Part 8 (2/2)
The craving for literary expression in Th.o.r.eau was strong and constant, but, as he confesses, he could not always select a theme. ”I am prepared not so much for contemplation as for forceful expression.”
No matter what the occasion, ”forceful expression” was the aim. No meditation, or thinking, but sallies of the mind. All his paradoxes and false a.n.a.logies and inconsistencies come from this craving for a forceful expression. He apparently brought to bear all the skill he possessed of this kind on all occasions. One must regard him, not as a great thinker, nor as a disinterested seeker after the truth, but as a master in the art of vigorous and picturesque expression. To startle, to wake up, to communicate to his reader a little wholesome shock, is his aim. Not the novelty and freshness of his subject-matter concerns him but the novelty and unhackneyed character of his literary style.
That throughout the years a man should keep up the habit of walking, by night as well as by day, and bring such constant intellectual pressure to bear upon everything he saw, or heard, or felt, is remarkable. No evidence of relaxation, or of abandonment to the mere pleasure of the light and air and of green things growing, or of sauntering without thoughts of his Journal. He is as keyed up and strenuous in his commerce with the Celestial Empire as any tradesman in world goods that ever ama.s.sed a fortune. He sometimes wrote as he walked, and expanded and elaborated the same as in his study. On one occasion he dropped his pencil and could not find it, but he managed to complete the record. One night on his way to Conantum he speculates for nearly ten printed pages on the secret of being able to state a fact simply and adequately, or of making one's self the free organ of truth--a subtle and ingenious discussion with the habitual craving for forceful expression. In vain I try to put myself in the place of a man who goes forth into wild nature with malice prepense to give free swing to his pa.s.sion for forcible expression. I suppose all nature-writers go forth on their walks or strolls to the fields and woods with minds open to all of Nature's genial influences and significant facts and incidents, but rarely, I think, with the strenuousness of Th.o.r.eau--grinding the grist as they go along.
Th.o.r.eau compares himself to the bee that goes forth in quest of honey for the hive: ”How to extract honey from the flower of the world. That is my everyday business. I am as busy as the bee about it. I ramble over all fields on that errand and am never so happy as when I feel myself heavy with honey and wax.” To get material for his Journal was as much his business as it was the bee's to get honey for his comb. He apparently did not know that the bee does not get honey nor wax directly from the flowers, but only nectar, or sweet water. The bee, as I have often said, makes the honey and the wax after she gets home to the swarm. She puts the nectar through a process of her own, adds a drop of her own secretion to it, namely, formic acid, the water evaporates, and lo! the tang and pungency of honey!
VIII
There can be little doubt that in his practical daily life we may credit Th.o.r.eau with the friendliness and neighborliness that his friend Dr.
Edward W. Emerson claims for him. In a recent letter to me, Dr. Emerson writes: ”He carried the old New England undemonstrativeness very far. He was also, I believe, really shy, prospered only in monologue, except in a walk in the woods with one companion, and his difficulties increased to impossibility in a room full of people.” Dr. Emerson admits that Th.o.r.eau is himself to blame for giving his readers the impression that he held his kind in contempt, but says that in reality he had neighborliness, was dutiful to parents and sisters, showed courtesy to women and children and an open, friendly side to many a simple, uncultivated townsman.
This practical helpfulness and friendliness in Th.o.r.eau's case seems to go along with the secret contempt he felt and expressed in his Journal toward his fellow townsmen. At one time he was chosen among the selectmen to perambulate the town lines--an old annual custom. One day they perambulated the Lincoln line, the next day the Bedford line, the next day the Carlisle line, and so on, and kept on their rounds for a week. Th.o.r.eau felt soiled and humiliated. ”A fatal coa.r.s.eness is the result of mixing in the trivial affairs of men. Though I have been a.s.sociating even with the select men of this and adjoining towns, I feel inexpressibly begrimed.” How fragile his self-respect was! Yet he had friends among the surrounding farmers, whose society and conversation he greatly valued.
That Th.o.r.eau gave the impression of being what country folk call a crusty person--curt and forbidding in manner--seems pretty well established. His friend Alcott says he was deficient in the human sentiments. Emerson, who, on the whole, loved and admired him, says: ”Th.o.r.eau sometimes appears only as a _gendarme_, good to knock down a c.o.c.kney with, but without that power to cheer and establish which makes the value of a friend.” Again he says: ”If I knew only Th.o.r.eau, I should think cooperation of good men impossible. Must we always talk for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, and joy?
Centrality he has, and penetration, strong understanding, and the higher gifts,--the insight of the real, or from the real, and the moral rect.i.tude that belongs to it; but all this and all his resources of wit and invention are lost to me, in every experiment, year after year, that I make, to hold intercourse with his mind. Always some weary captious paradox to fight you with, and the time and temper wasted.” ”It is curious,” he again says, ”that Th.o.r.eau goes to a house to say with little preface what he has just read or observed, delivers it in a lump, is quite inattentive to any comment or thought which any of the company offer on the matter, nay, is merely interrupted by it, and when he has finished his report departs with precipitation.”
It is interesting in this connection to put along-side of these rather caustic criticisms a remark in kind recorded by Th.o.r.eau in his Journal concerning Emerson: ”Talked, or tried to talk, with R. W. E. Lost my time--nay, almost my ident.i.ty. He, a.s.suming a false opposition where there was no difference of opinion, talked to the wind--told me what I knew--and I lost my time trying to imagine myself somebody else to oppose him.”
