And I shall shudder to
think that the next question will be, 'What did you do while you were
warm?'" Even after we have settled with Admetus in the person of Mr.
Tarbell, there comes, you see, a further question. It is not enough to
have earned our livelihood. Either the earning itself should have been
serviceable to mankind, or something else must follow. To live is
sometimes very difficult, but it is never meritorious in itself; and we
must have a reason to allege to our own conscience why we should
continue to exist upon this crowded earth. If Thoreau had simply dwelt
in his house at Walden, a lover of trees, birds, and fishes, and the
open air and virtue, a reader of wise books, an idle, selfish
self-improver, he would have managed to cheat Admetus, but, to cling to
metaphor, the devil would have had him in the end. Those who can avoid
toil altogether and dwell in the Arcadia of private means, and even
those who can, by abstinence, reduce the necessary amount of it to some
six weeks a year, having the more liberty, have only the higher moral
obligation to be up and doing in the interest of man. The second passage is this: "There is a far more important and warming
heat, commonly lost, which precedes the burning of the wood. It is the
smoke of industry, which is incense. I had been so thoroughly warmed in
body and spirit, that when at length my fuel was housed, I came near
selling it to the ashman, as if I had extracted all its heat." Industry
is, in itself and when properly chosen, delightful and profitable to the
worker; and when your toil has been a pleasure, you have not, as Thoreau
says, "earned money merely," but money, health, delight, and moral
profit, all in one. "We must heap up a great pile of doing for a small
diameter of being," he says in another place; and then exclaims, "How
admirably the artist is made to accomplish his self-culture by devotion
to his art!" We may escape uncongenial toil, only to devote ourselves to
that which is congenial. It is only to transact some higher business
that even Apollo dare play the truant from Admetus. We must all work for
the sake of work; we must all work, as Thoreau says again, in any
"absorbing pursuit--it does not much matter what, so it be honest"; but
the most profitable work is that which combines into one continued
effort the largest proportion of the powers and desires of a man's
nature; that into which he will plunge with ardour, and from which he
will desist with reluctance; in which he will know the weariness of
fatigue, but not that of satiety; and which will be ever fresh,
pleasing, and stimulating to his taste. Such work holds a man together,
braced at all points; it does not suffer him to doze or wander; it keeps
him actively conscious of himself, yet raised among superior interests;
it gives him the profit of industry with the pleasures of a pastime. This is what his art should be to the true artist, and that to a degree
unknown in other and less intimate pursuits. For other professions stand
apart from the human business of life; but an art has its seat at the
centre of the artist's doings and sufferings, deals directly with his
experiences, teaches him the lessons of his own fortunes and mishaps,
and becomes a part of his biography. So says Goethe:

  "Spät erklingt was früh erklang;
   Glück und Unglück wird Gesang." Now Thoreau's art was literature; and it was one of which he had
conceived most ambitiously. He loved and believed in good books. He said
well, "Life is not habitually seen from any common platform so truly and
unexaggerated as in the light of literature." But the literature he
loved was of the heroic order. "Books, not which afford us a cowering
enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an
idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which
even make us dangerous to existing institutions--such I call good
books." He did not think them easy to be read. "The heroic books," he
says, "even if printed in the character of our mother-tongue, will
always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must
laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a
larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valour and
generosity we have." Nor does he suppose that such books are easily
written. "Great prose, of equal elevation, commands our respect more
than great verse," says he, "since it implies a more permanent and level
height, a life more pervaded with the grandeur of the thought. The poet
often only makes an irruption, like the Parthian, and is off again,
shooting while he retreats; but the prose writer has conquered like a
Roman and settled colonies." We may ask ourselves, almost with dismay,
whether such works exist at all but in the imagination of the student. For the bulk of the best of books is apt to be made up with ballast; and
those in which energy of thought is combined with any stateliness of
utterance may be almost counted on the fingers. Looking round in English
for a book that should answer Thoreau's two demands of a style like
poetry and sense that shall be both original and inspiriting, I come to
Milton's "Areopagitica," and can name no other instance for the moment. Two things at least are plain: that if a man will condescend to nothing
more commonplace in the way of reading, he must not look to have a large
library; and that if he proposes himself to write in a similar vein, he
will find his work cut out for him. Thoreau composed seemingly while he walked, or at least exercise and
composition were with him intimately connected; for we are told that
"the length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing." He
speaks in one place of "plainness and vigour, the ornaments of style,"
which is rather too paradoxical to be comprehensively true. In another
he remarks: "As for style of writing, if one has anything to say it
drops from him simply as a stone falls to the ground." We must
conjecture a very large sense indeed for the phrase "if one has anything
to say." When truth flows from a man, fittingly clothed in style and
without conscious effort, it is because the effort has been made and the
work practically completed before he sat down to write. It is only out
of fulness of thinking that expression drops perfect like a ripe fruit;
and when Thoreau wrote so nonchalantly at his desk, it was because he
had been vigorously active during his walk. For neither clearness,
compression, nor beauty of language, come to any living creature till
after a busy and prolonged acquaintance with the subject on hand. Easy
writers are those who, like Walter Scott, choose to remain contented
with a less degree of perfection than is legitimately within the compass
of their powers.