John Burroughs
John Burroughs long seemed old to many of his readers, but measured by anything but mere linear years he was older than he seemed to most of them. Measured, for instance, by reference to the fame of Whitman, Burroughs went back to the days when he was a clerk in the Treasury, and Whitman, then likewise a Government clerk, was dismissed from his post by a Secretary of the Interior who now survives in the memory of his nation chiefly by reason of this episode. Burroughs wrote the earliest book ever written about his greatest friend, and for more than half a century he neither forgot nor long neglected to praise Whitman’s large sanity and seerlike wisdom. Measured by the reputation of Thoreau, of whom it was easy for the most casual to perceive that Burroughs was in some fashion a disciple, he went back so far that he had been seventeen when Walden came into the world, and he began himself to write about birds and green fields before Thoreau died. And measured by a line even longer than the fame of either Whitman or Thoreau, Burroughs went back so nearly to the origins of American literature that he saw the Catskills, of which he was to remain the particular singer and annalist, within three or four years after Irving, heretofore acquainted with them only from the deck of a Hudson River boat, had first visited the neighbourhood already sacred to the quite mythical but also immortal spook of Rip Van Winkle.
To mention Irving is to suggest a comparison actually more fruitful than that which some thousands of pens have recently made between Burroughs and Thoreau. The bland old man whose beard was latterly as well known in these States as that of Bryant in its day, had hardly anything in common, except an affectionate concern for external nature, with the dry, hard, vivid Yankee who acted out his anarchistic principles on the shores of Walden Pond and fiercely proclaimed the duty of civil disobedience to all men who might find the world travelling along false paths. Burroughs had in him too much of the milk of American kindness to thrive in a comparison with an authentic genius like Thoreau, who might not be half the naturalist that Burroughs was but was twice the poet and a dozen times the pungent critic of human life. Nor, in another direction, does Burroughs appear to much advantage by comparison with Whitman, who had a cosmic reach and a prophetic lift and thrust that never visited Slabsides. Rather, for all Burroughs employed a modern idiom and took to the country instead of staying snugly in town, he points back to the earlier tradition of smoothness and urbane kindness and level optimism which Irving practised. Did Burroughs not but a few weeks before his death take a mild exception to the “naked realism” of Howells? In that phrase a very old school speaks. Perhaps we shall in the long run remember best that Burroughs annually made one of an odd triumvirate of campers which included besides him Thomas A. Edison and Henry Ford. Let us, for the sake of seeing the group in its true perspective, call Mr. Ford the village blacksmith who happens to have the fortunate touch of Midas; let us call Mr. Edison the village inventor who happens to have the touch of a mechanical Merlin; let us call Burroughs the village naturalist who to his native instincts adds the winning gift of language and makes himself heard, as his friends do by their machines, outside the village.