Our Friend John Burroughs

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I have not been a burden-bearer; for shame be it said, perhaps,
when there are so many burdens to be borne by some one. I have
borne those that came in my way, or that circumstances put upon
me, and have at least pulled my own weight. I have had my share
of the holiday spirit; I have had a social holiday, a moral
holiday, a business holiday. I have gone a-fishing while others
were struggling and groaning and losing their souls in the great
social or political or business maelstrom. I know, too, I have
gone a-fishing while others have labored in the slums and given
their lives to the betterment of their fellows. But I have been
a good fisherman, and I should have made a poor missionary, or
reformer, or leader of any crusade against sin and crime. I am
not a fighter, I dislike any sort of contest, or squabble, or
competition, or storm. My strength is in my calm, my serenity,
my sunshine. In excitement I lose my head, and my heels, too. I
cannot carry any citadel by storm. I lack the audacity and spirit
of the stormer. I must reduce it slowly or steal it quietly.
I lack moral courage, though I have plenty of physical and
intellectual courage. I could champion Walt Whitman when nearly
every contemporaneous critic and poet were crying him down, but
I utterly lack the moral courage to put in print what he dared to.
I have wielded the "big stick" against the nature-fakers, but I am
very uncomfortable under any sort of blame or accusation. It is
so much easier for me to say yes than no. My moral fibre is soft
compared to my intellectual. I am a poor preacher, an awkward
moralizer. A moral statement does not interest me unless it can
be backed up by natural truth; it must have intellectual value.
The religious dogmas interest me if I can find a scientific basis
for them, otherwise not at all.

I shall shock you by telling you I am not much of a patriot. I
have but little national pride. If we went to war with a foreign
power to-morrow, my sympathies would be with the foreigner if
I thought him in the right. I could gladly see our navy knocked
to pieces by Japan, for instance, if we were in the wrong. I
have absolutely no state pride, any more than I have county or
town pride, or neighborhood pride. But I make it up in family
or tribal affection.

I am too much preoccupied, too much at home with myself, to feel
any interest in many things that interest my fellows. I have
aimed to live a sane, normal, healthy life; or, rather, I have an
instinct for such a life. I love life, as such, and I am quickly
conscious of anything that threatens to check its even flow. I
want a full measure of it, and I want it as I do my spring water,
clear and sweet and from the original sources. Hence I have always
chafed in cities, I must live in the country. Life in the cities
is like the water there--a long way from the original sources, and
more or less tainted by artificial conditions.

The current of the lives of many persons, I think, is like a muddy
stream. They lack the instinct for health, and hence do not know
when the vital current is foul. They are never really well. They
do not look out for personal inward sanitation. Smokers, drinkers,
coffee-tipplers, gluttonous eaters, diners-out, are likely to lose
the sense of perfect health, of a clear, pure life-current, of
which I am thinking. The dew on the grass, the bloom on the grape,
the sheen on the plumage, are suggestions of the health that is
within the reach of most of us.

The least cloud or film in my mental skies mars or stops my work.
I write with my body quite as much as with my mind. How persons
whose bread of life is heavy, so to speak,--no lightness or buoyancy
or airiness at all,--can make good literature is a mystery to me;
or those who stimulate themselves with drugs or alcohol or coffee.
I would live so that I could get tipsy on a glass of water, or find
a spur in a whiff of morning air.

Such as my books are, the bloom of my life is in them; no morbidity,
or discontent, or ill health, or angry passion, has gone to their
making. The iridescence of a bird's plumage, we are told, is not
something extraneous; it is a prismatic effect. So the color in my
books is not paint; it is health. It is probably nothing to brag
of; much greater books have been the work of confirmed invalids.
All I can say is that the minds of these inspired invalids have
not seemed to sustain so close a relation to their bodies as my
mind does to my body. Their powers seem to have been more purely
psychic. Look at Stevenson--almost bedridden all his life, yet
behold the felicity of his work! How completely his mind must have
been emancipated from the infirmities of his body! It is clearly
not thus with me. My mind is like a flame that depends entirely
upon the good combustion going on in the body. Hence, I can never
write in the afternoon, because this combustion is poorest then.

