Modern characteristics Author:John Morley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: III. QUAEEELS. HE man who has gone through the world without having once quarrelled with a friend, if, indeed, such a man anywhere exists, might at the fir... more »st glance appear a fit person both to admire and to envy. Quarrelling with one's friends is a process at once so painful and so profitless that anybody who has contrived to escape it may be considered to have escaped one of the most troublesome drawbacks of life. But it is worth remembering that a man who has never had a quarrel has probably never had a friend. The only person who manages to get on without estrangements, lasting or temporary, is one who can be quite content without attachments. There are some people, it is true, of whom it may be said, in the well-known phrase, that they have a genius for friendship; but even this is noguarantee for a peaceful life. In one sense, there is truth in the saying that it takes two to make a quarrel; but then, if Orestes resolves to estrange himself from Pylades, why Pylades has no means of preventing an alienation in which he actually has no part. Even the warmest and most considerate of men, those who possess most of the genius of friendship, are thus in a manner at the mercy of those with whom they are thrown, by circumstances or an unwise choice, into close intercourse. The fatal law, that the side on which we are most susceptible of pleasure is also that on which we may have inflicted on us the deepest pain, applies as well to friendship as to all other occasions of emotion. The amount of delight a man can take in the affection and geniality of a friend is always the exact measure of the grief he has to endure when the affection gradually burns lower and lower, and finally nickers out among the grey ashes. Whether, however, quarrels are an inevitable source of distress to e...« less