F.O. Matthiessen

From 1850s

[edit] F.O. Matthiessen

[edit] from 'The Organic Structure of Walden' from American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Oxford University Press: 1941

Wherever Thoreau turned for fresh confirmation of his belief that true beauty reveals necessity, he saw that ‘Nature is a greater and more perfect art,’ and that there is a similarity between her operations and man’s even in the details and trifles. He held, like Emerson, that ‘man’s art has wisely imitated those forms into which all matter is most inclined to run, as foliage and fruit.’ But Thoreau studied more examples in detail than Emerson did. Any glance from his door could provide him with fresh evidence…

…As a result Walden has spoken to men of widely differing convictions, who have in common only the intensity of their devotion to life. It became a bible for many of the leaders of the British labor movement after Morris. When the sound of a little fountain in the shop window in Fleet Street made him think suddenly of lake water, Yeats remembered also his boyhood enthusiasm for Thoreau. He did not leave London then and go and live on Innisfree. But out of his loneliness in the foreign city he did write the first of his poems that met with a wide response, and ‘The Lake Isle’ – despite its Pre-Raphaelite flavor – was reminiscent of Walden even to ‘the small cabin’ Yeats built and the ‘bean rows’ he planted in his imagination. Walden was also one of our books that bulked largest for Tolstoy when he addressed his brief message to America (1901) and urged us to rediscover the greatness of our writers of the fifties: ‘And I should like to ask the American people why they do not pay more attention to these voices (hardly to be replaced by those of financial and industrial millionaires, or successful generals and admirals), and continue the good work in which they made such hopeful progress.’ In 1904 Proust wrote to the Comtesse de Noailles: ‘Read…the admirable pages of Walden. It seems to me that one reads them in oneself because they come form the depths of our intimate experience.’…

…Thoreau’s deep obligation to such traditional ways has been obscured by our thinking of him only as the extreme protestant. It is now clear that his revolt was bound up with a determination to do all he could to prevent the dignity of common labor from being degraded by the idle tastes of the rich. When he objected that ‘the mason who finishes the cornice of the palace returns at night perchance to a hut not so good as a wigwam,’ he showed the identity of his social and aesthetic foundations…

…The structural wholeness of Walden makes it stand as the firmest product in our literature of such life-giving analogies between the processes of art and daily work. Moreover, Thoreau’s very lack of invention brings him closer to the essential attributes of craftsmanship, if by that term we mean the strict, even spare, almost impersonal ‘revelation of the object,’ in contrast to the ‘elaborated skill,’ the combinations of more variegated resources that we describe as technique…

…Thoreau demonstrated what Emerson merely observed, that the function of the artist in society is always to renew the primitive experience of the race, that he ‘still goes back for materials and begins again of the most advanced stage.’ Thoreau’s scent for wildness ferreted beneath the merely conscious levels of cultivated man…