HENRY DAVID THOREAU A CRITICAL STUDY HENEY DAVID THOBEATJ A CEITICAL STUDY BY MAKE VAN DOREN BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY fifoetfi&e pre 1916 COPYRIGHT, IQI6. BY MARK VAN DOREN ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published September igib TO MY FATHER AND MOTHER PREFACE THIS study is founded pretty largely, it will be seen, on Thoreau s Journal, which has not been examined before, so far as I know, with much attention to chronology. If new emphasis has been placed here or there, it is because new ground has been covered. If now and then un welcome conclusions are arrived at, the Journal is to blame ; the Journal is important, I think, not because it is the most attractive, but because it is the most complete, picture of Thoreau s mind. I am led to attach a preface to so slight an essay mainly by the consciousness of certain debts which I have incurred while occupied with Thoreau, and which I desire very much to ac knowledge somewhere. The essay owes most to Professor S. P. Sherman, of the University of Illinois, who was its constant stimulus when it was being written, and to my brother, Carl Van Doren, who gave invaluable aid when it was being revised. Professor A. H. Thorndike and Professor "\V. P. Trent, of Columbia University, kindly read the manuscript, and made important suggestions. Mr. George S. Hellman generously viii PREFACE gave me carte blanche with his Thoreau posses sions. Mr. F. H. Allen brought his accurate knowledge of Thoreau to bear upon the essay as it was going through the press. M. V. D. CONTENTS I. THE SOLITARY 1 II. FRIENDSHIP; NATURE .... 14 III. EXPANSION 39 IV. THE SPECIFIC ...... 67 V. READING . ; 87 VI. POSITION 109 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 129 INDEX 133 HENRY DAVID THOREAU THE SOLITARY THE character and the works of Henry David Thoreau, who chose to live alone in the world, have roused stabbing assailants like Lowell and Stevenson, or complete panegyrists like Emer son and the biographers, but few critics. In the twentieth century it is desirable not so much to condemn or justify the whole of Thoreau as to describe and explain his parts, not so much to take or reject the whole of his shrewdly pro pounded doctrine as to decide wherein only and wherein not at all his extraordinary and un doubted spiritual value lies ; and now, when vir tually all he wrote is in print, such a study becomes possible. It becomes possible both to ask the reason for his living to himself how much it was his nature, how much it was his theory ; and to ask the consequences of the life he lived how valuable his theory, how im portant his personality ? If in the present essay the ends of his thinking seem to be sought ex clusively in the Journal, the excuse is that only in the Journal did Thoreau think to the end ; it 2 HENRY DAVID THOREAU was his misfortune that to think to the end transcen den tally was to think extravagantly ; it is nowhere pretended that this is his most im portant thinking ; it is never forgotten that the best of him is not the raw Journal. Thoreau states his theory of solitude as clearly as relentlessly. Whoever is solitary by nature, says Aristotle, is either a wild beast or a god. Thoreau hints now and then that he feels him self in the company of gods ; certainly his ap- roach to the arcanum of solitude betrays the morning worshiper. The slender musing of Wil liam Drummond in Hawthornden; the jaunty salute of Cotton and Walton, " Farewell, thou busy world, and may We never meet again " ; the gentlemanly retreat of Cowley ; the Hora- tian pose of Pope ; the hermitage of the eight eenth-century sentimentalist ; the plaintive self- assurance of Shelley, " a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds " ; the mellow confidence of Wordsworth in his mountain surroundings ; the pugnacity of Landor, who strove with none ; the quizzical fancy of Hazlitt for "living to one s self " ; the terrible nakedness of Carlyle at twenty-three, " wandering over the moors like a restless spirit " ; the mock bravery of Browning, THE SOLITARY 3 hoisting his soul amid infinite din, none of these has either the quiet consecrated relent- lessness of Thoreau s passion or the salt of his irony^ Nor does the sense of futility that is in the youthful Arnold haunt Thoreau as it haunted most men of letters in the nineteenth century ; Thoreau never shrank publicly from his meta physics. In America the long tradition of Puritan and Quaker inward awe, the exalted security of Bry ant, and the lonely forests of Cooper take us but a little way toward Thoreau. Even within the transcendental circle we find him apart. Emerson, whose " strength and doom " was " to be solitary," and who set the fashion of solitude, anticipated the whole gist of Lowell s " Thoreau " when he reminded himself that " it is not the solitude of place, but the solitude of soul which is so estimable to us." Hawthorne, who did not conceal his personal horror of the spiritual vac uums he created in fiction, and Herman Mel ville, who shuddered throughout his " Moby Dick" to find his imagination "encompassed by all the horrors of the half -known life," these clearly have not the self-sufficiency of Thoreau, of whom Emerson said, " He was bred to no profession ; he never married ; he lived alone ; he never went to church ; he never voted ; he re fused to pay a tax to the State ; he ate no flesh, 4 HENRY DAVID THOREAU he drank no wine, he never knew the use of to bacco ; and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun." Only Thoreau among the tran- 1 scendentalists by constitution demanded lifelong letting alone was content (at least in theory) with pure loneliness. Only Thoreau can be vis ualized as an isolated personality, lying prone on the ice to explore the bottom of Walden Pond, or reading Homer in his hut on bad nights, or hoeing beans in quiet clearings, or strolling in condescension towards the village, or talking to a friend across the pond, or holding the world at bay with a paradox. Such is the Thoreau of " Walden " and the "Week." But there is a wide space between the public and the private Thoreau. The private Thoreau was not all self-sufficiency. Speaking always very stoutly, claiming to have been born for solitude, and professing to find it " whole some to be alone the greater part of the time," he still had not at center one third of the poise and complacency of Emerson. What students | of Thoreau might always have suspected, the fourteen volumes of his " Journal," betraying the self-doubter in almost equal proportions with the self-exploiter, now confirm. Among the critics, the personality of Thoreau has never been presented in full, mainly because it has been treated in no case by any one who THE SOLITARY 5 was not interested in proving a point that Thoreau was a hermit, that Thoreau was not a hermit, that Thoreau had pity and humor, that Thoreau was cold and inhuman, that Thoreau was a perfect stoic, that Thoreau was a senti mentalist, that Thoreau was a skulker. Emer son, who knew him best, cannot always be re lied on to give a fair account of the man, because Emerson s interest in him was the interest of a philosophic father in a philosophic son ; he spoke of him as " my Henry Thoreau " ; he com mended Thoreau the naturalist only because he practiced (or so Emerson believed) what Emer son the philosopher of Nature preached ; and after Thoreau s death he edited a volume of let ters which he said he had selected to represent " a perfect piece of stoicism." Thoreau had not bid for such an interpretation, or indeed for any interpretation. " You may rely on it that you have the best of me in my books, and that I am not worth seeing personally," he wrote to a friend in February, 1856. But it may be re membered that he hated visitors, and that if the best of him is in the books he published, by no means all of him is or can be there. One is never in doubt that Thoreau s person ality was not neutral, but pungent. Emerson^ found him too withdrawing in his later years ; but Thoreau then believed that Emerson was 6 HENRY DAVID THOREAU patronizing him, 1 and he certainly was no man to bask for long at a time in the sun of Emer sonian geniality. To a cool observer Thoreau must have been most interesting for what has been called the " fine aroma " of his character. At least his personality was positive enough to hold its own with the other transcendentalists. Stevenson took the cue for his remarkable crit icism of Thoreau s disposition from the " thin, penetrating, big-nosed face." The face, even the whole figure, is significant. The Rowse crayon 2 and the Worcester daguerreotype 3 both show a face by no means simple to describe con temptuous yet sensitive, aglint with irony yet dissolved in the pains of self, cold yet sensuous, alert yet lonely. His figure was unusually slight, with sloping shoulders and narrow chest, but it was " alive with Thoreau." Emerson s statement that there was " somewhat military in his na ture " scarcely does justice to the quality of this 44 life" in Thoreau s body. There was much of determination ; his hand was habitually clenched; in walking he was a " noticeable man," with " his eyes bent on the ground, his long swinging gait, his hands perhaps clasped behind him, or held 1 Thoreau s Journal, ni, 256. The references hereafter to Thoreau s works are to the volumes of the Walden Edition, 20 vols., Boston : Houghton Mifflin Company, 1906. a 1854. Frontispiece of vol. I of the Journal. 8 1856. Frontispiece of the Week. THE SOLITARY 1 closely at his side." There was also much of wildness; Hawthorne thought him something of an Indian, found him " wild, original as ugly as sin," with uncouth though courteous manners. Alcott was "touched by his aboriginal vigor," and a younger observer jotted down these notes in his diary after his first sight of Thoreau: T" Thoreau looks eminently sagacious like a sort of wise, wild beast ... a ruddy weather- beaten face, which reminds me of some shrewd and honest animal s some retired philosophical woodchuck or magnanimous fox. . . . He walks about with a brisk, rustic air, and never seems tired." Thoreau s ancestry reveals very few secrets. His racial inheritance is as interesting as it is complicated ; but it is too simple to conjecture, as writers have done, that he derived his narrow ness from the Scotch, his tendency to hold an extreme logical position from the French, his wistfulness and his wildness from the Celts, his clear, pure mysticism from the Quakers, or his sense of moral responsibility from the Puritans. It would be more reasonable to inquire what his immediate family must have meant to him. There is little to be known, and less that is significant, even here. The father, it seems, gave Thoreau scarcely more than his workmanlike quality ; we hear that he was " a cautious man, a close ob- 8 HENRY DAVID THOREAU server, methodical and deliberate in action," who "produced excellent results." The mother con tributed, it is to be supposed, quick wit, high spirits, audacity, and alertness. < Those qualities of Thoreau s mind and heart which a wise reader will not forget are six : sen sibility, concreteness of vision, thoroughness, wild combative self-sufficiency, humor, and wist- , fulness. Thoreau was more at the mercy of his senses than a perfect piece of stoicism is expected to be. "He had many elegances of his own," says Emerson. " Thus, he could not bear to hear the sound of his own steps, the grit of gravel ; and therefore never willingly walked in the road, but in the grass, on mountains and in woods. * The sight of a suffering fugitive slave could strike extraordinary pity from him. One of the most effective chapters in " Walden" is on "Sounds," and his passion for music was more than philo sophical sometimes almost " tore him to pieces." H betrays a sensitiveness in his hu man relationships which one is tempted to em ploy for explaining his very aloofness. He could not speak of his brother John Thoreau s death, twelve years after it had occurred, " without physical suffering, so that when he related it to his friend Kicketson at New Bedford, he turned pale and was forced to go to the door for air." THE SOLITARY 9 Certainly he was not at center the iron-cold structure of Stevenson s essay. Indeed, it is pos sible that his indifference was after all only a superstructure built on a very unfirm founda tion, that his whole "stoic" career was the career of one who demanded desperately the right to feel what he pleased as secretly but as powerfully as he pleased. This story is told of Thoreau at nineteen or twenty : " While in col lege he once asked his mother what profession she would have him choose. She said, pleasantly, You can buckle on your knapsack, dear, and roam abroad to seek your fortune ; but the thought of leaving home and forsaking Concord made the tears roll down his cheeks. Then his sister Helen, who was standing by, tenderly put her arm around him and kissed him, saying, No, Henry, you shall not go; you shall stay at home and live with us. " That youth was not the Cato he is supposed by many to have been. He preferred Concord to cosmopolitanism for a rea son. He cannot reprove the world for having emotions. If Thoreau felt and saw and heard much, he also felt and saw and heard concretely. In his writing and in his living his genius for the specific, his preoccupation with details, his love of facts, and his passion for real experience mark him off as distinctly as is possible from his tran- 10 HENRY DAVID THOREAU scendental brethren. His handiness with tools, which the pencil-making evinces, has become al most proverbial. He seemed eminently sensible to his friends ; Hawthorne found in him " a basis of good sense " and thought him " a healthy and wholesome man to know." Alcott knowingly refers to his "russet probity and good sense." Certainly an utter sincerity and a passion for ^genuine experience were in him. "There are \ nowadays professors of philosophy, but not phi losophers," he writes in "Walden." "To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of ^simplicity, independence, magnanimity, L^and trust, What Emerson preached in smiling benignity, his disciple Thoreau lived and described with amazing thoroughness, with set lips. He kept both his poise and his singleness of aim intact ; he was always on tiptoe ready for a new experience ; he could pursue a subject of conversation more relentlessly and longer than could any other in the company. Even if he were insignificant in that he took all of his ideas from Emerson, he would still be significant in that he reduced them to their practicable and visualizable essence. He not only suited himself in solitude, but went out and challenged more social souls to THE SOLITARY 11 combat. Even as early as one of his college es says, he attacked " the man of the world " as a " viper." Living " extempore," living the life of whim that Emerson recommended, Thoreau was unpleasant to contradict, and dangerous to curb. Pie had none of what he called " a false shame lest he be considered singular and eccentric." He lived by instinct on the defensive, striking back constantly with paradox, and steadily throwing up works around his person and his philosophy with assertion. % Thoreau is with difficulty sweet," said Emerson. Thoreau rarely bothered about being sweet. He had an appetite for sarcasm and a gift for rejoinder, and often indulged both purely for his own satisfaction in closed pages of the Journal. He was a voluble talker, and did not spare his fellow townsmen any criticism. Stevenson most absurdly charges him with a " hatred of a genuine brand, -hot as Corsican revenge, and sneering like Voltaire." Emerson s gentler judgment, that " he did not feel himself except in opposition," comes much closer to the truth. Thoreau had more of native humor than any of the transcendentalists, just as he had a live lier appreciation of facts. If "Walden " is the best transcendental book, that is partly because it was written in bounding spirits, with ^ and tongue in cheek. Cynical generally, satur- 12 HENRY DAVID THOREAU I nine, impish on occasions, always pointed, his humor sometimes broadened into boisterousness. When Ellery Channing visited Thoreau at Wai- den, the two " made that small house ring with boisterous mirth." There are puns in the Letters and the Journal which only pure fun could order. There is testimony that Thoreau liked to come down from his study of evenings to dance or whistle or sing ; and he sang " Tom Bowline " with considerable relish. He had scarcely the 44 cast-iron quaintness " which Dickens observed in the New England transcendentalists, but he had another New England trait : he saw pretty \ tfar^at_times into hmnagjaature, and found his Jhumor there. It was his saving humor, finally, which trimmed the excesses of his Journal when he went into print. Throughout all Thoreau s professions of self- sufficiency sound hauntings of dissatisfaction and wistfulness, which, Celtic or not, are by no means the equivalent of the indefinite yearning of the German romanticists, but give hint of a very real passion in Thoreau s make-up. There are traces of pure affection now and: then which Stevenson was blind to. He was guide and / teacher for children on berrying parties. There are youthful love poems to be accounted for, and rumors of a love-affair. And there is the famous paragraph in " Walden," by no means clear on the THE SOLITARY 13 face of it, and not yet explained, which Emerson calls "the mythical record of his disappoint ments": " I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves." S So much of personal wistfulness, most of it never expressed, in this passage veiled by alle gory, suggests that there was something with which Thoreau was not completely satisfied, and that this was neither the transcendental universe nor the will-o -the-wisps of Beauty and the Pres ent, but some one of the human relationships themselves. II FRIENDSHIP ; NATURE " SURELY joy is the condition of life," wrote this chanticleer of the nineteenth century. It is perfectly obvious that he would have his readers shun melancholy as they would shun the Devil. He, at least in his capacity of author and lec turer, will be no moping owl to complain that existence is desperate. He will not have it that an author s life is hard - he to whom " to be hin dered from accomplishing" his literary labors in the Walden hermitage (whither he went, as every one knows, to assemble the " Week " from several years of the Journal) "for want of a little common sense, a little enterprise and busi ness talent, appeared not so sad as foolish." Tingling with idealism, exalted by freedom, like chanticleer on tiptoe quivering with expansion, Thoreau could veil his disappointments. 1 1 The title-page of the first edition of Walden (1854) bore this legend, printed beneath a captivating woodcut of Tho- reau s Walden " hermitage," and repeated on page 92 of the ensuing text : " I do not propose to write an ode to dejection, but to brag as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up." The sentence signified more to Thoreau and his first readers than is gener ally realized. Some unpublished pages of Thoreau s Journal in the possession of Mr. George 3. Hellman, of New York, are FRIENDSHIP; NATURE 15 But he did not blot the sadness he could veil. " He had many reserves," says Emerson, " and intensely interesting as containing two quotations jotted down by Thoreau without ascription or comment as if in a common place-book, one of which is from Coleridge s Ode to Dejection: " It were a vain endeavor, Theugh I should gaze forever On that green light that lingers in the west : I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within. I see them all so excellently fair, I see, not feel, how beautiful they are ! O Lady ! We receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live." At the end of the passage Thoreau interposes, " And thus sounds another s wail," and goes on to quote from Byron s Don Juan : " No more no more Oh ! never more on me The freshness of the heart can fall like dew, Which out of all the lovely things we see Extracts emotions beautiful and new, Hived in our bosoms like the bag o the bee : Think st thou the honey with these objects grew? Alas ! t was not in them, but in thy power To double even the sweetness of a flower. 