Life has been to me simply an opportunity to learn and enjoy, and,
through my books, to share my enjoyment with others. I have had no
other ambition. I have thirsted to know things, and to make the
most of them. The universe is to me a grand spectacle that fills me
with awe and wonder and joy, and with intense curiosity. I have had
no such religious burden to bear as my fathers did--the conviction
of sin, the struggle, the agony, the despair of a soul that fears
it is lost. The fear of hell has never troubled me. Of sin in the
theological sense, the imputed sin of Adam's transgression, which so
worried the old people, I have not had a moment's concern. That I
have given my heart to Nature instead of to God, as these same old
people would have said, has never cast a shadow over my mind or
conscience--as if God would not get all that belonged to Him, and
as if love of his works were not love of Him! I have acquiesced in
things as they are, and have got all the satisfaction out of them
that I could.

Over my personal sins and shortcomings, I have not been as much
troubled as I should; none of us are. We do not see them in relief
as others do; they are like the color of our eyes, or our hair, or
the shapes of our noses.

I do not know that it is true that my moral fibre is actually weak.
If I may draw a figure from geology, it is probably true that my
moral qualities are the softer rock in the strata that make up my
being--the easiest worn away. I see that I carry the instinct of
the naturalist into all my activities. If a thing is natural,
sane, wholesome, that is enough. Whether or not it is conventionally
correct, or square with the popular conception of morality, does not
matter to me.

I undoubtedly lack the heroic fibre. My edge is much easier turned
than was that, say, of Thoreau. Austerity would ill become me. You
would see through the disguise. Yes, there is much soft rock in my
make-up. Is that why I shrink from the wear and tear of the world?

The religious storm and upheaval that I used to hear so much of
in my youth is impossible with me. I am liable to deep-seated
enthusiasms; but to nothing like a revolution in my inward life,
nothing sudden, nothing violent. I can't say that there has been
any abandonment of my opinions on important subjects; there has
been new growth and evolution, I hope. The emphasis of life shifts,
now here, now there; it is up hill and down dale, but there is
no change of direction. . . . Certain deep-seated tendencies and
instincts have borne me on. I have gravitated naturally to the
things that were mine.

I could not make anything I chose of myself; I could only be what I
am. In my youth I once "went forward" at a "protracted meeting,"
but nothing came of it. The change in me that I was told would
happen did not happen, and I never went again. My nature was too
equable, too self-poised, to be suddenly overturned and broken up.

I am not a bit gregarious. I cannot herd with other men and be
"Hail, fellow, well met!" with them as I wish I could. I am much
more at home with women; we seem to understand one another better.
Put me with a lot of men, and we naturally separate as oil and water
separate. On shipboard it is rarely that any of the men take to
me, or I to them--I do not smoke or drink or tell stories, or talk
business or politics, and the men have little use for me. On my
last voyage across the Atlantic, the only man who seemed to notice
me, or to whom I felt drawn at all, was a Catholic priest. Real
countrymen, trappers, hunters, and farmers, I seem to draw near to.
On the Harriman Alaskan Expedition the two men I felt most at home
with were Fred Dellenbaugh, the artist and explorer, and Captain
Kelly, the guide. Can you understand this? Do you see why men
do not, as a rule, care for me, and why women do?

I accuse myself of want of sociability. Probably I am too
thin-skinned. A little more of the pachyderm would help me in
this respect.

Some day I will give you more self-analysis and self-criticism.

