IV

Thoreau's friends and neighbors seem to have persuaded themselves that

his natural-history lore was infallible, and, moreover, that he

possessed some mysterious power over the wild creatures about him that

other men did not possess. I recall how Emerson fairly bristled up

when on one occasion while in conversation with him I told him I

thought Thoreau in his trips to the Maine woods had confounded the

hermit thrush with the wood thrush, as the latter was rarely or never

found in Maine. As for Thoreau's influence over the wild creatures,

Emerson voiced this superstition when he said, "Snakes coiled round

his leg, the fishes swam into his hand, and he took them from the

water; he pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail, and took

the foxes under his protection from the hunters." Of course Thoreau

could do nothing with the wild creatures that you or I could not do

under the same conditions. A snake will coil around any man's leg if

he steps on its tail, but it will not be an embrace of affection; and

a fish will swim into his hands under the same conditions that it will

into Thoreau's. As for pulling a woodchuck out of its hole by the

tail, the only trouble is to get hold of the tail. The 'chuck is

pretty careful to keep his tail behind him, but many a farm boy, aided

by his dog, has pulled one out of the stone wall by the tail, much

against the 'chuck's will. If Thoreau's friends were to claim that he

could carry _Mephitis mephitica_ by the tail with impunity, I can say

I have done the same thing, and had my photograph taken in the act.

The skunk is no respecter of persons, and here again the trouble is to

get hold of the tail at the right moment--and, I may add, to let go of

it at the right moment.

Thoreau's influence over the wild creatures is what every man

possesses who is alike gentle in his approach to them. Bradford Torrey

succeeded, after a few experiments, in so dispelling the fears of an

incubating red-eyed vireo that she would take insect food from his

hand, and I have known several persons to become so familiar with the

chickadees that they would feed from the hand, and in some instances

even take food from between the lips. If you have a chipmunk for a

neighbor, you may soon become on such intimate terms with him that he

will search your pockets for nuts and sit on your knee and shoulder

and eat them. But why keep alive and circulate as truth these animal

legends of the prescientific ages?

Thoreau was not a born naturalist, but a born supernaturalist. He was

too intent upon the bird behind the bird always to take careful note

of the bird itself. He notes the birds, but not too closely. He was at

times a little too careless in this respect to be a safe guide to the

bird-student. Even the saunterer to the Holy Land ought to know the

indigo bunting from the black-throated blue warbler, with its languid,

midsummery, "Zee, zee, zee-eu."

Many of his most interesting natural-history notes Thoreau got from

his farmer friends--Melvin, Minott, Miles, Hubbard, Wheeler. Their

eyes were more single to the life around them than were his; none of

them had lost a hound, a turtle-dove, and a bay horse, whose trail

they were daily in quest of.

A haunter of swamps and river marshes all his life, he had never yet

observed how the night bittern made its booming or pumping sound, but

accepted the explanation of one of his neighbors that it was produced

by the bird thrusting its bill in water, sucking up as much as it

could hold, and then pumping it out again with four or five heaves of

the neck, throwing the water two or three feet--in fact, turning

itself into a veritable pump! I have stood within a few yards of the

bird when it made the sound, and seen the convulsive movement of the

neck and body, and the lifting of the head as the sound escaped. The

bird seems literally to vomit up its notes, but it does not likewise

emit water.

Every farmer and fox-hunter would smile if he read Thoreau's

statement, made in his paper on the natural history of Massachusetts,

that "when the snow lies light and but five or six inches deep, you

may give chase and come up with the fox on foot." Evidently Thoreau

had never tried it. With a foot and a half, or two feet of snow on the

ground, and traveling on snowshoes, you might force a fox to take to

his hole, but you would not come up to him. In four or five feet of

soft snow hunters come up with the deer, and ride on their backs for

amusement, but I doubt if a red fox ever ventures out in such a depth

of snow. In one of his May walks in 1860, Thoreau sees the trail of

the musquash in the mud along the river-bottoms, and he is taken by

the fancy that, as our roads and city streets often follow the early

tracks of the cow, so "rivers in another period follow the trail of

the musquash." As if the river was not there before the musquash was!

