THE character and opinions of Henry David Thoreau have, for an obvious reason, been a frequent stumbling-block to the judgment of his critics. As the early naturalists were puzzled to account for the peculiar structure of the bat, which did not readily adapt itself to their established system of classification, so the literary critics have been perplexed and baffled by the elusive qualities of this unique personality, who flits unclassified along the confines of civilisation and wildness. One who “was bred to no profession, who never married, who lived alone, who never went to church, who never voted, who refused to pay a tax to the State, who ate no flesh, who drank no wine, who never knew the use of tobacco; and, though a naturalist, used neither trap nor gun”—it is evident that such a man must appear unreasonable and contumacious to those who have never seriously questioned the shibboleths of social order and respectability. If an individual finds himself in conflict with society, it is assumed to be the fault of the individual; he is perverse, or idle, or cynical, or indifferent, and the duties of citizenship have not been rightly apprehended by him. Such is the common charge against Thoreau; but before we acquiesce in it we shall do well to test its accuracy by a study of his “Anti-slavery and Reform Papers,” which will, perhaps, show him in a new light to those readers who know him only by Walden. On what social subjects was he an indifferentist, and on what was he not so?
The facts of Thoreau’s life can here be only summarized. He was born at Concord, Massachusetts, on July 12, 1817, being the third child of a worthy but unimaginative pencil-maker, of French extraction, whose father had emigrated from the Channel Islands to New England in 1773. Henry Thoreau was educated at Harvard University, where, though known as a sound classical scholar, he was looked upon by his class-mates as dull, phlegmatic, and unimpressionable. But, after his return to Concord in 1838, there was a remarkable awakening of the energies that lay dormant and unsuspected in his mind, the immediate cause of this change being the quickening influence of Emerson and the rise of the transcendental school of thought. The presence of Emerson at Concord (he settled there in 1834) had the effect of transforming that quiet village into the centre of a social and philosophic movement which attracted many earnest thinkers; and among these “apostles of the newness,” who preached an ideal simplicity both in life and art, there was none more single-hearted and resolute than Henry Thoreau.
The remainder of his life was spent in his native village or its neighbourhood, varied by occasional brief visits to Boston or New York, and more lengthy excursions to Canada, the mountains of New Hampshire, the forests of Maine, and the sandy peninsula of Cape Cod. His thrifty self-contented nature did not need the stimulus of travel, in the ordinary sense; it was at once his pleasure and his profit to find in Concord all the material of his thought. After a brief experience of school-keeping, he supported himself by pencil-making, land-surveying, and various odd pieces of handicraft, his singular aptness and dexterity enabling him to satisfy the few wants of his existence (for he deliberately minimised his wants in order to secure greater leisure and personal liberty) by a very small outlay of remunerative labour, and so to devote himself more freely to what he considered the real business of his life—the study of wild nature, which earned him the appropriate title of the “poet-naturalist.” He died at Concord in 1862, of pulmonary consumption, the result of a cold caught while botanizing in severe weather.
Thoreau’s singular personality has thus been described by Emerson. “Henry was homely in appearance, a rugged stone hewn from the cliff. I believe it is accorded to all men to be moderately homely. But he surpassed sex. He had a beautiful smile and an earnest look. His character reminds me of Massillon. One could jeopard anything on him. A limpid man, a realist with caustic eyes that looked through all words and shows and bearing with terrible perception!” *
“Thoreau was a Stoic,” says G. W. Curtis, “but he was in no sense a cynic. His neighbours in the village thought him odd and whimsical, but his practical skill as a surveyor and in woodcraft was known to them. No man was his enemy, and some of the best were his fastest friends. But his life was essentially solitary and reserved. Careless of appearances in later days, when his hair and beard were long, if you had seen him in the woods you might have fancied Orson passing by; but had you stopped to talk with him, you would have felt that you had seen the shepherd of Admetus’ flock, or chatted with a wiser Jaques.”† The same writer has graphically described the characteristic rigour of Thoreau’s personal manner—his “erect posture, which made it seem impossible that he should ever lounge or slouch, and which made Hawthorne speak of him as ‘cast iron,’” and his “staccato style of speech, every word coming separately and distinctly, as if preserving the same cool isolation in the sentence that the speaker did in society.”
