Thoreau: His Home, Friends and Books/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
THE WALDEN EXPERIMENT
THE methods of modern scholars happily blend induction and deduction. With analysis keen and delicate, which current science applies to all phases of life, there is joined the careful synthesis of these component elements before the ultimatum of criticism is reached. In past history and biography, there was a proneness to overrate certain prominent facts in character-analysis and overlook more integral but less obvious features. Modern historians coalesce the major and minor life-expressions of an individual or a period. The result of this later method in biography has been especially corrective. Greater use had been made of autobiographic journals and letters, revealing the entire man, less has depended upon partial and prejudiced conjectures.
Until very recent years it has been the honest opinion of the general world of readers that Thoreau was a stoic and a hermit. Critics have sacrificed justice to cleverness, they have delighted to picture him as an American Diogenes, sitting in his tub of Walden sunlight and roused, if at all, to warn all outsiders away from the rays of his special possession, Nature. The much-exploited incident of his Walden life, which we shall regard as an experiment, as he called it, represented only two years and a half of his forty-five years. It has been so overemphasized that "the hermit of Walden" has become his world-wide sobriquet; to many, as to Dr. Japp, Thoreau seemed "an odd, unaccountable kind of person." No one would assert that the motives of critics and biographers have been due, in the main, to intentional injustice to Thoreau; rather has there been a desire to picture, in the most dramatic light, one of the most unique and romantic episodes of modern literary history. A mystical charm always encircles the lives of hermits and ascetics, from John the Baptist and the early Essenes to Tristram and Roger Crab. A far greater curiosity has centred about this young recluse of modern life, who came from and returned to a happy home, who preached no religious creed or social scheme but who found in his life at Walden nucleus for a volume of bright, charming studies of nature, society, morality, and his relation to all three factors. The close student of Thoreau's life and records, coupled with the testimony of friends who visited him at Walden, must recognize that this experiment was a natural result of his environment and his complex nature. Thus regarded, the episode loses much of that outré look which, according to some critics, explains the real interest in his life.
The intellectual revolution in New England, succeeding the movements of progress in politics and literature in Europe during the early decades of the nineteenth century, had two sequential forms, Unitarianism and Transcendentalism. Distinct as was each in direct aim and result, they were allied with that great world-movement of liberty which transformed all the broader aspects of life. Channing preached a new, fearless gospel of mental freedom in religion, an appeal to reason and individual conscience rather than formulas. Transcendentalism, with relevant changes from the doctrines of Kant, Coleridge and Carlyle, sought to gain freedom for intellect,—to discover verities by reason and intuition, not by dogmas. As Unitarianism became dogmatic at times and suffered from divergent and extreme teachings tending towards agnosticism, so Transcendentalism, still more susceptible to emotional excess, often submerged its simpler, nobler ideals beneath much extravagance and mysticism. In the application of idealism to moral conduct and in the emphasis of the unity of life and literature, Transcendentalism, despite some chiaroscuric phases, became for many years one of the strongest influences upon American character and letters.
One of the most vital and practical effects of Transcendental teaching was the wish to devise means to simplify life, both economically and socially. To so reduce the daily wants of individual and family that time and anxiety might be saved and greater opportunities given for education of the higher facilities, "the things of the intellect and soul,"—this represented the open and latent purpose of leaders of this thought-movement. Joined with this practical desire to lessen physical demands and financial strain, was the fontal norm in the primal philosophy from which this had been evolved,—"the return to nature," to her sanative influence in lieu of artificiality and luxury. Mr. Emerson, in that rhapsodic essay on "Nature," well characterized by Carlyle as "azure-colored," had emphasized the purifying and educative effects of nature on the senses, intellect, morals and will. He always questioned, however, the utility of communal schemes for simplification and social reform. In 1840, he wrote to Carlyle,—"We are all a little wild with numberless projects of social reform; not a reading-man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket." At about the same time his sagacity and prudence warned these Sequesters;—"It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the coarsest observer, that many intelligent and religious persons withdraw themselves from the common labors of and competitions of the market and caucus, and betake themselves to a solitary and critical way of living, from which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify their separation." Reformers and individual oddities abounded and were attracted to Emerson's home in great variety. Vegetarians, spiritualists, mystics, philosophers of all degrees of earnestness and charlatanism came thither, to meet Thoreau and the other friends of Emerson, to leave behind often, as the lasting impress, the lack of that quality so well defined by Emerson as "the saving grace of common sense."
