The Face of the Fields

by Dallas Lore Sharp

A full-throated hymn, this, to the life that is, in the earth that is, a hymn without taint of cant, without a single note of that fevered desire for a land that is fairer than this, whose gates are of pearl and whose streets are paved with gold. If there is another land, may it be as fair as this! And a pair of bars will be gate enough, and gravel, cinders, grass, even March mud, will do for paving; for all that one will need there, as all that one needs here—here in New England in March—is to have “arctics” on one’s feet and an equator about one’s heart. The desire for heaven is natural enough, for how could one help wanting more after getting through with this? But he sins and comes short of the glory of God who would be quit of this world for the sake of a better one. There isn’t any better one. This one is divine. And as for those dreams of heaven in old books and monkish hymns, they cannot compare for glory and for downright domestic possibilities with the prospect of these snow-clad Hingham hills from my window this brilliant winter morning.

That “this world is not my resting-place” almost any family man can believe nowadays, but that “this world is not my home” I can’t believe at all. However poor a resting-place we make of it, however certain of going hence upon a “longe journey,” we may not find this earth anything else than home without confessing ourselves tenants here by preference, and liable, therefore, to pay rent throughout eternity. The best possible use for this earth is to make a home of it, and for this span of life, to live it like a human, earth-born being.

Such is the credo of the nature-writer. Not until it can be proved to him that eternal day is more to his liking than the sweet alternation of day and night, that unending rest is less monotonous than his round of labor until the evening, that streets of gold are softer for his feet than dirt roads with borders of grass and dandelions, that ceaseless hallelujahs about a throne exalt the excellency of God more than the quiet contemplation of the work of His fingers—the moon and the stars which He has ordained—not until, I say, it can be proved to him that God did not make this world, or, making it, spurned it, cursed it, that heaven might seem the more blessed—not until then will he forego his bean-patch at Walden, his vineyard at West Park, his garden at Selborne; will he deny to his body a house-lot on this little planet, and the range of this timed and tidy universe to his soul.

As between himself and nature, then, the thoroughly good nature-writer is in love—a purely personal state; lyric, emotional, rather than scientific, wherein the writer is not so much concerned with the facts of nature as with his view of them, his feelings for them, as they environ and interpret him, or as he centres and interprets them.

Were this all, it would be a simple story of love. Unfortunately, nature-writing has become an art, which means some one looking on, and hence it means self-consciousness and adaptation, the writer forced to play the difficult part of loving his theme not less, but loving his reader more.

For the reader, then, his test of the nature-writer will be the extreme test of sincerity. The nature-writer (and the poet) more than many writers is limited by decree to his experiences—not to what he has seen or heard only, but as strictly to what he has truly felt. All writing must be sincere. Is it that nature-writing and poetry must be spontaneously sincere? Sincerity is the first and greatest of the literary commandments. The second is like unto the first. Still there is considerable difference between the inherent marketableness of a cold thought and a warm, purely personal emotion. One has a right to sell one’s ideas, to barter one’s literary inventions; one has a right, a duty it may be, to invent inventions for sale; but one may not, without sure damnation, make “copy” of one’s emotions. In other words, one may not invent emotions, nor observations either, for the literary trade. The sad case with much of our nature-writing is that it has become professional, and so insincere, not answering to genuine observation nor to genuine emotion, but to the bid of the publisher.

You will know the sincere nature-writer by his fidelity to fact. But, alas! suppose I do not know the fact? To be sure. And the nature-writer thought of that, too, and penned his solemn, pious preface, wherein he declares that the following observations are exactly as he personally saw them; that they are true altogether; that he has the affidavits to prove it; and the Indians and the Eskimos to swear the affidavits prove it. Of course you are bound to believe after that; but you wish the preface did not make it so unnecessarily hard.

The sincere nature-writer, because he knows he cannot prove it, and that you cannot prove it, and that the scientists cannot prove it, knows that he must not be asked for proofs, that he must be above suspicion, and so he sticks to the truth as the wife of Cæsar to her spouse.