Part 6
For the average (uninitiated) reader, be it said, there is nothing better in Thoreau than his thumb-nail sketches of humble, every-day humanity; as there is no part of his work, not even his denunciation of worldly conformity, or his picturing of nature’s moods, which is done with more absolute good will. A man need not be an idealist, a naturalist, or anything else out of the ordinary, to like the Canadian woodchopper, for example, cousin to the pine and the rock, who never was tired in his life, and, stranger still, sometimes acted as if he were “thinking for himself and expressing his own opinions;” or the old fisherman, always haunting the river in serene afternoons, and “almost rustling with the sedge;” or the Cape Cod wrecker, whose face was “like an old sail endowed with life,”--one of the Pilgrims, perhaps, who had “kept on the back side of the Cape and let the centuries go by;” or the free-spoken Wellfleet oysterman, “a poor good-for-nothing crittur,” now “under petticoat government,” who yet remembered George Washington as “a r-a-ther large and portly-looking man, with a pretty good leg as he sat on his horse;” or the iron-jawed Nauset woman, who seemed to be shouting at you through a breaker, and who looked “as if it made her head ache to live;” or the country soldier boy on his way to muster, in full regimentals, with shouldered musket and military step, who in a lonely place in the woods is suddenly abashed at the sight of a stranger approaching, and finds himself hard put to it to get by in anything like military order.
With men like these, natural men, Thoreau found himself at home; he described them almost as sympathetically as if they had been so many woodchucks or hen-hawks. As he said of his own boyhood, they were “part and parcel of nature” itself. As for fine manners parading about in fine clothes, how should he, a rustic jealous of his rusticity, presume to know what, if anything, might be going on under all that broadcloth? Reality was the chief of his ideals. The shabbiest of it was more to the purpose than a masquerade.
Whether it would have been better for him had his taste been more liberal in this respect is a question about which it might be useless to speculate. Breadth may easily be sought at too great an expense, especially by one who has a distinct and highly individual work to accomplish. First of all, such a man must be himself. His imperfections, even, must be of his own kind, twin-born with his better qualities, a certain lack of complaisance being one of the likeliest and, in the strict sense, most appropriate. But that some of Thoreau’s private and hasty remarks, in his letters and journals, about the meanness of his fellow-creatures, the more “respectable” among them, especially, might profitably have been left unprinted, is less open to doubt. They were expressions of moods rather than of convictions, it is fair to assume, and in any event would never have been printed by their author, one of whose cravings was for some kind of india-rubber that would rub out at once all which it cost him so many perusals and so much reluctance to erase. It is pretty hard justice that holds a man publicly to everything he scribbles in private,--as if no allowance were to be made for whim and the provocation of the moment. The charm of a journal, as Thoreau says, consists in a “certain greenness.” It is “a record of experiences and growth, not a preserve of things well done or said.” After which it may be confessed that even from “Walden” and the “Week,” published in the author’s lifetime, it is possible to discover that charity and sweetness were not among his most distinguishing characteristics. Taste him after Gilbert White, and contrast the mellowness of the one with the sharp, assertive, acidulous quality of the other. Thoreau was a wild apple, and would have been proud of the name, suggestive of that “tang and smack” which he so feelingly celebrated. “Nonesuches” and “seek-no-furthers” were very tame and forgettable, he thought, as compared with the wildings, even the acrid and the puckery among which he begrudged to the cider-mill. It is in part this very “tang and smack,” we may be sure, that makes his books keep so well in Time’s literary cellar.
His humor, especially, “indispensable pledge of sanity,” as he calls it, is of that best of fruity flavors, a pleasant sour. Some, indeed, emulating his own fertility in paradox, have maintained that he had no humor, while others have rebuked him for priggishly excluding it from his later work. Did such critics never read “Cape Cod”? There, surely, Thoreau gave his natural drollery full play,--an almost antinomian liberty, to take a word out of those ecclesiastical histories, with the reading of which, under his umbrella, he so patiently enlivened his sandy march from Orleans to Provincetown. “As I sat on a hill one sultry Sunday afternoon,” he says, “the meeting-house windows being open, my meditations were interrupted by the noise of a preacher who shouted like a boatswain, profaning the quiet atmosphere, and who, I fancied, must have taken off his coat. Few things could have been more disgusting or disheartening. I wished the tithing-man would stop him.” Charles Lamb himself could hardly have bettered the delicious, biting absurdity of that final touch. It was not this Boanergian minister, but a man of an earlier generation, of whom we are told that he wrote a “Body of Divinity,” “a book frequently sneered at, particularly by those who have read it.”
