History of American Literature Part 20

"O tenderly the haughty day Fills his blue urn with fire,"

or even have seen

"The frolic architecture of the snow."

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.--The central aim of Emerson's writing is moral development. He is America's greatest ethical teacher. He thus voices his fixed belief:--

"A breath of will blows eternally through the universe of souls in the direction of the Right and Necessary."

This belief gives rise to his remarkable optimism for the future, to his conviction that evil is but a stepping stone to good.

In a material age he is the great apostle of the spiritual. "Will you not tolerate," he asks, "one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for thoughts not marketable or perishable?" To him "mind is the only reality,"

and his great man is never the one who can merely alter matter, but who can change our state of mind. He believed in reaching truth, guided by intuition. He would not argue to maintain his positions. He said that he did not know what argument signified with reference to a thought. To him a thought was just as natural a product as a rose and did not need argument to prove or justify its existence. Much of his work is tinged with Plato's philosophy.

Of all American writers, he is the most inspiring teacher of the young. One of his chief objects is, in his own phrase, "to help the young soul, add energy, inspire hope, and blow the coals into a useful flame; to redeem defeat by new thought, by firm action." John Tyndall, the eminent English scientist, declared that the reading of two men, Carlyle and Emerson, had made him what he was. He said to his students: "I never should have gone through a.n.a.lytical Geometry and Calculus, had it not been for these men. I never should have become a physical investigator, and hence without them I should not have been here to-day. They told me what I ought to do in a way that caused me to do it, and all my consequent intellectual action is to be traced to this purely moral force." After hearing one of Emerson's lectures, James Russell Lowell wrote, "Were we enthusiasts? I hope and believe we were, and am thankful to the man who made us worth something for once in our lives."

Few authors, excepting Shakespeare, have more of the quality of universality in their writings. Many things in Emerson will fit certain stages of individual development as well a thousand years hence as to-day and be as applicable to the moral improvement of the Chinese as of Americans. If he is not as much read in the future, it will be largely due to the fact that his most inspiring subject matter has been widely diffused through modern thought.

Emerson's style is condensed. He spoke of his own paragraphs as incompressible, "each sentence an infinitely repellent particle." Because of this condensation, it is best not to read more than one essay at a time.

Years ago some joker said that Emerson's _Essays_ could be read as well backward as forward, because there was no connection between the sentences.

The same observation could have been made with almost equal truth about _Proverbs_, some of Bacon's _Essays_, Polonius's _Advice to Laertes_, parts of Hamlet's _Soliloquy_, and, in general, about any condensed sentences that endeavor to convey a complete, striking truth. Lowell remarks acutely: "Did they say he was disconnected? So were the stars ... And were _they_ not knit together by a higher logic than our mere sense could master?" We should look for unity and connection in Emerson's chosen subject matter and trend of thought.

We must not forget that Emerson has in his prose as well as in his verse many of the general characteristics of a poet. In his _Essays_, he sometimes avails himself of the poetic license to be obscure and contradictory and to present philosophy that will not walk on all fours.

When we examine some of the best pa.s.sages on nature in his early prose (_e.g._ p. 158), we shall find that they are highly poetical.

Much of his verse is filled with the charm of nature and shows here and there remarkable power of putting great riches in a little room, although there may be intervening waste s.p.a.ces. Critics may say that his poetry lacks deep feeling, that it is mostly intellectual; if so, it is n.o.bly intellectual. Both his poetry and prose, to use an Emersonian expression, "sail the seas with G.o.d."

HENRY DAVID Th.o.r.eAU, 1817-1862

[Ill.u.s.tration: HENRY DAVID Th.o.r.eAU]

LIFE.--Henry David Th.o.r.eau, America's poet-naturalist, was born in 1817 at Concord, Ma.s.sachusetts. He was one of the youngest of the famous Concord group of writers and the only one who could claim Concord as his birthplace He was a lifelong student of nature, and he loved the district around Concord. As a boy he knew its woods and streams because he had hunted and fished in them. After his graduation from Harvard in 1837, he subst.i.tuted for the fis.h.i.+ng rod and gun, the spygla.s.s, microscope, measuring tape, and surveying instruments, and continued his out-of-door investigations.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Th.o.r.eAU'S SPY-GLa.s.s, FLUTE, ETC.]

He taught school with his brother and lectured, but in order to add to his slender income also did work unusual for a Harvard graduate, such as odd jobs of carpentering, planting trees, and surveying. He also a.s.sisted his father in his business of pencil making, and together they made the best pencils in New England. Whatever he undertook, he did thoroughly. He had no tolerance for the shoddy or for compromises. Exact workmans.h.i.+p was part of his religion. "Drive a nail home," he writes in _Walden_, "and clinch it so faithfully that you can wake up in the night and think of your work with satisfaction."

