A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

III

John Burroughs was born on a farm in Roxbury, New York, just below the Otsego County made famous by Cooper and the Leather-stocking Tales. His boyhood until he was seventeen "was mainly occupied," to quote his own words, "with farm work in the summer, and with a little study, offset by much hunting and trapping of wild animals in winter." One must study this boyhood if one is to understand the man's work:

From childhood I was familiar with the homely facts of the barn, and of cattle and horses; the sugar-making in the maple woods in early spring; the work of the corn-field, hay-field, potato-field; the delicious fall months with their pigeon and squirrel shootings; threshing of buckwheat, gathering of apples, and burning of fallows; in short, everything that smacked of, and led to, the open air and its exhilarations. I belonged, as I may say, to them; and my substance and taste, as they grew, assimilated them as truly as my body did its food. I loved a few books much; but I loved Nature, in all those material examples and subtle expressions, with a love passing all the books of the world.[81]

Of schooling he had little. "I was born," he once wrote, "of and among people who neither read books nor cared for them, and my closest associations since have been alien to literature and art." The usual winter term in his native district, a year or two in academy courses after he was seventeen—that was the extent of his formal education. At twenty he was married, at twenty-seven, after having drifted about as a school teacher, he settled at Washington in a position in the Treasury Department that held him closely for nine years.

It was a period of self-discipline. His intellectual life had been awakened by Emerson, and he had followed him into wide fields. He read enormously, he studied languages, he trained himself with models of English style. His love of the country, legacy of the boyhood which he never outgrew, impelled him to a systematic study of ornithology. Birds were his avocation, his enthusiasm; by and by they were to become his vocation.

In 1861, when he was twenty-four, he came for the first time in contact with Leaves of Grass, and it aroused him like a vision.

It produced the impression upon me in my moral consciousness that actual Nature did in her material forms and shows; ... I shall never forget the strange delight I had from the following passage, as we sat there on the sunlit border of an autumn forest:

I lie abstracted, and hear beautiful tales of things, and the reasons of things;

They are so beautiful, I nudge myself to listen.

I cannot say to any person what I hear—I cannot say it to myself—it is very wonderful;

It is no small matter, this round and delicious globe, moving so exactly in its orbit forever and ever, without one jolt, or the untruth of a single second;

I do not think it was made in six days, nor in ten thousand years, nor in ten billions of years;

Nor planned and built one thing after another, as an architect plans and builds a house.

It was the touch that he needed. There was in him a strain of wildness even as in Thoreau, an almost feminine shrinking from the crowd, a thinking of Nature as something apart from man, a retreat and an antidote; Whitman added the human element, the sympathetic touch, the sense of the value of man.

Burroughs's first work appeared that same year in the New York Leader, a series of papers under the heading "From the Back Country"—crude things compared with Higginson's polished work, yet filled with a genuineness and a freshness that were notable. All of his earlier sketches were the work of a careful observer who wrote from sheer love of Nature. Moreover, they were the work of a dreamer and a poet. As the years took him farther from that marvelous boyhood, the light upon it grew softer and more golden. He dreamed of it in the spring when the bluebird called and the high-hole; he dreamed of it on his walks in the city suburbs when the swallows greeted him and the warblers. His Atlantic paper "With the Birds," now the first chapter of his published works, begins with the sentence, now suppressed, "Not in the spirit of exact science, but rather with the freedom of love and old acquaintance, would I celebrate some of the minstrels of the field and forest." And years later, when he wrote the general introduction to his works, he could say:

My first book, Wake-Robin, was written while I was a government clerk in Washington. It enabled me to live over again the days I had passed with the birds and in the scenes of my youth. I wrote the book sitting at a desk in front of an iron wall. I was keeper of a vault in which many millions of bank notes were stored. During my long periods of leisure I took refuge in my pen. How my mind reacted from the iron wall in front of me and sought solace in memories of the birds and of summer fields and woods! Most of the chapters of Winter Sunshine were written at the same desk. The sunshine there referred to is of a richer quality than is found in New York and New England.

That was the secret of the early work of John Burroughs: to him Nature was a part of his boyhood, with boyhood's light upon it. He dreamed of her when the city homesickness was upon him and when he wrote of her he wrote from a full heart. He felt every line of it; the light that plays over it is indeed of "richer quality" than is found over any actual hills. A part of his early popularity came undoubtedly from the sentiment which he freely mingled with his studies of field and woodland.

