He set a low value on money. It might be of service to him, he once confessed, underscoring the doubt, but in general he accepted poverty as the better part. “We are often reminded,” he said, “that if there were bestowed on us the wealth of Crœsus, our aims must still be the same, and our means essentially the same.” Houses and lands, even, as he considered them, were often no better than incumbrances. Some of his well-to-do, highly respected, self-satisfied neighbors were as good as in prison, he thought. In what sense were men to be called free, if their “property” had put them under bonds to stay in such and such a place and do only such and such things? Life was more than meat, as he reckoned, and having trained himself to “strict business habits” (his own words), he did not believe in swapping a better thing for a poorer one. To him it was amazing that hard-headed, sensible men should stand at a desk the greater part of their days, and “glimmer and rust, and finally go out there.” “If they know anything,” he exclaimed, “what under the sun do they do that for?” He speaks as if the question were unanswerable; but no doubt many readers will find it easy enough, the only real difficulty being a deplorable scarcity of desks. For Thoreau’s part, at any rate, other men might save dollars if they would; he meant to save his soul. It should not glimmer and rust and go out, if a manly endeavor was good for anything. And he saved it. To the end he kept it alive; and though he died young, he lived a long life and did a long life’s work, and what is more to the present purpose, he left behind him a long memory.
His economies, which were so many and so rigorous, were worthy of a man. In kind, they were such as any man must practice who, having a task assigned him, is set upon doing it. If the river is to run the mill, it must contract itself. The law is general. To make sure of the best we must put away not only whatever is bad, but many things that of themselves are good,—a right hand, if need be, or a right eye, said one of old. For the artist, indeed, as for the saint,—for all seekers after perfection, that is,—the good and the best are often the most uncompromising of opposites, by no means to be entertained under the same roof. Manage it as we will, to receive one is to dismiss the other.
Rightly considered, Thoreau’s singularity consisted, not in his lodging in a cabin, nor in his wearing coarse clothes, nor in his non-observance of so-called social amenities, nor even in his passion for the wild, but in his view of the world and of his own place in it. He was a poet-naturalist, an idealist, an individualist, a transcendental philosopher, what you will; but first of all he was a prophet. “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness,” he might have said; and the locusts and wild honey followed as things of course. It followed, also, that the fathers neglected him,—stoning having gone out of fashion,—and the children garnish his sepulchre. A prophet is a very worthy person—after he is dead. Then come biographies, eulogies, and new editions of his works, including his journals and private letters. Fame is a plant that blossoms on graves; as a manual of such botany might say, “a late-flowering perennial, nowhere common, to be looked for in old cemeteries.”
A prophet, a writer, a student of nature: this was Thoreau, and the three were one.
He preached faith, simplicity, devotion to the ideal; and with all a prophet’s freedom he denounced everything antagonistic to these. He was not one of those nice people who are contented to speak handsomely of God and say nothing about the devil. It was not in his nature to halt between two opinions. He could always say yes or no—especially no. As was said of Pascal, there were no middle terms in his philosophy.
Withal, no man was more of a believer and less of a skeptic. Faith and hope, “infinite expectation,” were his daily breath. Charity was his, also, but less conspicuously, and after a pattern of his own, philanthropy, as he saw it practiced, being one of his prime aversions. He knew not the meaning of pessimism. The world was good. “I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.” To the final hour existence was a boon to him. “For joy I could embrace the earth,” he declared, though he seldom indulged himself in emotional expression; “I shall delight to be buried in it.” “It was not possible to be sad in his presence,” said his sister, speaking of his last illness. His may have been “a solitary and critical way of living,” to quote Emerson’s careful phrase, but in his work there is little trace of anything morbid or unwholesome. Some who might hesitate to rank themselves among his disciples keep by them a copy of “Walden,” or the “Week,” to dip into for refreshment and invigoration when life runs low and desire begins to fail. Readers of this kind please him better, we may guess, if he knows of them, than those who skim his pages for the natural history and the scenery. Such is the fate of prophets. The fulminations and entreaties of Isaiah are now highly recommended as specimens of Oriental belles-lettres. Yet worse things may befall a man than to be partially appreciated. As Thoreau himself said: “It is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom; as either the traveler may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a full stream.” His own was hardly a “full stream,” perhaps; a mountain brook rather than one of the world’s rivers; clear, cold, running from the spring, untainted by the swamp; less majestic than the Amazons, but not less unfailing, and for those who can climb, and who know the taste of purity, infinitely sweeter to drink from.
