[
167]
Chapter 7: the Concord group
Transcendentalism.
Before proceeding to deal with the individual members of the
Concord group, we must understand what that “Tranenscendentalism” was with which we commonly associate their names.
Perhaps one ought not to speak of understanding it, for it hardly understood itself.
It was less a philosophy than an impulse, and our interest in it must now be due to the fact, first, that it was an impulse most useful to the
America of that day, and, second, that it was strongly felt by many of the leading spirits of the time.
It was, in brief, an impulse toward an absolute freedom, intellectual, spiritual, and social.
Naturally, its best results were in the nature of subtle suggestion and inspiration to a generation which greatly needed to broaden its horizon.
Its more concrete experiments were often fantastic and short-lived, though never ignoble.
That
[
168]
curious journal of the Transcendentalists, the
Dial, lived only four years; the
Brook Farm community held together for seven years. The whole movement had about it much that was visionary and merely odd as well as much that was true and noble; but it had, on the whole, great power for good in that day, as, through the expression of its spirit by
Emerson, it has even now.
In coming to
Emerson we arrive at the controlling influence, if not the creator, of modern American thought.
Emerson never could have said what
Lady Diana Beauclerc wrote from
Bath, one foggy day: “A thousand children are running by the window.
I should like to whip every one of them for not being mine.”
In
Emerson's case the spiritual children are all his; they are still running by, and perhaps we must admit that the day sometimes looks foggy, and the children sometimes deserve whipping.
Emerson was born in
Boston, May 25, 1803, and had a clerical ancestor for eight generations back, on one side or the other and sometimes on both.
His mother, a widow, was obliged to economize strictly, and it is recorded that
[
169]
Emerson.
once went without the second volume of a book because his aunt had convinced him that his mother could not afford to pay six cents upon it at the
Circulating Library.
At college he was younger than most of his classmates, but was apt to be successful in competition for the few literary prizes then offered by the college.
His classmate
Josiah Quincy, who gained the first prize in one case where
Emerson got the second, on an ethical subject, remarked in his diary that “the dissertation on ethics was dull and dry;” and as he also regarded
Emerson's Class Day poem as “rather poor,” it is worth while to remember that there is no known criticism quite so merciless as that of college boys upon one another.
It was with these credentials, at any rate, that
Emerson went forth into the world in 1821 and became himself a clergyman.
Ten years later he had retired from the pulpit and was on his way to
Europe, where he stayed nearly a year.
It was during this visit that he made the acquaintance of
Landor and
Wordsworth, as described in
English traits.
He also went to Craigenputtock to see
Carlyle, who long afterwards, talking
[
170]
with
Longfellow, described his visit as being like the visit of an angel.
This was the beginning of that lifelong friendship the terms of which are recorded in their published correspondence.
“The dear
Emerson,” said
Carlyle to an American forty years later, “he thinks that the whole world is as good as himself.”
After his return to
Boston,
Emerson entered that secular pulpit called in those days the Lyceum, or lecture platform.
For half a century he was one of the leading lecturers of the country.
He spoke in forty successive seasons before the
Salem Lyceum.
Much of the success of these addresses came from the unique simplicity and dignity of his manner.
There was a legend of a woman in a town near
Concord, who once avowed frankly that she could not understand a word he said, but she loved to watch him lecturing, because he looked so good.
His calm and sonorous oratory, once heard, seemed to roll through every sentence of his that the student afterwards read, and his very peculiarities, the occasional pause, accompanied by a deep gaze of the eyes into the distance, “looking in the corner for rats,” as an irreverent
Boston young lady once described it, or an apparent
[
171]
hesitation in'the selection of a word,--felicitously preparing the way, like
Charles Lamb's stammer, for some stroke of mother-wit,these were a part of the man. It sometimes occurred that his auditors helped him, unconsciously, in the effect of his oratory.
Thus I can recall the occasion when he exclaimed, in the middle of a lecture, “Beware how you unmuzzle the valetudinarian!”
when a slight bustle was noticed among the seats, and one of the best known men in
Boston, a man of striking appearance, was seen bearing out in his arms his wife, one of the best known women in
Boston and a good deal of an invalid, who had apparently been unmuzzled by that particular sentence.
