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 become more various and
extensive. The physical tie, however vital, is insignificant in
comparison with the entire web of their conscious ties. Love is
included in their whole relation, as a rivulet threading a lake. This
subordination of the stream to the lake is surest to take place with
those 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.
A spotless and exalted pair of friends look out of English history at
us, in the faces of John and Lucy Hutchinson. He was governor of
Nottingham, and one of the judges of Charles I. In her widowhood,
Lady Hutchinson drew that wonderful portrait of her husband which has
been styled the most perfect piece of biography ever penned by a
woman.
John Austin, under crushing burdens and amidst freezing neglect,
wrought out the profoundest exposition of jurisprudence which exists
in the English language. His wife, Sarah Austin, distinguished for
her early importation and unveiling of German literature to the
English mind, was every thing to him that a tender, wise, and strong
friend could be. In the prefaces to her publications of his
posthumous works, the discerning reader may trace, through the modest
concealment, something of one of the purest, deepest, most steadfast
of those friendships which adorn while they enrich the annals of
human nature.
One shrinks from the indelicacy of alluding to persons still living,
and yet can hardly help suggesting what a friendship there must have
been in the union of such scholars, thinkers, poets, aspirants, as
Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. But space would fail for a
list of the royal friendships of this class revealed in literary
records. And, for every example published, there must obviously be a
multitude, quite as sweet and grand, which are hidden in purely
private life.
Leopold Schefer, the serene and lofty author of the "Layman's
Breviary," that charming work just published in our country in the
fine translation of Charles T. Brooks, lost his wife in the twenty
fifth year of their marriage. What a friend he had in her appears
from the simple words, surcharged with feeling, in which he speaks of
her. He writes, "Only a single unconquerable sorrow has smitten me in
all my life, the death of the still soul with whom life, for the
first time, was to me a life. Nor have I had any other troubles.
People who make trouble for themselves, and in an unappeased spirit
find an everlasting misery, may properly call me still a fortunate
man. But, though outwardly as much grass should grow over her grave
as ever can grow in long desolated days and nights, inwardly no grass
grows over a real life annihilating grief. One gets re adjusted with
the world; but, after all, he goes at last with an open wound into
the grave. Believe me in this."
An example yet more recent has obtained such a monumental
recognition, that mention of it is not here to be avoided. John
Stuart Mill dedicates his imperishable "Essay on Liberty" to his
deceased wife in these terms:
"To the beloved and deplored memory of her who was the inspirer, and
in part the author, of all that is best in my writings, the friend
and wife whose exalted sense of truth and right was my strongest
incitement, and whose approbation was my chief reward, I dedicate
this volume. Like all that I have written for many years, it belongs
as much to her as to me; but the work, as it stands, has had, in a
very insufficient degree, the inestimable advantage of her revision;
some of the most important portions having been reserved for a more
careful re examination, which they are now never destined to receive.
Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one half the great
thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave, I should
be the medium of a greater benefit to it than is ever likely to arise
from any thing that I can write unprompted and unassisted by her all
but unrivalled wisdom."
The conditions favoring the formation of a consummate friendship
between husband and wife meet in fortunate combination in two classes
of instances.
In the first, the sovereignty is the bond of a common nobleness; in
the second, the bond of a common ambition. The united worship of
truth, beauty, goodness, make, it is to be hoped, the most absolute
friends of unnumbered wedded pairs. One adoring pursuit of
excellence, one devout trust in God, one happy aiming at perfection,
draws their noblest activities into unison, free from the impediments
of selfishness and suspicion. Under the over arching sanctions of
Divinity, knowing each other to be worthy and true, they confide in
each other with the sympathy of a total esteem, based on a common
devotion to the supreme prizes of the universe, whose reflected
lustre already transfigures their spirits and sanctifies their
persons in each other's eyes.
Many a husband and wife are also made friends, above all their mere
love, by sharing in some earnest and condign social ambition. How
many a man of genius has been chiefly indebted for his achievements
to the wife who has sedulously identified herself with his success,
ever at his side, unseen perhaps by the world, studying his art,
lightening his tasks, soothing his pride, healing his hurts,
stimulating his confidence, baffling his enemies, gaining him patrons
or allies, assuaging his falls, refreshing his energy for new trials,
and, when he has triumphed, and is applauded on his eminence,
silently drinking in, as her reward, the popular admiration bestowed
on him.
