If any be disposed to insist, as some have insisted, that he made no discoveries (he discovered a new way of writing about nature, for one thing), and was more curious than scientific in his spirit and method as an observer, it is perhaps sufficient to reply that he cultivated his own field. From first to last he refused the claims of science,—whether rightly or wrongly is not here in question,—and with the exception of one or two brief essays wrote nothing directly upon natural history. He worshiped Nature, even while he played the spy upon her, fearing her enchantments and “looking at her with the side of his eye.” Run over the titles of his books: “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” “Walden,” “The Maine Woods,” “Cape Cod,” “A Yankee in Canada,” “Excursions.” The first two are studies in high and plain living,—practical philosophy, spiritual economy, the right use of society and solitude, books and nature. The rest are narratives of travel, with a record of what the traveler saw and thought and felt. In “Excursions,” to be sure, there is an early paper on “The Natural History of Massachusetts,” to which, by straining a point, we may add one on “The Succession of Forest Trees,” another on “Autumnal Tints,” and still another on “Wild Apples.” Elsewhere, though the landscape is sure to be carefully studied, it is always a landscape with figures. In truth, while he wrote so much of outward nature, and so often seemed to find his fellow-mortals no better than intruders upon the scene, his real subject was man. “Man is all in all,” he says; “Nature nothing but as she draws him out and reflects him.” And again he said, “Any affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects.”
The latter sentence was written shortly after the death of John Brown, in whose fate Thoreau had been so completely absorbed that his old Concord world, when he came back to it, had almost a foreign look to him, and he remarked with a start of surprise that the little grebe was still diving in the river. With all his devotion to nature and philosophy, it was the “human event” that really concerned him. But of course he had ideas of his own as to what constituted an event. As for men’s so-called affairs, and all that passes current under the name of news, nothing could be less eventful; for all such things he could never sufficiently express his contempt. “In proportion as our inward life fails,” he says, “we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office.” And he adds, in that peculiarly airy manner of his to which one is tempted sometimes to apply the old Yankee adjective “toplofty,” “I would not run round the corner to see the world blow up.” After which, the reader whose bump of incuriosity is less highly developed may console himself by remembering that when a powder-mill blew up in the next town, Thoreau, hearing the noise, ran downstairs, jumped into a wagon, and drove post-haste to the scene of the disaster. So true is it that it is
“the most difficult of tasks to keep
Heights which the soul is competent to gain.”
Careful economist as Thoreau was, bravely as he trusted his own intuitions and kept to his own path, much as he preached simplicity and heroically as he practiced it, he shared the common lot and fell short of his own ideal. Life is never quite so simple as he attempted to make it, and he, like other men, was conscious of a divided mind. He had by nature a bias toward the investigation of natural phenomena, a passion for particulars, which, if he had been less a poet and philosopher, might have made him a man of science. He knew it, and was inwardly chafed by it. Perhaps it was because of this chafing that he fell into the habit of speaking so almost spitefully of science and scientific men. Not to lay stress upon his frequent paradoxes about the superiority of superstition to knowledge, the advantages of astrology over astronomy, the slight importance of precision in matters of detail (“I can afford to be inaccurate”),—to say nothing of these things, which, taken as they were meant, are not without a measure of truth, and with which no lover of Thoreau will be much disposed to quarrel (those who cannot abide the nudge of a paradox or an inch or two of exaggeration may as well let him alone), it is plain that in certain moods, especially in his later years, his own semi-scientific researches were felt to be a hindrance to the play of his higher faculties. “It is impossible for the same person to see things from the poet’s point of view and that of the man of science,” he writes in 1842. “Man cannot afford to be a naturalist,” he says again, in 1853. “I feel that I am dissipated by so many observations.... Oh, for a little Lethe!” And a week afterward he falls into the same strain, in a tone of reminiscence that is of the very rarest with him. “Ah, those youthful days,” he breaks out, “are they never to return? when the walker does not too enviously observe particulars, but sees, hears, scents, tastes, and feels only himself, the phenomena that showed themselves in him, his expanding body, his intellect and heart. No worm or insect, quadruped or bird, confined his view, but the unbounded universe was his. A bird has now become a mote in his eye.” What devotee of natural science, if he be also a man of sensibility and imagination, does not feel the sincerity of this cry?
