narrative in which Hawthorne proposed to trace the fortunes of an
American family back to those of its English forebears. The idea of
connecting the obscure New England branch of the house with the proud
Old-World descendants by some vague claim on the ancestral estate is
almost too common in fiction. But Hawthorne seems to have been drawn
towards it by his life in the consulate at Liverpool, where he had
continually to check the exuberance of misguided fellow-countrymen who
had appropriated, in mind, not a few of the finest estates in England,
and only lacked faint encouragement to attempt entering on actual
possession.
The idea of the Bloody Footstep was taken from a tradition connected
with Smithell’s Hall in Bolton-le-Moors, and Hawthorne went to see
what purported to be the mark made in the stone step by the unhappy
man about whose mysterious history the romance gathers. The quest and
discovery of an elixir of life is in itself a threadbare motive, but
could hardly have been commonplace under Hawthorne’s treatment.
He was not to complete his design. The four versions of the story, _The
Dolliver Romance_, _The Ancestral Footstep_, _Septimius Felton_, and
_Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret_, furnish another glimpse into Hawthorne’s
literary studio, though we are warned not to infer that he always
worked in the way the existence of these fragments might suggest.
* * * * *
Hawthorne was the most gifted of our American romancers. In a certain
sense his field was a narrow one, but the soil was rich, and there
was magic in his husbandry. He himself once declared that he never
knew what patriotism was until he met an Englishman; that he was not
an American, New England was as big a lump of earth as he could hold
in his heart. The defect (if indeed it be a defect) was one of the
sources of his power. Hawthorne did indeed love New England, but to
suppose that he loved it with a blind and uncritical love is wholly
to misunderstand both the man and his work. He was the genius of his
little world. He knew its poetry and its prose, its mystery, charm,
beauty, and its repellent and sordid features. New England will have
no profounder interpreter, though it may be that as the superficial
characteristics of the people change, his transcripts of life will
increasingly take on the qualities of pure romance.
FOOTNOTES:
[38] Enlarged edition, 1854.
[39] Published in England under the absurd title of
_Transformation_. Hawthorne wrote to Henry Bright: ‘Smith and
Elder do take strange liberties with the titles of books. I
wanted to call it the _Marble Faun_, but they insisted on
_Transformation_ which will lead the reader to expect a sort
of pantomime.’
[40] Letter to Horatio Bridge, May 26, 1861.
[41] Henry James: _Terminations_.
XI
_Henry David Thoreau_
REFERENCES:
=R. W. Emerson=: ‘Thoreau’ in the ‘Atlantic Monthly,’ August,
1862.
=W. E. Channing=: _Thoreau: the Poet Naturalist_, 1873.
=F. B. Sanborn=: _Thoreau_, ‘American Men of Letters,’ 1882.
=H. S. Salt=: _Thoreau_, ‘Great Writers,’ 1896.
I
HIS LIFE
Philippe Thoreau, of the parish of Saint Helier in the Isle of Jersey,
had a son John who emigrated to America and opened a store on the
Long Wharf in Boston. He married Jane Burns, daughter of a well-to-do
Scotchman from the neighborhood of Stirling. John’s son John, a
lead-pencil maker of Concord, Massachusetts, married Cynthia Dunbar,
daughter of the Reverend Asa Dunbar, of Keene, New Hampshire. Of their
four children Henry David Thoreau, the author of _Walden_, was the
third. He was born at Concord on July 12, 1817.
After his graduation at Harvard in the Class of 1837, Thoreau taught
school, learned surveying and the art of making lead-pencils, and began
writing and lecturing. The episode in his life which gave him more
than a local reputation was his camping out by the shore of Walden
Pond. He spent two years and two months there studying how ‘to live
deliberately.’ His hut, built by himself, might have seemed bare and
cheerless to a victim of civilization. There was no carpet on the
floor, no curtain at the window. Every superfluity was stripped off and
life ‘driven into a corner’ in the hope of discovering what it was made
of. Thoreau sturdily resisted the efforts of friends and neighbors to
burden him with trumpery, refusing the gift of a door-mat on the plea
that it was ‘best to avoid the beginnings of evil,’ and throwing a
paper-weight out of the window ‘because it had to be dusted every day.’
He raised his own vegetables in a patch of ground near by, made his
own bread, and spent his leisure time in recording his observations
of nature and in writing his first book, _A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers_. When he was satisfied with this taste of life
‘reduced to its lowest terms,’ he went back to civilization.