Like so many of the transcendentalists, Th.o.r.eau desired to surround his life with a "wide margin of leisure" in order that he might live in his higher faculties and not be continuously dwarfed with the mere drudgery of earning his sustenance. He determined to divest himself of as many of the burdens of civilization as possible, to lead the simple life, and to waste the least possible time in the making of mere money. The leisure thus secured, he spent in studying birds, plants, trees, fish, and other objects of nature, in jotting down a record of his experiences, and in writing books.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SITE OF Th.o.r.eAU'S HUT, WALDEN POND]

Since he did not marry and incur responsibilities for others, he was free to choose his own manner of life. His regular habit was to reserve half of every day for walking in the woods; but for two years and two months he lived alone in the forest, in a small house that he himself built upon a piece of Emerson's property beside Walden Pond, about a mile south of Concord. Th.o.r.eau found that he could earn enough in six weeks to support himself in this simple way for the rest of the year. He thus acquired the leisure to write books that are each year read with increasing interest.

The record of his life at Walden forms the basis for his best known work. A few people practice the return to nature for a short time, but Th.o.r.eau spent his available life with nature.

He was a p.r.o.nounced individualist, carrying out Emerson's doctrine by becoming independent of others' opinions. What he thought right, he said or did. He disapproved, for example, of slavery, and consequently refused to pay his poll tax to a government that upheld slavery. When he was imprisoned because of non-payment, Emerson visited him and asked, "Why are you here, Henry?" Th.o.r.eau merely replied, "Why are you _not_ here?"

His intense individualism made him angular, and his transcendental love of isolation caused him to declare that he had never found "the companion that was so companionable as solitude"; but he was, nevertheless, spicy, original, loyal to friends, a man of deep family affection, stoical in his ability to stand privations, and Puritanic in his conviction about the moral aim of life. His last illness, induced by exposure to cold, confined him for months away from the out of doors that he loved. In 1862, at the age of forty-five, he said, as he lay on his deathbed, "When I was a very little boy, I learned that I must die, and I set that down, so, of course, I am not disappointed now." He was buried not far from Emerson's lot in the famous Sleepy Hollow cemetery at Concord.

WORKS.--Only two of his books were published during his lifetime. These were _A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers_ (1849) and _Walden_ (1854). The first of these, usually referred to as _The Week_, is the record of a week spent in a rowboat on the rivers mentioned in the t.i.tle.

The clearness and exactness of the descriptions are remarkable. Whenever he investigated nature, he took faithful notes so that when he came to write a more extended description or a book, he might have something more definite than vague memory impressions on which to rely. When he describes in _The Week_ a mere patch of the river bank, this definiteness of observation is manifest:--

"The dead limbs of the willow were rounded and adorned by the climbing milkania, _Milkania scandens_, which filled every crevice in the leafy bank, contrasting agreeably with the gray bark of its supporter and the b.a.l.l.s of the b.u.t.ton-bush."

This book did not prove popular, and almost three fourths of the edition were left on his hands. This unfortunate venture caused him to say, "I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which were written by myself."

_Walden_ is the book by which Th.o.r.eau is best known. It is crisper, livelier, more concise and humorous, and less given to introspective philosophizing than _The Week_. _Walden_, New England's _Utopia_, is the record of Th.o.r.eau's experiment in endeavoring to live an ideal life in the forest. This book differs from most of its kind in presenting actual life, in not being mainly evolved from the inner consciousness on the basis of a very little experience. He thus states the reason why he withdrew to the forest:--

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not 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."

[Ill.u.s.tration: FURNITURE FROM Th.o.r.eAU'S CABIN, WALDEN POND]

His food during his twenty-six months of residence there cost him twenty-seven cents a week. "I learned," he says, "from my two years'

experience that it would cost incredibly little trouble to obtain one's necessary food, even in this lat.i.tude; that a man may use as simple a diet as the animals, and yet retain health and strength.... I am convinced both by faith and experience that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hards.h.i.+p, but a pastime." This book has, directly or indirectly, caused more to desire the simple life and a return to nature than any other work in American literature.

In _Walden_ he speaks of himself as a "self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms." His companions.h.i.+p with nature became so intimate as to cause him to say, "Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me." When a sparrow alighted upon his shoulder, he exclaimed, "I felt that I was more distinguished by that circ.u.mstance than I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn."

