Our Friend John Burroughs Part 17

And of a letter written to him by Mr. Burroughs that same year he said: "It is a June letter, worthy of June; written in John's best outdoor mood. Why, it gets into your blood, and makes you feel worth while. I sit here, helpless as I am, and breathe it in like fresh air."

Minot Savage once asked in a sermon if it did not occur to his hearers that John Burroughs gets a little more of June than the rest of us do, and added that Mr. Burroughs had paid years of consecration of thought and patient study of the lives of birds and flowers, and so had bought the right to take June and all that it means into his brain and heart and life; and that if the rest of us wish these joys, we must purchase them on the same terms. We are often led to ask what month he has not taken into his heart and life, and given out again in his writings.

Perhaps most of all he has taken April into his heart, as his essay on it in "Birds and Poets" will show:--

How it (April) touches one and makes him both glad and sad! The voices of the arriving birds, the migrating fowls, the clouds of pigeons sweeping across the sky or filling the woods, the elfin horn of the first honey-bee venturing abroad in the middle of the day, the clear piping of the little frogs in the marshes at sundown, the camp-fire in the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar rising over the trees, the tinge of green that comes so suddenly on the sunny knolls and slopes, the full translucent streams, the waxing and warming sun,--how these things and others like them are noted by the eager eye and ear! April is my natal month, and I am born again into new delight and new surprises at each return of it. Its name has an indescribable charm to me. Its two syllables are like the calls of the first birds,--like that of the phoebe-bird, or of the meadowlark.

But why continue? The whole essay breathes of swelling buds, springing gra.s.s, calls of birds, April flowers, April odors, and April's uncloying freshness and charm. As we realize what the returning spring brings to this writer, we say with Bliss Carman:--

"Make (him) over. Mother April, When the sap begins to stir."

I fancy there are many of his readers who will echo what one of his friends has said to him: "For me the 3d of April will ever stand apart in the calendar with a poignant beauty and sweetness because it is your birthday. It is the keynote to which the whole springtime music is set."

Or another: "If April 3d comes in like any other day, please understand that it will be because she does not dare to show how glad she is over her own doings." On another birthday, the same correspondent says: "I find that you are so inwoven with the spring-time that I shall never again be able to resolve the season into its elements. But I am the richer for it. I feel a sort of compa.s.sion for one who has never seen the spring through your eyes."

Mr. Burroughs puts his reader into close and sympathetic communion with the open-air world as no other literary naturalist has done. Gilbert White reported with painstaking fidelity the natural history of Selborne; Th.o.r.eau gave Th.o.r.eau with glimpses of nature thrown in; Richard Jefferies, in dreamy, introspective descriptions of rare beauty and delicacy, portrayed his own mystical impressions of nature; but Mr. Burroughs takes us with him to the homes and haunts of the wild creatures, sets us down in their midst, and lets us see and hear and feel just what is going on. We read his books and echo Whitman's verdict on them: "They take me outdoors! G.o.d bless outdoors!" And since G.o.d _has_ blessed outdoors, we say, "G.o.d bless John Burroughs for taking us out of doors with him!"

Our writer never prates about nature, telling us to look and admire. He loves the common, everyday life about him, sees it more intimately than you or I see it, and tells about it so simply and clearly that he begets a like feeling in his reader. It was enjoined of the early Puritans "to walke honestlie in the sweete fields and woodes." How well our friend has obeyed this injunction!

And what an un.o.btrusive lover he is! Although it is through him that his mistress stands revealed, it is not until we look closely that we spy her adorer in the background, intent only on unveiling her charms.

How does he do this? First by succ.u.mbing himself--Nature's graces, her inconsistencies, even her objectionable traits appeal to him. Like the true lover, he is captivated by each of her phases, and surrenders himself without reserve. Such homage makes him the recipient of her choicest treasures, her most adorable revelations.

(Ill.u.s.tration of Mr. Burroughs sitting for a Statuette. From a photograph by Charles S. Olcott)

I have mentioned Gilbert White's contributions to the literature about nature: one must admire the man's untiring enthusiasm, but his book is mainly a storehouse of facts; how rarely does he invest the facts with charm! To pry into nature's secrets and conscientiously report them seems to be the aim of the English parson; but we get so little of the parson himself. What were his feelings about all these things he has been at such pains to record? The things themselves are not enough. It is not alluring to be told soberly:--

Hedge-hogs abound in my garden and fields. The manner in which they eat the roots of the plaintain in the gra.s.s walk is very curious; with their upper mandible, which is much larger than the lower, they bore under the plant, and so eat the root off upward, leaving the tuft of leaves untouched.

