“What means the fact,” he cries, “that a soul which has lost all hope for
itself can inspire in another listening soul such an infinite confidence
in it, even while it is expressing its despair?” The question is an echo
and an illustration of the words last quoted; and it forms the key-note
of his thoughts on friendship. No one else, to my knowledge, has spoken
in so high and just a spirit of the kindly relations; and I doubt whether
it be a drawback that these lessons should come from one in many ways so
unfitted to be a teacher in this branch. The very coldness and egoism of
his own intercourse gave him a clearer insight into the intellectual
basis of our warm, mutual tolerations; and testimony to their worth comes
with added force from one who was solitary and disobliging, and of whom a
friend remarked, with equal wit and wisdom, “I love Henry, but I cannot
like him.”
He can hardly be persuaded to make any distinction between love and
friendship; in such rarefied and freezing air, upon the mountain-tops of
meditation, had he taught himself to breathe. He was, indeed, too
accurate an observer not to have remarked that “there exists already a
natural disinterestedness and liberality” between men and women; yet, he
thought, “friendship is no respecter of sex.” Perhaps there is a sense
in which the words are true; but they were spoken in ignorance; and
perhaps we shall have put the matter most correctly, if we call love a
foundation for a nearer and freer degree of friendship than can be
possible without it. For there are delicacies, eternal between persons
of the same sex, which are melted and disappear in the warmth of love.
To both, if they are to be right, he attributes the same nature and
condition. “We are not what we are,” says he, “nor do we treat or esteem
each other for such, but for what we are capable of being.” “A friend is
one who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting all the virtues
from us, and who can appreciate them in us.” “The friend asks no return
but that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgrace his
apotheosis of him.” “It is the merit and preservation of friendship that
it takes place on a level higher than the actual characters of the
parties would seem to warrant.” This is to put friendship on a pedestal
indeed; and yet the root of the matter is there; and the last sentence,
in particular, is like a light in a dark place, and makes many mysteries
plain. We are different with different friends; yet if we look closely
we shall find that every such relation reposes on some particular
apotheosis of oneself; with each friend, although we could not
distinguish it in words from any other, we have at least one special
reputation to preserve: and it is thus that we run, when mortified, to
our friend or the woman that we love, not to hear ourselves called
better, but to be better men in point of fact. We seek this society to
flatter ourselves with our own good conduct. And hence any falsehood in
the relation, any incomplete or perverted understanding, will spoil even
the pleasure of these visits. Thus says Thoreau again: “Only lovers know
the value of truth.” And yet again: “They ask for words and deeds, when
a true relation is word and deed.”
But it follows that since they are neither of them so good as the other
hopes, and each is, in a very honest manner, playing a part above his
powers, such an intercourse must often be disappointing to both. “We may
bid farewell sooner than complain,” says Thoreau, “for our complaint is
too well grounded to be uttered.” “We have not so good a right to hate
any as our friend.”
“It were treason to our love
And a sin to God above,
One iota to abate
Of a pure, impartial hate.”
Love is not blind, nor yet forgiving. “O yes, believe me,” as the song
says, “Love has eyes!” The nearer the intimacy, the more cuttingly do we
feel the unworthiness of those we love; and because you love one, and
would die for that love to-morrow, you have not forgiven, and you never
will forgive, that friend’s misconduct. If you want a person’s faults,
go to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know. And
herein lies the magnanimous courage of love, that it endures this
knowledge without change.
It required a cold, distant personality like that of Thoreau, perhaps, to
recognise and certainly to utter this truth; for a more human love makes
it a point of honour not to acknowledge those faults of which it is most
conscious. But his point of view is both high and dry. He has no
illusions; he does not give way to love any more than to hatred, but
preserves them both with care like valuable curiosities. A more
bald-headed picture of life, if I may so express myself, has seldom been
presented. He is an egoist; he does not remember, or does not think it
worth while to remark, that, in these near intimacies, we are ninety-nine
times disappointed in our beggarly selves for once that we are
disappointed in our friend; that it is we who seem most frequently
undeserving of the love that unites us; and that it is by our friend’s
conduct that we are continually rebuked and yet strengthened for a fresh
endeavour. Thoreau is dry, priggish, and selfish. It is profit he is
after in these intimacies; moral profit, certainly, but still profit to
himself. If you will be the sort of friend I want, he remarks naïvely,
“my education cannot dispense with your society.” His education! as
though a friend were a dictionary. And with all this, not one word about
pleasure, or laughter, or kisses, or any quality of flesh and blood. It
was not inappropriate, surely, that he had such close relations with the
fish. We can understand the friend already quoted, when he cried: “As
for taking his arm, I would as soon think of taking the arm of an
elm-tree!”
