their solitary, melancholy lives; their tastes and pursuits; their joys and triumphs, were held in common. Writing to her best friend, Charlotte says, "You, my dear Miss W., know, as well as I do, the value of sisters' affection to each other; there is nothing like it in this world, I believe, when they are nearly equal in age, and similar in education, tastes, and sentiments." In another letter, written after she had lost both her sisters, she says, "Emily had a particular love for the moors; and there is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry leaf, not a fluttering lark or linnet, but reminds me of her. The distant prospects were Anne's delight; and, when I look round, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon." Let any one, who would understand what these rare natures felt for each other, read the memoir of her two sisters, prefixed by Charlotte to "Wuthering Heights" and "Agnes Grey."
In 1846, Margaret Fuller wrote an account of a visit she had just paid to Joanna Baillie, whom she had long honored almost above any of her sex. She says, "I found on her brow, not, indeed, a coronal of gold, but a serenity and strength undimmed and unbroken by the weight of more than fourscore years, or by the scanty appreciation which her thoughts have received. We found her in her little calm retreat, at Hampstead, surrounded by marks of love and reverence from distinguished and excellent friends. Near her was the sister, older than herself, yet still sprightly and full of active kindness, whose character, and their mutual relations, she has, in one of her last poems, indicated with such a happy mixture of sagacity, humor, and tender pathos, and with so absolute a truth of outline." This admirable, semi-biographical, semi-psychological poem was addressed by Joanna to her sister Agnes, her dear, life-long companion, on one of the latest anniversaries of her birthday. It is an interesting fragment in the literature of the friendships of sisters.
THE friendship of woman with woman, outside of the ties of blood, is pictured with varying degrees of fidelity in the works of many romance writers and novelists. One of the most glowing delineations of it, also one of the most famous, is given by Richardson in the character of Clarissa Harlowe. Jane Austen, in her "Northanger Abbey," treats it with great insight, in the relations of Catherine Morland, Isabella Thorpe, and Eleanor Tilney. Miss Edgeworth's "Helen" is likewise full of it: both its sympathies and its antagonisms are forcibly depicted. Helen Stanley is Lady Cecilia's double, her second self, her better self. Lady Katrine Hawksby is such an acidified piece of envy, so jealous of all her sex, that "every commonly decent marriage of her acquaintance gives her a sad headache." That there is truth in this bitter stroke cannot be denied; but there is truth as well in the extreme opposite. Many a girl, with a sublime self-renunciation, stifling an agony sharper than death, has given up a lover to a friend, in silence and secrecy. Women are capable of any sacrifice, and their grandest deeds are hidden. Could any woman capable of voluntarily withdrawing herself, in order that her friend might marry the man they both loved, be capable of boasting of it, or willingly letting it be known?
Mrs. Barbauld gives a beautiful description of pious friendship in her hymn beginning,
How blest the sacred tie that binds
In union sweet according minds!
How swift the heavenly course they run
Whose hearts, whose faith and hope, are one!
Their streaming tears together flow
For human grief and mortal woe;
Their ardent prayers together rise
Like mingling flames in sacrifice.
Pictures of female friendships, in all their glory and tragedy, their ecstatic fusions and heroic sacrifices, their bitter jealousies and inversions, abound in the great dramatists, who are the crowned expositors of human nature. Auger, Secretary of the French Academy, in his "Philosophical and Literary Miscellanies," has an excellent little essay entitled, "The Friendships of Women among themselves compared with the Friendships of Men among themselves; Difference of the two Friendships, and the Causes of that Difference." The essay, though not adequate, is true and suggestive. Charles Lamb's poem of "The Three Friends, "—Mary, Martha, and Margaret—is an extremely truthful and effective description of female friendship, its fervor, jealousy, estrangement, generosity, and restoration.
Grace Aguilar has written a work expressly on the subject of Woman's Friendship. Though not a work of a high order, it possesses considerable interest as a tale; and, as a treatment of the theme, it is full of sincere feeling and discriminating observations. In Lady Ida Villiers and Florence Leslie we have a picture of a pair of noble friends, proof against every trial. The black-hearted falsehood and hate of Flora Rivers form an effective foil; and, incidentally, there are many telling strokes and sidelights on the relations of women to each other. "It is the fashion to deride female friendship," Grace Aguilar says: "to look with scorn on those who profess it. There is always to me a doubt of the warmth, the strength, and purity of her feelings, when a girl merges into womanhood, looking down on female friendship as romance and folly." The subtile and masterly knowledge of the characters of women, their weaknesses and their strengths, is not the least of the charms of that consummate work of art, "The Princess" of Tennyson. Blanche, Melissa, Ida, Psyche, in their unions, Two women faster welded in one love Than pairs of wedlock, in their jealousies, quarrels, aspirations, sorrows, are psychological studies full of delicate truth. Mrs. Browning's "Aurora Leigh" discusses many of the same topics, in a manner characteristically contrasting with Tennyson's, but marked by all her own conscientiousness, power, and care. Lady Waldemar, Marian Erle, Aurora Leigh, with the unsparing censures, magnanimous thoughts, and burning aspirations strewn through this profound and massive work, are lasting lessons for all womankind. It seems to have been much easier for most of the critics of this great work to feel its artistic faults, its jarring metre, and cumbrous forms, than to appreciate the transcendent nobleness and wisdom wrought into it from the soul of its creator.
School-girl friendships are a proverb in all mouths. They form one of the largest classes of those human attachments whose idealizing power and sympathetic interfusions glorify the world and sweeten existence. With what quick trust and ardor, what eager relish, these susceptible creatures, before whom heavenly illusions float, surrender themselves to each other, taste all the raptures of confidential conversation, lift veil after veil till every secret is bare, and, hand in hand, with glowing feet, tread the paths of paradise Perhaps a more impassioned portrayal of this kind of union is not to be found in literature than the picture in "A Midsummer-Night's Dream," which Shakespeare makes Helena hold before Hermia, when the death of their love was threatened by the appearance of Lysander and Demetrius:
Is all the counsel that we two have shared,
The sisters' vows, the hours that we have spent,
When we have chid the hasty-footed time
For parting us, O! is all forgot?
All school-days' friendship, childhood innocence?
We, Hermia, like two artificial gods,
Have with our needles ccreated both one flower,
Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion,
Both warbling of one song, both in one key,
As if our hands, our sides; voices, and minds
Had been incorporate. So we grew together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition,
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem:
So with two seeming bodies, but one heart;
Two of the first, like coats in heraldry,
Due but to one and crowned with one crest.
And will you rend our ancient love asunder,
To join with men in scorning your poor friend?
Romantically warm and generous as the friendships of school-boys are, those of school-girls are much more so. They are more purposed and absorbing, more sedulously cultivated and consciously important. School-girls often have their distinctly defined and well-understood degrees of intimacy—their first, their second, their third, friend. Thus a thousand little dramas are daily played, full of delights and woes, of which outsiders, who have no key to them, never so much as dream. Probably no chapter of sentiment in modern fashionable life is so intense and rich as that which covers the experience of budding maidens at school. In their mental caresses, spiritual nuptials, their thoughts kiss each other, and more than all the blessedness the world will ever give them is foreshadowed. They have not yet reached the age for a public record or confession of their pangs and raptures; so these dramas are for the most part only guessed at. But keener agonies, more delicious passages, are nowhere else known than in the bosoms of innocent school-girls, in the lacerations or fruitions of their first consciously given affections. A startling illustration has come to the knowledge of the writer just as he is penning these words. Two girls, about sixteen years old, attending a private school together, in one of the chief cities of the United States, formed a strong attachment to each other, and were almost inseparable. The father of one of the girls, for some reason, had a dislike for the other, and forbade his daughter to associate with her. The two friends preferred death to separation. They took laudanum, and were found dead in each other's arms. What element of romance or tragedy ever known, is not every day experienced, all about us, under the thin disguise of commonplace?
No doubt there is often something a little grotesque or laughable in these youthful relations. An anecdote will illustrate it, and, at the same time, convey the corrective moral. There were a couple of school-girl friends, each of whom loved to do and experience whatever the other did or experienced. One of them accidentally set fire to the window-curtains in her chamber, and the house came near being burned down. She wrote word to her friend of the dangerous accident. The other at once proceeded carefully to set fire to the curtains in her chamber, so as to be just like her friend in everything.
One may well reprove, with a complacent smile of superiority, the folly of the act; but the sentiment underneath should never be ridiculed.
A harrowing instance of the suffering consequent on the overstrung feelings of girls is furnished by Margaret Fuller in the story of "Mariana," a vivid autobiographic leaf inserted in her "Summer on the Lakes." Much precious wisdom is learned, many cruel scars are received, in these sincere, though often fickle, connections—these inebriating preludes to the sober strain of existence. There is a touch of sadness in the thought that the earliest friendship of youth must so frequently fade and cease. But there is comfort for that sadness in the knowledge that the fair flowers of April are but precursors of those which June shall fill with the richer fragrance of a more royal fire.
Oft first love must perish
Like the poor snow-drop, boyish love of Spring,
Born pale to die, and strew the path of triumph
Before the imperial glowing of the rose,
Whose passion conquers all.
Some of the conditions for friendship between women are furnished in a high degree in the secluded intimacy of conventual life, with its stimulus of solitude and religious romance. Under such circumstances, Madame Roland, in her youth, had an ardent union with Angélique Boufflers. She had likewise a precious friendship of this kind with the two sisters, Sophie and Henrietta Cannet. Her description of the sisters' arrival at the convent, of the sensation which they made, and of her own love for them, is extrernel, graphic and spirited. Her letters to them, extending through many years, and reaching in number to near two hundred and fifty, give us one of the best record of the value and joy of a friendship whose parties, b: freely unbosoming themselves to each other, assuage every pang and double every delight.
Among the crowds of nuns, young ladies of noble families and refined education, early set apart to this mode of existence, with all their glowing sentiments and dreams undispelled by the cold touch of the world, the inviting and innocent vent of sisterly love must often have been welcomed as a heavenly boon, and improved with enthusiasm. Also a deep affection, mixed of many choice ingredients of authority, dependence, admiration, sympathy, and tenderness, must frequently have sprung up, and been nourished to an intense development, between Lady Superiors and their pupils, Abbesses and nuns. The relation of Mother Agnes Arnauld and Jacqueline Pascal exhibits an instance. The correspondence and memoirs of Madame de Chantal afford many striking examples. In the Order of the Visitation, founded by her, and whose outlines were drawn by St. Francis of Sales, the element of Christian friendship plays a large part. The Lady Superior has an aide, a sister chosen by herself, to admonish and warn her of her faults, and to receive all complaints from those who might feel that she had wronged or aggrieved them. The duty of the directress of the novices is to exercise them in obedience, sweetness, and modesty; to clear from their minds all those follies, whims, sickly tendernesses, by which their characters might be enfeebled; to instruct them in the practice of virtue, the best methods of prayer and meditation; and to give them a wise and patient sympathy and guidance in every exigency.
Madame de Longueville and Angeliaue Arnauld formed an impassioned friendship, worthy of mention as one of the richest on record—after the conversion of the former, and her retirement from the world. Unquestionably, if, at the waving of a wand, all the secrets of conventual life, of the female religious orders, could be revealed, a host of friendships would swarm to light, many of them as pure as those which link the white-robed angels. Yet, in affirming this, one need not be supposed ignorant of the meagre and repulsive phase of the life sometimes led in the convent, its mechanical ritual, its cold rules, and its irritating espionage.
The unions of heart formed between queens, princesses, or other great ladies, and their favorite maids of honor or their chosen companions, when these happen to be especially congenial, compose a still further class of female friendships. They are very frequent, and are especially attractive, on account of the scenes of rank and splendor, conspicuous romance and tragedy, amidst which they occur. Kadidasa, in his "Sakoontahi," that exquisite picture of ancient Hindu life, shows us the beautiful akoontaltl, constantly accompanied by her two confidential friends, Priyamvada and Anastiya. In the biographies of royal houses, it is a common occurrence to meet with an unhappy queen who was so fortunate as to find refuge and consolation for the sorrows inflicted on her by an unfaithful or cruel husband, in the ever-ready sympathy of some attendant, some true and loving woman of her court. In the annals of courts, the examples of jealousies and quarrels, of confidants turning rivals, and of maids undermining and ousting their mistresses, are also unhappily frequent. So, for instance, Maintenon displaced her patroness, Montespan; so Anne of Austria, after years of utter devotion, successively alienated her self-forgetful friends, Madame de Chevreuse, Mademoiselle de la Fayette, and the incomparable Mademoiselle de Hautefort; so did the unhappy Marie de Medicis, after half a life-time of lavished fondness, forsake her faithful Eleonora Galigäi, and turn against her in the cruel selfishness of misfortune and danger.
Catherine Picard was the beloved companion of Blanche of Lancaster. Her sister, Philippa Picard, was the favorite of Philippa, queen of Edward the Third. She was so attached to her mistress, that she kept her lover, the immortal Chaucer, waiting for her hand eight years, until the death of the queen set her free. Catherine Douglas, maid of honor to the Lady Jane Beaufort, wife of James the First of Scotland, showed her love for her queen by a deed which history and song will never forget to celebrate. When the assassins were forcing their way into the royal chamber, Catherine thrust her beautiful arm into the stanchion of the door, as a bolt, and held it there till it was broken.
Mary Stuart was blessed with the society of four maids of honor, lovely girls of rank, about her own age, named for her, and appointed from childhood to be her companions. Their names were Mary Flemming, Mary Seton, Mary Beton, and Mary Livingstone; and they were called the Queen's Marys. Through her unhappy fortunes, imprisonments and all, they remained with her, and ardently loved her, whatever her errors may have been. With the exception of Mary Seton, who, on account of illness, had withdrawn to a convent in France, they accepted, for the sake of supporting and comforting her, even the anguish of witnessing her execution.
The attendants of Queen Elizabeth, on the other hand, detested her. When, in her age and ugliness, she would no longer look in a glass, it is said they used to amuse themselves with powdering her cheeks, and rouging her nose. Elizabeth, as a woman, no doubt hated Mary for her fascinations more than, as a queen, she feared her for her political pretensions; and, in spite of every justifying argument, it must be said, that she treated her with cruel treachery. In their earlier days, Elizabeth sent Mary a most rare diamond ring as a pledge of her friendship, and accompanied it with earnest promises of aid and sympathy. Aubrey describes this ring as consisting of separate parts, which, united, formed the device of two right hands supporting a heart between them, the heart itself being composed of two diamonds held together by a spring. The Queen of Scots, in her final distress, dispatched this token to Elizabeth by a trusty messenger, and in return was ordered to the block. Mrs. Jameson eloquently thinks, we must feel that the scale was set even, when we remember how Mary was loved, how Elizabeth was hated, and died at last in loneliness, writhing on the floor like a crushed spider. However much to be regretted, it is yet natural that the powerful facts and logic of the later historians, like Froude, should find our prejudices so stubbornly set in favor of Mary, and against Elizabeth. They will change slowly; but I suppose they must, in a large degree, change. Sarah Jennings, famous as that Duchess of Marlborough whom Pope so fearfully satirized under the name of Atossa, having been selected as lady in waiting of Queen Anne, was immediately taken to her bosom. The queen asked no subserviency: "Afriend is what I most want," she said. They laid aside all titles, and addressed each other as equals under the assumed names of Mrs. Freeman and Mrs. Morley. This lackadaisical relation subsisted for several years. At length Mrs. Morley and Mrs. Freeman disappeared in the Queen and the Duchess. The familiarity and arrogance of "Queen Sarah" became insufferable to Queen Anne, and the quondam friends parted as irreconcilable foes. Swift says of Queen Anne, that she "had not a sufficient stock of amity for more than one person at a time." She would always have a favorite, now, Miss Jennings; afterwards, Miss Hill, better known as Lady Masham, the earnest friend of Locke; then, somebody else.
In the terrible romance of the life of Marie Antoinette, the deserved friendships and the undeserved hatreds that clustered around the stately, affectionate, ill-fated queen, are clothed with exceeding interest. In the memoirs of the Countess D'Adhemar, the most beloved and steadfast of her attendants, who was equally her watchful servant and her trusted friend, all the details of these attractions and aversions may be found, drawn as only a woman would draw them. Madame Geniis, whose overtures for familiarity were repulsed, plotted against her with spiteful vindictiveness. Madame Campan, whom the queen loved and took into her service, in return idolized and sought to shield and bless her. By far the first, however, in the heart of the queen, was the Princess Lamballe, a young widow, whose charms of person and of character made her one of the most universally admired women of that period. The queen revived for the princess the office of superintendent of the household, that she might live at Versailles. Their attachment, based on mutual esteem and tenderness, and nurtured by many events, grew enthusiastic. It became the fashion for every lady to have a friend, who accompanied her wherever she went, to whom morning notes were written, and with whom tea was sipped, and the evening spent, after the pattern of Antoinette and Lamballe. The princess showed herself as heroic in devotion to her friend, amidst the horrible carnival which surrounded the close of their lives, as she had been modest, gentle, and sympathizing in the brilliant season that preceded. A few days before the terrible crisis of the Revolution burst on the head of the queen herself, the princess, who occupied a room in the palace, adjoining that of her friend, that she might share all her tears and dangers, was called for a short time to the Chateau de Vernon, by the illness of her aged father-in-law. Marie seized the opportunity to write a letter to her friend, begging her to take care of herself and not return. "Your heart would be too deeply wounded, you would have too many tears to shed over my misfortunes, you who love me so tenderly. Adieu, my dear Lamballe; I am always thinking of you; and you know I never change."
The princess hastened back to the side of her imperilled mistress. With unfaltering fondness and resolution she clung to her through the sack which filled the palace with ruins and blood; through the tedious and brutal examinations in the Assembly; and through the fearful imprisonment in the Temple, until the jailers violently tore her from the arms of her sobbing friend. In vain the ferocious wretches in power strove to wring from her something prejudicial to the queen. The brave and beautiful woman preferred death; and was delivered over to the crowd to be murdered. Madame de Lebel, to whom the princess had been very kind, was going to inquire after the fate of her beloved benefactress, when she heard the howls of an approaching procession. She ran into the shop of a hairdresser; and was quickly followed by one of the mob, who ordered the master of the shop to dress the head of Madame de Lamballe. The princess was celebrated for the length and richness of her fine, golden locks. At this very moment, concealed among their bright, clustering masses, was found the letter from Antoinette, quoted above. The barber took the poor, disfigured head into his hands, cleansed the face from blood, and arranged and powdered the ringlets. The ruffian said, "Antoinette will recognize it now;" and, replacing it on the point of his pike, moved forward with the mob to the prison of the unhappy queen, before whose windows they elevated the appalling trophy, at the same time shrieking to her to look on it. After this experience, and others scarcely less revolting, we may well believe that the high-souled daughter of Maria Theresa welcomed the executioner's axe as a blessed relief. We see her, clad in the pale royalty of her personal beauty and grief, refusing insult, moving, in the death- cart, through the yelling masses of the populace, to her doom, like a goddess, incapable of degradation, borne in a car above an infuriated herd of apes, who vainly struggle to drag her down to themselves. Madame Salvage de Faverolles had a passionate faculty of admiration. She was fascinated with Madame Weamer, who was not much drawn to her, though she always treated her with kindness. Her unclaimed affection at length found its home in Queen Hortense, the daughter of Josephine, and the mother of Louis Napoleon. She was inseparable from her, and was called, with a touch of satire or humor, her body-guard. She identified herself with every enterprise, hope, or thought of her friend; accompanied her on every journey; watched over her in her last sickness, night and day, with heroic fidelity; and, after her death, executed her will in all particulars. The present Emperor of France has always had the credit of an ardent love for his mother. A just sentiment of gratitude would seem to require him—if he has not already done it—to enshrine, with tributary honor, close beside the ashes of the unhappy queen of Holland, those of Madame Salvage, the most unwearied and inalienable of all her friends.
PASSING on from the classes of feminine friendships now described, we come to individual instances of this affection in pairs of women. The young Beatrice Portinari, and Giovanna, that chosen companion of hers, who, for the singular freshness of her beauty, was called by the Florentines, Primavera, the Spring, are immortalized as a pair of friends by the divine touch of Dante, in his "Vita Nuova," where he mentions them under the names of Monna Vanna and Monna Bice. Very likely they were schoolgirls together, who did not suffer the fondness engendered in their shared studies and painted hopes and opening dreams of life to cease with the close, of that enchanted era.
Lady Dorothea Sydney and Lady Sophia Murray were a pair of friends whom it must have been delightful to contemplate, and is still, in a paler way, delightful to recall by literary reminiscence. They were the Sacharissa and Amoret of Waller. He dedicates a graceful poem to their friendship. These lines Occur in it:
Not the silver doves that fly
Yoked to Cytherea's car;
Not the wings that lift so high,
And convey her son so far,
Are so lovely, sweet, and fair,
Or do more ennoble love,
Are so choicely matched a pair,
Or with more consent do move.
Regina Collier and Katherine Phillips were, for a long period, a happy pair of friends. Friendship held so large a place in the life and writings of the latter lady that a brief sketch of her experience, and of its expression, will be interesting. The Mrs. Katherine Phillips, to whom Jeremy Taylor dedicated his celebrated discourse on the "Offices and Measures of Friendship," enjoyed a great reputation among her contemporaries, in the middle of the seventeenth century, and in the succeeding generation, as a woman of accomplishments and genius. Now that she is almost forgotten, it surprises one to read the extravagant published compliments lavished on her, in her life-time, by so many distinguished persons. The most remarkable peculiarity, alike of her character and of her literary productions, is the extraordinary prominence in them of the sentiment of friendship. She seems nearly all her life to have been enamored of this experience. Her affectionate spirit drew people to her by its strong charms, and still breathes vividly in her neglected pages. The overcharged and somewhat fantastic ideal of friendship which she unweariedly strove to realize in her relations with various persons, was so sincere and earnest in heart, that no one, who appreciates it, can suffer himself to ridicule, though he may smile at, its apparent affectation on the surface. Its deep ear nestness is proved in her life and character, as set forth by her associates: its superficial fancifullness appears in the sentimental names she was pleased to give herself and her friends. She was Orinda: her friends were Palmon, Poliarchus, Philaster, Silvander, Polycrite, Valeria, Lucasia, Rosania. Friendship is prominently treated in nearly every thing that she wrote. Her friendships with men, Jeremy Taylor, Francis Finch, Sir Charles Cotterel, and others, were as happy and unbroken as they were fervent and pure. Her long correspondence with Cotterel was published under the title, "Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus." When Finch had written his treatise on friendship, Mrs. Phillips addressed to him a poem, inscribed, "To the Noble Palmon, on his Incomparable Discourse of Friendship:"
Temples and statues time will eat away;
And tombs, like their inhabitants, decay:
But here Palm non lives, and so he must
When marbles crumble to forgotten dust.
