Pencils, school-keeping, and trade being thus discarded one
after another, Thoreau, with a stroke of strategy, turned the
position.  He saw his way to get his board and lodging for
practically nothing; and Admetus never got less work out of
any servant since the world began.  It was his ambition to be
an oriental philosopher; but he was always a very Yankee sort
of oriental.  Even in the peculiar attitude in which he stood
to money, his system of personal economics, as we may call
it, he displayed a vast amount of truly down-East
calculation, and he adopted poverty like a piece of business.
Yet his system is based on one or two ideas which, I believe,
come naturally to all thoughtful youths, and are only pounded
out of them by city uncles.  Indeed, something essentially
youthful distinguishes all Thoreau's knock-down blows at
current opinion.  Like the posers of a child, they leave the
orthodox in a kind of speechless agony.  These know the thing
is nonsense.  They are sure there must be an answer, yet
somehow cannot find it.  So it is with his system of economy.
He cuts through the subject on so new a plane that the
accepted arguments apply no longer; he attacks it in a new
dialect where there are no catchwords ready made for the
defender; after you have been boxing for years on a polite,
gladiatorial convention, here is an assailant who does not
scruple to hit below the belt.

"The cost of a thing," says he, "is THE AMOUNT OF WHAT I WILL
CALL LIFE which is required to be exchanged for it,
immediately or in the long run."  I have been accustomed to
put it to myself, perhaps more clearly, that the price we
have to pay for money is paid in liberty.  Between these two
ways of it, at least, the reader will probably not fail to
find a third definition of his own; and it follows, on one or
other, that a man may pay too dearly for his livelihood, by
giving, in Thoreau's terms, his whole life for it, or, in
mine, bartering for it the whole of his available liberty,
and becoming a slave till death.  There are two questions to
be considered - the quality of what we buy, and the price we
have to pay for it.  Do you want a thousand a year, a two
thousand a year, or a ten thousand a year livelihood? and can
you afford the one you want?  It is a matter of taste; it is
not in the least degree a question of duty, though commonly
supposed so.  But there is no authority for that view
anywhere.  It is nowhere in the Bible.  It is true that we
might do a vast amount of good if we were wealthy, but it is
also highly improbable; not many do; and the art of growing
rich is not only quite distinct from that of doing good, but
the practice of the one does not at all train a man for
practising the other.  "Money might be of great service to
me," writes Thoreau; "but the difficulty now is that I do not
improve my opportunities, and therefore I am not prepared to
have my opportunities increased."  It is a mere illusion
that, above a certain income, the personal desires will be
satisfied and leave a wider margin for the generous impulse.
It is as difficult to be generous, or anything else, except
perhaps a member of Parliament, on thirty thousand as on two
hundred a year.

Now Thoreau's tastes were well defined.  He loved to be free,
to be master of his times and seasons, to indulge the mind
rather than the body; he preferred long rambles to rich
dinners, his own reflections to the consideration of society,
and an easy, calm, unfettered, active life among green trees
to dull toiling at the counter of a bank.  And such being his
inclination he determined to gratify it.  A poor man must
save off something; he determined to save off his livelihood.
"When a man has attained those things which are necessary to
life," he writes, "there is another alternative than to
obtain the superfluities; HE MAY ADVENTURE ON LIFE NOW, his
vacation from humbler toil having commenced."  Thoreau would
get shelter, some kind of covering for his body, and
necessary daily bread; even these he should get as cheaply as
possible; and then, his vacation from humbler toil having
commenced, devote himself to oriental philosophers, the study
of nature, and the work of self-improvement.

Prudence, which bids us all go to the ant for wisdom and
hoard against the day of sickness, was not a favourite with
Thoreau.  He preferred that other, whose name is so much
misappropriated: Faith.  When he had secured the necessaries
of the moment, he would not reckon up possible accidents or
torment himself with trouble for the future.  He had no
toleration for the man "who ventures to live only by the aid
of the mutual insurance company, which has promised to bury
him decently."  He would trust himself a little to the world.
"We may safely trust a good deal more than we do," says he.
"How much is not done by us! or what if we had been taken
sick?"  And then, with a stab of satire, he describes
contemporary mankind in a phrase: "All the day long on the
alert, at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit
ourselves to uncertainties."  It is not likely that the
public will be much affected by Thoreau, when they blink the
direct injunctions of the religion they profess; and yet,
whether we will or no, we make the same hazardous ventures;
we back our own health and the honesty of our neighbours for
all that we are worth; and it is chilling to think how many
must lose their wager.

In 1845, twenty-eight years old, an age by which the
liveliest have usually declined into some conformity with the
world, Thoreau, with a capital of something less than five
pounds and a borrowed axe, walked forth into the woods by
Walden Pond, and began his new experiment in life.  He built
himself a dwelling, and returned the axe, he says with
characteristic and workman-like pride, sharper than when he
borrowed it; he reclaimed a patch, where he cultivated beans,
peas, potatoes, and sweet corn; he had his bread to bake, his
farm to dig, and for the matter of six weeks in the summer he
worked at surveying, carpentry, or some other of his numerous
dexterities, for hire.