Again, his mysterious "night warbler," to which he so often alludes,

was one of our common everyday birds which most school-children know,

namely, the oven-bird, or wood-accentor, yet to Thoreau it was a sort

of phantom bird upon which his imagination loved to dwell. Emerson

told him he must beware of finding and booking it, lest life should

have nothing more to show him. But how such a haunter of woods escaped

identifying the bird is a puzzle.

In his walks in the Maine woods Thoreau failed to discriminate the

song of the hermit thrush from that of the wood thrush. The melody,

no doubt, went to his heart, and that was enough. Though he sauntered

through orchards and rested under apple trees, he never observed that

the rings of small holes in the bark were usually made by the

yellow-bellied woodpecker, instead of by Downy, and that the bird was

not searching for grubs or insects, but was feeding upon the milky

cambium layer of the inner bark.

But Thoreau's little slips of the kind I have called attention to

count as nothing against the rich harvest of natural-history notes

with which his work abounds. He could describe bird-songs and animal

behavior and give these things their right emphasis in the life of the

landscape as no other New England writer has done. His account of the

battle of the ants in Walden atones an hundred-fold for the lapses I

have mentioned.

One wonders just what Thoreau means when he says in "Walden," in

telling of his visit to "Baker Farm": "Once it chanced that I stood in

the very abutment of a rainbow's arch, which filled the lower stratum

of the atmosphere, tinging the grass and leaves around, and dazzling

me as if I looked through colored crystal." Is it possible, then, to

reach the end of the rainbow? Why did he not dig for the pot of gold

that is buried there? How he could be aware that he was standing at

the foot of one leg of the glowing arch is to me a mystery. When I

see a rainbow, it is always immediately in front of me. I am standing

exactly between the highest point of the arch and the sun, and the

laws of optics ordain that it can be seen in no other way. You can

never see a rainbow at an angle. It always faces you squarely. Hence

no two persons see exactly the same bow, because no two persons can

occupy exactly the same place at the same time. The bow you see is

directed to you alone. Move to the right or the left, and it moves as

fast as you do. You cannot flank it or reach its end. It is about the

most subtle and significant phenomenon that everyday Nature presents

to us. Unapproachable as a spirit, like a visitant from another world,

yet the creation of the familiar sun and rain!

How Thoreau found himself standing in the bow's abutment will always

remain a puzzle to me. Observers standing on high mountains with the

sun low in the west have seen the bow as a complete circle. This one

can understand.

We can point many a moral and adorn many a tale with Thoreau's

shortcomings and failures in his treatment of nature themes. Channing

quotes him as saying that sometimes "you must see with the inside of

your eye." I think that Thoreau saw, or tried to see, with the inside

of his eye too often. He does not always see correctly, and many times

he sees more of Thoreau than he does of the nature he assumes to be

looking at. Truly it is "needless to travel for wonders," but the

wonderful is not one with the fantastic or the far-fetched. Forcible

expression, as I have said, was his ruling passion as a writer. Only

when he is free from its thrall, which in his best moments he surely

is, does he write well. When he can forget Thoreau and remember only

nature, we get those delightful descriptions and reflections in

"Walden." When he goes to the Maine woods or to Cape Cod or to Canada,

he leaves all his fantastic rhetoric behind him and gives us sane and

refreshing books. In his walks with Channing one suspects he often let

himself go to all lengths, did his best to turn the world inside out,

as he did at times in his Journals, for his own edification and that

of his wondering disciple.

To see analogies and resemblances everywhere is the gift of genius,

but to see a resemblance to volcanoes in the hubs or gnarls on birch

or beech trees, or cathedral windows in the dead leaves of the

andromeda in January, or a suggestion of Teneriffe in a stone-heap,

does not indicate genius. To see the great in the little, or the whole

of Nature in any of her parts, is the poet's gift, but to ask, after

seeing the andropogon grass, "Are there no purple reflections from the

culms of thought in my mind?"--a remark which Channing quotes as very

significant--is not to be poetical. Thoreau is full of these

impossible and fantastic comparisons, thinking only of striking

expressions and not at all about the truth. "The flowing of the sap

under the dull rind of the trees" is suggestive, but what suggestion

is there in the remark, "May I ever be in as good spirits as a

willow"? The mood of the scrub oak was more habitual with him.

