March, 1909
My Dear Friend,—
You once asked me how, considering my antecedents and youthful environment, I accounted for myself; what sent me to Nature, and to writing about her, and to literature generally. I wish I could answer you satisfactorily, but I fear I cannot. I do not know, myself; I can only guess at it.
I have always looked upon myself as a kind of sport; I came out of the air quite as much as out of my family. All my weaknesses and insufficiencies—and there are a lot of them—are inherited, but of my intellectual qualities, there is not much trace in my immediate forbears. No scholars or thinkers or lovers of books, or men of intellectual pursuits for several generations back of me—all obscure farmers or laborers in humble fields, rather grave, religiously inclined men, I gather, sober, industrious, good citizens, good neighbors, correct livers, but with no very shining qualities. My four brothers were of this stamp—home-bodies, rather timid, non-aggressive men, somewhat below the average in those qualities and powers that insure worldly success—the kind of men that are so often crowded to the wall. I can see myself in some of them, especially in Hiram, who had daydreams, who was always going West, but never went; who always wanted some plaything—fancy sheep or pigs or poultry; who was a great lover of bees and always kept them; who was curious about strange lands, but who lost heart and hope as soon as he got beyond the sight of his native hills; and who usually got cheated in every bargain he made. Perhaps it is because I see myself in him that Hiram always seemed nearer to me than any of the rest. I have at times his vagueness, his indefiniteness, his irresolution, and his want of spirit when imposed upon.
Poor Hiram! One fall in his simplicity he took his fancy Cotswold sheep to the State Fair at Syracuse, never dreaming but that a farmer entirely outside of all the rings and cliques, and quite unknown, could get the prize if his stock was the best. I can see him now, hanging about the sheep-pens, homesick, insignificant, unnoticed, living on cake and pie, and wondering why a prize label was not put upon his sheep. Poor Hiram! Well, he marched up the hill with his sheep, and then he marched down again, a sadder and, I hope, a wiser man.
Once he ordered a fancy rifle, costing upwards of a hundred dollars, of a gunsmith in Utica. When the rifle came, it did not suit him, was not according to specifications; so he sent it back. Not long after that the man failed and no rifle came, and the money was not returned. Then Hiram concluded to make a journey out there. I was at home at the time, and can see him yet as he started off along the road that June day, off for Utica on foot. Again he marched up the hill, and then marched down, and no rifle or money ever came.
For years he had the Western fever, and kept his valise under his bed packed ready for the trip. Once he actually started and got as far as White Pigeon, Michigan. There his courage gave out, and he came back. Still he kept his valise packed, but the end of his life's journey came before he was ready to go West again.
Hiram, as you know, came to live with me at Slabsides during the last years of his life. He had made a failure of it on the old farm, after I had helped him purchase it; nearly everything had gone wrong, indoors and out; and he was compelled to give it up. So he brought his forty or more skips of bees to West Park and lived with me, devoting himself, not very successfully, to bee-culture. He loved to "fuss" with bees. I think the money he got for his honey looked a little more precious to him than other money, just as the silver quarters I used to get when a boy for the maple sugar I made had a charm and a value no quarters have ever had in my eyes since.
That thing in Hiram that was so appealed to by his bee-culture, and by any fancy strain of sheep or poultry, is strong in me, too, and has played an important part in my life. If I had not taken it out in running after wild nature and writing about it I should probably have been a bee-man, or a fancy-stock farmer. As it is, I have always been a bee-lover, and have usually kept several swarms. Ordinary farming is prosy and tiresome compared with bee-farming. Combined with poultry-raising, it always had special attractions for me. When I was a farm boy of twelve or thirteen years, one of our neighbors had a breed of chickens with large topknots that filled my eye completely. My brother and I used to hang around the Chase henyard for hours, admiring and longing for those chickens. The impression those fowls made upon me seems as vivid to-day as it was when first made. The topknot was the extra touch—the touch of poetry that I have always looked for in things, and that Hiram, in his way, craved and sought for, too.
There was something, too, in my maternal grandfather that probably foreshadowed the nature-lover and nature-writer. In him it took the form of a love of angling, and a love for the Bible. He went from the Book to the stream, and from the stream to the Book, with great regularity. I do not remember that he ever read the newspapers, or any other books than the Bible and the hymn-book. When he was over eighty years, old he would woo the trout-streams with great success, and between times would pore over the Book till his eyes were dim. I do not think he ever joined the church, or ever made an open profession of religion, as was the wont in those days; but he had the religious nature which he nursed upon the Bible. When a mere boy, as I have before told you, he was a soldier under Washington, and when the War of 1812 broke out, and one of his sons was drafted, he was accepted and went in his stead. The half-wild, adventurous life of the soldier suited him better than the humdrum of the farm. From him, as I have said, I get the dash of Celtic blood in my veins—that almost feminine sensibility and tinge of melancholy that, I think, shows in all my books. That emotional Celt, ineffectual in some ways, full of longings and impossible dreams, of quick and noisy anger, temporizing, revolutionary, mystical, bold in words, timid in action—surely that man is in me, and surely he comes from my revolutionary ancestor, Grandfather Kelly.
