IV
HENRY DAVID THOREAU: HIS CHARACTER AND OPINIONS
I
Thoreau's thin, penetrating, big-nosed face, even in a bad woodcut,conveys some hint of the limitations of his mind and character. With hisalmost acid sharpness of insight, with his almost animal dexterity inact, there went none of that large, unconscious geniality of the world'sheroes. He was not easy, not ample, not urbane, not even kind; hisenjoyment was hardly smiling, or the smile was not broad enough to beconvincing; he had no waste lands nor kitchen-midden in his nature, butwas all improved and sharpened to a point. "He was bred to noprofession," says Emerson; "he never married; he lived alone; he neverwent to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; heate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco; and,though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun. When asked at dinnerwhat dish he preferred, he answered, 'the nearest.'" So many negativesuperiorities begin to smack a little of the prig. From his later workshe was in the habit of cutting out the humorous passages, under theimpression that they were beneath the dignity of his moral muse; andthere we see the prig stand public and confessed. It was "much easier,"says Emerson acutely, much easier for Thoreau to say _no_ than _yes_;and that is a characteristic which depicts the man. It is a usefulaccomplishment to be able to say _no_, but surely it is the essence ofamiability to prefer to say _yes_ where it is possible. There issomething wanting in the man who does not hate himself whenever he isconstrained to say no. And there was a great deal wanting in this borndissenter. He was almost shockingly devoid of weaknesses; he had notenough of them to be truly polar with humanity; whether you call himdemi-god or demi-man, he was at least not altogether one of us, for hewas not touched with a feeling of our infirmities. The world's heroeshave room for all positive qualities, even those which are disreputable,in the capacious theatre of their dispositions. Such can live manylives; while a Thoreau can live but one, and that only with perpetualforesight.
He was no ascetic, rather an Epicurean of the nobler sort; and he hadthis one great merit, that he succeeded so far as to be happy. "I lovemy fate to the core and rind," he wrote once; and even while he laydying, here is what he dictated (for it seems he was already too feebleto control the pen): "You ask particularly after my health. I _suppose_that I have not many months to live, but of course know nothing aboutit. I may say that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regretnothing." It is not given to all to bear so clear a testimony to thesweetness of their fate, nor to any without courage and wisdom; for thisworld in itself is but a painful and uneasy place of residence, andlasting happiness, at least to the self-conscious, comes only fromwithin. Now Thoreau's content and ecstasy in living was, we may say,like a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude;for there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, ina life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears thebracing contact of the world. In one word, Thoreau was a skulker. He didnot wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into acorner to hoard it for himself. He left all for the sake of certainvirtuous self-indulgences. It is true that his tastes were noble; thathis ruling passion was to keep himself unspotted from the world; andthat his luxuries were all of the same healthy order as cold tubs andearly rising. But a man may be both coldly cruel in the pursuit ofgoodness, and morbid even in the pursuit of health. I cannot lay myhands on the passage in which he explains his abstinence from tea andcoffee, but I am sure I have the meaning correctly. It is this: Hethought it bad economy and worthy of no true virtuoso to spoil thenatural rapture of the morning with such muddy stimulants; let him butsee the sun rise, and he was already sufficiently inspirited for thelabours of the day. That may be reason good enough to abstain from tea;but when we go on to find the same man, on the same or similar grounds,abstain from nearly everything that his neighbours innocently andpleasurably use, and from the rubs and trials of human society itselfinto the bargain, we recognise that valetudinarian healthfulness whichis more delicate than sickness itself. We need have no respect for astate of artificial training. True health is to be able to do withoutit. Shakespeare, we can imagine, might begin the day upon a quart ofale, and yet enjoy the sunrise to the full as much as Thoreau, andcommemorate his enjoyment in vastly better verses. A man who mustseparate himself from his neighbours' habits in order to be happy, is inmuch the same case with one who requires to take opium for the samepurpose. What we want to see is one who can breast into the world, do aman's work, and still preserve his first and pure enjoyment ofexistence.
Thoreau's faculties were of a piece with his moral shyness; for theywere all delicacies. He could guide himself about the woods on thedarkest night by the touch of his feet. He could pick up at once anexact dozen of pencils by the feeling, pace distances with accuracy, andgauge cubic contents by the eye. His smell was so dainty that he couldperceive the foetor of dwelling-houses as he passed them by at night;his palate so unsophisticated that, like a child, he disliked the tasteof wine--or perhaps, living in America, had never tasted any that wasgood; and his knowledge of nature was so complete and curious that hecould have told the time of year, within a day or so, by the aspect ofthe plants. In his dealings with animals he was the original ofHawthorne's Donatello. He pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by thetail; the hunted fox came to him for protection; wild squirrels havebeen seen to nestle in his waistcoat; he would thrust his arm into apool and bring forth a bright, panting fish, lying undismayed in thepalm of his hand. There were few things that he could not do. He couldmake a house, a boat, a pencil, or a book. He was a surveyor, a scholar,a natural historian. He could run, walk, climb, skate, swim, and managea boat. The smallest occasion served to display his physicalaccomplishment; and a manufacturer, from merely observing his dexteritywith the window of a railway carriage, offered him a situation on thespot. "The only fruit of much living," he observes, "is the ability todo some slight thing better." But such was the exactitude of his senses,so alive was he in every fibre, that it seems as if the maxim should bechanged in his case, for he could do most things with unusualperfection. And perhaps he had an approving eye to himself when hewrote: "Though the youth at last grows indifferent, the laws of theuniverse are not indifferent, _but are for ever on the side of the mostsensitive_."
