Letters and Social Aims by Emerson Ralph Waldo

Author:Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: (Privatkopie)
Published: 2010-02-03T05:00:00+00:00

»Thou art roaring ower loud, Clyde water,

Thy streams are ower strang;

Make me thy wrack when I come back,

But spare me when I gang,«

is a translation of Martial's epigram on Hero and Leander, where the prayer of Leander is the same: –

»Parcite dum propero, mergite dum redeo.«

Hafiz furnished Burns with the song of »John Barleycorn,« and furnished Moore with the original of the piece,

»When in death I shall calm recline,

O, bear my heart to my mistress dear,« etc.

There are many fables which, as they are found in every language, and betray no sign of being borrowed, are said to be agreeable to the human mind. Such are »The Seven Sleepers,« »Gyges's Ring,« »The Travelling Cloak,« »The Wandering Jew,« »The Pied Piper,« »Jack and his Beanstalk,« the »Lady Diving in the Lake and Rising in the Cave,« – whose omnipresence only indicates how easily a good story crosses all frontiers. The popular incident of Baron Munchausen, who hung his bugle up by the kitchen fire, and the frozen tune thawed out, is found in Greece in Plato's time. Antiphanes, one of Plato's friends, laughingly compared his writings to a city where the words froze in the air as soon as they were pronounced, and the next summer, when they were warmed and melted by the sun, the people heard what had been spoken in the winter. It is only within this century that England and America discovered that their nursery-tales were old German and Scandinavian stories; and now it appears that they came from India, and are the property of all the nations descended from the Aryan race, and have been warbled and babbled between nurses and children for unknown thousands of years.

If we observe the tenacity with which nations cling to their first types of costume, of architecture, of tools and methods in tillage, and of decoration, – if we learn how old are the patterns of our shawls, the capitals of our columns, the fret, the beads, and other ornaments on our walls, the alternate lotus-bud and leaf-stem of our iron fences, – we shall think very well of the first men, or ill of the latest.

Now shall we say that only the first men were well alive, and the existing generation is invalided and degenerate? Is all literature eavesdropping, and all art Chinese imitation? our life a custom, and our body borrowed, like a beggar's dinner, from a hundred charities? A more subtle and severe criticism might suggest that some dislocation has befallen the race; that men are off their centre; that multitudes of men do not live with Nature, but behold it as exiles. People go out to look at sunrises and sunsets who do not recognize their own quietly and happily, but know that it is foreign to them. As they do by books, so they quote the sunset and the star, and do not make them theirs. Worse yet, they live as foreigners in the world of truth, and quote thoughts, and thus disown them. Quotation confesses inferiority.

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