HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Henry D. Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1817. His
grandfather, John Thoreau, a Frenchman, had crossed to America in
1773 and had married a woman of Scotch birth in 1781. His mother came
from a Connecticut family of much earlier settlement in America, but
his more striking traits seem to have passed to him from the father's
side. He was a normal, out-of-door, fun-loving boy, though with more
than average fondness for books. At Harvard, where he was a graduate
in 1837, he was able but unconventional. He was more or less out of
patience with the narrow limits of the course of study and the spirit
of rivalry among the boys which made them work quite as much for
class ranking as for the value of what they learned. Toward the end
of senior year this contempt for college honors came to a head. He
had been ill, and on his return, as the wise President Quincy put it,
revealed "some notions concerning emulation and college rank, which had
a natural tendency to diminish his zeal, if not his exertions." When
the faculty resented this, even to the extent of planning to withdraw
scholarship support, the president took up his cause and backed him for
his character rather than for his performance. It was appropriate that
Emerson should have written in his young townsman's behalf, for his own
experience had not been altogether different.
The story of Thoreau's remaining years is quickly told. He lived,
unmarried, a kind of care-free, independent life that in an uneducated
laboring man would be called shiftless. Many of his townsmen
disapproved of his eccentricities--his brusque manners, abrupt speech,
and radical opinions, and his unwillingness to work for money unless
he had an immediate need for it. Yet he was less irregular than he was
reputed to be. From 1838 to 1841 he conducted a very successful school
in Concord with his brother John, giving it up only with the failure of
John's health, and--in spite of Emerson's statement to the contrary--he
had throughout his life a hand in the family business first of
pencil-making and later of preparing fine plumbago for electrotyping.
However, he was not an ordinary routine man. Like Crèvecoeur, whom he
variously suggests, he was a surveyor and a handy man with all sorts
of tools. Ten years after graduation he wrote to the secretary of his
college class:
I don't know whether mine is a profession, or a trade, or what
not.... I am a schoolmaster, a private Tutor, a Surveyor, a Gardener,
a Farmer, a Painter (I mean a House Painter), a Carpenter, a Mason,
a Day-laborer, a Pencil-maker, a Glass-paper-maker, a Writer, and
sometimes a Poetaster.
[Illustration: A LITERARY MAP OF CONCORD]
So as he was able to turn an honest penny whenever he needed one, and
as his needs were few, he worked at intervals and betweenwhiles shocked
many of his industrious townsfolk by spending long days talking with
his neighbors, studying the ways of plants and animals in the near-by
woods and waters, and occasionally leaving the village for trips to
the wilds of Canada, to the Maine woods, to Cape Cod, to Connecticut,
and, once or twice on business, to New York City. After college he
became a devoted disciple and friend of Emerson. From the outset
Emerson delighted in his "free and erect mind, which was capable of
making an else solitary afternoon sunny with his simplicity and clear
perception." They differed as good friends should, Emerson acquiescing
in laws and practices which he could not approve, and Thoreau defying
them. The stock illustration is on the issue of tax-paying. Emerson,
as a property-holder, paid about two hundred dollars and refused to
protest at what was probably an undue assessment. Thoreau, outraged at
the national policy in connection with the Mexican War, refused on
principle to pay his few dollars for poll tax and had to be shut up by
his good friend, Sam Staples, collector, deputy sheriff, and jailer,
who tried in vain to lend him the money. Emerson visited him at the
jail, where ensued the historic exchange of questions: "Henry, why are
you here?" "Waldo, why are you not here?"
The records of the rambles of the two men are many. In his memorial
essay on Thoreau, Emerson wrote:
It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him. He knew the
country like a fox or a bird, and passed through it as freely by
paths of his own. He knew every track in the snow or on the ground,
and what creature had taken this path before him.... On the day I
speak of he looked for the Menyanthes, detected it across the wide
pool, and on examination of its florets, decided it had been in
flower five days.
Emerson's records after walks with Thoreau are full of wood lore. He
may have recognized the plants himself, but he seldom recorded them
except when he had been with his more expert friend.
In 1839 Thoreau, in company with his brother, spent "A Week on the
Concord and Merrimac Rivers," from which he drew the material published
ten years later in a volume with that title. It is a meandering record
of the things he saw during the seven days and the thoughts suggested
by them. In his lifetime the book was so complete a commercial failure
that after some years he took back seven hundred of the thousand copies
printed. In the meanwhile, from 1845 to 1847, he indulged in his
best-known experience--his "hermitage" at Walden Pond, a little way
out from Concord. This gave him the subject matter for his most famous
book, "Walden," published in 1854 and much more successful in point of
sales. These two volumes, together with a few prose essays and a modest
number of poems, were all that was given to the public during his
lifetime. Since his death a large amount of the manuscript he left has
been published, as shown in the list at the end of this chapter.