II
Thoreau had decided, it would seem, from the very first to lead a lifeof self-improvement: the needle did not tremble as with richer natures,but pointed steadily north; and as he saw duty and inclination in one,he turned all his strength in that direction. He was met upon thethreshold by a common difficulty. In this world, in spite of its manyagreeable features, even the most sensitive must undergo some drudgeryto live. It is not possible to devote your time to study and meditationwithout what are quaintly but happily denominated private means; theseabsent, a man must contrive to earn his bread by some service to thepublic such as the public cares to pay him for; or, as Thoreau loved toput it, Apollo must serve Admetus. This was to Thoreau even a sourernecessity than it is to most; there was a love of freedom, a strain ofthe wild man, in his nature, that rebelled with violence against theyoke of custom; and he was so eager to cultivate himself and to be happyin his own society, that he could consent with difficulty even to theinterruptions of friendship. "_Such are my engagements to myself_ that Idare not promise," he once wrote in answer to an invitation; and theitalics are his own. Marcus Aurelius found time to study virtue, andbetween whiles to conduct the imperial affairs of Rome; but Thoreau isso busy improving himself that he must think twice about a morning call.And now imagine him condemned for eight hours a day to some uncongenialand unmeaning business! He shrank from the very look of the mechanicalin life; all should, if possible, be sweetly spontaneous and swimminglyprogressive. Thus he learned to make lead-pencils, and, when he hadgained the best certificate, and his friends began to congratulate himon his establishment in life, calmly announced that he should never makeanother. "Why should I?" said he; "I would not do again what I have doneonce
." For when a thing has once been done as well as it wants to be, itis of no further interest to the self-improver. Yet in after years, andwhen it became needful to support his family, he returned patiently tothis mechanical art--a step more than worthy of himself.
The pencils seem to have been Apollo's first experiment in the serviceof Admetus; but others followed. "I have thoroughly triedschool-keeping," he writes, "and found that my expenses were inproportion, or rather out of proportion, to my income; for I was obligedto dress and train, not to say, think and believe, accordingly, and Ilost my time into the bargain. As I did not teach for the benefit of myfellow-men, but simply for a livelihood, this was a failure. I havetried trade, but I found that it would take ten years to get under wayin that, and that then I should probably be on my way to the devil."Nothing, indeed, can surpass his scorn for all so-called business. Uponthat subject gall squirts from him at a touch. "The whole enterprise ofthis nation is not illustrated by a thought," he writes; "it is notwarmed by a sentiment; there is nothing in it for which a man should laydown his life, nor even his gloves." And again: "If our merchants didnot most of them fail, and the banks too, my faith in the old laws ofthis world would be staggered. The statement that ninety-six in ahundred doing such business surely break down is perhaps the sweetestfact that statistics have revealed." The wish was probably father to thefigures; but there is something enlivening in a hatred of so genuine abrand, hot as Corsican revenge, and sneering like Voltaire.
Pencils, school-keeping, and trade being thus discarded one afteranother, Thoreau, with a stroke of strategy, turned the position. He sawhis way to get his board and lodging for practically nothing; andAdmetus never got less work out of any servant since the world began. Itwas his ambition to be an Oriental philosopher; but he was always a veryYankee sort of Oriental. Even in the peculiar attitude in which he stoodto money, his system of personal economics, as we may call it, hedisplayed a vast amount of truly down-East calculation, and he adoptedpoverty like a piece of business. Yet his system is based on one or twoideas which, I believe, come naturally to all thoughtful youths, and areonly pounded out of them by city uncles. Indeed, something essentiallyyouthful distinguishes all Thoreau's knock-down blows at currentopinion. Like the posers of a child, they leave the orthodox in a kindof speechless agony. These know the thing is nonsense. They are surethere must be an answer, yet somehow cannot find it. So it is with hissystem of economy. He cuts through the subject on so new a plane thatthe accepted arguments apply no longer; he attacks it in a new dialectwhere there are no catch-words ready made for the defender; after youhave been boxing for years on a polite, gladiatorial convention, here isan assailant who does not scruple to hit below the belt.
"The cost of a thing," says he, "is _the amount of what I will calllife_ which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in thelong run." I have been accustomed to put it to myself, perhaps moreclearly, that the price we have to pay for money is paid in liberty.Between these two ways of it, at least, the reader will probably notfail to find a third definition of his own; and it follows, on one orother, that a man may pay too dearly for his livelihood, by giving, inThoreau's terms, his whole life for it, or, in mine, bartering for itthe whole of his available liberty, and becoming a slave till death.There are two questions to be considered--the quality of what we buy,and the price we have to pay for it. Do you want a thousand a year, atwo thousand a year, or a ten thousand a year livelihood? and can youafford the one you want? It is a matter of taste; it is not in the leastdegree a question of duty, though commonly supposed so. But there is noauthority for that view anywhere. It is nowhere in the Bible. It is truethat we might do a vast amount of good if we were wealthy, but it isalso highly improbable; not many do; and the art of growing rich is notonly quite distinct from that of doing good, but the practice of the onedoes not at all train a man for practising the other. "Money might be ofgreat service to me," writes Thoreau; "but the difficulty now is that Ido not improve my opportunities, and therefore I am not prepared to havemy opportunities increased." It is a mere illusion that, above a certainincome, the personal desires will be satisfied and leave a wider marginfor the generous impulse. It is as difficult to be generous, or anythingelse except perhaps a member of Parliament, on thirty thousand as ontwo hundred a year.
