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Title: Reform and the Reformers Author: Henry David Thoreau Language: en Topics: reform, reformism Source: Retrieved on 1st November 2020 from https://sniggle.net/TPL/index5.php?entry=reformers Notes: Thoreau never published this text. It has been assembled from notes he used first when giving a lecture on “The Conservative and the Reformer” in Boston in 1844, and later when trying to reuse this material for Walden and A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.
The Reformers are no doubt the true ancestors of the next generation;
the Conservative belongs to a decaying family, and has not learned that
he who seeks to save his “life” shall lose it. Both are sick, but the
one is already convalescent. His disease is not organic but acute, and
he looks forward to coming springs with hope. He is not sick of any
incurable disorder, of plague or consumption; but of tradition and
conformity and infidelity; but the other is still taking his bitters and
quack medicines patiently, and will grow worse yet. The heads of
conservatives have a puny and deficient look, a certain callowness and
concavity, as if they were prematurely exposed on one or both sides, or
were made to lie or pack together, as when several nuts are formed under
the same burr where only one should have been. We wonder to see such a
head wear a whole hat. Such as these naturally herd together for mutual
protection. They say We and Our, as if they had never been assured of an
individual existence. Our Indian policy; our coast defenses, our
national character. They are what are called public men, fashionable
men, ambitious men, chaplains of the army or navy; men of property,
standing and respectability, for the most part, and in all cases created
by society. Sometimes even they are embarked in “Great Causes” which
have been stranded on the shores of society in a previous age, carrying
them through with a kind of reflected and traditionary nobleness,
certainly disinterestedness. The Conservative has many virtues which the
Reformer has not — ofttimes a singular and unexpected liberality and
courtesy, a decided practicalness and reverence for facts, and with a
little less irritability, or more indifference would be the more
tolerable companion. He is the steward of society, and in this office at
least is faithful and generous. He is a dutiful son but a tyrannical
father, and does not foresee that unimaginable epoch when the rising
generation will have attained to a level with the risen. Rather he is
himself a son all his days, and never arrives at such maturity as to be
informed that he and such as he are now mankind and the latest
generation, the occupants and proprietors of the globe, but he still
feels it to be his chief duty to preserve the law and order and
institutions which he finds existing.
It is remarkable how well men train. The teamster rolls out of his
cradle into a Tom-and-Jerry — and goes at once to look after his team —
to fodder and water his horses, without standing agape at his position.
What is the destiny of a man, compared with the shipping interests? What
does he care for — his creator? doesn’t he drive for Squire Make-a-Stir?
The ladies of the land with equal bravery are weavers of toilet cushions
and tidies not to betray too green an interest in their fates. Men now
take snuff into their noses, but if they had been so advised in season,
they would have put it into their ears and eyes. They may gravely deny
this, but do not believe them.
In the midst of all this disorder and imperfection in human affairs
which he would rather avoid to think of comes the Reformer, the
impersonation of disorder and imperfection; to heal and reform them;
seeking to discover the divine order and conform to it; and earnestly
asking the cooperation of men.
No doubt the evil is great and manifest, and something must certainly be
done; and his zeal is in proportion to the urgency of the case — but I
know of few radicals as yet who are radical enough, and have not got
this name rather by meddling with the exposed roots of innocent
institutions than with their own.
The disease and disorder in society are wont to be referred to the false
relations in which men live one to another, but strictly speaking there
can be no such thing as a false relation if the condition of the things
related is true. False relations grow out of false conditions. The
inmate of a poorhouse would be more pauper still on a desolate island,
and the convict would find his prison and prison discipline there.
It is not the worst reason why the reform should be a private and
individual enterprise, that perchance the evil may be private also. From
what southern plains comes up the voice of wailing — under what
latitudes reside the heathen to whom we would send light — and who is
that intemperate and brutal man whom he would redeem?
