In Walden, Thoreau's American-ness manifests itself in a spectrum of features and concerns : a composite, including Romanticism, New Englandism, Metropolitanism, Property, Protestantism, Nationalism, National Literature, and Individualism . As in a spectrum, these are not mutually exclusive, but rather, shade indistinguishably one into the other . And, of these, Individualism will be seen to be the most prominent--primarily because Thoreau's ' I ' is ever immanent, and Walden is a literary assertion of this ' I ' as 'Man Thinking' (The Portable Emerson,p.30, re 'The American Scholar') .
Romanticism
The world of medieval courtly romance features the quest, knightly proving in a series of adventures, heroes and villains, virtue triumphant and vice punished . It contains, moreover, '' a class ethics which...is absolute, raised above all earthly contingencies and it gives those who submit to its dictates the feeling that they belong to a community of the elect, a circle of solidarity...set apart from the common herd''(A.Auerbach,Mimesis,pp.136-7). This scenario is readily replicated in the American experience : immigrants in quest of liberty and a new beginning, whose very journey across is a peril-fraught adventure, whose life in the maritime settlements is hedged around with the unknown--climate, indigenous flora and fauna, and the Native Americans . Their 'class ethics' turned on membership in the Protestant Elect . In retrospect, they were all heroes, but in situ their heroes would have been such as Hawthorne's Rev. Dimmesdale : those best seen to embody their religious values . Such as Roger Chillingworth--one who traversed the wild, and communed with the Native Americans--would, in succession, become the new hero : individual pioneers, pathfinders who opened up the continent, expanding the horizons for potential self-realisation among the immigrants, widening the opportunities for accumulating 'signs of election'--wealth . This sequence culminates--in Thoreau's days of fatted cattle and waving grainfields(101)--in a vapid pandemic heroism marked by possessions and a domiciliary ease which dissipate religious fervour and the pioneering spirit . Virtue is now a dollar sign. The villains are the impoverished recent immigrants--the Collins and the Fields--and the portionless indigents . The pathfinder is a metropolis-inspired, man-served and man-consuming iron horse . New horizons are in the newest news and in what someone else achieves therein .
Thoreau's present-day America is a nation with an insipid morality, an effete culture, and the stark contrasts of domiciliary ease and penurious life in a hovel . The pursuit of wealth and material possessions has left America morally diseased, shorn of inspiring horizons . To this, Thoreau recommends a treatment which at first seems allopathic : rude subsistence in the wild, to counter domiciliary ease . It is in fact homoeopathic : Thoreau alerts the acquisitive mind to the fact of myriad Nature on one's doorstep, there to be apprised . The horizon, the frontier, is there within one's environs, and while such as Walden Pond is purely location for a day's fishing, it can be the setting for a manifold experience of Nature in its wonderful purity(133), and thus the springboard of spiritual renewal : Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open . By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down(149). In the latter lies the rub, for there is a prevalent acceptance that the commercial instinct is the national spirit . If only men would steadily observe realities only, and not allow themselves to be deluded, life, to compare it with such things as we know, would be like a fairy tale and the Arabian Night's Entertainments(69). To counteract the delusion, Thoreau undertakes to live out this fairy tale life in Nature's demesne for a term sufficient to embrace Nature's annual cycle--and therefore sufficient to render his account impartial, not vamped towards a subjectively favoured season . Thoreau will be the pathfinder to Nature, in the hope of prefiguring his fellow Americans . His journey is to that fabulous landscape of my infant dreams(108), but it is a romance journey not for that reason, but in that it is a series of adventures with the object of 'knightly proving' : tests that he, as the prototype of everyman, has the wherewithal to be as the nobler plants [which] are valued for the fruit they bear at last in the air and light, far from the ground(15) .
New Englandism
New England, the region which embraces the Walden experience, and which Thoreaau knows best ''was originally as important as any other and had furnished much of the initial talent that promoted the creation of the Republic...It was the area of the most widely diffused culture and refinement . Here was great wealth and the sense of achievement brought by economic success''(R.Franklin Nichols,The Disruption of American Democracy,p.43). Because it is Thoreau's region it receives the bulk of the specifically localic comments in Walden--the inference being that Thoreau the inhabitant is best fitted to judge on these matters . Because the region is the American bastion of wealth, culture and refinement--the factors which most intervene between man and his potential unity with Nature--it is prime target in Thoreau's campaign of attrition, a process of undermining the settled, accepted norm by an accumulation of across-the-board instances of objections which he or any contemporary, reasonable, impartial observer could and would make to that norm .
