TRIANGULAR FRIENDSHIPS. From the Saturday Review. | eral principle of avoiding evil-speaking, or from a generous impulse of good-will towards C, say nothing but good of him? The dangers in that case are that B may be disappointed, may consequently like C the less, and may forever after have a lower opinion of A's discrimination. On the other hand, it is possible that B may take A's cue, and things may be made pleasant all round by this little preliminary oiling of the wheels of friendship. Some of the learned are of opinion that the risk of producing disappointment and consequent reaction is so great that A should make it a rule to abstain from any praise of C, and should even, if he be anxious to do C a good turn, speak a little against him to B. The dangers, however of this course are so great that A ought to have the skill of an artist and the selfdevotion of a hero before he ventures on it. We will not deny that under those conditions good results may be achieved; but to choose the exact kind and degree of dispar agement which will produce a favourable reaction in B's mind in favour of C, is a task to which very few are equal. And there is this great objection to such homeopathic treatment, that, unless the dose administered be really infinitesimal, it may succeed so well as to cost A some of B's regard for him, possibly even C's also. On the whole, we think that in nineteen cases out of twenty A's wisdom will lie in speaking nothing but good of C. The twentieth case will generally be that in which C's faults are either so obvious and so much on the surface that to prepare B for them can but save him a shock, and prevent his taking a discoverer's pleasure in magnifying them, or else of a kind of which, being forewarned, he may steer clear altogether. Such, for instance, are an exacting disposition with regard to small attentions, a want of discretion in repeating things, or irritability on some particular sore point. To carry on year after year, in anything like a successful and satisfactory manner, even a single friendship, is a work requiring a good deal of care and patience. The difficulty increases in a rapid proportion with every additional friendship. Merely to hold the balance even in one's own mindto be just in one's judgments of a number of people to whom one is bound by the most various ties of affection and natural affinity, to be constant without prejudice, and accessible without insincerity is no easy task. But when two or more of one's friends are also each other's friends or acquaintance, a whole new set of difficulties arises. Triangular friendships have their own special charms, not to be enjoyed without encountering special dangers. Somebody has remarked that, when any one of a circle of friends dies, the survivors lose not only the one who is gone, but his share in all the others. Each individual may be considered as an instrument from which no two performers bring out quite the same tone. Those whose perceptions are sufficiently cultivated to recognize the various harmonies of which the same human instrument is capable under different kinds of handling will be familiar with this corollary to the principal loss in such cases. They will know what it is to miss in some surviving friend the moods, the looks, and tones of voice which they themselves have never had the power to elicit, but which have perhaps become doubly dear to them for the sake of the one whose presence used to call them forth. Indeed, the delights of common friendships are too obvious to need description. Every one who cares much about friendships at all must enter into the happiness of seeing two of his friends appreciating and being helpful to each other. But the special dangers attending these triangular or polygonal friendships are less generally recognised; and it is not always easy to decide how they should be met. But, however carefully and successfully one may have guarded against these dangers, there always remains the risk of disappointment to oneself. It is scarcely possible not to look forward with some pleasure The earliest and not the least perplexing to the admiration and interest one's friends is that which arises when, two of A's friends are to feel for each other, or to be quite inbeing about to make acquaintance, B ques- different when they fail to excite it. Nobody tions A about C. Occasionally A may also quite likes that even a favourite picture or be called upon to satisfy C's curiosity about landscape should fall flat upon beholders B; but this double inquisition is a rare piece who were expected to be delighted with it; of ill-luck, and as, even in that case, the how much worse it is to be met with faint principle is the same, we need not entertain praise or unfavourable criticism when one so painful an hypothesis. Suppose, then, has contrived a meeting which ought to simply that A has to prepare B's mind for his have made two people happy. And yet this introduction to C. Should A, on the gen-happens continually, for it seems really im possible to predict who will like whom. It should always be remembered that every human being is an unknown quantity, so that the result of each fresh combination would be incalculable even were it a case of simple addition. But the fact is that characters combine in a manner which is much more like chemical than mechanical combination. Nobody really knows another well enough to predict exactly the way in which he would be affected by any given character; and when it is taken into account that, from the moment of meeting, that other character begins to be modified by his, the problem becomes too intricate for the human understanding. Shrewd guesses may of course be made, but they should never be taken for anything more than guesses. This would at least tend to prevent disappointment. But there are some other curious consequences of this chemical action of characters upon each other. People of very quick sympathies often vary so much in combination with different natures, that to be in the presence at the same time of two who influence them in opposite ways will give them a painful sense of constraint. And this may be