Now Thoreau's tastes were well defined. He loved to be free, to bemaster of his times and seasons, to indulge the mind rather than thebody; he preferred long rambles to rich dinners, his own reflections tothe consideration of society, and an easy, calm, unfettered, active lifeamong green trees to dull toiling at the counter of a bank. And suchbeing his inclination he determined to gratify it. A poor man must saveoff something; he determined to save off his livelihood. "When a man hasattained those things which are necessary to life," he writes, "there isanother alternative than to obtain the superfluities; _he may adventureon life now_, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced." Thoreauwould get shelter, some kind of covering for his body, and necessarydaily bread; even these he should get as cheaply as possible; and then,his vacation from humbler toil having commenced, devote himself toOriental philosophers, the study of nature, and the work ofself-improvement.
Prudence, which bids us all go to the ant for wisdom and hoard againstthe day of sickness, was not a favourite with Thoreau. He preferred thatother, whose name is so much misappropriated: Faith. When he had securedthe necessaries of the moment, he would not reckon up possible accidentsor torment himself with trouble for the future. He had no toleration forthe man "who ventures to live only by the aid of the mutual insurancecompany, which has promised to bury him decently." He would trusthimself a little to the world. "We may safely trust a good deal morethan we do," says he. "How much is not done by us! or what if we hadbeen taken sick?" And then, with a stab of satire, he describescontemporary mankind in a phrase: "All the day long on the alert, atnight we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves touncertainties." It is not likely that the public will be much affectedby Thoreau, when they blink the direct injunctions of the religion theyprofess; and yet, whether we will or no, we make the same hazardousventures; we back our own health and the honesty of our neighbours forall that we are worth; and it is chilling to think how many must losetheir wager.
In 1845, twenty-eight years old, an age by which the liveliest haveusually declined into some conformity with the world, Thoreau, with acapital of something less than five pounds and a borrowed axe, walkedforth into the woods by Walden Pond, and began his new experiment inlife. He built himself a dwelling, and returned the axe, he says withcharacteristic and workmanlike pride, sharper than when he borrowed it;he reclaimed a patch, where he cultivated beans, peas, potatoes, andsweet corn; he had his bread to bake, his farm to dig, and for thematter of six weeks in the summer he worked at surveying, carpentry, orsome other of his numerous dexterities, for hire. For more than fiveyears this was all that he required to do for his support, and he hadthe winter and most of the summer at his entire disposal. For six weeksof occupation, a little cooking and a little gentle hygienic gardening,the man, you may say, had as good as stolen his livelihood. Or we mustrather allow that he had done far better; for the thief himself iscontinually and busily occupied; and even one born to inherit a millionwill have more calls upon his time than Thoreau. Well might he say,"What old people tell you you cannot do, you try and find you can." Andhow surprising is his conclusion: "I am convinced that _to maintainoneself on this earth is not a hardship, but a pastime_, if we will livesimply and wisely; _as the pursuits of simpler nations are still thesports of the more artificial_."
When he had enough of that kind of life, he showed the same simplicityin giving it up as in beginning it. There are some who could have donethe one, but, vanity forbidding, not the other; and that is perhaps thestory of the hermits; but Thoreau made no fetich of his own example, anddid what he wanted squarely. And five years is long enough for anexperiment, and to prove the success of transcendental Yankeeism. It isnot his frugality which is worthy
of note; for, to begin with, that wasinborn, and therefore inimitable by others who are differentlyconstituted; and again, it was no new thing, but has often been equalledby poor Scotch students at the universities. The point is the sanity ofhis view of life, and the insight with which he recognised the positionof money, and thought out for himself the problem of riches and alivelihood. Apart from his eccentricities, he had perceived, and wasacting on, a truth of universal application. For money enters in twodifferent characters into the scheme of life. A certain amount, varyingwith the number and empire of our desires, is a true necessary to eachone of us in the present order of society; but beyond that amount, moneyis a commodity to be bought or not to be bought, a luxury in which wemay either indulge or stint ourselves, like any other. And there aremany luxuries that we may legitimately prefer to it, such as a gratefulconscience, a country life, or the woman of our inclination. Trite,flat, and obvious as this conclusion may appear, we have only to lookround us in society to see how scantily it has been recognised; andperhaps even ourselves, after a little reflection, may decide to spend atrifle less for money, and indulge ourselves a trifle more in thearticle of freedom.
III
"To have done anything by which you earned money merely," says Thoreau,"is to be" (have been, he means) "idle and worse." There are twopassages in his letters, both, oddly enough, relating to firewood, whichmust be brought together to be rightly understood. So taken, theycontain between them the marrow of all good sense on the subject of workin its relation to something broader than mere livelihood. Here is thefirst: "I suppose I have burned up a good-sized tree to-night--and forwhat? I settled with Mr. Tarbell for it the other day; but that wasn'tthe final settlement. I got off cheaply from him. At last one will say:'Let us see, how much wood did you burn, sir?' And I shall shudder tothink that the next question will be, 'What did you do while you werewarm?'" Even after we have settled with Admetus in the person of Mr.Tarbell, there comes, you see, a further question. It is not enough tohave earned our livelihood. Either the earning itself should have beenserviceable to mankind, or something else must follow. To live issometimes very difficult, but it is never meritorious in itself; and wemust have a reason to allege to our own conscience why we shouldcontinue to exist upon this crowded earth. If Thoreau had simply dweltin his house at Walden, a lover of trees, birds, and fishes, and theopen air and virtue, a reader of wise books, an idle, selfishself-improver, he would have managed to cheat Admetus, but, to cling tometaphor, the devil would have had him in the end. Those who can avoidtoil altogether and dwell in the Arcadia of private means, and eventhose who can, by abstinence, reduce the necessary amount of it to somesix weeks a year, having the more liberty, have only the higher moralobligation to be up and doing in the interest of man.
