it, is of that best of fruity flavors, a pleasant sour. Some, indeed,
emulating his own fertility in paradox, have maintained that he had no
humor, while others have rebuked him for priggishly excluding it from
his later work. Did such critics never read “Cape Cod”? There, surely,
Thoreau gave his natural drollery full play,--an almost antinomian
liberty, to take a word out of those ecclesiastical histories, with
the reading of which, under his umbrella, he so patiently enlivened
his sandy march from Orleans to Provincetown. “As I sat on a hill one
sultry Sunday afternoon,” he says, “the meeting-house windows being
open, my meditations were interrupted by the noise of a preacher who
shouted like a boatswain, profaning the quiet atmosphere, and who, I
fancied, must have taken off his coat. Few things could have been more
disgusting or disheartening. I wished the tithing-man would stop him.”
Charles Lamb himself could hardly have bettered the delicious, biting
absurdity of that final touch. It was not this Boanergian minister,
but a man of an earlier generation, of whom we are told that he wrote
a “Body of Divinity,” “a book frequently sneered at, particularly by
those who have read it.”
The whole Cape, past and present, was looked at half quizzically by
its inland visitor. The very houses “seemed, like mariners ashore,
to have sat right down to enjoy the firmness of the land, without
studying their postures or habiliments,”--a description not to be fully
appreciated except by those who have seen a Cape Cod village, with its
buildings dropped here and there at haphazard upon the sand. Here,
as everywhere, he was hungry for particulars; now improvising a rude
quadrant with which to calculate the height of the bank at Highland
Light, now, by ingenious but “not impertinent” questions, and for his
private satisfaction only, getting at the contents of a schoolboy’s
dinner-pail,--the homeliest facts being always “the most acceptable to
an inquiring mind.” Thoreau’s mother, by-the-bye, had some reputation
as a gossip.
His work, humorous or serious, transcendental or matter-of-fact, is
all the fruit of his own tree. Whatever its theme, nature or man,
it is all of one spirit. Think what you will of it, it is never
insipid. As his friend Channing said, it has its “stoical merits,” its
“uncomfortableness.” Well might its author express his sympathy with
the barberry bush, whose business is to ripen its fruit, not to sweeten
it,--and to protect it with thorns. “Seek the lotus, and take a draught
of rapture,” was Margaret Fuller’s rather high-flown advice to him;
yet she too perceived that his mind was “not a soil for the citron
and the rose, but for the whortleberry, the pine, or the heather.” In
all his books it would be next to impossible to find a pretty phrase
or a sentimental one. He resorted to nature--in his less inquisitive
hours--for the mood into which it put him, the invigoration, the
serenity, the mental activity it communicated. But his pleasure in it,
as compared with Wordsworth’s or Hazlitt’s, to take very dissimilar
examples, was mostly an intellectual affair, the reader is tempted
to say, though the remark needs qualification. One remembers such a
passage as that descriptive of a winter twilight in Yellow Birch Swamp,
where the gleams of the birches, as he came to one after another of
them, “each time made his heart beat faster.” Yet even here we are told
of his ecstasy rather than made to feel it; and in general, surely,
though he valued his emotions, and went to the woods and fields to
enjoy them, they were such emotions as belonged to a pretty stoical
sort of Epicurean; less rapturous than Wordsworths, less tender than
Hazlitt’s, and with no trace of the brooding melancholy which makes the
charm of books like Obermann and the journal of Amiel. He delighted in
artless country music (it does not appear that he ever heard any other,
and of course he felicitated himself upon this as upon all the rest of
his poverty; it was only the depraved ear, he thought, that needed the
opera), but let any reader try to imagine him writing this bit out of
one of Hazlitt’s essays:--
“I remember once strolling along the margin of a stream, skirted with
willows and plashy sedges, in one of those low, sheltered valleys on
Salisbury Plain, where the monks of former ages had planted chapels and
built hermits’ cells. There was a little parish church near, but tall
elms and quivering alders hid it from sight, when, all of a sudden,
I was startled by the sound of the full organ pealing on the ear,
accompanied by rustic voices and the willing quire of village maids
and children. It rose, indeed, ‘like an exhalation of rich distilled
perfumes.’ The dew from a thousand pastures was gathered in its
softness; the silence of a thousand years spoke in it. It came upon the
heart like the calm beauty of death; fancy caught the sound, and faith
mounted on it to the skies. It filled the valley like a mist, and still
poured out its endless chant, and still it swells upon the ear, and
wraps me in a golden trance, drowning the noisy tumult of the world!”
