Nature and Human Nature

NATURE AND HUMAN NATURE.

IF there is one sort of book which especially tempts overvaluation, it is the new book of the man whom everybody loves. Why should we not permit ourselves the luxury of absolute deference toward the writer who has won our hearts so easily ? It would be pleasant to think that his latest book is the best thing he has ever written. We welcome it in the happiest spirit of confidence ; we depend upon it to afford us a real and intimate pleasure. The chances are we lay it down in the same uncritical mood, and if there is occasion for us to speak of it, we find an easy refuge in terms of general and perhaps extravagant approbation ; we speak with sweetness, but without light. Comfortable as this procedure is, it of course does justice to nobody. A writer’s personality is not necessarily commanding because it has charm ; in fact, if we take it overseriously, we must rob it of something of its legitimate authority. People we love may readily influence us more than all the prophets in the world, but that is no reason for calling them prophets; probably we should not care for them if they were.

Perhaps no living American writer is more widely loved and delighted in than Mr. Henry van Dyke. His publishers know this so well that the first edition of The Ruling Passion ¹ was made — and advertised to be — almost as large as if it had been a historical novel. To magazine readers only the Writer’s Request of his Master and the preface will be new. They are interesting because they call attention, possibly undue attention, to the attitude of the author toward his work. “ Lord,” he prays, let me never tag a moral to a story, nor tell a story without a meaning. Make me respect my material so much that I dare not slight my work. Help me to deal very honestly with words and with people because they are both alive. . . . Give me an ideal that will stand the strain of weaving into human stuff on the loom of the real.” The passage very well illustrates the difficulty of dealing critically with such a writer. It is all so genuine, so ingenuous, we wish not to feel that it is out of place. Yet really the situation is not so momentous as this comes to. The collection of pleasant, wholesome stories is very well worth while ; but it is not, it does not need to be, a profound work of art. For we cherish the author of Little Rivers, not as an imposing figure in letters, but as a blessed survival, a writer of sentiment in a graphophonic age. Like Besant and Barrie and all true sentimentalists, he finds his theme in human nature rather than in human character. It is upon the loom of the ideal that he weaves the moving picture of life which lies before him, reflected in an enchanted mirror of Shalott, the golden mirror of optimism which is half of religion to him. It is not surprising, then, that he should make use of very well-known materials. His human types are as familiar as his situations ; and now and then his work suffers, as The Vicar of Wakefield suffered in the hands of a greater sentimentalist, from the attempt to turn a sketch into a story with a plot. The dénouement of A Lover of Music comes very close to melodrama. As for the tagging of morals, that is only a blemish in the work of sentiment when it is awkwardly done. Mr. van Dyke is very skillful at it, as for example in The White Blot, — a tale quite in the vein of Mr. T. R. Sullivan. Like Besant and Barrie, Mr. van Dyke is by nature an essayist rather than a story-teller ; his normal mode of attack is that of the light-armed moralist. The discursive method of Little Rivers gave him precisely his best opportunity ; interesting and characteristic as the present volume is, it can hardly add to his permanent reputation.

Both nature and human nature find a place in the subtitle ; and both present themselves to him quite simply, if not barely, without in the least perplexing or disconcerting him. He is content with the old-fashioned view of human nature as a thing to accept and love, and of nature as a pleasant setting for the human scene. Descriptions of natural scenery and conditions would hardly aggregate three pages of the book, yet it has an undeniably out - of - doors atmosphere. And in A Friend of Justice we seem to be promised something more, since dogs are understood to have more to do with nature than men have. Unfortunately for this expectation, it is the humanness rather than the doggishness of the hero which points the story.

