PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK:
1 DURANTE DEGLI ALGHIERI
ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY by Thomas Carlyle:
I. The Hero as Divinity. Odin. Paganism: Scandinavian Mythology. II. The Hero as Prophet. Mohammed: Islam. III. The Hero as Poet. Dante: William Shakespeare. IV. The Hero as Priest. Martin Luther; Reformation: John Knox; Puritanism. V. The Hero as Man of Letters. Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Robert Burns. VI. The Hero as King. Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon Bonaparte: Modern Revolutionism.
1. For Henry Thoreau’s familiarity with Dante Alighieri, consult J. Chesley Mathews’s “Thoreau’s Reading in Dante,” Italica 27 (1950):77-81. HDT WHAT? INDEX
THE PEOPLE OF A WEEK: DURANTE DEGLI ALGHIERI PEOPLE MENTIONED IN A WEEK
Tuscan, that wanderest through the realms of gloom, With thoughtful pace, and sad, majestic eyes, Stern thoughts and awful from thy soul arise, Like Farinata from his fiery tomb. Thy sacred song is like the trump of doom; Yet in thy heart what human sympathies, What soft compassion glows, as in the skies The tender stars their clouded lamps relume! Methinks I see thee stand, with pallid cheeks, By Fra Hilario in his diocese, As up the convent-walls, in golden streaks, The ascending sunbeams mark the day’s decrease; And, as he asks what there the stranger seeks, Thy voice along the cloister whispers, “Peace!” — Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
In his “The Allegash” manuscript, Thoreau offered that there is little prospect that we may be able to indulge in much good mythmaking in our grand future. Instead he complained that as “Anglo Americans” advanced, poetry and mythology seemed to retire. We ignorantly erase the mythological tablets to print mere handbills and town meeting warrants on them. In his late revisions, Thoreau cancelled the two sentences that followed this passage: “This wilderness is a great mythic poem worth a thousand of Spenser’s Faery Queens & Dante’s Divine Comedies. Spenser and Dante Alighieri translated only such sheets[?] of it as came round their grounds.”
1260 CE
The Guelf faction of Firenzi, after a period of ascendancy, was defeated in the battle of Montaperti (Dante Alighieri’s INFERNO X, XXXII). LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, I
1265 CE
Between May 21 and June 20, most likely on May 29th, Durante degli Alighieri (for us, Dante) was born into the important Alighieri family of Firenzi (for us, Florence).
During this late spring, the 17th-year cicadas Magicicada septendecim were swarming in what eventually would become New England. NEW ENGLAND
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1266 CE
As a sequel to the defeat of Manfred at Benevento, Charles of Anjou conquered Naples and Sicily. Until 1442, the Angevin Dynasty at Naples.
The Guelf faction of Firenzi, supported by papal and French armies, defeated the Ghibelline faction at Benevento and exiled them forever from their native city. The Guelphs, to whose party Dante Alighieri’s family adhered, at this point became able themselves to return to their homes in Firenzi. (Dante’s father had evidently not been of sufficient influence to have himself been sent into this exile.) Dante would thus grow up as an entitled member of a proud and expanding city-state as it sought to dominate the region of Tuscany.
1274 CE
May: Dante Alighieri, at a private feast in Firenzi, was entirely enraptured by a self-possessed little girl, another 9- year-old named Beatrice Portinari.
1277 CE
Dante Alighieri became betrothed to Gemma Donati.
1279 CE
Dante Alighieri’s mother Bella had died by this point, before he reached the age of 14.
1283 CE
Since Dante Alighieri, having as of the age of 18 come into his majority, was able as an orphan to sell a credit owned by his father and to take in marriage Gemma Donati, we can infer that by this point in time Dante’s father was deceased. (They would have four children, Jacopo, Pietro, Giovanni, and Antonia.) By this point, he would assert in Chapter III of his LA VITA NUOVA, he had taught himself the art of making verse.
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1289 CE
Dante Alighieri fought as a cavalryman against the Ghibellines in the battle of Campaldino in which the Guelf League (Firenzi and Lucca) defeated the Ghibellines of Arezzo. (Dante would recall this battle, in PURGATORIO.) LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, II
1290 CE
Beatrice Portinari died. DANTE
1292 CE
During this year and the next, Dante Alighieri was putting together his LA VITA NUOVA, the first of two collections of verse and prose he would make in his lifetime. Later, the CONVIVIO would contain the compositions from just prior to 1294 up to the writing of LA COMMEDIA (later named LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, THE DIVINE COMEDY).
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1294 CE
Dante Alighieri met Charles Martel, King of Hungary and heir to the kingdom of Naples and the country of Provence (he would report this meeting in PARADISO VIII).
Supremacy of the Visconti at Milan.
1295 CE
For the purpose of entering public life, Dante Alighieri joined the guild of the apothecaries.
1300 CE
Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed this to be a Jubilee Year. Eastertime of this year would provide the fictional date for the journey which Dante Alighieri would take in THE DIVINE COMEDY.
June 15-August 15For two months Dante Alighieri was a Prior of Florence, one of their six highest magistrates.
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1301 CE
The army of Charles of Valois was approaching Firenzi, and Dante Alighieri was sent as an envoy to Rome to seek assistance from Pope Boniface VIII.
1302 CE
January 27: When the Black Guelphs seized power in Firenzi, they initially banished Dante Alighieri from the city for two years beginning as of this date, and permanently forbade him to occupy any public office. (This 2-year banishment would be reconsidered and made perpetual and he would be condemned to be burned alive should he ever be discovered within the territory of the Florentine Republic.)
1304 CE
Dante Alighieri wrote the 1st and part of the 2nd of a planned 4-volume history and rhetoric of vernacular literature, DE VULGARI ELOQUENTIA. During this same period he was writing at the CONVIVIO, only four of a projected fifteen books of which would be completed.
1306 CE
It was probably in this year that Dante Alighieri interrupted work on his CONVIVIO and began his DIVINA COMMEDIA. LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, I LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, II LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, III
1310 CE
Henry of Luxembourg, Holy Roman Emperor, descended into Italy and Dante Alighieri addressed an Epistle to him. This is also the possible date of DANTE MONARCHIA (we know it originated between 1310 and 1313).
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1314 CE
Dante Alighieri’s INFERNO: Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ché la diritta via era smarrita.
which Henry Wadsworth Longfellow would render as:2 MIDWAY upon the journey of our life I found myself within a forest dark, For the straightforward pathway had been lost. LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, I
1315 CE
Dante Alighieri became a guest of Cangrande della Scala in Verona and there would work on his PURGATORIO and PARADISO and compose his QUESTIO DE ACQUE ET TERRA. LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, II LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, III
1319 CE
Dante Alighieri became a guest of Guido Novello da Polenta, lord of Ravenna and entered into Latin correspondence with Giovanni del Virgilio.
1321 CE
September 13: Dante Alighieri had fallen ill on his return to Ravenna from Venice, where he had been sent as ambassador by his patron Guido Novello da Polenta, and on this day or the next he died.
2. You’ll do considerably better with Robert Pinsky’s THE INFERNO OF DANTE (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994). “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 7 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1485
In London, the Bodyguard of the Yeoman of the Guard was established to provide security during the coronation of Henry VII. This has become now the oldest extent royal bodyguard and the white crossbelts of its traditional uniform had been originally intended to support the weight of an arquebus.
At about this point Leonardo da Vinci sketched some wheel-lock firing mechanisms.
For the Bereguardo Canal, the Duke of Milan’s engineer Bertola da Novato designed the first modern locks.
In Venice, Dante Alighieri’s DIVINA COMMEDIA was being printed by Petrus de Piasio. Between 1480 and 1483, this printer had been in partnership with the A. Torresanus who had taken possession of Jenson’s printing equipment upon Jenson’s death. (The edition of the COMMEDIA printed in Venice in 1491 by Petrus de Piasio of Cremona is better known, but this happens to be the edition of which I have a page image.) Here is what Dante had to say about what he supposed himself to be doing: “The subject of the whole work, taken literally, is the state of souls after death, regarded as fact. Taken allegorically, its subject is man, insofar as by merit or demerit, in the exercise of free will, he is exposed to the reward or punishment of justice.” In the narrative of his journey, which was inspired by a version in 1300, the authorial persona is accompanied by two guides, “Vigil, who stands for human reason, … and Beatrice, who symbolizes divine grace.” Virgil cannot pass beyond Purgatory, but Beatrice lifts him by contemplation through the spheres of Paradise. The last line depicts the “love which moves the sun and other stars.”
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1614
The Vatican put the DIVINA COMMEDIA of Dante Alighieri on its Index Expurgatorius, with the injunction that the portion of INFERNO dealing with simoniac popes (XIX 48-117), LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, I
the portion of PURGATORIO dealing with Pope Adrian V’s avarice and conversion (XIX 106-18), LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, II
and the portion of PARADISO dealing with the avarice of the Vatican high clergy (IX 136-142) in addition to being forbidden reading must be “suppressed.” LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, III
At that time the verses were not being understood as a work of poetic art, but instead were being taken to be the sheerest trash-writing. For instance, Paolo Beni (1552-1625) wrote in his IL CAVALCANTI that Dante’s slack lines, forced rhymes, various improprieties, insufferable
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obscenities, frequent affectations, and, to be brief, the horrid, stupid, licentious style, along with endless other errors of learning and art, show clearly that Dante was a worse than awful Poet, so little did he have any right to claim superiority over other Poets. And so it seems to me that he was very unfortunate, with a Poem in which one can perceive no industry or need of effort, that it should make him (so he sings) grow thin (the word is his) for many years.
1620
A more hedonistic view of poetry characteristic of the Baroque aesthetic began to work against the reputation of the poet Dante Alighieri. For instance, F. Guarino wrote in Canto V of his L'INFERNO D'AMORE: You sculpt well, Dante, but you do not polish; you are good, but not beautiful; you benefit, but do not please, and with too much knowledge you oppress the Muse.
1782
There would be over the years many attempt to render the DIVINE COMEDY of Dante Alighieri into English, some partial, some complete, some into poetry, some into poetry that accorded with Dante’s Terza Rima scheme in the Italian, and some into straightforward prose. In this year the first such attempt was made by Charles Rogers, with INFERNO only.
