"Crescit occulto velut arbor aevo
Fama Marcelli,"--
he pointed in felicitous phrase to the only fame that posterity has
much regarded,--the slow-growing, deep-rooted laurel of renown. And
Shakespeare, citing the old English rhyming saw,--
"Small herbs have grace,
Great weeds do grow apace,"--
signified the same thing in a parable,--the popularity and suddenness
of transient things, contrasted with the usefully permanent. There
were plenty of authors in Thoreau's time (of whom Willis may be taken
as the type) who would have smiled loftily to think that a rustic from
the Shawsheen and Assabet could compete with the traveled scholar or
elegant versifier who commanded the homage of drawing-rooms and
magazines, for the prize of lasting remembrance; yet who now are
forgotten, or live a shadowy life in the alcoves of libraries, piping
forth an ineffective voice, like the shades in Virgil's Tartarus. But
Thoreau was wiser when he wrote at the end of his poem,
"Inspiration,"--
"Fame cannot tempt the bard
Who's famous with his God;
Nor laurel him reward
Who has his Maker's nod."
He strove but little for glory, either immediate or posthumous, well
knowing that it is the inevitable and unpursued result of what men do
or say,--
"Our fatal shadow that walks by us still."
The Letters of Thoreau, though not less remarkable in some aspects
than what he wrote carefully for publication, have thus far scarcely
had justice done them. The selection made for a small volume in 1865
was designedly done to exhibit one phase of his character,--the most
striking, if you will, but not the most native or attractive. "In his
own home," says Ellery Channing, who knew him more inwardly than any
other, "he was one of those characters who may be called 'household
treasures;' always on the spot, with skillful eye and hand, to raise
the best melons in the garden, plant the orchard with choicest trees,
or act as extempore mechanic; fond of the pets, his sister's flowers,
or sacred Tabby; kittens were his favorites,--he would play with them
by the half-hour. No whim or coldness, no absorption of his time by
public or private business, deprived those to whom he belonged of his
kindness and affection. He did the duties that lay nearest, and
satisfied those in his immediate circle; and whatever the impressions
from the theoretical part of his writings, when the matter is probed
to the bottom, good sense and good feeling will be detected in it."
This is preëminently true; and the affectionate conviction of this
made his sister Sophia dissatisfied with Emerson's rule of selection
among the letters. This she confided to me, and this determined me,
should occasion offer, to give the world some day a fuller and more
familiar view of our friend.
For this purpose I have chosen many letters and mere notes,
illustrating his domestic and gossipy moods,--for that element was in
his mixed nature, inherited from the lively maternal side,--and even
the colloquial vulgarity (using the word in the strict sense of
"popular speech") that he sometimes allowed himself. In his last years
he revolted a little at this turn of his thoughts, and, as Channing
relates, "rubbed out the more humorous parts of his essays, originally
a relief to their sterner features, saying, 'I cannot bear the levity
I find;'" to which Channing replied that he ought to spare it, even to
the puns, in which he abounded almost as much as Shakespeare. His
friend was right,--the obvious incongruity was as natural to Thoreau
as the grace and French elegance of his best sentences. In the dozen
letters newly added to this edition, these contrasted qualities hardly
appear so striking as in the longer, earlier ones; but they all
illustrate events of his life or points in his character which are
essential for fully understanding this most original of all American
authors. The present volume is enlarged by some thirty pages, chiefly
by additional letters to Ricketson, and all those to C. H. Greene. The
modesty and self-deprecation in the Michigan correspondence will
attract notice.
I have not rejected the common and trivial in these letters; being
well assured that what the increasing number of Thoreau's readers
desire is to see this piquant original just as he was,--not arrayed in
the paradoxical cloak of the Stoic sage, nor sitting complacent in the
cynic earthenware cave of Diogenes, and bidding Alexander stand out of
his sunshine. He did those acts also; but they were not the whole man.
He was far more poet than cynic or stoic; he had the proud humility of
those sects, but still more largely that unconscious pride which
comes to the poet when he sees that his pursuits are those of the few
and not of the multitude. This perception came early to Thoreau, and
was expressed in some unpublished verses dating from his long,
solitary rambles, by night and day, on the seashore at Staten Island,
where he first learned the sombre magnificence of Ocean. He feigns
himself the son of what might well be one of Homer's fishermen, or the
shipwrecked seaman of Lucretius,--
"Saevis projectus ab undis
Cui tantum in vita restet transire malorum,"--
and then goes on thus with his parable:--
"Within a humble cot that looks to sea,
Daily I breathe this curious warm life;
Beneath a friendly haven's sheltering lee
My noiseless day with mystery still is rife.
"'T is here, they say, my simple life began,--
And easy credence to the tale I lend,
For well I know 't is here I am a man,--
But who will simply tell me of the end?
"These eyes, fresh-opened, spied the far-off Sea,
That like a silent godfather did stand,
Nor uttered one explaining word to me,
While introducing straight godmother Land.
"And yonder still stretches that silent Main,
With many glancing ships besprinkled o'er;
And earnest still I gaze and gaze again
Upon the selfsame waves and friendly shore.
"Infinite work my hands find there to do,
Gathering the relics which the waves upcast:
Each storm doth scour the sea for something new,
And every time the strangest is the last.
"My neighbors sometimes come with lumbering carts.
As if they wished my pleasant toil to share;
But straight they go again to distant marts,
For only weeds and ballast are their care."
"Only weeds and ballast?" that is exactly what Thoreau's neighbors
would have said he was gathering, for the most of his days; yet now he
is seen to have collected something more durable and precious than
they with their implements and market-carts. If they viewed him with a
kind of scorn and pity, it must be said that he returned the affront;
only time seems to have sided with the poet in the controversy that he
maintained against his busy age.
Superiority,--moral elevation, without peevishness or
condescension,--this was Thoreau's distinguishing quality. He softened
it with humor, and sometimes sharpened it with indignation; but he
directed his satire and his censure as often against himself as
against mankind; men he truly loved,--if they would not obstruct his
humble and strictly chosen path. The letters here printed show this,
if I mistake not,--and the many other epistles of his, still
uncollected, would hardly vary the picture he has sketched of himself,
though they would add new facts. Those most to be sought for are his
replies to the generous letters of his one English correspondent.[1]
The profile portrait reproduced in photogravure for this volume is
less known than it should be,--for it alone of the four likenesses
extant shows the aquiline features as his comrades of the wood and
mountain saw them,--not weakened by any effort to bring him to the
standard of other men in garb or expression. The artist, Mr. Walton
Ricketson, knew and admired him. To him and to his sister Anna I am
indebted for the letters and other material found in their volume
"Daniel Ricketson and His Friends."