Thoreau's "Maine Woods"

IT is more than half a century since Henry D. Thoreau made his last visit to Maine. And now the forest which he came to see has all but vanished, and in its place stands a new forest with new customs. No one should expect to find here precisely what Thoreau found; therefore, before all recollection of the old days has passed away, it is fitting that some one who knew their traditions should bear witness to Thoreau’s interpretation of the Maine woods.

We hardly appreciate how great are the changes of the last fifty years; how the steamboat, the motor-boat, the locomotive, and even the automobile, have invaded regions which twenty years ago could be reached only by the lumberman’s batteau and the hunter’s canoe; how cities have arisen, and more are being projected, on the same ground where Thoreau says that “the best shod travel for the most part with wet feet,” and that “melons, squashes, sweet-corn, tomatoes, beans, and many other vegetables, could not be ripened,” because the forest was so dense and moist.

Less than twenty years since there was not a sporting camp in any part of the northern Maine wilderness; now who may number them ? Yet, even before the nineties, when one could travel for days and meet no one, the pine tree was gone; the red-shirted lumberman was gone; the axe was about to give place to the saw; and soon, almost upon the clearing where Thoreau reported the elder Fowler, the remotest settler, as wholly content in his solitude and thinking that “ neighbors, even the best, were only trouble and expense,” was to rise one of the largest pulp mills in the world, catching the logs midway their passage down the river and grinding them into paper. And the pine tree, of which Thoreau made so much ? Native to the state and long accustomed to its woods, I cannot remember ever having seen a perfect, old-growtli white pine tree; it is doubtful if there is one standing in the state to-day.

So the hamadryad has fled before the demand for ship-timber and Sunday editions, and the unblemished forest has passed beyond recall. There are woods enough still; there is game enough, — more of some kinds than in the old days; there are fish enough; there seems to be room enough for all who come; but the man who has lived here long realizes that the woods are being “ camped to death; ” and the man who is old enough to remember days departed rustles the leaves of Thoreau’s book when he would listen again to the pine tree soughing in the wind.

What is it that The Maine Woods brings to us besides ? The moods and music of the forest; the vision of white tents beside still waters; of canoes drawn out on pebbly beaches; of camp-fires flickering across rippling rapids; the voice of the red squirrel, “ spruce and fine;” the melancholy laughter of the loon, and the mysterious “ night warbler,” always pursued and never apprehended. Most of all it introduces us to Thoreau himself.

It must be admitted in the beginning that The Maine Woods is not a masterpiece. Robert Louis Stevenson discards it as not literature. It is, however, a very good substitute, and had Robert Louis worn it next the skin he might perhaps have absorbed enough of the spirit of the American forest to avoid the gaudy melodrama which closes The Master of Ballantrae. The Maine Woods is of another world. Literature it may not be, nor one of “ the three books of his that will be read with much pleasure; ” but it is — the Maine woods. Since Thorean’s day, whoever has looked at these woods to advantage has to some extent seen them through Thoreau’s eyes. Certain it is that no other man has ever put the coniferous forest between the leaves of a book.

For that he came — for that and the Indian. Open it where you will — and the little old first edition is by all odds to be chosen if one is fastidious about the printed page, to get the full savor of it; open where you will and these two speak to you. He finds water “ too civilizing; ” he wishes to become “ selvaggia; ” he turns woodworm in his metamorphosis, and loves to hear himself crunching nearer and nearer to the heart of the tree. He is tireless in his efforts to wrench their secrets from the woods; and, in every trial, he endeavors, not to talk about them, but to flash them with lightning vividness into the mind of the reader. “ It was the opportunity to be ignorant that I improved. It suggested to me that there was something to be seen if one had eyes. It made a believer of me more than before. I believed that the woods were not tenantless, but choke-full of honest spirits as good as myself any day.”

It is sometimes the advantage of a second-rate book that it endears the writer to us. The Thoreau of Walden, with his housekeeping all opened up for inspection, refusing the gift of a rug rather than shake it, throwing away his paperweight to avoid dusting it — where’s the woman believes he would have dusted it ? — parades his economies priggishly, like some pious anchoret with a business eye fixed on Heaven. Rut when he tells us in the appendix to the Woods that for a cruise three men need only one large knife and one iron spoon (for all), a four-quart tin pail for kettle, two tin dippers, three tin plates and a fry pan, his economy, if extreme, is manly and convincing. We meet him here among men whom we have known ourselves; we see how he treated them and how they treated him, and he appears to better advantage than when skied among the lesser gods of Concord.

