Friendship is, however, a matter of caste. With just as many as share our point of view or can understand it, who laugh at the things we laugh at, who are tempted by our temptations and sin our sins, can we have a divine fellowship. Through these to others outside of our ken, through friend to friend's friend the tie passes that shall bind the whole world together at last.
Our set of friends is a solar system, a cluster of planets, that, revolving about us, moves with the same trend through space and time. Each member of the fraternity has its own aphelion and perihelion, occultation and transit. Whether they are visible or invisible, we must be sure that each in due season will return to the same relative position and exert the same attraction, answering the law of gravity that in true friendship keeps them in their orbits about us. But the circles interlace, and in that is the possibility of keeping the unity of our constellation of friends. Were the same comrades to accompany us unceasingly we could not develop. There must be an intricate complication of actions and reactions, and we must be affected by each in turn and in combination.
What is a parting from a friend but a departure in quest of new experience? Each fresh meeting, therefore, should be the sharing of the fruits that both have gathered, that each may profit by the contribution. If you tell me of a book you have read, I am amused and profited by the knowledge you bring me; shall I not be grateful to you for what you bring from an interesting person? If every new friend contributes to our development and enriches us by his personality, not only are we the better for it ourselves, but more worth while to our friends. It is not you as you are whom I love best, but you as you shall be when, in due time, you have come to your perfect stature; wherefore I shall not begrudge the loan of you to those who have set you on the way.
Though we may hold one friend paramount over all others, and admit him to every phase of intimacy, there are minor confidences that are often most possible with an entire stranger. Were we to meet a man of the Sixteenth Century, what could we not tell such an impersonal questioner! What would we care for the little mortifications that come between even the best of friends? We could confess faults and embarrassments without shame, we could share every hope and doubt without fear, for he would regard us without bias or prejudice. He could scourge us with no whip of conventional morality, and he would be able to judge any action of itself, hampered by no code or creed.
We had a game once, my sister and I, in which we agreed to look at each other suddenly, newly, as if we had never met before. Frequently we were able to catch a novel phase of character, and our sub-conscious self, freed from the servitude of custom, bounded in a new emotion. Could we, in this way, at times regard our friends, how much we might learn! We fall into the habit of seeing what we look for, and we compel old friends to live up to the preconception. Why not look at them, occasionally, as strangers to be studied and learned? There are two variable quantities in the equation of friendship, Yourself and Myself. Nor is our relation itself fixed; it is alive and changing from hour to hour. There is no such thing as an unalterable friendship, for both parties to the affair are moving at different speeds, first one and then the other ahead, giving a hand to be helped on and reaching back to assist. Might we not, indeed, reverse the previous experiment and regard any stranger as a blood relative, assuming a fraternity of interest? We need only to be honest and kind.
By these two processes we may keep old friends and make new ones; and our conscience shall acquit us of disloyalty. When one enlarges one's establishment, one does not decrease either the wages or the duties of the servants before employed. The new members of the household have new functions. More is given and more is received. But it is not so much that one must give more as that one should give wisely and economically, we must be generous in quality rather than in quantity; for, though there is love enough to go round for all, there is not time enough for most of us. We must clasp hands, give the message and pass on, trusting to meet again on the journey, and come to the same inn at nightfall.
A Defense of Slang
Could Shakespeare come to Chicago and listen curiously to "the man in the street," he would find himself more at home than in London. In the mouths of messenger boys and clerks he would find the English language used with all the freedom of unexpected metaphor and the plastic, suggestive diction that was the privilege of the Elizabethan dramatists; he would say, no doubt, that he had found a nation of poets. There was hardly any such thing as slang in his day, for no graphic trope was too virile or uncommon for acceptance, if its meaning were patent. His own heroes (and heroines, too, for Rosalind's talk was as forcible in figures of speech as any modern American's) often spoke what corresponds to the slang of today.
The word, indeed, needs precise definition, before we condemn all unconventional talk with opprobrium. Slang has been called "poetry in the rough," and it is not all coarse or vulgar. There is a prosaic as well as a poetic license. The man in the street calls a charming girl, for instance, a "daisy." Surely this is not inelegant, and such a reference will be understood a century hence without a foot-note. Slang, to prove adjuvant to our speech, which is growing more and more rigid and conventional, should be terse; it should make for force and clarity, without any sacrifice of beauty. Still, manner should befit matter; the American "dude" is, perhaps, no more unpleasant a word than the emasculated fop it described. The English "bounder" is too useful an appellation to do without in London, and, were that meretricious creature of pretence and fancy waistcoat more common in the United States, the term would be welcomed to American slang with enthusiasm. New York, alas, has already produced "cads," but no Yankee school would ever tolerate a "fag."
The mere substitution of a single synonymous term, however, is not characteristic of American slang. Your Chicago messenger boy coins metaphorical phrases with the facility of a primitive savage. A figure of speech once started and come into popular acceptance changes from day to day by paraphrase, and, so long as a trace of the original significance is apparent, the personal variation is comprehensible, not only to the masses, but generally to those whose purism eschews the use of the common talk. Thus, to give "the glassy eye" became the colloquial equivalent of receiving a cool reception. The man on the street, inventive and jocose, does not stop at this.