CHAPTER X

THOREAU

WHEN Thoreau died, Emerson wrote: "The country knows not yet, or in the least part how great a son it has lost." In fifty years the country, the world, has learned more of this great son. Friends and editors have assembled one by one the eleven volumes of the standard edition; and the recent publication of his complete journal indicates that there are readers who regard the least of his notes as worthy of preservation. The growing cult of the open air, the increasing host of amateur prodigals returning to nature, have given fresh vogue to his sketches of woods and waters. But, for all that, the man is not yet fully understood. Lowell's unsympathetic essay, product of a mind from which poetry and youth had evaporated, and of a social outlook grown conventionally decorous, has carried inevitable authority. Like Macaulay's essay on Bacon and Jeffrey's blundering miscomprehension of Wordsworth, it is an example of how one great reputation may for a period smother and distort another. Stevenson's popular essay, written in his half dramatic attitude of athletic good-cheer and arm-in-arm sympathy with a hooray-boy world, is based on a misconception of Thoreau's character and his message as a whole. It overemphasizes the gentle reservation with

which Emerson tempers his praise. Emerson in a few words sets forth the rounded integrity of Thoreau's work and personality; in one place he makes a comment upon his fellow-philosopher's proneness to negation and opposition. The comment, in its place, is just to Thoreau and expresses Emerson's more inclusive amiability. Stevenson singles out from Emerson's total estimate the negative characteristic, and stiffens it into an anti-social asceticism which is not foreign to Thoreau's nature but is by no means its dominant quality.

That original minds stand above the comprehension of mediocre minds of their own period and of later times is a fact observable everywhere in the history of the human intellect. More than that, some minds are not merely above the common herd; they are in advance of the best culture of their day and must await the intelligence of later generations to give them full recognition. Emerson and Holmes were as comprehensible to their generation as to ours. Whitman and Thoreau were trail-blazers; they went before to survey regions where later comers find a broad highway." Thoreau's vision shot beyond the horizon which bounded and still bounds the sight even of that part of the world which fancies itself liberal and emancipated.

"I am," says Thoreau, "a poet, a mystic and a transcendentalist." He was all that, and, moreover, he was an anarchist. He was the one anarchist of great literary power in a nation of slavish conformity to legalism, where obedience to statute and maintenance of "order" are assiduously inculcated as patriotic virtues by the social powers which profit from other peoples' docility. "Walden” and “A Week on

the Concord and Merrimac Rivers" have been accepted as classics. The essays on "Forest Trees" and "Wild Apples" were to be found in a school reader twenty-five years ago. But the ringing revolt of the essay on "Civil Disobedience" is still silenced under the thick respectability of our times. The ideas in it could not to-day be printed in the magazine which was for years owned by the publishers of Thoreau's complete works. Boston Back Bay would shiver! It would not do, really, to utter aloud Thoreau's ideas in a society whose leading university, Thoreau's alma mater, has recently ruled, "that the halls of the university shall not be open for persistent or systematic propaganda on contentious questions of contemporaneous social, economic, political or religious interests." That is, let the university offer fifty courses in philosophy, history and literature which is dead enough not to be dangerous to vested authority, but let it not take any part in philosophy, history, or literature which is in the making! The application of Thoreau's principles to the injustices of our present political and industrial life would be condemned as disloyally "unAmerican" in the community where he lived and which is now owned, body and soul, factory and college, by State Street. Thoreau's intellectual kinsmen are not there. For an adequate recognition of the value of Thoreau's challenge to authority one turns to no living New Englander, but to that other solitary and indignant moralist, Tolstoy.

་

On the right of the individual to withhold his sanction of word and deed from a government by any minority or majority which is engaged in dishonest practices and enforces

brutal laws, the American and the Russian philosopher are mainly in accord. Each says to government: "You may take me and break me because you are physically strong, but willing party to your legalized system of plunder and murder I will not be." The government against which Tolstoy rebelled is melodramatically barbarous, so that liberal minds all over the world find themselves in sympathy with him. It is easy to protest against tyranny on the other side of the planet. Thoreau's government (which is so like the present government of the United States that the change of a word or two, the insertion of modern instances, makes his essay as pertinent as if written yesterday) — Thoreau's government skulks behind the pacific mask of democracy; it deforms children, kills men and ruins women by common consent and not by the cossack forces of a picturesquely tyrannous Czar. The prosperous and so-called cultivated classes who manage for us our industrial, educational, literary and religious affairs, hold up horrified hands at Russia, but naturally have no quarrel with the system of government at home which leaves them in peace and offers them a career of ease. Therefore in the gallery of ideas through which admiring American youth is conducted, Thoreau's portrait of government is discreetly turned to the wall. His nature books, his poetic notes on the seasons, are recommended to an ever-growing number of readers. The flaming eloquence of his social philosophy, the significance, the conclusion of his experiment in individualism, is ignored. We praise Tolstoy, even in cultivated Boston, but we remain unacquainted with our own spiritual liberator.

One difference between Tolstoy and Thoreau is vital, a difference in personal circumstances. Tolstoy was born a landed aristocrat. He struggled in vain to bring the conduct of his life into accord with his beliefs. He desired to be a workman, but could only dabble in manual toil. In spite of his attempt to renounce copyright, his world-famous fictions brought money to his family. Circumstances enmeshed him, and his titanic struggle to extricate himself entangled him more and more, and made him a tragic figure. His life came to an impotent conclusion; only death, as in some Greek tragedy, could restore dignity and moral consistency. Thoreau, on the other hand, was born poor; he remained a bachelor; he earned his living by productive labour; and thus he had the good fortune to be able to practise his philosophy. He was not directly, nor by any economic indirection, dependent for his bread on another man. Tolstoy, an agonized prisoner in a wealth which he thought polluted him, may well have envied the Yankee pencilwhittler and land surveyor, a jack-of-all-trades and master of several, who did his honest day's work beside the common labourers of the world. The leisure which he spent in the company of sages, poets, and prophets, whose peer he was, he earned with his hands. He was spared the humiliation of writing sermons on freedom in time won at the expense of some other man's freedom.

"If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations,' he says, "I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man's shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations, too."