Here is another spirit than Thoreau’s, another voice, another kind
of prose--prose with the throb and even the accent of poetry. Stoics
and spiritual economists do not write in this strain, nor is this the
manner of a too envious observer of particulars. For better or worse,
the prose of our poet-naturalist went squarely on its feet. His fancy
might be never so nimble; conceit and paradox might fairly make a
cloud about him; but he essayed no flights. If his heart beat faster at
some beauty of sight or sound, he said so quietly, with no change of
voice, and passed on. As far as the mere writing went, it was done in
straightforward, honest fashion, as if a man rather than an author held
the pen.
Thoreau believed in well-packed sentences, each carrying its own
weight, expressive of its own thought, rememberable and quotable. Of
the beauties of a flowing style he had heard something too much. In
practice, nevertheless, whether through design or by some natural
felicity, he steered a middle course. The sentences might be complete
in themselves, detachable, able to stand alone, but the paragraph never
lacked a logical and even a formal cohesion. It was not a collection
of “infinitely repellent particles,” nor even a “basket of nuts.” A
great share of the writer’s art, as he taught it, lay in leaving out
the unessential,--the getting in of the essential having first been
taken for granted. As for readers, in his more exalted moods he wished
to write so well that there would be few to appreciate him; sometimes,
indeed, he seemed to desire no readers at all. He speaks with stern
disapproval of such as trouble themselves upon that point, and “would
fain have one reader before they die.” A lamentable weakness, truly.
In his present estate, however, let us hope that he carries himself
a shade less haughtily, and is not above an innocent pleasure in the
spread of his earthly fame, in new readers and new editions, and such
choicely limited popularity as befits a classic. Even in his lifetime,
as Emerson tells the story, he once tried to believe that something in
his lecture might interest a little girl who told him she was going to
hear it if it wasn’t to be one of those old philosophical things that
she didn’t care about; and this although he had just been maintaining,
characteristically, that whatever succeeded with an audience must be
bad. He speaks somewhere against luxurious books, with superfluous
paper and marginal embellishments. His taste was Spartan in those days.
But he was never a stickler for consistency, and we may indulge a
comfortable assurance that he takes no offense now at the sight of his
Cape Cod journey--in which he worked so hard on that soft, leg-tiring
Back-Side beach to get the ocean into him--decked out in colors and set
forth sumptuously in two volumes. It is a very modest author who fears
that his text will be outshone by any pictures, no matter how splendid.
But who would have thought it, fifty years ago,--a book by the hermit
of Walden in an _édition de luxe_, to lie on parlor tables! If only his
father and his brother John could have seen it!
Thoreau believed in himself and in the soundness of his work. He
coveted readers, and believed that he should have them. Without
question he wrote for the future, and foresaw himself safe from
oblivion. Emerson regretted Henry’s want of ambition, we are told. He
might have spared himself. “Show me a man who consults his genius,”
said Thoreau, “and you have shown me a man who cannot be advised.” And
he was the man. He was following an ambition of his own. If he did not
keep step with his companions, it was because he “heard a different
drummer.” His ambition, and what seemed his wayward singularity, have
been justified by the event. His “strange, self-centred, solitary
figure, unique in the annals of literature,” is in no danger of being
forgotten. But what is most cheering about his present increasing
vogue, especially in England, is that it arises from the very quality
that Thoreau himself most prized, the innermost thing in him,--the
loftiness and purity of his thought. Simplicity, faith, devotion to
the essential and the permanent,--these were never more needed than
now. These he taught, and, by a happy fate, he linked them with those
natural themes that change not with time, and so can never become
obsolete.
THOREAU’S DEMAND UPON NATURE
THOREAU’S DEMAND UPON NATURE
“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness.”