Here is Joe Polis, whose judgment of a man would be as shrewd as any mere literary fellow’s, and Joe talks freely, which in those days an Indian rarely did with whites. Here is the late Hiram L. Leonard, “the gentlemanly hunter of the stage,” known to all anglers by his famous fishing rods. Those who remember his retiring ways will not doubt that it was Thoreau who prolonged the conversation. Here is Deacon George A. Thatcher, the “ companion ” of the first two trips. That second invitation and the deacon’s cordial appreciation of “ Henry ” bespeak agreeable relations outside those of kinship. The Thoreau whom we meet here smiles at us. We see him, a shortish, squarish, brown-bearded, blue-eyed man, in a check shirt, with a black string tie, thick waistcoat, thick trousers, an old Kossuth hat, —for the costume that he recommends for woods wear must needs have been his own, — and over all a brown linen sack, on which, indelible, is the ugly smutch that he got when he hugged the sooty kettle to his side as he raced Polis across Grindstone Carry.

To every man his own Thoreau! But why is not this laughing runner, scattering boots and tinware, as true to life as any ? Brusque, rude, repellant no doubt he often was, and beyond the degree excusable; affecting an unnecessary disdain of the comfortable, harmless goods of life; more proud, like Socrates, of the holes in his pockets than young Alcibiades of his whole, new coat; wrong very often, and most wrong upon his points of pride; yet he still had his southerly side, more open to the sun than to the wind. It is not easy to travel an unstaked course, against the advice and wishes and in the teeth of the prophecies of all one’s friends, when it would be sweet and easy to win their approval — and, Himmel! to stop their mouths ! — by burning one’s faggot. A fighting faith, sleeping on its arms, often has to be stubborn and ungenial. What Henry Thoreau needed was to be believed in through thick and thin, and then let alone; and the very crabbedness, so often complained of, indicates that, like his own wild apples, in order to get a chance to grow, he had to protect himself by thorny underbrush from his too solicitous friends.

There is a popular notion that Thoreau was a great woodsman, able to go anywhere by dark or daylight, without path or guide; that he knew all the secrets of the pioneer and the hunter; that he was unequaled as an observer, and almost inerrant in judgment, being able to determine at a glance weight, measure, distance, area, or cubic contents. The odd thing about these popular opinions is that they are not true. Thoreau was not a woodsman; he was not infallible; he was not a scientific observer; he was not a scientist at all. He could do many things better than most men; but the sum of many excellencies is not perfection.

For the over-estimate of Thoreau’s abilities, Emerson is chiefly responsible. His noble eulogy of Thoreau has been misconstrued in a way which shows the alarming aptitude of the human mind for making stupid blunders. We all have a way of taking hold of a striking detail — which Mr. Emerson was a rare one for perceiving — and making of it the whole story. We might name it the fallacy of the significant detail. Do we not always see Hawthorne, the youth, walking by night? Who thinks of it as any less habitual than eating his dinner ? And because Stevenson, in an unguarded moment, confessed that “ he had played the sedulous ape ” to certain authors, no writer, out of respect to our weariness, has ever forborne to remind us of that pleasant monkey trick of Stevenson’s youth. Nor are we ever allowed to forget that Thoreau “ saw as with microscope, heard as with ear-trumpet,” and that “ his power of observation seemed to indicate additional senses.” It is because the majority of mankind see no difference in values between facts aglow with poetic fervor and facts preserved in the cold storage of census reports, that Emerson’s splendid eulogy of his friend, with its vivid, personal characterizations rising like the swift bubbles of a boiling spring all through it, has created the unfortunate impression that Thoreau made no blunders.

