Platonic Love; or, The Marriage of Souls
In the further consideration of these genial attachments of women with persons not of their own sex, we come to those whose relation is that of a wholly free and elective friendship, a friendship with no intermixture either of hereditary connections or of family obligations. This brings us directly to an examination of that species of affection celebrated through the world as Platonic love; on which so many false judgments, inadequate judgments, coarse judgments, have been pronounced by partial observers and critics. If, in this discussion of the relations of affection between men and women, delicate topics are handled, and some things said from which a squeamish reader may shrink, the vital importance of the matter and the motive of the treatment furnish the only needful apology. Prudery is the parsimony of a shrivelled heart, and is scarcely worthy of respect. The subject of the relations of sentiment and passion between the sexes has paramount claims on our attention. It actually occupies a foremost place in the thoughts of most persons. It is constantly handled in the most unrestrained banter on the stage and in all the provinces of fictitious literature. Almost every sensational tale reeks with vulgar portrayals of it. In the mean time, the reign of vice is thought daily to grow more common and more shameless; the demoralization of our great cities, in the flaunting openness of their profligacy, seems to be annually bringing them nearer to an equality with the debauched cities of pagan antiquity. The depravity of an abandoned life is supposed to gather constantly an enlarging class of victims, and to diffuse its undermining evils more widely around us. Shall the pulpit, the academic chair, the high court of the finer literature, alone be dumb? It is the duty of those clothed with the authority of wisdom and purity to speak in plain accents of warning and guidance. They are guilty of a wrong, if they let a mock modesty keep them silent on a matter so deeply imperilling the most sacred interests of the community.
Yet a word of protest is called for against those exaggerated sensational statements on this subject, so persistently forced on public attention by well-meaning but mistaken persons. A tendency has shown itself of late, in many quarters, to attribute that increase of sensual vices imagined to mark the age, not to temporary outward causes, provisional phases of our civilization, but to a growth of depravity in character, an intrinsic lowering of moral sanctions and heightening of foul passions in the people. Such a belief I hold to be both false in its basis and pernicious in its influence. To every competent student of human nature, history demonstrates a progressive diminution in the intensity of the physical passions, and a corresponding increase of moral sensibility and the power of conscience. The extension of sensual vice at the present time, if it be a fact, is owing to accidental conditions which will not be permanent, and is itself very far from being so common or so fearful as some alarmists think. Those alarmists are doing more hurt than good by their overdrawn descriptions and excited declamation. They are fastening a morbid attention on a morbid subject. There is an innocent ignorance, which, if dangerous in some cases, is, in many cases, the highest safety. There is a wholesome unconsciousness, a noble preoccupation with good and pure things, which is a far more promising protective from evil and its temptations than a keen scent and an eager notice of every tainted thing in the wind. If you choose the crow for your guide, you must expect your goal to be carrion. The travellers, who, after making the tour of the United States, write books taken up with the frequency of divorce among us, or devoted to such limited and exceptional aspects as that presented by the Mormon settlement at Utah, are not to be accepted as sound expositors of our social and moral condition. A De Tocqueville is a truer and more adequate teacher. Many recent writers on the relation of the sexes in the present age, writers belonging to the medical, priestly, and literary professions, appear to be infested with the suspicion that certain wicked and disgusting customs are almost universal. They seem occupied in looking everywhere to trace the signs of those customs. Their writings are less adapted to prevent or cure the deprecated evil than they are to fix a diseased gaze on it, and thus to aggravate its mischief. Their readers must get more harm than benefit from them. The belief in the exceptionality and the loneliness of vice is a restraint from it; the belief in its commonness is a demoralizing provocative to it. There are well-meant books now having a wide circulation in consequence of the efforts made to push them, which I cannot help believing do more injury than many books which are universally condemned. They give their readers the suspicion that the vilest forms of sensuality are universally prevalent, and induce in them the habit of looking for their signals in every direction. To every pure and lofty soul, such a suspicion and habit are enough to turn the sunshine into a stench and make the very landscape loathsome. The crowding of population in manufacturing and commercial centres, our thronged and exposed hotel-life, the expensive habits of fashion, the excessive luxury of wealth and vanity, are, undoubtedly, causes of much personal vice. But, notwithstanding all this, the vile and degraded men and women are the marked exception in every community among us. The vile and degraded are more segregated into a class by themselves, and are therefore more conspicuous and obtrusive than ever before. Licentiousness may have been more prevalent formerly than now, as I believe it was; but less prominent and less noticed, because of its greater diffusion. It was not so concentrated into relief. The unstainedly honorable and virtuous are the vast majority, and will, when a few evil conditions of society are outgrown, rapidly become an ever larger majority. Especially do I believe it to be a truth, which none but the ignorant or the vicious can question, that every city and village in America, outside of Mormondom, abounds with matrons and maidens, the face of any one of whom Purity herself might take for her escutcheon.
But, after we allow every just abatement from the overcharged representations of the extent of sensual vice in our time, there remains cause enough to make every lover of virtue anxious to employ all available means to lessen the force of social temptation and to increase the firmness Of individual resistance. And there cannot be a reasonable doubt that high-toned friendships of earnest men and women would be a holy and powerful restraint from illicit habits. To represent such attachments and intercourse as dangerous lures to evil, or, as a popular novelist of the day has called them, “delusions and snares,” is an inversion of their true influence. Consider the following picture drawn by a young Frenchman from his own experience amid the exposures of Paris:
“The house of Julius Fontaine is another home for me; he and his wife are a family for me. When I am gay, I go to them to pour out my gayety; if I am sad, I go to them to have my grief consoled; they receive kindly both my joy and my sorrow. No fixed day nor hour of admission, no ceremony and grand toilet; they receive me when I arrive; they welcome rue in whatever costume I present myself. I enjoy to the utmost, with these good friends, the pleasure of being spoiled; I give myself up to it with delight. As soon as I enter, they install me in a comfortable arm-chair, in a choice situation in the corner of the fireplace. They speak to me of every thing that is interesting to Ime; they listen to all my nonsense; they give me advice, if I ask for it; they consult me about all they intend doing. I am initiated, by a lively conversation, into the most minute details of the household; they relate to me the little triumphs and misdeeds of the children, whom they caress or scold before me. If the hour arrives for the meal, my place is set; and, invited or not, there are sure to be on the table some dishes for which they know my preference. In playing with the children, in dreaming aloud, in talking seriously, sometimes in a little discussion or backbiting, in laughing, and exchanging those nothings which charm, we know not why, the hours glide away. I leave as late as possible; we give cordial grasps of the hand, which express our regret at parting. The next day, or a few days after, I find myself there with renewed pleasure. It seems as if each evening we become more necessary to one another. They almost make me forget that they are two, and that I am one.”
Such a friendship must be a guardian guidance of virtue and happiness. The cultivation of such relations cannot be too strongly recommended. The odious vices of sensuality would die out before them. Profligacy either rots or petrifies the heart; but a pure friendship inspires, cleanses, expands, and strengthens the soul. It is the nutriment of genius and of every form of philanthropic virtue. “How can one who hates men love a woman without blushing?” is one of Richter’s incisive questions.
In now taking up the subject before us, the meaning of the thing in debate should first be perceived; for, while the ignorant are always the least competent, they are often the most forward, to give decisions. Truly understood, the Platonic sentiment does not denote love, in the distinctive significance of that word, but a pure and fervent friendship. Ideal love is ordinary love taken up, out of material organs and relations, into pure mentality, with the preserved correspondence of all it had on that lower plane where it naturally lives. Platonic love is a high personal passion, like the former, with the exception that no physical influence of sex enters into it; imagination exalting the soul, instead of inflaming the senses. Actual love is the marriage of total persons for mutual happiness, and for the transmission of themselves in new beings. Ideal love is either the memory of actual love, or the notion of it prevented from becoming actual by some impediment. Platonic love is the marriage of souls for the production of spiritual offspring, ideas, feelings, and volitions. The first looks ultimately to the perpetuation of life by providing new receptacles for it; the last looks ultimately to the enhancement of life by a sympathetic reflection of it. The children of actual love are organic reproductions of the being of the parents; the children of Platonic love are spiritual reflections of the being of the parents. The perfected offspring of love are boys and girls; the perfected offspring of friendship are states of consciousness.
Love, in its high and pure forms, is confined to one object. Friendship has this advantage, that it may be given to all, however numerous, whose conduct and qualities of character are fitted to command it. It is, therefore, less perilous, less exposed to fatal wreck, more capable of consolations and replacements. Love and friendship are properly not antagonists, but coadjutors. They naturally go together where there is adaptedness for them, mutually quickening and increasing each other. The former should never exist without the ennobling companionship and clarifying mixture of the latter. But there are numberless instances in which, while the former is impossible, or would be wrong, the latter is abundantly capable of nurture, and would prove a boon of unspeakable solace.
Six immortal names will serve to set in relief the distinction between that impassioned friendship of man and woman which constitutes Platonic love, and those forms of ideal love which are often erroneously confounded with it.
The affection of Petrarch for Laura, after her death, was ideal love. The love which, in her life, had pervaded his system, then rose, strained of its carnal elements, and re-appeared in his mind alone, with the ideal equivalents of all it had before. She became a heavenly idea exciting emotions in him, instead of an earthly object productive of sensations; yet a correspondence of all that had been in the sensations was still seen, purged and eternized, in the emotions.
The affection for Beatrice which consecrated the soul of Dante was Platonic love, or a divine friendship. It was free from sensual ingredients from the first. It was his spirit, ruled by an intense sympathy, mentally confronting hers, as a live mirror before a live mirror; creating in his own, in correspondent states of consciousness, all the entrancing shapes of truth, beauty, and goodness he saw passing in hers, revealed from God, revealing God, and clothed with power to redeem the gazer from every thing corrupt. Dante promised to immortalize Beatrice by dedicating to her such a strain of love as had never before celebrated a woman. He kept his promise wonderfully. But the essence of his love was not a new creation; it was simply an ardent, sexless, worshipping friendship, that Platonic passion which, wholly cleansed from sense, adored a beautiful soul as a type of the Divine Beauty, a medium of celestial realities, which shone through it in half-veiled reminiscences. The originality of the Dantean love consists, first, in the unique personality of the poet, and the equally peerless personality which his genius has given to his lady; secondly, in associating and blending with the Platonic substance of that love the constituents and scenery of the Christian doctrines of God and the future life.
Abelard and Heloise began with ordinary friendship, in the relation of teacher and pupil. The extreme beauty, genius, and graces of the parties soon poured into their intercourse an intoxicating potion, which swept the senses into the mental whirl; and friendship fermented into love. After their misfortunes and separation, the love, refined from passion to memory, rose out of the senses into the thoughts, and circulated in idea, instead of detaching itself in act. We imagine Petrarch offering enamored tribute to Laura, who warmly persuades his homage, but coldly repels his ardor. We think of Abelard and Heloise in pensive converse, hand in hand, eye to eye, living over the past with tender regrets. But we see Dante kneeling before Beatrice, in profound humility and intellectual entrancement, touching the hem of her robe, while she points upward to the supernal Glory, whose light is falling on her face.
What distinguishes this Platonic affection from ordinary friendship is, that the magic of imagination, with a religious emphasis, is in it. What distinguishes it from love is, that the consciousness of sex has nothing to do with it, while that element is essential in the latter. If woman is generally the object to whom this affection attaches, it is not because she is woman, but because she is purer, lovelier, more self-abnegating, a clearer mirror of divinity. Precisely the same affection exists, when favorable conditions meet, between man and man; as is abundantly shown in the sonnets of Shakespeare, in the writings of Plato himself, and in many other places.
The type of affection now defined, many people consider a mere theory, spun by a finical fancy, incapable of reduction to practice in the substantial relations of life. But such critics criticise themselves. They identify their own limitations with the diagram of human nature. This is the procedure ever characteristic of arrogant folly, to make its actual experience the measure of possible experience. All beauty that is sufficiently marked, does, in its very nature, awaken a blessed ravishment in every soul that is sufficiently harmonious and sensitive. The charm operates to this result through the imagination. Now, if the imagination distribute the spell through the body, as well as through the soul, ordinary love is the consequence; but, if imagination be confined within the intellect, Platonic love is the consequence. Some persons, no doubt, are incapable of the latter; the instant any form of beauty strikes their perceptions, it is deflected downward, and dips into the senses. Every esthetic impression, even the loveliness of painting, music, or a soft landscape, affects them voluptuously. But it is an outrage for them to attribute this peculiarity of constitutional structure, or temperamental key, to everybody else. There are persons built after a nobler pattern, keyed to a loftier music, susceptible of a more undefiled and eternal stir of the atoms of consciousness. They look on a beautiful woman, with a delight circling purely in the mind, with a serene melodious joy, like that given them by an exquisite picture, statue, or landscape. Dante tells us, in his Vita Nuova, that he carried about with him a list of the loveliest ladies in Florence. To attach any prurient association to the act, would be blasphemy; it can only be understood by reference to that sweet, poetic, religious worship of lovely forms, which seems to rise through contemplation of beauty to adoration of God. One man, brought into intimate relation with an attractive and gifted woman, feels as if he were a vase of fiery quicksilver; another feels as if he were a mirror of divine ideas. The latter is capable of a friendship with her as fervent as love, but without its alloy; the former is not. St. Beuve says of Maurice de Guérin, “The sympathetic friendship of a beautiful woman appeased instead of inflaming him.”
The exalted friendship of man and woman, known as Platonic love, is not, then, an empty mirage of sentimentality. But is it not too dangerous to be cultivated? Is it not liable to go too far, and to work fatal mischiefs? Many, judging from unworthy instances, With an inadequate knowledge of the data, answer these questions with a sweeping affirmative. But justice requires a careful discrimination. Unquestionably there are some who are unfit for this relation, in danger of perversion and betrayal at every step of its progress. Such should either shun the connection, or keep themselves with double guards of discreet reserve and watchfullness. Love and friendship, with them, are two electrical regions, insulated by a thin line of non-conduction. The more highly charged region tends, at the touch of any stimulative sign, to break through the barrier, and to flood the whole being with its own kind. For those of inflammable temperament and weak conscience, it is obvious enough what jeopardy must attend their playing about the conscious edges of relations on which such thunders of soul and fate hang, ready to be unleashed at a look. But there is another class of persons, with whom the fire of affection is harmless. Like those weird heat-lightnings that play in the firmament on summer evenings, it retains the lambent warmth and luminous loveliness, without the blasting violence. Of the intellectual and sensual regions, only the former is surcharged; the latter is either exhausted, or separated by an insulation so sure that it cannot possibly flash into the other. The unclean electricity of lust cannot find its way through the non-conductors of esteem, reverence, duty, and honor. Those are safe, who, shielded by such holy barriers, pay their worship, in the mental holy of holies, to the supernal charms of truth and virtue, to the dazzling sanctity of the principle of good. It is only the gross and weak who are discharged to their ruin by the lures of vice and pleasure. A profound reverence for a person at the same time inflames the soul and refrigerates the senses.
The common apprehension of danger from friendship between men and women is exaggerated. Those who fear such a danger should study the moral exaltation and the unspeakable usefullness and comfort of the friendship between Gunther, the court physician, and Matilda, the queen, depicted by Auerbach, with such careful truth, in his great novel, “On the Height.” Friendship is more likely to spring from love than love from friendship, in all but degraded characters. Desire is unprincipled. Love rests on a basis of desire, and naturally fights against the obstacles that oppose its gratification. It is, therefore, taken by itself, essentially dangerous. But friendship rests on a basis of esteem. Esteem is the very voice and face of moral and religious principle, the essential enemy of low temptations. It is the clear cold signet with which the soul stamps a commanding veto against every vicious act. Whenever there is danger that friendship will become another passion, where there are legal or moral duties forbidding it, the true course is not to dismiss and denounce the friendship, but to preserve it in its undegenerate integrity, by strengthening the sanctions, restraints, and obligations that should properly guide and guard it. The element of sense and sex sometimes breaks out with horrible fury in the closest relations. The cruel crime of Hebrew Amnon, the dark tale of Italian Cenci, numerous Greek tragedies, many of the terrible English tragedies of Massinger, Ford, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Beddoes, furnish harrowing examples. The amours of the unworthy yield no better argument against profound and earnest friendships between men and women than the morbid cases referred to yield against the proper affection of parent and child, brother and sister. One does not refuse to exercise his mind for fear it will lead to insanity; but he takes care to exercise it healthily. So he should not repudiate the friendship of a woman, because it may lead to harm; he should cherish the friendship, and beware of the harm. It is a profanation to judge of the natural effect of intimacy with the innocent or the wise and virtuous from the effects of intimacy with the depraved and guileful. Poor, sinful Tannhauser, long enslaved in the Venusberg, yearned to be free from the degrading bonds of sensuality. Utterly vain were his agonizing prayers to Venus to release him. But when, with a sudden ardor of faith and resolve, he cried to the Virgin Mary, the grotto in which he was confined instantly faded away, with all its unhallowed seductions.
The degree of danger in these connections will always depend on the characters of the parties. We cannot lay down, as tests, general rules which have much value irrespective of particular persons. Jean Paul, at twenty-six, wrote a prize-essay on “How far Friendship may proceed with the other sex without Love, and the Difference between it and Love.” The essay won the prize; but, if ever published, it is not contained in his collected writings. Probably the author’s maturer judgment pronounced it of but little value. In one of the volumes of the “Southern Literary Messenger” there is a very pleasing tale, entitled “How far Friendship may go with a Woman;” arguing that it is sure to end in love. The same conclusion is also advocated with much spirit in “A Debate on Friendship,” in the thirty-fourth volume of “Knickerbocker.” The opposite and better view is gracefully and effectively maintained in an article entitled “De l’Amitie,” in the fifteenth volume of “Harper’s Magazine.” Such special pleadings, however, will have slight weight with a sincere inquirer after the truth.
The most important principle for the guidance of such an inquirer is this: Friendship can be carried, without adulteration or peril, to a degree proportioned to the nobleness and consecration of the parties. It is shocking for those drawn together by a common pursuit of pleasures, to judge, by the standard applicable to themselves, those attracted towards each other by a common service of authorities. As a general rule, sensuality is in inverse ratio to intellectuality, but sensibility in direct ratio.
Accordingly, there is a select class of men and women, of the loftiest genius and character, the native haunt of whose souls is in the purest regions of nature and experience, who are made for friendship; and who, destitute of this, are deprived of their truest and fullest happiness. The movement of imagination which beauty starts in them keeps to the chariot-paths of celestial ideas, and is never switched into the burning tracks of sense. Friendship then reigns in sovereign distinction from love, sometimes by an unfittedness for the latter, sometimes by the interposition of moral principles and sentiments which lift their insulating behests as an impenetrable wall between the different regions.
One of the most striking of the testimonies borne to the value of the friendship of a woman is that of Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton:
“It is a wonderful advantage to a man, in every pursuit or avocation, to secure an adviser in a sensible woman. In woman there is at once a subtile delicacy of tact, and a plain soundness of judgment, which ire rarely combined to an equal degree in man. A woman, if she be really your friend, will have a sensitive regard for your character, honor, repute. She will seldom counsel you to do a shabby thing; for a woman Triend always desires to be proud of you. At the same time, her constitutional timidity makes her more cautious than your male friend. She, therefore, seldom counsels you to do an imprudent thing. By friendships I mean pure friendships, those in which there s no admixture of the passion of love, except in the married state. A man’s best female friend is a wife of good sense and good heart, whom he loves, and who loves him. If he have that, he need not seek elsewhere. But supposing the man to be without such a helpmate, female friendship he must have, or his intellect will be without a garden, and there will be many an unheeded gap even in its strongest fence.
“Better and safer, of course, are such friendships, where disparities of years or circumstances put the idea of love out of the question. Middle life has rarely the advantage youth and age have. Moliere’s old housekeeper was a great help to his genius; and Monaigne’s philosophy takes both a gentler and loftier character of wisdom from the date in which he finds, in Marie de Gournay, an adopted daughter, ‘certainly beloved by me,’ says the Horace of essayists, with more than paternal love, and involved in my solitude of retirement, as one of the best parts of my being. Female friendship, indeed, is to a man the bulwark, sweetener, ornament, of his existence. To his mental culture it is invaluable; without it, all his knowledge of books will never give him knowledge of the world.”
