Literature in the Making Part 15

"Do you believe," I asked, "that being in the city has had a good effect on literary activity among Columbia students?"

He answered: "I do think so, decidedly. It has produced an extreme individualism and has given the boys enterprising minds. It is true that it has its disadvantages, it has made the student, so to speak, centrifugal, and has destroyed collegiate co-operation of the old sort.

But it has produced an original, independent type of student.

"The older type of college student was interested in football because he knew that people expected him to be interested in football. The Columbia student of to-day is interested in poetry, not because it is a Columbia tradition to be interested in poetry, but because his tastes are naturally literary."

Several of the causes of this poetic renascence at Columbia had been mentioned in the course of our conversation, but Professor Erskine had ignored one of the most important of them. So I will mention it now. It is John Erskine.

_CITY LIFE VERSUS LITERATURE_

JOHN BURROUGHS

"Well," said John Burroughs, "she doesn't seem to want us out here, so I guess we'll have to go in." So we left the little summer-house overlooking the Hudson and went into the bark-walled study.

Now, "she" was a fat and officious robin, and her nest was in a corner of the summer-house just over my head, as I sat with the poet-naturalist. The nest was full of hungry and unprepossessing young robins, and the mother robin seemed to be annoyed in her visits to it by our talk. As we walked to the study, leaving to the robin family undisputed possession of the summer-house, I heard John Burroughs say in tones of mild indignation, half to himself and half to me:

"I won't stand this another year! This is the third year she's taken possession of that summer-house, and next May she simply must build her nest somewhere else!"

Nevertheless, I think that this impudent robin will rear her 1917 brood in John Burroughs's summer-house, if she wants to.

When I walked up from the station to Riverby--John Burroughs's twenty-acre home on the west sh.o.r.e of the Hudson--I was surprised by the agility of my seventy-nine-year-old companion. He walked with the elastic step of a young man, and his eyes and brain were as alert as in the days when he showed Emerson and Whitman the wild wonders of the hills.

"Living in the city," he said, "is a discordant thing, an unnatural thing. The city is a place to which one goes to do business; it is a place where men overreach one another in the fight for money. But it is not a place in which one can live.

"Years ago, I think, it was possible to have a home in the city. I used to think that a home in Boston might possibly be imagined. But no one can have a home in New York in all that noise and haste.

"Sometimes I am worried by the thought of the effect that life in the city will have on coming generations. All this grind and rush and roar of the Subway and the surface cars must have some effect on the children of New-Yorkers. And that effect cannot be good.

"And what effect can it have on our literature? It might produce, I suppose, in the writer's mind, a sense of the necessity of haste, a pa.s.sionate desire to get his effect as quickly as possible. But can it give him sharpness of intellect and keenness of aesthetic perception! I'd like to think so, but I can't. I don't see how literature can be produced in the city. Literature must have repose, and there is no repose in New York so far as I can see.

"Of course I have no right to speak for other writers. Some people can find repose in the city--I can't. I hear that people write on the trains, on the omnibus, and in the Subway--I don't see how they do it!"

"Have you noticed," I asked, as we left the lane and walked down a gra.s.sy slope toward the study, "that the city has not as yet set its mark on our literature?"

"I think," said John Burroughs, "that much of our modern fiction shows what I may call a metropolitan quality; it seems made up of showy streets and electric light. But I don't know. I don't read much fiction. I turn more to poetry and to meditative essays. Some poets find beauty in the city, and they must, I suppose, find repose there. Richard Watson Gilder spent nearly all his life in a city and reflected the life of the city in his poems. And Edmund Clarence Stedman was thoroughly a poet of the city. I don't think that any of Emerson's poems smack of the city. They smack of the country, and of Emerson's study in the country, his study under the pines, where, as he wrote:

the sacred pine-tree adds To the leaves her myriads.

