Impressions of great naturalists

“The two Johns,” as they were affectionately known by their comrades on the Harriman Expedition to Alaska, were alike in their Christian names, in their love of nature, and, to a certain extent, in their powers of expression, but they were profoundly different in every other respect. I had the privilege of knowing John Muir much more intimately than I knew John Burroughs. I learned through correspondence and through long and intimate conversations thoroughly to understand his Scotch soul, which had a strong Norse element in it and a moral fervor drawn from the Bible of the Covenanters. It is interesting to contrast this Scotch type of soul with the English type of soul seen in John Burroughs.

I had in mind for some time this idea of the racial soul as something more profound in its influence than either the racial temperament or the racial mind. If the body had a long history in the past, so has the soul of man. In reading Wordsworth’s noble “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” it flashed across my mind that along an entirely different path I had reached the same conclusion as Wordsworth: namely, that the human soul is full of reminiscences and that it responds to conditions and experiences long bygone.

Indelibly stamped on my mind is the celebration of John Burroughs’s seventy-fifth birthday in the Bird Hall of the American Museum of Natural History, when six hundred children of the New York East Side schools, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Slovaks, no trace of American stock among them, came to tell Burroughs how they loved him and his writings. Twelve bright girls and boys, each representing a volume of the edition of his collected works and wearing the name of the volume suspended in front, came forward and recited a verse or a bit of prose from the volume represented. Tears came into the eyes of “the good gray poet,” Burroughs’s own designation of Walt Whitman, as the love and admiration of the spirited children poured in upon him. The scene reflected the high purpose of literature, the interpretation of the spiritual and moral influences of nature.

With a large following of grown men, a circle of admirers which included such extremes as Henry Ford and Theodore Roosevelt, Burroughs was preeminently the poet of the school children of America, his ability for humanizing his dumb friends of the animal world having caught the fancy of the children, thus giving him one of his claims to immortality in America, if not in other countries. It was his part in America to throw the light of nature into the “prison-house,” to use Wordsworth’s phrase, which civilization throws around our youth:

His fellow poet of nature, John Muir, though in his way a writer of large imagination, did not humanize his birds and mammals as Burroughs did—a legitimate means of charming young and old with the habits and moralities of animal life, provided one makes it clear that it is an interpretation and an analogy and not a real resemblance being pictured. Burroughs loved nature of the East—of New York and New England—as Muir, his junior by only a year, cast over us the spell of the Pacific Coast, from Alaska to southern California, in all its virgin grandeur. On the voyages to Alaska in 1899 “the two Johns,” as they were affectionately called by their companions, met day by day. Alike in their disregard of conventions, in absent-mindedness in such trivial matters as clothing and food, and in their readiness to absorb and to pour out their nature-philosophy, it would appear that one steamer was not quite large enough for two such great men, accustomed as each was, in his advancing years, to unchecked discourse and to reverent attention and interest!

In my intimacy with Muir I learned that his views did not entirely harmonize with those of Burroughs; the difference was more or less traceable, I believe, to the Scotch ancestry of Muir and to his severe and rugged bringing up as contrasted with the more equable environment of Burroughs’s youth. Muir chose for observation those aspects of nature which present the greatest obstacles, glaciers and mountain tops, although he had tender moments with birds and found a personality in trees. He wrote about trees as has no one else in the whole history of trees, chiefly because he loved them as he loved men and women, and his powers of expression were gathered from classic British sources, such as the King James version of the Bible, Milton, Shakespeare, and Carlyle, with little influence from Thoreau and none from Whitman.

In feature and in spirit of the Nordic stock, with a dash of Celtic temperament, Burroughs was true to his heredity. From the paternal side of his ancestry Burroughs received, according to a close student of his forebears, his religious and moral nature, his stubbornness, his persistence, his emotional tendencies, his love of beauty, his curiosity as to causes and explanations; these were the Nordic traits of his pedigree. Of English ancestry on his mother’s side, he inherited from the Kelly line, perhaps Celtic, his slight melancholy and his care-free love of nature. There are numerous divines on the paternal Burroughs side, given to Bible reading; on the maternal Kelly side are country folk, lovers of the outdoors, fishermen, foxhunters, one hermit, and one Bible reader, “Granther Kelly.” Thus Burroughs’s intellectual and spiritual pedigree recalls what Goethe says of his own parents:

At various times in Burroughs’s life one set of impulses and then another predominated, but his genius manifested itself in three ways: first, in the possession of what may be called the nature supersense, a rare endowment observed also in Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Emerson, and recorded by them in some of their most beautiful sentences:

This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in nature, a part of itself. (Thoreau: “Walden.”)