There is something almost pathetic in the fact that the birds remain forever the same. You grow old, your friends die or remove to distant lands, events sweep on and all things are changed. Yet there in your garden or orchard are the birds of your boyhood, the same notes, the same calls, and, to all intents and purposes, the identical birds endowed with perennial youth. The swallows, that built so far out of your reach beneath the eaves of your father's barn, the same ones now squeak and chatter beneath the eaves of your barn. The warblers and shy wood birds you pursued with such glee ever so many summers ago, and whose names you taught to some beloved youth who now, perchance, sleeps amid his native hills, no marks of time or change cling to them; and when you walk out to the strange woods, there they are, mocking you with their ever renewed and joyous youth. The call of the high-holes, the whistle of the quail, the strong piercing note of the meadow lark, the drumming of the grouse—how these sounds ignore the years, and strike on the ear with the melody of that springtime when the world was young, and life was all holiday and romance.[82]

The twenty years following his first Atlantic paper were the years of his professional life. He left his clerkship at Washington in 1873 to become a national bank inspector, and until 1884, when he finally retired to rural life, he was busy with his duties as receiver of broken banks, examiner of accounts, and financial expert. During the two decades he published his most distinctive nature volumes: Wake-Robin, Winter Sunshine, Birds and Poets, Locusts and Wild Honey, and Pepacton, a small output for a man between the years of twenty-six and forty-six, yet one that is significant. Not a page of it had been written in haste, not a page that his later hand had found it necessary to revise. The primal freshness of youth is upon the books; they are as full of vitality and sweetness as a spring morning. Doubtless they are all the better for being the enthusiasms of hours stolen from a dry profession. It is tonic to read them. They are never at fault either in fact or in influence; they are the work of a trained observer, a scientist indeed, yet one who has gone to Nature like a priest to the holy of holies with the glow in his heart and the light on his face.

During the following decade, or, more exactly, the period between 1884 and 1894, he added four more books, three of them, Fresh Fields, Signs and Seasons, and Riverby, devoted to Nature, though with more and more of the coldly scientific spirit. These with the five earlier volumes stand alone as Burroughs's contribution to the field that he has made peculiarly his own. They contain his freshest and most spontaneous work.

To read these volumes is like going out ourselves into the forest with an expert guide who sees everything and who has at his command an unlimited store of anecdote and chatty reminiscence of birds and animals and even plants. To Burroughs, Nature was sufficient in herself. He loved her for the feelings she could arouse within him, for the recollections she could stir of the springtime of his life, for the beauty and the harmony that everywhere he found, and for the elemental laws that he saw on all sides at work and that stirred his curiosity. He had no desire to study Nature to secure evidences of a governing personality. He would draw no moral and offer no solutions of the problem of good and evil. Of the fortunes of the spirit of man he cared but little; as for himself, serene, he would fold his hands and wait. He was no mystic like Thoreau, listening for higher harmonies and peering eagerly beyond every headland to discover perchance the sources of the Nile. Upon him there was no necessity save to observe, to record, to discover new phenomena, to enlarge the store of facts, to walk flat-footed upon the material earth and observe the working of the physical mechanics about him and to teach others to observe them and to enjoy them. To appreciate the difference between Burroughs and Thoreau one has but to read them side by side. For instance, on March 21, 1853, Thoreau makes this entry:

As I was rising this crowning road, just beyond the old lime kiln, there leaked into my open ear the first peep of a hyla from some far pool ... a note or two which scarcely rends the air, does no violence to the zephyr, but yet leaks through all obstacles and far over the downs to the ear of the listening naturalist, as it were the first faint cry of the new-born year, notwithstanding the notes of birds. Where so long I have heard the prattling and moaning of the wind, what means this tenser, far-piercing sound?

Burroughs writes of the same subject in this way:

From what fact or event shall we really date the beginning of spring? The little piping frogs usually furnish a good starting point. One spring I heard the first note on the 6th of April; the next on the 27th of February; but in reality the latter season was only about two weeks earlier than the former.... The little piper will sometimes climb a bullrush to which he clings like a sailor to a mast, and send forth his shrill call. There is a Southern species, heard when you have reached the Potomac, whose note is far more harsh and crackling. To stand on the verge of a swamp vocal with these, pains and stuns the ear.

Then in a foot-note:

The Southern species is called the green hyla. I have since heard them in my neighborhood on the Hudson.

Never was there writer who kept his feet more firmly on solid earth. He takes nothing for granted; he is satisfied only with the testimony of the senses, and his own senses. Everything—example, allusion, figure of speech, subject and predicate—comes from him in the concrete. Everything is specific, localized, dated. He was in accord with his era that demanded only reality. It is the task of the writer, he declared, "to pierce through our callousness and indifference and give us fresh impressions of things as they really are."

How permanent is such work? How valuable is it? Is Nature then a thing simply to be observed and classified and reduced to formulæ? To determine the average day on which the bluebird comes, or the wild geese fly, or the hyla calls, is there virtue in that? To Burroughs, Nature was a thing to be observed accurately for new facts to add to the known. Of Thoreau he wrote: "Ten years of persistent spying and inspecting of Nature and no new thing found out." Do we ask of the poet and the seer simply for mere new material phenomena found out to add to our science? The supreme test that must come at last to all literature is the question: How much of human life is there in it? How much "Thus saith the Lord"? Who seeks for material things with eyes, however keen, and dreams of no sources of the Nile, no vision that may come perchance from supernatural power latent in bird and leaf and tendril, is a scientist, however charming he make his subject or however sympathetic be his attitude. Judged by such a standard, Burroughs falls short, far short of a place with the highest. He must decrease, while Thoreau increases. He must be placed at last among the scientists who have added facts and laws, while Thoreau is seated with the poets and the prophets.

