One word must be said in behalf of the punctilious giver, of the man who repays a gift as scrupulously as he returns a blow.  He wants to please, but he is baffled by not knowing, and by not being sympathetic enough to divine, what his inarticulate friend desires.  And if he does know, he may still vacillate between his friend’s sense of the becoming and his own.  The “Spectator,” in a mood of unwonted subtlety, tells us that there is a “mild treachery” in giving what we feel to be bad, because we are aware that the recipient will think it very good.  If, for example, we hold garnets to be ugly and vulgar, we must not send them to a friend who considers them rich and splendid.  “A gift should represent common ground.”

This is so well said that it sounds like the easy thing it isn’t.  Which of us has not nobly striven, and ignobly failed, to preserve our honest purpose without challenging the taste of our friends?  It is hard to tell what people really prize.  Heine begged for a button from George Sand’s trousers, and who shall say whether enthusiasm or malice prompted the request?  Mr. Oscar Browning, who as Master at Eton must have known whereof he spoke, insisted that it was a mistake to give a boy a well-bound book if you expected him to read it.  Yet binding plays a conspicuous part in the selection of Christmas and birthday presents.  Dr. Johnson went a step farther, and said that nobody wanted to read any book which was given to him;—­the mere fact that it was given, instead of being bought, borrowed, or ravished from a friend’s shelves, militated against its readable qualities.  Perhaps the Doctor was thinking of authors’ copies.  Otherwise the remark is the most discouraging one on record.

Yet when all the ungracious things have been said and forgotten, when the hard old proverbs have exhausted their unwelcome wisdom, and we have smiled wearily over the deeper cynicisms of Richelieu and Talleyrand, where shall we turn for relief but to Emerson, who has atoned in his own fashion for the harshness of his own words.  It is not only that he recognizes the goodness of the man who receives a gift well; but he sees, and sees clearly, that there can be no question between friends of giving or receiving, no possible room for generosity or gratitude.  “The gift to be true must be the flowing of the giver unto me, correspondent to my flowing unto him.  When the waters are at a level, then my goods pass to him, and his to me.  All his are mine, all mine, his.”

Critics have been disposed to think that this is an elevation too lofty for plain human beings to climb, an air too rarified for them to breathe; and that it ill befitted a man who churlishly resented the simple, stupid kindnesses of life, to take so sublime a tone, to claim so fine a virtue.  We cannot hope to scale great moral heights by ignoring petty obligations.

Yet Emerson does not go a step beyond Plato in his conception of the “level waters” of friendship.  He states his position lucidly, and with a rational understanding of all that it involves.  His vision is wide enough to embrace its everlasting truth.  Plato says the same thing in simpler language.  He offers his truth as self-evident, and in no need of demonstration.  When Lysis and Menexenus greet Socrates at the gymnasia, the philosopher asks which of the two youths is the elder.