Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers Part 28

HENRY D. Th.o.r.eAU

Seeing how all the world's ways came to nought, And how Death's one decree merged all degrees, He chose to pa.s.s his time with birds and trees, Reduced his life to sane necessities: Plain meat and drink and sleep and n.o.ble thought.

And the plump kine which waded to the knees Through the lush gra.s.s, knowing the luxuries Of succulent mouthfuls, had our gold-disease As much as he, who only Nature sought.

Who gives up much the G.o.ds give more in turn: The music of the spheres for dross of gold; For o'er-officious cares, flame-songs that burn Their pathway through the years and never old.

And he who shunned vain cares and vainer strife Found an eternity in one short life.

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

As a rule, the man who can do all things equally well is a very mediocre individual. Those who stand out before a groping world as beacon-lights were men of great faults and unequal performances. It is quite needless to add that they do not live on account of their faults or imperfections, but in spite of them.

Henry David Th.o.r.eau's place in the common heart of humanity grows firmer and more secure as the seasons pa.s.s; his life proves for us again the paradoxical fact that the only men who really succeed are those who fail.

Th.o.r.eau's obscurity, his poverty, his lack of public recognition in life, either as a writer or lecturer, his rejection as a lover, his failure in business, and his early death, form a combination of calamities that make him as immortal as a martyr. Especially does an early death sanctify all and make the record complete, but the death of a naturalist while right at the height of his ability to see and enjoy--death from tuberculosis of a man who lived most of the time in the open air--these things array us on the side of the man 'gainst unkind Fate, and cement our sympathy and love.

Nature's care forever is for the species, and the individual is sacrificed without ruth that the race may live and progress. This dumb indifference of Nature to the individual--this apparent contempt for the man--seems to prove that the individual is only a phenomenon. Man is merely a manifestation, a symptom, a symbol, and his quick pa.s.sing proves that he isn't the Thing. Nature does not care for him--she produces a million beings in order to get one who has thoughts--all are swept into the dustpan of oblivion but the one who thinks; he alone lives, embalmed in the memories of generations unborn.

One of the most insistent errors ever put out was that statement of Rousseau, paraphrased in part by T. Jefferson, that all men are born free and equal. No man was ever born free, and none are equal, and would not remain so an hour, even if Jove, through caprice, should make them so.

The Th.o.r.eau race is dead. In Sleepy Hollow Cemetery at Concord there is a monument marking a row of mounds where a half-dozen Th.o.r.eaus rest. The inscriptions are all of one size, but the name of one alone lives, and he lives because he had thoughts and expressed them. If any of the tribe of Th.o.r.eau gets into Elysium, it will be by tagging close to the only man among them who glorified his Maker by using his reason.

Nothing should be claimed as truth that can not be demonstrated, but as a hypothesis (borrowed from Henry Th.o.r.eau) I give you this: Man is only the tool or vehicle--Mind alone is immortal--Thought is the Thing.

Heredity does not account for the evolution of Henry Th.o.r.eau. His father was of French descent--a plain, stolid, little man who settled in Concord with his parents when a child; later he tried business in Boston, but the march of commerce resolved itself into a double-quick, and John Th.o.r.eau dropped out of line, and turned to the country village of Concord, where he hoped that between making lead-pencils and gardening he might secure a living.

He moved better than he knew.

John Th.o.r.eau's wife was Cynthia Dunbar, a tall and handsome woman, with a ready tongue and nimble wit. Her attentions were largely occupied in looking after the affairs of the neighbors, and as the years went by her voice took on the good old metallic tw.a.n.g of the person who discusses people, not principles.

Henry Th.o.r.eau was the third child in the family of seven. He was born in an old house on the Virginia Road, Concord, about a mile and a half from the village. This house was the home of Mrs. Th.o.r.eau's mother, but the Th.o.r.eaus had taken refuge there, temporarily, to escape a financial blizzard which seems to have hit no one else but themselves.

John Th.o.r.eau was a.s.sisted in the pencil-making by the whole family. The Th.o.r.eaus used to sell their pencils down at Cambridge, fifteen miles away, and Harvard professors, for the most part, used the Concord article in jotting down their sublime thoughts. At ten years of age, Th.o.r.eau had a furtive eye on Harvard, directed thither, they say, by his mother. All the best people in Concord, who had sons, sent them to Harvard--why shouldn't the Th.o.r.eaus? The spirit of emulation and family pride were at work.

Henry was educated princ.i.p.ally because he wasn't very strong, nor was he on good terms with work, and these are cla.s.sic reasons for imparting cla.s.sical education to youth, aspiring or otherwise.

The Concord Academy prepared Henry for college, and when he was sixteen, he trudged off to Cambridge and was duly entered in the Harvard Cla.s.s of Eighteen Hundred Thirty-seven. At Harvard, his cosmos seemed to be of such a slaty gray that no one said, "Go to--we will observe this youth and write anecdotes about him, for he is going to be a great man." The very few in his cla.s.s who remembered him wrote their reminiscences long years afterward, with memories refreshed by magazine accounts written by pious pilgrims from Michigan.

In college pranks and popular amus.e.m.e.nts he took no part, neither was he a "grind," for he impressed himself on no teacher or professor so that they opened their mouths and made prophecies.

Once safely through college, and standing on the threshold (I trust I use the right expression), Henry Th.o.r.eau refused to accept his diploma and pay five dollars for it--he said it wasn't worth the money.

In his "Walden," Th.o.r.eau expresses his opinion of college training this way: "If I wished a boy to know something about the arts and sciences I would not pursue the common course, which is merely to send him into the neighborhood of some professor, where everything is professed and practised but the art of life. To my astonishment, I was informed when I left college that I had studied navigation! Why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I would have known more about it."