The humanizing of animals appears to be a new - fashioned sort of “ pathetic fallacy.” It is possible that when, not so very long ago, man waked up to the fact that he was mere mammal, he began to cast about to see what could be said for his nearest relations. If we are only a little higher than the dog, we may as well make the dog out as fine a fellow as possible. To contrast Dr. John Brown’s Rab with Mr. van Dyke’s Pichou is to contrast the portrait of a very simple, noble beast with the ideal conception of a reasoning, moralizing person in the body of a dog. Pichou is not only a friend of justice, but a judge. He distinguishes between right and wrong as easily as between the convenient and the inconvenient; he invents an elaborate code of laws for the government of the dog community, and enforces it to the letter. Are we really to be interested in animals hereafter simply because they are so much like us ? Apparently, this is already taken to be true of the few animals which are the chosen companions of men ; the domestic creatures are understood to have had special advantages. Horses and dogs are flatteringly responsive, and it is easy to pass from approbation of their cleverness in deferring to human prejudice to the attribution of human qualities. George Macdonald could not imagine a dogless heaven, and, more lately, Mr. Alfred Ollivant has introduced us into a society of dogs of which there is not an unmoral member. Bob, Son of Battle, gained an extraordinarily wide reading on its first appearance, three years ago, and the recent publication of a new and elaborately illustrated edition ² points to its continued popularity. Of its power and charm as a narrative, enough, and not too much, has been said. And if indeed every dog has more than his day, that would be a noble meeting in the other world between the mighty Rab and Owd Bob o’ Kenmuir. But Rab is the real dog of the two ; though he did his duty according to human standards, he lived and died a dog. “ 'I tempit him wi’ kail and meat, but he wad take naething, and keepit me frae feedin’ the beast, and he was aye gur-gurrin’, and grup-gruppin’ me by the legs. I was laith to make awa’ wi’ the auld dowg, — his like wasna atween this and Thornhill, — but ’deed, sir, I could do naething else.’ I believed him. Fit end for Rab, quick and complete. His teeth and his friends gone, why should he keep the peace and be civil ? ” What have we done with this fine, simple conception of dog nature, and what have we got in its place ?

In the meantime, the naturalist who lives with and by wild animals is not going to have his free clients denied the virtues of caged creatures ; and a trifling stretch of egotistic fancy serves to bestow humanity upon wild-going fellow mortals, too. True, they cannot be said to have imitated ns : all the more credit to them for having been born like us. This seems to be the lever with which Mr. Seton-Thompson chooses to move his audience. In general appearance and character The Lives of the Hunted ³ is very much like Wild Animals I Have Known. The animals about which these stories are told are not only individuals, but humanish individuals. To strengthen the impression of personality, it will be noticed, the author often marks them by some peculiarity of form or habit. A giant ram, an invalid bear cub, an English sparrow that sings like a canary, — such creatures are easily treated as persons, and represented as thinking, judging, talking among themselves with the utmost freedom and propriety. That ancient moralizing of Æsop’s animals was only a sort of didactic jest ; and even Kipling’s jungle folk, quasi-human as they present themselves, are simply a very convincing type of fairy people. But in meeting Mr. Seton-Thompson’s animals we are meeting brothers and rivals. Undoubtedly, if they were less human, they would be less popular. The public is fond of the trick animal; it is flattering to see what a poor show, after all, the creature makes. Least of all can we suppose ourselves to be adding dignity to brute life by endowing it with human finery, physical or moral: the ring elephant ceases to be ridiculous only when he has done his turn and shed his borrowed millinery. It may be that this is making too much of a matter of method ; Mr. Seton-Thompson is a naturalist by profession, but frankly a romancer by choice. And his method, whether catchpenny or not, has a practical end for good ; for animals are not likely to be slaughtered in pure wantonness by those who feel closely akin to them. Wild life, as Mr. Seton-Thompson tells us so often,is tragic enough without the added curse of human cruelty.

