Chapter III: Part 3

Thoreau knew his local fauna and flora after a method of his own, a method which, for lack of a better word, may be called sympathetic. Nobody was ever more successful in getting inside of a bird; and that, from his point of view and for his purpose,--and not less for ours who read him,--was the one important thing. After that it mattered little if some of his flying neighbors escaped his notice altogether, while others led him a vain chase year after year, and are still, in his published journals, a puzzle to readers. Who knows what his night warbler was, or, with certainty, his seringo bird? The latter, indeed, a native of his own Concord hay-fields, he seems to have been pretty well acquainted with as a bird; its song was familiar to him, and less frequently he caught sight of the singer itself perched upon a fence-post or threading its way through the grass; but he had found no means of ascertaining its name, and so was driven to the primitive expedient of christening it with an invention of his own. His description of its appearance and notes leaves us in no great doubt as to its identity; probably it was the savanna sparrow; but how completely in the dark he himself was upon this point may be gathered from an entry in his journal of 1854. He had gone to Nantucket, in late December, and there saw, running along the ruts, flocks of “a gray, bunting-like bird about the size of the snow-bunting. Can it be the seaside finch,” he asks, “or the savanna sparrow, or the shore lark?” Savanna sparrow, or shore lark! A Baldwin apple, or a russet! But what then? There are gaps in every scholar’s knowledge, and the man who has “named _all_ the birds without a gun” is yet to be heard from. It is fair to remind ourselves, also, that Thoreau’s studies in this line were pursued under limitations and disadvantages to which the amateur of our later day is happily a stranger. Ornithologically, it is a long time since Thoreau’s death, though it is less than forty-five years.

If any be disposed to insist, as some have insisted, that he made no discoveries (he discovered a new way of writing about nature, for one thing), and was more curious than scientific in his spirit and method as an observer, it is perhaps sufficient to reply that he cultivated his own field. From first to last he refused the claims of science,--whether rightly or wrongly is not here in question,--and with the exception of one or two brief essays wrote nothing directly upon natural history. He worshiped Nature, even while he played the spy upon her, fearing her enchantments and “looking at her with the side of his eye.” Run over the titles of his books: “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” “Walden,” “The Maine Woods,” “Cape Cod,” “A Yankee in Canada,” “Excursions.” The first two are studies in high and plain living,--practical philosophy, spiritual economy, the right use of society and solitude, books and nature. The rest are narratives of travel, with a record of what the traveler saw and thought and felt. In “Excursions,” to be sure, there is an early paper on “The Natural History of Massachusetts,” to which, by straining a point, we may add one on “The Succession of Forest Trees,” another on “Autumnal Tints,” and still another on “Wild Apples.” Elsewhere, though the landscape is sure to be carefully studied, it is always a landscape with figures. In truth, while he wrote so much of outward nature, and so often seemed to find his fellow-mortals no better than intruders upon the scene, his real subject was man. “Man is all in all,” he says; “Nature nothing but as she draws him out and reflects him.” And again he said, “Any affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects.”

The latter sentence was written shortly after the death of John Brown, in whose fate Thoreau had been so completely absorbed that his old Concord world, when he came back to it, had almost a foreign look to him, and he remarked with a start of surprise that the little grebe was still diving in the river. With all his devotion to nature and philosophy, it was the “human event” that really concerned him. But of course he had ideas of his own as to what constituted an event. As for men’s so-called affairs, and all that passes current under the name of news, nothing could be less eventful; for all such things he could never sufficiently express his contempt. “In proportion as our inward life fails,” he says, “we go more constantly and desperately to the post-office.” And he adds, in that peculiarly airy manner of his to which one is tempted sometimes to apply the old Yankee adjective “toplofty,” “I would not run round the corner to see the world blow up.” After which, the reader whose bump of incuriosity is less highly developed may console himself by remembering that when a powder-mill blew up in the next town, Thoreau, hearing the noise, ran downstairs, jumped into a wagon, and drove post-haste to the scene of the disaster. So true is it that it is

“the most difficult of tasks to keep
Heights which the soul is competent to gain.”

