Chapter VI: Friendship Without Intimacy

“_There is a strange face in the Freshman class whom I should like to know very much. He has a great deal of character in his features and should be a fast friend or a bitter enemy. His name is ----. I shall endeavor to become better acquainted with him and wish, if possible, to recall at a future period the singular sensations which his presence produced in me_.”--JOURNAL, 1820.

Emerson was an upper classman, albeit only seventeen years of age, when he wrote thus of Martin Gay of Hingham, afterward a distinguished analytical chemist living in Boston. Emerson’s son, commenting on this passage, says that there is no evidence that his father, either in college or afterward, ever made any advances toward further acquaintance. It does not appear that he ever really knew him, yet he was always interested to hear of him, and was grieved at his untimely death in 1850. The two men were entirely different in their temperaments and interests, Gay being known by his classmates as “cool Gay.”

This capacity for shy admirations for his opposites, and for friendly interests in people with whom he would find it difficult to keep up a conversation, was characteristic of Emerson. He was sometimes painfully conscious of it as a barrier which prevented him from really “getting at” people whom he wished to know. At other times he defended the attitude that was natural to him, and so made a virtue of his necessity.

To most persons, Emerson’s essay on Friendship is unsatisfactory as an exposition of the subject, though it is very revealing of the author’s state of mind. “Friendship,” says Emerson, “like the immortality of the soul, is too good to be believed.” And his account of friendship has a fine aloofness that befits the love for a disembodied spirit rather than a warm attachment to an imperfect creature of flesh and blood.

One of the conditions that Emerson would make in a treaty of friendship would be that neither party should trespass on the personality of others. It was friendship by “absent treatment.”

“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, and 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.

“To my friend I write a letter, and from him I receive a letter. That seems to you little. It suffices me.

“You shall not come nearer to a man by getting into his house. We see the noble afar off, why should we intrude?”

In all this we feel that Emerson was riding his high horse. It is a shy man’s way of comforting himself for something that he unfortunately lacks, but which he would give anything to possess. He was, to use Paul’s phrase, glorying in his infirmities. That which he was praising was not friendship but sublimated hero-worship, which is quite a different thing.

In the privacy of his note-books he treats his infirmity in quite a different spirit. He laments the fact that he was not a good mixer. Like so many New Englanders, it was difficult for him to establish personal relations.

At the age of twenty, when looking forward to the ministry, he makes this self-criticism:

“Every comparison of myself with my mates that six or seven, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, years have made has convinced me that there exists a signal defect of character which neutralizes in great part the just influence my talents ought to have.” He expresses it as the “absence of common sympathies.” By this he seems to mean the absence of the material for “small talk.” “Its bitter fruits are a sore uneasiness in the company of most men and women, a frigid fear of offending and jealousy of disrespect, an inability to lead and an unwillingness to follow the current conversation.... In my frequent humiliation I am compelled to remember the poor boy who cried, ‘I told you, father, they would find me out.’” He sums up his youthful confession, “What is called a warm heart, I have it not.”

When he was sixty, he was conscious of the same limitation. He jotted down in his note-book: “Barriers of man impassable. They who should be friends cannot pass into each other. Friends are fictitious, founded on some momentary experience. But what we want is consecutiveness.”

All this is not evidence of lack of a warm heart. It was rather a lack of an easy way of expressing what he felt. The chill was not in himself, but in the atmosphere that was about him. But there was evidently a personal experience behind this generalization about society.

“Society, like wealth, is good for those who understand it. It is a foolish waste of time for those who do not. It seems impossible for any one to expand in a crowd to his natural dimensions. All character seems to fade away from all the accomplices. Every woman seems suffering for a chair, and you accuse yourself and commiserate those you talk to.”

There is something delightfully amusing in Emerson’s analysis of his own failure as a conversationalist.

“It seemed, as I mused in the streets of Boston on the unpropitious effect of the town on my humor, that there needs a certain deliberation and tenacity in the entertainment of a thought--a certain longanimity to make that confidence and stability which can meet the demands others make on us. I am too quick-eyed and unstable. My thoughts are too short, as they say my sentences are. I step along from stone to stone over the Lethe which gurgles around my path, but the odds are that my companion encounters me just as I leave one stone, and before my foot has well reached the other, and down I tumble into Lethe water. But the man of long wind who receives his thought with a certain phlegmatic entertainment, and unites himself to it for the time, as a sailor to a boat, has a better principle of poise and is not easily moved from the perpendicular.”

