brutality and triviality and irreverence, that the religious man is
prone to bring against him. He can care more deeply about things
because he can see so much more widely. And he can take life very
seriously because it interests him so intensely. And he can feel
its poignancy and its flux more keenly because he delivers himself
up bravely to its swirling, many-hued current. The inner peace of
religion seems gained only at the expense of the reality of living. A
life such as the life of irony, lived fully and joyously, cannot be
peaceful; it cannot even be happy, in the sense of calm content and
satisfaction. But it can be better than either--it can be wise, and it
can be fruitful. And it can be good, in a way that the life of inner
peace cannot be. For the life of irony having no reserve and weaving
itself out of the flux of experience rather than out of eternal values
has the broad, honest sympathy of democracy, that is impossible to any
temperament with the aristocratic taint. One advantage the religious
life has is a salvation in another world to which it can withdraw. The
life of irony has laid up few treasures in heaven, but many in this
world. Having gained so much it has much to lose. But its glory is that
it can lose nothing unless it lose all.
To shafts of fortune and blows of friends or enemies then, the ironist
is almost impregnable. He knows how to parry each thrust and prepare
for every emergency. Even if the arrows reach him, all the poison has
been sucked out of them by his clear, resolute understanding of their
significance. There is but one weak spot in his armor, but one disaster
that he fears more almost than the loss of his life,--a shrinkage of
his environment, a running dry of experience. He fears to be cut off
from friends and crowds and human faces and speech and books, for
he demands to be ceaselessly fed. Like a modern city, he is totally
dependent on a steady flow of supplies from the outside world, and
will be in danger of starvation, if the lines of communication are
interrupted. Without people and opinions for his mind to play on, his
irony withers and faints. He has not the faculty of brooding; he cannot
mine the depths of his own soul, and bring forth after labor mighty
nuggets of thought. The flow and swirl of things is his compelling
interest. His thoughts are reactions, immediate and vivid, to his daily
experience. Some deep, unconscious brooding must go on, to produce that
happy precision of judgment of his; but it is not voluntary. He is
conscious only of the shifting light and play of life; his world is
dynamic, energetic, changing. He lives in a world of relations, and he
must have a whole store of things to be related. He has lost himself
completely in this world he lives in. His ironical interpretation
of the world is his life, and this world is his nourishment. Take
away this environmental world and you have slain his soul. He is
invulnerable to everything except that deprivation.
V
THE EXCITEMENT OF FRIENDSHIP
My friends, I can say with truth, since I have no other treasure,
are my fortune. I really live only when I am with my friends. Those
sufficient persons who can pass happily long periods of solitude
communing with their own thoughts and nourishing their own souls
fill me with a despairing admiration. Their gift of auto-stimulation
argues a personal power which I shall never possess. Or else it
argues, as I like to think in self-defense, a callousness of spirit,
an insensitiveness to the outside influences which nourish and sustain
the more susceptible mind. And those persons who can shut themselves
up for long periods and work out their thoughts alone, constructing
beautiful and orderly representations of their own spirits, are to me a
continual mystery. I know this is the way that things are accomplished,
that “monotony and solitude” are necessary for him who would produce
creative thought. Yet, knowing well this truth, I shun them both. I am
a battery that needs to be often recharged. I require the excitement
of friendship; I must have the constant stimulation of friends. I do
not spark automatically, but must have other minds to rub up against,
and strike from them by friction the spark that will kindle my thoughts.
When I walk, I must have a friend to talk to, or I shall not even
think. I am not of those who, like Stevenson, believe that walking
should be a kind of vegetative stupor, where the sun and air merely
fill one with a diffused sense of well-being and exclude definite
thought. The wind should rather blow through the dusty regions of the
mind, and the sun light up its dark corners, and thinking and talking
should be saner and higher and more joyful than within doors. But one
must have a friend along to open the windows. Neither can I sympathize
with those persons who carry on long chains of reasoning while they
are traveling or walking. When alone, my thinking is as desultory as
the scenery of the roadside, and when with a friend, it is apt to
be as full of romantic surprises as a walk through a woodland glen.
