The one great enthusiasm of Thoreau’s life was engendered by John Brown. He had no more patriotism than he had family-feeling, but he had an enormous sense of justice. The speeches and conduct of that veteran abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, moved him considerably, but the seizure of the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, on October 18th, 1859, frenzied him. He had met John Brown, he had learned something of his thought and of his plans, without being particularly moved by them. But he was agitated to the depth of his soul by the thought of the gallows’ rope strangling the rough neck of his old friend and he began a verbal and scriptural drive to prevent the violence. It was the only real storm of his blood. M. Bazalgette describes it with great artistry. Likewise Thoreau’s meeting with Whitman is well rendered, but with not quite the same attention to verity. The account of the naturalist’s encounter with his hereditary enemy, tuberculosis, of his trip to the Middle West, of his last days, is masterfully done.
The great hiatus in Thoreau’s nature, moral and physical, was his incapacity for friendship. Emerson liked him but not enthusiastically, and he was Emerson’s handy man. Harrison Blake made a hero of him, and Daniel Ricketson of Cape Cod tried to deal with him on terms of equality; but the former’s admiration annoyed him, and a little of the latter’s bonne camaraderie sufficed him for a long time. The man who came nearest to him was William Ellery Channing: whimsical, fanciful, unsociable, infantile but charming—of whom Thoreau wrote: “He will accept sympathy and aid, but he will not bear questioning. He will ever be reserved and enigmatic and you must deal with him at arm’s length.” It is not improbable that he understood Thoreau but one is not convinced of it by reading Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist, published in 1876.
M. Bazalgette’s sympathy with his subject facilitates understanding, and the concluding pages of the seventh section of his book is the best soul-portrait of Henry Thoreau in existence. But it is not the last. Others will attempt it. Some day an interpreter of behaviour will explain the man who wrote, “For joy I could embrace the earth, I shall delight to be buried in it. And then I think of those among men who will know that I love them, though I tell them not.” The interpreter will tell why he did not tell them and why he could not.
Henry Thoreau was an intellectual monster. It showed in his face, in his prehensility, dexterity, sense-acuteness and in his conduct. He was a misogynist, teetotaler, vegetarian. He had no family or community feeling. He was wholly devoid of the sense of humour. He had no generosity, no sense of obligation, no bowels of compassion, save for animals. He was a universal dissenter, saturated with keen self-appreciation and devoted to self-indulgence. He had none of the weaknesses called vices, few of the strengths called virtues, and despite it all in life he was happy and in death he is a national asset. He will therefore always be an interesting subject for the moralist, the behaviourist and the psychologist.
His was a strange personality. He could not come out of himself, mingle with the world, lose his soul and thus save it. He had no wife, no children, no home, no town, no country as a part of himself, and yet despite this his “self” seemed not to suffer mutilation. A modern philosopher, Bradley, says: “A man is not what he thinks of, and yet is the man he is because of what he thinks of.” Thoreau was a man made by thought and he was that man because of what he thought.
Henry Thoreau did not add to the world’s knowledge, nor did his activities increase or facilitate its dissemination, but he made a contribution to the art of living at a time that was propitious and in a country that sadly needed it. He was a primitive in an artless land, an idealist in a country of materialists, a pagan in a community of puritans, a singer of nature to philistines with ears stuffed with cotton wool. He sought the ideal with the same ardour as man seeks the pleasure of the senses. He was a thinker, not a sensualist; a poet not a priest; a Pagan not a Christian; a genius not well poised who blazed the way for Burroughs and Muir and scores of others who have opened our eyes to the beauty of nature and have shown us how to appreciate and profit by familiarity with it. Personality defects fortunately do not long outlive the body. We quickly forget, when those we love are no longer with us, the things that annoyed us and we remember only their virtues. Time will remove the sting from Thoreau’s contempt, the hurt from his disdain, the injury from his indifference to the beliefs and welfare of his fellow-man. It will deal with him as it is dealing with Woodrow Wilson.
“For God’s sake, try to get at him” said Convick to his young friend when he threw Vereker’s (Henry James’) new novel into his hand and asked him to review it for the Times Literary Supplement. The young friend did it and he was convinced that he had got at him; but later when Vereker said across the dinner table at a country house where he was staying, when the review came under discussion, “Oh, it’s all right—the usual twaddle,” Convick’s young friend did not feel so puffed up. Yet he need not have felt humiliated, for Henry James himself was more lacking in specificity when he discussed his books than when he talked of anything else. The earlier ones were written that he might indulge his creative instinct (which was to produce works of art); the next that he might discover new avenues leading to art’s treasury; the last that he might guess the riddle that he propounded. There was an idea in his work just the same as there was in Goya’s. Goya was not able to describe it, neither was Henry James. A great many persons have succeeded in giving us a fairly comprehensive account of Goya’s idea; and a few, for instance, Mr. Follett, Mr. Beach, Miss Rebecca West, have laboured with considerable success to make us see the treasures of patience and ingenuosity that Henry James displayed in the perpetuation of his idea. Many readers of Henry James do not see that the texture of his books constitutes a complete representation of what he believed to be an exquisite scheme, but the initiated do and that is all he had a right to expect.
A sensitive, scholarly, sympathetic student of literature, Van Wyck Brooks, who has made a serious and laborious study of his writings which he calls The Pilgrimage of Henry James, attempts to explain why Henry James made a failure of life. If the interested reader objects that the word “failure” is too strong, he has only to study the last years of the master’s life, during which he expressed frequently to his friends a dissatisfaction with his accomplishments, and allowed them to discern that he had not received from the world the beer and skittles that he had anticipated in order to be convinced the term is not misapplied.
Mr. Brooks would have us believe that Henry James had a delusion and that it conditioned his conduct. The delusion was that somewhere in the world he could find a cordial, inviting culture; a people who would have urbanity, understanding, and charm; an arena where vulgarity of speech and conduct were rigorously excluded, where they would die of inanition did they succeed in forcing an entrance; where there would be no jostling, elbowing, or hurrying; where no one was better than his neighbour; where boasting was barred and boosting prohibited; a land where every prospect pleased and not even man was vile; the ideal land for which no one but a Henry James ever searches. Then Mr. Brooks thrusts an illusion on him as well, an optical illusion: he sees England as such a land.