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Essays
and Reviews
by
Archibald Lampman
Edited
by D.M.R. Bentley
Friendship
Friendship,
in the old heroic sense of the term," says Carlyle,
"no longer exists; it is in reality no longer expected
or recognized as a virtue among men." How true
is this indeed. Where civilization, that restless march
of the intellect over the ruins of the rude greatness
of the past—glorious ruins, amid whose flowers and mosses
there has ever been much that is tender and beautiful,
though their shattered fragments have been very nearly
all borne away, like the great stones at Carnac, and
built into some more modern specimen, of cold symmetry—where
this civilization wields an influence uninterrupted
by these political storms, which bring with them long
continued fear and doubt, and danger, true friendship,
such friendship as prompts men who feel it to sacrifice
advantage, property, even life for those they love,
is, in the ordinary positions in which men are placed,
almost an impossible thing. Man’s life runs evenly on
from boyhood to old age: his aims are selfish: he is
striving for wealth, or power, or fame: there are no
great and sudden dangers to beset him, such dangers
as in a semi-barbarous state of society make the future
full of uncertainty and dread: he lives on calmly and
contentedly, happy in the accomplishment of his purposes,
and confident in the belief that no dangers can fall
upon him which he is not capable of meeting. It is an
age of pride, independence, and self-reliance. Men feel
not the necessity of friendship, and it springs up very
tardily in their hearts. Gratitude is uncultivated;
indeed it is a very age of ingrat[it]ude; for men, calm,
and cold in the stiffness of the unendangered pursuit
of their own selfish aims, in the stiffness of their
hard, false pride, stoop not to receive kindness, and
thus put themselves under obligation to others, while
those benefits which are forced upon them, perhaps in
an hour of adversity, when prosperity returns they pass
by in contempt. In the olden time it was different.
Governments were unsettled. Dangers were on every side.
People were brought together by common interest into
small communities. A man’s life and property were liable
to destruction at any moment. The future was a great
cloud of gloom, doubt, and peril into which he marched
in fear and trembling. Then it was that one man was
obliged to cling to another for comfort and support,
and knew well how to shew gratitude for services of
which he would perhaps very soon be in need again. Those
were ages of suffering, anxiety, and oppression; but
yet a man possessed that one very great source of happiness—confidence
in the faithful attachment of his friends and a knowledge
that in an hour of reverse a trusty arm would be uplifted
to save him, something really risked out of true friendship
for him. In our time he has not the dangers and anxieties
of an age of feudal vassalage to bear up against, and
he has a contentment in the steady uninterrupted course
of prosperity which civilization allows him, but he
has lost and can never know that most perfect happiness
that rises out of faith in the attachment of those who
would call themselves his friends. Even the ties of
relationship bind men no longer. Brothers go forth into
the vast Babel of life; are separated far apart and
enter upon the pursuit of different schemes of ambition.
If one fails and sinks with a cry for help upon his
lips beneath a burden too heavy for him to bear, the
rest content themselves with a few cold words of feigned
pity, and leaving him to his fate, pass on with the
ceaseless stream of human activity and remember him
no more. Thus it has been in every age in which a high
standard of civilization has been attained— friendship
and gratitude have been for the most part unknown. When
the great Italian Republics, the wonder of the Middle
Ages, first cast off the irksome rule of the German
Emperors, and every member of a community was obliged
to bring his property and his life, and lay them at
the feet of his country, when war and discord desolated
the whole country from end to end, then people stood
manfully by each other, for no man could order his course
of life for himself from one week to another, and ingratitude
was a crime which brought with it hatred and contempt.
But when the wholesome hostility of the emperors was
withdrawn, and these gifted republicans at peace with
one another, turned their energies to the acquisition
of wealth and power, and of refinement in arts and literature,
then this blessed tenderness of heart was lost, and
every man’s heart was hardened against his brother in
the selfish strife for success. A state of civilization
was indeed attained which made Italy a magnificent enchanted
land of wonder and beauty to the semi-barbarians who
visited her from the rude North lands. And yet, I know
not but that I would have preferred the hazardous life
of those who dwelt under the despotic rulers beyond
the Alps. For in Italy, with all its civilization, the
restless, selfish, yet refined march to prosperity and
power, in which every man was engaged, produced a state
of society in which no man could trust his brother,
or knew his friend from his foe. Thus it will always
be. And in our age he who rushes into the great world,
restless with its countless multitudes of cold selfishly-struggling,
ever changing beings, filled with the hope that he may
find some faithful soul from whose unfailing attachment
he may receive confidence and counsel in prosperity;
and comfort, assistance and purest happiness in the
hour of distress, let him not look for such an one amid
the din of enterprise and life, as it is called, the
home of pleasure and ambition, for he can find naught
but neglect and contempt, and will have to make his
own way coldly and sternly to the front till he grows
as selfish and immovable as the rest; but let him cho[o]se
the man, if he can find such an one, who cares little
for the world, and knows less, one who has never ventured
to elbow his way among the merciless crowd, whose heart
is unclouded by its sophistries, whose feelings are
free to turn the way that nature would lead them. And
when he has found such an one, let him cling to him
as a drowning man clings to his rescuer, for if he lose
that greatest of all blessings a mortal can have, he
may never find another.
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