XI Henry Thoreau 1817–1862
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, July 12, 1817, and lived most of his life in or near his native town. The world, if you were to ask it who Thoreau was, would probably say “a crank,” because he did not think and act in quite the same way as other people, and because he practised what he preached. He never went to church or voted at elections, or drank wine or smoked tobacco, and he went to live alone in the woods. He was an author and a naturalist; and, happily for us, he has been able to reveal through his writings what sort of man he was.
But people trouble themselves nowadays very little about the quiet, retiring souls, and so “Walden,” the book Thoreau wrote on his Experiment—as he called his period of retirement in the woods, is not so well known as it ought to be; for it seems to stand alone in its beauty and originality; no other book is like it. As we hurry and scurry through this mechanical century, we might do well to turn to its quiet pages, and if we do we may wonder if Thoreau was not the wise one and we the cranks after all.
Henry Thoreau’s childhood was a calm and happy one. He was brought up under the best possible conditions for forming a steadfast and unworldly character. Concord was a large, quiet village of plain white houses and shady elm-trees—a specially good example of a New England village community. There were no very rich people and no very poor: the inhabitants managed all their little affairs for themselves, and were perfectly capable of so doing. They were shrewd, honest, good people, and friendly towards one another. They seemed to have few worldly ambitions and were naturally inclined to be simple and democratic. They had simple occupations and amusements and did not crave for excitement, as we do now. Concord produced a very fine race of people and a few remarkable individuals—Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau himself; there were others less well known, but equally stalwart in character. Emerson, the poet and philosopher, no doubt helped his neighbors to become more cultivated and ideal: he brought them into touch with all the enlightened thought of that day, for it was the period when Carlyle and Wordsworth and Coleridge were living in England, and when the civilized world was beginning to wake up to many problems it had never thought about before, or had accepted as dispensations of Providence.
In this safe and peaceful atmosphere of good-will and honest endeavor the Thoreaus lived. They were poor and had no worldly advantages; but they had what was far better, the position which comes from having qualities of independence and courage, and they were respected and looked up to by their neighbors. Henry Thoreau’s father made lead pencils for a living, and Henry learnt to make them too—very skilfully, it is said. He had two sisters and a brother, but even as a child Henry Thoreau showed the most marked character of the lot. He was always determined to go his own way, and was quite sure of what he liked and disliked. But he was also very like other children, for when he was told that he would one day go to heaven, he said he did not want to, because he would not be allowed to take his sled with him. He had heard that only very grand things were allowed in heaven, and his sled was quite common and had been made at home.
Thoreau went to college—to Harvard—like any other young man, and did nothing very brilliant while he was there; when he left, he took to teaching and to writing, which was his great talent. He had always written from quite early days, keeping a diary about all the things he observed in nature—the tints of morning and evening skies, the songs of birds, the habits of animals, and the flowering and growth of plants and trees. He had extraordinary powers of observation and was a very remarkable naturalist; his understanding of animals was almost uncanny—they seemed to realize how akin he was to them. Hunted foxes would come to him for protection, and wild squirrels would nestle in his coat; he could thrust his hand into a pool and pull out a fish, which seemed to trust him and show no objection! Thoreau was absolutely at home in the open air; he could skate and swim and row and sail. He thought that every boy between the ages of ten and fourteen should shoulder a gun, but that it should only be wild shooting, limitless, and not enclosed like the shooting of English noblemen. Fishermen and hunters, he observed, seemed to get into peculiar touch with nature in the intervals of their sport. But Thoreau himself gave up shooting entirely as he grew older, and studied the habits of birds with a spy-glass; he learnt to remain absolutely motionless, as still as the wall or ground he rested on. From earliest childhood he made collections of Indian relics and of turtles and fishes. He liked to take immense journeys in search of interesting new plants and animals; once he went three hundred and twenty-five miles in a canoe with an Indian. He would camp out and be exposed to all weathers; often he was cold and hungry. A friend describes with a shiver how he slept out with Thoreau on the bare rocks of a mountain without enough blankets; but Thoreau, if he loved a thing, could not do it moderately, and, though he was so hardy, he ended by hurting himself and destroying his health.