Evidently Concord philosophers were not always in concord.
More characteristic of Emerson is the incident Th.o.r.eau relates of his driving his own calf, which had just come in with the cows, out of the yard, thinking it belonged to a drove that was then going by. From all accounts Emerson was as slow to recognize his own thoughts when Alcott and Channing aired them before him as he was to recognize his own calf.
”I have got a load of great hardwood stumps,” writes Th.o.r.eau, and then, as though following out a thought suggested by them, he adds: ”For sympathy with my neighbors I might about as well live in China.
They are to me barbarians with their committee works and gregariousness.”
Probably the stumps were from trees that grew on his neighbors' farms and were a gift to him. Let us hope the farmers did not deliver them to him free of charge. He complained that the thousand and one gentlemen that he met were all alike; he was not cheered by the hope of any rudeness from them: ”A cross man, a coa.r.s.e man, an eccentric man, a silent man who does not drill well--of him there is some hope,”
he declares. Herein we get a glimpse of the Th.o.r.eau ideal which led his friend Alcott to complain that he lacked the human sentiment. He may or may not have been a ”cross man,” but he certainly did not ”drill well,” for which his readers have reason to be thankful.
Although Th.o.r.eau upholds the cross and the coa.r.s.e man, one would really like to know with what grace he would have put up with gratuitous discourtesy or insult. I remember an entry in his Journal in which he tells of feeling a little cheapened when a neighbor asked him to take some handbills and leave them at a certain place as he pa.s.sed on his walk.
A great deal of the piquancy and novelty in Th.o.r.eau come from the unexpected turn he gives to things, upsetting all our preconceived notions. His trick of exaggeration he rather brags of: ”Expect no trivial truth from me,” he says, ”unless I am on the witness stand.”
He even exaggerates his own tendency to exaggeration. It is all a part of his scheme to startle and wake people up. He exaggerates his likes, and he exaggerates his dislikes, and he exaggerates his indifference.
It is a way he has of bragging. The moment he puts pen to paper the imp of exaggeration seizes it. He lived to see the beginning of the Civil War, and in a letter to a friend expressed his indifference in regard to Fort Sumter and ”Old Abe,” and all that, yet Mr. Sanborn says he was as zealous about the war as any soldier. The John Brown tragedy made him sick, and the war so worked upon his feelings that in his failing state of health he said he could never get well while it lasted. His pa.s.sion for Nature and the wild carried him to the extent of looking with suspicion, if not with positive dislike, upon all of man's doings and inst.i.tutions. All civil and political and social organizations received scant justice at his hands. He instantly espoused the cause of John Brown and championed him in the most public manner because he (Brown) defied the iniquitous laws and fell a martyr to the cause of justice and right. If he had lived in our times, one would have expected him, in his letters to friends, to pooh-pooh the World War that has drenched Europe with blood, while in his heart he would probably have been as deeply moved about it as any of us were.
Th.o.r.eau must be a stoic, he must be an egotist, he must be illogical, whenever he puts pen to paper. This does not mean that he was a hypocrite, but it means that on his practical human side he did not differ so much from the rest of us, but that in his mental and spiritual life he pursued ideal ends with a seriousness that few of us are equal to. He loved to take an air-line. In his trips about the country to visit distant parts, he usually took the roads and paths or means of conveyance that other persons took, but now and then he would lay down his ruler on the map, draw a straight line to the point he proposed to visit, and follow that, going through the meadows and gardens and door-yards of the owners of the property in his line of march. There is a tradition that he and Channing once went through a house where the front and back door stood open. In his mental flights and excursions he follows this plan almost entirely; the hard facts and experiences of life trouble him very little. He can always ignore them or sail serenely above them.
How is one to reconcile such an expression as this with what his friends report of his actual life: ”My countrymen are to me foreigners. I have but little more sympathy with them than with the mobs of India or China”? Or this about his Concord neighbors, as he looks down upon them from a near-by hill: ”On whatever side I look off, I am reminded of the mean and narrow-minded men whom I have lately met there. What can be uglier than a country occupied by grovelling, coa.r.s.e, and low-minded men?--no scenery can redeem it.
Hornets, hyenas, and baboons are not so great a curse to a country as men of a similar character.” Tried by his ideal standards, his neighbors and his countrymen generally were, of course, found wanting, yet he went about among them helpful and sympathetic and enjoyed his life to the last gasp. These things reveal to us what a gulf there may be between a man's actual life and the high alt.i.tudes in which he disports himself when he lets go his imagination.
IX
In his paper called ”Life without Principle,” his radical idealism comes out: To work for money, or for subsistence alone, is life without principle. A man must work for the love of the work. Get a man to work for you who is actuated by love for you or for the work alone.
Find some one to beat your rugs and carpets and clean out your well, or weed your onion-patch, who is not influenced by any money consideration. This were ideal, indeed; this suggests paradise.
Th.o.r.eau probably loved his lecturing, and his surveying, and his magazine writing, and the money these avocations brought him did not seem unworthy, but could the business and industrial world safely adopt that principle?
So far as I understand him, we all live without principle when we do anything that goes against the grain, or for money, or for bread alone. ”To have done anything by which you earned money is to have been truly idle or worse.” ”If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular, which is to go down perpendicularly.”
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