Life
consists
with wildness.
Thoreau - Excursions and Poems
How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men,
stand it I do not know; but I have ground to suspect that most of them
do not _stand_ it at all. When, early in a summer afternoon, we have
been shaking the dust of the village from the skirts of our garments,
making haste past those houses with purely Doric or Gothic fronts,
which have such an air of repose about them, my companion whispers
that probably about these times their occupants are all gone to bed.
Then it is that I appreciate the beauty and the glory of architecture,
which itself never turns in, but forever stands out and erect, keeping
watch over the slumberers.
No doubt temperament, and, above all, age, have a good deal to do with
it. As a man grows older, his ability to sit still and follow indoor
occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in his habits as the
evening of life approaches, till at last he comes forth only just
before sundown, and gets all the walk that he requires in half an
hour.
But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking
exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated
hours,--as the swinging of dumbbells or chairs; but is itself the
enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in
search of the springs of life. Think of a man's swinging dumbbells for
his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures
unsought by him!
Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only
beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveler asked Wordsworth's
servant to show him her master's study, she answered, "Here is his
library, but his study is out of doors. "
Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a
certain roughness of character,--will cause a thicker cuticle to grow
over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and
hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their
delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may
produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin,
accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions.
Perhaps we should be more susceptible to some influences important to
our intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind
blown on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to
proportion rightly the thick and thin skin. But methinks that is a
scurf that will fall off fast enough,--that the natural remedy is to
be found in the proportion which the night bears to the day, the
winter to the summer, thought to experience. There will be so much the
more air and sunshine in our thoughts. The callous palms of the
laborer are conversant with finer tissues of self-respect and heroism,
whose touch thrills the heart, than the languid fingers of idleness.
That is mere sentimentality that lies abed by day and thinks itself
white, far from the tan and callus of experience.
When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would
become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some
sects of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods
to themselves, since they did not go to the woods. "They planted
groves and walks of Platanes," where they took _subdiales
ambulationes_ in porticos open to the air. Of course it is of no use
to direct our steps to the woods, if they do not carry us thither. I
am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods
bodily, without getting there in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would
fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to society.
But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village.
The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my
body is,--I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my
senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of
something out of the woods? I suspect myself, and cannot help a
shudder, when I find myself so implicated even in what are called good
works,--for this may sometimes happen.
My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I
have walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together,
I have not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great
happiness, and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours'
walking will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see.
A single farmhouse which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as
the dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of
harmony discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within
a circle of ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and
the threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become
quite familiar to you.
Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of
houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees,
simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.
A people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest
stand! I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle
of the prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after
his bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not
see the angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole
in the midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the
middle of a boggy Stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found
his bounds without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had
been driven, and looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was
his surveyor.
I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles,
commencing at my own door, without going by any house, without
crossing a road except where the fox and the mink do: first along by
the river, and then the brook, and then the meadow and the woodside.
There are square miles in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From
many a hill I can see civilization and the abodes of man afar. The
farmers and their works are scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and
their burrows. Man and his affairs, church and state and school, trade
and commerce, and manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the
most alarming of them all,--I am pleased to see how little space they
occupy in the landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that
still narrower highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the
traveler thither. If you would go to the political world, follow the
great road,--follow that market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and
it will lead you straight to it; for it, too, has its place merely,
and does not occupy all space. I pass from it as from a bean-field
into the forest, and it is forgotten. In one half-hour I can walk off
to some portion of the earth's surface where a man does not stand from
one year's end to another, and there, consequently, politics are not,
for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a man.
The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion
of the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads
are the arms and legs,--a trivial or quadrivial place, the
thoroughfare and ordinary of travelers. The word is from the Latin
_villa_, which together with _via_, a way, or more anciently _ved_ and
_vella_, Varro derives from _veho_, to carry, because the villa is the
place to and from which things are carried. They who got their living
by teaming were said _vellaturam facere_. Hence, too, the Latin word
_vilis_ and our vile, also _villain_. This suggests what kind of
degeneracy villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel
that goes by and over them, without traveling themselves.
Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk
across lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not
travel in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get
to any tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they
lead. I am a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. The
landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not
make that use of my figure. I walk out into a nature such as the old
prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may
name it America, but it is not America; neither Americus Vespucius,
nor Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a
truer account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so
called, that I have seen.
However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as
if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There is
the Old Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now,
methinks, unless that is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the
bolder to speak of it here, because I presume that there are one or
two such roads in every town.
