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Thoreau's Reading
A Study in Intellectual History with Bibliographical Catalogue
By Robert Sattelmeyer PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06745-2
CHAPTER 1
Harvard College, 1833–1837
Henry Thoreau "was fitted, or rather made unfit," as he later said, for college at Concord Academy under the tutelage of Phineas Allen. The academy, which Thoreau himself would later conduct with his brother John, had been founded as a college preparatory school in 1822, and its curriculum was explicitly designed to prepare its students for the Harvard entrance examinations. There were the "English Branches," where the scholars might study, depending upon the term and year, mathematics, composition and declamation, geography, history, and philosophy; but the primary emphasis was on languages: Latin, Greek, and French. The entrance exams themselves, according to the Harvard catalogue for 1833, the year Thoreau matriculated, covered the "whole of Virgil, Cicero's Select Orations, and Sallust; Jacob's Greek Reader, and the four Gospels of the Greek Testament," in addition to Greek and Latin grammar, arithmetic and algebra, and geography. Students were also expected to have some preparation in modern foreign languages. Thoreau's schoolmates at the academy remembered him as a quiet, somewhat standoffish boy who was both physically active and "very fond of reading," but he was an indifferent scholar at this age. In fact, he passed the entrance exams by the barest of margins and was "conditioned" (the rough equivalent of probationary status) in Greek, Latin, and mathematics, the three principal subjects. President Quincy told him bluntly, "You have barely got in" (EEM, 114).
Thoreau's parents, his mother especially, were eager for one of their sons to attend Harvard, and the family sacrificed to help put Henry through, but he apparently did not feel any corresponding pressure or burning ambition to excel. Compared with the educational regimen a decade earlier of the Emerson boys, who were required from the age of three to recite to their parents before breakfast, the pedagogical atmosphere in the Thoreau household was relaxed. Nor did Thoreau possess the sort of single-minded doggedness of application that enabled his Concord Academy friend and Harvard roommate Charles Stearns Wheeler to rank second in the class of 1837. Nevertheless, after his somewhat unpropitious start, he ranked sixth in a class of about fifty by his sophomore year. Thereafter he slipped somewhat from this relative eminence. Illness caused him to miss a term during his junior year, and as an upperclassman Thoreau apparently shared the skepticism of many of his fellows about Harvard's system of evaluation and ranking. President Quincy, in a letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson about some exhibition money Thoreau had won, ascribed Thoreau's failure to rank higher in his class to his having "imbibed some notions concerning emulation & College rank which had a natural tendency to diminish his zeal, if not his exertions."
Such notions would be difficult not to imbibe, given the system then in place. Class meetings, as well as class rank, were almost wholly based on recitation, which required mainly rote memorization and repetition of assignments. Class rank was determined by the accumulation of points assigned for everything from written themes to chapel attendance. The curriculum itself had remained essentially unchanged since the time of the Revolutionary War. During Thoreau's freshman year, members of all four classes petitioned to have the rank and recitation system changed, protesting with considerable justification that it "encouraged superficial scholarship," but as is usual in such cases the administration declined to consider their complaints. A few months later a more serious incident occurred: A student refused to translate in a Greek recitation class. When he withdrew from school rather than apologize to his tutor, the pent-up anger of his classmates erupted in the "Dunkin Rebellion," in which students destroyed the recitation room, attacked watchmen with rocks, and disrupted mandatory chapel services with "scraping, whistling, groaning and other disgraceful noises" such as anyone who has ever been in the company of adolescent boys can imagine. Several students were expelled, and the entire sophomore class was suspended for a term.
Nevertheless, despite this disorder and the narrowness of the system, Thoreau finished in the upper half of his class and won a place in commencement exercises. His generally good record suggests that he found Harvard to offer an unsophisticated New England village boy considerable impetus to intellectual growth. It had its share of inspiring teachers, the stimulation of gifted classmates, and a tradition of literary and debating societies that fostered independent learning in areas outside the formal curriculum. Most important of all its opportunities, perhaps, was the library, which, although small by modern standards (about forty thousand volumes), was at that time the best in the country. The library's stacks were open, too, so students could explore the collection as well as charge books required for class use. Nor was the preparation required for recitations so time consuming as to discourage independent reading. The published charging records of Thoreau and some of his classmates show that they all used the library extensively, and it may be presumed that Thoreau read a great deal more, informally and casually, than his charging record indicates. Additionally, the Institute of 1770, a literary and debating society to which he belonged, maintained its own library of some fourteen hundred volumes that Thoreau also patronized regularly. Since its members generated acquisitions, the institute's library tended to supplement the college library with better holdings in contemporary literature and periodicals. It was through this library, for example, that, during his senior year, Thoreau first became acquainted with the seminal work of American Transcendentalism, Emerson's Nature.
