Why such a vein of restlessness in modern literature? We are so often asked. Why such an obsession with the abnormal and such a dissecting of the unusual in human relationships? Is it that with the percolation of Freudian ideas into the average consciousness we are for the first time beginning to understand ourselves? Or is it due to the restlessness of modern life itself, for which we must seek a deeper cause?
An editorial in a recent number of the Literary Review of the New York Evening
Post inclines to this latter view. The writer believes that we are suffering
from "cityitis," from too much red brick. He says:
"You can readily note the effect of too much city dwelling on a man, and you can almost as easily tell when too much city dwelling lies behind a book.
The over-urbanized book is intelligent, its thoughts move quickly, it is vivid, it is clever, and sometimes smart. Its style is nervous, and tho it may be bad, it is never dull. . . . The never ceasing patter of hurrying humanity, the crash and groan of machines makes the authors irritable and their books are irritable. We have now a school of irritable poetry and we are getting a school of irritable fiction. In the irritable novel, everyone is disagreeable (including the author), no one is virtuous or wants to be. . . .
We do not complain of cities. They are, at the worst, necessary evils and at the best, the testing grounds of intellect. . . . But let these writers sometimes pack up their bags and get out of the streets, out of the studios, out of the subway, off and apart from human cliques and congeries and the noisy mass of mankind. The best criticism of many a novel is a beech woods in March and a thundering sea on a misty beach is the answer to much febrile poetry."
Tho we may not feel the impatience of John Burroughs toward the modern and the
experimental in recent literature, yet we may find in the philosophy and the
thinking of this last great American naturalist much to answer the probings
of modern thought. He found, and in his own life proved the efficacy, of the
answer which the writer in the Literary Review gave to these modern problems.
Read these lines from Burroughs' "Summit of the Years":
"The whole of nature, directly or indirectly, goes with him who gives his mind to objects in the open air. The observer of bird-life in the open has heaven and earth thrown in. . . . The book of living nature is unlike other books in this respect: One can read it over and over, and always find new passages and new meanings. It is a book that goes to press new every night, and comes forth fresh every morning, and yet it is not like the newspaper, except that it is up-to-date. Its news is always vital, you see it in the making, and you are not blinded or deafened with the dust and noise of the vulgar newspaper world."
More reading of John Burroughs or more acceptance of his philosophy, might help
us in adjusting our lives to modern thought and environment. In his last book,
"Accepting the Universe," he delves more deeply into the fundamental
beliefs which governed his thought and actions, probing for the philosophy back
of it all, seeking to express simply his concept of God and Nature. To seek
constantly to understand Nature, to accept man as but a step in the process
of evolution, to feel oneself one with Nature, and "to feel at home on
this planet," he looks upon as reason for being.
The dwellers in cities have given up the concept of God which satisfied their
fathers—a concept which to Burroughs seemed childish and insufficient—but
they have found no substitute. When Margaret Fuller said that she accepted the
universe, Carlyle's retort was, "Gad! she'd better." That is insufficient
and unsatisfying. But the serenity and certainty achieved by John Burroughs
make it seem worth the effort to struggle for a greater breadth than we find
in our "red brick literature." M. A. W.
Minneapolis, Minn.