But it is fortunate, on the whole, for the cause of sobriety that the simpler view of animals is not yet a mere matter of record. In The Fireside Sphinx⁴ Miss Repplier pleasantly expounds the faith of a lover of animals for their own sake and in their own character. The main charm of that character lies, for her, in its unhumanness, its aloofness from and independence of human standards. The cat, to be sure, gives exceptional ground for this argument, since she is wild and domestic at the same time, a companion on occasion and with reservations, but never a flatterer. Again and again, in the course of her charmingly erudite chronicle, the author returns gratefully to this feline characteristic. She does not deny that it has its ungracious side, but it is true, and in the main acceptable. To her, Puss in Boots is the least interesting of all possible pusses. She is ready to grant individuality in cats, differences in temperament and habit; but here she stops, impatient of attempts to credit with human virtues a creature which is complete in itself, and not to be improved away. “ Stories of virtuous cats who cannot be tempted to dishonesty ; of faithful cats who watch over children confided to their care; of affectionate cats who live on terms of sweet serenity with birds, and puppies, and guinea pigs, and white mice, would seem to prove — could we but credit them — that, of all four-footed prigs, Puss is the most fundamentally priggish.”

One has come to think of Miss Repplier as clear-eyed and witty, now and then a little at the expense of sympathy ; feminine, but with what we are accustomed to claim as a masculine shrinking from the display of sentiment. While she charms the reader with her brilliancy of phrase, her ready and apposite use of an extraordinarily minute lore, she disconcerts him at times by her calm poise and disinterestedness in treating themes which, with a possibly foolish clinging to an outworn prejudice, he has fancied extra-feminine. At all events, it is pleasant to find in the “Foreword ” and yet more delicate afterword in which her latest work is framed a tender tribute to a beloved little companion, long since dead : “ Dear little ghost, whose memory has never faded from my heart, accept this book, dedicated to thee, and to all thy cherished race. Sleep sweetly in the fields of asphodel, and waken, as of old, to stretch thy languid length, and purr thy soft contentment to the skies. . . . Little gray phantom, haunt me no longer with reproachful eyes. I have kept my word. I have done my best — and the book belongs to you.”

The city naturalist does not confine himself to the study of domestic animals. He knows how to conjure life, as the Japanese makes his square of cloth breed rabbits and goldfishes, out of the two yards of bare ground between the clothesreel and the alley fence ; or he discovers an amazing birdiness in dusty urban parks and commons. It is a good lesson to us ; it serves us right. We wonder where our eyes and ears have “been, and for a time we too are on the lookout for the children of the air and the littler children of the dust. Then we backslide, and become blind and deaf again. The satisfaction of such an observer must be something like the satisfaction of the poet who has found a true song, and not a mere “ civil saying,” lying within the narrow walls of the sonnet. Even Milton sought a grateful refuge from his visions of the “ vast abrupt ” and the “void profound” in the homelike garden of the sonneteers. Mr. Sharp’s Wild Life Near Home is the latest contribution of note to literature of this sort.⁵ As the work of the De Vinne Press the text is of course beautiful, and, reinforced by Mr. Horsfall’s delicate pictures, prepares the reader for something worth while in the substance of the book. He is not likely to be disappointed : the papers which make up the volume are of uncommon interest. Mr. Sharp makes much of the proposition, for which he has the authority of Thoreau and John Burroughs, that most wild life is near home ; that many animals and all birds prefer the neighborhood of men. Near his home, within city limits, he finds thirty-six species of birds nesting, among them the solitary vireo and the hermit thrush. This author does not deal in romantic biographies ; he is content with his possums and mice and rabbits and skunks as such. Nothing more than convenience leads him occasionally to express them in human terms. “ I used to catch a possum now and then in the box-traps set for rabbits. It is a delicate task to take a rabbit from such a trap; for give him a crack of chance, and away he bolts to freedom. Open the lid carefully when there is a possum inside, and you will find the old fellow curled up, with a sweet smile of peace on his face, fast asleep. Shake the trap, and he rouses yawningly, with a mildly injured air, offended at your rudeness, and wanting to know why you should wake an innocent possum from so safe and comfortable a bed. He blinks at you inquiringly and says, ‘ Please, sir, if you will be so kind as to shut the door and go away, I will finish my nap.’ And while he is saying it, before your very eyes, off to sleep he goes.”

