The Diogenes of Concord Walden. By H. D. Thoreau. With
Woodcuts by E. Fitch Daghall. (Chapman and Hall. 25s.) Walden. By H. D. Thoreau. With Woodcuts by E. Fitch Daghall. (Chapman and Hall. 25s.) THERE was something of the neurotic about Diogenes, as indeed there is about all world-weary people who cry out upon human society that it is a " vanity of vanities." To order Alexander the Great to get from between me and the sun " is really the impertinent gesture of an invalid, who knows, deep down in his soul, that his request is so irrelevant to life that it cannot wound. For in what does the wisdom of the hermit consist ? It is in the reduction of life's many problems to a few, and those few to be the simpler ones born of solitude. The heroism of a complete man, however, is called out not so much by the magnitude of his problems, as by their number. Life comes about our heads rather like a swarm of wasps than like a single tiger stalking us through the jungle of time ; and it is the simultaneous approach of these many little stings which baffles us, and turns our ordered and disciplined minds to a panic chaos. The policy of withdrawal is one, therefore; which we are tempted to look upon with contemptuous indul- gence. It is a little easier than accepting the daily petty responsibilities as they come.
Such is our attitude likely to be toward H. D. Thoreau, who temporarily eluded the burden of citizenship in his native town of Concord. For two years he gave up mankind in disgust, trafficking only with a few human beings whom he found worthy of his respect ; one or two woodmen, craftsmen, a poet or so, and Emerson. In refusing to suffer fools gladly, he did what we all long to do but dare not, being slaves of good manners, and not too sure of our own wisdom.
But though we all read with envy the record of his protest, we do not wholeheartedly admire him for it, except in a wanton sort of way, as we envy the tramp and the sponger. R. L. S. even went so far as to vent his jealousy, for all his life he longed for a reasoned irresponsibility, but never dared to it. Rather unfairly, he got his revenge by accusing Thoreau of being a canting humbug : as if, at some period or other during the evolution of our personal morality, we were not all humbugs. Stevenson's accusation has stuck, however, and Thoreau's gesture has never since been wholly accepted. It is all very well for Thoreau to be superior, and preach that a man doesn't want a handsome house and a full barn, for the fact is that a man does want these things, and if he did not, the triumph of man over nature would fail ; wild vines would entangle his legs, the thorns of the waste trip him up and ruin his dignity with derision. The poet, the prophet, the philoso- pher ; these people, wanderers from their birth, may not need the stable, house and barn, but the urbane citizen does, and it is because of this need that he evolves civilization. The other three serve but to remind him of his beginning and his end ; they point out the moth that corrupts, and urge him to keep on the alert, and not to put all his hopes in these actualities, these symbols of triumph over nature. They preach the eternal sermon that capital is very, very insecure.
How we hate them for it ! We crucify them, imprison them, starve them in garrets, patronize them, and set them in our drawing-rooms as pets. But their admonitions persist, barbed with the beauty of their genius.
So it is with Thoreau. He was an eccentric, but he had an inspired pen, and if he tells you only about a bagful of nails purchased toward the erection of his hut, it is with such gusto and vividness that you are spellbound, and rummage about in your imagination for a hammer, so that you may join him on the banks of Walden pond, and make the woods echo as you drive home the gleaming iron heads into the pine-logs.
Stevenson was right, however, for Thoreau was a bit of a humbug. There was a distinct sophistication about his solitude, which after all was only half a mile from the high road. And ditring his sojourn by the lake, the path from the road to his but was well worn by the feet of visitors. He tells us how, during the winter, the wind blew the dead leaves into the sunken track which their feet had trodden through the snow, so that their path was perpetually carpeted, and that at night they had this dark ribbon of leaves to guide them through the white waste to where his cabin window shone with a very literary welcome. And how convincing and plausible a rascal he was when they got there ! His arguments-were well worth the effort of the journey forth from the town, so shrewd and original was his tongue ; and, too, not tmelaborately. self-educated.
Yet that idea of his pig-headedness persists, even when we are most charmed by him. He describes, for instance, how every man looks at his own wood pile with a kind of affection. He then continues :—
" I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played about the stumps which I had got out of my beanfield. As my driver prophe- sied when I was ploughing, they warmed me twice, once while I was splitting them, and again when they 'were on the fire, so that no fuel could give out more heat. As for the axe, I was advised to get the village blacksmith to ' jump ' it ; but I jumped him, and, putting a hickory helve from the woods into it, made it do. If it was dull, it was at least hung true."
The fact remains that a man who laboriously chops wood with a blunt axe is a fool. That action is, indeed, one of the elemental follies, born of the indolence, despair, and sulkiness which followed the expulsion from Eden. Had Adam not been so piqued, had his common sense and human genius been fully awake, he would have gone back and borrowed the flaming sword of the Gatekeeper in order to supply himself with firewood. And Thoreau would have gone to the black- smith and got his axe sharpened. The mood which prompted this folly was symbolical of a certain strain of fatuous petulance which permeated his otherwise sincere experiment.
Beyond this amount of carping we can go no further with Stevenson. We ask ourselves what gives Walden its lasting interest, and the answer is found by dipping into any one of the pages of this fruitful book. Here we find a really alert, vital, and critical mind, aware even of its own idiosyncrasies. Thoreau himself reports the little weaknesses which we have been discussing. But then he reports everything, and that with a directness and life-giving power which makes us realize, by comparison, how vitiated our senses and intelligence have become by the sapping urbanity of conventional education and taste, and social diffidence.
Himself a very king among amateurs, Thoreau yet strikes at the core of weakness in all amateurishness. As if," he says, " you could kill time without injuring eternity." And so we realize that his adventure was undertaken in no spirit of boredom, or distrust of self. He believed healthily and heartily in his own originality, and was for testing its power of grappling with the inner monsters of self and nature, which come out to meet each other in the glades of solitude. Though the social isolation of this book is a sham, there is present real solitude of mind ; and that is the noblest and most fruitful silence obtainable. Beethoven, writing his Pastoral Symphony in Vienna, possessed this divine loneliness : and so did Thoreau amidst the coming and going of the intellectuals of the New World. He realized that it wants but little to waft us away from the familiar world, to which habit has made us blind.
" In our most trivial walks we are constantly, though uncoil., sciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighbouring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned round—for a man needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in, this world to be lost—do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. Every man has to learn the points of the compass again as often as he awakes, whether from sleep or any abstraction. Not till we are lost—in other words, not till we have lost the world—do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are, and the infinite extent of our relations."
This edition is very pleasant ; a well-made and printed volume, with sixteen woodcuts by Mr. Daglish, which are admirable for their sensitive appreciation of bird and animal
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