Thoreau: His Home, Friends and Books/Chapter 9
CHAPTER IX
THOREAU'S SERVICE AND RANK IN LITERATURE
IN Thoreau's first book, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," occur two significant sentences,—"Fame itself is but an epitaph; as late, as false, as true. But they only are the true epitaphs which Old Mortality retouches." Like many other words, viewed from the focus of the present, these seem prophetic of Thoreau's own tardy recognition, revivified and strengthened by the pulse of passing Time. It is still impossible to give an ultimate prediction regarding his future rank but his present status is worthy of attention. Opinion is yet divergent on the question of his work, as literature, per se. Some critics explain the interest which tenaciously clings to his name by his unique personality. Others, equally insistent, place him high on the century's list of authors, because of his marked originality in theme and form. Some would even outclass Emerson by Thoreau and prophesy that the popularity of the former among his contemporaries is only another indication of his supersedence among later generations by the man, so often called his imitator who, lacking Emerson's grace of form, surpassed him in expulsive and oracular force. Such comment is entirely unfair to both writers and would seem a bombastic application of Emerson's own doctrine of compensation.
While much that Thoreau wrote was by nature perishable, while doubtless in his own revision much would have been discarded, and the wisdom of its publication may be questioned, there remain many pages of rare value, sufficient to ensure his place among the world's benefactors in literature. In his recent volume of historical criticism, "The Literary History of America," Mr. Barrett Wendell, who always speaks with authority, represents the latest judgment on Thoreau as author. Of him, Mr. Wendell says,—"For whatever the quality of Thoreau's philosophy, the man was in his own way a literary artist of unusual merit."
The new interest in nature-study, among young and old during the last few years, has greatly extended knowledge of Thoreau among general readers. Mr. Burroughs has chosen two excellent adjectives to characterize these writings and their progressive effects upon the average reader. He calls them "the raciest and most antiseptic books in English literature," and adds,—"The first effect of the reading of his books upon many minds, is irritation and disapproval; the perception of their wisdom and beauty comes later." Nor need critics take such violent exceptions to Mr. Burroughs' index of Thoreau among the world's great writers,—"in the front of the second class of American authors." While his volumes contain ethical, scientific, and poetic material, unsurpassed in uniqueness and volume, as a litterateur he scarcely merits place beside the artists in structure and style,—Irving, Cooper, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Lowell. It is as difficult, however, to give him consistent place among the second class of writers, many of whom are so ephemeral and commonplace. In truth, the personality and the writings alike of Thoreau represented such an extreme, though prescribed, development of natural genius and transcendental culture that they defy classification among compeers. Some latter-day naturalists in essay form may be spoken of as successors of Thoreau but they are in no sense his imitators or even his disciples. Dr. Charles Abbott has well said,—"Thoreau had no predecessor and can have no successor."
In raising the question whether Thoreau's popularity is due to passing enthusiasm for nature, or whether he has attained a lasting place, not alone in native letters but also in the world's literature, two significant facts must be noted. In the first place, interest in his writings began fifty years ago and has grown steadily, even before the impulse of the last two decades. Literary comets do not thus quietly appear and remain. In the second place, while his books concentre about nature, they treat a second subject of equal import to humanity in all ages,—strong thoughts on the economy, morality, and true use of life.
Seldom has an author met less response from publishers and public during lifetime to win, as if by compensation, such cumulative interest after his death. As a result of twenty-five years of writing, he published only two books. The literary history of those decades, however, reveals almost parallel cases of defeat, or slowly-gained success. It was the critical childhood of American literature and her offspring could not be granted too great freedom or praise until their health had been tested. The survival of the fittest finds oft example in American literature of the last century. Had Bryant, Emerson, or Hawthorne died at Thoreau's age, forty-five, they would have had scarcely more recognition during their lives. Complacent as was Thoreau, this constant failure to win publishers in Boston and New York discouraged, and then disgusted, him. While his chief joy was in the expression of his thoughts for his own expansion, he had hoped to share these with a small and sympathetic reading-circle. With an undertone of resignation, he wrote;—
"Fame cannot tempt the bard
Who's famous with his God,
Nor laurel him reward
Who has his Maker's nod."
On no account would he desecrate his soul by accepting compromises or subsidies, that he might appear in print. His work was his religion. The literary impulse was an early one but he did not live in an age when literature was considered a possible profession. He added his name to the list of pioneers, led by Charles Brockden Brown, Philip Freneau, and others, who, with many discouragements and sturdy patience, established literature among the professions in America. In a letter to his sister Helen, in 1840, he had hinted at this aspiration,—"An honest book's the noblest work of man. It will do the world no good hereafter, if you merely exist, and pass life smoothly or roughly; but to have thoughts and write them down, that helps greatly." With a view of possible use as literary material, as well as contemporary record of thoughts and life, he began those famous journals which have furnished the nucleus of all his books, and have enabled the world to receive fresh impetus from his mind, long after his life here was ended.