From living so much with nature and animals, Thoreau got to look rather like a “wise wild beast”; this was how his friends described him. His face was ruddy and weather-beaten and very honest-looking; his nose was large and somewhat like a beak; his brows overhanging—but every one agreed that his eyes were the most attractive part of his face. They were sometimes blue and sometimes gray, and full of kindness and thought. He hated fine clothes and dressing up, so he always wore strong things, like corduroy (which no gentleman at that period would think of wearing), in order that he could make his way through the wood and climb rocks without tearing anything. His sisters and relations said he was simply delightful at home. He was a sort of household treasure, because he was always kind and useful and obliging. He would grow melons and plant the orchard, act as a mechanic—in fact, he was clever at any odd job with his hands—and he would attend to the animals and flowers. He was happy with children, and invented all sorts of games to amuse them and himself. He had no false pride, and was not ashamed to be seen in an old coat whitewashing the house or mending the gates. He was a great traveler in a small circle, but he never until the year before he died saw Niagara, or ever crossed the ocean. “I have a real genius for staying at home,” he said.
When he was twenty-five, Thoreau went to live with Emerson and a circle of friends on a farm near his own village of Concord. Emerson being older than Thoreau, was regarded by him as his teacher. There is no doubt that Emerson had a good deal of influence over the younger man and they thought alike about many things; but they were very different in temperament. Emerson was perhaps the more human, and he certainly had more personal charm, but Thoreau was the more original of the two. Emerson persuaded his young friend to join a sect of people formed with the object of improving the outlook of mankind; they wished to simplify living and to combine leisure for study with manual labor. Every member of the community had to do his or her share of the work to keep the house and farm going. They would plow, milk, make hay, cultivate the garden, and the women would wash up the dishes in the intervals of discussing how best to equalize the lots of rich and poor, how to simplify education so that every one might be educated, and how to destroy class differences. They were more like anarchists than socialists, because they did not believe in governments and had nothing to do with politics. Hawthorne, one of the members of this Brook Farm society, wrote a novel about them which gives a very vivid picture of their lives. They were not, except for a few members, particularly brilliant people, and their society cannot be called very successful if it is judged by renown, or by the amount of attention it got from fashionable people. This may have been because it avoided eccentricities and had very few rules—no sect could have had less—and indeed they were particularly keen on not interfering with a person’s liberty or private life. Idealism and Economy were the two principal articles of their faith. They were kind, simple, hopeful people, and were known as the Transcendentalists.
Thoreau lived with them for three years. The digging and outdoor work were easy congenial tasks to him, but Emerson, on the contrary, found that digging interfered with his writing, and after he left the sect he never again attempted to combine the two.
Thoreau was twenty-eight when he decided to go away and live by himself. It was not a sudden wish, for he had been thinking of it for some years. It was not because he was a hater of men that he wanted to get away, but he wished to find the answer to certain questions which had been bothering him. He was anxious to find out what real life could teach him, stripped of all its stupid complications and conventions. He wished also to study and to satisfy himself that he could be an author, and he went, too, because he hoped to draw strength and purpose from his experiment.
At this period he possessed only twenty-five dollars of his own, and one day in March he borrowed an axe and went into the woods which lay all around his village, and there, on the side of a thickly wooded hill, he found the perfect spot on which to build his house. At once he began to cut down the tall, straight pines with which the hill was covered to make a clearing, and with the purpose of using the pines as timber for his hut. He chose the spot specially for the view it had of the pond or lake beneath. Thoreau says a lake is a most beautiful and expressive feature in a landscape, and he likens it to the earth’s eye. It was called Walden, and from all the descriptions we read of it, it was a particularly beautiful pond, remarkable for its depth and its clearness, like a deep green well. Many people thought it was bottomless, and it was more than a mile long, the hills encircling it and rising steeply out of it on all sides. These days in which Thoreau worked, cutting and hewing wood, were pleasant spring days, and we can imagine how happy he was at his labors in the open air. He felt, he said, like a bird building its nest, and wondered if men, were they always to build their own homes, would become more poetical and sing as they worked.
