V.—BROTHERLY AND SISTERLY LOVE
Young people of both sexes more frequently make confidants and “bosom friends” of their playmates and classmates than of their brothers and sisters. Why is this so? Novelty perhaps has something to do with it. The domestic experiences and emotions of two brothers or sisters are apt to be so much alike as to become monotonous; whereas a member of another family may initiate them into a fresh and fascinating sphere of emotion and a novel way of looking at things. Moreover, friendship is very capricious in its choice; and as the number of brothers and sisters is limited, the selection is apt to be made in the wider field outside the domestic circle. Again, it is a peculiarity of human nature to appear in great négligé at home, and to regard the nearest relatives as the best lightning-rods for disagreeable moods; and this does not tend to deepen the love of brothers and sisters.
It may be doubted whether this form of affection exists among animals or among primitive men; and even among civilised peoples the bond is but a weak one, except in the most refined families. Though brothers feel bound to protect their sisters, they reserve most of their gallantry for some one else’s sister; and though a sister will feel proud if her brother is one of a victorious crew, her heart will beat twice as fast if it is her lover instead of her brother. The English language has not even a collective word for the love of brothers and sisters; and even the partial terms, “sisterly love” and “brotherly love,” have more of an ecclesiastic than a domestic flavour. The German language has a collective word—and a big one too,—Geschwisterliebe; but it would perhaps be misleading to infer from its existence and size that this species of family love is more developed in Germany than in England. The German’s advantage appears to be philological merely, and not sociological. He is less of a traveller and colonist than the Englishman, who is very often separated from his brothers and sisters for years. Yet this sometimes is rather a gain than a loss; for it destroys that excessive familiarity which, as just noted, makes friendship rarer among members of the same hearth than between individuals of different families.
To the wider circles of blood-relationship—up to “forty-second cousins”—the Germans pay much more regard than the English; and the French perhaps go a step beyond the Germans. For in France each family, with its ramifications, forms a sort of clique into which an outsider can rarely enter. Needless to say that this forms a great impediment to Love’s free choice.
VI.—FRIENDSHIP
If we now turn to the two remaining species of personal affection—Friendship and Love—the emotional scenery undergoes a great change. In all the cases so far considered, blood-relationship was a source of affection; whereas in friendship it is commonly a disadvantage, and in Romantic Love it is positively abhorred, except in the more remote degrees. Some savage tribes, it is true, allow, or even prescribe, marriages between brother and sister—especially a younger sister; and cases occur of marriages between father and daughter, mother and son. But civilised society—guided by religious precepts, and possibly also by a vague instinctive recognition of the advantages of cross-fertilisation—condemns such unions as hideous crimes; and the mediæval theologians, in their extreme zeal, forbade all marriages within the seventh degree of relationship.
In the case of friendship the objection to blood-relationship is not founded on a social or religious precept; but it exists all the same, as already noted. Perhaps Jean Paul’s maxim that friends may have everything in common except their room accounts for its existence. Brothers and sisters are commonly too much alike in their thoughts and tastes to become friends, in the special sense of the word. Hence it is that there is apt to be a deeper attachment between those brothers and sisters who have frequently been separated by school-terms than among those who are always together. For in friendship, as in love, a short absence is advantageous.
Friendship is partly an outgrowth of the social instinct and partly a result of special associations, habit, community of interests and tastes. As a boy I had an opportunity to make some interesting observations on friendship among animals, showing that it differed in degree only, and not in kind or origin, from that of man. Among the animals we kept at our country-house were a dog, a pet sheep, and some pigs. The dog showed his confidence in the sheep’s amiable forbearance by abandoning his cold kennel on winter nights and seeking warmer quarters by the side of his woolly neighbour. For the pigs his friendly regards were shown in a less utilitarian manner, by driving away, unbidden and untaught, any swinish tramps that appeared, uninvited, to share their meals. But the most peculiar relations existed between the sheep and the pigs. In the absence of any other means of satisfying its gregarious or social instincts, the sheep joined the pigs every morning in their foraging expeditions in the woods, returning with them in the evening. And, what was still more remarkable, when after a time a dozen sheep were added to our stock of animals, the old pet remained faithful to the pigs, and paid no attention whatever to the newcomers. Here the friendly attachment, based on habitual association and the memory of mutual pleasures of grazing, was strong enough to overcome the inherited fellow-feeling for members of its own species.
Between this instance and those ordinary cases of companionship among men which are called friendship, there is hardly any difference. In the more intimate cases of special friendship the craving for companionship is strengthened by a community of thoughts and emotions. Bacon gives us in a nut-shell three of the ingredients of friendship which are not to be found in the primitive form just considered. The first is this, that each friend becomes a sort of secular confessor, to whom the other may confide all his hopes and fears, joys and sorrows; the second is this, that “a friend’s wits and understanding do clarify and break up in the communicating and discoursing with another;” so that “he waxeth wiser than himself; and that more by an hour’s discourse than by a day’s meditation;” the third is the “aid and bearing a part in all actions and occasions” to be expected of a friend.
Friendship is not a modern sentiment. Cases of it such as existed among the ancient Greeks and Romans, characterised by an ardour that made Friendship resemble the Love passion, are no longer to be met with, although a somewhat less intense form frequently occurs among young men at college or young ladies in high schools: thus illustrating the law that the individual passes through the same stages of development as the race.