[Illustration: _The Old Marlborough Road_]
THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD
Where they once dug for money,
But never found any;
Where sometimes Martial Miles
Singly files,
And Elijah Wood,
I fear for no good:
No other man,
Save Elisha Dugan,--
O man of wild habits,
Partridges and rabbits,
Who hast no cares
Only to set snares,
Who liv'st all alone,
Close to the bone,
And where life is sweetest
Constantly eatest.
When the spring stirs my blood
With the instinct to travel,
I can get enough gravel
On the Old Marlborough Road.
Nobody repairs it,
For nobody wears it;
It is a living way,
As the Christians say.
Not many there be
Who enter therein,
Only the guests of the
Irishman Quin.
What is it, what is it,
But a direction out there,
And the bare possibility
Of going somewhere?
Great guide-boards of stone,
But travelers none;
Cenotaphs of the towns
Named on their crowns.
It is worth going to see
Where you _might_ be.
What king
Did the thing,
I am still wondering;
Set up how or when,
By what selectmen,
Gourgas or Lee,
Clark or Darby?
They're a great endeavor
To be something forever;
Blank tablets of stone,
Where a traveler might groan,
And in one sentence
Grave all that is known;
Which another might read,
In his extreme need.
I know one or two
Lines that would do,
Literature that might stand
All over the land,
Which a man could remember
Till next December,
And read again in the spring,
After the thawing.
If with fancy unfurled
You leave your abode,
You may go round the world
By the Old Marlborough Road.
At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private
property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys
comparative freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be
partitioned off into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will
take a narrow and exclusive pleasure only,--when fences shall be
multiplied, and man-traps and other engines invented to confine men to
the _public_ road, and walking over the surface of God's earth shall
be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman's grounds. To enjoy
a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true
enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the
evil days come.
* * * * *
What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we
will walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature,
which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is
not indifferent to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we
are very liable from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one.
We would fain take that walk, never yet taken by us through this
actual world, which is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love
to travel in the interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we
find it difficult to choose our direction, because it does not yet
exist distinctly in our idea.
When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will
bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me, I
find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and
inevitably settle southwest, toward some particular wood or meadow or
deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to
settle,--varies a few degrees, and does not always point due
southwest, it is true, and it has good authority for this variation,
but it always settles between west and south-southwest. The future
lies that way to me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer
on that side. The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a
circle, but a parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits
which have been thought to be non-returning curves, in this case
opening westward, in which my house occupies the place of the sun. I
turn round and round irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour,
until I decide, for a thousandth time, that I will walk into the
southwest or west. Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go
free. Thither no business leads me. It is hard for me to believe that
I shall find fair landscapes or sufficient wildness and freedom behind
the eastern horizon. I am not excited by the prospect of a walk
thither; but I believe that the forest which I see in the western
horizon stretches uninterruptedly toward the setting sun, and there
are no towns nor cities in it of enough consequence to disturb me.
Let me live where I will, on this side is the city, on that the
wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and more, and
withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much stress on
this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is the
prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and
not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say
that mankind progress from east to west. Within a few years we have
witnessed the phenomenon of a southeastward migration, in the
settlement of Australia; but this affects us as a retrograde movement,
and, judging from the moral and physical character of the first
generation of Australians, has not yet proved a successful experiment.
The eastern Tartars think that there is nothing west beyond Thibet.
"The world ends there," say they; "beyond there is nothing but a
shoreless sea. " It is unmitigated East where they live.
We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and
literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into
the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is
a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity
to forget the Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed
this time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before
it arrives on the banks of the Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the
Pacific, which is three times as wide.
I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of
singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his pettiest
walk with the general movement of the race; but I know that something
akin to the migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds,--which, in
some instances, is known to have affected the squirrel tribe,
impelling them to a general and mysterious movement, in which they
were seen, say some, crossing the broadest rivers, each on its
particular chip, with its tail raised for a sail, and bridging
narrower streams with their dead,--that something like the _furor_
which affects the domestic cattle in the spring, and which is referred
to a worm in their tails, affects both nations and individuals, either
perennially or from time to time. Not a flock of wild geese cackles
over our town, but it to some extent unsettles the value of real
estate here, and, if I were a broker, I should probably take that
disturbance into account.
"Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken strange strondes. "
Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a
West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He
appears to migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. He is
the Great Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night
of those mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor
only, which were last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis, and
the islands and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial
paradise, appear to have been the Great West of the ancients,
enveloped in mystery and poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when
looking into the sunset sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the
foundation of all those fables?
Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He
obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd of men
in those days scented fresh pastures from afar.
"And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropped into the western bay;
At last _he_ rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new. "
Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with
that occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and
varied in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the
European, as this is? Michaux, who knew but part of them, says that
"the species of large trees are much more numerous in North America
than in Europe; in the United States there are more than one hundred
and forty species that exceed thirty feet in height; in France there
are but thirty that attain this size. " Later botanists more than
confirm his observations. Humboldt came to America to realize his
youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation, and he beheld it in its
greatest perfection in the primitive forests of the Amazon, the most
gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so eloquently
described. The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes
farther,--farther than I am ready to follow him; yet not when he says:
"As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is made
for the animal world, America is made for the man of the Old World. . . .
The man of the Old World sets out upon his way. Leaving the highlands
of Asia, he descends from station to station towards Europe. Each of
his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the preceding,
by a greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic, he pauses
on the shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he knows not,
and turns upon his footprints for an instant. " When he has exhausted
the rich soil of Europe, and reinvigorated himself, "then recommences
his adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages. " So far
Guyot.
From this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the
Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern times. The
younger Michaux, in his "Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802,"
says that the common inquiry in the newly settled West was, "'From
what part of the world have you come? ' As if these vast and fertile
regions would naturally be the place of meeting and common country of
all the inhabitants of the globe. "
To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, _Ex Oriente lux; ex
Occidente_ FRUX. From the East light; from the West fruit.
Sir Francis Head, an English traveler and a Governor-General of
Canada, tells us that "in both the northern and southern hemispheres
of the New World, Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger
scale, but has painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly
colors than she used in delineating and in beautifying the Old
World. . . . The heavens of America appear infinitely higher, the sky is
bluer, the air is fresher, the cold is intenser, the moon looks
larger, the stars are brighter, the thunder is louder, the lightning
is vivider, the wind is stronger, the rain is heavier, the mountains
are higher, the rivers longer, the forests bigger, the plains
broader. " This statement will do at least to set against Buffon's
account of this part of the world and its productions.
Linnaeus said long ago, "Nescio quae facies _laeta_, _glabra_ plantis
Americanis" (I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the
aspect of American plants); and I think that in this country there are
no, or at most very few, _Africanae bestiae_, African beasts, as the
Romans called them, and that in this respect also it is peculiarly
fitted for the habitation of man. We are told that within three miles
of the centre of the East-Indian city of Singapore, some of the
inhabitants are annually carried off by tigers; but the traveler can
lie down in the woods at night almost anywhere in North America
without fear of wild beasts.
These are encouraging testimonies. If the moon looks larger here than
in Europe, probably the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of
America appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I trust that
these facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and
poetry and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar. At length,
perchance, the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the
American mind, and the intimations that star it as much brighter. For
I believe that climate does thus react on man,--as there is something
in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man
grow to greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under
these influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are
in his life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our
thoughts will be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our
sky,--our understanding more comprehensive and broader, like our
plains,--our intellect generally on a grander scale, like our thunder
and lightning, our rivers and mountains and forests,--and our hearts
shall even correspond in breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland
seas. Perchance there will appear to the traveler something, he knows
not what, of _laeta_ and _glabra_, of joyous and serene, in our very
faces. Else to what end does the world go on, and why was America
discovered?
To Americans I hardly need to say,--
"Westward the star of empire takes its way. "
As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise
was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this
country.
Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not confined to New England;
though we may be estranged from the South, we sympathize with the
West. There is the home of the younger sons, as among the
Scandinavians they took to the sea for their inheritance. It is too
late to be studying Hebrew; it is more important to understand even
the slang of to-day.
Some months ago I went to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like a
dream of the Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in
something more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans,
and repaired by later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names
were music to my ears, and each of which was the subject of a legend.
There were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I knew
only in history. They were ruins that interested me chiefly. There
seemed to come up from its waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys
a hushed music as of Crusaders departing for the Holy Land. I floated
along under the spell of enchantment, as if I had been transported to
an heroic age, and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry.
Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi, and as I
worked my way up the river in the light of to-day, and saw the
steamboats wooding up, counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh
ruins of Nauvoo, beheld the Indians moving west across the stream,
and, as before I had looked up the Moselle, now looked up the Ohio and
the Missouri and heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona's
Cliff,--still thinking more of the future than of the past or
present,--I saw that this was a Rhine stream of a different kind; that
the foundations of castles were yet to be laid, and the famous bridges
were yet to be thrown over the river; and I felt that _this was the
heroic age itself_, though we know it not, for the hero is commonly
the simplest and obscurest of men.