The keeping of journals was the fashion in these days of few books and many stirring thoughts. Alcott had voluminous records, a small part of which has been published; Hawthorne's journals or note-books, of earlier and later life, suggested not alone many personal experiences, giving the best picture of the inner life of this recluse, but also contained many germs of fancy used in later fiction; Emerson's journals, through the printed portions, reveal the real personality behind the veil of mystic idealism,—they were, as he declares, his "savings banks." The query of Judge Hoar,—"Why should Henry Thoreau's journals be published anyway?"—was not a reproach upon Thoreau but a natural inquiry of the years when journal-keeping was a common habit but journal-publishing had not yet come into vogue.
In one of the "forensics," written at Harvard in his junior year, Thoreau mentions the desirability of "keeping a private journal or record of thoughts, feelings, studies, and daily experience." In this respect, as in many others, he simply adopted the habit and idea of others, but gave to his personal application an intensity and absorption which made the result unusual and individual. There are journals and there are diaries. The latter are the common form,—mere chronology of daily experiences. In the last generation they usually began in almanac style with a record of the weather, probably a legacy from "Poor Richard" and his companions. Even these trivial and laconic diaries are superseded to-day by the tyrannous "engagement book." Thoreau's journals, from the inception of the idea, belonged to the loftier literary form, like the soul-records of Saint Augustine, Montaigne, Amiel, or Thomas à Kempis, or the "Table-Talk" of Luther and Coleridge. To him the journal became "a record of experiences and growth, not a preserve of things well done and said." His thoughts and inner experiences, emotions, moods and aspirations, were jotted down that later they might be united into a literary frame-work.
In the same college essay, in which he advocates the maintenance of a journal, he expands this idea somewhat by describing the view from his "little Gothic window," and his reveries on the quiet Sunday afternoon. In a fragmentary way he began the next year, 1835, to record occasional thoughts and observations. According to his own statement, "the big red journal" of 596 pages, was begun in October, 1837, and ended June, 1840. To it succeeded the thirty-five smaller volumes, ripe with the racy thoughts which the public has already gleaned in part. It has been my privilege to see these treasured little blank-books, varying in size and somewhat in thickness, though seldom aggregating more than one hundred pages. They are arranged to contain the entries of about six months each; many of them are carefully indexed. Until the last year of his life, when the records are meagre, they were written in ink, in that peculiar, uneven handwriting here reproduced. In examining these little books, carefully treasured to-day in their bank-vault, one realizes how laborious must have been the editing by Mr. Blake, carried on with earnest, devoted enthusiasm, which transformed the difficulties into labors of love. The notes are most puzzling to decipher, both because of the irregularity of the letter-form and also on account of many abbreviations. Interspersed are a few pen-illustrations of the different objects described. The portions of pages, which he extracted for his published work before his last sickness, are carefully indicated; the selections used in preparation for further volumes, during the last months of his life, are also marked with marginal notes. In addition to the journals bearing certain dates, are two volumes of extracts from his thoughts and readings. Nearly all the journals were written in an accountant's ledger of small size. One of Thoreau's direct complaints against the growing commercialism of his age was that he could not buy proper blank-books, in which to record his thoughts and relations with nature, without finding within them the inevitable and mercantile red-lines for dollars and cents.
These journals, as innately regarded, are most remarkable for their mingled sameness and variety; serene sameness of general theme but unending variety of expression and image. Nature, friendship, books, morality, justice,—such are the reiterated subjects. Are they not the universal concepts of a higher range of thought and life? In all the records there is a vital, intense touch, or a unique illustration with potent force, which seem to reveal the man behind the pen, however abstruse and chimerical may be the idea. He wrote,—"My journal should be the record of my love. I would write in it only of the things I love, my affection for an aspect of the world, what I love to think of." It is not strange that, by this mingling of enthusiasm and worthy exclusion, these journal-pages have such perennial vitality. Their dual charm is in the philosophy mingled with nature-pictures and melodies. Such were the manifestations of the author's own duality,—"the sylvan and the human."
In editing the volume, "Summer," Mr. Blake quoted Thoreau's own plan of these journals, to make "a book of the seasons, each page of which should be written in its own season and out-of-doors, or in its own locality, wherever it may be." Acting on this suggestion, the executor sifted and combined the thoughts for each season, a work of exhaustive, loving effort, until now the circle of the year is complete. Alcott well summarized, in his own journal, the value of Thoreau's "masterpieces,—a choice mingling of physical and metaphysical elements. . . . Quick with thought his sentences are colored and consolidated therein by his plastic genius." Perchance, it was to this friend that the thought of publishing these journals, may be first traced;—"A delightful volume might be compiled from Thoreau's journals by selecting what he wrote at a certain date annually, thus giving a calendar of his thoughts on that day from year to year." Such volumes, he adds, would be "instructive alike to naturalist, farmer, woodman and scholar."
