My country is the world; my countrymen are all mankind.
William Lloyd Garrison was the man who more than any one else helped to abolish slavery. He was what we call a Pioneer—or one who leads the way—because, though some people had hoped for the gradual freedom of the negroes, and a few had worked for it, Garrison was the first to ask for their immediate freedom and to set to work to make this question the most living and important one of the day. For he believed that if a thing is wrong in itself it should not exist another hour. Garrison was born at Newburyport, Mass., December 10, 1805. Like Thoreau and Hans Andersen, he was of humble birth and had a very hard childhood. His mother had been deserted by his father, and he was obliged to earn money to help her keep the home together. So as quite a small boy he went about peddling apples, and later worked at shoemaking and cabinet-making and other trades; he hated them all, and on one occasion ran away to sea. There was no time for learning from books, and he had practically no schooling. But when he was thirteen he became apprenticed to the printers’ business in the office of the Newburyport Herald, and to this work he took like a duck to water. He showed peculiar skill at printing, and also a great gift for writing. He wrote and sent articles to different papers and he read a great deal. He liked romantic books, the novels of Sir Walter Scott and the poems of Byron particularly. He wrote poetry himself which is considered good. His mother had always warned her son against being an author, as she believed the lot of all literary men was to die of starvation in a garret. Nevertheless, Garrison seemed cut out for an editor or writer. He was left alone in the world when he was eighteen, for his mother died and his only brother, a bad lot, had disappeared. His apprenticeship with the printer ended when he was twenty-one. At this time he was a very taking and charming young man, with a refined, sensitive, clean-shaven face, and always well dressed; pleasant, mildly ambitious, and social, enjoying parties and going to church regularly, he conformed outwardly to what the world thinks is the right and proper thing. But there was more in William Lloyd Garrison than met the eye. His friends, who had complete trust in him, now lent him money to start a newspaper of his own. He called it the Newburyport Free Press, and became the editor and proprietor of it, and wrote, too, most of the articles. But the views in them were much too independent to please the ordinary person, and it failed.
Garrison had always had a strong tendency to question authority—he was not going to take anybody’s word for a thing without thinking it all out for himself—as a boy he had taken up the cause of liberty wherever it had arisen and had been greatly moved by the struggles of the Greeks to throw off Turkish tyranny. But now again he was a printer in search of work, and after hard times he became the editor of a temperance paper, The National Philanthropist, in Boston, and then again the proprietor of a newspaper called The Journal of the Times. Once more he showed himself to be very much ahead of people in moral matters. In a number of this paper he wrote a forcible article on a law which had been passed in one of the States of America against teaching the blacks to read and write. He said how pitiable it was to seal up the mind and intellect of man to brutal incapacity.
“This state of things,” he declared with vehemence, “must come to an end.” The article drew the attention to him of a much older man—Benjamin Lundy—an excellent Quaker who had for some years past been agitating against slavery, and he now got into touch with Garrison. Garrison was deeply moved by Lundy’s preaching, and equally disgusted with the attitude of the clergy, to whom Lundy appealed in vain.
It was almost impossible to get a church or a school for an anti-slavery meeting, and when they did succeed, on one occasion, the meeting was broken up by a clergyman who denounced the agitation against slavery as dangerous. “The moral cowardice, the chilling apathy, the criminal unbelief and cruel skepticism that were revealed,” says Garrison on that occasion, “filled me with rage,” and from that time he ceased to go to church.
Garrison was asked now by Lundy to become editor with him of a paper called The Genius of Universal Emancipation, whose object was to suppress drink and to free the negro. Garrison joined him. He wrote most of the articles and Lundy did the lecturing. The articles were very clear and forcible. “For ourselves,” the paper declared, “we are resolved to agitate this subject to the utmost; nothing but death shall prevent us from denouncing a crime which has no parallel in human depravity.” Garrison worked hard: he got subscribers to the paper and managed to start a petition against slavery, which was signed by over two thousand people, and was presented to Congress. The answer came back that agitation would make the slaves restless and difficult to manage, and would put ideas into their heads when they might be comparatively happy and contented.
You can imagine the scorn Garrison felt for his Government. What else could he feel about a Government which boasted of itself as a democratic Government, which desired all people to have equal opportunities, rich or poor, and which, while sitting in the Capitol could see every day the manacled slave driven past the door to market? Custom, as it so often does, had blunted the sensibilities of these Senators: they remained untouched and unmoved. It needed a young, fresh, open mind like that of Garrison to show them the way. He was only twenty-six, but he saw clearly what much older men did not see, that in the long run the moral point of view is the only point of view, that right or justice is the only thing to work for, and all other issues are of no account at all. But it does not, perhaps, seem to us now a very wonderful thing that Garrison should have been so shocked and horrified at what he saw and heard about slavery. What strikes us as incredible now is that there were many thousands of people, and quite humane, kind people too, who defended it. It was the custom of the country and part of the Constitution. Many people didn’t trouble to reason about it; indeed, they believed that were slavery abolished the country would be ruined—they would have no cotton, no corn, no tobacco, because there would be no laborers to till the soil or to harvest the crops. The black men and women did the work for nothing. But so short-sighted and stupid were commercial people generally, that they could not see that slavery, besides being a moral wrong, was also a mistake economically. In the long run it was more expensive, because the work was less well done; an intelligent person who takes some interest in his work will do it very much better than one hardly removed from the animals.
One Sunday in Baltimore, Garrison was visited by a slave who had just been whipped with a cowhide, and whose back was bleeding from twenty-seven gashes, while his head was terribly bruised. He had not loaded a wagon to his master’s liking, and this was his punishment. Garrison could hear as he passed down the street the sound of whips and cries of agony. There seemed no mercy or justice anywhere, and his country’s barbarity made Garrison’s cheeks burn with shame.