* * * * *
The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I
have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of
the World. Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild.
The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the
forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind.
Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being
suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every
state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and
vigor from a similar wild source. It was because the children of the
Empire were not suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and
displaced by the children of the northern forests who were.
I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which
the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock spruce or arbor-vitae
in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for
strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the
marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course.
Some of our northern Indians eat raw the marrow of the Arctic
reindeer, as well as various other parts, including the summits of the
antlers, as long as they are soft. And herein, perchance, they have
stolen a march on the cooks of Paris. They get what usually goes to
feed the fire. This is probably better than stall-fed beef and
slaughter-house pork to make a man of. Give me a wildness whose glance
no civilization can endure,--as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos
devoured raw.
There are some intervals which border the strain of the wood thrush,
to which I would migrate,--wild lands where no settler has squatted;
to which, methinks, I am already acclimated.
The African hunter Cumming tells us that the skin of the eland, as
well as that of most other antelopes just killed, emits the most
delicious perfume of trees and grass. I would have every man so much
like a wild antelope, so much a part and parcel of nature, that his
very person should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence,
and remind us of those parts of nature which he most haunts. I feel
no disposition to be satirical, when the trapper's coat emits the odor
of musquash even; it is a sweeter scent to me than that which commonly
exhales from the merchant's or the scholar's garments. When I go into
their wardrobes and handle their vestments, I am reminded of no grassy
plains and flowery meads which they have frequented, but of dusty
merchants' exchanges and libraries rather.
A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is
a fitter color than white for a man,--a denizen of the woods. "The
pale white man! " I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin
the naturalist says, "A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian
was like a plant bleached by the gardener's art, compared with a fine,
dark green one, growing vigorously in the open fields. "
Ben Jonson exclaims,--
"How near to good is what is fair! "
So I would say,--
How near to good is what is _wild_!
Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet
subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward
incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made
infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country
or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be
climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest-trees.
Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not
in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. When,
formerly, I have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had
contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted
solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog,--a
natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me.
I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my
native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. There are
no richer parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda
(_Cassandra calyculata_) which cover these tender places on the
earth's surface. Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of
the shrubs which grow there,--the high blueberry, panicled andromeda,
lambkill, azalea, and rhodora,--all standing in the quaking sphagnum.
I often think that I should like to have my house front on this mass
of dull red bushes, omitting other flower plots and borders,
transplanted spruce and trim box, even graveled walks,--to have this
fertile spot under my windows, not a few imported barrowfuls of soil
only to cover the sand which was thrown out in digging the cellar. Why
not put my house, my parlor, behind this plot, instead of behind that
meagre assemblage of curiosities, that poor apology for a Nature and
Art, which I call my front yard? It is an effort to clear up and make
a decent appearance when the carpenter and mason have departed, though
done as much for the passer-by as the dweller within. The most
tasteful front-yard fence was never an agreeable object of study to
me; the most elaborate ornaments, acorn tops, or what not, soon
wearied and disgusted me. Bring your sills up to the very edge of the
swamp, then (though it may not be the best place for a dry cellar), so
that there be no access on that side to citizens. Front yards are not
made to walk in, but, at most, through, and you could go in the back
way.
Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to
dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human
art contrived, or else of a Dismal Swamp, I should certainly decide
for the swamp. How vain, then, have been all your labors, citizens,
for me!
My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness.
Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! In the desert, pure
air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The
traveler Burton says of it: "Your _morale_ improves; you become frank
and cordial, hospitable and single-minded. . . . In the desert,
spirituous liquors excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a
mere animal existence. " They who have been traveling long on the
steppes of Tartary say, "On reentering cultivated lands, the
agitation, perplexity, and turmoil of civilization oppressed and
suffocated us; the air seemed to fail us, and we felt every moment as
if about to die of asphyxia. " When I would recreate myself, I seek the
darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen,
most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a _sanctum
sanctorum_. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature. The wildwood
covers the virgin mould, and the same soil is good for men and for
trees. A man's health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect
as his farm does loads of muck. There are the strong meats on which
he feeds. A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by
the woods and swamps that surround it. A township where one primitive
forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below,--such a
town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and
philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and
Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the
Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.
