"The first red clover head just bloomed... but like
the people I meet, it has a ruddier cheek than those at home."
When we ask ourselves what it is that makes his essays so engaging, we conclude it is largely due to their lucidity, spontaneity, and large simplicity—qualities which make up a style original, fresh, convincing. His writing, whether about nature, literature, science, or philosophy, is always suggestive, potent, pithy; his humor is delicious; he says things in a crisp, often racy, way. Yet what a sense of leisureliness one has in reading him, as well as a sense of companionability!
What distinguishes him most, perhaps, is his vivid and poetic apprehension of the mere fact. He never flings dry facts at us, but facts are always his inspiration. He never seeks to go behind them, and seldom to use them as symbols, as does Thoreau. Thoreau preaches and teaches always; Mr. Burroughs, never. The facts themselves fill him with wonder and delight—a wonder and delight his reader shares. The seasons, the life of the birds and the animals, the face of nature, the ever new, the ever common day—all kindle his enthusiasm and refresh his soul. The witchery of the ideal is upon his page without doubt, but he will not pervert natural history one jot or tittle for the sake of making a pretty story. His whole aim is to invest the fact with living interest without in the least lessening its value as a fact. He does not deceive himself by what he wants to be true; the scientist in him is always holding the poet in check. Of all contemporary writers in this field, he is the one upon whom we can always depend to be intellectually honest. He has an abiding hankering after the true, the genuine, the real; cannot stand, and never could stand, any tampering with the truth. Had he been Cromwell's portrait painter, he would have delighted in his subject's injunction: "Paint me as I am, mole and all." And he would have made the mole interesting; he has done so, but that is a mole of another color.
This instinct for the truth being so strong in him, he knows it when he sees it in others; he detects its absence, too; and has no patience and scant mercy for those past-masters in the art of blinking facts,—those natural-history romancers who, realizing that "the crowd must have emphatic warrant," are not content with the infinite Variety of nature, but must needs spend their art in the wasteful and ridiculous excess of painting the lily, perfuming the violet, and giving to the rainbow an added hue. Accordingly, when one warps the truth to suit his purpose, especially in the realm of nature, he must expect this hater of shams to raise a warning voice—"Beware the wolf in sheep's clothing!" But he never cries "Wolf!" when there is no wolf, and he gives warm and generous praise to deserving ones.
It has surprised some of his readers, who know how kindly he is by nature, and how he shrinks from witnessing pain, in beast or man, much less inflicting it, to see his severity when nature is traduced—for he shows all the fight and fury and all the defense of the mother bird when her young are attacked. He won't suffer even a porcupine to be misrepresented without bristling up in its defense.
I have said that he never preaches, never seeks to give a moral twist to his observations of nature, but I recall a few instances where he does do a bit of moralizing; for example, when he speaks of the calmness and dignity of the hawk when attacked by crows or kingbirds: "He seldom deigns to notice his noisy and furious antagonist, but deliberately wheels about in that aerial spiral, and mounts and mounts till his pursuers grow dizzy and return to earth again. It is quite original, this mode of getting rid of an unworthy opponent—rising to heights where the braggart is dazed and bewildered and loses his reckoning! I'm not sure but it is worthy of imitation." Or, in writing of work on the farm, especially stone-fence making, he speaks of clearing the fields of the stones that are built into boundaries: "If there are ever sermons in stones, it is when they are built into a stone wall—turning your hindrances into helps, shielding your crops behind the obstacles to your husbandry, making the enemies of the plough stand guard over its products." But do we find such sermonizing irksome?
Just as "all architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it," so is all nature. Lovers of Nature muse and dream and invite their own souls. They interpret themselves, not Nature. She reflects their thoughts and minds, gives them, after all, only what they bring to her. And the writer who brings much—much of insight, of devotion, of sympathy—is sure to bring much away for his reader's delectation. Does not this account for the sense of intimacy which his reader has with the man, even before meeting him?—the feeling that if he ever does meet him, it will be as a friend, not as a stranger? And when one does meet him, and hears him speak, one almost invariably thinks: "He talks just as he writes." To read him after that is to hear the very tones of his voice.
We sometimes hear the expression, "English in shirt-sleeves," applied to objectionable English; but the phrase might be applied in a commendatory way to good English,—to the English of such a writer as Mr. Burroughs,—simple, forceful language, with homely, everyday expressions; English that shows the man to have been country-bred, albeit he has wandered from the home pastures to distant woods and pastures new, browsing in the fields of literature and philosophy, or wherever he has found pasturage to his taste. Or, to use a figure perhaps more in keeping with his main pursuits, he is one who has flocked with birds not of a like feather with those that shared with him the parent nest. Although his kin knew and cared little for the world's great books, he early learned to love them when he was roaming his native fields and absorbing unconsciously that from which he later reaped his harvest. It is to writers of this kind of "English in shirt-sleeves" that we return again and again. In them we see shirt-sleeves opposed to evening dress; naturalness, sturdiness, sun-tan, and open sky, opposed to the artificial, to tameness, constriction, and characterless conformity to prescribed customs.
Do we not turn to writers of the first class with eagerness, slaking our thirst, refreshing our minds at perennial springs? How are we glad that they lead us into green pastures and beside still waters, away from the crowded haunts of the conventional, and the respectably commonplace society garb of speech! What matter if occasionally one even gives a wholesome shock by daring to come into the drawing-room of our minds in his shirt-sleeves, his hands showing the grime of the soil, and his frame the strength that comes from battling with wind and weather? It is the same craving which makes us say with Richard Hovey:—
"I am sick of four walls and a ceiling;
I have need of the sky,
I have business with the grass."