This intimate knowledge of another appeals strangely to our vanity and pride; and we are often tempted to show it off by disclosing some of these secrets which have been revealed to us in the confidence of friendship. This is the meanest thing one person can do to another. The person who yields to this basest of temptations is utterly unworthy ever again to have a friend. Betrayal of friends is the unpardonable social sin.
THE VICE OF DEFECT.
We cannot find people who in every respect are exactly to our liking.—And, what is more to the point, we never can make ourselves exactly what we should like to have other people intimately know and understand. Friendship calls for courage enough to show ourselves in spite of our frailties and imperfections; and to take others in spite of the possible shortcomings which close acquaintance may reveal in them. Friendship requires a readiness to give and take, for better or for worse; and that exclusiveness which shrinks from the risks involved is simply a combination of selfishness and cowardice. Refusal to make friends is a sure sign that a man either is ashamed of himself, or else lacks faith in his fellow-men. And these two states of mind are not so different as they might at first appear. For we judge others chiefly by ourselves. And the man who distrusts his fellow-men, generally bases his distrust of them on the consciousness that he himself is not worthy of the trust of others. So that the real root of exclusiveness is the dread of letting other people get near to us, for fear of what they might discover. Exclusiveness puts on the airs of pride. But pride is only a game of bluff, by which a man who is ashamed to have other people get near enough to see him as he is pretends that he is terribly afraid of getting near enough to others to see what they are.
THE VICE OF EXCESS.
Effusiveness.—Some people can keep nothing to themselves. As soon as they get an experience, or feel an emotion, or have an ache or pain, they must straightway run and pour it into the ear of some sympathetic listener. The result is that experiences do not gain sufficient hold upon the nature to make any deep and lasting impression. No independence, no self-reliance, no strength of character is developed. Such people are superficial and unreal. They ask everything and have nothing to give. The stream is so large and constant that there is nothing left in the reservoir. Friendship must rest on solid foundations of independence and mutual respect. With great clearness and force Emerson proclaims this law in his Essay on Friendship: "We must be our own before we can be another's. Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather than that my friend should overstep, by a word or a look, his real sympathy. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is that the not mine is mine. I hate where I looked for a manly furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do without it. There must be very two, before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of two large formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity, which, beneath these disparities, unites them."
THE PENALTY.
If we refuse to go in company there is nothing left for us but to trudge along the dreary way alone.—If we will not bear one another's burdens, we must bear our own when they are heaviest in our unaided strength; and fall beneath their weight. Here as everywhere penalty is simply the inevitable consequence of conduct. The loveless heart is doomed to drag out its term of years in the cheerless isolation of a life from which the light of love has been withdrawn.
