In a December 1899 issue of the New York Times, A. S. Clark described a walk he had taken recently from the banks of the Charles River in Boston to the shores of Walden Pond, a classic saunter in the manner of Henry David Thoreau. Pilgrimages like this were familiar newspaper filler at the turn of the century, but Clark included in his narrative of famous landmarks an impression of the nature he encountered along the way. He might have recalled Thoreau’s description of Walden Pond in his youth as “completely surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods,” but if he anticipated a similar scene, the illusion was dispelled as he walked the path to the pond. The trail was bordered by spindly oak saplings and blackened pine stumps and showed signs of constant use—“the antithesis of those charms which commonly attach to a rural pathway.” From the hill above the pond the forest appeared thin and heavily cut, and only a brush-choked clearing marked the spot where trees once shaded Thoreau’s hut. Walden Pond was still a “beautiful expanse of water nestling down among the hills,” but the ongoing demand for fuel wood and lumber, Clark thought, promised even further desecration. Seventeen years later, Edward Emerson, who had grown up nearby, recorded a similar impression: the forest along the shore had been devastated by fire, gypsy moths, and “rude and reckless visitors,” and the shore itself strewn with trash and locomotive cinders.1
Others saw the pond differently. In the introduction to a 1910 edition of Walden, Clifton Johnson wrote that “the woodland seclusion is almost as complete as it was in Thoreau’s time,” and Winthrop Packard observed in his 1911 Literary Pilgrimages of a Naturalist that it was “much as Thoreau remembered it had been in his boyhood, walled in by dense forests, a place of echoes.” The nearby trees, Packard added, need not fear the bite of the woodsman’s ax. “The spirit of reverence for its shores . . . should prevent that.” C. T. Ramsey found the pond deserted on the day he visited, and the solitude gave the impression of wildness. His pilgrimage, he wrote later, “seemed almost like a dream; for a time I had forgotten the troubled world, and was transported into Elysian fields.”2
The play of memory, imagination, and evasion in these conflicting interpretations provides a glimpse into the complicated uses of nature at the turn of the century. Americans saw places like Walden Pond as refuges from the rapid pace of modern life, and their anticipations inspired a new class of popular literature dedicated to the natural world. Like Clark and Emerson, writers in this genre understood all too well the need for shielding their Arcadian retreats from a remorselessly materialistic society, and like Johnson and Packard, they were sometimes willing to ignore evidence that society had already enveloped them. These fears and dreams inspired a new way of thinking about America’s natural heritage.3
In the years between 1900 and World War I, literary scholars accepted Thoreau into the pantheon of American writers, and publishers included him in scores of republications and anthologies. At the same time, he became a symbol of nature in the popular mind. These two standards of judgment were both connected to the emergence of the nature-writing genre. Undiscovered in 1880, he was listed in the Cambridge History of American Literature among America’s great authors in 1917, and over the next half century Walden became a model for countless popular stories of withdrawal and rediscovery, including such classics as Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac and Henry Beston’s Outermost House.4 A literary revival like this is unusual. Typically, writers’ reputations diminish over the years, as critics and scholars turn to more contemporary authors addressing more contemporary issues. Buoyed by the surge in nature writing, Thoreau gained rather than lost adherents.
But the convergence of nature worship and Thoreau appreciation was not so simple. As historians of the literary canon point out, he was less a founder of this new genre than a product of it. His posthumous publications had been modestly successful, but the sale of his books lagged far behind other literary classics. Among lay readers, he was but one among hundreds of nature writers available at the turn of the century and not, in most estimates, the most popular. He was unique in drawing philosophical insights from his observations, but his early biographers had done their utmost to hide this distinction, sensitive to the fact that modern readers were less inclined than Thoreau to see nature as a paradigm for asceticism or a mirror of higher truth. Anderson Graham pointed out quite correctly in his 1891 survey of nature books that “more and more we see as time passes the reflected Transcendentalism of Thoreau falls into oblivion, . . . while the study of nature, that was his own peculiar sphere, wins a wider and fuller appreciation.”5 For this reason, readers turned to New York naturalist John Burroughs, who, unlike Thoreau, was sociable in public, amazingly prolific, and attuned to the popular demand for a view of nature that removed, as Millard Davis wrote, “the . . . Spirit from the scene—or from behind it.” Most of all, Burroughs presented nature as a walk in the woods: a compelling, if not allegorical or inspirational, narrative of forest life. This was the nature that Clark, Emerson, Johnson, and Packard went looking for at Walden Pond.6
Thoreau’s reputation certainly benefited from this new, more sentimentalized vision of nature, but it also linked him to a movement with little lasting literary value; by the end of World War I nature study, as a distinct genre, had all but disappeared. How, then, did Thoreau became part of, and transcend, this evanescent literary genre, and what does this tell us about the idea of nature in the early twentieth century?
Nature writing had deep roots in American soil. As the writer Stanton Kirkham observed, colonial settlers, confronting an endlessly varied continental wilderness, became a nature-studying people; there was “scarcely a journal, a diary, or a set of letters . . . in which we do not find that careful seeing, and often that imaginative interpretation, so characteristic of the present day.” Wallace Stegner wrote later that finding something new in nature was an “indispensable element in the reports of exploration and discovery.”7 To Europeans, wilderness was an abstract romantic vision; to Americans, it was a vast physical reality bound up in the pageant of westward migration and the formation of national identity.
Nature writing gained coherence as a literary form in the mid-nineteenth century. Folio pictorials like Nathaniel Parker Willis’s 1840 American Scenery, George Putnam’s 1852 Home Book of the Picturesque, and William Cullen Bryant’s somewhat later Picturesque America included, along with illustrations by some of the nation’s most gifted artists, essays that romanticized America as a youthful agrarian republic.8 Susan Fenimore Cooper’s Rural Hours, published in 1850, was the first of many seasonally arranged books describing the nearby woods in thoroughly domestic terms. That same year Donald Grant Mitchell, writing as Ik Marvel, published Reverie of a Bachelor, a highly sentimentalized reminiscence of his country boyhood. Frederick William Shelton’s 1853 Up the River explored similar themes along the Hudson, and in Country Margins S. H. Hammond and L. W. Mansfield wrote of “beautiful valleys, . . . with broad farms and green fields . . . and . . . a quiet village with church steeples going up from among the clustered houses.” Marvel, Shelton, Hammond, and Mansfield were undeniably shallow writers. The literary critic Norman Foerster characterized their work as “a great deal of sensuousness and a negligible degree of spirituality,” to which the historian Edward Foster added, “God forbid the intrusion of a startling idea.” Still, they were popular in the second half of the century, and together with scores of articles in Harper’s, Scribners’s Monthly, Graham’s, and Godey’s Lady’s Book and thousands of prints, lithographs, engravings, and paintings, they represented an emerging market for rural nostalgia.9
Scholarly writing about nature changed as well. Transcendental philosophers saw nature mainly as a metaphor for divinity, but in the more secular society of post–Civil War America, authors transformed nature into a belletristic device. Magazines continued publishing essays on nature themes, but these were aimed at readers more interested in literary finesse than in nature itself. The essays would begin with a specific observation about nature and then shift to a broader commentary on the human condition. These thoughts were expressed with appealing literary flair and impeccable taste and typically ended with a clever ironic twist. The master of this literary form was James Russell Lowell.10
