Thoreau and Emerson

Picking up the threads of the previous chapter, the Romantic Period reached a sort of culmination in the form of New England Transcendentalism, which has been described as a combination of romanticism and societal reform. Transcendentalism was a philosophical belief system that valued nature, intuition over rationality, self-reliance and the divine in everyday life instead of in some distant heaven. Based on Concord, MA, Transcendentalism "has often been called a second war of independence: against cultural domination from abroad and against religious bigotry and rampant materialism at home." [Catalogue - Brooks, Speaking for Nature, p. xiii]

The founder of the Transcendentalist movement was Ralph Waldo Emerson [Link] (1803-1882), the philosopher, essayist and abolitionist who first set forth his philosophy in Nature in 1836. On the day before it was published, he and several friends formed the Transcendental Club, which became the center of the Transcendental movement. Emerson lectured extensively, eventually delivering over 1,500 addresses. Most of his famous essays after Nature started as lecture scripts and were subsequently revised by Emerson for publication.

In Nature, Emerson argues that human beings do not fully appreciate nature's beauty. To do so, one must go alone into the natural world and experience true solitude. He writes: "Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result. All the parts incessantly work into each other's hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the sun evaporates the sea; the wind blows the vapor to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man."

In essence, Emerson argued that nature represented the "Universal Being," a not uncontroversial view for his time.

Emerson's influence on American culture and philosophy generally, and the progenitors of the environmental movement in particular, cannot be overstated. Emerson was the American philosopher king of the age. "There is little disagreement that Emerson was the most influential writer of 19th-century America," per his Wikipedia page. He defined the American character.

One who accepted his views wholeheartedly was Henry David Thoreau [Link], who read Nature as a senior at Harvard in 1837. Upon returning to Concord, MA following graduation, he met Emerson, who became his friend and patron, encouraging him to write and submit poetry (his first avocation) and essays to The Dial, which was the journal of Transcendentalist thought edited by the brilliant Margaret Fuller.

Thoreau in the 1840's lived with the Emerson family for three years, tutoring the children while acting as a repairman and copy editor for Emerson. At the same time however, he began to depart from Emerson and the pure Transcendental focus on intuition and emotion. Thoreau respected scientific observation - he followed Humboldt, albeit from a very different perspective, in viewing nature as an interconnected web that required all the senses, emotions, intuition and art to fully comprehend, appreciate and articulate.

Nevertheless, Emerson was and continues to be a major influence on American philosophy and literature. His embrace of nature as a supreme being was hugely influential in public perception of the natural world and directly molded the views of Thoreau, whose Walden is a watershed in the development of both nature writing and ecological thinking.

In 1845-46, Thoreau spent two years living on a cabin he built in woods owned by Emerson on Walden Pond - he was said to be inspired to do so by a formerly enslaved woman named Zilpah White, who lived alone nearby (a most uncommon thing for a woman to do at the time) and supported herself by spinning flax.

While at Walden Thoreau wrote a draft of his first book, A Week on the Concord & Merrimack Rivers, about a two-week canoe trip in 1839 with his brother John, who died in 1842 - the book is Thoreau's grief-stricken elegy to him. He was unable to find a publisher for it and so self-funded publication of it in 1849, at considerable expense. The book was a commercial failure, and the printer ultimately returned over 700 copies of the 1000 originally printed back to Thoreau, leading him to quip "I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself." Ultimately Ticknor & Fields, the publisher of Walden, purchased the nearly 600 copies Thoreau had remaining in 1862 shortly before he died, and posthumously republished them with a new title page and a cancelled old one. [The copy of A Week in the Collection is from the original batch, and probably among those that were initially sold. Of those returned copies which Thoreau gave away or sold individually before reselling the balance to Ticknor, he or his sister typically handwrote three lines which were dropped from page 396 in the original printing.]

In 1854, Thoreau published Walden: Or Life in the Woods, through Ticknor. Walden represents a watershed in the history of environmental writing - and American letters generally. "Henry David Thoreau is generally considered the father of the nature essay as a literary form." [Brooks p. ix]. Thoreau brought a unique voice not only to nature writing but to all of American literature, combining a passion for nature, a naturalist's eye, an iconoclastic point of view of society, and an Emersonian appreciation for self-reliance and self-actualization (although the latter is not a phrase he'd have ever heard or used). It remains as fresh and relevant today as it was nearly two hundred years ago - it speaks to a streak of the American psyche that values independence and self-reliance, as well as the uniquely rich American natural environment.

Make no mistake - in the countless hours I have spent reading, researching and writing this website, there is no name which recurs more than that of Henry David Thoreau.

I went to the woods because 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, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

Thoreau also said, "in Wildness is the preservation of the World." Roderick Nash (see Sources) says "Americans had not heard the like before. Previous discussion of wilderness had been in terms of...cliches. Thoreau tossed these aside in an effort to approach the significance of the wild more closely. In so doing he came to grips with issues which others had only faintly discerned. At the same time he cut the channels in which a large portion of thought about wilderness subsequently flowed." [Nash p. 84].

As a Transcendentalist, Thoreau "grounded his argument on the idea that wildness was the source of vigor, inspiration, and strength...Human greatness of any kind depended on tapping this primordial vitality." [Nash p. 86]. Yet Nash notes even Thoreau could be uncomfortable with true wilderness. In The Maine Woods, Thoreau describes the Maine wilderness as "savage and dreary", and notes that "vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature has got him at disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers of him some of his divine faculty. She does not smile in him as in the Plains."

