The Illustrated Walden, Page 2

  If he was “competent to live in any part of the world,” he was peculiarly fitted to live in Concord. The fates had been kind to him. The lines had fallen to him in pleasant places; he wished no goodlier heritage. He left Concord only for brief seasons, and always returned to it gladly. Here he soon began in earnest to do his own work: thinking, reading, walking, and keeping a journal,—a journal out of which his books were to be made.

  For the furtherance of this work, a temporary withdrawal to the woods had been under contemplation by Thoreau for several years. Nothing could have been more natural and less surprising for a young man of his tastes and purposes. The dream, at least, was inevitable. It was not his alone. His friends and associates, the band of earnest transcendentalists whose headquarters, so to speak, were in Concord, were also planning a separation from the world. They thought, however, of a life in common, and made their experiments accordingly,—at Brook Farm and Fruitlands,—with what success or want of success need not here be estimated. Thoreau wished no share in these Utopian partnerships. His dream was of individual independence. “As for their communities,” he says, with characteristic freedom of speech, “I think I had rather keep bachelor’s hall in hell than go to board in heaven.” His heart was set upon a hermitage. He “suspected any enterprise in which two were engaged together.” “When the sticks prop one another, none, or only one, stands erect.” And in another place he jots down the same thought thus: “No fruit will ripen on the common.”

  As early as October, 1841, Margaret Fuller writes to him, as of something already talked about: “Let me know whether you go to the lonely hut;” and two months later Thoreau wrote in his diary: “I want to go soon and live away by the pond, where I shall hear only the wind whispering among the reeds.” His friends, he added, were curious to know what he would do when he got there; but he thought it would be “employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons.” For a time he coveted the Hollowell farm, a retired spot near the river, some two miles from the village; and according to his own whimsical account of the affair,—which the reader must take more or less seriously, as he can,—he even went so far as to negotiate for its purchase. At the last moment, fortunately, the owner’s wife changed her mind and refused to sign the deed (“every man has such a wife,” is Thoreau’s comment), and the bargain failed. So near did he come to owning a landed estate; but he “never got his fingers burned by actual possession.” Not that he loved the Hollowell farm less; “I retained the landscape,” he says, “and have since annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow;” but he was saved from becoming a “serf of the soil;” he had the good of the land, and yet his poverty was not damaged.

  He lost the Hollowell farm, but he kept his dream, and in March, 1845, he borrowed Alcott’s axe and began cutting down trees on land belonging to Emerson on the shore of Walden Pond. In May the house was “raised,” Alcott, Curtis, and others assisting, and on the 4th of July Thoreau celebrated his independence by moving into it. There he lived for something more than two years. There he edited (put together out of his journals and out of the pages of “The Dial”) his first book, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers;” and there he lived (and partly wrote) his second book, “Walden, or Life in the Woods.”

  The latter work, the one with which we have here particularly to do, may be called the record of a personal and experimental treatment of the poor scholar’s question, the question which Thoreau himself had been compelled to face on leaving college: How shall I get my living and still have time to live? There is much else in the book, of course,—Thoreau was a journalizer, and a journalizer is ever discursive,—but this is its core, as we may say; this it is that gives it the comparative unity and concreteness which have greatly assisted its popularity. That it is the best known and most widely enjoyed of all Thoreau’s books is not to be doubted. Whether it is intrinsically better than the Week and the volumes of the Journal is a point about which readers may be allowed and expected to differ, not only with one another, but sometimes with themselves.

  Like every real book, “Walden” is for its own hours and its own minds; a book for those who love books, for those who love nature, for those who love courageous thinking, courageous acting, and all sturdy, manly virtues; a book to be read through; a book, also, to be read in parts, as one uses a manual of devotion; a tonic book in the truest sense; a book against meanness, conformity, timidity, discouragement, unbelief; a book easily conceived of as marking an era in a reader’s life; a book for the individual soul against the world. Its author believed in “a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust;” in an “economy of living which is synonymous with philosophy;” in “the poverty that enjoys true wealth.” His literary creed was stoical, like his personal tastes. Reading, in his view, was, or ought to be, “a noble, intellectual exercise.” He did not wish to be lulled asleep; nor would he suffer his life to be taken by newspapers and novels. Perhaps his taste was narrow. He believed in books that call for alertness, books that a man must “stand on tiptoe to read;” books that deal with high themes simply; books “solidly done,” not “cursed with a style.”