Mrs. Jameson quotes the opinion of Auguste Comte, that “the only true and firm friendship is that between man and woman, because it is the only one free from all possible competition.” And she adds, “In this I am inclined to agree with him, and to regret that our conventional morality, or immorality, places men and women in such a relation socially as to render such friendships difficult and rare.” Sydney Smith said, and the remark applies as forcibly to America as to England, “It is a great happiness to form a sincere friendship with a woman; but a friendship among persons of different sexes rarely or never takes place in this country.” The strong jealousy felt in these countries for any intimate relations of affection between men and women other than fathers and daughters, mothers and sons, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives; the readiness to cast coarse insinuations on them, is more discreditable to our hearts than it is creditable to our morals. It implies the belief that they cannot be attached as spirits without becoming entangled as animals. It is absurd to pretend that the multiplication of virtuous friendships between the sexes would foster licentiousness. Their flourishes best in their absence. Their lifeelement, esteem, is death to licentiousness. A holy thought, with its train of vestal emotions, like Diana and her nymphs, hunts impure desire out of the blood. One of the most known and remarkable friendships of woman and man was that of the Pope Hildebrand and the Countess Matilda of Tuscany. Their relation was based on veneration for each other’s commanding and austerely virtuous characters, ardent sympathy in convictions, plans, dangers, labors, and sufferings. They were both supremely devoted to the Church, to the support of its creed, and to the extension of its power. An enthusiastic community in so much experience made them enthusiastic friends. The vile charges of impurity brought against them by their vulgar foes then, and repeated since by prejudiced historians, are a matter of indignation and disgust to every impartial judge.
The most persuasive recommendation of these friendships is seen in the class of persons who are their most distinguished cultivators and exemplars. Men overflowing with the tenderest sensibility, devoted to the loftiest ends, bravest to dare, firmest to suffer, quickest to renounce, studious, afflicted, holy, unconquerable souls, are the ones who put the highest estimate on the friendships of women; who instinctively seek to win the confidence and interest of the best women they meet; who are surest to surround themselves with a group of pure and noble women, from whose sympathy, through conversation and correspondence, they draw unfailing supplies of comfort, strength and hope. Find a person to whom a tender friendship is an absolute necessity, as it was to the classic De Tocqueville, who said, “I cannot be happy, or even calm, unless I meet with the encouragement and sympathy of some of my fellow-creatures,” and you will never find him sneering at Platonic love. Klopstock, soul of ethereal softness and sanctity; Jean Paul, who added the finest heart of womanhood to the athletic soul of manhood; Richardson, so blameless in his life, so pathetic in his writings, so pleasing in his half naïve, half grandiose, personality; William Humboldt, the loving son and brother, the irreproachable statesman, the majestic scholar, the model of a Christian gentleman; Matthieu de Montmorency, hero and saint; Schleiermacher, the unflinching thinker and prophet, devout rouser, yearning comrade, encircled by Rahel Levin, Charlotte Von Kathen, Dorothea Veit, Henrietta Herz, and the rest; Charming, brave seeker and servant of truth, spotless patriot, lofty friend of humanity, burning aspirant to God, finest and grandest American character, these, and such as these, are the men who have most valued friendships with choice and unspotted women. On the other hand, the contemners of such a sentiment will be found most fitly represented by Thersites, who continued to ridicule Achilles for the tender-heartedness he showed towards the dead queen of the Amazons, until the hero killed the rancorous scoffer with one blow of his fist.
But, of all the class of men we have been speaking of, no one has more thoroughly tasted the contents of this relation in personal experience, or more completely mastered and displayed its secrets by psychological criticism, than Jacobi. Jacobi sat, for half his life, in the centre of a sort of Platonic academy of noble women, such as his own sisters, and the Princess Galitzin, Sophia Delaroche, and Cornelia Goethe, revolving, both in native feeling and critical thought, all the treasures of pure affection. Bettine, after a visit to him, said, “Jacobi is tender as a Psyche awakened too early.” In his two works, “Allwill’s Correspondence” and “Woldemar,” he unfolds the true philosophy of Platonic love, in its psychological foundations and workings, and in all its subtilest ramifications, more fully than anybody else has ever done it. Jacobi held the glass before his own bosom, dipped the pen in his own heart, and drew the noble though fevered Woldemar after the life. The chief characters in this romance of philosophy and sentiment are Woldemar; his brother Biderthal, to whom he is passionately attached; Dorenburg; the three sisters, Caroline, Luise, and Henriette Hornich; and their dear neighbor and associate, Allwina Clarenau. Caroline and Luise marry Biderthal and Dorenburg; Allwina becomes Woldemar’s wife; but Henriette becomes his friend. This friendship becomes so comprehensive and intense in its vitality, that life would be nothing to them without it. After a while, an element of strange perturbation and suspicion enters into it; they fear it is becoming love, and are most wretched. But at length, after much perplexity and distress, all comes clear; and they are again blessed with a perfect spiritual sympathy, as serene and pure as that between two seraphs.
The story and many of its separate incidents have been greatly censured and ridiculed; but Jacobi had an insight, a knowledge, a mastery, in these delicate matters, far superior to that of his critics. Whoso really fathoms his exposition must justify and admire it. The characters of Woldemar and Henriette are extraordinary and exceptional; they are nevertheless true; and their experience is accurately depicted, and offers an invaluable lesson for those who can read it. “I had, from a child,” Woldemar writes, “a sweet lovingness for every thing which came in beauty towards my senses or my soul. I was full of pleasure, courage, and sadness. I bore something in my heart which divided me from all things; yea, from myself, I strove so earnestly to embrace and unite myself with all. But what made my heart so loving, so foolish, so warm and good, that I never found in any one. Before the rising and before the setting sun, under the moon and the stars, full of love and full of despair, I have wept as Pygmalion before the image of his goddess.” After many vain trials to win a sufficing friendship, after long observation of others and study of himself, Woldemar concluded it unattainable, and laid the hope aside. “I found,” he says, “that, collectively and singly, we nourish too many and too eager desires, are too deeply harassed by the pursuits, cares, joys, and pains of life, are too much tortured, excited, distracted, for two men anywhere, in these times, to become and remain so completely one as my loving enthusiasm had made me dream.” But Henriette revived this long-forgotten dream in Woldemar, and made it real; and in his friendship we see carried out the idea of a man in whom a foreign personality has so overlaid and taken up his own, absorbing his will and determining his re-actions, that, in his relation to her, the element of sex is excluded, as it is in his relation to himself; and marriage with her would seem to him worse than incest.
The Duchess de Duras, in a letter to Madame Swetchine, expresses herself as being “indignant with the refinements of Woldemar,”
“The mixture of true and false, the combination of just reasoning with perverted sentiment. This love which is not friendship! and this friendship which is not love! Well, in the name of God, to love, is it not to love? Ah, Madame la Duchesse! do you think, then, that all the infinitely complicated minglings and windings of human feeling are so lucid and simple? Is Jacobi, the German Plato, so stupid a metaphysician and so low a moralist that you can so easily teach him acumen and ethics? Scorn or mirth is misdirected against him.” Had Madame Swetchine read “Woldemar,” we may be sure her verdict would have been different.
France has stood for a long time in advance of every other nation, in regard to the friendships of its men and women, pure as well as impure; it is a slander to limit them to the latter class. The reason of this is to be traced in historic causes, going back to the birth and dispersed influence of chivalry. Chivalry burst into its most gorgeous flower in Provence; Toulouse was the capital whence its light and perfume radiated through France. It spread thence into Spain, Italy, Germany, England, and other places; but nowhere reached the height and copiousness of power it had in the land of its origin. Its most fervent manifestation, at the summit of its state, was seen in the worship of woman, the chaste and enthusiastic homage paid by the knight to the lady of his choice. This ideal idolatry of woman, which played so dazzling a part in the poems of the minstrels and in the inner life and historic feats of the knights, subsided, in the gradual change of times, into delight in the society and conversation of woman. The peculiar combination of influences that presided over this process may be briefly indicated.
Few women at the present time appreciate the debt of honor and gratitude they owe to the troubadour or wandering minstrel of the early Middle Age. Moncaut has well revealed it in his “History of Modern Love.” Feudal tyranny then held the whole sex in the sternest slavery. One day, the wife, or the young daughter, confined in the upper story of the walled fortress, sees, passing by the castle, a poor youth with a guitar suspended from his neck, humming a languishing air. She gazes on him; she hearkens to his song; she thanks him with a gesture and a smile. He has brought a momentary relief to the weariness of her sad captivity. Cast a glance on this roaming singer, this houseless rhymer; the last representative of that noble poesy born before Homer. This gentle son of poverty, seeking his bread with the strings of his viol, this Bohemian of the eleventh century, goes to regenerate barbarian society. The influence of music and poesy, which nothing mortal can resist, will win him permission in all places to sing what no one would dare to say. He will publish the sighs of woman for liberty, at a time when her life is an imprisonment; the prerogatives of love, its independence, when the father disposes of his daughter without deigning to consult her wishes or her vows. Before the ladies of the castles, he will celebrate the splendid deeds of the knights; before the knights, he will compassionate the tears and hardships of the ladies shut up in the castles; and thence will arise a double current of attraction and of sympathy between the oppressed women who suffer, and the generous men who long to deliver them.
But causes far deeper and wider than that of minstrelsy wrought in the favorable influence of chivalry on the condition of women, causes psychological, physiological, and social. The exalting effect of love is well known; its inciting and glorifying power is seen even in birds and beasts at the pairing-time, in a new brilliancy of plumage, and a wonderful increase of courage. Love produces a greater secretion of force in the brain and other nervous centres. This exuberance of spirit, or exaltation of function, is usually a transient phenomenon, the gratification of its impulses bringing its cause to a termination. It may, however, be made permanent by such an appropriation of the product as will re-act to keep the cause alive. That is to say, materialize a passion, and you destroy its power, its flame dies in the damps of indulgence; but spiritualize a passion, and you perpetuate its power, its flame becomes a spur, pricking the sides of intent.
The love of woman has in all ages given birth in man to passionate desires, poetic dreams, deferential attentions, persuasive forms of politeness; but only once in the whole of history has this softening, quickening, exalting power restrained from a destructive outlet, and stimulated to an unparalleled richness of manifestation, stamped with chastity by the dominant conscience and imagination of the time broken out in one great swell as an inspiration to glorious deeds, illuminating the world, and making an immortal epoch. Such, in one of its aspects, is the significance of chivalry, whose crest-wave broke into bloom in the Provencal literature; whose consummate flower, lifted far aloft, was Dante’s homage to Beatrice. The inspiration of chivalry was the love of woman; but that love was spiritual. It aimed not at a personal union, to die away in marriage, but at a deathless fruition in heroic achievements. This ideal appropriation of love, to engender self-abnegating valor and beneficent deeds, originated from the meeting of the two currents of martial history and the Christian religion in a prepared people and period.
War was the chief institution and experience of man down to the Middle Age; Christianity had then become sovereign of the common beliefs and fears. The priests, who governed thought and conscience almost without check, were vowed to perpetual chastity; that was held up as the highest virtue. But gallantry has always marked the soldier. This element of military life, inoculated with the fire of imagination and the sanctity of the gospel, as happened in the poetic atmosphere of priestly and feudal Provence, was transformed into that pure, intense worship of woman which was sung by the Christian troubadours, and admired and emulated alike by lords, minstrels, and squires. For when the priesthood adopted the sons of war, and sent them forth under Christian sanctions, they naturally imparted to them, as far as possible, their own duties and sentiments. The result was the knight, with his lyre, cross, and sword, mixture of poet, warrior and saint; impersonating, in strange but beautiful union, the military, the literary, and the ecclesiastic ideal, in which the sensual flame fostered in the atmosphere of battle was blended with the mental purity nourished by the exercises of the cloister, and tempered with the rich fancy evoked under the stimulus of the academy. Chivalry was the child of martial adventure and religious faith, married by the culture of the Church. The gallant worship of woman native to the camp, the poetic worship of woman created in the court of minstrelsy, and the religious worship of woman set forth by the Church in the apotheosis of the Virgin Mary, blent in chivalry, produced that stainless and ardent devotion of the knight to his lady, which was appropriated as at once the incitement and the reward of brave and disinterested actions. Dipped in that pure pool of sentiment which the Angel of Christianity stirred, the darts of Cupid were cleansed from aphrodisiacs. The thought of a pure and lovely woman was then naturally allied with the thought of Divinity; the association of garter and star was not difficult.
The enthusiasm thus copiously generated, forbidden by the reigning spirit and circumstances of the age to escape, either through the vent of sensual indulgence, or through that of mere dreaming sentimentalism, was forced to flow forth in the only remaining channel, that of self-consecration to perilous adventures, glorious services, feats of toil and penance. When arms and knight-errantry fell out of fashion, in a more settled age, this force of enthusiasm, no longer flashing forth in warlike emprise, illumined the saloon; the current of feeling, instead of being directed upon the field, circled in the breast, and sparkled out in genial talk and graceful forms. The idolatrous devotion to woman, which had nerved the arm of the knight, and upheld chivalry, now subsided into a respectful sympathy with woman, and, animating the heart of the gentleman, became the ornament and sweetener of society, the inspiring basis of intercourse. In consequence of the stimulus and position resulting from the extreme honor paid to the great feudal dames and their beautiful sisters, in that palmy era, the higher class of women in France obtained a social development whose advantages they have never since lost.
France also had another period quite unique for the varied and wonderful development it gave to the genius and character of woman. An anonymous writer, in the English “National Review,” has described this epoch in a passage of marked wisdom and brilliancy. “The court of France,” he says, “in the reign of Louis XIII, the regency of Anne of Austria, and the early part of the reign of Louis XIV, produced a company of ladies, in whose presence all the remaining tract of history looks dim. Cousin has nobly drawn the portraits of their leaders. The wars of the League had left the great nobles of France in the enjoyment of an amount of personal freedom, importance, and dignity, greater than was ever before or since the lot of any aristocracy. Chivalrous traditions; the custom of appeal to arms for the settlement of personal quarrels, a custom which is said to have cost the country some nine hundred of its best gentlemen in about as many years; the worship of womanhood, carried to a pharisaical strictness of observance, were conditions, which, though socially disastrous in various ways, exalted the individual worth, power, and majesty of men to the most imposing height, and rendered a corresponding exaltation imperative upon the women, in order to secure that personal predominance which it is their instinct to seek. The political state of France was one which afforded the members of its court extraordinary occasions for the display of character. That state was one of a vast transition. Feudal privileges had to be either moderated, defined, and constitutionalized, or else destroyed. The revolution which was about to operate in England, and to end in liberty, was already working in France with a manifestly opposite destiny. Richelieu and Mazarin were slowly and surely bringing about an absolute despotism, as the only solution of the political difficulties of the State consistent with its greatness, and, probably, even with its unity. The opposition of the nobles to the diminution of their power was carried on with far greater boldness and grandeur of personal effect, inasmuch as it was done without directly affronting the monarchical authority in the persons of its weak representatives, Louis XIII. and Anne of Austria. The two great ministers were the objects against which the whole wrath of the nobility was directed. Hence the war against encroaching monarchy was in great part waged in the court itself; and the king and the queen-regent were themselves found from time to time in the ranks of the indignant aristocracy. Here, then, was a wonderful field for individual effect; and that field was open to women no less, or even more, than to men; for the struggle on the part of the latter was, upon the whole, a selfish and ignoble one. No national idea inspired it; every one was for himself and his house; and the women were perfectly able to sympathize and assist in quarrels of this personal and intelligible interest. In these days, too, rose Port-Royal, with its female reformers, saints, and theologians, offering an asylum to weary and repentant worldliness and passion, or a fresh field for vanity which had exhausted its ordinary irritants. On every side lay great temptations and great opportunities; and the women of the period seem to have been endowed with singular qualifications for the illustration of both.”
The historic tradition of her great, lovely, brilliant, accomplished women is one chief reason why friendships of women with men are more common and important in France than in most other countries. Besides, the French are a more ideal people than others; live more from the brain, less from the spinal axis; take a deeper delight in the mere social reflection and echoing of life. And in this, on account of their instinctive swiftness of susceptibility, perception, and adroitness, refined women can have no rivals in the other sex. The luxury of the British is taciturnity; but to this day the favorite excitement of the French is conversation; and conversation is the food of friendship.
The inner history of the Catholic Church, so wealthy in many departments of experience, is especially rich in an original class of profound friendships of men and women, friendships between devout ladies and their spiritual directors. Without referring to the abuses which would sometimes occur in the instances of weak or sinister characters, these religious friendships have often been surprisingly permeating and transparent. This follows from the nature of the case. For the most ardent healthy devotees of religion are persons of the most exalted ideas and affections, most deeply endowed with the sensibility of genius. Every coarse passion both alien to their souls and awed away by the infinite realities they adore in common, the historic abyss of the Church scintillating around them with the memories and presences of saints, martyrs, angels, it is natural that all the purer sympathies of their being, enkindled and consecrated, should yearn together. The woman also confides every secret, unveils the inmost states of her spirit, to her confessor; takes counsel of him; holds with him the most confidential communion known outside of marriage. And the priest, in turn, shut out from the chief personal ties and vents of family, spontaneously bestows, so far as is blameless, his best human affections, turned back elsewhere, on the sister, daughter, mother, friend, fellow-worshipper, who looks up to him with such affecting trust, opening her heart to him, telling him her hopes and griefs, her errors, prayers, and fears. Madame de Sévigné, speaking of the attachment of women for their confessors, says, “They would rather talk ill of themselves than not talk of themselves.” When pure and beautiful women, wonderfully dowered with spiritual charms, and noble priests, eminently possessed of every virtue and authority of character, so often meet, amid such inspiring circumstances, beneath the august sanctions of the church, drawn forward by the sublime mysteries of religion, and blending the potential perfections of heaven with the actual experiences of earth, it would be no less than a miracle if many friendships of singular sincerity and power did not spring up. They have sprung up in every part and period of Christendom; more in the Catholic Church than anywhere else, because its ritual and doctrine, its organized religious life and its practice of direction, furnish for them unequalled facilities and provocatives.
The friendship all divine which Jesus showed for many women, of whom Mary and Martha, the sisters of his friend Lazarus, are examples—the friendship which drew such matchless devotion from them, has been perpetuated in the Church in a relation of peculiar tenderness between the priest and the devotee.
“Many women followed Jesus from Galilee, ministering unto him.” With what godlike benignity he spoke to the Samaritan woman, to the Syrophenician woman, and to the poor adulteress! With what indescribable compassion he turned to the women who accompanied him towards Calvary, bewailing and lamenting him, and said, “Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me”. And what words shall be set beside those which fell from his lips when, as he hung on the cross, he saw his mother, and the disciple standing by whom he loved, and he saith unto his mother, “Woman, behold thy son!” then he saith to the disciple, “Behold thy mother!” Verily, from that hour, the Church has taken woman to itself, as the recipient of a ministration full of respect and purity. In any enumeration of renowned ecclesiastical friendships, Saint Chrysostom and Saint Olympias, the gold-mouthed bishop of Constantinople and the rich and noble widow, deserve to head the list. Under the guidance of the eloquent preacher, she labored to perfect herself in the religious life, and gave her time and wealth to all kinds of charity and good works. From her Christian affection he drew precious strength and comfort. When he was carried from his church and driven into exile, the weeping Olympias fell at his feet, and clasped them so closely that the officers had to use force in tearing him from her. Sixteen letters addressed to her by Chrysostom during his banishment are still extant, silently pronouncing her eulogy throughout the Christian world. A friendship like the foregoing, only still more complete, was that of Saint Jerome and Saint Paula. The talents, scholarship, services, and enthusiasm of Jerome are universally known; and the chief personal attachment of his life is scarcely less familiar to the public. Paula, immortalized not less in literary history as his friend than in the ecclesiastical calendar for her virtues, was one of the most distinguished women of the age. She had great riches and high rank, as well as pronounced talents and worth. The blood of the Scipios, of the Gracchi, and of Paulus Emilius, met in her veins. Jerome was her spiritual director at Rome for two years and a half-her other soul while life remained. She built and supported at her own expense an extensive monastery for Jerome and his monks at Bethlehem. When she died, Jerome wrote to her daughter the long and celebrated letter called “Epitaph of Paula,” in which he exhausts the hyperboles of praise. The features of a rare character and the proofs of an extraordinary affection may be discerned within the extravagances of this eloquent panegyric. The tombs of Jerome and Paula are still to be seen side by side in the monastery at Bethlehem. Saint Clara of Assisi, on account of her high rank, great wealth, and extreme loveliness, had many offers of marriage, many temptations to enter into the gayeties and luxuries of the world. But she preferred the thorny path of mortification and the crown of celestial beatitude. The melting pathos of the preaching of Saint Francis, with the penetrative charm of his spirit, drew her to throw herself at his feet and supplicate his guidance. He approved her desire to devote herself wholly to the religious life in seclusion; and, when she had made her escape by night from the proud castle, clad in her festal garments, and with a palm-branch in her hand, he and his poor brotherhood met her at the chapel-door, with lighted tapers and hymns of praise, and led her to the altar. Francis cut off her long golden hair, and threw his own penitential habit over her. She became his disciple, daughter, and friend, never wavering, though exposed to dangers and trials of the severest character. Under his direction, she formed the famous order of Franciscan nuns, afterwards named from her the Poor Clares.
