Thoreau's Walden

Contents

PAGE

Introduction ix

BiBUOGRAPHY xviii

Introduction

Henry Thoreau was a man of whom there is little that is significant to know which cannot be found in his chief book, Walden. From the worldly- standpoint his life was wholh^ uneventful, even the publication of his writings causing little comment at the time. He was born, lived, and died in Concord, Massachusetts, the friend and associate of the great men of his time who lived there, notably Emerson. He went to Harvard College, being graduated in 1837; taught school for a time; assisted his father in the manufacture of plumbago and pencils (a few of the pencils still survive in Massachusetts, stamped ''Thoreau and Son"); worked as surveyor when he was in need of money; gave occasional lectures in the popular "lyceums" of the day; and read and wrote abundantly, but not at all in the manner or for the purposes of a professional literary man. For the most part he sought only to live, in a spiritually rich sense, and it has been truly said that His " was a life in which the picking up of an arrow-head or the discovery of a richer blueberry patch were events, and the election of a new President but an incident." When statistics concerning his college class were being gathered, ten years after graduation, Thoreau replied to the questions asked :

"Am not married. I don't know whether mine is a profession, or a trade, or what not. It is not yet learned ... I am a Schoolmaster, a private Tutor, a Surveyor, a Gardener, a Farmer, a Painter (I mean a House Painter), a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-laborer, a Pencilmaker, a Glass-paper-maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poetaster. ... I have found out a way to live without what is commonly called employment or industry, attractive or otherwise. Indeed, my steadiest employment, if such it can be called, is to keep myself at the top of my condition, and ready for whatever may turn up in heaven or on earth.''

¥iii INTRODUCTION.

Thoreau's literary work is composed of the two books published in his lifetime, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1S49), and Walden, or Life in the Woods (1S54), and of various papers which he contributed to periocUcals; these last, together with portions of his journals and correspondence, were made into books after his death. The whole fills some dozen volumes, but the method and spirit of all that Thoreau said were so steadfast and simple that to know one of the volumes, one might say, is to know the rest. They contain many thoughts drawn from Thoreau's reading, which covered as wide a range as that of any American of his time; they also echo some of the teachings of the " Concord philosophers," Emerson and Bronson Alcott, of whom Thoreau was a friend and — to some extent — a disciple; but chiefly they contain his own thoughts " on man, on nature, and on human life," and from that standpoint are among the most original writings of their age.

There are two chiefly significant aspects of these writings, and the first is their connection with nature. •» Thoreau's love of the out-door world and all its creatures perhaps impressed his friends more than any other characteristic. Bronson Alcott wrote of him:

" I had never thought of knowing a man so thoroughly of the country, and so purely a son of nature. I think he had the profoundest passion for it of any one of his time. . . . He seemed one with things, of nature's essence and core, knit of strong timbers, — like a wood and its mhabitants. There was in him sod and shade, wilds and waters manifold, — the mold and mist of earth and sky. . . . He, of all men, seemed to be the native New Englander, as much so as the oak, the granite ledge; our best sample of an indigenous American, untouched by the old country, unless he came down rather from Thor the Northman, whose name he bore."

So it was his occupation, not his recreation, to roam the open country, never using the railroad or other artificial means of locomotion if he could help it, and to find in almost every foot of ground something worth seeing and remembering.

"He knew the country like a fox or a bird," wrote

INTRODUCTION. is

Emerson, ''and passed through it as freely by paths of his own. He knew every track in the snow or on the ground, and what creature had taken this path before him. . . . On the day I speak of he looked for the Menyanthes, detected it across the wide pool, and, on examination of the florets, decided that it had been in flower five days. He drew out of his breast-pocket his diary, and read the names of all the plants that should bloom on this day, whereof he kept account as a banker when his notes fall due. The Cypripedium not due till to-morrow. He thought that, if waked up from a trance in this swanip, he could tell by the plants what time of the year it was within two days. . . . His power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses. He saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet, and his memory was a photographic register of all he saw and heard. And yet none knew better than he that it is not the fact that imports, but the impression or effect of the fact on your mind. Every fact lay in glory in his mind, a tj'pe of the order and beauty of the whole."

