"John is making an impression on his age--has come to stay--has
veritable, indisputable, dynamic gifts," Walt Whitman said familiarly
to a friend in 1888, in commenting on our subject's place in literature.
And of a letter written to him by Mr. Burroughs that same year he said:
"It is a June letter, worthy of June; written in John's best outdoor
mood. Why, it gets into your blood, and makes you feel worth while. I
sit here, helpless as I am, and breathe it in like fresh air."
Minot Savage once asked in a sermon if it did not occur to his hearers
that John Burroughs gets a little more of June than the rest of us do,
and added that Mr. Burroughs had paid years of consecration of thought
and patient study of the lives of birds and flowers, and so had bought
the right to take June and all that it means into his brain and heart
and life; and that if the rest of us wish these joys, we must purchase
them on the same terms. We are often led to ask what month he has not
taken into his heart and life, and given out again in his writings.
Perhaps most of all he has taken April into his heart, as his essay on
it in "Birds and Poets" will show:--
How it (April) touches one and makes him both glad and sad! The voices
of the arriving birds, the migrating fowls, the clouds of pigeons
sweeping across the sky or filling the woods, the elfin horn of the
first honey-bee venturing abroad in the middle of the day, the clear
piping of the little frogs in the marshes at sundown, the camp-fire in
the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar rising over the trees, the tinge of
green that comes so suddenly on the sunny knolls and slopes, the full
translucent streams, the waxing and warming sun,--how these things and
others like them are noted by the eager eye and ear! April is my natal
month, and I am born again into new delight and new surprises at
each return of it. Its name has an indescribable charm to me. Its two
syllables are like the calls of the first birds,--like that of the
phoebe-bird, or of the meadowlark.
But why continue? The whole essay breathes of swelling buds, springing
grass, calls of birds, April flowers, April odors, and April's uncloying
freshness and charm. As we realize what the returning spring brings to
this writer, we say with Bliss Carman:--
"Make (him) over. Mother April,
When the sap begins to stir."
I fancy there are many of his readers who will echo what one of his
friends has said to him: "For me the 3d of April will ever stand apart
in the calendar with a poignant beauty and sweetness because it is your
birthday. It is the keynote to which the whole springtime music is set."
Or another: "If April 3d comes in like any other day, please understand
that it will be because she does not dare to show how glad she is over
her own doings." On another birthday, the same correspondent says: "I
find that you are so inwoven with the spring-time that I shall never
again be able to resolve the season into its elements. But I am the
richer for it. I feel a sort of compassion for one who has never seen
the spring through your eyes."
Mr. Burroughs puts his reader into close and sympathetic communion with
the open-air world as no other literary naturalist has done. Gilbert
White reported with painstaking fidelity the natural history of
Selborne; Thoreau gave Thoreau with glimpses of nature thrown in;
Richard Jefferies, in dreamy, introspective descriptions of rare beauty
and delicacy, portrayed his own mystical impressions of nature; but
Mr. Burroughs takes us with him to the homes and haunts of the wild
creatures, sets us down in their midst, and lets us see and hear and
feel just what is going on. We read his books and echo Whitman's verdict
on them: "They take me outdoors! God bless outdoors!" And since God
_has_ blessed outdoors, we say, "God bless John Burroughs for taking us
out of doors with him!"
Our writer never prates about nature, telling us to look and admire. He
loves the common, everyday life about him, sees it more intimately than
you or I see it, and tells about it so simply and clearly that he begets
a like feeling in his reader. It was enjoined of the early Puritans "to
walke honestlie in the sweete fields and woodes." How well our friend
has obeyed this injunction!
And what an unobtrusive lover he is! Although it is through him that his
mistress stands revealed, it is not until we look closely that we spy
her adorer in the background, intent only on unveiling her charms.
How does he do this? First by succumbing himself--Nature's graces, her
inconsistencies, even her objectionable traits appeal to him. Like
the true lover, he is captivated by each of her phases, and surrenders
himself without reserve. Such homage makes him the recipient of her
choicest treasures, her most adorable revelations.
