SOMETHING ABOUT FRIENDSHIP.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume V, Issue 43, 25 October 1890, Page 7

SOMETHING ABOUT FRIENDSHIP.

The talk of making friends is largely a misuse of language. Friends are found, not made. They are a discovery, not a creation. For any friendship that is worth the name is a predestined and foreordained affair. It is not at all a matter of rational choice nor of well considered reason, but rather of magnetism and temperament. We make goodwill as a mental atmosphere surrounding us, and whether we have this or not, depends very largely on ourselves. We make pleasant acquaintances and well-wish-ers by exercising certain qualities of self-control, generosity and courtesy ; but a friend is found, not made. No •observance of polite form, or even the deeper influence of noble qualities of nrind and heart can determine this, nor hardly can the lack of these change that friendship which is simply recognition. It is unchanging and eternal in its very essence. It can bear everything of friction, trial, annoyance or pain, and yet spring up again with even new vitality. Such friendship is a gift of the-gods,*and is not commonly found. People talk lightly and carelessly enough of their friends, when they do not know the meaning •of the word, when they are not themselves the stuff that friends are made of, and know no more the strength and devotion and infinite sacrifice that the word comprehends than they do of the emotions of the inhabitants of Mars. To exchange calls and dinner invitations ; to be members of the same club, or the same ehurch, or to have views in common regarding the Wagner Operas and the Ibsen dramas is by no means friendship; although many relations, even more ■superficial than these, masquerade under that name. There are plenty of people fitted out with a relay of substantial qualities and pleasing attributes, who fill well the place of that extensive outer court of acquaintance. Society requires for its cohesion, polite conformity, cultivated taste ami powers of selection and self-control. Of friends, in any genuine sense, one can inevitably have but few. Even one is quite enough to make life beautiful and redeem it from materialism. And even one is more than perhaps themajority of people possess,although they who least know the higher possibilities of friendship would be the first to deny this assertion. That life is rich which holds one perfect friendship, in which mutual sympathy is almost mutual clairvoyance, and in which sacrifice would be a personal luxury if done for the good of one another. Trust and tenderness are the two factors of this finest and sweetest of social relations. Yet it is a relation for the most part that defies analysis, defies explanation, defies all known laws of the chart of polite society. But its strength is the one great stimulus of life ; it is inspiration. We can do for our friend that which we could not do for ourselves ; we can rise with him, or for him, to heights otherwise unknown.