Abundantly as Henry Thoreau informs us about himself in his Journal,
his correspondence and his writings, his story, owing to the extreme
reticence of his nature, would obviously be incomplete if it were
reduced to these elements alone. To finish it remained the task
of certain of his contemporaries, members of his circle. What the
following pages owe to their invaluable testimony is so evident that
it has not been thought necessary to emphasize this indebtedness by
crowding the book with notes, as if it laid any claim to erudition.
Nevertheless, this absence of references, ill-judged as it may be, must
not be taken to imply that this portrait-study has been inspired by
any desire less exacting than their own for the pure and simple truth.
It merely means that behind this truth there was perhaps another, less
often sought for, but no less moving after these vanished years.
I
Someone has died in the village: the man who bought the house on the
square a year ago--the retired seaman.
A new face that has soon disappeared. Perhaps he had his reasons in
choosing for his retreat this straggling village, twenty miles from
the city from which he came. Or perhaps it had been enough for him to
chance upon it one day, a city-dweller in search of a resting-place, to
be won by the fine elms and maples that sheltered a gracious village,
nestling among the low hills and deep woods and named after the
slow-moving river that watered the broad meadows: Concord.
For a man who had lived in the bustle of a port after a life of
adventure, everything there breathed a blessed peace. Nor was the
silence of the fields too sedative for one who had come from a capital.
Concord smiled in the agreeable spectacle of its thousand inhabitants,
farmers, workmen, tradespeople, village officials, and formed a
stopping-place for the stage-coach, the travellers, the carters who
passed through it on their way to the high pastoral regions of New
Hampshire. There was an inn, there were taverns where they served you
a stiff glass of liquor, several stores, the Town Hall. There was the
wooden church, too, and a fine stone jail that sheltered the county
criminals. They even hanged people there now and then. A man who was
accustomed to the world would not feel too remote from civilization.
Perhaps, too, the renown of a spot where the country-folk had offered
a bold and decisive resistance to the troops of His Britannic Majesty,
at the dawn of the Revolution, had affected his choice. But this memory
of twenty-five years ago was of far less importance than the promise
of the forests of pines and oaks and the fields and the footpaths
along the slopes for a man who knew he was ill and was looking for a
retreat where he could recover the strength of his lungs.... In the
pine-scented air of Concord floated the hope of a cure. And here he had
indeed found himself at rest, forever. The pure air of the valley had
not been able to restore the consumptive to health, no, nor the whey he
used to take at the houses of his friends on the days when they made
cheese, nor the simples from which he had made a syrup for his evil
cough. A man of moderate height, but broad-backed, who would once have
seized a barrel of molasses and carried it on his head. An old seaman,
in short, dying now of consumption, at the age of forty-seven, in the
year one of the nineteenth century, in the house on the square that he
had just bought the year before, and going to his rest in the cemetery
of a New England village, twenty miles from the ocean that he had put
between himself and his kindred, the Thoreaus of Saint-Helier.
For he was a lad from the Old World who had set out to seek his fortune
in the colonies, leaving behind him at nineteen a little green island
in order to attempt a great continent of mystery and chance. In Jersey,
where he was born, his family lived in comfort as people of substance,
of good Norman stock, speaking the old _langue d’oïl_. How would the
old family name sound in another tongue? The mother was a certain Marie
le Galais, who had had nine children and was in her seventy-ninth year
at the moment when her John, over there, had just been laid, without
her knowledge, in the Concord cemetery, laid there by the children he
had left behind him. The late Philippe Thoreau, her husband, had taken
over the business of his father, a wine merchant, with a branch in
London, where two of their daughters had married extremely well. They
belonged to the solid bourgeoisie, these Norman Thoreaus.
The younger son of a numerous family, John had not waited for his
twentieth year before yielding to the invitation of a sailing vessel
that plied between Boston and Saint-Helier, and he had set out, leaving
his family to their casks on the little Channel island. John had gone
to sea. On his first long voyage he was shipwrecked and suffered
much. At Boston, along the docks, he found employment with various
ship-chandlers. Then the war broke out; no more work. The Harbour was
blockaded by the British fleet. He dug in the trenches round the town,
under the fire of the guns. Then he shipped on a privateer that set
out in pursuit of English vessels: for a Jerseyman, this was to follow
one of the hardiest traditions of his race. At the end of the war his
share of the prizes enabled him to open a shop on Long Wharf, where,
with one partner, he carried on business for twenty years. John had not
discredited his family; in the sale of molasses and other substantial
products, he had resumed the family path of business and sound
principles.
