An Unorthodox View of Burroughs
Our Friend John Burroughs, by Clara Barrus. [Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.]
That title engenders a resentment in me, a sense of unfitness. It is an epitome of a popular approval which has cheapened the word “friendship.” If Walt Whitman, John Muir, and Francis F. Browne had jointly written of Burroughs, the words “our friend” in the title of their collaboration would have been inevitable and nice. The common disregard of so unimportant a matter as this seems to be in the author’s opinion exhibits the crass liberties which the public is wont to take with personalities. The result is that a great man may become popular and useful before he is understood.
Burroughs happily is both read and understood. His popularity therefore is wholesome. But the mild and consistent protest which his life has been and is against the necessary artificialities in which most of his “friends” live has never drawn them into a comprehending, practicing sympathy with it. He is read, applauded, and envied—but not followed. His softness and gentle unconcern with affairs are the antitheses of those dynamic qualities which confer leadership and vitalize men’s impulses and deeds. His urban admirers go to the country to rusticate and picnic but not to live a life like his. He does too much speculative thinking to give his attitude toward the world an opportunity to go home to his readers.
Whitman, with a similar indifference to a following, drives men into the open road; Thoreau lures them to Walden Ponds to repeat his experiment; Ik Marvel persuades them to farm; David Grayson charms city folk back to the land, to anchor and live. Burroughs attracts visitors to Slabsides. He is on the verge of becoming an institution, a curiosity. His life has been a personal success. He is young in spirit and surprisingly robust at nearly eighty years of age—he is seventy-seven this month—and I daresay that his obvious failure to lead his readers towards country homes of their own or seriously to interest them in the art of simple living has never given him the slightest pain. He has assumed no responsibility for the ways of the world. Nature is capable of working out her own salvation during a future eternity. A leaf on a tree does not quarrel with or attempt to reform its personal kin. It functions alone; the life of which it is a part must take care of horticultural sociology. Burroughs to me acknowledges himself to be a leaf on the great tree. That is exceedingly interesting; but endow leaves with reason, give them an expanding consciousness, and their functions must change. Burroughs would require to be more than a predestinated leaf if his fellows were leaves.
By virtue of society’s struggle and industry, in which Burroughs is not interested, he has made of the world, so far as he is concerned, a quiet, beautiful outdoor cathedral, domed by the sky, its chief priest being fed and clothed by the slaves of productive industry in your world and mine. With great respect and admiration I pronounce him a sagacious man, a clever leaf that has employed its reason with remarkable personal advantage. In Burroughs’ world the tragedies, strife, and noise that we experience do not exist; his cathedral is a by-product and he is a modest beneficiary of humanity’s work. In relation to the masses of people it is as unreal as it is unproductive of racial fitness to persist in the world as most men know it. He loves to dream, think, and write in his cathedral; what is going on outside does not disturb him. He revels in the leisure, order, and security which the outsiders have provided. He assures us that it is pleasant and satisfying, and we honor and reward him for the information, but I should like to ask him whether the largest freedom and selfhood that are achievable apart from working, conflicting, warring men are not themselves fundamentally artificial.
Burroughs does not seem to be sufficiently alive to suspect that he has missed something greater than personal contentment. A reader of everything that he has published, I never, until I read the autobiographical sketches in this work, felt the pity and unsocial contempt—not for the man but for the type—which I have here tried to express.
D. C. W.