HATER OF SHAMS In Jail with Thoreau and His Thoughts JOHN COURNOS NE evening-it was during the early forties-a man carrying under his arm a boot which needed mending was walking toward the cobbler's in the village of Concord, Massachusetts. He was advancing with the firm step of a man used to walking long distances across country, and there was something in his stride which bespoke resolution of character and independence of mind; something almost pugnacious, one might say. Under thirty years of age, with a large aquiline nose and a queer mouth which its owner would have done well to hide under a deciduous hirsute growth, he was decidedly "unprepossessing as to looks. But his eyes, which had the appearance of being used to gaze into long distances, were clear and honest, and intelligent and virile; a stranger might have also considered them hard. The same stranger might have found himself at a loss if he had tried to determine to what stratum of society the man with the boot under his arm belonged, to what trade he was bound, and what justification could be found for him in life. The man looked as if he did not give a hang as to what any one thought. Now and then, as he walked, a farmer or a working hand he happened to meet greeted him laconically, and it was clear from the greeting that he enjoyed their respect and even their affection. The man was nearing the cobbler's, when a big jovial fellow clapped him on the shoulder, an action which did not seem natural when one considered the proud aloofness of the man whose shoulder suffered the indignity. The good-natured man Sam Staples, the local jailer and taxcollector; and the man on whose shoulder his hand descended so affectionately was Henry Thoreau, a graduate of Harvard and now a local celebrity, a philosopher whose aim in life was to be natural, himself, and to meddle in no man's business. Staples, though a jailer, was a kindly soul, and had a fondness for Thoreau, and his first remark was more than friendly. "I'll pay your tax, Henry, if you're hard up." But Henry was not hard up, and said so. To be frank, he thought the State poll-tax unjust, and he hadn't the least intention of paying it. That being the case, poor Staples, the authorized tax-collector of the place, had no alternative but to do his duty, which was to conduct his friend to jail. He did this with not a ignorance which was far from being little reluctance and regret. bliss. Not much space is needed for the body if one's thoughts are free. His wandered, now to the Pharaohs, now to Pericles, now to the eternal Ganges, then into the starry space; and neither the Chinese Wall nor the multitudinous nebulæ of the Milky Way hindered their progress, faster than the light of the stars. It was marvelous thus to sit still and survey time and space. Thus also, thousands of years hence, future ages might look back upon Thoreau's outer world and pronounce it a prison, wherein ignorance and barbarism reigned. And the prison cell in which he sat in punishment for his principles was the living symbol of that world. Henry made no demur. A lover of solitudes, he was mindful of the fact that in jail as well as anywhere, he would have the longed-for opportunity to meditate to his heart's content without hindrance from intruding well-meaning people. He was self-contained; he bore his world, such as it was, within himself. They might deprive him of his physical liberty, even of his possessions; they could not take from him the only capital he had that was of any value —his thoughts, the only capital that does not diminish with unremitting use. And where is there a better place than the inside of a jail to contemplate the beauties and benefits of official institutions? He had given much thought to the subject, and here he was to have a practical demonstration of his opinions. He was nothing if not practical. Was it so tedious, so boring, then, to sit in a little cell, with his thoughts for companions? Not when the thoughts, despite their being shut in between the walls of the skull as one's body is by the walls of the jail, are yet free to journey at will through the universe. Eastern sages, he was aware, can think of infinity for days and weeks while contemplating a crack in the wall; and there was something of the Eastern sage about Henry. The world itself, as he saw it, was for most men but a larger prison in which they walked about wrapped in the illusion that they were free, while actually bound by a thousand habits and fictitious needs, and by conventions hiding their real selves, atrophied by that larger So Henry was thinking, while his observant glance paused on a spider weaving his web. Back and forth, back and forth, from point to point, from point to point, journeys the deft insect, weaving its silken thread to catch the stupid fly which wings through space and might go on winging through space, an infinitude of space, yet allows itself to be caught in the silken meshes of tenuous illusion. Is not this a picture of dual man, man the spider and man the