"Well," said John Burroughs, "she doesn't seem to want us out here, so I
guess we'll have to go in." So we left the little summer-house
overlooking the Hudson and went into the bark-walled study.
Now, "she" was a fat and officious robin, and her nest was in a corner
of the summer-house just over my head, as I sat with the
poet-naturalist. The nest was full of hungry and unprepossessing young
robins, and the mother robin seemed to be annoyed in her visits to it by
our talk. As we walked to the study, leaving to the robin family
undisputed possession of the summer-house, I heard John Burroughs say in
tones of mild indignation, half to himself and half to me:
"I won't stand this another year! This is the third year she's taken
possession of that summer-house, and next May she simply must build her
nest somewhere else!"
Nevertheless, I think that this impudent robin will rear her 1917 brood
in John Burroughs's summer-house, if she wants to.
When I walked up from the station to Riverby--John Burroughs's
twenty-acre home on the west shore of the Hudson--I was surprised by the
agility of my seventy-nine-year-old companion. He walked with the
elastic step of a young man, and his eyes and brain were as alert as in
the days when he showed Emerson and Whitman the wild wonders of the
hills.
"Living in the city," he said, "is a discordant thing, an unnatural
thing. The city is a place to which one goes to do business; it is a
place where men overreach one another in the fight for money. But it is
not a place in which one can live.
"Years ago, I think, it was possible to have a home in the city. I used
to think that a home in Boston might possibly be imagined. But no one
can have a home in New York in all that noise and haste.
"Sometimes I am worried by the thought of the effect that life in the
city will have on coming generations. All this grind and rush and roar
of the Subway and the surface cars must have some effect on the children
of New-Yorkers. And that effect cannot be good.
"And what effect can it have on our literature? It might produce, I
suppose, in the writer's mind, a sense of the necessity of haste, a
passionate desire to get his effect as quickly as possible. But can it
give him sharpness of intellect and keenness of aesthetic perception! I'd
like to think so, but I can't. I don't see how literature can be
produced in the city. Literature must have repose, and there is no
repose in New York so far as I can see.
"Of course I have no right to speak for other writers. Some people can
find repose in the city--I can't. I hear that people write on the
trains, on the omnibus, and in the Subway--I don't see how they do it!"
"Have you noticed," I asked, as we left the lane and walked down a
grassy slope toward the study, "that the city has not as yet set its
mark on our literature?"
"I think," said John Burroughs, "that much of our modern fiction shows
what I may call a metropolitan quality; it seems made up of showy
streets and electric light. But I don't know. I don't read much
fiction. I turn more to poetry and to meditative essays. Some poets find
beauty in the city, and they must, I suppose, find repose there. Richard
Watson Gilder spent nearly all his life in a city and reflected the life
of the city in his poems. And Edmund Clarence Stedman was thoroughly a
poet of the city. I don't think that any of Emerson's poems smack of the
city. They smack of the country, and of Emerson's study in the country,
his study under the pines, where, as he wrote:
the sacred pine-tree adds
To the leaves her myriads.
"Of the younger poets, John James Piatt has written beautifully of the
city. He wrote a very fine poem called 'The Morning Street,' which
appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_ some years ago. In it he describes
vividly the hush of early morning in a great city, when the steps of a
solitary traveler echo from the walls of the sleeping houses. I don't
suppose Piatt is known to many readers of this generation. He was a
friend of Howells, and was the co-author with Howells of _Poems by Two
Friends_, published in the early sixties. This was Howells's first
venture."
We were in the bark-walled study now, seated before the great stone
fireplace, in which some logs were blazing. On the stone shelf I saw,
among the photographs of Carlyle and Emerson and other friends of my
host, a portrait of Whitman.
"Your friend, Walt Whitman," I said, "got inspiration from the city."
"Yes," said John Burroughs, "he got inspiration from the city, but you
wouldn't call his poems city poetry. His way of writing wasn't
metropolitan, you know; you might say that he treated the city by a
country method. What he loved about the city was its people--he loved
the throngs of men, he loved human associations.
"But he was a born lover of cities, Whitman was. He loved the city in
all its phases, mainly because he was such a lover of his kind, of the
'human critter,' as he calls him. Whitman spent most of his life in the
city, and was more at home there than in the country. He came to
Brooklyn when he was a boy, and there he worked in a law-office, and as
a printer and on the _Eagle_.