For New Englanders, truth lies in the overt, the veneer : we...inhabitants of New England...think that that is which appears to be(69). Refinement is a veneer, and is misused : The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling . Yet we do not treat ourselves nor one another thus tenderly(9) . The manifestations of wealth belie the trumpeted democratic principle : Even in our democratic New England towns the accidental possession of wealth, and its manifestation in dress and equipage alone, obtain for the possessor almost universal respect(20) . Again democracy, and religion too, are subordinated to a concern with possessions : This town is said to have the largest houses for oxen...not behindhand in its public buildings ; but there are very few halls for free worship or free speech in this county(43) . Concord culture consists in literate illiteracy : little or no acquaintance with the English classics... the feeblest efforts anywhere made to become acquainted with them[ancient classics and Bibles](76) . The New Englander is in thrall to distant and fluctuating markets(48) needlessly, for he has the means to self-sufficiency : Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs in this land of rye and Indian corn(48) . And Thoreau is bitingly ironic on the local soldiery : like drones in a Middlesex hive, loud but sterile females in the male role of defenders : I felt proud to know that the liberties of Massachusetts and our fatherland were in such safe keeping(110) . In sum, Thoreau's sum is a manifold objection to complacently held norms .
Metropolitanism
By this I mean the burgeoning influence on continental America of the commercial and financial centres of the Eastern maritime, with a view to promotional enterprise throughout, and to exploitation of the national hinterland . Thoreau's concern is that English post-Industrial Revolution conditions look like being repeated here : the condition of the operatives is becoming every day like that of the English in order that the corporations may be enriched(23) . Under the other headings, Thoreau will be seen to consistently inveigh against American enslavement to foreign lands, markets and cultures--mainly, to the English . Metropolitanism is, however, an endemic enslavement--from afar, but by fellow-Americans .
Thoreau has himself almost endeavored to acquire strict business habits(16), so the commercial instinct can have value to the self--so long as the self is not overtaken, overwhelmed by, and finally absorbed into service to, another's commercial instinct, beyond the self . It is, however, already too late for the mass of Americans . And Thoreau's note is elegiac when he advocates as good ventures the exporting of purely native products(18)--ice, pine timber, granite . These are pre-industrial materiel at a time when the post-industrial tentacle of the railroad and its cornucopia of the world's products are already at Thoreau's door .
As he is uncertain about the relative advantages of the transcontinental telegraph(40), so he is uneasy with, ambivalent about, the merits of the railroad . It is a life-consuming monster : We do not ride on the railroad ; it rides upon us(67) . The locomotive's whistle is likened to the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer's yard(82) . It has cut a swathe through, and has eradicated in its service, the boundless chestnut woods of Lincoln--they now sleep their long sleep under the railroad(161) . Yet Thoreau admires the heroism of both railroad people and users, and himself savours the aromas of the world as they pass his door (84) .
His conclusion is the grudged admission that the railroad is comparatively good(41) . But his gut feeling is revealed in his ironies : with poverty all around, look at our railroads, that last improvement of civilization(28) . In similar fashion, he hopefully sees off the telegraph by means of absurdities concerning Princess Adelaide and a lady with a trumpet(40) . His objection to these soul-less tentacles of metropolitanism is that they both foster a domicile-based dependency, and provide a surfeit of goods---non-indigenous or not locally produced---productive of moral lassitude while promoting the commercial instinct, to the exclusion of all else of value . The effect is best seen in the contrast Thoreau draws between the annual sum of his business's small concerns---6 weeks' labour = 46 weeks' total freedom---and the daily sum of the stock businessman's extensive concerns, in its manifold detail(18) . Thoreau, in effect, bears this sort of businessman--and this attitude to what is a 'full life'--down with the businessman's very own, life-consuming details . In sum, metropolitanism is under attack as being yet another factor which intervenes between man and his potential unity with Nature .