the case where there is no insincerity (though insincere persons are, of course, especially liable to be tempted to it), simply from the difficulty of bringing the mind into tune with two very different natures at once; and one of the advantages of triangular friendships is that they afford a subtle test of sincerity. It needs considerable singleness of mind and purpose to live in intimate relations with several people, who are also intimate with each other, so as to be entirely secure from any inharmonious revelations. For it is not only impossible to calculate how people will affect each other, but it is equally so to foretell what will transpire amongst friends. Things repeated to an intimate friend of the person quoted may convey much more than is even understood, much less intended, by the person quoting them. Secrets may even be revealed by those who do not know them, by the accidental mention of some saying or circumstance to others who have the clue to its meaning. And it is curious how impossible it is for two persons, being in possession of the same secret, to conceal that fact from each other. A look, a tone of voice, even silence, may destroy the isolation in a moment. In short, if it is " a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive," it may be said that the web with which we have to do in belonging to a circle of intimate friends is so intricate that we cannot afford to tangle it, and can only avoid | doing so by entire sincerity and singlemindedness. Sincerity, however, is only in the nature of defensive armour, and not enough even of that. To steer successfully through all the intricacies of the situation, much judgment and delicacy are needed; and there is room for many good offices of a positive kind. One of the most important instruments for rendering such services in skilful hands, is the repetition in the proper quarter, and at the right time, of things which should be conveyed, but which cannot be directly said by the first speaker, to those whom they concern. When one considers how much may be cleared up, how many useful hints suggested, and how much pleasure may be given in this way, one scarcely feels that any one who does not make a practice of forwarding these waifs and strays to their destination can be acquitted of culpable negligence. But it must be done very prudently; it is emphatically one of the cases in which "fools rush in where angels fear to tread." Some persons have a great power, which may easily become a snare to them, of seeing people through the eyes of others. This power is valuable very much in proportion to the degree in which it is voluntary, and consciously exercised. If through sympathy with a friend I am able, in addition to my own observation of some one else, to see that third person from my friend's point of view, I manifestly gain a fuller apprehension of his character than I could by myself. It is a sort of binocular arrangement, the result of which is to my unassisted judgment what the stereoscope is to the ordinary photograph, and it is only fair to my friend to note and remember the different appearance of the character in question as seen from his point of view. But the moment I begin to be unconsciously influenced by my friend's judgment, I confound instead of combining the two images, and am liable to be carried away blindfold to a height of admiration from which, when left to my own resources, I may drop into a dismal swamp of disgust; or, on the other hand, I may be cheated out of what would have been meat to me merely because it happens to be poison to my friend. In this second case, however, it must be owned that to be quite independent may cost one something. It is probably not pleasant to eat pork among Jews, nor is it altogether agreeable to associate in a friendly manner with the most estimable persons, in presence of those who contemn and dislike them. Few things are more trying than to be mixed up in a quarrel, or even a misunderstanding, between two people for whom one has much regard. If one side is clearly right, one must either give up the other. friend, or at least lose some of one's good opinion of him. If they are, as the landlord of the public-house in Silas Marner habitually considered his customers, "both right and both wrong," one is in a cleft stick between them, and has to suffer for both. To be in such a cleft stick is certainly a very instructive, though very unpleasant, experience. It teaches one, perhaps more effectually than anything else can, the natural history of misunderstandings, how different the two sides of the shield look, and how impossible it is to explain in words a difference of aspect which has shifted the meaning of the words themselves. The better one understands the point of view of each party, the more clearly one sees the impossibility of their understanding each other. Indeed a few such lessons are enough to make a very cautious or sensitive person with many friends (and such a combination is not impossible) long for some such charm as that which Vivien coaxed Merlin into giving her: But if no one cares to promote one's friends' happiness, one would not willingly, even for a quiet life, throw away the many opportunities which, as the apex of a triangle, one possesses of bringing them into closer and more harmonious relations with each other. It is wonderful how much may be done in this way by an affectionate and clearsighted friend who has the will and the leisure to watch for opportunities of interpreting people to each other, of removing accidental causes of misunderstanding, and of infusing fresh life and warmth into their relations by the contagion of a hearty appreciation. Those who are duly qualified for such offices are not likely to think the risk of appearing to meddle, or the certainty of a good deal of annoyance and disappointment, too great a price to pay for a reasonable degree of success. From the Saturday Review. HERO-WORSHIP. ALL children, almost all young women, and a great many young men, are heroworshippers; but there are few hero-worshippers who are old men, while the exact age at which hero-worship disappears out of the