Now, if anything ail a man so that he does not perform his functions;
especially if his digestion is poor, though he may have considerable
nervous strength left; if he has failed in all his undertakings
hitherto; if he has committed some heinous sin and partially repents,
what does he do? He sets about reforming the world. Do ye hear it, ye
Woloffs, ye Patagonians, ye Tartars, ye Nez Percés? The world is going
to be reformed, formed once and for all. Presto — Change! Methinks I
hear the glad tidings spreading over the green prairies of the west;
over the silent South American pampas, parched African deserts, and
stretching Siberian versts; through the populous Indian and Chinese
villages, along the Indus, the Ganges, and Hydaspes.
There is no reformer on the globe, no such philanthropic, benevolent and
charitable man, now engaged in any good work anywhere, sorely afflicted
by the sight of misery around him, and animated by the desire to relieve
it, who would not instantly and unconsciously sign off from these pure
labors, and betake himself to purer, if he had but righted some obscure,
and perhaps unrecognized private grievance. Let but the spring come to
him, let the morning rise over his couch, and he will forsake his
generous companions, without apology or explanation!
The Reformer who comes recommending any institution or system to the
adoption of men, must not rely solely on logic and argument, or on
eloquence and oratory for his success, but see that he represents one
pretty perfect institution in himself, the center and circumference of
all others, an erect man.
I ask of all Reformers, of all who are recommending Temperance, Justice,
Charity, Peace, the Family, Community or Associative life, not to give
us their theory and wisdom only, for these are no proof, but to carry
around with them each a small specimen of his own manufactures, and to
despair of ever recommending anything of which a small sample at least
cannot be exhibited: — that the Temperance man let me know the savor of
Temperance, if it be good, the Just man permit to enjoy the blessings of
liberty while with him, the Community man allow me to taste the sweets
of the Community life in his society.
I cannot bear to be told to wait for good results, I pine as much for
good beginnings. We never come to final results, and it is too late to
start from perennial beginnings.
But alas, when we ask the schemer to show us the material of which his
structure is to be built. He exhibits only fair looking words, resolute
and solid words for the underpinning, convenient and homely words for
the body of the edifice, poems and flights of the imagination for the
dome and cupola.
Men know very well how to distinguish barren words from those which are
cousin to a deed, and the promising or threatening speaker is only rated
at his faculty and resolution to do what he says. The phlegmatic
audience which sits near the doors know that the speaker does not mean
to abolish property or dissolve the family die, or do without human
governments all over the world tonight, but that simply, he has agreed
to be the speaker and — they have agreed to be the audience. They may
chance to know that the lecturer against the use of money is paid for
his lecture, and that is the precept which they hear and believe, and
they have a great deal of sympathy with him.
After all the peace lectures and non-resistance meetings it was never
yet learned from them how any of the speakers would conduct in an
emergency, because a very important disputant, one Mr. Resistance was
not present to offer his arguments.
There are not only books, but lectures and sermons of fiction, whether
written or extemporaneous. The modern Reformers are a class of
improvvisánti more wonderful and amusing than the Italians.
What the prophets even have said is forgotten, and the oracles are
decayed, but what heroes and saints have done is still remembered, and
posterity will tell it again and again.
We rarely see the Reformer who is fairly launched in his enterprise,
bringing about the right state of things with hearty and effective tugs,
and not rather preparing and grading the way through the minds of the
people. What if the community were to pull altogether says he! — Aye,
what if two — what if one even were to work harmoniously and with all
his energies! say I. No wonder you plead for my cooperation — I could
exert myself considerably. It would be worth the whole methinks to have
my traces hitched to some good institution.
There certainly can be no greater folly than for men to set about to
prove a truth at their leisure who have no other business with it. As if
one were to proclaim that he was going a long journey, and because one
of his neighbors was inattentive or did not believe it, should put it
off. To the man of industry and work it is not quite essential that I
should think with him. When my neighbor is going to build a house,
whether for me or for himself, he does not come to me and reproach or
pity me for living in a shed, but he digs the cellar and raises the
frame, and makes haste to get the roof done, that he may do the
inside-work more comfortably, and he knows very well what assistance he
can count upon in these labors.