While the journals were the granaries from which the larger number of Thoreau's books were to be gathered, his earliest efforts at publication were through the magazines. Dr. Jones, in his valuable bibliography of Thoreau, has collated the few interesting magazine articles published during his 
THOREAU'S JOURNAL
Reproduced from a photograph of the actual volume life or soon after his death. In addition to his contributions to The Dial, his only noteworthy essays were the study of Carlyle in Graham's, in 1847, a portion of "The Yankee in Canada" in Putnam's in 1853, and the article on "The Maine Woods" in the Atlantic which caused the strained relations with Lowell, already mentioned. He also contributed to the Democratic Review, and some other organs of anti-slavery trend. The year before Thoreau's death, Mr. James T. Fields succeeded to the editorship of the Atlantic. He had visited Thoreau at Walden and at Concord, was deeply interested in him as man and writer, and invited him to become a contributor to his magazine. The lectures on "Walking" and "Autumnal Tints," with the study of "Wild Apples," which have been mentioned, appeared a few months before his death, prepared and revised in that cheery sitting-room that refused to accept any suggestion of gloom or idleness. These essays are among the best work which bears Thoreau's name. They are breezy and cogent, fitting sequels to the active, nature-enshrined life of their author.
The papers on slavery themes are included in the volume of his essays. Here also is that fine study of Carlyle, so well conceived and executed that the reader regrets Thoreau's failure to act upon Greeley's advice to supplement this article with similar studies on Emerson, Alcott, and Hawthorne. The refusal was probably due to two causes which are, perhaps, identical in sequel. In the first place, Thoreau was the last man who would coin money out of his friendships. He would not openly reveal the defects which his keen mind perceived. On the other hand, his sure sense of justice and truth would preclude any concealment of flaws in a critical study. Thus, his idealistic sentiment on friendship and his absolute sincerity combined to prevent any published judgment on his friends. In a different and impersonal way Carlyle had been a formative influence in Thoreau's life. To him, unbound by the ties of friendship, he could give careful and frank analysis. He has most happily mingled tribute and censure. In truth, this essay on Carlyle ranks to-day as one of the most just, sympathetic and comprehensive analyses of the great prophet-author. It is interesting to read, by way of comparison, the study by Lowell. Both Thoreau and Lowell, as young men, had been thrilled by this new voice of the age. Lowell, with characteristic apprehension, analyzes Carlyle's literary qualities,—his humor, his vehemence, his imagery,—while Thoreau is stirred by the moral earnestness and deep sincerity of the man and seer. Thoreau could deeply sympathize with "this brave looker-on" who "never sacrificed one jot of his honest thought to art or whim, but to utter himself in the most direct and effectual way,—that is the endeavor." These two men, coeval prophets of social degeneracy, had many similitudes of temperament and thought. In the emphasis of individualism, of work, of hero-worship for the undaunted men of the past, in the expulsive comments on modern society, in the paradoxical catholicity and narrow prejudice, they suggest frequent comparison. Thoreau unconsciously dissects his own nature, when he says of Carlyle,—"Not the most free and catholic observer of men and events, for they are likely to find him preoccupied, but unexpectedly free and catholic when they fall within the focus of his lens."
One could scarcely admire Carlyle, as deeply as did Thoreau, without also accepting much of Goethe's teaching. In the portion of "Thursday," in "A Week," is a careful, appreciative study of Goethe's moral and literary significance, one of the first and best American criticisms on the great inspirer of modern literary standards. These early essays of Thoreau, many of them incorporated in part into his first book, evidence more literary insight than his later volumes reveal. As the years passed, with the Walden residence and its emphasis of his mission as nature-interpreter, the naturalistic tastes seemed to submerge the literary and critical. He also became more concerned with the problems of morality and government, less devoted to literary models. Once again, in later years, he became interested in an author whose genius and crudeness evoked many comments in Thoreau's letters. During a visit to New Jersey in 1856, he called on Walt Whitman. In a letter to Mr. Blake, after the incident, Thoreau wrote,—"He is apparently the greatest democrat the world has ever seen. He is very broad, but, as I have said, not fine." Thoreau was essentially "fine," he was sensitively repelled by any coarseness, in whatever veneer of refinement. This quality combated his desire to appreciate Whitman. Always recognizing the latter's democracy, religious faith, and affinity with nature, Thoreau could not excuse his treatment of sexual love. To him no sentiment was so delicate, so sacred, too holy for bald or open "celebration." He said of Whitman's attitude,—"He does not celebrate love at all. It is as if the beasts spoke." He was, however, too large a man in judgment to allow these disagreeable interpolations to dim his impress of Whitman's real power and stimulus. After he had read with care the copy of poems given him by their author, he wrote,—"Though rude and sometimes ineffectual, it is a great primitive poem,—an alarum or trumpet-note ringing through the American camp."
Thoreau's volumes, exclusive of the extracts from his journals, edited since his death, are quite distinctive and representative of the versatile traits of the man. The first book, "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," shows the naturalist, in the romantic and poetic phases of his development, and the literary student fresh from the influence of the classics. His philosophic inquiries are in incipient stages. In "Walden" the latter find more experimental treatment and the book was the work of a naturalist-philosopher, even as the earlier volume bore stamp of the naturalist-poet. The three volumes, "Excursions," "The Maine Woods," and "Cape Cod," records largely prepared by the author for the press during his last months, are yet more representative of the naturalist and his zeal for botanical, geological, and ethnological discoveries. The traveler was a scientist, but he was also a poet and a philosopher; he had become a keen student of life as well as nature, and these later volumes contain a gallery of vivid types and individuals.