_A Week on the Concord and Merrimack_ was a failure, as publishers say;
meaning that it did not sell. Having published at his own expense,
Thoreau was financially embarrassed when seven hundred and fifty
copies of an edition of a thousand came back on his hands. He said to
a friend: ‘I have added several hundred volumes to my library lately,
all of my own composition.’[42] His second venture, _Walden_, was
more fortunate. He printed a few articles in the ‘Boston Miscellany,’
‘Putnam’s Magazine,’ the ‘New York Tribune,’ ‘Graham’s Magazine,’ and
the ‘Atlantic Monthly,’ but at no time could he be said to live by
literature.
His income from his lectures must have been small, and apparently
he made no effort to obtain engagements. He had an exalted idea of
what constitutes a good lecture, and was suspicious of oratory. He
told his English acquaintance Cholmondeley that he was from time to
time congratulating himself on his ‘general want of success as a
lecturer.... I do my work clean as I go along, and they will not be
likely to want me anywhere again.’
When Hawthorne was corresponding secretary of the Salem Lyceum, he
invited Thoreau in behalf of the managers to give them a lecture. The
invitation was accepted. The lecture must have had the fatal defect of
being ‘interesting,’ for Thoreau was asked to speak before the Lyceum a
second time the same winter.
Thoreau was a radical Abolitionist and for six years refused to pay his
poll-tax, on the ground that the tax went indirectly to the support
of slavery. For this delinquency he was once lodged in the town-jail
over night. In 1857 he made the acquaintance of ‘one John Brown’ as
a Southern-born president of a Northern college naïvely describes
that terrible old man. When two years later news came of the desperate
attempt at Harper’s Ferry, Thoreau gave in a church vestry at Concord
his impassioned ‘Plea for Captain John Brown,’ which one of his
admirers regards as the most significant of his utterances.
Of the twelve volumes forming his collected writings two only were
seen by Thoreau in book form. The remaining ten have been made up of
reprinted magazine articles or selections from journals and letters.
The list is as follows: _A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers_,
1849; _Walden; or, Life in the Woods_, 1854; _Excursions_ (edited by
R. W. Emerson and Sophia Thoreau), 1863; _The Maine Woods_, 1864; _Cape
Cod_, 1865; _Letters to Various Persons_ [with Poems], 1865; _A Yankee
in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers_, 1866; _Early Spring in
Massachusetts_, 1881; _Summer_, 1884; _Winter_, 1888; _Autumn_, 1892;
_Miscellanies_, 1894; _Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau_, 1894.
Thoreau ‘travelled widely’ in Concord and made a few trips elsewhere.
Aside from his excursions to the Maine woods, the White Mountains, Cape
Cod, and Staten Island, he took no long journey until 1861, when he
went as far west as Minnesota. He was in ill health then, and a violent
cold terminating in pulmonary consumption brought about his death (May
6, 1862). It has been often mentioned as a strange fact that this
man who almost symbolized the out-of-door existence, who chanted its
praises, and who was unhappy unless he had at least ‘four hours a day
in the woods and fields,’ should have died, at the age of forty-five,
of exposure to the elements which (according to his whimsical
philosophy) were more friendly than man.
II
THOREAU’S CHARACTER
Without posing, Thoreau contrived somehow to gain the reputation of a
poseur. Because his nose was more Emersonian than Emerson’s, because
he lived for a time at Emerson’s house (where he was beloved by every
member of the family), and because he affected the Orphic and seer-like
mode of expression, he was called an imitator. Because he was a recluse
and a stoic, and because his letters were edited in a way to emphasize
his stoicism, he has been thought to lack the human and friendly
qualities.
The charge of imitation has been refuted by those who knew him best.
‘Doubtless his growth was stimulated by kindred ideas. This is all that
can be granted. Utter independence, strong individuality distinguished
him. His one foible was, not subserviency, but combativeness, mainly
from mere love of fence when he found a worthy adversary, as his best
friends knew almost too well.’[43]
In many ways Thoreau was much like other men. He was a devoted son, a
brotherly brother, a helpful neighbor, a genial companion. We have his
own word for it that he could out-sit the longest sitter in the village
tap-room if there were occasion.
On the other hand, he was not ‘approachable’ in the common meaning
of the word. He puzzled many people. He could be angular, stiff,
remote, encrusted. Howells saw him in 1860, ‘a quaint stump figure of
a man.’[44] He sat on one side of the room, having first placed his
visitor in a chair on the other side. It was more difficult to get near
him spiritually than physically. He seemed almost unconscious of his
caller’s presence.