At twenty-seven he married Jane Burns, the child of a Scottish emigrant
to Massachusetts and of the daughter of a Quaker who was a sailor too.
When she died, after fifteen years, he owned, aside from the proceeds
of his prosperous trade, the town-house which Jane had inherited from
her grandfather David, the Quaker: a fine house worth all of $10,000.
A widower, forty years old, with a houseful of children--the eldest,
eight years old, still a little girl--John Thoreau, the merchant of
Long Wharf, took for his second wife a certain Widow Kettell. Shortly
after this, finding his health affected, he sold out his business and
retired to the country to live on his income.
And now the house he had bought on the square at Concord, thanks to
the handsome fortune amassed in these twenty years of trade, sheltered
a woman widowed anew and the little children of whom the oldest boy,
John, second of the name, was fourteen at the death of his father--and
four others bearing in their breast a heritage that weighed more
heavily than the few thousand dollars that were to come to each of
them....
* * * * *
A child was born on the Minot farm, on the Eastern edge of the village,
by that road down there, a little to one side, which they called, no
one knew why, the Virginia Road. Perhaps because it dived down into a
vague country, in the other direction from the road that led to the
market-place.
But there was no need to take the child to the market-place. The father
with his wife and his two chicks, Helen, not yet five, and John,
who was three, found themselves there, for want of anything better,
because his mother-in-law Minot, left a widow for the second time, had
given him a chance to turn his ability to account on the farm. This
agriculturist by accident was the eldest son of the old sailor who had
come to Concord to die: John Thoreau II, now thirty years old and a man
upon whom fortune, far from smiling, had turned its bare teeth.
No luck yet for good little John. Nevertheless, the paternal shade
had guided him along the right path: he should undoubtedly have been
a merchant, like his father, like the Thoreaus of Saint-Helier. Good
blood would tell. After a year of school to complete his primary
studies begun in Boston, he had lost no time in apprenticing himself
to their neighbour, who kept a store and added to the dignity of a
merchant that of parish Deacon. Thus the potent sisters Grocery and
Piety took the little store-clerk by the hand. Then he enlarged his
experience of the world and affairs at a small dry-goods store in the
little town of Salem. The kindly epoch still existed when people were
not afraid of humanising trade by offering you a glass of liquor over
the counter, when you had made a sizable purchase.
At twenty-one, rich in practical knowledge acquired elsewhere and with
a few bank-notes borrowed from his good step-mother, John had returned
to Concord to open a store. The beginning was most promising, but he
took a partner with whom he had a misunderstanding--the result was a
law-suit, which he won. Meanwhile the store had failed. He had to begin
all over again. Elizabeth, his older sister, had married and gone to
live in Maine. John followed and joined them, establishing himself at
Bangor with his brother-in-law, on the edge of the wilderness, where
the Indians were their best customers. Was John homesick, or was the
trade insufficient to maintain two managers? However it was, Concord
soon saw him back again, and at twenty-five, like a wise little man, he
married there.
This charming, sprightly Cynthia certainly brought our brave John the
greatest happiness of his life. But she brought him nothing else; so
the two of them set out together to try their fortune in Boston, the
great city. Who could tell, if one had had no luck thus far in villages
and small towns, perhaps one was cut out for success in a capital. Not
in this case, not this time. The solidest wealth they acquired was a
new baby, John, third of the name, following Helen, born the same year
as their marriage. And then they returned to Concord, to the house of
Cynthia’s mother, the farm where Cynthia herself had been living at
the time of her marriage. Home enough for a young family without any
definite situation; before tempting chance elsewhere, a little farming,
to help the mother-in-law, would serve in the interval. And then the
maternal presence would not be unprofitable for Cynthia, during her
imminent confinement.
