The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Seer of Slabsides, by Dallas Lore Sharp
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Title: The Seer of Slabsides
Author: Dallas Lore Sharp
Release Date: September 29, 2013 [EBook #43846]
Language: English
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THE SEER OF SLABSIDES
[Illustration: IN THE DOORWAY, SLABSIDES]
THE
SEER OF SLABSIDES
BY
DALLAS LORE SHARP
[Illustration]
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1921
COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1911 AND 1921, BY DALLAS LORE SHARP
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
TO
HENRY FORD
LOVER OF BIRDS
FRIEND OF JOHN BURROUGHS
THE SEER OF SLABSIDES
THE SEER OF SLABSIDES
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.
II
And this same restoration I find in his books. John Burroughs began
that long line of books by writing an essay for the "Atlantic
Monthly," entitled "Expression,"--"a somewhat Emersonian Expression,"
says its author,--which was printed in the "Atlantic" for November,
1860, sixty-one years ago; and in each of those sixty-one years he
has not failed to publish one or more essays here where "Expression"
led the way.
Sixty-one years are not threescore and ten, being nine years short.
Many men have lived and wrought for more than threescore and ten
years; but Burroughs's "Atlantic" years are unique. To write without
a break for sixty-one years, and keep one's eye undimmed, one's
natural force unabated, one's soul unfagged and as fresh as dawn, is
of itself a great human achievement.
Only a few weeks before his death he sent me a copy of the last
book that he should see through the press, and who shall say that
"Accepting the Universe" lacks anything of the vigor or finish
or freshness found in his earliest books? It is philosophical,
theological, indeed, in matter, and rather controversial in style;
its theme is like that of "The Light of Day," a theme his pen was
ever touching, but nowhere with more largeness and beauty (and
inconsistency) than here. For Burroughs, though deeply religious, was
a poor theologian. He hated cant, and feared the very vocabulary
of theology as he feared the dark. Life was remarkably single with
Burroughs and all of a piece. In a little diary, one of the earliest
he has left us, he asks, under date of October 8, 1860 (a month
before his first essay appeared in the "Atlantic"):
"Is there no design of analogy in this Universe? Are these striking
resemblances that wed remote parts, these family traits that break
out all through nature and that show the unity of the creating mind,
the work of chance? Are these resemblances and mutual answerings of
part to part that human intelligence sees and recognizes only in its
most exalted moments--when its vision is clearest--a mere accident?"
That was written in pencil filling a whole page of his diary for
1860. On page 220 of "Accepting the Universe," published sixty-one
years later, and only a short time before his death, we find this
attempted answer:
"So, when we ask, Is there design in Nature? we must make clear what
part or phase of Nature we refer to. Can we say that the cosmos as
a whole shows any design in our human sense of the word? I think
not. The Eternal has no purpose that our language can compass.
There can be neither center nor circumference to the Infinite. The
distribution of land and water on the globe cannot be the result of
design any more than can the shapes of the hills and mountains, or
Saturn's rings, or Jupiter's moons. The circular forms and orbits
of the universe must be the result of the laws of matter and force
that prevail in celestial mechanics; this is not a final solution of
the riddle, but is as near as we can come to it. One question stands
on another question, and that on another, and so on, and the bottom
question we can never reach and formulate."
It is a beautiful illustration of the continuity, the oneness of
this singularly simple life; and it is as good an illustration of
how the vigor of his youth steadies into a maturity of strength
with age, which in many a late essay--as in "The Long Road," for
instance--lifts one and bears one down the unmeasured reaches of
geologic time as none of his earlier chapters do.
Many men have written more than John Burroughs. His twenty-five
volumes are perhaps nothing remarkable for sixty years of steady
writing. But it is remarkable to come up to four and eighty with one
book just off the press, two more books in manuscript to appear after
the light has failed; for there is still a book of miscellaneous
papers, and some studies on Emerson and Thoreau yet to be published.
And I think it a rather remarkable lot of books, beginning with
"Wake-Robin," running down through the titles, with "Winter
Sunshine," "Birds and Poets," "Locusts and Wild Honey," "Pepacton,"
"Fresh Fields," "Signs and Seasons," "Riverby," "Far and Near," "Ways
of Nature," "Leaf and Tendril," "The Summit of the Years," "Time and
Change," "The Breath of Life," "Under the Apple-Trees," and "Field
and Study," to "Accepting the Universe," for these books deal very
largely with nature, and by themselves constitute the largest, most
significant group of nature-books that have come, perhaps, from any
single pen.
