Then, again, we seldom make sufficient allowance for the burden which there is in obligation, at least to all but great and good minds. There are some people who can receive as heartily as they would give; but the obligation of an ordinary person to an ordinary person is more apt to be brought to mind as a present sore than as a past delight.
Amongst the unreasonable views of the affections, the most absurd one has been the fancy that love entirely depends upon the will; still more that the love of others for us is to be guided by the inducements which seem probable to us. We have served them; we think only of them; we are their lovers, or fathers, or brothers: we deserve and require to be loved and to have the love proved to us. But love is not like property: it has neither duties nor rights. You argue for it in vain; and there is no one who can give it you. It is not his or hers to give. Millions of bribes and infinite arguments cannot prevail. For it is not a substance, but a relation. There is no royal road. We are loved as we are lovable to the person loving. It is no answer to say that in some cases the love is based on no reality, but is solely in the imagination—that is, that we are loved not for what we are, but for what we are fancied to be. That will not bring it any more into the dominions of logic; and love still remains the same untamable creature, deaf to advocacy, blind to other people’s idea of merit, and not a substance to be weighed or numbered at all.
Then, as to the complaints about broken friendship. Friendship is often outgrown; and his former child’s clothes will no more fit a man than some of his former friendships. Often a breach of friendship is supposed to occur when there is nothing of the kind. People see one another seldom; their courses in life are different; they meet, and their intercourse is constrained. They fancy that their friendship is mightily cooled. But imagine the dearest friends, one coming home after a long sojourn, the other going out to new lands: the ships that carry these meet: the friends talk together in a confused way not relevant at all to their friendship, and, if not well assured of their mutual regard, might naturally fancy that it was much abated. Something like this occurs daily in the stream of the world. Then, too, unless people are very unreasonable, they cannot expect that their friends will pass into new systems of thought and action without new ties of all kinds being created, and some modification of the old ones taking place.