It was a strange freak of nature that manifested itself in Concord, Mass., July 12th, 1817, by the birth of a Thoreau child to which was given the name of Henry David. In breeding parlance he was a “sport,” but from the social standpoint, he was far removed from it. He did not have the varied ancestry that Sinclair Lewis gives Doctor Martin Arrowsmith, but it was diversified enough to satisfy any one. Three distinct chromosonic streams, French, Scotch and Saxon, confluented in him. His father was the son of a Frenchman born in the Isle of Jersey who married Jane Burns, daughter of a Quaker Scotch who emigrated to Massachusetts. His mother’s forebears, the Dunbars and the Jones, had been long enough in this country to be entitled to the designation American.
There was little of Hermes in Henry Thoreau, but that little he got from a maternal uncle, Charles Dunbar, and from him also he got his unconventionally, his wanderlust, his self-command, his equilibrium and determination. Uncle Charles had a disdain for taking thought of the morrow that amounted to contempt and nephew Henry inherited it. Where he got his self-sufficiency, his indifference to man and his comforts, his amatory dysesthesia we are still uninformed.
No biographer has ever found much material for his pen in the plastic years of Thoreau. M. Bazalgette has been no more successful than his predecessors. Thoreau’s most distinctive urge: love of nature, and the most conspicuous feature of his personality: self-sufficiency, revealed themselves early in life and accompanied him to the day of his death, and that is all there is to be said. Neither in school nor in college did his conduct suggest scholarship or antinomianism, but on leaving Harvard his Commencement Oration, in which he unrolled his map of life, suggested them both. His auditors perceived but did not apprehend that the future itinerant surveyor had had other engrossments than examinations at Harvard. For him “this curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used. The order of things should be somewhat reversed: the seventh should be man’s day of toil wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow, and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul.” The distinguishing feature of the paranoiac is that he reasons logically, often trenchantly, but his premises are always wrong. One could argue that the world is the most congenial place we know, that its usefulness is testified by the mouths that it feeds, that those whom it supports would not go very far should they substitute admiration for use of it.
Radicalism which had budded slowly in college flowered quickly at home. It disturbed his family and annoyed his town-folk but water on a duck’s back was a riot compared to the sensations that their disturbance and annoyance caused in him. Had he been in the habit of invoking supernatural aid he probably would have said, “God help me, I can do no other.” A college course nearly a century ago was supposed to prepare for a vocation, but Henry Thoreau manifested no sign that it had prepared him. He began to teach in the public school, but his ideas and conduct were offensive to parent and taxpayer, so he started a school of his own and began to be keenly attentive to his sole confidant, his diary; and he built a boat. In it, he and his brother John went from Concord, Mass., to Concord, New Hampshire. The description of that trip is the only tiresome section in M. Bazalgette’s book. This is all the more astonishing to one who read The Week in his boyhood, was fascinated by it, and who has read parts of it many times since then.
Thoreau’s contact with the transcendentalists is described most sympathetically, and the sketches which the author makes of some of the leading figures, Emerson, Alcott, Channing, Margaret Fuller, are animated and vigorous. If ever one falls in love with Thoreau it is when he goes to the Emersons, to work for his board, as it were. Here for the first time, he seems to be human: his playfulness with the children, his praise of Mrs. Fuller, his appreciation of Aunt Mary testify his kinship to man. The chip which he seemed always to carry on his shoulder when he frequented the haunts of man, was consigned to the woodbox and quickly burnt up. Here he indulged his tastes and developed his ambition. The fields and the woods told him their secrets and his host took him on adventurous excursions through the clouds into the realms of philosophy. The children adored him, birds trusted him, beasts loved him. Thoreau was happy and admitted it. But happiness like all other things in the world is transitory and cyclical. He found it out when he went to Staten Island to tutor the Philosopher’s nephew. Neither the child nor the parents was sympathetic, and he was soon back in Concord helping his father make pencils. Manual labour was, in his opinion, the thing which agrees best with an intellectual worker. It would seem to have been congenial to him—at times. Agrippa would probably have agreed with him but scarcely any one this side of the Roman. But that no one was in accord with him would not have disturbed Henry Thoreau. Like