I am what you might call an extemporaneous writer--I write without
any previous study or preparation, save in so far as my actual
life from day to day has prepared me for it. I do not work up
my subject, or outline it, or sketch it in the rough. When I
sit down to write upon any theme, like that of my "Cosmopolitan"
article last April ["What Life Means to Me," 1906], or of my
various papers on animal intelligence, I do not know what I have
to say on the subject till I delve into my mind and see what I
find there. The writing is like fishing or hunting, or sifting
the sand for gold--I am never sure of what I shall find. All I
want is a certain feeling, a bit of leaven, which I seem to refer
to some place in my chest--not my heart, but to a point above that
and nearer the centre of the chest--the place that always glows or
suffuses when one thinks of any joy or good tidings that is coming
his way. It is a kind of hunger for that subject; it warms me a
little to think of it, a pleasant thrill runs through me; or it
is something like a lover's feeling for his sweetheart--I long to
be alone with it, and to give myself to it. I am sure I shall
have a good time. Hence, my writing is the measure of my life.
I can write only about what I have previously felt and lived. I
have no legerdemain to invoke things out of the air, or to make a
dry branch bud and blossom before the eyes. I must look into my
heart and write, or remain dumb. Robert Louis Stevenson said one
should be able to write eloquently on a broomstick, and so he could.
Stevenson had the true literary legerdemain; he was master of the
art of writing; he could invest a broomstick with charm; if it
remained a broomstick, it was one on which the witches might carry
you through the air at night. Stevenson had no burden of meaning
to deliver to the world; his subject never compelled him to write;
but he certainly could invest common things and thoughts with rare
grace and charm. I wish I had more of this gift, this facility
of pen, apart from any personal interest in the subject. I could
not grow eloquent over a broomstick, unless it was the stick of
the broom that used to stand in the corner behind the door in the
old kitchen at home--the broom with which Mother used to sweep the
floor, and sweep off the doorstones, glancing up to the fields and
hills as she finished and turned to go in; the broom with which we
used to sweep the snow from our boots and trouser-legs when we came
from school or from doing the chores in winter. Here would be a
personal appeal that would probably find me more inevitably than
it would Stevenson.

I have never been in the habit of doing a thing, of taking a walk,
or making an excursion, for the purpose of writing it up. Hence,
when magazine editors have asked me to go South or to California,
or here or there, to write the text to go with the pictures their
artist would make, I have felt constrained to refuse. The thought
that I was expected to write something would have burdened me and
stood in the way of my enjoyment, and unless there is enjoyment,
there is no writing with me.

I was once tempted into making an excursion for one of the magazines
to a delightful place along the Jersey coast in company with an
artist, and a memorable day it was, too, with plenty of natural and
of human interest, but nothing came of it--my perverse pen would not
do what it was expected to do; it was no longer a free pen.

When I began observing the birds, nothing was further from my
thoughts than writing them up. I watched them and ran after them
because I loved them and was happy with them in the fields and
woods; the writing came as an afterthought, and as a desire to share
my enjoyment with others. Hence, I have never carried a notebook,
or collected data about nature in my rambles and excursions. What
was mine, what I saw with love and emotion, has always fused with
my mind, so that in the heat of writing it came back to me
spontaneously. What I have lived, I never lose.

My trip to Alaska came near being spoiled because I was expected
to write it up, and actually did so from day to day, before fusion
and absorption had really taken place. Hence my readers complain
that they do not find me in that narrative, do not find my stamp
or quality as in my other writings. And well they may say it.
I am conscious that I am not there as in the others; the fruit
was plucked before it had ripened; or, to use my favorite analogy,
the bee did not carry the nectar long enough to transform it into
honey. Had I experienced a more free and disinterested intercourse
with Alaskan nature, with all the pores of my mind open, the result
would certainly have been different. I might then, after the
experience had lain and ripened in my mind for a year or two, and
become my own, have got myself into it.

When I went to the Yellowstone National Park with President
Roosevelt, I waited over three years before writing up the trip.
I recall the President's asking me at the time if I took notes.
I said, "No; everything that interests me will stick to me like
a burr." And I may say here that I have put nothing in my writings
at any time that did not interest me. I have aimed in this to
please myself alone. I believe it to be true at all times that
what does not interest the writer will not interest his reader.

From the impromptu character of my writings come both their merits
and their defects--their fresh, unstudied character, and their want
of thoroughness and reference-book authority. I cannot, either in
my writing or in my reading, tolerate any delay, any flagging of
the interest, any beating about the bush, even if there is a bird
in it. The thought, the description, must move right along, and I
am impatient of all footnotes and quotations and asides.

A writer may easily take too much thought about his style, until
it obtrudes itself upon the reader's attention. I would have my
sentences appear as if they had never taken a moment's thought of
themselves, nor stood before the study looking-glass an instant. In
fact, the less a book appears written, the more like a spontaneous
product it is, the better I like it. This is not a justification of
carelessness or haste; it is a plea for directness, vitality,
motion. Those writers who are like still-water fishermen, whose
great virtues are patience and a tireless arm, never appealed to
me any more than such fishing ever did. I want something more like
a mountain brook--motion, variety, and the furthest possible remove
from stagnation.

