I
After Emerson, the name of no New England man of letters keeps greener
and fresher than that of Thoreau. A severe censor of his countrymen,
and with few elements of popularity, yet the quality of his thought,
the sincerity of his life, and the nearness and perennial interest of
his themes, as well as his rare powers of literary expression, win
recruits from each generation of readers. He does not grow stale any
more than Walden Pond itself grows stale. He is an obstinate fact
there in New England life and literature, and at the end of his first
centennial his fame is more alive than ever.
Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, July, 1817, and passed
most of his life of forty-five years in his native town, minding his
own business, as he would say, which consisted, for the most part, in
spending at least the half of each day in the open air, winter and
summer, rain and shine, and in keeping tab upon all the doings of wild
nature about him and recording his observations in his Journal.
The two race strains that met in Thoreau, the Scottish and the French,
come out strongly in his life and character. To the French he owes his
vivacity, his lucidity, his sense of style, and his passion for the
wild; for the French, with all their urbanity and love of art, turn to
nature very easily. To the Scot he is indebted more for his character
than for his intellect. From this source come his contrariness, his
combativeness, his grudging acquiescence, and his pronounced
mysticism. Thence also comes his genius for solitude. The man who in
his cabin in the woods has a good deal of company "especially the
mornings when nobody calls," is French only in the felicity of his
expression. But there is much in Thoreau that is neither Gallic nor
Scottish, but pure Thoreau.
The most point-blank and authoritative criticism within my knowledge
that Thoreau has received at the hands of his countrymen came from the
pen of Lowell about 1864, and was included in "My Study Windows." It
has all the professional smartness and scholarly qualities which
usually characterize Lowell's critical essays. Thoreau was vulnerable,
both as an observer and as a literary craftsman, and Lowell lets him
off pretty easily--too easily--on both counts.
The flaws he found in his nature lore were very inconsiderable: "Till
he built his Walden shack he did not know that the hickory grew near
Concord. Till he went to Maine he had never seen phosphorescent
wood--a phenomenon early familiar to most country boys. At forty he
spoke of the seeding [_i. e._, flowering][3] of the pine as a new
discovery, though one should have thought that its gold-dust of
blowing pollen might have earlier caught his eye."
[Footnote 3: See "Walking" in _Excursions_. He was under thirty-three
when he made these observations (June, 1850).]
As regards his literary craftsmanship, Lowell charges him only with
having revived the age of _concetti_ while he fancied himself going
back to a preclassical nature, basing the charge on such a far-fetched
comparison as that in which Thoreau declares his preference for "the
dry wit of decayed cranberry-vines and the fresh Attic salt of the
moss-beds" over the wit of the Greek sages as it comes to us in the
"Banquet" of Xenophon--a kind of perversity of comparison all too
frequent with Thoreau.
But though Lowell lets Thoreau off easily on these specific counts, he
more than makes up by his sweeping criticism, on more general grounds,
of his life and character. Here one feels that he overdoes the matter.
It is not true, in the sense which Lowell implies, that Thoreau's
whole life was a search for the doctor. It was such a search in no
other sense than that we are all in search of the doctor when we take
a walk, or flee to the mountains or to the seashore, or seek to bring
our minds and spirits in contact with "Nature's primal sanities." His
search for the doctor turns out to be an escape from the conditions
that make a doctor necessary. His wonderful activity, those long walks
in all weathers, in all seasons, by night as well as by day, drenched
by rain and chilled by frost, suggest a reckless kind of health. A
doctor might wisely have cautioned him against such exposures. Nor was
Thoreau a valetudinarian in his physical, moral, or intellectual
fiber.
It is not true, as Lowell charges, that it was his indolence that
stood in the way of his taking part in the industrial activities in
which his friends and neighbors engaged, or that it was his lack of
persistence and purpose that hindered him. It is not true that he was
poor because he looked upon money as an unmixed evil. Thoreau's
purpose was like adamant, and his industry in his own proper pursuits
was tireless. He knew the true value of money, and he knew also that
the best things in life are to be had without money and without price.
