Women, he has said in his
"First Blast," are "weak, frail, impatient, feeble, and foolish"; and
yet it does not appear that he was himself any less dependent than other
men upon the sympathy and affection of these weak, frail, impatient,
feeble, and foolish creatures; it seems even as if he had been rather
more dependent than most. Of those who are to act influentially on their fellows, we should expect
always something large and public in their way of life, something more
or less urbane and comprehensive in their sentiment for others. We
should not expect to see them spend their sympathy in idyls, however
beautiful. We should not seek them among those who, if they have but a
wife to their bosom, ask no more of womankind, just as they ask no more
of their own sex, if they can find a friend or two for their immediate
need. They will be quick to feel all the pleasures of our
association--not the great ones alone, but all. They will know not love
only, but all those other ways in which man and woman mutually make each
other happy--by sympathy, by admiration, by the atmosphere they bear
about them--down to the mere impersonal pleasure of passing happy faces
in the street. For, through all this gradation, the difference of sex
makes itself pleasurably felt. Down to the most lukewarm courtesies of
life, there is a special chivalry due and a special pleasure received,
when the two sexes are brought ever so lightly into contact. We love our
mothers otherwise than we love our fathers; a sister is not as a brother
to us; and friendship between man and woman, be it never so unalloyed
and innocent, is not the same as friendship between man and man. Such
friendship is not even possible for all. To conjoin tenderness for a
woman that is not far short of passionate with such disinterestedness
and beautiful gratuity of affection as there is between friends of the
same sex, requires no ordinary disposition in the man. For either it
would presuppose quite womanly delicacy of perception, and, as it were,
a curiosity in shades of differing sentiment; or it would mean that he
had accepted the large, simple divisions of society: a strong and
positive spirit robustly virtuous, who has chosen a better part
coarsely, and holds to it steadfastly, with all its consequences of pain
to himself and others; as one who should go straight before him on a
journey, neither tempted by wayside flowers nor very scrupulous of small
lives under foot. It was in virtue of this latter disposition that Knox
was capable of those intimacies with women that embellished his life;
and we find him preserved for us in old letters as a man of many women
friends; a man of some expansion toward the other sex; a man ever ready
to comfort weeping women, and to weep along with them. Of such scraps and fragments of evidence as to his private life and more
intimate thoughts as have survived to us from all the perils that
environ written paper, an astonishingly large proportion is in the shape
of letters to women of his familiarity. He was twice married, but that
is not greatly to the purpose; for the Turk, who thinks even more meanly
of women than John Knox, is none the less given to marrying. What is
really significant is quite apart from marriage. For the man Knox was a
true man, and woman, the _ewig-weibliche_, was as necessary to him, in
spite of all low theories, as ever she was to Goethe. He came to her in
a certain halo of his own, as the minister of truth, just as Goethe came
to her in a glory of art; he made himself necessary to troubled hearts
and minds exercised in the painful complications that naturally result
from all changes in the world's way of thinking; and those whom he had
thus helped became dear to him, and were made the chosen companions of
his leisure if they were at hand, or encouraged and comforted by letter
if they were afar. It must not be forgotten that Knox had been a presbyter of the old
Church, and that the many women whom we shall see gathering around him,
as he goes through life, had probably been accustomed, while still in
the communion of Rome, to rely much upon some chosen spiritual director,
so that the intimacies of which I propose to offer some account, while
testifying to a good heart in the Reformer, testify also to a certain
survival of the spirit of the confessional in the Reformed Church, and
are not properly to be judged without this idea. There is no friendship
so noble, but it is the product of the time; and a world of little
finical observances, and little frail proprieties and fashions of the
hour, go to make or to mar, to stint or to perfect, the union of
spirits the most loving and the most intolerant of such interference. The trick of the country and the age steps in even between the mother
and her child, counts out their caresses upon niggardly fingers, and
says, in the voice of authority, that this one thing shall be a matter
of confidence between them, and this other thing shall not. And thus it
is that we must take into reckoning whatever tended to modify the social
atmosphere in which Knox and his women friends met, and loved and
trusted each other. To the man who had been their priest, and was now
their minister, women would be able to speak with a confidence quite
impossible in these latter days; the women would be able to speak, and
the man to hear. It was a beaten road just then; and I daresay we should
be no less scandalised at their plain speech than they, if they could
come back to earth, would be offended at our waltzes and worldly
fashions. This, then, was the footing on which Knox stood with his many
women friends. The reader will see, as he goes on, how much of warmth,
of interest, and of that happy mutual dependence which is the very gist
of friendship, he contrived to ingraft upon this somewhat dry
relationship of penitent and confessor. It must be understood that we know nothing of his intercourse with women
(as indeed we know little at all about his life) until he came to
Berwick in 1549, when he was already in the forty-fifth year of his age. At the same time it is just possible that some of a little group at
Edinburgh, with whom he corresponded during his last absence, may have
been friends of an older standing. Certainly they were, of all his
female correspondents, the least personally favoured. He treats them
throughout in a comprehensive sort of spirit that must at times have
been a little wounding. Thus, he remits one of them to his former
letters, "which I trust be common betwixt you and the rest of our
sisters, for to me ye are all equal in Christ. "[82] Another letter is a
gem in this way. "Albeit," it begins, "albeit I have no particular
matter to write unto you, beloved sister, yet I could not refrain to
write these few lines to you in declaration of my remembrance of you.