Our Friend John Burroughs

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"It'll put an inch of fat on Muir's ribs," retorted "Oom John,"
who was not without chagrin at the fiasco.

"Johnnie, when you sail for Honolulu, I expect, unless you're
narrowly watched, you'll get on the wrong ship and go off to
Vancouver," teased the fun-loving Scot.

In Yosemite, Mr. Muir told us about the great trees he used to
saw into timber during his early years in the valley, showing us
the site of his old mill, and bragging that he built it and kept
it in repair at a cost of less than twenty-five cents a year. It
seemed strange that he, a tree-lover, could have cut down those
noble spruces and firs, and I whispered this to Mr. Burroughs.

"Ask him about it," said the latter, "ask him." So I did.

"Bless you, I never cut down the trees--I only sawed those the
Lord had felled."

The storms that swept down the mountains had laid these monarchs
low, and the thrifty Scot had merely taken advantage of the ill
winds, at the same time helping nature to get rid of the debris.

"How does this compare with Esopus Valley, Johnnie?" Mr. Muir was
fond of asking Mr. Burroughs, when he saw the latter gazing in
admiration at mighty El Capitan, or the thundering Yosemite
Falls. Or he would say, "How is that for a piece of glacial work,
Johnnie?" as he pointed to Half Dome and told how the glacier had
worn off at least half a mile from its top, and then had sawed
right down through the valley.

"O Lord! that's too much, Muir," answered Mr. Burroughs. He
declared that it stuck in his crop--this theory that ice alone
accounts for this great valley cut out of the solid rocks. When
the Scot would get to riding his ice-hobby too hard, Mr. Burroughs
would query, "But, Muir, the million years before the ice age--what
was going on here then?'

"Oh, God knows," said Mr. Muir, but vouchsafed no further explanation.

[Illustration: John Burroughs and John Muir in the Yosemite. From
a photograph by F. P. Clatworthy]

"With my itch for geology," said Mr. Burroughs, "I want it scratched
all the time, and Muir doesn't want to scratch it." So he dropped
his questions, which elicited only bantering answers from the
mountaineer, and gave himself up to sheer admiration of the glories
and beauties of the region, declaring that of all the elemental
scenes he had beheld, Yosemite beat them all--"The perpetual thunder
peal of the waters dashing like mad over gigantic cliffs, the
elemental granite rocks--it is a veritable 'wreck of matter and
crush of worlds' that we see here."

Mr. Burroughs urged Mr. Muir again and again to reclaim his early
studies in the Sierra which were printed in the "Overland Monthly"
years ago, and give them to the public now with the digested
information which he alone can supply, and which is as yet
inaccessible in his voluminous notes and sketches of the region.
At Mr. Muir's home we saw literally barrels of these notes. He
admitted that he had always been dilatory about writing, but not
about studying or note-taking; often making notes at night when
fatigued from climbing and from two and three days' fasting; but
the putting of them into literature is irksome to him. Yet, much
as he dislikes the labor of writing, he will shut himself away from
the air and sunshine for weeks at a time, if need arises, and write
vigorously in behalf of the preservation of our forests. He did
this back in the late seventies, and in more recent years has been
tireless in his efforts to secure protection to our noble forests
when danger has threatened them.

Mr. Muir's knowledge of the physiognomy and botany of most of the
countries of the globe is extensive, and he has recently added
South America and South Africa to his list; there is probably no
man living, and but few who have lived, so thoroughly conversant
with the effects of glaciation as is he; yet, unless he puts his
observations into writing, much of his intimate knowledge of these
things must be lost when he passes on. And, as Mr. Burroughs says,
"The world wants this knowledge seasoned with John Muir, not his
mere facts. He could accumulate enough notes to fill Yosemite,
yet that would be worth little. He has spent years studying and
sketching the rocks, and noting facts about them, but you can't
reconstruct beauty and sublimity out of mere notes and sketches.
He must work his harvest into bread." But concerning this writing
Mr. Muir confesses he feels the hopelessness of giving his readers
anything but crumbs from the great table God has spread: "I can
write only hints to incite good wanderers to come to the feast."

Here we see the marked contrast between these two nature students:
Mr. Muir talks because he can't help it, and his talk is good
literature; he writes only because he has to, on occasion; while
Mr. Burroughs writes because he can't help it, and talks when he
can't get out of it. Mr. Muir, the Wanderer, needs a continent
to roam in; while Mr. Burroughs, the Saunterer, needs only a
neighborhood or a farm. The Wanderer is content to scale mountains;
the Saunterer really climbs the mountain after he gets home, as he
makes it truly his own only by dreaming over it and writing about it.
The Wanderer finds writing irksome; the Saunterer is never so well
or so happy as when he can write; his food nourishes him better,
the atmosphere is sweeter, the days are brighter. The Wanderer has
gathered his harvest from wide fields, just for the gathering; he has
not threshed it out and put it into the bread of literature--only
a few loaves; the Saunterer has gathered his harvest from a rather
circumscribed field, but has threshed it out to the last sheaf; has
made many loaves; and it is because he himself so enjoys writing that
his readers find such joy and morning freshness in his books, his own
joy being communicated to his reader, as Mr. Muir's own enthusiasm
is communicated to his hearer. With Mr. Burroughs, if his field of
observation is closely gleaned, he turns aside into subjective fields
and philosophizes--a thing which Mr. Muir never does.

One of the striking things about Mr. Muir is his generosity; and
though so poor in his youth and early adult life, he has now the
wherewithal to be generous. His years of frugality have, strange
to say, made him feel a certain contempt for money. At El Tovar
he asked, "What boy brought up my bags?" Whereupon a string of
bell-boys promptly appeared for their fees, and Mr. Muir handed
out tips to all the waiting lads, saying in a droll way, "I didn't
know I had so many bags." When we tried to reimburse him for the
Yosemite trip, he would have none of it, saying, almost peevishly,
"Now don't annoy me about that." Yet, if he thinks one is trying
to get the best of him, he can look after the shekels as well as
any one. One day in Yosemite when we were to go for an all day's
tramp and wished a luncheon prepared at the hotel, on learning of
the price they were to charge, he turned his back on the landlord
and dispatched one of us to the little store, where, for little
more than the hotel would have charged for one person, a luncheon
for five was procured, and then he really chuckled that he had been
able to snap his fingers at mine host, who had thought he had us
at his mercy.

I see I have kept Mr. Muir close to the footlights most of the
time, allowing Mr. Burroughs to hover in the background where
he blends with the neutral tones; but so it was in all the
thrilling scenes in the Western drama--Mr. Muir and the desert,
Mr. Muir and the petrified trees, Mr. Muir and the canon, Mr.
Muir and Yosemite; while with "Oom John," it was a blending with
the scene, a quiet, brooding absorption that made him seem a part
of them--the desert, the petrified trees, the Grand Canon, Yosemite,
and Mr. Burroughs inseparably linked with them, but seldom standing
out in sharp contrast to them, as the "Beloved Egotist" stood out
on all occasions.

Perhaps the most idyllic of all our days of camping and tramping
with John of Birds and John of Mountains was the day in Yosemite
when we tramped to Nevada and Vernal Falls, a distance of fourteen
miles, returning to Camp Ahwahnee at night, weary almost to
exhaustion, but strangely uplifted by the beauty and sublimity
n which we had lived and moved and had our being. Our brown tents
stood hospitably open, and out in the great open space in front we
sat around the campfire under the noble spruces and firs, the Merced
flowing softly on our right, mighty Yosemite Falls thundering away
in the distance, while the moon rose over Sentinel Rock, lending
a touch of ineffable beauty to the scene, and a voice, that is now
forever silenced, lent to the rhymes of the poets its richness of
varied emotion, as it chanted choicest selections from the Golden
Poems of all time. We lingered long after the other campers had
gone to rest, loath to bring to its close a day so replete with
sublimity and beauty. Mr. Burroughs summed it up as he said
good-night: "A day with the gods of eld--a holy day in the
temple of the gods."

JOHN BURROUGHS: AN APPRECIATION

"John is making an impression on his age--has come to stay--has
veritable, indisputable, dynamic gifts," Walt Whitman said
familiarly to a friend in 1888, in commenting on our subject's
place in literature. And of a letter written to him by Mr.
Burroughs that same year he said: "It is a June letter, worthy
of June; written in John's best outdoor mood. Why, it gets into
your blood, and makes you feel worth while. I sit here, helpless
as I am, and breathe it in like fresh air."

Minot Savage once asked in a sermon if it did not occur to his
hearers that John Burroughs gets a little more of June than the
rest of us do, and added that Mr. Burroughs had paid years of
consecration of thought and patient study of the lives of birds
and flowers, and so had bought the right to take June and all that
it means into his brain and heart and life; and that if the rest
of us wish these joys, we must purchase them on the same terms.
We are often led to ask what month he has not taken into his heart
and life, and given out again in his writings. Perhaps most of all
he has taken April into his heart, as his essay on it in "Birds and
Poets" will show:--

How it [April] touches one and makes him both glad and sad! The
voices of the arriving birds, the migrating fowls, the clouds of
pigeons sweeping across the sky or filling the woods, the elfin
horn of the first honey-bee venturing abroad in the middle of
the day, the clear piping of the little frogs in the marshes at
sundown, the camp-fire in the sugar-bush, the smoke seen afar
rising over the trees, the tinge of green that comes so suddenly
on the sunny knolls and slopes, the full translucent streams, the
waxing and warming sun,--how these things and others like them are
noted by the eager eye and ear! April is my natal month, and I am
born again into new delight and new surprises at each return of it.
Its name has an indescribable charm to me. Its two syllables are
like the calls of the first birds,--like that of the phoebe-bird,
or of the meadowlark.

But why continue? The whole essay breathes of swelling buds,
springing grass, calls of birds, April flowers, April odors,
and April's uncloying freshness and charm. As we realize what the
returning spring brings to this writer, we say with Bliss Carman:--

"Make [him] over. Mother April,
When the sap begins to stir."

I fancy there are many of his readers who will echo what one of
his friends has said to him: "For me the 3d of April will ever
stand apart in the calendar with a poignant beauty and sweetness
because it is your birthday. It is the keynote to which the whole
springtime music is set." Or another: "If April 3d comes in like
any other day, please understand that it will be because she does
not dare to show how glad she is over her own doings." On another
birthday, the same correspondent says: "I find that you are so
inwoven with the spring-time that I shall never again be able to
resolve the season into its elements. But I am the richer for it.
I feel a sort of compassion for one who has never seen the spring
through your eyes."

Mr. Burroughs puts his reader into close and sympathetic communion
with the open-air world as no other literary naturalist has done.
Gilbert White reported with painstaking fidelity the natural
history of Selborne; Thoreau gave Thoreau with glimpses of nature
thrown in; Richard Jefferies, in dreamy, introspective descriptions
of rare beauty and delicacy, portrayed his own mystical impressions
of nature; but Mr. Burroughs takes us with him to the homes and
haunts of the wild creatures, sets us down in their midst, and lets
us see and hear and feel just what is going on. We read his books
and echo Whitman's verdict on them: "They take me outdoors! God
bless outdoors!" And since God /has/ blessed outdoors, we say, "God
bless John Burroughs for taking us out of doors with him!"

Our writer never prates about nature, telling us to look and
admire. He loves the common, everyday life about him, sees it
more intimately than you or I see it, and tells about it so simply
and clearly that he begets a like feeling in his reader. It was
enjoined of the early Puritans "to walke honestlie in the sweete
fields and woodes." How well our friend has obeyed this injunction!

And what an unobtrusive lover he is! Although it is through him that
his mistress stands revealed, it is not until we look closely that
we spy her adorer in the background, intent only on unveiling her
charms. How does he do this? First by succumbing himself--Nature's
graces, her inconsistencies, even her objectionable traits appeal to
him. Like the true lover, he is captivated by each of her phases,
and surrenders himself without reserve. Such homage makes him the
recipient of her choicest treasures, her most adorable revelations.

[Illustration: Mr. Burroughs sitting for a Statuette. From a
photograph by Charles S. Olcott]

I have mentioned Gilbert White's contributions to the literature
about nature: one must admire the man's untiring enthusiasm, but his
book is mainly a storehouse of facts; how rarely does he invest the
facts with charm! To pry into nature's secrets and conscientiously
report them seems to be the aim of the English parson; but we get
so little of the parson himself. What were his feelings about
all these things he has been at such pains to record? The things
themselves are not enough. It is not alluring to be told soberly:--

Hedge-hogs abound in my garden and fields. The manner in which they
eat the roots of the plaintain in the grass walk is very curious;
with their upper mandible, which is much larger than the lower,
they bore under the plant, and so eat the root off upward, leaving
the tuft of leaves untouched.

And so on. By way of contrast, see how Mr. Burroughs treats
a similar subject. After describing the porcupine, mingling
description and human encounter, thereby enlisting the reader's
interest, he says:--

In what a peevish, injured tone the creature did complain of our
unfair tactics! He protested and protested, and whimpered and
scolded like some infirm old man tormented by boys. His game
after we led him forth was to keep himself as much as possible
in the shape of a ball, but with two sticks and the cord we
finally threw him over on his back and exposed his quill-less
and vulnerable under side, when he fairly surrendered and seemed
to say, "Now you may do with me as you like."

Here one gets the porcupine and Mr. Burroughs too.

Thoreau keeps his reader at arm's length, invites and repels at
the same time, piques one by his spiciness, and exasperates by
his opinionatedness. You want to see his bean-field, but know
you would be an intruder. He might even tell you to your face
that he was happiest the mornings when nobody called. He likes
to advise and berate, but at long range. Speaking of these two
writers, Whitman once said, "Outdoors taught Burroughs gentle
things about men--it had no such effect upon Thoreau."

Richard Jefferies appeals to lovers of nature and lovers of
literature as well. He has the poet's eye and is a sympathetic
spectator, but seldom gives one much to carry away. His
descriptions, musical as they are, barely escape being wearisome
at times. In his "Pageant of Summer" he babbles prettily of green
fields, but it is a long, long summer and one is hardly sorry to
see its close. In some of his writings he affects one unpleasantly,
gives an uncanny feeling; one divines the invalid as well as the
mystic back of them; there is a hectic flush, perhaps a neurotic
taint. Beautiful, yes, but not the beauty of health and sanity. It
is the same indescribable feeling I get in reading that pathetically
beautiful book, "The Road-Mender," by "Michael Fairless"--the gleam
of the White Gate is seen all along the Road, though the writer
strives so bravely to keep it hidden till it must open to let him
pass. One of the purest gems of Jefferies--"Hours of Spring"--has
a pathos and haunting melody of compelling poignancy. It is like
a white violet or a hepatica.

But with Mr. Burroughs we feel how preeminently sane and healthy
he is. His essays have the perennial charm of the mountain brooks
that flow down the hills and through the fertile valleys of his
Catskill home. They are redolent of the soil, of leaf mould,
of the good brown earth. His art pierces through our habitual
indifference to Nature and kindles our interest in, not her beauty
alone, but in her rugged, uncouth, and democratic qualities.

Like the true walker that he describes, he himself "is not merely
a spectator of the panorama of nature, but is a participator in it.
He experiences the country he passes through,--tastes it, feels it,
absorbs it." Let us try this writer by his own test. He says:
"When one tries to report nature he has to remember that every
object has a history which involves its surroundings, and that the
depth of the interest which it awakens in us is in the proportion
that its integrity in this respect is preserved." He must, as we
know Mr. Burroughs does, bring home the river and the sky when he
brings home the sparrow that he finds singing at dawn on the alder
bough; must make us see and hear the bird /on the bough/, and this is
worth a whole museum of stuffed and labeled specimens. To do this
requires a peculiar gift, one which our essayist has to an unusual
degree--an imagination that goes straight to the heart of whatever
he writes about, combined with a verbal magic that re-creates what
he has seen. Things are felicitously seen by Mr. Burroughs, and
then felicitously said. A dainty bit in Sidney's "Apologie for
Poetrie" seems to me aptly to characterize our author's prose: "The
uttering sweetly and properly the conceits of the minde, which is
the end of speech."

One can pick out at random from his books innumerable poetic
conceits; the closed gentian is the "nun among flowers"; a patch
of fringed polygalas resembles a "flock of rose-purple butterflies"
alighted on the ground; the male and female flowers of the early
everlasting are "found separated from each other in well-defined
groups, like men and women in an old-fashioned country church";
"the note of the pewee is a human sigh"; the bloodroot--"a
full-blown flower with a young one folded in a leaf beneath it,
only the bud emerging, like the head of a papoose protruding
from its mother's blanket." Speaking of the wild orchids known
as "lady's-slippers," see the inimitable way in which he puts
you on the spot where they grow: "Most of the floral ladies
leave their slippers in swampy places in the woods, only the
stemless one (/Cypripedium acaule/) leaves hers on dry ground
before she reaches the swamp, commonly under evergreen trees
where the carpet of pine needles will not hurt her feet."
Almost always he invests his descriptions with some human
touch that gives them rare charm--nature and human nature
blended--if it is merely the coming upon a red clover
in England--

"The first red clover head just bloomed . . . but like
the people I meet, it has a ruddier cheek than those at home."

