A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

The output of Muir, especially of books, has been small. To one who cares nothing for money and who is indifferent to fame, it is hard to offer inducements. He wrote only to please himself; he would not be commanded or bribed or begged, for why should one write words when the Sierras are in bloom and the winds are calling in the upper peaks? The public at large knows little of him, compared with what it knows of Burroughs or even of Thoreau. His influence, therefore, has been small. Though he had published many magazine articles, it was not until 1894 that he published The Mountains of California, his first book. Our National Parks came in 1901, and My First Summer in the Sierra in 1911. The last is Muir's journal, kept on the spot, full of the thrill and the freshness of the original day. If it be a sample of the journal which we have reason to believe that he kept with Thoreau-like thoroughness almost to the time of his death—he died in December, 1914—the best work of John Muir may even yet be in store.

Muir was more gentle than Thoreau or Burroughs, and more sympathetic with everything alive in the wild places which he loved. Unlike Burroughs, he has named the birds without a gun, and, unlike Thoreau, he has refused to kill even fish or rattlesnakes. He could look on even the repulsive lizards of his region, some of them veritable monsters in size and hideousness, with real affection:

Small fellow-mortals, gentle and guileless, they are easily tamed, and have beautiful eyes, expressing the clearest innocence, so that, in spite of prejudices brought from cool, lizardless countries, one must soon learn to like them. Even the horned toad of the plains and foothills, called horrid, is mild and gentle, with charming eyes, and so are the snake-like species found in the underbrush of the lower forests.... You will surely learn to like them, not only the bright ones, gorgeous as the rainbow, but the little ones, gray as lichened granite, and scarcely bigger than grasshoppers; and they will teach you that scales may cover as fine a nature as hair or feather or anything tailored.

And there is no more sympathetic, interpretative study among all the work of the nature-writers than his characterization of the Douglas squirrel of the Western mountains:

One never tires of this bright chip of Nature, this brave little voice crying in the wilderness, observing his many works and ways, and listening to his curious language. His musical, piney gossip is savory to the ear as balsam to the palate; and though he has not exactly the gift of song, some of his notes are sweet as those of a linnet—almost flute-like in softness; while others prick and tingle like thistles. He is the mocking-bird of squirrels, pouring forth mixed chatter and song like a perennial fountain, barking like a dog, screaming like a hawk, whistling like blackbirds and sparrows; while in bluff, audacious noisiness he is a jay.

Emerson visited Muir during his trip to the West Coast, climbed the precarious ladder that led to his room in the Yosemite sawmill, and passed a memorable afternoon. "He is more wonderful than Thoreau," he said, and he tried long to induce him to leave the mountains for the East, and to live in the midst of men. But to Muir the leaving of the Yosemite and the Sierra was like leaving God Himself. To him the city was the place of unnatural burdens, of money that dulls and kills the finest things of the soul, of separation from all that is really vital in the life of man.

His style is marked by vividness and fervid power. He makes a scene stand out with sharpness. He is original; there are in his work no traces of other writings save those of the Bible, with which he was saturated, and at rare intervals of Thoreau. Often there is a rhetorical ring to his page, a resonant fullness of tone that can be described only by the word eloquent. In passages describing storm or mountain majesty there is a thrill, an excitement, that are infectious. The prose of John Muir may be summed up as sincere and vigorous, without trace of self-consciousness or of straining for effect. Few writers of any period of American literature have within their work more elements of promise as they go down to the generations to come.

V

Beginning with the late sixties, out-of-door themes more and more took possession of American literature. Burroughs was only one in an increasing throng of writers; he was the best known and most stimulating, and soon, therefore, the leader and inspirer. The mid-nineteenth century had been effeminate in the bulk of its literary product; it had been a thing of indoors and of books: the new after-the-war spirit was masculine even at times to coarseness and brutality. Maurice Thompson (1844–1901), one of the earliest of the new period, perceived the bent of the age with clearness. "We are nothing better than refined and enlightened savages," he wrote in 1878. "The wild side of the prism of humanity still offers its pleasures to us.... Sport, by which is meant pleasant physical and mental exercise combined—play in the best sense—is a requirement of this wild element, this glossed over heathen side of our being, and the bow is its natural implement."[84] It was the apology of the old school for the new era of sport. Thompson would direct these heathen energies toward archery, since it was a sport that appealed to the imagination and that took its devotees into the forests and the swamps, but there was no directing of the resurging forces. Baseball and football sprang up in the seventies and grew swiftly into hitherto unheard-of proportions. Yachting, camping, mountaineering, summer tramping in the woods and the borders of civilization swiftly became popular. The Adirondacks and the Maine forests and the White Mountains sprang into new prominence. As early as 1869 Stedman had complained that The Blameless Prince lay almost dead on the shelves while such books as Murray's Adventures in the Wilderness sold enormously. For a time indeed W. H. H. Murray—"Adirondack Murray"—did vie even with Bonner's Ledger in popularity. He threw about the wilderness an alluring, half romantic atmosphere that appealed to the popular imagination and sent forth, eager and compelling, what in later days came to be known as "the call of the wild." His books have not lasted. There is about them a declamatory, artificial element that sprang too often from the intellect rather than the heart. Charles Dudley Warner in his In the Wilderness, 1878, and William H. Gibson in such books as Camp Life in the Woods, sympathetically illustrated by their author, were far more sincere and wholesome. Everywhere for a decade or more there was appeal for a return to the natural and the free, to the open-air games of the old English days, to hunting and trapping and camping—a masculine, red-blooded resurgence of the savage, a return to the wild. The earlier phase of the period may be said to have culminated in 1882 with the founding of Outing, a magazine devoted wholly to activities in the open air.

The later eighties and the nineties are the period of the bird books. C. C. Abbott's A Naturalist's Rambles About Home, 1884; Olive Thorne Miller's Bird Ways, 1885; Bradford Torrey's Birds in the Bush, 1885; and Florence Merriam Bailey's Birds Through an Opera Glass, 1889, may be taken as representative. Bird life and bird ways for a period became a fad; enthusiastic observers sprang up everywhere; scientific treatises and check lists and identification guides like Chapman's Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America, began to appear in numbers. What the novelists of locality were doing for the unusual human types in isolated corners of the land, the nature writers were doing for the birds.