Comments & Questions
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the work’s history. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and “Civil Disobedience” through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.
Comments
RALPH WALDO EMERSON
It cost [Thoreau] 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.” ... In 1845 he built himself a small framed house on the shores of Walden Pond, and lived there two years alone, a life of labor and study. This action was quite native and fit for him. No one who knew him would tax him with affectation. He was more unlike his neighbors in his thought than in his action. As soon as he had exhausted the advantages of that solitude, he abandoned it. In 1847, not approving some uses to which the public expenditure was applied, he refused to pay his town tax, and was put in jail. A friend paid the tax for him, and he was released. The like annoyance was threatened the next year. But as his friends paid the tax, notwithstanding his protest, I believe he ceased to resist. No opposition or ridicule had any weight with him. He coldly and fully stated his opinion without affecting to believe that it was the opinion of the company. It was of no consequence if every one present held the opposite opinion.
—from The Atlantic Monthly (August 1862)
WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER
[Thoreau’s] self estimate and ambition were inordinate; his willingness to pay the price of their outward gratification, a negative quantity. Their exorbitant demands absorbed him; but he had not those powerful charms and signs which would draw from others a correspondent valuation of him and attention to him. Accordingly, he shut his real self in a cell of secrecy, and retreated from men whose discordant returns repelled, to natural objects whose accordant repose seemed acceptingly to confirm and return, the required estimate imposed on them. The key of his life is the fact that it was devoted to the art of an interior aggrandizement of himself. The three chief tricks in this art are, first, a direct self-enhancement, by a boundless pampering of egotism; secondly, an indirect self-enhancement, by a scornful depreciation of others; thirdly, an imaginative magnifying of every trifle related to self, by associating with it a colossal idea of the self. It is difficult to open many pages in the written record of Thoreau without being confronted with examples of these three tricks. He is constantly, with all his boastful stoicism, feeling himself, reflecting himself, fondling himself, reverberating himself, exalting himself, incapable of escaping or forgetting himself. He is never contented with things until they are wound through, and made to echo himself; and this is the very mark of spiritual disturbance.... Many a humble and loving author who nestled amongst his fellow-men and not boasted, has contributed far more to brace and enrich the characters and sweeten the lives of his readers than the ill-balanced and unsatisfied hermit of Concord, part cynic, part stoic, who strove to compensate himself with nature and solitude for what he could not wring from men and society. The extravagant estimate he put on solitude may serve as a corrective of the extravagant estimate put on society by our hives of citizens. His monstrous preference of savagedom to civilization may usefully influence us to appreciate natural unsophisticatedness more highly, and conventionality more lowly. As a teacher, this is nearly the extent of his narrow mission. Lowell, in a careful article, written after reading all the published works of Thoreau, says of him: “He seems to us to have been a man with so high a conceit of himself, that he accepted without questioning, and insisted on our accepting, his defects and weaknesses of character, as virtues and powers peculiar to himself. Was he indolent,—he finds none of the activities which attract or employ the rest of mankind worthy of him. Was he wanting in qualities that make success,—it is success that is contemptible, and not himself that lacks persistency and purpose. Was he poor,—money was an unmixed evil. Did his life seem a selfish one,—he condemns doing good, as one of the weakest of the superstitions.”
In relation to the intellectual and moral influence of solitude, the example of Thoreau, with all the alleviating wisdom, courage, and tenderness confessedly in it, is chiefly valuable as an illustration of the evils of a want of sympathy with the community.
—from Solitudes of Nature and Man; or the Loneliness of Human Life (1866)
HENRY JAMES
Whatever question there may be of [Thoreau’s] talent, there can be none, I think, of his genius. It was a slim and crooked one; but it was eminently personal. He was imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial—he was parochial; it is only at his best that he is readable. But at his best he has an extreme natural charm, and he must always be mentioned after those Americans—Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell, Motley—who have written originally. He was Emerson’s independent moral man made flesh—living for the ages, and not for Saturday and Sunday; for the Universe, and not for Concord. In fact, however, Thoreau lived for Concord very effectually, and by his remarkable genius for the observation of the phenomena of woods and streams, of plants and trees, and beasts and fishes, and for fighting a kind of spiritual interest over these things, he did more than he perhaps intended toward consolidating the fame of his accidental human sojourn.
—from Hawthorne (1879)
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
In one word, Thoreau was a skulker. He did not wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into a corner to hoard it for himself. He left all for the sake of certain virtuous self-indulgences. It is true that his tastes were noble; that his ruling passion was to keep himself unspotted from the world; and that his luxuries were all of the same healthy order as cold tubs and early rising. But a man may be both coldly cruel in the pursuit of goodness, and morbid even in the pursuit of health. I cannot lay my hands on the passage in which he explains his abstinence from tea and coffee, but I am sure I have the meaning correctly. It is this: He thought it bad economy and worthy of no true virtuoso to spoil the natural rapture of the morning with such muddy stimulants; let him but see the sun rise, and he was already sufficiently inspirited for the labors of the day. That may be reason good enough to abstain from tea; but when we go on to find the same man, on the same or similar grounds, abstain from nearly everything that his neighbors innocently and pleasurably use, and from the rubs and trials of human society itself into the bargain, we recognize that valetudinarian health-fulness which is more delicate than sickness itself. We need have no respect for a state of artificial training. True health is to be able to do without it. Shakespeare, we can imagine, might begin the day upon a quart of ale, and yet enjoy the sunrise to the full as much as Thoreau, and commemorate his enjoyment in vastly better verses. A man who must separate himself from his neighbors’ habits in order to be happy, is in much the same case with one who requires to take opium for the same purpose. What we want to see is one who can breast into the world, do a man’s work, and still preserve his first and pure enjoyment of existence.