For more than five years, this was all that he required to do
for his support, and he had the winter and most of the summer
at his entire disposal.  For six weeks of occupation, a
little cooking and a little gentle hygienic gardening, the
man, you may say, had as good as stolen his livelihood.  Or
we must rather allow that he had done far better; for the
thief himself is continually and busily occupied; and even
one born to inherit a million will have more calls upon his
time than Thoreau.  Well might he say, "What old people tell
you you cannot do, you try and find you can."  And how
surprising is his conclusion: "I am convinced that TO
MAINTAIN ONESELF ON THIS EARTH IS NOT A HARDSHIP, BUT A
PASTIME, if we will live simply and wisely; AS THE PURSUITS
OF SIMPLER NATIONS ARE STILL THE SPORTS OF THE MORE
ARTIFICIAL."

When he had enough of that kind of life, he showed the same
simplicity in giving it up as in beginning it.  There are
some who could have done the one, but, vanity forbidding, not
the other; and that is perhaps the story of the hermits; but
Thoreau made no fetish of his own example, and did what he
wanted squarely.  And five years is long enough for an
experiment and to prove the success of transcendental
Yankeeism.  It is not his frugality which is worthy of note;
for, to begin with, that was inborn, and therefore inimitable
by others who are differently constituted; and again, it was
no new thing, but has often been equalled by poor Scotch
students at the universities.  The point is the sanity of his
view of life, and the insight with which he recognised the
position of money, and thought out for himself the problem of
riches and a livelihood.  Apart from his eccentricities, he
had perceived, and was acting on, a truth of universal
application.  For money enters in two different characters
into the scheme of life.  A certain amount, varying with the
number and empire of our desires, is a true necessary to each
one of us in the present order of society; but beyond that
amount, money is a commodity to be bought or not to be
bought, a luxury in which we may either indulge or stint
ourselves, like any other.  And there are many luxuries that
we may legitimately prefer to it, such as a grateful
conscience, a country life, or the woman of our inclination.
Trite, flat, and obvious as this conclusion may appear, we
have only to look round us in society to see how scantily it
has been recognised; and perhaps even ourselves, after a
little reflection, may decide to spend a trifle less for
money, and indulge ourselves a trifle more in the article of
freedom.


III.


"To have done anything by which you earned money merely,"
says Thoreau, "is to be" (have been, he means) "idle and
worse."  There are two passages in his letters, both, oddly
enough, relating to firewood, which must be brought together
to be rightly understood.  So taken, they contain between
them the marrow of all good sense on the subject of work in
its relation to something broader than mere livelihood.  Here
is the first: "I suppose I have burned up a good-sized tree
to-night - and for what?  I settled with Mr. Tarbell for it
the other day; but that wasn't the final settlement.  I got
off cheaply from him.  At last one will say: 'Let us see, how
much wood did you burn, sir?'  And I shall shudder to think
that the next question will be, 'What did you do while you
were warm?'"  Even after we have settled with Admetus in the
person of Mr. Tarbell, there comes, you see, a further
question.  It is not enough to have earned our livelihood.
Either the earning itself should have been serviceable to
mankind, or something else must follow.  To live is sometimes
very difficult, but it is never meritorious in itself; and we
must have a reason to allege to our own conscience why we
should continue to exist upon this crowded earth.

If Thoreau had simply dwelt in his house at Walden, a lover
of trees, birds, and fishes, and the open air and virtue, a
reader of wise books, an idle, selfish self-improver, he
would have managed to cheat Admetus, but, to cling to
metaphor, the devil would have had him in the end.  Those who
can avoid toil altogether and dwell in the Arcadia of private
means, and even those who can, by abstinence, reduce the
necessary amount of it to some six weeks a year, having the
more liberty, have only the higher moral obligation to be up
and doing in the interest of man.

The second passage is this: "There is a far more important
and warming heat, commonly lost, which precedes the burning
of the wood.  It is the smoke of industry, which is incense.
I had been so thoroughly warmed in body and spirit, that when
at length my fuel was housed, I came near selling it to the
ashman, as if I had extracted all its heat."  Industry is, in
itself and when properly chosen, delightful and profitable to
the worker; and when your toil has been a pleasure, you have
not, as Thoreau says, "earned money merely," but money,
health, delight, and moral profit, all in one.  "We must heap
up a great pile of doing for a small diameter of being," he
says in another place; and then exclaims, "How admirably the
artist is made to accomplish his self-culture by devotion to
his art!"  We may escape uncongenial toil, only to devote
ourselves to that which is congenial.  It is only to transact
some higher business that even Apollo dare play the truant
from Admetus.  We must all work for the sake of work; we must
all work, as Thoreau says again, in any "absorbing pursuit -
it does not much matter what, so it be honest;" but the most
profitable work is that which combines into one continued
effort the largest proportion of the powers and desires of a
man's nature; that into which he will plunge with ardour, and
from which he will desist with reluctance; in which he will
know the weariness of fatigue, but not that of satiety; and
which will be ever fresh, pleasing, and stimulating to his
taste.  Such work holds a man together, braced at all points;
it does not suffer him to doze or wander; it keeps him
actively conscious of himself, yet raised among superior
interests; it gives him the profit of industry with the
pleasures of a pastime.  This is what his art should be to
the true artist, and that to a degree unknown in other and
less intimate pursuits.  For other professions stand apart
from the human business of life; but an art has its seat at
the centre of the artist's doings and sufferings, deals
directly with his experiences, teaches him the lessons of his
own fortunes and mishaps, and becomes a part of his
biography.  So says Goethe:


"Spat erklingt was fruh erklang;
Gluck und Ungluck wird Gesang."


