SOME men think women unfitted for friendship. Feminine hearts are so
complex, changeable, elusive, that the belief has had great currency
among themselves as well as with their critics. In comparing the two
sexes in this particular, many persons commit a gross error by
overlooking the fact that there are all kinds and degrees of feminine
characters, not less than of masculine. When Heine says, "I will not
affirm that women have no character; rather they have a new one every
day," he means precisely what Pope meant by the famous couplet in his
poem on the Characters of Women:
Nothing so true as what you once let fall,
Most women have no characters at all.
This want of character is held by many thoughtful men for what
Coleridge asserted it to be, the perfection of a woman; as
tastelessness proves the purity of water; transparency, that of
glass. Plausible ground for this view is furnished by the fact, that
the perfection of fine and noble manners the peculiar province of
feminine genius consists in the absence of egotism, in that chaste
and lustrous exuberance of sympathetic joy which results from the
opposite of all personal domination; namely, spontaneous obedience to
the whole law of duty. Nevertheless, the opinion is unsound; partly
untrue, partly inadequate. It results from the despotic selfhood of
man, who wishes not to reflect another, but only to be reflected. The
absence of fixed individuality makes one a readier mirror; and man,
as the historic master, desires the woman who confronts him to be, at
least apparently, the yielding subject of his will. But since woman
is an independent being, endowed with a separate responsibleness, she
has a distinct personal destiny to fulfil as much as he has, and
should be granted an equal freedom of individuality.
The perfection of a woman in the sight of God is one thing: her
irresistible charmingness to selfish man may be quite another thing.
If the latter requires a soft compliance, involving the absence of
will, the former is not irreconcilable with the firmest constancy of
individual traits; and, in fact, women can no more be lumped together
in level community, either by positives or by negatives, than men can
be. Those differ from each other as widely as these do. Accuracy of
thought has seldom been more recklessly offered up to pungency of
expression than in the above-cited aphorism of Pope. There is an
ample variety of tenacious womanly characters between the extremes
marked by Miriam beating her timbrels, and Cleopatra applying the
asp; Cornelia showing her Roman jewels, and Guyon rapt in God;
Lucrezia Borgia raging with bowl and dagger, and Florence Nightingale
sweetening the memory of the Crimean war with philanthropic deeds.
What group of men indeed can be brought together, more distinct in
individuality, more contrasted in diversity of traits and destiny,
than such women as Eve in the Garden of Eden, Mary at the foot of the
cross, Rebecca by the well, Semiramis on her throne, Ruth among the
corn, Jezebel in her chariot, Lais at a banquet, Joan of Arc in
battle, Tomyris striding over the field with the head of Cyrus in a
bag of blood, Perpetua smiling on the lions in the amphitheatre,
Martha cumbered with much service, Pocahontas under the shadow of the
woods, Saint Theresa in the convent, Madame Roland on the scaffold,
Mother Agnes at Port Royal, exiled De Staël wielding her pen as a
sceptre, and Mrs. Fry lavishing her existence on outcasts!
In searching for the friendships of women, it is difficult at first
to find striking examples. Their lives are so private, their
dispositions are so modest, their experiences have been so little
noticed by history, that the annals of the feminine heart are for the
most part a secret chapter. But a sufficiently patient search will
cause a beautiful multitude of such instances to reveal themselves.
Nothing, perhaps, will strike the literary investigator of the
subject more forcibly than the frequency with which he meets the
expressed opinion, that women really have few or no friendships; that
with them it must be either love, hate, or nothing. A writer in one
of our popular periodicals has recently ventured this dogmatic
assertion: "If the female mind were not happily impervious to logic,
we might demonstrate, even to its satisfaction, that the history of
the sex presents no single instance of a famous friendship." Before
we get through our work, we shall meet with abundant confutations of
this rash and uncomplimentary statement.
