LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ^«*K DDD1773Sfi34 & D V V LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. A : • ! IT: / Swiss Thoreau : \ CAROLINE C. LEIGHTON AUTHOR OF "LIFE AT PUGET SOUND" BOSTON MDCCCXC LEE AND SHEPARD PUBLISHERS 10 MILK STREET NEXT "THE OLD SOUTH MEETING HOUSE" NEW YORK CHAS. T. DILLINGHAM 71S AND 720 BROADWAY ^1 1 Copyright, 1889, By Lee and Shefard. A SWISS THOREAU Henri-Frederic Amiel was born at Geneva, in September, 1821, his ancestors having left Languedoc for that place on the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. He was a delicate child, of sensitive disposition. At twelve years of age he had lost both his. parents, and was separated at that time from his two sis- ters, who were his only near relatives. He was educated in the gloomy Calvinistic be- lief, with which the whole atmosphere of the place was impregnated. After completing his course of study at the Academy, he entered upon his Wanderjahre in Europe, studying also at Heidelberg and Berlin, where he came under the influence of German philoso- phy, and drank deep of its mysticism. Hegel's 4 A SWISS THOREAU ideas were everywhere discussed, and Scho- penhauer was beginning to attract attention. Released from the restraints and convention- alities of the stiff and formal Geneva, his powers expanded. The eminent French critic, Edmond Scherer, who saw him at this time, said that he seemed to him " like a man to have the world at his feet, so laden was he with science, yet wearing his knowledge so lightly, with so extraordinary a power of sustained and concentrated thought, and so passionate a delight in the exercise of it." Returning to Geneva, he obtained, by com- petitive examination, the professorship of aesthetics and French literature in the Acad- emy, — afterward exchanging it for that of moral philosophy. These few facts concerning the outward details of his life are gleaned from the in- troduction to the English translation of his Journal Intime, by Mrs. Humphrey Ward. A SWISS THOREAU 5 In all this, one might well ask, What re- semblance to Thoreau ? In environment none ; neither in those phases of character which outward conditions affect. In the natural man, in the original germ, unaltera- ble by any circumstances, lies the similarity. Neither of them was much known during his life-time ; but each, leading a solitary life, and feeling an irrepressible desire to express himself, confided his thoughts, his observa- tions of nature, his deepest experiences, to a journal. Thoreau left forty note-books ; Amiel, one of seventeen thousand folio pages. Each was a born observer, feeling that to see, and to reflect upon what he saw, was more his business than to take any active part in life ; and the delicate apprecia- tion and truthful and sympathetic statement of one so recall the other, that we might easily make the mistake of supposing that we were listening to some new excerpts 6 A SWISS THOREAU made by Mr. Blake's indefatigable hand from the manuscripts of his friend, on hearing these passages from Amiel's journal : — " On May 14th, I saw the first glow worm of the season, in the turf beside the little winding road. It was crawling furtively under the grass, like a timid thought or a dawning talent." " Arachne's delicate webs were swaying in the green branches of the pine, little ball- rooms for the fairies, carpeted with powdered pearls, and kept in place by a thousand dewy strands hanging from above like the chains of a lamp, and supporting them from below like the anchors of a vessel. These little airy edifices had all the fantastic lightness of the elf world, and all the vaporous freshness of dawn." " The middle of the day is like the middle of the night. There is no sound but the murmur of the flies, and on this summer A SWISS THOREAU 7 noon life seems suspended just where it is most intense." "The hedges were hung with wild roses, the scent of the acacia perfumed the paths, and the light down of the poplar seeds floated in the air like a kind of fair-weather snow." " What message had this lake for me, with its sad serenity, its soft and even tranquillity, in which was mirrored the cold, monotonous pallor of mountains and clouds ? That dis- enchanted, disillusioned life may still be traversed by duty, lit by a memory of heaven." " The sky was hung with various shades of gray, and melancholy mists hovered over the distant mountains. . . . The half-stripped trees stood in their ragged splendor of dark red, scarlet, and yellow, and a few flowers still lingered, shedding their petals. Every landscape is, as it were, a state of the soul." 8 A SWISS THOREAU Nothing was unattractive or meaningless in Nature's varied moods. Dull weather was to Amiel a sombre reverie of earth and sky. Thoreau worshipped the brown light of the sod when heaven offered him nothing brighter. Amiel loved the drifting mist. "The miles of country which were yester- day visible are to-day hidden under a thick gray curtain. . . . The fog transports me to