For the most part by simply agreeing in opinion with the preacher and
Reformer I defend myself and get rid of him, for he really asks for no
sympathy with deeds — and this trick it would be well for the irritable
Conservative to know and practice.
The great benefactors of their race have been single and singular and
not masses of men. Whether in poetry or history it is the same: Minerva
— Ceres — Neptune — Prometheus — Socrates — Christ — Luther — Columbus —
Arkwright.
There is no objection to action in societies or communities when it is
the individual using the society as his instrument, rather than the
society using the individual. While one’s inspiration is so high and
pure as to be necessarily solitary and not to be made a subject of
sympathy or congratulation, he may safely use any instrument in his way,
whether wood or iron or masses of men. But when the vote of the society
rises to a level with his own prayers, and its resolution in the least
confirms his own, he may suspect himself, or he may suspect his
companions. There have been meetings, religious, political and
reformatory, to which men came a hundred miles — though all they had to
offer were — some resolutions! What becomes of resolutions that have
been offered?
In every society there is or was at least one individual, its founder
and leader, who did not belong to it, but who imparted to it whatever
life and efficiency it had, and sad indeed is the condition of that
society, and it is the condition of most, which is deprived of its head
— and soul — for the members can still vote — and as it were by force of
galvanism, a spasmodic action be kept up in the body, and men call it
life, and expect virtue and character from senseless nerves and muscles.
Such societies, as they prize life, will have recourse to dinners and
tea-parties that the members may not utterly fail for want of a belly
also.
Consider, after all, how very private and silent an affair it is to lead
a life — that we do not consider our duties, or the actions of our life,
as in a caucus or convention of men, where the subject has been before
the meeting a long time, and many resolutions have been proposed and
passed, and now one speaker has the floor and then another, and the
subject is fairly under discussion; but the convention where our most
private and intimate affairs are discussed is very thinly attended,
almost we are not there ourselves, that is the go-to-meeting part of us.
It is very still, and few resolutions get passed. Few words are spoken,
and the hours are not counted!
Next and nearest to that unfortunate man, even whom we would stand by in
our philanthropy, is the mystery of his life. It is nearer than cold or
hunger, for they are but the outside of it — it is between him and them,
and do what we will, we must leave him alone with that.
The information which the gods vouchsafe to give us is never concerning
anything which we wished to know. We are not wise enough to put a
question to them. Tell me some truth about society and you will
annihilate it. What though we are its ailing members and prisoners. We
cannot always be detained by your measures for reform. All that is
called hindrance without is but occasion within. The prisoner who is
free in spirit, on whose innocent life some rays of light and hope still
fall, will not delay to be a reformer of prisons, an inventor of
superior prison disciplines, but walks forth free on the path by which
those rays penetrated to his cell. Has the Green Mountain boy made no
better nor more thrilling discovery than that the church is rotten and
the state corrupt? Thank heaven, we have not to choose our calling out
of those enterprises which society has to offer. Is he then indeed
called, who chooses to what he is called? Obey your calling rather, and
it will not be whither your neighbors and kind friends and patrons
expect or desire, but be true nevertheless, and choose not, nor go
whither they call you. “Thy lot or portion of life, is seeking after
thee; therefore be at rest from seeking after it.”
From the side to which all eyes are turned, and the hue and cry leads,
from the effort which the state abets, and the church prays for, the
least profitable result comes, the least performance issues.
We would have some pure product of man’s hands, some pure labor, some
life got in this old trade of getting a living — some work done which
shall not be a mending, a cobbling, a reforming. Show me the mountain
boy, the city boy, who never heard of an abuse, who has not chosen his
calling. It is the delight of the ages, the free labor of man, even the
creative and beautiful arts.
Be sure your fate
Doth keep apart its state;
Not linked with any band,
Even the noblest of the land;
In tented fields with cloth of gold
No place doth hold,
But is more chivalrous than they are,
And sigheth for a nobler war;
A finer strain its trumpet sings,
A brighter gleam its armor flings.
The life that I aspire to live
No man proposeth me,
Only the promise of my heart
Wears its emblazonry.