Swift says, "To speak the truth, I never yet knew a tolerable woman
to be fond of her own sex." The statement, if taken with too wide a
meaning, might have been refuted by the sight, under his eyes, of the
cordial and life-long affection of Miss Johnson and Lady Gifford, the
sister of Sir William Temple. He could not expect a Stella and a
Vanessa to be friends: an exclusive love for a common object
inevitably made them deadly rivals. But the author of "Gulliver's
Travels" was a keen observer; his maxims have always a basis in fact;
and it is undoubtedly true that women of exceptional cleverness
prefer the wit, wisdom, and earnestness of the more cultivated
members of the other sex to the too frequent ignorance and triviality
of their own. Undoubtedly, in most societies, women of unusual genius
and accomplishments can more easily find congenial companionship with
men than with women. But to infer from this any natural
incompatibility for friendships between women is to draw a monstrous
inference, wholly unwarranted by the premises. In the sensible
chapter of "A Woman's Thoughts about Women," which Miss Muloch
devotes to this subject, she says, "The friendships of women are much
more common than those of men; but rarely or never so firm, so just,
or so enduring." But then she proceeds, justly, though with a little
inconsistency, to say, "With women these relations may be
sentimental, foolish, and fickle; but they are honest, free from
secondary motives of interest, and infinitely more respectable than
the time-serving, place-hunting, dinner-seeking devotion which
Messrs. Tape and Tadpole choose to denominate friendship." That the
sharper and sincerer feelings of women make them more capable than
men of sacrificing their interests to their passions, less likely to
sacrifice their passions to their interests, and that they are more
absorbed by their sympathies and antipathies, admits of no question.
Eugénie de Guérin, a woman of the rarest heart and soul, wrote in her
journal, a few years ago, this passage, which has already grown
famous: "I have ever sought a friendship so strong and earnest that
only death could break it; a happiness and unhappiness which I had,
alas! in my brother Maurice. No woman has been, or will be, able to
replace him; not even the most distinguished has been able to give me
that bond of intelligence and of tastes, that broad, simple, and
lasting relation. There is nothing fixed, enduring, vital, in the
feelings of women; their attachments to each other are so many pretty
bows of ribbons. I notice these light affections in all female
friends. Can we not, then, love each other differently? I neither
know an example in history nor am acquainted with one in the present.
Orestes and Pylades have no sisters. It makes me impatient, when I
think of it, that you men have something in your hearts which is
wanting to us. In return we have devotedness." It is striking to
notice the identity of sentiment here with that in the maxim of La
Bruyere: "In love women exceed the generality of men, but in
friendship we have infinitely the advantage."
With reference to the statement that "Orestes and Pylades have no
sisters," besides the superfluous disproofs of it contained in the
pages that follow, it is an interesting fact that classic literature
affords one example, which modern writers have never, to my
knowledge, noticed. Pausanias, in his "Description of Greece," tenth
book, twenty-ninth chapter, gives an recount of an elaborate painting
by Polygnotus of the underworld, the scenery and fate of the dead in
the future state. Among the images of the departed set forth on the
canvas were two women, Chloris and rhyia, locked in a fond embrace.
Of these two women, thus shown eternally united in the realm beyond
he grave, Pausanias says that they were a pair of friends
extraordinarily attached to each other in life. Their story is lost.
The imagination of womankind might compensate for the missing
narrative, and make the names of Chloris and Thyia live with the
lames of Damon and Pythias.
Let us sift the grounds of the opinion that women ire relatively
incapable of friendship, analyze the appearances on which it rests,
and separate the truth in it from the error.
The first fact of the subject is, that women are naturally less
selfish and more sympathetic than men.
They have more affection to bestow, greater need of sympathy, and
therefore are more sure, in the absence of love, to seek friendship.