Attractive as these unpretentious records are, there is one odd inconsistency in the recorder which may have puzzled more than one reader of recent nature books. His sympathy for brute creatures is very great, but it is not allowed to interfere with the satisfaction of his curiosity. It is easy to see that a professional naturalist might find it profitable to practice a sort of moral vivisection, to frighten and harass animals for the sake of seeing what they do under the spur of surprise or terror. Mr. Sharp is an amateur, as he takes care to tell us ; yet he is even more interested in the mother killdeer’s agonized performance than touched by it. For the amusement of “ a clerical friend ” he fells a dead pine in midwinter. " As the tree struck, three tiny, brown-backed, white-footed creatures were dashed into the soft snow. ‘ The prettiest thing I ever saw,’ he declared enthusiastically, as I put into his hand the only mouse captured. . . . We traced the chambers up and down the tree, as they wound, stairway-like, just inside the hard outer shell. Here and there we came upon garners of acorns and bunches of bird feathers and shredded bark, — a complete fortress against the siege of winter.” Then there is a male wren, who defends his nest and mate with a burst of wild singing. I leaned forward nearer the bank. At this he went crazy with his efforts, — into a fit, almost. . . . It Was as fine an illustration of courage as I ever saw, a triumph of love and duty over fear, — fear that perhaps we have no way to measure.” Most instructive ; but the lay reader is tempted to inquire of what, to a disinterested observer, the behavior of the human actor in the little drama might be an illustration. Again, Mr. Sharp is delighted one morning to hear the note of the solitary vireo. “I soon found him high in the tops of the trees; but I wanted him nearer. He would not descend. So I chased him, stoning and mocking him, even.” What insufferable condescension there is, after all, in the love of men for animals ! We “ want them nearer,” so we stone them !

Somehow, one does not think of this point in reading Gilbert White, that early master among domestic observers, for he nowhere suggests the connection of sentiment with the animal world which he so loves to study. His frank insensibility to this aspect is consistent, at least. More than Gilbertians will be pleased with the latest reprint of his classic, — a beautiful and in every way satisfying edition.⁶

The city naturalist, limited as his view must be, feels in part, at least, the significance of the free life which abounds even in the thick of the human press, and in so far as he makes us aware of it he is a prophet. But if anything has been suggested by the foregoing comments, it is that the study of animal life is, on the whole, a means of subtle selfflattery to human nature. Fortunately, nature has larger aspects and greater prophets ; they have a less comfortable message for us, perhaps. It is one thing to feel mildly chagrined at our blindness to the minutiae of life just about us ; it is quite another order of abjectness of which we are conscious when our deafness to the big voices of nature comes home to us. There has been something appalling to our ears in the large word “ nature,” the thing it stands for is so vague. It must be a very great or a very small human nature which can find peace in the vast prospect from Washington or the Jungfrau. To most of us it is bewildering, a little humiliating. I think it is John Burroughs who records his preference for restricted views, for the picture rather than the panorama. Even Thoreau, fond as he was of the solitude of his own suburban wilderness, was overwhelmed by the “ primeval, untamed, and forever untamable Nature ” of the real wilds in Maine. “ Some part of the beholder, even some vital part, seems to escape through the loose grating of his ribs as he ascends. He is more lone than you can imagine. There is less of substantial thought and fair understanding in him than in the plains where men inhabit. His reason is dispersed and shadowy, more thin and subtile, like the air. Vast, Titanic, inhuman nature has got him at disadvantage, caught him alone, and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty.”

