I THINK THAT I love society as much as most, and am ready enough to
fasten myself like a bloodsucker for the time to any full-blooded
man that comes in my way. I am naturally no hermit, but might possibly
sit out the sturdiest frequenter of the bar-room, if my business
called me thither.
I had three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for
friendship, three for society. When visitors came in larger and
unexpected numbers there was but the third chair for them all, but
they generally economized the room by standing up. It is surprising
how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had
twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof,
and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near
to one another. Many of our houses, both public and private, with
their almost innumerable apartments, their huge halls and their
cellars for the storage of wines and other munitions of peace,
appear to be extravagantly large for their inhabitants. They are so
vast and magnificent that the latter seem to be only vermin which
infest them. I am surprised when the herald blows his summons before
some Tremont or Astor or Middlesex House, to see come creeping out
over the piazza for all inhabitants a ridiculous mouse, which soon
again slinks into some hole in the pavement.
One inconvenience I sometimes experienced in so small a house, the
difficulty of getting to a sufficient distance from my guest when we
began to utter the big thoughts in big words. You want room for your
thoughts to get into sailing trim and run a course or two before
they make their port. The bullet of your thought must have overcome
its lateral and ricochet motion and fallen into its last and steady
course before it reaches the ear of the bearer, else it may plow out
again through the side of his head. Also, our sentences wanted room to
unfold and form their columns in the interval. Individuals, like
nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a
considerable neutral ground, between them. I have found it a
singular luxury to talk across the pond to a companion on the opposite
side. In my house we were so near that we could not begin to bear-
we could not speak low enough to be heard; as when you throw two
stones into calm water so near that they break each other's
undulations. If we are merely loquacious and loud talkers, then we can
afford to stand very near together, cheek by jowl, and feel each
other's breath; but if we speak reservedly and thoughtfully, we want
to be farther apart, that all animal heat and moisture may have a
chance to evaporate. If we would enjoy the most intimate society
with that in each of us which is without, or above, being spoken to,
we must not only be silent, but commonly so far apart bodily that we
cannot possibly hear each other's voice in any case. Referred to
this standard, speech is for the convenience of those who are hard
of hearing; but there are many fine things which we cannot say if we
have to shout. As the conversation began to assume a loftier and
grander tone, we gradually shoved our chairs farther apart till they
touched the wall in opposite corners, and then commonly there was
not room enough.
My "best" room, however, my withdrawing room, always ready for
company, on whose carpet the sun rarely fell, was the pine wood behind
my house. Thither in summer days, when distinguished guests came, I
took them, and a priceless domestic swept the floor and dusted the
furniture and kept the things in order.
If one guest came he sometimes partook of my frugal meal, and it was
no interruption to conversation to be stirring a hasty-pudding, or
watching the rising and maturing of a loaf of bread in the ashes, in
the meanwhile. But if twenty came and sat in my house there was
nothing said about dinner, though there might be bread enough for two,
more than if eating were a forsaken habit; but we naturally
practised abstinence; and this was never felt to be an offence against
hospitality, but the most proper and considerate course. The waste and
decay of physical life, which so often needs repair, seemed
miraculously retarded in such a case, and the vital vigor stood its
ground. I could entertain thus a thousand as well as twenty; and if
any ever went away disappointed or hungry from my house when they
found me at home, they may depend upon it that I sympathized with them
at least. So easy is it, though many housekeepers doubt it, to
establish new and better customs in the place of the old. You need not
rest your reputation on the dinners you give. For my own part, I was
never so effectually deterred from frequenting a man's house, by any
kind of Cerberus whatever, as by the parade one made about dining
me, which I took to be a very polite and roundabout hint never to
trouble him so again. I think I shall never revisit those scenes. I
should be proud to have for the motto of my cabin those lines of
Spenser which one of my visitors inscribed on a yellow walnut leaf for
a card:
"Arrived there, the little house they fill,
Ne looke for entertainment where none was;
Rest is their feast, and all things at their will:
The noblest mind the best contentment has."
When Winslow, afterward governor of the Plymouth Colony, went with a
companion on a visit of ceremony to Massasoit on foot through the
woods, and arrived tired and hungry at his lodge, they were well
received by the king, but nothing was said about eating that day. When
the night arrived, to quote their own words- "He laid us on the bed
with himself and his wife, they at the one end and we at the other, it
being only planks laid a foot from the ground and a thin mat upon
them. Two more of his chief men, for want of room, pressed by and upon
us; so that we were worse weary of our lodging than of our journey."
At one o'clock the next day Massasoit "brought two fishes that he
had shot," about thrice as big as a bream. "These being boiled,
there were at least forty looked for a share in them; the most eat
of them. This meal only we had in two nights and a day; and had not
one of us bought a partridge, we had taken our journey fasting."
Fearing that they would be light-headed for want of food and also
sleep, owing to "the savages' barbarous singing, (for they use to sing
themselves asleep,)" and that they might get home while they had
strength to travel, they departed. As for lodging, it is true they
were but poorly entertained, though what they found an inconvenience
was no doubt intended for an honor; but as far as eating was
concerned, I do not see how the Indians could have done better. They
had nothing to eat themselves, and they were wiser than to think
that apologies could supply the place of food to their guests; so they
drew their belts tighter and said nothing about it. Another time
when Winslow visited them, it being a season of plenty with them,
there was no deficiency in this respect.
As for men, they will hardly fail one anywhere. I had more
visitors while I lived in the woods than at any other period in my
life; I mean that I had some. I met several there under more favorable
circumstances than I could anywhere else. But fewer came to see me
on trivial business. In this respect, my company was winnowed by my
mere distance from town. I had withdrawn so far within the great ocean
of solitude, into which the rivers of society empty, that for the most
part, so far as my needs were concerned, only the finest sediment
was deposited around me. Beside, there were wafted to me evidences
of unexplored and uncultivated continents on the other side.
Who should come to my lodge this morning but a true Homeric or
Paphlagonian man- he had so suitable and poetic a name that I am sorry
I cannot print it here- a Canadian, a woodchopper and post-maker,
who can hole fifty posts in a day, who made his last supper on a
woodchuck which his dog caught. He, too, has heard of Homer, and,
"if it were not for books," would "not know what to do rainy days,"
though perhaps he has not read one wholly through for many rainy
seasons. Some priest who could pronounce the Greek itself taught him
to read his verse in the Testament in his native parish far away;
and now I must translate to him, while he holds the book, Achilles'
reproof to Patroclus for his sad countenance.- "Why are you in
tears, Patroclus, like a young girl?"
"Or have you alone heard some news from Phthia?
They say that Menoetius lives yet, son of Actor,
And Peleus lives, son of Aeacus, among the Myrmidons,
Either of whom having died, we should greatly grieve."
He says, "That's good." He has a great bundle of white oak bark
under his arm for a sick man, gathered this Sunday morning.- I suppose
there's no harm in going after such a thing today," says he. To him
Homer was a great writer, though what his writing was about he did not
know. A more simple and natural man it would be hard to find. Vice and
disease, which cast such a sombre moral hue over the world, seemed
to have hardly any existance for him. He was about twenty-eight
years old, and had left Canada and his father's house a dozen years
before to work in the States, and earn money to buy a farm with at
last, perhaps in his native country. He was cast in the coarsest
mould; a stout but sluggish body, yet gracefully carried, with a thick
sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, and dull sleepy blue eyes, which
were occasionally lit up with expression. He wore a flat gray cloth
cap, a dingy wool-colored greatcoat, and cowhide boots. He was a great
consumer of meat, usually carrying his dinner to his work a couple
of miles past my house- for he chopped all summer- in a tin pail; cold
meats, often cold woodchucks, and coffee in a stone bottle which
dangled by a string from his belt; and sometimes he offered me a
drink. He came along early, crossing my bean-field, though without
anxiety or haste to get to his work, such as Yankees exhibit. He
wasn't a-going to hurt himself. He didn't care if he only earned his
board. Frequently he would leave his dinner in the bushes, when his
dog had caught a woodchuck by the way, and go back a mile and a half
to dress it and leave it in the cellar of the house where he
boarded, after deliberating first for half an hour whether he could
not sink it in the pond safely till nightfall- loving to dwell long
upon these themes. He would say, as he went by in the morning, "How
thick the pigeons are! If working every day were not my trade, I could
get all the meat I should want by hunting-pigeons, woodchucks,
rabbits, partridges- by gosh! I could get all I should want for a week
in one day."
He was a skilful chopper, and indulged in some flourishes and
ornaments in his art. He cut his trees level and close to the
ground, that the sprouts which came up afterward might be more
vigorous and a sled might slide over the stumps; and instead of
leaving a whole tree to support his corded wood, he would pare it away
to a slender stake or splinter which you could break off with your
hand at last.
He interested me because he was so quiet and solitary and so happy
withal; a well of good humor and contentment which overflowed at his
eyes. His mirth was without alloy. Sometimes I saw him at his work
in the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with a laugh of
inexpressible satisfaction, and a salutation in Canadian French,
though he spoke English as well. When I approached him he would
suspend his work, and with half-suppressed mirth lie along the trunk
of a pine which he had felled, and, peeling off the inner bark, roll
it up into a ball and chew it while he laughed and talked. Such an
exuberance of animal spirits had he that he sometimes tumbled down and
rolled on the ground with laughter at anything which made him think
and tickled him. Looking round upon the trees he would exclaim - "By
George! I can enjoy myself well enough here chopping; I want no better
sport." Sometimes, when at leisure, he amused himself all day in the
woods with a pocket pistol, firing salutes to himself at regular
intervals as he walked. In the winter he had a fire by which at noon
he warmed his coffee in a kettle; and as he sat on a log to eat his
dinner the chickadees would sometimes come round and alight on his arm
and peck at the potato in his fingers; and he said that he "liked to
have the little fellers about him."
In him the animal man chiefly was developed. In physical endurance
and contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. I asked him
once if he was not sometimes tired at night, after working all day;
and he answered, with a sincere and serious look, "Gorrappit, I
never was tired in my life." But the intellectual and what is called
spiritual man in him were slumbering as in an infant. He had been
instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in which the
Catholic priests teach the aborigines, by which the pupil is never
educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of
trust and reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept a
child. When Nature made him, she gave him a strong body and
contentment for his portion, and propped him on every side with
reverence and reliance, that he might live out his threescore years
and ten a child. He was so genuine and unsophisticated that no
introduction would serve to introduce him, more than if you introduced
a woodchuck to your neighbor. He had got to find him out as you did.
He would not play any part. Men paid him wages for work, and so helped
to feed and clothe him; but he never exchanged opinions with them.
He was so simply and naturally humble- if he can be called humble
who never aspires- that humility was no distinct quality in him, nor
could he conceive of it. Wiser men were demigods to him. If you told
him that such a one was coming, he did as if he thought that
anything so grand would expect nothing of himself, but take all the
responsibility on itself, and let him be forgotten still. He never
heard the sound of praise. He particularly reverenced the writer and
the preacher. Their performances were miracles. When I told him that I
wrote considerably, he thought for a long time that it was merely
the handwriting which I meant, for he could write a remarkably good
hand himself. I sometimes found the name of his native parish
handsomely written in the snow by the highway, with the proper
French accent, and knew that he had passed. I asked him if he ever
wished to write his thoughts. He said that he had read and written
letters for those who could not, but he never tried to write thoughts-
no, he could not, he could not tell what to put first, it would kill
him, and then there was spelling to be attended to at the same time!
I heard that a distinguished wise man and reformer asked him if he
did not want the world to be changed; but he answered with a chuckle
of surprise in his Canadian accent, not knowing that the question
had ever been entertained before, "No, I like it well enough." It
would have suggested many things to a philosopher to have dealings
with him. To a stranger he appeared to know nothing of things in
general; yet I sometimes saw in him a man whom I had not seen
before, and I did not know whether he was as wise as Shakespeare or as
simply ignorant as a child, whether to suspect him of a fine poetic
consciousness or of stupidity. A townsman told me that when he met him
sauntering through the village in his small close-fitting cap, and
whistling to himself, he reminded him of a prince in disguise.
His only books were an almanac and an arithmetic, in which last he
was considerably expert. The former was a sort of cyclopaedia to
him, which he supposed to contain an abstract of human knowledge, as
indeed it does to a considerable extent. I loved to sound him on the
various reforms of the day, and he never failed to look at them in the
most simple and practical light. He had never heard of such things
before. Could he do without factories? I asked. He had worn the
home-made Vermont gray, he said, and that was good. Could he
dispense with tea and coffee? Did this country afford any beverage
beside water? He had soaked hemlock leaves in water and drank it,
and thought that was better than water in warm weather. When I asked
him if he could do without money, he showed the convenience of money
in such a way as to suggest and coincide with the most philosophical
accounts of the origin of this institution, and the very derivation of
the word pecunia. If an ox were his property, and he wished to get
needles and thread at the store, he thought it would be inconvenient
and impossible soon to go on mortgaging some portion of the creature
each time to that amount. He could defend many institutions better
than any philosopher, because, in describing them as they concerned
him, he gave the true reason for their prevalence, and speculation had
not suggested to him any other. At another time, hearing Plato's
definition of a man- a biped without feathers- and that one
exhibited a cock plucked and called it Plato's man, he thought it an
important difference that the knees bent the wrong way. He would
sometimes exclaim, "How I love to talk! By George, I could talk all
day!" I asked him once, when I had not seen him for many months, if he
had got a new idea this summer. "Good Lord"- said he, "a man that
has to work as I do, if he does not forget the ideas he has had, he
will do well. May he the man you hoe with is inclined to race; then,
by gorry, your mind must be there; you think of weeds." He would
sometimes ask me first on such occasions, if I had made any
improvement. One winter day I asked him if he was always satisfied
with himself, wishing to suggest a substitute within him for the
priest without, and some higher motive for living. "Satisfied!" said
he; "some men are satisfied with one thing, and some with another. One
man, perhaps, if he has got enough, will be satisfied to sit all day
with his back to the fire and his belly to the table, by George!"
Yet I never, by any manoeuvring, could get him to take the spiritual
view of things; the highest that he appeared to conceive of was a
simple expediency, such as you might expect an animal to appreciate;
and this, practically, is true of most men. If I suggested any
improvement in his mode of life, he merely answered, without
expressing any regret, that it was too late. Yet he thoroughly
believed in honesty and the like virtues.
There was a certain positive originality, however slight, to be
detected in him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking
for himself and expressing his own opinion, a phenomenon so rare
that I would any day walk ten miles to observe it, and it amounted
to the re-origination of many of the institutions of society. Though
he hesitated, and perhaps failed to express himself distinctly, he
always had a presentable thought behind. Yet his thinking was so
primitive and immersed in his animal life, that, though more promising
than a merely learned man's, it rarely ripened to anything which can
be reported. He suggested that there might be men of genius in the
lowest grades of life, however permanently humble and illiterate,
who take their own view always, or do not pretend to see at all; who
are as bottomless even as Walden Pond was thought to be, though they
may be dark and muddy.
Many a traveller came out of his way to see me and the inside of
my house, and, as an excuse for calling, asked for a glass of water. I
told them that I drank at the pond, and pointed thither, offering to
lend them a dipper. Far off as I lived, I was not exempted from the
annual visitation which occurs, methinks, about the first of April,
when everybody is on the move; and I had my share of good luck, though
there were some curious specimens among my visitors. Half-witted men
from the almshouse and elsewhere came to see me; but I endeavored to
make them exercise all the wit they had, and make their confessions to
me; in such cases making wit the theme of our conversation; and so was
compensated. Indeed, I found some of them to be wiser than the
so-called overseers of the poor and selectmen of the town, and thought
it was time that the tables were turned. With respect to wit, I
learned that there was not much difference between the half and the
whole. One day, in particular, an inoffensive, simpleminded pauper,
whom with others I had often seen used as fencing stuff, standing or
sitting on a bushel in the fields to keep cattle and himself from
straying, visited me, and expressed a wish to live as I did. He told
me, with the utmost simplicity and truth, quite superior, or rather
inferior, to anything that is called humility, that he was
"deficient in intellect." These were his words. The Lord had made
him so, yet he supposed the Lord cared as much for him as for another.
"I have always been so," said he, "from my childhood; I never had much
mind; I was not like other children; I am weak in the head. It was the
Lord's will, I suppose." And there he was to prove the truth of his
words. He was a metaphysical puzzle to me. I have rarely met a
fellow-man on such promising ground- it was so simple and sincere
and so true all that he said. And, true enough, in proportion as he
appeared to humble himself was he exalted. I did not know at first but
it was the result of a wise policy. It seemed that from such a basis
of truth and frankness as the poor weak-headed pauper had laid, our
intercourse might go forward to something better than the
intercourse of sages.
I had some guests from those not reckoned commonly among the
town's poor, but who should be; who are among the world's poor, at any
rate; guests who appeal, not to your hospitality, but to your
hospitality; who earnestly wish to be helped, and preface their appeal
with the information that they are resolved, for one thing, never to
help themselves. I require of a visitor that he be not actually
starving, though he may have the very best appetite in the world,
however he got it. Objects of charity are not guests. Men who did
not know when their visit had terminated, though I went about my
business again, answering them from greater and greater remoteness.
Men of almost every degree of wit called on me in the migrating
season. Some who had more wits than they knew what to do with; runaway
slaves with plantation manners, who listened from time to time, like
the fox in the fable, as if they heard the hounds a-baying on their
track, and looked at me beseechingly, as much as to say,
"O Christian, will you send me back? "
One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward
toward the north star. Men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken,
and that a duckling; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads,
like those hens which are made to take charge of a hundred chickens,
all in pursuit of one bug, a score of them lost in every morning's
dew- and become frizzled and mangy in consequence; men of ideas
instead of legs, a sort of intellectual centipede that made you
crawl all over. One man proposed a book in which visitors should write
their names, as at the White Mountains; but, alas! I have too good a
memory to make that necessary.
I could not but notice some of the peculiarities of my visitors.
Girls and boys and young women generally seemed glad to be in the
woods. They looked in the pond and at the flowers, and improved
their time. Men of business, even farmers, thought only of solitude
and employment, and of the great distance at which I dwelt from
something or other; and though they said that they loved a ramble in
the woods occasionally, it was obvious that they did not. Restless
committed men, whose time was an taken up in getting a living or
keeping it; ministers who spoke of God as if they enjoyed a monopoly
of the subject, who could not bear all kinds of opinions; doctors,
lawyers, uneasy housekeepers who pried into my cupboard and bed when I
was out- how came Mrs.- to know that my sheets were not as clean as
hers?- young men who had ceased to be young, and had concluded that it
was safest to follow the beaten track of the professions- all these
generally said that it was not possible to do so much good in my
position. Ay! there was the rub. The old and infirm and the timid,
of whatever age or sex, thought most of sickness, and sudden
accident and death; to them life seemed full of danger- what danger is
there if you don't think of any?- and they thought that a prudent
man would carefully select the safest position, where Dr. B. might
be on hand at a moment's warning. To them the village was literally
a com-munity, a league for mutual defence, and you would suppose
that they would not go a-huckleberrying without a medicine chest.
The amount of it is, if a man is alive, there is always danger that he
may die, though the danger must be allowed to be less in proportion as
he is dead-and-alive to begin with. A man sits as many risks as he
runs. Finally, there were the self-styled reformers, the greatest
bores of all, who thought that I was forever singing,
This is the house that I built;
This is the man that lives in the house that I built;
but they did not know that the third line was,
These are the folks that worry the man
That lives in the house that I built.
I did not fear the hen-harriers, for I kept no chickens; but I
feared the men-harriers rather.
I had more cheering visitors than the last. Children come
a-berrying, railroad men taking a Sunday morning walk in clean shirts,
fishermen and hunters, poets and philosophers; in short, all honest
pilgrims, who came out to the woods for freedom's sake, and really
left the village behind, I was ready to greet with- "Welcome,
Englishmen! welcome, Englishmen!" for I had had communication with
that race.
The Bean-Field
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