Emerson always shrank from extemporaneous speech, though he was sometimes most effective in its use. He wrote of himself once as “the worst known public speaker and growing continually worse;” but his most studied remarks had the effect of offhand conviction from the weight and beauty of his elocution.
It was in the year 1834 that
Emerson retired to his father's birthplace,
Concord, and became a dweller for the rest of his life in what was at first a small rural village.
If
[
172]
Cambridge was small compared to
Boston,
Concord was still smaller compared to
Cambridge; and, like
Cambridge, it held, then or soon after, an unusual proportion of cultivated people.
It is said to have been remarked by
Bret Harte, when he first came to
Cambridge from
California, that the town was so full of authors “you could not fire a revolver from your front door without bringing down a two-volumer.”
The same state of things soon presented itself at
Concord, although the front doors were fewer, and the dwellers rarely limited themselves to two volumes.
Emerson soon sent forth from this new retreat his first thin book, entitled
Nature.
From the beginning to the end of this first volume, the fact is clear that it was consciously and deliberately a new departure.
Those ninety brief pages were an undisguised challenge to the world.
On the very first page the author complains that our age is retrospective,--that others have “beheld God and nature face to face; we only through their eyes.
Why should not we,” he says, “also enjoy an original relation to the universe?
Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition?”
[
173]
Thus the book begins, and on the very last page it ends, “Build, therefore, your own world!”
At any time, and under almost any conditions, the first reading of such words by any young person would be a great event in life, but in the comparative conventionalism of the literature of that period it had the effect of a revelation.
It was six years later, July, 1840, that the first number of the
Dial was published, and on the very first page the editors speak of “a strong current of thought and feeling which for a few years past has led many sincere persons in
New England to make new demands on literature.”
In
Emerson's paper in the second number of the
Dial, he says, “What shall hinder the genius of the time from speaking its thought?
It cannot be silent if it would.
It will write in a higher spirit and wider knowledge and with a grander practical aim than ever yet guided the pen of poet. . . and that which was ecstasy shall become daily bread.”
From this time he was identified with
Concord, and his house was for many years what Lord Clarendon called the house of Lord Falkland, “a college situated in purer air”
[
174]
and “a university in less volume.”
Emerson's books appeared in rapid succession, and his fame extended far beyond his native land.
It is probable that no writer of the
English tongue had more influence in
England thirty years ago, before the all-absorbing interest of the new theories of evolution threw all the so-called transcendental philosophy into temporary shade.
This influence has now plainly revived, since the stress of the Darwinian period has passed, and one is sure to see one of
Emerson's books on any English or American list of republished classics.
As a master of language, it may be fearlessly said that within the limits of a single sentence no man who ever wrote the
English tongue has put more meaning into words than
Emerson.
In his hands, to adopt
Ben Jonson's phrase, “words are rammed with thought.”
In all literature you will find no man who has better fulfilled that aspiration stated in such condensed phrase by
Joubert: “To put a whole book into a page, a whole page into a phrase and that phrase into a word.”
Emerson himself said of the Greeks that they “anticipated by their very language what the best orator could say;” and
[
175]
neither
Greek precision nor Roman vigor could produce a phrase that
Emerson could not match.
Who stands in all literature as the master of condensation if not
Tacitus?
Yet
Emerson, in his speech at the antiKansas meeting in
Cambridge, quoted that celebrated remark by
Tacitus as to the ominousness of the fact that the effigies of
Brutus and
Cassius were not carried at a certain state funeral; and in translating it
Emerson bettered the original.
The indignant phrase of
Tacitus is, “
Praefulgebant . . eo ipso quod . . non visebantur,” “They shone conspicuous from the very fact that they were not seen,” thus enforcing a moral lesson in fourteen Latin syllables; but
Emerson gives it in seven English syllables and translates it, even more powerfully: “They glared through their absences.”
After all it is such tests as this which give literary immortality,--the perfection of a phrase,--and if you say that nevertheless there is nothing accomplished unless an author has given us a system of the universe, it can only be said that
Emerson never desired to do this; and, indeed, left on record the opinion that the world is “too young by some ages yet to form a creed.”
