to him that eternal day is more to his liking than the sweet
alternation of day and night, that unending rest is less monotonous
than his round of labor until the evening, that streets of gold are
softer for his feet than dirt roads with borders of grass and
dandelions, that ceaseless hallelujahs about a throne exalt the
excellency of God more than the quiet contemplation of the work of His
fingers--the moon and the stars which He has ordained--not until, I
say, it can be proved to him that God did not make this world, or,
making it, spurned it, cursed it, that heaven might seem the more
blessed--not until then will he forego his bean-patch at Walden, his
vineyard at West Park, his garden at Selborne; will he deny to his
body a house-lot on this little planet, and the range of this timed
and tidy universe to his soul.
As between himself and nature, then, the thoroughly good nature-writer
is in love--a purely personal state; lyric, emotional, rather than
scientific, wherein the writer is not so much concerned with the facts
of nature as with his view of them, his feelings for them, as they
environ and interpret him, or as he centres and interprets them.
Were this all, it would be a simple story of love. Unfortunately,
nature-writing has become an art, which means some one looking on, and
hence it means self-consciousness and adaptation, the writer forced to
play the difficult part of loving his theme not less, but loving his
reader more.
For the reader, then, his test of the nature-writer will be the
extreme test of sincerity. The nature-writer (and the poet) more than
many writers is limited by decree to his experiences--not to what he
has seen or heard only, but as strictly to what he has truly felt. All
writing must be sincere. Is it that nature-writing and poetry must be
spontaneously sincere? Sincerity is the first and greatest of the
literary commandments. The second is like unto the first. Still there
is considerable difference between the inherent marketableness of a
cold thought and a warm, purely personal emotion. One has a right to
sell one’s ideas, to barter one’s literary inventions; one has a
right, a duty it may be, to invent inventions for sale; but one may
not, without sure damnation, make “copy” of one’s emotions. In other
words, one may not invent emotions, nor observations either, for the
literary trade. The sad case with much of our nature-writing is that
it has become professional, and so insincere, not answering to genuine
observation nor to genuine emotion, but to the bid of the publisher.
You will know the sincere nature-writer by his fidelity to fact. But,
alas! suppose I do not know the fact? To be sure. And the
nature-writer thought of that, too, and penned his solemn, pious
preface, wherein he declares that the following observations are
exactly as he personally saw them; that they are true altogether; that
he has the affidavits to prove it; and the Indians and the Eskimos to
swear the affidavits prove it. Of course you are bound to believe
after that; but you wish the preface did not make it so unnecessarily
hard.
The sincere nature-writer, because he knows he cannot prove it, and
that you cannot prove it, and that the scientists cannot prove it,
knows that he must not be asked for proofs, that he must be above
suspicion, and so he sticks to the truth as the wife of Cæsar to her
spouse.
Let the nature-writer only chronicle his observations as Dr. C. C.
Abbott does in “A Naturalist’s Rambles about Home,” or let him dream a
dream about his observations as Maeterlinck does in “The Life of the
Bee,” yet is he still confined to the truth as a hermit crab to his
shell--a hard, inelastic, unchangeable, indestructible house that he
cannot adapt, but must himself be adapted to, or else abandon.
Chronicle and romance alike we want true to fact. But this particular
romance about the Bee will not thus qualify. It was not written for
beekeepers, even amateur beekeepers, for they all know more or less
about bees, and hence they would not understand the book. It was
written for those, the city-faring folk, like my market-man, who asked
me how many pounds of honey a bee would gather up in a year, and
whether I kept more than one bee in a hive. A great many persons must
have read “The Life of the Bee,” but only one of them, so far as I
know, had ever kept bees, and she had just a single swarm in between
the wall of her living-room and the weather-boards outside. But she
had listened to them through the wall, and she sent me her copy of
“The Life,” begging me to mark on the margins wherever the Bee of the
book was unlike her bee in the wall. She had detected a difference in
the buzz of the two bees.
Now the two bees ought to buzz alike--one buzz, distinct and always
distinguishable from the buzz of the author. In the best
nature-writing the author is more than his matter, but he is never
identical with it; and not until we know which is which, and that the
matter is true, have we faith in the author.
