by John Burroughs
The Century, July 1882
Thoreau Reader: Home - Three Thoreaus - Burroughs Part 1
[1] One of his chief weapons is a kind of restrained extravagance of statement, a compressed exaggeration of metaphor. The hyperbole is big, but it is gritty and is firmly held. Sometimes it takes the form of paradox, as when he tells his friend that he needs his hate as much as his love:
Though I ponder on it well,
Which were easier to state,
All my love or all my hate."[2] His literary art, like that of Emerson’s, is in the unexpected turn of his sentences. Shakespeare says:
"It is the witness still of excellencyThis "strange face" Thoreau would have at all hazards, even if it was a false face. If he could not state a truth he would state a paradox, which, however, is not always a false face. He must make the commonest facts and occurrences wear a strange and unfamiliar look. The commonplace he would give a new dress, even if he set it masquerading. But the reader is always the gainer by this tendency in him. It gives a fresh and novel coloring to what in other writers would prove flat and weansome. He made the whole world interested in his private experiment at Walden Pond by the strange and, on the whole, beaming face he put upon it. Of course, this is always more or less the art of genius, but it was preeminently the art of Thoreau. We are not buoyed up by great power, we do not swim lightly as in deep water, but we are amused and stimulated, and now and then positively electrified.
To put a strange face on his own perfection."[3] To make an extreme statement, and so be sure that he made an emphatic one, that was his aim. Exaggeration is less to be feared than dullness and tameness. The far-fetched is good if you fetch it swift enough; you must make its heels crack — jerk it out of its boots, in fact. Cushions are good provided they are well stuck with pins; you will be sure not to go to sleep in that case. Warm your benumbed hands in the snow; that is a more wholesome warmth than that of the kitchen stove. This is the way he underscored his teachings. Sometimes he racked his bones to say the unsayable. His mind had a strong gripe, and he often brings a great pressure to bear upon the most vague and subtle problems, or shadows of problems, but he never quite succeeds to my satisfaction in condensing bluing from the air or from the Indian summer haze, any more than he succeeded in extracting health and longevity from water-gruel and rye-meal. He knew what an exaggeration he was, and he went about it deliberately. He says to one of his correspondents, a Mr. B whom he seems to have delighted to pummel with these huge boxing-gloves: "I trust that you realize what an exaggerator I am, — that I lay myself out to exaggerate whenever I have an opportunity, — pile Pelion upon Ossa to reach heaven so. Expect no trivial truth from me, unless I am on the witness-stand. I will come as near to lying as you can drive a coach-and-four."
[4] We have every reason to be thankful that he was not always or commonly on the witness-stand. The record would have been much duller. Eliminate from him all his exaggerations, all his magnifying of the little, all his inflation of bubbles, etc., and you make sad havoc in his pages — as you would, in fact, in any man's. Of course it is one thing to bring the distant near, and thus magnify as does the telescope, and it is quite another thing to inflate a pigmy to the stature of a giant with a gas-pipe. But Thoreau brings the stars as near as any writer J know of, and if he sometimes magnifies a will-o’-the-wisp, too, what matters it? He had a hard common-sense, as well as an uncommon sense, and he knows well when he is conducting you to the brink of one of his astonishing hyperboles, and inviting you to take the leap with him, and what is more, he knows that you know it. Nobody is deceived and the game is well played. Writing to a correspondent who had been doing some big mountain-climbing, he says:
"It is after we get home that we really go over the mountain if ever. What did the mountain say? What did the mountain do? I keep a mountain anchored off eastward a little way, which I ascend in my dreams, both awake and asleep. Its broad haze spreads over a village or two, which do not know it; neither does it know them, nor do I when I ascend it. I can see its general outline as plainly now in my mind as that of Wachusett. I do not invent in the least, but state exactly what I see. I find that I go up it when I am light-footed and earnest. I am not aware that a single villager frequents it or knows of it. I keep this mountain to ride instead of a horse."What a saving clause is that last one, and what humor![5] The bird Thoreau most admired was Chanticleer, crowing from his perch in the morning. He says the merit of that strain is its freedom from all plaintiveness. Unless our philosophy hears the cock-crow in the morning it is belated. "It is an expression of the health and soundness of Nature — a brag for all the world." "Who has not betrayed his Master many, times since he last heard that note?" "The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter, but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy? When in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or perchance a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow, far or near, I think to myself, ‘There is one of us well, at any rate,’ — and with a sudden gush return to my senses"
[6] Thoreau pitched his Walden in this key; he claps his wings and gives forth a clear, saucy, cheery, triumphant note — if only to wake his neighbors up. And the book is certainly the most delicious piece of brag in literature. There is nothing else like it; nothing so good, certainly. It is a challenge and a triumph, and has a morning freshness and élan. Read the chapter on his "bean-field." One wants to go forthwith and plant a field with beans, and hoe them barefoot. It is a kind of celestial agriculture. "When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed beans; and I remembered with as much pity as. pride, if I remembered at all, my acquaintances who had gone to the city to attend the oratorios." "On gala days the town fires its great guns, which echo like pop-guns to these woods, and some waif of martial music occasionally penetrated thus far. To me, away there in my bean-field and the other end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a puff-ball had burst; and when there was a military turn-out of which I was ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague sense all day, — of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would break out there soon, either scarlatina or canker-rash, — until at length some more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the Wayland road, brought me information of the ‘trainers’!"
