A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

The literary criticism of Burroughs—four volumes of it in the final edition, or nearly one-fourth of his whole output—may be classed with the sanest and most illuminating critical work in American literature. Lowell's criticism, brilliant as it is at times, is overloaded with learning. He belongs to the school of the early reviewers, ponderous and discursive. He makes use of one-third of his space in his essay on Thoreau before he even alludes to Thoreau. He is self-conscious, and self-satisfied; he poses before his reader and enjoys the sensation caused by his brilliant hit after hit. Stedman, too, is often more literary than scientific. Often he uses epithet and phrase that have nothing to commend them save their prettiness, their affectation of the odd or the antique. He is an appreciator of literature rather than critic in the modern sense. Burroughs, however, is always simple and direct. He is a scientific critic who compares and classifies and seeks causes and effects. He works not on the surface but always in the deeper currents and always with the positive forces, those writers who have turned the direction of the literature and the thinking of their generation. In marked contrast with Stedman, he can place Longfellow and Landor among the minor singers: "Their sympathies were mainly outside their country and their times." He demands that the poet have a message for his age. He says of Emerson: "Emerson is a power because he partakes of a great spiritual and intellectual movement of his times; he is unequivocally of to-day and New England."

Burroughs's nature essays, charming as they are and full as they are of a delightful personality, will be superseded by others as careful and as charming; Burroughs's criticism was the voice of an era, and it will stand with the era. It was in his later years that he put forth his real message.

IV

John Burroughs is the historian of a small area; he has the home instinct, the hereditary farmer's love for his own fields and woods, and the haunts of his childhood. He is contemplative, tranquil, unassertive. John Muir was restless, fervid, Scotch by temperament as by birth, the very opposite of Burroughs. He was telescopic, not microscopic; his units were glaciers and Yosemites, Sierras and Gardens of the Gods.

The childhood of Muir was broken at eleven by the migration of his family from their native Scotland to the wilderness of Wisconsin, near the Fox River. After a boyhood in what literally was a new world to him, he started on his wanderings. By accident he found himself in the University of Wisconsin, where he studied for four years, the first author of note to be connected with the new state college movement, the democratizing of education. He pursued no regular course, but devoted himself to chemistry, botany, and other natural sciences that interested him, and then, to quote his own words, "wandered away on a glorious botanical and geological excursion, which has lasted nearly fifty years and is not yet completed, always happy and free, poor and rich, without thought of a diploma, of making a name, urged on and on through endless, inspiring, Godful beauty."

First he went to Florida, walking all the way, and sleeping on the ground wherever night overtook him; then he crossed to Cuba, with visions of South America and the Amazon beyond; but malarial fever, caused by sleeping on swampy ground, turned him away from the tropics toward California, where he arrived in 1868. The tremendous scenery of this west coast, those American Alps edging a continent from the Sierras to the Alaskan glaciers, so gripped his imagination and held him that he forgot everything save to look and wonder and worship. For years he explored the region, living months at a time in the forests of the Yosemite, in the wild Alpine gardens and glacial meadows of the Sierra, in passes and cañons, moving as far north as Alaska, where he was the first to see the great glacier now called by his name, sleeping where night overtook him, disdaining blanket or shelter, and returning to civilization only when driven by necessity. After years of such wandering he became as familiar with the mighty region, the tremendous western wall of a continent, as Thoreau was with Concord or Burroughs was with the banks of the Pepacton.

Unlike Burroughs, Muir sent down no roots during his earlier formative period; he was a man without a country, anchored to no past, a soul unsatisfied, restless, bursting eagerly into untrodden areas, as hungry of heart as Thoreau, but with none of Thoreau's provincialism and transcendental theories. In 1869 in the Big Tuolumne Meadows he was told of a marvelous, but dangerous, region beyond, and his account of the episode illumines him as with a flash-light:

Recognizing the unsatisfiable longings of my Scotch Highland instincts, he threw out some hints concerning Bloody Cañon, and advised me to explore it. "I have never seen it myself," he said, "for I never was so unfortunate as to pass that way. But I have heard many a strange story about it, and I warrant you will at least find it wild enough." Next day I made up a bundle of bread, tied my note-book to my belt, and strode away in the bracing air, full of eager, indefinite hope.

His first out-of-doors article, a paper on the Yosemite glaciers, was published in the New York Tribune in 1871. Later he contributed to the Overland Monthly, to Harper's, and Scribner's Monthly articles that have in them an atmosphere unique in literature. What sweep and freedom, what vastness of scale, what abysses and gulfs, what wildernesses of peaks. It is like sweeping over a continent in a balloon. One is ever in the vast places: one thrills with the author's own excitement:

How boundless the day seems as we revel in these storm-beaten sky-gardens amidst so vast a congregation of onlooking mountains.... From garden to garden, ridge to ridge, I drifted enchanted, now on my knees gazing into the face of a daisy, now climbing again and again among the purple and azure flowers of the hemlocks, now down among the treasuries of the snow, or gazing afar over domes and peaks, lakes and woods, and the billowy glaciated fields of the upper Tuolumne, and trying to sketch them. In the midst of such beauty, pierced with its rays, one's body is all a tingling palate. Who wouldn't be a mountaineer! Up here all the world's prizes seem nothing.—July 26, 1869.