THOREAU'S LIFE.* THOREAU'S aims were clear and simple,—he wished truly

to live his own life according to his convictions. Yet no man, perhaps, has been the subject of more contradictory estimates. He has been called an " American Rousseau," a "Yankee Stoic," a "pistillate plant fertilised by Emersonian pollen," a "misan- thropic recluse," "too nearly a stoico-epicurean adiaphorist [!] to discompose himself in party or even in national strife," a " skulker," a " mystico-transcendentalist realist," an "Anti- Slavery zealot,"—" that terrible Thoreau," a "morbid hermit,' a "hybrid sentimentalist," an "American Diogenes," an "egotist in the guise of an indifferentist," a "modern St. Francis," a " cynico-humorous philanthropist," a "missionary of self-worship," and a "mystic preparer of the way for Darwinism." These terms suggest points of view sufficient to indicate something curiously vital, something difficult to diagnose or define, something at least puzzling, new, original, and suggestive. Mr. R. L. Stevenson wrote a brilliant essay, in which he declared that he, in reading the man through the books, found Thoreau crabbed and sour as the wild-fruits he delighted in ; and then, under fuller knowledge of facts, which allowed him in some degree to read the books through the man,

in a preface corrective of his points of view, really undid all

that he had done. His text, like that of the Koran or the Vedas, was too sacred to be touched; but he wrote a preface which practically recalled and overshadowed it. To read that essay without the preface were to look at the landscape without regarding the figure in the foreground which imparted all the meaning to it. Mr. Salt writes on this matter very judiciously :—" A skulker ' is the phrase in which Mr. R. L

Stevenson summed up Thoreau's character in his essay in Men and Books; but as he himself admits in the later written

preface that he had quite misread Thoreau through lack of sufficient knowledge of his life, there is no reason why admirers. of Walden should feel much disturbed at the bestowal of that singularly inappropriate appellation."

Notwithstanding that several Lives of Thoreau had been written prior to this of Mr. Salt, it could not be said that Thoreau had been altogether happy in his biographers.

Emerson's sketch prefixed to the Excursions was slight— more the characterisation of a disciple by a master than a

Life—loving and discerning, yet with a kind of egotistic colour suffusing it, like light through stained glass. Mr. Ellery Channing came next; his volume was disfigured by affectation and self-consciousness, and by too pronounced a vein of eulogy,—too little attention to fact, and a lack of shading. Then came Mr. Page, who treated his subject, as.

it were, at arm's-length, with sympathy, but rather vaguely in the biographic part, which was thin and meagre, though he should not be too harshly blamed for this, as he distinctly warned his readers that his little volume was a "study," and not a memoir. Next came Mr. Sanborn, full of facts, with access to the Thoreau family and to unpublished documents; but, alas ! Mr. Sanborn had little or no artistic quality. His Life was the work of a Dryasdust, without perspective, colour,. or elevation : correct, it may be, but hard, angular, sapless. If Mr. Page and Mr. Sanborn could only have been fused together, then a worthy memoir might have been the result.

It will thus be seen that ample room was left for a capable writer who could sympathise and yet discriminate, who would patiently search out details, and give unity by deep pene- tration to the springs of character and motive. It is not too- much to say that Mr. Salt has done this. His perception of motive and tendency is as marked as are his complete command and skilful grouping of facts. And his reading of ethical purpose is self-consistent and interesting. Here Thoreau stands; fair and complete amid his proper surroundings, for

• The Life of Henry Da rid Thoreau. By H. S. Salt. With Portrait, London t Richard Bentley and Son.

Mr. Salt has found local colour and aptly used it. He has been as industrious as he is devoted, and has left no stone unturned. He not only understands his subject ; he seems to have gained identity with him through some kindredship of interest, opinion, and thought. And he is careful to avoid painting too much in bright colours, and so incur the charge of white-washing ! He seldom pats his points too strongly, and is concerned to let Thoreau, as far as possible, speak for himself. While he does not agree with Mr. R. L. Stevenson that Thoreau, in a cynically-humorous way, sought to impose on himself no less than on his readers, as in the essay on Friendship," he is prudent enough to admit that light may be thrown on some of Thoreau's apparent paradoxes by per- ceiving that sometimes he half-humorously fenced his deepest thoughts, and only expressed them by asides.