The whole Cape, past and present, was looked at half quizzically by its inland visitor. The very houses “seemed, like mariners ashore, to have sat right down to enjoy the firmness of the land, without studying their postures or habiliments,”--a description not to be fully appreciated except by those who have seen a Cape Cod village, with its buildings dropped here and there at haphazard upon the sand. Here, as everywhere, he was hungry for particulars; now improvising a rude quadrant with which to calculate the height of the bank at Highland Light, now, by ingenious but “not impertinent” questions, and for his private satisfaction only, getting at the contents of a schoolboy’s dinner-pail,--the homeliest facts being always “the most acceptable to an inquiring mind.” Thoreau’s mother, by-the-bye, had some reputation as a gossip.
His work, humorous or serious, transcendental or matter-of-fact, is all the fruit of his own tree. Whatever its theme, nature or man, it is all of one spirit. Think what you will of it, it is never insipid. As his friend Channing said, it has its “stoical merits,” its “uncomfortableness.” Well might its author express his sympathy with the barberry bush, whose business is to ripen its fruit, not to sweeten it,--and to protect it with thorns. “Seek the lotus, and take a draught of rapture,” was Margaret Fuller’s rather high-flown advice to him; yet she too perceived that his mind was “not a soil for the citron and the rose, but for the whortleberry, the pine, or the heather.” In all his books it would be next to impossible to find a pretty phrase or a sentimental one. He resorted to nature--in his less inquisitive hours--for the mood into which it put him, the invigoration, the serenity, the mental activity it communicated. But his pleasure in it, as compared with Wordsworth’s or Hazlitt’s, to take very dissimilar examples, was mostly an intellectual affair, the reader is tempted to say, though the remark needs qualification. One remembers such a passage as that descriptive of a winter twilight in Yellow Birch Swamp, where the gleams of the birches, as he came to one after another of them, “each time made his heart beat faster.” Yet even here we are told of his ecstasy rather than made to feel it; and in general, surely, though he valued his emotions, and went to the woods and fields to enjoy them, they were such emotions as belonged to a pretty stoical sort of Epicurean; less rapturous than Wordsworths, less tender than Hazlitt’s, and with no trace of the brooding melancholy which makes the charm of books like Obermann and the journal of Amiel. He delighted in artless country music (it does not appear that he ever heard any other, and of course he felicitated himself upon this as upon all the rest of his poverty; it was only the depraved ear, he thought, that needed the opera), but let any reader try to imagine him writing this bit out of one of Hazlitt’s essays:--
“I remember once strolling along the margin of a stream, skirted with willows and plashy sedges, in one of those low, sheltered valleys on Salisbury Plain, where the monks of former ages had planted chapels and built hermits’ cells. There was a little parish church near, but tall elms and quivering alders hid it from sight, when, all of a sudden, I was startled by the sound of the full organ pealing on the ear, accompanied by rustic voices and the willing quire of village maids and children. It rose, indeed, ‘like an exhalation of rich distilled perfumes.’ The dew from a thousand pastures was gathered in its softness; the silence of a thousand years spoke in it. It came upon the heart like the calm beauty of death; fancy caught the sound, and faith mounted on it to the skies. It filled the valley like a mist, and still poured out its endless chant, and still it swells upon the ear, and wraps me in a golden trance, drowning the noisy tumult of the world!”
Here is another spirit than Thoreau’s, another voice, another kind of prose--prose with the throb and even the accent of poetry. Stoics and spiritual economists do not write in this strain, nor is this the manner of a too envious observer of particulars. For better or worse, the prose of our poet-naturalist went squarely on its feet. His fancy might be never so nimble; conceit and paradox might fairly make a cloud about him; but he essayed no flights. If his heart beat faster at some beauty of sight or sound, he said so quietly, with no change of voice, and passed on. As far as the mere writing went, it was done in straightforward, honest fashion, as if a man rather than an author held the pen.
Thoreau believed in well-packed sentences, each carrying its own weight, expressive of its own thought, rememberable and quotable. Of the beauties of a flowing style he had heard something too much. In practice, nevertheless, whether through design or by some natural felicity, he steered a middle course. The sentences might be complete in themselves, detachable, able to stand alone, but the paragraph never lacked a logical and even a formal cohesion. It was not a collection of “infinitely repellent particles,” nor even a “basket of nuts.” A great share of the writer’s art, as he taught it, lay in leaving out the unessential,--the getting in of the essential having first been taken for granted. As for readers, in his more exalted moods he wished to write so well that there would be few to appreciate him; sometimes, indeed, he seemed to desire no readers at all. He speaks with stern disapproval of such as trouble themselves upon that point, and “would fain have one reader before they die.” A lamentable weakness, truly.
