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THE GIFT OF FRIENDSHIP
THE FOULIS BOOKS
[Illustration: frontispiece]
THE · GIFT · OF
FRIENDSHIP.
[Illustration: colophon]
ILLUSTRATED BY H C
PRESTON MACGOUN
R S W
T N FOULIS
London & Edinburgh
_Printed October 1910_
Edinburgh: T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty
CONTENTS
I. R. W. EMERSON
PAGE
Friendship 1
II. H. D. THOREAU
Friends and Friendship 45
III. THOMAS CARLYLE
The Sentiment of Friendship 79
IV. HENRY MACKENZIE
On the Acquisition of Friends 89
V. OLIVER GOLDSMITH
On Friendship 99
VI. DR. JOHNSON
The Pleasures of Friendship 109
VII. DR. JOHNSON
The True Art of Friendship 119
VIII. GEORGE BERKELEY
The Virtue of Friendship 137
IX. SIR RICHARD STEELE
On the Choice of Friends 151
X. JOSEPH ADDISON
The Qualifications of Friendship 161
XI. FRANCIS BACON
Of Friendship 173
XII. MONTAIGNE
Of Friendship 193
XIII. ANTHUSA TO ST. JOHN
Ideal Friendship 231
XIV. ARISTOTLE
The Blessings of Friendship 247
ILLUSTRATIONS
From Water-Colour Drawings by H. C. PRESTON MACGOUN, R.S.W.
‘We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God’ _Frontispiece_
_Facing page_
‘My friends have come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me’ 56
‘It is a spiritual gift, worthy of him to give and of me to receive’ 136
‘Then shall we meet ... as water with water’ 216
SELECTED AND
EDITED BY
ALFRED H. HYATT
TO MY FRIEND
FRED. G. BOWLES
I
FRIENDSHIP
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
FRIENDSHIP
[Sidenote: An element of love]
We have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. Maugre all the
selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human
family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many
persons we meet in houses whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honour,
and who honour us; how many we see in the street, or sit with in church,
whom, though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with! Read the language
of these wandering eye-beams. The heart knoweth.
The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a certain
cordial exhilaration. In poetry, and in common
[Sidenote: Affection the sweetness of life]
speech, the emotions of benevolence and complacency which are felt
towards others are likened to the material effects of fire; so swift or
much more swift, more active more cheering are these fine inward
irradiations. From the highest degree of passionate love, to the lowest
degree of goodwill, they make the sweetness of life.
Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. The
scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation do not
furnish him with one good thought or happy expression; but it is
necessary to write a letter to a friend--and, forthwith, troops of
gentle thoughts invest themselves on every hand with chosen words. See,
in any house where virtue and self-respect abide, the palpitation which
the approach of a stranger causes. A commended stranger is expected
[Sidenote: A stranger’s arrival]
and announced, and an uneasiness betwixt pleasure and pain invades all
the hearts of a household. His arrival almost brings fear to the good
hearts that would welcome him. The house is dusted, all things fly into
their places, the old coat is exchanged for the new, and they must get
up a dinner if they can. Of a commended stranger, only the good report
is told by others, only the good and new is heard by us. He stands to us
for humanity. He is what we wish. Having imagined and invested him, we
ask how we should stand related in conversation and action with such a
man, and are uneasy with fear. The same idea exalts conversation with
him. We talk better than we are wont. We have the nimblest fancy, a
richer memory, and our dumb devil has taken leave for the time. For long
hours we
[Sidenote: Rich communications]
can continue a series of sincere, graceful, rich communications, drawn
from the oldest, secretest experience, so that they who sit by, of our
own kinsfolk and acquaintance, shall feel a lively surprise at our
unusual powers. But as soon as the stranger begins to intrude his
partialities, his definitions, his defects, into the conversation, it is
all over. He has heard the first, the last, and best he will ever hear
from us. He is no stranger now. Vulgarity, ignorance, misapprehension
are old acquaintances. Now, when he comes, he may get the order, the
dress, and the dinner--but the throbbing of the heart, and the
communications of the soul, no more.
What is so pleasant as these jets of affection which make a young world
for me again? What so delicious as a just and firm encounter of two, in
a thought,
[Sidenote: A thanksgiving for friends]
in a feeling? How beautiful, on their approach to this beating heart,
the steps and forms of the gifted and the true! The moment we indulge
our affections, the earth is metamorphosed; there is no winter, and no
night; all tragedies, all ennuis, vanish--all duties even; nothing fills
the proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant of beloved persons.