Good talk is like good scenery--continuous yet constantly varying,
and full of the charm of novelty and surprise. How unnatural it is
to think except when one is forced to do it, is discovered when one
attempts to analyze one’s thoughts when alone. He is a rare genius who
finds something beyond the mere visual images that float through his
mind,--either the reflection of what he is actually seeing, or the
pictorial representations of what he has been doing or what he wants
or intends to do in the near or far future. We should be shocked to
confess to ourselves how little control we have over our own minds; we
shall be lucky if we can believe that we guide them.
Thinking, then, was given us for use in emergencies, and no man can
be justly blamed if he reserves it for emergencies. He can be blamed,
however, if he does not expose himself to those crises which will call
it forth. Now a friend is such an emergency, perhaps the most exciting
stimulus to thinking that one can find, and if one wants to live beyond
the vegetative stupor, one must surround one’s self with friends. I
shall call my friends, then, all those influences which warm me and
start running again all my currents of thought and imagination. The
persons, causes, and books that unlock the prison of my intellectual
torpor, I can justly call my friends, for I find that I feel toward
them all the same eager joy and inexhaustible rush of welcome. Where
they differ it shall be in degree and not in kind. The speaker whom
I hear, the book that I read, the friend with whom I chat, the music
that I play, even the blank paper before me, which subtly stirs me
to cover it with sentences that unfold surprisingly and entice me to
follow until I seem hopelessly lost from the trail,--all these shall be
my friends as long as I find myself responding to them, and no longer.
They are all alike in being emergencies that call upon me for instant
and definite response.
The difference between them lies in their response to me. My personal
friends react upon me; the lecturers and books and music and pictures
do not. These are not influenced by my feelings or by what I do. I
can approach them cautiously or boldly, respond to them slowly or
warmly, and they will not care. They have a definite quality, and do
not change; if I respond differently to them at different times, I
know that it is I and not they who have altered. The excitement of
friendship does not lie with them. One feels this lack particularly
in reading, which no amount of enthusiasm can make more than a feeble
and spiritless performance. The more enthusiasm the reading inspires
in one, the more one rebels at the passivity into which one is forced.
I want to get somehow at grips with the book. I can feel the warmth
of the personality behind it, but I cannot see the face as I can the
face of a person, lighting and changing with the iridescent play of
expression. It is better with music; one can get at grips with one’s
piano, and feel the resistance and the response of the music one plays.
One gets the sense of aiding somehow in its creation, the lack of which
feeling is the fatal weakness of reading, though itself the easiest
and most universal of friendly stimulations. One comes from much
reading with a sense of depression and a vague feeling of something
unsatisfied; from friends or music one comes with a high sense of
elation and of the brimming adequacy of life.
If one could only retain those moments! What a tragedy it is that our
periods of stimulated thinking should be so difficult of reproduction;
that there is no intellectual shorthand to take down the keen
thoughts, the trains of argument, the pregnant thoughts, which spring
so spontaneously to the mind at such times! What a tragedy that one
must wait till the fire has died out, till the light has faded away,
to transcribe the dull flickering remembrances of those golden hours
when thought and feeling seemed to have melted together, and one
said and thought what seemed truest and finest and most worthy of
one’s immortalizing! This is what constitutes the hopeless labor of
writing,--that one must struggle constantly to warm again the thoughts
that are cold or have been utterly consumed. What was thought in the
hours of stimulation must be written in the hours of solitude, when the
mind is apt to be cold and gray, and when one is fortunate to find on
the hearth of the memory even a few scattered embers lying about. The
blood runs sluggish as one sits down to write. What worry and striving
it takes to get it running freely again! What labor to reproduce even
a semblance of what seemed to come so genially and naturally in the
contact and intercourse of friendship!
