"REP MEN" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo )

through life, ignorant of the ruin and incapable of seeing it,
though all the world point their finger at it every day. The worthless
and offensive members of society, whose existence is a social pest,
invariably think themselves the most ill-used people alive, and
never get over their astonishment at the ingratitude and selfishness
of their contemporaries. Our globe discovers its hidden virtues, not
only in heroes and archangels, but in gossips and nurses. Is it not
a rare contrivance that lodged the due inertia in every creature,
the conserving, resisting energy, the anger at being waked or changed?
Altogether independent of the intellectual force in each is the
pride of opinion, the security that we are right. Not the feeblest
grandame, not a mowing idiot, but uses what spark of perception and
faculty is left, to chuckle and triumph in his or her opinion over the
absurdities of all the rest. Difference from me is the measure of
absurdity. Not one has a misgiving of being wrong. Was it not a bright
thought that made things cohere with this bitumen, fastest of cements?
But, in the midst of this chuckle of self-gratulation, some figure
goes by which Thersites too can love and admire. This is he that
should marshal us the way we were going. There is no end to his aid.
Without Plato we should almost lose our faith in the possibility of
a reasonable book. We seem to want but one, but we want one. We love
to associate with heroic persons, since our receptivity is
unlimited; and, with the great, our thoughts and manners easily become
great. We are all wise in capacity, though so few in energy. There
needs but one wise man in a company and all are wise, so rapid is
the contagion.
Great men are thus a collyrium to clear our eyes from egotism and
enable us to see other people and their works. But there are vices and
follies incident to whole populations and ages. Men resemble their
contemporaries even more than their progenitors. It is observed in old
couples, or in persons who have been housemates for a course of years,
that they grow like, and if they should live long enough we should not
be able to know them apart. Nature abhors these complaisances which
threaten to melt the world into a lump, and hastens to break up such
maudlin agglutinations. The like assimilation goes on between men of
one town, of one sect, of one political party; and the ideas of the
time are in the air, and infect all who breathe it. Viewed from any
high point, this city of New York, yonder city of London, the
Western civilization, would seem a bundle of insanities. We keep
each other in countenance and exasperate by emulation the frenzy of
the time. The shield against the stingings of conscience is the
universal practice, or our contemporaries. Again, it is very easy to
be as wise and good as your companions. We learn of our contemporaries
what they know without effort, and almost through the pores of the
skin. We catch it by sympathy, or as a wife arrives at the
intellectual and moral elevations of her husband. But we stop where
they stop. Very hardly can we take another step. The great, or such as
hold of nature and transcend fashions by their fidelity to universal
ideas, are saviors from these federal errors,*(4) and defend us from
our contemporaries. They are the exceptions which we want, where all