By July his house was ready to live in, though he had not yet built his chimney—he liked in summer-time to do his cooking out of doors. He left till later also the plastering of his hut, so that the cool air blew through the chinks between the logs, which was very delicious in summer-time. From the door of his hut a little pathway ran straight down to the pond, and behind it he had made a clearing of some acres where he might grow his corn and vegetables. In his book “Walden” Thoreau describes how he spent his day during that first year. He would rise very early in the morning in summer-time and take his bath in the pond, and before the sun was high and the dew lay on everything he would attend to the bean-field he loved so much and hoe between the long green rows. After this he would do his housework, which he called a pleasant pastime. He had only a bed, a table, a desk, three chairs, a looking-glass (three inches across), a pair of tongs and andirons, a kettle, a frying-pan, a wash-bowl, one or two jugs, one cup, and a lamp.
When his floor was dirty, he merely set all his furniture out of doors on the grass, dashed water on the floor of his hut and sprinkled it with white sand, and then with a broom swept it clean. By the time other people were just getting up his house was dry again and his work finished.
The first year at Walden he worked a great deal in his garden. Then he had his cooking to do, and he studied very carefully the art of making bread, baking it at first out of doors on the end of a stick of timber over an open fire. He made experiments and discoveries with foods, cooking odd wild plants and weeds. He proved that a man in that land could support himself on what he grew. He could, for instance, grow his own rye and Indian corn and grind them in a hand-mill, and sugar he could extract from beet and pumpkins or from maples, which abound in that country. You could avoid, he said, going to any shops at all, and he was sure that to maintain yourself on the earth simply and wisely was not a hardship at all, but a pleasure.
Sometimes during this first year Thoreau did nothing at all but sit in his doorway dreaming, quite undisturbed and in silence, except for the flittering and twittering of birds. He would not realize how the time had flown until he saw the sunlight lighting up his west window, or heard the sound of some horse and wagon in the distance going home to rest. He did not feel this to be a waste of time, for he seemed, he said, to grow under these conditions like the corn in the night.
Not very far from where he lived was a railway line, and a train would pass at certain intervals. In spite of his love of solitude Thoreau liked the sound of it, and the whistle of the engine he likened to the cry of a hawk. He would listen to the passage of the moving train with the same feeling he had about the rising sun. It was so punctual and regular, and when the train had passed with its clang and clatter Thoreau felt more alone than ever, for it had made him feel the peacefulness and contrast of his own solitary yet not lonely life. On Sundays he would listen to the bells of distant towns, when the wind was in the right direction—the sounds would come floating faint and sweet over the trees, as if it were the music of the woods: so Thoreau describes it.
In the warm summer evenings he would spend a good deal of time in his boat, playing the flute and watching the fish. He would make echoes by smacking the water with his paddle till every corner of the wooded hills cried and answered him. Sometimes he would fish at midnight to get something for his next day’s dinner, and he would listen to the owls he loved so much, and to the foxes crying, or to the call of some mysterious night-birds; and the fish he describes as dimpling the moonlit surface of the water with their tails.
His days passed probably very quickly—if you are contented and happy the day is all too short. Thoreau said he hadn’t got to look for amusement anywhere, as his life had become his amusement, it was so real and full of interest. But he did not cut himself off from people altogether. Sometimes he would go to the village to hear some talk. He usually went in the evening, and he liked to stay very late there, especially when it was dark and stormy, because it was so pleasant to leave some bright, warm village room and to go out into the black night to find his harbor in the woods. He did not mind how wild the weather was—in fact, he preferred it wild and often faced severe storms. Those who have never been in the woods by night have no idea how dark they can be. They would frighten and bewilder most people, but not Thoreau. He would feel his way with his feet on the faint track he had worn, or he would steer with his hands, feeling particular trees and passing between two pines, perhaps not more than eighteen inches apart; or he might sometimes guess his whereabouts by seeing a piece of light above him—a glimpse of the sky through a well-remembered break in the trees. One can understand the satisfactory and joyful feeling of reaching at last the little hut, always unlocked and open to any traveler who cared to enter. When Thoreau went away for a time he left it thus, hoping that some wayfarer might care to enter, to sit in his chair and read the few books which lay on his table.