Little chick, born by chance on an out-of-the-way farm, when your
grandfather died in a big house on the town square, are you as poor
as all that at the moment when you are cast upon this earth where he,
the old privateer, has been resting for sixteen years? In your veins
the calm blood of the Thoreaus is united with the impetuous blood of
the Dunbars; from this mixture you will be able to make something
perhaps, if you have a touch of fancy. Your father is a fine, sturdy
fellow, serious and kind-hearted, who is doing his best to make his way
with his three little children. If he has not developed into a great
commercial strategist, fate has made up for it by giving him a superior
wife. A very good thing, for your arrival in the world has not improved
their fortune.
No more than her husband was Cynthia a child of Concord. They were of
the same age. Just as he had come as a boy, with his people, so she
had come as a little girl, with her mother, from New Hampshire, where
the father whom she had never known, Asa Dunbar, had died. Cynthia was
the daughter of a minister, a minister who had been at the same time a
counsellor-at-law and a zealous freemason. On the maternal side, the
great crisis of the Revolution, which had given the first John Thoreau
an opportunity to amass a handsome capital, had ruined the family,
who had once been important and influential gentlefolk. Colonel
Jones, her grandfather, who, with his eight sons, had taken the side
of the Crown, had shared the lot of the vanquished: confiscation of
their land, imprisonment, banishment. The chivalrous and adventurous
race of the Joneses had left their mark upon Cynthia in traits as
pronounced as the obscurity of her husband’s character: a taste for
elegance, a gift of eloquence. She knew how to talk, and there was as
much conviction in her words as in his silence. She loved to set the
lively tone of a bow of ribbon singing on a piece of cloth, like a
declaration of independence. She was not afraid to startle people by
a freedom of speech that was sharp enough to be malicious. It was a
handsome girl with dark eyes that John had taken for his wife, with
the calm assurance of these little serious, sedate men. Her charming
voice, when she sang, the animation of her talk, the vividness of her
replies had made up for his abysses of silence and self-effacement.
Happiest of harmonies, secured by an unassuming man whose wife talks
and is cheerful and has enough wit for two. John and Cynthia formed one
of those happy unions to which one brings genius, the other his lack
of genius, and both have courage enough to meet the ups and downs of
existence.
Cynthia, the youngest of her family, had two sisters, Sophia and
Louisa. She had the luck to possess a brother also, the gem of the
Dunbars, the rare flower of generations that had multiplied their
branches to blossom at last in the alliance of a minister with the
daughter of a gentleman-farmer. Charles Dunbar had taken the sunny
side of life. He had not asked it to make dollars grow on the counter
of a shop or in the furrows of husbandry where a man strains his
back, greatly to the detriment of his good-humour; he had let it go
its own way, since it was full of amusing things and he himself was
a strong man, capable of mastering it. Not stupid enough to settle
down, he rambled from village to village, an eternal apprentice whose
apprenticeship pursued its course especially in taverns. A splendid
voice, bursting from his athletic frame, was enough to assure him
success among his jolly comrades. But Uncle Charles was also an
incomparable wag. It is not enough to draw the long bow and talk well
in a tavern to put the company in a cheerful mood: you must show what
you are. Then you do astonishing tricks with cards, toss your hat into
the air and catch it again on the top of your head, swallow your nose,
or juggle away the knives, forks and plates on the table, refusing to
restore them until the landlord agrees not to charge you for your meal.
And as if this were not enough, you seize a ten-foot ladder, stand it
upright without any support, clamber up to the last rung and descend on
the other side, pushing it back with your foot. Yes, and handsomely.
Would any of these gentlemen like to have a try?... But old Charles’s
great feat was wrestling. With him wrestling was a primal, necessary
function, like eating and drinking. In the most natural way in the
world, he would walk into your house with the flattering remark, “Come
along, I’m going to throw you. Out with you.” And you had to go out,
spread some straw in the yard and place yourself in position. Of course
he did throw you. And then he was as pleased as if you had invited him
to the best of dinners at your house. This passion for wrestling seized
him suddenly as sensual desire seizes people who are badly brought
up. And you never had to be afraid that he would break your ribs: an
accomplished wrestler, he would displant you neatly, like an artist and
a gentleman. In this vocation he had lost all his teeth at the age of
twenty-one, which did not prevent him from having every blessed one of
them later on. Perhaps they had grown again--you never can tell with
these fire-eaters.
