THE HUMAN NATURE OF A NATURALIST.*
Many of Mr. John Burroughs's readers must have interrupted their reading more
than once to ask themselves why it is that everything he writes has so unquestionable
a reality, so inevitable an interest, so inescapable a charm. Scrutiny and analysis
fail to reveal in his page any rhetorical trick or other device that can be made
to explain the secret, nor does the thought which his language clothes attain
to such stupendous heights or depths as shall account for his unfailing command
of our attention. Finally, therefore, the conclusion is reached that it is the
man's personality itself that speaks to the reader so compellingly, though so
quietly and unassumingly. One is made to live the writer's own life and think
his own thoughts with him in his books. flow then can they fail to be alive with
meaning and pregnant with reality? As supplementary to these masterpieces of
intimate self-portraiture, such a volume as Dr. Clara Barrus's "Our Friend
John Burroughs," with its passages of autobiography from the naturalist's
own pen and its scraps of familiar talk from his lips, must be very welcome to
the less fortunate thousands of his admirers who have never enjoyed Miss Barrus's
good fortune in being invited to visit him at Slabsides and Woodchuck Lodge,
or to travel with him and camp with him in Colorado and California and the Hawaiian
Islands.
The book's first chapter, bearing the same title as the book itself, attempts
to show why Mr. Burroughs is "our friend," and says, among other things,
that "it is the 'child in the heart,' and, in a way, the 'child' in his books,
that accounts for his wide appeal. He often says he can never think of his books
as works, because so much play went into the making of them. He has gone out
of doors in a holiday spirit, has had a good time, has never lost the boy's relish
for his outings, and has been so blessed with the gift of expression that his
own delight is communicated to his reader." Then follow instances and letters
and anecdotes illustrating the large, generous friendliness of the man.
"The Retreat of a Poet-Naturalist," as the next chapter is called,
shows the "Sage of
Slabsides" under his own rustic roof-tree. It
was only after twelve years' acquaintance with his books that Miss Barrus yielded
to her impulse and sent Mr. Burroughs a letter telling him what a joy his writings
had been to her. Later there came to her a gracious invitation to visit him,
and so close a friendship was formed that for the past twelve years she has had
the enviable privilege of helping him with his correspondence, which, in respect
to letters received, at least, is of no small proportions. Following this admirable
presentation of the naturalist in his woodland retreat comes what must be accounted
the best part of the book, bits of autobiography sent in the form of letters
to Miss Barrus at her request, and pieced out with fitting additions of her own
or selections from the autobiographer's other reminiscent writings. In three
parts, dealing with his ancestry and family life, his childhood and youth, and
an inquiry into the origin and nature of his own distinctive peculiarities, he
most frankly and engagingly depicts himself and his environment, exciting admiration
for the noble candor to which any concealment or disguise is so utterly foreign.
Like Franklin, he unhesitatingly tells the worst that can be told about himself
; but unlike Franklin he has nothing that is morally repellent to reveal. Like
Franklin, again, he was one of a large family of brothers and sisters, none of
the rest of whom attained to distinction.
A chapter is next devoted to Mr. Burroughs's early writings, with illustrative
extracts. In the formality and comparative heaviness of those first ventures
into print, philosophical or didactic in tone as they mostly were, there showed
itself very little of the man as he soon afterward became when he really began
to find himself and his true place in the order of things. Even in that first
"Atlantic" essay ("Expression") which Lowell so promptly
accepted and published—it was in 1860, when its writer was twenty-three
years old—there
was, unconsciously to the essayist, so much more of Emerson than of the future
author of "Wake Robin" that the piece was generally ascribed to the
Concord sage. Indeed', it may be found indexed in "Poole" as of
Emersonian origin, and the earlier editions of Hill's "Rhetoric"
have a footnote quoting a line from it and assigning it to Emerson. It was
Miss Barrus herself,
it now appears, who called the Harvard professor's attention to the error.
"A Winter Day at Slabsides" shows Mr. Burroughs in the youthfulness
and high spirits of seventy-four years, roasting a duck in a pot for his invited
guests and giving them such a
feast of reason together with the products of his culinary art as may well
excite the reader's envy of those favored banqueters. Then comes a view of
the naturalist
restored to the scenes of his boyhood, in the town of Roxbury, Delaware County,
New York, where he has reclaimed an abandoned farmhouse half a mile from
the old homestead where he was born, and has christened it "Woodchuck
Lodge." It
is here that he has the "hay-barn study" so pleasantly familiar
to readers of his later essays, and it is here that he now spends his summers,
wondering
at the perversity that kept him so long estranged from this beautiful Catskill
country of his childhood. In her penultimate chapter, perhaps her best, Miss
Barrus relates what must have been the event of her life,—a camping
trip (with one other of her own sex) with "the two Johns," "John
of Birds" and "John
of Mountains." The latter—Mr. John Muir, of course—joined
the party in the Petrified Forests of Arizona, showed them the wonders of
the Grand
Canon
and the Mojave Desert, the beauties of Southern California and the sublimities
of the Yosemite, and only parted with them when they embarked for Hawaii.
The striking contrast between these two nature-lovers and old friends is
excellently
brought out in the lively chronicle of the memorable excursion, as, for instance,
in this passage:
Miss Barrus's closing chapter is devoted to an appreciation of Mr. Burroughs
as a nature-lover and a writer. Classing him with Gilbert
White, Thoreau, and Richard Jefferies, she not unnaturally finds him greatly
superior in some respects to the three others. For example:
Of Whitman and of Mr. Burroughs's intimacy with and admiration for him,
the book has considerable to say, as it also has of other men, famous
or obscure,
whose
lives or writings or personalities have been in some way significant
in the naturalist's life-history and the maturing of his powers. The purpose
and
method of the entire
book are well conceived, and the author's success in bringing before
us
a very real and living and lovable Mr. Burroughs is worthy of warm
praise, even though
she must share that praise largely with Mr. Burroughs himself, whose
own pen has contributed not the least valuable portions of the volume. She
writes
in
a style not unworthy of the master whose manner, admirable for its
clearness and simplicity, she so justly commends. Good portraits and views
show
the naturalist in a number of his favorite haunts, and an unusually full
and accurate index
makes quickly available any part of the riches which it so handily
unlocks.
PERCY F. BICKNELL.