Let the soul be assured that somewhere in the universe it should rejoin
its friend, and it would be content and cheerful alone for a thousand
years.
I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old
and the new. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who daily showeth
himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I embrace solitude, and
yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely, and
[Sidenote: Friends come unsought]
the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate. Who hears me,
who understands me, becomes mine--a possession for all time. Nor is
nature so poor but she gives me this joy several times, and thus we
weave social threads of our own, a new web of relations; and, as many
thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall by and by stand
in a new world of our own creation, and no longer strangers and pilgrims
in a traditionary globe. My friends have come to me unsought. The great
God gave them to me. By oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue
with itself, I find them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in
them derides and cancels the thick walls of individual character,
relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now
makes many one. High
[Sidenote: The nobility of friendship]
thanks I owe you, excellent lovers, who carry out the world for me to
new and noble depths, and enlarge the meaning of all my thoughts. These
are new poetry of the first Bard--poetry without stop--hymn, ode, and
epic, poetry still flowing, Apollo and the Muses chanting still. Will
these, too, separate themselves from me again, or some of them? I know
not, but I fear it not; for my relation to them is so pure that we hold
by simple affinity, and the Genius of my life being thus social, the
same affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is as noble as these
men and women, wherever I may be.
I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. It is almost
dangerous to me to ‘crush the sweet poison of misused wine’ of the
affections. A new person is to me a great event, and hinders
[Sidenote: A great event]
me from sleep. I have often had fine fancies about persons which have
given me delicious hours; but the joy ends in the day; it yields no
fruit. Thought is not born of it; my action is very little modified. I
must feel pride in my friend’s accomplishments as if they were mine--and
a property in his virtues. I feel as warmly when he is praised as the
lover when he hears applause of his engaged maiden. We over-estimate the
conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than our goodness,
his nature finer, his temptations less. Everything that is his--his
name, his form, his dress, books, and instruments--fancy enhances. Our
own thought sounds new and larger from his mouth.
Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without their analogy
in
[Sidenote: The golden hour of friendship]
the ebb and flow of love. Friendship, like the immortality of the soul,
is too good to be believed. The lover, beholding his maiden, half knows
that she is not verily that which he worships; and in the golden hour of
friendship we are surprised with shades of suspicion and unbelief. We
doubt that we bestow on our hero the virtues in which he shines, and
afterwards worship the form to which we have ascribed this divine
inhabitation. In strictness, the soul does not respect men as it
respects itself. In strict science all persons underlie the same
condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool our love by
mining for the metaphysical foundation of this Elysian temple? Shall I
not be as real as the things I see? If I am, I shall not fear to know
them for what they are. Their essence
[Sidenote: A magnificent conception]
is not less beautiful than their appearance, though it needs finer
organs for its apprehension. The root of the plant is not unsightly to
science, though for chaplets and festoons we cut the stem short. And I
must hazard the production of the bald fact amidst these pleasing
reveries, though it should prove an Egyptian skull at our banquet. A man
who stands united with his thought conceives magnificently of himself.
He is conscious of a universal success, even though bought by uniform
particular failures. No advantages, no powers, no gold or force, can be
any match for him. I cannot choose but rely on my own poverty more than
on your wealth. I cannot make your consciousness tantamount to mine.
Only the star dazzles; the planet has a faint, moon-like ray. I hear
[Sidenote: The shadow of the Phenomenal]
what you say of the admirable parts and tried temper of the party you
praise, but I see well that for all his purple cloaks I shall not like
him, unless he is at last a poor Greek like me. I cannot deny it, O
friend, that the vast shadow of the Phenomenal includes thee also in its
pied and painted immensity,--thee, also, compared with whom all else is
shadow. Thou art not Being, as Truth is, as Justice is,--thou art not my
soul, but a picture and effigy of that. Thou hast come to me lately, and
already thou art seizing thy hat and cloak. It is not that the soul puts
forth friends as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently, by the
germination of new buds, extrudes the old leaf? The law of nature is
alternation forevermore. Each electrical state super-induces the
opposite. The soul environs
[Sidenote: The search after friendship]
itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance
or solitude; and it goes alone for a season, that it may exalt its
conversation or society. This method betrays itself along the whole
history of our personal relations. The instinct of affection revives the
hope of union with our mates, and the returning sense of insulation
recalls us from the chase. Thus every man passes his life in the search
after friendship, and if he should record his true sentiment, he might
write a letter like this to each new candidate for his love.
