Alger, William Rounseville, 1822-1905 / 2008-09-04 00:00:00


HAVE WOMEN NO FRIENDSHIPS?
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.
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