FAIR-WEATHER FRIENDS. PROVERBS xvii. 17; xix. 7. F one swallow makes not summer, so neither do Who shall Fair life. A summer friend is for summer wear. warrant him winter-proof? There is more by a great deal of summer than of friendship in his make-up. Summer friends come like swallows, so depart. weather brings them; come foul, and they are gone. He that sang in the Forest of Arden "Blow, blow, thou winter wind," called the boreal blast he invoked "not so unkind as man's ingratitude;" and declared most friendship to be feigning; and sang again, "Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky," "Thy sting is not so sharp as friend remembered not." So collapses many a Midsummer Night's Dream of present friendship into a bleak Winter's Tale of friendship fled. Now, a friend, in the authentic sense, as wise men understand it, and as the Wise King defines it, “A friend loveth at all times, and a brother is born for adversity." At all times, bad as well as good, for worse as well as for better. In all seasons; autumn's darkening decline as well as spring's joyous outburst,-winter's chill darkness that may be felt, not less than summer's prodigality of sunshine. But the Wise King knew as well in his day the tricks and lapses and laches of summer friends, as any deluded and forsaken victim can know, in this our late day, upon whom the end of the nineteenth century is coming, almost come; and so true is poor human nature to itself that it was as indisputable a fact in the days of Solomon as it is in our own, that "all the brethren of the 186 FAIR-WEATHER FRIENDS. poor do hate him; how much more do his friends go far from him! he pursueth them with words, yet they are wanting to him." Poverty parts good company. And then is seen and laid to heart as never before, that a friend in winter time is a friend for all time; that a friend in need is a friend indeed. It is a theme Ovid harps upon. So long as things go well with you, says he, many are the friends you may reckon, if not reckon upon; but let clouds gather, and anon you are left to yourself. "Donec eris felix multos numerabis amicos; Tempora si fuerint nubila, solus eris." Elsewhere again; no one, he says, is beloved but the man whom Fortune favours; the first faint clap of her thunder startles into flight the whole pack of summer friends, who verily stay not on the order of their going, but go at once. "Diligitur nemo nisi cui Fortuna secunda est, Quæ, simul intonuit, proxima quæque fugat." And in another place the same poet, who had seen life, and life in high places too, sententiously moralizes on the care taken by ants never to waste time and trouble in wending their way to an empty granary; just so, no friend, of the fair-weather sort, will stultify himself by visiting those who have come to the end of their wealth. "Horrea formicæ tendunt ad inania nunquam; Prosperity hath many friends, says the adage: Felicitas multos habet amicos. But the complexion of their friendship is that of the "mahogany "-table friends they are, who will be off when Timon's board is empty and himself undone. Est amicus socius mensæ, et non permanebit in die necessitatis. Seneca can get but a distant view of the friends of the unfortunate, so POVERTY PARTS GOOD COMPANY. 187 cautious are they not to come too near: Viri infelicis procul amici. Plautus computes the tenacity of such friendship by the scale of a man's means; let him be reduced, and his hangers-on fall off. "Ut cuique homini res parata est, firmi amici sunt; si res lassa labat Itidem amici collabuscunt." The lapse of wealth is the collapse of that social circle. So Theognis, in a passage familiar in analecta books: If you are wealthy, says that poet, you will have friends in plenty; but be you poor, and they will be few, and you will have forfeited your reputation as a good fellow. Εἰ μὲν γὰρ πλουτῇς πόλλοι φίλοι, ἢν δὲ πένηαι Let the pot boil, and friendship will keep hot the while Zei xúτpa, pixía: Fervet olla, vivit amicitia. Horace, for the boiling pot, has the well-filled cask; empty that, and there is a flight of friends in all directions: Diffugiunt, cadis Cum face siccatis, amici Ferre jugum pariter dolosi. They will, some of them, stay on for the draining of the dregs; but not a second later. When we are happy, in the spring-tide of abundance, and the rising flood of plenty, as Feltham words it, the world will be our servant; then all men flock about us, with bare heads, and bended bodies, and protesting tongues. But when these pleasant waters "fall to ebbing; when wealth but shifts to another hand; these men look upon us at a distance, and stiffen themselves as if they were in armour; lest, if they should come nigh us, they should get a wound in the close." There is what the author of Middlemarch calls a cold air surrounding those who are down in the world, and people are glad to get away from them, as from a cold room: human beings, mere men and women, without furniture, without anything to offer you, who have ceased to count as anybody, "present an embarrassing negation of 188 FAIR-WEATHER FRIENDS. reasons for wishing to see them, or of subjects on which to converse with them." Noureddin's eavesdropper-friend who overhears the steward's dismal report to his master of failing means, loses no time in repeating it to the company, and they lose none in giving Noureddin the cold shoulder. Another of the Arabian Nights' tales is pointed at, or points, the same moral; the prodigal hospitality of Abon Hassan is suddenly checked by want of funds; and then we read, that "as soon as he left off keeping his table his friends forsook him: whenever they saw him they avoided him, and if by chance he met any of them, and went to stop them, they always excused themselves on some pretence or other." A Social Essayist is satirical upon the once popular picturesque illustration in story-books of some easy, careless, amiable spendthrift, who, after lavishing his fortune upon socalled friends, was, in the evil hour, deserted by them. Now, friends, it is objected, are not the sort of people men do lavish fortunes upon the spendthrift wished to make a figure or enjoy himself, and collected about him whoever would further this end; but it was really the fault of the spender, not of the world, that he should drop through after his money was gone. "The assumption was preposterous that, after his own means were wasted, his acquaintance should make all straight by giving him theirs-which was the moral apparently pressed on our raw and perplexed judgment." What! shall we not resort to our friends in time of need? is a query of exclamation put by Bishop Latimer in one of his sermons; and he answers it by another: "And trow ye we shall not find them asleep?* Yes, I warrant you; and when we need their help most, we shall not have In reference to Gethsemane. FRIENDSHIP THAT TURNS TO ACQUAINTANCE. 189 it." Friendship in ill-luck turns to mere acquaintance: the wine of life, as a modern moralist puts it, goes into vinegar; and folks that hugged the bottle shirk the cruet. *Ονομα γὰρ, ἔργον δ ̓ οὐκ ἔχουσιν οἱ φίλοι Οἱ μὴ 'πὶ ταῖσι συμφοραῖς ὄντες φίλοι. * Chaucer's version of the Romaunt of the Rose is but a vigorous variation of the old-world theme: the professions of fair-weather friends are all falsehood and guile, his warning runs, to the credulous and deluded,— "As they shal aftirward se, Whanne they arn falle in poverte, And ben of good and catelle bare ; Nor of a thousand fulle scarsly, Ne shal they fynde unnethis oon, Bolingbroke in mature age described himself as having been apt in early life† to confound his acquaintance and his friends together,―never doubting that he had a numerous cohort of the latter. He expected, if ever he should fall into misfortune, to have as many and as remarkable instances of friendship to produce as the Scythian in one of Lucian's dialogues draws from his nation. Into these misfortunes he had fallen. And with this recorded result: "The fire of my adversity has purged the mass of my acquaintance; and, the separa*Euripid. Orestes, 454, 455, 664-666. "At that age of life when there is balm in the blood, and that confidence in the mind which the innocency of our own heart inspires, and the experience of other men's destroys."-Bolingbroke to Swift, March 17, 1719. |