Indeed, where can you find a better symbol of good style in
literature than a mountain brook after it is well launched towards
the lowlands--not too hurried, and not too loitering--limpid,
musical, but not noisy, full but not turbid, sparkling but not
frothy, every shallow quickly compensated for by a deep reach
of thought; the calm, lucid pools of meaning alternating with
the passages of rapid description, of moving eloquence or gay
comment--flowing, caressing, battling, as the need may be,
loitering at this point, hurrying at that, drawing together
here, opening out there--freshness, variety, lucidity, power.

[We wish that, like the brook, our self-analyst would "go on
forever"; but his stream of thought met some obstacle when he
had written thus far, and I have never been able to induce it
to resume its flow. I have, there-fore, selected a bit of
self-analysis from Mr. Burroughs's diary of December, 1884,
with which to close this subject. C.B.]

I have had to accomplish in myself the work of several generations.
None of my ancestors were men or women of culture; they knew
nothing of books. I have had to begin at the stump, and to rise
from crude things. I have felt the disadvantages which I have
labored under, as well as the advantages. The advantages are, that
things were not hackneyed with me, curiosity was not blunted, my
faculties were fresh and eager--a kind of virgin soil that gives
whatever charm and spontaneity my books possess, also whatever of
seriousness and religiousness. The disadvantages are an inaptitude
for scholarly things, a want of the steadiness and clearness of
the tone of letters, the need of a great deal of experimenting, a
certain thickness and indistinctness of accent. The farmer and
laborer in me, many generations old, is a little embarrassed in the
company of scholars; has to make a great effort to remember his
learned manners and terms.

The unliterary basis is the best to start from; it is the virgin
soil of the wilderness; but it is a good way to the college and
the library, and much work must be done. I am near to nature and
can write upon these themes with ease and success; this is my
proper field, as I well know. But bookish themes--how I flounder
about amid them, and have to work and delve long to get down to
the real truth about them in my mind!

In writing upon Emerson, or Arnold, or Carlyle, I have to begin, as
it were, and clear the soil, build a log hut, and so work up to the
point of view that is not provincial, but more or less metropolitan.

My best gift as a writer is my gift for truth; I have a thoroughly
honest mind, and know the truth when I see it. My humility, or
modesty, or want of self-assertion, call it what you please, is
also a help in bringing me to the truth. I am not likely to stand
in my own light; nor to mistake my own wants and whims for the
decrees of the Eternal. At least, if I make the mistake to-day,
I shall see my error to-morrow.

[The discerning reader can hardly fail to trace in the foregoing
unvarnished account of our subject's ancestry and environment many
of the factors which have contributed to the unique success he has
attained as a writer. Nor can he fail to trace a certain likeness,
of which our author seems unconscious, to his father. To his mother
he has credited most of his gifts as a writer, but to that childlike
unselfconsciousness which he describes in his father, we are
doubtless largely indebted for the candid self-analysis here given.

But few writers could compass such a thing, yet he has done it
simply and naturally, as he would write on any other topic in
which he was genuinely interested. To be naked and unashamed is
a condition lost by most of us long ago, but retained by a few who
still have many of the traits of the natural man. C.B.]

THE EARLY WRITINGS OF JOHN BURROUGHS

I once asked Mr. Burroughs about his early writings, his beginnings.
He replied, "They were small potatoes and few in a hill, although
at the time I evidently thought I was growing some big ones. I had
yet to learn, as every young writer has to learn, that big words do
not necessarily mean big thoughts." Later he sent me these maiden
efforts, with an account of when and where they appeared.

