The whole Cape, past and present, was looked at half quizzically by its inland visitor. The very houses “seemed, like mariners ashore, to have sat right down to enjoy the firmness of the land, without studying their postures or habiliments,”—a description not to be fully appreciated except by those who have seen a Cape Cod village, with its buildings dropped here and there at haphazard upon the sand. Here, as everywhere, he was hungry for particulars; now improvising a rude quadrant with which to calculate the height of the bank at Highland Light, now, by ingenious but “not impertinent” questions, and for his private satisfaction only, getting at the contents of a schoolboy’s dinner-pail,—the homeliest facts being always “the most acceptable to an inquiring mind.” Thoreau’s mother, by-the-bye, had some reputation as a gossip.
His work, humorous or serious, transcendental or matter-of-fact, is all the fruit of his own tree. Whatever its theme, nature or man, it is all of one spirit. Think what you will of it, it is never insipid. As his friend Channing said, it has its “stoical merits,” its “uncomfortableness.” Well might its author express his sympathy with the barberry bush, whose business is to ripen its fruit, not to sweeten it,—and to protect it with thorns. “Seek the lotus, and take a draught of rapture,” was Margaret Fuller’s rather high-flown advice to him; yet she too perceived that his mind was “not a soil for the citron and the rose, but for the whortleberry, the pine, or the heather.” In all his books it would be next to impossible to find a pretty phrase or a sentimental one. He resorted to nature—in his less inquisitive hours—for the mood into which it put him, the invigoration, the serenity, the mental activity it communicated. But his pleasure in it, as compared with Wordsworth’s or Hazlitt’s, to take very dissimilar examples, was mostly an intellectual affair, the reader is tempted to say, though the remark needs qualification. One remembers such a passage as that descriptive of a winter twilight in Yellow Birch Swamp, where the gleams of the birches, as he came to one after another of them, “each time made his heart beat faster.” Yet even here we are told of his ecstasy rather than made to feel it; and in general, surely, though he valued his emotions, and went to the woods and fields to enjoy them, they were such emotions as belonged to a pretty stoical sort of Epicurean; less rapturous than Wordsworths, less tender than Hazlitt’s, and with no trace of the brooding melancholy which makes the charm of books like Obermann and the journal of Amiel. He delighted in artless country music (it does not appear that he ever heard any other, and of course he felicitated himself upon this as upon all the rest of his poverty; it was only the depraved ear, he thought, that needed the opera), but let any reader try to imagine him writing this bit out of one of Hazlitt’s essays:—
“I remember once strolling along the margin of a stream, skirted with willows and plashy sedges, in one of those low, sheltered valleys on Salisbury Plain, where the monks of former ages had planted chapels and built hermits’ cells. There was a little parish church near, but tall elms and quivering alders hid it from sight, when, all of a sudden, I was startled by the sound of the full organ pealing on the ear, accompanied by rustic voices and the willing quire of village maids and children. It rose, indeed, ‘like an exhalation of rich distilled perfumes.’ The dew from a thousand pastures was gathered in its softness; the silence of a thousand years spoke in it. It came upon the heart like the calm beauty of death; fancy caught the sound, and faith mounted on it to the skies. It filled the valley like a mist, and still poured out its endless chant, and still it swells upon the ear, and wraps me in a golden trance, drowning the noisy tumult of the world!”
Here is another spirit than Thoreau’s, another voice, another kind of prose—prose with the throb and even the accent of poetry. Stoics and spiritual economists do not write in this strain, nor is this the manner of a too envious observer of particulars. For better or worse, the prose of our poet-naturalist went squarely on its feet. His fancy might be never so nimble; conceit and paradox might fairly make a cloud about him; but he essayed no flights. If his heart beat faster at some beauty of sight or sound, he said so quietly, with no change of voice, and passed on. As far as the mere writing went, it was done in straightforward, honest fashion, as if a man rather than an author held the pen.
Thoreau believed in well-packed sentences, each carrying its own weight, expressive of its own thought, rememberable and quotable. Of the beauties of a flowing style he had heard something too much. In practice, nevertheless, whether through design or by some natural felicity, he steered a middle course. The sentences might be complete in themselves, detachable, able to stand alone, but the paragraph never lacked a logical and even a formal cohesion. It was not a collection of “infinitely repellent particles,” nor even a “basket of nuts.” A great share of the writer’s art, as he taught it, lay in leaving out the unessential,—the getting in of the essential having first been taken for granted. As for readers, in his more exalted moods he wished to write so well that there would be few to appreciate him; sometimes, indeed, he seemed to desire no readers at all. He speaks with stern disapproval of such as trouble themselves upon that point, and “would fain have one reader before they die.” A lamentable weakness, truly.
In his present estate, however, let us hope that he carries himself a shade less haughtily, and is not above an innocent pleasure in the spread of his earthly fame, in new readers and new editions, and such choicely limited popularity as befits a classic. Even in his lifetime, as Emerson tells the story, he once tried to believe that something in his lecture might interest a little girl who told him she was going to hear it if it wasn’t to be one of those old philosophical things that she didn’t care about; and this although he had just been maintaining, characteristically, that whatever succeeded with an audience must be bad. He speaks somewhere against luxurious books, with superfluous paper and marginal embellishments. His taste was Spartan in those days. But he was never a stickler for consistency, and we may indulge a comfortable assurance that he takes no offense now at the sight of his Cape Cod journey—in which he worked so hard on that soft, leg-tiring Back-Side beach to get the ocean into him—decked out in colors and set forth sumptuously in two volumes. It is a very modest author who fears that his text will be outshone by any pictures, no matter how splendid. But who would have thought it, fifty years ago,—a book by the hermit of Walden in an édition de luxe, to lie on parlor tables! If only his father and his brother John could have seen it!
Thoreau believed in himself and in the soundness of his work. He coveted readers, and believed that he should have them. Without question he wrote for the future, and foresaw himself safe from oblivion. Emerson regretted Henry’s want of ambition, we are told. He might have spared himself. “Show me a man who consults his genius,” said Thoreau, “and you have shown me a man who cannot be advised.” And he was the man. He was following an ambition of his own. If he did not keep step with his companions, it was because he “heard a different drummer.” His ambition, and what seemed his wayward singularity, have been justified by the event. His “strange, self-centred, solitary figure, unique in the annals of literature,” is in no danger of being forgotten. But what is most cheering about his present increasing vogue, especially in England, is that it arises from the very quality that Thoreau himself most prized, the innermost thing in him,—the loftiness and purity of his thought. Simplicity, faith, devotion to the essential and the permanent,—these were never more needed than now. These he taught, and, by a happy fate, he linked them with those natural themes that change not with time, and so can never become obsolete.
THOREAU’S DEMAND UPON NATURE
THOREAU’S DEMAND UPON NATURE
“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness.” So Thoreau began an article in “The Atlantic Monthly” forty-four years ago. He wished to make an extreme statement, he declared, in hope of making an emphatic one. Like idealists in general,—like Jesus in particular,—he believed in omitting qualifications and exceptions. Those were matters certain to be sufficiently insisted upon by the orthodox and the conservative, the minister and the school committee.