When the Thoreau school unexpectedly closed, Henry was only twenty-four
years old. But he had moved forward since he had left Harvard. His
convictions, already clear, the presentiments of the college boy, had
acquired more force. He had ripened early in solitude and study, and
his experience of the world had enlarged. He had had some taste of it,
and the face he presented to it held little promise of friendship.
The aversion he had felt in college for an atmosphere dominated by the
young gentleman was extended now to the village atmosphere, the realm
of the young gentleman’s self-satisfied country cousin. The dear little
town, preserved in a syrup of sweet conventions, smiled with an air of
inviting him to add to its sweetness. The church-tower there pointed
toward heaven the sacred meaning of its anxious cares: observance,
decency, mediocrity--store-keepers, farmers, townspeople, honourable
souls one and all, cast in the same mould, more or less orthodox, good
folk, honest folk, so very honest, in almost perfect agreement, as if
they were acting together some excellent amateur comedy of manners.
Join in the dance, my boy. As he watched them performing their parts he
had no inclination to figure in the play. These farces bored him and
left him cold. Henry felt within him a disobedient soul.
Where in the world had it come from, this little seed of rebellion that
had sprouted in the soul of the child and sprung up in the boy? It was
to-day, at any rate, a fine, tough-grained shrub, well-rooted in the
soil. The school-less schoolmaster had no inclination to share in the
social mill that blissfully revolved about him. Under his hat there was
not an atom of the will that animated his forebears, the merchants of
the Norman island, or his grandfather, the store-keeper of Long Wharf.
A sad fact, but so it was. As naturally as they breathed or said their
prayers his family had put on the harness in all docility and taken
the road like good domestic animals who never dream that anything else
exists in the universe than the shafts, the rack, the halter, the
town-square and the street-corners where one turns every day. Doesn’t
this attract you, this cab-horse’s life, with the certainty of a bag of
oats at the end of the journey? With a beautiful plume on your head?
With your diploma you could easily be the master’s horse.
Many thanks. This may very well be, as the doctors say, the good old
wisdom of the ages, with an assured recompense in this world and the
next, but for me it has a disagreeable taste. If I listen to you and
nibble the good oats now, I shall soon find myself grazing in the
field and obliged to chew dry stalks. No doubt about that. I don’t
propose to let your wisdom catch me. It is soft and subtle; it is so
powerful because everyone, wherever he turns, not only breathes it in
himself and is impregnated at its touch, but passes it on, willy-nilly,
to the next fellow. It has its agents at work in the four quarters
of the world. To this marvellous wisdom, the crown of centuries of
civilisation, Henry gives another name, fraud. It has made itself at
home in the village as in the great city. And it has that smile because
it knows it is universally accepted.
Henry smiles too, for he is thinking of another universe than that of
the hay-merchants. What alienates him from their brotherhood is the
ugliness of their existence, pure derision. His own seems to him true,
fresh and full of unexpected things, lived in the quick beauty of
every moment, demanding no other profit than itself. Munch away your
life, then, good citizens of Concord, and permit me to _live_ mine.
The shadow cast by our elms is not sufficiently enveloping to sweep
me along after you into the paths of honourable stupefaction. I know
what your society makes of a man by taming him. It will get along very
well without my help. If it has held me for a short time, while I was
groping my way, trying to get my bearings, you may be assured that this
is over and done with. I have no desire to be a bad neighbour to you;
you are very worthy members of this parish. But don’t count on my aid
in making your merry-go-round go. I have my own corn to grind. You say
that in refusing to adapt myself to your rhythm I condemn myself to
poverty. As you please; why not? He laughs best who laughs last. I am
not afraid of my poverty. But I should have a terrible fear of what you
call your respectability, your industry, your virtue, if I were ever
threatened with having to share them.
But his whole race, all this little world about him, modelled in the
image of the great world, had obeyed the commandment: Look after
your business, increase your wealth. He listened to the mandate from
within--listened in his own fashion. Yes, exactly, look after one’s
_own_ business, increase one’s _own_ wealth. Interpret this freely, in
your own way. This boy does interpret it in his own free way. He counts
as much as anyone on “making a position for himself.” There are many
fine formulas of this kind that pass like counters from hand to hand,
from one shop to another, from father to son, while no one suspects
their true value. “Make a living” is one of them. Do you mean, make
a living and lose what makes it worth while? Then make it, makers of
money. We shall see in the end who is rich and who is poor. There is
nothing the matter with your formulas. I shall take them and give them
a good cleaning before I use them, for your hands have dulled them,
soiled them. They will have to be bright and new for my poverty.
Henry is no frivolous boy, make no mistake about that. The great
business of existence occupies his thoughts too. He asks himself if
life is not too precious an affair to be sold in pencils or lessons,
or measured out behind a counter, or at so much the page at a clerk’s
desk. Yes indeed, the great business of existence.... Exactly. But in
quite another sense than that of all these poor souls who are much
more aware of their dollars, their cattle and their land than of their
essential poverty. Henry is quite willing to be poor, but poor like
these people, never. By _no_ means. Not at any price. He intends to
pile up day by day the wealth to which all these well-to-do people, who
think they are so comfortable and so shrewd, pay no heed. The great
business of existence, in his twenty-five-year old eyes, is to create
oneself, to _live_, develop oneself, with respect for this gift that
one is--respect and love for this material that has been placed in
one’s hands in the rough for one to make of it the most beautiful of
works of art. Is that clear, you poor souls, with your minds on dollars
and cents?
As he watches this world, so diligent in its little wiles, its little
thieveries, Henry has no disposition for recriminations and dark
thoughts. He is too full of happiness. He feels his own strength. Let
them have their gains! A tissue of trivialities, their days, whose
comings and goings form the woof and the warp of their life. It amuses
him vastly to behold the beautiful acquisitions they pile up around
their mediocrity, like so much worthless bric-a-brac. Dull souls,
not to see that the first step to wealth is to simplify one’s life,
disencumber it of endless useless knick-knacks that prevent it from
growing. Money, to Henry, represents a pair of stout boots, a straw
hat, corduroy trousers. These elements once acquired at little cost, he
feels that all the other things--the savoury things the earth freely
offers--are given him in addition, as a bounty, as to anyone who
trusts. The apples in the orchard and the pike in the river and the joy
of the banks are all thrown in. Your money, your absurd money, thanks
to which you think you are assured of the enjoyment of the world,
simply prevents you from getting it. Your incomes are your jailers;
they stand on guard night and day about you. You serious men, you
sensible men, perpendicularly set upon your principles, you sly old men
of business, dignified heads of families, with an iron belief in the
sanctity of your motives, how ludicrous you are in the eyes of a boy
who strips away your mask....
A certain mustiness, for the rest, which he finds everywhere in this
Puritan atmosphere, offends the taste of the savage and the soul of
the pagan that have come to him heaven knows whence. He is not adapted
to the moral sanctity which these wooden sidewalks exhale. From his
childhood, the meeting-house, the pulpit, the Sunday school and the
tedious Sunday itself have made piety unpleasant in his eyes. How
does it happen that the church is generally the ugliest building in
a village? Is it a symbol? And if, some fine Sunday, in place of the
preacher, shouting like a herdsman whose herd is refractory, some
honest soul, some simple wood-cutter from the backwoods were to begin
to utter, with his accent, before the congregation, a few of the words
of Jesus, do you imagine that a single pane would remain in the windows
of the edifice, that a single worshipper would stay in his pew and
brave the crash? That old story refers across the ages to a fine,
frank character who must have been as simple as a wood-cutter, and who
could never have suspected, poor soul (otherwise how quickly he would
have stopped talking!), that after eighteen hundred years his name
would be invoked by all the brawlers of New England and creation to
confuse men and women. A splendid fellow, this Jesus, the carpenter’s
son--too beautiful for us to be able to doubt, in spite of the
vagueness of his story or of his legend, that he really existed in the
flesh--a boy come from the people to recall the bigots and hucksters
to decency, close up the vestries and the temples, put a little manly
pride into the heart of the poor, and obliged, after his time and in
spite of himself, to be the patron of the most flourishing business of
emasculation.