(Illustration of Mr. Burroughs sitting for a Statuette. From a
photograph by Charles S. Olcott)
I have mentioned Gilbert White's contributions to the literature about
nature: one must admire the man's untiring enthusiasm, but his book is
mainly a storehouse of facts; how rarely does he invest the facts with
charm! To pry into nature's secrets and conscientiously report them
seems to be the aim of the English parson; but we get so little of the
parson himself. What were his feelings about all these things he has
been at such pains to record? The things themselves are not enough. It
is not alluring to be told soberly:--
Hedge-hogs abound in my garden and fields. The manner in which they eat
the roots of the plaintain in the grass walk is very curious; with their
upper mandible, which is much larger than the lower, they bore under
the plant, and so eat the root off upward, leaving the tuft of leaves
untouched.
And so on. By way of contrast, see how Mr. Burroughs treats a similar
subject. After describing the porcupine, mingling description and human
encounter, thereby enlisting the reader's interest, he says:--
In what a peevish, injured tone the creature did complain of our unfair
tactics! He protested and protested, and whimpered and scolded like some
infirm old man tormented by boys. His game after we led him forth was
to keep himself as much as possible in the shape of a ball, but with two
sticks and the cord we finally threw him over on his back and exposed
his quill-less and vulnerable under side, when he fairly surrendered and
seemed to say, "Now you may do with me as you like."
Here one gets the porcupine and Mr. Burroughs too.
Thoreau keeps his reader at arm's length, invites and repels at the
same time, piques one by his spiciness, and exasperates by his
opinionatedness. You want to see his bean-field, but know you would be
an intruder. He might even tell you to your face that he was happiest
the mornings when nobody called. He likes to advise and berate, but at
long range. Speaking of these two writers, Whitman once said, "Outdoors
taught Burroughs gentle things about men--it had no such effect upon
Thoreau."
Richard Jefferies appeals to lovers of nature and lovers of literature
as well. He has the poet's eye and is a sympathetic spectator, but
seldom gives one much to carry away. His descriptions, musical as they
are, barely escape being wearisome at times. In his "Pageant of Summer"
he babbles prettily of green fields, but it is a long, long summer and
one is hardly sorry to see its close. In some of his writings he affects
one unpleasantly, gives an uncanny feeling; one divines the invalid
as well as the mystic back of them; there is a hectic flush, perhaps a
neurotic taint. Beautiful, yes, but not the beauty of health and sanity.
It is the same indescribable feeling I get in reading that pathetically
beautiful book, "The Road-Mender," by "Michael Fairless"--the gleam of
the White Gate is seen all along the Road, though the writer strives so
bravely to keep it hidden till it must open to let him pass. One of the
purest gems of Jefferies--"Hours of Spring"--has a pathos and haunting
melody of compelling poignancy. It is like a white violet or a hepatica.
But with Mr. Burroughs we feel how preeminently sane and healthy he is.
His essays have the perennial charm of the mountain brooks that flow
down the hills and through the fertile valleys of his Catskill home.
They are redolent of the soil, of leaf mould, of the good brown earth.
His art pierces through our habitual indifference to Nature and kindles
our interest in, not her beauty alone, but in her rugged, uncouth, and
democratic qualities.
Like the true walker that he describes, he himself "is not merely a
spectator of the panorama of nature, but is a participator in it. He
experiences the country he passes through,--tastes it, feels it, absorbs
it." Let us try this writer by his own test. He says: "When one tries to
report nature he has to remember that every object has a history which
involves its surroundings, and that the depth of the interest which it
awakens in us is in the proportion that its integrity in this respect is
preserved." He must, as we know Mr. Burroughs does, bring home the river
and the sky when he brings home the sparrow that he finds singing at
dawn on the alder bough; must make us see and hear the bird _on
the bough_, and this is worth a whole museum of stuffed and labeled
specimens. To do this requires a peculiar gift, one which our essayist
has to an unusual degree--an imagination that goes straight to the
heart of whatever he writes about, combined with a verbal magic that
re-creates what he has seen. Things are felicitously seen by Mr.
Burroughs, and then felicitously said. A dainty bit in Sidney's
"Apologie for Poetrie" seems to me aptly to characterize our author's
prose: "The uttering sweetly and properly the conceits of the minde,
which is the end of speech."