category of human foibles cannot be laid down with precision. Probably heroworship must rank among the other victims of the great iconoclast, Middle Age. About the same time that the digestion gives way, many romantic tendencies take wing, and this possibly among the number. A few Colonel Newcomes remain idolators to the very end; here and there is to be seen an occasional Uncle Toby; one or two greyhaired old gentlemen still adore the name of some living Duke of Wellington; and, in the same way, even old ladies sometimes preserve a hero embalmed in recollection, without being interrupted in their devotion to his memory by a sharp sense of his defects. But heroes, as a rule, belong to the age of delightful irreflection. Mr. Thackeray used to portray with wonderful subtlety the glow and vitality of hero-worship in hot unthinking youth, its decline in the cynic or the epicurean of middle life, and its extinction in the lean and slippered pantaloon. The moral he taught was usually this, that we ought to worship heroes betimes, or we shall never worship them at all. And this is true enough. All castles in the air are pretty sure to be blown up at last, and Bayards, Galahads, and Launcelots in profusion will one day be buried hopelessly under the ruins. Two opposite processes seem' always in operation with respect to heroes. The human imagination is continually creating them, and, as fast as imagination turns them out, experience works away upon the counter-occupation of destroying them. By far the greater part of the literature of any particular time is devoted almost exclusively to the manufacture. Each votary worships in his own peculiar way, but the cultus is common to all. Every now and then we praise a poet for the nobility of conception he has displayed in the painting of some one or other of his characters. This only means that he has been at work making heroes upon paper, just as a boy makes his paper boats, only that paper heroes have a real influence upon the world, and that we happen to approve of the specimen of hero which the writer puts up for our approba tion. Novelists, again, are only hero-makers | once painted. The vast advantage which who compose in prose, instead of metre and history has in this respect is that historical rhyme, and most fictions that are destined heroes seldom aggravate us. Whether or to be permanent contain some pattern of humanity upon whose delineation the author has expended all his energy and power. And if we did not know what history contributes to the gallery of manufactured heroes, Mr. Carlyle would have written in vain. History is, in her very essence, as persistent and designing a manufacturer as either poetry or romance. One purpose that history serves may be perhaps to furnish us with a sort of broken and untrustworthy mirror of the future, which never represents or repeats the past, but which often bears just enough resemblance to the past to make the records of the past practically useful for our guidance. But this is by no means all that history does, or is made to do by ingenious and able moralists. They make, and intentionally make, heroes out of real men and women by throwing out the characters they write of into bold relief. What often prevents people from being heroes to us in actual life is some little personal foible or habit which irritates us when they are with us, and causes us to dislike their company, and eventually to look on their virtues or attainments with a disparaging eye. For a long time we have been, perhaps, in the habit of thinking with profound admiration of some famous man. At last the time arrives when we are introduced to him, and we observe with horror and dissatisfaction that he snuffles while he talks, or that he takes snuff, or that his temper is deplorable, or that he makes a sad hash over his aspirates. We grow tired of sitting in the room with him, and whenever we call up his image again in our minds, the act of memory is attended with disagreeable associations. Young ladies of an impressible and sentimental turn are subject to a good many such terrible calamities. They discover that the poet of whom they have always been so full does not brush his hair, or is overbearing and snappish to his wife; and though they are too chivalrous in their friendships to allow the outer world to see their disappointment, and resolutely maintain in public to the last that it can be of no real consequence whether a hero brushes his hair or not, and that it must be the hero's wife who is in the wrong, the sad experience does nevertheless leave a secret bitterness behind it in their hearts. A fat and unkempt hero cannot ever again be the same as that grand and stately and intellectual-looking creature which their fancy not Mr. Cobden dropped his aspirates is a matter which posterity will consider perfectly unimportant. Nobody now dislikes the great Napoleon any more for taking snuff. Wordsworth went about dressed like a farmer of the Westmoreland lakes, and Dr. Johnson ate voraciously and never tied his shoes; but Dr. Johnson's præterhuman greediness and Mr. Wordsworth's dress vex none of their respective admirers. When one is too close to men and women, and is living constantly with them, it is difficult, if not impossible, not to fix one's attention from day to day on peccadilloes or peculiarities which bear no genuine proportion to the great outline or sum total, or clear purpose of their lives. The proverb that no man is a hero to his valet is merely a rough and vulgar way of expressing this indisputable truth; for it is not merely a valet who is incapable of summing up and grasping as a whole the qualities of his master. Characters, like mountains, only become intelligible, or indeed visible, when they recede a little into the distance; and the daily life of all heroes must of necessity be overlaid with trivialities that prevent near spectators from understanding the vigorous completeness of the heroes as a whole. History, literature, and fiction are thus for ever doing one thing, while the sensitive experience of every day inclines to do the contrary. The latter brings us into awkward proximity