"Walden" is externally an account of the two years and two months of
his residence at the lakeside, but it is really, like his sojourn
there, a commentary and criticism on life. In the chapter on "Where I
lived and What I lived for" he wrote:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front
only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what
it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not
lived.... I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,
to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was
not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into
a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to
be mean, why then, to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and
publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it
by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next
excursion.
The actual report of his days by the lakeside can be separated from his
decision as to what they were worth. He went out near the end of March,
1845, to a piece of land owned by Emerson on the shore of the pond.
He cut his own timber, bought a laborer's shanty for the boards and
nails, during the summer put up a brick chimney, and counting sundry
minor expenses secured a tight and dry--and very homely--four walls and
ceiling for a total cost of $28.12-1/2. Fuel he was able to cut. Food
he largely raised. His clothing bill was slight. So that his account
for the first year runs as follows:
House $28.12-1/2
Farm, one year 14.72-1/2
Food, eight months 8.74
Clothing, etc., eight months 8.40-3/4
Oil, etc., eight months 2.00
---------
$61.99-3/4
To offset these expenses he recorded:
Farm produce sold $23.44
Earned by day labor 13.34
------
$36.78
leaving $25.21-3/4, which was about the cash in hand with which he
started. The expense of the second year did not, of course, include the
heaviest of the first-year items--the cost of the house.
I learned from my two years' experience that it would cost incredibly
little trouble to obtain one's necessary food, even in this
latitude.... In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience,
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 the
simpler nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is
not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his
brow, unless he sweats easier than I do.
So much for the external account of the Walden years. The last words
of the quotation give a cue to the criticism with which he accompanies
the bare statement. This is contained chiefly in chapters I, "Economy"
(the longest, amounting to one fourth of the book); II, "Where I
lived and What I lived for"; V, "Solitude"; VIII, "The Village"; and
XVIII, "Conclusion." He contended that life had been made complex and
burdensome because of the mistaken notion that property was much to
be desired. This idea had led men to buy land and build houses, go
into trade, construct railways and ships, and to set up government and
rival governments, in order to protect the things men owned and those
they were buying and selling. Being who he was, he asserted boldly and
sometimes savagely a large number of charges against organized society
and the men who submitted to it. "The laboring man has not leisure for
a true integrity." "The civilized man's pursuits are not worthier than
the savage's." "The college student obtains an ignoble and unprofitable
leisure, defrauding himself." "Thank God, I can sit and I can stand
without the aid of a furniture warehouse." "Men say a stitch in time
saves nine, so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine
to-morrow." "Society is commonly too cheap." "Wherever a man goes, men
will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they
can, constrain him to belong to their desperate, odd-fellow society."
At this point he challenges comparison again with Crèvecoeur (see
p. 60). To the hearty immigrant of the eighteenth century the common
right to own the soil and to enjoy the fruits of labor seemed almost
millennial in view of the Old World conditions which denied these
privileges to the masses. To the New England townsman the ownership of
property was oppressive in view of the aboriginal right to traverse
field and forest without any obligation to maintain an establishment
or "improve" an acreage. In Crèvecoeur's France, where for centuries
the people had lived on sufferance, tenure of the land seemed an
inestimable privilege. Thoreau's America seemed so illimitable that
he apparently supposed land would always be "dirt cheap." Yet though
one prized property and the other despised it, they were alike in not
foreseeing the economic changes that the nineteenth century was to
produce.
The more positive side of Thoreau's criticism lies in the passages in
which he told how excellent was his way of living, how full of freedom
and leisure and how blest with solitude. There is no question that he
did live cheaply, easily, happily, and independently, nor is there
any question that the love of money and what it represents has made
life more of a burden than a joy for millions of people; but there is
this immense difference between the independence of Thoreau and the
independence of Emerson--that Emerson discharged his duties in the
family and in the state and that Thoreau protested at his obligations
to the group even while he was reaping the benefits of other men's
industry. At Walden he lived on land owned by Emerson, who bought it
and paid the taxes on it. The bricks and glass and nails in his shanty
and the tools he borrowed to build it with were the products of mines
and factories and kilns brought to him on the railroads and handled by
the shopkeepers whom he scorned. He was therefore in the ungraceful
position of being a beneficiary of society while he was carrying on a
kind of guerrilla warfare against it.