These sixteen or seventeen volumes are John Burroughs's most
characteristic and important work. If he has done any desirable
thing, made any real contribution to American literature, that
contribution will be found among these books. His other books are
eminently worth while: there is reverent, honest thinking in his
religious essays, a creedless but an absolute and joyous faith; there
is simple and exquisite feeling in his poems; close analysis and an
unmitigatedness wholly Whitmanesque in his interpretation of Whitman;
and no saner, happier criticism anywhere than in his "Literary
Values." There are many other excellent critics, however, many poets
and religious writers, many other excellent nature-writers, too; but
is there any other who has written so much upon the ways of nature as
they parallel and cross the ways of men, upon so great a variety of
nature's forms and expressions, and done it with such abiding love,
with such truth and charm?
Yet such a comparison is beyond proof, except in the least of the
literary values--mere quantity; and it may be with literature as
with merchandise: the larger the cask the greater the tare. Charm?
Is not charm that which I chance to like, or _you_ chance to like?
Others have written of nature with as much love and truth as has
John Burroughs, and each with his own peculiar charm: Audubon, with
the spell of wild places and the thrill of fresh wonder; Traherne,
with the ecstasy of the religious mystic; Gilbert White, with the
sweetness of the evening and the morning; Thoreau, with the heat
of noonday; Jefferies, with just a touch of twilight shadowing all
his pages. We want them severally as they are; John Burroughs as he
is, neither wandering "lonely as a cloud" in search of poems, nor
skulking in the sedges along the banks of the Guaso Nyero looking
for lions. We want him at Slabsides, near his celery fields, or at
Woodchuck Lodge overlooking the high fields that run down from the
sky into Montgomery Valley. And whatever the literary quality of our
other nature-writers, no one of them has come any nearer than John
Burroughs to that difficult ideal--a union of thought and form, no
more to be separated than the heart and the bark of a live tree.
Take John Burroughs's work as a whole, and it is beyond dispute the
most complete, the most revealing, of all our outdoor literature.
His pages lie open like the surface of a pond, sensitive to every
wind, or calm as the sky, holding the clouds and the distant blue,
and the dragon-fly, stiff-winged, and pinned to the golden knob of a
spatter-dock.
All outdoor existence, all outdoor phenomena, are deeply interesting
to him. There is scarcely a form of outdoor life, scarcely a piece
of landscape, or natural occurrence characteristic of the Eastern
States, which has not been dealt with suggestively in his pages: the
rabbit under his porch, the paleozoic pebble along his path, the salt
breeze borne inland by the Hudson, the whirl of a snow-storm, the
work of the honey bees, the procession of the seasons over Slabsides,
even the abundant soil out of which he and his grapes grew and which,
"incorruptible and undefiled," he calls divine.
He devotes an entire chapter to the bluebird, a chapter to the fox,
one to the apple, another to the wild strawberry. The individual,
the particular thing, is always of particular interest to him. But
so is its habitat, the whole of its environment. He sees the gem,
not cut and set in a ring, but rough in the mine, where it glitters
on the hand of nature, and glitters all the more that it is worn in
the dark. Naturally John Burroughs has written much about the birds;
yet he is not an ornithologist. His theme has not been this or that,
but nature in its totality, as it is held within the circle of his
horizon, as it surrounds, supports, and quickens him.
That nature does support and quicken the spiritual of him, no less
than the physical, is the inspiration of his writing and the final
comment it requires. Whether the universe was shaped from chaos with
man as its end, is a question of real concern to John Burroughs,
but of less concern to him than the problem of shaping himself to
the universe, of living as long as he can upon a world so perfectly
adapted to life, if only one be physically and spiritually adaptable.
To take the earth as one finds it, to plant one's self in it, to
plant one's roof-tree in it, to till it, to understand it and the
laws which govern it, and the Perfection which created it, and to
love it all--this is the heart of John Burroughs's religion, the pith
of his philosophy, the conclusion of his books.
But if a perfect place for the fit, how hard a place is this world
for the lazy, the ignorant, the stubborn, the weak, the physically
and spiritually ill! So hard that a torpid liver is almost a mortal
handicap, the stars in their courses fighting against the bilious to
defeat them, to drive them to take exercise, to a copious drinking
of water, to a knowledge of burdock and calomel--to obedience and
understanding.
Underlying all of John Burroughs's thought and feeling, framing
every one of his books, is a deep sense of the perfection of nature,
the sharing of which is physical life, the understanding of which
is spiritual life, is knowledge of God himself, in some part of His
perfection. "I cannot tell what the simple apparition of the earth
and sky mean to me; I think that at rare intervals one sees that they
have an immense spiritual meaning, altogether unspeakable, and that
they are the great helps, after all." How the world was made--its
geology, its biology--is the great question, for its answer is poetry
and religion and life itself. John Burroughs was serenely sure as to
how the world was made; the theological speculation as to _why_ it
was made, he answered by growing small fruits on it, living upon it,
writing about it.
