other,--these he would preach, in season and, if possible, out of
season. “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs
be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a
million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.”
This, which, after all, is nothing but the old doctrine of the one
thing needful,--since it is one mark of a prophet that he deals not
in novelties, but in truth,--all this spiritual economy is connected
at the root with Thoreau’s belief in free will, his vital assurance
that the nobility or meanness of a man’s life is committed largely to
his own choice. He may waste it on the trivial, or spend it on the
essential. There is “no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable
ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.” And what
a man is inwardly, that to _him_ will the world be outwardly; his mood
affects the very “quality of the day.” Could anything be truer or
more finely suggested? For himself, Thoreau was determined to get the
goodness out of time as it passed. He refused to be hurried. The hour
was too precious. “If the bell rings, why should we run?” Neither would
he knowingly take up with a second-best, or be put off with a sham,--as
if there were nothing real. He would not “drive a nail into mere lath
and plastering,” he declared. Such a deed would keep him awake nights.
A very reasonable and practical kind of doctrine, certainly, whether
it be called transcendentalism or common sense. Perhaps we discredit
it with a long word by way of refusing the obligation it would lay us
under.
And possibly it is for a similar reason that the world in general
has agreed to regard Thoreau not as a preacher of righteousness, but
as an interpreter of nature. For those who have settled down to take
things as they are, having knocked under and gone with the stream, in
Thoreau’s language, it is pleasanter to read of beds of water-lilies
flashing open at sunrise, or of a squirrel’s pranks upon a bough, than
of daily aspiration after an ideal excellence. Whatever the reason,
Thoreau is to the many a man who lived out of doors, and wrote of
outdoor things.
His attainments as a naturalist have been by turns exaggerated and
belittled, one extreme following naturally upon the other. As for the
exaggeration, nothing else was to be expected, things being as they
were. It is what happens in every such case. If a man knows some of
the birds, his neighbors, who know none of them, celebrate him at once
as an ornithologist. If he is reputed to “analyze” flowers,--pull them
to pieces under a pocket-lens, and by means of a key find out their
polysyllabic names,--he straightway becomes famous as a botanist; all
of which is a little as if the ticket-seller and the grocer’s clerk
should be hailed as financiers because of their facility in making
change.
Thoreau knew his local fauna and flora after a method of his own, a
method which, for lack of a better word, may be called sympathetic.
Nobody was ever more successful in getting inside of a bird; and that,
from his point of view and for his purpose,--and not less for ours
who read him,--was the one important thing. After that it mattered
little if some of his flying neighbors escaped his notice altogether,
while others led him a vain chase year after year, and are still,
in his published journals, a puzzle to readers. Who knows what his
night warbler was, or, with certainty, his seringo bird? The latter,
indeed, a native of his own Concord hay-fields, he seems to have been
pretty well acquainted with as a bird; its song was familiar to him,
and less frequently he caught sight of the singer itself perched
upon a fence-post or threading its way through the grass; but he had
found no means of ascertaining its name, and so was driven to the
primitive expedient of christening it with an invention of his own.
His description of its appearance and notes leaves us in no great
doubt as to its identity; probably it was the savanna sparrow; but how
completely in the dark he himself was upon this point may be gathered
from an entry in his journal of 1854. He had gone to Nantucket, in late
December, and there saw, running along the ruts, flocks of “a gray,
bunting-like bird about the size of the snow-bunting. Can it be the
seaside finch,” he asks, “or the savanna sparrow, or the shore lark?”
Savanna sparrow, or shore lark! A Baldwin apple, or a russet! But what
then? There are gaps in every scholar’s knowledge, and the man who has
“named _all_ the birds without a gun” is yet to be heard from. It is
fair to remind ourselves, also, that Thoreau’s studies in this line
were pursued under limitations and disadvantages to which the amateur
of our later day is happily a stranger. Ornithologically, it is a long
time since Thoreau’s death, though it is less than forty-five years.