I know you are going to say to me: this is no substantial nourishment,
this old gospel of Judea, for a hearty lad who has worked all day and
likes to put a juicier morsel into his mouth. I agree. It does not
alter the fact that in spite of all the efforts of Christianity to
disgust you with him, Jesus, my brother, spreads about him an aroma
of godlike humanity. As you read the almost unknown book in which his
life is told, you wish, just because you are a pagan yourself, that you
could call your friends and say to them: Look here, I want to read to
you some pages you probably don’t know--they enchant me.... What do you
think of my discovery? Isn’t it fine? Isn’t it a splendid heresy, with
enough revolutionary force in it to crack the shell of this antiquated
world? And how happy you would be to welcome as a comrade the friend of
the vagabond if ... if the fanatic in front did not need him to thrust
into his sermon and shoot him at the worshipper at his feet.... Poor
fellow, soul of love, heart of the poor, what have they made of you?...
The famous Pilgrim Fathers, who embarked on the Mayflower to free
themselves spiritually and found a new England--did they imagine that
in doing this they would be liberated from themselves? It was hardly
worth while making this long voyage when, in the hold of the famous
boat, the Son of Man was in irons. They had really come to organize,
among other solid businesses, that immense conspiracy against life with
which every child born under a roof in any of the Atlantic States is
supposed to associate itself tacitly, and which he must never betray
till death, under pain of eternal damnation and a damned existence here
below. What a black responsibility Plymouth Rock bears!
This particular mania is what the posterity of the Pilgrim Fathers
call their religion. It taxes with sin the innocence of a boy who sets
off for a Sunday walk in the woods, or takes his fishing-line to the
water-side at church-time, to feel religious in his own fashion: the
Brotherhood of Sunday Bores sneers as the Sunday Walker passes. This
religion, with its church-tower, is broadminded enough to tolerate
the guile that gets the best of your neighbour during six days of the
week.... Ugh.... Come nearer, good people, and let me tweak your noses
and then turn my back and enjoy a good laugh. Your pious, mercantile
existence is too dismal; a little gaiety would not ill become you. Your
Sabbath bell strikes death into the soul; it sounds as if the continent
were groaning in the unending misery of the terrestrial abode adorned
by the Smug.
How was it possible for Henry to feel that he belonged to the same
parish as these parishioners? As a matter of fact, this refractory
soul had early declared his position. Soon after his return from
college, at twenty, he had refused to pay the church-tax of the parish
and officially separated himself from it with a written declaration
in which no deacon caught a hint of humour: “Know all men by these
presents that I Henry Thoreau do not wish to be regarded as a member of
any incorporated society which I have not joined.” This was plain and
precise. Take that, clerk of the parish; put this disavowal away among
your old papers, so it can bear witness in case there is need for it
some day. The parish has carelessly counted one parishioner too many.
This was about the time when Henry, master in a parish school, flatly
refused to form the character of his pupils with the help of the
rod. Naturally this double rebellion, against the authorities of the
village and the church, made him a suspicious character. The following
year, when he reached the age for voting, he openly refused to perform
the elementary act of a good citizen of a great democratic Republic.
Moreover, the very success, for three years, of the Thoreau school
had brought him the marked hostility of the mandarins of the village.
This stiff little schoolmaster ... this whipper-snapper of twenty-one
who permitted himself not to have recourse to corporal punishment, who
taught in an independent, lively fashion, who took the children off
boating or gathering huckleberries instead of holding them by fear!
Impudent! We shall have to be on our guard against you.
All right, be on your guard, mandarins. If the world speaks through
your lips, I shall let the world go. From childhood Henry has been used
to walking alone, at his own pace. He will try to find whether there
does not exist somewhere another world of which he carries the image in
himself. His one ambition, and it is a great one, is to make the finest
use of the marvellous gift that he has received--life. He has received
it, he is sure of that, and he knows its value. He must find out how
to employ his faculties, that is all. Perhaps he is destined for some
uncatalogued employment. He will see. But it must be an occupation that
dispenses him from conniving with this world of universal huckstering.
That’s settled. Every line he has meditated in college, every one
of his impressions since the time when he drove his parents’ cow to
pasture, has confirmed him in the resolution to remain himself, cost
what it may. The inflexibility which he does not dissemble and which
renders him insupportable to the mandarins is merely the outward sign
of this will.
In any case, he desires to work only at what is useful, with his
hands or his brain or his idleness--fruitfully, that is all that
matters--according to his own idea of the useful. Those numberless
absurd or degrading interests that absorb the human race he puts aside
with deliberate design. He can easily make shift with the little
sympathy that is felt for him in some quarters. If he had piled up a
lot of rubbish in a shop and sold it at a good profit, like a true
Thoreau of tradition, he would certainly have accomplished a work
agreeable to the Lord. It’s a pity, but he has no desire to please the
Lord or his servants. He wants to please himself. This is certainly
not the way to get up in the world; but for the moment, so far as that
is concerned, to be planted on his two legs and to stand on the top of
the Cliffs and watch the sun setting behind the mountains seems to him
sufficiently happy till something better turns up.
* * * * *
And then there was another side to the story. Since college Henry had
been working with definite aspirations, drawn towards a path that led
heaven knew whither but solicited him with an authority as sweetly
irresistible as the open spaces, out there, on a morning when he had a
hunger for discovery.
This dated even from the days before college. At Harvard some of his
compositions revealed an intellectual curiosity, a boldness, a turn of
mind that did not suggest the future lawyer or the embryo minister.
Henry was already trying to express himself. As a growing boy he had
devoured eagerly the scraps of new thought that came within reach of a
villager. They had a fresh, exquisite flavour that left a good taste in
his mouth. One day the friends of culture had inaugurated at Concord
one of those Lyceums which were being founded almost everywhere in
Massachusetts. Henry was only twelve years old at the time; but in
future, before going to college, he followed assiduously the lectures
and debates. The most beautiful of these lectures was the one he heard
there when he was eighteen, delivered by the step-grandson of old Dr.
Ripley, the minister of the parish, and a former minister himself,
who had come to settle in the village after a difference with the
ecclesiastical authorities.
What seized him, exalted him, was not so much the oration itself,
composed for the occasion of the second centenary of the founding of
Concord, as the sight of the lecturer, his expression, his eyes, the
indefinable charm of his words. How right he had been to give up the
church and its nonsense, this fellow of thirty-three, to come out
as a man among men and talk to them with that voice and that smile
that invited you to close your eyes to the wretched spectacles of the
world and contemplate the figures which the spheres describe in their
sacred dances. This man spoke as one inspired, with a simplicity, a
nobility that carried you away. It was said that he had made a journey
to Europe and had met a great many people over there, talked with
Coleridge, Wordsworth and this Carlyle who was about to publish an
astonishing book. He was just going to marry a second time. The year
after the lecture, they had recited a poem of his in celebration of
the anniversary of the famous battle of Lexington, a historic date
from which Concord drew most of its lustre. It looked as if this new
inhabitant, who had come to enjoy the natural charm of the little
town, had brought it in exchange a superior charm capable of raising
it above itself: short as the time was since he had settled there,
he already cut a great figure, second only to that of his venerable
step-grandfather, the spiritual director of the parish. Henry was
nineteen years old. And this very year the poet published a book
that was even richer than the most beautiful lecture. What a book!
