Indelibly stamped on my mind is the celebration of John Burroughs’s
seventy-fifth birthday in the Bird Hall of the American Museum of
Natural History, when six hundred children of the New York East Side
schools, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Slovaks, no trace of American stock
among them, came to tell Burroughs how they loved him and his writings.
Twelve bright girls and boys, each representing a volume of the edition
of his collected works and wearing the name of the volume suspended in
front, came forward and recited a verse or a bit of prose from the
volume represented. Tears came into the eyes of “the good gray poet,”
Burroughs’s own designation of Walt Whitman, as the love and admiration
of the spirited children poured in upon him. The scene reflected the
high purpose of literature, the interpretation of the spiritual and
moral influences of nature.
With a large following of grown men, a circle of admirers which included
such extremes as Henry Ford and Theodore Roosevelt, Burroughs was
preeminently the poet of the school children of America, his ability for
humanizing his dumb friends of the animal world having caught the fancy
of the children, thus giving him one of his claims to immortality in
America, if not in other countries. It was his part in America to throw
the light of nature into the “prison-house,” to use Wordsworth’s phrase,
which civilization throws around our youth:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.
His fellow poet of nature, John Muir, though in his way a writer of
large imagination, did not humanize his birds and mammals as Burroughs
did—a legitimate means of charming young and old with the habits and
moralities of animal life, provided one makes it clear that it is an
interpretation and an analogy and not a real resemblance being pictured.
Burroughs loved nature of the East—of New York and New England—as Muir,
his junior by only a year, cast over us the spell of the Pacific Coast,
from Alaska to southern California, in all its virgin grandeur. On the
voyages to Alaska in 1899 “the two Johns,” as they were affectionately
called by their companions, met day by day. Alike in their disregard of
conventions, in absent-mindedness in such trivial matters as clothing
and food, and in their readiness to absorb and to pour out their
nature-philosophy, it would appear that one steamer was not quite large
enough for two such great men, accustomed as each was, in his advancing
years, to unchecked discourse and to reverent attention and interest!
In my intimacy with Muir I learned that his views did not entirely
harmonize with those of Burroughs; the difference was more or less
traceable, I believe, to the Scotch ancestry of Muir and to his severe
and rugged bringing up as contrasted with the more equable environment
of Burroughs’s youth. Muir chose for observation those aspects of nature
which present the greatest obstacles, glaciers and mountain tops,
although he had tender moments with birds and found a personality in
trees. He wrote about trees as has no one else in the whole history of
trees, chiefly because he loved them as he loved men and women, and his
powers of expression were gathered from classic British sources, such as
the King James version of the Bible, Milton, Shakespeare, and Carlyle,
with little influence from Thoreau and none from Whitman.
In feature and in spirit of the Nordic stock, with a dash of Celtic
temperament, Burroughs was true to his heredity. From the paternal side
of his ancestry Burroughs received, according to a close student of his
forebears, his religious and moral nature, his stubbornness, his
persistence, his emotional tendencies, his love of beauty, his curiosity
as to causes and explanations; these were the Nordic traits of his
pedigree. Of English ancestry on his mother’s side, he inherited from
the Kelly line, perhaps Celtic, his slight melancholy and his care-free
love of nature. There are numerous divines on the paternal Burroughs
side, given to Bible reading; on the maternal Kelly side are country
folk, lovers of the outdoors, fishermen, foxhunters, one hermit, and one
Bible reader, “Granther Kelly.” Thus Burroughs’s intellectual and
spiritual pedigree recalls what Goethe says of his own parents:
To my father I owe my stature,
My impulse to the serious life;
To my mother dear my joyous nature,
My love of story-telling.
At various times in Burroughs’s life one set of impulses and then
another predominated, but his genius manifested itself in three ways:
first, in the possession of what may be called the _nature supersense_,
a rare endowment observed also in Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Emerson, and
recorded by them in some of their most beautiful sentences:
This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and
imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange
liberty in nature, a part of itself. (Thoreau: “Walden.”)
... We have crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night
and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their
bosom. How willingly we would escape the barriers which render them
comparatively impotent, escape the sophistication and second thought,
and suffer nature to entrance us.... These enchantments are medicinal,
they sober and heal us. (Emerson: “Nature.”)
