IT WAS Frank B. Sanborn who ventured the prophecy that of all the Concord group of American writers Henry David Thoreau, the least regarded in his lifetime, would live the longest in the end, and it begins to look as if the prediction might be realized. Who could have foreseen fifty years ago, at a time when Thoreau’s books seemed practically still-born and were being returned to him by the hundreds as unsalable, that within half a century one of the foremost American publishing firms would be printing an edition of his works in twenty volumes; that an original copy of his rejected book, the “Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” would sell for ten guineas; and that scraps of his hand-writing would fetch more than their weight in gold? Yet this is literally what has happened.
In contemplating the new “Walden” edition* of Thoreau, Mr. Henry S. Salt, one of Thoreau’s loyalest English interpreters, confesses his astonishment at this splendid monument now tardily raised to “a name which has had to fight its way, year by year, against much obloquy and misapprehension, and with little else to aid it than its own quenchless vitality.” He adds: “I will not say that such an event marks the climax of Thoreau’s fame, for I believe that in another half-century he will be still more highly appreciated; but it certainly marks the most important epoch in a great writer’s acceptance—the point where he ceases to be classed with the minora sidera of his generation, and takes his proper place in the literary heavens.”
In reviewing some of the recent English criticism of Thoreau, Mr. Salt is impressed by a tendency to measure and classify and label the American poet-naturalist by some other standard than his own. Mr. Arthur Rickett, for instance, in his book on “The Vagabond in Literature,” praises Thoreau’s intimacy with wild nature, but blames him for his “moralizing;” as if, comments Mr. Salt, Thoreau were not a great deal more than a “vagabond,” in the ordinary sense of the term. Again, Mr. Theodore Watts-Dunton, in an essay on “Thoreau and Children of the Open Air” prefacing a recent edition of “Walden,” complains sadly that Thoreau was “self-conscious,” that he talked of “experience,” was “touched by the modern dry-rot of education,” and was “guilty of the impertinence of symbolizing Nature.” Was he then, asks Mr. Watts-Dunton, “a veritable child of the open air?” To this Mr. Salt replies: “The question is a rather futile one, since the answer must depend on how the terms are defined, and on that point there is no agreement.” Mr. Salt continues:
“It is beyond question that Thoreau loved Nature as few men have done, else why did he spend the greater part of his life with her? It is equally certain that he was much more than a nature-lover pure and simple, such as George Borrow. Need we then repine that Thoreau was not Borrow, or that Borrow was not Thoreau? Is it not wiser to enjoy both of them for what they ate worth? ‘A great deal of criticism,’ as Weiss remarked in his essay on Thoreau, ‘is inspired by inability to perceive the function and predestined quality of the man who passes in review. It only succeeds in explaining the difference between him and the critic. Such a decided fact as a man of genius is, ought to be gratefully accepted and interpreted.’ The sum of the matter is contained in Thoreau’s own remark: ‘We are constantly invited to be what we are.’”
It was of course inevitable, Mr. Salt observes, that so eccentric and uncompromising a nature as Thoreau’s should be misunderstood by the majority of his kinsmen and acquaintances. What could his common-sense neighbors make of a man who described himself as follows?
“I am a schoolmaster, a private tutor, a surveyor, a gardener, a farmer, a painter (I mean a house-painter), a carpenter, a mason, a day-laborer, a pencil-maker, a glass paper maker, a writer, and sometimes a poetaster. My present employment is to answer such orders as may be expecteded from so general an advertisement as the above. That is, if I think fit, which is not always the case, for I have found out a way to live without what is commonly called employment or industry, attractive or otherwise, Indeed, my steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to myself at the top of my condition, and ready for whatever may turn up in heaven or on earth.”
This statement seems to us now an admirable description of Thoreau’s genius. To his contemporaries it must have seemed eccentricity or affectation. Mr. Salt reminds us than Thoreau’s own father, and even Emerson, were far from appreciating his motive:
“We recall an occasion, recorded in the Journal, when Thoreau’s father, that practical, unobtrusive old man, made protest against his son’s waste of time, as he considered it, in making sugar in a neighboring maple-wood, when he could have obtained it more cheaply in Concord, and received for answer that this occupation, far from ‘taking him from his studies,’ was his study—he felt, after it, ‘as if he had been to a university. In like manner even Emerson complained that Thoreau, lacking ambition, ‘instead of engineering for all America, was the captain of a huckleberry party’; while Lowell, less sympathetic and less scrupulous, misrepresented the Walden episode as an attempt at ‘an entire independency of mankind.’ But such misapprehensions, inevitable once, are less pardonable now, after an interval of fifty years, during which time the fuller publication of Thoreau’s works has corrected the earlier impressions of him, and has shown him in a clearer light to those who desire to understand him. We can see now that, as an original thinker and idealist, he did ‘engineer for all America,’ in a sense other than that which Emerson intended—that he built for his countrymen, and for us, a priceless viaduct of thought, to lead us on from the sophisms and falsities of a too complex civilization to a simpler and happier mode of living.”