Now Thoreau's art was literature; and it was one of which he
had conceived most ambitiously.  He loved and believed in
good books.  He said well, "Life is not habitually seen from
any common platform so truly and unexaggerated as in the
light of literature."  But the literature he loved was of the
heroic order.  "Books, not which afford us a cowering
enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring;
such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be
entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing
institutions - such I call good books."  He did not think
them easy to be read.  "The heroic books," he says, "even if
printed in the character of our mother-tongue, will always be
in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must
laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line,
conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of
what wisdom and valour and generosity we have."  Nor does he
suppose that such books are easily written.  "Great prose, of
equal elevation, commands our respect more than great verse,"
says he, "since it implies a more permanent and level height,
a life more pervaded with the grandeur of the thought.  The
poet often only makes an irruption, like the Parthian, and is
off again, shooting while he retreats; but the prose writer
has conquered like a Roman and settled colonies."  We may ask
ourselves, almost with dismay, whether such works exist at
all but in the imagination of the student.  For the bulk of
the best of books is apt to be made up with ballast; and
those in which energy of thought is combined with any
stateliness of utterance may be almost counted on the
fingers.  Looking round in English for a book that should
answer Thoreau's two demands of a style like poetry and sense
that shall be both original and inspiriting, I come to
Milton's AREOPAGITICA, and can name no other instance for the
moment.  Two things at least are plain: that if a man will
condescend to nothing more commonplace in the way of reading,
he must not look to have a large library; and that if he
proposes himself to write in a similar vein, he will find his
work cut out for him.

Thoreau composed seemingly while he walked, or at least
exercise and composition were with him intimately connected;
for we are told that "the length of his walk uniformly made
the length of his writing."  He speaks in one place of
"plainness and vigour, the ornaments of style," which is
rather too paradoxical to be comprehensively, true.

In another he remarks: "As for style of writing, if one has
anything to say it drops from him simply as a stone falls to
the ground."  We must conjecture a very large sense indeed
for the phrase "if one has anything to say."  When truth
flows from a man, fittingly clothed in style and without
conscious effort, it is because the effort has been made and
the work practically completed before he sat down to write.
It is only out of fulness of thinking that expression drops
perfect like a ripe fruit; and when Thoreau wrote so
nonchalantly at his desk, it was because he had been
vigorously active during his walk.  For neither clearness
compression, nor beauty of language, come to any living
creature till after a busy and a prolonged acquaintance with
the subject on hand.  Easy writers are those who, like Walter
Scott, choose to remain contented with a less degree of
perfection than is legitimately within the compass of their
powers.  We hear of Shakespeare and his clean manuscript; but
in face of the evidence of the style itself and of the
various editions of HAMLET, this merely proves that Messrs.
Hemming and Condell were unacquainted with the common enough
phenomenon called a fair copy.  He who would recast a tragedy
already given to the world must frequently and earnestly have
revised details in the study.  Thoreau himself, and in spite
of his protestations, is an instance of even extreme research
in one direction; and his effort after heroic utterance is
proved not only by the occasional finish, but by the
determined exaggeration of his style.  "I trust you realise
what an exaggerator I am - that I lay myself out to
exaggerate," he writes.  And again, hinting at the
explanation: "Who that has heard a strain of music feared
lest he should speak extravagantly any more for ever?"  And
yet once more, in his essay on Carlyle, and this time with
his meaning well in hand: "No truth, we think, was ever
expressed but with this sort of emphasis, that for the time
there seemed to be no other."  Thus Thoreau was an
exaggerative and a parabolical writer, not because he loved
the literature of the East, but from a desire that people
should understand and realise what he was writing.  He was
near the truth upon the general question; but in his own
particular method, it appears to me, he wandered.  Literature
is not less a conventional art than painting or sculpture;
and it is the least striking, as it is the most comprehensive
of the three.  To hear a strain of music to see a beautiful
woman, a river, a great city, or a starry night, is to make a
man despair of his Lilliputian arts in language.  Now, to
gain that emphasis which seems denied to us by the very
nature of the medium, the proper method of literature is by
selection, which is a kind of negative exaggeration.  It is
the right of the literary artist, as Thoreau was on the point
of seeing, to leave out whatever does not suit his purpose.
Thus we extract the pure gold; and thus the well-written
story of a noble life becomes, by its very omissions, more
thrilling to the reader.  But to go beyond this, like
Thoreau, and to exaggerate directly, is to leave the saner
classical tradition, and to put the reader on his guard.  And
when you write the whole for the half, you do not express
your thought more forcibly, but only express a different
thought which is not yours.