Temperamentally John Burroughs was an optimist, as vocationally
he was a writer, and avocationally a vine-dresser. He planted and
expected to gather--grapes from his grapevines, books from his
book-vines, years, satisfactions, sorrows, joys, all that was due him.
The waters know their own and draw
The brook that springs in yonder heights;
So flows the good with equal law
Unto the soul of pure delights.
And what is it that was due him? Everything; everything essential;
as everything essential is due the pine-tree, the prairie, the very
planet. Is not this earth a star? Are not the prairie, the pine-tree,
and man the dust of stars? each a part of the other? all parts of one
whole--a universe, round, rolling, without beginning, without end,
without flaw, without lack, a universe self-sustained, perfect?
I stay my haste, I make delays,
For what avails this eager pace?
I stand amid the eternal ways,
And what is mine shall know my face.
John Burroughs came naturally by such a view of nature and its
consequent optimism. It was due partly to his having been born and
brought up on a farm where he had what was due him from the start.
Such birth and bringing-up is the natural right of every boy. To know
and to do the primitive, the elemental; to go barefoot, to drive the
cows, to fish, and to go to school with not too many books, but with
"plenty of real things"--these are nominated in every boy's bond.
Serene, I fold my hands and wait,
is the poem of a childhood on the farm, and the poem of a manhood on
the farm, in spite of the critic who says:
"We have never ceased to wonder that this friend of the birds,
this kindly interpreter of nature in all her moods, was born and
brought up on a farm; it was in that smiling country watered by the
east branch of the Delaware. No man, as a rule, knows less about
the colors, songs, and habits of birds, and is more indifferent to
natural scenery than the man born to the soil, who delves in it and
breathes its odors. Contact with it and laborious days seem to deaden
his faculties of observation and deprive him of all sympathy with
nature."
During the days when the deadening might have occurred, John
Burroughs was teaching school. Then he became a United States bank
examiner, and only after that returned to the country--to Riverby and
Slabsides, and Woodchuck Lodge,--to live out the rest of his years,
years as full of life and books as his vines along the Hudson are
full of life and grapes.
Could it be otherwise? If men and grapes are of the same divine
dust, should they not grow according to the same divine laws? Here
in the vineyard along the Hudson, John Burroughs planted himself in
planting his vines, and every trellis that he set has become his own
support and stay. The very clearing of the land for his vineyard was
a preparation of himself physically and morally for a more fruitful
life.
"Before the snow was off in March," he says in "Literary Values," "we
set to work under-draining the moist and springy places. My health
and spirits improved daily. I seemed to be under-draining my own life
and carrying off the stagnant water, as well as that of the land."
And so he was. There are other means of doing it--taking drugs,
playing golf, walking the streets; but surely the advantages and the
poetry are all in favor of the vineyard. And how much fitter a place
the vineyard to mellow and ripen life, than a city roof of tarry
pebbles and tin!
Though necessarily personal and subjective, John Burroughs's writing
is entirely free from self-exploitation and confession. There are
pages scattered here and there dealing briefly and frankly with his
own natural history, but our thanks are due to John Burroughs that
he never made a business of watching himself. Once he was inveigled
by a magazine editor into doing "An Egotistical Chapter," wherein
we find him as a boy of sixteen reading essays, and capable at that
age of feeding for a whole year upon Dr. Johnson! Then we find him
reading Whipple's essays, and the early outdoor papers of Higginson;
and later, at twenty-three, settling down with Emerson's essays, and
getting one of his own into the "Atlantic Monthly."
How early his own began to come to him!
That first essay in the "Atlantic" was followed by a number of
outdoor sketches in the New York "Leader"--written, Burroughs says,
"mainly to break the spell of Emerson's influence and get upon
ground of my own." He succeeded in both purposes; and a large and
exceedingly fertile piece of ground it proved to be, too, this which
he got upon! Already the young writer had chosen his field and his
crop. The out-of-doors has been largely his literary material, as the
essay has been largely his literary form, ever since. He has done
other things--volumes of literary studies and criticisms; but his
theme from first to last has been the Great Book of Nature, a page of
which, here and there, he has tried to read to us.
Burroughs's work, in outdoor literature, is a distinct species, with
new and well-marked characteristics. He is the nature-writer, to be
distinguished from the naturalist in Gilbert White, the mystic in
Traherne, the philosopher in Emerson, the preacher, poet, critic in
Thoreau, the humorist in Charles Dudley Warner. As we now know the
nature-writer we come upon him for the first time in John Burroughs.
