Whatever Thoreau tried to do was tried in fair, square prose,
with sentences solidly built, and no help from bastard
rhythms. Moreover, there is a progression - I cannot call it
a progress - in his work towards a more and more strictly
prosaic level, until at last he sinks into the bathos of the
prosy. Emerson mentions having once remarked to Thoreau:
"Who would not like to write something which all can read,
like ROBINSON CRUSOE? and who does not see with regret that
his page is not solid with a right materialistic treatment
which delights everybody?" I must say in passing that it is
not the right materialistic treatment which delights the
world in ROBINSON, but the romantic and philosophic interest
of the fable. The same treatment does quite the reverse of
delighting us when it is applied, in COLONEL JACK, to the
management of a plantation. But I cannot help suspecting
Thoreau to have been influenced either by this identical
remark or by some other closely similar in meaning. He began
to fall more and more into a detailed materialistic
treatment; he went into the business doggedly, as one who
should make a guide-book; he not only chronicled what had
been important in his own experience, but whatever might have
been important in the experience of anybody else; not only
what had affected him, but all that he saw or heard. His
ardour had grown less, or perhaps it was inconsistent with a
right materialistic treatment to display such emotions as he
felt; and, to complete the eventful change, he chose, from a
sense of moral dignity, to gut these later works of the
saving quality of humour. He was not one of those authors
who have learned, in his own words, "to leave out their