"Emerson, Ralph W. - Representative Men" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

a reasonable book. We seem to want but one, but we want one. We love
to associate with heroic persons, since our receptivity is
unlimited; and, with the great, our thoughts and manners easily become
great. We are all wise in capacity, though so few in energy. There
needs but one wise man in a company and all are wise, so rapid is
the contagion.

Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our eyes from egotism and
enable us to see other people and their works. But there are vices and
follies incident to whole populations and ages. Men resemble their
contemporaries even more than their progenitors. It is observed in old
couples, or in persons who have been housemates for a course of years,
that they grow like, and if they should live long enough we should not
be able to know them apart. Nature abhors these complaisances which
threaten to melt the world into a lump, and hastens to break up such
maudlin agglutinations. The like assimilation goes on between men of
one town, of one sect, of one political party; and the ideas of the
time are in the air, and infect all who breathe it. Viewed from any
high point, this city of New York, yonder city of London, the
Western civilization, would seem a bundle of insanities. We keep
each other in countenance and exasperate by emulation the frenzy of
the time. The shield against the stingings of conscience is the
universal practice, or our contemporaries. Again, it is very easy to
be as wise and good as your companions. We learn of our contemporaries
what they know without effort, and almost through the pores of the
skin. We catch it by sympathy, or as a wife arrives at the
intellectual and moral elevations of her husband. But we stop where
they stop. Very hardly can we take another step. The great, or such as
hold of nature and transcend fashions by their fidelity to universal
ideas, are saviors from these federal errors,*(4) and defend us from
our contemporaries. They are the exceptions which we want, where all
grows like. A foreign greatness is the antidote for cabalism.

Thus we feed on genius, and refresh ourselves from too much
conversation with our mates, and exult in the depth of nature in
that direction in which he leads us. What indemnification is one great
man for populations of pigmies! Every mother wishes one son a
genius, though all the rest should be mediocre. But a new danger
appears in the excess of influence of the great man. His attractions
warp us from our place. We have become underlings and intellectual
suicides. Ah! yonder in the horizon is our help;- other great men, new
qualities, counterweights and checks on each other. We cloy of the
honey of each peculiar greatness. Every hero becomes a bore at last.
Perhaps Voltaire was not bad-hearted, yet he said of the good Jesus,
even, "I pray you, let me never hear that man's name again." They
cry up the virtues of George Washington,- "Damn George Washington!" is
the poor Jacobin's whole speech and confutation. But it is human
nature's indispensable defence. The centripetence augments the
centrifugence. We balance one man with his opposite, and the health of
the state depends on the see-saw.