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From “Henry D. Thoreau” (1909)
- University of Iowa Press
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[185] UT From “Henry D. Thoreau” (1909) Thomas Wentworth Higginson Published two years before Higginson died, this assessment reflects his case for the importance of Thoreau in the twentieth century. In the Atlantic Monthly a few years earlier, Higginson had found it difficult to believe that Thoreau, “eccentric and unsuccessful” in his own time, was then “still growing in international fame”; by 1900, however, he described Thoreau and Margaret Fuller as “our most original authors” (Cheerful Yesterdays, 170; Studies, 235). In this article, Higginson criticizes Sophia Thoreau for “repress[ing] the publication” of Thoreau’s journals, although he was likely far more piqued by her refusal to allow him to edit them. Higginson opens this assessment by comparing Thoreau’s reputation at the turn of the century to that of Poe and Whitman, a strategy that allows him another opportunity to impugn Whitman , whose work he found “nausea[ting]” (Part of a Man’s Life, 164). there has been in America no such instance of posthumous reputation as in the case of Thoreau. Poe and Whitman may be claimed as parallels, but not justly. Poe, even during his life, rode often on the very wave of success , until it subsided presently beneath him, always to rise again, had he but made it possible. Whitman gathered almost immediately a small but stanch band of followers, who have held by him with such vehemence and such flagrant imitation as to keep his name defiantly in evidence, while perhaps enhancing the antagonism of his critics. Thoreau could be egotistical enough, but was always high-minded; all was open and aboveboard; one could as soon conceive of self-advertising by a deer in the woods or an otter of the brook. He had no organized clique of admirers, nor did he possess even what is called personal charm,—or at least only that piquant attraction which he himself found in wild apples. As a rule, he kept men at a distance, being busy with his own affairs. He left neither wife nor children to attend to his memory; and his sister seemed for a time to repress the publication of his manuscripts. Yet this plain, shy, retired student, who when thirty-two years old carried the unsold edition of his first book upon his back to his thoreau in his own time [186] attic chamber; who died at forty-four still unknown to the general public; this child of obscurity, who printed but two volumes during his lifetime, has had ten volumes of his writings published by others since his death, while four biographies of him have been issued in America. . . . When I was endeavoring, about 1870, to persuade Thoreau’s sister to let some one edit his journals, I invoked the aid of Judge Hoar, then lord of the manor in Concord, who heard me patiently through, and then said: “Whereunto? You have not established the preliminary point. Why should any one wish to have Thoreau’s journals printed?” Ten years later, four successive volumes were made out of these journals by the late H. G. O. Blake, and it became a question if the whole might not be published. I hear from a local photograph dealer in Concord that the demand for Thoreau’s pictures now exceeds that for any other local celebrity. In the last sale catalogue of autographs which I have encountered, I find a letter from Thoreau priced at $17.50, one from Hawthorne valued at the same, one from Longfellow at $4.50 only, and one from Holmes at $3, each of these being guaranteed as an especially good autograph letter. Now the value of such memorials during a man’s life affords but a slight test of his permanent standing,—since almost any man’s autograph can be obtained for two postage-stamps if the request be put with sufficient ingenuity;—but when this financial standard can be safely applied more than thirty years after a man’s death, it comes pretty near to a permanent fame. . . . The real and human Thoreau, who often whimsically veiled himself . . . was plainly enough seen by any careful observer. That he was abrupt and repressive to bores and pedants, that he grudged his time to them and frequently withdrew himself, was as true of him as of Wordsworth or Tennyson . If they were allowed their privacy, though in the heart of England, an American who never left his own broad continent might at least be allowed his privilege of...