You ask me to tell you more about myself, my life, how it has been with
me, etc. It is an inviting subject. How an old man likes to run on about
himself!
I see that my life has been more of a holiday than most persons', much
more than was my father's or his father's. I have picnicked all along
the way. I have on the whole been gay and satisfied. I have had no great
crosses or burdens to bear; no great afflictions, except such as must
come to all who live; neither poverty, nor riches. I have had uniform
good health, true friends, and some congenial companions. I have done,
for the most part, what I wanted to do. Some drudgery I have had, that
is, in uncongenial work on the farm, in teaching, in clerking, and in
bank-examining; but amid all these things I have kept an outlook, an
open door, as it were, out into the free fields of nature, and a buoyant
feeling that I would soon be there.
My farm life as a boy was at least a half-holiday. The fishing, the
hunting, the berrying, the Sundays on the hills or in the woods, the
sugar-making, the apple-gathering--all had a holiday character. But the
hoeing corn, and picking up potatoes, and cleaning the cow stables, had
little of this character. I have never been a cog in the wheel of any
great concern. I have never had to sink or lose my individuality. I have
been under no exacting master or tyrant.... I have never been a slave to
any bad habit, as smoking, drinking, over-feeding. I have had no social
or political ambitions; society has not curtailed my freedom or dictated
my dress or habits. Neither has any religious order or any clique.
I have had no axe to grind. I have gone with such men and women as
I liked, irrespective of any badge of wealth or reputation or social
prestige that they might wear. I have looked for simple pleasures
everywhere, and have found them. I have not sought for costly pleasures,
and do not want them--pleasures that cost money, or health, or time. The
great things, the precious things of my life, have been without money
and without price, as common as the air.
Life has laid no urgent mission upon me. My gait has been a leisurely
one. I am not bragging of it; I am only stating a fact. I have never
felt called upon to reform the world. I have doubtless been culpably
indifferent to its troubles and perplexities, and sins and sufferings.
I lend a hand occasionally here and there in my own neighborhood, but I
trouble myself very little about my neighbors--their salvation or their
damnation. I go my own way and do my own work.
I have loved nature, I have loved the animals, I have loved my
fellow-men. I have made my own whatever was fair and of good report. I
have loved the thoughts of the great thinkers and the poems of the great
poets, and the devout lines of the great religious souls. I have not
looked afar off for my joy and entertainment, but in things near at
hand, that all may have on equal terms. I have been a loving and dutiful
son, and a loving and dutiful father, and a good neighbor. I have got
much satisfaction out of life; it has been worth while.
I have not been a burden-bearer; for shame be it said, perhaps, when
there are so many burdens to be borne by some one. I have borne those
that came in my way, or that circumstances put upon me, and have at
least pulled my own weight. I have had my share of the holiday spirit;
I have had a social holiday, a moral holiday, a business holiday. I
have gone a-fishing while others were struggling and groaning and losing
their souls in the great social or political or business maelstrom. I
know, too, I have gone a-fishing while others have labored in the slums
and given their lives to the betterment of their fellows. But I have
been a good fisherman, and I should have made a poor missionary, or
reformer, or leader of any crusade against sin and crime. I am not a
fighter, I dislike any sort of contest, or squabble, or competition,
or storm. My strength is in my calm, my serenity, my sunshine. In
excitement I lose my head, and my heels, too. I cannot carry any citadel
by storm. I lack the audacity and spirit of the stormer. I must reduce
it slowly or steal it quietly. I lack moral courage, though I have
plenty of physical and intellectual courage. I could champion Walt
Whitman when nearly every contemporaneous critic and poet were crying
him down, but I utterly lack the moral courage to put in print what he
dared to. I have wielded the "big stick" against the nature-fakers, but
I am very uncomfortable under any sort of blame or accusation. It is so
much easier for me to say yes than no. My moral fibre is soft compared
to my intellectual. I am a poor preacher, an awkward moralizer. A moral
statement does not interest me unless it can be backed up by natural
truth; it must have intellectual value. The religious dogmas interest me
if I can find a scientific basis for them, otherwise not at all.
I shall shock you by telling you I am not much of a patriot. I have but
little national pride. If we went to war with a foreign power to-morrow,
my sympathies would be with the foreigner if I thought him in the right.
I could gladly see our navy knocked to pieces by Japan, for instance, if
we were in the wrong. I have absolutely no state pride, any more than
I have county or town pride, or neighborhood pride. But I make it up in
family or tribal affection.
