著者

重松 勉

出版者

中村学園大学

雑誌

中村学園研究紀要 (ISSN:02887312)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.16, pp.23-30, 1983-12-24

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"For my own part, I commonly attend more to nature than to man, but any affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects," Thoreau wrote in The Last Days of John Brown. In fact Thoreau was a poet-naturalist who devoted himself to walking in the fields and woods, observing plants and animals and writing poems and nature-essays. He was a great trnscendentalist who quetsted on for the virtue immanent in the universe and human being. As shown in the principle based on transcendental individualism, he never resorted to violence, though he was destined to assume a firm attitude toward the social evil. At last, however, he stood up for Captain John Brown who attacked slavery with a combined armed group of black men and white. This was why Thoreau recognized the riot raised by John Brown as the most sovereign deed. Actually it was disadvantageous for Thoreau to dare to plead for Brown, who was taken for an ignorant, narrow-minded, self egotist, a cruel, insane and fanatically prejudiced religious maniac. Thoreau held on by his principle, transcendentalism, grounded on the supreme dignity of an individual, which included the supreme inviolability of his body against the physical invasion of bloodletting. This dramatic action raised by John Brown was too universal and spiritual to hypercritize and crush into pieces. Brown was the very man who "showed himself superior to nature and had a spark of dignity in him." It was John Brown who embodied Thoreau's great idea "there are a thousand hackings at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." Thoreau concludes in A Plea for Captain John Brown as follows: I foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene no longer going to Rome for a subject; the poet will sing it; the histrian record it; and, with the Landing of the Pilgrims and the Declaration of Independence, it will be the ornament of some future national gallery, when at least the present form of slavery shall be no more here. We shall then be at liberty to weep for Captain Brown. Then, and not till then, we will take our revenge. When Thoreau changed his attitude from the passive resistance to the positive resistance, his plea for Brown meant that he realized his ideal based on universal and creative view of life of poet-naturalist as well as on unalterable individualism of transcendentalist.