You can, indeed, love your friend, viewed just
as this individual. But love for an individual is so far just a fondness
for a fascinating human presence, and is essentially capricious, whether
it lasts or is transient. You can be, and should be, loyal to your
friendship, to the union of yourself and your friend, to that ideal
comradeship which is neither of you alone, and which is not the mere
doubleness that consists of you and your friend taken as two detached
beings who happen to find one another's presence agreeable. Loyalty to a
friendship involves your willingness actively and practically to create
and maintain a life which is to be the united life of yourself and your
friend--not the life of your friend alone, nor the life of yourself and
your friend as you exist apart, but the common life, the life above and
inclusive of your distinctions, the one life that you are to live as
friends. To the tie, to the unity, to the common life, to the union of
friends, you can be loyal. Without such loyalty friendship consists only
of its routine of more or less attractive private sentiments and mere
meetings, each one of which is one more chance experience, heaped
together with other chance experiences.
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