Part 14

No, I am not going to touch that lecture again. I shall put it away, send it to London, and entirely dismiss it from my mind until I take the train for Oxford—that Romanes Lecture is finished!

He kept this resolution and instead of taking the manuscript of his three great European addresses with him, as other authors would have done, he went to Africa with only the Dark Continent in his mind. This was one of the secrets of his extraordinary success, namely, his power to concentrate all his thought and energy for the time being on a single object.

Some years after Roosevelt’s return from Africa and his triumphal tour of Europe, including the reception at Oxford, in conversation with the Archbishop of York our talk turned on Theodore Roosevelt and this Romanes Lecture of 1910. Said His Grace: “I heard Roosevelt, and in the way of grading which we have at Oxford we agreed to mark the lecture ‘beta minus’ but the lecturer ‘alpha plus.’ While we felt that the lecture was not a very great contribution to science we were sure that the lecturer was a very great man, to be ranked in the plus A class. After the lecture Colonel Roosevelt asked me how I liked it. I may have expressed rather qualified admiration and seeing my hesitation he said: ‘Well, that lecture would have been a great deal stronger had not one of my scientific friends in America blue-penciled the best part of it.’”

While perhaps strongest in his knowledge of birds, Theodore Roosevelt also gained an extraordinary knowledge of mammals, especially of North America and of Africa. In preparing for his African trip he called upon me for all the books I could supply from the Osborn Library in the American Museum, which in many respects is one of the most complete in the country, if not in the world. For several weeks he consumed five books a week, sitting up to the small hours of the morning to complete his reading or until Mrs. Roosevelt insisted upon his retiring. Thus in the course of a few weeks he had read all that had been written about the great mammals of Africa from Sclater to Selous. He read so rapidly that it did not seem possible that he could absorb it all, yet when we gathered at Sagamore Hill to talk over his expedition—a group of the very best naturalists familiar with African life whom he could get together for luncheon—he displayed a knowledge of the genera and species and of the precise localities where each might be found which was equal or superior to that of any man in the room. To cite only one instance of his marvelous memory and of his thoroughness of preparation: a question arose as to the locality of a particular subspecies, Grevy’s zebra (Equus grevyi foai). Roosevelt went to the map, pointed out directly the particular and only spot where it could be found and said that he thought the expedition could not possibly get down in that direction.

Equipped with this knowledge and aided by three or four exceptional men like Heller and Akeley, he conducted, under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution, by far the most successful expedition that has ever penetrated Africa, the chief collections from which are now housed in our National Museum in Washington, a few fine specimens coming to the American Museum. Not content with his magazine articles in Scribner’s about the African trip, Roosevelt set to work with Heller and wrote one of the finest books we have, “African Game Trails,” a volume replete from cover to cover with accurate, original information—in fact, a real contribution.

Roosevelt’s return from Africa and triumphal progress through Germany, France, and England, which reached a climax in the boisterous welcome he received in the avenues of New York, left his personality utterly untouched by a trace of vanity. A few days afterward, at a very quiet lunch at the Museum, I spoke of the great opportunity afforded by the detachment of his life in Africa to gain a true perspective of his life and career, such as it is impossible to gain in the crowded conditions of the modern world. I shall always remember his gesture and reply. Partly raising his hands in front of his face, as if to shut out the inner vision, he said, “I never want to look at or think about myself.”

In the many conversations and conferences which we enjoyed together and in the correspondence of the succeeding years, the impression which Roosevelt made upon me was one of innate modesty, of full consciousness of the limitations of his powers and of sincere deference to the opinions of more experienced men, especially in his own beloved field of natural history. The same desire to be accurate and to be right displayed in the preparation of his Romanes Lecture reappeared from time to time in the submission of his opinions and theories to other naturalists.

Perhaps the finest illustration of his lack of self-deception came out in a private testimonial dinner given him by his friend Robert Collier. The dinner was by far the most brilliant one of the kind I have ever attended; the guests came from various parts of the country and included only his warm personal friends and admirers. When it came Roosevelt’s turn to speak he leaned forward, resting both closed hands on the table after the manner of Clemenceau, and spoke very quietly, with the utmost simplicity and directness, expressing with brief candor his own feelings regarding his reception abroad and at home. Briefly rehearsing his experiences abroad, he said that he was far more gratified by his reception at home and welcome to America than by any of the acclamation he had received abroad. Then, lowering his voice and his head, he continued:

But, my friends—you all are my friends—I am not deceived for one moment. I know the American people; they have a way of erecting a triumphal arch, and after the Conquering Hero has passed beneath it he may expect to receive a shower of bricks on his back at any moment! Yes, my friends, I am having a bully time. I am swimming on the very crest of the wave and enjoying it immensely, but I am not for a moment deceived; next week or next month I may be again in the trough of the wave, but I assure you I shall be swimming just as hard and enjoying life just as much as I now am.

