Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays
(Second Series).
> The Poet (7-45)
The poet is the sayer,
the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the
centre. For the world is not painted, or
adorned, but is from the beginning beautiful; and God has not made some
beautiful things, but Beauty is the creator of the universe. (11)
The poet has a new thought: he has a
whole new experience to unfold: (single dot) he will tell us how it was with him,
and all men will be the richer in his fortune.
For, the experience of each new age requires a new confession, and the
world seems always waiting for its poets.
(14)
A beauty not explicable,
is dearer than a beauty which we can see to the end of. (19)
The poet knows that he speaks
adequately, then, only when he speaks somewhat wildly, or, "with the
flower of the mind;" not with the intellect, used as an organ, but with
the intellect released from all service, and suffered to take its direction
from its celestial life; or, as the ancients were wont to express themselves,
not with intellect alone, but with the intellect inebriated by nectar. (30)
As the traveller
who has lost his way, throws his reins on his horse's neck, and trusts to the
instinct of the animal to find his road, so must we do with the divine animal who carries us through this world. For if in any manner we can stimulate this
instinct, new passages are opened for us into nature, the mind flows into and
through things hardest and highest, and the metamorphosis is possible. (30)
This is the reason why bards love
wine, mead, narcotics, coffee, tea, opium, the fumes of sandal- wood and
tobacco, or whatever other species of animal exhilaration. All men avail themselves of such means as they
can, to add this extraordinary power to their normal powers; and to this end
they prize conversation, music, pictures, sculpture, dancing, theatres, travelling, war, mobs, fires, gaming, politics, or love, or
science, or animal intoxication, which are several coarser or finer
quasi-mechanical substitutes for the true nectar, which is the ravishment of
the intellect by coming nearer to the fact.
These are auxiliaries to the centrifugal tendency of a man, to his passage
out into free space, and they help him to escape the custody of that body in
which he is pent up, and of that jail-yard of individual relations in which he
is enclosed. Hence a great number of
such as were professionally expressors of Beauty, as
painters, poets, musicians, and actors, have been more than others wont to lead
a life of pleasure and indulgence, all but the few who received the true
nectar; and, as it was a spurious mode of attaining freedom, as it was an
emancipation not into the heavens, but into the freedom of baser places, they
were punished for theat advantage they won, by a
dissipation and a deterioration. But
never can any advantage be taken of nature by a trick. The spirit of the world, the great calm
presence of the creator, comes not forth to the sorceries of opium or of
wine. The sublime vision comes to the
pure and simple soul in a clean and chaste body. (31)
If the imagination intoxicates the
poet, it is not inactive in other men.
The metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of joy. The use of symbols has a certain power of
emancipation and exhilaration for all men.
We seem to be touched by a wand, which makes us dance and run about
happily, like children. We are like
persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables,
oracles, and all poetic forms. Poets are
thus liberating gods. (33)
Art is the path of the creator to
his work. The paths, or methods, are
ideal and eternal, though few men ever seen them, not the artist himself for
years, or for a lifetime, unless he come into the conditions. (41)
Experience (47-88)
Do not craze yourself with thinking,
but go about your business anywhere.
Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy. Its chief good is for well-mixed people who
can enjoy what they find, without question.
(63)
To fill the hour, - that is
happiness; to fill the hour, and leave no crevice for a repentance or an
approval. We live amid surfaces, and the
true art of life is to skate well on them.
(63)
Life itself is a mixture of power
and form, and will not bear the least excess of either. To finish the moment, to find the journey's
end in every step of the road, to live the greatest number of good hours, is
wisdom. (63)
All good conversation, manners, and
action, come from spontaneity which forgets usages, and makes the moment great.
(71)
No man ever came to an experience
which was satiating, but his good is tidings of a better. Onward and onward! (78)
Character (89-116)
I see plainly how many firm acts have
been done; how many valiant noes have this day been
spoken, when others would have uttered ruinous yeas. (95)
We can drive a stone upward for a
moment into the air, but it is yet true that all stones will forever fall; and
whatever instances can be quoted of unpunished theft, or of a lie which
somebody credited, justice must prevail, and it is the privilege of truth to
make itself believed. Character is this
moral order seen through the medium of an individual nature. (97)
A healthy soul stands united with
the Just and the True, as the magnet arranges itself with the pole, so that he
stands to all beholders like a transparent object betwixt them and the sun, and
whoso journeys towards the sun, journeys towards that person. He is thus the highest medium of the highest
influence to all who are not on the same level.
