The Friendships of Women Part 1

The Friends.h.i.+ps of Women.

by William Rounseville Alger.

PREFACE.

A STATEMENT of the facts in which this book began may gratify the curiosity of some of its readers.

While gathering materials for a History of Friends.h.i.+p, I was often struck both by the small number of recorded examples of the sentiment among women, which were discovered in my researches, and by the commonness of the expressed belief, that strong natural obstacles make friends.h.i.+p a comparatively feeble and rare experience with them.

Spurred by further thought, as well as by many talks, I kept on exploring the subject. At length, so much matter was mustered that I determined to insert in my work a distinct chapter on the Friends.h.i.+ps of Women. Still the subject grew in interest for me, and the bulk of historic ill.u.s.tration swelled beyond the size of a chapter. Then I decided to make a little treatise of it by itself.

The principle and sentiment of friends.h.i.+p deserve a much larger share of the attention given, alike in the life and the literature of our time, to the pa.s.sion of love. One would infer from most of the popular writings of the day, that love is the only emotion worthy of notice. But surely there are in human nature other feelings, which demand far more culture than they generally receive, feelings which really play an important part in human life, and which ought to play a still more important part. Am I deceived in thinking, that, in particular, the place of friends.h.i.+p in the Live; of women is a subject which, if soundly discussed, and set forth with mastery and sympathy, may give precious guidance, comfort, and inspiration to thousands of embittered and languis.h.i.+ng souls? Will not the large number, who are denied the satisfactions of impa.s.sioned love, be grateful for a book which shows them what rich and n.o.ble resources they may find in his widely different, though closely kindred, sentiment? Is not such a book especially needed at he present time?

In method of treatment, I have, without neglecting moral a.n.a.lysis or reflective exposition, even greater prominence to biographic narrative, living presentation of instances from which the reader may draw the befitting lessons of the topic, and apply them for personal profit. Poetry, it has been said, is balm on the wounds of non- fulfilment in our lives. When our own experience and imagination are wanting in that balm, we must borrow it from others. If we muse, with open heart, on the enthusiastic dreams and fruitions of more richly impa.s.sioned or more happily placed natures, the contagious glow of their affections may enkindle ours. This is one of the highest uses of art, a use which puts on artists the duty of setting before their patrons sights of righteousness and bliss, trust and peace, rather than sights of wretchedness, wrangling, doubt, and error.

In conjoined importance and interest, to those who have a taste for it, no other study can compare with the study of human nature and human experience, as ill.u.s.trated in individual examples. If the students are curious as to the secrets of greatness, and are emulous of excellence, the attraction is enhanced when they deal with persons of extraordinary powers and careers. It then becomes fascinating.

Beautiful and n.o.ble characters can find nothing so enchanting as a beautiful and n.o.ble character. It was truly said by Vauvenargues, "Sooner or later, we enjoy only souls." These pages will present portrayals of a large number of charming souls, with accounts of their happiest experiences. For our poor human heart, there will always be a bewitchment about the memories of those persons who were either remarkable for their power of drawing affection or were signalized by their enjoyment of the boon. Many a rare character, otherwise long ago consumed in the alembic of time, will long continue to be fondly singled out and studied. So when the famous Marchioness of Salisbury was accidentally burned to death, the Skeleton was known as hers only by the jewels with which she had been decked.

It may be dangerous to overlook ignorantly what is false and hateful in society; but it is pernicious to pick out such objects for exclusive or permanent scrutiny. The most wholesome results are likely to be secured by the fastening of our attention prevailingly on what is true and fair and blessed in our fellow-beings. Such a choice will commend itself to the best spirits; for, while it is the spontaneous movement of a mean nature to contract and swoop, a generous nature prefers to expand and soar. The vulture pounces on rottenness with a cry of obscene satisfaction; but the lark seeks the sunrise with a song of wors.h.i.+p. So let the ingenuous mind, studying human character and life, bestow a shunning glance at evil, a fixed gaze on good. So, should any one wish to write a history of the enmities of women, for which, doubtless, the materials are ample, I willingly yield him the task, appropriating only the privilege of doing justice to their friends.h.i.+ps.

