The Vagabond in Literature

by Arthur Compton-Rickett

II

Some of his earlier work suffers somewhat from a too faithful discipleship of Emerson; but when he had found himself, as he has in Walden, he can break away from this tendency, and there are many lovely passages untouched by didacticism.

“The stillness was intense and almost conscious, as if it were a natural sabbath. The air was so elastic and crystalline that it had the same effect on the landscape that a glass has on a picture—to give it an ideal remoteness and perfection. The landscape was bathed in a mild and quiet light, while the woods and fences chequered and partitioned it with new regularity, and rough and uneven fields stretched far away with lawnlike smoothness to the horizon, and the clouds, finely distinct and picturesque, seemed a fit drapery to hang over fairyland.”

But while there is the Wordsworthian appreciation of the peaceful moods of Nature and of the gracious stillnesses, there is the true spirit of the Vagabond in his Earth-worship. Witness his pleasant “Essay on Walking”:—

“We are but faint-hearted crusaders; even the walkers nowadays undertake no persevering world’s end enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearthside from which we set out. Half of the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walks, perchance, in the spirit of stirring adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdom. If you have paid your debts and made your will and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.”

There is a relish in this sprightly abjuration that is transmittible to all but the dullest mind. The essay can take its place beside Hazlitt’s “On Going a Journey,” than which we can give it no higher praise.

With all his appreciation of the quieter, the gentler aspects of nature, he has the true hardiness of the child of the road, and has as cheery a welcome for the east wind as he has for the gentlest of summer breezes. Here is a little winter’s sketch:—

“The wonderful purity of Nature at this season is a most pleasing fact. Every decayed stump and moss-grown stone and rush of the dead leaves of autumn are concealed by a clean napkin of snow. In the bare fields and trickling woods see what virtue survives. In the coldest and bleakest places the warmest charities still maintain a foothold. A cold and searching wind drives away all contagion, and nothing can withstand it but what has a virtue in it; and accordingly whatever we meet with in cold and bleak places as the tops of mountains, we respect for a sort of sturdy innocence, a Puritan toughness.”

But Thoreau’s pleasant gossips about the woods in Maine, or on the Concord River, would pall after a time were they not interspersed with larger utterances and with suggestive illustrations from the Books of the East. Merely considered as “poet-naturalist” he cannot rank with Gilbert White for quaint simplicity, nor have his discursive essays the full, rich note that we find in Richard Jefferies. That his writings show a sensitive imagination as well as a quick observation the above extracts will show. But unfortunately he had contracted a bad attack of Emersonitis, from which as literary writer he never completely recovered. Salutary as Emerson was to Thoreau as an intellectual irritant, he was the last man in the world for the discursive Thoreau to take as a literary model.

Many fine passages in his writings are spoiled by vocal imitations of the “voice oracular,” which is the more annoying inasmuch as Thoreau was no weak replica of Emerson intellectually, showing in some respects indeed a firmer grasp of the realities of life. But for some reason or other he grew enamoured of certain Emersonian mannerisms, which he used whenever he felt inclined

to fire off a platitude. Sometimes he does it so well that it is hard to distinguish the disciple from his master. Thus:—

“How can we expect a harvest of thought who have not a seedtime of character?”

Again:—

“Only he can be trusted with goods who can present a face of bronze to expectations.”

Unimpeachable in sentiment, but too obviously inspired for us to view them with satisfaction. And Thoreau at his best is so fresh, so original, that we decline to be put off with literary imitations, however excellently done.

And thus it is that Thoreau has been too often regarded as a mere disciple of Emerson. For this he cannot altogether escape blame, but the student will soon detect the superficiality of the criticism, and see the genuine Thoreau beneath the Emersonian veneer.

Thoreau lacked the integrating genius of Emerson, on the one hand, yet possessed an eye for concrete facts which the master certainly lacked. His strength, therefore, lay in another direction, and where Thoreau is seen at his best is where he is dealing with the concrete experiences of life, illustrating them from his wide and discursive knowledge of Indian character and Oriental modes of thought.

III

Insufficient attention has been paid, I think, to Thoreau’s sympathy with the Indian character and his knowledge of their ways.

