In an attempt at an extreme statement, Thoreau was very unlikely to fail. Thanks to an inherited aptitude and years of practice, there have been few to excel him with the high lights. In his hands exaggeration becomes one of the fine arts. We will not call it the finest art; his own best work would teach us better than that; but such as it is, with him to hold the brush, it would be difficult to imagine anything more effective. When he praises a quaking swamp as the most desirable of dooryards, or has visions of a people so enlightened as to burn all their fences and leave all the forests to grow, who shall contend with him? And yet the sympathetic reader—the only reader—knows what is meant, and what is not meant, and finds it good; as he finds it good when he is bidden to resist not a thief, or to hate his father and mother.
Thoreau’s love for the wild—not to be confounded with a liking for natural history or an appreciation of scenery—was as natural and unaffected as a child’s love of sweets. It belonged to no one part of his life. It finds utterance in all his books, but is best expressed, most feelingly and simply, and therefore most convincingly, in his journal, especially in such an entry as that of January 7, 1857, a bitterly cold, windy day, with snow blowing,—one of the days when “all animate things are reduced to their lowest terms.” Thoreau has been out, nevertheless, for his afternoon walk, “through the woods toward the cliffs along the side of the Well Meadow field.” Contact with Nature, even in this her severest mood, has given a quickening yet restraining grace to his pen. Now, there is no question of “emphasis,” no plotting for an “extreme statement,” no thought of dull readers, for whom the truth must be shown large, as it were, by some magic-lantern process. How differently he speaks! “Might I aspire to praise the moderate nymph Nature,” he says, “I must be like her, moderate.”
The passage is too long for quotation in full. “There is nothing so sanative, so poetic,” he writes, “as a walk in the woods and fields even now, when I meet none abroad for pleasure. Nothing so inspires me, and excites such serene and profitable thought.... Alone in distant woods or fields, in unpretending sprout-lands or pastures tracked by rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day like this, when a villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related. This cold and solitude are friends of mine.... I get away a mile or two from the town, into the stillness and solitude of nature, with rocks, trees, weeds, snow about me. I enter some glade in the woods, perchance, where a few weeds and dry leaves alone lift themselves above the surface of the snow, and it is as if I had come to an open window. I see out and around myself.... This stillness, solitude, wildness of nature is a kind of thoroughwort or boneset to my intellect. This is what I go out to seek. It is as if I always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging, though invisible companion, and walked with him.”
Four days later, dwelling still upon his “success in solitary and distant woodland walking outside the town,” he says: “I do not go there to get my dinner, but to get that sustenance which dinners only preserve me to enjoy, without which dinners are a vain repetition.... I never chanced to meet with any man so cheering and elevating and encouraging, so infinitely suggestive, as the stillness and solitude of the Well Meadow field.”
Language like this, though all may perceive the beauty and feel the sincerity of it, is to be understood only by those who are of the speaker’s kin. It describes a country which no man knows unless he has been there. It expresses life, not theory, and calls for life on the part of the hearer.
And if the appeal be made to this tribunal, the language used here and so often elsewhere, by Thoreau, touching the relative inferiority of human society will neither give offense nor seem in any wise extravagant or morbid. Thoreau knew Emerson; he had lived in the same house with him; but even Emerson’s companionship was less stimulating to him than Nature’s own. Well, and how is it with ourselves, who have the best of Emerson in his books? Much as these may have done for us, have we never had seasons of communion with the life of the universe itself when even Emerson’s words would have seemed an intrusion? Is not the voice of the world, when we can hear it, better than the voice of any man interpreting the world? Is it not better to hear for ourselves than to be told what another has heard? When the forest speaks things ineffable, and the soul hears what even to itself it can never utter,—for such an hour there is no book, there never will be. And if we wish not a book, no more do we wish the author of a book. We are in better company. In such hours,—too few, alas!—though we be the plainest of plain people, our own emotions are of more value than any talk. We know, in our measure, what Thoreau—
“An early unconverted Saint”—
was seeking words for when he said, “I feel my Maker blessing me.”
To him, as to many another man, visitations of this kind came oftenest in wild and solitary places. Small wonder, then, that he loved to go thither. Small wonder that he found the pleasures of society unsatisfying in the comparison. There he communed, not with himself nor with his fellow, but with the “Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe.” And when it is objected that this ought not to have been true, that he ought to have found the presence of men more elevating and stimulating than the presence of “inanimate” nature, we must take the liberty to believe that the critic speaks of that whereof he knows nothing. To revert to our own figure, he has never lived in Thoreau’s country.
Thoreau was wedded to Nature not so much for her beauty as for delight in her high companionableness. There was more of Wordsworth than of Keats or Ruskin in him. He was more philosopher than poet, perhaps we may say. He loved spirit rather than form and color, though for these also his eye was better than most. Being a stoic, a born economist, a child of the pinched and frozen North, he felt most at home with Nature in her dull seasons. His delight in a wintry day was typical. He loved his mistress best when she was most like himself; as he said of human friendships, “I love that one with whom I sympathize, be she ‘beautiful’ or otherwise, of excellent mind or not.” The swamp, the desert, the wilderness, these he especially celebrated. He began by thinking that nothing could be too wild for him; and even in his later years, notably in the “Atlantic” essay above quoted, he sometimes blew the same heroic strain. By this time, however, he knew and confessed, to himself at least, that there was another side to the story; that there was a dreariness beyond even his ready appreciation. More than once we find in his diary expressions like this, in late November: “Now a man will eat his heart, if ever, now while the earth is bare, barren, and cheerless, and we have the coldness of winter without the variety of ice and snow.”