Taking an elm tree by the arm

On a warm and sunny Friday afternoon in Concord, Massachusetts, May 10, 1862, at 3 pm, with the smell of spring in the air and violets in the church lawn, Henry Thoreau was remembered and eulogized at the church in which he had declined membership more than twenty years before. Thoreau, aged 44, had died peacefully on May 6, after several months' confinement at his parents' home. Sam Staples, formerly Thoreau's jailer in the incident that led to the writing of Civil Disobedience, said of the dying Thoreau, “Never saw a man dying with so much pleasure and peace.”

The world around the dying Thoreau was anything but peaceful. On April 6, 1862, a month to the day before Thoreau died, Confederate troops surprised a Union encampment in a dawn attack at Shiloh, Tennessee. By the time the battle ended on the next day, there were thirteen thousand Union casualties and ten thousand Confederate casualties, making Shiloh the bloodiest battle in American history up to that time. It was nearly a catastrophic defeat for the Union Army under the leadership of Maj. Gen. U. S. Grant, who kept his command only because Abraham Lincoln resisted pressure to relieve him.

Thoreau had bravely spoken with admiration of John Brown soon after Brown was hanged, but Thoreau's reputation as a pacifist and his outspoken contempt for anything that resembled industry cannot have made him a figure to be admired in the face of the bloody and increasingly disconcerting reality of civil war. Thoreau had died of tuberculosis, a disease that, at the time, was popularly thought to be the result of solitary sexual incontinence, and it was bruited about, both then and later, that, in effect, the author of Walden and Civil Disobedience had masturbated himself into the grave. Thoreau's fame, of course, was barely in its infancy.

Unitarian divines, one of whom had been the very first actually to pay for a copy of Walden, traveled from places as diverse as Boston and Worcester to attend the funeral. Children were let out of school, perhaps so the the pews would be full. The service was conducted by the resident divine, The Rev. Mr. Grindall Reynolds, and Thoreau's mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered the eulogy, which became famous in its own right.

Julia Ward Howe's “Battle Hymn of the Republic” had been published at Boston by the Atlantic Monthly on the first of February of that year. It was a time for men of action, not for idlers and dreamers. Even Jesus had signed up. Thus, it might be inferred that Mr. Emerson had given himself a tough assignment that afternoon in May. He was to eulogize a masturbater and idler, a prickly dreamer with contempt for the very things that made the Union strong enough to lift the Lord's terrible swift sword, a man who threw away a Harvard education, apparently to accomplish essentially nothing.

Whatever else Emerson may have thought of Thoreau, he had the man's measure in a way that perhaps no one else did. “The country knows not yet,” Emerson said near the end of his eulogy, "or in the least part, how great a son it has lost." One imagines that not even Emerson could see, just as no one else could see, what a lasting and important contribution to American literature and thought Thoreau had made.

If Emerson knew and acknowledged Thoreau's greatness, he nevertheless seems largely to have missed the point of the man. He described Thoreau as he would have been known locally and as he is still known by some today: as an amateur and unsystematic naturalist and ambler about the countryside. In fact, Thoreau corresponded and collaborated with Louis Agassiz, a Harvard naturalist who was the first to propose a past ice age, but Emerson either didn't know about that collaboration or didn't take it seriously.

Thoreau's prose is far more satisfactory to the modern ear than Emerson's, but Emerson had no praise for Thoreau as a writer. In fact, he bluntly criticized one of Thoreau's habits in writing and was critical of Thoreau's poetry. Thoreau's poetry, to be sure, is now of interest only because Thoreau wrote it.

“It was a pleasure and a privilege to walk with him,” Emerson said by way of praise, but he also said

It cost him nothing to say No; indeed, he found it much easier than to say Yes. It seemed as if his first instinct on hearing a proposition was to controvert it, so impatient was he of the limitations of our daily thought. This habit, of course, is a little chilling to the social affections; and though the companion would in the end acquit him of any malice or untruth, yet it mars conversation. Hence, no equal companion stood in affectionate relations with one so pure and guileless. "I love Henry," said one of his friends, "but I cannot like him; and as for taking his arm, I should as soon think of taking the arm of an elm-tree."

“We live amid surfaces, Emerson had said in his essay, “Experience,” “and the true art of life is to skate well on them.” Thoreau was not good at skating on surfaces and he emphatically did not wish to be. Thoreau wrote in Walden

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through Church and State, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time.

The United States, born as a nation out of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, was already a confection of shams and appearances, at least to Thoreau, and he wanted nothing to do with it. Emerson, on the other hand, was a startling apologist for the ethics of commerce. “For there is no crime to the intellect,” Emerson wrote in “Experience,” anticipating Nietzsche,

"It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder," said Napoleon, speaking the language of the intellect. To it, the world is a problem in mathematics or the science of quantity, and it leaves out praise and blame and all weak emotions. All stealing is comparative. If you come to absolutes, pray who does not steal?

“Weak emotions?” Thoreau was a truth-teller, and the world did not welcome truth-tellers if telling the truth interfered with commerce, which it almost always did. Thoreau had written in Walden

I once invented a rule for measuring cord-wood, and tried to introduce it in Boston; but the measurer there told me that the sellers did not wish to have their wood measured correctly- that he was already too accurate for them, and therefore they commonly got their wood measured in Charlestown before crossing the bridge.

