There never was a bigger, fatter, flabbier woodchuck than old Tubby—among wild animals that I alone have known. Tubby is a fixture of the farm. He was here when we came, or else it was his father or his grandfather. He is fat and flabby and as broad as he is long, and broader when full of beans. He is very much of a tub. When he sits in the garden, he sits like a tub. When he runs, he runs like a tub. And he holds beans like a tub. It is worth a few beans to see him run—a medley in motions: up and down and round and round, the spinning of a top and the hop of a saucepan on a hot stove with amazing progress forward. He knows which end of him is head and which tail; but from a distance I can see neither head nor tail, only sides, bulging, tubby sides spilling down the garden. One seldom does see the ends of a thing from a distance. Tubby has a head-end; and he has wits A full-sized woodchuck is twenty-two inches long; and I presume that Tubby is not more than twenty-two inches wide, though I have seen him wobbling out of the garden and carrying off as mere ballast a cabbage or two, and a watermelon, and a peck or two of beans, and all of the Swiss chard in the three rows. There are several bushels of chard in three such rows. The way he can run with his load! His little black heels twinkling through the vines, his shapeless carcass flopping into his hole with me on top of him! Then I will hear a chuckling deep down among the hickory roots, a peculiar vegetarian chuckle quite unlike a carnivorous growl. And then I will sit down on the hole and chuckle, having lost for the moment my carnivorous growl. He is so bold, so impudent, so When I place a trap in one entrance to his burrow, he uses the other opening; if I put another trap here, he promptly digs a passage around it; if I block this with chunks of rock, he undermines the stones and patiently moves to a new house farther along the ridge; and, if I set traps for him here, he changes house again. It is a wide wooded ridge around the garden, and honeycombed with woodchuck holes. By and by he is back in his favorite house under the hickory—when the spiders have hung the doors with signs that the traps are gone. But it happened once that I forgot the traps. Wood-earth and bits of bark and dead leaves washed down till the wicked gins were covered, and Tubby, coming back after weeks off on the ridge, tumbled into one of the traps and got his thick fat fist fast. I heard him making a dreadful racket, and rushed up with a club in my thick fat fist. Old Tubby stopped kicking and grunting, and looked at me. I don’t believe that I was It was a rotten thing to do. Somehow he made me feel as if I had trapped one of my neighbors. He saw how I was feeling, and took advantage of me. “Whose woods are these, anyway?” he asked. “Whose ancestors were here first, yours or mine? You didn’t even come over in the Mayflower. But I came here in Noah’s Ark.” “I know it. But keep quiet,” I begged him, “and stop looking at me that way.” “What way?” he asked. “Why, so much like my brother!” I exclaimed. “Don’t say it, then,” I begged. But he was wound up. “Any man who is brute enough to set this sort of thing for his brother has no soul. And any man who can’t share his beans with his brother doesn’t deserve a soul. If I were as low-down and as lazy as you, I would go over to the north side of this hill and dig a deep hole, and crawl into it, and pull it in on top of me, I would.” And all the time I was pressing down on the spring with my club, trying to free him. Suddenly there was a flop in the hole, and away in the sub-cellar, among the hickory roots, there was talk of me which I should have heard, had I been able to understand. But I have much to learn. And so has Pup, our Scotch-Irish terrier. Time and time again Pup has sent the old woodchuck tumbling over himself for his hole. Once or twice they have come to blows at the mouth of the burrow, and Pup has come off with a limp or a hurt ear, but with only a mouthful of coarse reddish hair to growl over. He came off with a deep experience The new light began to dawn on Pup when Tubby moved up from the woods to a corner of the ice-house near the barn. The impudence, the audacity of the thing stood Pup’s hair on end, and he took to the blackberry-vines at the other corner of the ice-house to see what would happen. Tubby’s raiding hour was about five in the afternoon. At that hour the shadows of the ice-house and the barn lay wide across the mowing-field—the proper time and color for things to happen. And there in the close-cut field, as if he had come up out of a burrow, sat old Tubby, looking as big as a bear! Pup stole softly out