ACQUAINTANCES.
ARE acquaintances of much value in life ? Sir Mountstuaxt Grant Duff, in the exceedingly readable book of reminis- cences which he has just issued, replies in the affirmative, declaring that he made up his mind when quite a young man to make all the acquaintances he could, especially among men intellectually superior to himself. He made perhaps as many of various nationalities as any man alive, all of whom will read this little remark with a sense that their highly thought- ful and slightly sarcastic friend has made them a very pretty bow. We, on the other band, should be inclined to answer in the negative, but it would be without much of Sir Mount- stuart's apparent certainty. There is one way certainly in which a long list of acquaintances is invaluable. It is a reservoir out of which you pick friends, and without friends life would lose half its value, and nearly all its agreeableness. There are countries, like America, where they are the only armour of proof, the lone individual being always over- whelmed by the hail of arrows which fall on him, and even in more civilised lands they form the pleasantest of garments against the sleet of life. Indeed, but for those who understand one without having everything, as the Scotch say, "summered and wintered" to them, one fails to perceive the use of having the benigner qualities at all. Better be "a thinking machine" like Mr. Blank, who was never yet known to say a civil thing, or to do an unkindly one. The men and women of one's own clan are seldom so loving or so bright that one needs no others, though they say there was once a Scotch laird who was heard to affirm that about his cousins—he afterwards defined his cousins as "those who defer to me "— and except them and one's acquaintance there is no treasure- house from which friendships may be drawn. That is, of course, unanswerable, for without friends life loses not only all its charm but much of its meaning, and becomes not only a place of pilgrimage, which is the theologian's con- stant conception of it, but of pilgrimage through a desert in which there is no water and no shade. There may be Sinai at the end towering above its shadow, but how if one faints before reaching even its foot, and there are neither palm-trees nor cool wells ? We understand Sir Mountstaart, however, to claim for acquaintanceships with the bright—we fear, though he never "lets on" about them in his book, that he is capable of being bored by the dull, or even the average— something more than this, something of that sharpening quality which the old Hebrew attributed to the face of a friend. (He was bored with himself, that man, that is very clear ; and indeed the liability to be bored is the permanent drawback of all Asiatic life, and produces its spasmodic energy.) You derive something, Sir Mountstuart seems to think, from every acquaintance who is not stupid, and he can, therefore, bear to converse with twenty men in an hour. We are not quite sure that we agree. There may be too many musicians for the best music. Not to mention that there are acquaint- ances, often one's intellectual superiors, who have a distinctly depressing effect—they say Louis Napoleon had it to a degree that created among his advisers a sort of supersti- tion that he could draw the life of their minds out of them unperceived, as vampires draw blood from their victims, yet do not fatten on it—the variety of them, especially when taken in large samples, rather dissipates mental energy. The mind loses the wiriness it has acquired in rest and solitude. Too many ideas and too various are forced on one at once, and they prove often indigestible. Of all the French ladies who once kept salon we never heard that even one ever did anything, unless it were Madame de Stael, and her greatest doing was to earn from the master of France a sentence of banishment to the wilds. The remainder talked and listened, doing both intelligently — except Madame Recamier, who only listened, and has not even a mot recorded of her—and so came to an end. Of all human beings Kings must have the most aquaintance, and of the most varied kinds, but they rarely appear to have gained from them either wit or wisdom. Louis XVIII. and Frederick the Great are no doubt exceptions comparatively modern ; but then Louis recognised that his function in life was to borrow brain, paying with the loan his debt to all who addressed him; and Frederick the Great had a special use for his acquaint- ance. He made hones of them to sharpen his bitter wit on. The chiefs of society about whom people write memoirs have rarely done anything, and the men who know everybody and delight everybody, like the late Mr. Montgomery, are forgotten even in memoirs. We should say the same of "Jacob Omnium" but for a few of his letters, and for the fact that while he was alive his whip cut so deep that he is well remembered still, —by the scarred. The truth seems to be that the intellectual haggis which one derives from many acquaintance—is there not a description of haggis as "fine promiscuous feeding " ?— is only digestible by the few, and probably does not add to the intellectual stamina of any. Even in Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff's case, were it not for his wonderful receptivity of humour and botanical facts, we would, speaking of course for
ourselves and not the public, which will buy his present volumes by the ten thousand, rather have the conclusions -which be draws from his endless experience as politician and looker.on than fifty volumes of reminiscences. That would be dinner, and this is only a choice liqueur. We believe that the majority, though not Sir Mountstuart, posi- tively lose by having too many bright acquaintances, so that their minds are being perpetually filled with thin wine from the outside instead of being nourished by any spring • of clear water from within. They are apt to be like the men who, from pure weariness of themselves, are eternally reading :novels, and do not gain from a score of them as much -knowledge even of human beings as one good history would .give. Or rather, to be very modern indeed in one's similes, they are like those few bicyclists who delight in a crowd, and gain the most singular command both over their nerves and over their metal steeds, but are never invigorated by one sharp run over the solitary and beautiful moorland road.
The difference of opinion between ourselves and Sir Mount- -stuart Grant Duff is, we suppose, at bottom this, that he ranks intelligence first and we rank character. No doubt conversa- tion does improve and, above all, brighten intelligence, though not so much when the interlocutors are acquaintance as when they are friends. Acquaintances seldom reveal any. thing except, indeed, their preferences or spites. They rarely -let their minds go, and are very apt, when you ask for bread, to present you smilingly with pates de foie gras. Sir Mount- stuart's French friends did that very constantly, we perceive, so leaving an impression that one has had a feast when there has been but very little to satisfy hunger. One enjoys creminiscences like these, but one gains more from books like the jottings of Nassau Senior, and not even from him, who reported mature thoughts and not intelligent epigrams, do we gain as we gain from De Tocqueville or Stuart Mill. As a source of strength to the mind, if it is not priggish to say so, we prefer reflection, or even reading—the great thinkers of earth who have moulded thought have not always been reading men—to conversation even with superiors, and, indeed, hardly see how it can affect character any more than the murmur of brooks can affect the trees by their side. Character grows, like a tree, from within ; and though, of -course, trees require nutriment, and most of them, even in Peru or Egypt, demand that their thirst be slaked, it cannot be beneficially slaked with wine. It is wine, the conversation -of clever acquaintance, and though it adds greatly to the pleasure of living, and sometimes draws out latent forces, we do not know that it helps much to nourish the constitution. One talker of antiquity, no doubt, diffused wisdom ; bat then, we take it, those who listened to the sayings of Socrates were disciples, that is, specially devoted friends, and could not be described in any way as mere acquaintance. The sword is sharpened by filing, but it was not from filing but in the mine that the iron acquired the qualities which made it capable of becoming steel.
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