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

Under this head too falls that homage, very pure as I think, which
all ranks pay to the hero of the day, from Coriolanus and Gracchus
down to Pitt, Lafayette, Wellington, Webster, Lamartine. Hear the
shouts in the street! The people cannot see him enough. They delight
in a man. Here is a head and a trunk! What a front! what eyes!
Atlantean shoulders, and the whole carriage heroic, with equal
inward force to guide the great machine! This pleasure of full
expression to that which, in their private experience, is usually
cramped and obstructed, runs also much higher, and is the secret of
the reader's joy in literary genius. Nothing is kept back. There is
fire enough to fuse the mountain of ore. Shakespeare's principal merit
may be conveyed in saying that he of all men best understands the
English language, and can say what he will. Yet these unchoked
channels and floodgates of expression are only health or fortunate
constitution. Shakespeare's name suggests other and purely
intellectual benefits.

Senates and sovereigns have no compliment, with their medals, swords
and armorial coats, like the addressing to a human being thoughts
out of a certain height, and presupposing his intelligence. This
honor, which is possible in personal intercourse scarcely twice in a
lifetime, genius perpetually pays; contented if now and then in a
century the proffer is accepted. The indicators of the values of
matter are degraded to a sort of cooks and confectioners, on the
appearance of the indicators of ideas. Genius is the naturalist or
geographer of the supersensible regions, and draws their map; and,
by acquainting us with new fields of activity, cools our affection for
the old. These are at once accepted as the reality, of which the world
we have conversed with is the show.

We go to the gymnasium and the swimming-school to see the power
and beauty of the body; there is the like pleasure and a higher
benefit from witnessing intellectual feats of all kinds; as feats of
memory, of mathematical combination, great power of abstraction, the
transmutings of the imagination, even versatility and
concentration,- as these acts expose the invisible organs and
members of the mind, which respond, member for member, to the parts of
the body. For we thus enter a new gymnasium, and learn to choose men
by their truest marks, taught, with Plato, "to choose those who can,
without aid from the eyes or any other sense, proceed to truth and
to being." Foremost among these activities are the summersaults,
spells and resurrections wrought by the imagination. When this
wakes, a man seems to multiply ten times or a thousand times his
force. It opens the delicious sense of indeterminate size and inspires
an audacious mental habit. We are as elastic as the gas of
gunpowder, and a sentence in a book, or a word dropped in
conversation, sets free our fancy, and instantly our heads are
bathed with galaxies, and our feet tread the floor of the Pit. And
this benefit is real because we are entitled to these enlargements,