Pipefuls | Page 2

or more books, or more pairs of pyjamas; but we
have never heard of a man saying that he did not have enough friends.
For, while one can never have too many friends, yet those one has are
always enough. They satisfy us completely. One has never met a man
who would say, "I wish I had a friend who would combine the good
humour of A, the mystical enthusiasm of B, the love of doughnuts
which is such an endearing quality in C, and who would also have the
habit of giving Sunday evening suppers like D, and the well-stocked
cellar which is so deplorably lacking in E." No; the curious thing is that
at any time and in any settled way of life a man is generally provided
with friends far in excess of his desert, and also in excess of his
capacity to absorb their wisdom and affectionate attentions.
There is some pleasant secret behind this, a secret that none is wise
enough to fathom. The infinite fund of disinterested humane kindliness
that is adrift in the world is part of the riddle, the insoluble riddle of life
that is born in our blood and tissue. It is agreeable to think that no man,
save by his own gross fault, ever went through life unfriended, without
companions to whom he could stammer his momentary impulses of
sagacity, to whom he could turn in hours of loneliness. It is not even

necessary to know a man to be his friend. One can sit at a lunch counter,
observing the moods and whims of the white-coated pie-passer, and by
the time you have juggled a couple of fried eggs you will have caught
some grasp of his philosophy of life, seen the quick edge and tang of
his humour, memorized the shrewdness of his worldly insight and been
as truly stimulated as if you had spent an evening with your favourite
parson.
If there were no such thing as friendship existing to-day, it would
perhaps be difficult to understand what it is like from those who have
written about it. We have tried, from time to time, to read Emerson's
enigmatic and rather frigid essay. It seems that Emerson must have put
his cronies to a severe test before admitting them to the high-vaulted
and rather draughty halls of his intellect. There are fine passages in his
essay, but it is intellectualized, bloodless, heedless of the trifling
oddities of human intercourse that make friendship so satisfying. He
seems to insist upon a sterile ceremony of mutual self-improvement, a
kind of religious ritual, a profound interchange of doctrines between
soul and soul. His friends (one gathers) are to be antisepticated, all the
poisons and pestilence of their faulty humours are to be drained away
before they may approach the white and icy operating table of his heart.
"Why insist," he says, "on rash personal relations with your friend?
Why go to his house, or know his wife and family?" And yet does not
the botanist like to study the flower in the soil where it grows?
Polonius, too, is another ancient supposed to be an authority on
friendship. The Polonius family must have been a thoroughly dreary
one to live with; we have often thought that poor Ophelia would have
gone mad anyway, even if there had been no Hamlet. Laertes preaches
to Ophelia; Polonius preaches to Laertes. Laertes escaped by going
abroad, but the girl had to stay at home. Hamlet saw that pithy old
Polonius was a preposterous and orotund ass. Polonius's doctrine of
friendship--"The friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple
them to thy soul with hoops of steel"--was, we trow, a necessary one in
his case. It would need a hoop of steel to keep them near such a dismal
old sawmonger.

Friendships, we think, do not grow up in any such carefully tended and
contemplated fashion as Messrs. Emerson and Polonius suggest. They
begin haphazard. As we look back on the first time we saw our friends
we find that generally our original impression was curiously astray. We
have worked along beside them, have consorted with them drunk or
sober, have grown to cherish their delicious absurdities, have
outrageously imposed on each other's patience--and suddenly we
awoke to realize what had happened. We had, without knowing it,
gained a new friend. In some curious way the unseen border line had
been passed. We had reached the final culmination of Anglo-Saxon
regard when two men rarely look each other straight in the eyes
because they are ashamed to show each other how fond they are. We
had reached the fine flower and the ultimate test of comradeship--that is,
when you get a letter from one of your "best friends," you know you
don't need to answer it