How did such a state of things arise, one may ask; how did these black men and women come to be living in such numbers on American soil? It happened in this way: the English in the past, having conquered lands in different parts of the world, needed men to work and develop these lands. They were mostly wild and uncultivated. The British, the Spaniards, and the Portuguese were chiefly responsible for the slave trade. Prince Henry the Navigator, a Portuguese, had been the first to bring negroes into Europe in the fifteenth century, capturing them on his exploring expeditions round the coast of Africa. Sir John Hawkins was the first Englishman to engage in the traffic, and in the seventeenth century the slave trade was mostly in English hands. England made a very good business of supplying slaves to the Spanish settlements, and imported also a huge cargo of negroes to Virginia for tobacco planting, and this was the beginning of slavery in America.
This hunting of human beings to make them slaves was more barbarous than anything the negroes themselves could have imagined. These wretched black men, having been captured, their huts destroyed and whole villages burnt, were placed on ships which brought them to our colonies, to the West Indies and Jamaica; so packed and overloaded were these ships and the poor negroes were so ill-treated that many died on the way; out of a hundred only fifty would be any good for work. This was one of the prices paid for what is called expansion and having colonies. When the English came to know the real nature of this dreadful business, all the best opinion was against it; but the Quakers were the first to take any practical action against the slave trade, which they did as early as the seventeenth century, both in America and England, by turning out of their society all who should be engaged in it. Gradually the British did away with slavery in their colonies, and it was finally abolished in 1833, when Lord Grey was Prime Minister; but the honor of being the first to abolish it lies not with England but with Denmark, who forbade it in its possessions at the end of the eighteenth century. Several countries followed the example of England after she had put down slavery so far as it concerned herself, but the United States was the last to fall in.
Garrison in his campaign against slavery was not going to tolerate any half-measures; if a thing was a sin, then it should not exist another day: it was real anguish to have to think of the sufferings of these poor people, and he could not rest or be happy for a moment so long as injustice and such a barbarous state of things existed. Therefore, the immediate freedom of the negro was the only thing to strive and live for. Here he and Lundy disagreed—not as to the evil of slavery, but on the question of the best way to put an end to it. Lundy was not so extreme as Garrison. His view was that the negro should gradually be set free and sent to colonize in another country. Garrison asked for his immediate freedom on American soil. His attitude made the slave-owners very angry, and also filled them with alarm: they had heard a good deal of talk about freeing the negro in the future, but never had the demand been made for his immediate release. So Garrison now broke his partnership with Lundy and started on his campaign alone. For a so-called libel on a slave trader he was sent to prison, and being unable to pay the fine, he was forty-nine days in jail, until he was released by Arthur Tappan, of New York, a famous Quaker philanthropist and abolitionist, who paid his fine for him. Garrison was no martyr, but his anger was aroused against the slave-owners and he felt more desperately keen about his cause than ever. Once more he looked to the churches to support him, and again they failed him. In Boston they closed their doors against him, and it was a society of free-thinkers who finally gave Garrison a hall to lecture in, and some who heard him there were moved to join him and assist in his campaign.
Never did a man have more uphill work in trying to move these people out of their sloth and indifference. He visited all the principal people in Boston and urged them to think; he implored the clergy to turn to Christianity and bring it into practice. Coldheartedness and utter contempt of the negro he met with everywhere. He was disheartened but undefeated; his hatred of injustice, his loathing of cruelty, his pity, all these feelings carried him on.
In order to further his views he set up a paper of his own in Boston. He had no money nor a single subscriber, but he found a sympathetic partner, and these two printed their own paper, their only helper being a negro boy. It was called The Liberator, and its motto was “My country is the world; my countrymen are all mankind.” By this he meant that he worked for the good of the whole world, not only for that portion of it to which he himself belonged, for only by treating men of other countries as your friends and brothers will you have progress, peace, and true prosperity at home.
In the first number of The Liberator, Garrison had a manifesto, or address, to the public, the words of which became the whole spirit of his life. He declared that he would work for and think of nothing else but the freedom of the slave, and ended up with the words, “I am in earnest: I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard.” This address was signed by twelve men, all poor, but after they had met together one evening for the purpose of signing the address they stepped out into the starry night with glad hearts and an object to live for. This address of Garrison’s lost him many subscribers, because it went too far and was thought too extreme, but gradually it gained him influence and power. It was the seed of many anti-slavery societies, and it started other newspapers working with the same objects. The Liberator was destined to contain President Lincoln’s declaration of emancipation.
An anti-slavery society had been started in England, supported by the great and courageous clergyman Wilberforce, who had been for years working against slavery and had helped to bring it to an end in the British possessions. Garrison was asked to go over and speak to the English society, which he did, and was received with great enthusiasm. The English were very much impressed by Garrison’s sincerity and the burning enthusiasm that lay under his quiet and modest manner. He was not the sort of man they imagined an American agitator to be. He was, of course, very greatly encouraged, but on his return to America hard times awaited him, because he had stated in England that the United States was a sham so long as it allowed the present state of things to exist. A meeting in New York to start an anti-slavery league was broken up and the hall emptied by a furious mob. Another mob also besieged and tried to destroy the offices of The Liberator at Boston. There was great excitement everywhere: Garrison’s work had begun to tell. Disagreeable though violent opposition is, it is often the first step toward being heard. Now, Garrison undoubtedly criticized his country; he found fault with it, and used very strong language about the slave-owners. The commonly held view is that any criticism of one’s country is treacherous, mischievous, and unpatriotic, but Garrison said:
I speak the truth, painful, humiliating, and terrible as it is, and because I am bold and faithful to do so, am I to be branded as the calumniator and enemy of my country? If to suffer sin upon my brother be to hate him in my heart, then to suffer sin upon my country would be an evidence not of my love but hatred of her; it is because my affection for her is intense and paramount to all selfish considerations that I do not parley with her crime. I know that she can neither be truly happy nor prosperous while she continues to manacle every sixth child born on her soil.
