"Essays 2nd Series" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

with a civil and conformed manner of living, and to write poems from
the fancy, at a safe distance from their own experience. But the
highest minds of the world have never ceased to explore the double
meaning, or, shall I say, the quadruple, or the centuple, or much
more manifold meaning, of every sensuous fact: Orpheus, Empedocles,
Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg, and the masters of
sculpture, picture, and poetry. For we are not pans and barrows, nor
even porters of the fire and torch-bearers, but children of the fire,
made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted, and at two or
three removes, when we know least about it. And this hidden truth,
that the fountains whence all this river of Time, and its creatures,
floweth, are intrinsically ideal and beautiful, draws us to the
consideration of the nature and functions of the Poet, or the man of
Beauty, to the means and materials he uses, and to the general aspect
of the art in the present time.

The breadth of the problem is great, for the poet is
representative. He stands among partial men for the complete man,
and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the common-wealth. The
young man reveres men of genius, because, to speak truly, they are
more himself than he is. They receive of the soul as he also
receives, but they more. Nature enhances her beauty, to the eye of
loving men, from their belief that the poet is beholding her shows at
the same time. He is isolated among his contemporaries, by truth and
by his art, but with this consolation in his pursuits, that they will
draw all men sooner or later. For all men live by truth, and stand
in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in
labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is
only half himself, the other half is his expression.

Notwithstanding this necessity to be published, adequate
expression is rare. I know not how it is that we need an
interpreter; but the great majority of men seem to be minors, who
have not yet come into possession of their own, or mutes, who cannot
report the conversation they have had with nature. There is no man
who does not anticipate a supersensual utility in the sun, and stars,
earth, and water. These stand and wait to render him a peculiar
service. But there is some obstruction, or some excess of phlegm in
our constitution, which does not suffer them to yield the due effect.
Too feeble fall the impressions of nature on us to make us artists.
Every touch should thrill. Every man should be so much an artist,
that he could report in conversation what had befallen him. Yet, in
our experience, the rays or appulses have sufficient force to arrive
at the senses, but not enough to reach the quick, and compel the
reproduction of themselves in speech. The poet is the person in whom
these powers are in balance, the man without impediment, who sees and
handles that which others dream of, traverses the whole scale of
experience, and is representative of man, in virtue of being the
largest power to receive and to impart.