Our Friend John Burroughs

by Clara Barrus

A strong vigorous writer is not obscure—at any rate, not habitually so; never leaves his reader in doubt, or compels him to mount the lever and help to raise his burden; but clutches it in his mighty grasp and hurls it into the air, so that it is not only unencumbered by the soil that gave it birth, but is wholly detached and relieved, and set off against the clear blue of his imagination. His thought is not like a rock propped up but still sod-bound, but is like a rock held aloft, or built into a buttress, with definite shape and outline.

Let me next quote from "A Thought on Culture," which appeared in the same publication a little later, and which is the first to bear his signature:—

In the conduct of life a man should not show his knowledge, but his wisdom; not his money—that were vulgar and foolish—but the result of it—independence, courage, culture, generosity, manliness, and that noble, humane, courteous air which wealth always brings to the right sort of a man.

A display of mere knowledge, under most circumstances, is pedantry; an exercise of wisdom is always godlike. We cannot pardon the absence of knowledge, but itself must be hid. We can use a thing without absolutely showing it, we can be reasonable without boring people with our logic, and speak correctly without parsing our sentences.

The end of knowledge is not that a man may appear learned, any more than the end of eating is that a man may seem to have a full stomach; but the end of it is that a man may be wise, see and understand things as they are; be able to adjust himself to the universe in which he is placed, and judge and reason with the celerity of instinct, and that without any conscious exercise of his knowledge. When we feel the food we have eaten, something is wrong; so when a man is forever conscious of his learning, he has not digested it, and it is an encumbrance....

The evolution of this author in his use of titles is interesting. Compare the crudity of "Vagaries vs. Spiritualism," and "Deep," for example, with those he selects when he begins to publish his books. "Wake-Robin," "Winter Sunshine," "Locusts and Wild Honey," "Leaf and Tendril,"—how much they connote! Then how felicitous are the titles of most of his essays! "Birch Browsings," "The Snow-Walkers," "Mellow England," "Our Rural Divinity" (the cow), "The Flight of the Eagle" (for one of his early essays on Whitman), "A Bunch of Herbs," "A Pinch of Salt," "The Divine Soil," "The Long Road" (on evolution)—these and many others will occur to the reader.

Following "A Thought on Culture" was a short essay on poetry, the drift of which is that poetry as contrasted with science must give us things, not as they are in themselves, but as they stand related to our experience. Our young writer is more at his ease now:—

Science, of course, is literal, as it ought to be, but science is not life; science takes no note of this finer self, this duplicate on a higher scale. Science never laughs or cries, or whistles or sings, or falls in love, or sees aught but the coherent reality. It says a soap bubble is a soap bubble—a drop of water impregnated with oleate of potash or soda, and inflated with common air; but life says it is a crystal sphere, dipped in the rainbow, buoyant as hope, sensitive as the eye, with a power to make children dance for joy, and to bring youth into the look of the old....

Who in his youth ever saw the swallow of natural history to be the twittering, joyous bird that built mud nests beneath his father's shed, and in the empty odorous barn?—that snapped the insects that flew up in his way when returning at twilight from the upland farm; and that filled his memory with such visions of summer when he first caught its note on some bright May morning, flying up the southern valley? Describe water, or a tree, in the language of exact science, or as they really are in and of themselves, and what person, schooled only in nature, would recognize them? Things must be given as they seem, as they stand represented in the mind. Objects arrange themselves in our memory, not according to the will, or any real quality in themselves, but as they affect our lives and stand to us in our unconscious moments. The hills we have dwelt among, the rocks and trees we have looked upon in all moods and feelings, that stood to us as the shore to the sea, and received a thousand impresses of what we lived and suffered, have significance to us that is not accounted for by anything we can see or feel in them.

Here we see the youth of twenty-three setting forth a truth which he has sedulously followed in his own writing about nature, the following of which accounts so largely for the wide appeal his works have made.