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Friendship - Part II
Friendship - Part II
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 walks 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-pedlars to the silken and perfumed amity which only 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.
For perfect friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly,
so well tempered each 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 very seldom can its satisfaction be realized. 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 at once 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 and 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 baulked 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. It turns the
stomach, it blots the daylight; 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. To be capable 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. He must be so to know
its law. He must be one who is sure that greatness and goodness are always
economy. He must be one who is not swift to intermeddle with his fortunes. Let
him not dare to 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 must not be wilful, we must not provide. 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 if he be a man 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. Be not so much his friend that you can never know his peculiar
energies, like fond mammas who shut up their boy in the house until he is
almost grown a girl. 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 ill -
confounding pleasure, instead of the pure nectar of God.
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 great counterpart; have a princedom to thy
friend. Let him be to thee forever 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. Me it suffices. 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, aequat. 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 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 soul shall speak. Wait until the
necessary and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves
of your lips. The only money of God is God. He pays never with any thing less,
or any thing else. 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 catch
never 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 become pronounced. You demonstrate yourself, so as to put
yourself out of the reach of false relations, and 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. He is the harbinger of a greater friend. It is the
property of the divine to be reproductive.
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, far 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 times, 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 me, 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 the poor fact 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 instantly 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.
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