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

From “Thoreau’s ‘Maine Woods’” (1908)

[180] UT From “Thoreau’s ‘Maine Woods’” (1908) [Fanny Hardy Eckstorm] Graduate of Smith College, where she founded the school’s Audubon Society, Fanny Hardy Eckstorm (1865–1946) was the daughter of a Maine lumberman and fur trader who had worked with Thoreau’s cousin George Thatcher, who accompanied Thoreau on two of his Maine excursions. She married Jacob A. Eckstorm in 1893. During her life, Eckstorm was an author, a naturalist, a school administrator, a wilderness guide, and a taxidermist; additionally, she was highly regarded as an authority on Maine’s Penobscot people. In addition to books on ornithology, she published articles in Forest and Stream supporting fish and game protection laws in Maine. Her astute observations in this review praise the authenticity of Thoreau’s Maine Woods with a sharp dismissiveness toward Thoreau as a woodsman and a scientist. Near the end of her life, however, and assured of Thoreau’s centrality to American literature, Eckstorm significantly revised her opinion of Thoreau: He was “a prophet— like that earlier race of prophets of the Bible, Elijah and Elisha, who did not foretell but who saw what was about them and the trend of coming events” (qtd. in Williams, 32). it must be admitted in the beginning that The Maine Woods is not a masterpiece . Robert Louis Stevenson discards it as not literature. It is, however , a very good substitute, and had Robert Louis worn it next the skin he might perhaps have absorbed enough of the spirit of the American forest to avoid the gaudy melodrama which closes The Master of Ballantrae. The Maine Woods is of another world. Literature it may not be, nor one of “the three books of his that will be read with much pleasure;” but it is—the Maine woods. Since Thoreau’s day, whoever has looked at these woods to advantage has to some extent seen them through Thoreau’s eyes. Certain it is that no other man has ever put the coniferous forest between the leaves of a book. [181] For that he came—for that and the Indian. Open it where you will—and the little old first edition is by all odds to be chosen if one is fastidious about the printed page, to get the full savor of it; open where you will and these two speak to you. He finds water “too civilizing”; he wishes to become “selvaggia”; he turns woodworm in his metamorphosis, and loves to hear himself crunching nearer and nearer to the heart of the tree. He is tireless in his efforts to wrench their secrets from the woods; and, in every trial, he endeavors, not to talk about them, but to flash them with lightning vividness into the mind of the reader. “It was the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a believer of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day.” It is sometimes the advantage of a second-rate book that it endears the writer to us. The Thoreau of Walden, with his housekeeping all opened up for inspection, refusing the gift of a rug rather than shake it, throwing away his paperweight to avoid dusting it—where’s the woman believes he would have dusted it?—parades his economies priggishly, like some pious anchoret with a business eye fixed on Heaven. But when he tells us in the appendix to the Woods that for a cruise three men need only one large knife and one iron spoon (for all), a four-quart tin pail for kettle, two tin dippers, three tin plates and a fry pan, his economy, if extreme, is manly and convincing. We meet him here among men whom we have known ourselves; we see how he treated them and how they treated him, and he appears to better advantage than when skied among the lesser gods of Concord. Here is Joe Polis, whose judgment of a man would be as shrewd as any mere literary fellow’s, and Joe talks freely, which in those days an Indian rarely did with whites. Here is the late Hiram L. Leonard, “the gentlemanly hunter of the stage,” known to all anglers by his famous fishing rods. Those who remember his retiring ways will not doubt that it was Thoreau who prolonged the conversation. Here is...