The Feast of St. Friend, Arnold Bennett [easy readers .txt] 📗

principles of his own and in a manner terribly impartial. Parents have no sterner nor more discerning critics than their own children.

And so you may be polite to a child, and pretend to appreciate his point of view; but, unless you really do put yourself to the trouble of understanding him, unless you throw yourself, by the exercise of imagination, into his world, you will not succeed in being his friend. To be his friend means an effort on your part, it means that you must divest yourself of your own mental habit, and, for the time being, adopt his. And no nice phrases, no gifts of money, sweets or toys, can take the place of this effort, and this sacrifice of self. With five minutes of genuine surrender to him, you can win more of his esteem and gratitude than five hundred pounds would buy. His notion of real goodwill is the imaginative sharing of his feelings, a convinced participation in his pains and pleasures. He is well aware that, if you honestly do this, you will be on his side.

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Now, adults, of course, are tremendously clever and accomplished persons and children are no match for them; but still, with all their talents and omniscience and power, adults seem to lack important pieces of knowledge which children possess; they seem to forget, and to fail to profit by, their infantile experience. Else why should adults in general be so extraordinarily ignorant of the great truth that the secret of goodwill lies in the sympathetic exercise of the imagination? Since goodwill is the secret of human happiness, it follows that the secret of goodwill must be one of the most precious aids to sensible living; and yet adults, though they once knew it, have gone and forgotten it! Children may well be excused for concluding that the ways of the adult, in their capricious irrationality, are past finding out.

To increase your goodwill for a fellow creature, it is necessary to imagine that you are he: and nothing else is necessary. This feat is not easy; but it can be done. Some people have less of the divine faculty of imagination than others, but nobody is without it, and, like all other faculties, it improves with use, just as it deteriorates with neglect. Imagination is a function of the brain. In order to cultivate goodwill for a person, you must think frequently about that person. You must inform yourself about all his activities. You must be able in your mind's eye to follow him hour by hour throughout the day, and you must ascertain if he sleeps well at night--because this is not a trifle. And you must reflect upon his existence with the same partiality as you reflect upon your own. (Why not?) That is to say, you must lay the fullest stress on his difficulties, disappointments and unhappinesses, and you must minimise his good fortune. You must magnify his efforts after righteousness, and forget his failures. You must ever remember that, after all, he is not to blame for the faults of his character, which faults, in his case as in yours, are due partly to heredity and partly to environment. And beyond everything you must always give him credit for good intentions. Do not you, though sometimes mistakenly, always act for the best? You know you do! And are you alone among mortals in rectitude?

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This mental exercise in relation to another person takes time, and it involves a fatiguing effort. I repeat that it is not easy. Nor is it invariably agreeable. You may, indeed, find it tedious, for example, to picture in vivid detail all the worries that have brought about your wife's exacerbation--negligent maid, dishonest tradesman, milk in a thunder storm, hypercritical husband, dirt in the wrong place--but, when you have faithfully done so, I absolutely defy you to speak to her in the same tone as you used to employ, and to cherish resentment against her as you used to do. And I absolutely defy you not to feel less discontented with yourself than in the past. It is impossible that the exercise of imagination about a person should not result in goodwill towards that person. The exercise may put a strain upon you; but its effect is a scientific certainty. It is the supreme social exercise, for it is the giving of oneself in the most intimate and complete sense. It is the suspension of one's individuality in favour of another. It establishes a new attitude of mind, which, though it may well lead to specific social acts, is more valuable than any specific act, for it is ceaselessly translating itself into demeanour.

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The critic with that terrible English trait, an exaggerated sense of the ridiculous, will at this point probably remark to himself, smiling: "I suppose the time will come, when by dint of regular daily practice, I shall have achieved perfect goodwill towards the first object of my attentions. I can then regard that person as 'done.' I can put him on a shelf, and turn to the next; and, in the end, all my relations, friends and acquaintances will be 'done' and I can stare at them in a row on the shelf of my mind, with pride and satisfaction * * *." Except that no person will ever be quite "done," human nature, still being human, in spite of the recent advances of civilisation, I do not deprecate this manner of stating the case.