When he had need of money, he earned it. He turned his hand to many
things--land-surveying, lecturing, magazine-writing, growing white
beans, doing odd jobs at carpentering, whitewashing, fence-building,
plastering, and brick-laying.
Lowell's criticism amounts almost to a diatribe. He was naturally
antagonistic to the Thoreau type of mind. Coming from a man near his
own age, and a neighbor, Thoreau's criticism of life was an affront to
the smug respectability and scholarly attainments of the class to
which Lowell belonged. Thoreau went his own way, with an air of
defiance and contempt which, no doubt, his contemporaries were more
inclined to resent than we are at our distance. Shall this man in his
hut on the shores of Walden Pond assume to lay down the law and the
gospel to his elders and betters, and pass unrebuked, no matter on
what intimate terms he claims to be with the gods of the woods and
mountains? This seems to be Lowell's spirit.
"Thoreau's experiment," says Lowell, "actually presupposed all that
complicated civilization which it theoretically abjured. He squatted
on another man's land; he borrows an axe; his boards, his nails, his
bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough,
his hoe, all turn state's evidence against him as an accomplice in the
sin of that artificial civilization which rendered it possible that
such a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all." Very clever,
but what of it? Of course Thoreau was a product of the civilization he
decried. He was a product of his country and his times. He was born in
Concord and early came under the influence of Emerson; he was a
graduate of Harvard University and all his life availed himself, more
or less, of the accumulated benefits of state and social
organizations. When he took a train to Boston, or dropped a letter in,
or received one through, the post office, or read a book, or visited a
library, or looked in a newspaper, he was a sharer in these benefits.
He made no claims to living independently of the rest of mankind. His
only aim in his Walden experiment was to reduce life to its lowest
terms, to drive it into a corner, as he said, and question and
cross-question it, and see, if he could, what it really meant. And he
probably came as near cornering it there in his hut on Walden Pond as
any man ever did anywhere, certainly in a way more pleasing to
contemplate than did the old hermits in the desert, or than did
Diogenes in his tub, though Lowell says the tub of the old Greek had a
sounder bottom.
Lowell seemed to discredit Thoreau by attacking his philosophy and
pointing out the contradictions and inconsistencies of a man who
abjures the civilization of which he is the product, overlooking the
fact that man's theories and speculations may be very wide of the
truth as we view it, and yet his life be noble and inspiring. Now
Thoreau did not give us a philosophy, but a life. He gave us fresh and
beautiful literature, he gave us our first and probably only nature
classic, he gave us an example of plain living and high thinking that
is always in season, and he took upon himself that kind of noble
poverty that carries the suggestion of wealth of soul.
No matter how much Thoreau abjured our civilization, he certainly made
good use of the weapons it gave him. No matter whose lands he squatted
on, or whose saw he borrowed, or to whom or what he was indebted for
the tools and utensils that made his life at Walden possible,--these
things were the mere accidents of his environment,--he left a record
of his life and thoughts there which is a precious heritage to his
countrymen. The best in his books ranks with the best in the
literature of his times. One could wish that he had shown more
tolerance for the things other men live for, but this must not make us
overlook the value of the things he himself lived for, though with
some of his readers his intolerance doubtless has this effect. We
cannot all take to the woods and swamps as Thoreau did. He had a
genius for that kind of a life; the most of us must stick to our farms
and desks and shops and professions.
Thoreau retired to Walden for study and contemplation, and because, as
he said, he had a little private business with himself. He found that
by working about six weeks in the year he could meet all his living
expenses, and then have all his winter and most of his summers free
and clear for study. He found that to maintain one's self on this
earth is not a hardship, but a pastime, if one will live simply and
wisely. He said, "It is not necessary that a man should earn his
living by the sweat of his brow unless he sweats easier than I do."
Was not his experiment worth while?