The
[
176]
system-makers have their place, no doubt, but when we consider how many of them have risen and fallen since
Emerson began to write, -
Schelling,
Cousin,
Comte,
Mill, down to the Hegel of yesterday and the Spencer of today,--it is evident that the absence of a system is not the only thing which may shorten fame.
Emerson's precise position as a poet cannot yet be assigned.
He has been likened to an aeolian harp which now gives and then perversely withholds its music.
Nothing can exceed the musical perfection of the lines:--
Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,
Or dip thy paddle in the lake,
But it carves the bow of beauty there,
And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.
Yet within the compass of this same fine poem (
Woodnotes) there are passages which elicited from
Theodore Parker, one of the poet's most ardent admirers, the opinion that “a pine tree which should talk as
Mr. Emerson's tree talks would deserve to be plucked up and cast into the sea.”
His poetic reputation came distinctly later in time than his fame as an essayist and lecturer.
Like
Wordsworth and
Tennyson, he educated the
[
177]
public mind to himself.
The same verses which were received with shouts of laughter when they first appeared in the
Dial were treated with respectful attention when colleeted into a volume, and it is possible that some of them may take their places among the classic poems of all literature.
It is evident from
Emerson's criticisms in the
Dial, as that on
Ellery Channing's poems, that he had a horror of what he called “French correctness” and could more easily pardon what was rough than what was tame.
When it came to passing judgment on the details of poetry, he was sometimes whimsical; his personal favorites were apt to be swans, and, on the other hand, there were whole classes of great writers whom he hardly recognized at all. This was true of
Shelley, for example, about whom he wrote “though uniformly a poetic mind, he is never a poet.”
About prose writers his estimate was a shade more trustworthy, yet he probably never quite appreciated
Hawthorne, and certainly discouraged young people from reading his books.
He died May 6, 1882.
There were grouped about
Emerson in
Concord, or frequently visiting it, several persons
[
178]
of the
Transcendental School whom we must not pass by. One of these was
Theodore Parker, that eminent heretic, who has had the curious experience of being at last held up to admiration by the very churches which once cast him out. In a literary way, he was the most profitable contributor of the
Dial, his manner being much more popular than the rest, so that
Mr. Emerson used to say that the only numbers which sold well were those which had
Theodore Parker's articles in them.
He was a systematic student on a large scale, which
Emerson was not, and he was also a man of action, wearing himself out by such a variety of labors that his lifetime was short.
There is no one whom
Lowell hits off better in the
Fable for critics:--
Here comes Parker, the Orson of parsons, a man
Whom the Church undertook to put under her ban.
...
But the ban was too small or the man was too big,
For he recks not their bells, books, and candles a fig.
...
Every word that he speaks has been fierily furnaced
In the blast of a life that has struggled in earnest:
There he stands, looking more like a ploughman than priest,
If not dreadfully awkward, not graceful at least,
[179]
His gestures all downright and same, if you will,
As of brown-fisted Hobnail in hoeing a drill;
But his periods fall on you, stroke after stroke,
Like the blows of a lumberer felling an oak;
You forget the man wholly, you're thankful to meet
With a preacher who smacks of the field and the street,
And to hear, you're not over-particular whence,
Almost Taylor's profusion, quite Latimer's sense.
A more immediate ally of
Emerson, as the first leading editor of the
Dial, was the most remarkable American woman up to our time, in the literary path at least,
Margaret Fuller, afterwards
Madame Ossoli.
She not only had to edit it for nothing and man it with good contributors for nothing, but to criticise even
Emerson's contributions, sometimes greatly to his advantage, and to steer between the demands of the popular and matter-of-fact
Theodore Parker, on the one side, and the dreamy
Alcott, on the other.
Of one number she was forced to write eighty-five out of its hundred and thirty-six pages herself, and after two years had to resign the task.
Carlyle, who always criticised the
American Transcendentalists severely, excepted only her, besides
Emerson, among its writers.
He called her writings “the undeniable utterances
[
180]
of a true heroic mind, altogether unique, so far as I know, among the writing women of this generation.”
The last of
Emerson's immediate and closest friends, and one whom he always placed far above himself, was
Amos Bronson Alcott, in one respect a more characteristic
New England product than any of the others, inasmuch as he rose from a very humble source to be one of the leading influences of the time, in spite of all whims and oddities.
