BOOK Se
THOREAU, HIS LIFE AND AIMS.* 'Tins is a biographical study, founded on the sketch to which we called the attention of our readers some time since. It has, besides
* Thoreau, Su Life and atm: a Btudy. By IL A. Page. London Matto and Windne,
other merits, that of brevity, so rare in these days ; and though we rose from the book with a strong desire for more, a feeling that we had only had half a meal, we have no doubt Mr. Page is right. This " study " is more likely, in our judgment, to attract readers, and send them to Thoreau's works, than an elaborate life ; and we shall be surprised if it does not create a demand for those works, which, strange to say, has never yet arisen in England. The New England hermit ought, one would think, to be almost as great a favourite with English boys of this generation as Robinson Crasoe; and how it is that Walden has never been published in England has always puzzled us. Mr. Page seems to think that his two years' life in the woods "occupies a wholly disproportionate place in the general notion of Thoreau" (p. 42), but in this we entirely differ from him. We should rather reckon it as the flowering, in probably the most original of the young men who beard the master, of the teaching of Emerson, after that great preacher had resigned his church in Boston and settled at Concord. It was in 1841. and 1842 that Emerson spoke his famous discourses on "The Transcendental- ist" and "Man the Reformer." In them he told the young New Englander that though the employments of commerce were not intrinsically unfit for man, yet that these had become so vitiated by derelictions and abuses at which all connive, "that all such ingenuous souls as feel in themselves the irrepressible strivings of a noble aim, who by the law of their nature must act simply, find these ways of trade unfit for them." The professions were no better ; in all of them " a tender and intelligent conscience is a disqualification for success." What, then, is the youth to do ? He can at least wait, "without complaint, or even with good- humour, his turn of action in the infinite counsels." If he can- not work, "at least he need not lie, and all that is clearly due to-day is not to lie." If, then, "the accumulated wealth of the past is thus tainted, we must begin to consider if it were not the nobler part to renounce it, and to put ourselves in primary relations with the soil and nature, and abstaining from whatever is dis- honest and unclean, to take each of us bravely his part with his own hands in the manual labour of the world." In this way the young Transcendentalist will come "to behold the procession of facts you call the world as flowing perpetually outward from an unsounded centre in himself, centre alike of him and them."
We have thus shortly indicated the strongest influence which was in New England air when Thoreau grew to manhood, and which undoubtedly was inclining some of the best of the rising generation to strike work, renounce ordinary ambitions, and cry out for something worth doing. Thoreau, we must remember, lived at Concord, a small rural town, even now barely numbering 3,000 inhabitants, in which every one knew his neighbours, so that he was in constant and intimate contact with the great Transcendentalist. He bad taken his degree at Harvard, and was picking up a living by keeping a school with one of his brothers, and doing a little land-surveying, in which he was very skilful, for the neighbouring farmers, while indulging in rambles amongst the New England mountains and woods. It was not the mere enthusiasm of a boy which led him to make his experiment in obedience to the 'vox clamantie lie was almost 28 years old when he resolved to give up all "traps and baggage," to go into his favourite woods, there build a home for himself, in which he would earn his living by labour of his hands only, and test his own belief that "to maintain oneself on this earth is not a hardship, but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely." (p. 44.) How he carried out his plan faithfully, and proved his point to his own satisfaction, working slowly, for want of eattlaand imple- ments, and so getting "more intimate with my beans than is usual with farmers ; " scalding his yeast, and so learning that wholesome bread can be made without it, and that his own was made in accordance with Cato's receipt, 2,000 years old ; going without bread altogether for a month at a time, when he had no money ; becoming as intimate as an elder brother with all the birds and beasts in Walden Wood, and all the while thinking out his own thoughts, and becoming more and more convinced that there is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living, is one of the most attractive stories of our time, and we have to thank Mr. Page for reproducing it for us, though he does it almost under protest. We wish we had space for extracts bearing on Thoreau's ex- traordinary attraction for and knowledge