I think of the Burroughs branch of my ancestry as rather retiring, peace-loving, solitude-loving men—men not strongly sketched in on the canvas of life, not self-assertive, never roistering or uproarious—law-abiding, and church-going. I gather this impression from many sources, and think it is a correct one.
Oh, the old farm days! how the fragrance of them still lingers in my heart! the spring with its farm, the returning birds, and the full, lucid trout-streams; the summer with its wild berries, its haying, its cool, fragrant woods; the fall with its nuts, its game, its apple-gathering, its holidays; the winter with its school, its sport on ice and snow, its apple-bins in the cellar, its long nights by the fireside, its voice of fox-bounds on the mountains, its sound of flails in the barn—how much I still dream about these things!
But I am slow in keeping my promise to try to account for myself. Yet all these things are a part of my antecedents; they entered into my very blood—father and mother and brothers and sisters, and the homely life of the farm, all entered into and became a part of that which I am.
I am certain, as I have told you before, that I derived more from my mother than from my father. I have more of her disposition—her yearning, breeding nature, her subdued and neutral tones, her curiosity, her love of animals, and of wild nature generally. Father was neither a hunter nor a fisherman, and, I think, was rarely conscious of the beauty of nature around him. The texture of his nature was much less fine than that of Mother's, and he was a much easier problem to read; he was as transparent as glass. Mother had more of the stuff of poetry in her soul, and a deeper, if more obscure, background to her nature. That which makes a man a hunter or a fisherman simply sent her forth in quest of wild berries. What a berry-picker she was! How she would work to get the churning out of the way so she could go out to the berry lot! It seemed to heal and refresh her to go forth in the hill meadows for strawberries, or in the old bushy bark-peelings for raspberries. The last work she did in the world was to gather a pail of blackberries as she returned one September afternoon from a visit to my sister's, less than a mile away.
I am as fond of going forth for berries as my mother was, even to this day. Every June I must still make one or two excursions to distant fields for wild strawberries, or along the borders of the woods for black raspberries, and I never go without thinking of Mother. You could not see all that I bring home with me in my pail on such occasions; if you could, you would see the traces of daisies and buttercups and bobolinks, and the blue skies, with thoughts of Mother and the Old Home, that date from my youth. I usually eat some of the berries in bread and milk, as I was wont to do in the old days, and am, for the moment, as near a boy again as it is possible for me to be.
(Illustration of One of Mr. Burroughs's Favorite Seats, Roxbury, New York. From a photograph by Clifton Johnson)
No doubt my life as a farm boy has had much to do with my subsequent love of nature, and my feeling of kinship with all rural things. I feel at home with them; they are bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. It seems to me a man who was not born and reared in the country can hardly get Nature into his blood, and establish such intimate and affectionate relations with her, as can the born countryman. We are so susceptible and so plastic in youth; we take things so seriously; they enter into and color and feed the very currents of our being. As a child I think I must have been more than usually fluid and impressionable, and that my affiliations with open-air life and objects were very hearty and thorough. As I grow old I am experiencing what, I suppose, all men experience, more or less; my subsequent days slough off, or fade away, more and more, leaving only the days of my youth as a real and lasting possession.
When I began, in my twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth year, to write about the birds, I found that I had only to unpack the memories of the farm boy within me to get at the main things about the common ones. I had unconsciously absorbed the knowledge that gave the life and warmth to my page. Take that farm boy out of my books, out of all the pages in which he is latent as well as visibly active, and you have robbed them of something vital and fundamental, you have taken from the soil much of its fertility. At least, so it seems to me, though in this business of self-analysis I know one may easily go far astray. It is probably quite impossible correctly to weigh and appraise the many and complex influences and elements that have entered into one's life.
When I look back to that twilight of early youth, to that half-mythical borderland of the age of six or seven years, or even earlier, I can see but few things that, in the light of my subsequent life, have much significance. One is the impression made upon me by a redbird which the "hired girl" brought in from the woodpile, one day with a pail of chips. She had found the bird lying dead upon the ground. That vivid bit of color in the form of a bird has never faded from my mind, though I could not have been more than three or four years old.