The most intimate of Thoreau’s friends were Emerson, Ellery Channing, Alcott, Harrison Blake, Daniel Ricketson, and F. B. Sanborn, all of whom have expressed the strongest admiration for the nobility and purity of his genius. It has been his misfortune—or rather the misfortune of a later generation of readers—that his eccentricities have been magnified out of all due proportion by critics who have failed to apprehend the true key to his character. “I have myself walked, talked, and corresponded with him,” says Colonel Wentworth Higginson, “and can testify that while tinged here and there, like most New England thinkers of his time, with the manner of Emerson, he was yet, as a companion, essentially original, wholesome, and enjoyable. Though more or less of a humorist, nursing his own whims, and capable of being tiresome when they came uppermost, he was easily led away from them to the vast domains of literature and nature, and then poured forth endless streams of the most interesting talk.”‡ As a lecturer—for lecturing was another occasional employment of this transcendental jack-of-all-trades—Thoreau is said to have been somewhat of an enigma to his audiences. It was not his purpose, as he himself tells us in his essay on “Life Without Principle,” to deal merely in trivial and popular generalities, but rather to give utterance to his “privatest experiences,” and at the risk of wearying his listeners, to treat them to “a strong dose of himself.”
The most vital of all Thoreau’s convictions was his fixed unalterable faith in individuality and self-reliance. Idealist though he was, he had a shrewd practical cast of mind which made him keenly aware of the incongruities involved in many of the social schemes which were so abundantly put forward during the transcendentalist revival; it was not to co-operation that he looked for the regeneration of society, but to the efforts of one man that is, of each man, developing and perfecting his own individual powers. His attitude on this point is well shown in the essay contributed to the Democratic Review in 1843, under the title of “Paradise (to be) Regained,” a notice, ironical in tone, yet kindly withal, of a Fourierite volume which advocated a method of speedily realising the millennium by means of co-operation and machinery. For the same reason, when a section of the transcendentalist party was occupied in organising communities at Brook Farm and elsewhere, Thoreau stood resolutely aloof, preferring to achieve his independence by what was to him the surer and more congenial method of simplifying his own life.
It was this same individualistic tendency that led him to make his now famous retirement to the shore of Walden Pond, where, in 1845, he built himself a shanty in which he lived for over two years, as has been inimitably related by him in the most characteristic and widely appreciated of his writings. It should be noted, however, that this sojourn in the woods, though, perhaps, the most striking episode of his career, was an episode only, and occupied but a tenth part of his mature life; it was simply a period of self-trial and communion with nature, in which he tested the soundness and efficacy of those intellectual weapons of which, as we shall see, he afterwards made brilliant use. It is, therefore, a misunderstanding, none the less complete because it is so common, to regard Thoreau as a cynical recluse, coldly indifferent to the interests and welfare of his fellow-men. He went to Walden, as he himself recorded, for a definite purpose—”to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles;” this purpose accomplished, he left the woods “for as good a reason as he went there.” The notion that the Walden experiment was designed to be “an entire independency of mankind,” owes its origin not to Thoreau himself, but to the inventiveness of certain critics, who, being minded to prove him a fool, found it convenient to invest him gratuitously with the insignia of folly.
Thoreau’s anarchist principles, which play so important a part in the “Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers,” were a direct outcome of this natural individualism. When quite a young man he had been brought into collision, as he tells us in his essay on “Civil Disobedience,” with that power of which he always remained a sworn enemy—the State; his refusal to pay the Church rate, enforced by the Massachusetts government on the members of the various religious congregations, being the cause of the disagreement. He also, like his friend Alcott, declined to pay the annual poll-tax, for which continued act of contumacy he was arrested in the autumn of 1845 (his first year at Walden), and lodged for a night in the gaol at Concord, a novel experience of which he has himself given us a characteristic description. The immediate cause of this withdrawal of allegiance, on the part of one who was in reality American to the backbone in his sympathies and predilections, was the iniquity, as he conceived it, of the war then being waged by the United States on Mexico, in pursuance of their policy of annexing Texas and fostering territorial disputes—an iniquity which made him declare that under such a government the only place for an honest man was in prison. “Henry, why are you here?” said Emerson, in astonishment, when he visited his friend in the village prison. “Why are you not here?” was the emphatic rejoinder. On this, as on other occasions, the required tax was paid on Thoreau’s behalf by one of his friends.
