Chapter III (1)

When the Thoreau school unexpectedly closed, Henry was only twenty-four years old. But he had moved forward since he had left Harvard. His convictions, already clear, the presentiments of the college boy, had acquired more force. He had ripened early in solitude and study, and his experience of the world had enlarged. He had had some taste of it, and the face he presented to it held little promise of friendship.

The aversion he had felt in college for an atmosphere dominated by the young gentleman was extended now to the village atmosphere, the realm of the young gentleman’s self-satisfied country cousin. The dear little town, preserved in a syrup of sweet conventions, smiled with an air of inviting him to add to its sweetness. The church-tower there pointed toward heaven the sacred meaning of its anxious cares: observance, decency, mediocrity--store-keepers, farmers, townspeople, honourable souls one and all, cast in the same mould, more or less orthodox, good folk, honest folk, so very honest, in almost perfect agreement, as if they were acting together some excellent amateur comedy of manners. Join in the dance, my boy. As he watched them performing their parts he had no inclination to figure in the play. These farces bored him and left him cold. Henry felt within him a disobedient soul.

Where in the world had it come from, this little seed of rebellion that had sprouted in the soul of the child and sprung up in the boy? It was to-day, at any rate, a fine, tough-grained shrub, well-rooted in the soil. The school-less schoolmaster had no inclination to share in the social mill that blissfully revolved about him. Under his hat there was not an atom of the will that animated his forebears, the merchants of the Norman island, or his grandfather, the store-keeper of Long Wharf. A sad fact, but so it was. As naturally as they breathed or said their prayers his family had put on the harness in all docility and taken the road like good domestic animals who never dream that anything else exists in the universe than the shafts, the rack, the halter, the town-square and the street-corners where one turns every day. Doesn’t this attract you, this cab-horse’s life, with the certainty of a bag of oats at the end of the journey? With a beautiful plume on your head? With your diploma you could easily be the master’s horse.

Many thanks. This may very well be, as the doctors say, the good old wisdom of the ages, with an assured recompense in this world and the next, but for me it has a disagreeable taste. If I listen to you and nibble the good oats now, I shall soon find myself grazing in the field and obliged to chew dry stalks. No doubt about that. I don’t propose to let your wisdom catch me. It is soft and subtle; it is so powerful because everyone, wherever he turns, not only breathes it in himself and is impregnated at its touch, but passes it on, willy-nilly, to the next fellow. It has its agents at work in the four quarters of the world. To this marvellous wisdom, the crown of centuries of civilisation, Henry gives another name, fraud. It has made itself at home in the village as in the great city. And it has that smile because it knows it is universally accepted.

Henry smiles too, for he is thinking of another universe than that of the hay-merchants. What alienates him from their brotherhood is the ugliness of their existence, pure derision. His own seems to him true, fresh and full of unexpected things, lived in the quick beauty of every moment, demanding no other profit than itself. Munch away your life, then, good citizens of Concord, and permit me to _live_ mine. The shadow cast by our elms is not sufficiently enveloping to sweep me along after you into the paths of honourable stupefaction. I know what your society makes of a man by taming him. It will get along very well without my help. If it has held me for a short time, while I was groping my way, trying to get my bearings, you may be assured that this is over and done with. I have no desire to be a bad neighbour to you; you are very worthy members of this parish. But don’t count on my aid in making your merry-go-round go. I have my own corn to grind. You say that in refusing to adapt myself to your rhythm I condemn myself to poverty. As you please; why not? He laughs best who laughs last. I am not afraid of my poverty. But I should have a terrible fear of what you call your respectability, your industry, your virtue, if I were ever threatened with having to share them.

But his whole race, all this little world about him, modelled in the image of the great world, had obeyed the commandment: Look after your business, increase your wealth. He listened to the mandate from within--listened in his own fashion. Yes, exactly, look after one’s _own_ business, increase one’s _own_ wealth. Interpret this freely, in your own way. This boy does interpret it in his own free way. He counts as much as anyone on “making a position for himself.” There are many fine formulas of this kind that pass like counters from hand to hand, from one shop to another, from father to son, while no one suspects their true value. “Make a living” is one of them. Do you mean, make a living and lose what makes it worth while? Then make it, makers of money. We shall see in the end who is rich and who is poor. There is nothing the matter with your formulas. I shall take them and give them a good cleaning before I use them, for your hands have dulled them, soiled them. They will have to be bright and new for my poverty.

