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"I have never had the arrogance of those who, when they fail to understand
an artist, blame the artist, not themselves."
- Yevgeni Yevtushenko. A Precocious Autobiography.
Thoreau is not easy to understand. In spite of the epigraph of this paper there are, as I see it, two main difficulties to be encountered by anyone seeking to understand Thoreau: first, the multifarious reports concerning what the man was actually like; and second, the exaggeration in his writings.
There are as many different reports on what Thoreau was like as there are people who spoke of him, and, on occasion, there are different reports even from the same person. Consequently, when one tries to recreate him one is faced with the staggering question which Walter Harding poses: "Where in the center of controversy does the truth lie?"[1] It seems important in Thoreau's case that we know something about him as a man - possibly because he preaches, and we like to see someone practice what preaches. Many people seem very ready to lash out at most of the things Thoreau said or did from a cursory and incomplete knowledge of his writings and life; few, if any, of the other "great names in American literature" (Vernon Parrington's phrase) - even Walt Whitman - come in for such contumelious attacks when they are being discussed. Indeed, it is difficult even in our day to discuss his principles and beliefs without some reference being made to his character, and invariably someone starts hurling brickbats at the man. Odell Shepard identifies these people as "the sluggish mass of smug and timorous and genteel folk by whom everything that he did, said, and wrote was felt, quite rightly, as a rebuke."[2] But Thoreau's writings and his life, stemming as they do from the same organic fatality, are inseparable; and each is necessary to an attempt at understanding the man.
If biography should be written by an acute enemy (as Arthur James Balfour has suggested) then Thoreau was fortunate in having made as many enemies as he did, but unfortunate because they helped to relegate him to a position of secondary importance as a writer - until "Time & Co…. the only quite honest and trustworthy publishers that we know,"[3] discovered him. Often people are enemies because they do not understand each other, and very few who helped to form public opinion understood this individual a outrance. Thoreau was antipodal to most men; most of what they stood for and believed in he disavowed. He never courted popularity in the sense that he was willing to change to be popular; if he could have remained as he was yet have been popular, he would probably not have been displeased. He had to be popular (as with everything else) on his own terms. There was no give in him. You did not make agreements with Thoreau; it was this way or it was that way, and you did not, though you opposed each other, try to come to an understanding. One feels that his pronouncement was final, and that he did not like to entertain any opinions but his own. Everything he did and everything he wrote smacks of his disposition to be independent of other men and their opinions, and his determination to "breathe after my own fashion." [4] In the reports that we have from his friends and acquaintances references are often made to his manner of dealing with them; and at times his behavior seems to belie his fine sentiments. Emerson, for one, writing in 1856, when Thoreau was thirty-nine, says:
If I knew only Thoreau, I should think co-operation of good men impossible. Must we always take for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, and joy?… Always some weary captious paradox to fight you with.[5]
Yet Thoreau was the man to complain that:
Most with whom you endeavor to talk soon come to a stand against some institution in which they appear to hold stock, -- that is, some particular, not universal, way of viewing things. They will continually thrust their own low roof, with its narrow skylight, between you and the sky when it is the unobstructed heavens you would view. [6]
In the rarified sphere in which Thoreau had his being men did not explain their misunderstandings; they communicated all their feelings silently, trusting that others would read them aright. (Who are the estranged?" Thoreau asks. "Two Friends explaining."[7]) In risky relationships like this misunderstandings are bound to occur, and they certainly did in Thoreau's case. One wonders sometimes whether he made the allowance for others which he demanded for himself, or whether he was always looking for others to hear him out while not permitting them to have their say. ("My friend… takes me for what I am."[8] "I have never met with a friend who furnished me sea-room."[9] - The emphasis always seems to be on what his friends should do for him. He did not have a generous and expansive allowance for all sorts of people and opinions. In a letter from New York written to Emerson he complained that the "pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population."[10] That he held this or similar view of men so late in his life as 1856, when he was thirty-nine - he died at forty-four - is evident by Walt Whitman's account of their meeting in that year, Whitman says:
Thoreau's great fault was disdain for men (for Tom, Dick, and Harry): inability to appreciate the average life - even the exceptional life: it seemed to me to be a want of imagination. He couldn't put his life into any other life - realize why one man was so and another man was so: was impatient with other people on the street and so forth."[11]