So Thoreau began an article in “The Atlantic Monthly” forty-four years
ago. He wished to make an extreme statement, he declared, in hope of
making an emphatic one. Like idealists in general,--like Jesus in
particular,--he believed in omitting qualifications and exceptions.
Those were matters certain to be sufficiently insisted upon by the
orthodox and the conservative, the minister and the school committee.
In an attempt at an extreme statement, Thoreau was very unlikely to
fail. Thanks to an inherited aptitude and years of practice, there have
been few to excel him with the high lights. In his hands exaggeration
becomes one of the fine arts. We will not call it the finest art; his
own best work would teach us better than that; but such as it is, with
him to hold the brush, it would be difficult to imagine anything more
effective. When he praises a quaking swamp as the most desirable of
dooryards, or has visions of a people so enlightened as to burn all
their fences and leave all the forests to grow, who shall contend with
him? And yet the sympathetic reader--the only reader--knows what is
meant, and what is not meant, and finds it good; as he finds it good
when he is bidden to resist not a thief, or to hate his father and
mother.
Thoreau’s love for the wild--not to be confounded with a liking for
natural history or an appreciation of scenery--was as natural and
unaffected as a child’s love of sweets. It belonged to no one part of
his life. It finds utterance in all his books, but is best expressed,
most feelingly and simply, and therefore most convincingly, in his
journal, especially in such an entry as that of January 7, 1857, a
bitterly cold, windy day, with snow blowing,--one of the days when
“all animate things are reduced to their lowest terms.” Thoreau has
been out, nevertheless, for his afternoon walk, “through the woods
toward the cliffs along the side of the Well Meadow field.” Contact
with Nature, even in this her severest mood, has given a quickening yet
restraining grace to his pen. Now, there is no question of “emphasis,”
no plotting for an “extreme statement,” no thought of dull readers, for
whom the truth must be shown large, as it were, by some magic-lantern
process. How differently he speaks! “Might I aspire to praise the
moderate nymph Nature,” he says, “I must be like her, moderate.”
The passage is too long for quotation in full. “There is nothing so
sanative, so poetic,” he writes, “as a walk in the woods and fields
even now, when I meet none abroad for pleasure. Nothing so inspires me,
and excites such serene and profitable thought.... Alone in distant
woods or fields, in unpretending sprout-lands or pastures tracked by
rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day like this, when a
villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more
feel myself grandly related. This cold and solitude are friends of
mine.... I get away a mile or two from the town, into the stillness
and solitude of nature, with rocks, trees, weeds, snow about me. I
enter some glade in the woods, perchance, where a few weeds and dry
leaves alone lift themselves above the surface of the snow, and it is
as if I had come to an open window. I see out and around myself....
This stillness, solitude, wildness of nature is a kind of thoroughwort
or boneset to my intellect. This is what I go out to seek. It is as if
I always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely
encouraging, though invisible companion, and walked with him.”
Four days later, dwelling still upon his “success in solitary and
distant woodland walking outside the town,” he says: “I do not go
there to get my dinner, but to get that sustenance which dinners only
preserve me to enjoy, without which dinners are a vain repetition....
I never chanced to meet with any man so cheering and elevating and
encouraging, so infinitely suggestive, as the stillness and solitude of
the Well Meadow field.”
Language like this, though all may perceive the beauty and feel the
sincerity of it, is to be understood only by those who are of the
speaker’s kin. It describes a country which no man knows unless he has
been there. It expresses life, not theory, and calls for life on the
part of the hearer.
And if the appeal be made to this tribunal, the language used here
and so often elsewhere, by Thoreau, touching the relative inferiority
of human society will neither give offense nor seem in any wise
extravagant or morbid. Thoreau knew Emerson; he had lived in the same
house with him; but even Emerson’s companionship was less stimulating
to him than Nature’s own. Well, and how is it with ourselves, who have
the best of Emerson in his books? Much as these may have done for us,
have we never had seasons of communion with the life of the universe
itself when even Emerson’s words would have seemed an intrusion? Is not
the voice of the world, when we can hear it, better than the voice of
any man interpreting the world? Is it not better to hear for ourselves
than to be told what another has heard? When the forest speaks things
ineffable, and the soul hears what even to itself it can never
utter,--for such an hour there is no book, there never will be. And if
we wish not a book, no more do we wish the author of a book. We are
in better company. In such hours,--too few, alas!--though we be the
plainest of plain people, our own emotions are of more value than any
talk. We know, in our measure, what Thoreau--
“An early unconverted Saint”--
was seeking words for when he said, “I feel my Maker blessing me.”