Thoreau's true subject was the pursuit of self-improvement
combined with an unfriendly criticism of life as it goes on
in our societies; it is there that he best displays the
freshness and surprising trenchancy of his intellect; it is
there that his style becomes plain and vigorous, and
therefore, according to his own formula, ornamental.  Yet he
did not care to follow this vein singly, but must drop into
it by the way in books of a different purport.  WALDEN, OR
LIFE IN THE WOODS, A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK
RIVERS, THE MAINE WOODS, - such are the titles he affects.
He was probably reminded by his delicate critical perception
that the true business of literature is with narrative; in
reasoned narrative, and there alone, that art enjoys all its
advantages, and suffers least from its defects.  Dry precept
and disembodied disquisition, as they can only be read with
an effort of abstraction, can never convey a perfectly
complete or a perfectly natural impression.  Truth, even in
literature, must be clothed with flesh and blood, or it
cannot tell its whole story to the reader.  Hence the effect
of anecdote on simple minds; and hence good biographies and
works of high, imaginative art, are not only far more
entertaining, but far more edifying, than books of theory or
precept.  Now Thoreau could not clothe his opinions in the
garment of art, for that was not his talent; but he sought to
gain the same elbow-room for himself, and to afford a similar
relief to his readers, by mingling his thoughts with a record
of experience.

Again, he was a lover of nature.  The quality which we should
call mystery in a painting, and which belongs so particularly
to the aspect of the external world and to its influence upon
our feelings, was one which he was never weary of attempting
to reproduce in his books.  The seeming significance of
nature's appearances, their unchanging strangeness to the
senses, and the thrilling response which they waken in the
mind of man, continued to surprise and stimulate his spirits.
It appeared to him, I think, that if we could only write near
enough to the facts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but
ardently, we might transfer the glamour of reality direct
upon our pages; and that, if it were once thus captured and
expressed, a new and instructive relation might appear
between men's thoughts and the phenomena of nature.  This was
the eagle that he pursued all his life long, like a schoolboy
with a butterfly net.  Hear him to a friend: "Let me suggest
a theme for you - to state to yourself precisely and
completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for
you, returning to this essay again and again until you are
satisfied that all that was important in your experience is
in it.  Don't suppose that you can tell it precisely the
first dozen times you try, but at 'em again; especially when,
after a sufficient pause you suspect that you are touching
the heart or summit of the matter, reiterate your blows
there, and account for the mountain to yourself.  Not that
the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make
it short."  Such was the method, not consistent for a man
whose meanings were to "drop from him as a stone falls to the
ground."  Perhaps the most successful work that Thoreau ever
accomplished in this direction is to be found in the passages
relating to fish in the WEEK.  These are remarkable for a
vivid truth of impression and a happy suitability of
language, not frequently surpassed.

Whatever Thoreau tried to do was tried in fair, square prose,
with sentences solidly built, and no help from bastard
rhythms.  Moreover, there is a progression - I cannot call it
a progress - in his work towards a more and more strictly
prosaic level, until at last he sinks into the bathos of the
prosy.  Emerson mentions having once remarked to Thoreau:
"Who would not like to write something which all can read,
like ROBINSON CRUSOE? and who does not see with regret that
his page is not solid with a right materialistic treatment
which delights everybody?"  I must say in passing that it is
not the right materialistic treatment which delights the
world in ROBINSON, but the romantic and philosophic interest
of the fable.  The same treatment does quite the reverse of
delighting us when it is applied, in COLONEL JACK, to the
management of a plantation.  But I cannot help suspecting
Thoreau to have been influenced either by this identical
remark or by some other closely similar in meaning.  He began
to fall more and more into a detailed materialistic
treatment; he went into the business doggedly, as one who
should make a guide-book; he not only chronicled what had
been important in his own experience, but whatever might have
been important in the experience of anybody else; not only
what had affected him, but all that he saw or heard.  His
ardour had grown less, or perhaps it was inconsistent with a
right materialistic treatment to display such emotions as he
felt; and, to complete the eventful change, he chose, from a
sense of moral dignity, to gut these later works of the
saving quality of humour.  He was not one of those authors
who have learned, in his own words, "to leave out their
dulness."  He inflicts his full quantity upon the reader in
such books as CAPE COD, or THE YANKEE IN CANADA.  Of the
latter he confessed that he had not managed to get much of
himself into it.  Heaven knows he had not, nor yet much of
Canada, we may hope.  "Nothing," he says somewhere, "can
shock a brave man but dulness."  Well, there are few spots
more shocking to the brave than the pages of YANKEE IN
CANADA.

There are but three books of his that will be read with much
pleasure: the WEEK, WALDEN, and the collected letters.  As to
his poetry, Emerson's word shall suffice for us, it is so
accurate and so prettily said: "The thyme and majoram are not
yet honey."  In this, as in his prose, he relied greatly on
the goodwill of the reader, and wrote throughout in faith.
It was an exercise of faith to suppose that many would
understand the sense of his best work, or that any could be
exhilarated by the dreary chronicling of his worst.  "But,"
as he says, "the gods do not hear any rude or discordant
sound, as we learn from the echo; and I know that the nature
towards which I launch these sounds is so rich that it will
modulate anew and wonderfully improve my rudest strain."


IV.


"What means the fact," he cries, "that a soul which has lost
all hope for itself can inspire in another listening soul
such an infinite confidence in it, even while it is
expressing its despair?"  The question is an echo and an
illustration of the words last quoted; and it forms the key-
note of his thoughts on friendship.  No one else, to my
knowledge, has spoken in so high and just a spirit of the
kindly relations; and I doubt whether it be a drawback that
these lessons should come from one in many ways so unfitted
to be a teacher in this branch.  The very coldness and egoism
of his own intercourse gave him a clearer insight into the
intellectual basis of our warm, mutual tolerations; and
testimony to their worth comes with added force from one who
was solitary and obliging, and of whom a friend remarked,
with equal wit and wisdom, "I love Henry, but I cannot like
him."

