Thoreau is one of the most read and most influential of American authors, with a readership and a following around the world. His writings have been reprinted countless times, both in English and in translation into many foreign languages. His Walden is required reading in American literature courses at the college level. Much has been published about Thoreau’s life and his work, both of which have been closely studied by scholars. The author himself has been idolized, and his image and quotations from his writings have been employed for a variety of purposes, including commercial use. In sharp contrast to his current popularity, during his lifetime there was only limited appreciation of Thoreau as a man and as a writer.
The way Thoreau was perceived by his contemporaries no doubt affected the reception of his work. Thoreau the man was easy to misunderstand. Even those who cared about him were conflicted in their feelings. He was not interested in making a good impression on others and did not care to correct false impressions. Thoreau’s strong individualism, rejection of the conventions of society, and philosophical idealism all distanced him from others. He had no desire to meet external expectations if they varied from his own sense of how to live his life. Emerson, in his eulogy of Thoreau (printed in the August 1862 issue of Atlantic Monthly), wrote:
Had his genius been only contemplative, he had been fitted to his life, but with his energy and practical ability he seemed born for great enterprise and for command; and I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry-party.
But ambition was a word little used in Thoreau’s writings. At the end of Walden he wrote, “Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises?”
There was no reason why the merchants, lawyers, and church-goers of Concord—those who formed the fabric of society—should sympathize with Thoreau’s outlook. Not only did he dismiss their values, but he wrote about it, too. Moreover, Thoreau made no attempt to conciliate those who felt threatened by his disregard of community concerns. When, in 1844, Thoreau and Edward Hoar unintentionally set fire to the woods in Concord, the disapproval of men who regretted the loss of property in the form of standing and cut wood was aggravated by Thoreau’s lack of repentance. “I have had nothing to say to any of them,” he wrote in his journal.
And yet, Thoreau was pragmatic as well as idealistic. His useful skills appealed to practical men. Emerson commented in his eulogy:
He grew to be revered and admired by his townsmen, who had at first known him only as an oddity. The farmers who employed him as a surveyor soon discovered his rare accuracy and skill, his knowledge of their lands, of trees, of birds, of Indian remains . . . which enabled him to tell every farmer more than he knew before of his own farm; so that he began to feel a little as if Mr. Thoreau had better rights in his land than he. They felt, too, the superiority of character which addressed all men with a native authority.
Emerson probably overstated the case in asserting the farmers’ willingness to admit Thoreau’s superior rights to their land. Nevertheless, through his residence in Concord from birth, his usefulness in his father’s pencil business, and his range of skills as a handyman as well as a surveyor, Thoreau held a place in the community. And although he shunned superficial social connections (he referred to a party that he had attended as “a bad place to go”), he relished sympathetic companionship. He wrote in his journal entry for November 14, 1851, for example:
…old Mr. Joseph Hosmer and I ate our luncheon of cracker and cheese together in the woods. I heard all he said, though it was not much, to be sure, and he could hear me. And then he talked out of such a glorious repose, taking a leisurely bite at the cracker and cheese between his words; and so some of him was communicated to me, and some of me to him…
Thoreau clearly shared the common human craving for understanding.
Thoreau’s idealism strained his relationships. Emerson wrote in his eulogy that “no equal companion stood in affectionate relations with one so pure and guileless,” and went so far as to comment, “I think the severity of his ideal interfered to deprive him of a healthy sufficiency of human society.” Moreover, there was an offputting thorniness to Thoreau’s personality. Elizabeth Hoar said of him (as recorded in Emerson’s journal and later incorporated into the eulogy), “I love Henry, but do not like him.” Some of Thoreau’s journal entries show a clear perception of the conflict between his need for friendship and closeness and his tendency toward disappointment with actual relationships. The fact that he never married (although he proposed once) likely indicates some level of understanding that his idealism worked against long-term intimacy.