He was always searching for the perfect man; but his conception of the perfect man has an ethereal, ineffable ring - the ring of a being who could not share our infirmities and be mortal. Perhaps a Plato or a Socrates would have satisfied him, but none of his neighbors - exception perhaps Alcott - did. It is unfortunate that Thoreau did not become a Plato or a Socrates to others. The only people Thoreau defended and believed in were the saints and the martyrs, never the darlings, of the people - as the books he read were those "not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but… which even make us dangerous to existing institutions." [12] John Brown, the abolitionist, received his unstinted praise, but would he have if he had been Thoreau's constant companion? In our day he would have championed such men as Gandhi and martin Luther King, men who, like them, take on the establishments. He too had the blood of martyrs in him, and like the other martyrs of history it is up to a later age to appreciate this. John Burroughs maintained that:
He was of the stuff that saints and martyrs and devotees, or, if you please, fanatics are made of, and no doubt, in an earlier age, would have faced the rack of the stake with perfect composure. [13]
He is getting a hearing now; it is dilatory and select, but it is there. Opposed to those who would identify and dwell almost exclusively on his shortcomings are those who have deified him. For them his every contradiction, his every bit of nonsense - and there is nonsense in Thoreau, as there is in all of us - must be explained away and exalted into wisdom. And so in our day, over a hundred years after his death, he still has his apologists and his antagonists, and we seem little further advanced toward a complete understanding of the man. We might as well conclude with Bradford Torrey, one of the editors of his Journal, that:
Thoreau was a man of his own kind. Many things may be said of him, favorable and unfavorable, but this must surely be said first, -- that, taken for all in all, he was like nobody else. [14]
If we permitted Thoreau to have the last word on this controversy, he would probably say, as he said in Walden, "My shortcomings and inconsistencies do not affect the truth of my statement."[15]
But this statement leads us to the second difficulty - his own writings. If we set about to ignore the diverse views of the man and follow the suggestion of one of his earliest biographers, F. B. Sanborn, that "Thoreau is best read not in the comments and guesses of others… but in his own pages."[16] We are not much further ahead. When we do we encounter a wild array of exaggerations. He blatantly admits that he exaggerates, far beyond the exaggeration normal in the literary artist.
I trust that you realize what an exaggerator I am, -- that I lay myself out to exaggerate whenever I have the opportunity, -- pile Pelion upon Ossa, to reach Heaven so.[17]
This being so, he makes it very difficult for us to know when he is speaking the truth - the plain, unvarnished turth… and when he is exaggerating. Of his penchant for exaggeration he says, by way of self-defense and explanation:
I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression. Who that has heard a strain of music feared then lest he should speak extravagantly any more forever?[18]
Although he was a master of the craft of writing he looks upon words, however painstakingly chosen, as poor conveyors of feeling and thoughts. In his essay on Thomas Carlyle he goes so far as to assert that "he who cannot exaggerate is not qualified to utter truth."[19]
Thoreau's writings, particularly his published and consequently polished writings, show that he had developed a masterful command of his pen. In many passages he fairly drips with feeling, drenching us with a shower of words so beautifully and convincingly concatenated that we can understand the young men Emerson spoke of in his biographical sketch of Thoreau who felt that "this was the man they were in search of, the man of men, who would tell them all they should do."[20] because he is a captivating writer, our second difficulty embraces the question: How can we know when he is not exaggerating and thus achieving an effect? Edgar Lee Maters, discussing another Concordian, Emerson, illustrates a danger in not being selective in what we should take from that worthy, and his illustrations might apply equally to Thoreau. After mentioning how he had discovered Emerson, Masters says:
There were two others in my school who found themselves through Emerson. Both were girls. One of them conceived under Emerson's influence that she was a genius, which was not the case. Her life might be taken as an example of the possible evil that Emerson could be. And further, she went from Emerson into the quackery of mental healing, into the belief that everything is possible through the assertion of the will, the genius of the mind. As Emerson had roots in all the rubbish of his day, so his flower had in it the essence of all the deranging panaceas. In the case of my girl schoolmate it did not make a genius of her, but she became an interesting mind, much beyond what she would have become without Emerson…. The other became a very sensible and enterprising teacher and traveler.[21]
We might find ourselves living on the ragged edge, destitute and deranged, were we to accept Thoreau holus-bolus, or were we to hitch our wagon to one of his exaggerations. Suppose, for example, we, believing ourselves to be (let us say) quasi-philosophers, were to be convinced that the philosopher "is not fed, sheltered, clothed, warmed, like his contemporaries,'[22] and were to stop eating, living, dressing and heating themselves as we do - how long would we last? We know what he means; but it is one thing, to speak allegorically and symbolically, another to live that way. (And was Thoreau himself wise to try to live more like the animals than humans; perhaps if he had taken better care of himself he might not have succumbed quite so early to the family malady, consumption). On the other hand, taken selectively, he can enlarge the circumference of our personal vision.
When Thoreau declared "The society which I was made for is not here,"[23] he spoke with discerning acumen. Robert Louis Stevenson said in reference to him that "a man who must separate himself from his neighbor's habits in order to be happy, is in much the same case with one who requires to take opium for the same purpose."[24] There is some evidence, however, that as Thoreau grew older he became somewhat more accommodating. He makes a curious statement in his Journal, when he is forty-two, which might be quite autobiographical. He says, in speaking of youth, that "it takes him forty years to accommodate himself to the carapax of this world."[25] Does he mean that when youth has adjusted himself to the carapace he will accept the world's ways better and be less hard on its inhabitants? Nietzche said of Jesus: "He died too early; he himself would have revoked his doctrine had he reached" a riper age; "noble enough to revoke he was!"[26] His words might have applied to Thoreau. Sam Staples, the Concord jailer who had incarcerated Thoreau that memorable night, said after he spent an hour with the dying Thoreau: "Never spent an hour with more satisfaction. Never saw a man dying with so much pleasure and peace."[27] And Henry S. Salt, one of Thoreau's most sympathetic and understanding biographers, tells us that:
From his window, which looked out on the village street, he saw passing and repassing some of his favorite children, whom he had so often conducted in their merry expeditions after huckleberry or water-lily. 'Why don't they come to see me?' he said to his sister. 'I love them as if they were my own.'[28]
This is a Thoreau not usually known, nor one sufficiently proclaimed. His writings and the impressions we have of him make us feel that he was forbidding and stern. Truly, it would have been interesting to have seen whether he would have rescinded any of his judgments had he lived to a riper age.
"The greatness of a writer can be estimated," John Cowper Powys suggests, "by the gap which would yawn in our interpretation of life if we conceived for a moment the expurgation of his whole body of work from our minds."[29] Let us acknowledge that the world would have wagged on one way or another without the contributions of most writers, including Thoreau; but mankind would look a little poorer and meaner without him. "Why write of characters at all," asks Emil Ludwig, "unless an example, or perhaps a warning, can result from the process?"[30] We would miss his startling doctrines and an example of a life consecrated to simplicity, integrity, independence, and virtue ("The word virtue has meaning again," says Henry Miller, "when connected with his name."[31]). As it now stands, we can, in spite of all that can be said against him, point to Thoreau as a man who, like very few others in the roll call of history, was the apotheosis of self-reliance; a man who, with all his inconsistencies and shortcomings, exalted in being alive and beholding the mystery of life. Here was a man who turned his back on what most men consider to be the accepted goods of life, preferring freedom and wildness to power, fame, popularity, and money. The desire to live simple and uncomplicated lives, which resides to some extent in us all, but which surfaces, with varying degrees of frequency, was with him a way of life. Always, when the world becomes frenetic and crowds about us, and life reaches an intolerable pitch, we can, by an act of will, think back to the example of one man who resisted all attempts to make him conform, and be renewed in the assurance that he accomplished in his life what we, in those moments, wish we could.
To change the tense of one of his sentiments and apply the words to him which he applied to one of his neighbors, we might say: "It is a great encouragement that an honest man made this world his abode.[32]
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