Some Unpublished Letters of Henry D. and Sophia E. Thoreau/The Froude Episode
SOME UNPUBLISHED LETTERS
OF HENRY D. AND
SOPHIA E. THOREAU.
I.
THE FROUDE EPISODE.
HOW strangely human lives are interlinked: the chain of influences beginning and ending how little we know where and when. At the first reading of Emerson's Each and All, who is not startled by the lines—
Nor knowest thou what argument
Thy life to thy neighbor's creed hath lent.
Is not that enquiry a 'flash-light' for the soul?
Into these mysterious relations and influences Time and Space enter not. Far remote is the little monastery at Zwolle, and five centuries have passed since the meekest of pietists put aside his pen, but if there is in this world to-day a spiritual influence of potent puissance it is Thomas of Kempen's Imitatio Christi. The serene monk has vanished, and only Omniscience knoweth what argument his secluded life hath lent to the variant creeds of millions, who are now his 'neighbors' in that Civitas Dei the son of Monica has made known to us.
Say you, All that was so long ago! Well, would it lose anything of its mysteriousness if it were of this downright to-day? That which we call "to-day" also hath its mysteries, and not the least of them is this interlinking of our lives through and by these occult influences.
Here we are gathered to-night, some five hundred and twenty years after the birth of Thomas à Kempis, avowing his influence upon our lives. He that was Thomas à Kempis had lain in his grave twenty-one years before the prow of the Pinta was pointed towards the New World, yet here are we upon a beautiful peninsula—"Peninsulam amœnam"—therein, and actually indebted to a lady now in Italy, and whom it is little likely that any one of us hath ever met,—indebted, I say, to this remote stranger for the privilege of reading a letter written fifty years ago, never yet published, and having an interesting bearing upon the matter that you have come together to hear about.
"145 Via Rasella, Rome,
"Really, there is not much to tell about the Froude letter. Miss Sophia Thoreau sent for me, a few weeks before her death, to give me some last instructions and to ask my assistance in distributing personal things; and at the same time she gave me several letters for myself, among them this, knowing that I would value them as autographs.
"My impression is that she feared people would think it too flattering, and for that or some other reason she did not at that time care to have it published.
"She gave me other letters and manuscripts, requesting me to place them with my own hands in one of the trunks deposited in the Concord Town Library, which were to be passed on to Mr. Blake (I think that was his name); I mean Thoreau's literary executor. Had she wished this letter to be published she would undoubtedly have placed it with the manuscripts which I was to put in one of the boxes from which Mr. Blake was to select material for publication.
"I once showed it to Mr. Emerson, who thought Mr. Blake should see it at once; but as it was given to me and not to him, and as I felt certain Miss Thoreau did not wish it published at that time, I did not act upon this advice.
"I have often wondered why she did not put it with the papers which were to be placed in the box of manuscripts. Her action was no doubt intentional, as we read the letter over together about three weeks before her death: at the same time, I think there can be no harm in publishing it now."
So far as pertains to our purpose to-night I might go on at once to the Froude letter, but in so doing I should shirk a duty to the dead, for the discharging of which I am sure you will allow me a few moments.
If you should open a certain Life of Thoreau you could read therein, "Mrs. Thoreau, with her sister Louisa, and her sisters-in-law, Sarah, Maria, and Jane Thoreau, took their share in the village bickerings"; and also that Mrs. Thoreau indulged in "sharp and sudden flashes of gossip and malice": this and much else that is derogatory. Now Mrs. Thoreau died in 1873, and yet, in 1897, and so casually, the lady whose letter I am reading thus testifies to the high quality of the women of the Thoreau family:
"The women of the Thoreau family seem to me quite as remarkable as the men; and people who knew John Thoreau considered him even cleverer and more promising than Henry and greatly lamented his untimely death. Certainly both Helen, whom I never knew, and Sophia, whom I knew well, were exceptionally clever women. Sophia was extremely witty, a brilliant conversationalist, and her love of nature made her the most delightful of companions for a ramble through the woods and meadows.