In the present volume, my first and constant purpose has been boldly to state the truth just as it is, to do justice to the facts of the subject. My second purpose has been to be of use, to give help and comfort. In whatever degree poetry and ideal sentiment may be accompaniments, neither of them has in any sense been made an aim of the work. While freely allowing his mind to s.h.i.+ne into his pen, and his heart to flow through it, the writer has adopted every precaution to prevent or correct all those refractions of ignorance and prejudice, and all that coloring of morbid sentimentality, which would stand in the way of truth and use. In treating such a theme as friends.h.i.+p, the worst dangers are hardness and levity on the one extreme, exaggeration and mawkishness on the other, and cowardice and squeamishness between. These faults, it is hoped, are not chargeable on the following pages.

This book is a book of goodness. It is devoted to the nurture of those benign virtues which it so plainly shows waiting on and winning the best beauty and joy of the world. Small causes can bring about great effects, when time and facts conspire to help them. A cocoanut, tossed by the waves into a little sand on a rock amidst the ocean, has been known to strike root, and to form the centre of a luxuriant island of palms. Unable to look for any such striking result from the influence of this work, I shall be happy, indeed, if the power of the examples to which I have here given voice shall demonstrate the other side of the deep thought penned by Shakespeare: One good deed, dying tongueless, Slaughters a thousand waiting upon that.

THE FRIENDs.h.i.+PS OF WOMEN.

INTRODUCTION.

THE peculiar mission of woman, it has been said, is to be a wife and mother. Is it not as truly the peculiar mission of man to be a husband and father? If she is called to add to the happiness and worth of her husband, he is called to add to the happiness and worth of his wife. They are alike bound to protect and educate their children. And the other duties, the private improvement of self and the public improvement of society rest on them in common. The a.s.sertion, then, that the distinctive Office of woman is to be the helpmeet of man, does not imply that she ought to be legally or morally any more subservient to him than he to her; for the supreme duty of a woman, as of every other human being, is, through the perfecting of her own nature as a child of G.o.d, to fulfil her personal destiny in the universe. To love, to marry, to rear a family, is by no means an entire statement of the obligations and privileges of women: because no woman always has lover, husband, or children; many fail to have all of them in succession; and a few never have either of them.

In some of these cases the domestic appointment of woman is defeated; but her personal destiny may still De achieved. The qualities of her soul and the fruitions of her life, as a free individual, may be perfected in spite of this relative mutilation in her lot. The growing desire in our time for show and luxury, the increase of the excitements of publicity, the sensational literature of fiction, which is absorbing an ever-larger share of attention from the more sensitive portion of the feminine public, these causes are concentrating an undue interest on the pa.s.sion of love. It is the almost exclusive theme of plays, novels, poems. One consequence is an exaggeration of the part that should be played by this sentiment in the experience of the individual. It comes to be the engrossing subject of regard. Life is considered a failure, unless it contains love, followed by marriage; yet it must often be deprived of this experience. In the most civilized countries, especially in their brilliant capitals, a higher and higher ratio of women miss of happy love and marriage.

There never were many morally baffled, uneasy, and complaining women on the earth as now; because never before did the capacities of intelligence and affection so greatly exceed their gratifications.

New perceptions are the scouts of fresh desires; fresh desires precede their own fulfilment: a just reconciliation is a slow, historic process. The lives of a mult.i.tude of women all around us contain a large element of unsuccessful outward or inward ambitions, vain attempts and prayers. This drives them back upon themselves, into a deeper and sadder seclusion than that naturally imposed by their housekeeping and their historic withdrawment from the bustling businesses of the world. In that silent retirement, in thousands of instances, a tragedy not less severe than un.o.btrusive is enacted, the tragedy of the lonely and breaking heart. An obscure mist of sighs exhales out of the solitude of women in the nineteenth century. The proportionate number of examples of virtuous love, completing itself in marriage, will probably diminish, and the relative examples of defeated or of unlawful love increase, until we reach some new phase of civilization, with better harmonized social arrangements, arrangements both more economical and more truthful. In the mean time, every thing which tends to inflame the exclusive pa.s.sion of love, to stimulate thought upon it, or to magnify its imagined importance, contributes so much to enhance the misery of its withholding or loss, and thus to augment an evil already lamentably extensive and severe.