In October, Thoreau collected his stores for the winter. He would go a-graping, but this, he says, more for the beauty of the grapes than for any nourishment they gave him, and he would get wild apples and store them, and principally he would make expeditions to the chestnut woods, to get chestnuts, which are a good substitute for bread. He would have a sack on his back and a stick in his hand with which to open the prickly burrs, and as he gathered them up the squirrels and jays called angrily to him for taking any of their food. Thoreau also discovered, while digging the ground near, a sort of potato used by the first peoples who lived in America; it had a sweetish taste like a frostbitten potato.
When visitors called on Thoreau, which they did sometimes, he describes the manner in which, if he were out, they would leave their cards—either a bunch of flowers, a wreath of evergreen, or a name in pencil on a yellow leaf or chip. If he had friends in summer days he took them into his best room, or drawing-room, which was the pine wood behind his house. Travelers did sometimes come out of their way to see Thoreau, having heard of the strange man living in the woods, and they were curious to see him and the inside of his hut. They would make an excuse for calling by asking for a glass of water, and Thoreau would direct them to the pond, where he always drank himself, and hand them a cup. It interested him to observe the effect the woods and solitude had on people. Girls and boys and young women, he said, seemed very happy to be there, but men, even farmers, thought only of the loneliness and how far it was from somewhere, adding that of course they enjoyed a ramble in the woods.
In November of the first year he was at Walden, Thoreau built his chimney, having studied masonry, and he lingered about the fire-place of his house, as being, he says, the most important part of a house. Then he plastered the hut in freezing weather, fetching the sand for the purpose from the shore below. Then, he says, “I began to use it for warmth as well as shelter.” When he had finished this work the pond was frozen and snow covered the ground. Thoreau, happy and serene, retired still further into his shell, keeping a bright fire in his house and within his breast. All this time he wrote a good deal, and his employment out of doors was to collect dead wood and to drag it into his shed. He loved his woodpile, and would build it where he could see it in front of his window. For many weeks in the snow Thoreau would spend cheerful evenings by his fireside, and no visitors would come to the woods—only woodmen came occasionally to cut and take wood on sleds back to the village. But no weather interfered with Thoreau’s walks. He managed to make a little pathway by always treading on the same track, and he would go thus in deepest snow to keep, as he expressed it, an appointment with an old beech-tree or a birch, or an old friend among the pines. His descriptions of winter in the woods are perhaps more fascinating and romantic than any other part of his “Walden,” and he tells of the wonders of the coming spring, the gradual melting of the ice, the longer days, the note of some arriving bird.
His second year at Walden was, he said, the same as the first, and when he left it in September he had lived there rather over two years. He left, he said, for as good a reason as he entered it. He does not tell the reason, but it was an unselfish one. His father had died, and his relations needed some one to work for them and to make a little money; so, much as he hated it, as we know he must have done, he returned to the world to make pencils and to write and to lecture till the end of his life.
When Thoreau emerged from his seclusion, you can imagine the questions he was asked by curious people who wanted to know all about it. Why did he do it; wasn’t he lonely; what did he do with himself; what did he eat? So he decided to publish an account of his experiment, filling out the diary he had written daily at Walden, and giving his reasons for his retirement and the conclusions he had formed about life and the world through his experiment. He learned, he tells us, that if you have a dream or some sort of idea of what a perfect life should be, or anyhow the life that appears to you to be the most lovely, the most useful, or the most satisfactory, you should advance quite confidently in that direction—that is to say, in the direction of your dreams; and that if you do this you will meet with a great deal of success. Also, that in proportion as you simplify your life the world will appear less complicated, you will be less poor and less lonely; the simple natural things will never fail to interest you, your requirements will be few, and your life full of enjoyment. Instead of three meals a day, eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce everything in proportion. Life, says Thoreau, is simply frittered away by detail. And about clothes—Thoreau describes how he asked his acquaintances if they would appear with a neat patch on their trousers, and most of them thought they would be disgraced for life. Apparently, Thoreau says, they would rather have a broken leg than a trouser with a rent in it. It is certain that a man’s clothes are more important to some people than the man himself, and all these things, to one who lives a natural life, appear almost too absurd to be tolerated; and Thoreau, I think, did a useful work in drawing attention to these fallacies, which we are all inclined to take as a matter of course.