To judge him from this unconventional manner of living, anyone might
suppose that Charles would have been the victim of bad habits. A
great mistake. He did not gamble, he drank only in reason, he did not
smoke--at most, for the sake of politeness, he would take a pinch
of snuff if you offered it to him. His dress was always correct and
his language free from coarseness. Among his rare privileges Charles
possessed that of suddenly falling asleep in the very midst of whatever
he happened to be doing. Sometimes, with his razor in his hand, before
his mirror, without any reason he would succumb to sleep; and in order
to conform to the strict observance of the Sabbath which, as we know,
prohibits sleep, he found it necessary to devote himself on that day
to some absorbing occupation, such as sprouting potatoes. In pursuing
these artistic hobbies one does not gather very much of this world’s
goods, but he had found more enviable advantages: a reputation solidly
established in various public places and the promise of restoring
to the Lord a soul as fresh as on the day when it had been confided
to his care. Charles Dunbar, you are the salt of your family. Your
kindred should bless you. And as for this baby nephew who is just
born, to have an uncle who can hold himself in equilibrium on the top
of an unsupported ladder and possesses that formidable voice which,
from the strand, hails a ship at sea--what self-command this will give
him later, and what carrying-power for anything he may have to say or
proclaim.... If he is seized with a desire to leap over some obstacle,
his legs will remember you who, while leading your oxen, sprang over
the yoke with your feet together, once, twice, a mere nothing to amuse
the lads of the saw-mill whose eyes popped out of their heads at this
phenomenon.
When she was eight years old, Cynthia had set out by sea on a
ramshackle boat, with her mother and her two sisters, to see her
Jones uncles, the refugees in Maine and Canada. It was shortly after
this rather risky voyage that the mother and the daughter had come
to Concord, where the former had remarried and the latter, fifteen
years later, had fixed her destiny, sought her fortune, by uniting her
poverty with John’s.
To their possessions had now been added this youngster born on the
farm. The 12th of July, 1817, was inscribed on the tablets of the
household. Also the date of baptism, three months later, when,
stoically, uttering no shrill cries, Henry David (this latter name in
memory of Uncle David, who had just died) entered upon the Christian
life. One enters as one can. But whatever might be the virtue of the
baptismal water and the minister of the parish, Dr. Ripley, would it
prevail against the farm and the old deserted road on the edge of
which the child had been born? Glance at this farm: it is an ancient
two-storied dwelling, with plank walls discoloured with age, a setting
as appropriate for the birth of a god as for the coming of this poor
little soul. It stands on a knoll where the grass grows at will. No
fence. In front, a running brook. Around it, meadows and orchards,
where you smell the good soil and the turf. The nearest neighbour is
a long way off. The old winding road leads to no point whither the
interests of the villagers call them; and left to itself, it smiles at
its turnings, its ruts, at all the weeds on its banks, inviting the
fields it passes to share its delightful futility. The family occupies
one wing of the dwelling, the other half being inhabited by some people
who also have a little boy, in whose company John, with the authority
of his three years, drives the turkeys to pasture.
For the rest, the revenues of the farm were so small that the
mother-in-law had barely enough to live on. Eight months after
Henry’s birth, the household went to rejoin her in the red house
where she lived at the end of the village. The head of a family whose
peregrinations had not yet brought him wealth tried to think of some
better means of providing bread for these three little importunate
beaks. One must manage somehow. What remained of the paternal heritage
was scarcely worth talking about: the numerous minors having once
grown up, the lawyers and the trustees had left it nothing but a pale
memory. At the death of the Widow Kettell, each of the children of
the old sailor had pocketed a few crumbs, and that was the end of it.
And John’s share of the Boston house was already mortgaged. He had to
put his wits together. John had an idea. A vocation is not so easily
renounced, especially when it is confirmed by the voice of one’s
ancestors. Suppose they were to try Chelmsford over there, ten miles
away, and take a store. Cynthia could wait on the customers, while
John, who was very fertile in manual resources in spite of his modest
air, would try to find work outside. He could paint signs and do odd
jobs, and they would get on somehow.
Henry’s Aunt Sarah had already taught him to walk when, at sixteen
months, he took part in the exodus to Chelmsford. They remained there
two years and a half, keeping a grocery with a bar, near the church.