As a citizen and as a critic of society Thoreau lacked the sturdy
Puritan conscience which is the bone and sinew of Emerson's character,
and he lacked the "high seriousness" of his greater townsman. In
consequence, instead of being serenely self-reliant he was often
petulant; and instead of being nobly dignified he was nervously on
guard against deserved rebuke. Emerson frequently uttered and wrote
striking sentences which surprise one into pleased attention, Thoreau
came out with smart and clever sayings like an eager and half-naughty
boy who is trying to shock his elders. Almost the only rejoinder that
his protests called forth must have been disturbing to him, because
Oliver Wendell Holmes was so unruffled as he wrote his "Contentment."
"This is an interesting argument from a well-meaning young man," Holmes
seems to have said:
Little _I_ ask, _my_ wants are few;
and then in playful satire he told about the hut--of stone--on Beacon
Street that fronts the sun, where he too could live content with a
well-set table, the best of clothes, furniture, jewelry, paintings, and
a fast horse when he chose to take an airing. This was the attitude of
many good-humored men and women of the world who were inclined to smile
indulgently at whatever came out of Concord.
However, a fair estimate of Thoreau and his case against the world
should steer the wise course between taking him too seriously and
literally and not taking him seriously at all, between Stevenson's
scathing attack in "Familiar Portraits" and Holmes's supercilious
"Contentment." If one elects to act as a prosecuting attorney, one can
say of him what Thoreau quotes a friend as saying of Carlyle, that he
"is so ready to obey his humour that he makes the least vestige of
truth the foundation of any superstructure, not keeping faith with his
better genius nor truest readers." But if one choose to value him as a
friend might, one can exonerate him in the light of a warning and a
confession of his own: "I trust that you realize what an exaggerator
I am,--that I lay myself out to exaggerate whenever I have an
opportunity,--pile Pelion upon Ossa, to reach heaven so." This is the
very point of his title-page inscription to "Walden": "I do not propose
to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in
the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up."
It is easy to compare Emerson and Thoreau to the disadvantage of the
younger man. But at one point they were quite alike, and that is in the
fact that both were more social in their lives than in their writings.
Thoreau was not an unmitigated anarchist, or hermit, or loafer. He was
more capable and industrious than he admits; he was devoted to his
family and a loyal friend. In his protest at the ways of the world
he was, in a manner, "whistling to keep his courage up," and often
his whistling became rather shrill. The greater part of "Walden" and,
indeed, of his writing as a whole is the work of a naturalist--the work
included in such chapters as "Sounds," "The Ponds," "Brute Neighbors,"
"Former Inhabitants," and "Winter Visitors," "Winter Animals," and "The
Pond in Winter." In the two generations since Crèvecoeur's "Letters
from an American Farmer" no one on this side the Atlantic had written
about the out of doors with such fullness and intimate knowledge. In
this respect, moreover, Thoreau, instead of being a student or imitator
of Emerson, was his guide and instructor. Although modern science owes
little to him and has corrected many of his findings, it recalls his
help to Agassiz in collecting specimens; and modern literature has
produced only one or two men, like John Burroughs and John Muir, who
write of nature with the same sympathy and beauty. The title of his
friend Channing's book "Thoreau: the Poet-Naturalist" tells the whole
story. He was fascinated by growing things. He could not learn enough
about their ways. The life in Concord's rivers, ponds, fields, and
woods by day and night and during the changing seasons was an endless
study and pleasure. In his journal he kept a detailed record of the
pageant of the year, which after his death was assembled in the four
volumes "Spring in Massachusetts," "Summer," "Autumn," and "Winter."
When he went to other parts of the country he carried his knowledge of
Concord as a sort of reference book. From Staten Island he wrote: "The
woods are now full of a large honeysuckle in full bloom, which differs
from ours.... Things are very forward here compared with Concord." In
the Maine woods he recognized his old familiars but in more massively
primitive surroundings than those at home. The sandy aridity of
Cape Cod furnished him daily with fascinating contrasts, in natural
surroundings and in their effect on the residents. On his trip to Mount
Washington he found forty-two of the forty-six plants he expected,
adding one to his list when, after falling and spraining his ankle, he
limped a few steps and said, "Here is the arnica, anyhow," reaching for
an _arnica mollis_, which he had not found before. And when he chose
to put into essay form some of the information he had gleaned, he was
exact without being technical and never for long repressed his lively
spirits.