A revelation, a gospel, the music of which made you melt with pure
admiration and joy. To think that this man was your neighbour.... That
simple title _Nature_ touched Henry at the most sensitive point. He was
captivated, illumined, confirmed in his own aspirations. If he himself,
some day, could only write pages that had a little of that subtle and
luminous quality!...
If he could become a writer, one of those people who have something to
say and know how to say it! At certain moments when he found himself
really face to face with himself, Henry had the impression that there
was something more than a great desire within him, that he had the
power as well. Before his twentieth year and aside from his college
dissertations, he composed, as an experiment, a few descriptive pages,
wrote a rhymed ballad. And since his return from college, his Journal
had always been there, scrupulously written up, to receive the secrets
of this desire, the more urgent inquiries, the first attempts of a
beginner who does not really know if the vein is rich but is heartily
resolved to pursue his exploration, even if he is to have at the end
nothing but the joy of exploring and contemplating the beautiful veins
of the earth cut away by the drill.
Whenever he was not too dissatisfied with a page he had written, he
read it to his little sister, for when you have a sister like Sophia,
who feels just as you do, a true Thoreau, you can let her into the
secret. It was at the beginning of the autumn that followed Henry’s
return home. A sister-in-law of the new great man of Concord was
boarding with his parents. Henry liked her very much: one day in the
spring of this year, while passing under her open window, with the
gesture of a shy young boy, he had even thrown her a bouquet of fresh
violets gathered on his walk, wrapped up in his apprentice rhymes.
Yes, Henry liked Lucy Brown very much and he told or wrote her of
things that he would never have been willing to confide to anyone
else. In talking with this friend, Sophia, who had gone to one of the
great man’s lectures, could not help remarking: “That is very much
like something that Henry has written....” It was easy to verify this
singular concordance, which Lucy Brown mentioned to her brother-in-law.
The great man wanted to see this young neighbour whose thought was so
much akin to his own; had he progressed so well, then, the college
boy whom he, as an influential and charitable man, had recommended
to the benevolence of the President of Harvard? And so Henry found
himself face to face with the man whose words, whose expression, whose
beautiful book had stirred him.
And now that they had met they were delighted with each other. Each
had understood the other at a glance; and before long they felt as if
they had always been friends. Waldo was the elder by fourteen years,
but Henry’s maturity of mind made one forget that he was only twenty.
Practically speaking, they were of the same age. The great man, who
also kept a Journal, observed in it: “My good Henry Thoreau made
this else solitary afternoon sunny with his simplicity and clear
perception.” Happiest of moments were those when they set out together
for a ramble in the woods. At such times it was as if Henry was
introducing his lady-love to the author of the beautiful book on Dame
Nature. There Henry was at home, his companion was only on a visit. But
so happy, this latter, to become acquainted, thanks to his guide, with
so many things he had only perceived from a distance, things he had
touched in thought but not through the senses. This boy knew everything
that a philosopher did not suspect and introduced his friends of the
forest to you in such a way that they counted henceforth among your own
friends. In an excursion with Henry you were the guest shown about by
the master of the estate. The great man became the student once more
in the hands of this initiate. Charming student. Charming walks when
these two were happy together, the one penetrating into the secret life
of the woods with this sylvan creature, the other showing his intimate
friend the cherished marvels that had been familiar to him from his
childhood. How could a friendship rooted in the mould of the forest
fail to shoot up high and thick? When the great man’s family planned an
expedition to the Cliffs, they sometimes begged Henry to go with them
and not to forget to bring his flute.
Who can say what either one or the other of the friends reaped from
these walks, these conversations, this exchange? Who gained the more?
It would be hard to say. For Henry, in any case, in return for what he
brought the great man--an influence that was tonic, real, strong as
the taste of some crumpled aromatic plant or even the pungency of a
thought impregnated with the raciness of the soil--how comforting it
was to find in his elder such a wonderful response to his own youthful
meditations ... to hear, for instance, such perceptions as these: “Life
is an art. When we consider what life may be to all, and what it is to
most, we shall see how little this art is yet understood.... The work
of life ... is self-culture ... the perfect unfolding of our individual
nature,” when, at his own entrance into life, his instinct had repeated
to him in every key this very admonition.... To hear this from the lips
of a sage whose personality was so magnetically impressive was to yield
to the purest appeal of oneself while gathering the sweetest fruit of
friendship.
In the warmth of this exchange, which transformed old Concord and gave
it a new relish, Henry’s tastes were developed, along with his peculiar
ambition. From an assiduous listener at the meetings of the Lyceum he
had become a lecturer. At twenty-one he read there the fragment he was
just then writing on _Society_. It was as bold as the first attempt of
a young man is likely to be, and not very thrilling for the village
_élite_, who had come to listen to a little schoolmaster on his first
appearance on the platform; especially as he made no elocutionary
efforts to win them. He read his paper to them as he would have read
it at home to his sister, without any further adornment; it was their
business to listen and profit by it. When people do not understand
you there always remains for them the resource of guessing at your
drift. In spite of this, the following year, because he was actively
interested in the maintenance of this centre in the grey village
existence, they made him the secretary of the Lyceum, in charge of the
lectures--without remuneration, which gave the post its value and charm
in Henry’s eyes. Whether the audience followed him or not he meant to
go on speaking, even if the things he had to say were a little beyond
the horizon of Concord. Why should Concord not permit itself to shed a
little light, even from afar, upon those who lacked it?
So from now on a luminous centre existed here in spite of the good
people who were so busy, here as elsewhere, digesting the dough of
their days, without disturbing themselves about an art of living.
There were philosophic symposia at the great man’s house. A few choice
men and even a muse met there, deeply interested in lofty problems
and united in the same disinterested worship of the ideal. Towards
the third year of the Thoreau school, various wise personages were to
be seen there, Harvard graduates, men of learning, a poet, most of
them young, attracted from various points in the neighbouring country
through their love for a certain new thought. Especially to be noted
was one who had the air of presiding over the conversations, with the
authority of a man of forty; a pure spirit, lodged by mistake or a
singular taste for antithesis in a carnal envelope--thin, lanky, with
a pale skin and a head crowned with weeping hair, already white, named
after one of the minor prophets, Amos. Amos Bronson Alcott. This noble
dreamer had just settled in Concord with his terrestrial family, for
he had taken a wife and begotten daughters, after the human law. As
for the muse, her thirty summers had brought forth a bony visage and
masculine features; her fascination was due to her great learning and
her fancy and enthusiasm. Her name was Margaret Fuller. In such company
you soon felt disburdened of your clayey mediocrity. You were ready to
embark for the various points in the sky which the programme of the
meeting indicated. The smile of the master of the house was enough
to give you full confidence. Adventurous, intoxicating expeditions
on which, after soaring through the clouds, you were never sure of
being able to recover your path on the earth. They were veritable
skylarkings of the spirit.
Henry listened, sharing in the discussions. Allied as he was to these
choice spirits by the noble interests that were common to them, he
did not feel entirely in harmony with them. Alcott was very eloquent
and said many beautiful things. But while these tours of the heavens
have an irresistible attraction for young and generous souls, Henry
had never lost his plebeian habit of feeling the grain of the earth
under his boots. In this refined game it was the stakes that mattered
to him; the game for the game’s sake struck him as a little academic.
They were neo-platonists. But as these new aspirations required a
new name they had adopted that of Realists or Transcendentalists,
which the great man had selected with his friend George Ripley, who
lived in Boston. Realists, those who pursued the reality behind the
appearance--Transcendentalists, seekers of the infinite through the
finite: this had the right sound, it told the story, and it was
unorthodox enough to disturb all those pious heads that were congealed
in the ice of their formulas. The smell of heresy is sweet to the
nostrils of one who is fond of sniffing the wind.