I knew a big boy once who had almost reached the footprint in
“Robinson Crusoe” (the tragedy of _almost_ reaching it!) when some one
blunderingly told him that the book was all a story, made up, not true
at all; no such island; no such Crusoe! The boy shut up the book and
put it forever from him. He wanted it true. He had thought it true,
because it had been so real. Robbed of its reality, he was unable to
make it true again.
Most of us recover from this shock in regard to books, asking only
that they seem real. But we are eternally childish, curious,
credulous, in our thought of nature; she is so close and real to us,
and yet so shadowy, hidden, mysterious, and remote! We are eager to
listen to any tale, willing to believe anything, if only it be true.
Nay, we are willing to believe it true--we _were_, I should say,
until, like the boy with the book, we were rudely told that all this
fine writing was made up, that we have no such kindred in the wilds,
and no such wilds. Then we said in our haste, all men--who write
nature-books--are liars.
“How much of this is real?” asked a keen and anxious reader, eyeing me
narrowly, as she pointed a steady finger at an essay of mine in the
“Atlantic.” “Have you, sir, a farm and four real boys of your own, or
are they _faked_?”
“Good heavens, madam!” I exclaimed. “Has it come to this? My boys
faked!”
But it shows how the thoughtful and the fearful regard the literary
naturalist, and how paramount is the demand for honesty in the matter
of mere fact, to say nothing of the greater matter of expression.
Only yesterday, in a review in the “Nation” of an animal-man book, I
read: “The best thing in the volume is the description of a fight
between a mink and a raccoon--or so it seems. Can this be because the
reader does not know the difference between a mink and a raccoon, and
does know the difference between a human being and the story-teller’s
manikin?”
This is the wandering wood, this Errour’s den,
is the feeling of the average reader--of even the “Nation’s” book
reviewer--nowadays, toward nature-writing, a state of mind due to the
recent revelations of a propensity in wild-animal literature to stand
up rather than to go on all fours.
Whatever of the Urim and of the Thummim you put into your style,
whatever of the literary lights and the perfections, see to it that
you make the facts “after their pattern, which hath been shewed thee
in the mount.”
Thou shalt not bear false witness as to the facts.
Nor is this all. For the sad case with much nature-writing, as I have
said, is that it not only fails to answer to genuine observation, but
it also fails to answer to genuine emotion. Often as we detect the
unsound natural history, we much oftener are aware of the unsound, the
insincere, art of the author.
Now the facts of nature, as Mr. Burroughs says, are the material of
nature literature--of _one_ kind of such literature, let me add; for,
while fabrications can be made only into lies, there may be another
kind of good nature-literature compounded wholly of fancies. Facts, to
quote Mr. Burroughs again, are the flora upon which the nature-writer
lives. “I can do nothing without them.” Of course he could not. But
Chaucer could. Indeed, Chaucer could do nothing with the facts; he had
to have fancies. The truth in his story of the Cock and the Fox is a
different kind of truth from the truth about Burroughs’s “Winter
Neighbors,” yet no less the truth. Good nature-writing is literature,
not science, and the truth we demand first and last is a literary
truth--the fidelity of the writer to himself. He may elect to use
facts for his material; yet they are only material, and no better as
material than fancies. For it is not matter that counts last in
literature; it is manner. It is spirit that counts. It is the man.
Only honest men make literature. Writers may differ in their purpose,
as Burroughs in his purpose to guide you through the woods differs
from Chaucer’s purpose to entertain you by the fire; but they are one
in their spirit of honesty.
Chaucer pulls a long face and begins his tale of the Cock and the Fox
with a vivid and very realistic description of a widow’s cottage,
B’syde a grovë, standing in a dalë,
as a setting, not for the poor widow and her two daughters, not at
all; but rather to stage the heroic comedy between Chauntecleer and
his favorite wife, the scarlet-eyed Pertelote.
It is just before daybreak. They are not up yet, not off the roost,
when they get into a discussion about the significance of dreams,
Chauntecleer having had a very bad dream during the night. The dispute
waxes as it spreads out over medicine, philosophy, theology, and
psychology. Chauntecleer quotes the classics, cites famous stories,
talks Latin to her:--
For, also sicker as _In principio
Mulier est hominis confusio_;
translating it for her thus:--
Madam, the sentence of this Latin is--
Woman is mannës joy and all his blis,
while she tells him he needs a pill for his liver in spite of the fact
that he wears a beard. It is fine scorn, but passing sad, following so
close upon the old English love song that Chauntecleer was wont to
wake up singing.