To him, as to many another man, visitations of this kind came oftenest
in wild and solitary places. Small wonder, then, that he loved to
go thither. Small wonder that he found the pleasures of society
unsatisfying in the comparison. There he communed, not with himself
nor with his fellow, but with the “Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe.”
And when it is objected that this ought not to have been true, that he
ought to have found the presence of men more elevating and stimulating
than the presence of “inanimate” nature, we must take the liberty to
believe that the critic speaks of that whereof he knows nothing. To
revert to our own figure, he has never lived in Thoreau’s country.
Thoreau was wedded to Nature not so much for her beauty as for delight
in her high companionableness. There was more of Wordsworth than of
Keats or Ruskin in him. He was more philosopher than poet, perhaps we
may say. He loved spirit rather than form and color, though for these
also his eye was better than most. Being a stoic, a born economist,
a child of the pinched and frozen North, he felt most at home with
Nature in her dull seasons. His delight in a wintry day was typical.
He loved his mistress best when she was most like himself; as he said
of human friendships, “I love that one with whom I sympathize, be she
‘beautiful’ or otherwise, of excellent mind or not.” The swamp, the
desert, the wilderness, these he especially celebrated. He began by
thinking that nothing could be too wild for him; and even in his later
years, notably in the “Atlantic” essay above quoted, he sometimes blew
the same heroic strain. By this time, however, he knew and confessed,
to himself at least, that there was another side to the story; that
there was a dreariness beyond even his ready appreciation. More than
once we find in his diary expressions like this, in late November: “Now
a man will eat his heart, if ever, now while the earth is bare, barren,
and cheerless, and we have the coldness of winter without the variety
of ice and snow.”
And what was true of seasons was, in the long run, equally true of
places. Let them be wild, by all means, yet not too wild. When he
returned from the Maine woods, he had seen, for the time being, enough
of the wilderness. It was a relief to get back to the smooth but still
varied landscape of eastern Massachusetts. That, for a permanent
residence, seemed to him incomparably better than an unbroken forest.
The poet must live open to the sky and the wind; his road must be
prepared for him; and yet, “not only for strength, but for beauty, the
poet must, from time to time, travel the logger’s path and the Indian’s
trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the Muses.”
In short, the poet should live in Concord, and only once in a while
seek the inspirations of the outer wilderness.
What we have called Thoreau’s stoicism (knowing very well that he was
not a stoic, except in some partial, looser meaning of the word), his
liking for plainness and low expense, is perhaps at the base of one
of his rarest excellencies as a writer upon nature,--his reserve and
moderation. In statement, it is true, he could extravagate like a
master. He boasts, as well he may, of his prowess in that direction;
but in tone and sentiment, when it came to dealing, not with ethics or
philosophy, but with the mistress of his affections, he kept always
decently within bounds. He had a very sprightly fancy, when he chose
to give it play; but he had with it, and controlling it, a prevailing
sobriety, the tempering grace of good sense. “The alder,” he says, “is
one of the prettiest trees and shrubs in the winter. It is evidently so
full of life, with its conspicuously pretty red catkins dangling from
it on all sides. It seems to dread the winter less than other plants.
It has a certain heyday and cheery look, less stiff than most, with
more of the flexible grace of summer. With those dangling clusters of
red catkins which it switches in the face of winter, it brags for all
vegetation. It is not daunted by the cold, but still hangs gracefully
over the frozen stream.”
Most admirable, thrown in thus by the way, amid unaffected,
matter-of-fact description and every-day sense, and with its homely
“brags” and “switches” to hold it true,--to save it from a touch of
foppery, a shade too much of prettiness. How differently some writers
have dealt with similar themes: men so afraid of the commonplace as to
be incapable of saying a thing in so many words, though it were only
to mention the day of the week; men whose every other sentence must
contain a “felicity;” whose pages are as full of floweriness and dainty
conceits as a milliner’s window; who surfeit you with confections, till
you think of bread and water as a feast. Whether Thoreau’s temperance
is to be credited to the restraints of stoical philosophy or to plain
good taste, it is a virtue to be thankful for.
