John Burroughs

I am trying again to read Bergson's "Creative Evolution," with poor success. When I recall how I was taken with the work ten or more years ago, and carried it with me whenever I went from home, I am wondering if my mind has become too old and feeble to take it in. But I do not have such difficulty with any other of my favorite authors. Bergson's work now seems to me a mixture of two things that won't mix—metaphysics and natural science. It is full of word-splitting and conjuring with terms, and abounds in natural history facts. The style is wonderful, but the logic is not strong. He enlarges upon the inability of the intellect to understand or grasp Life. The reason is baffled, but sympathy and the emotional nature and the intuitions grasp the mystery.

This may be true, the heart often knows what the head does not; but is it not the intellect that tells us so? The intellect understands the grounds of our inability. We can and do reason about the limitations of reason. We do not know how matter and spirit blend, but we know they do blend. The animals live by instinct, and we live largely in our emotions, but it is reason that has placed man at the head of the animal kingdom.

Bergson himself by no means dispenses with the logical faculty. Note his close and convincing reasoning on the development of the vertebrate eye, and how inadequate the Darwinian idea of the accumulation of insensible variations is to account for it. A closer and more convincing piece of reasoning would be hard to find.

Bergson's conception of two currents—an upward current of spirit and a downward current of matter—meeting and uniting at a definite time and place and producing life, is extremely fanciful. Where had they both been during all the geologic ages? I do not suppose they had been any where. How life arose is, of course, one of the great mysteries. But do we not know enough to see that it did not originate in this sudden spectacular way?—that it began very slowly, in unicellular germs?

At first I was so captivated by the wonderful style of M. Bergson, and the richness of his page in natural history, that I could see no flaws in his subject-matter, but now that my enthusiasm has cooled off a little I return to him and am looking closer into the text.

Is not Bergson guilty of false or careless reasoning when he says that the relation of the soul to the brain is like that of a coat to the nail upon which it hangs? I call this spurious or pinchbeck analogy. If we know anything about it, do we not know that the relation of the two is not a mechanical or fortuitous one? and that it cannot be defined in this loose way?

"To a large extent," Bergson says, "thought is independent of the brain." "The brain is, strictly speaking, neither an organ of thought, nor of feeling, nor of consciousness." He speaks of consciousness as if it were a disembodied something floating around in the air overhead, like wireless messages. If I do not think with my brain, with what do I think? Certainly not with my legs, or my abdomen, or my chest. I think with my head, or the gray matter of my brain. I look down at the rest of my body and I say, this is part of me, but it is not the real me. With both legs and both arms gone, I should still be I. But cut off my head and where am I?

Has not the intelligence of the animal kingdom increased during the geologic ages with the increase in the size of the brain?

REVISIONS

I have little need to revise my opinion of any of the great names of English literature. I probably make more strenuous demands upon him who aspires to be a poet than ever before. I see more clearly than ever before that sweetened prose put up in verse form does not make poetry any more than sweetened water put in the comb in the hive makes honey. Many of our would-be young poets bring us the crude nectar from the fields—fine descriptions of flowers, birds, sunsets, and so on—and expect us to accept them as honey. The quality of the man makes all the difference in the world. A great nature can describe birds and flowers and clouds and sunsets and spring and autumn greatly.

Dean Swift quotes Sir Philip Sidney as saying that the "chief life of modern versifying consists in rhyme." Swift agrees with him. "Verse without rhyme," he says, "is a body without a soul, or a bell without a clapper." He thinks Milton's "Paradise Lost" would be greatly improved if it had rhyme. This, he says, would make it "more heroic and sonorous than it is."

Unobtrusive rhyme may be a help in certain cases, but what modern reader would say that a poem without rhyme is a body without a soul? This would exclude many of the noblest productions of English literature.

BERGSON AND TELEPATHY

Bergson seems always to have been more than half-convinced of the truth of spiritualism. When we are already half-convinced of a thing, it takes but little to convince us. Bergson argues himself into a belief in telepathy in this wise: "We produce electricity at every moment; the atmosphere is continually electrified; we move among magnetic currents. Yet for thousands of years millions of human beings have lived who never suspected the existence of electricity."

Millions of persons have also lived without suspecting the pull of the sun and moon upon us; or that the pressure of the atmosphere upon our bodies is fifteen pounds to the square inch; or that the coast of this part of the continent is slowly subsiding (the oscillations of the earth's crust); or without suspecting the incredible speed of the stars in the midnight sky; or that the earth is turning under our feet; or that electrons are shooting off from the candle or lamp by the light of which we are reading. There are assuredly more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy, many of which we shall doubtless yet find out, and many more of which we shall never find out. Wireless messages may be continually going through our houses and our bodies, and through the air we breathe, and we never suspect them. Shall we, then, infer that the air around us is full of spirits of our departed friends? I hope it is, but I fail to see any warrant for the belief in this kind of reasoning. It does not lend color even to the probability, any more than it does to the probability that we shall yet be able to read one another's thoughts and become expert mind-readers. Mind-reading seems to be a reality with a few persons, with one in many millions. But I cannot therefore believe in spiritualism as I believe in the "defeat of the Invincible Armada." Fleets have been defeated in all ages. Facts are amenable to observation and experiment, but merely alleged facts do not stand the laboratory tests.

If memory is not a function of the brain, of what is it a function? If "judgment, reasoning, or any other act of thought" are not functions of the brain, of what are they the functions? The scientific method is adequate to deal with all questions capable of proof or disproof. If we apply the scientific or experimental method to miracles, where does it leave them? Ask Huxley. Thought-transference is possible, but does this prove spiritualism to be true?

I know of a man who can answer your questions if you know the answers yourself, even without reading them or hearing you ask them. He once read a chemical formula for Edison which nobody but Edison had ever seen. I am glad that such things are possible. They confirm our faith in the reality of the unseen. They show us in what a world of occult laws and influences we live, but they tell us nothing of any other world.

METEORIC MEN AND PLANETARY MEN

There are meteoric men and there are planetary men. The men who now and then flash across our intellectual heavens, drawing all eyes for the moment, these I call meteoric men. What a contrast they present to the planetary men, who are slow to attract our attention, but who abide, and do not grow dim! Poets like Emerson, Whitman, and Wordsworth were slow to gain recognition, but the radiance of their names grows. I call such a poet as Swinburne meteoric, a poet of a certain kind of brilliant power, but who reads him now? Stephen Phillips with his "Marpessa" had a brief vogue, and then disappeared in the darkness. When I was a young man, I remember, a Scottish poet, Alexander Smith, published a "Life Drama," which dazzled the literary world for a brief period, but it is forgotten now. What attention Kidd's "Social Evolution" attracted a generation or more ago! But it is now quite neglected. It was not sound. When he died a few years ago there was barely an allusion to it in the public press. The same fate befell that talented man, Buckle, with his "Civilization in England." Delia Bacon held the ear of the public for a time with the Bacon-Shakespeare theory. Pulpit men like Joseph Cook and Adirondack Murray blazed out, and then were gone. Half a century ago or more an Englishman by the name of M. F. Tupper published a book called "Proverbial Philosophy" which had a brief season of popularity, and then went out like a rush-light, or a blaze of tissue paper. Novels like Miss Sprague's "Earnest Trifler," Du Maurier's "Trilby," and Wallace's "Ben Hur" have had their little day, and been forgotten. In the art world the Cubists' crazy work drew the attention of the public long enough for it to be seen how spurious and absurd it was. Brownell's war poems turned out to be little more than brief fireworks. Joaquin Miller, where is he? Fifty years ago Gail Hamilton was much in the public eye, and Grace Greenwood, and Fanny Fern; and in Bohemian circles, there were Agnes Franz and Ada Clare, but they are all quite forgotten now.