Mounting toward the upland again, I pause reverently as the hush and
stillness of twilight come upon the woods. It is the sweetest, ripest
hour of the day. And as the hermit’s evening hymn goes up from the
deep solitude below me, I experience that serene exaltation of
sentiment of which music, literature, and religion are but the faint
types and symbols. (Burroughs: “In the Hemlocks.”)
Of the reality of this nature supersense there is as little doubt as of
its rarity.
Burroughs may be called a natural philosopher—a nature-lover more than a
naturalist, for the latter term is reserved for the few gifted ones,
like Darwin and Fabre. His powers of original observation of nature were
not great powers such as would entitle him to be called a great
naturalist, but powers of intimate, truthful, and sympathetic
observation joined with a love of expression that made him a prolific
producer, and that suggested the title of his first paper, “Expression,”
published in 1860. The naturalist instinct has certainly been rare among
other poets and men of letters. Emerson’s “Nature,” published in 1835,
might have been written at his library table, gazing into the firelight,
although his poems, “May-Day,” “To the Humble Bee,” “The Rhodora,” and
“Titmouse,” are full of the nature vision. Maeterlinck’s delightful
naturalistic writings are rather the mastery of the observations of
Fabre than of a single original observation on his own part. Similarly,
the natural philosophy so beautifully expressed by Tennyson in 1850 in
his “In Memoriam” was drawn from conversations in a Darwinian club.
Wordsworth was richly endowed with the nature supersense, perhaps more
so than Burroughs, but he was neither observer, naturalist, nor natural
philosopher; he was preeminently the spiritual interpreter. On the other
hand, the naturalistic poetry of Erasmus Darwin at the end of the
eighteenth century, his “Botanic Garden,” his “Loves of the Plants,”
were the rhythmic expression of original and philosophical thought of a
high order. This is true also of Goethe’s natural history writings and
poetic allusions to nature which sprang from original work in botany and
anatomy and brought him near a conception of the theory of evolution a
half-century before Charles Darwin.
We look to Gilbert White as one of Burroughs’s prototypes in the union
of observation and expression, to Izaak Walton in the joy of outdoor
life, and especially to the truly great Americans, Thoreau and Walt
Whitman. That Burroughs fell under Whitman’s influence very early, his
poem “Waiting,” written at the age of twenty-five, would seem to
indicate.
My own attention, at the age of twenty-two, was called to Whitman in a
memorable manner, when he was not considered fit reading for the young.
It was in 1879, in the rooms of Francis Balfour, younger brother of
Arthur, at Cambridge University, where there were weekly dinners at
which one met wits and celebrities from London and Oxford, as well as
from Cambridge. One evening I was approached by a tall youth with a
handsome face, long hair, flowing collar, and sensuous mouth, who began
immediately to offer an opinion of American literature. He said: “You
have no real poets in America. To me Longfellow, Whittier, and the
others are mere echoes of English singers. You Americans have only one
sweet and true songster, whom you do not appreciate, and that is Walt
Whitman.” These words and young Oscar Wilde’s appearance are indelibly
impressed upon my memory because they first brought home to me the idea
that the all-essential quality in a writer of eminence is that he must
be of his country, of his soil. This quality, preeminent in Whitman, was
possessed in no less degree by Burroughs, although Burroughs was by no
means so poetic. Americanism in Americans is essential for the
fundamental biological reason that our spiritual and intellectual
powers, to reach their highest development, must react to our own
environment and not to some other distant or bygone environment. Welcome
as British, French, or classical reactions may be among us, they are not
of our soil.
These are interpretations of Burroughs’s genius, not explanations; we
may examine and compare him with other men, but we cannot explain him
any more than we can explain the prehistoric artists of the cave period.
In each case the genius arrives, assumes leadership, and lifts an entire
community of less gifted souls to a little higher level.
This brings us to the sources of the racial soul. Why did the soul of
John Burroughs react throughout his life to the genial conditions of our
East, to its birds and plants and flowers, to its seasons, to its few
retreats still accessible where Nature has preserved some of her
unrestrained beauty in her contest with the ruthless destroyer that we
call Civilization? Why was he the poet of our robins, of our
apple-trees, of the beauties of our forests and farms? Why was he the
ardent and sometimes violent prophet of conservation?
