Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young
Friend (File 3 of 5)
Edward Waldo Emerson
[PAGE
041]
reau,
told me that he soon learned by running over again Thoreau’s lines that
he was sure to find his plans minutely accurate if he made in them
correction required by the variation of the compass, some degrees since
Thoreau’s day. Never but once did he find an error, and that was not in
angular measurement and direction, but in distance, one chain, probably an
error in count of his assistant. Thoreau did work in the spirit of George
Herbert’s prayer two hundred years before:—
“Teach
me, my God, my King,
In all things Thee to see,
And what I do in any thing
To do it as for Thee.
“Not
rudely as a beast
To run into an action,
But still to make Thee prepossessed
And give it its perfection.”
[055] He wrote: “I would not
be one of those who will foolishly drive a nail into [PAGE 042] mere lath and plastering: such a deed would keep me awake nights.
Give me a hammer and let me feel for the furring. Drive a nail home, and
clinch it so faithfully, that you can wake up in the night and think of
your work with satisfaction, a work at which you would not be ashamed to
invoke the Muse. So will help you God, and so only. Every nail driven
should be as another rivet in the machine of the universe, you carrying on
the work.” Small things for him symbolized great.
[056] Thoreau enjoyed his surveying, and the more if it led him
into the wild lands East of the Sun, West of the Moon. But he construed his business
largely, looking deeper than its surface. While searching for their bounds
with his townsmen and neighbours in village, swamp, and woodlot, he found
everywhere, marked far more distinctly than by blazed black-oak [PAGE 043] tree or stake and stones, lines, imaginary truly, but forming
bounds to their lives more impassable than stone. Many he saw imprisoned
for life, and he found these walls already beginning to hedge in his
horizon, shut out the beautiful free life of his hope, and saw that, in
the end, the converging walls might even shut out the blessed Heaven. What
if the foundations of these walls were justice, natural right, human
responsibility; and the first tier of blocks of experience, goodwill, and
reverence, if the upper stories were fashion, conservatism, unenlightened
public opinion, party politics, dishonest usage of trade, immoral law, and
the arch and key-stones the dogmas still nominally accepted by Christian
Congregational churches in the first half of the nineteenth century? Who
would take a vault with the Last Judgment frescoed on it, even by Michael
Angelo, [PAGE 044] in exchange
for Heaven’s blue cope, painted by the oldest Master with cloud and
rainbow, and jewelled by night with his worlds and suns?
“Heaven
lies about us in our infancy,”
sang
the poet, and Thoreau, mainly to save a view of those heavens, and, that
the household clatter and village hum drown not the music of the spheres,
went into the woods for a time.
[057] His lifelong friend, Mr. Harrison G. O. Blake, of Worcester,
pointed out that Thoreau, feeling that the best institutions, home,
school, public organization, were aimed to help the man or woman to lead a
worthy life— “instead of giving himself to some profession or
business, whereby he might earn those superfluities which men have agreed
to call a living; instead of thus earning a position in society and so
acting upon it; [PAGE 045] instead
of trying to see how the town, the State, the Country might be better
governed, so that future generations might come nearer to the ideal life,
he proposed to lead that life at once himself, as far as possible.” To
this cause “he early turned with simplicity and directness.”001
[058] When the spirit clearly shows a man of high purpose what his
gift is, or may be, his neighbours must not insist on harnessing him into
a team,—just one more to pull through their crude or experimental
reform,—or require of him exact following of village ways or city
fashion. We all know persons whose quiet light shining apart from public
action has more illuminated and guided our lives.
[059] As a man who once had some knowledge of the habits of our
people, such as a country doctor acquires, I may say that I found that the
root of much disease, [PAGE 046] disappointment, and blight was, that few persons stand off
and look at the way their days pass, but live minute by minute, and as is
customary, and therefore never find that the day, the year, and the
lifetime pass in preparation to live, but the time to live never
comes—here, at least. Thoreau could n’t do this, for he was a
surveyor—one who oversees the ground, and takes account of direction and
distance. Be sure his life at Walden was an experiment in keeping means
and ends in their proper relative positions. He was not one who lived to
eat.
[060] Speaking of what his solitary and distant wood-walks were
worth to him, he writes in his journal: “I do not go there to get my
dinner, but to get that sustenance which dinners only preserve me to
enjoy, without which dinners were a vain repetition.” “We dine,” he
said, “at the sign of the shrub-oak.”
[PAGE
047] “If I should sell
both my forenoons and afternoons to society,” wrote Thoreau in his
journal, “as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be
nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my
birthright for a mess of pottage. I wish to suggest that a man may be very
industrious, and yet not spend his time well. There is no more fatal
blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his
living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance,
must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its
boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving.”
[061] Mr. Emerson noted in his journal, a few years before this
Walden venture: “Henry made last night the fine remark that ‘as long
as a man stands in his own way, everything seems to be in his way, [PAGE 048] —governments, society, and even the sun and moon and stars, as
astrology may testify.’” Now he put aside doubt and custom, and all
went well.
