Essays, First Series

R >> Ralph Waldo Emerson >> Essays, First Series

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Hence arose the saying, "If I love you, what is that to
you?" We say so because we feel that what we love is not
in your will, but above it. It is not you, but your
radiance. It is that which you know not in yourself and
can never know.

This agrees well with that high philosophy of Beauty
which the ancient writers delighted in; for they said
that the soul of man, embodied here on earth, went
roaming up and down in quest of that other world of
its own out of which it came into this, but was soon
stupefied by the light of the natural sun, and unable
to see any other objects than those of this world,
which are but shadows of real things. Therefore the
Deity sends the glory of youth before the soul, that
it may avail itself of beautiful bodies as aids to its
recollection of the celestial good and fair; and the
man beholding such a person in the female sex runs to
her and finds the highest joy in contemplating the form,
movement, and intelligence of this person, because it
suggests to him the presence of that which indeed is
within the beauty, and the cause of the beauty.

If however, from too much conversing with material
objects, the soul was gross, and misplaced its
satisfaction in the body, it reaped nothing but
sorrow; body being unable to fulfil the promise
which beauty holds out; but if, accepting the hint
of these visions and suggestions which beauty makes
to his mind, the soul passes through the body and
falls to admire strokes of character, and the lovers
contemplate one another in their discourses and their
actions, then they pass to the true palace of beauty,
more and more inflame their love of it, and by this
love extinguishing the base affection, as the sun puts
out the fire by shining on the hearth, they become pure
and hallowed. By conversation with that which is in
itself excellent, magnanimous, lowly, and just, the
lover comes to a warmer love of these nobilities, and
a quicker apprehension of them. Then he passes from
loving them in one to loving them in all, and so is
the one beautiful soul only the door through which he
enters to the society of all true and pure souls. In
the particular society of his mate he attains a clearer
sight of any spot, any taint which her beauty has
contracted from this world, and is able to point it out,
and this with mutual joy that they are now able, without
offence, to indicate blemishes and hindrances in each
other, and give to each all help and comfort in curing
the same. And beholding in many souls the traits of the
divine beauty, and separating in each soul that which
is divine from the taint which it has contracted in the
world, the lover ascends to the highest beauty, to the
love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on this
ladder of created souls.

Somewhat like this have the truly wise told us of love
in all ages. The doctrine is not old, nor is it new. If
Plato, Plutarch and Apuleius taught it, so have Petrarch,
Angelo and Milton. It awaits a truer unfolding in opposition
and rebuke to that subterranean prudence which presides at
marriages with words that take hold of the upper world,
whilst one eye is prowling in the cellar; so that its gravest
discourse has a savor of hams and powdering-tubs. Worst, when
this sensualism intrudes into the education of young women,
and withers the hope and affection of human nature by
teaching that marriage signifies nothing but a housewife's
thrift, and that woman's life has no other aim.

But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only one
scene in our play. In the procession of the soul from
within outward, it enlarges its circles ever, like the
pebble thrown into the pond, or the light proceeding
from an orb. The rays of the soul alight first on things
nearest, on every utensil and toy, on nurses and
domestics, on the house and yard and passengers, on the
circle of household acquaintance, on politics and geography
and history. But things are ever grouping themselves
according to higher or more interior laws. Neighborhood,
size, numbers, habits, persons, lose by degrees their power
over us. Cause and effect, real affinities, the longing for
harmony between the soul and the circumstance, the progressive,
idealizing instinct, predominate later, and the step backward
from the higher to the lower relations is impossible. Thus
even love, which is the deification of persons, must become
more impersonal every day. Of this at first it gives no hint.
Little think the youth and maiden who are glancing at each
other across crowded rooms with eyes so full of mutual
intelligence, of the precious fruit long hereafter to
proceed from this new, quite external stimulus. The work
of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark
and leaf-buds. From exchanging glances, they advance to
acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery passion, to
plighting troth and marriage. Passion beholds its object as
a perfect unit. The soul is wholly embodied, and the body is
wholly ensouled:--

"Her pure and eloquent blood
Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,
That one might almost say her body thought."

Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to
make the heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has no
other aim, asks no more, than Juliet,--than Romeo.
Night, day, studies, talents, kingdoms, religion, are
all contained in this form full of soul, in this soul
which is all form. The lovers delight in endearments,
in avowals of love, in comparisons of their regards.
When alone, they solace themselves with the remembered
image of the other. Does that other see the same star,
the same melting cloud, read the same book, feel the
same emotion, that now delight me? They try and weigh
their affection, and adding up costly advantages, friends,
opportunities, properties, exult in discovering that
willingly, joyfully, they would give all as a ransom for
the beautiful, the beloved head, not one hair of which
shall be harmed. But the lot of humanity is on these
children. Danger, sorrow, and pain arrive to them, as to
all. Love prays. It makes covenants with Eternal Power
in behalf of this dear mate. The union which is thus
effected and which adds a new value to every atom in
nature--for it transmutes every thread throughout the
whole web of relation into a golden ray, and bathes the
soul in a new and sweeter element--is yet a temporary
state. Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry,
protestations, nor even home in another heart, content
the awful soul that dwells in clay. It arouses itself
at last from these endearments, as toys, and puts on
the harness and aspires to vast and universal aims. The
soul which is in the soul of each, craving a perfect
beatitude, detects incongruities, defects and
disproportion in the behavior of the other. Hence arise
surprise, expostulation and pain. Yet that which drew
them to each other was signs of loveliness, signs of
virtue; and these virtues are there, however eclipsed.
They appear and reappear and continue to attract; but
the regard changes, quits the sign and attaches to the
substance. This repairs the wounded affection. Meantime,
as life wears on, it proves a game of permutation and
combination of all possible positions of the parties,
to employ all the resources of each and acquaint each
with the strength and weakness of the other. For it is
the nature and end of this relation, that they should
represent the human race to each other. All that is in
the world, which is or ought to be known, is cunningly
wrought into the texture of man, of woman:--

"The person love does to us fit,
Like manna, has the taste of all in it."

The world rolls; the circumstances vary every hour. The
angels that inhabit this temple of the body appear at
the windows, and the gnomes and vices also. By all the
virtues they are united. If there be virtue, all the
vices are known as such; they confess and flee. Their
once flaming regard is sobered by time in either breast,
and losing in violence what it gains in extent, it becomes
a thorough good understanding. They resign each other
without complaint to the good offices which man and woman
are severally appointed to discharge in time, and exchange
the passion which once could not lose sight of its object,
for a cheerful, disengaged furtherance, whether present or
absent, of each other's designs. At last they discover that
all which at first drew them together,--those once sacred
features, that magical play of charms,--was deciduous, had
a prospective end, like the scaffolding by which the house
was built; and the purification of the intellect and the
heart from year to year is the real marriage, foreseen and
prepared from the first, and wholly above their consciousness.
Looking at these aims with which two persons, a man and a
woman, so variously and correlatively gifted, are shut up
in one house to spend in the nuptial society forty or fifty
years, I do not wonder at the emphasis with which the heart
prophesies this crisis from early infancy, at the profuse
beauty with which the instincts deck the nuptial bower, and
nature and intellect and art emulate each other in the gifts
and the melody they bring to the epithalamium.

Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not
sex, nor person, nor partiality, but which seeks virtue
and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue
and wisdom. We are by nature observers, and thereby
learners. That is our permanent state. But we are often
made to feel that our affections are but tents of a night.
Though slowly and with pain, the objects of the affections
change, as the objects of thought do. There are moments
when the affections rule and absorb the man and make his
happiness dependent on a person or persons. But in health
the mind is presently seen again,--its overarching vault,
bright with galaxies of immutable lights, and the warm
loves and fears that swept over us as clouds must lose
their finite character and blend with God, to attain their
own perfection. But we need not fear that we can lose any
thing by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted
to the end. That which is so beautiful and attractive as
these relations, must be succeeded and supplanted only by
what is more beautiful, and so on for ever.

FRIENDSHIP.

A RUDDY drop of manly blood
The surging sea outweighs;
The world uncertain comes and goes,
The lover rooted stays.
I fancied he was fled,
And, after many a year,
Glowed unexhausted kindliness
Like daily sunrise there.
My careful heart was free again,--
O friend, my bosom said,
Through thee alone the sky is arched,
Through thee the rose is red,
All things through thee take nobler form
And look beyond the earth,
The mill-round of our fate appears
A sun-path in thy worth.
Me too thy nobleness has taught
To master my despair;
The fountains of my hidden life
Are through thy friendship fair.

VI.
FRIENDSHIP.

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.

