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needed, when Jomt enterprise still required the collaboration of
personal allies. Horatio, for example, is less a modern personal friend
than a perfect confidant, sharing and aiding his "lord's" stratagems,
keeping them in confidence, immune to passion and flattery. He
remains alive only on Hamlet's charge to "report me and my cause
aright," evoking the obligation of late medieval brothers-in-arms
to
inherit feuds and "maintain causes." His counterpoint with Rosen–
crantz and Guildenstern-not figures of fun, but authentically danger–
ous false friends from whom Hamlet is safe only because he early
detects their "insinuation"-is carefully arranged. The poignancy of
Hamlet's bond with Horatio is only in part due to its "personal"
aspect; it is in a tradition of formal obligation which, because no
longer reliable, was the more precious in a dangerous world. Wishing
to die, Horatio compares himself to "the antique Roman"-summon–
ing the classical models of loyalty, rather than the "Dane," the man of
his own treacherous times.
As the network of bureaucracy and market exchange spread in the
centuries that followed, distaste mounted in some circles for the
conscious, practical reciprocities that had marked "personal" bonds in
the Western cultural tradition. The frankly utilitarian aspects of
bonded loyalties were sometimes obscured by anachronistic sentimen–
tality, strengthening the distaste for new times. Ideal forms of helping
and loyalty became both a refuge and an implied criticism of the public
sphere-they are of high quality precisely to the extent that they invert
the rules of the great society. In the ideal Commonwealth, the bour–
geois
polis,
men seek peaceably
to
exchange equivalent values, so that
each benefits and neither loses; in such exchanges, virtue lies in utility,
justice in equivalence, probity in impersonality. But forms of personal
helping embedded in bonds of private loyalties and friendships are
diminished to the extent that they rest frankly on such foundations;
rather, they celebrate the unconditional commitment of persons cher–
ished not for their public resources but their unique value as private
beings. The stronger and purer such bonds, the less they resemble the
ways of the world.
The eighteenth century moralists did not share in this romantic or
reactive response. Elizabethan administrators, merchants, and early
capitalists, according to Benjamin Nelson's
The Idea of Usury,
depre–
cated the "cult of friendship"-the strenuous celebration of personal
loyalty and self-sacrificing helpfulness as a heroic virtue patterned on
the old social forms. Similarly, the eighteenth century moralists of a
society becoming pervasively commercial sought to shape personal
