I
This title, "The Seer of Slabsides," does not quite fit John
Burroughs--the Burroughs I knew. He was a see-er. A lover of nature,
he watched the ways of bird and beast; a lover of life, he thought
out and wrought out a serene human philosophy that made him teacher
and interpreter of the simple and the near at hand rather than of
such things as are hidden and far off. He was altogether human; a
poet, not a prophet; a great lover of the earth, of his portion
of it in New York State, and of everything and everybody dwelling
there with him. He has added volumes to the area of New York State,
and peopled them with immortal folk--little folk, bees, bluebirds,
speckled trout, and wild strawberries. He was chiefly concerned with
living at Slabsides, or at Woodchuck Lodge, and with writing what
he lived. He loved much, observed and interpreted much, speculated
a little, but dreamed none at all. "The Lover of Woodchuck Lodge" I
might have called him, rather than "The Seer of Slabsides."
Pietro, the sculptor, has made him resting upon a boulder, his
arm across his forehead, as his eyes, shielded from the sun, peer
steadily into the future and the faraway. I sat with the old
naturalist on this same boulder. It was in October, and they laid
him beside it the following April, on his eighty-fourth birthday. I
watched him shield his eyes with his arm, as the sculptor has made
him, and gaze far away over the valley to the rolling hills against
the sky, where his look lingered, sadly, wearily, for a moment at
their vaunting youth and beauty; then coming instantly back to the
field below us, he said: "This field is as full of woodchucks as
it was eighty years ago. I caught one right here yesterday. How
eternally interesting life is! I've studied the woodchuck all my
life, and there's no getting to the bottom of him."
He knew, as I knew, that he might never rest against this rock again.
He had played upon it as a child. He now sleeps beside it. But so
interesting was the simplest, the most familiar thing to him, that
the long, long twilight, already filling the valley and creeping up
toward him, still gave him a chance, as we sat there, to watch the
woodchuck slipping from his burrow. Had I been the sculptor, I should
have made the old naturalist lying flat on the round of that rock,
his white beard a patch of lichen, his eyes peering from under his
slouch hat over the top of the boulder at something near at hand--at
the woodchuck feeding below in the pasture.
He was the simplest man I ever knew, simpler than a child; for
children are often self-conscious and uninterested, whereas
Burroughs's interest and curiosity grew with the years, and his
directness, his spontaneity, his instant pleasure and his constant
joy in living, his utter naturalness and naïveté amounted to genius.
They were his genius--and a stumbling-block to many a reader.
_Similia similibus curantur_, or a thief to catch a thief, as we say;
and it certainly requires such a degree of simplicity to understand
Burroughs as few of us possess.
Not every author improves upon personal acquaintance, but an actual
visit with Burroughs seems almost necessary for the right approach to
his books. Matter and manner, the virtues and faults of his writings,
the very things he did not write about, are all explained in the
presence of a man of eighty-three who brings home a woodchuck from
the field for dinner, and saves its pelt for a winter coat. And with
me at dinner that day were other guests, a lover of Whitman from
Bolton, England, a distinguished American artist, and others.
The country road, hardly more than a farm lane, shies up close to
Woodchuck Lodge as it goes by. Here on the vine-grown porch was the
cot of the old naturalist, as close to the road as it could get.
Burroughs loved those remote ancestral hills, and all the little
folk who inhabitated them with him. He was as retiring and shy as
a song sparrow--who nests in the bushes, and sings from the fence
stake. No man loved his fellow-man more than Burroughs. Here in his
cot he could watch the stars come out upon the mountain-tops and see
the fires of dawn kindle where the stars had shone, and here, too,
he could see every passer-by and, without rising, for he had need
to rest, he could reach out a hand of welcome to all who stopped on
their journey past.
And everybody stopped. If he had no fresh woodchuck to serve them,
he would have one out of a can, for no less in his home than in his
heart had he made provision for the coming guest. The stores of the
village were far away, but there was no lack of canned woodchuck and
hospitality in the Lodge. Few men have had more friends or a wider
range of friends than Burroughs. And months later, as I sat looking
over the strange medley of them gathered at his funeral, I wondered
at them, and asked myself what was it in this simple, childlike man,
this lover of the bluebird, of the earth on his breast and the sky
on his back, that drew these great men and little children about him.
He was elemental. He kept his soul. And through the press men crowded
up to touch him, and the virtue that went out from him restored to
them their souls--their bluebird with the earth on its breast and the
sky, the blue sky, on its back.