The Friendships of Women. William Rounseville Alger
in whom pure mind most predominates, whose spirit is least roiled by the perturbation of the senses. With such it is almost a necessity, when hate or indifference does not intervene, that love should refine into friendship. As the ferment of passion ceases, the lees settle, and a transparent sympathy appears, reflecting all heavenly and eternal things.
As an example of the transmutation of passion into sentiment, of impulse into principle, of feverish flame into calm fire, we may instance the Greek Pericles and Aspasia, who were friends even more than lovers, their intellectual companionship and common pursuit of culture being one of the precious traditions of humanity. Grote, whose learning, ability, and fairness give weight to his opinion, affirms his belief that the vile charges brought against Aspasia were the offspring of lying gossip and scandal. The estimate of her talents and accomplishments was so high that the authorship of the greatest speech ever delivered by Pericles was attributed to her. She is also particularly interesting to us as the first woman who kept an open parlor for the visits of chosen friends and the culture of conversation, as the earliest queen of the drawing room. Her house was the centre of the highest literary and philosophical society of Athens. Socrates himself was a constant visitor there. There too, as Plutarch asserts, many of the most distinguished Athenian matrons were wont to go with their husbands for the pleasure and profit of her conversation.
In Roman history we may point to Brutus and his heroic Portia, who was fully capable of entering into all his counsels, dangers, and hopes, and, when he fell, of dying as became the daughter of Cato. The characters of the noble and Arria were likewise in perfect accord, in their high strains of wisdom, valor, and virtue; and when the brutal emperor, Claudius, commanded the death of her husband, the wife, stabbing herself, handed him the dagger, with the immortal words, "Brutus, it does not hurt."
Seneca and his Paulina were bound together by community of tastes and acquirements, and unbroken happiness. He asks, "What can be sweeter than to be so dear to your wife that it makes you dearer to yourself?" When the tyrant ordered the philosopher to commit suicide, his wife insisted on opening her veins, and dying with him. After long resistance, he consented, saying, "I will not deprive you of the honor of so noble an example." But Nero would not allow her to die thus, and had her veins bound up; not, however, until she had lost so much blood that her blanched face, for the rest of her days, gave rise to the well known rhetorical comparison, "as pale as Seneca's Paulina."
Calpurnia, likewise, the wife of the younger Pliny, was identified with her husband in all his studies, ambitions, triumphs. She fashioned herself after his pattern, knew his works by heart, sang his verses, listened behind a screen to his public speeches, drinking in the applauses lavished on him. We may justly infer from the whale character of the "Letter of Consolation," which he wrote to her, on occasion of the death of their beloved daughter, Timoxena, that a relation similar to the one just mentioned subsisted between Plutarch and his wife.
By friendship in marriage is meant companionship of inner lives, community of aims and efforts, the lofty concord of aspiring minds. These are comparatively few, as made known to us in classic antiquity, owing to the jealous separation of the sexes in social life, that strict subjection of woman to man, which was characteristic of the ancient world. If we were thinking of wedded love instead of wedded friendship, it would be easy to cull a host of affecting and imposing instances: such as, the Hebrew Rebekah and Rachel; the Greek Alcestis; the Hindu Savitri; the Persian Pantheia; and a glorious crowd of Roman matrons, like Lucretia, who have left a renown as grand and deathless as the memory of Rome itself.
The modern examples of fortunate friendship in marriage are more numerous than the ancient ones. Two delightful instances, particularly worthy of study, have been so fully described by Mrs. Jameson as to make superfluous any thing more than a slight allusion here. The first of these pairs is the early English poet, William Habington, and his Castara. Habington collected and published, in two rich parts, the poems he wrote to Castara before and after his marriage, and added a preface full of choice thought and heartfelt emotion. By her husband's pen,
Castara's name
Is writ as fair in the register of fame
As the ancient beauties, which translated are,
By poets, up to heaven, each there a star.
The illustrious Roman lawyer, Giambattista Zappi, and Faustina Maratti were the other pair alluded to, whose wedded love was crowned with a superior friendship. Zappi is celebrated for his sublime sonnet on the Moses of Michael Angelo. But the most of his verses were inspired by his wife, and dedicated to her. Her verses were almost exclusively inspired by her husband, and dedicated to him. Their works are published together in one volume.
Roland, the famous Girondist minister, a man of marked abilities and incorruptible integrity, married the gifted and high souled Jeanne Philippon a short time before the outbreak of the French Revolution. He was twenty two years her senior. Her love for him, founded on his philosophic spirit and antique virtues, was so ardent and so faithful that she has often been called "the Heloise of the eighteenth century." Their principles, their souls, their hopes, their toils and sufferings, were alike and inseparable. They hailed the early efforts of the Revolutionists as the dawn of a golden age for mankind. Madame Roland shared in the studies of her husband, aided him in his compositions, and served as his sole secretary during his two ministries. No intrigue of his party was unknown to her, or uninfluenced by her genius. Yet no falsehood or trickery debased, no meanness sullied her. "She was the angel of the cause she espoused, the soul of honor, and the conscience of all who embraced it." When Robespierre overthrew the Girondists, Roland, with others of his party, saved his life by a flight to Rouen. His wife was soon sentenced to death by the infamous Fouquier Tinville. She rode to the guillotine clad in white, her glossy black hair hanging down to her girdle, and embraced her fate with divine courage and dignity. Hearing the direful news, Roland walked a few miles out of Rouen, and deliberately killed himself with his cane sword. His body was found by the roadside, with a paper containing his last words: "Whoever thou art that findest these remains, respect them as those of a man who consecrated his life to usefullness, and who dies, as he has lived, honest and virtuous. Hearing of the death of my wife, I would not remain another day on this earth so stained with crimes."
All appreciative readers of the works and the life of Herder gratefully associate his Caroline with their recollections of him. Under the stress of his many sore trials, this great, vexed, struggling, sorrowing man would have succumbed to his afflictions, and entered the grave much earlier than he did, if it had not been for the solace and strength his wife gave him at home; and not a little of his present celebrity is due to the devoted energy of pride and affection with which she labored to have justice done to his writings and his memory.
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