• 1785-1802 Reverend Henry Boyd’s DIVINE COMEDY • 1805-1806 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s INFERNO only • 1812 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s DIVINE COMEDY • 1807 N. Howard’s INFERNO only • 1812 Hume’s INFERNO only • 1833-1840 I.C. Wright’s DIVINE COMEDY • 1836 Odoardo Volpi’s ten cantos of INFERNO in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian • 1842 C. Hindley’s INFERNO only (in prose) • 1843 Reverend John Dayman’s INFERNO only • 1849 Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s INFERNO only (in prose) • 1850 Patrick Bannerman’s DIVINE COMEDY • 1851-1854 C.B. Cayley’s DIVINE COMEDY • 1852 E. O’Donnell’s DIVINE COMEDY (in prose) • 1854 T. Brooksbank’s INFERNO only • 1854 Frederick Pollock’s DIVINE COMEDY • 1846 Leigh Hunt’s STORIES FROM THE ITALIAN POETS, portions of DIVINE COMEDY • 1859 J.W. Thomas’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian • 1859 Bruce Whyte’s INFERNO only • 1862 “Hugh Bent” (nom de plume)’s INFERNO only • 1862 W.P. Wilkie’s INFERNO only
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• 1862/1863 Mrs. Ramsay’s DIVINE COMEDY • 1865 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 17 cantos of INFERNO • 1865 James Ford’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian • 1865 Reverend John Dayman’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian • 1865 William Michael Rossetti’s INFERNO only • 1865/1866 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s INFERNO only, illustrated by G. Doré • 1867 Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s INFERNO only (in prose) (2d edition) • 1867 Thomas William Parsons’s first canticle of INFERNO only • 1867 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s DIVINE COMEDY • 1867 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s DIVINE COMEDY • 1867/1868 D. Johnston’s DIVINE COMEDY • 1871 Miss Rossetti’s SHADOW OF DANTE, portions of DIVINE COMEDY • 1871 Ernest Ridsdale Ellaby’s ten cantos of INFERNO in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian • 1876 J.W. Parsons’s nine cantos of PURGATORIO • 1877 Mrs. Oliphant’s FOREIGN CLASSICS FOR ENGLISH READERS, portions of DIVINE COMEDY • 1892 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s INFERNO with illustrations by Gustave Doré • 1899 Thomas Okey (PURGATORIO), Dr. John Aitken Carlyle (INFERNO), and Philip H. Wicksteed (PARADISO) DIVINE COMEDY • 1980 C.H. Sisson’s DIVINE COMEDY • 1994 Robert Pinsky’s THE INFERNO OF DANTE (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
1805
The Reverend Henry Francis Cary put out a translation of Dante’s INFERNO that would be oft reprinted down through the centuries (the title page of the 1892 edition, that had the well-known illustrations by Gustave Doré, is shown on a following screen).
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1816
Dante Alighieri’s LA DIVINA COMMEDIA was republished in a 3-volume Italian edition LA DIVINA COMMEDIA. CON ARGOMENTI, ED ANNOTAZIONI SCELTE DA’ MIGLIORI COMMENTATORI. NUOVA EDIZIONE COL’ACCENTO DI
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PROSODIA (Avignone: F. Sequin aîné). LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, I LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, II LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, III
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1818
December: Percy Bysshe Shelley drafted “A Philosophical View of Reform.”
Samuel Taylor Coleridge began a series of lectures on Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Spenser, and Cervantes, that would persist into March of the following year.
1820
March: George Gordon, Lord Byron wrote THE PROPHECY OF DANTE. DANTE ALIGHIERI
1824
William Blake produced PILGRIM’S PROGRESS designs and a hundred Dante Alighieri drawings. On a following screen, for instance, is his depiction of the plight of Ulysses and Diomedes in section 26 of the Inferno.
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Summer: Frances Trollope observed:
CINCINNATI, OHIO. WOMEN AT A CAMP MEETING.
...The exhortation nearly resembled that which I had heard at “the Revival,” but the result was very different; for, instead of the few hysterical women who had distinguished themselves on that occasion, above a hundred persons, nearly all females, came forward, uttering howlings and groans, so terrible that I shall never cease to shudder when I recall them. They appeared to drag each other forward, and on the word being given, “let us pray,” they all fell on their knees; but this posture was soon changed for others that permitted greater scope for the convulsive movements of their limbs; and they were soon all lying on the ground, an indescribable confusion of heads and legs. They threw about their limbs with such incessant and violent motion, that I was every instant expecting some serious accident to occur. But how am I to describe the sounds that proceeded from this strange mass of human beings? I know no words which can convey an idea of it. Hysterical sobbings, convulsive groans, shrieks and screams the most appalling, burst forth on all sides. I felt sick with horror. As if their hoarse and overstrained voices failed to make noise enough, they soon began to clap their hands violently. The scene described by Dante was before me:
“Quivi sospiri, pianti, ed alti guai Risonavan per l’aere——— DANTE ALIGHIERI ———Orribili favelle Parole di dolore, accenti d’ira Voci alti e fioche, e suon di man con elle.” Many of these wretched creatures were beautiful young females. The preachers moved about among them, at once exciting and soothing their agonies. I heard the muttered “Sister! dear sister!” I saw the insidious lips approach the cheeks of the unhappy girls; I heard the murmured confessions of the poor victims, and I watched their tormentors, breathing into their ears consolations that tinged the pale cheek with red. Had I been a man, I am sure I should have been guilty of some rash act of interference; nor do I believe that such a scene could have been acted in the presence of Englishmen without instant punishment being inflicted; not to mention the salutary discipline of the tread-mill, which, beyond all question, would, in England, have been applied to check so turbulent and so vicious a scene. After the first wild burst that followed their prostration, the meanings, in many instances, became loudly articulate: and I then experienced a strange vibration between tragic and comic feeling. A very pretty girl, who was kneeling in the attitude of Canova’s Magdalene immediately before us, amongst an immense quantity of jargon, broke out thus: “Woe! woe to the backsliders! hear it, hear it Jesus! when I was fifteen my mother died, and I backslided, oh Jesus, I backslided! take me home to my mother, Jesus! take me home to her, for I am weary! Oh John Mitchel! John Mitchel!” and after sobbing piteously behind her raised hands, she lifted her sweet face again, which was as pale as death, and said, “Shall I sit on the sunny bank of salvation with my mother? my own dear mother? oh Jesus, take me home, take me home!” Who could refuse a tear to this earnest wish for death in one so young and so lovely? But I saw her, ere I left the ground, with her hand fast locked, and her head supported by a man who looked very much as Don Juan might, when sent back to earth as too bad for the regions below. One woman near us continued to “call on the Lord,” as it is termed, in the loudest possible tone, and without a moment’s interval, for the two hours that we kept our dreadful station. She became frightfully hoarse, and her face so red as to make me expect she would burst a blood-vessel. Among the rest of her rant, she said “I will hold fast to Jesus, I never will let him go; if they take me to hell, I will still hold him fast, fast, fast!”
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1836
September 1836 to March 20: During the 1st and 2d terms of his Senior year at Harvard College, David Henry Thoreau would be studying Italian under the Harvard instructor Pietro Bachi. It seems clear that under Bachi he read Dante Alighieri’s INFERNO (presumably, while studying under Professor Longfellow, he also encountered the PURGATORIO and PARADISO3 — this despite the fact that his favorite poet was said to be Torquato Tasso). It was as a student of Bachi that Thoreau was presented for his final examination in Italian.
3. Thoreau had in his personal library a 3-volume set of Dante Alighieri’s LA DIVINA COMMEDIA. CON ARGOMENTI, ED ANNOTAZIONI SCELTE DA’ MIGLIORI COMMENTATORI. NUOVA EDIZIONE COL’ACCENTO DI PROSODIA (Avignone: F. Sequin aîné, 1816) as well Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s DIVINE COMEDY: THE INFERNO. A LITERAL PROSE TRANSLATION WITH THE TEXT OF THE ORIGINAL COLLATED FROM THE BEST EDITIONS, AND EXPLANATORY NOTES (New York: Harper & brothers, 1849). LA DIVINA COMMEDIA CARLYLE’S THE INFERNO
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1837
December 27, Wednesday: Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody heard Jones Very speak at the Salem Lyceum, on the epic poetry of the antique Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton — and on the epic poetry of one who was almost their contemporary, Coleridge.
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At the end, she invited him to come home with her and her father. Shortly after Very had left their home that night, she took up her pen and wrote to Waldo Emerson, saying that he should send for Very “at once” to make his acquaintance and to hear him lecture.
Henry Thoreau wrote in his journal in such manner as to indicate that Emerson was sharing with him a book of self-congratulatory racist “herstory” that he had recently checked out from the library of the Athenaeum, Sharon Turner’s HISTORY OF THE ANGLO-SAXONS: REVOLUTIONS
Dec. 27. Revolutions are never sudden. Not one man, nor many men, in a few years or generations, suffice to regulate events and dispose mankind for the revolutionary movement. The hero is but the crowning stone of the pyramid, — the keystone of the arch. Who was Romulus or Remus, Hengist or Horsa, that we should attribute to them Rome or England? They are famous or infamous because the progress of events has chosen to make them its stepping-stones. But we would know where the avalanche commenced, or the hollow in the rock whence springs the Amazon. The most important is apt to be some silent and unobtrusive fact in history. In 449 three Saxon cyules arrived on the British coast, — “Three scipen gode comen mid than flode, three hundred enihten.”4 The pirate of the British coast was no more the founder of a state than the scourge of the German shore. HEROES The real heroes of minstrelsy have been ideal, even when the names of actual heroes have been perpetuated. The real Arthur, who “not only excelled the experienced past, but also the possible future,” of whom it was 4. Cf. the essay “Reform and the Reformers”: “In the year 449 three Saxon cyules arrived on the British coast. ‘Three scipen gode comen mid than flode.’” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 23 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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affirmed for many centuries that he was not dead, but “had withdrawn from the world into some magical region; from which at a future crisis he was to reappear, and lead the Cymri in triumph through the island,” whose character and actions were the theme of the bards of Bretagne and the foundation of their interminable romances, was only an ideal impersonation. Men claim for the ideal an actual existence also, but do not often expand the actual into the ideal. “If you do not believe me, go into Bretagne, and mention in the streets or villages, that Arthur is really dead like other men; you will not escape with impunity; you will be either hooted with the curses of your hearers, or stoned to death.” HOMESICKNESS The most remarkable instance of homesickness is that of the colony of Franks transplanted by the Romans from the German Ocean to the Euxine, who at length resolving to a man to abandon the country, seized the vessels which carried them out, and reached at last their native shores, after innumerable difficulties and dangers upon the Mediterranean and Atlantic. THE INTERESTING FACTS IN HISTORY How cheering is it, after toiling through the darker pages of history, — the heartless and fluctuating crust of human rest and unrest, — to alight on the solid earth where the sun shines, or rest in the checkered shade. The fact that Edwin of Northumbria “caused stakes to be fixed in the highways where he had seen a clear spring,” and that “brazen dishes were chained to them, to refresh the weary sojourner, whose fatigues Edwin had himself experienced,” is worth all Arthur’s twelve battles. The sun again shines along the highway, the landscape presents us sunny glades and occasional cultivated patches as well as dark primeval forests, and it is merry England after all.
A WEEK: Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the spectator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience. Men seem anxious to accomplish an orderly retreat through the centuries, earnestly rebuilding the works behind, as they are battered down by the encroachments of time; but while they loiter, they and their works both fall a prey to the arch enemy. History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us, — when did burdock and plantain sprout first? It has been so written for the most part, that the times it describes are with remarkable propriety called dark ages. They are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark about them. The sun rarely shines in history, what with the dust and confusion; and when we meet with any cheering fact which implies the presence of this luminary, we excerpt and modernize it. As when we read in the history of the Saxons that Edwin of Northumbria “caused stakes to be fixed in the highways where he had seen a clear spring,” and “brazen dishes were chained to them to refresh the weary sojourner, whose fatigues Edwin had himself experienced.” This is worth all Arthur’s twelve battles.
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1840
The wealthy young Frances Appleton, future wife of the celebrant of the humble laborer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, recorded her year’s reading. She had studied Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Reverend Jared Sparks, Sir Francis Bacon, and Frances Trollope. She had read essays by John Locke, the letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the letters of Abigail Adams, and three of the novels of Jane Austen. And she had begun Dante Alighieri’s DIVINE COMEDY after finishing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s FAUST.
