The Friendships of Women

by William Rounseville Alger

"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.