To continue our exegesis. Who dwells in our woods? "Woodmen
and rustics," says Thoreau - the latter denoting country
folk while also connoting "crude, coarse, or simple"
people. As to the word "woodman," it has evolved over
the centuries from the supernatural to the civilized, appropriately
to its use here. To the Elizabethans, it could still have meant
"a wild man of the woods, a faun or satyr" as well
as a hunter, forester, or forest-dweller. By Thoreau's time,
the "wild" meaning was obsolete and "woodman"
most commonly denoted that harbinger of material civilization,
the woodcutter. [9]
Now Thoreau launches a parallel clause ("-- that is,
[our woods are] selvaggia, and the inhabitants are salvages…")
that translates his proposition into other sylvan-derived words.
Quite out of the blue, he introduces (as a synonym for "sylvan")
the Italian adjective selvaggia, "wild" (from
selva, wood; the French cognate is sauvage).[10]
Why this unexpected excursion into the Romance languages?
For one thing, it introduces (if you read Italian, at least)
a lexicon in which Latin word-roots are more clearly discernible
- a revealing language which has not lost all its "wild"
character.[11] Specifically, it enables Thoreau to put aside
his tongue-in-cheek treatment of "sylvan" long enough
to recapture the word's original idea - "wild" - before
reversing it with the very next pun.
"And the inhabitants are salvages." This is a cardinal
pun. Thoreau intends his antique spelling to bring us closer
to the word's root meaning, of course - yet he knows that "salvages"
(especially when seen in print, not pronounced) is bound to draw
us away from the forest and out to sea. The inhabitants are not
exactly savages, woods-people, any more. Nowadays they are mere
items of salvage.
If such are the inhabitants of our
woods (as distinct from wilderness-men), they must be the very
opposite of savages. They might just be the "civilized men"
of Thoreau's following sentence, rescued from the shipwreck that
is civilization, and redeemable (if at all) by a sojourn in the
forest.[12]
* Thoreau, The Maine Woods, ed. Joseph
J. Moldenhauer, Princeton NJ: Princeton U P, 1972, 155.
9. The definitions I offer for "rustics,"
"woodman," and "civilized" are culled from
the Oxford English Dictionary, 7th ed. (1982).
In contrast to the woods / wilderness distinction
in "Chesuncook," the younger Thoreau who visited Katahdin
seems to have sometimes conceived the wilderness itself as sylvan
- a more conventional version of pastoral, perhaps. Certainly
Thoreau populates the Maine woods of "Ktaadn" with
woodmen, rustics, and sylvani - nor are they Indians or "salvages."
In a manuscript of 1846, Thoreau describes his woodsman guide,
Tom Fowler, as "a young and ingenuous waterman with that
indolent but mild and mellow expression of those who had had
much intercourse with rude nature - the noble frankness of a
forest child." [Journal, Walden, April 17, 1846,
Berg Collection, NYPL, quoted in Leonard Neufeldt, "The
Making of Alek Therien," Concord Saunterer, XII (1977)
#2, 14.] Insofar as an unspoken sexual attraction motivates these
pastoral tropes [Walter Harding, "Thoreau's Sexuality,"
Journal of Homosexuality, 21 #3 (1991), 32], the "forest
children" along Thoreau's path are more than guides - some
are conductors of a powerful current. They channel the lifelong
sublimation [Harding, 30] by which Thoreau transforms eros into
his overarching love of Nature.
10. Thoreau gives selvaggio a feminine-singular
ending, no doubt modifying the unstated subject "woods"
(selva). Robert F. Sayre seems to misinterpret this Italian
adjective as if it were a plural noun (Thoreau and the American
Indians, Princeton: Princeton U P, 1977, 8), but it does
not skew Sayre's interpretation of this passage.
11. Cf. Journal, Feb. 23, 1853 (IV, 494):
"I think myself in a wilder country, and a little nearer
to primitive times, when I read in old books which spell the
word savages with an l (salvages) like John Smith's 'General
Historie of Virginia, etc.,' reminding me of the derivation of
the word from sylva. There is some of the wild wood and
its bristling branches still left in their language. The savages
they describe are really salvages, men of the woods."
Ichiro Iida cites this passage in pondering
Thoreau's etymologically driven conceptualization of "savage"
("Thoreau and the Indian: Savagism and Wilderness vs. Civilization,"
Studies in Henry David Thoreau, Kobe: Thoreau Society
of Japan, 1999, 81-82.)
12. As the above journal entry (note 8) suggests,
the third letter in 17th-century "salvages," meaning
savages, was usually silent. In print, this etymological vestige
blurs the difference between this "salvages" and its
homograph, "salvages" meaning rescued properties.
In a contemporary variant, the l is pronounced
(and the stress laid on the final syllable) in "The Dry
Salvages," the Massachusetts place-name that T. S. Eliot
chose for the title of his "Third Quartet" (Eliot,
Complete Poems and Plays, NY: Harcourt, Brace, 1952, 130).
Eliot presumed that this cluster of rocks
off Cape Ann got its name as les trois sauvages, so that
these Salvages are savages - creatures of the wild. The unique
pronunciation ("to rhyme with assuages") differentiates
this French-derived "salvages" from its homograph.
Thoreau, of course, passed by Cape Ann on his steamboat trips
to Maine (cf. p. 85). Anticipating Eliot in the field, Thoreau
on his third visit queried a Cape Ann carpenter about Salvages
as a place name: "he and all the inhabitants of the Cape
always called it 'Selvaygias.'" The distinctive regional
pronunciation is substantially that which Eliot later found;
however, Thoreau's carpenter supposed that "Salvages"
referred to shipwrecks (rather than savages). (Journal, June
19, 1857. IX, 445).