“To have done anything by which you earned money merely,” says Thoreau,
“is to be” (have been, he means) “idle and worse.” There are two
passages in his letters, both, oddly enough, relating to firewood, which
must be brought together to be rightly understood. So taken, they
contain between them the marrow of all good sense on the subject of work
in its relation to something broader than mere livelihood. Here is the
first: “I suppose I have burned up a good-sized tree to-night—and for
what? I settled with Mr. Tarbell for it the other day; but that wasn’t
the final settlement. I got off cheaply from him. At last one will say:
‘Let us see, how much wood did you burn, sir?’ And I shall shudder to
think that the next question will be, ‘What did you do while you were
warm?’” Even after we have settled with Admetus in the person of Mr.
Tarbell, there comes, you see, a further question. It is not enough to
have earned our livelihood. Either the earning itself should have been
serviceable to mankind, or something else must follow. To live is
sometimes very difficult, but it is never meritorious in itself; and we
must have a reason to allege to our own conscience why we should continue
to exist upon this crowded earth.
If Thoreau had simply dwelt in his house at Walden, a lover of trees,
birds, and fishes, and the open air and virtue, a reader of wise books,
an idle, selfish self-improver, he would have managed to cheat Admetus,
but, to cling to metaphor, the devil would have had him in the end.
Those who can avoid toil altogether and dwell in the Arcadia of private
means, and even those who can, by abstinence, reduce the necessary amount
of it to some six weeks a year, having the more liberty, have only the
higher moral obligation to be up and doing in the interest of man.
The second passage is this: “There is a far more important and warming
heat, commonly lost, which precedes the burning of the wood. It is the
smoke of industry, which is incense. I had been so thoroughly warmed in
body and spirit, that when at length my fuel was housed, I came near
selling it to the ashman, as if I had extracted all its heat.” Industry
is, in itself and when properly chosen, delightful and profitable to the
worker; and when your toil has been a pleasure, you have not, as Thoreau
says, “earned money merely,” but money, health, delight, and moral
profit, all in one. “We must heap up a great pile of doing for a small
diameter of being,” he says in another place; and then exclaims, “How
admirably the artist is made to accomplish his self-culture by devotion
to his art!” We may escape uncongenial toil, only to devote ourselves to
that which is congenial. It is only to transact some higher business
that even Apollo dare play the truant from Admetus. We must all work for
the sake of work; we must all work, as Thoreau says again, in any
“absorbing pursuit—it does not much matter what, so it be honest;” but
the most profitable work is that which combines into one continued effort
the largest proportion of the powers and desires of a man’s nature; that
into which he will plunge with ardour, and from which he will desist with
reluctance; in which he will know the weariness of fatigue, but not that
of satiety; and which will be ever fresh, pleasing, and stimulating to
his taste. Such work holds a man together, braced at all points; it does
not suffer him to doze or wander; it keeps him actively conscious of
himself, yet raised among superior interests; it gives him the profit of
industry with the pleasures of a pastime. This is what his art should be
to the true artist, and that to a degree unknown in other and less
intimate pursuits. For other professions stand apart from the human
business of life; but an art has its seat at the centre of the artist’s
doings and sufferings, deals directly with his experiences, teaches him
the lessons of his own fortunes and mishaps, and becomes a part of his
biography. So says Goethe:
“Spät erklingt was früh erklang;
Glück und Unglück wird Gesang.”
Now Thoreau’s art was literature; and it was one of which he had
conceived most ambitiously. He loved and believed in good books. He
said well, “Life is not habitually seen from any common platform so truly
and unexaggerated as in the light of literature.” But the literature he
loved was of the heroic order. “Books, not which afford us a cowering
enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an
idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which
even make us dangerous to existing institutions—such I call good books.”
He did not think them easy to be read. “The heroic books,” he says,
“even if printed in the character of our mother-tongue, will always be in
a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the
meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common
use permits out of what wisdom and valour and generosity we have.” Nor
does he suppose that such books are easily written. “Great prose, of
equal elevation, commands our respect more than great verse,” says he,
“since it implies a more permanent and level height, a life more pervaded
with the grandeur of the thought. The poet often only makes an
irruption, like the Parthian, and is off again, shooting while he
retreats; but the prose writer has conquered like a Roman and settled
colonies.” We may ask ourselves, almost with dismay, whether such works
exist at all but in the imagination of the student. For the bulk of the
best of books is apt to be made up with ballast; and those in which
energy of thought is combined with any stateliness of utterance may be
almost counted on the fingers. Looking round in English for a book that
should answer Thoreau’s two demands of a style like poetry and sense that
shall be both original and inspiriting, I come to Milton’s
_Areopagitica_, and can name no other instance for the moment. Two
things at least are plain: that if a man will condescend to nothing more
commonplace in the way of reading, he must not look to have a large
library; and that if he proposes himself to write in a similar vein, he
will find his work cut out for him.
Thoreau composed seemingly while he walked, or at least exercise and
composition were with him intimately connected; for we are told that “the
length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing.” He speaks
in one place of “plainness and vigour, the ornaments of style,” which is
rather too paradoxical to be comprehensively, true.