He can hardly be persuaded to make any distinction between
love and friendship; in such rarefied and freezing air, upon
the mountain-tops of meditation, had he taught himself to
breathe.  He was, indeed, too accurate an observer not to
have remarked that "there exists already a natural
disinterestedness and liberality" between men and women; yet,
he thought, "friendship is no respecter of sex."  Perhaps
there is a sense in which the words are true; but they were
spoken in ignorance; and perhaps we shall have put the matter
most correctly, if we call love a foundation for a nearer and
freer degree of friendship than can be possible without it.
For there are delicacies, eternal between persons of the same
sex, which are melted and disappear in the warmth of love.

To both, if they are to be right, he attributes the same
nature and condition.  "We are not what we are," says he,
"nor do we treat or esteem each other for such, but for what
we are capable of being."  "A friend is one who incessantly
pays us the compliment of expecting all the virtues from us,
and who can appreciate them in us."  "The friend asks no
return but that his friend will religiously accept and wear
and not disgrace his apotheosis of him."  "It is the merit
and preservation of friendship that it takes place on a level
higher than the actual characters of the parties would seem
to warrant."  This is to put friendship on a pedestal indeed;
and yet the root of the matter is there; and the last
sentence, in particular, is like a light in a dark place, and
makes many mysteries plain.  We are different with different
friends; yet if we look closely we shall find that every such
relation reposes on some particular apotheosis of oneself;
with each friend, although we could not distinguish it in
words from any other, we have at least one special reputation
to preserve: and it is thus that we run, when mortified, to
our friend or the woman that we love, not to hear ourselves
called better, but to be better men in point of fact.  We
seek this society to flatter ourselves with our own good
conduct.  And hence any falsehood in the relation, any
incomplete or perverted understanding, will spoil even the
pleasure of these visits.  Thus says Thoreau again: "Only
lovers know the value of truth."  And yet again: "They ask
for words and deeds, when a true relation is word and deed."

But it follows that since they are neither of them so good as
the other hopes, and each is, in a very honest manner,
playing a part above his powers, such an intercourse must
often be disappointing to both.  "We may bid farewell sooner
than complain," says Thoreau, "for our complaint is too well
grounded to be uttered."  "We have not so good a right to
hate any as our friend."


"It were treason to our love
And a sin to God above,
One iota to abate
Of a pure, impartial hate."


Love is not blind, nor yet forgiving.  "O yes, believe me,"
as the song says, "Love has eyes!"  The nearer the intimacy,
the more cuttingly do we feel the unworthiness of those we
love; and because you love one, and would die for that love
to-morrow, you have not forgiven, and you never will forgive,
that friend's misconduct.  If you want a person's faults, go
to those who love him.  They will not tell you, but they
know.  And herein lies the magnanimous courage of love, that
it endures this knowledge without change.

It required a cold, distant personality like that of Thoreau,
perhaps, to recognise and certainly to utter this truth; for
a more human love makes it a point of honour not to
acknowledge those faults of which it is most conscious.  But
his point of view is both high and dry.  He has no illusions;
he does not give way to love any more than to hatred, but
preserves them both with care like valuable curiosities.  A
more bald-headed picture of life, if I may so express myself,
has seldom been presented.  He is an egoist; he does not
remember, or does not think it worth while to remark, that,
in these near intimacies, we are ninety-nine times
disappointed in our beggarly selves for once that we are
disappointed in our friend; that it is we who seem most
frequently undeserving of the love that unites us; and that
it is by our friend's conduct that we are continually rebuked
and yet strengthened for a fresh endeavour.  Thoreau is dry,
priggish, and selfish.  It is profit he is after in these
intimacies; moral profit, certainly, but still profit to
himself.  If you will be the sort of friend I want, he
remarks naively, "my education cannot dispense with your
society."  His education! as though a friend were a
dictionary.  And with all this, not one word about pleasure,
or laughter, or kisses, or any quality of flesh and blood.
It was not inappropriate, surely, that he had such close
relations with the fish.  We can understand the friend
already quoted, when he cried: "As for taking his arm, I
would as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree!"

As a matter of fact he experienced but a broken enjoyment in
his intimacies.  He says he has been perpetually on the brink
of the sort of intercourse he wanted, and yet never
completely attained it.  And what else had he to expect when
he would not, in a happy phrase of Carlyle's, "nestle down
into it"?  Truly, so it will be always if you only stroll in
upon your friends as you might stroll in to see a cricket
match; and even then not simply for the pleasure of the
thing, but with some afterthought of self-improvement, as
though you had come to the cricket match to bet.  It was his
theory that people saw each other too frequently, so that
their curiosity was not properly whetted, nor had they
anything fresh to communicate; but friendship must be
something else than a society for mutual improvement -
indeed, it must only be that by the way, and to some extent
unconsciously; and if Thoreau had been a man instead of a
manner of elm-tree, he would have felt that he saw his
friends too seldom, and have reaped benefits unknown to his
philosophy from a more sustained and easy intercourse.  We
might remind him of his own words about love: "We should have
no reserve; we should give the whole of ourselves to that
business.  But commonly men have not imagination enough to be
thus employed about a human being, but must be coopering a
barrel, forsooth."  Ay, or reading oriental philosophers.  It
is not the nature of the rival occupation, it is the fact
that you suffer it to be a rival, that renders loving
intimacy impossible.  Nothing is given for nothing in this
world; there can be no true love, even on your own side,
without devotion; devotion is the exercise of love, by which
it grows; but if you will give enough of that, if you will
pay the price in a sufficient "amount of what you call life,"
why then, indeed, whether with wife or comrade, you may have
months and even years of such easy, natural, pleasurable, and
yet improving intercourse as shall make time a moment and
kindness a delight.

