It is not inconceivable that we shall have to face squarely a split between those who prefer the American tradition and those who do not, although where the cleavage line would run, whether between races or classes, is past guessing. There are among us apparently men and women who would risk wars, external or internal, in order to hasten the discordant day; although just what they expect as a result, whether an Irish-German state organized by German efficiency and officered by graduates of Tammany Hall, or a pseudo-Russian communism, is not yet clear. In any case, the time is near when whoever calls himself American will have to take his stand and do more thinking, perhaps, than was necessary in 1917. He will need to know what tradition is, what his own consists of, and what he would do without it. He will need especially to rid himself of such simple and fallacious ideas as that what was good enough for his grandfather is good enough for him; or that, as some of our more reputable newspapers profess to think, the Constitution has taken the place once held by the Bible, and contains the whole duty of man and all that is necessary for his welfare. He will need to think less of 100 percent Americanism, which, as it is commonly used means not to think at all, and more of how he himself is molding American tradition for the generation that is to follow. If he is not to be a pawn merely in the struggle for American unity, he must think more clearly and deeply than has been his habit in the past.
But whatever happens in America (and after the sad experiences of prophets in the period of war and reconstruction, who would prophesy), let us cease abusing England whenever we have indigestion in our own body politic. It is seemingly inevitable that the writers of vindictive editorials should know little more of England as she is to-day than of Russia or the Chinese Republic; inevitable, apparently, that for them the Irish policy of the Tory group in Parliament, Indian unrest, and Lloyd George, are all that one needs to known about a country whose liberal experiments in industrial democracy since the war, and whose courage in reconstruction, may well make us hesitate in dispraise. But it is not inevitable that Americans who are neither headline and editorial writers, nor impassioned orators, regardless of facts, should continue to damn the English because their ancestors and ours founded America.
BACK TO NATURE
No one tendency in life as we live it in America to-day is more characteristic than the impulse, as recurrent as summer, to take to the woods. Sometimes it disguises itself under the name of science; sometimes it is mingled with hunting and the desire to kill; often it is sentimentalized and leads strings of gaping "students" bird-hunting through the wood lot; and again it perilously resembles a desire to get back from civilization and go "on the loose." Say your worst of it, still the fact remains that more Americans go back to nature for one reason or another annually than any civilized men before them. And more Americans, I fancy, are studying nature in clubs or public schools—or, in summer camps and the Boy Scouts, imitating nature's creatures, the Indian and the pioneer—than even statistics could make believable.
What is the cause? In life, it is perhaps some survival of the pioneering instinct, spending itself upon fishing, or bird- hunting, or trail hiking, much as the fight instinct leads us to football, or the hunt instinct sends every dog sniffing at dawn through the streets of his town. Not every one is thus atavistic, if this be atavism; not every American is sensitive to spruce spires, or the hermit thrush's chant, or white water in a forest gorge, or the meadow lark across the frosted fields. Naturally. The surprising fact is that in a bourgeois civilization like ours, so many are affected.
And yet what a criterion nature love or nature indifference is. It seems that if I can try a man by a silent minute in the pines, the view of a jay pirating through the bushes, spring odors, or December flush on evening snow, I can classify him by his reactions. Just where I do not know; for certainly I do not put him beyond the pale if his response is not as mine. And yet he will differ, I feel sure, in more significant matters. He is not altogether of my world. Nor does he enter into this essay. There are enough without him, and of every class. In the West, the very day laborer pitches his camp in the mountains for his two weeks' holiday. In the East and Middle West, every pond with a fringe of hemlocks, or hill view by a trolley line, or strip of ocean beach, has its cluster of bungalows where the proletariat perform their villeggiatura as the Italian aristocracy did in the days of the Renaissance. Patently the impulse exists, and counts for something here in America.
It counts for something, too, in American literature. Since our writing ceased being colonial English and began to reflect a race in the making, the note of woods-longing has been so insistent that one wonders whether here is not to be found at last the characteristic "trait" that we have all been patriotically seeking.
I do not limit myself in this statement to the professed "nature writers" of whom we have bred far more than any other race with which I am familiar. In the list—which I shall not attempt—of the greatest American writers, one cannot fail to include Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Cooper, Lowell, and Whitman. And every one of these men was vitally concerned with nature, and some were obsessed by it. Lowell was a scholar and man of the world, urban therefore; but his poetry is more enriched by its homely New England background than by its European polish. Cooper's ladies and gentlemen are puppets merely, his plots melodrama; it is the woods he knew, and the creatures of the woods, Deerslayer and Chingachgook, that preserve his books. Whitman made little distinction between nature and human nature, perhaps too little. But read "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" or "The Song of the Redwood-Tree," and see how keen and how vital was his instinct for native soil. As for Hawthorne, you could make a text-book on nature study from his "Note-Books." He was an imaginative moralist first of all; but he worked out his visions in terms of New England woods and hills. So did Emerson. The day was "not wholly profane" for him when he had "given heed to some natural object." Thoreau needs no proving. He is at the forefront of all field and forest lovers in all languages and times.
These are the greater names. The lesser are as leaves in the forest: Audubon, Burroughs, Muir, Clarence King, Lanier, Robert Frost, and many more—the stream broadening and shallowing through literary scientists and earnest forest lovers to romantic "nature fakers," literary sportsmen, amiable students, and tens of thousands of teachers inculcating this American tendency in another generation. The phenomenon asks for an explanation. It is more than a category of American literature that I am presenting; it is an American trait.
The explanation I wish to proffer in this essay may sound fantastical; most explanations that explain anything usually do— at first. I believe that this vast rush of nature into American literature is more than a mere reflection of a liking for the woods. It represents a search for a tradition, and its capture.