FRIENDSHIP WITHOUT INTIMACY
“_There is a strange face in the Freshman class whom I should like to
know very much. He has a great deal of character in his features and
should be a fast friend or a bitter enemy. His name is ----. I shall
endeavor to become better acquainted with him and wish, if possible,
to recall at a future period the singular sensations which his
presence produced in me_.”--JOURNAL, 1820.
Emerson was an upper classman, albeit only seventeen years of age,
when he wrote thus of Martin Gay of Hingham, afterward a distinguished
analytical chemist living in Boston. Emerson’s son, commenting on
this passage, says that there is no evidence that his father, either
in college or afterward, ever made any advances toward further
acquaintance. It does not appear that he ever really knew him, yet
he was always interested to hear of him, and was grieved at his
untimely death in 1850. The two men were entirely different in their
temperaments and interests, Gay being known by his classmates as “cool
Gay.”
This capacity for shy admirations for his opposites, and for friendly
interests in people with whom he would find it difficult to keep up a
conversation, was characteristic of Emerson. He was sometimes painfully
conscious of it as a barrier which prevented him from really “getting
at” people whom he wished to know. At other times he defended the
attitude that was natural to him, and so made a virtue of his necessity.
To most persons, Emerson’s essay on Friendship is unsatisfactory as an
exposition of the subject, though it is very revealing of the author’s
state of mind. “Friendship,” says Emerson, “like the immortality of the
soul, is too good to be believed.” And his account of friendship has
a fine aloofness that befits the love for a disembodied spirit rather
than a warm attachment to an imperfect creature of flesh and blood.
One of the conditions that Emerson would make in a treaty of friendship
would be that neither party should trespass on the personality of
others. It was friendship by “absent treatment.”
“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, and 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.
“To my friend I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter. That
seems to you little. It suffices me.
“You shall not come nearer to a man by getting into his house. We see
the noble afar off, why should we intrude?”
In all this we feel that Emerson was riding his high horse. It is a shy
man’s way of comforting himself for something that he unfortunately
lacks, but which he would give anything to possess. He was, to use
Paul’s phrase, glorying in his infirmities. That which he was praising
was not friendship but sublimated hero-worship, which is quite a
different thing.
In the privacy of his note-books he treats his infirmity in quite a
different spirit. He laments the fact that he was not a good mixer.
Like so many New Englanders, it was difficult for him to establish
personal relations.
At the age of twenty, when looking forward to the ministry, he makes
this self-criticism:
“Every comparison of myself with my mates that six or seven, perhaps
sixteen or seventeen, years have made has convinced me that there
exists a signal defect of character which neutralizes in great part
the just influence my talents ought to have.” He expresses it as the
“absence of common sympathies.” By this he seems to mean the absence of
the material for “small talk.” “Its bitter fruits are a sore uneasiness
in the company of most men and women, a frigid fear of offending and
jealousy of disrespect, an inability to lead and an unwillingness to
follow the current conversation.... In my frequent humiliation I am
compelled to remember the poor boy who cried, ‘I told you, father,
they would find me out.’” He sums up his youthful confession, “What is
called a warm heart, I have it not.”
When he was sixty, he was conscious of the same limitation. He jotted
down in his note-book: “Barriers of man impassable. They who should be
friends cannot pass into each other. Friends are fictitious, founded on
some momentary experience. But what we want is consecutiveness.”
All this is not evidence of lack of a warm heart. It was rather a
lack of an easy way of expressing what he felt. The chill was not
in himself, but in the atmosphere that was about him. But there was
evidently a personal experience behind this generalization about
society.
“Society, like wealth, is good for those who understand it. It is a
foolish waste of time for those who do not. It seems impossible for
any one to expand in a crowd to his natural dimensions. All character
seems to fade away from all the accomplices. Every woman seems
suffering for a chair, and you accuse yourself and commiserate those
you talk to.”
There is something delightfully amusing in Emerson’s analysis of his
own failure as a conversationalist.
“It seemed, as I mused in the streets of Boston on the unpropitious
effect of the town on my humor, that there needs a certain
deliberation and tenacity in the entertainment of a thought--a certain
longanimity to make that confidence and stability which can meet
the demands others make on us. I am too quick-eyed and unstable. My
thoughts are too short, as they say my sentences are. I step along
from stone to stone over the Lethe which gurgles around my path, but
the odds are that my companion encounters me just as I leave one
stone, and before my foot has well reached the other, and down I
tumble into Lethe water. But the man of long wind who receives his
thought with a certain phlegmatic entertainment, and unites himself
to it for the time, as a sailor to a boat, has a better principle of
poise and is not easily moved from the perpendicular.”