Whence the poet’s soul, whence the soul of a race, of a people, of a
nation? Have we not reason to believe that there is _a racial soul_ as
well as a racial mind, a racial system of morals, a racial anatomy? This
is the thought to which I have been led in trying to penetrate to the
inner meaning of the life and works of John Burroughs, because, eager as
I am about anatomy, I am far more eager about the origin and development
of the moral, spiritual, and intellectual nature of man—the mystery of
mysteries in biology at the present time. When Huxley in his Romanes
Lecture held that Darwinism fails to throw light on the moral nature of
man, he was, in my opinion, wrong; yet the origin of the anatomy and
even of the moral nature of man is relatively simple when compared with
the origin of the spirit and mind of man. The peculiar mystery about the
origin of our spiritual and intellectual powers is that they appear to
arise before they are needed—they are ready to play their part before
the time and opportunity arise.
Moreover, we have long since abandoned Herbert Spencer’s teaching that
our spiritual and intellectual faculties are developed through the
inherited effects of use, and we now adhere to Weismann’s teaching that
the use or disuse of our spiritual and intellectual powers has no effect
whatever on our offspring, except in so far as it tends to keep us in a
normal state of mind and health. The death-blow to Herbert Spencer’s
view was given in the discoveries of prehistoric art within the last
quarter of a century, from which it appears that a race of men of
spiritual and intellectual powers arose in which the art spirit had
little to do with the struggle for existence and may have run counter to
it, as it does at the present time. These discoveries also appear to
give pause to the Darwinian theory of the origin of our spiritual and
intellectual powers through Natural Selection, for the periods in man’s
history and prehistory when the artist or the man of letters has been
best fitted to survive have been few and far between.
Again, this sudden emergence of our spiritual and intellectual nature
from the man of the environing woods, forests, streams, plains, and
deserts of primeval Asia and Europe does not favor Bergson’s view of the
creative evolution of an internal spiritual and intellectual impulse
which must flower out in time, because if Bergson were right we should
have spiritual and intellectual genius appearing out of season and
entirely out of accord with environment. This is not the case, because
there is always an adjustment, a relation, between the internal
spiritual and intellectual powers and the external nature of the time,
the beauty or the ugliness, the ease or the hardship. It is through this
reciprocal relation of the inner man and the environing world that there
are so few misfits. If Bergson were right, our western world would be
full of disharmonies; we should find Mediterranean geniuses springing up
in Scandinavian atmospheres, as is never the case. The _racial_ creative
spirit of man always reacts to its own historic racial environment, into
the remote past.
Our conclusion is that distinctive spiritual and intellectual powers
originate along lines of slow racial evolution in climate and
surroundings of distinct kinds. In the south were the Mediterranean
lines of migration along sunny seas, formidable enough in the winter
season, favorable to rapid development of maritime powers, together with
artistic powers, the Mycenæans, the Phœnicians, the early Italian races.
The Mediterraneans take nature for granted. In the centre of Europe were
the lines of Alpine or Celtic invaders, kept entirely away from the sea,
races of agriculturalists and of miners, rich in mechanical talent,
neither adventurous nor sea-loving. To the north lived a race of
hunters, of seafaring adventurers, resolutely contending with the forces
of nature, fond of the open, curious and inquisitive about the causes of
things; deliberate in spiritual development, very gradually they reach
the greatest intellectual heights and depths.
The racial aptitudes in these three environments of the past twenty
thousand years are now revealed in anatomy and will be no less clearly
revealed in the predispositions of morals, of intellect, and of spirit.
Here nature, religion, and beauty, kept apart by the superficial vision
of man in science, theology, and æsthetics, are one in the eternal
vision and purpose of the Creator. In the marvelous continuity of
heredity a thousand years are as yesterday.
This is my idea of the origin of the racial soul, this is my
interpretation of Wordsworth’s immortal lines:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
Burroughs, the poet of today, found himself at home in the environment
of his remote flint-making ancestors of northern Europe. The soul that
rose with him had its setting for countless generations in the north; it
came from afar, not in forgetfulness, reflecting and recalling the
northern clouds of nature’s glory.
[Illustration:
JOHN MUIR
]