The Friendships of Women Part 5

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?

PLATONIC LOVE; OR, THE MARRIAGE OF SOULS.

IN the further consideration of these genial attachments of women with persons not of their own s.e.x, we come to those whose relation is that of a wholly free and elective friends.h.i.+p, a friends.h.i.+p 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, coa.r.s.e judgments, have been p.r.o.nounced 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 pa.s.sion between the s.e.xes 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 fict.i.tious 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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sions 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 pa.s.sions, 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 n.o.ble 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 s.e.xes 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 cla.s.s 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 friends.h.i.+ps 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 blus.h.i.+ng?" 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 friends.h.i.+p. 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 pa.s.sion, like the former, with the exception that no physical influence of s.e.x 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 friends.h.i.+p are states of consciousness.

Love, in its high and pure forms, is confined to one object.

Friends.h.i.+p 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 enn.o.bling companions.h.i.+p 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 impa.s.sioned friends.h.i.+p of man and woman which const.i.tutes 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 friends.h.i.+p. 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 pa.s.sing in hers, revealed from G.o.d, revealing G.o.d, 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, s.e.xless, wors.h.i.+pping friends.h.i.+p, that Platonic pa.s.sion 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 a.s.sociating and blending with the Platonic substance of that love the const.i.tuents and scenery of the Christian doctrines of G.o.d and the future life.

Abelard and Heloise began with ordinary friends.h.i.+p, 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 friends.h.i.+p fermented into love. After their misfortunes and separation, the love, refined from pa.s.sion 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 friends.h.i.+p is, that the magic of imagination, with a religious emphasis, is in it. What distinguishes it from love is, that the consciousness of s.e.x 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 const.i.tutional structure, or temperamental key, to everybody else. There are persons built after a n.o.bler 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 a.s.sociation to the act, would be blasphemy; it can only be understood by reference to that sweet, poetic, religious wors.h.i.+p of lovely forms, which seems to rise through contemplation of beauty to adoration of G.o.d. 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 friends.h.i.+p with her as fervent as love, but without its alloy; the former is not. St.

Beuve says of Maurice de Guerin, "The sympathetic friends.h.i.+p of a beautiful woman appeased instead of inflaming him."

The exalted friends.h.i.+p 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 friends.h.i.+p, 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 cla.s.s 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 l.u.s.t cannot find its way through the non-conductors of esteem, reverence, duty, and honor. Those are safe, who, s.h.i.+elded by such holy barriers, pay their wors.h.i.+p, in the mental holy of holies, to the supernal charms of truth and virtue, to the dazzling sanct.i.ty 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 friends.h.i.+p between Gunther, the court physician, and Matilda, the queen, depicted by Auerbach, with such careful truth, in his great novel, "On the Height." Friends.h.i.+p is more likely to spring from love than love from friends.h.i.+p, 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 friends.h.i.+p will become another pa.s.sion, where there are legal or moral duties forbidding it, the true course is not to dismiss and denounce the friends.h.i.+p, 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 s.e.x 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 Ma.s.singer, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Beddoes, furnish harrowing examples. The amours of the unworthy yield no better argument against profound and earnest friends.h.i.+ps 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 friends.h.i.+p of a woman, because it may lead to harm; he should cherish the friends.h.i.+p, 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 Friends.h.i.+p may proceed with the other s.e.x 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 p.r.o.nounced it of but little value. In one of the volumes of the "Southern Literary Messenger" there is a very pleasing tale, ent.i.tled "How far Friends.h.i.+p 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 Friends.h.i.+p," in the thirty-fourth volume of "Knickerbocker." The opposite and better view is gracefully and effectively maintained in an article ent.i.tled "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: Friends.h.i.+p can be carried, without adulteration or peril, to a degree proportioned to the n.o.bleness 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 cla.s.s 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 friends.h.i.+p; and who, dest.i.tute 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. Friends.h.i.+p 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 const.i.tutional timidity makes her more cautious than your male friend. She, therefore, seldom counsels you to do an imprudent thing.

By friends.h.i.+ps I mean pure friends.h.i.+ps, those in which there s no admixture of the pa.s.sion 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 friends.h.i.+ps, where disparities of years or circ.u.mstances 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 friends.h.i.+p, 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 friends.h.i.+p is that between man and woman, because it is the only one free from all possible compet.i.tion." 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 friends.h.i.+ps 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 friends.h.i.+p with a woman; but a friends.h.i.+p among persons of different s.e.xes 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 coa.r.s.e 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 friends.h.i.+ps between the s.e.xes 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 friends.h.i.+ps 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 friends.h.i.+ps is seen in the cla.s.s 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 friends.h.i.+ps 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 n.o.ble women, from whose sympathy, through conversation and correspondence, they draw unfailing supplies of comfort, strength and hope. Find a person to whom a tender friends.h.i.+p is an absolute necessity, as it was to the cla.s.sic 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 sanct.i.ty; 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 nave, 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 G.o.d, finest and grandest American character, these, and such as these, are the men who have most valued friends.h.i.+ps 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 cla.s.s 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 n.o.ble 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 gla.s.s before his own bosom, dipped the pen in his own heart, and drew the n.o.ble 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 pa.s.sionately attached; Dorenburg; the three sisters, Caroline, Luise, and Henriette Hornich; and their dear neighbor and a.s.sociate, Allwina Clarenau. Caroline and Luise marry Biderthal and Dorenburg; Allwina becomes Woldemar's wife; but Henriette becomes his friend. This friends.h.i.+p 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 G.o.ddess." After many vain trials to win a sufficing friends.h.i.+p, 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 hara.s.sed 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 friends.h.i.+p 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 s.e.x is excluded, as it is in his relation to himself; and marriage with her would seem to him worse than incest.

The d.u.c.h.ess 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 friends.h.i.+p! and this friends.h.i.+p which is not love! Well, in the name of G.o.d, to love, is it not to love? Ah, Madame la d.u.c.h.esse! 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 ac.u.men 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 friends.h.i.+ps of its men and women, pure as well as impure; it is a slander to limit them to the latter cla.s.s. 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 grat.i.tude 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 s.e.x in the sternest slavery. One day, the wife, or the young daughter, confined in the upper story of the walled fortress, sees, pa.s.sing by the castle, a poor youth with a guitar suspended from his neck, humming a languis.h.i.+ng 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 n.o.ble 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 compa.s.sionate the tears and hards.h.i.+ps 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 pa.s.sion, and you destroy its power, its flame dies in the damps of indulgence; but spiritualize a pa.s.sion, and you perpetuate its power, its flame becomes a spur, p.r.i.c.king the sides of intent.

The love of woman has in all ages given birth in man to pa.s.sionate 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 chast.i.ty 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 inst.i.tution 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 chast.i.ty; 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 sanct.i.ty of the gospel, as happened in the poetic atmosphere of priestly and feudal Provence, was transformed into that pure, intense wors.h.i.+p 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 wors.h.i.+p of woman native to the camp, the poetic wors.h.i.+p of woman created in the court of minstrelsy, and the religious wors.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sociation of garter and star was not difficult.

The enthusiasm thus copiously generated, forbidden by the reigning spirit and circ.u.mstances 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 fas.h.i.+on, in a more settled age, this force of enthusiasm, no longer flas.h.i.+ng 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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sage 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 n.o.bly drawn the portraits of their leaders. The wars of the League had left the great n.o.bles 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 const.i.tutionalized, 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 n.o.bles 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 n.o.bility 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 ign.o.ble one. No national idea inspired it; every one was for himself and his house; and the women were perfectly able to sympathize and a.s.sist 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 pa.s.sion, 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 ill.u.s.tration of both."