These nuns, clad in gowns of gray wool, knotted girdles, white coifs and black veils, engaged in touching works of humility and charity, have been seen in many nations now for seven centuries, keeping alive the example of their foundress. When the body of Saint Francis, on its way to burial, was borne by the church of San Damiano, where Clara and her nuns dwelt, she came forth with them weeping, saluted the remains of her friend, and kissed his hands and his garments. The memory of the relation of these sainted friends is perpetuated in many pictures of the Madonna, wherein Clara is portrayed on one side of the throne of the Virgin, and Francis on the other, both barefooted, and wearing the gray tunic and knotted cord emblematic of poverty. Perhaps the most fervent and interesting of all the friendships between director and devotee, of which the documents have been published, is that of Saint Francis of Sales and Madame de Chantal. Full materials for studying this relation are furnished in the letters that passed between the parties, both of whom were of a temperament strung to the most exquisite tones of consciousness, with minds both wise and strong, and with characters under the control of austere principles of duty and piety. Michelet, in his work on the Confessional, gives a skilful and forcible picture of this rapt friendship; but his own pervading sensuousness, not to say sensuality, does the sentiment gross injustice by mixing in it so much of flesh and earth. The union of these two mystics in spirit and deed was as taintless as that of two angels in heaven.
If throbs of agonizing passion sometimes mounted up, the invariable heroism with which they were veiled and suppressed simply adds the martyr merit to the saintly one. Saint Francis had an irresistible attractiveness of figure and face, a temper and bearing of singular sweetness. Childlike, and so fair in appearance that it was difficult to withdraw the eyes from him, he united the greatest social insight and skill with the greatest sincerity and simplicity. Madame de Chantal, early left a widow, with several children and an aged and infirm father, administered the business of her household with systematic prudence, and filled her leisure hours with fervent religious exercises. Saint Francis and Madame de Chantal seem to have been predestined for friends. Their biographers relate, that, long before they had seen each other, they met in mystical visions and ecstasies. Archbishop Fremiot, brother of Madame de Chantal, and an intimate acquaintance of Saint Francis, invited him to preach at Dijon. During his sermon, the preacher noticed one lady particularly above the rest; and, as he came down from the desk, asked, “Who is that young widow who listened so attentively to the word?” The archbishop replied, “That is my sister, the Baroness de Chantal.” An inspired understanding appears to have at once united their minds. “It is enchantment,” Michelet says, “to read the vivacious and delightful letters which open the correspondence of Saint Francis with his dear sister and dear daughter. Nothing can be more pure, nothing can be more ardent.” He says the sentiment she awakened powerfully assisted his spiritual progress. He thought of her at the moment of partaking of the sacrament. “I have given you and your widowed heart and your children daily to the Lord, in offering up his Son.” She dispensed with her former confessor, and confided her spirit to Saint Francis. She desired to take the conventual vows; but he restrained her a long time. In the name of his mother, he gave her his young sister to educate.
This occupation tranquillized her mind; but the beloved child soon died at her house, in her arms. She prayed God “to take her own life, or one of her children, in place of her dear pupil.” Saint Francis now consented that she should withdraw from the world. Her household presented a piteous scene-her old father and father-in-law in tears; her son, afterwards the father of Madame de Sévigné, prostrating himself on the threshold to prevent her departure. But the passionate response in her to the supposed call of Heaven broke all lower ties; and she passed over the body of her son, and said farewell for ever to her home. Saint Francis intrusted her with the formation of a new religious order—the celebrated Order of the Visitation. In nurturing this order, writing, travelling, praying in its interests, with intervals of silent retreat, she spent the rest of her days. Her intense temperament, her absolute faith and submission, her systematic attention to business, her mystical ecstasies, her heroic sacrifice, form a most original combination. Her life seems an alternation of sober processes, stormy raptures, and stifling calms. Her restless sensibility, girdled by fixed principle, gives us the picture of a sea of fire breaking on a shore of frost. Her essay on “Desire and the Agony of Disappointment” is a gush forced from the bottom of a heart full of baffled feeling, under the pressure of a mountain of pain. The constancy and power of her attachment to Saint Francis, through all, are marvellous. On the day of his mother’s death, he writes, “I have given you the place of my mother in my memorial at the mass: now you hold in my heart both her place and your own.” She writes to him, “Pray that I may not survive you.” Twenty years did she outlive him; finding, to the last, her greatest pleasure in remembering him, carrying out his wishes, and corresponding about him with his friends. Ten years after the death of Saint Francis, Madame de Chantal had his tomb opened in the presence of her community, and made an address before the embalmed body. A testimony to the deep impression their friendship had made is found in the myth, that, when on this occasion she reverently lifted to her head the dead hand of the saint, it acknowledged her devotion by an answering caress. The winning qualities of Madame Guion awakened an enthusiastic interest in many of those whom her remarkable religious experience brought into close relations with her. Especially they produced in her confessor, Father Lacombe, such a ruling admiration, reverence, and tenderness, that he was subdued into a caricature of her. He followed her everywhere, could not dine without her, made her directions his law. When her peculiar doctrines of the Quietist life, and her fame, had caused a disturbance in the Church, her enemies circulated scandals about the friends. The spotless and heavenly-minded woman smiled, and paid no heed to the wrong. But Father Lacombe, under the combined power of his Quietistic fanaticism, poor health, bitter persecutions, and relentless imprisonment, lost the balance of his mind altogether, and died. Fenelon also, interested in Madame Guion by her genuine piety, and by sympathy with many of her views, and finding this interest greatly deepened on personal acquaintance, formed a strong attachment for her. Convinced of her innocence, and knowing her rare worth, the misfortunes and sufferings brought on her by her persecutors served but to redouble his kindness. Her enemies then became his; and they made him pay dearly for his fidelity, by robbing him of waiting honors, and throwing him into disgrace at court.
His friendship for Madame Guion was like that of a guardian angel. It never failed. One can imagine what her feelings towards him must have been. Many noble women had a strong friendship for Fenelon. He could not come into the confiding relations of his office with them without that result. His face was all intelligence and all harmony; his voice, music; his manner, fascination; his character, heaven. His unconscious suavity, his abnegated personality, formed a mighty magnet; and every soul, with any steel of nobleness in it, fondly swayed to him. Madame Maintenon gave him, for years, all the reverence and affection of which her commonplace nature was capable; and then, at the command of her selfish bigotry, became chilled. The impassioned and unhappy La Maisonfort, so talented and so beautiful, whose pathetic story is charged with every element of romance, adored him. And the Duchess de Chevreuse and the Duchess de Beauvilliers always paid him an homage whose grace and sweetness the happiest man that ever lived might well sigh for. To the latter of these queenly women, then a sorrowing widow, he wrote, in the last letter he penned, “We shall soon find again that which we have not lost: every day we approach it with swift strides; yet a little while, and there will be no more cause for tears.” Among the penitents of Bossuet, there was one—a widow, named Cornuau, to whom the great prelate gave more of his heart than to any of the rest. In submitting her spiritual life to his oversight, they were often brought together, both by letters and by personal interviews. The affectionate docility and loyalty of the novice won his kind esteem, and the condescending benignity and greatness of the noble genius kindled her enthusiasm. And so the opposite ends of the chain of their attachment were fastened. After displaying exemplary zeal, for fifteen years, in all the works of duty assigned her, she was permitted to become a nun, taking the name of Bossuet in addition to the title of Sister Saint Benigne. Despite her humble origin and the mediocrity of her intellect, Bossuet preferred her above all the high-born and brilliant ladies who constantly knelt for his benedictions. It was only natural, that, notwithstanding the work of grace, she should sometimes feel jealous. But once, after she had expressed herself “ready to burst with jealousy” of a certain great lady, whom she falsely supposed esteemed more than herself by the lofty director, when the object of her jealousy was smitten with a frightful disease, Sister Benigne, with sublime self-sacrifice, went to Paris, and became her nurse; “shut herself up with her, watched over and loved her.” When Bossuet died, La Cornuau, “happily guided by her friendship, forgetting her own vanity, and mindful only of the fame of her spiritual father, did more for him, perhaps, than any panegyrist.” She published the two hundred letters he had written to her, “noble letters, written in profound secrecy, never intended to see the light, but worthy of exposure to the perusal of the whole world.”
A friendship, such as we might suppose would be characteristic of such ecstatic natures, was cherished between the two celebrated Spanish mystics, Saint Theresa and Saint John of the Cross. The fullest expressions of it may be found in their respective writings, now translated into many languages, and easy of access almost anywhere. Unquestionably there have been very numerous Friendships, worthy of notice, between clergymen and devout women, in the Protestant sects. But they are different from those in the Catholic communion, which has, in this respect, great advantages. In the Protestant establishment, all are on a free equality; and the religion is an element fused into the life. With the Catholics, the overwhelming authority of the Church invests the priests with godlike attributes; while celibacy detaches their hearts from the home and family, leaving them ready for other calls. The laity are placed in a passive attitude, except as to faith and affection, which are more active for the restrictions applied elsewhere; and religion is pursued and practised as an art by itself. The church ritual, by its dramatic contents and movement, peerless in its pathetic, imaginative power, intensifies and cleanses the passions of those who appreciatively celebrate or witness it, and who are naturally attracted together, as, in blended devotional emotions and aims, they cultivate that supernatural art whose infinite interests make all earthly concerns appear dwarfed and pale.
The instances already cited of the friendships thus originating suffice to indicate the wealth in this kind of experience which must remain for ever unknown to the public. But one example which has just been brought to light, and is worthy to rank with the best of earlier times, should be mentioned here. It is the relation of Madame Swetchine and the most renowned preacher of our century, Lacordaire. This friendship has been beautifully portrayed by Montalembert. A full account of it will be found farther on in these pages. The friendship that joined the souls, and still links the names, of Vittoria Colonna and Michael Angelo, is one of the most celebrated in history. Her married life with the chivalrous and magnificent Marquis of Pescara, in his palace on the bewitching isle of Ischia, was one of the most romantically happy unions ever known; and nothing could be more noble than her impassioned fidelity to his memory. It was in the twelfth year of her widowhood that she first met with Michael Angelo, then sixty-three years old. Such were their respective attributes of personal worth and majesty, rank and fame, exaltation of character and genius, stainless purity, dignity, earnestness, and devotion, that they could not fail to regard each other with ardent esteem. For ten years, till death separated them, this esteem, with a consequent sympathy and happiness, steadily grew. To her he dedicated many works of his chisel and his pencil, and addressed several exquisite poems.
Their example affords a fine illustration of the sentiment of Platonic love; and his verses repeatedly give it a rhetorical expression equally fine. He says,
Better plea
Love cannot have, than that, in loving thee,
Glory to that eternal Peace is paid,
Who such divinity to thee imparts
As hallows and makes pure all gentle hearts.
His hope is treacherous only whose love dies
With beauty, which is varying every hour.
But in chaste hearts, uninfluenced by the power
Of outward change, there blooms a deathless flower,
That breathes on earth the air of Paradise.
Vittoria said, “He who admires only the works of Michael Angelo values the smallest part in him.” One of the only two portraits he ever painted was hers. The aged Angelo stood by the couch of Vittoria at her death. When the last breath had gone, “he raised her hand, and kissed it with a sacred respect.” It is touching to know, that the sublime old man, years afterwards, recalling that scene to a friend, lamented, that, in the awe of the moment, he had refrained from pressing his lips on those of the sainted Colonna. Hermann Grimm says, “How great the loss was which he sustained can be realized only by him who has himself felt the void which the removal of a superior intellect irretrievably leaves behind it. It must have been to him as if a long-used, magnificent book, in which he found words suiting every mood, had been suddenly closed, never to be re-opened. Nothing can compensate for the loss of a friend who has journeyed with us for many years, sharing our experiences. Vittoria was the only one who had ever fully opened her soul to him. What profit could he draw from the reverence of those who would have ceased to understand him, had he shown himself as he was in truth? His only consolation was the thought, that his own career was near its close.”
Among the celebrated French women, who have had a genius and a passion for friendships, Mademoiselle de Scudéry deserves prominent mention. Her great talents, virtuous character, and affectionate disposition, made her a favorite in the distinguished society she frequented. The great Conde, Madame de Longueville, and the other famous visitors of the Hotel Rambouillet, honored her, and took delight in her companionship. Her ardent devotion to her friends, her beautiful and heroic fidelity to them, her chivalrous vein of sentiment and character, Cousin has illustrated with his minute learning and generous eloquence. Why Madame de Longueville was in disgrace with the court party, Mademoiselle de Scudéry, with a fearless and noble constancy, dedicated a book to her, and, in consequence, lost her pension, and had to write for her bread. For this her aristocratic friends, instead of forsaking her, admired and clung to her the more. Her famous work, the “Grand Cyrus,” in ten thick volumes, to which Cousin has brought to light a complete key, is filled with disguised portraits of her friends and associates, and with descriptions of the times.
She draws her own likeness under the name of Sappho. In this work, the pictures, incidents, and conversations reflect a state of society, in which “the degrees and shades of friendship, from deep Platonic love to the slight impression one person makes on another at first meeting, are the real pre-occupations of existence; the smallest grace of mind or manner is observed, and of importance; there is an intense epicurism in companionship; it is both the first occupation and the greatest pleasure of life.” The second edition of an English translation of the whole ten volumes of the “Grand Cyrus” was published in London in 1691. The translator, F. G., Esq., erroneously attributes the authorship to “that famous wit of France, Monsieur de Scudéry, Governour of Nostre-Dame.” He confounds the sister with the brother. It is dedicated to Queen Mary, wife of William of Orange, in a style of sonorous pomp, worthy of the court of Nadir Shah. In his preface, F. G. says, “If you ask what the subject is; ’Tis the Height of Prowess, intermixed with Virtuous and Heroick Love; consequently the language lofty, and becoming the Grandeur of the Illustrious Personages that speak; so far from the least Sully of what may be thought Vain or Fulsom, that there is not anything to provoke a Blush from the most modest Virgin; while Love and Honour are in a seeming Contention which shall best instruct the willing ear with most Delight.” In describing the deep and rare friendships with which the “Grand Cyrus” abounds, Mademoiselle de Scudéry had but to look into her own heart, and make copies from her experience. Especially might the union of Sappho and Phaon stand for the picture of her own connection with Pélisson.” The exchange of their thoughts was so sincere that all those in Sappho’s mind passed into Phaon’s, and all those in Phaon’s came into Sappho’s. They told each other every particular of their lives; and so perfect was their union, that nothing was ever seen equal to it. Never did love join so much purity to so much ardor. He wished for nothing beyond the possession of her heart. They understood each other without words, and saw their whole hearts in each other’s eyes.” Pélisson was twenty-nine, and Mademoiselle de Scudéry forty-five, when they first met. Their instant mutual interest deepened, on more thorough acquaintance, into the warmest esteem and affection, and remained unshaken for over forty years. The perfection of their intimacy was known to every one; and every one believed in its entire purity. Cousin says it is touching to see these two noble persons made so happy by their friendship, a friendship which even the coarse and slanderous Tallement respected so much that he refrained from casting a single sneer at it. The story of Pélisson’s imprisonment in the Bastile is known to the whole world by the anecdote of the spider.
His only companion, during those wretched years, was a large spider, which he had tamed, and was accustomed to feed and play with. One day, the brute of a jailer trod on him, and killed him; and Passon wept. His friend employed all her ingenuity, during his confinement, in inventing means of communication with him. “At times, when he was ready to fall into despair, a few lines would reach him, and bring him comfort.” At length his prison was opened, and fortune smiled again. At his death, Mademoiselle de Scudéry, though eighty-six years old, wrote and published a simple and affecting memoir of him, paying a deserved tribute to his character, in which, she said, there reigned a singular and most charming combination of tenderness, delicacy, and generosity. The most constant among the large circle of admiring friends drawn around Madame de Sévigné by her merits and charms was a cultivated Italian gentleman named Corbinelli, who lived in Paris, on a moderate income, asking only leisure, and the gratification of his high tastes. He was “one of those rare exceptions who seem created by nature to be the benevolent spectators of human events, without taking any part in them beyond that of observation and interest for the actors.” He had talents equal to the greatest achievements, but was indolent and unambitious.
He was one of the earliest to discern and to proclaim Madame de Sévigné’s exquisite superiority of mind, disposition, and manners, and to pay reverential court to her. Lamartine gives this account of the friendship that ensued—an account not less instructive than interesting: “His admiration, his worship, which sought no return, gained him admittance to her house, where he was regarded as one of the family, and became a necessary appendage. Madame de Sévigné, at first charmed by his wit, afterward touched by his disinterested attachment, concluded by making him the confidant of her most secret emotions. Every heart that beats warmly beneath its own bosom seeks to hear itself repeated in that of another. Corbinelli became the echo of Madame de Sévigné’s mind, soul, and existence. He participated in her adoration of her daughter. At Paris, he visited her every day: he sometimes followed her to Livry; and, when absent, corresponded with her frequently.
“The dominion which his friend exercised over him was so gentle, that he experienced no feeling of slavery while submitting ’implicitly to the rule of her tastes. So absolute was her empire, that, when she became a devotee, he became a mystic: he followed her, as the satellite accompanies the planet, from the worldly gayeties of her youth, even to the foot of the altar, and the ascetic self-denial of Port-Royal. He survived her, as though he had survived himself, and lived to the extraordinary age of one hundred and four years, animated to unusual life by his gentle and amiable feelings. Such was Madame de Sévigné’s principal friend. If his name were erased from her letters, the monument would be mutilated.” La Rochefoucauld, whose reputation the indignant eloquence of Cousin has so damaged, was the object of an admiring friendship, of which he was not worthy, from Madame de Sévigné and Madame de la Fayette. But of all the friends to whom the ardent, imaginative, faithful heart of Madame de Sévigné attached itself, no one, after her husband and her daughter, held so commanding a place as Fouquet, the unfortunate minister of Louis XIV. Fouquet must have had rare traits, besides his acknowledged greatness of mind, to have won such a pure and unconquerable affection. Cast down from power, disgraced, closely imprisoned for fifteen years in the fortress of Pignerol, scoffed at by those who had fawned on him in his prosperity, and forgotten by nearly all whom he had befriended, never did Madame de Sévigné forget him, or cease, for one day, her efforts to alleviate his condition— cheering him with letters, and toiling to secure his liberation. D’Alembert had a long and sedulously improved friendship with Madame du Deffand, of whom Henault said, “Friendship was a passion with her; and no woman ever had more friends, or better deserved them.”
There was a basis for this eulogy; but it needs much qualification. She and D’Alembert prized each other’s society highly, and passed much time together. But jealousy and exaction are tenacious occupants, easily recalled to the heart even of an aged and friendly woman. When D’Alembert formed a closer friendship with Mademoiselle Lespinasse, the young and charming companion of Madame du Deffand, the latter imperiously dictated the renunciation of the new friend as the condition of retaining the old. The superiority of temper, genius, and worth in Mademoiselle Lespinasse did not permit D’Alembert to hesitate; and she repaid him with memorable fidelity. The affectionate and dependent girl was harshly driven out. In her anguish, she took laudanum, but not with a fatal result. D’Alembert then called Du Deffand an old viper; but his friend checked him, and would never allow any abuse of her former mistress, much less herself indulge in vituperation of her. When D’Alembert was attacked by a malignant fever, she went to his bedside, and nursed him day and night till he was convalescent. Marmontel says, “Malice itself never assailed their pure and innocent intimacy.” She afterwards formed an attachment, of the most romantic character, to the young Spanish Marquis de Mora, who reciprocated her affection with impassioned ardor. He died while on the road to join her; and she was not long in following him into the grave, though, in the mean time, a still stronger passion for Guibert had weaned her from D’Alembert. The fervent tenderness of the latter for her remained unaltered, and he was inconsolable at her departure. On hearing of her death, Madame du Deffand said, “Had she only died fifteen years earlier, I should not have lost D’Alembert.” Her letters are famous in the literature of love. Sir James Mackintosh says, “They are, in my opinion, the truest picture of deep passion ever traced by a human being.” Margaret Fuller writes, “I am swallowing by gasps that cauldrony beverage of selfish passion and morbid taste, the letters of Lespinasse. It is good for me. The picture, so minute in its touches, is true as death.” Madame de Staël had many devoted friendships, as would naturally be expected from the overwhelming wealth and ardor of her nature. Affinity of genius and a common love of liberty drew Benjamin Constant and her into intimate relations; and she maintained for years still closer relations with the all-knowing, all-cultured August Schlegel, whose devouring egotism and ever-sensitive vanity put all her patience and generosity to the proof.