Henry is no frivolous boy, make no mistake about that. The great business of existence occupies his thoughts too. He asks himself if life is not too precious an affair to be sold in pencils or lessons, or measured out behind a counter, or at so much the page at a clerk’s desk. Yes indeed, the great business of existence.... Exactly. But in quite another sense than that of all these poor souls who are much more aware of their dollars, their cattle and their land than of their essential poverty. Henry is quite willing to be poor, but poor like these people, never. By _no_ means. Not at any price. He intends to pile up day by day the wealth to which all these well-to-do people, who think they are so comfortable and so shrewd, pay no heed. The great business of existence, in his twenty-five-year old eyes, is to create oneself, to _live_, develop oneself, with respect for this gift that one is--respect and love for this material that has been placed in one’s hands in the rough for one to make of it the most beautiful of works of art. Is that clear, you poor souls, with your minds on dollars and cents?

As he watches this world, so diligent in its little wiles, its little thieveries, Henry has no disposition for recriminations and dark thoughts. He is too full of happiness. He feels his own strength. Let them have their gains! A tissue of trivialities, their days, whose comings and goings form the woof and the warp of their life. It amuses him vastly to behold the beautiful acquisitions they pile up around their mediocrity, like so much worthless bric-a-brac. Dull souls, not to see that the first step to wealth is to simplify one’s life, disencumber it of endless useless knick-knacks that prevent it from growing. Money, to Henry, represents a pair of stout boots, a straw hat, corduroy trousers. These elements once acquired at little cost, he feels that all the other things--the savoury things the earth freely offers--are given him in addition, as a bounty, as to anyone who trusts. The apples in the orchard and the pike in the river and the joy of the banks are all thrown in. Your money, your absurd money, thanks to which you think you are assured of the enjoyment of the world, simply prevents you from getting it. Your incomes are your jailers; they stand on guard night and day about you. You serious men, you sensible men, perpendicularly set upon your principles, you sly old men of business, dignified heads of families, with an iron belief in the sanctity of your motives, how ludicrous you are in the eyes of a boy who strips away your mask....

A certain mustiness, for the rest, which he finds everywhere in this Puritan atmosphere, offends the taste of the savage and the soul of the pagan that have come to him heaven knows whence. He is not adapted to the moral sanctity which these wooden sidewalks exhale. From his childhood, the meeting-house, the pulpit, the Sunday school and the tedious Sunday itself have made piety unpleasant in his eyes. How does it happen that the church is generally the ugliest building in a village? Is it a symbol? And if, some fine Sunday, in place of the preacher, shouting like a herdsman whose herd is refractory, some honest soul, some simple wood-cutter from the backwoods were to begin to utter, with his accent, before the congregation, a few of the words of Jesus, do you imagine that a single pane would remain in the windows of the edifice, that a single worshipper would stay in his pew and brave the crash? That old story refers across the ages to a fine, frank character who must have been as simple as a wood-cutter, and who could never have suspected, poor soul (otherwise how quickly he would have stopped talking!), that after eighteen hundred years his name would be invoked by all the brawlers of New England and creation to confuse men and women. A splendid fellow, this Jesus, the carpenter’s son--too beautiful for us to be able to doubt, in spite of the vagueness of his story or of his legend, that he really existed in the flesh--a boy come from the people to recall the bigots and hucksters to decency, close up the vestries and the temples, put a little manly pride into the heart of the poor, and obliged, after his time and in spite of himself, to be the patron of the most flourishing business of emasculation.

I know you are going to say to me: this is no substantial nourishment, this old gospel of Judea, for a hearty lad who has worked all day and likes to put a juicier morsel into his mouth. I agree. It does not alter the fact that in spite of all the efforts of Christianity to disgust you with him, Jesus, my brother, spreads about him an aroma of godlike humanity. As you read the almost unknown book in which his life is told, you wish, just because you are a pagan yourself, that you could call your friends and say to them: Look here, I want to read to you some pages you probably don’t know--they enchant me.... What do you think of my discovery? Isn’t it fine? Isn’t it a splendid heresy, with enough revolutionary force in it to crack the shell of this antiquated world? And how happy you would be to welcome as a comrade the friend of the vagabond if ... if the fanatic in front did not need him to thrust into his sermon and shoot him at the worshipper at his feet.... Poor fellow, soul of love, heart of the poor, what have they made of you?...

The famous Pilgrim Fathers, who embarked on the Mayflower to free themselves spiritually and found a new England--did they imagine that in doing this they would be liberated from themselves? It was hardly worth while making this long voyage when, in the hold of the famous boat, the Son of Man was in irons. They had really come to organize, among other solid businesses, that immense conspiracy against life with which every child born under a roof in any of the Atlantic States is supposed to associate itself tacitly, and which he must never betray till death, under pain of eternal damnation and a damned existence here below. What a black responsibility Plymouth Rock bears!

