To make oneself beloved, says an old French proverb, this is, after
all, the best way to be useful. That is one of the deep sayings which
children think flat, and which young men, and even young women, despise;
and which a middle-aged man hears with a certain troubled surprise, and
wonders if there is not something in it after all; and which old people
discover to be true, and think with a sad regret of opportunities
missed, and of years devoted, how unprofitably, to other kinds of
usefulness! The truth is that most of us who have any ambitions at all,
do not start in life with a hope of being useful, but rather with an
intention of being ornamental. We think, like joseph in his childish
dreams, that the sun and moon and the eleven stars, to say nothing
of the sheaves, are going to make obeisance to us. We want to be
impressive, rich, beautiful, influential, admired, envied; and then, as
we move forward, the visions fade. We have to be content if, in a quiet
corner, a single sheaf gives us a nod of recognition; and as for the
eleven stars, they seem unaware of our very existence! And then we
make further discoveries; that when we have seemed to ourselves most
impressive, we have only been pretentious; that riches are only a
talisman against poverty, and even make suffering and pain and grief
more unendurable; that beauty fades into stolidity or weariness; that
influence comes mostly to people who do not pursue it, and that the
best kind of influence belongs to those who do not even know that they
possess it; that admiration is but a brilliant husk, which may or may
not contain a wholesome kernel; and as for envy, there is poison in that
cup! And then we become aware that the best crowns have fallen to those
who have not sought them, and that simple-minded and unselfish people
have won the prize which has been denied to brilliance and ambition.
That is the process which is often called disillusionment; and it is a
sad enough business for people who only look at one side of the medal,
and who brood over the fact that they have been disappointed and have
failed. For such as these, there follow the faded years of cynicism and
dreariness. But that disillusionment, that humiliation, are the freshest
and most beautiful things in the world, for people who have real
generosity of spirit, and whose vanity has been of a superficial kind;
because they thus realise that these great gifts are real and true
things, but that they must be deserved and not captured; and then
perhaps such people begin their life-work afresh, in a humble and
hopeful spirit; and if it be too late for them to do what they might
have once done, they do not waste time in futile regret, but are
grateful for ever so little love and tenderness. After all, they have
lived, they have learnt by experience; and it does not yet appear what
we shall be. Somewhere, far hence--who knows?--we shall make a better
start.
Some philosophers have devoted time and thought to tracing backwards all
our emotions to their primal origin; and it is undoubtedly true that in
the intensest and most passionate relationships of life--the love of a
man for a woman, or a mother for a child--there is a large admixture of
something physical, instinctive, and primal. But the fact also remains
that there are unnumbered relationships between all sorts of apparently
incongruous persons, of which the basis is not physical desire, or the
protective instinct, and is not built up upon any hope of gain or profit
whatsoever. All sorts of qualities may lend a hand to strengthen and
increase and confirm these bonds; but what lies at the base of all is
simply a sort of vital congeniality. The friend is the person whom one
is in need of, and by whom one is needed. Life is a sweeter, stronger,
fuller, more gracious thing for the friend's existence, whether he be
near or far: if the friend is close at hand, that is best; but if he is
far away, he is still there, to think of, to wonder about, to hear from,
to write to, to share life and experience with, to serve, to honour,
to admire, to love. But again it is a mistake to think that one makes
a friend because of his or her qualities; it has nothing to do with
qualities at all. If the friend has noble qualities, we admire them
because they are his; if he has obviously bad and even noxious faults,
how readily we condone them or overlook them! It is the person that we
want, not what he does or says, or does not do or say, but what he is:
that is eternally enough.
Of course, it does sometimes happen that we think we have made a friend,
and on closer acquaintance we find things in him that are alien to our
very being; but even so, such a friendship often survives, if we have
given our heart, or if affection has been bestowed upon us--affection
which we cannot doubt. Some of the richest friendships of all are
friendships between people whose whole view of life is sharply
contrasted; and then what blessed energy can be employed in defending
one's friend, in explaining him to other people, in minimising faults,
in emphasising virtues! "While the thunder lasted," says the old Indian
proverb, "two bad men were friends." That means that a common danger
will sometimes draw even malevolent people together. But, for most of
us, the only essential thing to friendship is a kind of mutual trust and
confidence. It does not even shake our faith to know that our friend may
play other people false: we feel by a kind of secret instinct that he
will not play us false; and even if it be proved incontestably that he
has played us false, why, we believe that he will not do so again, and
we have all the pleasure of forgiveness.