But Thoreau, because he went into the woods to live alone, did not wish every one to do so; indeed, he thought there should be as many different kinds of people in the world as possible. What he wanted people to do was to find out for themselves the best thing for themselves, and not necessarily to follow in the footsteps of their fathers and mothers and friends, to be Republicans because these were Republicans or Democrats because they were Democrats, to think as they did and to live as they did without giving any thought at all to it. He wanted people to have the courage to experiment and to take risks. But he did not wish to make rules for strong, courageous natures, nor did he wish to alter the way of living of those who found encouragement and happiness in their present manner of life. He did not speak at all to those who were well employed, but he did want to help people who complained, who were discontented and saw life as a desert, dull and joyless and without hope. He had in his head chiefly what he calls “that seemingly wealthy but most terribly impoverished class of all,” the people who have accumulated money and property and so have forged their own gold and silver fetters. He was tremendously scornful about the rich, and perhaps not pitiful enough. On the other hand, everything he has said against the possession of money and the futility of luxury is so perfectly reasonable and true and without any exaggeration, that no arguments can really be found to meet him. A good many of us admit that riches do not bring happiness, and that they undoubtedly increase our responsibilities and make us less free, but we all fail to act up to our beliefs, and continue to wish for more money in order to have a larger house, more servants, more clothes—and thus, as Thoreau says, we become “the tools of our tools” and the slaves of our own helpers and servants; in fact, these things are a hindrance to our development. “Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.” This is one of Thoreau’s maxims. It was certainly easier for Thoreau than for some to live a perfectly natural life in the woods. He had not been brought up in luxury. What he named luxuries we most of us call comforts. He was frugal by training as well as by inclination. Therefore in criticizing as he did the life that is led by most people in the world he was not very generous, because he had never felt their temptations. He was, some have thought, hardly human. In fact, he had very few weaknesses, and to be almost perfect is not a very attractive quality. We like to find imperfections in people and faults like our own. Thoreau was very little troubled by indecisions or doubts as to whether a thing was right or wrong for himself. He was quite sure of what he wanted; he went to look for it, and he found it. He was determined to improve himself, to be good and to be happy, and he succeeded. Even when he was dying of consumption he said in a letter he was enjoying existence as much as ever. When he believed in things he believed in them wholly, and principally he believed in the invigorating power of nature. He loved books; he loved writing and wood-cutting and walks in the country. He has written a delightful essay on walking, and has told us that he wrote in proportion to his rambles—if he was shut up indoors he could not write at all. He liked, too, association with simple, genuine people who were spending their lives in the open—fishermen, woodmen, and sometimes farmers—so that it cannot be said that he was a misanthropist—one who hates his fellow-creatures; if they were real and natural he enjoyed them and cared for them, but he had not got to depend on human beings for his entertainment. His interests and resources lay within himself, and he could always fall back on nature. “You may,” he says, “have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode. The snow melts before its door as early in the spring.”
Thoreau’s enjoyment was calm and level. From his writings we do not gather that he was ever desperately unhappy, unless it was perhaps in a crowded street or in a luxurious drawing-room. He did mind very much the struggle and bustle, the ugliness of city life and all it stands for. It had a bad, cramping effect upon him, and he shunned it. Once back again in his woods and fields, his whole nature expanded. On cheerless, bleak days, when he was out of doors and the villagers would be thinking of their inn, he would, he says, come to himself and feel himself to be part of it all. “This cold and solitude are friends of mine.” In the country and alone he would see things as they are, “grand and beautiful,” and forget “all trivial men and things.” The stillness and solitude inspired him. His brain and mind worked and his nerves were steadied.