Thoreau was in no sense an interpreter of nature; he did not draw out

its meanings or seize upon and develop its more significant phases.

Seldom does he relate what he sees or thinks to the universal human

heart and mind. He has rare power of description, but is very limited

in his power to translate the facts and movements of nature into human

emotion. His passage on the northern lights, which Channing quotes

from the Journals, is a good sample of his failure in this respect:

Now the fire in the north increases wonderfully, not

shooting up so much as creeping along, like a fire on the

mountains of the north seen afar in the night. The

Hyperborean gods are burning brush, and it spread, and all

the hoes in heaven couldn't stop it. It spread from west to

east over the crescent hill. Like a vast fiery worm it lay

across the northern sky, broken into many pieces; and each

piece, with rainbow colors skirting it, strove to advance

itself toward the east, worm-like, on its own annular

muscles. It has spread into their choicest wood-lots. Now it

shoots up like a single solitary watch-fire or burning bush,

or where it ran up a pine tree like powder, and still it

continues to gleam here and there like a fat stump in the

burning, and is reflected in the water. And now I see the

gods by great exertions have got it under, and the stars

have come out without fear, in peace.

I get no impression of the mysterious almost supernatural character of

the aurora from such a description in terms of a burning wood-lot or a

hay-stack; it is no more like a conflagration than an apparition is

like solid flesh and blood. Its wonderful, I almost said its

spiritual, beauty, its sudden vanishings and returnings, its spectral,

evanescent character--why, it startles and awes one as if it were the

draperies around the throne of the Eternal. And then his mixed

metaphor--the Hyperborean gods turned farmers and busy at burning

brush, then a fiery worm, and then the burning wood-lots! But this is

Thoreau--inspired with the heavenly elixir one moment, and drunk with

the brew in his own cellar the next.

V

Thoreau's faults as a writer are as obvious as his merits. Emerson hit

upon one of them when he said, "The trick of his rhetoric is soon

learned; it consists in substituting for the obvious word and thought,

its diametrical antagonist." He praises wild mountains and winter

forests for their domestic air, snow and ice for their warmth, and so

on. (Yet Emerson in one of his poems makes frost burn and fire

freeze.) One frequently comes upon such sentences as these: "If I were

sadder, I should be happier"; "The longer I have forgotten you, the

more I remember you." It may give a moment's pleasure when a writer

takes two opposites and rubs their ears together in that way, but one

may easily get too much of it. Words really mean nothing when used in

such a manner. When Emerson told Channing that if he (Emerson) could

write as well as he did, he would write a great deal better, one

readily sees what he means. And when Thoreau says of one of his

callers, "I like his looks and the sound of his silence," the

contradiction pleases one. But when he tells his friend that hate is

the substratum of his love for him, words seem to have lost their

meaning. Now and then he is guilty of sheer bragging, as when he says,

"I would not go around the corner to see the world blow up."

He often defies all our sense of fitness and proportion by the degree

in which he magnifies the little and belittles the big. He says of the

singing of a cricket which he heard under the border of some rock on

the hillside one mid-May day, that it "makes the finest singing of

birds outward and insignificant." "It is not so wildly melodious, but

it is wiser and more mature than that of the wood thrush." His forced

and meaningless analogies come out in such a comparison as this: "Most

poems, like the fruits, are sweetest toward the blossom end." Which

_is_ the blossom end of a poem?

Thoreau advised one of his correspondents when he made garden to plant

some Giant Regrets--they were good for sauce. It is certain that he

himself planted some Giant Exaggerations and had a good yield. His

exaggeration was deliberate. "Walden" is from first to last a most

delightful sample of his talent. He belittles everything that goes on

in the world outside his bean-field. Business, politics, institutions,

governments, wars and rumors of wars, were not so much to him as the

humming of a mosquito in his hut at Walden: "I am as much affected by

the faint hum of a mosquito making its invisible and unimaginable tour

through my apartment at earliest dawn, when I was sitting with door

and windows open, as I could be by any trumpet that ever sang of fame.