This particular mania is what the posterity of the Pilgrim Fathers call their religion. It taxes with sin the innocence of a boy who sets off for a Sunday walk in the woods, or takes his fishing-line to the water-side at church-time, to feel religious in his own fashion: the Brotherhood of Sunday Bores sneers as the Sunday Walker passes. This religion, with its church-tower, is broadminded enough to tolerate the guile that gets the best of your neighbour during six days of the week.... Ugh.... Come nearer, good people, and let me tweak your noses and then turn my back and enjoy a good laugh. Your pious, mercantile existence is too dismal; a little gaiety would not ill become you. Your Sabbath bell strikes death into the soul; it sounds as if the continent were groaning in the unending misery of the terrestrial abode adorned by the Smug.

How was it possible for Henry to feel that he belonged to the same parish as these parishioners? As a matter of fact, this refractory soul had early declared his position. Soon after his return from college, at twenty, he had refused to pay the church-tax of the parish and officially separated himself from it with a written declaration in which no deacon caught a hint of humour: “Know all men by these presents that I Henry Thoreau do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined.” This was plain and precise. Take that, clerk of the parish; put this disavowal away among your old papers, so it can bear witness in case there is need for it some day. The parish has carelessly counted one parishioner too many.

This was about the time when Henry, master in a parish school, flatly refused to form the character of his pupils with the help of the rod. Naturally this double rebellion, against the authorities of the village and the church, made him a suspicious character. The following year, when he reached the age for voting, he openly refused to perform the elementary act of a good citizen of a great democratic Republic. Moreover, the very success, for three years, of the Thoreau school had brought him the marked hostility of the mandarins of the village. This stiff little schoolmaster ... this whipper-snapper of twenty-one who permitted himself not to have recourse to corporal punishment, who taught in an independent, lively fashion, who took the children off boating or gathering huckleberries instead of holding them by fear! Impudent! We shall have to be on our guard against you.

All right, be on your guard, mandarins. If the world speaks through your lips, I shall let the world go. From childhood Henry has been used to walking alone, at his own pace. He will try to find whether there does not exist somewhere another world of which he carries the image in himself. His one ambition, and it is a great one, is to make the finest use of the marvellous gift that he has received--life. He has received it, he is sure of that, and he knows its value. He must find out how to employ his faculties, that is all. Perhaps he is destined for some uncatalogued employment. He will see. But it must be an occupation that dispenses him from conniving with this world of universal huckstering. That’s settled. Every line he has meditated in college, every one of his impressions since the time when he drove his parents’ cow to pasture, has confirmed him in the resolution to remain himself, cost what it may. The inflexibility which he does not dissemble and which renders him insupportable to the mandarins is merely the outward sign of this will.

In any case, he desires to work only at what is useful, with his hands or his brain or his idleness--fruitfully, that is all that matters--according to his own idea of the useful. Those numberless absurd or degrading interests that absorb the human race he puts aside with deliberate design. He can easily make shift with the little sympathy that is felt for him in some quarters. If he had piled up a lot of rubbish in a shop and sold it at a good profit, like a true Thoreau of tradition, he would certainly have accomplished a work agreeable to the Lord. It’s a pity, but he has no desire to please the Lord or his servants. He wants to please himself. This is certainly not the way to get up in the world; but for the moment, so far as that is concerned, to be planted on his two legs and to stand on the top of the Cliffs and watch the sun setting behind the mountains seems to him sufficiently happy till something better turns up.

* * * * *

And then there was another side to the story. Since college Henry had been working with definite aspirations, drawn towards a path that led heaven knew whither but solicited him with an authority as sweetly irresistible as the open spaces, out there, on a morning when he had a hunger for discovery.

This dated even from the days before college. At Harvard some of his compositions revealed an intellectual curiosity, a boldness, a turn of mind that did not suggest the future lawyer or the embryo minister. Henry was already trying to express himself. As a growing boy he had devoured eagerly the scraps of new thought that came within reach of a villager. They had a fresh, exquisite flavour that left a good taste in his mouth. One day the friends of culture had inaugurated at Concord one of those Lyceums which were being founded almost everywhere in Massachusetts. Henry was only twelve years old at the time; but in future, before going to college, he followed assiduously the lectures and debates. The most beautiful of these lectures was the one he heard there when he was eighteen, delivered by the step-grandson of old Dr. Ripley, the minister of the parish, and a former minister himself, who had come to settle in the village after a difference with the ecclesiastical authorities.

