The
friendship between Thoreau and Emerson like Wordsworth and Coleridge, is an
important landmark in the history of American Literature. Both cannot be discussed individually
without mutually referring to the other.
Both are great transcendentalists, and both had lived and died in
Concord. Both had shaped the destiny of
early American philosophy and the course of American Literature by founding a
new philosophical movement called New Transcendentalism. Much closer to it come Wordsworth and
Coleridge who inaugurated the great Romantic Movement in Britain by jointly
publishing the trend-setting book of poems, Lyrical Ballads in 1798. To stretch the comparison between these two
groups, we may note that the friendship between Thoreau and Emerson on the one
hand and Coleridge and Wordsworth on the other did not last long. In America Thoreau drifted away from Emerson
because the former had found in the latter an incorrigible theoretician. In Britain Coleridge’s relationship with
Wordsworth broke away because the former had seen in the latter moving closer
and closer to nature by becoming more and more mystical, while he wanted to
remain as an intellectual philosopher down-to-earth probing into the creative
processes. Well, these similarities
listed here are not meant to account for any serious in-depth study. But, it is interesting to find such literary
friendships in human literature in the world.
Whatever the literary coincidences might be both Emerson and Thoreau
were deeply fascinated, influenced and shaped by Indian philosophy. Both were avowed Individualists, lovers of
nature, and staunch believers in the divine potentialities of man.
Born in 1803, Emerson was fourteen years older than Thoreau was. When Thoreau got acquainted with Emerson is a question that cannot be easily determined. However, it can be said from their entries in journals that Emerson became a resident of Concord in 1835, while Thoreau was away at Harvard College. [He entered the college in 1833]. He was graduated in 1837, an important year in which he started writing his journal at the instance of Emerson. Thoreau made the first entry on October 22, 1837 acknowledging that it was Emerson who advised him to keep such a record. “What are you doing now?” he asked. “Do you keep a journal? So I make my first entry today.” The year marked the beginning of maintaining the journals, and Thoreau had never swerved from it till he breathed his last in 1862 for as many as twenty four years. The journals became the authentic sources of material for his literary works. Indeed, the journals by themselves have become the great repositories of his personal experiences in world literatures.
One legend shows that they became acquainted when Emerson heard that Thoreau had walked twenty miles to hear him lecture. At any rate Emerson discovered talent in the younger Thoreau and valued him as a friend and literary equal. On February 11, 1838, Emerson recorded in his journal: “I delight much in my young friend, who seems to have as free and erect a mind as any I have ever met.” Their friendship ripened and deepened. Thoreau sought his guidance and patronage. It was at Emerson suggestion that Emerson began to keep a journal and to nurture the ambition of becoming a writer. Emerson prophesied that it was Thoreau who would be “the man of Concord”. Emerson thought of him as one who had a “profound mind” and was a “person of true magnanimity.” Henry Seidel Canly remarks: “No one but Emerson thought that Thoreau was even remarkable in 1838.”
In 1841, Thoreau was invited to live with the Emerson’s, exchanging his hardwork around the Emerson household for board and room. He helped edit the Dial and did many of the chores about the house and garden. Much of the time he was able to enjoy the solitude of his bedroom or to saunter in the near-by woods. But the shocking incident was the death of Thoreau’s brother John in January, 1842 and soon two weeks after came the death of Emerson’s first child, Waldo. Waldo was Thoreau’s favourite when he was living with the Emersons. Thoreau wrote of him, “he died as the mist rises from the brook … He had not even taken root here.” Their mutual grief tightened the bonds of friendship between the two men. But two years after, his intellectual ripening pricked his conscience of being dependent on others. To be independent had occupied his mind uppermost. At this time, he had read Emerson’s essay, “Self-Reliance” – “It is only as a man puts off from himself all external completely independent. Emerson thereupon arranged with his brother William, who lived in Staten Island, to employ the youth as a tutor for his son. This had provided Thoreau an opportunity to be a writer. The next six months he tried hard to market his essays and reviews. But the editors and publishers gave him little encouragement. Later he returned to his native haunts of Concord with disillusionment toward the end of 1843. But in Concord he was once again haunted by the beauties of surroundings. He had an irresistible desire to shun compromise, shy away from dogma and custom and seek the means of human existence and truth by retiring into the woods. The result was his that great Walden experience.
