Essays — First Series
delicious torment. Thine ever, or never.
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, instead of the tough fibre
of the human heart. The laws of friendship are 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.
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, 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 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.”
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_ 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.
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.
I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest courage.
When they are real, they are not glass threads or frostwork, 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, to the great games where the first-born of the world are the
competitors. He proposes himself for contests 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 speed 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, like 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 under a certain religious
frenzy cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliment 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 plaindealing, 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 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.
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,—“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. 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 ploughboys and
tin-peddlers to the silken and perfumed amity which celebrates its days
of encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle 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 unity. It should never fall into something usual and
settled, but should be alert and inventive and add rhyme and reason to
what was drudgery.
Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly, each so
well tempered and so happily adapted, and withal so circumstanced (for
even in that particular, a poet says, love demands that the parties be
altogether paired), that its satisfaction can very seldom be assured.
It cannot subsist in its perfection, say some of those who are learned
in this warm lore of the heart, betwixt more than two. I am not quite
so strict in my terms, perhaps because I have never known so high a
fellowship as others. I please my imagination more with a circle of
godlike men and women variously related to each other and between whom
subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this law of _one to one_
peremptory for conversation, which is the practice and consummation of
friendship. Do not mix waters too much. The best mix as ill as good and
bad. You shall have very useful and cheering discourse at several times
with two several men, but let all three of you come together and you
shall not have one new and hearty word. Two may talk and one may hear,
but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and
searching sort. In good company there is never such discourse between
two, across the table, as takes place when you leave them alone. In
good company the individuals merge their egotism into a social soul
exactly co-extensive with the several consciousnesses there present. No
partialities of friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister,
of wife to husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he
may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the party, and not
poorly limited to his own. Now this convention, which good sense
demands, destroys the high freedom of great conversation, which
requires an absolute running of two souls into one.
No two men but being left alone with each other enter into simpler
relations. Yet it is affinity that determines _which_ two shall
converse. Unrelated men give little joy to each other, will never
suspect the latent powers of each. We talk sometimes of a great talent
for conversation, as if it were a permanent property in some
individuals. Conversation is an evanescent relation,—no more. A man is
reputed to have thought and eloquence; he cannot, for all that, say a
word to his cousin or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much