How Comic Is Simplicity
By late October 1837, Emerson was recording Henry’s amusing quirks. During a philosophical conversation among Emerson and friends, a local farmer named Edmund Hosmer argued that he didn’t wish to claim a distinction between the mind of Jesus and that of a normal human. Then suddenly he changed his tone and remarked that Jesus created the world and was the eternal God.
“Mr. Hosmer has kicked the pail over,” observed Henry.
That night Emerson wrote in his journal, “I delight much in my young friend,1 who seems to have as free & erect a mind as any I have ever met.”
In December, Emerson informed Henry2 that he would be launching the lecture season at the Masonic Temple in Boston. Knowing the state of his unemployed friend’s finances, Emerson gave him a free-admission pass to the lecture. When he stopped by the Thoreau boarding-house on the day of the talk, apparently to offer a ride, Emerson found that Henry had departed hours earlier. Unable to afford even the carriage fare, Henry had set out to walk the nineteen miles to the lecture hall.
Flattered and impressed by Henry’s eager interest in his words, Emerson invited him to attend a weekly gathering at Bush, granting Henry associate membership in the family. The only other person at the gatherings besides Emerson, Lidian, Lidian’s mother, the Emersons’ one-year-old son Waldo, and Henry was a friend from Henry’s childhood—Elizabeth Hoar, sister of Henry’s childhood friend Edward, daughter of judge Samuel Hoar. Elizabeth had been engaged to Emerson’s brother Charles, who died before they could marry. Through his new mentor, Henry was being brought into contact with other intelligent, perceptive women besides those he could find at home in the boarding-house. Emerson’s influence was showing up in unpredictable ways.
Although Henry had published almost nothing, Emerson saw the young man’s potential in his challenging conversation and broad reading. He went out of his way to welcome Henry into Concord’s growing literary circle and wrote at length about him in his journal and in letters to friends. Emerson also offered Henry the run of his considerable library—a lure guaranteed to entice a young man who greatly missed the Harvard library. Emerson’s was a handsome but not elegant room to the right of the front door, the first of the two large square rooms on the right side of the hall that divided the house down the center.3 Its books were arrayed on plain and functional rather than decorative shelves that reached from ceiling to low wooden cabinets on only one side of the room,4 opposite a large fireplace with a low grate.
The winter of 1837–38 brought the two together often. Emerson’s city friends hesitated to brave the snow and ice for a journey to Concord. He was receiving considerable criticism for, and misrepresentation of, his recent essays5 and lectures, and outraged responses to Nature were still trickling in; so Emerson was in the mood to hide out in his bucolic oasis, avoiding disputation and turmoil. “My good Henry Thoreau6 made this else solitary afternoon sunny with his simplicity & clear perception,” Emerson remarked to his journal in February. “How comic is simplicity in this doubledealing quacking world. Every thing that boy says makes merry with society though nothing can be graver than his meaning.”
Henry’s grave approach to serious issues derived in part from his mother and sisters. All three were involved in a national movement. Across America, support for the abolition of slavery was growing daily, and women were one of the main reasons. In 1837, in Middlesex County alone, eight anti-slavery groups formed, three of them emphasizing female membership. Seventy percent of the signatures on a petition7 to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia were from Massachusetts women. “The destiny of the slaves is in the hands of the American women,” the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison had proclaimed in 1833, “and complete emancipation can never take place without their co-operation.” British women had organized on behalf of abolition in the 1820s and United States women were trying to catch up.
Massachusetts had banned slavery in 17838 and thousands of citizens in the state had since joined the growing movement to outlaw it across the nation. Locally, women organizing for public works dated back at least to 1814, with the founding of the Concord Female Charitable Society.9 The Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society held its first formal meeting on the eighteenth of October 1837. The sixty-one women who attended included Cynthia Thoreau with both Sophia and Helen; their boarders Mrs. Joseph Ward and her daughter Prudence; and Lidian Emerson. In early September, the Reverend John Wilder’s Trinitarian church had hosted10 a visit from a pair of famous—or notorious—abolitionists and advocates of women’s rights, sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké.11 Crowds flocked to hear them in Concord, as they did all over New England. The sisters lodged at the Thoreau boardinghouse, and Henry and his family found them inspiring. Emotional speeches were followed by liberal financial donations. “I think I shall not turn away my attention12 from the abolition cause,” wrote Lidian Emerson, “till I have found whether there is not something for me personally to do and bear to forward it.”
