There can be little doubt that in his practical daily life we may credit
Thoreau with the friendliness and neighborliness that his friend Dr.
Edward W. Emerson claims for him. In a recent letter to me, Dr. Emerson
writes: "He carried the old New England undemonstrativeness very far. He
was also, I believe, really shy, prospered only in monologue, except in
a walk in the woods with one companion, and his difficulties increased
to impossibility in a room full of people." Dr. Emerson admits that
Thoreau is himself to blame for giving his readers the impression that
he held his kind in contempt, but says that in reality he had
neighborliness, was dutiful to parents and sisters, showed courtesy to
women and children and an open, friendly side to many a simple,
uncultivated townsman.
This practical helpfulness and friendliness in Thoreau's case seems to
go along with the secret contempt he felt and expressed in his Journal
toward his fellow townsmen. At one time he was chosen among the
selectmen to perambulate the town lines--an old annual custom. One day
they perambulated the Lincoln line, the next day the Bedford line, the
next day the Carlisle line, and so on, and kept on their rounds for a
week. Thoreau felt soiled and humiliated. "A fatal coarseness is the
result of mixing in the trivial affairs of men. Though I have been
associating even with the select men of this and adjoining towns, I
feel inexpressibly begrimed." How fragile his self-respect was! Yet he
had friends among the surrounding farmers, whose society and
conversation he greatly valued.
That Thoreau gave the impression of being what country folk call a
crusty person--curt and forbidding in manner--seems pretty well
established. His friend Alcott says he was deficient in the human
sentiments. Emerson, who, on the whole, loved and admired him, says:
"Thoreau sometimes appears only as a _gendarme_, good to knock down a
cockney with, but without that power to cheer and establish which
makes the value of a friend." Again he says: "If I knew only Thoreau,
I should think coöperation of good men impossible. Must we always talk
for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, and joy?
Centrality he has, and penetration, strong understanding, and the
higher gifts,--the insight of the real, or from the real, and the
moral rectitude that belongs to it; but all this and all his resources
of wit and invention are lost to me, in every experiment, year after
year, that I make, to hold intercourse with his mind. Always some
weary captious paradox to fight you with, and the time and temper
wasted." "It is curious," he again says, "that Thoreau goes to a house
to say with little preface what he has just read or observed, delivers
it in a lump, is quite inattentive to any comment or thought which any
of the company offer on the matter, nay, is merely interrupted by it,
and when he has finished his report departs with precipitation."
It is interesting in this connection to put along-side of these rather
caustic criticisms a remark in kind recorded by Thoreau in his Journal
concerning Emerson: "Talked, or tried to talk, with R. W. E. Lost my
time--nay, almost my identity. He, assuming a false opposition where
there was no difference of opinion, talked to the wind--told me what I
knew--and I lost my time trying to imagine myself somebody else to
oppose him."
Evidently Concord philosophers were not always in concord.
More characteristic of Emerson is the incident Thoreau relates of his
driving his own calf, which had just come in with the cows, out of the
yard, thinking it belonged to a drove that was then going by. From all
accounts Emerson was as slow to recognize his own thoughts when Alcott
and Channing aired them before him as he was to recognize his own
calf.
"I have got a load of great hardwood stumps," writes Thoreau, and
then, as though following out a thought suggested by them, he adds:
"For sympathy with my neighbors I might about as well live in China.
They are to me barbarians with their committee works and
gregariousness."
Probably the stumps were from trees that grew on his neighbors' farms
and were a gift to him. Let us hope the farmers did not deliver them
to him free of charge. He complained that the thousand and one
gentlemen that he met were all alike; he was not cheered by the hope
of any rudeness from them: "A cross man, a coarse man, an eccentric
man, a silent man who does not drill well--of him there is some hope,"
he declares. Herein we get a glimpse of the Thoreau ideal which led
his friend Alcott to complain that he lacked the human sentiment. He
may or may not have been a "cross man," but he certainly did not
"drill well," for which his readers have reason to be thankful.
Although Thoreau upholds the cross and the coarse man, one would
really like to know with what grace he would have put up with
gratuitous discourtesy or insult. I remember an entry in his Journal
in which he tells of feeling a little cheapened when a neighbor asked
him to take some handbills and leave them at a certain place as he
passed on his walk.
A great deal of the piquancy and novelty in Thoreau come from the
unexpected turn he gives to things, upsetting all our preconceived
notions. His trick of exaggeration he rather brags of: "Expect no
trivial truth from me," he says, "unless I am on the witness stand."
He even exaggerates his own tendency to exaggeration. It is all a part
of his scheme to startle and wake people up. He exaggerates his likes,
and he exaggerates his dislikes, and he exaggerates his indifference.
It is a way he has of bragging. The moment he puts pen to paper the
imp of exaggeration seizes it. He lived to see the beginning of the
Civil War, and in a letter to a friend expressed his indifference in
regard to Fort Sumter and "Old Abe," and all that, yet Mr. Sanborn
says he was as zealous about the war as any soldier. The John Brown
tragedy made him sick, and the war so worked upon his feelings that in
his failing state of health he said he could never get well while it
lasted. His passion for Nature and the wild carried him to the extent
of looking with suspicion, if not with positive dislike, upon all of
man's doings and institutions. All civil and political and social
organizations received scant justice at his hands. He instantly
espoused the cause of John Brown and championed him in the most public
manner because he (Brown) defied the iniquitous laws and fell a martyr
to the cause of justice and right. If he had lived in our times, one
would have expected him, in his letters to friends, to pooh-pooh the
World War that has drenched Europe with blood, while in his heart he
would probably have been as deeply moved about it as any of us were.
Thoreau must be a stoic, he must be an egotist, he must be illogical,
whenever he puts pen to paper. This does not mean that he was a
hypocrite, but it means that on his practical human side he did not
differ so much from the rest of us, but that in his mental and
spiritual life he pursued ideal ends with a seriousness that few of us
are equal to. He loved to take an air-line. In his trips about the
country to visit distant parts, he usually took the roads and paths or
means of conveyance that other persons took, but now and then he
would lay down his ruler on the map, draw a straight line to the
point he proposed to visit, and follow that, going through the meadows
and gardens and door-yards of the owners of the property in his line
of march. There is a tradition that he and Channing once went through
a house where the front and back door stood open. In his mental
flights and excursions he follows this plan almost entirely; the hard
facts and experiences of life trouble him very little. He can always
ignore them or sail serenely above them.
How is one to reconcile such an expression as this with what his
friends report of his actual life: "My countrymen are to me
foreigners. I have but little more sympathy with them than with the
mobs of India or China"? Or this about his Concord neighbors, as he
looks down upon them from a near-by hill: "On whatever side I look
off, I am reminded of the mean and narrow-minded men whom I have
lately met there. What can be uglier than a country occupied by
grovelling, coarse, and low-minded men?--no scenery can redeem it.
Hornets, hyenas, and baboons are not so great a curse to a country as
men of a similar character." Tried by his ideal standards, his
neighbors and his countrymen generally were, of course, found wanting,
yet he went about among them helpful and sympathetic and enjoyed his
life to the last gasp. These things reveal to us what a gulf there
may be between a man's actual life and the high altitudes in which he
disports himself when he lets go his imagination.