Who, then, one may ask, is the true patriot? He who has before his eyes a high ideal for his country, who wishes it to be the best, the most civilized and the most prosperous, its people educated, far-seeing, and humane; who does not shut his eyes to his country’s faults and to the mistakes of its governments, but who strives to help as he would help a friend to remedy his faults—to show people how things might be better and how to set about improving them? Or is the patriot the man who in the face of monstrous evils cries “It is God’s will,” or “My country, right or wrong”? Where should we be now were it not for the men who obeyed their own consciences rather than the commands of the State? When we think that burning people at the stake for their religious beliefs, hanging them for sheep-stealing, putting women to death for petty thefts, or working small children in mines were considered right, when we remember that these inhuman laws were regarded by the patriot of the time as the will of God, and the people who wished to see them altered as disloyal to their rulers, we may be a little less bitter against the reformer of the present day: the man who sees that there are still many unjust laws and conditions even in his own country, and who has the courage to say so.
Garrison, however, found now enough support to start what was known as “The American Anti-slavery Society.” He called together a meeting for the purpose at Philadelphia, when he made a striking declaration of his beliefs. He spoke the most moving and inspiring words about the state of the slaves and the rights of liberty. He announced what their work would be: to organize anti-slavery societies everywhere, to hold meetings unceasingly, to circulate literature, to spare no efforts whatever to bring the nation, as he expressed it, “to a speedy repentance.”
Now began what has been called “the martyr age” in America, and the most active period of Garrison’s life. He and his followers held meetings night and day, and mobs of rough and brutal men were sent by their opponents to break them up. Anti-slavery people were in danger of their lives; they were mobbed wherever they were known, and their houses burnt or ruined. Halls where meetings were to be held were destroyed. A young divinity student was flogged publicly for having anti-slavery literature in his bag. Another lost his life defending a friend against the ruffians who attacked him. In the South, men even suspected of favoring the abolition of slaves were lynched, and judges were all in favor of slavery, and treated the anti-slavery people as vagabonds. Garrison on one occasion had his clothes torn off him and was dragged through the streets with a rope round his body. He was rescued from a raging crowd by the mayor of the town, who saw no way of protecting him but by putting him in prison. On the wall of his cell Garrison wrote: “William L. Garrison was put into this cell on Wednesday afternoon, October 21, 1835, to save him from the violence of a respectable and influential mob who sought to destroy him for preaching the abominable and dangerous doctrine that all men are created equal and that all oppression is odious in the sight of God.” A merchant on one occasion spoke in public to the abolitionists. “It is not a matter of principle with us,” he said; “it is a business necessity; we cannot afford to let you succeed; we do not mean to allow you to succeed; we mean to put you down by fair means if we can, by foul means if we must.” Garrison said that Government and the heads of commerce were the forces that really kept slavery going; it could not, he felt, be the will of the people when they began to think and to understand what the real nature of slavery was. It was the business of his life to show them, and he devoted all his energies, all his power of eloquence and persuasion, to move the people, to appeal to their reason and sense of justice and compassion. He sought to abolish slavery by moral means alone; he did not attempt political means, such as asking Congress to use its power. He worked only in the Northern States, for the South was practically united in its convictions. He found strong opposition in the North, too, for there were many Northern people who looked upon the Constitution as sacred, and because the principle of slavery was incorporated in it, regarded all opposition to slavery as disloyalty to the State.
Garrison was undoubtedly helped by the Fugitive Slave Law. It is often the case that things get worse before they get better. This cruel law was a case in point. It was this: that those slaves who had escaped from the Southern States and were living in Canada or the North, some of them well off, useful, and happy, were to be hunted down and brought back to slavery; those who housed them and helped them in any way to escape would also be fined or imprisoned. The result of this new law was to rouse the people’s feeling for liberty and to touch their hearts. When they saw the wretched fugitives driven along the streets in chains great feeling was shown. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was inspired by incidents resulting from the Fugitive Slave Law. Though written in an old-fashioned way, with a good deal of religious talk, it is a moving and sincere book, by a writer whose heart was full of pity and indignation. It touched many hearts, including those of the clergy, and stirred people to action. It had perhaps more influence than any book with a purpose that has ever been written.
The people of the North suffered great humiliation at this period, for nothing could save them from lending their troops and using all their forces to help in slave catching, for it was the law of their Constitution. John Brown also, in connection with this law, appeared rather violently upon the scene. Most people have heard of him; many have heard of him who do not know anything about W. L. Garrison. He became a hero and a martyr by being hanged as a rebel, and the song written about him, “John Brown’s body lies a-moldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on,” became a sort of “Marseillaise” of the North, and has undoubtedly helped to keep his memory alive. John Brown had been for some time a keen anti-slavery agitator, and when the Fugitive Slave Law was passed he carried out a scheme of his own for helping to hide and establish fugitives in a stronghold he had built in the mountains of Virginia. For an armed raid which he made into that State with slaves, in which he captured an arsenal, he was brought up on the charge of high treason and hanged.
Garrison thought John Brown courageous and disinterested, but he also thought the raid wild and useless; but then Garrison’s views of war and bloodshed were very different from John Brown’s. One thing he did see was the wonderful change that thirty years of fighting against slavery had brought about in the tremendous outburst of sympathy for Brown, for great indignation was shown and felt at his fate.
Up to this time it would have been almost impossible for a President to be chosen who was not loyal to slavery. But times had changed, and Garrison, if he had not been entirely responsible, had been the principal cause of the change in people’s views; the sympathies of Lincoln, who was a candidate for the Presidency of the United States, were known—he was against slavery, and he was elected by the North, for the hearts of the people had been moved.
Garrison for the first time saw the results of his life’s work, and it is more than some reformers have done. In the election of Lincoln as President he could see, though still a long way off, an end to his labors, to the long and weary battle he had fought. But much suffering and anguish was to be gone through before anything could be accomplished. Lincoln was elected by the Northern States, and the South, furious, declared themselves independent of the Government and the Union, and forming a Government of their own, called themselves “The Confederate States of America.” Civil war started, and never was a war more passionately felt on both sides. It was not a war of Governments, or a war merely to decide whether the South should be united to the North, but it involved a living question of right or wrong between those who believed in slavery and those who did not. The people knew what they were fighting about, which is more often the case in civil war than in wars between nations planned by their Governments. Garrison had been a man of peace. He hated war and preached against it, yet he saw that the conflict could not be stopped. It had been taken out of his hands. Slavery must be overthrown, and, hateful though it was to him, blood, it seemed, must be spilt.