If any be disposed to insist, as some have insisted, that he made
no discoveries (he discovered a new way of writing about nature, for
one thing), and was more curious than scientific in his spirit and
method as an observer, it is perhaps sufficient to reply that he
cultivated his own field. From first to last he refused the claims of
science,--whether rightly or wrongly is not here in question,--and with
the exception of one or two brief essays wrote nothing directly upon
natural history. He worshiped Nature, even while he played the spy
upon her, fearing her enchantments and “looking at her with the side
of his eye.” Run over the titles of his books: “A Week on the Concord
and Merrimack Rivers,” “Walden,” “The Maine Woods,” “Cape Cod,” “A
Yankee in Canada,” “Excursions.” The first two are studies in high and
plain living,--practical philosophy, spiritual economy, the right use
of society and solitude, books and nature. The rest are narratives of
travel, with a record of what the traveler saw and thought and felt.
In “Excursions,” to be sure, there is an early paper on “The Natural
History of Massachusetts,” to which, by straining a point, we may add
one on “The Succession of Forest Trees,” another on “Autumnal Tints,”
and still another on “Wild Apples.” Elsewhere, though the landscape is
sure to be carefully studied, it is always a landscape with figures. In
truth, while he wrote so much of outward nature, and so often seemed to
find his fellow-mortals no better than intruders upon the scene, his
real subject was man. “Man is all in all,” he says; “Nature nothing
but as she draws him out and reflects him.” And again he said, “Any
affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects.”
The latter sentence was written shortly after the death of John Brown,
in whose fate Thoreau had been so completely absorbed that his old
Concord world, when he came back to it, had almost a foreign look to
him, and he remarked with a start of surprise that the little grebe
was still diving in the river. With all his devotion to nature and
philosophy, it was the “human event” that really concerned him. But
of course he had ideas of his own as to what constituted an event. As
for men’s so-called affairs, and all that passes current under the
name of news, nothing could be less eventful; for all such things he
could never sufficiently express his contempt. “In proportion as our
inward life fails,” he says, “we go more constantly and desperately to
the post-office.” And he adds, in that peculiarly airy manner of his
to which one is tempted sometimes to apply the old Yankee adjective
“toplofty,” “I would not run round the corner to see the world blow
up.” After which, the reader whose bump of incuriosity is less highly
developed may console himself by remembering that when a powder-mill
blew up in the next town, Thoreau, hearing the noise, ran downstairs,
jumped into a wagon, and drove post-haste to the scene of the disaster.
So true is it that it is
“the most difficult of tasks to keep
Heights which the soul is competent to gain.”
Careful economist as Thoreau was, bravely as he trusted his own
intuitions and kept to his own path, much as he preached simplicity
and heroically as he practiced it, he shared the common lot and fell
short of his own ideal. Life is never quite so simple as he attempted
to make it, and he, like other men, was conscious of a divided mind.
He had by nature a bias toward the investigation of natural phenomena,
a passion for particulars, which, if he had been less a poet and
philosopher, might have made him a man of science. He knew it, and was
inwardly chafed by it. Perhaps it was because of this chafing that
he fell into the habit of speaking so almost spitefully of science
and scientific men. Not to lay stress upon his frequent paradoxes
about the superiority of superstition to knowledge, the advantages of
astrology over astronomy, the slight importance of precision in matters
of detail (“I can afford to be inaccurate”),--to say nothing of these
things, which, taken as they were meant, are not without a measure of
truth, and with which no lover of Thoreau will be much disposed to
quarrel (those who cannot abide the nudge of a paradox or an inch or
two of exaggeration may as well let him alone), it is plain that in
certain moods, especially in his later years, his own semi-scientific
researches were felt to be a hindrance to the play of his higher
faculties. “It is impossible for the same person to see things from
the poet’s point of view and that of the man of science,” he writes in
1842. “Man cannot afford to be a naturalist,” he says again, in 1853.
“I feel that I am dissipated by so many observations.... Oh, for a
little Lethe!” And a week afterward he falls into the same strain, in
a tone of reminiscence that is of the very rarest with him. “Ah, those
youthful days,” he breaks out, “are they never to return? when the
walker does not too enviously observe particulars, but sees, hears,
scents, tastes, and feels only himself, the phenomena that showed
themselves in him, his expanding body, his intellect and heart. No worm
or insect, quadruped or bird, confined his view, but the unbounded
universe was his. A bird has now become a mote in his eye.” What
devotee of natural science, if he be also a man of sensibility and
imagination, does not feel the sincerity of this cry?
