Thoreau went on to make languages his special project. George Ticknor had turned modern languages into Harvard’s “live literary center,” and Thoreau took everything available: Italian from the banished political dissident Pietro Bachi, who read his beloved poets with such beauty that “it was like hearing a sweet and soft music”;34 four terms of French, until he passed the required exam; German from the political exile Hermann Bokum; the smattering of Spanish and Portuguese offered by the immaculately dressed and powdered Frenchman Francis Sales. Having missed the great Ticknor, Thoreau nearly missed his replacement, Longfellow, as well: in his final term he sat in on the poet’s inaugural lectures on German and Northern Literature, but caught under a crushing course load, he soon dropped out. By the time he graduated, Thoreau could read at least five foreign languages—Latin, Greek, Italian, French, and German—plus a little Spanish and Portuguese. On his own he studied Wampanoag, the Native American language of eastern Massachusetts; he may have been inspired by his classmate Horatio Hale, who while still a student published a monograph on Penobscot languages based on interviews he conducted with a group of Penobscot encamped on Harvard’s grounds.35 It’s possible that Thoreau, so fascinated with both languages and with Native Americans, went along.
Mathematics was another Harvard signature, and here Thoreau was lucky: his newly hired professor, Benjamin Peirce, was the foremost mathematician of his day and the leading theorist and practitioner of surveying and practical navigation; soon he would also be superintendent of the US Coast Survey. Or perhaps Thoreau was unlucky—as Frisbie Hoar laughed, not one person in the room understood Peirce’s lectures. “He would take the chalk in his hand and begin in his shrill voice, ‘if we take,’ then he would write an equation in algebraic characters, ‘then we have,’ following it by another equation or formula,” covering the board in a transport of delight, smearing his clothes with chalk, and leaving his bewildered students far behind. Yet Thoreau’s flair for mathematics might have put him in the advanced study group who met at Peirce’s home in the evenings. In Walden he professed astonishment at being informed, upon graduation, “that I had studied navigation!—why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it.”36 Nevertheless, his successful career as Concord’s town surveyor began under Peirce, in whose classroom he acquired a rich trove of navigational metaphors.
Thoreau would have flourished in science courses, too, had there been any. Instead he was taught physics and astronomy by a tutor who marched them through recitations in outdated French treatises without a single laboratory demonstration and without once looking at the stars. More amusing were the chemistry lectures of Professor John Webster, whose fondness for blowing things up earned him the name “Sky-rocket Jack.” During one of his demonstrations, a copper vessel exploded with such force that a chunk flew into the back row, where it would have killed the student sitting there had he not chanced to be absent that day. Webster was only mildly repentant: “The President sent for me and told me I must be more careful. He said I should feel very badly indeed if I had killed one of the students. And I should.”37 Webster’s nonchalance perhaps foreshadowed his shocking crime: one day in November 1849, Professor George Parkman unaccountably disappeared; a week later, a suspicious janitor unearthed human body parts in a brick vault underneath Webster’s chemistry lab. Thoreau’s former professor was tried for murder, confessed, and hanged.
The man who truly introduced Thoreau to science was not a professor at all, but the college’s shy and modest librarian, beloved by generations of students: Thaddeus William Harris. When Harvard had an open position in natural history but no funds to hire anyone, Harris agreed to cover the required course in natural history, dutifully drilling his students in Harvard’s outdated textbooks. But Harris’s passion for natural history was real, and he was building one of the best insect collections in America. In May 1837, he joined forces with Thoreau and friends to found Harvard’s Natural History Society, leading them on field excursions around Cambridge in pursuit of plants, birds, and insects. Students long recalled Harris’s “beauty loving soul,” his enthusiasm at their discoveries “as if he had never seen the like before,” and his willingness to lend books and help “with a kindness and patience beyond praise.” One student recalled how every spring Harris’s eyes would kindle over a “plain little orchid” that grew “in a certain field near the Observatory”; he led their annual quest for it with an enthusiasm that cast the Holy Grail itself into insignificance.38 Thoreau’s rambles to flickers’ nests and weasel dens were thus not lonely escapes from society, but expressions of shared passion and mutual instruction amid a circle of friends. Harris himself would remain Thoreau’s friend and mentor until his death, in 1856.
