In his paper called "Life without Principle," his radical idealism
comes out: To work for money, or for subsistence alone, is life
without principle. A man must work for the love of the work. Get a man
to work for you who is actuated by love for you or for the work alone.
Find some one to beat your rugs and carpets and clean out your well,
or weed your onion-patch, who is not influenced by any money
consideration. This were ideal, indeed; this suggests paradise.
Thoreau probably loved his lecturing, and his surveying, and his
magazine writing, and the money these avocations brought him did not
seem unworthy, but could the business and industrial world safely
adopt that principle?
So far as I understand him, we all live without principle when we do
anything that goes against the grain, or for money, or for bread
alone. "To have done anything by which you earned money is to have
been truly idle or worse." "If you would get money as a writer or
lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly."
Yet his neighbor Emerson was in much demand as a lecturer, and earned
a good deal of money in that way. Truly idealists like Thoreau are
hard to satisfy. Agassiz said he could not afford to give his time to
making money, but how many Agassiz are there in the world at any one
time? Such a man as our own Edison is influenced very little by the
commercial value of his inventions. This is as it should be, but only
a small fraction of mankind do or can live to ideal ends. Those who
work for love are certainly the lucky ones, and are exceptionally
endowed. It is love of the sport that usually sends one a-fishing or
a-hunting, and this gives it the sanction of the Gospel according to
Thoreau. Bradford Torrey saw a man sitting on a log down in Florida
who told him, when he asked about his occupation, that he had no time
to work! It is to be hoped that Thoreau enjoyed his surveying, as he
probably did, especially when it took him through sphagnum swamps or
scrub-oak thickets or a tangle of briers and thorns. The more
difficult the way, the more he could summon his philosophy. "You must
get your living by loving." It is a hard saying, but it is a part of
his gospel. But as he on one occasion worked seventy-six days
surveying, for only one dollar a day, the money he received should not
be laid up against him.
As a matter of fact we find Thoreau frequently engaging in manual
labor to earn a little money. He relates in his Journal of 1857 that
while he was living in the woods he did various jobs about
town--fence-building, painting, gardening, carpentering:
One day a man came from the east edge of the town and said
that he wanted to get me to brick up a fireplace, etc.,
etc., for him. I told him that I was not a mason, but he
knew that I had built my own house entirely and would not
take no for an answer. So I went.
It was three miles off, and I walked back and forth each
day, arriving early and working as late as if I were living
there. The man was gone away most of the time, but had left
some sand dug up in his cow-yard for me to make mortar with.
I bricked up a fireplace, papered a chamber, but my
principal work was whitewashing ceilings. Some were so dirty
that many coats would not conceal the dirt. In the kitchen I
finally resorted to yellow-wash to cover the dirt. I took my
meals there, sitting down with my employer (when he got
home) and his hired men. I remember the awful condition of
the sink, at which I washed one day, and when I came to look
at what was called the towel I passed it by and wiped my
hands on the air, and thereafter I resorted to the pump. I
worked there hard three days, charging only a dollar a day.
About the same time I also contracted to build a wood-shed
of no mean size, for, I think, exactly six dollars, and
cleared about half of it by a close calculation and swift
working. The tenant wanted me to throw in a gutter and
latch, but I carried off the board that was left and gave
him no latch but a button. It stands yet,--behind the Kettle
house. I broke up Johnny Kettle's old "trow," in which he
kneaded his bread, for material. Going home with what nails
were left in a flower [_sic!_] bucket on my arm, in a rain,
I was about getting into a hay-rigging, when my umbrella
frightened the horse, and he kicked at me over the fills,
smashed the bucket on my arm, and stretched me on my back;
but while I lay on my back, his leg being caught under the
shaft, I got up, to see him sprawling on the other side.
This accident, the sudden bending of my body backwards,
sprained my stomach so that I did not get quite strong there
for several years, but had to give up some fence-building
and other work which I had undertaken from time to time.
I built the common slat fence for $1.50 per rod, or worked
for $1.00 per day. I built six fences.