What seized him, exalted him, was not so much the oration itself, composed for the occasion of the second centenary of the founding of Concord, as the sight of the lecturer, his expression, his eyes, the indefinable charm of his words. How right he had been to give up the church and its nonsense, this fellow of thirty-three, to come out as a man among men and talk to them with that voice and that smile that invited you to close your eyes to the wretched spectacles of the world and contemplate the figures which the spheres describe in their sacred dances. This man spoke as one inspired, with a simplicity, a nobility that carried you away. It was said that he had made a journey to Europe and had met a great many people over there, talked with Coleridge, Wordsworth and this Carlyle who was about to publish an astonishing book. He was just going to marry a second time. The year after the lecture, they had recited a poem of his in celebration of the anniversary of the famous battle of Lexington, a historic date from which Concord drew most of its lustre. It looked as if this new inhabitant, who had come to enjoy the natural charm of the little town, had brought it in exchange a superior charm capable of raising it above itself: short as the time was since he had settled there, he already cut a great figure, second only to that of his venerable step-grandfather, the spiritual director of the parish. Henry was nineteen years old. And this very year the poet published a book that was even richer than the most beautiful lecture. What a book! A revelation, a gospel, the music of which made you melt with pure admiration and joy. To think that this man was your neighbour.... That simple title _Nature_ touched Henry at the most sensitive point. He was captivated, illumined, confirmed in his own aspirations. If he himself, some day, could only write pages that had a little of that subtle and luminous quality!...

If he could become a writer, one of those people who have something to say and know how to say it! At certain moments when he found himself really face to face with himself, Henry had the impression that there was something more than a great desire within him, that he had the power as well. Before his twentieth year and aside from his college dissertations, he composed, as an experiment, a few descriptive pages, wrote a rhymed ballad. And since his return from college, his Journal had always been there, scrupulously written up, to receive the secrets of this desire, the more urgent inquiries, the first attempts of a beginner who does not really know if the vein is rich but is heartily resolved to pursue his exploration, even if he is to have at the end nothing but the joy of exploring and contemplating the beautiful veins of the earth cut away by the drill.

Whenever he was not too dissatisfied with a page he had written, he read it to his little sister, for when you have a sister like Sophia, who feels just as you do, a true Thoreau, you can let her into the secret. It was at the beginning of the autumn that followed Henry’s return home. A sister-in-law of the new great man of Concord was boarding with his parents. Henry liked her very much: one day in the spring of this year, while passing under her open window, with the gesture of a shy young boy, he had even thrown her a bouquet of fresh violets gathered on his walk, wrapped up in his apprentice rhymes. Yes, Henry liked Lucy Brown very much and he told or wrote her of things that he would never have been willing to confide to anyone else. In talking with this friend, Sophia, who had gone to one of the great man’s lectures, could not help remarking: “That is very much like something that Henry has written....” It was easy to verify this singular concordance, which Lucy Brown mentioned to her brother-in-law. The great man wanted to see this young neighbour whose thought was so much akin to his own; had he progressed so well, then, the college boy whom he, as an influential and charitable man, had recommended to the benevolence of the President of Harvard? And so Henry found himself face to face with the man whose words, whose expression, whose beautiful book had stirred him.

And now that they had met they were delighted with each other. Each had understood the other at a glance; and before long they felt as if they had always been friends. Waldo was the elder by fourteen years, but Henry’s maturity of mind made one forget that he was only twenty. Practically speaking, they were of the same age. The great man, who also kept a Journal, observed in it: “My good Henry Thoreau made this else solitary afternoon sunny with his simplicity and clear perception.” Happiest of moments were those when they set out together for a ramble in the woods. At such times it was as if Henry was introducing his lady-love to the author of the beautiful book on Dame Nature. There Henry was at home, his companion was only on a visit. But so happy, this latter, to become acquainted, thanks to his guide, with so many things he had only perceived from a distance, things he had touched in thought but not through the senses. This boy knew everything that a philosopher did not suspect and introduced his friends of the forest to you in such a way that they counted henceforth among your own friends. In an excursion with Henry you were the guest shown about by the master of the estate. The great man became the student once more in the hands of this initiate. Charming student. Charming walks when these two were happy together, the one penetrating into the secret life of the woods with this sylvan creature, the other showing his intimate friend the cherished marvels that had been familiar to him from his childhood. How could a friendship rooted in the mould of the forest fail to shoot up high and thick? When the great man’s family planned an expedition to the Cliffs, they sometimes begged Henry to go with them and not to forget to bring his flute.

Who can say what either one or the other of the friends reaped from these walks, these conversations, this exchange? Who gained the more? It would be hard to say. For Henry, in any case, in return for what he brought the great man--an influence that was tonic, real, strong as the taste of some crumpled aromatic plant or even the pungency of a thought impregnated with the raciness of the soil--how comforting it was to find in his elder such a wonderful response to his own youthful meditations ... to hear, for instance, such perceptions as these: “Life is an art. When we consider what life may be to all, and what it is to most, we shall see how little this art is yet understood.... The work of life ... is self-culture ... the perfect unfolding of our individual nature,” when, at his own entrance into life, his instinct had repeated to him in every key this very admonition.... To hear this from the lips of a sage whose personality was so magnetically impressive was to yield to the purest appeal of oneself while gathering the sweetest fruit of friendship.

