THE CONUNDRUM OF BEAUTY

The rain bow … What form of beauty could be imagined more striking & conspicuous … Plainly thus the maker of the Universe sets the seal of his covenant with men … Designed to impress man[.] All men beholding it begin to understand the significance of the Greek epithet applied to the world—name for the world–Kosmos [?Kalos] or beauty. It was designed to impress man. We live as it were within the calyx of a flower.

Thoreau, August 6, 1852, Journal 5, 1997, pp. 284–85

Thoreau's natural history was a history of a world of his own making, one guided by a powerful aesthetic. To grasp this dimension of Thoreau's project, consider again the sand bank he describes in the “Spring” chapter of Walden. There Thoreau not only uses evocative descriptions, free and poetic, but selfconsciously regards the scene as the work of a divine artist, the sand and clay the medium of His handiwork. Turning to the spring 1848 Journal entry from which this passage derives, we perhaps more clearly see the aesthetic dimension in the raw:

These little streams & ripples of lava like clay over flow & interlace one another like some mythological vegetation—like the forms which I seem to have seen initiated in bronze–What affects me is the presence of the law—between the inert mass and the luxuriant vegetation what interval

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is there? Here is an artist at work—as it were not at work but—aplaying designing– –(Journal 2, 1984, p. 383)

In these few lines we see Thoreau associating freely: clay is the medium of the sculptor; the interlacing is the weaving of a tapestry; the mythological vegetation is evocative of fantasy; forms are like bronze statues, again evoking sculpture. Then he raises a theme that is repeated throughout the rest of the entry (and later included in the published passage of Walden—e.g., “There is nothing inorganic” [1971, p. 308])—namely, the seamless continuity of a shared life that encompasses the organic and the inorganic. The greatest of artists molded a seemingly inanimate sand bank into movement replete with color (“bluish clay now clay mixed with reddish sand—now pure iron sand—and sand and clay of every degree of fineness and every shade of color” [Journal 2, 1984, p. 383]) to present to the discerning eye a veritable life form.^[14] This is a rush of insight. Thoreau sees the connectedness of all nature and places himself within that verdure wherein he shares the complete interrelatedness of nature: “I perceive that there is the same power that made me my brain my lungs my bowels my fingers & toes working in other clay this very day–I am in the studio of an artist” (ibid., p. 384).

The splendor of nature always dominates. As he ends the sand bank passage in Walden, Thoreau perceives the earth as a great living entity, “with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic” (1971, p. 309). We see only the most superficial expressions of a throbbing earth whose inhabitants are but “plastic in the hands of the potter” (ibid.). The artistic trope is more than metaphor for Thoreau. He wants to capture the essence of his own understanding through aesthetic sympathy with nature, which he sees as “living poetry” (ibid.). But a certain knowledge haunts his reverie. Whereas the Artist effectively works the “soil,” Thoreau can present no such vehicle—music or image—to his reader. He is constrained by lexicon and grammar when portraying his perception, and we sense his own artistic frustration. As he confided to his Journal in the year of Walden' s publication, and published in somewhat different form in its “Conclusion” (p. 324):

I fear only lest my expressions may not be extravagant enough,—may not wander far enough beyond the narrow limits of our ordinary insight and faith, so as to be adequate to the truth of which I have been convinced. I desire to speak somewhere without bounds, in order that I may attain to an expression in some degree adequate to truth of which I have been convinced. From a man in a waking moment, to men in their waking moments. Wandering toward the more distant boundaries of a wider pasture. Nothing is so truly bounded and obedient to law as

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music, yet nothing so surely breaks all petty and narrow bonds. Whenever I hear any music I fear that I may have spoken tamely and within bounds. And I am convinced that I cannot exaggerate enough even to lay the foundation of a true expression. As for books and the adequateness of their statements to the truth, they are as the tower of Babel to the sky. (Thoreau, February 5, 1854,Journal, [1906] 1962, 6:100)^[15]

Nevertheless, Thoreau regarded himself as an artist committed to perfection—an ideal that he could never attain. He comes as close to a confession as we possess in Walden's Kouroo artist fable.^[16]

I close these short comments on Thoreau's aesthetic venture by drawing a circle back to Goethe and commenting on Thoreau's relation to him—his indebtedness and, perhaps more saliently, their differences. In this latter case, we clearly discern how Thoreau thought of himself as a poet. First, as already noted, Thoreau endorsed the universality of the Primal Plant image Goethe discovered as the basis of botanical variation. But Thoreau would take that insight a step further. In the sand bank passage, the leaf not only fulfills the botanic role Goethe assigned it, but also assumes a universal significance, serving as the template of rivers, feathers, wings, ice, because all of nature—inanimate and animate—follows a selfsame law. In the erupting sand, one finds

an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. The atoms have already learned this law, and are pregnant by it. The overhanging leaf sees here its prototype. (Walden, 1971, p. 306; emphasis added)

In a sense, Thoreau would go one step further than Goethe. The Young Turk can make this move because of a complex reading he gives Goethe. The clues are offered in testimonials made before Walden was published. In A Week, Thoreau devotes several pages to Goethe, appreciating his descriptions,^[17] and he goes on to laud Goethe as a writer, indeed as the possessor of characteristics we might well imagine that Thoreau himself wished to have. Perhaps Thoreau modeled himself in part on Goethe's own example of power and thoroughness in the descriptions found in his notebooks of the Italian Journey (1786–1788).