But having delivered himself thus passionately, what does the diarist
set down next? Without a break he goes on: “Dug into what I take to be
a woodchuck’s burrow in the low knoll below the cliffs. It was in the
side of the hill, and sloped gently downward at first diagonally into
the hill about five feet, perhaps westerly, then turned and ran north
about three feet, then northwest further into the hill four feet, then
north again four feet, then northeast I know not how far, the last five
feet, perhaps, ascending,”--with as much more of the same tenor and
equally detailed. A laughable paragraph, surely, to follow a lament
over a too envious observation of particulars; with its “perhaps” four
times repeated, its five feet westerly, three feet northerly, and so
on, like a conveyancer’s description of a wood-lot: and all about a
hole in the ground, which he “took to be” a woodchuck’s burrow!
In vain shall a man bestir himself to run away from his own instincts.
In vain, in such a warfare, shall he trust to the freedom of the will.
Happily for himself, and happily for the world, Thoreau, though he
“could not afford to be a naturalist,” could never cease from his “too
envious observation.”
By inclination and habit he liked to see and do things for himself,
as if they had never been seen or done before. That was one mark of
his individualistic temper, not to say a chief mark of his genius.
He describes in his journal an experiment in making sugar from the
sap of red maple trees. Here, too, he goes into the minutest details,
not omitting the size of the holes he bored and the frequency with
which the drops fell,--about as fast as his pulse beat. His father, he
mentions (the son was then forty years old), chided him for wasting his
time. There was no occasion for the experiment, the father thought; it
was well known that the thing could be done; and as for the sugar, it
could be bought cheaper at the village shop. “He said it took me from
my studies,” the journal records. “I said that I made it my study,
and felt as if I had been to a university.” If fault-finding is in
order, an individualist prefers to administer it on his own account.
One remembers Thoreau’s characteristic declaration that he had never
received the first word of valuable counsel from any of his elders.
In the present instance, surely, as much as this must be said for
him,--that by habits of this unpractical-seeming kind knowledge is made
peculiarly one’s own, and, old or new, keeps something of the freshness
of discovery upon it. The critic may smile, but even he will not
dispute the charm of writing done in such a spirit,--the very spirit in
which the old books were written, in the childhood of the world.
Even the edibility of white-oak acorns affected Thoreau, at the age of
forty, as a new fact. So far as his feeling about it was concerned,
the fruit might have been that morning created. “The whole world is
sweeter” to him for having “discovered” it. “To have found two Indian
gouges and tasted sweet acorns, is it not enough for one afternoon?” he
asks himself. And the next day, shrewd economist and exaggerator that
he is, he tries his new dainty again, and behold, a second discovery:
the acorns “appear to dry sweet!” One need not be a critic, but only a
homely-witted, country-bred Yankee, to smile at this. But indeed, it
is a relief to be able to smile now and then at one who held himself
so high and aloof,--“a Switzer on the edge of the glacier,” as he
called himself; who found no wisdom too lofty for him, no companionship
quite lofty enough; and who, in his longing for something better than
the best, could exclaim, “Give me a sentence which no intelligence
can understand.” Not that we feel any diminution of our respect or
affection; but it pleases us to have met our Switzer for once on
something near our own level. In an author, as in a friend, an amiable
weakness, if there be strength enough behind it, is only another point
of attraction.
As a writer, Thoreau is by himself. There are no other books like
“Walden” and the “Week.” The reader may like them or leave them (unless
he is pretty sure of himself, he may be advised to try “Walden”
first), he will find nowhere else the same combination of pure nature
and austere philosophy. It is hard even to see with what to compare
them, or to conceive of any one else as having written them. If Marcus
Aurelius, with half his sweetness of temper eliminated, and something
of sharpness, together with liberal measures of cool intellectuality,
injected, could have been united with Gilbert White, rather less
radically transformed, and if the resultant complex person had made
it his business to write, we can perhaps imagine that his work would
not have been in all respects unlike that of the sage of Walden; in
saying which we have but taken a circuitous course back to our former
position, that Thoreau was a man of his own kind.