Now, the most healthful and effective antidote for the evils of an extravagant pa.s.sion is to call into action neutralizing or supplementary pa.s.sions; to balance the excess of one power by stimulating weaker powers, and fixing attention on them; to a.s.suage disappointments in one direction by securing gratifications in another. Accordingly, the offices of friends.h.i.+p in the lives of women, lives often so secluded, impoverished, and self-devouring, is a subject of emphatic timeliness; promising, if properly treated, to yield lessons of no slight practical value. This vein of sentiment has suffered unmerited neglect among us. No other vein of sentiment in human nature, perhaps, has so much need to be cherished. In the lives of women, friends.h.i.+p is, First, the guide to love; a preliminary stage in the natural development of affection. Secondly, it is the ally of love; the distributive tendrils and branches to the root and trunk of affection. Thirdly, it is, in some cases, the purified fulfilment and repose into which love subsides, or rises.

Fourthly, it is, in other cases, the comforting subst.i.tute for love.

A just display of these points, in the light of an accurate a.n.a.lysis, aided by the appropriate learning, can hardly fail to repay the study it will require. The insight into the nature and the working of the affections, to be secured by a careful study of the subject, should be a precious acquisition of knowledge easily convertible into power.

The activity of the sympathies enkindled by tracing the biographical sketches of a large number of the richest and most winsome examples of feminine friends.h.i.+p preserved for us in history, should bestow a rare pleasure. And the plain directions to be deduced from the discussion and the narratives should furnish a store of instruction for the wiser guidance of personal experience.

The writer, as he is about to intrust his book upon that current of literature which flows by the doors of all the intelligent, bearing its offerings to their hands, is quite aware that the subject of the rights and the wrongs, the joys and the griefs, the hopes and the fears, the duties and the plans, belonging to the outer and inner life of womankind in the present age, happens just now to be one of the chief matters of popular interest and agitation. This, however, has had no influence in leading him to treat the subject. It has long been in his mind. He has been drawn to investigate it and write on it simply by its intrinsic attractions for him. But the extent and earnestness with which the public mind is preoccupied by the social and political discussions of the theme, going on in all quarters, much increase the difficulty of treating it, as is here proposed, from the scholarly, moral, and experimental point of view, with perfect candor and calmness, and with a careful avoidance of prejudices, exaggerations, and declamatory appeals. Demagogues and partisans, who seek personal notoriety or other ends of private pa.s.sion, naturally try to produce effect by the use of pungent epigrams, overstrained trifles, extravagant views, and sophistical arguments, fitted to play on the biases, piques, and ignorances of those whose attention they can gain. All this obviously adds to the hardness of the task imposed on him who would steer clear of every extremity, and keep in the golden mean of truth and use.

Such a one is also least likely to secure popular praise. The extreme conclusions, peppery rhetoric, and pa.s.sionate declamation of the leaders on both sides, who aim at sensation and victory, are surest to awaken the enthusiasm of the extremists, who always direct the admiring gaze of heir parasites to the favorite representatives of their own party, their scorn to the favorite representatives of the other party. But under such circ.u.mstances, by is much as the moderation of impartiality and of a patient search for the exact truth is hard to be kept, an unlikely to win popularity, it is the more a duty, and the surer to bear good fruits of service to the public. There is a fas.h.i.+onable habit of laughing or sneering at the illusions of the young, a habit usually mistimed and injurious. For an illusion is as real as a truth. Every phenomenon implies truth, however incorrectly t may be understood. An illusion is, in fact, but a reality misinterpreted. Harmless, joy-breeding illusions are the magic coloring of our existence. They should be cultivated rather than rudely driven away.

The dry critic who daily labors, and with success, to destroy them, may be knowing; but he is not wise. Every seeming acquisition really impoverishes him. The n.o.ble Mendelssohn once said, "Life without illusions is only death." The illusions of high and guileless hearts are the blessed hopes created by generous faiths fastening on the better aspects of truth. They are to our experience what the tremulous iridescence is to the neck of the dove. To allow, as we grow old, a sinister gaze at the sterner aspects of truth to banish these rich and kindly illusions, is a wretched folly, however much it may dress itself as wisdom. There are lures and deceits, enchanting at an early period, which, at a later one, ought to be outgrown, seen through and left behind, but not with arid and scoffing conceit. The way to escape sadness, when the light of one beautiful promise after another goes out, is to kindle in place thereof the light of one glorious reality after another. If the gathered experience we carry at evening renders worthless many things we prized in the morning, it should also give preciousness to many things unvalued then.

