Thoreau had decided, it would seem, from the very first to lead a life of
self-improvement: the needle did not tremble as with richer natures, but
pointed steadily north; and as he saw duty and inclination in one, he
turned all his strength in that direction. He was met upon the threshold
by a common difficulty. In this world, in spite of its many agreeable
features, even the most sensitive must undergo some drudgery to live. It
is not possible to devote your time to study and meditation without what
are quaintly but happily denominated private means; these absent, a man
must contrive to earn his bread by some service to the public such as the
public cares to pay him for; or, as Thoreau loved to put it, Apollo must
serve Admetus. This was to Thoreau even a sourer necessity than it is to
most; there was a love of freedom, a strain of the wild man, in his
nature, that rebelled with violence against the yoke of custom; and he
was so eager to cultivate himself and to be happy in his own society,
that he could consent with difficulty even to the interruptions of
friendship. “_Such are my engagements to myself_ that I dare not
promise,” he once wrote in answer to an invitation; and the italics are
his own. Marcus Aurelius found time to study virtue, and between whiles
to conduct the imperial affairs of Rome; but Thoreau is so busy improving
himself, that he must think twice about a morning call. And now imagine
him condemned for eight hours a day to some uncongenial and unmeaning
business! He shrank from the very look of the mechanical in life; all
should, if possible, be sweetly spontaneous and swimmingly progressive.
Thus he learned to make lead-pencils, and, when he had gained the best
certificate and his friends began to congratulate him on his
establishment in life, calmly announced that he should never make
another. “Why should I?” said he “I would not do again what I have done
once.” For when a thing has once been done as well as it wants to be, it
is of no further interest to the self-improver. Yet in after years, and
when it became needful to support his family, he returned patiently to
this mechanical art—a step more than worthy of himself.
The pencils seem to have been Apollo’s first experiment in the service of
Admetus; but others followed. “I have thoroughly tried school-keeping,”
he writes, “and found that my expenses were in proportion, or rather out
of proportion, to my income; for I was obliged to dress and train, not to
say think and believe, accordingly, and I lost my time into the bargain.
As I did not teach for the benefit of my fellow-men, but simply for a
livelihood, this was a failure. I have tried trade, but I found that it
would take ten years to get under way in that, and that then I should
probably be on my way to the devil.” Nothing, indeed, can surpass his
scorn for all so-called business. Upon that subject gall squirts from
him at a touch. “The whole enterprise of this nation is not illustrated
by a thought,” he writes; “it is not warmed by a sentiment; there is
nothing in it for which a man should lay down his life, nor even his
gloves.” And again: “If our merchants did not most of them fail, and the
banks too, my faith in the old laws of this world would be staggered.
The statement that ninety-six in a hundred doing such business surely
break down is perhaps the sweetest fact that statistics have revealed.”
The wish was probably father to the figures; but there is something
enlivening in a hatred of so genuine a brand, hot as Corsican revenge,
and sneering like Voltaire.
Pencils, school-keeping, and trade being thus discarded one after
another, Thoreau, with a stroke of strategy, turned the position. He saw
his way to get his board and lodging for practically nothing; and Admetus
never got less work out of any servant since the world began. It was his
ambition to be an oriental philosopher; but he was always a very Yankee
sort of oriental. Even in the peculiar attitude in which he stood to
money, his system of personal economics, as we may call it, he displayed
a vast amount of truly down-East calculation, and he adopted poverty like
a piece of business. Yet his system is based on one or two ideas which,
I believe, come naturally to all thoughtful youths, and are only pounded
out of them by city uncles. Indeed, something essentially youthful
distinguishes all Thoreau’s knock-down blows at current opinion. Like
the posers of a child, they leave the orthodox in a kind of speechless
agony. These know the thing is nonsense. They are sure there must be an
answer, yet somehow cannot find it. So it is with his system of economy.
He cuts through the subject on so new a plane that the accepted arguments
apply no longer; he attacks it in a new dialect where there are no
catchwords ready made for the defender; after you have been boxing for
years on a polite, gladiatorial convention, here is an assailant who does
not scruple to hit below the belt.
“The cost of a thing,” says he, “is _the amount of what I will call life_
which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long
run.” I have been accustomed to put it to myself, perhaps more clearly,
that the price we have to pay for money is paid in liberty. Between
these two ways of it, at least, the reader will probably not fail to find
a third definition of his own; and it follows, on one or other, that a
man may pay too dearly for his livelihood, by giving, in Thoreau’s terms,
his whole life for it, or, in mine, bartering for it the whole of his
available liberty, and becoming a slave till death. There are two
questions to be considered—the quality of what we buy, and the price we
have to pay for it. Do you want a thousand a year, a two thousand a
year, or a ten thousand a year livelihood? and can you afford the one you
want? It is a matter of taste; it is not in the least degree a question
of duty, though commonly supposed so. But there is no authority for that
view anywhere. It is nowhere in the Bible. It is true that we might do
a vast amount of good if we were wealthy, but it is also highly
improbable; not many do; and the art of growing rich is not only quite
distinct from that of doing good, but the practice of the one does not at
all train a man for practising the other. “Money might be of great
service to me,” writes Thoreau; “but the difficulty now is that I do not
improve my opportunities, and therefore I am not prepared to have my
opportunities increased.” It is a mere illusion that, above a certain
income, the personal desires will be satisfied and leave a wider margin
for the generous impulse. It is as difficult to be generous, or anything
else, except perhaps a member of Parliament, on thirty thousand as on two
hundred a year.