  He aimed to make his own work conform to these standards. “Good writing,” he thinks, “will be obedience to conscience,” with no “particle of will or whim;” and it will only be done with pains. “The most transient and passing remark must be reconsidered by the writer, made sure and warranted, as if the earth had rested on its axis to back it.” In his writing, as truly as in his daily living, he practiced economy. He knew the secret of strength, and trimmed his sentences close. The end of language is not display, but expression. To that end he studied words; but before that, and better than that, he had an instinct for them. He liked such as are “well naturalized or rooted.” Some men, he says, have a peculiar relish for bad words. “They will pick you out of a thousand the still-born, the falsettos, the wing-clipt and lame.” Not so did Thoreau. His English is of the soundest, caught, as Lowell said, “at its living source.” Yet the word, carefully as he might choose it, was never for itself, but for the end he had in view. When he describes a man or an act, you see the man himself, not the description, and the thing is done on the spot. Read, for instance, in “Walden,” the story of the hounds, the hunter, and the fox. The excellences of his writing are fundamental excellences, classical excellences, good always and everywhere,—strength, vitality, simplicity; and, with the rest, a comfortable, companionable something, for which it is hard to find a name, a pervasive naturalness or homeliness, which of itself goes far to make a book good to live with. With such virtues, elemental, universal, perennial, independent of time and fashion, his work may well serve as a wholesome corrective for those who, misled by current judgment,—itself misled by the accidents of the hour,—look up to men like Pater and Meredith (named only as examples), both of whom, despite their high qualities, not for a moment in dispute here, are as bad models as a young writer could find in a lifelong search. To have a “style,” let passing criticism say what it will, is not of necessity to practice a total abstinence from the accepted forms of natural every-day speech. Studious refinements and affectations, deep-seeming obscurities, sentences that call for a dark lantern, to quote a word of Mr. Henley’s, excessive niceties and crying originalities, these may do much for a man, without doubt; but they will never make him a classic.

  Primarily, as we have said, “Walden” is a dealing with a question of personal economy: How to live so as not to waste one’s life in trying to save it. It is one of Thoreau’s originalities that he believed, and acted upon his belief, that this almost universal necessity of self-support might be made one of the pleasures of existence. It is a “grave question,” he tells his friend Blake; “yet it is a sweet and inviting question.” He wished not to shirk it. “None have so pleasant a time as they who in earnest seek to earn their bread. It is true actually as it is true really; it is true materially as it is true spiritually, that they who see
k honestly and sincerely, with all their hearts and lives and strength, to earn their bread, do earn it, and it is sure to be very sweet to them.” And several years afterward, writing to the same friend, he recurs to the same question. “Are you in want of amusement nowadays?” he asks. “Then play a little at the game of getting a living. There never was anything equal to it. Do it temperately, though, and don’t sweat.”

  On this point, as on all others, he had scant patience with snivelers. Patience with other men’s weaknesses is not one of the stoical virtues. “We are too often told of the pursuit of knowledge under difficulties,” he declares. “Let us hear the other side of the story. Why should not the scholar, if he is really wiser than the multitude, do coarse work now and then? Why not let his greater wisdom enable him to do without things?” A pertinent inquiry. For his own part, he has maintained himself for five years by manual labor, “not getting a cent from any other quarter or employment;” and “the toil has occupied so few days,” he goes on to say, “perhaps a single month, spring and fall each, that I must have had more leisure than any of my brethren for study and literature.” In this period of five years were included the two years and more spent at Walden,—“in a fairly good cabin, plastered and warmly covered.” “There,” he says, “I earned all I needed, and kept to my own affairs. During that time my weekly outlay was but seven and twenty cents; and I had an abundance of all sorts.” How he accomplished this feat, and what the “abundance of all sorts” was, the reader may discover, if he can, in the pages of “Walden.” The secret is largely in that innocent phrase, “doing without things;” one of the arts of life concerning which Thoreau could profess, without boasting, “I speak as an expert.”

