Thoreau was not a great philosopher, he was not a great naturalist, he
was not a great poet, but as a nature-writer and an original character
he is unique in our literature. His philosophy begins and ends with
himself, or is entirely subjective, and is frequently fantastic, and
nearly always illogical. His poetry is of the oracular kind, and is
only now and then worth attention. There are crudities in his writings
that make the conscientious literary craftsman shudder; there are
mistakes of observation that make the serious naturalist wonder; and
there is often an expression of contempt for his fellow countrymen,
and the rest of mankind, and their aims in life, that makes the
judicious grieve. But at his best there is a gay symbolism, a felicity
of description, and a freshness of observation that delight all
readers.
As a person he gave himself to others reluctantly; he was, in truth, a
recluse. He stood for character more than for intellect, and for
intuition more than for reason. He was often contrary and
inconsistent. There was more crust than crumb in the loaf he gave us.
He went about the business of living with his head in the clouds, or
with an absolute devotion to the ideal that is certainly rare in our
literary history. He declared that he aimed to crow like chanticleer
in the morning, if only to wake his neighbors up. Much of his writings
have this chanticleerian character; they are a call to wake up, to rub
the film from one's eyes, and see the real values of life. To this end
he prods with paradoxes, he belabors with hyperboles, he teases with
irony, he startles with the unexpected. He finds poverty more
attractive than riches, solitude more welcome than society, a sphagnum
swamp more to be desired than a flowered field.
Thoreau is suggestive of those antibodies which modern science makes
so much of. He tends to fortify us against the dry rot of business,
the seductions of social pleasures, the pride of wealth and position.
He is antitoxic; he is a literary germicide of peculiar power. He is
too religious to go to church, too patriotic to pay his taxes, too
fervent a humanist to interest himself in the social welfare of his
neighborhood.
Thoreau called himself a mystic, and a transcendentalist, and a
natural philosopher to boot. But the least of these was the natural
philosopher. He did not have the philosophic mind, nor the scientific
mind; he did not inquire into the reason of things, nor the meaning of
things; in fact, had no disinterested interest in the universe apart
from himself. He was too personal and illogical for a philosopher. The
scientific interpretation of things did not interest him at all. He
was interested in things only so far as they related to Henry Thoreau.
He interpreted Nature entirely in the light of his own idiosyncrasies.
Science goes its own way in spite of our likes and dislikes, but
Thoreau's likes and dislikes determined everything for him. He was
stoical, but not philosophical. His intellect had no free play outside
his individual predilection. Truth as philosophers use the term, was
not his quest but truth made in Concord.
Thoreau writes that when he was once asked by the Association for the
Advancement of Science what branch of science he was especially
interested in, he did not reply because he did not want to make
himself the laughing-stock of the scientific community, which did not
believe in a science which deals with the higher law--his higher law,
which bears the stamp of Henry Thoreau.
He was an individualist of the most pronounced type. The penalty of
this type of mind is narrowness; the advantage is the personal flavor
imparted to the written page. Thoreau's books contain plenty of the
pepper and salt of character and contrariness; even their savor of
whim and prejudice adds to their literary tang. When his individualism
becomes aggressive egotism, as often happens, it is irritating; but
when it gives only that pungent and personal flavor which pervades
much of "Walden," it is very welcome.
Thoreau's critics justly aver that he severely arraigns his countrymen
because they are not all Thoreaus--that they do not desert their farms
and desks and shops and take to the woods. What unmeasured contempt he
pours out upon the lives and ambitions of most of them! Need a
nature-lover, it is urged, necessarily be a man-hater? Is not man a
part of nature?--averaging up quite as good as the total scheme of
things out of which he came? Cannot his vices and shortcomings be
matched by a thousand cruel and abortive things in the fields and the
woods? The fountain cannot rise above its source, and man is as good
as is the nature out of which he came, and of which he is a part. Most
of Thoreau's harsh judgments upon his neighbors and countrymen are
only his extreme individualism gone to seed.
An extremist he always was. Extreme views commended themselves to him
because they were extreme. His aim in writing was usually "to make an
extreme statement." He left the middle ground to the school committees
and trustees. He had in him the stuff of which martyrs and heroes are
made. In John Brown he recognized a kindred soul. But his literary
bent led him to take his own revolutionary impulses out in words. The
closest he came to imitation of the hero of Harper's Ferry and to
defying the Government was on one occasion when he refused to pay his
poll-tax and thus got himself locked in jail overnight. It all seems a
petty and ignoble ending of his fierce denunciation of politics and
government, but it no doubt helped to satisfy his imagination, which
so tyrannized over him throughout life. He could endure offenses
against his heart and conscience and reason easier than against his
imagination.
He presents that curious phenomenon of a man who is an extreme product
of culture and civilization, and yet who so hungers and thirsts for
the wild and the primitive that he is unfair to the forces and
conditions out of which he came, and by which he is at all times
nourished and upheld. He made his excursions into the Maine wilderness
and lived in his hut by Walden Pond as a scholar and philosopher, and
not at all in the spirit of the lumbermen and sportsmen whose wildness
he so much admired. It was from his vantage-ground of culture and of
Concord transcendentalism that he appraised all these types. It was
from a community built up and sustained by the common industries and
the love of gain that he decried all these things. It was from a town
and a civilization that owed much to the pine tree that he launched
his diatribe against the lumbermen in the Maine woods: "The pine is no
more lumber than man is; and to be made into boards and houses no more
its true and highest use than the truest use of man is to be cut down
and made into manure." Not a happy comparison, but no matter. If the
pine tree had not been cut down and made into lumber, it is quite
certain that Thoreau would never have got to the Maine woods to utter
this protest, just as it is equally certain that had he not been a
member of a thrifty and industrious community, and kept his hold upon
it, he could not have made his Walden experiment of toying and
coquetting with the wild and the non-industrial. His occupations as
land-surveyor, lyceum lecturer, and magazine writer attest how much he
owed to the civilization he was so fond of decrying. This is Thoreau's
weakness--the half-truths in which he plumes himself, as if they were
the whole law and gospel. His Walden bean-field was only a pretty
piece of play-acting; he cared more for the ringing of his hoe upon
the stones than for the beans. Had his living really depended upon the
product, the sound would not have pleased him so, and the botany of
the weeds he hoed under would not have so interested him.
Thoreau's half-truths titillate and amuse the mind. We do not nod over
his page. We enjoy his art while experiencing an undercurrent of
protest against his unfairness. We could have wished him to have shown
himself in his writings as somewhat sweeter and more tolerant toward
the rest of the world, broader in outlook, and more just and
charitable in disposition--more like his great prototype, Emerson, who
could do full justice to the wild and the spontaneous without doing an
injustice to their opposites; who could see the beauty of the pine
tree, yet sing the praises of the pine-tree State House; who could
arraign the Government, yet pay his taxes; who could cherish Thoreau,
and yet see all his limitations. Emerson affirmed more than he denied,
and his charity was as broad as his judgment. He set Thoreau a good
example in bragging, but he bragged to a better purpose. He exalted
the present moment, the universal fact, the omnipotence of the moral
law, the sacredness of private judgment; he pitted the man of to-day
against all the saints and heroes of history; and, although he decried
traveling, he was yet considerable of a traveler, and never tried to
persuade himself that Concord was an epitome of the world. Emerson
comes much nearer being a national figure than does Thoreau, and yet
Thoreau, by reason of his very narrowness and perversity, and by his
intense local character, united to the penetrating character of his
genius, has made an enduring impression upon our literature.