Many critics of the proposed communities, among them Dr. Ezra Ripley and Mr. Emerson, failed to understand the ultimate aim of the promoters,—not exclusion but inclusion. If these sundry settlements should prove stable, they were to furnish models, like Ruskin's "St. George's Guild," for establishment in all parts of America of agrarian communities, presided over by men of intellect and philosophical training. These experiments, so numerous in America from 1840 to 1850, had two general forms,—the larger number were communities for families, the smaller in number and lesser known were individualistic. Of the latter, Thoreau's experiment is the popular example. The wave of social agitation which overran America at this time was the natural sequence of the teachings of Lassalle and Fourier, of Southey, Coleridge and Godwin. The actual experiments of Robert Owen, on his proselyting visit from England twenty years before, had included a short-lived settlement in Indiana. The Fourierian Phalansteries in New Jersey and Pennsylvania were established under the guidance of William Channing and Horace Greeley. At about the same time was started the still existent Oneida Community.
As early as 1835 there had gathered in New England, with centre of interest at Boston, philosophers to discuss the idealism of Kant, Hegel and Schelling and its interpretations in the writings of English authors. To these abstract phases of discussion were joined, in America, zealous arguments on state, church and society. Here smouldered reactionary fires against both the Trinitarian and the Unitarian forms of Puritanism. Defiant to the Calvinistic dogma of man's inherited depravity, were doctrines of human goodness and progress, emphasis of the divinity in man and his relation to the intuitive, transcendent life. When these "disciples of the newness" met in Boston for the symposium, compared by Emerson to "going to heaven in a swing," the public gave them the name of "The Transcendental Club," though it is still questioned if any real organization existed. James Freeman Clarke once said that they called themselves "the club of the like-minded, because no two thought alike." To their discussions were admitted Alcott, Hawthorne, the Peabody sisters, Margaret Fuller, Thoreau, Weiss, Bartol, and others, in addition to the leaders of the movement, the Ripleys, Emerson, Brownson, Hedge and James Freeman Clarke. As an evident outcome of the discussions for simplifying daily routine and reforming educational methods, came the Brook Farm community, with its varied history from 1841-1847. Here the Transcendental Club divided. Emerson, assured that the individual, not the community, must be basal in all reform, never eager for special scheme or method, was indifferent to such communities, as already shown. Ripley, however, determined to apply the theories which he had imbibed, purchased the famous farm in West Roxbury in 1840, planned for a corporate association, and attracted thither, during the next few years, many noted reformers and authors. Emerson enjoyed visits at Brook Farm. He allowed his Dial to report the life there, since Margaret Fuller was one of his editors and also in residence at the community, but he was never influenced to identify himself with the communal life. This is not the place to portray further the life of this picturesque settlement with its commingled seraphic thought and manual work. Mr. Lindsay Swift, in his admirable study of Brook Farm, records that, after Alcott's visits and his nebulous symbolism, "the pie was always cut from the centre to the periphery," while a desire for butter was couched in the psychic phrase,—"Is the butter within the sphere of your influence?" One fact must be noted, that Brook Farm, as originally conceived, consisted of an association of individual families. The later influence of Albert Brisbane, promulgator of Fourierism and communism, was responsible for the change in constitution in 1844, which made it a Fourierian Phalanx, akin to the communities at Hopedale, Northampton and the "Ceresco," or Wisconsin, settlement.
"With the same purpose as Brook Farm, but with briefer life, was the experiment of Alcott and his English friends, Lane and Wright, at Harvard, Massachusetts. This plan was executed in 1843, while Thoreau was at Staten Island, but sundry references to it are in the letters interchanged with Emerson and Lane. In The New England Magazine for April, 1900, is an interesting article upon "The Alcotts in Harvard," outlining the life at "Fruitlands." The sixteen members of this family lived through the balmy summer "in harmony with the primitive instincts of man," when fruit and light clothing were acceptable amenities. The cold, dismal winter made such life unendurable and, in dismay, they left "Apple Slump," as Mrs. Alcott called the home that had proved another fiasco for this transmigratory family. Louisa Alcott's story, "Transcendental Wild Oats," portrays well the mingled joys and sorrows of the time, while her little poem, "Despondency," expresses the gloom, yet courage, of this girl of eleven years. Alcott in his journal gives a characteristic comment on this and similar experiments,—"None of us were prepared to actualize practically the ideal life of which we dreamed."