In fact the young lady was falling sadly behind in her reading, for this year would see:
• William Makepeace Thackeray’s PARIS SKETCH BOOK. • Thomas Hood’s UP THE RHINE, THE LOVES OF SALLY BROWN AND BEN THE CARPENTER, MISS KILMANSEGG AND HER PRECIOUS LEG (in the New Monthly Magazine).
May 12, Tuesday: Thomas Carlyle gave the lecture “The Hero as Poet. Dante; Shakspeare” which would achieve publication in 1892 as Lecture 3 in ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY.
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July: Early in this month Miss Elizabeth Palmer Peabody opened, in the front parlor of the building she had leased at 13 West Street in Boston, her Foreign Library, a bookstore and circulating library.5
At the suggestion of Washington Allston she would stock imported art supplies. One section was allocated to the homeopathic nostrums created by her father, Dr. Nathaniel Peabody. She displayed on the walls the paintings her sister Sophia was offering for sale. Margaret Fuller had staged her “conversations” here in late 1839 and this would continue in the early 1840s. The Reverend William Ellery Channing would stop by to read the newspaper. Sophia would marry Nathaniel Hawthorne at West Street in 1842. The editors of and contributors to THE DIAL would meet there, and for a time in 1842 and 1843 she would publish this journal as well as writing for it (her “A Glimpse of Christ’s Idea of Society,” a piece about Brook Farm, would appear in the October 1841 issue, and her “Fourierism” would appear in the April 1844 issue). I had ... a foreign library of new French and German books, and then I came into contact with the world as never before. The Ripleys were starting Brook Farm, and they were friends of ours. Theodore Parker was beginning his career, and all these things were discussed in my book-store by Boston lawyers and Cambridge professors. Those were very living years for me.
5. Circulating libraries were privately owned collections of books and periodicals lent out for profit at fixed rates; this institution had its heyday in America in the first half of the 19th Century, just prior to the rise of the public library movement.
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In this year Miss Peabody issued the first of two printed catalogs of her book collection.6 The collection included such titles as Wolfgang Menzel’s GERMAN LITERATURE. TR. FROM THE GERMAN OF WOLFGANG MENZEL. BY C.C. FELTON.... (3 volumes, Boston: Hilliard, Gray, and Company, 1840),7 Miss Peabody’s edition of Anna Cabot Lowell’s THEORY OF TEACHING, Lamartine’s HISTORY OF THE GIRONDISTS and TRAVELS IN THE EAST, Michelet’s MÉMOIRES DE LUTHER, Waldo Emerson’s NATURE, the Reverend Ripley’s LETTERS ON THE LATEST FORM OF INFIDELITY (a response to Andrews Norton’s attack on Transcendentalism), Robespierre’s MÉMOIRES, and Rosini’s LUISA STROZZI, in addition to classic works by Æschylus, Ludovico Ariosto, Honoré de Balzac, George Bancroft, George Gordon, Lord Byron, Thomas Carlyle, Miguel de Cervantes, the Reverend Channing, Chateaubriand, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Cousin, Dante, Dumas, Euripides, Gerando, Goethe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Hesiod, Homer, Victor Hugo, Mirabeau, Molière, Petrarch, Plato, Racine, Richter, Rousseau, George Sand, Schiller, Schlegel, William Shakespeare, Madame de Staël, Alexis de Tocqueville, Voltaire, William Wordsworth, and Xenophon. The collection also included various periodicals such as the Annales des Sciences Naturelles, Blackwood’s Magazine, the Boston Quarterly Review, THE DIAL, the Edinburgh Review, the Journal des Literarische Unterhaltung, the London and Edinburgh Philosophical Magazine, the Musical Journal, the New-York Review, the Revue des Deux Mondes, and the Western Messenger.
6. A facsimile of this catalog still exists, as part of Madeleine B. Stern’s “Elizabeth Peabody’s Foreign Library (1840),” American Transcendental Quarterly, No. 20 Supplement, Part 1, pages 5-12. 7. Henry Thoreau would consult this volume on December 5, 1840. His extracts would consist of quotations from Lorenz Oken and from Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert. “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 27 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1841
February 20, Sunday: Henry Thoreau commented in his journal that “In Homer and Æschylus and Dante I miss a nice discrimination of the important shades of character.”
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1842
January 2, Sunday: Henry Thoreau commented in his journal, in regard to the time period of Geoffrey Chaucer, that “Dante, though just departed, still exerted the influence of a living presence,” a remark he would later insert into A WEEK.
A WEEK: There is no wisdom that can take place of humanity, and we find that in Chaucer. We can expand at last in his breadth, and we think that we could have been that man’s acquaintance. He was worthy to be a citizen of England, while Petrarch and Boccacio lived in Italy, and Tell and Tamerlane in Switzerland and in Asia, and Bruce in Scotland, and Wickliffe, and Gower, and Edward the Third, and John of Gaunt, and the Black Prince, were his own countrymen as well as contemporaries; all stout and stirring names. The fame of Roger Bacon came down from the preceding century, and the name of Dante still possessed the influence of a living presence. On the whole, Chaucer impresses us as greater than his reputation, and not a little like Homer and Shakespeare, for he would have held up his head in their company. Among early English poets he is the landlord and host, and has the authority of such. The affectionate mention which succeeding early poets make of him, coupling him with Homer and Virgil, is to be taken into the account in estimating his character and influence. King James and Dunbar of Scotland speak of him with more love and reverence than any modern author of his predecessors of the last century. The same childlike relation is without a parallel now. For the most part we read him without criticism, for he does not plead his own cause, but speaks for his readers, and has that greatness of trust and reliance which compels popularity. He confides in the reader, and speaks privily with him, keeping nothing back. And in return the reader has great confidence in him, that he tells no lies, and reads his story with indulgence, as if it were the circumlocution of a child, but often discovers afterwards that he has spoken with more directness and economy of words than a sage. He is never heartless, “For first the thing is thought within the hart, Er any word out from the mouth astart.”
GEOFFREY CHAUCER DANTE GOWER
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(Thoreau would also comment, in A WEEK, that Chaucer “rendered a similar service to his country to that which Dante rendered to Italy.”)
A WEEK: Chaucer had eminently the habits of a literary man and a scholar. There were never any times so stirring that there were not to be found some sedentary still. He was surrounded by the din of arms. The battles of Hallidon Hill and Neville’s Cross, and the still more memorable battles of Cressy and Poictiers, were fought in his youth; but these did not concern our poet much, Wickliffe and his reform much more. He regarded himself always as one privileged to sit and converse with books. He helped to establish the literary class. His character as one of the fathers of the English language would alone make his works important, even those which have little poetical merit. He was as simple as Wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a literature, and rendered a similar service to his country to that which Dante rendered to Italy. If Greek sufficeth for Greek, and Arabic for Arabian, and Hebrew for Jew, and Latin for Latin, then English shall suffice for him, for any of these will serve to teach truth “right as divers pathes leaden divers folke the right waye to Rome.” In the Testament of Love he writes, “Let then clerkes enditen in Latin, for they have the propertie of science, and the knowinge in that facultie, and lette Frenchmen in their Frenche also enditen their queinte termes, for it is kyndely to their mouthes, and let us shewe our fantasies in soche wordes as we lerneden of our dames tonge.”
GEOFFREY CHAUCER DANTE
Thoreau would also cite, in A WEEK, the CONFESSIO AMANTIS (IV, 2427-2432) of “Poet Laureate” John Gower:
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A WEEK: These modern ingenious sciences and arts do not affect me as those more venerable arts of hunting and fishing, and even of husbandry in its primitive and simple form; as ancient and honorable trades as the sun and moon and winds pursue, coeval with the faculties of man, and invented when these were invented. We do not know their John Gutenberg, or Richard Arkwright, though the poets would fain make them to have been gradually learned and taught. According to Gower, — “And Iadahel, as saith the boke, Firste made nette, and fishes toke. Of huntyng eke he fond the chace, Whiche nowe is knowe in many place; A tent of clothe, with corde and stake, He sette up first, and did it make.” Also, Lydgate says: — “Jason first sayled, in story it is tolde, Toward Colchos, to wynne the flees of golde. Ceres the Goddess fond first the tilthe of londe; Also, Aristeus fonde first the usage Of mylke, and cruddis, and of honey swote; Peryodes, for grete avauntage, From flyntes smote fuyre, daryng in the roote.”
GOWER
January 2, Sunday. The ringing of the church bell is a much more melodious sound than any that is heard within the church. All great values are thus public, and undulate like sound through the atmosphere. Wealth cannot purchase any great private solace or convenience. Riches are only the means of sociality. I will depend on the extravagance of my neighbors for my luxuries, for they will take care to pamper me if I will be overfed. The poor man who sacrificed nothing for the gratification seems to derive a safer and more natural enjoyment from his neighbor’s extravagance than he does himself. It is a new natural product, from the contemplation of which he derives new vigor and solace as from a natural phenomenon. In moments of quiet and leisure my thoughts are more apt to revert to some natural than any human relation. Chaucer’s sincere sorrow in his latter days for the grossness of his earlier works, and that he “cannot recall and annul” what he had “written of the base and filthy love of men towards women; but alas they are now continued from man to man,” says he, “and I cannot do what I desire,” is all very creditable to his character. Chaucer is the make-weight of his century, — a worthy representative of England while Petrarch and Boccaccio lived in Italy, and Tell and Tamerlane in Switzerland and Asia, and Bruce and Rienzi in Europe, and Wickliffe and Gower in his own land. Edward III and John of Gaunt and the Black prince complete the company. The fame of Roger Bacon came down from the preceding century, and Dante, though just departed, still exerted the influence of a living presence.’ With all his grossness he is not undistinguished for the tenderness and delicacy of his muse. A simple pathos and feminine gentleness is peculiar to him which not even Wordsworth can match. And then his best passages of length are marked by a happy and healthy wit which is rather rare in the poetry of any nation. On the whole, he impresses me as greater than his reputation, and not a little like Homer and Shakespeare, for he would have held up his head in their company. Among the earliest English poets lie is their landlord and host, and has the authority of such. We read him with affection and without criticism, for he pleads no cause, but speaks for us, his readers, always. He has that greatness of trust and reliance which compels popularity. He is for a whole country and country [sic] to know and to be proud of. The affectionate mention which succeeding early poets make of him, coupling him with Homer and Virgil, is also to be taken into the account in estimating his character. King James and Dunbar of Scotland speak with more love and reverence of him than any cotemporary poet of his predecessors of the last century. That childlike relation, indeed, does not seem to exist now which was then.
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1843
Waldo Emerson translated Dante’s VITA NUOVA.
At the end of the journal entries for this year, he listed his recent readings in Oriental materials: “Plotinus; Iamblichus; Synesius; Proclus; (Thomas Taylor’s translations); Thomas Taylor; Sheking8; THE FOUR BOOKS (Chinese Classics); Vishnu Sarna; Saadi; Desatir (Persian).”
Emerson had recorded during this year the fact that “My Chinese book does not forget to record to Confucius, that his nightgown was one length and a half of his body.” He may on some unknown occasions have caught a glimpse of one or another Chinaman and one or another Jew (or one or another giraffe), for he also opinioned in his journal that “The Chinese are as wonderful for their etiquette as the Hebrews for their piety.”
(This is in Volume VI, page 418. The Sage of Concord might of course as well have been expressing an informed opinion that “The lion is as wonderful for its ferocity as the ant for its diligence” or that “The negroes are as wonderful for their sense of rhythm as the English for their sense of propriety”!)
