It is clear that closer association, and more knowledge of one another, offer no security against hostile feeling. Whether intimacy will improve our sentiment toward another man or not depends upon the true relation of his way of thinking and feeling to ours, which intimacy is likely to reveal. There are many persons with whom we get on very well at a certain distance, who would turn out intensely antipathetic if we had to live in the same house with them. Probably all of us have experienced in one form or another the disgust and irritation that may come from enforced intimacy with people we liked well enough as mere acquaintances, and with whom we can find no particular fault, except that they rub us the wrong way. Henry James, speaking of the aversion of the brothers Goncourt for Saint Beuve, remarks that it was “a plant watered by frequent intercourse and protected by punctual notes.”[68] It is true that an active sense of justice may do much to overcome unreasonable antipathies; but there are so many urgent uses for our sense of justice that it is well not to fatigue it by excessive and unnecessary activity. Justice involves a strenuous and symmetrical exercise of the imagination and reason, which no one can keep up all the time; and those who display it most on important occasions ought to be free to indulge somewhat their whims and prejudices in familiar intercourse. Neither do refinement, culture, and taste have any necessary tendency to diminish hostility. They make a richer and finer sympathy possible, but at the same time multiply the possible occasions of antipathy. They are like a delicate sense of smell, which opens the way to as much disgust as appreciation. Instead of the most sensitive sympathy, the finest mental texture, being a safeguard against hostile passions, it is only too evident from a study of the lives of men of genius that these very traits make a sane and equable existence peculiarly difficult. Read, for instance, the confessions of Rousseau, and observe how a fine nature, full of genuine and eager social idealism, is subject to peculiar sufferings and errors through the sensibility and imagination such a nature must possess. The quicker the sympathy and ideality, the greater the suffering from neglect and failure, the greater also the difficulty of disciplining the multitude of intense impressions and maintaining a sane view of the whole. Hence the pessimism, the extravagant indignation against real or supposed wrong-doers, and not infrequently, as in Rousseau’s case, the almost insane bitterness of jealousy and mistrust.