But though this policy of territorial aggression, and still more (as we shall see) the sanction given by Massachusetts to the institution of slavery, were the ostensible causes of Thoreau’s rebellion against the State, it can hardly be doubted that a man of so individualistic a temperament must in any event have been placed in antagonism, in theory at any rate, to the existing form of government; and Thoreau has expounded his amurchist doctrines with considerable frankness in his vigorous essays on “Civil Disobedience” and “Slavery in Massachusetts.” “I heartily accept,” he says, “the motto—’that government is best which governs least;’ and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically.” He unhesitatingly asserts the entire independence of the individual in all matters where conscience is concerned, as opposed to those of mere expediency. “Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think we should be men first and subjects afterwards. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right.” Policy, he insists, is not morality. “What is wanted is men, not of policy but of probity… the fate of the country does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.” At the same time, he admits that many reforms are needed, and while asserting anarchism as the ideal of the future, does not deny that wise legislation may be advisable in the present. What he demands is, “not at once no government, but at once a better government.”
The most brilliant of Thoreau’s “Anti-Slavery Papers,” and indeed the most impassioned of all his writings, is the “Plea for John Brown.” John Brown was first introduced to Thoreau by F. B. Sanborn, in the spring of 1857, when he visited Concord and addressed a meeting of citizens in the Town Hall. “On the day appointed,” says Mr. Sanborn, “Brown went up from Boston at noon, and dined with Mr. Thoreau, then a member of his father’s family, and residing not far from the railroad station. The two idealists, both of them in revolt against the civil government because of its base subservience to slavery, found themselves friends from the beginning of their acquaintance. They sat after dinner discussing the events of the border warfare in Kansas, and Brown’s share in them, when, as it often happened, Mr. Emerson called at Mr. Thoreau’s door on some errand to his friend. Thus the three men met under the same roof, and found that they held the same opinion of what was then uppermost in the mind of Brown.” ** Thoreau’s admiration of the massive strength and earnestness of Brown’s character was instant and unalterable. “He worshipped a hero in mortal disguise,” says Channing, “under the shape of that homely son of justice; his pulses thrilled and his hands involuntarily clenched together at the mention of Captain Brown.”
Two years and a half later, Brown was again in Concord, and started from that place on his final expedition to Harper’s Ferry, where after seizing the arsenal, he was overpowered and captured on October 18th, 1859, in an attempt to organise an insurrection among the Virginian slaves. From the first, there was little doubt that his life would be the price exacted for this culminating act of boldness, which was virulently denounced by the almost unanimous voice of the American press, and was deprecated even by Abolitionists as ill-considered and unseasonable. It was at this juncture that Thoreau came forward publicly with his “Plea for Captain John Brown,” which was read in the Concord Town Hall on October 30, and again at Boston on November 1st, and on each occasion was received with deep attention and respect by a crowded audience. It is an emphatic endorsement of Brown’s action as entirely humane, rational, and right-principled—justified by the monstrous wickedness of the slaveholding system with which he was at war. “I shall not be forward,” said Thoreau, “to think him mistaken in his method who quickest succeeds in liberating the slave. I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable.” The first public word spoken in defence of the hero-martyr of abolition, this essay is a worthy monument of the genius of both its subject and its author, men so unlike in many points of character and education, yet animated by the same intense hatred of cruelty and injustice.
Enough has now been said to show that the charge of indifferentism which is sometimes brought against Thoreau is mistaken and misleading, since he was very far from being regardless of the welfare of his fellow-countrymen or of mankind in general. It is an error to imagine that a man whose convictions are so opposed to those of the majority as to seem whimsical and quixotic, is necessarily an indifferentist, or that a Protestant, an individualist, a solitary and a free-lance, like Thoreau, is one whit less earnest a citizen because he is not content to make the course of his life conform to the ordinary social groove; the real indifferentists are rather they who find it easier and more comfortable to swim with the tide, and to avoid placing themselves in antagonism to that “public opinion,” which in America, even more than in England, is so tremendous a power. The charge of indifferentism is therefore a perfectly vague and pointless one, unless it be shown that the indifference complained of relates to matters of real and vital import; to be unconcerned about trifles is one thing, to neglect matters of conscience is another. Now Thoreau, as we learn from the statements of those who knew him intimately, was absolutely indifferent to many things which the man of the world holds dear: he did not care for money, or personal comforts, or fine clothes, or success in business, or the innumerable cumbersome trappings, physical and intellectual, which are foolishly supposed by those who have never tried to dispense with them, to be an essential part of modern civilisation. It was his opinion that “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone;” and his general attitude on this point may be gathered from that typical reply of his, when he was asked which dish he would prefer at table—”the nearest.”
