consequent optimism. It is due partly to his having been born and
brought up on a farm where he had what was due him from the start.
Such birth and bringing-up is the natural right of every boy. To know
and to do the primitive, the elemental; to go barefoot, to drive the
cows, to fish, and to go to school with not too many books but with
“plenty of real things”--these are nominated in every boy’s bond.
Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
is the poem of a childhood on the farm, and the poem of a manhood on
the farm, in spite of the critic who says:--
“We have never ceased to wonder that this friend of the birds, this
kindly interpreter of nature in all her moods, was born and brought up
on a farm; it was in that smiling country watered by the east branch
of the Delaware. No man, as a rule, knows less about the colors,
songs, and habits of birds, and is more indifferent to natural scenery
than the man born to the soil, who delves in it and breathes its
odors. Contact with it and laborious days seem to deaden his faculties
of observation and deprive him of all sympathy with nature.” During
the days when the deadening might have occurred, Mr. Burroughs was
teaching school. Then he became a United States bank examiner, and
only after that returned to the country where he still lives. He is
now in his seventies, and coming full of years, and fuller and fuller
of books, as his vines are full of years, and fuller and fuller of
grapes.
Could it be otherwise? If men and grapes are of the same divine dust,
should they not grow according to the same divine laws? Here in the
vineyard along the Hudson, Mr. Burroughs planted himself in planting
his vines, and every trellis that he set has become his own support
and stay. The very clearing of the land for his vineyard was a
preparation of himself physically and morally for a more fruitful
life.
“Before the snow was off in March,” he says in “Literary Values,” “we
set to work under-draining the moist and springy places. My health and
spirits improved daily. I seemed to be under-draining my own life and
carrying off the stagnant water, as well as that of the land.” And so
he was. There are other means of doing it--taking drugs, playing golf,
walking the streets; but surely the advantages and the poetry are all
in favor of the vineyard. And how much fitter a place the vineyard to
mellow and ripen life, than a city roof of tarry pebbles and tin!
Though necessarily personal and subjective, Mr. Burroughs’s writing is
entirely free from self-exploitation and confession. There are pages
scattered here and there dealing briefly and frankly with his own
natural history, but our thanks are due to Mr. Burroughs that he never
made a business of watching himself. Once he was inveigled by a
magazine editor into doing “An Egotistical Chapter,” wherein we find
him as a boy of sixteen reading essays, and capable at that age of
feeding for a whole year upon Dr. Johnson! Then we find him reading
Whipple’s essays, and the early outdoor papers of Higginson; and
later, at twenty-three, settling down with Emerson’s essays, and
getting one of his own into the “Atlantic Monthly.”
How early his own began to come to him!
That first essay in the “Atlantic” was followed by a number of outdoor
sketches in the New York “Leader”--written, Mr. Burroughs says,
“mainly to break the spell of Emerson’s influence and get upon ground
of my own.” He succeeded in both purposes; and a large and exceedingly
fertile piece of ground it proved to be, too, this which he got upon!
Already the young writer had chosen his field and his crop. The
out-of-doors has been largely his literary material, as the essay has
been largely his literary form, ever since. He has done other
things--volumes of literary studies and criticisms; but his theme from
first to last has been the Great Book of Nature, a page of which, here
and there, he has tried to read to us.
Mr. Burroughs’s work, in outdoor literature, is a distinct species,
with new and well-marked characteristics. He is the nature-writer, to
be distinguished from the naturalist in Gilbert White, the mystic in
Traherne, the philosopher in Emerson, the preacher, poet, egotist in
Thoreau, the humorist in Charles Dudley Warner. As we now know the
nature-writer we come upon him for the first time in Mr. Burroughs.
Such credit might have gone to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, had he not
been something else before he was a lover of nature--of letters first,
then of flowers, carrying his library into the fields; whereas Mr.
Burroughs brings the fields into the library. The essay whose matter
is nature, whose moral is human, whose manner is strictly literary,
belongs to Mr. Burroughs. His work is distinguished by this threefold
and _even_ emphasis. In almost every other of our early outdoor
writers either the naturalist or the moralist or the stylist holds the
pen.
Early or late, this or that, good outdoor writing must be marked,
first, by fidelity to fact; and, secondly, by sincerity of expression.