44 No more no more Oh ! never more, my heart, Canst thou be my sole world, my universe ! Once all in all, but now a thing apart, Thou canst not be my blessing or my curse : The illusion s gone forever." The pages on which these lines are entered are undated, but it is safe to assume that they belong among the first pages of the Journal, since Thoreau did most of his quoting early. The two quotations, and more particularly the tone of the remark written between them, are important as showing Thoreau set ting his face early and definitely against the winds of philo sophic despair that blew throughout the nineteenth century. The lines from Coleridge and Byron were, of course, widely known and felt in those days. The lines from Coleridge ex- 16 HENRY DAVID THOREAU knew how to throw a poetic veil over his expe rience." He threw no poetic veil over his Journal, which was his experience ; and he left elsewhere a litter which is easy to collect and with the tes timony of which it is easy to indict him on the charge of experiencing disillusionment. *^ The parable of the hound, the bay horse, and the turtle-dove is plainly a "mythical record of disappointments. But what disappointments has been a question. What his quest was he never told ; not that he was ignorant himself, not that it was anything like the blue flower of Novalis, a symbol of indefinite and infinite yearning ; but "he had many reserves." His quest was the present, the self, the secret of Nature, or Keal- actly expressed John Stuart Mill s youthful pessimism. Mill con fesses in the Autobiography. When Tennyson went in 1848 to visit the Reverend Stephen Hawker, the latter observed : " His temper seemed very calm. His spirits very low. When I quoted, O never more on me, etc., he said they too were his haunting 1 words." That Thoreau was not only crowing 1 to keep up his own courage, but was willing to crow against the storm for all mankind, is attested by his pen-sketch of chanticleer on the manuscript title-page which he drew up originally for Walden and which has been reproduced in the edition of Walden pub lished by the Bibliophile Society of Boston. Under the chan ticleer legend on the same page is a quotation from Sadi (never printed), which offers Thoreau s solution of the whole problem of living implicit obedience to Nature : " The clouds, wind, moon, sun and sky act in cooperation that thou mayest get thy daily bread, and not eat it with indifference ; all revolve for thy sake, and are obedient to command ; it must be an equi table condition, that thou shalt be obedient also." FRIENDSHIP- NATURE 17 itj, say his commentators ; and if Thoreau were entirely unknown personally, any of these con jectures might be plausible. Thus if one were setting out to prove the case for u the present," one would find Thoreau reminding himself that he "must live above all in the present"; 1 and declaring in 1850 2 "In all my travels I never ^ came to the abode of the present." But it is clear | enough that Thoreau s quest was not for any metaphysical entity, because he wore his meta physics as comfortably as any one. It is clear enough that this single disappointment of his life was not an intellectual but an emotional one, and that it arose in the domain of the human re lations. His ideal was perfection in human inter course, and his quest was for an absolutely satis factory condition of friendship. The evidence is the Journal and a passage in the "Dial." In March of 1842, 3 Thoreau wrote, " Where is my heart gone? They say men can not part with it and live." A year later he edited for the "Dial " 4 passages from the " Chinese Four Books," one paragraph of which, astonishing for its resemblances to the famous parable, reads thus : " Benevolence is man s heart, and justice is man s path. If a man lose his fowls or his dogs, he knows how to seek them. There are those who lose their 1 Journal, n, 138. 2 Ibid., n, 74. 8 Ibid., i, 350. * Dial, rv, 206. 18 HENRY DAVID THOREAU hearts and know not how to seek them. The duty of the student is no other than to seek his lost heart." There is good reason to believe that Tho- reau, putting his own construction upon this pas sage, employed it eleven years later in " Walden " to veil a personal longing which was genuine and keen and which demanded expression if only through parable. A year before " Walden " ap peared, he was writing : l " No fields are so barren to me as the men of whom I expect everything but get nothing. In their neighborhood I experi ence a painful yearning for society, which cannot be satisfied." What was Thoreau s hope from abstract friend ship, and where are the unmistakable signs of his disappointment? No one ever spoke more loftily about friend ship. " No one else, to my knowledge," says Steven son, "has spoken in so high and just a spirit of the kindly relations ; and I doubt whether it be a drawback that these lessons should come from one in many ways so unfitted to be a teacher in this branch. . . . The very coldness and egoism of his intercourse gave him a clearer insight into the intellectual basisof our warm, mutual tolerations." No one ever claimed more for friendship. " All those contingencies," wrote Thoreau in 1841, 2 " which the philanthropist, statesman, and house- i Journal, v, 87. 2 Ibid., i, 190. FRIENDSHIP ; NATURE 19 keeper write so many books to meet are simply and quietly settled in the intercourse of friends." No one ever expected more from friendship. In 1843 he wrote to a friend, " We always seem to be living just on the brink of a pure and lofty inter course which would make the ills and trivialness of life ridiculous. After each little interval, though it be but for the night, we are prepared to meet each other as gods and goddesses." At the same time, no one was ever more disap pointed in friendship. Thoreau speaks his disap pointment in two voices. One voice is for the world which he has found inadequate, has the tone of sharp reproof and the manner of the cynic philoso pher, and expresses contempt for " that old musty cheese that we are." " In what concerns you much," he wrote, "do not think that you have compan ions ; know that you are alone in the world." " How alone must our life be lived ! We dwell on the sea shore, and none between us and the sea. Men are my merry companions, my fellow-pilgrims, who beguile the way but leave me at the first turn of the road, for none are travelling one road so far as myself." It was in this key that his acquaint ances found him strung ; it was the man u who never felt himself except in opposition" that Emerson is complaining of here in his Journal: 1 " If I knew only Thoreau, I should think cobper- 1 Emerson s Journal, ix, 15. 20 HENRY DAVID THOREAU ation of good men impossible. Must we always talk for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, and joy? Centrality he has and pene tration, strong understanding, and the higher gifts but all this and all his resources of wit and invention are lost to me in every experiment, year after year, that I make, to hold intercourse with his mind. Always some weary, captious paradox to fight you with, and the time and tem per wasted." Thoreau is found reporting from his side a conversation with Emerson : l " p. M. Talked, or tried to talk, with R. W. E. Lost my time nay, almost my identity. He, assuming a false opposition where there was no difference of opinion, talked to the wind r told me what I knew and I lost my time trying to imagine myself somebody else to oppose him." It is plain that very little can be learned about Thoreau s private feeling in the matter of friendship from his published writings or from his conversations; in what he published he scowled and strutted ; in conversation he rose up like a gamecock at flut ter of opposition and never lowered his head. Emerson and Thoreau are peers in egoism; they tell nothing about each other. Thoreau s other voice is for himself ; its very persistence distinguishes him from his transcen dental fellows. " Love is a thirst that is never 1 Journal, v, 188. FRIENDSHIP; NATURE 21 slaked," he wrote in his Journal. 1 No one out side knew what was needed to quench that thirst, precisely because no one could even be sure of its existence. "You are not living altogether as I could wish," wrote Thomas Cholmondeley T an English friend, to Thoreau in 1SS6. " You ought to have society. A college, a conventual life is for you. You should be the member of some society A not yet formed. . . . Without this you will be liable to moulder away as you get older. Your love for Nature is ancillary to some affection which you have not yet discovered. The great ^ Kant never dined alone. Once, when there was a danger of the empty dinner table, he sent his valet out, bidding him catch the first man he could find and bring him in ! So necessary was the tonic, the effervescing cup of conversation, to his deeper labors. . . . The lonely man is a dis eased man, I greatly fear. See how carefully Mr. Emerson avoids it ; and yet, who dwells, in all essentials, more religiously free than he? ... By such a course you would not lose Nature. But supposing that reasons, of which I can know nothing, determine you to remain in quasi retire ment ; still, let not this retirement be too lonely." Thoreau did not need to be told all that, hoping as he continually was in his solitude that the quality of affection would be born, that the hound, 1 Journal, vra, 231. 22 HENRY DAVID THOREAU the horse, and the turtle-dove would pause and wait for him and consent to be stroked. The history of Thoreau s personal experiences in friendship is written in the early poems and in the Journal. They give one best to under stand what were the nature and requirements of his ideal. " His biography is in his verses," said Emer son. The poems serve best, perhaps, to prove both that his ideal of human intercourse was with him from the first, and that the personal, real affection for which he yearned was never the affection of or for this or that particular person, but was the sentiment of affection, or the capacity for affection, itself that thing which, too late to mend matters, he found had been ruled, perhaps without his consent, out of his life. There were rumors of an unreturned, even martyred love, for one Ellen Sewall, and the lines from his first contribution to the " Dial," " Sympathy," - " Each moment as we nearer drew to each, A stern respect withheld us farther yet, So that we seemed beyond each other s reach, And less acquainted than when first we met," i have been said to refer covertly to his relations with her. It is hinted darkly that " certain son nets which he addressed to her will some day see the light." Many have sentimentalized the FRIENDSHIP ; NATURE 23 legend. As a matter of fact, the evidence that Thoreau ever loved any particular woman is ex ceedingly slight. To Mrs. Emerson in 1843 he writes, " You must know that you represent to me woman, for I have not traveled very far or wide." Eyes trained from birth on infinity, uncompro mising always in friendship as in other matters, it is unlikely that he regretted much the absence of a living heart. It was his constitutional want of so desirable and fundamental an organ a want only accentuated by his philosophy that perplexed and saddened him. The verses " To the Maiden in the East" cannot be autobio graphical so much as expressive of the fastidious ideal of love that Thoreau s youthful melancholy had fashioned out of the egoistic materials of his temperament. Its strenuous delicacy and plaintive laboriousness are wholly characteristic of Thoreau s early verse. " It was a summer eve, The air did gently heave While yet a low-hung cloud Thy eastern skies did shroud ; The lightning s silent gleam, Startling my drowsy dream Seemed like the flash Under thy dark eyelash. " Direct thy pensive eye Into the western sky ; 24 HENRY DAVID THOREAU And when the evening star Does glimmer from afar Upon the mountain line, Accept it for a sign That I am near, And thinking of thee here. " I 11 walk with gentle pace, And choose the smoothest place, And careful dip the oar, And shun the winding shore, And gently steer my boat Where water-lilies float, And cardinal-flowers Stand in their sylvan bowers." Some lines of the same period, " My love must be as free As is the eagle s wing," and " Let such pure hate still underprop Our love, that we may be Each other s conscience," with their blither, cooler notes, confirm the judg ment that Thoreau was only idealizing from the beginning. The Journal, containing a wealth of self-rev elation of a character which a reader only of Thoreau s books does not dream of, continues the history of Thoreau s experiences in friend ship. " My Journal should be the record of my love," writes Thoreau in the second volume. 1 1 Journal, u, 101. FRIENDSHIP ; NA TURE 25 In 1845 he first struck fire in friction with so ciety, when he was arrested for refusing to pay taxes ; and lost a friend or two. Henceforth his path is by no means a smooth one; doubts much more substantial than the yearning he could veil with allegory assail him. A series of extracts from the Journal (or elsewhere) can, better than anything else, indicate the real qualities of Tho- reau s temper and the trend of his feeling for friends and for mankind. 1850 : l " I love my friends very much, but I find that it is of no use to go to see them. I hate them commonly when I am near them." 1850 : 2 " I go and see my friend and try his atmosphere. If our atmospheres do not mingle, if we repel each other strongly, it is of no use to stay." 1851 : 3 "I wish my neighbors were wilder."" , ^ 1 851 : 4 " What is the use of going to see people whom yet you never see, and who never see you ? I begin to suspect that it is not necessary that we should see one another. . . . The society of young women is the most unprofitable I have ever tried. They are so light and flighty that you can never be sure whether they are there or not there. I prefer to talk with the more staid and settled, settled for life, in every sense." 1 Journal, n, 98. 2 Ibid., n, 109. 3 Ibid., n, 171. 4 Ibid., in, 116. 26 HENR Y DA VI D THOREA U 1851: * " Ah, I yearn toward thee, my friend, but I have not confidence in thee. ... I am not thou ; thou art not I." 1851 : 2 "It would give me such joy to know that a friend had come to see me, and yet that pleasure I seldom if ever experience." 1851 : 3 "I seem to be more constantly merged in nature ; my intellectual life is more obedient to nature than formerly, but perchance less obedi ent to spirit. I have less memorable seasons. I exact less of myself. ... O if I could be dis contented with myself ! " 1852 : 4 " If I have not succeeded in my friend ships, it was because I demanded more of them and did not put up with what I could get ; and I got no more partly because I gave so little." 1852 : 5 " I go away to cherish my idea of friend ship. Is not friendship a great relation?" 1856 : 6 " And now another friendship is ended. I do not know what has made my friend doubt me, but I know that in love there is no mistake, and that every estrangement is well founded. But my destiny is not narrowed, but if possible the broader for it." 1856: 7 "Farewell, my friends. . . . For a long time you have appeared further and further 1 Journal, in, 61. a Ibid., in, 150. 8 Ibid., in, 6f>. * Ibid., in, 262. * Ibid., iv, 314. Ibid., ix, 249. Ibid., viii, 281. FRIENDSHIP; NATURE 27 off to me. I see that you will at length disap pear altogether." 1857 i 1 "If I should make the least conces sion, my friend would spurn me." 1857 : 2 "I have tried them [men] . . . they did not inspire me ... I lost my time. But out there [in Nature] ! Who shall criticise that com panion? It is like the hone to the knife. . . . Shall I prefer a part, an infinitely small fraction, to the whole?" 1857 : 3 "It does look sometimes as if the world were on its last legs. ... It would be sweet to deal with men more, I can imagine, but where dwell they? Not in the fields which I traverse." 1862 : 4 " The vine is dried up, and the fig tree languisheth ; the pomegranate tree, the palm tree also, and the apple tree, even all the trees of the field, are withered; because joy is withered away from the sons of men. / " The meaning of Nature was never attempted K\ to be defined by him," said Emerson. It is true that Thoreau did not dogmatize about Nature. Yet, time and again, in the Journal and elsewhere, he defined his own personal relation to her so clearly that no one now can mistake it. Such epithets as " companion," " club," " friend," and 1 Journal, ix, 279. 2 Ibid., ix, 216. 8 Ibid., ix, 205. * Excursions, " Wild Apples." 28 HENRY DAVID THOREAU "bride" leave no uncertain impression. Nature was Thoreau s best, because his only, friend. Alcott considered that Thoreau had " the pro- foundest passion for it [Nature] of any one liv ing." Certainly there was no one like him in America. The mere fact that he was a philo sophic son of Emerson, who with the aid of Cole ridge had joined Bacon with Plato, matter with mind, nature with intellect, experiment with dia lectic, sensation with ideas, to engender the tran scendental Nature, does not furnish a reason or an adequate motive for Thoreau s ruling passion. Emerson, who indulged in " a breath under the apple tree, a siesta on the grass, a whiff of wind, an interval of retirement" only in order to "revive the overtired brain" or in order to re store " the balance and serenity," understood that Thoreau s bent was independent of his own in fluence, and declared that " his determination on Natural History was organic." If Emerson stud ied Nature to know himself, Thoreau wedded I Nature to know himself. "Remember thy Creator in the days of thy Youth ; i.e., lay up a store of natural influences," counseled Thoreau in 185 1. 1 He never came out from under those influences. As finely sus ceptible as Wordsworth, as passionate to report his spiritual experiences, with a personality more 1 Journal, n, 330. FRIENDSHIP NA TURE 29 pointed than Wordsworth s, he wore a rapt and stealthy air in his approach to Nature which no one else has shared. In the woods his face is said / to have shone with a light not seen in the village. For him there was an " ideal summer " blowing through his brain, there was " a nature behind the common, unexplored by science or by litera ture " which, like the plumage of the red election bird, he hoped would " assume stranger and more dazzling colors, like the tints of morning, in pro portion as I advanced further into the darkness and solitude of the forest." He was ever expect ing greater things ; " we have hardly entered the vestibule of Nature," he believed. He had a pas sionate desire to exhibit his strange love as she dressed for him, to reproduce these absolutely strange elements of Nature in literature. Lowell s earliest judgments, 1 of Thoreau that " generally he holds a very smooth mirror up to nature," and of his literary achievement that " Melville s pic tures of life in Typee have no attraction beside it," by no means did justice to Thoreau s effort. Nor did Henry James s patronizing notice of " his remarkable genius for flinging a kind of spirit ual interest over these things [birds and beasts and trees] " strike the center. John Burroughs questions Thoreau s sincerity : " If Thoreau had 1 Pertaining to Thoreau (ed. S. A. Jones, Detroit, 1901), pp. 21, 23. 30 HENRY DAVID THOREAU made friends with a dog to share his bed and board in his retreat by Walden Pond, one would have had more faith in his sincerity. The dog would have been the seal and authentication of his retreat. A man who has no heart for a dog, how can he have a heart for Nature herself?" But Mr. Burroughs has never been quite able to understand what Thoreau was doing, and has been content to observe that "he put the whole of Nature between himself and his fellows" ; forget ting that for Thoreau there were no " fellows," and only one love. Thoreau informed a friend in 1841 that Na ture was " more human than any single man or woman can be." In those early days such a re mark amounted in Thoreau to little more than a pleasantry, an exercise in paradox. Then Na ture was mere mild " Alma Natura," and meant mainly health to Thoreau. But very soon he is " struck with the pleasing friendships and una nimities of Nature, as when the lichen on the trees takes the form of their leaves." Some years later he finds himself a party to such a " unanimity " : " My acquaintances sometimes imply that I am too cold ; but each thing is warm enough of its kind. . . . You who complain that I am cold find Nature cold. To me she is warm." 1 "If I am too cold for human friend- 1 Journal, m, 147. FRIENDSHIP NATURE 31 ship, I trust I shall not soon be too cold for natural influences. It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature. Those qualities which bring you near to the one estrange you from the other." 1 At Walden he finds that " every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me " ; and in 1854 he is heard at his distance asserting, " I cannot spare my moonlight and my mountains for the best of men I am likely to get in exchange." " Because joy is withered away from the sons of men," and because friends of the perfect sort are not to be found among the sons of men, he hastens to play the " welcome guest " to Nature. " Who . shall criticise that companion ? " Did not their atmospheres mingle ? Was not she wild enough to be a neighbor ? Was not she staid and settled for life ? Was not she minding her own busi ness superbly? Was he not she? was she not he ? Did not she give all that he demanded ? " I love nature, because it never cheats me. It never jests. It is cheerfully, musically earnest," he wrote in a kind of desperation. Was it not altogether possible to cherish his "idea" of friendship in the company of Nature ? Did not Nature hold out to him the only hope of assur ance that life was yet joyful when he saw slavery 1 Journal, m, 400. 82 HENRY DAVID THOREAU in Massachusetts ? With his friends disappear ing over the rim of his little or big world, was not Nature left? If men dwelt nowhere, were there not fields still to traverse? Who could "communicate immortality" to him better than Nature? "All nature is my bride," announced Tho- reau in 1857. 1 The bride and groom, it seems, had been children together. " Henry talks about Nature just as if she d been born and brought up in Concord," observed Madam Hoar. Nature was as faithful a consort to Thoreau as Ocean was to Melville s Moby Dick : " Almost univer sally," says Melville, "a lone whale proves an ancient one. Like venerable moss-bearded Dan iel Boone, he will have no one near him but Nature herself ; and her he takes to wife in the wilderness of waters, and the best of wives she is, though she keeps so many moody secrets." The two died together, perhaps : " When he had wakeful nights," writes Sophia Thoreau, " he would ask me to arrange the furniture so as to make fantastic shadows on the wall, and he wished his bed was in the form of a shell that he might curl up in it." When it is said that Thoreau found in Nature his ideal friend, it is meant that he found in her his complete sympathizer. Hawthorne, who as a 1 Journal, ix, 337. FRIENDSHIP; NATURE 33 young man interviewed Thoreau, " said that Thoreau prided himself on coming nearer the heart of a pine-tree than any other human being." Thoreau has much to say concerning this affin ity. " Friendship is the unspeakable joy and blessing that results to two or more individuals who from constitution symmthize. . . . Who are the estranged? Two friends explaining." 