A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

Thoreau belongs completely to the later period: he is as thoroughly of American soil as even Mark Twain or Lincoln or Whitman. While Longfellow and Lowell, Taylor and Aldrich, and the rest of their school were looking eagerly to Europe, Thoreau was completely engrossed with his own land. "No truer American ever existed than Thoreau," wrote Emerson in his essay. "His preference of his country and condition was genuine, and his aversion from English and European manners and tastes almost reached contempt.... He wished to go to Oregon, not to London." It was this new-worldness, this freshness, this originality that made him the man of the new era. He went always to the sources; his work is redolent at every point of American soil. His images, his illustrations, his subject matter, all are American. His style, after he had outgrown an early fondness for Carlyle, is peculiarly his own, wonderfully simple and limpid and individual. Often it flows like poetry:

The sun is near setting away beyond Fair Haven. A bewitching stillness reigns through all the woodland, and over all the snowclad landscape. Indeed, the winter day in the woods or fields has commonly the stillness of twilight. The pond is perfectly smooth and full of light. I hear only the strokes of a lingering woodchopper at a distance and the melodious hooting of an owl.—December 9, 1856.

And what is this but poetry?

On the morning when the wild geese go over, I, too, feel the migratory instinct strong within me, and anticipate the breaking up of winter. If I yielded to this impulse, it would surely guide me to summer haunts. This indefinite restlessness and fluttering on the perch no doubt prophesy the final migration of souls out of nature to a serener summer, in long harrows and waving lines, in the spring weather, over that fair uplands and fertile Elysian meadows, winging their way at evening, and seeking a resting place with loud cackling and uproar.—January 29, 1859.

Thoreau was one of the most tonic forces of the later period. His inspiration and his spirit filled all the later school of Nature writers. One cannot read him long, especially in his later and more unconscious work, and find oneself unmoved. He inspires to action, to restlessness of soul. Take an entry like that of January 7, 1857, made during one of the most tumultuous of New England winter storms: "It is bitter cold, with a cutting N.W. wind.... All animate things are reduced to their lowest terms. This is the fifth day of cold, blowing weather," and so on and on till one fairly hears the roaring of the storm. Yet, despite the blast and the piercing cold, Thoreau goes out for his walk as usual and battles with the elements through miles of snow-smothered wilderness. "There is nothing so sanative, so poetic, as a walk in the woods and fields even now, when I meet none abroad for pleasure. Nothing so inspires me, and excites such serene and profitable thought." His battle with the wind and the cold and the wilderness grips us as we read. We too would rush into the storm and breast it and exult in it; we too would walk with Nature under the open skies, in the broad, wholesome places, and view the problems of life with serene soul. It is this dynamic element of Thoreau that has given him his following. He is sincere, he is working from the impulses of his soul, he is genuine. He is not a scientist: he is a poet and a seer. When we walk with Burroughs, we see as with new eyes; when with Thoreau, we feel. With Burroughs we learn of signs and seasons and traits; with Thoreau we find ourselves straining ears to catch the deeper harmonies, the mysterious soul of Nature, that somehow we feel to be intertwined eternally with the soul of man.

II

The transition from Thoreau to John Burroughs was through Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Wilson Flagg (1805–1884) had contributed to the early volumes of the Atlantic a series of bird studies Irving-like in atmosphere and sentiment, but he had made little impression. He was too literary, too much the child of the mid century. In his study of the owl, for instance, he could write: "I will not enter into a speculation concerning the nature and origin of those agreeable emotions which are so generally produced by the sight of objects that suggest the ideas of decay and desolation. It is happy for us, that, by the alchemy of poetry, we are able to turn some of our misfortunes into sources of melancholy pleasure, after the poignancy of grief has been assuaged by time," and so on and on till he got to midnight and the owl. It is a literary effort. There is lack of sincerity in it: the author is thinking too exclusively of his reader. The difference between it and a passage from Thoreau is the difference between a reverie in the study and a battle in the woods. Higginson, who followed in the Atlantic with "April Days," "The Life of Birds," and the other studies which he issued as Out-Door Papers in 1863, avoided the over-literary element on one hand and the over-scientific on the other and so became the first of what may be called the modern school of nature writers.

As we read Higginson's book to-day we find style and method curiously familiar. For the first time in American literature we have that chatty, anecdotal, half-scientific, half-sentimental treatment of out-door things that soon was to become so common. It is difficult to persuade oneself that a paper like "The Life of Birds," for instance, was not written by the Burroughs of the earlier period. Out-Door Papers and Wake-Robin are pitched in the same key. Who could be positive of the authorship of a fragment like this, were not Higginson's name appended:

To a great extent, birds follow the opening foliage northward, and flee from its fading, south; they must keep near the food on which they live, and secure due shelter for their eggs. Our earliest visitors shrink from trusting the bare trees with their nests; the song-sparrow seeks the ground; the blue-bird finds a box or hole somewhere; the red-wing haunts the marshy thickets, safer in the spring than at any other season; and even the sociable robin prefers a pine-tree to an apple-tree, if resolved to begin housekeeping prematurely. The movements of birds are chiefly timed by the advance of vegetation; and the thing most thoroughly surprising about them is not the general fact of the change of latitude, but their accuracy in hitting the precise locality. That the same cat-bird should find its way back, every spring, to almost the same branch of yonder larch-tree—that is the thing astonishing to me.