Emerson himself did not distinguish between the habitual and the accidental; between a clever trick, like that of lifting breams guarding their nests, and the power to handle any kind of fish, He even ran short of available facts, and grouped those of unequal value. To be able to grasp an even dozen of pencils requires but little training; to be able to estimate the weight of a pig, or the cordwood in a tree, needs no more than a fairly good judgment; but that “ he could pace sixteen rods more accurately than another man could measure them with rod and chain,” — that is nonsense, for it puts at naught the whole science of surveying. Emerson’s data being unequal in rank and kind, the whole sketch is a little out of focus, and consequently the effect is agreeably artistic.

Nor is the matter mended by misquotation. Emerson says,“He could find his path in the woods at night, he said, better by his feet than his eyes.” There is nothing remarkable in this. How does any one keep the path across his own lawn on a black dark night? But even so careful a man as Stevenson paraphrases thus: “ He could guide himself about the woods on the darkest night by the touch of his feet.” Here we have a different matter altogether. By taking out that “ path,” a very ordinary accomplishment is turned into one quite impossible. Because Emerson lacked woods learning, the least variation from his exact words is likely to result in something as absurd or as exaggerated as this.

Thoreau’s abilities have been overrated. The Maine Woods contains errors in the estimates of distance, area, speed, and the like, too numerous to mention in detail. No Penobscot boatman can run a batteau over falls at the rate of fifteen miles an hour, as Thoreau says; no canoeman can make a hundred miles a day, even on the St. John River. The best records I can discover fall far short of Thoreau’s estimate for an average good day’s run. Even when he says that his surveyor’s eye thrice enabled him to detect the slope of the current, he magnifies his office. Any woman who can tell when a picture hangs straight can see the slant of the river in all those places.

But his worst error in judgment, and the one most easily appreciated on its own merits, is the error he made in climbing Katahdin. He writes that their camp was “ broad off Katahdin and about a dozen miles from the summit,” whereas we know that his camp was not five miles in an air-line from the top of the South Slide, and not more than seven from the highest peak. The trail from the stream to the slide has always been called four miles, and Thoreau says that his boatmen told him that it was only four miles to the mountain; “ but as I judged, and as it afterwards proved, nearer fourteen.” The only reason why it proved “ nearer fourteen ” was because he did not go the short way. Instead of climbing by the Slide, where all West Branch parties ascend to-day, he laid a northeast course “ directly for the base of the highest peak,” through all the débris and underbrush at the foot of the mountain, climbing where it is so steep that water hardly dares to run down. He ought to have reasoned that the bare top of a mountain is easy walking, and the nearest practicable point, rather than the peak itself, was the best place to climb.

But surely he was a competent naturalist ? There is no space to go over the text in detail, but we may turn directly to the list of birds in the appendix. After making allowance for ornithology in the fifties being one of the inexact sciences, the list must be admitted to be notably bad. It is worse than immediately appears to the student who is not familiar with the older nomenclature. Thoreau names thirty-seven species, and queries four of them as doubtful. Oddly, the most characteristic bird of the region, the Canada jay, which the text mentions as seen, is omitted from the list. Of the doubtful species, the herring gull is a good guess; but the yellow-billed cuckoo and the prairie chicken (of all unlikely guesses the most improbable) are surely errors, while the white-bellied nuthatch, which he did not see, but thought he heard, rests only upon his conjecture. Mr. William Brewster thinks that it might occur in that region in suitably wooded localities, but I can find no record west of Houlton and north of Katahdin. The tree sparrow, though a common migrant, is more than doubtful as summer resident. The pine warbler must be looked upon with equal suspicion. The wood thrush is impossible — a clear mistake for the hermit. His Fuligula albicola (error for albeola) is not the buffle-headed duck, which breeds north of our limits (and Thoreau was here in July); it is most likely the horned grebe in summer plumage, identified after his return by a picture. Similarly his redheaded woodpecker, which he vouches for thus, “ Heard and saw, and good to eat,” must have been identified by the vernacular name alone. Among our woodsmen the “ red-headed woodpecker” is not Picus erythrocephalus, as Thoreau names it, but Ceophlœus pileatus abieticola, the great pileated woodpecker, or logcock, a bird twice as large, heavily crested, and wholly different in structure and color. Seven out of the thirty-seven birds are too wrong to be disputed; the whitebellied nuthatch stands on wholly negative evidence; and, if we had fuller data of the forest regions, perhaps several of the others might be challenged.