Emerson copied many sentences from the translation by the Reverend D. Collier of THE FOUR BOOKS, published in Malacca, into his journals for inclusion in his later works, and in fact he would insert into almost
8. THE BOOK OF ODES. Presumably this was borrowed from Samuel Gray Ward of Lenox MA, as there is a reference in this year to “Ward’s Chinese book.” “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 33 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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every book he would issue, at one point or another, a few such Chinese sayings, which (I will parenthetically remark) he was deploying clearly for mere purposes of color and never delving into in any interesting manner. In radical contrast with the serious manner in which Henry Thoreau would consider his Confucian extracts, Emerson used such materials as mere “throwaways,” inserted into his materials for reader titillation — for him Chinese wisdom was merely opportunistic as opposed to religious, and was so impoverished by Eastern inertia and quietism that it was not to be taken seriously. Chinese philosophy boiled down to Confucius, and that guy, in Emerson’s view of the matter, had been no originator, no innovator, no creator — but a mere “middle man.” The writings of Confucius, Emerson suggested, were to Eastern philosophy as the writings of General Washington were to Western philosophy — merely a record of practicality and of practice. In this year Emerson made some permissive remarks about the go-ahead spirit of the Americans: EMERSON AND CHINA THOREAU AND CHINA
5. Now these things are so in Nature. All things ascend, and the royal rule of economy is, that it should ascend also, or, whatever we do must always have a higher aim. Thus it is a maxim, that money is another kind of blood. Pecunia alter sanguis: or, the estate of a man is only a larger kind of body, and admits of regimen analogous to his bodily circulations. So there is no maxim of the merchant, e. g., “Best use of money is to pay debts;” “Every business by itself;” “Best time is present time;” “The right investment is in tools of your trade;” or the like, which does not admit of an extended sense. The counting-room maxims liberally expounded are laws of the Universe. The merchant’s economy is a coarse symbol of the soul’s economy. It is, to spend for power, and not for pleasure. It is to invest income; that is to say, to take up particulars into generals; days into integral eras, — literary, emotive, practical, of its life, and still to ascend in its investment. The merchant has but one rule, absorb and invest: he is to be capitalist: the scraps and filings must be gathered back into the crucible; the gas and smoke must be burned, and earnings must not go to increase expense, but to capital again. Well, the man must be capitalist. Will he spend his income, or will he invest? His body and every organ is under the same law. His body is a jar, in which the liquor of life is stored. Will he spend for pleasure? The way to ruin is short and facile. Will he not spend, but hoard for power? It passes through the sacred fermentations, by that law of Nature whereby everything climbs to higher platforms, and bodily vigor becomes mental and moral vigor. The bread he eats is first strength and animal spirits: it becomes, in higher laboratories, imagery and thought; and in still higher results, courage and endurance. This is the right compound interest; this is capital doubled, quadrupled, centupled; man raised to his highest power.
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1847
During this year Waldo Emerson contributed the following deeply profound thought about our human trajectory to his journal:
It is not determined of man whether he came up or down: Cherubim or Chimpanzee.
At the end of the journal entries for this year, Waldo listed his recent readings in Oriental materials: “Plotinus; Synesius; Proclus; Institutes of Menu; Bhagavat Geeta; Vishnu Purana; Confucius; Zoroaster; Saadi; Hafiz; Firdusi; Ferradeddin.”
The culture of the Imagination, how imperiously demanded, how doggedly denied. There are books which move the sea and the land, and which are the realities of which you have heard in the fables of Cornelius Agrippa and Michael Scott. Sweetness of reading: Montaigne, Froissart; Chaucer. Ancient: the three Banquets [Plato, Xenophon, Plutarch]. Oriental reading: [HE FORGOT TO FILL THIS OUT] Grand reading: Plato; Synesius; Dante; Vita Nuova; Timæus (weather, river of sleep); Cudworth; Stanley. All-reading: Account of Madame de Staël’s rule; Rabelais; Diderot, Marguerite Aretin. English reading: Clarendon; Bacon; Milton; Johnson; Northcote. Manuals: Bacon’s Essays; Ben Jonson; Ford; Beaumont and Fletcher. Favorites: Sully; Walpole; Evelyn; Walton; Burton; White’s Selborne; Aubrey; Bartram’s Travels; French Gai Science, Fabliaux. Tonic books: Life of Michael Angelo; Gibbon; Goethe; Coleridge. Novels: Manzoni. Of Translation: Mitchell. Importers: Cousin; De Staël; Southey.
Emerson also incidentally mentioned in his journal for this year someone he had been reading, Charles Kraitsir, mentioning all the languages in his head. A few pages later he included something that Kraitsir had written, that “All the languages should be studied abreast.”
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1848
June: Herman Melville read the Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s 1812 translation of Dante Alighieri’s DIVINE COMEDY.9
1849
The initial installment of what Dr. John Aitken Carlyle intended to become a translation of the entirety of Dante Alighieri’s DIVINA COMMEDIA appeared as DIVINE COMEDY: THE INFERNO. A LITERAL PROSE TRANSLATION WITH THE TEXT OF THE ORIGINAL COLLATED FROM THE BEST EDITIONS, AND EXPLANATORY NOTES (NY: Harper & brothers).10 CARLYLE’S THE INFERNO This volume would be in Henry Thoreau’s personal library.
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1852
January 17, Saturday, or 22, Thursday: Per Leary, Henry Thoreau began the process of creative reshaping of WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, onto 67 leaves of white and cream paper marked with the GOODWIN*HARTFORD anchor watermark, which following Ronald Earl Clapper we refer to as “Draft D.” For instance WALDEN 314,
9. There have been over the years a very great many attempts to accomplish this: 1782 Charles Rogers’s INFERNO only (blank verse) 1785-1802 Reverend Henry Boyd’s DIVINE COMEDY (rhymed six-line stanzas) 1805-1806 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s INFERNO only (blank verse) 1812 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s DIVINE COMEDY (blank verse) 1807 N. Howard’s INFERNO only 1833-1840 I.C. Wright’s DIVINE COMEDY 1836 Odoardo Volpi’s ten cantos of INFERNO in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1842 C. Hindley’s INFERNO only (in prose) 1843 Reverend John Dayman’s INFERNO only 1849 Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s INFERNO only (in prose) 1850 Patrick Bannerman’s DIVINE COMEDY 1851-1854 C.B. Cayley’s DIVINE COMEDY 1852 E. O’Donnell’s DIVINE COMEDY (in prose) 1854 T. Brooksbank’s INFERNO only 1854 Frederick Pollock’s DIVINE COMEDY 1846 James Henry Leigh Hunt’s STORIES FROM THE ITALIAN POETS, portions of DIVINE COMEDY 1859 J.W. Thomas’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1859 Bruce Whyte’s INFERNO only 1862 “Hugh Bent” (nom de plume)’s INFERNO only 1862 W.P. Wilkie’s INFERNO only 1862/1863 Mrs. Ramsay’s DIVINE COMEDY 1865 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 17 cantos of INFERNO 1865 James Ford’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1865 Reverend John Dayman’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1865 William Michael Rossetti’s INFERNO only 1865/1866 Reverend H.F. Cary’s INFERNO only, illustrated by G. Doré 1867 Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s INFERNO only (in prose) (2d edition) 1867 Thomas William Parsons’s first canticle of INFERNO only 1867 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s DIVINE COMEDY 1867 Reverend Henry F. Cary’s DIVINE COMEDY 1867/1868 D. Johnston’s DIVINE COMEDY 1871 Miss Rossetti’s SHADOW OF DANTE, portions of DIVINE COMEDY 1871 Ernest Ridsdale Ellaby’s ten cantos of INFERNO in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1876 J.W. Parsons’s nine cantos of PURGATORIO 1877 Mrs. Oliphant’s FOREIGN CLASSICS FOR ENGLISH READERS, portions of DIVINE COMEDY 1892 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s INFERNO with illustrations by Gustave Doré 1899 Thomas Okey (PURGATORIO), Dr. John Aitken Carlyle (INFERNO), and Philip H. Wicksteed (PARADISO) DIVINE COMEDY 1980 C.H. Sisson’s DIVINE COMEDY 1994 Robert Pinsky’s THE INFERNO OF DANTE (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 37 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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10. There have been over the years a very great many attempts to accomplish this: 1782 Charles Rogers’s INFERNO only (blank verse) 1785-1802 Reverend Henry Boyd’s DIVINE COMEDY (rhymed six-line stanzas) 1805-1806 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s INFERNO only (blank verse) 1812 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s DIVINE COMEDY (blank verse) 1807 N. Howard’s INFERNO only 1833-1840 I.C. Wright’s DIVINE COMEDY 1836 Odoardo Volpi’s ten cantos of INFERNO in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1842 C. Hindley’s INFERNO only (in prose) 1843 Reverend John Dayman’s INFERNO only 1849 Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s INFERNO only (in prose) 1850 Patrick Bannerman’s DIVINE COMEDY 1851-1854 C.B. Cayley’s DIVINE COMEDY 1852 E. O’Donnell’s DIVINE COMEDY (in prose) 1854 T. Brooksbank’s INFERNO only 1854 Frederick Pollock’s DIVINE COMEDY 1846 James Henry Leigh Hunt’s STORIES FROM THE ITALIAN POETS, portions of DIVINE COMEDY 1859 J.W. Thomas’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1859 Bruce Whyte’s INFERNO only 1862 “Hugh Bent” (nom de plume)’s INFERNO only 1862 W.P. Wilkie’s INFERNO only 1862/1863 Mrs. Ramsay’s DIVINE COMEDY 1865 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 17 cantos of INFERNO 1865 James Ford’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1865 Reverend John Dayman’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1865 William Michael Rossetti’s INFERNO only 1865/1866 Reverend H.F. Cary’s INFERNO only, illustrated by G. Doré 1867 Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s INFERNO only (in prose) (2d edition) 1867 Thomas William Parsons’s first canticle of INFERNO only 1867 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s DIVINE COMEDY 1867 Reverend Henry F. Cary’s DIVINE COMEDY 1867/1868 D. Johnston’s DIVINE COMEDY 1871 Miss Rossetti’s SHADOW OF DANTE, portions of DIVINE COMEDY 1871 Ernest Ridsdale Ellaby’s ten cantos of INFERNO in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1876 J.W. Parsons’s nine cantos of PURGATORIO 1877 Mrs. Oliphant’s FOREIGN CLASSICS FOR ENGLISH READERS, portions of DIVINE COMEDY 1892 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s INFERNO with illustrations by Gustave Doré 1899 Thomas Okey (PURGATORIO), Dr. John Aitken Carlyle (INFERNO), and Philip H. Wicksteed (PARADISO) DIVINE COMEDY 1980 C.H. Sisson’s DIVINE COMEDY 1994 Robert Pinsky’s THE INFERNO OF DANTE (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
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added into draft D of 1852:
We should be fortunate & blessed if we were so sane & in season, with our robes always tucked up, that we were able & could afford to live in the present without any definite or recognized object from day to day. If we could without be thus [?] always where God & Nature are, and not live on a tangent to the sphere, for the world is round. As an old poet says “Though man proposeth, God disposeth all.” What have we to boast of. We make ourselves the very sewers, the cloacae of nature. I too revive as does the grass after rain. We are never so floundering, our day is never so fair, but that the sun may come out a little brighter through mists and we yearn to live after a better fashion.
