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.