Ralph Waldo Emerson - Essays

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9. 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[295] 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."

10. 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_[296] 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.

11. 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.

12. I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest
courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or frost-work,
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,[297] 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 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, but 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,[298] under a certain
religious frenzy, cast off this drapery, and omitting all compliments
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, 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[299] 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.

13. 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,[300]--"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.[301] 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 plow-boys and tin-peddlers, to the silken and perfumed
amity which only celebrates its days of encounter by a frivolous
display, by rides in a curricle,[302] 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.

14. 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_,[303] 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 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.

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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 benefits.

18. 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 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. 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.

19. 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[304] 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.

20. 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 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 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.

21. 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,[305] 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 specters and shadows merely.

22. 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:[306] 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[307] of a greater friend.

23. 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 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 lusters, 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.

24. 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.[308] 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.

HEROISM[309]

"Paradise is under the shadow of swords,"[310]
_Mahomet._

1. In the elder English dramatists,[311] and mainly in the plays of
Beaumont and Fletcher,[312] there is a constant recognition of
gentility, as if a noble behavior were as easily marked in the society
of their age, as color is in our American population. When any Rodrigo,
Pedro, or Valerio[313] enters, though he be a stranger, the duke or
governor exclaims, This is a gentleman,--and proffers civilities without
end; but all the rest are slag and refuse. In harmony with this delight
in personal advantages, there is in their plays a certain heroic cast of
character and dialogue,--as in Bonduca, Sophocles, the Mad Lover, the
Double Marriage,[314]--wherein the speaker is so earnest and cordial,
and on such deep grounds of character, that the dialogue, on the
slightest additional incident in the plot, rises naturally into poetry.
Among many texts, take the following. The Roman Martius has conquered
Athens--all but the invincible spirits of Sophocles, the duke of Athens,
and Dorigen, his wife. The beauty of the latter inflames Martius, and he
seeks to save her husband; but Sophocles will not ask his life, although
assured, that a word will save him, and the execution of both proceeds.

"_Valerius._ Bid thy wife farewell.

_Soph._ No, I will take no leave. My Dorigen,
Yonder, above, 'bout Ariadne's crown.[315]
My spirit shall hover for thee. Prithee, haste.

_Dor._ Stay, Sophocles--with this, tie up my sight;
Let not soft nature so transformed be,
And lose her gentler sexed humanity,
To make me see my lord bleed. So, 'tis well;
Never one object underneath the sun
Will I behold before my Sophocles:
Farewell; now teach the Romans how to die.

_Mar._ Dost know what 'tis to die?

_Soph._ Thou dost not, Martius,
And therefore, not what 'tis to live; to die
Is to begin to live. It is to end
An old, stale, weary work, and to commence
A newer and a better. 'Tis to leave
Deceitful knaves for the society
Of gods and goodness. Thou, thyself, must part
At last, from all thy garlands, pleasures, triumphs,
And prove thy fortitude what then 'twill do.

_Val._ But art not grieved nor vexed to leave thy life thus?

_Soph._ Why should I grieve or vex for being sent
To them I ever loved best? Now, I'll kneel,
But with my back toward thee; 'tis the last duty
This trunk can do the gods.

_Mar._ Strike, strike, Valerius,
Or Martius' heart will leap out at his mouth:
This is a man, a woman! Kiss thy lord,
And live with all the freedom you were wont.
O love! thou doubly hast afflicted me
With virtue and with beauty. Treacherous heart,
My hand shall cast thee quick into my urn,
Ere thou transgress this knot of piety.

_Val._ What ails my brother?

_Soph._ Martius, oh Martius,
Thou now hast found a way to conquer me.

_Dor._ O star of Rome! what gratitude can speak
Fit words to follow such a deed as this?

_Mar._ This admirable duke, Valerius,
With his disdain of fortune and of death,
Captived himself, has captived me,
And though my arm hath ta'en his body here,
His soul hath subjugated Martius' soul.
By Romulus,[316] he is all soul, I think;
He hath no flesh, and spirit cannot be gyved;
Then we have vanquished nothing; he is free,
And Martius walks now in captivity."

2. I do not readily remember any poem, play, sermon, novel, or
oration, that our press vents in the last few years, which goes to the
same tune. We have a great many flutes and flageolets, but not often
the sound of any fife. Yet, Wordsworth's Laodamia, and the ode of
"Dion,"[317] and some sonnets, have a certain noble music; and
Scott[318] will sometimes draw a stroke like the portrait of Lord
Evandale, given by Balfour of Burley.[319] Thomas Carlyle,[320] with
his natural taste for what is manly and daring in character, has
suffered no heroic trait in his favorites to drop from his
biographical and historical pictures. Earlier, Robert Burns[321] has
given us a song or two. In the Harleian Miscellanies,[322] there is an
account of the battle of Lutzen,[323] which deserves to be read. And
Simon Ockley's[324] History of the Saracens recounts the prodigies of
individual valor with admiration, all the more evident on the part of
the narrator, that he seems to think that his place in Christian
Oxford[325] requires of him some proper protestations of abhorrence.
But if we explore the literature of Heroism, we shall quickly come to
Plutarch,[326] who is its Doctor and historian. To him we owe the
Brasidas,[327] the Dion,[328] the Epaminondas,[329] the Scipio[330] of
old, and I must think we are more deeply indebted to him than to all
the ancient writers. Each of his "Lives" is a refutation to the
despondency and cowardice of our religious and political theorists. A
wild courage, a Stoicism[331] not of the schools, but of the blood,
shines in every anecdote, and has given that book its immense fame.

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