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Thoreau on Poverty and Magnanimity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Thomas Woodson
Thomas Woodson*
Affiliation:
Ohio State University, Columbus
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Abstract

In Walden and his other mature writings Thoreau often approaches the social problem of poverty not through the directly assertive rhetoric of the Transcendentalist reformers, but by associating certain poor men with the Aristotelian quality of “greatness of soul”. This American, democratic, magnanimous hero lives quietly close to nature, but he is “a prince in disguise”, reincarnating “the worthies of antiquity”, the gods and heroes of classical mythology and history. Walden contains both a sharp awareness of how the Protestant ethic leads to economic hypocrisy in the New Englander's attitude toward the poor and a highly imaginative art of characterization, through which Thoreau transforms the innocent poor into heroes like those of contemporary American romances. But his political essays of the 1850's, particularly those on slavery and the heroic revolutionary activities of John Brown, reveal the limitations of Thoreau's art. His mythopoeic characterization of Brown comes too easily, emerging from a simplistic, abstract, merely polemical response to evil. “Magnanimity” becomes sheer brute force. Thoreau's characters thus lack the dimension of tragic magnanimity; his account of Brown has none of the mysterious innocence of Melville's Billy Budd, whose life and death present striking parallels to Brown's.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 85 , Issue 1 , January 1970 , pp. 21 - 34
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1970

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References

1 Henry David Thoreau, Correspondence, eds. Walter Harding and Carl Bode (New York, 1958), pp. 137, 146.

2 See Frank Buckley, “Thoreau and the Irish,” NEQ, 'xiii“ (1940), 389–400.

3 Perry Miller, ed., The Transcendent-lists: An Anthology (Cambridge, Mass., 1950), pp. 431–457, contains the relevant documents with commentary. When Emerson published the comment on Irish working conditions quoted above in “The Young American,” Dial, ‘iv“ (1844), 484–507, he added, revealingly, that ”this grim day's work of fifteen or sixteen hours, though deplored by all the humanity of the neighborhood, is a better police than the sheriff and his deputies.“ On Brownson's program, see esp. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ”Orestes Brownson: An American Marxist before Marx,“ Sewanee Review, ‘xivii” (1939), 317–323.

4 William Charvat, “American Romanticism and the De-pression of 1837,” Science and Society, ‘ii“ (1937), 80; Robert H. Bremner, From the Depths: The Discovery of Poverty in the United Slates (New York, 1956), pp. 87–88. But see also John L. Thomas, ”Romantic Reform in America, 18151865,“ AQ, ‘xvii” (1965), 656–681, which argues that Emerson's attitude is an aspect of a larger perfectionist approach to reform which came out of and gradually transformed the conservative religious revival of the early nineteenth century.

5 D. Gordon Rohman, “An Annotated Edition of Henry David Thoreau's Walden,” unpub. diss. (Syracuse, 1957), p. 75. See also Rohman, “Thoreau's Transcendental Stewardship,” Emerson Society Quarterly, No. 44 (1966), pp. 72–77.

6 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York, 1958), p. 170.

7 Citations from Walden, simply by page number in the text, are from Henry David Thoreau, Writings (Boston: Walden Ed., 1906), 'ii“.

8 Thoreau's uneasiness with the term “poverty” continues in his Journal till the end; in 1857 he congratulates himself on his “so-called poverty,” and in 1859 he discusses “what is often called poverty.” Thoreau's Journal, eds. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allan (Boston, 1906), is cited as / in the text; these two passages are /, ‘ix“, 245 and J, ‘xii”, 297.

9 Matthew x.39, xix.21, xvi.26, quoted in Thoreau, Writings, 'i“, 73. Thoreau uses Matthew vi.19–21 at the beginning of ”Economy“ in Walden (p. 6).

10 The Protestant Ethic, pp. 193–194.

11 See R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New York, 1947), p. 216. Michael F. Moloney argues for Thoreau's affinity to “the desert saints of the early Church” and to St. Francis of Assisi in “Henry David Thoreau 1817–1862 : Christian Malgré Lui,” A merican Classics Re-considered, ed. Harold C. Gardiner, S.J. (New York, 1958), pp. 193–209.

12 Thoreau, Writings, ‘i“, 74. In ”Economy“ he directly denies Jesus’ statement, often used to justify Puritan capitalism, ”The poor ye have always with you“ (Walden, p. 35).