To some, Thoreau appeared to have a cold personality. One man said of him he would as soon think of taking his arm as taking the arm of an elm-tree. “You could not,” said Carlyle, “nestle up to him.” There are others who put a man down as a coward if he runs away from the world as it is, and does not face it and make the best of it. On this question there must always be a good deal of dispute, but it is really rather an absurd thing to argue about, because we are all made so differently. What is one man’s meat is another man’s poison. One person may not physically be able to stand a certain climate, but finds another to suit him, and so, as regards a man’s nature, he must discover how he may make the best of himself in order to develop his character and disposition. Thoreau’s argument was that if you cannot put a great proportion of your powers and enthusiasm into what you are doing, it is not of much use to yourself or mankind. He valued a man’s work in proportion to how much it enlarged and improved his soul.
To those who remain to fight in the hurly-burly while saying they dislike it, it probably has some bracing quality of which they are conscious, but Thoreau, as we have seen, felt himself in the streets to be “cheap and mean.” So he helped in his own way. To have forced him to sit on an office stool or to have a regular profession would have been a crime. If he had been more conventional and less peculiar, “Walden” would never have been written. Besides, he saw for what futile and ignoble reasons men chose their professions; sometimes not even because they had to make a living or to keep a wife and children, but for the sake of having expensive cigars and wines, a man-servant or a large house; and for these things, he observed, people will toil and make others toil at some stupid or sordid work, leaving themselves no time for thought, for true friendship, or for the enjoyment of books or nature or any real things. “There is no more fatal blunderer,” says Thoreau, “than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.” He calculated for himself that six weeks’ work would bring him in all the money he required to live. So that the whole of his winter and most of his summer would be free for study and enjoyment of country life. But it must not be thought that Thoreau was lazy or had never worked himself. In early days he had perfected himself in the craft of pencil-making and surveying. He had also worked very hard at his writing. He had learned industry, and in everything that he did he showed a peculiar thoroughness and skill.
If we want to find fault with Thoreau, it must be that he was perhaps too bent on improving himself. Thoreau and Emerson both believed very strongly in the importance of making oneself more interesting. Thoreau had a corresponding horror of consciously doing good to people, and of philanthropy generally. “Philanthropy,” he says, “is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind”; and again, “If you give money spend yourself with it. Do not merely abandon it to them” (the poor).
There are those who accuse Thoreau of being odd on purpose, and speak of his writing as paradoxical. It is much more likely that we who are doing and thinking exactly like our neighbors, without thinking if it is a good thing in itself, are the odd ones, or rather the lazy ones, because we cannot be bothered to disagree, to incur the disapproval of our friends, or to have them laughing at us. Emerson said that in life you must choose between Truth and Repose. By repose he means that you swallow your convictions for the sake of a quiet life—that you act always with the majority, or largest number of people, and shout with the biggest crowd. It is very comfortable to have people agreeing with you, and to live at ease and in accord with your neighbors, but to do this you must make up your mind to think very little and never to have a cause too much at heart, or you will be sure to offend somebody. You must shut your eyes to the horrors of war, of poverty, of hungry children, and say it is no use bothering or criticizing, as these things cannot be remedied. The man who says they can be remedied is often looked upon with suspicion or contempt, and even anger. All the greatest men and women have given their allegiance to truth, as we know by reading history. Thoreau was one of these. He lived at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when people were no longer sent to the stake for holding independent views, but they were made, as they still are now, to suffer all the same. Thoreau, like Garrison and Tolstoy and others of our heroes, thought that conscience should be above the State, and that men should be men first and subjects afterwards. But he was much more consistent than most people. He put himself to a great deal of trouble to carry out his principles. It was not enough for him to preach against the things he disapproved of—he lived and acted his disapproval. He pleaded in public for John Brown when he was condemned to death, and went to prison for a night for refusing to pay a tax in support of what he considered an unjust war. He did not enjoy this; it was a trouble and a bother, but Thoreau did what he thought right.
His was a pure and courageous spirit; he never said a thing for the sake of pleasing, and he saw with a clear, unprejudiced eye the futility, the stupidity, the waste of energy, and the sadness of much we have come to look upon as part of existence itself. But Thoreau was always, to the end of his rather short life, full of hope and trust. He would set about improving things by improving himself. His greatness lay in his originality and independence of character. He thrashed out questions for himself, and threw a fresh and illuminating light on them. He was a rebel in his quiet way, as Garibaldi or Cromwell were rebels on the field of battle.