DEAR FRIEND,--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
[Sidenote: A letter to a friend]
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
[Sidenote: Friendship’s laws]
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.
[Sidenote: Society a perpetual disappointment]
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 honour 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 organisation 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.
[Sidenote: The good spirit of our life]
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
[Sidenote: Friendship not to be treated daintily]
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
[Sidenote: A friend’s house]
solemnity of that relation, and honour 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.
[Sidenote: The elements of friendship]
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,
[Sidenote: Every man alone is sincere]
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
plain-dealing, 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
[Sidenote: We can seldom go erect]
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 humoured; 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.
[Sidenote: A friend 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
[Sidenote: The goal of fortune]
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 neighbourhood;
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 plough-boys
[Sidenote: The name of friendship]
and tin-pedlars 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
[Sidenote: The end of friendship]
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
[Sidenote: Friendship consummated]
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
coextensive 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,
[Sidenote: The law of _one to one_]
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
[Sidenote: Of conversation]
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.
[Sidenote: Friendship’s requirements]
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
recognise 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
[Sidenote: Friendship’s demand]
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 honour, 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 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
[Sidenote: Friends are self-elected]
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 neighbourly 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
[Sidenote: A friend’s society]
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.
[Sidenote: A beautiful enemy]
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 the
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.
[Sidenote: We must be our own]
Who set you to cast about what you should say to the select souls, or
how to say anything 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,
[Sidenote: Select souls]
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
[Sidenote: The last analysis]
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.
[Sidenote: Desired friends are dreams and fables]
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,
[Sidenote: A friend is Janus-faced]
‘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
[Sidenote: Spiritual astronomy]
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 vanquishing 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
[Sidenote: New visions]
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 subtle 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
[Sidenote: The essence of friendship]
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.
[Illustration]
II
FRIENDS AND FRIENDSHIP
HENRY D. THOREAU
FRIENDS & FRIENDSHIP
[Sidenote: The familiar word]
No word is oftener on the lips of men than Friendship, and indeed no
thought is more familiar to their aspirations. All men are dreaming of
it, and its drama, which is always a tragedy, is enacted daily. It is
the secret of the universe. You may thread the town, you may wander the
country, and none shall ever speak of it, yet thought is everywhere busy
about it, and the idea of what is possible in this respect affects our
behaviour toward all new men and women and a great many old ones.
Nevertheless, I can remember only two or three essays on this subject in
all literature. No wonder that the Mythology, and Arabian
[Sidenote: The most interesting drama]
Nights, and Shakespeare, and Scott’s novels entertain us: we are poets
and fablers and dramatists and novelists ourselves. We are continually
acting a part in a more interesting drama than any written. We are
dreaming that our Friends are our _Friends_, and that we are our
Friends’ _Friends_. Our actual Friends are but distant relations of
those to whom we are pledged. We never exchange more than three words
with a Friend in our lives on that level to which our thoughts and
feelings almost habitually rise.
One goes forth prepared to say, ‘Sweet Friends!’ and the salutation is,
‘Damn your eyes!’ But never mind; faint heart never won true Friend.
Oh, my Friend, may it come to pass once, that when you are my Friend I
may be yours.
[Sidenote: The name of friendship]
Of what use the friendliest dispositions even, if there are no hours
given to Friendship, if it is for ever postponed to unimportant duties
and relations? Friendship is first, Friendship last. But it is equally
impossible to forget our Friends, and to make them answer to our ideal.
When they say farewell, then indeed we begin to keep them company. How
often we find ourselves turning our backs on our actual Friends that we
may go and meet their ideal cousins! I would that I were worthy to be
any man’s Friend.
What is commonly honoured with the name of Friendship is no very
profound or powerful instinct. Men do not, after all, _love_ their
friends greatly. I do not often see the farmers made seers and wise to
the verge of insanity by their Friendship for one another. They are not
often
[Sidenote: Friendship wrong ascribed]
transfigured and translated by love in each other’s presence.