I am too much preoccupied, too much at home with myself, to feel any
interest in many things that interest my fellows. I have aimed to live
a sane, normal, healthy life; or, rather, I have an instinct for such a
life. I love life, as such, and I am quickly conscious of anything that
threatens to check its even flow. I want a full measure of it, and I
want it as I do my spring water, clear and sweet and from the original
sources. Hence I have always chafed in cities, I must live in the
country. Life in the cities is like the water there--a long way from the
original sources, and more or less tainted by artificial conditions.
The current of the lives of many persons, I think, is like a muddy
stream. They lack the instinct for health, and hence do not know when
the vital current is foul. They are never really well. They do not look
out for personal inward sanitation. Smokers, drinkers, coffee-tipplers,
gluttonous eaters, diners-out, are likely to lose the sense of perfect
health, of a clear, pure life-current, of which I am thinking. The dew
on the grass, the bloom on the grape, the sheen on the plumage, are
suggestions of the health that is within the reach of most of us.
The least cloud or film in my mental skies mars or stops my work. I
write with my body quite as much as with my mind. How persons whose
bread of life is heavy, so to speak,--no lightness or buoyancy or
airiness at all,--can make good literature is a mystery to me; or those
who stimulate themselves with drugs or alcohol or coffee. I would live
so that I could get tipsy on a glass of water, or find a spur in a whiff
of morning air.
Such as my books are, the bloom of my life is in them; no morbidity, or
discontent, or ill health, or angry passion, has gone to their making.
The iridescence of a bird's plumage, we are told, is not something
extraneous; it is a prismatic effect. So the color in my books is not
paint; it is health. It is probably nothing to brag of; much greater
books have been the work of confirmed invalids. All I can say is that
the minds of these inspired invalids have not seemed to sustain so close
a relation to their bodies as my mind does to my body. Their powers seem
to have been more purely psychic. Look at Stevenson--almost bedridden
all his life, yet behold the felicity of his work! How completely his
mind must have been emancipated from the infirmities of his body! It is
clearly not thus with me. My mind is like a flame that depends entirely
upon the good combustion going on in the body. Hence, I can never write
in the afternoon, because this combustion is poorest then.
Life has been to me simply an opportunity to learn and enjoy, and,
through my books, to share my enjoyment with others. I have had no other
ambition. I have thirsted to know things, and to make the most of them.
The universe is to me a grand spectacle that fills me with awe and
wonder and joy, and with intense curiosity. I have had no such religious
burden to bear as my fathers did--the conviction of sin, the struggle,
the agony, the despair of a soul that fears it is lost. The fear of hell
has never troubled me. Of sin in the theological sense, the imputed sin
of Adam's transgression, which so worried the old people, I have not had
a moment's concern. That I have given my heart to Nature instead of to
God, as these same old people would have said, has never cast a shadow
over my mind or conscience--as if God would not get all that belonged to
Him, and as if love of his works were not love of Him! I have acquiesced
in things as they are, and have got all the satisfaction out of them
that I could.
Over my personal sins and shortcomings, I have not been as much troubled
as I should; none of us are. We do not see them in relief as others do;
they are like the color of our eyes, or our hair, or the shapes of our
noses.
I do not know that it is true that my moral fibre is actually weak. If
I may draw a figure from geology, it is probably true that my moral
qualities are the softer rock in the strata that make up my being--the
easiest worn away. I see that I carry the instinct of the naturalist
into all my activities. If a thing is natural, sane, wholesome, that is
enough. Whether or not it is conventionally correct, or square with the
popular conception of morality, does not matter to me.
I undoubtedly lack the heroic fibre. My edge is much easier turned than
was that, say, of Thoreau. Austerity would ill become me. You would see
through the disguise. Yes, there is much soft rock in my make-up. Is
that why I shrink from the wear and tear of the world?
The religious storm and upheaval that I used to hear so much of in my
youth is impossible with me. I am liable to deep-seated enthusiasms; but
to nothing like a revolution in my inward life, nothing sudden, nothing
violent. I can't say that there has been any abandonment of my opinions
on important subjects; there has been new growth and evolution, I hope.
The emphasis of life shifts, now here, now there; it is up hill and
down dale, but there is no change of direction.... Certain deep-seated
tendencies and instincts have borne me on. I have gravitated naturally
to the things that were mine.
I could not make anything I chose of myself; I could only be what I am.
In my youth I once "went forward" at a "protracted meeting," but nothing
came of it. The change in me that I was told would happen did not
happen, and I never went again. My nature was too equable, too
self-poised, to be suddenly overturned and broken up.