[7] What visitors he had, too, in his little hut — what royal company! — "especially in the morning, when nobody called." "One inconvenience I sometimes experience in so small a house — the difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest, when we began to utter the big thoughts in big words." "The bullet of your thought must have overcome its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady course before it reaches the ear of the hearer, else it may plough out again through the side of his head." He bragged that Concord could show him nearly everything worth seeing in the world or in nature, and that he did not need to read Dr. Kane’s "Arctic Voyages" for phenomena that he could observe at home. He declined all invitations to go abroad, because he should then lose so much of Concord. As much of Paris, or London, or Berlin as he got, so much of Concord should he lose. He says in his journal: "It would be a wretched bargain to accept the proudest Paris in exchange for my native village." "At best, Paris could only be a school in which to learn to live here — a stepping-stone to Concord, a school in which to fit for this university." "The sight of a marsh-hawk in Concord meadows is worth more to me than the entry of the Allies into Paris." This is very Parisian and Victor Hugoish, except for its self-consciousness and the playful twinkle in the author’s eye.
[8] Thoreau had humor, but it had worked a little — it was not quite sweet; a vinous fermentation had taken place more or less in it. There was too much acid for the sugar. It shows itself especially when he speaks of men. How he disliked the average social and business man, and said his only resource was to get away from them. He was surprised to find what vulgar fellows they were. "They do a little business commonly each day, in order to pay their board, and then they congregate in sitting-rooms, and feebly fabulate and paddle in the social slush; and when I think that they have sufficiently relaxed, and am prepared to see them steal away to their shrines, they go unashamed to their beds, and take on a new layer of sloth." Methinks there is a drop of aquafortis in this liquor. Generally, however, there is only a pleasant acid or sub-acid flavor to his humor, as when he refers to a certain minister who spoke of God as if he enjoyed a monopoly of the subject; or when he says of the good church-people that "they show the whites of their eyes on the Sabbath, and the blacks all the rest of the week." He says the greatest bores who visited him in his hut by Walden Pond were the self-styled reformers, who thought that he was forever singing:
"This is the house that I built;But they did not know that the third line was:
This is the man that lives in the house that I built.""These are the folks that worry the man"I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no chickens, but I feared the men-harriers rather."