Harvard taught history and philosophy as extensions of Greece and Rome, conceived not as dead civilizations but as living expressions of art, culture, and history—the springboard into the democratic politics necessary to govern the new American republic. Thoreau arrived at Harvard just as Charles Beck and Cornelius Conway Felton were leading this national New Humanist revolution; Beck, who taught Latin, was a German émigré who brought the latest German scholarship straight from Tübingen; Felton became the Eliot Professor of Greek Literature in 1834, making Thoreau among the first to study Greek under America’s most influential scholar of classics. The New Humanists hadn’t yet been able to toss out Harvard’s antiquated Latin textbooks, which Felton joked had defeated generations of students more thoroughly than the Roman Legions had ever defeated the Carthaginians. But they did open a new vista by insisting that one not merely learn about Greece and Rome, but to speak and write in Greek and Latin, inhabit the language itself, to become Greek or Roman. Felton famously led his students away from the stern civic virtue of republican Rome to an emotive, Romantic Hellenism meant to cleanse the self of the toxins of modernity and remake the soul, laying the foundation for a lifetime of self-culture. Athens, not Rome, was the true mirror of America, offering American democracy a deeper and more authentic past. While Rome had risen only to fall, America would learn from the past to build a literature, a culture, and a nation that would last, surpassing all that had come before.39
With all this, Thoreau was completely at home: when Concord’s town fathers had swept away the creaky shops and odious factories to erect those fine, white-columned neoclassical monuments, they were deliberately embodying neoclassic republican virtue in wood and paint, just as the architects of Washington, DC, did in marble and granite. The Concord Academy itself, where sons and daughters learned leadership by imbibing Latin and Greek, was part of this national movement toward a new, secular civic culture, an America modeled on the measured and timeless self-sacrifices of the ancients. This is the sweeping vista behind the small moment in Walden when, on a Sunday morning, Thoreau’s “Homeric” man, the French Canadian immigrant Alek Therien, takes the Iliad, the bible of Greece, in his hands while Thoreau translates for him Achilles’s reproof to the grieving Patroclus. “He says, ‘That’s good.’”40 In that simple passage, the promise of a democratic American future is borne forward out of the deepest historical past.
To set up this scene on Walden’s shores took all the resources of Harvard: even as Thoreau was mastering the classics in depth, he was being marched through world history up to the American Constitution, offered as the capstone to world progress. He was immersed in John Locke, the foundation of American political philosophy, then steeped in William Paley’s Moral Philosophy and Scottish Common Sense philosophy, and enjoined by the aging and saintly Henry Ware Sr. to admire Paley’s Evidences of Christianity. All this was rounded off in the senior year by Ware’s lectures on the Greek New Testament.41 By the time he graduated, Thoreau was saturated with Harvard rationalism at its finest, even as outside the classroom he was finding his way to the very writers and intellectuals who were about to topple it all.
