Part 6 (1/2)
Of course Emerson is only emphasizing the fact of the beauty of utility, of the things we do, of the buildings we put up for use, and not merely for show. A hut, a log cabin in a clearing, a farmer's unpainted barn, all have elements of beauty. A man leading a horse to water, or foddering his cattle from a stack in a snow-covered field, or following his plough, is always pleasing. Every day I pa.s.s along a road by a wealthy man's estate and see a very elaborate stone wall of cobblestones and cement which marks the boundary of his estate on the highway. The wall does not bend and undulate with the inequalities of the ground; its top is as level as a foundation wall; it is an offense to every pa.s.ser-by; it has none of the simplicity that should mark a division wall; it is studied and elaborate, and courts your admiration. How much more pleasing a rough wall of field stone, or ”wild stone,” as our old wall-layer put it, with which the farmer separates his fields! No thought of looks, but only of utility. The showy, the highly ornate castle which the multimillionaire builds on his estate--would an artist ever want to put one of them in his picture? Beauty is likely to flee when we make a dead set at her.
Emerson's exaggerations are sometimes so excessive as to be simply amusing, as, when speaking of the feats of the imagination, he says, ”My boots and chair and candlestick are fairies in disguise, meteors and constellations.” The baseball, revolving as it flies, may suggest the orbs, or your girdle suggest the equator, or the wiping of your face on a towel suggest the absorption of the rain by the soil; but does the blacking of your shoes suggest anything celestial? Hinges and levers and fulcrums are significant, but one's old hat, or old boots, have not much poetic significance. An elm tree may suggest a cathedral, or a sh.e.l.l suggest the rainbow, or the sparkling frost suggest diamonds, or the thread that holds the beads symbolize the law that strings the spheres, but a b.u.t.ton is a b.u.t.ton, a shoestring a shoestring, and a spade a spade, and nothing more.
I cherish and revere the name of Emerson so profoundly, and owe him such a debt, that it seems, after all, a pity to point out the flaws in his precious amber.
Let us keep alive the Emersonian memories: that such a man has lived and wrought among us. Let us teach our children his brave and heroic words, and plant our lives upon as secure an ethical foundation as he did. Let us make pilgrimages to Concord, and stand with uncovered heads beneath the pine tree where his ashes rest. He left us an estate in the fair land of the Ideal. He bequeathed us treasures that thieves cannot break through and steal, nor time corrupt, nor rust nor moth destroy.[2]
[Footnote 2: At the onset of the author's last illness he attempted to rearrange and improve this essay, but was even then unequal to it, and, after a little s.h.i.+fting and editing, gave it up. ”Do what you can with it,” he said; and when I asked him if he could not add a few words to close it, he sat up in bed, and wrote the closing sentences, which proved to be the last he ever penned.--C. B.]
III
ANOTHER WORD ON Th.o.r.eAU
I
After Emerson, the name of no New England man of letters keeps greener and fresher than that of Th.o.r.eau. A severe censor of his countrymen, and with few elements of popularity, yet the quality of his thought, the sincerity of his life, and the nearness and perennial interest of his themes, as well as his rare powers of literary expression, win recruits from each generation of readers. He does not grow stale any more than Walden Pond itself grows stale. He is an obstinate fact there in New England life and literature, and at the end of his first centennial his fame is more alive than ever.
Th.o.r.eau was born in Concord, Ma.s.sachusetts, July, 1817, and pa.s.sed most of his life of forty-five years in his native town, minding his own business, as he would say, which consisted, for the most part, in spending at least the half of each day in the open air, winter and summer, rain and s.h.i.+ne, and in keeping tab upon all the doings of wild nature about him and recording his observations in his Journal.
The two race strains that met in Th.o.r.eau, the Scottish and the French, come out strongly in his life and character. To the French he owes his vivacity, his lucidity, his sense of style, and his pa.s.sion for the wild; for the French, with all their urbanity and love of art, turn to nature very easily. To the Scot he is indebted more for his character than for his intellect. From this source come his contrariness, his combativeness, his grudging acquiescence, and his p.r.o.nounced mysticism. Thence also comes his genius for solitude. The man who in his cabin in the woods has a good deal of company ”especially the mornings when n.o.body calls,” is French only in the felicity of his expression. But there is much in Th.o.r.eau that is neither Gallic nor Scottish, but pure Th.o.r.eau.
The most point-blank and authoritative criticism within my knowledge that Th.o.r.eau has received at the hands of his countrymen came from the pen of Lowell about 1864, and was included in ”My Study Windows.” It has all the professional smartness and scholarly qualities which usually characterize Lowell's critical essays. Th.o.r.eau was vulnerable, both as an observer and as a literary craftsman, and Lowell lets him off pretty easily--too easily--on both counts.
The flaws he found in his nature lore were very inconsiderable: ”Till he built his Walden shack he did not know that the hickory grew near Concord. Till he went to Maine he had never seen phosph.o.r.escent wood--a phenomenon early familiar to most country boys. At forty he spoke of the seeding [_i. e._, flowering][3] of the pine as a new discovery, though one should have thought that its gold-dust of blowing pollen might have earlier caught his eye.”
[Footnote 3: See ”Walking” in _Excursions_. He was under thirty-three when he made these observations (June, 1850).]