Property
Thoreau's basic attitude to Property is that it is an encumbrance turning to excess the moment it tends to limit the individual's potential for self-realisation and self-assertion . His view, as applied to his fellow-Americans, is that an owned house is a prison (27) ; a rented house is an absurd life-sentence with no final ownership ; accumulated wealth is accumulated dross(16) ; farms, houses, barns...(80 are the burdens of legacy . These are various forms of enslavement, but if acquisitive desires are curtailed to a minimum, then one can readily and at whim take up one's box and walk, and sleep in it too . This is a simplistic recipe as much as it is a solitary's recipe . The Collins family may well take up one large bundle(34) and walk, but not out of choice . The family experience is one of putting out new generative roots, as well as establishing local roots somewhere with a view to work and a life in participation with, and benefiting from, the local community . The alternatives are the gypsy one of family life in larger boxes than Thoreau proposes, but in a mobile self-contained community, or, following Thoreau's example, family life and self-subsistence at Walden for the Fields . The latter proposal is for the Fields a sound one, but this family marches on the bread-winner's stomach, and the appetitive faculty draws them out and away from Nature . The proposal, however, as with Thoreau's tenure at Walden, is feasible by virtue of squatting, and the logical conclusion of this recommendation is a nation of squatters, all laying claim to the most amenable stretches of land, even of the wild . The consequence would be Hobbes' vision of pre-civilised life : nasty, brutish and short . So it may be that while Thoreau calls everyman to Nature there to become a nobler plant, logic demands--though Walden does not seem explicitly to say so--that Nature's Elect be select .
The argument in favour of Nature's Property there all around in the wild is that it is something to be apprised but not owned : Enjoy the land but own it not(141) .And this because it is a quality--invigorating, infusing the person who communes with Nature, and thus residing within him, it travels hence with the traveller . Its immaterial quality is best put concerning the Ponds : Lakes of Light . If they were permanently congealed and small enough to be clutched, they would, perchance, be carried off by slaves, like precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors(137) . A central point, in the matter of relevant Property, is made when Thoreau, working his field, comes to realise that working the land produces a proprietorial attitude to land and nature (115), and that it is a false attitude, a homocentric one which, if the evidence-as-is is given, must give way to a heliocentric one . The sun is the principal cultivator(114), and its crop is an endowment for all--men and woodchucks . It is a lesson in humility for Thoreau and those who follow : Nature's products can be accumulated towards a winter store, but they are not man's Property, no more than is he the centre of the universe . Nature is, and man is party to the dispensation--and more so if he communes with Nature, and thereby carries true Property within .
Protestantism
This feature of Thoreau's 'American-ness' may have been expected to come under the New Englandism heading, simply because the first New England settlers were Puritans, with a stridently Protestant viewpoint suffusing every aspect of their lives, then because this Protestantism spread therefrom and was reinforced by successive waves of mainly Protestant immigrants so as to become the dominant religion within the nation, and further because, since the Walden experience takes place within that New England religious base, one would expect Thoreau's philosophical analyses of local and national moral life to be couched in themes and motifs which are recognisably Protestant--that is, if Thoreau identified with the dominant religion, or even if he opposed it, but without a separate religious viewpoint . In either case, he does not, though Protestantism, with its emphasis on individual, direct communion with God, has had its influence on Thoreau, whether as individual, as typical American, or as prototype finder of a new path to God .
Thoreau's New England is one where there are very few halls for free worship(43), and where at home one is at ease with one's household gods--material possessions, signs of membership in the monied Elect . A moral life is all but gone under in the service of Mammon . Thoreau's alternative is not nominally Protestant, but is Protestant in spirit in that it offers individual direct communion with God--not founded on Biblical directives, but found in and through Nature : Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open(149) . Again, Nature offers the means of redemption--not that once-for-all universally applicable Christian Redemption which the religious can rely upon and even, in their moral complacency, fall back upon, but an existential, individually achieved redemption : I should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state, if that were the consequence of men's beginning to redeem them selves(140) .
It is clear from the above that Thoreau appropriates Protestant motifs and terminology, and uses them in Walden to depict his 'Protestant' pathway to God . The effect is to undermine the complacent Protestantism of his contemporaries . Thoreau's base-line is that Signs of Election are evil, and his armoury comprises innocence, the Fall, Adamesque liberty and labour, Edenesque Nature, Hawthorne's sinful forest, rooting out sin, and the antithesis of good and evil . In Walden, from the outset both local district and nation are cast in a postlapsarian light : the Concord inhabitants are doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways(7-8) . In this state of society, clothes serve to cover nakedness(19) . But their Fall is not in the Biblical sense but rather, in Thoreau's : a fall from a minimum level of material requirements---for Thoreau too requires clothes and materiel for his venture---into excess . It is thus that Thoreau refuses the mat--I declined it...It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil(50)--and too that warm coffee...a dish of tea threaten his ascetic purity : Ah how low I fall when I am tempted by them(147) . Similarly where Adam's labour marks his Biblical Fall, for Thoreau labour marks a Fall not per se-- for If you would avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, though it be at cleaning a stable(150)-- but rather if that labour is unnecessary, either in society so as to realise excessive possessions, or with himself, in the matter of dusting the limestones(29), because both manner of activities are time-consumingly distractive from a communion with God .