The current opinion concerning Madame de Staël, that she was an exacting and disagreeable woman, is unjust. Schiller, who shrank from her impetuous eloquence, and Heine, whose reckless satire depicts her as going through Europe, a whirlwind in petticoats, both do her wrong. William von Humboldt, who knew her well, pronounces a glowing eulogy on her exalted traits, and says that Goethe, from prejudice and ignorance, was very unjust to her. Madame Mole says, “Women are not half grateful enough to Madame de Staël for the honor she conferred upon her sex by taking up the noble side of every question, armed with her pen and her eloquence, and never once calculating what the consequences might be. As time goes on, and details sink into insignificance, she will rise as the grand figure who withstood Bonaparte at the head of six hundred thousand men, with Europe at his back. His vanity was such that he could not bear one woman should refuse to praise him; for that was her only guilt.” She was capable of the utmost magnanimity and disinterestedness. Every exalted sentiment struck a powerful chord in her heart. She lived in justice, freedom, beneficence, love, aspiration. The friendship of Matthieu de Montmorency, the most intimate and devoted of all her friends, is enough to prove her exalted worth, making every abatement for her acknowledged foibles. This chivalrous nobleman came, in his youth, to America with Lafayette, and fought for the new Republic. Although one of the foremost members of the aristocracy, it was on his motion in the Constituent Assembly that the privileges of the nobility were abolished. Sympathy in opinions and in the generous strain of their characters was the basis of a connection between him and Madame de Staël, that constantly grew in strength with the trials to which it was subjected, and was not severed even by death. When his brother, ardently loved, fell under the axe of the Revolution, it was her delicate sympathy, her ingenious and indefatigable goodness, that first soothed his anguish, assuaged the horror that threatened his reason, and prepared the way for religion and peace. And in turn, when she was exiled by Napoleon, Montmorency journeyed to Switzerland to visit her, at the risk of being banished himself, as he immediately was. “Matthieu, the friend of twenty years, is the most faultless being I have ever known.” “How could he think I should tarry in Germany, when, by leaving it, I had a chance of seeing him? All Germany could not pay me for the loss of two days of his society.” No unkindness, suspicion, or ignobleness of any sort, ever interrupted or mixed in the affection of these high friends. When Montmorency died, suddenly, in church, years after the death of Madame de Staël, the daughter of the latter, the Duchess de Broglie, instinctively exclaimed, on hearing of the event, “Ah, my God! I seem to see the grief of my poor mother.” The prejudice in England and America against friendships between men and women has operated considerably to lessen their frequency, still more to keep them from public attention when they do exist. Undoubtedly, many a charming English woman, many a charming American woman, in her time the centre of the social circles of fashion, letters, and politics, has been surrounded by a company of friends as devoted at heart as those who have gathered with more public homage about the famous dames of France and Germany. Such groups will be called to mind by the English names of Mrs. Montagu, Lady Melbourne, Lady Holland; the American names of Mrs. Madison, Mrs. Hamilton, Mrs. Seaton, Mrs. Schuyler, and many others. But, since, with the most of these latter, the details have not been taken from the category of private property, by publications of memoirs and journals, it would be impertinent to single them out for personal mention, even where it is possible.
Magdalen Herbert, mother of George Herbert, befriended Dr. Donne in his distresses, ministering to the wants of his family with generous delicacy, and comforting him by her society. His discernment of her wit and piety, her gracious and noble disposition, combined with his gratitude to make him her fast and fervent friend. His conversation, together with that of Bishop Andrews, whose renown Clarendon and Milton unite to swell, appears to have given Lady Herbert great delight. Lasting evidence of the impression her character and kindness made on him is found in his verses and letters addressed to her, and in the funeral sermon which, with many tears, he preached for her. He says in verse, in her advancing age,
No spring nor summer beauty has such grace
As I have seen on an autumnal face.
And he gratefully writes to her in his quaint prose, “Your favors to me are everywhere. I use them and have them. I enjoy them at London and leave them there, and yet find them at Mitcham. Such riddles as these become things inexpressible; and such is your goodness.” There was a choice, ever-comforting, and sacred friendship between the great John Locke and the excellent Lady Damaris Masham, the only daughter of that ornament of the English Church, the learned and benignant Cudworth.
She was one of the most gifted, cultivated, and elegant women of her time. The genius and moral worth of Locke are well known to all. Domesticated in the family of Lady Masham for many years before his death, giving her all the advantage of his talents, acquirements, and sympathy, “she returned the obligation with singular benevolence and gratitude, always treating him with the utmost generosity and respect; for she had an inviolable friendship for him.” She watched by him in his last illness. He asked her to read a psalm to him. As death approached, he desired her to break off reading, and in a few minutes breathed his closing breath. She wrote the fine sketch of his character published in the “Historical Dictionary.” She says his manners made him very agreeable to all sorts of people, and nobody was better received than he among those of the highest rank. “His greatest amusement was to talk with sensible people, and he courted their conversation.” The amiable, unfortunate Cowper, the most shrinking and melancholy of men, too gentle and too unworldly for common companionship, was especially fitted for the soothing ministrations and the healing sympathy of women. He was dependent on these friendships, and found his chief happiness in them. But for them, his career would have been as brief as it was wretched; and his name, now haloed with such sadly pleasing attractions, would have had no place in English literature, except in the dark list of madmen and suicides. Who that has read his matchless lines on his mother’s picture will not bless the good women who shed so many rays of peace and bliss on his unhappy lot. His cousin, the angelic Lady Hesketh, whose disinterested tenderness lavished grateful attentions on him, with a sweet skill that failed neither in his youth nor in his age, was as a light from heaven on his path through the whole journey. Some touching verses, and innumerable references in his letters, attest his appreciation of her. Mrs. Throckmorton and her husband, in whose grounds he loved to walk, and in whose kindly and refined society he spent so many delightful hours, furnished a healthy relief from the gloom of his austere religion, in the atmosphere of their genial catholicity; and were an invaluable comfort and benefit to him. Lady Austen also, a sprightly and accomplished woman, of intellectual tastes, quick sympathies, and charming manners, whose appearance at Olney “added fresh plumes to the wings of time,” was at one period an inexpressible blessing to him. “Lady Austen’s conversation acted on Cowper’s mind as the harp of David on the troubled spirit of Saul.” He christened her “Sister Ann,” and wrote cordial verses to her. Constant communications with her withdrew his attention from depressing superstitions, and enlivened his spirits. At her suggestion it was, and under her sustaining encouragement, that he composed the immortal ballad of “John Gilpin,” the “Dirge for the Royal George,” and his greatest work, “The Task.” Love being proscribed by his repeated subjection to insanity, friendship was the resource in which he was thrice fortunate.
Far above all others in the number of his female friends, in importance, must be ranked Mary Unwin, whose name is indissolubly joined with his in the memories of all who are familiar with his plaintive story. Mrs. Unwin, wife of a clergyman, religious after the most scrupulous evangelical type, was first drawn to Cowper by a sectarian interest. They were fated to be friends, as by the striking of a die. “That woman,” he soon wrote to Lady Hesketh, “is a blessing to me; and I never see her without being the better for her company.” This is the secret of the charm of all true friendship—that it soothes the heart, clarifies the mind, heightens the soul. One feels so much the better for it. Almost penniless as he was, a shiftless manager, assailed by terrible depression and even madness, the Unwins took him under their roof, and gave him a home on the most generous terms. From this time until her death, the friendship of Mary was a necessity to Cowper, the greatest support and enjoyment the hapless poet knew, combining with his native humor and gentleness to combat his melancholy malady with frequent and long victories. In his fits of insanity, she watched and waited on him day and night, defying alike personal hardships and the slanderous remarks of the vile. The only drawback on Cowper’s indebtedness to Mrs. Unwin was her jealous wish to restrict him to the society of her own sect of religionists, that harrowing type of piety represented by John Newton. Otherwise, he might have enjoyed much more frequent and prolonged periods of what he cheerily characterized as “absences of Mr. Blue-devil.” Lady Hesketh said of her, “She seems in truth to have no will left on earth but for his good. How she has supported the constant attendance she has gone through with the last thirteen years is to me, I confess, wonderful.” Cowper himself said, “It is to her, under Providence, I owe it that I am alive at all.” With a devotion in which self appeared to be lost, “there she sat, on the hardest and smallest chair, leaving the best to him, knitting, with the finest possible needles, stockings of the nicest texture. He wore no others than of her knitting.” After nearly a generation of her fond and sedulous ministering, repeatedly stricken with paralysis, her mind decayed, mute, almost blind, as she sat by his side, a pathetic memento of what she had been, Cowper composed for her that unsurpassed tribute, his exquisite and imperishable lines, “To Mary”:
The twentieth year has well-nigh past,
Since first our sky was overcast:
Ah! would that this might be our last,
My Mary!
Thy spirits have a fainter flow:
I see thee daily weaker grow;
’Tis my distress that brought thee low,
My Mary!
Thy needles, once a shining store,
For my sake restless heretofore,
Now rust, disused, and shine no more,
My Mary!
Thy indistinct expressions seem
Like language uttered in a dream;
Yet me they charm, whate’er the theme,
My Mary!
Thy silver locks, once auburn bright,
Are still more lovely in my sight
Than golden beams of orient light,
My Mary!
Partakers of my sad decline,
Thy hands their little force resign;
Yet, gently prest, press gently mine,
My Mary!
Yet ah! by constant heed, I know
How oft the sadness that I show
Transforms thy smiles to looks of woe,
My Mary!
And should my future lot be cast
With much resemblance of the past,
Thy worn-out heart will break at last,
My Mary!
Lady Hesketh, ever a true angel, came and dwelt with the afflicted pair. And when Cowper, after four wretched years of separation, plunged, as he expressed it, in deeps unvisited by any human soul save his, followed his faithful sister-spirit to a better world, Lady Hesketh, that model of a third friend, built, in St. Edmund’s Chapel, where he was buried, a monument displaying two tablets, both bearing poetical inscriptions; one dedicated to William Cowper, the other to Mary Unwin. The friendship of Garrick and Mrs. Clive is memorable for its sprightliness, sincerity, unbroken harmony-saving a few momentary quarrels for relish—long duration, and the large measure of happiness it yielded. Their correspondence is very entertaining, and reflects honor on them both. Their talents and virtues contributed in a high degree to adorn and elevate the profession to which they belonged. It is an interesting fact, equally creditable to all the parties, that “Pivy,” as they affectionately called Kittie Clive, was as dear to the excellent Mrs. Garrick as to her brilliant husband. The friendship of David Garrick was also one of the most delightful features in the life of the admirable Hannah More. A letter written by Hannah on seeing him play Lear, greatly pleased him, and led to their acquaintance. Acquaintance soon ripened into a warm esteem, and produced a friendship of the most cordial—and intimate character, which lasted until death. He declared that the nine muses had taken up their residence in her mind; and both in his conversation and his letters he constantly called her “Nine.” One day when she and Johnson, and a few others, were at table with the Garricks, David read to the company her Sir Eldred, with such inimitable feeling that the happy authoress burst into tears. Friendship filled a large space in the life of Hannah More, administering incalculable strength in her labors, joy in her successes, comfort in her afflictions. It has left its memorials in the records of a host of visits, gifts, letters, poems, dedications. Her correspondence with Sir William Pepys shows what an invaluable resource a wise, pure, comprehensive friendship is in the life of a thoughtful woman. Bishop Porteus bequeathed her a legacy of a hundred pounds. She consecrated an urn to him near her house with an inscription in memory of his long and faithful friendship. Mr. Turner, of Belmont, to whom she was for six years betrothed, but broke off the engagement after he had three times postponed the appointed wedding-day, always retained the highest esteem for her, and left her a thousand pounds at his death. She also maintained a most friendly relation, as long as his increasing habit of intemperance allowed it, with her early tutor, Langhorne, the translator of Plutarch. On occasion of an anticipated visit from her, Langhorne wrote a very pretty poem, beginning,
Blow, blow, my sweetest rose!
For Hannah More will soon be here;
And all that crowns the ripening year
Should triumph where she goes.
Joanna Baillie and Sir Walter Scott were deeply attached friends. United by a generous admiration for genius, by esteem for exalted worth and by community of tastes, they were drawn still more closely together by many mutual kindnesses, visits, and frequent correspondence. A copy of Scott’s “Marmion,” fresh from the press, was placed in Joanna’s hands. She cut the leaves and began to read it aloud to a small circle of friends, when she suddenly came upon the following magnificent and electrifying tribute to herself:
Or, if to touch such chord be thine,
Restore the ancient tragic line,
And emulate the notes that rung
From the wild harp that silent hung
By silver Avon’s holy shore
Till twice an hundred years rolled o’er;
When she, the bold enchantress, came
With fearless hand and heart in flame,
From the pale willow snatched the treasure,
And swept it with a kindred measure,
Till Avon’s swans, while rung the grove
With Monfort’s hate and Basil’s love,
Awakening at the inspired strain,
Deemed their own Shakespeare lived again!
Joanna, though taken by surprise, read on in a firm voice, till she observed the uncontrollable emotion of a friend by her side. Then she too gave way. It is delightful to partake by sympathy in so generous a gift of joy. What a pity it is that such a loving magnanimity as that of glorious Sir Walter is not more frequent among authors! The chief advantage of Fox over Pitt consisted in the fascinating demonstrativeness of his heart and manners. This won him hosts of idolizing friends, foremost among whom were many of the choicest ladies of the kingdom.
Pre-eminent among these were the two dazzlingly lovely women, ardent friends of each other too, Mrs. Catherine Crewe and Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire. They were indefatigable in canvassing for him. On one occasion, when the conflict for votes was intense, a butcher offered to vote for Fox on condition that the Duchess of Devonshire would allow him a kiss. The enthusiastic canvasser, perhaps the most beautiful woman then living, granted it amid deafening cheers. Nor was Mrs. Crewe less efficient. At a private banquet in honor of Fox’s triumph, the Prince of Wales gave as a toast, “True Blue, and Mrs. Crewe.” She gave in return, “True Blue, and all of you.” The Duchess of Devonshire exerted all her powers, though in vain, to reconcile Burke with Fox, after their quarrel. On the death of Fox, she wrote a poetic tribute to his memory. Dr. Beattie, author of “The Minstrel,” so many of whose touching lines have rung through souls of sensibility and are familiar to all lovers of poetry—such, for example, as,
Ah, who can tell how hard it is to climb
The steep where Fame’s proud temple shines afar:
Ah, who can tell how many a soul sublime
Has felt the influence of malignant star,
And with inglorious fortune waged eternal war!
enjoyed a delightful friendship with the Duchess of Gordon. He spent the happiest hours of his saddened life at her castle, in the enjoyment of her unvarying kindness. He sent her books; they exchanged letters; and in all the brilliant whirl of her life as a reigning beauty, an ardent politician, and a leader of fashion, she fully appreciated his worth, and reciprocated his attentions and esteem until his death.
A friendship of an uncommon character, containing the elements of a romance, has left a monument of itself in two volumes, called “Letters of William Von Humboldt to a Female Friend.” Humboldt, then an undergraduate at Göttingen, during one of his vacations spent three days at Pyrmont. Much of this time he passed in the society of a lovely and very superior young lady who was staying there with her father. Each was deeply interested in the other, without suspecting that the feeling was mutual. On parting, Humboldt gave his fair friend an album-leaf as a memento. The image of the fascinating student was indelibly impressed on her imagination, a centre of ideal activity and accumulation. So, it afterwards seemed, was her image left in his imagination. Twenty-six years passed in absence and silence. Humboldt had become famous and prominent, and was blessed with a happy family. Charlotte had been married, and was now a childless widow. Deprived of her parents, her husband, her property, she was overwhelmed with misfortunes. Her large property having been devoted to the State, it occurred to her that her old friend, of the three youthful days at Pyrmont, now a minister of the king, might assist her to recover, at least a portion of it, or at all events give her valuable advice as to what to do. She gathered courage to write him a letter, enclosing his old album-leaf, recalling their early meeting, telling how sacredly the memory of him had been enshrined in her soul, and begging him to counsel and console her in her great distress. The character of the letter was such, revealing a spirit so rich, high, and pure, that the generous nature of Humboldt was much moved. He at once replied with great kindness and wisdom, and with oars of practical aid. Thus began a correspondence which lasted until his death, twenty years later, during the whole of which period they only met twice for a brief time. Charlotte’s portion of the correspondence, which is clot published—so affectionately reverential, so transparently sincere and trustful, evidently gave the great scholar and statesman extreme pleasure, a most varied stimulus. His letters reveal the fragrant warmth of his heart, the rare virtues and treasures of his soul, his saintly wisdom, in a most attractive manner. They were prized by Charlotte as the religion and sanctuary of her existence, and left to be given to the world as a holy bequest after her death. An interesting fact in the character of Charlotte, often noticed in these letters, and full of fruits in her life, is that she always had an intense desire to have a friend in the fullest sense of the word—a desire which was early heightened by the repeated enthusiastic perusal of Richardson’s “Clarissa Harlowe.” This dream had many partial realizations—the most complete and lasting in Humboldt. Rarely has any relation of individuals been so original, and awakened so much interest, as that between Goethe and his child-friend Bettine. In publishing their correspondence, many years after its close, Bettine prefaces it with the remark: “This book is for the good, and not for the bad.” She foresaw how the bad would misinterpret it, yet felt that she could afford to defy their incompetent construal. She loved Goethe to idolatry—her whole soul vibrating beneath the power of the possession; but the ideality of the passion, in her naïve and spontaneous nature, was a perfect safeguard from evil. Under this spell, all her rich, unquestioning ardors of reverence and fondness were as sacredly guided as the movements of Mignon, dancing blindfold amidst the eggs, with never a false step. Goethe’s conduct towards the trustful and impassioned girl was exceedingly discreet, in its mingled kindness and wisdom. He felt the sweetness of her worship; he guarded her, as a father would, from its dangers. But, above all, he was profoundly interested in the spectacle of her young, original, unveiled soul. The electric soil of her brain teemed with a miraculous efflorescence, on which he never tired of gazing. It was to him like sitting apart in some still place, and watching the secret forces and workings of nature, reflected in a small mirror. Thus Bettine writes from the strange fullness of her mind, in mystic language, to Goethe’s mother: “Would that I sat, a beggar-child, before his door, and took a piece of bread from his hand, and that he knew, by my glance, of what spirit I am the child. Then would he draw me nigh to him, and cover me with his cloak, that I might be warm. I know he would never bid me go again. I should wander in the house, and no one would know who I was nor whence I came; and years would pass, and life would pass, and in his features the whole world would be reflected to me, and I should not need to learn any thing more.” And Goethe replies, “Your dear letters bestow on me so much that is delightful, that they may justly precede all else: they give me a succession of holidays, whose return always blesses me anew. Write to me all that passes in your mind. Farewell. Be ever near me, and continue to refresh me.” Mont Blanc stoops, with all his snows, to kiss the rosy vale nestling at his feet. Goethe, in the course of his life, stood in the most intimate relations with a large number of the rarest women. Few men have ever appreciated female character so well. No one has exhibited their virtues, and pleaded their cause with a more impressive combination of insight, sympathy, and veneration.
His many sins towards women deserve severe condemnation and rebuke; but it is an outrageous wrong towards his noble genius to limit attention, as so many critics do, to that aspect of the case. The wondering love and study which Frederike, Lili, and others drew from him; the religious admiration and awed curiosity evoked in him by the spiritual Fraulein von Klettenburg, “over whom,” as he said, “in her invalid loneliness, the Holy Ghost brooded like a dove;” the respectful affection, gratitude, and homage commanded by the extraordinary merits of his lofty and endeared friends, the Duchess Amelia, and the Grand Duchess Louise—all bore fruits in his experience and his works. The revelations they made, the examples they set, the lessons they taught, the noble suggestions they kindled, re-appear in the series of enchanting, glorious, adorable women—Gretchen, Natalia, Ottilia, Iphigenia, Makaria, and the rest— who, with their artless affection, their self-renouncement, their wisdom, their dignity, their holiness, their sufferings, appear in his master-works, breathing presentments of life, for the edification and delight of generations of readers. He has recognized, more profoundly than any other author, the essentially feminine form of that divine principle of disinterested love, that impulse of pure self-abnegation, in which resides the redemptive power of humanity; and has set it forth with incomparable clearness and constancy. At the close of Faust, he has given it statement in a form which associates his genius with that of Dante, and in a kindred height. It is the womanly element, he would say, worshipful and self-denying love, that draws us ever forward, redeeming and uplifting our grosser souls:—
Das ewig weibliche
Zieht uns hinan.