When we ask ourselves what it is that makes his essays so engaging,
we conclude it is largely due to their lucidity, spontaneity, and
large simplicity--qualities which make up a style original, fresh,
convincing. His writing, whether about nature, literature,
science, or philosophy, is always suggestive, potent, pithy; his
humor is delicious; he says things in a crisp, often racy, way.
Yet what a sense of leisureliness one has in reading him, as well
as a sense of companionability!

What distinguishes him most, perhaps, is his vivid and poetic
apprehension of the mere fact. He never flings dry facts at us,
but facts are always his inspiration. He never seeks to go behind
them, and seldom to use them as symbols, as does Thoreau. Thoreau
preaches and teaches always; Mr. Burroughs, never. The facts
themselves fill him with wonder and delight--a wonder and delight
his reader shares. The seasons, the life of the birds and the
animals, the face of nature, the ever new, the ever common day--all
kindle his enthusiasm and refresh his soul. The witchery of the
ideal is upon his page without doubt, but he will not pervert
natural history one jot or tittle for the sake of making a pretty
story. His whole aim is to invest the fact with living interest
without in the least lessening its value as a fact. He does not
deceive himself by what he wants to be true; the scientist in him
is always holding the poet in check. Of all contemporary writers
in this field, he is the one upon whom we can always depend to be
intellectually honest. He has an abiding hankering after the true,
the genuine, the real; cannot stand, and never could stand, any
tampering with the truth. Had he been Cromwell's portrait painter,
he would have delighted in his subject's injunction: "Paint me as I
am, mole and all." And he would have made the mole interesting; he
has done so, but that is a mole of another color.

This instinct for the truth being so strong in him, he knows it
when he sees it in others; he detects its absence, too; and has
no patience and scant mercy for those past-masters in the art of
blinking facts,--those natural-history romancers who, realizing
that "the crowd must have emphatic warrant," are not content with
the infinite Variety of nature, but must needs spend their art in
the wasteful and ridiculous excess of painting the lily, perfuming
the violet, and giving to the rainbow an added hue. Accordingly,
when one warps the truth to suit his purpose, especially in the
realm of nature, he must expect this hater of shams to raise a
warning voice--"Beware the wolf in sheep's clothing!" But he never
cries "Wolf!" when there is no wolf, and he gives warm and generous
praise to deserving ones.

It has surprised some of his readers, who know how kindly he is
by nature, and how he shrinks from witnessing pain, in beast or
man, much less inflicting it, to see his severity when nature is
traduced--for he shows all the fight and fury and all the defense of
the mother bird when her young are attacked. He won't suffer even a
porcupine to be misrepresented without bristling up in its defense.

I have said that he never preaches, never seeks to give a moral
twist to his observations of nature, but I recall a few instances
where he does do a bit of moralizing; for example, when he speaks
of the calmness and dignity of the hawk when attacked by crows
or kingbirds: "He seldom deigns to notice his noisy and furious
antagonist, but deliberately wheels about in that aerial spiral,
and mounts and mounts till his pursuers grow dizzy and return to
earth again. It is quite original, this mode of getting rid of an
unworthy opponent--rising to heights where the braggart is dazed and
bewildered and loses his reckoning! I'm not sure but it is worthy
of imitation." Or, in writing of work on the farm, especially
stone-fence making, he speaks of clearing the fields of the stones
that are built into boundaries: "If there are ever sermons in
stones, it is when they are built into a stone wall--turning your
hindrances into helps, shielding your crops behind the obstacles
to your husbandry, making the enemies of the plough stand guard
over its products." But do we find such sermonizing irksome?

Just as "all architecture is what you do to it when you look upon
it," so is all nature. Lovers of Nature muse and dream and invite
their own souls. They interpret themselves, not Nature. She
reflects their thoughts and minds, gives them, after all, only
what they bring to her. And the writer who brings much--much of
insight, of devotion, of sympathy--is sure to bring much away for
his reader's delectation. Does not this account for the sense of
intimacy which his reader has with the man, even before meeting
him?--the feeling that if he ever does meet him, it will be as
a friend, not as a stranger? And when one does meet him, and
hears him speak, one almost invariably thinks: "He talks just
as he writes." To read him after that is to hear the very tones
of his voice.

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