The last time that the Easy Chair saw that remarkable man, Henry
Thoreau, he came quietly into Mr. Emerson's study to get a volume of
Pliny's letters. Expecting to see no one, and accustomed to attend
without distraction to the business in hand, he was as quietly going
out, when the host spoke to him, and without surprise, and with
unsmiling courtesy, Thoreau greeted his friends. He seated himself,
maintaining the same habitual erect posture, which made it seem
impossible that he could ever lounge or slouch, and that made
Hawthorne speak of him as "cast-iron," and immediately he began to
talk in the strain so familiar to his friends. It was a staccato style
of speech, every word coming separately and distinctly, as if
preserving the same cool isolation in the sentence that the speaker
did in society; but the words were singularly apt and choice, and
Thoreau had always something to say. His knowledge was original. He
was a Fine-ear and a Sharp-eye in the woods and fields; and he added
to his knowledge of nature the wisdom of the most ancient times and of
the best literature. His manner and matter both reproved trifling, but
in the most impersonal manner. It was like the reproof of Pan's
statue. There seemed never to be any loosening of the intellectual
tension, and a call from Thoreau in the highest sense "meant
business."
On the morning of which we are speaking the talk fell upon the
Indians, with whom he had a profound sympathy, and of whose life and
ways and nature he apparently had an instinctive knowledge. In the
slightly contemptuous inference against civilization which his remarks
left, rather than in any positively scornful tone, there was something
which rather humorously suggested the man who spoke lightly of the
equator, but with the difference that there would have been if the
light speaking had left a horrible suspicion of that excellent circle.
For Thoreau so ingeniously traced our obligations to the aborigines
that the claims of civilization for what is really essential palpably
dwindled. He dropped all manner of curious and delightful information
as he went on, and it was sad to see in the hollow cheek and the
large, unnaturally lustrous eye the signs of the disease that very
soon removed him from among us. Those who remember him, and were
familiar with his truly heroic and virtuous life, or those who
perceive in his works that spirit of sweetness and content which made
him at the last say that he was as happy to be sick as to be well,
will apply to him the words of his own poem in the first number of the
_Dial_:
"Say not that Caesar was victorious,
With toil and strife who stormed the House of Fame;
In other sense this youth was glorious,
Himself a kingdom wheresoe'er he came."
His talk of the Indians left an impression entirely unlike that of the
Cooper novel and the red man of the theatre. It was untouched by
romance or sentimentality. It made them a grave, manly race,
intimately familiar with nature, with a lofty scorn of feebleness. The
sylvan shade and the leafy realm and Arden and pastoral poetry were
wholly wanting in the picture he drew, quite as much as the theory
that they are vermin to be exterminated as fast as possible. He said
that the pioneers of civilization, as it is called, among the Indians
are purveyors of every kind of mischief. We graft the sound native
stock with a sour fruit, then denounce it bitterly and cut it down.
What was most admirable in Daniel Boone, he said, was his Indian
nature and sympathy; and the least admirable part was his hold, such
as it was, upon civilization. He seemed to imply that if Boone could
only have succeeded in becoming an Indian altogether, it would have
been a truly memorable triumph. Thoreau acknowledged that the Indian
was not only doomed, but, as he gravely said, damned, because his
enemies were his historians; and he could only say, "Ah, if we lions
had painted the picture!"
The sylvan idea of Daniel Boone would probably have been very rudely
shattered could he have been actually seen; and Thoreau's Indian was
certainly not visible in the stories of men of his time who had passed
weeks among the Indians upon the plains. The pioneers, like Boone, are
not romantic; their life is a hard toil and struggle; they are
ignorant, rude, and even repulsive. This is natural, because their
real work is that of the subsoil plough and the harrow. They lay the
strong foundations. Without them, no soft waving field of golden
harvest, no velvet lawn, no Palladian villa, no flower of art and
culture--in a word, no progress, as we call it--however the shade of
Thoreau may implacably smile. So when the Lady Cavaliere whispered
from under her beaded veil, "Don't speak of it, but I am tired to
death of reformers," it was only the artist's impatience of the
ploughman; it was Rupert and his men not only sneering at Praise God
Bare-bones, and singing their mock prayer in the Lenten litany,
"That it may please thee to suppose
Our actions are as good as those
That gull the people through the nose,"
but heartily believing Cromwell and his men to be canting hypocrites.
And yet the Lady Cavaliere is too well informed not to know that it
was not the silken chivalry who planted the king's standard and
defended it with all heroism, in whose praise the poets sang, who are
still the heroes of romance, and whose life had the charm of grace and
ease and accomplishment and _savoir faire_, that saved England and a
great deal more. The lady has sauntered through the palaces where the
Vandyck portrait of the king hangs upon the walls, the handsome,
melancholy Stuart. She looked at it secretly, perhaps, with something
of the same feeling that men think of the hapless Mary, as we call
her. What a gentleman! how refined! how sad! how agreeable to the
fancy! Yes, dear lady, and what a liar! how false-hearted! who would
have had his own foolish way whatever happened to other men! He would
have gratified your taste to the utmost; you would never have said
under your breath, "How I hate reformers!" he would have, perhaps,
carried your imagination and taste against your conscience and
judgment. And it is for that very reason--because taste and
imagination are so subtly seductive--that it is essential to challenge
them. St. Anthony did not mind the devil as a dragon; but the devil as
a siren--ah! how hard St. Anthony had to pray!
