Essays — First Series
reason as they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade.
In the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his thought he
will regain his tongue.
Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and unlikeness that
piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other
party. Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather than that my
friend should overstep, by a word or a look, his real sympathy. I am
equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an
instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine, is that
the _not mine_ is _mine_. I hate, where I looked for a manly
furtherance, or at least a manly resistance, to find a mush of
concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his
echo. The condition which high friendship demands is ability to do
without it. That high office requires great and sublime parts. There
must be very two, before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance
of two large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared,
before yet they recognize the deep identity which, beneath these
disparities, unites them.
He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous; who is sure that
greatness and goodness are always economy; who is not swift to
intermeddle with his fortunes. Let him not intermeddle with this. Leave
to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the births of
the eternal. Friendship demands a religious treatment. We talk of
choosing our friends, but friends are self-elected. Reverence is a
great part of it. Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course he has
merits that are not yours, and that you cannot honor if you must needs
hold him close to your person. Stand aside; give those merits room; let
them mount and expand. Are you the friend of your friend’s buttons, or
of his thought? To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a
thousand particulars, that he may come near in the holiest ground.
Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as property, and to suck
a short and all-confounding pleasure, instead of the noblest benefit.
Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long probation. Why should
we desecrate noble and beautiful souls by intruding on them? Why insist
on rash personal relations with your friend? Why go to his house, or
know his mother and brother and sisters? Why be visited by him at your
own? Are these things material to our covenant? Leave this touching and
clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a sincerity,
a glance from him, I want, but not news, nor pottage. I can get
politics and chat and neighborly conveniences from cheaper companions.
Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal
and great as nature itself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in
comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that
clump of waving grass that divides the brook? Let us not vilify, but
raise it to that standard. That great defying eye, that scornful beauty
of his mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather
fortify and enhance. Worship his superiorities; wish him not less by a
thought, but hoard and tell them all. Guard him as thy counterpart. Let
him be to thee for ever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly
revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast
aside. The hues of the opal, the light of the diamond, are not to be
seen if the eye is too near. To my friend I write a letter and from him
I receive a letter. That seems to you a little. It suffices me. It is a
spiritual gift worthy of him to give and of me to receive. It profanes
nobody. In these warm lines the heart will trust itself, as it will not
to the tongue, and pour out the prophecy of a godlier existence than
all the annals of heroism have yet made good.
Respect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as not to prejudice its
perfect flower by your impatience for its opening. We must be our own
before we can be another’s. There is at least this satisfaction in
crime, according to the Latin proverb;—you can speak to your accomplice
on even terms. _Crimen quos inquinat, æquat_. To those whom we admire
and love, at first we cannot. Yet the least defect of self-possession
vitiates, in my judgment, the entire relation. There can never be deep
peace between two spirits, never mutual respect, until in their
dialogue each stands for the whole world.
What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of
spirit we can. Let us be silent,—so we may hear the whisper of the
gods. Let us not interfere. Who set you to cast about what you should
say to the select souls, or how to say any thing to such? No matter how
ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland. There are innumerable
degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be
frivolous. Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary
and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves of
your lips. The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a
friend is to be one. You shall not come nearer a man by getting into
his house. If unlike, his soul only flees the faster from you, and you
shall never catch a true glance of his eye. We see the noble afar off
and they repel us; why should we intrude? Late,—very late,—we perceive
that no arrangements, no introductions, no consuetudes or habits of
society would be of any avail to establish us in such relations with
them as we desire,—but solely the uprise of nature in us to the same
degree it is in them; then shall we meet as water with water; and if we
should not meet them then, we shall not want them, for we are already
they. In the last analysis, love is only the reflection of a man’s own
worthiness from other men. Men have sometimes exchanged names with
their friends, as if they would signify that in their friend each loved
his own soul.
The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the less easy
to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in the world.
Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope
cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the
universal power, souls are now acting, enduring, and daring, which can
love us and which we can love. We may congratulate ourselves that the
period of nonage, of follies, of blunders and of shame, is passed in
solitude, and when we are finished men we shall grasp heroic hands in
heroic hands. Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike
leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be.
Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no god
attends. By persisting in your path, though you forfeit the little you
gain the great. You demonstrate yourself, so as to put yourself out of
the reach of false relations, and you draw to you the first-born of the
world,—those rare pilgrims whereof only one or two wander in nature at
once, and before whom the vulgar great show as spectres and shadows
merely.
It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spiritual, as if so
we could lose any genuine love. Whatever correction of our popular
views we make from insight, nature will be sure to bear us out in, and
though it seem to rob us of some joy, will repay us with a greater. Let
us feel if we will the absolute insulation of man. We are sure that we
have all in us. We go to Europe, or we pursue persons, or we read
books, in the instinctive faith that these will call it out and reveal
us to ourselves. Beggars all. The persons are such as we; the Europe,
an old faded garment of dead persons; the books, their ghosts. Let us
drop this idolatry. Let us give over this mendicancy. Let us even bid
our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, ‘Who are you?
Unhand me: I will be dependent no more.’ Ah! seest thou not, O brother,
that thus we part only to meet again on a higher platform, and only be
more each other’s because we are more our own? A friend is Janus-faced;
he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my
foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a
greater friend.
I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would have them
where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We must have society on
our own terms, and admit or exclude it on the slightest cause. I cannot
afford to speak much with my friend. If he is great he makes me so
great that I cannot descend to converse. In the great days,
presentiments hover before me in the firmament. I ought then to
dedicate myself to them. I go in that I may seize them, I go out that I
may seize them. I fear only that I may lose them receding into the sky
in which now they are only a patch of brighter light. Then, though I
prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with them and study their
visions, lest I lose my own. It would indeed give me a certain
household joy to quit this lofty seeking, this spiritual astronomy or
search of stars, and come down to warm sympathies with you; but then I
know well I shall mourn always the vanishing of my mighty gods. It is
true, next week I shall have languid moods, when I can well afford to
occupy myself with foreign objects; then I shall regret the lost
literature of your mind, and wish you were by my side again. But if you
come, perhaps you will fill my mind only with new visions; not with
yourself but with your lustres, and I shall not be able any more than
now to converse with you. So I will owe to my friends this evanescent
intercourse. I will receive from them not what they have but what they
are. They shall give me that which properly they cannot give, but which
emanates from them. But they shall not hold me by any relations less
subtile and pure. We will meet as though we met not, and part as though
we parted not.
It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to carry a
friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspondence on the
other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets that the receiver is not
capacious? It never troubles the sun that some of his rays fall wide
and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the reflecting
planet. Let your greatness educate the crude and cold companion. If he
is unequal he will presently pass away; but thou art enlarged by thy
own shining, and no longer a mate for frogs and worms, dost soar and
burn with the gods of the empyrean. It is thought a disgrace to love
unrequited. But the great will see that true love cannot be unrequited.
True love transcends the unworthy object and dwells and broods on the
eternal, and when the poor interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but
feels rid of so much earth and feels its independency the surer. Yet
these things may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to the
relation. The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity
and trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats its
object as a god, that it may deify both.
VII.
PRUDENCE
Theme no poet gladly sung,
Fair to old and foul to young;
Scorn not thou the love of parts,
And the articles of arts.
Grandeur of the perfect sphere
Thanks the atoms that cohere.
PRUDENCE
What right have I to write on Prudence, whereof I have Little, and that
of the negative sort? My prudence consists in avoiding and going
without, not in the inventing of means and methods, not in adroit
steering, not in gentle repairing. I have no skill to make money spend
well, no genius in my economy, and whoever sees my garden discovers
that I must have some other garden. Yet I love facts, and hate
lubricity and people without perception. Then I have the same title to
write on prudence that I have to write on poetry or holiness. We write