That lives in the house that I built."[9] What sweet and serious humor in that passage in Walden wherein he protests that he was not lonely in his hermitage:
"I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old settler and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond and stoned it, and fringed it with pine-woods; who tells me stories of old time and of new eternity; and between us we manage to pass a cheerful evening with social mirth and pleasant views of things, even without apples or cider — a most wise and humorous friend, whom I love much, who keeps himself more secret than ever did Goffe or Whalley; and though he is thought to be dead, none can show where he is buried. An elderly dame, too, dwells in my neighborhood, invisible to most persons, in whose odorous herb-garden I love to stroll sometimes, gathering simples and listening to her fables; for she has a genius of unequaled fertility, and her memory runs back farther than mythology, and she can tell me the original of every fable, and on what fact every one is founded, for the incidents occurred when she was young. A ruddy and lusty old dame, who delights in all weathers and seasons, and is likely to outlive all her children yet."[10] Emerson says Thoreau’s determination on natural history was organic, but it was his determination on supernatural history that was organic. Natural history was but one of the doors through which he sought to gain admittance to this inner and finer heaven of things. He hesitated to call himself a naturalist; probably even poet-naturalist would not have suited him. He says in his journal: "The truth is, I am a mystic, a transcendentalist, and a natural philosopher to boot," and the least of these is the natural philosopher. He says: "Man cannot afford to be a naturalist, to look at Nature directly, but only with the side of his eye. He must look through and beyond her. To look at her is as fatal as to look at the head of Medusa. It turns the man of science to stone." It is not looking at Nature that turns the man of science to stone, but looking at his dried and labeled specimens, and his dried and labeled theories of her. Thoreau always sought to look through and beyond her, and he missed seeing much there was in her; the jealous goddess had her revenge. I do not make this remark as a criticism, but to account for his failure to make any new or valuable contribution to natural history. He did not love Nature for her own sake, or the bird and the flower for their own sakes, or with an unmixed and disinterested love, as Gilbert White did, for instance, but for what he could make out of them. He says (Journal, page 83): "The ultimate expression or fruit of any created thing is a fine effluence, which only the most ingenuous worshiper perceives at a reverent distance from its surface even." This "fine effluence" he was always reaching after, and often grasping or inhaling. This is the mythical hound and horse and turtle-dove which he says in Walden he long ago lost, and has been on their trail ever since. He never abandons the search, and in every woodchuck-hole or musk-rat-den, in retreat of bird, or squirrel, or mouse, or fox that he pries into, in every walk and expedition to the fields or swamps, or to distant woods, in every spring note and call that he listens to so patiently, he hopes to get some clew to his lost treasures, to the effluence that so provokingly eludes him.[11] Hence, when we regard Thoreau simply as an observer or as a natural historian, there have been better, though few so industrious and persistent. He was up and out at all hours of the day and night, and in all seasons and weathers, year in and year out, and yet he saw and recorded nothing new. I cannot say that there was any felicitous and happy seeing; there was no inspiration of the eye, certainly not in the direction of natural history. He has added no new line or touch to the portrait of bird or beast that I can recall — no important or significant fact to their lives. What he saw in this field everybody may see who looks; it is patent. He had not the detective eye of the great naturalist; he did not catch the dews and hints dropped here and there, the quick, flashing movements, the shy but significant gestures by which new facts are disclosed, mainly because he was not looking for them. His eye was not penetrating and interpretive. It was full of speculation; it was sophisticated with literature, sophisticated with Concord, sophisticated with himself. His mood was subjective rather than objective. He was more intent on the natural history of his own thought than on that of the bird. To the last his ornithology was not quite sure, not quite trustworthy. In his published journal he sometimes names the wrong bird, and what short work a naturalist would have made of his night-warbler, which Emerson reports Thoreau had been twelve years trying to identify. It was perhaps his long-lost turtle-dove, in some one of its disguises. From his journal it would seem that he was a long time puzzled to distinguish the fox-colored sparrow from the tree or Canadian sparrow — a very easy task to one who has an eye for the birds. But he was looking too intently for a bird behind the bird — for a mythology to shine through his ornithology. "The song-sparrow and the transient fox-colored sparrow — have they brought me no message this year? Is not the coming of the fox-colored sparrow something more earnest and significant than I have dreamed of? Have I heard what this tiny passenger has to say while it flits thus from tree to tree?" "I love the birds and beasts because they are mytholog ically in earnest." (Journal, page 284.)
[12] If he had had the same eye for natural history he possessed for arrow-heads, what new facts he would have disclosed! But he was looking for arrow-heads. He had them in his mind; he thought arrow-heads; he was an arrow-head himself, and these relics fairly kicked themselves free of the mold to catch his eye.