Change is apt to present itself first in its unhandsome aspect. You
would much rather hear a lute in the moonlight upon the lawn, and
behold! a coarse plough and a frightful harrow. Yet, so lutes and
lawns begin. You like the smooth music of a silken court, the
picturesque ceremony, the poetic tradition, the perfume, the splendor,
and lo! a troop in jerkin pricking to the fray in horrible earnest,
and blood, and ghastly wounds, and torture, and merciful death! Yet,
so courts and ceremonies are instituted. One of the hardest battles
that reform has to fight is this battle in the air--so to speak: this
contest with taste and imagination that cling to the myriad-hued moss
and the delicate vine fringe upon the ogre's castle, and that find the
donjon so much more picturesque than the house.
A cause is seen through its pioneers, and taste and imagination are
confused and confounded in the medium. A nature like Falkland's could
not see liberty clearly even through John Pym--how much less through
nasal psalm-singing butchers and brewers building a scaffold for the
king. So, in our own time, the great question that so sorely rent us
was seen by taste and imagination in the form of delicate,
highly-cultured women, of a superficial tranquil elegance of society,
of patriarchal tradition, of easy knowledge of the world, and the
smooth habit of society upon the one hand; and upon the other, often
in the form of a queer medley of grotesque people, each more
extravagant than the other, and uttering the wildest sentiments in the
most absurd rhetoric. The Lady Cavaliere has not forgotten that the
last retreat of the doomed system was the salon and the boudoir, where
taste is law, and where decorous immorality is not unwelcome.
By-and-by, when the reform is established and has become traditional,
its pioneers become heroic and poetic. The Norman robber is then
discovered to be a kind of blue-blooded gentleman, or at least the
sturdy, aboriginal father of gentlemen. The rough and half-savage
Boone is the ideal frontiersman, with a smack of Arden and the sylvan
realm. And as for the coarse-toothed harrow--as my Lady Cavaliere sits
upon the porch and sees the peacock unfolding his glory upon the soft,
thick sward, do you see that my lady wears a delicate trinket around
her swan neck, and lo! it is a harrow exquisitely wrought in gold.
The feeling with which she breathed through her beaded veil her
dislike of pioneer reformers is as old as human nature. But it was not
the sigh of wisdom, but of weariness, in my lady. There is a certain
insight even in gentle youth which does not recoil from the pioneer,
and foresees the soft sward springing under the harrow as it tears the
heavy clods. Those in whom youth abides never outgrow that precious
insight and foresight. One such, not less fair than my Lady Cavaliere,
of the most tranquil and undemonstrative behavior, has long been to
how many good causes one of the most valuable and efficient friends.
She has not cared that Daniel Boone should recede into poetic distance
before he seemed to her a hero. In his cabin as he smoked, in the hard
winter day as he felled the forest tree, in the rough, unhandsome
experience of every hour, he has been to her the forerunner of
refinement and plenty and ease. If taste and imagination shrink from
the squalor of the frontier, she remembers the greater squalor and the
darker tragedy of the city slum. If the long-haired, shambling, shrill
fanatic upon the platform be a contemptuous jest to my Lady Cavaliere,
this fairer lady remembers John clad in goat-skins and crying in the
wilderness. I wish, she says, that mankind might sit at a sumptuous
table, but I shall not scoff at the wooden spoon that feeds its
hunger. She hangs one picture upon her wall: it is Christ sitting at
meat with publicans and sinners. And so season after season, year
after year, she carries her sympathy, her hope, her steady faith to
all the pioneers. She is not a poet, but the world is to her
enchanted. Under the sharp voice of the reformer she hears the music
of the harmony which he discordantly foretells. With the distorted
eyes of the ill-disciplined, ignorant enthusiast she beholds the
symmetry of the future towards which he looks. In turn, the reformer
and the enthusiast behold in her and vaguely comprehend the outward
charm of beauty and grace and high condition which they blindly
announce. It is as if Daniel Boone, shaggy and savage, suddenly saw
his cabin and his rude clearing glorified: a stately, hospitable
mansion, overlooking a placid landscape of rounded groves and blooming
gardens and distant parks, murmuring with the song of birds and all
domestic sounds. Her service to a good cause is more than eloquence,
more than devotion--it is the perpetual presence of its ideal.
There were plenty of Lords and Ladies Cavaliere who were tired to
death of that solemn enthusiast and bore, Columbus. But when he saw
the shore of San Salvador he must have recalled that he had long ago
seen it in the patient faith of any unknown friend who had always
hoped for him and believed with him. The Lady Cavaliere who thinks
Daniel Boone in early Kentucky, or Christopher Columbus pacing the
shore and ceaselessly looking westward, the most romantic of figures,
does not know that she sneered at both when she whispered, "I am tired
to death of reformers."