The Face of the Fields

by Dallas Lore Sharp

is the poem of a childhood on the farm, and the poem of a manhood on the farm, in spite of the critic who says:—

“We have never ceased to wonder that this friend of the birds, this kindly interpreter of nature in all her moods, was born and brought up on a farm; it was in that smiling country watered by the east branch of the Delaware. No man, as a rule, knows less about the colors, songs, and habits of birds, and is more indifferent to natural scenery than the man born to the soil, who delves in it and breathes its odors. Contact with it and laborious days seem to deaden his faculties of observation and deprive him of all sympathy with nature.” During the days when the deadening might have occurred, Mr. Burroughs was teaching school. Then he became a United States bank examiner, and only after that returned to the country where he still lives. He is now in his seventies, and coming full of years, and fuller and fuller of books, as his vines are full of years, and fuller and fuller of grapes.

Could it be otherwise? If men and grapes are of the same divine dust, should they not grow according to the same divine laws? Here in the vineyard along the Hudson, Mr. Burroughs planted himself in planting his vines, and every trellis that he set has become his own support and stay. The very clearing of the land for his vineyard was a preparation of himself physically and morally for a more fruitful life.

“Before the snow was off in March,” he says in “Literary Values,” “we set to work under-draining the moist and springy places. My health and spirits improved daily. I seemed to be under-draining my own life and carrying off the stagnant water, as well as that of the land.” And so he was. There are other means of doing it—taking drugs, playing golf, walking the streets; but surely the advantages and the poetry are all in favor of the vineyard. And how much fitter a place the vineyard to mellow and ripen life, than a city roof of tarry pebbles and tin!

Though necessarily personal and subjective, Mr. Burroughs’s writing is entirely free from self-exploitation and confession. There are pages scattered here and there dealing briefly and frankly with his own natural history, but our thanks are due to Mr. Burroughs that he never made a business of watching himself. Once he was inveigled by a magazine editor into doing “An Egotistical Chapter,” wherein we find him as a boy of sixteen reading essays, and capable at that age of feeding for a whole year upon Dr. Johnson! Then we find him reading Whipple’s essays, and the early outdoor papers of Higginson; and later, at twenty-three, settling down with Emerson’s essays, and getting one of his own into the “Atlantic Monthly.”

How early his own began to come to him!

That first essay in the “Atlantic” was followed by a number of outdoor sketches in the New York “Leader”—written, Mr. Burroughs says, “mainly to break the spell of Emerson’s influence and get upon ground of my own.” He succeeded in both purposes; and a large and exceedingly fertile piece of ground it proved to be, too, this which he got upon! Already the young writer had chosen his field and his crop. The out-of-doors has been largely his literary material, as the essay has been largely his literary form, ever since. He has done other things—volumes of literary studies and criticisms; but his theme from first to last has been the Great Book of Nature, a page of which, here and there, he has tried to read to us.

Mr. Burroughs’s work, in outdoor literature, is a distinct species, with new and well-marked characteristics. He is the nature-writer, to be distinguished from the naturalist in Gilbert White, the mystic in Traherne, the philosopher in Emerson, the preacher, poet, egotist in Thoreau, the humorist in Charles Dudley Warner. As we now know the nature-writer we come upon him for the first time in Mr. Burroughs. Such credit might have gone to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, had he not been something else before he was a lover of nature—of letters first, then of flowers, carrying his library into the fields; whereas Mr. Burroughs brings the fields into the library. The essay whose matter is nature, whose moral is human, whose manner is strictly literary, belongs to Mr. Burroughs. His work is distinguished by this threefold and even emphasis. In almost every other of our early outdoor writers either the naturalist or the moralist or the stylist holds the pen.

Early or late, this or that, good outdoor writing must be marked, first, by fidelity to fact; and, secondly, by sincerity of expression. Like qualities mark all good literature; but they are themselves the very literature of nature. When we take up a nature-book we ask (and it was Mr. Burroughs who taught us to ask), “Is the record true? Is the writing honest?”