Like qualities mark all good literature; but they are themselves the
_very_ literature of nature. When we take up a nature-book we ask (and
it was Mr. Burroughs who taught us to ask), “Is the record true? Is
the writing honest?”
In these eleven volumes by Mr. Burroughs there are many observations,
and it is more than likely that some of them may be wrong, but it is
not possible that any of them could be mixed with observations that
Mr. Burroughs knows he never made. If Mr. Burroughs has written a line
of sham natural history, which line is it? In a preface to
“Wake-Robin,” the author says his readers have sometimes complained
that they do not see the things which he sees in the woods; but I
doubt if there ever was a reader who suspected Mr. Burroughs of not
seeing the things.
His reply to these complaints is significant, being in no manner a
defense, but an exquisite explanation, instead, of the difference
between the nature which anybody may see in the woods and the nature
that every individual writer, because he is a writer, and an
individual, must put into his book: a difference like that between the
sweet-water gathered by the bee from the flowers and the drop of
acid-stung honey deposited by the bee in the comb. The sweet-water
undergoes a chemical change in being brought to the hive, as the wild
nature undergoes a literary change--by the addition of the writer’s
self to the nature, while with the sweet-water it is by the addition
of the bee.
One must be able to walk to an editorial office and back, and all the
way walk humbly with his theme, as Mr. Burroughs ever does--not
entirely forgetful of himself, nor of me (because he has invited me
along); but I must be quiet and not disturb the fishing--if we go by
way of a trout-stream.
True to the facts, Mr. Burroughs is a great deal more than scientific,
for he loves the things--the birds, hills, seasons--as well as the
truths about them; and true to himself, he is not by any means a
simple countryman who has never seen the city, a natural idyl, who
lisps in “Atlantic” essays, because the essays come. He is fully aware
of the thing he wants to do, and by his own confession has a due
amount of trouble shaping his raw material into finished literary
form. He is quite in another class from the authors of “The Complete
Angler” and “New England’s Rarities Discovered.” In Isaak Walton, to
quote Leslie Stephen, “_a happy combination of circumstances_ has
provided us with a true country idyl, fresh and racy from the soil,
not consciously constructed by the most skillful artistic hand.”
Now the skillful artistic hand is everywhere seen in Mr. Burroughs.
What writer in these days could expect happy combinations of
circumstances in sufficient numbers for eleven volumes? Albeit a stone
house, in a vineyard by the Hudson, seems a very happy combination,
indeed!
But being an idyl, when you come to think of it, is not the result of
a happy combination of circumstances, but rather of stars--of
horoscope. You are born an idyl or you are not, and where and when you
live has nothing to do with it.
Who would look for a true country idyl to-day in the city of
Philadelphia? Yet one came out of there yesterday, and lies here open
before me, on the table. It is a slender volume, called “With the
Birds, An Affectionate Study,” by Caroline Eliza Hyde. The author is
discussing the general subject of nomenclature and animal
distribution, and says:--
“When the Deluge covered the then known face of the earth, the birds
were drowned with every other living thing, except those that Noah,
commanded by God, took two by two into the Ark.
“When I reflect deeply and earnestly about the Ark, as every one
should, thoughts crowd my mind with an irresistible force.”
[And they crowd my mind, too.]
“Noah and his family had preserved the names of the birds given them
by Adam. This is assured, for Noah sent a raven and a dove out to see
if the waters had abated, and we have birds of that name now. Nothing
was known of our part of the globe, so these birds must have remained
in the Holy Land for centuries. We do not hear of them until America
was discovered....
“Bats come from Sur. They are very black mouse-like birds, and
disagreeable.... The bobolink is not mentioned in the Bible, but it is
doubtless a primitive bird. The cock that crows too early in the
morning ... can hardly be classed with the song-birds. The name of the
hummingbird is not mentioned in the Bible, but as there is nothing new
under the sun, he is probably a primitive bird.”
Mr. Burroughs will agree that the hummingbird is probably a primitive
bird; and also that this is a true idyl, and that he could not write a
true idyl if he tried. No one could write like that by trying. And
what has any happy combination of circumstances to do with it? No, a
book essentially is only a personality in type, and he who would not
be frustrated of his hope to write a true idyl must himself be born a
true idyl. A fine Miltonic saying!
