The Seer of Slabsides

by Dallas Lore Sharp

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, critic in Thoreau, the humorist in Charles Dudley Warner. As we now know the nature-writer we come upon him for the first time in John 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 Burroughs brings the fields into the library. The essay whose matter is nature, whose moral is human, whose manner is strictly literary, belongs to John 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 Burroughs who taught us to ask), "Is the record true? Is the writing honest?"

In these many volumes by John Burroughs there are many observations, and it is more than likely that some of them may be wrong, but it is not possible that any of them could be mixed with observations that Burroughs knows he never made. If Burroughs has written a line of sham natural history, which line is it? In a preface to "Wake-Robin," the author says his readers have sometimes complained that they do not see the things which he sees in the woods; but I doubt if there ever was a reader who suspected John Burroughs of not seeing the things.

His reply to these complaints is significant, being in no manner a defense, but an exquisite explanation, instead, of the difference between the nature which anybody may see in the woods and the nature that every individual writer, because he is a writer, and an individual, must put into his book: a difference like that between the sweet-water gathered by the bee from the flowers and the drop of acid-stung honey deposited by the bee in the comb. The sweet-water undergoes a chemical change in being brought to the hive, as the wild nature undergoes a literary change—by the addition of the writer's self to the nature, while with the sweet-water it is by the addition of the bee.

One must be able to walk to an editorial office and back, and all the way walk humbly with his theme, as Burroughs ever does—not entirely forgetful of himself, nor of me (because he has invited me along); but I must be quiet and not disturb the fishing—if we go by way of a trout-stream.

True to the facts, Burroughs is a great deal more than scientific, for he loves the things—the birds, hills, seasons—as well as the truths about them; and true to himself, he is not by any means a simple countryman who has never seen the city, a natural idyl, who lisps in books and essays, because the essays come. He is fully aware of the thing he wants to do, and by his own confession has a due amount of trouble shaping his raw material into finished literary form. He is quite in another class from the authors of "The Complete Angler" and "New England's Rarities Discovered." In Isaak Walton, to quote Leslie Stephen, "a happy combination of circumstances has provided us with a true country idyl, fresh and racy from the soil, not consciously constructed by the most skillful artistic hand."

Now the skillful artistic hand is everywhere seen in John Burroughs. What writer in these days could expect happy combinations of circumstances in sufficient numbers for so many volumes?

But being an idyl, when you come to think of it, is not the result of a happy combination of circumstances, but rather of stars—of horoscope. You are born an idyl or you are not, and where and when you live has nothing to do with it.

Who would look for a true country idyl to-day in the city of Philadelphia? Yet one came out of there yesterday, and lies here open before me, on the table. It is a slender volume, called "With the Birds, An Affectionate Study," by Caroline Eliza Hyde. The author is discussing the general subject of nomenclature and animal distribution, and says:

"When the Deluge covered the then known face of the earth, the birds were drowned with every other living thing, except those that Noah, commanded by God, took two by two into the Ark.