The Aesthetic Imperatives of Thoreau’s “Autumnal Tints”

Consider the history of unacknowledged obligation addressed in Henry David Thoreau’s final essays on nature. Incessantly referring to the New World as a land of milk and honey, yet acting as if it were a Hobbesian state of nature, Americans had routinely treated the magnificent terrain they encountered as something to be vanquished or exploited—turning a blind eye to any environmental damage that might result from this endeavor. John Cotton’s “Gods Promise to his Plantations” (1630) declared it to be “a Principle in Nature, That in a vacant soyle, hee that taketh possession of it, and bestoweth culture and husbandry upon it, his Right it is. And the ground of this is from the grand Charter given to Adam and his posterity in Paradise, Gen. 1.28. Multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it.”¹ Exhortations of this sort assumed that the most pervasive source of environmental damage was nature itself—a product of such wrathful and capricious forces as floods, frosts, and storms, as well as the more prosaic havoc of insects and weeds. The implication was that nature was constantly subject to a kind of deterioration which had to be vigilantly combated by husbandry and improvement. But James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823), the first of the Leatherstocking novels, signaled a new anxiety about nature. One of the novel’s most exciting set pieces is a deadly, engulfing forest fire that coincidentally ignites a canister of gunpowder—an escalating conflagration that seems to be the result of arson or human carelessness. Cooper also includes a despairing commentary on the damage done by silver mining, a chapter on how rapaciously the forest was being cleared for potash and lumber, another on the wanton slaughter of pigeons, still another on the profligate taking of fish, and a warning from Leatherstocking to “Use, but don’t waste.”² While Cooper’s remained a relatively solitary voice for a while, this was the moment when Americans began to see themselves as a source of environmental harm as well as husbandry. John Winthrop had warily defined the Massachusetts Bay Colony as a “community of perills,” endlessly endangered by any weakness the colonists might display in their compact with each other and with God.³ Now the nation seemed to be imperiled by a misguided compact with nature as well.⁴

Each of Thoreau’s final essays on nature—“Autumnal Tints” (1859), “The Succession of Forest Tress” (1860), “Wild Apples” (1860), and “Huckleberries” (1861)—appears to be shadowed by this sense of loss and culpability. Sometimes Thoreau is simply saddened, as when he observes with a resigned yet pomaceous sigh: “The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. It is a fruit which will probably become extinct in New England.”⁵ At other times he is clearly outraged, his tone more strident, closer to that of “Slavery in Massachusetts”: “What sort of country is that where the huckleberry fields are private property? When I pass such fields on the highway, my heart starts to sink within. I see a blight on the land.” These and other comments suggest that the essays as a whole can be seen as an attempt to stem or reverse this impending blight by convincing people to take a different view of improvement. “All our improvements, so called, tend to convert the country into the town,” he remarks in “Huckleberries.” “I do not say this by way of complaining of this custom in particular, which is beginning to prevail … It is my way of living that I complain of as well as yours—and therefore I think that my remarks will come home to you.”⁶

Sadly, the insistent tone of the essays also seems to reflect the lingering disappointment of a man who felt that his remarks hadn’t come home to his fellow citizens, at least not yet, because they still hadn’t “set him for their watchman.”⁷ At the same time, however, Thoreau clearly hoped that his remarks would prove both provocative enough and persuasive enough to change people’s minds. For...