Mr. Burroughs is not an idyl, but an essayist, with a love for books
only second to his love for nature; a watcher in the woods, a tiller
of the soil, a reader, critic, thinker, poet, whose chief business
these fifty years has been the interpretation of the out-of-doors.
Upon him as interpreter and observer, his recent books, “Ways of
Nature” and “Leaf and Tendril,” are an interesting comment.
Truth does not always make good literature, not when it is stranger
than fiction, as it often is, and the writer who sticks to the truth
of nature must sometimes do it at the cost of purely literary ends.
Have I sacrificed truth to literature? asks Mr. Burroughs of his
books. Have I seen in nature the things that are there, or the
strange man-things, the “winged creeping things which have four
feet,” and which were an abomination to the ancient Hebrews, but which
the readers of modern nature-writing do greedily devour--are these the
things I have seen? And for an answer he sets about a reëxamination of
all he has written, from “Wake-Robin” to “Far and Near,” hoping “that
the result of the discussion or threshing will not be to make the
reader love the animals less, but rather to love the truth more.”
But the result, as embodied in “Ways of Nature” and in “Leaf and
Tendril,” is quite the opposite, I fear; for these two volumes are
more scientific in tone than any of his other work; and it is the
mission, not of science, but of literature, to quicken our love for
animals, even for truth. Science only adds to the truth. Yet here, in
spite of himself, Mr. Burroughs is more the writer, more the
interpreter, than the investigator. He is constantly forgetting his
scientific thesis, as, for instance, in the account of his neighbor’s
errant cow. He succeeds finally, however, in reducing her fairly well
to a mechanical piece of beef acting to vegetable stimuli upon a nerve
ganglion located somewhere in the region between her horns and her
tail.
Now, all this is valuable, and the use made of it is laudable, but
would we not rather have the account than the cow, especially from Mr.
Burroughs? Certainly, because to us it is the _account_ that he has
come to stand for. And so, if we do not love his scientific animals
more, and his scientific findings more, we shall, I think, love all
his other books more; for we see now that, from the beginning, he has
regarded the facts of nature as the solid substance of his books, to
be kept as free from fancy and from false report, as his
interpretation of them is to be kept free from all exaggeration and
cant.
Here, then, are eleven volumes of honest seeing, honest feeling,
honest reporting. Such honesty of itself may not make good
nature-literature, but without such honesty there can be no good
nature-literature.
Nature-literature is not less than the truth, but more; how much more,
Mr. Burroughs himself suggests to us in a passage about his literary
habits.
“For my part,” he says, “I can never interview nature in the reporter
fashion. I must camp and tramp with her to get any good, and what I
get I absorb through my emotions rather than consciously gather
through my intellect.... An experience must lie in my mind a certain
time before I can put it upon paper--say from three to six months. If
there is anything in it, it will ripen and mellow by that time. I
rarely take any notes, and I have a very poor memory, but rely upon
the affinity of my mind for a certain order of truths or observations.
What is mine will stick to me, and what is not will drop off. We who
write about nature pick out, I suspect, only the rare moments when we
have had glimpses of her, and make much of them. Our lives are dull,
our minds crusted over with rubbish like those of other people. Then
writing about nature, or about most other subjects, is an expansive
process; we are under the law of evolution; we grow the germ into the
tree; a little original observation goes a good way.” For “when you go
to nature, bring us good science or else good literature, and not a
mere inventory of what you have seen. One demonstrates, the other
interprets.”
Careful as Mr. Burroughs has been with his facts, so careful as often
to bring us excellent science, he yet has left us no inventory of the
out-of-doors. His work is literature; he is not a demonstrator, but an
interpreter, an expositor who is true to the text and true to the
whole of the context.
Our pleasure in Mr. Burroughs as an interpreter comes as much from his
wholesome good sense, from his balance and sanity, I think, as from
the assurance of his sincerity. Free from pose and cant and deception,
he is free also from bias and strain. There is something ordinary,
normal, reasonable, companionable, about him; an even tenor to all his
ways, a deliberateness, naturalness to all his paths, as if they might
have been made originally by the cows. So they were.