The second passage is this: "There is a far more important and warmingheat, commonly lost, which precedes the burning of the wood. It is thesmoke of industry, which is incense. I had been so thoroughly warmed inbody and spirit, that when at length my fuel was housed, I came nearselling it to the ashman, as if I had extracted all its heat." Industryis, in itself and when properly chosen, delightful and profitable to theworker; and when your toil has been a pleasure, you have not, as Thoreausays, "earned money merely," but money, health, delight, and moralprofit, all in one. "We must heap up a great pile of doing for a smalldiameter of being," he says in another place; and then exclaims, "Howadmirably the artist is made to accomplish his self-culture by devotionto his art!" We may escape uncongenial toil, only to devote ourselves tothat which is congenial. It is only to transact some higher businessthat even Apollo dare play the truant from Admetus. We must all work forthe sake of work; we must all work, as Thoreau says again, in any"absorbing pursuit--it does not much matter what, so it be honest"; butthe most profitable work is that which combines into one continuedeffort the largest proportion of the powers and desires of a man'snature; that into which he will plunge with ardour, and from which hewill desist with reluctance; in which he will know the weariness offatigue, but not that of satiety; and which will be ever fresh,pleasing, and stimulating to his taste. Such work holds a man together,braced at all points; it does not suffer him to doze or wander; it keepshim actively conscious of himself, yet raised among superior interests;it gives him the profit of industry with the pleasures of a pastime.This is what his art should be to the true artist, and that to a degreeunknown in other and less intimate pursuits. For other professions standapart from the human business of life; but an art has its seat at thecentre of the artist's doings and sufferings, deals directly with hisexperiences, teaches him the lessons of his own fortunes and mishaps,and becomes a part of his biography. So says Goethe:
"Spaet erklingt was frueh erklang; Glueck und Unglueck wird Gesang."
Now Thoreau's art was literature; and it was one of which he hadconceived most ambitiously. He loved and believed in good books. He saidwell, "Life is not habitually seen from any common platform so truly andunexaggerated as in the light of literature." But the literature heloved was of the heroic order. "Books, not which afford us a coweringenjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as anidle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, whicheven make us dangerous to existing institutions--such I call goodbooks." He did not think them easy to be read. "The heroic books," hesays, "even if printed in the character of our mother-tongue, willalways be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we mustlaboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing alarger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valour andgenerosity we have." Nor does he suppose that such books are easilywritten. "Great prose, of equal elevation, commands our respect morethan great verse," says he, "since it implies a more permanent and levelheight, a life more pervaded with the grandeur of the thought. The poetoften only makes an irruption, like the Parthian, and is off again,shooting while he retreats; but the prose writer has conquered like aRoman and settled colonies." We may ask ourselves, almost with dismay,whether such works exist at all but in the imagination of the student.For the bulk of the best of books is apt to be made up with ballast; andthose in which energy of thought is combined with any stateliness ofutterance may be almost counted on the fingers. Looking round in Englishfor a book that should answer Thoreau's two demands of a style likepoetry and sense that shall be both original and inspiriting, I come toMilton's "Areopagitica," and can name no other instance for the moment.Two things at least are plain: that if a man will condescend to nothingmore commonplace in the way of reading, he must not look to have a largelibrary; and that if he proposes himself to write in a similar vein, hewill find his work cut out for him.
Thoreau composed seemingly while he walked, or at least exercise andcomposition were with him intimately connected; for we are told that"the length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing." Hespeaks in one place of "plainness and vigour, the ornaments of style,"which is rather too paradoxical to be comprehensively true. In anotherhe remarks: "As for style of writing, if one has anything to say itdrops from him simply as a stone falls to the ground." We mustconjecture a very large sense indeed for the phrase "if one has anythingto say." When truth flows from a man, fittingly clothed in style andwithout conscious effort, it is because the effort has been made and thework practically completed before he sat down to write. It is only outof fulness of thinking that expression drops perfect like a ripe fruit;and when Thoreau wrote so nonchalantly at his desk, it was because hehad been vigorously active during his walk. For neither clearness,compression, nor beauty of language, come to any living creature tillafter a busy and prolonged acquaintance with the subject on hand. Easywriters are those who, like Walter Scott, choose to remain contentedwith a less degree of perfection than is legitimately within the compassof their powers. We hear of Shakespeare and his clean manuscript; but inface of the evidence of the style itself and of the various editions of_Hamlet_, this merely proves that Messrs. Hemming and Condell wereunacquainted with the common enough phenomenon ca
lled a fair copy. Hewho would recast a tragedy already given to the world must frequentlyand earnestly have revised details in the study. Thoreau himself, and inspite of his protestations, is an instance of even extreme research inone direction; and his effort after heroic utterance is proved not onlyby the occasional finish, but by the determined exaggeration of hisstyle. "I trust you realise what an exaggerator I am--that I lay myselfout to exaggerate," he writes. And again, hinting at the explanation:"Who that has heard a strain of music feared lest he should speakextravagantly any more for ever?" And yet once more, in his essay onCarlyle, and this time with his meaning well in hand: "No truth, wethink, was ever expressed but with this sort of emphasis, that for thetime there seemed to be no other." Thus Thoreau was an exaggerative anda parabolical writer, not because he loved the literature of the East,but from a desire that people should understand and realise what he waswriting. He was near the truth upon the general question; but in his ownparticular method, it appears to me, he wandered. Literature is not lessa conventional art than painting or sculpture; and it is the leaststriking, as it is the most comprehensive of the three. To hear a strainof music, to see a beautiful woman, a river, a great city, or a starrynight, is to make a man despair of his Lilliputian arts in language.Now, to gain that emphasis which seems denied to us by the very natureof the medium, the proper method of literature is by selection, which isa kind of negative exaggeration. It is the right of the literary artist,as Thoreau was on the point of seeing, to leave out whatever does notsuit his purpose. Thus we extract the pure gold; and thus thewell-written story of a noble life becomes, by its very omissions, morethrilling to the reader. But to go beyond this, like Thoreau, and toexaggerate directly, is to leave the saner classical tradition, and toput the reader on his guard. And when you write the whole for the half,you do not express your thought more forcibly, but only express adifferent thought which is not yours.
