Insufficient attention has been paid, I think, to Thoreau's sympathy with
the Indian character and his knowledge of their ways.
The Indians were to Thoreau what the gypsies were to Borrow. Appealing
to certain spiritual affinities in the men's natures, they revealed their
own temperaments to them, enabling them to see the distinctiveness of
their powers. Thoreau was never quite able to give this intimate
knowledge such happy literary expression as Borrow. Apprehending the
peculiar charm, the power and limitations of the Indian character,
appreciating its philosophical value, he lacked the picturesque pen of
Borrow to visualize this for the reader.
A lover of Indian relics from his childhood, he followed the Indians into
their haunts, and conversed with them frequently. Some of the most
interesting passages he has written detail conversations with them. One
feels he knew and understood them; and they no less understood him, and
talked with him as they certainly would not have done with any other
white man. But one would have liked to have heard much more about them.
If only Thoreau could have given us an Indian Petulengro, how interesting
it would have been!
But, like the Indian, there was a reserve and impenetrability about
Thoreau which prevented him from ever becoming really confidential in
print. If he had but unbended more frequently, and not sifted his
thought so conscientiously before he gave us the benefit of it, he would
certainly have appealed to our affections far more than he does.
One feels in comparing his writings with the accounts of him by friends
how much that was interesting in the man remains unexpressed in terms of
literature. Partly this is due, no doubt, to his being tormented with
the idea of self-education that he had learnt from Emerson. In a
philosopher and moralist self-education is all very well. But in a
naturalist and in a writer with so much of the Vagabond about him as
Thoreau this sensitiveness about self-culture, this anxiety to eliminate
all the temperamental tares, is blameworthy.
The care he took to eliminate the lighter element in his work--the flash
of wit, the jocose aside--a care which pursued him to the last, seems to
show that he too often mistook gravity for seriousness. Like Dr. Watts'
bee (which is not Maeterlinck's) he "improved the shining hour," instead
of allowing the shining hour to carry with it its own improvement, none
the less potent for being unformulated. But beside the Emersonian
influence, there is the Puritan strain in Thoreau's nature, which must
not be overlooked. No doubt it also is partly accountable for his
literary silences and austere moods.
To revert to the Indians.
If Thoreau does not deal dramatically with his Indians, yet he had much
that is interesting and suggestive to say about them. These are some
passages from _A Week on the Concord_:--
"We talk of civilizing the Indians, but that is not the name for his
improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim
forest-life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods, and is
admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with
Nature. He has glances of starry recognition to which our salons are
strangers. The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because
distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared
with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles. .
. . We would not always be soothing and taming Nature, breaking the
horse and the ox, but sometimes ride the horse wild and chase the
buffalo. The Indian's intercourse with Nature is at least such as
admits of the greatest independence of each. If he is somewhat of a
stranger in her midst, the gardener is too much of a familiar. There
is something vulgar and foul in the latter's closeness to his
mistress, something noble and cleanly in the former's distance. In
civilization, as in a southern latitude, man degenerates at length
and yields to the incursion of more northern tribes.
'Some nations yet shut in
With hills of ice.'
"There are other savager and more primeval aspects of Nature than our
poets have sung. It is only white man's poetry--Homer and Ossian
even can never revive in London or Boston. And yet behold how these
cities are refreshed by the mere tradition or the imperfectly
transmitted fragrance and flavour of these wild fruits. If one could
listen but for an instant to the chant of the Indian muse, we should
understand why he will not exchange his savageness for civilization.
Nations are not whimsical. Steel and blankets are strong
temptations, but the Indian does well to continue Indian."
These are no empty generalizations, but the comments of a man who has
observed closely and sympathetically. All of Thoreau's references to
Indian life merit the closest attention. For, as I have said, they help
to explain the man himself. He had a sufficient touch of wildness to be
able to detach himself from the civilized man's point of view. Hence the
life of the woods came so naturally to him. The luxuries, the
excitements, that mean so much to some, Thoreau passed by indifferently.
There is much talk to-day of "the simple life," and the phrase has become
tainted with affectation. Often it means nothing more than a passing fad
on the part of overfed society people who are anxious for a new
sensation. A fad with a moral flavour about it will always commend
itself to a certain section. Certainly it is quite innocuous, but, on
the other hand, it is quite superficial. There is no real intention of
living a simple life any more than there is any deep resolve on the part
of the man who takes the Waters annually to abstain in the future from
over-eating. But with Thoreau the simple life was a vital reality. He
was not devoid of American self-consciousness, and perhaps he pats
himself on the back for his healthy tastes more often than we should
like. But of his fundamental sincerity there can be no question.