Such credit might have gone to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, had he
not been something else before he was a lover of nature--of letters
first, then of flowers, carrying his library into the fields; whereas
Burroughs brings the fields into the library. The essay whose matter
is nature, whose moral is human, whose manner is strictly literary,
belongs to John Burroughs. His work is distinguished by this
threefold and _even_ emphasis. In almost every other of our early
outdoor writers either the naturalist or the moralist or the stylist
holds the pen.
Early or late, this or that, good outdoor writing must be marked,
first, by fidelity to fact; and, secondly, by sincerity of
expression. Like qualities mark all good literature; but they
are themselves the _very_ literature of nature. When we take up a
nature-book we ask (and it was Burroughs who taught us to ask), "Is
the record true? Is the writing honest?"
In these many volumes by John Burroughs there are many observations,
and it is more than likely that some of them may be wrong, but it is
not possible that any of them could be mixed with observations that
Burroughs knows he never made. If Burroughs has written a line of
sham natural history, which line is it? In a preface to "Wake-Robin,"
the author says his readers have sometimes complained that they do
not see the things which he sees in the woods; but I doubt if there
ever was a reader who suspected John Burroughs of not seeing the
things.
His reply to these complaints is significant, being in no manner a
defense, but an exquisite explanation, instead, of the difference
between the nature which anybody may see in the woods and the
nature that every individual writer, because he is a writer, and an
individual, must put into his book: a difference like that between
the sweet-water gathered by the bee from the flowers and the drop of
acid-stung honey deposited by the bee in the comb. The sweet-water
undergoes a chemical change in being brought to the hive, as the wild
nature undergoes a literary change--by the addition of the writer's
self to the nature, while with the sweet-water it is by the addition
of the bee.
One must be able to walk to an editorial office and back, and all the
way walk humbly with his theme, as Burroughs ever does--not entirely
forgetful of himself, nor of me (because he has invited me along);
but I must be quiet and not disturb the fishing--if we go by way of a
trout-stream.
True to the facts, Burroughs is a great deal more than scientific,
for he loves the things--the birds, hills, seasons--as well as the
truths about them; and true to himself, he is not by any means a
simple countryman who has never seen the city, a natural idyl, who
lisps in books and essays, because the essays come. He is fully aware
of the thing he wants to do, and by his own confession has a due
amount of trouble shaping his raw material into finished literary
form. He is quite in another class from the authors of "The Complete
Angler" and "New England's Rarities Discovered." In Isaak Walton, to
quote Leslie Stephen, "_a happy combination of circumstances_ has
provided us with a true country idyl, fresh and racy from the soil,
not consciously constructed by the most skillful artistic hand."
Now the skillful artistic hand is everywhere seen in John Burroughs.
What writer in these days could expect happy combinations of
circumstances in sufficient numbers for so many volumes?
But being an idyl, when you come to think of it, is not the result
of a happy combination of circumstances, but rather of stars--of
horoscope. You are born an idyl or you are not, and where and when
you live has nothing to do with it.
Who would look for a true country idyl to-day in the city of
Philadelphia? Yet one came out of there yesterday, and lies here
open before me, on the table. It is a slender volume, called "With
the Birds, An Affectionate Study," by Caroline Eliza Hyde. The
author is discussing the general subject of nomenclature and animal
distribution, and says:
"When the Deluge covered the then known face of the earth, the birds
were drowned with every other living thing, except those that Noah,
commanded by God, took two by two into the Ark.
"When I reflect deeply and earnestly about the Ark, as every one
should, thoughts crowd my mind with an irresistible force."
[And they crowd my mind, too.]
"Noah and his family had preserved the names of the birds given them
by Adam. This is assured, for Noah sent a raven and a dove out to see
if the waters had abated, and we have birds of that name now. Nothing
was known of our part of the globe, so these birds must have remained
in the Holy Land for centuries. We do not hear of them until America
was discovered....
"Bats come from Sur. They are very black mouse-like birds, and
disagreeable.... The bobolink is not mentioned in the Bible, but it
is doubtless a primitive bird. The cock that crows too early in the
morning ... can hardly be classed with the song-birds. The name
of the humming-bird is not mentioned in the Bible, but as there is
nothing new under the sun, he is probably a primitive bird."
Burroughs would have agreed that the humming-bird is probably a
primitive bird; and also that this is a true idyl, and that he could
not write a true idyl if he tried. No one could write like that by
trying. And what has any happy combination of circumstances to do
with it? No, a book essentially is only a personality in type, and
he who would not be frustrated of his hope to write a true idyl must
himself be born a true idyl. A fine Miltonic saying!