The Indians were to Thoreau what the gypsies were to Borrow. Appealing to certain spiritual affinities in the men’s natures, they revealed their own temperaments to them, enabling them to see the distinctiveness of their powers. Thoreau was never quite able to give this intimate knowledge such happy literary expression as Borrow. Apprehending the peculiar charm, the power and limitations of the Indian character, appreciating its philosophical value, he lacked the picturesque pen of Borrow to visualize this for the reader.

A lover of Indian relics from his childhood, he followed the Indians into their haunts, and conversed with them frequently. Some of the most interesting passages he has written detail conversations with them. One feels he knew and understood them; and they no less understood him, and talked with him as they certainly would not have done with any other white man. But one would have liked to have heard much more about them. If only Thoreau could have given us an Indian Petulengro, how interesting it would have been!

But, like the Indian, there was a reserve and impenetrability about Thoreau which prevented him from ever becoming really confidential in print. If he had but unbended more frequently, and not sifted his thought

so conscientiously before he gave us the benefit of it, he would certainly have appealed to our affections far more than he does.

One feels in comparing his writings with the accounts of him by friends how much that was interesting in the man remains unexpressed in terms of literature. Partly this is due, no doubt, to his being tormented with the idea of self-education that he had learnt from Emerson. In a philosopher and moralist self-education is all very well. But in a naturalist and in a writer with so much of the Vagabond about him as Thoreau this sensitiveness about self-culture, this anxiety to eliminate all the temperamental tares, is blameworthy.

The care he took to eliminate the lighter element in his work—the flash of wit, the jocose aside—a care which pursued him to the last, seems to show that he too often mistook gravity for seriousness. Like Dr. Watts’ bee (which is not Maeterlinck’s) he “improved the shining hour,” instead of allowing the shining hour to carry with it its own improvement, none the less potent for being unformulated. But beside the Emersonian influence, there is the Puritan strain in Thoreau’s nature, which must not be overlooked. No doubt it also is partly accountable for his literary silences and austere moods.

To revert to the Indians.

If Thoreau does not deal dramatically with his Indians, yet he had much that is interesting and suggestive to say about them. These are some passages from A Week on the Concord:—

“We talk of civilizing the Indians, but that is not the name for his improvement. By the wary independence and aloofness of his dim forest-life he preserves his intercourse with his native gods, and is admitted from time to time to a rare and peculiar society with Nature. He has glances of starry recognition to which our salons are strangers. The steady illumination of his genius, dim only because distant, is like the faint but satisfying light of the stars compared with the dazzling but ineffectual and short-lived blaze of candles. . . . We would not always be soothing and taming Nature, breaking the horse and the ox, but sometimes ride the horse wild and chase the buffalo. The Indian’s intercourse with Nature is at least such as admits of the greatest independence of each. If he is somewhat of a stranger in her midst, the gardener is too much of a familiar. There is something vulgar and foul in the latter’s closeness to his mistress, something noble and cleanly in the former’s distance. In civilization, as in a southern latitude, man degenerates at length and yields to the incursion of more northern tribes.

‘Some nations yet shut in
With hills of ice.’

“There are other savager and more primeval aspects of Nature than our poets have sung. It is only white man’s poetry—Homer and Ossian even can never revive in London or Boston. And yet behold how these cities are refreshed by the mere tradition or the imperfectly transmitted fragrance and flavour of these wild fruits. If one could listen but for an instant to the chant of the Indian muse, we should understand why he will not exchange his savageness for civilization. Nations are not whimsical. Steel and blankets are strong temptations, but the Indian does well to continue Indian.”

These are no empty generalizations, but the comments of a man who has observed closely and sympathetically. All of Thoreau’s references to Indian life merit the closest attention. For, as I have said, they help to explain the man himself. He had a sufficient touch of wildness to be able to detach himself from the civilized man’s point of view. Hence the life of the woods came so naturally to him. The luxuries, the excitements, that mean so much to some, Thoreau passed by indifferently. There is much talk to-day of “the simple life,” and the phrase has become tainted with affectation. Often it means nothing more than a passing fad on the part of overfed society people who are anxious for a new sensation. A fad with a moral flavour about it will always commend itself to a certain section. Certainly it is quite innocuous, but, on the other hand, it is quite superficial. There is no real intention of living a simple life any more than there is any deep resolve on the part of the man who takes the Waters annually to abstain in the future from over-eating. But with Thoreau the simple life was a vital reality. He was not devoid of American self-consciousness, and perhaps he pats himself on the back for his healthy tastes more often than we should like. But of his fundamental sincerity there can be no question.