He saw even more clearly than Emerson the futility and debilitating
effect of extravagance and luxury--especially American luxury. And his
whole life was an indignant protest.
Yet it is a mistake to think (as some do) that he favoured a kind of
Rousseau-like "Return to Nature," without any regard to the conventions
of civilization. "It is not," he states emphatically, "for a man to put
himself in opposition to society, but to maintain himself in whatever
attitude he finds himself through obedience to the laws of his own being,
which will never be one of opposition to a just government. I left the
woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that
I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for
that one."
This is not the language of a crank, or the words of a man who, as Lowell
unfairly said, seemed "to insist in public in going back to flint and
steel when there is a match-box in his pocket."
Lowell's criticism of Thoreau, indeed, is quite wide of the mark. It
assumes throughout that Thoreau aimed at "an entire independence of
mankind," when Thoreau himself repeatedly says that he aimed at nothing
of the sort. He made an experiment for the purpose of seeing what a
simple, frugal, open-air life would do for him. The experiment being
made, he returned quietly to the conditions of ordinary life. But he did
not lack self-assurance, and his frank satisfaction with the results of
his experiment was not altogether pleasing to those who had scant
sympathy with his passion for the Earth.
To be quite fair to Lowell and other hostile critics one must admit that,
genuine as Thoreau was, he had the habit common to all self-contained and
self-opiniated men of talking at times as though his very idiosyncrasies
were rules of conduct imperative upon others. His theory of life was
sound enough, his demand for simple modes of living, for a closer
communion with Nature, for a more sympathetic understanding of the "brute
creation," were reasonable beyond question. But the Emersonian mannerism
(which gives an appearance of dogmatism, when no dogmatism is intended)
starts up from time to time and gives the reader the impression that the
path to salvation traverses Walden, all other paths being negligible, and
that you cannot attain perfection unless you keep a pet squirrel.
But if a sentence here and there has an annoying flavour of complacent
dogmatism, and if the note of self-assertion grows too loud on occasion
for our sensitive ears, {102} yet his life and writings considered as a
whole do not assuredly favour verdicts so unfavourable as those of Lowell
and Stevenson.
Swagger and exaggeration may be irritating, but after all the important
thing is whether a man has anything to swagger about, whether the case
which he exaggerates is at heart sane and just.
Every Vagabond swaggers because he is an egotist more or less, and
relishes keenly the life he has mapped out for himself. But the swagger
is of the harmless kind; it is not really offensive; it is a sort of
childish exuberance that plays over the surface of his mind, without
injuring it, the harmless vanity of one who having escaped from the
schoolhouse of convention congratulates himself on his good luck.
Swagger of this order you will find in the writings even of that quiet,
unassuming little man De Quincey. Hazlitt had no small measure of it,
and certainly it meets us in the company of Borrow. It is very
noticeable in Whitman--far more so than in Thoreau. Why then does this
quality tend to exasperate more when we find it in _Walden_? Why has
Thoreau's sincerity been impugned and Whitman escaped? Why are Thoreau's
mannerisms greeted with angry frowns, and the mannerisms, say of Borrow,
regarded with good-humoured intolerance? Chiefly, I think, because of
Thoreau's desperate efforts to justify his healthy Vagabondage by
Emersonian formulas.
I am not speaking of his sane and comprehensive philosophy of life. The
Vagabond has his philosophy of life no less than the moralist, though as
a rule he is content to let it lie implicit in his writings, and is not
anxious to turn it into a gospel. But he did not always realize the
difference between moral characteristics and temperamental peculiarities,
and many of his admirers have done him ill service by trying to make of
his very Vagabondage (admirable enough in its way) a rule of faith for
all and sundry. Indeed, I think that much of the resentment expressed
against Thoreau by level-headed critics is due to the unwise eulogy of
friends.
Thoreau has become an object of worship to the crank, and in our
annoyance with the crank--who is often a genuine reformer destitute of
humour--we are apt to jumble up devotee and idol together. Idol-worship
never does any good to the idol.