How long shall vice give a home to virtue? One generation abandons the
enterprises of another. Many an institution which was thought to be an
essential part of the order of society, has, in the true order of
events, been left like a stranded vessel on the sand.
When a zealous Reformer would fain discourse to me, I would have him
consider first if he has anything to say to me. All simple and necessary
speech between men is sweet; but it takes calamity, it takes death or
great good fortune commonly to bring them together. We are sages and
proud to speak when we are the bearers of great news, even though it be
hard; to tell a man of the welfare of his kindred in foreign parts, or
even that his house is on fire, is a great good fortune, and seems to
relate us to him by a worthier tie.
It is a great blessing to have to do with men, to be called to them as
simply as into the field of your occupation. It refreshes and
invigorates us. But this happiness is rare. For the most part we can
only treat one another to our wit, our good manners and equanimity, and
though we have eagles to give we demand of each other only coppers. We
pray that our companion will demand of us truth, sincerity, love and
noble behavior, for now these virtues lie impossible to us, and we only
know them by their names. Only lovers know the value and magnanimity of
truth, while traders prize a cheap honesty, and neighbors and
acquaintances a cheap civility.
If you have nothing to say let me have your silence, for that is good
and fertile. Silence is the ambrosial night in the intercourse of men in
which their sincerity is recruited and takes deeper root. — There are
such vices as frivolity, garrulity, and verbosity, not to mention
profanity, growing out of the abuse of speech which does not belong
wholly to antiquity, and none have imparted a more cheerless aspect to
society.
A man must serve another and a better use than any he can consciously
render. Every class and order in the universe is the heaven of certain
gifts to men. There is a whole class of musk-bearing animals, and each
flower has its peculiar odor. And all these together go to make the
general wholesome and invigorating atmosphere. So each man should take
care to emit his fragrance, and after all perform some such office as
hemlock boughs, or dried and healing herbs. Though you are a Reformer we
want not your reasons, your good roots and foundations — nor your
uprightness and benevolence which are your stem and leaves — but we want
the flower and fruit of the man — that some fragrance at least as of
fresh spring life be wafted over from thee to me. This is consolation
and that charity that hides a multitude of sins. Our companion must be a
sort of appreciable wealth to us or at least make us sensible of our own
riches — in his degree an apostle á Mercury, á Ceres, á Minerva, the
bearer of diverse gifts to us. He must bring me the morning light
untarnished, and the evening red undimmed. There must be the hilarity of
spring in his mirth, the summer’s serenity in his joy, the autumnal
ripeness in his wisdom, and the repose and abundance of winter in his
silence. He should impart his courage and not his despair; his health
and ease, and not his disease, and take care that this does not spread
by contagion.
It is rare that we are able to impart wealth to our fellows, and do not
surround them with our own cast off griefs as an atmosphere, and name it
sympathy. If we would indeed reform mankind by truly Indian, botanic,
magnetic, or natural means, let us strive first to be as simple and well
as nature ourselves.
I would say therefore to the anxious speculator and philanthropist — Let
us dispel the clouds which hang over our own brows — take up a little
life into your pores, endeavor to encourage the flow of sap in your
veins, find your soil, strike root and grow — Apollo’s waters and God
will give the increase. Help to clothe the human field with green. Be
green and flourishing plants in God’s nursery, and not such complaining
bleeding trees as Dante saw in the Infernal Regions.
If your branches wither, send out your fibers into every kingdom of
nature for its contribution — lift up your boughs into the heavens for
ethereal and starry influences, let your roots like those of the willow
wander wider, deeper, to some moist and fertile spot in the earth, and
make firm your trunk against the elements.
Be fast rooted withal in your native soil of originality and
independence, your virgin mould of unexhausted strength and fertility —
Nor suffer yourself ever to be transplanted again into the foreign and
ungenial regions of tradition and conformity, or the lean and sandy
soils of public opinion.
What! to be blown about, a creature of the affections, preaching love
and good will and charity, with these tender fibers all bare in a cold
world, and not a brother kind enough to throw a spade-full of earth over
them! Better try what virtue there is in sand even, and cover your roots
with the first exhausted soil you can find.