Shetland, to Spitsbergen, to the Ossianic countries, where man, thrown back upon himself, feels his heart beat more quickly, and his thought expand more freely, — so long, at least, as he is not frozen and con- gealed by cold. . . . The sun, as it were, sheds us abroad, scatters and disperses us ; mist draws us together and concentrates us. It is cordial, homely, charged with feeling. . . . Shrouded in perpetual mist, men love each other better ; for the only reality then is the family, and, within the family, the heart." A SWISS THOREAU 9 " Fog has certainly a poetry of its own, a grace, a dreamy charm. . . . The light mist hovering over the bosom of the plain is the image of that tender modesty which veils the features and shrouds the inmost thoughts of the maiden." He liked a quiet rainy day. It was like a song in a minor key. It revived his con- verse with himself. Under the gray sky he felt his life to its centre. To him it was " like those silences in worship which are not the empty moments of devotion, but the full moments." Both looked into curious, out-of-the-way places, and drew from them unexpected com- parisons. Thoreau delighted in watching the changing appearance of thawing sand-banks. Amiel says, — " I found in a hidden nook a sheet of fine sand, which the water had furrowed and folded like the pink palate of a kitten's 10 A SWISS THOREAU mouth." When a sparrow once alighted on Thoreau's shoulder as he hoed the beans in a neighbor's field, he felt that it was the proudest epaulet he could have worn. It required a wider sympathy, a still more hos- pitable heart, to appreciate the little yellow- ish cat, ugly and pitiable, that followed Amiel into his room, and curled up in a chair beside him, seeming perfectly happy, as if he wanted nothing more. He says : " Far from being wild, nothing will induce him to leave me, and he has followed me from room to room all day. I have nothing at all that is eatable in the house, but what I have I give him : that is to say, a look and a caress. People have sometimes said to me that weak and feeble creatures are happy with me. ... It seems to me sometimes as though I could woo the birds to build in my beard, as they do in the headgear of some cathedral saint." To both the heart of nature was more A SWISS THOREAU II open than human hearts, and communion with her more satisfying than human inter- course. The idea of performance of any kind was not predominant in their theory of life. To dream was more truly living than to act. Thoreau withdrew into the woods in order really to live, to find out what life amounted to. He gives his idea of success in life in these words: "That your day and night be such that you greet them with joy ; that life shall emit a fragrance to you like flowers and sweet-scented herbs ; be elastic, starry, and immortal ! " — a definition which is complete without necessitating a relation to any other human being. Amiel says: " To open one's heart in purity to this ever pure nature, to allow this immortal life of things to penetrate into one's soul, is at the same time to listen to the voice of God. Sensation may be a prayer, and self-abandonment an act of devotion." 12 A SWISS THOREAU And aofain : ' ' When we are doing - nothing in particular, it is then that we are living through all our being, and when we cease to add to our growth it is only that we may ripen and possess ourse" " Reverie is the Sunday of thought. In an inaction which is meditative and attentive, the wrinkles of the soul are smoothed away, and it spreads itself, unfolds, and springs afresh like the trodden grass of the road-side or the bruised leaf of a plant, repairs its injuries, becomes new. spontaneous, and original." Thoreau sat sometimes in a summer morn- ing in his sunnv doorwav from sunrise till noon, " rapt in a reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumacs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds san^ around or rlitted noiseless through the house. The dav advanced as if to liorht some work of mine ; it was morning, and now it is A SWISS THOREAU 13 evening, and nothing memorable is accom- plished. This was sheer idleness to my fellow-townsmen, no doubt ; but if the birds and flowers had tried me by their standard, I should not have been found wanting. My life itself had become my amusement, and never ceased to be novel." In their introspection, in each one's critical study of himself, they resemble each other even more than in their appreciation of the natural world. To Thoreau, most affairs of general interest were mere dissipation. He shrank from action. To produce in any way was a demand the force of which he felt but lightly. Development of one's self, truth to one's ideal, were the only affairs of moment. If Amiel made a step toward action of any kind, the inner life seemed to him endan- gered. He was always eager to return from all participation in active life to his old habit of dreaming, to feel the River of Life rush 14 A SWISS THOREAU by him, but he himself only like a statue