fly, one weaving the web, the other flying into it-meshes the prisoner may not break for all the fineness of the silken tissue? Foolish man, to be caught thus to his undoing! Henry was having a marvelous, an exulting time. Foolish, foolish man, to live and struggle under laws and regulations binding him to shop-counter or office desk, to think ever and ever of security, to fill his house with a thousand useless things matching the furniture of his mind, to toil and moil, to indulge in petty joys and petty lusts, in the end to die without having lived. Six days a week a man did toil, and on the seventh he rested. Foolish man not to have a week of one working day and six Sundays! His mind went wandering to his college days. days. He had He had gone to Harvard. For what? Harvard had not taught him anything. He saw no way of using Harvard knowledge in life. He had cast off all that knowledge which spurred men to careers, "to get on" in the world, as the saying goes. He deemed as useless much of what other men called useful. What he had said on the day of his "commencement" he stood by now, years later. He had then said: Men were active, energetic, restless, they thought faster and freer than ever before. The winds and the waves, and all the provision of nature, were not enough for men; they must needs dig deep into the bowels of the earth that they might travel faster on its surface. The earth had become a vast bee-hive. Yet, in the midst of all this bustle, how many men lived their lives wisely and well? Hardly one in a hundred. How many were happy? One might count the happy ones on one's fingers, and they were by no means among the bustlers. As often as not, they were like the happy beggar of the fairy-tale whose shirt the king sought for his happiness, only to find that the beggar had no shirt. The happiest traveler was he who carried the least baggage. Possessions hindered men from taking wing. What a wonderful place the earth. was with its profuse beauty, with its diversity of climes, variety of vege tation and of animal life, and changes of season. It was the Garden of Eden, if men wanted it so. Yet what were men doing? They were abusing the wealth of nature, they thought of nature wholly in terms of utility, they made nature a beast of burden, and made themselves beasts of burden. The commercial spirit was rampant in the land, everything was done to foster and sustain it. It developed "a blind and unmanly love of wealth." The ruling spirit, "it infused into all our thoughts and affections a degree of its own selfishness; we become selfish in our patriotism, selfish in our domestic relations, selfish in our religion." So Henry had thought when he was twenty. So he thought now, years later. He was a man who had his mind made up when he was born. He would die thinking the same thoughts. There was to him a vexing thing about most men—they were too confused by the conflict between their true nature and their education to know what they wanted. They were one thing one hour, another the next. Impulse pulled them one way, civilized artifice another. One never knew where to find them. But he, Henry, never had the least doubt as to the sort of life he ought to lead; for that matter, he had more than an inkling that it would be well for the world if it could share his modest desires. People thought too much of making their lives useful; they saw everything in terms of utility. Yet he, Henry, knew—with a knowledge which would brook of no contradiction-that "this curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient; more beautiful than it is useful; it is more to be admired and enjoyed than used.” And again and again he thought, it would be well if the order of things were reversed; "the seventh should be man's day of toil, wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow; the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul-in which to range this wide-spread garden and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of Nature." He himself was the happiest of men. He communed with the trees of the forest and heard delicious mysteries in the mere rustling of leaves in the wind; he spoke with the birds and the snakes and knew their secret wisdom; it was fine to walk on the soft moss yielding under his feet; every blade of grass lived for him its own enchanted life. It was a joy to pick a berry on the way. Was this monotonous? The seasons gave him diversity. And, oh, the splendors of the sun in the spring! It warmed your back with a soft tenderness; it thawed out the sleepy winter in your soul; you felt that first slow awakening as when the tiny rivulets begin to flow from under the yet clinging snow. And, oh, the splendor of water as it mirrors blue skies, and the joy of being in a canoe as it gracefully skims the pellucid surfaces, and the attendant joy of pausing somewhere, leaping on to shore wooded with pines, of building a fire in a remote glade, of spreading on the ground your modest repast tastier than any dish out of the king's kitchen, of gulping it all down with a cupful or two of the freshest, coolest of spring-water which you had gone out to find and had found! 