TIMELINE OF WALDEN WALDEN A ----> G This process would continue into September.
Henry Thoreau reminisced about the two young women who borrowed his dipper while he was living at the pond and then failed to bring it back:
January 17, Saturday, 1852: One day two young women–a sunday–stopped at the door of my hut and asked for some water. I answered that I had no cold water but I would lend them a dipper. They never returned the dipper–and I had a right to suppose that they came to steal. They were a disgrace to their sex and to humanity. ... Pariahs of the moral world– Evil spirits that thirsted not for water but threw the dipper into the DANTE lake.– Such as Dante saw. What the lake to them but liquid fire & brimstone. They will never know peace till they have returned the dipper– In all the worlds this is decreed. ...
A disgrace to their sex and to humanity! —It really sounds as if these two had attempted to flirt with him. However, this is all of the incident that got into the book manuscript:
WALDEN: Many a traveller came out of his way to see me and the inside of my house, and, as an excuse for calling, asked for a glass of water. I told them that I drank at the pond, and pointed thither, offering to lend them a dipper. Far off as I lived, I was not exempted from that annual visitation which occurs, methinks, about the first of April, when every body is on the move; and I had my share of good luck, though there were some curious specimens among my visitors.
January 17, Saturday, 1852: ... Evergreens would be a good title for some of my things.– or Gill-go- over the Ground.– or Winter green–or Checker-berry. or Esnea lichens. &c &c Iter Canadense.... One day an innoffensive simple minded pauper from the almshouse–who with others I often saw used as fencing
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stuff standing or sitting on a bushel in the fields to keep cattle from straying–visited me. and expressed a wish to live as I did. He told me in the simplest manner–(and therefore quite superior to anything that is called humility–it was too simple & truthful for that) that he was deficient in intellect these were his words–the Lord had made him so–and yet he supposed that the Lord cared for him as much as for another. Said he I have always been so from my childhood I never had much mind. It was the Lord’s will I suppose. I am weak in the head”– I was not like other children.” I have rarely been so fortunate as to meet a fellow man on such promising ground. It was so solemnly true–all that he said. The other day the 14th, as I was passing the further Garfield house beyond Holden’s with my pantaloons as usual tucked into my boots (there was no path beyond Holden’s) I heard some persons in Garfields shed but did not look round–and when I had got a rod or two beyond–I heard some one call out impudently from the shed– quite loud–something like “Ho’lloa–mister–what do you think of the walking?” I turned round directly and saw three men standing in the shed. I was resolved to discomfit them–that they should prove their manhood if they had any–and find something to say though they had nothing before.– that they should make amends to the universe by feeling cheap. They should either say to my face & eye what they had said to my back–or they should feel the meanness of having to change their tone. So I called out looking at one do you wish to speak to me Sir? no answer– So I stepped a little nearer & repeated the question– When one replied yes sir. So I advanced with alacrity up the path they had shovelled. In the meanwhile one ran into the house. I thought I had seen the nearest one– He called me by name faintly & with hesitation & held out his hand half unconsciously which I did not decline–and I inquired gravely if he wished to say anything to me, he could only wave me to the other & mutter my brother. I approached him & repeated the question. He looked as if he was shrinking into a nutshell–a pitiable object he was–he looked away from me while he began to frame some business some surveying that he might wish to have done I saw that he was drunk–that his brother was ashamed of him–and I turned my back on him in the outset of this indirect but drunken apology. IDA PFEIFFER When Madame Pfeiffer arrived in Asiatic Russia she felt the necessity–of wearing other than a travelling dress, when she went to meet the authorities–for as she remarks she “was now in a civilized country where – – people are judged of by their clothes.” This is another barbarous trait. It seemed that from such a basis as the poor weak headed pauper had laid–such a basis of truth & frankness– our intercourse might go forward to something better than the intercourse of sages. It was on the 4th of July that I put a few things into a hay-rigging some of which I had made myself, & commenced housekeeping. There is the worldwide fact that from the mass of men–the appearance of wealth–dress & equipage alone command respects,–they who yield it are the heathen who need to have missionaries sent to them–and they who cannot afford to live & travel but in this respectable way are if possible more pitiable still. In proportion as I have celestial thoughts, is the necessity for me to be out and behold the western sky before sunset these winter days. That is the symbol of the unclouded mind that knows neither winter nor summer. What is your thought like? That is the hue–that the purity & transparency and distance from earthly taint of my inmost mind–for whatever we see without is a symbol of something within–& that which is farthest off– is the symbol of what is deepest within. The lover of contemplation accordingly will gaze much into the sky.– Fair thoughts & a serene mind make fair days. The rain bow is the symbol of the triumph which succeeds to a grief that has tried us to our advantage– so that at last we can smile through our–tears– It is the aspect with which we come out of the house of mourning. We have found our relief in tears. As the skies appear to a man so is his mind. Some see only clouds there some prodigies & portents–some rarely look up at all, their heads like the brutes are directed toward earth. Some behold there serenity–purity beauty ineffable. The World run to see the panorama when there is a panorama in the sky which few go out to see. Methinks there might be a chapter–when I speak of hens in the thawy days & spring weather on the chips– called Chickweed. or Plantain. To sea-going men the very Mts are but boats turned upside down–as the North men in Norway speak of the “keel-ridge of the country” i.e. the ridge of the Mts which divide the waters flowing east & west Those western vistas through clouds to the sky–show the clearest heavens–clearer & more elysian than if the whole sky is comparatively free from clouds–for then there is wont to be a vapor more generally diffused especially near the horizon–which in cloudy days is absorbed as it were & collected into masses. And the vistas are clearer than the unobstructed cope of heaven. The endless variety in the forms & texture of the clouds! Some fine some coarse grained. I saw tonight over 2 head–stretching /31] across the sky what looked like the back bone with portions of the ribs of a fossil monster. Every form & creature is thus shadowed forth in vapor in the heavens. Saw a teamster coming up the Boston road this afternoon sitting on his load which was bags of corn or salt apperently behind 2 horses & beating his hands for warmth. He finally got off & walked behind to make his
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blood circulate faster– and I saw that he was a large man– But when I came near him I found that he was a monstrous man & dwarfed all whom he stood by–so that I did not know whether he was large or they were small. Yet though he stood so high he stooped considerably more than anybody I think of & he wore a flat glazed cap to conceal his hight. & when he got into the village he sat down on his bags again. I heard him remark to a boy that it was a cold day & it was. But I wondered that he should feel the cold so sensibly–for I thought it must take a long time to cool so large a body. I learned that it was Kimball of Littleton–that probably he was not 20. The family was not large Wild who took the census–said so and that his sister said he could’nt do much” health & strength not much. It troubled him that he was so large–for people looked at him. There is at once something monstrous in the bad sense suggested by the sight of such a man. Great size is inhuman. It is as if a man should be born with the earth attached to him. I saw him standing upon a sled talking with the driver while his own team went on ahead. And I supposed from their comparative height that his companion was sitting–but he proved to be standing. Such a man is so much less human–that is what may make him sad. Those old Northmen were not like so many men in these days whom you can pass your hand through because they have not any back-bone. When Asmund was going to kill Harek of Thiottö with a thin hatchet, King Magnus said “‘Rather take this axe of mine’. It was thick, and made like a club. ‘Thou must know, Asmund,’ added he, ‘that there are hard bones in the old fellow’.” Asmund struck Harek on the head & gave him his death wound, but when he returned to the king’s house, it appeared that “the whole edge of the axe was turned with the blow”. It appears to me that at a very early age–the mind of man–perhaps at the same time with his body, ceases to be elastic. His intellectual power becomes something defined–& limited. He does not think expansively as he would stretch himself in his growing days– What was flexible sap hardens into heartwood and there is no further change. In the season of youth methinks man is capable of intellectual effort & performance which surpass all rules & bounds– As the youth lays out his whole strength without fear or prudence & does not feel his limits. It is the transition from poetry to prose. The young man can run & leap–he has not learned exactly how far–he knows no limits– The grown man does not exceed his daily labor. He has no strength to waste.
Some men are never where they For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. By Through an infirmity of their our natures, they we suppose a case, and put themselves ourselves into it, and hence they we are in two cases, the actual and the supposed, at the same time, which is to be in a dilemma, and it is doubly difficult to get out. A few healthy & true men In healthy and true moments In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is…. Any truth is presentable. better than make-believe. (Clapper 862-7; WALDEN, 326-7)
[I]n an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter…. [T]ime had been an illusion…. Some men are never where they For the most part, we are not where we are, but in a false position. By Through an infirmity of their our natures, they we suppose a case, and put themselves ourselves into it, and hence they we are in two cases, the actual and the supposed, at the same time, which is to be in a dilemma, and it is doubly difficult to get out. A few healthy & true men In healthy and true moments In sane moments we regard only the facts, the case that is…. Any truth is presentable. better than make-believe. (Clapper 862-7; WALDEN, 326-7)
Wherever I sat, there I might live, and the landscape radiated from me accordingly. (Clapper 256-7; WALDEN, 81)
1864
January: Three cantos of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s translation of the PARADISO (the third and final part of Dante 11 Alighieri’s COMMEDIA) appeared in The Atlantic Monthly.
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1866
Thomas Hicks painted his “Authors of the United States” as a name-dropping set piece to show off various of the portraits of prominent personages he had painted at his studio in New-York. We have no idea as to the present whereabouts of the original of this, but an engraving of it was made by A.H. Ritchie. We note that the statues on the upper balcony are of course of founding literary giants Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William 11. There have been over the years a very great many attempts to accomplish this: 1782 Charles Rogers’s INFERNO only (blank verse) 1785-1802 Reverend Henry Boyd’s DIVINE COMEDY (rhymed six-line stanzas) 1805-1806 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s INFERNO only (blank verse) 1812 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s DIVINE COMEDY (blank verse) 1807 N. Howard’s INFERNO only 1833-1840 I.C. Wright’s DIVINE COMEDY 1836 Odoardo Volpi’s ten cantos of INFERNO in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1842 C. Hindley’s INFERNO only (in prose) 1843 Reverend John Dayman’s INFERNO only 1849 Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s INFERNO only (in prose) 1850 Patrick Bannerman’s DIVINE COMEDY 1851-1854 C.B. Cayley’s DIVINE COMEDY 1852 E. O’Donnell’s DIVINE COMEDY (in prose) 1854 T. Brooksbank’s INFERNO only 1854 Frederick Pollock’s DIVINE COMEDY 1846 James Henry Leigh Hunt’s STORIES FROM THE ITALIAN POETS, portions of DIVINE COMEDY 1859 J.W. Thomas’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1859 Bruce Whyte’s INFERNO only 1862 “Hugh Bent” (nom de plume)’s INFERNO only 1862 W.P. Wilkie’s INFERNO only 1862/1863 Mrs. Ramsay’s DIVINE COMEDY 1865 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 17 cantos of INFERNO 1865 James Ford’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1865 Reverend John Dayman’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1865 William Michael Rossetti’s INFERNO only 1865/1866 Reverend H.F. Cary’s INFERNO only, illustrated by G. Doré 1867 Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s INFERNO only (in prose) (2d edition) 1867 Thomas William Parsons’s first canticle of INFERNO only 1867 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s DIVINE COMEDY 1867 Reverend Henry F. Cary’s DIVINE COMEDY 1867/1868 D. Johnston’s DIVINE COMEDY 1871 Miss Rossetti’s SHADOW OF DANTE, portions of DIVINE COMEDY 1871 Ernest Ridsdale Ellaby’s ten cantos of INFERNO in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1876 J.W. Parsons’s nine cantos of PURGATORIO 1877 Mrs. Oliphant’s FOREIGN CLASSICS FOR ENGLISH READERS, portions of DIVINE COMEDY 1892 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s INFERNO with illustrations by Gustave Doré 1899 Thomas Okey (PURGATORIO), Dr. John Aitken Carlyle (INFERNO), and Philip H. Wicksteed (PARADISO) DIVINE COMEDY 1980 C.H. Sisson’s DIVINE COMEDY 1994 Robert Pinsky’s THE INFERNO OF DANTE (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
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Shakespeare, and Dante Alighieri. Henry Thoreau is of course as always not noticeably absent, since he would not emerge into his present renown until well into the 20th Century.