He was an author from the beginning. Of that, as he said himself, he
was never in doubt. His ceaseless observation of nature--which some
have decried as lacking purpose and method--and his daily journal were
deliberately chosen means to that end. “Here have I been these forty
years learning the language of these fields that I may the better
express myself.” That was what he aimed at, let his subject be what it
might,--to express _himself_.
Few writers have ever treated their work more seriously, or studied
their art more industriously. He talked sometimes, to be sure, as
if there were no art about it. To listen to him in such a mood, one
might suppose that the fact and the thought were the only things to
be considered, and that language followed of itself. Such was neither
his belief nor his practice. But he was one of the fortunate ones who
by taking pains can produce an effect of easiness; who can recast and
recast a sentence, and in the end leave it looking as if it had dropped
from a running pen. One of the fortunates, we say; for an air of
innocent unconsciousness is as becoming in a sentence as in a face.
On this point a useful study in contrasts might be made between
Thoreau and a man who gladly acknowledged him as one of his masters.
“Upon me,” says Robert Louis Stevenson, “this pure, narrow, sunnily
ascetic Thoreau had exercised a great charm. I have scarce written ten
sentences since I was introduced to him, but his influence might be
somewhere detected by a close observer.” The observer would need to be
very close indeed, the majority of Stevensonians will think, but that,
true or false, is nothing to the purpose here. Stevenson and Thoreau
both made writing a lifelong study, and with exceedingly diverse
results. The Scotchman’s style is the finer, but then it is sometimes
in danger of becoming _super_fine. We may not wish it different. Such
work must be as it is. It could hardly be better without being worse,
the writing of fine prose being always a question of compromises, a
gain here for a loss there, a choice of imperfections; perfect prose
being in fact impossible, except in the briefest snatches. But surely
Stevenson’s gift was not an absolute naturalness and transparency,
such as lets the thought show through on the instant, and leaves the
beauty of the verbal medium to catch the attention afterward, if the
reader will. “For love of lovely words,” an artist of Stevenson’s
temperament, however sound his theories, may sometimes find it hard to
make a righteous choice between the music of an exquisite cadence and
the pure expressiveness of a halting phrase. The author of “Walden” had
his literary temptations, but not of this kind. Let the phrase halt,
so long as it expressed a sturdy truth in sturdy fashion. As for that
homely quality--“careless country talk”--which Thoreau prayed for, and
in good measure received, it is questionable whether Stevenson ever
sought it, though he would no doubt have assented to Thoreau’s words:
“Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the
reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.”
Thoreau, indeed, first as a spiritual economist, and next as an artist,
had a natural relish for the common and the plain. Every landscape that
was dreary enough, as he says of Cape Cod, had a certain beauty in his
eyes. Whether in literature or in life, he preferred the beauty that is
inherent,--the beauty of the thing itself. Ornament, beauty laid on,
did not much attract him. Among persons, it was the wilder-seeming, the
less tamed and cultivated, with whom he liked to converse, and whose
sayings he oftenest recorded. Though they might be crabbed specimens,
“run all to thorn and rind, and crowded out of shape by adverse
circumstances, like the third chestnut in the burr,” they were still
what nature had made them. Even a crowd pleased him, if it was composed
of the right materials,--that is to say, if it was rude enough. Thus
he, a hermit, took pleasure in the autumnal cattle-show. With what a
touch of affection he lays on the colors! “The wind goes hurrying down
the country, gleaning every loose straw that is left in the fields,
while every farmer lad, too, appears to scud before it,--having donned
his best pea-jacket and pepper-and-salt waistcoat, his unbent trousers,
outstanding rigging of duck, or kerseymere, or corduroy, and his furry
hat withal,--to country fairs and cattle-shows, to that Rome among the
villages where the treasures of the year are gathered. All the land
over they go leaping the fences with their tough, idle palms, which
have never learned to hang by their sides, amid the low of calves and
the bleating of sheep,--Amos, Abner, Elnathan, Elbridge,--
‘From steep pine-bearing mountains to the plain.’