to meet him, moving over till he was between the chuck and the ice-house hole. It was a deliberate act and one of The ground rose slightly to Pup’s disadvantage, and he was maneuvering to avoid the uphill rush when Tubby heard something off in the woods and turned with a dash for his hole. It was head-on and terrific! And the utter shock of it, the moral shock, was more terrific! Neither knew for an instant just what had happened; the suddenness, the precision, the amazing boldness and quality of the attack putting Pup almost out of action. But it was precisely the jar old Tubby needed. Every flabby fiber of him was fight. The stub feet snapped into action; the chunk of a body shot forward, ramming Pup amidships, sending him to the bottom of the slope, Tubby slashing like a pirate with his terrible incisors. But the touch of those long teeth brought And Tubby was fighting with his head as well as with teeth and toes. He was cooler than Pup. He had a single-track mind, and it ran straight to his burrow. The head-work was perfectly clear; the whole powerful play going forward with the nicest calculation, mad as it appeared to be in the wild rough-and-tumble. There was method in Tubby’s madness. He was fighting true to plan. But Pup was fighting to kill, and he lost his head. It was to win his Over and over, right and left, they lunged when the woodchuck, sent spinning from Pup’s foreleg, came up with the dog chopping at his stub nose, but, giving him all four of his mailed feet instead, he bounded from the face of the dog, and, with a lightning somersault, landed plop in his burrow, Pup raking the hair from the vanishing haunch. And now Pup knows that there is no bottom to a woodchuck’s burrow. But do I fully realize that there is no bottom to the woodchuck? I have been almost fatally slow over this lesson. Yet this is the writer’s first and most important lesson, no matter what his theme. “I have been studying the woodchuck all my life,” said my old friend Burroughs to me, “and there is no getting to the bottom of him!” He made that great discovery early; eighty-four years of study confirmed it; and from early to Others have made this discovery concerning other things: the philosophers, of truth; the poets, of men and flowers; the prophets, of God. But the writer must find it true of all things, of all his own things, from woodchucks to God. There is nothing new in this discovery. It simply makes all things new to the discoverer. The skeptical, the shallow, the fool who says in his heart there is nothing but bowels to a woodchuck—what would he at four-and-eighty find at Woodchuck Lodge to write about? He might have all knowledge and a pen with which he could remove mountains, but, lacking wonder, that power to invest things with new and infinite significance, he would see no use in removing the mountains and turning them into steppes and pampas and peopled plains. All creative work, whether by brush or pen or hoe, is somehow making mountains into men, out of the dust an image, in our own likeness created, in the likeness of God. It may be woodchuck dust, or dandelion dust, or the shining How hard a lesson that has been for me to learn! And so slow have I been learning it that little time is left for me to preach or sing. If only I had known early that Mullein Hill was as good as Helicon; that the people of Hingham were as interesting as the people of Cranford; that Hingham has a natural history as rich and as varied as Selborne! My very friends have helped to mislead and hinder me: “I don’t see what you find to write about up here!” they exclaim, looking out with commiseration over the landscape, as if Wellfleet or Washington or Wausau were better for books than Hingham! Hanover may be better for ducks than Scituate; but Hingham is as good as Hanover or Heaven for books. One of my friends started for Hanover once for a day of hunting—but I will let him tell the story: “‘Is this the road to Hanover?’ we called. “The man backed into the kitchen door, put down his milk-pail, came out again, carefully closing the door behind him, and started down the walk toward the front gate. He opened the gate, turned and latched it behind him as carefully as he had latched the kitchen door, and, stepping out into the road, approached our carryall. Looking up, then down the road intently, he hitched his right foot to the hub of our front wheel, spat precisely into the dust, and, fixing his face steadfastly toward Cape Cod, answered: “‘Say it with flowers!’ snapped our driver, wheeling about for the other fork. “At the turn I looked back. There stood our guide in the road, his right foot still in the air, I think; and there—though it is several years since, he may still be standing—one foot planted on the road to Scituate, the other foot resting on the hub of the wheel that should have been on the road to Hanover.” The man in the road knew that this road ran to Scituate. He lived on it. Had they asked him: “Master, which is the Great Commandment?” he had answered: “Take this road for Scituate.” For were they not duck hunting in Hanover? Then what profounder error could they have been in than on the road to Scituate! But most people go that way for Hanover. Every young writer I know hankers to get his Hanover ducks out of Scituate, as if, failing to get ducks, he might get Scituate; novelty, the mere novelty of gunning in Scituate when the ducks are in Hanover, making the best sort of “copy.” Is it some new thing that we should search For some years, now, I, also, have been going to and fro and up and down in the earth thinking that I might find some better place than Hingham. I have just returned from Wausau, Wisconsin, where they have a very hard red granite, and a deep green granite, both of them the loveliest tombstone stuff that, I think, I ever saw. Certainly they are superior to our seam-face Hingham granite for tombstones. Up to the time of my Wausau visit, I had never given much thought to tombstones; but it shows how one’s thought expands with travel, and how easily Wausau may surpass Hingham, not alone in gravestones, but in other, even in literary, materials. But Hingham has one thing in the line of Perhaps one must needs go to California in order to come by this deep desire for Weymouth. Then let him go early. For if he is to write “The Natural History of Weymouth,” or of Selborne, This brings me back to Hingham. I wish that I could write “The Natural History of Hingham”! A modest desire! There can never be another Gilbert White—but not for lack of birds and beasts in Hingham. Were I a novelist I would write a “Cranford”—and I could! I would call it “Hingham,” not “Main Street,” though that is the name of perhaps the longest street in Hingham. But there are many other streets in Hingham, and all kinds of interesting people. And here I am on Mullein Hill, Hingham, with all of these streets, and all of these people, and woodchucks a plenty to write about—and planning this day a trip to California! I might have been the author of a recent book whose It may be true in California, but the opposite of that is true in Hingham. To be sure, I have tried to preËmpt Mullein Hill; I now own the knoll outside my study window, and the seven-acre woodlot beyond; but there are many other peaks here among the hills of Hingham, and scarcely any of them occupied. The people of Hingham all crowd into the plains. So did the people of Israel crowd into the plains—of Moab, leaving Pisgah to Moses, who found it very lonesome. There is no one on Pisgah now, I understand; no one on Ararat; no one on Popocatepetl; no one on the top of Vesuvius, nor on the peak of Everest, peaks as well known as White Plains or the Plains of Abraham, but not anything like so crowded. Moses sleeps on Nebo, yet no man knows where he lies. Have them lay you in Sleepy Hollow if you wish your Why has there been no Iliad of Hingham? There are Helens in Hingham, as there were Helens of Troy. Hingham is short of Homers. Mute, inglorious Miltons have we in Hingham. If one of them, however, should take his pen in hand, would he dream, and if he dreamed, would he dare to cry to the Heavenly Muse, “I thence Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song, That with no middle flight intends to soar Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme”? Which of our poets thinks any more of an adventurous song? Of attempting any more the unattempted in either prose or rhyme? It is as if everything had been attempted; everything dared; everything accomplished—the peaks all preËmpted. Politics or religion or literature, it matters not: the great days are gone, the great things are done, the great men securely housed in the Hall of Fame. Heaven offers us a League of Nations and we prefer the tried and proved device of war; a famed evangelist comes “We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of every individual in it,” says Emerson. “Every rational creature has all nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution.” I have not spoken lately with a man who seemed to think he was entitled to the world. That grand old faith has Even my quiet old friend Burroughs had his Ford. It was her creator himself who gave her to him. The creature would climb around the slopes and over the walls about Woodchuck Lodge like a side-hill gouger, Burroughs