These early articles show that Mr. Burroughs was a born essayist.
They all took the essay form. In his reading, as he has said,
any book of essays was pretty sure to arrest his attention. He
seems early to have developed a hunger for the pure stuff of
literature--something that would feed his intellect at the same
time that it appealed to his aesthetic sense. Concerning his first
essays, he wrote me:--

The only significant thing about my first essays, written between
the ages of eighteen and twenty-three, is their serious trend of
thought; but the character of my early reading was serious and
philosophical. Locke and Johnson and Saint-Pierre and the others
no doubt left their marks upon me. I diligently held my mind down
to the grindstone of Locke's philosophy, and no doubt my mind was
made brighter and sharper by the process. Out of Saint-Pierre's
"Studies of Nature," a work I had never before heard of, I got
something, though it would be hard for me to say just what. The
work is a curious blending of such science as there was in his
time, with sentiment and fancy, and enlivened by a bright French
mind. I still look through it with interest, and find that it has
a certain power of suggestion for me yet.

He confessed that he was somewhat imposed upon by Dr. Johnson's
high-sounding platitudes. "A beginner," he said, "is very apt to
feel that if he is going to write, the thing to do is to write,
and get as far from the easy conversational manner as possible.
Let your utterances be measured and stately." At first he tried
to imitate Johnson, but soon gave that up. He was less drawn to
Addison and Lamb at the time, because they were less formal, and
seemingly less profound; and was slow in perceiving that the art
of good writing is the art of bringing one's mind and soul face
to face with that of the reader. How different that early attitude
from the penetrating criticism running through his "Literary
Values"; how different his stilted beginnings from his own limpid
prose as we know it, to read which is to forget that one is reading!

Mr. Burroughs's very first appearance in print was in a paper in
Delaware County, New York,--the Bloomfield "Mirror,"--on May 18,
1856. The article--"Vagaries vs. Spiritualism"--purports to be
written by "Philomath," of Roxbury, New York, who is none other
than John Burroughs, at the age of nineteen. It starts out showing
impatience at the unreasoning credulity of the superstitious
mind, and continues in a mildly derisive strain for about a column,
foreshadowing the controversial spirit which Mr. Burroughs displayed
many years later in taking to task the natural-history romancers.
The production was evidently provoked by a too credulous writer
on spiritualism in a previous issue of the "Mirror." I will quote
its first paragraph:--

Mr. Mirror,--Notwithstanding the general diffusion of knowledge
in the nineteenth century, it is a lamentable fact that some minds
are so obscured by ignorance, or so blinded by superstition, as to
rely with implicit confidence upon the validity of opinions which
have no foundation in nature, or no support by the deductions of
reason. But truth and error have always been at variance, and the
audacity of the contest has kept pace with the growing vigor of the
contending parties. Some straightforward, conscientious persons,
whose intentions are undoubtedly commendable, are so infatuated by
the sophistical theories of the spiritualist, or so tossed about on
the waves of public opinion, that they lose sight of truth and good
sense, and, like the philosopher who looked higher than was wise in
his stargazing, tumble into a ditch.

In 1859 or 1860, Mr. Burroughs began to contribute to the columns
of the "Saturday Press," an organ of the literary bohemians in
New York, edited by Henry Clapp. These were fragmentary things
of a philosophical cast, and were grouped under the absurd title
"Fragments from the Table of an Intellectual Epicure," by "All
Souls." There were about sixty of these fragments. I have
examined most of them; some are fanciful and far-fetched; some are
apt and felicitous; but all foreshadow the independent thinker and
observer, and show that this "Intellectual Epicure" was feeding on
strong meat and assimilating it.

I assume that it will interest the reader who knows Mr. Burroughs
only as the practiced writer of the past fifty years to see some of
his first sallies into literature, to trace the unlikeness to his
present style, and the resemblances here and there. Accordingly I
subjoin some extracts by "All Souls" from the time-stained pages of
the New York "Saturday Press" of 1859 and 1860:--

A principle of absolute truth, pointed with fact and feathered with
fancy, and shot from the bow-string of a master intellect, is one
of the most potent things under the sun. It sings like a bird of
peace to those who are not the object of its aim, but woe, woe to
him who is the butt of such terrible archery!

For a thing to appear heavy to us, it is necessary that we have
heft to balance against it; to appear strong, it is necessary that
we have strength; to appear great, it is necessary that we have
an idea of greatness. We must have a standard to measure by, and
that standard must be in ourselves. An ignorant peasant cannot
know that Bacon is so wise. To duly appreciate genius, you must
have genius; a pigmy cannot measure the strength of a giant. The
faculty that reads and admires, is the green undeveloped state of
the faculty that writes and creates.

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