BY C. L. R. SASTRI

I

One can never tell how inspiration takes a man. Look at myself. Here am I, writing on all sorts of things from year’s end to year’s end, and not yet being in the fortunate position of hitting upon a theme that suits one to a T. I have been trying this and I have been trying that, but it has all been, up to now, merely so much groping about my way, merely so much preparing of the ground for the receiving of the proper seed at the proper time–nothing more nor less. It is an agonising thought, but it is true, nevertheless, that none of us seems to succeed at the very first venture. The brain must reel, the body must sweat, before victory–or any reasonable simulacrum of it–comes our way; and only by a process of trial and error may we hope ever to attain to a correct, fool-proof understanding of ourselves. As Matthew Arnold said:

II

Mr. H. G. Wells has remarked of the later manner of Henry James that it reminded him of a hippopotamus picking up a pea. Well, it not seldom happens that we put ourselves to enormous trouble to reach out to what is near at hand. Two deductions result. One is that we must take pains to get a glimpse of our real aptitudes. The other is that, now and then, it turns out to be but an ‘expense of spirit’ in ‘a waste of’ deliberation, because we could have attained to that self-knowledge with a tithe of that energy: the secret of the mystery all the while lying at our very feet, so to speak. The late Thomas Earle Welby–may his soul rest in peace!–used to say of Gilbert Keith Chesterton (of hallowed memory) that he was like a man who was in the habit of making a tour of all the shires of England and Scotland in order to find out what was but next door. I appear perilously like that in the present instance. The subject that fits me like a glove is the one that I have chosen for this essay; and to think that it has escaped me so long almost brings tears to my eyes. Why, it is like foraging in other countries when, as it were, my own native land has been incessantly beckoning to me. I am, not to mince matters, by way of being an authority on friendship; and, instead of dissertating on my own range of ‘expertise,’ instead of cultivating my own special patch of land, I have been engaging myself and my readers on a veritable devil’s dance of politics and literature, on

–on all topics, in short, that are not germane to my particular province. Enough of this truancy. The time, I feel, has arrived when I must rely on my own mother-wit and acquired wisdom and discard other persons’ erudition without a moment’s regret. Other persons’ erudition, indeed! In the end every dog has to hang by his own tail. Then why not sooner rather than later?

III

We are living in an age of extreme, of awe-inspiring, rationalism. For everything we are obliged to quote chapter and verse. The eternal question is: ‘Produce your credentials!’ Well, I suppose I have no option but to produce mine. I have boasted that if anyone has a right to ‘blow the gaff’ on friendship, that one is none other than (if you please) your most humble servant. And I shall presently show why. It is because I have no friends; and friendship, though I have courted it many a time and oft, is still evading me in a diabolically masterly fashion. Not the coyest maiden, alive or dead, has ever looked askance at ‘nods and becks and wreathed smiles’ so disdainfully as that mysterious entity called friendship has looked at me: so much so, indeed, that I have well-nigh begun to have some pretty serious misgivings about myself. Am I not like other men?–I have asked myself. Do I in any way suggest Richard the Crook-back, Judas Iscariot, Machiavelli, Iago, Dillinger, the Man in the Iron Mask, Uriah Heep, Flibbertigibbit, or anyone else of that fraternity? Is devilishness ‘writ large’ on my face? I look into the mirror and do not find the word–or the thing–throughout the length and breadth and height of the countenance that stares back at me through it. Wherein, O wherein, am I lacking? With my own eyes I behold many around me that are simply wallowing in friends and friendship: some of whom at least I know to a certainty to be C₃ men, and even worse. So-and-so is very stiff, but even he has a few comrades with whom he is privileged to shake hands and exchange smiles. There is that sour-face, looking unutterable things, but do you think he is, for that reason, without any choice spirits that dote on him? No fear! And I have thought and thought, and have reached a few conclusions that do seem to me to be fairly fool-proof. And I ask you, gentle reader, whether I who have brooded on friendship these innumerable days and months and years, who have craved for the bread of friendship and have received but the stones of it instead, am not the man best fitted to write about it? ‘Produce your credentials!’ quotha? These are my credentials. On the principle that the spectator sees more of the game than the player himself, I have the temerity to fancy that the fellow who has failed in friendship, and not his far more fortunate companion, is an authority on the subject. Your perfectly healthy man wastes no thought on the matter of his health: he is too busy enjoying his health to contemplate upon it. No: it is your chronic invalid that specialises in it and can, from the abundance of his experience, give copious advice to others about it, even though he may not be able to cure himself in spite of that plethora of erudition. ‘Physician, heal thyself!’ is, in a sense, a psychologically mistaken injunction. His function is to heal his fellow-men: someone else must come and heal him!