I do not observe them purified, refined, and elevated by the love of a
man. If one abates a little the price of his wood, or gives a neighbour
his vote at town-meeting, or a barrel of apples, or lends him his wagon
frequently, it is esteemed a rare instance of Friendship. Nor do the
farmers’ wives lead lives consecrated to Friendship. I do not see the
pair of farmer Friends of either sex prepared to stand against the
world. There are only two or three couples in history.
To say that a man is your Friend means commonly no more than this, that
he is not your enemy. Most contemplate only what would be the accidental
and trifling advantages of Friendship, as that the Friend can assist in
time of
[Sidenote: Friends to be spiritual ministers]
need by his substance, or his influence, or his counsel; but he who
foresees such advantages in this relation proves himself blind to its
real advantage, or indeed wholly inexperienced in the relation itself.
Such services are particular and menial compared with the perpetual and
all-embracing service which it is. Even the utmost goodwill and harmony
and practical kindness are not sufficient for Friendship, for Friends do
not live in harmony merely, as some say, but in melody. We do not wish
for Friends to feed and clothe our bodies--neighbours are kind enough
for that--but to do the like office to our spirits. For this, few are
rich enough, however well disposed they may be. For the most part we
stupidly confound one man with another. The dull distinguish only races
or nations, or at
[Sidenote: The importance of friendship]
most classes, but the wise man, individuals. To his Friend a man’s
peculiar character appears in every feature and in every action, and it
is thus drawn out and improved by him.
Think of the importance of Friendship in the education of men.
‘He that hath love and judgment too,
Sees more than any other doe.’
It will make a man honest; it will make him a hero; it will make him a
saint. It is the state of the just dealing with the just, the
magnanimous with the magnanimous, the sincere with the sincere, man with
man.
And it is well said by another poet--
‘Why love among the virtues is not known,
Is that love is them all contract in one.’
All the abuses which are the object of reform with the philanthropist,
the statesman,
[Sidenote: The intercourse of friends]
and the housekeeper are unconsciously amended in the intercourse of
Friends. A Friend is one who incessantly pays us the compliment of
expecting from us all the virtues, and who can appreciate them in us. It
takes two to speak the truth--one to speak and another to hear. How can
one treat with magnanimity mere wood and stone? If we dealt only with
the false and dishonest, we should at last forget how to speak truth.
Only lovers know the value and magnanimity of truth, while traders prize
a cheap honesty, and neighbours and acquaintance a cheap civility. In
our daily intercourse with men our nobler faculties are dormant and
suffered to rust.
None will pay us the compliment to expect nobleness from us. Though we
have gold to give, they demand only copper.
[Sidenote: A neighbour’s reply]
We ask our neighbour to suffer himself to be dealt with truly,
sincerely, nobly; but he answers no by his deafness. He does not even
hear this prayer. He says practically, I will be content if you treat me
as ‘no better than I should be,’ as deceitful, mean, dishonest, and
selfish. For the most part, we are contented so to deal and to be dealt
with, and we do not think that for the mass of men there is any truer
and nobler relation possible. A man may have _good_ neighbours, so
called, and acquaintances, and even companions, wife, parents, brothers,
sisters, children, who meet himself and one another on this ground only.
The State does not demand justice of its members, but thinks that it
succeeds very well with the least degree of it, hardly more than rogues
practice; and so do the neighbourhood and the
[Sidenote: Our lives are divine and miraculous]
family. What is commonly called Friendship even is only a little more
honour among rogues.
But sometimes we are said to _love_ another--that is, to stand in a true
relation to him, so that we give the best to, and receive the best from,
him. Between whom there is hearty truth, there is love; and in
proportion to our truthfulness and confidence in one another, our lives
are divine and miraculous, and answer to our ideal. There are passages
of affection in our intercourse with mortal men and women such as no
prophecy had taught us to expect, which transcend our earthly life and
anticipate Heaven for us. What is this Love that may come right into the
middle of a prosaic Goffstown day, equal to any of the gods; that
discovers a new world, fair and fresh and
[Sidenote: Heaven anticipated]
eternal, occupying the place of the old one, when to the common eye a
dust has settled on the universe? which world cannot else be reached,
and does not exist. What other words, we may almost ask, are memorable
and worthy to be repeated than those which love has inspired? It is
wonderful that they were ever uttered. They are few and rare indeed;
but, like a strain of music, they are incessantly repeated and modulated
by the memory. All other words crumble off with the stucco which
overlies the heart. We should not dare to repeat these now aloud. We are
not competent to hear them at all times.