The overall record of Thoreau's reading at Harvard suggests that his intellectual development during these years proceeded on two paths that were not always parallel but that were eventually convergent. On the one hand, the reading required by his formal program of studies gave him a foundation in subjects and modes of inquiry and discourse that would serve him all his life. On the other hand, the "more valuable education," as he was to term it in Walden, that he got by "associating with the most cultivated of his contemporaries" (WA, 50) included reading that would lead him away from the careful Unitarian orthodoxy of Harvard and prepare the way intellectually for his conversion — or development, really — to Transcendentalism, a process that was well advanced by the time he graduated. Other areas of his mature interest, however, most notably early American history and natural history, were relatively undeveloped in his Harvard years, and more than a decade would pass before he would return to the Harvard library and the library of the Boston Society of Natural History to begin to train himself systematically in these subjects.
Thoreau's formal studies at Harvard may be divided, according to the branches of the curriculum itself, into classical and modern languages, mathematics and science, rhetoric and oratory, and philosophy and religion. Literary studies, which in practice loomed large in the curriculum, were subsumed in the programs in languages and rhetoric. Likewise, history was not a major component of the curriculum (Thoreau studied history formally only in his freshman year), although a good deal of ancient and European history was included in the study of classical and modern languages.
Among these divisions, the study of languages was preeminent; classical languages prevailed, of course, but modern languages were offered as electives and Thoreau enrolled in them regularly. During his first three years, Thoreau took Greek and Latin every term, and usually one and sometimes two modern languages as well. During his senior year he continued his study of modern languages, so that by the time he graduated he had completed — in addition to the standard Greek and Latin curriculum — five terms of Italian, four of French, three of German, and two of Spanish. Of these, he was most fluent in French, which he had begun to study at the Concord Academy. Although he had the occasion to speak the language only briefly, on his visit to Montreal and Quebec in 1850, he read it fairly often and fairly easily, from French translations of Oriental scriptures to the accounts of early explorers and missionaries in North America.
Despite this extensive acquaintance with modern languages, Thoreau seems not to have developed a correspondingly strong interest in European literature. His courses did not include a great deal of reading of important contemporary literary works, and he supplemented his reading with only a few library withdrawals that were probably outside assignments for class work: Tasso, a volume of Chateaubriand, dramas by Racine and Metastasio. The one exception to this pattern was German. He studied German with Orestes Brownson while teaching school in Canton, Massachusetts, in 1836; and during the last term of his senior year, prompted in all likelihood by the lectures of the newly installed Smith Professor of Modern Languages, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, he read Carlyle's translation of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. This last work was de rigueur reading for literary-minded youths of Thoreau's generation, and both Goethe and Carlyle were to exert considerable influence on Thoreau during the early years of his career. Back in Concord the year after his graduation, reading Goethe in German was an interest he shared with Emerson and a marker of the growth of their friendship. In general, however, Thoreau's interest in languages would later tend to express itself chiefly in what might be termed philological concerns — especially etymology, plays on words and conventional expressions, and the origins of language. This interest, in turn, would manifest itself in the basic traits of his style rather than in any particular or longstanding preoccupation with foreign languages and literatures.
Classical languages and literature, on the other hand, were both the central core of the Harvard curriculum and, as Ethel Seybold has shown, an integral part of Thoreau's literary imagination throughout his career. From a decidedly mediocre entering student he made himself into an able classicist — perhaps the best among the Transcendentalists, excepting Jones Very — who would count among his first literary ventures an essay on the Roman satirist Persius and translations of Aeschylus and Pindar. Freshman Latin and Greek classes began with Horace's Odes and selections from Livy, and Xenophon's Anabasis and the orations of Demosthenes and Aeschines. Each class studied grammar and composition as well, of course, and also the "antiquities" of Greece and Rome — that is, the culture, geography, and civilization of the classical world. Included in Thoreau's reading either in required texts or library withdrawals his first year, for example, are Cleveland's Epitome of Grecian Antiquities, Harwood's Grecian Antiquities, Adam's Roman Antiquities, and Rollin's Ancient History. The long deserts of translation recital must have been at least occasionally interrupted by lectures, discussion, or allusion to contextual works such as these.
