HOW TO KEEP FRIENDS.
When Goldsmith once talked to Johnson of the difficulty of living on very intimate terms with any one with whom you differed on an important topic, Johnson replied: “Why, sir, you must shun the subject as to which you disagree. For instance, I can live very well with Burke; I love his knowledge, his genius, his diffusion, and effulgence of conversation; but I would not talk to him of the Rockingham party.”
Mr. Helps, in his admirable work, Friends in Council, well observes: “A rule for living happily with others is to avoid having stock subjects of disputation. It mostly happens, when people live much together, that they come to have certain set topics, around which, from frequent dispute, there is such a growth of angry words, mortified vanity, and the like, that the original difference becomes a standing subject for quarrel; and there is a tendency in all minor disputes to drift down to it. Again: if people wish to live well together, they must not hold too much to logic, and supposing every thing is to be settled by sufficient reason. Dr. Johnson saw this clearly with regard to married people when he said, ‘Wretched would be the pair, above all names of wretchedness, who should be doomed to adjust by reason every morning all the minute detail of a domestic day.’ But the application should be much more general than he made it. There is no time for such reasonings, and nothing that is worth them. And when we recollect how two lawyers, or two politicians, can go on contending, and that there is no end of one-sided reasoning on any subject, we shall not be sure that such contention is the best mode for arriving at truth. But certainly it is not the way to arrive at good temper.”
The most gifted men are least addicted to depreciate either friends or foes. Dr. Johnson, Mr. Burke, and Mr. Fox were always more inclined to overrate them; your shrewd, sly, evil-speaking fellow is generally a shallow person; and frequently he is as venomous, as false when he flatters as when he reviles. He seldom praises John but to vex Thomas.