on its bank. He writes: " All my published essays are little else than studies, games, exercises, for the purpose of testing myself. I play scales, as it were ; I run up and down my instrument ; I train my hand and make sure of its capacity. Satisfied with the power to act, I never arrive at the will to act." This reminds us of Thoreau's pencils. In assist- ing his father in the manufacture of lead pencils, he made an important discovery by which they could be very much improved. Upon a friend's congratulating him that he would make a fortune from it, he answered that his interest in the work was now over. Each found in himself so good a com- panion, that it often made him, as Thoreau remarks, poor company for another. This one being with whom he could, without sus- picion of intrusion, become thoroughly ac- quainted, possessed great interest for him. A SWISS THOREAU 15 Each studied himself as a specimen of humanity, and, therefore, of general interest. Amiel says : "I am to the great majority of men what the circle is to rectilinear figures. I am everywhere at home because I have no particular and nominative self. Perhaps on the whole this defect has good in it. Though I am less of a man, I am perhaps nearer to the man, perhaps rather more man" Thus he confides to us the odd way in which he recon- ciles himself to his deficiencies. His free- dom of speech in this regard reminds one of Thoreau's saying, in one of his apathetic moods, that it was quite as much the business of the spirit to be seeking him, as his to be seeking the spirit. Amiel says: "Do no violence to yourself. Respect in yourself the oscillations of feeling. They are your life. One wiser than you ordained them." In both the loftiness of the ideal interfered with practical attainment. Amiel writes : "I 16 A SWISS THOREAU cannot be content with second best. ... 1 linger in the provisional, from timidity and from loyalty. . . . No special study interests me. What I wish to know is the sum of all knowledge. What I possess I must abso- lutely and wholly possess. I am afraid of only partially securing it. I have a horror of being duped — above all, duped by myself; and I would rather cut myself off from all life's joys than deceive or be deceived." Amiel often wondered if his pupils were pleased with his instructions. Their testi- mony is, that, although they loved and ad- mired the man, it could not be said that they enjoyed his lectures, on account of the peculiar ideas he held in regard to instruc- tion, — his stern fidelity to what he thought it proper to require of them. He considered that the bare facts he announced ought of themselves to prove of such interest as to secure their attention; saying: "I have A SWISS THOREAU 17 never aimed at any oratorical success. I re- spect myself too much, and I respect my class too much, to attempt rhetoric. ... A lecturer has nothing to do with paying court to the scholars, or with showing off the master. ... I hate everything that savors of cajoling. ... A professor is the priest of his subject, and should do the honors of it gravely and with dignity." So, in his practi- cal work, he made no use of powers which would have enabled him to render the dullest subject clear and impressive. In regard to literary labor he writes : "To know is enough for me ; to attempt to ex- press seems often a kind of profanity. . . . If we are to give anything a form, we must, so to speak, be the tyrants of it. We must treat our subject brutally, and not be always trembling lest we are doing it a wrong. . . . This sort of confident effrontery is beyond me. My whole nature tends to that imper- 18 A SWISS THOREAU sonality which respects and subordinates itself to the object. It is love of truth which holds me back from concluding and deciding. ... I am afraid of having forgotten a point, of having exaggerated an expression, or having used a word out of place ; my pen stumbles at every line, so anxious am I to find the ideally best expression. ... I have always postponed the serious study of the art of writing, from a sort of awe of it and a secret love of its beauty." Thus he con- tinued to confide to his journal, rather than offer to the public, what he regarded as mere preparation for what he would sometime do. In regard to his indecision in action, he says of himself: " I remain motionless like a timid child, who, left alone in his father's laboratory, does not touch anything, for fear of springs, explosions, and catastrophes, which may burst from every corner at the least movement of his inexperienced hands." A SWISS THOREAU 19 No such timidity restrained Thoreau from action. His outlook was always a cheery, confident one. The influence of early surroundings is so great in moulding the temperament, we can hardly say what either would have been in this respect if their positions had been exchanged. Thoreau was reared in the bosom of his own kindly family, in the neigh- borhood of the optimistic Emerson, of the congenial Alcott and Channing. He seems to have had that