Friendship

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Title:     Friendship
Author: Arthur C. Benson [More Titles by Benson]

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!

[The end]
Arthur C. Benson's essay: Friendship

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