It is here, at this critical juncture of the nature-story, that
Chaucer pauses to remark seriously:--
For thilkë tyme, as I have understondë,
Bestës and briddës couldë speke and singë.
Certainly they could; and “speking and singing in thilkë tyme” seems
much more natural for “bestës and briddës” than many of the things
they do nowadays.
Here, again, is Izaak Walton, as honest a man as Chaucer--a lover of
nature, a writer on angling; who knew little about angling, and less
about nature; whose facts are largely fancies; but--what of it? Walton
quotes, as a probable fact, that pickerel hatch out of the seeds of
the pickerelweed; that toads are born of fallen leaves on the bottoms
of ponds. He finds himself agreeing with Pliny “that many flies have
their birth, or being, from a dew that in the spring falls upon the
leaves of the trees”; and, quoting the divine du Bartas, he sings:--
So slow Boötes underneath him sees
In th’ icy isles those goslings hatch’d of trees,
Whose fruitful leaves, falling into the water,
Are turn’d, they say, to living fowls soon after.
But the “Compleat Angler” is not a scientific work on fishes, nor a
handbook on angling for anglers. It is a book for all that are lovers
of literature; for “all that are lovers of virtue; and dare trust in
his providence; and be quiet; and go a Angling.”
This is somewhat unscientific, according to our present light; but,
wonderful as it seemed to Walton, it was all perfectly natural
according to his light. His facts are faulty, yet they are the best he
had. So was his love the best he had; but that was without fault,
warm, deep, intense, sincere.
Our knowledge of nature has so advanced since Walton’s time, and our
attitude has so changed, that the facts of nature are no longer
enough for literature. We know all that our writer knows; we have seen
all that he can see. He can no longer surprise us; he can no longer
instruct us; he can no longer fool us. The day of the marvelous is
past; the day of the _cum laude_ cat and the _magna cum laude_ pup is
past, the day of the things that I alone have seen is past; and the
day of the things that I, in common with you, have honestly felt, is
come.
There should be no suggestion in a page of nature-writing that the
author--penetrated to the heart of some howling summer camp for his
raw material; that he ever sat on his roof or walked across his back
yard in order to write a book about it. But nature-books, like other
books, are gone for that way--always and solely for the pot. Such
books are “copy” only--poor copy at that. There is nothing new in
them; for the only thing you can get by going afar for it is a
temptation to lie; and no matter from what distance you fetch a
falsehood--even from the top of the world--you cannot disguise the
true complexion of it. Take the wings of the morning and dwell in the
uttermost parts of the sea, and you will find nothing new there;
ascend into heaven or make your bed in hell for copy, as is the
fashion nowadays--But you had better look after your parish, and go
faithfully about your chores; and if you have a garden with a tortoise
in it, and you love them, and love to write about them, then write.
Nature-writing must grow more and more human, personal,
interpretative. If I go into the wilderness and write a book about it,
it must be plain to my reader that “the writing of the book was only a
second and finer enjoyment of my holiday in the woods.” If my chippy
sings, it must sing a chippy’s simple song, not some gloria that only
“the careless angels know.” It must not do any extraordinary thing for
me; but it may lead me to do an extraordinary thing--to have an
extraordinary thought, or suggestion, or emotion. It may mean
extraordinary things to me; things that have no existence in nature,
whose beginnings and ends are in me. I may never claim that I, because
of exceptional opportunities, or exceptional insight, or exceptional
powers of observation, have discovered these marvelous things here in
the wilds of Hingham. My pages may be anthropomorphic, human; not,
however, because I humanize my bees and toads, but because I am human,
and nature is meaningful ultimately only as it is related to me. I
must not confuse myself with nature; nor yet “struggle against fact
and law to develop and keep” my “own individuality.” I must not
anthropomorphize nature; never denature nature; never follow my own
track through the woods, imagining that I am on the trail of a
better-class wolf or a two-legged bear. I must never sentimentalize
over nature again--write no more about “Buzz-Buzz and Old Man
Barberry”; write no more about wailing winds and weeping skies; for
mine is not “a poet’s vision dim,” but an open-eyed, scientific sight
of things as they actually are. Once I have seen them, gathered them,
if then they turn to poetry, let them turn. For so does the squash
turn to poetry when it is brought in from the field. It turns to pie;
it turns to poetry; and it still remains squash.
