The Scottish writer, publisher, and editor Alexander Hay Japp (1837–1895) was the author, after Channing’s, of a second biography of Thoreau, Thoreau: His Life and Aims (1877). An expert on the Victorian literary scene, he played a crucial role in securing the serialized publication of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Sea Cook, which went on to become an international best-seller under the title Treasure Island.
In the excerpt that follows, Japp complains that Thoreau has been treated so far as a mere disciple of Emerson. He also points out the fact that Thoreau’s reputation as a transcendentalist has earned him many enemies in the scientific community. Japp here refers to the reaction against science and the Enlightenment of which transcendentalism, like European romanticism, was an important part. The Scottish writer confronts the dichotomy in Thoreau’s writings between humanism and science, two polarities that much subsequent criticism on the author of Walden has addressed. Far from being a handicap, the fact that Thoreau was also a poet and not only a man of science enriches his scientific dimension. According to Japp, because Thoreau was also a poet, he was able to uplift science and avoid its separation from humanity. Contrary to the majority of the early critical pieces on Thoreau, Japp’s characterization of the New England writer emphasizes his philanthropic and Christian vision. Japp’s portrayal of Thoreau is thus in stark contrast to those that depict Thoreau as a hermit aloof from society.
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Thoreau has been too absolutely claimed by the transcendentalists and treated as a mere disciple of emerson. This has led in large measure to his
being rejected all too decisively by the purely scientific men, for whom, nevertheless, he has many hints that are equally original and valuable. it must be admitted, however, that if he had been less of a poet, he would have recommended himself better to the scientific class, precisely as he would have been a better emersonian, if his eye for concrete facts had been less keen. he is impatient of certain forms of analysis—more concerned to gain insight into the inner nature than to anatomize and win knowledge of the mere details of structure.
Both these circumstances have tended to deprive Thoreau of the credit that belongs to him. after you deduct in the most exacting manner all that is due to emerson and transcendentalism, and allow that in some points he failed under the most rigid reckonings of science, much remains to establish his claims on our sympathy and deference. his instincts were true; his patience was unbounded; he never flinched from pain or labour when it lay in the way of his object; and complaint he was never known to utter on his own account.
no hard logical line ought to be laid to his utterances in the sphere of personal opinion or liking. he confessedly wrote without regard to abstract consistency. his whole life was determined by sympathy, though he sometimes seemed cynical. We are fain to think, indeed, that under his brusqueness, there lay a suppressed humorous questioning of his reader’s capacity and consequent right to understand him and to offer sympathy.
if, on this account, he may be said to have sacrificed popularity, he paid the penalty, which people often pay in actual life for too consciously hiding their true feelings under a veil of indifference; and it is much if we find that the cynical manner seldom intruded on the real nature.
The story of Thoreau’s life has a value too, inasmuch as we see in him how the tendency of culture, and of theoretic speculation, towards rationalistic indifference, and a general unconcern in the fate of others, may be checked by a genuine love of nature, and by the self-denials she can prompt in the regard that she conveys and enforces for the individual life and for freedom.
The practical lesson of a true transcendentalism, faithfully applied, must issue thus—and it is the same whether we see it in St. Francis, in the saintly eckhart, in William Law, or in the naturalist Thoreau. all life is sanctified by the relation in which it is seen to the source of life—an idea which lies close to the Christian spirit, however much a fixed and rationalized dogmatic relation to it may tend to dessicate and render bare and arid those spaces of the individual nature, which can bloom and blossom only through sympathy and emotions that ally themselves with what is strictly mystical.
it was through nature, to which he retreated, that Thoreau recovered his philanthropic interests—his love of mankind, which he might have come near to losing through the spirit of culture which can only encourage cynicism and weariness in view of artificial conventions and pretexts. Thoreau would have shrunk with loathing horror from the touch of that savant, who, as agassiz seriously assures us, said to him that the age of real civilization would have begun when you could go out and shoot a man for scientific purposes. This seems very awful when put baldly on paper: it is but the necessary expression of the last result of culture coldly rationalistic, of science determinately materialistic, since both alike must operate towards loosening the bonds of natural sympathy. Thoreau was saved from the “modern curse of culture” by his innocent delights, and his reverence for all forms of life, so stimulated. his strong faith in the higher destiny of humanity through the triumph of clearer moral aims, and the apprehension of a good beyond the individual or even the national interest, would have linked him practically with the Christian philanthropist rather than with the cultured indifferentist or worshipper of artistic beauty or knowledge for their own sakes.
in this view Thoreau, in spite of his transcendentalism, or, as some would say, professed pantheism, was a missionary. his testimony bears in the direction of showing that the study of nature, when pursued in such a way as to keep alive individual affection and the sentiments of reverence, is one that practically must work in alliance with enlightened Christian conceptions, and that in a moment of real peril, when cruelty and wrong and disorder else would triumph, the true votary of nature will be on the side of the Christian hero, who suffers wrong to redeem the weak. Thoreau thus exhibits to us one way of uplifting science, in relieving her from the false associations which would disconnect her from common humanity, and set her in opposition to its strongest instincts—the science falsely so called, which by baseless asumptions would demoralize, materialize, and brutify, and refuse scope to the exercise of the more ideal and beneficient part of man because it fails to comprehend it or to cover it adequately by its exacting definitions.
it would be ungrateful in us, who are so deeply indebted to emerson for many benefits, to analyze at length the deteriorating effect which his teachings had, in certain directions, on Thoreau. But they are too outstanding to be wholly passed over without notice. it is patent that Thoreau’s peculiar gifts led him to deal with outward things. he was an observer, a quick-eyed and sympathetic recorder of the inner life of nature. emerson’s teaching developed a certain self-conscious and theorising tendency far from natural to Thoreau. he is often too concerned to seek justification for certain facts
in purely ideal conceptions which nevertheless have not been reduced to coherency with a general scheme. he is too indifferent to the ordinary scientific order, too much intent on giving us a cosmology in fragments, in which paradox shall startle, if it does not enlighten. Whenever Thoreau proceeds to air abstract statements he is treading on insecure ground; his love of emersonian philosphy leads him some strange dances. above all, this foreign element is seen in the effusive egotism which constantly appears when he leaves the ground of facts for general disquisition. he would fain attract us by forced freshness and by the effort to utter paradoxical and startling statements. no man could be more clear, simple, direct, incisive than he is when he has a real nature-object before his eye or his mind; for memory never fails him. But when he is abstract and oracular, he is oftentimes more puzzling than his master. When Thoreau is telling his own story—what he saw, what he heard, what he did,—he is simply delightful. his pantheism, so far as it was a conscious thing with him, is not inviting; and would often be very hard and unattractive, were it not that his instincts were far truer than his mind was exact on the logical side, and saved him from the natural effects of such vagary and paradoxical assertions. But we can dissociate Thoreau’s merits from these adhesions. his emersonian pantheism did not destroy his finer sensibilities and sympathies, which made him, as he certainly was, one of nature’s diviners and reconcilers—a pantheist as all true poets have been, as Christ himself was. Like many others, he brought a double gift; but that which is truest and most available is that of which he made but little account.
So it is that we believe we can detach from his writings what will serve to illustrate the better side of his genius. Fitly and fully done, this cannot but prove a service; for we can ill afford wholly to miss the benefit of the record of such a peculiar experience—a discerning and divining instinct, on the whole wisely directed to its true purpose, and revealing rare possibilities in human life, new relationships and sources of deep joy.
—alexander hay Japp, as “h.a. Page”, Thoreau: His Life and Aims, 1878, pp. 257–264