Every American knows the story of that struggle. The war began in 1861 and lasted four years, ending in a victory for the North, though the South fought desperately and gained much sympathy by their bravery. As the struggle went on the hatred of slavery grew, and before it ended many slaves were set free. Various States were asked to free their slaves, and those who did not were held to be in rebellion against the State. The total abolition of slavery by an amendment of the Constitution did not come about till the close of the war in 1865.
Garrison tells of visiting a camp of twelve hundred slaves just liberated. He called upon them to give cheers for freedom, and to his astonishment they were silent: the poor things did not know how to cheer.
It may be asked how Garrison set the slaves free, for he had not the power to do so. He had done so by preparing the ground, by educating the people, rousing them from their selfishness and awakening in them a moral sense. His efforts were rewarded by the election of Lincoln, who as President had the power to complete and to crown the work that Garrison had done.
To the truly great man it is the triumph of his cause, and not personal success, that will make him glad and thankful. Garrison’s contemporaries fully realized how he had been the chief cause in bringing about the emancipation of the slaves. Those who have lived since may have forgotten, and the great figure of Lincoln stands out as the man who before all others brought an infamous system to an end.
Garrison’s work was done, and he retired into private life. He had not been spoilt by publicity; he never really cared for a life of excitement; he was extraordinarily modest and had no personal ambition at all. Though most of his life he had been abused and slandered, it had never made him bitter; he remained happy, serene, and good-tempered in himself, and kept his warm affections to the end of his life. His domestic life, too, was very happy, and he was devoted to his wife and children. He died when he was seventy-three, at Boston, quite peacefully, his wife having died three years before him.
Garrison had his faults, if faults they could be called. He was too easily taken in—he had perhaps too open a mind, and at one time got into the hands of some rather shady people, who led him to take up spiritualism, quack medicines, phrenology, homeopathy, and so on. He was always hoping that any one of these things might possibly help to improve the conditions of mankind. But some of his fads, as they were then called, have become the beliefs of a great many people in the world. The supporters of The Liberator were annoyed with Garrison for preaching in his paper against capital punishment, against governments and the Church, and in favor of votes for women and temperance. They did not see why they should have to believe in these things because they believed in the freeing of the negro. But Garrison’s beliefs were the result of his experience and circumstances. He hated governments because his Government had built up its Constitution on slavery; he despised the Church because it upheld the crime of slavery; if it did not give it active support, it gave it by silence as to its evils, by tolerating slave-holding by its ministers and members, and by preventing whenever it could meetings or discussions being held against it. The Church, Garrison thought, should not be regarded as the Church of Christ, but as the foe of freedom, humanity, and religion. He hated Sunday because on that day no abolition meetings could be held—yet, as we know, he had been a strict church-goer as a young man, and was always to the end of his life a Christian, longing for men and women and the Church to turn to true Christianity, apart from its forms and dogmas.
Garrison had demanded for the negro full citizenship, but he did not live to see how strong is the prejudice in many places against black people. He had not to face this problem of race. It was a great step in the history of civilization to abolish slavery, but it was not the end of the negro question. Is the black man to have the same rights as the white man, the same opportunities for education and improvement? Is there a place for him in this world? Can he make himself useful and indispensable? If we read the history of the negroes’ struggles to get education against fearful difficulties and opposition, of how they endeavored to learn with their clouded, unused minds, and of how they succeeded in lifting themselves by their own efforts out of ignorance and degradation, I think we must believe that there is a place for them, that, given a share in the world’s work and its responsibilities, they will show themselves worthy of the trust put in them. But the white man himself must become more enlightened before an answer to this problem can be found. In the words of a remarkable negro, Booker Washington, who rose from being a slave to the position of a great teacher: “You cannot hold a man down in a ditch without stopping down there with him yourself.”
D. P.
I never found the companion that was so companionable as
solitude.
Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, July 12, 1817, and lived most of his life in or near his native town. The world, if you were to ask it who Thoreau was, would probably say “a crank,” because he did not think and act in quite the same way as other people, and because he practised what he preached. He never went to church or voted at elections, or drank wine or smoked tobacco, and he went to live alone in the woods. He was an author and a naturalist; and, happily for us, he has been able to reveal through his writings what sort of man he was.
But people trouble themselves nowadays very little about the quiet, retiring souls, and so “Walden,” the book Thoreau wrote on his Experiment—as he called his period of retirement in the woods, is not so well known as it ought to be; for it seems to stand alone in its beauty and originality; no other book is like it. As we hurry and scurry through this mechanical century, we might do well to turn to its quiet pages, and if we do we may wonder if Thoreau was not the wise one and we the cranks after all.
Henry Thoreau’s childhood was a calm and happy one. He was brought up under the best possible conditions for forming a steadfast and unworldly character. Concord was a large, quiet village of plain white houses and shady elm-trees—a specially good example of a New England village community. There were no very rich people and no very poor: the inhabitants managed all their little affairs for themselves, and were perfectly capable of so doing. They were shrewd, honest, good people, and friendly towards one another. They seemed to have few worldly ambitions and were naturally inclined to be simple and democratic. They had simple occupations and amusements and did not crave for excitement, as we do now. Concord produced a very fine race of people and a few remarkable individuals—Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau himself; there were others less well known, but equally stalwart in character. Emerson, the poet and philosopher, no doubt helped his neighbors to become more cultivated and ideal: he brought them into touch with all the enlightened thought of that day, for it was the period when Carlyle and Wordsworth and Coleridge were living in England, and when the civilized world was beginning to wake up to many problems it had never thought about before, or had accepted as dispensations of Providence.
In this safe and peaceful atmosphere of good-will and honest endeavor the Thoreaus lived. They were poor and had no worldly advantages; but they had what was far better, the position which comes from having qualities of independence and courage, and they were respected and looked up to by their neighbors. Henry Thoreau’s father made lead pencils for a living, and Henry learnt to make them too—very skilfully, it is said. He had two sisters and a brother, but even as a child Henry Thoreau showed the most marked character of the lot. He was always determined to go his own way, and was quite sure of what he liked and disliked. But he was also very like other children, for when he was told that he would one day go to heaven, he said he did not want to, because he would not be allowed to take his sled with him. He had heard that only very grand things were allowed in heaven, and his sled was quite common and had been made at home.