In his present estate, however, let us hope that he carries himself a shade less haughtily, and is not above an innocent pleasure in the spread of his earthly fame, in new readers and new editions, and such choicely limited popularity as befits a classic. Even in his lifetime, as Emerson tells the story, he once tried to believe that something in his lecture might interest a little girl who told him she was going to hear it if it wasn’t to be one of those old philosophical things that she didn’t care about; and this although he had just been maintaining, characteristically, that whatever succeeded with an audience must be bad. He speaks somewhere against luxurious books, with superfluous paper and marginal embellishments. His taste was Spartan in those days. But he was never a stickler for consistency, and we may indulge a comfortable assurance that he takes no offense now at the sight of his Cape Cod journey--in which he worked so hard on that soft, leg-tiring Back-Side beach to get the ocean into him--decked out in colors and set forth sumptuously in two volumes. It is a very modest author who fears that his text will be outshone by any pictures, no matter how splendid. But who would have thought it, fifty years ago,--a book by the hermit of Walden in an _édition de luxe_, to lie on parlor tables! If only his father and his brother John could have seen it!
Thoreau believed in himself and in the soundness of his work. He coveted readers, and believed that he should have them. Without question he wrote for the future, and foresaw himself safe from oblivion. Emerson regretted Henry’s want of ambition, we are told. He might have spared himself. “Show me a man who consults his genius,” said Thoreau, “and you have shown me a man who cannot be advised.” And he was the man. He was following an ambition of his own. If he did not keep step with his companions, it was because he “heard a different drummer.” His ambition, and what seemed his wayward singularity, have been justified by the event. His “strange, self-centred, solitary figure, unique in the annals of literature,” is in no danger of being forgotten. But what is most cheering about his present increasing vogue, especially in England, is that it arises from the very quality that Thoreau himself most prized, the innermost thing in him,--the loftiness and purity of his thought. Simplicity, faith, devotion to the essential and the permanent,--these were never more needed than now. These he taught, and, by a happy fate, he linked them with those natural themes that change not with time, and so can never become obsolete.
THOREAU’S DEMAND UPON NATURE
THOREAU’S DEMAND UPON NATURE
“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness.” So Thoreau began an article in “The Atlantic Monthly” forty-four years ago. He wished to make an extreme statement, he declared, in hope of making an emphatic one. Like idealists in general,--like Jesus in particular,--he believed in omitting qualifications and exceptions. Those were matters certain to be sufficiently insisted upon by the orthodox and the conservative, the minister and the school committee.
In an attempt at an extreme statement, Thoreau was very unlikely to fail. Thanks to an inherited aptitude and years of practice, there have been few to excel him with the high lights. In his hands exaggeration becomes one of the fine arts. We will not call it the finest art; his own best work would teach us better than that; but such as it is, with him to hold the brush, it would be difficult to imagine anything more effective. When he praises a quaking swamp as the most desirable of dooryards, or has visions of a people so enlightened as to burn all their fences and leave all the forests to grow, who shall contend with him? And yet the sympathetic reader--the only reader--knows what is meant, and what is not meant, and finds it good; as he finds it good when he is bidden to resist not a thief, or to hate his father and mother.
Thoreau’s love for the wild--not to be confounded with a liking for natural history or an appreciation of scenery--was as natural and unaffected as a child’s love of sweets. It belonged to no one part of his life. It finds utterance in all his books, but is best expressed, most feelingly and simply, and therefore most convincingly, in his journal, especially in such an entry as that of January 7, 1857, a bitterly cold, windy day, with snow blowing,--one of the days when “all animate things are reduced to their lowest terms.” Thoreau has been out, nevertheless, for his afternoon walk, “through the woods toward the cliffs along the side of the Well Meadow field.” Contact with Nature, even in this her severest mood, has given a quickening yet restraining grace to his pen. Now, there is no question of “emphasis,” no plotting for an “extreme statement,” no thought of dull readers, for whom the truth must be shown large, as it were, by some magic-lantern process. How differently he speaks! “Might I aspire to praise the moderate nymph Nature,” he says, “I must be like her, moderate.”
The passage is too long for quotation in full. “There is nothing so sanative, so poetic,” he writes, “as a walk in the woods and fields even now, when I meet none abroad for pleasure. Nothing so inspires me, and excites such serene and profitable thought.... Alone in distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout-lands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related. This cold and solitude are friends of mine.... I get away a mile or two from the town, into the stillness and solitude of nature, with rocks, trees, weeds, snow about me. I enter some glade in the woods, perchance, where a few weeds and dry leaves alone lift themselves above the surface of the snow, and it is as if I had come to an open window. I see out and around myself.... This stillness, solitude, wildness of nature is a kind of thoroughwort or boneset to my intellect. This is what I go out to seek. It is as if I always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging, though invisible companion, and walked with him.”