But then a fascinating critique emerges, one that sets the stakes much higher, for Thoreau proceeds to assess Goethe as an artist. A distancing now emerges: “Goethe's whole education and life were those of the artist.He lacks the unconsciousness of the poet” (A Week, 1980a, p. 327; emphasis added). Thoreau explains that Goethe was hampered by living in the city,

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surrounded by artists and cultural refinement, where neither nature nor a more primal life might have been experienced. “He was defrauded of much which the savage boy enjoys” (ibid.)—obviously a liability given Thoreau's own orientation toward the value of the wild, the celebration of the common man, his pride in American democratic ideals (too often unfulfilled in his opinion), and the general disparagement of effete Europe relative to the rigor and promise of the West. But beyond Goethe's “cultural deprivation,” which one might well imagine Thoreau thought devastating for a poet, the American takes a potentially lancing cut at the German's character: “The Man of Genius may at the same time be, indeed is commonly, an Artist, but the two are not to be confounded” (ibid., p. 328). The former is original, inspired, producing “a perfect work in obedience to laws yet unexplored,” while the Artist follows in his wake, applying “rules which others have detected” (ibid.). And so who is who?

Thoreau offered a critical clue in a lecture on poetry (“Homer. Ossian. Chaucer.”), which he delivered to the Concord Lyceum in 1843. In his lecture, Thoreau takes pains to describe true poetry (“distinguished … by the atmosphere which surrounds it”) and poets: “There are two classes of men called poets. The one cultivates life, the other art,” and correspondingly there are two kinds of writing, “one that of genius or the inspired, the other of intellect and taste.” The former

is above criticism, always correct…. It vibrates and pulsates with life forever. It is sacred, and to be read with reverence, as the works of nature are studied…. We do not take his words on our lips, but his sense into our hearts. It is the stream of inspiration…. The other is selfpossessed and wise. It is reverent of genius, and greedy of inspiration…. The train of thought moves with subdued and measured step, like a caravan. But the pen is only an instrument in its hand, and not instinct with life…. The works of Goethe furnish remarkable instances of the latter. (Thoreau 1975b, pp. 171–72)

Thoreau, the man of nature, thus contrasts himself with the refined European court functionary. Goethe is conversant with “life” but hardly in intimate step with the rhythm of nature, is unable to participate in the exuberance of inspiration, and therefore must, by implication, follow the true poet, the man of true genius, the individual immersed in nature who might traverse the barrier of experience to truly communicate the awesome splendor and unity of nature. Although Thoreau attests that “there has been no man of pure Genius” (A Week, 1980a, p. 328), there are indeed a select few who are so gifted— “only one in a hundred millions [is awake enough for] a poetic or divine life” (Walden, 1971, p. 90). The true poet's standards are,

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indeed, Thoreau's thinly disguised descriptions of his own work. Regardless of the poems actually composed—and Thoreau certainly wrote a lot of poetry—the true work of the poet, of the genius, was to place himself within the pulse of life, to commune with nature intimately, and then to “brag [of his findings] as lustily as chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up” (Walden, 1971, p. 84; epigraph on title page of first edition). Thoreau's writings—the works of a true poet in his view—testify to this mandate.

Thoreau thus distinguished himself primarily by his acute sense of nature. But interestingly, he failed to acknowledge the deeper source of his indebtedness to Goethe. Goethe's influence on Emerson (Van Cromphout 1990) and Thoreau, indeed on nineteenth-century thought generally, can hardly be overestimated: “Goethe was simply the paramount intellectual influence upon the age…. [I]n a very real sense, his achievement defined modernity” (ibid., p. 9). Van Cromphout uses “modernity” to refer to an awareness of self, a sense of disrupted tradition, and a rejection of authority. Most saliently, nineteenth-century modernity was in a state of “perpetual crisis and an unceasing exercise in selfdefinition” (ibid., p. 14).^[18] The “definition” of the self resulted in a selfconscious ego peering at itself in bewilderment. Any form of knowledge—whether history, science, poetry— arose from a consciousness divided against itself in endless reappraisal, but deliberate “selfdefinition,” the effort of defining applied to “the self,” was endlessly recursive (Taylor 1989). Emerson was well aware that Faust was the exemplar text of such selfawareness (ibid., p. 18), and Thoreau too faced this fundamental divide in every aspect of his intellectual and spiritual pursuits. Indeed, this is the critical key for understanding Thoreau's projects, each of which was in service to mending the self's division.