WALDEN AND ON THE DUTY OF CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE. Henry David Thoreau
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broken ground.
It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd
so diligently follow. The traveller who stops at the best houses, so
called, soon discovers this, for the publicans presume him to be a
Sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies he
would soon be completely emasculated. I think that in the railroad car
we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety and convenience,
and it threatens without attaining these to become no better than a
modern drawing room, with its divans, and ottomans, and sun-shades, and
a hundred other oriental things, which we are taking west with us,
invented for the ladies of the harem and the effeminate natives of the
Celestial Empire, which Jonathan should be ashamed to know the names
of. I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be
crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart
with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an
excursion train and breathe a _malaria_ all the way.
The very simplicity and nakedness of man’s life in the primitive ages
imply this advantage at least, that they left him still but a sojourner
in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep he contemplated
his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and
was either threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing
the mountain tops. But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.
The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is
become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a
housekeeper. We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled
down on earth and forgotten heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely
as an improved method of _agri_-culture. We have built for this world a
family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art
are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself from this
condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state
comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten. There is actually no
place in this village for a work of _fine_ art, if any had come down to
us, to stand, for our lives, our houses and streets, furnish no proper
pedestal for it. There is not a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf
to receive the bust of a hero or a saint. When I consider how our
houses are built and paid for, or not paid for, and their internal
economy managed and sustained, I wonder that the floor does not give
way under the visitor while he is admiring the gewgaws upon the
mantel-piece, and let him through into the cellar, to some solid and
honest though earthy foundation. I cannot but perceive that this so
called rich and refined life is a thing jumped at, and I do not get on
in the enjoyment of the _fine_ arts which adorn it, my attention being
wholly occupied with the jump; for I remember that the greatest genuine
leap, due to human muscles alone, on record, is that of certain
wandering Arabs, who are said to have cleared twenty-five feet on level
ground. Without factitious support, man is sure to come to earth again
beyond that distance. The first question which I am tempted to put to
the proprietor of such great impropriety is, Who bolsters you? Are you
one of the ninety-seven who fail, or of the three who succeed? Answer
me these questions, and then perhaps I may look at your bawbles and
find them ornamental. The cart before the horse is neither beautiful
nor useful. Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the
walls must be stripped, and our lives must be stripped, and beautiful
housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation: now, a
taste for the beautiful is most cultivated out of doors, where there is
no house and no housekeeper.
Old Johnson, in his “Wonder-Working Providence,” speaking of the first
settlers of this town, with whom he was contemporary, tells us that
“they burrow themselves in the earth for their first shelter under some
hillside, and, casting the soil aloft upon timber, they make a smoky
fire against the earth, at the highest side.” They did not “provide
them houses,” says he, “till the earth, by the Lord’s blessing, brought
forth bread to feed them,” and the first year’s crop was so light that
“they were forced to cut their bread very thin for a long season.” The
secretary of the Province of New Netherland, writing in Dutch, in 1650,
for the information of those who wished to take up land there, states
more particularly that “those in New Netherland, and especially in New
England, who have no means to build farmhouses at first according to
their wishes, dig a square pit in the ground, cellar fashion, six or
seven feet deep, as long and as broad as they think proper, case the
earth inside with wood all round the wall, and line the wood with the
bark of trees or something else to prevent the caving in of the earth;
floor this cellar with plank, and wainscot it overhead for a ceiling,
raise a roof of spars clear up, and cover the spars with bark or green
sods, so that they can live dry and warm in these houses with their
entire families for two, three, and four years, it being understood
that partitions are run through those cellars which are adapted to the
size of the family. The wealthy and principal men in New England, in
the beginning of the colonies, commenced their first dwelling houses in
this fashion for two reasons; firstly, in order not to waste time in
building, and not to want food the next season; secondly, in order not
to discourage poor laboring people whom they brought over in numbers
from Fatherland. In the course of three or four years, when the country
became adapted to agriculture, they built themselves handsome houses,
spending on them several thousands.”
In this course which our ancestors took there was a show of prudence at
least,