"A Week," with its varied themes chosen for each day, from piscatory facts to Indian history, Buddhism, friendship, and poetry, affords an impressionist picture of Thoreau during these years of developing manhood which culminated at Walden. Many of the most pithy thoughts quoted by Mr. Blake, in his volume of epigrams, are traced to this first book. It was essentially a literary promise,—appropriate is the buoyant stanza of greeting,—
"Ply the oars! away! away!
In each dewdrop of the morning
Lies the promise of a day."
The quotations, which introduce the several sections, index the young scholar's devotion to all the best poets of the past and to Tennyson, Emerson, and Channing of his own time. One of the most significant reviews of this book was by Lowell in The Massachusetts Quarterly, for December, 1849. Regarding the volume as a record of travel, Lowell praised the author as a modern disciple of the leisurely, old-time traveler-poet, who is "both wise man and poet,—the true cosmopolitan and citizen of the beautiful." He appreciated the literary flavor no less than the "fresh smell of the woods." With enthusiastic comments, the critic also refers to the poems, melodious and distinct, which form the interludes to the prose narration. Here are those tender stanzas "To the Maiden in the East," quoted in an earlier chapter, the poem on the Concord River, the noble panegyric to the mountains, and the more familiar stanzas, "Sic Vita," "To a Swallow" and "Sympathy." Some of these poems had appeared in The Dial, but were here given permanent lodgment.
The rare poetic promise of Thoreau's early manhood, versus the suppression of poetic form in later life, will always be a regretful and puzzling theme to his critics. Among other incidental statements is the explanation, given by him during his last weeks, that he was dissuaded from writing and publishing more poetry by Emerson's criticisms. Such assertion, which comes through intermediate sources, seems scarcely adequate to explain his renunciation. Thoreau was too self-reliant to accept any one's verdict on a matter involving self-development. The real cause for the gradual and almost complete transference to prose forms is probably found in the deepening earnestness and serious studies of nature and life to which his mature years were devoted. Doubtless, the criticisms upon his ruggedness of metre and mystical enigmas of thought, many of them quite as applicable to Emerson's own verse, fostered the inclination to abandon metrical form, but his poetic imagery remained to the last. As Carlyle's prose was marked by bursts of matchless melody, so the pages of Thoreau, in journal or finished essay, abound in passages of rare prose-poetry. Listen again to this poet's swan-song, in “Walking,” “So we saunter towards the Holy Land, till one day when the sun shall shine more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank side in autumn.”
In his later years of more strenuous thought the poetic fancies became submerged, or, more truly, assimilated. They were never expelled. One of the last acts of his life was the destruction of several poems, written at varied periods,—an irreparable loss to biography and literature. With truth, Emerson said, “Thoreau's best biography is in his poems.” Perhaps, he realized the unveiled light which these would cast upon certain repressed experiences of heart and soul, treasured memories to him but too sacred to be paraded before a curious public. If Thoreau's poems are marred by indirectness and excess of philosophic trend, there are occasional stanzas of freedom and beauty. Love of music, whether heard in nature's tones or in the artificial strains of a music-box, was a lifelong trait of Thoreau. It was to him a means of religion, of soul-exaltation;—"The profane never hear music, the holy ever hear it. It is God's voice, the divine breath audible."
Emerson and other friends often refer to Thoreau's delicate skill upon the flute; from it he would evoke melodies otherwise unknown. There seemed an aptness in Thoreau's love for the flute,—the symbol of classic times and the legends of Pan. Here was a new god of woods and fields. With exquisite sympathy Miss Alcott wove this thought into her elegy of Thoreau, written amid night watches in the hospital of the battle-fields. She refers to the strange incident told by the family, that, after Thoreau's death, a passing breeze over his flute, as it hung upon the wall, brought forth a plaintive note, as if a message from its master;—
"Then from the flute, untouched by hands,
There came a low, harmonious breath;
For such as he there is no death;—
Above man's aims his nature rose.
The wisdom of a just content
Made one small spot a continent,
And turned to poetry life's prose.
"To him no vain regrets belong
Whose soul, that finer instrument,
Gave to the world no poor lament,
But woodnotes ever sweet and strong.
O lonely friend! he still will be
A potent presence though unseen,—
Steadfast, sagacious, and serene;
Seek not for him—he is with thee!"
In this same first volume are found the two sonnets, "Smoke" and "Haze," which were published earlier in The Dial in April, 1843. The former, which is placed by Mr. Stedman in his "American Anthology," represents lofty, poised imagination as well as skilful structure. It was considered a prophetic note of a young American sonnetteer. Like much of Thoreau's work in verse and prose, the full cadence of this poem can only be appreciated when read aloud;—
"Light-winged Smoke! Icarian bird,
Melting thy pinions in thy upward flight;
Lark without song, and messenger of dawn,
Circling above the hamlets as thy nest;
Or else, departing dream, and shadowy form
Of midnight vision, gathering up thy skirts;
By night star-veiling, and by day
Darkening the light and blotting out the sun;
Go thou, my incense, upward from this hearth,
And ask the gods to pardon this clear flame."
