From gropings along unlit ways, and towards an undiscoverable goal, what
a pleasant experience it is to turn suddenly back to the well-trodden
paths of a near and a tried companionship! It is almost an exact
parallel to the sensations of the child who, having rushed out of its
home into the wild winter night, full of hollow reverberations, and
perturbing gleams, suddenly retreats, and finds itself once more beside
the hearth, with an absolutely new sense of its security, and wide-armed
delightfulness.
Upon few topics has more ink been expended than upon this one of
friendship. As regards one point all the pens have I think been agreed,
and that is that diversity constitutes its soundest basis. If a truism,
this is at least one of those truisms that every day’s experience throws
into new relief. Friendship demands absolutely no conformity, but lives,
thrives, and has its being upon the most absolutely radical differences.
Friend and friend may differ by nearly everything that can
differentiate one human being from another. By the tenour of their
thoughts; by the circumstances of their lives; by the very texture of
their brains, their souls, their hearts, their entire natures.
Friendship makes light of such little discrepancies as these. Its roots
push down to a stratum where even the largest of them become mere
accidents, and at that serene depth they meet and lock securely under
them all.
To say that such a tie is the great ameliorator of life, the soother of
its sorrows, the encourager of its brighter moments, is to say
ridiculously little. To say that it is one that we could hardly endure
to think of existing without, is to say almost less. The very notion of
such a deprivation produces a sort of vertigo; a species of mental
confusion, akin to the thought of losing identity itself. Worse, indeed,
for it is not merely the everyday, the vulgar self, that such a
loss--supposing it to be complete--would deprive one of. It is that
other, better, and more shining self, which only really exists inside
the enchanted walls of a loving, sympathetic friendship. Within those
fostering walls it grows, expands, and flourishes, but outside of them
it sickens, pines away, and dies.
It is a very singular tie, when one reflects a little upon it; so close
often that no nearness of blood, no identity of name, could, so far as
one can see, make it any closer. It seems to be antecedent, not alone
to itself, but to the whole social warp and woof, of which it is an
outcome. Just as the trees in one wood seem, to anyone who wanders often
in it, to have acquired a sort of identity, so two who have walked for
some time very closely together, though they may differ as widely as an
ash does from a pine, as an oak does from a hornbeam, acquire a sort of
similarity, due to the same sunshine having warmed, the same storms
having shaken and darkened both. It is well to speak a good word now and
then of a personage whom one habitually abuses, so let it be recorded in
favour of that odd compound of good and ill which we call our existence
that, if it has thwarted our desires, dwarfed our ambitions, nipped in
our joys, chilled back our aspirations, cut down our hopes, and not
infrequently wrung our hearts, at least----it has given us our
friends!