With the remarkable group of men who made Concord famous, Emerson was
on terms of familiar friendship. For Bronson Alcott he cherished an
admiration which seems extravagant. He loved to walk and talk with
the shy poet, Ellery Channing. Thoreau was for two years an inmate of
Emerson’s house, and the two men worked in the garden together. In
Boston Emerson was a member of the Saturday Club, where he continually
met Longfellow, Holmes, Agassiz and the rest.
Yet he was not a man to shine in such society. His mind was
contemplative, rather than conversational. He did not care to “hold his
own” in a controversy. Why should he? “Emerson was a good citizen and
a good neighbor with his neighbors, always went to town meeting and
listened intently to the strong spirits who ruled the discussions,
without taking any part in them himself.”
The most notable of his friendships was with Thomas Carlyle. The
correspondence between them continued for many years, and there were
many expressions of esteem. The friendship was a real one, but the fact
that the broad Atlantic lay between them was a great aid to their good
fellowship. For though the two men liked each other, they did not like
the same things.
Carlyle threatened to visit America, and we may be sure that he would
not have enjoyed the visit. Emerson’s cheery faith in the common man
seemed to the testy Scotchman a bit of sentimentalism. They both
believed in hero-worship, but they did not worship the same heroes. New
England Transcendentalism did not agree with Carlyle’s temper.
Emerson sent a copy of the _Dial_ to his friend. Carlyle writes,
“The Dial No. 1 came duly. Of course I read it with interest; it is
the utterance of what is youngest in your land, pure, etherial as
the voices of the morning! And yet--you know me--for me it is _too_
etherial, speculative, theoretic; all theory becomes more and more
confessedly inadequate, untrue, unsatisfactory, almost a kind of
mocking to me.”
“Faithful are the wounds of a friend.” And these tokens of friendship
were seldom absent from the letters that passed between the two.
Carlyle writes of the impression Emerson’s essays made upon him:
“It is a _sermon_ to me as all your deliberate utterances are; a
real _word_ which I feel to be such--alas, almost or altogether the
one such, in a world all full of jargons, hearsays, echoes and vain
noises which cannot pass with me for _words_. This is a praise far
beyond any ‘literary’ one; literary praises are not worth repeating in
comparison. For the rest I have to object still (what you will call
objecting to the Law of Nature) that we find you a speaker indeed,
but as it were a _soliloquizer_ on the eternal mountain tops only, in
vast solitudes where men and their affairs lie all hushed in a dim
remoteness; and only the _man_ and the stars are visible, whom so
fine a fellow seems he, we could perpetually punch into and say, ‘Why
won’t you come and help us then? We have terrible need of one man like
you down among us! It is cold and vacant up there; nothing paintable
but rainbows and emotions; come down and you shall do life pictures,
passions, facts--which transcend all thought, and leave it stuttering
and stammering!’ To which he answers that he won’t, can’t and doesn’t
want to (as the cockneys have it): so I leave him and say, ‘You
Western Gymnosophist! Well, we can afford one man for that, too.’”
This is all very well for a friendship carried on by correspondence.
Carlyle thinks of himself as a man who is dealing with concrete
realities, while Emerson is dealing in remote abstractions.
But had they lived in the same town with opportunity to discuss the
practical questions of politics and social welfare, they would have
come into collision. The fact was that Emerson was as much interested
in concrete realities as Carlyle, but he came to different conclusions
in regard to them. Carlyle believed in government by strong men, like
Frederick the Great and Cromwell. Democracy was an abomination to him.
A statesman like Lincoln, who thought of himself as an interpreter of
the popular will, was altogether outside his sympathy. Liberalism of
the modern sort seemed to him utter weakness and muddleheadedness.
Emerson, though he preferred to write about principles rather than
their immediate applications, was never in doubt as to which side he
was on. The principles which he preached were the ones which were being
applied by the democratic reformers of his own day. He believed in the
movements at which Carlyle scoffed. Answering his friend’s criticism,
he says:
“What you say now and heretofore respecting the remoteness of my
writing and thinking from real life, though I hear substantially the
same criticism made by my countrymen, I do not know what it means.”
Indeed, Emerson’s idea of real life differed so profoundly from
Carlyle’s that their minds seldom met. To him the laws of the universe
were not only the great realities, but the most intimate realities.
Every person and every action illustrated them. He believed in the
principles of democracy which Carlyle scorned. These fundamental
differences would have been accentuated in daily intercourse. The visit
of the Scotchman to New England never took place, and it was well that
it did not; “for,” says Emerson, “the higher the style we demand of
friendship the less easy to establish it in flesh and blood.”