When the fallen torch of ambition has smouldered into blackness, we ought to make the eternal star of religion our guide. To take spiritual treasures away without replacing them by better ones is robbery. The cynical authors who deal chiefly in ridicule and satire, or in what they call solid facts, the alternate levity and bitterness of whose writings tend to destroy all ingenuous faith and glowing affection, all magnanimous sympathies and hopes, seem to me to be engaged in as miserable a business as those African hunters who train falcons to dart on gazelles, and pick out their beautiful eyes. The illusiveness of life that results from teeming love and trust is as a mist of gold sifted into the atmosphere, through which all the objects of our regard loom, colossal and glittering. As we advance in years, we should indeed learn to recognize, and make allowance for, this refraction and these tints, but without ceasing to enjoy the beautiful aggrandizement they bestow. When there is danger that a character will melt into a mere mush of ungirt feelings, the astringent and bracing use of satire is fit. The application of a fleecing nonchalance or of a jibing scorn to a soul of strong and ardent sentiment, is unfit. A certain divinity should hedge every manifestation of trustful affection, even though it be misjudged. It is for the most part profane to scoff an overstretched or misplaced admiration: it calls rather for a considerate instruction which shall tenderly set it right.

It is insipidity of the feelings that gives rise to sentimentality, as, when the tongue is disordered, we are always trying it. The cure of that insipidity is to direct upon it the energy of an objective earnestness, a current of positive faith and love. No negative treatment, of indifference or of contempt, can avail. Sentimentality, frozen under the cutting breath of derision, resembles that loathsome ice-lake of poison in the Scandinavian h.e.l.l. Sentimentality, fired by the glorious contagion of self-forgetful admiration and loyalty, is raised into sentiment, or even divinized into enthusiasm. The author will devote his best endeavor to do justice to both sides of the subject treated in his book, taking warning from the partisans who fix an exclusive attention on that aspect of it which they respectively prefer. He will try to set down such true thoughts in such a pure spirit, as, instead of drying up in his readers the springs of generous faith, and disenchanting them of all romantic expectation, will leave them at the end with a higher estimate of the worth of human nature and of the sweetness of human life.

Ever so correct a perception of what we despise and detest leaves our moral rank undetermined; but the measure of what we love and admire is the measure of our own worth. It should never be forgotten, that the most delicate and enduring pleasures we enjoy are those we give.

It should always be remembered, that, while the proud demand honor, and the humble seek sympathy, there is a self-respectful affection, neither haughty nor cringing, which will always earn honor, but never stop to ask it, always enjoy sympathy, but never be dependent on it.

This whole book is a demonstration of the truth, that, however much woman may need deliverance from some outward trials and disabilities, her grand want is a freer, deeper, richer, holier, inward life. Let her, if she so please, reach out for the ballot, enter on a larger range of work and responsibility. But let her not be blind to the truth, that her foremost, weightiest need is a more thorough intellectual possession and moral fulfilment of herself, leading to a closer union with friends and an absolute surrender to G.o.d. The just formula for the aims of woman, as it seems to me, is neither, on the one hand, limitation to domestic life; nor, on the other hand, devotion to public life as an end; but, dedication to the duties and joys of family and social life, and to the nurture of the personal inner life, as the true ends, and a free partic.i.p.ation in the grand interests of public life, as a means of purifying the domestic and the inner life from selfish littlenesses, and enriching the experience of the individual with the wide obligations and hopes of humanity at large. Not domestic life alone; not public life alone; not merely domestic life and public life together; but domestic life and public life, for the sake of the personal inner life, purified and aggrandized by the ideal appropriation of the essential experience and progress of the whole world.

This, with such allowances as the distinction of s.e.x really requires, should be the aim of every woman as well as of every man. If this view be correct, it is plain how great and vital an interest it gives to the theme of the present work; the friends.h.i.+p of women; since the very ground and gist of a n.o.ble friends.h.i.+p is the cultivation in common of the personal inner lives of those who partake in it, their mutual reflection of souls and joint sharing of experience inciting them to a constant betterment of their being and their happiness.

