Sir,—Possibly some of your readers might care to hear of a rather belated conversation which I have had with Professor Raymond Adams,, of North Carolina University; I say belated, because nearly seventy years ago I was warned, unprofessionally, by a kindly physician that unless I waived my objection to flesh- food 1 must not expect to add more than two years to my life, and now at eighty-six I feel that I have over stepped the mark. Mr. and Mrs. Adams have been on a visit to England during August, mainly to talk with friends about Thoreau, whose biography Mr. Adams is writing, and to see some remaining relatives in Jersey, whence the Thoreau family derived; and the fact that I had written, in 1890, what we called a Life of Thoreau, mainly supplied by American friends, led to this meeting, apart from the pleasure of which, there was a certain piquancy in the exchange of ideas between a relic of antiquity like myself and a representative of the New, one whose book (which I fear I shall not live to see) is likely to be the chief and most authoritative work on the subject. I think vegetarianism has not honoured Thoreau as highly as it ought to have done, probably because of his not being always consistent. After all, does it matter so much about consistency? I have been faithful to the cause for more years than most people can count, but when I read some of those sentences in “Walden,” I would prefer to have written them. This one for instance:
“Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.”
I had to own to Mr. Adams that Thoreau’s genius is far too little appreciated in this country, where people are afraid of every- thing that runs to paradox (except, of course, Mr. Bernard Shaw’s); but I was glad to hear that it is otherwise in America, and that it is gradually being recognized there that Thoreau, not Emerson, is the great man. Emerson was a very good friend to Thoreau; but he made one fatal mistake—he patronised him. There is a passage in one of Thoreau’s journals where he says ‘Talked, or tried to talk, with R.W.E. Lost my time, nay almost my identity.” I have often wished that someone would comprise a record of cases of this kind, where elderly men, like Wordsworth, for example, or Emerson, are so besieged by admirers, that it ends in their over- rating themselves, and it is left to time to set things straight. I think the best epitaph on Thoreau is in the old lines of Sir H. Wotton:
“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.”
But the difficulty is that when a great man does appear, it takes us so many. years to understand him.
Yours, etc.,
Henry S. SALT.
The Vegetarian Messenger and Health Review, Vol. 34 No. 10, October 1937, pp. 319-320