This use of nature in genteel literature fell out of favor at the turn of the century. In his Responsibilities of the Novelist, Frank Norris attributed this to the aridness of the genre and its failure to connect to modern sensibilities. “The New England school for too long dominated the entire range of American fiction—limiting it, specializing it, polishing, refining and embellishing it, narrowing it down to a veritable cult. . . . It is small wonder that the reaction came when and as it did.” By the end of the century, as Norris indicated, the pantheon of great American writers was in flux.11 In the autumn of 1890 the Springfield (MA) Republican issued a eulogy on those writers who invoked nature as a framework for stylistic flourish: “These brilliant woods of October, now growing bare and casting on the green sward their carpet of colored leaves, . . . fits well with the literature of New England a generation ago as we now look back upon it. There was a verdure and freshness therein,—it adorned the age, it covered and matured much noble fruit which the world has gathered and preserved; but how much of it is like these fallen leaves, splendid and rusting, at our feet,—admired and admirable, but, withal, of the Past.” Those who contributed to this renaissance in writing would remain fresh and green, in the author’s opinion, only to the degree they conveyed “a keen sense of New England.” Those whose approaches to nature were abstract and universal rather than tangible and local were, like the fallen leaves, destined to wither and disappear.12 And this was indeed Lowell’s fate. His poetry, once considered the most decorous in American literature, was too abstruse for end-of-the-century readers. His metaphors, according to the literary critic John Macy, seemed flat and formless; “the music simply does not happen.” The dilettante style of subordinating nature to the turn of phrase had run its course. The writer as pure artist, the ideal that drove Lowell’s criticism of Thoreau, gave way to the writer as messenger—the muckraker, the progressive—or the outdoor advocate.13
The nature-writing genre developed in concert with a turn-of-the-century expansion in outdoor activities like hiking, golfing, bird-watching, fishing, hunting, mountaineering, camping, and bicycling. As early as 1875 the New York Times published a series of articles on the “walking mania” sweeping the Northeast, and in the next decade garden clubs, rod and gun clubs, cycling clubs, conservation associations, mountaineering organizations, and private recreational camps and lodges proliferated.14 The popularity of these outdoor activities signaled a deeper dialectical turn in American culture. In the 1860s and 1870s Americans had been captivated by the panorama of industrial ascent, but over the next two decades this optimistic feeling gave way to an ill-defined disenchantment with economic and cultural trends such as industrialism, urbanism, secularism, and modern science. The University of Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s brilliant address on the significance of the frontier in American history underscored the cultural importance of the nation’s pioneering past, but even those unaware of his commentary understood that the two-hundred-year push against the western wilderness had shaped American character, and the conclusion of this epic triggered a quest for reaffirming contact with frontier-like environments. President Theodore Roosevelt celebrated the strenuous life, and millions of Americans heeded his call for robust outdoor activity.15
While urban-industrial life provided a motive for withdrawing to nature, railroads provided the means, and common carriers like these became important promoters of leisure travel and park development. In addition, by 1909 America boasted some three million registered automobiles, and the Good Roads campaigns initiated earlier by bicycle enthusiasts yielded state funding for road improvement. “Our highways are reasonably good, our lanes and by-ways . . . inviting,” wilderness traveler Maurice Thompson wrote. “There is no good reason why . . . tourists . . . should not explore the pastoral districts where the richest materials for poetry, romance, and art may be had for the taking.”16 These outdoor enthusiasms generated an outpouring of guidebooks and essays on bird-watching, hiking, camping, botany, and gardening, and this in turn transformed the rural picturesque tradition into a new nature-study genre.
Just as transcendentalism grew out of European romanticism, turn-of-the-century nature writing was linked to literary trends in Britain. The nation’s huge stratum of gentry, clerics, priests, vicars, and scholars, all with sufficient leisure to pursue pastimes like hunting, angling, rambling, birding, and botanizing, sustained an outdoor tradition dating back to Izaak Walton’s 1653 Compleat Angler. The tradition culminated in the British naturalist Richard Jefferies, whose Gamekeeper at Home, Amateur Poacher, Wild Life in a Southern Country, and Nature Near London were widely read in America.17 Jefferies ascribed to the British tradition of the chase, while American nature writers developed a less adversarial fellowship with nature, and he populated his landscapes with farmers, gamekeepers, huntsmen, poachers, shepherds, mowers, thatchers, and field-workers, while the Americans typically screened humans out of their nature scenes.18 Still, American writers adopted a narrative style much like Jefferies’s, who gave his readers the illusion of moving through a picturesque, almost magical, landscape: “A little farther, and the ground declines; through the tall fern we come upon a valley. But the soft warm sunshine, the stillness, the solitude have induced an irresistible idleness. Let us lie down upon the fern, on the edge of the green vale, and gaze up at the slow clouds as they drift across the blue vault.” American writers conveyed this experience as a walk in the woods, and in this sense they had more in common with Jefferies’s country embellishments than with Thoreau’s symbol-laded descriptions of Concord.19
Thoreau aside, there were two writers who bridged the gap between the country-life books of the 1850s and turn-of-the-century nature writing. The first of these was Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who published nature essays in the Atlantic Monthly and included them in his Out-Door Papers in 1863, at a time when the popularity of nature writing was at low ebb. The first writer in what would later become a genre, he explored the landscapes around his suburban home near Boston and composed a “chatty, anecdotal, half-scientific, half-sentimental” chronicle, as Fred Lewis Pattee said in his history of nature writing, of “semi-rural life.” Higginson owed much to his transcendental friends Emerson and Thoreau, but for his book he chose the uncharted territory between sentiment and science. Like the country-life authors, he romanticized “the simple enjoyment that may be crowded into one hour of sunshine,” but like the scientific naturalists of his day, he insisted this enjoyment be focused on specifically identified natural objects. “The transition from Thoreau to John Burroughs,” as Pattee put it, “was through Thomas Wentworth Higginson.”20
Wilson Flagg, who wrote of places more natural than Higginson’s suburbia, preceded Thoreau into print by about a decade. Flagg attended Harvard Medical School but abandoned medicine for the life of a writer, composing essays for the Boston Weekly Magazine in 1839–40 and collecting these in 1857 into Studies in the Field and Forest.21 Flagg’s essays combined a keen understanding of nature with a deep love of rural settings. Even the most sublime natural scene, he contended, would be “cold and unaffecting” without the domestic touch—grazing cattle, perhaps, or a humble cottage. His compositions were as sentimental as those of Ik Marvel, but, like Higginson, he was precise and realistic in his depiction of nature, anticipating in many ways the ecological insights of Vermonter George Perkins Marsh’s 1864 Man and Nature. Also like Higginson, he presented nature in narrative form and tangible detail, using a technique that forecast end-of-the-century trends. Nature appreciation, once the province of wealthy travel writers and literary elites, was becoming democratized.22
In 1880 John Burroughs, Wilson Flagg, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson stood virtually alone in sustaining the tradition of nature writing in America, but at the end of that decade they were joined by hundreds of others. “It seems only a few years ago that the few books on outdoor life which had any sort of general circulation got it largely because of their uncommon literary value,” a New York Times correspondent wrote in 1900. People read Emerson “before their library fireplaces and with no idea of going and doing likewise.”23 End-of-the-century readers demanded a more engaging literature. The average person, by one account, “regarded an interest in letters as a mark of detachment from reality, if not downright frivolity. . . . Robust energies found profitable outlets.” Nature writing provided vent for these robust energies; it was filled with practical advice on the location, behavior, and identifying characteristics of plants, animals, and birds and hints on forestry, gardening, or farming. “Let us learn to see and name first,” Dallas Sharp told his readers. “The inexperienced, the unknowing, the unthinking, cannot love.”24
Nature writing fed on the enthusiasm generated by outdoor activities, but it also owed much to bookmakers, who saw market opportunity in these popular recreational trends. During the 1880s Ticknor & Fields of Boston emerged as a colossus in the publishing field, producing elegant but relatively low-priced books by writers such as Emerson, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Whittier, Bryant, Lowell, Holmes, Stowe, Agassiz, Jewett, Dana, Child, and Thoreau. James T. Fields, himself an important arbiter of American literature, took a particular interest in books with nature themes, and as editor of magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, the North American Review, Our Young Folks, and Every Saturday, he regularly included essays on nature. Fields retired in 1870, and in 1880 the firm merged with the publishing house of Henry Houghton and George Mifflin. Houghton Mifflin benefited from the reputation Ticknor & Fields had established in American classics, but by 1880 the center of American book publishing was shifting to New York City. As both writing and publishing diffused away from New England, the Boston firm found it difficult to attract top novelists and essayists, and in response it began cultivating a new crop of writers to meet the demand for middlebrow reading. In 1876 the company published John Burroughs’s first book, Wake-Robin, and the firm continued to dominate the field of popular nature writing well into the twentieth century, giving the genre, according to the historian Eric Lupfer, a “coherence and cultural prominence that it would not have had otherwise.” With Burroughs’s popularity on the rise, Houghton Mifflin “saw that it might hitch Thoreau’s wagon to Burroughs’s star.” Thus, as Barksdale Maynard writes, the nature-writing movement “created Thoreau, and not the other way around.”25
