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.
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
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.