One of the curious superstitions of friendship is that we somehow
choose our friends. To the connoisseur in friendship no idea could be
more amazing and incredible. Our friends are chosen for us by some
hidden law of sympathy, and not by our conscious wills. All we know
is that in our reactions to people we are attracted to some and are
indifferent to others. And the ground of this mutual interest seems
based on no discoverable principles of similarity of temperament or
character. We have no time, when meeting a new person, to study him or
her carefully; our reactions are swift and immediate. Our minds are
made up instantly,--“friend or non-friend.” By some subtle intuitions,
we know and have measured at their first words all the possibilities
which their friendship has in store for us. We get the full quality of
their personality at the first shock of meeting, and no future intimacy
changes that quality.
If I am to like a man, I like him at once; further acquaintance
can only broaden and deepen that liking and understanding. If I am
destined to respond, I respond at once or never. If I do not respond,
he continues to be to me as if I had never met him; he does not exist
in my world. His thoughts, feelings, and interests I can but dimly
conceive of; if I do think of him it is only as a member of some
general class. My imaginative sympathy can embrace him only as a type.
If his interests are in some way forced upon my attention, and my
imagination is compelled to encompass him as an individual, I find his
ideas and interests appearing like pale, shadowy things, dim ghosts of
the real world that my friends and I live in.
Association with such aliens--and how much of our life is necessarily
spent in their company--is a torture far worse than being actually
disliked. Probably they do not dislike us, but there is this strange
gulf which cuts us off from their possible sympathy. A pall seems
to hang over our spirits; our souls are dumb. It is a struggle and
an effort to affect them at all. And though we may know that this
depressing weight which seems to press on us in our intercourse
with them has no existence, yet this realization does not cure our
helplessness. We do not exist for them any more than they exist for
us. They are depressants, not stimulators as are our friends. Our
words sound singularly futile and half-hearted as they pass our lips.
Our thoughts turn to ashes as we utter them. In the grip of this
predestined antipathy we can do nothing but submit and pass on.
But in how different a light do we see our friends! They are no types,
but each a unique, exhaustless personality, with his own absorbing
little cosmos of interests round him. And those interests are real and
vital, and in some way interwoven with one’s own cosmos. Our friends
are those whose worlds overlap our own, like intersecting circles.
If there is too much overlapping, however, there is monotony and a
mutual cancellation. It is, perhaps, a question of attitude as much as
anything. Our friends must be pointed in the same direction in which we
are going, and the truest friendship and delight is when we can watch
each other’s attitude toward life grow increasingly similar; or if not
similar, at least so sympathetic as to be mutually complementary and
sustaining.
The wholesale expatriation from our world of all who do not overlap us
or look at life in a similar direction is so fatal to success that we
cannot afford to let these subtle forces of friendship and apathy have
full sway with our souls. To be at the mercy of whatever preordained
relations may have been set up between us and the people we meet is
to make us incapable of negotiating business in a world where one
must be all things to all men. From an early age, therefore, we work,
instinctively or consciously, to get our reactions under control, so
as to direct them in the way most profitable to us. By a slow and
imperceptible accretion of impersonality over the erratic tendencies
of personal response and feeling, we acquire the professional
manner, which opens the world wide to us. We become human patterns
of the profession into which we have fallen, and are no longer
individual personalities. Men find no difficulty in becoming soon so
professionalized that their manner to their children at home is almost
identical with that to their clients in the office. Such an extinction
of the personality is a costly price to pay for worldly success. One
has integrated one’s character, perhaps, but at the cost of the zest
and verve and peril of true friendship.