13 Joseph Jones, Index to Walden (Austin, Tex., 1955), p. 11; Rohman, “An Annotated Edition of. . . Walden,” p. 167. Jones's view has been adopted by Walter Harding, ed., The Variorum Walden (New York, 1963), p. 275, n. 229, and by Charles R. Anderson, ed., Walden, in American Literary Masters, eds. Charles R. Anderson et al. (New York, 1965), 'i“, 688, n. 22, and elaborated by Lee A. Pederson, ”Thoreau's Rhetoric and Carew's Lines,“ Thoreau Society Bulletin, No. 82 (1963), p. 1. A fuller, though inconclusive, study of Thoreau's use of Carew is Raymond D. Gozzi, ”The Meaning of the 'Complemental Verses' in Walden“ Emerson Society Quarterly, No. 35 (1964), pp. 79–82.

14 “The Young American,” Dial, 'iv“ (1844), 487.

15 Oscar Handlin, Boston's Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1959), p. 132.

16 J. Lyndon Shanley, The Making of Walden with the Text of the First Version (Chicago, 1957), p. 106.

17 Robert H. Bremner, American Philanthropy (Chicago, 1960), p. 44.

18 The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), p. 410.

19 Cotton Mather, Two Brief Discourses . . . (Boston, 1701), pp. 37–38, quoted by A. Whitney Griswold, “Three Puritans on Prosperity,” NEQ, 'vii“ (1934), 477–479.

20 The New England Mind, pp. 411–412.

21 Oscar Handlin and Mary Flug Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774–1861 (New York, 1947), pp. 206–208.

22 Stephan Thernstrom, Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth Century City (Cambridge, Mass., 1964), pp. 48–49.

23 Quoted by Oscar Handlin, Boston's Immigrants, pp. 160, 132. See also Thomas R. Ryan, “Orestes A. Brownson and the Irish,” Mid-America, 'xxviii“ (1956), 156–172. The attitudes of the conservative clerical reformers are summarized by Thomas, ”Romantic Reform in America, 1815–1865,“ pp. 657–661.

24 The fable from Saadi's Gulistan which precedes the “Complemental Verses” contributes to Thoreau's argument by describing the “free man” as one who does not contribute external goods to the community (the basis of Mather's piety), but who simply possesses an internal wisdom which is beyond the mutability of time. Thoreau's most succinct statement on this matter is perhaps this from “Civil Disobedience”: “He who gives himself entirely to his fellow-men appears to them useless and selfish; but he who gives himself partially to them is pronounced a benefactor and philanthropist” (Writings, 'iv“, 360).

25 Thomas Carew, Coelum Britannicum, A Masque, 1. 855, in Carew, Poems, ed. Rhodes Dunlap (London, 1949). Citations of the masque not quoted from Walden, p. 89, are from this edition.

26 Literary Notebook in the Library of Congress: Facsimile Text, ed. Kenneth Walter Cameron (Hartford, Conn., 1964), p. 296. Thoreau used the edition of Carew edited by John Frv (London, 1810).

27 Aristophanes, Plutus, ll. 507–517; see Dunlap's note, Carew, Poems, p. 281.

28 See, for example, J, 'iii“, 98–99. For an interpretation of these lines from ”Complemental Verses“ as a key to the mythology of Walden, see William Bysshe Stein, ”Walden: The Wisdom of the Centaur,“ ELH, 'xxv” (1958), 194–215, and “The Motif of the Wise Old Man in Walden,” MLN, 'LXXV“ (1960), 201–204.

29 Shanley, The Making of Walden, p. 135.

30 Shanley, The Making of Walden, p. 173.

31 Maurice B. McNamee, S.J., Honor and the Epic Hero: A Study of the Shifting Concept of Magnanimity in Philosophy and Epic Poetry (New York, 1960), pp. 140–145.

32 Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Book ‘iv“, Ch. iii, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York, 1941), pp. 991–995. McNamee, Honor and the Epic Hero, Chs. i and ii, argues convincingly that Homer's Achilles (one of Carew's ”worthies“) lives according to this ethic. See also Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, trans. Gilbert Highet (Oxford, 1939), ‘i”, 9–10, 23–27, 45–46.

33 “Magnanimity” for Thoreau contains the post-Aristotelian connotation of generosity, of democratic comradely impulse, but to a lesser degree than in the usage of Emerson, Whitman, or Melville; for Thoreau, “constant superfluity” is less a matter of intention than a by-product of an egoistic code of conduct. Similarly, he finds magnanimous people aesthetically useful for reasons of which they are usually unconscious.

34 Francis H. Allen, ed., Men of Concord . . . as Portrayed in the Journal of Henry David Thoreau (Boston, 1936), pp. vii–xi; F. O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance (New York, 1941), pp. 174–175, 646–649; Laurence Stapleton, ed., H. D. Thoreau: A Writer's Journal (New York, 1960), pp. xxv–xxxix. For a more “economic” view of Thoreau's attitude toward these characters, see Leo Stoller, After Walden: Thoreau's Changing Views on Economic Man (Stanford, Calif., 1957), pp. 114–127.

35 In a letter of 1850 to H. G. O. Blake Thoreau wrote: “I am not afraid that I shall exaggerate the value and significance of life, but that I shall not be up to the occasion which it is. I shall be sorry to remember that I was there, but noticed nothing remarkable,—not so much as a prince in disguise; lived in the golden age a hired man; visited Olympus even, but fell asleep after dinner, and did not hear the conversation of the gods” (Correspondence, pp. 257–258). And in his late essay “Wild Apples”: “Every wild-apple shrub excites our expectation thus, somewhat as every wild child. It is, perhaps, a prince in disguise. What a lesson to man! . . . Poets and philosophers and statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast the hosts of unoriginal men” (Writings, v, 307).

36 In his poem “Poverty,” Thoreau sees his “mineral wealth hoarded in earth . . . Buried in seas in mines and ocean caves / More safely kept than is the merchant's worth, / Which every storm committeth to the waves.” Collected Poems, ed. Carl Bode, enlarged ed. (Baltimore, 1965), p. 219.

37 For a somewhat different approach to the theme of the “prince in disguise,” see Joel Porte, “Emerson, Thoreau, and the Double Consciousness,” NEQ, 'xli“ (1968), 40–50.

38 See Carl F. Hovde, “The Conception of Character in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” The Thoreau Centennial, ed. Walter Harding (Albany, N. Y., 1965), pp. 5–15.

39 Horace Traubel, With Walt Whitman in Camden (Boston, 1906), 'i“, 212. Compare the more sweeping (and more debatable) conclusion of Tony Tanner: ”What of course is missing in all Thoreau's nature is human nature . . . Consequently Thoreau is not really interested in the moral possibilities of the innocent eye,“ in The Reign of Wonder: Naivety and Reality in American Literature (Cambridge, Eng., 1965), p. 63,

40 Herman Melville, Complete Stories, ed. Jay Leyda (New York, 1949), p. 146. Sidney P. Moss, “ ‘Cock-A-Doodle-Dool’ and Some Legends in Melville Scholarship,” AL, 'xl“ (1968), 192–210, argues convincingly against the idea that Melville in this story satirizes Emerson or Thoreau, and argues for Melville's sharing with them ”the comedic vision“ of ”defiance of life-denying forces.“

41 Richard Chase, The American Novel and its Tradition (Garden City, N. Y., 1957), pp. ix, xi. See also Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), pp. 304–307, and “The Drunken Boat: The Revolutionary Element in Romanticism,” in Romanticism Reconsidered, ed. Northrop Frye (New York, 1963), pp. 11–12.

42 A Study of English Romanticism (New York, 1968), p. 4.

43 Collected Poems, pp. 161–162, 318.

44 Citations in the text from “Civil Disobedience,” “Slavery in Massachusetts,” “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” “The Last Days of John Brown,” and “After the Death of John Brown,” are from Thoreau, Writings, iv.

45 Ethel Seybold, Thoreau: The Quest and the Classics (New Haven, 1951), p. 38, says that under the influence of Plutarch's Lives Thoreau “inclined to believe that the events themselves were unimportant and that only the courage and wisdom—or the lack of them—with which men met events had value as history, that history became truth only as it approached the mythical or apocryphal.” For a study of the relation of poverty to heroism in Emerson's writings, see Edmund G. Berry, Emerson's Plutarch (Cambridge, Mass., 1961), esp. pp. 74–82, 102–108. A typical Emersonian-Plutarchan expression of the theme is this from “Heroism”: “The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. . . . The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very well abide its loss”—Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston and New York, 1903–1904), 'ii“, 255.

46 Shanley, The Making of Walden, p. 174.

47 The Life of Henry David Thoreau (Boston, 1917), p. 282.

48 Complete Works, 'xi“, 279–280.

49 See esp. Joseph Wood Krutch, Henry David Thoreau (New York, 1948), pp. 230–237, and Heinz Eulau, “Wayside Challenger: Some Remarks on the Politics of Henry David Thoreau,” Thoreau: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Sherman Paul (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1962), pp. 123, 127–129.

50 “Lucky Fox at Walden,” Thoreau in Our Season, ed. John D. Hicks (Amherst, Mass., 1966), p. 133.

51 “Wayside Challenger,” p. 129.

52 “Thoreau and John Brown,” Thoreau in Our Season, pp. 145–147.

53 Complete Works, 'xi“, 269.

54 Citations in the text are from Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), eds. Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. (Chicago, 1962).

55 Billy Budd, Sailor, p. 115. Warner Berthoff, The Example of Melville (Princeton, 1962), pp. 193–200.