John Burroughs was not an idyl, but an essayist, with a love for
books only second to his love for nature; a watcher in the woods,
a tiller of the soil, a reader, critic, thinker, poet, whose chief
business these sixty years has been the interpretation of the
out-of-doors.
Upon him as interpreter and observer, certain of his books, "Ways of
Nature" and "Leaf and Tendril," are an interesting comment.
Truth does not always make good literature, not when it is stranger
than fiction, as it often is; and the writer who sticks to the truth
of nature must sometimes do it at the cost of purely literary ends.
Have I sacrificed truth to literature? asks Burroughs of his books.
Have I seen in nature the things that are there, or the strange
man-things, the "winged creeping things which have four feet," and
which were an abomination to the ancient Hebrews, but which the
readers of modern nature-writing do greedily devour--are these the
things I have seen? And for an answer he sets about a reëxamination
of all he has written, from "Wake-Robin" to "Far and Near," hoping
"that the result of the discussion or threshing will not be to make
the reader love the animals less, but rather to love the truth more."
But the result, as embodied in "Ways of Nature" and in "Leaf and
Tendril," is quite the opposite, I fear; for these two volumes are
more scientific in tone than any of his other work; and it is the
mission, not of science, but of literature, to quicken our love
for animals, even for truth. Science only adds to the truth. Yet
here, in spite of himself, Burroughs is more the writer, more the
interpreter, than the investigator. He is constantly forgetting his
scientific thesis, as, for instance, in the account of his neighbor's
errant cow. He succeeds finally, however, in reducing her fairly well
to a mechanical piece of beef acting to vegetable stimuli upon a
nerve ganglion located somewhere in the region between her horns and
her tail.
Now, all this is valuable, and the use made of it is laudable, but
would we not rather have the account than the cow, especially from
Burroughs? Certainly, because to us it is the _account_ that he has
come to stand for. And so, if we do not love his scientific animals
more, and his scientific findings more, we shall, I think, love all
his other books more; for we see now that, from the beginning,
he has regarded the facts of nature as the solid substance of his
books, to be kept as free from fancy and from false report, as his
interpretation of them is to be kept free from all exaggeration and
cant.
Here, then, are a score of volumes of honest seeing, honest
feeling, honest reporting. Such honesty of itself may not make good
nature-literature, but without such honesty there can be no good
nature-literature.
Nature-literature is not less than the truth, but more; how much
more, Burroughs himself suggests to us in a passage about his
literary habits.
"For my part," he says, "I can never interview Nature in the reporter
fashion. I must camp and tramp with her to get any good, and what
I get I absorb through my emotions rather than consciously gather
through my intellect.... An experience must lie in my mind a certain
time before I can put it upon paper--say from three to six months.
If there is anything in it, it will ripen and mellow by that time.
I rarely take any notes, and I have a very poor memory, but rely
upon the affinity of my mind for a certain order of truths or
observations. What is mine will stick to me, and what is not will
drop off. We who write about Nature pick out, I suspect, only the
rare moments when we have had glimpses of her, and make much of them.
Our lives are dull, our minds crusted over with rubbish like those
of other people. Then writing about Nature, or about most other
subjects, is an expansive process; we are under the law of evolution;
we grow the germ into the tree; a little original observation goes a
good way." For "when you go to Nature, bring us good science or else
good literature, and not a mere inventory of what you have seen. One
demonstrates, the other interprets."
Careful as John Burroughs has been with his facts, so careful
as often to bring us excellent science, he yet has left us no
inventory of the out-of-doors. His work is literature; he is not a
demonstrator, but an interpreter, an expositor who is true to the
text and true to the whole of the context.
Our pleasure in Burroughs as an interpreter comes as much from
his wholesome good sense, from his balance and sanity, I think, as
from the assurance of his sincerity. Free from pose and cant and
deception, he is free also from bias and strain. There is something
ordinary, normal, reasonable, companionable, about him; an even tenor
to all his ways, a deliberateness, naturalness to all his paths, as
if they might have been made originally by the cows. So they were.
If Burroughs were to start from my door for a tramp over these small
Hingham hills he would cross the trout-brook by my neighbor's stone
bridge, and, nibbling a spear of peppermint on the way, would follow
the lane and the cow-paths across the pasture. Thoreau would pick
out the deepest hole in the brook and try to swim across; he would
leap the stone walls of the lane, cut a bee-line through the pasture,
and drop, for his first look at the landscape, to the bottom of the
pit in the seam-face granite quarry. Here he would pull out his
notebook and a gnarly wild apple from his pocket, and, intensely,
critically, chemically, devouring said apple, make note in the book
that the apples of Eden were flat, the apples of Sodom bitter, but
this wild, tough, wretched, impossible apple of the Hingham hills
united all ambrosial essences in its striking odor of squash-bugs.