Wieland and Sophia de la Roche were profoundly attached to each other during the greater part of their lives. He and his beloved wife were buried beside her; and a tasteful monument erected over them, according to his orders. It bears the inscription, in German, composed by himself:—
Love and Friendship joined these kindred souls in life, And their mortal part is covered by this common stone.
Hölderlin, whose soaring and fiery soul was caged in too exquisite an organization, lived, for some time, when he first became sick, in a peasant’s hut, beside a brook, sleeping with open doors, spending hours, every day, reciting Greek poems to the murmur of the stream. The princess of Homburg, who greatly admired his genius, and his deep, pure sentiment, had made him a present of a grand piano. In the coming-on of his madness he cut most of the strings. On the few keys that still sounded he continued to fantasy until his insanity grew so engrossing, that it was necessary to remove him to an asylum. Silvio Pellico, the story of whose sufferings in the prison of Spielberg, has carried his plaintive memory into all lands, and the Marchioness Giulia di Barolo were a pair of friends brought together as by a special appointment of Heaven.
When the holy and gentle poet, patriot, and Christian came out of his prison, with a broken constitution and a wounded heart, into a bleak and prizeless world, the Marchioness—who had long been a mother to the poor of her native city, an assiduous visitor of the jails, a saintly benefactress to all the unhappy whom her charities could reach—drawn to him by a strong interest of respect and pity, gave him a home in her house, and supplied him with congenial employment. Pellico gratefully appreciated her goodness to him, and deeply reverenced her worth. In works of religion and beneficence their lives moved on. He began to write a memoir of his friend; but left it, a fragment, when his lingering consumption brought him to the grave. The pious friendship of the Marchioness did not end with his death. On his tomb, in the Campo Santo, at Turin, she placed a column surmounted by a marble bust, and inscribed with this epitaph from her own pen:
Under the weight of the cross
He learned the way to heaven.
Christians pray for him, And follow him.
The pathetic life, the gentle sweetness of spirit, the mournful end of Silvio Pellico, are well known to all. The Marchioness di Barolo, whose name is linked to his in the memory of so pure and benign a union of friendship, lived the life, died the death, and bequeathed the renown of a saint.
She said, “It is a great suffering to have done all in your power for a person, and to find only ingratitude in return. There is no anger in this suffering, nor does it necessarily destroy affection; but the wound is buried deep in the heart; and if it has been inflicted by one very dearly loved, no human consolation can heal it. The most profitable education persons receive is the one they give themselves, through the love of God and labors of charity. I was a great deal alone in my youth, and I am sure it was good for me.”
Wordsworth’s affection for persons, not less than for nature, was remarkable for its tenacity, the perseverance with which his attention returned to it, and for the deep, clear consciousness with which he cherished it. The most beloved of his lady friends was Isabel Fenwick, who was a frequent visitor at Rydal Mount during the last twenty years of his life. She wrote, to his dictation, the autobiographical notes used in the memoir of him. Her admiring and devoted friendship was evidently a strong inspiration and precious solace to him. It was for her sake that he built the Level Terrace, on which he paced to and fro for many an hour, in sight of the valley of the Rothay and the banks of Lake Windermere. Not many finer expressions of sentiment are to be found in our tongue than Wordsworth has given in his sonnet on a portrait of his dear friend Isabel:
We gaze, nor grieve to think that we must die.
But that the precious love this friend hath sown
Within our hearts, the love whose flower hath blown
Bright as if heaven were ever in its eye,
Will pass so soon from human memory;
And not by strangers to our blood alone,
But by our best descendants be unknown,
Unthought of this may surely claim a sigh.
Yet, blessed Art, we yield not to dejection,
Thou against time so feelingly dost strive:
Where’er, preserved in this most true reflection,
An image of her soul is kept alive,
Some lingering fragrance of the pure affection,
Whose flower with us will vanish, must survive.
Charming had many qualities especially fitting him for friendships with women. His sensitive delicacy of refinement, disinterested justice, tender magnanimity, earnest culture of every thing beautiful and true, immaculate purity of soul, and burning ideal enthusiasm, made him feel most joyfully at home with women of enlarged sympathies, well-trained minds, and noble aspirations. He was too shrinking, fastidious, devout, to enjoy intercourse with the rough, hard average of society.
His diffidence, depression, and loneliness, were soothed and alleviated, his noblest powers inspired, by affectionate communion with several of the choicest women of his time. “To them,” his biographer says, “he could freely unveil his native enthusiasm, his fine perceptions of fitness, his love of beauty in nature and art, his romantic longings for a pure-toned society, his glorious hopes of humanity. And his profound reverence for the nature and duty of women gave that charm of unaffected courtesy to his manner, look, and tone, which won them freely to exchange their cherished thoughts as with an equal.” The following extract from one of his letters to a woman, whose solemn depth of soul and mind, and wondrous range of acquirements and experience rank her with the very greatest of her sex, Harriet Martineau, is an exceedingly interesting revelation:
“MY DEAR FRIEND, I thought I had spoken my last word to you on this side the Atlantic; but I have this moment received your letter, and must write a line of acknowledgment. I know, from my own experience, that there are those who need the encouragement of praise. There are more than is thought who feel the burden of human imperfection too sorely, and who receive strength from approbation. Happy they who from just confidence in right action, and from the habit of carrying out their convictions, need little foreign support. I thank you for this expression of your heart. Without the least tendency to distrust, without the least dejection at the idea of neglect, with entire gratitude for my lot, I still feel that I have not the power, which so many others have, of awakening love, except in a very narrow circle. I knew that I enjoyed your esteem; but I expected to fade with my native land, not from your thoughts, but from your heart. Your letter satisfies me that I shall have one more friend in England. I shall not feel far from you, for what a nearness is there in the consciousness of working in the same spirit!” The friendship between Channing and Lucy Aikin, as seen in the rich series of her letters to him, extending over a period of sixteen years, must have been a valued resource, enjoyment, and stimulus to them both. An extract or two will make the reader regret that relations charged with such priceless blessings are not more cultivated. “To converse with my guide, philosopher, and friend, has now become with me not a mere indulgence, but a want. I daily discover more and more how much I have come under the influence of your mind, and what great things it has done, and I trust is still doing, for mine. I was never duly sensible, till your writings made me so, of the transcendent beauty and sublimity of Christian morals; nor did I submit my heart and temper to their chastening and meliorating influences. In particular, the spirit of unbounded benevolence, which they breathe, was a stranger to my bosom: far indeed was I from looking upon all men as my brethren. I shudder now to think how good a hater I was in the days of my youth. Time and reflection, a wider range of acquaintance, and a calmer state of the public mind, mitigated by degrees my bigotry; but I really knew not what it was to open my heart to the human race, until I had drunk deeply into the spirit of your writings. You have given me a new being. May God reward you!” At another time she writes, “O my dear friend, I was told yesterday that you had been very, very ill; and though it was added that you were now better, I have been able to think of little else since. What would I give to know how you are at this moment! The distance which separates us has something truly fearful in such circumstances.”
“Never, my friend, are you forgotten, when my soul seeks communion with our common Father; and when I strive most earnestly to overcome some evil propensity, or to make some generous sacrifice, the thought of you gives me strength not my own.”
There is something especially attractive, solacing, and noble in such a relation as the foregoing. It covers a large class of friendships existing between Protestant clergymen and the women who, blessed by their instructions and personal interest, have formed an attachment to them of grateful reverence and sympathy. Such an attachment is often a communication of profit and pleasure most precious to both parties.
Several instances are recorded in the memoirs of Theodore Parker. His friendship with Miss Frances Power Cobbe is particularly worthy of notice. She wrote her gratitude to him for the benefits her mind had derived from his writings. Gratefully appreciating her worth and high aims, he continued to correspond with her by letter until his death. How cordial their relation became; what kind deeds went across it; what delights it yielded; what a deep and pure blessing of encouragement, joy, and peace it was to them both—appears in the few letters given to the public. When they first met, the titanic toiler, outworn with his cares and battles, was at the edge of death. “Do not,” said the expiring athlete, “do not say what you feel for me; it makes me too unhappy to leave you.” During those lingering days of transition from the earthly state to the heavenly, he dared not trust himself to see her often. As he said, “it made his heart swell too high.” A class of friendships of extreme moral value, and often of great attractiveness, results from the relations of noble and royal women with the scholars and philosophers chosen to serve them as tutors or advisers. The names of Zenobia and Longinus give us an example of it in antiquity. If the annals of the crowned houses of Europe, imperial and provincial, were searched with reference to this point, a large number of admirable instances would be brought to light. On the one side power, rank, grace, patronage, every courtly charm; on the other side, learning, experience, gratitude, devoted service, eminent personal worth—could not fail in many instances to give birth to the most cordial esteem, and lead to a charming intercourse. Such was the case with both Wieland and Herder, and those queenly ladies, the Duchess Mother and the reigning Duchess of the court of Weimar. The relation between Columbus and Queen Isabella, after her chivalrous confidence and patronage—must have drawn their souls towards each other with a romantic interest, only needing better opportunities for personal intimacy to warm into a fervent sympathy.
The Countess of Pembroke, wife of that Philip Herbert who was the brother of Shakespeare’s friend, showed how tenderly she remembered her old instructor, Daniel, the poet-laureate, by erecting a handsome monument to him in Beckington Church, bearing this inscription: “Here lies, expecting the second coming of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, the dead body of Samuel Daniel, Esq., who was tutor to the Lady Anne Clifford in her youth. She was that daughter and heir to George Clifford, Earl of Cumberland, who, in gratitude to him, erected this monument to his memory, a long time after, when she was Countess Dowager of Pembroke, Dorset, and Montgomery.” One of the most beautiful recorded friendships of this kind is that revealed in the long correspondence of Descartes and his pupil, the Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia. Her charming character and distinguished attainments add largely to the gratification with which we trace her ardent esteem and attachment for her instructor and friend, whose brilliant genius and adventurous career are of themselves fascinating. A pleasing little volume by M. de Caren was published at Paris so lately as the year 1862, under the title, “Descartes and the Princess Palatine, or the Influence of Cartesianism on the Women of the Seventeenth Century.” An example of a kindred friendship is also given by Leibnitz and his pupil, Caroline of Brunswick. Soon after the electoress became Queen of Prussia, she invited him to visit her, saying, “Think not that I prefer this greatness and this crown, about which they make such a bustle here, to the conversations on philosophy we have had together in Lutzenburg.” Frederick the Great relates that the queen, in her last hours, mentioned the name of Leibnitz. One of the ladies in waiting burst into tears, and the queen said to her, “Weep not for me; for I am now going to satisfy my curiosity respecting the origin of things, which Leibnitz has never been able to explain to me, respecting space, existence and non-existence, and the Infinite.” Frederick adds, that, as “those persons to whom Heaven vouchsafes gifted souls raise themselves to an equality with monarchs, this queen esteemed Leibnitz well worthy of her friendship.” The philosopher was affected deeply and long by the loss of her who had been his closest and best friend. He wrote, being absent at the time, to one of her favorite maids, who was also a friend of his own, “I infer your feelings from mine. I weep not; I complain not; but I know not where to look for relief. The loss of the queen appears to me like a dream; but when I awake from my revery, I find it too true. Your misfortune is not greater than mine; but your feelings are more lively, and you are nearer to the calamity. This encourages me to write, begging you to moderate your sorrow. It is not by excessive grief that we shall best honor the memory of one of the most perfect princesses of the earth; but rather by our admiration of her virtues. My letter is more philosophical than my heart, and I am unable to follow my own counsel: it is, notwithstanding, rational.” Ascham relates, in his “Schoolmaster,” a conversation he once held with Lady Jane Grey. She said that the sports of the gentlemen and ladies in the park were but a shadow of pleasure compared with that which she found in reading Plato. And, in explaining how she came to take such delight in learning, she said, “One of the benefits that ever God gave me is that he sent so sharp and severe parents, and so gentle a schoolmaster. For when I am in presence of either father or mother, whether I speak, keep silence, sit, stand, or go, eat, drink, be merry, or sad, be sewing, playing, or dancing, or any thing else, I must do it, as it were, in such weight, measure, and number, even so perfectly, as God made the world; or else I am so sharply taunted, so cruelly threatened; yea, presently sometimes, with pinches, nips, bobs, and other ways, which I will not name, for the honor I bear them, so without measure misordered that I think myself in hell, till time come that I must go to Mr. Elmer, who teaches me so gently, so pleasantly, with such fair allurements to learning, that I think all the time nothing while I am with him.” Elizabeth Robinson, afterwards the famous Mrs. Montague, the attracting centre of a noted and memorable association of friends, both men and women, had an exemplary friendship, full of good offices and pleasure, and undisturbed by any thing until death, with her preceptor, the distinguished scholar and writer, Conyers Middleton. Hester Lynch Salusbury, at thirteen, formed a most affectionate attachment to Dr. Collier, a guest of her father, who had volunteered to supervise her education. “He was just four times my age; but the difference or agreement never crossed my mind. A friendship more tender, or more unpolluted by interest or by vanity, never existed. Love had no place at all in the connection, nor had he any rival but my mother.” The young Hester afterwards became the famous Mrs. Thrale, to all the varied incidents of whose long and close friendship with Dr. Johnson the world-Wide renown of that great man has given a universal publicity. The relation of patroness, sustained with such signal grace and generosity, and with such soothing and inspiring effect, by many queenly ladies in former times, is virtually obsolete now. But it has left memorials never to die; and it is hard to imagine any office which at this day should be more grateful and gracious, more full of happiness and good to a woman of noble heart and mind, blessed with position, wealth, and culture, than that of extending appreciative sympathy, aid, and encouragement, to young men of genius, in their unbefriended, early struggles. It has been strikingly said by that noble woman, Sarah Austin, with reference to Madame Récamier, “All who were admitted to her intimacy, hastened to her with their joys and their sorrows, their projects and ideas; certain not only of secrecy and discretion, but of the warmest and readiest sympathy. If a man had the rough draught of a book, a speech, a picture, an enterprise, in his head, it Was to her that he unfolded his half-formed plan, sure of an attentive and sympathizing listener. This is one of the peculiar functions of women. It is incalculable what comfort and encouragement a kind and wise woman may give to timid merit, what support to uncertain virtue, what wings to noble aspirations.” Chaucer was thus patronized by Philippa, queen of Edward III; by Anne of Bohemia, for whom he composed his “Legend of Good Women;” and most of all by Blanche of Lancaster, wife of John of Gaunt, whose courtship he celebrated allegorically in the “Parliament of Birds,” whose epithalamium he sang in his “Dream,” and whose death he lamented in his “Book of the Duchess.” The beautiful and kindly Lady Venetia Digby patronized and befriended Ben Jonson. The attentions of so fair and gentle a creature as she was, according to the description of her in his two poems, called, “The Picture of the Body,” and “The Picture of the Mind,”—could not have been otherwise than most soothing, grateful, and inspiring to him. She was found dead in her bed one morning, her cheek resting on her hand.
She past away
So sweetly from the world, as if her clay
Laid only down to slumber.
Jonson dedicated to her memory the imperishable tribute of his heart in a long poem made up of ten parts. The ninth part is inscribed, “Elegy on my Muse, the truly honored Lady Venetia Digby, who, living, gave me leave to call her so.” These lines are from it:
There time that I died too, now she is dead,
Who was my Muse, and life of all I said,
The spirit that I wrote with and conceived
All that was good or great with me, she weaved,
And set it forth: the rest were cobwebs fine,
Spun out in name of some of the old Nine,
To hang a window or make dark the room
Till, swept away, they were cancelled with a broom.
Lucy, the Countess of Bedford, was likewise a great friend of Ben Jonson. He has sung her worth in one of the most magnificent of his shorter poems. She was also a kind and fast friend of Daniel and Donne, both of whom wrote verses in her honor. But Jonson vastly distanced them both. Exquisite and sublime as his praise was, it was agreed, by those who knew her, that she fully deserved it. It is a luxury to recall such a tribute:
This morning, timely rapt with holy fire,
I thought to form unto my zealous Muse
What kind of creature I could most desire
To honor, serve, and love; as poets use,
I meant to make her fair and free and wise,
Of greatest blood, and yet more good than great;
I meant the day-star should not brighter rise,
Nor lend like influence from his lucent seat.
I meant she should be courteous, facile, sweet,
Hating that solemn vice of greatness, pride:
I meant each softest virtue there should meet,
Fit in that softer bosom to reside.
Only a learned and a manly soul
I purposed her, that should, with even powers,
The rock, the spindle, and the shears, control,
Of Destiny, and spin her own free hours.
Such when I meant to feign, and wished to see,
My Muse bade, BEDFORD write, and that was She.
Milton had many qualities and tastes fitting him to be the delight of female society, and to delight in it. His natural bent for all the delicacies of sentiment, for every fine and high range of character, thought, and passion, has strewn many choice expressions of itself in his writings, and sprinkles his poems with eulogistic allusions to the virtues and charms of womanhood. These have too much escaped the popular notice, which has fastened on the numerous stinging utterantes wrung from certain bitter passages of his experience. Scores of critics have dwelt on the terrible traits he has given to Delilah in “Samson Agonistes,” where one has called attention to the breathing emotion, the celestial coloring, the ineffable sweetness and grandeur he has lavished on the Lady in “Comus.” For imperishable monuments of his friendships with the selectest women of that age, behold his Italian lines to Leonora Baroni, his sonnets “To a Virtuous Young Lady,” “To the Lady Margaret Ley,” “To the Memory of Mrs. Catharine Thomson,” and the record of his long and unbroken intimacy with the admirable and all-accomplished Countess Ranclagh, of whom he said, “She was to me in the place of every want.”
The Duchess of Queensbury was the unfailing friend and encourager of Gay. When Gay died, she eloquently rebuked the vitriolic Swift, for expressing the heartless sentiment, that a lost friend might be replaced as well as spent money. Madame Rambouillet was the friend of Voiture; Madame Sabliere of La Fontaine. Hundreds of similar examples might easily be gathered. Few of the French literary men of the seventeenth or the eighteenth century led those disorderly and disreputable lives which were the calamity and the disgrace of most of the professed writers of England at that time. Madame Mole justly observes, “They owed their exemption from these miseries chiefly to the women, who, from the earliest days of French literature, gave them all the succor they could; bringing them into contact with the rich and the great, showing them off with every kind of ingenuity and tact, so as to make them understood and valued. If we examine the private history of all their celebrated men, we find scarcely one to whom some lady was not a ministering spirit. They helped them with their wit, their influence, and their money. They did far more. They helped them with their hearts, listened to their sorrows, admired their genius before the world had become aware of it, advised them, entered patiently into all their feelings, soothed their wounded vanities and irritable fancies. What balm has been found in the listening look, for the warm and vexed spirit how has it risen again after repeated disappointment, comforted by encouragements gently administered! If the Otways and the Chattertons had possessed one such friend, their country might not have been disgraced by their fate. Are the life and happiness of the poet, of the man of genius, a trifle? What would human society be without them? Let all who hold a pen think of the kind hearts who, by the excitement of social intercourse and sympathy, have preserved a whole class from degradation and vice.”