As a matter of fact he experienced but a broken enjoyment in his
intimacies. He says he has been perpetually on the brink of the sort of
intercourse he wanted, and yet never completely attained it. And what
else had he to expect when he would not, in a happy phrase of Carlyle’s,
“nestle down into it”? Truly, so it will be always if you only stroll in
upon your friends as you might stroll in to see a cricket match; and even
then not simply for the pleasure of the thing, but with some afterthought
of self-improvement, as though you had come to the cricket match to bet.
It was his theory that people saw each other too frequently, so that
their curiosity was not properly whetted, nor had they anything fresh to
communicate; but friendship must be something else than a society for
mutual improvement—indeed, it must only be that by the way, and to some
extent unconsciously; and if Thoreau had been a man instead of a manner
of elm-tree, he would have felt that he saw his friends too seldom, and
have reaped benefits unknown to his philosophy from a more sustained and
easy intercourse. We might remind him of his own words about love: “We
should have no reserve; we should give the whole of ourselves to that
business. But commonly men have not imagination enough to be thus
employed about a human being, but must be coopering a barrel, forsooth.”
Ay, or reading oriental philosophers. It is not the nature of the rival
occupation, it is the fact that you suffer it to be a rival, that renders
loving intimacy impossible. Nothing is given for nothing in this world;
there can be no true love, even on your own side, without devotion;
devotion is the exercise of love, by which it grows; but if you will give
enough of that, if you will pay the price in a sufficient “amount of what
you call life,” why then, indeed, whether with wife or comrade, you may
have months and even years of such easy, natural, pleasurable, and yet
improving intercourse as shall make time a moment and kindness a delight.
The secret of his retirement lies not in misanthropy, of which he had no
tincture, but part in his engrossing design of self-improvement and part
in the real deficiencies of social intercourse. He was not so much
difficult about his fellow human beings as he could not tolerate the
terms of their association. He could take to a man for any genuine
qualities, as we see by his admirable sketch of the Canadian woodcutter
in _Walden_; but he would not consent, in his own words, to “feebly
fabulate and paddle in the social slush.” It seemed to him, I think,
that society is precisely the reverse of friendship, in that it takes
place on a lower level than the characters of any of the parties would
warrant us to expect. The society talk of even the most brilliant man is
of greatly less account than what you will get from him in (as the French
say) a little committee. And Thoreau wanted geniality; he had not enough
of the superficial, even at command; he could not swoop into a parlour
and, in the naval phrase, “cut out” a human being from that dreary port;
nor had he inclination for the task. I suspect he loved books and nature
as well and near as warmly as he loved his fellow-creatures,—a
melancholy, lean degeneration of the human character.
“As for the dispute about solitude and society,” he thus sums up: “Any
comparison is impertinent. It is an idling down on the plain at the base
of the mountain instead of climbing steadily to its top. Of course you
will be glad of all the society you can get to go up with? Will you go
to glory with me? is the burden of the song. It is not that we love to
be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar the company grows
thinner and thinner till there is none at all. It is either the tribune
on the plain, a sermon on the mount, or a very private ecstasy still
higher up. Use all the society that will abet you.” But surely it is no
very extravagant opinion that it is better to give than to receive, to
serve than to use our companions; and above all, where there is no
question of service upon either side, that it is good to enjoy their
company like a natural man. It is curious and in some ways dispiriting
that a writer may be always best corrected out of his own mouth; and so,
to conclude, here is another passage from Thoreau which seems aimed
directly at himself: “Do not be too moral; you may cheat yourself out of
much life so. . . . _All fables_, _indeed_, _have their morals_; _but
the innocent enjoy the story_.”