In another he remarks: “As for style of writing, if one has anything to
say it drops from him simply as a stone falls to the ground.” We must
conjecture a very large sense indeed for the phrase “if one has anything
to say.” When truth flows from a man, fittingly clothed in style and
without conscious effort, it is because the effort has been made and the
work practically completed before he sat down to write. It is only out
of fulness of thinking that expression drops perfect like a ripe fruit;
and when Thoreau wrote so nonchalantly at his desk, it was because he had
been vigorously active during his walk. For neither clearness
compression, nor beauty of language, come to any living creature till
after a busy and a prolonged acquaintance with the subject on hand. Easy
writers are those who, like Walter Scott, choose to remain contented with
a less degree of perfection than is legitimately within the compass of
their powers. We hear of Shakespeare and his clean manuscript; but in
face of the evidence of the style itself and of the various editions of
_Hamlet_, this merely proves that Messrs. Hemming and Condell were
unacquainted with the common enough phenomenon called a fair copy. He
who would recast a tragedy already given to the world must frequently and
earnestly have revised details in the study. Thoreau himself, and in
spite of his protestations, is an instance of even extreme research in
one direction; and his effort after heroic utterance is proved not only
by the occasional finish, but by the determined exaggeration of his
style. “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. 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 combined with
an unfriendly criticism of life as it goes on in our societies; it is
there that he best displays the freshness and surprising trenchancy of
his intellect; it is there that his style becomes plain and vigorous, and
therefore, according to his own formula, ornamental. Yet he did not care
to follow this vein singly, but must drop into it by the way in books of
a different purport. _Walden_, _or Life in the Woods_, _A Week on the
Concord and Merrimack Rivers_, _The Maine Woods_,—such are the titles he
affects. He was probably reminded by his delicate critical perception
that the true business of literature is with narrative; in reasoned
narrative, and there alone, that art enjoys all its advantages, and
suffers least from its defects. Dry precept and disembodied
disquisition, as they can only be read with an effort of abstraction, can
never convey a perfectly complete or a perfectly natural impression.
Truth, even in literature, must be clothed with flesh and blood, or it
cannot tell its whole story to the reader. Hence the effect of anecdote
on simple minds; and hence good biographies and works of high,
imaginative art, are not only far more entertaining, but far more
edifying, than books of theory or precept. Now Thoreau could not clothe
his opinions in the garment of art, for that was not his talent; but he
sought to gain the same elbow-room for himself, and to afford a similar
relief to his readers, by mingling his thoughts with a record of
experience.
Again, he was a lover of nature. The quality which we should call
mystery in a painting, and which belongs so particularly to the aspect of
the external world and to its influence upon our feelings, was one which
he was never weary of attempting to reproduce in his books. The seeming
significance of nature’s appearances, their unchanging strangeness to the
senses, and the thrilling response which they waken in the mind of man,
continued to surprise and stimulate his spirits. It appeared to him, I
think, that if we could only write near enough to the facts, and yet with
no pedestrian calm, but ardently, we might transfer the glamour of
reality direct upon our pages; and that, if it were once thus captured
and expressed, a new and instructive relation might appear between men’s
thoughts and the phenomena of nature. This was the eagle that he pursued
all his life long, like a schoolboy with a butterfly net. Hear him to a
friend: “Let me suggest a theme for you—to state to yourself precisely
and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you,
returning to this essay again and again until you are satisfied that all
that was important in your experience is in it. Don’t suppose that you
can tell it precisely the first dozen times you try, but at ’em again;
especially when, after a sufficient pause you suspect that you are
touching the heart or summit of the matter, reiterate your blows there,
and account for the mountain to yourself. Not that the story need be
long, but it will take a long while to make it short.” Such was the
method, not consistent for a man whose meanings were to “drop from him as
a stone falls to the ground.” Perhaps the most successful work that
Thoreau ever accomplished in this direction is to be found in the
passages relating to fish in the _Week_. These are remarkable for a
vivid truth of impression and a happy suitability of language, not
frequently surpassed.
Whatever Thoreau tried to do was tried in fair, square prose, with
sentences solidly built, and no help from bastard rhythms. Moreover,
there is a progression—I cannot call it a progress—in his work towards a
more and more strictly prosaic level, until at last he sinks into the
bathos of the prosy. Emerson mentions having once remarked to Thoreau:
“Who would not like to write something which all can read, like _Robinson
Crusoe_? and who does not see with regret that his page is not solid with
a right materialistic treatment which delights everybody?” I must say in
passing that it is not the right materialistic treatment which delights
the world in _Robinson_, but the romantic and philosophic interest of the
fable. The same treatment does quite the reverse of delighting us when
it is applied, in _Colonel Jack_, to the management of a plantation. But
I cannot help suspecting Thoreau to have been influenced either by this
identical remark or by some other closely similar in meaning. He began
to fall more and more into a detailed materialistic treatment; he went
into the business doggedly, as one who should make a guide-book; he not
only chronicled what had been important in his own experience, but
whatever might have been important in the experience of anybody else; not
only what had affected him, but all that he saw or heard. His ardour had
grown less, or perhaps it was inconsistent with a right materialistic
treatment to display such emotions as he felt; and, to complete the
eventful change, he chose, from a sense of moral dignity, to gut these
later works of the saving quality of humour. He was not one of those
authors who have learned, in his own words, “to leave out their dulness.”
He inflicts his full quantity upon the reader in such books as _Cape
Cod_, or _The Yankee in Canada_. Of the latter he confessed that he had
not managed to get much of himself into it. Heaven knows he had not, nor
yet much of Canada, we may hope. “Nothing,” he says somewhere, “can
shock a brave man but dulness.” Well, there are few spots more shocking
to the brave than the pages of _The Yankee in Canada_.
There are but three books of his that will be read with much pleasure:
the _Week_, _Walden_, and the collected letters. As to his poetry,
Emerson’s word shall suffice for us, it is so accurate and so prettily
said: “The thyme and majoram are not yet honey.” In this, as in his
prose, he relied greatly on the goodwill of the reader, and wrote
throughout in faith. It was an exercise of faith to suppose that many
would understand the sense of his best work, or that any could be
exhilarated by the dreary chronicling of his worst. “But,” as he says,
“the gods do not hear any rude or discordant sound, as we learn from the
echo; and I know that the nature towards which I launch these sounds is
so rich that it will modulate anew and wonderfully improve my rudest
strain.”