Thoreau was born at Concord in 1817, and he died in 1862. He was the only man among the Transcendentalists that allowed their theories the fullest play in him, and the incompleteness and failure of his life cannot be concealed by all the verbiage and praise of his biographers. Emerson’s high-flown monologues ruined him. A trick of naturalizing and botanizing which he had, and which never reached the dignity or usefulness of science, was exaggerated by a false praise that acted more powerfully than any other influence in sending him into the woods as a hermit, and among mountains as a poet-naturalist. He appears to have cherished some crude notions about the glory and bountifulness of Nature and her soothing and uplifting ministry, but these notions are, in the ultimate analysis, admissive of much limitation and qualification, if they be not altogether ægræ somnia mentis. The Transcendentalists worshipped Nature and built airy altars to the Beautiful, but they did not venture into the woods on a rainy day without thick shoes and good umbrellas. Thoreau gave up his life to this delusory study and adoration of Nature, and got for his worship a bronchial affection which struck him down in the full vigor of manhood. We have no patience with an ideal that takes us away from the comforting and companionship of our fellow-men. What divine lessons has Nature to teach us comparable with her manifestations in human nature? Why should we run off into solitude, and busy ourselves with the habits of raccoons and chipmunks that are sublimely indifferent to us? How much better is old Dr. Johnson’s theory: “This is a world in which we have good to do, and not much time in which to do it,” and who, on being asked by Boswell to take a walk in the fields, answered: “Sir, one green field is like another green field. I like to look at men.”
Life in the woods is very good for a mood or a vacation, but man escapes from them into the city. The old proverb about solitude runs, Aut deus, aut lupus—no one but a divinity or a wolf can stand solitude. One of the weaknesses of Transcendentalism was an affectation of seclusion. It was too good for human nature’s daily food. Man is such a bore! “O for a lodge in some vast wilderness!” Now, all this is sinful and unreasonable. Why should we shrink from the bad and evil and objectionable in mankind to herd with the wild beasts of the forest? The only thing that sanctifies solitude is the Catholic faith; and, even when the monastic idea sought to realize complete isolation from the world, the superiors were loath to grant permission. They felt that it is not good for man to be alone, and St. Benedict, in his Rule, has a reflection that there were monks lost in solitude who would have been saved in community. The true idea is that we can be solitary in spirit in the midst of crowds. There is no necessity of betaking ourselves to the woods.
Very likely the high praise of isolation, as nutritive of genius, acting upon a naturally retiring disposition, first led Thoreau to his sylvan life. The common idea that he was a hermit or a misanthropist is fully disproved by his biographers. In our opinion he is just the reverse, and if we were disposed to bring in evidence we could show that he was wild for notoriety. His private letters are more affected than Pope’s, who wrote with an eye to publication. All Thoreau’s books are full of his private experiences, thoughts, and emotions. He never suffers you to escape from his overpowering personality. He never sinks the ego. He reminds one of the diary of the private gentleman in Addison’s Spectator: “To-day the beef was underdone. Took a walk. Dreamt about the Grand Turk.” Thoreau is for ever telling us about his personal feelings, his method of baking bread, and his dreams about tortoises, etc. There is something funny in his writing six volumes for men on whom he fancied he looked with Transcendental contempt. The fact is, he was a fine, naturally talented, and poetic man, who was bewitched by the theories which we have sketched; and the contest within his spirit has led his biographers and critics into pardonable misapprehensions of his life and aims. Left to himself and his aspirations, he would have developed into a fair poet or a good naturalist—perchance an Agassiz or an Audubon. He had no theological or philosophical ability, but a deep sense of truthfulness, which made him experimentalize upon the theories which he heard. He found it much easier than would most men to live in the woods, to take long walks, to navigate rivers, and to collect specimens of natural history. His studies in nature have no value to the scientist. He was a good surveyor and liked animals. He wrote some indifferent poetry. He described some gorgeous sunsets. He delivered an oration on John Brown, and he managed to let the world know that he built and lived in a hut at Walden. Voilà tout. He flippantly criticised our Lord Jesus Christ, ridiculed all Christian beliefs, preferred the company of a mouse to that of a man, of an Indian to a white man, and died without a single throb of supernatural faith, hope, or charity. This was a man, too, who had Catholic blood in his veins, but who could not bear to hear the chime of church-bells without some contemptuous remarks, and who professed himself a Buddhist without the Indic veneration, and a worshipper of Pan without knowing or believing that the great Pan had died for his salvation.
Two biographies are before us, one by William Ellery Channing, who was Thoreau’s friend and companion, the other by H. A. Page, who appears to be a biographer-in-general or by profession. Channing’s, as might be expected, is a sort of prose In Memoriam; and Page’s is made ridiculous by an attempted comparison between Thoreau and St. Francis of Assisi, based on the saint’s love of, and miraculous power over, animals, and the Concord man’s ability to bring a mouse out of its hole or tickle a trout. Strange as it sounds, this comparison is carried on through one-third of the volume. Page must be a member of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, for Thoreau’s kindness to brutes he evidently regards as his finest trait. Such stuff as “the animals are brethren of ours and undeveloped men,” and the slops of evolution in general, are poured out in vast quantity, and the impression forced upon the reader is that Mr. Page, who speaks of himself as an Englishman, has no conception of Thoreau’s character, nor, indeed, of any adventurous or sport-loving nature such as freely develops on our wide plains and high mountains.
