Friends on the Shelf

by Bradford Torrey

And what was true of seasons was, in the long run, equally true of places. Let them be wild, by all means, yet not too wild. When he returned from the Maine woods, he had seen, for the time being, enough of the wilderness. It was a relief to get back to the smooth but still varied landscape of eastern Massachusetts. That, for a permanent residence, seemed to him incomparably better than an unbroken forest. The poet must live open to the sky and the wind; his road must be prepared for him; and yet, “not only for strength, but for beauty, the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger’s path and the Indian’s trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the Muses.” In short, the poet should live in Concord, and only once in a while seek the inspirations of the outer wilderness.

What we have called Thoreau’s stoicism (knowing very well that he was not a stoic, except in some partial, looser meaning of the word), his liking for plainness and low expense, is perhaps at the base of one of his rarest excellencies as a writer upon nature,—his reserve and moderation. In statement, it is true, he could extravagate like a master. He boasts, as well he may, of his prowess in that direction; but in tone and sentiment, when it came to dealing, not with ethics or philosophy, but with the mistress of his affections, he kept always decently within bounds. He had a very sprightly fancy, when he chose to give it play; but he had with it, and controlling it, a prevailing sobriety, the tempering grace of good sense. “The alder,” he says, “is one of the prettiest trees and shrubs in the winter. It is evidently so full of life, with its conspicuously pretty red catkins dangling from it on all sides. It seems to dread the winter less than other plants. It has a certain heyday and cheery look, less stiff than most, with more of the flexible grace of summer. With those dangling clusters of red catkins which it switches in the face of winter, it brags for all vegetation. It is not daunted by the cold, but still hangs gracefully over the frozen stream.”

Most admirable, thrown in thus by the way, amid unaffected, matter-of-fact description and every-day sense, and with its homely “brags” and “switches” to hold it true,—to save it from a touch of foppery, a shade too much of prettiness. How differently some writers have dealt with similar themes: men so afraid of the commonplace as to be incapable of saying a thing in so many words, though it were only to mention the day of the week; men whose every other sentence must contain a “felicity;” whose pages are as full of floweriness and dainty conceits as a milliner’s window; who surfeit you with confections, till you think of bread and water as a feast. Whether Thoreau’s temperance is to be credited to the restraints of stoical philosophy or to plain good taste, it is a virtue to be thankful for.

With him the study of nature was not an amusement, nor even a more or less serious occupation for leisure hours, but the work of his life; a work to which he gave himself from year’s end to year’s end, as faithfully and laboriously, and with as definite a purpose,—a crop as truly in his eye,—as any Concord farmer gave himself to his farm. He was no amateur, no dilettante, no conscious hobbyist, laughing between times at his own absorption. His sense of a mission was as unquestioning as Wordsworth’s, though happily there went with it a sense of humor that preserved it in good measure from over-emphasis and damaging iteration.

In degree, if not in kind, this wholehearted, lifelong devotion was something new. It was one of Thoreau’s originalities. To what a pitch he carried it, how serious and all-controlling it was, the pages of his journal bear continual witness. His was a Puritan conscience. He could never do his work well enough. After a eulogy of winter buds, “impregnable, vivacious willow catkins, but half asleep along the twigs” (there, again, is fancy of an uncloying type), he breaks out: “How healthy and vivacious must he be who would treat of these things. You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the sweet crust of any bread or cake; you must be able to extract nutriment out of a sand heap.” “Must” was a great word with Thoreau. In hard times, especially, he braced himself with it. “The winter, cold and bound out as it is, is thrown to us like a bone to a famishing dog, and we are expected to get the marrow out of it. While the milkmen in the outskirts are milking so many scores of cows before sunrise, these winter mornings, it is our task to milk the winter itself. It is true it is like a cow that is dry, and our fingers are numb, and there is none to wake us up.... But the winter was not given us for no purpose. We must thaw its cold with our genialness. We are tasked to find out and appropriate all the nutriment it yields. If it is a cold and hard season, its fruit no doubt is the more concentrated and nutty.”