Superficial though it was, the genre filled a void in popular culture. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, published in 1859, undermined confidence in the fixity and permanence of the natural world, and this void was deeply troubling at a time when society itself seemed to lack a solid center.26 Novelists such as Jack London, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris, haunted by the realization that civilization was but a thin veneer over the Darwinian struggle, portrayed social interaction in both urban and rural settings as senseless and futile. Progress was an illusion and morality, as the historian George Cotkin put it, “largely a matter of force.”27
Nature writers were sensitive to the challenge presented by Darwinism. Dallas Sharp readily admitted that the natural world seemed at times senselessly savage. With the onset of winter, wild creatures, “unhoused and often unsheltered . . . suffer as we hardly yet understand.” Yet he quickly turned from these stark images to describe animals tucked securely in their burrows and fortified with an ample harvest of seeds. William Beebe portrayed the coming of winter in equally ambiguous terms: “How pitiful the weak flight of the last yellow butterfly of the year, as with tattered and battered wings it vainly seeks for a final sip of sweets! The fallen petals and the hard seeds are black and odourless, the drops of sap are hardened. Little by little the wings weaken, the tiny feet clutch convulsively at a dried weed stalk, and the four golden wings drift quietly down among the yellow leaves, soon to merge into the dark mould beneath.” This image of poignant death translated the Darwinian struggle into sentimental pathos, and the writer was soon anticipating “the keen, invigorating pleasures of winter.” Bradford Torrey’s approach to the struggle for survival was equally evasive. Plants and animals persevered by “elbowing their rivals out of the way,” but these apparently wasted lives served higher purposes. “It must be unsafe to criticise the working of a single wheel here or there, when we . . . can only guess at the grand design itself.” Nature writers found ways to reestablish the harmony and stability that seemed so lacking in the Darwinian world and at the same time reignite the spirit of adventure that had gone missing in urban-industrial life. All of this, of course, Thoreau was admirably prepared to do.28
Nature writing was a literature of invitation, and by way of example several writers actually abandoned the city, moved to a farm, and wrote pleasant reflections on nature from the perspective of an educated outsider.29 Birding manuals were another popular form of invitation. Informational in tone, they nevertheless managed to romanticize birds as charming and illusive neighbors. Although no hint of Darwinism appeared in these endearing narratives, they were at least superficially scientific. Frank Chapman’s popular Bird Life and his Handbook of the Birds of Eastern North America, both published in a light, easily handled format with a minimum of technical data, hinted at the emotional side of bird life, and Citizen Bird: Scenes from Bird Life in Plain English for Beginners was a spectacularly successful collaboration between Mabel Osgood Wright, a dedicated conservationist; Elliott Coues, a respected ornithologist; and Louis Agassiz Fuertes, one of America’s finest illustrators. Florence Merriam’s Birds of the Village and Field and Birds through an Opera Glass likewise struck a balance between scientific fact and appealing anecdote, as did Neltje Blanchan’s Bird Neighbors, Jenny Stickney’s Bird World, and Sara Prueser’s Our Dooryard Friends.30
Bradford Torrey, America’s best-known bird-guide author, spent his childhood in Boston and learned bird lore on strolls through the Common and Public Garden. At age twenty-one he organized America’s first birding organization, the Nuttall Ornithological Club, which eventually became the American Ornithologists’ Union. Beginning with a chapter on the Boston Commons, his 1885 Birds in the Bush described nests, habits, and songs in precise detail and added charming anecdotes about the romance of birding and bird life. Another urban ornithologist, Olive Thorne Miller, purchased caged robins, blue jays, bluebirds, and other common species and kept them though the winter in her Brooklyn aviary before releasing them. At her desk she studied them as individuals, finding some among the same species selfish and others kind, some optimists and others pessimists. As they grew comfortable in her presence, they revealed their individual “bird tragedies and comedies, bird loves and griefs,” which she recorded in a series of graceful and moving sketches that maintained an air of scientific credibility yet took on a fictive quality. This narrative format, with its emphasis on individuality and emotion, fueled the passion for birds that gave rise to Audubon Clubs all across the country.31
Writers of plant guides likewise took on the challenge of blending science and romance. Caroline Creevey’s Flowers of Field, Hill, and Swamp, for instance, described forget-me-nots by quoting Tennyson’s ode to the flower and explaining that “they nestle modestly among mosses and galiums, peeping with mild eyes around clumps of onoclea fern.” To this library of popular guidebooks, John Henry Comstock added Insect Life, containing chapters on pond life, brook life, orchard life, forest life, and roadside life. Phil Robinson’s In Garden, Orchard, and Spinney detailed the natural history of a small plot of land, similar to Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s The Procession of the Flowers and Charles M. Skinner’s Nature in a City Yard. Backyard nature writers, as a reviewer put it, discovered a delightful outdoor world in “a few square feet of homely soil.”32
Each of these authors had a unique perspective on nature, but there were generalities enough to define them as part of a distinct field, neither mainstream literature nor scientific study. First, the authors built their narratives around personal observation rather than textual research; they at least purported to be eyewitnesses of nature. Second, they wrote to an urban audience they imagined living in sheltered apartments and working in artificial surroundings. Urbanites, as one writer put it, lived in a “snow-choked, smoke-clouded, cobble-paved, wheel-wracked, street-scented, wire-lighted half-day, half-night something, that is neither spring, summer, autumn, nor winter.” Having expressed this antiurban bias, writers offered to reacquaint their readers with the exotic world outside the city. Third, in a somewhat contrary fashion, nature writers described places that were not remote and wild but accessible even to the city dweller. Nature was next door, they imagined, to almost every American. William Beebe, for instance, pointed out that any marsh “within a half-hour’s trolley ride of any of our cities or town” could host an adventure.33 Fourth, success in the genre depended on arranging the outdoor experience into a simple but compelling narrative that subordinated scientific knowledge and abstract philosophy to a simple walk-in-the-woods format. This heavily narrative style led one critic to remark that things happened to the nature writer “in the most accommodating way, for they manage to give each story of bird or beast a point, while ordinary mortals do the same things and have no adventures that so pleasantly will round off a chapter.” Nature writers aimed at capturing the “spirit of out-doors” and made no attempt at deeper understanding.34
Finally, all nature writers were, like A. S. Clark and Edward Emerson at Walden Pond, sensitive to the fact that nature was under siege, and for this reason they were kin to the great conservation figures of the Progressive Era. They were distinct from these conservationists, however, in projecting a sentimental as opposed to utilitarian message. Mabel Osgood Wright and Frank Chapman, the nation’s leading bird conservationists, heightened their readers’ sympathy for victims of the feather trade by giving them individual personality and emotion. Both were editors of the Audubon Society’s Bird-Lore, which published hundreds of articles romanticizing and anthropomorphizing birds in order to sharpen the society’s preservationist tone. While mainstream conservationists made using nature more efficient, these writers made it a matter of the heart. “Let us consider some of the more humble trees about us,” Beebe entreated. “Not, however, from the standpoint of the . . . scientific forester, but from the sympathetic point of view of a living fellow form, sharing the same planet.” Messages like this had far greater popular appeal than the cold logic of economic efficiency.35
