Henry D. Thoreau 33

Henry D. Thoreau 33

"There appears to be something noble, something exalted, in

giving up one's own interest for that of his fellow-beings.

He is a true patriot, who, casting aside all selfish

thoughts, and not suffering his benevolent intentions to

be polluted by thinking of the fame he is acquiring,

presses forward in the great work he has undertaken, with

unremitted zeal; who is as one pursuing his way through a

garden abounding with fruits of every description, without

turning aside, or regarding the brambles which impede his

progress, but pressing onward with his eyes fixed upon the

golden fruit before him. He is worthy of all praise; his

is, indeed, true greatness."

 

In contrast with this man the young philosopher sets before us the man

who wishes, as the Greeks said, _pleonektein_,--to get more than his

square meal at the banquet of life.

 

"Aristocrats may say what they please,--liberty and equal

rights are and ever will be grateful, till nature herself

shall change; and he who is ambitious to exercise authority

over his fellow-beings, with no view to their benefit or

injury, is to be regarded as actuated by peculiarly selfish

motives. Self-gratification must be his sole object.

Perhaps he is desirous that his name may be handed down to

posterity; that in after ages something more may be said

of him than that he lived and died. His deeds may never be

forgotten; but is this greatness? If so, may I pass through

life unheeded and unknown!"

 

What was his own ambition--a purpose in life which only the

unthinking could ever confound with selfishness--was expressed by him

early in a prayer which he threw into this verse:--

 

"Great God! I ask Thee for no meaner pelf,

Than that I may not disappoint myself;

That in my conduct I may soar as high

As I can now discern with this clear eye.

That my weak hand may equal my firm faith,

And my life practice more than my tongue saith;

That my low conduct may not show,

Nor my relenting lines,

That I thy purpose did not know,

Or overrated thy designs."

 

And it may be said of him that he acted this prayer as well as uttered

it. Says Channing again:--

 

"In our estimate of his character, the moral qualities form

the basis; for himself rigidly enjoined; if in another,

he could overlook delinquency. Truth before all things;

in all your thoughts, your faintest breath, the austerest

purity, the utmost fulfilling of the interior law; faith

in friends, and an iron and flinty pursuit of right, which

nothing can tease or purchase out of us."

 

Thus it is said that when he went to prison rather than pay his tax,

which went to support slavery in South Carolina, and his friend

Emerson came to the cell and said, "Henry, why are you here?" the

reply was, "Why are you _not_ here?"

 

In this act, which even his best friends at first denounced as "mean

and sneaking and in bad taste,"--this refusal to pay the trifling sum

demanded of him by the Concord tax-gatherer,--the outlines of his

political philosophy appear. They were illuminated afterwards by his

trenchant utterances in denunciation of slavery and in encomium of

John Brown, who attacked that monster in its most vulnerable part.

It was not mere whim, but a settled theory of human nature and the

institution of government, which led him, in 1838, to renounce the

parish church and refuse to pay its tax, in 1846 to renounce the State

and refuse tribute to it, and in 1859 to come forward, first of all

men, in public support of Brown and his Virginia campaign. This theory

found frequent __EXPRESSION__ in his lectures. In 1846 he said:--

 

"Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a

majority of one already."

 

And again:--

 

"I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if

ten men whom I could name,--if ten _honest_ men only,--ay,

if one honest man, _ceasing to hold slaves_, were actually

to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in

the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of

slavery in America. Under a government which imprisons any

unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."

 

This sounded hollow then, but when that embodiment of American justice

and mercy, John Brown, lay bleeding in a Virginia prison, a dozen

years later, the significance of Thoreau's words began to be seen;

and when a few years after our countrymen were dying by hundreds of

thousands to complete what Brown, with his single life, had begun, the

whole truth, as Thoreau had seen it, flashed in the eyes of the nation.

 

In this same essay of 1846, on "Civil Disobedience," the ultimate

truth concerning government is stated in a passage which also does

justice to Daniel Webster, our "logic-fencer and parliamentary

Hercules," as Carlyle called him in a letter to Emerson in 1839.