[062] In these changed days, when the shores of our beautiful pond
have been devastated by fire and moths and rude and reckless visitors,
when the white sand and whiter stony margin of the cove have been defiled
by coke cinders, when even the clear waters have ebbed, it is pleasant to
turn to the picture of what Thoreau looked out on seventy years ago:
“When I first paddled a boat on Walden it was completely surrounded by
thick and lofty pine and oak woods and in some of its coves grapevines had
run over the trees next the water and formed bowers under which a boat
could pass. The hills which form its shores were so steep, and the woods
on them were then so high, that, as you looked down from [PAGE 049] the west end, it had the appearance of an amphitheatre for
some kind of sylvan spectacle.”
[063] His sojourn in Walden woods, as seen by his townsmen, told by
himself, and rumoured abroad, made a stronger impression, and more
obvious, than any part of his strong and original life. He is more thought
of as a hermit, preaching by life and word a breach with society, than in
any other way; and this notion is so widespread that it seems to require a
few words here.
[064] And, first, it must be remembered that the
part of his life lived in the Walden house was from July 4, 1845, to
September 6, 1847, just two years and two months of his forty-four years
of life. They were happy, wholesome years, helping his whole future by
their teachings. He did not go there as a Jonah crying out on Nineveh, but
simply for his [PAGE 050] own
purposes, to get advantageous conditions to do his work, exactly as a
lawyer or banker or any man whose work requires concentration is sure to
leave his home to do it. He prepared there his first and perhaps best
book, the “Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers,” for publication;
he tried his spiritual, intellectual, social and economic experiment,
and recorded it; and incidentally made an interesting survey and history
of one of the most beautiful and remarkable ponds in Massachusetts.
Meantime he earned the few dollars that it took to keep him.
[065] Unlike the prophet at Nineveh, he went to the woods to mind
his own business in the strictest sense, and there found the freedom,
joy, and blessed influences that came of so simple and harmless a life,
nearer the flowers and stars, and the God that the child had [PAGE 051] looked for behind the stars, free from the millstones, even the
carved and gilded ones, which customary town life hangs around the necks
of most of us. Then, when he went down into the village, found the good
people set at such elementary problems as they seem to us now, and then to
him,—whether it was right for this country to uphold human slavery, or
for man to withhold from woman her right in her property, or for persons
to get somewhat drunk frequently, or for a citizen to violate a law
requiring him to become a slave hunter, or whether an innocent, blameless
person dying, not a church member, had any chance of escaping the terrible
wrath, not of the Adversary, but of his Maker, which should be exercised
on him for untold millions of years,—or perhaps found advanced
philosophers spending their time discussing if more aspiration [PAGE 052] cannot come from eating upward-growing vegetables like wheat,
instead of burrowing, darkling carrots or grovelling turnips; or the soul
may not be polluted by eating “raised bread;” or again, when he found
the people spending their rare holidays in the bar-room, or the old-time
muster-field, strewn with fired ram-rods, and redolent of New England rum
and bad language and worse discipline, or, having forced their farm-work
that they might do so, spending days listening to the foul or degrading
details of the Criminal Court session, or cheering blindly for Webster
after his deliberate desertion of all that he had once stood for to best
New England,—no wonder, then, I say, that he rejoiced that his neck was
out of such yokes, and his eyes washed clearer by Walden water, and, as
his generous instinct always bade him share the knowledge he won, he
[PAGE
053]
“Chanted the bliss of his
abode,
To men imprisoned in their own.”
[066] By village
firesides on winter evenings his foolish whim was gossiped over with pity;
but the wind harping gloriously in the pine boughs over his hut, as he sat
at his Spartan feast below, sang to him like the Sea-King, whose
“hands that loved
the oar,
Now dealt with the rippling harp-gold, and he sang of the shaping of
earth,
And how the stars were lighted, and where the winds had birth;
And the gleam of the first of summers on the yet untrodden grass.
What though above the roof-tree they heard the thunder pass,
Yet had they tales for song-craft and the blossoming garth of rhyme,
Tales of the framing of all things, and the entering in of Time
From the halls of the outer heaven, so near they knew the door.”
[067]
Hear his story of his high company:—
“I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the
snow falls fast [PAGE 054] and the wind howls in the woods, from an old settler and
original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond and stoned it
around, and fringed it with pine woods; who tells me stories of old time
and new eternity; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful evening with
social mirth and pleasant views of things, even without apples and
cider,—a most wise and humorous friend, whom I love much, who keeps
himself more secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley;002
and though he is thought to be dead, none can show where he is buried. An
elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighbourhood, invisible to most persons,
in whose odorous herb-garden I love to stroll sometimes, gathering simples
and listening to her fables; for she has a genius of unequalled fertility,
and her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me the
original of every fable, [PAGE 055] and on what fact every one is founded, for the incidents
occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in
all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her children
yet.”
[068] Again he wrote: “I silently smiled at my incessant good
fortune.”