In the warmth of this exchange, which transformed old Concord and gave it a new relish, Henry’s tastes were developed, along with his peculiar ambition. From an assiduous listener at the meetings of the Lyceum he had become a lecturer. At twenty-one he read there the fragment he was just then writing on _Society_. It was as bold as the first attempt of a young man is likely to be, and not very thrilling for the village _élite_, who had come to listen to a little schoolmaster on his first appearance on the platform; especially as he made no elocutionary efforts to win them. He read his paper to them as he would have read it at home to his sister, without any further adornment; it was their business to listen and profit by it. When people do not understand you there always remains for them the resource of guessing at your drift. In spite of this, the following year, because he was actively interested in the maintenance of this centre in the grey village existence, they made him the secretary of the Lyceum, in charge of the lectures--without remuneration, which gave the post its value and charm in Henry’s eyes. Whether the audience followed him or not he meant to go on speaking, even if the things he had to say were a little beyond the horizon of Concord. Why should Concord not permit itself to shed a little light, even from afar, upon those who lacked it?

So from now on a luminous centre existed here in spite of the good people who were so busy, here as elsewhere, digesting the dough of their days, without disturbing themselves about an art of living. There were philosophic symposia at the great man’s house. A few choice men and even a muse met there, deeply interested in lofty problems and united in the same disinterested worship of the ideal. Towards the third year of the Thoreau school, various wise personages were to be seen there, Harvard graduates, men of learning, a poet, most of them young, attracted from various points in the neighbouring country through their love for a certain new thought. Especially to be noted was one who had the air of presiding over the conversations, with the authority of a man of forty; a pure spirit, lodged by mistake or a singular taste for antithesis in a carnal envelope--thin, lanky, with a pale skin and a head crowned with weeping hair, already white, named after one of the minor prophets, Amos. Amos Bronson Alcott. This noble dreamer had just settled in Concord with his terrestrial family, for he had taken a wife and begotten daughters, after the human law. As for the muse, her thirty summers had brought forth a bony visage and masculine features; her fascination was due to her great learning and her fancy and enthusiasm. Her name was Margaret Fuller. In such company you soon felt disburdened of your clayey mediocrity. You were ready to embark for the various points in the sky which the programme of the meeting indicated. The smile of the master of the house was enough to give you full confidence. Adventurous, intoxicating expeditions on which, after soaring through the clouds, you were never sure of being able to recover your path on the earth. They were veritable skylarkings of the spirit.

Henry listened, sharing in the discussions. Allied as he was to these choice spirits by the noble interests that were common to them, he did not feel entirely in harmony with them. Alcott was very eloquent and said many beautiful things. But while these tours of the heavens have an irresistible attraction for young and generous souls, Henry had never lost his plebeian habit of feeling the grain of the earth under his boots. In this refined game it was the stakes that mattered to him; the game for the game’s sake struck him as a little academic. They were neo-platonists. But as these new aspirations required a new name they had adopted that of Realists or Transcendentalists, which the great man had selected with his friend George Ripley, who lived in Boston. Realists, those who pursued the reality behind the appearance--Transcendentalists, seekers of the infinite through the finite: this had the right sound, it told the story, and it was unorthodox enough to disturb all those pious heads that were congealed in the ice of their formulas. The smell of heresy is sweet to the nostrils of one who is fond of sniffing the wind.

Henry rejoiced to feel in himself the soul of a Transcendentalist. A good word this, Transcendentalist. It is long but it goes a long way. He was not quite sure that this “ist” had just the same shade of meaning for the whole gathering. Perhaps it was pale and crowned with white curls like the noble Alcott. Or curved in an exquisite smile like the lips of Waldo. Perhaps Transcendentalism, like its brother isms, had no more value than the individual who happened to pass it round his neck like a collar. Perhaps it was nothing but a tool in the hands of a worker, good or bad. Henry was going to use it as a worker who knows what to do with a tool. As for the word itself, serious as the matter was for him, there were even moments when Henry was tempted not to take it much more seriously than did the outsiders who lost no time in ridiculing the new gospel. Besides, he always had the resource of being a Transcendentalist in his own fashion. Let his friends seek for the real and the infinite as they chose; he was going to seek for it first under the soles of his heavy boots. Of this he was transcendentally sure.

As they were a circle of apostles revealing a new life at the heart of the old withered Puritanism, it was necessary for them to propagate this outside the work-room where they gathered. They founded a magazine; it appeared every three months and the muse of the group assumed the care and the expense of editing it. The great man gave it many pages that ought to have won for it subscribers by the thousand if the public could only have altered its detestable habit of ignoring a magazine supported solely by a belief in the beauty of humanity. If you publish, for instance, noble old bits from the classics, how can you expect to catch readers who ask for things that are amusing and sensational and up-to-the-minute? In the opening number of the magazine Henry had seen himself in print for the first time. A small emotion compared to that which was concealed, to all save one or two persons perhaps, in this poem entitled “Sympathy,” under the signature Henry Thoreau. The author was twenty-three years old. He had published. He had emerged from his Journal. He was in a circle of friends who were initiating the renaissance of mystic idealism that was going to renovate the thought of New England and America. This was no reason for giving up his big boots or chinking in his pocket the dollars he had not received, since the magazine paid nothing. But it gave him the desire to write, to collaborate in this rare magazine in which his friends welcomed his manuscripts so cordially--or, when they refused them, refused as friends. They had not refused his “Aulus Persius Flaccus,” his first public attempt as a writer of prose. And an unpaid article will sometimes earn one a friendship that is worth more than money. Often one is not to know of this till much later.

