This is a very charming little book. We had noticed, on their appearance
in various periodicals, some of the articles of which it is composed,
and we find that, read continuously, they have given us even more
pleasure. We have, indeed, enjoyed them more perhaps than we can show
sufficient cause for. They are slender and light, but they have a real
savour of their own.
Mr. Burroughs is known as an out-of-door observer--a devotee of birds
and trees and fields and aspects of weather and humble wayside
incidents. The minuteness of his observation, the keenness of his
perception of all these things, give him a real originality which is
confirmed by a style sometimes indeed idiomatic and unfinished to a
fault, but capable of remarkable felicity and vividness. Mr. Burroughs
is also, fortunately for his literary prosperity in these days, a
decided "humourist"; he is essentially and genially an American, without
at all posing as one, and his sketches have a delightful oddity,
vivacity, and freshness.
The first half of his volume, and the least substantial, treats of
certain rambles taken in the winter and spring in the country around
Washington; the author is an apostle of pedestrianism, and these pages
form a prolonged rhapsody upon the pleasures within the reach of any one
who will take the trouble to stretch his legs. They are full of charming
touches, and indicate a real genius for the observation of natural
things. Mr. Burroughs is a sort of reduced, but also more humourous,
more available, and more sociable Thoreau. He is especially intimate
with the birds, and he gives his reader an acute sense of how sociable
an affair, during six months of the year, this feathery lore may make a
lonely walk. He is also intimate with the question of apples, and he
treats of it in a succulent disquisition which imparts to the somewhat
trivial theme a kind of lyrical dignity. He remarks, justly, that women
are poor apple-eaters.
But the best pages in his book are those which commemorate a short visit
to England and the rapture of his first impressions. This little sketch,
in spite of its extreme slightness, really deserves to become classical.
We have read far solider treatises which contained less of the essence
of the matter; or at least, if it is not upon the subject itself that
Mr. Burroughs throws particularly powerful light, it is the essence of
the ideal traveller's spirit that he gives us, the freshness and
intensity of impression, the genial bewilderment, the universal
appreciativeness. All this is delightfully _naif_, frank, and natural.
"All this had been told, and it pleased me so in the seeing that I must
tell it again," the author says; and this is the constant spirit of his
talk. He appears to have been "pleased" as no man was ever pleased
before; so much so that his reflections upon his own country sometimes
become unduly invidious. But if to be appreciative is the traveller's
prime duty, Mr. Burroughs is a prince of travellers.
"Then to remember that it was a new sky and a new earth I was beholding,
that it was England, the old mother at last, no longer a faith or a
fable but an actual fact, there before my eyes and under my feet--why
should I not exult? Go to! I will be indulged. These trees, those
fields, that bird darting along the hedge-rows, those men and boys
picking blackberries in October, those English flowers by the roadside
(stop the carriage while I leap out and pluck them), the homely domestic
look of things, those houses, those queer vehicles, those thick-coated
horses, those big-footed, coarsely-clad, clear-skinned men and women;
this massive, homely, compact architecture--let me have a good look, for
this is my first hour in England, and I am drunk with the joy of seeing!
This house-fly let me inspect it, and that swallow skimming along so
familiarly."
One envies Mr. Burroughs his acute relish of the foreign spectacle even
more than one enjoys his expression of it. He is not afraid to start and
stare; his state of mind is exactly opposed to the high dignity of the
_nil admirari_. When he goes into St. Paul's, "my companions rushed
about," he says, "as if each one had a search-warrant in his pocket; but
I was content to uncover my head and drop into a seat, and busy my mind
with some simple object near at hand, while the sublimity that soared
about me stole into my soul." He meets a little girl carrying a pail in
a meadow near Stratford, stops her and talks with her, and finds an
ineffable delight in "the sweet and novel twang of her words. Her family
had emigrated to America, failed to prosper, and come back; but I hardly
recognise even the name of my own country in her innocent prattle; it
seemed like a land of fable--all had a remote mythological air, and I
pressed my enquiries as if I was hearing of this strange land for the
first time."
Mr. Burroughs is unfailingly complimentary; he sees sermons in stones
and good in everything; the somewhat dusky British world was never
steeped in so intense a glow of rose-colour. Sometimes his optimism
rather interferes with his accuracy--as when he detects "forests and
lakes" in Hyde Park, and affirms that the English rural landscape does
not, in comparison with the American, appear highly populated. This
latter statement is apparently made apropos of that long stretch of
suburban scenery, pure and simple, which extends from Liverpool to
London. It does not strike us as felicitous, either, to say that women
are more kindly treated in England than in the United States, and
especially that they are less "leered at." "Leering" at women is happily
less common all the world over than it is sometimes made to appear for
picturesque purposes in the magazines; but we should say that if there
is a country where the art has not reached a high stage of development,
it is our own.
It must be added that although Mr. Burroughs is shrewd as well as
_naif_, the latter quality sometimes distances the former. He runs over
for a week to France. "At Dieppe I first saw the wooden shoe, and heard
its dry, senseless clatter upon the pavement. How suggestive of the
cramped and inflexible conditions with which human nature has borne so
long in these lands!" But in Paris also he is appreciative--singularly
so for so complete an outsider as he confesses himself to be--and
throughout he is very well worth reading. We heartily commend his little
volume for its honesty, its individuality, and, in places, its really
blooming freshness.