Thoreau had decided, it would seem, from the very first to lead a life
of self-improvement: the needle did not tremble as with richer natures,
but pointed steadily north; and as he saw duty and inclination in one,
he turned all his strength in that direction. He was met upon the
threshold by a common difficulty. In this world, in spite of its many
agreeable features, even the most sensitive must undergo some drudgery
to live. It is not possible to devote your time to study and meditation
without what are quaintly but happily denominated private means; these
absent, a man must contrive to earn his bread by some service to the
public such as the public cares to pay him for; or, as Thoreau loved to
put it, Apollo must serve Admetus. This was to Thoreau even a sourer
necessity than it is to most; there was a love of freedom, a strain of
the wild man, in his nature, that rebelled with violence against the
yoke of custom; and he was so eager to cultivate himself and to be happy
in his own society, that he could consent with difficulty even to the
interruptions of friendship. "_Such are my engagements to myself_ that I
dare not promise," he once wrote in answer to an invitation; and the
italics are his own. Marcus Aurelius found time to study virtue, and
between whiles to conduct the imperial affairs of Rome; but Thoreau is
so busy improving himself that he must think twice about a morning call.
And now imagine him condemned for eight hours a day to some uncongenial
and unmeaning business! He shrank from the very look of the mechanical
in life; all should, if possible, be sweetly spontaneous and swimmingly
progressive. Thus he learned to make lead-pencils, and, when he had
gained the best certificate, and his friends began to congratulate him
on his establishment in life, calmly announced that he should never make
another. "Why should I?" said he; "I would not do again what I have done
once." For when a thing has once been done as well as it wants to be, it
is of no further interest to the self-improver. Yet in after years, and
when it became needful to support his family, he returned patiently to
this mechanical art--a step more than worthy of himself.
The pencils seem to have been Apollo's first experiment in the service
of Admetus; but others followed. "I have thoroughly tried
school-keeping," he writes, "and found that my expenses were in
proportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income; for I was obliged
to dress and train, not to say, think and believe, accordingly, and I
lost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the benefit of my
fellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I have
tried trade, but I found that it would take ten years to get under way
in that, and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil."
Nothing, indeed, can surpass his scorn for all so-called business. Upon
that subject gall squirts from him at a touch. "The whole enterprise of
this nation is not illustrated by a thought," he writes; "it is not
warmed by a sentiment; there is nothing in it for which a man should lay
down his life, nor even his gloves." And again: "If our merchants did
not most of them fail, and the banks too, my faith in the old laws of
this world would be staggered. The statement that ninety-six in a
hundred doing such business surely break down is perhaps the sweetest
fact that statistics have revealed." The wish was probably father to the
figures; but there is something enlivening in a hatred of so genuine a
brand, hot as Corsican revenge, and sneering like Voltaire.
Pencils, school-keeping, and trade being thus discarded one after
another, Thoreau, with a stroke of strategy, turned the position. He saw
his way to get his board and lodging for practically nothing; and
Admetus never got less work out of any servant since the world began. It
was his ambition to be an Oriental philosopher; but he was always a very
Yankee sort of Oriental. Even in the peculiar attitude in which he stood
to money, his system of personal economics, as we may call it, he
displayed a vast amount of truly down-East calculation, and he adopted
poverty like a piece of business. Yet his system is based on one or two
ideas which, I believe, come naturally to all thoughtful youths, and are
only pounded out of them by city uncles. Indeed, something essentially
youthful distinguishes all Thoreau's knock-down blows at current
opinion. Like the posers of a child, they leave the orthodox in a kind
of speechless agony. These know the thing is nonsense. They are sure
there must be an answer, yet somehow cannot find it. So it is with his
system of economy. He cuts through the subject on so new a plane that
the accepted arguments apply no longer; he attacks it in a new dialect
where there are no catch-words ready made for the defender; after you
have been boxing for years on a polite, gladiatorial convention, here is
an assailant who does not scruple to hit below the belt.
"The cost of a thing," says he, "is _the amount of what I will call
life_ which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the
long run." I have been accustomed to put it to myself, perhaps more
clearly, that the price we have to pay for money is paid in liberty.
Between these two ways of it, at least, the reader will probably not
fail to find a third definition of his own; and it follows, on one or
other, that a man may pay too dearly for his livelihood, by giving, in
Thoreau's terms, his whole life for it, or, in mine, bartering for it
the whole of his available liberty, and becoming a slave till death.