Regarding himself as a foreordained teacher and always assuming that attitude to all, he yet left on record utterances which show an entire lack of vanity at heart.
For instance, he wrote thus from
Concord in 1865: “Have been also at
Lynn and
Haverhill speaking lately.
Certainly men need teaching badly enough when any words of mine can help them.
Yet I would fain believe that not I, but the Spirit, the Person, sometimes speaks to revive and spare.”
In the children's stories of his daughter he took a father's satisfaction, however far her sphere seemed from his own. There were one or two occasions when he showed himself brave where others had flinched.
One
[
181]
of the heroic pictures yet waiting to be painted in
New England history is that of the tranquil and high-minded philosopher at the time during a fugitive slave case, when the rear entrance of the
Boston Court House, then temporarily used as a slave-pen, had been beaten in, and the few who got inside had been driven out by the police, the mob hesitating to follow them.
There was the open door with the gaslights burning brightly upon it and the pistols of the marshal's men showing themselves above the inner stairway.
Outside were the vacant steps and the crowd of lookers-on.
Quietly there penetrated the mob the figure of a white-haired man, like the ghost of an ancient
Puritan; he mounted the steps tranquilly, cane in hand, and pausing near the top said to one of the ringleaders of the attack, pointing placidly forward, “Why are we not within?”
“Because,” said the person addressed, “these people will not stand by us.”
He paused again at the top, the centre of all eyes from within and from without.
A revolver was fired from within, and finding himself wholly unsupported he turned and walked down, without hastening a step.
Neither
Plato nor
[
182]
Pythagoras could have done the thing better; and the whole event brought back vividly the appearance of the
Gray Champion in one of
Hawthorne's tales.
But
Alcott now bids fair to be remembered only for the. influence which he had upon greater men. His personality could impose itself upon those who saw him and heard his words, but could find no effective expression in literature.
Just the contrary was true of
Hawthorne.
He was, to be sure, a man of striking presence, and his physical strength and stateliness irresistibly connected themselves in the minds of those who saw him with the self-contained purpose, the large resources, the waiting power, of the great writer.
I first met him on a summer morning in
Concord, as he was walking along the road near the Old Manse, with his wife by his side, and a noble-looking baby-boy in a little wagon which the father was pushing.
I remember him as tall, firm, and strong in bearing; his wife looked pensive and dreamy, as she indeed was, then and always.
When I passed,
Hawthorne lifted upon me his great gray eyes, with a look too keen to seem indifferent, too shy to be sympathetic — and
[
183]
that was all. But it comes back to memory like that one glimpse of
Shelley which
Browning describes, and which he likens to the day when he found an eagle's feather.
It is surprising to be asked whether
Hawthorne was not physically very small.
It seems at the moment utterly inconceivable that he could have been anything less than the sombre and commanding personage he was.
Ellery Channing well describes him as a
Tall, compacted figure, ably strung,
To urge the Indian chase, or point the way.
One can imagine any amount of positive energy — that of
Napoleon Bonaparte, for instance — as included within a small physical frame.
But the self-contained purpose of
Hawthorne, the large resources, the waiting power,--these seem to the imagination to imply an ample basis of physical life; and certainly his stately and noble port is inseparable, in my memory, from these characteristics.
Again I met
Hawthorne at one of the sessions of a short-lived literary club; and I recall the imperturbable dignity and patience with which he sat through a vexatious
[
184]
discussion, whose details seemed as much dwarfed by his presence as if he had been a statue of
Olympian Zeus.
The events of his life may be briefly given.
He was born in
Salem, July 4, 1804, of an old
Salem family.
One of his ancestors was a judge in some of the famous witch trials, and had, according to tradition, brought a curse upon his descendants by his severity.
Born of such stock, and bred in such surroundings, it is no wonder that
Hawthorne became early the romantic interpreter of that sombre code and mode of living which we call Puritanism.
His boyhood was given more to general reading.
than to study.
He graduated from Bowdoin, with
Longfellow, in 1825, and spent twelve quiet years at
Salem writing and rewriting; publishing little, and that through the most inconspicuous channels: becoming, in short, as he said, “the obscurest man of letters in
America.”