Emerson edited Thoreau’s letters so as to present ‘a most perfect piece
of stoicism.’ It was the side of his friend’s character in which he
most rejoiced. The book should be read exactly as Emerson intended it
to be read. Later it should be supplemented by the _Familiar Letters_,
which brings into relief the affectionate and winning side of Thoreau’s
character.
III
THE WRITER
Thoreau was a painstaking student of the art of expression, but never
for its own sake, always as a means to an end. One may conclude that
it was not mere author’s vanity which led him to resent editorial
tampering with his manuscript. He had good reasons for believing that
neither Curtis of ‘Putnam’s’ nor Lowell of ‘The Atlantic’ could change
his text to advantage. The question was not one of mere nicety of
phrase, but of that subtile quality of style due to the inextricable
interweaving of the thought and the language in which the thought is
expressed.
An out-of-doors writer, Thoreau’s power to produce was in direct ratio
of his intercourse with Nature. If shut up in the house he could not
write at all. When he walked he stored up literary virtue. He believed
that nothing was so good for the man of letters as work with the hands.
It cleared the style of ‘palaver and sentimentality.’
The fresh wild beauty of Thoreau’s style (when he is at his best) may
be praised without reserve. There is no danger of exaggerating its
perfect novelty and attractiveness; the danger is that we may take the
hint of these qualities for the reality. Thoreau could be commonplace
when he chose.
IV
THE BOOKS
Early in September, 1839, the Thoreau brothers, John and Henry, made a
voyage down the Concord and Merrimac rivers. The boat used was of their
own building. It was painted blue and green, had wheels by which it
could be dragged around the dams, and must have been as ugly as it was
useful. _A Week on the Concord and Merrimack_ records the unadventurous
adventures of the two young men both on this and other excursions.
It is a medley of prose and verse, of homely common-sense and lofty
speculation. Side by side with realistic portraits of plain people,
farmers, fishermen, boatmen, and lock-keepers, are minute and exquisite
descriptions of the life of field, mountain, stream, lake, and air.
The literary allusions are many, and taken from sources as wide apart
as the poles, Shattuck (the historian of Concord) and Anacreon, Gookin
and Chaucer. Here is to be found the famous essay on Friendship, the
spirit of which may be partly divined from this sentence: ‘I could tame
a hyena more easily than my friend.’
The poetry in the volume is a stumbling-block to not a few readers.
Doubtless it has its virtues, but too often Thoreau’s poetry must be
forgiven for the sake of his prose. The stiff, almost self-conscious
air of _A Week on the Concord and Merrimack_ and the hobbling verse
help to explain the indifference of the author’s contemporaries to a
very original work.
_Walden_, the second of Thoreau’s books, is the better of the two,
which does not mean that the first could be spared. The style is
easier, the flavor more racy, the spirit more humorous. The attitude of
the writer is characteristically provoking and pugnacious. The chapters
abound in audacities which at once pique and delight the reader.
This modern Diogenes-Crusoe, solving the problem of existence on an
improvised desert-island two miles from his mother’s door-step, is a
refreshing figure.
Life in the woods fascinated Thoreau. _Walden_ is a tribute to this
fascination. In the absence of domestic sounds he had the murmur of the
forest, the cry of the loon, the ‘tronk’ of the frog, and the clangor
of the wild-goose. Society was plenty and of the best. His neighbors
were the squirrel, the field-mouse, the phœbe, the blue jay. Human
companionship was not wanting, for there were visitors of all sorts,
from the half-witted to those who had more wits than they knew what to
do with. Matter-of-fact people were amazed at the young man’s way of
living, lacking the penetration to see that he might live as he did
from the humor of it. When sceptics asked him whether he thought he
could subsist on vegetable food alone, Thoreau, to strike at the root
of the matter at once, was accustomed to say that he ‘could live on
board nails.’ ‘If they cannot understand that they cannot understand
much that I say.’
The Walden episode was an experiment in emancipation, and the book is a
challenge to mankind to live more simply and freely. Thoreau mocks at
the worship of luxury. ‘I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all
to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on
earth in an ox-cart, with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the
fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way.’
_Excursions_ is a collection of nine essays. Some of them are formal
and scientific with the Thoreau-esque flavor (‘Natural History of
Massachusetts,’ ‘The Succession of Forest Trees,’ ‘Autumnal Tints,’
‘Wild Apples’), others are pure Thoreau (‘A Walk to Wachusett,’ ‘The
Landlord,’ ‘A Winter Walk,’ ‘Walking,’ ‘Night and Moonlight’). The
flavor of these ‘wildlings of literature,’ as a devotee happily calls
them, is as marked almost as that of _Walden_. They are, in fact,
_Walden_ in miniature.