... We have crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night and morning, and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How willingly we would escape the barriers which render them comparatively impotent, escape the sophistication and second thought, and suffer nature to entrance us.... These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. (Emerson: “Nature.”)

Mounting toward the upland again, I pause reverently as the hush and stillness of twilight come upon the woods. It is the sweetest, ripest hour of the day. And as the hermit’s evening hymn goes up from the deep solitude below me, I experience that serene exaltation of sentiment of which music, literature, and religion are but the faint types and symbols. (Burroughs: “In the Hemlocks.”)

Of the reality of this nature supersense there is as little doubt as of its rarity.

Burroughs may be called a natural philosopher—a nature-lover more than a naturalist, for the latter term is reserved for the few gifted ones, like Darwin and Fabre. His powers of original observation of nature were not great powers such as would entitle him to be called a great naturalist, but powers of intimate, truthful, and sympathetic observation joined with a love of expression that made him a prolific producer, and that suggested the title of his first paper, “Expression,” published in 1860. The naturalist instinct has certainly been rare among other poets and men of letters. Emerson’s “Nature,” published in 1835, might have been written at his library table, gazing into the firelight, although his poems, “May-Day,” “To the Humble Bee,” “The Rhodora,” and “Titmouse,” are full of the nature vision. Maeterlinck’s delightful naturalistic writings are rather the mastery of the observations of Fabre than of a single original observation on his own part. Similarly, the natural philosophy so beautifully expressed by Tennyson in 1850 in his “In Memoriam” was drawn from conversations in a Darwinian club. Wordsworth was richly endowed with the nature supersense, perhaps more so than Burroughs, but he was neither observer, naturalist, nor natural philosopher; he was preeminently the spiritual interpreter. On the other hand, the naturalistic poetry of Erasmus Darwin at the end of the eighteenth century, his “Botanic Garden,” his “Loves of the Plants,” were the rhythmic expression of original and philosophical thought of a high order. This is true also of Goethe’s natural history writings and poetic allusions to nature which sprang from original work in botany and anatomy and brought him near a conception of the theory of evolution a half-century before Charles Darwin.

We look to Gilbert White as one of Burroughs’s prototypes in the union of observation and expression, to Izaak Walton in the joy of outdoor life, and especially to the truly great Americans, Thoreau and Walt Whitman. That Burroughs fell under Whitman’s influence very early, his poem “Waiting,” written at the age of twenty-five, would seem to indicate.

My own attention, at the age of twenty-two, was called to Whitman in a memorable manner, when he was not considered fit reading for the young. It was in 1879, in the rooms of Francis Balfour, younger brother of Arthur, at Cambridge University, where there were weekly dinners at which one met wits and celebrities from London and Oxford, as well as from Cambridge. One evening I was approached by a tall youth with a handsome face, long hair, flowing collar, and sensuous mouth, who began immediately to offer an opinion of American literature. He said: “You have no real poets in America. To me Longfellow, Whittier, and the others are mere echoes of English singers. You Americans have only one sweet and true songster, whom you do not appreciate, and that is Walt Whitman.” These words and young Oscar Wilde’s appearance are indelibly impressed upon my memory because they first brought home to me the idea that the all-essential quality in a writer of eminence is that he must be of his country, of his soil. This quality, preeminent in Whitman, was possessed in no less degree by Burroughs, although Burroughs was by no means so poetic. Americanism in Americans is essential for the fundamental biological reason that our spiritual and intellectual powers, to reach their highest development, must react to our own environment and not to some other distant or bygone environment. Welcome as British, French, or classical reactions may be among us, they are not of our soil.

These are interpretations of Burroughs’s genius, not explanations; we may examine and compare him with other men, but we cannot explain him any more than we can explain the prehistoric artists of the cave period. In each case the genius arrives, assumes leadership, and lifts an entire community of less gifted souls to a little higher level.

This brings us to the sources of the racial soul. Why did the soul of John Burroughs react throughout his life to the genial conditions of our East, to its birds and plants and flowers, to its seasons, to its few retreats still accessible where Nature has preserved some of her unrestrained beauty in her contest with the ruthless destroyer that we call Civilization? Why was he the poet of our robins, of our apple-trees, of the beauties of our forests and farms? Why was he the ardent and sometimes violent prophet of conservation?