Burroughs takes us along with him. Thoreau comes upon us in the
woods--jumps out at us from behind some bush, with a "_Scat!_"
Burroughs brings us home in time for tea; Thoreau leaves us tangled
up in the briars.
It won't hurt us to be jumped at now and then and told to "_scat!_"
It won't hurt us to be digged by the briars. It is good for us,
otherwise we might forget that _we_ are beneath our clothes. It is
good for us and highly diverting,--and highly irritating too.
But Thoreau stands alone. "Walden Pond" is one of America's certain
contributions to the world's great books.
For my part, when I take up an outdoor book I am glad if there
is quiet in it, and fragrance, and something of the saneness and
sweetness of the sky. Not that I always want sweet skies. It is
ninety-eight degrees in the shade, and three weeks since there fell
a drop of rain. I could sing like a robin for a sizzling, crackling
thunder-shower--less for the sizzling and crackling than for the
shower. Thoreau is a succession of showers--"tempests"; his pages
are sheet-lightning, electrifying, purifying, illuminating, but not
altogether conducive to peace. "Walden Pond" is something more than
a nature book. There is a clear sky to most of Burroughs's pages, a
rural landscape, wide, gently rolling, with cattle standing here and
there beneath the trees.
Burroughs's natural history is entirely natural, his philosophy
entirely reasonable, his religion and ethics very much of the kind we
wish our minister and our neighbor might possess; and his manner of
writing is so unaffected that we feel we could write in such a manner
ourselves. Only we cannot.
Since the time he can be said to have "led" a life, Burroughs has
led a literary life; that is to say, nothing has been allowed to
interfere with his writing; yet the writing has not been allowed
to interfere with a quiet successful business--with his raising of
grapes.
He has a study and a vineyard.
Not many men ought to live by the pen alone. A steady diet of
inspiration and words is hard on the literary health. The writing
should be varied with some good, wholesome work, actual hard work
for the hands; not so much work, perhaps, as one would find in
an eighteen-acre vineyard; yet John Burroughs's eighteen acres
certainly proved to be no check--rather, indeed, a stimulus--to his
writing. He seems to have gathered a volume out of every acre; and
he seems to have put a good acre into every volume. "Fresh Fields"
is the name of one of the volumes, "Leaf and Tendril" of another;
but the freshness of his fields, the leaves and the tendrils of his
vineyard, enter into them all. The grapes of the vineyard are in them
also.
Here is a growth of books out of the soil, books that have been
trimmed, trained, sprayed, and kept free from rot. Such books may not
be altogether according to the public taste; they will keep, however,
until the public acquires a better taste. Sound, ripe, fresh, early
and late, a full crop! Has the vineyard anything to do with it?
It is not every farmer who should go to writing, nor every writer
who should go to farming; but there is a mighty waste of academic
literature, of premature, precocious, lily-handed literature, of
chicken-licken literature, because the writers do not know a spade
when they see one, would not call it a spade if they knew. Those
writers need to do less writing and more farming, more real work with
their soft hands in partnership with the elemental forces of nature,
or in comradeship with average elemental men--the only species extant
of the quality to make writing worth while.
John Burroughs had this labor, this partnership, this comradeship.
His writing is seasoned and sane. It is ripe, and yet as fresh as
green corn with the dew in the silk. You have eaten corn on the cob
just from the stalk and steamed in its own husk? Green corn that _is_
corn, that has all its milk and sugar and flavor, is corn on the cob,
and in the husk--is cob and kernel and husk--not a stripped ear that
is cooked into the kitchen air.
Literature is too often stripped of its human husk, and cut from its
human cob: the man gone, the writer left; the substance gone, the
style left--corn that tastes as much like corn as it tastes like
puffed rice--which tastes like nothing at all. There is the sweetness
of the husk, the flavor of the cob, the substance of the uncut corn
to John Burroughs.
There is no lack of cob and husk to Thoreau--of shell and hull, one
should say, for he is more like a green walnut than an ear of green
corn. Thoreau is very human, a whole man; but he is almost as much
a tree, and a mountain, and a pond, and a spell of weather, and a
state of morals. He is the author of "Walden," and nobody else in
the world is that; he is a lover of Nature, as ardent a lover as
ever eloped with her; he is a lover of men, too, loving them with an
intensity that hates them bag and baggage; he is poetical, prophetic,
paradoxical, and utterly impossible.
