THIS is a very charming little book. We had noticed, on their appearance in various periodicals, some of the articles of which it is composed, and we find that, read continuously, they have given us even more pleasure. We have, indeed, enjoyed them more perhaps than we can show sufficient cause for. They are slender and light, but they have a real savour of their own.
Mr. Burroughs is known as an out-of-door observer—a devotee of birds and
trees and fields and aspects of weather and humble wayside incidents. The minuteness
of his observation, the keenness of his perception of all these things, give
him a real originality which is confirmed by a style sometimes indeed idiomatic
and unfinished to a fault, but capable of remarkable felicity and vividness.
Mr. Burroughs is also, fortunately for his. literary prosperity in these days,
a decided "humourist"; he is essentially and genially an American,
without at all posing as one, and his sketches have a delightful oddity, vivacity,
and freshness.
The first half of his volume, and the least substantial, treats of certain rambles
taken in the winter and spring in the country around Washington; the author
is an apostle of pedestrianism, and these pages form a prolonged rhapsody upon
the pleasures within the reach of anyone who will take the trouble to stretch
his legs. They are full of charming touches, and indicate a real genius for
the observation of natural things. Mr. Burroughs is a sort of reduced, but also
more humourpus, more available, and more sociable Thoreau. He is especially
intimate with the birds, and he gives his reader an acute sense of how sociable
an affair, during six months of the year, this feathery lore may make a lonely
walk. He is also intimate with the question of apples, and he treats of it in
a succulent disquisition which imparts to the somewhat trivial theme a kind
of lyrical dignity. He remarks, justly, that women are poor apple-eaters.
But the best pages in his book are those which commemorate a short visit to
England and the rapture of his first impressions. This little sketch, in spite
of its extreme slightness, really deserves to become classical. We have read
far solider treatises which contained less of the essence of the matter; or
at least, if it is not upon the subject itself that Mr. Burroughs throws particularly
powerful light, it is the essence of the ideal traveller's spirit that he gives
us, the freshness and intensity of impression, the genial bewilderment, the
universal appreciativeness. All this is delightfully naïf, frank, and natural.
"All this had been told, and it pleased me so in
the seeing that I must tell it again," the author says; and this
is the constant spirit of his talk. He appears to have been "pleased"
as no man was ever pleased before; so much so that his reflections upon his
own country sometimes become unduly invidious. But if to be appreciative is
the traveller's prime duty, Mr. Burroughs is a prince of travel.
"Then to remember that it was a new sky and new earth
I was beholding, that it was England, the old mother at last, no longer a faith
or a fable but an actual fact, there before my eyes and under my feet—why
should I not exult? Go to! I will be indulged. These trees, those fields, that
bird I darting along the hedge-rows, those men and boys picking blackberries
in October, those English flowers by the roadside (stop the carriage while I
leap out and pluck them), the homely domestic look 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 let me inspect it, and that swallow skimming
along so familiarly."
One envies Mr. Burroughs his acute relish of the foreign spectacle even more
than one enjoys his expression of it. He is not afraid to start and stare; his
state of mind is exactly opposed to the high dignity of the nil admirari. When
he goes into St. Paul's, "my companions rushed about,"
he says, "as if each one had a search-warrant in
his pocket; but I was content to uncover my head and drop into a seat, and busy
my mind with some simple object near at hand, while the sublimity that soared
about me stole into my soul." He meets a little girl carrying a
pail in a meadow near Stratford, stops her and talks with her, and finds an
ineffable delight in "the sweet and novel twang of
her words. Her family had emigrated to America, failed to prosper, and come
back; but I hardly recognise 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 enquiries as if I was hearing of this strange land for
the first time."
Mr. Burroughs is unfailingly complimentary; he sees sermons in stones and good
in everything; the somewhat dusky British world was never steeped in so intense
a glow of rose-colour. Sometimes his optimism rather interferes with his accuracy—as
when he detects "forests and lakes" in Hyde Park, and affirms that
the English rural landscape does not, in comparison with the American, appear
highly populated. This latter statement is apparently made apropos of that long
stretch of suburban scenery, pure and simple, which extends from Liverpool to
London. It 'does not strike us as felicitous, either, to say that women are
more kindly treated in England than in the United States, and especially that
they are less "leered at." "Leering" at women is happily
less common all the world over than it is sometimes made to appear for picturesque
purposes in the magazines; but we should say that if there is a country where
the art has not reached a high stage of development, it is our own.
It must be added that although Mr. Burroughs is shrewd as well as naïf,
the latter quality sometimes distances the former. He runs over for a week to
France. "At Dieppe I first saw the wooden shoe, and
heard its dry, senseless clatter upon the pavement. How suggestive of the cramped
and inflexible conditions with which human nature has borne so long in these
lands!" But in Paris also he is appreciative—singularly so
for so complete an outsider as he confesses himself to be—and throughout
he is very well worth reading. We heartily commend his little volume for its
honesty, its individuality, and, in places, its really blooming freshness.
[Transcribist's note: this article was originally published anonymously. It was later claimed by Henry James in his a collection of his works, Views and Reviews, 1908.]