"Walden" is a wonderful and delightful piece of brag, but it is much
more than that. It is literature; it is a Gospel of the Wild. It made
a small Massachusetts pond famous, and the Mecca of many devout
pilgrims.
Lowell says that Thoreau had no humor, but there are many pages in
"Walden" that are steeped in a quiet but most delicious humor. His
humor brings that inward smile which is the badge of art's felicity.
His "Bean-Field" is full of it. I venture to say that never before had
a hermit so much fun with a field of white beans.
Both by training and by temperament Lowell was disqualified from
entering into Thoreau's character and aims. Lowell's passion for books
and academic accomplishments was as strong as was Thoreau's passion
for the wild and for the religion of Nature. When Lowell went to
Nature for a theme, as in his "Good Word for Winter," his "My Garden
Acquaintance," and the "Moosehead Journal," his use of it was mainly
to unlock the treasures of his literary and scholarly attainments; he
bedecked and be jeweled Nature with gems from all the literatures of
the world. In the "Journal" we get more of the flavor of libraries
than of the Maine woods and waters. No reader of Lowell can doubt that
he was a nature-lover, nor can he doubt that he loved books and
libraries more. In all his nature writings the poverty of the
substance and the wealth of the treatment are striking. The final
truth about Lowell's contributions is that his mind was essentially a
prose mind, even when he writes poetry. Emerson said justly that his
tone was always that of prose. What is his "Cathedral" but versified
prose? Like so many cultivated men, he showed a talent for poetry, but
not genius; as, on the other hand, one may say of Emerson that he
showed more genius for poetry than talent, his inspiration surpassed
his technical skill.
One is not surprised when he finds that John Brown was one of
Thoreau's heroes; he was a sort of John Brown himself in another
sphere; but one is surprised when one finds him so heartily approving
of Walt Whitman and traveling to Brooklyn to look upon him and hear
his voice. He recognized at once the tremendous significance of
Whitman and the power of his poetry. He called him the greatest
democrat which the world had yet seen. With all his asceticism and his
idealism, he was not troubled at all with those things in Whitman that
are a stumbling-block to so many persons. Evidently his long
intercourse with Nature had prepared him for the primitive and
elemental character of Whitman's work. No doubt also his familiarity
with the great poems and sacred books of the East helped him. At any
rate, in this respect, his endorsement of Whitman adds greatly to our
conception of the mental and spiritual stature of Thoreau.
* * * * *
I can hold my criticism in the back of my head while I say with my
forehead that all our other nature writers seem tame and insipid
beside Thoreau. He was so much more than a mere student and observer
of nature; and it is this surplusage which gives the extra weight and
value to his nature writing. He was a critic of life, he was a
literary force that made for plain living and high thinking. His
nature lore was an aside; he gathered it as the meditative saunterer
gathers a leaf, or a flower, or a shell on the beach, while he ponders
on higher things. He had other business with the gods of the woods
than taking an inventory of their wares. He was a dreamer, an
idealist, a fervid ethical teacher, seeking inspiration in the fields
and woods. The hound, the turtle-dove, and the bay horse which he said
he had lost, and for whose trail he was constantly seeking, typified
his interest in wild nature. The natural history in his books is quite
secondary. The natural or supernatural history of his own thought
absorbed him more than the exact facts about the wild life around
him. He brings us a gospel more than he brings us a history. His
science is only the handmaid of his ethics; his wood-lore is the foil
of his moral and intellectual teachings. His observations are
frequently at fault, or wholly wide of the mark; but the flower or
specimen that he brings you always "comes laden with a thought." There
is a tang and a pungency to nearly everything he published; the
personal quality which flavors it is like the formic acid which the
bee infuses into the nectar he gets from the flower, and which makes
it honey.
I feel that some such statement about Thoreau should precede or go
along with any criticism of him as a writer or as an observer. He was,
first and last, a moral force speaking in the terms of the literary
naturalist.