Thoreau's countrymen were scrambling all over one another in pursuit of wealth. Emerson cut a deal for publication of the eulogy he had just delivered while still on the steps of the church. Well might Emerson have been critical of Thoreau, for surely Thoreau had been critical of him

To speak impartially, the best men that I know are not serene, a world in themselves. For the most part, they dwell in forms, and flatter and study effect only more finely than the rest. We select granite for the underpinning of our houses and barns; we build fences of stone; but we do not ourselves rest on an underpinning of granitic truth, the lowest primitive rock. Our sills are rotten. What stuff is the man made of who is not coexistent in our thought with the purest and subtilest truth? I often accuse my finest acquaintances of an immense frivolity; for, while there are manners and compliments we do not meet, we do not teach one another the lessons of honesty and sincerity that the brutes do, or of steadiness and solidity that the rocks do. The fault is commonly mutual, however; for we do not habitually demand any more of each other.

Thoreau's eulogist was an assiduous student of form, and he faulted Thoreau for not playing along, but Thoreau's stubborn “No” is the reason we still read him today. No to slavery, no to wage slavery, no to conformity, no to taxes to support war, no to unnecessary encumbrances, no to the endless oppressions that made a mockery of the freedom of America, including the oppression of agreeing to lies as a condition for acceptance in the community.

One tries to imagine how the townsmen of Concord would have taken the reverence with which Thoreau is read today. Even more, one tries to imagine how they would react to his being seen as the first fruit of that place and time. Not well, probably.

And how would the world react to a Thoreau in the flesh today? Hardly better. Emerson makes it clear that Thoreau's uncompromising nature made him disagreeable as company—“That terrible Thoreau,” as he was characterized in Concord.

Thoreau is commonly thought of as being a misanthrope, but he was not. He welcomed company at Walden Pond. One gathers that he encouraged the company of children, another reason why school might have been let out for his funeral. He may well have been an insufferable prig even to those who tried hard to warm up to him, but then, probably so were the prophets of Hebrew Scripture. What Thoreau wanted, as did the prophets, was not to cast off his fellow man, but to lead him to a better way, even in the absence of having been asked to lead.

Emerson ended his eulogy in an elegiac tone worthy of his reputation as a speaker and writer:

There is a flower known to botanists, one of the same genus with our summer plant called "Life-Everlasting," a Gnaphalium like that, which grows on the most inaccessible cliffs of the Tyrolese mountains, where the chamois dare hardly venture, and which the hunter, tempted by its beauty, and by his love, (for it is immensely valued by the Swiss maidens,) climbs the cliffs to gather, and is sometimes found dead at the foot, with the flower in his hand. It is called by botanists the Gnaphalium leontopodium, but by the Swiss Edelweisse, which signifies Noble Purity. Thoreau seemed to me living in the hope to gather this plant, which belonged to him of right. The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity, and we were the less prepared for his sudden disappearance.

As beautiful as is Emerson's prose, it largely misses the point of Thoreau's career. Thoreau had no trouble harvesting Edelweisse—noble purity—for himself. He wrote to interest others in the same quest. In his own lifetime, he was largely a failure at that enterprise, hardly more than a curiosity, a passing odd note. In the long view, of course, even Thoreau might have been pleased with the harvest of his labors. If not, he should have been.

The American Civil War darkened Emerson's view of the world—crushed him spiritually, almost. Emerson continued to write, but his best work was behind him. Not only that, but Emerson's reputation waned even as the world started to take notice of Thoreau. Emerson made an important contribution to American letters in his own right, but, without Emerson, we might not even know of Thoreau, and it is bringing Thoreau to our attention that Emerson made his greatest contribution.

Thoreau's life was, after all, a life well lived. Emerson could not see that, so he could not say it, and his eulogy of Thoreau stands as a monument to myopia. There never has been a time, one thinks, when true prophets have been well-received. Certainly Thoreau was not. Thoreau's studied indifference to the barely-concealed contempt with which he was treated in the community had to have been an enormous act of will.

To make the appraisal fair, one admits that appreciating Thoreau the man must have been no easy task and that a few put themselves mightily to the effort. In delivering his eulogy, Emerson did no more or less than what Thoreau would have wanted. He said what was on his mind. In that sense, the eulogy is a fitting final tribute, well-deserving to be the salute of a master craftsman to a true prophet and genius, a man well ahead of his time.

Suppose our material wants were easily met, which, in Thoreau's case, they were. Then what? Long before the reach of the Industrial Revolution had become clear to most, Thoreau anticipated the ennui that would result from having all essential material wants satisfied for the bulk of men.

We measure out the quiet desperation of our lives now in miles of film or its digital equivalent. What would Thoreau have said about working so that one has the money and the leisure to sit with a companion in a darkened theater to watch patterns of color projected on a screen?

The farmer can work alone in the field or the woods all day, hoeing or chopping, and not feel lonesome, because he is employed; but when he comes home at night he cannot sit down in a room alone, at the mercy of his thoughts, but must be where he can 'see the folks,' and recreate, and, as he thinks, remunerate himself for his day's solitude; and hence he wonders how the student can sit alone in the house all night and most of the day without ennui and 'the blues'; but he does not realize that the student, though in the house, is still at work in his field, and chopping in his woods, as the farmer in his, and in turn seeks the same recreation and society that the latter does, though it may be a more condensed form of it. Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other. We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are. We have had to agree on a certain set of rules, called etiquette and politeness, to make this frequent meeting tolerable and that we need not come to open war.

Awkward though he may have been in company, or perhaps precisely because he was so awkward in company, Thoreau could accurately take the measure of our interactions with one another. We sit in a movie theater and ignore one another and regard it as time spent in company.

The more desperate our lives become, the more we want to turn to someone like Thoreau. Why is it that we have so much and yet have so little? Thoreau asked that question long before it became urgent. His eulogist Emerson, so much a reflection of the values of his time, would have thought the question silly.