The poet in him brought him back continually to the beauty in what he
saw. He did not particularly incline to philosophize about creation
like Emerson, the sheer facts of it meant so much more to him. Nor did
he care to expound the beauties of nature; he simply held them up to
view. Take, for example, this bit from "The Pond in Winter," in which
the last twelve words are quite as beautiful as the thing they describe:
Standing on the snow-covered plain, as if in a pasture amid the
hills, I cut my way first through a foot of snow, and then a foot
of ice, and open a window under my feet, where, kneeling to drink,
I look down into the quiet parlor of fishes, pervaded by a softened
light as through a window of ground glass, with its bright sanded
floor the same as in summer; there a perennial waveless serenity
reigns as in the amber, twilight sky.
Or, again, this prose poem quoted in Channing's book:
One more confiding heifer, the fairest of the herd, did by degrees
approach as if to take some morsel from our hands, while our hearts
leaped to our mouths with expectation and delight. She by degrees
drew near with her fair limbs (progressive), making pretence of
browsing; nearer and nearer, till there was wafted to us the bovine
fragrance,--cream of all the dairies that ever were or will be: and
then she raised her gentle muzzle toward us, and snuffed an honest
recognition within hand's reach. I saw it was possible for his herd
to inspire with love the herdsman. She was as delicately featured
as a hind. Her hide was mingled white and fawn-color, and on her
muzzle's tip there was a white spot not bigger than a daisy; and on
her side turned toward me, the map of Asia plain to see.
The following passages fulfill the main tenets of the contemporary
Imagists:
I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud,
or than Walden pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, I
pray?... I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a
pasture, or a bean-leaf, or sorrel, or a horse-fly, or a bumble-bee.
I am no more lonely than the Mill Brook, or a weather-cock, or the
north star, or the south wind, or an April shower, or a January thaw,
or the first spider in a new house.
The wind has gently murmured through the blinds, or puffed with
feathery softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like
a summer zephyr, lifting the leaves along, the livelong night. The
meadow-mouse has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl has
sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the swamp; the rabbit, the
squirrel and the fox have all been housed. The watch-dog has lain
quiet on the hearth, and the cattle have stood silent in their
stalls.... But while the earth has slumbered, all the air has been
alive with feathery flakes descending, as if some northern Ceres
reigned, showering her silvery grain over all the fields.
No yard; but unfenced Nature reaching to your very sills. A young
forest growing up under your windows, and wild sumachs and blackberry
vines breaking through into your cellar; sturdy pitch-pines rubbing
and creaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots
reaching quite under the house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown
off in the gale,--a pine tree torn up by the roots behind your house
for fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great
Snow,--no gate--no front yard, and no path to the civilized world.
His manner of writing was so like Emerson's that the comments on the
style of the elder man (see pp. 212-215) apply for the most part to
that of the younger.
From the year of "Walden's" appearance to the end of Thoreau's life, in
1862, three matters are specially worthy of record. The first is that
recognition began at last to come. This probably did not hasten his
writing, but it released some of the great accumulation of manuscript
in his possession. Several of the magazines accepted his papers,
notably _The Atlantic Monthly_, which took eight of his articles,
although seven of them were not published until the two years just
after his death. The second is his eager friendship for two of the most
strikingly unconventional men of his day--Walt Whitman and John Brown
"of Harper's Ferry." Of Whitman he wrote, when few were reading him and
few of these approving:
I have just read his second edition (which he gave me), and it has
done me more good than any reading for a long time.... I have found
his poems exhilarating, encouraging.... We ought to rejoice greatly
in him. He occasionally suggests something a little more than human.
You can't confound him with the other inhabitants of Brooklyn or New
York. How they must shudder when they read him!... Since I have seen
him, I find I am not disturbed by any brag or egoism in his book. He
may turn out the least of a braggart of all, having a better right to
be confident.
John Brown he had met in Concord only a few weeks before the Harper's
Ferry raid. Two weeks after the capture of Brown he delivered an
address on the issues, first in Concord and later in Worcester and in
Boston, defying his friends who advised him to silence. And after the
execution of the old Kansan he arranged funeral services in Concord.
It turns what sweetness I have to gall, to hear, or hear of, the
remarks of some of my neighbors. When we heard at first that he was
dead, one of my townsmen observed that "he died as the fool dieth";
which, pardon me, for an instant suggested a likeness in him dying to
my neighbor living.... This event advertises me that there is such a
fact as death,--the possibility of a man's dying. It seems as if no
man had ever lived before; for in order to die you must first have
lived.... I hear a good many pretend that they are going to die; or
that they have died, for aught that I know. Nonsense! I'll defy them
to do it. They haven't got life enough in them. They'll deliquesce
like fungi; and keep a hundred eulogists mopping the spot where they
left off. Only a half a dozen or so have died since the world began.