I love these sons of earth, every mother’s son of them.” It is worth
while to see the country’s people, he thinks, and even the “supple
vagabond,” who is “sure to appear on the least rumor of such a
gathering, and the next day to disappear, and go into his hole like
the seventeen-year locust.”
For the average (uninitiated) reader, be it said, there is nothing
better in Thoreau than his thumb-nail sketches of humble, every-day
humanity; as there is no part of his work, not even his denunciation
of worldly conformity, or his picturing of nature’s moods, which is
done with more absolute good will. A man need not be an idealist, a
naturalist, or anything else out of the ordinary, to like the Canadian
woodchopper, for example, cousin to the pine and the rock, who never
was tired in his life, and, stranger still, sometimes acted as if he
were “thinking for himself and expressing his own opinions;” or the old
fisherman, always haunting the river in serene afternoons, and “almost
rustling with the sedge;” or the Cape Cod wrecker, whose face was “like
an old sail endowed with life,”--one of the Pilgrims, perhaps, who had
“kept on the back side of the Cape and let the centuries go by;” or the
free-spoken Wellfleet oysterman, “a poor good-for-nothing crittur,” now
“under petticoat government,” who yet remembered George Washington as
“a r-a-ther large and portly-looking man, with a pretty good leg as he
sat on his horse;” or the iron-jawed Nauset woman, who seemed to be
shouting at you through a breaker, and who looked “as if it made her
head ache to live;” or the country soldier boy on his way to muster,
in full regimentals, with shouldered musket and military step, who
in a lonely place in the woods is suddenly abashed at the sight of a
stranger approaching, and finds himself hard put to it to get by in
anything like military order.
With men like these, natural men, Thoreau found himself at home; he
described them almost as sympathetically as if they had been so many
woodchucks or hen-hawks. As he said of his own boyhood, they were “part
and parcel of nature” itself. As for fine manners parading about in
fine clothes, how should he, a rustic jealous of his rusticity, presume
to know what, if anything, might be going on under all that broadcloth?
Reality was the chief of his ideals. The shabbiest of it was more to
the purpose than a masquerade.
Whether it would have been better for him had his taste been more
liberal in this respect is a question about which it might be
useless to speculate. Breadth may easily be sought at too great an
expense, especially by one who has a distinct and highly individual
work to accomplish. First of all, such a man must be himself. His
imperfections, even, must be of his own kind, twin-born with his better
qualities, a certain lack of complaisance being one of the likeliest
and, in the strict sense, most appropriate. But that some of Thoreau’s
private and hasty remarks, in his letters and journals, about the
meanness of his fellow-creatures, the more “respectable” among them,
especially, might profitably have been left unprinted, is less open to
doubt. They were expressions of moods rather than of convictions, it
is fair to assume, and in any event would never have been printed by
their author, one of whose cravings was for some kind of india-rubber
that would rub out at once all which it cost him so many perusals and
so much reluctance to erase. It is pretty hard justice that holds a man
publicly to everything he scribbles in private,--as if no allowance
were to be made for whim and the provocation of the moment. The charm
of a journal, as Thoreau says, consists in a “certain greenness.”
It is “a record of experiences and growth, not a preserve of things
well done or said.” After which it may be confessed that even from
“Walden” and the “Week,” published in the author’s lifetime, it is
possible to discover that charity and sweetness were not among his most
distinguishing characteristics. Taste him after Gilbert White, and
contrast the mellowness of the one with the sharp, assertive, acidulous
quality of the other. Thoreau was a wild apple, and would have been
proud of the name, suggestive of that “tang and smack” which he so
feelingly celebrated. “Nonesuches” and “seek-no-furthers” were very
tame and forgettable, he thought, as compared with the wildings, even
the acrid and the puckery among which he begrudged to the cider-mill.
It is in part this very “tang and smack,” we may be sure, that makes
his books keep so well in Time’s literary cellar.