In these winter journalizings, we not only have example and proof of the earnestness with which Thoreau pursued his outdoor studies, but are shown their method and their sufficient object. He was to be a writer, and nature was to be his theme, or, more exactly, his medium of expression. He required, therefore, in the way of raw material, a considerable store of outward knowledge,—knowledge of the outside or aspect of things,—classified, for convenience, as botany, ornithology, entomology, and the like; but after this, and infinitely more than this, he needed a living, deepening intimacy with the life of the world itself. For observation of the ways of plants and animals, of the phases of earth and sky, he had endless patience and all necessary sharpness of sense; work of this kind was easy,—he could do it in some good degree to his satisfaction; the vexatious thing about it was that it readily became too absorbing; but his real work, his hard work, the work that was peculiarly his, that taxed his capacities to the full, and even so was never accomplished, this work was not an amassing of relative knowledge, an accumulation of facts, a familiarizing of himself with appearances, but a perfecting of sympathy, the organ or means of that absolute knowledge which alone he found indispensable, which alone he cared greatly to communicate. There, except at rare moments, he was to the last below his ideal. His “task” was never done. His union with nature was never complete.

The measure of this union was gauged, as we have seen already, by its spiritual and emotional effects, by the mental states it brought him into; as the religious mystic measures the success of his prayers. He walked in the old Carlisle road, as the saint goes to his knees, to “put off worldly thoughts.” The words are his own. There, when the hour favored him, he “sauntered near to heaven’s gate.”

It must be only too evident that success of this transcendental quality is not to be counted upon as one counts upon finding specimens for a botanical box. There is no comparison between scientific pursuits, so called, and this kind of supernatural history. For this, as Thoreau says, “you must be in a different state from common.” “If it were required to know the position of the fruit dots or the character of the indusium, nothing could be easier than to ascertain it; but if it is required that you be affected by ferns, that they amount to anything, signify anything, to you, that they be another sacred scripture and revelation to you, helping to redeem your life, this end is not so easily accomplished.”

This, then, it was for which Thoreau was ever on the alert; this was the prize set before him; this he required of ferns and clouds, of birds and swamps and deserted roads,—that they should stir him inwardly, that they should do something to redeem his life, or, as he said elsewhere, to affect the quality of the day. For this he cultivated the “fellowship of the seasons,” a fellowship on which no man ever made larger drafts. Even when nature seemed to be getting “thumbed like an old spelling-book,” even in the month that tempted him sometimes to “eat his heart,” he still “sat the bench with perfect contentment, unwilling to exchange the familiar vision that was to be unrolled for any treasure or heaven that could be imagined.” A new November was a novelty more tempting than any voyage to Europe or even to another world. “Young men have not learned the phases of nature:” so he comforted himself, when the fervors and inspirations of youth seemed at times to be waning: “I would know when in the year to expect certain thoughts and moods, as the sportsman knows when to look for plover.”

Here, as everywhere with Thoreau, nature, in his ultimate conception of it, was nothing of itself. Everything is for man. This belief underlies all his writing upon natural themes, and, as well, all his personal dealings with the natural world. His idlest wanderings, whether in the Maine forests or in Well Meadow field, were made serious by it. To judge him by his own testimony, he seems to have known comparatively little of a careless, purposeless, childish delight in nature for its own sake. Nature was a better kind of book; and books were for improvement. In this respect he was sophisticated from his youth, like some model of “early piety.” Nature was not his playground, but his study, his Bible, his closet, his means of grace. As we have said, and as Channing long ago implied, his was a Puritan conscience. He must get at the heart of things, sparing no pains nor time, holding through thick and thin to the devotee’s faith: “To him that knocketh it shall be opened.” In this spirit he waited upon nature and the motions of his own genius. Patience, solitude, stillness, sincerity, and a quiet mind,—these were the instruments of his art. With them, not with prying sharp-sightedness, was the secret to be won. In his own phrase, characteristic in its homely expressiveness, if you would appreciate a phenomenon, though it be only a fern, you must “camp down beside it.” And you must invent no distinctions of great and small. The humming of a gnat must be as significant as the music of the spheres.