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Reprinted, with permission, from The Thoreau Society Bulletin,
No. 233, Fall 2000, pp. 4-6.
"A Sylvan Appearance": An Instance
of Woodplay in The Maine Words
Page One
By Randall Conrad
This article is excerpted from a study in
progress. Randall Conrad directs the Thoreau Project at Calliope,
Inc., Lexington, Mass.
Footnotes are at the bottom of each page. Use
your scrollbar!
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Our woods are sylvan, and their inhabitants woodmen and
rustics, - that is, selvaggia, and the inhabitants are
salvages. A civilized man, using the word in the ordinary sense,
with his ideas and associations, must at length pine there, like
a cultivated plant, which clasps its fibres about a crude and
undissolved mass of peat. - "Chesuncook"[1] |
The three essay-chapters that make up Thoreau's second posthumous
publication, The Maine Woods, are wondrously pun-profuse.
As always, the puns and other wordplay that Thoreau installs
in his verbal landscape become so many rabbit-holes for us to
fall through. Or (to push the reference) every play on words
is a looking-glass portal, reflecting novel and even contradictory
dimensions.
The second chapter, "Chesuncook," first published in
1858 and originating in a trip taken in September 1853, is often
considered the most sustained of the three. At once clear-sighted
and evocative, "Chesuncook" explores a recurring contrast
in The Maine Woods - that between "the wild"
and the "partially cultivated country" (like Walden
Woods). Culminating with a sensitive portrayal of a cruel and
wasteful moose-hunt, "Chesuncook" is an extended expression
of Thoreau's mature concern that wilderness, although it is a
sacred place, is exposed to destruction by modern civilization.
In the concluding pages of "Chesuncook," Thoreau recapitulates
the difference he sees between Maine's wilderness and "our
smooth, but still varied landscape," to which he returns
in Concord. But before we reach his concluding plea for forest
conservation, we stumble into a small thicket of wordplay, namely
the two sentences given above.
Thoreau has arranged this string of synonyms, cognates and translations
rather like a little hall of mirrors, by whose light every conceit,
and virtually each word, reflects multiple nuances of Thoreau's
overall distinction between the wilderness and the tamed forest,
and ultimately between the "savage" and the "civilized"
man.[2]
Consider the key word, "sylvan" - what is it doing
here? Literally speaking, all woods are sylvan, so Thoreau's
assertion is merely redundant from the standpoint of denotation.
True, the word evokes John Evelyn's Sylva, or a Discourse
of Forest Trees and the Propagation of Timber (1664, 1679
- read
Sylva online), a major literary influence in "Chesuncook."
(As Robert D. Richardson observes, "much of what we think
of as Thoreau's conservation ethic either derives from or is
closely paralled by Evelyn's seventeenth-century interest in
the same problem."[3])
Clearly, though, Thoreau is invoking some connotation
of "sylvan" that will characterize "our"
familiar woods only, but not the wilderness. What then does "sylvan"
summon up, beyond its literal meanings?
Something amusing, evidently. If we turn to this essay's first
use of "sylvan" one page earlier, Thoreau evokes a
comical image, imagining the earth stripped of all forest, even
the very shrubs (so that "we shall be reduced to gnaw the
very crust of the earth for nutriment"): "At this rate,
we shall all be obliged to let our beards grow at least, if only
to hide the nakedness of the land and make a sylvan appearance"
(p. 154).
This ironic conceit, in turn, reflects an earlier image of the
denuded earth (p. 151). The wilderness, as Thoreau states there,
had a "wild, damp, and shaggy look" before men cultivated
it almost out of existence. Visualized in this context, Thoreau's
sylvan men with their full-grown beards will mimic (and parody)
the wild, damp, and shaggy look of wilderness past. Insofar as
Thoreau's bearded men are prone while gnawing the earth's crust,
they even resemble the vanished numbers of "fallen and decaying
trees" wearing a "thick coat of moss," which Thoreau
says formerly lay upon the forest floor, part of the cycle of
succession.[4]
Returning to connotations of "sylvan" in the passage
we are considering, there is plentiful evidence that this adjective,
first recorded in Elizabethan literature, was suffering from
an advanced case of overfamiliarity in Thoreau's time. When Thoreau
uses "sylvan" in The Maine Woods, I believe
he is helping this worn-out word advance to its terminal stage,
self-parody.
