Archibald McKellar MacMechan

“ If he had possessed the artistic instinct of Stevenson, or had undergone Stevenson’s rigid self-imposed discipline in the writer’s craft, he might have made A Week as complete a little masterpiece as An Inland Voyage. A Week fails on account of its scattering aim. It is neither a record of a week’s excursion, nor a book of essays, but a jumble of the two. Thoreau’s American contempt for tradition accounts for the artistic failure.
Where Thoreau is not the transcendental essayist, but the first-hand observer of nature, he is delightful. ”

“ To Thoreau nature is no divinity as she is to Wordsworth; she is simply the pleasantest of companions, or rather the pleasantest environment for a natural man. In a house, in a town, he is like a creature caged. ”

“ Thoreau had turned against the Church, he had turned against the State, and now he turned against organized society. He perceived that man was bound to the wheel of circumstance, he was the passive, unquestioning slave of a vain and sordid routine. One man at least would wrench himself free from the mill at which he saw his fellows ceaselessly toiling. ”

“ So wild creatures live in the wild, when not hunger-driven. The wild things found him to be of their own kind; a mouse made friends with him, a hen partridge led her brood about his hut, he could take a fish out of the water in his hand. Thoreau is perhaps the first to suggest the pleasure of hunting animals without a gun, of learning about them without any desire to kill. He was not influenced by Darwin, or such a conception as the struggle for existence. Nature to him was not red in tooth and claw with ravin ”

“ In the Age of Faith he would have fled to the wilderness for the same reason that he built his hut by Walden pond, in order to save his soul. Salvation for him meant escape from endless labour for the acquisition of useless things. By another paradox of his career, he freed himself from New England thrift by being still more thrifty. By denying himself and faring more scantily than his neighbours, he secured leisure for pursuits they could not comprehend. Thoreau is a prophet of the simple life, perhaps the first in America. ”

“ Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race.... Homer has never been printed in English, nor Æschylus, nor Virgil even,—works as refined, as solidly done, as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for later writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely if ever equalled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary labours of the ancients. Thoreau translated the Prometheus Vinctus and tried his hand at Pindar. ”

“ Still it is the adventurous, Robinson Crusoe part that is imperishable. How a man resolved to live in a new way, how he borrowed an axe and began felling pines on the ground that sloped southward to a wonderful pond, how he trimmed his rafters, dug his cellar, bought an Irish labourer’s shanty, transported the materials to a new site and raised the frame, appeal to the open-air instinct of every man. ”

“ He was not a real solitary, for visitors were always coming to view the progress of the odd experiment in living. Still Thoreau differed widely from the ordinary gregarious man in that he could manage to be alone for long periods with the woods and the sky. A friend called him a poet-naturalist; but the description is not exact. He hardly views nature as a poet, and he is surpassed by not a few observers of nature, who have had the stimulus of Darwin. The merely pictorial in nature does not much interest him, probably because he had seen no pictures. ”

“ The atmosphere of Walden is always serene and free from cloud or storm. Rain and winter come in their season; but they never seem to touch him; the rain does not wet, and the winter does not chill. There may be a thousand nooks in New England more beautiful than Walden, but they remain unknown, while the pine-clad slope which this strange being discovered and haunted for two years is charted as a permanent addition to the world-wide map of Romance.
§ 10. Style. Thoreau has two styles, the oracular and the simple; and in Walden the simple prevails. ”

“ What benefit he derived from his college years is a matter both of record and of inference. “What I was learning in college was chiefly, I think, to express myself,” he writes five years after leaving Harvard. Perhaps the most significant memorial of his college career is the Latin letter he wrote to his sister Helen, in 1840. It gave him pleasure to use the language of Virgil and Cicero, for one of the many paradoxes in Thoreau’s life was the union of true American contempt for tradition with an unaffected love of the classics. ”

“ Lowell saw and condemned it in his criticism of A Week. In prose there is the sentence which reads like an oracle. It may be the profoundest wisdom, or it may be the merest matter of moonshine. When Thoreau writes “Ancient history has an air of antiquity,” or, “Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand,” the critic can only fall back on the Gilbertian comment upon the young man who “expresses himself in terms too deep for me.” The imitation of Emerson’s poetry is even more marked and results in what Lowell calls Thoreau’s “worsification.” ”

“ Thoreau’s Youth and Education. For a generation which plumes itself upon its “breadth,” no slight effort is needed to picture the life of a typical New England village before the Transcendental movement had broken up the hard old Puritanic crust. It was a rigid and limited life made up of work, thrift, duty, and meetings. Caricatured and ridiculed though it be, that old stern life moulded men and women of the toughest moral and intellectual fibre. ”