Whence the poet’s soul, whence the soul of a race, of a people, of a nation? Have we not reason to believe that there is a racial soul as well as a racial mind, a racial system of morals, a racial anatomy? This is the thought to which I have been led in trying to penetrate to the inner meaning of the life and works of John Burroughs, because, eager as I am about anatomy, I am far more eager about the origin and development of the moral, spiritual, and intellectual nature of man—the mystery of mysteries in biology at the present time. When Huxley in his Romanes Lecture held that Darwinism fails to throw light on the moral nature of man, he was, in my opinion, wrong; yet the origin of the anatomy and even of the moral nature of man is relatively simple when compared with the origin of the spirit and mind of man. The peculiar mystery about the origin of our spiritual and intellectual powers is that they appear to arise before they are needed—they are ready to play their part before the time and opportunity arise.

Moreover, we have long since abandoned Herbert Spencer’s teaching that our spiritual and intellectual faculties are developed through the inherited effects of use, and we now adhere to Weismann’s teaching that the use or disuse of our spiritual and intellectual powers has no effect whatever on our offspring, except in so far as it tends to keep us in a normal state of mind and health. The death-blow to Herbert Spencer’s view was given in the discoveries of prehistoric art within the last quarter of a century, from which it appears that a race of men of spiritual and intellectual powers arose in which the art spirit had little to do with the struggle for existence and may have run counter to it, as it does at the present time. These discoveries also appear to give pause to the Darwinian theory of the origin of our spiritual and intellectual powers through Natural Selection, for the periods in man’s history and prehistory when the artist or the man of letters has been best fitted to survive have been few and far between.

Again, this sudden emergence of our spiritual and intellectual nature from the man of the environing woods, forests, streams, plains, and deserts of primeval Asia and Europe does not favor Bergson’s view of the creative evolution of an internal spiritual and intellectual impulse which must flower out in time, because if Bergson were right we should have spiritual and intellectual genius appearing out of season and entirely out of accord with environment. This is not the case, because there is always an adjustment, a relation, between the internal spiritual and intellectual powers and the external nature of the time, the beauty or the ugliness, the ease or the hardship. It is through this reciprocal relation of the inner man and the environing world that there are so few misfits. If Bergson were right, our western world would be full of disharmonies; we should find Mediterranean geniuses springing up in Scandinavian atmospheres, as is never the case. The racial creative spirit of man always reacts to its own historic racial environment, into the remote past.

Our conclusion is that distinctive spiritual and intellectual powers originate along lines of slow racial evolution in climate and surroundings of distinct kinds. In the south were the Mediterranean lines of migration along sunny seas, formidable enough in the winter season, favorable to rapid development of maritime powers, together with artistic powers, the Mycenæans, the Phœnicians, the early Italian races. The Mediterraneans take nature for granted. In the centre of Europe were the lines of Alpine or Celtic invaders, kept entirely away from the sea, races of agriculturalists and of miners, rich in mechanical talent, neither adventurous nor sea-loving. To the north lived a race of hunters, of seafaring adventurers, resolutely contending with the forces of nature, fond of the open, curious and inquisitive about the causes of things; deliberate in spiritual development, very gradually they reach the greatest intellectual heights and depths.

The racial aptitudes in these three environments of the past twenty thousand years are now revealed in anatomy and will be no less clearly revealed in the predispositions of morals, of intellect, and of spirit. Here nature, religion, and beauty, kept apart by the superficial vision of man in science, theology, and æsthetics, are one in the eternal vision and purpose of the Creator. In the marvelous continuity of heredity a thousand years are as yesterday.

This is my idea of the origin of the racial soul, this is my interpretation of Wordsworth’s immortal lines:

Burroughs, the poet of today, found himself at home in the environment of his remote flint-making ancestors of northern Europe. The soul that rose with him had its setting for countless generations in the north; it came from afar, not in forgetfulness, reflecting and recalling the northern clouds of nature’s glory.

I believe that John Muir’s name is destined to be immortal through his writings on mountains, forests, rivers, meadows and the sentiment of the animal and plant life they contain. I believe that no one else has ever lived with just the same sentiment toward trees and flowers and the works of nature in general as that which John Muir manifested in his life, his conversations and his writings.

In the splendid journey which I had the privilege of taking with him to Alaska in 1896 I first became aware of his passionate love of nature in all its forms and his reverence for it as the direct handiwork of the Creator. He retained from his early religious training under his father this belief, which is so strongly expressed in the Old Testament, that all the works of nature are directly the works of God. In this sense I have never known any one whose nature-philosophy was more thoroughly theistic; at the same time he was a thorough-going evolutionist and always delighted in my own evolutionary studies, which I described to him from time to time in the course of our journeyings and conversations.