Thoreau’s reputation must be viewed in light of this rising popular interest in nature. In the 1880s, as the literary historian Lawrence Buell noted, Houghton Mifflin began anthologizing Thoreau’s work in their literary collections and textbooks, “ensuring that [he] . . . would become a household word.” In all of these selections the company emphasized nature writing, as did the eleven-volume compilation published by Houghton Mifflin in 1893. And with copyrights expiring, new editions appeared more frequently in print, including an issue of The Maine Woods from Thomas Y. Crowell with photographs taken by Clifton Johnson along the trails Thoreau followed through the wilderness. Publications like this helped integrate Thoreau into the nature-study movement. After reading the Crowell volume, for instance, the Yale literary historian Henry Beers described Thoreau not as a transcendentalist but as an outdoorsman, listening “with his ear close to the ground, for the voice of the earth.”36
By the turn of the century the mood of the nation seemed opportune for publishing the entire journal. Sophia Thoreau had passed the volumes on to Harrison Blake, who bequeathed them to Elias Russell, and he in turn sold the rights to Houghton Mifflin for $3,000. In 1905 the Atlantic Monthly began printing selections in installments, and these were lauded as “pure beauties of observation and feeling, easily disentangled from all transcendental discourse.” Houghton Mifflin contracted with Bradford Torrey to edit the journal, and it was published in 1906 with only minor changes and excisions, making up fourteen of the twenty volumes in Houghton Mifflin’s Writings of Henry David Thoreau.37
According to Buell, the twenty-volume edition marks the departure point for Thoreau’s canonization. Buell attributes this event to the Atlantic Monthly editor and Harvard professor Bliss Perry, who was intrigued by the journal’s literary richness and recommended it to Houghton Mifflin. Indeed, it was rare, as Franklin Sanborn wrote in the Dial, to “find the diary of a man published in multiple volumes who was not a president, a traveler, or an interviewer of others”—and this from an author who only a few years earlier had been “generally overlooked or condemned.” It was here, then, that academics began looking at Thoreau seriously and here that the twin paths of scholarly discourse and popular opinion began to intertwine. Sluggish sales suggest that popular reaction was at best mixed, and Paul More, literary editor for the Independent and the Nation, pointed out that “laboring through the fourteen volumes . . . may well appall the sturdiest reader,” especially since Thoreau’s most memorable reflections were already available in the Blake volumes reissued by Houghton Mifflin in 1894.38
Popular and academic opinion also coalesced in reading the journal almost exclusively as a nature study. In his preface Bradford Torrey claimed that “the world in general has agreed to regard Thoreau not as a preacher of righteousness, but as an interpreter of nature.” Edward Emerson added that a “whole literature” had sprung up since his day, “unquestionably inspired by him.” Had he simply “ruminat[ed] . . . on the eternities,” the literary historian Barrett Wendell insisted, “his position . . . would hardly be important. What gave him lasting power was his unusually sympathetic observation of Nature.” All this prompted Anderson Graham to demand that “every passage with a precept, a teaching or a doctrine . . . be ruthlessly excised.” Thoreau had arrived at the gates of literary fame, but his message had to be thinned considerably to fit the fashion of the times.39
This worried some critics. “Why is it, then, that Thoreau the thinker is still knocking at the gate where Thoreau the writer has been admitted?” biographer Henry Salt asked. Daniel Mason complained that “of the philosopher, . . . we hear, strangely enough, scarcely anything at all,” and the socialist critic John Macy, who edited the Nation, found it ironic that in the age of the robber baron, Thoreau’s sobering pronouncements on industrial society had been “discreetly turned to the wall.” Others wondered if he could “outlast the sentimentality which was the disease of the movement that called him father.” As these critics suggest, Thoreau was incomplete as a writer at this turning point in his literary reputation, and, just as important, he was not yet America’s most popular nature writer.40 A brief look at the authors who best represent the early-twentieth-century love affair with nature brings to light the strengths and limitations of Thoreau’s reputation in the age of progress.
The differences between Thoreau and turn-of-the-century writers are exemplified in the era’s two greatest naturalists, John Burroughs and John Muir. Together, they help explain how the nature-study movement transformed Thoreau and how he transcended the genre these two men represented. Burroughs was born in 1837 and grew up on a farm in the Hudson Highlands. While teaching school he read Flagg, Emerson, and Thoreau and began recording his own experiences in the woods. He published his first article, “Expressions,” in James Russell Lowell’s Atlantic Monthly in 1860, two years before Thoreau died. In 1864 he moved to Washington, DC, where he worked in the Treasury Department and as a bank examiner before returning to New York State. His first book, Wake-Robin, was published in 1871, and he followed this with a long string of publications that, by the end of the century, ranked him as America’s best-known naturalist. He died in 1921 on a train returning to his New York home after spending a winter in California.41
Well into the twentieth century Burroughs was, as his biographer Clara Barrus claimed, “more sought after . . . than any other American author.” Like other nature writers, he stripped away the philosophical meanings transcendentalists had attached to nature and gave readers a realistic depiction that neither overtaxed their capacity for sentimentalism nor challenged their literary reach. His images conveyed a vivaciousness that Thoreau seldom bothered to cultivate, but, more important, he presented nature on terms familiar to his readers. “When we read Thoreau we are always conscious of Thoreau,” Fred Lewis Pattee explained. “With Burroughs we are . . . walking with a delightful companion who knows everything and who points out new wonders at every step.” Thoreau loaded his descriptions with transcendent symbols and encouraged readers to go beyond the nature he described. Burroughs simplified nature, employing none of the moody foreshadowing that sometimes occluded Thoreau’s compositions. According to W. G. Barton, “What he feels you shall share.”42
The greatest difference between Thoreau and Burroughs was the meaning each assigned to nature. Thoreau saw it as a philosophic conundrum and Burroughs a walk in the woods. Burroughs cast nature as a setting for nostalgic withdrawal. “You grow old, your friends die or remove to distant lands, events sweep on and all things are changed,” he wrote, “yet there in your garden or orchard are the birds of your boyhood, the same notes, the same calls, and, to all intents and purposes, the identical birds endowed with perennial youth.” Thoreau demanded that his readers seek higher truths in nature, a condition that was, as Dallas Sharp said, “electrifying, purifying, illuminating, but not altogether conducive to peace.” Nor was Burroughs likely to let his social opinions intrude on his nature studies. Like Thoreau, he believed that cities were confining, but he fell short of condemning those who lived there to lives of “quiet desperation.” Where Thoreau judged and chided, Burroughs reassured. He left no moral messages, but in an age that saw nature as a place of recreation and therapeutic escape, he was, as William Sloane Kennedy wrote, “predestined to popularity.”43
A sense of personal inadequacy kept Burroughs from writing his self into his studies: “I think I . . . lack egoism,” he wrote. “But this weakness . . . is probably a great help to me as a writer upon nature. I do not stand in my own light. . . . I can surrender myself to nature without effort.” Thoreau used nature to define his selfhood; Burroughs abandoned his selfhood to nature. This was the difference, according to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, that put Thoreau’s writing “on the level of literature” and that of Burroughs at the “level of journalism.”44
Burroughs understood these differences. Thoreau, he thought, was less interested in nature than in the meaning behind it, and at times this preoccupation came “at the expense of the truth.” Burroughs recorded many misgivings like this, perhaps to accentuate his own virtues as a nature writer, but more likely as a way to step out from Thoreau’s shadow into the sunlight of turn-of-the-century nature appreciation. William Sloane Kennedy noted as much: “Burroughs’s . . . irritable overhaulings of Thoreau toward the end of his life were partly an attempt, it seems to me, to define his own position. Conscious of being much more deeply veined with humanity than Thoreau, and yet ever-lured by the intense white light of his ethical quality, and of his superior erudition, he wanted . . . to . . . place himself in his own sphere, so all could see the fact.”45 Burroughs nonetheless found much to admire in his predecessor, and at the end of his life he found himself regretting the distance between them. “I was thinking this morning of Thoreau’s way of writing, and what a mistake I have made in not heeding it,” he mused. “I am afraid I try to say things in too pretty a way. . . . I am too afraid to give the mind a jolt.” Successful nature writing, he realized, was not simply vivid description. Thoreau “walks . . . into the land of mythology, ideality, religion—while I just walk in the fields and woods.”46 This distinction would favor him only as long as the enthusiasm for nature study lasted.
