Henry David Thoreau (1823-1867) was the eccentric but stylish oddball who built his own house in the woods near Concord, New Hampshire, and wrote that masterpiece of observation and unconventional wisdom known as Walden. His essay entitled “Walking” is less well known, but is just as remarkable for its critique of conventional thinking, and its thought-provoking insights into the way men interact with Nature.
But he is not to everyone’s taste – notably that of his contemporary, Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote a brilliant, if perverse, essay entitled “Henry David Thoreau His Character and Opinions”, which is to be found in the collection Familiar Studies of Men and Books.
With his almost acid sharpness of insight, with his almost animal dexterity in act, there went none of that large, unconscious geniality of the world’s heroes. He was not easy, not ample, nor urbane, not even kind; his enjoyment was hardly smiling, or the smile was not broad enough to be convincing…
Stevenson then goes on to quote Emerson’s famous words:
He was bred to no profession; he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco; and, though a naturalist, he used neither trap nor gun.
Emerson is saying that here we have an unusual and exceptional human being. Stevenson agrees with Emerson, but is minded to add the epithets “dislikeable” and “unattractive” : “So many negative superiorities begin to smack a little of the prig” he concludes. The word “prig” is itself ambiguous. In the 17th and 18th centuries it was applied to puritans and “precisians in religion”, that is, those who are rigidly precise in their religious observances. In the 18th and 19th centuries it came to mean (as OED puts it) “a precisian in speech and manners; one who cultivates or affects a propriety of culture, learning or morals which offends or bores others; a conceited or self-important and affected and didactic person.
Stevenson is both right and wrong about Thoreau, who has on the one hand all the spiky individuality of someone nurtured in the tradition of New England nonconformity – but yet on the other hand never went to church, and appears to have had little or nothing in the way of religious belief. As for being a prig in the later sense of the word, he was certainly didactic – though whether in the process of being didactic he was offensive, or fraudulent, or boring, or conceited or self-important is debateable.
Of one thing there is no doubt. Nobody would disagree with Emerson that “it was much easier for Thoreau to say no than yes.” Thoreau was indeed a nay-sayer. But, given the way the world has evolved since the 19th century, his particular brand of nay-saying is perhaps a badge of honour rather than otherwise, having a force and cogency that was not altogether apparent to his contemporaries – and notably Stevenson, who dwells on what he perceives as his subject’s radical flaws of character:
...Thoreau's content and ecstasy in living was, we may say, like a plant that he had watered and tended with womanish solicitude; for there is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in a life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the bracing contact of the world. In one word, Thoreau was a skulker. He did not wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into a corner to hoard it for himself. He left all for the sake of certain virtuous self-indulgences.
The choice of the word “skulker” is striking, and while Stevenson is not suggesting that he was stealthy and underhanded, he makes no bones about his belief that Thoreau’s characteristic posture of withdrawal from “the bracing contact of the world” is neither commendable nor admirable. What underlies all the fine words is a self-indulgent shirking of duty, verging on moral cowardice, that is incompatible with true manliness.
Preferring as he did to stand aloof from social intercourse – and declining to “feebly fabulate and paddle in the social slush” – it is not surprising that Thoreau should have incurred the disapproval of such an intensely – perhaps incorrigibly - social creature as Stevenson. Thoreau comes across as “dry, priggish and selfish” unhealthily concerned with his own self improvement to the exclusion of everything and everybody else. But at the same time Stevenson is shrewd enough, and dispassionate enough, to feel his way towards a more rounded and fairer assessment –as when he writes: “He was not so much difficult about his fellow human beings as he could not tolerate the terms of their association.” Could it be that the problem lies not so much in Thoreau as in what Stevenson terms “the real deficiencies of social intercourse”? If so, then his preference for retreat and retirement may be attributable not to fear of his fellow men, but to a high degree of scrupulosity. At all events the opening blast of the fine, virile essay on “Walking” suggests anything but fearfulness:
I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil – to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee, and every one of you will take care of that.
This could be no other writer than Thoreau. The banner he marches under is one of intellectual challenge. The characteristic note is not fearful womanish reclusiveness, but boldness and unconventionality – of a real man shaking off the constraints of conventional social values, and subjecting the accepted standards of the day to close and critical scrutiny. Nor does he shy away from alienating the reader – “every one of you”. He looks him, us, straight in the eye and in a matter of fact manner tells us that we have got it wrong, and that the way society is organized is all wrong, fixated as it is on money, work, property and keeping up appearances. All that stuff is Vanity Fair, and Thoreau is like Christian in that great Puritan classic, The Pilgrim’s Progress
Now, he had not run far from his own door, but his wife and children,
perceiving it, began to cry after him to return; but the man put
his fingers in his ears, and ran on, crying, Life! life! eternal
life! [Luke 14:26] So he looked not behind him, but fled towards
the middle of the plain.
As in Bunyan, the nay-saying is qualified by confidence that there not only has to be, but there is, a better way of doing things. There is the possibility of personal salvation, although not in religious terms. Today, Thoreau’s version is considerably more appealing and appetizing than Bunyan’s, and the remarkable thing is that he manages to be subversive without being shrill. He has the confidence of the true believer or the dedicated anarchist – together with an engagingness and a sense of humour that is not generally associated with either. But as for the fearfulness alleged by Stevenson, no – although he may have had some anxiety on account of the way society’s values impacted upon one whom he regarded in his oddball fashion as a close relative of his, even if most people do not consider her literally in that way, namely mother Nature:
Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man – a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.