[13] Thoreau was a man eminently "preoccupied of his own soul."(1) He had no self-abandonment, no self-forgetfulness; he could not give himself to the birds or animals: they must surrender to him. He says to one of his correspondents: "Whether he sleeps or wakes, whether he runs or walks, whether he uses a microscope or a telescope, or his naked eye, a man never discovers anything, never overtakes anything, or leaves anything behind, but himself." This is half true of some; it is wholly true of others. It is wholly true of Thoreau. Nature was the glass in which he saw himself. He says the partridge loves peas, but not those that go into the pot with her! All the peas Thoreau loved had been in the pot with him and were seasoned by him.[14] I trust I do not in the least undervalue Thoreau’s natural history notes; I only wish there were more of them. What makes them so valuable and charming is his rare descriptive powers. He could give the simple fact with the freshest and finest poetic bloom upon it. He says: "The note of the first blue-bird in the air answers to the purling nil of melted snow beneath. It is evidently soft and soothing, and, as surely as the thermometer, indicates a higher temperature. It is the accent of the south wind, its vernacular." Of the return of the highhole, or pigeon wood-pecker, he says: "The loud peep! of a pigeon woodpecker is heard, and, anon, the prolonged loud and shrill cackle calling the thin-wooded hill-sides and pastures to life. It is like the note of an alarm-clock set last fall so as to wake Nature up at exactly this date. Up up up up up up up up up!"
[15] Often a single word or epithet of his tells the whole story. Thus he says, speaking of the music of the black-bird, that it has a "split-whistle "; the note of the red-shouldered starling is "gurgle-ee." Looking out of his window one March day, he says he cannot see the heel of a single snow-bank anywhere. He does not seem to have known that the shrike sang in the fall and winter as well as in the spring; and is he entirely sure he saw a musk-rat building its house in March (the fall is the time they build); or that he heard the whippoorwill singing in September; or that the woodchuck dines principally upon crickets? With what patience and industry he watched things for a sign! From his journal it would appear that Thoreau kept nature about Concord under a sort of police surveillance the year round. He shadowed every flower and bird and musquash that appeared. His vigilance was unceasing; not a mouse or a squirrel must leave its den without his knowledge. If the birds or frogs were not on hand promptly at his spring roll-call, he would know the reason ; he would look them up; he would question his neighbors. He was up in the morning and off to some favorite haunt earlier than the day-laborers, and he chronicled his observations on the spot as if the case was to be tried in court the next day and he was the principal witness. He watched the approach of spring as a doctor watches the development of a critical case. He felt the pulse of the wind and the temperature of the day at all hours. He examined the plants growing under water, and noted the radical leaves of various weeds that keep green all winter under the snow. He felt for them with benumbed fingers amid the wet and the snow. The first sight of bare ground and of the red earth excites him. The fresh meadow spring odor was to him like the fragrance of tea to an old tea-drinker. In early March he goes to the Corner Spring to see the tufts of green grass, or he inspects the minute lichens that spring from the bark of trees. "It is short commons," he says, "and innutritious." He brings home the first frog-spittle he finds in a ditch and studies it in a tumbler of water. The first water-beetle that appears he makes a note of, and the first skunk-cabbage that thrusts its spathe up through the mold is of more interest to him than the latest news from Paris or London. "I go to look for mud-turtles in Heywood’s meadow," he says, March 23, 1853. The first water-fowl that came in the spring he stalked like a pot-hunter, crawling through the swamps and woods, or over a hill on his stomach, to have a good shot at them with his — journal. He is determined nature shall not get one day the start of him; and yet he is obliged to confess that "no mortal is alert enough to be present at the first dawn of spring "; still he will not give up trying. "Can you be sure," he says, "that you have heard the first frog in the township croak?" A lady offered him the life of Dr. Chalmers to read, but he would not promise. The next day she was heard through a partition shouting to some one who was deaf: "Think of it — he stood half an hour to-day to hear the frogs croak, and he wouldn’t read the life of Chalmers!" He would go any number of miles to interview a musk-rat or a woodchuck, or to keep an "appointment with an oak-tree," but he records in his journal that he rode a dozen miles one day with his employer, keeping a profound silence almost all the way. "I treated him simply as if he had bronchitis and could not speak — just as I would a sick man, a crazy man, or an idiot."