The list proves that, even according to the feeble light of the day, Thoreau was not an ornithologist. As a botanist he did much better; but that was largely by grace of Gray’s Manual, then recently published. Of the scientific ardor which works without books and collates and classifies innumerable facts for the sake of systematic knowledge, he had not a particle. His notes, though voluminous and of the greatest interest, rarely furnish material for science. If he examined a partridge chick, newly hatched, it was not to give details of weight and color, but to speculate upon the rare clearness of its gaze. If he recorded a battle between black ants and red, he saw its mock heroic side and wrote an Antiad upon the occasion; but he did not wait to see the fight finished, and to count the slain.

It was not as an observer that Thoreau surpassed other men, but as an interpreter. He had the art —and how much of an art it is no one can realize until he has seated himself before an oak or a pine tree and has tried by the hour to write out its equation in terms of humanity — he had the art to see the human values of natural objects, to perceive the ideal elements of unreasoning nature and the service of those ideals to the soul of man. “ The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable,” wrote Emerson; and it became Thoreau’s chief text. It is the philosophy behind Thoreau’s words, his attempt to reveal the Me through the Not Me, reversing the ordinary method, which makes his observations of such interest and value.

This power to see is rare; but mere good observation is not supernormal. We must not attribute to Thoreau’s eyes what was wrought in his brain; to call him uniquely gifted in matters wherein a thousand men might equal him is not to increase his fame.

The Maine Woods also shows clearly that Thoreau knew nothing of woodcraft. Do we realize that his longest trip gave him only ten days actually spent in the woods? or that few tourists to-day attempt to cover the same ground in less than two or three weeks ? What his own words proclaim there can be no disputing over, and Thoreau admits frankly, and sometimes naively, that he was incapable of caring for himself in the woods, which surely is the least that can be asked of a man to qualify him as a “ woodsman.”

In the first place, his mind does not work like a woodsman’s. “ We had not gone far,” he writes, “ before I was startled by seeing what I thought was an Indian encampment, covered with a red flag, on the bank, and exclaimed ‘ Camp! ’ to my comrades. I was slow to discover that it was a red maple changed by the frost.” He ought to have been “slow to discover ” that it was anything else.

“ I could only occasionally perceive his trail in the moss,” he writes of Polis, “ yet he did not appear to look down nor hesitate an instant, but led us out exactly to the canoe. This surprised me, for without a compass, or the sight or noise of the river to guide us, we could not have kept our course many minutes, and we could have retraced our steps but a short distance, with a great deal of pains and very slowly, using laborious circumspection. But it was evident that he could go back through the forest wherever he had been during the day.” A woodsman may have to use “ laborious circumspection ” in following the trail of another man, but his own he ought to be able to run back without hesitation.

“Often on bare rocky carries,” he says again, “ the trail was so indistinct that 1 repeatedly lost it, but when I walked behind him [Polis] I observed that he could keep it almost like a hound, and rarely hesitated, or, if he paused a moment on a bare rock, his eye immediately detected some sign which would have escaped me. Frequently we found no path at all in these places, and were to him unaccountably delayed. He would only say it was ‘ ver strange.’ ”

“The carry-paths themselves,” he says again, “were more than usually indistinct, often the route being revealed only by countless small holes in the fallen timber made by the tacks in the drivers’ boots, or where there was a slight trail we did not find it.” This is almost funny. In those days the carries were little traveled except by the river-drivers; in summer they were much choked with shrubbery; but what did the man expect —a king’s highway ? That spring the whole East Branch drive, probably a hundred men, had tramped the carry for days; and every man had worn boots each of which, in those days, was armed with twenty-nine inch-long steel spikes. The whole carry had been pricked out like an embroidery pattern. Those little “ tackholes ” were the carry. If Thoreau could have realized that a river-driver never goes far from water, and that his track is as sure as a mink’s or an otter’s to lead back to water, he would have appreciated how much, instead of how little, those calk-marks were telling him. But Thoreau did not know the facts of woods life, and when he saw a sign he was often incapable of drawing an inference from it.