If Mr. Burroughs were to start from my door for a tramp over these
small Hingham hills he would cross the trout-brook by my neighbor’s
stone bridge, and nibbling a spear of peppermint on the way, would
follow the lane and the cow-paths across the pasture. Thoreau would
pick out the deepest hole in the brook and try to swim across; he
would leap the stone walls of the lane, cut a bee-line through the
pasture, and drop, for his first look at the landscape, to the bottom
of the pit in the seam-face granite quarry. Here he would pull out his
note-book and a gnarly wild apple from his pocket, and intensely,
critically, chemically, devouring said apple, make note in the book
that the apples of Eden were flat, the apples of Sodom bitter, but
this wild, tough, wretched, impossible apple of the Hingham hills
united all ambrosial essences in its striking odor of squash-bugs.
Mr. Burroughs takes us along with him. Thoreau comes upon us in the
woods--jumps out at us from behind some bush, with a “_Scat!_”
Burroughs brings us home in time for tea; Thoreau leaves us tangled up
in the briars.
It won’t hurt us to be jumped at now and then and told to “_scat!_” It
won’t hurt us to be digged by the briars. It is good for us, otherwise
we might forget that _we_ are beneath our clothes. It is good for us
and highly diverting, but highly irritating too.
For my part, when I take up an outdoor book I am glad if there is
quiet in it, and fragrance, and something of the saneness and
sweetness of the sky. Not that I always want sweet skies. It is
ninety-eight degrees in the shade, and three weeks since there fell a
drop of rain. I could sing like a robin for a sizzling, crackling
thunder-shower--less for the sizzling and crackling than for the
shower. Thoreau is a succession of showers--“tempests”; his pages are
sheet-lightning, electrifying, purifying, illuminating, but not
altogether conducive to peace. There is a clear sky to most of Mr.
Burroughs’s pages, a rural landscape, wide, gently rolling, with
cattle standing here and there beneath the trees.
Mr. Burroughs’s natural history is entirely natural, his philosophy
entirely reasonable, his religion and ethics very much of the kind we
wish our minister and our neighbor might possess; and his manner of
writing is so unaffected that we feel we could write in such a manner
ourselves. Only we cannot.
Since the time he can be said to have “led” a life, Mr. Burroughs has
led a literary life; that is to say, nothing has been allowed to
interfere with his writing; yet the writing has not been allowed to
interfere with a quiet successful business,--with his raising of
grapes.
He has a study and a vineyard.
Not many men ought to live by the pen alone. A steady diet of
inspiration and words is hard on the literary health. The writing
should be varied with some good wholesome work, actual hard work for
the hands; not so much work, perhaps, as one would find in an
eighteen-acre vineyard; yet Mr. Burroughs’s eighteen acres have
certainly proved no check--rather, indeed, a stimulus--to his writing.
He seems to have gathered a volume out of every acre; and he seems to
have put a good acre into every volume. “Fresh Fields” is the name of
one of the volumes, “Leaf and Tendril” of another; but the freshness
of his fields, the leaves and the tendrils of his vineyard, enter into
them all. The grapes of the vineyard are in them also.
Here is a growth of books out of the soil, books that have been
trimmed, trained, sprayed, and kept free from rot. Such books may not
be altogether according to the public taste; they will keep, however,
until the public acquires a better taste. Sound, ripe, fresh, early
and late, a full crop! Has the vineyard anything to do with it?
It is not every farmer who should go to writing, nor every writer who
should go to farming; but there is a mighty waste of academic
literature, of premature, precocious, lily-handed literature, of
chicken-licken literature, because the writers do not know a spade
when they see one, would not call it a spade if they knew. Those
writers need to do less writing and more farming, more real work with
their soft hands in partnership with the elemental forces of nature,
or in comradeship with average elemental men--the only species extant
of the quality to make writing worth while.
Mr. Burroughs has had this labor, this partnership, this comradeship.
His writing is seasoned and sane. It is ripe, and yet as fresh as
green corn with the dew in the silk. You have eaten corn on the cob
just from the stalk and steamed in its own husk? Green corn that _is_
corn, that has all its milk and sugar and flavor, is corn on the cob,
and in the husk,--is cob and kernel and husk,--not a stripped ear that
is cooked into the kitchen air.