There is also in her volume of poems, another one addressed to "Mr.
Francis Finch, the Excellent Palmmon:"
'Twas he that rescued gasping friendship,
when The bell tolled for her funeral with men:
'Twas he that made friends more than lovers burn,
And then made love to sacred friendship turn.
Mrs. Phillips was less fortunate in the sequels to her friendships with persons of her own sex; though, while they lasted, they were, at least on her side, moreardent and entire. Her principal female friends were Regina Collier, whom she named Rosania, and Mrs. Anne Owen, designated, in all their communications, as Lucasia. Many of her poems were written to these two idolized friends. She concludes a most glowing celebration of her union with the former, thus:
A dew shall dwell upon our tomb,
Of such a quality
That fighting armies, thither come,
Shall reconciled be.
We'll ask no epitaph, but say,
ORINDA and ROSANIA.
The exaggerated pitch of sentiment in Orinda, the sensitive and absorbing demands of her affection, and, perhaps, some lightness, or even falsity, on the part of Rosania, led to a rupture. The indignant and unhappy Orinda expressed her sorrows in several heartfelt poems, one of which bears the superscription, "To the Queen of Inconstancy, Regina Collier:"
Unworthy, since thou hast decreed
Thy love and honor both shall bleed,
My friendship could not choose to die
In better time or company.
Another is entitled, "On Rosania's Apostacy and Lucasia's Friendship." For the injured Orinda tried to find solace for the loss of an old, in the arms of a new, friend; or, rather, by transferring to one, in intensified unity, the love and attention she had before divided between two. She writes "To my Lucasia, in Defence of Declared Friendship,"
I did not live until this time Crowned my felicity,
When I could say, without a crime,
I am not thine but thee.
And, again, in "Friendship's Mystery, To my dearest Lucasia,"
Our hearts are mutual victims laid,
While they, such power in friendship lies,
Are altars, priests, and offerings made;
And each heart which thus kindly dies,
Grows deathless by the sacrifice.
For a good while this attachment kept its keen flavor, and was only heightened by sympathy in misfortunes and distress. Cowley celebrated it in the following lines:
The fame of friendship which so long had told
Of three or four illustrious names of old,
Till hoarse and weary of the tale she grew,
Rejoices now to have got a new,
A new and more surprising story,
Of fair Lucasia and Orinda's glory.
Mr. Owen, Lucasia's husband, died. Mrs. Phillips went from a distance to visit her bereaved friend, and they fell into each other's arms with copious tears. In a poem, Orinda describes this meeting under the beautiful image of two sister rivulets, which, creeping from their separate springs, in secret currents under ground, burst together at last, swollen by their own embraces to a flood. Lucasia marries again, and becomes Lady Dungannon. This marriage, by the new scenes, ties, and pleasures it introduces, proves the undoing of poor Orinda's happiness. Lucasia cools towards her, allows her less space in her heart than she craves; and finally we have a reluctant farewell poem, bearing the ominous title, "Orinda to Lucasia. Parting, October, 1661, at London:
"Adieu, dear object of my love's excess,
And with thee all my hopes of happiness.
I to resign thy dear converse submit,
Since I can neither keep nor merit it:
I ask no inconvenient kindness now,
To move thy passion or to cloud thy brow;
And thou wilt satisfy my boldest plea
By some few soft remembrances of me.
The lines may remind one of the pathetic sentiment expressed almost two hundred years later by a kindred heart. Eugénie de Guérin says, "In the moment of union, the seed of separation is sown. Cruel illusion, the belief in friendships that are eternal. The knowledge is bitter, but let me learn the lesson." Yes: learn the lesson indeed, so far as it is true; but do not exaggerate it, nor let it cast too wide and dense a shadow over the rest of life.
Elizabeth Rowe seems to have had a heart peculiarly alive to tender attachments. And she was happy in winning and retaining many friends. Her superiors, her equals, her servants, all loved her as one of the best of women. Her "Friendship in Death, in Twenty Letters from the Dead to the Living," enjoyed great celebrity in its day. The beautiful Countess Hertford was her enthusiastic friend. She exchanged many visits with her, again and again leaving her own stately mansion to abide in the humble house of her admired friend; and she sacredly cherished her memory after death had parted them. Thomson, in the original form of his "Hymn to Solitude," celebrated these friends as "Philomela and the gentle-looking Hertford." Lady Hertford had so affectionate a heart, so rich a mind, so gracious a mien, and was so tenacious in her fondnesses, that she captivated the souls of many of her contemporaries. She was the patron of Thomson, who, in some exquisite lines, dedicated his "Spring" to her. She rewarded the young Elizabeth Carter for a poem in honor of Mrs. Rowe, with her steadfast love and her correspondence. But her most important friendship was that with the Countess of Pomfret. This ran through the largest part of her life, was a source of the greatest comfort and edification to them both, and has left a monument of its unwavering sincerity and fullness in the long series of their published letters.
Mrs. Montague's passion for friendships led her to form intimacies with many of the most distinguished persons of her time, both men and women. When she was Elizabeth Robinson, at the age of twelve she exchanged her doll for a living friend, in the person of Lady Margaret Harley, who became the celebrated Duchess of Portland. This intimacy was kept up to the end of their lives, by constant letters, visits, and other endearments. The admirable Mrs. Barbauld, Hannah More, and Elizabeth Carter, were also her cherished friends. She was the founder of the far-famed "Blue-Stocking Club." Few friendships, it is certain, have ever existed between women more thoroughly sound and comforting than that of Hannah More and Mrs. Garrick. After the death of the great tragedian, Hannah spent a large part of her time with his widow. Mrs. Garrick fondly called Miss More her chaplain. As friends of Elizabeth Carter, besides those already named, Pulteney, Earl of Bath, Mr. Montague, Dr. Johnson, Sir George Lyttleton, Archbishop Seeker, Miss Sutton, Mrs. Vesey, and, above all, Miss Catherine Talbot, deserve to be especially Mentioned. Miss Carter and Miss Talbot corresponded regularly for thirty years, and shared almost every secret. Not a single misunderstanding occurred to mar the placidity of their solid confidence and good will. It is a pleasure, even at this day, to look through their voluminous, rather stiff and prosy, but entirely sensible and affectionate correspondence.
There was an ardent friendship, of which the details have perished, between the once famous novelist and poet, Charlotte Smith, and the lovely, unhappy, romantic Henrietta, Lady O'Niel.
Twelve times the moon, that rises red
O'er yon tall wood of shadowy pine,
Has filled her orb, since low was laid,
My Harriet, that sweet form of thine!
No more thy friendship soothes to rest
This wearied spirit, tempest-tossed:
The cares that weigh upon my breast
Are doubly felt since thou art lost.
But, ere that wood of shadowy pine
Twelve times shall yon full orb behold,
This sickening heart, that bleeds for thine,
My Harriet, may like thine be cold!
Anna Seward, considerably admired in her own generation, as a beauty and as a writer, though the great faults of her judgment and style are fast bringing oblivion over her pages, was a devoted friend of that beautiful Honora Sneyd of whom Major Andre was the rejected lover. It was a profound sympathy with both the parties which prompted the composition of her once famous "Monody on Major Andre." One is sorry to learn, that, on the marriage of Honora with Mr. Edgeworth, and her removal to Ireland, her friendship for Anna, as often happens in such cases, died of a slow consumption. But, on the other side, the early affection never ceased to glow. Miss Seward writes to one of her lady friends, "When my attachment to Cornet sunk in the snow-drifts of his altered conduct, Honora Sneyd, educated in our family from five years old, was commencing woman, and only eight years younger than myself; more lovely, more amiable, more interesting than any thing I ever saw in the female form. Death had deprived me of my beloved and only sister, who had shared with me in the delightful task of instructing our angelic pupil; and, when disappointed love threw all the energies of my soul into the channel of friendship, Honora was its chief object. The charms of her society, when her advancing youth gave equality to our connection, made Lichfield an Edenic scene to me. Ah, how deeply was I a fellow sufferer with Major Andre on her marriage! We both lost her for ever."
The following verses, written by Anna to Honora, from the seaside, are pleasing in the picture they present and in the sentiment they enshrine. The prophecy they make has also been fulfilled:
I write Honora on the sparkling sand!
The envious waves forbid the trace to stay:
Honora's name again adorns the strand,
Again the waters bear their prize away!
So Nature wrote her charms upon thy face,
The cheek's bright bloom, the lip's envermeilled dye,
And every gay and every witching grace
That youth's warm hours and beauty's stores supply.
But Time's stern tide, with cold Oblivion's wave,
Shall soon dissolve each fair, each fading charm;
E'en Nature's self, so powerful, cannot save
Her own rich gifts from this o'erwhelming harm.
Love and the Muse can boast superior power;
Indelible the letters they shall frame:
They yield to no inevitable hour,
But on enduring tablets write thy name.
Romney, in his fancy-picture of Serena reading by candle-light, accidentally produced an accurate likeness of this lost friend of Miss Seward's heart. "Drawing his abstract idea of perfect loveliness, the form and the face of Honora Sneyd rose beneath his pencil." This beauteous resemblance Anna hung in her room, and made her constant companion. "It contributes to endear, as the bright reality endeared, in times long past, this pleasant mansion to my affections. Thus are those dear lineaments ever present to my sight, retouching the traits of memory, over which indistinctness is apt to steal." Again she says, "The luxury of mournful delight with which I continually gaze upon that form, is one of the most precious comforts of my life." Years after, in giving to Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Ponsonby an account of a recent journey she had made, Miss Seward writes, "The stars glimmered in the lake of Weston, as we travelled by its side: but their light did not enable me to distinguish the church, beneath the floor of whose porch rests the mouldered form of my heart, dear Honora. Yet of our approach to that consecrated spot my spirit felt all the mournful consciousness." In her poem on the death of her intimate friend. Andre, Miss Seward had written,
O Washington! I thought thee great and good,
Nor knew thy Nero-thirst for guiltless blood,
Severe to use the power that Fortune gave,
Thou cool, determined Murderer of the Brave!
It is interesting to read in a letter, written by her long afterwards to the Ladies of Llangollen, "A few years after peace was signed between this country and America, an officer introduced himself, commissioned by Washington to call upon me, and to assure me from the general himself, that no circumstance of his life had been so mortifying as to be censured in the "Monody on Andre" as the pitiless author of his ignominions fate; that he had labored to save him; that he requested my attention to papers on the subject, which he had sent by this officer for my perusal. On examining them, I found they entirely acquitted the general. They filled me with contrition for the rash injustice of my censure."
An extraordinary instance of feminine friendship, of the courage and sacrifice the affections will prompt in woman, was afforded in the relation of Anna Seward to the Countess of Northesk. The countess, afflicted by a malady which had baffled the most skilful physicians in London, was drawn to Lichfield by the fame of Dr. Darwin. She staid for some time at his house, and awakened the deepest interest in his family and friends. Miss Seward was especially attracted by her engaging manners and disposition, as well as by sympathy for her peril, and for the distress of her husband and children. She was unwearied in efforts to alleviate the sufferings and the weary hours of the countess, whose fervent gratitude re-acted to enhance to enthusiasm the interest of the fair ministrant. One day, Dr. Darwin suggested the possibility of effecting a cure of his patient by transfusing into her veins a supply of vital blood, freshly taken from some healthy person. Anna, then in the full bloom of youth, instantly offered her own veins. The project was abandoned from want of sufficiently delicate instruments. But the countess was deeply affected by the generous offer of her friend, and repaid it with the most affectionate attachment. She was restored to health; and, on returning home, sent Miss Seward the gift of a set of jewels, in token of her love. They continued to correspond with each other until the tragic death of the countess by the accidental burning of her dress.
The most remarkable instance in history, perhaps, of a pair of female friends is the romantic example of the Ladies of Llangollen, whose story, widely renowned two generations ago, is now obliterated from popular knowledge, save in meagre literary allusions.
A little after the middle of the eighteenth century, Lady Eleanor Butler and Miss Sarah Ponsonby, two young women of wealth and high station, formed an extreme mutual attachment, and were possessed with an ardent desire to forsake the world, and devote their lives to each other. Taking measures accordingly, they departed to an obscure retreat in the country. Their relatives frowned on this eccentricity, traced them out in their hiding-place, and, despite their protestations, separated them, and brought them back. But they soon effected a second elopement, which proved a successful and permanent one. Confiding the place of their flight only to a single faithful servant, they sacrificed, in the prime of their lives, the prizes and the glare of the fashionable world, and settled down in a secret nook of beauty and peace. In the romantic Valley of Llangollen, in Wales, one of the sweetest and quietest spots on earth, they bought a charming cottage, fitted it up with every comfort, and adorned it with exquisite taste. Here, in this remote and lovely haunt, amply provided with books, pictures, and other means of culture, giving themselves up to the enjoyment of their own society, they lived together in uninterrupted contentment for nearly threescore years. For a long period, their neighbors, ignorant of their names, knew them only as the "Ladies of the Vale." For a quarter of a century, it is said, they never spent twenty-four hours at a time out of their happy valley.
They seem never to have fallen out, never to have wearied of each other, never to have repented of their repudiation of public life. By books and correspondence, they kept up a close connection with the brilliant world they had deserted. The romance of their action, penetrating far and wide, through cultivated circles, brought many distinguished visitors to their hospitality, literary and titular celebrities from all parts of Great Britain, likewise from the continent. Many of these became fast friends to them; and, in letters to other persons, speak of their fine qualities of sentiment and taste, their engaging traits of character and manners. Madame Geniis writes rapturously of her tarry with them, the charms of their residence, and especially of the Aeolian harp, which she there heard for the first time, amid the befitting associations of the mystic legends and natural minstrelsy of Welsh landscape. Mrs. Tighe also, the winsome but unfortunate authoress of the "Loves of Psyche and Cupid," on departing from their cottage after a delighted stay, left upon her table a beautiful sonnet addressed to them.
But Miss Anna Seward; between whom and the pair of friends a warm affection was cherished, has given the fullest description known to us of the home and habits of the Ladies of Llangollen. She thought that the compliment Hayley paid to Miers, the miniature painter,
"His magic pencil in its narrow space
Pours the full portion of uninjured grace"
might be transferred to the talents and exertion which converted a cottage in two acres and a half of turnip ground to a fairy palace amid the bowers of Calypso. It consisted of four small apartments; the exquisite cleanliness of the kitchen, its utensils and auxiliary offices, vying with the finished elegance of the light-some little dining-room, as that contrasted with the gloomy grace of the library into which it opened. This room was fitted up in the Gothic style, the door and large sash windows of that form—the latter of painted glass, shedding a dim religious light. Candles were seldom admitted into this apartment. The ingenious friends had invented a kind of prismatic lantern, which occupied the whole elliptic arch of the Gothic door. This lantern was of cut glass, variously colored, inclosing two lamps with their reflectors. The light it imparted resembled that of a volcano—sanguine and solemn. It was assisted by two glowworm lamps, that, in little marble reservoirs, stood on the opposite chimney-piece. These supplied the place of the daylight, when the dusk of evening sabled, or night wholly involved the solitude. A large Aeolian harp was fixed in one of the windows; and, when the weather permitted them to be open, it breathed its deep tones to the gale, swelling and softening as that rose and fell.
Ah me! what hand can touch the strings so fine?
Who up the lofty diapason roll
Such sweet, such sad, such solemn airs divine,
And let them down again into the soul?
This saloon of the two Minervas, Miss Seward says, contained the finest editions, superbly bound, and arranged in neat wire cases, of the best authors in prose and verse, which the English, French, and Italian languages boast. Over them hung the portraits in miniature, and some in larger ovals, of the favored friends of these celebrated votaries to the sentiment which exalted the characters of Theseus and Peirithous, of David and Jonathan.
The wavy and shaded gravel-walk which encircled this elysium was enriched with curious shrubs and flowers. It was nothing in extent, every thing in grace and beauty and in variety of foliage. In one part of it you turned upon a small knoll, which overhung a deep, hollow glen. At the tangled bottom of this glen, a frothing brook leaped and clamored over the rough stones in its channel. A large spreading beech canopied the knoll, and beneath its boughs a semilunar seat admitted four persons. It had a fine effect to enter the Gothic library at dusk, as Miss Seward says she first entered it. The prismatic lantern diffused a light gloomily glaring, assisted by the paler flames of the little lamps on the chimney-piece. Through the open windows was shown a darkling view of the lawn, of the concave shrubbery of tall cypresses, yews, laurels, and lilacs, of the wooded amphitheatre on the opposite hill, and of the gray, barren mountain which forms the background. The evening star had risen above the mountain; and the airy harp rang loudly to the breeze, completing the magic of the scene.
And what of the enchantresses themselves, beneath whose wand these graces arose? Lady Eleanor was of middle height, and somewhat over- plump, her face round and fair, with the glow of luxuriant health. She had not fine features, but they were agreeable, enthusiasm in her eye, hilarity and benevolence in her smile. She had uncommon strength and fidelity of memory, an exhaustless fund of knowledge, and her taste for works of imagination, particularly for poetry, was very awakened; and she expressed all she felt with an ingenuous ardor, at which cold-spirited beings stared. Both the ladies read and spoke most of the modern languages, and were warm admirers of the Italian poets, especially of Dante. Miss Ponsonby, somewhat taller than her friend, was neither slender nor otherwise, but very graceful. Easy, elegant, yet pensive, was her address; her voice, kind and low. A face rather long than round, a complexion clear, but without bloom, with a countenance whose soft melancholy lent it peculiar interest. If her features were not beautiful, they were very attractive and feminine. Though the pensive spirit within permitted not her dimples to make her smile mirthful, they increased its sweetness, and, consequently, her power of engaging the affections. We could see, through the veil of shading reserve, that all the talents and accomplishments which enriched the mind of Lady Eleanor, existed with equal power in her charming friend. Such are the portraits drawn by Miss Seward, of the two extraordinary women, who, in the bosom of their deep retirement, were sought by the first characters of the age, both as to rank and talents. To preserve that retirement from too frequent invasion, they were obliged to be somewhat coy of approach. Yet they were generous in a select hospitality; and when, toward the end of their lives, they welcomed a coming guest, Miss Martineau says it was a singular sight to see these ancient ladies, in their riding habits, with their rolled and powdered hair, their beaver hats, and their notions and manners of the last century.
When we consider their intellectual resources, their energy and industry, their interludes of company and correspondence, we need not be surprised at the assertion they made to one of their most intimate visitors, that neither the long summer's day, nor winter's night, nor weeks of imprisoning snows, had ever inspired one weary sensation, one wish of returning to the world they had abandoned.
Anna Seward had so interested Lady Butler and Miss Ponsonby in the character of her dear friend, Honora Sneyd, by the sonnet addressed to her, which she showed them, by impassioned descriptions of her loveliness, as well as by the celebrated poem on the fate of Major Andre, that the two ladies were desirous of possessing a portrait of the deceased beauty.
With great pains, Anna succeeded in obtaining for them a copy of what was a perfect image of her, Romney's ideal picture of Serena in the "Triumphs of Temper." Writing on it, "Such was Honora Sneyd," she had it framed and glazed, and sent it as a gift to the Ladies of Llangollen. They received it with delight, and hung it in a prominent position, where the fair giver afterward had the pleasure of gazing on it with romantic emotion.
Miss Seward paid several happy tributes in verse to her admired friends. One of these, written at the close of a prolonged visit, began thus:
Oh, Cambrian Tempe! Oft with transport hailed,
I leave thee now, as I did ever leave
Thee and thy peerless mistresses, with heart
Where lively gratitude and fond regret For mastery strive.
She also published, in a little volume by itself, an enthusiastic poem in praise of the Cambrian Arden, Llangollen Valley, adorned with an engraving of the landscape as seen from the home of its Rosalind and Celia. They fully appreciated her affection, and returned it. They sent her the gift of a jewel consisting of the head and lyre of Apollo, making a ring and seal in one. In acknowledgment of this, the pleased and grateful poet wrote, "I have to thank you, dearest ladies, for a beautiful but too costly present. It is a fine gem in itself, and a rich and elegant circlet for the finger."
When Lady Butler and Miss Ponsonby left their splendid family residences in Ireland to seek in Wales a retirement where they might spend their days in the culture of letters and friendship, a faithful and affectionate servant who pined for them, after a few months of their absence, set out to search for them in England. She had no clew to direct her pursuit; since, to avoid solicitations to return, they had kept their place of abode secret even from their nearest relatives. Learning, however, of her attempt, they sent for her. She went, and was their fond servitor until her death, thirty years afterward. Miss Seward once writes to Lady Eleanor, "I was concerned to hear that you had lately been distressed by the illness and alarmed for the life of your good Euryclea. That she is recovering, I rejoice. The loss of a domestic, faithful and affectionate as Orlando's Adam, must have cast more than a transient gloom over the Cambrian Arden: the Rosalind and Celia of real life give Llangollen Valley a right to that title." When this endeared servant died, her mourning mistresses buried her in the grave which they had prepared for themselves, and inscribed above her a cordial tribute in verse.
Drawn by the pleasing sentiment that invests the story of these ladies, the writer, being then in England, made a pilgrimage from London to Llangollen in the early autumn of 1865.
It was Saturday afternoon when I arrived at the little Welsh inn. The next morning I found my way to the classic cottage. The fingers of Time had indeed been busy on it. The vestiges of its former glory were still apparent, but the ornaments were crumbled and dim. The prismatic lantern over the door was a mixture of garishness and dust. The bowers were broken, the vines and plants dead, the walks draggled and uneven, the gates rickety, the fences tottering or prostrate. The numerous tokens of art and care in the past made the present ruinousness and desolation more pathetic. I could not help recalling the final couplet of Miss Seward's poem, prophesying the fame of this place:
While all who honor virtue gently mourn Llangollen's vanished Pair, and wreathe their sacred urn.