From this standpoint, then, Walden is one of the few great books which are especially valued for their power of communicating the richness of the flavor of the world of nature.

But by "nature," when Thoreau is concerned, we must understand not merely the landscape and its creatures, but natural living, as contrasted with the complex and artificial life of society. Many of us like to free ourselves from the bustle and trappings of civilization for a few days' outing, but Thoreau honestly and consistently wished to do so all the time. He not only enjoyed "the simple life," but he believed in it, and proclaimed: "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone." So to him " life in the woods " was typical of freedom from the drudgery, the blind moneygetting and moncj'-spending, of the great part of mankind. And after thinking a good while about the things that one "can afford to let alone," he put his theories to the test by building a little hut on the shore of Walden Pond, and living in it for some two years. (See the text itself for an account' of what the cxrjerinient cost him, and the

X INTRODUCTION.

proportionate time which he saved for more important things than earning money.) "I went to the woods because I wished to hve deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. ... I wanted to live deep, and suck out all the marrow of life." The book W olden is not only the record of his experiment, but the evidence of what he found ^' the marrow of life " to be.

This brings us to the second of the significant aspects of Thoreau's work. Besides being a great naturalist, he was a great idealist. Far more than most men, he valued and loved both the world of things and the world of ideas. He found in himself, he said, "an instinct toward a higher, or as it is named, spiritual life, and another toward a primitive, rank and savage one: and I reverence them both." So his thoughts roamed from the fishes and the pebbles in Walden Pond to the deepest recesses of the mind, and in both directions he found happiness. "While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons, I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me." Ancl he bade others test their happiness by their relation to nature: "If the day and the night arc such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal — that is your success." But in such sayings he was of course not referring chiefly to the physical side of life; that was only a means to the life of the spirit. As truly as any man who ever lived, Thoreau believed that "the life is more than meat, and the body than raiment." And he persistently looked at human activities from this ideal standpoint. If his doctrines appeared only in what he wrote for pul^lication, it might be thought that he was posing — as some did think, in his lifetime. But his letters show the same ideas everywhere. In 1857, after a general financial panic, he wrote to a friend :

"The merchants and company have long laughed at transcendentalism [on the meaning of this word, see page xiv], higher laws, etc., crying ' None of your moonshine,' as if they were anchored to something not only definite.

INTRODUCTION. xi

but sure and permanent. If there was any institution which was presumed to rest on a solid and secure basis, and more than any other represented this boasted common sense, prudence, and practical talent, it was the bank; and now those very banks are found to be mere reeds shaken by the wind. Scarcely one in the land has kept its promise. . . . But there is the moonshine still, serene, beneficent, unchanged."

This passage may well be compared with the defence of ideals in the closing pages of W olden: ^' If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. ... If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them." No better word than this has been spoken to youth by any American writer.

But it must be said that, despite the nobility and purity of Thoreau's thinking, it can hardly be taken as a safe guide. In his concern for individual freedom, he never sufficiently regarded man's place and duties in organized society, and a portion of his teaching reads like the expression of a kind of exalted selfishness; — compare, for example, his rather scornful references to "Doing-good" and ''philanthropy," in the closing pages of the first chapter. From such sayings one must subtract something, because of his love of paradox and exaggeration; the same sjDirit that led him to say, "I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it," or, when he wished to urge the younger generation to act on its own best impulses, to utter this absurdity: " I have lived some thirty years on this planet, and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable advice from my seniors." Such utterances he himself explained, in the Conclusion to Walden, saying: "I fear chiefly lest my expression may not be extra-vagant enough. ... I desire to speak somewhere without bounds, for I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression." But no allowance for exaggeration will enable one to feel that Thoreau could ever have xii INTRODUCTION.

worked much with other men for the good of the community.

