There are those who look at Nature from the standpoint of
conventional and artificial life,--from parlor windows and through
gilt-edged poems,--the sentimentalists. At the other extreme are those
who do not look at Nature at all, but are a grown part of her, and look
away from her toward the other class,--the backwoodsmen and pioneers,
and all rude and simple persons. Then there are those in whom the
two are united or merged,--the great poets and artists. In them the
sentimentalist is corrected and cured, and the hairy and taciturn
frontiersman has had experience to some purpose. The true poet knows
more about Nature than the naturalist because he carries her open
secrets in his heart. Eckermann could instruct Goethe in ornithology,
but could not Goethe instruct Eckermann in the meaning and mystery of
the bird? It is my privilege to number among my friends a man who has
passed his life in cities amid the throngs of men, who never goes to
the woods or to the country, or hunts or fishes, and yet he is the true
naturalist. I think he studies the orbs. I think day and night and the
stars, and the faces of men and women, have taught him all there is
worth knowing.
We run to Nature because we are afraid of man. Our artists paint the
landscape because they cannot paint the human face. If we could look
into the eyes of a man as coolly as we can into the eyes of an animal,
the products of our pens and brushes would be quite different from what
they are.
V
But I suspect, after all, it makes but little difference to which school
you go, whether to the woods or to the city. A sincere man learns pretty
much the same things in both places. The differences are superficial,
the resemblances deep and many. The hermit is a hermit, and the poet
a poet, whether he grow up in the town or the country. I was forcibly
reminded of this fact recently on opening the works of Charles Lamb
after I had been reading those of our Henry Thoreau. Lamb cared nothing
for nature, Thoreau for little else. One was as attached to the city and
the life of the street and tavern as the other to the country and the
life of animals and plants. Yet they are close akin. They give out the
same tone and are pitched in about the same key. Their methods are the
same; so are their quaintness and scorn of rhetoric. Thoreau has the
drier humor, as might be expected, and is less stomachic. There is more
juice and unction in Lamb, but this he owes to his nationality. Both are
essayists who in a less reflective age would have been poets pure and
simple. Both were spare, high-nosed men, and I fancy a resemblance even
in their portraits. Thoreau is the Lamb of New England fields and
woods, and Lamb is the Thoreau of London streets and clubs. There was a
willfulness and perversity about Thoreau, behind which he concealed his
shyness and his thin skin, and there was a similar foil in Lamb, though
less marked, on account of his good-nature; that was a part of his
armor, too.