"'Aunt Maria' was, at the time I knew her, a sweet, gentle old lady who occasionally wrote me charming letters. Mrs. Thoreau, Henry's mother, was full of kind feeling for everybody, and had a generous, helpful spirit. She was most kind to all the children of her acquaintance, often devising entertainments for them; and I still have a vivid recollection of the boxes of home-made sweets she used to send to me when I was away at school."
Are you quite ready to believe that "gossip and malice" could find an abiding place in such a heart as this?
Now have we reached the letter written when Froude had burned his ships and was submitted to the slings and arrows of the "black dragoons" on whom John Sterling had also turned his back.
Dear Mr. Thoreau:
I have long intended to write to you, to thank you for that noble expression of yourself you were good enough to send me. I know not why I have not done so; except from a foolish sense that I should not write until I had thought of something to say that it would be worth your while to read.
What can I say to you except express the honour and the love I feel for you. An honour and a love which Emerson taught me long ago to feel, but which I feel now 'not on account of his word, but because I myself have read and know you.'
When I think of what you are—of what you have done as well as what you have written, I have the right to tell you that there is no man living upon this earth at present, whose friendship or whose notice I value more than yours.
What are these words! yet I wished to say something—and I must use words, though they serve but seldom in these days for much but lies.
In your book and in one other from your side of the Atlantic, "Margaret" I see hope for the coming world; all else which I have found true in any of our thinkers (or even yours) is their flat denial of what is false in the modern popular jargon—but for their positive affirming side, they do but fling us back upon our own human nature to hold on by that with our own strength. A few men here and there do this as the later Romans did—but mankind cannot, and I have gone near to despair. I am growing not to despair, and I thank you for a helping hand.
Well, I must see you some time or other. It is not such a great matter with these steam bridges. I wish to shake hands with you and look a brave man in the face. In the meantime I will but congratulate you on the age in which your work is cast: the world has never seen one more pregnant.
God bless you!
Your friend (if you will let him call you so),
There is so much between the lines here that one must go back to the middle of the present century for a clue. In 1849 Froude, then a Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, published a book—The Nemesis of Faith—which, immediately following in the wake of the "Oxford Movement," gave a disagreeable shock to Anglican Churchmen, lay and cleric. The scholarly Fellow of Exeter College had been coquetting with Catholicism. He had managed to lose the faith of his fathers, but had utterly failed to find any surrogate; before him surged a weltering waste, pitiless storm, and blinding darkness, and no place whereon to plant his way-worn feet.
The obnoxious book was burned in the quadrangle by the Senior Fellow of Oriel College; "the old, familiar faces" either looked askance at the audacious doubter or were wholly averted; the Quarterlies were flooded with condemnatory reviews, in which even lay journalism participated,—and this in America as well as Great Britain,—and the author's every hope of place and preferment in the Established Church perished beyond all expectation of resurrection: for him there was no "benefit of the clergy." It was a pitiful immolation, because a self-immolation. As Carlyle grimly told Froude—he should have "burned his own smoke."
The Nemesis of Faith is not a wholesome book to read, because it is not the doubt that is born of mental and therefore spiritual health. One need only read Froude's previous publication, The Shadows of the Clouds, to discover the morbid mind. The Nemesis of Faith is wholly destructive—and in such high matters it is so fatally easy to destroy—it has not the shadow of an endeavor to provide a shelter for the soul: that is left naked, houseless, and homeless to the pitiless peltings of the storm of doubt and unbelief. It was a moral suicide in a moment of desperate aberration,—a soul's tragedy.
Emerson knew some time before that something of this nature was imminent. He wrote in his journal for April, 1848: "I had an old invitation from Mr. Clough, a Fellow of Oriel, and last week I had a new one from Dr. Daubeny, the botanical professor. I went on Thursday. I was housed close upon Oriel, though not within it, but I lived altogether upon college hospitalities, dining at Exeter College with Palgrave, Froude, and other Fellows, and breakfasting next morning at Oriel with Clough, Dr. Daubeny, etc. They all showed me the kindest attentions, . . . . but, much more, they showed me themselves; who are so many of them very earnest, faithful, affectionate, some of them highly gifted men; some of them, too, prepared to make great sacrifices for conscience's sake. Froude is a noble youth to whom my heart warms; I shall soon see him again. Truly I became fond of these monks of Oxford."
Evidently there was one man in America to whom the devastating Nemesis of Faith did not come as a surprise.
Of course Thoreau learned of Froude from Emerson's lips, and read Emerson's copy of that "incendiary" book. That Thoreau should send Froude a copy of his own first book—then falling still-born from Munroe's—press was only natural, considering the downrightness of that chapter in the work fancifully termed "Sunday." Froude's letter to Thoreau is the acknowledgment of the gift, and what an acknowledgment: "I have a right to tell you that there is no man living upon this earth at present, whose friendship or whose notice I value more than yours."
These men had so much in common. Thoreau also had forsaken the faith of his fathers; but a serener 'pagan' never shattered the shrines of the Saints. He could say, as another of our latter-day renunciants has said, "I need no assurances, I am a man who is preoccupied of his own soul."
Thoreau was too solidly self-centred to need assurances; yet he had become an author, and, being flesh and blood, his heart went out to his book as doth a mother's to her first-born. But howsoever interpenetrated by a conviction, howsoever possessed by it, howsoever driven by it, even to the forsaking of all that makes life dear, howsoever swerveless and indomitable in service thereto, nevertheless the solitary Thinker becomes as an armed host so soon as his conviction is shared by another. "I have gone near to despair. I am growing not to despair, and I thank you for a helping hand." Such is the assurance that this long-hidden letter carried to Thoreau. His still-born book had found one fellow-man who believed it. One can readily imagine Thoreau reading that old letter in the leafy solitude of Walden woods, and the thought of his heart is written upon his sunburnt face: "My book may be a sealed volume to the multitude, 'caviare to the general,' but here is one to whom it is intelligible, speaking audibly to the soul of him. It is enough if the book were written for him alone: is not every true book written for only him who can understand its message?"
Froude had written, "I congratulate you on the age in which your work is cast." Never did any compliment go farther astray. Thoreau had been obliged to publish at his own risk, and he had gone deeply into debt for the edition of one thousand volumes. Little heed did the 'age' take of his 'cast.'
Four years after the date of Froude's assuring letter, Thoreau wrote in his journal: "For a year or two past my publisher, falsely so called, has been writing from time to time to ask what disposition should be made of the copies of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers still on hand, and at last suggesting that he had use for the room they occupied in his cellar. So I had them all sent to me here, and they have arrived to-day by express, filling the man's wagon, 706 copies out of an edition of 1000, which I bought of Munroe four years ago, and have been ever since paying for and have not quite paid for yet. The wares are sent to me at last, and I have an opportunity to examine my purchase. They are something more substantial than fame, as my back knows, which has borne them up two flights of stairs to a place similar to that to which they trace their origin. Of the remaining 290 and odd, 75 were given away, the rest sold. I now have a library of nearly 900 volumes, over 700 of which I wrote myself. Is it not well that the author should behold the fruits of his labor? My works are piled up on one side of my chamber as high as my head, my opera omnia. This is authorship, these are the works of my brain. There was just one piece of good luck in the venture. The unbound copies were tied up by the printer four years ago in stout paper wrappers, and inscribed:—
H. D. Thoreau,
Concord River,
50 cops.
Home of the Thoreau Family, Concord, Mass.
It was in his bedroom in the attic of this house that Thoreau piled the 706 unsold
copies of his first book. He died in the front room on the ground floor
to the right of the main entrance.
what thought or experience I may have had, with as much satisfaction as ever. Indeed I believe that the result is more inspiring and better for me than if a thousand had bought my wares. It affects my privacy less and leaves me freer."
From all that I can learn of Thoreau, I find no reason to doubt the sincerity of this imperturbability. I believed it to be sincere before I knew of the Froude letter; I am assured of it now that I have read it. Such are the secret sustainments of the Thinker, and such sustainments should be and ever will be vouchsafed; for is not he who brings a message to men an Ambassador from the Most High, and do not even the ravens feed such Ministers Plenipotentiary?
The assurance of the Fellow of Exeter College was grateful to the graduate of Harvard; but Belief is not the accident of a diploma or the prerogative of the aristocracy of Letters. Thoreau was to have another assurance, dearer no doubt to him because its source was so much nearer the soil.