Another bird incident, equally vivid, I have related in "Wake-Robin," in the chapter called "The Invitation,"—the vision of the small bluish bird with a white spot on its wing, one Sunday when I was six or seven years old, while roaming with my brothers in the "Deacon woods" near home. The memory of that bird stuck to me as a glimpse of a world of birds that I knew not of.
Still another bird incident that is stamped upon my memory must have occurred about the same time. Some of my brothers and an older boy neighbor and I were walking along a road in the woods when a brown bird flew down from a bush upon the ground in front of us. "A brown thrasher," the older boy said. It was doubtless either the veery, or the hermit thrush, and this was my first clear view of it. Thus it appears that birds stuck to me, impressed me from the first. Very early in my life the coming of the bluebird, the phoebe, the song sparrow, and the robin, in the spring, were events that stirred my emotions, and gave a new color to the day. When I had found a bluebird's nest in the cavity of a stump or a tree, I used to try to capture the mother bird by approaching silently and clapping my hand over the hole; in this I sometimes succeeded, though, of course, I never harmed the bird. I used to capture song sparrows in a similar way, by clapping my hat over the nest in the side of the bank along the road.
I can see that I was early drawn to other forms of wild life, for I distinctly remember when a small urchin prying into the private affairs of the "peepers" in the marshes in early spring, sitting still a long time on a log in their midst, trying to spy out and catch them in the act of peeping. And this I succeeded in doing, discovering one piping from the top of a bulrush, to which he clung like a sailor to a mast; I finally allayed the fears of one I had captured till he sat in the palm of my hand and piped—a feat I have never been able to repeat since.
I studied the ways of the bumblebees also, and had names of my own for all the different kinds. One summer I made it a point to collect bumblebee honey, and I must have gathered a couple of pounds. I found it very palatable, though the combs were often infested with parasites. The small red-banded bumblebees that lived in large colonies in holes in the ground afforded me the largest yields. A large bee, with a broad light-yellow band, was the ugliest customer to deal with. It was a fighter and would stick to its enemy like grim death, following me across the meadow and often getting in my hair, and a few times up my trousers leg, where I had it at as great a disadvantage as it had me. It could stab, and I could pinch, and one blow followed the other pretty rapidly.
As a child I was always looked upon and spoken of as an "odd one" in the family, even by my parents. Strangers, and relatives from a distance, visiting at the house, would say, after looking us all over, "That is not your boy," referring to me, "who is he?" And I am sure I used to look the embarrassment I felt at not being as the others were. I did not want to be set apart from them or regarded as an outsider. As this was before the days of photography, there are no pictures of us as children, so I can form no opinion of how I differed in my looks from the others. I remember hearing my parents say that I showed more of the Kelly—Mother's family.
I early "took to larnin'," as Father used to say, differing from my brothers and sisters in this respect. I quickly and easily distanced them all in the ordinary studies. I had gone through Dayball's Arithmetic while two of my older brothers were yet in addition. "Larnin'" came very hard to all of them except to Hiram and me, and Hiram did not have an easy time of it, though he got through his Dayball, and studied Greenleaf's Grammar.
There was a library of a couple of dozen of volumes in the district, and I used to take home books from it. They were usually books of travel or of adventure. I remember one, especially, a great favorite, "Murphy, the Indian Killer." I must have read this book several times. Novels, or nature books, or natural-history books, were unknown in that library. I remember the "Life of Washington," and I am quite certain that it was a passage in this book that made a lasting impression upon me when I was not more than six or seven years old. I remember the impression, though I do not recall the substance of the passage. The incident occurred one Sunday in summer when Hiram and a cousin of ours and I were playing through the house, I carrying this book in my hand. From time to time I would stop and read this passage aloud, and I can remember, as if it were but yesterday, that I was so moved by it, so swept away by its eloquence, that, for a moment, I was utterly oblivious to everything around me. I was lifted out of myself, caught up in a cloud of feeling, and wafted I know not whither. My companions, being much older than I was, regarded not my reading.
These exalted emotional states, similar to that just described, used occasionally to come to me under other conditions about this time, or later. I recall one such, one summer morning when I was walking on the top of a stone wall that ran across the summit of one of those broad-backed hills which you yourself know. I had in my hand a bit of a root of a tree that was shaped much like a pistol. As I walked along the toppling stones, I flourished this, and called and shouted and exulted and let my enthusiasm have free swing. It was a moment of supreme happiness. I was literally intoxicated; with what I do not know. I only remember that life seemed amazingly beautiful—I was on the crest of some curious wave of emotion, and my soul sparkled and flashed in the sunlight. I have haunted that old stone wall many times since that day, but I have never been able again to experience that thrill of joy and triumph. The cup of life does not spontaneously bead and sparkle in this way except in youth, and probably with many people it does not even then. But I know from what you have told me that you have had the experience. When one is trying to cipher out his past, and separate the factors that have played an important part in his life, such incidents, slight though they are, are significant.