I am not a bit gregarious. I cannot herd with other men and be "Hail,
fellow, well met!" with them as I wish I could. I am much more at home
with women; we seem to understand one another better. Put me with a
lot of men, and we naturally separate as oil and water separate. On
shipboard it is rarely that any of the men take to me, or I to them--I
do not smoke or drink or tell stories, or talk business or politics, and
the men have little use for me. On my last voyage across the Atlantic,
the only man who seemed to notice me, or to whom I felt drawn at all,
was a Catholic priest. Real countrymen, trappers, hunters, and farmers,
I seem to draw near to. On the Harriman Alaskan Expedition the two men
I felt most at home with were Fred Dellenbaugh, the artist and explorer,
and Captain Kelly, the guide. Can you understand this? Do you see why
men do not, as a rule, care for me, and why women do?
I accuse myself of want of sociability. Probably I am too thin-skinned.
A little more of the pachyderm would help me in this respect.
Some day I will give you more self-analysis and self-criticism.
I am what you might call an extemporaneous writer--I write without any
previous study or preparation, save in so far as my actual life from day
to day has prepared me for it. I do not work up my subject, or outline
it, or sketch it in the rough. When I sit down to write upon any theme,
like that of my "Cosmopolitan" article last April ("What Life Means to
Me," 1906), or of my various papers on animal intelligence, I do not
know what I have to say on the subject till I delve into my mind and see
what I find there. The writing is like fishing or hunting, or sifting
the sand for gold--I am never sure of what I shall find. All I want is a
certain feeling, a bit of leaven, which I seem to refer to some place in
my chest--not my heart, but to a point above that and nearer the centre
of the chest--the place that always glows or suffuses when one thinks of
any joy or good tidings that is coming his way. It is a kind of hunger
for that subject; it warms me a little to think of it, a pleasant thrill
runs through me; or it is something like a lover's feeling for his
sweetheart--I long to be alone with it, and to give myself to it. I am
sure I shall have a good time. Hence, my writing is the measure of my
life. I can write only about what I have previously felt and lived. I
have no legerdemain to invoke things out of the air, or to make a dry
branch bud and blossom before the eyes. I must look into my heart and
write, or remain dumb. Robert Louis Stevenson said one should be able
to write eloquently on a broomstick, and so he could. Stevenson had the
true literary legerdemain; he was master of the art of writing; he could
invest a broomstick with charm; if it remained a broomstick, it was one
on which the witches might carry you through the air at night. Stevenson
had no burden of meaning to deliver to the world; his subject never
compelled him to write; but he certainly could invest common things and
thoughts with rare grace and charm. I wish I had more of this gift,
this facility of pen, apart from any personal interest in the subject.
I could not grow eloquent over a broomstick, unless it was the stick of
the broom that used to stand in the corner behind the door in the old
kitchen at home--the broom with which Mother used to sweep the floor,
and sweep off the doorstones, glancing up to the fields and hills as she
finished and turned to go in; the broom with which we used to sweep the
snow from our boots and trouser-legs when we came from school or from
doing the chores in winter. Here would be a personal appeal that would
probably find me more inevitably than it would Stevenson.
I have never been in the habit of doing a thing, of taking a walk,
or making an excursion, for the purpose of writing it up. Hence, when
magazine editors have asked me to go South or to California, or here
or there, to write the text to go with the pictures their artist would
make, I have felt constrained to refuse. The thought that I was expected
to write something would have burdened me and stood in the way of my
enjoyment, and unless there is enjoyment, there is no writing with me.
I was once tempted into making an excursion for one of the magazines to
a delightful place along the Jersey coast in company with an artist,
and a memorable day it was, too, with plenty of natural and of human
interest, but nothing came of it--my perverse pen would not do what it
was expected to do; it was no longer a free pen.
When I began observing the birds, nothing was further from my thoughts
than writing them up. I watched them and ran after them because I loved
them and was happy with them in the fields and woods; the writing came
as an afterthought, and as a desire to share my enjoyment with others.
Hence, I have never carried a notebook, or collected data about nature
in my rambles and excursions. What was mine, what I saw with love and
emotion, has always fused with my mind, so that in the heat of writing
it came back to me spontaneously. What I have lived, I never lose.
My trip to Alaska came near being spoiled because I was expected to
write it up, and actually did so from day to day, before fusion and
absorption had really taken place. Hence my readers complain that they
do not find me in that narrative, do not find my stamp or quality as in
my other writings. And well they may say it. I am conscious that I am
not there as in the others; the fruit was plucked before it had ripened;
or, to use my favorite analogy, the bee did not carry the nectar long
enough to transform it into honey. Had I experienced a more free and
disinterested intercourse with Alaskan nature, with all the pores of my
mind open, the result would certainly have been different. I might then,
after the experience had lain and ripened in my mind for a year or two,
and become my own, have got myself into it.
