Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
operatives is becoming every day more like that of the English;
and it cannot be wondered at, since, as far as I have heard or
observed, the principal object is, not that mankind may be well and
honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that the corporations may be
enriched. (_Walden_, “Economy.”)
The whole middle-class philosophy of exploitation was hateful to him,
the middleman equally with the manufacturer. “Trade curses everything
it touches; and though you trade in messages from heaven, the whole
curse of trade attaches to the business.” Men have been deceived by a
false economy--lured by the bog lights away from the open fields to
flounder in the miasmic marshes. While Ruskin was still pottering over
Turner, Thoreau was elaborating in _Walden_ the text: The only wealth
is life.
In other bits _Walden_ is curiously like _Hopes and Fears for Art_,
and the drift of the whole is one with the revolutionary teachings of
Morris, that the abiding satisfactions are those which spring from free
creative work. This Yankee Greek had learned that it is a beautiful
life back of the tool that creates beauty, and that if the work of our
hands is ugly, it is because our liver are mean and sordid, affording
no outlet for the free creative spirit. In New England, Puritan and
Yankee alike had conspired against beauty, and the gods had taken
revenge by clothing life in drab.
Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls
must be stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful
living be laid for a foundation: now, a taste for the beautiful
is most cultivated out of doors, where there is no house and no
housekeeping.
What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has gradually grown
from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the
indweller, who is the only builder,--out of some unconscious
truthfulness, and nobleness, without ever a thought for the
appearance; and whatever additional beauty of this kind is destined
to be produced will be preceded by a like unconscious beauty of
life. The most interesting dwellings in this country, as the
painter knows, are the most unpretending, humble log huts and
cottages of the poor commonly; it is the life of the inhabitants
whose shells they are, and not any peculiarity in their surfaces
merely, which makes them _picturesque_; and equally interesting
will be the citizen’s suburban box, when his life shall be as
simple and as agreeable to the imagination, and there is no
straining after effect in the style of his dwelling. (_Walden_,
“Economy.”)
Thoreau needed only to have lived in a world that honored craftsmanship
to have opened fully the vein of gold that Morris dug his philosophy
from; he had the instinct of the craftsman but not his training. His
turning from the workshop to the fields, hearing no call in the humdrum
village economy to develop a beautiful craftsmanship, was an implied
criticism of the common sterility of labor in every-day Concord; yet
the honest sincerity of his nature led him to the conclusion that lies
at the heart of the philosophy of the great English craftsman:
None have so pleasant a time as they who in earnest seek to earn
their bread. It is true actually as it is true really; it is true
materially as it is true spiritually, that they who seek honestly
and sincerely, with all their hearts and lives and strength, to
earn their bread, do earn it, and it is sure to be very sweet to
them.
In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to
maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime,
if we will live simply and wisely; as the pursuits of the simpler
nations are still the sports of the more artificial. It is not
necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his
brow, unless he sweats easier than I do. (_Walden_, “Economy.”)
At Walden Pond and on the Merrimac River Thoreau’s mind was serene as
the open spaces; but this Greek serenity was rudely disturbed when he
returned to Concord village and found his neighbors drilling for the
Mexican War, and when authority in the person of the constable came
to him with the demand that he pay a due share to the public funds.
The war to him was a hateful thing, stupid and unjust, waged for the
extension of the obscene system of negro slavery; and Thoreau was
brought sharply to consider his relations to the political state that
presumed to demand his allegiance, willing or unwilling, to its acts.
Under the stress of such an emergency the transcendentalist was driven
to examine the whole theory of the relation of the individual to the
state. He was not political-minded; he had concerned himself little
with political theory; he would gladly let the government alone if
government would let him alone; he was even prepared to make excuses
for government. But he would not compromise with his conscience; and
when the state applied the principle of coercion, he applied the
counter principle of passive resistance. It was while he was domiciled
in Walden cabin that the hand of the law seized him and thrust him
into Concord jail. He went with the constable quietly, but there was
a dangerous contempt in his heart. It seemed absurd that a man could
not go to the cobbler’s for a pair of mended boots, but he must be
interfered with by a neighbor playing the rôle of constable. Constable,
jailer, the magistrate on the bench, all the elaborate machinery of
the law, Thoreau contemplated quizzically and judged his neighbors
fools to have exchanged their freedom for such masquerades. Those who
got anything from such instruments--lawyers and propertied men--might
think well of them, but they were a mere impertinence to Thoreau who
wanted to go huckleberrying. When they let him out he went quietly
after his berries, and discovered there was “no state in sight among
the berry bushes.” “I saw,” he remarked casually, “that the state was
half-witted, that it was as timid as a lone woman with her silver
spoons, and that it did not know its friends from its foes, and I lost
all my remaining respect for it and pitied it.”