Who shall tell what blossoms, what fruits, what public and private
advantage may push up through this rind we call a man? The traveller may
stand by him as a perennial fountain in the desert and slake his thirst
forever.
The wind rustling the leaves, the brags of some children have thrilled
me more than the lives of the greatest and holiest men. What idle sorrow
and stereotyped despair in the saints! What wavering performance in the
heroes! Even the prophets and redeemers have rather consoled the fears
than satisfied the free demands and hopes of man! We know nowhere
recorded a simple and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life,
a memorable and unbribed praise of God. So long as the Reformers are
earnest enough and pleased with their own conceptions, they may
entertain me, but when the time comes that their theme is exhausted, and
only the sad alternative is left to do the things they have said; and
they would rather that I should do them, then they are intolerable
companions.
I like the old world and I like the new — winter and summer, hay and
grass — but the death that presumes to give laws to life, and persists
in affirming essential disease and disorder to the child who has just
begun to bathe his senses and his understanding in the perception of
order and beauty — that perseveres in maturing its schemes of life till
its last days are come, is not to be compared to anything in nature. The
growing man or youth is a fact which commonly we do not enough allow for
in our speculations, but to remember which would be fatal to many a fine
theory. Speak for yourself, old man. When we are oppressed by the heat
and turmoil of the noon, we should remember that the sun which scorches
us with his beams is gilding the hills of morning and awaking the
woodland quires for other men. So too it must not be forgotten, the
evening exhibits in the still rear of day a beauty to which the morning
and the noon are strangers.
It is hard to make those who have talked much, especially preachers and
lecturers, deepen their speech, and give it fresh sincerity and
significance. It will be a long time before they understand what you
mean. They will wonder if you don’t value fluency. But the drains flow.
Turn your back, and wait till you hear their words ring solid, and they
will have cause to thank you! How infinitely trackless yet passable are
we. Is not our own interior white on the chart? Inward is a direction
which no traveller has taken. Inward is the bourne which all travellers
seek and from which none desire to return. There are the sources of the
Nile and Niger.
Every man is the lord of a realm beside which the earthly empire of the
Czars is but a petty state — with its ocean borders, its mountain
ranges, and its trackless paradises of unfallen nature. And, O ye
Reformers! if the good Gods have given ye any high ray of truth to be
wrought into life, here in your own realms without let or hindrance is
the application to be made.
Those who dwell in Oregon and the far west are not so solitary as the
enterprising and independent thinker, applying his discoveries to his
own life. This is the way we would see a man striving with his axe and
kettle to take up his abode. To this rich soil should the New Englander
wend his way. Here is Wisconsin and the farthest west. It is simple,
independent, original, natural life.
Most whom I meet in the streets are, so to speak, outward bound; they
live out and out, are going and coming, looking before and behind, all
out of doors and in the air. I would fain see them inward bound,
retiring in and in, farther and farther every day, and when I inquired
for them I should not hear that they had gone abroad anywhere, to
Rondont or Sackets Harbor, but that they had withdrawn deeper within the
folds of being.
England and France, Spain and Portugal, Gold Coast and Slave Coast, all
front upon this private sea, but no bark from them has ventured out of
sight of land — though it is without a doubt the direct way to India.
I would say then to my vagrant countrymen: Go not to any foreign theater
for spectacles, but consider first that there is nothing which can
delight or astonish the eyes, but you may discover it all in yourselves.
One hastens to Southern Africa perchance to chase the giraffe; but that
is not the game he would be after. How long, pray, would a man hunt
giraffes, if he could? — What was the meaning of that Exploring
Expedition with all its parade and expense, but a recognition of the
fact that there are continents and seas in the moral world to which
every man is an inlet, yet unexplored by him; but that it is easier to
sail many thousand miles through cold and storms and savage cannibals,
in a government ship, with five hundred men and boys to steer and sail
for one, than it is to explore the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific
ocean of one’s being alone.