The ambitious and resolute man, with an exaggerated sense of the ridiculous, would see nothing ridiculous in ticking off a number of different objects as they were successively achieved. If for example it was part of his scheme to learn various foreign languages, he would know that he could only succeed by regular application of the brain, by concentration of thought daily; he would also know that he could never acquire any foreign language in absolute perfection. Still, he would reach a certain stage in a language, and then he would put it aside and turn to the next one on his programme, and so on. Assuredly, he would not be ashamed of employing method to reach his end.

Now all that can be said of the acquirement of foreign languages can be said of the acquirement of goodwill. In remedying the deficiences of the heart and character, as in remedying the deficiences of mere knowledge, the brain is the sole possible instrument, and the best results will be obtained by using it regularly and scientifically, according to an arranged method. Why, therefore, if a man be proud of method in improving his knowledge, should he see something ridiculous in a deliberate plan for improving his heart--the affair of his heart being immensely more important, more urgent and more difficult? The reader who has found even one good answer to the above question, need read no more of this book, for he will have confounded me and it.


EIGHT


THE FEAST OF ST. FRIEND

The consequences of the social self-discipline which I have outlined will be various. A fairly early result will be the gradual decline, and ultimately the death, of the superior person in oneself. It is true that the superior person in oneself has nine lives, and is capable of rising from the dead after even the most fatal blows. But, at worst, the superior person--(and who among us does not shelter that sinister inhabitant in his soul?)--will have a very poor time in the soul of him who steadily practises the imaginative understanding of other people. In the first place, the mere exercise of the imagination on others absolutely scotches egotism as long as it lasts, and leaves it weakened afterwards. And, in the second and more important place, an improved comprehension of others (which means an intensified sympathy with them) must destroy the illusion, so widespread, that one's own case is unique. The amicable study of one's neighbours on the planet inevitably shows that the same troubles, the same fortitudes, the same feats of intelligence, the same successes and failures, are constantly happening everywhere. One can, indeed, see oneself in nearly everybody else, and, in particular, one is struck by the fact that the quality in which one took most pride is simply spread abroad throughout humanity in heaps! It is only in sympathetically contemplating others that one can get oneself in a true perspective. Yet probably the majority of human beings never do contemplate others, save with the abstracted gaze which proves that the gazer sees nothing but his own dream.

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Another result of the discipline is an immensely increased interest in one's friends. One regards them even with a sort of proprietary interest, for, by imagination, one has come into sympathetic possession of them. Further, one has for them that tender feeling which always follows the conferring of a benefit, especially the secret conferring of a benefit. It is the benefactor, not the person benefited, who is grateful. The benefit which one has conferred is, of course, the gift of oneself. The resulting emotion is independent of any sympathy rendered by the other; and where the sympathy is felt to be mutual, friendship acquires a new significance. The exercise of sympathetic imagination will cause one to look upon even a relative as a friend--a startling achievement! It will provide a new excitement and diversion in life.

When the month of December dawns, there need be no sensation of weary apprehension about the difficulty of choosing a present that will suit a friend. Certainly it will not be necessary, from sheer indifference and ignorance, to invite the friend to choose his own present. On the contrary, one will be, in secret, so intimate with the friend's situation and wants and desires, that sundry rival schemes for pleasuring him will at once offer themselves. And when he receives the present finally selected, he will have the conviction, always delightfully flattering to a donee, that he has been the object of a particular attention and insight. * * * And when the cards of greeting are despatched, formal phrases will go forth charged, in the consciousness of the sender, with a genuine meaning, with the force of a climax, as though the sender had written thereon, in invisible ink: "I have had you well in mind during the last twelve months; I think I understand your difficulties and appreciate your efforts better than I did, and so it is with a peculiar sympathetic knowledge that I wish you good luck. I have guessed what particular kind of good luck you require, and I wish accordingly. My wish is not vague and perfunctory only."

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And on the day of festival itself one feels that