A book on nature may be relied upon to attract readers, just
as all eyes are drawn to a man who comes into any public place with a fowling-piece
on his shoulder, or a string of fish in his hand. The public is easily pleased
with such a work; if it only contains the results of personal observation, all
literary defects are readily excused, and even egotism becomes a sort of merit.
It is pleasant to feel the positive charm of directness and simplicity in a
book like "'Wild Life in a Southern County,"*
and it is impossible not to perceive that in this respect "Locusts and
Wild Honey" is at some disadvantage. The English book is written by a man
who has known what it is to have old folios and quartos on his bookcase (p.
141); and yet there is not a wordy or ambitious phrase from beginning to end;
an immense wealth of natural observation is given in a way that any rustic hunter
or fisherman can understand. But the style of Mr. Burroughs is in the transition
state from that of the naturalist to that of the literary idealist; and, while
giving us poetic touches such as the Englishman scarcely attempts, the American
lacks the charm of an even execution and a discriminating taste. The descriptions
of nature in "Wild Life" are like the processes of Nature herself,
who is wonderfully clear and sweet amid all the facts of change and decay. In
the work of Mr. Burroughs there is far more cause for complaint. True, he does
not here offend good taste so seriously as in some of his earlier books—as,
for instance, in that very unpleasant passage in "Winter Sunshine"
(p. 197); still it is needlessly annoying to be brought down from some really
graceful and airy fancy to such phrases as "boss-clouds" (" Locusts,"
etc., p. 96), or "the clerk of the weather has a sour stomach" (p.
88). It costs the English observer no effort to avoid such blemishes, and he
describes the homeliest incidents of farm-life without needing to employ a coarse
word.
It is necessary to refer to these qualities of style in Mr.
Burroughs, because they do not seem accidental, but rather the working out of
a system. The theory still pervades his books that literary smoothness or finish
are not merely dangerous qualities—which is quite true—but that
they are dastardly, and imply some fatal weakness. I knew a young girl who had
lived in a far Western State of the Union, and who, on first coming to the Atlantic
cities, declared that the men she met in society did not seem to her like men,
they made so little noise, and were so neatly dressed. Mr. Burroughs betrays
some such solicitude, and his theories, if legitimately carried out, would make
Ossian the chief of poets. If he praises Shakespeare, it is as showing "the
grit and virility of the primitive bard" (p. 178), and in some of his earlier
writings he refers to the Greek poets as "the shaggy old bards"; whereas
the characterization of Shakespeare as a wild, irregular genius was protested
against, long since, by Charles Lamb, and has never reappeared in literature;
and the laws of Greek verse were so strict that the roughest passage in Æschylus
was composed under restraints far severer than controlled Longfellow's smoothest
line. Thoreau knew the Greeks better than Mr. Burroughs, and it was for the
"refinement" and "perfection" of their work that he praised
them, not for shaggy strength. Even when Mr. Burroughs applies the same theory
to the study of nature, he does not succeed much better. "I have thought,"
he says, "that all forms of life in the Old World were marked by greater
prominence of type, or stronger characteristic and fundamental qualities than
with us—coarser and more hairy and virile, and therefore more powerful
and lasting" (p. 153). But the fortunes of the now extinct hairy mammoth
hardly justify this therefore; and in literature, as in nature, the
finer types, not the ruder, survive. It is not the test of strength in a writer
that he should use the word "virility" a great many times, but that
his vigor should show itself, even through a careful literary execution, like
a powerful character beneath refined manners, or the concentrated force of an
army beneath the subdued proprieties of its drill. Nature itself—an authority
to which Mr. Burroughs, as her faithful disciple, must yield—confirms
this assertion at every point. "In the softest tree or the airiest waterfall,
the fundamental lines are as lithe and muscular as the crouching haunches of
a leopard."
But for all Mr. Burroughs's occasional mannerisms and willfulness,
it is a pleasure to follow him where he is familiar, observing the bees on the
farm, the trout in the forest brook, or the thrushes in the wood. He is on our
own ground, deals with cis-Atlantic themes, and every novel fact he gives is
something reclaimed from the unexplored regions of our own outdoor life. He
sometimes falls into an inadvertence in language, as when he speaks of the "hylas"
instead of the" hyla" (p. 54), using the pronoun" him" afterward,
so that he plainly is not employing the name in the plural. It seems unlikely
that any bird should be called "la siffleur" (p. 223) instead
of "le siffleur," in Canada; and we should surely read "La
Grande Brûllure" instead of "La Grand Brulure"
(pp. 226, 244). It is possible to criticise such extreme colloquialisms as "she
was to the ground before the cicada was" (p. 40). But Mr. Burroughs is
too painstaking an observer to be often caught tripping in his facts, and, though
his thoughts often take a flavor from Emerson or Thoreau, he has studied well
in their school, and his observations are his own.
If the author of "Wild Life" does not report to
us the affairs of our own woods and meadows, he gives the charming and congenial
atmosphere of English rural scenes. It affords a quaint flavor to have him use
here and there familiarly and without quotation-marks many rustic words, for
which we must go to the dictionary,—such words as coombe (p.54),
bennet (p'. 11, etc.), haulier (p. 107), sarsenstone
(p. 149), ash-stole (p. 208), eyot (p. 313). It is interesting
to come upon what have always seemed local American phrases, and to learn where
and how they are used in England; thus the "flake," which he defines
as "a frame of light wood, used after the manner of a hurdle" (p.
63), reappears in those wooden frames called "fish-flakes" along the
Now England shore. It is interesting to notice the same complaints of decreasing
villages (p. (7) in some parts of Old England as in some parts of New England;
to find that houses where King Charles slept are there as omnipresent (p. 76)
as those where Washington slept in America; to have descriptions of old-fashioned
cottages built around their chimneys (p. 80) like the old cottages in Massachusetts
and Rhode Island; and to find that there, as here, the health of villages has
really improved in these days (p. 111), instead of declining. It is curious
to be told (p. 123) that wine is rapidly supplanting ale among English fanners
of the better class, while here it is plain that lager-beer is taking the place
of wine and spirits. One reads with envy of the attention still given to bell-ringing
as a fine art in country parishes (p. 90), while among us that graceful employment
has never found a foothold, because chimes of bells are so rare. Some of his
observations on nature, although they bear the marks of careful accuracy, seem
quite unlike the results of American observation; thus I have tried in vain
to verify his statement that ants avoid placing their nests where people walk,
and put them only at the edges of the garden-paths (p.50). Is it a bit of covert
satire in Nature that ants in a republican country grow indifferent to being
trampled upon? But there are few points where even this amount of criticism
can be made; and when our anonymous Englishman draws a general reflection it
is quite as good as anything offered by Mr. Burroughs. What can be prettier
than when, in watching the busy and joyous goldfinches, he decides that "a
sunshiny day must be like a month to them" (p. 156); or what can be wiser
than when he says, "Often in striving to get the most value from our time
it slips from us, as the reality did from the dog that greedily grasped the
shadow" (p. 185); or more inspiring and suggestive than when he concludes,
after studying the manner in which young cuckoos are reared by robins, "Higher
sentiments than those usually attributed to the birds and beasts of the field
may, I think, be traced in some of their actions"? (p. 291). The thoughts
of so kindly and modest an observer may well recall us with delight to that
wholesome rural side of English life, always so attractive to an American, and
more satisfying in these days than the strife of English politics or the new-born
imperialism of Lord Beaconsfield.
THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON.
* Wild Life in a Southern County. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
Locusts and Wild Honey. By John Burroughs. Boston: Houghton, Osgood & Co.