To those of us, then, who have not been tempted by success, or who
have been so fortunate as to escape it, friendship is a life-long
adventure. We do not integrate ourselves, and we have as many sides to
our character as we have friends to show them to. Quite unconsciously I
find myself witty with one friend, large and magnanimous with another,
petulant and stingy with another, wise and grave with another, and
utterly frivolous with another. I watch with surprise the sudden
and startling changes in myself as I pass from the influence of one
friend to the influence of some one else. But my character with each
particular friend is constant. I find myself, whenever I meet him,
with much the same emotional and mental tone. If we talk, there is
with each one some definite subject upon which we always speak and
which remains perennially fresh and new. If I am so unfortunate as to
stray accidentally from one of these well-worn fields into another, I
am instantly reminded of the fact by the strangeness and chill of the
atmosphere. We are happy only on our familiar levels, but on these
we feel that we could go on exhaustless forever, without a pang of
ennui. And this inexhaustibility of talk is the truest evidence of good
friendship.
Friends do not, on the other hand, always talk of what is nearest
to them. Friendship requires that there be an open channel between
friends, but it does not demand that that channel be the deepest in our
nature. It may be of the shallowest kind and yet the friendship be of
the truest. For all the different traits of our nature must get their
airing through friends, the trivial as well as the significant. We let
ourselves out piecemeal, it seems, so that only with a host of varied
friends can we express ourselves to the fullest. Each friend calls out
some particular trait in us, and it requires the whole chorus fitly to
teach us what we are. This is the imperative need of friendship. A man
with few friends is only half-developed; there are whole sides of his
nature which are locked up and have never been expressed. He cannot
unlock them himself, he cannot even discover them; friends alone can
stimulate him and open them. Such a man is in prison; his soul is in
penal solitude. A man must get friends as he would get food and drink
for nourishment and sustenance. And he must keep them, as he would keep
health and wealth, as the infallible safeguards against misery and
poverty of spirit.
If it seems selfish to insist so urgently upon one’s need for friends,
if it should be asked what we are giving our friends in return for
all their spiritual fortification and nourishment, the defense would
have to be, that we give back to them in ample measure what they give
to us. If we are their friends, we are stimulating them as they are
stimulating us. They will find that they talk with unusual brilliancy
when they are with us. And we may find that we have, perhaps, merely
listened to them. Yet through that curious bond of sympathy which has
made us friends, we have done as much for them as if we had exerted
ourselves in the most active way. The only duty of friendship is that
we and our friends should live at our highest and best when together.
Having achieved that, we have fulfilled the law.
A good friendship, strange to say, has little place for mutual
consolations and ministrations. Friendship breathes a more rugged air.
In sorrow the silent pressure of the hand speaks the emotions, and
lesser griefs and misfortunes are ignored or glossed over. The fatal
facility of women’s friendships, their copious outpourings of grief to
each other, their sharing of wounds and sufferings, their half-pleased
interest in misfortune,--all this seems of a lesser order than the
robust friendships of men, who console each other in a much more
subtle, even intuitive way,--by a constant pervading sympathy which is
felt rather than expressed. For the true atmosphere of friendship is
a sunny one. Griefs and disappointments do not thrive in its clear,
healthy light. When they do appear, they take on a new color. The
silver lining appears, and we see even our own personal mistakes and
chagrins as whimsical adventures. It is almost impossible seriously
to believe in one’s bad luck or failures or incapacity while one is
talking with a friend. One achieves a sort of transfiguration of
personality in those moments. In the midst of the high and genial flow
of intimate talk, a pang may seize one at the thought of the next day’s
drudgery, when life will be lived alone again; but nothing can dispel
the ease and fullness with which it is being lived at the moment. It
is, indeed, a heavy care that will not dissolve into misty air at the
magic touch of a friend’s voice.
Fine as friendship is, there is nothing irrevocable about it. The
bonds of friendship are not iron bonds, proof against the strongest of
strains and the heaviest of assaults. A man by becoming your friend
has not committed himself to all the demands which you may be pleased
to make upon him. Foolish people like to test the bonds of their
friendships, pulling upon them to see how much strain they will stand.
When they snap, it is as if friendship itself had been proved unworthy.