Thoreau said:--

 

"Statesmen and legislators, standing so completely

within the institution (of government) never distinctly

and nakedly behold it. They speak of moving society,

but have no resting-place without it. They are wont to

forget that the world is not governed by policy and

expediency. Webster never goes behind government, and

so cannot speak with authority about it. His words are

wisdom to those legislators who contemplate no essential

reform in the existing government; but for thinkers, and

those who legislate for all time, he never once glances

at the subject. Yet compared with the cheap professions

of most reformers, and the still cheaper wisdom and

eloquence of politicians in general, his are almost the

only sensible and valuable words, and we thank heaven for

him. Comparatively, he is always strong, original, and,

above all, practical; still his quality is not wisdom, but

prudence. Truth is always in harmony with herself, and

is not concerned chiefly to reveal the justice that may

consist with wrong-doing. For eighteen hundred years the

New Testament has been written; yet where is the legislator

who has wisdom and practical talent enough to avail himself

of the light which it sheds on the science of government?"

 

Such a legislator, proclaiming his law from the scaffold, at last

appeared in John Brown:--

 

"I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible,

or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that

'whatsoever I would that men should do unto me, I should do

even so to them.' It teaches me further to 'remember them

that are in bonds as bound with them.' I endeavored to act

up to that instruction. I say that I am yet too young to

understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe

that, to have interfered as I have done in behalf of His

despised poor, was not wrong, but right."

 

Before these simple words of Brown, down went Webster and all his

industry in behalf of the "compromises of the Constitution." When

Thoreau heard them, and saw the matchless behavior of his noble old

friend, he recognized the hour and the man.

 

"For once," he cried in the church-vestry at Concord, "we

are lifted into the region of truth and manhood. No man, in

America, has ever stood up so persistently and effectively

for the dignity of human nature; knowing himself for a

man, and the equal of any and all governments. The only

government that I recognize,--and it matters not how few

are at the head of it, or how small its army,--is that

power which establishes justice in the land."

 

Words like these have proved immortal when spoken in the cell of

Socrates, and they lose none of their vitality, coming from the

Concord philosopher.

 

The weakness of Webster was in his moral principles; he could not

resist temptation; could not keep out of debt; could not avoid

those obligations which the admiration or the selfishness of his

friends forced upon him, and which left him, in his old age, neither

independence nor gratitude. Thoreau's strength was in his moral

nature, and in his obstinate refusal to mortgage himself, his time, or

his opinions, even to the State or the Church. The haughtiness of his

independence kept him from a thousand temptations that beset men of

less courage and self-denial.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER XIII.

 

LIFE, DEATH, AND IMMORTALITY.

 

 

The life of Thoreau naturally divides itself into three parts: his

Apprenticeship, from birth to the summer of 1837, when he left Harvard

College; his Journey-work (Wanderjahre) from 1837 to 1849, when he

appeared as an author, with his first book; and his Mastership,--not

of a college, a merchantman, or a mechanic art, but of the trade and

mystery of writing. He had aspired to live and study and practice, so

that he could write--to use his own words--"sentences which suggest

far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them, which do

not report an old, but make a new impression." To frame such sentences

as these, he said, "as durable as a Roman aqueduct," was the art of

writing coveted by him; "sentences which are expressive, towards which

so many volumes, so much life went; which lie like boulders on the

page, up and down or across,--not mere repetition, but creation, and

which a man might sell his ground or cattle to build." It was this

thirst for final and concentrated __EXPRESSION__, and not love of fame,

or "literary aspirations," as poor Greeley put it, which urged him

on to write. For printing he cared little,--and few authors since

Shakespeare have been less anxious to publish what they wrote. Of the

seven volumes of his works first printed, and twenty more which may

be published some day, only two, "The Week" and "Walden," appeared in

his lifetime,--though the material for two more had been scattered

about in forgotten magazines and newspapers, for his friends to

collect after his death. Of his first works (and some of his best) it

could be said, as Thomas Wharton said, in 1781, of his friend Gray's

verses, "I yet reflect with pain upon the cool reception which those

noble odes, 'The Progress of Poetry' and 'The Bard' met with at their

first publication; it appeared there were not twenty people in England

who liked them." This disturbed Thoreau's friends, but not himself;

he rather rejoiced in the slow sale of his first book; and when the

balance of the edition,--more than seven hundred copies out of one

thousand,--came back upon his hands unsold in 1855, and earlier,

he told me with glee that he had made an addition of seven hundred

volumes to his library, and all of his own composition. "O solitude,

obscurity, meanness!" he exclaims in 1856 to his friend Blake, "I

never triumph so as when I have the least success in my neighbors'

eyes." Of course, pride had something to do with this; "it was a wild

stock of pride," as Burke said of Lord Keppel, "on which the tenderest

of all hearts had grafted the milder virtues." Both pride and piety led him to write,