Part 9 (1/2)
Yet his neighbor Emerson was in much demand as a lecturer, and earned a good deal of money in that way. Truly idealists like Th.o.r.eau are hard to satisfy. Aga.s.siz said he could not afford to give his time to making money, but how many Aga.s.siz are there in the world at any one time? Such a man as our own Edison is influenced very little by the commercial value of his inventions. This is as it should be, but only a small fraction of mankind do or can live to ideal ends. Those who work for love are certainly the lucky ones, and are exceptionally endowed. It is love of the sport that usually sends one a-fis.h.i.+ng or a-hunting, and this gives it the sanction of the Gospel according to Th.o.r.eau. Bradford Torrey saw a man sitting on a log down in Florida who told him, when he asked about his occupation, that he had no time to work! It is to be hoped that Th.o.r.eau enjoyed his surveying, as he probably did, especially when it took him through sphagnum swamps or scrub-oak thickets or a tangle of briers and thorns. The more difficult the way, the more he could summon his philosophy. ”You must get your living by loving.” It is a hard saying, but it is a part of his gospel. But as he on one occasion worked seventy-six days surveying, for only one dollar a day, the money he received should not be laid up against him.
As a matter of fact we find Th.o.r.eau frequently engaging in manual labor to earn a little money. He relates in his Journal of 1857 that while he was living in the woods he did various jobs about town--fence-building, painting, gardening, carpentering:
One day a man came from the east edge of the town and said that he wanted to get me to brick up a fireplace, etc., etc., for him. I told him that I was not a mason, but he knew that I had built my own house entirely and would not take no for an answer. So I went.
It was three miles off, and I walked back and forth each day, arriving early and working as late as if I were living there. The man was gone away most of the time, but had left some sand dug up in his cow-yard for me to make mortar with.
I bricked up a fireplace, papered a chamber, but my princ.i.p.al work was whitewas.h.i.+ng ceilings. Some were so dirty that many coats would not conceal the dirt. In the kitchen I finally resorted to yellow-wash to cover the dirt. I took my meals there, sitting down with my employer (when he got home) and his hired men. I remember the awful condition of the sink, at which I washed one day, and when I came to look at what was called the towel I pa.s.sed it by and wiped my hands on the air, and thereafter I resorted to the pump. I worked there hard three days, charging only a dollar a day.
About the same time I also contracted to build a wood-shed of no mean size, for, I think, exactly six dollars, and cleared about half of it by a close calculation and swift working. The tenant wanted me to throw in a gutter and latch, but I carried off the board that was left and gave him no latch but a b.u.t.ton. It stands yet,--behind the Kettle house. I broke up Johnny Kettle's old ”trow,” in which he kneaded his bread, for material. Going home with what nails were left in a flower [_sic!_] bucket on my arm, in a rain, I was about getting into a hay-rigging, when my umbrella frightened the horse, and he kicked at me over the fills, smashed the bucket on my arm, and stretched me on my back; but while I lay on my back, his leg being caught under the shaft, I got up, to see him sprawling on the other side.
This accident, the sudden bending of my body backwards, sprained my stomach so that I did not get quite strong there for several years, but had to give up some fence-building and other work which I had undertaken from time to time.
I built the common slat fence for $1.50 per rod, or worked for $1.00 per day. I built six fences.
These homely and laborious occupations show the dreamer and transcendentalist of Walden in a very interesting light. In his practical life he was a ready and resourceful man and could set his neighbors a good example, and no doubt give them good advice. But what fun he had with his correspondents when they wrote him for practical advice about the conduct of their lives! One of them had evidently been vexing his soul over the problem of Church and State: ”Why not make a very large mud pie and bake it in the sun? Only put no Church nor State into it, nor upset any other pepper box that way. Dig out a woodchuck--for that has nothing to do with rotting inst.i.tutions. Go ahead.”
Dear, old-fas.h.i.+oned Wilson Flagg, who wrote pleasantly, but rather tamely, about New England birds and seasons, could not profit much from Th.o.r.eau's criticism: ”He wants stirring up with a pole. He should practice turning a series of summer-sets rapidly, or jump up and see how many times he can strike his feet together before coming down.
Let him make the earth turn round now the other way, and whet his wits on it as on a grindstone; in short, see how many ideas he can entertain at once.”
Expect no Poor Richard maxims or counsel from Th.o.r.eau. He would tell you to invest your savings in the bonds of the Celestial Empire, or plant your garden with a crop of Giant Regrets. He says these are excellent for sauce. He encourages one of his correspondents with the statement that he ”never yet knew the sun to be knocked down and rolled through a mud puddle; he comes out honor bright from behind every storm.”
X
All Th.o.r.eau's apparent inconsistencies and contradictions come from his radical idealism. In all his judgments upon men and things, and upon himself, he is an uncompromising idealist. All fall short. Add his habit of exaggeration and you have him saying that the pigs in the street in New York (in 1843) are the most respectable part of the population. The pigs, I suppose, lived up to the pig standard, but the people did not live up to the best human standards. Wherever the ideal leads him, there he follows. After his brother John's death he said he did not wish ever to see John again, but only the ideal John--that other John of whom he was but the imperfect representative. Yet the loss of the real John was a great blow to him, probably the severest in his life. But he never allows himself to go on record as showing any human weakness.