The day-dreams I used to indulge in when twelve or thirteen, while at work about the farm, boiling sap in the spring woods, driving the cows to pasture, or hoeing corn,—dreams of great wealth and splendor, of dress and equipage,—were also significant, but not prophetic. Probably what started these golden dreams was an itinerant quack phrenologist who passed the night at our house when I was a lad of eight or nine. He examined the heads of all of us; when he struck mine, he grew enthusiastic. "This is the head for you," he said; "this boy is going to be rich, very rich"; and much more to that effect. Riches was the one thing that appealed to country people in those times; it was what all were after, and what few had. Hence the confident prophesy of the old quack made an impression, and when I began to indulge in day-dreams I was, no doubt, influenced by it. But, as you know, it did not come true, except in a very limited sense. Instead of returning to the Old Home in a fine equipage, and shining with gold,—the observed of all observers, and the envy of all enviers,—as I had dreamed, and as had been foretold, I came back heavy-hearted, not indeed poor, but far from rich, walked up from the station through the mud and snow unnoticed, and took upon myself the debts against the old farm, and so provided that it be kept in the family. It was not an impressive home-coming; it was to assume burdens rather than to receive congratulations; it was to bow my head rather than to lift it up. Out of the golden dreams of youth had come cares and responsibilities. But doubtless it was best so. The love that brought me back to the old home year after year, that made me willing to serve my family, and that invested my native hills with such a charm, was the best kind of riches after all.
As a youth I never went to Sunday-school, and I was not often seen inside the church. My Sundays were spent rather roaming in the woods and fields, or climbing to "Old Clump," or, in summer, following the streams and swimming in the pools. Occasionally I went fishing, though this was to incur parental displeasure—unless I brought home some fine trout, in which case the displeasure was much tempered. I think this Sunday-school in the woods and fields was, in my case, best. It has always seemed, and still seems, as if I could be a little more intimate with Nature on Sunday than on a week-day; our relations were and are more ideal, a different spirit is abroad, the spirit of holiday and not of work, and I could in youth, and can now, abandon myself to the wild life about me more fully and more joyously on that day than on any other.
The memory of my youthful Sundays is fragrant with wintergreens, black birch, and crinkle-root, to say nothing of the harvest apples that grew in our neighbor's orchard; and the memory of my Sundays in later years is fragrant with arbutus, and the showy orchid, and wild strawberries, and touched with the sanctity of woodland walks and hilltops. What day can compare with a Sunday to go to the waterfalls, or to "Piney Ridge," or to "Columbine Ledge," or to stroll along "Snake Lane"? What sweet peace and repose is over all! The snakes in Snake Lane are as free from venom as are grasshoppers, and the grasshoppers themselves fiddle and dance as at no other time. Cherish your Sundays. I think you will read a little deeper in "Nature's infinite book of secrecy" on Sunday than on Monday. I once began an essay the subject of which was Sunday, but never finished it. I must send you the fragment.
But I have not yet solved my equation—what sent me to nature? What made me take an intellectual interest in outdoor things? The precise value of the x is hard to find. My reading, no doubt, had much to do with it. This intellectual and emotional interest in nature is in the air in our time, and has been more or less for the past fifty years. I early read Wordsworth, and Emerson and Tennyson and Whitman, and Saint-Pierre's "Studies of Nature," as I have before told you. But the previous question is, why the nature poets and nature books appealed to me. One cannot corner this unknown quantity. I suppose I was simply made that way—the love of nature was born in me. I suppose Emerson influenced me most, beginning when I was about nineteen; I had read Pope and Thomson and Young and parts of Shakespeare before that, but they did not kindle this love of nature in me. Emerson did. Though he did not directly treat of outdoor themes, yet his spirit seemed to blend with Nature, and to reveal the ideal and spiritual values in her works. I think it was this, or something like it, that stimulated me and made bird and tree and sky and flower full of a new interest. It is not nature for its own sake that has mainly drawn me; had it been so, I should have turned out a strict man of science; but nature for the soul's sake—the inward world of ideals and emotions. It is this that allies me to the poets; while it is my interest in the mere fact that allies me to the men of science.