But the truth is that good friendships are fragile things and require
as much care in handling as any other fragile and precious things.
For friendship is an adventure and a romance, and in adventures it is
the unexpected that happens. It is the zest of peril that makes the
excitement of friendship. All that is unpleasant and unfavorable is
foreign to its atmosphere; there is no place in friendship for harsh
criticism or fault-finding. We will “take less” from a friend than we
will from one who is indifferent to us.
Good friendship is lived on a warm, impetuous plane; the long-suffering
kind of friendship is a feeble and, at best, a half-hearted affair.
It is friendship in the valley and not on the breezy heights. For the
secret of friendship is a mutual admiration, and it is the realization
or suspicion that that admiration is lessening on one side or the other
that swiftly breaks the charm. Now this admiration must have in it no
taint of adulation, which will wreck a friendship as soon as suspicion
will. But it must consist of the conviction, subtly expressed in every
tone of the voice, that each has found in the other friend a rare
spirit, compounded of light and intelligence and charm. And there must
be no open expression of this feeling, but only the silent flattery,
soft and almost imperceptible.
And in the best of friendships this feeling is equal on both sides.
Too great a superiority in our friend disturbs the balance, and casts
a sort of artificial light on the talk and intercourse. We want to
believe that we are fairly equal to our friends in power and capacity,
and that if they excel us in one trait, we have some counterbalancing
quality in another direction. It is the reverse side of this shield
that gives point to the diabolical insight of the Frenchman who
remarked that we were never heartbroken by the misfortunes of our
best friends. If we have had misfortunes, it is not wholly unjust and
unfortunate that our friends should suffer too. Only their misfortunes
must not be worse than ours. For the equilibrium is then destroyed,
and our serious alarm and sympathy aroused. Similarly we rejoice in
the good fortune of our friends, always provided that it be not too
dazzling or too undeserved.
It is these aspects of friendship, which cannot be sneered away by the
reproach of jealousy, that make friendship a precarious and adventurous
thing. But it is precious in proportion to its precariousness, and its
littlenesses are but the symptoms of how much friends care, and how
sensitive they are to all the secret bonds and influences that unite
them.
Since our friends have all become woven into our very selves, to part
from friends is to lose, in a measure, one’s self. He is a brave and
hardy soul who can retain his personality after his friends are gone.
And since each friend is the key which unlocks an aspect of one’s own
personality, to lose a friend is to cut away a part of one’s self. I
may make another friend to replace the loss, but the unique quality
of the first friend can never be brought back. He leaves a wound which
heals only gradually. To have him go away is as bad as to have him pass
to another world. The letter is so miserable a travesty on the personal
presence, a thin ghost of the thought of the once-present friend. It
is as satisfactory as a whiff of stale tobacco smoke to the lover of
smoking.
Those persons and things, then, that inspire us to do our best, that
make us live at our best, when we are in their presence, that call
forth from us our latent and unsuspected personality, that nourish and
support that personality,--those are our friends. The reflection of
their glow makes bright the darker and quieter hours when they are not
with us. They are a true part of our widest self; we should hardly have
a self without them. Their world is one where chagrin and failure do
not enter. Like the sun-dial, they “only mark the shining hours.”
VI
THE ADVENTURE OF LIFE
That life is an adventure it needs nothing more than the wonder of
our being in the world and the precariousness of our stay in it to
inform us. Although we are, perhaps, as the scientists tell us, mere
inert accompaniments of certain bundles of organized matter, we tend
incorrigibly to think of ourselves as unique personalities. And as
we let our imagination roam over the world and dwell on the infinite
variety of scenes and thoughts and feelings and forms of life, we
wonder at the incredible marvel that has placed us just here in this
age and country and locality where we were born. That it should be
this particular place and time and body that my consciousness is
illuminating gives, indeed, the thrill of wonder and adventure to the
mere fact of my becoming and being.