But though he be thus without vision and without message, save as an invitation to come to material Nature and learn to observe is a message, Burroughs has a charm of manner and a picturesqueness of material that are to be found in few other writers of the period. His power lies in his simplicity and his sincerity. He is more familiar with his reader than Thoreau. He is never literary, never affected; he talks in the most natural way in the world; he tells story after story in the most artless way of homely little happenings that have passed under his own eye, and so charming is his talk that we surrender ourselves like children to listen as long as he will. When we read Thoreau we are always conscious of Thoreau. His epithets, his distinction of phrase, his sudden glimpses, his unexpected turns and climaxes, his humor, for in spite of Lowell's dictum, he is full of humor, keep us constantly in the presence of literature; but with Burroughs we are conscious of nothing save the birds and the season and the fields. We are walking with a delightful companion who knows everything and who points out new wonders at every step.

The poetry of Burroughs faded more and more from his work with every book, and the spirit of the scientist, of the trained observer impatient of everything not demonstrable by the senses, grew upon him, until at length it took full control and expressed itself as criticism, as scientific controversy, and as philosophical discussion. Riverby, 1894, with its prefatory note stating that the volume was "probably my last collection of out-of-door papers," marks the point of division between the two periods. If we follow the Riverside edition, at present [1914] the definitive canon, eight books preceded Riverby and eight followed it. The groups are not homogeneous; it is not to be gathered that on a certain date Burroughs abandoned one form of essay and devoted himself exclusively to another, but it is true that the work of his last period is prevailingly scientific and critical. His Indoor Studies, 1889, Whitman, a Study, and Literary Values are as distinctively works of literary criticism as Arnold's Essays in Criticism; his Light of Day discusses religion from the standpoint of the scientist; his Ways of Nature is scientific controversy; and his Time and Change and The Summit of the Years are philosophy.

It is in this second period that Burroughs has done his most distinctive work, though not perhaps his most spontaneous and delightful. By temperament and training he is a critic, a scientific critic, an analyzer and comparer. Only men of positive character, original forces, attract him: Emerson and Whitman, and later Wordsworth, Carlyle, and Arnold, men who molded the intellectual life of their age. His first published book had been a critical study, Notes on Walt Whitman, 1867, a work the most wonderful in many ways of his whole output. It came at a critical moment, in those pregnant closing years of the sixties, and it struck clear and full the note of the new period. Burroughs's later studies of Whitman are more finished and more mature than this never-republished volume, but they lack its clarion quality. It is more than a defense and an explanation of Whitman: it is a call to higher levels in literature and art, a call for a new definition of poetry, a condemnation of that softness and honey sweetness of song that had lured to weakness poets like Taylor and Stoddard. Poetry henceforth must be more than mere beauty for beauty's sake: it must have a message; it must come burning from a man's soul; it must thrill with human life.

And it is here that Burroughs stands as a dominating figure. He was the first of American critics to insist without compromise that poetry is poetry only when it is the voice of life—genuine, spontaneous, inevitable. "How rare," he complained in later years, "are real poems—poems that spring from real feeling, a real throb of emotion, and not from a mere surface itching for expression." This has been the key to all his criticism: literature is life, the voicing of a man's soul. Moreover, it is a voicing of the national life, the expression of a nation's soul:

All the great imaginative writers of our century have felt, more or less, the stir and fever of the century, and have been its priests and prophets. The lesser poets have not felt these things. Had Poe been greater or broader he would have felt them, so would Longfellow. Neither went deep enough to touch the formative currents of our social or religious or national life. In the past the great artist has always been at ease in Zion; in our own day only the lesser artists are at ease, unless we except Whitman, a man of unshaken faith, who is absolutely optimistic, and whose joy and serenity come from the breadth of his vision and the depth and universality of his sympathies.[83]

The literary criticism of Burroughs—four volumes of it in the final edition, or nearly one-fourth of his whole output—may be classed with the sanest and most illuminating critical work in American literature. Lowell's criticism, brilliant as it is at times, is overloaded with learning. He belongs to the school of the early reviewers, ponderous and discursive. He makes use of one-third of his space in his essay on Thoreau before he even alludes to Thoreau. He is self-conscious, and self-satisfied; he poses before his reader and enjoys the sensation caused by his brilliant hit after hit. Stedman, too, is often more literary than scientific. Often he uses epithet and phrase that have nothing to commend them save their prettiness, their affectation of the odd or the antique. He is an appreciator of literature rather than critic in the modern sense. Burroughs, however, is always simple and direct. He is a scientific critic who compares and classifies and seeks causes and effects. He works not on the surface but always in the deeper currents and always with the positive forces, those writers who have turned the direction of the literature and the thinking of their generation. In marked contrast with Stedman, he can place Longfellow and Landor among the minor singers: "Their sympathies were mainly outside their country and their times." He demands that the poet have a message for his age. He says of Emerson: "Emerson is a power because he partakes of a great spiritual and intellectual movement of his times; he is unequivocally of to-day and New England."

Burroughs's nature essays, charming as they are and full as they are of a delightful personality, will be superseded by others as careful and as charming; Burroughs's criticism was the voice of an era, and it will stand with the era. It was in his later years that he put forth his real message.