Thoreau visited "Fruitlands" but declined to become a member of the colony. In a letter to him from Lane, June 7, 1843, is a complimentary hint which doubtless preceded more urgent invitation. After describing the general topography of their farm of ninety acres, the writer says,—"On the estate are about fourteen acres of wood, part of it extremely pleasant as a retreat, a very sylvan realization, which only wants a Thoreau's mind to elevate it to classic beauty." In that sentence is suggestion that Thoreau had already expressed desire for some retreat, some "sylvan realization." In truth, the Walden lodge was the outcome of a long, though vague, anticipation. From the communistic settlements of the time, Emerson and Thoreau both held aloof. Emerson's clear foresight and prudence realized their futility under existent conditions; he also disapproved of their restrictive character which seemed to him undemocratic, if not unpatriotic. He was, however, sufficiently impressed by the communistic spirit so that, in 1840, he invited the Alcott family to share his home and urged Mrs. Emerson to further simplify their domestic life by including the servants at the family dining-table. Mrs. Emerson thought the former plan "a wild scheme" but acquiesced. Mrs. Alcott's good sense, however, prompted her refusal to accept such unmeasured hospitality. The efforts at domestic social reform also proved futile because the two maids were quite unwilling to join the family at meals.
Thoreau's reasons for distrust of communism were resident in his antagonism to the fundamental idea. His trend of mind was wholly individualistic. He was never a disciple of communism, as living together; he did, however, advocate cooperation, in the sense of working together. In "Walden" he says,—"To cooperate, in the highest as well as the lowest sense, means to get our living together." Deeply influenced by the reform theories of his friends, though averse to their schemes, lacking dependent home-ties, with his independent doctrine of self-expansion firmly planted, Thoreau had long planned to go into semi-retirement for study of nature, reflection and writing. Already he had tested his powers and inclinations and had so far "found himself" that he recognized his special gifts as nature-interpreter and poet. To more fully observe her forms and changes, to have leisure from sordid tasks for calm reflection, he wished to shut himself within some isolated retreat there to educe a philosophy of life. In the Commencement Conference, already mentioned, he had said;—"The order of things should be somewhat reversed; the seventh should be a man's day of toil, wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow; and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul—in which to range this widespread garden and drink in the soft influence and sublime revelations of nature." Thus early had this nebulous fancy haunted him! In his journal, December 24, 1841, is recorded,—"I want to go soon and live away by the pond, where I shall hear only the wind whispering among the reeds. It will be success if I shall have left myself behind. But my friends ask what I will do when I get there,—will it not be employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons?" About the same time are vague references to this plan of his in letters from Channing and Margaret Fuller.
This desire to sequester oneself from conflicting and exacting duties, and to develop the mental and religious life, was no uncommon incident of that age; indeed, it is the aspiration of many individuals in every age. All sections of America can point to some "hermitage" where a recluse has buried himself for purposes of study or religion, sometimes because of blighted affection, and thus has become an object of curiosity to the community. This idea of isolation by individuals and communities, this return to simple agrarian life, was pervasive through the atmosphere half a century ago. Among the college friends of Thoreau, already noted, was Charles Stearns Wheeler, whose tragic death in Germany in 1843, was a great grief to Emerson and Thoreau. His home was in Lincoln, four miles from Concord, and in 1841-2, that he might find time for study and save money for foreign travel, he built a shanty, "a woodland study," near Flint's Pond, midway between Lincoln and Concord. There is a tradition that Thoreau assisted him in constructing the hut; Mr. Channing is authority for the statement that Thoreau visited Wheeler there for six weeks. It is sure that this and other examples of the time, in retirement for study and economy, greatly influenced Thoreau in fostering his desire for a temporary home by the pond, in the midst of nature's peaceful beauty.
Before Walden was chosen, he wavered for a time after he had determined to build a lodge somewhere. In a letter recently seen, is this reference under date of 1841,—"I am sorry for Mr. Henry's disappointment about his farm." Doubtless this is the incident told in breezy style in the early chapters of "Walden,"—the effort to purchase the Hollowell farm on the road to Nine Acre Corner, with its gray, weather-beaten building, its red maple grove, and its rabbit-knawed apple-trees. With semi-satiric detail he explained;—"The nearest that I came to actual possession was when I bought the Hollowell place, and had begun to sort my seeds, and collected materials with which to make a wheelbarrow to carry it on or off with; but before the owner gave me a deed of it, his wife,—every man has such a wife,—changed her mind and wished to keep it, and he offered me ten dollars to release him. Now, to speak the truth, I had but ten cents in the world, and it surpassed my arithmetic to tell, if I was that man that had ten cents, or who had a farm, or ten dollars, or all together. However, I let him keep the ten dollars and the farm too, I had carried it far enough; or rather, to be generous, I sold him the farm for just what I gave for it, and, as he was not a rich man, made him a present of ten dollars, and still had my ten cents, and seeds, and materials for a wheel-barrow left. I found thus that I had been a rich man without any danger to my poverty. But I retained the landscape, and I have since annually carried off what it yielded without any wheel-barrow."