Threading the briery dell, and following the brook that prattled down the steep slope, I climbed the hill which directly overhangs the hamlet. It was church-time as I sat down on the top, and slowly drank in the charms of that celebrated landscape. To such a scene, at such an hour, the very heart-strings grow. The fields were clothed with a dense velvety-green. Across the narrow glen, on the strange cone of Dinas Bran, frowned threateningly, in dark mass, unsoftened by distance, the huge, bare fragments of an old castle, the immemorial type of an iron age when the hearts of men were iron. Beneath my feet, the vapors of the morning floated here and there in the sunshine, like torn folds of a satin gauze. A hundred smokes curled from the village chimneys, and the tones of the sabbath bells were wafted up to me with no mixture of profane toils. The very cattle seemed to know the holy day, and to browse and gaze, or ruminate and look around, with an unusual assurance of repose and satisfaction. But the spell must be broken, however reluctantly.
Descending into the village, just as the religious service was ended, I went into the churchyard, and copied from the triangular tomb in which the Ladies of Llangollen sleep, with their favorite servant, amid the magical loveliness of the pastoral scenery, these three inscriptions. On the first side:
IN MEMORY OF MRS. MARY CARRYL,
Deceased 22 November, 1809,
This Monument is erected by Eleanor Butler
And Sarah Ponsonby, of Plas Newydd, in this Parish.
Released from earth and all its transient woes,
She, whose remains beneath this stone repose,
Steadfast in faith resigned her parting breath,
Looked up with Christian joy, and smiled in death.
Patient, industrious, faithful, generous, kind,
Her conduct left the proudest far behind.
Her virtues dignified her humble birth,
And raised her mind above this sordid earth.
Attachment (sacred bond of grateful breasts)
Extinguished but with life, this tomb attests;
Reared by two friends who will her loss bemoan,
Till with her ashes here shall rest their own.
On the second side:
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF
The Right Honorable
LADY ELEANOR CHARLOTTE BUTLER,
Late of Plas Newydd, in this parish,
Deceased 2d June, 1829,
Aged Ninety Years,
Daughter of the Sixteenth, Sister of the Seventeenth
Earls of Ormonde and Ossory,
Aunt to the late and to the present
Marquess of Ormonde.
Endeared to her many friends by an almost
Unequalled excellence of heart, and by manners
Worthy of her illustrious birth, the admiration
And delight of a very numerous acquaintance,
From a brilliant vivacity of mind, undiminished
To the latest period of a prolonged existence.
Her amiable condescension and benevolence
Secured the grateful attachment of those
By whom they had been so long and so
Extensively experienced: her various perfections,
Crowned by the most pious and cheerful
Submission to the Divine Will, can only be
Appreciated where, it is humbly believed, they are
Now enjoying their eternal reward; and by her.
Of whom for more than fifty years they constituted
That happiness which, through our blessed Redeemer,
She trusts will be renewed when this Tomb
Shall have closed over its Latest Tenant.
On the third side:
SARAH PONSONBY departed this life On the 9th of December, 1831, aged 76.
She did not long survive her beloved companion,
Lady Eleanor Butler, with whom she had lived in this
Valley for more than half a century of uninterrupted friendship
But they shall no more return to their house, neither
Shall their place know them any more.
In that sequestered valley, how quietly, with what blessed joy and peace, their lives kept the even tenor of their way Standing beside their grave, in the shadow of the old church, while the little Welsh river ran whispering by, and thinking how the eyes and hearts in which so long and happy a love had burned, were now fallen to atoms, and literally mixed in the dust below, as once they morally mixed in life above, I felt, What a pity that those thus blessed cannot live forever! Then I thought, No, it is better as it is. They were happy. They drained the best cup existence can offer. When the world was becoming an infirmary, and the song of the grasshopper a burden, it was meet that they should sleep. Those only are to be pitied who die without the experience of affection.
This attempt to revive the story and brighten the urn of the Ladies of Llangollen may suggest that friendship lies within the province of women as much as within the province of men; that there are pairs of feminine friends as worthy of fame as any of the masculine couples set by classic literature in the empyrean of humanity; that uncommon love clothes the lives of its subjects with the interest of unfading romance; that the true dignity, happiness, and peace of women and of men, too—are to be found rather in the quiet region of personal culture, and the affections, than in the arena of ambitious publicity. Mrs. Thrale and Fanny Burney were every thing to each other for a long time. But, on the marriage of the former with Mr. Piozzi, a breach occurred, which was never repaired. Four years after this coldness, Fanny writes in her diary, "Oh, little does she know how tenderly, at this moment, I could run into her arms, so often opened to receive me with a cordiality I believed inalienable." Two years after that, Mrs. Piozzi writes in her diary, "I met Miss Burney at an assembly last night. She appeared most fondly rejoiced in good time I answered with ease and coldness, but in exceeding good humor; and all ended, as it should do, with perfect indifference." Thirty- one years later still, Fanny enters in her diary this brief record: "I have just lost my once most dear, intimate, and admired friend, Mrs. Thrale Piozzi."
The young Bettine Brentano, several years before her acquaintance with Goethe, was placed temporarily in the house of a female religious order to pursue her studies. There she soon made the acquaintance of a canoness named Günderode, considerably older than herself, though still young, with rare mental endowments and romantic affections. The cultivated intellect, spirituality, and mystic melancholy of Günderode, under her singularly attractive features and calm demeanor, drew the impassioned and redundant Bettine to her by an irresistible bond. Their companionship ripened into romantic friendship. Their letters, collected and published by the survivor, compose one of the most original and stimulative delineations of the inner life of girlhood to be met with in literature. To cold and shallow readers, this correspondence will prove an unknown tongue; but those who can appreciate the reflection of wonderful personalities, and the workings of intense sentiment, will prize it as a unique treasure.
Bettine was electrical, magical, seeming ever to be overcharged with the spirit of nature; Günderode, cloudy, opalescent, suggesting a spirit native of some realm above nature. The interplaying of the two was strangely delightful to them both; and they made day after day rich by hoarding and sharing what life brought, the wealth of their souls. The fresh vitality of Bettine, her rushing inspiration, her dithyrambic love of wild nature, breathed a balsamic breath over her drooping friend, who yet had a more than counterbalancing depth of consciousness to impart in return.
Günderode, keyed too high for common companionship, too deep and tenacious in her moods, of a delicacy preternaturally lofty and far- reaching in its sensitiveness, was solitary, sad, thoughtful, yearning, prescient of an early death; yet, by the whole impression of her being, she gave birth, in those who lovingly looked on her, to the surmise that she was mysteriously self-sufficing and happy. Bettine writes to her, "I begin to believe thy feelings are enthroned beyond clouds which cast their shadows on the earth; while thou, borne on them, art revelling in celestial light." The best way to indicate briefly what this friendship was, will be to quote a selection of the characteristic expressions of it, though such a compilation of fragments does great wrong to a correspondence so compacted of the sparks of love and genius. Let those who find in this relation only the expression of a fantastic sentimentality, weigh what Sarah Austin says, a woman who speaks with the utmost weight of authority which learning, experience, and wisdom can give: "We, in England and France," Mrs. Austin says, "have no measure for the character of a German girl, brought up in comparative solitude, nurtured on poetry and religion, knowing little of the actual world, but holding close converse with the ideal in its grandest forms. She is capable of an enthusiasm we know not of."
At different times, Günderode writes thus: "I have bad many thoughts of thee, dear Bettine. Some nights ago I dreamed thou wast dead: I wept bitterly at it; and the dream left, for a whole day, a mournful echo in my heart." "My mood is often very sad, and I have not power over it." "Thou art my bit of a sun that warms me, while everywhere else frost falls on me." "Thy letter, dear Bettine, I have sipped as wine from the goblet of Lyus." "I am studying the distinguished Spartan women. If I cannot be heroic, and am always ill from hesitation and timidity, I will at least fill my soul with that heroism, and feed it with that vital power, in which I am so sadly deficient." "Thou seemest to me the clay which a god is moulding with his feet; and what I perceive in thee is the fermenting fire, that, by his transcendent contact, he is strongly kneading into thee." "When I read what I have written some time ago, I think I see myself lying in my coffin, staring at my other self in astonishment."
"Clemens's letters make me think and consider, while over thine I only feel; and they are grateful as a breath of air from the Holy Land." "If two are to understand each other, it requires the inspiring influence of a third divine one. And so I accept our mutual existence as a gift of the gods, in which they themselves play the happiest part."
And thus, on the other side, Bettine at various times writes to Günderode: "I wrote down, To-day I saw Günderode: it was a gift of God. To-day, as I read it again, I would gladly do every thing for the love of thee. How much do I think of thee and of thy words, of the black lashes that shaded thy blue eyes as I saw thee for the first time; of thy kindly mien, and thy hand that stroked my hair!" "Thy letter today has drawn a charmed ring around me." "On the castle of the hill, in the night-dew, it was fair to be with thee. Those were the dearest hours of all my life; and, when I return, we will again dwell together there. We will have our beds close together, and talk all night." "Thou and I think in harmony: we have as yet found no third who can think with us, or to whom we have confided what we think." "Thou art the sweet cadence by which my soul is rocked." "What will become of me, if ever I pass out of the light which beams on me from thine eyes? for thou seemest to me an ever-living look, and as if on that my life hung." "I feel a deep longing to be with thee again; for, beautiful as it is here on the Rhine, it is sad to be without an echo in a living breast. Man is nothing but the desire to feel himself in another." "When I dare look up to thee from my childish pursuits, I think I see a bride whose priestly robes do not betray, nor her face express, whether she is sad or joyous in her ecstasy." "Thou lookest deeper into my breast, knowest more of my spiritual fate, than I, because I need only read in thy soul to find myself." "I would possess every thing, wealth and power of beautiful ideas, art and science, only to give it to thee, to gratify my love to thee, and my pride in thy love." "Formerly, I often thought, Why was I born? but, after thou wert with me, I never asked again." "I see thee wandering past the grove where I am at home, just as a sparrow, concealed by dense foliage, watches a solitary swan swimming on the quiet waters, and, hidden, sees how it bends its neck to dip into the flood, drawing circles around it; sacred signs of its isolation from the impure, the reckless, the unspiritual!" "I have been made happy to-day: some one secretly placed in my room a rose- tree with twenty-seven buds; these are just thy years."
Many plaintive presentiments of unknown woe, parting, death, gave a mysterious undertone of sadness to much of the correspondence of these two friends. The forebodings were destined to be more than fulfilled in the tragic reality. Poor Günderode, wrought to madness by a disappointment in love, committed suicide. She drowned herself in a river, where her body was found entangled in the long sedge. Years afterwards, Bettine relates the story in a letter to Goethe, the perusal of which has made many a gentle heart ache. The substance of the tragedy may be briefly told:
"One day," Bettine writes, "Günderode met me with a joyful air, and said, "Yesterday I spoke with a surgeon, who told me it was very easy to make away with one's self. She hastily opened her gown, and pointed to the spot beneath her beautiful breast. Her eyes sparkled with delight. I gazed at her, and felt uneasy. And what shall I do when thou art dead?' I asked. Oh! ere then,' said she, thou wilt not care for me any more; we shall not remain so intimate till then: I will first quarrel with thee.' I turned to the window to hide my tears and my anger. She had gone to the other window, and was silent. I glanced secretly at her: her eye was lifted to heaven; but its ray was broken, as though its whole fire were turned within. After I had observed her awhile, I could no longer control myself: I broke into loud crying, I fell on her neck, I dragged her down to a seat, and sat upon her knee, and wept, and kissed her on her mouth, and tore open her dress, and kissed her on the spot where she had learned to reach the heart. I implored her, with tears of anguish, to have mercy upon me; and fell again on her neck, and kissed her cold and trembling hands. Her lips were convulsed; and she was quite cold, stiff, and deadly pale. Speaking with difficulty, she said slowly, Bettine, do not break my heart.' I wanted to recover myself, and not give her pain. But as, amidst my smiles and tears and sobs, she grew more anxious, and laid herself on the sofa, I jestingly tried to make her believe I had taken all as a joke.
"A few days after, she showed me a dagger with a silver hilt, which she had bought at the mart. She was delighted with the beauty and sharpness of the steel. I took the blade, and pressed on her with it, exclaiming, Rather than suffer thee to kill thyself, I myself will do it.' She retreated in alarm, and I flung the dagger away. I took her by the hand, and led her to the garden, into the vine-bower, and said, Thou mayest depend on me: there is no hour when, if thou wert to utter a wish, I would hesitate for a moment. Come to my window at midnight and whistle, and I will, without preparation, go round the world with thee. What right hast thou to cast me off? How canst thou betray such devotion? Promise me now.' She hung her head and was pale. 'Günderode,' said I, if thou art in earnest, give me a sign. She nodded.
"Two months passed away, when I again came to Frankfort. I ran to the chapter-house of the canonesses, opened the gate, and lo! there she stood, and looked coldly at me. 'Günderode,' I cried, may I come in?' She was silent, and turned away. 'Günderode, say but one word, and my heart beats against thine.' 'No,' she said, 'come no nearer, turn back, we must separate.' 'What does this mean?' I asked. 'Thus much, that we have been deceived, and do not belong to one another.' Ah! I turned away. First despair; first cruel blow, so dreadful to a young heart! I, who knew nothing but entire abandonment to my love, must be thus rejected."
A short period elapsed, when news was brought to Bettine that a young and beautiful lady, who was seen walking a long time at evening beside the Rhine, had been found the next morning, on the bank, among the willows. She had filled her handkerchief with stones, and tied it about her neck, probably intending to sink in the river; but, as she stabbed herself to the heart, she fell backward; and they found her thus lying under the willows by the Rhine, in a spot where the water was deepest. It was the poor, unhappy Günderode.
The next day, Bettine, who was then with her brother and a small party of friends, sailing on the Rhine, landed at Rudesheim. "The story was in every one's mouth. I ran past all with the speed of wind, and up to the summit of Mount Ostein, a mile in height, without stopping. When I had come to the top, I had far outstripped the rest; my breath was gone, and my head burned. There lay the splendid Rhine, with his emerald island gems. I saw the streams descending to him from every side, the rich, peaceful towns on both banks, and the slopes of vines on either side. I asked myself if time would not wear out my loss. And then I resolved to raise myself above grief; for it seemed to me unworthy to utter sorrow which the future would enable me to subdue."
The dithyrambic exuberances in this relation, the romantic extravagances of sentiment, illustrate both the strength and the weakness of a genius bordering close on disease. They show how much such a genius needs to apply to itself the balancing and rectifying criticisms of a sober wisdom. They may also contribute something to awaken and enrich more cold and sluggish natures, which are yet aspiring and docile.
Lucy Aikin has left record of the warm and faithful friendships with which she was blessed by some of the most gifted and amiable women of her time. She was a person of strong character, of highly cultivated talents, and quite remarkable for her powers of conversation, an accomplishment which seems hastening to join the lost arts. The parties which modern fashion gathers, are not so much groups of friends, drawn together for rational and affectionate communion, as they are jabbering herds, among whom all individuality and docile earnestness are lost in the general buzz and clack of simultaneous speech.
One of these friends was Miss Benger, an estimable literary lady, who had considerable celebrity a quarter of a century ago. Miss Aikin has written a brief memoir of her. The following extract sufficiently shows the cordiality and comfort of their union: "To those who knew and enjoyed the friendship of Miss Benger, her writings, pleasing and beautiful as they are, were the smallest part of her merit and her attraction. Endowed with the warmest and most grateful of human hearts, she united to the utmost delicacy and nobleness of sentiment, active benevolence, which knew no limit but the furthest extent of her ability, and a boundless enthusiasm for the good and fair, wherever she discovered them. Her lively imagination, and the flow of eloquence which it inspired, aided by one of the most melodious of voices, lent an inexpressible charm to her conversation; which was heightened by an intuitive discernment of character, rare in itself, and still more so in combination with such fertility of fancy and ardency of feeling. As a companion, whether for the graver or the gayer hour, she had, indeed, few equals; and her constant forgetfullness of self, and unfailing sympathy for others, rendered her the general friend, favorite, and confidante of persons of both sexes, all classes, and all ages. Many would have concurred in judgment with Madame de Staël, when she pronounced Miss Benger the most interesting woman she had seen during her visit to England. Of envy and jealousy there was not a trace in her composition; her probity, veracity, and honor were perfect. Though as free from pride as from vanity, her sense of independence was such, that no one could fix upon her the slightest obligation capable of lowering her in any eyes. She had a generous propensity to seek those most, who needed her offices of friendship. No one was more scrupulously just to the characters and performances of others, no one more candid, no one more deserving of every kind of reliance. It is gratifying to reflect to how many hearts her unassisted merit found its way. Few persons have been more widely or deeply deplored in their sphere of acquaintance; but even those who loved her best could not but confess that their regrets were purely selfish. To her the pains of sensibility seemed to be dealt in even fuller measure than its joys: her childhood and early youth were consumed in a solitude of mind, and under a sense of contrariety between her genius and her fate, which had rendered them sad and full of bitterness; her maturer years were tried by cares, privations, and disappointments, and not seldom by unfeeling slights or thankless neglect. The irritability of her constitution, aggravated by inquietude of mind, had rendered her life one long disease. Old age, which she neither wished nor expected to attain, might have found her solitary and ill-provided: now she has taken the wings of the dove to flee away and be at rest."
Miss Aikin also held a constant intercourse, through a large part of her life, with Joanna Baillie, whom she always regarded with profound honor and love. She had a personal acquaintance with almost every literary woman of celebrity in England, from the last decade of the eighteenth, to the middle of the nineteenth, century. And of all these, with the sole exception of Mrs. Barbauld, she says, Joanna Baillie made by far the deepest impression on her. "Her genius," writes this admiring friend, "was surpassing; her character, the most endearing and exalted." No one had suspected the great genius of Joanna Baillie, so thick a veil of modest reserve had covered it. Soon after the publication of her "Plays on the Passions," Miss Aikin says, "She and her sister I well remember the scene arrived on a morning call at Mrs. Barbauld's. My aunt immediately introduced the topic of the anonymous tragedies, and gave utterance to her admiration with that generous delight in the manifestation of kindred genius which distinguished her. But not even the sudden delight of such praise, so given, could seduce our Scottish damsel into self- betrayal. The faithful sister rushed forward to bear the brunt, while the unsuspected author lay snug in the asylum of her taciturnity. She had been taught to repress all emotions, even the gentlest. Her sister once told me that their father was an excellent parent; when she had once been bitten by a dog thought to be mad, he had sucked the wound, at the hazard, as was supposed, of his own life; but that he had never given her a kiss. Joanna spoke to me once of her yearning to be caressed, when a child. She would sometimes venture to clasp her little arms about her mother's knees, who would seem to chide her; but I know she liked it. Be that as it may, the first thing which drew upon Joanna the admiring notice of society was the devoted assiduity of her attention to her mother, then blind as well as aged, whom she waited on day and night.
"An innocent and maiden grace still hovered over Miss Baillie to the end of her old age. It was one of her peculiar charms, and often brought to my mind the line addressed to the vowed Isabella, in Measure for Measure: I hold you for a thing enskyed and saintly. If there were ever human creature pure in the last recesses of the soul, it was surely this meek, this pious, this noble-minded, and nobly-gifted woman, who, after attaining her ninetieth year, carried with her to the grave the love, the reverence, the regrets, of all who had ever enjoyed the privilege of her society." The graves of these friends are side by side in the old churchyard at Hampstead.
The exquisite delicacy and wealth of Mrs. Hemans's nature, her winning beauty, modesty, and sweetness, drew a circle of dear friends around her wherever she tarried. In her poems and letters and memoirs, they numerously appear, in becoming lights, men and women, lofty and lowly in rank, from Wordsworth and Scott, to whom she paid visits, giving and receiving the choicest delight, to her own dependants, who worshipped her. She tells one of her correspondents, "I wish I could give you the least idea of what kindness is to me, how much more, how far dearer, than fame." The most interesting of her many prized friendships is that which she formed with Miss Jewsbury, who, having long admired her with the whole ardor of her powerful nature, passed a summer in Wales, near Mrs. Hemans, for the express purpose of making her acquaintance. The enthusiastic admiration on one side, the grateful appreciation of it on the other, the spiritual purity and earnestness and high literary and personal aspirations on both sides, quickly produced an attachment between these two gifted women, which yielded them full measures of encouragement, comfort, and bliss. They had just those resemblances and those contrasts of person and mind, together with community of moral aims, which made them delightfully stimulative to each other. Miss Jewsbury dedicated to her friend her "Lays of Leisure Hours," addressed her in the poem "To an Absent One," and described her in the first of the "Poetical Portraits" contained in the same book. Also, in her "Three Histories," Mrs. Hemans is the original of Egeria. "Egeria was totally different from any other woman I had ever seen, either in Italy or England. She did not dazzle, she subdued, me. I never saw another woman so exquisitely feminine. Her movements were features. Her strength and her weakness alike lay in her affections. Her gladness was like a burst of sunlight; and if, in her depression, she resembled night, it was night wearing her stars. She was a muse, a grace, a variable child, a dependent woman, the Italy of human beings." Miss Jewsbury married, and went to India, where she soon died. Mrs. Hemans paid a heartfelt tribute to her memory, in the course of which she says, "There was a strong chain of interest between us, that spell of mind on mind, which, once formed, can never be broken. I felt, too, that my whole nature was understood and appreciated by her; and this is a sort of happiness which I consider the most rare in earthly affection."
Mary Mitford and Mrs. Browning were blessed with a friendship enviably full and satisfying. It has recorded itself in a correspondence, which, if published, would add fresh honor to them both in the hearts of their admirers. It was likewise celebrated with happy heartiness by Miss Barrett, in her maiden days, in her fine poem, "To Flush, my Dog;" the dog, Flush, being a valued gift from Miss Mitford.
Margaret Fuller, after seeing an engraving of Madame Récamier, writes in her journal,
"I have so often thought over the intimacy between her and Madame de Staël. It is so true, that a woman may be in love with a woman, and a man with a man. I like to be sure of it; for it is the same love which angels feel, where Sie fragen nicht nach Mann und Weib."
Of the friendships of women, perhaps none is more historic than this. A large selection from the correspondence was published, in 1862, by Madame Lenormant, in connection with a volume called "Madame de Staël and the Grand Duchess Louise." It is impossible to read these letters, without being struck by the rare grace that reigned in the union of which they are the witnesses, and being affected by the sight of a friendship so faithful, a confidence so entire.