And so on. By way of contrast, see how Mr. Burroughs treats a similar subject. After describing the porcupine, mingling description and human encounter, thereby enlisting the reader's interest, he says:--

In what a peevish, injured tone the creature did complain of our unfair tactics! He protested and protested, and whimpered and scolded like some infirm old man tormented by boys. His game after we led him forth was to keep himself as much as possible in the shape of a ball, but with two sticks and the cord we finally threw him over on his back and exposed his quill-less and vulnerable under side, when he fairly surrendered and seemed to say, "Now you may do with me as you like."

Here one gets the porcupine and Mr. Burroughs too.

Th.o.r.eau keeps his reader at arm's length, invites and repels at the same time, piques one by his spiciness, and exasperates by his opinionatedness. You want to see his bean-field, but know you would be an intruder. He might even tell you to your face that he was happiest the mornings when n.o.body called. He likes to advise and berate, but at long range. Speaking of these two writers, Whitman once said, "Outdoors taught Burroughs gentle things about men--it had no such effect upon Th.o.r.eau."

Richard Jefferies appeals to lovers of nature and lovers of literature as well. He has the poet's eye and is a sympathetic spectator, but seldom gives one much to carry away. His descriptions, musical as they are, barely escape being wearisome at times. In his "Pageant of Summer"

he babbles prettily of green fields, but it is a long, long summer and one is hardly sorry to see its close. In some of his writings he affects one unpleasantly, gives an uncanny feeling; one divines the invalid as well as the mystic back of them; there is a hectic flush, perhaps a neurotic taint. Beautiful, yes, but not the beauty of health and sanity.

It is the same indescribable feeling I get in reading that pathetically beautiful book, "The Road-Mender," by "Michael Fairless"--the gleam of the White Gate is seen all along the Road, though the writer strives so bravely to keep it hidden till it must open to let him pa.s.s. One of the purest gems of Jefferies--"Hours of Spring"--has a pathos and haunting melody of compelling poignancy. It is like a white violet or a hepatica.

But with Mr. Burroughs we feel how preeminently sane and healthy he is.

His essays have the perennial charm of the mountain brooks that flow down the hills and through the fertile valleys of his Catskill home.

They are redolent of the soil, of leaf mould, of the good brown earth.

His art pierces through our habitual indifference to Nature and kindles our interest in, not her beauty alone, but in her rugged, uncouth, and democratic qualities.

Like the true walker that he describes, he himself "is not merely a spectator of the panorama of nature, but is a partic.i.p.ator in it. He experiences the country he pa.s.ses through,--tastes it, feels it, absorbs it." Let us try this writer by his own test. He says: "When one tries to report nature he has to remember that every object has a history which involves its surroundings, and that the depth of the interest which it awakens in us is in the proportion that its integrity in this respect is preserved." He must, as we know Mr. Burroughs does, bring home the river and the sky when he brings home the sparrow that he finds singing at dawn on the alder bough; must make us see and hear the bird _on the bough_, and this is worth a whole museum of stuffed and labeled specimens. To do this requires a peculiar gift, one which our essayist has to an unusual degree--an imagination that goes straight to the heart of whatever he writes about, combined with a verbal magic that re-creates what he has seen. Things are felicitously seen by Mr.

Burroughs, and then felicitously said. A dainty bit in Sidney's "Apologie for Poetrie" seems to me aptly to characterize our author's prose: "The uttering sweetly and properly the conceits of the minde, which is the end of speech."

One can pick out at random from his books innumerable poetic conceits; the closed gentian is the "nun among flowers"; a patch of fringed polygalas resembles a "flock of rose-purple b.u.t.terflies" alighted on the ground; the male and female flowers of the early everlasting are "found separated from each other in well-defined groups, like men and women in an old-fas.h.i.+oned country church"; "the note of the pewee is a human sigh"; the bloodroot--"a full-blown flower with a young one folded in a leaf beneath it, only the bud emerging, like the head of a papoose protruding from its mother's blanket." Speaking of the wild orchids known as "lady's-slippers," see the inimitable way in which he puts you on the spot where they grow: "Most of the floral ladies leave their slippers in swampy places in the woods, only the stemless one (_Cypripedium acaule_) leaves hers on dry ground before she reaches the swamp, commonly under evergreen trees where the carpet of pine needles will not hurt her feet." Almost always he invests his descriptions with some human touch that gives them rare charm--nature and human nature blended--if it is merely the coming upon a red clover in England--

"The first red clover head just bloomed... but like the people I meet, it has a ruddier cheek than those at home."

When we ask ourselves what it is that makes his essays so engaging, we conclude it is largely due to their lucidity, spontaneity, and large simplicity--qualities which make up a style original, fresh, convincing.

His writing, whether about nature, literature, science, or philosophy, is always suggestive, potent, pithy; his humor is delicious; he says things in a crisp, often racy, way. Yet what a sense of leisureliness one has in reading him, as well as a sense of companionability!

What distinguishes him most, perhaps, is his vivid and poetic apprehension of the mere fact. He never flings dry facts at us, but facts are always his inspiration. He never seeks to go behind them, and seldom to use them as symbols, as does Th.o.r.eau. Th.o.r.eau preaches and teaches always; Mr. Burroughs, never. The facts themselves fill him with wonder and delight--a wonder and delight his reader shares. The seasons, the life of the birds and the animals, the face of nature, the ever new, the ever common day--all kindle his enthusiasm and refresh his soul. The witchery of the ideal is upon his page without doubt, but he will not pervert natural history one jot or t.i.ttle for the sake of making a pretty story. His whole aim is to invest the fact with living interest without in the least lessening its value as a fact. He does not deceive himself by what he wants to be true; the scientist in him is always holding the poet in check. Of all contemporary writers in this field, he is the one upon whom we can always depend to be intellectually honest.

He has an abiding hankering after the true, the genuine, the real; cannot stand, and never could stand, any tampering with the truth. Had he been Cromwell's portrait painter, he would have delighted in his subject's injunction: "Paint me as I am, mole and all." And he would have made the mole interesting; he has done so, but that is a mole of another color.

This instinct for the truth being so strong in him, he knows it when he sees it in others; he detects its absence, too; and has no patience and scant mercy for those past-masters in the art of blinking facts,--those natural-history romancers who, realizing that "the crowd must have emphatic warrant," are not content with the infinite Variety of nature, but must needs spend their art in the wasteful and ridiculous excess of painting the lily, perfuming the violet, and giving to the rainbow an added hue. Accordingly, when one warps the truth to suit his purpose, especially in the realm of nature, he must expect this hater of shams to raise a warning voice--"Beware the wolf in sheep's clothing!" But he never cries "Wolf!" when there is no wolf, and he gives warm and generous praise to deserving ones.

It has surprised some of his readers, who know how kindly he is by nature, and how he shrinks from witnessing pain, in beast or man, much less inflicting it, to see his severity when nature is traduced--for he shows all the fight and fury and all the defense of the mother bird when her young are attacked. He won't suffer even a porcupine to be misrepresented without bristling up in its defense.

I have said that he never preaches, never seeks to give a moral twist to his observations of nature, but I recall a few instances where he does do a bit of moralizing; for example, when he speaks of the calmness and dignity of the hawk when attacked by crows or kingbirds: "He seldom deigns to notice his noisy and furious antagonist, but deliberately wheels about in that aerial spiral, and mounts and mounts till his pursuers grow dizzy and return to earth again. It is quite original, this mode of getting rid of an unworthy opponent--rising to heights where the braggart is dazed and bewildered and loses his reckoning! I'm not sure but it is worthy of imitation." Or, in writing of work on the farm, especially stone-fence making, he speaks of clearing the fields of the stones that are built into boundaries: "If there are ever sermons in stones, it is when they are built into a stone wall--turning your hindrances into helps, s.h.i.+elding your crops behind the obstacles to your husbandry, making the enemies of the plough stand guard over its products." But do we find such sermonizing irksome?

Just as "all architecture is what you do to it when you look upon it,"

so is all nature. Lovers of Nature muse and dream and invite their own souls. They interpret themselves, not Nature. She reflects their thoughts and minds, gives them, after all, only what they bring to her. And the writer who brings much--much of insight, of devotion, of sympathy--is sure to bring much away for his reader's delectation. Does not this account for the sense of intimacy which his reader has with the man, even before meeting him?--the feeling that if he ever does meet him, it will be as a friend, not as a stranger? And when one does meet him, and hears him speak, one almost invariably thinks: "He talks just as he writes." To read him after that is to hear the very tones of his voice.

We sometimes hear the expression, "English in s.h.i.+rt-sleeves," applied to objectionable English; but the phrase might be applied in a commendatory way to good English,--to the English of such a writer as Mr.

Burroughs,--simple, forceful language, with homely, everyday expressions; English that shows the man to have been country-bred, albeit he has wandered from the home pastures to distant woods and pastures new, browsing in the fields of literature and philosophy, or wherever he has found pasturage to his taste. Or, to use a figure perhaps more in keeping with his main pursuits, he is one who has flocked with birds not of a like feather with those that shared with him the parent nest. Although his kin knew and cared little for the world's great books, he early learned to love them when he was roaming his native fields and absorbing unconsciously that from which he later reaped his harvest. It is to writers of _this_ kind of "English in s.h.i.+rt-sleeves" that we return again and again. In them we see s.h.i.+rt-sleeves opposed to evening dress; naturalness, st.u.r.diness, sun-tan, and open sky, opposed to the artificial, to tameness, constriction, and characterless conformity to prescribed customs.

Do we not turn to writers of the first cla.s.s with eagerness, slaking our thirst, refres.h.i.+ng our minds at perennial springs? How are we glad that they lead us into green pastures and beside still waters, away from the crowded haunts of the conventional, and the respectably commonplace society garb of speech! What matter if occasionally one even gives a wholesome shock by daring to come into the drawing-room of our minds in his s.h.i.+rt-sleeves, his hands showing the grime of the soil, and his frame the strength that comes from battling with wind and weather? It is the same craving which makes us say with Richard Hovey:--

"I am sick of four walls and a ceiling; I have need of the sky, I have business with the gra.s.s."

But it will not do to carry this a.n.a.logy too far in writing of Mr.

Burroughs lest it be inferred that I regard the author's work as having in it something of the uncouth, or the ill-timed, or the uncultured.

His writing is of the earth, but not of the earth earthy. He sees divine things underfoot as well as overhead. His page has the fertility of a well-cultivated pastoral region, the limpidness of a mountain brook, the music of our unstudied songsters, the elusive charm of the blue beyond the summer clouds; it has, at times, the ruggedness of a shelving rock, combined with the grace of its nodding columbines.

Mr. Burroughs has told us, in that June idyl of his, "Strawberries,"

that he was a famous berry-picker when a boy. It was with a peculiar pleasure that I wandered with him one midsummer day over the same meadows where he used to gather strawberries. My first introduction to him as a writer, many years before, had been in hearing this essay read.

And since then never a year pa.s.ses that I do not read it at least three times--once in winter just to bring June and summer near; once in spring when all outdoors gives promise of the fullness yet to be; and once in the radiant summer weather when daisies and clover and bobolinks and strawberries riot in one's blood, making one fairly mad to bury one's self in the June meadows and breathe the clover-scented air. And it always stands the test--the test of being read out in the daisy-flecked meadows with rollicking bobolinks overhead.

What quality is it, though, that so moves and stirs us when Mr.

Burroughs recounts some of the simple happenings of his youth? What is it in his recitals that quickens our senses and perceptions and makes our own youth alive and real? It is paradise regained--the paradise of one's lost youth. Let this author describe his boyhood pastures, going 'cross lots to school, or to his favorite spring, whatsoever it is--is it the path that he took to the little red schoolhouse in the Catskills?

Is it the spring near his father's sugar bush that we see? No. One is a child again, and in a different part of the State, with tamer scenery, but scenery endeared by early a.s.sociations. The meadow you see is the one that lies before the house where you were born; you read of the boy John Burroughs jumping trout streams on his way to school, but see yourself and your playmates scrambling up a ca.n.a.l bank, running along the towpath, careful to keep on the land side of the towline that stretches from mules to boat, lest you be swept into the green, uninviting waters of the Erie. On you run with slate and books; you smell the fresh wood as you go through the lumber yard. Or, read another of his boyish excursions, and you find yourself on that first spring outing to a distant, low-lying meadow after "cowslips"; another, and you are trudging along with your brother after the cows, stopping to nibble spearmint, or pick b.u.t.tercups by the way. Prosaic recollections, compared to spring paths and trout brooks in the Catskill valleys, yet this is what our author's writings do--re-create for each of us our own youth, with our own childhood scenes and experiences, invested with a glamour for us, however prosy they seem to others; and why? Because, though nature's aspects vary, the human heart is much the same the world over, and the writer who faithfully adds to his descriptions of nature his own emotional experiences arouses answering responses in the soul of his reader.