The secret of his retirement lies not in misanthropy, of
which he had no tincture, but part in his engrossing design
of self-improvement and part in the real deficiencies of
social intercourse.  He was not so much difficult about his
fellow human beings as he could not tolerate the terms of
their association.  He could take to a man for any genuine
qualities, as we see by his admirable sketch of the Canadian
woodcutter in WALDEN; but he would not consent, in his own
words, to "feebly fabulate and paddle in the social slush."
It seemed to him, I think, that society is precisely the
reverse of friendship, in that it takes place on a lower
level than the characters of any of the parties would warrant
us to expect.  The society talk of even the most brilliant
man is of greatly less account than what you will get from
him in (as the French say) a little committee.  And Thoreau
wanted geniality; he had not enough of the superficial, even
at command; he could not swoop into a parlour and, in the
naval phrase, "cut out" a human being from that dreary port;
nor had he inclination for the task.  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.

"As for the dispute about solitude and society," he thus sums
up: "Any comparison is impertinent.  It is an idling down on
the plain at the base of the mountain instead of climbing
steadily to its top.  Of course you will be glad of all the
society you can get to go up with?  Will you go to glory with
me? is the burden of the song.  It is not that we love to be
alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar the
company grows thinner and thinner till there is none at all.
It is either the tribune on the plain, a sermon on the mount,
or a very private ecstasy still higher up.  Use all the
society that will abet you."  But surely it is no very
extravagant opinion that it is better to give than to
receive, to serve than to use our companions; and above all,
where there is no question of service upon either side, that
it is good to enjoy their company like a natural man.  It is
curious and in some ways dispiriting that a writer may be
always best corrected out of his own mouth; and so, to
conclude, here is another passage from Thoreau which seems
aimed directly at himself: "Do not be too moral; you may
cheat yourself out of much life so. . . .  ALL FABLES,
INDEED, HAVE THEIR MORALS; BUT THE INNOCENT ENJOY THE STORY."


V.


"The only obligation," says he, "which I have a right to
assume is to do at any time what I think right."  "Why should
we ever go abroad, even across the way, to ask a neighbour's
advice?"  "There is a nearer neighbour within, who is
incessantly telling us how we should behave.  BUT WE WAIT FOR
THE NEIGHBOUR WITHOUT TO TELL US OF SOME FALSE, EASIER WAY."
"The greater part of what my neighbours call good I believe
in my soul to be bad."  To be what we are, and to become what
we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.  It is
"when we fall behind ourselves" that "we are cursed with
duties and the neglect of duties."  "I love the wild," he
says, "not less than the good."  And again: "The life of a
good man will hardly improve us more than the life of a
freebooter, for the inevitable laws appear as plainly in the
infringement as in the observance, and" (mark this) "OUR
LIVES ARE SUSTAINED BY A NEARLY EQUAL EXPENSE OF VIRTUE OF
SOME KIND."  Even although he were a prig, it will be owned
he could announce a startling doctrine.  "As for doing good,"
he writes elsewhere, "that is one of the professions that are
full.  Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it
may seem, am satisfied that it does not agree with my
constitution.  Probably I should not conscientiously and
deliberately forsake my particular calling to do the good
which society demands of me, to save the universe from
annihilation; and I believe that a like but infinitely
greater steadfastness elsewhere is all that now preserves it.
If you should ever be betrayed into any of these
philanthropies, do not let your left hand know what your
right hand does, for it is not worth knowing."  Elsewhere he
returns upon the subject, and explains his meaning thus: "If
I ever DID a man any good in their sense, of course it was
something exceptional and insignificant compared with the
good or evil I am constantly doing by being what I am."