He saw even more clearly than Emerson the futility and debilitating effect of extravagance and luxury—

especially American luxury. And his whole life was an indignant protest.

Yet it is a mistake to think (as some do) that he favoured a kind of Rousseau-like “Return to Nature,” without any regard to the conventions of civilization. “It is not,” he states emphatically, “for a man to put himself in opposition to society, but to maintain himself in whatever attitude he finds himself through obedience to the laws of his own being, which will never be one of opposition to a just government. I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one.”

This is not the language of a crank, or the words of a man who, as Lowell unfairly said, seemed “to insist in public in going back to flint and steel when there is a match-box in his pocket.”

Lowell’s criticism of Thoreau, indeed, is quite wide of the mark. It assumes throughout that Thoreau aimed at “an entire independence of mankind,” when Thoreau himself repeatedly says that he aimed at nothing of the sort. He made an experiment for the purpose of seeing what a simple, frugal, open-air life would do for him. The experiment being made, he returned quietly to the conditions of ordinary life. But he did not lack self-assurance, and his frank satisfaction with the results of his experiment was not altogether pleasing to those who had scant sympathy with his passion for the Earth.

To be quite fair to Lowell and other hostile critics one must admit that, genuine as Thoreau was, he had

the habit common to all self-contained and self-opiniated men of talking at times as though his very idiosyncrasies were rules of conduct imperative upon others. His theory of life was sound enough, his demand for simple modes of living, for a closer communion with Nature, for a more sympathetic understanding of the “brute creation,” were reasonable beyond question. But the Emersonian mannerism (which gives an appearance of dogmatism, when no dogmatism is intended) starts up from time to time and gives the reader the impression that the path to salvation traverses Walden, all other paths being negligible, and that you cannot attain perfection unless you keep a pet squirrel.

But if a sentence here and there has an annoying flavour of complacent dogmatism, and if the note of self-assertion grows too loud on occasion for our sensitive ears, [102] yet his life and writings considered as a whole do not assuredly favour verdicts so unfavourable as those of Lowell and Stevenson.

Swagger and exaggeration may be irritating, but after all the important thing is whether a man has anything to swagger about, whether the case which he exaggerates is at heart sane and just.

Every Vagabond swaggers because he is an egotist more or less, and relishes keenly the life he has mapped out for himself. But the swagger is of the harmless kind; it is not really offensive; it is a sort of childish exuberance that plays over the surface of his mind,

without injuring it, the harmless vanity of one who having escaped from the schoolhouse of convention congratulates himself on his good luck.

Swagger of this order you will find in the writings even of that quiet, unassuming little man De Quincey. Hazlitt had no small measure of it, and certainly it meets us in the company of Borrow. It is very noticeable in Whitman—far more so than in Thoreau. Why then does this quality tend to exasperate more when we find it in Walden? Why has Thoreau’s sincerity been impugned and Whitman escaped? Why are Thoreau’s mannerisms greeted with angry frowns, and the mannerisms, say of Borrow, regarded with good-humoured intolerance? Chiefly, I think, because of Thoreau’s desperate efforts to justify his healthy Vagabondage by Emersonian formulas.

I am not speaking of his sane and comprehensive philosophy of life. The Vagabond has his philosophy of life no less than the moralist, though as a rule he is content to let it lie implicit in his writings, and is not anxious to turn it into a gospel. But he did not always realize the difference between moral characteristics and temperamental peculiarities, and many of his admirers have done him ill service by trying to make of his very Vagabondage (admirable enough in its way) a rule of faith for all and sundry. Indeed, I think that much of the resentment expressed against Thoreau by level-headed critics is due to the unwise eulogy of friends.

Thoreau has become an object of worship to the crank, and in our annoyance with the crank—who is often a

genuine reformer destitute of humour—we are apt to jumble up devotee and idol together. Idol-worship never does any good to the idol.