Henry rejoiced to feel in himself the soul of a Transcendentalist.
A good word this, Transcendentalist. It is long but it goes a long
way. He was not quite sure that this “ist” had just the same shade of
meaning for the whole gathering. Perhaps it was pale and crowned with
white curls like the noble Alcott. Or curved in an exquisite smile like
the lips of Waldo. Perhaps Transcendentalism, like its brother isms,
had no more value than the individual who happened to pass it round his
neck like a collar. Perhaps it was nothing but a tool in the hands of
a worker, good or bad. Henry was going to use it as a worker who knows
what to do with a tool. As for the word itself, serious as the matter
was for him, there were even moments when Henry was tempted not to
take it much more seriously than did the outsiders who lost no time in
ridiculing the new gospel. Besides, he always had the resource of being
a Transcendentalist in his own fashion. Let his friends seek for the
real and the infinite as they chose; he was going to seek for it first
under the soles of his heavy boots. Of this he was transcendentally
sure.
As they were a circle of apostles revealing a new life at the heart of
the old withered Puritanism, it was necessary for them to propagate
this outside the work-room where they gathered. They founded a
magazine; it appeared every three months and the muse of the group
assumed the care and the expense of editing it. The great man gave it
many pages that ought to have won for it subscribers by the thousand
if the public could only have altered its detestable habit of ignoring
a magazine supported solely by a belief in the beauty of humanity. If
you publish, for instance, noble old bits from the classics, how can
you expect to catch readers who ask for things that are amusing and
sensational and up-to-the-minute? In the opening number of the magazine
Henry had seen himself in print for the first time. A small emotion
compared to that which was concealed, to all save one or two persons
perhaps, in this poem entitled “Sympathy,” under the signature Henry
Thoreau. The author was twenty-three years old. He had published.
He had emerged from his Journal. He was in a circle of friends who
were initiating the renaissance of mystic idealism that was going to
renovate the thought of New England and America. This was no reason
for giving up his big boots or chinking in his pocket the dollars he
had not received, since the magazine paid nothing. But it gave him the
desire to write, to collaborate in this rare magazine in which his
friends welcomed his manuscripts so cordially--or, when they refused
them, refused as friends. They had not refused his “Aulus Persius
Flaccus,” his first public attempt as a writer of prose. And an unpaid
article will sometimes earn one a friendship that is worth more than
money. Often one is not to know of this till much later.
But to whom was he to give these little verses, the scribblings of a
sentimental and philosophic schoolmaster, since the great man, who did
not like them very much, advised him not to publish them? They had the
archaic flavour of the old English poets who had helped him to endure
his exile in the college library. They were like the work of a boy
who amuses himself collecting little wanton butterflies and pinning
them on equal lines on a card in some harmonious arrangement of their
tinted wings. It was a game at which boys amuse themselves, boys and
those older children who re-translate Horace after sixty. Henry was
not yet twenty-five, and he was only a child in the sense that his
childhood was inseparable from him; but he loved these soothing little
old-fashioned verses, just as he loved to play a little air on his
flute or whistle the tune of some organ-grinder in the street. Not
“smooth and flowing” enough for the taste of the great man of Concord,
who made rhymes too now and then. There was nothing to be done then but
to keep them to himself, since their rhythm was dear to him in spite of
all. There would always be time to throw them into the stove.
But what was he to do with those great chunks of prose interspersed
with the little verses in his Journal? And when did he first realize
that he was the writer, the poet, in them, and not in these rhymes
of an elderly amateur? Aside from the pages that he had used in the
composition of his first essay, “Sound and Silence,” there were those
he had copied and sent to Margaret Fuller, the editor, who did not
want them for her magazine. Yet they had rather a strong quality.
In a tone of juvenile grandiloquence, but with a firm accent, Henry
pronounced his vows, notified society of his refusal to collaborate
with it, and dedicated himself to the service of the cause. The editor
did not perceive that a writer of prose had been born, prolix and not
yet sufficiently sure of himself to break through the weight of words,
carried away by his love of paradox, but rich in savoury fantasy, a
creator of bold, fresh images. Her copy had been returned to him, with
a graceful note of refusal. He would wait, then.
Henry stored his harvest away. Henry worked. Outside his father’s
little factory, where he made the pencils, there was a labourer at his
toil, awaiting his audience without anxiety.
* * * * *
How does it happen that Henry, yesterday a schoolmaster, should be
living at his friend Waldo’s house? Ralph Waldo Emerson, yes. It has
come about quite simply.
His friend, finding him free after the closing of the school, has made
him a proposal.
He is greatly in need of someone to look after a hundred and one little
matters, in the house and outside, which he cannot attend to himself.
When he is away, off on lecture tours, it would be very pleasant
to feel that he was leaving at home someone he could trust to see
that everything went smoothly, as it should go in the household of a
philosopher. He thought that such a man as Henry, who was a famous
gardener and understood everything, would be just the person. Was he
mistaken? Henry could come and live in their house without sacrificing
any of his cherished liberty. How did Henry feel about it?
The latter had accepted. Not as a young man of twenty-four, only
too happy to yield to the desire of a great elder, but because this
proposal had a sound that pleased him. In that house at least he knew
they would accept him, discerningly, at his true value. They were
not appealing to a workman whose arms or brain one hires; they were
appealing to Henry, raw as he was, with his qualities and his defects.
That is why he had said yes. An ugly word becomes clarified when you
take a “job” with people who understand you and love you as nature has
made you. Heavens, yes, he had agreed without a single reservation.
The arrangement was quite simple. The steward was to work as he chose
in the garden or elsewhere, at any hours that pleased him and whenever
work seemed good to him; in return, he was to have his meals and his
room as if he were one of the family. He was to be one of the family.
Wasn’t that clear and above-board?... If you were a great philosopher,
illumined with a serene wisdom, but little fitted for all those small
material affairs that have to be reckoned with just the same in the
daily life of a philosopher, would you not be very happy to have
engaged a trustworthy man to shoulder all these little troublesome
tasks and be on the spot, with an alert eye and a sure hand, during
your absences? And suppose, at the same time, that you could converse
occasionally on the noblest topics with your confidential man, as a
brother, an equal, who is prepared to accompany you, to follow or
precede you, up the highest peaks of thought: would not this be a
famous combination?... And if you were a penniless young man, seeking
employment for your faculties or your skill with people who would not
make use of you simply as a tool that one takes up and throws aside,
a tool that one oils or allows to rust, would you not be overjoyed to
be the confidential man of a sage who wants to place in your hands
all the odd tasks about the house? A sage who knows perfectly who you
are and appeals to the man as well as the worker? Would you hesitate?
Hardly, for it would strike you that to work for such an employer,
such a friend, would be like playing even if the work sometimes were
hard; it would be the highest form of collaboration. Your friend is a
philosopher divinely adroit in the field of ideas, but far from handy
in the practical domain; he needs your workingman’s hands and allows
them to exist side by side with the soul of a poet. Your friend opens
his house to you as an equal.
