Page:A Bit of Unpublished Correspondence Between Henry D. Thoreau and Isaac T. Hecker.djvu/10

 The work which these men did in after years cannot, it seems to me, be profitably compared. It will inevitably be judged from opposite points of view. It is idle to talk of more or less where the difference is one not of degree but of kind.

However, with aims and means so diverse and exclusive as to be distinctly antagonistic, Thoreau and Hecker possessed in common one predominant characteristic, namely, a redoubtable egoism—using the term in no disparaging sense, something that suggests what is called in physics the hydrostatic paradox, in virtue of which the smallest single drop of water holds its own against the ocean. The manifestation of this quality, however, as a trait of character was wholly unlike in the two, even apparently to the point of diametric opposition. In Thoreau its development was outward and obvious, in rugged features of eccentricity and self-sufficiency sculptured as it were in high relief against the background of society and custom. He was well practised in the grammar of dissent. As Emerson says, "It cost him nothing to say No; indeed, he found it much easier than to say Yes." It was nothing for him to declare, and to repeat in one form or another on almost every page of his writings, "the greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad." This he says without emphasis as if it were a matter of course, scarcely calculated to provoke surprise or dissent. The selfsame quality in Hecker, on the contrary, took the subtle and illusive shape of obedience to an Inward Voice, never suspected of being his own, always projected as a Brocken spectre upon the clouds, not unlike the dæmon of Socrates, and which thus wore the guise of self-effacement and pious submission to the immediate and almost articulate behests of a divine authority. The figure of Hecker's egoism was engraved in his nature like a die or an intaglio, while in Thoreau, as I have said, it was reversed and stood out with the bold relief of a cameo. But the