ingrained sunniness of dis- position which he attributed to his favorite pitch-pine. Everything was eminently satis- factory to him. He felt that he was born in the choicest spot of the inhabitable world, and " in the very nick of time." He could always catch a glimmer of light somewhere in the sky at any hour of the darkest night. Beneath the harsh moan of the sea he heard ever an undertone of purest melody. His ■ 20 A SWISS THOREAU own Yankee common sense, and that which surrounded him, restrained within wholesome limits peculiarities that might have attained a morbid development. He led a healthful life, including occasional active manual toil ; loved to chat with the wood-chopper and the farmer, fraternized most cordially with the Indian guides who accompanied him in his wilder expeditions, enjoyed the company of any man of native sense, and even one with- out sense. The pauper idiot who called upon him, and announced himself as wanting in that particular, pleased him by his inno- cent, ingenuous ways. He thought there might be a good basis for a true relation to men if all spoke with like simplicity. He could say, in his gay way, " I am no more lonely than a single mullein or dandelion in a pasture, or a house-fly or a humble-bee." Troubles like Amiel's never overtook him. Of those two great modifiers of character, A SWISS THOREAU 21 sickness and sorrow, he knew but little, — his only illness lasting but little more than a year, during which he was tenderly cared for by his devoted mother and sister. Amiel, with his frail health and sensitive disposition, was early bereft of his natural protectors and friends. Educated in the dark faith of Calvin, stepping, according to Renan, as the first act of his mature life, into a false position, since the professorship at Geneva confined him to the company of uncongenial associates, struggling for seven years against a most distressing malady (a complication of asthma and heart-disease), — who can won- der that he was at times overcome with de- spondency ? With what marvellous elasticity he rebounded from it, recovering himself, " becoming again young and aspiring ! " His life was chiefly that of a solitary thinker. His contact with German thought in the years he spent at Berlin only strength- 22 A SWISS THOREAU ened the natural tendencies of his subtle, searching spirit, and made practical life more than ever distasteful. Schopenhauer's oriental ideas fascinated him, but his funda- mental belief that all being is evil he never shared, — replying derisively to the state- ment that "Life is an insatiable thirst," — " Our hunger and our thirst are not what men claim of us, but our bread and our gourd." He was dismayed to find how per- fectly he represented Schopenhauer's typical man, " for whom the individual life is a mis- fortune from which impersonal contemplation is the only enfranchisement." " Yet," said he, "deep within this ironical and disap- pointed being of mine there is a child hidden, a frank, sad, simple creature who believes in the ideal, in love, in holiness, and all heavenly illusions." According to our hu- man judgment, he had more than his share of the afflictions of this life ; but tested by A SWISS THOREAU 23 his own philosophy there is in this fact no cause for regret. It favored the develop- ment of his character ; especially it made him more sympathetic. In his earlier days he had said of himself: " I am individual in the presence of men, objective in the presence of things. I attach myself to the object, and absorb myself in it. I detach myself from subjects (persons), and hold myself on my guard against them. I feel myself dif- ferent from the mass of men and akin to the great whole of Nature." So intensely interested was he sometimes in an animal or a plant, that all personality of his own seemed merged in the image which it formed in him ; he lived only in its life. In a luminous, serene morning, he was beguiled out of himself, dissolved in sunbeams, breezes, perfumes. He even felt himself at times returning to an elemental state, as if a vague, formless, undetermined life flowed 24 A SWISS THOREAU through him. In his later years this power of entering into other lives drew him more towards persons. He says, " We are struck by something bewildering and ineffable when we look down into the depths of an abyss, — and every soul is an abyss, a mystery of love and pity. A sort of sacred emotion descends upon me whenever I penetrate the recesses of this sanctuary of man, and hear the gentle murmur of the prayers, hymns, and supplica- tions which rise from the hidden depths of the heart. . . . This experience seems to me as wonderful as poetry, and divine with the divineness of birth and dawn. . . . Every characteristic individuality shapes itself ideally in me, moulds me for the moment into its own image." Amiel felt keenly deprivations of which no words of Thoreau's give any hint. He mourned that he was never a father, and that he had all his life waited in vain for the A SWISS THOREAU 2$ woman