"Essays 1st Series" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

spiritual nature unfolded in strict unity with the body. In it
existed those human forms which supplied the sculptor with his models
of Hercules, Ph;oebus, and Jove; not like the forms abounding in the
streets of modern cities, wherein the face is a confused blur of
features, but composed of incorrupt, sharply defined, and symmetrical
features, whose eye-sockets are so formed that it would be impossible
for such eyes to squint, and take furtive glances on this side and on
that, but they must turn the whole head. The manners of that period
are plain and fierce. The reverence exhibited is for personal
qualities, courage, address, self-command, justice, strength,
swiftness, a loud voice, a broad chest. Luxury and elegance are not
known. A sparse population and want make every man his own valet,
cook, butcher, and soldier, and the habit of supplying his own needs
educates the body to wonderful performances. Such are the Agamemnon
and Diomed of Homer, and not far different is the picture Xenophon
gives of himself and his compatriots in the Retreat of the Ten
Thousand. "After the army had crossed the river Teleboas in Armenia,
there fell much snow, and the troops lay miserably on the ground
covered with it. But Xenophon arose naked, and, taking an axe, began
to split wood; whereupon others rose and did the like." Throughout
his army exists a boundless liberty of speech. They quarrel for
plunder, they wrangle with the generals on each new order, and
Xenophon is as sharp-tongued as any, and sharper-tongued than most,
and so gives as good as he gets. Who does not see that this is a
gang of great boys, with such a code of honor and such lax discipline
as great boys have?

The costly charm of the ancient tragedy, and indeed of all the
old literature, is, that the persons speak simply, -- speak as
persons who have great good sense without knowing it, before yet the
reflective habit has become the predominant habit of the mind. Our
admiration of the antique is not admiration of the old, but of the
natural. The Greeks are not reflective, but perfect in their senses
and in their health, with the finest physical organization in the
world. Adults acted with the simplicity and grace of children. They
made vases, tragedies, and statues, such as healthy senses
should,---- that is, in good taste. Such things have continued to be
made in all ages, and are now, wherever a healthy physique exists;
but, as a class, from their superior organization, they have
surpassed all. They combine the energy of manhood with the engaging
unconsciousness of childhood. The attraction of these manners is
that they belong to man, and are known to every man in virtue of his
being once a child; besides that there are always individuals who
retain these characteristics. A person of childlike genius and
inborn energy is still a Greek, and revives our love of the Muse of
Hellas. I admire the love of nature in the Philoctetes. In reading
those fine apostrophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks, mountains, and
waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea. I feel the
eternity of man, the identity of his thought. The Greek had, it
seems, the same fellow-beings as I. The sun and moon, water and