Simplicity of life and devotion to the ideal, the one a means to the other,—these he would preach, in season and, if possible, out of season. “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.” This, which, after all, is nothing but the old doctrine of the one thing needful,—since it is one mark of a prophet that he deals not in novelties, but in truth,—all this spiritual economy is connected at the root with Thoreau’s belief in free will, his vital assurance that the nobility or meanness of a man’s life is committed largely to his own choice. He may waste it on the trivial, or spend it on the essential. There is “no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.” And what a man is inwardly, that to him will the world be outwardly; his mood affects the very “quality of the day.” Could anything be truer or more finely suggested? For himself, Thoreau was determined to get the goodness out of time as it passed. He refused to be hurried. The hour was too precious. “If the bell rings, why should we run?” Neither would he knowingly take up with a second-best, or be put off with a sham,—as if there were nothing real. He would not “drive a nail into mere lath and plastering,” he declared. Such a deed would keep him awake nights. A very reasonable and practical kind of doctrine, certainly, whether it be called transcendentalism or common sense. Perhaps we discredit it with a long word by way of refusing the obligation it would lay us under.
And possibly it is for a similar reason that the world in general has agreed to regard Thoreau not as a preacher of righteousness, but as an interpreter of nature. For those who have settled down to take things as they are, having knocked under and gone with the stream, in Thoreau’s language, it is pleasanter to read of beds of water-lilies flashing open at sunrise, or of a squirrel’s pranks upon a bough, than of daily aspiration after an ideal excellence. Whatever the reason, Thoreau is to the many a man who lived out of doors, and wrote of outdoor things.
His attainments as a naturalist have been by turns exaggerated and belittled, one extreme following naturally upon the other. As for the exaggeration, nothing else was to be expected, things being as they were. It is what happens in every such case. If a man knows some of the birds, his neighbors, who know none of them, celebrate him at once as an ornithologist. If he is reputed to “analyze” flowers,—pull them to pieces under a pocket-lens, and by means of a key find out their polysyllabic names,—he straightway becomes famous as a botanist; all of which is a little as if the ticket-seller and the grocer’s clerk should be hailed as financiers because of their facility in making change.
Thoreau knew his local fauna and flora after a method of his own, a method which, for lack of a better word, may be called sympathetic. Nobody was ever more successful in getting inside of a bird; and that, from his point of view and for his purpose,—and not less for ours who read him,—was the one important thing. After that it mattered little if some of his flying neighbors escaped his notice altogether, while others led him a vain chase year after year, and are still, in his published journals, a puzzle to readers. Who knows what his night warbler was, or, with certainty, his seringo bird? The latter, indeed, a native of his own Concord hay-fields, he seems to have been pretty well acquainted with as a bird; its song was familiar to him, and less frequently he caught sight of the singer itself perched upon a fence-post or threading its way through the grass; but he had found no means of ascertaining its name, and so was driven to the primitive expedient of christening it with an invention of his own. His description of its appearance and notes leaves us in no great doubt as to its identity; probably it was the savanna sparrow; but how completely in the dark he himself was upon this point may be gathered from an entry in his journal of 1854. He had gone to Nantucket, in late December, and there saw, running along the ruts, flocks of “a gray, bunting-like bird about the size of the snow-bunting. Can it be the seaside finch,” he asks, “or the savanna sparrow, or the shore lark?” Savanna sparrow, or shore lark! A Baldwin apple, or a russet! But what then? There are gaps in every scholar’s knowledge, and the man who has “named all the birds without a gun” is yet to be heard from. It is fair to remind ourselves, also, that Thoreau’s studies in this line were pursued under limitations and disadvantages to which the amateur of our later day is happily a stranger. Ornithologically, it is a long time since Thoreau’s death, though it is less than forty-five years.