They sold spirits. They were honest and upright. But it’s always the
same story: fortune, which so joyously allows herself to be captured
by dare-devils, has not even the shadow of a smile for these honest
and reserved little Johns, even when they offer it a glass over the
counter. A pity, but there was no need to be discouraged because a
fourth child had been born. This one was a daughter; she was going to
bring them happiness and they would call her Sophia. Once more they set
out to try the capital, where people were rolling in money and might
be willing to let a few crumbs drop into the till of an honest man.
They found a perch in the southern part of Boston, calling on the way
at Concord. During this journey a pair of infant eyes that were hardly
open as yet to the images of the world were impressed by the glimpse
of a wild pond in the setting of an immemorial forest. The gaze of a
tender little creature, who knew nothing about the gold they had set
out to win among the rich, secretly absorbed the lustre of this pearl.
In two years of the great city they had three abodes. The town offered
every facility for sending to school a little boy of five, but there
was no great harvest for his parents to reap there. They were obliged
to give it up as hopeless. These removals had brought the young
household no success.
There was nothing to do but to return to the fold, to the house on
the square in which Thoreau the father had died, the father upon whom
fortune had smiled, and where John’s two sisters lived. It was the last
resource. John had been an apprentice in the village, he knew everybody
there, and there the little ones had been born. After all, it might be
better to live in poverty in Concord than to tempt chance elsewhere.
Off for old Concord. An honest little man, pursued by ill fortune, with
four chicks and their mother, was to seek his destiny henceforth in the
shadow of the great elms.
* * * * *
You will soon be six years old. Your parents have toiled and tried
every expedient to make ends meet, but for you who do not enter into
these domestic considerations life is a long holiday. All Concord is
spread out on your lap, like a great book full of pictures and songs.
You go forth and meet the adventures the roads offer. A dog passes,
a man, a cart. The great elms sigh. A cock calls in the distance of
the grey-white village. Two neighbours are soberly gossiping. The
first beautiful drops of a shower drum on the leaves and the wooden
sidewalk. You have no desire to turn back. The little girl ahead of you
is hurrying to the store. All these and how many other marvels, from
morning to bedtime, the long stretch of unmeasured hours, are all for
you, you who are not a king’s son, but the little Henry of the man who
lives on the village square, in the centre of a bustling, confused,
spangled universe, striped with sun-rays and surprises.
You are growing, and about you as you grow the world takes form. When
you are big and able to stand firmly on your feet, people depend on
you and entrust you with important commissions: leading the cow to
pasture, running on errands in the village. When you are very big you
are allowed to do everything; and if you have a brother who is much
bigger than you there are no limits to the conquests you can make
together. You are bound only by the four points of the compass. The
country about the village stretches away to the impossible. You have a
knife in your pocket, with which you can whittle anything you please,
a whistle, a weapon, a slingshot, a wagon. You make a trap. You rove
on wild adventures through the sunny meadows, gorge yourself with
huckleberries, run about, playing Indian, dig a cave, build a hut and
store it with provisions. At twelve you go hunting with your brother.
To feel the fowling-piece hanging from your shoulder, to be the crafty
master of the life and death of the creatures who have no suspicion
of your overwhelming power, to lie in wait for them, press the gun to
your shoulder, take aim, see the animal roll or tumble over: fearful
joys. There will be others later, but will they have the pure taste of
these? When you penetrate into these deep woods, a swarming world opens
before you that probably has no end. No village, no houses, no parents,
no fences any more; nothing but the great pines and the solemn oaks,
assembled like conspirators to hold counsel far from listening ears.
You are alone and very small under those heads touching one another
up there, but you feel no fear. You are armed, and, besides, your big
brother is with you. In the middle of the woods there is a pond towards
which the arches of foliage bend amid their garlands of wild vines. You
come there to fish for pouts and breams. You have brought your lunch to
spend the whole day there, as if you were on a desert island, on the
edge of this smooth water that mirrors the patriarchal trees. Night has
fallen; you have made a fire on the stones and before going away you
seize the red brands and shake them, describing fiery circles in the
air, then throw them into the water where they hiss and go out. Then,
when the flames are dead, you find yourself once more in the dense
night, in a darkness thick enough to cut, and groping your way you
return to the village with your fish--two Concord boys, who scour the
earth barefoot the better to possess it.