in his long white beard driving her, as Father Time might drive a merry-go-round. He nearly lost his life in her, too. But everybody nearly loses Perhaps our machines are taking us—we wish to believe so—to some new Arden, some far-off Avalon, where we shall heal us of our motor-minds, our movie-nerves, our corner-light religion; where “Safety First” shall give place to “Derring-Do” as a national motto; where we shall ascend the empty peaks, and out of the thunder and smoke of shaking Sinai bring down some daring commandment, done by the finger of God on new tables of stone. We are not lacking courage. It is imagination that we lack. We dare. But we do not think it worth while. We are shallow, skeptical, conventional, out of tune with the Infinite, and out of touch with spiritual things. If we do not try the unattempted, it is because we believe it has already been tried. It is because Homer has “Like to the greatness of God is the greatness within The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn.” But here we fail. We no longer see the greatness of God in things. We have covered God with an atom. We ask for bread, and Science gives us a stone; for God, and Science gives us an electron. It was a super-electron that created the heavens and the earth when it saw that all of the other electrons were without form and void. Atomism has taken the place of theism in our religion, if it is religion. Man is only a “What is man?” I ask, and Science laughs and answers, “Electrons.” That is its latest guess. But does man look like them? Does he feel like them? Does he behave like them? Does he believe like them? In the laboratory he may. But out here in the hills of Hingham, where I am returned to the earth and the sky and to my own soul, I know that I AM, and that I still hold to all of those first things which Science would shame me out of, offering me electrons instead! I accept the electrons. Capering little deities, they are the sons of God. But so are you and I the sons of God—and we are electrons, trillions of electrons, if you like. Gods and atoms, we can dwell and think and feel as either, the two realms distinct and far apart, the roads between in a continual state Science clears the sight and widens its range; but Science can never clear up the shadows at the bottom of a woodchuck. Only vision can do that, and Science lacks vision, using a microtome instead, paring its woodchuck till he is thinner than sliced sunlight before it can see through so much as a single stained cell of him. Science turns aside from shadows, walking by sight or else standing still. It deals with the flesh, not the spirit; and is as impotent in literature and art as in life and society. The potent thing among men and nations is love. Love never faileth. Yet never were we so afraid of love as we are to-day; and never did art and literature seem so fearful of the imagination, of vision, of the eternal, the divine. “Go get me a bird,” the old scientist said to me; “I will give you a lesson in skinning and mounting.” I was a young boy. Hurrying out To this day I feel the wonder of that knowledge, and I thrill at the meaning of that bird’s gizzard. Here was science and charity and poetry and religion. What untold good to man! What greater possible good to man? That was before I knew or understood the cuckoo’s song. And neither the old scientist, nor yet his book, “Sixteen Weeks in ZoÖlogy,” dealt with the song. Science is sure and beautiful with a gizzard. Poetry is sure and beautiful with both gizzard and song. And I wonder if the grinding gizzard or the singing throat is the better part of the cuckoo, even in this world of worms? “Though babbling only to the vale, Of sunshine and of flowers, Thou bringest unto me a tale Of visionary hours. “Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring! Even yet thou art to me No bird, but an invisible thing, A voice, a mystery; “And I can listen to thee yet; Can lie upon the plain And listen, till I do beget That golden time again. “O blessed Bird! the earth we pace Again appears to be An unsubstantial faËry place, That is fit home for thee!” I have a great book, published by the Government, devoted entirely to birds’ gizzards, mills of the gods, and their grindings. It is not a dull book, though the mills grind slowly and grind exceeding small. It is a book of bones, of broken beetles, seeds, hairs, feathers, and fragments. It is a great work of science. One might not like to lay it down unfinished; but, having finished it, one could hardly say: “And I can listen to thee yet; Can lie upon the plain And listen, till I do beget That golden time again. “O blessed Bird! the earth