All right, it’s settled, friend Waldo. This environment, this household
are sympathetic to Henry; the house itself smiles on him. Coming
to Concord, Emerson, after visiting his step-grandfather, in the
delightful old manse built by his ancestor where he himself had written
_Nature_, had had the luck to find and establish there, as the home of
his second marriage, the true dwelling for a sage. At the far end of
the village, on the same side as the Poor Farm, it was called, from
the name of a previous holder, the Coolidge house. The benediction of
the great trees along the road prepared you for the grave smile of a
little white dwelling among the pines whose modest porch seemed to
say to the new master: I give myself to you for eternity. Be faithful
to me. We shall always understand each other. And the nine windows
in front approved and the two chimneys took the oath; the Mill Brook
in the great meadow was the witness of the engagement. And you felt
immediately that what the porch said was true. From there it was only
a short quarter of an hour to Walden Pond, where you found yourself
in the wild woods; a spot haunted by Henry since his childhood, where
the Sage particularly loved to air his thoughts under the pines. It
was a house after Rousseau’s heart and after Henry’s heart. And when a
house pleases you, everything you have to do that depends on the house
is tinged with pleasure. It was only a few weeks after the closing of
his school that Henry had come to occupy the place offered him in this
home, nestling in the joy of the fields at the end of April.
There is nothing like a little white house and its out-buildings in
the fields for giving you work to do. This is Henry’s business. From
the kitchen-dresser hangs a door the hinges of which have come off.
Just in his line. The hinges of the door of eternal life are in the
best of order, but the genius of a philosopher does not understand
kitchen-dressers. The stove draws badly; it must be taken apart. This
is in your line too, man of all work. The disfigurement of hands soiled
with soot is not indelible. And who is to assume the important labours
of the hen-house? A philosopher, of course, possesses like the most
ordinary mortal the art of eating a soft-boiled egg; but before and
after this beautiful fresh egg is laid for you to go and take it out of
the nest, how many little details there are that demand the skill and
experience of a man well up in other tasks than the tasks of the study!
Fowls have their own life and their own ideas; there is the practical
philosophy of the poultry-yard on which neo-platonism has made no
profound impression, and there is the hand that knows how to make just
the right twist to restore the broken roost. An idealist especially
needs good roosts and hens that lay. Not necessarily golden eggs;
simple, soft yellow eggs are the thing for your philosophic breakfast.
And who but a gardener-poulterer is to prevent the blessed hens from
marauding among the flowers in the garden? Then there is a pail that
leaks, and here is the tinker. You have everything under your hand with
that wonderful boy. He is the universal repairer. The neighbours know
him well and have recourse to his knowledge. And he is a great hand
at chopping wood. When you see Henry handling the wood you feel that
his friend Waldo is going to gain a good deal by this exchange. His
trusty man does not measure the pains he takes, he is indefatigable and
performs his labourer’s toil with the same conscientiousness with which
he has elaborated a page of prose, for himself alone, in his Journal.
But Henry’s real kingdom is the garden. He understands not merely
how to raise melons, but how to prune fruit-trees; he knows how to
graft, and how to catch moles and field-mice; he is ready if there is
a stake that needs to be strengthened with heavy blows of the mallet,
vegetables to be transplanted or trenches to be dug. Sometimes the
philosopher and the gardener work together in the garden. Near this
invaluable boy, who is like a brother to him, the Sage is happy; it
is not merely the garden-work that does him so much good, but Henry’s
presence acts on him like a tonic. The stroke of this little man’s
spade seems to stir the roots of his own philosophy; on the clod that
he turns up a worm is wriggling. The spade plunges into the secrecy
of the combinations of the earth that will make the seed of the idea
germinate.
Henry is in a fortunate position. He can really share in such a
household. He feels at home there. In their leisure hours the master
and his confidential man have long conversations in the study, where
the plain board shelves do not look as if they held the books merely
for the charm of their bindings. At these moments their everyday
intimacy rises to the loftiest comradeship. They prolong these
fine excursions in which Waldo remembers that he is the son of a
mighty walker before the Eternal. In the open fields and amid this
full-hearted intimacy, they make astonishing discoveries. Yes, they
are happy, and neither of them would be able to say what it is that so
enlivens the landscape when they set out together. The Sage does not
walk on Sunday; on that day it is more suitable to stay at home.
So now the master of the Coolidge house can set out with a mind at
ease when he is going to give his lectures. He can depend on his young
friend, from whom he receives letters that have the fragrance of their
garden days together. In his absence the confidential man becomes the
protector and the stay of the household. Other ties unite him to the
family than those of the hen-house and philosophy. If Lidian, the
mistress of the household, loves him like a grown-up son, it is not
merely because he looks after the flowers in her garden that she has
brought from her parents’ house. In the same month in which Henry had
lost his brother, she had lost her dear little Waldo, her eldest, five
years old. It was to John, the charming John who had brought Emerson
one day a bluebird-box for the barn, that she owed that daguerreotype
of the child who had now vanished with him.... This poignant double
loss had touched depths that the Transcendentalist doctrines never
reached. From the bereavement they had simultaneously undergone there
had sprung up, in the mistress of the house, an affection like that of
an older sister for the big boy of the house, which he returned with a
deep, tender respect. The good gardener who took such pains with her
garden and her flowers gratefully accepted the authority, extending to
all sorts of small daily observances, of this woman who confided in him.
They led a very frugal existence in the home of the philosopher, who
was familiar with narrow circumstances from his childhood, his mother
having been left a widow with five small children to bring up, and he
had kept the taste for simplicity. This mother with her wholesome face,
always smiling, had come to live with her son and daughter-in-law. As
for Aunt Mary, who was also to be seen in the house, still so young at
eighty years, Henry had simply won her heart. And it was a holiday when
Lidian’s elder sister, Lucy Brown, the gardener’s very dear friend,
happened to be there. Yes, Henry, the philosopher’s right-hand man, was
very much at home.
Nothing was needed but children to make him feel completely so, for
between Henry and the children there was a tacit alliance. There were
only two of them, Ellen and Edith, babies or practically so, since the
death of little Waldo, but with Henry they formed a new trio. With
the children as in the garden he was in his element. Their innocence
brought out several Henrys, for he was never at the end of his wits.
There was the inexhaustible teller of wonderful tales, a wizard who had
no equal for making them little flutes and whistles with the simple
reeds they collected in the meadow. And all those tricks he showed
them: how to manage the warming-pan in which they heated the pop-corn
till it burst and fell in showers like fire-works, the jack-knife that
he swallowed and took out again through the nose, with a skill that
would have made his Uncle Charles jealous, and the trick of the apple
divided so cleverly that it seemed to be intact till he asked you
to cut it and it fell into quarters. And how many other inventions!
The only person whom Ellen and Edith never saw with their friend was
Father Spoil-Sport. When they were bigger he was going to take them
out in his boat, and they were going to be Indians and camp out in
a hut of branches and live on huckleberries and sour apples and make
music. Meanwhile, after supper, they could go on strange journeys on
the carpet before the fire; play horse and gallop astride his knee, or
perch perilously on Henry’s sloping shoulders, standing straight up
taller than Grandma and almost touching the ceiling. When Ellen said,
“Papa may be coming home this evening,” little Edith, who was beginning
to talk, would repeat “Papa” and look at her friend Henry. He had a
big nose like her real Papa and they were quite willing to accept him
as a second Papa. He was not a grave gentleman all in black like those
whom they saw coming to the house and who remained shut up in Papa’s
study. He at least was willing to lend a hand and was not afraid of
soiling it. He was a Henry after their own heart with whom they could
exchange a knowing smile, for he understood the mysterious meaning of
the onomatopoeia of children who create a language of their own before
accepting another ready-made; a Henry whom they respected though he did
not growl at them and was not one of these respectable people; a Henry
who was on secret terms with the world of fairies, strange plants,
astonishing animals and corn that burst in the fire, and with the
little folk who were in ecstasy before these marvels.