[16] Thoreau seems to have been aware of his defect on the human side. He says: "If I am too cold for human friendship, I trust I shall not soon be too cold for natural influences"; and then he goes on with this doubtful statement: "It appears to be a law that you cannot have a deep sympathy with both man and nature. Those qualities which bring you near to the one estrange you from the other." One day he met a skunk in the field, and he describes its peculiar gait exactly when he says: "It runs, even when undisturbed, with a singular teter or undulation, like the walking of a Chinese lady." He ran after the animal to observe it, keeping out of the reach of its formidable weapon, and when it took refuge in the wall he interviewed it at his leisure. If it had been a man or a woman he had met, he would have run the other way. Thus he went through the season, Nature’s reporter, taking down the words as they fell from her lips, and distressed if a sentence is missed.
[17] The Yankee thrift and enterprise that he had so little patience with in his neighbors, he applied to his peculiar ends. He took the day and the season by the foretop. "How many mornings," he says in Walden, "summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine!" He had an eye to the main chance, to a good investment. He probed the swamps like a butter-buyer, he sampled the plants and the trees and lichens like a tea-taster. He made a burning-glass of a piece of ice; he made sugar from a pumpkin and from the red-maple, and wine from the sap of the black-birch, and boiled rock-tripe for an hour and tried it as food. If he missed any virtue or excellence in these things or in anything in his line, or any suggestion to his genius, he felt like a man who had missed a good bargain. Yet he sometimes paused in this peeping and prying into nature, and cast a regretful look backward. "Ah, those youthful days," he says in his journal, under date of March 30, 1853, "are they never to return? — when the worker does not too enviously observe particulars, but sees, hears, scents, tastes, and feels only himself — the phenomena that showed themselves in him, his expanding body, his intellect and heart. No worm or insect, quadruped or bird confined his view, but the unbounded universe was his. A bird has now become a mote in his eye." Then he proceeds to dig out a woodchuck.
[18] In Walden, Thoreau pretends to quote the following passage from the Gulistan, or Rose Garden of Sadi of Shiraz, with an eye to its application to his own case, but as he evidently found it not in, but under, Sadi’s lines, it has an especial significance, and may fitly close this paper:
"They asked a wise man, saying: ‘Of the many celebrated trees which the Most High God has created, lofty and umbrageous, they call none azad, or free, excepting the cypress, which bears no fruit; what mystery is there in this?’ He replied: ‘Each has its appropriate produce and appointed season, during the continuance of which it is fresh and blooming, and during their absence dry and withered; to neither of which states is the cypress exposed, being always flourishing; and of this nature are the azads, or religious independents — Fix not thy heart on that which is transitory; for the Dijlah or Tigris will continue to flow through Bagdad after the race of caliphs is extinct: if thy hand has plenty, be liberal as the date-tree; but if it affords nothing to give away, be an azad, or free man, like the cypress.’"Note1. "I NEED no assurances — I am a man who is preoccupied, of his own Soul" - Walt Whitman, "Assurances" - back
Additional comments on Thoreau from Burroughs...
“Before Genius”, The Galaxy, April 1868: “Thoreau occupies a niche by himself; but Thoreau was not a great personality; far from it; yet his writings have a strong characteristic flavor. There is a real electric discharge into the mind from every page. He is anti-scorbutic, like leeks and onions. He has reference, also, to the highest truths.”
“Exhilarations of the Road”, The Galaxy, June 1873: “When you get into a railway car you want a continent, the man in his carriage requires a township; but a walker like Thoreau finds as much and more along the shores of Walden Pond.”
“Autumn Tides”, Scribners Monthly, October 1876: “Thoreau, I believe, was the first to remark upon the individuality of trees of the same species with respect to their foliage, — some maples ripening their leaves early and some late, and some being of one tint and some of another; and moreover, that each tree held to the same characteristics, year after year.”
“The Vital Touch in Literature”, The Atlantic Monthly, March 1899: “Readers fancy that in the works of Thoreau … some new charm or quality of nature is disclosed, that something hidden in field or wood is brought to light. They do not see that what they are in love with is the mind or spirit of the writer himself. Thoreau does not interpret nature, but nature interprets him. The new thing disclosed in bird and flower is simply a new sensibility to these objects in the beholder.”
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