Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
stem short. And I must hazard the production of the bald fact amid
these pleasing reveries, though it should prove an Egyptian skull at
our banquet.[291] A man who stands united with his thought, conceives
magnificently to himself. He is conscious of a universal success,[292]
even though bought by uniform particular failures. No advantages, no
powers, no gold or force can be any match for him. I cannot choose but
rely on my own poverty, more than on your wealth. I cannot make your
consciousness tantamount to mine. Only the star dazzles; the planet
has a faint, moon-like ray. I hear what you say of the admirable parts
and tried temper of the party you praise, but I see well that for all
his purple cloaks I shall not like him, unless he is at least a poor
Greek like me. I cannot deny it, O friend, that the vast shadow of the
Phenomenal includes thee, also, in its pied and painted
immensity,--thee, also, compared with whom all else is shadow. Thou
art not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is,--thou art not my soul, but
a picture and effigy of that. Thou hast come to me lately, and already
thou art seizing thy hat and cloak. It is not that the soul puts forth
friends, as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently, by the
germination of new buds, extrudes the old leaf?[293] The law of nature
is alternation forevermore. Each electrical state superinduces the
opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter
into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude; and it goes alone, for a
season, that it may exalt its conversation or society. This method
betrays itself along the whole history of our personal relations. The
instinct of affection revives the hope of union with our mates, and
the returning sense of insulation recalls us from the chase. Thus
every man passes his life in the search after friendship, and if he
should record his true sentiment, he might write a letter like this,
to each new candidate for his love:--
DEAR FRIEND:--
If I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, sure to match
my mood with thine, I should never think again of trifles,
in relation to thy comings and goings. I am not very wise;
my moods are quite attainable; and I respect thy genius; it
is to me as yet unfathomed; yet dare I not presume in thee a
perfect intelligence of me, and so thou art to me a
delicious torment. Thine ever, or never.
8. Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity, and
not for life. They are not to be indulged. This is to weave cobweb,
and not cloth. Our friendships hurry to short and poor conclusions,
because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams,[294] instead
of the tough fiber of the human heart. The laws of friendship are
great, austere, and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of
morals. But we have aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a
sudden sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden
of God, which many summers and many winters must ripen. We seek our
friend not sacredly but with an adulterate passion which would
appropriate him to ourselves. In vain. We are armed all over with
subtle antagonisms, which, as soon as we meet, begin to play, and
translate all poetry into stale prose. Almost all people descend to
meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the
very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures
disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual
disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted!
After interviews have been compassed with long foresight, we must be
tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable
apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of
friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and both
parties are relieved by solitude.
9. I ought to be equal to every relation. It makes no difference how
many friends I have, and what content I can find in conversing with
each, if there be one to whom I am not equal. If I have shrunk unequal
from one contest instantly, the joy I find in all the rest becomes
mean and cowardly. I should hate myself, if then I made my other
friends my asylum.
"The valiant warrior[295] famoused for fight,
After a hundred victories, once foiled,
Is from the book of honor razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toiled."
10. Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashfulness and apathy are
a tough husk in which a delicate organization is protected from
premature ripening. It would be lost if it knew itself before any of
the best souls were yet ripe enough to know and own it. Respect the
_naturlangsamkeit_[296] which hardens the ruby in a million years,
and works in duration, in which Alps and Andes come and go as
rainbows. The good spirit of our life has no heaven which is the price
of rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but
for the total worth of man. Let us not have this childish luxury in
our regards, but the austerest worth; let us approach our friend with
an audacious trust in the truth of his heart, in the breadth,
impossible to be overturned, of his foundations.
11. The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted, and I
leave, for the time, all account of subordinate social benefit, to
speak of that select and sacred relation which is a kind of absolute,
and which even leaves the language of love suspicious and common, so
much is this purer, and nothing is so much divine.
