BELIEVING Thoreau’s importance to lie much more in his sayings and writings than in that incident which has perhaps attracted too much attention—his residence in the hut—and regarding his “Walden” as America’s greatest book, I would like, with your permission, to state as briefly as possible that I think your contributor, Mr. Worthing, has misjudged him. It is useless to argue about these things. Critics who attribute to Thoreau egotism, arrogance, lack of humanitarian sympathies, and (most annoying) of humour; who cannot understand his “paradoxes,” and describe them as untrue, or devoid of wisdom, seem to me to be accusing not Thoreau but themselves. I will only say that these very qualities are to me signal proofs of his goodness and genius, and have been a joy and delight for nearly sixty years of vegetarian life.
Many great men seem to be misunderstood by some of their own generation, but it passes off after a century or two; and it would be useless for me here to repeat what I have said in the second edition of my biography of Thoreau (1896) and elsewhere. It will be more profitable if I mention that a full and, I should guess, final Life of him, from the pen of Professor Raymond Adams, of North Carolina, will shortly be forthcoming. I have had much help and kindness from American friends and correspondents; Dr. Emerson, for example (son of R.W.E.), wrote to me nearly fifty years ago that he chafed at Lowell’s “patronizing and superficial estimate of a man whose life was passed upon a plane which Lowell only reaches in his best flight.” I was pleased to hear, too, from Mr. Gandhi that when he was engaged in the passive resistance struggle, a reading of Thoreau’s essay on “Civil Disobedience” left a deep impression on him.
I think we vegetarians will be well advised to do justice and to give honour to the great men, like Thoreau and Edward Carpenter, who, though not strict adherents of the rational diet, have paid notable tribute to its efficiency.
Yours
Henry S. Salt
The Vegetarian Messenger and Health Review, Vol. 33 No. 10, October 1936, p. 328