1 " Friendship takes place between those who have an affinity for one another and is a perfectly natural and regular event." " It is hard to know rocks. They are crude and inaccessible to our nature. We have not enough of the stony ele ment in us." Nature, thought Thoreau, could always be trusted by one who had this affinity for her ; perhaps it was because the affinity be tween himself and Nature had not yet become complete that on a certain day, after long de liberation and many trials at a mutual under standing, he spanked a woodchuck which would keep pestering his premises. j It is easy to see where Thoreau wished all the sympathy to be. " In the whole school," says Lowell, speaking of Rousseau and the European sentimentalists, " there is a sickly taint ... a sensibility to the picturesque in Nature, not with Nature as a strengthen er and consoler, a whole some tonic for a mind ill at ease with itself, but 1 Journal, HI, 146. 34 HENRY DAVID THOREAU with Nature as a kind of feminine echo to the mood, flattering it with sympathy rather than correcting it with rebuke or lifting it away from its unmanly depression, as in the wholesomer fellow-feeling of Wordsworth." In Thoreau there is also a taint, though it is scarcely a " sickly " or an " unmanly " taint. Emerson, who pro nounced that " in fine the ancient precept, Know thyself, and the modern precept, Study Nature, become at last one maxim," was him self tainted with mad (if manly) intellectual egoism. And Thoreau, who always went one step farther than Emerson, went here also one step farther. When one of Thoreau s critics went into forest retirement for two years, he found his imagination " awed and purified " by con tact with Nature, and found that great peace of mind was the fruit of the fellowship peace in the presence oj Nature s great, calm, " passion less power." \ He considered then that Nature to Thoreau had also been a " discipline of the will as much as a stimulant to the imagination. * -This is true only with a reservation ; Thoreau s will ran free of discipline to the extent that his intellect ran wild in Nature ; and there was lit tle else than intellect in him (as in the other transcendental essayists) to discipline. " He had 1 Paul Elmer More, " A Hermit s Notes on Thoreau," Shel- burne Essays, i. FRIENDSHIP; NATURE 35 no temptations to fight against no appetites, no passions," Emerson said. He lived, indeed, quite outside the circle of Good and Bad. When Thoreau told himself in 1841, 1 "I exult in stark inanity, leering on nature and the soul," he surely was launching forth on no career of strict self-supervision. As early as 1842 he was recommending the forest to the readers of the " Dial " for no other reason than that " the soli tary rambler may find a response and expression for every mood" in its depth. He refused to like men because they begrudged him indefinite expansion in their direction ; 2 and came to like Nature because Nature expected nothing of him. " What a hero one can be without moving a finger ! " he exclaimed at twenty-one. He might have exclaimed in 1850, " What a lover of Na ture one can be without conceding a mood ! " His ideal was independence ; Nature never criti cized him. His ideal demanded something abso lutely to be trusted, capable of any interpreta- tion^inexhaustible to any curious mind, giving all and taking nothing, yet not complaining of the sacrifice ; Nature was all that. Thoreau can be very grandly condemned for seeking himself in Nature. But his successors in the poet-naturalist role can be condemned yet more for seeking themselves in Nature. One i Journal, i, 175. 2 j wd<> IX) 2 09. 36 HENRY DAVID THOREAU cannot say that Thoreau was a better man than they, or a stronger ; Nature is neither good nor bad, neither strong nor weak. One can say that Thoreau is vastly more interesting than they. At least he is the only one of them all whose per sonality is intrinsically so interesting that people will long be interested in preserving the books in which it is reflected on Nature s mirror. Thoreau himself despised what he called " the mejjly-mouthed enthusiasm of the [mere] lover of nature." One smiles to think what he would say in these latter days. He would deplore the exploitation by nature-fakers and nature-hacks of the pathetic fallacy in their animal stories. He would be monstrously impajient with the poor "nature-study" of bird books and tree books, which prefers quite harmless and quite useless curiosity to dangerous or quite useful specula tion. He would say that modern nature books insult the intelligence, and are gauged for a race of school-children. He would not flatly agree that " one must live until tired, and think until baffled, before he can know his need of Nature," or that all one goes to the woods for is to find a place where he can " know without thinking." He would have veneration for the manly ancl painstaking John Burroughs, but he would agree that he is no poet. He would be unspeakably sickened by the hot hysteria in the books of FRIENDSHIP; NATURE 37 Richard Jefferies, with their " insatiable yearning for a full, rich life," their effeminate groping for a newer " series of ideas " and a newer " range of thought " than those which have exercised the world for five thousand years, or five million, their morbid fidgeting to be " plunged deep in existence," their sad conviction that " there is something more than existence," their un fledged talk of " soul-culture," their total want of originality, their spiritual sterility. If one seeks a point of difference between Thoreau and Jefferies, he need read no further than this sen tence in the latter s " Story of my Life": "I should like to be loved by every beautiful woman on earth from the swart Nubian to the white and divine Greek." Further comparisons are of no value. " After all," said Walt Whitman, reflecting once on the difference between the relations to Nature of Burroughs and Thoreau, " I suppose outdoors had nothing to do with that difference. The con trast just shows what sort of men Thoreau and Burroughs were to start with." / It has been seen that Thoreau s ideal of the friendly relation de manded complete sympathy and toleration from the second party. It has been seen that he found no such friend among mankind, went therefore to Nature, and was satisfied with her companion ship. When Nature was about to slay his body 38 HENRY DAVID THOREAU with consumption, he was not resentful. She still was friend to what he believed to be the real part of him, his mind ; she still, permitted him to think whatever he pleased. This exaggerated confidence in his own mind was what Thoreau had to start with. Ill EXPANSION A WHIMSICAL passage in the Journal for 1856 1 intimates the character of the demands which Thoreau made upon the universe and which no friend save Nature could meet : "Aug. 31. Sunday, P.M. To Hubbard Bath Swamp by boat. " There sits bne by the shore who wishes to go with me, but I cannot think of it. I must be fancy-free. There is no such mote in the sky as a man who is not perfectly transparent to you, who has any opacity. I would rather attend to him earnestly for half an hour, on shore or else where, and then dismiss him. He thinks I could merely take him into my boat and then not mind him. He does not realize that I should by the s. same act take him into my mind, where there is no room for him, and my bark would surely founder in such a voyage as I was contemplating. I know very well that I should never reach that expansion of the river I have in my mind, with him aboard with his broad terrene qualities. He would sink my bark (not to another sea) and never know it. I could better carry a heaped load 1 Journal, ix, 46. 40 HENRY DAVID THOREAU of meadow mud and sit on the thole-pins. There would be more room for me, and I should reach that expansion of the river nevertheless. . . . These things are settled by fate. The good ship sails when she is ready. . . . What is getting into a man s carriage when it is full, compared with putting your foot in his mouth and popping right into his mind without considering whether it is occupied or not ? . . . Often, I would rather undertake to shoulder a barrel of pork and carry it a mile than take into my company a man. It would not be so heavy a weight upon my mind. I could put it down and only feel my back ache for it." " Let us know our limits," proposed Pascal. For Thoreau, expansion beyond all limits was the one thing needful. Friends are a weary weight, companions are a burden. He maintained aus- terely, like the Oriental philosopher, that " per fect benevolence does not admit the feeling of affection. . . . Perfect benevolence is the very highest thing. ... It is difficult to forget all the men in the world." His idea of a friend was " some broad and generous natural person, as \ frank as the daylight, in whose presence our be havior will be as simple and unconstrained as , the wanderer amid the recesses of these hills." 1 To be friends two persons must be something 1 Journal, 1, 442. EXPANSION 41 inhuman like the elements the daylight to each other, must have universes that coincide. The circles must not intersect. He morbidly de manded, as " the essence of friendship," " a total magnanimity and trust." " What Henry Thoreau needed," said one who knew him, " was to be believed in through thick and thin and then let alone." He asked for the privilege, not of loving, but of admiring, and he exercised man s prerog ative, not in being hurt, but in being disgusted. Mr. Howells says it was a " John Brown type, a John Brown ideal, a John Brown principle," for which he was protagonist, and not a man John Brown. The sympathy he called for was of a higher strain than that in which most men sympathize. It was a sympathy of which the mind could make any disposition it chose; it could be exercised on fish as legitimately as on men; and it was to be paid for only by toleration, agree ment, veneration. It has been supposed that the experiment with a community at Brook Farm suggested to Tho reau the other experiment of perfecting man in solitude. Thoreau, it is more correct to say, was /j I born possessed with the demon of expansion, and much more radically so than the reader only of " Walden," with its witty digs at busybodies and its droll defense of loneliness, can realize. " Every man should stand for a force which is 42 HENRY DAVID THOREAU perfectly irresistible," he wrote to a friend in 1848. " How can any man be weak who dares to be at all? . . . What a wedge, what a beetle, what a catapult, is an earnest man ! What can resist him? " Emerson lamented that Thoreau did not let his uncommon energy play in action. It did play and quiver within him steadily in pure, vacuous expansion. "My most essential progress must be to me a state of absolute rest," announced Thoreau, for whom absolute rest was absolute action, and " engineering for all Amer ica" were pure waste of time. If a note in nine teenth-century romantic thought was the note of natural human expansion, Thoreau in that cen- NT""" tury, on tiptoe like chanticleer, stands himself . for pure expansion of the pure self. If the ex pansion of Chateaubriand was an expansion of the religious sensibilities, if that of Wordsworth was benevolent, if that of Ruskin was aesthetic, if that of Emerson was intellectual, that of Tho reau was most purely egoistic. "The cost of a thing," says he, " is the amount of what I call ] life [and what others might call self-satisfaction] which is required to be exchanged for it." There was in Thoreau a rage for self-satisfaction, not always to be appeased. Stevenson says, " He had not enough of the superficial, even at command." He fled the superficial for " centrality," and wanted centrality as a caged lion wants liberty. EXPANSION 43 " As long as possible live free and uncommitted," he advised in " Walden." All he asked was to be let alone. As early as his twentieth year he was saying in a college oration, " The character istic of our epoch is perfect freedom freedom of thought and action " ; and twelve years later he was telling himself that " The only obligation which I have a right to assume is to do at any time what I think right." He asked for elbow- room because he never knew in advance in what direction he might have to expand : " I have no more distinctness or pointedness in my yearn ings than an expanding bud. ... I feel ripe for something, yet do nothing, can t discover what that thing is. I feel fertile merely." This testi- ness and this mere fertility are far from be ing the pleasant qualities of Thoreau. Stevenson says, " Thoreau is dry, priggish, and selfish," and has " none of that large, unconscious geni ality of the world s heroes " probably a just judgment. " A call from Thoreau in the high est sense meant business," and " he was on his guard not to be over-influenced," acquaintances reported. It is impossible to imagine at times a more relentless or a more disagreeable expan sion. Expansion of the pure self explains Thoreau s attitude toward collective society. Alcott con sidered him " the best republican citizen in the 44 HENRY DAVID THOREAU world, always at home, and minding his own affairs." Certainly the troubles of mankind caused him no disturbance. He was as stead fastly and religiously self-centered as Cardinal Newman was concerned for the personal soul when Newman held it " better for the sun and moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to fail, and for all the many millions on it to die of starvation in extremest agony, as far as temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, I will not say should be lost, but should commit one venial sin." Thoreau believed, indeed, that God was with him ; " God does not sympathize with the popu lar movements," he said. He had a Nietzschean contempt for the " gregariousness " of men ; as semblies of men he said he saw only as assem blies of animals with broad flapping ears. Defy ing the fourth chapter of Ecclesiastes, he per mitted himself to describe society as "pigs in a litter, which lie close together to keep each other warm"; 1 and opposed Fourierism because it asked men to stand propped against one an other rather than planted, each one firmly, in the eternal. A curt passage in the " Maine Woods " reflects best, perhaps, if vicariously, Thoreau s own contempt for the intercourse of men : " We had been told in Bangor of a man O who lived alone, a sort of hermit, at the dam, to 1 Journal, iv, 307. EXPANSION 45 take care of it, who spent his time tossing a bul let from one hand to the other for want of em ployment. . . . This sort of tit-for-tat intercourse between his two hands, bandying to and fro a leaden object, seems to have been his symbol for society." The course of Thoreau s career in expansion is interesting. From the first he stood apart. Says a college mate, " The touch of his hand was moist and indifferent, as if he had taken up some thing when he saw your hand coming and caught your grasp upon it." From the first he had determined to grow perfect after his own fashion. " What a hero one can be without mov ing a finger ! " But not until the rather listless and aimless Thoreau who left college was ener gized by the spirit of Emerson, not until his re markable essay, "The Service, or Qualities of the Recruit," written about 1840, perhaps in answer to the " discourses on Peace and Non- Resistance which in 1840 were so numerous in New England," 1 and left unprinted in full till the edition of 1902, does Thoreau s policy of spherical expansion find words 2 : " We shall not attain to be spherical by lying on one or the other side for an eternity, but only by resigning ourselves implicitly to the law of gravity in us, shall we find our axis coincident with the celes- 1 The Service (ed. F. B. Sanborn), p. vii. 2 Ibid., p. 6. 46 HENRY DAVID THOREAU tial axis, and by revolving incessantly through all circles, acquire a perfect sphericity. . . . The brave man is a perfect sphere, which cannot fall on its flat side, and is equally strong every way." The recruit in the ranks of the Eternal can dis pense with bravado before the world : " The coward wants resolution, which the brave man can do without. . . . His [the brave man s] bravery deals not so much in resolute action, as healthy and assured rest ; its palmy state is a staying at home and compelling alliance in all directions." Here is the last word needed to prove that Tho- reau from the first was self-appointed to expand spherically at the expense of the world s gifts friendship, love, fame. Perhaps more of the es sential Thoreau can be seen in " The Service " than in any other twenty-five pages of him. Thoreau, then, embarks upon his voyage of ex pansion. " It is time now that I begin to live," he tells himself in 1841. 1 When he goes to Ktaadn he is reassured to find that the forest owl is " plainly not nervous about his solitary life." In 1850 he writes of accidentally setting fire to some woods, and so destroying the prop erty of several farmers ; but he is more concerned for himself than for the farmers, since the woods have been his friend, the boundary of his visible sphere. In 1851 his harvest of satisfaction does 1 Journal, I, 299. EXPANSION 47 not appear so rich as lie had expected : " Here I am thirty-four years old, and yet my life is almost wholly un expanded. How much is in the germ ! " * He notices in alarm that " the character of my knowledge is from year to year becoming more dis tinct and scientific ; that, in exchange for views as wide as heaven s cope, I am being narrowed down to the field of the microscope." But he decides that he has perhaps contracted " a fatal coarseness " as the " resultof mixing in the trivial affairs of men," and decides that human wishes are intrinsically and inevitably vain : " The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or perchance a palace or temple on the earth, and at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a wood-shed with them." He takes Nature now to wife, and henceforth alternates between doubt that his expansion is bearing the fruit for which his appetite was set and overemphatic self-assur ance. In 1853 he looks back wistfully to riper days when he grew like corn in the night : " Ah, those youthful days ! Are they never to return ? When the walker does not too curiously observe particulars, but sees, hears, scents, tastes, and feels only himself, . . . his expanding body, his intellect and heart. . . . The unbounded universe was his. A bird is now become a mote in his eye." But he secures himself again at Walden, 1 Journal, u, 316. 48 HENRY DAVID THOREAU whither he had gone most confidently to "front only the essential facts of life" : " I learned this, at least, by my experiment : that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours." By 1856 he is willing to concede that the fruit of expansion may be slight and intangible after all : " Let not your life be wholly without an object, though it be only to ascertain the flavor of a cranberry, for it will not be only the quality of an insignificant berry that you will have tasted, but the flavor of your life to that extent, and it will be such a sauce as no wealth can buy." 1 Life by 1857 is empty to Thoreau beside the life he sketched in " The Service " : " In proportion as death is more earnest than life, it is better than life." In 1858 " the truth com pels me to regard the ideal and the actual as two things." 2 As early as 1849 Thoreau had observed 3 that perhaps the tang in the wild apple s flavor was the one thing real, and could " make my ap parently poor life rich." In the last few years, and particularly after the John Brown episode, this tang is the only solace in solitude, the only justi fication for fastidiousness, is all that remains in Thoreau s universe, one is tempted to conclude. The necessity of wildness is all he can declaim 1 Journal, ix, 37. 2 Familiar Letters, 332. 8 Ibid., 174. EXPANSION 49 on in " Walking." In the ninth volume of the " Journal " he hints that " life is barely tol erable " at times. Coming from the pure mysticism of " The Service," through the practical self-assurance of " Walden," down through the tortuous mysticism of the later Journal, to drain the cup of expan sion, Thoreau finds the dregs to be a single shriveled sensation. The lion in his cage purred contentedly in 1840 ; breathed easily and deeply in pastoral sphericity in the nature essays of 1842 and 1843 ; swelled opulently and confidently in the " Week " ; began to prowl along the walls and sniff in apprehension at the locks in " Wal- deii " ; chased off all intruders next ; lay down, sore and annoyed, during the slavery debates ; rose up and struck out with his paw once when prodded ; lay down again in the end to sniff Eter nity for tang. Timon is shrunk indeed. If Thoreau was born with the germ of expan sion within him, where did he find an external, a philosophical, sanction ? Who else preached sphe ricity before him? Who gave him words and ideas with which to announce his programme and report his progress? The expansion seed certainly took wing in the beginning from transcendental Germany. But transcendentalism is one thing, and romanticism is another. It has never been determined just 50 HENRY DAVID THOREAU how much the movement which grew out of Ger man transcendentalism and which is called German romanticism had to do with American transcen dental expansion. It has been suggested that " the transcendental philosophy of New England had absorbed the language and ideas of German romanticism, if not its inmost spirit"; 1 and that the formulae of the school may have been transmitted to America through the magazines. It is true that there are not a few of the romantic marks on the Americans. Emerson, in the " Eng lish Traits," said, " The Germans think for Eu rope" ; Emerson had been given more than an outline of the German programme by Coleridge. Even before the time of the romanticists, Zimmer- rnann, a German Rousseauist, had sent forth some of their ideas in his widely popular " Thoughts on the Influence of Solitude on the Heart," and this book ran through ten editions in America be tween 1793 and 1825 ; 2 Daniel Ricketson, Tho- reau s friend, had a copy in his shanty when Thoreau visited him in 1857. 