One can pick out at random from his books innumerable poetic conceits;
the closed gentian is the "nun among flowers"; a patch of fringed
polygalas resembles a "flock of rose-purple butterflies" alighted on the
ground; the male and female flowers of the early everlasting are "found
separated from each other in well-defined groups, like men and women
in an old-fashioned country church"; "the note of the pewee is a human
sigh"; the bloodroot--"a full-blown flower with a young one folded in
a leaf beneath it, only the bud emerging, like the head of a papoose
protruding from its mother's blanket." Speaking of the wild orchids
known as "lady's-slippers," see the inimitable way in which he puts
you on the spot where they grow: "Most of the floral ladies leave
their slippers in swampy places in the woods, only the stemless one
(_Cypripedium acaule_) leaves hers on dry ground before she reaches the
swamp, commonly under evergreen trees where the carpet of pine needles
will not hurt her feet." Almost always he invests his descriptions with
some human touch that gives them rare charm--nature and human nature
blended--if it is merely the coming upon a red clover in England--
"The first red clover head just bloomed... but like
the people I meet, it has a ruddier cheek than those at home."
When we ask ourselves what it is that makes his essays so engaging, we
conclude it is largely due to their lucidity, spontaneity, and large
simplicity--qualities which make up a style original, fresh, convincing.
His writing, whether about nature, literature, science, or philosophy,
is always suggestive, potent, pithy; his humor is delicious; he says
things in a crisp, often racy, way. Yet what a sense of leisureliness
one has in reading him, as well as a sense of companionability!
What distinguishes him most, perhaps, is his vivid and poetic
apprehension of the mere fact. He never flings dry facts at us, but
facts are always his inspiration. He never seeks to go behind them, and
seldom to use them as symbols, as does Thoreau. Thoreau preaches and
teaches always; Mr. Burroughs, never. The facts themselves fill him with
wonder and delight--a wonder and delight his reader shares. The seasons,
the life of the birds and the animals, the face of nature, the ever new,
the ever common day--all kindle his enthusiasm and refresh his soul. The
witchery of the ideal is upon his page without doubt, but he will not
pervert natural history one jot or tittle for the sake of making a
pretty story. His whole aim is to invest the fact with living interest
without in the least lessening its value as a fact. He does not deceive
himself by what he wants to be true; the scientist in him is always
holding the poet in check. Of all contemporary writers in this field, he
is the one upon whom we can always depend to be intellectually honest.
He has an abiding hankering after the true, the genuine, the real;
cannot stand, and never could stand, any tampering with the truth. Had
he been Cromwell's portrait painter, he would have delighted in his
subject's injunction: "Paint me as I am, mole and all." And he would
have made the mole interesting; he has done so, but that is a mole of
another color.
This instinct for the truth being so strong in him, he knows it when he
sees it in others; he detects its absence, too; and has no patience and
scant mercy for those past-masters in the art of blinking facts,--those
natural-history romancers who, realizing that "the crowd must have
emphatic warrant," are not content with the infinite Variety of nature,
but must needs spend their art in the wasteful and ridiculous excess of
painting the lily, perfuming the violet, and giving to the rainbow an
added hue. Accordingly, when one warps the truth to suit his purpose,
especially in the realm of nature, he must expect this hater of shams
to raise a warning voice--"Beware the wolf in sheep's clothing!" But
he never cries "Wolf!" when there is no wolf, and he gives warm and
generous praise to deserving ones.
It has surprised some of his readers, who know how kindly he is by
nature, and how he shrinks from witnessing pain, in beast or man, much
less inflicting it, to see his severity when nature is traduced--for he
shows all the fight and fury and all the defense of the mother bird
when her young are attacked. He won't suffer even a porcupine to be
misrepresented without bristling up in its defense.
