A commended stranger is expected and announced, and an uneasiness between pleasure and pain runs through the household. The house is dusted and the table is laid. In the first hours Emerson is eloquent: we talk better than we are wont, with the nimblest fancy and a richer memory, and our dumb devil has taken leave. Then the stranger brings in his own partialities and defects, and the spell is over. He is no longer the stranger who stood for humanity. The same pattern runs through friendship at large. Fine hours of affection, built from wine and dreams, hurry to short and poor conclusions when the real person arrives.
Emerson admits how much he is moved by this. A new person is a great event to him and costs him sleep, yet the fine fancy yields no fruit, no thought and no change in what he does. The heart has a systole and a diastole, and love ebbs and flows. He copies out the letter any candidate for love might write, a delicious torment, and then calls such uneasy pleasures and fine pains a matter of curiosity, not life. They weave cobweb, not cloth. He prefers the company of plough-boys and tin-peddlers to the perfumed amity that marks its days with rides in a curricle and dinners at the best taverns.
Real friendship, he says, has two elements, Truth and Tenderness, and it must be treated with the roughest courage. A friend is a person with whom I can be sincere, and before whom I may think aloud. Yet a second person at the table is enough to start the hypocrisy again, and friendship asks us to drop even the undermost garments of courtesy. Tenderness has to be tested on hard ground: pity at the funeral, justice, punctuality. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. Two may talk, but three cannot share the most sincere conversation, and there must be very two before there can be very one.
The demands only grow. Emerson asks us to buy our entrance to this guild by a long probation and to treat the friend as a spectacle, standing aside so that his merits have room to expand. Reverence is a great part of it. We must be our own before we can be another's, and the condition high friendship sets is the ability to do without it. Friends such as he describes are dreams and fables. He keeps his friends as he keeps his books, where he can find them and seldom uses them. The only reward of virtue is virtue, and the only way to have a friend is to be one.
Coming Up in Chapter 5
Next comes Heroism. Emerson opens with scenes from the old English stage, where a wife and a soldier face death with grace and courtesy. He asks what makes courage look so gentle in them, and whether ordinary people can learn to carry themselves in the same way.