Thoreau clearly made mistakes in his species descriptions, but his contemporaries had been less interested in fact than in symbol. If he had been “too intent upon the bird behind the bird,” it was because he and his readers saw nature as metaphor more than substance. By Burroughs’s time, nature had assumed more concrete meanings, and this put pressure on writers in his generation to accurately identify and describe it. W. G. Barton, writing in 1885 shortly after Harrison Blake published the first of his four volumes of journal entries, captured these changes in an essay comparing Thoreau, the recently deceased Wilson Flagg, and John Burroughs, still rising to the pinnacle of his career. Thoreau was less fluid as a writer than Flagg and less ebullient than Burroughs, who “sees, hears, smells, feels, fancies, thinks, and bursts forth copious and rich.” But Thoreau could “bring his reader so very close to that great . . . untamable spirit in himself.” This was the essential difference, as Higginson said earlier, between journalism and literature: Thoreau explored his own soul in his visions of nature, and thus his writing gained an element as timeless as the soul itself.47
In his musings on Thoreau, Burroughs also described his predecessor as the “first man in this country, or in any other, so far as I know, . . . to announce a Gospel of the Wild.” Thoreau’s quest for the primal essence of nature left Burroughs awestruck. He “ransacked the country . . . in all seasons and weathers, and at all times of the day and night; he delved into the ground, he probed the swamps, he searched the waters, he dug into woodchuck holes, into muskrats’ dens, into the retreats of the mice and squirrels.” There was something in this obsessive quest that flavored his writing—something Burroughs could never quite grasp. Channing and Alcott had emphasized Thoreau’s gentler, friendlier side, but to later critics he was, as William Sloane Kennedy insisted, best read as a “civilized wild man”—a capricious and unkempt soul. He “craved wildness,” George Ellwanger added, “a nature primordial and untrodden by the foot of man.”48
Burroughs to the contrary, Thoreau’s fascination with wilderness was not altogether unique in the mid-nineteenth century. Wilderness adventure books began appearing in the United States as early as the 1840s, when the English journalist Henry William Herbert, writing as Frank Forester, popularized primitive outdoor recreation his Field Sports, Fish and Fishing, and Complete Manual for Young Sportsmen. By the end of the century Forester had several American imitators, including William Sedgwick Steele, “Adirondack” Murray, Wallace Hoff, Isabella Bird, Lucius Hubbard, and Willard Glazier. Novelists such as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Jack London used Darwinian motifs in their work, and this inspired nature writers to add a hint of struggle and survival to their own stories. Among them, it was Maurice Thompson who carried this atavistic theme to extremes. Souls “weakened by civilized living,” he insisted, could be restored only in contact with raw nature, and this was especially true for those too young to have earned their manhood in the Civil War or by pioneering in the West. Thompson’s own masculine affirmation came in plunging his canoe “down between the dank, fantastically grooved jaws of the gorge, till the mist and darkness blended into one, and the thunder of the stream in its agony was appalling.” W. H. Hudson likewise entered an “instinctive or primitive state of mind” in the face of danger. Layers of self-deception fell away, leaving him in touch with his core consciousness. “I have met men whose talk was spicy and aromatic,” he wrote, “from whose lips simple words fell with a new, racy meaning.” Writing for a generation concerned about the sedentary state of urban life, Thompson, Hudson, and writer-adventurers such as Clarence King and Enos Mills made nature a test of stamina, manhood, resourcefulness, and moral fiber.49
Burroughs and others like him abandoned the symbolic and literary associations that so ornamented Thoreau’s work and presented nature as a nostalgic retreat. Those who found this approach too shallow discovered in the West, with its vast, unfathomed wilderness, a new set of transcendent meanings. Stanton Kirkham’s 1911 East and West: Comparative Studies in Nature in Eastern and Western States, perhaps the first nature book predicated on auto travel, searched out nature in both familiar and unfamiliar places. The ancient landscapes of the East, he discovered, were wild in their own way, but the West, a land still in its birth throes, appealed to the “primitive untrammeled man . . . who is not content with hills and brooks but demands mountain chains, the forest, and the desert for his portion.” In the West Kirkham found himself in touch with the “cryptic depths of the subconscious mind of the race.”50 Nature—challenging, energizing, affirming—regained its transcendent symbolism.
This new emphasis on wilderness gave Thoreau a more outdoorsy persona. W. H. Hudson praised his willingness to “take a ranker hold on life and live more as the animals do,” and the Iowa naturalist W. T. Worth observed that anywhere but in the woods he was “like a creature caged. Writing in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly, Lincoln Adams paraphrased Emerson’s eulogy for Thoreau: “He could find his way in the woods at night as easily as by day. He could see as through a spyglass; hear as with an ear trumpet, and each track upon the earth or in the snow revealed to him the creature which had gone before.” At a time of “luxurious living and artificiality,” Adams thought, this was the model of true manhood.51 Academics highlighted his wild qualities as well. Dalhousie University’s Archibald MacMechan, who wrote a chapter on Thoreau for the Cambridge History of American Literature, described Walden as “the struggle of primitive man to obtain food and shelter,” and Norman Foerster remarked that Thoreau’s “lust (hardly too strong a word) for rainstorms and swamps” was evidence of his “ardent yearning for wildness.”52
Here again, Thoreau differed from turn-of-the-century nature writers. The wilderness they typically described was resistant to the intimate forms of kinship that characterized so much of his writing. Mary Austin, writing at the turn of the century, crafted a lyrical tribute to the sparsely settled desert region east of the Sierra Nevada, where “not the law, but the land sets the limits.” The desert world was both inspiring and beautiful, but its extreme climate and furtive creatures kept the wanderer at bay. Writers like Austin showed that America’s wastelands could be wonderlands, but they abandoned the sense of connectedness Thoreau and Burroughs found in their northeastern woods. In his 1910 Henry Thoreau and Other Children of the Open Air, Theodore Watts-Dunton emphasized the way Thoreau imbedded himself into the world around him: “A squirrel or raccoon or woodchuck, bolder than the rest, would approach the motionless man silently and warily, and ready to make retreat at the smallest movement of an arm. . . . The raccoons approached nearer. The squirrels did the same, til at last they positively touched him. . . . An intimacy soon sprang up between him and them.” Most late-century wilderness writing centered on the adventure of confronting a remote and alien natural world; America still awaited someone who could imagine these exotic places on terms as familiar and inviting as Thoreau’s Concord or Burroughs’s Hudson Highlands.53
Western nature writing reached its apogee in John Muir, who found in the Sierra Nevada a wilderness far different from that described by Thoreau or Burroughs.54 This was scenery at its most sublime, and Muir churned this experience into a froth of ecstatic and religious references that profoundly altered the way America thought about nature. And like Thoreau, he embedded himself in this craggy landscape, achieving an intimacy every bit as familiar as the natural world of Thoreau and Burroughs. Muir was born in Scotland, and when he was young his family moved to Wisconsin. During a boyhood shadowed by his father’s stern sense of duty and equally grim theological rigor, he learned to view nature as a life-affirming refuge. Where Thoreau’s move to Walden was a philosophical decision, Muir’s escape to the Sierra Nevada was driven by his experience with crushing toil, nay-saying religion, and overbearing patriarchal authority.