Erret et extremos alter scrutetur Iberos.
Plus habet hic vitae, plus habet ille viae.
Let the other wander and scrutinize the outlandish Australians.
This one has more of God, that one has more of the road.
Here is demanded the eye and the nerve. Only the defeated and deserters
go to the wars — cowards that run away and enlist. O ye Chivalry, ye
could not fight a duel with your lives, and so ye challenged a man!
I met a pilgrim travel-worn, who could speak all tongues and conform
himself to the customs of all nations, who carried a passport to all
countries, and was naturalized in all climes, who had vanquished all the
chimeras and caused the Sphinx to go and dash her head against a stone,
who never retraced his steps nor returned to his native land, and was
reputed to have travelled further than all the travellers. He bore for
device on his shield these words only — “Know Thyself.”
“Direct your eye sight inward, and you’ll find
A thousand regions in your mind
Yet undiscovered. Travel them, and be
Expert in home-cosmographie.”
Most revolutions in society have not power to interest, still less alarm
us, but tell me that our rivers are drying up, or the genus pine dying
out in the country, and I might attend. Some events in history are more
remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun by which all are
attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.
Revolutions are never sudden. The most important is commonly some silent
and unobtrusive fact in history. In the year 449 three Saxon cyules
arrived on the British coast. “Three scipen gode comen mid than flode.”
To the sick the doctors wisely recommend a change of air and scenery.
Who chains me to this dull town?
There is this moment proposed to me every kind of life that men lead
anywhere or at any time — or that imagination can paint. By another
spring I may be a mail carrier in Peru, or a South African planter, or a
Siberian exile, or a Greenland whaler, or a settler on the Columbia
River, or a Canton merchant, or a soldier in Mexico, or a mackerel
fisher off Cape Sable, or a Robinson Crusoe in the Pacific, or a silent
navigator of any sea.
How many are not standing on the European coast whom another spring will
find located on the Wisconsin or the Sacramento!
I can move away from public opinion, from government, from religion,
from education, from society. Shall I be reckoned a rateable poll in the
county of Middlesex, or be rated at one spear under the palm trees of
Guinea? Shall I raise corn and potatoes in Massachusetts, or figs and
olives in Asia Minor? Sit out the day in my office in State street, or
ride it out on the steppes of Tartary? For my Brobdingnag I may sail to
Patagonia, for my Lilliput to Lapland. In Arabia and Persia my days’
adventures may surpass the Arabian Nights entertainments. I may be a
logger on the head waters of the Penobscot, to be recorded in fable
hereafter as an amphibious river God by as sounding a name as Triton or
Proteus — carry furs from Nootka to China and so be more renowned than
Jason and his Golden Fleece, or join a South Sea exploring expedition to
be recounted hereafter along with the Periplus of Hanno.
And how many more things may I do with which there is none to be
compared!
Thank Heaven here is not all the world. The buckeye does not grow in New
England, and the mocking bird is rarely heard here. Why should I fall
behind the summer and the migrations of birds? Shall we not compete with
the buffalo who keeps pace with the seasons, cropping the pastures of
the Colorado till a greener and sweeter grass awaits him by the
Yellowstone? The wild-goose is a more cosmopolite than we — he breaks
his fast in Canada, takes a luncheon in the Susquehanna, and plumes
himself for the night in a Louisiana bayou. The pigeon carries an acorn
in his crop from the King of Holland’s to Mason and Dixon’s Line. Yet we
think if rail-fences are pulled down and stone walls set up on our
farms, bounds are henceforth set to our lives and our fates decided. If
you are chosen town-clerk forsooth, you cannot go to Tierra del Fuego
this summer.
But what would all this activity amount to?
Goosey goosey gander
Where shall I wander?
Up stairs down stairs
In a lady’s chamber?
Shall we not stretch our legs? Why shall we pause this side of sundown?
We will not then be immigrants still further into our native country.
Let us start now on that fartherest western way which does not pause at
the Mississippi or the Pacific, pushing on by day and night, sun down,
moon down, stars down, and at last earth down too.