Thoreau's true subject was the pursuit of self-improvement combined withan unfriendly criticism of life as it goes on in our societies; it isthere that he best displays the freshness and surprising trenchancy ofhis intellect; it is there that his style becomes plain and vigorous,and therefore, according to his own formula, ornamental. Yet he did notcare to follow this vein singly, but must drop into it by the way inbooks of a different purport. "Walden, or Life in the Woods"; "A Week onthe Concord and Merrimack Rivers"; "The Maine Woods,"--such are thetitles he affects. He was probably reminded by his delicate criticalperception that the true business of literature is with narrative; inreasoned narrative, and there alone, that art enjoys all its advantages,and suffers least from its defects. Dry precept and disembodieddisquisition, as they can only be read with an effort of abstraction,can never convey a perfectly complete or a perfectly naturalimpression. Truth, even in literature, must be clothed with flesh andblood, or it cannot tell its whole story to the reader. Hence the effectof anecdote on simple minds; and hence good biographies and works ofhigh, imaginative art, are not only far more entertaining, but far moreedifying, than books of theory or precept. Now Thoreau could not clothehis opinions in the garment of art, for that was not his talent; but hesought to gain the same elbow-room for himself, and to afford a similarrelief to his readers, by mingling his thoughts with a record ofexperience.
Again, he was a lover of nature. The quality which we should callmystery in a painting, and which belongs so particularly to the aspectof the external world and to its influence upon our feelings, was onewhich he was never weary of attempting to reproduce in his books. Theseeming significance of nature's appearances, their unchangingstrangeness to the senses, and the thrilling response which they wakenin the mind of man, continued to surprise and stimulate his spirits. Itappeared to him, I think, that if we could only write near enough to thefacts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but ardently, we might transferthe glamour of reality direct upon our pages; and that, if it were oncethus captured and expressed, a new and instructive relation might appearbetween men's thoughts and the phenomena of nature. This was the eaglethat he pursued all his life long, like a schoolboy with a butterflynet. Hear him to a friend: "Let me suggest a theme for you--to state toyourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountainsamounted to for you, returning to this essay again and again until youare satisfied that all that was important in your experience is in it.Don't suppose that you can tell it precisely the first dozen times youtry, but at 'em again; especially when, after a sufficient pause, yoususpect that you are touching the heart or summit of the matter,reiterate your blows there, and account for the mountain to yourself.Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to makeit short." Such was the method, not consistent for a man whose meaningswere to "drop from him as a stone falls to the ground." Perhaps the mostsuccessful work that Thoreau ever accomplished in this direction is tobe found in the passages relating to fish in the "Week." These areremarkable for a vivid truth of impression and a happy suitability oflanguage, not frequently surpassed.
Whatever Thoreau tried to do was tried in fair, square prose, withsentences solidly built, and no help from bastard rhythms. Moreover,there is a progression--I cannot call it a progress--in his work towardsa more and more strictly prosaic level, until at last he sinks into thebathos of the prosy. Emerson mentions having once remarked to Thoreau:"Who would not like to write something which all can read, like'Robinson Crusoe'? and who does not see with regret that his page is notsolid with a right materialistic treatment which delights everybody?" Imust say in passing, that it is not the right materialistic treatmentwhich delights the world in "Robinson," but the romantic and philosophicinterest of the fable. The same treatment does quite the reverse ofdelighting us when it is applied, in "Colonel Jack," to the managementof a plantation. But I cannot help suspecting Thoreau to have beeninfluenced either by this identical remark or by some other closelysimilar in meaning. He began to fall more and more into a detailedmaterialistic treatment; he went into the business doggedly, as one whoshould make a guide-book; he not only chronicled what had been importantin his own experience, but whatever might have been important in theexperience of anybody else; not only what had affected him, but all thathe saw or heard. His ardour had grown less, or perhaps it wasinconsistent with a right materialistic treatment to display suchemotions as he felt; and, to complete the eventful change, he chose,from a sense of moral dignity, to gut these later works of the savingquality of humour. He was not one of those authors who have learned, inhis own words, "to leave out their dulness." He inflicts his fullquantity upon the reader in such books as "Cape Cod," or "The Yankee inCanada." Of the latter he confessed that he had not managed to get muchof himself into it. Heaven knows he had not, nor yet much of Canada, wemay hope. "Nothing," he says somewhere, "can shock a brave man butdulness." Well, there are few spots more shocking to the brave than thepages of "The Yankee in Canada."