3 Thoreau himself bears some resemblance to the German romanti cists ; for him too " paradox was the fine flower 1 Paul Elmer More, " Thoreau and German Romanticism, * Shelburne Essays, v. 2 W. C. Goodnight, German Literature in American Maga zines prior to 1S46. University of Wisconsin, 1909. 8 Journal, ix, 324. A memorandum by Thorean of the books in his library in 1840 (with later additions) shows that he also owned a copy of Zimmermann s book, printed in Albany. EXPANSION 51 of thought." The Germans too decried " extreme busyness," contemned the professions, and de spised politics. Novalis was made much of in the " Dial "; and Thoreau worships Night now and then like a Novalis. It has been claimed more than once that the parable of the hound, the bay horse, and the turtle-dove is a direct remi niscence of Novalis and so of Germany. But the suggestion for that parable might have come, the " Dial " shows, from an Oriental Bible in an English translation. And it is think able that most of the so-called resemblances be tween the Americans and the Germans are no more than the inevitable resemblances between kindred minds trained on the same theme. While it can be said that the German influence on Eng lish and American speculation was profound, it can be said with equal foundation that any specu lation is more or less profound per se, and does not always ask for full instructions from without. A certain passage from Emerson s Journal for 1849 may reinforce that point: 1 "Mr. Scherb [a German exile in Concord] attempted last night to unfold Hegel for me, and I caught somewhat that seemed cheerful and large, and that might, and probably did, come by Hindoo suggestion. But all abstract philosophy is easily anticipated, it is so structural, or necessitated by the mould of the human mind." Any one who has begun a 1 Emerson s Journal, vm, 69. 1849. 52 HENRY DAVID THOREAU " structural " philosophy like Spinoza s appreci ates that only a hint the first definition is needed to set the mind careering at once through the whole system unaided. It may be worth while to experiment with a typical American transcendental interest, and measure how much of German influence it shows. It can be shown that the Americans, and partic ularly Thoreau, got their Oriental enthusiasm, not from the Germans, but directly from their own philosophical needs and indirectly from Eng land. Thoreau himself had not a free use of Ger man, 1 and had no enthusiasm for it. The books sent him by his English friend Cholmondeley were " English, French, Latin, Greek, and Sans krit." The Oriental books which Thoreau be queathed to Emerson 2 were in English and French. In the prefaces to his selections from the Oriental Scriptures in the " Dial " Thoreau cites only English editions by Colebrooke, Jones, Hodgson, Collie, Wilson, or Wilkins. He need not have gone outside his Chalmers s " Poets," which he read without skipping, to come under the enthusiastic Sir William Jones s influence ; Jones s Oriental poems and " Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern Nations" were printed there. 1 F. B. Sanborn, The Personality of Thoreau (1906), p. 36. 2 Emerson s Journal, ix, 419. EXPANSION 53 By what chance Thoreau came to read the Orientals, or what editions he read, is of less consequence, perhaps, than why they were con genial, and who interested him in them. The encouragement to this reading, it would seem, came solely from Emerson and thence from Eng land always, of course, against the broad back ground of European transcendental assertion of the moral and intellectual dignity of man. Emer son, " who, bland angel as he was, very much wanted his own way," " invented or elected his philosophy," one of the most careful of writers has said. 1 And it is perfectly reasonable to agree that, born with a capacious mind, moved by the sentiment of intellectuality, enchanted by glimpses into Coleridge s bottomless intellect, quick to accept Coleridge s policy of reflection for reflection s sake, and committed to compre hensiveness of intellect as the definition and goal of genius, Emerson might have gone quite in dependently, and not as an impoverished bor rower, to whatever works seemed to him profound, and have taken away what caprice or plan dic tated. Emerson owned one of the first copies of the " Bhagavad-Gita " in America ; 2 he lent it freely; and he got it read much more widely than the Harvard Library copy was read. It was 1 W. C. Brownell, " Emerson," American Prose Masters. 2 Nation (New York), May 12, 1910, p. 481. 54 HENRY DAVID THOREAU to English or French scholars, and not to Ger man scholars, that the American transcendental- ists went Jones, Colebrooke, Mackintosh, Wil son, Wilkins, Lee, Wilford, Marshrnan, and Collie, descendants of a long line of purely Eng lish Orientalists hailing from the fourteenth cen tury. German and English scholars of the early nineteenth century vied with each other for rec ognition as inspirers of European Oriental en thusiasm. The matter can hardly be settled. It is enough to show that Emerson s and Thoreau s / Orientalism could have been an independent growth on English soil. The point has been made that Thoreau re ceived the breath of the German philosophy, but 44 always . . . with differences caused by other surroundings and traditions." 1 These differences are really more interesting than the resemblance . itself. The two schools are exactly alike in that they preach infinite expansion of self. But when it is considered that the Americans lived what they thought, as Novalis did not ; that the aspi ration of the Americans was as much for a whole people as it was for their esthetic selves ; that the Germans often, the Americans never, in clined to the fleshly, it is easy to see very important details of dissimilarity. There is a 1 Paul Elmer More, " The Centenary of Longfellow," Shel- burne Essays, v. EXPANSION 55 greater difference than any of those. The expan sion of the Germans was emotional ; that of the Americans was intellectual. And Thoreau took his cue, not from Germany at all, but from America ; he took it from the New England in tellectual renaissance and from Emerson, who himself was much more a Platonist than he was a German idealist. 1 " No truer American ever lived," said Emer son. Probably no one not a Yankee could have written so shrewd and yet so earnest a book as " Walden." Thoreau at least was writing what he believed to be the truth for America, and not solely what pleased his own fancy ; he did not want to live alone merely to be eccentric, but that he might be normal to the brim a nor mal American. And to be a normal American in 1840 was neither to have forgotten one s Puritan heritage nor to have failed to cast one s self in with the intellectually emancipated. De Tocque- ville said that the Americans were a nation with out neighbors, and given to moral self-contem plation. By 1840 New England had by no means forgotten the profound religious experiences of such men as Cotton, Wheelwright, Vane, Penn, John Woolman, Jonathan Edwards, Nicholas Gilman, and Samuel Hopkins; nor had it for gotten Puritanism, the firmness of whose estab- 1 J. H. Harrison, The Teachers of Emerson. (1910.) 56 HENRY DAVID THOREAU lishment in even Thoreau s transcendental mind is attested by the fact that he denounced what he did not believe in for example, money as not only foolish but sinful. It was that ances tral Puritan voice that made Thoreau hearken to Confucius when he recommended " blameless- ness of life," or " simple truth and earnestness." Neither was he unaware that a veritable renais sance of intellect had set in in New England during his boyhood, and that what he called "brain rot" was on the way to being cured. New England itself had subscribed to sphericity. Conscious of new spiritual liberty and nearly isolated from Europe during the thirty years of comparative international quiet following the Napoleonic wars, coming in that period to take account of its intellectual stock and finding it slim, craving a spiritual exaltation commensur able with the new territorial and numerical ex pansion of America, and piqued by such insults from Europe as Sydney Smith s poser in the "Edinburgh Keview " in 1820 "Who reads an American Book ? " it was inevitable that some of the doughtier spirits should propose to wage a grim spiritual campaign. Such spirits, wearing self-reliance for a charm, and deplor ing the meaner " busyness " of their fellow citi zens, must have tired of " bargain and corrup tion " politics, must have scorned to notice the EXPANSION 57 twenty-nine benevolent and charitable institu tions that had grown up in Boston between 1810 and 1840, must have disdained Fourier and Al bert Brisbane, and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, must have held fastidious noses up above the penny newspapers which tried to be all things to all men and were, it was charged, not very much of one thing to any. Specifically, Thoreau s doctrine of spherici came from Emerson. Emerson, optimistically announcing that " all things show that on every side we are very near to the best " ; Emerson, preaching his philosophy of " circles " with un rivaled zeal ; Emerson, declaring that " there is no end in Nature, but every end is a beginning ; that there is always another dawn risen on mid- noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens "; Emerson, having it that " the only sin is limi tation," caught and held and made Thoreau or, as one man had it, " ruined " him. " No one meeting Emerson was ever the same again." Perhaps a conversation with Emerson furnished Thoreau a hint for " The Service," for Emerson wrote this in his essay " Character " : " The face which character wears to me is self-sufficingness . . . character is centrality, the impossibility of being displaced or overset." It is possible that Thoreau saw a challenge in Emerson s essay, "The Transcendentalist " in the "Dial" for 58 HENRY DAVID THOREAU 1842, which contained a clause, " There is no pure Transcendentalist." Emerson has much to say upon the relations between his ideas and Thoreau s : " Thoreau gives me, in flesh and blood and pertinacious Saxon belief, my own ethics. He is far more real, and daily practically obey ing them, than I." 1 " I am very familiar with all his thoughts, they are my own quite origi nally drest." 2 Certainly Thoreau s ideas of Na ture, Love, Friendship, Sphericity, are Emer son s Emerson s pointed and trimmed with Thoreau s tools. And certainly, with Emerson s wide reading in Herbert, Henry More, Milton, Coleridge, Thomas Taylor, Plato, Plotinus, and the Oriental Scriptures at hand, Thoreau did not need to look to Germany for intellectual day. He had with him always one of the best examples of the intellectual gormandizer the world has seen. When Thoreau s most discriminating critic 3 defines the larger differences between Thoreau and the Germans, he implies that Thoreau was, upon the whole, not altogether as rapacious for expansion as were the Germans. Thus, finding on both the marks of romanticism, " aloofness," "irony," "sacred idleness," "musical revery," " communion with Nature," and " contempt for limitations," he goes on to say for Thoreau that 1 Emerson s Journal, vin, 303. 2 Ibid., VI, 74. 8 More, " Thoreau and German Romanticism." EXPANSION 59 because he expanded from the base of character and intellect rather than from the base of sensi bility and the flesh, he therefore exercised his will for discipline of self, exercised a " higher self- restraint." The critic suggests that several in termediary influences are responsible for this element of restraint in the American, " the inheritance of the Puritan religion," " the British notion of practical individualism," " the lesson of Wordsworth s austerity in the devotion to Na ture," the " spirit of fine expectancy " in the seventeenth-century poets, the " incalculable force of Emerson s personality " ; and one might add the discipline of the classics, the discipline of manual labor, and the example of the Indian race. It can be questioned whether the differ ence between the Germans and Thoreau was the difference between men who exercised no re straint at all and a man who exercised a " higher self-restraint." It is no evidence in Thoreau s favor that he, with all the transcendentalists, dealt all the while in " character " and " intel lect," or that he lived in a " dry light." Further glances into the Journal and other localities will reveal what use Thoreau and Emerson made of the terms " intellect " and " character," and what actually came of Thoreau s " dry light." There is no evidence that Emerson and Tho reau believed in training or did train their intel- 60 HENRY DAVID THOREAU lects ; there is no end of evidence that they en gaged instead in a very noble and care-free kind of intellectual debauch and indulged what has been styled their " intellectual pride and moral confidence " to the mortal limit. " There is no past in the soul " no building of ideas said Thoreau. They believed heart and soul in doing as one likes, in being as good as one can in any way one likes, and in thinking as industriously as one can in any direction he fancies. Spes sibi quisque, from Virgil, was Thoreau s motto for " The Service." Thoreau went out to Wai- den Pond in order to " have a little world all to himself " . . . " not cumbered and mortified by his memory." Emerson and Thoreau had ideals ; their ideals were themselves. They were intellectual and moral, but intellectual and moral all to themselves. They cared to be conscious of no limits. " Who," asks Thoreau in "Walking," "but the Evil One has cried Whoa! to man kind?" The "spirit of fine expectancy" of the seventeenth-century poets would not have owned New England in 1850. Herbert s face was turned upward ; Emerson s and Thoreau s faces inward. Herbert pleaded with God for vision ; Emerson and Thoreau only pricked themselves perpetu ally on to further spiritual adventures. Herbert s " morning " was that time of man s life when he is permitted to forget himself and glimpse EXPANSION 61 the universal order. Emerson s and Thoreau s " morning " was a perpetual period in which men should be " awake " that is, have " life, and knowledge " of themselves. The self-con scious, thin patriarchal integrity they thought they had reclaimed from civilization the patri archs would not recognize at all. Emerson and Thoreau led a headlong revolt against " natural " sympathy only to plunge into shoreless seas of intellectual and moral egotism. Mind-intoxicated men, cutting their own channels, thinking as they pleased, keep ing their foreheads smooth, hungry for ideas and uncritical of ideas when they come along, dreading to repeat themselves, needing " infinite room " to utter their thoughts in, musing to sa tiety, boasting native potential omniscience, refusing to argue but eager to declaim, never comparing but always uttering, setting thought above knowledge and instinct above reflection, more hospitable to thoughts than to men, they furnish beautiful examples of the behavior of wild nature in intellect. Thinking to defy Hume s conclusions concerning "the weakness of human reason, and the narrow limits to which it is confined," they denied any limits whatever. As Rnskin said, " Men are as their tastes," and Carlyle said, " Men are as they are strong," so these said, " Men are as they think bound- 62 HENRY DAVID THOREAU lessly." Fondly imagining their intellectual sys tem to be organized on the grandest possible ulti mate plan, they careered on with no immediate organization whatever ; identifying " centrality " of Emersonian thought with universal gravita tion, they believed themselves safe and sped on after new sensations. With no conception of that kind of intellectual organization which Newman, for one, demanded, they tore on their way to flaunt endlessly those faculties which Newman shuddered to contemplate " fierce, wilful hu man nature," " the wild living intellect of man," " the immense energy of the aggressive, capri cious, untrustworthy intellect." Neither Emerson nor Thoreau was free from the intellectual demon; neither Emerson nor Thoreau escaped those intellectual perils which are inevitably contingent upon so fatally easy a system as theirs and which have been visible since among the Christian Scientists. Neither Emerson nor Thoreau wound up his intellectual career with half the satisfaction that he began it. That was not possible when their procedure was so prodigal. Thoreau is to be seen, as early as his college days, recommending the keeping of a Journal in order to conserve one s thoughts and to be able to oversee one s mind ; and he declares that thoughts come " spontaneously," " suggest themselves." An intellectual epicure at twenty, EXPANSION 63 he is an intellectual hero at thirty, when he says, " All I can say is that I live and breathe and have my thoughts," and when he believes that " to know, is to know good." 1 Miss Fuller said she " had a pleasant time with her mind." So Thoreau in his prime played with his mind. He tells, in the Journal for 185 1, 2 how " I had a thought this morning before I awoke. I endeav ored to retain it in my mind s grasp after I be came conscious, yet I doubted, while I lay on my back, whether my mind could apprehend it when I should stand erect. It is a ... difficult feat to get up without spilling your morning thought." Certain parts of the Journal breathe no such self- satisfaction as this. There are to be read what for Thoreau are long, incoherent passages which betray that, along with his loss of confidence in sphericity and his unspoken pain at the loss of friends, he suffered pretty frequently a diminu tion of that " hard mentality," that " grip and exactitude of mind," that " mental materialism" which Emerson praised in George Herbert. Here is no noble mind overthrown ; but here are men tal gifts squandered somewhat from want of shaping and direction. If Thoreau had been in truth what Emerson believed him, and what he may have wished to 1 " Natural History of Massachusetts," Excursions. 2 Journal, in, 121. 64 HENRY DAVID THOREAU believe himself, & " perfect piece of stoicism," there would have been shaping of a kind ; but one cannot detect a note of genuine stoicism in all of him. One cannot confuse Thoreau with Marcus Aurelius, falling back on Providence and universal philanthropy. Thoreau was not weary of life, saw nothing in it to hide, heard nothing in it that should be talked down. He surrendered himself to no universal law he could not understand, resigned himself to nothing he did not like. He was no " strong and noble spirit contending against odds." His philosophy was no " reaction against chronic anxiety." Tho reau liked to think that he was something of a Cato, and read, it seems pretty carefully, in Cato, Varro, and Columella. But there is a vast difference between the citizen Cato and the sen timentalist Thoreau. Cato embraced simplicity as a duty ; Thoreau embraced it as a luxury. Cato lived in Rome ; Thoreau lived in " a little world of his own." Cato had a rough, sensible Lincolnian humor ; Thoreau priggishly exor cised humor from his books. Thoreau extrava gantly claimed everything for solitude ; of Cato, Livy says, Nulla ars neque privatce neque pub licce rei gerendoB ei defuit. Thoreau was an out-and-out Epicurean. It is not true that he " wanted little." He wanted everything. Stevenson says he "loved to in- EXPANSION 65 dulge the mind rather than the body, * and was " an Epicurean of the nobler sort," " cruel in the pursuit of goodness, morbid in the pursuit of health . . . that valetudinarian healthfulness which is more delicate than sickness itself." " Economy is the second or third cousin of Ava rice," goes the proverb. Thoreau s absolute sense of security in the world was not stoical but epi curean ; he said, " A man should feed his senses on the best the land affords." Marcus Aurelius was a Stoic because he kept an inner self to which he could retire for ease and reassurance in the midst of a distressed life. Thoreau avoided a distressed life in order to have perpetual peace, to monopolize his inner self. The world could not seem hard to him, because he was padded on all sides by his ego. He wrote, in "The Service," " Necessity is my eastern cushion on which I recline. ... I ask no more but to be left alone with it. ... How I welcome my grim fellow, and walk arm in arm with him ! . . . I love him, he is so flexible, and yields to me as the air to my body. I leap and dance in his midst, and play with his beard till he smiles." Finally, here is this rhapsody from the Jour nal : l " The luxury of wisdom ! the luxury of virtue! Are there any intemperate in these things?" " He left all for the sake of certain 1 Journal, n, 269. 66 HENRY DAVID THOEEAU virtuous self-indulgences," says Stevenson. He never gave up any vital part of himself from respect for universal law. He gave up only what he believed he did not need. " It is the greatest of all advantages to enjoy no advantage at all," he wrote. 1 He was what Sir Thomas Browne said Diogenes was, " more ambitious in refusing all Honours, than Alexander was in re jecting none." He made no renouncements out right ; what renouncements he seems to have made he made only after he had gained his whole will and got his own way. He who wept at twenty to stay in Concord affected thereafter to scorn lo cality. He who evaded the crisis in which most youths choose professions was thereafter a loud despiser of professions " on principle." He re jected " the shocking and passionate," 2 not be cause he had outgrown them, but because he was without certain passions. The Stoic ideal is indifference to things we cannot command. Tho- reau said, " I do not think much of the actual;" " Whatever actually happens to a man is won derfully trivial and insignificant." 3 But he was far from indifferent to a number of things his home, his freedom, his sphericity, his books, his boat, his Journal. If his Journal one day had burned, he would no doubt have jerked the long beard of Necessity in something like anger, i Journal, ix, 160. 