The devastating egotism of man is properly foreign to woman; though
there are many women as haughty, hard, and imperious as any man. But
these are unfeminine, despite their sex. There are women who seem
cold and beautiful stones, their hearts icicles, their tears frozen
gems pressed out by injured pride. On the other hand, there are men
as soft, as modest, as celestially sympathetic, as almost any woman.
Still, the cardinal contrast holds, that women are self-forgetful,
men self-asserting; women hide their surplus affection under a
feigned indifference; men hide their indifference under a feigned
affection. Of course, in this comparison, depraved women are
excluded: these are generally far more heartless and calculating than
men. The aphorism of Rochefoucauld "In their first passion, women
love the lover; in their subsequent ones, they love love" is
descriptive, not of women, but of that class of women who cherish a
succession of lovers, a class familiar to the base and brilliant
French aphorist. With such, the venal commonness of affection first
profanes, then destroys it.
It is a pathetic sign of the diviner nature of women, that they
conceal sorrow more easily than joy, while men conceal joy more
easily than sorrow. The lover of Adelaide de Comminge having joined a
convent of Trappists, she followed him thither, disguised as a man,
took the vows, and was not recognized by him until on her death-bed.
Man is not capable of such pure devotion: only a woman could thus
forbear, and be content with the secret joy of the beloved presence.
Man demands action: woman demands emotion. Friendship between two
youths is martial, adventurous, a trumpet-blast or a bugle-air:
friendship between two girls is poetic, contemplative, the sigh of a
harp-string or the swell of an organ-pipe.
Woman needs friendship more than man, because she is less self-
sufficing. She is much more apt than he to think the form in the
mirror is lovely, but not to think it of herself. Milton's Eve was
startled with a shy delight at the fair shape in the fountain, never
dreaming that it was herself. Men are flutes: they must be filled
with the warm breath of a foreign sympathy. Women are harpsichords:
they have all the conditions of music in themselves, and only need to
be struck. But, containing so much, their need of being struck is the
greater. Charlotte Bronte, in her sad, weary life, full, as she
expressed it, of loneliness, of longing for companionship, had two
faithful and precious friends; her "dear, dear E.," and her "good,
kind Miss W." To the former she writes, "I am at this moment
trembling all over with excitement, after reading your note: it is
what I never received before, the unrestrained pouring out of a warm,
gentle, generous heart. If you love me, do, do, do come on Friday. I
shall watch and wait for you; and, if you disappoint me, I shall
weep." Few sayings are more touching than that which Thackeray heard
a woman utter, that she would gladly have taken Swift's cruelty to
have had his tenderness. Now, is it not true that the intenser need
naturally implies the keener search and the more copious finding?
The great reason why the friendships of women are not more frequent
and prominent than they are is, that the proper destiny of woman
calls her to love; and this sentiment, in its fullness, is usually
too absorbing to leave room and force for conspicuous friendships.
With men the other sentiments are not so much suspended or engulfed
by conjugal and parental love. "The men," La Bruyere says, "are the
occasion that women do not love each other." With the one-sided
exaggeration incident to most aphorisms, this is true. Husband and
children occupy the wife and mother; and marriage is often the grave
of feminine friendships. According to the maxim of Saint Paul, "The
head of the woman is the man:" the attraction of another woman must
generally be weaker. The lives of men are the sighs of nature: the
lives of women are their echoes. The sharp-eyed Richter says, "A
woman, unlike Narcissus, seeks not her own image and a second I: she
much prefers a not-I." This profound remark exactly touches the
difference between friendship and love, and between the respective
relations of man and woman to the two sentiments. Friendship is the
simple reflection of souls by each other. Love is the mutual
reflection of their entire being by two persons, each supplementing
the defects of the other. Love, therefore, is friendship, with a
differential addition. True love includes friendship, as the greater
includes the smaller. Now, the self-sufficient character of man makes
him seek a second I; that is, wish to see himself reflected in
another. But the sympathetic character of woman makes her seek a not-
I; that is, wish to see another reflected in herself. It is incorrect
to say, that woman has less capacity than man for friendship: it is
correct only to say, that man is more easily satisfied with
friendship than woman is. She demands that, and something more; and
every page of history teems with the records of that something more,
the heavenly records of the sufferings, sacrifices, and triumphs of
woman's love. When this imperial sentiment is baffled, and yet the
soul remains mistress of herself, it is impossible that the next
strongest sentiment should not, in all available instances, be
cultivated as a solace and vicegerent. One of the renowned apothegms
of that sinister moralist, Rochefoucauld, is, "Women feel friendship
insipid after love." But he should have limited his remark to vicious
women. It will not apply to virtuous women. Jane Austin, who in
knowledge of the feminine heart has few equals, says, "Friendship is
certainly the finest balm for the pangs of disappointed love."