Thoreau went to college—to Harvard—like any other young man, and did nothing very brilliant while he was there; when he left, he took to teaching and to writing, which was his great talent. He had always written from quite early days, keeping a diary about all the things he observed in nature—the tints of morning and evening skies, the songs of birds, the habits of animals, and the flowering and growth of plants and trees. He had extraordinary powers of observation and was a very remarkable naturalist; his understanding of animals was almost uncanny—they seemed to realize how akin he was to them. Hunted foxes would come to him for protection, and wild squirrels would nestle in his coat; he could thrust his hand into a pool and pull out a fish, which seemed to trust him and show no objection! Thoreau was absolutely at home in the open air; he could skate and swim and row and sail. He thought that every boy between the ages of ten and fourteen should shoulder a gun, but that it should only be wild shooting, limitless, and not enclosed like the shooting of English noblemen. Fishermen and hunters, he observed, seemed to get into peculiar touch with nature in the intervals of their sport. But Thoreau himself gave up shooting entirely as he grew older, and studied the habits of birds with a spy-glass; he learnt to remain absolutely motionless, as still as the wall or ground he rested on. From earliest childhood he made collections of Indian relics and of turtles and fishes. He liked to take immense journeys in search of interesting new plants and animals; once he went three hundred and twenty-five miles in a canoe with an Indian. He would camp out and be exposed to all weathers; often he was cold and hungry. A friend describes with a shiver how he slept out with Thoreau on the bare rocks of a mountain without enough blankets; but Thoreau, if he loved a thing, could not do it moderately, and, though he was so hardy, he ended by hurting himself and destroying his health.
From living so much with nature and animals, Thoreau got to look rather like a “wise wild beast”; this was how his friends described him. His face was ruddy and weather-beaten and very honest-looking; his nose was large and somewhat like a beak; his brows overhanging—but every one agreed that his eyes were the most attractive part of his face. They were sometimes blue and sometimes gray, and full of kindness and thought. He hated fine clothes and dressing up, so he always wore strong things, like corduroy (which no gentleman at that period would think of wearing), in order that he could make his way through the wood and climb rocks without tearing anything. His sisters and relations said he was simply delightful at home. He was a sort of household treasure, because he was always kind and useful and obliging. He would grow melons and plant the orchard, act as a mechanic—in fact, he was clever at any odd job with his hands—and he would attend to the animals and flowers. He was happy with children, and invented all sorts of games to amuse them and himself. He had no false pride, and was not ashamed to be seen in an old coat whitewashing the house or mending the gates. He was a great traveler in a small circle, but he never until the year before he died saw Niagara, or ever crossed the ocean. “I have a real genius for staying at home,” he said.
When he was twenty-five, Thoreau went to live with Emerson and a circle of friends on a farm near his own village of Concord. Emerson being older than Thoreau, was regarded by him as his teacher. There is no doubt that Emerson had a good deal of influence over the younger man and they thought alike about many things; but they were very different in temperament. Emerson was perhaps the more human, and he certainly had more personal charm, but Thoreau was the more original of the two. Emerson persuaded his young friend to join a sect of people formed with the object of improving the outlook of mankind; they wished to simplify living and to combine leisure for study with manual labor. Every member of the community had to do his or her share of the work to keep the house and farm going. They would plow, milk, make hay, cultivate the garden, and the women would wash up the dishes in the intervals of discussing how best to equalize the lots of rich and poor, how to simplify education so that every one might be educated, and how to destroy class differences. They were more like anarchists than socialists, because they did not believe in governments and had nothing to do with politics. Hawthorne, one of the members of this Brook Farm society, wrote a novel about them which gives a very vivid picture of their lives. They were not, except for a few members, particularly brilliant people, and their society cannot be called very successful if it is judged by renown, or by the amount of attention it got from fashionable people. This may have been because it avoided eccentricities and had very few rules—no sect could have had less—and indeed they were particularly keen on not interfering with a person’s liberty or private life. Idealism and Economy were the two principal articles of their faith. They were kind, simple, hopeful people, and were known as the Transcendentalists.
Thoreau lived with them for three years. The digging and outdoor work were easy congenial tasks to him, but Emerson, on the contrary, found that digging interfered with his writing, and after he left the sect he never again attempted to combine the two.
Thoreau was twenty-eight when he decided to go away and live by himself. It was not a sudden wish, for he had been thinking of it for some years. It was not because he was a hater of men that he wanted to get away, but he wished to find the answer to certain questions which had been bothering him. He was anxious to find out what real life could teach him, stripped of all its stupid complications and conventions. He wished also to study and to satisfy himself that he could be an author, and he went, too, because he hoped to draw strength and purpose from his experiment.
At this period he possessed only twenty-five dollars of his own, and one day in March he borrowed an axe and went into the woods which lay all around his village, and there, on the side of a thickly wooded hill, he found the perfect spot on which to build his house. At once he began to cut down the tall, straight pines with which the hill was covered to make a clearing, and with the purpose of using the pines as timber for his hut. He chose the spot specially for the view it had of the pond or lake beneath. Thoreau says a lake is a most beautiful and expressive feature in a landscape, and he likens it to the earth’s eye. It was called Walden, and from all the descriptions we read of it, it was a particularly beautiful pond, remarkable for its depth and its clearness, like a deep green well. Many people thought it was bottomless, and it was more than a mile long, the hills encircling it and rising steeply out of it on all sides. These days in which Thoreau worked, cutting and hewing wood, were pleasant spring days, and we can imagine how happy he was at his labors in the open air. He felt, he said, like a bird building its nest, and wondered if men, were they always to build their own homes, would become more poetical and sing as they worked.