Now Thoreau’s tastes were well defined. He loved to be free, to be
master of his times and seasons, to indulge the mind rather than the
body; he preferred long rambles to rich dinners, his own reflections to
the consideration of society, and an easy, calm, unfettered, active life
among green trees to dull toiling at the counter of a bank. And such
being his inclination he determined to gratify it. A poor man must save
off something; he determined to save off his livelihood. “When a man has
attained those things which are necessary to life,” he writes, “there is
another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; _he may adventure
on life now_, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced.” Thoreau
would get shelter, some kind of covering for his body, and necessary
daily bread; even these he should get as cheaply as possible; and then,
his vacation from humbler toil having commenced, devote himself to
oriental philosophers, the study of nature, and the work of
self-improvement.
Prudence, which bids us all go to the ant for wisdom and hoard against
the day of sickness, was not a favourite with Thoreau. He preferred that
other, whose name is so much misappropriated: Faith. When he had secured
the necessaries of the moment, he would not reckon up possible accidents
or torment himself with trouble for the future. He had no toleration for
the man “who ventures to live only by the aid of the mutual insurance
company, which has promised to bury him decently.” He would trust
himself a little to the world. “We may safely trust a good deal more
than we do,” says he. “How much is not done by us! or what if we had
been taken sick?” And then, with a stab of satire, he describes
contemporary mankind in a phrase: “All the day long on the alert, at
night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to
uncertainties.” It is not likely that the public will be much affected
by Thoreau, when they blink the direct injunctions of the religion they
profess; and yet, whether we will or no, we make the same hazardous
ventures; we back our own health and the honesty of our neighbours for
all that we are worth; and it is chilling to think how many must lose
their wager.
In 1845, twenty-eight years old, an age by which the liveliest have
usually declined into some conformity with the world, Thoreau, with a
capital of something less than five pounds and a borrowed axe, walked
forth into the woods by Walden Pond, and began his new experiment in
life. He built himself a dwelling, and returned the axe, he says with
characteristic and workman-like pride, sharper than when he borrowed it;
he reclaimed a patch, where he cultivated beans, peas, potatoes, and
sweet corn; he had his bread to bake, his farm to dig, and for the matter
of six weeks in the summer he worked at surveying, carpentry, or some
other of his numerous dexterities, for hire.
For more than five years, this was all that he required to do for his
support, and he had the winter and most of the summer at his entire
disposal. For six weeks of occupation, a little cooking and a little
gentle hygienic gardening, the man, you may say, had as good as stolen
his livelihood. Or we must rather allow that he had done far better; for
the thief himself is continually and busily occupied; and even one born
to inherit a million will have more calls upon his time than Thoreau.
Well might he say, “What old people tell you you cannot do, you try and
find you can.” And how surprising is his conclusion: “I am convinced
that _to maintain oneself on this earth is not a hardship_, _but a
pastime_, if we will live simply and wisely; _as the pursuits of simpler
nations are still the sports of the more artificial_.”
When he had enough of that kind of life, he showed the same simplicity in
giving it up as in beginning it. There are some who could have done the
one, but, vanity forbidding, not the other; and that is perhaps the story
of the hermits; but Thoreau made no fetish of his own example, and did
what he wanted squarely. And five years is long enough for an experiment
and to prove the success of transcendental Yankeeism. It is not his
frugality which is worthy of note; for, to begin with, that was inborn,
and therefore inimitable by others who are differently constituted; and
again, it was no new thing, but has often been equalled by poor Scotch
students at the universities. The point is the sanity of his view of
life, and the insight with which he recognised the position of money, and
thought out for himself the problem of riches and a livelihood. Apart
from his eccentricities, he had perceived, and was acting on, a truth of
universal application. For money enters in two different characters into
the scheme of life. A certain amount, varying with the number and empire
of our desires, is a true necessary to each one of us in the present
order of society; but beyond that amount, money is a commodity to be
bought or not to be bought, a luxury in which we may either indulge or
stint ourselves, like any other. And there are many luxuries that we may
legitimately prefer to it, such as a grateful conscience, a country life,
or the woman of our inclination. Trite, flat, and obvious as this
conclusion may appear, we have only to look round us in society to see
how scantily it has been recognised; and perhaps even ourselves, after a
little reflection, may decide to spend a trifle less for money, and
indulge ourselves a trifle more in the article of freedom.