We hear of Shakespeare and his clean manuscript; but in
face of the evidence of the style itself and of the various editions of
_Hamlet_, this merely proves that Messrs. Hemming and Condell were
unacquainted with the common enough phenomenon called a fair copy. He
who would recast a tragedy already given to the world must frequently
and earnestly have revised details in the study. Thoreau himself, and in
spite of his protestations, is an instance of even extreme research in
one direction; and his effort after heroic utterance is proved not only
by the occasional finish, but by the determined exaggeration of his
style. "I trust you realise what an exaggerator I am--that I lay myself
out to exaggerate," he writes. And again, hinting at the explanation:
"Who that has heard a strain of music feared lest he should speak
extravagantly any more for ever?" And yet once more, in his essay on
Carlyle, and this time with his meaning well in hand: "No truth, we
think, was ever expressed but with this sort of emphasis, that for the
time there seemed to be no other." Thus Thoreau was an exaggerative and
a parabolical writer, not because he loved the literature of the East,
but from a desire that people should understand and realise what he was
writing. He was near the truth upon the general question; but in his own
particular method, it appears to me, he wandered. Literature is not less
a conventional art than painting or sculpture; and it is the least
striking, as it is the most comprehensive of the three. To hear a strain
of music, to see a beautiful woman, a river, a great city, or a starry
night, is to make a man despair of his Lilliputian arts in language. Now, to gain that emphasis which seems denied to us by the very nature
of the medium, the proper method of literature is by selection, which is
a kind of negative exaggeration. It is the right of the literary artist,
as Thoreau was on the point of seeing, to leave out whatever does not
suit his purpose. Thus we extract the pure gold; and thus the
well-written story of a noble life becomes, by its very omissions, more
thrilling to the reader. But to go beyond this, like Thoreau, and to
exaggerate directly, is to leave the saner classical tradition, and to
put the reader on his guard. And when you write the whole for the half,
you do not express your thought more forcibly, but only express a
different thought which is not yours. Thoreau's true subject was the pursuit of self-improvement combined with
an unfriendly criticism of life as it goes on in our societies; it is
there that he best displays the freshness and surprising trenchancy of
his intellect; it is there that his style becomes plain and vigorous,
and therefore, according to his own formula, ornamental. Yet he did not
care to follow this vein singly, but must drop into it by the way in
books of a different purport. "Walden, or Life in the Woods"; "A Week on
the Concord and Merrimack Rivers"; "The Maine Woods,"--such are the
titles he affects. He was probably reminded by his delicate critical
perception that the true business of literature is with narrative; in
reasoned narrative, and there alone, that art enjoys all its advantages,
and suffers least from its defects. Dry precept and disembodied
disquisition, as they can only be read with an effort of abstraction,
can never convey a perfectly complete or a perfectly natural
impression. Truth, even in literature, must be clothed with flesh and
blood, or it cannot tell its whole story to the reader. Hence the effect
of anecdote on simple minds; and hence good biographies and works of
high, imaginative art, are not only far more entertaining, but far more
edifying, than books of theory or precept. Now Thoreau could not clothe
his opinions in the garment of art, for that was not his talent; but he
sought to gain the same elbow-room for himself, and to afford a similar
relief to his readers, by mingling his thoughts with a record of
experience. Again, he was a lover of nature. The quality which we should call
mystery in a painting, and which belongs so particularly to the aspect
of the external world and to its influence upon our feelings, was one
which he was never weary of attempting to reproduce in his books. The
seeming significance of nature's appearances, their unchanging
strangeness to the senses, and the thrilling response which they waken
in the mind of man, continued to surprise and stimulate his spirits. It
appeared to him, I think, that if we could only write near enough to the
facts, and yet with no pedestrian calm, but ardently, we might transfer
the glamour of reality direct upon our pages; and that, if it were once
thus captured and expressed, a new and instructive relation might appear
between men's thoughts and the phenomena of nature. This was the eagle
that he pursued all his life long, like a schoolboy with a butterfly
net. Hear him to a friend: "Let me suggest a theme for you--to state to
yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains
amounted to for you, returning to this essay again and again until you
are satisfied that all that was important in your experience is in it. Don't suppose that you can tell it precisely the first dozen times you
try, but at 'em again; especially when, after a sufficient pause, you
suspect that you are touching the heart or summit of the matter,
reiterate your blows there, and account for the mountain to yourself. Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make
it short." Such was the method, not consistent for a man whose meanings
were to "drop from him as a stone falls to the ground." Perhaps the most
successful work that Thoreau ever accomplished in this direction is to
be found in the passages relating to fish in the "Week." These are
remarkable for a vivid truth of impression and a happy suitability of
language, not frequently surpassed. Whatever Thoreau tried to do was tried in fair, square prose, with
sentences solidly built, and no help from bastard rhythms. Moreover,
there is a progression--I cannot call it a progress--in his work towards
a more and more strictly prosaic level, until at last he sinks into the
bathos of the prosy. Emerson mentions having once remarked to Thoreau:
"Who would not like to write something which all can read, like
'Robinson Crusoe'? and who does not see with regret that his page is not
solid with a right materialistic treatment which delights everybody?" I
must say in passing, that it is not the right materialistic treatment
which delights the world in "Robinson," but the romantic and philosophic
interest of the fable. The same treatment does quite the reverse of
delighting us when it is applied, in "Colonel Jack," to the management
of a plantation. But I cannot help suspecting Thoreau to have been
influenced either by this identical remark or by some other closely
similar in meaning.