No wonder we feel something like awe for the man who is able, in all simplicity and without consciousness of his merit, to find not only sermons, but dear companionship, in solitude, space, and even desolation. If his recent book ⁷ shows Mr. John C. Van Dyke to have fallen just short of this high achievement, it is not the fault of his intent. Two years in the Mojave Desert of Arizona have given him opportunity for rare observation of nature, in bulk and in the raw. He has investigated, he has admired, he has put forth his sympathy and found everything touched with beauty ; but he cannot speak as a native, he has not been at home. Large as his attitude is, Mr. Van Dyke does not escape the oppression of the city dweller in the face of wild sublimity. Consequently, the desert is to him, though in a very noble sense, “ copy.” The writer’s personality is carefully subordinated, but one cannot help feeling it strongly : that of a man more sensitive to color than to form ; enthusiastic, but with a stern hand upon his own pulse; sure that there is beauty in everything natural, even in human nature ; sure at least of the grim balance of nature’s adjustments. The desert appeals to him as a person, whose neglected cause he champions with the fierceness of a lover. He protests against the hackneyed view of it as monotonous, ugly, and death-giving. It deserves to be protected like the forests, — a reservoir of pure air as they are fountains of pure water. It is not amiable, he grants. “ There is not a thing about it that is ‘ pretty,’ and not a spot upon it that is ‘ picturesque ’ in any Berkshire Valley sense. The shadows of foliage, the drift of clouds, the fall of rain upon leaves, the sound of running waters, — all the gentler qualities of nature that minor poets love to juggle with, — are missing on the desert.” Yet in this very sternness he discerns a charm. “ What is it that draws us to the boundless and the fathomless ? Why should the lovely things of earth — the grasses, the trees, the lakes, the little hills — appear trivial and insignificant when we come face to face with the sea or tire desert or the vastness of the midnight sky ? Is it that the one is the tale of things known, and the others merely a hint, a suggestion, of the unknown ? Or have immensity, space, magnitude, a peculiar beauty of their own ? Is it not true that bulk and breadth are primary and essential qualities of the sublime in landscape ? ”

All this arid desolation has its eager life : plants which hoard their miserable pittance of moisture, and put forth leaf and blossom in their season ; animals which can live without water, and wring a week’s living from a few insects or a handful of dried grass. Plant and animal alike are armed for offense and defense in the ceaseless struggle for existence. Though he dwells upon it, the observer will not let himself be moved by the bitterness of this struggle. For the desert has infected him with its profound melancholy. The ghost of these limitless spaces fills his consciousness, and dwarfs the little life of the individual, whether plant, beast, or man. It is all sad, no doubt, that there should be pain and strife, and very soon the touch of death; but this is nature’s way. There is nothing to be gained by crying about it. “ A cry in the night! Overhead the planets in their courses make no sound, the earth is still, the very animals are mute. Why then the cry of the human ? How it jars the harmonies ! How it breaks in discord upon the unities of earth and air and sky! Century after century that cry has gone up, mobbing high heaven ; and always insanity in the cry, insanity in the crier. What folly to protest where none shall hear! There is no appeal from the law of nature. It was made for bird and beast and creeping thing. Will the human never learn that in the eye of the law he is not different from the things that creep ? ”

And here is the very turn of the shield : fair treatment, after our patronizing admissions that animals are nearly as good as we are, to be told that we are of no more account than animals. Let us take comfort in the thought that Mr. Van Dyke is not indigenous to the wilderness, and may have failed to grasp its whole message.