This intense co operation and struggle towards an outer goal, when
unneutralized, produces that wondrous identification which is the
type of complete friendship. A crowd of the most brilliant artists,
authors, statesmen, might each point to his wife, and say, "To that
bosom friend, to that guardian angel, to her quick intelligence,
unfailing consolation, steady stimulus, I principally owe, under
Heaven, what I am and what I have done." Many beautiful delineations
of this fact have been given in fiction. The picture of Lord and Lady
Davenant, in Miss Edgeworth's "Helen," is worthy of particular
mention as a picture drawn to the life.
Nothing in fiction, however, is finer or more commanding, as an
example of the true relation of the sexes, than is afforded in real
life by the biography of Lord William and Lady Russell. Every such
historic instance has a benign lesson for our time, in which, it is
to be feared, many bad influences are working with fatal effect,
temporarily at least, to lessen the attractions and undermine the
sanctity of marriage, Guizot ends his beautiful and noble essay on
the married life of Lord and Lady Russell with this impressive
paragraph:
"I have felt profound pleasure in relating the history of this lady,
so pure in her passion, always great and always humble in her
greatness, devoted with equal ardor to her feelings and her duties in
grief and joy, in triumph and adversity. Our times are attacked with
a deplorable malady: men believe only in the passion which is
attended with moral derangement. All ardent, exalted, and soul
mastering sentiments appear to them impossible within the bounds of
moral laws and social conventions. All order seems to them a
paralyzing yoke, all submission a debasing servitude: no flame is any
thing, if it is not a devouring conflagration. This disease is the
graver because it is not the crisis of a fever nor the explosion of
an exuberant force. It springs from perverse doctrines, from the
rejection of law and faith, from the idolatry of man. And with this
disease there is joined another no less lamentable: man not only
adores nothing but himself, but even himself he adores only in the
multitude where all men are confounded. He hates and envies every
thing that rises above the vulgar level: all superiority, all
individual grandeur, seems to him an iniquity, an injury towards that
chaos of undistinguished and ephemeral beings whom he calls humanity.
When we have been assailed by these base doctrines, and the shameful
passions which give birth to or are born from them; when we have felt
the hatefullness of them, and measured the peril, it is a lively
delight to meet with one of those noble examples which are their
splendid confutation. In proportion as I respect humanity in its
totality, I admire and love those glorified images of humanity which
personify and set on high, under visible features and with a proper
name, whatever it has of most noble and most pure. Lady Russell gives
the soul this beautiful and virtuous joy."
It is fitting, in the next place, to say something of the
disappointment and wretchedness which so many married men and women
notoriously experience in their relations with each other. It may be
useful to state the principal causes of this unhappiness, and to give
some definite directions in the way of remedy. Absence of love,
absence of reason, absence of justice, absence of taste, in other
words, harshness and neglect, silliness and frivolity, vice and
crime, vulgarity and slovenliness, are the leading and inevitable
creators of alienation, dislike, and misery in marriage. Whatever
tends to increase these tends to multiply separations and divorces
between those who cannot endure each other; and to multiply
irritations, quarrels, sorrows, and agonies between those who may
endure, but cannot enjoy, each other. In marriage, the intimacy is so
great and constant that the slightest friction easily becomes
galling. Nowhere beside is there such need of magnanimous forbearance
in one, or else of equality of worth and refinement in both. "Love
does not secure happiness in marriage, often the contrary: reason is
necessary." So said the wise Jean Paul. He also said, "The best man
joined with the worst woman has a greater hell than the best woman
joined with the worst man." This is, no doubt, true as a general
rule, because woman is so much more capable than man of self
abnegation, silent patience, meek submission, and flexible adjustment
to inevitable circumstances. Probably the women who keenly and
chronically suffer from unhappy marriages are far more numerous than
the kindred sufferers of the other sex. This is because they are more
deeply susceptible to cruelty and indifference and to all the
repulsive traits of character; are less capable of ignoring such
things; have less of absorbing occupation of their own to take up
their attention, and are less able to be absorbed in things beyond
the personal and domestic sphere. There are unquestionably thousands
of married women whose experience is made a living martyrdom by the
infidelity, the tyranny, the coarseness, the general odiousness and
wearisomeness of their husbands. In most cases, even where a divorce
is wished, the shocking public scandal and disgrace are too much; and
they wear on to the end. What misery delicate and conscientious
women, of dedicated souls and polished manners, who love every thing
that is pure and beautiful, are compelled to undergo in their bondage
to husbands, ignorant, uninteresting, ignoble, relentlessly
domineering, is not to be expressed. Their best weapons in such
cases, if they knew it, are gentleness, patience, persuasion, and the
skilful use of every means to improve and uplift their unequal
companions to their own level. The Persian poet expressed a rich
truth when he wrote, "Gentleness is the sail on the table of morals."