Literature is too often stripped of its human husk, and cut from its
human cob: the man gone, the writer left; the substance gone, the
style left--corn that tastes as much like corn as it tastes like
puffed rice,--which tastes like nothing at all. There is the sweetness
of the husk, the flavor of the cob, the substance of the uncut corn to
Mr. Burroughs.
There is no lack of cob and husk to Thoreau, of shell and hull, one
should say, for he is more like a green walnut than an ear of green
corn. Thoreau is very human, a whole man; but he is almost as much a
tree, and a mountain, and a pond, and a spell of weather, and a state
of morals. He is the author of “Walden,” and nobody else in the world
is that; he is a lover of nature, as ardent a lover as ever eloped
with her; he is a lover of men, too, loving them with an intensity
that hates them bag and baggage; he is poetical, prophetic,
paradoxical, and utterly impossible.
But he knew it. Born in Concord, under the transcendental stars, at a
time when Delphic sayings and philosophy, romance and poetry ran wild
in the gardens where Bouncing-Bet and Wayward Charlie now run wild,
Thoreau knew that he was touched, and that all his neighbors were
touched, and sought asylum at Walden. But Walden was not distant
enough. If Mr. Burroughs in Roxbury, New York, found it necessary to
take to the woods in order to escape from Emerson, then Thoreau should
have gone to Chicago, or to Xamiltapec.
It is the strain, in Thoreau, that wearies us; his sweating among the
stumps and woodchucks, for a bean crop netting him eight dollars,
seventy-one and one half cents. But such beans! Beans with minds and
souls! Yet, for baking, plain beans are better than these
transcendental beans, because your transcendental beans are always
baked without pork. A family man, however, cannot contemplate that
piddling patch with any patience, even though he have a taste for
literature as real as his taste for beans. It is better to watch Mr.
Burroughs pruning his grape-vines for a crop to net him one thousand,
three hundred and twenty-five dollars, and _no_ cents, and no
half-cents. Here are eighteen acres to be cultivated, whose fruit is
to be picked, shipped, and sold in the New York markets at a profit--a
profit plainly felt in Mr. Burroughs’s books.
The most worthy qualities of good writing are those least
noticeable,--negative qualities of honesty, directness, sincerity,
euphony; noticeable only by their absence. Yet in Mr. Burroughs they
amount to a positive charm. Indeed, are not these same negative
qualities the very substance of good style? Such style as is had by a
pair of pruning-shears, as is embodied in the exquisite lines of a
flying swallow--the style that is perfect, purposeful adaptability?
But there is more than efficiency to Mr. Burroughs’s style; there are
strengths and graces existing in and for themselves. Here is a
naturalist who has studied the art of writing. “What little merit my
style has,” he declares, “is the result of much study and discipline.”
And whose style, if it be style at all, is not the result of much
study and discipline. Flourish, fine-writing, wordiness, obscurity,
and cant are exorcised in no other way; and as for the “limpidness,
sweetness, freshness,” which Mr. Burroughs says should characterize
outdoor writing, and which do characterize his writing, how else than
by study and discipline shall they be obtained?
Outdoor literature, no less than other types of literature, is both
form and matter; the two are mutually dependent, inseparably one; but
the writer is most faithful to the form when he is most careful of the
matter. It makes a vast difference whether his interest is absorbed by
what he has to say, or by the possible ways he may say it. If Mr.
Burroughs writes in his shirt-sleeves, as a recent critic says he
does, it is because he goes about his writing as he goes about his
vineyarding--for grapes, for thoughts, and not to see how pretty he
can make a paragraph look, or into what fantastic form he can train a
vine. The vine is lovely in itself,--if it bear fruit.
And so is language. Take Mr. Burroughs’s manner in any of its moods:
its store of single, sufficient words, for instance, especially the
homely, rugged words and idioms, and the flavor they give, is second
to the work they do; or take his use of figures--when he speaks of De
Quincey’s “discursive, roundabout style, herding his thoughts as a
collie dog herds sheep,”--and unexpected, vivid, apt as they are, they
are even more effective. One is often caught up by the poetry of these
essays and borne aloft, but never on a gale of words; the lift and
sweep are genuine emotion and thought.