to the crust and the flaws of the statue, which, when placed a little further off, will attract admiration up to the full of its deserts. The use of imagination, in constructing heroes for us to worship while we are young and inexperienced, is on a par with many similar benefits conferred upon us by the same mental faculty or power. The process of idealizing is a common one even as far back as childhood, and very early in life we begin to idealize both men and things. Nature seems, to speak popularly, to have her own object in bestowing this capacity upon the young. The things that are most advantageous both for our physical and moral growth would never be done at all if we were not in a sort of way deceived and cheated into doing them. If boys did not regard hoops and balls and marbles as so many splendid and invaluable treasures, they would never gain health in the chase of them; and if a prize at school or college were seen in the light in which such distinctions appear to people of maturer age, sex to whose necessities it is more peculiarly suited. When we cease to believe in the reality of Homeric heroes and heroines, History steps in with a dish accommodated to the exact stage of our credulity, and gives us Cromwells and Charlemagnes to live and thrive upon. And lest dull and prosaic experience should make us incredulous of historic virtue, Fiction is always at hand with an endless bill of fare suited to the most fanciful and fastidious appetite. Thanks to its wise frauds, young women believe in the unalterable constancy of the passions till long after they have arrived at a marriageable age; and men who are never honest or unselfish themselves, and who are sceptical as to the honesty or unselfishness of their friends and acquaintances, and do not hesitate to act upon their scepticism whenever action is necessary, are gently induced by Mr. Dickens, or Mr. Thackeray, or Mr. Trollope, to continue in the vague belief that honesty and unselfishness must exist somewhere, when they read about them so constantly upon paper. knowledge would scarcely of itself have sufficient charms to entice the volatile young philosopher into the pursuit of it. And, in the same manner, it may be said that, but for hero-worship, the world would be a poor place, and few great actions would be attempted, and few noble characters would be gradually formed. It has been remarked with truth how many illustrious actors on the world's stage have been fond of Plutarch's Lives, nor can it be doubted for a moment that the narrative of one great man has a tendency to make another. Anybody who has had anything to say to education must be aware of the magical influence, in all training and discipline, of such histories. A hero, as drawn in literature, is generally a picture of one or two considerable virtues, such as bravery, generosity, or patience, underneath which the name of some real human being is written. Each of the gods of ancient Rome and Greece may be taken to stand as a representative and type of some particular quality; and the heroes and heroines of ancient and modern history are only the ancient gods and goddesses over The full proof of the value of this idealagain, dressed in later fashions to suit the izing, or hero-worship, while it lasts, is to be exigencies of the time, and to make it found in the unquestionable fact that when easier for us to believe in their existence. the power of worshipping heroes leaves us, Aristides is fully as much justice as Diana the character soon ceases to improve. Unwith her crescent moon was purity. Mary happily this is a tolerably palpable phenomQueen of Scots and Marie-Antoinette are enon, and no extensive familiarity with hubeauty in distress, as Venus wounded by man nature is required to bring it to our the spear of Diomede was two thousand notice. Some men, perhaps, have a power years before. Julius Cæsar and Mars are of going on from better to better till they only different ways of embodying the ideas die, and of developing fresh good points of victory and audacity of war; and whether every year, as a tree every autumn produces we call amorous Majesty Henry VIII. with its annual growth of fresh fruit. The good Mr. Froude, or Jupiter with Homer and points so developed are commonly those with Lemprière's Dictionary, the effect pro- which result from an enlarged acquaintance uced upon the juvenile imagination is with life. Perhaps they have seen many identical. The jealous and powerful and men and many men's opinions, or, as Burke acrimonious Juno fulfils the same part as said of himself, they have read the book of Queen Elizabeth for purposes of education, life a great deal and other books a little. and Minerva with her owl does not stand This helps them to be tolerant of the more completely for wisdom than Sir Walter thoughts, or even of the vanities and vices, Raleigh does for magnanimity, and Christo- of others into collision or contact with whom pher Columbus for adventure. No boy who they are thrown. They do not feel so anis worth his salt fails to class Robinson Cru-gry as they once did with Mr. Bright, or so soe, landing in the middle of the surf upon his desert island, with Ulysses placed by Homeric tempests in a similar condition, or to think of the Cyropædia in connection or contrast with the veracious history of Tom Brown. The task which history, fiction, and poetry accomplish is accordingly similar in each case, and this task or mission is a meritorious one. They all place the various virtues that are within the reach of human attainment in a personal and interesting light. Each of them has its special age or fierce against M. Comte, or so incapable of admitting the bright side of the theologians or politicians or philosophers with whom they disagree. Their temper and disposition has mellowed as their intellectual store has increased. But this kind of improvement is an offshoot of their general mental growth, not so much the result of their morality. It is far more rare to find an increase in the virtues which produce great deeds - virtues which for the most part are the consequence of the cultivation of generous and disinter |