HAVE WOMEN NO FRIENDs.h.i.+PS?

SOME men think women unfitted for friends.h.i.+p. Feminine hearts are so complex, changeable, elusive, that the belief has had great currency among themselves as well as with their critics. In comparing the two s.e.xes in this particular, many persons commit a gross error by overlooking the fact that there are all kinds and degrees of feminine characters, not less than of masculine. When Heine says, "I will not affirm that women have no character; rather they have a new one every day," he means precisely what Pope meant by the famous couplet in his poem on the Characters of Women:

Nothing so true as what you once let fall, Most women have no characters at all.

This want of character is held by many thoughtful men for what Coleridge a.s.serted it to be, the perfection of a woman; as tastelessness proves the purity of water; transparency, that of gla.s.s. Plausible ground for this view is furnished by the fact, that the perfection of fine and n.o.ble manners the peculiar province of feminine genius consists in the absence of egotism, in that chaste and l.u.s.trous exuberance of sympathetic joy which results from the opposite of all personal domination; namely, spontaneous obedience to the whole law of duty. Nevertheless, the opinion is unsound; partly untrue, partly inadequate. It results from the despotic selfhood of man, who wishes not to reflect another, but only to be reflected. The absence of fixed individuality makes one a readier mirror; and man, as the historic master, desires the woman who confronts him to be, at least apparently, the yielding subject of his will. But since woman is an independent being, endowed with a separate responsibleness, she has a distinct personal destiny to fulfil as much as he has, and should be granted an equal freedom of individuality.

The perfection of a woman in the sight of G.o.d is one thing: her irresistible charmingness to selfish man may be quite another thing.

If the latter requires a soft compliance, involving the absence of will, the former is not irreconcilable with the firmest constancy of individual traits; and, in fact, women can no more be lumped together in level community, either by positives or by negatives, than men can be. Those differ from each other as widely as these do. Accuracy of thought has seldom been more recklessly offered up to pungency of expression than in the above-cited aphorism of Pope. There is an ample variety of tenacious womanly characters between the extremes marked by Miriam beating her timbrels, and Cleopatra applying the asp; Cornelia showing her Roman jewels, and Guyon rapt in G.o.d; Lucrezia Borgia raging with bowl and dagger, and Florence Nightingale sweetening the memory of the Crimean war with philanthropic deeds.

What group of men indeed can be brought together, more distinct in individuality, more contrasted in diversity of traits and destiny, than such women as Eve in the Garden of Eden, Mary at the foot of the cross, Rebecca by the well, Semiramis on her throne, Ruth among the corn, Jezebel in her chariot, Lais at a banquet, Joan of Arc in battle, Tomyris striding over the field with the head of Cyrus in a bag of blood, Perpetua smiling on the lions in the amphitheatre, Martha c.u.mbered with much service, Pocahontas under the shadow of the woods, Saint Theresa in the convent, Madame Roland on the scaffold, Mother Agnes at Port Royal, exiled De Stael wielding her pen as a sceptre, and Mrs. Fry lavis.h.i.+ng her existence on outcasts!

In searching for the friends.h.i.+ps of women, it is difficult at first to find striking examples. Their lives are so private, their dispositions are so modest, their experiences have been so little noticed by history, that the annals of the feminine heart are for the most part a secret chapter. But a sufficiently patient search will cause a beautiful mult.i.tude of such instances to reveal themselves.

Nothing, perhaps, will strike the literary investigator of the subject more forcibly than the frequency with which he meets the expressed opinion, that women really have few or no friends.h.i.+ps; that with them it must be either love, hate, or nothing. A writer in one of our popular periodicals has recently ventured this dogmatic a.s.sertion: "If the female mind were not happily impervious to logic, we might demonstrate, even to its satisfaction, that the history of the s.e.x presents no single instance of a famous friends.h.i.+p." Before we get through our work, we shall meet with abundant confutations of this rash and uncomplimentary statement.