—from Cornhill Magazine (June 1880)
JOHN BURROUGHS
Thoreau pitched his Walden in this key; he claps his wings and gives forth a clear, saucy, cheery, triumphant note—if only to wake his neighbors up. And the book is certainly the most delicious piece of brag in literature. There is nothing else like it; nothing so good, certainly. It is a challenge and a triumph, and has a morning freshness and elan. Read the chapter on his “bean-field.” One wants to go forthwith and plant a field with beans, and hoe them barefoot. It is a kind of celestial agriculture.
—from The Century (July 1882)
Questions
1. “The book is certainly the most delicious piece of brag in literature,” wrote John Burroughs of Walden. Is this just? Then Burroughs goes on: “There is nothing else like it; nothing so good, certainly.” Is this praise?
2. “In one word, Thoreau was a skulker. He did not wish virtue to go out of him among his fellow-men, but slunk into a corner to hoard it for himself. He left all for the sake of certain virtuous self-indulgences.” So wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. What kind of person emerges from the pages as you read Walden and “Civil Disobedience”? Is Thoreau a skulker, a narcissist, a misanthrope, an embittered loser, or a brave man willing to do without in the name of principle? Would he have been capable of his philosophy had he not spent so much time alone?
3. Thoreau seems to prefer “the cow which kicks over the pail, leaps the cow-yard fence, and runs after her calf, in milking time,” to the migrating buffalo seeking “new pastures in another latitude” (pp. 253-254). What sorts of humans are the cow and buffalo representative of? Is Thoreau’s preference for the cow intelligible? The tame cow commits an “extravagance.” The buffalo, a herd animal, is nevertheless wild and seeks out “new pastures in another latitude.” Which do you prefer and why?
4. Suppose Nation A starts a war with Nation B. You are a citizen of Nation A. You oppose the war. Is refusing to pay your taxes (part of which help pay for the war) and going to jail for it a good way to make Nation A desist? Or would this action merely feed your self-esteem?
5. What do you think: Is spending time in the wilderness, away from other people and the material and moral aspects of civilization, good for one’s character or not? In either case, why?
For Further Reading
Selected Biographies
Harding, Walter. The Days of Henry Thoreau: A Biography. Expanded edition: 1982. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992.
Howarth, William L. The Book of Concord: Thoreau’s Life as a Writer. New York: Viking, 1982.
Richardson, Robert D., Jr. Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Thoreau in Context
Bennett, Jane. Thoreau’s Nature: Ethics, Politics, and the Wild. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1994.
Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Burbick, Joan. Thoreau’s Alternative History: Changing Perspectives on Nature, Culture, and Language. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987.
Cain, William E., ed. A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Foster, David R. Thoreau’s Country: Journey through a Transformed Landscape. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Gura, Philip F. The Wisdom of Words: Language, Theology, and Literature in the New England Renaissance. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981.
Meyer, Michael. Several More Lives to Live: Thoreau’s Political Reputation in America. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977.
Packer, Barbara. “The Transcendentalists.” In The Cambridge History of American Literature, vol. 2, 1820-1865, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch and Cyrus R. K. Patell. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 329-604.
Sattelmeyer, Robert. Thoreau’s Reading: A Study in Intellectual History with Bibliographical Catalogue. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988.
Sayre, Robert F. Thoreau and the American Indians. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977.
Tauber, Alfred I. Henry David Thoreau and the Moral Agency of Knowing. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
Walls, Laura Dassow. Seeing New Worlds: Henry David Thoreau and Nineteenth-Century Natural Science. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995.
Weisbuch, Robert. Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
On Walden and “Civil Disobedience”
Bickman, Martin. Walden: Volatile Truths. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992.
Cavell, Stanley. The Senses of Walden. 1972. Expanded edition: San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981.
Garber, Frederick. Thoreau’s Redemptive Imagination. New York: New York University Press, 1977.
Golemba, Henry. Thoreau’s Wild Rhetoric. New York: New York University Press, 1990.
Paul, Sherman. The Shores of America: Thoreau’s Inward Exploration. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1958.
Peck, H. Daniel. Thoreau’s Morning Work: Memory and Perception in “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” “The Journal,” and “Walden.” New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990.
Shanley, J. Lyndon. The Making of Walden, with the Text of the First Version. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957.
Works Cited in the Introduction
Borst, Raymond R. The Thoreau Log: A Documentary Life of Henry David Thoreau, 1817-1862. New York: G. K. Hall, 1992.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. New York: Library of America, 1983.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Heart of Hawthorne’s Journals. Edited by Newton Arvin. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1929.
Jefferson, Thomas. Writings. New York: Library of America, 1984.
Lowell, James Russell. Literary Essays. 4 vols. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1899.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. 1964. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.
Poirier, Richard, ed. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Porte, Joel, ed. Emerson in His Journals. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982.
Scharnhorst, Gary. Henry David Thoreau: An Annotated Bibliography of Comment and Criticism Before 1900. New York and London: Garland Publishers, 1992.
Thoreau, Henry David. Collected Essays and Poems. New York: Library of America, 2001.