The Friendships of Women

by William Rounseville Alger

Elizabeth Barrett Barrett allows us a few glimpses into two friendships, which, to a nature like hers, we cannot but think must have been nobly precious. One, celebrated in her poem of "Cyprus Wine," was with Hugh Stuart Boyd, who amused himself during some weary periods in his blindness with the grateful occupation of teaching her to read Greek. The other was with her cousin, John Kenyon, author of "A Rhymed Plea for Tolerance," to whom she so expressively inscribes the most elaborate work of her life, "Aurora Leigh."

It is difficult to find any more remarkable example of the inspiration, the balm, and the joy a great man may derive from the pure friendship of an appreciative woman than that which is furnished in the relation between Auguste Comte and Madame Clotilde de Vaux. In his "Catechism of Positive Religion," and in the preface and dedication of the first volume of his "System of Positive Politics," he has given quite a full account of this friendship, of its circumstances and its effects. Comte was a man of an extraordinary original genius; of profound effusiveness; but excessively proud, and sensitive to affronts. Full of noble thoughts and sentiments, heroically devoted to the pursuit of truth and the good of his race, his outward life was unfortunate. He was poor and lonely. He had many severe quarrels, disappointments, and vexations. No one appreciated him with admiring love. His wife was utterly unsuited to his tastes, and finally deserted him. Meantime he toiled, with a martyr-like pertinacity, at his great task of philosophical construction. Believing his work destined to be of incalculable service to mankind, he rewarded himself, for his vast achievements and his unmerited sufferings, with an exceptional valuation and esteem of himself.

Just at this time, sad, weary, solitary, and teeming with suppressed tenderness, he met with Madame Clotilde de Vaux, a young woman of a fine feminine genius and character, made virtually a widow by the crime and imprisonment of her unworthy husband. She seems at once to have fully appreciated the best side of the genius of Comte, entered into his disinterested sentiments, pitied his misfortunes, and ministered to his highest wants like an angel. As his disciple and friend, she lavished on him an enthusiastic admiration and affection. She reflected him, in her esteem and treatment, at a height, and in a glory, harmonizing with his own estimation of his mission. It was a celestial luxury; and it wrought miracles in him. He was transformed into apparently another person. His scientific and philosophical career became a poetic and religious one. He reproduced the most glowing and delicate emotions of Dante and Petrarch and Thomas a Kempis. The relation between Comte and Madame de Vaux was one of absolute blamelessness and purity. For one year only was he allowed to enjoy this divine delight. He was about to adopt her legally as his daughter, when she died, leaving him inconsolable, save for the melancholy satisfaction of beatifying her memory with his pen, and of worshipping her in his heart.

"An unalterable purity," he says, "confirmed her tenderness, and was the cause of a moral resurrection to me during the incomparable year of our external union. My present adoration of her is more assiduous and profound, but less vivid, than when she was alive. It daily makes me feel the truth of a sentence which once dropped from her pen: There is nothing in life irrevocable, except death.'"

The deep and stern solitude of Comte, the wearisome toils he underwent, the austere pre-occupations of his mind, the harassments and lacerations he had known, seemed to make him doubly susceptible to the action of the sympathetic instincts, to those pleasures of praise and tenderness which aggrandize and sweeten our existence, and constitute our keenest happiness. No one was purer than he in his life; no one severer in his condemnation of every form of corrupt indulgence. Therefore, no one has had a higher idea of the value of feminine friendship, and no one been more loyal to it in his own experience. It is truly touching to read, in the light of his life and character, what he has written on this topic. The three guardian angels, for devout and effusive communion with whom he set apart a sacred period every day, were, Rosalie Boyer, Clotilde de Vaux, and Sophie Eliot, his mother, his friend, and his servant. By prayer and meditation on these three beloved memories, he cultivated the three chief sympathies, veneration for superiors, attachment to equals, goodness to inferiors. He expresses the deepest gratitude for the privilege of that friendship, "the tardy felicity reserved for a solitary life, devoted, from the first, to the fundamental service of humanity." Even its removal by death, he said, did not restore his former isolation; for the inward treasure of affection it had bestowed, constantly contemplated afresh in memory, remained the permanent and principal resource of his life. "She has, now for more than six years since her death, been associated with all my thoughts, and with all my feelings."

The injustice of the popular view of Comte's character, in its deepest truth, as hard, coarse, despotic, is shown by his favorite aphorisms. "Live for others." "Disinterested love is the supreme good of man." "Love cannot be deep, unless it is also pure." "The one thing essential to happiness is, that the heart shall be always nobly occupied." It is probable that Comte exaggerated the worth of his friend, when he ascribed to her "a marvellous combination of tenderness and nobleness, never, perhaps, realized in another heart in an equal degree;" but he did not exaggerate the blessed comfort which her friendship was to him, or the power with which it wrought in his soul. That she was a very superior nature, appears clearly from the few expressions of her mind which are preserved to us. For example, she says, "No one knows better than myself how weak our nature is, unless it has some lofty aim beyond the reach of passion." And again she says, "Our race is one which must have duties, in order to form its feelings."

In speaking thus of Auguste Comte, I am not ignorant of his foibles of character, the morbid side of his ill-balanced mind and heart. But the unquestionable greatness and nobleness of the man are so much superior to his weaknesses, and are so much less appreciated by the public, that I can treat his memory only with reverence, willingly leaving to others the ungrateful task of ridiculing or scorning him. He had, no doubt, an exaggerated pride and vanity. But he labored for truth and his fellow-men with transcendent fidelity. His irascible egotism made him suffer its own punishment. His lot was lonely and was painful. The solace of the stainless friendship which Madame Clotilde de Vaux brought him appeals to my most respectful sympathy. And it has a lesson which many of those who sneer would be benefited by appropriating. Let us leave the history with the breathing words of Comte himself:

"Adieu, my unchangeable companion! Adieu, my holy Clotilde, who art to me at once wife, sister, and daughter! Adieu, my dear pupil, and my fit colleague. Thy celestial inspiration will dominate the remainder of my life, public as well as private, and preside over my progress towards perfection, purifying my sentiments, ennobling my thoughts, and elevating my conduct. Perhaps, as the principal reward of the grand tasks yet left for me to complete under thy powerful invocation, I shall inseparably write thy name with my own, in the latest remembrances of a grateful humanity."

When Paul, the Czar of Russia, espoused the Princess Marie de Wurtemburg, Sophie Soymonof, then in her sixteenth year, and distinguished for her accomplishments, was chosen maid of honor to the new empress. Marie was endowed with rare beauty, and surrounded by seductions and difficulties; but she set such an example of amiable and solid virtue in her lofty place, that calumny never assailed her.

A strong affection, based on mutual esteem and tenderness, sprang up between the empress and her maid. This affection was never interrupted nor chilled. The fury and puerility, the monstrous pride and jealousy, of Paul, made him constantly quarrel with those who were brought into close relations with him. The empress alone triumphed over his outbursts, by dint of unfailing sweetness, modesty, and patience. She smilingly submitted to the capricious exactions, distasteful exercises, and excessive fatigues he imposed. However bitter her sufferings, the serenity of her soul was never visibly altered. But, in sympathizing with the hardships of her kind mistress, Sophie early learned to penetrate the secret of noisy pomp and hidden woes, glittering prosperity and silent tears.