Do not try to play the child with children if you lack the proper
physique. Henry’s figure contributes greatly to his success with young
people. Small, thin as a wolf, with a narrow chest, sloping shoulders,
he looks like a wise and cunning gnome. No matter if he is ugly, of an
ugliness for which not one of the seven deadly sins would accept the
responsibility, for this really makes no difference to them. At the
ends of his long arms are veritable workingman’s hands; a spindling
trunk, rather short legs planted on big feet. His markedly aquiline
nose points to a mouth with singularly expressive lips and knows
nothing of the receding chin. Sunk beneath the saliant eyebrows are
large, clear, wide-open eyes, grey with a tinge of the blue of the
sky, that look you through and through. Light-brown hair, abundant and
fine. His sunburnt complexion, a certain rusticity of manner, which
his association with Harvard and its fine gentlemen has not corrected,
would make it very easy to mistake him for some longshore-man on a
visit up country. As you see him pass, with his rough clothes, worn
alike on weekdays and Sundays, his hob-nailed boots bound with leather
laces, with the long, swinging step of a man who is used to walking
great distances, hands behind his back and fists clenched, often with
his eyes on the ground, the impression of physical resistance this thin
little fellow gives is in flat contradiction to the meagre frame. When
he lifts his eyes and looks at you it is as if a jet of implacable
sincerity and perspicacity had struck you; the whole man is revealed in
those eyes. Not a very easy fellow to teach, you say to yourself. But
the twinkling of the grey eyes has another meaning which the children
and his few friends know; under the bold features of a face that can
be serious to the point of desolation, they know what fancy, what a
vein of caustic humour and sober gayety is waiting for a chance to be
released. And these diverse impressions melt in the aroma of open air
that breathes from his whole person.
Not easy to get on with, assuredly no. You can look to him for adhesion
or resistance, but never for submission. You can do nothing with
him unless you accept him as he is, with his mulish obstinacy, his
final “noes,” his likes and his dislikes. They know him well at the
Emersons’: sudden bursts of frankness, resistance without any reason,
fits of combativeness, a bluntness that does not always conform to the
code of politeness are to be expected from this right-hand man, who
shocks them now and then. But it is always wiser to let him follow his
own fancy, singular as it may be. If they had engaged a gardener by
the year or a day-labourer, he would have done his money’s worth--his
money’s worth exactly or a little less, done his job like a duty that
enables you to live. With Henry you always get more than your money’s
worth, because money to him means nothing--or something so different.
You have only to let him choose his own hours and his own way of
working. There is no one who will do a job better than he, as long as
it has none of the grey tinge of a duty.
For the rest, who could deny the excellence of the arrangement? A man
who can do everything about the house and yard is very valuable: how
much more so if he can be your literary collaborator as well! Margaret
Fuller, who is finding it very difficult to make a success of the
_Dial_, the Transcendentalist magazine that only needs subscribers to
be the first magazine of the continent, has finally turned over the
editorship to Emerson. The latter asks Henry to help him. They will
work in the garden and the magazine together. They have to assemble
the copy, send it to the printer, read the proofs, put it into pages,
canvass for new subscribers. A task not quite so familiar to Henry
as grafting and pruning, but he sets to work and does it. Under his
hands the magazine takes a new turn. It associates the old Oriental
sapience with the fresh wisdom of the Atlantic shores. Henry likes his
work as editorial secretary. Here he is at the heart of the movement.
And now it is he, whose manuscripts the amiable editress had refused,
who judges and inserts the manuscripts of other people. He profits
by the change to extract from his Journal, revise and publish long
fragments--accounts of excursions, impressions of nature, studies of
the fauna and the flora of the country. The editor thinks very highly
of this gardener-subeditor who helps him so earnestly in preparing the
magazine and filling out the table of contents.
Can you imagine a boy looking back later upon this time of his
twenty-fifth year, passed thus in the confidence of a little white
house, and not finding in the recollection the happiest of tastes?
The best part of it was not so much the privilege of having lived on
such intimate terms with a great man as the liberty they had given
him, the trust they had reposed in him in this household. Henry,
their confidential man--how wise they had been in giving him their
confidence!... In return for his board, they had permitted him to live
in his own way, giving what he was able to give on this condition. They
had not asked him not to be the Henry that he was by the grace of God,
with all his oddities and his pig-headedness and his nonchalance.
Everything else could be forgotten, but this noble and affectionate
indulgence, this magnanimous faith in him, a young man who had not yet
shown his best, had warmed his heart at a time when the future seemed
dim to a boy who had nothing to offer the world but what the world had
no use for. Whatever this future might be, there would remain between
his elder and himself the magnetism of this friendship, the tie of
these fraternal years when they had cultivated the garden together.
Even if he said little about it, he carried this always in the bottom
of his shy, remembering heart.
* * * * *
After a visit to New York in February, 1843, Emerson was at home again
by the end of the winter to welcome another spring in Concord. It
would soon be two years since Henry had come to his house to live: or
had he always been there, and was he to remain always? It was time
to do a little thinking. William, the philosopher’s older brother,
was looking for a tutor for one of his children. What would the
confidential man, the Harvard graduate, say to this? He would have
to give up Concord, for William Emerson was living near New York. A
serious resolution, to leave his kingdom and his own people. On the
other hand, the neighbourhood of New York would be favourable to his
literary ambitions, and might help him, who could say, to sell a few
articles. This chance to try was perhaps the most tempting opportunity
that might offer. And then he would see a new country, another horizon
would stand out against the setting sun. Henry had had no further
glimpse of New York since he had gone there on business, at nineteen,
with his father.
So it happened that, in the May of this year, the confidential man
found himself on Staten Island, the island with its back to the
continent like an animal advancing to sniff that much larger animal,
Long Island, which has come out of the Atlantic, with the bay of New
York crowding between their two muzzles. It was on the north side of
the island that William Emerson had his residence. A beautiful house,
worthy souls who did their best to be amiable. But one who had just
left a house like that of Waldo and Lidian recognized by the smell,
the moment he entered this house, that these people were of another
species. It was imposing, grave and stupefying. Henry felt like a
stranger among strangers; even the title of Judge, borne by the master
of the house, weighed upon him. They did not understand one another,
they never would understand one another; but for all that he would
do his work as well as he could since he was a tutor and it was a
question of Waldo’s brother. Later on, he would see; meanwhile, the
tutor was obliged to stay in his room. For on arriving he had caught
a violent cold that kept him shut up for a week. A misery to have had
such a weak chest ever since that bad case of bronchitis which had made
him so ill when he was eighteen.
A bad beginning at the Judge’s, in an unknown country. In front of the
house, deep woods, and a mile away the sea, which he heard roaring
when the wind blew. The house stood with its back against a hill a
hundred yards high, from which you surveyed the immense panorama of
the Bay, the Narrows, Brooklyn, New York in the distance, the coast of
New Jersey. The first time he climbed it and took in all this horizon,
he was sure of one thing: this was the place he would come to for
the nourishment he would never find under this roof, where there was
nothing to hold him aside from his duties as a tutor. His real daily
repast awaited him on the hill. He could live for a few months in a
strange house, situated at the foot of a height that commanded such a
quarter of space. Alone, up there, he could collect himself towards
evening, watching the boats and the sea or reading a dear letter
received from far, far over there, beyond the boats and the sea--from
old Concord of which he dreamed and the forest paths that preserved the
imprint of his feet.
Henry felt a void in his soul. A stoical boy has remedies against
homesickness and, wherever he is, his own company helps him to endure
it. Just the same, the soul suffers from a sudden change of diet; it
is slow in acclimatizing itself. Over there were his own people and
the face of his own country, the voices of the two rivers and the Mill
Brook and the smell of the upturned earth in Waldo’s garden. Here,
everything breathed of exile, and the summer had a different language;
in spite of the sun he shivered.
When homesickness prowls about, seeking for some chink by which to
worm its way into you, the best thing to do, when you are not shut up
between the walls of a college, is to set out for discoveries over the
island, to see what it has to offer you. When you are a mighty walker,
a born vagabond, you hold homesickness at a respectful distance. From
nine to two o’clock Henry makes his pupil work, then he is free.
