The Rhetorical Function of Proverbs in Walden

Abstract

WALT WHITMAN'S descriptive phrase for Leaves of Grass, language experiment,1 is applicable to much of the literature of New England Transcendentalism, not least to the writings of Henry Thoreau. The experimental character of Transcendental prose and poetry has its analog, if not its origin and sanction, in a theory of language expressed most vigorously by Emerson. According to this theory, the of nature and outward experience reflect factstruths of the all-pervading divinity which of necessity symbolize themselves throughout the phenomenal world. Nature, then, is the language of spirit; but man's language is also symbolic.2 In the most rudimentary sense, words are signs of natural facts-that is, symbols of spiritual truths at the second remove. Since, however, the mind of man shares directly in the same divinity which manifests itself in the material realm of nature, man's language could be something more than a faint echo of the Over-Soul's. It could, on the contrary, itself be creative -either by depicting and organizing physical facts in such a way as to make their latent spiritual meaning more apparent, or by literally giving significance to its referents through metaphor and analogy. (Man is an analogist, and studies relations in all objects. He is placed in the centre of beings, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him. )3 In the hands of the responsible artistthe artist who was true to himself-such metaphors would not be whimsical or fantastic but profoundly true, consistent both with nature and with spiritual law. This was so because the profound self which the artist respected, and on which he relied, was the author of nature. Emerson even ventured to suggest that man in his hypothetically perfect development could speak nature into being-could evoke or express the sun and moon and stars out of himself.4 More especially even for Thoreau than for Emerson, this basic philosophy of language was accompanied by a curiosity about particular linguistic and semantic phenomena. Words being man's characteristic expressive symbols, it was worth the while to study the etymology of rival,5 or to compare the Massachuset and Abnaki Indian meanings of Musketaquid, the aboriginal name for the Concord River (W., III, I57, 187).6 To do so was to realize the fundamental design of human experience everywhere and thus to discover oneself.