But he knew it. Born in Concord, under the transcendental stars, at
a time when Delphic sayings and philosophy, romance and poetry ran
wild in the gardens where Bouncing-Bet and Wayward Charlie now run
wild, Thoreau knew that he was touched, and that all his neighbors
were touched, and sought asylum at Walden. But Walden was not distant
enough. If John Burroughs in Roxbury, New York, found it necessary
to take to the woods in order to escape from Emerson, then Thoreau
should have gone to Chicago, or to Xamiltepec.
It is the strain, in Thoreau, that wearies us; his sweating among the
stumps and woodchucks, for a bean crop netting him eight dollars,
seventy-one and one half cents. But such beans! Beans with minds
and souls! Yet, for baking, plain beans are better than these
transcendental beans, because your transcendental beans are always
baked without pork. A family man, however, cannot contemplate that
piddling patch with any patience, even though he have a taste for
literature as real as his taste for beans. It is better to watch
John Burroughs pruning his grapevines for a crop to net him one
thousand, three hundred and twenty-five dollars, and _no_ cents, and
no half-cents. Here were eighteen acres to be cultivated, whose fruit
was to be picked, shipped, and sold in the New York markets at a
profit--a profit plainly felt in John Burroughs's books.
Reading what I have just said, as it appeared in the "Atlantic" for
November, 1910, Burroughs wrote in the course of a letter to me:
"I feel like scolding you a little for disparaging Thoreau for my
benefit. Thoreau is nearer the stars than I am. I may be more human,
but he is as certainly more divine. His moral and ethical value I
think is much greater, and he has a heroic quality that I cannot
approach."
Perhaps no truer word will ever be said of these two men than that;
and certainly no more generous word was ever spoken by one great
writer of another, his nearest rival. I have not, nor would I,
disparage Thoreau for Burroughs's benefit. Thoreau dwells apart. He
is long past all disparagement. "Walden Pond" and "The Week," if not
the most challenging, most original books in American literature,
are, with Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" and Emerson's "Essays," among
those books.
Thoreau and Burroughs had almost nothing in common except their love
of nature, and in that they were farther apart than in anything
else, Thoreau searching by night and day in all wild places for his
lost horse and hound while Burroughs quietly worshiped, as his rural
divinity, the ruminating cow.
The most worthy qualities of good writing are those least
noticeable--negative qualities of honesty, directness, sincerity,
euphony; noticeable only by their absence. Yet in John Burroughs they
amounted to a positive charm. Indeed, are not these same negative
qualities the very substance of good style? Such style as is had by a
pair of pruning-shears, as is embodied in the exquisite lines of a
flying swallow--the style that is perfect, purposeful adaptability?
But there is more than efficiency to John Burroughs's style; there
are strengths and graces existing in and for themselves. Here is
a naturalist who has studied the art of writing. "What little
merit my style has," he declares, "is the result of much study
and discipline." And whose style, if it be style at all, is not
the result of much study and discipline? Flourish, fine-writing,
wordiness, obscurity, and cant are exorcised in no other way; and
as for the "limpidness, sweetness, freshness," which John Burroughs
says should characterize outdoor writing, and which do characterize
his writing, how else than by study and discipline shall they be
obtained?
Outdoor literature, no less than other types of literature, is both
form and matter; the two are mutually dependent, inseparably one;
but the writer is most faithful to the form when he is most careful
of the matter. It makes a vast difference whether his interest is
absorbed by what he has to say, or by the possible ways he may say
it. If John Burroughs wrote in his shirt-sleeves, as a recent critic
says he did, it was because he went about his writing as he went
about his vineyarding--for grapes, for thoughts, and not to see how
pretty he could make a paragraph look, or into what fantastic form he
could train a vine. The vine is lovely in itself--if it bear fruit.
And so is language. Take John Burroughs's manner in any of its moods:
its store of single, sufficient words, for instance, especially the
homely, rugged words and idioms, and the flavor they give, is second
to the work they do; or take his use of figures--when he speaks of
De Quincey's "discursive, roundabout style, herding his thoughts as
a collie dog herds sheep"--and unexpected, vivid, apt as they are,
they are even more effective. One is often caught up by the poetry of
these essays and borne aloft, but never on a gale of words; the lift
and sweep are genuine emotion and thought.
As an essayist--as a nature-writer I ought to say--John Burroughs's
literary care is perhaps nowhere so plainly seen as in the simple
architecture of his essay plans, in their balance and finish, a
quality that distinguishes him from others of the craft, and that
neither gift nor chance could so invariably supply. The common
fault of outdoor books is the catalogue--raw data, notes. There are
paragraphs of notes in John Burroughs, volumes of them in Thoreau.