The proof that Thoreau did not know the alphabet of woodcraft — if further proof is wanted — is that, on Mud Pond Carry, which, in his day, was the most open and well-trodden of all the woods roads beyond North-East Carry, he took a tote-road, used only for winter hauling, showing neither hoof-mark, sledtrack, nor footprint in summer, and left the regular carry, worn by human feet, merely because a sign-board on the former pointed to his ultimate destination, Chamberlain Lake. Now in the woods a tote-road is a tote-road, and a carry is a carry; when a man is told to follow one, he is not expected to turn off upon the other; there is no more reason to confuse the two than to mistake a trolley line for a steam-railroad track. No wonder Polis “ thought little of their woodcraft.”

But aside from this deficiency in woods education, Thoreau never got to feel at home in the Maine wilderness. He was a good “ pasture man,” but here was something too large for him. He appreciated all the more its wildness and strangeness; and was the more unready to be venturesome. The very closeness of his acquaintance with Concord conspired to keep him from feeling at home where the surrounding trees, flowers, and birds were largely unfamiliar; for the better a man knows one fauna, the more he is likely to be ill at ease under a different environment. No man has expressed so well the timidity which sometimes assails the stranger when surrounded by the Sabbath peace of the wilderness. “You may penetrate half a dozen rods farther into that twilight wilderness, after some dry bark to kindle your fire with, and wonder what mysteries lie hidden still deeper in it, say at the end of a long day’s walk; or you may run down to the shore for a dipper of water, and get a clearer view for a short distance up or down the stream. . . . But there is no sauntering off to see the country, and ten or fifteen rods seems a great way from your companions, and you come back with the air of a much-traveled man, as from a long journey, with adventures to relate, although you may have heard the crackling of the fire all the while, — and at a hundred rods you might be lost past recovery, and have to camp out.” That is all very true, but most men do not care to own it. “ It was a relief to get back to our smooth and still varied landscape,” he writes after a week’s trip to Chesuncook, which then, as now, was only the selvage of the woods.

I have a friend of the old school who appreciates Thoreau, but who always balks at one point. “ Call him a woodsman! ” he cries in disgust; “why, he admits himself that he borrowed the axe that he built his Walden shanty with! ” (This seems to him as indefensible as borrowing a toothbrush.) — “ But,” I urge, “ he says, too, that he returned it sharper than when he took it.” — “ It makes no difference, none at all,” says he, “ for I tell you that a real woodsman owns his axe.” The contention is valid; moreover, it is fundamental. A master workman in all trades owns his tools. Those who have praised Thoreau as a woodsman have probably done so under the impression that every man who goes into the woods under the care of a guide is entitled to the name. They have not understood the connotation of the term, and may have even supposed that there is such a thing as an amateur woodsman. But there are some few high professions where whatever is not genuine is counterfeit; half-and-half gentlemen, halting patriots, amateur woodsmen, may safely be set down as no gentlemen, patriots, or woodsmen at all. For in truth woodcraft is a profession which cannot be picked up by browsing in Massachusetts pastures, and no one learns it who does not throw himself into it whole-heartedly.

Yet because Thoreau does not measure up to the standard of the woodsman born and bred, it would be wrong to infer that the average city man could have done as well in his place. Well done for an amateur is often not creditable for a professional; but Thoreau’s friends demand the honors of a professional. On the other hand, because he made some mistakes in unimportant details, he must not be accused of being unreliable. How trustworthy Thoreau is may be known by this, — that fifty years after he left the state forever, I can trace out and call by name almost every man whom he even passed while in the woods. He did not know the names of some of them; possibly he did not speak to them; but they can be identified after half a century. And that cannot be done with a slipshod record of events. The wonder is, not that Thoreau did so little here, but that in three brief visits, a stranger, temperamentally alien to these great wildernesses, he got at the heart of so many matters.

