tion, though not as common
as it used to be. If this teacher had had more brains, it would have
been a lie. The word idled is the hopeless part of this criticism, or
rather of this uncritical remark. To ask this kind of a man, who plays
all the "choice gems from celebrated composers" literally, always
literally, and always with the loud pedal, who plays all hymns, wrong
notes, right notes, games, people, and jokes literally, and with the
loud pedal, who will die literally and with the loud pedal--to ask this
man to smile even faintly at Thoreau's humor is like casting a pearl
before a coal baron. Emerson implies that there is one thing a genius
must have to be a genius and that is "mother wit." ... "Doctor Johnson,
Milton, Chaucer, and Burns had it. Aunt Mary Moody Emerson has it and
can write scrap letters. Who has it need never write anything but
scraps. Henry Thoreau has it." His humor though a part of this wit is
not always as spontaneous, for it is sometimes pun shape (so is Charles
Lamb's)--but it is nevertheless a kind that can serenely transport us
and which we can enjoy without disturbing our neighbors. If there are
those who think him cold-hearted and with but little human sympathy,
let them read his letters to Emerson's little daughter, or hear Dr.
Emerson tell about the Thoreau home life and the stories of his
boyhood--the ministrations to a runaway slave; or let them ask old Sam
Staples, the Concord sheriff about him. That he "was fond of a few
intimate friends, but cared not one fig for people in the mass," is a
statement made in a school history and which is superficially true. He
cared too much for the masses--too much to let his personality be
"massed"; too much to be unable to realize the futility of wearing his
heart on his sleeve but not of wearing his path to the shore of
"Walden" for future masses to walk over and perchance find the way to
themselves. Some near-satirists are fond of telling us that Thoreau
came so close to Nature that she killed him before he had discovered
her whole secret. They remind us that he died with consumption but
forget that he lived with consumption. And without using much charity,
this can be made to excuse many of his irascible and uncongenial moods.
You to whom that gaunt face seems forbidding--look into the eyes! If he
seems "dry and priggish" to you, Mr. Stevenson, "with little of that
large unconscious geniality of the world's heroes," follow him some
spring morning