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

miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.' Rough and graceless
would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer than the affectation
of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, -- else it is
none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached as the counteraction
of the doctrine of love when that pules and whines. I shun father
and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me. I would
write on the lintels of the door-post, _Whim_. I hope it is somewhat
better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in explanation.
Expect me not to show cause why I seek or why I exclude company.
Then, again, do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my
obligation to put all poor men in good situations. Are they _my_
poor? I tell thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the
dollar, the dime, the cent, I give to such men as do not belong to me
and to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom by
all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold; for them I will go to
prison, if need be; but your miscellaneous popular charities; the
education at college of fools; the building of meeting-houses to the
vain end to which many now stand; alms to sots; and the thousandfold
Relief Societies; -- though I confess with shame I sometimes succumb
and give the dollar, it is a wicked dollar which by and by I shall
have the manhood to withhold.

Virtues are, in the popular estimate, rather the exception than
the rule. There is the man _and_ his virtues. Men do what is called
a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much as they
would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance on parade.
Their works are done as an apology or extenuation of their living in
the world, -- as invalids and the insane pay a high board. Their
virtues are penances. I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My
life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it
should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it
should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet,
and not to need diet and bleeding. I ask primary evidence that you
are a man, and refuse this appeal from the man to his actions. I
know that for myself it makes no difference whether I do or forbear
those actions which are reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay
for a privilege where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my
gifts may be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or
the assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people
think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual
life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and
meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who
think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is
easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in
solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the
midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of
solitude.