The Face of the Fields

by Dallas Lore Sharp

“Noah and his family had preserved the names of the birds given them by Adam. This is assured, for Noah sent a raven and a dove out to see if the waters had abated, and we have birds of that name now. Nothing was known of our part of the globe, so these birds must have remained in the Holy Land for centuries. We do not hear of them until America was discovered....

“Bats come from Sur. They are very black mouse-like birds, and disagreeable.... The bobolink is not mentioned in the Bible, but it is doubtless a primitive bird. The cock that crows too early in the morning ... can hardly be classed with the song-birds. The name of the hummingbird is not mentioned in the Bible, but as there is nothing new under the sun, he is probably a primitive bird.”

Mr. Burroughs will agree that the hummingbird is probably a primitive bird; and also that this is a true idyl, and that he could not write a true idyl if he tried. No one could write like that by trying. And what has any happy combination of circumstances to do with it? No, a book essentially is only a personality in type, and he who would not be frustrated of his hope to write a true idyl must himself be born a true idyl. A fine Miltonic saying!

Mr. Burroughs is not an idyl, but an essayist, with a love for books only second to his love for nature; a watcher in the woods, a tiller of the soil, a reader, critic, thinker, poet, whose chief business these fifty years has been the interpretation of the out-of-doors.

Upon him as interpreter and observer, his recent books, “Ways of Nature” and “Leaf and Tendril,” are an interesting comment.

Truth does not always make good literature, not when it is stranger than fiction, as it often is, and the writer who sticks to the truth of nature must sometimes do it at the cost of purely literary ends. Have I sacrificed truth to literature? asks Mr. Burroughs of his books. Have I seen in nature the things that are there, or the strange man-things, the “winged creeping things which have four feet,” and which were an abomination to the ancient Hebrews, but which the readers of modern nature-writing do greedily devour—are these the things I have seen? And for an answer he sets about a reëxamination of all he has written, from “Wake-Robin” to “Far and Near,” hoping “that the result of the discussion or threshing will not be to make the reader love the animals less, but rather to love the truth more.”

But the result, as embodied in “Ways of Nature” and in “Leaf and Tendril,” is quite the opposite, I fear; for these two volumes are more scientific in tone than any of his other work; and it is the mission, not of science, but of literature, to quicken our love for animals, even for truth. Science only adds to the truth. Yet here, in spite of himself, Mr. Burroughs is more the writer, more the interpreter, than the investigator. He is constantly forgetting his scientific thesis, as, for instance, in the account of his neighbor’s errant cow. He succeeds finally, however, in reducing her fairly well to a mechanical piece of beef acting to vegetable stimuli upon a nerve ganglion located somewhere in the region between her horns and her tail.

Now, all this is valuable, and the use made of it is laudable, but would we not rather have the account than the cow, especially from Mr. Burroughs? Certainly, because to us it is the account that he has come to stand for. And so, if we do not love his scientific animals more, and his scientific findings more, we shall, I think, love all his other books more; for we see now that, from the beginning, he has regarded the facts of nature as the solid substance of his books, to be kept as free from fancy and from false report, as his interpretation of them is to be kept free from all exaggeration and cant.

Here, then, are eleven volumes of honest seeing, honest feeling, honest reporting. Such honesty of itself may not make good nature-literature, but without such honesty there can be no good nature-literature.

Nature-literature is not less than the truth, but more; how much more, Mr. Burroughs himself suggests to us in a passage about his literary habits.