As regards his literary craftsmans.h.i.+p, Lowell charges him only with having revived the age of _concetti_ while he fancied himself going back to a precla.s.sical nature, basing the charge on such a far-fetched comparison as that in which Th.o.r.eau declares his preference for ”the dry wit of decayed cranberry-vines and the fresh Attic salt of the moss-beds” over the wit of the Greek sages as it comes to us in the ”Banquet” of Xenophon--a kind of perversity of comparison all too frequent with Th.o.r.eau.
But though Lowell lets Th.o.r.eau off easily on these specific counts, he more than makes up by his sweeping criticism, on more general grounds, of his life and character. Here one feels that he overdoes the matter.
It is not true, in the sense which Lowell implies, that Th.o.r.eau's whole life was a search for the doctor. It was such a search in no other sense than that we are all in search of the doctor when we take a walk, or flee to the mountains or to the seash.o.r.e, or seek to bring our minds and spirits in contact with ”Nature's primal sanities.” His search for the doctor turns out to be an escape from the conditions that make a doctor necessary. His wonderful activity, those long walks in all weathers, in all seasons, by night as well as by day, drenched by rain and chilled by frost, suggest a reckless kind of health. A doctor might wisely have cautioned him against such exposures. Nor was Th.o.r.eau a valetudinarian in his physical, moral, or intellectual fiber.
It is not true, as Lowell charges, that it was his indolence that stood in the way of his taking part in the industrial activities in which his friends and neighbors engaged, or that it was his lack of persistence and purpose that hindered him. It is not true that he was poor because he looked upon money as an unmixed evil. Th.o.r.eau's purpose was like adamant, and his industry in his own proper pursuits was tireless. He knew the true value of money, and he knew also that the best things in life are to be had without money and without price.
When he had need of money, he earned it. He turned his hand to many things--land-surveying, lecturing, magazine-writing, growing white beans, doing odd jobs at carpentering, whitewas.h.i.+ng, fence-building, plastering, and brick-laying.
Lowell's criticism amounts almost to a diatribe. He was naturally antagonistic to the Th.o.r.eau type of mind. Coming from a man near his own age, and a neighbor, Th.o.r.eau's criticism of life was an affront to the smug respectability and scholarly attainments of the cla.s.s to which Lowell belonged. Th.o.r.eau went his own way, with an air of defiance and contempt which, no doubt, his contemporaries were more inclined to resent than we are at our distance. Shall this man in his hut on the sh.o.r.es of Walden Pond a.s.sume to lay down the law and the gospel to his elders and betters, and pa.s.s unrebuked, no matter on what intimate terms he claims to be with the G.o.ds of the woods and mountains? This seems to be Lowell's spirit.
”Th.o.r.eau's experiment,” says Lowell, ”actually presupposed all that complicated civilization which it theoretically abjured. He squatted on another man's land; he borrows an axe; his boards, his nails, his bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough, his hoe, all turn state's evidence against him as an accomplice in the sin of that artificial civilization which rendered it possible that such a person as Henry D. Th.o.r.eau should exist at all.” Very clever, but what of it? Of course Th.o.r.eau was a product of the civilization he decried. He was a product of his country and his times. He was born in Concord and early came under the influence of Emerson; he was a graduate of Harvard University and all his life availed himself, more or less, of the acc.u.mulated benefits of state and social organizations. When he took a train to Boston, or dropped a letter in, or received one through, the post office, or read a book, or visited a library, or looked in a newspaper, he was a sharer in these benefits.
He made no claims to living independently of the rest of mankind. His only aim in his Walden experiment was to reduce life to its lowest terms, to drive it into a corner, as he said, and question and cross-question it, and see, if he could, what it really meant. And he probably came as near cornering it there in his hut on Walden Pond as any man ever did anywhere, certainly in a way more pleasing to contemplate than did the old hermits in the desert, or than did Diogenes in his tub, though Lowell says the tub of the old Greek had a sounder bottom.
Lowell seemed to discredit Th.o.r.eau by attacking his philosophy and pointing out the contradictions and inconsistencies of a man who abjures the civilization of which he is the product, overlooking the fact that man's theories and speculations may be very wide of the truth as we view it, and yet his life be n.o.ble and inspiring. Now Th.o.r.eau did not give us a philosophy, but a life. He gave us fresh and beautiful literature, he gave us our first and probably only nature cla.s.sic, he gave us an example of plain living and high thinking that is always in season, and he took upon himself that kind of n.o.ble poverty that carries the suggestion of wealth of soul.
No matter how much Th.o.r.eau abjured our civilization, he certainly made good use of the weapons it gave him. No matter whose lands he squatted on, or whose saw he borrowed, or to whom or what he was indebted for the tools and utensils that made his life at Walden possible,--these things were the mere accidents of his environment,--he left a record of his life and thoughts there which is a precious heritage to his countrymen. The best in his books ranks with the best in the literature of his times. One could wish that he had shown more tolerance for the things other men live for, but this must not make us overlook the value of the things he himself lived for, though with some of his readers his intolerance doubtless has this effect. We cannot all take to the woods and swamps as Th.o.r.eau did. He had a genius for that kind of a life; the most of us must stick to our farms and desks and shops and professions.
Th.o.r.eau retired to Walden for study and contemplation, and because, as he said, he had a little private business with himself. He found that by working about six weeks in the year he could meet all his living expenses, and then have all his winter and most of his summers free and clear for study. He found that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hards.h.i.+p, but a pastime, if one will live simply and wisely. He said, ”It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow unless he sweats easier than I do.”
Was not his experiment worth while?