Not until the publication of
Twice-told tales (1837) did he obtain recognition.
A brief residence in the
Brook Farm community gave him the materials for
The Blithedale romance.
In 1841 he was married, and settled in the Old Manse at
Concord, which, some years later, he made
[
185]
famous in
Mosses from an old Manse.
He afterwards held a post in the
Salem Custom House for three years; during which period he wrote little, but
The Scarlet letter gradually took shape in his mind.
It was published in 1850, to be followed during the two succeeding years by
The house of the seven Gables and
The Blithedale romance.
Then followed seven years in
Europe, four of them at the Liverpool consulate, and, as a result, his last great romance,
The marble Faun.
He died May 19, 1864.
Hawthorne we all agree to be the greatest American imaginative prose writer; and his place in the literature of our tongue becomes every day more sure.
If his genius matured slowly, it did really mature.
His notebooks are frequently commonplace; probably because his art was massive and deliberate, and he had no faculty for spinning delight out of next to nothing.
His personality, too, was of a subtlety and remoteness which could not be interpreted colloquially; perhaps it was only in his rarest creative morents that the man was intimate with himself.
Of the originality of his best work we can, at all events, feel more certain than we
[
186]
can of any other American's; and this because its unique quality consists not in queerness or cleverness, but in the reflection of a strong and sane and whole personality.
Dickens and
Bulwer and
Thackeray were among
Hawthorne's contemporary English novelists, but he has far less in common with any of them than they have with each other, either in manner or in spirit.
Hawthorne's work was, in fact, the product of two principal impulses: a reaching toward the moral intensity of old
New England Puritanism, and toward the spiritual subtlety of modern
New England Transcendentalism.
But he is not finally to be classified either as
Puritan or Transcendentalist, for all the elements of his nature were fused as they can be only in the great artist; and it is as an artist in the largest sense of the word that
Hawthorne is likely to be known.
One of the most characteristic of his literary methods is his habitual use of guarded under-statements and veiled hints.
It is not a sign of weakness, but of conscious strength, when he qualifies his statements, takes you into his counsels, offers hypotheses, as, “May it not have been?”
or, “Shall we not rather
[
187]
say?”
and sometimes, like a conjurer, urges particularly upon you the card he does not intend you to accept.
He seems not quite to know whether
Arthur Dimmesdale really had a fiery scar on his breast, or whether Donatello had furry ears, or what finally became of Miriam and her lover.
He will gladly share with you any information he possesses, and, indeed, has several valuable hints to offer; but that is all. The result is, that you place yourself by his side to look with him at his characters, and gradually share with him the conviction that they must be real.
Then, when he has you in his possession, he leaves you to discover the profound spiritual truth involved in the story.
I have always thought him in this respect to have been influenced, or at least anticipated, by a writer who has been too much overlooked, and whose influence upon him seems to me quite perceptible, although his biographer,
Prof. Woodberry, is disposed to set it entirely aside.
This was
William Austin, the author of
Peter Rugg, the Missing man, a delineation more Hawthornesque, in my opinion, than anything in
Scott, to whom
Prof. Woodberry rightfully assigns some slight influence
[
188]
over
Hawthorne.
This tale was first printed in
Buckingham's
New England Galaxy for Sept. 10, 1824; and that editor says of it: “This article was reprinted in other papers and books, and read more than any newspaper communication that has fallen within my knowledge.”
The original story purports to belong to the year 1820, and the scene of a later continuation is laid in the year 1825, both these being reprinted in the
Boston book for 1841, and in the lately republished works of
William Austin.
It is the narrative, in the soberest language, of a series of glimpses of a man who spends his life in driving a horse and chaise — or more strictly “a weatherbeaten chair, once built for a chaise-body” -in the direction of
Boston, but never getting there, until extreme old age. He is accompanied by a child; and it subsequently turns out that he really left
Boston about the time of the
Boston massacre, before the Revolution (1770), and has been traveling ever since,--the explanation being that he was once overtaken by a storm at
Menotomy, now
Arlington, a few miles from
Boston, and that being a man of violent temper he swore to
[
189]
get home that night or never see home again.
Thenceforth he is always traveling; a cloud and a storm always follow him, and every horse that sees his approach feels abject terror.