There are two questions to be considered--the quality of what we buy,
and the price we have to pay for it. Do you want a thousand a year, a
two thousand a year, or a ten thousand a year livelihood? and can you
afford the one you want? It is a matter of taste; it is not in the least
degree a question of duty, though commonly supposed so. But there is no
authority for that view anywhere. It is nowhere in the Bible. It is true
that we might do a vast amount of good if we were wealthy, but it is
also highly improbable; not many do; and the art of growing rich is not
only quite distinct from that of doing good, but the practice of the one
does not at all train a man for practising the other. "Money might be of
great service to me," writes Thoreau; "but the difficulty now is that I
do not improve my opportunities, and therefore I am not prepared to have
my opportunities increased." It is a mere illusion that, above a certain
income, the personal desires will be satisfied and leave a wider margin
for the generous impulse. It is as difficult to be generous, or anything
else except perhaps a member of Parliament, on thirty thousand as on
two hundred a year.
Now Thoreau's tastes were well defined. He loved to be free, to be
master of his times and seasons, to indulge the mind rather than the
body; he preferred long rambles to rich dinners, his own reflections to
the consideration of society, and an easy, calm, unfettered, active life
among green trees to dull toiling at the counter of a bank. And such
being his inclination he determined to gratify it. A poor man must save
off something; he determined to save off his livelihood. "When a man has
attained those things which are necessary to life," he writes, "there is
another alternative than to obtain the superfluities; _he may adventure
on life now_, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced." Thoreau
would get shelter, some kind of covering for his body, and necessary
daily bread; even these he should get as cheaply as possible; and then,
his vacation from humbler toil having commenced, devote himself to
Oriental philosophers, the study of nature, and the work of
self-improvement.
Prudence, which bids us all go to the ant for wisdom and hoard against
the day of sickness, was not a favourite with Thoreau. He preferred that
other, whose name is so much misappropriated: Faith. When he had secured
the necessaries of the moment, he would not reckon up possible accidents
or torment himself with trouble for the future. He had no toleration for
the man "who ventures to live only by the aid of the mutual insurance
company, which has promised to bury him decently." He would trust
himself a little to the world. "We may safely trust a good deal more
than we do," says he. "How much is not done by us! or what if we had
been taken sick?" And then, with a stab of satire, he describes
contemporary mankind in a phrase: "All the day long on the alert, at
night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to
uncertainties." It is not likely that the public will be much affected
by Thoreau, when they blink the direct injunctions of the religion they
profess; and yet, whether we will or no, we make the same hazardous
ventures; we back our own health and the honesty of our neighbours for
all that we are worth; and it is chilling to think how many must lose
their wager.
In 1845, twenty-eight years old, an age by which the liveliest have
usually declined into some conformity with the world, Thoreau, with a
capital of something less than five pounds and a borrowed axe, walked
forth into the woods by Walden Pond, and began his new experiment in
life. He built himself a dwelling, and returned the axe, he says with
characteristic and workmanlike pride, sharper than when he borrowed it;
he reclaimed a patch, where he cultivated beans, peas, potatoes, and
sweet corn; he had his bread to bake, his farm to dig, and for the
matter of six weeks in the summer he worked at surveying, carpentry, or
some other of his numerous dexterities, for hire. For more than five
years this was all that he required to do for his support, and he had
the winter and most of the summer at his entire disposal. For six weeks
of occupation, a little cooking and a little gentle hygienic gardening,
the man, you may say, had as good as stolen his livelihood. Or we must
rather allow that he had done far better; for the thief himself is
continually and busily occupied; and even one born to inherit a million
will have more calls upon his time than Thoreau. Well might he say,
"What old people tell you you cannot do, you try and find you can." And
how surprising is his conclusion: "I am convinced that _to maintain
oneself on this earth is not a hardship, but a pastime_, if we will live
simply and wisely; _as the pursuits of simpler nations are still the
sports of the more artificial_."
When he had enough of that kind of life, he showed the same simplicity
in giving it up as in beginning it. There are some who could have done
the one, but, vanity forbidding, not the other; and that is perhaps the
story of the hermits; but Thoreau made no fetich of his own example, and
did what he wanted squarely. And five years is long enough for an
experiment, and to prove the success of transcendental Yankeeism. It is
not his frugality which is worthy of note; for, to begin with, that was
inborn, and therefore inimitable by others who are differently
constituted; and again, it was no new thing, but has often been equalled
by poor Scotch students at the universities. The point is the sanity of
his view of life, and the insight with which he recognised the position
of money, and thought out for himself the problem of riches and a
livelihood. Apart from his eccentricities, he had perceived, and was
acting on, a truth of universal application. For money enters in two
different characters into the scheme of life. A certain amount, varying
with the number and empire of our desires, is a true necessary to each
one of us in the present order of society; but beyond that amount, money
is a commodity to be bought or not to be bought, a luxury in which we
may either indulge or stint ourselves, like any other. And there are
many luxuries that we may legitimately prefer to it, such as a grateful
conscience, a country life, or the woman of our inclination. Trite,
flat, and obvious as this conclusion may appear, we have only to look
round us in society to see how scantily it has been recognised; and
perhaps even ourselves, after a little reflection, may decide to spend a
trifle less for money, and indulge ourselves a trifle more in the
article of freedom.