It was inevitable that much in certain parts should bear a slightly polemic air. If Mr. Salt were at all to recognise the writings of such men as Mr. Lowell, Professor Nichol, and others, who sought to give colour to the idea that Thoreau was a morbid reactionary and nothing else, it could only be to rebut them by presenting a broader and more comprehensive

view. This he has done as far as possible indirectly, letting his new facts and the lights they throw speak for themselves. Few persons of open minds, we should think, could read this

volume, and not feel that something essential is wanting in the strictures referred to,—something which shall cover and include, without suggestion of strain or special pleading, Thoreau's constant, long-continued Anti-Slavery work and agitation, and his power, exhibited in the most effective manner, to keep a heart open for the individual while pleading for a race. Mr. Page, as Mr. Salt has pointed out, did not lose sight of this circumstance, and sought to bring Thoreau's Anti-Slavery action into consistency with his retreat to the woods at Walden, which was, after all, confessedly and from the first, meant merely as an episode, an experiment to pre- pare the better for action in various lines afterwards. Besides, we know now that Walden was a secret station for the "great underground railroad," which Thoreau made the means of helping more than one slave towards the North Star. His self-denials for the slaves, indeed, were many, and the thought of them should have given pause to much which has been written of Thoreau from the merely literary side. Thoreau, after all, would have looked askance at much which has been claimed for him by the high-flying literary critics ; for, despite what has been called his "airs," expression with him was ever subordinate to experience, and he would far rather have been

recognised as the writer of the Plea for John Brown or Slavery in Massachusetts, which some of the literary critics might sneer at, than be praised for the deftest sentences of description or of reflection.

It is worth noting that while justice is more and more being done to Thoreau as a true and tender-hearted man, an un- affected lover of his kind, in spite of expressions that some- times, it must be confessed, bore an air of revolt, not against society, but against the evils that come in the train of arti- ficial life, a higher and more distinguished place is claimed for him as a man of science which he himself hardly claimed to be. Listen to Mr. Grant Allen, who recently visited Concord and studied its natural history :—

"Like no one else, he knew the meaning of every note and movement of bird and beast and fish and insect. Born out of due time, just too early for the great change in men's views of nature which transferred all interest in outer life from the mere dead things one sees in museums to their native habits and modes of living, he was yet in some sort a vague and mystical antici- patory precursor of the modern school of functional biology. Page after page of his diary notes facts about the pollen showers of pine-trees, the fertilisation of skunk-cabbages, the nesting of birds, the preferences of minx, or musk-rat, the courtship of butterflies, all of a piece with those minute observa- tions on which naturalists nowadays build their most interesting theories." (Fortnightly Review, May, 1888.) The St. Francis-like features in hie, character—his love and care for the creatures of wood and wild—only come out the more effectively when associated with this view of him as a

pioneer of scientific theory; only he would have claimed that love, and all the finer instincts which it awakens and strengthens, stand for more than any new principle of classification ; and thus, though he sought for links of

brotherhood between man and brute, would hardly have proved a true Darwinian, though perhaps he suggests the very elements which future Darwins must fall back on, to

save them from the master's fate,—loss of hold on poetry, beauty, and all that these imply. But one thing is certain,— his significance grows as we recede from him ; he demands to be more and more studied and recognised on many sides ; and Mr. Salt's able volume comes just in the nick of time to pro- mote this object. "The generation he [Thoreau] lectured so sharply," says Mr. John Burroughs, "will not give the same heed to his words as will the next and the next. The first effect of the reading of his books upon many minds is irrita- tion and disappointment ; the perception of their beauty and wisdom comes later."

When we read that truly stoical expression of his feelings when he received back from Monroe, the publisher, almost the whole of the first impression of his first book, and his resolu- tion to go on, unmoved, in recording his observations and experiences, with the piles of memoirs, reminiscences, criti- cisms, and essays alongside, we cannot but be glad that he was stoic enough manfully to proceed in what he deemed his true course. Only one slip have we noticed in the volume, and that is in repeating the error that Thoreau, after his father's death, managed the lead-pencil making business, which, it seems, fell to his sister Sophia ; and there is, of course, much to add to the bibliography, which, though calculated to be useful, could at first be only tentative. And we much wish that Mr. Salt had followed the example of Dr. S. A. Jones, of Ann Arbor, and indicated the American magazines, in which English articles on Thoreau had been reprinted.