There are but three books of his that will be read with much pleasure:the "Week," "Walden," and the collected letters. As to his poetry,Emerson's word shall suffice for us, it is so accurate and so prettilysaid: "The thyme and marjoram are not yet honey." In this, as in hisprose, he relied greatly on the goodwill of the reader, and wrotethroughout in faith. It was an exercise of faith to suppose that manywould understand the sense of his best work, or that any could beexhilarated by the dreary chronicling of his worst. "But," as he says,"the gods do not hear any rude or discordant sound, as we learn from theecho; and I know that the nature towards which I launch these sounds isso rich that it will modulate anew and wonderfully improve my rudeststrain."
IV
"What means the fact," he cries, "that a soul which has lost all hopefor itself can inspire in another listening soul such an infiniteconfidence in it, even while it is expressing its despair?" The questionis an echo and an illustration of the words last quoted; and it formsthe key-note of his thoughts on friendship. No one else, to myknowledge, has spoken in so high and just a spirit of the kindlyrelations; and I doubt whether it be a drawback that
these lessonsshould come from one in many ways so unfitted to be a teacher in thisbranch. The very coldness and egoism of his own intercourse gave him aclearer insight into the intellectual basis of our warm, mutualtolerations; and testimony to their worth comes with added force fromone who was solitary and disobliging, and of whom a friend remarked,with equal wit and wisdom, "I love Henry, but I cannot like him."
He can hardly be persuaded to make any distinction between love andfriendship; in such rarefied and freezing air, upon the mountain-tops ofmeditation, had he taught himself to breathe. He was, indeed, tooaccurate an observer not to have remarked that "there exists already anatural disinterestedness and liberality" between men and women; yet, hethought, "friendship is no respecter of sex." Perhaps there is a sensein which the words are true; but they were spoken in ignorance; andperhaps we shall have put the matter most correctly, if we call love afoundation for a nearer and freer degree of friendship than can bepossible without it. For there are delicacies, eternal between personsof the same sex, which are melted and disappear in the warmth of love.
To both, if they are to be right, he attributes the same nature andcondition. "We are not what we are," says he, "nor do we treat or esteemeach other for such, but for what we are capable of being." "A friend isone who incessantly pays us the compliment of expecting all the virtuesfrom us, and who can appreciate them in us." "The friend asks no returnbut that his friend will religiously accept and wear and not disgracehis apotheosis of him." "It is the merit and preservation of friendshipthat it takes place on a level higher than the actual characters of theparties would seem to warrant." This is to put friendship on a pedestalindeed; and yet the root of the matter is there; and the last sentence,in particular, is like a light in a dark place, and makes many mysteriesplain. We are different with different friends; yet if we look closelywe shall find that every such relation reposes on some particularapotheosis of oneself; with each friend, although we could notdistinguish it in words from any other, we have at least one specialreputation to preserve: and it is thus that we run, when mortified, toour friend or the woman that we love, not to hear ourselves calledbetter, but to be better men in point of fact. We seek this society toflatter ourselves with our own good conduct. And hence any falsehood inthe relation, any incomplete or perverted understanding, will spoil eventhe pleasure of these visits. Thus says Thoreau again: "Only lovers knowthe value of truth." And yet again: "They ask for words and deeds, whena true relation is word and deed."
But it follows that since they are neither of them so good as the otherhopes, and each is, in a very honest manner, playing a part above hispowers, such an intercourse must often be disappointing to both. "We maybid farewell sooner than complain," says Thoreau, "for our complaint istoo well grounded to be uttered." "We have not so good a right to hateany as our friend."
"It were treason to our love And a sin to God above, One iota to abate Of a pure, impartial hate."
Love is not blind, nor yet forgiving. "O yes, believe me," as the songsays, "Love has eyes!" The nearer the intimacy, the more cuttingly do wefeel the unworthiness of those we love; and because you love one, andwould die for that love to-morrow, you have not forgiven, and you neverwill forgive, that friend's misconduct. If you want a person's faults,go to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know. Andherein lies the magnanimous courage of love, that it endures thisknowledge without change.
It required a cold, distant personality like that of Thoreau, perhaps,to recognise and certainly to utter this truth; for a more human lovemakes it a point of honour not to acknowledge those faults of which itis most conscious. But his point of view is both high and dry. He hasno illusions; he does not give way to love any more than to hatred, butpreserves them both with care like valuable curiosities. A morebald-headed picture of life, if I may so express myself, has seldom beenpresented. He is an egoist; he does not remember, or does not think itworth while to remark, that, in these near intimacies, we areninety-nine times disappointed in our beggarly selves for once that weare disappointed in our friend; that it is we who seem most frequentlyundeserving of the love that unites us; and that it is by our friend'sconduct that we are continually rebuked and yet strengthened for a freshendeavour. Thoreau is dry, priggish, and selfish. It is profit he isafter in these intimacies; moral profit, certainly; but still profit tohimself. If you will be the sort of friend I want, he remarks naively,"my education cannot dispense with your society." His education! asthough a friend were a dictionary. And with all this, not one word aboutpleasure, or laughter, or kisses, or any quality of flesh and blood. Itwas not inappropriate, surely, that he had such close relations with thefish. We can understand the friend already quoted, when he cried: "Asfor taking his arm, I would as soon think of taking the arm of anelm-tree!"