It is a tragedy that the good wife of a bad husband is so identified
with him, that the penalties of his offences fall on her head, often
more terribly than on his. A pure woman loving a wicked man must
expect to have her affections ravaged by his sins: does not the
lightning drawn by the rod blast the innocent ivy entwining it? What
lacerating woes the gambler, the drunkard, the forger, the adulterer,
inflicts on his wife!
And yet, profound as is the misfortune, sharp as is the suffering of
such, it may be doubted whether a noble, sensitive, cultivated man,
with a yearning heart of softness and peace, a capacious mind full of
grand aspirations, married, by some fatal chance, to a woman with a
petty soul, a teasing and tyrannical temper, a mendacious and rasping
tongue, whose taste is for small gossip and scandal, whose ambition
is for fashionable show and noise, whose life is one incessant fret
and sting, it may be doubted if this man's lot is not severer with
his ill matched consort than hers would be with the worst husband in
the world. He had better marry a vinegar cruet than such a Tartar.
When weary and seeking to rest, to be roused up by a scolding; when
searching for truth, or contemplating beauty, or communing with God,
or aspiring to perfection, or scheming some vast good for mankind, to
be aggravated by abuse, insulted by false charges, dragged down to
petty interests which he despises, and mixed up with wrongs and
passions which he loathes, these degrading injuries, these wasteful
vexations, are what he must endure. No wonder if he vehemently
resents a treatment so incongruous with his worth. No wonder if,
vexed, hurt, goaded half to madness, he gets enraged, and unseemly
contentions ensue, followed by painful depression and remorseful
grief. No wonder if he finds it hard indeed to forget or to forgive
the infliction of an evil so incomparably profound and frightful.
There is, to a high smiled man, no wrong more hurtful or more
difficult to pardon than to have mean motives falsely ascribed to
him, to be placed by misinterpretation on a lower plane than that
where he belongs. Every such experience stabs the moral source of
life, and draws blood from the soul itself. Husband and wife
powerfully tend to a common level and likeness. The higher must
redeem and lift the unequal mate, or live in strife and misery. If
the lower takes pattern after the superior one, the petty, frivolous,
false, and fretful becoming magnanimous, dedicated, truthful, and
serene, it is a divine triumph of grace, and the result will be full
of blessedness. But otherwise a wearing unhappiness is inevitable,
however carefully it be hidden, however bravely it be borne. George
Sand says very strikingly of Rousseau and Therese Levasseur, "His
true fault was in persevering in his attachment for that vulgar
woman, who turned to her own profit the weaknesses of his ill starred
character and his self torturing imagination. One does not with
impunity live in company with a little soul. When one is a Jean
Jacques Rousseau, one does not acquire the faults of littleness, does
not lose his native grandeur; but he feels his genius troubled,
combated, worried, distempered, and he makes a pure loss of immense
efforts to surmount miseries unworthy of him."
Let a husband be the true and pure guardian of his family, laboring
always to adorn himself with the godlike gems of wisdom, virtue, and
honor; let him bear himself in relation to his wife with gracious
kindness towards her faults, with grateful recognition of her merits,
with steady sympathy for her trials, with hearty aid for her better
aspirations, and she must be of a vile stock, if she does not revere
him, and minister unto him with all the graces and sweetness of her
nature.
Let a wife, in her whole intercourse with her husband, try the
efficacy of gentleness, purity, sincerity, scrupulous truth, meek and
patient forbearance, an invariable tone and manner of deference, and,
if he is not a brute, he cannot help respecting her and treating her
kindly; and in nearly all instances he will end by loving her and
living happily with her.