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, 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 derides and cancels 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 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 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. 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 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 for evermore. 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 austere and eternal, of
one web with the laws of nature and of morals. But we have
aimed at a swift and petty benefit, to suck a sudden
sweetness. We snatch at the slowest fruit in the whole garden
of God, which many summers and many winters must ripen. We
seek our friend not sacredly, but with an adulterate passion
which would appropriate him to ourselves. In vain. We are
armed all over with subtle antagonisms, which, as soon as
we meet, begin to play, and translate all poetry into stale
prose. Almost all people descend to meet. All association
must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower
and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures
disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual
disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and
gifted! After interviews have been compassed with long
foresight we must be tormented presently by baffled blows,
by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and
of animal spirits, in the heyday of friendship and thought.
Our faculties do not play us true, and both parties are
relieved by solitude.

I ought to be equal to every relation. It makes no
difference how many friends I have and what content
I can find in conversing with each, if there be one
to whom I am not equal. If I have shrunk unequal from
one contest, the joy I find in all the rest becomes
mean and cowardly. I should hate myself, if then I
made my other friends my asylum:--

"The valiant warrior famoused for fight,
After a hundred victories, once foiled,
Is from the book of honor razed quite,
And all the rest forgot for which he toiled."

Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashfulness and
apathy are a tough husk in which a delicate organization
is protected from premature ripening. It would be lost
if it knew itself before any of the best souls were yet
ripe enough to know and own it. Respect the naturlangsamkeit
which hardens the ruby in a million years, and works in
duration in which Alps and Andes come and go as rainbows.
The good spirit of our life has no heaven which is the
price of rashness. Love, which is the essence of God, is
not for levity, but for the total worth of man. Let us not
have this childish luxury in our regards, but the austerest
worth; let us approach our friend with an audacious trust
in the truth of his heart, in the breadth, impossible to
be overturned, of his foundations.

The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted,
and I leave, for the time, all account of subordinate
social benefit, to speak of that select and sacred
relation which is a kind of absolute, and which even
leaves the language of love suspicious and common, so
much is this purer, and nothing is so much divine.

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with
roughest courage. When they are real, they are not
glass threads or frostwork, but the solidest thing we
know. For now, after so many ages of experience, what
do we know of nature or of ourselves? Not one step has
man taken toward the solution of the problem of his
destiny. In one condemnation of folly stand the whole
universe of men. But the sweet sincerity of joy and
peace which I draw from this alliance with my brother's
soul is the nut itself whereof all nature and all thought
is but the husk and shell. Happy is the house that
shelters a friend! It might well be built, like a festal
bower or arch, to entertain him a single day. Happier,
if he know the solemnity of that relation and honor its
law! He who offers himself a candidate for that covenant
comes up, like an Olympian, to the great games where the
first-born of the world are the competitors. He proposes
himself for contests where Time, Want, Danger, are in
the lists, and he alone is victor who has truth enough
in his constitution to preserve the delicacy of his
beauty from the wear and tear of all these. The gifts
of fortune may be present or absent, but all the speed
in that contest depends on intrinsic nobleness and the
contempt of trifles. There are two elements that go to
the composition of friendship, each so sovereign that
I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why
either should be first named. One is truth. A friend
is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I
may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence
of a man so real and equal that I may drop even those
undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and
second thought, which men never put off, and may deal
with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which
one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury
allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest
rank; that being permitted to speak truth, as having
none above it to court or conform unto. Every man alone
is sincere. At the entrance of a second person, hypocrisy
begins. We parry and fend the approach of our fellow-man
by compliments, by gossip, by amusements, by affairs. We
cover up our thought from him under a hundred folds. I
knew a man who under a certain religious frenzy cast off
this drapery, and omitting all compliment and commonplace,
spoke to the conscience of every person he encountered,
and that with great insight and beauty. At first he was
resisted, and all men agreed he was mad. But persisting--
as indeed he could not help doing--for some time in this
course, he attained to the advantage of bringing every
man of his acquaintance into true relations with him. No
man would think of speaking falsely with him, or of
putting him off with any chat of markets or reading-rooms.
But every man was constrained by so much sincerity to the
like plaindealing, and what love of nature, what poetry,
what symbol of truth he had, he did certainly show him.
But to most of us society shows not its face and eye, but
its side and its back. To stand in true relations with
men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, is it not?
We can seldom go erect. Almost every man we meet requires
some civility,--requires to be humored; he has some fame,
some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy in his
head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all
conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who
exercises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me
entertainment without requiring any stipulation on my
part. A friend therefore is a sort of paradox in nature.
I who alone am, I who see nothing in nature whose
existence I can affirm with equal evidence to my own,
behold now the semblance of my being, in all its height,
variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a foreign form; so
that a friend may well be reckoned the masterpiece of
nature.

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