In 1864 Muir left the farm for Canada to avoid the military draft. He returned in 1866, worked briefly in a foundry, and after recovering from a serious eye injury decided on a walking tour of South America, only to be struck down by fever in Florida. He boarded a steamer and sailed to San Francisco, where he immediately “inquired for the nearest way out of town.”55 He first spied the Sierra crest from the western rim of the San Joachin Valley. “At my feet lay the Great Central Valley of California, level and flowery, like a lake of pure sunshine, forty or fifty miles wide . . . and from the eastern boundary of this vast golden flowerbed rose the mighty Sierra, miles in height, and so gloriously colored and so radiant, it seemed not clothed with light, but wholly composed of it, like a wall of some celestial city.” Muir spent his first summer in the Sierra in 1868 as a sheepherder, and in a spiritual sense, he never left.56
As a natural scientist, Muir was far more engaged than Thoreau. He discovered living glaciers in the Sierra and successfully defended his geological theories against those who saw catastrophic earthquakes as the primary source of mountain building. Because he thought in geological time, his nature was dynamic and immensely powerful, and his understanding of these great earth events gave his writing a unique aura of primal energy. Burroughs, who visited Yosemite Valley in 1909, regarded the towering walls and tumbling waters as he regarded his eastern woods: “You at once feel the spell of the brooding calm and sheltered seclusion,” he wrote. Where Burroughs and Thoreau both emphasized the “home instinct,” Muir’s essays suggested wanderlust. “To read Muir is to be in the presence not of a tranquil, chatty companion like Burroughs. It is rather to be with a tempestuous soul whose units are storms and mountain ranges and mighty glacial moraines, who strides excitedly along the bare tops of ragged peaks and rejoices in their vastness and awfulness, who cries, ‘Come with me along the glaciers and see God making landscapes!’”57
One of the few nature writers of his day to appreciate the evolutionary aspects of landscape formation, Muir was fascinated by the power of glaciers, earthquakes, floods, avalanches, fires, and storms. Watching a forest fire boil up out of the Kaweah Basin, he was transfixed by the sheer elemental force of this “master scourge and controller of the distribution of trees.” It raced up the chaparral slopes “in a broad cataract of flames, now bending down low to feed on the green bushes, devouring acres of them at a breath, now towering high in the air as if looking abroad to choose a way, then stooping to feed again.” During a mountain storm he climbed a tall tree and while swaying like a “supple goldenrod” absorbed a lesson in tree perseverance. “Consider what centuries of storms have fallen upon them since they were first planted—hail, to break the tender seedlings; lightning, to scorch and shatter; snow, winds, and avalanches, to crush and overwhelm—while the manifest result of all this wild storm-culture is the glorious perfection we behold.” Glaciers required aeons to shape mountains, but fires, earthquakes, and storms could change the face of the region in an instant—“simply by giving the mountains a shake.” However terrifying, these forces were “only harmonious notes in the song of creation, varied expressions of God’s love.” Here indeed was a feeling of transcendence.58
Muir was familiar with Thoreau’s writing, and there were similarities in the way the two men approached nature. Both were solitary explorers, both saw religious significance in nature, and both viewed nature holistically. More significantly, both immersed themselves in their environment: Muir bathed in the beatific glow of a High Sierra summer, and Thoreau hunkered down beside a turtle laying eggs. Muir’s descriptions were more whimsical, but his kinship with the creatures he encountered was as genuine as Thoreau’s. Water ouzels, at home amid the cascades and cliffs, were especially dear: “Every breath he draws is part of a song, and he gets his first music lessons before he is born; for the eggs vibrate in time with the tones of the waterfalls.” Like Muir, the ouzel was equally ebullient in any weather: “He must sing, though the heavens fall.” If indeed the purpose of nature writing was to touch the heart, Muir was the genre’s master.59
There were differences as well, and as with Burroughs, these help explain the resilience that carried Thoreau beyond the turn-of-the-century nature-study movement. Some could be attributed to the vastly different landscapes the two men explored. Concord’s closed-in forests and pinched farmlands inspired austere and pensive commentary on nature’s wildness, while Muir’s sweeping canyons and lush sun-soaked meadows gave rise to buoyant orations on nature’s divinity. Muir cherished the uninhabitable world of ice and stone above the timberline, while Thoreau, like Emerson, believed that nature was meaningful only when it was the object of human thought or activity.60 Scrambling up a barren talus slope would have appalled Thoreau, who had no perceptual means of connecting to a wilderness this profound, while sauntering through a second-growth New England forest would have similarly annoyed Muir. On his trip to Maine in 1846, Thoreau climbed Mount Katahdin, and this, aside from his treks along the beaches of Cape Cod, was his only experience with the monumental landscapes Muir saw everywhere in the Sierra. Shrouded in low-hanging clouds and braced against a damp wind, Thoreau lingered only for a few minutes on the high tableland before he retreated, uttering agoraphobic pronouncements against a landscape that offered too much space and too little life. When Muir stood in similar circumstances atop North Dome, some two thousand feet above the Yosemite Valley floor, he was ecstatic. The vast, barren landscape and great stretches of space and time put him in direct contact with the infinite. Thoreau, like most nature writers of his day, was satisfied with the subtle wildness of a cultivated field or cutover woodlot; Muir required high, remote canyons and towering sequoias to frame his relation to nature.61
There were other differences that put Thoreau in the class of great literature and Muir, like Burroughs, in the camp of the turn-of-the-century nature writer. Muir was an unstoppable talker, but his writing was labored, and when he did write, he composed in a style one critic described as “adjectivorous”; he made his point by overworking terms like glorious and radiant. Thoreau was a measured, classical writer who took immense pride in the perfect sentence or metaphor; Muir was an eyewitness to ecstasy.62 Muir’s writing was also guided by his nature advocacy. While Thoreau made a few eloquent gestures toward preserving his native town, Muir threw himself passionately into the effort to save the Sierra’s delicate meadows, towering sequoias, and pristine valleys from grazers, loggers, and dam builders. “Any fool can destroy trees,” he famously wrote. “They cannot run away; and if they could, they would still be destroyed—chased and hunted down as long as fun or a dollar could be got out of their bark hides . . . or magnificent bold backbones.” He spoke to readers on the highest moral plane, but his preservationist zeal overshadowed his aspirations as a writer. More impassioned than Thoreau, he epitomized the turn-of-the-century nature writer’s focus on conservation and recreation as opposed to lasting literary legacy.63
Here again, philosophical differences separated the two men. Concord’s familiar landscapes seemed wild to Thoreau because wildness was a philosophical construct born of his wish to understand the primal self and glimpse the unknowable essence behind the veil of nature. As a poet and philosopher, he could find metaphors and allegories in even the most common scene. Muir’s wildness was simpler, born of his awestruck fascination with a vast, monumental, and sublime physical presence. His vision was panoramic, but as a scholar wrote, “he seems not able to get beyond the thought of reproducing the scene.” To writers in Muir’s age, nature was truly transcendent only where it was dramatic, remote, exotic, or monumental; elsewhere, as Burroughs intimated, it was simply a walk in the woods.64
Muir, like Burroughs, demonstrates the way Thoreau’s use of nature differed from that of the turn-of-the-century writer. The Sierra peak, the Hudson Highlands, and the Concord woods all offered an opportunity to connect emotionally with nature, but the meaning of this connection changed in the decades after 1862. For Thoreau, nature was the quest for a metaphor; for Burroughs, a search for grand stories encapsulated in small events; and for Muir, an immersion in the sublime. Thoreau found transcendence, if not sublimity, in his familiar surroundings. He was a “literary Genius loci,” bent on knowing and connecting with every rock and rill of his familiar world. He discovered “more on a few acres than many human beings do on square miles” and gave these few acres personality, flavor, appeal—and a sense of wildness.65 Muir reveled in the monumental and paid less attention to the spiritual nuance in the ground under his feet. He represented a new view of nature—boundless and majestic but otherwise simply corporeal.