all possessors of paranoiac trends, he had faith and confidence in himself that transcended in intensity and depth every other kind of faith and confidence. He was not like other men. He was an American who cared nothing about getting on; a Yankee without the slightest relish for trading; a man who seemed bent on remaining poor; an individual in whose veins flowed the blood of the Celt and the Gaul, whose temperature had never been raised by any of Eve’s descendants; he was the one man in all the world who did not need a friend. He could heed nothing that was said by man and he could hear everything that was said by Nature. Public opinion was against him, but he had a contempt for public opinion and for those who made it that words are impotent to express. He liked all animal life, man least of all. The higher one goes in the scale of animal life, the less the species understood him and trusted him. His fellows found him conceited, sarcastic, uppish; animals found him kind, companionable and simple. Men doubted his sincerity and his sanity, but their doubt was founded on their own fatuity. Animals trusted him. He was in love with the world and satisfied with himself. He was more incapable of love than Amiel. He had some family feeling as a child, but as years went by, it was replaced by an affectionate feeling for poor, ignorant, simple people, and small folk. They were his real family. He did not want to live with them; he wanted to live alone, but he wanted to think of them. They were like regular work, they would prevent him from living his life. The simple life as Roosevelt understood it was a riot of luxury for Thoreau.
It is well-known that solitude whether of desert or mountain often increases self-consciousness to such a degree that the individual doubts his own identity. But the eternities did not press down on Thoreau, or submerge the boundaries of his reason. Neither solitude nor poverty, neither dreaming nor distress of mind could make a mystic of Thoreau. He was practical and pragmatic, but the world of his acquaintance would not admit it. He patted the non-conformist of religion on the back; he spat in the face of the non-conformist of life.
The whole world knows that he built himself a cabin on Walden Pond; as John the Baptist did in the wilderness, he nourished himself on locusts and wild honey with an occasional cereal and vegetable. For two years he devoted himself to finding out what life is and how it should be lived. Thoreau’s poetic biographer would have us believe that every hour in Walden was like the measure of sand passed through the sieve of the gold seeker—it left enough of residue to make a boy comfortable for the rest of his days; perhaps it did, but many of his readers other than those from Missouri will want to have other proof of it than is given in a book entitled Walden, or Life in the Woods. It is the romantic Frenchman who sees him there in this setting.
“You would say then that the earth had chosen this poor, shy boy whom you see absorbed there, on the threshold of his cabin, as an instrument for thinking in peace of its own unity and eternity. How can he say where he is? The planet is silent, time and space are strangely annihilated, the notion of any journey is lost, he may be at the antipodes. Under the pines of Walden, this man who is lost in his dream is Mir Mohammed Ali, perhaps, the painter of Ispahan; his American profile is drawn in miniature in the colours of a precious stone on the blue of the pond. Or is he some Chinese poet-philosopher in whom mingle the souls of animals, and plants, and hermits sitting under an arbour near a little lake? There comes to this man as he listens to sounds beyond music, a music that is deeper and more ample than the music of his everyday life; he feels on his palate as it were a taste of immortality—it grows clearer than the clear morning about him. This beetle that buzzes by, this sweet flag swaying on the pond are like messengers charged with transmitting to him the friendship of men who have dreamed the same dreams in the depth of the old Orient.”
But the friendship of the forest became irksome to Thoreau and he went back to the Sage’s house while the Sage himself was abroad. Again it fitted him like an old glove. He was not ecstatic there as he was in his cabin on the pond, but he was happy; this happiness was interrupted by a lady who thought to marry him, but like so many other little annoyances of life, the trouble was transitory. After a short time he tried lecturing but he did not hit it off with his audiences. They could not stomach either his paradoxes or his ferocious affirmations. He irritated, not amused them; he bored, not instructed them.
When he was in contact with a superior like Emerson or Agassiz, he curbed his tongue, but how he really felt about scientists may be learned from his journal; he considered them pedantic and pretentious. He went to Boston to consult a book but, in the Library he was so self-conscious that he could not concentrate his attention. The city, though it reeked of respectability, was full of shams and shoddy. “What,” he demanded, “is the real?”