None of his friends at that time believed that such a prophecy could possibly be realized, yet it came true with amazing suddenness. Within a few weeks his name had apparently left the headlines for good; it appeared only in small type in brief paragraphs on inside pages. To the superficial observer, to those who did not know the real Roosevelt and his powers of resilience his career was ended.

The lull in publicity gave him the quiet he needed to devote to three volumes of natural history and to prepare for his last and altogether greatest period of exploration. His manifold ability and the marked characteristics of his multiple personality came out in the course of his plans for the great expedition to South America projected in the spring of 1913 and executed between October, 1913, and June, 1914. He had selected an unknown and particularly dangerous region, where the native tribes had never been thoroughly subdued by the Brazilian government. He marked out this region as his first choice for a South American expedition. I sent word to him through our mutual friend, Frank M. Chapman, that I would never consent to his going to this particular region under the American Museum flag, that I would not assume even part of the responsibility for his entering such a dangerous country and not returning alive. With a smile he sent back to me through Chapman a characteristic reply:

Tell Osborn I have already lived and enjoyed as much of life as any nine other men I know; I have had my full share, and if it is necessary for me to leave my bones in South America, I am quite ready to do so.

Although more prudent plans prevailed and we finally determined upon a route which resulted in the discovery of the Rio Roosevelt, yet the exposure, the excessively moist climate, the dearth of food, clothing and supplies, and the malarial infection very nearly cost Roosevelt his life. There is no doubt that the hazard of the trip meant nothing to him. While never reckless, he was absolutely fearless. His plans were made with the utmost intelligence and thoroughness, and with the trained assistance of his son Kermit, the South American experience and stalwart courage of George K. Cherrie, and the devoted companionship of Colonel Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon and Leo E. Miller, he led the most important expedition that has ever gone from North into South America. As a result of this expedition through Paraguay and the wilderness of Brazil more than 450 mammal and 1375 bird specimens were added to the American Museum collections, in addition to the geographic results, which aroused such a chorus of discussion and diversity of opinion. Roosevelt was so impressed with the importance of continuing the exploration that on his return he personally contributed two thousand dollars from his literary earnings to send his companion naturalists back to the field.

An American statesman, who should have known better, once characterized Roosevelt as “one who knew a little about more things than any one else in this country.” This gives an entirely false impression of Roosevelt’s mind, which was of quite the contrary order. What Roosevelt did know in history and in natural history he knew thoroughly; he went to the very bottom of things, if possible, and no one was more conscientious than he where his knowledge was limited or merely that of the intelligent layman. His thorough research in preparing for the African and South American expeditions was not that of the amateur or of the sportsman but of the trained naturalist who desires to learn as much as possible from previous students and explorers.

The State of New York will erect a splendid memorial to Theodore Roosevelt the Naturalist and Explorer which will perpetuate the idealistic and courageous aspects of his character and life as a naturalist. It will adjoin the American Museum of Natural History, which he loved and which inspired him to the activities of his youth and his mature years, where he sought the companionship of men of kindred ambitions and to which he repaired, in the intervals of politics and of pressing duties of every kind, for keen and concentrated discussions on animal coloration, the geographic distribution of mammals and birds, the history of human races, evolution of special groups of animals, and the furtherance of his expeditions. The memorial will remind boys and girls of all generations of Americans of Theodore Roosevelt’s spirit of self-effacement, of love, of zeal, of fearlessness, of energy, of intelligence with which they should approach nature in all of its wonderful aspects.

