12 July: Boreham on Henry David Thoreau

Romance of a Recluse
Henry David Thoreau, whose birthday this is, blinked like an owl at a world that dazzled and bewildered him. He was a born hermit. His instinct for solitude is to some extent understandable. He was a consumptive; his pitiless disease generated a sense of aloofness; like Cowper's stricken deer that, wounded by the archers, left the herd, young Thoreau felt that he must stand on the cold pavement whilst life, with bands playing and flags flying, passed him by.

He lived practically his whole life at Concord, that Eden of the West, with which Emerson and Hawthorne have familiarised us. But neither Emerson nor Hawthorne saw in Concord the enchantment that Thoreau discovered there. In the course of his life, he made a few timid journeys into the world beyond; but he returned to Concord on each occasion convinced that Concord was the home of all beauty and all grandeur.

The Thoreaus were by no means wealthy, and it strained their resources to the utmost to send Henry from school to Harvard University. And then the trouble began. He was no mixer, and his fellow students could make neither head nor tail of him. He moved about the college precincts like an uneasy ghost.

Yet he did reasonably well; qualified as a surveyor; bade goodbye to Harvard; and went back to Concord to wrestle with the problem of his future. He wanted a profession that would bring him as little as possible into touch with his fellow men. As shy as a school girl, he hated to be drawn into conversation and blushed furiously whenever he was introduced to a stranger.

Misunderstanding People, And By People Misunderstood
He detested ordinary fireside chatter; he somehow sensed that very little of it was sincere. People said what they were expected to say, or what it was pleasant to say, or what would tickle the ears of the company. Even when, a few years later, he found himself grouped with the most eminent figures of his day, he was as uncomfortable as a toad under a harrow.

The only people with whom he felt perfectly happy were ploughboys, axe-men, trappers, and the like. He did not care how uncouth and ungrammatical a man might be; if he said what he meant, and meant what he said, that was all that Henry Thoreau cared. He would stand in the fields talking to such a man by the hour at a stretch.

Of women he could make nothing at all. They were apocalyptic mysteries, sealed with seven seals. If he came upon a cluster of them, he would stumble over his own feet, collide with the tables and chairs, and stutter and stammer to the point of incomprehensibility. Soon after leaving college he met Ellen Sewell. She was the sister of a Harvard man who brought her to the Concord home to stay for a day or two.

In his funny way Henry made love to her. So, in a different fashion, did John, Henry's brother. Six months later, Henry proposed. Ellen wrote, sorrowfully rejecting him. She married John. Later on, at the age of 24, Henry went to stay for two years with the Emersons and fell in love with Mrs. Emerson. He felt very much ashamed of himself, and, as far as possible, kept his secret locked within his breast. But the experience deepened his conviction that he had accidentally stumbled into a world that was not made to his measure, and in the economy of which he was a hopeless misfit.

The Transition From Contemplation To Activity
Still, here he was, and he must make the best of it! To live in such an oddly constituted system, he must earn money. How? He toyed with the idea of entering the ministry. For a while, he practised as a surveyor. He spent some time in making lead pencils and then tried his hand as a school master.

At length a really brilliant notion seized him. A born naturalist, all the creatures of the woods sought his company and ate out of his hand. Even a snake courted his caresses. Why not live in the forest, keep a diary, and, perhaps elaborate the entries into essays for the newspapers or even into lectures for the universities? It was in 1845, at the age of 28, that he built his little cabin beside the pond at Walden. The land was Emerson's and was cheerfully placed at his disposal. Borrowing an axe, he fashioned his hermitage with his own hands. The total cost was about £8, and here he lived for two blissful and fruitful years.

Those who have revelled in his "Walden" know how well the time was spent. He wove the wail of the whip-poor-will, the cry of the screech owl, the call of the peewee, and the mew of the cheewink into an exquisite prose poem that has become one of his country's choicest classics. It is the Westem counterpart of Gilbert White's "Natural History of Selborne."

Strangely enough, on his emergence from his hermitage, his career assumed an entirely new complexion. From being a recluse, he became a warrior. The country was in the grip of the agitation for the emancipation of slaves. Henry Thoreau came into touch with John Brown, whose soul, according to the song, still marches on. Thoreau's enthusiasm was fired, and with voice and with pen he laboured day and night to ensure the triumph of the abolitionist cause. But, in 1862, his consumption caught up with him. In the most revered little God's acre in the Western world, the pine-fringed cemetery at Sleepy Hollow in Concord, he lies with Hawthorne, Emerson, and Louisa Alcott, whilst his name, like theirs, lives for evermore.

F W Boreham

Image: Henry David Thoreau