Friendship is almost always the union of a part of one mind with a part
of another; people are friends in spots. Friendship sometimes rests on
sharing early memories, as do brothers and schoolfellows, who often,
but for that now affectionate familiarity with the same old days, would
dislike and irritate one another extremely. Sometimes it hangs on
passing pleasures and amusements, or on special pursuits; sometimes on
mere convenience and comparative lack of friction in living together.
One's friends are that part of the human race with which one can be
human. But there are youthful friendships of quite another quality,
which I seem to have discovered flourishing more often and more frankly
in England than in other countries; brief echoes, as it were, of that
love of comrades so much celebrated in antiquity. I do not refer to the
"friendship of virtue" mentioned by Aristotle, which means, I suppose,
community in allegiance or in ideals. It may come to that in the end,
considered externally; but community in allegiance or in ideals, if
genuine, expresses a common disposition, and its roots are deeper and
more physical than itself. The friendship I have in mind is a sense of
this initial harmony between two natures, a union of one whole man
with another whole man, a sympathy between the centres of their being,
radiating from those centres on occasion in unanimous thoughts, but
not essentially needing to radiate. Trust here is inwardly grounded;
likes and dislikes run together without harness, like the steeds of
Aurora; you may take agreement for granted without words; affection
is generously independent of all tests or external bonds; it can even
bear not to be mutual, not to be recognized; and in any case it shrinks
from the blatancy of open vows. In such friendships there is a touch of
passion and of shyness; an understanding which does not need to become
explicit or complete. There is wine in the cup; it is not to be spilled
nor gulped down unrelished, but to be sipped slowly, soberly, in the
long summer evening, with the window open to the college garden, and
the mind full of all that is sweetest to the mind.
Now there is a mystery here--though it need be no mystery--which some
people find strange and distressing and would like to hush up. This
profound physical sympathy may sometimes, for a moment, spread to the
senses; that is one of its possible radiations, though fugitive; and
there is a fashionable psychology at hand to explain all friendship,
for that reason, as an aberration of sex. Of course it is such in some
people, and in many people it may seem to be such at rare moments;
but it would be a plain abuse of language to call a mother's love
for her children sexual, even when they are boys, although certainly
she could not have that love, nor those children, if she had no sex.
Perhaps if we had no sex we should be incapable of tenderness of any
sort; but this fact does not make all forms of affection similar in
quality nor in tendency. The love of friends is not, like the love of
woman, a lyrical prologue to nest--building. Engaging, no doubt, the
same radical instincts, in a different environment and at another phase
of their development, it turns them, whilst still plastic, in other
directions. Human nature is still plastic, especially in the region
of emotion, as is proved by the ever-changing forms of religion and
art; and it is not a question of right and wrong, nor even, except
in extreme cases, of health and disease, but only a question of
alternative development, whether the human capacity to love is absorbed
in the family cycle, or extends to individual friendships, or to
communion with nature or with God. The love of friends in youth, in the
cases where it is love rather than friendship, has a mystical tendency.
In character, though seldom in intensity, it resembles the dart which,
in an ecstatic vision, pierced the heart of Saint Theresa, bursting
the normal integument by which the blood is kept coursing through
generation after generation, in the closed channel of human existence
and human slavery. Love then escapes from that round; it is, in one
sense, wasted and sterilized; but in being diverted from its earthly
labours it suffuses the whole universe with light; it casts its glowing
colours on the sunset, upon the altar, upon the past, upon the truth.
The anguished futility of love corrects its own selfishness, its own
illusion; gradually the whole world becomes beautiful in its inhuman
immensity; our very defeats are transfigured, and we see that it was
good for us to have gone up into that mountain.
That such mystic emotions, whether in religion or in friendship, are
erotic was well known before the day's of Freud. They have always
expressed themselves in erotic language. And why should they not be
erotic? Sexual passion is itself an incident in the life of the Psyche,
a transitive phase in the great cycle by which life on earth is kept
going. It grows insensibly out of bodily self-love, childish play, and
love of sensation; it merges in the end, after its midsummer night's
dream, into parental and kingly purposes. How casual, how comic, the
purely erotic impulse is, and how lightly nature plays with it, may be
seen in the passion of jealousy. Jealousy is inseparable from sexual
love, and yet jealousy is not itself erotic either in quality or in
effect, since it poisons pleasure, turns sympathy into suspicion,
love into hate, all in the interests of proprietorship. Why should
we be jealous, if we were simply merry? Nature weaves with a wide
loom, and crosses the threads; and erotic passion may be as easily
provoked peripherally by deeper impulses as be itself the root of other
propensities. Lovers sometimes pretend at first to be only friends,
and friends have sometimes fancied, at first blush, that they were
lovers; it is as easy for one habit or sentiment as for the other to
prove the radical one, and to prevail in the end. As for Englishmen,
the last thing they would do would be to disguise some base prompting
in high-flown language; they would call a spade a spade, if there were
occasion. They are shy of words, as of all manifestations; and this
very shyness, if it proves that there is at bottom a vital instinct
concerned, also proves that it is not intrinsically more erotic than
social, nor more social than intellectual. It is each of these things
potentially, for such faculties are not divided in nature as they are
in language; it may turn into any one of them if accident leads it that
way; but it reverts from every casual expression to its central seat,
which is the felt harmony of life with life, and of life with nature,
with everything that in the pulses of this world beats our own measure,
and swells the music of our thoughts.
18