and the work capable of taking entire possession of him and becoming his end and aim. " Love," he says, " could have done everything with me. By myself and for my- self, I prefer to be nothing/' In speaking of children, he says : " These 80,000 daily births, of which statistics tell us, represent an infusion of innocence and fresh- ness, struggling not only against the death of the race, but against human corruption. . . . Without fatherhood, without mother- hood, I think that love itself would not pre- vent men from devouring each other. . . . What little of Paradise we still see on earth is due to the presence of children among us." He so reverenced the nature of a woman that it was a fact altogether past his compre- hending that any woman could be otherwise than beautiful in appearance. It shocked him " like a solecism or a dissonance." Women and children are not often men- 26 A SWISS THOREAU tioned in Thoreau's notes. One cannot easily forget, however, his graphic description of a child he saw in a cabin, where he took refuge one day when overtaken by a heavy thunder-shower : " The wrinkled, sibyl-like, cone-headed infant that sat upon its father's knee as in the palaces of nobles, and looked out from its home, in the midst of wet and hunger, inquisitively, upon the stranger, with the privilege of infancy, not knowing but it was the last of a noble line and the hope and cynosure of the world, instead of John Field's poor starveling brat." We must admit that its points are artistically presented, since it vividly calls up many a similar image. But how wanting is he in recognition of the respect due to this newly arrived celestial visitor ! He ridiculed the Cape-Cod women, and especially one, whom he described as " like a man-of-war's man in petticoats, whose voice A SWISS THOREAU 27 sounded as if she were talking to you through a breaker." It may have been all true, but it is not what Amiel would have seen in her. Amiel's was certainly a more emotional, — was it not also a richer, more joyous nature than Thoreau's ? Could any one be so uni- formly, steadily cheerful as the latter without a kind of stolidity as basis for it, some want of sensitiveness ; or, should we say, a rare freedom from morbid sensitiveness ? Thoreau was especially exhilarated and de- lighted by all the phenomena of winter. Its cold purity seems to mirror his life. Amiel rejoiced in the sunbeam, in fragrance, in the butterfly and the rose. In his favorite La Fontaine were two omissions ; — there was neither butterfly nor rose. He had always an eye for butterflies, and never failed to notice them, and to delight in their spon- taneity, their enjoyment of the passing hour, in contrast with his own painfully studied 28 A SWISS THOREAU ways, recording in his diary as one of the important events of his life the visit three butterflies paid him when he was resting under a tree one summer noon, and the de- lightful reverie they awakened in him. As he watched them flying from flower to flower, over hill and dale, he threw off his load of care, and remembered that " the soul too is a butterfly." When these airy creatures dis- appeared from the landscape, he saw in the sea-gulls gigantic butterflies hovering over the waves. One of Thoreau's last remarks was that he felt "no regret" in leaving this life. Amiel used the same expression, explaining his feelings more fully. Neither had acted with the least reference to the opinion of others. Amiel, in casting his last glance backward, doubted if this had been the true course. " It would have been such a joy to me," he says, " to have been smiled upon, welcomed, A SWISS THOREAU 29 encouraged, and to obtain what I was so ready to give, kindness and good-will. But to hunt down consideration and reputation, to force the esteem of others, seemed to me an effort unworthy of myself. Notwithstand- ing my intense consciousness of having ac- complished so little, I do not think I have been wholly wrong. I have been throughout in harmony with my best self. . . . One busi- ness we have in this world is to see that our own type is neither altered nor degraded." Although never wholly losing the impres- sion of his early religious instruction, the constant presence of the one sympathizing Spirit for whom he recorded all his experi- ences was the great reality to him. His reveries were a silent converse with this one unfailing Friend. " I have been dreaming," he says, " my head in my hands. About what ? About happiness. I have been asleep, as it were, on the fatherly breast of God." 30 A SWISS THOREAU In his ramblings he once happened upon the little churchyard at Clarens, called " The Oasis." It was surrounded by deep, mys- terious woods, but between the branches of the trees he caught glimpses of misty moun- tains and the tender blue of the lake. Above him was a noise of wings, the murmur of birds ; butterflies and roses were all about him. In that peaceful spot death seemed to him like sleep ; a sleep instinct with hope. It is there that he rests. N m*. \, % *