2 Ibid., n, 3. 8 Ibid., n, 43, 44. IV THE SPECIFIC THOREAU is much more than an expansive bore. As all the greater transcendental! sts had for saving remnants native qualities more vital and permanent than their rhapsodic and their German ingredients, Carlyle his humor and his seer s powers and Emerson his flashing in tellect, so Thoreau has one natural gift which joins him to the ordinary world and saves him to posterity. That is his genius for the specific, his concreteness of character arid" viyiuii. Tins genius is important both in his personality and in his authorship. Thoreau is significant to culture in great meas ure because his personality is definite and un mistakable " as free and erect a mind as any I have ever met," wrote Emerson in his Journal after first meeting Thoreau. There is a stanch^ and crackling integrity about the man which holds him, even at the moment of his most ex pansive departure, safe above the Romantic stupor of self -contemplation and self -absorption ;. when one reads this passage in a letter of 1854, one need not fear for Thoreau s self-possession : " I left the village and paddled up the river. 68 HENRY DAVID THOREAU ... I was smoothed with an infinite stillness. I got the world, as it were, by the nape of the neck, and held it under in the tide of its own events, till it was drowned, and then I let it go down-stream like a dead dog." If Thoreau is a Buddhist he is a vigorous and a sprightly Bud dhist. " The intellect is a cleaver ; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things," wrote Thoreau in "Walden." There is a thrust, an as siduous, workmanlike quality in Thoreau s men tal operations which marks him as distinct from his fellows. Thoreau spoke always as a per son, never as a mere metaphysician. Coleridge s essay " On Sensibility" in the "Aids to Eeflec- tion" amounts almost to an epitome of Tho reau s thinking*; but to no more than an epitome. Thoreau s reaction to his friends and to society is as sharp as any that is recorded. No other naturalist has been so malicious; no other tran- scendentalist has been so fastidious. He draws his personal circle very distinctly, to make sure that it is seen. He is very positive; a college essay begins, " The order of things should be re versed." He can be very disturbing as well, as Stevenson sets forth in a clear paragraph : " His system of personal economics ... is based on one or two ideas which, I believe, come naturally to all thoughtful youths, and are only pounded out of them by city uncles. Indeed, something essen- THE SPECIFIC 69 tially youthful distinguishes all Thoreau s knock down blows at current opinion. Like the posers of a child, they leave the orthodox in a kind of speechless agony. These know the thing is non sense. They are sure there must be an answer, yet somehow cannot find it. ... He attacks the subject in a new dialect where there are no catchwords ready made for the defender." Even after the catchword is brought forth and the paradox is ex posed, he defeats still by a cool twinkling in the eye which cannot be startled away. This passage from " Life Without Principle " best exemplifies what Stevenson was describing : " A strange age of the world this, when empires, kingdoms, and republics come a-begging to a private man s door, and utter their complaints at his elbow ! I cannot take up a newspaper but I find that some wretched government or other, hard pushed and on its last legs, is interceding with me, the reader, to vote for it, more importunate than an Italian beggar." When his expansion is hindered, he strikes back very decisively. He knew his ex pansion was good ; said so with a flash of the eye ; struck fire when challenged. "For pure, nonsensical abstractions he had no taste," thought Channing. He is interesting to-day only in those respects in which he broke out of the thick mystic cloud which enveloped New England broke out to breathe pure air 70 HENRY DAVID THOREAU with George Herbert or Homer or Persius or Confucius or the crab-apple tree. He could be + 1 (concise even in his mysticism if that is not a I (paradox. He has many unfledged, thick pas sages in the Journal, but they are not the best of Thoreau, and need not be kept. It is vastly to his credit that he selected the best of the Journal, the most sensible, the most intelligible, the most definite, for publication in " Walden " and the " Week." For it is only when he is definite, when, for example, he is telling what is silent rather than preaching about Silence, that he is valuable. He applied what others preached, illustrated what others asserted, sought to make sphericity lovely in the eyes of all men. " My thought is a part of the meaning of the world, and hence I use a part of the world as a symbol to express my thought," he wrote. 1 He swore, " Anta3us-like," to " be not long absent from the ground." It was by putting sphericity into fig ures, into terms of human economics, in " Wal den," that he became a classic. Thoreau is a specific Emerson. " The Service" is " Circles " measured and cooled and visual ized even brought home to earth in " the ele phant s rolling gait " and the " huge sphere drawn along the streets." The lilt, airiness, spontaneity of Emerson are sacrificed in Thoreau 1 Journal, iv, 410. THE SPECIFIC 71 for a more deliberate method ; but that delibera tion is worth something in itself. Emerson him self expounds its virtues : " In reading Henry Thoreau s journal I am very sensible of the vigor of his constitution. That oaken strength which I noted whenever he walked, or worked or sur veyed wood-lots, the same unhesitating hand with which a field-laborer accosts a piece of work which I should shun as a waste of strength, Henry shows in his literary strength. He has muscle, and ventures on and performs feats which I am forced to decline. In reading him I find the same thoughts, the same spirit that is in me, but he takes a step beyond and illus trates by excellent images that which I should have conveyed in a sleepy generalization. T is as if I went into a gymnasium and saw youths leap and climb and swing with a force unap proachable, though their feats are only continu ations of my initial grapplings and jumps." 1 Thoreau is not satisfied with sleepy generaliza tions, but is passionate after what seems to him reality. He never lets himself forget that it is genuine experience he is seeking. " It is not easy to write in a journal what interests us at any time, because to write it is not what in terests us," he wrote. Emerson had said, " There 1 Emerson s Journal, quoted in E. W. Emerson, Emerson in Concord (1890), p. 113. 72 HENRY DAVID THOREAU /is no pure Transcend entail st "; Thoreau wished to see what pure transcendentalism was, and went to Walden. Emerson stands and guesses, Thoreau goes and finds. Thoreau literally put his whole life into his books. Emerson wishes to talk mainly about tendencies and about ex pansive strivings, as in " Circles " ; Thoreau wishes to "drive life into a corner" and report what he sees. He marked off a real circle of j individual rights. That he deceived himself is not relevant here. Thoreau was born an observer, and was not ashamed of his gift. At twenty he praises Goethe in the Journal because " he is generally satisfied with giving an exact description of objects as they appear to him." In a college essay he com mended the " appetite for visible images " mani fested by Greek and Italian poets, and thought the Northern poets rather inclined to a " fond ness for the dark and mysterious," a " neglect of the material." Thoreau s " steps were winged with the most eager expectation " ; he craved the sight and feel of facts. A keen and single-minded critic, he could see far into the more ordinary human motives. His observations of people are not profound, perhaps because they are few ; his metaphysical steed ran too fast, in the main, for him to dare to glance aside at faces in the world. But he did observe bodies and gaits and eccen- THE SPECIFIC 73 trie! ties shrewdly now and then, as in " Cape Cod," where he is like Dickens, or in " Walden," in John Field s cottage. He was extraordinarily sensitive, like Stevenson himself, to the subtler of the superficial relations, as some passages can demonstrate : " There is a proper and only right way to en ter a city, as well as to make advances to a strange person ; neither will allow of the least forwardness nor bustle. A sensitive person can hardly elbow his way boldly, laughing and talk ing, into a strange town, without experiencing some twinges of conscience, as when he has treated a stranger with too much familiarity." 1 " It is a very true and expressive phrase, 4 He looked daggers at me. ... It is wonder ful how we get about the streets without being wounded by these delicate and glancing weapons, a man can so nimbly whip out his rapier, or without being noticed carry it unsheathed. Yet after all, it is rare that one gets seriously looked at." 2 "With him [the lock-keeper at Middlesex] we had a just and equal encounter of the eyes, as between two honest men. The movements of the eyes express the perpetual and unconscious courtesy of the parties. It is said that a rogue does not look you in the face, neither does an i Journal, I, 47. 2 Week. 74 HENRY DAVID THOREAU honest man look at you as if he had his reputa tion to establish. I have seen some who did not know when to turn aside their eyes in meet ing yours. A truly confident and magnanimous spirit is wiser than to contend for the mastery in such encounters. Serpents alone conquer by the steadiness of their gaze. My friend looks me in the face and sees me, that is all." l It would be pleasant to hear more of Thoreau s " Uncle Charles " Dunbar. A half-dozen para graphs scattered through the Journal uncover in Thoreau a gift for hitting off character which it seems too bad was never improved. September, 1850 : "Charles grew up to be a remarkably eccentric man. He was of large frame, athletic, and celebrated for his feats of strength. His lungs were proportionally strong. There was a man who heard him named once, and asked if it was the same Charles Dunbar whom he re membered when he was a little boy walking on the coast of Maine. A man came down to the shore and hailed a vessel that was sailing by. He should never forget that man s name." April 3,1856 : " Uncle Charles used to say that he had n t a single tooth in his head. The fact was they were all double, and I have heard that he lost about all of them by the time he was twenty -one. Ever since I knew him he could swallow his nose." 1 Week. THE SPECIFIC 75 March 11, 1859: " E. Hosmer says that a man told him that he had seen my uncle Charles take a twelve-foot ladder, set it up straight, and then run up and down the other side, kicking it from behind him as he went down." January 15, 1853 : " Saw near L s, the 12th, a shrike. He told me about seeing Uncle Charles once, come to Barrett s mill with logs, leap over the yoke that drew them and back again. It amused the boys." January 1, 1853 : " After talking with Uncle Charles the other night about the worthies of this country, Webster and the rest, as usual, considering who were geniuses and who were not, I showed him up to bed, and when I had got into bed myself, I heard his chamber door opened, after eleven o clock, and he called out, in an earnest, stentorian voice, loud enough to wake the whole house, 4 Henry ! was John Quincy Adams a genius? No, I think not, was my reply. Well, I did n t think he was, answered he." Thoreau s genius for the specific is to be seen working on the largest scale in his assembling of isolated passages from various years of the Journal into such organic units as " Walden," the " Week," and " Cape Cod." Few readers realize that "Walden," for instance, is made up out of as many as sixteen years of the Journal 76 HENRY DAVID THOREAU (1838-54). It is scarcely too generous to credit him here with some measure of creative genius of which it has been asserted he has " not a spark." J " He was probably reminded by his delicate critical perception that the true business of literature is with narrative," says Stevenson, whose hobby can be forgiven for the once. "Truth, even in literature, must be clothed with flesh and blood, or it cannot tell its whole story to the reader." Thoreau does have unquestion ably the story-teller s knack. He thought .ZEsop would be intolerable if his morals only were printed. 2 He understood that expectation is the secret of the charm in romance, and has not a few stealthy, intense fragments of narrative in 1 This genius can best be appreciated by one who consults the edition of Walden printed by the Bibliophile Society of Boston, wherein Thoreau s original arrangement of the Jour nal pages out of which the present Walden was assembled is followed faithfully by the editors, Mr. Harper and Mr. San- born. The differences between the earlier, less shapely "book" and the classic of 1854 are many and great. It is quite improbable that any other than Thoreau made the changes. The publisher (who Mr. Harper intimates was re sponsible for the improvement) or any one could have removed twelve thousand words easily enough ; but it is scarcely think able that Thoreau, who was always jealous of his text, would have entrusted the task of abridgment and unification to an other ; it is almost certain that no other than his own skillful hand was the manipulator; the hand, whose ever it was, touched so many parts of the manuscript that " it was neces sary to make changes in nearly three hundred pages." 2 Journal, in, 240. THE SPECIFIC 77 his Journal. He understood, too, that people read pictures, that the writer must seem to speak out of somewhere, must seem to live perpetually in such an atmosphere or even in such a locality as only his art knows how to select and arrest from the perplexing disorder of passing life. He knew how to dress himself in a cloak of wistful expectancy ; and he knew how to wrap the locali ties he was describing in " atmospheres," knew how to make the spirit of the ponds and the clearings permeate " Walden," the spirit of the lazy river the " Week," the spirit of the omi nous sea " Cape Cod," and the spirit of the tall forest the " Maine Woods." He believed in the milieu. His talent for organization is even more than this ; it contains elements of the dramatic. The paragraphs on " Uncle Charles " show an apti tude for " humours," and chapters in " Cape Cod " have been likened to Dickens. Thoreau confesses to that temperamental dualism which creators of " humours " are likely to experience, and which forced Daudet almost against his will, as he stood by his mother s coffin, to set to grouping the surroundings (including himself) into a tab leau suitable to fiction. "I ... am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another," Thoreau wrote. 1 1 Journal, rv, 291. 78 HENRY DAVID THOREAU He could group his impressions and experiences, and frame his picture with facts, like a play wright or an encadreur. He had a predilection for some kind of unity; an island pleased his imagination because it was " integral " and u con tinent." The vicinity of Walden Pond, the beach at Cape Cod, the seven-day stretch of the Mer- rimac and Concord Rivers, are geographical or at least psychological units. The i^adejLis_never without a feeliiig^Lsatisfaction, as of being cer tain of his location and his directions. The bean- field, the villageT^he ponds, th~e~ woods are as important in " Walden " perhaps as the ideas there upon economy or upon Homer. The railroad and the train crew are most skillfully employed as points of reference as foils for ideas as guaranties of reality. And when Thoreau says he lay for a long time at the edge of a hole in the ice and mooned at the uneven floor of the pond, his readers see him in his proper place upon a stage ; and they never wish themselves out of the audience and looking over his shoulder. This illusion of place is most admirably achieved in " Walden " of all Thoreau s works ; Thoreau is everywhere effective in proportion as he deals in this illusion. It would be unjust to him to say that it is accidental in " Walden." He was as conscious of a dramatic mission there as he was of a spiritual mission in " The Service." THE SPECIFIC 79 Thoreau s genius for the specific was of the first importance in his writing, where he strove to precipitate the vapor of a cloudy philosophy in fixed, crystal drops, and where his most en during excellence surely lies ; it is of the first importance now to any one who would study his theory and practice of composition. It is hardly too much to say that for Thoreau, even in the most literal sense, writing meant liv ing. " I think Thoreau had always looked forward to authorship as his work in life," said Emerson. Channing thought that " no matter where he might have lived, or in what circumstance, he would have been a writer ; he was made for this by all his tendencies of mind and temperament"; and records that " it was a saying of his that he had lived and written as if to live forty years longer ; his work was laid out for a long life." l Such testimony establishes his passion. More testimony establishes his good faith. If he had a passion for writing, and so for living, he had also a passion for writing perfectly and so for living completely. He wrote every day in his Journal for training; he composed prose while he walked ; and always he devoted his powers to the written page, refusing to strive for any unusual effects 1 Thoreau left, among 1 other literary effects, eleven manu script volumes, or about three thousand pages, filled labori ously with notes on the Indians, of whom it is known he intended to write an elaborate study. 80 HENRY DAVID THOEEAU in his lecturing. He understood that " nothing goes by luck in composition," and took to heart Carlyle s condemnation of Novalis for not "trou bling to express his truth with any laborious accuracy " for " want of rapid energy . . . and . . . the emphasis and resolute force of a man." He hated "palaver" in style, and said he did manual labor in order to outgrow it. " It is vain to try to write unless you feel strong in the knees," said Thoreau. Thoreau subscribed to conciseness and indi viduality in his writing as elsewhere. In 1851 he was reminding himself by a footnote in the Journal, " My faults are : Paradoxes, saying just the opposite, a style which may be imitated. Ingenious. Using current phrases and maxims, when I should speak for myself. Want of conciseness." He envied the Greeks because they could " ex press themselves with more facility than we in distinct and lively images." He hated " wooden and lifeless " words, with " paralysis in their tails," as he hated gossip. He was a good work man, filing rather more finely than Emerson took the trouble to file. " Every sentence is the result THE SPECIFIC 81 of a long probation," he said, and " should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end." " The prose writer has conquered like a Roman, and settled colonies," it seemed to him. He omitted no practicable measures for perfecting his equipment. " Henry Thoreau says he values only the man who goes directly to his needs ; who, wanting wood, goes to the woods and brings it home," said Chan- ning. He disciplined himself by studying Her bert and Quarles, and by translating two dramas of ^Eschylus and selections from Homer, Anac- reon, and Pindar ; he aped the styles of a dozen prose-masters. The most remarkable product of his mimicry is the last paragraph of the chapter called " The Pond in Winter " in Walden," which moves with many a token of the gait of Sir Thomas Browne. All in all, Thoreau, if not radiant, writes so satisfactorily that the critic is tempted (and his earlier critics did not in fact resist the temptation) to do nothing but fill his space with quotations ; for Thoreau can take the matter in hand away from the bungling expositor and dispatch it in a phrase or paragraph that calls for no amendment. It is not difficult to decide to what school of literary theorists Thoreau belongs. He . was a nineteenth-century euphuist of the stamp of Flau- 82 HENRY DAVID THOREAU bert, Stevenson, and Pater ; he travailed to catch consciousness itself in the trap of the specific ; he wished to express " himself." " Men are con stantly dinging in my ears their fair theories and plausible solutions of the universe, but ever there is no help, and I return again to my shoreless, islandless ocean, and fathom unceasingly for a bottom that will hold an anchor." l He believed that if he could come squarely upon his self, and could describe that self exactly, he would be an chored for once and all. His whole literary quest was a quest for a charm by which he could trans fer the facts of consciousness to him as to many men of letters in the nineteenth century the only reality to the printed page. He watched his "moods ... as narrowly as a cat does a mouse," he said. " He had as touchstone for authors their degree of ability to deal with supersensual facts and feeling with scientific precision and dignity," an acquaintance wrote. For him "thought" meant " impression," and " impression " meant " reality." He considered that he should have come nearest reality when he had " kinked and knotted " his impressions into " something hard and significant, which you could swallow like a diamond, without digesting." 2 He wished his " life " to go into his books, and is alarmed in 1840 3 when he considers " how little I am actu- 1 Journal, i, 54. 2 Ibid., 11, 419. 