Sophomore Greek concentrated on the tragedies of Sophocles — Oedipus Tyrannus, Oedipus Coloneus, and Antigone and Euripides' Alcestis. Latin covered Cicero's De Officiis, Horace's Satires and Epistles, and the Medea of Seneca. In his junior year Thoreau studied Juvenal in Latin (perhaps as a balance to the Horatian satires of the previous year) and the Iliad in Greek. Thoreau showed his enthusiastic response to Homer in a letter to a classmate (COR, 9), and the Greek epic made a powerful impression on him as an expression of the heroic potential in life. Ten years later, at Walden Pond, he would keep a copy of the Iliad on his desk to remind him of that potential, and he would take time from hoeing beans to translate from it in his Journal and read passages to Alek Therien, the woodchopper (WA, 144; PJ 2.160, 172–173). Reading Greek became the intellectual analogue of the physical struggles described in the Iliad: "The student may read Homer or Aeschylus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness," he said, "for it implies that he in some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages" (WA, 100). As a student himself, Thoreau devoted time to the classics beyond required hours, for in his senior year when he was no longer enrolled in Latin and Greek he wrote reviews, probably for the Institute of 1770, of H. N. Coleridge's Introductions to the Study of the Greek Classic Poets and Adam Ferguson's History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (EEM, 50–58, 63–66).
According to Christian Gruber's study of Thoreau's Harvard education, much of the credit for Thoreau's enthusiasm for and devotion to the classics belongs to C. C. Felton, Eliot Professor of Greek Literature. Felton's pedagogy stressed "that the students should widen their interest beyond the purely linguistic and become aware of 'the whole life of the people whose language was studied.'" Felton also expressed the belief that "the study of antiquity has a noble power to elevate the mind above the low passions of the present, by fixing its contemplation on the great and immortal spirits of the past." This sentiment suggests the role — as an antidote to the burgeoning material culture of nineteenth-century America — that the classics played in Thoreau's Transcendentalism. Additionally, Homeric Greek was attractive, according to Transcendental literary theory, as a "primitive" language that was closer than modern tongues to the poetic and spiritual origins of language. (A confirmation of this view of the classics, as well as his first passing exposure to the significance of the classics of Oriental literature, was provided by Friedrich von Schlegel's Lectures on the History of Literature, a key document of Romantic literary criticism which Thoreau read during his junior year.) Felton would probably have been pained to find himself described as a conduit to Transcendentalism (he would later be critical of Emerson's Essays for threatening Christianity), but his emphasis on the elevating ideal of classical thought and culture was consonant with Thoreau's own response to the classics. It was Felton's edition of the Iliad that Thoreau used at Harvard, and he remained faithful to it, using it during the 1850s for the Iliad quotations in drafts of Cape Cod.
Yet Thoreau's classical education had considerable gaps, at least by modern standards. Despite his veneration of Homer's Iliad, for example, he mentions the Odyssey infrequently, and he seems not to have known it except through secondary sources and perhaps Pope's translation. Neither did Thoreau's studies in either philosophy or classics touch directly upon the great philosophical tradition of antiquity, so that he had in college little or no exposure to Platonic or Aristotelian philosophy, or to Roman Stoics such as Marcus Aurelius, whose views he might have found congenial. It should be noted, however, that Cicero's De Officiis, read in the sophomore year, does contain an exposition and defense of Stoic doctrines.
The curriculum in mathematics at Harvard was fairly stringent, but the formal study of science, with which it was most closely connected, was still in its infancy. The mathematics course sequence was a combination of pure and "mixed" — that is, applied — subjects, and since its bearing on Thoreau's later development is mainly confined to its usefulness to his work as a part-time surveyor, little needs to be said about his reading in this area. He studied in sequence geometry, algebra, trigonometry, and calculus, followed by the applied subjects of mechanics, optics, electricity, and astronomy. The last four areas were treated in a series of texts called the Cambridge Natural Philosophy, prepared for the Harvard course sequence by John Follen.
Thoreau's scientific study in college consisted of one term of natural history recitation and lecture, one term each of voluntary lectures on mineralogy and astronomy (which he may or may not have attended), and the scientific component of his "mixed" mathematics courses. (Had he not missed a term through illness during his junior year, he would also have taken a term of chemistry.) Thus his only formal course work bearing upon his later avocation as a naturalist was the single term of natural history taken at the end of his senior year. It was
taught by Thaddeus William Harris, who later became a noted entomologist, but whose principal duties were as college librarian, a fact that may serve to suggest the importance that Harvard attached to instruction in science at this time.
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Excerpted from Thoreau's Reading by Robert Sattelmeyer. Copyright © 1988 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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