The choice of Walden as final site for his lodge was probably decided by two dissimilar agencies. As he tells his readers one of his earliest memories was a ride to Walden woods and a fleeting, childish wish that he might live by the pond there. Later he found boyish pleasure in idling along its banks or building fires to attract the pouts close to its edge. Thus, the locality was associated not alone with his youth but also with the memories of his brother. The second decisive circumstance was the purchase by Emerson of some woodland along both shores of Walden, to supply him with fire-wood and also give him a sense of ownership in his favorite walks. There can be no doubt that he planned to have a study on the opposite shore of the pond from that chosen by Thoreau. No place about Concord was more wildly picturesque and, at the same time, accessible for Thoreau's experiment than Walden. Distant about a mile and a half from the town centre, it is reached by a gradual incline, bordered by brambles, wayside flowers and trees of varied kinds. As the visitor looks across the meadow he recalls that Thoreau found a shorter path to the homes of his friends, a by-road traversing the fields and entering the main road just below Emerson's house and nearly opposite the "Wayside," then called "The Hillside," and at that time the home of Alcott. With the keen eye of a resident poet, Thoreau has described Walden Pond, the peculiar clarity and varying tints, blue, green, and gray, with the arching hills, from forty to one hundred and fifty feet high.
The legends, no less than the scenery, attracted him thither. This region, now consecrate to peaceful memories, was earlier a place of uncanny and gruesome traditions. It was an Indian haunt and Thoreau asserts that the pond may have been named from an Indian squaw, Walden, who escaped after a frightful pow-wow where the profanity was so extreme that there was an earthquake in warning and, at the concussion, the stones rolled down the hillside and thus formed the present paved shore. He also suggests another possible derivation;—"If the name was not derived from some English locality,—Saffron Walden for instance,—one might suppose that it was originally called Walled-in-Pond." Later, it was the encampment of a band of outlaws whose evil deeds long frightened the Concord farmers and whose downfall from virtue was due to "a demon not distinctly named in old mythology, who has acted a prominent and astounding part in our New England life, and deserves as much as any mythological character, to have his biography written one day; who first comes in the guise of a friend or hired man, and then robs and murders the whole family,—New England Bum." In this vicinity also lived for many years, Zilpha, the noisy witchlike singer and spinner, and her descendant, the quiet, yet awe-inspiring sooth-sayer, Zenda. Senator Hoar recalls a tradition of his boyhood, told by one Tommy Wyman whose hut was near Walden, that an Indian doctor dwelt in a hidden recess near the pond and would seize children and cut up their livers to make medicines.
Upon the north shore of the pond, just above its 
SITE OF THOREAU'S HOUSE, WALDEN
Upon the north shore of the pond, just above its cove, Thoreau selected
his site about forty yards from the water cove, Thoreau selected his site about forty yards from the water. He delighted to call himself a "squatter" on Emerson's land, for this nomadic term well suited his mood. In the early spring of 1845 he associated yet another friend with his enterprise by borrowing Alcott's axe to hew his timbers. He states, with grim humor and exactness mingled, that he returned the axe sharper than when he received it. Happily he spent his days, felling and shaping and joining his timbers, never too busy to note each sight and sound of nature, the scream of the Walden owl, the movements of the pouts in the water, and each night he returned to his home. At last the frame was completed, the cellar dug, the planks bought from an Irishman's shanty, and the famous little lodge, ten feet by fifteen, with its snug closet, garret, window, two doors and fireplace, was raised by the friendly assistance of Alcott, Hosmer, and George William Curtis, then an inmate of Hosmer's home and an apprentice on his farm. With graceful tribute to these friends, Thoreau wrote in "Walden";—"No man was ever more honored in the character of his raisers than I. They are destined, I trust, to assist at the raising of loftier structures one day." The necessary plain furniture, not forgetting the desk and small looking-glass, as well as the cooking utensils, were moved thither, his boat transferred to the cove, and on the Fourth of July, 1845, he became resident of this unique home, constructed by himself at a cost of $28.12½. The personal work in the structure of the house had for him a romantic, as well as economic, interest;—"Who knows but if men constructed their dwellings with their own hands and provided food for themselves and families simply and honestly enough, the poetic faculty would be universally developed as birds universally sing when they are so engaged. But alas! we do like cow-birds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built and cheer no traveler with their chattering and unmusical notes." As the tourist stands in that tiny Thoreau room at the Concord Antiquarian Hall and looks at that cot, desk and chair preserved from the lodge, it is not difficult to picture the interior of the hut that gave opportunity for mental inspiration to the poet and naturalist. Mr. S. R. Bartlett, a frequent visitor, recalled that on the closet door was a sketch in pencil of a man feeding a tame mouse, an appropriate and suggestive decoration.
Reference has been made to this encampment at Walden as an experiment; for this term, we have Thoreau's own words, at least twice in the record of his life there. In the section on "Shelter" he says,—"But to make haste to my own experiment;" again, he concludes,—"I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that, if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life that he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." In retiring thus for a time for self-analysis and growth, he had three main motives,—to find the actual cost of the necessaries of civilized life, to gain an intimate and constant acquaintance with nature at all seasons, and to attend to what he calls "some private business,"—namely, to read, think, and record his observations, reflections, and practical experiences. He had a tentative belief that his special aptitude was writing, and writing of a particular, and then unusual, trend,—the preservation of poetic and philosophical ideas associated with nature-lore.
The residence at Walden has been too often misconstrued both as regards aim, general and personal, and also his actual life there. Professor Gates, in a recent study of Wordsworth, has said,—"At times it almost seems as if Wordsworth would have liked to have all men and women take to the woods." The same thought has been expressed often about Thoreau and the question has been raised regarding the "scheme" which he proposed. He offered no scheme; rather he denied such intent in "Walden";—"I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different persons in the world as possible; but I would that each one be very careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or his mother's or his neighbor's instead." Could other words more fully proclaim his individualism and disclaim his dogmatism? Could any words more fully declare that this residence was an experiment and only that? In a nugget, he summarized his purpose,—"I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach."
Thoreau thus represented the theoretical inquiries of the Transcendentalists regarding the simplification of life and the real freedom of action and will. He was, also, deeply concerned with the practical question of sufficient income to maintain his needs and, at the same time, give him leisure to study and expand mentally and spiritually. With his proud, exact disposition, he was always industrious in the true meaning of the term, and punctilious about debts. He had tried teaching, editing, surveying, pencil-making, and like pursuits, but he found these occupations so confining, with so little margin for the free, full expression of his higher nature, that he felt shriveled and rebelled against such mechanical thraldom. He believed, and proved by his experiment, that a student who was content to reduce his wants to the lowest ratio, who would combine in moderation manual work and mental improvement, could thus secure the greatest blessings of life. Like our Southern poet, Paul Hamilton Hayne, at Copse Hill, he found in the pine retreat invigoration for body and spirit. Here he would experimentalize with the bugbear, maintenance, regarding the four requisites of life,—shelter, food, fuel, and clothing,—here he would expand and train his mind and soul.
In no way was he anxious to pose as a hermit or even a strict recluse. Nearly every day he walked to the village, as he tells us, to see his family and friends and gather the news. He was within access of any real service which he might render, he was a popular host, and his life there as elsewhere, commingled "the human and the sylvan." Among magazine articles that exerted a modicum of unjust influence during his life was that in Chamber's Journal, November 21, 1857, entitled "An American Diogenes." It abounds in false statements and unjust surmises; as example, "he lived lazily in a hut, in a lonely wood, subsisting on beans." Dr. Edward Emerson has said of this Walden incident,—"His own Walden camping was but a short experimental episode, and even then this very human and affectionate man constantly visited his friends in the village, and was a most dutiful son and affectionate brother."
On the practical side, as a personal experience, his experiment succeeded. For two years and a half he lived simply and healthily, easily meeting his necessary expenses by an occasional contract for surveying for some neighbor farmer, or by exchange or sale of his beans and other produce. At the same time, he had ample leisure for study and soul-expansion. To-day, one finds the spot near the highway where he sowed, hoed, and harvested vegetables, mainly beans, whose rows would aggregate seven miles, planting some for early, some for later, harvest. The beans became associated not alone with pleasurable physical exercise but also with constant thoughts of lofty scope. The bean was a classic vegetable, associated with myths and heroic history as well as with Roman agriculture. Perchance, Thoreau's poetic, classic-trained mind chose this distinctive vegetable for this reason, but, more probably, his Yankee thrift recognized that the soil favored this commodity. In tribute of memory, he wrote,—"I came to love my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the soil, and so I got strength like Antæus." Here spoke the poetic, well-rounded workman, who knew the glory of true work! He had close rivals in the woodchucks who "nibbled for me a quarter of an acre clean." He maintained, however, as did Lowell of birds in "My Garden Acquaintance," that the transgressors had prior rights of residence. Though he caught one in a trap, and confined him for a few hours, he refused to concur in any sentence more severe than transportation two miles away and a reprimand, accentuated by a stick; so the woodchuck departed in quest of pastures new. Thoreau was often amused at the comments heard from the roadway, as travelers passed in gigs, "with elbows on knees and reins hanging loosely in festoons." "Does he live there?" asks the black bonnet of the gray coat; "and the hard-featured farmer reins up his grateful dobbin to inquire what you are doing when he sees no manure in the furrow, and recommends a little chip dirt, or any little waste stuff, or it may be, ashes or plaster." What a vivid silhouette! Occasionally, he gave variety to his diet by a catch of fish from Walden or Flint Pond. He became, however, far more of a poet and romanticist in his attitude towards nature during his lake-encampment. His substitute pleasure for angling was reverie in his boat on warm evenings, "playing the flute, and watching the perch, which I seemed to have charmed, hovering around me, and the moon traveling over the ribbed bottom, which was strewed with the wrecks of the forest."