The first meeting of these celebrated women took place when Madame de Staël was thirty-two years old; Madame Récamier, twenty-one. Among the few existing papers from the pen of the latter is a description of this interview:
"She came to speak with me for her father, about the purchase of a house. Her toilet was odd. She wore a morning gown, and a little dress bonnet, adorned with flowers. I took her for a stranger in Paris. I was struck with the beauty of her eyes and her look. She said, with a vivid and impressive grace, that she was delighted to know me; that her father, M. Necker at these words I recognized Madame de Staël. I heard not the rest of her sentence. I blushed, my embarrassment was extreme. I had just come from reading her 'Letters on Rousseau,' and was full of the excitement. I expressed what I felt more by my looks than by my words. She at the same time awed and drew me. She fixed her wonderful eyes on me, with a curiosity full of kindness, and complimented me on my figure, in terms which would have seemed exaggerated and too direct if they had not been marked by an obvious sincerity, which made the praise very seductive. She perceived my embarrassment, and expresssd a desire to see me often, on her return to Paris; for she was going to Coppet. It was then a mere apparition in my life; but the impression was intense. I thought only of Madame de Staël, so strongly did I return the action of this ardent and forceful nature."
Madame de Staël was a plain, energetic embodiment of the most impassioned genius. Madame Récamier was a dazzling personification of physical loveliness, united with the perfection of mental harmony. She had an enthusiastic admiration for her friend, who, in return, found an unspeakable luxury in her society. Her angelic candor of soul, and the frosty purity which enveloped her as a shield, inspired the tenderest respect; while her happy equipoise calmed and refreshed the restless and expensive imagination of the renowned author. There could be no rivalry between them. Both had lofty and thoroughly sincere characters. They were partly the reflection, partly the complement, of each other; and their relation was a blessed one, charming and memorable among such records. "Are you not happy," writes Madame de Staël, "in your magical power of inspiring affection? To be sure always of being loved by those you love, seems to me the highest terrestrial happiness, the greatest conceivable privilege." Again, acknowledging the gift from her friend of a bracelet containing her portrait, she says, "It has this inconvenience: I find myself kissing it too often." In 1800, Madame Récamier had a brilliant social triumph in England: "Ah, well, beautiful Juliette! do you miss us? Have your successes in London made you forget your friends in Paris?" Madame Récamier was the original of the picture of the shawl-dance in "Corinne;" and her friend says of her, in the "Ten Years of Exile," that "her beauty expressed her character." The following passages, taken from letters written in 1804, show how the intimacy had deepened:
"For four clays, faithless beauty, I have not heard the noise of the wind without thinking it was your carriage. Come quickly. My mind and my heart have need of you more than of any other friend." "I have just seen Madame Henri Belmont. People say that all beautiful persons remind them of you. It is not so with me. I have never found any one who looks like you; and the eyes of this Madame Henri seem to me blind by the side of yours." "Dear and beautiful Juliette, they give me the hope of seeing you when I return from Italy; then only shall I no longer feel myself an exile. I will receive you in the chateau where I lost what of all the world I most loved; and you will bring the feeling of happiness which no more exists there. I love you more than any other woman in France. Alas! when shall I see you again?"
The friends passed the autumn of 1807 together at Coppet, with Matthieu de Montmorency, Benjamin Constant, and a brilliant group of associates, amidst all the romance in which the scenery and atmosphere of that enchanted spot are steeped. One day they made a party for an excursion on Mont Blanc. Weary, scorched by the sun, De Staël and Récamier protested that they would go no farther. In vain the guide boasted, both in French and German, of the spectacle presented by the Mer de Glace. "Should you persuade me in all the languages of Europe," replied Madame de Staël, "I would not go another step." During the long and cruel banishment inflicted by Napoleon on this eloquent woman, the bold champion of liberty, her friend often paid her visits, and constantly wrote her letters:
"Dear Juliette, your letters are at present the only interest of my life." "How much, dear friend, I am touched by your precious letter, in which you so kindly send me all the news! My household rush from one room to another, crying, A letter from Madame Récamier!' and then all assemble to hear her" "Every one speaks of my beautiful friend with admiration.. You have an ethereal reputation which nothing vulgar can approach." "Adieu, dear angel. My God, how I envy all those who are near you!"
When an envious slanderer had greatly vexed and grieved Madame Récamier, Madame de Staël wrote to her, "You are as famous in your kind as I am in mine, and are not banished from France. I tell you there is nothing to be feared but truth and material persecution. Beyond these two things, enemies can do absolutely nothing; and your enemy is but a contemptible woman, jealous of your beauty and purity." "Write to me. I know you address me by your deeds; but I still need your words."
In 1811, Madame de Staël resolved to flee to Sweden. Montmorency, paying her a parting visit, received from Napoleon a decree of instant exile. Madame Récamier determined, at any risk, to embrace her friend before this great distance should separate them. The generous fugitive wrote, imploring her not to come: "I am torn between the desire of seeing you, and the fear of injuring you." No dissuasion could avail; but no sooner did she arrive at Coppet than the mean soul of Napoleon sought revenge by exiling her also. The distress of Madame de Staël knew no bounds. On learning the fatal news, she wrote,
"I cannot speak to you; I fling myself at your feet; I implore you not to hate me." "What your noble generosity has cost you! If you could read my soul, you would pity me." "The only service I can do my friends is to make them avoid me. In all my distraction, I adore you. Farewell, farewell! When shall I see you again? Never in this world."
Throughout the period of their banishment, the friends kept up an incessant correspondence, and often interchanged presents.
"Dear friend," writes Madame de Staël, "how this dress has touched me! I shall wear it on Tuesday, in taking leave of the court. I shall tell everybody that it is a gift from you, and shall make all the men sigh that it is not you who are wearing it."
In return, some time later, she sends a pair of bracelets, and a copy of a new work from her pen, adding, "In your prayers, dear angel, ask God to give peace to my soul." In another letter she says, "Adieu, dear angel: promise to preserve that friendship which has given me such sweet days." And again,
"Angel of goodness, would that my eternal tenderness could recompense you a little for the penalties your generous friendship has brought on you!" "You cannot form an idea, my angel, of the emotion your letter has caused me. It is at the extremity of Moravia that these celestial words have reached me. I have shed tears of sorrow and tenderness in hearkening to the voice which comes to me in the desert, as the angel came to Hagar."
What a rare and high compliment is contained in the following passage! "You are the most amiable person in the world, dear Juliette; but you do not speak enough of yourself. You put your mind, your enchantment, in your letters, but not that which concerns yourself. Give me all the details pertaining to yourself." "The hundred fine things Madame de Boigne and Madame de Belle-garde say of you and me, prove to me that I live a double life: one in you, one in myself."
When Napoleon fell, in 1814, Madame de Staël hurried home from her long exile. The great news found Madame Récamier at Rome. In a few days, she embraced her illustrious friend in Paris. Close was their union, great their joy. It was engrossing admiration and devotion on one side; absorbing sympathy, respect, and gratitude, on the other. The power and charm of Madame Récamier were not merely in her ravishing beauty, imperturbable good nature, and all-subduing graciousness, but also in her mind and character. Madame de Staël, who was a great critic, and no flatterer, says to her,
"What a charm there is in your manner of writing! I wish you would compose a romance, put in it some celestial being, and give her your own natural expressions, without altering a word. You have a character of astonishing nobleness; and the contrast of your delicate and gracious features, with your grand firmness of soul, produces an incomparable effect."
The last letter written by the dying author to her friend concluded with the words, "All that is left of me embraces you." The survivor paid the pious rites of affection to the departed, with the devotion which had marked their whole relation. And when, years afterward, on the loss of her property, Madame Récamier betook herself to the Abbaye-aux-Bois, in her humble chamber, where she was more sought and admired than ever in her proudest prosperity, the chief articles to be seen, in addition to the indispensable furniture, were, as Chateaubriand has described the scene, a library, a harp, a piano, a magnificent portrait of Madame de Staël by Gerard, and a moonlight view of Coppet. Madame de Staël had once written to her, "Your friendship is like the spring in the desert, that never fails; and it is this which makes it impossible not to love you." Death caused no decay of that sentiment, but raised and sanctified it. Her translated friend now became an object of worship; and she devoted her whole energies to extend and preserve the memory of the illustrious writer.
The self-forgetting sympathy of Madame Récamier, and the magical atmosphere of loveliness she carried around her, obtained for her many warm friendships with women. Foremost, by far, among these was that with Madame de Staël. But others also were very dear. The widow of Matthieu de Montmorency was extremely attached to her, wrote her touching letters, and took every opportunity to see her. Madame de Boigne, too, was joined with Madame Récamier in a relation of respect and affection truly profound and vivid. This lady was greatly distinguished for her beauty as well as for her voice, which was compared with that of Catalani. She was much impressed by the noble behavior of Madame Récamier at the time of her husband's bankruptcy; and, by her delicate attentions, secured the most grateful love in return. Their earnest and faithful affection lasted until death. A novel, entitled "Une Passion dans le Grande Monde," in which Madame de Staël and Madame Reeamier are the two chief characters, was left for publication by Madame de Boigne at her death. It was published in 1866.
One of Madame Récamier's sweetest friendships was with the accomplished and charming Elizabeth Foster, Duchess of Devonshire, the fame of whose exquisite loveliness traversed the earth. The duchess said of her friend, "At first she is good, then she is intellectual, and after this she is very beautiful," a striking compliment, when spoken, in relation to an admired rival, by one who was herself so dazzlingly gifted. The order of precedence in her charms, however, was differently recognized by men. They were subdued successively by her beauty, her goodness, her judgment, her character. The Duchess of Devonshire had known all the romance and all the sorrow of life. Her experience had left upon her a melancholy which attracted the heart almost as quickly as it did the eye, and lent to her something pensive and caressing. Although a Protestant, she had formed, during her long residence in Rome, an entire friendship with the Cardinal Consalvi, who was the prime-minister and favorite of Pope Pius VII through his whole pontificate. These two beautiful women, as soon as they met, felt, by all the laws of elective affinity, that they belonged to each other. The death of the Pope was followed, in a few months, by that of his minister and friend. During the illness of Consalvi, Madame Récamier shared all the hopes, fears, and distresses of the duchess. And when the fatal event had befallen, and the cardinal was laid in state, and the romantic and despairing woman would go to look on her dead friend, she accompanied her, deeply veiled, through the crowd, and knelt with her, amidst the solemn pomp, in tears and prayer, beside the unanswering clay. The duchess was struck to the heart by this irreparable loss. All that a devoted sympathy could yield to soothe and sustain, she received from Madame Récamier. And when, soon after, unable to speak, she lay dying, she silently pressed the hand of this faithful friend, as the final act of her existence.
Madame Récamier retained to the last her enviable power of inspiring affection. Madame Lenormant says that the Countess Caffarelli found her, in her age and blindness, watching by the death-bed of Chateaubriand. Drawn by her singular goodness, she sought to share with her in these holy cares. She thus became the loving and beloved associate of the final hour. This admirable person worthily closes the list the rich and bright list of the friends of Madame Récamier.
In her youth, the first wish of Madame Récamier was the wish to please; and she was, no doubt, a little too coquettish, not enough considerate of the masculine hearts she damaged, and the feminine hearts she pained. The Duke de Laval said, "The gift of involuntary and powerful fascination was her talisman." Not, sometimes, to make a voluntary use of that talisman, she must have been more than human. As years and trials deepened her nature, she sought rather to make happy than merely to please. She always cared more to be respected than to be flattered, to be loved than to be admired. Admiration and sympathy were stronger in her than vanity and love of pleasure: reason and justice were strongest of all. Her judgment was as clear, her conscience as commanding, her sincerity, courage, and firmness as admirable, as her heart was rich and good. When Fouche said to her, in her misfortunes and exile, "The weak ought to be amiable," she instantly replied, "And the strong ought to be just." Her exquisite symmetry of form, her dazzling purity of complexion, her graciousness of disposition, her perfect health, her desire to please, and generous delight in pleasing, composed an all-potent philter, which the sympathy of every spectator drank with intoxicating effect. She discriminated, with perfect truthfullness, the various degrees of acquaintance and friendship. She made all feel self-complacent, by her unaffected attention causing them to perceive that she wished their happiness and valued their good opinion. Ballanche tells her, "You feel yourself the impression you make on others, and are enveloped in the incense they burn at your feet." Wherever she went, as if a celestial magnet passed, all faces drifted towards her with admiring love and pleasure. By her lofty integrity and her matchless sweetness and skill, as by a rare alchemy, she transmuted her fugitive lovers into permanent friends. Her talents were as attractive as her features: little by little her conversation made the listener forget even her loveliness. Saint-Beuve says, "As her beauty slowly retreated, the mind it had eclipsed gradually shone forth, as on certain days, towards twilight, the evening star appears in the quarter of the heaven opposite to the setting sun." Her voice was remarkably fresh, soft, and melodious. Her politeness never forsook her: with an extreme ease of manner, she had a horror of familiarity, as well as of all excess and violence. Her moderation of thought, serenity of soul, and velvet manner, were as unwearying as reason and harmony. Without pretence of any sort, she hid, under the full bloom of her beauty and her fame, like humble violets, modesty and disinterestedness. At the time of her death, Guizot, when a distinguished American lady asked him what was the marvel of her fascination, replied, with great emotion, "Sympathy, sympathy, sympathy." She had none of that aridity of heart which regular coquetry either presupposes or produces. Deprived by destiny of those relations which usually fill the heart of woman, she carried into the only sentiment allowed her, an ardor, a faithfullness, and a delicacy, which were unequalled; and the veracity of her soul, joined with her singular discretion, gave her friends a most enjoyable sense of security. Ballanche called her "the genius of devotedness;" and Montalembert, "the genius of confidence."
From the most dangerous and deteriorating influences of her position she found a safeguard in active works of charity. Her pecuniary generosity, in her days of opulence, was boundless. She seemed to feel that every unfortunate had a right to her interest and her assistance. "Disgrace and misfortune had for her," avowed one who knew her entirely, "the same sort of attraction that favor and success have for vulgar souls; and under no circumstances was she ever false to this characteristic." The fine taste she had for literature and art, the great pleasure she took in their beauties, the natural grace and good-will with which she expressed her admiration, furnished precisely that kind of incense which authors and artists love to breathe. Old Laharpe, who, in her young days, had derived the deepest delight from her attention and praise, wrote to her, "I love you as one loves an angel." The readiness with which the word "angel" rises to the lips of her friends is striking. Almost every one of them applies the word to her on nearly every occasion. Madame de Krudener writes to her, "I shall have the happiness, I hope, dear angel, of embracing you to-morrow, and talking with you." All seemed instantly to recognize something angelic in her expression. It was in her disposition as much as in her appearance, apparently in the latter because in the former, as Ballanche said to her, "In your thought, taste, and grace will ever be united in one harmonious whole. I am fascinated at the idea of so perfect a harmony, and want the whole world to know what I so easily divine. It will be your mission to make the intrinsic character of beauty fully understood; to show that it is an entirely moral thing. Had Plato known you, he need not have resorted to so subtile an argument. You would have made him alive to a truth that was always a mystery to him; and that rare genius would thus have had one more title to the admiration of the world."
There was something celestial in her motions, that suggested the undulations of a spirit rather than joints and muscles, and made her soul and flesh one melody. As to her heavenly temper of goodness, there is but one voice from all who knew her. She accorded to the sufferings of self-love a pity and kindness seldom shown to them. She had the sweetest faculty for dressing the wounds of envy and jealousy, soothing the lacerations of rivalry and hate, assuaging the bitterness of neglected and revengeful souls. For all those moral pains, or griefs of imagination, which burn in some natures with a cruel intensity, she was a true sister of charity. To the rest of her winsome gifts she added according to the unanimous testimony of the witnesses this rare and resistless quality, the power of listening to, and occupying herself with, others, the secret both of social success, and of happiness without that success. "She said little," De Tocqueville avers, "but knew what each man's forte was, and led him to it. If any thing was said particularly well, her face brightened. You saw that her attention was always active, always intelligent." Lamartine said, "As radiant as Aspasia, but a pure and Christian Aspasia, it was not her features only that were beautiful: she was beautiful herself." Sarah Austin affirmed, "It was the atmosphere of benignity which seemed to exhale like a delicate perfume from her whole person, that prolonged the fascination of her beauty." And Lemoine declared, in his eloquent obituary notice, "In the hearts of those who had the honor and the happiness of living in constant intercourse with her, Madame Récamier will for ever remain the object of a sort of adoration which we should find it impossible to express." The only fault her friends would confess in her was the generous fault of too great toleration and indulgence. And to dwell unkindly on this is as ungracious a task as to try to fix a stain on a star.
Arrayed in her divine charms; armed with irresistible goodness and archness; enriched with equal wisdom and uprightness, every movement a mixture of grace and dignity; protected by an aureole of purity which always surrounded her; walking among common mortals, "like a goddess on a cloud," she made it the business of her life to soften the asperities, listen to the' plans, sympathize with the disappointments, stimulate the powers, encourage the efforts, praise the achievements, and enjoy the triumphs, of her friends. No wonder they loved her, and thronged around her alike in prosperity and in adversity. To appreciate her character is a joy; to portray her example, a duty. She was a kind of saint of the world.
The single fault which Saint-Beuve finds with the spirit of the society she formed, and governed so long with her irresistible sceptre, is that there was too much of complaisance and charity in it. Stern truth suffered, and character was enervated, while courtesy and taste flourished: "The personality or self-love of all who came into the charmed circle was too much caressed." One can scarcely help lamenting that so gracious a fault is not oftener to be met in the selfish and satirical world. For the opposite fault of a harsh carelessness is so much more frequent as to make this seem almost a virtue. Cast in an angel's mould, and animated with an angel's spirit, her consciousness vacant of self, vacant also of an absorbing aim, ever ready to install the aim of any worthy person who came before her, she was such a woman as Dante would have adored. It seems impossible not to recognize how much fitter a type of womanhood she is for her sex to admire than those specimens who spend their days in publicly ventilating their vanity, feverishly courting notoriety and power; or those who, without cultivation, without expansion, without devotion, without aspiration, lead a life of monotonous drudgery, with not a single interest beyond their own homes.
A certain Madame Ancelot has written a book, in which, doubtless under the pain of some galling memory—she attacks Madame Récamier as a selfish coquette, enamored only of admiration, fame, and power. Her chief weapon, as this woman asserts, was a skilful application of deliberate unprincipled flattery to the pride and vanity of everybody she met. The conduct attributed to Madame Récamier in the odious examples fabricated by this slanderer, would have been insufferably repulsive even to average persons. To persons of such insight, refinement, and elevation as marked all her most intimate associates, it would have been unutterably disgusting. The whole representation, while awakening the indignation of the reader, shows what a degrading caricature noble souls undergo when reflected in the minds of base observers. Contrast with the view of this Madame Ancelot what is said with unquestionable authority, after the intimacy of a lifetime, by the gifted and illustrious Countess de Boigne. "Amidst the overwhelming reverses of her husband's fortunes, I found Madame Récamier so calm, so noble, so simple, lifted so far above all the vain shows of her former life, that I was extremely struck; and I date from that moment the vivid affection which subsequent events have served only to confirm. No portrait does her justice. All praise her incomparable beauty, her active beneficence, her sweet urbanity. Many declare her great talents; but few have discerned, through the habitual ease of her intercourse, the loftiness of her heart, the independence of her character, the impartiality of her judgment, and the fairness of her soul!" These are the words of one absolutely competent to judge, intrinsically incapable of falsifying; and also when death had removed every motive for flattery.
All who have written on this most admired and beloved woman have had much to say of the secret and the lesson of her sway. One ascribes her dominion to a subtile blandishment; another to a marvellous tact, another to an indescribable magic. But really the secret was simple. It was the refined suavity and Womanliness of her nature, the ineffable charm of a temper of unconquerable sweetness and kindliness, a ruling "desire to give pleasure, avert pain, avoid offence, render her society agreeable to all its members, and enable every one to present himself in the most favorable light." Let the fair creatures made to adorn and reign over society add to their beauty, as Sarah Austin observes, the proper virtues of true-born and Christian women, gentleness, love, anxiety to please, fearfullness to offend, meekness, pity, an overflowing good-will manifested in kind words and deeds, and they may see in the example before us how high and lasting its empire is. This is the true secret revealed, this the genuine lesson taught, by the rare career which we have been reviewing.
After this glorious example of the moral mission of woman, glorious despite its acknowledged imperfections, it is not necessary to deny the common assertion, that men have a monopoly of the sentiment of friendship. Neither is it necessary to expatiate on the great happiness this sentiment is capable of yielding in the comparatively narrow and quiet lives of women, or to insist on the larger space which ought to be assigned to the cultivation of it in those lives. The moral of the whole subject may be put into one short sentence, namely this: The chief recipe for giving richness and peace to the soul is, less of vague passion, less of ambitious activity, anti more of dedicated sentiment in the private personal relations of the inner life.
How little matter unto us the great!
What the heart touches, that controls our fate.
From the full galaxy we turn to one,
Dim to all else, but to ourselves the sun;
And still, to each, some poor, obscurest life
Breathes all the bliss, or kindles all the strife.
Wake up the countless dead; ask every ghost,
Whose influence tortured or consoled the most?
How each pale spectre of the host would turn
From the fresh laurel and the glorious urn,
To point where rots, beneath a nameless stone,
Some heart in which had ebbed and flowed its own!
The salon which Madame Swetchine opened in the Rue Saint-Dominique was one of the powers of Paris for over forty years. Here she drew around her all that was most select, most distinguished, most exalted, in Catholic France; and subdued all by the holy dignity of her character, the authority of her wisdom, the sweetness of her spirit, and the charm of her manners. In the homage she inspired, the favors she distributed, and the tributes she received, she was truly a queen. Her days were divided into parts, observed with strict uniformity. She reserved the morning to herself, hearing mass and visiting the poor until eight o'clock; then returning home, and closing her door until three. From three to six she received company; secluded herself from six to nine; and welcomed her friends again from nine until midnight. Her drawing-room, if not so famous, was as influential and fascinating to its frequenters as that of Madame Récamier. Unlike as they were, they have often been compared. The Récamier salon, with its slightly intoxicating perfume of elegance, was infinitely more easy, more agreeable; the Swetchine salon, with its bracing atmosphere of sanctity, was more earnest, more religious. Though personal nobleness was honored in both, polished fashion predominated in one, devout principle in the other. The presiding genius of the former was the perfection of the best spirit of the world; the presiding genius of the latter was the perfection of the best spirit of the Catholic Church. The guests of Madame Récamier went to the Abbaye-aux-Bois to please and to be pleased, to exchange eloquent thoughts, to breathe chivalrous sentiments, and to enjoy an exquisite grace of politeness never surpassed. The guests of Madame Swetchine went to the Rue Saint-Dominique to take counsel on the affairs of the higher politics, the interests of the nation, and the welfare of the Church; to enjoy a community of faith and aspiration, to refresh their best purposes, and to learn how more effectively to serve the great ends to which they were pledged. There, liberty of opinion and speech was unlimited, and a refined complacency aimed at; here, loyalty to certain foregone principles and institutions was expected, and a tacit spiritual direction maintained: but in both were found the same delightful moderation, repose, and gracious forbearance; the same reconciling skill; the same indescribable art of ruling and leading while appearing to obey and follow.