Swift says, "To speak the truth, I never yet knew a tolerable woman to be fond of her own s.e.x." The statement, if taken with too wide a meaning, might have been refuted by the sight, under his eyes, of the cordial and life-long affection of Miss Johnson and Lady Gifford, the sister of Sir William Temple. He could not expect a Stella and a Vanessa to be friends: an exclusive love for a common object inevitably made them deadly rivals. But the author of "Gulliver's Travels" was a keen observer; his maxims have always a basis in fact; and it is undoubtedly true that women of exceptional cleverness prefer the wit, wisdom, and earnestness of the more cultivated members of the other s.e.x to the too frequent ignorance and triviality of their own. Undoubtedly, in most societies, women of unusual genius and accomplishments can more easily find congenial companions.h.i.+p with men than with women. But to infer from this any natural incompatibility for friends.h.i.+ps between women is to draw a monstrous inference, wholly unwarranted by the premises. In the sensible chapter of "A Woman's Thoughts about Women," which Miss Muloch devotes to this subject, she says, "The friends.h.i.+ps of women are much more common than those of men; but rarely or never so firm, so just, or so enduring." But then she proceeds, justly, though with a little inconsistency, to say, "With women these relations may be sentimental, foolish, and fickle; but they are honest, free from secondary motives of interest, and infinitely more respectable than the time-serving, place-hunting, dinner-seeking devotion which Messrs. Tape and Tadpole choose to denominate friends.h.i.+p." That the sharper and sincerer feelings of women make them more capable than men of sacrificing their interests to their pa.s.sions, less likely to sacrifice their pa.s.sions to their interests, and that they are more absorbed by their sympathies and antipathies, admits of no question.

Eugenie de Guerin, a woman of the rarest heart and soul, wrote in her journal, a few years ago, this pa.s.sage, which has already grown famous: "I have ever sought a friends.h.i.+p so strong and earnest that only death could break it; a happiness and unhappiness which I had, alas! in my brother Maurice. No woman has been, or will be, able to replace him; not even the most distinguished has been able to give me that bond of intelligence and of tastes, that broad, simple, and lasting relation. There is nothing fixed, enduring, vital, in the feelings of women; their attachments to each other are so many pretty bows of ribbons. I notice these light affections in all female friends. Can we not, then, love each other differently? I neither know an example in history nor am acquainted with one in the present.

Orestes and Pylades have no sisters. It makes me impatient, when I think of it, that you men have something in your hearts which is wanting to us. In return we have devotedness." It is striking to notice the ident.i.ty of sentiment here with that in the maxim of La Bruyere: "In love women exceed the generality of men, but in friends.h.i.+p we have infinitely the advantage."

With reference to the statement that "Orestes and Pylades have no sisters," besides the superfluous disproofs of it contained in the pages that follow, it is an interesting fact that cla.s.sic literature affords one example, which modern writers have never, to my knowledge, noticed. Pausanias, in his "Description of Greece," tenth book, twenty-ninth chapter, gives an recount of an elaborate painting by Polygnotus of the underworld, the scenery and fate of the dead in the future state. Among the images of the departed set forth on the canvas were two women, Chloris and rhyia, locked in a fond embrace.

Of these two women, thus shown eternally united in the realm beyond he grave, Pausanias says that they were a pair of friends extraordinarily attached to each other in life. Their story is lost.

The imagination of womankind might compensate for the missing narrative, and make the names of Chloris and Thyia live with the lames of Damon and Pythias.

Let us sift the grounds of the opinion that women ire relatively incapable of friends.h.i.+p, a.n.a.lyze the appearances on which it rests, and separate the truth in it from the error.

The first fact of the subject is, that women are naturally less selfish and more sympathetic than men.

They have more affection to bestow, greater need of sympathy, and therefore are more sure, in the absence of love, to seek friends.h.i.+p.

The devastating egotism of man is properly foreign to woman; though there are many women as haughty, hard, and imperious as any man. But these are unfeminine, despite their s.e.x. There are women who seem cold and beautiful stones, their hearts icicles, their tears frozen gems pressed out by injured pride. On the other hand, there are men as soft, as modest, as celestially sympathetic, as almost any woman.

