William Ellery Channing’s Thoreau

Pencil Box, J. Thoreau & Co.
(Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
Emerson (“Eulogy, 1862”): “From a box containing a bushel or more of loose pencils, he could take up with his hands fast enough just a dozen pencils at every grasp.”

Cold morning. Up, dilatory, rebelling, at four (to light up the lamp at five). Odd sleeps. Perused William Ellery Channing’s Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist, the 1902 F. B. Sanborn-edited version of the 1873 original. One gathers something of the “somewhat mercurial Channing” (Krutch) through the rampant quotational jitters of the “Preface.” In part:

      In a biographic thesis there can hardly occur very much to amuse, if of one who was reflective and not passionate, and who might have entered like Anthony Wood in his journal, “This day old Joan began to make my bed,”—an entry not fine enough for Walpole. At the same time the account of a writer’s stock in trade may be set off like the catalogues of George Robins, auctioneer, with illustrations even in Latin or, as Marlowe says—

“The learned Greek, rich in fit epithets,
Blest in the lovely marriage of pure words.”

      Byron’s bath at Newstead Abbey is described as a dark and cellar-like hole. The halos about the brows of authors tarnish with time. Iteration, too, must be respected,—that law of Nature. Authors carry their robes of state not on their backs, but, like the Indians seen by Wafer, in a basket behind them,—“the times’ epitome.” But as the cheerful host says:—

“I give thee all, I can no more,
If poor the offering be,”

the best scraps in the larder, like Pip’s pork-pie.
. . .
      Claude Lorraine used to say, “I sell you my landscapes: the figures I give away.” So there are patch-work quilts made by the saints where bits of fine silk are sewed on pieces of waste paper,—that seems, madam, not that is. But recall the trope that “very near to admiration is the wish to admire” and permit the excellence of the subject to defray in a measure the meanness of the treatment . . .

Whew. Sanborn, regarding Channing’s re-drafting of an earlier (1863) manuscript, notes Channing’s “perversity of genius” in the redoing. And unsigned review in the New York Times dated 25 October 1873 reads in part:

The preface is an epitome of the book, which is written without order or method, and in a style oftentimes so obtrusively bad as to suggest the suspicion that Mr. Channing has purposely adopted it, the better to set off the simplicity and clearness of the extracts he gives from Thoreau. Of the latter he tells us that “for so learned a man he spared his erudition,” and that “there are so few obscurities in Thoreau’s writing, that his style has that ease and moderateness he appears to lack.” The exact reverse is true of his chronicler, amid whose clumsy inversions, deplorable Latinisms, and uncouth efforts at humor, Thoreau’s clear and clean-cut sentences shine like diamonds in a dust heap. Mr. Channing talks of “isolate houses,” or “at-length-deserted pathways,” and the “breathing aloofness”; a hen is the “origin of feathers,” ice is “shaggy enamel.” . . . What can be expected of a man who talks of “tadpoles beginning, like magazine writers, to drop their tails” . . .

Ah, the pleasures of vituperating. (Ah, the pleasures of a poverty of epithets . . .) One recalls Thoreau’s own sense of the stifling air of “poetry . . . collected into one alove”*:

When looking over dry and dusty volumes of the English poets, I cannot believe that those fresh and fair creations I had imagined are contained in them. English poetry from Gower down, collected into one alcove, and so from the library window compared with the commonest nature, seems very mean. Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar’s atmosphere. . . . I can hardly be serious with myself when I remember that I have come to Cambridge after poetry; and while I am running over the catalogue and selecting, I think it would be a shorter way to a complete volume to step at once into the field or wood, with a very low reverence to students and librarians. Milton did not see what company he was to fall into.

(Journal, 30 November 1841, quoted by Krutch.) Continuing: “On running over the titles of these books, looking from time to time at their first pages or farther, I am oppressed by an inevitable sadness.”

Alors, some few reading notes out of the Channing biography:

Henry retained a peculiar pronunciation of the letter r, with a decided French accent. He says, “September is the first month with a burr in it”; and his speech always had an emphasis, a burr in it.
. . .
When he was fourteen months old, his family removed to Chelmsford, where they were settled for two years . . . At Chelmsford he was tossed by a cow, and again, by getting at an axe without advice, he cut off a good part of one of his toes; and once he fell from a stair. After this last achievement, as after some others, he had a singular suspension of breath, with a purple hue in his face, owing, I think, to his slow circulation (shown in his slow pulse through life) and hence the difficulty of recovering his breath.
. . .
His own house is rather minutely described in his “Walden.” It was just large enough for one, like the plate of boiled apple pudding he used to order of the restaurateur, and which, he said, constituted his invariable dinner in a jaunt to the city.
. . .
For shoddy he had an aversion: a pattern of solid Vermont gray gave him genuine satisfaction, and he could think of corduroy. His life was of one fabric. He spared the outfitters no trouble; he wished the material cut to suit him, as he was to wear it, not worshipping “the fashion” in cloth or opinion. He bought but few things, and “those not till long after he began to want them,” so that when he did get them he was prepared to make a perfect use of them and extract their whole sweet.
. . .
Ever on the search for knowledge, he lived to get information; and as I am so far like Alfieri that I have almost no curiosity, I once said to him how surprised I was at the persistence of this trait in him. “What else is there in life?” was his reply. He did not end, in this search, with the farmers, nor the broadcloth world; he knew another class of men, who hang on the outskirts of society, those who love “grog” and never to be seen abroad without a fish-pole or a gun in their hands; with elfish locks, and of a community with nature not to be surpassed. They lived more out of doors than he did, and faced more mud and water without flinching, sitting all day in the puddles, like frogs, with a line in the river, catching pouts, or wading mid-leg in marshes, to shoot woodcock. One of these men, who called cherry-birds “port-royals,” he long frequented, though looked on in the town as by no means sacred; who, having a prejudice for beer, at times transcended propriety.
. . .
He was a natural Stoic, not taught from Epictetus nor the trail of Indians. Not only made he no complaint, but in him was no background of complaint, as in some, where a lifelong tragedy dances in polished fetters. He enjoyed what sadness he could find. He would be as melancholy as he could and rejoice with fate. “Who knows but he is dead already?" He voyaged about his river in December, the drops freezing on the oar, with a cheering song; pleased with the silvery chime of icicles against the stems of the button-bushes, toys of “immortal water, alive even to the superficies.”
. . .
So, through life, he steadily declined trying or pretending to do what he had no means to execute, yet forbore explanations; and some have thought his refusals were unwillingness. When he had grown to an age suitable for company, and not very fond of visiting, he could not give the common refusal, that it was not convenient, or not in his power, or he regretted, but said the truth, “I do not want to go.”
. . .
In Boston he . . . visited libraries, and the end of Long Wharf, having no other business there than with the books and that brief sight of the sea, so fascinating to a landsman. Thus he had no love at all for cities; those curious outcroppings of mortal ingenuity, called “institutions,” furnished him more than one good mark to shoot at. “One wise sentence,” he said, “is worth the State of Massachusetts many times over.”
. . .
Once walking in old Dunstable, he much desired the town history by C. J. Fox of Nashua; and, knocking, as usual, at the best house, he went in and asked a young lady who made her appearance whether she had the book in question. She had, it was produced. After consulting it, Thoreau in his sincere way inquired very modestly whether she “would not sell it to him.” I think the plan surprised her, and have heard that she smiled; but he produced his wallet, gave her the pistareen, and went his way rejoicing with the book, which remained in his small library.
. . .
He was by no means one of those crotchety persons who believe, because they set up Plato or Goethe or Shakespeare as the absolute necessities of literary worship, that all other students must so make idols of them. I never knew him say a good word for Plato, and I fear he had never finished Shakespeare. His was a very uncompleted reading; there being with him a pressure of engrossing flowers, birds, snow-storms, swamps, and seasons. He had no favorites among the French or Germans and I do not recall a modern writer except Carlyle and Ruskin whom he valued much. In fact, the pointed and prismatic style now so common, and the chopped-hay fashion of writing, suited not with his homely, long-staple vein. For novels, stories, and such matters, he was devoid of all curiosity; and for the works of Dickens had a hearty contempt. Usually, all the popular books were sealed volumes to him. But no labor was too onerous, no material too costly, if expended on the right enterprise.
. . .
Another faithful reading was those old Roman farmers, Cato and Varro, and musically named Columella, for whom he had a liking. He is reminded of them by seeing the farmers so busy in the fall carting out their compost. “I see the farmer now on every side carting out his manure, and sedulously making his compost-heap, or scattering it over his grass-ground and breaking it up with a mallet, and it reminds me of Cato’s advice. He died 150 years before Christ. Indeed, the farmer’s was pretty much the same routine then as now. ‘Sterquilinium magnum stude ut habeas. Stercus sedulo conserva, cum exportatis purgato et comminuito. Per autumnum evehito.’ Study to have a great dung-heap. Carefully preserve your dung. When you carry it out, make clean work of it, and break it up fine. Carry it out during the autumn.”
. . .
Abroad, he used the pencil, writing but a few moments at a time, during the walk; but into the note-book must go all measurements with the foot-rule which he always carried, or the surveyor’s tape that he often had with him. Also all observations with his spy-glass (another invariable companion for years), all conditions of plants, spring, summer, and fall, the depth of snows, the strangeness of the skies, all went down in this note-book. To his memory he never trusted for a fact, but to the page and the pencil, and the abstract in the pocket, not the Journal. I have seen bits of this note-book, but never recognized any word in it; and I have read its expansion in the Journal, in many pages, of that which occupied him but five minutes to write in the field. “Have you written up your notes in your Journal?” was one of his questions. Such was the character of his mind, to make what is called little become grand and noble, and thus to dignify life. “To have some one thing to do, and do it perfectly.”

Assez.