Whatever of the Urim and of the Thummim you put into your style, whatever of the literary lights and the perfections, see to it that you make the facts “after their pattern, which hath been shewed thee in the mount.”
Thou shalt not bear false witness as to the facts.
Nor is this all. For the sad case with much nature-writing, as I have said, is that it not only fails to answer to genuine observation, but it also fails to answer to genuine emotion. Often as we detect the unsound natural history, we much oftener are aware of the unsound, the insincere, art of the author.
Now the facts of nature, as Mr. Burroughs says, are the material of nature literature—of one kind of such literature, let me add; for, while fabrications can be made only into lies, there may be another kind of good nature-literature compounded wholly of fancies. Facts, to quote Mr. Burroughs again, are the flora upon which the nature-writer lives. “I can do nothing without them.” Of course he could not. But Chaucer could. Indeed, Chaucer could do nothing with the facts; he had to have fancies. The truth in his story of the Cock and the Fox is a different kind of truth from the truth about Burroughs’s “Winter Neighbors,” yet no less the truth. Good nature-writing is literature, not science, and the truth we demand first and last is a literary truth—the fidelity of the writer to himself. He may elect to use facts for his material; yet they are only material, and no better as material than fancies. For it is not matter that counts last in literature; it is manner. It is spirit that counts. It is the man. Only honest men make literature. Writers may differ in their purpose, as Burroughs in his purpose to guide you through the woods differs from Chaucer’s purpose to entertain you by the fire; but they are one in their spirit of honesty.
Chaucer pulls a long face and begins his tale of the Cock and the Fox with a vivid and very realistic description of a widow’s cottage,
B’syde a grovë, standing in a dalë,
as a setting, not for the poor widow and her two daughters, not at all; but rather to stage the heroic comedy between Chauntecleer and his favorite wife, the scarlet-eyed Pertelote.
It is just before daybreak. They are not up yet, not off the roost, when they get into a discussion about the significance of dreams, Chauntecleer having had a very bad dream during the night. The dispute waxes as it spreads out over medicine, philosophy, theology, and psychology. Chauntecleer quotes the classics, cites famous stories, talks Latin to her:—