Still, the cardinal contrast holds, that women are self-forgetful, men self-a.s.serting; women hide their surplus affection under a feigned indifference; men hide their indifference under a feigned affection. Of course, in this comparison, depraved women are excluded: these are generally far more heartless and calculating than men. The aphorism of Rochefoucauld "In their first pa.s.sion, women love the lover; in their subsequent ones, they love love" is descriptive, not of women, but of that cla.s.s of women who cherish a succession of lovers, a cla.s.s familiar to the base and brilliant French aphorist. With such, the venal commonness of affection first profanes, then destroys it.

It is a pathetic sign of the diviner nature of women, that they conceal sorrow more easily than joy, while men conceal joy more easily than sorrow. The lover of Adelaide de Comminge having joined a convent of Trappists, she followed him thither, disguised as a man, took the vows, and was not recognized by him until on her death-bed.

Man is not capable of such pure devotion: only a woman could thus forbear, and be content with the secret joy of the beloved presence.

Man demands action: woman demands emotion. Friends.h.i.+p between two youths is martial, adventurous, a trumpet-blast or a bugle-air: friends.h.i.+p between two girls is poetic, contemplative, the sigh of a harp-string or the swell of an organ-pipe.

Woman needs friends.h.i.+p more than man, because she is less self- sufficing. She is much more apt than he to think the form in the mirror is lovely, but not to think it of herself. Milton's Eve was startled with a shy delight at the fair shape in the fountain, never dreaming that it was herself. Men are flutes: they must be filled with the warm breath of a foreign sympathy. Women are harpsichords: they have all the conditions of music in themselves, and only need to be struck. But, containing so much, their need of being struck is the greater. Charlotte Bronte, in her sad, weary life, full, as she expressed it, of loneliness, of longing for companions.h.i.+p, had two faithful and precious friends; her "dear, dear E.," and her "good, kind Miss W." To the former she writes, "I am at this moment trembling all over with excitement, after reading your note: it is what I never received before, the unrestrained pouring out of a warm, gentle, generous heart. If you love me, do, do, do come on Friday. I shall watch and wait for you; and, if you disappoint me, I shall weep." Few sayings are more touching than that which Thackeray heard a woman utter, that she would gladly have taken Swift's cruelty to have had his tenderness. Now, is it not true that the intenser need naturally implies the keener search and the more copious finding?

The great reason why the friends.h.i.+ps of women are not more frequent and prominent than they are is, that the proper destiny of woman calls her to love; and this sentiment, in its fullness, is usually too absorbing to leave room and force for conspicuous friends.h.i.+ps.

With men the other sentiments are not so much suspended or engulfed by conjugal and parental love. "The men," La Bruyere says, "are the occasion that women do not love each other." With the one-sided exaggeration incident to most aphorisms, this is true. Husband and children occupy the wife and mother; and marriage is often the grave of feminine friends.h.i.+ps. According to the maxim of Saint Paul, "The head of the woman is the man:" the attraction of another woman must generally be weaker. The lives of men are the sighs of nature: the lives of women are their echoes. The sharp-eyed Richter says, "A woman, unlike Narcissus, seeks not her own image and a second I: she much prefers a not-I." This profound remark exactly touches the difference between friends.h.i.+p and love, and between the respective relations of man and woman to the two sentiments. Friends.h.i.+p is the simple reflection of souls by each other. Love is the mutual reflection of their entire being by two persons, each supplementing the defects of the other. Love, therefore, is friends.h.i.+p, with a differential addition. True love includes friends.h.i.+p, as the greater includes the smaller. Now, the self-sufficient character of man makes him seek a second I; that is, wish to see himself reflected in another. But the sympathetic character of woman makes her seek a not- I; that is, wish to see another reflected in herself. It is incorrect to say, that woman has less capacity than man for friends.h.i.+p: it is correct only to say, that man is more easily satisfied with friends.h.i.+p than woman is. She demands that, and something more; and every page of history teems with the records of that something more, the heavenly records of the sufferings, sacrifices, and triumphs of woman's love. When this imperial sentiment is baffled, and yet the soul remains mistress of herself, it is impossible that the next strongest sentiment should not, in all available instances, be cultivated as a solace and vicegerent. One of the renowned apothegms of that sinister moralist, Rochefoucauld, is, "Women feel friends.h.i.+p insipid after love." But he should have limited his remark to vicious women. It will not apply to virtuous women. Jane Austin, who in knowledge of the feminine heart has few equals, says, "Friends.h.i.+p is certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love."