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Friendship - Part I
Friendship - Part I
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 honor, and who honor 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 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 good will, 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 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 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.
Pleasant are these jets of affection which make a young world for me
again. Delicious is a just and firm encounter of two, in a thought, 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 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, both deride and cancel the thick walls of individual
character, relation, age, sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and
now makes many one. High 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 not stark and stiffened persons, but the new-born poetry
of God, - poetry without stop, - hymn, ode and epic, poetry still flowing and
not yet caked in dead books with annotation and grammar, but 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 always a great event and hinders me from sleep. I have
had such fine fancies lately about two or three 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, - wild, delicate, throbbing
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. Every thing 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 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 facing the fact, 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 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 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. Is it 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 superinduces the opposite. The
soul environs 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 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 great, 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 hey-dey 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,
instantly 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 essense 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.
That 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! It
is not idle bond, no holiday engagement. 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 contest 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 hap 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 most 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 face him, 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 exercise not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me
entertainment without requiring me to stop, or to lisp, or to mask myself. 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.
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