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.
Thus we extract the pure gold; and thus the well-written
story of a noble life becomes, by its very omissions, more
thrilling to the reader. But to go beyond this, like
Thoreau, and to exaggerate directly, is to leave the saner
classical tradition, and to put the reader on his guard. And
when you write the whole for the half, you do not express
your thought more forcibly, but only express a different
thought which is not yours.

Thoreau's true subject was the pursuit of self-improvement