V
Beginning with the late sixties, out-of-door themes more and more took possession of American literature. Burroughs was only one in an increasing throng of writers; he was the best known and most stimulating, and soon, therefore, the leader and inspirer. The mid-nineteenth century had been effeminate in the bulk of its literary product; it had been a thing of indoors and of books: the new after-the-war spirit was masculine even at times to coarseness and brutality. Maurice Thompson (1844–1901), one of the earliest of the new period, perceived the bent of the age with clearness. "We are nothing better than refined and enlightened savages," he wrote in 1878. "The wild side of the prism of humanity still offers its pleasures to us.... Sport, by which is meant pleasant physical and mental exercise combined—play in the best sense—is a requirement of this wild element, this glossed over heathen side of our being, and the bow is its natural implement."[84] It was the apology of the old school for the new era of sport. Thompson would direct these heathen energies toward archery, since it was a sport that appealed to the imagination and that took its devotees into the forests and the swamps, but there was no directing of the resurging forces. Baseball and football sprang up in the seventies and grew swiftly into hitherto unheard-of proportions. Yachting, camping, mountaineering, summer tramping in the woods and the borders of civilization swiftly became popular. The Adirondacks and the Maine forests and the White Mountains sprang into new prominence. As early as 1869 Stedman had complained that The Blameless Prince lay almost dead on the shelves while such books as Murray's Adventures in the Wilderness sold enormously. For a time indeed W. H. H. Murray—"Adirondack Murray"—did vie even with Bonner's Ledger in popularity. He threw about the wilderness an alluring, half romantic atmosphere that appealed to the popular imagination and sent forth, eager and compelling, what in later days came to be known as "the call of the wild." His books have not lasted. There is about them a declamatory, artificial element that sprang too often from the intellect rather than the heart. Charles Dudley Warner in his In the Wilderness, 1878, and William H. Gibson in such books as Camp Life in the Woods, sympathetically illustrated by their author, were far more sincere and wholesome. Everywhere for a decade or more there was appeal for a return to the natural and the free, to the open-air games of the old English days, to hunting and trapping and camping—a masculine, red-blooded resurgence of the savage, a return to the wild. The earlier phase of the period may be said to have culminated in 1882 with the founding of Outing, a magazine devoted wholly to activities in the open air.
The later eighties and the nineties are the period of the bird books. C. C. Abbott's A Naturalist's Rambles About Home, 1884; Olive Thorne Miller's Bird Ways, 1885; Bradford Torrey's Birds in the Bush, 1885; and Florence Merriam Bailey's Birds Through an Opera Glass, 1889, may be taken as representative. Bird life and bird ways for a period became a fad; enthusiastic observers sprang up everywhere; scientific treatises and check lists and identification guides like Chapman's Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America, began to appear in numbers. What the novelists of locality were doing for the unusual human types in isolated corners of the land, the nature writers were doing for the birds.
Of all the later mass of Nature writings, however, very little is possessed of literary distinction. Very largely it is journalistic in style and scientific in spirit. Only one out of the later group, Bradford Torrey, compels attention. Beyond a doubt it is already safe to place him next in order after Burroughs and Muir. He is more of an artist than Burroughs, and he is more literary and finished than Muir. In his attitude toward Nature he is like Thoreau—sensitive, sympathetic, reverent. It was he who edited the journals of Thoreau in their final form, and it was he also who after that experience wrote what is undoubtedly the most discriminating study that has yet been made of the great mystic naturalist.