When nature had some special celebration with the trees, such as decking them with snow or ice or the first buds of spring, he frequently tramped eight or ten miles "to keep an appointment with a beech-tree or a yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines." It is amusing to read how on such a walk he disturbed the daytime slumbers of a large owl, how the bird opened its eyes wide, "but their lids soon fell again, and he began to nod," and how a sympathetic hypnotization began to take effect on Th.o.r.eau. "I too," he says, "felt a slumberous influence after watching him half an hour, as he sat thus with his eyes half open, like a cat, winged brother of the cat."

In spite of some Utopian philosophy and too much insistence on the self-sufficiency of the individual, _Walden_ has proved a regenerative force in the lives of many readers who have not pa.s.sed the plastic stage.

The book develops a love for even commonplace natural objects, and, like poetry, discloses a new world of enjoyment. _Walden_ is Th.o.r.eau's most vital combination of his poetic apprehension of wild nature with his philosophy and aggressive individualism.

Almost all of his work is autobiographical, a record of actual experience.

_The Maine Woods_ (1864), _Cape Cod_ (1865), and _A Yankee in Canada_ (1866) are records of his tramps in the places named in the t.i.tles-, but these works do not possess the interest of _Walden_.

His voluminous ma.n.u.script _Journal_ is an almost daily record of his observations of nature, mingled with his thoughts, from the time when he left college until his last sickness. At periods for nearly fifty years after his death, various works have been compiled from this _Journal_. The volumes published under the t.i.tles, _Early Spring in Ma.s.sachusetts_ (1881), _Summer_ (1884), _Winter_ (1887), _Autumn_ (1892), and _Notes on New England Birds_ (1910) were not arranged by him in their present form.

Editors searched his _Journal_ for entries dealing with the same season or type of life, and put these in the same volume. Sometimes, as, for instance, in _Winter_, paragraphs separated by an interval of nineteen years in composition become neighbors. In spite of the somewhat fragmentary nature of these works, lovers of Th.o.r.eau become intensely interested in them. His _Journal_ in the form in which he left it was finally published in 1906, in fourteen volumes containing 6811 printed pages. He differs from the majority of writers because the interest in his work increases with the pa.s.sing of the years.

GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS.--Th.o.r.eau's object was to discover how to live a rich, full life with a broad margin of leisure. Intimate companions.h.i.+p with nature brought this secret to him, and he has taught others to increase the joys of life from sympathetic observation of everyday occurrences.

A mere unimaginative naturalist may be a bore; but Th.o.r.eau regarded nature with the eyes of a poet. His ear was thrilled with the vesper song of the whippoorwill, the lisping of the chickadee among the evergreens, and the slumber call of the toads. For him the bluebird "carries the sky on its back." The linnets come to him "bearing summer in their natures." When he asks, "Who shall stand G.o.dfather at the christening of the wild apples?"

his reply shows rare poetic appreciation of nature's work:--

"We should have to call in the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and the autumn woods and the wild flowers, and the woodp.e.c.k.e.r and the purple finch and the squirrel and the jay and the b.u.t.terfly, the November traveler and the truant boy, to our aid."

He is not only a poet-naturalist, but also a philosopher, who shows the influence of the transcendental school, particularly of Emerson. Some of Th.o.r.eau's philosophy is impractical and too unsocial, but it aims to discover the underlying basis of enchantment. He thus sums up the philosophy which his life at Walden taught him:--

"I learned this at least by my experiment--that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.... If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

The reason why he left Walden shows one of his p.r.o.nounced transcendental characteristics, a dread of repet.i.tion. He gives an account of only his first year of life there, and adds, "the second year was similar to it." He says:--

"I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond side."

He does not demand that other human beings shall imitate him in devoting their lives to a study of nature. He says, "Follow your genius closely enough, and it will not fail to show you a fresh prospect every hour." He thus expresses his conception of the fundamental basis of happiness in any of the chosen avenues of life:--

"Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails."

His insistence on the necessity of a moral basis for a happy life is a characteristic that he shared in common with the great authors of the New England group, but he had his own individual way of impressing this truth.

He thought life too earnest a quest to tolerate the frivolous or the dilettante, and he issued his famous warning that no one can "kill time without injuring eternity." His aim in studying nature was not so much scientific discovery as the revelation of nature's joyous moral message to the spiritual life of man. He may have been unable to distinguish between the song of the wood thrush and the hermit thrush. To him the most important fact was that the thrush is a rare poet, singing of "the immortal wealth and vigor that is in the forest." "The thrush sings," says Th.o.r.eau, in his _Journal_, "to make men take higher and truer views of things."