The average nature-writer sees not too much of nature, but knows all
too little of literary values; he sees everything, gets a meaning
out of nothing; writes it all down; and gives us what he sees, which
is precisely what everybody may see; whereas, we want also what he
thinks and feels. Some of our present writers do nothing but feel and
divine and fathom--the animal psychologists, whatever they are. The
bulk of nature-writing, however, is journalistic, done on the spot,
into a notebook, as were the journals of Thoreau--fragmentary, yet
with Thoreau often exquisite fragments--bits of old stained glass,
unleaded, and lacking unity and design.
No such fault can be found with John Burroughs. He went pencilless
into the woods, and waited before writing until his return home,
until time had elapsed for the multitudinous details of the trip to
blur and blend, leaving only the dominant facts and impressions for
his pen. Every part of his work is of selected stock, as free from
knots and seams and sapwood as a piece of old-growth pine. There is
plan, proportion, integrity to his essays--the naturalist living
faithfully up to a sensitive literary conscience.
John Burroughs was a good but not a great naturalist, as Audubon and
Gray were great naturalists. His claim (and Audubon's in part) upon
us is literary. He was a watcher in the woods; he made a few pleasant
excursions into the primeval wilderness, leaving his gun at home, and
his camera, too, thank Heaven! He broke out no new trail, discovered
no new animal, no new thing. But he saw all the old, uncommon things,
saw them oftener, watched them longer, through more seasons, than
any other writer of our out-of-doors; and though he discovered no
new thing, yet he made discoveries, volumes of them--contributions
largely to our stock of literature, and to our store of love for
the earth, and to our joy in living upon it. He turned a little
of the universe into literature; translated a portion of the earth
into human language; restored to us our garden here eastward in
Eden--apple-tree and all.
For a real taste of fruity literature, try John Burroughs's
chapter on "The Apple." Try Thoreau's, too,--if you are partial to
squash-bugs. There are chapters in John Burroughs, such as "Is it
going to Rain?" "A River View," "A Snow-Storm," which seem to me as
perfect, in their way, as anything that has ever been done--single,
simple, beautiful in form, and deeply significant; the storm being
a piece of fine description, of whirling snow across a geologic
landscape, distant, and as dark as eternity; the whole wintry picture
lighted and warmed at the end by a glowing touch of human life:
"We love the sight of the brown and ruddy earth; it is the color of
life, while a snow-covered plain is the face of death; yet snow is
but the mark of life-giving rain; it, too, is the friend of man--the
tender, sculpturesque, immaculate, warming, fertilizing snow."
There are many texts in these volumes, many themes; and in them all
there is one real message: that this is a good world to live in; that
these are good men and women to live with; that life is good, here
and now, and altogether worth living.
III
It was in October that I last saw him--at Woodchuck Lodge. November
22 he wrote:
I neglected to make any apologies for the long letter I wrote
you the other day. I promise not to do so again. I am enclosing
an old notebook of mine, filled with all sorts of jottings as
you will see. I send it for a keepsake.
We are off for California to-morrow. Hope to be there in early
December. We leave Chicago on the 29th. My address there will
be _La Jolla_, San Diego. Good luck to you and yours.
Always your friend
JOHN BURROUGHS
He kept his promise too too well. This was the last letter I ever had
from him.
He dreaded that California journey. San Diego is a long, long way
from Woodchuck Lodge when one is nearing eighty-four. Dr. Barrus
and two of her nieces made the trip with him, Henry Ford, out of
his friendship, meeting the expenses of the winter sojourn. But
California had no cure for the winter that had at last fallen upon
the old naturalist. Sickness, and longing for home, and other ills
befell him. He was in a hospital for many days. But visitors came to
see him as usual; he went among the schools speaking; nor was his
pen idle--not yet; one of the last things, if not the very last he
wrote for publication, being a vigorous protest against free verse,
called "The Reds of Literature." But all the while he was thinking of
home, and planning for his birthday party at the Lodge back on the
ancestral farm.
We celebrated it. He was there. But he did not know. On the third
day of April, his eighty-fourth birthday, followed by a few of his
friends, mourned by all the nation, he was laid to rest in the hill
pasture, beside the boulder on which he had played as a child, and
where only a few months before he had taken me to see the glory of
hill and sky that had been his lifelong theme, and that were to be
his sleep forever.
He died on the train that was bringing him back from California, his
last desire not quite fulfilled. He was a wholly human man; and an
utterly simple man; and so true to himself, that his last words,
uttered on the speeding train, expressed and completed his whole life
with singular beauty: "How far are we from home," he asked,--and the
light failed; and the train sped on as if there were need of hurry
now!
"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."
THE END
The Riverside Press
CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS
U . S . A
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