Good nature-literature, like all good literature, is more lived than
written. Its immortal part hath elsewhere than the ink-pot its
beginning. The soul that rises with it, its life’s star, first went
down behind a horizon of real experience, then rose from a human
heart, the source of all true feeling, of all sincere form. Good
nature-writing particularly must have a pre-literary existence as
lived reality; its writing must be only the necessary accident of its
being lived again in thought. It will be something very human, very
natural, warm, quick, irregular, imperfect, with the imperfections and
irregularities of life. And the nature-writer will be very human, too,
and so very faulty; but he will have no lack of love for nature, and
no lack of love for the truth. Whatever else he does, he will never
touch the flat, disquieting note of make-believe. He will never
invent, never pretend, never pose, never shy. He will be honest--which
is nothing unusual for birds and rocks and stars; but for human
beings, and for nature-writers very particularly, it is a state less
common, perhaps, than it ought to be.
VI
JOHN BURROUGHS
JOHN BURROUGHS
John Burroughs began his literary career (and may he so end it!) by
writing an essay for the “Atlantic Monthly,” as good an introduction
(and conclusion), speaking by the rhetoric, as a lifelong composition
need have. That first essay entitled “Expression,” “a somewhat
Emersonian Expression,” says its author, was printed in the “Atlantic”
for November, 1860, which was fifty years ago. Fifty years are not
threescore and ten; many men have lived past threescore and ten, but
not many men have written continuously for the “Atlantic” for fifty
years with eye undimmed and natural force unabated. Mr. Burroughs’s
eye for the truth of nature has grown clearer during these fifty
years, and the vigor of his youth has steadied into a maturity of
strength which in some of his latest essays--“The Long Road,” for
instance--lifts one and bears one down the unmeasured reaches of
geologic time, compassing the timelessness of time, its
beginninglessness, its endinglessness, as none of his earlier chapters
have done.
Many men have written more than Mr. Burroughs. His eighteen or twenty
books, as books may be turned out, are nothing remarkable for fifty
years of work. It is not their numbers, but the books, that are
remarkable, that among them should be found “Wake-Robin,” “Winter
Sunshine,” “Birds and Poets,” “Locusts and Wild Honey,” “Pepacton,”
“Fresh Fields,” “Signs and Seasons,” “Riverby,” “Far and Near,” “Ways
of Nature,” and “Leaf and Tendril”; for these eleven nature-books, as
a group, stand alone and at the head of the long list of books written
about the out-of-doors since the days of the _Historia Animalium_, and
the mediæval “Fables” and “Beasteries.”
These eleven volumes are Mr. Burroughs’s characteristic, his important
work. His other books are eminently worth while: there is reverent,
honest thinking in his religious essays, a creedless but an absolute
and joyous faith; there is simple and exquisite feeling in his poems;
close analysis and an unmitigatedness, wholly Whitmanesque, in his
interpretation of Whitman; and no saner, happier criticism anywhere
than in his “Literary Values.” There are many other excellent critics,
however, many poets and religious writers, many other excellent
nature-writers, too; but is there any other who has written so much
upon the ways of nature as they parallel and cross the ways of men,
upon so great a variety of nature’s forms and expressions, and done it
with such abiding love, with such truth and charm?
Yet such a comparison is beyond proof, except in the least of the
literary values--mere quantity; and it may be with literature as with
merchandise: the larger the cask the greater the tare. Charm? Is not
charm that which _I_ chance to like, or _you_ chance to like? Others
have written of nature with as much love and truth as has Mr.
Burroughs, and each with his own peculiar charm: Audubon, with the
spell of wild places and the thrill of fresh wonder; Traherne, with
the ecstasy of the religious mystic; Gilbert White, with the sweetness
of the evening and the morning; Thoreau, with the heat of noonday;
Jefferies, with just a touch of twilight shadowing all his pages. We
want them severally as they are; Mr. Burroughs as he is, neither
wandering “lonely as a cloud” in search of poems, nor skulking in the
sedges along the banks of the Guaso Nyero looking for lions. We want
him at Slabsides, near his celery fields. And whatever the literary
quality of our other nature-writers, no one of them has come any
nearer than Mr. Burroughs to that difficult ideal,--a union of thought
and form, no more to be separated than the heart and the bark of a
live tree.