By July his house was ready to live in, though he had not yet built his chimney—he liked in summer-time to do his cooking out of doors. He left till later also the plastering of his hut, so that the cool air blew through the chinks between the logs, which was very delicious in summer-time. From the door of his hut a little pathway ran straight down to the pond, and behind it he had made a clearing of some acres where he might grow his corn and vegetables. In his book “Walden” Thoreau describes how he spent his day during that first year. He would rise very early in the morning in summer-time and take his bath in the pond, and before the sun was high and the dew lay on everything he would attend to the bean-field he loved so much and hoe between the long green rows. After this he would do his housework, which he called a pleasant pastime. He had only a bed, a table, a desk, three chairs, a looking-glass (three inches across), a pair of tongs and andirons, a kettle, a frying-pan, a wash-bowl, one or two jugs, one cup, and a lamp.
When his floor was dirty, he merely set all his furniture out of doors on the grass, dashed water on the floor of his hut and sprinkled it with white sand, and then with a broom swept it clean. By the time other people were just getting up his house was dry again and his work finished.
The first year at Walden he worked a great deal in his garden. Then he had his cooking to do, and he studied very carefully the art of making bread, baking it at first out of doors on the end of a stick of timber over an open fire. He made experiments and discoveries with foods, cooking odd wild plants and weeds. He proved that a man in that land could support himself on what he grew. He could, for instance, grow his own rye and Indian corn and grind them in a hand-mill, and sugar he could extract from beet and pumpkins or from maples, which abound in that country. You could avoid, he said, going to any shops at all, and he was sure that to maintain yourself on the earth simply and wisely was not a hardship at all, but a pleasure.
Sometimes during this first year Thoreau did nothing at all but sit in his doorway dreaming, quite undisturbed and in silence, except for the flittering and twittering of birds. He would not realize how the time had flown until he saw the sunlight lighting up his west window, or heard the sound of some horse and wagon in the distance going home to rest. He did not feel this to be a waste of time, for he seemed, he said, to grow under these conditions like the corn in the night.
Not very far from where he lived was a railway line, and a train would pass at certain intervals. In spite of his love of solitude Thoreau liked the sound of it, and the whistle of the engine he likened to the cry of a hawk. He would listen to the passage of the moving train with the same feeling he had about the rising sun. It was so punctual and regular, and when the train had passed with its clang and clatter Thoreau felt more alone than ever, for it had made him feel the peacefulness and contrast of his own solitary yet not lonely life. On Sundays he would listen to the bells of distant towns, when the wind was in the right direction—the sounds would come floating faint and sweet over the trees, as if it were the music of the woods: so Thoreau describes it.
In the warm summer evenings he would spend a good deal of time in his boat, playing the flute and watching the fish. He would make echoes by smacking the water with his paddle till every corner of the wooded hills cried and answered him. Sometimes he would fish at midnight to get something for his next day’s dinner, and he would listen to the owls he loved so much, and to the foxes crying, or to the call of some mysterious night-birds; and the fish he describes as dimpling the moonlit surface of the water with their tails.
His days passed probably very quickly—if you are contented and happy the day is all too short. Thoreau said he hadn’t got to look for amusement anywhere, as his life had become his amusement, it was so real and full of interest. But he did not cut himself off from people altogether. Sometimes he would go to the village to hear some talk. He usually went in the evening, and he liked to stay very late there, especially when it was dark and stormy, because it was so pleasant to leave some bright, warm village room and to go out into the black night to find his harbor in the woods. He did not mind how wild the weather was—in fact, he preferred it wild and often faced severe storms. Those who have never been in the woods by night have no idea how dark they can be. They would frighten and bewilder most people, but not Thoreau. He would feel his way with his feet on the faint track he had worn, or he would steer with his hands, feeling particular trees and passing between two pines, perhaps not more than eighteen inches apart; or he might sometimes guess his whereabouts by seeing a piece of light above him—a glimpse of the sky through a well-remembered break in the trees. One can understand the satisfactory and joyful feeling of reaching at last the little hut, always unlocked and open to any traveler who cared to enter. When Thoreau went away for a time he left it thus, hoping that some wayfarer might care to enter, to sit in his chair and read the few books which lay on his table.
In October, Thoreau collected his stores for the winter. He would go a-graping, but this, he says, more for the beauty of the grapes than for any nourishment they gave him, and he would get wild apples and store them, and principally he would make expeditions to the chestnut woods, to get chestnuts, which are a good substitute for bread. He would have a sack on his back and a stick in his hand with which to open the prickly burrs, and as he gathered them up the squirrels and jays called angrily to him for taking any of their food. Thoreau also discovered, while digging the ground near, a sort of potato used by the first peoples who lived in America; it had a sweetish taste like a frostbitten potato.
When visitors called on Thoreau, which they did sometimes, he describes the manner in which, if he were out, they would leave their cards—either a bunch of flowers, a wreath of evergreen, or a name in pencil on a yellow leaf or chip. If he had friends in summer days he took them into his best room, or drawing-room, which was the pine wood behind his house. Travelers did sometimes come out of their way to see Thoreau, having heard of the strange man living in the woods, and they were curious to see him and the inside of his hut. They would make an excuse for calling by asking for a glass of water, and Thoreau would direct them to the pond, where he always drank himself, and hand them a cup. It interested him to observe the effect the woods and solitude had on people. Girls and boys and young women, he said, seemed very happy to be there, but men, even farmers, thought only of the loneliness and how far it was from somewhere, adding that of course they enjoyed a ramble in the woods.
In November of the first year he was at Walden, Thoreau built his chimney, having studied masonry, and he lingered about the fire-place of his house, as being, he says, the most important part of a house. Then he plastered the hut in freezing weather, fetching the sand for the purpose from the shore below. Then, he says, “I began to use it for warmth as well as shelter.” When he had finished this work the pond was frozen and snow covered the ground. Thoreau, happy and serene, retired still further into his shell, keeping a bright fire in his house and within his breast. All this time he wrote a good deal, and his employment out of doors was to collect dead wood and to drag it into his shed. He loved his woodpile, and would build it where he could see it in front of his window. For many weeks in the snow Thoreau would spend cheerful evenings by his fireside, and no visitors would come to the woods—only woodmen came occasionally to cut and take wood on sleds back to the village. But no weather interfered with Thoreau’s walks. He managed to make a little pathway by always treading on the same track, and he would go thus in deepest snow to keep, as he expressed it, an appointment with an old beech-tree or a birch, or an old friend among the pines. His descriptions of winter in the woods are perhaps more fascinating and romantic than any other part of his “Walden,” and he tells of the wonders of the coming spring, the gradual melting of the ice, the longer days, the note of some arriving bird.