America’s fascination with nature had been fueled by a nostalgic mood among first- or second-generation urban migrants, but by the beginning of the new century the simple walk-in-the-woods narrative, stripped of transcendent meaning, was losing its appeal. Some writers, like Muir, responded by discovering the sublime in remote and monumental places. Others added a more compelling story line to their description of nearby nature. Collecting observations that were sufficiently interesting to serve these narratives required time in the field, great patience, a lively imagination, and no small amount of luck. Thoreau met this challenge by devoting his entire life to field study and by giving even the most mundane event metaphorical significance. Latter-day nature writers, having set aside both hard science and high philosophy, were forced to find literary merit in the facts as they found them. Their success depended on giving these discoveries, as Peter Schmitt writes, “all the conventions of dramatic action.”66
All nature writers were to some degree torn between their obligation to the fact and their commitment to the story, but just where they positioned themselves along the boundary between fact and fantasy was a matter of individual taste. Some were “gushy,” as Kirkham put it, tempted by the naïveté of the urban reader to invest their topics with more sentiment and less science. Other writers hewed to the facts, observing nature with a “cold and calculating eye.” While the former risked their credibility, the latter imparted too little zest to their stories. The balance depended on whether the author saw nature writing as fiction or nonfiction. “It is not the eye that sees, but the man behind the eye,” Bradford Torrey explained. But how much license should be given to the man behind the eye? Wrestling with the same question, Dallas Sharp cautioned that “if my chippy sings, it must sing a chippy’s simple song, not some gloria that only ‘the careless angels know.’ It must not do any extraordinary thing for me; but it may lead me to do an extraordinary thing—to have an extraordinary thought, or suggestion, or emotion.” Yet, as Sharp observed, no matter how factual, nature writing was, by definition, a “more or less . . . fraud.” Imagining the self in nature required at least some literary license, and this pushed the entire genre to the brink: when the reader’s faith was “threatened by obvious insincerity or by the laughter of its critics, the whole mythical structure might crumble.”67
This faith was shaken when the pressure to popularize nature encouraged a new form of literature known as animal fiction. The genre was pioneered by nature writer Ernest Thompson Seton, whose Wild Animals I Have Known ran through ten editions in the first few years after its publication in 1898. Born in England, Seton emigrated to the Canadian West in 1866, and while hunting on the prairie he learned to sketch wildlife, read animal tracks, and “recreate the story of their lives” through observation, deduction, and narrative imagination. He later moved to New Mexico, where he wrote stories about individual animals that revealed curious or compelling details about their species behavior. Young readers sympathized with his creatures, marveled at his Indian lore, and learned about nature through nature’s eyes. Encouraged by this eager young audience, he sometimes gave his animals more sentience and moral bearing than science might allow.68 Although immensely popular, his stories troubled those who linked their writing more closely to facts from the field.
The Reverend William J. Long wrote in a similar vein for Youth’s Companion and later in children’s books, among them Ways of the Wood Folk, Fowls of the Air, and School of the Woods. His stories conveyed the impression that woodland behavior was not much different from the behavior of his young readers. Typically, he opened with a few well-established facts to buttress his credibility and then narrated a personal experience with a particular group of animals. Each episode revealed personality traits—curiosity, pride, perseverance, spirit, playfulness, or humor—that characterized both the species and his animal hero. Like Seton, Long insisted that his material came from actual observation—his own or those of the hunters and woodsmen with whom he traveled—and as a graduate of Harvard College, Andover Theological Seminary, and Heidelberg University, he verified his accounts by simply announcing that he was “accustomed to being believed when I speak.”69 While his stories generally stayed within the bounds of credibility, he occasionally crossed the threshold. In a 1903 Outlook article, for instance, he described a woodcock making a cast of mud and sticks for its broken leg.
Stories like these, as Sharp said, threw a shadow across the entire genre. Nature writing depended on the presumption of scientific truth, no matter how thin. To establish this, the author began, as Sharp put it, with a “solemn, pious preface, wherein he declares that the following observations are exactly as he personally saw them; that they are true altogether; that he has the affidavits to prove it; and the Indians and the Eskimos to swear the affidavits prove it.” But as he pointed out, this protestation raised suspicions that all other accounts were less than true. Sensitive to the damage that Seton, Long, and others might do to the field, John Burroughs wrote a long article in the Atlantic Monthly in May 1903 titled “Real and Sham Natural History.” He began by listing those whom he considered genuine naturalists and then flayed Seton and Long for taking “liberties . . . with the facts.” In reply Long insisted that animal behavior was individualistic and thus not subject to scrutiny based on generalizations about species behavior. At this point, Theodore Roosevelt, himself a noted outdoorsman, stepped into the fray with his own criticism of the so-called nature fakirs. Long replied again with an open letter chastising the president for using his office to seize the high ground. Roosevelt might have understood these animal stories better, Long insisted, had he not been so preoccupied with “killing everything in sight.” The only time he got near the heart of an animal, he put a “bullet through it.”70
To bring the debate to a close, Roosevelt arranged a symposium in the September 1907 Everybody’s magazine that included testimony from the most respected field naturalists in his acquaintance. He also wrote to Seton, urging him to confine his stories to the facts. Taking Roosevelt’s advice to heart, Seton abandoned animal fiction and produced several authoritative works on wildlife, including Lives of Game Animals which, ironically, won the John Burroughs Medal from the American Museum of Natural History for its excellence as a work of natural history. Roosevelt’s symposium and other forms of public exposure reined in the nature fakirs, and in a few years the debate was all but forgotten.71 Still, the flurry of accusations and counteraccusations touched even the most respected figures in the field and challenged the credibility of virtually everything written about nature. And if the nature writer’s primary appeal was sentiment, reining in the emotional narrative had a significant constraining effect on the entire genre. For this and other reasons, nature writing faded in the years following World War I. Burroughs, Muir, Torrey, and a few others managed through sheer literary talent to retain readers without overtaxing the instinct to empathize with animals, but those with less stylistic acumen fell by the wayside.
Thoreau’s journal, published in 1906, was caught up in the nature-fakir debate. The literary critic Norman Foerster maintained that he “had no excuse, scientifically speaking, for many of the blunders he committed” and insisted that “any schoolboy with the same advantages—spyglass, books, and a love of nature—could in five years equal, nay excel, Thoreau’s total knowledge of birds.” In his preface to the journal, Bradford Torrey admitted that Thoreau could identify only a small portion of the common birds of Massachusetts, “wonderful as his knowledge seemed to those who, like Emerson, knew practically nothing.” Field equipment was primitive in Thoreau’s day, Torrey continued, but these errors were still mystifying: “How could an ornithological observer . . . be in the field daily for ten or fifteen years before setting eyes upon his first rose-breasted grosbeak?”72 Reviewers were quick to take advantage of this skepticism. “Mr. Torrey has by no means a high opinion of Thoreau as a naturalist,” one observed, then concluded that Thoreau was “essentially an amateur.”73 Burroughs, like Torrey, was puzzled: “Considering that Thoreau spent half of each day for upward of twenty years in the open air, bent upon spying out nature’s ways and doings . . . it is remarkable that he made so few real observations.” Fannie Hardy Eckstorm, a Maine naturalist and folklorist who knew the woods of her state more intimately than any writer of her time, challenged the “popular notion that Thoreau was a great woodsman.” The Maine Woods was replete with errors, and his bird list made it clear that he was not an ornithologist. Still, she found compensation in his literary skill: “He had the art . . . to see the human values of natural objects, to perceive the ideal elements of unreasoning nature and the service of those ideals to the soul of man.”74
Responding to a complaint that Thoreau described a “spot” on a nighthawk’s wing rather than a “bar,” Francis Allen argued that he was not offering a scientific description but simply “recording an impression of the bird as seen in flight.” Allen’s interpretation, although it probably failed to convince dedicated bird-watchers, expressed the lasting merit in Thoreau’s work: the impression of nature was more important than nature itself. Most defenders, however, insisted on the quality of his physical observations—his discovery, for instance, of new species of fish, mice, plants, and tortoises. To these loyalists, Thoreau was still a nature narrator first and a philosopher of nature only incidentally. “As we read, we feel at times a wish that he would sooner reach his conclusions on philosophical or political questions, because we are sure they will be followed by some bright reference to a bird or beast, simply phrased, yet so cunningly that the creature stands before us,” Charles Abbott mused. It was Thoreau’s genius, Charles Richardson declared in his 1891 literary history, that he got near to “Nature’s heart” and described it in “simple, true, poetic, eloquent words.”75
Writing in the same year as Richardson, the literary critic Joshua Caldwell marveled that a man so obscure in his own lifetime could be so widely recognized at the end of the century. Was the antebellum reader at fault for not recognizing Thoreau’s genius, or were the turn-of-the-century nature lovers to be blamed for trumpeting the virtues of a minor literary figure? Caldwell suspected the latter. He found much to admire in Thoreau’s idealism and his unbending moral fiber, but these characteristics were not in themselves a foundation for literary fame. Yankee in Canada, The Maine Woods, and Cape Cod would remain of interest only among those living in these places, and “Civil Disobedience,” “Slavery in Massachusetts,” “Life without Principle,” and “John Brown” would be read only while these issues remained timely. Otherwise, Caldwell found a certain “incompleteness and want of harmony” in the entire corpus. His reputation, Caldwell thought, had been artificially advanced first by his Concord friends, then by publishers who issued “books so handsomely bound and so highly indorsed [they] could not have failed to sell,” and finally by those caught up in the enthusiasm for outdoor life. Paul More agreed. Thoreau was too little interested in people to be a great writer; there was none of the fiery spirit that caused Lord Byron to mingle compassion for humanity with his devotion to the Alpine solitudes.76
Where Eckstorm felt Thoreau would be better read as a poet than as a naturalist, Caldwell saw natural history as his only true genius. Had he confined himself to nature writing, “the foundations of his fame would have been much more firmly laid.” But, of course, standing him on this particular pedestal was problematic; it reduced his books and essays to a simple exercise in description no different from the hundreds of volumes that crowded the booksellers’ shelves in Caldwell’s day. Caldwell himself recognized the consequences: there was “no reason for concluding that Thoreau can maintain his present prominence among American writers, or that his place in literature, if permanent at all, will be a high one.”77 Caldwell overlooked a great deal in his assessment of Thoreau’s writing, but his commentary suggests the ambiguous effect nature writing had on the meaning and message of his work.
Like Caldwell, historians of literary canon have been puzzled by Thoreau’s sudden rise to fame among scholars such as Foerster and popularizers such as Lincoln Adams. The literary historian Lawrence Buell, like Caldwell, attributes this to Thoreau’s friends and publishers, but he notes that “Thoreau’s advocates could not have succeeded if history weren’t already running their way”—a reference to the cultural shift in the perception of nature at the turn of the century. Still, Buell admits that “just what it was that put Thoreau in a different category from his successors was never precisely identified.” Indeed, there are continuities enough to suggest that he was simply a forerunner to a literary movement that disappeared with the American entry into World War I. Most turn-of-the-century writers, like Thoreau, were interested primarily in nearby nature, and they shared Thoreau’s interest in what Charles Abbott called “philosophical zoology”—animal behavior understood from the animal’s point of view.78 Thoreau’s attempt to commune with woodchucks, foxes, frogs, and other creatures provided grounding for the animal stories that gained such popularity at the turn of the century.
Other features, however, set him apart from this genre and assured him a lasting place in the literary pantheon. First was his total and unconditional dedication to the natural world. As one critic pointed out, the sixty-eight hundred printed pages of his journal, “wrought for no eyes save his own,” attested to a life given over completely to nature.79 The results of this single-mindedness were evident in his lofty, indeed spiritual, regard for nature and in the exquisite balance he struck between fact, symbol, and imagination.
Second, unlike later writers, he used nature as a vehicle for self-discovery. Others wrote to make their readers aware of nature; Thoreau wrote to make them aware of themselves. Nature was a mere starting point for the spiritual awakening that would transfix their lives, as it transfixed his. He saw nature, as Norman Foerster said, “through the refracting medium of his personality,” but he also used it as a means of understanding his personality. His classical background taught him that transformation was the mission of all great literature, and his own writing was no exception. As he explored the world around him, he became better acquainted with his own consciousness and more determined to make his life “equal [in] simplicity . . . with the earth herself.” He offered redemption rather than escape: a chance to “thrum with the excitement of the universe,” as Carl Van Doren put it, but also to put himself in harmony with these vibrations.80 The heady combination of inspection and introspection gave his writing a sense of high purpose that was lacking in later writers, who vacillated between blustering masculine self-assertion, like Maurice Thompson, and passive observation, like John Burroughs.
Third, he wrote with an unshakable conviction that nature’s operations mirrored divine law. As a dedicated transcendentalist surrounded by others who shared his faith in higher truths, he crowned nature with a symbolic superstructure that would have been impossible to construct in any other time or place. He aimed at high truth, while later nature writers aspired to factual truth. Foerster put this succinctly: “Thoreau’s view of life was genuinely imaginative, sincerely idealistic, whereas the view of life that one finds in the typical nature-writing of the twentieth century is absurdly shallow and sentimental.”81 Turn-of-the-century readers may have found this idealism distracting, but it lent his words an incredible power that sustained him when outdoor enthusiasm succumbed to urban cultural influences after World War I.
Finally, Thoreau coupled his spiritual interpretation of nature to his reform ideals. The connection was obscure, but the two sides of his legacy were in subtle ways mutually reinforcing. On the centennial of his birth in 1917, Houghton Mifflin reissued Edward Emerson’s Henry Thoreau: As Remembered by a Young Friend, which had been dedicated to rescuing Thoreau’s reputation from his nineteenth-century critics. “I saw this man,” Emerson wrote, “always spoken of with affection and respect by my parents and other near friends; knew him [to be] strongly, but not noisily, interested on the side of Freedom in the great struggle that then stirred the country.” Emerson’s Lincolnesque tribute struck home: no other writer had been able to connect nature to the idea of human freedom as resoundingly as Thoreau. The centennial came amid the anxieties of European war, and this, too, reinforced the popular impression that Thoreau wrote about nature with a sense of social purpose. A Cleveland Plain Dealer editor remembered him as “an odd man” who preferred the friendship of birds, bugs, and beasts to humans, but he considered Thoreau a model for sane living in an insane world. The philosophic truths in Walden—simplicity, individualism, spiritual sensitivity—stood out against the banality of commerce and the trauma of war and gave his writing a universality missing in contemporary books on nature.82 This side of Thoreau—his critique of society against the backdrop of nature—would sustain him through the decades between the two world wars.
The connection between Thoreau and the nature-study movement was problematic, but it was an important turning point in the trajectory of his reputation. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived,” Thoreau said in the opening lines of Walden. The nature writers who went to the woods at the turn of the century learned something far less inspirational, but in their zeal they managed to convey a deep-seated passion for the outdoors to an American public still ambivalent about the idea of nature. They gave the woods and fields emotional significance, if not transcendent value. Nostalgia, therapeutic composure, masculine affirmation, and in Muir’s case sheer ecstasy made nature accessible to a broader class of people than those reached by the transcendentalists, and in a nation overwhelmed by the multiple complications of urban-industrial life, the natural world once again made sense. And this, after all, was the message Thoreau struggled to convey to the American people.83