Stories of Authors, British and American Part 19

"One evening, as we were quitting the Straits of Bonifacio, some one remarked at dinner that, though Victor Hugo was born in Paris, the earliest impressions of his life were received in Corsica, close to which we were pa.s.sing. Ten or twelve of us lingered after the meal was finished to talk of the great French poet. One of the party spoke of him as embodying, more than any other writer, the humanistic tendencies of the nineteenth century and as the exponent of what is best in humanity.

"We had been talking in French, when the Russian lady exclaimed in English to the gentleman who had last spoken, 'How can you, an American, give to him the place that is occupied by your own Longfellow? Longfellow is the universal poet. He is better known, too, among foreigners than any one except their own poets! Then she commenced repeating in rich, mellow tones:

I stood on the bridge at midnight, As the clocks were striking the hour, And the moon rose over the city Behind the dark church tower.

I recall how her voice trembled over the words:

And the burden laid upon me Seemed greater than I could bear.

and how it swelled out in the concluding lines:

As the symbol of love in Heaven, And its wavering image here.

It was dramatic and never to be forgotten. Then she added, 'I long to visit Boston that I may stand on the Bridge.'

"In the company was an English captain returning from the Zulu war. He was the son of that member of Parliament' who had been the chief supporter of the claimant in the famous Tichborne case, and who had poured out his money like water in behalf of the man whom he considered cruelly wronged. The captain was a typical British soldier, with every characteristic of his cla.s.s. Joining our steamer at Genoa, he had so far talked only of the Zulus and, with bitter indignation, of the manner in which the Prince Imperial had been deserted by British soldiers to be slain by savages. As soon as the Russian lady had concluded he said: 'I can give you something better than that,'

and began in a voice like a trumpet:

Tell me not in mournful numbers Life is but an empty dream.

His recitation of the entire poem was marked by the common English upheaval and down-letting of the voice in each line; but it was evident that he loved what he was repeating.

"Then a tall, lank, gray-haired Scotchman, who knew no French, who had hardly mingled with the other pa.s.sengers, and who seemed always communing with himself, suddenly commenced:

There is no flock, however watched and tended, But one dead lamb is there.

He repeated only a few stanzas, but could apparently have given the whole poem, had he wished.

"For myself, I know that my contribution was _My Lost Youth_, beginning

Often I think of the beautiful town, That is seated by the sea; Often in thought go up and down The pleasant streets of that dear old town And my youth comes back to me.

Never did the distance from an early home seem so great to one, New England born, as in that strange company, gathered from many lands, each with words upon the lip which the American had first heard in childhood.

"A handsome, olive-cheeked young man, a Greek from Manchester, educated and living in England, said, 'How do you like this?' Then he began to sing:

Stars of the summer night, Far in yon azure deeps, Hide, hide your golden light!

She sleeps!

My lady sleeps!

Sleeps!

So he rendered the whole of that exquisite serenade--dear to American college students--with a freedom and a fire which hinted that he had sung it at least once before on some more appropriate occasion.

Perhaps to some dark-eyed maiden of that elegant Greek colony of Manchester it had come as a revelation, and perhaps she had first heard it sung in front of her father's mansion and had looked down, appreciative but unseen, from above.

"The captain of the _Donai_ was not her regular commander, but an officer of the national French navy, who was in charge only for a few voyages. A thorough Frenchman, no one would have accused him of knowing a word of any tongue, save his own. Versatile, overflowing with wit and _bons mots_, it must have wearied him to be silent so long. To our astonishment, in accents so Gallic that one discerned with difficulty that he was attempting English, he intoned:

Zee seds of neet fair valeeng fast, Ven t'rough an Alpeen veelage past A yout, who bore meed snow and eece A bannair veed dees strange deveece Excelsiorr!

"'_Eh, voila_,' he exclaimed with satisfaction, '_J'ai appris cela a l'ecole. C'est tout l'anglais que je sais._'

"'_Mais, commandant_,' said the Russian lady, '_ce n'est pas l'anglais du tout ce que vous venez de dire la._'

"'_Ah, oui, madame, ca vient de votre Longfellow._'

"None of the other pa.s.sengers contributed, but already six nationalities had spoken--Scotch, Russian, Greek, French, English, and American. As we arose from the table and went up on deck to watch the lights glimmering in Napoleon's birthplace, Ajaccio, the Russian lady said: 'Do you suppose there is any other poet of any country, living or dead, from whom so many of us could have quoted? Not one. Not even Shakspere or Victor Hugo or Homer.'"

LVIII

HENRY DAVID Th.o.r.eAU

During his lifetime Th.o.r.eau published but two books,--_Walden_, and the _Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers_,--and these had but limited sale while the author was living. Over seven hundred copies of the _Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers_ were returned, to Th.o.r.eau by his publisher. Th.o.r.eau must have had a helpful sense of humor, for after lugging the burden upstairs he complacently remarks,--"I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself." In recent times a costly edition of all Th.o.r.eau's writings has been published. He is one of the rare spirits whose fame increases with the years. But of all his voluminous writings _Walden_, so it seems to me, is the most readable, the freshest, the most stimulating. Higginson says that it is, perhaps, the only book yet written in America that can bear an annual reading.

_Walden_ is a record of Th.o.r.eau's sojourn for about two years in the woods by Walden Pond. He went about two miles from his mother's door, built a little house or hut, and there lived, reading his favorite books, philosophizing, studying nature, and to a great extent avoiding society. Some people have condemned him as selfish, others have defended him. His best defense is his work. If anything so fresh and readable as _Walden_ be the result, we might be willing to deny ourselves the society of some of our urban friends, without charging them with selfishness. Th.o.r.eau is sometimes called a "wild man"; in a sense, he is untamed. He himself confessed,--"There is in my nature, methinks, a singular yearning toward all wildness." Yet he was a true lover of men. He hated slavery and went to jail rather than pay his taxes, because he disbelieved in supporting a government that upheld slavery. When his friend, the philosophic Emerson, peered into the prison cell and said,--"Henry, why are you here?" the quick retort was,--"Why are you not here?"