I have said that he never preaches, never seeks to give a moral twist to
his observations of nature, but I recall a few instances where he does
do a bit of moralizing; for example, when he speaks of the calmness
and dignity of the hawk when attacked by crows or kingbirds: "He seldom
deigns to notice his noisy and furious antagonist, but deliberately
wheels about in that aerial spiral, and mounts and mounts till his
pursuers grow dizzy and return to earth again. It is quite original,
this mode of getting rid of an unworthy opponent--rising to heights
where the braggart is dazed and bewildered and loses his reckoning! I'm
not sure but it is worthy of imitation." Or, in writing of work on the
farm, especially stone-fence making, he speaks of clearing the fields of
the stones that are built into boundaries: "If there are ever sermons
in stones, it is when they are built into a stone wall--turning your
hindrances into helps, shielding your crops behind the obstacles to
your husbandry, making the enemies of the plough stand guard over its
products." But do we find such sermonizing irksome?
Just as "all architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it,"
so is all nature. Lovers of Nature muse and dream and invite their
own souls. They interpret themselves, not Nature. She reflects their
thoughts and minds, gives them, after all, only what they bring to
her. And the writer who brings much--much of insight, of devotion, of
sympathy--is sure to bring much away for his reader's delectation. Does
not this account for the sense of intimacy which his reader has with
the man, even before meeting him?--the feeling that if he ever does meet
him, it will be as a friend, not as a stranger? And when one does meet
him, and hears him speak, one almost invariably thinks: "He talks just
as he writes." To read him after that is to hear the very tones of his
voice.
We sometimes hear the expression, "English in shirt-sleeves," applied to
objectionable English; but the phrase might be applied in a commendatory
way to good English,--to the English of such a writer as Mr.
Burroughs,--simple, forceful language, with homely, everyday
expressions; English that shows the man to have been country-bred,
albeit he has wandered from the home pastures to distant woods and
pastures new, browsing in the fields of literature and philosophy,
or wherever he has found pasturage to his taste. Or, to use a figure
perhaps more in keeping with his main pursuits, he is one who has
flocked with birds not of a like feather with those that shared with him
the parent nest. Although his kin knew and cared little for the world's
great books, he early learned to love them when he was roaming his
native fields and absorbing unconsciously that from which he later
reaped his harvest. It is to writers of _this_ kind of "English
in shirt-sleeves" that we return again and again. In them we see
shirt-sleeves opposed to evening dress; naturalness, sturdiness,
sun-tan, and open sky, opposed to the artificial, to tameness,
constriction, and characterless conformity to prescribed customs.
Do we not turn to writers of the first class with eagerness, slaking our
thirst, refreshing our minds at perennial springs? How are we glad that
they lead us into green pastures and beside still waters, away from
the crowded haunts of the conventional, and the respectably commonplace
society garb of speech! What matter if occasionally one even gives a
wholesome shock by daring to come into the drawing-room of our minds
in his shirt-sleeves, his hands showing the grime of the soil, and his
frame the strength that comes from battling with wind and weather? It is
the same craving which makes us say with Richard Hovey:--
"I am sick of four walls and a ceiling;
I have need of the sky,
I have business with the grass."
But it will not do to carry this analogy too far in writing of Mr.
Burroughs lest it be inferred that I regard the author's work as having
in it something of the uncouth, or the ill-timed, or the uncultured.
His writing is of the earth, but not of the earth earthy. He sees divine
things underfoot as well as overhead. His page has the fertility of a
well-cultivated pastoral region, the limpidness of a mountain brook, the
music of our unstudied songsters, the elusive charm of the blue beyond
the summer clouds; it has, at times, the ruggedness of a shelving rock,
combined with the grace of its nodding columbines.
Mr. Burroughs has told us, in that June idyl of his, "Strawberries,"
that he was a famous berry-picker when a boy. It was with a peculiar
pleasure that I wandered with him one midsummer day over the same
meadows where he used to gather strawberries. My first introduction to
him as a writer, many years before, had been in hearing this essay read.
And since then never a year passes that I do not read it at least three
times--once in winter just to bring June and summer near; once in spring
when all outdoors gives promise of the fullness yet to be; and once in
the radiant summer weather when daisies and clover and bobolinks and
strawberries riot in one's blood, making one fairly mad to bury one's
self in the June meadows and breathe the clover-scented air. And it
always stands the test--the test of being read out in the daisy-flecked
meadows with rollicking bobolinks overhead.
