He was an author from the beginning. Of that, as he said himself, he was never in doubt. His ceaseless observation of nature—which some have decried as lacking purpose and method—and his daily journal were deliberately chosen means to that end. “Here have I been these forty years learning the language of these fields that I may the better express myself.” That was what he aimed at, let his subject be what it might,—to express himself.
Few writers have ever treated their work more seriously, or studied their art more industriously. He talked sometimes, to be sure, as if there were no art about it. To listen to him in such a mood, one might suppose that the fact and the thought were the only things to be considered, and that language followed of itself. Such was neither his belief nor his practice. But he was one of the fortunate ones who by taking pains can produce an effect of easiness; who can recast and recast a sentence, and in the end leave it looking as if it had dropped from a running pen. One of the fortunates, we say; for an air of innocent unconsciousness is as becoming in a sentence as in a face.
On this point a useful study in contrasts might be made between Thoreau and a man who gladly acknowledged him as one of his masters. “Upon me,” says Robert Louis Stevenson, “this pure, narrow, sunnily ascetic Thoreau had exercised a great charm. I have scarce written ten sentences since I was introduced to him, but his influence might be somewhere detected by a close observer.” The observer would need to be very close indeed, the majority of Stevensonians will think, but that, true or false, is nothing to the purpose here. Stevenson and Thoreau both made writing a lifelong study, and with exceedingly diverse results. The Scotchman’s style is the finer, but then it is sometimes in danger of becoming superfine. We may not wish it different. Such work must be as it is. It could hardly be better without being worse, the writing of fine prose being always a question of compromises, a gain here for a loss there, a choice of imperfections; perfect prose being in fact impossible, except in the briefest snatches. But surely Stevenson’s gift was not an absolute naturalness and transparency, such as lets the thought show through on the instant, and leaves the beauty of the verbal medium to catch the attention afterward, if the reader will. “For love of lovely words,” an artist of Stevenson’s temperament, however sound his theories, may sometimes find it hard to make a righteous choice between the music of an exquisite cadence and the pure expressiveness of a halting phrase. The author of “Walden” had his literary temptations, but not of this kind. Let the phrase halt, so long as it expressed a sturdy truth in sturdy fashion. As for that homely quality—“careless country talk”—which Thoreau prayed for, and in good measure received, it is questionable whether Stevenson ever sought it, though he would no doubt have assented to Thoreau’s words: “Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.”
Thoreau, indeed, first as a spiritual economist, and next as an artist, had a natural relish for the common and the plain. Every landscape that was dreary enough, as he says of Cape Cod, had a certain beauty in his eyes. Whether in literature or in life, he preferred the beauty that is inherent,—the beauty of the thing itself. Ornament, beauty laid on, did not much attract him. Among persons, it was the wilder-seeming, the less tamed and cultivated, with whom he liked to converse, and whose sayings he oftenest recorded. Though they might be crabbed specimens, “run all to thorn and rind, and crowded out of shape by adverse circumstances, like the third chestnut in the burr,” they were still what nature had made them. Even a crowd pleased him, if it was composed of the right materials,—that is to say, if it was rude enough. Thus he, a hermit, took pleasure in the autumnal cattle-show. With what a touch of affection he lays on the colors! “The wind goes hurrying down the country, gleaning every loose straw that is left in the fields, while every farmer lad, too, appears to scud before it,—having donned his best pea-jacket and pepper-and-salt waistcoat, his unbent trousers, outstanding rigging of duck, or kerseymere, or corduroy, and his furry hat withal,—to country fairs and cattle-shows, to that Rome among the villages where the treasures of the year are gathered. All the land over they go leaping the fences with their tough, idle palms, which have never learned to hang by their sides, amid the low of calves and the bleating of sheep,—Amos, Abner, Elnathan, Elbridge,—
‘From steep pine-bearing mountains to the plain.’
I love these sons of earth, every mother’s son of them.” It is worth while to see the country’s people, he thinks, and even the “supple vagabond,” who is “sure to appear on the least rumor of such a gathering, and the next day to disappear, and go into his hole like the seventeen-year locust.”