At the time, that remark about “a merely English nobility” must have caused a sharp intake of breath in some quarters – and must have seemed as unsettling then as a remark now would on say, “merely American values” or “merely Western values.” But that is just what Thoreau is attempting, in subjecting the values of nineteenth-century America to a less parochial and more universal standard. He would have understood and applauded Gandhi, who when asked what he thought of Western civilization, replied something on the lines that that would be a very good idea. Like his friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau was a good deal more familiar with the classics of Eastern philosophy and meditation, and in particular the Hindu scriptures, than the great majority of his contemporaries.
This is perhaps the central paradox of this paradoxical man. Although he traveled far less extensively than Robert Louis Stevenson, it could be plausibly argued that he displays a far greater range and diversity in his thinking. He may not have shivered on Skye, or squatted at Silverado or sojourned on Samoa, but he had traveled much in realms unexplored by the indefatigably peripatetic Scot. They had different ends in view, of course. Stevenson was a storyteller who recognized that Thoreau could not clothe his opinions in the garment of art, for that was not his talent. But what was his talent? Stevenson does not answer that question directly, although he does say that his “true subject was the pursuit of self-improvement combined with an unfriendly criticism of life as it goes on in our societies.” It is repeatedly intimated in Stevenson’s essay not only that Thoreau was a cold fish who had small capacity for friendship with his fellow human beings, but that this deficiency amounts to a moral flaw. “I suspect he loved books and nature as well and near as warmly as he loved his fellow creatures – a melancholy, lean degeneration of the human character.” But many readers will ask themselves if the more important consideration with respect to Thoreau’s criticism of life is not whether it was friendly or not, but whether or not it was – and indeed is – true. Stevenson focuses on what he perceives to be the flaws of Thoreau’s character to the exclusion of the message.
Both Stevenson and Thoreau were concerned with the human condition – the former more with the diversity of it, the latter more with the health of it. Both writers have great powers of observation, but these powers are differently focused. Stevenson delights in the company of his fellow men, whereas Thoreau, though he is incidentally no misanthrope, finds his greatest satisfaction in the society of nature and natural objects – although “satisfaction” hardly justice to the almost visionary quality of his prose at such moments. There is a remarkable passage in “Walking” where he describes some pine trees caught in the light of the setting sun:
I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord, unknown to me, - to whom the sun was servant, - who had not gone into society in the village, - who had not been called on. .. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labour. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum, - as of a distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking…..They fade irrevocably out of my mind even now while I speak and endeavour to recall them, and recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their cohabitancy. It if were not for such families as this, I think I should move out of Concord.
What Stevenson could not possibly have foreseen was that with the benefit of hindsight Thoreau was right to have such strong reservations about human development, and the way in which society is organized. Rather than wonder at the darkness of his analysis we may now wonder whether it was dark enough. “Were he alive today one suspects there would be a sharper edge to that unfriendly criticism, inasmuch as the possibility for individuals to retreat into tranquil self-knowledge has become so much diminished. He would undoubtedly be appalled by the noise, the triviality and the consumerism of modern society. For many, the avenues to human happiness have become totally choked with junk. The way we live now, collectively, is so exploitative, so scatty, so brainless and so infectious as to constitute a threat to the continuation of our species. If what he has to say about business and the banks strikes a chord with the modern reader, it is perhaps not because Thoreau is uncannily prescient, but because things have remained uncannily the same:
If our merchants did not most of them fail, and the banks, too, my faith in the old laws of this world would be staggered. The statement that ninety-six in a hundred doing such business surely break down is perhaps the sweetest fact that statistics have revealed.
Stevenson was right to discern an authentic quality of rage in those lines – “there is something enlivening in a hatred of so genuine a brand, hot as Corsican revenge, and sneering like Voltaire.”
Human systems are still as flawed and inadequate as they were in Thoreau’s day. It is clear from fraud and greed exposed by the recent global financial crisis that there is still room for his kind of rage. What would he have made of the burgeoning of the human population and all that that entails in the way of environmental degradation? Awareness of the cohabitancy of natural objects, and especially with manifestations of wild Nature, is increasingly difficult to achieve. The fact that wild Nature is now so comprehensively in retreat before the human onslaught gives poignancy to Thoreau’s words, which were not only wise, but with the benefit of hindsight seem to have a sadly prophetic ring to them. He was by no means the first writer to sense that as a species human beings have forfeited their kinship – or as he would put it their cohabitancy - with nature. Several decades earlier Wordsworth had complained that the world is too much with us, and that, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers. Was Stevenson justified in criticising Thoreau for husbanding his powers and trying to live in a sensible and sustainable way by keeping himself to himself? A man who believes that “the greater part of what my neighbours call good I believe in my soul to be bad”, can hardly be blamed for so doing.
What Thoreau does, in a more practical manner than any of the English Romantic poets did, or indeed like-minded contemporaries such as Carlyle and Ruskin, is to outline an alternative approach – reflective, inward, and in tune with nature. It calls for dedication, courage, and above all, detachment. It is this quality that makes him such a dispassionate and perceptive analyst. The difference between Thoreau and Stevenson is the difference between the entertainer and the moralist. Empathy with the common man is a prerequisite for a writer of fiction such as Stevenson – who had the masterly knack of furnishing the kind of dream of escape that the common man dreams of – such as digging up treasure on tropical islands. But that, one suspects, is not the kind of escapade that Thoreau would have much time for.
Discovering gold on tropical islands is an agreeable fantasy, but it is not going to save the world. Maybe the template that Thoreau gives us is not going to save the world either – there are just not enough Waldens to go around – but at least he points the reader in the right direction by intimating that if he is serious about it, he has to start by saving himself. Paradoxical though it may seem, Thoreau’s detachment is a symptom not of denial, but a radical affirmation of life
