Our Friend John Burroughs Part 8

You ask me to tell you more about myself, my life, how it has been with me, etc. It is an inviting subject. How an old man likes to run on about himself!

I see that my life has been more of a holiday than most persons', much more than was my father's or his father's. I have picnicked all along the way. I have on the whole been gay and satisfied. I have had no great crosses or burdens to bear; no great afflictions, except such as must come to all who live; neither poverty, nor riches. I have had uniform good health, true friends, and some congenial companions. I have done, for the most part, what I wanted to do. Some drudgery I have had, that is, in uncongenial work on the farm, in teaching, in clerking, and in bank-examining; but amid all these things I have kept an outlook, an open door, as it were, out into the free fields of nature, and a buoyant feeling that I would soon be there.

My farm life as a boy was at least a half-holiday. The fishing, the hunting, the berrying, the Sundays on the hills or in the woods, the sugar-making, the apple-gathering--all had a holiday character. But the hoeing corn, and picking up potatoes, and cleaning the cow stables, had little of this character. I have never been a cog in the wheel of any great concern. I have never had to sink or lose my individuality. I have been under no exacting master or tyrant.... I have never been a slave to any bad habit, as smoking, drinking, over-feeding. I have had no social or political ambitions; society has not curtailed my freedom or dictated my dress or habits. Neither has any religious order or any clique.

I have had no axe to grind. I have gone with such men and women as I liked, irrespective of any badge of wealth or reputation or social prestige that they might wear. I have looked for simple pleasures everywhere, and have found them. I have not sought for costly pleasures, and do not want them--pleasures that cost money, or health, or time. The great things, the precious things of my life, have been without money and without price, as common as the air.

Life has laid no urgent mission upon me. My gait has been a leisurely one. I am not bragging of it; I am only stating a fact. I have never felt called upon to reform the world. I have doubtless been culpably indifferent to its troubles and perplexities, and sins and sufferings.

I lend a hand occasionally here and there in my own neighborhood, but I trouble myself very little about my neighbors--their salvation or their d.a.m.nation. I go my own way and do my own work.

I have loved nature, I have loved the animals, I have loved my fellow-men. I have made my own whatever was fair and of good report. I have loved the thoughts of the great thinkers and the poems of the great poets, and the devout lines of the great religious souls. I have not looked afar off for my joy and entertainment, but in things near at hand, that all may have on equal terms. I have been a loving and dutiful son, and a loving and dutiful father, and a good neighbor. I have got much satisfaction out of life; it has been worth while.

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 circ.u.mstances 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 compet.i.tion, 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 j.a.pan, 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 gra.s.s, 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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sion, 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 emanc.i.p.ated 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 h.e.l.l 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 G.o.d, as these same old people would have said, has never cast a shadow over my mind or conscience--as if G.o.d 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 Th.o.r.eau. 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-a.n.a.lysis 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 ch.o.r.es 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 a.n.a.logy, 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-gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sages 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-a.n.a.lyst 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-a.n.a.lysis 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 inapt.i.tude 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 embarra.s.sed 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-a.s.sertion, 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-a.n.a.lysis here given.

But few writers could compa.s.s 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:--