[069] They err entirely who suppose that he counselled every one to
build hermitages in the woods, break with society and live on meal. This
he distinctly disavows, but makes a plea for simple and brave living, not
drowned in the details, not merely of cooking, sweeping, and dusting, but
of politics, whether parish, town, state, or federal, and even of
societies, religious, professional, charitable, or social, for, after all,
these are but preparatory,—police regulations on a larger or smaller
scale,—designed as means to make life possible, and not to be pursued [PAGE 056] as ends. Even by Walden, as he tells us, he wore a path, and he
found that his life there was falling into it: evidently he saw it was
incomplete, so, keeping its sweet kernel, he left the shell. In cheerful
mood, years after, he discusses the matter: “Why did I change? Why did I
leave the woods? I do not think that I can tell. I have often wished
myself back. I do not know any better how I came to go there. Perhaps it
is none of my business, even if it is yours. Perhaps I wanted change.
There was a little stagnation, it may be, about 2 o’clock in the
afternoon. Perhaps if I lived there much longer, I might live there
forever. One would think twice before he accepted Heaven on such terms.”
[070] Taking a bird’s-eye view of institutions and marking their
provisional and makeshift and hence transitory character, he writes in his
journal: “As for dis- [PAGE 057] pute
about solitude and society, any comparison is impertinent. It is an idling
down on a plain at the base of a mountain instead of climbing steadily to
its top. Of course, you will be glad of all the society you can get to go
up with. ‘Will you go to Glory with me?’ is the burden of the song. It
is not that we love to be alone, but that we love to soar, and, when we do
soar, the company grows thinner and thinner, till there is none at all. It
is either the Tribune or the
plain, a sermon on the Mount, or a very private ecstasy higher up. Use all
the society that will abet you.”
[071] And now as to the belief that he was hard, stern, selfish, or
misanthropic. Truly he was undemonstrative; a sisterly friend said of him,
“As for taking his arm, I should as soon think of taking the arm of an
elm-tree as Henry’s”; and he, himself, said, “When I am dead you
will [PAGE 058] find swamp-oak
written on my heart”; but under this oak-bark was friendship and loyalty
in the tough grain, through and through. He was a friend, “even to the
altars,” too sincere and true to stoop to weakness from his noble ideal.
Hear his creed of sincere yet austere friendship as he states it in his
journal:—
“It steads us to be as true to children and boors as to God
himself. It is the only attitude which will suit all occasions, it only
will make the Earth yield her increase, and by it do we effectually
expostulate with the wind. If I run against a post, that
is the remedy. I would meet the morning and evening on very sincere
grounds. When the sun introduces me to a new day, I silently say to
myself, ‘Let us be faithful all round. We will do justice and receive
it.’ Something like this is the charm of Nature’s demeanour towards
us; strict [PAGE 059] conscientiousness
and disregard of us when we have ceased to have regard to ourselves. So
she can never offend us. How true she is, and never swerves. In her most
genial moment her laws are as steadfastly and relentlessly
fulfilled—though the Decalogue is rhymed and set to sweetest music—as
in her sternest. Any exhibition of affection, as an inadvertent word, or
act or look, seems premature, as if the time were not ripe for it, like
the buds which the warm days near the end of winter cause to push out and
unfold before the frosts are yet gone.”
[072] Again he writes that in the relation of friends: “There is
no ambition except virtue, for why should we go round about who may go
direct? All those contingencies which the philanthropist, statesman, and
housekeeper write so many books to meet are simply and [PAGE 060] quietly settled in the intercourse of friends.”
[073] I can bring my own witness and that of many others to his
quiet, dutiful, loyal attitude to his mother and father, how respectfully
he listened to them, whether he agreed with them or not; how in his quiet
way he rendered all sorts of useful and skillful help in domestic and
household matters. After his father’s death his mother said, “But for
this I should never have seen the tender side of Henry,” who had nursed
him with loving care. His family were a little anxious and troubled when
he went to Walden, fearing danger and hardship in this life, and they
missed him; but they sympathized with his desire and wanted him to carry
it out as pleased him. He came constantly home to see them and to help
them in garden or house, and also dropped in at other friendly homes in
Next file (4 of 5)
NOTES
001
Page
45, note 1.
Thoreau writes: “Explore your own higher latitudes; nay, be a Columbus
to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not
of trade, but of thought. Every man is lord of a realm beside which the
earthly empire of the Czar is but a petty state. I do not wish to be any
more busy [PAGE 136] with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and
feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells
me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their
snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through
these hills. I think that the
richest vein is somewhere hereabouts: so by the divining rod and thin
rising vapours I judge: and here I will begin to mine.”
Again: “If my curve is large, why bend it to a smaller circle?”
Emerson wrote of Thoreau: “He who sees the horizon may securely say what
he pleases of any twig or tree between him and it.” [Back to text]
002 Page
54, note 1. “The Regicides,” Edward Goffe and William Whalley,
distinguished officers under Cromwell, who, proscribed after the
Restoration, fled to New England and with a price set on their heads lived
to old age hidden among the hills near Hadley and New Haven. [Back to text] |