The extent to which women have been the occasions, the suggesters, and sustaining encouragers of artistic creations in literature, painting, sculpture, and music, will astonish any one who will take the trouble to look up the history of it. When Orpheus found that Eurydice was gone, he threw his harp away. Women have delighted to administer inspiration, praise, and comfort, to great poets, orators, philosophers, because it gratifies their natural talent for admiring, and because they are reverentially grateful to the genius which can so clearly read their secrets, and so powerfully portray their souls to themselves. Sophocles, the highest Greek poet, whose firm and delicate portraitures of feminine character were not equalled in antique literature, must have had many admirers and friends among the choice women of Athens. And Virgil, we cannot imagine any high-souled, refined woman knowing the tender Virgil without a respectful and affectionate attachment. Octavia fainted away when he read before her his undying description of the death of Marcellus. The kiss of Aileen Margaret on the lips of the sleeping minstrel, Alain Chartier, is a type of woman’s homage to literary genius. The same thing was shown, a little earlier in the same century, at the funeral of Heinrich von Meissen, surnamed Frauenlob, from the infinite praises he had lavished on the Virgin Mary, and on the female sex in general. After his death in the outer quarters of the cathedral at Mayence, which were set apart for hospitality to strangers and honored guests, a great company of women, it is related, sighing and weeping, bore his coffin to the burial, and poured into his sepulchre such an abundance of wine as ran over the whole circumference of the church. Five hundred years later, the women of Mayence celebrated his memory by tributary eulogies, and by the erection of a beautiful new monument, faced with a marble portrait of him.
Bernardin Saint Pierre says, “There is in woman an easy gayety, which scatters the sadness of man.” It may be said, on the other hand, that there is in the man of literary genius a masterly insight, joined with sympathetic tenderness and masculine strength, which administers to woman that reflective and glorifying interpretation, and that supporting guidance, whereof she continually stands in such need. What woman would not be proud and grateful at receiving such a tribute as that which Waller paid to the Countess of Carlisle, on seeing her dressed in mourning?
When from black clouds no part of sky is clear,
But just so much as lets the sun appear,
Heaven then would seem thy image, and reflect
Those sable vestments and that bright aspect.
A spark of virtue by the deepest shade
Of sad adversity is fairer made:
No less advantage doth thy beauty get,
A Venus rising from a sea of jet!
What woman capable of appreciating the genius of Racine could read the works in which his choice thoughts and effusive sentiments are enshrined, purified and confirmed echoes of the finest sighs ever breathed by the heart, and not be drawn to him honoring esteem and love? It was this mastery of the interior life, this impassioned voicing of its subtilest secrets, that made Rousseau so irresistibly attractive to women. To the many who befriended him, or paid precious tributes to him in his life, the name of Madame de Verdelin has recently been added, by the publication of her correspondence. Sainte Beuve has prefixed her recovered portrait in an essay marked by his best touches. After quoting her final letter, he says, “From that day, Madame de Verdelin wholly disappears. She is known only through Rousseau. A ray of his glory fell on her; that ray—withdrawn, she repasses into the shade, and every trace is lost.” The gifted critic says he feels a deep gratification in thus recalling the image of this generous woman. “She is a conquest for us: we pay the debt of Rousseau to her.” He concludes what he has written with reference to these friendships of mind to mind, these intimacies of intelligence and feeling, these affections of women and authors, more tender than those of men, and yet quite distinct from love, by saying, with instructive emphasis, “Evidently, social morality has taken a step forward: a new chapter, unknown to the ancients, too much forgotten by the moderns, is henceforth to be added in all treatises of friendship.”
Perhaps no author has ever written more that must speak with irresistible power to the inmost hearts of all women who have souls sensitive enough, complex, cultivated, and forcible enough, for an adequate reaction on the richness of his works, than Jean Paul Richter. In all the heights and depths and subtilties of the natural affections, and of imaginative or ideal emotion, as well as in truthful and endlessly varied expressions of those mysteries, he has no equal, scarcely a rival, in literature. In spite of his poverty and confining toil, he made, in his day, a profound personal sensation. And such is the personal spell of his ineffable tenderness, nobleness, and grandeur, even as exerted on the reader from his printed pages, that many a strong man, pilgriming thither from remote lands, has been known to kneel with convulsive emotion on his lowly grave at Bayreuth. His life was heroic in labor, and spotless in purity. When his heart sank in death, it seems as though the earth itself ought to have collapsed with the breaking of so great a thing. His sensibility was a world-harp, responding to every tremulous breath of air or flame. Sweet, pure, wise, mighty, modest, no wonder he drew upon himself the affectionate interest of many lofty ladies, and found treasures of inspiration and solace in their conversation and letters. Reviewing his life in the circle of his friends, he seems as a sun, with pale and burning moons and planets revolving around him. Charlotte von Kalb; Caroline Herder; Emilie von Berlepsch; Josephine von Sydow; the mother and the wife of Carl August; the daughters of the Duke of Mecklenburg, to whom, as “The Four Lovely and Noble Sisters on the Throne,” he dedicated his “Titan,” such, with many others like them, were the gracious women with whom Jean Paul, in his much-tried life, interchanged homage, friendly counsels, and sacred joys. The intelligent and enthusiastic praises they poured on him for his works must have been to him a divine luxury. And ah I how much he needed such comforts, he who could say, in one of his frequent moments of sadness, “Reckoning off from the neighborhood of my heart, I find life cold and empty”! A whole volume of his before unpublished “Correspondence with Renowned Women” was given to the public in 1865, a glowing treasury of gems of the heart.
Rahel Levin was such a fascinating queen of society, such a signal and fortunate mistress of friendships with celebrated men, that her character and career are on this account full both of interest and instruction. The secrets of influence, the charms that attract attention, awaken confidence, exert authority, dispense pleasure, and minister to human wants, are scarcely anywhere more clearly shown than in her person and story. The pronounced character, the uncommon talents, the rare combination of extreme candor and tact, the broad, intellectual culture, and impulsive demonstrativeness of the youthful Jewess, very soon gave her a prominent position in society, and made her fascination felt and talked about. Her first advent and sway prophesied her future renown as the most celebrated woman in Germany who has kept an open drawing-room for the practice of conversation and the joy of intellectual society. It was said of her, at that early period, “She was full of an obliging good temper, that made her anticipate wishes, divine annoyances in order to relieve them, and forget herself in seeking to make others happy.”
Her thirtieth year she spent in France, where she had the finest opportunities for studying the famous salon-life of Paris. Without being captivated or at all overborne by it, she no doubt drew many lessons and profited much from it, on carrying her German soul back to her German home. Returning to Berlin, she bewitched all the choice spirits of that city. Married to Varnhagen von Ense, her house was, for a quarter of a century, the rendezvous of whatever was noblest, purest, strongest, most distinguished in Germany. She moved among them as a queen, looked up to by all. She had glowing and sustained friendships, emphatically rich and faithful friendships, of the highest moral order, with Marwitz, Gentz, Prince Louis Ferdinand, Brinckmann, and Veit; besides relations of earnest affection and communion with many other honored contemporaries, such as Schleiermacher, Schlegel, and Jean Paul.
In addition to sketches of her by different hands, we possess five volumes, drawn chiefly from her own pen and edited by her husband, containing records of her thoughts, portraits of her closest friends, and full accounts of her intercourse and correspondence with them. In all this literary transcript, as in the course of experience which it copies, the most conspicuous element is friendship, the reception, reciprocation, culture, and expression of friendship. The king among her friends was her lover and husband, Varnhagen von Ense; her union with whom was not more a marriage of persons, than it was a marriage of minds, souls, interior lives, and social interests and ends. It is principally through him, next after her own writings, that welearn the characteristics of Rahel, which made such deep impressions on people, and held them so fast to her. He thus describes her, as she first dawned on him amidst the highest society of Berlin: “There appeared a light, graceful figure, of small stature, but strong make, with delicate and full limbs, feet and hands remarkably small; the countenance, encircled with rich, dark locks, spoke intellectual superiority; the quick, and yet firm, deep glances left the observer in doubt whether they gave or received more; an expression of suffering lent a soft grace to the clear features. She moved in a dark dress, light almost as a shadow, but also with freedom and sureness; her greeting was as easy as it was kindly. But what struck me most was the sonorous and mellow voice which seemed to swell from the inmost depths of the soul, and a conversation the most extraordinary that I had ever met with. She threw out, in the most facile and unpretending fashion, thoughts full of originality and humor, where wit was united with simplicity, and acuteness with amiability; and into the whole a deep truth was cast, as it were out of iron, giving to every sentence a completeness of impression which rendered it hard for the strongest, in any way, to break or rend it. In her presence, I had the conviction that a genuine human being stood before me, in its most pure and perfect type; through her whole frame, and in all her motions, nature and intellect in fresh, breezy reciprocity; organic shape, elastic fibre, living connection with every thing around; the greatest originality and simplicity in perception and utterance; the combined imposingness of innocence and wisdom; in word and deed, alertness, dexterity, precision; and all imbosomed in an atmosphere of the purest goodness and benevolence; all guided by an energetic sense of duty, and heightened by a noble self-forgetfullness in the presence of the joys and griefs of others.”
Such is a glimpse of the Rahel, who, for thirty years, exemplified in her drawing-room, amidst the joy and admiration of the most glorious circle of her countrymen, that rich, strong, free, and noble ideal of womanhood, which Herder, Schiller, Richter, and Goethe, illustrated in so many of their works. So many contrasted qualities met and were reconciled in her, that different friends and critics report her in quite different likenesses. According to one, she never thought pronouncedly, but gave forth the exquisite perfume of thought: her life was made of tears, smiles, dreams, fantasies, flutterings of wings, too celestial for the gross air of earth. According to another, she was too recklessly thorough, and used too shattering an emphasis. In fact, both these sides were true. Gentz, the celebrated politician, called her “a great man,” and confessed himself to be, in comparison, a woman. Yet no one who knew her could deny that she strikingly possessed the best traits of her sex, purity, tenderness, modesty, patience, and self-sacrifice. In 1813, during the horrors of disease in Berlin, and the horrors of war in Prague, she gave herself up with joy to nursing the sick and the wounded. “The feast of doing good,” she called it. “Never have I seen elsewhere,” said Varnhagen, “such a mass of masculine breadth and penetration, alongside of which, however, swelled, without remission, the warm flow of womanly mildness and beauty. Never have I seen an eye and a mouth animated with such loveliness, and yet, at times, giving vent to such outbreaks of enthusiasm and indignation.”
Her intellectual power and her tact formed, no doubt, one strong element of the attraction which drew and kept so many artists, philosophers, preachers, statesmen, and brilliant social leaders by her side. But her heroic and unconquerable truthfullness was a still more royal and authoritative trait. She sought for truth; she spoke truth; she indignantly denounced all falsehoods and shams. Some of her sentences on this point seem burned into the page, as by the flame of a blowpipe. “The whole literary and fashionable world is baked together of lies.” To those who expressed their respect and admiration of her she said, “Natural candor, absolute purity of soul, and sincerity of heart are the only things worthy of homage: the rest is conventionality.” She wrote to a friend, “Never try to suppress a generous impulse, or to crowd out a genuine feeling: despair or discouragement is the only fruit of dry reasoning, unenlightened by the heart.” In the following sentence she betrays, by the law of opposites, the deepest charm of such a nature as her own; namely, a thoroughly sincere and fluent spontaneousness of character. “I have just found out the thing that I most utterly hate: it is pedantry. To see such a big nothing in full march is to me the most revolting and the most unendurable of all sights.”
Another fine and winning quality in Rahel was her profound interest in exalted and original characters, and her ardent veneration for them. This drew them gratefully to her in return. She had an almost idolatrous admiration for Goethe. All aspirants for true interior greatness naturally love and revere those who exemplify their ideal to them. She once called Goethe and Fichte the first and second eyes of Germany. A soul capable of such enthusiasm for great souls is rare, and is most charming. Her maxim, like that of all the highest and strongest of the guiding souls of our race, was, “Act only from your inmost conscience, and only good will come to you.” A vast, tonic freedom and charity breathe in some of her sentences. “A catholic sympathy with all possible systems; a resolute liberation from the exclusive trammels of any; an entire surrender into the hands of Him who wields all possibilities; and an honest dealing with the depths of our own hearts, this seems to me more than all philosophy, and a thing well pleasing to God.”
It is no wonder that the favored friends of such a woman honored her even to the verge of worship, as we find then doing in their letters. Though not technically—or professedly a religious woman, she was really one. She felt the mystery of things; she revered the providential guides of the race; she owned the law of the whole; she bowed in submissive adoration before God. “Since the decease of my mother,” she said, “I know death better. I see him everywhere. He has assumed a new power over me.” A fatal disease struck her at sixty-two. Her husband scarcely left her bedside. Until the last, he continued to read her favorite books to her. The young Heine, how different then from the dreadful wreck he became! hearing that fresh rose-leaves, applied to her inflamed eyes, were grateful, sent her his first hook of poems, enveloped in a basket of roses. With what fitter words can we take leave of Rahel and her friends than these of her own: “I have thought an epitaph. It is this, Good men, when any thing good happens to mankind, then think affectionately in your peace also of mine.”
The life of Madame Récamier is interesting, in a pre-eminent degree, on account of the warmth, elevation, and fidelity of the friendships which filled it. Her personal loveliness and social charm made her a universal favorite, and gave her an unparalleled celebrity. But, full as her career was of romantic adventures, rich as it was in brilliant associations, its keynote throughout, its strongest interest at every point, is friendship. Unlike those of so many of the famous women of France, her friendships were as remarkable for their rational soundness, purity, and tenacity, as for their fervor. They were free from every thing morbid or affected. An adverse fate forbade the love to which she seemed destined by her bewitching beauty and grace; and a certain divine chill in the blood, a stamp from Diana in the senses, turned all the warmth of affection upwards into the mind, to radiate thence in her face and manners, and to make her a high priestess of friendship. The pure and wise Ballanche, who idolized her, said that she was originally an Antigone, of whom people vainly wished by force to make an Armada.
Her nominal husband is supposed by some to have been in reality her father; the marriage being merely a titular one, to secure his fortune to her in case of his death by the guillotine, of which he was then in daily dread. Deprived of the usual domestic vents of affection, her rich heart naturally led her to crave the best substitute, friendship. And her matchless personal gifts, together with her truly charming traits of character, enabled her permanently to win and experience this in a very exalted degree. Her three principal friends were Montmorency, Ballanche, and Chateaubriand; all three original and extraordinary characters, and all three worthy in spite of some drawbacks on the part of the last of the extraordinary devotion she gave them. The letters of these three possess extreme interest. Especially, those of the first named are the unique monument of an affection whose purity and delicacy equalled its vivacity and depth.
Matthieu de Montmorency was one of the noblest of the nobility of France, alike in birth and in spirit. In his youth a voluptuous liver, he had afterwards undergone a genuine and solemn conversion. While in Switzerland, the news of the guillotining of his brother gave him such a shock, that it revolutionized his motives and his life. The gay, impassioned, fascinating man of the world became an austere and fervent Christian. The rich sensibility he had formerly spent in amours and display, henceforward ennobled by wisdom and sanctified by religion, lent a singular charm of tenderness and loftiness to his friendships. The memory of his own errors gave a gracious charitableness to his judgments; his sorrow imparted an incomparable refinement to his air; his grave and devout demeanor inspired veneration; his sweet magnanimity drew every unprejudiced heart. He had long been a fervent friend of Madame de Staid, when the youthful virgin-wife, the dazzling Julie Récamier, formed an engrossing attachment to that gifted woman. Drawn mutually to this common goal, the fore-ordained friends soon met. He was then fifty years old; she, twenty-three. Her extraordinary charms of person and spirit, her dangers, exposed, with such, bewildering beauty and such peculiar domestic relations, to all the seductions of a most corrupt society, awakened at once his admiration, his sympathy, and his pity. As an increasing intimacy revealed her irresistible sweetness of disposition, her many gifts and virtues, Montmorency found himself ever more and more drawn to her by the united bonds of reason, conscience, and affection. He undertook not merely to be her friend in the ordinary pleasures of sympathy, but, as a Christian, under the eye of God, sincerely and profoundly to befriend her. From that moment until his death, his devotion, though once severely tried, never faltered nor slumbered. He was to her more than a father and a brother; he was her guardian angel, as pure in feeling, as watchful to warn, to restrain, to encourage, to support, and console. For many years, through trying reverses of fortune, he visited her every evening. For many years each had a vital share in all that concerned the other; and, when he died, it was as if a large part of her being had been suddenly torn out of her soul, and transferred to heaven. The letters that passed between them form one of the most delightful and impressive records ever made of Christian friendship, a record in which wisdom and duty are as prominent as affection.
Pierre Simon Ballanche, one of the most delicate and philosophical of French authors, most disinterested and affectionate of men, the perfect model of a friend, was born at Lyons in 1776. He was first introduced to Madame Récamier, in 1812, by their common friend, the generous and eloquent Camille Jordan. Ballanche, in an enthusiastic attachment to a noble, portionless young girl, had suffered a disappointment so deep, that it caused him to dismiss all thoughts of marriage for ever. He sought to ease the burden of rejected love, by letting the sadness it had engendered exhale in a literary work. This exquisite work, called “Fragments,” Jordan induced Madame Récamier to read: he also described to her the refined and magnanimous character of the author. Thus prepared, and aided by her own keen discernment, she immediately detected his choice talents, his rare vein of sentiment, his abiding hunger for affection. Ballanche was a philosopher of solitude, a poet and priest of humanity, spending his days far from the crowd and uproar of the world, his proper haunt the summits of the loftiest minds, the mysterious cradle of the destinies of society. His soul was an “AEolian harp,” through which the music of the pre-historic ages played. Chastity and sorrow were two geniuses, who unveiled to him the destiny of man. His philosophy, so redolent of the heart and the imagination, amidst the material struggles and selfishness of the time, has been compared to a chant of Orpheus in the school of Hobbes. The friendship which Madame Récamier gave this lonesome, sad, expansive, and lofty spirit, was as if a goddess had come down from heaven on purpose to minister to him. She brought him the attention he needed, the sympathy he pined for, the position and praise which were so grateful to his sensitive nature. She strove to win for him from others the recognition he deserved, to call out his powers, and to show off his gift to the best advantage. Ballanche was timid, awkward, ugly, with no wealth, with no rank; but, in the sight of Madame Récamier, the treasures and graces of his soul were an intrinsic recommendation far superior to these outward advantages, and she was ready to honor it to the full.
Never was kindness more worthily bestowed; never was it more gratefully received. “I often,” he says, “find myself astonished at your goodness to me. The silent, weary, sad man, whom others neglect, you notice, and seek with infinite tact to draw him out. You are indulgence and pity personified, and you compassionately see in me a kind of exile. Together with the feeling of a brother for a sister, I offer you the homage of my soul.” From that time, he belonged to her, and could not bear to live separate from her. Under her appreciation and encouragement, he expanded, like a plant moved from a chill shade into the sunshine. His devotion was entire, and sought no equal return. It was simply the natural expression of his gratitude to her, his admiration of her, his delight in seeing her and in being with her. His love for her, like that of Dante for Beatrice, was a religious worship, a celestial exhalation of his soul, utterly free from every alloy of earth and sense. For thirty-four years, he was almost inseparable from her. He removed to Paris, that he might look on her every day. Wherever she travelled, abroad or at home, he was one of her companions. At her receptions of company, the fame of which has gone through the world, he was invariably an honored and active assistant. And, despite his deformed face, and uncouth appearance and bearing, he was a great favorite with all the chosen guests at the Abbaye-aux-Bois. To those who really knew him, his large, beaming eyes and noble forehead, his disinterested goodness, his literary and philosophical accomplishments, his modest unworldliness and attentive sympathy, redeemed his physical blemishes, and covered them with a radiance superior to that of mere beauty. The letters of Ballanche to Madame Récamier are charming in their originality. His praise of her is marked by an inimitable grace of sincerity and refinement:
“Your presence, so full of magic, the sweet reflection of your soul, will be to me a powerful inspiration. You are a perfect poem; you are poesy itself. It is your destiny to inspire, mine to be inspired. An occupation would do you good; your disturbed and dreamy imagination has need of aliment. Take care of your health, spare your nerves: you are an angel who has gone a little astray in coming into a world of agitation and falsehood.”
What a reading of her inmost heart through her envied position, what matchless felicity of representation, in this picture of herself sent to her in one of his letters “The phoenix, marvellous but solitary bird, is said often to weary of himself. He feeds on perfumes, and lives in the purest region of the air; and his brilliant existence ends on a pyre of odoriferous woods, kindled by the sun. More than once, without doubt, he envies the lot of the white dove, because she has a companion like herself.”
In his high estimate of her talent, he tried to persuade her to undertake a literary work, the translation and illustration of Petrarch, which she actually began, but left unfinished.
“Your province, like my own,” he writes, “is the interior of the sentiments; but, believe me, you have at command the genius of music, of flowers, of brooding meditation, and of elegance. Privileged creature, assume a little confidence, lift your charming head, and fear not to try your hand on the golden lyre of the poets. It is my mission to see that some trace of your noble existence remains on this earth. Help me to fulfil my mission. I regard it as a blessing that you will be loved and appreciated when you are no more. It would be a real misfortune if so excellent a being should pass merely as a charming shadow. Of what use is memory, if it does not perpetuate the beautiful and good?”