What quality is it, though, that so moves and stirs us when Mr.
Burroughs recounts some of the simple happenings of his youth? What is
it in his recitals that quickens our senses and perceptions and makes
our own youth alive and real? It is paradise regained--the paradise of
one's lost youth. Let this author describe his boyhood pastures, going
'cross lots to school, or to his favorite spring, whatsoever it is--is
it the path that he took to the little red schoolhouse in the Catskills?
Is it the spring near his father's sugar bush that we see? No. One is a
child again, and in a different part of the State, with tamer scenery,
but scenery endeared by early associations. The meadow you see is the
one that lies before the house where you were born; you read of the
boy John Burroughs jumping trout streams on his way to school, but see
yourself and your playmates scrambling up a canal bank, running along
the towpath, careful to keep on the land side of the towline that
stretches from mules to boat, lest you be swept into the green,
uninviting waters of the Erie. On you run with slate and books; you
smell the fresh wood as you go through the lumber yard. Or, read another
of his boyish excursions, and you find yourself on that first spring
outing to a distant, low-lying meadow after "cowslips"; another, and you
are trudging along with your brother after the cows, stopping to
nibble spearmint, or pick buttercups by the way. Prosaic recollections,
compared to spring paths and trout brooks in the Catskill valleys, yet
this is what our author's writings do--re-create for each of us our own
youth, with our own childhood scenes and experiences, invested with a
glamour for us, however prosy they seem to others; and why? Because,
though nature's aspects vary, the human heart is much the same the world
over, and the writer who faithfully adds to his descriptions of nature
his own emotional experiences arouses answering responses in the soul of
his reader.
Perhaps the poet in Mr. Burroughs is nowhere more plainly seen than in
his descriptions of bird life, yet how accurately he gives their salient
points; he represents the bird as an object in natural history, but
ah! how much more he gives! Imagine our bird-lover describing a bird as
Ellery Channing described one, as something with "a few feathers, a hole
at one end and a point at the other, and a pair of wings"! We see the
bird Mr. Burroughs sees; we hear the one he hears. Long before I had the
memorable experience of standing with him on the banks of the Willowemoc
and listening at twilight to the slow, divine chant of the hermit
thrush, I had heard it in my dreams, because of that inimitable
description of its song in "Wake-Robin." It does, indeed, seem to be
"the voice of that calm, sweet solemnity one attains to in his best
moments." As one listens to its strain in the hush of twilight, the
pomp of cities and the pride of civilization of a truth seem trivial and
cheap.
What a near, human interest our author makes us feel in the birds, how
we watch their courtships, how we peer into their nests, and how lively
is our solicitude for their helpless young swung in their "procreant
cradles," beset on all sides by foes that fly and creep and glide! And
not only does he make the bird a visible living creature; he makes it
sing joyously to the ear, while all nature sings blithely to the eye. We
see the bird, not as a mass of feathers with "upper parts bright blue,
belly white, breast ruddy brown, mandibles and legs black," as the
textbooks have it, but as a thing of life and beauty: "Yonder bluebird
with the earth tinge on his breast and the sky tinge on his back,--did
he come down out of heaven on that bright March morning when he told us
so softly and plaintively that, if we pleased, spring had come?" Who is
there in reading this matchless description of the bluebird that does
not feel the retreat of winter, that does not feel his pulse quicken
with the promise of approaching spring, that does not feel that the bird
did, indeed, come down out of heaven, the heaven of hope and promise,
even though the skies are still bleak, and the winds still cold? Who,
indeed, except those prosaic beings who are blind and deaf to the most
precious things in life?
"I heard a bluebird this morning!" one exclaimed exultantly, so stirred
as to forget momentarily her hearer's incapacity for enthusiasm. "Well,
and did it sound any different from what it did last year, and the year
before, and the year before that?" inquired in measured, world-wearied
tones the dampener of ardors. No, my poor friend, it did not. And just
because it sounded the same as it has in all the succeeding springs
since life was young, it touched a chord in one's heart that must be
long since mute in your own, making you poor, indeed, if this dear
familiar bird voice cannot set it vibrating once more.