A great interpreter of life ought not himself to need interpretation,
least of all can he need it for contemporaries. When time has wrought
changes of fashion, mental and social, the critic serves a useful turn
in giving to a poet or a teacher his true place, and in recovering ideas
and points of view that are worth preserving. Interpretation of this
kind Emerson cannot require. His books are no palimpsest, 'the prophet's
holograph, defiled, erased, and covered by a monk's.' What he has
written is fresh, legible, and in full conformity with the manners and
the diction of the day, and those who are unable to understand him
without gloss and comment are in fact not prepared to understand what it
is that the original has to say. Scarcely any literature is so entirely
unprofitable as the so-called criticism that overlays a pithy text with
a windy sermon. For our time at least Emerson may best be left to be his
own expositor.
Nor is Emerson, either, in the case of those whom the world has failed
to recognise, and whom therefore it is the business of the critic to
make known and to define. It is too soon to say in what particular
niche among the teachers of the race posterity will place him; enough
that in our own generation he has already been accepted as one of the
wise masters, who, being called to high thinking for generous ends, did
not fall below his vocation, but, steadfastly pursuing the pure search
for truth, without propounding a system or founding a school or
cumbering himself overmuch about applications, lived the life of the
spirit, and breathed into other men a strong desire after the right
governance of the soul.
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