SOME years ago, in the palmy days of the "New York Leader," I remember falling upon an essay or two by John Burroughs. There was something in his unusually vigorous and thoughtful style that arrested attention at once, and piqued curiosity. It certainly stood in curious contrast to most of the rapid work which goes to fill the insatiate columns of even the weekly press. The "Leader" could scarcely be accused of dullness; it had a coterie of brilliant and sparkling writers; but Mr. Burroughs, who was then a very young man, had evidently struck a solid and assured note of his own that was very distinctly audible in the midst of their almost contagious levity. It seemed to me at the first look—though Mr. Burroughs's name was then entirely new—that here was a writer who had something to say to the world, and must eventually he heard from. He was to be followed presently into "The Atlantic" and "The Galaxy," and, after its establishment, into SCRIBNER'S,—and through these and other periodicals he has won the well-recognized position, which no one has held so well since Thoreau's death, of our Prophet of Outdoordom. "The Nation" says, "Mr. Burroughs is a sort of reduced, but also more humorous, more available, and more sociable Thoreau."
Yet, if I remember rightly, Mr. Burroughs's earlier essays
were not so preponderately on topics relating to Nature as are those which have
given him his deserved place. I recall an essay which appeared in "The
Atlantic"—it must be ten or more years ago—on "Expression,"
in which he was as metaphysical as Emerson, and which must have been mistaken
for Emerson's by more than one reader. This, though, was when the magnetism
of a great name was deflecting more or less nearly all the young and rising
writers, and making them, by necessity, talk through a medium in which they
had been powerfully quickened, and had learned how to think,—I might say,
through which they could hardly escape an effort to mold their thoughts. Curiously
enough, Mr. Burroughs's first book 1 was not about
Nature—except as Mr. Walt Whitman represents Nature,—and in this
the author confesses that when he was a "well grown country youth"
he was "curious about books—fond even then of the Emersonian essays
and poems, and all of that ilk; but my life was mainly occupied in farm-work
in the summer, and with a little study, offset by much hunting and trapping
of wild animals in winter." As his confession is so illustrative of what
I wish soon to say, I will quote him still further at this point:
"From childhood I was familiar with the homely facts of the barn, and of cattle and horses; the sugar making in the maple woods in early spring; the work of the corn-field, hay-field, potato-field; the delicious fall months, with their pigeon and squirrel shootings; threshing of buckwheat, gathering of apples, and burning of fallows; in short, everything that smacked of, and led to, the open air and its exhilarations, I belonged, as I may say, to them; and my substance and taste, as they grew, assimilated them as truly as my body did its food. I loved a few books much; but I love Nature, in all those material examples and subtle expressions, with a love passing all the books of the world."
This monograph on Walt Whitman is still a most readable little
volume, and on many points that concern modern poetry, is exquisitely stimulating
and suggestive. It is a robust and sweeping theory that is laid down; but it
is worth attention as a pungent and ringing protest against poetry of the overdone-dainty
and confectionery kind. Together with Mr. O'Connor's "The Good Gray Poet,"
and Mr. Emerson's premature compliment, the book gave Whitman a "send off"
that soon reverberated from England in the loud welcome of the Swinburne and
Rossetti fraternity. Without sharing all this enthusiasm, I can yet see its
considerable basis; and think those who still look upon the "Leaves of
Grass" bard in bewilderment, as what a friend of mine calls "the literary
Nebuchadnezzar," cannot do better than to take up before they finally decide
what he is, this earnest and sympathetic exposition of him. Mr. Burroughs says
the literary hints in the book are "experimental"—they come
partly from personal experience with the author, and "will show the standard
of Nature more than the standard of books." His first acquaintance with
Walt Whitman's writings—the "Leaves of Grass"—is interesting
enough to be narrated; for he says "it produced the impression upon me
in my moral consciousness that actual Nature did in her material forms and shows."
He found the book in a friend's hands in 1861, while on a nutting excursion,
and says: "I shall never forget the strange delight I had from the following
passage, as we sat there on the sunlit border of an autumn forest:"
I hope all this, which I have been saying somewhat tangentially to my theme, will not seem out of place; for it serves to give a hint of Mr. Burroughs's tendency and mental sympathy, and will, perhaps, help the reader to understand him better as he appears in his later books. The book on Whitman was published in 1867; "Wake Robin," in 1871; and "Winter Sunshine," his latest, has but just appeared. The last two are from the press of Messrs. Hurd & Houghton, who are about to publish a new edition of "Wake Robin," with illustrations.