Women are more sensitive and acute than men, more delicate
electrometers for all the imponderable agencies of sympathy; and this
greater penetration makes them more fastidious, gives them better
ability indeed to admire what is superior, but causes them to be less
tolerant of what is offensive. The innervation and nutrition of woman
are finer and more complicated than those of man; and, by as much as
her nerves are more numerous and more delicate, she has a keener and
richer consciousness, including many states he is incapable of
reproducing. He is more of a head; she, more of a plant. Her body is
far more intelligent than his; and feelings are the thoughts of the
body, as thoughts are the feelings of the mind. No one can forget the
lines, made so famous by their exquisite felicity, written of
Elizabeth Drury by Donne:
The pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
Ye might have almost said her body thought.
Mothers feel as if still connected with their offspring by the fibres
that joined them in their prenatal life; as the nerves continue to
report in consciousness an amputated hand or foot. There is in all
their emotions a vascular quality or consanguineous tincture never to
be wholly eliminated.
The greater material identification of mothers than of fathers with
their children, in the long period of gestation and nursing, leads to
a closer and more persistent mental identification with them. The
physical differences of the sexes react on the mind to make moral
differences; and these are further heightened by differences in their
education, habits of life, and sphere of interests. No doubt, these
differences occupy a larger share of attention in women than in men.
Those who have suffered sharply, see keenly; and it is difficult to
conceal much from women. They have the strangest facility in reading
physiological language, tones, gestures, bearing, and all those
countless signs which make the face and eyes such tell-tales of the
soul. They will look into your eyes, and see you think; listen to
your voice, and hear you feel. The coy and subtle world of emotion
now infinitely timid and reticent, now all gates flung down for the
floods to pour is their domain. They are at home in it all, from the
rosy fogs of feeling to the twilight borders of intelligence. On the
one side, these endowments are a help to friendship. The ardor with
which a pure and generous woman enters into choice states of soul in
another is a redemptive sight. This capacity of swift perception and
sympathy makes the friendship of a woman a precious boon to a man who
aims at greatness or perfection; and scarcely ever has there been an
illustrious man who has not been appreciated, comforted, and inspired
in secret by some woman long before he became famous, circling around
him with her unselfish ministrations, like that star which is the
invisible companion of Sirius.
The poor young Niebuhr writes home from Great Britain to Madam
Hensler, the wife of the good professor who had befriended him in
college, "Your letter has made me so wild with delight, that I have
felt full of affection to every creature that has come in my way."
The melancholy heart and dismal lot of Gerald Griffin, the Irish
novelist, found almost their solitary human alleviation and
brightness in the sustaining kindness and admiration of a lady,
designated in his brother's biography of him as Mrs. L. John Foster,
whose social career was as trying to him as his massive soul was
lonely, exceedingly enjoyed the cordial encouragement and affection
of a number of cultivated and excellent women. Many of his published
letters were addressed to one of these, Mrs. Mant. He thus writes to
her of another one: "I turn, disgusted and contemptuous, from insipid
and shallow folly, to lave in the tide of deeper sentiments. There I
swim and dive and rise and gambol, with all that wild delight which
could be felt by a fish, after panting out of its element awhile,
when flung into its own world of waters by some friendly hand. Such a
hand to me is Mrs. C.'s. It is impossible to give a just idea of the
strange fascination she diffuses around her. My mind seems to be
larger, stronger, and more brilliant in her company than anywhere
else. Every fountain of sentiment opens at her approach."