The process of this recognition of Thoreau, Mr. Salt declares, has been a slow but sure one; and if Thoreau, the thinker, is still knocking at the gate where Thoreau, the writer, has been admitted, it is “plainly because the message brought by him was in some respects a disturbing one, and unwelcome to the majority of those who heard it.” Mr. Salt goes on to say:
“What, then, are the ‘ideas’ for which Thoreau stands in American literature? It is difficult to express them in a word, for if we say ‘simplicity’—the word which perhaps most nearly comprehends his views—there is a danger that it will be taken, as it often is, to imply a mere simplification of living. ‘To what end,’ he asks in one of his letters, ‘do I lead a simple life at all? That I may teach others to simplify their lives, and so all our lives be simplified merely, like an algebraic formula? Or not, rather, that I may make use of the ground I have cleared, to live more worthily and profitably?’ The intention of ‘prescribing rules’ was expressly disavowed by him; it was not his wish to induce the luxuriously minded to abandon their luxuries, but rather to spur the sluggish minds to think for themselves and so to follow their own personal tastes instead of the traditional prejudice. Individuality of judgment lies at the very root of his simplification. His intensely alert and thrifty nature, barbed with keenest insight into the sophistries of custom, led him to the simple life (if we may still use that much-maligned term) of which he was the chief modern exponent—a very different life, be it observed, from the fashionable, easy-going ‘simplicity’ which a popular writer (Charles Wagner, in ‘The Simple Life’) has commended as ‘a state of mind,’ and as demanding ‘no external characteristics.’ In Thoreau’s creed, the natural life is to be lived as well as eulogized; and, as it is here that he comes to grips with conventional habit as no other writer has done, it is not surprising that on this point he has been most persistently misapprehended.
“‘It is a very shallow view,’ says Lowell, ‘that affirms trees and rocks to be healthy, and cannot see that men in communities are just as true to the laws of their organization.’ But what Thoreau condemned was not, of course, the mere congregating of men in communities, but the diseases, mental and physical, that result therefrom; his real object was to restore a just balance between the exaggerated claims of society and the neglected claims of nature. ‘Living much out of doors,’ he says, ‘will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character, as staying in the house, on the other hand, may produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness, of skin, accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions. No doubt it is a nice matter to proportion rightly the thick and thin skin.’ These are hardly the words of the bigoted advocate of savagely which Thoreau’s critics would represent him,”
In concluding, Mr. Salt pleads for a truer, & more intimate, view of the character of Thoreau. He says:
“To dwell upon the sincerity of Thoreau might be deemed an impertinence, for this quality, to those who sympathize with him, is written unmistakably on his every page; yet even so genial a writer as Mr. A. C. Benson has lately referred to him as the most conspicuous instance in literature of the ‘desire to stimulate the curiosity of others.’ As Lowell, regarding Thoreau through his ‘Study Windows,’ saw but a misguided fanatic, so Mr. Benson, gazing westward from ‘A College Window,’ sees in him ‘a rugged, sunbrowned, slovenly, solemn person,’ who was for ever looking at himself in the glass and describing to others what he saw there. The moral would seem to be: Let the critics cease to view Thoreau through study windows or college windows; but leaving their academic prejudices behind, let them go forth and read him in the open air where his own thoughts were ripened and recorded; and then, perhaps, they will find in him, as it is said that some of his contemporaries did, ‘the man they were in search of, the man of men, who could tell them all they should do.’ For, after all, the final test in Thoreau’s case is that of character. When we remember the wonderful strength of the impression left by his personality on those who knew him most closely-—on such friends as Emerson, Alcott, Channing, Ricketson, Blake, Higginson, and Sanborn—there is surely much significance in this entire agreement of many diverse witnesses, each of whom pays independent homage to his nobility. He had a rare magnetism which could influence not only those around him, but a later generation of readers, among whom a common love for Thoreau has often become a link of personal friendship (as the present writer has reason to remember with gratitude) between lives that were otherwise far apart. It was he who, more than any other modern thinker, realized in his own person the truth of Sir Henry Wotton’s lines:
This man is freed from servile bands
Of hope to rise, or fear to fall;
Lord of himself, though not of lands,
And having nothing, yet hath all.”
*THE WRITINGS OF HENRY DAVID THOREAU. IN TWENTY VOLUMES. Edited by Bradford Torrey. Houghton Miffin & Company.
Current Opinion, Vol. 45 No. 2, 1908, pp. 170-1