Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau. By Henry S. Salt. Imported by Charles Scribner’s Sons. $1.00.

IT is a curious circumstance that a life as shy and circumscribed and _introverted as Thoreau’s should have furnished material for more than one biography. Perhaps the explanation may be that the subtle secret of his personality both provokes and baffles curiosity, for after all that has been said or written we find that full understanding has eluded us, and that the real Thoreau is as unapproachable and unapproached as ever.

Born in Concord in 1817, of mingled French, Scotch, and New England extraction, son to a quiet, unobtrusive, reliable maker of lead pencils, Henry Thoreau grew up with an inherited passion for freedom and for nature. An observer from earliest childhood, a born naturalist and solitary “self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rain storms,” as he phrases it, his Harvard education added to his life the richness of a genuine love of learning and the classics. John Glen King of Salem, himself a fine old classical scholar, said of him that he “was the only man who thoroughly loved both nature and Greek.”

On leaving college he tried his hand at literary and editorial work, at his father’s craft, at school-teaching.

I am a parcel of vain strivings, tied
By a loose bond together,

he says in one of his early poems. Land surveying was another thing he worked at, but whatever he did he did thoroughly and with unflagging zeal, though always with an individual tinge in his work which marked it as different from the work of other people.

Vague hints of an early disappointment in love are given in this memoir, but we find them difficult of belief. That Thoreau should have “fallen in love,” after the ordinary acceptation of the phrase, would seem as impossible as that a pine knot or a bracket fungus should become sensible of the charm of a mortal maiden. Something, however, there may have been, some awakening, distinct enough to leave a pang and arouse the poet’s need of expression within him.

During the two years between 1841 and 1843 Thoreau was an inmate of the Emerson household, where he seems to have been valued at his true worth. He left it to accept a tutor’s place in the family of Judge Emerson, brother of the Concord philosopher, then living on Staten Island. He was often in New York and in the midst of the literary and radical circle of that day, but he would seem to have been as little at home in the great city, in any great city, as a stray woodchuck, looking on at the busy play of interests and passions out of a pair of furtive forest eyes, alien and unakin to the striving world of men.

Two years later he built the hut on Walden Pond where his highest thinking and plainest living were done, and began the “grand process of devouring himself alive,” as William Ellery Channing called it. “I see no alternative, no other hope for you,” he wrote. ‘Eat yourself up; you will eat nobody else nor anything else.” Thoreau’s own theory of the experiment was different. “I went to the woods,” he writes, “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

The experiment lasted two years. The short remainder of his life, a brief fifteen years, he spent in Concord, writing and editing the few choice books which record his observations and deductions, the summed-up total of his minutely watchful study of natural law and sequence. He died in 1862 of consumption, induced by overfatigue and neglect of ordinary precautions. When asked whether “he had made his peace with God” he quickly replied that “he had never quarreled with Him.” His last audible words were “moose” and “Indian;” and so, painlessly and without fear, he “went the uncompanied way,” scarcely less companionless than that which he had trodden during the forty-five years of his mortal life

It is noteworthy that this careful monograph on Thoreau should be the work of an Englishman, Mr. Henry S. Salt. The unique personality of the Philosopher of Walden Pond aroused attention in England before Americans had awakened to the rare quality of their shyest citizen:

His example and doctrines were coldly and incredulously received during his lifetime by most of those with whom he came in contact, and his comparatively early death cut him off, in the prime of his vigor, from reaping the harvest which he had sown with such patience and assiduity; so far his career, like that of most idealists, must be pronounced a failure. But these are not the tests by which idealists — least of all, Thoreau — can be judged, for he enjoyed that priceless and inalienable success which consists in perfect serenity of mind and contentment with one’s own fortunes. ‘If the day and night,” he says in Walden, “are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs — is more elastic, starry, immortal — that is your success.”

The Literary World (Boston), Vol. 27, October 17, 1896, pp. 342-343