Thoreau graduated at Harvard, but without distinction. He and his brother taught school for a while at Concord, where the sage lives who gave such cheering voice to Carlyle. There was a wildness in him which nothing could subdue, yet it took no cruel or brutal form. He appears to have had that passionate love of external nature which is so sublime as a reality, so detestable as an affectation. He was made of the stuff of pioneers and Indian scouts, but with rarer feeling and poetic temperament. A water-lily was more than a water-lily to him. He had no social theory to advocate—a delusion about him into which Page falls—but he took to the woods as an Indian to a trail. There is nothing Transcendental about his life, and yet he is the chief and crown of Transcendentalists. He had a brave, high life in him, which is perfectly intelligible and realizable, quite as much in the parlor as in the swamp. Heroism need not leave New York for the steppes of Russia. A naturally timid priest who anoints a small-poxed patient is as brave in his way as Alexander or Charles XII. of Sweden. A thousand hermits have lived before Thoreau, and made no palaver over their social discomforts, which are, indeed, inseparable from their way of life. There is an unpleasant soupçon of Yankeeism when, in Walden, Thoreau lectures us on economy. The Transcendental aurora vanishes before the prosaic hearth-fire.
We remember having read A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers and The Maine Woods during a summer vacation which we spent between Mount Desert and Nantucket, and the sweet naturalness of those two beautiful books sank into our heart, touched, perhaps, by the glorious yet sombre scenery in which we moved. The jar and discord of Thoreau’s theological opinions melted away in the harmony of the great music which he made us hear among the hills and scenes which he loved so well, and of which he seemed a part. Hawthorne’s keen eye, sharpened, we will not say purified, by high æsthetic cultivation, detected in Thoreau the latent qualities of the Faun whose existence, by an anomaly, he has thrown into modern Italy, and even intimates as wrought on by the church. We love to think of Thoreau, not as idealized by Emerson, Channing, or Page, nor shallowly criticised as by Lowell, but as bright and winsome, afar from the sensuous creation of Hawthorne, and full of that boyish love of flood and field which has made us all at one time Robinson Crusoes. This is a most undignified descent from that ideal type of character which Thoreau is supposed to represent; but we submit to any reader of his books, if he did not skip his foolish theories about religion, friendship, society, ethics, and other such themes on which Emerson expatiates, and about which dear old Thoreau never knew anything at all practical, and leap with him into the stream, follow the trails he knew so well, learn the mysteries of angling and hunting, and tramp with him through the forests, read with him his dearly-loved Homer, and, in spite of our half-concealed laughter, listen to his wonderful explanations of the Beghavat-Gheeva.
It is encouraging to notice how bravely he shakes off half the nonsense of Transcendentalism, though bound by the wiles of Merlin, who lived only two miles from Walden. Transcendentalism gave no religion. It was even hollower than Rousseau’s Contrat Social and Émile, in which writings the wicked old Voltaire said that Jean Jacques was so earnest in converting us back to nature that he almost persuaded us to go upon all fours. Even Emerson confesses to the failure of Thoreau’s life. “Pounding beans,” says that wise old man, with the air of a Persian sage—a character which he frequently adopts, especially when he recommends some thousand-dollar Persian book to us as infinitely superior to the New Testament,—“Pounding beans,” says he, referring to poor Thoreau’s attempt to carry out his Transcendentalism, “may lead to pounding thrones; but what if a man spends all his life pounding beans?”
And so, in the style of the tellers of fairy stories, we say that poor Thoreau continued all his life pounding beans, but without caring very much for the bearing of beans upon the eternities, splendors, and thrones, and that he lived a cheerful and wholesome, natural life, though rather an uncomfortable one, in his woods and among his beasts and flowers; that he was kind and gentle to beasts, but not to God or to man, of whom he seemed to be afraid, which was a mistake; and after he was dead he was made out to be a great philosopher, a golden poet, a great social theorist, and a Transcendental saint, which is another mistake.
With Thoreau died the Transcendental hermit, and, so far as human nature and a happy combination of character and circumstance could permit, the only truly ideal man that Transcendentalism has produced. Yet how far he falls below the most commonplace monk in spiritual range and power and aim! No great spiritual fire burns in his bosom; nor will any Montalembert be attracted to his memory. There was not the light of Christian faith or love upon his life, which is distinguished from the savage’s only by its superior mental civilization and its relation to that civilization which he so humorously yet contradictorily despised. With Emerson, who has now convinced himself of the absurdity of immortality, its greatest writer will die. The Kulturkampf of Germany, which New England introduced into America, cannot survive the literary changes which take place every half-century. Emerson will fade into oblivion, and even now he is no longer listened to. But there is that in Thoreau’s books which gives vitality to old Walton’s Angler, and the traveller on the Concord and through Maine will recall the memory of Thoreau, no longer, we hope, to be associated with the eclipse of his false philosophy, but seen bright and vivid in that sunshine and beauty he loved so well.