It was in Alaska that he quoted the lines from Goethe’s “Wilhelm Meister” which inspired all his travels:

Another sentiment of his regarding trees and flowers always impressed me: that was his attributing to them a personality, an individuality, such as we associate with certain human beings and animals, but rarely with plants. To him a tree was something not only to be loved but to be respected and revered. I well remember his intense indignation over the proposal by his friend Charles S. Sargent to substitute the name Magnolia fœtida for Magnolia grandiflora on the ground of priority. He quoted Sargent as saying, “After all, ‘what’s in a name?’” and himself as replying, “There is everything in the name; why inflict upon a beautiful and defenseless plant for all time the stigma of such a name as Magnolia fœtida? You yourself would not like to have your own name changed from Charles S. Sargent to ‘the malodorous Sargent.’”

John Muir’s incomparable literary style did not come to him easily, but as the result of the most intense effort. I observed his methods of writing in connection with two of his books upon which he was engaged during the years 1911 and 1912. He came to our home on the Hudson in June, 1911, after the Yale commencement, where he had received the degree of LL.D. on June 21. He brought with him his new silken hood, in which he said he had looked very grand in the commencement parade. On Friday, June 21, he was established in Woodsome Lodge, a log cabin on a secluded mountain height, to complete his volume on the Yosemite. Daily he rose at 4.30 o’clock, and after a simple cup of coffee labored incessantly on his two books, “The Yosemite” and “Boyhood and Youth.” It was very interesting to watch how difficult it was for him. In my diary of the time I find the following notes: “Knowing his beautiful and easy style it is very interesting to learn how difficult it is for him; he groans over his labors, he writes and rewrites and interpolates. He loves the simplest English language and admires most of all Carlyle, Emerson, and Thoreau. He is a very firm believer in Thoreau and starts my reading deeply of this author. He also loves his Bible and is constantly quoting it, as well as Milton and Burns. In his attitude toward nature, as well as in his special gifts and abilities, Muir shares many qualities with Thoreau. First among these is his mechanical ability, his fondness for the handling of tools; second, his close identification with nature; third, his interpretation of the religious spirit of nature; fourth, his happiness in solitude with nature; fifth, his lack of sympathy with crowds of people; sixth, his intense love of animals.” Thoreau’s quiet residence at Walden is to be contrasted with Muir’s world-wide journeyings from Scotland to Wisconsin; his penniless journey down the Mississippi to Louisiana, Florida, across Panama, and northward into California in its early grandeur; his establishment of the sawmill, showing again his mechanical ability, as a means of livelihood in the Yosemite; his climbs in the high Sierras and discovery of still living glaciers; his eagerness to see the largest glaciers of Alaska and his several journeys and sojourns there; his wandering all over the great western and eastern forests of the United States; his visits to special forests in Europe; his world tour, without preconceived plan, including the wondrous forests of Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Asia. Finally, his very last great journey.

When starting out on this South American journey, from which I among other friends tried to dissuade him, he often quoted the phrase, “I never turn back.” Although he greatly desired to have a comrade on this journey and often urged me to accompany him, he finally was compelled to start out alone, quoting Milton: “I have chosen the lonely way.” On July 26 I said good-by to this very dear friend, leaving him to work on his books and prepare for the long journey to South America, especially to see the forests of Araucaria. I know that at this time he had little intention of going on to Africa. It was impulse that led him from the east coast of South America to take a long northward journey in order to catch a steamer for the Cape of Good Hope.

Among the personal characteristics which stand out like crystal in the minds and hearts of his friends were his hatred of shams and his scorn of the conventions of life, his boldness and fearlessness of attack, well illustrated in his assault on the despoilers of the Hetch Hetchy Valley of the Yosemite, whom he loved to characterize as “thieves and robbers.” It was a great privilege to be associated with him in this campaign. But certainly his chief characteristic was his intimacy with nature and passionate love of its beauties; also, I believe, his marvelous insight into the creative powers of nature, closely interwoven with his deep religious sentiments and beliefs. Like John Burroughs in many of his characteristics, in others he was totally different, and these differences I attribute to the racial antecedents of the two men, as studied in the “Racial Soul of John Burroughs.”

There were published in the New York Evening Mail some verses by Charles L. Edson with which I would close this all too brief tribute: