Our Friend John Burroughs

by Clara Barrus

I undoubtedly lack the heroic fibre. My edge is much easier turned than was that, say, of Thoreau. Austerity would ill become me. You would see through the disguise. Yes, there is much soft rock in my make-up. Is that why I shrink from the wear and tear of the world?

The religious storm and upheaval that I used to hear so much of in my youth is impossible with me. I am liable to deep-seated enthusiasms; but to nothing like a revolution in my inward life, nothing sudden, nothing violent. I can't say that there has been any abandonment of my opinions on important subjects; there has been new growth and evolution, I hope. The emphasis of life shifts, now here, now there; it is up hill and down dale, but there is no change of direction.... Certain deep-seated tendencies and instincts have borne me on. I have gravitated naturally to the things that were mine.

I could not make anything I chose of myself; I could only be what I am. In my youth I once "went forward" at a "protracted meeting," but nothing came of it. The change in me that I was told would happen did not happen, and I never went again. My nature was too equable, too self-poised, to be suddenly overturned and broken up.

I am not a bit gregarious. I cannot herd with other men and be "Hail, fellow, well met!" with them as I wish I could. I am much more at home with women; we seem to understand one another better. Put me with a lot of men, and we naturally separate as oil and water separate. On shipboard it is rarely that any of the men take to me, or I to them—I do not smoke or drink or tell stories, or talk business or politics, and the men have little use for me. On my last voyage across the Atlantic, the only man who seemed to notice me, or to whom I felt drawn at all, was a Catholic priest. Real countrymen, trappers, hunters, and farmers, I seem to draw near to. On the Harriman Alaskan Expedition the two men I felt most at home with were Fred Dellenbaugh, the artist and explorer, and Captain Kelly, the guide. Can you understand this? Do you see why men do not, as a rule, care for me, and why women do?

I accuse myself of want of sociability. Probably I am too thin-skinned. A little more of the pachyderm would help me in this respect.

Some day I will give you more self-analysis and self-criticism.

I am what you might call an extemporaneous writer—I write without any previous study or preparation, save in so far as my actual life from day to day has prepared me for it. I do not work up my subject, or outline it, or sketch it in the rough. When I sit down to write upon any theme, like that of my "Cosmopolitan" article last April ("What Life Means to Me," 1906), or of my various papers on animal intelligence, I do not know what I have to say on the subject till I delve into my mind and see what I find there. The writing is like fishing or hunting, or sifting the sand for gold—I am never sure of what I shall find. All I want is a certain feeling, a bit of leaven, which I seem to refer to some place in my chest—not my heart, but to a point above that and nearer the centre of the chest—the place that always glows or suffuses when one thinks of any joy or good tidings that is coming his way. It is a kind of hunger for that subject; it warms me a little to think of it, a pleasant thrill runs through me; or it is something like a lover's feeling for his sweetheart—I long to be alone with it, and to give myself to it. I am sure I shall have a good time. Hence, my writing is the measure of my life. I can write only about what I have previously felt and lived. I have no legerdemain to invoke things out of the air, or to make a dry branch bud and blossom before the eyes. I must look into my heart and write, or remain dumb. Robert Louis Stevenson said one should be able to write eloquently on a broomstick, and so he could. Stevenson had the true literary legerdemain; he was master of the art of writing; he could invest a broomstick with charm; if it remained a broomstick, it was one on which the witches might carry you through the air at night. Stevenson had no burden of meaning to deliver to the world; his subject never compelled him to write; but he certainly could invest common things and thoughts with rare grace and charm. I wish I had more of this gift, this facility of pen, apart from any personal interest in the subject. I could not grow eloquent over a broomstick, unless it was the stick of the broom that used to stand in the corner behind the door in the old kitchen at home—the broom with which Mother used to sweep the floor, and sweep off the doorstones, glancing up to the fields and hills as she finished and turned to go in; the broom with which we used to sweep the snow from our boots and trouser-legs when we came from school or from doing the chores in winter. Here would be a personal appeal that would probably find me more inevitably than it would Stevenson.

I have never been in the habit of doing a thing, of taking a walk, or making an excursion, for the purpose of writing it up. Hence, when magazine editors have asked me to go South or to California, or here or there, to write the text to go with the pictures their artist would make, I have felt constrained to refuse. The thought that I was expected to write something would have burdened me and stood in the way of my enjoyment, and unless there is enjoyment, there is no writing with me.

I was once tempted into making an excursion for one of the magazines to a delightful place along the Jersey coast in company with an artist, and a memorable day it was, too, with plenty of natural and of human interest, but nothing came of it—my perverse pen would not do what it was expected to do; it was no longer a free pen.

When I began observing the birds, nothing was further from my thoughts than writing them up. I watched them and ran after them because I loved them and was happy with them in the fields and woods; the writing came as an afterthought, and as a desire to share my enjoyment with others. Hence, I have never carried a notebook, or collected data about nature in my rambles and excursions. What was mine, what I saw with love and emotion, has always fused with my mind, so that in the heat of writing it came back to me spontaneously. What I have lived, I never lose.