Careful economist as Thoreau was, bravely as he trusted his own intuitions and kept to his own path, much as he preached simplicity and heroically as he practiced it, he shared the common lot and fell short of his own ideal. Life is never quite so simple as he attempted to make it, and he, like other men, was conscious of a divided mind. He had by nature a bias toward the investigation of natural phenomena, a passion for particulars, which, if he had been less a poet and philosopher, might have made him a man of science. He knew it, and was inwardly chafed by it. Perhaps it was because of this chafing that he fell into the habit of speaking so almost spitefully of science and scientific men. Not to lay stress upon his frequent paradoxes about the superiority of superstition to knowledge, the advantages of astrology over astronomy, the slight importance of precision in matters of detail (“I can afford to be inaccurate”),--to say nothing of these things, which, taken as they were meant, are not without a measure of truth, and with which no lover of Thoreau will be much disposed to quarrel (those who cannot abide the nudge of a paradox or an inch or two of exaggeration may as well let him alone), it is plain that in certain moods, especially in his later years, his own semi-scientific researches were felt to be a hindrance to the play of his higher faculties. “It is impossible for the same person to see things from the poet’s point of view and that of the man of science,” he writes in 1842. “Man cannot afford to be a naturalist,” he says again, in 1853. “I feel that I am dissipated by so many observations.... Oh, for a little Lethe!” And a week afterward he falls into the same strain, in a tone of reminiscence that is of the very rarest with him. “Ah, those youthful days,” he breaks out, “are they never to return? when the walker does not too enviously observe particulars, but sees, hears, scents, tastes, and feels only himself, the phenomena that showed themselves in him, his expanding body, his intellect and heart. No worm or insect, quadruped or bird, confined his view, but the unbounded universe was his. A bird has now become a mote in his eye.” What devotee of natural science, if he be also a man of sensibility and imagination, does not feel the sincerity of this cry?

But having delivered himself thus passionately, what does the diarist set down next? Without a break he goes on: “Dug into what I take to be a woodchuck’s burrow in the low knoll below the cliffs. It was in the side of the hill, and sloped gently downward at first diagonally into the hill about five feet, perhaps westerly, then turned and ran north about three feet, then northwest further into the hill four feet, then north again four feet, then northeast I know not how far, the last five feet, perhaps, ascending,”--with as much more of the same tenor and equally detailed. A laughable paragraph, surely, to follow a lament over a too envious observation of particulars; with its “perhaps” four times repeated, its five feet westerly, three feet northerly, and so on, like a conveyancer’s description of a wood-lot: and all about a hole in the ground, which he “took to be” a woodchuck’s burrow!

In vain shall a man bestir himself to run away from his own instincts. In vain, in such a warfare, shall he trust to the freedom of the will. Happily for himself, and happily for the world, Thoreau, though he “could not afford to be a naturalist,” could never cease from his “too envious observation.”

By inclination and habit he liked to see and do things for himself, as if they had never been seen or done before. That was one mark of his individualistic temper, not to say a chief mark of his genius. He describes in his journal an experiment in making sugar from the sap of red maple trees. Here, too, he goes into the minutest details, not omitting the size of the holes he bored and the frequency with which the drops fell,--about as fast as his pulse beat. His father, he mentions (the son was then forty years old), chided him for wasting his time. There was no occasion for the experiment, the father thought; it was well known that the thing could be done; and as for the sugar, it could be bought cheaper at the village shop. “He said it took me from my studies,” the journal records. “I said that I made it my study, and felt as if I had been to a university.” If fault-finding is in order, an individualist prefers to administer it on his own account. One remembers Thoreau’s characteristic declaration that he had never received the first word of valuable counsel from any of his elders. In the present instance, surely, as much as this must be said for him,--that by habits of this unpractical-seeming kind knowledge is made peculiarly one’s own, and, old or new, keeps something of the freshness of discovery upon it. The critic may smile, but even he will not dispute the charm of writing done in such a spirit,--the very spirit in which the old books were written, in the childhood of the world.

Even the edibility of white-oak acorns affected Thoreau, at the age of forty, as a new fact. So far as his feeling about it was concerned, the fruit might have been that morning created. “The whole world is sweeter” to him for having “discovered” it. “To have found two Indian gouges and tasted sweet acorns, is it not enough for one afternoon?” he asks himself. And the next day, shrewd economist and exaggerator that he is, he tries his new dainty again, and behold, a second discovery: the acorns “appear to dry sweet!” One need not be a critic, but only a homely-witted, country-bred Yankee, to smile at this. But indeed, it is a relief to be able to smile now and then at one who held himself so high and aloof,--“a Switzer on the edge of the glacier,” as he called himself; who found no wisdom too lofty for him, no companionship quite lofty enough; and who, in his longing for something better than the best, could exclaim, “Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand.” Not that we feel any diminution of our respect or affection; but it pleases us to have met our Switzer for once on something near our own level. In an author, as in a friend, an amiable weakness, if there be strength enough behind it, is only another point of attraction.