With the remarkable group of men who made Concord famous, Emerson was on terms of familiar friendship. For Bronson Alcott he cherished an admiration which seems extravagant. He loved to walk and talk with the shy poet, Ellery Channing. Thoreau was for two years an inmate of Emerson’s house, and the two men worked in the garden together. In Boston Emerson was a member of the Saturday Club, where he continually met Longfellow, Holmes, Agassiz and the rest.

Yet he was not a man to shine in such society. His mind was contemplative, rather than conversational. He did not care to “hold his own” in a controversy. Why should he? “Emerson was a good citizen and a good neighbor with his neighbors, always went to town meeting and listened intently to the strong spirits who ruled the discussions, without taking any part in them himself.”

The most notable of his friendships was with Thomas Carlyle. The correspondence between them continued for many years, and there were many expressions of esteem. The friendship was a real one, but the fact that the broad Atlantic lay between them was a great aid to their good fellowship. For though the two men liked each other, they did not like the same things.

Carlyle threatened to visit America, and we may be sure that he would not have enjoyed the visit. Emerson’s cheery faith in the common man seemed to the testy Scotchman a bit of sentimentalism. They both believed in hero-worship, but they did not worship the same heroes. New England Transcendentalism did not agree with Carlyle’s temper.

Emerson sent a copy of the _Dial_ to his friend. Carlyle writes, “The Dial No. 1 came duly. Of course I read it with interest; it is the utterance of what is youngest in your land, pure, etherial as the voices of the morning! And yet--you know me--for me it is _too_ etherial, speculative, theoretic; all theory becomes more and more confessedly inadequate, untrue, unsatisfactory, almost a kind of mocking to me.”

“Faithful are the wounds of a friend.” And these tokens of friendship were seldom absent from the letters that passed between the two. Carlyle writes of the impression Emerson’s essays made upon him:

“It is a _sermon_ to me as all your deliberate utterances are; a real _word_ which I feel to be such--alas, almost or altogether the one such, in a world all full of jargons, hearsays, echoes and vain noises which cannot pass with me for _words_. This is a praise far beyond any ‘literary’ one; literary praises are not worth repeating in comparison. For the rest I have to object still (what you will call objecting to the Law of Nature) that we find you a speaker indeed, but as it were a _soliloquizer_ on the eternal mountain tops only, in vast solitudes where men and their affairs lie all hushed in a dim remoteness; and only the _man_ and the stars are visible, whom so fine a fellow seems he, we could perpetually punch into and say, ‘Why won’t you come and help us then? We have terrible need of one man like you down among us! It is cold and vacant up there; nothing paintable but rainbows and emotions; come down and you shall do life pictures, passions, facts--which transcend all thought, and leave it stuttering and stammering!’ To which he answers that he won’t, can’t and doesn’t want to (as the cockneys have it): so I leave him and say, ‘You Western Gymnosophist! Well, we can afford one man for that, too.’”

This is all very well for a friendship carried on by correspondence. Carlyle thinks of himself as a man who is dealing with concrete realities, while Emerson is dealing in remote abstractions.

But had they lived in the same town with opportunity to discuss the practical questions of politics and social welfare, they would have come into collision. The fact was that Emerson was as much interested in concrete realities as Carlyle, but he came to different conclusions in regard to them. Carlyle believed in government by strong men, like Frederick the Great and Cromwell. Democracy was an abomination to him. A statesman like Lincoln, who thought of himself as an interpreter of the popular will, was altogether outside his sympathy. Liberalism of the modern sort seemed to him utter weakness and muddleheadedness.

Emerson, though he preferred to write about principles rather than their immediate applications, was never in doubt as to which side he was on. The principles which he preached were the ones which were being applied by the democratic reformers of his own day. He believed in the movements at which Carlyle scoffed. Answering his friend’s criticism, he says:

“What you say now and heretofore respecting the remoteness of my writing and thinking from real life, though I hear substantially the same criticism made by my countrymen, I do not know what it means.”

Indeed, Emerson’s idea of real life differed so profoundly from Carlyle’s that their minds seldom met. To him the laws of the universe were not only the great realities, but the most intimate realities. Every person and every action illustrated them. He believed in the principles of democracy which Carlyle scorned. These fundamental differences would have been accentuated in daily intercourse. The visit of the Scotchman to New England never took place, and it was well that it did not; “for,” says Emerson, “the higher the style we demand of friendship the less easy to establish it in flesh and blood.”