JOHN BURROUGHS—JUNE, 1896 ]

THE TWO JOHNS

JOHN BURROUGHS 1837–1919

JOHN MUIR 1838–1914

“The two Johns,” as they were affectionately known by their comrades on the Harriman Expedition to Alaska, were alike in their Christian names, in their love of nature, and, to a certain extent, in their powers of expression, but they were profoundly different in every other respect. I had the privilege of knowing John Muir much more intimately than I knew John Burroughs. I learned through correspondence and through long and intimate conversations thoroughly to understand his Scotch soul, which had a strong Norse element in it and a moral fervor drawn from the Bible of the Covenanters. It is interesting to contrast this Scotch type of soul with the English type of soul seen in John Burroughs.

I had in mind for some time this idea of the racial soul as something more profound in its influence than either the racial temperament or the racial mind. If the body had a long history in the past, so has the soul of man. In reading Wordsworth’s noble “Ode on the Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” it flashed across my mind that along an entirely different path I had reached the same conclusion as Wordsworth: namely, that the human soul is full of reminiscences and that it responds to conditions and experiences long bygone.

THE RACIAL SOUL OF JOHN BURROUGHS

Indelibly stamped on my mind is the celebration of John Burroughs’s seventy-fifth birthday in the Bird Hall of the American Museum of Natural History, when six hundred children of the New York East Side schools, Czechs, Hungarians, Poles, Slovaks, no trace of American stock among them, came to tell Burroughs how they loved him and his writings. Twelve bright girls and boys, each representing a volume of the edition of his collected works and wearing the name of the volume suspended in front, came forward and recited a verse or a bit of prose from the volume represented. Tears came into the eyes of “the good gray poet,” Burroughs’s own designation of Walt Whitman, as the love and admiration of the spirited children poured in upon him. The scene reflected the high purpose of literature, the interpretation of the spiritual and moral influences of nature.

With a large following of grown men, a circle of admirers which included such extremes as Henry Ford and Theodore Roosevelt, Burroughs was preeminently the poet of the school children of America, his ability for humanizing his dumb friends of the animal world having caught the fancy of the children, thus giving him one of his claims to immortality in America, if not in other countries. It was his part in America to throw the light of nature into the “prison-house,” to use Wordsworth’s phrase, which civilization throws around our youth:

Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy, But He beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy; The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature’s Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day.

His fellow poet of nature, John Muir, though in his way a writer of large imagination, did not humanize his birds and mammals as Burroughs did—a legitimate means of charming young and old with the habits and moralities of animal life, provided one makes it clear that it is an interpretation and an analogy and not a real resemblance being pictured. Burroughs loved nature of the East—of New York and New England—as Muir, his junior by only a year, cast over us the spell of the Pacific Coast, from Alaska to southern California, in all its virgin grandeur. On the voyages to Alaska in 1899 “the two Johns,” as they were affectionately called by their companions, met day by day. Alike in their disregard of conventions, in absent-mindedness in such trivial matters as clothing and food, and in their readiness to absorb and to pour out their nature-philosophy, it would appear that one steamer was not quite large enough for two such great men, accustomed as each was, in his advancing years, to unchecked discourse and to reverent attention and interest!

In my intimacy with Muir I learned that his views did not entirely harmonize with those of Burroughs; the difference was more or less traceable, I believe, to the Scotch ancestry of Muir and to his severe and rugged bringing up as contrasted with the more equable environment of Burroughs’s youth. Muir chose for observation those aspects of nature which present the greatest obstacles, glaciers and mountain tops, although he had tender moments with birds and found a personality in trees. He wrote about trees as has no one else in the whole history of trees, chiefly because he loved them as he loved men and women, and his powers of expression were gathered from classic British sources, such as the King James version of the Bible, Milton, Shakespeare, and Carlyle, with little influence from Thoreau and none from Whitman.

In feature and in spirit of the Nordic stock, with a dash of Celtic temperament, Burroughs was true to his heredity. From the paternal side of his ancestry Burroughs received, according to a close student of his forebears, his religious and moral nature, his stubbornness, his persistence, his emotional tendencies, his love of beauty, his curiosity as to causes and explanations; these were the Nordic traits of his pedigree. Of English ancestry on his mother’s side, he inherited from the Kelly line, perhaps Celtic, his slight melancholy and his care-free love of nature. There are numerous divines on the paternal Burroughs side, given to Bible reading; on the maternal Kelly side are country folk, lovers of the outdoors, fishermen, foxhunters, one hermit, and one Bible reader, “Granther Kelly.” Thus Burroughs’s intellectual and spiritual pedigree recalls what Goethe says of his own parents: