The Face of the Fields

You will know the sincere nature-writer by his fidelity to fact. But, alas! suppose I do not know the fact? To be sure. And the nature-writer thought of that, too, and penned his solemn, pious preface, wherein he declares that the following observations are exactly as he personally saw them; that they are true altogether; that he has the affidavits to prove it; and the Indians and the Eskimos to swear the affidavits prove it. Of course you are bound to believe after that; but you wish the preface did not make it so unnecessarily hard.

The sincere nature-writer, because he knows he cannot prove it, and that you cannot prove it, and that the scientists cannot prove it, knows that he must not be asked for proofs, that he must be above suspicion, and so he sticks to the truth as the wife of Cæsar to her spouse.

Let the nature-writer only chronicle his observations as Dr. C. C. Abbott does in “A Naturalist’s Rambles about Home,” or let him dream a dream about his observations as Maeterlinck does in “The Life of the Bee,” yet is he still confined to the truth as a hermit crab to his shell – a hard, inelastic, unchangeable, indestructible house that he cannot adapt, but must himself be adapted to, or else abandon. Chronicle and romance alike we want true to fact. But this particular romance about the Bee will not thus qualify. It was not written for beekeepers, even amateur beekeepers, for they all know more or less about bees, and hence they would not understand the book. It was written for those, the city-faring folk, like my market-man, who asked me how many pounds of honey a bee would gather up in a year, and whether I kept more than one bee in a hive. A great many persons must have read “The Life of the Bee,” but only one of them, so far as I know, had ever kept bees, and she had just a single swarm in between the wall of her living-room and the weather-boards outside. But she had listened to them through the wall, and she sent me her copy of “The Life,” begging me to mark on the margins wherever the Bee of the book was unlike her bee in the wall. She had detected a difference in the buzz of the two bees.

Now the two bees ought to buzz alike – one buzz, distinct and always distinguishable from the buzz of the author. In the best nature-writing the author is more than his matter, but he is never identical with it; and not until we know which is which, and that the matter is true, have we faith in the author.

I knew a big boy once who had almost reached the footprint in “Robinson Crusoe” (the tragedy of almost reaching it!) when some one blunderingly told him that the book was all a story, made up, not true at all; no such island; no such Crusoe! The boy shut up the book and put it forever from him. He wanted it true. He had thought it true, because it had been so real. Robbed of its reality, he was unable to make it true again.

Most of us recover from this shock in regard to books, asking only that they seem real. But we are eternally childish, curious, credulous, in our thought of nature; she is so close and real to us, and yet so shadowy, hidden, mysterious, and remote! We are eager to listen to any tale, willing to believe anything, if only it be true. Nay, we are willing to believe it true – we were, I should say, until, like the boy with the book, we were rudely told that all this fine writing was made up, that we have no such kindred in the wilds, and no such wilds. Then we said in our haste, all men – who write nature-books – are liars.

“How much of this is real?” asked a keen and anxious reader, eyeing me narrowly, as she pointed a steady finger at an essay of mine in the “Atlantic.” “Have you, sir, a farm and four real boys of your own, or are they faked?”

“Good heavens, madam!” I exclaimed. “Has it come to this? My boys faked!”

But it shows how the thoughtful and the fearful regard the literary naturalist, and how paramount is the demand for honesty in the matter of mere fact, to say nothing of the greater matter of expression.

Only yesterday, in a review in the “Nation” of an animal-man book, I read: “The best thing in the volume is the description of a fight between a mink and a raccoon – or so it seems. Can this be because the reader does not know the difference between a mink and a raccoon, and does know the difference between a human being and the story-teller’s manikin?”

This is the wandering wood, this Errour’s den,

is the feeling of the average reader – of even the “Nation’s” book reviewer – nowadays, toward nature-writing, a state of mind due to the recent revelations of a propensity in wild-animal literature to stand up rather than to go on all fours.

Whatever of the Urim and of the Thummim you put into your style, whatever of the literary lights and the perfections, see to it that you make the facts “after their pattern, which hath been shewed thee in the mount.”

Thou shalt not bear false witness as to the facts.

Nor is this all. For the sad case with much nature-writing, as I have said, is that it not only fails to answer to genuine observation, but it also fails to answer to genuine emotion. Often as we detect the unsound natural history, we much oftener are aware of the unsound, the insincere, art of the author.

Now the facts of nature, as Mr. Burroughs says, are the material of nature literature – of one kind of such literature, let me add; for, while fabrications can be made only into lies, there may be another kind of good nature-literature compounded wholly of fancies. Facts, to quote Mr. Burroughs again, are the flora upon which the nature-writer lives. “I can do nothing without them.” Of course he could not. But Chaucer could. Indeed, Chaucer could do nothing with the facts; he had to have fancies. The truth in his story of the Cock and the Fox is a different kind of truth from the truth about Burroughs’s “Winter Neighbors,” yet no less the truth. Good nature-writing is literature, not science, and the truth we demand first and last is a literary truth – the fidelity of the writer to himself. He may elect to use facts for his material; yet they are only material, and no better as material than fancies. For it is not matter that counts last in literature; it is manner. It is spirit that counts. It is the man. Only honest men make literature. Writers may differ in their purpose, as Burroughs in his purpose to guide you through the woods differs from Chaucer’s purpose to entertain you by the fire; but they are one in their spirit of honesty.

Chaucer pulls a long face and begins his tale of the Cock and the Fox with a vivid and very realistic description of a widow’s cottage, as a setting, not for the poor widow and her two daughters, not at all; but rather to stage the heroic comedy between Chauntecleer and his favorite wife, the scarlet-eyed Pertelote.

B’syde a grovë, standing in a dalë,

It is just before daybreak. They are not up yet, not off the roost, when they get into a discussion about the significance of dreams, Chauntecleer having had a very bad dream during the night. The dispute waxes as it spreads out over medicine, philosophy, theology, and psychology. Chauntecleer quotes the classics, cites famous stories, talks Latin to her: —

For, also sicker as In principioMulier est hominis confusio;

translating it for her thus: —

Madam, the sentence of this Latin is —Woman is mannës joy and all his blis,

while she tells him he needs a pill for his liver in spite of the fact that he wears a beard. It is fine scorn, but passing sad, following so close upon the old English love song that Chauntecleer was wont to wake up singing.

It is here, at this critical juncture of the nature-story, that Chaucer pauses to remark seriously: —

For thilkë tyme, as I have understondë,Bestës and briddës couldë speke and singë.

Certainly they could; and “speking and singing in thilkë tyme” seems much more natural for “bestës and briddës” than many of the things they do nowadays.

Here, again, is Izaak Walton, as honest a man as Chaucer – a lover of nature, a writer on angling; who knew little about angling, and less about nature; whose facts are largely fancies; but – what of it? Walton quotes, as a probable fact, that pickerel hatch out of the seeds of the pickerelweed; that toads are born of fallen leaves on the bottoms of ponds. He finds himself agreeing with Pliny “that many flies have their birth, or being, from a dew that in the spring falls upon the leaves of the trees”; and, quoting the divine du Bartas, he sings: —

So slow Boötes underneath him seesIn th’ icy isles those goslings hatch’d of trees,Whose fruitful leaves, falling into the water,Are turn’d, they say, to living fowls soon after.

But the “Compleat Angler” is not a scientific work on fishes, nor a handbook on angling for anglers. It is a book for all that are lovers of literature; for “all that are lovers of virtue; and dare trust in his providence; and be quiet; and go a Angling.”

This is somewhat unscientific, according to our present light; but, wonderful as it seemed to Walton, it was all perfectly natural according to his light. His facts are faulty, yet they are the best he had. So was his love the best he had; but that was without fault, warm, deep, intense, sincere.

Our knowledge of nature has so advanced since Walton’s time, and our attitude has so changed, that the facts of nature are no longer enough for literature. We know all that our writer knows; we have seen all that he can see. He can no longer surprise us; he can no longer instruct us; he can no longer fool us. The day of the marvelous is past; the day of the cum laude cat and the magna cum laude pup is past, the day of the things that I alone have seen is past; and the day of the things that I, in common with you, have honestly felt, is come.

There should be no suggestion in a page of nature-writing that the author – penetrated to the heart of some howling summer camp for his raw material; that he ever sat on his roof or walked across his back yard in order to write a book about it. But nature-books, like other books, are gone for that way – always and solely for the pot. Such books are “copy” only – poor copy at that. There is nothing new in them; for the only thing you can get by going afar for it is a temptation to lie; and no matter from what distance you fetch a falsehood – even from the top of the world – you cannot disguise the true complexion of it. Take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, and you will find nothing new there; ascend into heaven or make your bed in hell for copy, as is the fashion nowadays – But you had better look after your parish, and go faithfully about your chores; and if you have a garden with a tortoise in it, and you love them, and love to write about them, then write.

Nature-writing must grow more and more human, personal, interpretative. If I go into the wilderness and write a book about it, it must be plain to my reader that “the writing of the book was only a second and finer enjoyment of my holiday in the woods.” If my chippy sings, it must sing a chippy’s simple song, not some gloria that only “the careless angels know.” It must not do any extraordinary thing for me; but it may lead me to do an extraordinary thing – to have an extraordinary thought, or suggestion, or emotion. It may mean extraordinary things to me; things that have no existence in nature, whose beginnings and ends are in me. I may never claim that I, because of exceptional opportunities, or exceptional insight, or exceptional powers of observation, have discovered these marvelous things here in the wilds of Hingham. My pages may be anthropomorphic, human; not, however, because I humanize my bees and toads, but because I am human, and nature is meaningful ultimately only as it is related to me. I must not confuse myself with nature; nor yet “struggle against fact and law to develop and keep” my “own individuality.” I must not anthropomorphize nature; never denature nature; never follow my own track through the woods, imagining that I am on the trail of a better-class wolf or a two-legged bear. I must never sentimentalize over nature again – write no more about “Buzz-Buzz and Old Man Barberry”; write no more about wailing winds and weeping skies; for mine is not “a poet’s vision dim,” but an open-eyed, scientific sight of things as they actually are. Once I have seen them, gathered them, if then they turn to poetry, let them turn. For so does the squash turn to poetry when it is brought in from the field. It turns to pie; it turns to poetry; and it still remains squash.

Good nature-literature, like all good literature, is more lived than written. Its immortal part hath elsewhere than the ink-pot its beginning. The soul that rises with it, its life’s star, first went down behind a horizon of real experience, then rose from a human heart, the source of all true feeling, of all sincere form. Good nature-writing particularly must have a pre-literary existence as lived reality; its writing must be only the necessary accident of its being lived again in thought. It will be something very human, very natural, warm, quick, irregular, imperfect, with the imperfections and irregularities of life. And the nature-writer will be very human, too, and so very faulty; but he will have no lack of love for nature, and no lack of love for the truth. Whatever else he does, he will never touch the flat, disquieting note of make-believe. He will never invent, never pretend, never pose, never shy. He will be honest – which is nothing unusual for birds and rocks and stars; but for human beings, and for nature-writers very particularly, it is a state less common, perhaps, than it ought to be.

VI

JOHN BURROUGHS

JOHN BURROUGHS began his literary career (and may he so end it!) by writing an essay for the “Atlantic Monthly,” as good an introduction (and conclusion), speaking by the rhetoric, as a lifelong composition need have. That first essay entitled “Expression,” “a somewhat Emersonian Expression,” says its author, was printed in the “Atlantic” for November, 1860, which was fifty years ago. Fifty years are not threescore and ten; many men have lived past threescore and ten, but not many men have written continuously for the “Atlantic” for fifty years with eye undimmed and natural force unabated. Mr. Burroughs’s eye for the truth of nature has grown clearer during these fifty years, and the vigor of his youth has steadied into a maturity of strength which in some of his latest essays – “The Long Road,” for instance – lifts one and bears one down the unmeasured reaches of geologic time, compassing the timelessness of time, its beginninglessness, its endinglessness, as none of his earlier chapters have done.

Many men have written more than Mr. Burroughs. His eighteen or twenty books, as books may be turned out, are nothing remarkable for fifty years of work. It is not their numbers, but the books, that are remarkable, that among them should be found “Wake-Robin,” “Winter Sunshine,” “Birds and Poets,” “Locusts and Wild Honey,” “Pepacton,” “Fresh Fields,” “Signs and Seasons,” “Riverby,” “Far and Near,” “Ways of Nature,” and “Leaf and Tendril”; for these eleven nature-books, as a group, stand alone and at the head of the long list of books written about the out-of-doors since the days of the Historia Animalium, and the mediæval “Fables” and “Beasteries.”

These eleven volumes are Mr. Burroughs’s characteristic, his important work. His other books are eminently worth while: there is reverent, honest thinking in his religious essays, a creedless but an absolute and joyous faith; there is simple and exquisite feeling in his poems; close analysis and an unmitigatedness, wholly Whitmanesque, in his interpretation of Whitman; and no saner, happier criticism anywhere than in his “Literary Values.” There are many other excellent critics, however, many poets and religious writers, many other excellent nature-writers, too; but is there any other who has written so much upon the ways of nature as they parallel and cross the ways of men, upon so great a variety of nature’s forms and expressions, and done it with such abiding love, with such truth and charm?

Yet such a comparison is beyond proof, except in the least of the literary values – mere quantity; and it may be with literature as with merchandise: the larger the cask the greater the tare. Charm? Is not charm that which I chance to like, or you chance to like? Others have written of nature with as much love and truth as has Mr. Burroughs, and each with his own peculiar charm: Audubon, with the spell of wild places and the thrill of fresh wonder; Traherne, with the ecstasy of the religious mystic; Gilbert White, with the sweetness of the evening and the morning; Thoreau, with the heat of noonday; Jefferies, with just a touch of twilight shadowing all his pages. We want them severally as they are; Mr. Burroughs as he is, neither wandering “lonely as a cloud” in search of poems, nor skulking in the sedges along the banks of the Guaso Nyero looking for lions. We want him at Slabsides, near his celery fields. And whatever the literary quality of our other nature-writers, no one of them has come any nearer than Mr. Burroughs to that difficult ideal, – a union of thought and form, no more to be separated than the heart and the bark of a live tree.

Take Mr. Burroughs’s work as a whole, and it is beyond dispute the most complete, the most revealing, of all our outdoor literature. His pages lie open like the surface of a pond, sensitive to every wind, or calm as the sky, holding the clouds and the distant blue, and the dragon-fly, stiff-winged and pinned to the golden knob of a spatter-dock.

All outdoor existence, all outdoor phenomena, are deeply interesting to him. There is scarcely a form of outdoor life, scarcely a piece of landscape, or natural occurrence characteristic of the Eastern States, which has not been dealt with suggestively in his pages: the rabbit under his porch, the paleozoic pebble along his path, the salt breeze borne inland by the Hudson, the whirl of a snowstorm, the work of the honeybees, the procession of the seasons over Slabsides, even the abundant soil out of which he and his grapes grow and which, “incorruptible and undefiled,” he calls divine.

He devotes an entire chapter to the bluebird, a chapter to the fox, one to the apple, another to the wild strawberry. The individual, the particular thing, is always of particular interest to him. But so is its habitat, the whole of its environment. He sees the gem, not cut and set in a ring, but rough in the mine, where it glitters on the hand of nature, and glitters all the more that it is worn in the dark. Naturally Mr. Burroughs has written much about the birds; yet he is not an ornithologist. His theme has not been this or that, but nature in its totality, as it is held within the circle of his horizon, as it surrounds, supports, and quickens him.

That nature does support and quicken the spiritual of him, no less than the physical, is the inspiration of his writing and the final comment it requires. Whether the universe was shaped from chaos with man as its end, is a question of real concern to Mr. Burroughs, but of less concern to him than the problem of shaping himself to the universe, of living as long as he can upon a world so perfectly adapted to life, if only one be physically and spiritually adaptable. To take the earth as one finds it, to plant one’s self in it, to plant one’s roof-tree in it, to till it, to understand it and the laws which govern it, and the Perfection which created it, and to love it all, – this is the heart of Mr. Burroughs’s religion, the pith of his philosophy, the conclusion of his books.

But if a perfect place for the fit, how hard a place is this world for the lazy, the ignorant, the stubborn, the weak, the physically and spiritually ill! So hard that a torpid liver is almost a mortal handicap, the stars in their courses fighting against the bilious to defeat them, to drive them to take exercise, to a copious drinking of water, to a knowledge of burdock and calomel – to obedience and understanding.

