Doubtless the wildest man New England has turned out since the red
aborigines vacated her territory was Henry Thoreau,--a man in whom the
Indian reappeared on the plane of taste and morals. One is tempted to
apply to him his own lines on “Elisha Dugan,” as it is very certain
they fit himself much more closely than they ever did his neighbor:--
“O man of wild habits,
Partridges and rabbits,
Who hast no cares.
Only to set snares,
Who liv’st all alone
Close to the bone,
And where life is sweetest
Constantly eatest.”
His whole life was a search for the wild, not only in nature but in
literature, in life, in morals. The shyest and most elusive thoughts
and impressions were the ones that fascinated him most, not only in
his own mind, but in the minds of others. His startling paradoxes are
only one form his wildness took. He cared little for science, except
as it escaped the rules and technicalities, and put him on the trail
of the ideal, the transcendental. Thoreau was of French extraction;
and every drop of his blood seems to have turned toward the aboriginal,
as the French blood has so often done in other ways in this country.
He, for the most part, despised the white man; but his enthusiasm
kindled at the mention of the Indian. He envied the Indian; he coveted
his knowledge, his arts, his woodcraft. He accredited him with a more
“practical and vital science” than was contained in the books. “The
Indian stood nearer to wild Nature than we.” “It was a new light
when my guide gave me Indian names for things for which I had only
scientific ones before. In proportion as I understood the language, I
saw them from a new point of view.” And again, “The Indian’s earthly
life was as far off from us as Heaven is.” In his “Week” he complains
that our poetry is only white man’s poetry. “If we could listen for
an instant to the chant of the Indian muse, we should understand why
he will not exchange his savageness for civilization.” Speaking of
himself, he says, “I am convinced that my genius dates from an older
era than the agricultural. I would at least strike my spade into the
earth with such careless freedom, but accuracy, as the woodpecker
his bill into a tree. There is in my nature, methinks, a singular
yearning toward all wildness.” Again and again he returns to the
Indian. “We talk of civilizing the Indian, but that is not the name
for his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his
dim forest life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods,
and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with
Nature. He has glances of starry recognition, to which our saloons are
strangers. The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because
distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared
with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles.”
“We would not always be soothing and taming nature, breaking the horse
and the ox, but sometimes ride the horse wild, and chase the buffalo.”
The only relics that interest him are Indian relics. One of his regular
spring recreations or occupations is the hunting of arrow-heads. He
goes looking for arrow-heads as other people go berrying or botanizing.
In his published journal he makes a long entry under date of March
28, 1859, about his pursuit of arrow-heads. “I spend many hours every
spring,” he says, “gathering the crop which the melting snow and rain
have washed bare. When, at length, some island in the meadow or some
sandy field elsewhere has been ploughed, perhaps for rye, in the fall,
I take note of it, and do not fail to repair thither as soon as the
earth begins to be dry in the spring. If the spot chances never to have
been cultivated before, I am the first to gather a crop from it. The
farmer little thinks that another reaps a harvest which is the fruit of
his toil.” He probably picked up thousands of arrow-heads. He had an
eye for them. The Indian in him recognized its own.
His genius itself is arrow-like, and typical of the wild weapon he so
loved,--hard, flinty, fine-grained, penetrating, winged, a flying
shaft, bringing down its game with marvelous sureness. His literary art
was to let fly with a kind of quick inspiration; and though his arrows
sometimes go wide, yet it is always a pleasure to watch their aerial
course. Indeed, Thoreau was a kind of Emersonian or transcendental
red man, going about with a pocket-glass and an herbarium, instead
of with a bow and a tomahawk. He appears to have been as stoical and
indifferent and unsympathetic as a veritable Indian; and how he hunted
without trap or gun, and fished without hook or snare! Everywhere the
wild drew him. He liked the telegraph because it was a kind of æolian
harp; the wind blowing upon it made wild, sweet music. He liked the
railroad through his native town, because it was the wildest road he
knew of: it only made deep cuts into and through the hills. “On it are
no houses nor foot-travellers. The travel on it does not disturb me.
The woods are left to hang over it. Though straight, it is wild in its
accompaniments, keeping all its raw edges. Even the laborers on it are
not like other laborers.” One day he passed a little boy in the street
who had on a home-made cap of woodchuck’s skin, and it completely
filled his eye. He makes a delightful note about it in his journal.
That was the kind of cap to have,--“a perfect little idyl, as they
say.” Any wild trait unexpectedly cropping out in any of the domestic
animals pleased him immensely. The crab-apple was his favorite apple,
because of its beauty and perfume. He perhaps never tried to ride a
wild horse, but such an exploit was in keeping with his genius.
Thoreau hesitated to call himself a naturalist. That was too tame; he
would perhaps have been content to have been an Indian naturalist. He
says in this journal, and with much truth and force, “Man cannot afford
to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side
of his eye. He must look through and beyond her. To look at her is as
fatal as to look at the head of Medusa. It turns the man of science to
stone.” When he was applied to by the secretary of the Association for
the Advancement of Science, at Washington, for information as to the
particular branch of science he was most interested in, he confesses
he was ashamed to answer for fear of exciting ridicule. But he says,
“If it had been the secretary of an association of which Plato or
Aristotle was the president, I should not have hesitated to describe
my studies at once and particularly.” “The fact is, I am a mystic, a
transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot.” Indeed, what
Thoreau was finally after in nature was something ulterior to science,
something ulterior to poetry, something ulterior to philosophy; it
was that vague something which he calls “the higher law,” and which
eludes all direct statement. He went to Nature as to an oracle; and
though he sometimes, indeed very often, questioned her as a naturalist
and a poet, yet there was always another question in his mind. He
ransacked the country about Concord in all seasons and weathers, and
at all times of the day and night he delved into the ground, he probed
the swamps, he searched the waters, he dug into woodchuck holes,
into muskrats’ dens, into the retreats of the mice and squirrels;
he saw every bird, heard every sound, found every wild-flower, and
brought home many a fresh bit of natural history; but he was always
searching for something he did not find. This search of his for the
transcendental, the unfindable, the wild that will not be caught, he
has set forth in a beautiful parable in “Walden:”--
“I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still
on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them,
describing their tracks, and what calls they answered to. I have met
one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and
even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud; and they seemed as anxious
to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.”