Hanover Browsing
LLEWELLYN POWYS in his recent book The Twelve Months writes: "The month of June may be considered as the queen of all the months of the year." The love for the outdoors, especially in the summer months, the joy in walking, or cultivating one's garden, is shared by almost everyone since the middle of the eighteenth century, and so this month instead of writing about contemporary books, I am going to write of a few great books and authors whose forte was nature writing. Of writers whose genius can distill for us the smell of thyme and honeysuckle, of hay drying on a field, of the damp smell of mud, and who make us hear the sounds of myriad insects which haunt the summer air, and who write of the birds, those happiest of creatures as Leopardi wrote of them, swinging through the blue void, or resting on an apple bough pouring out their souls in song.
"You are well overtaken, Gentlemen: a good morning to you both: I have stretched my legs up Tottenham Hill to overtake you, hoping your business may occasion you towards Ware, wither I am going this fine, fresh May morning." So begins the ever delightful volume The CompleteAngler, or the Contemplative Man's Recreation, by Izaak Walton and Charles Cotton. Walton, born in 1593, published the first part of his celebrated book in 1653, and lived to see it go through five editions, the last of which added Part Two, written by his friend and adopted son Charles Cotton. The book is addressed to true anglers, those men who love fishing and the opportunity for ruminating, and are happy even if on a particular day no fly will entice the trout or salmon. It is a contemplative book, but full of specific information still, good to-day, for it is my belief that the natures of fish change little through the ages, contrary to man, who, sociologists aver, are becoming wiser and better. This may be true, though it is doubtful, but happily fish still grab, or should I say, lunge at the Twatchel or Lobworm, or the Red-fly, or Moor-fly. Whether you fish or not you will love old Izaak, who was a man, as Lincoln said of Whitman, and whose memory is still fresh this month of June, nineteen hundred and thirty seven.
AN ENGLISH VILLAGE
Then there is the classic by Gilbert White which describes in detail, not, it is true, scientifically, but with eighteenth century literary conventions, his native village of Selborne in Hampshire about sixty miles southwest of London. The NaturalHistory of Selbome, published first in 1789. still holds its place. Editions appear regularly, testifying to the freshness of the old vicar's observations. You can do worse than to read about this little village, and if you do you will know intimately one spot in England, and rather well the author himself, though true to his age, he does not pour forth his soul as did his later followers.
AMERICAN NATURE WRITERS
To turn for the moment to our own country. Who are the writers of our greatest nature books, and what are some of their titles? Well, there is that strange genius Audubon, whose life has been recently written by Constance Rourke, and by D. C. Peattie. Go direct to Audubon himself in his Delineations of AmericanScenery and Character republished from his great book on American birds by G. A. Baker & Co., in 1936. There is "that terrible Thoreau," as his neighbors called him, for he believed in working one day a week, and loafing six, whose Week on theConcord and Merrimack Rivers, his Walden, his Maine Woods, Excursions, and so on have become American classics. It is fitting to read this crotchety individualist to-day in a world of totalitarian states, for his was the voice of one who believed in the New England conscience, and woe to any law, if it disagreed with his inner conviction. Then turn and read his successor John Burroughs who lived until 1921. Burroughs wrote more than twenty volumes, but turn to Riverby, WakeRobin, his first book, or to Signs andSeasons. He was also a good literary critic especially when he wrote on Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau. He was a philosopher in The Last Harvest and The Lightof Day. More scientific than Thoreau, less of a Puritan and more of a Pantheist, he was also friendlier toward men than the somewhat misanthropic Thoreau, whose "I have seldom met a man who was as instructive as the silence he breaks" could not have come from Burroughs. Then there is William Beebe, whose bathosphere has explored depths formerly unknown to man, and whose Galapagos and other books recount his strange adventures and discoveries among the "denizens of the deep." There is Donald Culross Peattie, a new writer, and almost too elaborate a stylist, whose An Almanac for Moderns, and more recent Book of Hours distills the sights and sounds and meanings to be found in Nature. But I want to turn to writers you are less apt to know.
Of course you have read W. H. Hudson the most poetic and romantic of modern writers on nature. No man that I have ever read can write so charmingly of birds. One of the strangest of men, who wished he had lived long ago when primitive men walked over the downs of England and lit their fires on what is now the Salisbury Plain, he made the best of living his eighty two years from 1840 to 1922. Born of American parents who had settled in the Argentine, Hudson after a bad attack of rheumatic fever left South America about the year 1867 never to return. England, and not America called him. He wrote, as Conrad said of him, "as the green grass grows." (Read Ford Madox Ford's admirable account of him in his most recent book Portraits from Life.) What are his best books? I should say the half a dozen best are Talesof the Pampas (El Ombu in the English edition), Far Away and Long Ago, GreenMansions which deal with South America, and Hampshire Days, A Shepherd's Life, and Birds and Man which treat of England.