“ Walden is also the memorial of an American faun, of a wild man who lived in the woods, who carried an umbrella like Robinson Crusoe, to weatherfend his head, and used a microscope to study insects with. About the same time, just after leaving Harvard, Thoreau found his first arrowhead and began his first journal, and the two streams of tendency ran side by side in his nature till the end. Intercourse with nature was even more necessary to Thoreau than intercourse with books. Intercourse with human beings he thought he did not need, but he was always tramping off to the village for a chat. ”

“ The Greek dog-sage in his tub, the English Quaker in his suit of leather, the Yankee land-surveyor in his wooden hut are three object lessons to the world of the ancient truth that “a man’s life consisteth not in the abundance of the things that he possesseth.” The Walden experiment is open to all the criticism of Lowell: “it presupposed all the complicated civilization which it theoretically abjured.” Even for Thoreau it was not a success. ”

“ The reader follows the solitary in his swim across the lake, or through the wood to the village, or about the hut, or along the rows of beans, with a zest he can hardly explain to himself. The reason is that Henry Thoreau in Walden wood is the same as the mariner of York on the Island of Desolation; he represents once more the struggle of primitive man to obtain food and shelter, in fact the epic of civilization. ”

“ Stevenson found the book dull. Still, it has an interest of its own for the light it sheds on Thoreau’s peculiar temperament, and particularly on his robust Americanism, a sentiment based on traditional dislike of Britain and on contempt for monarchy as an effete institution. Patriotism is a curious passion. It does not seem possible to love one’s own country except by hating some other country. Emerson defines Thoreau almost in these terms:
No truer American existed than Thoreau. ”

“ The stimulus to thought must have been most potent, and Emerson’s influence could not but stiffen Thoreau in his natural independence and confirm him in his design of living his own life.
§ 5. Rebellions: Church; State; Society. The village rebel who will not conform rebels first against the local religion. It is the obvious thing to rebel against. What Thoreau dissented from was New England Puritanism, as is plainly shown in “Sunday” of A Week. The atmosphere of that lost religion hangs about the letter of his roommate at Harvard, who became a minister in due course. ”

“ He would carry out his boyhood’s dream, and, by reorganization of his life, obtain freedom for the things that matter. By making life more simple, he would cheat circumstance and really begin to live. ”

“ When the mathematician would solve a difficult problem, he first frees the equation from all encumbrances, and reduces it to its simplest terms. So simplify the problem of life, distinguish the necessary and the real. ”

“ Even how he maintained the fire on the hearth, and grubbed out the fat pine roots to feed it, are matters of absorbing interest. His struggle with the weeds and poor soil of the two-acre patch on which he raised his beans and potatoes, every item of his various accounts, his food, his daily routine, his house-cleaning, have the fascination of a narrative by Defoe. ”

“ Canada. The next year, 1850, Thoreau and his friend Channing made a brief raid across the border into Quebec, though the record of his experience was not published until 1866, with the title A Yankee in Canada. ”

“ Heidelberg [1902] . Stevenson, Robert Louis. Henry David Thoreau: His Character and Opinions. Cornhill Magazine. June, 1880. Familiar Studies of Men and Books. London, 1882. Torrey, Bradford. Thoreau as a Diarist. Atlantic Monthly, Jan., 1905. —— Friends on the Shelf. Boston, 1906. Van Doren, Mark. Henry David Thoreau, a Critical Study. Boston and New York, 1916. Vincent, Leon H. American Literary Masters. Boston, 1906. Watts-Dunton, Theodore. Introd. to Walden. World’s Classics. Oxford, [1906] . Woodbury, Charles J. Talks with Ralph Waldo Emerson. London, 1890. ”

“ Wendell Phillips before the Concord Lyceum. The Liberator. 28 Mar., 1845. (6) Slavery in Massachusetts. Ibid. 21 July, 1854. (7) The Last Days of John Brown. Ibid. 27 July, 1860. (8) Ktaadn and the Maine Woods. Union Magazine. July, Aug., Sept., Oct., Nov., 1848. (9) Excursion to Canada. Putnam’s Monthly Magazine. Jan., Feb., Mar., 1853. (10) Cape Cod. Ibid. June, July, Aug., 1855. (11) The Succession of Forest Trees. New York Tribune. 6 Oct., 1860. [For other forms and appearances of this essay, see Allen’s Bibliography, p. 75] . (12) Inspiration [poem] . The Commonwealth [Boston] . ”