If we now turn to the two remaining species of personal
affection—Friendship and Love—the emotional scenery undergoes a great
change. In all the cases so far considered, blood-relationship was _a
source of affection_; whereas in friendship it is commonly a
disadvantage, and in Romantic Love it is positively abhorred, except in
the more remote degrees. Some savage tribes, it is true, allow, or even
prescribe, marriages between brother and sister—especially a younger
sister; and cases occur of marriages between father and daughter, mother
and son. But civilised society—guided by religious precepts, and
possibly also by a vague instinctive recognition of the advantages of
cross-fertilisation—condemns such unions as hideous crimes; and the
mediæval theologians, in their extreme zeal, forbade all marriages
within the seventh degree of relationship.
In the case of friendship the objection to blood-relationship is not
founded on a social or religious precept; but it exists all the same, as
already noted. Perhaps Jean Paul’s maxim that friends may have
everything in common except their room accounts for its existence.
Brothers and sisters are commonly too much alike in their thoughts and
tastes to become friends, in the special sense of the word. Hence it is
that there is apt to be a deeper attachment between those brothers and
sisters who have frequently been separated by school-terms than among
those who are always together. For in friendship, as in love, a short
absence is advantageous.
Friendship is partly an outgrowth of the social instinct and partly a
result of special associations, habit, community of interests and
tastes. As a boy I had an opportunity to make some interesting
observations on friendship among animals, showing that it differed in
degree only, and not in kind or origin, from that of man. Among the
animals we kept at our country-house were a dog, a pet sheep, and some
pigs. The dog showed his confidence in the sheep’s amiable forbearance
by abandoning his cold kennel on winter nights and seeking warmer
quarters by the side of his woolly neighbour. For the pigs his friendly
regards were shown in a less utilitarian manner, by driving away,
unbidden and untaught, any swinish tramps that appeared, uninvited, to
share their meals. But the most peculiar relations existed between the
sheep and the pigs. In the absence of any other means of satisfying its
gregarious or social instincts, the sheep joined the pigs every morning
in their foraging expeditions in the woods, returning with them in the
evening. And, what was still more remarkable, when after a time a dozen
sheep were added to our stock of animals, the old pet remained faithful
to the pigs, and paid no attention whatever to the newcomers. Here the
friendly attachment, based on habitual association and the memory of
mutual pleasures of grazing, was strong enough to overcome the inherited
fellow-feeling for members of its own species.
Between this instance and those ordinary cases of companionship among
men which are called friendship, there is hardly any difference. In the
more intimate cases of special friendship the craving for companionship
is strengthened by a community of thoughts and emotions. Bacon gives us
in a nut-shell three of the ingredients of friendship which are not to
be found in the primitive form just considered. The first is this, that
each friend becomes a sort of secular confessor, to whom the other may
confide all his hopes and fears, joys and sorrows; the second is this,
that “a friend’s wits and understanding do clarify and break up in the
communicating and discoursing with another;” so that “he waxeth wiser
than himself; and that more by an hour’s discourse than by a day’s
meditation;” the third is the “aid and bearing a part in all actions and
occasions” to be expected of a friend.
Friendship is not a modern sentiment. Cases of it such as existed among
the ancient Greeks and Romans, characterised by an ardour that made
Friendship resemble the Love passion, are no longer to be met with,
although a somewhat less intense form frequently occurs among young men
at college or young ladies in high schools: thus illustrating the law
that the individual passes through the same stages of development as the
race.
“The enthusiasm of friendship,” says Voltaire in his _Philosophic
Dictionary_, “was greater among the Greeks and Arabians than it is among
ourselves. The tales which these peoples have imagined on friendship are
delightful; we have nothing to match them. We are somewhat dry in
everything. I do not see a single grand trait of friendship in our
novels, in our histories, on our stage.”
Why is this so? Let another Frenchman, La Rochefoucauld, answer: “The
reason why the majority of women are but little touched by friendship,
is because it seems insipid after one has experienced love.”
Precisely. The reason why the ancients, in their histories and dramas,
made so much of friendship, while modern poets almost ignore it, is that
the latter have a subject a thousand times more fascinating than
friendship, a subject unknown to the ancients—the inexhaustible subject
of Romantic Love.