IV

Jesting apart, I should like to supply a few hints, from a whole medicine-chest of them that I have been able to accumulate during my sojourn on this planet, on friendship to those that are yet of an age to profit by them and that have not collected a surplusage of friends so far. Well, the chief thing is not to entertain extravagant hopes about your capacity to collect them. Put on a brave front, even a supercilious front; go about breathing fire and brimstone; cultivate a stiff upper lip; do not talk unless you are talked to; look as profound as possible; comfort yourself as though you were the ‘monarch of all you survey; and, believe me, friends will literally fall into your lap. Somehow it so happens that it is not, as is commonly supposed, the soft word, but the cruel word, that turneth away wrath: that humanity is more easily wooed by using the big stick, and not by cajoling and flattering. Whosoever cares not a tinker’s curse, as the saying is, for the feelings of others will prosper beautifully in friendship. Command, and thou shalt be obeyed: reject, and thou shalt be accepted. Be scornful and overbearing, and thou shalt be hugged to one’s bosom. Have a stony heart, and other people’s hearts will simply melt for you. Above all, be of the world worldly. If, by any chance, you have been endowed by a benign Providence with a trifle too much of sincerity, then be sure that you are a non-starter in the friendship stakes. Learn to use the world as the world uses you: that is, harshly. Never err on the side of charitableness: if you must err at all, err on the opposite side. Be careful to give a man less than his due. If–God forbid!–you have the disposition of Dickens’s Brothers Cheeryble, shut yourself up in your room, do not venture out. Remember always that, if you insist on wearing your heart on your sleeve, daws will be sure to peck at it. Exaggerate your worth invariably: bear in mind the incontrovertible fact that, unless you go about pretending to be some pumpkins you do not stand a chance of being regarded even as a very ordinary cucumber. The Kingdom of Heaven may be for the humble, but the kingdom of the earth is assuredly for the haughty and the vainglorious. In other words, do not commit the mistake of evaluating yourself at, or below, par: that way madness lies. It is sheer, stark, worldly suicide. The truth is, the world, speaking in general terms, is superficial, is insincere: consequently, it has no use for the better kind. If you confront it by depth and sincerity, it cannot make head or tail of your idiom: so far as it is concerned, you may be talking in an alien tongue. When the usual standard about you is low, it is no good your habitually displaying a higher standard. If you are false, as the world is false, you may, in time, be taken for a tolerably truthful man. But if you have the misfortune to hoist the flag of truth on your mast as a matter of daily practice, then, my dear friend, you are ‘done for,’ your plight is past mending: you are sure to be regarded as a liar ‘to the manner born.’ Christ did not say for nothing: ‘The first shall be the last, and the last first.’ Or: ‘He who shall lose his life for me shall save it.’ He knew perfectly well that the world’s standards are just the opposite of those of the Heavenly Kingdom; and some such reversal of fortune as he adumbrated is bound to take place ‘up above.’

V

I am trying to lead on to the point that, on certain conditions, friendship is not worthwhile. It is, any day, better to be without friends than to barter your soul. If you find that the world and yourself do not hit it off as you and the world ought to, do not, for Heaven’s sake, shorten your life by brooding over it endlessly: in especial, when you feel in your bones that it is you who are in the right and that it is the world which is in the wrong. There is a poem, called the ‘Northern Farmer,’ which tells us:

We may, for our purpose, say, instead of ‘the poor in a loomp is bad,’ ‘men in a loomp are bad.’ At any rate, men in the lump are not chivalrous. The age of chivalry is gone–though not for the reason that Burke attributed. Being in a minority means being in hell–as the world goes; and if you are not only in a minority, but in a minority of one, then God only can help you. But that is no just cause why you should lose heart. The friendless man is often the man whose friendship ought to be courted by those that are not everlastingly content to toe the line to the vulgar crowd. ‘A man may smile and smile and be a villain,’ as Shakespeare has recorded, with characteristic insight into human nature. Well, a man may wallow in friends– may have friends, if I may so, ‘to the right of him,’ and friends ‘to the left of him,’ and friends behind as well as in front of him–and be none the richer in spiritual currency: while a man may have swarms and swarms of enemies and yet be accounted wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. Friendship on my own terms–yes. Otherwise–no. A man without friends is not necessarily a bad man: on the contrary, the odds are that he is a very good man. Else, listen to that forthright writer, Mr. St. John Ervine. He is writing on the late Mr. Alfred Sutro, a dramatist of distinction (The Observer, Oct. 15, 1933):

"It is sometimes said of a man, insultingly I think, that he has not an enemy in the world. My heart would break if anybody said that of me; for how colourless, or diabolically deceitful, a man must be if he rouses no resentment against himself in anybody! Among the Beatitudes is a warning to us to beware when all men speak well of us. The warning is often misinterpreted, and is generally thought to mean that those of whom all men speak well are good people who are being treacherously flattered. That is not the meaning of the warning as I read it. "Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you! for so did their fathers to the false prophets." The false prophets, presumably because they were powerful, received flattery in bucketsful until they were no longer powerful. That means, I suppose, that a man who is universally praised had better search his conscience to find out what sin he has committed, for it is only bad and powerful men of whom all men speak well. And they are flattered only because they are ruthless. There is no praise for them when they become impotent. Good men are not subjected to general flattery: they begin by being generally cursed and are very likely to be persecuted and even to be put to death. A good man, when he hears himself universally acclaimed, falls in horror on his knees and asks for God’s pardon. Let us go on guard against men who have no enemies: they are probably scoundrels."

I agree with Mr. Ervine whole-heartedly. Let us have friends, by all means, if so be we are not compelled to throw our principles overboard, if so be we are not expected to ‘bow in the House of Rimmon’ for the honour of retaining their friendship. But, at the same time, let us not be afraid of having enemies! Perhaps, after all, it is the man that has enemies and not friends who is, in nine cases out of ten, the better man.

VI

But, if you must have friends, then it is well to be fore-warned that they may not come up to your expectations entirely: only by being so forewarned can you escape much bitterness of soul in the end. It is safest to provide against later disillusionment at the very beginning. As Emerson puts it, in his inimitable way, in his essay on the same subject:

"It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew to carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with the poor fact that the receiver is not capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion. If he is unequal, he will presently pass away; but thou art enlarged by thy own shining, and, no longer a mate for frogs and worms, dost soar and burn with the gods of the empyrean. It is thought a disgrace to love unrequited. But the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited. True love transcends instantly the unworthy object, and dwells and broods on the eternal; and when the poor, interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much earth, and feels its independence the surer."

I am to conclude my essay with these pregnant words.

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