The Foundations of Personality [61]
and when it reaches a group they become gentle in tone and manners and feel as one. The dream of the reformer has always been the extension of this tender feeling from the baby, from the child and the helpless, to all men, thus abolishing strife, conquering hate, unifying man. This type of love is also paternal, though it is doubtful whether as such it ever reaches the intensity it does in the mother. By a sort of association it spreads to all children, to all little things, to all helpless things, except where there exists a counter feeling already well established. Though typical in the mother, child relationship, tender feeling or love, exists in many other relationships. The human family, with its close association, its inculcated unity of interests, in its highest form is based on the tender feeling. The noble ideal of the brotherhood of man comes from an extension of the feeling found in brothers. The brotherly feeling is emphasized, though the sisterly feeling is fully as strong, merely because the male member of genus homo has been the articulate member, he has written and talked as if he, and not his sister, were the important human personage. So fraternal feeling is tender feeling, existing between members of the same family, or the love that we conceive ought to be present. Is such love instinctive, as is the maternal love? If it is, that instinct is very much weaker, and hostile feeling, indifference, rivalry, may easily replace it. We rarely conceive of a mortal world where so intense a love as that of the mother will be the common feeling; all we dare hope for is a world in which there will be a fine fraternal feeling. Fraternal feeling is born of association together, any task undertaken en masse, any living together under one roof. Even when men sit down to eat at the same table, it tends to appear. So college life, the barracks, secret orders, awaken it, but here, as always, while it links together the associated, it shuts out as non-fraternal those not associated. What we call friendly feeling is a less vehement, more intellectualized form of tender feeling. It demands a certain equality and a certain similarity in tastes, though some friendships are noted for the dissimilarity of the friends. Friendship lives on reciprocal benefits, tangible or intangible, though sentimentalists may take exception to this. Primary in it is the good opinion of the friends and interest in one another; we cannot be friends with those who think we are foolish or mean or bad. We ALLOW a friend to say that we have acted wrongly because we think he has our interest at heart, because he has shown that he has this interest at heart, though his saying so sometimes strains the friendship for a while. Friendship ideally expects no material benefits, but it lives on the spiritual benefit of sympathy and expressed interest and the flattery of a taste in common. It is a unification of individuals that has been glorified as the perfect relationship, since it has no classifiable instinct behind it and is in a sense democracy at its noblest. Friendship is easiest formed in youth, because men are least selfish, least specialized at that time. As time goes on, alas, our own interests and purposes narrow down in order that we may succeed; there is less time and energy for friendship. Sex love is only in part made up of tender feeling. Passion, admiration of beauty, desire of possession, the love of conquest, take away from the "other" feeling that is the basis of tenderness or true love. We desire so much for ourselves in sex love that we have not so much capacity for tender feeling as we usually think we have. The protests of eternal devotion and unending self-sacrifice are sincere enough but they have this proviso in the background: "You must give yourself to me." If the lovers can also be friends, if they have a real harmony of tastes, desires and ambitions, if they can recede their ego feeling, know how to compromise, then this added to sex feeling makes the most genuinely satisfying of all human relations, or at least the most reciprocal.