There is a rude nobility, like that of a barbarian king, in
this unshaken confidence in himself and indifference to the
wants, thoughts, or sufferings of others.  In his whole works
I find no trace of pity.  This was partly the result of
theory, for he held the world too mysterious to be
criticised, and asks conclusively: "What right have I to
grieve who have not ceased to wonder?"  But it sprang still
more from constitutional indifference and superiority; and he
grew up healthy, composed, and unconscious from among life's
horrors, like a green bay-tree from a field of battle.  It
was from this lack in himself that he failed to do justice to
the spirit of Christ; for while he could glean more meaning
from individual precepts than any score of Christians, yet he
conceived life in such a different hope, and viewed it with
such contrary emotions, that the sense and purport of the
doctrine as a whole seems to have passed him by or left him
unimpressed.  He could understand the idealism of the
Christian view, but he was himself so unaffectedly unhuman
that he did not recognise the human intention and essence of
that teaching.  Hence he complained that Christ did not leave
us a rule that was proper and sufficient for this world, not
having conceived the nature of the rule that was laid down;
for things of that character that are sufficiently
unacceptable become positively non-existent to the mind.  But
perhaps we shall best appreciate the defect in Thoreau by
seeing it supplied in the case of Whitman.  For the one, I
feel confident, is the disciple of the other; it is what
Thoreau clearly whispered that Whitman so uproariously bawls;
it is the same doctrine, but with how immense a difference!
the same argument, but used to what a new conclusion!
Thoreau had plenty of humour until he tutored himself out of
it, and so forfeited that best birthright of a sensible man;
Whitman, in that respect, seems to have been sent into the
world naked and unashamed; and yet by a strange consummation,
it is the theory of the former that is arid, abstract, and
claustral.  Of these two philosophies so nearly identical at
bottom, the one pursues Self-improvement - a churlish, mangy
dog; the other is up with the morning, in the best of health,
and following the nymph Happiness, buxom, blithe, and
debonair.  Happiness, at least, is not solitary; it joys to
communicate; it loves others, for it depends on them for its
existence; it sanctions and encourages to all delights that
are not unkind in themselves; if it lived to a thousand, it
would not make excision of a single humorous passage; and
while the self-improver dwindles towards the prig, and, if he
be not of an excellent constitution may even grow deformed
into an Obermann, the very name and appearance of a happy man
breathe of good-nature, and help the rest of us to live.

In the case of Thoreau, so great a show of doctrine demands
some outcome in the field of action.  If nothing were to be
done but build a shanty beside Walden Pond, we have heard
altogether too much of these declarations of independence.
That the man wrote some books is nothing to the purpose, for
the same has been done in a suburban villa.  That he kept
himself happy is perhaps a sufficient excuse, but it is
disappointing to the reader.  We may be unjust, but when a
man despises commerce and philanthropy alike, and has views
of good so soaring that he must take himself apart from
mankind for their cultivation, we will not be content without
some striking act.  It was not Thoreau's fault if he were not
martyred; had the occasion come, he would have made a noble
ending.  As it is, he did once seek to interfere in the
world's course; he made one practical appearance on the stage
of affairs; and a strange one it was, and strangely
characteristic of the nobility and the eccentricity of the
man.  It was forced on him by his calm but radical opposition
to negro slavery.  "Voting for the right is doing nothing for
it," he saw; "it is only expressing to men feebly your desire
that it should prevail."  For his part, he would not "for an
instant recognise that political organisation for HIS
government which is the SLAVE'S government also."  "I do not
hesitate to say," he adds, "that those who call themselves
Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their
support, both in person and property, from the government of
Massachusetts."  That is what he did: in 1843 he ceased to
pay the poll-tax.  The highway-tax he paid, for he said he
was as desirous to be a good neighbour as to be a bad
subject; but no more poll-tax to the State of Massachusetts.
Thoreau had now seceded, and was a polity unto himself; or,
as he explains it with admirable sense, "In fact, I quietly
declare war with the State after my fashion, though I will
still make what use and get what advantage of her I can, as
is usual in such cases."  He was put in prison; but that was
a part of his design.  "Under a government which imprisons
any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.
I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if
ten men whom I could name - ay, if ONE HONEST man, in this
State of Massachusetts, CEASING TO HOLD SLAVES, were actually
to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the
county gaol therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in
America.  For it matters not how small the beginning may seem
to be; what is once well done is done for ever."  Such was
his theory of civil disobedience.

And the upshot?  A friend paid the tax for him; continued
year by year to pay it in the sequel; and Thoreau was free to
walk the woods unmolested.  It was a FIASCO, but to me it
does not seem laughable; even those who joined in the
laughter at the moment would be insensibly affected by this
quaint instance of a good man's horror for injustice.  We may
compute the worth of that one night's imprisonment as
outweighing half a hundred voters at some subsequent
election: and if Thoreau had possessed as great a power of
persuasion as (let us say) Falstaff, if he had counted a
party however small, if his example had been followed by a
hundred or by thirty of his fellows, I cannot but believe it
would have greatly precipitated the era of freedom and
justice.  We feel the misdeeds of our country with so little
fervour, for we are not witnesses to the suffering they
cause; but when we see them wake an active horror in our
fellow-man, when we see a neighbour prefer to lie in prison
rather than be so much as passively implicated in their
perpetration, even the dullest of us will begin to realise
them with a quicker pulse.

Not far from twenty years later, when Captain John Brown was
taken at Harper's Ferry, Thoreau was the first to come
forward in his defence.  The committees wrote to him
unanimously that his action was premature.  "I did not send
to you for advice," said he, "but to announce that I was to
speak."  I have used the word "defence;" in truth he did not
seek to defend him, even declared it would be better for the
good cause that he should die; but he praised his action as I
think Brown would have liked to hear it praised.

Thus this singularly eccentric and independent mind, wedded
to a character of so much strength, singleness, and purity,
pursued its own path of self-improvement for more than half a
century, part gymnosophist, part backwoodsman; and thus did
it come twice, though in a subaltern attitude, into the field
of political history.


NOTE. - For many facts in the above essay, among which I may
mention the incident of the squirrel, I am indebted to
THOREAU: HIS LIFE AND AIMS, by J. A. Page, or, as is well
known, Dr. Japp.