The _Maine Woods_ consists of three long essays, ‘Ktaadn,’
‘Chesuncook,’ and ‘The Allegash and East Branch.’ They are readable,
informing, uninspired. In the degree in which he left himself out of
his pages Thoreau became as tame and conventional as the most academic
of writers. The strength of some men of letters lies in conformity.
Thoreau is strongest in non-conformity.
_Cape Cod_ is far more characteristic than the _Maine Woods_. He who
likes the savor of salt and the tonic of ocean air will enjoy this book
whether he cares for Thoreau or not. It is interesting as an early
contribution to the history of Cape Cod folks by a historian who was
more of an enigma to the natives than they were to him.
The best part of _A Yankee in Canada_ is not to be found in the
account of the excursion to Montreal and Quebec, but in the sheaf of
anti-slavery and reform papers bound up in the same volume. Here are
printed the address on ‘Slavery in Massachusetts,’ the paper on ‘Civil
Disobedience,’ containing the lively account of the author’s experience
in Concord jail, the two addresses on John Brown, the essay on ‘Life
without Principle,’ and the critical study of ‘Thomas Carlyle and his
Works.’
The four volumes named for the seasons are valuable for the light
they shed on Thoreau’s method as a writer, and his skill and accuracy
in reporting the facts of Nature. They are sure to be read by the
faithful, because the genuine Thoreau enthusiast can read his every
line. The rest of the world will be content to know him by two or three
of the twelve volumes bearing his name. _A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers, alden_, the _Familiar Letters_, and a few essays
from _Excursions_ and the Anti-Slavery papers ought to be sufficient.
* * * * *
No more than greater men of letters can Thoreau be disposed of in a
paragraph. Some of his pronounced characteristics can be, however.
He was a paradoxical philosopher. To praise Nature at the expense of
civilized society, to eulogize the ‘perfection’ of the one and lament
the degradation of the other, to declare solemnly that church spires
deform the landscape, and that it is a mistake to do a second time
what has been done once,--these declarations give a wholly incomplete
but, so far as they go, not unjust idea of his manner. Taking Thoreau
literally is a capital way to breed a dislike for him. Grant him
his own manner of expressing his thought, make no effort to exact
conformity from so wayward a genius, and at once you are, as Walt
Whitman would say, ‘rapport’ with him. It is easy to exaggerate his
paradoxicalness. Say to yourself as you take up the volume: ‘Now let
us find out just how whimsical this fellow can be,’ and straightway he
disappoints by not being whimsical at all.
If Thoreau’s praise of Nature at the expense of Society seems to
border on the absurd, one must bear in mind how complete and intimate
was his knowledge of what he praised. His love of forest, lake, hill,
and mountain, of beast and bird, was deep, passionate, unremitting.
He speaks somewhere of an old man so versed in Nature’s ways that
apparently ‘there were no secrets between them.’ This might have been
said of Thoreau himself. He could pay lofty tributes to the ‘mystical’
quality in Nature; but he was not a mere rhapsodist, a petty village
Chateaubriand; he could come straight down to tangible facts and
recount every detail of the advent of spring at Walden. His power to
see and his skill in describing the thing seen unite to give the very
atmosphere of life in the woods.
He was himself so complete an original and his literary attractiveness
is such that Thoreau numbers among his best friends not only those who
are nature-blind but the confirmed city-men as well, the frequenters
of clubs, the lovers of pavements and crowds. That some of the most
appreciative tributes to his genius should have come from these is but
one paradox the more in the history of him who (at times) delighted
above all else in the paradoxical.
FOOTNOTES:
[42] F. B. Sanborn: _The Personality of Thoreau_, p. 30.
[43] Edward W. Emerson in the ‘Centenary’ Emerson, vol. x, p. 607.
[44] _Literary Friends and Acquaintance_, p. 59.
XII
_Oliver Wendell Holmes_
REFERENCES:
=W. Sloane Kennedy=: _Oliver Wendell Holmes_, 1883.
=J. T. Morse, Jr.=: _Life and Letters of Oliver Wendell Holmes_,
1896.
I
HIS LIFE
Holmes invented a phrase which became celebrated--‘the Brahmin caste of
New England,’ that is to say, an aristocracy of culture. The inventor
of the phrase belonged to the class. He was a son of the Reverend Abiel
Holmes, minister of the First Church of Cambridge and author of that
‘painstaking and careful work,’ the _American Annals_.