As for the wild, where Hawthorne posits a saintly settlement surrounded by a menacing, sinful forest peopled with demons, Thoreau inverts the scenario : a Walden of wonderful purity(133), A young forest growing up under your windows(90), peopled with manifold Nature's flora and fauna which are shown to be life-enhancing and, indeed, neighbourly in situ--and this wild is surrounded by a society which is sinful and fallen in the sense described, which menaces the wild's viability by hewing down the chestnut woods of Lincoln(161), by shearing off the Walden pond ice . What is innocent in Thoreau's wild is not, therefore, Edenesque, but is innocent in Thoreau's terms : it is untouched by that excessively acquisitive society out there--not one innocent huckleberry can be transported thither[to Boston](119) ; I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe(64) . Indeed, Thoreau is careful to deny the possibility that he be ascribed as Biblically Adamic : both in the matter of Native American arrowheads in his bean-field, and in the traces of aboriginal hunters on the path to the pond(124), Thoreau points up previous inhabitance . His site is new and unprofaned and he is Adamesque in his own terms . And, finally, through this communion with Nature and God, one emerges to commune with one's neighbours, not in the old Puritan sense that communion is the means to search out the other's failings, sins and evil, but rather, Through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of neighbours...all his faults are forgotten. There is not only an atmosphere of good will about him, but even a savor of holiness groping for expression(209) . Where society's intendants--judge, preacher, and jailor--judge awrong, the follower of Thoreau's path has the moral perception to judge aright, for the man before him is made in God's image, just as manifold Nature is God's creation . Thoreau's 'Protestantism' leads one to read not from Biblical Revelation, but from living Revelation .
Nationalism
Just as Thoreau leaves behind the Biblical Fall, he grapples with the reasons for the periodic rise and fall of Walden(125), not from myth, folklore or rumour, but from his reason's assessment of the extant natural phenomenon there before him : Some are dinning in our ears that we are Americans, and moderns generally, are intellectual dwarfs compared with the ancients, or even the Elizabethan men . But what is that to the purpose ? A living dog is better than a dead lion(216) . Part of that living dog is national pride in American success in the War of Independence, and, while Thoreau acknowledges the point of principle---I have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax on their tea(156)---the Myrmidon analogy [red republicans...black imperialists(155) ] is an anti-war parable . Elsewhere one notes Thoreau's opposition to the Mexican War, and, throughout, the renowned American figures--the Franklins, the Washingtons--are notable by their absence from Walden . The nationalism Thoreau wishes to be prized is not measured in its militarism or military heroes, past or present .
He does not eschew the past totally, however, for he summons up as precedents people who lived the more ascetic and self-sufficiently American lifestyle which he himself practises and recommends . In the matter of house-building, Thoreau proceeds from the directions in the memoirs of Old Johnson, Secretary of the Province of New Netherland (31) . Like Jonathan, Thoreau would rather sit on a pumpkin (29-30) than in railroad car divans redolent of Eastern European luxury . And he practises and preaches self-sufficiency within Nature's endowments as the Forefathers sang(48) . His nationalism has, then, a more demotic strain, and, as he does with Protestant motifs, he works national motifs---self-emancipation, democracy, independence, liberty---against the grain of current American reality . Although you are the slave-driver of yourself(10), you can emancipate yourself . The legatees of American Revolution have nothing to learn from abroad : nothing new does ever happen in foreign parts, a French Revolution not excepted(68) . Individual liberty and independence are bartered away for fashion's sake--the head monkey at Paris puts on a traveller's cap and all the monkeys in America do the same(22)--or to accumulate excessive wealth : some ,not wise, go to the other side of the globe(14) to finance an easeful old age in New England .
