Essays · Chapter
The Landlord explained
Thoreau celebrates the figure of the Landlord and the tavern as a place of genuine hospitality, sincerity, and public life, contrasting it with the privacy and isolation of the man of genius.
What happens
Thoreau celebrates the figure of the Landlord and the tavern as a place of genuine hospitality, sincerity, and public life, contrasting it with the privacy and isolation of the man of genius. The Landlord embodies a primitive, open, and healthy existence, offering food, shelter, and sympathetic conversation to all travelers. Thoreau elevates the tavern above the church, praising its practical virtues and the landlord's role as a true public servant.
Themes in this chapter
Nature and Simplicity
Thoreau praises the landlord's simple, primitive life close to nature, with his axe and spade, and the tavern's essential, cave-like hospitality.
Critique of Materialism and Business
The essay contrasts the genuine, open hospitality of the tavern with the civilities of commerce and the privacy of the man of genius, celebrating a life free from modern fashionable diseases.
Heroism and Moral Courage
The landlord is portrayed as a heroic figure, sitting at the crossroads and offering himself to the public with unruffled serenity, embodying a sublimely trivial life for the good of men.
Characters to notice
- The Landlord
The central figure of the essay, celebrated for his primitive hospitality, sincerity, and public spirit. He is portrayed as a healthy, open, and sociable man who offers himself freely to all travelers.
- Chaucer
Quoted for his description of the Host in the Canterbury Tales, which Thoreau uses to praise the ideal landlord.
- Shakespeare
Mentioned as a great poet whose works are tame compared to the rude incidents of the road heard by the landlord.
Key passages
“The Landlord stands clear back in nature, to my imagination, with his axe and spade felling trees and raising potatoes with the vigor of a pioneer; with Promethean energy making nature yield her increase to supply the wants of so many; and he is not so exhausted, nor of so short a stride, but that he comes forward even to the highway to this wide hospitality and publicity.”
Thoreau imagines the landlord as a pioneer, working the land with axe and spade, and then stepping forward to offer generous hospitality to all travelers.
Highlights the landlord's connection to nature and his generous public spirit.
“The church is the place where prayers and sermons are delivered, but the tavern is where they are to take effect, and if the former are good, the latter cannot be bad.”
Thoreau argues that the tavern is where the virtues preached in church are actually practiced, making it at least as good as the church.
Summarizes Thoreau's elevation of the tavern over the church as a place of genuine virtue.