In the early days of their friendship, both used to take long walks in nature and have long discussions on philosophical matters. Thoreau’s admiration and love for Emerson was unquestionable, and the former idolized the latter. He recorded in his journal: “Emerson … is a critic, poet, philosopher with talent not so conspicuous, not so adequate to his task; but his field is still higher, his task more arduous. Lives a far more intense life; seeks to realize a divine life; his affections and intellect equally developed.” Thoreau’s friendship with Emerson in the initial stage has a special significance. It was Emerson who had introduced him to a vast wealth of Hindu literature. Emerson put his large personal library at the disposal of Thoreau. This library had some rare collections of translations of Hindu scriptural texts like William Jones translation of Laws of Manu and Hitopadesa, Charles Wilkinson’s the Bhagvad Gita and a French translation of Harivamsa. Thoreau had read them voraciously. After he had exhausted all of them, he turned to Harvard College for further readings.
Thoreau’s reading of Oriental books was great, and his understanding of them remained far superior to that of Emerson’s. He absorbed the spirit of the contents, and the result of this was the great Walden Experiment. In this sense, Thoreau appears to be more practical than Emerson who was demonstrating every conceived truth theoretically. It was here the fundamental difference between the two had lied, which of course in the later years widened the chasm between them. To prove his down-to-earth pragmatism, when Thoreau was arrested and jailed in early one July evening in 1846, on his way into Concord from his Walden cabin to get his shoe repaired, Emerson visited him and asked, “Henry, why are you here?” “Waldo, why are you not here?” Thoreau is said to have replied.
Though Thoreau had lived with Emerson’s after return from Walden, looking out for the family while Emerson was on a lecture tour abroad, it was brief and the relationship has started breaking. Thoreau became more critical, more objective and more independent. In 1848 they drifted apart after differences of opinion and temperament had crept in. By the mid 1850s there was a definite cooling of their friendship. Perhaps Thoreau was irritated by the frequent changes, such as those by James Russell Lowell that he was too imitative of Emerson.
Or perhaps Thoreau felt that Emerson became more conservative and was compromising his ideals as he grew older. At any rate, there were more and more disappointments and disillusionment’s with Emerson. Thoreau recorded the following in his journal:
I had two friends. The one offered me friendship on such terms that could not accept it, without a sense of a sense of degradation. He would not meet me on equal terms, but only be to some extent my patron. He would not come to see, but was hurt if did not visit him. He would not readily accept a favour, but a favour, but would gladly confer one. He treated me with ceremony occasionally, though he could be simple and downright sometimes; and from time to time acted a part, treating me as if I were a distinguished stranger; was on stills, using made words. Our relation was one long tragedy, yet I did not directly speak of it. I do not believe in complaint, that we do not love each other, that we cannot confide in each other. I could not bring myself to speak, and so recognize an obstacle to our affection.
The break was not one-sided. Emerson too made such complaints against Thoreau in his journals:
If I knew only Thoreau, I should think cooperation of good men impossible. Must we always talk for victory, and never once for truth, for comfort, and joy? Centrality he has, and penetration, strong understanding, and the higher gifts, -- the insight of the real, or from the real, and the moral rectitude that belongs to it; but all this and all his resources of wit and invention are lost to me, in every experiment, year after year, that I make, to hold intercourse with his mind. Always some weary captious paradox to fight you with, and the time and temper wasted.
But the break between the two men was never
absolute. Though there were differences
between the two, they were not based on personal animosities, but over the
implementation of transcendental ideas and thoughts. They had never become abject enemies. When Thoreau died in 1862, Emerson had paid his rich tributes
honestly!
The country knows no yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost. I seems an injury that he should leave in the midst his broken task which none else can finish, a kind of indignity to so noble a soul that he should depart out of Nature before yet he had been really shown to his peers for what he is. But he, at least is content. His soul was made for the noblest society; he had in a short life exhausted the capabilities of this world; wherever there is knowledge wherever there is virtue, wherever there is beauty, he will find a home.
Reference
Notes:
1.
Meltzer,
Milton and Walter Harding. A Thoreau
Profile. Massachusettes: Thoreau
Foundation, INC., 1962. P.56
2.
Ibid.
P.56-7
3.
Ibid.
P.57