It is well to remember, however, that Th.o.r.eau had no ambitions to become a navigator. His mission was simply to paddle his own canoe on Walden Pond and Concord River. The men who really launched him on his voyage of discovery were Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson--both Harvard men. Had he not been a college man, it is quite probable he would never have caught the speaker's eye. His efforts in working his way through college, a.s.sisted by his poverty-stricken parents, proved his quality.

And as for his life in a shanty on the sh.o.r.es of Walden Pond, the occurrence is too commonplace to mention, were it not for the fact that the solitary occupant of the shanty was a Harvard graduate who used no tobacco.

Harvard prepares a youth for life--but here is a man who, having prepared for life, deliberately turns his back on life and lives in the woods.

A genuine woodsman is no curiosity, but a civilized woodsman is. The tendency of colleges is to turn men from Nature to books; from bonfires to stoves, steam-heat and cash-registers; but Th.o.r.eau, by reversing all rules, suddenly found himself, and others, explaining his position in print.

Harvard supplied him the alternating current; he influenced the people in his environment, and he was influenced by his environment.

But without Harvard there would have been no Th.o.r.eau. Having earned his diploma, he had the privilege of declining it; and having gone to college, it was his right to affirm the emptiness of the cla.s.sics. Only the man with a goodly bank-balance can wear rags with impunity.

John Th.o.r.eau made his lead-pencils and peddled them out, and we hear of his saying, "Pencils, I fear, are going out of fas.h.i.+on--people are buying nothing but these miserable new-fangled steel pens." When called upon to surrender, Paul Jones replied, "We haven't yet begun to fight."

The truth was, the people had not really begun to use pencils. Pencils weren't going out of fas.h.i.+on, but John Th.o.r.eau was. The poor man moved here and there, evicted by rapacious landlords and taken in by his relatives, who didn't care whether he was a stranger or not. If he owed them ten dollars, they took fifty dollars' worth of pencils and called it square.

Then they undersold John one-half, and he said times were scarce.

This, it need not be explained, was in Ma.s.sachusetts.

A hundred years ago, these men who whittled useful things out of wood during the long winter days were everywhere in New England. The sons of these men invented machines to make the same things, and thus were started the New England manufactories. It was brains against hands, cleverness against skill, initiative against plodding industry. And the man who can tell of the sorrow and suffering of all those industrious sparrows that were caught and wound around flying shuttles, or stamped beneath the swift presses of invention, hadn't yet been born. G.o.d doesn't seem to care for sparrows--three-fourths of all that are hatched die in the nest or fall fluttering to the ground and perish, Grant Allen says.

Comparatively few persons can adjust themselves happily to new conditions: the rest are pushed and broken and bent--and die.

When Dixon and Faber invented machines that could be fed automatically, and turn out more pencils in a day than John Th.o.r.eau could in a year, John was out of the game.

John had brought up his children to work, and Henry became an expert pencil-maker. Henry, we say, should have found employment with Faber and Company, as foreman, or else evaded their patents and made a pencil-machine of his own. Instead, however, he settled down and made pencils just like his father used to make, and in the same way. He peddled out a few to his friends, but his business instinct was shown in that he himself tells how one year he made a thousand dollars' worth of pencils, but was obliged to sacrifice them all to cancel a debt of one hundred dollars.

And yet there are people who declare that genius is not transmissible.

John Th.o.r.eau failed at pencil-making, but Henry Th.o.r.eau failed because he played the flute morning, noon and night, and went singing the immunity of Pan. He fished, and tramped the woods and fields, looking, listening, dreaming and thinking.

At Keswick, where the water comes down at Lodore, there is a pencil-factory that has been there since the days of William the Conqueror. The wife of Coleridge used to work there and get money that supported her philosopher-husband and their children. Southey lived near, and became Poet Laureate of England through the right exercise of Keswick pencils; Wordsworth lived only a few miles away, and once he brought over Charles and Mary Lamb, and bought pencils for both, with their names stamped on them. The good old man who now keeps the pencil-factory explained these things to me, and also explained the direct relations.h.i.+p of good lead-pencils to literature, but I do not remember what it was.

If Henry Th.o.r.eau had held on a few years, until the pilgrims began to arrive at Concord, he could have gotten rich selling souvenir pencils.

But he just dozed and dreamed and tramped and philosophized; and when he wrote he used an eagle's quill, with ink he himself distilled from elderberries, and at first, birch-bark sufficed for paper. "Wild men and wild things are the only ones that have life in abundance," he used to say.

Brook Farm was a serious, sober experiment inaugurated by the Reverend George Ripley with intent to live the ideal life--the life of useful effort, direct honesty, simplicity and high thinking.

But Th.o.r.eau could not be induced to join the community--he thought too much of his liberty to entrust it to a committee. He was interested in the experiment, but not enough to visit the experimenters. Emerson looked in on them, remained one night, and went back home to continue his essay on Idealism.

Hawthorne remained long enough to get material for his "Blithedale Romance." Margaret Fuller secured good copy and the cordial and lifelong dislike of Hawthorne, all through misprized love, alas! George William Curtis and Charles Dana graduated out of Brook Farm, and went down to New York to make goodly successes in the great game of life.

At Brook Farm they succeeded in the high thinking all right, but the entrepreneur is quite as necessary as the poet--and a little more so.

Brook Farm had no business head, and things unfit fall into natural dissolution. But the enterprise did not fail, any more than a rotting log fails when it nourishes a bank of violets. The net results of Brook Farm's high thinking have pa.s.sed into the world's treasury, smelted largely by Emerson and Th.o.r.eau, who were not there.