The greater sensibility, insight, and impulsiveness of women, on the
other hand, expose them more to obstacles in the way of friendship.
Coldness and meanness are less endurable by them. A genuinely feeling
soul has an insuperable repugnance alike for unfeelingness, for false
feeling, and for false expressions of feeling. An Arabian courser
cannot travel comfortably with a snail. A soul whose motions are
musical curves cannot well blend with a soul whose motions are
discordant angles. A woman is naturally as much more capricious than
a man, as she is more susceptible. A slighter shock suffices to
jostle her delicate emotions out of delight into disgust. She is
therefore a severer personal critic. Male peccadilloes are female
crimes. A wet-blanket presence that she could not tolerate may
refresh him. As less strong, less stably poised, than he, she is more
tempted to have recourse to artifice; and when she does stoop to
dissimulation, she uses it with inimitable dexterity, as shield, as
foil, as poniard. It would be a difficult task for men to do what the
spotless and loving Eugénie de Guérin was horrified at seeing two
prominent Parisian ladies do, play the part of tender friends in
society, and then turn away and venomously caricature each other.
What woman who possessed a ring conferring invisibility on its
wearer, would dare to put it on, and move about among her friends?
The weakness of women is an exaggerated attention to trifles. The
great condition of steady friendship is community of plans and ends
in the parties. This is much wanting in women, who think chiefly of
persons, little of laborious aims. Two girls, who live in a multitude
of evaporating impulses and dreams it were as easy to yoke a couple
of humming-birds, and make them draw. Because the polarity of a grand
fixed purpose is absent from it, the mind of many a woman is a heap
of petty antipathies; and, where the likings are fickle, the
dislikings are pretty sure to be tenacious. A keen student of human
nature has remarked, that many women "spend force enough in trivial
observations on dress and manners, to form a javelin to pierce quite
through a character." Women's eyes are armed with microscopes to see
all the little defects and dissimilarities which can irritate and
injure their friendships. Hence there are so many feminine friends
easily provoked to mutual criticisms and recriminations.
The dear friends, Fanny Squeers and Matilda Price, experienced a
violent jealousy on account of Nicholas Nickleby. After a fierce
altercation, they fell into tears, followed by remonstrances and an
explanation, and terminated by embraces and by vows of eternal
friendship; "the occasion making the fifty-second time of repeating
the same impressive ceremony within a twelvemonth." But obviously it
is a closer approach to the truth to take the sensitiveness and
interruptions in the mutual relations of women, as compared with
those in the relations of men, as the direct, rather than as the
inverse, measure of the number and value of their respective
friendships. Yet, by a gross error, the estimate is usually made in
the latter way.
The maxim of Walter Savage Landor is a palpable stroke at the truth:
"No friendship is so cordial or so delicious as that of girl for
girl; no hatred so intense and immovable as that of woman for woman."
In fact, there is immensely less indifference between women than
between men; there are incomparably more enmities; and there are a
great many more friendships. It is the enormous preponderance of the
mutual dislikes of women over those of men, which chiefly has given
rise to the fallacious belief that their mutual likes are less.
These, too, are more, though not, perhaps, so much more.