we Pace Again appears to be An unsubstantial faËry place, That is fit home for thee!” Nature will not do, nor all the truth of nature, for stuff of song and story. As life is more than meat, so is literature more than life. Nature conforms to art; and in fiction “the only real people are those who never existed.” At Good-Will Farm, Maine, there is a rock marked with a copper plate. It had been marked for drill and dynamite, until, one day, my car swung up and over a sharp turn in the road before the schoolhouse, skidding rather horribly on the smooth outcropping ledge which had been uncovered and left as part of the roadbed. “You ought to blast that thing out,” I said, somewhat testily, to the supervisor who came out to greet me, my nerves, strung a bit too tight on the long day’s drive, snapping with the skid here at the very end of the trip. “I’ll do it,” he replied, apologetically. “I had intended to do it from the first.” The next day we were climbing this road on foot, and, standing on the ledge to take in the wide landscape of the Kennebec below us, I chanced to look down at my feet and saw, cut “Don’t blast out this rock!” I exclaimed. “Tear down your schoolhouse rather. Build a new road through the grounds, but leave this stone. This is part of a great book.” “I don’t understand,” said the supervisor. “Here is written a page of the greatest story ever penned. These lines were done by the hand of the glacier who came this way in the Ice Age. Don’t blot it out. Put a fence about it, and a copper plate upon it, translating the story so that your students can read it and understand.” He did. There was no need of the fence; but he set the plate into the rock, telling of the Ice Age, how the glacier came down, ploughing out the valley of the Kennebec, rounding and smoothing this ledge, and inditing this manuscript for Good-Will Farm School ages later. So much does the mere scratch of science enhance the virtue of a stone! Now add to your science history. Instead of the scratch of a glacier, let it be a chisel and a human hand, and let the marks be—“1620.” Now read—if you can read and understand.
My mother was visiting me. She is a self-contained old Quaker, and this was the second time in all of her eighty years that she had even seen New England! What should we do first? What did she most desire to see? “Take me to see Plymouth Rock first,” she said; and we were off, mother as excited and as lively as a girl. As we entered Plymouth, however, I noticed that mother had grown silent, and that her doctor-daughter, beside her on the back seat, always sensitive to her moods, was also silent. When Science and Religion thus clash, Science must give way. Mother knew as much about germs as her doctor-daughter. She had lived longer than her daughter; she had lost more, and had loved more—some things more than life itself. Science has marked every rock; but only those that are wet with such tears and kissed with such lips are ripe for sermon and song. These are the eyes and these the lips of those, who, passing through Bacca, make it a well. Knowledge alone, though it course the very heavens, will come back to earth without so much as one shining fleck of stardust in its hair. The other day a great astronomer was delivering a lecture in Boston on the stars. Wonder The effect was terrific. The scientific smiled. The simple left the hall dazed and stunned. They lost all sense of time and space, they lost sight of the very stars in this swift, far fall. They had been carried up through the seven spheres to the very gate of heaven, then hurled to earth. The lecture failed—not of instruction, not of emotion, but of will, leaving the listeners powerless and undone. The lecturer may be right—for astronomy; and yet be quite wrong, for poetry. He may have uttered the last word—for science; but this end is only the beginning for religion. How much greater an astronomer this college professor than that shepherd psalmist on the far-off Syrian hills! Ranging the same astral field as “When I consider thy heavens, The work of thy fingers, The moon and the stars Which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? And the son of man, that thou visitest him?” Then, swinging upward on those mighty wings, past the reach of science, out of the range of knowledge, up, up to the divinest height ever touched by human thought, the psalmist-astronomer cries impiously, exultantly, “For thou hast made him but little lower than God, And crownest him with glory and honor!” This starts where the astronomer stopped. This is religion and literature. And I have these very stars over my hilltop here in Hingham! CHAPTER IV THE DUTY TO DIG |