It is in precisely this wide, solitary atmosphere that the spirit of John Muir expands and feels itself at home.⁸ The wilderness which he most loves, and in which he chooses to dwell, is of the more approachable sort, it is true. He is satisfied with the normal phenomena of forest life ; the bizarre has no unbalancing attraction for him. He takes keen delight, to be sure, in the wonders of the Yellowstone and the Yosemite, in the miracle of the geyser and the marvel of the sequoia. But his eye rests with equal pleasure and interest upon the graceful flora of wood and mountain ; he calls them over fondly, name by name, making music, like Milton, out of mere catalogue material. No manifestation of natural power is too delicate or too mighty for his serene gaze. Nothing excites or disquiets him ; he moves from first to last in an atmosphere of calm elation. Nature is not a spectacle, but a religion, and animal, plant, and boulder are cardinal points in the creed. The rattlesnake, which Professor Van Dyke finds (and takes some credit for finding) beautiful to the eye, is the object of simple tenderness to this friend of Emerson. “ For myself,” says Van Dyke, “ being somewhat prejudiced in favor of this drear waste and its savage progeny, I may confess to having watched the flowing movements of snakes, their coil and rattle and strike, many times and with great pleasure.” “ Poor creatures,” sighs John Muir, “ loved only by their Maker, they are timid and bashful, as mountaineers know; and though perhaps not possessed of much of that charity that suffers long and is kind, seldom, either by mistake or by mishap, do harm to any one. . . . Nevertheless, again and again, in season and out of season, the question comes up, ‘ What are rattlesnakes good for ? ’ As if nothing that does not obviously make for the benefit of man had any right to exist; as if our ways were God’s ways.” All-outdoors has cured this man of pettiness, — if indeed we can imagine him to have needed cure, — and he is eager to win new patients for the healing touch of nature.

“ Wander here a whole summer, if you can. Thousands of God’s wild blessings will search you and soak you as if you were a sponge, and the big days will go by uncounted.” He thinks of the wilderness not only as a home for himself, but as a place of wholesome joy for all. Evidently, he would not assent to Mr. SetonThompson’s theory that every animal lives a tragedy. “The whole wilderness,” he says gently, “ is enlivened with happy animals.” “ Big ” and “ enthusiastic” are his favorite adjectives, and a big, calm enthusiasm is the mark of his style. In place of the brief, vivid, often exclamatory phrases of Mr. Van Dyke are long, sounding, luxuriant sentences, full of the harmony and peace of the deeper faith.

For John Muir’s belief is more than resignation ; Mr. Van Dyke’s recognition of law is far enough from being his last resort. Often they cover the same ground, but at what different elevations ! Perhaps it is the question of nature’s method. “ So perish the hills that we are accustomed to speak of as ‘ everlasting,’ ” says Mr. Van Dyke. “ It is merely another illustration of Nature’s method in the universe. She is as careless of the individual hill or mountain as of the individual man, animal, or flower. All are beaten into dust. But the species is more enduring, better preserved.” Why is it that this seems cold, rigid, formular, beside John Muir’s similar passage ? “ The granite domes and pavements, apparently imperishable, we take as symbols of permanence, while these crumbling peaks, down whose frosty gullies avalanches are ever falling, are symbols of change and decay. Yet all alike, fast or slow, are surely vanishing away. Nature is ever at work, building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything out of one beautiful form into another.”

Evidently, the difference is of feeling rather than of theory. Mr. Muir celebrates the scientific fact where Mr. Van Dyke merely states it. How radical this difference in feeling is, upon what fundamental difference in belief it is founded, a single further parallel will serve to show. Mr. Van Dyke has been deploring the indications that even the desert is not to be long safe from the “ exploiting ” of “ practical men.” He comforts himself by the reflection that in the course of time the “ practical men,” too, will go their way. “ And sooner or later Nature will surely come to her own again. Nothing human is of long duration. Men and their deeds are obliterated, the race itself fades ; but Nature goes calmly on with her projects. She works, not for man’s enjoyment, but for her own satisfaction and her own glory.” The writer does not wish to be bitter any more than Mr. Muir means to be pious when he writes, “ Storms of every sort, torrents, cataclysms, ‘ convulsions of nature,’ etc., however mysterious and lawless at first sight they may seem, are only harmonious notes in the song of creation, varied expressions of God’s love.”

H. W. Boynton.