Thoreau's prayer in one of his poems--that he might greatly disappoint
his friends--seems to have been answered. While his acquaintances went
into trade or the professions, he cast about to see what he could do
to earn his living and still be true to the call of his genius. In his
Journal of 1851 he says: "While formerly I was looking about to see
what I could do for a living, some sad experiences in conforming to
the wishes of friends being fresh in my mind to tax my ingenuity, I
thought often and seriously of picking huckleberries; that surely I
could do, and its small profits might suffice, so little capital is
required, so little distraction from my wonted thoughts." He could
range the hills in summer and still look after the flocks of King
Admetus. He also dreamed that he might gather the wild herbs and carry
evergreens to such villagers as loved to be reminded of the woods. But
he soon learned that trade cursed everything, and that "though you
trade in messages from heaven, the whole curse of trade attaches to
the business." The nearest his conscience would allow him to approach
any kind of trade was to offer himself to his townsmen as a
land-surveyor. This would take him to the places where he liked to be;
he could still walk in the fields and woods and swamps and earn his
living thereby. The chain and compass became him well, quite as well
as his bean-field at Walden, and the little money they brought him was
not entirely sordid.
In one of his happy moods in "Walden" he sets down in a
half-facetious, half-mystical, but wholly delightful way, his various
avocations, such as his self-appointment as inspector of snow-storms
and rain-storms, and surveyor of forest paths and all across-lot
routes, and herdsman of the wild stock of the town. He is never more
enjoyable than in such passages. His account of going into business at
Walden Pond is in the same happy vein. As his fellow citizens were
slow in offering him any opening in which he could earn a living, he
turned to the woods, where he was better known, and determined to go
into business at once without waiting to acquire the usual capital. He
expected to open trade with the Celestial Empire, and Walden was just
the place to start the venture. He thought his strict business habits
acquired through years of keeping tab on wild Nature's doings, his
winter days spent outside the town, trying to hear what was in the
wind, and his early spring mornings before his neighbors were astir to
hear the croak of the first frog, all the training necessary to ensure
success in business with the Celestial Empire. He admits, it is true,
that he never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but doubted
not that it was of the last importance only to be present at it. All
such fooling as this is truly delightful. When he goes about his
sylvan business with his tongue in his cheek and a quizzical,
good-humored look upon his face in this way, and advertises the hound,
the bay horse, and the turtle-dove he lost so long ago, he is the true
Thoreau, and we take him to our hearts.
One also enjoys the way in which he magnifies his petty occupations.
His brag over his bean-field is delightful. He makes one want to hoe
beans with him:
When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to
the woods and the sky and was an accompaniment to my labor
which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no
longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I
remembered with as much pity as pride, if I remembered at
all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the
oratorios. The nighthawk circled overhead in the sunny
afternoons--for I sometimes made a day of it--like a mote in
the eye, or in heaven's eye, falling from time to time with
a swoop and a sound as if the heavens were rent, torn at
last to very rags and tatters, and yet a seamless cope
remained; small imps that fill the air and lay their eggs on
the ground on bare sand or rocks on the top of hills, where
few have found them; graceful and slender like ripples
caught up from the pond, as leaves are raised by the wind to
float in the heavens; such kindredship is in nature. The
hawk is aërial brother of the wave which he sails over and
surveys, those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to
the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea. Or sometimes I
watched a pair of hen-hawks circling high in the sky,
alternately soaring and descending, approaching and leaving
one another, as if they were the embodiment of my own
thoughts. Or I was attracted by the passage of wild pigeons
from this wood to that, with a slight quivering winnowing
sound and carrier haste; or from under a rotten stump my hoe
turned up a sluggish portentous and outlandish salamander, a
trace of Egypt and the Nile, yet our contemporary. When I
paused to lean on my hoe, these sounds and sights I heard
and saw anywhere in the row, a part of the inexhaustible
entertainment which the country offers.
All this is in his best style. Who, after reading it, does not long
for a bean-field? In planting it, too what music attends him!