But to whom was he to give these little verses, the scribblings of a sentimental and philosophic schoolmaster, since the great man, who did not like them very much, advised him not to publish them? They had the archaic flavour of the old English poets who had helped him to endure his exile in the college library. They were like the work of a boy who amuses himself collecting little wanton butterflies and pinning them on equal lines on a card in some harmonious arrangement of their tinted wings. It was a game at which boys amuse themselves, boys and those older children who re-translate Horace after sixty. Henry was not yet twenty-five, and he was only a child in the sense that his childhood was inseparable from him; but he loved these soothing little old-fashioned verses, just as he loved to play a little air on his flute or whistle the tune of some organ-grinder in the street. Not “smooth and flowing” enough for the taste of the great man of Concord, who made rhymes too now and then. There was nothing to be done then but to keep them to himself, since their rhythm was dear to him in spite of all. There would always be time to throw them into the stove.

But what was he to do with those great chunks of prose interspersed with the little verses in his Journal? And when did he first realize that he was the writer, the poet, in them, and not in these rhymes of an elderly amateur? Aside from the pages that he had used in the composition of his first essay, “Sound and Silence,” there were those he had copied and sent to Margaret Fuller, the editor, who did not want them for her magazine. Yet they had rather a strong quality. In a tone of juvenile grandiloquence, but with a firm accent, Henry pronounced his vows, notified society of his refusal to collaborate with it, and dedicated himself to the service of the cause. The editor did not perceive that a writer of prose had been born, prolix and not yet sufficiently sure of himself to break through the weight of words, carried away by his love of paradox, but rich in savoury fantasy, a creator of bold, fresh images. Her copy had been returned to him, with a graceful note of refusal. He would wait, then.

Henry stored his harvest away. Henry worked. Outside his father’s little factory, where he made the pencils, there was a labourer at his toil, awaiting his audience without anxiety.

* * * * *

How does it happen that Henry, yesterday a schoolmaster, should be living at his friend Waldo’s house? Ralph Waldo Emerson, yes. It has come about quite simply.

His friend, finding him free after the closing of the school, has made him a proposal.

He is greatly in need of someone to look after a hundred and one little matters, in the house and outside, which he cannot attend to himself. When he is away, off on lecture tours, it would be very pleasant to feel that he was leaving at home someone he could trust to see that everything went smoothly, as it should go in the household of a philosopher. He thought that such a man as Henry, who was a famous gardener and understood everything, would be just the person. Was he mistaken? Henry could come and live in their house without sacrificing any of his cherished liberty. How did Henry feel about it?

The latter had accepted. Not as a young man of twenty-four, only too happy to yield to the desire of a great elder, but because this proposal had a sound that pleased him. In that house at least he knew they would accept him, discerningly, at his true value. They were not appealing to a workman whose arms or brain one hires; they were appealing to Henry, raw as he was, with his qualities and his defects. That is why he had said yes. An ugly word becomes clarified when you take a “job” with people who understand you and love you as nature has made you. Heavens, yes, he had agreed without a single reservation.

The arrangement was quite simple. The steward was to work as he chose in the garden or elsewhere, at any hours that pleased him and whenever work seemed good to him; in return, he was to have his meals and his room as if he were one of the family. He was to be one of the family. Wasn’t that clear and above-board?... If you were a great philosopher, illumined with a serene wisdom, but little fitted for all those small material affairs that have to be reckoned with just the same in the daily life of a philosopher, would you not be very happy to have engaged a trustworthy man to shoulder all these little troublesome tasks and be on the spot, with an alert eye and a sure hand, during your absences? And suppose, at the same time, that you could converse occasionally on the noblest topics with your confidential man, as a brother, an equal, who is prepared to accompany you, to follow or precede you, up the highest peaks of thought: would not this be a famous combination?... And if you were a penniless young man, seeking employment for your faculties or your skill with people who would not make use of you simply as a tool that one takes up and throws aside, a tool that one oils or allows to rust, would you not be overjoyed to be the confidential man of a sage who wants to place in your hands all the odd tasks about the house? A sage who knows perfectly who you are and appeals to the man as well as the worker? Would you hesitate? Hardly, for it would strike you that to work for such an employer, such a friend, would be like playing even if the work sometimes were hard; it would be the highest form of collaboration. Your friend is a philosopher divinely adroit in the field of ideas, but far from handy in the practical domain; he needs your workingman’s hands and allows them to exist side by side with the soul of a poet. Your friend opens his house to you as an equal.