"Of the younger poets, John James Piatt has written beautifully of the city. He wrote a very fine poem called 'The Morning Street,' which appeared in the _Atlantic Monthly_ some years ago. In it he describes vividly the hush of early morning in a great city, when the steps of a solitary traveler echo from the walls of the sleeping houses. I don't suppose Piatt is known to many readers of this generation. He was a friend of Howells, and was the co-author with Howells of _Poems by Two Friends_, published in the early sixties. This was Howells's first venture."

We were in the bark-walled study now, seated before the great stone fireplace, in which some logs were blazing. On the stone shelf I saw, among the photographs of Carlyle and Emerson and other friends of my host, a portrait of Whitman.

"Your friend, Walt Whitman," I said, "got inspiration from the city."

"Yes," said John Burroughs, "he got inspiration from the city, but you wouldn't call his poems city poetry. His way of writing wasn't metropolitan, you know; you might say that he treated the city by a country method. What he loved about the city was its people--he loved the throngs of men, he loved human a.s.sociations.

"But he was a born lover of cities, Whitman was. He loved the city in all its phases, mainly because he was such a lover of his kind, of the 'human critter,' as he calls him. Whitman spent most of his life in the city, and was more at home there than in the country. He came to Brooklyn when he was a boy, and there he worked in a law-office, and as a printer and on the _Eagle_.

"For a while, I remember, he drove a 'bus up and down Broadway when the driver, who was a friend of his, was sick. That's where he got the stuff he put in _The Funeral of an Old Omnibus-driver_. He put in it all the signs and catch-words of the 'bus-drivers."

John Burroughs pointed his steady old hand at a big framed photograph on the wall. It is an unusual portrait of Walt Whitman, showing him seated, with his hands clasped, with a flaring s.h.i.+rt collar, like a sailor's.

"Whitman," John Burroughs continued, "seems to be appealing more and more to young men. But in the modern Whitmanesque young poets I don't see much to suggest Whitman, except in form. They do clever things, but not elemental things, not things with a cosmic basis. Whitman, with all his commonness and nearness, reached out into the abysmal depths, as his imitators fail to do. I think Robert Frost has been influenced by Whitman. His _North of Boston_ is very good; it is genuine realism; it is a faithful, convincing picture of New England farm life. When I first saw the book I didn't think I'd read three pages of it, but I read it all with keen interest. It's absolutely true.

"I used to see Whitman often when he and I were working in Was.h.i.+ngton.

And he came up to see me here. When I was in Was.h.i.+ngton Whitman used to like to come up to our house for Sunday morning breakfast. Mrs.

Burroughs makes capital pancakes, and Walt was very fond of them, but he was always late for breakfast. The coffee would boil over, the griddle would smoke, car after car would go jingling by, and no Walt. But a car would stop at last, and Walt would roll off it and saunter up to the door--cheery, vigorous, serene, putting every one in good humor. And how he ate! He radiated health and hopefulness. This is what made his work among the sick soldiers in Was.h.i.+ngton of such inestimable value. Every one who came into personal relations with him felt his rare, compelling charm.

"Very few young literary men of Whitman's day accepted him. Stedman did, and the fact is greatly to his credit. Howells and Aldrich were repelled by his bigness. All the Boston poets except Emerson hesitated. Emerson didn't hesitate--unlike Lowell and Holmes, he kept open house for big ideas."

I asked Mr. Burroughs what, in his opinion, had brought about the change in the world's att.i.tude toward Whitman.

"Well," he replied, looking thoughtfully into the radiant depths of the open fire, "when Whitman first appeared we were all subservient to the conventional standards of English literature. We understood and appreciated only the pretty and exact. Whitman came in his working-man's garb, in his s.h.i.+rt sleeves he sauntered into the parlor of literature.

"We resented it. But the young men nowadays are more liberal. More and more Whitman is forcing on them his open-air standards. Science supplemented by the human heart gives us a bigger and freer world than our forefathers knew. And then the European acceptance of Whitman had had its effect. We take our point of view so largely from Europe. And a force like Whitman's must be felt slowly; it's a c.u.mulative thing."

"You believe," I said, "that Whitman is our greatest poet?"