His second year at Walden was, he said, the same as the first, and when he left it in September he had lived there rather over two years. He left, he said, for as good a reason as he entered it. He does not tell the reason, but it was an unselfish one. His father had died, and his relations needed some one to work for them and to make a little money; so, much as he hated it, as we know he must have done, he returned to the world to make pencils and to write and to lecture till the end of his life.
When Thoreau emerged from his seclusion, you can imagine the questions he was asked by curious people who wanted to know all about it. Why did he do it; wasn’t he lonely; what did he do with himself; what did he eat? So he decided to publish an account of his experiment, filling out the diary he had written daily at Walden, and giving his reasons for his retirement and the conclusions he had formed about life and the world through his experiment. He learned, he tells us, that if you have a dream or some sort of idea of what a perfect life should be, or anyhow the life that appears to you to be the most lovely, the most useful, or the most satisfactory, you should advance quite confidently in that direction—that is to say, in the direction of your dreams; and that if you do this you will meet with a great deal of success. Also, that in proportion as you simplify your life the world will appear less complicated, you will be less poor and less lonely; the simple natural things will never fail to interest you, your requirements will be few, and your life full of enjoyment. Instead of three meals a day, eat but one; instead of a hundred dishes, five; and reduce everything in proportion. Life, says Thoreau, is simply frittered away by detail. And about clothes—Thoreau describes how he asked his acquaintances if they would appear with a neat patch on their trousers, and most of them thought they would be disgraced for life. Apparently, Thoreau says, they would rather have a broken leg than a trouser with a rent in it. It is certain that a man’s clothes are more important to some people than the man himself, and all these things, to one who lives a natural life, appear almost too absurd to be tolerated; and Thoreau, I think, did a useful work in drawing attention to these fallacies, which we are all inclined to take as a matter of course.
But Thoreau, because he went into the woods to live alone, did not wish every one to do so; indeed, he thought there should be as many different kinds of people in the world as possible. What he wanted people to do was to find out for themselves the best thing for themselves, and not necessarily to follow in the footsteps of their fathers and mothers and friends, to be Republicans because these were Republicans or Democrats because they were Democrats, to think as they did and to live as they did without giving any thought at all to it. He wanted people to have the courage to experiment and to take risks. But he did not wish to make rules for strong, courageous natures, nor did he wish to alter the way of living of those who found encouragement and happiness in their present manner of life. He did not speak at all to those who were well employed, but he did want to help people who complained, who were discontented and saw life as a desert, dull and joyless and without hope. He had in his head chiefly what he calls “that seemingly wealthy but most terribly impoverished class of all,” the people who have accumulated money and property and so have forged their own gold and silver fetters. He was tremendously scornful about the rich, and perhaps not pitiful enough. On the other hand, everything he has said against the possession of money and the futility of luxury is so perfectly reasonable and true and without any exaggeration, that no arguments can really be found to meet him. A good many of us admit that riches do not bring happiness, and that they undoubtedly increase our responsibilities and make us less free, but we all fail to act up to our beliefs, and continue to wish for more money in order to have a larger house, more servants, more clothes—and thus, as Thoreau says, we become “the tools of our tools” and the slaves of our own helpers and servants; in fact, these things are a hindrance to our development. “Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.” This is one of Thoreau’s maxims. It was certainly easier for Thoreau than for some to live a perfectly natural life in the woods. He had not been brought up in luxury. What he named luxuries we most of us call comforts. He was frugal by training as well as by inclination. Therefore in criticizing as he did the life that is led by most people in the world he was not very generous, because he had never felt their temptations. He was, some have thought, hardly human. In fact, he had very few weaknesses, and to be almost perfect is not a very attractive quality. We like to find imperfections in people and faults like our own. Thoreau was very little troubled by indecisions or doubts as to whether a thing was right or wrong for himself. He was quite sure of what he wanted; he went to look for it, and he found it. He was determined to improve himself, to be good and to be happy, and he succeeded. Even when he was dying of consumption he said in a letter he was enjoying existence as much as ever. When he believed in things he believed in them wholly, and principally he believed in the invigorating power of nature. He loved books; he loved writing and wood-cutting and walks in the country. He has written a delightful essay on walking, and has told us that he wrote in proportion to his rambles—if he was shut up indoors he could not write at all. He liked, too, association with simple, genuine people who were spending their lives in the open—fishermen, woodmen, and sometimes farmers—so that it cannot be said that he was a misanthropist—one who hates his fellow-creatures; if they were real and natural he enjoyed them and cared for them, but he had not got to depend on human beings for his entertainment. His interests and resources lay within himself, and he could always fall back on nature. “You may,” he says, “have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours even in a poorhouse. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the almshouse as brightly as from the rich man’s abode. The snow melts before its door as early in the spring.”
Thoreau’s enjoyment was calm and level. From his writings we do not gather that he was ever desperately unhappy, unless it was perhaps in a crowded street or in a luxurious drawing-room. He did mind very much the struggle and bustle, the ugliness of city life and all it stands for. It had a bad, cramping effect upon him, and he shunned it. Once back again in his woods and fields, his whole nature expanded. On cheerless, bleak days, when he was out of doors and the villagers would be thinking of their inn, he would, he says, come to himself and feel himself to be part of it all. “This cold and solitude are friends of mine.” In the country and alone he would see things as they are, “grand and beautiful,” and forget “all trivial men and things.” The stillness and solitude inspired him. His brain and mind worked and his nerves were steadied.