You can see him setting out in his good Concord boots to seek his
fortune. The interior of the island is like a great pleasure-park,
with its valleys, its woods, its verdure; fruit-trees abound there,
cherry-trees are common along the hedges, the tulip-tree flourishes,
and the magnolia in July is enthroned like a supernatural bride. A
park in which some care has been taken for the views; through the long
clefts in the earth you suddenly perceive, over a field, a ship under
full sail, passing thirty miles out at sea--as in a magic lantern. In
the valleys, shielded by the foliage, are the farms of the Huguenots,
the first colonists; the old elm on the shore still marks the spot
where they landed, after placing the ocean between themselves and the
Dragonnades of Louis XIV--the great-great-grandparents of your own
people at Saint-Helier, brought here not by the desire to make fortunes
but by their passion for spiritual independence. In the northeastern
corner, not very far from Castleton, where the Emersons’ house is,
there is another Concord. You find them everywhere. The Sundays are
free for long excursions. The vast kingdom of an island seems still
more vast, for you are surprised that the seashore can surround so
much country. The walker annexes it methodically. Everything is new
to him. They raise tomatoes and potatoes in the open fields. Henry
has not left at home his old vigilance as a rover. Crossing a field
he stoops and picks up an arrow-head. It is really almost laughable.
At Concord or wherever he may be, when a flint-flake emerges, however
imperceptibly, from the earth or a heap of pebbles, you may be sure
that Henry, tramping in that neighbourhood, will fall upon it. He
smells it. It is as if in his shrewd glance there were a magnet that
makes these arrow-heads emerge for his benefit from the earth where
they are hidden.
Henry scours the island. A surveyor, no doubt, this lanky fellow whom
people see crossing and re-crossing the fields, examining everything
with his old habit of inventorying a piece of land, as if he were
going to buy it: he cuts across it in a bee-line, whether the ground
is good or bad, regardless of the regular road. Or perhaps a man
looking for a good site for some speculation. He must be pretty well
acquainted with the state of things. A poor devil of a tutor, you say?
Come now!... More attractive still than the interior of the island are
its watery shores, the salt marshes, the approaches of the sea. Henry
wanders along the beach, waiting for this enormous presence to define
itself. Never before has he had such a chance to be impressed by it.
Perhaps it has things to say to him which the pines about Concord
have forgotten to convey. He has the whole of space to himself; there
is nothing frivolous to distract him, the hidden musicians play for
him alone, and he can walk and walk and walk to its ritornello in the
dazzling marine daylight. It is grand enough to overwhelm him if he
were not made of tough gristle. A pack of half-wild dogs scours the
beaches in quest of carrion thrown up by the ocean. The smallest of
them stops and barks after him. He has surely rubbed against mankind,
this cur, for he was the one you took under your protection yesterday,
driving off with stones the big fellows that were chasing him. The
only people you see are fishermen who have drawn their boats up on the
shore--herring-fishers, with great nets. Far away glide the boats with
men on board who think as you do. You feel as if you were one of these
boats, and you too long to spread your sails, instead of leaving your
footprints on the wet sand or walking on the shingle like the crabs.
Concord, you are in no danger of being forgotten, but confess that you
have no such sight as this to offer. The best place from which to take
it in is some height where you are the monarch over this immensity.
Then, though you are too far away to reach the shore, the ocean seems
to you so near that you could touch it. The whole radiant panorama of
the sea, islands, bay, shores, marshes, converges towards your own
small self that receives it and feasts upon it; your landsman’s soul
drinks in the sea and the sailors. From an old ruined fort, Henry
watches the arrival of the vessels; the health-officer climbing on
board, the messenger who has come for his bundle of newspapers. Best of
all is the hill-top behind the house which he can ascend every evening,
the ideal observatory from which to count the sails in sight as the
sun sets, revealing more and more of them the lower it falls--passing,
returning, departing, sometimes in a long procession, busy, stately,
as if they were coming here, between the muzzles of the two fishes, to
conclude their tour of the world.
Before this huge spectacle of the bay of New York, this incessant
passing of vessels, this amplitude of ocean that is offered to the
eye of the little tutor, sitting and musing there on the ridge, his
rustic Concord soul communes with itself and wonders if it could become
acclimatized here. This hour is the best of the day, and on this
hill-top he recovers his balance. Yes, the sea alone can mitigate the
separation. It is like the winds that blow in the woods at home. But
if, at the foot of the hill or on his return from a walk, there were
only some friend with whom he could talk as a brother! Or if he could
merely find himself again in some circle of familiar silence bathed
in an atmosphere of trust! For Henry solitude is an old and honoured
acquaintance: but never till now has it wearied him as it sometimes
wearies him here. There are no human faces about him on the island--for
all these New York families who come over to spend the summer--save an
old fisherman, a neighbour, who invites him to come to the beach and
see the beautiful shad he has caught. So Staten Island is not a desert
island; it is inhabited by old Smith in whose presence he feels happy
as a man and a fresh-water fisherman himself.
In a rapid, sloping hand, cut with dashes for punctuation, Henry
writes affectionate letters to his family and friends in Concord--an
extraordinary number of letters for him. This cheers him up when the
unsavoury food of his days, served on the Judge’s table, leaves on his
palate an after-taste of exile. He entreats his mother for details of
the life at home, for news of everybody, including Aunt Louisa, whose
benignant face smiles upon him like an apparition from the wall of his
room, and Cousin George Minot. The lonely boy ingenuously commits all
sorts of enormities: he, with his sovereign contempt for newspapers,
asks them to send him the Concord paper. Of course it is perfectly
idiotic there, but how good it would be here, alone on the hill in the
evening, or in his room, to have a taste of the printed news from home!
And business, the pencils? And the vegetable garden? Henry is still so
full of Concord that, when he wakes up at night he can hardly believe
that the sound of the neighbouring sea is not that of the wind among
the woods of his childhood. In his dreams he sits under the poplar
behind his father’s house, sure that he is going to spend his whole
life there. He has bought a new pair of pantaloons which have cost him
$2.25 ready-made; the stockings are wearing well, for they are properly
made--knitted at home. His mother need have no fears: his outfit will
not have to be renewed yet--it withstands the new climate as well as
its master’s frame. Henry is going through a period of strange mental
lethargy, which makes him think of his waggish Uncle Charles, the
famous wrestler who was so speedily overthrown by the demon of sleep,
in the very middle of a conversation or even while he was shaving.
And he also thinks of his brother, in his grave now for more than a
year.... He writes to Waldo. How conceal the fact that he grates upon
William and Susan Emerson as much as these excellent people grate upon
him? His pupil is clever and is making progress, but nothing about him
wins the affection of his tutor. He takes after the Judge. As for your
brother, your sister-in-law, your nephews, dear Waldo, you can’t guess
how much further away one feels from them, thinking of you and yours
and the years passed in the little white house! He writes to Lidian.
How are the flowers getting on in her garden? Are the weeds coming up
too fast? She must have a new gardener. And the chickens? And do they
go huckleberrying as they used to do? The poor woman is not well and
she has told him about her difficulties; and in his own solitude, in
his affection and respect, her old right-hand man feels more grateful
than ever to this noble friend. Henry has a heavy heart, but as he
breathes these dear odours of Concord his hand does not tremble. His
advice to a sick friend is an exhortation to fortitude; his letters
to Waldo are as luminous as the conversations they had had when they
were off together on some excursion in the fields. The exile dreams,
collects his thoughts, struggles against his debility. The penholder
and the pocket inkstand which Elizabeth Hoar, Emerson’s friend, had
given him for his journey, are there like a feminine invitation. He
translates the “Seven Against Thebes,” and even composes for the _Dial_
a piece that is full of visions of dear Concord, _A Winter Walk_. If
it comes out well he will send it off for the next number. He can only
follow from afar the little review they are making among themselves,
imprinting it with a style all its own; but how he loves it as a ray
of light, an annunciation--and how he loves its disdain for commercial
methods.