But if he is vulgar and vicious, despotic, reckless, so as to have no
devotion for the august prizes and incorruptible pleasures of
existence; if she is an unappeasable termagant, or a petty worrier,
so taken up with trifling annoyances, that, wherever she looks, "the
blue rotunda of the universe shrinks into a housewifery room;" if the
presence of each acts as a morbid irritant on the nerves of the
other, to the destruction of comfort, and the lowering of self
respect, and the draining away of peace and strength, their
companionship must infallibly be a companionship in wretchedness and
loss.
The banes of domestic life are littleness, falsity, vulgarity,
harshness, scolding vociferation, an incessant issuing of superfluous
prohibitions and orders, which are regarded as impertinent
interferences with the general liberty and repose, and are
provocative of rankling or exploding resentments. The blessed
antidotes that sweeten and enrich domestic life are refinement, high
aims, great interests, soft voices, quiet and gentle manners,
magnanimous tempers, forbearance from all unnecessary commands or
dictation, and generous allowances of mutual freedom. Love makes
obedience lighter than liberty. Man wears a noble allegiance, not as
a collar, but as a garland. The Graces are never so lovely as when
seen waiting on the Virtues; and, where they thus dwell together,
they make a heavenly home.
No affection, save friendship, has any sure eternity in it.
Friendship ought, therefore, always to be cultivated in love itself,
as its only certain guard and preservative, not less than as the only
sufficing substitute in its absence. A couple joined by love without
friendship, walk on gunpowder with torches in their hands. Shall I
venture to depict the sad decay which love naturally suffers, and the
redemptive transformation which it sometimes undergoes? I will do it
by translating a truthful and eloquent passage from Chateaubriand:
"At first our letters are long, vivid, frequent. The day is not
capacious enough for them. We write at sunset; at moonrise we trace a
few more lines, charging its chaste and silent light to hide our
thousand desires. We watch for the first peep of dawn, to write what
we believe we had forgotten to say in the delicious hours of our
meeting. A thousand vows cover the paper, where all the roses of
aurora are reflected; a thousand kisses are planted on the words,
which seem born from the first glance of the sun. Not an idea, an
image, a reverie, an accident, a disquietude, which has not its
letter. Lo! one morning, something almost imperceptible steals on the
beauty of this passion, like the first wrinkle on the front of an
adored woman. The breath and perfume of love expire in these pages of
youth, as an evening breeze dies upon the flowers. We feel it, but
are unwilling to confess it. Our letters become shorter and fewer,
are filled with news, with descriptions, with foreign matters; and,
if any thing happens to delay them, we are less disturbed. On the
subject of loving and being loved, we have grown reasonable. We
submit to absence without complaint. Our former vows prolong
themselves: here are still the same words; but they are dead. Soul is
wanting in them. I love you is merely an expression of habit, a
necessary form, the I have the honor to be of the love letter. Little
by little the style freezes where it inflamed. The post day, no
longer eagerly anticipated, is rather dreaded; writing has become a
fatigue. We blush to think of the madnesses we have trusted to paper,
and wish we could recall our letters and burn them. What has
happened? Is it a new attachment which begins where an old one ends?
No: it is love dying in advance of the object loved. We are forced to
own that the sentiments of man are subjected to the effects of a
hidden process: the fever of time, which produces lassitude, also
dissipates illusion, undermines our passions, withers our loves, and
changes our hearts even as it changes our locks and our years. There
is but one exception to this human infirmity. There sometimes occurs
in a strong soul a love firm enough to transform itself into
impassioned friendship, so as to become a duty, and appropriate the
qualities of virtue. Then, neutralizing the weakness of nature, it
acquires the immortality of a principle."
Before leaving this part of the theme, it may not be out of place to
express the belief, a belief founded on no hurried inference from a
narrow survey of history, or from a superficial study of the data in
the breast, that the greatest number of examples of the most
impassioned, absorbing, and lasting affection between the sexes have
occurred within the ties of marriage, and not outside of those ties.
