Our Friend John Burroughs

by Clara Barrus

There seems to be this terrible alternative put to every man on entering the world, conquer or be conquered. It is what the waves say to the swimmer, "Use me or drown"; what gravity says to the babe, "Use me or fall"; what the winds say to the sailor, "Use me or be wrecked"; what the passions say to every one of us, "Drive or be driven." Time in its dealings with us says plainly enough, "Here I am, your master or your servant." If we fail to make a good use of time, time will not fail to make a bad use of us. The miser does not use his money, so his money uses him; men do not govern their ambition, and so are governed by it....

These considerations are valuable chiefly for their analogical import. They indicate a larger truth. Man grows by conquering his limitations—by subduing new territory and occupying it. He commences life on a very small capital; his force yet lies outside of him, scattered up and down in the world like his wealth—in rocks, in trees, in storms and flood, in dangers, in difficulties, in hardships,—in short, in whatever opposes his progress and puts on a threatening front. The first difficulty overcome, the first victory gained, is so much added to his side of the scale—so much reinforcement of pure power.

I have said elsewhere that Mr. Burroughs has written himself into his books. We see him doing this in these early years; he was an earnest student of life at an age when most young men would have been far less seriously occupied. Difficulties and hardships were roundabout him, his force was, indeed, "scattered up and down in the world, in rocks and trees," in birds and flowers, and from these sources he was even then wresting the beginnings of his successful career.

It was in November, 1860, when twenty-three years of age, that he made his first appearance in the pages of the "Atlantic Monthly," in the essay "Expression," comments upon which by its author I have already quoted. At that time he was under the Emersonian spell of which he speaks in his autobiographical sketch. Other readers and lovers of Emerson had had similar experiences. Brownlee Brown, an "Atlantic" contributor (of "Genius" and "The Ideal Tendency," especially), was a "sort of refined and spiritualized Emerson, without the grip and gristle of the master, but very pleasing and suggestive," Mr. Burroughs says. The younger writer made a pilgrimage to the home of Brownlee Brown in the fall of 1862, having been much attracted to him by the above-named essays. He found him in a field gathering turnips. They had much interesting talk, and some correspondence thereafter. Mr. Brown admitted that his mind had been fertilized by the Emersonian pollen, and declared he could write in no other way.

Concerning his own imitation of Emerson, Mr. Burroughs says:—

It was by no means a conscious imitation. Had I tried to imitate him, probably the spurious character of my essay would have deceived no one. It was one of those unconscious imitations that so often give an impression of genuineness.... When I began to realize how deeply Emerson had set his stamp upon me, I said to myself: "This will never do. I must resist this influence. If I would be a true disciple of Emerson, I must be myself and not another. I must brace myself by his spirit, and not go tricked out in his manner, and his spirit was 'Never imitate.'"

It was this resolution, as he has before told us, that turned him to writing on outdoor subjects.

In rereading "Expression" recently, I was struck, not so much by its Emersonian manner, as by its Bergsonian ideas. I had heard Mr. Burroughs, when he came under the spell of Bergson in the summer of 1911, say that the reason he was so moved by the French philosopher was doubtless because he found in him so many of his own ideas; and it was with keen pleasure that I came upon these forerunners of Bergson written before Bergson was born.

At the time when Mr. Burroughs was dropping the Emersonian manner, and while his style was in the transition stage, he wrote an essay on "Analogy," and sent it also to the "Atlantic," receiving quite a damper on his enthusiasm when Lowell, the editor, returned it. But he sent it to the old "Knickerbocker Magazine," where it appeared in 1862. Many years later he rewrote it, and it was accepted by Horace Scudder, then the "Atlantic's" editor; in 1902, after rewriting it the second time, he published it in "Literary Values."

Because of the deep significance of them at this time in the career of Mr. Burroughs, I shall quote the following letters received by him from David A. Wasson, a Unitarian clergyman of Massachusetts, and a contributor to the early numbers of the "Atlantic." Their encouragement, their candor, their penetration, and their prescience entitle them to a high place in an attempt to trace the evolution of our author. One readily divines how much such appreciation and criticism meant to the youthful essayist.