The final fact of these later years is the breakdown of his own health.
In spite of the moderation and sanity of his out-of-door habits his
strength began to fail him before he had reached what should be the
prime of life. From the ages of thirty-eight to forty he had to
exercise the greatest care, avoiding any heavy exertion. A severe cold
caught in 1860 developed soon into consumption, which carried him off
in the spring of 1862 at the age of forty-five.
BOOK LIST
HENRY DAVID THOREAU. Works. The Riverside Edition. 1894. 10 vols.
Walden Edition. 1906. 20 vols. (Of these volumes the last fourteen
are the complete Journal, which includes in its original form what
stands in Vols. V-VIII of the Riverside Edition, as Early Spring
in Massachusetts, Summer, Autumn, Winter.) His works appeared
in book form originally as follows: A Week on the Concord and
Merrimack Rivers, 1849; Walden, 1854; Excursions, 1863; The Maine
Woods, 1864; Cape Cod, 1865; Letters to Various Persons, 1865;
A Yankee in Canada, 1866; Early Spring in Massachusetts, 1881;
Summer, 1884; Winter, 1888; Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers, 1890;
Essays and Other Writings, 1891; Autumn, 1892; Miscellanies, 1893;
Familiar Letters, 1894; Poems, 1895.
=Bibliography=
A volume compiled by Francis H. Allen. 1908. Also Cambridge
History of American Literature, Vol. II, pp. 411-415.
=Biography and Criticism=
The standard life is by Frank B. Sanborn. 1917.
BENTON, JOEL. The Poetry of Thoreau. _Lippincot's_, May, 1886.
BURROUGHS, JOHN. Indoor Studies. 1889.
CHANNING, W. E. Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist. 1873.
EMERSON, R. W. Lectures and Biographical Sketches. Centenary
Edition. 1903.
FOERSTER, NORMAN. Humanism of Thoreau. _Nation_, Vol. CV, pp.
9-12.
LOWELL, J. R. My Study Windows. 1871.
MACMECHAN, ARCHIBALD. Cambridge History of American Literature,
Vol. II, Bk. II, chap. x.
MARBLE, A. R. Thoreau: his Home, Friends, and Books. 1902.
MORE, P. E. Shelburne Essays. _Ser. 1._ 1904.
PATTEE, F. L. American Literature since 1870, chap. viii, sec.
I. 1915.
RICHARDSON, C. F. American Literature, Vol. I. 1887.
SALT, H. S. Life of Thoreau. 1890.
SALT, H. S. Literary Sketches. 1888.
SANBORN, F. B. Life of Thoreau. 1882. _(A.M.L.Ser._)
SANBORN, F. B. Personality of Thoreau. 1901.
STEVENSON, R. L. Familiar Studies of Men and Books. 1882.
TORREY, BRADFORD. Friends on the Shelf. 1906.
TRENT, W. P. American Literature. 1903.
VAN DOREN, MARK. Henry David Thoreau: a Critical Study. 1916.
Pertaining to Thoreau. S. A. Jones, editor. 1901. (Contains
ten reprinted magazine articles on Thoreau.)
TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Read Emerson's "Woodnotes," Vol. I, pp. 2 and 3, for a passage which
admirably characterizes Thoreau, though it is said to have been written
without specific regard to him.
Read "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," noting chiefly
either the passages on literature and men of letters or the passages of
a sociological interest. Is there a connecting unity in these passages?
Read "Economy" in "Walden" and the second and third of Crèvecoeur's
"Letters from an American Farmer" for the contrast in ideas on property
or for the contrast in ideas on the privileges and the obligations of
citizenship.
Read in "Walden" or "The Maine Woods" or "Cape Cod" or "A Yankee in
Canada" or "Excursions" for examples of exaggeration and of aggressive
self-consciousness. Is there any real likeness between Thoreau and
Whitman in these respects?
Read the characterizations of Thoreau in the essays by Robert Louis
Stevenson and James Russell Lowell and decide in which points they
should be modified.
Read any one or two essays for Thoreau's allusions to science and to
the sciences, the kind of allusions made, and the kind of significances
derived from them.
Read any two or three essays for the nature element in them, the kind
of things alluded to, and the kind of significances derived from them.