The meteoric men would not appreciate President Wilson's wise saying that he would rather fail in a cause that in time is bound to succeed than to succeed in a cause that in time is bound to fail. Such men cannot wait for success. Meteoric men in politics, like Elaine and Conkling, were brilliant men, but were politicians merely. What fruitful or constructive ideas did they leave us? Could they forget party in the good of the whole country? Are not the opponents of the League of Nations of our own day in the same case—without, however, shining with the same degree of brilliancy? To some of our Presidents—Polk, Pierce, Buchanan—we owe little or nothing. Roosevelt's career, though meteoric in its sudden brilliancy, will shine with a steady light down the ages. He left lasting results. He raised permanently the standard of morality in politics and business in this country by the gospel of the square deal. Woodrow Wilson, after the mists and clouds are all dispelled, will shine serenely on. He is one of the few men of the ages.

THE DAILY PAPERS

Probably the worst feature of our civilization is the daily paper. It scatters crime, bad manners, and a pernicious levity as a wind scatters fire. Crime feeds upon crime, and the newspapers make sure that every criminally inclined reader shall have enough to feed upon, shall have his vicious nature aroused and stimulated. Is it probable that a second and a third President of the United States would ever have been assassinated by shooting, had not such notoriety been given to the first crime? Murder, arson, theft, peculation, are as contagious as smallpox.

Who can help a pitying or a scornful smile when he hears of a school of journalism, a school for promoting crime and debauching the manners and the conscience of the people?—for teaching the gentle art of lying, for manufacturing news when there is no news? The pupils are taught, I suppose, how to serve up the sweepings from the streets and the gutters and the bar-rooms in the most engaging manner. They are taught how to give the great Public what it wants, and the one thing the great Public wants, and can never get enough of is any form of sensationalism. It clearly loves scandals about the rich, or anything about the rich, because we all want and expect to be rich, to out-shine our neighbors, to cut a wide swath in society. Give us anything about the rich, the Public says; we will take the mud from their shoes; if we can't get that, give us the parings of their finger-nails.

The inelastic character of the newspaper is a hampering factor—so many columns must be filled, news or no news. And when there is a great amount of important news, see how much is suppressed that but for this inelasticity would have been printed!

The professor at the school of journalism says: "I try to hammer it into them day after day that they have got to learn to get the news—that, whatever else a reporter can or cannot do, he isn't a reporter till he has learned to get the news." Hence the invasion of private houses, the bribery, the stealing of letters, the listening at key-holes, the craze for photographing the most sacred episodes, the betrayals of confidence, that the newspapers are responsible for. They must get what the dear Public most likes to hear, if they have to scale a man's housetop, and come down his chimney. And if they cannot get the true story, they must invent one. The idle curiosity of the Public must be satisfied.

Now the real news, the news the Public is entitled to, is always easy to get. It grows by the wayside. The Public is entitled to public news, not to family secrets; to the life of the street and the mart, not to life behind closed doors. In the dearth of real news, the paper is filled with the dust and sweepings from the public highways and byways, from saloons, police courts, political halls—sordid, ephemeral, and worthless, because it would never get into print if there were real news to serve up.

Then the advertising. The items of news now peep out at us from between flaming advertisements of the shopmen's goods, like men on the street hawking their wares, each trying to out-scream the other and making such a Bedlam that our ears are stunned.[6]

[6] This fragment is hardly representative of the attitude of Mr. Burroughs toward our worthy dailies, and, could he have expanded the article, it would have had in its entirety a different tone. He lived on the breath of the newspapers; was always eager for legitimate news; and was especially outspoken in admiration of the superb work done by many newspaper correspondents during the World War. Furthermore, he was himself always most approachable and friendly to the reporters, complaining, however, that they often failed to quote him when he took real pains to help them get things straight; while they often insisted on emphasizing sensational aspects, and even put words in his mouth which he never uttered. But the truth is, he valued the high-class newspapers, though regarding even them as a two-edged sword, since their praiseworthy efforts are so vitiated by craze for the sensational.—C. B.

THE ALPHABET

Until we have stopped to think about it, few of us realize what it means to have an alphabet—the combination of a few straight lines and curves which form our letters. When you have learned these, and how to arrange them into words, you have the key that unlocks all the libraries in the world. An assortment and arrangement of black lines on a white surface! These lines mean nothing in themselves; they are not symbols, nor pictures, nor hieroglyphics, yet the mastery of them is one of the touchstones of civilization. The progress of the race since the dawn of history, or since the art of writing has been invented, has gone forward with leaps and bounds. The prehistoric races, and the barbarous races of our own times, had and have only picture language.