Underlying all of Mr. Burroughs’s thought and feeling, framing every one of his books, is a deep sense of the perfection of nature, the sharing of which is physical life, the understanding of which is spiritual life, is knowledge of God himself, in some part of His perfection. “I cannot tell what the simple apparition of the earth and sky mean to me; I think that at rare intervals one sees that they have an immense spiritual meaning, altogether unspeakable, and that they are the great helps, after all.” How the world was made – its geology, its biology – is the great question, for its answer is poetry and religion and life itself. Mr. Burroughs is serenely sure as to who made the world; the theological speculation as to why it was made, he answers by growing small fruits on it, living upon it, writing about it.

Temperamentally Mr. Burroughs is an optimist, as vocationally he is a writer, and avocationally a vine-dresser. He plants and expects to gather – grapes from his grape-vines, books from his book-vines, years, satisfactions, sorrows, joys, all that is due him.

The waters know their own and drawThe brook that springs in yonder heights;So flows the good with equal lawUnto the soul of pure delights.

And what is it that is due him? Everything; everything essential; as everything essential is due the pine tree, the prairie, the very planet. Is not this earth a star? Are not the prairie, the pine tree, and man the dust of stars? each a part of the other? all parts of one whole – a universe, round, rolling, without beginning, without end, without flaw, without lack, a universe self-sustained, perfect?

I stay my haste, I make delays,For what avails this eager pace?I stand amid the eternal ways,And what is mine shall know my face.

Mr. Burroughs came naturally by such a view of nature and its consequent optimism. It is due partly to his having been born and brought up on a farm where he had what was due him from the start. Such birth and bringing-up is the natural right of every boy. To know and to do the primitive, the elemental; to go barefoot, to drive the cows, to fish, and to go to school with not too many books but with “plenty of real things” – these are nominated in every boy’s bond.

Serene, I fold my hands and wait,

is the poem of a childhood on the farm, and the poem of a manhood on the farm, in spite of the critic who says: —

“We have never ceased to wonder that this friend of the birds, this kindly interpreter of nature in all her moods, was born and brought up on a farm; it was in that smiling country watered by the east branch of the Delaware. No man, as a rule, knows less about the colors, songs, and habits of birds, and is more indifferent to natural scenery than the man born to the soil, who delves in it and breathes its odors. Contact with it and laborious days seem to deaden his faculties of observation and deprive him of all sympathy with nature.” During the days when the deadening might have occurred, Mr. Burroughs was teaching school. Then he became a United States bank examiner, and only after that returned to the country where he still lives. He is now in his seventies, and coming full of years, and fuller and fuller of books, as his vines are full of years, and fuller and fuller of grapes.

Could it be otherwise? If men and grapes are of the same divine dust, should they not grow according to the same divine laws? Here in the vineyard along the Hudson, Mr. Burroughs planted himself in planting his vines, and every trellis that he set has become his own support and stay. The very clearing of the land for his vineyard was a preparation of himself physically and morally for a more fruitful life.

“Before the snow was off in March,” he says in “Literary Values,” “we set to work under-draining the moist and springy places. My health and spirits improved daily. I seemed to be under-draining my own life and carrying off the stagnant water, as well as that of the land.” And so he was. There are other means of doing it – taking drugs, playing golf, walking the streets; but surely the advantages and the poetry are all in favor of the vineyard. And how much fitter a place the vineyard to mellow and ripen life, than a city roof of tarry pebbles and tin!

Though necessarily personal and subjective, Mr. Burroughs’s writing is entirely free from self-exploitation and confession. There are pages scattered here and there dealing briefly and frankly with his own natural history, but our thanks are due to Mr. Burroughs that he never made a business of watching himself. Once he was inveigled by a magazine editor into doing “An Egotistical Chapter,” wherein we find him as a boy of sixteen reading essays, and capable at that age of feeding for a whole year upon Dr. Johnson! Then we find him reading Whipple’s essays, and the early outdoor papers of Higginson; and later, at twenty-three, settling down with Emerson’s essays, and getting one of his own into the “Atlantic Monthly.”