of wild animals, quite justifying to our mind the parallel which Mr. Page suggests between him and St. Francis, even though we cannot go with him the full length of maintaining that "all true Christians must be trans- cendentalists in the sense that Thoreau was." (p. 200.) There is one question, however, which has been raised which we cannot allow to pass. It seems that in America, Thoreau has been supposed to want humour, and that even Mr. Lowell has lent his high sanction to this strange notion, We would refer any Englishman who may share it to the account of Thoreau's visit during a heavy storm to the tumble- down cabin of John Field, a shiftless, hard-working Irishman, his nearest neighbour at Walden. John's wife, the diligent slattern, always thinking of improving her condition one day, with the never-absent mop in one hand, and yet no effects of it visible anywhere—the chickens walking about the cabin like members of the family, "too humanised to roast well "—and John Field him- self, are all sketches which Charles Lamb or Sterne need not have "disowned, Thoreau's own handling of John, talking to him "as if he were a philosopher, or desired to be one," is inimitable. We got a good laugh in an uncomfortable railway carriage from fancying John Field's face while Thoreau shows him, by his own example, how he need not work so hard. "I did not use tea," he tefigi John, "nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat, and so did not have to work to get them. As I did not work hard, I did not have to eat hard, and it cost me but a trifle for my food ; but as be began with tea, and coffee, and butter, and milk, and beef, he had to work hard to pay for them, and when he had worked hard, he had to eat hard again to repair the waste to his system,--and so it was as broad as it was long ; or rather, it was broader than it was long, for he was discontented, and wasted his life into the bargain ; and yet he had rated it as a gain in coming to America, that here you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day." The impression of this teaching on John Field was, Thoreau admits, of the faintest ; and be imagines him and his family still "taking life bravely after their fashion, face to face, giving it tooth and nail, not having skill to split its massive column with any fine-entering wedge ;" and moralises that to undertake the culture of an Irishman is an enterprise which requires a kind of "moral bog-hoe." (p. 150.) The episode of Thoreau's day in prison, where he went for re- fusing to pay his arrears of poll-tax (p. 251), in loyalty to his theory that "there is a sphere where Government has no right to follow a man, if you can only find it," and that he had found it, and his idyl of "the Homeric or Paphlagonian man, a Canadian wood-chopper, who can hole fifty posts in a day, and made his last supper on a wood-chuck which his dog had caught," who was a frequent visitor to his hut (pp. 136.145), will dispose of any doubt as to 'Thoreau's " humour " which John Field and his cabin may not have entirely dissipated.
At the end of two years his experiment was fairly tried, and he returned to ordinary life, and there vindicated transcendentalism in an unexpected manner. The mystic of Walden took up his family business, and manufactured the best lead pencils in America ; the "morbid hermit" became one of the most resolute and active of Abolitionists, who helped to work the" underground railway ;" gained the nickname of "the terrible Thoreau," from his uncompromising assertion that "nature was partner to no Missouri Compromise," and when John Brown was taken at Harper's Ferry, was the first man to step forward and justify him. The Republican and Abolitionist Committees, cowed by the fury of the South, sent to beg him not to speak. I did not send to you for advice," was his reply, "but to announce that I am to speak." lie did not long survive the grand old Puritan, the meaning of whose life and death he had been the first to recognise. In November, 1860, he caught a violent cold from exposure in his favourite pur- suit, while counting the rings of trees in a deep snow, and passed away on the 8th of May, 1861, while his country was arming for the great struggle which he had so long foretold, at the age of 44, —a true martyr, or witness, to the last, of the transcendental creed, as he understood it, that if a man will advance constantly "in the direction of his dreams, and endeavour to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unsuspected in common hours ;" that "if you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. That is where they should be. Now put the founda- tions under them." (p. 197.) Mr. Page has done a good deed in making the " poet-naturalist " known to English readers, lie will increase our obligation to him, if he will give us an English edition of the works and speeches of Henry David Thoreau.
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