"Oh yes," he replied, "Whitman is the greatest poet America has produced. He is great with the qualities that make Homer and the cla.s.sic poets great. Emerson is more precious, more intellectual. Whitman and Emerson are our two greatest poets."

While we strolled over the pleasant turf and watched a wood-thrush resting in the cool of the evening above her half-built nest among the cherry blossoms, John Burroughs returned to the subject that we had discussed on our way from the station--the city's evil effect on literature.

"Business life," he said, "is inimical to poetry. To write poetry you must get into an atmosphere utterly different from that of the city. And one of the greatest of all enemies of literature is the newspaper. The style of writing that the newspaper has brought into existence is as far as possible from art and literature. When you are writing for a daily paper, you don't try to say a thing in a poetic or artistic way, but in an efficient way, in a business-like way. There is no appeal to the imagination, no ideality. A newspaper is a noisy thing that goes out into the street and shouts its way into the attention of people.

"If you are going to write poetry you must say to certain phases of the newspapers, 'Get thee behind me, Satan!' A poet can't be developing his gossiping faculty and turning everything hot off the griddle. The daily paper is a new inst.i.tution, and it has come to stay. But it has bad manners, and it is the enemy of all meditation, all privacy, all things that make for great art.

"It's the same way with nature and writing about nature. From nature we get not literature, but the raw material for literature. It is very important for us to remember that the bee does not get honey from the flowers; it makes honey from what it gets from the flowers. What it gets from the flowers is nothing but sweet water. The bee gets its sweet water, retires, thinks it over, and by a private process makes it into honey.

"So many nature-writers fail to profit by the example of the bee. They go into the woods and come out again and write about their experience--but they don't give us honey. They don't retire and subject what they find in the woods to a private process. They don't give us honey; they give us just a little sweet water, pretty thoroughly diluted.

"In my own work--if I may mention it in all humbleness--I have tried for years not to give the world just a bare record, but to flavor it, so to speak, with my own personality, as the bee turns the sweet water that it gets into honey by adding its own formic acid.

"If I lived in the city I couldn't do any writing, unless I succeeded in obliterating the city from my consciousness. But I shouldn't try to force my standards on every one. Other men live in the cities and write--Carlyle did most of his work in London. But he lived a secluded life even in the city, and he had to have his yearly pilgrimage to Scotland."

It is some years since John Burroughs has written poetry, although all his prose is clearly the work of a poet. And it is safe to say that better known than any of his intimate prose studies of the out-of-door world--better known even than _Wake Robin_ and that immortal _A Hunt for the Nightingale_ and _In Fresh Fields_--is one of his poems, _Waiting_, the poem that begins:

Serene, I fold my hands and wait, Nor care for wind, nor tide, nor sea; I rave no more 'gainst time or fate, For lo! my own shall come to me.

"I wrote _Waiting_," he said, "in 1862, when I was reading medicine in the office of a country physician. It was a dingy afternoon, and I was feeling pretty blue. But the thought came to me--I suppose I got it from Goethe or some of the Orientals, probably by way of Emerson--that what belonged to me would come to me in time, if I waited--and if I also hustled. So I waited and I hustled, and my little poem turned out to be a prophecy. My own has come to me, as I never expected it to come. The best friends I have were seeking me all the while. There's Henry Ford; he had read all my books, and he came to me--that great-hearted man, the friend of all the birds, and my friend.

"The poem first appeared in the _Knickerbocker Magazine_. That magazine was edited by a c.o.c.kney named Kinneha Cornwallis. It ran long enough to print one of Cornwallis's novels, and then it died. I remember that the _Knickerbocker Magazine_ never paid me for _Waiting_, and the poem didn't attract any attention until Whittier printed it in his _Songs of Three Centuries_.

"It has been changed and tampered with and had all sorts of things done to it. It was found among the ma.n.u.scripts of a poet down South after his death, and his literary executor was going to print it in his book. He wrote to me and asked if I could show a date for it earlier than 1882. I said, 'Yes, 1862!' and that settled that matter.