As an individual, however, he was deeply interested in certain public questions. On account of his disapproval of the Mexican War he refused to pay his polltax, and in 1845 was arrested and imprisoned for this refusal. (See page 142, and the note on it.) Later he proposed similar action for those who wished to protest against slavery, saying, ''Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." From the same standpoin the admired and befriended the revolutionary abolitionist, John Brown, when he came to Concord; and when, in 1859, Brown was about to be executed for his daring raid at Harper's Ferr}'-, it was Thoreau who gathered his fellow-citizens together at Concord, and read them a ringing address in honor of the man who had so conspicuously represented his own principle of ''civil disobedience." But with ordinary, orderly matters of social good he had little concern; and in the thrilling days of 18G1 we find him writing to a friend: " I do not so much regret the present condition of things in this country as I do that 1 ever heard of it. I know one or two who have this year, for the first time, read a President's Message; but they do not see that this implies a fall in themselves rather than a rise in the President. Blessed were the days before you read a President's Message. Blessed are they who never read a newspaper."

Thoreau's criticism of life, then, is valuable chiefl}^ in a negative way. For those who feel that they are social beings, and must live in cooperation with othei-s, he has little positive advice. But he strikes splendid blows at the stupidity and wastefulness of many men's lives, and such scorn is ennobling. "I have seen more men than usual, lately," he writes (in a letter of Aug. 8, 1854), "and well as I was acquainted with one, I am surprised to find what vulgar fellows they are. They do a little business commonly each day, in order to pay their board, and then they congregate in sitting-rooms and feebly fabulate and paddle in the social slush; and when I think that they have sufficiently relaxed, and am prepared ta

INTRODUCTION. xiii

see them steal away to their shrines, they go unashamed to their beds, and take on a new layer of sloth." The salty vigor of this is more like Carlyle's than it is like any American writer, and often Thoreau's virile satire suggests the temper of Carlyle rather than that of Emerson, with whom he is more commonly associated.

The strictly literary value of his work is very uneven. He wrote freely and unsystematically, as he thought and lived, not seeking to order his material carefully, or to build up the structure of his thought in the manner of one who really tries to prove something. Sometimes he will linger and amble when we would wish to go more speedily.* But aside from these things, Thoreau's style is singularly rich aijd rewarding. He studs his writing with gems from every quarter of literature, so that to understand all his allusions might be said to be a liberal education. His moral earnestness at times has a dignity quite the equal of Emerson's, and flashes out in the same sort of noble, compact utterances. ''The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation is uninterrupted." "God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine." "There is more day to dawn; the sun is but a morning star." On the other hand, his humor is far more ready and abundant than his friend's. " I retained the landscape, and I have annually carried off what it yielded without a wheelbarrow." " We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate." Or, compare the account of Circulating Library novels in Chapter III, or the delicious contrast, in Chapter V, between Thoreau going comfortal)ly to bed in his hut and the prosperous farmer driving cattle to market through the darkness and the mud, in order to enjoy "the comforts of life." Sometimes he will revel in a bit of pure verbal melody, like the old seventeenth-century

* Walden is certainly longer than it need be. Those who prefer to read less than the whole may be advised to include the first five chapters, and perhaps the eighth, eleventh, sixteenth, and eighteenth, for the rest — by no means omitting the last.

xiv INTRODUCTION.

writers whom he knew and loved; such is the beautiful close of the sixteenth chapter, where the Walden water is followed "past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides," till it "makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian gull, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas." And sometimes, again, there is a masterly bit of narrative or description, which may be taken out and made to stand by itself as a work of art in miniature. Such is the Battle of the Ants, in Chapter XII, for narration; and, for description, the splendid picture of the old fisherman in the Week on the Concord and Merrimack, too good not to be quoted here:

"I often discovered him unexpectedly amid the pads and the gray willows when he moved, fishing in some old country method — for youth and age then went a fishing together — full of incommunicable thoughts, perchance about his own Tyne and Northuml^erland. He was always to be seen in serene afternoons haunting the river, and almost rustling with the sedge; so many sunny hours in an old man's life, entrapping silly fish; almost grown to be the sun's familiar; what need had he of hat or raiment any, having served out his time, and seen through such thin disguises? I have seen how his coeval fates rewarded him with the yellow perch, and yet I thought his luck was not in proportion to his years; and I have seen when, with slow steps and weighed down with aged thoughts, he disappeared with his fish under his low-roofed house on the skirts of the village. I think nobody else saw him; nobody else remembers him now, for he soon after died, and migrated to new Tyne streams. His fishing was not a sport, nor solely a means of subsistence, but a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged read their Bibles."

Certain aspects of Thoreau's work cannot be understood without remembering his connection with the group of New England " Transcendcntalists " who exerted an important influence on American thought and literature in the 40's of the nineteenth century. Transcendentalism may be ]:)riefly defined as the belief that there are sources of knowledge which transcend —

INTRODUCTION. xv

that is, are of higher origin than — the five senses and the common reason; that the spirit of man may l<now certain truths through its very nature, or through communication with the divine spirit (see the passage on Brahma, page 81, and the note on it). Consistently with this idea, all the writers of the group — notably Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreau — will be found to state many teachings which they make no attempt to prove, but which they conceive will appeal as true to the right perceptions of those addressed. We must not think of the group as forming any definite organization, or even a systematic "school" of thought; on the contrary, it was of the very nature of their beliefs that every man should think for himself. This freedom of individual thought found many different expressions, from the most noble to the most absurd. Reforms in matters of eating, clothing, and social and political organization, were everywhere "in the air." James Russell Lowell described the more amusing aspect of the times: "Bran had its apostles, and the pre-sartorial simplicity of Adam its martyrs. . . . Not a few impecunious zealots abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people), professing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. . . . Communities were established where everything was to be common but common-sense." While Emerson gave this account, in 1840, of its deeper aspect:

"No one can converse much with different classes of society in New England without remarking the progress of a revolution. Those who share in it have no external organization, no badge, no creed, no name. They do not vote, or print, or even meet together. They do not know each other's faces or names. They are united only in a common love of truth and love of its work. . . . They have silently given in their several adherence to a new hope, and in all companies do signify a greater trust in the nature and resources of man than the laws or the popular opinions will well allow."

An important representative of this movement was the magazine called The Dial, which was published quarterly from 1840 to 1844 under the editorship, first of 5largaret Fuller, then of Emerson. To this Thoreau was a leading xvi INTRODUCTION.

contributor, and indeed for a brief period acted as editor. More of his poems v/ere published here than elsewhere during his life, and to look through the numbers of The Dial is to come into the same atmosphere that pervades his writings. One series of articles in the journal is particularly significant for readers of Wcdden — the so-called "Ethnical Scriptures." All the Concord transcendentalists had become interested in the ethical and religious writings of Asia, — particularly of China and India, — some of which had lately become accessible to English readers ; for they found in them certain aspects of thought which harmonized with their own thinking, in ways which cannot be discussed here, and their new sense of religious freedom led them to think that these "Bibles" of other nations might be as truly worthy of study as the Bible of Jews and Christians. In The Dial for July, 1S42, occurs this note, probably written by Emerson :

"We commence in the present number the printing of a series of selections from the oldest ethical and religious writings of men, exclusive of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures. Each nation has its bible more or less pure; none has yet been willing or aljle in a wise and devout spirit to collate its own with those of other nations, and, sinking the civil-historical and the ritual portions, to bring together the grand expressions of the moral sentiment in different ages and races, the rules for the guidance of life, the bursts of piety and of abandonment to the Invisible and Eternal; — a work inevitable sooner or later."