Thoreau's tenor is not so much xenophobic as anti-English, because England was the 'old country' of the Pilgrims and is still for many in his day . Its language is the dominant language in America, and English literature thereby threatens to leave American literature still-born . English post-Industrial Revolution enslavement of the masses has infiltrated commercial America . American fields produce, not Native American corn, but English hay(141) . Independent America is still dependent, and Thoreau's solution is to drum up a non-militarist militancy against England : these sedges and brakes...will never become English hay(141) ; Instead of noble-men, let us have noble villages of men(78) ; 'Walden', on the basis of specifically local features, could signify Walled-in Pond, and not some English locality(126) ; and rather than being confined to one Paris or one Oxford forever...It is time that we had uncommon schools...that villages were universities (178) . The alternatives are to be swallowed up by English modes or to follow John Field's path to nowhere, thinking to live by some derivative old-country mode in this primitive new country(142) . Thoreau's nationalism may be represented in, and identified with, a living dog, but the dead lion still seems to be snarling, or Thoreau would not snarl so back .
National Literature
The nationalistic Thoreau treads the middle ground between opposition to English influences and Anglophobia, for the prototype and pathfinding Thoreau cannot at once discern the innocence of our neighbours(209), discern God in everyman, and hate the English too . He opposes not the people, but the pervasive influence of their culture, and European culture like an incubus within it, fit to stifle American culture by sheer weight . His procedure is to foreground in Walden this sheer weight in order to din the reader's mind into an acceptance of its irrelevance to an indigenous American literature .
His first endeavour is to show that he knows thoroughly the language and allusions of European writers, so that he may be deemed fit to judge on the relative merits of European intrusions into American culture . To this end he has as Ancient Chorus a mock-Linnaeus alter ego busily tagging manifold Nature to specific Latin classifications---turning the living thing into antiquarian must, and jarring the mind, by an accumulation of instantial irrelevancies, into the anti-Europe camp . With mock-Linnaeus in tow, Thoreau throughout spreads instances of his grasp of language and allusion : the ant parable arises from the meaning of Myrmidons,'ants'(155) ; the goodness tainted(55) turns on the etymology of Simoom, from Arab 'samum', from 'samma', 'to poison' ; the unsuccessful fisherman who had concluded commonly...(119-20) is ascribed to the sect of Coenobites, from Greek 'koinos', 'common' ; the pack of hounds pursuing the fox, their Actaeon(185), are out-foxed on Walden shore--'Actaeon' means 'shore-dweller' . The accumulative effect is what he intends : '' What has all this to do with the price of meat, American meat ? Do these inclusions enhance Walden, this example of American literature here before me ?'' The same perplexity and annoyance arise where quotations or allusions not determined by a focal name intrude on---are purposedly intruded into---Thoreau's natural, American, conversational idiom : making darkness visible(55) recalls Milton, but Milton's heroic strain is ill-fitted to talk of Robin Goodfellow...cottage window...lunatics...meats(55) ; or If you would avoid uncleanness...work earnestly, though it be at cleaning a stable(150)---suggesting the Augean Stables, but the literary backdrop is irrelevant, for, in his American rural ambience, Thoreau literally means 'cleaning a stable' . Mock-Milton is a distinct feature . Milton frequently used classical similes, stylistically apt to the heroic strain, to enhance the significance of the immediate context. But how does like the Etesian winds(115) enhance or sit well with Redding & Company's on State Street, they kept nuts and raisins(115) ? Or what of the Hercules-Deucalion and Pyrrha-Raleigh collage(8-9) and that of Solomon-Roman praetors-Hippocrates(11) ? These literary analogues are used accumulatively in either-or constructions interposed between matter-of-fact social comment and Thoreau's respective conclusions . They attract the reader's impatience both at the stylistic break and at their irrelevance to furthering the matter-of-fact point at issue . The result is that European literature in sum bears the brunt of annoyance, it is isolated thereby, and isolated within an American literary text .
Thoreau turns the sheer weight of European literary influences into dead weight . But there is something worth the saving from the wreck, if one is selective : the best of Shakespeare can be kept ; Spenser furnishes the motto for Thoreau's house(99) ; and Vedas and Zendavedas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares : By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last(74) . Yet the Iliad is ever in the portmanteau of Alexander(73), a megalomanic militarist . And elsewhere the least scraps of paper which lay on the ground, my holder, or tablecloth, afforded me as much entertainment, in fact answered the same purpose as the Iliad(35) . It is, then, a matter of selection of the best of the known, for one notes that those influences that are unerringly commended in Walden are not mainstream European but Oriental--the ancient philosophers, Chinese, Hindoo, Persian, and Greek(14)--praised thus perhaps because We know not much about them(14), and they do not therefore present the hulking threat to American literature that Europe does .
