The Friendships of Women. William Rounseville Alger
the "Journal and Letters of Maurice de Guérin;" and, five years later, he published, in a companion volume, the "Journal and Letters of Eugénie de Guérin." The striking original genius and worth of these volumes, and the enviable praise already awarded them, insure for their authors a beautiful and enduring fame together. As long as the words of this devoted sister shall win the attention of gentle readers, tears will spring into their eyes, and a throb of pitying love fill their hearts with pleasing pain. "My soul slips easily into thee, O soul of my brother!" "We were two eyes looking out of one forehead." "My thought was only a reflex of my brother's; so vivid when he was there, then changing into twilight, and now gone." "O beautiful past days of my youth, with Maurice, the king of my heart!" "I am on the horizon of death: he is below it. All that I can do is to strain my gaze into it."
FRIENDSHIPS OF WIVES AND HUSBANDS.
THE friendships between persons of opposite sex, thus far considered, spring up under the primary impulse of consanguinity, and embroider themselves around the fostering relations of natural duty. Based on affiliation of descent, organic community of circumstances, and mixture of experience, and sanctioned by the most authoritative seals of social opinion, they are, when not impoverished or poisoned by any evil interference, warm, precious, and sacred. The strongest preventives of their frequency and the commonest drawbacks from their power are the dullness which creeps over all emotions under the dominion of passive habit, and the tendency to look elsewhere for more vivid attachments, more exciting associations.
But there is another class of friendships, more important in influence, if not in number, having also the highest sanctions both of law and of custom, and marked by such peculiarities that they constitute a species by themselves. It consists of the friendships which grow up between husbands and wives, within the shielded enclosure of matrimony. The community of interests between those united in wedlock if they are married in truth as well as in form is the most intimate and entire that can exist.
Their unqualified surrender and blending of lives, unreserved confidence and conjunction of hearts, afford, on the one hand, the most hazardous, on the other hand, the most propitious, conditions for a perfect mutual reflection of souls with all their contents. Nowhere else has knowledge such free scope, have the inducements for esteem or contempt such unhampered range, as in this relation. The inmost secrets of the parties are always exposed to revelation or to betrayal. Hypocrisy and deception are reduced to the narrowest limits. Accordingly, both the most absolute antagonism and misery, and the most absolute sympathy and happiness, are known in the conjugal union. Milton puts in the mouth of Samson a fearful expression of the former:
To wear out miserable days, Intangled with a poisonous bosom snake.
Of the latter we have an affecting instance in the historic narrative of that Italian Countess del Verme, who, losing her husband after an elysian union for eight years, was so shocked on learning his death, that she threw herself on his body in a convulsion of grief which broke her heart, and she instantly died beside him.
Are the parties selfish, unfeeling, ungenuine? Every possible opportunity is afforded for the base and alien qualities to recognize each other, and clash or effervesce. Is one wise, aspiring, magnanimous? the other, foolish, vulgar, revengeful? The yoke, pulled contrary ways, must gall and irritate. Then the fellowship of husband and wife is like that of acid and alkali. But, if they are filled with consecrating tenderness, sweet patience, and earnest purposes, all possible motives urge them to adjust their characters and conduct to each other; to tune their intercourse by heavenly laws; to mingle their experience in one blessed current; to soothe, support, and beautify each other's being. Then there results a union, including every faculty, satisfying every want, unparalleled for its integrity and its blessedness. In such cases as this, it may truly be said, marriage is the queen of all friendships.
A beautiful example of such a union is unveiled, in the tribute paid to his wife, by Sir James Mackintosh. He says, "I found an intelligent companion and a tender friend, a prudent monitress, the most faithful of wives, and a mother as tender as children ever had the misfortune to lose. I met a woman, who, by tender management of my weaknesses, gradually corrected the most pertinacious of them. She became prudent from affection; and, though of the most generous nature, she was taught frugality and economy by her love for me. She gently reclaimed me from dissipation, propped my weak and irresolute nature, urged my indolence to all the exertion that has been useful and creditable to me, and was perpetually at hand to admonish my heedlessness or improvidence. In her solicitude for my interest, she never for a moment forgot my feelings or character. Even in her occasional resentment, for which I but too often gave her cause, (would to God I could recall those moments!) she had no sullenness or acrimony. Such was she whom I have lost, when her excellent natural sense was rapidly improving, after eight years' struggle and distress had bound us fast together and moulded our tempers to each other; when a knowledge of her worth had refined my youthful love into friendship, and before age had deprived it of much of its original ardor."
It is to be presumed that those who enter into a relation with each other on which so much of their destiny is staked, take the step under the influence of love. And by love the love which looks to a conjugal union is to be understood a general movement of personal sympathy, imparting a special richness and intensity to the imagination in its action toward the individuals concerned, and thus giving each of them a genial and generous idea of the other to govern their mutual references; the whole operation being animated and emphasized, more or less prominently, by the impulse of sex. The idea of each other with which the wedded pair begin their union, an idea ennobled and vivified by imagination, and serving as the basis and stimulus of their love, may be largely made up of illusions, or may be sound, though inadequate. In the former case, one of three results will follow, either, as the poetic illusions are dispelled, and the fancied charms of the soul are replaced by barren poverty or haggard ugliness, the ardor of affection will be reversed by disappointment and friction into antipathy, engendering a chronic state, sometimes of fierce hatred, sometimes of sullen dislike; or that affection, robbed of its moral supports, admiration, gratitude, faith, and desire, will subside into a condition of spiritual tedium, unnoticing routine; or else, the imaginative element dying out, while the sexual element retains or perhaps even exaggerates its force, love will degenerate into lust. These three results depict the real union subsisting between three classes of husbands and wives, when the hymeneal glow has passed, and fixed realities assert their sway. The first is a hideous association of enemies, a yoked animosity; the second, a lukewarm connection of colleagues, an external partnership; the third, a convenient alliance of pleasure seekers, an animal cohabitation.
But that imaginative stir which lends such ardor and elevation to the honeymoon period is not always a fermentation of happy error. It is many times a fruition of beauty and good, resting on a perception of realities, growing greater, lovelier, more efficacious, with the growing powers and opportunities for appreciation. In these cases, where the divine bias which causes the newly wedded twain to put a beautiful interpretation on all the signs of each other's being depends not on illusion, but originates in truth, and where no fatal alloy or shock interferes to destroy it, the blessed affection in which they live together, instead of souring into aversion, stagnating into indifference, or sinking to a baser level than it began on, will naturally triumph over other changes, and grow more comprehensive and noble, as enlarged experiences disclose vaster grounds for justifying it, and furnish finer stimulants to feed it. In such instances, the beautifying tinges of romance, that streak and flush the horizon, neither fade into the grayness of fact, nor die into the darkness of neglect, but now broaden and deepen into the blue of meridian assurance, now clarify and ascend into the starlight of faith and mystery. The conditions that originally inspired the confiding and admiring sympathy become, with the lapse of time and the progress of acquaintance, more pronounced and more adequate, and insure a union ever fonder and more blunt. A husband and wife so united generally remain a pair of lovers, but sometimes become a pair of friends. Which of these two names is most descriptive of the union depends on the relative space held in it by the element of sense and sex. With some this ingredient is so important, that it infuses its quality into their very thoughts, and gives the distinctive character of love to their whole relation. With others this feature in the marriage fellowship becomes relatively less as the heyday of youth subsides, and the moral and mental bonds