As a matter of fact he experienced but a broken enjoyment in hisintimacies. He says he has been perpetually on the brink of the sort ofintercourse he wanted, and yet never completely attained it. And whatelse had he to expect when he would not, in a happy phrase of Carlyle's,"nestle down into it"? Truly, so it will be always if you only stroll inupon your friends as you might stroll in to see a cricket match; andeven then not simply for the pleasure of the thing, but with someafterthought of self-improvement, as though you had come to the cricketmatch to bet. It was his theory that people saw each other toofrequently, so that their curiosity was not properly whetted, nor hadthey anything fresh to communicate; but friendship must be somethingelse than a society for mutual improvement--indeed, it must only bethat by the way, and to some extent unconsciously; and if Thoreau hadbeen a man instead of a manner of elm-tree, he would have felt that hesaw his friends too seldom, and have reaped benefits unknown to hisphilosophy from a more sustained and easy intercourse. We might remindhim of his own words about love: "We should have no reserve; we shouldgive the whole of ourselves to that business. But commonly men have notimagination enough to be thus employed about a human being, but must becoopering a barrel, forsooth." Ay, or reading Oriental philosophers. Itis not the nature of the rival occupation, it is the fact that yousuffer it to be a rival, that renders loving intimacy impossible.Nothing is given for nothing in this world; there can be no true loveeven on your own side, without devotion; devotion is the exercise oflove, by which it grows; but if you will give enough of that, if youwill pay the price in a sufficient "amount of what you call life," whythen, indeed, whether with wife or comrade, you may have months and evenyears of such easy, natural, pleasurable, and yet improving intercourseas shall make time a moment and kindness a delight.
The secret of his retirement lies not in misanthropy, of which he had notincture, but part in his engrossing design of self-improvement and partin the real deficiencies of social intercourse. He was not so muchdifficult about his fellow human beings as he could not tolerate theterms of their association. He could take to a man for any genuinequalities, as we see by his admirable sketch of the Canadian woodcutterin "Walden"; but he would not consent, in his own words, to "feeblytabulate and paddle in the social slush." It seemed to him, I think,that society is precisely the reverse of friendship, in that it takesplace on a lower level than the characters of any of the parties wouldwarrant us to expect. The society talk of even the most brilliant man isof greatly less account than what you will get from him in (as theFrench say) a little committee. And Thoreau wanted geniality; he had notenough of the superficial, even at command; he could not swoop into aparlour and, in the naval phrase, "cut out" a human being from thatdreary port; nor had he inclination for the task. I suspect he lovedbooks and nature as well and near as warmly as he loved hisfellow-creatures,--a melancholy, lean degeneration of the humancharacter.
"As for the dispute about solitude and society," he thus sums up: "Anycomparison is impertinent. It is an idling down on the plain at the baseof the mountain instead of climbing steadily to its top. Of course youwill be glad of all the society you can get to go up with. Will you goto glory with me? is the burden of the song. It is not that
we love tobe alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar the companygrows thinner and thinner till there is none at all. It is either thetribune on the plain, a sermon on the mount, or a very private ecstasystill higher up. Use all the society that will abet you." But surely itis no very extravagant opinion that it is better to give than toreceive, to serve than to use our companions; and above all, where thereis no question of service upon either side, that it is good to enjoytheir company like a natural man. It is curious and in some waysdispiriting that a writer may be always best corrected out of his ownmouth; and so, to conclude, here is another passage from Thoreau whichseems aimed directly at himself: "Do not be too moral; you may cheatyourself out of much life so.... _All fables, indeed, have their morals;but the innocent enjoy the story._"
V
"The only obligation," says he, "which I have a right to assume is to doat any time what I think right." "Why should we ever go abroad, evenacross the way, to ask a neighbour's advice?" "There is a nearerneighbour within, who is incessantly telling us how we should behave._But we wait for the neighbour without to tell us of some false, easierway._" "The greater part of what my neighbours call good I believe in mysoul to be bad." To be what we are, and to become what we are capable ofbecoming, is the only end of life. It is "when we fall behind ourselves"that "we are cursed with duties and the neglect of duties." "I love thewild," he says, "not less than the good." And again: "The life of a goodman will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for theinevitable laws appear as plainly in the infringement as in theobservance, and" (mark this) "_our lives are sustained by a nearly equalexpense of virtue of some kind_." Even although he were a prig, it willbe owned he could announce a startling doctrine. "As for doing good," hewrites elsewhere, "that is one of the professions that are full.Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, amsatisfied that it does not agree with my constitution. Probably I shouldnot conscientiously and deliberately forsake my particular calling to dothe good which society demands of me, to save the universe fromannihilation; and I believe that a like but infinitely greatersteadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it. If you should everbe betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left handknow what your right hand does, for it is not worth knowing." Elsewherehe returns upon the subject, and explains his meaning thus: "If I ever_did_ a man any good in their sense, of course it was somethingexceptional and insignificant compared with the good or evil I amconstantly doing by being what I am."
