HENRY SEIDEL CANBY (1878- )

BACK TO NATURE1

O one tendency in life as we live it in America to-day is more characteristic than the impulse, as recurrent as summer, to take to the woods. Sometimes it disguises itself under the name of science; sometimes it is mingled with hunting and the desire to kill; often it is sentimentalized and leads strings of gaping "students" bird-hunting through the wood lot; and again it perilously resembles a desire to get back from civilization and go "on the loose." Say your worst of it, still the fact remains that more Americans go back to nature for one reason or another annually than any civilized men before them. And more Americans, I fancy, are studying nature in clubs or public schools-or, in summer camps and the Boy Scouts, imitating nature's creatures, the Indian and the pioneer than even statistics could make believable.

What is the cause? In life, it is perhaps some survival of the pioneering instinct, spending itself upon fishing, or bird-hunting, or trail hiking, much as the fight instinct leads us to football, or the hunt instinct sends every dog sniffing at dawn through the streets of his town. Not everyone is thus atavistic, if this be atavism; not every American is sensitive to spruce spires, or the hermit

1 From Definitions, by Henry S. Canby, copyright, 1922, by Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc. Reprinted through the kind permission of the author and the publisher.

thrush's chant, or white water in a forest gorge, or the meadow lark across the frosted fields. Naturally. The surprising fact is that in a bourgeois civilization like ours, so many are affected,

And yet what a criterion nature love or nature indifference is. It seems that if I can try a man by a silent minute in the pines, the view of a jay pirating through the bushes, spring odors, or December flush on evening snow, I can classify him by his reactions. Just where I do not know; for certainly I do not put him beyond the pale if his response is not as mine. And yet he will differ, I feel sure, in more significant matters. He is not altogether of my world. Nor does he enter into this essay. There are enough without him, and of every class. In the West, the very day laborer pitches his camp in the mountains for his two weeks' holiday. In the East and Middle West every pond with a fringe of hemlocks, or hill view by a trolley line, or strip of ocean beach, has its cluster of bungalows where the proletariat perform their villeggiatura as the Italian aristocracy did in the days of the Renaissance. Patently the impulse exists, and counts for something here in America.

It counts for something, too, in American literature. Since our writing ceased being colonial English and began to reflect a race in the making, the note of woods-longing has been so insistent that one wonders whether here is not to be found at last the characteristic "trait" that we have all been patriotically seeking.

I do not limit myself in this statement to the professed "nature writers" of whom we have bred far more than any other race with which I am familiar. In the listwhich I shall not attempt of the greatest American writers, one cannot fail to include Emerson, Hawthorne,

Thoreau, Cooper, Lowell, and Whitman. And every one of these men was vitally concerned with nature, and some were obsessed by it. Lowell was a scholar and man of the world, urban therefore; but his poetry is more enriched by its homely New England background than by its European polish. Cooper's ladies and gentlemen are puppets merely, his plots melodrama; it is the woods he knew, and the creatures of the woods, Deerslayer and Chingachgook, that preserve his books. Whitman made little distinction between nature and human nature, perhaps too little. But read "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" or "The Song of the Redwood Tree," and see how keen and how vital was his instinct for native soil. As for Hawthorne, you could make a text-book on nature study from his Note Book. He was an imaginative moralist first of all; but he worked out his visions in terms of New England woods and hills. So did Emerson. The day was "not wholly profane" for him when he had "given heed to some natural object." Thoreau needs no proving. He is at the head and forefront of all field and forest lovers in all languages and times.

These are the greater names. The lesser are as leaves in the forest: Audubon, Burroughs, Muir, Clarence King, Lanier the stream broadening and shallowing through earnest forest lovers, romantic "nature fakers," literary sportsmen, amiable students, and tens of thousands of teachers inculcating this American tendency in another generation. The phenomenon asks for an explanation. It is more than a category of American literature that I am presenting; it is an American trait.

The explanation I wish to proffer in this essay may sound fantastical; most explanations that explain anything usually do at first. I believe that this vast rush of nature

into American literature is more than a mere reflection of a liking for the woods. It represents a search for a tradition and its capture.

Good books, like well-built houses, must have tradition behind them. The Homers and Shakespeares and Goethes spring from rich soil left by dead centuries; they are like native trees that grow so well nowhere else. The little writers hacks who sentimentalize to the last order, and display their plot novelties like bargains on an advertising page are just as traditional. The only difference is that their tradition goes back to books instead of life. Middlesized authors the very good and the probably enduring— are successful largely because they have gripped a tradition and followed it through to contemporary life. This is what Thackeray did in Vanity Fair, Howells in The Rise of Silas Lapham, and Mrs. Wharton in The House of Mirth. But the back-to-nature books-both the sound ones and those shameless exposures of the private emotions of ground hogs and turtles that call themselves nature books are the most traditional of all. For they plunge directly into what might be called the adventures of the American subconsciousness.

It is the subconsciousness that carries tradition into literature. That curious reservoir where forgotten experiences lie waiting in every man's mind, as vivid as on the day of first impression, is the chief concern of psychologists nowadays. But it has never yet had due recognition from literary criticism. If the subconsciousness is well stocked, a man writes truly, his imagination is vibrant with human experience, he sets his own humble observation against a background of all he has learned and known and forgotten of civilization. If it is under-populated, if he has done little, felt little, known little of the tradi

tional experiences of the intellect, he writes thinly. He can report what he sees, but it is hard for him to create. It was Chaucer's rich subconsciousness that turned his simple little story of Chauntecleer into a comment upon humanity. Other men had told that story-and made it scarcely more than trivial. It is the promptings of forgotten memories in the subconsciousness that give to a simple statement the force of old, unhappy things, that keep thoughts true to experience, and test fancy by life. The subconsciousness is the governor of the waking brain. Tradition-which is just man's memory of man-flows through it like an underground river from which rise the springs of everyday thinking. If there is anything remarkable about a book, look to the subconsciousness of the writer and study the racial tradition that it bears.

Now, I am far from proposing to analyze the American subconsciousness. No man can define it. But of this much I am certain. The American habit of going "back to nature" means that in our subconsciousness nature is peculiarly active. We react to nature as does no other race. We are the descendants of pioneers-all of us. And if we have not inherited a memory of pioneering experiences, at least we possess inherited tendencies and desires. The impulse that drove Boone westward may nowadays do no more than send some young Boone canoeing on Temagami, or push him up Marcy or Shasta to inexplicable happiness on the top. But the drive is there. And furthermore, nature is still strange in America. Even now the wilderness is far from no American city. Birds, plants, trees, even animals have not, as in Europe, been absorbed into the common knowledge of the race. There are discoveries everywhere for those who can make them. Nature, indeed, is vivid in a surprising number of