He is an egoist; he does not remember, or does not think it
worth while to remark, that, in these near intimacies, we are
ninety-nine times disappointed in our beggarly selves for once that we
are disappointed in our friend; that it is we who seem most frequently
undeserving of the love that unites us; and that it is by our friend's
conduct that we are continually rebuked and yet strengthened for a fresh
endeavour. Thoreau is dry, priggish, and selfish. It is profit he is
after in these intimacies; moral profit, certainly; but still profit to
himself. If you will be the sort of friend I want, he remarks naively,
"my education cannot dispense with your society." His education! as
though a friend were a dictionary. And with all this, not one word about
pleasure, or laughter, or kisses, or any quality of flesh and blood. It
was not inappropriate, surely, that he had such close relations with the
fish. We can understand the friend already quoted, when he cried: "As
for taking his arm, I would as soon think of taking the arm of an
elm-tree!" As a matter of fact he experienced but a broken enjoyment in his
intimacies. He says he has been perpetually on the brink of the sort of
intercourse he wanted, and yet never completely attained it. And what
else had he to expect when he would not, in a happy phrase of Carlyle's,
"nestle down into it"? Truly, so it will be always if you only stroll in
upon your friends as you might stroll in to see a cricket match; and
even then not simply for the pleasure of the thing, but with some
afterthought of self-improvement, as though you had come to the cricket
match to bet. It was his theory that people saw each other too
frequently, so that their curiosity was not properly whetted, nor had
they anything fresh to communicate; but friendship must be something
else than a society for mutual improvement--indeed, it must only be
that by the way, and to some extent unconsciously; and if Thoreau had
been a man instead of a manner of elm-tree, he would have felt that he
saw his friends too seldom, and have reaped benefits unknown to his
philosophy from a more sustained and easy intercourse. We might remind
him of his own words about love: "We should have no reserve; we should
give the whole of ourselves to that business. But commonly men have not
imagination enough to be thus employed about a human being, but must be
coopering a barrel, forsooth." Ay, or reading Oriental philosophers. It
is not the nature of the rival occupation, it is the fact that you
suffer it to be a rival, that renders loving intimacy impossible. Nothing is given for nothing in this world; there can be no true love
even on your own side, without devotion; devotion is the exercise of
love, by which it grows; but if you will give enough of that, if you
will pay the price in a sufficient "amount of what you call life," why
then, indeed, whether with wife or comrade, you may have months and even
years of such easy, natural, pleasurable, and yet improving intercourse
as shall make time a moment and kindness a delight. The secret of his retirement lies not in misanthropy, of which he had no
tincture, but part in his engrossing design of self-improvement and part
in the real deficiencies of social intercourse. He was not so much
difficult about his fellow human beings as he could not tolerate the
terms of their association. He could take to a man for any genuine
qualities, as we see by his admirable sketch of the Canadian woodcutter
in "Walden"; but he would not consent, in his own words, to "feebly
tabulate and paddle in the social slush." It seemed to him, I think,
that society is precisely the reverse of friendship, in that it takes
place on a lower level than the characters of any of the parties would
warrant us to expect. The society talk of even the most brilliant man is
of greatly less account than what you will get from him in (as the
French say) a little committee. And Thoreau wanted geniality; he had not
enough of the superficial, even at command; he could not swoop into a
parlour and, in the naval phrase, "cut out" a human being from that
dreary port; nor had he inclination for the task. I suspect he loved
books and nature as well and near as warmly as he loved his
fellow-creatures,--a melancholy, lean degeneration of the human
character. "As for the dispute about solitude and society," he thus sums up: "Any
comparison is impertinent. It is an idling down on the plain at the base
of the mountain instead of climbing steadily to its top. Of course you
will be glad of all the society you can get to go up with. Will you go
to glory with me? is the burden of the song. It is not that we love to
be alone, but that we love to soar, and when we do soar the company
grows thinner and thinner till there is none at all. It is either the
tribune on the plain, a sermon on the mount, or a very private ecstasy
still higher up. Use all the society that will abet you." But surely it
is no very extravagant opinion that it is better to give than to
receive, to serve than to use our companions; and above all, where there
is no question of service upon either side, that it is good to enjoy
their company like a natural man. It is curious and in some ways
dispiriting that a writer may be always best corrected out of his own
mouth; and so, to conclude, here is another passage from Thoreau which
seems aimed directly at himself: "Do not be too moral; you may cheat
yourself out of much life so.... _All fables, indeed, have their morals;
but the innocent enjoy the story._"


  V

"The only obligation," says he, "which I have a right to assume is to do
at any time what I think right." "Why should we ever go abroad, even
across the way, to ask a neighbour's advice?" "There is a nearer
neighbour within, who is incessantly telling us how we should behave. _But we wait for the neighbour without to tell us of some false, easier
way._" "The greater part of what my neighbours call good I believe in my
soul to be bad." To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of
becoming, is the only end of life. It is "when we fall behind ourselves"
that "we are cursed with duties and the neglect of duties." "I love the
wild," he says, "not less than the good." And again: "The life of a good
man will hardly improve us more than the life of a freebooter, for the
inevitable laws appear as plainly in the infringement as in the
observance, and" (mark this) "_our lives are sustained by a nearly equal
expense of virtue of some kind_." Even although he were a prig, it will
be owned he could announce a startling doctrine. "As for doing good," he
writes elsewhere, "that is one of the professions that are full. Moreover, I have tried it fairly, and, strange as it may seem, am
satisfied that it does not agree with my constitution.