The Grimké sisters knew whereof they spoke. At the age of five Sarah had witnessed the brutal whipping of a slave. She told audiences that in response she tried to run away from home aboard a ship, hoping to voyage to a land without slavery. The sisters’ father, John Faucheraud Grimké, who had died in 1819, had been chief judge of the South Carolina Supreme Court and a wealthy landowner, an upper-class Charlestonian who owned hundreds of slaves. As an aristocratic Southerner, he had never publicly opposed slavery. After Sarah nursed him through a mysterious fatal illness, however, she joined her younger sister in devoting their lives to eradicating the practice they saw as the scourge of civilization. And she had inspired the Thoreau family to join the fight.
In Hingham, Massachusetts, the Reverend Albert Folsom warned his parishioners that such political involvement would “poison the soul” of white women. He claimed that Woman was naturally amiable and modest, and that she should not interfere in politics, lest she become “bigoted, rash, and morose.13 Nor is this all. Self-sufficiency, arrogance, and masculine boldness follow naturally in the train.”
Only a few weeks later, in Illinois, a young man named Elijah Parish Lovejoy was murdered. A Presbyterian minister, journalist, and editor, he had just founded an antislavery newspaper called the Alton Observer. He was receiving, as quietly as possible to avoid attention, a fourth printing press, this one sent by the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, because his first three had been destroyed by pro-slavery mobs. On the seventh of November 1837, a mob stormed Lovejoy’s office14 with guns and stones. He was shot and killed. The Lovejoy murder helped ignite nationwide awareness of the urgent need for abolition, and as Henry and his family devoured the sad news stories they began to think of themselves as committed abolitionists.
Lidian Emerson, kind-hearted and intelligent, liked Henry and enjoyed his company. Her admiration for her brilliant and popular husband had originally carried over into his friendships with others; she wanted to like the people he liked. Already, however, she was becoming jealous of Emerson’s time and attention in some cases. Their ambitious dream of an intellectually balanced marriage was fading, as Emerson wrote and traveled while Lidian managed the household servants and tended to Waldo. The boy restored the family’s enjoyment of life following the death of Emerson’s brother a few months before Waldo’s birth. He liked to be pulled in a wagon around the barn, barking at dogs and mooing at cows and, when glimpsing a sheep, uttering his favorite exclamation: “Baaaaaaa. . .” Henry enjoyed the company of children more than that of most adults, and Lidian liked his easy familiarity with Waldo, his patience and calm.
Henry was often at the Emerson house. He and his new mentor had more in common than was apparent to others at first sight. Each found his greatest delight in the natural world, although each also applied considerable symbolism to the act of responding to nature. Emerson’s comment in his journal—one of many instances of an observation metamorphosing into a symbol during the act of recording it—could have been written by Henry in his own: “In nature all the growth15 is contemporary. Man’s labor in the garden is successive but the weeds and plants swell root & ripen all over the farm in the same instant of time.” Henry instinctively cared more about the actual animal or plant before him and tried to respond with open spirit to its presence and uniqueness, while Emerson had difficulty seeing a creature or process without framing it in symbolic terms. He would firmly remind himself, “We must use the language of facts16 & not be superstitiously abstract,” and then ask himself, “Is not the Vast17 an element in man? Yet what teaching or book of today appeals to the Vast?” Yet his eureka revelation18 about the interconnectedness of all nature had occurred in the Jardin des Plantes, the great botanical garden of the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle in Paris, where he discovered the plant taxonomy system of the pioneer French botanist Antoine Laurent de Jussieu.
Both Henry and Emerson responded with dismay to society’s parade of demeaning and frivolous diversions. “Then retire & hide,”19 Emerson instructed himself that summer; “& from the valley behold the mountain. Have solitary prayer & praise. Love the garden, the barn, the pasture, & the rock. There digest & correct the past experience, blend it with the new & divine life, & grow with God.” At about the same time, Henry was writing in his own journal, “Men are constantly dinging20 in my ears their fair theories and plausible solutions of the universe, but ever there is no help, and I return again to my shoreless, islandless ocean, and fathom unceasingly for a bottom that will hold an anchor, that it may not drag.” Society drove both back to what they thought of as the real world. “Nature is the beautiful asylum,”21 Emerson wrote, “to which we look in all the years of striving & conflict as the assured resource when we shall be driven out of society by ennui or chagrin or persecution or defect of character.”