In accordance with this plan the editors reprinted extracts from the Hindu "laws of Menu," the Persian " Desatir or Regulations," the Chinese "Four Books" of Confucius and others, "the Preaching of Buddha," and the "Chaldaean Oracles." For a number of these articles Thoreau was probably responsible, and it is certain that he was deeply interested in the plan. There is a story that, when a friend said something to him about the Bible, he replied " Which one? " And the reader of Walden will sec how consistently he followed up the study of these scriptures of other peoples, and illustrated his ideas from their writings. Now that these Oriental

INTRODUCTION. xvii

writings have been known to the Western world for a century, it is pretty clear that Thoreau and his friends exaggerated their value, on both the religious and the literary side. They are very far from having taken a place, among the Christian peoples, by the side of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. But many of their nobler elements have been handed down in modern literature, through the influence of Thoreau and Emerson — the charm of which is perhaps best exemplified, for readers of W olden, by the story of the artist of Kouroo (pp. 263-264), surely one of the gems of the book. The noble idealism expressed by this little tale is closely akin to that which Emerson attributed to his friend in the closing words of the sketch he wrote after Thoreau's death; and nothing better could be found as a conclusion to these introductory pages:

"There is a flower known to botanists, one of the same genus with our summer plant called Life-Everlasting, a Gnaphaliiim like that, which grows on the most inaccessible cliffs of the Tyrolese mountains, where the chamois dare hardly venture, and which the hunter, tempted by its beauty, and by his love (for it is immensely valued by the Swiss maidens) climbs the cliffs to gather, and is sometimes found dead at the foot, with the flower in his hand. It is called ])y botanists the Gnaphaliwn leonto- ■podiuvi, but by the Swiss Edehveisse, which signifies Noble Purity. Thoreau seemed to me living in the hope to gather this plant, which belonged to him of right. The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity, and we were the less prepared for his sudden disappearance. The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. . . . But he, at least, is content. His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge, wherever there is virtue, , wherever there is beauty, he will find a home."

n

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.

Thoreau's collected writings are published in eleven volumes in the Riverside Edition (Houghton-Mifflin Co., Boston). Emerson's Biographical Sketch of Thoreau is included in Volume X, called Miscellanies. It may also be found in the original edition (1S63) of the volume called Excursions, and in the Cambridge Classics Edition of Walden (Houghton-Mifflin Co.). the best extended life of Thoreau is that of Henry S. Salt (Walter Scott, London), which contains some admirable critical chapters and a complete bibliography. William EUery Channing's memoir, called Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist (1873), while rambling and uneven, contains considerable interesting matter; a new edition, with notes by F. B. Sanborn, was pubhshed in 1902 (C. E. Goodspeed, Boston). Mr. Sanborn is also the author of the volume on Thoreau in the American Men of Letters Series (Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1SS2) ; its account of the Concord of Thoreau's time is more satisfactory than the biographical matter. Other interesting accounts of Thoreau, by his contemporaries, will be found in Bronson Alcott's Concord Days (1872), Moncure Conway's Emerson at Home and Abroad (1882), Thomas Wentworth Higginson's Short Studies of American Authors (1888), and Charles J. Woodbury's Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson (1890).

Perhaps the most important critical articles on Thoreau's writings are that by James Russell Lowell (in My Study Windoivs), which, however, is rather lacking in sympathic appreciation; that by John Burroughs, in Indoor Studies; and that by Robert Louis Stevenson in Familiar Studies of Men and Books. For other references, see the bibliography in Salt's Ldfe, already referred to. There are also good brief critical notices of Thoreau in Pancoast's Introduction to American Literature (Holt, New York), and Newcomer's American Literature (Scott, Foresman & Co., Chicago).

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HENRY DAVID THOREAU

WALDEN.

ECONOMY.

Whex I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only. I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.