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