The Bases of Character (1857)

AUTHOR: Greeley, Horace

This short essay, an extract from an unpublished lecture on “Self-Culture” (65), discusses the relation between individual moral improvement and social reform, with Greeley “regard[ing] Social Reform and Individual improvement not as competitors but as co-workers and mutual helpers” (65). He then focuses on the most important aspects of individual improvement or self-culture. For Greeley, these are industry, usefulness, and the avoidance of debt. It is in the context of a discussion of the latter point that he presents Henry David Thoreau and his experiment at Walden – without naming either Thoreau or the location – as an example to emulate, particularly emphasizing Thoreau's self-sustaining, peaceful co-habitation with nature and his frugality, including his reliance on simple, plant-based food:

All he would accept from any man's favor was permission to live on a spot of ground otherwise unused, and convert to his own ends some little of the timber growing thereon – elements, which, in his private thought, were rightfully as much his as those of him whom the law pronounced their exclusive owner, and whom he therefore deferred to as such. Here, by the side of a petty lake, deep in the enshrouding forest, far away from the homes and the haunts of men, he with his own hands built his small but adequate cabin – sufficient to contain his few but choice books, his simple food, his clothing and himself. By its side he planted the patch of corn and other esculents which formed his principal food; for no deadly weapon defiled his peaceful sanctuary, and the gentler denizens of the flood and the forest pursued their sports unharmed and fearless within the shadow of his lodge. There he passed the golden summer and the sterner winter, in thoughtful alternation from book to pen, and thence to the scanty implements of his moderate, invigorating toil; there the few friends who sought found him pensive but not melancholy, modest but not shy; and thence he would emerge at intervals into the seething world without, to fulfil some social obligation, learn the news of the day, procure some book, or earn, by honest, downright labor in the fields of more extensive cultivators, the cost of his plain clothing and the very few additions to his own products that were needed to supply his simple fare. Thus he improved some two or three years, not alone in labor and study, but in unimpeded thought and deep communing with Nature; and when at length he came forth to live and strive with his fellows, I venture to affirm that not many universities had meantime supplied even one student with equal opportunities or an education generally comparable to his (70-72).

Last updated on September 29th, 2024

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