This league of lofty friendship, of endearing intercourse and service, held good while a whole generation of mortals came upon the stage and disappeared; and it throve with growing validity in the latest old age of the fortunate parties. Ballanche believed, after the death of his mother, that he saw her, several successive mornings, enter his room, and ask him how he had passed the night. This ocular illusion affords us an affecting glimpse of his heart. He wrote to his friend, “Antiquity confides its weariness and grief to us, without doubt, to beguile us from our own.” “Had Orpheus never met Eurydice, his existence would have remained incomplete; and, in place of the cruel grief of her loss, he would have known another grief not less intense, solitude of soul.” “I am alone, and the solitude weighs heavily upon me. Permit me to solace myself by talking a moment with you.” “I protest to you in all sincerity, that my one absorbing thought is my warm feeling of friendship for you. I have need to be assured by you, and that as often as possible, that this sentiment shall not end in unhappiness for me. The thought of that is an agony which terrifies me. You are so kind, you have so much sympathy for all unhappy persons, that I fear it is through pity and condescension that you show kindness to me.” This expression was in the year 1816; but all such uneasiness soon vanished, and he learned to rely on her sincere cordiality with a serene assurance, which was the richest luxury of his life.
In 1830, Ballanche, publishing his chief work, the “Palingénésie Sociale,” dedicated it to Madame Récamier, in a form whose delicacy and fervor made it one of the most exquisite pieces of praise ever paid in letters. Alluding to Canova’s portrait of Madame Récamier, in the character of the celestial guide of Dante, he says, “An artist enveloped in a grand renown, a sculptor who has just shed so much glory on the illustrious land of Dante, and whose graceful imagination the masterpieces of antiquity have so often exalted, one day, for the first time, saw a woman who seemed to him a living apparition of Beatrice. Full of that religious emotion which is the gift of genius, he immediately commanded the marble, always obedient to his chisel, to express the sudden inspiration of the moment; and the Beatrice of Dante passed from the vague region of poetry into the domain of substantial art. The sentiment which dwells in this harmonious countenance, now become a new type of pure and virgin beauty, in its turn inspires artists and poets. This woman, whose name I would here conceal, whom I would veil even as Dante does, is endowed with all the generous sympathies of our age. She has visited, with the select few, the haunts of lofty minds. Here, in this seat of imperturbable peace, of unalterable security, she has formed noble friendships, those friendships which have filled her life, which, born under immortal auspices, are sheltered alike from time, from death, and from all human vicissitudes. I address myself, then, to her who has been seen as a living apparition of Beatrice. Can she encourage me with her smile, with that serious smile of love and of grace, which expresses at once confidence and pity for the pains of probation, for the burdens of an exile that should end, sweet and calm augury, wherein is revealed, even in the present, the certainty of our infinite hopes, the grandeur of our definitive destinies?”
When the good Ballanche was taken dangerously ill, Madame Récamier had just undergone an operation for cataract, and was under strict orders from the physician not to leave her couch. But, on the announcement of the condition of Ballanche, she immediately rose, and went to his bedside, and watched by him until his last breath. In the anxiety and tears of this experience, she lost all hope of recovering her sight. Her incomparable friend received the supreme hospitality at her hands, and was buried in her family tomb, leaving, in his works, a delightful picture of his mind; in his life, a perfect model of devotion. The removal of this soul, echo of her own; this heart, wholly filled by her; this mind, so gladly submissive to her influence, could not but leave a mighty void behind. For, notwithstanding the wondrous array of gifts, attractions, and attentions lavished on her, her deep sensibility and interior loneliness made her often unhappy. She would sit by herself, in the twilight, playing from memory choice pieces of the great masters of music, the tears rolling down her cheeks. Friendship was more than a delight: it was a necessity to her.
De Tocqueville pronounced an exquisite eulogy by the grave of Ballanche, in the name of the Academy. La Prade, in the funeral address he delivered at Lyons, the birthplace of the deceased, said, “There was in his mind, in its serenity, its charming simplicity, its tenderness, something more than is found in the wisest and the best. His virtue was of a divine nature: it was at once a prolonged innocence and an acquired wisdom. Serene and radiant as his soul may now be in the mansions of peace, we can hardly conceive of it as more loving and more pure than we beheld it on this earth of infirmity and of strife.” What a delight it is to contemplate the relation that bound two such spirits together, the measureless treasures of inspiration, solace, joy, it must have yielded to them both I Sarah Austin, who was in Paris at the time Ballanche died, and an intimate of the illustrious circle of friends, says, “I shall never forget the sort of consternation, mingled with sorrow, which this death caused. Everybody felt regret for so pure and excellent a man, but yet more of grief and pity for Madame Récamier, whose loss was felt to be overwhelming, and entirely irreparable.” Ampere says, in his cordial and glowing memoir of Ballanche, “While he was composing his ‘Antigone,’ Poetry appeared to him under an enchanting form. He became acquainted with her, of whom he said that the charm of her presence laid his sorrows to sleep; who, after being the soul of his most elevated and delicate inspirations, became in later years the providence of every moment of his life.” Ballanche himself often assured Madame Récamier, that the ideal of the “Antigone” of his dreams was revealed to him by her, and that, in drawing this perfect portrait, he had copied largely from her. “It was only through Eurydice,” he writes, “that Orpheus had any mission for his brother-men. If my name survives me, as appears more and more probable, I shall be called the Philosopher of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, and my philosophy will be considered as inspired by you. This thought is my joy. I am now entering on the last stage of my life: however prolonged this stage may be, I know well what is at the end of it. I shall fall asleep in the bosom of a great hope, full of confidence that your memory and mine will live the same life.” Fortunate friends! happy in their living union immaculate as heaven, happy in the grateful admiration and love of all fit souls who shall ever read of them!
And if he grieved because his words, his name,
The breath of after-ages will not stir,
’Tis but because he would impart his fame,
And share an immortality with her;
So might there, from the brightest, holiest flame
That ere did martyrdom of heart confer,
Two shadowy forms of Truth and Friendship rise,
To seek their home together in the skies.
Pervading and earnest, however, as were these attachments of Madame Récamier to Montmorency and Ballanche, the crowning passion of her life was her friendship for Chateaubriand. This grand writer and imposing person has described his first meeting with her:
“I was one morning with Madame de Staël, who, at toilet in the hands of her maid, twirled a green twig in her fingers while she talked. Suddenly Madame Récamier entered, clothed in white. She sits down on a blue-silk sofa. Madame de Staël, standing, continues her eloquent conversation. I scarcely reply, my eyes riveted on Madame Récamier. I had never seen any one equal to her, and was more than ever depressed. My admiration of her changed into dissatisfaction with myself. She went out, and I saw her no more for twelve years. Twelve years! What hostile power squanders thus our days, ironically lavishing them on the indifferences called attachments, on the wretchednesses named felicities!”
But it was in 1817, at a private dinner in the chamber of the dying Madame de Staël, that their real acquaintance began. The literary fame of Chateaubriand was then greater than that of any living man. He was a lofty, romantic, melancholy person, with a superb head and face, polished manners, and a grand vein of eloquence. Nothing was so deeply characteristic of Madame Récamier as her enthusiasm for brilliant minds, noble sentiment and conduct. It was this that had so fascinated her with Madame de Staël. The sure proof of the ideal nature of her attachments, their freedom from sensual ingredients, is this ruling stamp of reverence and loyalty. Those whom she admired the most enthusiastically she loved the most passionately. It was inevitable that her imagination would be captivated with the chivalrous and imposing Chateaubriand, especially at such an affecting time. “He seemed the natural heir to Madame de Staël’s place in her heart.” Speaking of this overwhelming sentiment, thirty years later, she said, “It is impossible for a head to be more completely turned than mine was: I used to cry all day.” Montmorency and Ballanche were greatly distressed, and not a little mortified and jealous. It was not that they had fallen into a lower and narrower place in her affection, but that they saw Chateaubriand installed in a higher and larger place. They feared that her peace would be wrecked in wretchedness by an intimate connection with one so discontented and capricious, a sort of spoilt idol, a hero of ennui, filled with causeless melancholy, voracious of praise, querulous, exacting, his own imperious and inevitable personality ever uppermost. In vain they sought to warn and dissuade her from the new attachment. Montmorency seems to have fancied that the passion was not friendship, but love; and faithfully, with solemn energy, he adjured her, by all the sanctions of religion, to guard herself. He soon learned his error, and gracefully apologized: “When I read your perfect letter, lovely friend, remorse seized me, and now fills my soul. I am deeply touched by the proofs of your friendship, and by the triumphs of your reason. I am, for friendship’s sake, proud of the exclusive privilege you accord to me of admission and consolation, and impatiently long to go and exercise the sweet right. Pardon me my letter of this morning. Adieu. Persist in your generous resolutions, and turn to Him who alone can strengthen them and reward them.”
The friendship of Madame Récamier and Chateaubriand became more absorbing and complete, and was destined to endure with their lives. “It was,” Madame Lenormant says, “the one aim of her life to appease the irritability, soothe the susceptibilities, and remove the annoyances of this noble, generous, but selfish nature, spoiled by too much adulation.” Her steady moderation, moral wisdom, beautiful repose, and sweet oblivion of self, were an admirable antidote to his extreme moods, uneasy vanity, and morbid depression. Communion with her serene equity, her matchless beauty, her inexhaustible tenderness, the experience of her constant homage, soothed his haughty and mordant, but magnanimous and affectionate, nature, and were an infinite luxury to him. An admiring recognition is almost a necessity for those highly endowed with genius. And Madame Récamier’s intense faculty of admiration, with her self-forgetting devotedness, exactly fitted her for this ministry. Chateaubriand became the first object of her life. Modifying her habits to suit his tastes, she made him, instead of herself, the centre around which every thing was to revolve. She devised endless means of lending an interest to his existence. She listened to every thing he wrote. She drew into her parlor, to meet him, all those persons who could interest or amuse him, or in any way give him pleasure. She diverted attentions from herself to him with exhaustless skill and generosity. In a poem which he addressed to her, he called her the “soft star that guided his path.”
Such jealousy as can find a place in natures so noble is easily to be traced in the letters of Ballanche and Montmorency. Chateaubriand calls Ballanche “the hierophant” or “the mysterious initiator,” “the man the most advanced at the Abbaye-aux-Bois.” Ballanche, in turn, calls Chateaubriand “the king of intelligence.” But Madame Récamier’s wonderful sweetness and discretion invariably restored the interrupted harmony. Nor, indeed, did she allow the superior attraction to cast her old friends in the shade. Several years after the death of Montmorency, which happened in church on a Good Friday, Chateaubriand wrote to her thus: “Yesterday I believed myself dying, as your best friend did. Then you would have found one resemblance at least between us, and perhaps you would have joined us in your heart.” Five years after their first meeting, Chateaubriand, then ambassador at Berlin, writes to her, “That I shall see you in a month, seems a kind of dream to me.” Twenty-five years later, two years before his death, he writes to her at a watering-place whither she had gone for her health, “Do not hasten back. I pass my time here in Notre Dame. It is well occupied; for I think only of you and of God.” The persistence of an affection so profound and so pure as that of Madame Récamier bore its proper fruit, and ended by subduing Chateaubriand. Gratitude, respect, veneration, struck their roots to the very bottom of his heart. Little by little, his self-occupied personality yields, and at last he writes to her, “You have transformed my nature.” When she was alarmingly ill, in the winter of 1837, he, together with Ballanche, might be seen, in the cold mornings, “his beautiful white hair blown about by the wind, his physiognomy the image of despair,” in the court of the Abbaye-aux-Bois, waiting for the doctor to come out. He then writes, “I bring this note to your door. I was so terrified yesterday at not being admitted, that I believed you were going from me. Ah! remember it is I who am to go before you. Never speak of what I shall do without you. I have not done any thing so evil that I should be left behind you.” She recovered, and devoted herself more than ever, if possible, through the years of his mental decay, to alleviate and disguise the sad changes that came over him. Blindness began their separation before death came. Nothing can more emphatically bespeak her divine self-abnegation than the fact, that, for a long time after she had become perfectly blind, a dislike to trouble others with her infirmities led her to conceal the misfortune from her general acquaintance. Her eyes kept their brightness, and her hearing was most acute: she recognized, by the first inflection of the voice, those who drew near. The furniture was carefully arranged, always in the same way, so that she could move about confidently; and many persons, when she spoke of her “poor eyes,” never dreamed that she had actually lost her sight.
After the decease of his wife, Chateaubriand besought Madame Récamier to marry him. She refused, on the ground, that, if she resided with him, the variety and pleasure his daily visits brought into the tedium of his existence would be destroyed. “Were we younger,” she said, “I would gladly accept the right to consecrate my life to you. Age and blindness give me this right. I know the world will do justice to the purity of our relation. Let us change nothing.” During his last sickness, he was as unable to speak as she was to see. She had the fortitude to undergo two operations on her eyes in the hope of looking on him once more; but in vain. By his bedside when he expired, she felt the sources of her life struck. She came from the room with no outward sign of distress, but clothed with a deadly paleness, which from that hour never left her. Her niece wrote, at the time, to a friend in England, “Those who, during the last two years, have seen Madame Récamier, blind, though the sweetness and brilliancy of her eyes remained uninjured, surrounding the illustrious friend, whose age had extinguished his memory, with cares so delicate, so tender, so watchful; who have seen her joy when she helped him to snatch a momentary distraction from the conversation around him, by leading it to subjects connected with that past which still lingered in his memory, those persons will never forget the scene. They could not help being deeply affected with pity and respect at the sight of that noble beauty, brilliancy, and genius bending beneath the weight of age, and sheltered, with such ingenious tenderness, by the sacred friendship of a woman who forgot her own infirmities, in the endeavor to lighten his.”
History scarcely affords a finer instance of the ministrations of womanhood to soothe the woes and supply the wants of man than is exhibited in the relation of Madame Récamier and Chateaubriand. His egotistic and restless mental activity; his exaggerated, perturbed, and gnawing self-consciousness; his despairing view of men; his alienation from the spirit of his age, made him most lonely and unhappy. Meanwhile his ardent poetic susceptibility, his soaring imagination, his impassioned tenderness, his knightly sentiments, his religious feeling, pre-eminently fitted him to enjoy the moral homage, the delicate, sympathetic attentions, of a woman crowned with every exalting attribute of her sex. He appreciated the prize at its full worth. When nothing else could any longer interest him, her charm retained its pristine power. When beyond his threescore and ten, he writes to her thus, at different times:
“Other things are old stories: you are all that I love to see.” “I am going to walk out with the lark. She shall sing to me of you: then she will be silent for ever in the furrow into which she drops.” “I have only one hope graven on my heart, and that is, to see you again.” “Cherish faithfully your attachment to me: it is all my life. You see how my poor hand trembles; but my heart is firm.” “I have but one thought, fidelity to you: all the rest is gone.”
For many years, even after his noble faculties were broken, and he had lost the use of his limbs, so that he was forced to be carried into her room, he passed the hours of every day, from three to six, with her. Amidst the ordinary hatreds, miseries, and indifferences of society, is it not indeed instructive and refreshing to see this example of a spotless friendship still yielding, in extreme old age, the interest, the solace, the happiness, which every thing else had ceased to yield?
Chateaubriand devotes to Madame Récamier the eighth volume of his “Memoires d’Outre Tombe.” He recognizes, in her serious friendship, a support for the weariness of his life, a remuneration for all his sufferings.
“It seems, in nearing the close of my existence, as if every thing that has been dear to me has been dear to me in Madame Récamier, and that she was the concealed source of my affections. All my memories, both of my dreams and of my realities, have been kneaded into a mixture of charms and sweet pains, of which she has become the visible form. In the midst of these Memoirs,’ the temple I am eagerly building, she will meet the chapel which I dedicate to her. Perhaps it will please her to repose there. There I have placed her image.” During the few months that she survived their loss, Madame Récamier often spoke of Chateaubriand and Ballanche together. Repeatedly, if the door chanced to open at the hour when these two friends had been accustomed to enter, she started; and, on being asked the reason, replied that at certain moments her thought of them was so vivid, that it amounted to an apparition. Only three days previous to her death, she received M. de Saint Priest, and took great interest in hearing him read the eulogy on Ballanche which he was about to pronounce before the Academy.
Besides these three chief friends, Madame Récamier had many others well deserving of separate mention. Paul David, nephew of her husband, was a most devoted and inseparable companion of her whole life. When she lost her sight, he used to read to her every evening. He was a poor reader; and, perceiving that she was sensitive to this defect, he secretly took lessons, at the age of sixty-four, to improve his elocution. Junot and Bernadotte were her ardent, lasting friends, and always delighted to serve her. Her rare graces, and her generous goodness to Madame Desbordes-Valmore, disarmed the prejudices and won the heart of the gifted but misanthropic Latouche. The Duke de Noailles, who, under the envelope of a chill manner, concealed a conscientiousness of judgment, a constancy and delicacy of feeling, in strong sympathy with her own nature, was admitted to the rank and title of friend, “a serious thing,” says her biographer, “for her who, more than any one in the world, inspired and practised friendship in the most perfect sense of the word.” He held a place in her esteem like that held by Matthieu de Montmorency. One of the latest and warmest of her friends was the brilliant and high-souled Ampere, introduced to her by Ballanche, who had been an intimate friend of his father, and who now loved the son with double fervor, a debt which the grateful young man repaid with interest in a noble tribute to his memory. Never did a mother feel a deeper solicitude in the prospects of a darling son, or exert herself more devotedly to further his success; never did a son more thoroughly idolize a beautiful and good mother, than was realized between Madame Récamier and Ampere. Solely to please her, this most entertaining and most courted man in Paris devoted himself not merely to her, which would have been easy; but to Chateaubriand, which was difficult. Nothing can better illustrate her irresistible charm. And nothing can better illustrate the coarseness and ignorance of many of our critics, than the presumption with which one of them, in 1864, speaking of Ampere’s funeral, says, “He was one of Madame Récamier’s many lovers, and was bitterly disappointed at her refusal to marry him after the death of Chateaubriand!”
Such were the few principal men who penetrated to the centre of that select circle, in whose outer ranges of general benevolence the right of citizenship was granted to so many choice figures. Among the more distinguished of these latter may be named Benjamin Constant, the Duke de Doudeauville, De Gerando, Prosper de Barante, Delacroix, Gerard, Thierry, Ville-main, Lamartine, Guizot, De Tocqueville, Sainte Beuve. Surrounded by such persons as these, in the humble chamber to which, on the loss of her fortune, she had betaken herself, she presided like a priestess in the temple of friendship, ever pre-occupied with them, their glory her dominant passion, never herself seeking to shine, but intent only to elicit and display their gifts. Was it not natural, that they should, in the humorous phrase of Ballanche, “gravitate towards the centre of the Abbaye-aux-Bois”?
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.
Secretary Soymonof, aware of the precarious tenure by which the dependents of the court held their prosperity, was anxious to secure for his daughter a trustworthy protector, and a handsome position in the future. He cast his eyes on his personal friend, General Swetchine, a man of an imposing aspect, a firm character, a just and calm spirit, who had had an honorable career, and was held in high consideration. Sophie accepted, with her usual deference to her father’s wishes, the husband thus chosen, although he was twenty-five years older than herself. It cost her many a secret pang; for she was already in love with a young man of noble birth and fortune, with rare qualities of mind and a brilliant destiny. She knew that her affection was reciprocated. But, from a sense of filial duty, she silently renounced him; and, when he in turn resigned himself to another marriage, she became the warm and steadfast friend of his wife. This painful renunciation, in the introspective reflection, and the dissolution of romantic dreams to which it led, was the first of those earthly disenchantments, which, shattering and darkening the empire of social ambition, transferred her interest from material pleasures and hopes to the imperturbable satisfactions of religion.
The second blow quickly followed. Only a few days after that marriage which her father thought promised so much security and consolation to his old age, the Emperor Paul, in a cruel whim, suddenly banished him from Petersburg. Retiring to Moscow, the galling sense of his disgrace, the separation from his darling daughter, together with a frigid reception by a friend on whom he had especially relied, plunged him into the deepest grief. A terrible attack of apoplexy swept him away. At the dire announcement, Madame Swetchine sunk on her knees; and, in the spiritual solitude, unable any more to lean on her father, turned with irrepressible need and effusion to God.