This Walden experiment had potent influence in informing and educing the naturalist, both in scientific and poetic qualities. As he had anticipated, so he gained that intimate and wide knowledge of nature as is only revealed to one who lives in familiar communion with her through the varying changes of two complete seasons. One of his acknowledged purposes was to note the actual awakening of spring in the subtle, secretive phases of soil, woodland, sap, and insect. Eagerly he saw and compared the primal signs of release from hibernation of all vegetable and animal life; with exultant thrill he heard the first note of bird, the earliest buzz of bee, and the faintest chirp of the frog. In truth, as one traces the services of Thoreau as naturalist, he realizes that the first true revelation came to him in this very heart of nature, able to count her pulse-beats, free from the sordid distractions and cares of outside life.
Allusion has been made to "some private business" which Thoreau wished to accomplish at Walden. Mr. Channing is inclined to regard this as a restrictive reference to writing and he calls the hut "a writing-case." It is true that he already had essayed authorship but he felt the need of much preparation. His unique and conscientious nature sought years of reflection and observation before he was ready to say,—"My work is writing." The depth and complexity of his thoughts on nature and life distinguish his volumes from those of the casual author of books on similar themes. At Walden during the winter months he studied and wrote, reviewing in sad, yet placid, memory the week's voyage with his brother, and preparing the journal notes and interpolated thoughts for publication. He also recorded and compiled his observations on nature before and during the Walden residence. One must recall, however, that "A Week on the Concord and Merrimack," was not published until two years after he left Walden and that the book which commemorates his life in the woods was deferred, partly for financial reasons, for six years later. While writing formed part of his "private business," another important part was leisurely reflection and philosophic inquiry, combined with assiduous study of the best classics, preparation for later authorship and lectures. In the section, entitled "Higher Laws," he writes,—"I found in myself, and still find, an instinct towards a higher, or, as it is named, a spiritual life, as do most men, and another towards a primitive, rank and savage one, and I reverence them both." Here was resident the dual pleasure in this Walden experience. It was essentially an oasis in a life of work. It was his "Sabbatical year," a dream yet a realization, an anticipation yet a preparation for nobler, fuller life. The life had been opened, the time of refreshment and preparation must end, and so he explains,—"I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps, it seemed to me that I had several lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one."
Thus far, we have reviewed Thoreau's life at Walden in its subjective aspect, and to many readers this would seem the only possible perspective. If we refuse to consider him as a hermit, however, another opinion must prevail. Speaking personally he declared,—"My life itself was become my amusement and never ceased to be novel." The words are as applicable to the objective side of the life, whose novelty has been the subject of unending criticism. In "Walden" he offers a few glimpses of his relations with humanity during these two years. Occasional visitors and friends have furnished many other memories. He recites his daily life from the early morning bath in the pond and the floor-scrubbing, with all the furniture moved out in the sunlight, to his quiet evening hours either spent at his lodge or in the town, from which he returned to enjoy the whippoorwill or owl, with "its truly Ben Jonsonian scream," or to listen to the distant whistle of the train. One of the most interesting phases of his Walden life was the interchange of visits with his family and friends. A relative who often spent weeks with the Thoreau family has recalled their custom to visit him on Saturday afternoons, carrying some delicacies of cookery which he always accepted with pleasure. Frequently, he came into town to have dinner or tea with his own household or at the homes of Emerson, Alcott, or Hosmer. At the latter hearth-side he spent Sunday evenings, returning the visit which the farmer and some of his family always paid Thoreau Sunday afternoons. Miss Jane Hosmer kindly narrated to me her memories of these visits when, as a child, she accompanied her father to the famous little lodge, scrupulously neat, where Thoreau sat at his desk, her father in an adjacent chair, and the children on "the bunk," listening, not always with patience, to the extended discussions on philosophy or Scandinavian mythology. As a result, she gained her primal instruction in that branch so that, in later years, she found herself compelled to translate Greek and Roman myths into her earlier models of Thor, Woden, and Igdrasil.
