THOREAU. 153 



^Thoreau had no humour, and this implies that he was a sorry 

 logician. Himself an artist in rhetoric, he confounds thought 

 with style when he undertakes to speak of the latter. He was 

 for ever talking of getting away from the world, but he must be 

 always near enough to it, nay, to the Coricord corner of it, to 

 feel the impression he makes there, fae verifies the shrewd 

 remark of Sainte-Beuve, On touche encore a son temps et tres- 

 fort, meme quand on le repousse. This egotism of his is a 

 Stylites pillar after all, a seclusion which keeps him in the pub 

 lic eye. The dignity of man is an excellent thing, but therefore 

 to hold one s self too sacred and precious is the reverse of ex 

 cellent. There is something delightfully absurd in six volumes 

 addressed to a world of such vulgar fellows as Thoreau affirmed 

 his fellowmen to be. We once had a glimpse of a genuine soli 

 tary who spent his winters one hundred and fifty miles beyond 

 all human communication, and there dwelt with his rifle as his 

 only confidant. Compared with this, the shanty on Waldcn 

 Pond has something the air, it must be confessed, of the Her 

 mitage of La Chevrette. We do not believe that the way to a 

 true cosmopolitanism carries one into the woods or the society 

 of musquashes. Perhaps the narrowest provincialism is that cf 

 Self; that of Kleinwinkel is nothing to it. The natural man, 

 like the singing birds, comes out of the forest as inevitably as 

 the natural bear and the wildcat stick there. To seek to be na 

 tural implies a consciousness that forbids all naturalness for ever. 

 It is as easy and no easier to be natural in a salon as in a 

 swamp, if one do not aim at it, for what we call unnaturalness 

 always has its spring in a man s thinking too much about him 

 self. It is impossible, said Turgot, for a vulgar man to be 

 simple. 



We look upon a great deal of the modern sentimentalism 

 about Nature as a mark of disease. It is one more symptom of 

 the general liver-complaint. To a man of wholesome constitu 

 tion the wilderness is well enough for a mood or a vacation, but 

 not for a habit of life. Those who have most loudly advertised 

 their passion for seclusion and their intimacy with nature, from 

 Petrarch down, have been mostly sentimentalists, unreal men, 

 misanthropes on the spindle side, solacing an uneasy suspicion 

 of themselves by professing contempt for their kind. They 

 make demands on the world in advance proportioned to their 

 inward measure of their own merit, and are angry that the 

 world pays only by the visible measure of performance. It is 

 true of Rousseau, the modern founder of the sect, true of Saint 