General Swetchine was made military commandant and governor of St. Petersburg. At the head of a splendid establishment, his young wife found herself in the highest circle of the most brilliant society in Europe; for at that time the Revolution had banished the noblest families of France, and their headquarters were in the Russian capital. Madame Swetchine always possessed, in remarkable union, an earnest desire for action and companionship, and a strong taste for solitude and meditation. She managed her life so skilfully, that both these inclinations were largely gratified. With many of the most high-toned and accomplished persons whom she met, both of the Russian nobility and the French emigrants, she formed earnest and lasting relations of mind and heart. The most refined, pronounced, and impressive characters in St. Petersburg, between the years 1800 and 1815, were embraced in her friendships. Her leisure hours were scrupulously and eagerly devoted to self-improvement. She engaged in a wide range of literary, historic, and philosophical studies; making copious extracts from the books she read, patiently reflecting on the subjects, and setting down independent comments. The progress she made was rapid, and soon rendered her a notable woman.
Paul, full of lugubrious visions and suspicions, one day disgraced General Swetchine by removing him from office. But this official dismission did not entail banishment, and was followed by no loss of social caste. The general and his exemplary wife continued to live amidst their numerous friends as happily as before. The interchange of literary and philosophic ideas shared the hours in their attractive parlor with the revolutionary and reactionary politics of the time. The profound attachments, stamped with reverence and the rarest truthfullness, which in those years united many admirable persons with Madame Swetchine, were frequently reporting themselves, under far other circumstances, in a distant land, half a century later.
In 1833, the celebrated Count Joseph de Maistre was accredited from France to the Russian court. He was then about fifty, a man of pure life, rare genius, and fervent enthusiasm; familiar with the world, with the human heart, and with the loftiest ranges of sentiment and learning. His zeal for the Catholic Church was extreme. Madame Swetchine, at this time, without being at all a devotee, was a sincere member of the Greek Church. She was already familiar with the great minds of all ages and lands; and, at this particular period, was earnestly studying modern philosophical controversies, comparing the ideas of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel with those of Descartes, Pascal, and Leibnitz. Despite the difference in their points of view, and the many other contrasts between them, these two remarkable persons the thoroughly trained master, in whom the gifts of knowledge, eloquence, faith, and finesse, were accumulated; and the meditative, earnest, consecrated young woman of twenty-one had no sooner met than they felt the parity and harmony of their souls. They formed an exalted friendship, full of solace and happiness to them both, a friendship charged with the most important results on the destiny of the woman, since it led to her conversion from the Greek Church to the Catholic, and gave a deep religious inspiration and stamp to her entire subsequent life. Such minds have a thousand lofty topics of common interest to talk of; and they frequently visited each other, exchanging thoughts with ever-deepening confidence and esteem. “The cold countenance of the Count de Maistre,” Madame Swetchine writes to her dearest female friend, “conceals a soul of profound sensibility. Without praising me, he often says pleasing things to me.” At another time, she humorously writes to the same friend: “The Princess Alexis and I have been to spend an evening at the house of the Count de Maistre. From deference to the duties of hospitality, he would not suffer himself a single moment of sleep. He rose with the palm of victory out of this terrible struggle of nature and politeness; but who can tell at what a cost?” She said that great griefs had purified his ambition, and lent a strange interest to him, elevating and aggrandizing his character. He set an extreme value on her friendship; and wrote to her, that he should never spare any pains to preserve in its integrity what he felt was an infinite honor to him. He wrote to his friend, the Viscount de Bonald, that he had never seen so much moral strength, talent, and culture, joined with so much sweetness of disposition, as in Madame Swetchine. On their separation, by a residence in different countries, De Maistre gave her a magnificent portrait of himself, on the frame of which he had written four verses, adjuring the happy image, in answer to the call of awaiting friendship, to fly, and take its place where the original would so gladly be. This portrait she kept prominently hung in her parlor as long as she lived. In one of his letters to her, he writes: “My thought will always go out to seek you: my heart will always feel the worth of yours.” The memory of this first great friend continued to hover over her life to the end. In her last days, generously offended by what she thought the unjust strokes in the portraiture of De Maistre, presented by Lamartine in his “Confidences,” she took up her pen in refutation, and wielded it with telling effect. This eloquent vindication of her old friend, when he had been dead nearly forty years, was one of her latest acts, and truly characteristic of her tenacious fidelity of affection.
The enthusiasm shown by the Count de Maistre for the Roman Catholic Church awakened a deep interest in Madame Swetchine. This interest was greatly enhanced by the admirable examples of piety and charity set before her in the lives of several of the French exiles in St. Petersburg, with whom she had contracted friendships. Especially was she impressed and attracted by the amiable virtues of the Princess de Tarente, the devout elevation of her character, and the triumphant sanctity of her death. Madame Swetchine at length resolved to make a deliberate examination of the claims of the Roman Church, and to come to a settled conclusion. Providing herself with an appropriate library, acompanied only by her adopted daughter Nadine, in the summer of 1815, she withdrew to a lonely and picturesque estate, situated on the borders of the Gulf of Finland. Here, through the days and nights of six months, she plunged into the most laborious researches, historical and argumentative. The result was, that she became convinced of the apostolic authority of the Roman primacy, and avowed herself a Catholic. Soon after this conversion, the Jesuits were ordered to leave Russia. Indignant at an order which she regarded as unjust, she openly identified herself with the cause of these proscribed missionaries. The machinations of the political enemies of General Swetchine had made his situation disagreeable to him; and, when he saw those enemies gaining credit, his pride took offence, and he determined to leave the country. Madame Swetchine’s passion for travel and observation combined with her new religious faith to make this removal less unwelcome than it would otherwise have been.
The close of the year 1816 found her established in Paris, where, with the exceptions of a year in Russia, and a couple of years in Italy, she was to reside until her death. The Bourbon nobility, now recalled to France, and reinstated in power, repaid the generous kindness she had shown them in St. Petersburg, by giving her a hearty welcome, and lavishing attentions and affection on her. Her deep interest in charitable institutions soon brought her into intimate and most cordial relations with De Gerando. Baron Humboldt and the Count Pozzo di Borgo, among the earliest to become her friends, were assiduous visitors at her house; and, in the salon of the brilliant Duchess de Duras, where she was quickly appreciated and made to feel at home, she became acquainted with the most interesting and commanding minds of France at that time, such as Chateaubriand, Remusat, Cuvier, Montmorency, Villemain, Barante. These persons have all testified, in turn, to the great impression her character made on them.
Madame Swetchine formed with a large number of men of rare excellence and accomplishments ardent and lasting attachments, which were the greatest comfort to herself, and administered invaluable inspiration and happiness to them. Among these, particular mention should be made of her confessor, the pious and venerable Abbé Desjardins; her brother-in-law, Father Gargarin; Moreau; Turquety; Montalembert; and, at a later date, De Tocqueville, who writes to her, “The friendship of such as you are, imposes obligations.” Another expression of De Tocqueville must not be omitted here: “Let me thank you for your last letter. It contained, as all your letters do, proofs of an affection which consoles and strengthens me. I never received a line of your writing without being sensible of this twofold impression. The reason is, I think, that one finds in you a heart easily moved, in connection with a mind firmly fixed upon abiding principles. Here is the secret of your charm and your sway. I want to profit more than do by your precious friendship. It distresses me that I succeed so ill.” She was one of those few natures able to forget themselves, take an enthusiastic interest in others, and devote unwearied pains to further their interests, sympathize and aid in their pursuits, calm, refine, enrich, and bless their souls. She sustained the ideal standards, and raised the self-respect, of every one who enjoyed the honor of her regard. Accordingly, no noble man could be intimate with her without grateful and affectionate veneration. M. de Maistre said of her, “More loyalty, intellect, and learning were never seen joined to so much goodness.” The Viscount de Bonald said, “She is a friend worthy of you; and one of the best heads I have ever met, effect or cause of the most excellent qualities of the heart with which a mortal can be endowed.” The poet Turquety sent her an exquisite poem, descriptive of herself and of his feelings towards her. She wrote in reply, “Before thanking you, I have thanked God for giving your heart such an impression of me, unworthy of it as I am. The illusion which arises from affection is another grace, I had almost said another virtue. Your accent has a persuasive sincerity; and faith, when it is vivid, believes in miracles.” And then she thus delicately indicates her objection to the publication of the verses: “I condemn this charming flower to enchant only my solitude; but this is the better to gather its fragrance, and it will survive me.”
An invaluable friendship also existed between Madame Swetchine and Alexander the Emperor of Russia, one of the most interesting and romantic characters of modern time, of whom she said to Roxandra Stourdza, “Already above other men, by his glory; by the influence of religion, he will be above himself.” When the famous mystical Madame de Kriidener appealed to him, in the name of virtue and of religion, to be true to his own better nature, he burst into tears, and hid his face in his hands. As she paused apologetically, he exclaimed, “Speak on, speak on: your voice is music to my soul.” She obtained a great influence over him. He had likewise an enthusiastic attachment for Napoleon; and Madame de Kriidener called them respectively the white angel and the black angel. His sensibility to all generous sentiments, all thoughts of poetic height and richness, was extraordinarily tender and expansive. He was often known, in the overwhelming re-action of his emotions, convulsed with tears, to leap into his carriage alone, and drive out into the solitary country or forest. Such were the exalted traits of his character, and his many beautiful deeds, that Madame Swetchine felt her natural relations of duty and submission transmuted into those of vivid admiration and devotion. “I fully sympathize,” she writes to her earliest bosom-friend, “with the vivacity of your admiration for our dear Emperor. What a happiness to be able to eulogize with truth! Let us hope we are in the aurora of a most beautiful day for Russia. How pleased I am at having always seen in his soul that which this day shows itself with a glory so fair and so pure! He is a true hero of humanity. He seems in his conduct to realize all my dreams of moral dignity; and I find, at last, in this union of religious sentiments and liberal ideas, the long-sought resemblance of the type I carry in my mind, and which has hitherto been qualified as fantastic, the creation of a too sanguine imagination. In him we see, that, even on the throne, in the wild tumult of all interests, of all passions, one can remain man, Christian, philosopher; pursue the wisest and most generous plans; and carry into his actions every thing that is beautiful, from the highest justice to the most touching modesty.”
Alexander testified his respect and regret, when Madame Swetchine departed to reside in Paris, by asking her to be his correspondent. The correspondence was continued until his death, ten years afterwards. The Emperor Nicholas, on his accession, restored to Madame Swetchine all her letters; and she allowed an eminent statesman, in 1845, to read the whole collection. After her death, no trace of it was to be found among her papers. It must possess an intense interest; and it is to be hoped that it still exists, and may yet one day see the light.
Perhaps the most intimate and truly devoted of all the friends of Madame Swetchine was that accomplished member of the French Academy whose biographic and editorial labors have erected such an attractive and perdurable monument to her memory, the Count Alfred de Falloux. The soul of reverence, gratitude, and love exhales in his sentences when he writes of her. After describing what “she was to all who had the inexpressible happiness of knowing her,” he acids, “and this she will now be to all who shall read her; and death will but give to her words one consecration more.” But the modesty of M. de Falloux has not given the public her letters to him, and has kept his personal relations with her much in the background. We are left to guess the measure and the activity of their friendship, from indirect indications.
On the whole, possibly because of the editor’s reticence as to himself, we are left to believe, that the friend who held the pre-eminent place in the heart of Madame Swetchine, during the last twenty-five years of her life, was Father Lacordaire, the illustrious Catholic preacher. A complete picture of this ardent and unfaltering friendship is shown in the letters of the two parties, gathered in an octavo volume of nearly six hundred pages. We know not where, in the annals of human affection, to find the account of a friendship more spotless or more morally satisfying than this. The volume which preserves and exhibits it will be found by all who are duly interested in the psychology and experience of persons so extraordinary, both for their genius in society, and for the quantity and quality of their private experience full of solid instruction and romantic interest. The inner life of Madame Swetchine was a sacred epic: the outer career of Lacordaire, an electrifying drama. This double interest of a private, spiritual ascent, and of a chivalrous gallantry in the thick of battle, is clearly unfolded in the book before us.
The chivalrous young Count de Montalembert was one of the dearest friends of Madame Swetchine. She said that his soul seemed formed under the inspiration of the fine thought of Plato: “The beautiful as a means of reaching the true.” Behold, in the following extract from one of the many letters in which she strove to pacify his perturbed spirit, by recalling him from the war of politics, and reconciling his passionate reformatory sentiments with the ruling principles and authorities of the Catholic Church, the tender wisdom and affection with which she speaks: “You seize only on the disinterested and poetic side of these questions, but all the same you are in the battle, giving and taking blows. And thus, with a mind perfectly high-toned and honorable, a crystal which is almost a diamond, with faultless habits, and all the believing and pious sentiments they involve, you have neither the heart’s sweet joy nor its sweet peace. The reason why you are so ill at ease, is, that your conscience lies so near your heart that their voices and their troubles are confounded. My dear Charles, will you not reward me by being all that my wishes and my prayers would fain make you? I will not say whether you have the power to rejoice or afflict my heart; but, when you woke in me a mother’s emotions, I cannot believe that you condemned me to the sorrow of Rachel.”
One day this beloved young man led to the drawing-room of his maternal friend his heart’s brother, the eloquent Lacordaire, then in the early renown of his wonderful career of ecclesiastical oratory. Madame Swetchine had already been deeply moved by his preaching, and was desirous of knowing him. She quickly won his confidence, and became, what she ever continued to be, a ministering angel to his spirit. She was much older than he, much more profoundly versed in human nature, much more soberly balanced and calm in soul. With a vigilance, a wisdom, and a tenderness that were unwearied and inexhaustible, she watched his course, studied the wants of his mind and heart, and labored, as need was, alternately to confirm his sinking courage and to soothe his excited imagination. Without being ostensibly such, she was really his spiritual director. “Her subtile and tender spirit,” as Dora Greenwell has remarked, “seems to move across his heart, to woo and to caress it to peace and goodness, to call out its deepest concords, as the hand of the skilled musician moves across his instrument, knowing well each fret and chord of the sweet viol he doth love.”
It was the greatness, not the weakness, of Lacordaire, that, before loving God, he had loved glory. Few men have spirit enough truly to seek fame: it is notice which they wish. The heart of Lacordaire was a pure fire, encased in a cold intellect. It reminds us of an intense flame clothed in transparent ice. Sometimes, he said, he hardly knew whether his voice was moved from within by the spirit, or from without by renown. In regard to every such scruple Madame Swetchine was an infallible counsellor. Her advice was as the speech of incarnate reason and love in their most purified and exalted form. The heavy perfume that drenched his oratoric atmosphere would have intoxicated most men with self-adulation; but he offset every such allurement by constantly withdrawing from trifles, excitements, and seductions, and spending long hours in the unbroken solitude of thought and the awful neighborhood of God. If both these extremes brilliant public triumphs, and severe seclusion and asceticism had their special dangers, Madame Swetchine was his resistless guardian against them both. No one who has not read their correspondence, reaching richly through a whole generation, can easily imagine the services rendered by this gifted and saintly woman to this holy and powerful man. Community of faith, of loyalty, of nobleness, joined them. It was in looking to heaven together that their souls grew united. Drawn by the same attractions, and held by one sovereign allegiance, such souls need no vows, nor lean on any foreign support. The divinity of truth and good is their bond.
No prayer persuades, no flattery fawns,
Their noble meanings are their pawns:
And so thoroughly is known
Each other’s counsel by his own,
They can parley without meeting.
At first Madame Swetchine shrank from the excessive agitation she underwent in listening to the great sermons of Lacordaire in Notre Dame. “I go through all his perils,” she said: “I tremble at every rock; I feel every stroke. His way of speaking acts upon the human soul in the same way as sanctity: it wounds; but it enraptures.” At length her attendance on his sermons became so constant, and her pleasure and admiration so obvious, that many of the congregation supposed her to be literally, as she was morally, his mother. One day, as she was leaning against a pillar in the crowded church, her face upturned towards the pulpit, two persons were heard whispering to each other: “Would you like to see the preacher’s mother?” “Why, she died ten years ago.” “No, there she is: look at her.”
The genius of Madame Swetchine was sweeter, serener, more tolerant, than that of her friend. Her influence on him in these respects was benignant. He thought more of the strict doctrine: she, more of the broad and charitable spirit. She once said, concerning dogmas, that she could consent to see the ocean filtered to a thread of water, if it but remained pure. He wrote to her, “My dear friend, you have proved yourself deficient in holy anger; otherwise you would not have been able to tolerate M.” His electric, vehement soul needed exactly the check her reflective subtilty and prudent consideration gave. So she tells him once, “I acted as your ballast, or rather I held you by the skirts of your garment, to retard your too impetuous movements. Perhaps these are the very attributes with which you would have done well to invest some one at Rome, who might have united the two conditions which I fulfilled so perfectly: first, that of not being you, either in natural disposition, antecedents, or age; second, and more essential, that of loving you better than you could possibly love yourself.”
With the lapse of years, their attachment grew closer and deeper. Lacordaire writes from Rome, “I have been bitterly disappointed in not hearing from you. You know what a need one has of friendly words when one is alone and so far away.” And when the epistle comes, he writes to her, “I had no sooner opened your letter than my soul was inundated with joy.” Again he says, “I found in your last letter the expression of an affection so tender, and a watchfullness so fixed, that I was melted by it, even to tears.” “Your letters are always to me a balm and a force.” In excuse of his own reserve, he strikingly writes, “Women have this admirable quality, that they can talk as much as they wish, as they wish, with what expression they wish: their heart is a fountain that flows naturally. The heart of man, especially mine, is like those volcanoes whose lava leaps forth only at intervals after a convulsion.” We find Madame Swetchine saying, in one of her letters to Lacordaire, “I protest against long silences: they are to me that vacuum of which nature has a horror.” The exceeding care which this discreet woman took always to administer her advice, her praise, or rebuke, in such a way as not to offend or injure the most sensitive recipient of it, is a rare lesson for others. Lacordaire once wrote to her, although he knew very well how guileless was the motive of her managements, “You say, dear friend, that you fear to displease me in speaking your thought about me. I assure you my sole reproach is, that you are too circumspect and delicate in your style of expression. I appreciate all the more that flattery which is the guardian escort of truth, because it is wholly wanting to me. I speak things out too bluntly; and it is true that almost always men need an extreme sweetness in the language of those who would benefit them. The heart is like the eyes: it cannot bear too glaring a light. However, I find you excessive in the art of shades.” Soon afterwards he says, “Excuse my franknesses; with you, as with God. I can say every thing.” Scarcely ever did a man owe more to a woman than this eloquent and heroic priest to the heavenly-minded friend who said she loved him as father, brother, and son, all at once. He deeply felt his debt, and faithfully paid it. He paid it in loving words and attentions, while she lived, and in a tribute of immortal eloquence when she was dead. “You appeared to me,” he tells her, “between two distinct parts of my life, as the angel of the Lord might appear to a soul wavering between life and death, between earth and heaven.” To a common friend he wrote of her, “Her soul was to mine what the shore is to the plank shattered by the waves; and I still remember, after the lapse of twenty-five years, all the light and strength she afforded to me when I was young and unknown.” He dedicated to her his “Life of Saint Dominic,” saying, “I wish that some one of your descendants may one day know that his ancestress was a woman whom Saint Jerome would have loved as he loved Paula and Marcella, one who needed only a pen illustrious and saintly enough to do her justice.” Hearing of her last illness, he made a journey of six hundred miles, to be with her, and lavished on her every winning word and act that filial love and reverence could suggest; and, after all was over, he pronounced on her a funeral address, which will always rank with the highest trophies of his genius. No other words can be so fitting as his own to close this sketch:
“She belongs to the nation of the great minds of our age. In a time of intellectual dependence, when parties bore every thing in their train, she made no engagement, and submitted to no attraction: she isolated every question from the noise around her, and placed it in the silence of eternity. A constant simplicity and an equal elevation gave to her ideas a personal influence. This double charm might be resisted; but she could not fail to be loved herself, and to inspire the desire to become better. Happy mouth, which for forty years made not an enemy to God, but which poured into a multitude of wounded or languishing hearts the germ of the resurrection and the rapture of life! Alas! dear and illustrious lady. I cannot attach to your name the glory of those Roman women whom Saint Jerome has immortalized; and yet you were of their race. Conquered for God through the language of France, you wished to live under the French speech; and, quitting a country you alwaysloved, you came among us with the modesty of a disciple and of an exile. But you brought us more than we gave you. The light of your soul illumined the land which received you, and for forty years you were for us the sweetest echo of the gospel and the surest road to honor.”