"For a while, I remember, he drove a 'bus up and down Broadway when the
driver, who was a friend of his, was sick. That's where he got the
stuff he put in _The Funeral of an Old Omnibus-driver_. He put in it all
the signs and catch-words of the 'bus-drivers."
John Burroughs pointed his steady old hand at a big framed photograph on
the wall. It is an unusual portrait of Walt Whitman, showing him seated,
with his hands clasped, with a flaring shirt collar, like a sailor's.
"Whitman," John Burroughs continued, "seems to be appealing more and
more to young men. But in the modern Whitmanesque young poets I don't
see much to suggest Whitman, except in form. They do clever things, but
not elemental things, not things with a cosmic basis. Whitman, with all
his commonness and nearness, reached out into the abysmal depths, as his
imitators fail to do. I think Robert Frost has been influenced by
Whitman. His _North of Boston_ is very good; it is genuine realism; it
is a faithful, convincing picture of New England farm life. When I first
saw the book I didn't think I'd read three pages of it, but I read it
all with keen interest. It's absolutely true.
"I used to see Whitman often when he and I were working in Washington.
And he came up to see me here. When I was in Washington Whitman used to
like to come up to our house for Sunday morning breakfast. Mrs.
Burroughs makes capital pancakes, and Walt was very fond of them, but he
was always late for breakfast. The coffee would boil over, the griddle
would smoke, car after car would go jingling by, and no Walt. But a car
would stop at last, and Walt would roll off it and saunter up to the
door--cheery, vigorous, serene, putting every one in good humor. And how
he ate! He radiated health and hopefulness. This is what made his work
among the sick soldiers in Washington of such inestimable value. Every
one who came into personal relations with him felt his rare, compelling
charm.
"Very few young literary men of Whitman's day accepted him. Stedman did,
and the fact is greatly to his credit. Howells and Aldrich were repelled
by his bigness. All the Boston poets except Emerson hesitated. Emerson
didn't hesitate--unlike Lowell and Holmes, he kept open house for big
ideas."
I asked Mr. Burroughs what, in his opinion, had brought about the change
in the world's attitude toward Whitman.
"Well," he replied, looking thoughtfully into the radiant depths of the
open fire, "when Whitman first appeared we were all subservient to the
conventional standards of English literature. We understood and
appreciated only the pretty and exact. Whitman came in his working-man's
garb, in his shirt sleeves he sauntered into the parlor of literature.
"We resented it. But the young men nowadays are more liberal. More and
more Whitman is forcing on them his open-air standards. Science
supplemented by the human heart gives us a bigger and freer world than
our forefathers knew. And then the European acceptance of Whitman had
had its effect. We take our point of view so largely from Europe. And a
force like Whitman's must be felt slowly; it's a cumulative thing."
"You believe," I said, "that Whitman is our greatest poet?"
"Oh yes," he replied, "Whitman is the greatest poet America has
produced. He is great with the qualities that make Homer and the classic
poets great. Emerson is more precious, more intellectual. Whitman and
Emerson are our two greatest poets."
While we strolled over the pleasant turf and watched a wood-thrush
resting in the cool of the evening above her half-built nest among the
cherry blossoms, John Burroughs returned to the subject that we had
discussed on our way from the station--the city's evil effect on
literature.
"Business life," he said, "is inimical to poetry. To write poetry you
must get into an atmosphere utterly different from that of the city. And
one of the greatest of all enemies of literature is the newspaper. The
style of writing that the newspaper has brought into existence is as far
as possible from art and literature. When you are writing for a daily
paper, you don't try to say a thing in a poetic or artistic way, but in
an efficient way, in a business-like way. There is no appeal to the
imagination, no ideality. A newspaper is a noisy thing that goes out
into the street and shouts its way into the attention of people.
"If you are going to write poetry you must say to certain phases of the
newspapers, 'Get thee behind me, Satan!' A poet can't be developing his
gossiping faculty and turning everything hot off the griddle. The daily
paper is a new institution, and it has come to stay. But it has bad
manners, and it is the enemy of all meditation, all privacy, all things
that make for great art.