The Chinese have no alphabet. It is said that they are now accepting a phonetic alphabet. The Chinese system of writing comprises more than forty thousand separate symbols, each a different word. It requires the memorizing of at least three thousand word-signs to read and write their language. The national phonetic script is made up of sixty distinct characters that answer to our twenty-four. These characters embrace every verbal sound of the language, and in combination make up every word. The progress of China has been greatly hampered by this want of an alphabet.

Coleridge says about the primary art of writing: "First, there is mere gesticulation, then rosaries, or wampum, then picture language, then hieroglyphics, and finally alphabetic letters,"—the last an evolution from all that went before. But there is no more suggestion of an alphabet in the sign language of the North American Indian than there is of man in a crinoid.

THE REDS OF LITERATURE

A class of young men who seem to look upon themselves as revolutionary poets has arisen, chiefly in Chicago; and they are putting forth the most astonishing stuff in the name of free verse that has probably ever appeared anywhere. In a late number of "Current Opinion," Carl Sandburg, who, I am told, is their chosen leader, waves his dirty shirt in the face of the public in this fashion:

Does not this resemble poetry about as much as a pile of dirty rags resembles silk or broadcloth? The trick of it seems to be to take flat, unimaginative prose and cut it up in lines of varying length, and often omit the capitals at the beginning of the lines—"shredded prose," with no "kick" in it at all. These men are the "Reds" of literature. They would reverse or destroy all the recognized rules and standards upon which literature is founded. They show what Bolshevism carried out in the field of poetry, would lead to. One of them who signs himself H. D. writes thus in the "Dial" on "Helios":

What it all means—who can tell? It is as empty of intelligent meaning as a rubbish-heap. Yet these men claim to get their charter from Whitman. I do not think Whitman would be enough interested in them to feel contempt toward them. Whitman was a man of tremendous personality, and every line he wrote had a meaning, and his whole work was suffused with a philosophy as was his body with blood.

These Reds belong to the same class of inane sensationalists that the Cubists do; they would defy in verse what the Cubists defy in form.

I have just been skimming through an illustrated book called "Noa Noa," by a Frenchman, which describes, or pretends to describe, a visit to Tahiti. There is not much fault to be found with it as a narrative, but the pictures of the natives are atrocious. Many of the figures are distorted, and all of them have a smutty look, as if they had been rubbed with lampblack or coal-dust. There is not one simple, honest presentation of the natural human form in the book. When the Parisian becomes a degenerate, he is the most degenerate of all—a refined, perfumed degenerate. A degenerate Englishman may be brutal and coarse, but he could never be guilty of the inane or the outrageous things which the Cubists, the Imagists, the Futurists, and the other Ists among the French have turned out. The degenerate Frenchman is like our species of smilax which looks fresh, shining, and attractive, but when it blooms gives out an odor of dead rats.

I recently chanced upon the picture of a kneeling girl, by one of the Reds in art, a charcoal sketch apparently. It suggests the crude attempts of a child. The mouth is a black, smutty hole in the face, the eyes are not mates, and one of them is merely a black dot. In fact, the whole head seems thrust up into a cloud of charcoal dust. The partly nude body has not a mark of femininity. The body is very long and the legs very short, and the knees, as they protrude from under the drapery, look like two irregular blocks of wood.

To falsify or belie nature seems to be the sole aim of these creatures. The best thing that could happen to the whole gang of them would be to be compelled to go out and dig and spade the earth. They would then see what things are really like.

THE EVOLUTION OF EVOLUTION

It is interesting to note that the doctrine of evolution itself has undergone as complete an evolution as has any animal species with which it deals. We find the germ of it, so to speak, in the early Greek philosophers and not much more. Crude, half-developed forms of it begin to appear in the eighteenth century of our era and become more and more developed in the nineteenth, till they approximate completion in Darwin. In Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire in 1795 there are glimpses of the theory, but in Lamarck, near the beginning of the nineteenth century, the theory is so fully developed that it anticipates Darwin on many points; often full of crudities and absurdities, yet Lamarck hits the mark surprisingly often. In 1813 Dr. W. C. Wells, an Englishman, read a paper before the Royal Society in London that contains a passage that might have come from the pages of Darwin. In the anonymous and famous volume called "Vestiges of Creation," published in 1844, the doctrine of the mutability of species is forcibly put. Then in Herbert Spencer in 1852 the evolution theory of development receives a fresh impetus, till it matures in the minds of Darwin and Wallace in the late fifties. The inherent impulse toward development is also in Aristotle. It crops out again in Lamarck, but was repudiated by Darwin.

FOLLOWING ONE'S BENT

I have done what I most wanted to do in the world, what I was probably best fitted to do, not as the result of deliberate planning or calculation, but by simply going with the current, that is, following my natural bent, and refusing to run after false gods. Riches and fame and power, when directly pursued, are false gods. If a man deliberately says to himself, "I will win these things," he has likely reckoned without his host. His host is the nature within and without him, and that may have something to say on the subject. But if he says, "I will do the worthy work that comes to my hand, the work that my character and my talent bring me, and I will do it the best I can," he will not reap a barren harvest.

So many persons are disappointed in life! They have had false aims. They have wanted something for nothing. They have listened to the call of ambition and have not heeded the inner light. They have tried short cuts to fame and fortune, and have not been willing to pay the price in self-denial that all worthy success demands. We find our position in life according to the specific gravity of our moral and intellectual natures.

NOTES ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OLD AGE[7]

The physiology of old age is well understood—general sluggishness of all the functions, stiffness of the joints, more or less so-called rheumatism, loss of strength, wasting tissues, broken sleep, failing hearing and eyesight, capricious appetite, and so on. But the psychology of old age is not so easily described. The old man reasons well, the judgment is clear, the mind active, the conscience alert, the interest in life unabated. It is the memory that plays the old man tricks. His mind is a storehouse of facts and incidents and experiences, but they do not hold together as they used to; their relations are broken and very uncertain. He remembers the name of a person, but perhaps cannot recall the face or presence; or he remembers the voice and presence, but without the name or face. He may go back to his school-days and try to restore the faded canvas of those distant days. It is like resurrecting the dead; he exhumes them from their graves: There was G——; how distinctly he recalls the name and some incident in his school life, and that is all. There was B——, a name only. There was R——, and the memory of the career he had marked out for himself and his untimely death through a steamboat accident; but of his looks, his voice—not a vestige! It is a memory full of holes, like a net with many of the meshes broken. He recalls his early teachers, some of them stand out vividly—voice, look, manner—all complete. Others are only names associated with certain incidents in school.

Names and places with which one has been perfectly familiar all his life suddenly, for a few moments, mean nothing. It is as if the belt slipped, and the wheel did not go round. Then the next moment, away it goes again! Or, shall we call it a kind of mental anÆsthesia, or mental paralysis? Thus, the other day I was reading something about Georgetown, South America. I repeated the name over to myself a few times. "Have I not known such a place some time in my life? Where is it? Georgetown? Georgetown?" The name seemed like a dream. Then I thought of Washington, the Capital, and the city above it, but had to ask a friend if the name was Georgetown. Then suddenly, as if some chemical had been rubbed on a bit of invisible writing, out it came! Of course it was Georgetown. How could I have been in doubt about it? (I had lived in Washington for ten years.)

So we say, old age may reason well, but old age does not remember well. This is a commonplace. It seems as if memory were the most uncertain of all our faculties.

Power of attention fails, which we so often mistake for deafness in the old. It is the mind that is blunted and not the ear. Hence we octogenarians so often ask for your question over again. We do not grasp it the first time. We do not want you to speak louder, we only need to focus upon you a little more completely.

Of course both sight and hearing are a little blunted in old age. But for myself I see as well as ever I did, except that I have to use spectacles in reading; but nowadays the younger observers hear the finer sounds in nature that sometimes escape me.

Some men mellow with age, others harden, but the man who does not in some way ripen is in a bad way. Youth makes up in sap and push what it lacks in repose.

To grow old gracefully is the trick.

