Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
to natural beauty that belonged to the older civilization. Brought
up under the “pale negations” of Dr. Ripley’s theology, he emerged a
pagan. He was the most widely read in Greek literature of the Concord
transcendentalists; had translated _Prometheus Bound_, and much of
Pindar; and was completely at home in the clear Greek atmosphere. Who
but a Hellenist could utter such words as these which serve as his
apology for the Walden experiment?
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front
only the essential facts of life, and to see if I could learn what
it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I
had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living
is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was
quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow
of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout
all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to
drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and,
if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine
meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it
were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true
account of it in my next excursion. (_Walden_, “What I Lived For.”)
To seek Pan in a tired world and recover joys that have long been
forgotten is a business that only a romantic will engage in; yet
Thoreau set out on the quest with a clear-eyed purpose:
... My Good Genius seemed to say,--Go fish and hunt far and wide
day by day,--farther and wider,--and rest thee by many brooks
and hearth-sides without misgiving. Remember thy Creator in the
days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek
adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and the night
over-take thee everywhere at home. There are no larger fields
than these, no worthier games than may here be played. Grow wild
according to thy nature, like those sedges and brakes, which will
never become English hay. Let the thunder rumble; what if it
threaten ruin to farmer’s crops? that is not its errand to thee.
Take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and sheds.
Let not to get a living by thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the
land, but own it not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are
where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like
serfs. (_Ibid._, “Baker Farm.”)
If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and
life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is
more elastic, more starry, more immortal,--that is your success.
All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily
to bless yourself.... The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat
as intangible and indiscernible as the tints of morning or evening.
It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I
have clutched. (_Ibid._, “Higher Laws.”)
To save one’s soul has always been accounted in New England a matter
worthy of a man’s best effort, and Thoreau’s days were given over to
it with a single-heartedness without parallel even in New England.
The Puritan, he believed, had suffered his high spiritual mission
to be sacrificed to the economic; he would recover that mission by
sacrificing the economic to the spiritual; but he would interpret
the spiritual as a Hellenist rather than a Hebraist. The Christian
other-worldliness seemed to him unduly regardless of the loveliness of
this world. “Christianity,” he says in the _Week_, “only hopes. It has
hung its harp on the willows, and cannot sing a song in a strange land.
It has dreamed a sad dream, and does not yet welcome the morning with
joy.”
I am not sure but I should betake myself in extremities to the
liberal divinities of Greece, rather than to my country’s God....
In my Pantheon, Pan still reigns in his pristine glory, with his
ruddy face, his flowing beard, and his shaggy body, his pipe and
his crook, his nymph Echo, and his chosen daughter Iambe; for the
great God Pan is not dead, as was rumored. Perhaps of all the gods
of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at his
shrine. (_The Week_, “Sunday.”)
His extraordinarily frank evaluation of the New Testament, and
of Calvinistic New England that had too long chewed the cud of
conscience--“they did not know when to swallow their cud, and their
lives of course yielded no milk”--is the work of a pagan from whom all
creeds slip easily. Few more searching sermons have been preached in
Massachusetts than the sermon that composed itself as Thoreau’s boat
floated down the Concord River, past the Billerica meeting-house where
the honest villagers were worshiping the God of New England--a sermon
that with fine irony summons minister and congregation to consider the
deeper teachings of their sacred book.
I know of no book that has so few readers. There is none so truly
strange, and heretical, and unpopular. To Christians, no less than
Greeks and Jews, it is foolishness and a stumbling-block. There
are, indeed, severe things in it which no man should read aloud but
once. “Seek first the kingdom of heaven.”--“Lay not up for yourself
treasures on earth.”--“If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that
thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in
heaven.”--“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole
world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange
for his soul?”--Think of this, Yankees!... Think of repeating these
things to a New England audience! thirdly, fourthly, fifteenthly,
till there are three barrels of sermons! Who, without cant, can
read them aloud? Who, without cant, can hear them, and not go out
of the meeting-house? They never _were_ read, they never _were_
heard. Let but one of these sentences be rightly read from any
pulpit in the land, and there would not be left one stone of that
meeting-house upon another.