Who shall explain the extraordinary instinct that tells us, perhaps
after a single meeting, that this or that particular person in some
mysterious way matters to us? The person in question may have no
attractive gifts of intellect or manner or personal appearance; but
there is some strange bond between us; we seem to have shared experience
together, somehow and somewhere; he is interesting, whether he speaks or
is silent, whether he agrees or disagrees. We feel that in some secret
region he is congenial. Est mihi nescio quid quod me tibi temperat
astrum, says the old Latin poet--"There is something, I know not what,
which yokes our fortunes, yours and mine." Sometimes indeed we are
mistaken, and the momentary nearness fades and grows cold. But it is
not often so. That peculiar motion of the heart, that secret joining of
hands, is based upon something deep and vital, some spiritual kinship,
some subtle likeness.
Of course, we differ vastly in our power of attracting and feeling
attraction. I confess that, for myself, I never enter a new company
without the hope that I may discover a friend, perhaps THE friend,
sitting there with an expectant smile. That hope survives a thousand
disappointments; yet most of us tend to make fewer friends as time goes
on, partly because we have not so much emotional activity to spare,
partly because we become more cautious and discreet; and partly, too,
because we become more aware of the responsibilities which lie in
the background of a friendship, and because we tend to be more shy of
responsibility. Some of us become less romantic and more comfortable;
some of us become more diffident about what we have to give in return;
some of us begin to feel that we cannot take up new ideas--none of
them very good reasons perhaps; but still, for whatever reason, we make
friends less easily. The main reason probably is that we acquire a
point of view, and it is easier to keep to that, and fit people in who
accommodate themselves to it, than to modify the point of view with
reference to the new personalities. People who deal with life generously
and large-heartedly go on multiplying relationships to the end.
Of course, as I have said, there are infinite grades of friendship,
beginning with the friendship which is a mere camaraderie arising out of
habit and proximity; and every one ought to be capable of forming this
last relationship. The modest man, said Stevenson, finds his friendships
ready-made; by which he meant that if one is generous, tolerant, and
ungrudging, then, instead of thinking the circle in which one lives
inadequate, confined, and unsympathetic, one gets the best out of it,
and sees the lovable side of ordinary human beings. Such friendships
as these can evoke perhaps the best and simplest kind of loyalty. It
is said that in countries where oxen are used for ploughing in double
harness, there are touching instances of an ox pining away, and even
dying, if he loses his accustomed yoke-fellow. There are such human
friendships, sometimes formed on a blood relationship, such as
the friendship of a brother and a sister; and sometimes a marriage
transforms itself into this kind of camaraderie, and is a very blessed,
quiet, beautiful thing.
And then there are infinite gradations, such as the friendships of
old and young, pupils and masters, parents and children, nurses
and nurslings, employers and servants, all of them in a way unequal
friendships, but capable of evoking the deepest and purest kinds of
devotion: such famous friendships have been Carlyle's devotion to his
parents, Boswell's to Johnson, Stanley's to Arnold; till at last
one comes to the typical and essential thing known specially as
friendship--the passionate, devoted, equal bond which exists between two
people of the same age and sex; many of which friendships are formed at
school and college, and which often fade away in a sort of cordial glow,
implying no particular communion of life and thought. Marriage is often
the great divorcer of such friendships, and circumstances generally,
which sever and estrange; because, unless there is a constant
interchange of thought and ideas, increasing age tends to emphasise
differences. But there are instances of men, like Newman and FitzGerald,
who kept up a sort of romantic quality of friendship to the end.
I remember the daughter of an old clergyman of my acquaintance
telling me a pathetic and yet typical story of the end of one of these
friendships. Her father and another elderly clergyman had been devoted
friends in boyhood and youth. Circumstances led to a suspension of
intercourse, but at last, after a gap of nearly thirty years, during
which the friends had not met, it was arranged that the old comrade
should come and stay at the vicarage. As the time approached, her
father grew visibly anxious, and coupled his frequent expression of the
exquisite pleasure which the visit was going to bring him with elaborate
arrangements as to which of his family should be responsible for the
entertainment of the old comrade at every hour of the day: the daughters
were to lead him out walking in the morning, his wife was to take him
out drives in the afternoon, and he was to share the smoking-room with a
son, who was at home, in the evenings--the one object being that the
old gentleman should not have to interrupt his own routine, or bear the
burden of entertaining a guest; and he eventually contrived only to meet
him at meals, when the two old friends did not appear to have anything
particular to say to each other. When the visit was over, her father
used to allude to his guest with a half-compassionate air: "Poor Harry,
he has aged terribly--I never saw a man so changed, with such a limited
range of interests; dear fellow, he has quite lost his old humour. Well,
well! it was a great pleasure to see him here. He was very anxious
that we should go to stay with him, but I am afraid that will be rather
difficult to manage; one is so much at a loose end in a strange house,
and then one's correspondence gets into arrears. Poor old Harry! What a
lively creature he was up at Trinity, to be sure!" Thus with a sigh dust
is committed to dust.
