Editor's Note: July 12 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau was renowned as an author, abolitionist, and tax-resister. His 1849 book Resistance to Civil Government (also known as Civil Disobedience) was an inspiration to Mahatma Gandhi and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - but his best known work was Walden; or, Life in the Woods published in 1854. The book, and its author, inspired generations of environmental activists and those interested in the preservation of public lands. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” Thoreau had said in a lecture in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1851, shortly after his two-year sojourn at nearby Walden Pond. In October, 1954, The Progressive published this review in honor of the book’s 100th anniversary.
One hundred years ago, a short, muscular man of 37, with bright, keen eyes, tousled hair, and puckish lips, with long stride and swinging arms, a man dressed in homespun and more at home in field and wood than drawing room, opened a copy of his book published that August day, Walden; Or Life in the Woods, by Henry D. Thoreau. He read:
“When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shores of Walden Pond, in Concord, Mass., and earned my living by the labor of my hands only.”
That had happened from 1845 to 1847, when he had also written A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which when published had enjoyed but little success. For Walden, Thoreau neither expected nor received more than the acclaim of a few friends like Emerson, the praise of a few reviewers like Horace Greeley, and the approving encouragement of such readers as might sense even then that America’s manifest destiny would exact a heavier and heavier toll of the independence of spirit in which this country had found its origin.
1854 title page
After the Civil War, Walden was read by Americans mostly for its descriptive passages. An age of gentility and robber barons had no place for the philosophy of a man who questioned whether industrialization could be equated with freedom, and riches with progress. It was not until the Nineties that the book began to come into its own, and not until after World War I that its accurate observations of nature, its wry humor, its heretic opinions, its prose heavy-laden with paradox and metaphor, were understood to be essentials to the unity of the volume which perhaps more than any other of the Nineteenth Century speaks to the Twentieth.
In this judgment American critics and readers were but belatedly following the lead of such Britishers as George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, William Morris, and G. B. Shaw, who had learned earlier and better of the treasures that had been hidden in a little New England pond and discovered by its sole inhabitant. Already Walden had been translated into a score of languages and had become, with Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, meaty reading for pacifists, socialists, anarchists, and other such. Tolstoy had learned from them the threat of the machine and the possibilities of passive resistance. So had Gandhi. Thoreau, who never belonged to a political party of more than one, would have been amused had he known that his writings would become tracts of the times. Yet he would have been pleased to know that in the minds of millions the two books and he had become one, that his survey of town and of man’s soul were fully the expression of his life.
By now, Thoreau has become the manifest conscience of an America which exists in the lonely stretches of countryside where the conveniences of mechanized civilization are thought to be sometimes less important than the conveniences of living without them; which exists among youth who are unafraid because they do not know, and among their elders who are unafraid because they have exhausted the quiet desperation of most men’s lives.
Thoreau was a complex man of many moods and meanings, often misunderstood by his neighbors, and as often understood and condemned. He was cold in his relations with others; one warmed not to his person but to his prose.
He was a misogynist, perhaps; certainly women made him shy, and he had no need for them. At any rate, Walden is a man’s book, as are the only other publications of the period that can be ranked with it—Moby Dick and Leaves of Grass. And whatever objections may be raised against this opinion, it must stand for one who has attempted again and again to teach the book to women. But to young men, and especially veterans, Walden works a spell that is later never quite undone. To them Walden, with its commitment to a life without hostages to fortune, is a call.
Thoreau was not, withal, a cynic, nor an iconoclast who breaks idols for the sheer love of destruction. In a sense, he was a frontiersman, a pragmatist, and a tester. He placed no man’s opinion above his own experiment with truth.
Nor was he a hermit. Almost daily he walked to the square to talk with his fellow townsmen about the chronicles of time and weather. He ate Sunday dinner with relatives and Sunday supper usually with the Emersons. There was always a welcome for visitors at his little shack.
He was a man whose feet were planted firmly in the primeval mud, but his eyes were sighted to the stars, and an ear was cocked to the music of the spheres. For two years and two months he stayed at Walden Pond, there “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” These he recorded in his now famous journal, which is not only the natural history of the township of Concord, but also the natural history of a definitely independent spirit that “does not keep pace with his companions . . . because he hears a different drummer.” It was from the journal that the raw materials for Walden were mined, to be smelted and refined for nearly 10 years.
While at Walden he wrote Two Weeks, several essays, and a number of addresses. He visited Canada, Cape Cod, Fire Island, and Brooklyn (to meet Whitman); he also paid a brief visit to the town jail in protest against taxes to support slavery. He lived by his own labor, and learned that money is sometimes not even a convenience. He grew beans, and grew in wisdom.
Thoreau left Walden for the reason that any of us undertakes new enterprise; he had other lives to lead, as surveyor, as boat builder, as odd jobber, as defender of John Brown. He died in 1862, neither in obscurity nor in fame. Many thought of him as a crank, an eccentric, perhaps even a fool. To others he was a writer whose promise had been only partly fulfilled. To a few he had achieved greatness. To Emerson, he was the man of Concord.
So he is to us today. The appeal of Walden 100 years after publication is manifold, and its author may be the best survivor of that group of transcendentalists who made Concord the Athens of America in the first half of the Nineteenth Century. Emerson’s childlike optimism and senile platitudes no longer have much meaning to a generation that has known two world wars and watches the slow approach of a third. His fellow writers fare even worse.
But Thoreau speaks directly to us, because he went directly to life for his philosophy rather than to what other men said about life. Through Walden he speaks to us in a hundred passages.
He tells us that “most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.” And we remember the next installment due the television set, or the hours at work to pay for a new car, or the budget for yearly changes in feminine fashions.
He tells us that our lives are “frittered away by detail” and that we must simplify, simplify, simplify. And we are reminded of commuting schedules and income taxes and the other myriad activities of our daily existence that consume our time and energies and spirit.
And he tells us, as he has told the Gandhis and the Tolstoys who knew the truth and practicability of Walden, that “if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
E. Nelson Hayes taught at Cornell, Union College, and Skidmore. He reviewed fiction for The Boston Globe and participated in a weekly book review program over radio station WFDR and its affiliates.