His friend Edward Thomas, killed by a German shell in 1917, has also written some excellent nature books. His first book was The Woodland Life, 1897, and he followed this with In Pursuit of Spring, TheIcknield Way, The South Country, and one of his best A Literary Pilgrim in England. Fame denied him in life went to his wife Helen Thomas who wrote the popular As It Was some years back. You will like his poetry, too. He was an early friend of the American poet Robert Frost.
Henry Williamson is well known. He lives in a cottage named Shallowford, in Filleigh, North Devon, near the Taw and Torridge Rivers where dwelled Salar the salmon and Tarka the otter. Read these stories, and also The Labouring Life,Village Book, and Devon Holiday. He is about to publish a life of Richard Jefferies.
Jefferies is well known as the author of a poignant autobiography entitled TheStory of My Heart, Bevis, the story of a young boy. Nature Near London, Amaryllis at the Fair, Gamekeeper at Home, and so on.
The Story of a Red Deer, by the late John Fortescue is a forgotten little classic about the stags of Exmoor.
For far off places read L. M. Nesbitt's Desert and Forest (about Abyssinia), GoldFever (about the Rand in South Africa), and Desolate Marches (about Venezuela). While on South America one recalls a book now in the Everyman Library by Charles Waterton called Wanderings inSouth America.
For Arabia consult the writings of Charles Doughty, T. E. Lawrence, Wilfrid and Lady Anne Blunt, D. G. Hogarth (A Wandering Scholar in the Levant), Kinglake, and others, including Lady Gertrude Bell.
John Still has written a classic on Ceylon entitled The Jungle Tide. This was published over here by Houghton Mifflin, and was remaindered.
Rowland Evans Robinson, the Vermonter, is becoming better known. His dialect stories are superb, and Vergennes lives again in his stories of old Vermont.
Recommendations for the serious reader
The Higher Learning in America, by R. M Hutchins. Yale Press.
The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, 1865-1883. Little, Brown. The Concept of Nature in Nineteenth-Century English Poetry, by Joseph W. Beach. Macmillan.
Pushkin, by Ernest J. Simmons. Harvard Press.
Hamilton Fish, by Allan Nevins. Dodd, Mead.
Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Scribner's.
Modern English Usage, Fowler. Oxford Press.
Yes, my Darling Daughter, a comedy in three acts by Mark Reed 'is published by Samuel French, will be reviewed in a later issue of the MAGAZINE.
American Writers, a series of papers contributed to Blackwood's Magazine (1824-1825) by John Neal, has been edited with notes and bibliography by Fred Lewis Pattee '88. This book published by the Duke University Press, will be reviewed in a later issue of the MAGAZINE.
William H. Timbers '37 has written an article American Isolation in the WesternHemisphere, which appears in a pamphlet entitled Council on Foreign Relations,Conference for University Men on "American Neutrality Policy" held February 18-19, 1937.
Professor George F. Thomas of the Philosophy department has contributed an essay entitled A reasoned faith to The Nature of Religious Experience, a volume dedicated by some of his former students to Professor Douglas Clyde Macintosh of the Yale Divinity School upon his sixtieth birthday anniversary. This volume is published by Harpers.
The March issue of Archives of Pediatrics contains an article by Dr. Charles H. Voelker entitled Emendation of the Organic Aspects of the Pathologic Speech ofMongolians.
SUMMER READING
I shall complete this months vagabond notes by suggesting a few random books on nature.
Percy Lubbock's Earlham, the story of an English manor house.
T. H. White's England Have My Bones. Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of a FoxHunting Man.
Edmund Blunden's The Face of England.
H. J. Massingham's English Country, an anthology, 1934.
A. G. Street's The Gentleman of theParty, a fine book describing four or five generations of the history of an English farm.
William Brewster's October Farm, which is a journal concerning the wild life in Concord, Mass.
Edmund Vale's North Country, a review of the scenery and life of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Durham, Northumberland, and so on, with one hundred and thirty good illustrations.
H. E. Bates' Through the Woods, a companion volume to Clare Leighton's FourHedges, and both are illustrated with charming woodcuts.
R. P. T. Coffin's Lost Paradise, which deals with Maine.