The personages depicted are 1=Washington Irving 2=William Cullen Bryant 3=James Fenimore Cooper 4=Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 5=Miss Sedgwick 6=Mrs. Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney 7=Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth 8=Mitchell 9=Nathaniel Parker Willis 10=Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 11=Kennedy 12=Mrs. Mowatt Ritchie 13=Alice Carey 14=Prentice 15=G.W. Kendall 16=Morris 17=Edgar Allan Poe 18=Frederick Goddard Tuckerman 19=Nathaniel Hawthorne 20=Simms 21=P. Pendelton Cooke 22=Hoffman 23=William H.Prescott 24=George Bancroft 25=Parke Godwin 26=John Lothrop Motley 27=Reverend Henry
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Ward Beecher 28=George William Curtis 29=Ralph Waldo Emerson 30=Richard Henry Dana, Jr. 31=Margaret Fuller, marchesa d’Ossoli 32=Reverend William Ellery Channing 33=Harriet Beecher Stowe 34=Mrs. Kirkland 35=Friend John Greenleaf Whittier 36=James Russell Lowell 37=Boker 38=Bayard Taylor 39=Saxe 40=Stoddard 41=Mrs. Amelia Welby 42=Gallagher 43=Cozzens 44=Halleck.
1867
In a 2d, revised edition of Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s “English prosing” of Dante Alighieri’s INFERNO, the translator mentioned plans to also issue translations of PURGATORIO and PARADISO (he would work at this but of course it would not happen).12
THE DIVINE COMEDY OF Dante Alighieri / translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Boston: Ticknor and Fields; Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin and Company; Authorized edition Leipzig: B. Tauchnitz, 186713
Boston: J.R. Osgood, 1869-1871, [Volume 1, 1871] Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870 Boston: James R. Osgood & Company, 1875 Boston and NY: Houghton, Mifflin and company 1882 Boston and NY: Houghton, Mifflin and company, [1886] With an introd. by Henry Morley. London: G. Routledge, 1886 Boston and New York, Houghton, Mifflin and Co., [1888, c1867]
1882
Reprinting, unchanged, of the 1867 edition of Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s “English prose” version of Dante Alighieri’s INFERNO. CARLYLE’S THE INFERNO
The Reverend Frederic Henry Hedge edited and annotated a metrical translation by Miss Anna Swanwick of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s FAUST. MISS SWANWICK’S FAUST
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1899
THE DIVINE COMEDY by Dante Alighieri. Translators Thomas Okey (PURGATORIO), Dr. John Aitken Carlyle
12. There have been over the years a very great many attempts to accomplish this: 1782 Charles Rogers’s INFERNO only (blank verse) 1785-1802 Reverend Henry Boyd’s DIVINE COMEDY (rhymed six-line stanzas) 1805-1806 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s INFERNO only (blank verse) 1812 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s DIVINE COMEDY (blank verse) 1807 N. Howard’s INFERNO only 1833-1840 I.C. Wright’s DIVINE COMEDY 1836 Odoardo Volpi’s ten cantos of INFERNO in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1842 C. Hindley’s INFERNO only (in prose) 1843 Reverend John Dayman’s INFERNO only 1849 Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s INFERNO only (in prose) 1850 Patrick Bannerman’s DIVINE COMEDY 1851-1854 C.B. Cayley’s DIVINE COMEDY 1852 E. O’Donnell’s DIVINE COMEDY (in prose) 1854 T. Brooksbank’s INFERNO only 1854 Frederick Pollock’s DIVINE COMEDY 1846 James Henry Leigh Hunt’s STORIES FROM THE ITALIAN POETS, portions of DIVINE COMEDY 1859 J.W. Thomas’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1859 Bruce Whyte’s INFERNO only 1862 “Hugh Bent” (nom de plume)’s INFERNO only 1862 W.P. Wilkie’s INFERNO only 1862/1863 Mrs. Ramsay’s DIVINE COMEDY 1865 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 17 cantos of INFERNO 1865 James Ford’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1865 Reverend John Dayman’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1865 William Michael Rossetti’s INFERNO only 1865/1866 Reverend H.F. Cary’s INFERNO only, illustrated by G. Doré 1867 Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s INFERNO only (in prose) (2d edition) 1867 Thomas William Parsons’s first canticle of INFERNO only 1867 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s DIVINE COMEDY 1867 Reverend Henry F. Cary’s DIVINE COMEDY 1867/1868 D. Johnston’s DIVINE COMEDY 1871 Miss Rossetti’s SHADOW OF DANTE, portions of DIVINE COMEDY 1871 Ernest Ridsdale Ellaby’s ten cantos of INFERNO in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1876 J.W. Parsons’s nine cantos of PURGATORIO 1877 Mrs. Oliphant’s FOREIGN CLASSICS FOR ENGLISH READERS, portions of DIVINE COMEDY 1892 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s INFERNO with illustrations by Gustave Doré 1899 Thomas Okey (PURGATORIO), Dr. John Aitken Carlyle (INFERNO), and Philip H. Wicksteed (PARADISO) DIVINE COMEDY 1980 C.H. Sisson’s DIVINE COMEDY 1994 Robert Pinsky’s THE INFERNO OF DANTE (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 45 HDT WHAT? INDEX
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(INFERNO), and Philip H. Wicksteed (PARADISO). With full notes. LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, I LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, II LA DIVINA COMMEDIA, III
13. There have been over the years a very great many attempts to accomplish this: 1782 Charles Rogers’s INFERNO only (blank verse) 1785-1802 Reverend Henry Boyd’s DIVINE COMEDY (rhymed six-line stanzas) 1805-1806 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s INFERNO only (blank verse) 1812 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s DIVINE COMEDY (blank verse) 1807 N. Howard’s INFERNO only 1833-1840 I.C. Wright’s DIVINE COMEDY 1836 Odoardo Volpi’s ten cantos of INFERNO in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1842 C. Hindley’s INFERNO only (in prose) 1843 Reverend John Dayman’s INFERNO only 1849 Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s INFERNO only (in prose) 1850 Patrick Bannerman’s DIVINE COMEDY 1851-1854 C.B. Cayley’s DIVINE COMEDY 1852 E. O’Donnell’s DIVINE COMEDY (in prose) 1854 T. Brooksbank’s INFERNO only 1854 Frederick Pollock’s DIVINE COMEDY 1846 James Henry Leigh Hunt’s STORIES FROM THE ITALIAN POETS, portions of DIVINE COMEDY 1859 J.W. Thomas’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1859 Bruce Whyte’s INFERNO only 1862 “Hugh Bent” (nom de plume)’s INFERNO only 1862 W.P. Wilkie’s INFERNO only 1862/1863 Mrs. Ramsay’s DIVINE COMEDY 1865 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 17 cantos of INFERNO 1865 James Ford’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1865 Reverend John Dayman’s DIVINE COMEDY in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1865 William Michael Rossetti’s INFERNO only 1865/1866 Reverend H.F. Cary’s INFERNO only, illustrated by G. Doré 1867 Dr. John Aitken Carlyle’s INFERNO only (in prose) (2d edition) 1867 Thomas William Parsons’s first canticle of INFERNO only 1867 Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s DIVINE COMEDY 1867 Reverend Henry F. Cary’s DIVINE COMEDY 1867/1868 D. Johnston’s DIVINE COMEDY 1871 Miss Rossetti’s SHADOW OF DANTE, portions of DIVINE COMEDY 1871 Ernest Ridsdale Ellaby’s ten cantos of INFERNO in the original Terza Rima of Dante’s Italian 1876 J.W. Parsons’s nine cantos of PURGATORIO 1877 Mrs. Oliphant’s FOREIGN CLASSICS FOR ENGLISH READERS, portions of DIVINE COMEDY 1892 Reverend Henry Francis Cary’s INFERNO with illustrations by Gustave Doré 1899 Thomas Okey (PURGATORIO), Dr. John Aitken Carlyle (INFERNO), and Philip H. Wicksteed (PARADISO) DIVINE COMEDY 1980 C.H. Sisson’s DIVINE COMEDY 1994 Robert Pinsky’s THE INFERNO OF DANTE (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
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1950
Joseph Chesley Mathews’s “Thoreau’s Reading in Dante,” Italica 27 (1950):77-81.
Translation of Thoreau materials into Portuguese in Brazil: ENSAÍSTAS AMERICANOS. Coleção Clássicos Jackson, vol. XXXIII. Tradução de Sarmento de Beires e José Duarte. Contém “Andar a pé.” São Paulo: W.M. Jackson. 360 pages. TIMELINE OF WALDEN
1988
As I recollect, it was in about this year –after having successfully pioneered the copying of an old typesetting tape of the King James Bible into straight ASCII test and burned it onto a CD-ROM, and after having belatedly realized that technological advances of this sort were immaterial unless someone could somehow be induced to access the electronic results– that I began to muse on the prospect that, as Dante had used Virgil as his guide through INFERNO, PURGATORIO, and PARADISO, we might with benefit use Henry Thoreau as our guide through the known and unknown universe of our own divine comedy: ASSLEY WE NEED A TRAVELING COMPANION
We live in an educated age – at least people generally read and write. We live in a religious age – at least people attend various worship services and seek “a religious experience.” But we no longer study our Scriptures as we should. This is a problem in all religious traditions, but in particular, to my own mortification, Quakers don’t study the Bible. We find ourselves encouraged to peruse a whole lot of quasi-religious stuff such as what my monthly meeting’s “reading club” is currently sitting around reading to each other on a series of Thursday nights, M. Scott Peck’s THE DIFFERENT DRUM, but after our childhood indoctrination or immunization we no longer pay much attention to our traditional stuff.
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The result is that we are shallow. For instance, we are quite unable to read WALDEN as it was written: not only do the greater number of Thoreau’s allusions to the Hindu spiritual tradition escape us, but also even his allusions to the dominant spiritual traditions of New England. I offer that at least part of the problem of our unfamiliarity with our heritage is that in this era we no longer have an adequate “persona” to guide us in our religious wanderings. We need a READER’S G UIDE TO P ROFOUND L ITERATURE. When a tired traveler takes a Gideon BIBLE out of a dresser drawer in a Duluth motel, and flips through it, scripture is encountered directly, as a “writing” severed from all context, or worse, this tired traveler has an image of the member of the Gideon Society who placed that Gideon in that drawer. The image we tend to have (which may be false!) is that of a spiritual molester – it is the image of some self-righteous businessman who is trying to salve his tired soul by saving others’ souls. Consequently, resistance to the sacred words puts the tired traveler to sleep. Our Bibles have become pillow books, pillows, pills. But as the image of Virgil once guided Dante over the supernatural terrain of the INFERNO, might not the image of Thoreau be a suitable guide for us through the texts of the sacred scriptures?