Nash argues that insofar as the Transcendentalists were ultimately interested in humanity, Thoreau saw nature as a necessary counterpoint to the equally desirable refined civilization. He "arrived at the middle by straddling. He rejoiced in the extremes and, by keeping a foot in each, believed he could extract the best of both worlds." [Nash p. 94]. This state of "half-savage...gave the American idealization of the pastoral a new foundation" while "wildness and refinement were not fatal extremes but equally beneficent influences....With this concept, Thoreau led the intellectual revolution that was beginning to invest wilderness with attractive rather than repulsive qualities." [Nash pp. 94-5].

The distinction between the pastoral environment and wilderness, and the perception of the value of the former as the EC movement evolved, is discussed in more detail in the chapters on John Burroughs.

Despite being reasonably well-received by critics, Walden did not have a huge impact during Thoreau's lifetime. It took Ticknor about five years to sell out of the initial print run of 2,000 copies, and it was out of print until Thoreau's death in 1862, when Ticknor reissued the copies of Week that it had bought back, and published a new edition of Walden as well. However, critics have come to regard it as a classic American work exploring the natural world, simplicity, harmony, and beauty as models for superior social and cultural conditions.

Part of the reason Thoreau's reception during his own lifetime paled compared to that of posterity may be because he comes across as something of an asshole in person. There is no doubt his value system was laudable - he was an ardent abolitionist, a conductor on the Underground Railroad and a vocal supporter of John Brown, for example (some scholars have theorized that Thoreau's despair over Brown's execution at Harper's Ferry may have hastened his own demise). But one gleans that he could be an irritating, self-righteous prig at times, if not all the time. One might say he foreshadows a substantial percentage of the ultra-progressive wing of the Democratic party today. His friend and correspondent H.G.O. Blake wrote a very backhanded compliment subsequent to Thoreau's death: "Geniality, versatility, personal familiarity are, of course, agreeable in those about us, and seem necessary in human intercourse, but I did not miss them in Thoreau...." [Sources: Blake]

As John Burroughs wrote in the late 1880's: Thoreau's fame "was little more than in the bud at that time [of his death], and its full leaf and flowering are not yet, perhaps not in many years yet. He improves with age.... The generation he lectured so sharply will not give the same heed to his words as will the next and the next." As Brooks notes, again quoting Burroughs: "On first reading, Thoreau could be irritating; time is required 'to take off a little of his asperity and fully ripen him.... The world likes a good hater and refuser almost as well as it likes a good lover and acceptor, only it likes him farther off.'" [Brooks pp 4-5]

Away from Walden, Thoreau's most influential work in modern times might be his essay "Resistance to Civil Government", posthumously entitled "Civil Disobedience", in which he proclaimed: "I heartily accept the motto, - 'That government is best which governs least;' and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe, - 'That government is best which governs not at all;' and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. ... I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government." Paradoxically, Thoreau has been hailed as a visionary not just by environmentalists but also small-government republicans, anarchists, survivalists and all sorts of other ists.

Thoreau contracted tuberculosis in 1835 and suffered from it sporadically afterwards. In 1860, following a late-night excursion to count the rings of tree stumps during a rainstorm, he became ill with bronchitis. His health declined, with brief periods of remission, and he eventually became bedridden. Recognizing the terminal nature of his disease, Thoreau spent his last years revising and editing his unpublished works, particularly The Maine Woods and Excursions, and petitioning publishers to print revised editions of A Week and Walden. He wrote letters and journal entries until he became too weak to continue. His friends were alarmed at his diminished appearance and were fascinated by his tranquil acceptance of death. When his aunt Louisa asked him in his last weeks if he had made his peace with God, Thoreau responded, "I did not know we had ever quarreled." [Wikipedia entry on HDT]

A Week on the Concord & Merrimack Rivers and Walden were the only two books published by Thoreau during his lifetime. However, upon his death he was acclaimed in obituaries and, in addition to the reissues of Week and Walden discussed above, five books were published in the next four years collecting various of his essays, papers and letters. These are The Maine Woods (1863), Excursions (1864), Cape Cod (1865), Letters to Various Persons (1865) and A Yankee in Canada with Anti-Slavery and other Reform Papers (1866). "Civil Disobedience," which had previously only been published in an 1849 anthology, was republished for the first time in A Yankee in Canada.

Thoreau's essay "The Succession of Forest Trees" was originally delivered as an address to an agricultural society and was published in Excursions. Writes the Library of Congress: "...[H]e analyzes aspects of what later came to be understood as forest ecology and urges farmers to plant trees in natural patterns of succession...becoming perhaps his most influential ecological contribution to conservationist thought." [memory.loc.gov/ammem/amrvhtml/cnchron1.html].

In the 1880's through 1892, Thoreau's friend H.G.O. Blake, quoted above, edited and published four volumes excerpted from Thoreau's voluminous journals, which Blake had inherited from Thoreau's sister Sophia when she died in Maine in October 1876. These are entitled Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881), Summer (1884), Winter (1888) and Autumn (1892). The complete journals were not published until the early 1900's.

In The Maine Woods, Thoreau called for establishment of "national preserves" of virgin forest, "not for idle sport or food, but for inspiration and our own true re-creation." Years later John Muir marked this passage, among many others, in his own copy. That notwithstanding, Thoreau was not a pure environmental conservationist in the current sense of the term - which is not to degrade him in the least. He extolled the virtues of wilderness and nature, but the idea that it needed protection was not his thesis - not surprising given the lack of development and the riches of wilderness and nature which still then existed even in the northeastern United States.

In sum, Thoreau was and is the cornerstone - the visionary, the philosopher and the conscience - of the environmental conservation movement.