What first strikes me in Mr. Burroughs's work, even above
its well-acquired style, is the unqualified weight of conscience it exhibits.
You are sure he feels precisely what he says. There is no posturing for effect;
an admiration he does not have he never mimics. We find in him, therefore, a
perfectly healthy and hearty flavor. Apparently, he does not put his pen to
paper hastily, or until he is filled with his subject. What has been aptly termed
the secondary, or final stage of thought, has with him full play. The omnivorous
newspaper which skims off, in its daily hunger, the surface of so many quick
minds, has never drawn him within its vortex by force, and though he resorted
to it in his tentative efforts, it was only in the most casual way. A natural
observer of things, he summons all the facts, near or remote,—there is
no side-light too small,—and, when the material is all in, it seems to
undergo a long incubation in his mind; or shows at least that reflection has
done its perfect and many-sided work. Under his careful treatment and keen eye
for the picturesque, the details get the proper artistic distribution, and stand
forth in poetic guise. The essay, when it appears, comes to us freighted with
"the latest news" from the meadows and the woods, and bears the unmistakable
imprint of authenticity.
He has alert senses—the sixth sense of the naturalist,
so to speak—and a faculty for the minutest things. The bird is usually
the pivot of his walk and observation, or is mingled with them; but he notices
also the larger setting and furniture which Nature throws around it. The humblest
way-side incident does not elude him; and yet the view to the horizon is ever
open and is seen through vistas of enchantment. He defends the song of the hermit-thrush
against the discriminating silence of Wilson and Audubon; he discovers the fact
that the bobolink goes southward in the night, which Audubon had testified against,—though
he acknowledges this to be the only misstatement he has been able to find in
the voluminous observations of this eminent naturalist; and, whether it be the
architecture of a bird's nest, or the song, or whatever the habit, he is patiently
accurate in reporting it. Of the song of a bird he shrewdly says:
"It seems to me that I do not know a bird till I have heard its voice; then I come nearer it at once, and it possesses a human interest to me. I have met the gray-cheeked thrush (Turdus Aliciæ) in the woods and held him in my hand: still I do not know him. The silence of the cedar-bird throws a mystery about him which neither his good looks nor his petty larcenies in cherry-time can dispel. A bird's song contains a clew to its life, and establishes a sympathy—an understanding—between itself and the listener."
He remarks a "human significance" in the songs of
most birds:
"The song of the bobolink to me expresses hilarity; the song-sparrow's, faith; the blue-bird's, love; the cat-bird's, pride; the white-eyed fly-catcher's, self-consciousness; that of the hermit-thrush, spiritual serenity; while there is something military in the call of the robin."
I have come upon these passages almost at random. They are
neither better than, nor greatly different from, the average matter of the author's
books; but they betray the intimate acquaintance with, and sincere study of,
his subject, which I have already alluded to. And it is this absence of dilettanteism
and sham that gives to everything he has to offer its prime importance and charm.
"Winter Sunshine" is mainly his description of winter and autumn experiences,
and the habits of such of the smaller animals as keep open house at this time
of year. Besides these, however, we have a juicy and appetizing essay on the
apple; a eulogy of walking; and some seventy pages describing England and English
characteristics, an excursion over to France, and the trip from London to New
York. It is interesting to notice that Mr. Burroughs's travels among men are
not less humorously and acutely marked than are his incursions into field and
forest. Along with much evidence of culture, they have the most naive and frequently
insouciant manner; they tell you—what is even better than the
facts—how it all seemed to him; and he takes no pains to
keep back his intense delight and surprise over the wonders and newness of his
experience. He jumps ashore and says:
"Go to! I will be indulged. These trees, those fields, that bird darting along the hedge-rows, those men and boys picking blackberries in October, those English flowers by the road-side,—(stop the carriage while I leap out and pluck them),—the homely domestic looks of things, those houses, those queer vehicles, those thick-coated horses, those big-footed, coarsely clad, clear-skinned men and women; this massive, homely, compact architecture;—let me have a good look, for this is my first hour in England, and I am drunk with the joy of seeing! This house-fly even, let me inspect it; and that swallow skimming along so familiarly,—is he the same I saw trying to cling to the sails of the vessel the third day out?—or is the swallow the swallow the world over? This grass I certainly have seen before, and this red and white clover; but the daisy and dandelion are not the same; and I have come three thousand miles to see the mullein cultivated in a garden, and christened the velvet plant."