To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest
for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years
ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the
very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees there was, methinks, a
tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibres of men's
thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate
days of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of
good thickness, and we no longer produce tar and turpentine.
The civilized nations--Greece, Rome, England--have been sustained by
the primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They
survive as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture!
little is to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is
exhausted, and it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its
fathers. There the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous
fat, and the philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.
It is said to be the task of the American "to work the virgin soil,"
and that "agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown
everywhere else. " I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even
because he redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in
some respects more natural. I was surveying for a man the other day a
single straight line one hundred and thirty-two rods long, through a
swamp at whose entrance might have been written the words which Dante
read over the entrance to the infernal regions, "Leave all hope, ye
that enter,"--that is, of ever getting out again; where at one time I
saw my employer actually up to his neck and swimming for his life in
his property, though it was still winter. He had another similar swamp
which I could not survey at all, because it was completely under
water, and nevertheless, with regard to a third swamp, which I did
_survey_ from a distance, he remarked to me, true to his instincts,
that he would not part with it for any consideration, on account of
the mud which it contained. And that man intends to put a girdling
ditch round the whole in the course of forty months, and so redeem it
by the magic of his spade. I refer to him only as the type of a class.
The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories,
which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not
the sword and the lance, but the bushwhack, the turf-cutter, the
spade, and the bog hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and
begrimed with the dust of many a hard-fought field. The very winds
blew the Indian's corn-field into the meadow, and pointed out the way
which he had not the skill to follow. He had no better implement with
which to intrench himself in the land than a clamshell. But the farmer
is armed with plow and spade.
In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but
another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild
thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and
mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild
duck is more swift and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild--the
mallard--thought, which 'mid falling dews wings its way above the
fens. A truly good book is something as natural, and as unexpectedly
and unaccountably fair and perfect, as a wild-flower discovered on the
prairies of the West or in the jungles of the East. Genius is a light
which makes the darkness visible, like the lightning's flash, which
perchance shatters the temple of knowledge itself,--and not a taper
lighted at the hearth-stone of the race, which pales before the light
of common day.
English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake
Poets,--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare,
included,--breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It
is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and
Rome. Her wilderness is a greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There
is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself.
Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild
man in her, became extinct.
The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The
poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the
accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.
Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be
a poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to
speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers
drive down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who
derived his words as often as he used them,--transplanted them to his
page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and
fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at
the approach of spring, though they lay half smothered between two
musty leaves in a library,--aye, to bloom and bear fruit there, after
their kind, annually, for the faithful reader, in sympathy with
surrounding Nature.
I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this
yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is
tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or
modern, any account which contents me of that Nature with which even I
am acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something which no
Augustan nor Elizabethan age, which no _culture_, in short, can give.
Mythology comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a
Nature, at least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English
literature! Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its
soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected
with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is
unabated. All other literatures endure only as the elms which
overshadow our houses; but this is like the great dragon-tree of the
Western Isles, as old as mankind, and, whether that does or not, will
endure as long; for the decay of other literatures makes the soil in
which it thrives.
The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The
valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their
crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate,
the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce.
Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a
fiction of the past,--as it is to some extent a fiction of the
present,--the poets of the world will be inspired by American
mythology.
The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though
they may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common
among Englishmen and Americans to-day. It is not every truth that
recommends itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild
clematis as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are
reminiscent,--others merely _sensible_, as the phrase is,--others
prophetic. Some forms of disease, even, may prophesy forms of health.
The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins,
flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have
their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct
before man was created, and hence "indicate a faint and shadowy
knowledge of a previous state of organic existence. " The Hindoos
dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a
tortoise, and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an
unimportant coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state,
that a fossil tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large enough
to support an elephant. I confess that I am partial to these wild
fancies, which transcend the order of time and development. They are
the sublimest recreation of the intellect. The partridge loves peas,
but not those that go with her into the pot.
In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a
strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human
voice,--take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for
instance,--which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me
of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so
much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and
neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a
faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.
I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native
rights,--any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original
wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her
pasture early in the spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, gray
tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It
is the buffalo crossing the Mississippi. This exploit confers some
dignity on the herd in my eyes,--already dignified. The seeds of
instinct are preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses,
like seeds in the bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.
Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one day a herd of a
dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldy sport,
like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised
their tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and I perceived by their
horns, as well as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe.