These illustrious women were perhaps equal in the interest they awakened, and the sway they exercised over their friends; but there was a great difference in the secret of the charm which they severally possessed. There is nothing more disagreeable in a companion than pre-occupation, if it be pre-occupation with self; nothing more fascinating, if it be pre-occupation with you, or with something of universal authority and attraction. The spell of Madame Récamier lay in her irresistible personal beauty, grace, and graciousness; that of Madame Swetchine, in her unquestionable greatness and goodness and simplicity. Each was marvellously self- detached and kind to everybody. But Madame Récamier was an unoccupied mirror, ready to reflect upon you what you brought before it; Madame Swetchine, a mirror pre-occupied with the lovely and authoritative forms of virtue, wisdom, and piety. The former personally enchanted and captivated all; the latter caused all to bow, with herself, before a common sovereignty. The one was the fairest model of nature; the other, a representative of supernatural realities, a holy symbol of God.
It is extremely interesting to trace the effect of these remarkable personalities on each other. When Madame Swetchine visited Rome, at the age of forty-two, her mind was somewhat imbued with prejudices against Madame Récamier, whom she had never seen, and who was then tarrying there. Madame Récamier was forty-seven years old, with a reputation unsullied by a breath, and a beauty which was remarkable even twenty years afterwards. The manner in which Madame Swetchine speaks of her, in a letter to Madame de Montcalm, forms the least satisfactory passage we remember in all her correspondence:
"Madame Récamier seems sincerely to prefer a secluded life. It is fortunate, her beauty and celebrity being on the decline: ruins make little sensation in a country of ruins. It seems that to be drawn to her one must know her more; and, after such brilliant successes, certainly nothing can be more flattering than to reckon almost as many friends as formerly lovers. Perhaps, however, not that I would detract from her merit, had she but once loved—the number would have been sensibly diminished."
It is charming to see, in the rich, eloquent letter which Madame Swetchine wrote to Madame Récamier, soon after their first interview, how quickly these prejudices were dispelled on personal contact, and replaced by an earnest attachment:
"I have yielded to the penetrating, indefinable charm with which you enthrall even those for whom you do not yourself care. It seems as if we had passed a long time together, and had many memories in common. This would be inexplicable, did not certain sentiments have a little of eternity in them. One should say, that, when souls touch, they put off all the poor conditions of earth; and, happier and freer, already obey the laws of a better world."
The reciprocation of this interest is shown by the fact, that Madame Récamier urgently besought Madame Swetchine to make her residence in the same house with her, the Abbaye-aux-Bois; which she would probably have done, had it not been for the objections of General Swetchine.
The open secret of the wonderful influence which Madame Swetchine exerted on all who came in contact with her, of the extreme reverence and love with which they regarded her, was, therefore, the incomparable power, sincerity, generosity, and gentleness of her character. But to appreciate this truth, and learn the lesson it conveys, we must analyze the case more in detail. The distinguished friend who has written her life says,
"The most remarkable peculiarity of the character of Madame Swetchine was, that all the qualities, all the virtues, and all the powers were distributed in perfect harmony. She was in the same degree enthusiastic and sensible, because her reason was equal to her imagination: she thought as deeply as she felt. However often a man in mind, she always remained a woman in heart; and her personal abnegation was neither feigned nor studied. As exempt from envy as from ambition, she lived first in others, then in public works; only thought of herself after being occupied with everybody else; and great as was her dislike of egotism, never needed to rebuke it because she found such a rich joy in the opposite sentiment. Her disinterestedness reconciled others to her superiority."
Her faith stood so firm in the whirlwind of opinions, that she needed not to bolster it by bigotry. To the friends, who once murmured against her too great tolerance, she replied, "Of what use is it to live, if one is never to hear any thing but his own voice?" Her compassion and her patience were unconquerable. Nothing could draw from her the slightest sign of vexation or weariness. One of her constant visitors, for fifteen years, was a woman universally detested for her outrageous temper and her bad manners. The announcement of her name was the signal of dismay and dispersion. But the saintly hostess invariably gave her an affectionate reception; and to all the attempts made to induce her to cast off the obnoxious guest, she said, with a smile, "What do you wish? All the world avoids her; she is unhappy, and she has only me." This woman died of old age; and, during her last days, Madame Swetchine went often to see her, and passed long hours beside her death-bed.
The face of Madame Swetchine, without being handsome, was remarkably expressive; and the inflections of her singularly rich and strong voice were exactly modulated to every thought and feeling of her soul. Destitute of egotism herself, she showed an invariable tolerance for the egotisms of others, and her management of them was a marvel of magnanimous considerateness and soothing skill. The unrestrained frankness of her affection, the intimate confidences she imparted, the noble grounds she assumed to be common to them and her, the tender compliments she was ever paying them with all the skill of a sincere heart, were irresistible. She writes to the Duchess de la Rochefoucauld, "Reply to all my inquiries; especially speak to me of yourself. I long to be relieved from the punishment of your reserve." Some persons would deal with souls as carelessly as if they were pieces of mechanism; handle hearts as they would handle groceries. Madame Swetchine was unable to contemplate without awe, or treat without scrupulous delicacy, a human spirit seeking to open and show itself to her as it was in the eyes of God.
In addition to all this, she had an amazing knowledge of the mysteries of human nature and the experience of human life. She said she had traversed the whole circle of passions and affections, and was a true doctor of that law. "Reading in my own heart, I have learned to understand the hearts of others: the single knowledge of myself has given me the key of those innumerable enigmas called men." She avowed herself an instinctive disciple of Lavater, and said, "The expression of the face is the accent of the figure." Her biographer says that her insight amounted almost to divination. A word, a gesture, a look, a silence, hardly noticed by others, was to her a complete revelation. She had the science of souls, as physicists have the science of bodies. While the ordinary man sees in a plant merely its color or its outline, the botanist discerns, at first sight, all its specific attributes. Such was the power of Madame Swetchine: one lineament, one trait, enabled her to recognize and reconstruct a whole character. There is no luxury greater than that of unveiling our inmost souls where we are sure of meeting a superior intelligence, invincible charity, generous sympathy, and needed support and guidance. All this was certain to be found in Madame Swetchine. She had no rivalry, no envy, no desire to eclipse any one, no bigotry or asperity; and the aged, the mature, and the youthful, alike came with grateful pleasure under her empire. Women, usually little accessible to the influence of another woman, were full of trust and docility towards her. Loving solitude, plunging into metaphysics as into a bath, she yet took great delight in the beauty, freshness; playfullness, and hopes of girls just entering society. Her taste in every thing belonging to the toilet was known to be fine and sure: they loved, when in full dress for company, to pass under her eyes; and she deeply enjoyed admiring and praising them, at the same time pointing out any thing ill-judged or excessive. Not unfrequently, the same ones, who, in the evening, in their glittering array, had paused on their way to the ball, would return in the morning, and sit with her, face to face, in communion on far other and graver matters. Sick and erring hearts showed themselves to her in utter sincerity, while, with unwearied sympathy and adroit wisdom, she poured on them, drop by drop, the light, the truth, the life, they needed. No one can tell to how many she was a spiritual mother, her direction all the more welcome and efficacious that she was not a director by profession, but by instinctive fitness.
Madame Swetchine enjoyed friendships of extraordinary strewth and preciousness with the Countess de Nesselrode, the Princess Galitzin, Madame de Saint Aulaire, the Duchess de Duras, the Marchioness de Lillers, Madame Craven, the Duchess de la Rochefoucauld, and many other women of noble natures and rich interior lives. The record of their intercourse is an imperial banquet for the mind and heart of the reader. The study of it must make ordinary women sigh for envy and shame over their own cold relations, outward ambition, sterile experience, and suspicious caution. Madame Swetchine writes, "I have long made over all my invested capital to the account of those I love: their welfare, their hopes, are the income on which I live." The Duchess de Duras writes to her, "I love you more than I should have believed it ever would be possible for me to love, after what I have experienced. I believe in you, I who have become so suspicious. I rely on you with entire security, whatever happens." Again she writes, when her friend is absent in Russia, "I miss you every moment. Return, return. Your chamber is ready, and that of Nadine. Come, come, dear friend: life is so short, why lose it thus?" Madame Swetchine held such a high place in the esteem of her friends, because she was so serene, so wise, so steadfast, so kind, so pure, that she soothed and strengthened all who came near her. One of her friends expresses this in saying to her, "No society pleases and agrees with me like yours." She always acted on her own aphorism, "To bear faults, to manage egotisms, is an aim perhaps best accomplished by a skilful dissimulation; but the true ideal is to correct faults and to cure self-love."
The best example, in a relation with one of her own sex, of that sentiment of friendship which was such a pervasive need of Madame Swetchine's nature, and which she experienced so profusely, was her connection with Roxandra Stourdza, a Greek maiden of great beauty and genius, born at Constantinople. Originally brought together at court, when the latter was maid of honor to the Empress Elizabeth, they formed an enthusiastic attachment, which, for half a century, largely constituted the richness, consolation, and joy of their lives. The monument of it preserved in their correspondence possesses extreme interest and value, and must secure for it a prominent place among the few historic friendships of women. The oriental Roxandra was the object of an admiration truly romantic from her friend, who seemed always to see her seated on an ideal throne, and to address her as some queen of Trebizond. Saint-Beuve says, the refined and exalted affection between these two young persons, living in the artificial world of the Russian court, and each throwing back, in her own way, the mystic influences derived from the sky of Alexandria, affected him as the exciting perfume exhaled by two rare plants nourished in a hot-house. It is unimaginable what lofty, exquisite, and mysterious sentiments they exchange. Their naked souls and minds, with all their workings, are visible in these ingenuous and crowded letters, as in a glass hive we can study the industry of bees. Saint-Beuve affirms, that the later difference in their religion, the Countess Edling always remaining in the Greek communion, Madame Swetchine becoming a zealous Catholic, finally made ice between them; and that, when the countess came to Paris to visit her old friend, she complained of finding coldness and reserve. Probably there was something in this, but not much. The friendship will be best revealed by citing, from the parties themselves, some of its characteristic expressions.
The letters of Roxandra have not been published; but, in those of Sophie, both souls are clearly reflected. For, as M. de Falloux says, Madame Swetchine never Ised hackneyed language, never repeated for one what he had first thought for another. She placed herself, with a skill, or rather a condescension, truly marvelous, at the point of view of those with whom she conversed; and she would never have so easily ended by bringing them to herself, had she not always begun by going to them. This habit was so familiar, this movement so natural to her, that, at the close of every correspondence, we have before our eyes the physiognomy of the correspondent as distinctly outlined as the physiognomy of the writer:
"Did you believe me, my dear Roxandra, when I mechanically said, on leaving you, that I should write to you only after five or six clays? I knew not what I said at the time. If you begin to know me a little, you have seen that I could never hear so long a silence. La Bruyere has said, How difficult it is to be satisfied with any one! Ah! well, my friend, I am satisfied with you; and, were it not for my extreme self-distrust, which nourishes so many inquietudes, I should be almost tranquil, almost happy, almost reasonable. My friend, this moment I receive your letter: how can I thank you? Ah! read my grateful heart; and sometimes tell me, that you wish to keep it, in order that it may become worthy of you." "I feel so deeply the happiness of being loved by you, that you can never cease to love me." "I need to know all your thoughts, to follow all your motions, and can find no other occupation so sweet and so dear." "My heart is so full of you, that, since we parted, I have thought of nothing but writing to you." "I see in your soul as if it were my own." "Dear Roxandra, you are every way a privileged being: you unite the advantages of the most opposed characters without any of their inconveniences." "My attachment for you will, without doubt, be a consolation; but that word, when not unmeaning, is so sad that I desire my friendship to fulfil higher offices. I often envy characters whose impressions are slight and transient. The sponge passes across the slate, and nothing is left. Perhaps such a nature best agrees with man, whose pleasures are for a moment, whose pains for a life. Adieu, my friend! How many times already that word has filled my heart with grief! Take good care of yourself; hasten to God; and, when the struggle is too severe, beseech grace instead of combating." "It seems to me that souls seek each other in the chaos of this world, like elements of the same nature tending to re-unite. They touch, they feel themselves tallied; confidence is established without an assignable cause. Reason and reflection following, and fixing the seal of their approval on the union, think they have done it all, as subaltern ministers regard the transactions of their masters nothing until they have been permitted to sign their names at the bottom. I fear no misunderstanding with you; and my gratitude alone can equal the perfect security with which you inspire me." "I must show myself to you absolutely as I am." "I know of no pleasure more alluring than a sweet and confidential converse which begins with an interchange of ideas, and ends with one of sentiments. This I have found in our intercourse." "It seems to me that your good angel is very busy about you, and is covering your thorns with some few flowers. How I should like to be charged with the visible execution of this charming mission!" "When near you, I breathe the atmosphere of calmness and depth, which agrees with me: although I have not the rages of King Saul, there is in the sound of your voice something, I know not what, that reminds me of the effect of the harp of David." "Never was there a goodness more compassionate and penetrating than yours. Yours are the words that seek pain at the bottom of the soul in order to soothe it. How well you possess that divine dexterity which applies balm to wounds almost without touching them!" "My friend, I have met nothing sweeter, more consoling to love, than you. The admirable simplicity of your character, its steadiness, its frankness, have a charm which more than attracts: it fixes." "We must carry, untouched, to the gates of eternity the deposit each has confided to the other."
The above extracts give some idea of the warmth and preciousness of the surpassing friendship, but no idea of the high and varied range of intellectual and religious interests that entered into it. "I always," Madame Swetchine writes, "have your little ring on my finger. This symbol, fragile as all symbols, will outlive me; but I grieve not for that, since I am sure that the sentiment which makes me prize it so highly will survive it in turn." Dora Greenwell says, "The letters of Madame Swetchine are full of an intimate sweetness that has something in it, piercing even to pain, like the scent of the sweet-brier." We are reminded of this when she writes, "If life were perfectly beautiful, yet death would be perfectly desirable." Also again, when she writes to her Roxandra, "What is the pen, sad signal of our long separation, after the pleasure of flinging myself on your neck, and pouring my soul into yours through a deluge of words?" The two friends often indulged the sweet dream of passing their last years together, preparing; each other for the passage equally dreaded and desired, advancing arm in arm and heart in heart towards the unknown. The dream was not destined for fulfilment. But Madame Swetchine had the great joy of seeing her favorite nephew one of the Gargarin boys whom she loved so fondly in their childhood married to Marie Stourdza, the niece and sole heiress of her friend. The only words we have seen from Roxandra herself are worthy of the eulogies paid her, and would seem to justify the highest estimate of her character. She says, "May we all contribute, by our life and our death, to the great thought of God, the re-establishment of order and of truth among men!" And again, amid the alarming revolutions that were shaking all Europe, she says, "We are witnessing the grand judgment of human pride."
Among the wretched children of misfortune, loved and aided by the saintly charity of Madame Swetchine, she was especially drawn to the solacement of deaf mutes. She keenly felt the sadness and danger consequent on this cruel infirmity. She took, as her own maid, a poor deaf mute, named Parisse, whose temper was so bad that she was scarcely tolerated by any one. She found a charm in taking her walks with this still companion, to whom it was not necessary to speak, and who was not humiliated in keeping silence. "With Parisse," she said, "I can believe myself alone, and have a needed arm to support me, and an aid which does not encroach on my liberty." Thus she loved to appear the obliged party rather than the benefactress. The haughty and quarrelsome Parisse often put on the grand airs of an outraged queen. When the other servants were battling with her, Madame Swetchine would go among them, and say, "I love you all, but know that every one shall go before Parisse: she is the most unfortunate, and much should be excused in her." After enduring almost every thing, she succeeded, by her imperturbable good-nature and firmness, in winning the poor girl to a more amiable behavior. Parisse worshipped her mistress, and had the joy one day of being represented behind her in the likeness engraved by a celebrated artist. They became really attached friends. Is it not touchingly instructive thus to trace the religious ascent of the soul of this noble woman in her friendships, as they successively stoop from the Czarina Marie to the deaf mute Parisse? In his funeral sermon on Madame Swetchine, Lacordaire thus alludes to Parisse: "As we watched the sad setting of that beauteous star, I saw her beloved mute following her with her eyes from an adjoining chamber, the vigilant sentinel of a life which had been so lavish of itself, and whose light went out with faithful friendship on the one side, and grateful poverty on the other."
Madame Swetchine was endowed from birth with the material, the physiological conditions, for a great and original character, force competent to the finest and the grandest things, with an over-bias of that force to the brain. For long periods, she was compelled to walk in her chamber from seven to eight hours a day, to avoid intolerable nervous pressures and pains. At sixty-six, she wrote to one of her friends, "My interior life sterilizes itself by reason of superabundance; the too great fullness causes an incessant restlessness. I cannot give body to the multitude of confused ideas which crowd each other, interweave, and suffocate me for want of articulation." This profuse force, which continued throughout her life, enabled her to achieve an amount of work, and acquire a wealth of knowledge and wisdom, truly astonishing. Her youthful education, with the many difficult accomplishments she mastered, was the first resource for the occupation of her teeming energy. The second was the discharge of her domestic and public duties, with as much discretion and skill as if her sole ambition were to be a faultless housekeeper and member of the social order. The third was friendship, to whose genial duties of visiting and correspondence she devoted herself with a fullness and an ardor as passionate as they were genuine. And yet there remained a surplusage of unappropriated soul, whose vague and constant action distressed her. She entered on an extensive study of literature, history, psychology, and philosophy. Her biographer says, that scarcely an important work on these subjects appeared in Europe for fifty years with whose contents she did not familiarize herself, pen in hand. She interspersed these arduous labors by a systematic application to philanthropic works, personally visiting the sick and the poor, and ministering to their wants. And still her force was unexhausted she had more faculty and strength longing to be used, and disturbing her with mysterious solicitations; a solitary activity, without aliment; a wheel for ever revolving in a void; a burning ardor, which, in the absence of sufficing affections below, turned upward, and became a subtile mysticism. When practical duty, friendship, literature, philosophy, and charitable deeds had failed to absorb and satisfy her, plainly there was but one resource left, religion. She entered on the path to God and his fellowship, the sublime way of the life of perfection. She entered on it with an extraordinary capacity for ascending through the various degrees of perception, feeling, and transfusion; and, at the same time, with a power of rational poise which kept her experience of piety from the two extremes of mawkishness and delirium. Such balancing good sense and sobriety, such freedom from every thing morbid, combined with so much thoroughness of faith and so much fervor, we know not where else to find. Some hearts open downward, and send their exciting drench through the body; hers opened upward, and sent its pure vapor aloft into the mind to wear celestial colors. Her head was a higher heart, playing off intelligence and affection, transmuted into each other.
In the charming treatise on "Old Age," from the pen of Madame Swetchine, a piece of serene poetry and impassioned wisdom, a critic complains that she rather transfigures the subject than shows it. But, however much she may have transfigured it in description, in person and experience she has shown it in the most beautiful form of truth of which it is susceptible. Year by year, to the very end, she became ever wiser, calmer, more influential, more honored and beloved, more saintly and content. Her religious abnegation grew perfect; her peace deepened; her active benevolence broadened; her spirit, always genially tolerant, acquired a mellower ripeness. In relation to one of her acquaintances, she says, "The last time I saw him, I was struck by a kind of rigidity, of bitterness, a want of charity in his judgments which injured their justice; for the more I see, the more I am convinced that we must love in order to know." The detestable Rochefoucauld said, "Old age is the hell of women." For Madame Swetchine it had much more of paradise, as the rich ardor and impetuosity of her youth slowly moderated, and, by judicious oversight, she trained her powers into harmony among themselves and submission to God. Long before, she had said that the saddest of all sights was that of an aged woman, deprived of the consideration and respect belonging to a serious life. Now she could say of herself, "I have deserved most of the disappointments I have experienced; yet God has softened them, as if he meant them not for penalties, but trials. Benevolence surrounds me; my need of esteem is satisfied; I have known the most distinguished people; my heart has been fortunate in friendship. Self-detached, in a calm and sweet tranquillity, I need no more, to close my course with courage." She was not one of those who never speak of themselves because they are always thinking of themselves. De Tocqueville, after receiving an epistle from her, wrote back, with grateful delight in her frank and honoring confidence, "Your letter is a full-length portrait of yourself." In fact, she always spoke of herself with the utmost freedom, because she looked at herself from without as she would at any other object. Her last years were a fine illustration of her own thought, "Old age is the majestic and imposing dome of human life."
The death of this memorable woman, touchingly described by Falloux in a letter to Montalembert written at the time, was worthy of what had gone before it, of the preparations she had made for it, and of the glorious destiny to which she believed it the entrance. That "we are to seek God, not deludedly wait for him to seek us," was not more the maxim of her pen than of her practice. "I speak to others; but with whom do I converse, if it be not, O my God with thee?" To one of the group of tearful and venerating friends standing around her, she said, "Do not, my good friend, ask for me one day more, or one pang less." Without any decay of her faculties or waning of her moral force, bearing her sufferings with invincible patience and sweetness, maintaining a dignity of thought and speech comparable with that of the last conversation of Socrates, but with the triumph of a perfect Christian faith, she dropped what was mortal, and passed immortally into the bosom of God. It was in September, 1857, and she was seventy-five years young. The great, dazzling, guilty Paris has loosed no purer or richer spirit for the skies. Her dust hallows the cemetery of Montmartre, where, in the coming days, many a pilgrim will go to look on her monument.
While Margaret Fuller was yet a little girl, in her father's house, an elegant English lady came to pass a few weeks in Cambridge. Her beauty, with her repose and softness of manner, wrought like a strange spell on the idealizing spirit of the lonely and passionate girl. She found the first angel of her life: heaven was opened; and the image of the fair stranger, who soon vanished beyond the sea, was an intoxicating vision in her brain, full of light and perfume, for many a year. In her later life, Margaret formed impassioned connections with a great many superior girls, who were drawn to her by an affinity for her overflowing powers of intellect, feeling, and aspiration. The last on the list of her friendships was the noble Marchioness Arconati, in Italy. The entire intercourse of these two women forms a chapter of devoted warmth and frankness. Through all her life, Margaret felt the necessity for intense relations of affection with the worthiest persons she met. One of her biographers says, "Her friendships wore a look of such romantic exaggeration that she seemed to walk enveloped in a shining fog of sentimentalism. Yet, in fact, Truth at all cost was her ruling maxim. Her earnestness to read the hidden history of others was the gauge of her own emotion."
