"Literary Ethics" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

ic LITERARY ETHICS

_An Oration delivered before the Literary Societies of
Dartmouth College, July 24, 1838_

GENTLEMEN,
The invitation to address you this day, with which you have
honored me, wall so welcome, that I made haste to obey it. A summons
to celebrate with scholars a literary festival, is so alluring to me,
as to overcome the doubts I might well entertain of my ability to
bring you any thought worthy of your attention. I have reached the
middle age of man; yet I believe I am not less glad or sanguine at
the meeting of scholars, than when, a boy, I first saw the graduates
of my own College assembled at their anniversary. Neither years nor
books have yet availed to extirpate a prejudice then rooted in me,
that a scholar is the favorite of Heaven and earth, the excellency of
his country, the happiest of men. His duties lead him directly into
the holy ground where other men's aspirations only point. His
successes are occasions of the purest joy to all men. Eyes is he to
the blind; feet is he to the lame. His failures, if he is worthy,
are inlets to higher advantages. And because the scholar, by every
thought he thinks, extends his dominion into the general mind of men,
he is not one, but many. The few scholars in each country, whose
genius I know, seem to me not individuals, but societies; and, when
events occur of great import, I count over these representatives of
opinion, whom they will affect, as if I were counting nations. And,
even if his results were incommunicable; if they abode in his own
spirit; the intellect hath somewhat so sacred in its possessions,
that the fact of his existence and pursuits would be a happy omen.

Meantime I know that a very different estimate of the scholar's
profession prevails in this country, and the importunity, with which
society presses its claim upon young men, tends to pervert the views
of the youth in respect to the culture of the intellect. Hence the
historical failure, on which Europe and America have so freely
commented. This country has not fulfilled what seemed the reasonable
expectation of mankind. Men looked, when all feudal straps and
bandages were snapped asunder, that nature, too long the mother of
dwarfs, should reimburse itself by a brood of Titans, who should
laugh and leap in the continent, and run up the mountains of the West
with the errand of genius and of love. But the mark of American
merit in painting, in sculpture, in poetry, in fiction, in eloquence,
seems to be a certain grace without grandeur, and itself not new but
derivative; a vase of fair outline, but empty, -- which whoso sees,
may fill with what wit and character is in him, but which does not,
like the charged cloud, overflow with terrible beauty, and emit
lightnings on all beholders.

I will not lose myself in the desultory questions, what are the
limitations, and what the causes of the fact. It suffices me to say,