20 He was a savage, some had said; and he had not said nay. There was something to be said for savages. He felt a closer kinship with the Red Indian than with the white man who had driven him out. Poor deluded white man, with his bagful of illusions, and flasks of fire-water to sustain them! Men had been swept along by ambition-for conquest, for wealth, for power. Of what avail these energetic efforts which were always stopped by the grave, always ended by tumbling into a small hole three by six, the mightiest ambitions being but food for worms? They could not take with them the kingdoms they had conquered, the wealth they had accrued. Folly and vanity! And yet, he thought, there was one thing surely worth while; and that was Love-when it was Love! Not love founded on sham or illusion; nor yet that love, like other things in men's lives, inspired by the commercial spirit, based on lust, convenience, or blindness. Far from being blind, Love, if it was Love, was the most seeing thing on earth; it could not be simulated, nor could it be a victim of deception. True Love was the highest wisdom; a double harness, if you like, but a double harmony too; one was at harmony with one's self and one was in harmony with the other. It was the supreme friendship of two imaginations as well as of two hearts. It was always the lover's imagination that was hurt before his or her heart was hurt. A thing of infinitely delicate perceptions, it saw and it felt, and its fingers played on the heart as on a stringed instrument, luring from it a tune of passionate ecstasy or a dirge of aches and wails. Love was the greatest reality, for it could least endure sham. And nothing lived on sham so much as that unreality which so often passed with men under the name of Love. Did not a hidden lust hide under a mask of polite pretensions to purity? Certainly, there was a great deal of sham in society's attitude, which was to swathe the subject in silence and mystery. But this silence was not the silence which took natural things for granted-it was born of the effort to hide false shame; and this mystery was not the mystery which is as a screening veil to a sacred religious rite, but an implication of something downright nasty and ugly. Thus was the most sacred function in life, the function of producing more life, so intimately allied with the deepest religious mood, dragged in the mud. What was more beautiful than man and woman in harmony, in body and spirit? What miracle surpassed this, while Love remained? The flame of a perfect union consumed false shame and elevated passion to the realm of religious experience. Did not Herodotus relate how the Assyrian husband and wife, after experiencing the mutual ecstasy, sat up until dawn round the bowl of burning incense as a tribute to the creative spirit of their God? Only that which was sham countenanced false shame and extolled it as a virtue, masking from the world. unclean flames hurtful to the race. And the hope of the race, thought Henry, lay precisely in Love, in harmonious unions born of Love. Men could not be improved, as some men thought, by being bred in the way cattle are bred. "Let Love be purified, and all the rest will follow." Yes, he thought, "a pure love is the panacea for all the ills of the world." There was to be sure, no woman as yet to fill Henry's life for him. Why did not the preacher practise his own doctrine? Henry's life was full as it was. He was in love with Nature; he sat at Nature's feet and let her caressing breezes run through his hair. He strove to be at one with her, to imbibe of her eternal wisdom, and dreamed of creating children in the form of books which should teach men to return to forgotten ways. He was a man of one mind, of one heart, and his mind and heart were one. That was the secret of life, he was sure: to create a harmony within one's self and to relate that harmony with the natural world. He was a part of Nature, and he must find his place in Nature. He must not, as other men do, think one thing and act another. He must make his life fit his philosophy; he had better chuck it if he couldn't! How many artists and philosophers advocated the ideal life, and themselves lived in discord with their thoughts! How many men gave lip-service to God, while leading ungodly lives! The man and his art should be one, as the lover and his beloved are one. Henry smiled to himself. Was it not for this that he was in jail? He paid his road-tax, which was reasonable; but he would not pay his poll-tax, which was unreasonable. It was but a frail gesture for one man to make; but was not his manhood worth something to himself? He would not encourage injustice. Rogues were at liberty; but he, a man careful of great virtues, was in jail. Was not that the measure of the Government's folly? Why should the State go to the expense of lodging him for no crime save the possession of that precious contra |