This prayer was found among the papers written in her earlier life: "Father, I am weary. Re-assume me for a while, I pray thee. Oh, let me rest awhile in thee, thou only Love! In the depth of my prayer, I suffer much. Take me only awhile. No fellow-being will receive me. I cannot pause: they will not detain me by their love. Take me awhile, and again I will go forth on a renewed service. I sink from want of rest; and none will shelter me. Thou knowest it all. Bathe me in thy Love." Emerson says of her, "Her friendships, as a girl with girls, as a woman with women, were not unmingled with passion, and had passages of romantic sacrifice and of ecstatic fusion, which I have heard with the ear, but could not trust my profane pen to report." At the close of her life, amidst the ruins of Rome, she wrote, "I have been the object of great love, from the noble and the humble: I have felt it towards both. Yet I am tired out, tired of thinking and hoping, tired of seeing men err and bleed. Coward and foot-sore, gladly would I creep into some green recess, where I might see a few not unfriendly faces, and where not more wretches should come than I could relieve. I am weary, and faith soars and sings no more. Nothing good of me is left, except, at the bottom of the heart, a melting tenderness."
The Duchess of Orleans, that Helen of Mecklenburg who married the eldest son of Louis Philippe, was one of those women whose exalted charms of person, character, and manners glorify their sex, fascinate all beholders, and win the enthusiastic devotion of their associates. She was the worthy grand-daughter of that noble Duchess Louise of Saxe-Weimar, wife of Carl August, the friend of Goethe and Schiller, of whom Napoleon said, "Behold a woman whom all my cannon cannot frighten." Through the checkered scenes of her brilliant and melancholy lot, her happy childhood; her dazzling nuptials; her enviable married life; the terrible shock of her sudden widowhood; the frightful scenes of the revolution, when, with her infant son by her side, she confronted the levelled muskets of the infuriated mob, and looked massacre in the face, without the ruffle of a feature; the dismal days of exile, decline, and death, she bore herself with that sweet dignity, that spotless purity, that ineffable and sublime grace of wisdom and goodness which sometimes appear to lift the perfection of womanhood so nearly to the prerogatives of an angel. She had many friends of her own sex, who cherished an idolatrous affection for her. One of these, the inseparable companion of her existence, has anonymously written a sketch of her life and character, a most charming and impressive tribute. This modest memoir instructively suggests far more than it betrays. The writer says of her adorable friend, "Life was interesting by her side. She captivated the imagination of every one. I know no other woman with whom I could converse for twelve hours together, without for an instant feeling void or weariness. I feel as if I had always something to say to her; for her interest never flags." It is singular that, of all the multitude who desire to enchain their friends, so few ever learn to practise the deep secret contained in this italicized clause, the innocent secret of a self-abnegating heart of love.
Sarah Austin, one of the wisest and noblest women of England, formed a reverential and ardent friendship for this matchless lady, in her adversity. How profound, how sacred this attachment was, is proved by the notice which, on the day the duchess died, Mrs. Austin wrote, and sent to the press, blotted with tears; and also by the fuller sketch she afterwards prefixed to her English translation of the life of the duchess from its French original. "Her character was always presenting itself in new and harmonious lights; her manners were indescribably refined and winning; her conversation never flagged, was never trifling, never pedantic, never harsh; it always kept you at an elevation which at once soothed and invigorated the mind. There was not in her nature the slightest tinge of the cynical skepticism or sarcastic contempt which chill the soul, and annihilate hope and courage. These are the weapons which vulgar minds oppose to misfortune, the bitter and poisonous plants which wrongs and calamities produce in poor and barren hearts; but her tender and magnanimous nature could bring forth nothing which was not good and generous. It was most affecting to watch the working of her transparent mind through its faithful index, her countenance, during conversation.
"The interest her great qualities inspired was raised, by pity for her cruel misfortunes, to a height which might almost be called a passion. A veil of sadness overspread her sweet face; but behind this veil there was always such a beaming benignity, so lovely a concern for the welfare of mankind, such a high-hearted courage, that you left her cheered rather than depressed. It is to the extraordinary power she had of giving a high tone to the minds of others, joined to the unalterable sweetness of her daily intercourse, that I attribute the discouraged feeling common to those who mourn her loss. If her misfortunes were august, solemn, and terrible as a Greek tragedy, her heart was large, high, and strong enough to meet them. With all her gentleness, Christian and womanly patience, the most striking feature in her character was its moral grandeur.
"Greatness of mind and nobleness
Build in her loveliest, and create an awe
About her, as a guard angelic placed."
Such a woman is the highest exemplar and benefactor of her sex. A religious quality is evoked in the soul that contemplates her. Every impure feeling is struck dead with awe before her. The angelic serenity of her face is as if the smiles which others wear outwardly, with her had retreated inward, and hovered in perpetual play about the heart. By spiritual contact with her, other persons become angelic also. She teaches, by example, what a divine exaltation is sometimes reached through adversity and pain. The head, discrowned of earthly glory, is crowned with celestial beauty. When sufferings stimulate virtues, the thorn-wreath blossoms on our brow: when sacrifices feed faith, the cross which we clasp puts on wings and lifts us heavenward.
I have reserved, to close this chapter, a singularly romantic example of a pair of female friends, set forth by old Thomas Heywoode, in his "Nine Books of Various History concerning Women," published at London in 1624. A certain sinless maiden, called Bona, "who lived a retired life in a house of religious Nunnes, had a bedfellow, unto whom, above all others, she was tied, lying on her death-bed, and no help to be devised for her recovery." This Bona, being herself in perfect health, besought the Almighty, that she might not survive her friend; but, as they had lived together in all sanctity and sisterly love, so their chaste bodies might not be separated in death. As she prayed, so it happened. Both died on the same day, and were buried in the same sepulchre, being fellows in one house, one bed, and one grave; and now, no question, joyful and joint inheritors of one kingdom.
IF one-tenth of the efforts which women now make to fill their time with amusements, or to gratify outward ambition, were devoted to personal improvement, and to the cultivation of high-toned friendships with each other, it would do more than any thing else to enrich and embellish their lives, and to crown them with contentment. Their characters would thus be elevated, their hearts warmed, their minds stored, their manners refined, and kindness and courtesy infused into their intercourse.
Nothing else will ever add to society the freshness, variety, and stimulant charm, the noble truths and aspirations, the ingenuous, co-operating affections, whose absence at present makes it often so deceitful and repulsive, so barren and wearisome. The relish of existence is destroyed, the glory of the universe darkened, to multitudes of tender and highsouled persons, by the loathsome insincerity and treachery, the frivolous fickleness, the petty suspicions and envies, and the incompetent judgments, which they are constantly meeting. These superficial and miserable vices of common society disenchant the soul, and dry up the springs of love and hope. They are fatal to that magnanimous wisdom and that trustful sympathy which compose at once the brightest ornaments of our nature, and the costliest treasures of experience. Ah, if, in place of them, we could everywhere meet the honest hand, the open heart, the serious mind, the frank voice, the upward eye, the emulous and helpful soul largely endowed with knowledge and reverence! Then one would never be troubled with that frightfully depressing feeling—the feeling that there is nothing worth living for. Verily, the most dismal of all deaths is to die from lack of a sufficient motive for living. And is it not to be feared that many in our age die this death?
The true remedy for the fierce, shallow war of society, or its faded and jaded hollowness, is to be found in generous friendships, begotten by a common pursuit of the holiest ends of existence. In the nurture of these relations, by every law of fitness and want, it belongs to women to take the lead. The realm of the affections, with its imperious exactions and its imperial largesses, is theirs. Certainly no right or privilege should be withheld from women; but they ought to be careful not to mistake dangers or defects or vices for rights and privileges. It is simple blindness to fail to see that the distinctively feminine sphere of action is domestic life, and the inner life—not the brawling mart and caucus. The freedom and education of woman should be so enlarged that she can include, in intelligence and sympathy, all the interests of mankind. But, in action, we would rather coax men to withdraw from the gladiatorial strifes and shows of the world, than goad women to enter them.
And yet this statement needs qualification. There is much to be said on the other side. Woman is still generally regarded, on account of the transmitted opinions and usages of the past, as a mere appendage to man. The truth of the greatest importance to be considered is, that the element of humanity, not the element of sex, is the supreme fact by which the question should be determined. Seen from the point of view of absolute morality, man is no more a child of God and an heir of the eternal universe, than woman. She has a personal destiny of her own to fulfil, irrespective of him, just as much as he has one, irrespective of her "The most important duty of woman," it has been said, "is to perfect man." Why so? No one would say that the most important duty of man is to perfect woman. And yet, why is it not just as much his duty to be her servant, as it is her duty to be his servant? It is a remnant of barbaric prejudice, preserved from the ages of brute force, which makes the difference in the estimate. The first duty of every human being is self-perfection. The ideal of marriage is the mutual perfection of both parties. In its truest idea, marriage is an institution for the perfecting of the race, by the perfecting of individual men and women through their co-operating intelligence and affection. To limit its end to the perfecting of the man alone, is the highest stretch of masculine arrogance. Is it not a just inference, that, if woman is as completely a human unit as man, she has an equal right with him to the use of every means of self- development in the fulfilment of her destiny? The foremost claim to be made in behalf of women, therefore, is liberty, as untrammelled a choice of occupation and mode of life, as free a range of individuality and spiritual fruition, as is granted to men. But would this really be an advance, or a retrogression? Many maintain that it would be subversive of the genuine progress of civilization, to abandon the prejudices and throw down the bars which have hitherto restrained women from a full share in the chosen avocations and ambitions of men. All improvement is marked, they say, by an increase of differences, greater separation and complexity of offices. Therefore, to efface or lessen the social distinctions between the sexes would be to reverse the order of development. Auguste Comte, who felt a strong interest in this subject, and had a deep insight into some of its data, says, "All history assures us, that, with the growth of society, the peculiar features of each sex have become not less but more distinct. Woman may persuade, advise, judge; but she should not command. By rivalry in the selfish pursuits of life, mutual affection between the sexes would be corrupted at its source. There is a visible tendency towards the removal of women, wherever it is possible, from all industrial occupations. Christianity has taken from them the priestly functions they held under Polytheism. With the decline of the principle of caste, they are more rigidly excluded from royalty and every kind of political authority. Thus their life, instead of becoming independent of the Family, is becoming more concentrated in it. That Man should provide for Woman is a law of the human race—a law connected with the essentially domestic character of female life." There is a larger admixture of error in the foregoing representation, than is usual with this deep and original thinker on social ethics. It is true that differences increase with the progress of society; it is also true that similarity increases. There is both a minuter subdivision of functions, and a wider freedom of choice in the selection of their functions by individuals. In the rudest state, the relative condition and mode of life of whole classes are rigidly fixed by their birth or by arbitrary violence. As science and art are developed, and wealth accumulated, the varieties of industry and of social rank are largely multiplied; liberty of choice is extended, and facility of change is increased. Once there was a royal caste, a priestly caste, a warrior caste, a servile caste; determined by blood, and unalterable. These invidious castes are now, for the most part, broken down, and their several functions comparatively open to all who, observing the conditions, choose to fulfil them. The most prevalent and obstinate of caste distinctions is that of sex; the monopoly by man of public action, power, and honor; the exclusion of one-half of our race from what men regard as the highest social prerogatives, an exclusion which was no deliberate act, but a natural result of historic causes. Dr. Hedge says, with the clear vigor characteristic of his admirable mind, "As to the charge of exclusion, I think it would be quite as correct to say that women have combined to exclude men from the kitchen, the laundry, the nursery, as that men have combined to exclude women from the army or the navy, or the bar or the pulpit, or the broker's board. I suppose the assignment of either sex to the class of occupations which society, as now constituted, respectively devolves upon them came about in the beginning as naturally as the difference in costume which has always divided male and female. A sense of fitness, of natural affinity, determined each in its several way. There was no compulsion of the weaker by the stronger, and no formal allotment. Each following its own instincts arrived where it is. A tacit agreement settled this point as it has so many others of the social economy. Nor would any discontent with the present arrangement have arisen; had the family life kept pace with the growth of society." This exclusive usurpation of the public life by man—or rather, as we should say, this natural development and division—so organized by immemorial usage as to have become a second nature in both parties, is at last beginning to reveal its injustice, and to give way. In savage life, woman is little more than a bearer of burdens, a slave, and a drudge; as coarse as man, and lower in rank and treatment. The man fishes, hunts, fights, plays, rests; putting every repulsive task exclusively on the woman. It is the brute right of the stronger, which very slowly yields to the refining influence of reflective sympathy.
With each successive advance of society, it is not true that the distinction of sex becomes more definite and more important; but it is true that the distinctive feeling of men towards women becomes less a feeling of scorn and authority—more a feeling of deference and homage. Woman is as distinct from man in the grossest barbarism as in the finest civility: only, in that, she is the degraded servant of his senses; in this, the honored companion of his soul. If, with the progress of society, the sphere of feminine life becomes more domestic, inward, individual, so also does that of man. His ideal life constantly encroaches more on his active life; his physical energies become less predominant, and his moral sympathies stronger. Woman begins by being totally distinct from man in personality and estate, totally subjected to him in service. She goes on, with the improvement of civilization, to be ever freer from his authority, nearer his equal in status, more closely blended with him in personality and moral pursuits. They are not master and servant; but equals, responsible to one another for mutual perfection, each responsible to God for personal perfection. While, therefore, to efface the intrinsic characteristics of the sexes would undoubtedly be a retrograde step, it is an impossible step, which no one proposes to take. It is proposed merely to efface those factitious characteristics, whose removal will clear away barriers and secure the more rapid improvement of all, by blending their culture, their liberty, and their worship—showing us men and women as equal units of humanity in its personal ends, but dependent co-adjutors in its social means.
The common destiny of a woman, as a representative of humanity, is the same as that of a man; namely, the perfect development of her being in the knowledge of truth, and in the practice of virtue and piety. Her peculiar destiny is wifehood and maternity. But if she declines this peculiar destiny of her sex, or it is denied her, still her common human destiny remains unforfeited; and she has as clear a right to the unrestricted use of every means of fulfilling it as she could have if she were a man.
The good wife and mother fulfils a beautiful and a sublime office—the fittest and the happiest office she can fulfil. If her domestic cares occupy and satisfy her faculties, it is a fortunate adjustment; and it is right that her husband should relieve her of the duty of providing for her subsistence. But what shall be said of those millions of women who are not wives and mothers; who have no adequate domestic life—no genial private occupation or support?
Multitudes of women have too much self respect to be desirous of being supported in idleness by men; too much genius and ambition to be content with spending their lives in trifles; and too much devotedness not to burn to be doing their share in the relief of humanity, the work and progress of the world. If these were all happy wives and mothers, that might be best. But denied that function, and being what they are, why should not all the provinces of public labor and usefullness, which they are capable of occupying, be freely open to them? What else is it save prejudice that applauds a woman dancing a ballet or performing an opera, but shrinks with disgust from one delivering an oration, preaching a sermon, or casting a vote? Why is it less womanly to prescribe as a physician than to tend as a nurse? If a woman have a calling to medicine, divinity, law, literature, art, instruction, trade, or honorable handicraft, it is hard to see any reason why she should not have a fair chance of pursuing it.
Of course, such must ever be the exceptional callings of women; but in proportion as those not otherwise more satisfactorily employed enter into them, we must believe that the burden on men, instead of being aggravated by the new competition, will be shared, and thus lightened, and the best interests of society receive impulse. Is it not, then, a sound claim which demands for women a full initiation into all the noble realms and interests of humanity? Slavery and ignorance engender worse vices and more hopeless degradation than can result from the exposures of freedom and knowledge. Besides, freedom and knowledge are the guides to every form of nobleness. They alone can fit women truly to exert their most sacred prerogatives. Those who have enjoyed the best means of knowing the truth say, that the Harems of the East are the hot-beds of every wicked quality whose seeds slumber in the heart of woman. Surrounded by rivals; incessantly watched by those cunning and merciless monsters, the eunuchs; knowing nothing of science, art, literature, or industry— they must be devoured by animal passion, by love of intrigue and deception, by jealousy, envy, and hatred. The true remedy for the melancholy stagnation or the frightful effervescence of their existence is not indeed to call them forth into a contest with men for the notice of society and the prizes of the world; but to give them their liberty, remanding them to their own consciences and the social sanctions of the great laws of right and wrong, to educate them to the highest point in every department of knowledge and sentiment, and to throw open to them the boundless field of private and public moral influence, with a fair chance for the achievement of happiness.
Therefore, while as perfect an education, and as absolute a liberty, are claimed for women as for men, they are to be adjured to remember that their conscious aims should be wisdom, goodness, spiritual force, delicacy, and harmony, with the consequent moral influence and contentment; and not the trophies of power, or the publicities of fame. And precisely the same duty holds with regard to men.
The effort to attain the highest graces of character, instead of plunging recklessly into the selfish ways of the world, is as truly obligatory for man as for woman.
Brazen impudence, unprincipled greed, ignorance, cruelty, are vices in him too; modesty, patience, obedience, cleanliness, and aspiration, are virtues in him too. If those vices were to receive a new development, these virtues a new check, by setting before women the higher industries and prizes of society, it would be an immense evil. But is it not probable that such a course will do more to elevate than to degrade, by a larger diffusion of the moral stimulants and restraints of life more closely assimilating the sexes in their diversity, interchanging their respective traits for mutual advantage, and speeding them forward in the common race? The two most pronounced feminine characteristics are tenderness and purity; masculine, courage and knowledge. Humanity will not be perfected, either in individual character or social destiny, by the greater separate enhancement of these in the sexes, but only by their balanced diffusion in both, making the women wise and courageous, the men tender and pure.
It is necessary to see more clearly the grounds on which women, as a class, have hitherto been excluded from public activity and authority, in order properly to understand the justice or the injustice of that exclusion. And, in studying the origin of customs and opinions now prevalent, it is as much our right to do it with freedom, as it is our duty to do it with reverence. Many persons forget that the highest question is, what ought to be? and not, What has been or is? Usages frequently endure after their utility has ceased, after their propriety has gone. The true ideal of human conduct is not to be seen in the imperfections of the past, but to be constructed from the perfections of the future. The fact that a thing has always been, is an historic justification of it for bygone time, but not a moral justification of it for coming time. This requires intrinsic and enduring reasons—reasons of right and use. While the exclusion of women from public life has been natural in the ages behind us, it is a distinct inquiry whether such an exclusion be either obligatory or expedient now.
History demonstrates that the male sex has greater muscular strength, with its natural accompaniments, than the female. The more differentiated and largely supplied nervous structure, connected with the offices of maternity, detracts so much from the amount of force furnished for the muscles and the will. In the rudeness of the primitive state, it is an unavoidable result of the superior muscular power of man that woman is his subject. But the more pronounced nervous system of woman gives her certain spiritual advantages. Her greater sensibility, her greater seclusion, with its relative stimulus of solitude and meditation; the closer endearments of maternity—develop her affections in a higher degree than his. Hence arises a tendency to refinement, elevation, influence, on her part—a tendency, to which, in proportion to his moral susceptibility, he responds with sympathy, respect, and veneration. Every step of social progress has been marked by a softening of the tyranny of man and a lifting of the position of woman—an approximation towards an equal companionship. First the tool of his will, next the toy of his pleasure, then the minister of his vanity, she is at last to become the free sharer of his life, the friend of his mind and heart. In the first of these stages, no question of right was consciously raised: the brute preponderance of strength decided all. In the last stage, there will be no question in debate, no exercise of executive authority on either side; all being settled by a spontaneous harmony of privileges and renunciations on both sides. But in the intermediate stages, covering the whole historic period thus far, man has sought to justify himself in monopolizing authority.
The first argument of the master was the argument, prompted by the unneutralized selfish instincts, that the mere possession of power to rule, gives the right to rule. Muscular superiority is, by intrinsic fitness and necessity, divinely installed to reign. Woman, as "the weaker vessel," must obey. Such a mode of thought was unavoidable, and had its legitimate ages of sway. But no moralist would dream of adopting it, after the conscience has advanced to the stage of general principles, has risen into the region of disinterested sympathy or justice. No one would now consciously employ this argument to maintain the subjection of women; yet in multitudes, below the stratum of their conscious thoughts, it blindly upholds that subjection. A single consideration is enough to show the logical absurdity of the assumption. If men are entitled to the exclusive enjoyment of political privileges, simply because they have more physical might, then, by the same principle, among men themselves, the weak should be subject to the strong. But the very purpose of law, the moral essence of civilization, is to rectify the natural domination of strength, and bring all before a common standard.
The argument from intellectual inferiority is as vacant as that from muscular inferiority. In the first place, it is an open question whether women, as a whole, are inferior in mind to men. Many intelligent judges firmly believe, that, taken as a whole, they are superior. Cornelius Agrippa wrote a book in 1509, entitled "The Nobility of the Female Sex, and the Superiority of Woman over Man." Lucretia Marinella published a book at Venice, in 1601, undertaking to prove the superiority of her sex to the other. A book entitled "La Femme Genereuse," an attempt to demonstrate "that the women are more noble, more polite, more courageous, more knowing, more virtuous, and better managers than the men," was published at Paris, in 1643. Madame Guillaume also published at Paris, in 1665, a work called "Les Dames Illustres," devoted to the proof of the proposition that the female sex surpasses the masculine in all kinds of valuable qualifications. Mrs. Farnham devotes her book "Woman and her Era," published in New York in 1864, to the support of the same thesis, with new arguments and illustrations. That woman is intellectually superior to man, was likewise the opinion of Schopenhauer, an exceedingly strong and independent thinker. The supreme examples of genius have indeed been furnished by men; but this is no disproof of the opinion, that the average height and quickness of feminine mentality are above the masculine average.