CHAPTER V - YOSHIDA-TORAJIRO



THE name at the head of this page is probably unknown to the
English reader, and yet I think it should become a household
word like that of Garibaldi or John Brown.  Some day soon, we
may expect to hear more fully the details of Yoshida's
history, and the degree of his influence in the
transformation of Japan; even now there must be Englishmen
acquainted with the subject, and perhaps the appearance of
this sketch may elicit something more complete and exact.  I
wish to say that I am not, rightly speaking, the author of
the present paper: I tell the story on the authority of an
intelligent Japanese gentleman, Mr. Taiso Masaki, who told it
me with an emotion that does honour to his heart; and though
I have taken some pains, and sent my notes to him to be
corrected, this can be no more than an imperfect outline.

Yoshida-Torajiro was son to the hereditary military
instructor of the house of Choshu.   The name you are to
pronounce with an equality of accent on the different
syllables, almost as in French, the vowels as in Italian, but
the consonants in the English manner - except the J, which
has the French sound, or, as it has been cleverly proposed to
write it, the sound of ZH.  Yoshida was very learned in
Chinese letters, or, as we might say, in the classics, and in
his father's subject; fortification was among his favourite
studies, and he was a poet from his boyhood.  He was born to
a lively and intelligent patriotism; the condition of Japan
was his great concern; and while he projected a better
future, he lost no opportunity of improving his knowledge of
her present state.  With this end he was continually
travelling in his youth, going on foot and sometimes with
three days' provision on his back, in the brave, self-helpful
manner of all heroes.  He kept a full diary while he was thus
upon his journeys, but it is feared that these notes have
been destroyed.  If their value were in any respect such as
we have reason to expect from the man's character, this would
be a loss not easy to exaggerate.  It is still wonderful to
the Japanese how far he contrived to push these explorations;
a cultured gentleman of that land and period would leave a
complimentary poem wherever he had been hospitably
entertained; and a friend of Mr. Masaki, who was likewise a
great wanderer, has found such traces of Yoshida's passage in
very remote regions of Japan.

Politics is perhaps the only profession for which no
preparation is thought necessary; but Yoshida considered
otherwise, and he studied the miseries of his fellow-
countrymen with as much attention and research as though he
had been going to write a book instead of merely to propose a
remedy.  To a man of his intensity and singleness, there is
no question but that this survey was melancholy in the
extreme.  His dissatisfaction is proved by the eagerness with
which he threw himself into the cause of reform; and what
would have discouraged another braced Yoshida for his task.
As he professed the theory of arms, it was firstly the
defences of Japan that occupied his mind.  The external
feebleness of that country was then illustrated by the
manners of overriding barbarians, and the visit of big
barbarian war ships: she was a country beleaguered.  Thus the
patriotism of Yoshida took a form which may be said to have
defeated itself: he had it upon him to keep out these all-
powerful foreigners, whom it is now one of his chief merits
to have helped to introduce; but a man who follows his own
virtuous heart will be always found in the end to have been
fighting for the best.  One thing leads naturally to another
in an awakened mind, and that with an upward progress from
effect to cause.  The power and knowledge of these foreigners
were things inseparable; by envying them their military
strength, Yoshida came to envy them their culture; from the
desire to equal them in the first, sprang his desire to share
with them in the second; and thus he is found treating in the
same book of a new scheme to strengthen the defences of Kioto
and of the establishment, in the same city, of a university
of foreign teachers.  He hoped, perhaps, to get the good of
other lands without their evil; to enable Japan to profit by
the knowledge of the barbarians, and still keep her inviolate
with her own arts and virtues.  But whatever was the precise
nature of his hope, the means by which it was to be
accomplished were both difficult and obvious.  Some one with
eyes and understanding must break through the official
cordon, escape into the new world, and study this other
civilisation on the spot.  And who could be better suited for
the business?  It was not without danger, but he was without
fear.  It needed preparation and insight; and what had he
done since he was a child but prepare himself with the best
culture of Japan, and acquire in his excursions the power and
habit of observing?

He was but twenty-two, and already all this was clear in his
mind, when news reached Choshu that Commodore Perry was lying
near to Yeddo.  Here, then, was the patriot's opportunity.
Among the Samurai of Choshu, and in particular among the
councillors of the Daimio, his general culture, his views,
which the enlightened were eager to accept, and, above all,
the prophetic charm, the radiant persuasion of the man, had
gained him many and sincere disciples.  He had thus a strong
influence at the provincial Court; and so he obtained leave
to quit the district, and, by way of a pretext, a privilege
to follow his profession in Yeddo.  Thither he hurried, and
arrived in time to be too late: Perry had weighed anchor, and
his sails had vanished from the waters of Japan.  But
Yoshida, having put his hand to the plough, was not the man
to go back; he had entered upon this business, and, please
God, he would carry it through; and so he gave up his
professional career and remained in Yeddo to be at hand
against the next opportunity.  By this behaviour he put
himself into an attitude towards his superior, the Daimio of
Choshu, which I cannot thoroughly explain.  Certainly, he
became a RONYIN, a broken man, a feudal outlaw; certainly he
was liable to be arrested if he set foot upon his native
province; yet I am cautioned that "he did not really break
his allegiance," but only so far separated himself as that
the prince could no longer be held accountable for his late
vassal's conduct.  There is some nicety of feudal custom here
that escapes my comprehension.