It must be remembered that Th.o.r.eau lived in a time of social experiment. Hawthorne had thrown in his lot for a brief time with the Brook Farm idealists. Why should not Th.o.r.eau make an experiment of his own? Why not live the simple life before Wagner wrote about it? He was tired of the conventionalities of society, of the incessant interruptions to steady thought. Society is naught but a conspiracy to compel imitation. "The head monkey of Paris puts on a traveler's cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same." So Th.o.r.eau moves out into the woods by the side of Walden Pond. Before he can live there he must build his house:

"Near the end of March, 1845, I borrowed an axe and went down to the woods by Walden Pond, nearest to where I intended to build my house, and began to cut down some tall arrowy pines, still in their youth, for timber. It is difficult to begin without borrowing, but perhaps it is the most generous course thus to permit your fellow-men to have an interest in your enterprise. The owner of the axe as he released his hold on it, said that it was the apple of his eye; but I returned it sharper than I received it."

His house, when finished, was ten feet wide and fifteen long. The exact cost was twenty-eight dollars, twelve and one-half cents. In _Walden_ he gives an itemized account of the cost. And then he adds, with a twinkle of his eye, I think,--"I intend to build me a house which will surpa.s.s any on the main street in Concord in grandeur and luxury, as soon as it pleases me as much and will cost me no more than my present one."

Th.o.r.eau also finds some satisfaction that his house cost him less than the year's rent of a college room at Harvard; for there the mere rent of a student's room, "which is only a little larger than my own, is thirty dollars each year, though the corporation had the advantage of building thirty-two side by side and under one roof."

In this book he gives a very interesting account of what his food cost him during the eight months from July 4 to March 1. Here is his list:

Rice $1.73- Mola.s.ses 1.73 Rye meal 1.04- Indian meal .99- Pork .22 Flour .88 Sugar .80 Lard .65 Apples .25 Dried apple .22 Sweet potatoes .10 One pumpkin .06 One watermelon .02 Salt .03

"Yes," says he, "I did eat $8.74, all told; but I should not thus unblus.h.i.+ngly publish my guilt, if I did not know that most of my readers were equally guilty with myself, and that their deeds would look no better in print." In this connection one may call to mind a reported saying of Mrs. Emerson's to the effect that Henry never got very far away from the sound of the dinner horn. It is not hard to imagine that the hospitable Emerson often invited the kindred-spirited Th.o.r.eau into his house for a warm and abundant dinner. Another writer recently has advanced also this thought: Th.o.r.eau was not so much of a selfish hermit as it might appear. He went into the woods to make his house or hut a station on the underground railroad. If this be true, a new and different light is thrown upon Th.o.r.eau's conduct.

Th.o.r.eau was a great lover of nature and the things of nature loved him. Dr. Channing gives us this glimpse of the man:

"Th.o.r.eau named all the birds without a gun, a weapon he never used in mature years. He neither killed nor imprisoned any animal, unless driven by acute needs. He brought home a flying squirrel, to study its mode of flight, but quickly carried it back to the wood. He possessed true instincts of topography, and could conceal choice things in the bush and find them again.... If Th.o.r.eau needed a box in his walk, he would strip a piece of birch bark off the tree, fold it, when cut straightly, together, and put his tender lichen or brittle creature therein."

Emerson supplements this picture with the following account of a visit he once made to Walden:

"The naturalist waded into the pool for the water plants, and his strong legs were no insignificant part of his armor. On this day he looked for the menyanthes and detected it across the wide pool; and, on examination of the floret, declared that it had been in flower five days. He drew out of his breast-pocket a diary, and read the names of all the plants that should bloom that day, whereof he kept account as a banker does when his notes are due.... He could pace rods more accurately than another man could measure them with rod and chain. He could find his way in the woods at night better by his feet than by his eyes. He knew every track in the snow and on the ground, and what creature had taken the path in the snow before him."

Th.o.r.eau could write the most beautiful descriptions when he was so inclined. Here is an exquisite description of a snowstorm.

"Did you ever admire the steady, silent, windless fall of the snow, in some lead-colored sky, silent save the little ticking of the flakes as they touched the twigs? It is chased silver, molded over the pines and oak leaves. Soft shades hang like curtains along the closely-draped wood-paths. Frozen apples become little cider-vats. The old crooked apple-trees, frozen stiff in the pale, s.h.i.+vering sunlight, that appears to be dying of consumption, gleam forth like the heroes of one of Dante's cold h.e.l.ls; we would mind any change in the mercury of the dream. The snow crunches under the feet; the chopper's axe rings funereally through the tragic air. At early morn the frost on b.u.t.ton-bushes and willows was silvery and every stem and minutest twig and filamentary weed came up a silver thing, while the cottage smoke rose salmon-colored into that oblique day. At the base of ditches were shooting crystals, like the blades of an ivory-handled penknife, the rosettes and favors fretted of silver on the flat ice. The little cascades in the brook were ornamented with transparent s.h.i.+elds, and long candelabrums and spermaceti-colored fools'-caps and plated jellies and white globes, with the black water whirling along transparently underneath. The sun comes out, and all at a glance, rubies, sapphires, diamonds, and emeralds start into intense life on the angles of the snow crystals."

LIX