As a writer, Thoreau is by himself. There are no other books like “Walden” and the “Week.” The reader may like them or leave them (unless he is pretty sure of himself, he may be advised to try “Walden” first), he will find nowhere else the same combination of pure nature and austere philosophy. It is hard even to see with what to compare them, or to conceive of any one else as having written them. If Marcus Aurelius, with half his sweetness of temper eliminated, and something of sharpness, together with liberal measures of cool intellectuality, injected, could have been united with Gilbert White, rather less radically transformed, and if the resultant complex person had made it his business to write, we can perhaps imagine that his work would not have been in all respects unlike that of the sage of Walden; in saying which we have but taken a circuitous course back to our former position, that Thoreau was a man of his own kind.

He was an author from the beginning. Of that, as he said himself, he was never in doubt. His ceaseless observation of nature--which some have decried as lacking purpose and method--and his daily journal were deliberately chosen means to that end. “Here have I been these forty years learning the language of these fields that I may the better express myself.” That was what he aimed at, let his subject be what it might,--to express _himself_.

Few writers have ever treated their work more seriously, or studied their art more industriously. He talked sometimes, to be sure, as if there were no art about it. To listen to him in such a mood, one might suppose that the fact and the thought were the only things to be considered, and that language followed of itself. Such was neither his belief nor his practice. But he was one of the fortunate ones who by taking pains can produce an effect of easiness; who can recast and recast a sentence, and in the end leave it looking as if it had dropped from a running pen. One of the fortunates, we say; for an air of innocent unconsciousness is as becoming in a sentence as in a face.

On this point a useful study in contrasts might be made between Thoreau and a man who gladly acknowledged him as one of his masters. “Upon me,” says Robert Louis Stevenson, “this pure, narrow, sunnily ascetic Thoreau had exercised a great charm. I have scarce written ten sentences since I was introduced to him, but his influence might be somewhere detected by a close observer.” The observer would need to be very close indeed, the majority of Stevensonians will think, but that, true or false, is nothing to the purpose here. Stevenson and Thoreau both made writing a lifelong study, and with exceedingly diverse results. The Scotchman’s style is the finer, but then it is sometimes in danger of becoming _super_fine. We may not wish it different. Such work must be as it is. It could hardly be better without being worse, the writing of fine prose being always a question of compromises, a gain here for a loss there, a choice of imperfections; perfect prose being in fact impossible, except in the briefest snatches. But surely Stevenson’s gift was not an absolute naturalness and transparency, such as lets the thought show through on the instant, and leaves the beauty of the verbal medium to catch the attention afterward, if the reader will. “For love of lovely words,” an artist of Stevenson’s temperament, however sound his theories, may sometimes find it hard to make a righteous choice between the music of an exquisite cadence and the pure expressiveness of a halting phrase. The author of “Walden” had his literary temptations, but not of this kind. Let the phrase halt, so long as it expressed a sturdy truth in sturdy fashion. As for that homely quality--“careless country talk”--which Thoreau prayed for, and in good measure received, it is questionable whether Stevenson ever sought it, though he would no doubt have assented to Thoreau’s words: “Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.”

Thoreau, indeed, first as a spiritual economist, and next as an artist, had a natural relish for the common and the plain. Every landscape that was dreary enough, as he says of Cape Cod, had a certain beauty in his eyes. Whether in literature or in life, he preferred the beauty that is inherent,--the beauty of the thing itself. Ornament, beauty laid on, did not much attract him. Among persons, it was the wilder-seeming, the less tamed and cultivated, with whom he liked to converse, and whose sayings he oftenest recorded. Though they might be crabbed specimens, “run all to thorn and rind, and crowded out of shape by adverse circumstances, like the third chestnut in the burr,” they were still what nature had made them. Even a crowd pleased him, if it was composed of the right materials,--that is to say, if it was rude enough. Thus he, a hermit, took pleasure in the autumnal cattle-show. With what a touch of affection he lays on the colors! “The wind goes hurrying down the country, gleaning every loose straw that is left in the fields, while every farmer lad, too, appears to scud before it,--having donned his best pea-jacket and pepper-and-salt waistcoat, his unbent trousers, outstanding rigging of duck, or kerseymere, or corduroy, and his furry hat withal,--to country fairs and cattle-shows, to that Rome among the villages where the treasures of the year are gathered. All the land over they go leaping the fences with their tough, idle palms, which have never learned to hang by their sides, amid the low of calves and the bleating of sheep,--Amos, Abner, Elnathan, Elbridge,--

‘From steep pine-bearing mountains to the plain.’