But Thoreau was not done with the comedy. It set him upon thinking,
and the result was the essay, _Civil Disobedience_. Taken by itself
alone, it is a somewhat astonishing performance. This Yankee
transcendentalist quite evidently has turned philosophical anarchist.
But read in the light of Emerson’s _Journals_, or in the light of
Godwin’s _Political Justice_, it is easily comprehensible. It is no
more than transcendental individualism translated into politics, with
all comfortable compromises swept away. Its sources run straight back
to eighteenth-century liberalism with its doctrine of the minimized
state--a state that must lose its coercive sovereignty in the measure
that the laws of society function freely. Very likely Thoreau had never
read Godwin, yet his political philosophy was implicit in _Political
Justice_. In Godwin’s thinking the problem of man in society is the
problem of a voluntary adjustment of the individual to the state; and
it is only by establishing economics and politics on morality, that
political justice is possible. The moral law is the fundamental law,
superior to statutes and constitutions; and to it the citizen is bound
to render allegiance. “The object of the present state of society is
to multiply labor,” asserted Godwin; “in another state it will be to
simplify it.” “The only adequate apology of government is necessity.”
“Government however reformed” is “little capable of affording solid
benefit to mankind.” “Give us equality and justice but no constitution.
Suffer us to follow without restraint the dictates of our own judgment,
and to change our forms of social order as fast as we improve the
dictates of our own judgment.” “The pretense of collective wisdom is
the most palpable of all impostures.” “The true reason why the mass of
mankind has so often been the dupe of knaves, has been the mysterious
and complicated nature of the social system. Once annihilate the
quackery of government, and the most homespun understanding will be
prepared to scorn the artifices of the state juggler that would mislead
him.”
By his own path Thoreau came to identical conclusions. There is
little in _Civil Disobedience_ that is not in _Political Justice_. To
neither thinker is there an abstract state, society or nation--only
individuals; and to both, the fundamental law is the law of morality.
Political expediency and the law of morality frequently clash, and
in such event it is the duty of the individual citizen to follow the
higher law. Thoreau went even further, and asserted the doctrine of
individual compact, which in turn implied the doctrine of individual
nullification; no government, he said, can have any “pure right over my
person or property but what I concede to it.”
I heartily accept the motto,--“That government is best which
governs least”; and I should like to see it acted up to more
rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to
this, which also I believe,--“That government is best which governs
not at all”; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the
kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but
an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments
are sometimes, inexpedient.
A government in which the majority rule in all cases cannot
be based on justice.... We should be men first and subjects
afterwards. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law,
so much as for the right.... How does it become a man to behave
toward this American government today? I answer, that he cannot
without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant
recognize that political organization as _my_ government which
is the _slave’s_ government also.... There is but little virtue
in the action of masses of men.... It is not a man’s duty, as a
matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any,
even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other
concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his
hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it
practically his support. If I devote myself to other pursuits and
contemplations, 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.... If the law is
of such a nature that it requires you to be an agent of injustice
to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter
friction to stop the machine.... As for adopting the ways which
the state has provided for remedying the evil, I know not of such
ways. They take too much time, and a man’s life will be gone....
Some are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union.... Why do
they not dissolve it themselves,--the union between themselves and
the state,--and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury?[458]
(_Works_, Vol. X, pp. 131-170.)
“Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine”--in this
doctrine of individual syndicalism Thoreau’s conception of the relation
of the citizen to the state is tersely summed up. In so far as he
was a democrat it was of the transcendental school, rather than the
Jacksonian. He would be governed by the majority no more than by the
minority. The scorn of a fine ethical mind for practical government by
politicians could scarcely be more tellingly phrased than in the bit of
verse he tucks into _Civil Disobedience_:
A drab of state, a cloth-o’-silver slut,
To have her train borne up, and her soul trail in the dirt.
Such a man quite evidently would go for Nullification as fiercely as