To be a Concord boy is to be intoxicated with the joy of the river, the
two rivers that unite here, the sluggish one and the lively one, and
pull as well together as John and Cynthia. It is to swim by the hour
in the cove with your comrades, under the arbour of pine branches that
shelters your duck-like sports. In the spring the overflowing river
floods the meadows--an immense sheet of water from which the trees
emerge: it is no longer fifty yards from bank to bank but half a mile
wide and more, like a great lake with gulls flying over it. There is
hay-time and the cranberry season; there are the Cliffs from which you
descry the faraway peaks where you have never gone, where perhaps the
world ends--since over there is the empire of the setting sun. You sail
a boat with a paddle or a mast, drink in the fragrance of the banks,
the waterplants, the crumpled mint-leaves, or you carry your line
with you and are engrossed for hours, dividing your attention between
the mystery of the depths that spread quivering up to your float and
the squadrons of clouds that cleave the great sky spread out over the
meadows. At these times you encounter now and then an old fisherman,
leathery and taciturn, who blends into the bank of the river, his
ancient cloak having taken its colour with time, and returns at evening
with slow steps to his little shanty on the edge of the village. When
he is fishing you have no desire to disturb him; he looks so grave.
He is not amusing himself, he is conducting a rite--the rite of the
compleat angler. No one pays any attention to the old chap: but Henry
knows him well and is attracted by his silence. Perhaps he has been
there since the time of the Indians; he is ageless. This must be old
Father Musketaquid, who is on the most intimate terms with all the
fishes.
And then the immense charm of the passage of an occasional barge on the
river, come who knows whence?--the rivers, whence come they? whither
do they go?--floating soundlessly towards nowhere. One day you see
that barge moored at the edge of a meadow; the following day it has
disappeared. To what race do these men on board belong? What language
do they speak? They have come from the world outside and yet they know
the river so well.... When will they pass again? On these boats are
piled hogsheads full of lime or bricks or iron-ore, with wheel-barrows.
How do they manage not to sink under this formidable weight? And yet,
when you climb up there, it is firm, it does not give. Strange. And
these men who, they say, sleep in their boats and live there as Henry
lives in a house on the village square.... How he would love to sleep
in a boat too, eat there, light a fire, spend the whole night on the
water! There are people who insist that these boats have sails like the
boats that go on the ocean; they have seen them. How can you believe
that? They pass like the birds, conjuring up other lands and a whole
unknown world to which the river may lead, a world that is certainly
impenetrable. Henry dashes off with his brother to feast on this
marvel. But he has still more beautiful sensations. Once a year a group
of men with reddish brown faces, altogether different from the men
of the village, come and camp under a tent in the meadows. They make
baskets and offer you collars of glass beads. Among themselves they
speak the language of sorcerers. They have a canoe which they manage in
the strangest fashion. The big people tell you that they were once the
masters of the country, in the days of old Tahataivan, before such a
place as Concord ever existed. If you had a canoe and were one of the
Redskins, you would not make baskets; you would spend your time hunting
and fishing and making expeditions; you would be one of the kings of
the country.
There is, of course, a school to which they send you, for it is a fine
thing to know how to read straight off, like your father, who reads
the newspaper. But the class is only an interlude between two sessions
of school out of doors. The river, the ponds are hard and smooth as
steel; it is the season for skating and sleighing-parties on the snow.
What does it matter that your sled has no iron runners and the other
boys make fun of it? You love it just the same because it is your own,
and nothing in the world could induce you to give it up. When you know
how to read, write and cipher, you still have a great many things
to learn, for your family dreams of a more brilliant future for you
than that of a store-keeper. So you enter the Academy founded by the
well-to-do for boys who want to become learned men. You must master
Greek, Latin, French, plunge into the classics, and grind away till you
are sixteen.
To follow the course at the Concord Academy and become better educated
than your parents is all very fine, for Concord has so many ways
of compensating you. But afterwards? These ambitious parents have
conceived the bold project of sending their younger boy to college to
learn what the Concord Academy cannot teach him. To leave Concord....
Ah, how desolate the Greek, the Latin, the French, this stupendous
human learning looks at the thought of all you must leave behind in
order to fathom its mysteries!... How heavy your heart is, at sixteen,
Henry, with these early tender affections to which you are to bid
an abrupt farewell as you set out for Harvard ... you, the son of
the little store-keeper, to serve your time in a department store of
learning.