Take Mr. Burroughs’s work as a whole, and it is beyond dispute the
most complete, the most revealing, of all our outdoor literature. His
pages lie open like the surface of a pond, sensitive to every wind, or
calm as the sky, holding the clouds and the distant blue, and the
dragon-fly, stiff-winged and pinned to the golden knob of a
spatter-dock.
All outdoor existence, all outdoor phenomena, are deeply interesting
to him. There is scarcely a form of outdoor life, scarcely a piece of
landscape, or natural occurrence characteristic of the Eastern States,
which has not been dealt with suggestively in his pages: the rabbit
under his porch, the paleozoic pebble along his path, the salt breeze
borne inland by the Hudson, the whirl of a snowstorm, the work of the
honeybees, the procession of the seasons over Slabsides, even the
abundant soil out of which he and his grapes grow and which,
“incorruptible and undefiled,” he calls divine.
He devotes an entire chapter to the bluebird, a chapter to the fox,
one to the apple, another to the wild strawberry. The individual, the
particular thing, is always of particular interest to him. But so is
its habitat, the whole of its environment. He sees the gem, not cut
and set in a ring, but rough in the mine, where it glitters on the
hand of nature, and glitters all the more that it is worn in the dark.
Naturally Mr. Burroughs has written much about the birds; yet he is
not an ornithologist. His theme has not been this or that, but nature
in its totality, as it is held within the circle of his horizon, as it
surrounds, supports, and quickens him.
That nature does support and quicken the spiritual of him, no less
than the physical, is the inspiration of his writing and the final
comment it requires. Whether the universe was shaped from chaos with
man as its end, is a question of real concern to Mr. Burroughs, but of
less concern to him than the problem of shaping himself to the
universe, of living as long as he can upon a world so perfectly
adapted to life, if only one be physically and spiritually adaptable.
To take the earth as one finds it, to plant one’s self in it, to plant
one’s roof-tree in it, to till it, to understand it and the laws which
govern it, and the Perfection which created it, and to love it
all,--this is the heart of Mr. Burroughs’s religion, the pith of his
philosophy, the conclusion of his books.
But if a perfect place for the fit, how hard a place is this world for
the lazy, the ignorant, the stubborn, the weak, the physically and
spiritually ill! So hard that a torpid liver is almost a mortal
handicap, the stars in their courses fighting against the bilious to
defeat them, to drive them to take exercise, to a copious drinking of
water, to a knowledge of burdock and calomel--to obedience and
understanding.
Underlying all of Mr. Burroughs’s thought and feeling, framing every
one of his books, is a deep sense of the perfection of nature, the
sharing of which is physical life, the understanding of which is
spiritual life, is knowledge of God himself, in some part of His
perfection. “I cannot tell what the simple apparition of the earth and
sky mean to me; I think that at rare intervals one sees that they have
an immense spiritual meaning, altogether unspeakable, and that they
are the great helps, after all.” How the world was made--its geology,
its biology--is the great question, for its answer is poetry and
religion and life itself. Mr. Burroughs is serenely sure as to who
made the world; the theological speculation as to _why_ it was made,
he answers by growing small fruits on it, living upon it, writing
about it.
Temperamentally Mr. Burroughs is an optimist, as vocationally he is a
writer, and avocationally a vine-dresser. He plants and expects to
gather--grapes from his grape-vines, books from his book-vines, years,
satisfactions, sorrows, joys, all that is due him.
The waters know their own and draw
The brook that springs in yonder heights;
So flows the good with equal law
Unto the soul of pure delights.
And what is it that is due him? Everything; everything essential; as
everything essential is due the pine tree, the prairie, the very
planet. Is not this earth a star? Are not the prairie, the pine tree,
and man the dust of stars? each a part of the other? all parts of one
whole--a universe, round, rolling, without beginning, without end,
without flaw, without lack, a universe self-sustained, perfect?
I stay my haste, I make delays,
For what avails this eager pace?
I stand amid the eternal ways,
And what is mine shall know my face.