We may any day take a walk as strange as Dante Alighieri’s imaginary one to L’INFERNO or PARADISO (MLJ 29: 242-43; MS only).
As Dante Alighieri once allowed the image of Virgil to guide him over the supernatural terrain of the INFERNO, let us allow the image of Thoreau to guide us beyond the strangeness of, beyond
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our estrangement from, our sacred texts.
It is a matter of what is significant to us. Auto repair instructions are currently being put on CD-ROM for a number of reasons centering around the concept of accessibility. We might be as willing to do this for our scriptures as for our repair
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manuals, for they are no less significant to us. Now that the technology is available, putting the scriptures of the world on CD-ROM –at least one English translation of the books of the BIBLE, and the BHAGAVAD GITA, and the FOUR BOOKS of China, and the QUR’AN, etc.– would be no stunt. It would not be in the same league with using a microscope to inscribe the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin as was popular in my youth. It is a vital project. Just as this is more than just a technological project, to demonstrate that it is possible to user modern technology to create a new kind of scholarly journal that is cumulative from issue to issue, it can be more than just a literary or historical project in academia. Yes, I am well aware that no-one who is presently unwilling to muse on Scripture out of a bound book will be eager to scroll through the same words on a green screen! There is much more to this than technology or literature or history: we can use Thoreau as a persona to guide us in our religious readings, in such a manner as to make ourselves eager to scroll through them on the computer screen. The linkage is utterly simple: Thoreau loved all these old books with the most sincere passion, and we all love Thoreau. Although our disk of religious writings will serve the purposes of a study of an interesting and almost contemporary life, Thoreau’s life, it can in fact have other uses, devotional uses. For our Thoreau was not merely a poet or nature watcher, or merely an Emerson clone. When Thoreau cries “Blake! Blake! are you awake?” he is of course attempting to speak like a man in a waking moment to a man in his waking moment and he is of course summoning his definition “Morning is when I am awake and there is dawn in me” which he derived from his reading of the VISHNU PURANA in early 1850: “All intelligences awake with the morning.” He is suggesting to Blake that his two observations of maternal behavior at the depôt are something that we will need to stand on tiptoe to understand and something that we will need to devote our most alert and wakeful hours to. What I am adding to Thoreau’s insistence on alertness is my own insistence that, for these intricate studies into our best thoughts, we must utilize the most advanced and capable computer hardware, operating systems, applications software, and multimedia hypertext contextures. –We need all the help we can get, so our task will not be quite beyond our abilities.
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1992
July 6, Monday: Andrew Delbanco, who edited and wrote the introduction to Viking’s THE PORTABLE ABRAHAM 14 LINCOLN, reviewed the new volume 4 of Henry Thoreau’s JOURNAL in the pages of The New Republic (v207, n2:37-42):
[go to material presented on next screen] There is an unprovable, intriguing story that when Thoreau was teaching school in Concord (a plum of a job after the 1837 financial crash), a school board member visited his class and reprimanded him for failing to cane his students. Thoreau walked back into the classroom, selected six students at random, and beat them vigorously. And then he quit. The story accords with Thoreau’s spirit, if not necessarily with the facts; and there is a hint in it of his peculiar position in the American literary tradition. The better-known part of Thoreau was the gentle dissident who spent a night in Concord jail rather than pay the poll tax. But he had also a certain pursed-lipped sourness; out on the trail he was adept, as one of his best recent critics has put it, at consuming wild berries that “were so tart it was a triumph to eat them.” Thoreau’s was an unreconciled temperament. He was a countercultural hero, a nineteenth-century combination of Pete Seeger and Noam Chomsky. If he wrote reverently about nature, he was equally capable of writing about people with a shriveling disdain: One farmer says to me, “You cannot live on vegetable food solely, for it furnishes nothing to make bones with”; and so he religiously devotes a part of his day to supplying his system with the raw material of bones; walking all the while he talks behind his oxen, which, with vegetable-made bones, jerk him and his lumbering plough along in spite of every obstacle. Thoreau would have something acerbic to say, in this spirit, about his appearance in one of the black-jacketed volumes of the LIBRARY OF AMERICA, for which he has been cut to the same size, bound in the same cloth, and furnished with the same typeface and bookmark ribbon as the other writers (including, now, a couple of generals and politicians) who have been designated American classics. Being packaged as a worthy would make him uneasy, since he was, among the great figures of the American Renaissance, the most suspicious, arch, macabre. He was corrosively skeptical of all established structures and quick to categorize other men even as he condemned them for having categorical minds. In his lapidary technique and ghoulish humor (in the “Higher Laws” chapter of WALDEN he says that he is
14. Henry Thoreau. THE WRITINGS OF HENRY D. THOREAU, JOURNAL, VOLUME 4: 1851-1852, ed. Neufeldt, Leonard N. and Nancy Craig Simmons, Princeton NJ: Princeton UP, 1992 TIMELINE OF JOURNAL
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“strongly tempted to seize and devour [a woodchuck] raw”), he bore less resemblance to the earnest New England transcendentalists than to the alien writer whom Emerson called “the jingle man,” that is, to Poe. Wounded by a sense of disfranchisement –the son of a pencilmaker, he was short of money most of his life– Thoreau was always contemptuous of social organizations, even those that were willing to include him. When he replied to the Harvard alumni questionnaire by acknowledging that he was only marginally employed, he declined to be considered a charity case, and offered advice to any of his classmates who might wish something more valuable than money. Asked to join the Brook Farm communal experiment, he declined on the grounds that “I had rather keep bachelor’s hall in hell than go to board in heaven.” And when he traveled through New England in search of the receding wilderness, walking “across-lots” and following his compass and ignoring the fences and hedges that marked property lines, he saw nature as a great contaminated garden, and could seem oblivious to the plucky men who struggled to make a living from what nature supplied them: No wonder that we hear so often of vessels which are becalmed off our coast, being surrounded a week at a time by floating lumber from the Maine woods. The mission of men these seems to be, like so many busy demons, to drive the forest all out of the country, from every solitary beaver-swamp and mountain-side, as soon as possible. The hovels of the cattle, he remarks, could be distinguished from those of the loggers only because they have no chimneys. For the last twenty-four of his forty-five years, Thoreau kept a journal that ran to nearly 2 million words. Out of the more than forty volumes of what John L. O’Sullivan called “private interviews with nature,” he fashioned two books that were published in his lifetime, A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS and WALDEN. Through the efforts of friends, two more volumes, THE MAINE WOODS and CAPE COD (which had appeared partially in magazines), and several collections of essays and letters were published posthumously. As a result, we think of Thoreau as a writer of books. But it is not clear that this is the way he wanted it to be. “I do not know,” he wrote in his journal in 1852, “but thoughts written down thus in a journal might be printed in the same form to greater advantage – than if the related ones were brought together into separate essays. They are now allied to life – and are seen by the reader not to be far fetched.” The fact is that Thoreau did fetch his own words from afar –from back volumes of his journal– for both A WEEK and WALDEN, which are books more constructed than written, in which the writer has plagiarized himself. Thoreau lived at Walden Pond, in a cabin of his own construction (neighbors helped to raise the frame) for twenty-six months, beginning on July 4, 1845. While other New Englanders went on grand adventures –R.H. Dana to the open sea, Francis Parkman to the Oregon territory– Thoreau remarked coyly that he had “traveled much in Concord.” His two years at the little pond outside the village have struck
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many readers as somehow comical, like a child camping in the backyard, bravely holding back urine until morning to avoid having to squat outdoors. He “sneaked back from Walden in the evening,” says Harold Bloom, “to be fed dinner by Lidian Emerson,” But these chastisements miss the point. Thoreau was not embarked on some Outward Bound test of manhood, yet where he lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia’s Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe.