  The reader may discover the secret if he can, we say; for Thoreau, with all the simplicity and directness of his literary style, is not always given to excessive plainness of meaning. He trusts the reader to “pardon some obscurities.” “There are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s,” he tells us. He hides himself in parables and exaggerations, like a greater teacher before him. Without profanity he might have said, “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” One of his valued friends complained that much of his writing was “mystical.” Why could not Thoreau, having common sense, write always in plain English; “teach men in detail how to live a simple life, etc.”? To which Thoreau responded—not to the complainant, but to somebody else—by a resort to the clouds. He had no scheme, he protested, no designs on men. In short, he repeated, less plainly, what he had said in the beginning of “Walden” itself, that his teaching was only for those who could take it. Others would but stretch the seams of the coat in putting it on.

  This much is certain: he wished no imitators. It was no part of his purpose that men in general should live apart in huts. He preached no crusade, or none of that kind. He went to Walden, for a longer or shorter period, as things should turn out, “to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles,” not to set an example for others to follow. For one thing, he said, by the time they were ready to follow it, he should very likely be doing something else. Besides which, he desired that there should be “as many different people in the world as possible.”

  At the same time, he made no concealment of his belief that most of his neighbors, who were “said to live in Concord,” were living foolishly, spending money for that which was not bread, and their labor for that which could never satisfy a man’s craving. He had “traveled a good deal in Concord,” and he knew that men were living in a vain show. How they should free themselves, he would not take upon himself to say; but he would tell his own experience, and crow over it as lustily as any chanticleer. The root of men’s trouble lay in mistaking the nature of good; in preferring the outward; in making life to consist in an abundance of things; in brief, the error sprang from a lack of simplicity and faith. The formula of life had become too complicated. To get a pair of shoe-strings a man speculated in herds of cattle. Each must have as many needless “goods” as his neighbor, and kept himself poor in the struggle to acquire them; “as if a man were to complain of hard times because he could not afford to buy him a crown!” From such a slavery, as degrading as it is uncomfortable, let us be delivered at any price. “He was a lucky fox that left his tail in the trap.”

  “I preferred some things to others,” said Thoreau; and those few words, rightly considered, are the sufficient explanation of his peculiar manner of life. If other men liked to be industrious for industry’s sake or to keep themselves out of mischief, if they must have rich carpets and delicate cookery at the expense of personal servitude, he had nothing to say. De gustibus non est disputandum. He had his own life to live and meant to enjoy it rather than its accidents. If this was selfish, he did not mind. His neighbors were all so charitable that he hoped one man might be allowed to go his own way and fulfill his own destiny. By such a course, indeed, he might really be doing his fellows the highest service. A Newfoundland dog will pull a drowning man out of a ditch, but it takes something better than a dog to set an example of real goodness. Philanthropy—of the Newfoundland dog type—is already sufficiently appreciated. Let the world learn to value its spiritual fathers and mothers rather than its dear old uncles and aunts; to welcome instruction in righteousness rather than to be forever asking alms.

  Thoreau’s treatment of this question, How to live, and what to live for, makes, as we have said, the core of his book; but some readers, or readers in some moods, may enjoy better still the chapters in which he deals with his own every-day life at Walden. Though he dwelt in the woods, he was but two miles from the village, and had many visitors. “Men of almost every degree of wit called on me in the migrating season,” he says; and many of them he turned to admirable literary account. The best of them in this respect was not Alcott, nor Channing; nor the town paupers, “good for fencing-stuff;” nor the runaway slave, whom Thoreau “helped to forward toward the north star;” nor the ministers, “who could not bear all kinds of opinions;” nor Mrs. ——, who discovered somehow that the solitary’s sheets were not so clean as they might have been; nor the old hunter with a long tongue, who came once a year to bathe in the pond; nor the Lexington man who arrived, one day, to inquire for a lost hound, but could hardly listen to Thoreau’s answer, he was so eager to ask, “What do you do here?” None of these were so good, when ground into paint, as the Canadian wood-chopper and post-maker. He, if any of Thoreau’s men, is among the immortals.

