The Face of the Fields

by Dallas Lore Sharp

Let the nature-writer only chronicle his observations as Dr. C. C. Abbott does in “A Naturalist’s Rambles about Home,” or let him dream a dream about his observations as Maeterlinck does in “The Life of the Bee,” yet is he still confined to the truth as a hermit crab to his shell—a hard, inelastic, unchangeable, indestructible house that he cannot adapt, but must himself be adapted to, or else abandon. Chronicle and romance alike we want true to fact. But this particular romance about the Bee will not thus qualify. It was not written for beekeepers, even amateur beekeepers, for they all know more or less about bees, and hence they would not understand the book. It was written for those, the city-faring folk, like my market-man, who asked me how many pounds of honey a bee would gather up in a year, and whether I kept more than one bee in a hive. A great many persons must have read “The Life of the Bee,” but only one of them, so far as I know, had ever kept bees, and she had just a single swarm in between the wall of her living-room and the weather-boards outside. But she had listened to them through the wall, and she sent me her copy of “The Life,” begging me to mark on the margins wherever the Bee of the book was unlike her bee in the wall. She had detected a difference in the buzz of the two bees.

Now the two bees ought to buzz alike—one buzz, distinct and always distinguishable from the buzz of the author. In the best nature-writing the author is more than his matter, but he is never identical with it; and not until we know which is which, and that the matter is true, have we faith in the author.

I knew a big boy once who had almost reached the footprint in “Robinson Crusoe” (the tragedy of almost reaching it!) when some one blunderingly told him that the book was all a story, made up, not true at all; no such island; no such Crusoe! The boy shut up the book and put it forever from him. He wanted it true. He had thought it true, because it had been so real. Robbed of its reality, he was unable to make it true again.

Most of us recover from this shock in regard to books, asking only that they seem real. But we are eternally childish, curious, credulous, in our thought of nature; she is so close and real to us, and yet so shadowy, hidden, mysterious, and remote! We are eager to listen to any tale, willing to believe anything, if only it be true. Nay, we are willing to believe it true—we were, I should say, until, like the boy with the book, we were rudely told that all this fine writing was made up, that we have no such kindred in the wilds, and no such wilds. Then we said in our haste, all men—who write nature-books—are liars.

“How much of this is real?” asked a keen and anxious reader, eyeing me narrowly, as she pointed a steady finger at an essay of mine in the “Atlantic.” “Have you, sir, a farm and four real boys of your own, or are they faked?”

“Good heavens, madam!” I exclaimed. “Has it come to this? My boys faked!”

But it shows how the thoughtful and the fearful regard the literary naturalist, and how paramount is the demand for honesty in the matter of mere fact, to say nothing of the greater matter of expression.

Only yesterday, in a review in the “Nation” of an animal-man book, I read: “The best thing in the volume is the description of a fight between a mink and a raccoon—or so it seems. Can this be because the reader does not know the difference between a mink and a raccoon, and does know the difference between a human being and the story-teller’s manikin?”

This is the wandering wood, this Errour’s den,

is the feeling of the average reader—of even the “Nation’s” book reviewer—nowadays, toward nature-writing, a state of mind due to the recent revelations of a propensity in wild-animal literature to stand up rather than to go on all fours.