Among women, it is true, only a few of those memorable unions of soul
and life are known which entitle the parties to be ranked as pairs of
friends. Our ignorance, however, of such cases does not prove their
non-existence. There have been thousands of them. There are a great
many at this moment. It is the characteristic modesty and privacy of
the lives of women which keep these heart-histories concealed. The
most gifted, refined, and elevated natures are most likely to have
this experience; and such natures shrink with unconquerable
repugnance from all obtrusion, or betrayal, of their inmost
experiences. The lives of noble women are "so transparent and so deep
that only the subtle insight of sympathy can penetrate them:" their
open secrets baffle all the scrutiny of coarse souls. The choicest of
her sex will, to some extent, agree with the energetic sentiment of
Eugénie de Guérin "I detest those women who mount the pulpit, and lay
their passions bare." Engrossing, then, as the attachment of two
women may be, it is not often thrust into public view so as to obtain
the literary recognition won by the similar attachments of men who
act their parts in the front of society, seeking a place in history
for their achievements. As far as the public are concerned, women
merge their heart-lives in the careers of those dear to them. It is
accordingly in exceptional cases alone that a knowledge of the
friendships of women is preserved for posterity. This, indeed, holds
likewise of men, but in a much lower degree. Thus far there have been
printed accounts of the lives of hundreds of men where there has been
a printed account of the life of one woman. Allowance should be made
for this in our estimate of their comparative friendships.
And now has not something been said to shake the current opinion,
that the friendships of women are few and superficial? It is true
that women are more imperiously called to love than men are; are more
likely to be absorbed by this master-passion, and thus are more
exposed to jealousy of each other. It is true, that, owing to their
greater sensitiveness, keener subjection to the fastidious sway of
taste, women are more apt than men to fall out, being more easily
disturbed and estranged by trifles; but this relative subjection to
trifles is chiefly a consequence of the exclusion of woman hitherto
from the grandest fields of education, the noblest subjects of
interest and action. It is true, that the attachments of women, on
account of the greater privacy of their lives, are less conspicuous
than those of men, less frequently obtain historic or literary
mention, and therefore seem to be rarer. But it is not true, either
that women are incapable of enthusiastic and steadfast friendships
for each other, or that such friendships are uncommon. If women are
more critical and severe towards their own sex than men are, it is
chiefly because they cannot, like men, be indifferent to each other:
they must positively feel either sympathy or aversion.
It is very frequently the case, that a single woman, blessed with
wealth, invites some friend, to whom she is strongly attached, to
accept a home with her; and they live thenceforth in indissoluble
union. Such an instance among men is almost as rare as a white
blackbird. Unmarried sisters so often pass all their years together,
inseparably united, both inwardly and outwardly, that almost every
one of us is acquainted with many examples. But it is extremely rare
for bachelor brothers to club together, and pass a wholly shared
existence.
In the higher classes of society, it is a common custom for nobly-
born women to have lady companions, to whom they give a home and
support and constant love, for the sake of congenial intercourse with
them, for the comfort of their presence and conversation. There is
scarcely a corresponding custom among men. It has happened to the
writer to know numerous instances in which a wealthy woman has, in
her lifetime, freely bestowed on a poor friend, from a pure impulse
of good-will, a sum of money sufficient to secure her a handsome
independence. This substantial deed of friendship he has not known
paralleled in a single instance among men.
Men do not often go so far in either moral extreme as the other sex.
It is the corruption of the best that makes the worst. Who is this,
shameless mixture of beast and fiend, with body of fire, heart of
marble, brow of bronze, and hand hollowed to hold money? It is the
woman who sells herself in the street. And who is this, with upturned
eyes of fathomless love, the radiant paleness of ecstasy transfusing
her countenance, heaven flooding her soul, the world a forgotten toy
beneath her feet? It is the woman who, in silence and secrecy, gives
herself to God. So capacious of extremes is the feminine spirit.
There is no fretfullness, spitefullness, revengefullness, equal to
those of a woman. There is no grace, sweetness, dignity,
disinterestedness, equal to those of a woman. And, when all is said,
the conclusion of one who understands the subject will be, that, for
quick depth of sympathy, intuitive divination, joyous sacrifice,
perfect reproduction of all the modulations of feeling, there is no
friendship equal to that of a woman.