FullReads

When I reached home, I went over the fourteen volumes of Thoreau’s Journal to see if he had made any record of having heard the “woodcock’s evening hymn,” as Emerson calls it. He had not. Evidently he never heard it, which is the more surprising as he was abroad in the fields and marshes and woods at almost all hours in the twenty-four and in all seasons and weathers, making it the business of his life to see and record what was going on in nature.

Thoreau’s eye was much more reliable than his ear. He saw straight, but did not always hear straight. For instance, he seems always to have confounded the song of the hermit thrush with that of the wood thrush. He records having heard the latter even in April, but never the former. In the Maine woods and on Monadnock it is always the wood thrush which he hears, and never the hermit.

But if Thoreau’s ear was sometimes at fault, I do not recall that his eye ever was, while his mind was always honest. He had an instinct for the truth, and while we may admit that the truth he was in quest of in nature was not always scientific truth, or the truth of natural history, but was often the truth of the poet and the mystic, yet he was very careful about his facts; he liked to be able to make an exact statement, to clinch his observations by going again and again to the spot. He never taxes your credulity. He had never been bitten by the mad dog of sensationalism that has bitten certain of our later nature writers.

Thoreau made no effort to humanize the animals. What he aimed mainly to do was to invest his account of them with literary charm, not by imputing to them impossible things, but by describing them in a way impossible to a less poetic nature. The novel and the surprising are not in the act of the bird or beast itself, but in Thoreau’s way of telling what it did. To draw upon your imagination for your facts is one thing; to draw upon your imagination in describing what you see is quite another. The new school of nature writers will afford many samples of the former method; read Thoreau’s description of the wood thrush’s song or the bobolink’s song, or his account of wild apples, or of his life at Walden Pond, or almost any other bit of his writing, for a sample of the latter. In his best work he uses language in the imaginative way of the poet.

Literature and science do not differ in matters of fact, but in spirit and method. There is no live literature without a play of personality, and there is no exact science without the clear, white light of the understanding. What we want, and have a right to expect, of the literary naturalist is that his statement shall have both truth and charm, but we do not want the charm at the expense of the truth. I may invest the commonest fact I observe in the fields or by the roadside with the air of romance, if I can, but I am not to put the romance in place of the fact. If you romance about the animals, you must do so unequivocally, as Kipling does and as AEsop did; the fiction must declare itself at once, or the work is vicious. To make literature out of natural history observation is not to pervert or distort the facts, or to draw the long bow at all; it is to see the facts in their true relations and proportions and with honest emotion.

Truth of seeing and truth of feeling are the main requisite: add truth of style, and the thing is done.