When I went to the Yellowstone National Park with President Roosevelt,
I waited over three years before writing up the trip. I recall the
President's asking me at the time if I took notes. I said, "No;
everything that interests me will stick to me like a burr." And I may
say here that I have put nothing in my writings at any time that did not
interest me. I have aimed in this to please myself alone. I believe it
to be true at all times that what does not interest the writer will not
interest his reader.
From the impromptu character of my writings come both their merits
and their defects--their fresh, unstudied character, and their want
of thoroughness and reference-book authority. I cannot, either in
my writing or in my reading, tolerate any delay, any flagging of the
interest, any beating about the bush, even if there is a bird in it. The
thought, the description, must move right along, and I am impatient of
all footnotes and quotations and asides.
A writer may easily take too much thought about his style, until it
obtrudes itself upon the reader's attention. I would have my sentences
appear as if they had never taken a moment's thought of themselves, nor
stood before the study looking-glass an instant. In fact, the less a
book appears written, the more like a spontaneous product it is, the
better I like it. This is not a justification of carelessness or haste;
it is a plea for directness, vitality, motion. Those writers who are
like still-water fishermen, whose great virtues are patience and a
tireless arm, never appealed to me any more than such fishing ever did.
I want something more like a mountain brook--motion, variety, and the
furthest possible remove from stagnation.
Indeed, where can you find a better symbol of good style in
literature than a mountain brook after it is well launched towards the
lowlands--not too hurried, and not too loitering--limpid, musical, but
not noisy, full but not turbid, sparkling but not frothy, every shallow
quickly compensated for by a deep reach of thought; the calm, lucid
pools of meaning alternating with the passages of rapid description, of
moving eloquence or gay comment--flowing, caressing, battling, as the
need may be, loitering at this point, hurrying at that, drawing together
here, opening out there--freshness, variety, lucidity, power.
(We wish that, like the brook, our self-analyst would "go on forever";
but his stream of thought met some obstacle when he had written thus
far, and I have never been able to induce it to resume its flow. I have,
there-fore, selected a bit of self-analysis from Mr. Burroughs's diary
of December, 1884, with which to close this subject. C.B.)
I have had to accomplish in myself the work of several generations.
None of my ancestors were men or women of culture; they knew nothing of
books. I have had to begin at the stump, and to rise from crude things.
I have felt the disadvantages which I have labored under, as well as the
advantages. The advantages are, that things were not hackneyed with me,
curiosity was not blunted, my faculties were fresh and eager--a kind of
virgin soil that gives whatever charm and spontaneity my books possess,
also whatever of seriousness and religiousness. The disadvantages are an
inaptitude for scholarly things, a want of the steadiness and clearness
of the tone of letters, the need of a great deal of experimenting, a
certain thickness and indistinctness of accent. The farmer and laborer
in me, many generations old, is a little embarrassed in the company of
scholars; has to make a great effort to remember his learned manners and
terms.
The unliterary basis is the best to start from; it is the virgin soil of
the wilderness; but it is a good way to the college and the library,
and much work must be done. I am near to nature and can write upon these
themes with ease and success; this is my proper field, as I well know.
But bookish themes--how I flounder about amid them, and have to work and
delve long to get down to the real truth about them in my mind!
In writing upon Emerson, or Arnold, or Carlyle, I have to begin, as it
were, and clear the soil, build a log hut, and so work up to the point
of view that is not provincial, but more or less metropolitan.
My best gift as a writer is my gift for truth; I have a thoroughly
honest mind, and know the truth when I see it. My humility, or modesty,
or want of self-assertion, call it what you please, is also a help in
bringing me to the truth. I am not likely to stand in my own light; nor
to mistake my own wants and whims for the decrees of the Eternal. At
least, if I make the mistake to-day, I shall see my error to-morrow.
(The discerning reader can hardly fail to trace in the foregoing
unvarnished account of our subject's ancestry and environment many of
the factors which have contributed to the unique success he has attained
as a writer. Nor can he fail to trace a certain likeness, of which our
author seems unconscious, to his father. To his mother he has credited
most of his gifts as a writer, but to that childlike unselfconsciousness
which he describes in his father, we are doubtless largely indebted for
the candid self-analysis here given.
But few writers could compass such a thing, yet he has done it simply
and naturally, as he would write on any other topic in which he was
genuinely interested. To be naked and unashamed is a condition lost by
most of us long ago, but retained by a few who still have many of the
traits of the natural man. C.B.)