All About Love: Anatomy of an Unruly Emotion (52 page)

Montaigne’s thinking on affectionate friendship between men, its equality and permanence, emerged as something of a humanist ideal at a period when the feudal family and kinship networks were losing their hold and modern notions of individuality were in the making. A male friend becomes the trusted second self, the other through whom individual identity can be mirrored, measured and constituted. And as in so many other spheres, women hardly figure in these reflections on friendship: bound as they are, legally and socially, to fathers and husbands, they haven’t the freedom to be considered as equal ‘others’ who can be true friends. There is something of a historical irony here. As a ruthless capitalism takes hold in the nineteenth century and the solitary conquistadorial male emerges as hero, the affections are gendered female: ‘true’ friendship, grounded in conversation, gradually and increasingly becomes women’s sphere.

Without friends, ‘the world is but a wilderness’, Francis Bacon, that keen observer of men and matter, both statesman and philosopher of science, wrote in his essay ‘Of Friendship’ (1612). A vivid fear of loneliness colours Bacon’s essay: man alone, without fit society, topples from reason into brute animality. Those unfit for affection and friendship are more akin to beasts than humans. ‘It is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends.’ Bacon’s is an uneasy, changing world where familial as well as political instability haunts all relations. Shifts in power abut on instrumental friendships and clubbable associations, one-time friends are ostracized in preference for the new. Cities may burgeon, but ‘a crowd is not company’. Bacon’s thinking seems already to herald the insecure world that his last amanuensis, Thomas Hobbes, brings to life in
Leviathan
, that reflection on legitimate government written during the strife of the English Civil War.

Like some contemporary therapist urging the advantages of talk to purge discordant passions, Bacon underscores the healing value of friendship:

A friend, it seems, is superior to a priest. Not only does the ‘communicating of a man’s self to his friend’ redouble joy and cut grief in half, but a friend also engages one in the kind of argument that clarifies thought. This second fruit of friendship ‘is healthful and sovereign for the understanding’, just as the first is for the affections. ‘For friendship maketh indeed a fair day in the affections, from storm and tempests; but it maketh daylight in the understanding, out of darkness, and confusion of thoughts.’ Furthermore, if a friend can provide wise counsel, he can also act as a better second self. He can deputize for one, speak one’s case and one’s merits to others. He can often do so more objectively and persuasively than one can oneself, particularly where one’s existing role, such as husband or father, clouds vision. With a true friend, a man can also rest secure ‘that the care of his works will continue after him’.

Shakespeare probes this humanist ideal of friendship on stage. Hamlet and Horatio, Prince Hal and Falstaff, provide two distinct trajectories.

Horatio is Hamlet’s only confidant. Self-avowedly ‘more an antique Roman than a Dane’ (V.ii.346), he has the classical attributes of learning, bravery, virtue and good judgement. He is not afraid to stand up to the ghost and question him in the opening scene. He listens to Hamlet’s tortured thoughts and emotions with marked sympathy and self-control. By acting as a reliable witness to Hamlet’s extremes, Horatio enables us to enter into them without judging Hamlet too harshly. Trusting Hamlet, he allows us to trust the Prince as well. It is Horatio’s sound philosophy that anchors Hamlet’s searing consciousness of self and world.

‘Horatio, thou art e’en as just a man/As e’er my conversation cop’d withal’ (III.ii.56–7), Hamlet says, admiring in him the stoicism and strength of mind he himself does not possess. A little later, he adds:

Hamlet’s libidinal attachment to Ophelia and to his mother propels disaster, but his friendship with Horatio lasts beyond his own death. Horatio’s loyalty is such that as Hamlet lies dying, he is prepared–out of duty and honour–to take his own life. Hamlet dissuades him. ‘Report me and my cause aright/To the unsatisfied,’ he pleads.

And good Horatio will, indeed, be Hamlet’s representative, bearing his voice to the world and explaining Hamlet’s actions after his death. It is he who judiciously apprises rash Fortinbras, Prince of Norway, of the ‘plots and errors’ that have led to this sorry tragedy. By doing so, he fulfils the bonds of ideal friendship and reinstates Hamlet’s ‘noble heart’.

If this is Shakespeare’s portrait of classical friendship at its best, then Prince Hal and Falstaff in
Henry IV
Part 1 provide its counterpart in what the critic Allan Bloom has called a ‘parody of Aristotelian friendship’. Rather than augment his young friend’s virtue, Bacchic Falstaff, no equal, educates him in vice. Prince Hal’s honour is restored only once he rejects his Rabelaisian friend. Yet the rejection is not effected without some regret. When Hal believes Falstaff dead towards the end of the first part of their conjoined dramas, he mourns:

A better man would not have provided Prince Hal with half the school of common, yet excessive, life that Falstaff brings to him. If not quite an ageing sage in a Socratic, homoerotic academy, Falstaff does gives Hal some of the demotic wherewithal with which to rule in unruly times.

