dy to look generously and sympathetically
upon every wandering obsession or passing madness in the friend of
its choice.

With the exception of the love of a parent for a child this is the only
human love which is outward-looking and centrifugal in its gaze;
and even in the case of the love of a mother there is often something
possessive and indrawing.

How beautifully, how finally, Montaigne, in his description of this
high passion, sweeps aside at one stroke all that selfish emphasis
upon "advantage" of which Bacon makes so much, and all that
idealistic anxiety to retain one's "separate identity" in which
Emerson indulges!

"I love him because he is he and he loves me because I am I." This
is worthy to be compared with the beautiful and terrible "I _am_
Heathcliff" of the heroine in the Bronte novel.

Emerson speaks as though, having sounded the depths of one's
friend's soul, one moved off, with a wave of the hand, upon one's
lonely quest, having none but God as one's eternal companion.

This translunar preference for the "Over-soul" over every human
feeling is not Montaigne's notion of the passion of friendship. He is
more earth-bound in his proclivities.

"He is he and I am I," and as long as we are what we are, in our flesh,
in our blood, in our bones, nothing, while we live, can sever the
bond between us. And in death? Ah! how much nearer to the pagan
heart of this great mystery is the cry of the son of Jesse over the
body of his beloved than all the Ciceronian rhetoric in the
world--and how much nearer to what that loss means!

Montaigne does not really, as Pater so charmingly hints, break the
flexible consistency of his philosophic method when he loves his
friends in this unbounded manner. He is too great a sceptic to let his
scepticism stand in the way of high adventures of this sort.

The essence of his unsystematic system is that one should give
oneself freely up to what the gods throw in one's way. And if the
gods--in their inescapable predestination--have made him "for me"
and me "for him," to cling fast with cold cautious hands to the
anchor of moderation were to be false to the philosophy of the
"Eternal Now."

The whole of life is an enormous accident--a dice-throw of eternity
in the vapours of time and space. Why not then, with him we love
by our side, make richer and sweeter the nonchalant gaiety of our
amusement, in the great mad purposeless preposterous show, by the
"quips and cranks" of