guess at least why in old communities, like Hardy's Wessex or the
North of France, the inhabitants of villages not ten miles apart
will differ in temperament and often in temper, hill town varying
from lowland village beneath it sometimes more than Kansas City
from Minneapolis. He knows that the old elemental forces--wind,
water, fire, and earth--still mold men's thoughts and lives a
hundred times more than they guess, even when pavements, electric
lights, tight roofs, and artificial heat seem to make nature only
a name. He knows that the sights and sounds and smells about us,
clouds, songs, and wind murmurings, rain-washed earth, and fruit
trees blossoming, enter into our sub-consciousness with a power
but seldom appraised. Prison life, factory service long continued,
a clerk's stool, a housewife's day-long duties--these things stunt
and transform the human animal as nothing else, because of all
experiences they most restrict, most impoverish the natural
environment. And it is the especial function of nature books to
make vivid and warm and sympathetic our background of nature. They
make conscious our sub-conscious dependence upon earth that bore
us. They do not merely inform (there the scientist may transcend
them), they enrich the subtle relationship between us and our
environment. Move a civilization and its literature from one
hemisphere to another, and their adapting, adjusting services
become most valuable. Men like Thoreau are worth more than we have
ever guessed.
No one has ever written more honest books than Thoreau's "Walden,"
his "Autumn," "Summer," and the rest. There is not one literary
flourish in the whole of them, although they are done with
consummate literary care; nothing but honest, if not always
accurate, observation of the world of hill-slopes, waves, flowers,
birds, and beasts, and honest, shrewd philosophizing as to what it
all meant for him, an American. Here is a man content to take a
walk, fill his mind with observation, and then come home to think.
Repeat the walk, repeat or vary the observation, change or expand
the thought, and you have Thoreau. No wonder he brought his first
edition home, not seriously depleted, and made his library of it!
Thoreau needs excerpting to be popular. Most nature books do. But
not to be valuable!
For see what this queer genius was doing. Lovingly, laboriously,
and sometimes a little tediously, he was studying his environment.
For some generations his ancestors had lived on a new soil, too
busy in squeezing life from it to be practically aware of its
differences. They and the rest had altered Massachusetts.
Massachusetts had altered them. Why? To what? The answer is not
yet ready. But here is one descendant who will know at least what
Massachusetts _is_--wave, wind, soil, and the life therein and
thereon. He begins humbly with the little things; but humanly, not
as the out-and-out scientist goes to work, to classify or to
study the narrower laws of organic development; or romantically as
the sentimentalist, who intones his "Ah!" at the sight of dying
leaves or the cocoon becoming moth. It is all human, and yet all
intensely practical with Thoreau. He envies the Indian not because
he is "wild," or "free," or any such nonsense, but for his
instinctive adaptations to his background,--because nature has
become traditional, stimulative with him. And simply, almost
naively, he sets down what he has discovered. The land I live in
is like this or that; such and such life lives in it; and this is
what it all means for me, the transplanted European, for us,