"What passions our friendships were!" said Thackeray to FitzGerald,
speaking of University days. There is a shadow of melancholy in the
saying, because it implies that for Thackeray at all events that kind
of glow had faded out of life. Perhaps--who knows?--he had accustomed
himself, with those luminous, observant, humorous eyes, to look too deep
into the heart of man, to study too closely and too laughingly the seamy
side, the strange contrast between man's hopes and his performances, his
dreams and his deeds. Ought one to be ashamed if that kind of generous
enthusiasm, that intensity of admiration, that vividness of sympathy die
out of one's heart? Is it possible to keep alive the warmth, the colour
of youth, suffusing all the objects near it with a lively and rosy glow?
Some few people seem to find it possible, and can add to it a kind of
rich tolerance, a lavish affectionateness, which pierces even deeper,
and sees even more clearly, than the old partial idealisation. Such a
large-hearted affection is found as a rule most often in people
whose lives have brought them into intimate connection with their
fellow-creatures--in priests, doctors, teachers, who see others not
in their guarded and superficial moments, but in hours of sharp and
poignant emotion. In many cases the bounds of sympathy narrow themselves
into the family and the home--because there only are men brought into an
intimate connection with human emotion; because to many people, and to
the Anglo-Saxon race in particular, emotional situations are a strain,
and only professional duty, which is a strongly rooted instinct in
the Anglo-Saxon temperament, keeps the emotional muscles agile and
responsive.
Another thing which tends to extinguish friendships is that many of the
people who desire to form them, and who do form them, wish to have
the pleasures of friendship without the responsibilities. In the
self-abandonment of friendship we become aware of qualities and strains
in the friend which we do not wholly like. One of the most difficult
things to tolerate in a friend are faults which are similar without
being quite the same. A common quality, for instance, in the Anglo-Saxon
race, is a touch of vulgarity, which is indeed the quality that makes
them practically successful. A great many Anglo-Saxon people have a
certain snobbishness, to give it a hard name; it is probably the poison
of the feudal system lurking in our veins. We admire success unduly;
we like to be respected, to have a definite label, to know the right
people.
I remember once seeing a friendship of a rather promising kind forming
between two people, one of whom had a touch of what I may call "county"
vulgarity, by which I mean an undue recognition of "the glories of our
birth and state." It was a deep-seated fault, and emerged in a form
which is not uncommon among people of that type--namely, a tendency
to make friends with people of rank, coupled with a constant desire to
detect snobbishness in other people. There is no surer sign of innate
vulgarity than that; it proceeds, as a rule, from a dim consciousness of
the fault, combined with the natural shame of a high-minded nature
for being subject to it. In this particular case the man in question
sincerely desired to resist the fault, but he could not avoid making
himself slightly more deferential, and consequently slightly more
agreeable, to persons of position. If he had not suffered from the
fault, he would never have given the matter a thought at all.
The other partner in the friendly enterprise had a touch of a different
kind of snobbishness--the middle-class professional snobbishness,
which pays an undue regard to success, and gravitates to effective
and distinguished people. As the friendship matured, each became
unpleasantly conscious of the other's defect, while remaining
unconscious of his own. The result was a perpetual little friction on
the point. If both could have been perfectly sincere, and could have
confessed their weakness frankly, no harm would have been done. But each
was so sincerely anxious to present an unblemished soul to the other's
view, that they could not arrive at an understanding on the point; each
desired to appear more disinterested than he was; and so, after coming
together to a certain extent--both were fine natures--the presence of
grit in the machinery made itself gradually felt, and the friendship
melted away. It was a case of each desiring the unalloyed pleasure of an
admiring friendship, without accepting the responsibility of discovering
that the other was not perfection, and bearing that discovery loyally
and generously. For this is the worst of a friendship that begins in
idealisation rather than in comradeship; and this is the danger of
all people who idealise. When two such come together and feel a mutual
attraction, they display instinctively and unconsciously the best
of themselves; but melancholy discoveries supervene; and then what
generally happens is that the idealising friend is angry with the other
for disappointing his hopes, not with himself for drawing an extravagant
picture.
