A FRENCH STUDY OF THOREAU
ODDEST of all characters in American literature was Henry David Thoreau, grandson of an emigrant Jerseyman. He had
no intimates, consequently there was none to speak for him after his death. His relatives understood him poorly. Even Emerson, to whom he was gardener, factotum, tenant and
neighbour at various times, was baffled by him. In the sixty- two years since Thoreau's death several biographers have attempted to solve the riddle, but have succeeded only in giving the dry facts about the external man.
But now comes M. Bazalgette, who from a distance of 3,000 miles is able to let in a welcome ray of light, perhaps because of better perspective. M. Bazalgette illuminates his subject from the one point whence light could come—from within. For the purpose of biography M. Bazalgette becomes Thoreau himself. He inspects not only the snowstorms and forest paths to which Thoreau felt himself appointed, but the world as it then was, through Thoreau's eyes.
The result is that at last we are able to detect, with French clarity, that malady from which the Concord hermit suffered all his life—the inability to give friendship. Thoreau could give to his neighbours labour, to his squirrels nuts, to his visitors free access to his unlocked cabin at Walden Pond, but he could not give himself.
The " defence-mechanism " or crusty shell with which Thoreau surrounded himself at an early age—when indeed he was but a stripling in Harvard College—became in time an iron cage which well nigh suffocated him. Within it whatever was orginally of human warmth atrophied for lack of fresh fuel. Through it, it became difficult to any human affection to pene- trate. For this sin of unresponsiveness to the spontaneous overtures of his fellows, M. Bazalgette first argues with his subject, and then, finding him still obdurate, rebukes him.
M. Bazalgette's attitude is quaintly unlike that of the average biographer towards his subject. He rarely uses the third person. Sometimes it is the first, as in autobiography, but more often it is the second person. He addresses him familiarly as " Henry," not at all with patronage, but with the affectionate indulgence of one who is aware of a friend's shortcomings but does not look down on him for them. He accompanies Henry as a comrade on all his trips, walks, journeys, explorations, listening to his comments and being edified by them, but not being afraid to make remarks on his own account concerning whatever is curious, wonderful or strange.
This method of dealing with a character so stubby and reticent as Thoreau's, together with the frequent use of the present tense, especially in long, rhythmic, ecstatic passages, imparts an extraordinary freshness and vividness to M. Bazal- gette's narrative. Subject and biographer are fused and become one. The animation, the sympathy, the glow, in which Thoreau as a man was so lacking, are so freely lent and shed upon him by his French companion that our chilly " inspector of snowstorms " comes alive and is re-created before our eyes. His is no longer the gruff " sauvage " holding himself aloof in the Concord woods, but a sensitive and almost lovable figure, craving affection and yet unaware of his need, maintaining a dignity that was .but an intense self-respect, and pursuing steadily through the stinted years the lost " horse, dog and turtle-dove " which he was destined never to fmd.
One must have a care, by the way, not to give the word " sauvage " in M. Bazalgette's title its usual English transla- tion of " wild man." It is apparent that the French writer admires Thoreau simply as " the untamed." No one can deny that Thoreau justly earned the title ; throughout his span of years, as Harvard student, as pencil-maker in his father's factory, as school teacher, as friend of Emerson and Haw- thorne ; as writer, tourist, surveyor of nature's panoramas, and resident of the respectable village of Concord ; to laws, conventions and customs wherever found he remained " untamed." And as such d. Bazalgette delights in him.
Regarding Thoreau's literary work, M. Bazalgette has little to say. He is evidently interested primarily in Thoreau as a man and a liver of a life, and only secondarily in him as a writer. He approaches the New Englander's career as an admirer and not as a literary critic. Those writings of Thoreau which he mentions he weaves into the narrative ;
this is because M. Bazalgette sees in virtually all of Thoreau's written work a series of autobiographical notations. Con- cerning Thoreau's " Week on the Concord and Merrimac," he writes that in "this album of verse and prose" there was only " a pretext for personal divagations in which he sought to set down the whole universe, with its mud-breezes, its flow of light, the smell of the river banks at daybreak, and all the chaplet of surprises beneath the heavens, selected by a twenty-year-old believer."
Despite the stiffness of Thoreau's nature, M. Bazalgette constantly sees in him the " amoureux " ; a lover not of women nor of civilized men, but of whatsoever appeared to him as sauvage "—of swamps and wind-blown trees, of Red' Indians like Joe the Canadian guide, of hardy agitators like John Brown. It gave Thoreau a peculiar happiness to con- template whatever was self-contained and resistant.
" It is beautiful—that untamedness—and one joys in it, even though it causes suffering to the untamed."
PHILLIPS RUSSELL.
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