But in all cases where principle was at stake, Thoreau’s will was as inflexible as the cast iron to which Hawthorne compared him; herein contrasting sharply with the mental and moral pliability of the ordinary member of society. “No man,” he says, “ever stood the lower in my estimation for having a patch in his clothes; yet I am sure that there is greater anxiety, commonly, to have fashionable, or at least clean and unpatched clothes, than to have a sound conscience.” In his fine essay on “Life Without Principle,” he re-enforces those salutary, though unpopular lessons of integrity and hardihood, which form the moral of Walden, pointing out, with all the incisiveness of speed and felicity of illustration for which his style is conspicuous, the follies and sophisms which underlie the worldly wisdom on which much of our civilised life is based—the useless toil which is dignified with the name of industry; the degradation and loss of freedom by which a so-called “independency” is too often purchased; the immorality of the various methods of trading and money-making, respectable or the contrary; the hollowness of much that passes as science or religion; and the ineptitudes and frivolities of social intercourse, which can corrupt and weaken the strength and sanctity of the mind.
The conclusion of the whole matter brings us back to the lesson which Thoreau is never tired of repeating—the need of individuality and real personal development. “It is for want of a man,” he tells us, in one of his epigrammatic paradoxical utterances, “that there are so many men.” Thoreau’s gospel of social reform may, perhaps, be not unfairly summed up in one word—simplicity. He would have each individual test for himself the advantages or disadvantages of the various customs and appliances which have gradually been amassed in a complex and artificial state of society, and make sure that in continuing to employ them he does so from an actual preference, and not from mere force of habit and tradition. It has been wittily said of Thoreau by Dr. O. W. Holmes, that he was a would-be “nullifier of civilisation, who insisted on nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end.” But in reality there is no such conflict between simplicity of living and the higher civilisation—indeed, a true refinement will never be realized until men have learned the wisdom and pleasure of the course which Thoreau inculcates. It is important to emphasize the fact that it is not civilisation in general but the particular vices incidental to civilisation, against which his censure is directed. While recognizing that the civilised state is preferable to the uncivilised, he yet maintains that the latter is free from certain evils by which the former is afflicted, and urges that “we may possibly so live as to secure all the advantage without suffering any of the disadvantage” of organised society. “To combine the hardiness of the savage with the intellectualness of the civilised man,” was the problem to which Thoreau invited the attention of a self-indulgent and luxurious age, and in pursuing this course he did not scruple to avow his contempt for many of the pious fictions of conventional life. The “Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers,” apart from their worth as literature, afford a valuable corrective of the erroneous notion that the man who preached this gospel of simplicity was unable to sympathise with the higher interests and aspirations of mankind. Not such was the opinion of those who had the best opportunity of judging him, as may be seen from the following memorial lines, which convey no empty panegyric, but a faithful tribute to one of the justest and humanest of the men of genius whom America has produced:—
“Much do they wrong our Henry, wise and kind,
Morose who name thee, cynical to men,
Forsaking manners civil and refined,
To build thyself in Walden Woods a den—
Then flout society, flatter the rude hind.
We better knew thee, loyal citizen!
Thou, friendship’s all-adventuring pioneer,
Civility itself wouldst civilised:
While braggart boors, wavering ‘twixt rage and fear,
Slave-hearths lay waste and Indian huts surprise,
And swift the Martyr’s gibbet would uprear:
Thou hail’dst him great whose valorous emprise
Orion’s blazing belt dimmed in the sky—
Then bowed thy unrepining head to die.”
A. Bronson Alcott’s “Sonnets and Canzonets.”
* Recorded by C. J. Woodbury, Century Magazine, Feb. 1890.
† Harper’s Magazine, July, 1862.
‡ Short Studies of American Authors. Boston, 1888.
** “Memoirs of John Brown,” 1878.