Near at hand, upon the topmost spray of a birch, sings the
brown thrasher--or red mavis, as some love to call him--all
the morning, glad of your society, that would find out
another farmer's field if yours were not here. While you are
planting the seed he cries,--"Drop it, drop it,--cover it
up, cover it up,--pull it up, pull it up, pull it up." But
this was not corn, and so it was safe from such enemies as
he. You may wonder what his rigmarole, his amateur Paganini
performances on one string or on twenty, have to do with
your planting, and yet prefer it to leached ashes or
plaster. It was a cheap sort of top dressing in which I had
entire faith.
What lessons he got in botany in the hoeing!
Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes
with various kinds of weeds,--it will bear some iteration in
the account, for there was no little iteration in the
labor,--disturbing their delicate organizations so
ruthlessly, and making such invidious distinctions with his
hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously
cultivating another. That's Roman worm-wood,--that's
pigweed,--that's sorrel,--that's pipergrass,--have at him,
chop him up, turn his roots upward to the sun, don't let him
have a fibre in the shade, if you do he'll turn himself t'
other side up and be as green as a leek in two days. A long
war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans who had
sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me
come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of
their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead. Many
a lusty crest-waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above
his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in
the dust.
I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when
the snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an
old settler and original proprietor, who is reported to
have dug Walden Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it with
pine woods; who tells me stories of old time and of new
eternity; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful
evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even
without apples or cider,--a most wise and humorous friend,
whom I love much, who keeps himself more secret than ever
did Goffe or Whalley; and though he is thought to be dead,
none can show where he is buried. An elderly dame, too,
dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, in
whose odorous herb garden I love to stroll sometimes,
gathering simples and listening to her fables; for she has a
genius of unequalled fertility, and her memory runs back
farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original of
every fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the
incidents occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old
dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons, and is
likely to outlive all her children yet.
Thoreau taxed himself to find words and images strong enough to
express his aversion to the lives of the men who were "engaged" in the
various industrial fields about him. Everywhere in shops and offices
and fields it appeared to him that his neighbors were doing penance in
a thousand remarkable ways:
What I have heard of Bramins sitting exposed to four fires
and looking in the face of the sun; or hanging suspended,
with their heads downward, over flames; or looking at the
heavens over their shoulders "until it becomes impossible
for them to resume their natural position, while from the
twist of the neck nothing but liquids can pass into the
stomach"; or dwelling, chained for life, at the foot of a
tree; or measuring with their bodies, like caterpillars, the
breadth of vast empires; or standing on one leg on the tops
of pillars,--even these forms of conscious penance are
hardly more incredible and astonishing than the scenes which
I daily witness.... I see young men, my townsmen, whose
misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns,
cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily
acquired than got rid of.
Surely this disciple of the Gospel of the Wild must have disappointed
his friends. It was this audacious gift which Thoreau had for making
worldly possessions seem ignoble, that gives the tang to many pages of
his writings.
Thoreau became a great traveler--in Concord, as he says--and made
Walden Pond famous in our literature by spending two or more years in
the woods upon its shore, and writing an account of his sojourn there
which has become a nature classic. He was a poet-naturalist, as his
friend Channing aptly called him, of untiring industry, and the
country in a radius of seven or eight miles about Concord was threaded
by him in all seasons as probably no other section of New England was
ever threaded and scrutinized by any one man. Walking in the fields
and woods, and recording what he saw and heard and thought in his
Journal, became the business of his life. He went over the same ground
endlessly, but always brought back new facts, or new impressions,
because he was so sensitive to all the changing features of the day
and the season in the landscape about him.
Once he extended his walking as far as Quebec, Canada, and once he
took in the whole of Cape Cod; three or four times he made excursions
to the Maine woods, the result of which gave the name to one of his
most characteristic volumes; but as habitually as the coming of the
day was he a walker about Concord, in all seasons, primarily for
companionship with untamed Nature, and secondarily as a gleaner in the
fields of natural history.