With him the study of nature was not an amusement, nor even a more or
less serious occupation for leisure hours, but the work of his life;
a work to which he gave himself from year’s end to year’s end, as
faithfully and laboriously, and with as definite a purpose,--a crop
as truly in his eye,--as any Concord farmer gave himself to his farm.
He was no amateur, no dilettante, no conscious hobbyist, laughing
between times at his own absorption. His sense of a mission was as
unquestioning as Wordsworth’s, though happily there went with it a
sense of humor that preserved it in good measure from over-emphasis and
damaging iteration.
In degree, if not in kind, this wholehearted, lifelong devotion was
something new. It was one of Thoreau’s originalities. To what a pitch
he carried it, how serious and all-controlling it was, the pages of
his journal bear continual witness. His was a Puritan conscience. He
could never do his work well enough. After a eulogy of winter buds,
“impregnable, vivacious willow catkins, but half asleep along the
twigs” (there, again, is fancy of an uncloying type), he breaks out:
“How healthy and vivacious must he be who would treat of these things.
You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the
sweet crust of any bread or cake; you must be able to extract nutriment
out of a sand heap.” “Must” was a great word with Thoreau. In hard
times, especially, he braced himself with it. “The winter, cold and
bound out as it is, is thrown to us like a bone to a famishing dog,
and we are expected to get the marrow out of it. While the milkmen in
the outskirts are milking so many scores of cows before sunrise, these
winter mornings, it is our task to milk the winter itself. It is true
it is like a cow that is dry, and our fingers are numb, and there is
none to wake us up.... But the winter was not given us for no purpose.
We must thaw its cold with our genialness. We are tasked to find out
and appropriate all the nutriment it yields. If it is a cold and hard
season, its fruit no doubt is the more concentrated and nutty.”
In these winter journalizings, we not only have example and proof of
the earnestness with which Thoreau pursued his outdoor studies, but
are shown their method and their sufficient object. He was to be a
writer, and nature was to be his theme, or, more exactly, his medium
of expression. He required, therefore, in the way of raw material, a
considerable store of outward knowledge,--knowledge of the outside or
aspect of things,--classified, for convenience, as botany, ornithology,
entomology, and the like; but after this, and infinitely more than
this, he needed a living, deepening intimacy with the life of the
world itself. For observation of the ways of plants and animals, of
the phases of earth and sky, he had endless patience and all necessary
sharpness of sense; work of this kind was easy,--he could do it in some
good degree to his satisfaction; the vexatious thing about it was that
it readily became too absorbing; but his real work, his _hard_ work,
the work that was peculiarly his, that taxed his capacities to the
full, and even so was never accomplished, this work was not an amassing
of relative knowledge, an accumulation of facts, a familiarizing of
himself with appearances, but a perfecting of sympathy, the organ or
means of that absolute knowledge which alone he found indispensable,
which alone he cared greatly to communicate. There, except at rare
moments, he was to the last below his ideal. His “task” was never done.
His union with nature was never complete.
The measure of this union was gauged, as we have seen already, by its
spiritual and emotional effects, by the mental states it brought him
into; as the religious mystic measures the success of his prayers. He
walked in the old Carlisle road, as the saint goes to his knees, to
“put off worldly thoughts.” The words are his own. There, when the hour
favored him, he “sauntered near to heaven’s gate.”
It must be only too evident that success of this transcendental quality
is not to be counted upon as one counts upon finding specimens for a
botanical box. There is no comparison between scientific pursuits, so
called, and this kind of supernatural history. For this, as Thoreau
says, “you must be in a different state from common.” “If it were
required to know the position of the fruit dots or the character
of the indusium, nothing could be easier than to ascertain it; but
if it is required that you be affected by ferns, that they amount
to anything, signify anything, to you, that they be another sacred
scripture and revelation to you, helping to redeem your life, this end
is not so easily accomplished.”