The books for young people say a great deal about the _selection_ of
Friends; it is because they really have nothing to say about _Friends_.
They mean associates
[Illustration]
[Sidenote: Affinity of friends]
and confidants merely. ‘Know that the contrariety of foe and Friend
proceeds from God.’ Friendship takes place between those who have an
affinity for one another, and is a perfectly natural and inevitable
result. No professions nor advances will avail. Even speech, at first,
necessarily has nothing to do with it; but it follows after silence, as
the buds in the graft do not put forth into leaves till long after the
graft has taken. It is a drama in which the parties have no part to act.
We are all Mussulmen and fatalists in this respect.
Impatient and uncertain lovers think that they must say or do something
kind whenever they meet; they must never be cold. But they who are
Friends do not know what they _think_ they must, but what they _must_.
Even their
[Sidenote: A sublime phenomenon]
Friendship is to some extent but a sublime phenomenon to them.
The true and not despairing Friend will address his Friend in some such
terms as these:--
‘I never asked thy leave to let me love thee--I have a right. I love
thee not as something private and personal, which is _your own_, but as
something universal and worthy of love, _which I have found_. Oh, how I
think of you! You are purely good--you are infinitely good. I can trust
you for ever. I did not think that humanity was so rich. Give me an
opportunity to live.’
‘You are the fact in a fiction--you are the truth more strange and
admirable than fiction. Consent only to be what you are. I alone will
never stand in your way.’
[Sidenote: The fact in a fiction]
‘This is what I would like--to be as intimate with you as our spirits
are intimate--respecting you as I respect my ideal. Never to profane one
another by word or action, even by a thought. Between us, if necessary,
let there be no acquaintance.’
‘I have discovered you; how can you be concealed from me?’
The Friend asks no return but that his Friend will religiously accept
and wear and not disgrace his apotheosis of him. They cherish each
other’s hopes. They are kind to each other’s dreams.
Though the poet says, ‘’Tis the pre-eminence of Friendship to impute
excellence,’ yet we can never praise our Friend, nor esteem him
praiseworthy, nor let him think that he can please us by any
_behaviour_, or ever _treat_ us well enough.
[Sidenote: Friendship pre-eminent]
That kindness which has so good a reputation elsewhere can least of all
consist with this relation, and no such affront can be offered to a
Friend, as a conscious goodwill, a friendliness which is not a necessity
of the Friend’s nature.
The sexes are naturally most strongly attracted to one another by
constant constitutional differences, and are most commonly and surely
the complements of each other. How natural and easy it is for man to
secure the attention of woman to what interests himself! Men and women
of equal culture, thrown together, are sure to be of a certain value to
one another, more than men to men. There exists already a natural
disinterestedness and liberality in such society, and I think that any
man will more confidently carry his favourite books to read to
[Sidenote: Perfect equality required]
some circle of intelligent women than to one of his own sex. The visit
of man to man is wont to be an interruption, but the sexes naturally
expect one another. Yet Friendship is no respecter of sex; and perhaps
it is more rare between the sexes than between two of the same sex.
Friendship is, at any rate, a relation of perfect equality. It cannot
well spare any outward sign of equal obligation and advantage. The
nobleman can never have a Friend among his retainers, nor the king among
his subjects. Not that the parties to it are in all respects equal, but
they are equal in all that respects or affects their Friendship. The
one’s love is exactly balanced and represented by the other’s. Persons
are only the vessels which contain the nectar, and the hydrostatic
[Sidenote: Impossible friendships]
paradox is the symbol of love’s law. It finds its level and rises to its
fountainhead in all breasts, and its slenderest column balances the
ocean.
‘And love as well the shepherd can
As can the mighty nobleman.’
The one sex is not, in this respect, more tender than the other. A
hero’s love is as delicate as a maiden’s.
Confucius said, ‘Never contract Friendship with a man who is not better
than thyself.’ 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. The rays of light come to us in such a curve that
every man whom we meet appears to be taller than he actually is. Such
foundation has civility. My Friend is that one whom I can associate with
my choicest
[Sidenote: My friend]