I love these sons of earth, every mother’s son of them.” It is worth while to see the country’s people, he thinks, and even the “supple vagabond,” who is “sure to appear on the least rumor of such a gathering, and the next day to disappear, and go into his hole like the seventeen-year locust.”

For the average (uninitiated) reader, be it said, there is nothing better in Thoreau than his thumb-nail sketches of humble, every-day humanity; as there is no part of his work, not even his denunciation of worldly conformity, or his picturing of nature’s moods, which is done with more absolute good will. A man need not be an idealist, a naturalist, or anything else out of the ordinary, to like the Canadian woodchopper, for example, cousin to the pine and the rock, who never was tired in his life, and, stranger still, sometimes acted as if he were “thinking for himself and expressing his own opinions;” or the old fisherman, always haunting the river in serene afternoons, and “almost rustling with the sedge;” or the Cape Cod wrecker, whose face was “like an old sail endowed with life,”--one of the Pilgrims, perhaps, who had “kept on the back side of the Cape and let the centuries go by;” or the free-spoken Wellfleet oysterman, “a poor good-for-nothing crittur,” now “under petticoat government,” who yet remembered George Washington as “a r-a-ther large and portly-looking man, with a pretty good leg as he sat on his horse;” or the iron-jawed Nauset woman, who seemed to be shouting at you through a breaker, and who looked “as if it made her head ache to live;” or the country soldier boy on his way to muster, in full regimentals, with shouldered musket and military step, who in a lonely place in the woods is suddenly abashed at the sight of a stranger approaching, and finds himself hard put to it to get by in anything like military order.

With men like these, natural men, Thoreau found himself at home; he described them almost as sympathetically as if they had been so many woodchucks or hen-hawks. As he said of his own boyhood, they were “part and parcel of nature” itself. As for fine manners parading about in fine clothes, how should he, a rustic jealous of his rusticity, presume to know what, if anything, might be going on under all that broadcloth? Reality was the chief of his ideals. The shabbiest of it was more to the purpose than a masquerade.

Whether it would have been better for him had his taste been more liberal in this respect is a question about which it might be useless to speculate. Breadth may easily be sought at too great an expense, especially by one who has a distinct and highly individual work to accomplish. First of all, such a man must be himself. His imperfections, even, must be of his own kind, twin-born with his better qualities, a certain lack of complaisance being one of the likeliest and, in the strict sense, most appropriate. But that some of Thoreau’s private and hasty remarks, in his letters and journals, about the meanness of his fellow-creatures, the more “respectable” among them, especially, might profitably have been left unprinted, is less open to doubt. They were expressions of moods rather than of convictions, it is fair to assume, and in any event would never have been printed by their author, one of whose cravings was for some kind of india-rubber that would rub out at once all which it cost him so many perusals and so much reluctance to erase. It is pretty hard justice that holds a man publicly to everything he scribbles in private,--as if no allowance were to be made for whim and the provocation of the moment. The charm of a journal, as Thoreau says, consists in a “certain greenness.” It is “a record of experiences and growth, not a preserve of things well done or said.” After which it may be confessed that even from “Walden” and the “Week,” published in the author’s lifetime, it is possible to discover that charity and sweetness were not among his most distinguishing characteristics. Taste him after Gilbert White, and contrast the mellowness of the one with the sharp, assertive, acidulous quality of the other. Thoreau was a wild apple, and would have been proud of the name, suggestive of that “tang and smack” which he so feelingly celebrated. “Nonesuches” and “seek-no-furthers” were very tame and forgettable, he thought, as compared with the wildings, even the acrid and the puckery among which he begrudged to the cider-mill. It is in part this very “tang and smack,” we may be sure, that makes his books keep so well in Time’s literary cellar.