All right, it’s settled, friend Waldo. This environment, this household are sympathetic to Henry; the house itself smiles on him. Coming to Concord, Emerson, after visiting his step-grandfather, in the delightful old manse built by his ancestor where he himself had written _Nature_, had had the luck to find and establish there, as the home of his second marriage, the true dwelling for a sage. At the far end of the village, on the same side as the Poor Farm, it was called, from the name of a previous holder, the Coolidge house. The benediction of the great trees along the road prepared you for the grave smile of a little white dwelling among the pines whose modest porch seemed to say to the new master: I give myself to you for eternity. Be faithful to me. We shall always understand each other. And the nine windows in front approved and the two chimneys took the oath; the Mill Brook in the great meadow was the witness of the engagement. And you felt immediately that what the porch said was true. From there it was only a short quarter of an hour to Walden Pond, where you found yourself in the wild woods; a spot haunted by Henry since his childhood, where the Sage particularly loved to air his thoughts under the pines. It was a house after Rousseau’s heart and after Henry’s heart. And when a house pleases you, everything you have to do that depends on the house is tinged with pleasure. It was only a few weeks after the closing of his school that Henry had come to occupy the place offered him in this home, nestling in the joy of the fields at the end of April.

There is nothing like a little white house and its out-buildings in the fields for giving you work to do. This is Henry’s business. From the kitchen-dresser hangs a door the hinges of which have come off. Just in his line. The hinges of the door of eternal life are in the best of order, but the genius of a philosopher does not understand kitchen-dressers. The stove draws badly; it must be taken apart. This is in your line too, man of all work. The disfigurement of hands soiled with soot is not indelible. And who is to assume the important labours of the hen-house? A philosopher, of course, possesses like the most ordinary mortal the art of eating a soft-boiled egg; but before and after this beautiful fresh egg is laid for you to go and take it out of the nest, how many little details there are that demand the skill and experience of a man well up in other tasks than the tasks of the study! Fowls have their own life and their own ideas; there is the practical philosophy of the poultry-yard on which neo-platonism has made no profound impression, and there is the hand that knows how to make just the right twist to restore the broken roost. An idealist especially needs good roosts and hens that lay. Not necessarily golden eggs; simple, soft yellow eggs are the thing for your philosophic breakfast. And who but a gardener-poulterer is to prevent the blessed hens from marauding among the flowers in the garden? Then there is a pail that leaks, and here is the tinker. You have everything under your hand with that wonderful boy. He is the universal repairer. The neighbours know him well and have recourse to his knowledge. And he is a great hand at chopping wood. When you see Henry handling the wood you feel that his friend Waldo is going to gain a good deal by this exchange. His trusty man does not measure the pains he takes, he is indefatigable and performs his labourer’s toil with the same conscientiousness with which he has elaborated a page of prose, for himself alone, in his Journal.

But Henry’s real kingdom is the garden. He understands not merely how to raise melons, but how to prune fruit-trees; he knows how to graft, and how to catch moles and field-mice; he is ready if there is a stake that needs to be strengthened with heavy blows of the mallet, vegetables to be transplanted or trenches to be dug. Sometimes the philosopher and the gardener work together in the garden. Near this invaluable boy, who is like a brother to him, the Sage is happy; it is not merely the garden-work that does him so much good, but Henry’s presence acts on him like a tonic. The stroke of this little man’s spade seems to stir the roots of his own philosophy; on the clod that he turns up a worm is wriggling. The spade plunges into the secrecy of the combinations of the earth that will make the seed of the idea germinate.

Henry is in a fortunate position. He can really share in such a household. He feels at home there. In their leisure hours the master and his confidential man have long conversations in the study, where the plain board shelves do not look as if they held the books merely for the charm of their bindings. At these moments their everyday intimacy rises to the loftiest comradeship. They prolong these fine excursions in which Waldo remembers that he is the son of a mighty walker before the Eternal. In the open fields and amid this full-hearted intimacy, they make astonishing discoveries. Yes, they are happy, and neither of them would be able to say what it is that so enlivens the landscape when they set out together. The Sage does not walk on Sunday; on that day it is more suitable to stay at home.