... When one enters a village, the church, not only really but
from association, is the ugliest-looking building in it, because
it is the one in which human nature stoops the lowest and is
most disgraced. Certainly, such temples as these shall ere long
cease to deform the landscape.... Really, there is no infidelity,
now-a-days, so great as that which prays, and keeps the Sabbath,
and rebuilds the churches. (_The Week_, “Sunday.”)
As Thoreau understood the problem of economics there were three
possible solutions open to him: to exploit himself, to exploit his
fellows, or to reduce the problem to its lowest denominator. The
first was quite impossible--to imprison oneself in a treadmill when
the morning called to great adventure, to burden oneself with useless
fardels when the pack must be kept light, was the folly of a slave
mind. He had observed his neighbors closely and found little good in
their way of self-exploitation.
I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops,
and offices, and field, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be
doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways.... How many a poor
immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its
load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn
seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed,
and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture and
wood-lot.... The better part of the man is soon ploughed into the
soil for compost. (_Walden_, “Economy.”)
To exploit one’s fellows seemed to Thoreau’s sensitive social
conscience an even grosser infidelity. The leisure of a slave driver,
got by imprisoning his fellows in a treadmill, was an ignoble leisure
from which came the empty vulgarity of modern life. “If I devote myself
to other pursuits and contemplations,” he said, “I must first see, at
least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders.
I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations, too.”
Freedom with abstinence seemed to him better than serfdom with material
well-being, for he was only giving up the lesser to enjoy the greater,
as was the privilege of the philosopher.
To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor
even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according
to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity,
and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only
theoretically, but practically.... When he has obtained those
things which are necessary to life, there is another alternative
than to obtain the superfluities; and that is, to adventure on life
now, his vacation from humbler toil having commenced. (_Walden_,
“Economy.”)
It was the reply of the arch-individualist to the tyrannous
complexities of society, and it set him apart even in the world of
transcendentalism. Other members of the group professed to have found
a better way out of the dilemma--the way of Brook Farm and Fruitland;
a richer life was to be achieved not by espousing poverty but by
coöperation. But Thoreau could not adopt the coöperative solution; he
must either accept society as it was or remove. Convinced that it was
not worth accepting--that one made a foolish bargain in selling oneself
to it--he was content to remove to Walden Pond. “I came into this
world,” he said, “not chiefly to make this a good place to live in,
but to live in it, be it good or bad.” “I desire to speak impartially
on this point, and as one not interested in the success or failure of
the present economical and social arrangement.” He did not advocate
that other men should build cabins and live isolated. He had no wish
to dogmatize concerning the best mode of living--each must settle that
matter for himself. But that a satisfying life should be lived, that
the fox should somehow get free even though he left his tail in the
trap, he was vitally concerned about. “The youth may build or plant or
sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he
would like to do.” Let him at least rid himself of the false gospel of
creature comforts, which men pay too high a price for.
The story of Thoreau’s emancipation from the lower economics is the one
romance of his life, and _Walden_ is his great book. More restrained
than the _Week_ and lacking the exuberant beauty of the latter--its
noble talk and scathing criticism--it is “informed by a more explicit
unifying philosophy.” It is a book in praise of life rather than of
Nature, a record of calculating economies that studied saving in order
to spend more largely. But it is a book of social criticism as well, in
spite of its explicit denial of such a purpose, and in its speculations
much of Carlyle and Ruskin and William Morris crops out. In considering
the true nature of economy he concluded, with Ruskin, that “the cost
of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to
be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” Conceive of life
as cheap, a poor thing to be exploited, and the factory system becomes
the logical economic order; but conceive of it as dear, and the common
happiness the great objective of society, and quite another sort of
industrialism will emerge. Thoreau did not look with approval on the
rising city of Lowell, with its multiplying spindles and increasing
proletariat, and he did not understand why Americans should boast of
a system that provided vulgar leisure for the masters at the cost of
serfdom for the workers.
Where is this division of labor to end? [he asks] and what object
does it finally serve? I cannot believe that our factory system is
the best mode by which men may get clothing. The condition of the