I kept the evening of the day I met Hawthorne wholly for the thoughts of
him, or rather for that reverberation which continues in the young
sensibilities after some important encounter. It must have been the next
morning that I went to find Thoreau, and I am dimly aware of making one
or two failures to find him, if I ever really found him at all.
He is an author who has fallen into that abeyance, awaiting all authors,
great or small, at some time or another; but I think that with him, at
least in regard to his most important book, it can be only transitory. I
have not read the story of his hermitage beside Walden Pond since the
year 1858, but I have a fancy that if I should take it up now, I should
think it a wiser and truer conception of the world than I thought it
then. It is no solution of the problem; men are not going to answer the
riddle of the painful earth by building themselves shanties and living
upon beans and watching ant-fights; but I do not believe Tolstoy himself
has more clearly shown the hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness
of the life of the world than Thoreau did in that book. If it were newly
written it could not fail of a far vaster acceptance than it had then,
when to those who thought and felt seriously it seemed that if slavery
could only be controlled, all things else would come right of themselves
with us. Slavery has not only been controlled, but it has been
destroyed, and yet things have not begun to come right with us; but it
was in the order of Providence that chattel slavery should cease before
industrial slavery, and the infinitely crueler and stupider vanity and
luxury bred of it, should be attacked. If there was then any prevision
of the struggle now at hand, the seers averted their eyes, and strove
only to cope with the less evil. Thoreau himself, who had so clear a
vision of the falsity and folly of society as we still have it, threw
himself into the tide that was already, in Kansas and Virginia, reddened
with war; he aided and abetted the John Brown raid, I do not recall how
much or in what sort; and he had suffered in prison for his opinions and
actions. It was this inevitable heroism of his that, more than his
literature even, made me wish to see him and revere him; and I do not
believe that I should have found the veneration difficult, when at last I
met him in his insufficient person, if he had otherwise been present to
my glowing expectation. He came into the room a quaint, stump figure of
a man, whose effect of long trunk and short limbs was heightened by his
fashionless trousers being let down too low. He had a noble face, with
tossed hair, a distraught eye, and a fine aquilinity of profile, which
made me think at once of Don Quixote and of Cervantes; but his nose
failed to add that foot to his stature which Lamb says a nose of that
shape will always give a man. He tried to place me geographically after
he had given me a chair not quite so far off as Ohio, though still across
the whole room, for he sat against one wall, and I against the other; but
apparently he failed to pull himself out of his revery by the effort, for
he remained in a dreamy muse, which all my attempts to say something fit
about John Brown and Walden Pond seemed only to deepen upon him. I have
not the least doubt that I was needless and valueless about both, and
that what I said could not well have prompted an important response; but
I did my poor best, and I was terribly disappointed in the result. The
truth is that in those days I was a helplessly concrete young person, and
all forms of the abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical
discomforts. I do not remember that Thoreau spoke of his books or of
himself at all, and when he began to speak of John Brown, it was not the
warm, palpable, loving, fearful old man of my conception, but a sort of
John Brown type, a John Brown ideal, a John Brown principle, which we
were somehow (with long pauses between the vague, orphic phrases) to
cherish, and to nourish ourselves upon.
It was not merely a defeat of my hopes, it was a rout, and I felt myself
so scattered over the field of thought that I could hardly bring my
forces together for retreat. I must have made some effort, vain and
foolish enough, to rematerialize my old demigod, but when I came away it
was with the feeling that there was very little more left of John Brown
than there was of me. His body was not mouldering in the grave, neither
was his soul marching on; his ideal, his type, his principle alone
existed, and I did not know what to do with it. I am not blaming
Thoreau; his words were addressed to a far other understanding than mine,
and it was my misfortune if I could not profit by them. I think, or I
venture to hope, that I could profit better by them now; but in this
record I am trying honestly to report their effect with the sort of youth
I was then.