Almost any one can see superficial differences; but to perceive the essence of even familiar surroundings requires something akin to genius. To be sure, he was helped by all the books he could obtain, especially by Springer’s Forest Life and Forest Trees, to which he was indebted for both matter and manner; from which he learned to narrow his field of observation to the woods and the Indian, leaving other topics of interest unexamined. But how did he know, unless he discerned it in Springer’s account of them, that these remote woods farms, in his day (notnow), were “winter quarters ” ? How did he understand (and this he surely did not get from Springer) that it is the moose, and not the bear nor the beaver, which is “ primeval man ” ? How came he to perceive the Homeric quality of the men of the woods ? Hardly would the chance tourist see so much. And he can explain the Homeric times by these: “I have no doubt that they lived pretty much the same sort of life in the Homeric age, for men have always thought more of eating than of fighting; then, as now, their minds ran chiefly on ‘ hot bread and sweet cakes;’ and the fur and lumber trade is an old story to Asia and Europe.” And, with a sudden illumination, “I doubt if men ever made a trade of heroism. In the days of Achilles, even, they delighted in big barns, and perchance in pressed hay, and he who possessed the most valuable team was the best fellow.”

So, though he was neither woodsman nor scientist, Thoreau stood at the gateway of the woods and opened them to all future comers with the key of poetic insight. And after the woods shall have passed away, the vision of them as he saw them will remain. In all that was best in him Thoreau was a poet. The finest passages in this book are poetical, and he is continually striking out some glowing phrase, like a spark out of flint. The logs in the camp are “ tuned to each other with the axe.” “ For beauty give me trees with the fur on.” The pines are tor the poet, “ who loves them like his own shadow in the air.” Of the fall of a tree in the forest, he says, “ It was a dull, dry, rushing sound, with a solid core to it, like the shutting of a door in some distant entry of the damp and shaggy wilderness.” Katahdin is “ a permanent shadow.” And upon it, “rocks, gray, silent rocks, were the silent flocks and herds that pastured, chewing a rocky cud at sunset. They looked at me with hard gray eyes, without a bleat or low.”

I have seen the rocks on many granite hills, but that belongs only to the top of Katahdin.

Indeed, this whole description of Katahdin is unequaled. “ Chesuncook ” is the best paper of the three, taken as a whole, but these few pages on Katahdin are incomparable. Happily he knew the traditions of the place, the awe and veneration with which the Indians regarded it as the dwelling-place of Pamola, their god of thunder, who was angry at any invasion of his home and resented it in fogs and sudden storms. (“He very angry when you gone up there; you heard him gone 00-00-00 over top of gun-barrel,” they used to say.) Thoreau’s Katahdin was a realm of his own, in which for a few hours he lived in primeval solitude above the clouds, invading the throne of Pamola the Thunderer, as Prometheus harried Zeus of his lightnings. The gloomy grandeur of Æschylus rises before him to give him countenance, and he speaks himself as if he wore the buskin. But it is not windy declamation. He does not explode into exclamation points. Katahdin is a strange, lone, savage hill, unlike all others, — a very Indian among mountains. It does not need superlatives to set it off. Better by far is Thoreau’s grim humor, his calling it a “ cloud factory,” where they made their bed “ in the nest of a young whirlwind,” and lined it with “ feathers plucked from the live tree.” Had he been one of the Stonish men, those giants with flinty eyebrows, fabled to dwell within the granite vitals of Katahdin, he could not have dealt more stout-heartedly by the home of the Thunder-God.

The best of Thoreau’s utterances in this volume are like these, tuned to the rapid and high vibration of the poetic string, but not resolved into rhythm. It is poetry, but not verse. Thoreau’s prose stands in a class by itself. There is an honest hardness about it. We may accept or deny Buffon’s dictum that the style is the man; but the man of soft and slippery make-up would strive in vain to acquire the granitic integrity of structure which marks Thoreau’s writing. It is not poetical prose in the ordinary scope of that flowery term; but, as the granite rock is rifted and threaded with veins of glistening quartz, this prose is fused at white heat with poetical insights and interpretations. Judged by ordinary standards, he was a poet who failed. He had no grace at metres; he had no æsthetic softness; his sense always overruled the sound of his stanzas. The fragments of verse which litter his workshop remind one of the chips of flint about an Indian encampment. They might have been the heads of arrows, flying high and singing in their flight, but that the stone was obdurate or the maker’s hand was unequal to the shaping of it. But the waste is nothing; there is behind them the Kineo that they came from, this prose of his, a whole mountain of the same stuff, every bit capable of being wrought to ideal uses.