Granting, however, that women have less spiritual force than men, they certainly have greater fineness. Their smaller volume of power is compensated by their greater delicacy and tact, their more sensitive moral capacity: the power of self-sacrifice is surely higher than the power of self-assertion. The examples of queens, from Semiramis to Domna, from Zenobia to Catherine; of philosophers and scholars, like Theano, Hypatia, and Olympia Morata; of founders of orders and institutions, organizers and leaders of great enterprises, like Clara and Chantal; of actresses, like Siddons; of singers, like Malibran; of scientists, like Somerville; of heroines, like Charlotte Corday and Joan of Arc; of mystic prophetesses, like Kriidener; of religious thinkers, like Sarah Hennell; of novelists, like Madame Dudevant and Marian Evans; of artists, teachers, martyrs, saints—a host whose faces shine on us out of history, have abundantly vindicated for their sex, so far as force of will, intellect, imagination, and passion is concerned, the right of eminent domain in the whole empire of human experience. Besides, admitting the courage, knowledge, skill, and energy of average men to be greater than those of average women, the difference in their respective opportunities and training would go far towards explaining it. Women, as a class, have been excluded from a thousand lists and stimulants, under whose influences men have been sedulously educated. And, finally, even if we confess the hopeless inferiority of woman to man in some of the highest departments of action, that is no reason for denying her the chance to go as far as she can. If her mental victories must be lower and narrower than his, still she should enjoy the stimulus of the struggle, as one means of aiding the fulfilment of her human destiny. Because one can do more than another, shall he compel the other to do nothing?
When the untenableness of muscular or mental power, as a ground for holding women in an inferior position, becomes obvious, the next support man conceives for his exclusive appropriation of authority, is the belief that he is exclusively the representative and vicegerent of God on earth; that woman is placed in subordination to him by the direct command of God. In the Hindu law we read, "The husband of a woman is her deity;" and in the Ramayana, "A husband is the god of his consort." The New Testament says, "Man is the head of the woman, but the head of the man is God;" "Man is the glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man." The Apostle likewise declares, "I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve." This position of the Apostle was based on the Hebrew account of the creation of the first woman from the rib of the first man, and of the sentence of God upon her in consequence of her sin in eating the apple: "Thou shalt be subject to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." Few persons have a conception of the extent to which this representation has moulded the opinions and feelings of the Christian world. The origin of the view is obvious: the desire of the stronger for homage, and the willingness of the weaker to reflect that desire in their conduct. Is it a sound view? or is it a fallacy and a superstition? or is it a mixture of truth and error?
For those who believe in the infallibility of every word of Scripture, the subject is taken out of the province of natural reason, conscience, and expediency; and there is nothing to be said. They hold by the current tradition as the explicit will of God. But, at the present day, there is an increasing proportion of persons who look on the Hebrew narrative of the origin and earliest experience of our race in the garden of Eden, as a legend, similar to kindred narratives in other literatures. They are led, by teachings of philosophy and science which they cannot resist, to the conclusion, that the Almighty did not produce the human species by an arbitrary and wholly exceptional interposition; but created them just as he did the other species—through a law of development. It seems to them incredible, that man and woman were made separately, in succession, the latter exclusively for the former. They are obliged to suppose that man and woman were created simultaneously—the differentiation of sex having gone on in the lower types for incomputable ages, causing humanity to appear in its earliest rise as male and female. So, instead of saying, "The man was not made for the woman, but the woman for the man," they would affirm, "The man and the woman were equally made for each other, to advance hand in hand to perfection." Those who assume this scientific point of view, will see that the question of the rights of woman, and her true relation to man, is to be decided purely by a philosophical mastery of the expediency and inexpediency, the essential right and wrong, in the facts of the case. The question of the eligibility of woman to public life and political prerogatives has nothing to do with her comparative personal weakness; nothing to do with any supposed rule, given in an ancient revelation; nothing to do with any supposition that man was the first to be created and the second to sin, woman the second to be created and the first to sin. Did priority of creation confer authority to govern, then man should obey the lower animals; for they were made before he was. Even Apostolic logic sometimes limps. The question can be understood only by a correct perception of the will of God, as indicated in the nature and destiny of progressive humanity composed of male and female.
What, then, is the will of God, so indicated? Regarded as the two halves of humanity, men and women are alike and equal. Their unlikeness, when regarded as male and female, cannot destroy this primary and fundamental equality, or vitiate any of the rights it involves. Consequently, whatever belongs to humanity proper, belongs equally to men and to women. Woman has an equal claim with man to every thing permanently connected with the fulfilment of the human destiny; that is, the full and harmonious exercise of the faculties of human nature. The division into male and female, affecting not their equality of rights, merely gives special fitnesses and duties to each. Unquestionably, the higher nervous development and maternal offices of woman relatively fit her for tenderness and domesticity: the coarser muscular development and adventurousness of man relatively fit him for hardihood and publicity. But this can furnish no ground for subjecting one, and enthroning the other. It is a reason for their equal co-operation in assimilating each other's best qualities for their mutual and common perfection. Every thing that is good should be granted to both: whatever is evil should not be sought by either.
The true social desideratum at last is, not that women, equally with men, assume the exercise of authority; but that men, equally with women, forego the exercise of authority. The genuine perfection of humanity, instead of being the enforced obedience of one half to the other half, is the spontaneous obedience of both halves to the law of God. The incomplete statement of Paul, "I suffer not a woman to usurp authority," is supplemented by the far deeper word of Christ, "Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them, and they that are great exercise authority upon them. But it shall not be so among you: whosoever will be great among you, let him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant." This is the ideal of the future—that man shall no more have authority to command than woman, everybody doing right voluntarily, under the intrinsic sway of morality. Politics is the reign of force by legislative sanctions: morality is the reign of affection by social sanctions. The latter is pre-eminently the sphere of woman. Is it her sole sphere, or is she also called to enter the other sphere?
One thing is clear; namely, that it is unjust for the laws to discriminate against women on account of their actual exclusion from political power. They ought to have the same legal rights as men to earn, hold, and control property. Since they have the same interest as man in the laws they live under, they are entitled, in some way, either by their own voice or through others, to the same consideration in the framing and execution of those laws.
Shall we go still further, and say that they ought to take an equal part with men in the caucus, at the ballot-box, in the senate, at the bar, on the bench, and elsewhere? If universal suffrage be the true theory of government, then, logically, women are entitled to vote; because they, equally with men, represent humanity. Every asserted disqualification, on the ground of ignorance or preoccupation, is sophistical; because the same plea would disqualify four-fifths of the men too. If a government of all by all be the true theory, it is a wrong to exclude women. If they are not fully qualified, they ought to become qualified; and the only way to qualify them is to confess their claim and begin their education. Either all should vote, or merely those who are fitted: if merely those who are fitted, then thousands of men would be shut out, thousands of women admitted.
The plea for the admission of women to political activity is often met by the assertion, that they do not themselves wish it; that the best women revolt with profound distaste from every thing of the sort. But is this distaste a veracious instinct? or is it a prejudice, owing to the ideal of feminine character and life, which they have been educated to admire? Men have coveted a monopoly of executive power, and held up passive obedience as the fittest type of womanliness. Women, as a general rule, partake the prejudices, and like to flatter the vanity, of the stronger sex. The question is not, What do women desire? but, What ought they to desire? What is right and best for them? The question must not be decided by any thing extrinsic or accidental, any prejudices or fortuitous associations.
Every measure of intrinsic justice should be sustained despite of the incidental evils which may be feared. The opinion that women would be demoralized by voting, is no reason for withholding that right from them, if it be a right. To become egotistic, clamorous, corrupt, and brazen, is not a necessary accompaniment of political life; but is the personal fault of those who become so, and just as much a vice in men as in women, just as good a reason for recalling those from the ballot-box, as for withholding these. There is no incompatibility between the different realms of duty or of privilege.
What would be the effect of female voting? The physical womanliness of woman essentially consists in wifehood and maternity. This, of course, cannot be changed by any enlargement of her domain of interests and activities. Her moral womanliness consists in modesty and self-denial, the preponderance of disinterestedness over egotism. Now, is there any real likelihood that the assumption by women of the elective franchise, with its accompaniments, will destroy this type of womanhood, universally acknowledged as the ideal of womanly beauty and excellence? Is it not too well established in the authority of the most cultivated souls, to be so easily shaken? It is the true type, which, developed out of the historic progress in social conditions, cannot be lost, but must be more confirmed and glorified by the continued action, in the future, of the same causes which have already produced it. Not the destruction of the most exalted moral type of feminine character, rather its extension to masculine character, is what is to be looked for in the changes of the future. The greater the number of types of character exhibited to the public, and the greater the facility of comparison between them, the more sharply defined, and the more clearly recognized, will the best one be. Will not a pure and noble woman, eminently fitted by her wisdom and virtues for social influence, entering the political arena, set an example there, adapted to make men revere her, assimilate to her, and become themselves more modest, self-sacrificing, and incorruptible? On the other hand, when she is unfitted and unworthy, will not the reflection, in her, of their own vices of exasperated rivalry, pride, and tyranny, appear doubly detestable? Then the ideal, so far from being injured, would rather be improved—manly responsibilities making the women less timid and foolish, contact with womanly sentiment making the men less coarse and reckless. How well this conclusion is sustained by sound probabilities, deserves to be carefully weighed. No one should dogmatize on it.
In determining how far, if at all, women had best enter into the sphere of public life, and take part in the functions of government, there remains another consideration, which will be decisive with many minds. It is drawn from the difference between those things which are in themselves good, and therefore enduring parts of human life, and those things which are merely provisional means to good—means necessitated by existing evils, but destined gradually to lessen, and finally to pass away. Were political government an intrinsic and permanent end, an essential good of humanity, all, or at least all who are qualified, should share in it; because every human being has a right to a portion in every thing which is indispensable to the completion of the human destiny. Liberty, culture, and work are intrinsic and eternal elements of the human lot: women, therefore, have as clear a claim to these as men. But government is not a good in itself, is not an end. It is an evil attendant on human wickedness, a means devised to prevent severer evils; an element of decreasing proportions and of temporary duration. It is an artifice which we wish to see lessen as fast as is safe, and to disappear as soon as is possible.
Take the example of war. War is an evil, a transient incident in the fortunes of humanity; therefore the fewer who take part in it, the better. Women, being out of it, had best keep out of it. No one desires to have women become soldiers. Mental and physical labor will, as long as the world lasts, be a necessary part of the experience of humanity; therefore men and women properly have a joint heritage in its exactions and its privileges. But government is a passing phase in the evolution of the social system: when men are perfected, it will vanish in spontaneous obedience. War or crude violence universally governed in the primitive society. Little by little, this barbaric reign of force was encroached upon and superseded by politics, the forms of statesmanship and legislation. Then, little by little, the realm and rule of politics began to shrink before the increasing sway of conscience, reason, and sympathy, the personal law of justice and love, the intrinsic motives appropriated by the private heart from society and religion. As war has been narrowing and receding before politics, politics in turn must narrow and recede before morality. The less need a nation has of governmental interference for the securing of justice, the better off that nation is. The smaller the number of persons engaged in working that political mechanism, which is never productive, but merely regulative, the better it would seem to be for the people. We do not desire ever to see a woman occupy the office of a hangman, nor of a prosecuting attorney, nor yet of an electioneering politician; because, these being transient accompaniments of an imperfect society, the desideratum is to have concentrated on them the interest and energy of the smallest number competent to secure the needful results of order. He who believes that a universal devotion to politics would most speedily achieve the end of politics, namely, the supersedure of its whole machinery by the arrival at a self- rectifying observance of the conditions of private and public welfare—must advocate the bestowment of legislative and other public functions on women. Let all take part in voting and governing, for the sake of more quickly reaching the time when none shall vote or govern, but every one be a law unto himself. On the contrary, he who believes that a universal rush into public life, forensic controversy, party and personal rivalry, would exasperate the interest, and prolong the dominion, of politics, must earnestly recommend women to abstain from the struggle. Whatever logical right they may have, he will think it best that they abandon that right, and devote their zeal to the sphere of morality, whose elements are the eternal concern of all humankind. A wider outbreak of plots and cabals, an enlargement of the chase for notoriety and the scramble for office, a more virulent division of neighbors and of families, a new lease for the spirit of ambition and partisanship, would be an evil of the deadliest fatality. Being out of politics, which is the transient sphere of some, is it not best that woman keep out of it, and devote herself to morality, which is the permanent sphere of all? Here is furnished an honorable ground on which she may be, not shut out of, but excused from, the province of government.
What is the ideal of perfect society? Is it a state where there is a universal contention for notice, power, and honor? Then let women enter that contest now. Is it a state where each is content with the personal fruition of his own powers, in harmony with the same enjoyment by all others? Then let women, by setting such an example of abstinence from the public realm of politics, draw men also to their true happiness, in "the realm of home and morals."
Turning from the authority of history to the authority of moral science, there is no reason for the enslavement of woman to man. This is not yet fully seen, because the historic type of woman as pure subject, of man as pure sovereign, has sunk so deeply into the imagination of both sexes. The Gentoo Code declared, "A woman ought to burn herself alive on the funeral pyre of her husband." Body and soul, she was a mere appendage to him. The Mosaic Code declared a woman unclean eighty days after bearing a female child, but only forty days after bearing a male child. One of the laws of Solon forbade the Greek fathers and brothers from selling their daughters and sisters as slaves; showing that such an infamous custom had been prevalent. The passage of thousands of years had brought a degree of physical emancipation to woman; but she still remained mentally servile, when Catharine Parr said to her husband, Henry VII, "Your majesty doth know right well, neither I myself am ignorant, what great imperfection, by our first creation, is allotted to us women, to be appointed as inferior and subject unto man as our head; and that, as God made man in his own likeness, even so hath he made woman of man, by whom she is to be governed." This type of unquestioning subjection and obedience is depicted by Chaucer, after Boccaccio, in his "Griselda," and by Tennyson in his "Enid." The husbands of these most lovely and womanly of women try their temper, and their subjectedness, by the most capricious, and the most cruel, tests. They submit to every thing with unmurmuring sweetness and humility. The true lesson of these charming stories is, that an inexhaustible self-abnegation and obedience forms the most heavenly trait and power of human nature. But it is a perversion to limit the application to woman. Moral excellence is the same in man as in woman. It is an outrage to make that meek submission to wrong, which shows so divinely in her, a duty; and it is equally an outrage to make that autocratic authority of man over woman, which he so complacently assumes, a right. The progressive emancipation of woman, revealed in history, will go on until she ceases to be, in any sense, "a mere appendage of man," and they become mutually as independent as they are mutually dependent.
It is very curious to study the extremes of dishonor and of honor, in which women, as such, have been held, at different periods, under various social conditions. In the Oriental world, in consequence of the character fostered in them by despotism, they have always been regarded by men with complacent condescension as toys, or with distrust and scorn as vicious inferiors. In the Classic world, they were always treated as far inferior to the other sex, and held up in literature in the most odious light. Euripides was surnamed the woman-hater, from the scorn with which he depicts the sex. The comedies of Aristophanes are mercilessly sarcastic, in their portrayals of women: his "Ecclesia" might be taken for a freshly painted ironical picture of the "Woman's-rights Movement" of to-day. And what a frightful picture of the Roman women Juvenal paints in his "Sixth Satire "! In the Christian world, the pagan type of woman, thought of as lower and wickeder than man, bore, for a long period, an aggravated form, imparted by an intense theological dogma. The theologians taught that woman—by the seduction of Adam and the introduction of original sin, which led to the crucifixion of Christ— was the guiltiest and worst of human beings, the Temptress of Man and the Murderess of God. Hear how Tertullian raged against her: "She should always be veiled, clothed in mourning and in rags; that the eye may see in her a penitent, drowned in tears, and atoning for the sin of having ruined the human race. Woman! thou art the gateway of Satan."
The condition of women in the East has been unfavorably affected by polygamy, despotism, stagnant ignorance, their close confinement, and the profound sensual element in their religion. Yet there are exceptions to the rule there as well as elsewhere. It was a woman who recited the "Arabian Nights' Entertainments" to the Sultan. Oriental literature boasts many shining names of women. We have a pleasing introduction to some of them in Garcia de Tassy's essay on "The Female Poets of India." Ruckert's "Hamiisa," a collection of Arabic poetry, contains specimens from fifty-five female poets of Arabia. The genius of the Mohammedan saint, Rabia, has been given to fame by her wonderful sayings, translated into many modern tongues. In spite of these examples, however, the superiority of the condition of Western women over Eastern is not only incontestable, but, as a whole, incomparable.
The difference of the character of Jesus from that of Mohammed, and the difference of the spirit which they showed in their personal relations with women, would legitimate just the difference now existing in the condition of women, respectively in Christian and Mohammedan lands. Passing over other more notorious incidents, one anecdote will illustrate this statement. After the battle of Bedr, a Jewess of Medina, named Asma, wrote some satirical couplets against Mohammed. Omeir, at dead of night, instigated by the prophet, crept into the apartment where Asma, surrounded by her children, lay asleep. Feeling stealthily with his hand, he removed her infant from her breast, and plunged his sword into her bosom with such force that it went through her back. The next morning, at prayers in the Mosque, Mohammed said, "Hast thou slain the daughter of Marwan?" "Yes; but is there cause of fear for what I have done?" The implacable prophet replied, "None whatever: two goats will not knock their heads together for it."
Lamartine says of the Armenians, with whom he was intimate at Damascus, "I could not turn my eyes from these beautiful and graceful women. Our visits and conversations were everywhere prolonged; and I found them as amiable as they were lovely. The customs of Europe, the dress and ways of the women of the West, were our chief topics. They did not seem to envy the lives of our women; and, on observing the grace, the amiability, the simplicity, the serenity of mind and heart which they preserved in the seclusion of their domestic life, it would be difficult to say what they could envy in our women of the world, who, in the turmoil of society, waste in a few years their beauty, their minds, and their health." And yet, allowing the utmost for this greater calm and contentment, our women would lose a boon, standing quite alone in its immense value, if they were to give up that liberty which is so fast gaining them a full share in every real privilege enjoyed by men. Christian women mingle on equal terms in our social, literary, patriotic, and religious festivals. Hindu or Mohammedan ladies are condemned merely to look in, through windows grated with bamboo slats, on the preaching of the priests, and on the banquets of their husbands. Perhaps our ignorance as to the facts, and our prejudices as to the principle, exaggerate the actual evils of polygamy in Asia. The most trustworthy travellers there testify that not one man in ten can afford to maintain more than one wife; and that not one in ten, of those who can afford it, will venture on the trial, if they have a child by the first. Besides, the dreadful mortality of wives in many parts of America—owing to excessive worry, household drudgery, and rapid child-bearing—amounts to polygamy, only it is successive instead of simultaneous.
But one privilege European and American women have, which they cannot easily over-estimate; namely, their exemption from the irresponsible despotism still exercised over a majority of their sisters. The whole force of public opinion and of civil law is pledged for their protection. In his travels in Khasmir, published in 1844, Vigne relates this horrid incident, which happened within his own knowledge. Mihan Singh, governor of Kabul, had a favorite wife, the mother of his only son, who was accused of an intrigue. Her son, fearing the worst, dashed his turban on the ground before his father— the most imploring act an Oriental can use—and knelt, bareheaded, at his feet. But the enraged husband was inexorable, and caused his hapless wife to be baked alive. What a breadth of progress separates us from the state of society in which such a deed could be done openly, and without illegality, by a ruler! Can any woman be too grateful that she stands on this side of that breadth instead of on the other side? It is to be feared that her sex is not always mindful enough of the duty of those who are free to be bravely sincere and true. Deceit is proper to the slave. Liberty imposes frankness. The Asiatic woman carefully covers her face, but leaves her legs naked, and considers her European sister shameless in reversing this custom, There are, however, more impenetrable veils than those outwardly put on. When we compare the simplicity of the primitive ages of the East with the guileful art and hardened worldliness of the fashionable society of the West, we are tempted to think, that the more woman has bared her face, the more she has masked her mind.
Truth requires us to qualify the view of the social condition of women which we derive from the comic poets, from the later Greek writers in general, and from the biting epigrams on women preserved in the Greek Anthology. That qualification may be drawn from the history of Sappho. The consenting conclusions of the best critical scholars of recent times—as may be seen in such works as Smith's "Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography" and Miller's "Literature of Ancient Greece,"—have cleared her name from the foul aspersions thrown on it by the authors of a subsequent age, who interpreted her life and works by the unclean standards of their own. "Not a line in her fragments, rightly understood, can cast a cloud on her fair fame." In her time, sensual and sentimental love were not distinctly separated; and she expressed her passionate but pure sentiments with a simple freedom and fervor afterwards grossly misconceived. It is to a friend of her own sex that Sappho writes, "Equal to the gods seems to me the man who sits opposite to thee, and watches thy sweet mouth and charming smile. While I look at thee, my heart loses its force, my tongue ceases to speak, a subtile fire glides through my veins, and a rushing sound fills my ears." This mixture of feelings, this carrying on of friendships between men, or between women, in the language of passionate love, without the implication of any thing corrupt, was a feature of the Greek character, unknown to nations of a poorer and colder temperament. It seems, as is set forth by Miller, in the fourth book of his "Dorians," that, in Lesbos, and some other parts of Greece, female societies were formed, each under the lead of some woman of distinguished genius, for the cultivation of poesy, music, refinement and grace of manners, and the other elegant arts. Girls were sent from distant cities, and even from foreign lands, to be educated in these societies. Sappho was the head of one of them. She calls her house, "The House of the Servant of the Muses." She formed ardent friendships with many of her pupils. It is these friendships which she celebrates in most of her poems. They reveal the varied, affectionate intercourse sometimes known by the women of classic Greece in their private apartments. The fragments which have reached our day preserve, as the names of the choicest friends of Sappho, Telesilla, Megara, Athis, Mnasidica; Anactoria, of Miletus; Gongyla, of Colophon; Eunica, of Salamis; and Damophila, of Pamphylia. The animosity of her allusions to her rivals, Gorgo and Andromeda, shows that she could hate as vigorously as she loved, and reminds us of the title of Middleton's tragedy, "Women, beware Women!"
In the world of modern civilization, the tendency is in the opposite direction from that of the Oriental, Classic, and early Christian worlds. It expresses reverence for woman as a moral superior. But the chivalrous impulse to exalt woman above man is as mistaken as the impulse to degrade her beneath him. Humanity is worshipful only as it exhibits worshipful attributes; and these attributes have the same rank, wherever they appear. A woman deserves to be honored above a man only as she has more than he of the highest qualities of humanity. The moment she demands precedence, the crown crumbles from her brows in fragments of dark decay. This lesson is finely taught in the ancient Hindu epic, the "Mahilbhiirata." As Radhika walked with Krishna, her soul was elated with pride, and she thought herself better than he; and she said, "O my beloved! I am weary, and I pray you to carry me upon your shoulders." Krishna sat down and smiled, and beckoned to her to mount. But, when she stretched forth her hand, he vanished from her sight; and she remained alone, with outstretched hand. Then Radhika wept bitterly.