His humor, especially, “indispensable pledge of sanity,” as he calls it, is of that best of fruity flavors, a pleasant sour. Some, indeed, emulating his own fertility in paradox, have maintained that he had no humor, while others have rebuked him for priggishly excluding it from his later work. Did such critics never read “Cape Cod”? There, surely, Thoreau gave his natural drollery full play,--an almost antinomian liberty, to take a word out of those ecclesiastical histories, with the reading of which, under his umbrella, he so patiently enlivened his sandy march from Orleans to Provincetown. “As I sat on a hill one sultry Sunday afternoon,” he says, “the meeting-house windows being open, my meditations were interrupted by the noise of a preacher who shouted like a boatswain, profaning the quiet atmosphere, and who, I fancied, must have taken off his coat. Few things could have been more disgusting or disheartening. I wished the tithing-man would stop him.” Charles Lamb himself could hardly have bettered the delicious, biting absurdity of that final touch. It was not this Boanergian minister, but a man of an earlier generation, of whom we are told that he wrote a “Body of Divinity,” “a book frequently sneered at, particularly by those who have read it.”

The whole Cape, past and present, was looked at half quizzically by its inland visitor. The very houses “seemed, like mariners ashore, to have sat right down to enjoy the firmness of the land, without studying their postures or habiliments,”--a description not to be fully appreciated except by those who have seen a Cape Cod village, with its buildings dropped here and there at haphazard upon the sand. Here, as everywhere, he was hungry for particulars; now improvising a rude quadrant with which to calculate the height of the bank at Highland Light, now, by ingenious but “not impertinent” questions, and for his private satisfaction only, getting at the contents of a schoolboy’s dinner-pail,--the homeliest facts being always “the most acceptable to an inquiring mind.” Thoreau’s mother, by-the-bye, had some reputation as a gossip.

His work, humorous or serious, transcendental or matter-of-fact, is all the fruit of his own tree. Whatever its theme, nature or man, it is all of one spirit. Think what you will of it, it is never insipid. As his friend Channing said, it has its “stoical merits,” its “uncomfortableness.” Well might its author express his sympathy with the barberry bush, whose business is to ripen its fruit, not to sweeten it,--and to protect it with thorns. “Seek the lotus, and take a draught of rapture,” was Margaret Fuller’s rather high-flown advice to him; yet she too perceived that his mind was “not a soil for the citron and the rose, but for the whortleberry, the pine, or the heather.” In all his books it would be next to impossible to find a pretty phrase or a sentimental one. He resorted to nature--in his less inquisitive hours--for the mood into which it put him, the invigoration, the serenity, the mental activity it communicated. But his pleasure in it, as compared with Wordsworth’s or Hazlitt’s, to take very dissimilar examples, was mostly an intellectual affair, the reader is tempted to say, though the remark needs qualification. One remembers such a passage as that descriptive of a winter twilight in Yellow Birch Swamp, where the gleams of the birches, as he came to one after another of them, “each time made his heart beat faster.” Yet even here we are told of his ecstasy rather than made to feel it; and in general, surely, though he valued his emotions, and went to the woods and fields to enjoy them, they were such emotions as belonged to a pretty stoical sort of Epicurean; less rapturous than Wordsworths, less tender than Hazlitt’s, and with no trace of the brooding melancholy which makes the charm of books like Obermann and the journal of Amiel. He delighted in artless country music (it does not appear that he ever heard any other, and of course he felicitated himself upon this as upon all the rest of his poverty; it was only the depraved ear, he thought, that needed the opera), but let any reader try to imagine him writing this bit out of one of Hazlitt’s essays:--

“I remember once strolling along the margin of a stream, skirted with willows and plashy sedges, in one of those low, sheltered valleys on Salisbury Plain, where the monks of former ages had planted chapels and built hermits’ cells. There was a little parish church near, but tall elms and quivering alders hid it from sight, when, all of a sudden, I was startled by the sound of the full organ pealing on the ear, accompanied by rustic voices and the willing quire of village maids and children. It rose, indeed, ‘like an exhalation of rich distilled perfumes.’ The dew from a thousand pastures was gathered in its softness; the silence of a thousand years spoke in it. It came upon the heart like the calm beauty of death; fancy caught the sound, and faith mounted on it to the skies. It filled the valley like a mist, and still poured out its endless chant, and still it swells upon the ear, and wraps me in a golden trance, drowning the noisy tumult of the world!”