· · ·
Every teacher has been baffled by the mysterious alchemy of education. Given
a dozen or a hundred or a thousand students, there will be the one who trots in harness with the rest only to blossom—often quite suddenly—into a genius wholly unexpected. Of Harvard’s professors, it would seem one above all held the key to this genius: the man who taught (or tried to teach) Thoreau how to write. Every term for three long years, Edward Tyrrel Channing, the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, issued Thoreau a long series of assignments, every one of which he collected, corrected, and returned, scored on Quincy’s merciless eight-point scale. If Thoreau kept a journal through these years, it is lost; if he wrote letters home, they are gone; when he ventured into poetry, his verses mostly vanished.42 What survives are his essays for Channing. They disappoint. Plodding, creditable, wooden and conventional, they pleased Channing well enough, but to us, they say little. In Henry Seidel Canby’s succinct phrase, Harvard “nearly ruined him as a writer.”43
Nearly—but not quite. Channing assigned topics that forced students out of their comfort zones and taxed their ingenuity to think of something—anything!—to say. This was Channing’s intention; he wanted his students to discover themselves by exploring the broader universe of their reading. As Emerson (also a Channing student) insisted, “One must be an inventor to read well.” The problem wasn’t Channing’s method or his topics but his withering sarcasm, which destroyed any youthful flicker of originality. Week by week he called each author to the front of the room and made him sit, humiliated, while Channing read his worst passages aloud to the class. It was a terrible ordeal, and students wrote as little as possible so as to give the least occasion for offense. Typical was the time he called one student to the dreaded chair and read aloud, in his shrill voice, “‘The sable sons of Afric’s burning coast.’ You mean negroes, I suppose.” Yes, admitted the student, whereupon Channing crossed out the offending phrase and wrote “negroes” above it, to the student’s everlasting mortification.44 It took a tough mind to survive his methods, and, perhaps as a result, Channing had a profound effect not just on his students but on American literature. Three full years of Channing’s minute criticisms bled out all emotional excess, all frivolous ornament, all exaggeration, in the name of a balanced and sober style that could draw on the world’s classic literature to forge citizens capable of thoughtful deliberation and sound, well-informed political decisions. One editor remarked that he could always tell a Channing student: no one exposed to the fire of his ridicule ever forgot it.45 The young and earnest Henry Thoreau learned so well how to write for his teacher that it took ten years and a move to Walden Pond to shake himself free.
Not until June 1837, the eve of graduation, did Thoreau dare reveal the crackle of his wit. Channing’s topic was to define the standard by which a nation “is judged to be barbarous or civilized.” One more dull assignment—but Thoreau’s response is not dull: “A nation may be ever so civilized and yet lack wisdom,” he snaps to his teacher. “Wisdom is the result of education, and education being the bringing out, or development, of that which is in a man, by contact with the Not Me, is safer in the hands of Nature than of Art. The savage may be, and often is, a sage. Our Indian is more of a man than the inhabitant of a city. He lives as a man—he thinks as a man—he dies as a man.”46 Was Channing pleased with his pupil? The economy of phrasing, the taut parallelism of that final sentence, the worldly assurance of one who finds civilization wanting only after weighing it first, all owe to Channing. But the sass is all Thoreau’s. And the philosophy? Straight out of Emerson. The tight little eggshell of Harvard was cracking open.
Learning to Leave Harvard
Thoreau the freshman got off to a good start. In his first term he missed only a handful of classes and made up all his work; the only chapels he missed were the morning and evening of the Saturday he walked home with Wheeler. By the end of his second term, he had earned enough of Quincy’s precious points to put him sixteenth out of fifty students, and by the end of the year he’d racked up enough to walk away with twenty-five dollars, a major share of the freshman class’s prize money. Only two students earned more: Hildreth, the class poet, and the remarkable Horatio Hale were each awarded thirty dollars. Thus during the notorious year of the Dunkin Rebellion, Thoreau distinguished himself as one of his class’s top students, earning him election to the Institute of 1770. He was one of only seven freshmen to be elected on the first round. Ten more were admitted a week later, and soon all his best friends were members.
Election to the Institute of 1770 radically opened up Thoreau’s world. It had been founded on the eve of the Revolution by students who wanted extra practice in public speaking. They held biweekly meetings and set up a schedule of formal debates, with plenty of time for discussion. Members gave lectures to each other, composed poetry and read it aloud, and shared book reviews. Thoreau paid his annual two dollars regularly, seldom missed a meeting, and jumped right into debates, starting in September 1834 when he joined his old academy buddies Wheeler and Vose to debate the freedom of the press. Members could check out two books at a time from the institute’s growing library—more if they donated the complete works of some author, which Thoreau, who often carried away three or four books, must have done. The institute’s library may have been dwarfed by Harvard’s, which was the nation’s largest with 41,000 volumes by 1840, but the institute filled major gaps, offering the latest scientific works, the major literary journals—and the daring, the foreign, the forbidden, and the avant-garde. By spring 1837, Thoreau was hauling away armfuls of Goethe, Coleridge, Victor Cousin, and, of course, Emerson’s Nature, the great manifesto of Transcendentalism, which he borrowed from the Institute in April and again in June, after giving his own copy away.47
Thoreau kept up his honors record right through his sophomore year, ironically benefiting from an error Quincy made in his favor, which briefly raised him to sixth in his class.48 Emerson himself helped examine Thoreau in February 1835, and while neither impressed the other, Thoreau did well enough to be awarded a “detur,” a specially bound book.49 By school year’s end he’d dropped a bit, to eleventh—still strong enough to earn another twenty-five dollars in prize money and a speaking role in the college’s Exhibition Day: Thoreau translated into Greek and helped perform a dialogue in which he played Cato delivering a defiant message to Caesar.50 Altogether he was holding his own, momentum he kept up right through fall of his junior year, when he loaded up on no fewer than eight different classes. Quincy docked him for a variety of petty offenses (chiefly tardiness and absences) and under the load he slipped to fourteenth—still respectable.
· · ·
The trouble started in November 1835, when the overseers passed a rule allowing students to take a term off to earn extra money by teaching. Henry’s family had just given up their home of eight years to move in with the Aunts Thoreau, suggesting real financial strain, and Henry lost no time in applying for a teaching position. On December 2, he traveled to Canton, Massachusetts, for an interview with the Unitarian minister Orestes Brownson. Something clicked: the slight and wiry Harvard junior with the downcast gray eyes and the tall, lean, firebrand radical with the booming voice stayed up talking straight through to midnight, spurred by Brownson’s famous bottomless cups of coffee. Brownson informed the Harvard Overseers that Henry Thoreau had been examined, and would do, and would live with him for the term.51 Sometime after—the dates are lost to history—Thoreau joined the household: Orestes, his wife Sally, and their four children. In the daytime he kept the Canton grammar school, leading some seventy young people through their paces, and after hours, when he wasn’t tutoring the Brownson boys, he and Orestes studied German together and continued their ferocious conversations. This was Thoreau’s first encounter with a free-range intellectual for whom ideas snapped and crackled, who moved easily in the circles of the great and the near great. His term with Brownson broke the spell of Harvard.
Brownson was a Vermonter who had grown up in poverty, the orphaned son of a farmhand. He became a preacher, writer, and editor in upsta
te New York, a vocal supporter of the radical left, and a relentless religious seeker. By the time Thoreau met him, he had passed from Calvinist Presbyterianism all the way through the fires of atheism to Unitarianism; in 1844, he would complete his religious journey by converting to Catholicism. In 1834 he had named his third son William Ellery Channing, after the preacher who, in his great sermon “Likeness to God,” had said it was God within each of us who opens our eyes to see God in the world around us. Brownson went straight to Boston to tell Channing in person that his sermon had saved him from atheism. Though Channing kept his distance from the intense young outsider, his follower George Ripley embraced Brownson as a fast friend. Soon the two were trading the latest books from Europe and pounding out their plans to save the world. In 1841 Ripley went all in, founding the utopian community Brook Farm. Emerson and Thoreau both declined to join it, but Brownson sent his son Orestes Jr., as well as the idealistic religious seeker Isaac Hecker.
The Brownson who took Henry Thoreau under his wing was still simmering from the controversy of July 1834, when he had declared at an Independence Day address that in America, equality existed only on paper: “A free government is powerless without a free people.” Government must not lead, but follow; it must let the people alone; it must leave the people free to lead it. Years later, Thoreau opened “Civil Disobedience” with a tip of the hat to Brownson: “For government is an expedient by which men would fain succeed in letting one another alone; and, as has been said, when it is most expedient, the governed are most let alone by it.” As Brownson stormed on: “We have equality in scarcely any sense worth naming. Will you say that we are equal while all our seminaries of learning are virtually closed to all except the rich?” To Thoreau, the scholarship boy struggling to pay his tuition bills, Brownson’s words hit home. To Brownson, education was the key to creating true equality, which meant the key to remedying all the evils of society. He didn’t mean reading, writing, and ciphering; he meant real education, “the formation of character, the moral, religious, intellectual, and physical training, disciplining, of our whole community.”52
Henry David Thoreau Page 9