For the average (uninitiated) reader, be it said, there is nothing better in Thoreau than his thumb-nail sketches of humble, every-day humanity; as there is no part of his work, not even his denunciation of worldly conformity, or his picturing of nature’s moods, which is done with more absolute good will. A man need not be an idealist, a naturalist, or anything else out of the ordinary, to like the Canadian woodchopper, for example, cousin to the pine and the rock, who never was tired in his life, and, stranger still, sometimes acted as if he were “thinking for himself and expressing his own opinions;” or the old fisherman, always haunting the river in serene afternoons, and “almost rustling with the sedge;” or the Cape Cod wrecker, whose face was “like an old sail endowed with life,”—one of the Pilgrims, perhaps, who had “kept on the back side of the Cape and let the centuries go by;” or the free-spoken Wellfleet oysterman, “a poor good-for-nothing crittur,” now “under petticoat government,” who yet remembered George Washington as “a r-a-ther large and portly-looking man, with a pretty good leg as he sat on his horse;” or the iron-jawed Nauset woman, who seemed to be shouting at you through a breaker, and who looked “as if it made her head ache to live;” or the country soldier boy on his way to muster, in full regimentals, with shouldered musket and military step, who in a lonely place in the woods is suddenly abashed at the sight of a stranger approaching, and finds himself hard put to it to get by in anything like military order.
With men like these, natural men, Thoreau found himself at home; he described them almost as sympathetically as if they had been so many woodchucks or hen-hawks. As he said of his own boyhood, they were “part and parcel of nature” itself. As for fine manners parading about in fine clothes, how should he, a rustic jealous of his rusticity, presume to know what, if anything, might be going on under all that broadcloth? Reality was the chief of his ideals. The shabbiest of it was more to the purpose than a masquerade.
Whether it would have been better for him had his taste been more liberal in this respect is a question about which it might be useless to speculate. Breadth may easily be sought at too great an expense, especially by one who has a distinct and highly individual work to accomplish. First of all, such a man must be himself. His imperfections, even, must be of his own kind, twin-born with his better qualities, a certain lack of complaisance being one of the likeliest and, in the strict sense, most appropriate. But that some of Thoreau’s private and hasty remarks, in his letters and journals, about the meanness of his fellow-creatures, the more “respectable” among them, especially, might profitably have been left unprinted, is less open to doubt. They were expressions of moods rather than of convictions, it is fair to assume, and in any event would never have been printed by their author, one of whose cravings was for some kind of india-rubber that would rub out at once all which it cost him so many perusals and so much reluctance to erase. It is pretty hard justice that holds a man publicly to everything he scribbles in private,—as if no allowance were to be made for whim and the provocation of the moment. The charm of a journal, as Thoreau says, consists in a “certain greenness.” It is “a record of experiences and growth, not a preserve of things well done or said.” After which it may be confessed that even from “Walden” and the “Week,” published in the author’s lifetime, it is possible to discover that charity and sweetness were not among his most distinguishing characteristics. Taste him after Gilbert White, and contrast the mellowness of the one with the sharp, assertive, acidulous quality of the other. Thoreau was a wild apple, and would have been proud of the name, suggestive of that “tang and smack” which he so feelingly celebrated. “Nonesuches” and “seek-no-furthers” were very tame and forgettable, he thought, as compared with the wildings, even the acrid and the puckery among which he begrudged to the cider-mill. It is in part this very “tang and smack,” we may be sure, that makes his books keep so well in Time’s literary cellar.
His humor, especially, “indispensable pledge of sanity,” as he calls it, is of that best of fruity flavors, a pleasant sour. Some, indeed, emulating his own fertility in paradox, have maintained that he had no humor, while others have rebuked him for priggishly excluding it from his later work. Did such critics never read “Cape Cod”? There, surely, Thoreau gave his natural drollery full play,—an almost antinomian liberty, to take a word out of those ecclesiastical histories, with the reading of which, under his umbrella, he so patiently enlivened his sandy march from Orleans to Provincetown. “As I sat on a hill one sultry Sunday afternoon,” he says, “the meeting-house windows being open, my meditations were interrupted by the noise of a preacher who shouted like a boatswain, profaning the quiet atmosphere, and who, I fancied, must have taken off his coat. Few things could have been more disgusting or disheartening. I wished the tithing-man would stop him.” Charles Lamb himself could hardly have bettered the delicious, biting absurdity of that final touch. It was not this Boanergian minister, but a man of an earlier generation, of whom we are told that he wrote a “Body of Divinity,” “a book frequently sneered at, particularly by those who have read it.”