The Lay of the Land

by Dallas Lore Sharp

This is what they find, many of these who are caught up by the movement toward the fields; but not all of them. A little five-year-old from the village came out to see me recently, and while playing in the orchard she brought me five flowers, called them by their right names, and told me how they grew. Down in the loneliest marshes of Delaware Bay I know a lighthouse keeper and his solitary neighbor, a farmer: both have been touched by this nature spirit; both are interested, informed, and observant. The farmer there, on the old Zane’s Place, is no man of books, like the rector of Selborne, but he is a man of birds and beasts, of limitless marsh and bay and sky, of everlasting silence and wideness and largeness and eternal solitude. He could write a Natural History of the Maurice River Marshes.

These are not rare cases. The nature books, the nature magazines, the nature teachers, are directing us all to the out-of-doors. I subscribe to a farm journal (club rates, twenty-five cents a year!) in which an entire page is devoted to “nature studies,” while the whole paper is remarkably fresh and odorous of the real fields. In the city, on my way to and from the station, I pass three large bookstores, and from March until July each of these shops has a big window given over almost continuously to “nature books.” I have before me from one of these shops a little catalogue of nature books—“a select list”—for 1907, containing 233 titles, varying in kind all the way from “The Tramp’s Handbook” to one (to a dozen) on the very stable subject of “The Farmstead.” These are all distinctively “nature books,” books with an appeal to sentiment as well as to sense, and very unlike the earlier desiccated, unimaginative treatises.

There are a multitude of other signs that show as clearly as the nature books how full and strong is this tide that sets toward the open fields and woods. There are as many and as good evidences, too, of the genuineness of this interest in the out-of-doors. It may be a fad just now to adopt abandoned farms, to attend parlor lectures on birds, and to possess a how-to-know library. It is pathetic to see “nature study” taught by schoolma’ams who never did and who never will climb a rail fence; it is sad, to speak softly, to have the makers of certain animal books preface the stories with a declaration of their absolute truth; it is passing sad that the unnatural natural history, the impossible out-of-doors, of some of the recent nature books, should have been created. But fibs and failures and impossibilities aside, there still remains the thing itself,—the widespread turning to nature, and the deep, vital need to turn.

The note of sincerity is clear, however, in most of our nature writers; the faith is real in most of our nature teachers; and the love,—who can doubt the love of the tens of thousands of those whose feet feel the earth nowadays, whose lives share in the existence of some pond or wood or field? And who can doubt the rest, the health, the sanity, and the satisfaction that these get from the companionship of their field or wood or pond?

There is no way of accounting for the movement that reflects in the least upon its reality and genuineness. It may be only the appropriation by the common people of the world that the scientists have discovered to us; it may be a popular reaction against the conventionality of the eighteenth century; or the result of our growing wealth and leisure; or a fashion set by Thoreau and Burroughs,—one or all of these may account for its origin; but nothing can explain the movement away, or hinder us from being borne by it out, at least a little way, under the open of heaven, to the great good of body and soul.

Among the cultural influences of our times that have developed the proportions of a movement, this so-called nature movement is peculiarly American. No such general, widespread turning to the out-of-doors is seen anywhere else; no other such body of nature literature as ours; no other people so close to nature in sympathy and understanding, because there is no other people of the same degree of culture living so close to the real, wild out-of-doors.

The extraordinary interest in the out-of-doors is not altogether a recent acquirement. We inherited it. Nature study is an American habit. What else had the pioneers and colonists to study but the out-of-doors? and what else was half as wonderful? They came from an old urban world into this new country world, where all was strange, unnamed, and unexplored. Their chief business was observing nature, not as dull savages, nor as children born to a dead familiarity with their surroundings, but as interested men and women, with a need and a desire to know. Their coming was the real beginning of our nature movement; their observing has developed into our nature study habit.

Our nature literature also began with them. There is scarcely a journal, a diary, or a set of letters of this early time in which we do not find that careful seeing, and often that imaginative interpretation, so characteristic of the present day. Even the modern animal romancer is represented among these early writers in John Josselyn and his delicious book, “New England’s Rarities Discovered.”

It was not until the time of Emerson and Bryant and Thoreau, however, that our interest in nature became general and grew into something deeper than mere curiosity. There had been naturalists such as Audubon (he was a poet, also), but they went off into the deep woods alone. They were after new facts, new species. Emerson and Bryant and Thoreau went into the woods, too, but not for facts, nor did they go far, and they invited us to go along. We went, because they got no farther than the back-pasture fence. It was not to the woods they took us, but to nature; not a-hunting after new species in the name of science, but for new inspirations, new estimates of life, new health for mind and spirit.

But we were slow to get as far even as their back-pasture fence, slow to find nature in the fields and woods. It was fifty years ago that Emerson tried to take us to nature; but fifty years ago, how few there were who could make sense out of his invitation, to say nothing of accepting it! And of Thoreau’s first nature book, “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” there were sold, in four years after publication, two hundred and twenty copies. But two hundred and twenty of such books at work in the mind of the country could leaven, in time, a big lump of it. And they did. The out-of-doors, our attitude toward it, and our literature about it have never been the same since.