It has been stated that Thoreau, at inspired moments, wrote detached stanzas and committed them to his journal in varied contexts and afterwards combined them into complete poems. There is proof of this method in some of his earlier work. A loss of coherency sometimes results when the stanza, in "A Week," is taken from its contiguous prose and refitted into a complete poem. In addition to unrelated metrical stanzas, there are distinct mind-images, like the sublime tribute to the mountains or the gentle love-poem, already cited.
Thoreau's initial volume cannot be accounted a failure as literature because seven hundred copies of the edition were returned unsold. Like many another book, unappreciated by the public, it won for its author the respectful interest of a few men of poetic and critical minds. Though distinctly immature in parts, it suggested the plenteous harvest of thoughts on nature and life possible to one who had scattered thus widely seeds of poetry and philosophy. Reread to-day with the memories of his later work, the book still seems fertile in descriptions, ideals, poetry, despite much abstruseness and detachment. Among the letters which came to Thoreau in honor of his venture in authorship was one from Froude which, for some reason, probably modesty and reserve, was not shown by Thoreau and is not included in the "Familiar Letters." It is in a collection of "Unpublished Letters of Henry and Sophia Thoreau," edited and privately printed by Dr. Jones in 1899. Thoreau had read Froude's "Nemesis of Faith," perhaps Emerson's copy, and, in expressing his interest in this somewhat anarchical book, he had forwarded to its author a copy of "A Week," recently published. In a letter from Manchester. September 3, 1849, the English critic expressed strong, effusive admiration for the young Concord author and his book. Among other sentences of laudation are these:—"When I think of what you are, of what you have done as well as what you have written,—I have the right to tell you that there is no man living upon the earth at present, whose friendship or whose notice I value more than yours. In your book and in one other from your side of the Atlantic,—'Margaret,' I see hope for the coming world. . . . In the meantime, I will but congratulate you on the age in which your work is cast; the world has never seen one more pregnant." That last sentence must have raised a sardonic smile on the face of the young philosopher whose volume had searched so long for a publisher, whose author had spent ten successive weeks in hard manual work to meet the expense of its issue, and whose shoulders were soon to bear the bulk of the edition up the garret-stairs.
Profiting by the censures of vagueness and laxity of form upon this first volume, recognizing the interest, if not the real value, of his experiment at Walden, if narrated with directness and humor, Thoreau constructed a book which happily mingled the personal and the theoretical, earnest teaching and droll anecdote. In its unique form and theme, with spicy humor and delicate nature-lore, it is one of the most remarkable books of modern literature. The public made a mild response to its appearance in 1856 and two years after more than two thousand copies had been sold or dispersed. Emerson was especially enthusiastic over "Walden." In a letter to a friend, soon after the book was published, he wrote;—"All American kind are delighted with Walden as far as they have dared to say. The little pond sinks in these days as tremulous at its human fame. I do not know if the book has come to you yet, but it is cheerful, sparkling, readable, with all kinds of merits, and rising sometimes to very great heights. We count Henry the undoubted king of all American lions." Thoreau received many letters of tribute and some of questions. To his journal he confides the diverse and puzzled attitudes of the public towards the book. He cites the case of one reader who enjoyed "Walden" but viewed it as a huge satire and insisted that the map of the town, even, must be merely a caricature of the Coast Survey.
The permanent vitality of "Walden" is its sure excuse for being. Its spontaneity and vigor are as pervasive in the reading-world as they were a half-century ago. Mr. George R. Bartlett relates his encounter in the West with a Russian Jew who had read some stray leaves of "Walden" while still in his native land. He was so inspired by its atmosphere of freedom and hope and its suggestions of economy of life, that he came to America to gain a liberal education. That accomplished, he was determined to translate the book, which had been his inspiration, into the Russian tongue, that the young men might read it and assimilate its hopeful, vital lessons from nature and simple life. In addition to the valuable studies in natural history, for these are what “Walden” primarily affords, besides the practical and sage advice on material life, well illustrated by epigram and personal anecdote, there are some clever life-sketches, cartoons and photographs. With a realism worthy of Balzac, he describes the Collins family, from whom he bought the boards for his lodge;—“At six I passed him and his family on the road. One large bundle held all,—bed, coffee-mill, looking-glass, hens,—all but the cat, she took to the woods and became a wild-cat and, as I learned afterwards, trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last.” With similar compound of humor and realism, he introduced the family of shiftless John Field; his wife “with the never-absent mop in one hand and yet no effects of it visible anywhere.”
Cape Cod excels in light sketches, semi-humorous, semi-sympathetic. Valuable as a naturalist's survey of ocean, marsh, and beach, it ranks an easy second to "Walden" in characterizations and entertaining miniatures. Such are the coarse Nauset woman, "who looked as if she had committed infanticide" and "as if it made her head ache to live"; the postmistress, "said to be the best on the road, but we suspected that the letters must be subjected to very close scrutiny there"; the Wellfleet Oysterman, aged eighty-eight, under "petticoat government"; and the lighthouse keeper who read the newspaper by the light of fifteen Argand lamps, while Thoreau suggests that the Bible alone should be read beneath such grand, far-reaching glow. There is pure drollery in his description of the stage-coach and its crowded interior,—a vivid glimpse into earlier travel-customs:—"This coach was an exceedingly narrow one but as there was a slight spherical excess over two on a seat, the driver waited till nine passengers had got in, without taking the measure of any of them, and then shut the door after two or three ineffectual slams, as if the fault were all in the hinges or the latch,—while we timed our inspirations and expirations so as to assist him."
Such characterizations show the peculiar wit and humor that Thoreau possessed. He was master of both keen sarcasm and pungent humor. As the years passed, the wit became more pronounced, justifying Mr. Burroughs' pithy comment that his humor "had worked a little, a vinous fermentation had taken place more or less in it." In the volumes which he prepared for publication are touches of anecdote or witty illustration which distinguish them from the compilations made from his journals by other hands. Often Thoreau added these lightsome elements at the last, for they are missing in the original context. In the same way he arranged his material in sections, with breaks and sub-titles, thereby adding both variety and compactness. Such subtle modes example the literary artist who knows how to charm the general reader as well as to ensnare the thoughtful few. With all gratitude to the faithful editor of the later volumes, it is justice to Thoreau to remember that, had he lived, doubtless, their form would have been less monotonous and more finished, as were the books revised by his own hand.
"The Yankee in Canada" has a merry tone and the fun is largely at his own expense. At the outset, he declares;—"I fear that I have not got much to say about Canada, not having seen much,—what I got by going to Canada was a cold." Again, he recounts the droll efforts to talk with their Canadian host, deciding at last that "a less crime would be committed on the whole if we spoke French with him, and in no respect aided or abetted his attempts to speak English." Like all true humorists, especially of the last generation, Thoreau delighted in puns. Some of them were cogent, others weak. He wrote,—"I am monarch of all I survey"; and again, "I love to lie and re-ly on the earth." After his disappointing visit to a town on the Cape, he wrote,—"Ours was but half a Sandwich at most and that must have fallen on the buttered side sometime." Such bits of humor, like his poems, lose much flavor when divorced from the context,—they are wholly illustrative. Lowell, who in his later essay, denied humor to Thoreau, in the earlier review instanced "the passages of a genial humor interspersed at fit intervals."
On many of Thoreau's pages, where actual wit and humor are lacking, there exists a spiciness, an aroma, like that of his own Walden pines. He combined witty insight with somewhat of perversity and much exaggeration. The result was a trenchant piquancy. His confession was "I wish to make an extreme statement that so I may make an emphatic one." Again, in a letter to Mr. Blake, he writes,—"I trust that you realize what an exaggerator I am,—that I lay myself out to exaggerate whenever I have an opportunity,—pile Pelion on Ossa, to reach, heaven so." This was another trait which he shared with Carlyle. One must appreciate this underlying element in many of Thoreau's statements, or he will miss not alone the pithiness but often the meaning. A good example of extended hyperbole that does not veil the real truth, for this is always patent to a reader of in sight, is the record given by him in 1848, for his classbook, now in the college library:—"Am not married. I don't know whether mine is a profession or a trade, or what not. It is not yet learned, and in every instance has been practised before being studied. The mercantile part of it was begun by myself alone. It is not one but legion. I will give you some of the monster's heads. I am a Schoolmaster, a private Tutor, a Surveyor, a Gardener, a Farmer, a Painter, (I mean a House Painter) a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-laborer, a Pencil-maker, a Glasspaper-maker, a Writer, and sometimes, a Poetaster. If you will act the part of Iolus, and apply a hot iron to any of these heads, I shall be greatly obliged to you. My present occupation is to answer such orders as may be expected from so general advertisement as the above. That is, if I see fit, which is not always the case, for I have found out a way to live without what is commonly called employment or industry, attractive or otherwise. Indeed, my steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to keep myself at the top of my condition, and ready for whatever may turn up in heaven or on the earth. The last two or three years I lived in Concord woods alone, something more than a mile from any neighbor, in a house built entirely by myself.
"P. S.—I beg that the class will not consider me an object of charity, and if any of them are in want of any pecuniary assistance and will make their case known to me, I will engage to give them some advice of more worth than money."
Paradox became a favorite rhetorical aid to achieve these trenchant expressions. "I love mankind but I hate the institutions of the dead unkind." After a rainy day they "managed to keep their thoughts dry and only the clothes were wet." This tendency to exaggeration produced not alone an incisive humor, but also a strange vehemence akin to that of Carlyle and Ruskin. In his plea for John Brown, he arraigns the people with a violent comparison,—"You who pretend to care for Christ crucified, consider what you are about to do to him who offered himself to be the Saviour of four millions of men." With fearless vigor and a wit which had truly become acrid, he attacks the modern lethargic Christian, whose prayers begin with "Now I lay me down to sleep," and who is always anticipating "his long rest." Such comments, which, of necessity, seem extreme and unpardonable to-day, were called forth by the moral apathy of the times when Thoreau lived and wrote. The formalism and narrowness of the Puritan religion seemed to Thoreau, as it did to many another of his time, almost cruel, surely unjust, in its neglect of free, open-handed service to the poor and oppressed.
The extravagant, philosophic chapter on "Clothes" in "Walden" is suggestive of the satire and the serious remonstrance of Teüfelsdröckh. With forceful prophecy, again, he contrasts true education, which regards nature as fundamental and attains intelligent thought, with a forced instruction in sundry accomplishments, or hothouse branches. In the essay on "Walking" occurs this denunciation, couched in the terse, vigorous sentences of his most expulsive style,—"I would say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes, 'Go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with its green crop. The very cows are driven to their country pastures before the end of May; though I have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all the year round.' So, frequently, the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge treats its cattle."
Coexistent with this extravagance of expression in humor or in arraignment, which gives to Thoreau's style its vital magnetism, was an unswerving sincerity of form, no less than of purpose. The exaggeration was always bold and self-confessed, a mark of his ideality and his earnest aim to emphasize the pivot of his thought. At the basis, as the motive-principle in his life, was the deep sincerity without which his character and his writings would be nullified. His motto was,—"The best you can write will be the best you are. The author's character is read from title-page to end. Of this he never corrects the proofs." Well do these words apply to his journals and letters. The earlier volumes, which seemed to show "the perfect Stoic," only revealed a part of his character,—his nonconformity and courage. The later letters and journal-pages show the rounded man, in his gentleness as well as his independence, in his cravings of heart and soul as well as his mental strength and social indifference. This persistent desire to record his inner, true self, to deal with themes that were vital, not far-fetched, led to great precision and care in the formation of his more important sentences. Mr. Wendell has called this trait in Thoreau "a loving precision of touch."
Allied with humor, force, and sincerity, as literary attributes, was a scholarship at once unique and pervasive, adapted to a vast array of themes. His learning was deep rather than broad, but it was noted for aptness. From boyhood he read with care, always supplied with "fact-books." While classics of all literatures were familiar to him, and modern authors found, in comparison, scanty favor, yet it is a mistake to assume that he was not acquainted with current writers. His references show knowledge of Wordsworth, Tennyson, Landor, Darwin, Dickens, De Quincey, Longfellow and others. He recommends Coventry Patmore's poem, "The Angel in the House," then attracting current attention in England. He found Ruskin, whom he read extensively, "good and encouraging though not without crudeness and bigotry." His rare knowledge of the greater and lesser poets of Rome, Greece and early England, his intimacy with the naturalists and travelers of authority, merited the tribute of George William Curtis,—"he added to knowledge of nature the wisdom of the most ancient times and the best literatures." Many of his thoughts on reading are as pertinent and quotable as those of Emerson,—"Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all." "Books should contain pure discoveries, glimpses of terra firma, though by shipwrecked mariners, and not the art of navigation by those who have never been out of sight of land." Like the most potent literary prophets of to-day he urged primal study of the great books of the past, the human, vital world-books. Again, with predictive insight he made a strong plea for the study of all the scriptures, in a broad sense, the ethics and religion of Hebrews, Hindoos, Persians, Chinese; to him these were of as great interest as they are to the modern student of comparative religions.
To his exhaustive literary fund, he added a branch of research that was distinctly American. Interested from a lad in Indian customs, he made careful study of the race on his excursions, both from the standpoint of ethnology and sociology. Through interchange of facts with his famous guide, Joe Polis, in the Maine woods, he gained an insight, free from rhapsodic sentiment. He well distinguished their mental traits from those of the white man;—"The constitution of the Indian mind appears to be the very opposite of the white man's. He is acquainted with a different side of nature. He measures his life by winters, not summers. His year is not measured by the sun, but consists of a certain number of moons, and his moons are measured not by days but by nights. He has taken hold of the dark side of nature, the white man of the bright side." ("Autumn," p. 148.) Carefully prepared and collated, are twelve volumes of notes by Thoreau upon Indian archeology, legends and customs, waiting the service of his executor to furnish the world with these many rare facts about this indigenous people.
The multiplicity and seeming incoherence of Thoreau's themes have been ground of criticism by some unappreciative readers. Herein resides one of the chief qualities of uniqueness and charm. Nature and life in their varied phases, especially in their homely and simple aspects, formed his subjects for study and reflection. As if in answer to this very point, he wrote,—"It is wise to write on many themes, that so you may find the right and inspiring one." In his volumes are gathered practical economy, morality, philosophy, upon the lower levels of thought, while on the hilltops are the poetic and sympathetic vistas and songs. From a tirade upon the defects of modern newspapers, he turns to a description of the morning mist, with matchless imagery;—"But when its own sun began to rise on this pure world, I found myself a dweller in the dazzling halls of Aurora, into which poets have had but a partial glance over the eastern hills, drifting amid the saffron-colored clouds, and playing with the rosy fingers of the Dawn, in the very path of the Sun's chariot, and sprinkled with its dewy dust, enjoying the benignant smile, and near at hand the far-darting glances of the god." The economist urges simplification of life in details of food and clothing, but he hearkens, in the same moment, to the bobolink's song,—"It is as if he touched his harp within a vase of liquid melody, and when he lifted it out the notes fell like bubbles from the trembling strings."
The variety of themes, often linked by a closer bond than many casual readers perceive, gives to Thoreau's style a diversity as marked as that of his interests. He is always cogent and forceful, whether describing lumber or bird-notes. His paradoxes and symbolism do not detract from his "nutty sentences." He was sometimes careless as to graceful finish, but he never failed to emphasize the vital thought. He scorned sentences that "contain as much flowerliness and dainty conceits as a milliner's window," yet he was master, on occasion, of exquisite diction and pictorial illustration. He commended the vigor of the Bible, Homer, Pliny, Milton, and Raleigh. At times, true to these models, his own style is direct and potent, as in description of his first night in the woods or the picture of the moose-hunt. Again, some sentences are as laconic as Carlyle and Emerson;—"Say the thing with which you labor. . . . Be faithful to your genius. Write in the strain which interests you most. Consult not the popular taste." If he had the courage to live his thoughts, he also had the persistency and sincerity to exemplify these literary precepts.
In contrast with such passages of frank directness are occasional paragraphs of involved mysticism, especially in the later volumes unrevised by his own hand. In the main, however, his symbolism and imagery are vigorous, often commanding. Such is the battle-array of the red maples and the yellow birches, included in "Autumn." Among his more familiar metaphors, is one frequently borrowed by later writers, the picture of Cape Cod with her "bared and bended arm, boxing with northeast storms, and ever and anon, heaving up her adversary from the lap of the earth,—ready to thrust forward her other fist, which keeps guard the while upon her breast at Cape Ann."
In justice both to Thoreau and Lowell it may be pertinent to recall a few words from the closing paragraph of that essay in "My Study Windows," which contains so many clever half-truths and has, unwittingly, caused much injustice to the memory of Thoreau; after his caustic witticisms, Lowell's sense of critical justice comes to redeem his omissions and he says of Thoreau's writings,—"His better style as a writer is in keeping with the simplicity and purity of his life. . . . He had caught his English at its living source, among the poets and prose-writers of its best days; his literature was extensive and recondite; his quotations are always nuggets of the purest ore; there are sentences of his as perfect as anything in the language, and thoughts as clearly crystallized; his images and metaphors are always fresh from the soil." Sure it is, that few American authors, upon such simple themes often called commonplace or abstract, can equal the romantic and brilliant word-sketches, the detailed yet interesting facts in nature and life, and the eloquent, vital urgence upon themes of deep import, which are so fully exampled in Thoreau's style.
In his writings, as in his life, he must be regarded from two view-points. He lived a secluded life yet he was en rapport with the best intellectuality and ideals of his age. His was not the stellar existence so often pictured, nor yet did he urge any to adopt the restricted program of activity, which was his preference for mental and spiritual growth, but from which he often emerged to mingle in broader affairs. We have seen the man in Maine woods and in Lyceum, in Walden retirement and fronting the crisis of the Abolition movement. While self-improvement was his primal aim, one must not forget its corollary,—“I believe in the infinite joy and satisfaction of helping myself and others to the extent of my ability.” Self-expansion was the preliminary step to true service. He mingled rigid, elementary simplicity of life with a poetry and idealism wholly unsurpassed. So, in his literature, his themes and treatment may seem egotistic and constrained, sometimes trivial; but his aims are lofty, his conclusions are of universal import. Few characters offer more enticements for censure, even for caricature, on the externals of presence and actions. His nature was too complex to be consistent in every iota of progress, but the trend was unswerving and the life-expression was consistent in all large manifestations. His ideals were too high to adapt themselves to the restless conditions of modern life but they suffered neither vacillation nor compromise. With many defects of temperament and lack of amenities and graces of mien, with flaws of prejudice and perversity in mental as well as social nature, Thoreau was yet one of the large men whose powers of mind and soul should preclude undue emphasis of minor faults.
He lived the present life sincerely and intensely, in the light of the future, a future, to his vision, not one of reward so much as of soul-expansion. “Every part of nature teaches that the passing away of one life is the making room for another.” In the final analysis, his life-purpose was fealty to nature; other subjects were correlated, symbolic, or contrasting issues from this great interest. Noting with delight a little hillside stream at Hull, he wrote, in “Cape Cod,” the simple yet significant confession,—“If I should go to Rome, perhaps it would be some spring in the Capitoline Hill I should remember the longest.” In his diverse, potent nature-interpretation, in his uplifting ideals, towards which he strove with patience and progress, in his literary uniqueness and pictorial magnetism, Thoreau is a solitary figure, yet a pregnant inspiration, in American history and literature.