Thoreau by Henry Seidel CanbyReview by: Arthur E. Bestor, Jr.The American Historical Review, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Oct., 1940), pp. 169-170Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1839850 .

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Canby: Thoreau I69

who would explain the frontier phase of our history. While giving chief attention to the American Home Missionary Society, probably because its archives are the most voluminous and accessible, Mr. Goodykoontz sum- marizes the home missionary activities of the Presbyterians, Methodists. Baptists, and Episcopalians. His understanding and use of the peculiar nomenclature of these several bodies is always accurate and is in itself an unusual accomplishment. The author's thorough understanding of Amer- ican history enables him to fit the activities of the home missionaries into their appropriate economic, social, and political background. In other words it is not a partial picture that is here drawn; religion is not considered a "hot-house" plant which must be given special treatment or consideration; it finds its rightful place among the multiple interests of the developing society of the frontier. The treatment is always objective, but at the same time there is intelligent appreciation and full understanding.

A phase of religious activity on the frontier which seems to have been overlooked is the work carried on by the Baptist farmer preachers. This was far more important in spreading the Baptist gospel, especially in the early West and in the South even to this day, than any formal home missionary activities carried on by the Baptists. Nor was the early Methodist advance due to formal missionary societies. The whole organization of frontier Methodism was adapted to the meeting of frontier needs. In neither case was religion transplanted from the East to the West; both were indigenous to the soil. Missionary activity, as carried on by the American Home Missionary Society, too often delayed the rise of indigenous organization and created a dependent attitude. Here we have a partial explanation, at least, why both Methodists and Baptists far outstripped Congregationalists and Presbyterians.

Some sections of the book might have been improved if the author had had access to a number of recent studies in manuscript, such as C. T. Thrift's "The American Home Missionary Society in the South, i826-I86i" and Evah 1. Ostrander's "The American Home Missionary Society in Oregon, i849-I870". Perhaps some thought should be given as to how such materials may be made more widely available.

The University of Chicago. WILLIAM W. SWEET.

Th oreau. By HENRY SEIDEL CANBY. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. I939. PP. xx, 508. $3.75.) IN a "Preview" to his book the author sketches some "half-dozen possible

biographies of Thoreau", each emphasizing a particular aspect of his com- plex character. Lesser biographers have exploited the paradoxes which this classification implies; Mr. Canby has succeeded in the far greater task of integrating the varied themes into a complete and balanced whole. The work triumphantly demonstrates that thorough scholarship is the surest pathway to freshness of interpretation.

AM. HIST. REV., VOL. XLVI.-I2

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170 Reviews of Books

In some respects the author's greatest contribution is his steady concern with Thoreau as "a life-long apprentice to the art of good writing". Biographers have often proved more Transcendental than Thoreau himself, content to attribute his style to the benign influences of nature or intuition. As an editor Mr. Canby knows better, and he proceeds to consider Thoreau's life partly in terms of a writer's search for a theme, an audience, and a practicable way of life.

More publicized, though of minor significance, is Mr. Canby's investiga- tion of the exceedingly virginal love affairs of Thoreau. Tactfully presented, his conclusions free Thoreau from any suspicion of abnormality and indicate what part sublimation must have played in his thought. The identification of individuals, heavily veiled in the original sources, is reasonably convinc- ing. In the case of Sophia Foord, surmise admittedly plays a larger part than evidence in Mr. Canby's argument, but his conjectures are triumphantly vindicated by an unnoted passage in the biography of Elizabeth Buffum Chace by Lillie B. C. and Arthur C. Wyman (Boston, I9I4, I, I31). In I854, five years after the rumor of her suicide (Canby, p. 258), Miss Sophia Ford [sic], "a dark-skinned, pudgy-featured woman", was serving as governess in the abolitionist household of Mrs. Chace. She taught botany by means of field trips, and her pupils felt that she "brought Concord to Valley Falls [R. I.]". In private moments she "confided to Mrs. Chace her conviction that Thoreau's soul was twin to hers, and that in 'the Other World' her spirit and his would be united".

This is a book rich in interpretation. The exact nature of Emerson's in- fluence upon the young men of the time has never been more thoughtfully examined. Matters often obscured or misunderstood are cleared up: the relatively late development of Thoreau's minutely accurate observation, the influence of his life at Walden in turning his mind outward towards the objective world, the relation between his observations of nature and the formal scientific research of his day. Brilliant perceptions of intellectual in- fluence are frequent: the contributions of Harvard, of Brownson, of the literatures of the seventeenth century and Greece and the East, of the tradi- tions of New England diary writing.

What one sometimes misses is the examination of influences less proxi- mate than Emerson and less remote than the seventeenth century-Carlyle, for example; or the traditions of the American Revolution and the Unitarian controversy; or even Brook Farm. The pages on American society as a whole belong near the beginning, not sandwiched into a critique of Walden (pp. 282-86). Slips of the pen are few; but the Boston Quarterly Review was founded before Brook Farm (p. 59); George Ripley was not from Concord (p. 275); and Angelina Grimke was married to Weld not Birney (p. 409, but correct on p. 4IO).

Columbia University. ARTHUR E. BESTOR, JR.

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