But Henry was restless. Having thrown away an excellent job, he was looking for new employment elsewhere. In the spring of 1838, he solicited testimonials from three prominent individuals whose endorsement might help him find work. Emerson expressed confidence in Henry’s intelligence, character, energy, kindness, and scholastic promise, adding, “I shall esteem the town fortunate that secures his Services.” Reverend Ripley scrawled, “The undersigned very cheerfully hereby introduces to public notice the bearer, Mr David Henry Thoreau, as a teacher in the higher branches of useful literature. . .” President Quincy at Harvard, having changed his opinion of Henry’s commitment and enterprise during his latter years in college, wrote a glowing letter, certifying Henry’s graduation and explaining that “his rank was high as a scholar in all the branches, and his morals and general conduct unexceptionable and exemplary. He is recommended as well qualified as an instructor, for employment in any public or private school or private family.”
Yet still Henry could not find another job teaching, although the family needed his income. A fierce skin inflammation had forced Helen to abandon her own teaching22 position in Taunton, and she had moved home for a while. Henry’s quixotic abandonment of his first job after Harvard had resulted in more difficulty than he had imagined at the time.
As Emerson’s opinion of his protégé rose ever higher, his comments about him surprised those who had known Henry in college. Henry’s fellow Harvard ’37 graduate David Greene Haskins had had no expectations of Henry23 and no sense that he exhibited unusual potential. Henry had not been notable as either scholar or writer; he was not a member of literary societies. Unlike Haskins, he did not contribute to Harvardiana, the undergraduate literary journal that had been under the university’s auspices during his last couple of years there and had folded a year after his graduation. Furthermore, Haskins, along with many of Henry’s other classmates, had considered the homespun Concord boy aloof and unsociable. Early in 1838, Haskins corresponded with Henry about a possible teaching position, to which Henry had replied thankfully but with the cool greeting “Dear Classmate.” Apparently they had had no other contact since graduation.
Then one day during the summer of that year, while Haskins was studying at the Andover Theological Seminary, he was at his father’s office in Boston when he ran into his cousin Ralph Waldo Emerson. Haskins’s father, Ralph Haskins, was the brother of Emerson’s mother, Ruth Haskins Emerson, who had named young Ralph Waldo after him. In 1826, Haskins had become a student of Emerson’s after he took over his brother Edward’s school on the second floor of the octagonal Norfolk Bank Building. Haskins had enjoyed Emerson’s classes and was fond of him ever afterward. As a child riding on horseback to school in Roxbury, Haskins had often glimpsed Emerson’s daily trudge down Roxbury Street to the cemetery across from the Latin School. Emerson was visiting the shaded, quiet grave of his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker, after her death at the age of twenty in 1831, less than two years after their marriage. The cemetery visit was a ritual that he observed in all weather until his departure for Europe in 1833 for an educational tour and first encounter with his heroes—John Stuart Mill, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle.
In his father’s office that day, Haskins asked Emerson, Do you see much of my classmate, Henry Thoreau?
“Of Thoreau?” Emerson’s face lit up as he smiled. “Oh, yes. We could not do without him. When Mr. Carlyle comes to America, I expect to introduce Thoreau to him as the man of Concord.”
Haskins was dumbfounded. He thought his cousin’s estimate greatly exaggerated Henry’s talent and potential.
Soon after encountering Emerson in Boston, Haskins visited him at the big white house in Concord. He had been there several times before, bringing his sister with him from Roxbury, on which occasions he had been surprised by Emerson’s brief grace before meals: “We acknowledge the Giver.” This time Haskins saw Henry again as well and was shocked by changes that had taken place during the past year. Henry seemed to have altered everything about his behavior in conversation. He looked the same physically—the same awkard figure and unimpressive clothes, the same homely features. But he had adopted Emerson’s inflections and timbre, manners and figures of speech, even his pauses and hesitations in marshaling thoughts for a sentence he was in the process of forming aloud.
From college Haskins recalled Henry’s distinctive voice so well that he thought he could recognize it in the dark. Here the voices sounded so much alike that he decided to test this idea. Sitting in Emerson’s study by the wall of books, and listening to Henry and Emerson converse, Haskins closed his eyes in order to compare the voices. He found to his astonishment that most of the time he could not tell them apart. Haskins opened his eyes—and saw that Henry’s posture mimicked Emerson’s.
Haskins himself found his cousin’s personality and style magnetic, and after being in his presence could imitate his manner. He came to think of Henry’s curious metamorphosis as a kind of chemical reaction that had taken place within him in response to a powerful catalyst. Many other people noticed Henry’s imitation of Emerson.24 Some observed that his handwriting even came to resemble his mentor’s.25 A student who graduated in 1838, a year behind Henry, felt the same way as David Haskins—Cambridge-born James Russell Lowell, who saw Henry during the same summer and wrote to a friend, “I saw Thoreau last night,26 and it is exquisitely amusing to see how he imitates Emerson’s tone and manner. With my eyes shut I shouldn’t know them apart.”