But, alas! a sudden loud _Whoa! _ would have damped their ardor at
once, reduced them from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and
sinews like the locomotive. Who but the Evil One has cried "Whoa! " to
mankind? Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a
sort of locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his
machinery, is meeting the horse and the ox half-way. Whatever part the
whip has touched is thenceforth palsied. Who would ever think of a
_side_ of any of the supple cat tribe, as we speak of a _side_ of
beef?
I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be
made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats
still left to sow before they become submissive members of society.
Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization;
and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited
disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their
natures broken that they may be reduced to the same level. Men are in
the main alike, but they were made several in order that they might be
various. If a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly or quite
as well as another; if a high one, individual excellence is to be
regarded. Any man can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no other
man could serve so rare a use as the author of this illustration did.
Confucius says, "The skins of the tiger and the leopard, when they are
tanned, are as the skins of the dog and the sheep tanned. " But it is
not the part of a true culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to
make sheep ferocious; and tanning their skins for shoes is not the
best use to which they can be put.
* * * * *
When looking over a list of men's names in a foreign language, as of
military officers, or of authors who have written on a particular
subject, I am reminded once more that there is nothing in a name. The
name Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more
human than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of the
Poles and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they
had been named by the child's rigmarole, _Iery wiery ichery van,
tittle-tol-tan_. I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming
over the earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous
sound in his own dialect. The names of men are, of course, as cheap
and meaningless as _Bose_ and _Tray_, the names of dogs.
Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy if men were named
merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to
know the genus and perhaps the race or variety, to know the
individual. We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier
in a Roman army had a name of his own,--because we have not supposed
that he had a character of his own.
At present our only true names are nicknames. I knew a boy who, from
his peculiar energy, was called "Buster" by his playmates, and this
rightly supplanted his Christian name. Some travelers tell us that an
Indian had no name given him at first, but earned it, and his name was
his fame; and among some tribes he acquired a new name with every new
exploit. It is pitiful when a man bears a name for convenience merely,
who has earned neither name nor fame.
I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still see
men in herds for all them. A familiar name cannot make a man less
strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his
own wild title earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and a
savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours. I see that my
neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet William or Edwin, takes it
off with his jacket. It does not adhere to him when asleep or in
anger, or aroused by any passion or inspiration. I seem to hear
pronounced by some of his kin at such a time his original wild name in
some jaw-breaking or else melodious tongue.
* * * * *
Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all
around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the
leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to
that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,--a
sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English
nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.
In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a
certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are
already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from
the meadows, and deepens the soil,--not that which trusts to heating
manures, and improved implements and modes of culture only!
Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster,
both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very
late, he honestly slumbered a fool's allowance.
There may be an excess even of informing light. Niepce, a Frenchman,
discovered "actinism," that power in the sun's rays which produces a
chemical effect; that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues
of metal "are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of
sunshine, and, but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful, would
soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the
agencies of the universe. " But he observed that "those bodies which
underwent this change during the daylight possessed the power of
restoring themselves to their original conditions during the hours of
night, when this excitement was no longer influencing them. " Hence it
has been inferred that "the hours of darkness are as necessary to the
inorganic creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic
kingdom. " Not even does the moon shine every night, but gives place to
darkness.
I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any
more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be
tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only
serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant
future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.
There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus
invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and
dusky knowledge, _Gramatica parda_, tawny grammar, a kind of
mother-wit derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.
We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It
is said that knowledge is power, and the like. Methinks there is equal
need of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will
call Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for
what is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we
know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual
ignorance? What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance;
ignorance our negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry
and reading of the newspapers,--for what are the libraries of science
but files of newspapers? --a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them
up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters
abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass
like a horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would
say to the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge,
sometimes,--Go to grass. You have eaten hay long enough. The spring
has come with its green crop. The very cows are driven to their
country pastures before the end of May; though I have heard of one
unnatural farmer who kept his cow in the barn and fed her on hay all
the year round. So, frequently, the Society for the Diffusion of
Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.
A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful,--while
his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides
being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with,--he who knows nothing
about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows
nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he
knows all?
My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head
in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest
that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.
I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more
definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the
insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before,--a discovery that
there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our
philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot
_know_ in any higher sense than this, any more than he can look serenely
and with impunity in the face of the sun: ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? , ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ,
"You will not perceive that, as perceiving a particular thing," say the
Chaldean Oracles.
There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which
we may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for our
convenience, but a successful life knows no law. It is an unfortunate
discovery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not
know before that we were bound. Live free, child of the mist,--and
with respect to knowledge we are all children of the mist.