It was Homer's requiem; itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air,

singing its own wrath and wanderings. There was something cosmical

about it." One wonders what he would have made of a blow-fly buzzing

on the pane.

He made Walden Pond famous because he made it the center of the

universe and found life rich and full without many of the things that

others deem necessary. There is a stream of pilgrims to Walden at all

seasons, curious to see where so much came out of so little--where a

man had lived who preferred poverty to riches, and solitude to

society, who boasted that he could do without the post office, the

newspapers, the telegraph, and who had little use for the railroad,

though he thought mankind had become a little more punctual since its

invention.

Another conspicuous fault as a writer is his frequent use of false

analogies, or his comparison of things which have no ground of

relationship, as when he says: "A day passed in the society of those

Greek sages, such as described in the Banquet of Xenophon, would not

be comparable with the dry wit of decayed cranberry-vines, and the

fresh Attic salt of the moss-beds." The word "wit" has no meaning when

thus used. Or again where he says: "All great enterprises are

self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his

poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it

makes." Was there ever a more inept and untruthful comparison? To find

any ground of comparison between the two things he compared, he must

make his poet sustain his body by the scraps and lines of his poem

which he rejects, or else the steam planing-mill consume its finished

product.

"Let all things give way to the impulse of expression," he says, and

he assuredly practiced what he had preached.

One of his tricks of self-justification was to compare himself with

inanimate objects, which is usually as inept as to compare colors with

sounds or perfumes: "My acquaintances sometimes imply that I am too

cold," he writes, "but each thing is warm enough of its kind. Is the

stone too cold which absorbs the heat of the summer sun and does not

part with it during the night? Crystals, though they be of ice are not

too cold to melt.... Crystal does not complain of crystal any more

than the dove of its mate."

He strikes the same false note when, in discussing the question of

solitude at Walden he compares himself to the wild animals around him,

and to inanimate objects, and says he was no more lonely than the

loons on the pond, or than Walden itself: "I am no more lonely than a

single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a bean leaf, or a sorrel,

or a house-fly, or a humble-bee. I am no more lonely than the Mill

Brook, or a weather-cock, or the North Star, or the South Wind, or an

April Shower, or a January Thaw, or the first spider in a new house."

Did he imagine that any of these things were ever lonely? Man does get

lonely, but Mill Brook and the North Star probably do not.

If he sees anything unusual in nature, like galls on trees and plants,

he must needs draw some moral from it, usually at the expense of the

truth. For instance, he implies that the beauty of the oak galls is

something that was meant to bloom in the flower, that the galls are

the scarlet sins of the tree, the tree's Ode to Dejection, yet he

must have known that they are the work of an insect and are as healthy

a growth as is the regular leaf. The insect gives the magical touch

that transforms the leaf into a nursery for its young. Why deceive

ourselves by believing that fiction is more interesting than fact? But

Thoreau is full of this sort of thing; he must have his analogy, true

or false.

He says that when a certain philosophical neighbor came to visit him

in his hut at Walden, their discourse expanded and racked the little

house: "I should not dare to say how many pounds' weight there was

above the atmospheric pressure on every circular inch; it opened its

seams so that they had to be calked with much dulness thereafter to

stop the consequent leak--but I had enough of that kind of oakum

already picked." At the beginning of the paragraph he says that he and

his philosopher sat down each with "some shingles of thoughts well

dried," which they whittled, trying their knives and admiring the

clear yellowish grain of the pumpkin pine. In a twinkling the three

shingles of thought are transformed into fishes of thought in a stream

into which the hermit and the philosopher gently and reverently wade,

without scaring or disturbing them. Then, presto! the fish become a

force, like the pressure of a tornado that nearly wrecks his cabin!

Surely this is tipsy rhetoric, and the work that can stand much of

it, as "Walden" does, has a plus vitality that is rarely equaled.