”Comparatively,” he says, ”we can excuse any offense against the heart, but not against the imagination.” Th.o.r.eau probably lived in his heart as much as most other persons, but his peculiar gospel is the work of his imagination. He could turn his idealism to practical account. A man who had been camping with him told me that on such expeditions he carried a small piece of cake carefully wrapped up in his pocket and that after he had eaten his dinner he would take a small pinch of this cake. His imagination seemed to do the rest.
The most unpromising subject would often kindle the imagination of Th.o.r.eau. His imagination fairly runs riot over poor Bill Wheeler, a cripple and a sot who stumped along on two clumps for feet, and who earned his grog by doing ch.o.r.es here and there. One day Th.o.r.eau found him asleep in the woods in a low shelter which consisted of meadow hay cast over a rude frame. It was a rare find to Th.o.r.eau. A man who could turn his back upon the town and civilization like that must be some great philosopher, greater than Socrates or Diogenes, living perhaps ”from a deep principle,” ”simplifying life, returning to nature,”
having put off many things,--”luxuries, comforts, human society, even his feet,--wrestling with his thoughts.” He outdid himself. He out-Th.o.r.eaued Th.o.r.eau: ”Who knows but in his solitary meadow-hay bunk he indulges, in thought, only in triumphant satires on men? [More severe than those of the Walden hermit?] I was not sure for a moment but here was a philosopher who had left far behind him the philosophers of Greece and India, and I envied him his advantageous point of view--” with much more to the same effect.
Th.o.r.eau's reaction from the ordinary humdrum, respectable, and comfortable country life was so intense, and his ideal of the free and austere life he would live so vivid, that he could thus see in this besotted vagabond a career and a degree of wisdom that he loved to contemplate.
One catches eagerly at any evidence of tender human emotions in Th.o.r.eau, his stoical indifference is so habitual with him: ”I laughed at myself the other day to think that I cried while reading a pathetic story.” And he excuses himself by saying, ”It is not I, but Nature in me, which was stronger than I.”
It was hard for Th.o.r.eau to get interested in young women. He once went to an evening party of thirty or forty of them, ”in a small room, warm and noisy.” He was introduced to two of them, but could not hear what they said, there was such a cackling. He concludes by saying: ”The society of young women is the most unprofitable I have ever tried. They are so light and flighty that you can never be sure whether they are there or not.”
XI
As a philosopher or expositor and interpreter of a principle, Th.o.r.eau is often simply grotesque. His pa.s.sion for strong and striking figures usually gets the best of him. In discussing the relation that exists between the speaker or lecturer and his audience he says, ”The lecturer will read best those parts of his lecture which are best heard,” as if the reading did not precede the hearing! Then comes this grotesque a.n.a.logy: ”I saw some men unloading mola.s.ses-hogsheads from a truck at a depot the other day, rolling them up an inclined plane. The truckman stood behind and shoved, after putting a couple of ropes, one round each end of the hogshead, while two men standing in the depot steadily pulled at the ropes. The first man was the lecturer, the last was the audience.” I suppose the hogshead stands for the big thoughts of the speaker which he cannot manage at all without the active cooperation of the audience. The truth is, people a.s.semble in a lecture hall in a pa.s.sive but expectant frame of mind. They are ready to be pleased or displeased. They are there like an instrument to be played upon by the orator. He may work his will with them. Without their sympathy his success will not be great, but the triumph of his art is to win their sympathy. Those who went to scoff when the Great Preacher spoke, remained to pray. No man could speak as eloquently to empty seats, or to a dummy audience, as to a hall filled with intelligent people, yet Th.o.r.eau's ropes and hogsheads and pulling and pus.h.i.+ng truckmen absurdly misrepresent the true relation that exists between a speaker and his hearers. Of course a speaker finds it uphill work if his audience is not with him, but that it is not with him is usually his own fault.
Th.o.r.eau's merits as a man and a writer are so many and so great that I have not hesitated to make much of his defects. Indeed, I have with malice aforethought ransacked his works to find them. But after they are all charged up against him, the balance that remains on the credit side of the account is so great that they do not disturb us.
There has been but one Th.o.r.eau, and we should devoutly thank the G.o.ds of New England for the precious gift. Th.o.r.eau's work lives and will continue to live because, in the first place, the world loves a writer who can flout it and turn his back upon it and yet make good; and again because the books which he gave to the world have many and very high literary and ethical values. They are fresh, original, and stimulating. He drew a gospel out of the wild; he brought messages from the wood G.o.ds to men; he made a lonely pond in Ma.s.sachusetts a fountain of the purest and most elevating thoughts, and, with his great neighbor Emerson, added new l.u.s.ter to a town over which the muse of our colonial history had long loved to dwell.
IV
A CRITICAL GLANCE INTO DARWIN
I
It is never safe to question Darwin's facts, but it is always safe to question any man's theories. It is with Darwin's theories that I am mainly concerned here. He has already been shorn of his selection doctrines as completely as Samson was shorn of his locks, but there are other phases of his life and teachings that invite discussion.