A new friendship, by this unconscious imitation of the new friend's nature and habits, and by the excitement of the thing's pleasant novelty, causes us to discover new qualities in literature, art, our surroundings, ourselves. How different does the scenery look--still familiar but delightfully strange--as we drive along the valleys or scramble in the hills with the new friend! there is a distant peak one never noticed, or a scented herb which has always grown upon those rocks, but might as well never have done so, but for the other pair of eyes which drew ours to it, or the other hand which crushing made us know its fragrance. Pages of books, seemingly stale, revive into fresh meaning; new music is almost certain to be learned; and a harmony, a rational sequence, something very akin to music, perceived in what had been hitherto but a portion of life's noise and confusion. The changes of style which we note in the case of great geniuses--Goethe and Schiller, for instance, or Ruskin after his meeting with Carlyle--are often brought about, or prepared, by the accident of a new friendship; and, who knows? half of the disinterested progress of the world's thought and feeling might prove, under the moral microscope, to be but a moving web of invisible friendships, forgotten, but once upon a time new, and so vivid!
The falling off from such pleasure and profit in older friendships (it is very sad, but not necessarily cynical to recognize the fact) is due in some measure to our being less frank, less ourselves, in them than in new ones. Our mutual ways of feeling and seeing are apt to produce a definite track of intellectual and affective intercourse; and as this track deepens we find ourselves confined, nay, imprisoned in it, with little possibility of seeing, and none of escaping, as in some sunken Devonshire lane; the very ups and downs of the friendship existing, so to speak, below the level of our real life; disagreements and reconciliations always on one pattern. With people we have known very long, we are apt to go thus continually over the same ground, reciting the same formulæ of thought and feeling, imitating the _ego_ of former years in its relations with a _thou_ quite equally obsolete; the real personality left waiting outside for the chance stranger. It is so easy! so safe! We have done it so long! There is an air of piety almost in the monotony and ceremonial; and then, there are the other's habits of thought which might be jarred, or feelings we might hurt.... Meanwhile our sincere, spontaneous reality is idling elsewhere, ready to vagabond irresponsibly at the beck and call of the passing stranger. And, who knows? while we are thus refusing to give our poor old friend the benefit of our genuine, living, changed and changing self, we may ourselves be losing the charm and profit of his or her renovated and more efficacious reality.