Such friendships have a sort of emotional sensuality about them; and to
be dismayed by later discoveries is to decline upon Rousseau's vice of
handing in his babies to the Foundling Hospital, instead of trying to
bring them up honestly; what lies at the base of it is the indolent
shirking of the responsibilities for the natural consequences of
friendship. The mistake arises from a kind of selfishness, the
selfishness that thinks more of what it wants and desires to get, than
of taking what there is soberly and gratefully.
It is often said that it is the duty and privilege of a friend to warn
his friend faithfully against his faults. I believe that this is a
wholly mistaken principle. The essence of the situation is rather a
cordial partnership, of which the basis is liberty. What I mean
by liberty is not a freedom from responsibility, but an absence of
obligation. I do not, of course, mean that one is to take all one can
get and give as little as one likes, but rather that one must respect
one's friend enough--and that is implied in the establishment of the
relation--to abstain from directing him, unless he desires and asks for
direction. The telling of faults may be safely left to hostile critics,
and to what Sheridan calls "damned good-natured" acquaintances. But the
friend must take for granted that his friend desires, in a general way,
what is good and true, even though he may pursue it on different
lines. One's duty is to encourage and believe in one's friend, not to
disapprove of and to censure him. One loves him for what he is, not for
what he might be if he would only take one's advice. The point is that
it must be all a free gift, not a mutual improvement society--unless
indeed that is the basis of the compact. After all, a man can only feel
responsible to God. One goes astray, no doubt, like a sheep that is
lost; but it is not the duty of another sheep to butt one back into the
right way, unless indeed one appeals for help. One may have pastors
and directors, but they can never be equal friends. If there is to be
superiority in friendship, the lesser must willingly crown the greater;
the greater must not ask to be crowned. The secure friendship is
that which begins in comradeship, and moves into a more generous
and emotional region. Then there is no need to demand or to question
loyalty, because the tie has been welded by many a simple deed, many a
frank word. The ideal is a perfect frankness and sincerity, which
lays bare the soul as it is, without any false shame or any fear of
misunderstanding. A friendship of this kind can be one of the purest,
brightest, and strongest things in the world. Yet how rare it is! What
far oftener happens is that two people, in a sensitive and emotional
mood, are brought together. They begin by comparing experiences, they
search their memories for beautiful and suggestive things, and each
feels, "This nature is the true complement of my own; what light it
seems to shed on my own problems; how subtle, how appreciative it is!"
Then the process of discovery begins. Instead of the fair distant city,
all spires and towers, which we discerned in the distance in a sort
of glory, we find that there are crooked lanes, muddy crossings, dull
market-places, tiresome houses. Odd misshapen figures, fretful and
wearied, plod through the streets or look out at windows; here is a
ruin, with doleful creatures moping in the shade; we overturn a stone,
and blind uncanny things writhe away from the light. We begin to reflect
that it is after all much like other places, and that our fine
romantic view of it was due to some accident of light and colour, some
transfiguring mood of our own mind; and then we set out in search of
another city which we see crowning a hill on the horizon, and leave the
dull place to its own commonplace life. But to begin with comradeship is
to explore the streets and lanes first; and then day by day, as we go
up and down in the town, we become aware of its picturesqueness and
its charm; we realise that it has an intense and eager life of its own,
which we can share as a dweller, though we cannot touch it as a visitor;
and so the wonder grows, and the patient love of home. And we have
surprises, too: we enter a door in a wall that we have not seen before,
and we are in a shrine full of fragrant incense-smoke; the fallen day
comes richly through stained windows; figures move at the altar, where
some holy rite is being celebrated. The truth is that a friendship
cannot be formed in the spirit of a tourist, who is above all in search
of the romantic and the picturesque. Sometimes, indeed, the wandering
traveller may become the patient and contented inhabitant; but it is
generally the other way, and the best friendships are most often those
that seem at first sight dully made for us by habit and proximity, and
which reveal to us by slow degrees their beauty and their worth.
* * * * * *
Thus far had I written, when it came into my mind that I should like to
see the reflection of my beliefs in some other mind, to submit them to
the test of what I may perhaps be forgiven for calling a spirit-level!