I do not read Emerson much now, except to try to get myself back into the atmosphere of that foreworld when a paradox, or a startling affirmation, dissolved or put to flight a vast array of commonplace facts. What a bold front he did put on in the presence of the tyrannies of life! He stimulated us by a kind of heavenly bragging and saintly flouting of humdrum that ceases to impress us as we grow old. Do we outgrow him?—or do we fall away from him? I cannot bear to hear Emerson spoken of as a back-number, and I should like to believe that the young men of to-day find in him what I found in him fifty years ago, when he seemed to whet my appetite for high ideals by referring to that hunger that could "eat the solar system like gingercake." But I suspect they do not. The world is too much with us. We are prone to hitch our wagon to a star in a way, or in a spirit, that does not sanctify the wagon, but debases the star. Emerson is perhaps too exceptional to take his place among the small band of the really first-class writers of the world. Shear him of his paradoxes, of his surprises, of his sudden inversions, of his taking sallies in the face of the common reason, and appraise him for his real mastery over the elements of life and of the mind, as we do Bacon, or Shakespeare, or Carlyle, and he will be found wanting. And yet, let me quickly add, there is something more precious and divine about him than about any or all the others. He prepares the way for a greater than he, prepares the mind to accept the new man, the new thought, as none other does.
But how slow I am in getting at my point! Emerson took me captive. For a time I lived and moved and had my intellectual being in him. I think I have always had a pretty soft shell, so to speak, hardly enough lime and grit in it, and at times I am aware that such is the fact to this day. Well, Emerson found my intellectual shell very plastic; I took the form of his mould at once, and could not get away from him; and, what is more, did not want to get away from him, did not see the need of getting away from him. Nature herself seemed to speak through him. An intense individuality that possesses the quality of lovableness is apt to impose itself upon us in this way. It was under this spell, as you know, that I wrote "Expression," of which I have told you. The "Atlantic," by the way, had from the first number been a sort of university to me. It had done much to stimulate and to shape my literary tastes and ambitions. I was so eager for it that when I expected it in the mail I used to run on my way to the post office for it. So, with fear and trembling, I sent that essay to its editor. Lowell told a Harvard student who was an old schoolmate of mine that when he read the paper he thought some young fellow was trying to palm off an early essay of Emerson's upon him as his own, and that he looked through the "Dial" and other publications in the expectation of finding it. Not succeeding in doing so, he concluded the young man had written it himself. It was published in November, 1860, and as the contributors' names were not given at that time, it was ascribed to Emerson by the newspaper reviewers of that number. It went into Poole's Index as by Emerson, and later. Professor Hill
(Some years ago I took it upon myself to let Professor Hill know the real author of "Expression." He appeared grateful, though some what chagrined, and said the error should be corrected in the next edition. Mr. Burroughs smiled indulgently when he learned of my zeal in the matter: "Emerson's back is broad; he could have afforded to continue to shoulder my early blunders," he said. C. B.)
of Harvard, quoted a line from it in a footnote in his "Rhetoric," and credited it to Emerson. So I had deceived the very elect. The essay had some merit, but it reeked with the Emersonian spirit and manner. When I came to view it through the perspective of print, I quickly saw that this kind of thing would not do for me. I must get on ground of my own. I must get this Emersonian musk out of my garments at all hazards. I concluded to bury my garments in the earth, as it were, and see what my native soil would do toward drawing it out. So I took to writing on all manner of rural themes—sugar-making, cows, haying, stone walls. These, no doubt, helped to draw out the rank suggestion of Emerson. I wrote about things of which I knew, and was, therefore, bound to be more sincere with myself than in writing upon the Emersonian themes. When a man tells what he knows, what he has seen or felt, he is pretty sure to be himself. When I wrote upon more purely intellectual themes, as I did about this time for the "Leader," the Emersonian influence was more potent, though less so than in the first "Atlantic" essay.
Any man progresses in the formation of a style of his own in proportion as he gets down to his own real thoughts and feelings, and ceases to echo the thoughts and moods of another. Only thus can he be sincere; and sincerity is the main secret of style. What I wrote from "the push of reading," as Whitman calls it, was largely an artificial product; I had not made it my own; but when I wrote of country scenes and experiences, I touched the quick of my mind, and it was more easy to be real and natural.
I also wrote in 1860 or 1861 a number of things for the "Saturday Press" which exhaled the Emersonian perfume. If you will look them over, you will see how my mind was working in the leading-strings of Analogy—often a forced and unreal Analogy.
December, 1907
My Dear Friend,—
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 damnation. 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 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.)
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