More than other kindred relations, these rest on the nourishing basis
of public law and social honor, as well as of personal esteem and
avowed identification of interests. Whatever necessitates secrecy, or
compromises the fullness and frankness of self respect, even if it
give piquancy and fire, takes away moral health, steady integrity;
and inserts an insidious element, either of devouring fever or of
slow decay. Other things being equal, affection, wedded under every
legal and moral sanction, reaches the highest climax and is the most
complete and enduring. Every failure implies some defect in the
conditions. The readiness, in general, of illicit love to admit a
substitute, its facility of consolation and forgetfullness when any
fatal calamity has removed its object, demonstrates both its lower
origin and its baser nature. In a well consorted marriage, the soul,
the mind, esteem and faith, the pure strain of friendship, enter more
largely. The grave is not the boundary of its functions. After death,
the love is cherished in the ideal fife of the mind as vividly as
ever, and with an added sanctity. Widowed memory clings to the
disconsolate happiness of sitting by the fountain of oblivion, and
drawing up the sunken treasure. If, as Statius said, to love the
living be a pleasant indulgence, to love the dead is a religious
duty:
Vivam amare, voluptas; defunctam, religio.
A multitude of nameless husbands and wives have experienced this
truth in their bereavement; their love not decaying, but passing into
resurrection. The Hindus have a fine parable of Kamadeva, the eastern
Cupid. He shot Siva, who, turning on him in rage, reduced the
mischievous archer to ashes. All the gods wept over his ashes. Then
he arose in spiritual form, free from every physical trait or
quality. Literature, both eastern and western, ancient and modern,
gives us many instances of conjugal love outliving death, and, in
holy tenderness of dedication, pleasing itself with all kinds of
ideal restorations and celebrations of its object.
When Mausolus, king of Curia, died, his widow, Queen Artemisia,
seemed thenceforth almost wholly absorbed in the memory of him. She
built to him, at Halicarnassus, that magnificent monument, or
mausoleum, which was known as one of the seven wonders of the world,
and which became the generic name for all superb sepulchres. She
employed the most renowned rhetors of the age to immortalize the
glory of her husband, by writing and reciting his praises. At the
consecration of the wondrous fabric which she had reared in his
honor, she offered a prize for the most eloquent eulogy on Mausolus.
All the orators of Greece were invited to the contest. Theopompus
bore off the prize. It is said, that, during the two years by which
she survived her royal spouse, she daily mixed some of his ashes with
her drink, so that, ere their spirits met in Hades, her body was the
tomb of his. Unquestionably there is something greatly overstrained
in this; but the whole story is one of the most signal instances,
handed down from the past, of an intense wedded affection triumphant
over death, and crowning itself with death.
Still more costly honors than Artemisia lavished on her Mausolus, did
the Great Mogul, Shah Jehan, grandson of Akhar and father of
Aurungzebe, pay to his idolized wife, Moomtaza Mahul. She died, in
1631, in giving birth to a daughter. Shah Jehan's love for this
exquisite being appears to have been supreme and irreplaceable. In
her last moments, she made two requests: one, that he would build an
imposing tomb for her; the other, that he would never marry again. He
assented to both requests, and kept his word. His reign was the
culminating period of the prosperity, power, and pomp of the empire.
The gorgeousness of his state beggars description; but those terrible
British, destined to overshadow and destroy it, were already
beginning to get a foothold in India. Little, however, did the
imperial mourner, Shah Jehan, heed them.
He at once set his architects at work, with twenty thousand laborers,
to build over his lost Moomtaza a memorial worthy of her loveliness
and of his grief. For twenty two years they toiled, when, at a cost
equivalent to twenty million dollars now, unveiled from every
disfiguring accompaniment, rose on the banks of the clear blue Jumna,
at Agra, where it still stands to enchant the soul of every traveller
who approaches, the Taj Mahul, the most exquisite building on the
globe, an angelic dream of beauty, materialized, and translated to
earth. It is a romance, at once of oriental royalty, of marriage, and
of the human heart, that the unrivalled pearl of architecture in all
the world should thus be a tomb reared over the body of his wife by
the proudest monarch of the East.
Colonel Sleeman says, "Of no building on earth had I heard so much as
of this; for over five and twenty years, I had been looking forward
to the sight of it. And, from the first glimpse of the dome and
minarets on the distant horizon, to the last glance back from my tent
ropes to the magnificent gateway, I can truly say that every thing
surpassed my expectations. After going repeatedly over every part,
and examining the total view, from every position and in all possible
lights, from that of full moon at midnight in a cloudless sky, to
that of the noonday sun, the mind reposes in the calm persuasion,
that there is an entire harmony of parts, a faultless congregation of
architectural beauties, on which it could dwell for ever without
fatigue; and one leaves it with a feeling of regret that he cannot
have it all his life within his reach, and of assurance that the
image of what he has seen can never be obliterated from his mind
while memory holds her seat."
