The Seer of Slabsides

by Dallas Lore Sharp

It is the strain, in Thoreau, that wearies us; his sweating among the stumps and woodchucks, for a bean crop netting him eight dollars, seventy-one and one half cents. But such beans! Beans with minds and souls! Yet, for baking, plain beans are better than these transcendental beans, because your transcendental beans are always baked without pork. A family man, however, cannot contemplate that piddling patch with any patience, even though he have a taste for literature as real as his taste for beans. It is better to watch John Burroughs pruning his grapevines for a crop to net him one thousand, three hundred and twenty-five dollars, and no cents, and no half-cents. Here were eighteen acres to be cultivated, whose fruit was to be picked, shipped, and sold in the New York markets at a profit—a profit plainly felt in John Burroughs's books.

Reading what I have just said, as it appeared in the "Atlantic" for November, 1910, Burroughs wrote in the course of a letter to me:

"I feel like scolding you a little for disparaging Thoreau for my benefit. Thoreau is nearer the stars than I am. I may be more human, but he is as certainly more divine. His moral and ethical value I think is much greater, and he has a heroic quality that I cannot approach."

Perhaps no truer word will ever be said of these two men than that; and certainly no more generous word was ever spoken by one great writer of another, his nearest rival. I have not, nor would I, disparage Thoreau for Burroughs's benefit. Thoreau dwells apart. He is long past all disparagement. "Walden Pond" and "The Week," if not the most challenging, most original books in American literature, are, with Whitman's "Leaves of Grass" and Emerson's "Essays," among those books.

Thoreau and Burroughs had almost nothing in common except their love of nature, and in that they were farther apart than in anything else, Thoreau searching by night and day in all wild places for his lost horse and hound while Burroughs quietly worshiped, as his rural divinity, the ruminating cow.

The most worthy qualities of good writing are those least noticeable—negative qualities of honesty, directness, sincerity, euphony; noticeable only by their absence. Yet in John Burroughs they amounted to a positive charm. Indeed, are not these same negative qualities the very substance of good style? Such style as is had by a pair of pruning-shears, as is embodied in the exquisite lines of a flying swallow—the style that is perfect, purposeful adaptability?

But there is more than efficiency to John Burroughs's style; there are strengths and graces existing in and for themselves. Here is a naturalist who has studied the art of writing. "What little merit my style has," he declares, "is the result of much study and discipline." And whose style, if it be style at all, is not the result of much study and discipline? Flourish, fine-writing, wordiness, obscurity, and cant are exorcised in no other way; and as for the "limpidness, sweetness, freshness," which John Burroughs says should characterize outdoor writing, and which do characterize his writing, how else than by study and discipline shall they be obtained?

Outdoor literature, no less than other types of literature, is both form and matter; the two are mutually dependent, inseparably one; but the writer is most faithful to the form when he is most careful of the matter. It makes a vast difference whether his interest is absorbed by what he has to say, or by the possible ways he may say it. If John Burroughs wrote in his shirt-sleeves, as a recent critic says he did, it was because he went about his writing as he went about his vineyarding—for grapes, for thoughts, and not to see how pretty he could make a paragraph look, or into what fantastic form he could train a vine. The vine is lovely in itself—if it bear fruit.

And so is language. Take John Burroughs's manner in any of its moods: its store of single, sufficient words, for instance, especially the homely, rugged words and idioms, and the flavor they give, is second to the work they do; or take his use of figures—when he speaks of De Quincey's "discursive, roundabout style, herding his thoughts as a collie dog herds sheep"—and unexpected, vivid, apt as they are, they are even more effective. One is often caught up by the poetry of these essays and borne aloft, but never on a gale of words; the lift and sweep are genuine emotion and thought.

As an essayist—as a nature-writer I ought to say—John Burroughs's literary care is perhaps nowhere so plainly seen as in the simple architecture of his essay plans, in their balance and finish, a quality that distinguishes him from others of the craft, and that neither gift nor chance could so invariably supply. The common fault of outdoor books is the catalogue—raw data, notes. There are paragraphs of notes in John Burroughs, volumes of them in Thoreau. The average nature-writer sees not too much of nature, but knows all too little of literary values; he sees everything, gets a meaning out of nothing; writes it all down; and gives us what he sees, which is precisely what everybody may see; whereas, we want also what he thinks and feels. Some of our present writers do nothing but feel and divine and fathom—the animal psychologists, whatever they are. The bulk of nature-writing, however, is journalistic, done on the spot, into a notebook, as were the journals of Thoreau—fragmentary, yet with Thoreau often exquisite fragments—bits of old stained glass, unleaded, and lacking unity and design.