And so I read my essay to two wise, kindly, and gracious ladies, who
have themselves often indeed graduated in friendship, and taken the
highest honours. I will say nothing of the tender courtesy with which
they made their head-breaking balms precious; I told them that I had not
finished my essay, and that before I launched upon my last antistrophe,
I wanted inspiration. I cannot here put down the phrases they used, but
I felt that they spoke in symbols, like two initiated persons, for whom
the corn and the wine and the oil of the sacrifice stand for very
secret and beautiful mysteries; but they said in effect that I had
been depicting, and not untruly, the outer courts and corridors of
friendship. What they told me of the inner shrine I shall presently
describe; but when I asked them to say whether they could tell me
instances of the best and highest kind of friendship, existing and
increasing and perfecting itself between two men, or between a man and a
woman, not lovers or wedded, they found a great difficulty in doing so.
We sifted our common experiences of friendships, and we could find but
one or two such, and these had somewhat lost their bloom. It came then
to this: that in the emotional region, many women, but very few men, can
form the highest kind of tie; and we agreed that men tended to find what
they needed in marriage, because they were rather interested in than
dependent upon personal emotion, and because practical life, as the
years went on--the life of causes, and movements, and organisations,
and ideas, and investigations--tended to absorb the energies of men; and
that they found their emotional life in home ties; and that the man who
lived for emotional relations would tend to be thought, if not to be, a
sentimentalist; but that the real secret lay with women, and with men
of perhaps a feminine fibre. And all this was transfused by a kind of
tender pity, without any touch of complacency or superiority, such as a
mother might have for the whispered hopes of a child who is lost in tiny
material dreams. But I gathered that there was a region in which the
heart could be entirely absorbed in a deep and beautiful admiration
for some other soul, and rejoice whole-heartedly in its nobleness and
greatness; so that no question of gaining anything, or even of being
helped to anything, came in, any more than one who has long been pent in
shadow and gloom and illness, and comes out for the first time into
the sun, thinks of any benefits that he may receive from the caressing
sunlight; he merely knows that it is joy and happiness and life to be
there, and to feel the warm light comfort him and make him glad; and all
this I had no difficulty in understanding, for I knew the emotion that
they spoke of, though I called it by a different name. I saw that it
was love indeed, but love infinitely purified, and with all the sense of
possession that mingles with masculine love subtracted from it; and how
such a relation might grow and increase, until there arose a sort of
secret and vital union of spirit, more real indeed than time and space,
so that, even if this were divorced and sundered by absence, or the
clouded mind, or death itself, there could be no shadow of doubt as to
the permanence of the tie; and a glance passed between the two as they
spoke, which made me feel like one who hears an organ rolling, and
voices rising in sweet harmonies inside some building, locked and
barred, which he may not enter. I could not doubt that the music was
there, while I knew that for some dulness or belatedness I was myself
shut out; not, indeed, that I doubted of the truth of what was said, but
I was in the position of the old saint who said that he believed, and
prayed to One to help his unbelief. For I saw that though I projected
the lines of my own experience infinitely, adding loyalty to loyalty,
and admiration to admiration, it was all on a different plane. This
interfusion of personality, this vital union of soul, I could not doubt
it! but it made me feel my own essential isolation still more deeply,
as when the streaming sunlight strikes warmth and glow out of the fire,
revealing crumbling ashes where a moment before had been a heart of
flame.
"Ah te meae si partem animae rapit
Maturior vis, quid moror altera?"--
"Ah, if the violence of fate snatch thee from me, thou half of my soul,
how can I, the other half, still linger here?" So wrote the old cynical,
worldly, Latin poet of his friend--that poet whom, for all his deftness
and grace, we are apt to accuse of a certain mundane heartlessness,
though once or twice there flickers up a sharp flame from the
comfortable warmth of the pile. Had he the secret hidden in his heart
all the time? If one could dream of a nearness like that, which doubts
nothing, and questions nothing, but which teaches the soul to move in as
unconscious a unison with another soul as one's two eyes move, so that
the brain cannot distinguish between the impressions of each, would not
that be worth the loss of all that we hold most sweet? We pay a price
for our qualities; the thistle cannot become the vine, or the oak the
rose, by admiration or desire. But we need not doubt of the divine
alchemy that gives good gifts to others, and denies them to ourselves.
And thus I can gratefully own that there are indeed these high mysteries
of friendship, and I can be glad to discern them afar off, as the
dweller on the high moorland, in the wind-swept farm, can see, far away
in the woodland valley, the smoke go up from happy cottage-chimneys,
nestled in leaves, and the spire point a hopeful finger up to heaven.
Life would be a poorer thing if we had all that we desired, and it is
permitted to hope that if we are faithful with our few things, we may be
made rulers over many things!