The superiority ascribed to woman by fine minds in our era—a trait conspicuous, when we look from Tibullus to Frauenlob, from Pindar to Patmore—is often supposed to be her due, on account of some quality inherent in her mere femineity. It should be seen to be a consequence of the purer representation of goodness in her, by virtue of her personal renunciation of the struggle for precedence. Her mission is to set the example, and diffuse the spirit, of contented goodness— goodness contenting itself with the universal growth of goodness. In what way can she ever fulfil this mission, except by attracting man likewise to withdraw from the selfish battle for social distinction, and devote himself to the private attainment of personal perfection, and the public benefaction of his race? The chivalric transference of authority from man to woman is a striking instance of the propensity of human nature to oscillate from one extreme to the other.
Some of the champions of the "rights of women," in our day, apparently commit the error of inverting the real desideratum, which is, to make men renounce and love like the finest women—not to make women exact and fight like the coarsest men. They act as if they thought men were both better and better off than women, and were to be taken as models by them. But our hope lies in the saint, not in the amazon. Woman, as seen in the Mary who sat at the feet of Christ, brings a heavenly ministration to rescue man from every thing discordant: woman, as seen in the Penthesilea who fought Achilles, offers man but a perverted reflection of himself.
The common belief, that human life began in a paradisal state, is a sentimental and mischievous error. The cradles of civilization are full of murder. First, for a period of unknown duration, raged the strife for precedence in physical power and its grossest symbols. In civilized nations, this strife is now, for the most part, reduced to boys and pugilists, who are always eager to try each other's strength, and to crow above a thrown antagonist. Next came the strife for precedence in social power, and its finer symbols of rank, wealth, position, and fame. This strife may be traced in every record of the past and present; is far more extensive, seductive, and tenacious than the former; and has been left behind, as yet, only by the saintliest exemplars of our race. The third period, the ideal period which we now await, is one in which there shall be no strife among mankind for comparative superiority over each other; but, in place of it, a universal co-operating struggle for intrinsic personal worth, a constant advancement in gaining the real prizes of being. Then the wretched experiences of hate and jealousy, with their thousandfold sins and pains, will rapidly lessen. There will be no motives for envy and opposition, since the aims of men will be alike; and the gain of each, so far from being a loss to the rest, will be a gain to all. Let there be no strife for precedence, and all society must be the wiser, purer, and happier for every spiritual gain made by any member of it. Ambitious rivalry is wretchedness, and sure to end in sickening disappointment. Disinterested aspiration, equally to women and to men, is the benign mother of happiness.
We read in the Norse mythology, that the gods tied Loki, the impersonation of the evil principle, to three sharp rocks, and hung a snake over him in such a way, that its venom should drip on his face. But, in this dreadful case, there was one who did not forsake him. His wife Sigyn sat close by his head, and held a bowl to catch the torturing drops. As often as the bowl was full, she emptied it with the utmost haste; because, during that time, the drops struck on his face, and made him scream with agony. Her patience in holding the bowl, and her speed in emptying it, never failed. It is a forcible emblem of the ministration of woman to man. But, for man to impose a service of this nature on woman as her duty, is a cruel arrogance and wrong. The voluntary spirit of such a service teaches the one lesson which man himself needs to learn for his own salvation.
The laborious life of a statesman, a merchant, a banker, or a mechanic, is not rewarded by tender emotions, but by power, applause, or money. The heart of such a man, too often, gradually ossifies, becomes insensible to those fine and noble fruitions which imperatively demand leisure, and a steady lucid sensibility. The hard devotions of an external utility devour the riches of the imagination, and destroy the overflow of the affections. But the woman, who, shielded from the harsh frictions of the world, makes her soul a pure and still mirror of every form of celestial truth and good, may well be an inspiring prophetess for those who reverence and love her. Such a woman is, in some degree, a living representative of that star-girt face of the Virgin Mary which the medieval Church lifted into the night, and floated above the boiling nationalities of Europe. A Poppiea drawn by mules shod with gold, five hundred asses kept to supply her with baths of milk for the softening of her skin— is the enemy—and disgrace of both sexes. The true type and glory of the one sex, the admiration and salvation of the other, are displayed in such an example as that of the last hours of Madame Roland, who, riding in the death-cart to the guillotine, with an infirm and aged man who was broken down with terror and grief, devoted herself with heroic benevolence to comfort and sustain him. In order to spare him the double agony of seeing her execution previous to his own, with a sublime abnegation she refused the offered privilege of being the first victim, soothed and supported the trembling old man, saw him perish, then calmly bared her neck to the knife.
In one of De Tocqueville's letters to the illustrious Madame Swetchine occurs a passage marked by rare insight and weight. The noble writer urges that the clergy, without teaching special political doctrines, ought to instill into their hearers certain grand sentiments and loyalties, such as the feeling that every man belongs more to collective humanity than he does to himself. He then adds this impressive testimony: "During my somewhat long experience of public life, nothing has struck me more than the influence of women in developing public spirit—an influence the greater because indirect. I do not hesitate to say, that they give to every nation a moral temperament, which is shown in its politics. A hundred times I have seen weak men becoming of real political value, because they had by their side women who supported them, not by advice as to particulars, but by fortifying their feelings, and directing their ambition. More frequently, I must confess, I have seen the domestic influence gradually transforming a man, naturally noble and generous, into a cowardly, commonplace, selfish office-seeker, thinking of public affairs merely as a means of making himself comfortable; and this, simply by daily contact with a well-conducted woman, a faithful wife, an excellent mother, from whose mind the grand notion of public duty was entirely absent."
The hardening exposures, the gnawing jealousies, of overmuch fashionable society, with its shallow and bitter emulations, do far more to contract and sour the spirit of woman, to falsify and deprave her heart, to belittle and spoil her mind, to degrade and veneer her character, than any professional career can well be supposed to do. It cannot be doubted, that many a woman, who displays herself, as good as naked, in brilliant drawing-room assemblies, spends half her existence in the frivolity of crowded dinners, suppers, and balls, is more corrupted and bronzed than she could be by studying medicine, theology, jurisprudence, or political economy, and taking a zealous part in the affairs of her country. Let not the greater and nearer evil be neglected in a prejudiced imagination of a lesser and remoter one. Where do you find an exterior of politeness covering an interior of indifference or guile? a flaming demonstrativeness in front of a soul of ice? a beautiful show of nobleness and happiness, with a haggard reality of weariness and woe underneath? In the glare and fuss of society. And where do you find, purely shielded behind manners all frost, a heart all celestial fire? under conditions of unpretending simplicity, an experience ever fresh and serene, full of joy and dignity, and endlessly progressive? In those who lead lives of quiet sincerity and humility, consecrated to choice studies and chosen friends. What sweet charm or commanding grandeur or satisfying worth can be looked for in persons, the highest palpitations of whose hearts are raised by the touches of pride, money, and vanity? More patience, sincerity, studious seclusion, meditative consecration, and steady sympathy are the foremost want of our age.
The two arts of letter-writing and conversation, invaluable both as instruments of pleasure and of culture, seem to be dying out before the encroachment of innumerable trifles, absorbing amusements, tyrannical egotisms, and that pernicious flood of ephemeral literature, whose varieties are daily spawned upon all tables. The long, careful letters, full of thought, full of true personal interest and earnest general sentiment, so common two or three generations ago, are all but unknown now. There is no time left for them.
Conversation, too, has become the ghost of what it was. Where are the famous talkers now? Where are the circles in which conversation is carried on as the loftiest and richest of the social arts? The sustained comparison of views, interchange and discussion of opinions, accumulation of knowledge, argument, wit, sympathy, on themes of intense interest and solemn import, once so common in cultivated society, where all listened while each successively spoke, have given way before the telegraph, the newspaper, the pamphlet, the book, the platform, the swift diffusion of all information and the incessant hurry of everybody. Letter-writing is an indirect exchange of thoughts. Conversation is a personal exchange of life. The obvious decline of the former is a great loss; the notorious decline of the latter is a greater loss.
There is no way in which those women who are able to give the tone and set the fashion in society, can do so much good as by endeavoring to reinstate conversation, and to teach in every company the nobleness of leisure and attention, that each one who speaks shall be inspired to the fullest training of his best powers by the listening expectation of the rest. No one can talk well amidst a rude jabber of voices, or a perpetual succession of interruptions. Subtile thought, sacred sentiment, eloquent emotion, and artistic speech, are coy: they must have the encouragement of respectful audience. Conversation becomes the crowning art and luxury of life, the most completely satisfying of all employments, when groups of friends regularly meet, under the rules of gracious breeding, with leisure, with confidence in each other, with no jealous ambitions, no intolerant partisanship, but with catholic purposes of improvement. Instead of such meetings of choice friends, we now have mobs of people, drawn together by every sort of factitious motive—crowds who crush each other's dresses, desperately bow and smirk at each other; exchange intolerable commonplaces, with unmeaning conventionality; affect to listen to music, which no one can hear or would care for if he could hear; mix all their buzzing voices in one oceanic roar; or, when there is room, break up into whispering knots; then charge together upon the supper-table, as if it were a fortress to be taken by storm, and are unspeakably relieved when the assembly is over. As company is held in fashionable society now, the talk is not tenaciously kept to important themes, for ends of conviction, culture, light, or joy, but is a hodge-podge of trifles, an incoherent succession of unconsidered remarks. Each one speaks with his neighbor, regardless of all the rest of the guests, as if it were an evil to be silent, or an absurdity to expect that anybody could say any thing worth being listened to by all. Some one has said, with much piquancy, "Lectures are soliloquies reared on the ruins of conversation." Madame Mole suggestively remarks, "At the Hotel Rambouillet conversation was the all-sufficient amusement: we hear of neither cards nor music; for, wizen the habit of changing all thoughts and sentiments into words has become natural and easy, it offers so great a variety in itself that society needs no other. That form of talk alone can be called conversation in which what we really think and feel is called out, and flows the quicker from the pleasure of seeing it excite thoughts and feelings in others."
Those who, now-a-days, have a reputation as good talkers are rather declaimers, haranguers, orators, than conversers. True conversationalists seem to be nearly obsolete; because our social gatherings, whether in the drawing-room or at the table, do not furnish the needed conditions. To shine as a talker, one must override others by sheer vociferation and monopoly, treading his way amidst insincere applause and general dislike, over the injured self- love of every one present, to the throne of monologue. Such a condition is equally incompatible with what is best in character, in manners, and in personal communion.
For the revival of conversation, an improvement of character is necessary—a purification and deepening of the interior life. It grows out of friendship and the fervor of noble interests. And to these the fickleness and thinness of soul attendant on ignorance and selfishness, as well as on miscellaneous dissipation, are fatal.
For sparks electric only strike
On souls electrical alike;
The flash of intellect expires
Unless it meet congenial fires.
There can be no deep and enduring union of human beings without truthfullness, earnestness, aspiration. It is glorious for people to meet who ascend to meet. For social conquests, as well as for private content, the aggrandizement of individual character and experience is the mightiest talisman. As with the increase of esteem and confidence the spiritual veils are lifted, one by one, the person itself charms because the soul is seen, and seen to be divine. Even in those examples where beauty is the hook, grace is the bait, and virtue the line, with which hearts are caught. When we see wisdom and goodness the guests of another's eyes, love becomes the guest of our own. The great evil of an excessive devotion to society and fashion is the mechanical hollowness and insincerity it breeds—an evil as fatal to happiness as it is to virtue. Economy of force is the governing standard with those who are too constantly in contact with the world, too much given to the spirit of crowded company and fashion. Conscientious truthfullness, earnest discrimination, and a behavior honestly adapted to the facts of feeling and duty, are too expensive, would quickly drain to death the fop, the self-seeker, and the coquette. Accordingly, indifference is the shield of polite society, and affectation is the valve of artificial characters; but sincerity of soul is the first charm of manners, and extent of sympathy is the proper measure of happiness. The soul, dried and hardened by the heat and wear of crowds, or exhausted by dissipation, measures its success by how much it can exclude, how much it despises, how much it can save; but the glory of youth, the joy of genius, the height and charm of life, is the exuberance of the expenditure of force they can afford. Their standard of success is how much their sympathies can include, how much they can revere and love and serve. It is littleness and misery to make a private hoard of the good of the universe. The amount it lavishes measures the wealth of the rich and happy soul. That will be a blessed day when we make our social parties not for the purpose of ostentation or luxury, not to give dinners or suppers in return for those to which we have been invited, not to secure acquaintances who will aid in gratifying our external ambition, but simply to enjoy the society of friends whom we honor and love, to enhance our interior life by sincere spiritual intercourse, the reflection of minds and hearts. Wherever human beings meet, the bazaar of Fate stands open.
Another duty, closely allied with the foregoing, and especially incumbent on the finest and highest women, is to improve the common standard of good manners. This is a region of influence of momentous importance, and for which the most honored and beloved women have a pre-eminent adaptation by their beauty, grace, docility, and sympathetic ease of self-sacrifice. To associate with a quick-witted woman is an education. The last words of Madame Pompadour, addressed to her withdrawing confessor, just before her final breath, were, "Wait a moment, father; and we will go out together." In a democratic age and country like ours, many causes are at work to lower the average standard of manners by generating universal self-assertion, arrogance, and irreverence. As compared with the gracious type of chivalric manners exhibited in the best specimens of three or four centuries ago, it must be confessed that sweetness of dignity, abundance of courtesy, gentleness, magnanimity, have suffered badly. No gentle and lofty mind can turn from the reading of Digby's "Broad Stone of Honor" to that of Thackeray's "Book of Snobs," without deep pain. Here is a field of influence superlatively fitted for the activity of women, and worthy of the aspirations of the most favored and admirable representatives of the sex. Opinions may ascend; but manners descend.
The chief source of complacency to petty natures is in contemplating the weaknesses of their superiors. Pride nourishes itself by gazing on inferiors, and heightening the contrast. But the true habit of virtue is to stoop graciously, to lift inferiors towards itself, and to look reverentially on the merits of superiors, lifting itself with aspiring docility towards them.
Among the people of the present age, there is no need of teaching the lessons of social scorn or envy; but there is need of teaching the lessons of disinterested reverence and aspiration. It must therefore be a profitable service to hold up for the contemplation and study of women the examples of the noble sway, the delightful charm exerted by such women as the grand Duchess Louise of Weimar, Madame Récamier, Madame Swetchine, or the Duchess of Orleans. Each one of these deserves the homage of being patterned after:
For she was of that better clay
That treads not oft this earthly stage:
Such charmed spirits lose their way,
But once or twice into an age.
They seemed to shed dignity, wisdom, virtue, repose, and bliss around them wherever they moved, and to put all persons in their debt by the boons unconsciously emitted from their being and their manners. We cannot hold too constant or too worshipful communion with such characters: it is equally a culture and an enjoyment. The secret of their divine skill is not flattery, but deferential treatment. They take for granted, that their friends have noble qualities and admirable aims, and treat them accordingly, with a respectful attention which heightens the self-respect of its recipients. Neglect is insolent, and contempt is injurious. He who suffers them is hurt and lowered. One blessed magic there is, as guileless as it is supreme. This charm, this witchcraft, is a sincere and honoring attention.
Woman can more keenly than man "taste the pure enjoyment that results from the mere growth and exercise of good feelings." Who so well as she knows how much more true pleasure there is in one peaceful moment of modest goodness than in all the excitement that waits on the gaudy game of ambition? She is never so happy, as when doing most and asking least.
The Duchess de Duras wrote to a friend, "Madame de Montcalm has been sick: she is eaten up by politics: they are her vulture." To man, genius is an instrument, which he must use to achieve triumphs: to woman, it is a load, which she must transmute into blessings. Thus far in human history, it has been much easier for the most gifted of our race to be unhappy than to be happy; because happiness is an equilibrium of inner powers and outer conditions, and the most extraordinary gifts are surest to destroy or prevent that adjustment. The divine remedy is self-sacrifice, self-detachment, and the attuning of the soul by the laws of the ideal world, the perfect state of society.
Poor and feeble souls exact most from the world. Rich and soaring souls have a self-sufficing modesty, which, in its own exuberance, asks but little from others. The lark, when, at sunrise, she rises, singing, above our sight, shows that it was not from lack of power to climb, that she made the humble choice to build her nest in the grass. Here lies the most elect office of woman—to attract and train men to the sober and blissful ends of wisdom and love, and withdraw their passions from the wretched ends of folly, on which so many waste their lives, in ploughing the air, sowing the sea, and trying to catch the wind with a net. The redemption of the worst men will be effected when they make voluntary acquisition of what the best women possess by instinct, and spontaneously exhibit; namely, that disinterested love of goodness, which is willing to give all and ask nothing. Happy is he, and he alone safely happy, who gives affection to his fellows, as the sun gives light to the creation. It receives not directly back from single objects what it gives them; but, from the whole, all that it radiates is returned. It is so with the good man and his race. Persons may not return the reverence and love he lavishes, but humanity will. For what is his total feeling towards the collective individuals that constitute his race, except the glorified reverberation from humanity, back into his experience, of what his own soul has sent forth?
The call of woman, in this age, then, is not to be a brawling politician, clamoring for her share in the authorities and honors of the world, launching jokes, sarcasms, and sneers to the right and the left. Clearly, her genuine work, beyond the family circle, is to set an example of modest devotion to personal improvement and the social weal. Sir Philip Sidney describes a horseman who "stirred the bridle so gently, that it did rather distil virtue than use violence." That is, in some sense, a type of the proper power of woman. It is her heavenly mission to influence by yielding, rule by obeying, conquer by surrender, and put the crowning grace of joy and glory on her sex by ministering to the hurts and wants of humanity. Kindled by her example, and compensated by her smile, man will aspire to complete his highest destiny. Her destiny will be fulfilled with his, and in it; his in hers, and with it. They cannot be really separated; since woman as the inspirer and rewarder of man, in the most intense action at the top of society, moulds him by her ideal of him reflected in his imagination. Womanhood is by no means to be personified in the exclusive aspect of a nurse; but as artist, teacher, law-giver, queen, as well. The just personification of womanhood must include the total aspects and offices of humanity. She has as good a claim as man to them all. But let no hasty advocate insist on adding to the totality of true and permanent features in that personification, any of those vicious, accidental, and temporary features incident to the imperfect stages through which humanity has been passing, and is still passing, in its progressive evolution.
There is one respect, not often thought of, in which the various ethnic pantheons, from those of the rawest barbarism to those of the most intellectual civilization, possess deep interest and instructiveness. Their leading personages, gods and goddesses, reveal to us the chief types of human character from which they were created. The heavens and hells of mythology are the higher and lower reflections, or upward and downward echoes, of the earth; and the supernatural beings who people them are idealizations of men and women, more or less richly draped with attributes suggested by the phenomena of the universe. The groups of feminine figures furnished by mythology, therefore, afford a most striking exhibition of the typical groups of women which must have been known in the mythological ages of the world. Conceived in this way, with what thoughtfullness we should contemplate the Graces, the Muses, the Furies, the Fates, Nemesis, Vesta, Fortuna, Diana, Eris, Ceres, the majestic port of Juno, the frosty splendor of Minerva, the melting charm of Venus, the snaky horror of Medusa, Egvptian Isis, throned among the stars, and Scandinavian Hela, crouching in her grisly house!
It is a characteristic of satirists, in every age, that they class women together, as if they were all alike. Every fair view of the subject shows how false such a conclusion is. There is more freshness, subtilty, spontaneity, variety, in womanly characters than in manly. Their range, between the extremes of the demure and the hoydenish, is greater. The feminine types, Helen and Penelope, or Clytemnestra and Antigone, are as distinct as the masculine types, Agamemnon and Ulysses, or OEdipus and Philoctetes. The injustice of the vulgar saying, "It is just like a woman," implying that there are no differences among women, makes one indignant. Have we not seen women to whom death seems an indignity—looking, in every feature and glance, as immortal as Pallas Athene? And have we not seen women whose hideous shape and fiendish spirit suggested an alliance with antediluvian monsters? Is there not a Volumnia, as chaste as that star seen in winter dawns shivering on the cold forehead of the morning? And is there not a Messalina, who would receive embraces in a bath of blood? Is there not a Fulvia, who takes the head of the murdered Cicero in her hands, and tears his dumb tongue with her bodkin? And are there not a Saint Elizabeth and a Lady Godiva, capable of supernal deeds of self-denial and heroism for the sake of blessing the poor? The personality of any one of the best representatives of womanhood is as vivid and delicate as though moulded from a sensitive leaf instead of clay; yet of such strength as to be rich in frankness and courage, and sublime in patience. In fact, the distinction of woman is as much greater than that of men psychologically as it is physiologically. But her choicest vocation must always lie in the domestic range of the personal relations, and throughout the heights and depths of the spiritual life. Let her become there all that the capacities of human nature prophesy, and man will rapidly be perfected everywhere else.
The number of claimants contending for the prizes of society increases. The facility of a shallow and momentary success become greater; but the difficulty and rareness of a substantial and enduring triumph grow in a higher ratio. The arena is crowded; the battle is vulgar; the sufferings of the contestants are extreme; the rewards sought are uncertain and disappointing. How quickly, in our day, notoriety ends; and what a poor cheat it is! The passionate aspirant for fame, as described so finely by Michelet, stands beside the unknown sea of futurity, picks up a shell, lifts it to his ear, and listens to a slight noise, in which he fancies he hears the murmur of his own name! For solid dignity or pure contentment, no life can compare with the one devoted to intrinsic personal ends, the achievement of knowledge, harmony, and piety. Not the warrior, Ambition, not the giant, Legislation, but the little child, Love, is to lead in the golden age. She is the best woman who does most to hasten the inauguration of that divine Child.
Thoughtful observers agree, that the most ominous characteristic of the present age is, its complication of interests, its doubts, its weariness, its frittering multiplicity of indulgences, cares, and obligations. The best individual remedy for this evil is friendship. Affectionate communion with a trusted and confiding friend, more than any other experience, appeases the misgivings of conscience, satisfies the vague searches of the mind, and gives peace to the eternal cravings of our gregarious nature.
If ever the cry of the horse-leech shall cease to be the painful language of the heart, it will be when, the longings of the heart no longer baffled by the vacancies or the irritating rivalries of a vapid and jealous society, all human beings developed enough to need, and noble enough to deserve, shall also be fortunate enough to possess, true friends with whom they may commune in unity of spirit and mirrored doubleness of life. Gratified affection is the true fruition of a spiritual existence. To hope and fear in the being of another first gives us the fulfilled consciousness of our own.