"I trust you realise
what an exaggerator I am - that I lay myself out to
exaggerate," he writes. And again, hinting at the
explanation: "Who that has heard a strain of music feared
lest he should speak extravagantly any more for ever?" And
yet once more, in his essay on Carlyle, and this time with
his meaning well in hand: "No truth, we think, was ever
expressed but with this sort of emphasis, that for the time
there seemed to be no other." Thus Thoreau was an
exaggerative and a parabolical writer, not because he loved
the literature of the East, but from a desire that people
should understand and realise what he was writing. He was
near the truth upon the general question; but in his own
particular method, it appears to me, he wandered. Literature
is not less a conventional art than painting or sculpture;
and it is the least striking, as it is the most comprehensive
of the three. To hear a strain of music to see a beautiful
woman, a river, a great city, or a starry night, is to make a
man despair of his Lilliputian arts in language. Now, to
gain that emphasis which seems denied to us by the very
nature of the medium, the proper method of literature is by
selection, which is a kind of negative exaggeration. It is
the right of the literary artist, as Thoreau was on the point
of seeing, to leave out whatever does not suit his purpose.
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