These homely and laborious occupations show the dreamer and
transcendentalist of Walden in a very interesting light. In his
practical life he was a ready and resourceful man and could set his
neighbors a good example, and no doubt give them good advice. But what
fun he had with his correspondents when they wrote him for practical
advice about the conduct of their lives! One of them had evidently
been vexing his soul over the problem of Church and State: "Why not
make a very large mud pie and bake it in the sun? Only put no Church
nor State into it, nor upset any other pepper box that way. Dig out a
woodchuck--for that has nothing to do with rotting institutions. Go
ahead."
Dear, old-fashioned Wilson Flagg, who wrote pleasantly, but rather
tamely, about New England birds and seasons, could not profit much
from Thoreau's criticism: "He wants stirring up with a pole. He should
practice turning a series of summer-sets rapidly, or jump up and see
how many times he can strike his feet together before coming down.
Let him make the earth turn round now the other way, and whet his wits
on it as on a grindstone; in short, see how many ideas he can
entertain at once."
Expect no Poor Richard maxims or counsel from Thoreau. He would tell
you to invest your savings in the bonds of the Celestial Empire, or
plant your garden with a crop of Giant Regrets. He says these are
excellent for sauce. He encourages one of his correspondents with the
statement that he "never yet knew the sun to be knocked down and
rolled through a mud puddle; he comes out honor bright from behind
every storm."
X
All Thoreau's apparent inconsistencies and contradictions come from
his radical idealism. In all his judgments upon men and things, and
upon himself, he is an uncompromising idealist. All fall short. Add
his habit of exaggeration and you have him saying that the pigs in the
street in New York (in 1843) are the most respectable part of the
population. The pigs, I suppose, lived up to the pig standard, but the
people did not live up to the best human standards. Wherever the ideal
leads him, there he follows. After his brother John's death he said he
did not wish ever to see John again, but only the ideal John--that
other John of whom he was but the imperfect representative. Yet the
loss of the real John was a great blow to him, probably the severest
in his life. But he never allows himself to go on record as showing
any human weakness.
"Comparatively," he says, "we can excuse any offense against the
heart, but not against the imagination." Thoreau probably lived in his
heart as much as most other persons, but his peculiar gospel is the
work of his imagination. He could turn his idealism to practical
account. A man who had been camping with him told me that on such
expeditions he carried a small piece of cake carefully wrapped up in
his pocket and that after he had eaten his dinner he would take a
small pinch of this cake. His imagination seemed to do the rest.
The most unpromising subject would often kindle the imagination of
Thoreau. His imagination fairly runs riot over poor Bill Wheeler, a
cripple and a sot who stumped along on two clumps for feet, and who
earned his grog by doing chores here and there. One day Thoreau found
him asleep in the woods in a low shelter which consisted of meadow hay
cast over a rude frame. It was a rare find to Thoreau. A man who could
turn his back upon the town and civilization like that must be some
great philosopher, greater than Socrates or Diogenes, living perhaps
"from a deep principle," "simplifying life, returning to nature,"
having put off many things,--"luxuries, comforts, human society, even
his feet,--wrestling with his thoughts." He outdid himself. He
out-Thoreaued Thoreau: "Who knows but in his solitary meadow-hay bunk
he indulges, in thought, only in triumphant satires on men? [More
severe than those of the Walden hermit?] I was not sure for a moment
but here was a philosopher who had left far behind him the
philosophers of Greece and India, and I envied him his advantageous
point of view--" with much more to the same effect.
Thoreau's reaction from the ordinary humdrum, respectable, and
comfortable country life was so intense, and his ideal of the free and
austere life he would live so vivid, that he could thus see in this
besotted vagabond a career and a degree of wisdom that he loved to
contemplate.
One catches eagerly at any evidence of tender human emotions in
Thoreau, his stoical indifference is so habitual with him: "I laughed
at myself the other day to think that I cried while reading a pathetic
story." And he excuses himself by saying, "It is not I, but Nature in
me, which was stronger than I."
It was hard for Thoreau to get interested in young women. He once went
to an evening party of thirty or forty of them, "in a small room,
warm and noisy." He was introduced to two of them, but could not hear
what they said, there was such a cackling. He concludes by saying:
"The society of young women is the most unprofitable I have ever
tried. They are so light and flighty that you can never be sure
whether they are there or not."