The conception is essentially Hawthornelike; and so are the scene and the accessories.
The time to which
Rugg's career dates back is that border land of which
Hawthorne was so fond, between the colonial and the modern period; and the old localities, dates, costumes, and even coins are all introduced in a way to remind us of the greater artist.
But what is most striking in the tale is what may be called the
penumbra,--a word defined in astronomy as that portion of space which in an eclipse is partly but not entirely deprived of light; and in painting, as the boundary of shade and light, where the one blends with the other.
He seems in a manner to consult with the reader as to the true view, and often puts first that which he does not believe.
It is this precise gift which has long been recognized as almost peculiar to
Hawthorne among writers, and yet he shares it with the author of
Peter Rugg, a book written while
Hawthorne was a boy in college.
[
190]
For all these merits
Hawthorne paid one high and inexorable penalty,--the utter absence of all immediate or dazzling success.
His publisher,
Goodrich, tells us in his
Recollections, that
Hawthorne and
Willis began to write together in the
Token, in 1827, and that the now forgotten
Willis “rose rapidly to fame,” while
Hawthorne's writings “did not attract the slightest attention.”
For twenty years he continued to be, according to his own statement, “the obscurest mal of letters in
America.”
Goodrich testifies that it was almost impossible to find a publisher for
Twice-told tales in 1837, and I can myself remember how limited a circle greeted the reprint in the enlarged edition of 1841.
When
Poe, about 1846, wrote patronizingly of
Hawthorne, he added, “It was never the fashion, until lately, to speak of him in any summary of our best authors.”
Whittier once told me that when he himself had obtained, with some difficulty, in 1847, the insertion of one of
Hawthorne's sketches in the
National era, the latter said quietly, “There is not much market for my wares.”
It has always seemed to me the greatest triumph of his genius, not that he
[
191]
bore poverty without a murmur,--for what right has a literary man, who can command his time and his art, to sigh after wealth?but that he went on doing work of such a quality for an audience so small or so indifferent.
We pass now to the youngest of the wellknown
Concord authors of that circle, and one who, unlike the others, practically failed to win high appreciation during life, and passed into the other world apparently unsuccessful.
There is no fame really more permanent than that which begins its actual growth after the death of an author; and such is the fame of
Thoreau.
Before his death he had published but two books,
A week on the Concord and Merrimack rivers and
Walden. Nine more have since been printed, besides two volumes of selected extracts and two biographies, making fifteen in all. Such things are not accidental or the result of whim, and they indicate that the literary fame of
Thoreau is secure.
Indeed, it has already survived two of the greatest dangers that can beset reputation,--a brilliant satirist for a critic, and an injudicious friend for a biographer.
[
192]
This friend, the late
Ellery Channing, was a man of wayward genius, and of voluntary self-withdrawal from the world.
Both he in his memoir and
Lowell in his well-known criticism, have brought the eccentricities of
Thoreau into undue prominence, and have placed too little stress on the vigor, the good sense, the clear perceptions, of the man. One who has himself walked, talked, corresponded with him, can testify that the impression given by both these writers is far removed from that ordinarily made by
Thoreau himself.
While tinged here and there, like most American 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.
He taxed the patience of his companions, but not more so, on the whole, than is the case with most eminent talkers when launched upon their favorite themes.
[
193]
Lowell accepts throughout the popular misconception — and has, indeed, done much to strengthen it — that
Thoreau hated civilization, and believed only in the wilderness; whereas
Thoreau defined his own position on this point with exceeding clearness, and made it essentially the same with that of his critics.
“For a permanent residence,” he says, “it seemed to me that there could be no comparison between this [Concord] and the wilderness, necessary as the latter is for a resource and a background, the raw material of all our civilization.
The wilderness is simple almost to barrenness.
The partially cultivated country it is which chiefly has inspired, and will continue to inspire, the strains of poets such as compose the mass of any literature.”
In the light of such eminently sensible remarks as these, it will by and by be discovered that
Thoreau's whole attitude has been needlessly distorted.
Lowell says that “his shanty-life was mere impossibility, so far as his own conception of it goes, as an entire independency of mankind.
The tub of
Diogenes had a sounder bottom.”
