REAL friendships have been salient facts in the life-story of every nation from remote antiquity. No race but has its famous friendships in commemoration. Yet their fame is evidence of their rarity, of their having existed between men, or women, or men and women, of exceptionally lofty and strong natures.
The friendships of ordinary quality, —begun with little consideration, from some temporary congeniality of association, lightly rooted in poor soil and soon fading, or growing in rank conditions and ere long overgrown by stronger interests. It is the great characters, the associates in stirring events and dramatic conditions, men and women who achieve—in war, literature, religion, art, statecraft, life— who stand forth historically notable illustrations of the power of friendship. As in all other possibilities of life, it is the exceptional beings who have given great renown to this kinship of the soul.
In its highest estate friendship is infrequent. Its being celebrated by writers of all nations and times shows, truly, that it is universally human, but that it has existed in splendor only between splendid natures. It may almost be reckoned among the virtues, which like gold in the rocks and soils may be found in all regions of the earth, but in widely varying conditions of purity.
One thing is certain, however: friendship is of the heart. Great intellect and forceful will power can never make or keep a friend, without great heartedness. Happily, those less gifted with capabilities for exterior accomplishing may be endowed with unselfish, faithful affection, and enjoy the delights of friendship with unspeakable comfort. Even these are not common, however. Every reasonable person sifts and selects among acquaintances to find the friend. Many may attract and be likable, yet “we love but few”.” While friendship is, then, even in imperfection, one of the most satisfactory and blessed of human relations, it becomes the more precious from its very rarity.
Friendship has been a topic for discussion by philosophers, moralists, and essayists of all ages, as a peculiarly exalted condition of life, springing as it must from unselfish devotion to the welfare of another. But, while instances of it have been the inspiration of certain great elegies by great poets, one must note that as a favorite poetic theme it bears no remotest comparison with the passion of love—whether in the graceful comedies of its beginning, the power of its full course, or the pathos, and sometimes even the tragic grief, of its close in estrangement or in death.
The prose writers find it more congenial, as a subject for analysis and discursive thought, than do the poets, for their more emotive expression.
Indeed, it is chiefly when friendship passes into the emotional phase—either of joyful
Comradeship on the one hand, or on the other of grief in alienation or bereavement— that it seems to incite the poetic fire. The realms of fellowship in thought and elevated feeling have their celebrants, but they are few and choice. Even though it must have its inception in an esthetic attraction and mutual harmony of spirit, friendship is essentially more akin to the ethical qualities than to the spontaneity of passional love, which—like the elemental presence of external nature—pervades all literature.
Moreover, the moralist may find friendship more fruitful for preaching than for practice. Cicero’s famous discourse on this theme is probably the most complete and satisfactory extant, and his relations with Atticus, the friend to whom it was addressed, were certainly high, and pure, and stable. Yet when he says, “The foundation of that steadfastness and constancy which we seek in friendship is sincerity; for nothing is steadfast which is insincere,” we must illustrate that truth by recalling the variableness and insincerity which his own ambitious egotism displayed towards others who were his friends and early helpers. The same inconsistency appears in Bacon, whose wise discriminations on friendship are admirable, yet whose ambition led him to faithless ingratitude to friends. Cicero keenly notes: “There is no greater enmity to friendship than covetousness of money, in most men, and, even in the best, an emulous desire of high offices and glory.” There he touched upon the weakness of the strong.
Prosperity and adversity are the extreme tests of friendship; and if we add rivalry in ambition or in love, and too great freedom in that little “unruly member,” the tongue, we shall come upon the most frequent causes of dissension and disruption.
All these phases—the felicitous and the unhappy—have been more or less set forth in poetic numbers. It has been the attempt in the present selection to show the nature, the value, the fellowship, the loss, the grief, the memory and the hopes of friendship, with the permanence of all genuine affection, and its satisfying extension into the Unseen. Even the reaching out toward personal affection with the ideals man has cherished of the Source of all love, and to their manifestation on earth in Jesus, “the human heart of God,” has been deemed concordant with the design of gathering these “Poems of Friendship.”
In Hugh Black’s illuminating essay on this theme, he says “The secret of friendship is just the secret of all spiritual blessing. The way to get is to give… There must be loyalty, which finds expression in service.” No deeper truth underlies any satisfactory human relation, whether it be of friendship, love, or work-a-day labor; and, while the poetic inspiration is not sermonizing but sentiment, the genuine poet leads feeling into thought and realizes to us the pregnant phrase of Keats—“Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”
No anthology represent a tithe of the quest after its special material, —in the present case covering both many “works” of the authors themselves and other groupings of poetical selections. Among these, the compiler would acknowledge indebtedness for suggestions to “A Symphony of the Spirit,” a choice selection by George S. Merriam, and to Slason Thompson’s interesting collection “The Humbler Poets.”
Source: Howard John R. “The Best Poems of Friendship”; New York, Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1911. Pages 7-9.