The quadrangle in which the structure stands is 964 feet one way, 329
the other. The area around is laid out in parterres, planted with
flowers, blossoming shrubs, and cypresses, interlaced by rows of
bubbling fountains, and avenues paved with freestone slabs. The
mausoleum itself, the terrace, and the minarets, are all formed of
the finest white marble, and thickly inlaid with precious stones. The
funeral vault is a miracle of coolness, softness, splendor,
tenderness, and solemnity. Fergusson, the historian of architecture,
says, "No words can express the chastened beauty of that central
chamber, the most graceful and the most impressive of all the
sepulchres of the world." When, in that vault, before the two
sarcophagi containing the bodies of Moomtaza and Shah Jehan, the
priest reads the Koran in a sort of mournful chant, or an attendant
plays with subdued breathings on a flute, the notes are borne up into
the numerous arcades and domes, reduplicated, intermingled, dying
away, fainter and fainter, sweeter and sweeter, until the ravished
hearer, as he departs, can remember no more than that the sounds were
heavenly, and produced a heavenly effect, making him feel, that, if
to die were to listen for ever to those tones, death would be
inconceivable bliss.
Russell, in his "Diary in India," thus records the impression the
scene made on him: "Write a description of the Taj! As well write a
description of that lovely dream which flushed the poet's cheek, or
gently moved the painter's hand, as he lay trembling with delight,
the Endymion of the glorious Art Goddess, who reveals herself and
then floats softly away among the moonbeams and the dew clouds, as he
springs up to grasp the melting form! Here is a dream in marble, the
Taj: solid, permanent; but who, with pen or pencil, can convey to him
who has not seen it the exquisite delight with which the structure
imbues the mind at the first glance, the proportions and the beauty
of this strange loveliness, which rises in the Indian waste, as some
tall palm springs by the fountain in a barren wilderness? It is wrong
to call it a dream in marble: it is a thought, an idea, a conception
of tenderness, a sigh of eternal devotion and love, caught and imbued
with earthly immortality. There it stands in its astonishing
perfection, rising from a lofty platform of marble of dazzling
whiteness, minarets, dome, portals, all shining like a fresh, crisp
snow wreath. The proportions of the whole are so full of grace and
feeling, that the mind rests quite contented with the general
impression, ere it gives a thought to the details of the building,
the exquisite screens of marble in the windows, the fretted porches,
the arched doorways, from which a shower of fleecy marble, mingled
with a rain of gems, seems about to fall on you; the solid walls
melting and glowing with tendrils of bright flowers and wreaths of
blood stone, agate, jasper, carnelian, amethyst, snatched, as it
were, from the garden outside, and pressed into the snowy blocks.
Enter by the doorway in front: the arched roof of the cupola soars
above you, and the light falls dimly on the shrine like tombs in the
centre of the glistening marble, see a winter palace, in whose
glacial walls some gentle hand has buried the last flowers of
autumn." In yon cenotaph, profusely covered with ornamental texts
from the Koran, sleeps the lamented bride of the Indies. "Her lord
lies beside her, in a less costly but loftier casket; and the two
tombs are enclosed by a lattice of white marble, which is cut and
carved as though it were of the softest substance in the world. A
light burns in the tombs, and garlands of flowers are laid over the
rich imitations of themselves. Hark as you whisper gently, there
rolls through the obscure vault overhead a murmur like that of the
sea on a pebbly beach in summer. A white bearded priest, who never
raises his eyes from his book as we pass, suddenly reads out a verse
from the Koran. Hark! How an invisible choir takes it up, till the
reverberated echoes swell into a full volume of sound, as though some
congregation of the skies were chanting their hymns above our heads.
The eye fills and the lip quivers, we know not why: a sigh and a tear
are the tribute which every heart that can be moved to pity, or has
thrilled with love, must pay to the builder of the Taj."
Who that reads this tender romance of love and loss, pride and grief
and peerless memorial, will not sometimes amidst enchanted
recollections of Nala and Damayanti, Haroun Al Raschid and Zobeide,
Shahriar and Scheherazade in his recurring thoughts allow a place for
the imperfectly known but fascinating story of Shah Jehan and
Moomtaza Mahul?