Thoreau always welcomed sincere visitors and true neighbors, from whatever distance. While still hewing his timber, he attracted an occasional rambler and adds,—"we chatted pleasantly over the chips which I had made." To him "Visitors" included animal friends, the native mice, the phœbe and the wasps. In the same chapter on his visitors he answers the suggestion of hermit, saying;—"I think that I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to fasten myself like a blood-sucker for a time to any full-blooded man that comes in my way. I naturally am no hermit, but might possibly sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the barroom, if my business called me thither." Doubtless, he inherited some of the Dunbar loquacity, for he once said,—"I love dearly to talk," and friends testified to his wonderful conversational powers among congenial minds. In spite of such general statements and the addendum, given us in "Walden," that at one time he had "twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies," in his woodland home, one must recognize that he best enjoyed his part as host when he required "the two chairs for friendship" rather than "the three for society." He could stir a hasty-pudding and bake a loaf of bread with one guest, though if twenty came, "there was nothing said about dinner." With an amusing touch of sarcasm on the housekeeping customs of his time, he adds,—"My 'best' room, however, my withdrawing room, always ready for company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood behind my house. Thither, in summer days, when distinguished guests came, I took them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor and dusted the furniture and kept the things in order."
Distinguished guests often came; sometimes, finding their host absent, they left a visiting-card of yellow walnut leaf, appropriately inscribed. In addition to the intellectual friends who were frequent callers, Emerson, Alcott, Kipley, Channing, and others, he had many chance visitors of all social grades. There came the Canadian woodchopper and philosopher, "a true Homeric or Paphlagonian man." Hither strolled men and women, boys and girls, fishermen, hunters, poets, farmers, doctors, and "uneasy housewives who pried into my cupboard and bed when I was out." While he greeted all honest visitors with "Welcome, Englishmen," it would have been incompatible with his temperament if he had not arraigned the sham visitors, called thither by prurient criticism. With grim satire, he wrote;—"Finally, there were the self-styled reformers, the greatest bores of all who thought that I was forever singing,
This is the house that I built;
This is the man that lives in the house that I built;
but they did not know that the third line was
These are the folks that worry the man
That lives in the house that I built!"
At one time an impression was abroad that the Walden hut was a station in the underground railway for fugitive slaves, but this error has been corrected by Colonel Higginson. Thoreau mentions one "real runaway slave among the rest, whom I helped to forward towards the North Star."
All who have written or spoken their memories of this Walden lodge have testified to its neatness and charm and the quiet, cordial hospitality of its owner. In "Walden" is a subtle suggestion of a yearning and listening for "the visitor who never comes," and again confession of "a little stagnation, it may be, about two o'clock in the afternoon." When he plastered his cabin during the first autumn, Channing was his guest for a fortnight; it seems unfortunate that he has not given the world a more adequate vision of such phases of the life of his friend. In the series of poems, commemorative of Thoreau, "The Wanderer," Channing has described lovingly the interior of the hut and his friend's general aspect. The use of the term, hermit, must not be considered literal, for Channing did not so construe Thoreau's nature, as many passages in his biography witness:
"I loved to mark him,
So true to nature. In his scanty cabin,
All along the walls, he hid the crevice
With some rustic thought,—a withered grass,
Choice-colored blackberry vines, and nodding sedge
Fantastically seeded; or the plumes
The golden-rod dries in the fall; and tops
Of lespedeza, brown as the Spanish mane;
And velvet bosses quaintly cut away
Off the compliant birches, of whose trunks
This hermit blest made pillage."
One can readily imagine the religious purity of such environment as that of Walden when "every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with nature herself." With his deeply-rooted religion, pantheistic though it was, and his free solitary thought and action, he records, "My days were not days of the week, bearing the stamp of any heathen deity, nor were they minced into hours and fretted by the ticking of a clock." Such assertion throws light upon an incident related to me by a friend of the Thoreaus, an unpublished anecdote which illumines some of his traits and his frequent misinterpretation. His mother had expressed a wish for a pine-tree of certain size for the yard and Henry, always eager to give pleasure to his family, found the desired tree one morning, pulled it up by the roots, and, balancing it upon his shoulder, started for his Concord home. Arrived at the town-centre, he noticed a number of people coming out of the church and then, for the first time, he remembered it was Sunday. Fifty years ago, in a village community, such disregard of the Sabbath seemed most culpable, both to Trinitarians and Unitarians. When he first realized his position, he might have stopped at any house on the road, "where he was always welcome," said my informant, but any such concealment or device would be contrary to his open, sincere nature. With good motive he had started to bring home the pine-tree and, justifying his conscience, he sturdily bore his burden past the church amid the gaping, horrified people to his mother's yard. Of course, this incident, like many another in his life, was misconstrued as predetermined defiance of custom, and he suffered quietly the judgment which resulted, tenaciously refusing to explain.