Following the heyday of English pastoral poetry, "sylvan"
had become a convenient cliché for poets and writers,
the instant evocation of a Forest of Arden peopled by shepherds,
nymphs, sprites, and "Sylvanus" himself, a Roman forest
god (and by extension, any forest-dwelling fellow).
In Thoreau's time, both "Sylvanus" and "sylvan"
were enjoying a revival thanks partly to certain romanticizing
Transcendentalists. Think of Bronson Alcott's design for the
summerhouse he and Thoreau built for Emerson in 1847: "Alcott
fancied a 'sylvan' style, curving the rafters in a 'mystic serpentine,'
much to the distaste of both Thoreau and the town."[5]
More annoying still, the "sylvan" sobriquet had
begun to appear in certain advertisements for new lectures by
the author of a work in progress about Life in the Woods. Again
the chief perpetrator was Alcott, who was forever calling Thoreau
a modern Sylvanus.[6] When Alcott arranged and advertised a Thoreau
lecture on March 22, 1852,[7] it was plainly he and not the lecturer
who titled it "Sylvan Life." And didn't Thoreau exclaim
to his journal, three weeks after his lecture: "Alcott wished
me to name my book Sylvania!"
In this same journal entry, in fact, Thoreau nicely illustrates
his objection to the sort of pastoral pretension that indulges
in words like "sylvan" when he comments on the transience
of epithetical writing:
Channing calls our walks along the river […]
riparial excursions. It is a pleasing epithet, but I mistrust
such, even as good as this, in which the mere name is so agreeable,
as if it would ring hollow ere long; and rather the thing should
make the true name poetic at last. Alcott wished me to name my
book Sylvania! But he and C. are two men in these respects.
We make a good many prairial excursions.[8]
(Needless to state, time has confirmed Thoreau. Walden,
a "true name," has taken on a deep poetic resonance
in modern English. Would we be as tempted to read a Sylvania?)
In "Chesuncook" then, Thoreau's use of "sylvan"
is almost certainly sardonic. Our tamed woods we call by this
worn-out pastoral adjective that grates on Thoreau's ears - this
affectation of those who would rather romanticize the woods than
repair to them for spiritual renewal.
Continued on Page Two
Footnotes for This Page
1. Thoreau, The Maine Woods,
ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer, Princeton NJ: Princeton U P, 1972,
155.
2. "Savage," a word Thoreau employs
variously in the other chapters of The Maine Woods, appears
in "Chesuncook" only in the passage under consideration
here. It requires levels of explication beyond the scope of the
present exercise, raising as it does the important issue of Anglo-American
savagism. The pioneering studies of Thoreau and Indians by Robert
Sayre and Philip Gura in 1977 have launched a continuing dialogue,
to which recent participants have contributed views from multicultural
and Native standpoints. See, notably: Tom Lynch, "The 'Domestic
Air' of Wilderness: Henry Thoreau and Joe Polis in the Maine
Woods," Weber Studies, 14:3, Fall 1997, and available
on
the Web.
3. Robert D. Richardson, Thoreau: A Life
of the Mind, Berkeley: U Cal P, 1987, 304.
4. The pivotal pun that enables Thoreau's
jest involves "crust" (of bread), implicit in the earth's
"crust" - either its topsoil or, geologically speaking,
the entire solid outer layer of the planet. See note 12.
5. Walter Harding and Milton Meltzer, A
Thoreau Profile, NY: Crowell, 1962, 55. Also see W. Barksdale
Maynard, "Thoreau's House at Walden," Art Bulletin,
81:2, June 1999, esp. 312-20.
6. "A sylvan man accomplished in the
virtues of an aboriginal civility, and quite superior to the
urbanities of cities, Thoreau is himself a wood, and its inhabitants.
[…] and were an Indian to flower forth, and reveal the secrets
hidden in the wilds of his cranium, it would not be more surprising
than the speech of this Sylvanus." January 22, 1851. (Journals
of Bronson Alcott, Odell Shepard, ed., Boston: Little, Brown,
1938, 238). Years after Thoreau's death, Alcott would write that
his friend "united these qualities of sylvan and human."
(Concord Days, Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872, 11).
7. Walter Harding, The Days of Henry Thoreau,
Dover, 1982, 287.
8. Thoreau, Journal, April 15, 1852. (III,
418. Special thanks to Tom Blanding for locating this entry.)
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