Walden is the honest record of this self-exile. It is not an advertisement of competence or courage. Much of what Thoreau wrote in his journal while at Walden found its way, after many revisions, into the final version of the book, which was published in 1854. But the text as we know it also draws on earlier and later sources – notes he took on Staten Island years before; short, self-contained essays on what we would call the semiotics of clothing (“the head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same”) that he had written out in the early 1840s. Thoreau was a craftsman who worked with self-quotation and shuffled words that had once been, in Wordsworth’s phrase, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” but function later like modular blocks that can be placed in new relations with others composed in entirely discrete moods and moments. There is, as a result, a certain technological quality to the writing that Thoreau supervised for publication, as if he anticipated the new compositional possibilities made available to us all through the word processor. In this sense he belongs to a tradition of esoteric virtuosity; there are puzzles and clues embedded in WALDEN, a book that bristles with jokes in several languages and contains brilliant set pieces, such as the passage in which a wounded ant becomes Patroclus and his ferocious ally who avenges him by “gnawing at the near fore-leg of his enemy” becomes a formic Achilles. A great deal of Thoreau’s laborious artifice has been detailed by recent critics, but it was recognized already in his own time by his fellow transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. She wrote him a shrewd rejection note in response to an early submission to the DIAL: Last night’s second reading only confirms my impression from the first. The essay
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is rich in thoughts, and I should be pained not to meet it again. But then, the thoughts seem to me so out of their natural order, that I cannot read it through without pain. I never once felt myself in a stream of thought, but seem to hear the grating tools on the mosaic. This is perhaps the most acute comment ever made about Thoreau. Its establishment of the “stream of thought” as the ideal of literary representation that eluded him predates William James’s “stream of consciousness” by fifty year and Gertrude Stein by seventy-five. And when Fuller speaks of the pain that she felt in both approaching and leaving Thoreau’s prose, she has recognized in him a certain penal quality that is his genius and his limitation. Thoreau inflicts a kind of punishment on his reader because he hated, more than anything, intellectual laziness. He hated it in the way that Harriet Beecher Stowe hated slavery. He forbids us to relax into any accustomed mental posture: “We wished,” he writes in CAPE COD, “to associate with the ocean until it lost the pond-like look which it wears to a countryman.” The point is to attach all received ideas and images until they disintegrate under the assault. WALDEN is a lethal work (“I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still, and I threw them out the window in disgust”) that leaves no structure standing through which we may see, sense, or think the world as we had done before we read it. WALDEN is, in this sense, a very intolerant book. Its Emersonian project of destruction proceeds through a prose style that moves almost mechanically back and forth between contradictory assertions. “Old people,” Thoreau tells us, “did not know enough once, perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled around the globe with the speed of birds.” But at the same time the idea of progress is one of the myths he wishes most urgently to discredit: “We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.” Reading Thoreau is like walking a line held taut between two opposite-leaning posts. The prose retains its tension because of its internal antagonisms, which is why WALDEN has lately proved so attractive to the deconstructionists. Thoreau was not only a contradictory writer, he was also a contradictory man – a conservationist who once burned down 300 acres of woods by leaving a campfire undoused; a victim, according to some recent medical historians, of narcolepsy, who proclaimed his commitment always to wake with the sun. A man’s “growth requires,” he tells us, that he “remember well his ignorance,” yet he sends this proposition into collision with another one equally authoritative: “Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race.” The building materials of rustic WALDEN are its aphorisms modeled
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on classical sententiae; it is a book that summons us back to ignorance even as it rebukes us for the very ignorance we are supposed to recover. Beneath this vibration of contraries is a dreadful emptiness. The most cultivated and scholastic of the writers of the American Renaissance, Thoreau was ultimately a despiser of culture. He faced, I think, an abyss of his own creating – the specter of absolute self-reliance in a more radical sense than even Emerson contemplated. What Thoreau discovered was that language itself, in the narrow sense of verbal vocabulary and in the wider sense of gesture and accoutrements, made him feel dead, because it subjected him to the worn and degraded inventions of other minds. We are “like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in nests which other birds have built, and cheer no traveler with their chattering and unmusical notes.” Thoreau wanted desperately to make his own music, “to brag as lustily as Chanticleer in the morning, standing on his roost, if only to wake my neighbors up.” Without the sound of his own voice, in the fullest proprietary sense, he felt lost in the cacophony of culture, and regarded himself as a bloodless automation. Yet language was the human thing he most loved. One becomes aware of this from the way he italicizes certain words like auction and malaria, which carry, for him, not merely their conventional contemporary meanings (a public competitive sale; a feverish disease) but also older etymological meanings (an increase; bad air) – resonances from the Latin and Italian that have become almost inaudible beneath the parochial hum of culture. These ancient meanings are precious to Thoreau, not because they confer upon such words that dignity of age, or require acts of archaeology from the superior reader, but because they suggest a pure point of locatable origin behind the process of linguistic change. Words, for Thoreau, carry traces of God. WALDEN, in this sense, is a redemptive book. It peels away the layers of culture from everything it examines –words, dress, social habits– because beneath them, Thoreau believes, lies some ultimate stability that exists outside time. He was less the modern writer than his contemporary Melville, who, though he shared Thoreau’s quest for divinity in and through language, suspected that “by vast pains we mine into the pyramid; by horrible gropings we come to the central room; with joy we espy the sarcophagus; but we lift the lid –and no body is there! – appallingly vacant as vast is the soul of man!” Facing the prospect of such deserted ruins, Thoreau because what I would call a secret Catholic – the pilgrim who discovers and takes refuge in what he judges to be the one durable Church in which the spirit of God has consented to be realized in human form. Of the members of Emerson’s circle, only Orestes Brownson actually converted to Rome, but Thoreau, no less passionately, made a Church of his own words. “It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look.” Words themselves become objects of worship – through which “we
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are enabled to apprehend ... what is sublime and noble ... by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality which surrounds us.” As WALDEN proceeds with this sanctifying fervor, it is written more and more as if its own purified vocabulary were literally the only words God had permitted to be left in the word. This kind of self-enclosure may be seen in the stunning chapter on “The Village,” which describes the Main Street of Concord as a complete digestive system, by which the traveler is ingested, passed, and excreted “out through the rear avenues.” One can read this passage again and again without noticing the excremental metaphor, but once it is pointed out (as it was to me years ago by Joel Porte) the passage can never be read innocently again. Though it may certainly have precedents in Dante Alighieri and Rabelais and others, Thoreau’s own metaphoric invention now controls us utterly. Concord becomes a permanently clogged intestine, and his revulsion becomes our own. After reading this it is hard to visit Concord as a cheerful tourist again – as unlikely as tapping one’s foot to “Singin’ in the Rain” after seeing A Clockwork Orange. This passage, like many others among the most achieved in WALDEN and A WEEK, had first been written out years before in the journal – and is placed like an adjusted piece of masonry into a waiting slot in the book. Here, I think, we come to the heart of Thoreau’s dilemma. The project of his books is to break down the structures that intervene between culture and nature: “If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the hear and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career.” But in the end this ecstatic suicide cannot be performed through highly conscious craftsmanship, which creates opaque, if impressive, new edifices. The most moving moments in WALDEN are those where Thoreau recognizes this impasse: Though the woodchoppers have laid bare first this shore and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and the railroad has infringed on its border, and the icemen have skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me. It has not acquired one permanent wrinkle after all its ripples.... It struck me again tonight, as if I had not seen it almost daily for more than twenty years, –Why, here is Walden, the same woodland lake that I discovered so many years ago; ... it is the same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its Maker, ay, and it may be to me. Thoreau speaks here of the lake as if he has puppied after it (“almost daily”) like a shooed-away lover who will not give up; but the more devastating confession is that the aliveness that he had once known is slipping away. Thoreau’s self-portrait in WALDEN belongs with Dreiser’s portrait of Hurstwood and Hemingway’s of Jake Barnes. They are failing. Through and against language, Thoreau tries to get these powers back. Another way to put this is to say that death is the specter over Thoreau’s work. Magnifying the deadly struggle of the red and
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black ants under a tumbler on his windowsill, he writes with efficient fascination about the “breast all torn away,” the exposed vitals, “the still living heads... hanging on either side of” one ant “like ghastly trophies at his saddlebow.” In the harrowing first chapter of CAPE COD he walks the beach after a ship carrying Irish immigrants has run aground and broken up: I saw many marble feet and matted heads as the cloths were raised, and one livid, swollen, and mangled body of a drowned girl, –who probably had intended to go out to service in some American family, –to which some rags still adhered, with a string, half concealed by the flesh, about its swollen neck; the coiled-up wreck of a human hulk, gashed by the rocks or fishes, so that the bone and muscle were exposed, but quite bloodless, – merely red and white, –with wide-open and staring eyes, yet lustreless, deadlights; or like the cabin windows of a stranded vessel, filled with sand. This kind of writing, posing as an aesthetic evaluation, is really a test of Thoreau’s capacity to keep from flinching as “the sweet edge” of death cuts him “through the heart and marrow” – as he had been cut years before by his brother’s agonized death from lockjaw. He presents, for his own strengthening, the image of the men with carts busily collecting the seaweed which the storm had cast up, and conveying it beyond the reach of the tide, though they were often obliged to separate fragments of clothing from it, and they might at any moment have found a human body under it. Drown who might, they did not forget that this weed was a valuable manure. One is tempted to hear in this report the old intolerant voice of the lemonish Thoreau, as if he is judging these scavengers for disrespecting the dead. But I think the emotion here is closer to envy than to disgust. These stoic New Englanders are part of the natural cycle of things, salvaging the seaweed, preparing it for market or their own use, undefeated by the prospect that each new wave may wash up a new corpse and remind them of their own mortality. Thoreau wants not to dismiss them, but to find a way –despite all his contempt for the drudgery and thoughtlessness of their labor– to join them. He wants, in other words, to be somehow immunized against the fate of one woman who had come over [from Ireland] before, but had left her infant behind for her sister to bring, [and who] came and looked into these boxes, and saw in one ... her child in her sister’s arms, as if the sister had meant to be found thus; and within three days after, the mother died from the effect of that sight. Thoreau’s writing is, in the final analysis, an effort to train himself to go on living after such a sight. The finished books are the public testimonies of his survival. But his real self-therapy was his journal. It was published at the beginning of this century in a bulky edition, but is now being edited into a new clear text by a team of scholars at Princeton University Press, who have included some material never before published – fragmentary remains of portions of the journal from which Thoreau tore out sheets for insertion into works in draft. In this latest volume of the Princeton edition we can see Thoreau’s conception of the journal changing from a
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storehouse to be raided to an integral work in its own right. I would venture the prediction that Thoreau’s reputation has not yet reached its peak, because we are only beginning to know the journal. As it emerges we will recognize, more and more, his prescient formulations of what has become the leading intellectual problem of our time: the effort to move from the skeptical to the constructive mood; to come to terms with the discovery that rationality is just one in the infinite range of possible cultural performances; to remake a humane world at a time when the human “sciences” seem devoted to exposing their own arbitrariness. Thoreau’s skepticism was no less stringent that our own. What he had that we are losing was the redemptive idea of nature. It is in the journals even more than in the great books of “natural history” –A WEEK, WALDEN, THE MAINE WOODS, CAPE COD– that he takes us without stint to the experience of “fronting” nature. In the most careful study yet of the compositional relations between the journals and the books, H. Daniel Peck remarks that for Thoreau, the very act of making a “book” implied closure.... To make a book like WALDEN means drawing a boundary around the experiences it describes ... and it is precisely because he did not have to think of his JOURNAL as a text that he felt free to range between category and relation exactly as the power of paradigms, on the one hand, and the power of the world’s images, on the other, moved him. One sample from the extraordinary journal, from July 1851, will illustrate Peck’s important point: Now I yearn for one of those old meandering dry uninhabited roads which lead away from towns –which lead us away from temptation, which conduct to the outside of earth –over its uppermost crust –where you may forget in what country you are traveling –where no farmer can complain that you are treading down his grass –no gentleman who has recently constructed a seat in the country that you are trespassing –on which you can go off at half cock –and waive adieu to the village –along which you may travel like a pilgrim –going nowhither. Where travelers are not too often to be met. Where my spirit is free –where the walls & fences are not cared for –where your head is more in heaven than your feet are on earth –which have long reaches –where you can see the approaching traveler half a mile off and be prepared for him –not so luxuriant a soil as to attract men –some root and stump fences which do not need attention –Where travelers have no occasion to stop –but pass along and leave you to your thoughts –Where it makes no odds which way you face whether you are going or coming –whether it is morning or evening –mid noon or mid-night –Where earth is cheap enough by being public. Where you can walk and think with least obstruction –there being nothing to measure progress by. The exhilarating forward pressure of the open punctuation, the indifference to time, the ebullience of the Janusfaced traveler, all ensure that wherever we stop quoting from this passage, we have severed it from itself. Thoreau could not “walk and think with least obstruction” in the confines of a book. He was freest in his journal, and he knew, even as he made more than one literary monument out of it, that he was doing it a violence. Reading Thoreau, whether in the spontaneous journal or in the finished books, one feels accused of hoarding comforts. Among
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the strongest reactions I have ever witnessed in a student was during a class on WALDEN when one of my undergraduates, a daughter of Korean immigrants, protested almost to the point of tears that she valued her clothes, her furniture, her things, and that she resented this man for trying to take this capacity for pleasure away from her. “It is desirable that a man be clad so simply that he can lay his hands on himself in the dark, and that he live in all respects so compactly and preparedly, that if an enemy take the town, he can, like the old philosopher, walk out the gate empty-handed without anxiety.” My student did not want to hear that. Her protest was heartfelt because Thoreau had reached her, as we say, where she lives. He is, despite all the barricades he erected around himself, an irresistible writer; to read him is to feel wrenched away from the customary world and delivered into a place we fear as much as we need. Midway on his hike toward Mt. Katahdin, he accepts a drink of cedar beer from a backwoodsman and finds that “it was as if we sucked at the very teats of Nature’s pine-clad bosom.” Then, in words of wonderful pungency, he gives us (and himself) the full flavor of the drink: it tasted of the sap of all Millionocket botany commingled, –the topmost, most fantastic, and spiciest sprays of the primitive wood, and whatever invigorating and stringent gum or essence it afforded steeped and dissolved in it, –a lumberer’s drink, which would acclimate and naturalize a man at once, –which would make him see green, and, if he slept, dream that he heard the wind sought among the pines. To read Thoreau is almost to taste this elixir, and, with the unbearably tactile sense he gives of its absence, to crave it all the more.
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: November 17, 2013
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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request we have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining. To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a button.
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Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
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