"It's the same way with nature and writing about nature. From nature we
get not literature, but the raw material for literature. It is very
important for us to remember that the bee does not get honey from the
flowers; it makes honey from what it gets from the flowers. What it gets
from the flowers is nothing but sweet water. The bee gets its sweet
water, retires, thinks it over, and by a private process makes it into
honey.
"So many nature-writers fail to profit by the example of the bee. They
go into the woods and come out again and write about their
experience--but they don't give us honey. They don't retire and subject
what they find in the woods to a private process. They don't give us
honey; they give us just a little sweet water, pretty thoroughly
diluted.
"In my own work--if I may mention it in all humbleness--I have tried for
years not to give the world just a bare record, but to flavor it, so to
speak, with my own personality, as the bee turns the sweet water that it
gets into honey by adding its own formic acid.
"If I lived in the city I couldn't do any writing, unless I succeeded in
obliterating the city from my consciousness. But I shouldn't try to
force my standards on every one. Other men live in the cities and
write--Carlyle did most of his work in London. But he lived a secluded
life even in the city, and he had to have his yearly pilgrimage to
Scotland."
It is some years since John Burroughs has written poetry, although all
his prose is clearly the work of a poet. And it is safe to say that
better known than any of his intimate prose studies of the out-of-door
world--better known even than _Wake Robin_ and that immortal _A Hunt for
the Nightingale_ and _In Fresh Fields_--is one of his poems, _Waiting_,
the poem that begins:
Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea;
I rave no more 'gainst time or fate,
For lo! my own shall come to me.
"I wrote _Waiting_," he said, "in 1862, when I was reading medicine in
the office of a country physician. It was a dingy afternoon, and I was
feeling pretty blue. But the thought came to me--I suppose I got it from
Goethe or some of the Orientals, probably by way of Emerson--that what
belonged to me would come to me in time, if I waited--and if I also
hustled. So I waited and I hustled, and my little poem turned out to be
a prophecy. My own has come to me, as I never expected it to come. The
best friends I have were seeking me all the while. There's Henry Ford;
he had read all my books, and he came to me--that great-hearted man, the
friend of all the birds, and my friend.
"The poem first appeared in the _Knickerbocker Magazine_. That magazine
was edited by a Cockney named Kinneha Cornwallis. It ran long enough to
print one of Cornwallis's novels, and then it died. I remember that the
_Knickerbocker Magazine_ never paid me for _Waiting_, and the poem
didn't attract any attention until Whittier printed it in his _Songs of
Three Centuries_.
"It has been changed and tampered with and had all sorts of things done
to it. It was found among the manuscripts of a poet down South after his
death, and his literary executor was going to print it in his book. He
wrote to me and asked if I could show a date for it earlier than 1882. I
said, 'Yes, 1862!' and that settled that matter.
"There was a man in Boston that I wanted to kick! He wrote to me and
asked if he could print _Waiting_ on a card and circulate it among his
friends. I told him he could, and sent him an autographed copy to make
sure he'd get it straight. He sent me a package of the printed cards,
and I found that he had added a stanza to it--a religious stanza, all
about Heaven's gate! He had left out the second stanza, and added this
religious stanza. He was worried because God had been left out of my
poem--poor God, ignored by a little atom like me!
"When people ask me where I got the idea in it, I generally say that my
parents were old-school Baptists and believed in foreordination, and
that's the way that foreordination cropped out in me--it's a sort of
transcendental version of foreordination. I think the poem is true--like
attracts like; it's the way in which we are constituted, rather than any
conscious factor, that insures success. It's that that makes our
fortunes, it's that that is the 'tide in the affairs of men' that
Shakespeare meant."
A few rods from John Burroughs's riverside house a brown thrush is
building her nest in a cherry-tree. She is a bird of individual ideas,
and is thoroughly convinced that paper, not twigs and leaves, forms the
proper basis for her work. It is pleasant to think of John Burroughs
seated in his study communing with the memories of Whitman and Emerson,
and his other great dead friends. But it is pleasanter to think of him,
as I saw him, anxious and intent, his great white beard mingled with the
cherry blossoms, as he strolled over to fix the paper base of the
thrush's nest so that the wind could not destroy it.
_"EVASIVE IDEALISM" IN LITERATURE_