He speaks of the humanized and domestic character of all the
trees, "as if they were betaking themselves from the woods to the orchard,"
the half-tameness of the game, and, of course, the enormous number of birds.
He doubts if "a scraping together of all the birds in the United States
into any two of the largest States would people the earth and air more fully."
The British crow, he observes, is only a duller American one (would it be a
true parallel to say the Briton himself is only a more sedate Yankee?); and
the bird which Tennyson apostrophizes:
is, "in size, form, manner, note, call," merely a black robin. The English lark, he thinks, is no better singer than our bobolink. English clouds "are never sharply defined, and deeply dyed like ours, but soft, fleecy, vapory, indistinguishable." The architecture is milder in color—not a single white house with green blinds—the voices of the people, even the street cries are less aggressive; the locomotives do not scream so; the street gamins are more respectful. In respect to the railways, the English roadbeds are solid, but the cars are dingy; while we have finely upholstered cars and shabby roads. Our method, in this comparison, he does not commend. "It is like a man wearing a ruffled and jeweled shirt-front, but too poor to afford a shirt itself." He met a little girl on his walk to Stratford, who had been in America, and had lately returned. Her voice gave "a sweet and novel twang to her words, * * I hardly recognized even the name of my own country in her innocent prattle; it seemed like a land of fable; all had a remote, mythological air, and I pressed my inquiries as if I was hearing of this strange land for the first time." He thinks the magpie is either a Celt or a Catholic, because he saw it in France, and again in Ireland, but not once in England.
Some
of these experiences, and others that he records, have, as he acknowledges,
been made before by various people; but he wishes to tell them, and we are glad
to hear them told in his way. The essay on the Exhilarations of the Road is
a very choice piece of description, and might well be issued as a separate tract
to the non-walkers. The opening paragraphs in the discourse about Snow-Walkers
are worth notice as giving the key-note of his latest book; but I must resort
to abbreviation, and leave the reader to supply or find what is omitted.
"It is true that in winter we miss the pomp and pageantry; but there is
at least the presence of the infinite sky. The stars rekindle their fires, the
moon achieves a fuller triumph, and the heavens wear a look of more exalted
simplicity. Summer is more wooing and seductive, more versatile and human; winter
is of a more heroic cast, and addresses the intellect. The tendinous part of
the mind is more developed in winter; the fleshy in summer. The former is a
return to simple habits after a career of splendor and prodigality. It is the
philosopher coming back from the banquet and the wine to a cup of water and
a crust of bread. And then this beautiful masquerade of the elements—the
novel disguises our nearest friends put on! Here is another rain and another
dew,—water that will not flow nor spill, nor receive the taint of an unclean
vessel. All sounds are sharper in winter; the air transmits better. The words
are rigid and tense, keyed up by the frost, and resound like a stringed instrument.
The clouds are pearly and iridescent; the old dilapidated fence is set off with
the most fantastic ruffles—the world lies about me in a trance of snow."
In another place he depicts, with a few strokes, the ocean:
"It is a wide and fearful gulf that separates the two worlds. The landsman can know little of the wildness, savageness, and mercilessness of nature, till he has been upon the sea. It is as if he had taken a leap off into the interstellar spaces. In voyaging to Mars or Jupiter he might cross such a desert—might confront such awful purity and coldness. An astronomic solitariness and remoteness encompasses the sea. The earth and all remembrance of it is blotted out; there is no hint of it anywhere. This is not water, this cold, blue-black, vitreous liquid. It suggests not life but death. Indeed, the regions of everlasting ice and snow are not more cold and inhuman than the sea."
Mr. Burroughs's style is racy, full of blood, vascular and
bristling with just the words for the description in hand. It is idiomatic;
original, but individual still more; and has been melted out by the strong heat
of thought. It was not brought from the academy or college, or from wide reading
of classic lore; it is, rather, the outcome of his own robust circumstances
and moods. It is certainly not finished, in the way that Hawthorne's is, or
as Addison's is, or as Macaulay's is; but this is what you might, but would
not be likely to say of Emerson's or of Carlyle's. If it is not specially limpid,
it readily assumes a bright and prismatic shape—a form that is suggestive
like poetry.
Our author's passion for the bird seems to be acknowledged
in some sort even by the aërial tribe. They come nearer his eye and ear
than to the rest of us; and he takes them, as the trout-fisher sometimes takes
the trout, in his hands. It is a kind of cousinly reciprocity born of a subtile
psychic, if not fully understood, affinity. I remember showing him once near
my home a little bird perfectly white (an albino), which to an untrained eye
might pass for either the chipping-bird or one of the ground-sparrows, whose
general characteristics of form are quite similar. Of course, when Nature chooses
capriciously to whitewash one of these, it is not easy to tell, when it is on
the wing, to which of the kinds it belongs. I had noticed it for a year or two,
at different times, occupying a certain limited habitat along the Webutuck,
a poetic branch of the Housatonic River; and one day I took our author, and
a friend, in pursuit of the curiously clothed singer. Mr. Burroughs pronounced
it the ordinary "ground bird" at once, and came so near it, with his
outstretched hand, that if some dry bush on which he was compelled to step had
not crackled briskly under his tread, he would have picked the little fellow
off the branch overhanging the stream, about as easily as one might pick from
the orchard tree the neighborly and coveted apple.2
The bird acted, to all appearance, as if he was thoroughly conscious of the
fact that the one who could look under his mask, and classify and name him,
had at last arrived.
As an observer, Mr. Burroughs teaches us once more the needful,
and never too emphatic lesson, that, if we are to see much, it is not so great
a matter where we stand as it is what eyes we bring with us. Like Thoreau, he
can be happy walking through a swamp in the snow-porridge and desolation of
a winter night, and find more rapture than most of us extract from a perfect
morning in June. This temper and habit give to his writings that "natural
magic" which Lowell ascribes to White's "History of Selborne,"
of which he said: "Open the book where you will, it takes you out-of-doors."
Mr. Burroughs's masterly essay on Emerson is remarkable as
a piece of intelligent appreciation and exhaustive statement brought within
a narrow compass, and focused with the clearest light. It comes near being as
good a criticism as has been made of Emerson by anyone. His superior "attar
of thought," his wide-eyedness, his condensation, the electric play of
his mind, his perfect culture, his fine manners, his cogent emphasis, his pungent
apothegms, and his perpetual poetry and surprise, are summed up in a most pictorial
and discriminating delineation. But, while I do not fail to see that even Emerson
is not orbicular,—that he lacks dramatic power, and is a little bereaved
on the side of moist humor, who could wish him much other than he is? In fact,
is there such a possibility at all as the Whitman school insists upon of parallel
entirety, in respect to nature and art? Can the latter be made to include the
former in any way except by partiality? The cosmos, the all, can be comprehended
by no single force or man, for it comprehends all. The best of us can merely
go to nature with our small dippers, and take up a little. Even great Thor,
when he struggled with the giants of Jötunheim, could only drink off the
surface of one bay through their horn; the great ocean lay undiminished behind
him. What we take becomes art, which is simply a segment of nature put in the
crucible of, and modified by, man. We may be so dainty and finical, of course,
as to leave some strong elements out. There is Pope's manner, and there is Wordsworth's,
and there is Whitman's. But the song of the sparrow on the "alder bough,"
in its plenitude, is only to be got by going where it carols. No mere book,
no author can give it. As it is a different tune he sings in the cage, so is
man's chant of the ineffable different. Who shall—who can—"bring
home the river and sky?"
But in saying this—which I venture to do here, since,
while I write, the question of Whitman's claims is being discussed by English
and American critics with some asperity—one must not forget that art sometimes
justifies itself by some part of its performance, when the theory for which
it is supposed to stand falls to the ground. It seems to me, therefore, about
equally idle to assume on the one hand that Whitman has no claim at all to be
called a poet, and to assert on the other that he is the great cosmic bard—the
poet-herald of the future, who puts the universe in his rhyme, and who has set
the fashion that must henceforth displace the whole tuneful choir from Homer
to Tennyson. It will be a long time yet, I fancy, before Homer and Milton—to
use Emerson's late suggestion—shall become tin-pans.
I do not take it that Mr. Burroughs expects exactly this.
I know, in fact, that he is an appreciative reader of all kinds of verse, and
has
In his attitude to Whitman, he has been simply loyal to a force that gave him in the outset a strange and welcome stimulus; that put no restraint on his widest thought or most vagrant mood; that took him at one stroke from the faint tuberose-scented parlor, and set him in the resinous woods, and under the vocal sky. He would have no rhythm or time-beat that obscured for him the ripple of the brook. He was tired of the pert iteration of finished forms, and here came the primitive picturesqueness that tallied with, and seemed like, the outer world, among whose mysteries he is most at home. If I understand him, it is his belief that Mr. Whitman has already disclosed his secret, and put forth what thought is in him, and has nothing more to say; but, of the value and validity of his chief work, he has no possible doubt or question. To him, it is grand and aggressive, and we may well allow so competent a mind to declare how, and in what direction, he has been helped.
It may be interesting now to ask, since Mr. Burroughs has
written so well about poetry, how far the divine impulse has directly touched
his own pen. I find that he has produced a few poems, which were turned off
in the contagion common to youth, though not all of these have strayed into
type. One of them appeared, I think, in the old "Knickerbocker Magazine,"
about fourteen years ago. The sentiment it breathes is born of the same transcendental
quality as that which animates Mr. Wasson's rare lyric of "All's Well,"—though
it is molded in a quite different measure, and can stand bravely alone. It seems
almost a pity that his muse should furl her wings after so promising an effort.
Mr. Burroughs was born in Roxbury, Delaware County, N. Y., April 3d, 1837,—coming from English stock on his father's side, and inheriting a strong dash of Irish blood on his mother's. At seventeen, he shouldered his movables; left the paternal roof, and—as some one has aptly said "looked for a place where the crust was pretty thin to break through into the world." This brought him first to Olive, Ulster County, where he played the pedagogue,—we have no doubt with success. He married before he was twenty-one. In 1863, he received an appointment in the Treasury Department at Washington, where he remained until 1873, acting at first as vaultkeeper, and afterward as chief of the organization division in the Bureau of National Banks. During the last three years he has been filling the position of Receiver of the broken-down National Bank at Middletown, Orange County—a task of much delicacy and complication. He also does occasional service from time to time as Special National Bank Examiner. In this sort of work the cashiers who have to do with him find him extremely competent; and, what he does not see in their various columns of figures in a single afternoon, must be a very inert or infinitesimal quantity. This expertness is worth mentioning, because it is seldom found with so much ideality of the poet's sort as that which we are tempted to call one of his chief endowments. In 1871—with two other Treasury clerks, he went to Europe in charge of $15,000,000 of U. S. bonds to be delivered to the Syndicate.
Mr. Burroughs's predominant gift must be termed
that of a clear and powerful eye; but there is, of course a working brain behind it. From a boy he saw everything without conscious effort. As Thoreau, when some one on a walk asked him for an Indian's arrow, immediately stooped down and picked one up, so his visual sense seems to respond to every interrogation the spirit prompts. I should ask him with perfect confidence to show me any bird that the horizon incloses, and expect the verbal draft to be honored at once.
His books do not so much spur you to read and write, as make
you observe for yourself, and go tramping about with a pocketful of apples.
If Schiller's play of "The Robbers" ever did make any of
the German youth take to the woods as freebooters, it is by an equally magical
contagion that Mr. Burroughs's work inspires the true literary and scientific
prowler. Prof. Dowden, of Dublin, testifies eloquently to this characteristic
quality of our essayist's thought. The receptive reader does not give it his
languid, assent; but, laying the book down, finds a new robustness entering
his blood, and feels that he, too, "must go and fight Philip."
1Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and Person. By John Burroughs. New York: American News Company. 1867.
2. I am not ignorant of the fact that the albinoes, which are common to various species—even to crows and robins—possess a defective vision; but they can see sufficiently to avoid capture, even if not minutely enough to enjoy the æsthetic qualities of the landscape.