Among many distorted ideas regarding the Walden experiment, one of the most flagrant is Mr. Lowell's conclusion,—"His shanty life was a mere impossibility, so far as his own conception of it goes, as an entire independency of mankind." What possible evidence, from his own words or those of his friends, is there for the assertion that Thoreau had any desire to establish or declare "the entire independency of mankind"? Recently, a gentleman, speaking of Thoreau in public, but with inadequate knowledge as later statements evidenced, said, with a half-sneer,—"He started out to live without any aid of civilized man and began by borrowing an axe and setting his hut on another's land without paying any rental." Such have been some of the unfair ideas promulgated by Mr. Lowell and other critics who would not, or, at least, did not, read "Walden" with a fair, responsive mind. His distinct denial that he wished to form any band of hermits or that he desired to suggest a scheme of conduct, has already been quoted. In the early chapters of his life-record at Walden, he comments on the many questions asked regarding his life there, with its expense and details. If any one could gain profit by his experience or apply any of his lessons, it would be the student. Hence he addresses the book, in its early chapters, especially to "poor students. As for the rest of my readers, they will accept such portions as apply to them. I trust that none will stretch the seams in putting on the coat, for it may do good service to him whom it fits." He had scanty expectation that his experiment would be followed by many or that the hut would be of further use to him as residence. He made no effort to preserve it and it soon suffered removal. In letters to Mr. Emerson are sundry references to the gardener, Hugh Whelan, who in 1847, "has his eye on the Walden Agellum and who seeks to take the field and house and evolve there from a garden and a palace." Hugh, however, had "long differences with strong beer" and his magic anticipations vanished before his unsteady habits, so the hut became the property of a farmer who moved it on the old Carlisle road, where it remained a granary and tool-house until a few years after Thoreau's death.
There have been some experiments modeled after this Walden life that are unrecorded in accessible form, but the most familiar was the encampment at Walden in 1869–1870 of a young theological student, Edmund Stuart Hotham, of New York. Here, in a rude cabin, he studied theology and is referred to by Channing in "The Wanderer." Among many readers of "Walden" none have gained more recent notice than "A Victim of Thoreau," so humorously sketched by Dr. Charles C. Abbott in his "Recent Rambles." In a woodland stroll he met this "philosophic tramp" who could repeat pages of "Walden" but who had decided, by sad experience, that "Thoreau's philosophy won't work." Conversation disclosed the fact that he had tried the Walden plan with improvements, or rather with omissions, since energy and industry seemed lacking in his plan. His complaint was that he could not "get a living" by passive delight in nature and spasmodic cultivation of a bean-field.
The Walden encampment has too often been exaggerated as well as distorted. In it Thoreau was neither a hermit nor a misanthrope. It formed simply a climax to his years of preparation. Mr. Salt says, with force and succinctness,—"He was a student when he went to Walden; when he returned to Concord, he was a teacher." His residence amid the elemental, uplifting forces of nature had brought him temporal health and happiness and permanent knowledge of nature and life in its simple, fontal issues. In the woods he learned the "essential facts," a lesson to which he was to give expression in future years. No expansion of this thought could equal his own admirable conclusion in "Walden":—"He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."
Viewed from the focus of to-day, which often yearns for but seldom attains real privacy with nature and simplification of life, this seclusion of Thoreau has a far different aspect from that of its contemporaneous decade. It was then one of many experiments for reforming and simplifying conditions of society, for applying transcendental ideas. It was entirely parallel to the communities and sociological ventures of the age. It was the experiment of a philosopher who had no affiliations with communal plans but who sought their aim,—expansion of all the faculties and reduction of the demands of society to the lowest terms. With reference to the "Walden incident, as revelation of the character of Thoreau, no words are more pertinent than the simple, sincere lines of his poet-friend applied, as were many of Channing's stanzas, to both Emerson and Thoreau:—
"More fitting place I cannot fancy now
For such a man to let the line run off
The mortal reel, such patience hath the lake,
Such gratitude and cheer are in the pines.
But more than either lake or forest's depths
This man hath in himself; a tranquil man,
With sunny sides where well the fruit is ripe,
Good front, and resolute bearing to this life,
And some serener virtues which control
This rich exterior prudence; virtues high,
That in the principles of things are set.
Great by their nature and consign'd to him,
Who, like a faithful merchant does account
To God for what he spends, and in what way."