8 Ibid., 1, 143. THE SPECIFIC 83 ally concerned about the things I write in my journal." He wished his books to present an ab solutely new front of life, a new kind of reality his own life, and his own " reality." " If you can write what you will never read, you have done rare things," he said in the " Week." He was zealous in the cause of expressing particular and so for him the only genuine impres sions ; he has much to say to that man who can see no difference between one green field and an other. He comes nearest, perhaps, to convincing his readers of what they should be steadfastly reluctant to believe that there is anything new under the sun in such a passage as this im peccable one from the " Maine Woods " : " Once, when Joe [the Indian guide] had called again, and we were listening for moose, we heard, come faintly echoing, or creeping from afar, through the moss-clad aisles, a dull, dry, rushing sound with a solid core to it, yet as if half-smothered under the grasp of the luxuriant and fungus-like forest, like the shutting of a door in some dis tant entry of the damp and shaggy wilderness. If we had not been there, no mortal had heard it. When we asked Joe in a whisper what it was, he answered, Tree fall. " Thoreau is definitely related to the nineteenth- century prose " school of the particular," perhaps in the capacity of pioneer, through his influence 84 HENRY DAVID THOREAU upon Stevenson. There is no question that Ste venson took much from Thoreau. Both began by imitating. The very first sentence of " The Serv ice " would have done, as far as tone is con cerned, for the first sentence of " JEs Triplex." The " Week " reminds one of the " Inland Voy age " in the first paragraph and on almost every page thereafter. The trick of defining one im pression by bringing another impression smartly alongside "it is as if the beasts spoke" 1 Stevenson could have learned in the pages of Tho reau. Had Stevenson not been fascinated by the man himself, his judgments upon him could not have been as trenchant and subtle as they were ; he told some one in an enthusiastic moment that he supposed he had never written ten words after he had once read Thoreau which would not re call him. Thoreau, isolated in America, his wits stray ing through the endless and utterly formless reaches of a transcendental Journal, did not end his literary career as happily as Flaubert and Stevenson, writers of finished stories, and Pater, writer of finished essays, ended theirs. Fatally committed to sphericity, always, unfortunately, conscious of "eternity and space gambolling familiarly through my depths," 2 he had not the means of improving and disciplining his native 1 Thoreau on Whitman. 2 Journal, i, 54. THE SPECIFIC 85 genius for the specific which Pater had in his intellectual ideal of beauty and his better under standing* of the Greek feeling that the half yields greater satisfaction to the spirit than the whole. So that while the Greeks could " prune his ora tions and point his pen," and do somewhat to give him "bottom, endurance, wind," 1 they never gave Thoreau to understand that scrutiny of consciousness itself needs scrutiny. By 1850 he had forgotten to translate from the Greek, had forgotten to discipline his Journal prose by exercising in verse, and had fallen into the grasp of as relentless a demon of romantic com position as is anywhere to be seen in literature. " His literary art," says Burroughs, " was to let fly with a kind of quick inspiration." He tells himself in the Journal that the theme seeks him, not he it ; that he " fears no intemperance," but is prepared to " drain the cup of inspiration to its last dregs " ; that he is ambitious to " take as many bounds in a day as possible." He did take some very extravagant bounds in his Journal, believing implicitly that his natural mind was inexhaustible, welcoming any impression that was sharp and vivid, " improving every op portunity to express himself as if it were the last," making the most of every fancy lest if re jected it prove to have been important, piling 1 Emerson, English Traits. 86 HENRY DAVID THOREAU up examples and talking all around a subject in hopes of getting to it "naturally." In proportion as he grew desperate in his pursuit of the one germ at last which when swallowed would expand him indefinitely, he grew less effectual in his self- expression. The style and the self, whenever they dissipated, dissipated together. Perhaps a commission from the demon to labor for years on a work like " Marius the Epicurean " was what he, the writer, stood in need of, he the diamond disintegrating in his brave vacuum on the rock-bound coast of New England. HEADING " WE confess," wrote Lowell in his first essay on Thoreau, " that there is a certain charm for us even about a fool who has read myriads of books. There is an undefinable atmosphere around him as of distant lands around a great traveller, and of distant years around very old men." Lowell, who is far from insinuating that Thoreau is a fool, here puts the student on the track of what is soundest and most engaging in Thoreau his love and use of books. His genius for the specific did not fail him here but made of him (not to speak of the writer in him which it distinguished) a reader whose every remark rings true and inviting. Thoreau is a literary epicure of a superior order. He has neither the dissolute fastidiousness of a Sylvestre Bonnard nor the all-devouring hunger of an Emerson. He does not go mad over a quoted delicacy or a rare title, and he does not read ubiquitously for the sensation of inspiration. But he has that " undefinable atmosphere around him " which lies around any man who seems to have all the time in the world to do what he pleases in Thoreau s case the man who has all 88 HENRY DAVID THOREAU the time in the world to read and reread his favorite books. And since it is in his reading that Thoreau has most control of himself, his example is not bad. It is the chapter on "Reading" in " Walden," with its reminder that the language of the classics is dead only to the degenerate, and its assertion that "books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written " which marks him as a scholar and which distin guishes him from some of his less self-contained contemporaries. Perhaps his distinction as a writer and as a personality is to be ascribed to the fact that he studied only what was best in college, that he settled down to the luxurious, wonderful task of reading the older English poets through and did not always bother to gulp down the last piece of mystic bait from Germany or England. The charm and even value of his work may prove eventually to lie where the charm of his favorite Persius lies, in its bookishness. Thoreau knew pretty definitely from the beginning what he wanted to read, and he was able to keep himself within the wholesome limits which his instinct and conscience set. He has not the transcendental pride in catholicity of reading but chooses his fields like a self-reliant scholar. 1 1 Six fly-leaves in the back of Thoreau s copy of the Trav eller s Guide through the United States (1838), a little book car- READING 89 There is a rare workmanlike air about Tho- reau s handling of books. When he reports ried by him on one or more of his excursions, and now in the possession of Mr. George S. Hellman, are covered with bhe fol lowing pencil-notes, written in apparent hurry and without comment : 14th Caatine to Belfast by packet Capt. Skinner 15th Belfast to Bath 16th Wednesday, to Portland 17 to Boston Concord Campbell s Poems Sally Russell s Letters La Nouvelle Heloise. Akenside Emile Chefs D (Euvre de Corneille. Johnson s Lives of the Poets. Goethe Lettres Choisies de Mme De Sevigiie et De Main tenon. Am. Lib. Use. Knowl. Universal History Mechanics, Pneumatics, etc. Pilgrim s Progress (Euvres Completes De Platon 12 vols. Sir Th. Browne s Works 4 vols. Horace Walpole Private Correspondence Studies of Nature Leighton Johnson Donne s Devotions. Seneca s Morals Fielding s Proverbs Philip Van Artevelde Lardner s Cyc. Astronomy & Study of Nat. PhiL Montaigne Mrs. Somerville Wottoa 90 HENRY DAVID THOREAU his reading it is from isolation, and is as if a cabinet-maker stepped out of his shop to ex hibit a pet piece of his own making. When one hears that he read Chalmers s " Poets " through, one sees him sitting alone in rare quiet, fondling his book much as a carpenter squints along a smoothed board, or a sailor trims his yarn on a pile of canvas. He read as systemati cally as his means allowed in such fields as the older English poets, the seventeenth century, the classics, and the Oriental Scriptures, always in this workmanlike fashion. Intensely serious, De Stael s Germany Ben Johnson Beaumont and Fletcher Moliere St. Augustine Malte Brun Anecdotes of Eminent Persons Lib. Use. Knowl. Some volfl. Gibbon Hume Lord Bacon Percy Anecdotes Burton Bakewell s Geology Burke Clarendon Blackwood Dr. Byrom s Misc. Poems. 2 v. Wither s Britain s Remembrancer Norris Henry More Quarles Crashaw s Steps to the Temple Wilmott a Lives of the Sacred Poets. READING 91 sedulously intent on self-improvement, he se lected with precision and read for strength. He had a quick and true eye for excellence. " He would pass by many delicate rhythms," says Emerson, " but he would detect every live stanza or line in a volume, and knew very well where to find an equal poetic charm hi prose." One would like to have seen his collection of "ex tracts from the noblest poetry." An understanding of this bent for refining the best from books crystal sentences, precious lines, and fine flavors will take the student farthest along the way of his reading, and do most to explain why he tarried here, why he never left there, why he passed this field by, why he set up an idol in that place. An understanding of his philosophical position, which was almost identical with Emerson s, will not be half so useful a tool as this very keen one of his literary tact. Thus a very satisfactory founda tion for the whole of his thinking might be built out of such passages in the four volumes of the " Dial " as this (from an essay in the second num ber, "The Art of Life The Scholar s Call ing " *): " Life is an art. When we consider what life may be to all, and what it is to most, we shall see how little this art is yet understood. . . . The work of life, so far as the individual is concerned, i Dial, i, 175. 92 HENRY DAVID THOREAU and that to which the scholar is particularly called, is self-culture, the perfect unfolding of our in dividual nature. . . . The business of self-culture admits of no compromise. Either it must be made a distinct aim, or wholly abandoned. I respect the man, says Goethe, who knows distinctly what he wishes. ... In all things the times are marked by a want of steady aim and patient in dustry. . . . The young man launches into life with no definite course in view. . . . The sure sat isfaction which accompanies the consciousness of progress in the true direction towards the stature of a perfect man. Let him who would build . . . consider well the cost. . . . Much ... he will have to renounce. . . . No emoluments must seduce him from the rigor of his devotion. No engagements beyond the merest necessities of life must inter fere with his pursuit. A meagre economy must be his income. . . . The rusty coat must be his badge. Obscurity must be his distinction. . . . The business of society is not . . . the highest culture, but the greatest comfort. . . . On all hands man s existence is converted into a preparation for ex istence. We do not properly live in these days. . . . We cannot get to ourselves. . . . Conscious ness stops half way. O ! for some moral Alaric, who should sweep away all that has been in this kind. . . . The highest life is the life of the mind, the enjoyment of thought. Between this life and READING 93 any point of outward existence, there is never but one step, and that step is an act of the will. The business of self-culture is to live now, to live in the present, to live in the highest. . . . This habit of living for effect [is] utterly incom patible with wholesome effort and an earnest mind. No heroic character, no depth of feeling, or clearness of insight can ever come of such a life. All that is best in human attainments springs from retirement. ... In retirement we first become acquainted with ourselves, our means, and ends. Whatever selfishness there may seem to be in such a discipline as this, exists only in appearance. ... In self -culture lies the ground and condition of all culture. . . . The silent influence of example ... is the true reformer. . . . Society are more benefited by one sincere life, by seeing how one man has helped himself, than by all the projects that human policy has devised for their salvation. . . . All truth must be lived before it can be adequately known or taught. . . . The scholar has his function . . . he must be a radical in speculation, an ascetic in devotion, a cynic in independence, an anchorite in his habits, a perfectionist in discipline. Secluded from without, and nourished from within. . . . It is to such men that we must look for the long expected literature of this nation. . . . We have no practical poets, no epic lives." Philosophi- Thoreau was most drawn to and was most dur- 94 HENRY DAVID THOREAU cally considered, Thoreau has little more to say than the voluble writers of the " Dial " had to say. But he is more than a philosopher ; and why the artist in him could step, half-Phosnix and half- Chanticleer, clear-voiced and clean-limbed out of the swaddling-clothes of the Orphic "Dial," only his genius can explain. I/ ably nourished by three literary springs the Oriental Scriptures, the classics, and the older English poets. Outside of these (if the English Bible, and Emerson, whose books he "rarely looked at," l and Carlyle, whose style he admired but could not possibly imitate, are excepted) it is seldom necessary to go for literary influences. He disliked German metaphysics and the involved German language. Indeed, it is impossible for one S who appreciates the quiet, clear, spare, hard Gaul and Scot in him to link him for any reason with the German metaphysicians; just as it is impossi ble not to link with them Coleridge when he was steeped in opium and thick mystic eloquence, or Carlyle when he played the role of coffee-drinking, sulphurous mystic, hounded by his own energy. " He had no favorite among the French or Ger mans," it was said. One must stick to the solitary "heroic writers of antiquity," and to "those books which circulate round the world, whose 1 Journal, in, 134. READING 95 sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time onto linen paper," for " sources " of Thoreau. " We read the Orientals, but remain Occi dental. The fewest men receive anything from their studies," said Emerson. Thoreau remained as Occidental as any man could be ; he took from his Oriental reading merely what he was pleased to clip away ; and it was always he, Thoreau, who took it. So that while he " had the best library of Oriental books in the country," and was as de lighted over Cholmondeley s gift as he might have been at " the birth of a child," the total influence of Oriental philosophy upon Thoreau was neither broad nor profound. He neither embraced it lightly as a cloistral dream, nor sounded it stu diously for its deepest meaning. He cannot be said to have understood the true significance of the Oriental position, with its stern dualism, its diffi cult discipline (which in the " Week " he called " moral drudgery "), its pessimism and its resig nation. He, like Emerson and the other tran- scendentalists, was content to declare jauntily that " the Buddhist is a transcendentalist," or to ape the Zoroastrian hilltop worship on some Concord eminence, and do little more. Thoreau took figures and sentences, not ideas, from his Oriental reading. It was the sentences that stayed on his mind, and which he says he 96 HENRY DAVID THOREAU annoyed the neighbors with repeating. * One wise sentence is worth the State of Massachusetts many times over," was his judgment. If Emer son intellectualized the Oriental Scriptures, Tho- reau used whatever sayings in them could crisply advise him what to do or neatly and with an air of finality justify what he did. There is something youthful and delightful about the liberties this crisp, deft man takes with the heavy-tongued Orientals. It is the liberty which a curious and earnest youth, ambitious to know old and great things, disliking the " shocking and passionate, * perhaps deceived by vague mystery and high talk but craving confidence and bottom, takes with any wisdom that is ripe and of long standing. One thing more important than sentences Tho- reau took from the Orientals; and that was no such thing as the consciousness of standing " on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment," but some thing more sincere and vital. Thoreau is prob ably most interesting for his attitude on practi cal questions concerning the personal relations. Thoreau s native hatred of philanthropy must have been materially reinforced by contact with what Orientalists to-day hold up to the humanitarian West as the " true spirit of charity," the Orien tal doctrine of cold benevolence and separation in friendship. He must have relished this sen- READING 97 tence which he edited for the " Dial " in 1843 : l " Be silent, for I swear by Allah, it were equal to the torments of hell to enter into Paradise through the interest of a neighbor." Thoreau was somewhat better fitted to under stand and appropriate the Greek spirit than he was the Oriental spirit. Brought up among per sons who knew the value of Greek, and writing in a company (Parker, Miss Fuller, Alcott) which was extraordinarily proficient in the Greek language, Thoreau could not but take notice of the claims of classical literature upon the modern attention. That he did so with greater zest and to better advantage than his fellows is signifi cant. It is told that he read " Latin as readily as English," and " Greek without difficulty." 2 He was a more careful scholar, in this as in other fields, than Emerson. Thoreau "never had a good word to say for Plato " possibly because he distrusted the Neo-Platonism of Emerson ; but he " read all the Greek poets in the orig inal. ^ It seems too much to say what a recent writer has said, that "he was almost a transplanted Greek." He was no Greek at all in respect of temper unless, indeed, Greek life was a life of eccentricity and the Greek spirit was the spirit 1 Dial, iv, 404. 2 F. B. Sanborn, Personality of Thoreau, p. 36. 8 Ibid. 98 HENRY DAVID THOREAU of exaggeration. Thoreau announced what is al most a gospel of exaggeration : " I desire to speak somewhere without bounds ; for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression." He did not be gin to have the balance of temper which warns that important truth can scarcely be arrived at by assertion or founded on exaggeration. In general, he confessed in the " Week," he found Greece and Rome "tame"; though he praised Homer like a wild boy crediting him with ab solute realism and perfect naturalness, a magic power to describe the morning itself rather than an impression of it, and so on. He was relished in his day, it is said, as being " the only man who thoroughly loved both Nature and Greek." He spoke without bounds concerning Greece, and f he spoke without bounds concerning Nature ; dis closing, perhaps, that he knew the human bear- ings of neither any too well. Yet Greece furnished Thoreau a very effec tive means for artistic discipline in the way of a standard outside of New England and himself. Emerson had said in the " Dial " that the clas sics gave " the purest pleasure accessible to hu man nature." Thoreau assured the readers of " Walden " that " the student may read Homer or ^Eschylus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that READING 99 he in some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages." Be sides, Greece was favored by the gods with the gift of perfection ; " over Greece hangs the divine necessity, a mellow heaven of itself," he wrote in " The Service." There was sufficient exhorta tion in the " Dial " to " study their works and learn their methods." Emerson was only express ing a general transcendental conviction when he commended the study of the Greeks to the writer because they " prune his orations and point his pen." Thoreau s study of the Greek Anthology enabled him to write at least two pointed and ex cellent poems. One, " Mist," almost purely Greek and quite without fault, Chohnondeley consid ered Thoreau s best piece : " Low-anchored cloud, Newfoundland air, Fountain-head and source of rivers, Dew-cloth, dream-drapery, And napkin spread by fays ; Drifting meadow of the air, Where bloom the daisied banks and violets, And in whose fenny labyrinth The bittern booms and heron wades ; Spirit of lakes and seas and rivers, Bear only perfumes and the scent Of healing herbs to just men s fields." The other, " Smoke," scarcely less Greek or more exceptionable, Emerson thought suggested Simon- 100 HENRY DAVID THOREAU ides " but is better than any poem of Simoni- des":- " 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." These and similar exercises furnished no such discipline as Matthew Arnold sought in the classics, and it can scarcely be said that any of the American transcendentalists was diligent and patient enough to reap the " high benefit of clearly feeling and deeply enjoying the really ex cellent." Thoreau spoke of classical studies as " composing "; but genuine composure was not a transcendental virtue. " If men read aright, methinks they would never read anything but poems," runs a passage in the " Week." Thoreau, who devoted his col lege days to working in the mine of old English poetry, owes more to the styles and the tempera ments of the early poets than he owes to any other group of writers. Hardly a page is not reminis cent of one of them. " Old Chaucer s breadth " taught him that "there is no wisdom which can READING take the place of humanity"; 1 and Chaucer s clearness and raciness were by no means lost on Thoreau s style. The subtle qualities of Daniel were not lost on Thoreau. The admirable stanza beginning the poem " To the Lady Margaret, Countess of Cumberland ": " He that of such a height hath built his mind, And rear d the dwelling of his thoughts so strong, As neither fear nor hope can shake the frame Of his resolved powers; nor all the wind Of vanity or malice pierce to wrong His settled peace, or to disturb the same; What a fair seat hath he, from whence he may The boundless wastes and wilds of man survey ! " might have been a text for an essay ; he did quote time and again the famous lines from the same poem, " Unless above himself he can Erect himself, how poor a thing is man." He thought Daniel deserved praise "for his moderation," and said, " We can well believe that he was a retired scholar, who would keep himself shut up in his house two whole months together." He thought both Donne and Daniel had "strong sense," and respected the former because he had the " patience of a day laborer." 