To me one of the worst things about old age is that one has outlived all his old friends. The Past becomes a cemetery.

"As men grow old," said Rochefoucauld, "they grow more foolish and more wise"—wise in counsel, but foolish in conduct. "There is no fool like an old fool," said Tennyson, but it is equally true that there is no fool like the young fool. If you want calm and ripe wisdom, go to middle age.

As an octogenarian, I have found it interesting to collate many wise sayings of many wise men on youth and age.[8]

Cicero found that age increased the pleasure of conversation. It is certainly true that in age we do find our tongues, if we have any. They are unloosed, and when the young or the middle-aged sit silent, the octogenarian is a fountain of conversation. In age one set of pleasures is gone and another takes its place.

Emerson published his essay on "Old Age" while he was yet in the middle sixties, and I recall that in the "Emerson-Carlyle Correspondence" both men began to complain of being old before they were sixty. Scott was old before his time, and Macaulay too. Scott died at sixty-one, Macaulay at fifty-nine, Tennyson at eighty-three, Carlyle at eighty-six, Emerson at seventy-nine, Amiel at sixty.

I have heard it said that it is characteristic of old age to reverse its opinions and its likes and dislikes. But it does not reverse them; it revises them. If its years have been well spent, it has reached a higher position from which to overlook life. It commands a wider view, and the relation of the parts to the whole is more clearly seen....

"Old age superbly rising"—Whitman.

Age without decrepitude, or remorse, or fear, or hardness of heart!

FACING THE MYSTERY

I wish there were something to light up the grave for me, but there is not. It is the primal, unending darkness. The faith of all the saints and martyrs does not help me. I must see the light beyond with my own eyes. Whitman's indomitable faith I admire, but cannot share. My torch will not kindle at his great flame. From our youth up our associations with the dead and with the grave are oppressive. Our natural animal instincts get the better of us. Death seems the great catastrophe. The silver cord is loosened, and the golden bowl is broken. The physical aspects of death are unlovely and repellent. And the spiritual aspects—only the elect can see them. Our physical senses are so dominant, the visible world is so overpowering, that all else becomes as dreams and shadows.

I know that I am a part of the great cosmic system of things, and that all the material and all the forces that make up my being are as indestructible as the great Cosmos itself—all that is physical must remain in some form. But consciousness, the real Me, is not physical, but an effect of the physical. It is really no more a thing than "a child's curlicue cut by a burnt stick in the night," and as the one is evanescent, why not the other?

Nature is so opulent, so indifferent to that we hold most precious, such a spendthrift, evokes such wonders from such simple materials! Why should she conserve souls, when she has the original stuff of myriads of souls? She takes up, and she lays down. Her cycles of change, of life and death, go on forever. She does not lay up stores; she is, and has, all stores, whether she keep or whether she waste. It is all the same to her. There is no outside, no beyond, to her processes and possessions. There is no future for her, only an ever-lasting present. What is the very bloom and fragrance of humanity to the Infinite? In the yesterday of geologic time, humanity was not. In the to-morrow of geologic time, it will not be. The very mountains might be made of souls, and all the stars of heaven kindled with souls, such is the wealth of Nature in what we deem so precious, and so indifferent is she to our standards of valuation.

This I know, too: that the grave is not dark or cold to the dead, but only to the living. The light of the eye, the warmth of the body, still exist undiminished in the universe, but in other relations, under other forms. Shall the flower complain because it fades and falls? It has to fall before the fruit can appear. But what is the fruit of the flower of human life? Surely not the grave, as the loose thinking of some seem to imply. The only fruit I can see is in fairer flowers, or a higher type of mind and life that follows in this world, and to which our lives may contribute. The flower of life has improved through the ages—the geologic ages; from the flower of the brute, it has become the flower of the man. You and I perish, but something goes out, or may go out, from us that will help forward a higher type of mankind. To what end? Who knows? We cannot cross-question the Infinite. Something in the universe has eventuated in man, and something has profited by his ameliorations. We must regard him as a legitimate product, and we must look upon death as a legitimate part of the great cycle—an evil only from our temporary and personal point of view, but a good from the point of view of the whole.

THE END