Four days later, dwelling still upon his “success in solitary and distant woodland walking outside the town,” he says: “I do not go there to get my dinner, but to get that sustenance which dinners only preserve me to enjoy, without which dinners are a vain repetition.... I never chanced to meet with any man so cheering and elevating and encouraging, so infinitely suggestive, as the stillness and solitude of the Well Meadow field.”
Language like this, though all may perceive the beauty and feel the sincerity of it, is to be understood only by those who are of the speaker’s kin. It describes a country which no man knows unless he has been there. It expresses life, not theory, and calls for life on the part of the hearer.
And if the appeal be made to this tribunal, the language used here and so often elsewhere, by Thoreau, touching the relative inferiority of human society will neither give offense nor seem in any wise extravagant or morbid. Thoreau knew Emerson; he had lived in the same house with him; but even Emerson’s companionship was less stimulating to him than Nature’s own. Well, and how is it with ourselves, who have the best of Emerson in his books? Much as these may have done for us, have we never had seasons of communion with the life of the universe itself when even Emerson’s words would have seemed an intrusion? Is not the voice of the world, when we can hear it, better than the voice of any man interpreting the world? Is it not better to hear for ourselves than to be told what another has heard? When the forest speaks things ineffable, and the soul hears what even to itself it can never utter,--for such an hour there is no book, there never will be. And if we wish not a book, no more do we wish the author of a book. We are in better company. In such hours,--too few, alas!--though we be the plainest of plain people, our own emotions are of more value than any talk. We know, in our measure, what Thoreau--
“An early unconverted Saint”--
was seeking words for when he said, “I feel my Maker blessing me.”
To him, as to many another man, visitations of this kind came oftenest in wild and solitary places. Small wonder, then, that he loved to go thither. Small wonder that he found the pleasures of society unsatisfying in the comparison. There he communed, not with himself nor with his fellow, but with the “Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe.” And when it is objected that this ought not to have been true, that he ought to have found the presence of men more elevating and stimulating than the presence of “inanimate” nature, we must take the liberty to believe that the critic speaks of that whereof he knows nothing. To revert to our own figure, he has never lived in Thoreau’s country.
Thoreau was wedded to Nature not so much for her beauty as for delight in her high companionableness. There was more of Wordsworth than of Keats or Ruskin in him. He was more philosopher than poet, perhaps we may say. He loved spirit rather than form and color, though for these also his eye was better than most. Being a stoic, a born economist, a child of the pinched and frozen North, he felt most at home with Nature in her dull seasons. His delight in a wintry day was typical. He loved his mistress best when she was most like himself; as he said of human friendships, “I love that one with whom I sympathize, be she ‘beautiful’ or otherwise, of excellent mind or not.” The swamp, the desert, the wilderness, these he especially celebrated. He began by thinking that nothing could be too wild for him; and even in his later years, notably in the “Atlantic” essay above quoted, he sometimes blew the same heroic strain. By this time, however, he knew and confessed, to himself at least, that there was another side to the story; that there was a dreariness beyond even his ready appreciation. More than once we find in his diary expressions like this, in late November: “Now a man will eat his heart, if ever, now while the earth is bare, barren, and cheerless, and we have the coldness of winter without the variety of ice and snow.”
And what was true of seasons was, in the long run, equally true of places. Let them be wild, by all means, yet not too wild. When he returned from the Maine woods, he had seen, for the time being, enough of the wilderness. It was a relief to get back to the smooth but still varied landscape of eastern Massachusetts. That, for a permanent residence, seemed to him incomparably better than an unbroken forest. The poet must live open to the sky and the wind; his road must be prepared for him; and yet, “not only for strength, but for beauty, the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger’s path and the Indian’s trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the Muses.” In short, the poet should live in Concord, and only once in a while seek the inspirations of the outer wilderness.
What we have called Thoreau’s stoicism (knowing very well that he was not a stoic, except in some partial, looser meaning of the word), his liking for plainness and low expense, is perhaps at the base of one of his rarest excellencies as a writer upon nature,--his reserve and moderation. In statement, it is true, he could extravagate like a master. He boasts, as well he may, of his prowess in that direction; but in tone and sentiment, when it came to dealing, not with ethics or philosophy, but with the mistress of his affections, he kept always decently within bounds. He had a very sprightly fancy, when he chose to give it play; but he had with it, and controlling it, a prevailing sobriety, the tempering grace of good sense. “The alder,” he says, “is one of the prettiest trees and shrubs in the winter. It is evidently so full of life, with its conspicuously pretty red catkins dangling from it on all sides. It seems to dread the winter less than other plants. It has a certain heyday and cheery look, less stiff than most, with more of the flexible grace of summer. With those dangling clusters of red catkins which it switches in the face of winter, it brags for all vegetation. It is not daunted by the cold, but still hangs gracefully over the frozen stream.”