2 He admired Drayton s vigor, independence, and realism, and he commended old English tragedy 1 Journal, i, 301. 2 Ibid., I, 467. 102 .HENRY DAVID THOREAU because "it says something," moves "toward some conclusion," " has to do with things," is " downright and manly," and because its writers " come to the point and do not waste the time." 1 He had not much patience with the romantic criticism of Shakespeare, 2 believing that the critics obscured his "chief characteristics of reality and unaffected manliness." He quotes often enough from Shakespeare ; but he did not reverence him as he reverenced Milton. Thoreau s favorite and most important resort in old English poetry was to the religious poets of the seventeenth century Donne, Vaughan, Crashaw, Quarles, and Herbert. He was gen uinely akin to them in temperament, found their themes congenial, and made the most of their metrical example. They were much in favor with the New England transcendentalists. Emerson was devoted to Herbert from the be ginning, and Alcott had only one contemporary in his list of favorite poets : Wordsworth, Milton, Donne, Vaughan, Crashaw, Herbert, Quarles, and Cowley. In the main Thoreau s affinity with these poets was temperamental and spiritual; he admired Quarles only for his metallic qualities of verse and voice, and his eminently sturdy constitution. He found in him " plenty of tough, crooked tim- 1 Journal, I, 465. a Rid., i, 466. READING 103 ber," and wrote in his Journal, 1 " Quarles is never weak or shallow, though coarse and uu- tasteful. He presses able-bodied and strong- backed words into his service, which have a cer tain rustic fragrance and force, as if now first devoted to literature after having served sincere and stern uses ... a right manly accent." In the main Thoreau was drawn by their sober intro spection and intense concentration to the seven teenth-century religious poets, preferring them on this ground to the Elizabethans. Milton he read always, valuing him " above Shakespeare," and getting " Lycidas " by heart. In the others their more morbid and egoistic elements of ec centricity and nervous, crabbed intensity fasci nated him. Their poetry was made pretty largely out of the nerves, and Thoreau was not without nerves. He repaired to them for the discipline of their form, but indulged himself in the vehe mence of their sentiment. Like them, he could not finish a poem as bravely as he could begin it. Thoreau probably felt the seventeenth century most through George Herbert, whose almost morbid sensitiveness to details, whose strained simplicity, whose tremulous purity, whose low- voiced passion combined with what Emerson de scribed as his" hard mentality," his " grip and ex actitude of mind," and his " mental materialism " 1 Journal, i, 458-59. 104 HENRY DAVID THOREAU to make Thoreau something, certainly, of what he was. Thoreau had very little to say explicitly about Herbert, just as he had little to say about Emerson, another prime influence in his life. Emerson and Herbert at least the qualities of mind they represented Thoreau took for granted. He could never weld a poem as heated and as pure as the best of Herbert ; he was with difficulty sweet. But the signs of his vain striv ings are many ; and the Herbert in him never died. The youth who drew his breath in pain for every line of poetry he tried, did not outgrow that pain, however early he ceased trying to write poetry ; he wrote nervous and excellent prose largely by virtue of it. Thoreau seems to have been bent very early toward Herbert. The best poem from his early period, and one of the best of all his poems, " Sic Vita" (1837), is unmistakably like the Herbert of " Employment" and " Denial " and the rest in almost every technical feature : " I am a parcel of vain strivings tied By a chance bond together, Dangling this way and that, their links Were made so loose and wide, Methinks, For milder weather. 11 A bunch of violets without their roots, And sorrel intermixed, READING 105 Encircled by a wisp of straw Once coiled about their shoots, The law By which I m fixed. " A nosegay which Time clutched from out Those fair Elysian fields, With weeds and broken stems, in haste, Doth make the rabble rout That waste The day he yields. * And here I bloom for a short hour unseen. Drinking my juices up, With no root in the land To keep my branches green, But stand In a bare cup. " Some tender buds were left upon my stem In mimicry of life, But ah ! the children will not know, Till time has withered them, The woe With which they re rife. " But now I see I was not plucked for naught, And after in life s vase Of glass set while I might survive, But by a kind hand brought Alive To a strange place. " That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours, And by another year, 106 HENRY DAVID THOREAU Such as God knows, with freer air, More fruits and fairer flowers Will bear, While I droop here." * 1 EMPLOYMENT If as a flower doth spread and die, Thou wouldst extend me to some good, Before I were by frost s extremity Nipt in the bud, The sweetness and the praise were Thine, But the extension and the room, Which in Thy garland I should fill, were mine At Thy great doom. For as Thou dost impart Thy grace, The greater shall our glory be. The measure of our joys is in this place, The stuff with Thee. Let me not languish then, and spend A life as barren to Thy praise As is the dust to which that life doth tend, But with delays. All things are busy ; only I Neither bring honey with the bees, Nor flowers to make that, nor the husbandry To water these. I am no link of Thy great chain, But all my company is a weed. Lord, place me in Thy concert ; give one strain To my poor reed. DENIAL When my devotions could not pierce Thy silent ears, READING 107 An inferior poem of the next year, called "Friendship" in the Journal, 1 continues the tradition : Then was ray heart broken, as was my verse ; My breast was full of fears And disorder. My bent thoughts, like a brittle bow, Did fly asunder : Each took his way ; some would to pleasures go, Some to the wars and thunder Of alarms. As good go anywhere they say, As to benumb Both knees and heart in crying night and day, " Come, come, my God, come ! " But no hearing. O that Thou shouldst give dust a tongue To cry to thee, And then not hear it crying ! All day long My heart was in my knee, But no hearing. Therefore my soul lay out of sight, Untuned, unstrung : My feeble spirit, unable to look right, Like a nipt blossom hung Discontented. cheer and tune my heartless breast, Defer no time ; That so Thy favors granting my request, They and my mind may chime, And mend my rhyme. 1 Journal, I, 40-41. 108 HENRY DAVID THOREAU "I think awhile of Love, and, while I think, Love is to me a world, Sole meat and sweetest drink, And close connecting link Tween heaven and earth. " I only know it is, not how or why, My greatest happiness ; However hard I try, Not if I were to die, Can I explain. " I fain would ask my friend how it can be, But, when the time arrives, Then Love is more lovely Than anything to me, And so I m dumb." Hereafter the visible signs of Herbert in Thoreau fade ; but the quiet, passionate conviction which was the mark of his early style is not extinguished by maturer sarcasm, nor even stung to death by wild-apple tang. Herbert could not enlist Thoreau in the enterprise of " making humility lovely in the eyes of all men " ; but he could teach him in some measure his technique of living how to feel, and how to write. VI POSITION THOREAU S permanent, best qualities his sly and edged excellence, his leavening power come into fuller recognition as his less essential qualities are subtracted and retreat. He is prop erly discounted only as his readers grow civil ized and distrust the exposition of the elemen tary ; he will come fully into his own when there is no one left who takes him literally and recom mends his audacity as either profound or ulti mate. The by-products of his living and his thinking the excellences of the "Week" and " Walden," and whatever he prepared for print are more essential than their central product, the extravagances of the Journal. His theory of life, so neatly conceived, so skillfully and vari ously expressed, so pointedly reinforced by read ing and quotation, comes ultimately to seem futile and somewhat less than adequate ; while the very neatness of conception, the very skill and variety and flavor of expression, the very quotations, en dure. That Thoreau s main product was nothing, and his main effort vain, his own Journal best betrays. Emerson thought " he had exhausted all the capabilities of life in this world." The many 110 HENRY DAVID THOREAU pages of the Journal which uncover his private sense of bewilderment and pain when friends disappeared and confess his growing impotence in expansion, are the flattest denial that Thoreau died with any such conviction in his heart. Yet the Journal is also the best witness that it was indeed Thoreau s ambition to exhaust all the capabilities of life in this world. Better still, the Journal reveals why he had to fail. It / is the Journal which gives the best clue to the character of Thoreau s thinking, which gives to understand that Thoreau s whole philosophical significance is involved in the fact that he thought in a vacuum. It is very specifically that Thoreau says he in habits a vacuum, and it is very adroitly that he defends his choice of habitation ; it is perhaps in spite of himself that he proves better than almost any other theorizer the ultimate futility of all living in a vacuum. At any rate, his very clear remarks upon the subject, and his most relentless pursuit of its essence, make him a very satisfactory figure in which to observe its bearings and its consequences. Within his vac uum Thoreau was to become perfect with the least difficulty, was to be reborn into the Uni verse with the slightest travail. He was to be all that Man can be, at once and forever. He was to find Reality and keep it for a companion. By POSITION 111 taking thought he was to achieve absolute glory. And all would be very easy. " The brave man braves nothing," he boasted in " The Service." " What a hero one can be without moving a fin ger ! " " Not having anything to do, to do some thing." To be a real man how extremely easy, if only one has courage to slough real responsi bilities ! Intellectual perfection was quite within reach. " One may have many thoughts and not decide anything," decided Thoreau. He had only to knock the bottom out of his consciousness to know how unfathomably profound he was. He had only to withdraw into a dark corner to wit ness how pure white was the flame of his thought. Moral perfection was even a simpler matter in vacuo. Emerson had thrown out the disconcert ing statement in " The Transcendentalist " that " We have yet no man who has leaned entirely upon his character." Thoreau could do that eas ily enough. All he needed to do was to "rise above the necessity of virtue," so that his vices would " necessarily trail behind," and to facilitate the operation of the will by removing all the occasions for exercising it. He could not but be perfect when he was above having to be tested. He could solve any problem in his vacuum ab solutely to his satisfaction. He proposed, for in- stance, to " Find out heaven By not "knowing hell." 112 HENRY DAVID THOREAU Complete aesthetic and spiritual satisfaction also came easily in the vacuum. The humming of a telegraph-wire could supply the first; the second was inherent in a life of vacuous expan sion. " Simplify, simplify ! " cried Thoreau like a Rousseau in " Walden." In his vacuum he f simplified the meaning of exaltation of soul until it became equivalent to the sensation of expan sion, equivalent to the reminder (from anywhere) " that there were higher, infinitely higher, planes of life which it behooved me never to forget." l That sensation and that reminder he demanded infinite room to indulge and hearken for. No other mortal could be near ; only the universe, the equivalent of self, was to attend. A real spiritual existence was at stake. The duty of the self was to comprehend reality; reality was to be found only in the whole the universe ; therefore the duty of the individual was to be take himself where the universe in reality was. But the self by its own nature was fitted not only for comprehending the universe, but for be ing the universe as well ; so that to be one s self was the only legitimate aspiration of man. To magnify the self, to have sensations of infini tude, to thrum with the excitement of the uni verse, was the ambition of the man who went to V_Walden Pond. 1 Journal, n, 497. POSITION 113 Thoreau speaks in the Journal some thirty times of the excitement which the humming of a telegraph-wire caused within him. " He thought the best of music was in single strains," said Emerson ; a single strain of music was for him that " finest strain that a human ear can hear." " The laws of Nature break the rules of Art"; the telegraph-wire tolc^iim more about himself brought the universe closer around him than the noblest symphony. For symphonies, being civilized, presuppose rules and intelligence, while the telegraph-wire " When we listen to it we are so wise that we need not to know." l he telegraph-wire, which Thoreau does not tion after 1854 (probably because he thought he had exhausted its meaning), had been signifi cant to him because it had seemed intensely spiritual. It had concentrated into a single strain the meaning of the universe, had furnished him at no expense (at no cost of " life ") the entire spiritual stock which it is possible for man to accumulate. If Thoreau lost faith in the tele graph-wire, he never ceased to believe what Emerson had spent his life preaching: that " spirit "is a single fact, that the soul has a single voice, that all spiritual values are indis- tinguishably blended in one experience In- 1 The Service, 13. 114 HENRY DAVID THOREAU spiration. Any source of inspiration suffices; the exaltation is the thing ; man should be ready to be anything, in the ecstasy of being stimu lated. Thoreau never lost faith, as Emerson never did, in this Inspiration, this facile mo nopoly of spiritual privileges. When he found the world unsatisfactory, he scarcely knew why and blamed the world. He scarcely suspected that his imxnsity was distilling the essence out of a vacuum, and not out of life. Such men, complained Pascal, " inspire no tions of simple greatness, and that is not the state of man." Thoreau s spiritual existence was more than easy ; it was hopelessly, fatally easy. " Assure himself as he might that his own will the will of the universe, that thought and ing are indistinguishable, that soul and body are one, that necessity is sweet, that good and evil are phantoms easy to dissolve, yet he never suc ceeded in stepping entirely out of his little pri vate darkness. Perhaps he read George Herbert s exhortation, in " The Church Porch," to self- scrutiny : " By all means use sometimes to be alone. Salute thy self, see what thy soul doth wear. Dare to look in thy chest, for t is thine own, And tumble up and down what thou find st there." But if he read it, he read it wrong, read it with out the " sometimes " ; took it literally and ab- POSITION 115 solutely. And so doing, he fell into the error which Bacon describes as proceeding "from too great a reverence, and a kind of adoration of the mind and understanding of man ; by means whereof men have withdrawn themselves too much from the contemplation of nature, and the observations of experience, and have tumbled up and down in their own reason and conceits. Upon these intellectualists," Bacon goes on to say, " which are notwithstanding commonly taken for the most sublime and divine philosophers, Heraclitus gave a just censure, saying, Men sought truth in their own little worlds, and not in the great and common world ; for they dis dain to spell, and so by degrees to read in the volume of God s works; and contrariwise by continual meditation and agitation of wit do urge and as it were invocate their own spirits to divine and give oracles unto them, whereby they are deservedly deluded." Thoreau deluded himself, not because he was introspective, but because he was introspective in a certain mistaken, fruitless way. His specu lations and experiences, intellectual, moral, es thetic, yielded no important results, not because they were private, but because their privacy was their sole end and aim. Plato and Shakespeare were introspective, and learned to know the world in private ; but the world they learned to 116 HENRY DAVID THOREAU know was large and important, the " great and common world." They studied themselves along with the rest of the world Plato his opinions with the opinions of other men, Shakespeare his impressions with the impressions of other men ; Thoreau studied himself alone his opinions and his impressions by themselves. Shakespeare and Plato, like all men who are versed in the arts of comparison or dialectic, studied them selves as members of the universe; Thoreau studied himself as the universe. Shakespeare and Plato sought to learn their bearings in the world; Thoreau lost sight of bearings, and sought to be the world itself. Thoreau deluded himself precisely in proportion as he refused to keep the very delicate balance which it is neces sary for a great and good man to keep between his private and his public lives, between his own personality and the whole outside universe of personalities. Thoreau s introspection was sterile in so far as it was a brooding reverie of self-con templation rather than an effort to measure and , correct and check himself by reference to things V beyond himself. His counsel of perfection is meaningless to others in so far as it is intended to be realized in a vacuum, apart from contacts or comparisons ; it was useless to him in that it did not permit of friction with other perfections, did not provide for that jostling and settling into POSITION 117 place which the seasoned philosophy of life has undergone. It is clear that Thoreau could not see the bearings of his vacuous and expansive effort: "Is it all my fault? "he asked in the Journal. 1 " Have I no heart? Am I incapable of expansion and generosity ? I shall accuse my self of everything else sooner." It is clear enough that he was incapable of distinguishing between fruitless and fruitful expansion the expansion which merely distends the self at the present stage of its ignorance, and the expansion which really enlarges the self by thrusting it out into play with surrounding selves. Stevenson sug gests that " the world s heroes have room for all positive qualities, even those which are disrepu table, in the capacious theaters of their disposi tions. Such can live many lives, while Thoreau can live but one, and that with continual fore sight." Thoreau refused pretty consistently to be lieve that there was any other life besides his own. " You think," he addressed an imaginary critic in the later Journal, 2 " that I am impoverishing my self by withdrawing from men, but in my solitude I have woven for myself a silken web or chrysalis, and, nymph-like, shall ere long burst forth a more perfect creature, fitted for a higher society." A very brave hope, but unrealized anywhere in his career, if the Journal is to be believed. 1 Journal, iv, 314. 2 Ibid., ix, 246. 