  Better than most of these human visitors, from the point of view of Thoreau’s enjoyment and use of them, at all events, were his “brute neighbors:” the brown thrasher, that encouraged him in his garden, where he was “making the earth say beans instead of grass;” the nighthawks and the hen hawks, which he leaned on his hoe to watch in their soarings; the phœbe that built her nest in his shed, and the grouse that led her brood past his windows; the wild mouse that nibbled cheese from between the hermit’s fingers; the squirrels, “singularly frivolous and whimsical,” that stepped on his shoe, and the chickadees that alighted on the armful of wood he was carrying; the hares that came round the door to pick up the potato parings, and then, when the door was opened, went off “with a squeak and a bounce;” the “silly loon,” with its laugh like a demon’s and its howl like a wolf’s, silly, but too cunning for its pursuer, nevertheless. These and many more he has put into his book, not to forget the ants that waged a battle in his woodpile, a battle which he has narrated with such wonderful particularity and sympathy. “Concord Fight!” he exclaims. “Two killed on the patriots’ side and Luther Blanchard wounded! Why, here every ant was a Buttrick—‘Fire! for God’s sake, fire!’—and thousands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer!” Even in a woodpile there is matter for an epic, if genius be there to look on. This battle, he informs us, “took place in the Presidency of Polk, five years before the passage of Webster’s Fugitive Slave Bill.”

  There is no finer quality in “Walden,” perhaps, than the skill with which
small happenings are made worthy to stand on the same page with passages of large philosophy. The seeing eye and the recording pen—to these there are no trifles; or, if there are, they are such things as the newspapers chronicle, the day’s “events,” so called. If the hermit had no other company, there was always the pond, apt for any mood: now to be sounded patiently with a line; now to be curiously studied as to its mysterious rise and fall, or its changes of temperature; now to be dreamed over by the poet’s imagination. It was the best of good neighbors. “Of all the characters I have known,” says Thoreau, who loved nothing better than a piece of affectionate hyperbole, “perhaps Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many men have been likened to it, but few deserve that honor.”

  Walden was not alone. White Pond, more beautiful still, lay not far off in one direction, and Flint’s Pond in another. And if the reader desires to see Thoreau in his fieriest mood, white-hot with indignation, let him turn to the page or two in which the “unclean and stupid farmer” who gave his name to this “sky water,” though his “presence perchance cursed all the shore,” is held up at arm’s length and lashed with scorn. “I go not there to see him nor to hear of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never loved it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, nor thanked God he had made it.”

  In general, it must be acknowledged, Thoreau seems to have found his fellow men either irritating or amusing. With them for his theme, he is apt to become satirical. Paupers, half-wits, idlers, and ne’er-do-wells, for these he owned a liking; as he did also for men of good parts and little cultivation, half-wild men, fitting naturally into a wild landscape. Farmers, he declared in so many words, were respectable and interesting to him in proportion as they were poor. As for the beauty of a “model farm,” he “would as lief see a patent churn and a man turning it.” Other philosophers and moralists have professed similar views, of course, but in these later times, when so much has been discovered that was unknown in Judea, the attitude strikes us as peculiar and almost novel. When Thoreau went to the village of an afternoon, as he did every few days, to hear the news,—“which, taken in homœopathic doses, is really as refreshing in its way as the rustle of leaves or the peeping of frogs” (a grave concession that),—he found it comparable to a muskrat colony which he visited on other days in the river meadows. He went to both places on a natural historical errand, to observe the habits of the colonists. Between him and the villagers it was probably a drawn battle. They thought him a queer one, and he was not backward about returning the compliment. They wondered how he could bear to live alone, and he wondered how they could bear to live so near to each other. It was mainly a want of courage, he thought, that restrained them from a life of separate independence. For his own part, he had a great deal of company in his house, especially in the morning, when nobody called.