The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV | Page 7

that is the way it is. We find the world made to our hand. The wise
men marry the foolish virgins, and the splendid virgins marry dolts, and
matters in general are so mixed up, that the choice lies between nice
things about spoiled, and vile things that are not so bad after all, and it
is hard to tell sometimes which you like the best, or which you loathe
least.
I expect to lose every friend I have in the world by the publication of
this paper--except the dunces who are impaled in it. They will never
read it, and if they do, will never suspect I mean them; while the
sensible and true friends, who do me good and not evil all the days of
their lives, will think I am driving at their noble hearts, and will at once
fall off and leave me inconsolable. Still I am going to write it. You
must open the safety-valve once in a while, even if the steam does whiz
and shriek, or there will be an explosion, which is fatal, while the
whizzing and shrieking are only disagreeable.
Doubtless friendship has its advantages and its pleasures; doubtless

hostility has its isolations and its revenges; still, if called upon to
choose once for all between friends and foes, I think, on the whole, I
should cast my vote for the foes. Twenty enemies will not do you the
mischief of one friend. Enemies you always know where to find. They
are in fair and square perpetual hostility, and you keep your armor on
and your sentinels posted; but with friends you are inveigled into a
false security, and, before you know it, your honor, your modesty, your
delicacy are scudding before the gales. Moreover, with your friend you
can never make reprisals. If your enemy attacks you, you can always
strike back and hit hard. You are expected to defend yourself against
him to the top of your bent. He is your legal opponent in honorable
warfare. You can pour hot-shot into him with murderous vigor; and the
more he writhes, the better you feel. In fact, it is rather refreshing to
measure swords once in a while with such a one. You like to exert your
power and keep yourself in practice. You do not rejoice so much in
overcoming your enemy as in overcoming. If a marble statue could
show fight you would just as soon fight it; but as it can not, you take
something that can, and something, besides, that has had the temerity to
attack you, and so has made a lawful target of itself. But against your
friend your hands are tied. He has injured you. He has disgusted you.
He has infuriated you. But it was most Christianly done. You can not
hurl a thunderbolt, or pull a trigger, or lisp a syllable against those
amiable monsters who, with tenderest fingers, are sticking pins all over
you. So you shut fast the doors of your lips, and inwardly sigh for a
good, stout, brawny, malignant foe, who, under any and every
circumstance, will design you harm, and on whom you can lavish your
lusty blows with a hearty will and a clear conscience.
Your enemy keeps clear of you. He neither grants nor claims favors. He
awards you your rights,--no more, no less,--and demands the same from
you. Consequently there is no friction. Your friend, on the contrary, is
continually getting himself tangled up with you "because he is your
friend." I have heard that Shelley was never better pleased than when
his associates made free with his coats, boots, and hats for their own
use, and that he appropriated their property in the same way. Shelley
was a poet, and perhaps idealized his friends. He saw them, probably,
in a state of pure intellect. I am not a poet; I look at people in the

concrete. The most obvious thing about my friends is their avoirdupois;
and I prefer that they should wear their own cloaks and suffer me to
wear mine. There is no neck in the world that I want my collar to span
except my own. It is very exasperating to me to go to my bookcase and
miss a book of which I am in immediate and pressing need, because an
intimate friend has carried it off without asking leave, on the score of
his intimacy. I have not, and do not wish to have, any alliance that shall
abrogate the eighth commandment. A great mistake is lying round
loose hereabouts,--a mistake fatal to many friendships that did run well.
The common fallacy is that intimacy dispenses with the necessity of
politeness. The truth is just the opposite of this. The more points of
contact there are, the more danger