12. I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest
courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work,
but the solidest thing we know. For now, after so many ages of
experience, what do we know of nature, or of ourselves? Not one step
has man taken toward the solution of the problem of his destiny. In
one condemnation of folly stand the whole universe of men. But the
sweet sincerity of joy and peace, which I draw from this alliance
with my brother's soul, is the nut itself whereof all nature and all
thought is but the husk and shell. Happy is the house that shelters a
friend! It might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to
entertain him a single day. Happier, if he know the solemnity of that
relation, and honor its law! He who offers himself a candidate for
that covenant comes up, like an Olympian,[297] to the great games,
where the first-born of the world are the competitors. He proposes
himself for contest where Time, Want, Danger are in the lists, and he
alone is victor who has truth enough in his constitution to preserve
the delicacy of his beauty from the wear and tear of all these. The
gifts of fortune may be present or absent, but all the hap in that
contest depends on intrinsic nobleness, and the contempt of trifles.
There are two elements that go to the composition of friendship, each
so sovereign, that I can detect no superiority in either, no reason
why either should be first named. One is Truth. A friend is a person
with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think aloud. I am
arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal that I may
drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and
second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with
the simplicity and wholeness, with which one chemical atom meets
another. Sincerity is the luxury allowed, but diadems and authority,
only to the highest rank, _that_ being permitted to speak truth as
having none above it to court or conform unto. Every man alone is
sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We
parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by
gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him
under a hundred folds. I knew a man who,[298] under a certain
religious frenzy, cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliments
and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person he
encountered, and that with great insight and beauty. At first he was
resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But persisting, as indeed he
could not help doing, for some time in this course, he attained to the
advantage of bringing every man of his acquaintance into true
relations with him. No man would think of speaking falsely with him,
or of putting him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But
every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the like plain
dealing and what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he
had, he did certainly show him. But to most of us society shows not
its face and eye, but its side and its back. To stand in true
relations with men in a false age, is worth a fit of insanity, is it
not? We can seldom go erect. Almost every man we meet requires some
civility,--requires to be humored; he has some fame, some talent, some
whim of religion or philanthropy in his head that is not to be
questioned, and which spoils all conversation with him. But a friend
is a sane man who exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives
me entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my part. A
friend, therefore, is a sort of paradox[299] in nature. I who alone
am, I who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with
equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblance of my being in all
its height, variety and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so
that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of nature.
13. The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are holden to
men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by hope, by
lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circumstance and
badge and trifle, but we can scarce believe that so much character can
subsist in another as to draw us by love. Can another be so blessed,
and we so pure, that we can offer him tenderness? When a man becomes
dear to me, I have touched the goal of fortune. I find very little
written directly to the heart of this matter in books. And yet I have
one text which I cannot choose but remember. My author says,[300]--"I
offer myself faintly and bluntly to those whose I effectually am, and
tender myself least to him to whom I am the most devoted." I wish that
friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and eloquence. It must
plant itself on the ground, before it vaults over the moon. I wish it
to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite a cherub.[301] We
chide the citizen because he makes love a commodity. It is an exchange
of gifts, of useful loans; it is good neighborhood; it watches with
the sick; it holds the pall at the funeral; and quite loses sight of
the delicacies and nobility of the relation. But though we cannot find
the god under this disguise of a sutler, yet, on the other hand, we
cannot forgive the poet if he spins his thread too fine, and does not
substantiate his romance by the municipal virtues of justice,
punctuality, fidelity and pity. I hate the prostitution of the name of
friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. I much prefer the
company of plow-boys and tin-peddlers, to the silken and perfumed
amity which only celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous
display, by rides in a curricle,[302] and dinners at the best taverns.
The end of friendship is a commerce the most strict and homely that
can be joined; more strict than any of which we have experience. It is
for aid and comfort through all the relations and passages of life and
death. It is fit for serene days, and graceful gifts, and country
rambles, but also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty,
and persecution. It keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the
trances of religion. We are to dignify to each other the daily needs
and offices of man's life, and embellish it by courage, wisdom and