Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

things said there which staggered readers in the "rural districts" and caused sundry denominational journals to say plainly what they regarded as the final destination of the unorthodox author, but this only made their readers curious to know what he had said, and so the demand for his talk increased with each issue. This was one of the alarming paragraphs:

"Insanity is often the logic of an accurate mind overtasked. Good mental machinery ought to break its own wheels and levers, if anything is thrust among them suddenly which tends to stop them or reverse their motion. A weak mind does not accumulate force enough to hurt itself; stupidity often saves a man from going mad. We frequently see persons in insane hospitals, sent there in consequence of what are called religious mental disturbances. I confess that I think better of them than of many who hold the same notions, and keep their wits and appear to enjoy life well outside of the asylums. Any decent person ought to go mad, if he really holds such or such opinions. It is very much to his discredit if he does not. What is the use of saying what some of these opinions are? Perhaps more than one of you hold such as I should think ought to send you straight over to Somerville, if you have any logic in your heads or any human feeling in your hearts. Anything that is brutal, cruel, heathenish, that makes life hopeless for the most of mankind and perhaps for entire races, anything that assumes the extermination of instincts which were given to be regulated, no matter by what name you call it, no matter whether a fakir, or a monk, or a deacon believes it, if received, ought to produce insanity in every well regulated mind."

When the series was finished the demand for more continued. Accordingly a second, and after a

The "Profes

while a third followed under the titles of "The sor and "Professor" and "The Poet at the Breakfast

"Poet."

Table." Of these the author himself said that they were

like the successive squeezings of the vintage, but some, like Lowell, preferred the second run to the first. The third had the advantage of some years' interval between it and the preceding one.

So much cannot be said for his novels, which were the experiments of a professional in the line of his profession to illustrate theories of transmission and hered

Fiction and

Biography. ity. "Elsie Venner" has the kind of charm that is supposed to belong to the eye of a serpent. "The Guardian Angel" interests by its portrayal of provincial traits, and the" Mortal Antipathy" does not add to his renown. Better are his biographies of Motley and Emerson, works of sympathetic and keen appreciation. But the hurried reader will turn first to the earlier writings of the Professor and Poet in his chair at the Breakfast Table, where he is at his best and supreme.

The entire series may be regarded as similar brands from the same choice vine which had its roots close by the fountains of wisdom and its branches spread to the sunlight of heaven. The warmth of a genial spirit is in them, sparkling with vivacious wit and cheerful humor, stimulating to other minds, and steadying them withal by its sane intelligence. It is the rarefied common sense of the refined American, alert and discreet, deft and graceful, thoughtful and conservative. His eye was keen for the vulnerable spot and the weak one. Physician for the spirit as well as the body, for the soul cramps which New England had inherited with its rheumatism, he knew that laughter at its own infirmities would give it a wholesome shaking up, even if accompanied with shrieks of protestation. His hatred of Calvinism and homoeopathy sometimes made Physician, heal thyself" an appropriate

"

rejoinder, but he took much cant and nonsense out of the age, and taught the difference between good taste and poor in life and letters, between pretence and reality, honesty and dishonesty, affectation and sincerity, a little knowledge and profound wisdom. This he accomplished in the genuine kindliness of a gracious disposition, which was humorous without bitterness and witty without malice; whose pathos never descended into bathos, having always in it the elements of cheerfulness and of hope. Accordingly his place is among the bright and happy spirits in literature to whom we turn when we wish to listen to revelations of personality like those of Montaigne and Pepys and "Kit North," or to be reminded of talk and tables at the Mermaid Tavern, at Will's Coffee House, at Button's, at Ambrose's, and at Essex Head.

[blocks in formation]

Primitive

XXIX

HENRY DAVID THOREAU

In an age of high civilization a tendency is often detected to break loose from its restraints and to return to primitive simplicity of living. This reversion Inclinations. to primeval types is accomplished in the ordinary citizen's instance by "taking to the woods" for a few weeks in summer. He usually gets enough of the dry and wet side of nature to last him for the remainder of the year sometimes longer. Or if not, he satisfies himself and his family by the experience of the gentleman farmer on a country estate not too far from town. In both these cases, however, the divorce from custom is partial and generally brief. Canned delicacies follow the sportsman into the remotest wilds, and the self-rusticated tradesman hitches himself to a telephone wire and listens to the hum of the city. Now and then at long intervals an aboriginal man is reproduced who harks back to pristine methods for so long as the encroachments of civilized life permit. He used to go by the honored name of hermit; then as a recluse, now as an odd stick, a crank, or a solitary.

The last man of consequence to set up this secluded style of housekeeping was Thoreau, born in the philosophers' town of old Concord, Massachusetts, as most of these, Emerson included, were not. By the strictest economies his family helped him through Harvard, where

he devoted himself to such studies as pleased him best. After graduation he earned a bare living by surveying, gardening, and fence building, contriving always to get half of each day off to search fields and streams and woods for any new or old word which nature had to say to him. In this way he became a practical naturalist without troubling himself with the scientific side of research, as he had always been a lover of nature's common ways, seeing in them a hundred things which he fancied that most men do not observe. In this he was frequently mistaken, as in other things, where he supposed himself to be the original discoverer. However, his own observation was always as good to him as a first-class discovery, and he made the most of it. A great part of his charm as a writer is the naïve simplicity with which he describes things as new that several other observers were already familiar with. But there are so many who have not observed them, and others still who would rather read about them than get their feet wet in finding them, that Thoreau will continue to be the best naturalist for readers at home. For as next to going a-fishing is to read Izaak Walton, so a pleasanter diversion than to follow in Thoreau's tracks through thick and thin is to read how he made them and to hear him tell what he saw, even if one has seen it himself.

In 1845, at the age of twenty-eight, he built for himself a hut on a piece of woodland owned by Emerson on the edge of Walden pond. There he stayed as alone as his curious friends would permit for two years or over, "to live deliberately and to front only the essential facts of life and transact some private business," as he said; that is, to write his book entitled "A Week on the Concord

« AnteriorContinuar »