FullReads

Thoreau’s “Maine Woods” I look upon as one of the best books of the kind in English literature. It has just the right tone and quality, like Dana’s “Two Years Before the Mast”–a tone and quality that sometimes come to a man when he makes less effort to write than to see and feel truly. He does not aim to exploit the woods, but to live with them and possess himself of their spirit. The Cape Cod book also has a similar merit; it almost leaves a taste of the salt sea spray upon your lips. Emerson criticizes Thoreau freely, and justly, I think. As a person he lacked sweetness and winsomeness; as a writer he was at times given to a meaningless exaggeration.

Henry Thoreau sends me a paper with the old fault of
unlimited contradiction. The trick of his rhetoric is soon
learned: it consists in substituting for the obvious word
and thought its diametrical antagonist. He praises wild
mountains and winter forests for their domestic air; snow
and ice for their warmth; villagers and wood-choppers for
their urbanity, and the wilderness for resembling Rome and
Paris. With the constant inclination to dispraise cities and
civilization, he yet can find no way to know woods and
woodmen except by paralleling them with towns and townsmen.
Channing declared the piece is excellent: but it makes me
nervous and wretched to read it, with all its merits.

I told Henry Thoreau that his freedom is in the form, but he
does not disclose new matter. I am very familiar with all
his thoughts,–they are my own quite originally drest. But
if the question be, what new ideas has he thrown into
circulation, he has not yet told what that is which he was
created to say. I said to him what I often feel, I only know
three persons who seem to me fully to see this law of
reciprocity or compensation–himself, Alcott, and myself:
and ‘t is odd that we should all be neighbors, for in the
wide land or the wide earth I do not know another who seems
to have it as deeply and originally as these three
Gothamites.

A remark of Emerson’s upon Thoreau calls up the image of John Muir to me: “If I knew only Thoreau, I should think cooeperation of good men impossible. Must we always talk for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, and joy?” Then, after crediting Thoreau with some admirable gifts,–centrality, penetration, strong understanding,–he proceeds to say, “all his resources of wit and invention are lost to me, in every experiment, year after year, that I make to hold intercourse with his mind. Always some weary captious paradox to fight you with, and the time and temper wasted.”

Emerson met John Muir in the Yosemite in 1871 and was evidently impressed with him. Somewhere he gives a list of his men which begins with Carlyle and ends with Muir. Here was another man with more character than intellect, as Emerson said of Carlyle, and with the flavor of the wild about him. Muir was not too compliant and deferential. He belonged to the sayers of No. Contradiction was the breath of his nostrils. He had the Scottish chariness of bestowing praise or approval, and could surely give Emerson the sense of being met which he demanded. Writing was irksome to Muir as it was to Carlyle, but in monologue, in an attentive company, he shone; not a great thinker, but a mind strongly characteristic. His philosophy rarely rose above that of the Sunday school, but his moral fiber was very strong, and his wit ready and keen. In conversation and in daily intercourse he was a man not easily put aside. Emerson found him deeply read in nature lore and with some suggestion about his look and manner of the wild and rugged solitude in which he lived so much.