But what a man of straw is this that
Lowell is constructing!
What is this “shanty-life?”
A young man
[
194]
living in a country village, and having a passion for the minute observation of nature, and a love for
Greek and
Oriental reading, takes it into his head to build himself a study, not in the garden or the orchard, but in the woods, by the side of a lake.
Happening to be poor, and to live in a time when social experiments are in vogue at Brook Farm and elsewhere, he takes a whimsical satisfaction in seeing how cheaply he can erect his hut, and afterwards support himself by the labor of his hands.
He is not really banished from the world, nor does he seek or profess banishment: indeed, his house is not two miles from his mother's door; and he goes to the village every day or two, by his own showing, to hear the news.
In this quiet abode he spends two years, varied by an occasional excursion into the deeper wilderness at a distance.
He earns an honest living by gardening and land-surveying, makes more close and delicate observations on nature than any other American has ever made, and writes one of the few books, perhaps the only book, yet written in
America, that can bear an annual perusal.
Can it be really true that this is a life so wasted, so unpardonable?
[
195]
Let us not do injustice to
Lowell, who closes his paper on
Thoreau with a generous tribute that does much to redeem his earlier injustice.
The truth is, that
Thoreau shared the noble protest against worldliness of what is called the “transcendental” period, in America, and naturally shared some of the intellectual extravagances of that seething time ; but he did not, like some of his contemporaries, make his whims an excuse for mere selfishness, and his home life — always the best test — was thoroughly affectionate and faithful.
His lifelong celibacy was due, as has been asserted, to an early act of lofty self-abnegation toward his own brother, whose love had taken the same direction as his own. Certainly his personal fortitude amid the privations and limitations of his career was nothing less than heroic.
There is nothing finer in literary history than his description, in his unpublished diary, of receiving from his publisher the unsold copies — nearly the whole edition — of his
Week on the Concord and Merrimack rivers, and of his carrying the melancholy burden upstairs on his shoulders to his study.
“I have now a library,” he says, “of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself.”
[
196]
In the late volume giving memorials of one of the last of the Transcendentalists,
Daniel Ricketson, of New Bedford, there are interesting glimpses of the time when
Lowell's article on
Thoreau was supposed to have wellnigh suppressed him as an author.
Thoreau's sister wrote to
Ricketson, it seems, “I have too much respect for
Mr. Lowell's powers of discrimination to account at all for ris blundering and most unfriendly attack upon
Henry's book,” and
Ricketson himself adds, “
Lowell's nature is wholly inadequate to take in
Thoreau.
Lowell thought
Thoreau was posing for effect.
I am satisfied that
Thoreau could not possibly play a part.”
He then winds up with one of those seemingly daring combinations with which the Transcendentalists innocently startled more decorous ears: “I rank Christ Jesus,
Socrates, and
Thoreau as the sincerest souls that ever walked the earth.”
“ In literature nothing counts but genius,” yet the length of time which sifts out genius is an uncertain quantity.
In the
Boston of that period it was fancied quite easy thus to sift it out — but it proved that while men were right in attributing this gift to
Emerson,
[
197]
Longfellow,
Holmes,
Lowell, and
Whittier, the critics were quite wrong in denying it to
Thoreau, who was generally regarded as a mere reflection of
Emerson.
Mrs. Thoreau, the mother, thought with quite as much justice that it was
Emerson who reflected her son; but the weight of opinion was on the other side.
Many could not understand why anybody should really wish
Thoreau's letters to be published; but the final publication of his journal is acknowledged to be an important literary event; and it is probable that his fame will for some time increase; and will thereafter safely hold its own.
Thoreau died at forty-four, without having achieved fame or fortune.
For years his life was commonly spoken of as a failure; but it now proves, with all its drawbacks, to have been a great and eminent success.
Even testing it only by the common appetite of authors for immortality, his seems already a sure and enviable place.
Time is rapidly melting away the dross from his writings, and exhibiting their gold.
But his standard was higher than the mere desire for fame, and he has told it plainly.
“There is nowhere recorded,” he complains, “a simple
[
198]
and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any memorable praise of God. ... If the day and night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance, like flowers and sweet-scented herbs,--is more elastic, starry, and more immortal,that is your success.”