Here is another spirit than Thoreau’s, another voice, another kind of prose--prose with the throb and even the accent of poetry. Stoics and spiritual economists do not write in this strain, nor is this the manner of a too envious observer of particulars. For better or worse, the prose of our poet-naturalist went squarely on its feet. His fancy might be never so nimble; conceit and paradox might fairly make a cloud about him; but he essayed no flights. If his heart beat faster at some beauty of sight or sound, he said so quietly, with no change of voice, and passed on. As far as the mere writing went, it was done in straightforward, honest fashion, as if a man rather than an author held the pen.

Thoreau believed in well-packed sentences, each carrying its own weight, expressive of its own thought, rememberable and quotable. Of the beauties of a flowing style he had heard something too much. In practice, nevertheless, whether through design or by some natural felicity, he steered a middle course. The sentences might be complete in themselves, detachable, able to stand alone, but the paragraph never lacked a logical and even a formal cohesion. It was not a collection of “infinitely repellent particles,” nor even a “basket of nuts.” A great share of the writer’s art, as he taught it, lay in leaving out the unessential,--the getting in of the essential having first been taken for granted. As for readers, in his more exalted moods he wished to write so well that there would be few to appreciate him; sometimes, indeed, he seemed to desire no readers at all. He speaks with stern disapproval of such as trouble themselves upon that point, and “would fain have one reader before they die.” A lamentable weakness, truly.

In his present estate, however, let us hope that he carries himself a shade less haughtily, and is not above an innocent pleasure in the spread of his earthly fame, in new readers and new editions, and such choicely limited popularity as befits a classic. Even in his lifetime, as Emerson tells the story, he once tried to believe that something in his lecture might interest a little girl who told him she was going to hear it if it wasn’t to be one of those old philosophical things that she didn’t care about; and this although he had just been maintaining, characteristically, that whatever succeeded with an audience must be bad. He speaks somewhere against luxurious books, with superfluous paper and marginal embellishments. His taste was Spartan in those days. But he was never a stickler for consistency, and we may indulge a comfortable assurance that he takes no offense now at the sight of his Cape Cod journey--in which he worked so hard on that soft, leg-tiring Back-Side beach to get the ocean into him--decked out in colors and set forth sumptuously in two volumes. It is a very modest author who fears that his text will be outshone by any pictures, no matter how splendid. But who would have thought it, fifty years ago,--a book by the hermit of Walden in an _édition de luxe_, to lie on parlor tables! If only his father and his brother John could have seen it!

Thoreau believed in himself and in the soundness of his work. He coveted readers, and believed that he should have them. Without question he wrote for the future, and foresaw himself safe from oblivion. Emerson regretted Henry’s want of ambition, we are told. He might have spared himself. “Show me a man who consults his genius,” said Thoreau, “and you have shown me a man who cannot be advised.” And he was the man. He was following an ambition of his own. If he did not keep step with his companions, it was because he “heard a different drummer.” His ambition, and what seemed his wayward singularity, have been justified by the event. His “strange, self-centred, solitary figure, unique in the annals of literature,” is in no danger of being forgotten. But what is most cheering about his present increasing vogue, especially in England, is that it arises from the very quality that Thoreau himself most prized, the innermost thing in him,--the loftiness and purity of his thought. Simplicity, faith, devotion to the essential and the permanent,--these were never more needed than now. These he taught, and, by a happy fate, he linked them with those natural themes that change not with time, and so can never become obsolete.

THOREAU’S DEMAND UPON NATURE

THOREAU’S DEMAND UPON NATURE

“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness.” So Thoreau began an article in “The Atlantic Monthly” forty-four years ago. He wished to make an extreme statement, he declared, in hope of making an emphatic one. Like idealists in general,--like Jesus in particular,--he believed in omitting qualifications and exceptions. Those were matters certain to be sufficiently insisted upon by the orthodox and the conservative, the minister and the school committee.

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.”

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.

Was he too serious for his own good, whether as man or as writer? And did he sometimes feel himself so? Was he whipping his own fault when he spoke against conscientious, duty-ridden people, and praised

“simple laboring folk
Who love their work,
Whose virtue is a song”?

It is not impossible, of course. But he, too, loved his work,--loved it so well as perhaps to need no playtime. Some have said that he made too much of his “thoughts and moods,” that he was unwholesomely beset with the idea of self-improvement. Others have thought that he would have written better books had he stuck closer to science, and paid less court to poetry and Buddhistic philosophy. Such objections and speculations are futile. He did his work, and with it enriched the world. In the strictest sense it was his _own_ work. If his ideal escaped him, he did better than most in that he still pursued it.

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON