Solid Seasons. Jeffrey S. Cramer
that could be hit on for making the woods and waters and fields available to wit and worth, and for restraining the bold, bad man.”40 Their discussions on this topic formed the central dialogue found in Emerson’s essay “The Conservative,” in which Emerson points out the fundamental differences between the reformer, modeled after Thoreau, and the conservative, a role that Emerson sometimes reluctantly found himself adopting.
Of course conservatism always has the worst of the argument, is always apologizing, pleading a necessity, pleading that to change would be to deteriorate: it must saddle itself with the mountainous load of the violence and vice of society, must deny the possibility of good, deny ideas, and suspect and stone the prophet; whilst innovation is always in the right, triumphant, attacking, and sure of final success. Conservatism stands on man’s confessed limitations, reform on his indisputable infinitude; conservatism on circumstance, liberalism on power; one goes to make an adroit member of the social frame, the other to postpone all things to the man himself; conservatism is debonair and social, reform is individual and imperious. We are reformers in spring and summer, in autumn and winter we stand by the old; reformers in the morning, conservers at night.41
Alcott may have captured the essence of this dilemma, as Thoreau noted in his journal: “Alcott spent the day with me yesterday. He spent the day before with Emerson. He observed that he had got his wine and now he had come after his venison. Such was the compliment he paid me.”42 Alcott often compared the two, noting in his journal in 1852 after attending Emerson’s lecture “Wealth” that “there are finer things to be said in praise of Poverty, which it takes a person superior to Emerson even to say worthily. Thoreau is the better man, perhaps, to celebrate that estate.”43
While Emerson found Thoreau’s constant aspect of reform and rebellion tedious—“Always some weary captious paradox to fight you with . . .”44—Thoreau saw a man he doubted “could trundle a wheelbarrow through the streets, because it would be out of character.”45 Thoreau delighted in the story that Emerson, Louis Agassiz, and a few others
broke some dozens of ale-bottles, one after another, with their bullets, in the Adirondack country, using them for marks! It sounds rather Cockneyish. He says that he shot a peetweet for Agassiz, and this, I think he said, was the first game he ever bagged. He carried a double-barrelled gun,—rifle and shotgun,—which he bought for the purpose, which he says received much commendation,—all parties thought it a very pretty piece. Think of Emerson shooting a peetweet (with shot) for Agassiz, and cracking an ale-bottle (after emptying it) with his rifle at six rods! They cut several pounds of lead out of the tree.46
On the last day of August 1839, Thoreau and his brother, John, made a two-week river excursion from Concord, Massachusetts, to Concord, New Hampshire. Emerson applauded the two brothers with approbation tinged with wistfulness after they returned from their excursion: “Now here are my wise young neighbors who, instead of getting, like the wordmen, into a railroad-car, where they have not even the activity of holding the reins, have got into a boat which they have built with their own hands, with sails which they have contrived to serve as a tent by night, and gone up the Merrimack to live by their wits on the fish of the stream and the berries of the wood.”47
Later that month Emerson wrote his brother William that George Ripley and others were reviving “at this time the old project of a new journal,”—what would become The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion—“for the exposition of absolute truth, but I doubt a little if it reach the day,” insisting, with a sweep of self-deception, that he “will never be editor, though I am counted on as a contributor.”48 As he told Margaret Fuller, “I believe we all feel much alike in regard to this Journal; we all wish it to be, but do not wish to be in any way personally responsible for it.”49
The Dial would also serve as a receptacle for the writings of those Emerson wanted to help and whose work he might want to promote. He knew, however, the limitations of the “fine people” who would write for this journal and whose work would appear “nowhere else,” but in Thoreau he saw a different potential: “My Henry Thoreau will be a great poet for such a company, and one of these days for all companies.”50 He saw Thoreau as a contributor, providing him with an outlet for his early writings, and later, when Emerson did become editor, as an apprentice, positioning Thoreau as his assistant.
Margaret Fuller was The Dial’s first editor, and Emerson tried to encourage her about Thoreau’s work, though eventually needing to concede, “I do not like his piece very well, but I admire this perennial threatening attitude, just as we like to go under an overhanging precipice,” he wrote her in early 1842.51 The majority of Thoreau’s Dial contributions would not be published until Emerson took on the editorship, at which point his friend’s work had some, although a very limited, distribution.
In the spring of 1840 Emerson had been working on pieces that would form his first series of Essays. In June he was finishing up his essay on friendship, which he would place in the center of his book, as Thoreau would do when placing his own friendship essay in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Emerson’s essay contains the realization with which he wrestled his entire life: “Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables.”52
He was writing so much that he told Fuller he had “become a scrivener.”53 At the end of June, Emerson and Thoreau visited the Cliffs at Fair Haven for what Emerson called their “villeggiatura,” a country holiday, perhaps a well-deserved break from his book. Emerson’s journal entry for that date started with a view of his surroundings—“I saw nothing better than the passage of the river by the dark clump of trees that line the bank in one spot for a short distance”—before commenting on friendship.
We chide the citizen because, with all his honest merits, he does not conceive the delicacies and nobility of friendship, but we cannot forgive the poet if he does not substantiate his fine romance by the municipal virtues of justice, fidelity and pity. . . .
I think we must give up this superstition of company to spend weeks and fortnights. Let my friend come and say that he has to say, and go his way. Otherwise we live for show. That happens continually in my house, that I am expected to play tame lion by readings and talkings to the friends. The rich live for show: I will not.54
Thoreau’s journal at this same time shows a yearning combined with disappointment. Entries leading up to their holiday were anticipative and sanguine. “We will warm us at each other’s fire,” he wrote,55 followed two days later by “Our friend’s is as holy a shrine as any God’s, to be approached with sacred love and awe. Veneration is the measure of Love.”56 But subsequently he wrote, “Of all phenomena, my own race are the most mysterious and undiscoverable. For how many years have I striven to meet one, even on common manly ground, and have not succeeded!”57 He had begun to see, as he would say in a different context, “the interval between our hopes and their fulfillment.”58
Feeling out of step with Emerson, Thoreau wrote the first version of what would evolve into his most renowned quotation about the different drummer.
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