So now the master of the Coolidge house can set out with a mind at ease when he is going to give his lectures. He can depend on his young friend, from whom he receives letters that have the fragrance of their garden days together. In his absence the confidential man becomes the protector and the stay of the household. Other ties unite him to the family than those of the hen-house and philosophy. If Lidian, the mistress of the household, loves him like a grown-up son, it is not merely because he looks after the flowers in her garden that she has brought from her parents’ house. In the same month in which Henry had lost his brother, she had lost her dear little Waldo, her eldest, five years old. It was to John, the charming John who had brought Emerson one day a bluebird-box for the barn, that she owed that daguerreotype of the child who had now vanished with him.... This poignant double loss had touched depths that the Transcendentalist doctrines never reached. From the bereavement they had simultaneously undergone there had sprung up, in the mistress of the house, an affection like that of an older sister for the big boy of the house, which he returned with a deep, tender respect. The good gardener who took such pains with her garden and her flowers gratefully accepted the authority, extending to all sorts of small daily observances, of this woman who confided in him.

They led a very frugal existence in the home of the philosopher, who was familiar with narrow circumstances from his childhood, his mother having been left a widow with five small children to bring up, and he had kept the taste for simplicity. This mother with her wholesome face, always smiling, had come to live with her son and daughter-in-law. As for Aunt Mary, who was also to be seen in the house, still so young at eighty years, Henry had simply won her heart. And it was a holiday when Lidian’s elder sister, Lucy Brown, the gardener’s very dear friend, happened to be there. Yes, Henry, the philosopher’s right-hand man, was very much at home.

Nothing was needed but children to make him feel completely so, for between Henry and the children there was a tacit alliance. There were only two of them, Ellen and Edith, babies or practically so, since the death of little Waldo, but with Henry they formed a new trio. With the children as in the garden he was in his element. Their innocence brought out several Henrys, for he was never at the end of his wits. There was the inexhaustible teller of wonderful tales, a wizard who had no equal for making them little flutes and whistles with the simple reeds they collected in the meadow. And all those tricks he showed them: how to manage the warming-pan in which they heated the pop-corn till it burst and fell in showers like fire-works, the jack-knife that he swallowed and took out again through the nose, with a skill that would have made his Uncle Charles jealous, and the trick of the apple divided so cleverly that it seemed to be intact till he asked you to cut it and it fell into quarters. And how many other inventions! The only person whom Ellen and Edith never saw with their friend was Father Spoil-Sport. When they were bigger he was going to take them out in his boat, and they were going to be Indians and camp out in a hut of branches and live on huckleberries and sour apples and make music. Meanwhile, after supper, they could go on strange journeys on the carpet before the fire; play horse and gallop astride his knee, or perch perilously on Henry’s sloping shoulders, standing straight up taller than Grandma and almost touching the ceiling. When Ellen said, “Papa may be coming home this evening,” little Edith, who was beginning to talk, would repeat “Papa” and look at her friend Henry. He had a big nose like her real Papa and they were quite willing to accept him as a second Papa. He was not a grave gentleman all in black like those whom they saw coming to the house and who remained shut up in Papa’s study. He at least was willing to lend a hand and was not afraid of soiling it. He was a Henry after their own heart with whom they could exchange a knowing smile, for he understood the mysterious meaning of the onomatopoeia of children who create a language of their own before accepting another ready-made; a Henry whom they respected though he did not growl at them and was not one of these respectable people; a Henry who was on secret terms with the world of fairies, strange plants, astonishing animals and corn that burst in the fire, and with the little folk who were in ecstasy before these marvels.

Do not try to play the child with children if you lack the proper physique. Henry’s figure contributes greatly to his success with young people. Small, thin as a wolf, with a narrow chest, sloping shoulders, he looks like a wise and cunning gnome. No matter if he is ugly, of an ugliness for which not one of the seven deadly sins would accept the responsibility, for this really makes no difference to them. At the ends of his long arms are veritable workingman’s hands; a spindling trunk, rather short legs planted on big feet. His markedly aquiline nose points to a mouth with singularly expressive lips and knows nothing of the receding chin. Sunk beneath the saliant eyebrows are large, clear, wide-open eyes, grey with a tinge of the blue of the sky, that look you through and through. Light-brown hair, abundant and fine. His sunburnt complexion, a certain rusticity of manner, which his association with Harvard and its fine gentlemen has not corrected, would make it very easy to mistake him for some longshore-man on a visit up country. As you see him pass, with his rough clothes, worn alike on weekdays and Sundays, his hob-nailed boots bound with leather laces, with the long, swinging step of a man who is used to walking great distances, hands behind his back and fists clenched, often with his eyes on the ground, the impression of physical resistance this thin little fellow gives is in flat contradiction to the meagre frame. When he lifts his eyes and looks at you it is as if a jet of implacable sincerity and perspicacity had struck you; the whole man is revealed in those eyes. Not a very easy fellow to teach, you say to yourself. But the twinkling of the grey eyes has another meaning which the children and his few friends know; under the bold features of a face that can be serious to the point of desolation, they know what fancy, what a vein of caustic humour and sober gayety is waiting for a chance to be released. And these diverse impressions melt in the aroma of open air that breathes from his whole person.