A written word...is the work of art nearest to life itself(73), and Walden is Thoreau's work of art--not a journal, but a redaction, artificially synchronising an edited 26 months with Nature's annual cycle, from Spring to Spring . That life itself is to be experienced at the heart of Nature where the channel of purity to God is opened, and Thoreau's procedure on his way to the heart is to slough off all that to his contemporaries would be considered life itself : stock Romanticism, New Englandism, Metropolitanism, Property, Protestantism, Nationalism, as well as instances of National Literature like Hawthorne's sinful forests, plus the dead weight of European Literature . The purified Thoreau who emerges at one with God and the universe is prototype of the New American, for Thoreau emerges from a natural American locale, and redacts his experience there to create a work of indigenous American literature . His metaphors are attuned to, and draw on, natural American phenomena : a book is a coat(7) to be donned ; the whip-poor-wills chanted their vespers(87) ; current opinion is mere smoke of opinion (10) ; 'Little Reading' is this sort of gingerbread...baked daily and more sedulously than pure wheat or rye-and-Indian(75-6) . This natural idiom is a far cry from Etesian winds and Actaeons, and in the initial chapters, where European allusions are rife, it seems like homespun, somewhat quaint . But while he is accumulatively choking European literature with its dead weight, Thoreau is remorselessly using this natural idiom, so that, as the slough is progressively cast off, the natural idiom comes into its own---not because there is now greater room for it to flourish, which there is, but because the idiom is apt to, indeed integral with, this natural, native ambience : pond, house, trees, paths, pickerels, ice, rain, sun, squirrels and loons .
Thoreau's purpose in creating Walden is two-fold . Firstly, he wishes to show his 'Protestant' pathway to God to his followers, also to show that it is not a procedure exacting or beyond anyone's potential, and that it will be purifying and life-enhancing .The natural idiom, ambience and cycle subserve this pathfinding purpose, just as they do Thoreau's second, his literary, purpose : to create a work of indigenous American literature . And Thoreau's procedure towards this end is to naturalise English literary ideas treating of nature as prelude to a predominant treatment of man . The General Prologue of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales starts on an eleven-line celebration of Nature--'when that Aprill with his shoures soote...'--which immediately dissolves before the pageant of pilgrims and their Tales . In Walden, On the 1st of April it rained and melted the ice, and in the early part of the day, which was very foggy, I heard a stray goose...(33) .Chaucer's literary idea becomes Thoreau's literal reality, with the feel of living on the land, to the utter dissolution of literariness for its own sake .Thoreau purloins, reverses the import--his April rain leads towards a greater celebration of Nature--and absorbs, naturalises, and finally effaces Chaucer . Again, to Coleridge's Kubla Khan one may correlate Thoreau's Pond in Winter . The differences are, respectively, a Vision in a Dream compared to experienced reality ; synaesthetic pleasure to empirical pleasure at source ;detail disappearing out of mind to detail replete and accumulatively observed by Thoreau's inquisitive mind ; isolated literary artifact to literal record which, under redaction, is integrated into a composite literary artifact; Nature in thrall to Literature, in contrast with Literature in thrall to Nature ; the sublime envisioned to the sublime experienced . Instances of correlation of Coleridge with Thoreau are, respectively : the 'caverns measureless to man'-As for the inlet and outlet of Walden, I have not discovered any...(195) ;the 'deep romantic chasm'-a mountain...Even when cleft or bored through it is not comprehended in its entireness(194) ; the seething, bursting 'chasm'-the popping, cracking ice of Walden, and the sullen rush and roar(202) of Fair Haven Pond ; the 'caves of ice'- the Walden ice obelisk designed to pierce the clouds(197) ; and, finally, Coleridge's abject reliance on the song of 'A damsel...an Abyssinian maid' to Thoreau's existential delight in the immanent music of Nature : cheered by the music of a thousand tinkling rills and rivulets whose veins are filled with the blood of winter which they are bearing off(202) .In contrast with the Chaucer instance, this later correlation is more distinguishable because it is much more extensive . Coleridge is not effaced, but the rest holds true : his idea is purloined, absorbed, naturalised, and its import reversed--Thoreau's chasm erupts amid not man's but Nature's magnificent construction .