Abiel Holmes (a great-grandson of John Holmes, one of the settlers of
Woodstock, Connecticut) was twice married. His first wife was Mary
Stiles, daughter of President Ezra Stiles of Yale College. Five years
after her death he married Sarah Wendell of Boston, who became the
mother of Oliver Wendell Holmes. Through the Wendells, Holmes was
related by one line of descent to Anne Bradstreet; by another to Evert
Jansen Wendell of Albany.
The author of _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_ was born at
Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Harvard Commencement Day, August 29, 1809.
After a preliminary training at the Cambridgeport Academy (where he
had for schoolmates Margaret Fuller and Richard Henry Dana) Holmes
completed his college preparation at Phillips Academy, Andover, entered
Harvard in the class of 1829, and in due time was graduated.
He had, or thought he had, an inclination to carry the ‘green bag,’
and to this end spent a year at the Dane (now Harvard) Law School, in
Cambridge. He soon discovered a greater inclination towards medicine
and entered the private medical school of Doctor James Jackson, in
Boston. In 1833 he became a student at the École de Médecine in Paris,
and during two busy winters heard the lectures of Broussais, Andral,
Louis, and other teachers.
In 1836 he began the practice of medicine in Boston. During the two
following years he competed for and won four of the Boylston Prizes.
Enthusiastic in his profession, he found the life of a general
practitioner not to his liking, and when, in 1838, the professorship
of anatomy and physiology at Dartmouth College was offered him, he
was ‘mightily pleased.’ He held the position for two years (1839–40);
residence at Hanover was required for three months of each year.
Some time before going to Hanover, Holmes was writing to his friend
Phineas Barnes, congratulating him on having entered into ‘the beatific
state of duality,’ and wishing himself in like case. ‘I have flirted
and written poetry long enough,’ he said, ‘and I feel that I am growing
domestic and tabby-ish.’ On June 15, 1840, he married Miss Amelia
Jackson, a daughter of Judge Charles Jackson of Boston. She was a young
woman of rare endowments. ‘Every estimable and attractive quality of
mind and character seemed to be hers.’[45]
In 1847 Holmes was appointed Parkman professor of anatomy and
physiology in the Harvard Medical School. The multifarious extra cares
involved led him to say that in those early days he occupied not a
chair in the college but a settee. He held the position for thirty-five
consecutive years.
The reputation which Holmes began early to build up through his
writings was partly literary, partly scientific, partly a compound
of both. Lovers of well-turned and witty verse knew him through his
_Poems_ (1836) and his metrical essays, _Urania_ (1846) and _Astræa_
(1850). The public, always solicitous about its health, heard or
read the two lectures on _Homœopathy and its kindred Delusions_
(1842). Physicians made his acquaintance through the _Boylston Prize
Dissertations_ (1836–37), and the _Essay on the Contagiousness of
Puerperal Fever_ (1843).
Fame came to Holmes in 1857 when he began printing in the newly founded
‘Atlantic Monthly’ a series of papers entitled _The Autocrat of the
Breakfast-Table_. Reprinted as a book, it at once took its proper place
as an American classic, and now after forty-eight years its popularity
seems in no degree lessened.
The following list contains the principal works upon which Holmes’s
reputation as a man of letters rests. A full bibliography must be
consulted if one would know the extent of his literary and scientific
activity: _The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table_, 1858; _The Professor
at the Breakfast-Table_, 1860; _Currents and Counter-Currents, with
Other Addresses_, 1861; _Elsie Venner_, 1861; _Songs in Many Keys_,
1862; _Soundings from the Atlantic_, 1864; _The Guardian Angel_, 1867;
_The Poet at the Breakfast-Table_, 1872; _Songs of Many Seasons_, 1875;
_Memoir of John Lothrop Motley_, 1879; _The Iron Gate and Other Poems_,
1880; _Pages from an Old Volume of Life_, 1883; _A Mortal Antipathy_,
1885; _Ralph Waldo Emerson_, 1885; _Our Hundred Days in Europe_, 1887;
_Before the Curfew and Other Poems_, 1888; _Over the Teacups_, 1891.
Holmes’s life was without marked incident. His work at the Medical
School, his public lectures, social engagements, the normal and
agreeable responsibilities of home and society, filled the measure of
his days. The visit to England in 1886, when he was made a D. C. L.
by Oxford, a Litt. D. by Cambridge, and an LL. D. by Edinburgh, was
something like apotheosis, if the term be not too extravagant.
He endured the evils consequent on old age with philosophic composure,
and it became at the last a matter of scientific curiosity with him to
see how long he could maintain life. He was spared a tedious illness,
and died an almost painless death on October 7, 1894.
II
THE MAN