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Considering that most friendships are made by mere hazard, how is it
that men find themselves equipped and fortified with just the friends
they need? We have heard of men who asserted that they would like to
have more money, or more books, or more pairs of pyjamas; but we have
never heard of a man saying that he did not have enough friends. For,
while one can never have too many friends, yet those one has are always
enough. They satisfy us completely. One has never met a man who would
say, "I wish I had a friend who would combine the good humour of A, the
mystical enthusiasm of B, the love of doughnuts which is such an
endearing quality in C, and who would also have the habit of giving
Sunday evening suppers like D, and the well-stocked cellar which is so
deplorably lacking in E." No; the curious thing is that at any time and
in any settled way of life a man is generally provided with friends far
in excess of his desert, and also in excess of his capacity to absorb
their wisdom and affectionate attentions.
There is some pleasant secret behind this, a secret that none is wise
enough to fathom. The infinite fund of disinterested humane kindliness
that is adrift in the world is part of the riddle, the insoluble riddle
of life that is born in our blood and tissue. It is agreeable to think
that no man, save by his own gross fault, ever went through life
unfriended, without companions to whom he could stammer his momentary
impulses of sagacity, to whom he could turn in hours of loneliness. It
is not even necessary to know a man to be his friend. One can sit at a
lunch counter, observing the moods and whims of the white-coated
pie-passer, and by the time you have juggled a couple of fried eggs you
will have caught some grasp of his philosophy of life, seen the quick
edge and tang of his humour, memorized the shrewdness of his worldly
insight and been as truly stimulated as if you had spent an evening with
your favourite parson.
If there were no such thing as friendship existing to-day, it would
perhaps be difficult to understand what it is like from those who have
written about it. We have tried, from time to time, to read Emerson's
enigmatic and rather frigid essay. It seems that Emerson must have put
his cronies to a severe test before admitting them to the high-vaulted
and rather draughty halls of his intellect. There are fine passages in
his essay, but it is intellectualized, bloodless, heedless of the
trifling oddities of human intercourse that make friendship so
satisfying. He seems to insist upon a sterile ceremony of mutual
self-improvement, a kind of religious ritual, a profound interchange of
doctrines between soul and soul. His friends (one gathers) are to be
antisepticated, all the poisons and pestilence of their faulty humours
are to be drained away before they may approach the white and icy
operating table of his heart. "Why insist," he says, "on rash personal
relations with your friend? Why go to his house, or know his wife and
family?" And yet does not the botanist like to study the flower in the
soil where it grows?
Polonius, too, is another ancient supposed to be an authority on
friendship. The Polonius family must have been a thoroughly dreary one
to live with; we have often thought that poor Ophelia would have gone
mad anyway, even if there had been no Hamlet. Laertes preaches to
Ophelia; Polonius preaches to Laertes. Laertes escaped by going abroad,
but the girl had to stay at home. Hamlet saw that pithy old Polonius was
a preposterous and orotund ass. Polonius's doctrine of friendship--"The
friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul
with hoops of steel"--was, we trow, a necessary one in his case. It
would need a hoop of steel to keep them near such a dismal old
sawmonger.
Friendships, we think, do not grow up in any such carefully tended and
contemplated fashion as Messrs. Emerson and Polonius suggest. They begin
haphazard. As we look back on the first time we saw our friends we find
that generally our original impression was curiously astray. We have
worked along beside them, have consorted with them drunk or sober, have
grown to cherish their delicious absurdities, have outrageously imposed
on each other's patience--and suddenly we awoke to realize what had
happened. We had, without knowing it, gained a new friend. In some
curious way the unseen border line had been passed. We had reached the
final culmination of Anglo-Saxon regard when two men rarely look each
other straight in the eyes because they are ashamed to show each other
how fond they are. We had reached the fine flower and the ultimate test
of comradeship--that is, when you get a letter from one of your "best
friends," you know you don't need to answer it until you get ready to.
Emerson is right in saying that friendship can't be hurried. It takes
time to ripen. It needs a background of humorous, wearisome, or even
tragic events shared together, a certain tract of memories shared in
common, so that you know that your own life and your companion's have
really moved for some time in the same channel. It needs interchange of
books, meals together, discussion of one another's whims with mutual
friends, to gain a proper perspective. It is set in a rich haze of
half-remembered occasions, sudden glimpses, ludicrous pranks,
unsuspected observations, midnight confidences when heart spoke to
candid heart.
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The soul preaches humility to itself when it realizes, startled, that
it has won a new friend. Knowing what a posset of contradictions we all
are, it feels a symptom of shame at the thought that our friend knows
all our frailties and yet thinks us worth affection. We all have cause
to be shamefast indeed; for whereas we love ourselves in spite of our
faults, our friends often love us even on account of our faults, the
highest level to which attachment can go. And what an infinite appeal
there is in their faces! How we grow to cherish those curious little
fleshy cages--so oddly sculptured--which inclose the spirit within. To
see those faces, bent unconsciously over their tasks--each different,
each unique, each so richly and queerly expressive of the lively and
perverse enigma of man, is a full education in human tolerance.
Privately, one studies his own ill-modeled visnomy to see if by any
chance it bespeaks the emotions he inwardly feels. We know--as Hamlet
did--the vicious mole of nature in us, the o'ergrowth of some complexion
that mars the purity of our secret resolutions. Yet--our friends have
passed it over, have shown their willingness to take us as we are. Can
we do less than hope to deserve their generous tenderness, granted
before it was earned?
The problem of education, said R. L. S., is two-fold--"first to know,
then to utter." Every man knows what friendship means, but few can utter
that complete frankness of communion, based upon full comprehension of
mutual weakness, enlivened by a happy understanding of honourable
intentions generously shared. When we first met our friends we met with
bandaged eyes. We did not know what journeys they had been on, what
winding roads their spirits had travelled, what ingenious shifts they
had devised to circumvent the walls and barriers of the world. We know
these now, for some of them they have told us; others we have guessed.
We have watched them when they little dreamed it; just as they (we
suppose) have done with us. Every gesture and method of their daily
movement have become part of our enjoyment of life. Not until a time
comes for saying good-bye will we ever know how much we would like to
have said. At those times one has to fall back on shrewder tongues. You
remember Hilaire Belloc:
From quiet homes and first beginning
Out to the undiscovered ends,
There's nothing worth the wear of winning
But laughter, and the love of friends.