In their pairing, Shakespeare offers an early instance of those friendships with charismatic others that characterize the turbulence of adolescence. Forged in the sowing of wild oats, formed in companionable activity more than through conversation, such friendships may end when the responsibilities of more sedate maturity call. Yet, for all that, they remain emblazoned on the mind. And Falstaff, in some measure Prince Hal’s libidinal alter, provides a necessary transitional identification for the man who would be King, the responsible ruler whose body symbolically incorporates the many aspects of the state.

With the growth of cities and the development of a competitive commercial and industrial society, new pressures and pleasures attended friendship, as did new configurations of loving. In
The Wealth of Nations
(1776) Adam Smith worried that the increased division of labour in manufacture would have a damaging impact on relationships and impoverish human personality. Alone in an impersonal city, the poor labourer would be ‘sunk in obscurity and darkness’. Unobserved by friends or family, he would begin to neglect himself and his conduct. Friendship, Smith suggests, provides a mirroring effect, that recognition which bolsters character and a sense of self-worth. For the lonely urbanite, Smith urged the joining of associations and churches. Here companionship and mutual purpose would provide the solitary with the recognition that strengthens the self. Social policy planners today mirror such thinking and insistently align friendship with well-being.

Concerned by the decline in civic and communal spirit that a newly market-driven society based on contract might engender, Adam Ferguson, a leading figure in the Scottish Enlightenment, stressed that benevolence was a primary source of human happiness. Malice, fear, envy, greed, jealousy, all the nether emotions prompted by rivalrous competition, he argued, promoted no felicity. ‘To abstain from harm, is the great law of natural justice,’ he wrote in his
Essay on the History of Civil Society
(1767), ‘to diffuse happiness is the law of morality.’ Loving friendship came high on Ferguson’s list of social goods. Stressing the sociability of human nature, he draws on Pope’s pithy formulation in the
Essay on Man
: ‘Man, like the generous vine, supported lives;/The strength he gains, is from th’embrace he gives.’

For David Hume, who based his ethics on feeling rather than on abstract moral principles, urban life offered more optimistic prospects than it did for Ferguson. The city, after all, fostered ‘urbanity’, a growth of a new sociability and politeness. Friendship and kindness sparked more of the same. Human psychology, Hume observed, was characterized by a reciprocal flow of passions. Sympathy with another led to love and to the good of social benevolence:

Known as the great enlightening Age of Reason, the eighteenth century in its last four decades is also often dubbed in England the Age of Sensibility. After the long civil unrest and the wars of the previous century, overseen by a dour, punishing and omnipresent God, peace broke out and the heavens gave way to a newly interpreted, kinder, more distant and reasonable deity, happy to allow his subjects to get on with the pursuit of science, to dream more equitable regimes, do business, and engage in affectionate, companionate marriage. The times emphasized the faculty of feeling as a mark of civilization. Sensibility was understood as the capacity for refined emotion. It was both a physical, sometimes sexual, susceptibility
and
a mental and moral one. A quickness in displaying compassion was seen as a good, as was reflecting on sentiment. Generous hearts were praised, as were quick minds and tongues.

Exaggerated, however, sensibility could topple over into its own parody. The adjectives used to describe it change as the century turns. Janet Todd charts the movement from Addison’s ‘exquisite sensibility’, Hume’s ‘delicate sensibility’ and Sterne’s ‘dear sensibility’ to Austen’s ‘acute’, Coleridge’s ‘mawkish’ and Byron’s ‘sickly’.

Friendship was extolled throughout the period, between and across the sexes. Wives and women, too, could now be friends. Amorous friendships flourished in the French Enlightenment
salons
, sometimes drifting into the realm of the sexual but often enough stopping short at the pleasures of flirtatious conversation. For the early Romantics, feeling, fellowship and friendship ranked equally high, whatever their extolling of the sublimities of solitude. The young poets banded together, worked and argued and created a movement in the same way, if not with the same effect, that the Revolutionaries had done across the English Channel. At their gatherings Mary and Charles Lamb entertained a host of artists, politicians and poets, Coleridge amongst them. Letters teemed, extending affectionate and intellectual dialogue in times of absence. Goethe wrote thousands, dedicating some three hours before the start of the working day to correspondence. Bettina von Arnim poured out her rebellious heart to the poet-scientist-statesman, who was some thirty-five years her senior: published, her letters influenced Emerson and the tenor of American transcendentalism. Voltaire’s letters–witty, amorous, philosophical and, yes, networking–fill 102 volumes.

In her subtle essay on the long, often rebarbative, friendship between two of America’s founding fathers, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, Judith Shklar probes the way different kinds of political regime colour the nature of friendship. Despotisms and civil unrest, she argues, foster the ‘one soul in two bodies’ kind of friendship, such as Montaigne describes in his
amitié parfaite
with La Boétie. The friends form a ‘private polity’, a ‘moral universe’ in which ‘freedom and spontaneity reign while oppression and hypocrisy are the universal rule in the larger society’. If your friend is in trouble with the law, since there is an affinity between friends not just of feelings and opinions but of personality, the claims of friendship trump the claims of the state. ‘To love one’s friends more than one’s rulers may be morally and emotionally the one way to have a worthwhile life at all.’