As for the nearby metropolis, visible to the North, Henry was not
satisfied with observing it from the hill-top when his evening thought
interrogated the horizon. Since the first month of his arrival he had
profited by his Saturdays to go over and see New York. It was easy:
a half-hour’s walk on the road that passed in front of the house,
then three-quarters of a mile along the shore to the village of
Castleton, where you took the boat. In the city he went at once to see
two young friends of Emerson, clerks in an office. They had a drink
together. Thanks to these pleasant boys he did not feel alone in this
pandemonium, where everything shocked and grated on his country nerves.
Then he went to see a few sights that would serve as landmarks, the
Station, the Reservoir, the National Academy. He was not living so far
away; he would come back. Such a big morsel was not to be swallowed at
one mouthful. But there was one sight that had struck the Concord boy
much more than any of the monuments mentioned in the guide-books: the
crowd, the flood of faces in this Babel of a metropolis. The churches,
the Stock Exchange, the great pretentious buildings were mean, vulgar,
insupportable. But the crowd surging through the canyon-like streets
was a phenomenon that surpassed all these monuments, whether they were
dedicated to the worship of gold, God or the devil. Nothing like this
in Boston; it was a revelation. He would not forget the name of this
power. The crowd, yes, the herd that counted for so little beside
the individual. But what if the hum that rose from these swarms of
nobodies, this surge of faces in the great arteries, did correspond to
the waves that he had seen rushing together in the Narrows, or beating
the shores of the metropolis? He had the impression that this human
flood could, when it wished, submerge these stupid cubes of stone. The
crowd had imposed itself on little man.
Henry returned to the city whenever he could. He would have returned
oftener were it not for the expense. The boats left every hour, but you
had to pay your fare, and he was in rather bad straits. The distances
were great in the city, and he would have taken the stage often had
it not been for this miserable impecuniosity. If only that wretch of
an editor who had published one of his articles with a promise of
remuneration and who pretended to be dead would only have paid him!
He was obliged to space out his visits to New York. He went to see
Henry James, the Swedenborgian, a little plump, rosy, lame man who
looked like a broker. Henry spent three hours talking with him: in the
questions the latter asked he came into touch with a soul of wisdom
and goodness that refreshed him. One of those men who were able to
enliven a city whose tawdry buildings disheartened him. By degrees the
villager became used to the monster. He went to read in the libraries,
where he found the magazines and one or two substantial mouthfuls like
Carlyle’s last article; especially the Mercantile Library, the keeper
of which, an old Harvard tutor, had given him a card of admission
for a month. Moreover, in spite of this mental lethargy from which he
suffered, he did not forget one of the reasons that had led him to try
New York. He had come with the idea of seeing how the land lay in the
literary world. Horace Greeley, the editor-in-chief of the _Tribune_,
upon whom he called, made a good impression on him. They talked over
the experimental phalansteries, in which Horace had more faith than
Henry. Horace was a strong and important connection. He recommended
the beginner to the _Democratic Review_ which accepted his paper “The
Landlord,” for its October number. This was no great source of wealth,
for the magazine was poor and only paid famine prices. So he thought
it would be a good thing to find something else, for there was always
this irritating question of money. Henry held his lethargy in check
and boldly called upon publishers and editors; there might be one who
needed a young writer like himself, just fresh from his village, a
fruit of the orchards of Concord with their bloom still on him. One
of them proposed some work that an honest man could not do. Another
jingled the $50,000 in profits which he made year in, year out, just
by letting well enough alone. No doubt, no doubt. This chinking of
dollars made Henry feel that he was rich enough to despise them. There
was nothing much to tempt him indeed among fellows like that. It was
just as it was in Concord; no one needed him, and those who would
have liked to give him a welcome were unable to pay him. He had gone
the rounds of the magazines; those that he had thought of as possible
had obliging contributors by the dozen. There was, to be sure, the
_Ladies’ Companion_, which paid; but he was not likely to stray into
that company. Ask somebody else, dear lady. And yet he was absolutely
obliged to earn a little money. So Henry spent a whole day hawking
_The Agriculturist_ about New York. This was less humiliating than
scribbling for a trashy publisher. If there was nothing for a writer
to do in New York, he would wait for luckier days. The Republic of
Letters would not die, nor would Henry either. He would retire in good
order, as light in money and the hope of money as when he arrived. His
flat purse, on his return as on his departure, would serve to identify
him....
But have you reckoned up exactly what you are bringing back, my friend?
It is more than your purse would hold. Or even your portmanteau,
between your socks and your books. Your wealth, young man of Concord,
is solid and durable in a different way from the ready-made trousers
you have bought in New York. The experience of the literary market--how
much do you think that is worth? You have watched these shopkeepers,
big and little, at their counters; while they were talking, you have
caught the odours from the back-shop. These few glimpses were enough
for you to divine the flavour of their cooking, their motives, the
quality of their trade. The most generous of them could not pay for
your collaboration a more royal price than that of this experience.
At twenty-six, when you are beginning, to know once and for all that
the literary market is a market like other markets, to which you bring
your merchandise, which will remain on your hands if it does not suit
the taste of the customer; to know that the career of letters as you
understand it is not a trade that enables a man to subsist and that
there is no profit of money for you to hope for in this way ... tie up
this truth tight in your handkerchief and keep it as the rarest of your
arrow-heads.
And this ocean of faces in the streets, on the wharves, the human
flood of New York--how much is it worth, from your point of view, to
have coasted along that and felt it beat against you? The passionate
individualist is in rebellion against the power of the mass. But it has
fascinated you, disturbed you; its magnetism has impressed you at the
first contact. A mob, undoubtedly. But with a movement as grand and
sweeping as that of the clouds and the winds and the waves. And the
watery surroundings of the city, that luxuriance of ocean and horizon
and ships, absorbed from the hill-top, and those long walks on the
shore--do you imagine they have not affected you also? Recall those
crowds of immigrants you have seen passing, stopping for a day or two,
pent up on a wharf, men, women, children, tattered but so very human,
so real, washing their linen unconcernedly, cooking their dinner in
the open air, whole families come from the four corners of the Old
World to seek their fortunes in the hospitable West. Always the mob,
observed with a distrustful sympathy by a savage who will never admit
that man can keep his quality as a man by mingling in the mob. Yes,
but in this swarm of poor wretches, encamped on a wharf, among these
playing, whining children, these mothers sitting on their bundles of
clothing, has it not occurred to you as you observed them with the eye
of an artist fascinated by this picturesque parade, that there might be
some Henry going West with his tools and his fortune and a soul as rich
as your own or even greater? In any case, your glances have scrutinized
this horde on the march and recognized human faces in transit. And what
remains to you from this must not be forgotten when you balance your
accounts.
Have you lost your homesickness? Has even your health been strengthened
by the air of the bay? When you go home, you will remember, with a
leaping of the heart that will warm the November air, how much you
have been repaid for your months of exile by all that those crowds,
that ocean, those wharves, those steamers have left in you--yes, and
those hours of solitude when, from the top of the hill, your sick soul
was fed by the play of the storm and the sunlight and the moonlight at
midnight over the bay. And that sound of the sea which you have heard
in your bed in the silence of the Judge’s house, and the spectacle
of the sun rising from the Atlantic--do you think they will not add
something to the magnificence of the sunset when you have contemplated
it anew from your riverside heights of Musketaquid?