Thus, men of character are the conscience of the society to which they
belong. (98)
The class of character like to hear
of their faults; the other class do not like to hear of faults; they worship
events; secure them a fact, a connexion, a certain
chain of circumstances, and they will ask no more. (99)
The hero sees that the event is
ancillary: it must follow him. A given
order of events has no power to secure to him the satisfaction which the
imagination attaches to it; the soul of goodness escapes from any set of
circumstances, whilst prosperity belongs to a certain mind, and will introduce
that power and victory which is its natural fruit, into any order of events.
(99)
No change of circumstance can repair
a defect of character. (99)
Character is centrality, the
impossibility of being displaced or overset.
(101)
The wise man no only leaves out of
his thought the many, but leaves out the few.
(102)
It is only low merits that can be
enumerated. Fear, when your friends say
to you what you have done well, and say it through; but when they stand with
uncertain timid looks of respect and half-dislike, and must suspend their
judgment for years to come, you begin to hope.
Those who live to the future must always appear selfish to those who
live to the present. (105)
Character is nature in the highest
form. It is of no use to ape it, or to
contend with it. (106)
I know of nothing which life has to
offer so satisfying as the profound good understanding, which can subsist,
after much exchange of good offices, between two virtuous men, each of whom is
sure of himself, and sure of his friend.
It is a happiness which postpones all other gratifications, and makes
politics, and commerce, and churches, cheap.
(112)
Manners (119-154)
A beautiful form is better than a
beautiful face; a beautiful behavior is better than a beautiful from; it gives
a higher pleasure than statues or pictures; it is the finest of the fine
arts. (148)
Politics (197-218)
Every actual State is corrupt. Good men must not obey the laws too
well. (205)
The antidote to this abuse of formal
Government, is, the influence of private character, the growth of the
Individual; the appearance of the principal to supersede the proxy; the
appearance of the wise man, of whom the existing government, is, it must be
owned, but a shabby imitation. (213)
That which all things tend to educe,
which freedom, cultivation, intercourse, revolutions, go to form and deliver, is
character; that is the end of nature, to reach unto this coronation of her
king. To educate the wise man, the State
exists; and with the appearance of the wise man, the State expires. The appearance of character makes the State
unnecessary. The wise man is the
State. He needs no army, fort, or navy,
- he loves men too well; no bribe, or feast, or palace, to draw friends to him;
no church, for he is a prophet; no statute book, for he has the law-giver; no
money, for he is value; no road, for he is at home where he is, for the life of
the creator shoots through him, and looks from his eyes. He has no personal friends, for he who has
the spell to draw the prayer and piety of all men unto him, needs not husband
and educate a few, to share with him a select and poetic life. His relation to men is angelic; his memory is
myrrh to them; his presence, frankincense and flowers. (214)
Nominalist and Realist (221-244)
We infer the spirit of the nation in
great measure from the language, which is a sort of monument, to which each
forcible individual in a course of many hundred years has contributed a
stone. And,
universally, a good example, which cannot be debauched. In any controversy concerning morals, an
appeal may be made with safety to the sentiments, which the language of the
people expresses. Proverbs, words,
grammar inflections convey the public sense with more purity and precision,
than the wisest individual. (226-227)
Art, in the
artist, proportion, or, a habitual respect to the whole by an eye loving beauty
in details. (229)
The reason of idleness and of crime
is the deferring of our hopes. Whilst we
are waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with
crimes. (231)
The criticism and attack on
institutions which we have witnessed, gains nothing whilst a man, not himself
renovated, attempts to renovate things around him: he has become tediously good
in some particular, but negligent or narrow in the rest; and hypocrisy and
vanity are often the disgusting result.
(257)
It is handsomer to remain in the
establishment better than the establishment, and conduct that in the best
manner, that to make a sally against evil by some single improvement, without
supporting it by a total regeneration.
Do not be so vain of your one objections. Do you think there is only one? Alas!
My good friend, there is no part of society or of life better than any
other part. All our things are right and
wrong together. The wave of evil washes
all our institutions alike. Do you
complain of our Marriage? Our marriage
is no worse than our education, our diet, out trade, our social customs. (257)
Men in all ways are better than they
seem. They like flattery for the moment,
but they know the truth for their own.
It is a foolish cowardice which keeps us from trusting them, and
speaking to them rude truth. They resent
your honesty for an instant, they will thank you for
it always. (268)