Thoreau in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

From “A New Estimate of Thoreau” (1880)

[117] UT From “A New Estimate of Thoreau” (1880) William Sloane Kennedy William Sloane Kennedy (1850–1929) grew up in Oxford, Ohio and graduated from Yale University in 1875. He began a career in journalism in 1879 at the Philadelphia American and later worked for the Boston Evening Transcript. Kennedy was a prolific writer, authoring biographies of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier as well as his own poetry and nature essays. He was a staunch defender of Walt Whitman and authored Reminiscences of Walt Whitman (1896), Walt Whitman’s Diary in Canada (1904), and The Fight of a Book for the World (1926). His thoughtful evaluation of Thoreau ’s life and work valorizes the examples of a solitary life and an impassioned individual who “was the richest man in all the wide Americas.” to approach our task: Here is a certain phenomenon called Thoreau; the first thing to do is to account for him, to uncover the long filamental roots that run out from his life, far back into the past, and out on every side into the fabric of contemporary society. That society is a little too modest in its rejection of Thoreau. He is one of its fruits; let it then except him, and fairly and candidly try to explain him. Without doubt, the result of the examination will be far more honorable to him than was supposed, and at the same time productive of wholesome effects upon society, in leading it to see itself in new and startling aspects. Thoreau, the solitaire, is no new phenomenon, although he happened to be so in America. A practical, money-getting nation, naturally looked with some perplexity upon the advent in its midst of a pure and solitary mystic who looked with indifference, if not with contempt, upon the precious wealth which most of them spend their lives in accumulating. They thought him a fool, of diseased mind. But the story of such lives as his may be read in the literatures of all the olden countries of the globe. He takes his place with the great throng of sensitive geniuses, whom the hard blows of the world have always driven to nature and to books. The possession of thoreau in his own time [118] rarer mental powers than the mass of men have, has always driven the possessor into some degree of solitude, and always will. . . . The spell of illusion seems to be so woven over the minds of many, that they are unable to distinguish between the unhealthy and morbid dreamer, and the real prophet of a higher life among them, such as Thoreau was among his countrymen. It is such men as he who compel us to recognize the fact that society, as it is now constituted, is not altogether lovely in itself, but is all blotched and tainted with imperfections. If Thoreau had done nothing more than point out the unloveliness of society in many of its aspects, without any attempt to better it himself, his life would have been of as little value as it is by many supposed to have been. But nothing could be farther from the truth than such a view of his life and work. No truer patriot, no truer man has ever breathed the air of this new world. By his fine Spartan life he taught us how to live. The influence of his rugged energy, his fine idealism, the purity and honesty, and manliness of his life, shall for generations breathe through the literature and the life of America like a strengthening ocean breeze, adding tone, toughness, elasticity, and richest Attic sparkle to the thought of men. His influence is almost wholly hygienic and sanative to those who know how to read him,— avoiding his hobbies, and passing by his too morbid dislike of men. Why is it that the lives of such men as Alcott and Thoreau excite such warm opposition in some quarters? Is it not partly because there are many who keenly feel the rebuke which such lives imply? It does not do to be too good in this world; it excites envy. Then there is often a curious and not very laudable feeling of irritation at seeing something successfully accomplished, which people had voted well nigh impossible. The problem of the reconcilement of labor and culture, is one of these, and it has been worked out in Concord , Massachusetts. . . . What is wonderful in Thoreau’s case is, that he accomplished so much...