There is a rude nobility, like that of a barbarian king, in thisunshaken confidence in himself and indifference to the wants, thoughts,or sufferings of others. In his whole works I find no trace of pity.This was partly the result of theory, for he held the world toomysterious to be criticised, and asks conclusively: "What right have Ito grieve who have not ceased to wonder?" But it sprang still more fromconstitutional indifference and superiority; and he grew up healthy,composed, and unconscious from among life's horrors, like a greenbay-tree from a field of battle. It was from this lack in himself thathe failed to do justice to the spirit of Christ; for while he couldglean more meaning from individual precepts than any score ofChristians, yet he conceived life in such a different hope, and viewedit with such contrary emotions, that the sense and purport of thedoctrine as a whole seems to have passed him by or left him unimpressed.He could understand the idealism of the Christian view, but he washimself so unaffectedly unhuman that he did not recognise the humanintention and essence of that teaching. Hence he complained that Christdid not leave us a rule that was proper and sufficient for this world,not having conceived the nature of the rule that was laid down; forthings of that character that are sufficiently unacceptable becomepositively non-existent to the mind. But perhaps we shall bestappreciate the defect in Thoreau by seeing it supplied in the case ofWhitman. For the one, I feel confident, is the disciple of the other; itis what Thoreau clearly whispered that Whitman so uproariously bawls; itis the same doctrine, but with how immense a difference! the sameargument, but used to what a new conclusion! Thoreau had plenty ofhumour until he tutored himself out of it, and so forfeited that bestbirthright of a sensible man; Whitman, in that respect, seems to havebeen sent into the world naked and unashamed; and yet by a strangeconsummation, it is the theory of the former that is arid, abstract, andclaustral. Of these two philosophies, so nearly identical at bottom, theone pursues Self-improvement--a churlish, mangy dog; the other is upwith the morning, in the best of health, and following the nymphHappiness, buxom, blithe, and debonair. Happiness, at least, is notsolitary; it joys to communicate; it loves others, for it depends onthem for its existence; it sanctions and encourages to all delights thatare not unkind in themselves; if it lived to a thousand, it would notmake excision of a single humorous passage; and while the self-improverdwindles towards the prig, and, if he be not of an excellentconstitution, may even grow deformed into an Obermann, the very name andappearance of a happy man breathe of good-nature, and help the rest ofus to live.
In the case of Thoreau, so great a show of doctrine demands some outcomein the field of action. If nothing were to be done but build a shantybeside Walden Pond, we have heard altogether too much of thesedeclarations of independence. That the man wrote some books is nothingto the purpose, for the same has been done in a suburban villa. That hekept himself happy is perhaps a sufficient excuse, but it isdisappointing to the reader. We may be unjust, but when a man despisescommerce and philanthropy alike, and has views of good so soaring thathe must take himself apart from mankind for their cultivation, we willnot be content without some striking act. It was not Thoreau's fault ifhe were not martyred; had the occasion come, he would have made a nobleending. As it is, he did once seek to interfere in the world's course;he made one practical appearance on the stage of affairs; and a strangeone it was, and strangely characteristic of the nobility and theeccentricity of the man. It was forced on him by his calm but radicalopposition to negro slavery. "Voting for the right is doing nothing forit," he saw; "it is only expressing to men feebly your desire that itshould prevail." For his part, he would not "for an instant recognisethat political organisation for _his_ government which is the _slave's_government also." "I do not hesitate to say," he adds, "that those whocall themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw theirsupport, both in person and property, from the government ofMassachusetts." That is what he did: in 1843 he ceased to pay thepoll-tax. The highway-tax he paid, for he said he was as desirous to bea good neighbour as to be a bad subject; but no more poll-tax to theState of Massachusetts. Thoreau had now seceded, and was a polity untohimself; or, as he explains it with admirable sense, "In fact, Iquietly declare war with the State after my fashion, though I will stillmake what use and get what advantage of her I can, as is usual in suchcases." He was put in prison; but that was a part of his design. "Undera government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just manis also a prison. I know this well, that if one thousand, if onehundred, if ten men whom I could name--ay, if _one_ HONEST man, in thisState of Massachusetts, _ceasing to hold slaves_, were actually towithdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county gaoltherefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For itmatters not how small the beginning may seem to be; what is once welldone is done for ever." Such was his theory of civil disobedience.
And the upshot? A friend paid the tax for him; continued year by year topay it in the sequel; and Thoreau was free to walk the woods unmolested.It was a _fiasco_, but to me it does not seem laughable; even those whojoined in the laughter at the moment would be insensibly affected bythis quaint instance of a good man's horror for injustice. We maycompute the worth of that one night's imprisonment as outweighing half ahundred voters at some subsequent election; and if Thoreau had possessedas great a power of persuasion as (let us say) Falstaff, if he hadcounted a party however small, if his example had been followed by ahundred or by thirty of his fellows, I cannot but believe it would havegreatly precipitated the era of
freedom and justice. We feel themisdeeds of our country with so little fervour, for we are not witnessesto the suffering they cause; but when we see them wake an active horrorin our fellow-man, when we see a neighbour prefer to lie in prisonrather than be so much as passively implicated in their perpetration,even the dullest of us will begin to realise them with a quicker pulse.
Not far from twenty years later, when Captain John Brown was taken atHarper's Ferry, Thoreau was the first to come forward in his defence.The committees wrote to him unanimously that his action was premature."I did not send to you for advice," said he, "but to announce that I wasto speak." I have used the word "defence"; in truth he did not seek todefend him, even declared it would be better for the good cause that heshould die; but he praised his action as I think Brown would have likedto hear it praised.
Thus this singularly eccentric and independent mind, wedded to acharacter of so much strength, singleness, and purity, pursued its ownpath of self-improvement for more than half a century, partgymnosophist, part backwoodsman; and thus did it come twice, though in asubaltern attitude, into the field of political history.
NOTE.--For many facts in the above essay, among which I may mention the incident of the squirrel, I am indebted to "Thoreau: His Life and Aims," by H. A. Page, _i.e._, as is well known, Dr Japp.
The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 3 Page 5
