THOREAU. 205 



naturalness forever. 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 himself. " It is 

 impossible," said Turgot, " for a vulgar man to be sim- 

 ple." 



We look upon a great deal of the modern sentimental- 

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

 symptom of the general liver-complaint. To a man of 

 wholesome constitution 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 then- 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 Pierre, his 

 intellectual child, and of Chateaubriand, his grandchild, 

 the inventor, we might almost say, of the primitive forest, 

 and who first was touched by the solemn falling of a tree 

 from natural decay in the windless silence of the woods. 

 It is a very shallow view that affirms trees and rocks to 

 be healthy, and cannot see that men in communities 

 are just as true to the laws of their organization and 

 destiny; that can tolerate the puffin and the fox, but 

 not the fool and the knave ; that would shun politics 

 because of its demagogues, and snuff up the stench of 

 the obscene fungus. The divine life of Nature is more 

 wonderful, more various, more sublime in man than 

 in any. other of her works, and the wisdom that is gained 

 by commerce with men, as Montaigne and Shakespeare 



