Who are called friends because they are not foes;”
meaning by friends, kinsfolk; but such as, though not more than kin, are less than kind. Dr. Croly’s hero, Marston, soldier and statesman, on receiving, in his isolation, three letters from three proved friends, yet comparative strangers, describes himself as feeling, “while holding their letters in my hand, and almost pressing them to my heart, how much more strongly friendship may bind us than the ties of cold and negligent relationship.” So Mr. Thackeray is bitter on what it is to have sham friends and no sympathy; ties of kindred which bind one, as it were, to the corpse of friendship, and oblige one to bear through life the weight and the embraces of this lifeless, cold connection.
Noteworthy among the avowals of Sir Thomas Browne, in his “Religio Medici,” is this: “I confess I do not observe that order that the schools ordain our affections,—to love our parents, wives, children, and then our friends; for, excepting the injunctions of religion, I do not find in myself such a necessary and indissoluble sympathy to all those of my blood. I hope I do not break the fifth commandment, if I conceive I may love my friend before the nearest of my blood, even those to whom I owe the principles of life.” The father and the son may, as Montaigne says, be of quite contrary humours, and brothers be without any sympathy with brothers. So Feltham asserts it to be likeness which makes the true love-knot of friendship. When we find another of our own disposition, what is it, he asks, but the same soul in a divided body? “We are then intermutually transposed into each other; and nature, which makes us love ourselves, makes us for the same reason love those who are like us; hence a friend is a more sacred name than a brother.” What avails it, he further asks, to have bodies of the same original, when the souls within them differ?
The autobiographer in a modern work of fiction, having occasion to acknowledge, after being thrust amongst strangers to sicken, and all but die, that among strangers he received as much sympathy and kindness as he should have done among his own people, and in his father’s house,—characterizes this sort of confession as one which people are apt to make as a reflection upon their relations, “whereas it disgraces only themselves.” It is a case of rare misfortune, he contends, when we are not loved by our nearest of kin, in proportion as we desire and deserve to excite affection. Nevertheless, there is a too ample consensus of authorities whose testimony affirms, and confirms, the often slight and slender tenure of mere family ties, as such. “None of your family parties for me,” quoth one of Justice Haliburton’s shrewd spokesmen; “connections at best are poor friends, and commonly bitter enemies. If you want nothing, go to them, and you are sure to get it; if you are in want of any assistance, go to a stranger friend you have made for yourself, and that’s the boy that has a heart and a hand for you.” The Earl of Dudley, Bishop Copleston’s correspondent, in one of his always interesting letters to that prelate, adverting to the death of an uncle who had never taken the smallest interest in him, or showed him the smallest kindness, makes the avowal: “And, though I flatter myself that there is no person more capable of returning affection than myself, yet I fairly own that I am wholly unable to bestow it quite gratuitously even upon a near relation.” Richardson harps on this note again and again in his history of Clarissa. How much more binding and tender, that young lady writes—and the writing comes of bitter experience—are the ties of pure friendship and the union of like minds, than the ties of nature! And her chief correspondent, in commenting on the terms of a kinsman’s assurance, that he will not see Clarissa “imposed on either by friend or foe,”—interposes the verbal amendment: “By relation or foe, should he not have said? For a friend will not impose upon a friend.” Elsewhere the same writer has to put the home-question: “Would you side with a false brother against a true friend? A brother may not be a friend; but a friend will be always a brother.”
It was one of the aphorisms—or call them paradoxes—of M. de Stendhal (Henri Beyle) that our next of kin are our natural enemies when we enter the world; the simple matter of fact being, as an Edinburgh reviewer alleges, that his own character, tendencies, and aspirations had been invariably opposed to the plans, wishes, and modes of thinking of his family. Mr. Froude has depicted in Edward Fowler a young man who in his dealings with every one except with his own family, was frank, generous, and unselfish; and whose affections, naturally very strong, finding themselves forced out of their proper channel, poured themselves out on any one that happened to attract him. A few kind words from his father, now and then, implying real sympathy and inviting confidence, might, we are given to understand, have averted in this case, as in so many others, a bitter result of estrangement and desolation. Perhaps, as Mr. Disraeli somewhere intimates, with all their anxiety and opportunities for observation, the parent and tutor are rarely skilful in discovering the character of their child or charge. “Custom blunts the fineness of psychological study: those with whom we have lived long and early, are apt to blend our essential and our accidental qualities in one bewildering association.” Strange, exclaims Hamilton Aïde, how little we often know of those who are next us in the battle-ranks through this long march of life! Our daily familiar life, as George Eliot has remarked, is but a hiding of ourselves from each other behind a screen of trivial words and deeds; and those who sit with us at the same hearth are often the farthest off from the deep human soul within us, full of unspoken evil and unacted good. “Strangers yet,” as Lord Houghton has it:—
“After childhood’s winning ways,
After care, and blame, and praise,
Counsel asked, and wisdom given,
After mutual prayers to heaven,
Child and parent scarce regret