118 HENRY DAVID THOREAU If it is asked what led Thoreau into his error, what led him to believe he could find out all things by and in himself, perhaps Matthew Ar nold gives the keenest answer : "The blundering to be found in the world," says Arnold, u comes from some people fancying that some idea is a definite and ascertained thing, like the idea pf_a triangle, when it is not." The difficulty with Thoreau, as with many a philosopher during the nineteenth century, was that he had hypostatized an abstraction and seen his own reflection in it. During that century, the seedtime of the mod ern social soul, when the sun withheld its warmth and mankind suffered growing-pains, abstrac tions seemed blessed beyond all other commodi ties because they held out most promise of nour ishment, of hope for the solution of the secret of life. When nine tenths of life seemed flowing away, men were wont to seek refuge on the island of an abstraction. When mind and heart and soul were being explained away, men dog gedly identified themselves with certain func tions of their minds and hearts and souls and demanded immunity. " Elsewhere the world may change, but oh ! not here ! " they cried. Hallow ing abstractions in the face of doubt, clutching at phenomena of consciousness in the face of science, they preached and lived vehemently all their lives what right reason condemns as inade- POSITION 119 quate and provincial. Work," " Art," " Hap piness," "Beauty," "Inspiration," "Keality" rode the century relentlessly. Belief was ade quate if sincere and passionate. Men lived fully enough if they represented some quality or as pect of human nature to the consistent exclusion of other aspects and qualities ; if they were gripped and warped by a concept or stamped in an attitude, and forgot all else. Men of that time are not so much men as faculties not so much individual human beings as individual forces. Carlyle is a whole universe in miniature, "creaking, groaning, tortuous." Coleridge, says Sir Walter Scott, is " a lump of coal rich with gas, which lies expending itself in puffs and gleams, unless some shrewd body will clap it into a cast-iron box, and compel the compressed ele ment to do itself justice." Byron is an angry, glowing cheek. Keats is an odor hanging heavily close to the earth. Shelley is a mad bird who would fly higher than is possible. Wordsworth is a column of white mist moving among the hills. Ruskin is a swift, fevered river. Emerson is an electric wire snapping and emitting bril liant, cold sparks. Thoreau is a pard-like hunter, moving quietly whither he likes and refusing to be touched. Thoreau is one of the most deliberate of all hypostatizers. Born into a philosophical school 120 HENRY DAVID THOREAU whose ideas were already well formed, younger by ten years than most of its adherents, and with a craftman s mind for visualizing details, it is no wonder that he, most scrupulously of all men in America or Europe, should have assumed to be real, and attempted to live, the generalizations of Goethe and the abstractions of the transcen dental philosophy. Nor is it surprising that, with his passion for the specific, he should have hypostatized a little more strenuously than he did such abstractions as Character, Will, Spirit, Moral Nature of Man, Life, Self, the Present, that he should have hypostatized more strenuously than he did those abstractions, the quality of " Keality." It is not surprising that a man so quixotically practical should have asserted, when he heard his contemporaries com plaining that life had lost its realities, that Reality did exist, and that he would go out and capture it. The hypostatizing of Eeality is the simplest of everyday occurrences. Children be lieve that grown-ups are realler than themselves, and countrymen fancy that real life is to be had for the seeking in cities. The man who went out wolfishly to " live deep and suck out all the mar row of life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why, then to get the whole and genuine meanness of POSITION 121 it, and publish its meanness to the world," leaves no one doubting that the monster which pursued him was Keality hypostatized into life and turned loose upon him. Keality and its pard-like hunter these make up "the Thoreau." Thoreau s whole life was a search for embodied Eeality, and his whole contention on paper is that Real ity is accessible. " How to live, how to get the most out of life, how to extract the honey from the flower of the world. That is my every-day business. I am as busy as a bee about it," is not the only passage of its kind in the Journal. " Be it life or death," he adds, " we crave only real ity." He is confident that " there is a solid bot tom everywhere " if we only have the courage to sink to it. " Let us settle ourselves and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion and prejudice and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, ... to a hard bot tom and rock in place which we can call real- ity." When Thoreau says he is seeking "what was always and always must be because it really is now," the temptation is irresistible to speculate upon the probability of his success. It is easy to guess that he will look nowhere outside himself for "what really is now." If he finds his self, he finds reality. If he finds reality, he has found the universe. " It is only he," said Confucius, 122 HENRY DAVID THOREAU " in the world, who possesses absolute truth who can get to the bottom of the law of his being. He who is able to get to the bottom of the law of his being will 1 be able to get to the bottom of the law of being of other men. He who is able to get to the bottom of the law of being of men will be able to get to the bottom of the laws of physical nature. He who is able to get to the bottom of the laws of physical nature will be able to influence the forces of creation of the Universe. He who can influence the forces of creation of the Universe is one with the Powers of the Universe." Thoreau never gets to the bottom of the law of his being because he fails to keep the other men in mind, because he loses his bearings, because he does not recog nize his individual being as in any way distin guishable from universal being. He probes for the bottom of his being in Walden Pond, before he has taken the trouble to be anything among other beings away from Walden Pond. He hopes to find what his self is like absolutely apart from relationships. He hypostatizes " self," sees nothing else, loses its bearings, and so loses it. Like the secret of harmony, it " always retreats as I advance " ; and all he can do is to follow helplessly a nothing in search of a some thing ; a nothing perpetually dividing itself into a something and getting infinity. The problem POSITION 123 of self, like the problem of love, is his sore afflic tion. " There is no remedy for love but to love more," said he. So with being; there is no remedy for being but to be infinitely more of nothing. But it is as much of a mistake, on the whole, for Thoreau s critic to take him literally, as it was for Thoreau to take himself so seriously; few other persons besides the critic are going to do it. Thoreau s example in society need not be worried about. The instinct of self-preservation in humanity and the common capacity for humor bring it about, of course, that " Walden " is in general not taken literally. It is easy enough to point out that Thoreau s main effort came to nothing ; but the likelihood remains that Thoreau will always count for something among sophisti cated persons who take him with the sufficient allowance of salt. That something, though it be only a by-product, and though it represent only a fraction of the man "I speak out of the best part of myself," said Thoreau in another connec tion is permanent, and of the first importance. The best there is in Thoreau is not the natu ralist part of him. Emerson predicted that the example of his usefulness would lead to the crea tion of a " profession " of naturalist : " I think we must have one day a naturalist in each village as invariably as a lawyer or doctor ... all 124 HENRY DAVID THOREAU questions answered for stipulated fees." But Thoreau the philosopher of human relationships, talking of friendship and charity and solitude, will be remembered when Thoreau the visitor of wild flowers will beg for notice. Philosophically considered, the best of Tho reau is not his extreme transcendental gospel, the darkest corner of his little private darkness ; is not his urging of the elementary ; is not his association with a very provincial school which did not know enough in general. If read as scrip ture, as some of his friends read him, or as mad man, as Lowell read him, he will yield nothing. He cannot be taken literally any more than a wild odor can be seized and kept. " I am per mitted to be rash," he said in the " Week." It is his temper which is needed and felt, and not his vagaries that need be worshiped or excused. He is a good hater and refuser, and the world likes that now and then. Men like to be pricked ; men demand to be made mad on occasions. Men like Thoreau s temper in the atmosphere as much as they like the flavor of his wild apples in their memories. " These apples," he says, " have hung in the wind and frost and rain until they have absorbed the qualities of the weather or season, and thus are highly seasoned, and they pierce and sting and permeate us with their spirit " ; if his philosophical offering misses richness, it is highly POSITION 125 enough spiced. His sting is far from venom ous ; " I would give up most other things to be so good a man as Thoreau," wrote Stevenson to one of the biographers. No philosophical attack on Thoreau s individualism can take the tonic out of his pages or the temper out of his inde pendence. It can be shown that he was unreason able, and hypostatized " self " ; but in " Walden" (if not in the Journal) he still stands alone, halfway enviable in his loneliness. Whittier thought " Walden " " very wicked and heathen ish but " capital reading." The " Good heart, weak head " of Emerson furnishes a perpetual text for Thoreau. The steadfast air of the pages on philanthrophy in " Walden " should alone preserve Thoreau s name. An extreme exam ple of self-satisfaction can do no harm in the twentieth or any century. If Thoreau seems " all improved and sharpened to a point," his example nevertheless remains delicious. As long as indi vidual excellence is prized by however slight a minority, his books will be instructive, says Low ell, " as showing how considerable a crop may be raised on a comparatively narrow range of mind, and how much a man may make of his life if he will assiduously follow it, though perhaps never really finding it at last." Thoreau will be found a very satisfactory spokesman for one who feels driven into a posi- 126 HENRY DAVID THOREAU tion somewhat analogous to his position in 1840. Not only is he a wholesome shocking force in the lives of young people who have been brought up too exclusively on positivistic or humanitarian principles; he stands pretty staunchly back of one when one desires to strike at the confident and benevolent leveler, with his wash of sociality and sentiment, and when one desires to cry, " I do not believe you ! Man is great ! " "Do not seek so anxiously to be developed," warns Tho- reau, " to subject yourself to so many influences, to be played upon. It is all dissipation." The greatest apostle of Leisure in his century, he put to flight Folly s sociological brood, and only asked for leisure to be good. That his reaction was unreasonable, and that his refuge was in an instinct ("immemorial custom" and "transcendent law") as objectionable as the socialistic instinct, does not cripple his support when it is necessary that one be unreason able. One can be as combative and as asser tive now and then as Thoreau was always ; one still "finds it difficult to make a sufficiently moderate statement " ; one still wants to bristle with indignant hyperbole and paradox in the humanitarian, scientific, reformatory, or prag matic presence. If Thoreau loses in the broadest sense by being terribly single-minded, he is valu able in a narrower sense by virtue of his very POSITION 127 singleness valuable as a protestant, valuable as an antidotal flavor. Thoreau, finally, is an American classic. He will always appeal to the " confirmed city-men " he affected to pity. For the same reason that " Robinson Crusoe " appeals most to land folk, " Walden " will appeal more and more to the men and women of " institutions," to men in studies and clubs, to boys by the fireside in win ter. Thoreau is eminently a citizen in the repub lic of letters, and continues some excellent tradi tions. "Even his love of Nature seems of the intellectual order," Whitman thought, " the bookish, library, fireside rather than smack ing of out of doors. ... I often find myself catching a literary scent off his phrases." The readers of " Walden " will not distrust it be cause it is literary ; they will treasure it one cannot say how long because it is literary, because it is a classic, because it furnishes defi- / nite delight. A substantial critic thought " Wal den" in 1879 "the only book yet written in America that bears an annual perusal," and re marked that for his own part, with " Walden " in his hands, he could wish " that every other author in America might try the experiment of two years in a shanty." As almost every one has been ambitious to be a second Crusoe, so a few spirits (perhaps more than confess it) 128 HENRY DAVID THOREAU will always be furtively suspectiDg that by two years in the woods they could do themselves some service. "Crusoe" and " Walden," classics of solitude, people do not want to do without. " No truer American existed than Thoreau," said Emerson. At least no more plain-spoken representative of transcendental New England could be asked for, it seems safe to say. There can be little doubt that the spirit of " Walden " has pervaded the American consciousness, stif fened the American lip, steadied the American nerve, in a ponderable degree. By creating a classic image of the cynic hermit in ideal solitude Thoreau has demonstrated some of the mean nesses of the demands of Time and Matter, and furnished the spirit and will for social criticism ; he has made men acute critics, if not sensible shepherds, of their own sentiments. THE END BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE BIBLIOGRAPHIES : FRANCIS H. ALLEN. Bibliography of Thoreau. Boston, 1908. Excellent, and practically com plete to 1908. JOHN P. ANDERSON. Bibliography of Thoreau ap pended to the Life by Henry S. Salt in the Great Writers Series. Briefer, but useful to 1896. WORKS : References are to the Walden Edition (with all the "Journal"). 20 vols. Boston, 1906. Almost complete. The other authorized editions are the Riverside Edition, 11 vols., Boston, 1894, and the Riverside Pocket Edition, 11 vols., Boston, 1915. These are without the complete " Journal." The Service. Ed. F. B. Sanborn. Boston, 1902. The essay does not appear in full under this title in the Walden Edition, although most of the missing parts are to be found in the volumes of the " Journal " in the same edition. The Bibliophile Society of Boston has privately printed certain fragments of the Journal and other interesting pieces not elsewhere to be found. BIOGRAPHIES : W. E. CHANNING. Thoreau : The Poet-Naturalist. Boston, 1873, 1902. H. A. PAGE (A. H. JAPP). Thoreau, His Life and Aims. Boston, 1877. London, 1878. 132 BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE F. B. SANBORN. Henry D. Thoreau. American Men of Letters Series. Boston, 1882. HENRY S. SALT. Life of Henry David Thoreau. London, 1890. Great Writers Series, 1896. MRS. ANNIE RUSSELL MARBLE. Thoreau: His Home, Friends, and Books. New York, 1902. CHIEF CRITICAL ESSAYS : EMERSON, " Biographical Sketch." Prefixed to vol. I of the Walden Edition of Thoreau. LOWELL, " Thoreau." My Study Windows. STEVENSON, " Henry David Thoreau : His Char acter and Opinions." Familiar Studies of Men and Books. PAUL ELMER MORE. Shelburne Essays. New York. " A Hermit s Notes on Thoreau," vol. I (1904). "Thoreau s Journal," vol. V (1908). INDEX INDEX Adams, John Quincy, 75. ^schylus, 81, 98. ^sop, 76. Alcott, A. B., 7, 10, 28, 43, 97, 102. America, 3, 55-57, 128. Anacreon, 81. Aristotle, 2. Arnold, Matthew, 3, 100, 118. "Art of Life, The," 91. Bacon, Francis, 28, 115. Bible, English, 94. Boone, Daniel, 32. Brisbane, Albert, 57. Brook Farm, 41. Brown, John, 41, 48. Browne, Sir Thomas, 66, 81. Browning, Robert, 2. Bryant, W. C., 3. Burroughs, John, 29-30, 36, 37, 85. Byron, 15 n., 119. " Cape Cod," 73, 75, 77. Carlyle, Thomas, 2, 61, 67, 80, 94, 119. Cato, 9, 64. Chalmers s "Poets," 90. Channing, Ellery, 12. Channing, W. E., 69, 79, 81. Chanticleer, 14. " Character " (Emerson s), 57. Chateaubriand, 42. Chaucer, 100-01. Cholmondeley, Thomas, 21, 52, 95,99. Christian Science, 62. "Circles" (Emerson s), 70, 72. Colebrooke, H. T., 54. Coleridge, S. T., 15 n., 28, 50, 58, 68, 94, 119. Columella, 64. Confucius, 56, 70, 120. Cooper, J. F., 3. Cotton, Charles, 2. Cowley, Abraham, 2, 102. Crashaw, Richard, 102. Daniel, Samuel, 101. Daudet, 77. De Tocqueville, 55. "Dial," 17, 22, 35, 51, 52, 57, 91, 94, 97, 98, 99. Dickens, Charles, 12, 73, 77. Donne, John, 101, 102. Drayton, Michael, 101. Drummond, William, 2. Dunbar, Charles, 74 J?., 77. Ecclesiastes, 44. " Edinburgh Review," 55. Edwards, Jonathan, 55. Emerson, R. W., 1 ; on solitude, 3; on Thoreau s habits, 3; ac count of Thoreau, 5 ; edition of Thoreau s Letters, 5: on Thoreau s sensibility, 8; source of Thoreau s ideas, 10 ; on Thoreau s sarcasm, 11 ; on Thoreau s reserves, 15; con versation with Thoreau, 19-20; Cholmondeley, 21; on Tho reau s verses, 22 ; on Thoreau s "Nature," 27; on Thoreau s want of temptations, 35 ; on Thoreau s activity, 42 ; expan sion, 42 ; energizer of Thoreau, 45 ; on the Germans, 50 ; as Platonist, 55; on Thoreau as an American, 55 ; influence on Thoreau, 67 ff,\ intellectual egoism, 34,55^.; his genius, 67; first meeting with Tho reau, 67 ; particularized by Thoreau, 70-72; on Thoreau s literary ambitions, 79; read ing. 87; on Thoreau s reading, 136 INDEX 91; on the Orientals, 95; on the classics, 98, 99; on Tho- reau s " Smoke," 99 ; and George Herbert, 102, 103-04; on Thoreau s achievement, 109 ; a challenge for Thoreau, 111 ; interpretation of " spir it," 113, 114; his quality, 119; on Thoreau s importance as a naturalist, 123-24. Emerson, Mrs., 23. "English Traits" (Emerson s), 50, 85 n. EXPANSION, 39. Field, John, 73. Flaubert, 81, 84. Fourier, 57. Fourierisrn, 44. Friendship, 17-27. "Friendship," 107-08. FRIENDSHIP ; NATURE, 14. Fuller, Margaret, 63, 97. German romanticism, 12, 49 ff. Gilman, Nicholas, 55. Goethe, 72, 120. Greece, 80, 85, 99. Greek Anthology, 99. Greek literature, influence on Thoreau of, 97-100. Hawker, Rev. Stephen, 16 n. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 3, 7, 10, 32. Hazlitt, William, 2. Hegel, 51. Herbert, George, 58, 60, 63, 70,81, 102, 103-08, 114. Hoar, Madam, 32. Homer, 4, 70, 78, 81, 98. Hopkins, Samuel, 55. Hosmer, E., 75. Howells, W. D., 41. Hume, David, 61. James, Henry, 29. Jefferies, Richard, 37. Jones, Sir William. 54. Journal, Thoreau s : Value of, 1 ; self- revelation, 4; sarcasm, 11 ; puns, 12 ; extravagances, 1, 2, 12, 109; basis of the "Week," 14; his experience, 16; record of his friendships, 2S,ff.\ ex tracts on friendship, 25-27; on Nature, 11 ff. ; Thoreau s re gard for, 66; selected for " Walden " and the " Week," 70; method of composition, 79; influence on Thoreau 3 literary career, 84; character of the prose in, 85; the index of Thoreau s failure, 109-10; on the telegraph-wire, 112-13. Kant, Immanuel, 21. Keats, John, 119. Landor, W. S., 2. " Life Without Principle," 69. Livy, 64. Lowell, J.R., 1,3,29,33,87, 124, 125. Maine Woods," 44, 77, 83. Marcus Aurelius, 64, 65. " Marius the Epicurean " (Pa ter s), 86. Marshman, Joshua, 54. Melville, Herman, 3, 29, 32. Mill, J. S., 16 n. Milton, John, 58, 102, 103. "Mist, "99. More, Henry, 58. More, P. E., 34 n., 50 n., 58 n. Nature, 27-38, 47, 198. New England, 12, 55^., 96, 98, 128. Newman, Cardinal, 44, 62. Nietzsche, 44. Novalis, 16, 51, 54, 80. Oriental literature, influence on Thoreau of, 95-97. Parable, Thoreau s, 12, 16, 17, 18,51. Parker, Theodore, 97. Pascal, Blaise, 40, 114. Pater, Walter, 82, 84, 85. Perm, William, 55. INDEX 137 Persius, 70, 88. . Pindar, 81. Plato, 28, 58, 97, 115, 116. Plotinus, 58. Poems, Thoreau s, 22. Pope, Alexander, 2. POSITION, 109. Puritanism, 55-56, 59. Quarles, Francis, 81, 102, 103. READING, 87. Reading, list of Thoreau s, 88- 90 n. Ricketson, Daniel, 8, 50. " Robinson Crusoe," 127, 128. Romanticism, German, ^1 ff. Rousseau, 33, 112. Ruskin, John, 42, 61, 119. Sadi, 16 n. Scherb, Mr., 51. Scott, Sir Walter, 119. " Service, The," 45, 46, 48, 49, 57, 60, 65, 70, 78, 84, 99, 111. Sewall, Ellen, 22-24. Shakespeare, 102, 115, 116. Shelley, P. B., 2, 119. " Sic Vita," 104-06. Simonides, 99. Smith, Sydney, 56. " Smoke," 99, 100. SOLITARY, THE, 1. Solitude, 2. " Solitude " (Zimmermann s), 14. Sounds," 8. SPECIFIC, THE, 67. Spinoza, 52. Stevenson, R. L., 1. 5, 9, 11, 12, 18, 42, 43, 64, 66, 68, 69, 73, 76, 82, 84, 117, 126. Taylor, Thomas, 58. Telegraph-wire, 112-13. Tennyson, 16 n. Thoreau, Henry David : Theory of solitude, 2 ff. ; public and private, 4; as naturalist, 5; personal appearance, 5, 6 ; por traits, 6; stoicism, 5, 8, 9; race, 7; parents, 7, 8; traits, 8-13; parable, 12, 13; optimism, 14- 16 ; disappointments, 16; quest, 16, 17; friendship, 17-27; his ideal, 17; solitude, 19; Emer son s criticism, 19-20; love, 22- 24; Nature, 27-38; Emerson s view of Nature compared, 28 ; friendship for Nature, 27^ .; intellectual egoism, 34 ff. ; ideal of independence, 35 ; suc cessors as poet-naturalists, 35- 38; opinion of Nature-lovers, 36; need of expansion, 40 ff.\ sympathy, 41 ; self-satisfac tion, 42; view of society, 43 ff.; career in expansion, 45 ff.\ " The Service," 45-46; sources of his philosophy, 49 jf. ; ques tion of German influences, 49- 55; New England renaissance, 55 ff. ; influence of Emerson, 57 ff. ; intellectual egoism, 63^ .; stoicism, 63-64; com pared with Cato, 64; epicure anism, 64-66; genius for the specific, 67 ff.; self-possession, 67-68; observation of human nature, 72 ff. ; on " Uncle Charles Dunbar," 74 ff. ; cre ative genius, 76; genius for organization, 76^ .; dramatic gift, 77; theory and practice of writing, 79-86; work on the Indians, 79 n. ; preoccupation with the facts of conscious ness, 82; the " prose school of the particular," 81-86; roman tic composition, 85 ; charm as a reader, 87^. ; literary epicu reanism, 87; philosophical po sition, illustrated from the " Dial," 91-93 ; influence of the Orientals, 100-03 ; influence of George Herbert, 103-08 ; per manent and temporary qual ities, 109-10; his vacuum, 110- 17; his hypostatizing of Re ality, 118-23; his permanent value, 123-27. 138 INDEX Thoreau, John, 8. Thoreau, Sophia, 32. Transcendentalism, German, 49- 50. Transcendentalism, New Eng land, 50. Transeendentalists, 3, 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 20, 34, 59, 100, 102. Vane, Sir Henry, 55. Varro, 64. Vaughan, Henry, 102. Virgil, 60. Voltaire, 11. Walden, Thoreau s residence at, 4, 12, 30, 31, 47, 60, 72, 78, 112, 120. 11 Walden," 4, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16n., 18, 41, 43, ,49, 55, 68, 70, 73, 75, 76 n., 77,78, 81, 88, 98, 109, 112, 123, 125, 127, 128. " Walking," 49, 60. Walton, Izaac, 2. Webster, Daniel, 75. " Week on the Concord and Mer- rirnack Rivers," 4, 14, 49, 70, 75. 77, 83, 95, 98, 100, 109, 124. Whitman, Walt, 37, 84 n., 127. Whittier, J. G., 125. Wilkins, Sir Charles, 54. Woolman, John, 55. Wordsworth, William, 2, 23, 29, 34, 42, 59, 119. Zimmermann, J. G., 50. fitoctfibe CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS U . S . 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