But having delivered himself thus passionately, what does the diarist set down next? Without a break he goes on: “Dug into what I take to be a woodchuck’s burrow in the low knoll below the cliffs. It was in the side of the hill, and sloped gently downward at first diagonally into the hill about five feet, perhaps westerly, then turned and ran north about three feet, then northwest further into the hill four feet, then north again four feet, then northeast I know not how far, the last five feet, perhaps, ascending,”—with as much more of the same tenor and equally detailed. A laughable paragraph, surely, to follow a lament over a too envious observation of particulars; with its “perhaps” four times repeated, its five feet westerly, three feet northerly, and so on, like a conveyancer’s description of a wood-lot: and all about a hole in the ground, which he “took to be” a woodchuck’s burrow!
In vain shall a man bestir himself to run away from his own instincts. In vain, in such a warfare, shall he trust to the freedom of the will. Happily for himself, and happily for the world, Thoreau, though he “could not afford to be a naturalist,” could never cease from his “too envious observation.”
By inclination and habit he liked to see and do things for himself, as if they had never been seen or done before. That was one mark of his individualistic temper, not to say a chief mark of his genius. He describes in his journal an experiment in making sugar from the sap of red maple trees. Here, too, he goes into the minutest details, not omitting the size of the holes he bored and the frequency with which the drops fell,—about as fast as his pulse beat. His father, he mentions (the son was then forty years old), chided him for wasting his time. There was no occasion for the experiment, the father thought; it was well known that the thing could be done; and as for the sugar, it could be bought cheaper at the village shop. “He said it took me from my studies,” the journal records. “I said that I made it my study, and felt as if I had been to a university.” If fault-finding is in order, an individualist prefers to administer it on his own account. One remembers Thoreau’s characteristic declaration that he had never received the first word of valuable counsel from any of his elders. In the present instance, surely, as much as this must be said for him,—that by habits of this unpractical-seeming kind knowledge is made peculiarly one’s own, and, old or new, keeps something of the freshness of discovery upon it. The critic may smile, but even he will not dispute the charm of writing done in such a spirit,—the very spirit in which the old books were written, in the childhood of the world.
Even the edibility of white-oak acorns affected Thoreau, at the age of forty, as a new fact. So far as his feeling about it was concerned, the fruit might have been that morning created. “The whole world is sweeter” to him for having “discovered” it. “To have found two Indian gouges and tasted sweet acorns, is it not enough for one afternoon?” he asks himself. And the next day, shrewd economist and exaggerator that he is, he tries his new dainty again, and behold, a second discovery: the acorns “appear to dry sweet!” One need not be a critic, but only a homely-witted, country-bred Yankee, to smile at this. But indeed, it is a relief to be able to smile now and then at one who held himself so high and aloof,—“a Switzer on the edge of the glacier,” as he called himself; who found no wisdom too lofty for him, no companionship quite lofty enough; and who, in his longing for something better than the best, could exclaim, “Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand.” Not that we feel any diminution of our respect or affection; but it pleases us to have met our Switzer for once on something near our own level. In an author, as in a friend, an amiable weakness, if there be strength enough behind it, is only another point of attraction.
As a writer, Thoreau is by himself. There are no other books like “Walden” and the “Week.” The reader may like them or leave them (unless he is pretty sure of himself, he may be advised to try “Walden” first), he will find nowhere else the same combination of pure nature and austere philosophy. It is hard even to see with what to compare them, or to conceive of any one else as having written them. If Marcus Aurelius, with half his sweetness of temper eliminated, and something of sharpness, together with liberal measures of cool intellectuality, injected, could have been united with Gilbert White, rather less radically transformed, and if the resultant complex person had made it his business to write, we can perhaps imagine that his work would not have been in all respects unlike that of the sage of Walden; in saying which we have but taken a circuitous course back to our former position, that Thoreau was a man of his own kind.