The instance of the old man experiencing similarly Nature's sublimity at Fair Haven Pond(202) is there to show that Thoreau's experience is not unique--unlike Coleridge's--and is available to those who follow . What we have just witnessed is Thoreau's major premise of a literary syllogism which argues that a foreign idea can be so naturalised to American locale and idiom as to become organic with an indigenous literary work which celebrates God the Artificer through Nature . The minor premise is the immediately subsequent consideration of forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad...a hybrid product, which obeys half way the laws of currents, and half way that of vegetation(202-3) . Again from Coleridge 's distant sublime, we move to a close-up of the sublime internal dynamic of Nature . This truly grotesque vegetation is a fantasy redolent of Kubla khan's construction, yet it is material reality constructed by Nature--a prototype of manifold Nature found in a mere cut on the railroad, industrial man's emblem of primacy over Nature . And Thoreau's conclusion from this anticipation of the vegetable leaf(204) is that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly(204), and this expression is seen in leaves, the wings of birds and butterflies, fronds, trees, rivers, still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils(204) . That is, 'civilised' man is a threat to the leaf which the Maker of this earth [has] but patented(205), whereas if one communes with Nature on its own terms, the lost Abyssinian song can become American warblings...song sparrow...the last flakes of winter tinkled...The brooks sing carols and glees to the spring... The sinking sound of melting snow(206), and to your stamping foot the red squirrels below will chirrup the louder ; as if past all fear and respect in their mad pranks, defying humanity to stop them(206) . With all other properties sloughed off, Thoreau does create a work of National Literature, out of love for Nature's property . It is the American dream of wealth naturalised and given literary form, at the expense of Coleridge's fading dream . And for everyman it is a dream realisable at will, on one's doorstep .
Individualism
This feature of 'American-ness' has been seen variously under the other headings . Its source, I would suggest, is religious--in the Protestant assertion of individual communion with God--and was, therefore, for the bulk of America's immigrants, pre-American . The act of emigration asserts it, and subsequent American political developments---maritime settlement, statehood, the national struggle for independence, the watershed of independence itself---reinforce it as the dominant national motif . It underpins the metropolitan drive to exploit the unfolding continent, as well as the secular Protestantism in politics such as the assertion of individual liberty, of state liberty from congress, of national liberty from the 'old country' imperialists, Britain, France and Spain . The class-ethics base of medieval romantic idealism is replaced by a demotic wealth-ethic, membership to which class is achieved by individual ambition, drive, effort, and, indeed, obsession .
This American individualism is pervasive, and has settled into stock postures which are anti-Nature, anti-life, anti-liberty : nationalism translates into spitting a Mexican with a good relish(111) ; commercialism translates into Irishmen living in hovels or 'sleeping' under the railroad ; a garment cannot be had to suit individual requirements, but must be what they(21) ordain ; Walden Pond is a store of ice for the taking ; the self-appointed maintainer of Nature's byways around Concord is not deemed worthy of a moderate allowance(17) .
Thoreau's response to this current stock-American individualism is, essentially, to alert the individual to his Oneness with the universe, to take the homocentrism out of individualism so that man can still find out and pursue his own way(53), at the same time as appreciating, with Thoreau, that the gentle rain--which may prevent his working, or ruin completed work--would still be good for the grass on the uplands, and, being good for the grass, it would be good for me(92) . Thoreau's experience in this direction at times verges on complete immersion of individuality in the universe, such are its charms : his bean-husbandry was on the whole a rare amusement, which, continued too long, might have become a dissipation(112) ; the Hermit in him was as near being resolved into the essence of things as ever I was in my life(152) . Significantly, here, it is the Poet who breaks the spell and proffers the 13 angleworms, for the Poet recalls the Hermit to be a Fisher of men . Once out of these abstract ruminations, there is a social progression towards particularity . Thoreau gets involved in the individual behaviour of his Brute Neighbours---mouse, ants, flying cat, the family of partridges, the loon in the pond---and, subsequently, becomes so integrated with manifold Nature that he, like the squirrels, stocks up for winter, plasters the house walls, and, with the advent of wind and snow, I withdrew yet farther into my shell(167), only to emerge with the spring sunshine . Thoreau follows, in life, Plato's suppositious path of the philosopher-king out of abstractions and down into the empirical world to relay his wisdom in a responsible, social role . The Poet in Thoreau recalls the Hermit from abstraction because the Poet has the responsibility of creating a work of indigenous American literature which both asserts Thoreau's individualism and bodies forth a renovated, purified American individualism, born from the wisdom of Thoreau the philosopher .
