Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
Vol. VIII, p. 449). When the Fugitive Slave Bill passed he wrote:
“This filthy enactment was made in the nineteenth century, by people
who could read and write. I will not obey it, by God” (_ibid._, Vol.
VIII, p. 236). In smug and prosperous Boston he found no comfort--the
Boston that applauded when “Thank-God Choate thanked God five times” in
denouncing “the trashy sentimentalism of our lutestring enthusiasts.”
Emerson would have none of Boston:
In Boston is no company for a fine wit. There is a certain
_poor-smell_ in all the streets, in Beacon Street and Mount Vernon,
as well as in the lawyers’ offices, and the wharves, and the same
meanness and sterility, and leave-all-hope-behind, as one finds in
a boot manufacturer’s premises. (_Ibid._, Vol. VIII, p. 363.)
With Theodore Parker he judged Boston to be the home of Hunkers, of
that “cotton aristocracy” that Webster served. It groveled servilely
before State Street; how should the homely moralities get a hearing in
such a place? Even Harvard College he charged with being a tool of the
Boston counting-houses.[457]
It was the crass materialism of America, of the Democrats equally
with the Whigs, of the northern capitalists equally with the southern
planters, that drove him to exasperation, and tempered his optimism.
There is no jaunty optimism in a passage written during the panic days
of ’37:
... Society has played out its last stake; it is checkmated.
Young men have no hope. Adults stand like day-laborers idle in
the streets. None calleth us to labor. The old wear no crown of
warm life on their gray hairs. The present generation is bankrupt
of principles and hope, as of property. I see man is not what man
should be. He is a treadle of a wheel. He is the tassel at the
apron-string of society. He is a money-chest. He is the servant
of his belly. This is the causal bankruptcy, this the cruel
oppression, that the ideal should serve the actual, that the head
should serve the feet.... Pride, and Thrift, and Expediency, who
jeered and chirped and were so well pleased with themselves, and
made merry with the dream, as they termed it, of Philosophy and
Love,--behold they are all flat, and here is the Soul erect and
unconquered still. What answer is it now to say, It has always
been so? I acknowledge that, as far back as I can see the widening
procession of humanity, the marchers are lame and blind and deaf;
but to the soul that whole past is but one finite series in its
infinite scope. Deteriorating ever and now desperate. Let me begin
anew; let me teach the finite to know its master. (_Journals_, Vol.
IV, p. 242.)
To be a critic rather than a fighter, and a critic because he was a
poet and philosopher--this was the duty laid upon Emerson; and yet he
was sorely troubled when men from the skirmish line of social conflict
reported to him the need of leaders. Why should he be privileged to
remain in his study when slaves were abducted on the streets of Boston
and John Brown was fighting at Harper’s Ferry? With the extremest
reluctance he was drawn into the struggle--it was not his fight.
I waked at night [he recorded in his journal] and bemoaned myself,
because I had not thrown myself into this deplorable question of
Slavery, which seems to want nothing so much as a few assured
voices. But then, in hours of sanity, I recover myself, and say,
“God must govern his own world, and knows his own way out of this
pit, without my desertion of my post, which has none to guard it
but me. I have quite other slaves to free than those negroes, to
wit, imprisoned spirits, imprisoned thoughts, far back in the
brain of man,--far retired in the heaven of invention, and which,
important to the republic of Man, have no other watchman, or lover,
or defender, but I.” (_Ibid._, Vol. VIII, p. 316.)
But always in the end he was drawn in, and none spoke wiser or braver
words to a careless generation. He never faltered, never compromised;
the prophet of the ideal faced the real and told the truth about it,
serenely and with clear insight. His heroes were not the heroes of
State Street; Horace Greeley, Theodore Parker, Horace Mann, Henry
Ward Beecher, he accounted the great Americans of his day, and not
Everett and Webster and Clay and Calhoun. A friend of civilization, he
was partisan only to the ideal; to justice, truth, righteousness. A
Yankee of the Yankees, a Puritan of the Puritans, he had emancipated
himself from all that was mean and ungenerous in the one and harsh
and illiberal in the other. A free soul, he was the flowering of two
centuries of spiritual aspiration--Roger Williams and Jonathan Edwards
come to more perfect fruition.
Footnotes
[456] See, for example, _Journals_, Vol. VII, p. 221.
[457] “Harvard College has no voice in Harvard College, but State
Street votes it down on every ballot. Everything will be permitted
there which goes to adorn Boston whiggism: ... but that which it exists
for,--to be a fountain of novelties out of heaven, a Delphi uttering
warning and ravishing oracles to elevate and lead mankind,--_that_ it
shall not be permitted to do or to think of. On the contrary, every
generosity of thought is _suspected_, and gets a bad name.” (_Ibid._,
Vol. IX, p. 215.)
Chapter III • Henry Thoreau • Transcendental Economist
“Wisdom crieth in the streets and no man regardeth her”; yet “she
teacheth temperance and forethought, justice and fortitude; than which
men can have in their life nothing more profitable.”
The single business of Henry Thoreau, during forty-odd years of
eager activity, was to discover an economy calculated to provide a
satisfying life. His one concern, that gave to his ramblings in Concord
fields a value as of high adventure, was to explore the true meaning
of wealth. Honest, fearless, curiously inquisitive--a masterless
man who would give no hostages to fortune--he proved his right to
be called a philosopher by seeking wisdom as a daily counselor and
friend, and following such paths only as wisdom suggested. Out of his
own experience, tested in the clear light of the Greeks, he wrote a
transcendental declaration of independence that may be taken as the
final word of the Concord school touching the great issues of practical
living. _Walden_ is the handbook of an economy that endeavors to refute
Adam Smith and transform the round of daily life into something nobler
than a mean gospel of plus and minus.
It was the common opinion of his neighbors that Henry Thoreau was a
queer fellow who had somehow got all his values topsy-turvy. And yet
the more thoughtfully one considers him, the more doubtful it appears
whether the queerness lay with him or with his critics. Unfortunately
a wholly honest and original man is so rare as to fall under common
suspicion. To the inmates of Bedlam a sane man will appear queer. In a
society of serfs a masterless man will be accounted an outlaw. To the
Concord farmers Thoreau appeared strange only because he applied in
his daily life a truth they assented to on the Sabbath. The principle
that life is more than the meat and the body than raiment was familiar
enough to the Sunday doctrines of Concord; but that a man should
seriously apply it on week-days; that he should propose to regulate his
mid-week activities by the economy of the Sermon on the Mount, passed
the comprehension of practical Yankees who followed quite another
economy. It was Thoreau’s conduct that perplexed them, rather than his
philosophy.
From first to last that conduct was serenely logical. To this disciple
of the ancient wisdom, Sabbath and week-day were one, and in seeking
to square his daily life with the ancient precept, Thoreau became the
arch-rebel of his group, the most individual amongst the “lunatic
fringe” of the transcendental movement, the one who escapes elusively
from the grip of an adjective. He slips out of all phrases devised
to imprison him. “A bachelor of nature,” Emerson, with his gift for
cryptic phrase, called him; “poet-naturalist,” Ellery Channing who
knew him intimately, chose to call him. “I am a poet, a mystic, and a
transcendentalist,” Thoreau said of himself, disregarding his nature
writings. Yet none of these phrases, true as they are, quite adequately
sums him up. At the risk of committing a fresh futility, one may
perhaps suggest that he was a Greek turned transcendental economist.
His life seems to have been a persistent experiment in values. A
philosopher of the open air who kept his mind clear and his nerves
robust by daily contact with wind and weather; a mystic who pried
curiously into the meaning of nature and was familiar with Hellenic
and Oriental systems of thought; a Yankee, skilled in various homely
crafts, yet rather interested in proving for himself what things were
excellent and taking nothing on hearsay--Thoreau’s chief business
would seem to have been with life itself, and how it might best be
lived by Henry Thoreau; how a rational being, in short, might enjoy
the faculties God has given him, following the higher economy and not
enslaving himself to the lower, so that when he came to die he might
honestly say, I have lived.
Amongst the members of the transcendental school Thoreau was the one
Concord man, born and bred there, literally of the soil and loving
the things of the soil. His tireless rovings were commonly bounded
by the familiar Concord horizons. His life had taken deep root in
the Concord fields, and he refused to join the restless multitude
of the _déracinés_, who seek novel experiences in a succession of
transplantings. No English peasant ever clung to the home-acres with
more loving tenacity. He was a countryman in instinct, distrusting the
great city twenty miles away that disseminated its virus through the
outlying villages and farms. The city was wedded to the economy of
industrialism and exploitation. But as a child of Jean Jacques, Thoreau
chose to believe that the road to heaven ran through the fields and
not over the cobblestones of Boston; he discovered an honest integrity
of character oftener in the country than in Lowell mills, yet none
too often there. It was easier to be free there, yet even in Concord
village the herd mind was always laying springes to catch the unwary;
and Thoreau would not be caught. He was poet and philosopher as well as
countryman, and he weighed his own life and the life of his neighbors
in the scales of Hellenic thought. He was surveyor of broader fields
than his neighbor’s wood-lot; was acquainted with other mysteries than
the mystery of pencil-making. He desired other ends than those his
shopkeeping, farm-tending neighbors served; he would not be encumbered
as they were. He could not carry such gross impedimenta in his pack
and be a free man; the pack was too heavy; and he proceeded to lighten
it with a thoroughness that startled Concord. He “signed off” from
Dr. Ripley’s church; with Alcott, he refused to pay his poll tax: he
severed his allegiance to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the
Federal government; he rid himself of all concern at what Concord
thought of his ways; he spoke out his honest convictions in the village
Lyceum--convictions about John Brown and slavery and Massachusetts’
part in sending negroes back to their masters--quite careless of the
disapproval of Judge Hoar and other Concord dignitaries. Such a man had
never before walked the village streets, and the spectacle filled his
neighbors with amazement.
With so much useless luggage got rid of, Thoreau was ready to set
about the high business of living. To outward appearance a somewhat
angular Yankee, practical and capable, he was at heart a Greek, with
the delight in the simple round of the seasons and a responsiveness