To some, Thoreau appeared to have a cold personality. One man said of him he would as soon think of taking his arm as taking the arm of an elm-tree. “You could not,” said Carlyle, “nestle up to him.” There are others who put a man down as a coward if he runs away from the world as it is, and does not face it and make the best of it. On this question there must always be a good deal of dispute, but it is really rather an absurd thing to argue about, because we are all made so differently. What is one man’s meat is another man’s poison. One person may not physically be able to stand a certain climate, but finds another to suit him, and so, as regards a man’s nature, he must discover how he may make the best of himself in order to develop his character and disposition. Thoreau’s argument was that if you cannot put a great proportion of your powers and enthusiasm into what you are doing, it is not of much use to yourself or mankind. He valued a man’s work in proportion to how much it enlarged and improved his soul.
To those who remain to fight in the hurly-burly while saying they dislike it, it probably has some bracing quality of which they are conscious, but Thoreau, as we have seen, felt himself in the streets to be “cheap and mean.” So he helped in his own way. To have forced him to sit on an office stool or to have a regular profession would have been a crime. If he had been more conventional and less peculiar, “Walden” would never have been written. Besides, he saw for what futile and ignoble reasons men chose their professions; sometimes not even because they had to make a living or to keep a wife and children, but for the sake of having expensive cigars and wines, a man-servant or a large house; and for these things, he observed, people will toil and make others toil at some stupid or sordid work, leaving themselves no time for thought, for true friendship, or for the enjoyment of books or nature or any real things. “There is no more fatal blunderer,” says Thoreau, “than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.” He calculated for himself that six weeks’ work would bring him in all the money he required to live. So that the whole of his winter and most of his summer would be free for study and enjoyment of country life. But it must not be thought that Thoreau was lazy or had never worked himself. In early days he had perfected himself in the craft of pencil-making and surveying. He had also worked very hard at his writing. He had learned industry, and in everything that he did he showed a peculiar thoroughness and skill.
If we want to find fault with Thoreau, it must be that he was perhaps too bent on improving himself. Thoreau and Emerson both believed very strongly in the importance of making oneself more interesting. Thoreau had a corresponding horror of consciously doing good to people, and of philanthropy generally. “Philanthropy,” he says, “is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind”; and again, “If you give money spend yourself with it. Do not merely abandon it to them” (the poor).
There are those who accuse Thoreau of being odd on purpose, and speak of his writing as paradoxical. It is much more likely that we who are doing and thinking exactly like our neighbors, without thinking if it is a good thing in itself, are the odd ones, or rather the lazy ones, because we cannot be bothered to disagree, to incur the disapproval of our friends, or to have them laughing at us. Emerson said that in life you must choose between Truth and Repose. By repose he means that you swallow your convictions for the sake of a quiet life—that you act always with the majority, or largest number of people, and shout with the biggest crowd. It is very comfortable to have people agreeing with you, and to live at ease and in accord with your neighbors, but to do this you must make up your mind to think very little and never to have a cause too much at heart, or you will be sure to offend somebody. You must shut your eyes to the horrors of war, of poverty, of hungry children, and say it is no use bothering or criticizing, as these things cannot be remedied. The man who says they can be remedied is often looked upon with suspicion or contempt, and even anger. All the greatest men and women have given their allegiance to truth, as we know by reading history. Thoreau was one of these. He lived at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when people were no longer sent to the stake for holding independent views, but they were made, as they still are now, to suffer all the same. Thoreau, like Garrison and Tolstoy and others of our heroes, thought that conscience should be above the State, and that men should be men first and subjects afterwards. But he was much more consistent than most people. He put himself to a great deal of trouble to carry out his principles. It was not enough for him to preach against the things he disapproved of—he lived and acted his disapproval. He pleaded in public for John Brown when he was condemned to death, and went to prison for a night for refusing to pay a tax in support of what he considered an unjust war. He did not enjoy this; it was a trouble and a bother, but Thoreau did what he thought right.
His was a pure and courageous spirit; he never said a thing for the sake of pleasing, and he saw with a clear, unprejudiced eye the futility, the stupidity, the waste of energy, and the sadness of much we have come to look upon as part of existence itself. But Thoreau was always, to the end of his rather short life, full of hope and trust. He would set about improving things by improving himself. His greatness lay in his originality and independence of character. He thrashed out questions for himself, and threw a fresh and illuminating light on them. He was a rebel in his quiet way, as Garibaldi or Cromwell were rebels on the field of battle.
The true life is the common life of all—not the life of the one.
All must labor for the life of others.
Tolstoy, one of the greatest novelists and the greatest thinkers of the nineteenth century, was a Russian.
His father, Count Nicholas Tolstoy, and his mother, Princess Marie Volkonsky, were both aristocrats, whose ancestors had been well known and important people for some generations.
Yasnaya Polyana (which means “Bright Glade”), where Leo Tolstoy was born, belonged to his mother. It was a very pretty place, and consisted of a large wooden house surrounded by woods and avenues of lime-trees, and with a river and four lakes and a lot of property belonging to it.
Tolstoy’s mother died when he was a year and a half old, so he could not remember her; but all he heard about her made him love her memory. He tells us that she appeared to him as “a creature so elevated, fine, and spiritual,” that often, during his struggles to be good and overcome temptation, he prayed to her soul to help him, and that such prayer always did. She seems to have been a gifted and delightful woman, speaking five languages and playing the piano exceptionally well. She had a gift for telling stories too. At balls, it is said, her young girl-friends would leave the dance and gather together in a dark room to hear her tell a story, for the Princess had to have the room darkened or she felt shy.
Tolstoy’s mother was hot-tempered, yet self-controlled. She was generous and hardly ever condemned anybody, and she was very truthful. Her son Leo inherited many of her qualities.
Tolstoy lost his father when he was nine years old, but he remembered him quite well, and writes of him as a good, conscientious man, who spent his life looking after his estate, not very cleverly, but who was especially humane and kind for those days, as he never beat his serfs and was considered lacking in firmness. He was, however, an independent-minded man, who refused to bow down before the will of the Russian Government: indeed, he refused always to serve under it. Tolstoy had a great love and admiration for his father, but nothing like the feeling he had for the memory of his mother.