Seeking Beauty and Solace in the Familiar: Three Books by Walter Prichard Eaton (1920, 1930, 1933)

 Agriculture and Husbandry, Backyard Nature, Birds, book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Landscape History, Native Plants, Natural History, Sense of Place  1 Response »
Jan 072024
 

My Berkshire house sits at the head of an ancient orchard and looks, on one side, up a steep, high, densely wooded mountain shoulder; on the other, over rolling fields plumed with maples and sentineled with little cedears, to the pines on a hill and the wall of tamaracks edging the great swamp. Trees are my cloud of witnesses. Ever they surround me, and from the once contemptibly familiar they have become, to eyes grown wiser in seeking beauty and solace in the familiar, a constant source of charm and wonder and delight…

Last night, I finished the last few essays in In Berkshire Fields (1920) by Walter Prichard Eaton (1878-1957), and closing the book was a bittersweet moment. It was my last book by Eaton, and this post is my farewell to an author I have grown to know as a companion and friend. As an author, his prose is generally more effective than soaring, and more informative than inspirational. While I finish some books with pages of notes of favorite passages to share, that generally does not happen with Eaton’s writing. Eaton was by no means a scientist of nature; rather, he was a fairly wealthy theater critic with a penchant for wandering the woods and fields around his Berkshire home, punctuated by occasional camping and hiking treks to the West. After living for several years in a home on just five acres in a western Massachusetts town, he purchased 200 acres on the slopes of Mt. Everett (the second most prominent peak in Massachusetts, after Greylock, although only the eighth tallest). Wandering his property, he would occasionally encounter hired help, pruning a tree in his orchard. Writing during the Depression, he observed that he had several friends who had gone golfing in Bermuda for the winter, and half-wished he could join them — indicating, in passing, that the cost did not hold him back. He was a golf aficionado, in fact — he mentions a local golf course or aspects of the game a few times in his writing. Despite these things, I find his writing sincere and his sense of place in the Berkshire hills sufficiently robust that I feel transported there with him as I read his work. His inspiration was chiefly Henry David Thoreau, though he dedicated In Berkshire Fields to William Hamilton Gibson. He did not advance the cause of science with discoveries or insights, although his essay on why we shouldn’t rake leaves (more anon) at least shows that the idea dates back at least to pre-1933. His writing is pleasant, and I am grateful to have shared his world over five volumes. In particular, I find him noteworthy because his nature essays are the first that I have read that refer to World War I and the Great Depression. Indeed, his 1930 and 1933 titles are practically the only ones I have found by nature authors published in those years.

First, though, a few words about Eaton’s substantial work, In Berkshire Fields. By substantial, I mean that it weighs 2 1/2 pounds, although it is just over 300 pages. The paper is exceedingly thick, and the illustrations are numerous. The artist, Walter King Stone (1875-1949), makes multiple appearances in Eaton’s essays, including sharing tales of his own animal encounters. A gifted illustrator and Cornell University art professor, Stone provided artwork for many publications and collaborated with Eaton both here and in Eaton’s Skyline Camps. Based on his excellent images in this volume, Stone also had a predilection for chickadees.

In Berkshire Fields is a deep investigation of nature in the Berkshires at the time — a region transitioning from agriculture back to woodland. Although no evident attempt was made to unify the work, the essay collection covers a range of natural history topics, from birds (obviously a favorite subject of Eaton’s) to mammals to trees and orchids to the landscape as a whole. Mostly, the essays themselves are workmanlike, making their way through aspects of a chosen topic (a particular bird species or group of birds, foxes and their kin, etc.). They become most engaging when given over to brief narratives, such as tales about the behaviors exhibited by various semi-tamed crows. (Evidently, it was a rural pastime in 1920 to capture a juvenile crow and rear it in the home for amusement.) One essay that stands out is “From a Berkshire Cabin: An Essay in War-Time”. Writing from a small cabin high on the slopes of Mount Everett, Eaton grapples with the paradox of being surrounded by nature’s calm beauty while a war was raging in Europe:

I am aware with a pang of almost intolerable sorrow of the peacefulness about me. How strange, how bitter the very word sounds! Even here, where I have come to forget for a day, I cannot forget. Dear friends, youngsters I have watched grow up, relatives, a myriad unknown brothers of every creed and color, are to-day plunged in bloody battle killing and being killed, and man has made of peace a mockery… What I try to realize right now with a care never before exercised in what was essentially a care-free enjoyment what it is exactly in my surroundings that gives me so much pleasure, and from that to realize, if possible, what strange duality in our natures must be explained in order to understand even a little the terrible facts of armed conflict.

Ultimately, Eaton realizes the extent to which he, and all humanity, are complicit in the world war. In a passage eerily appropriate today, Eaton recognizes the selfishness that comes from taking individual rights for granted without recognizing that democracy requires the dedicated participation of everyone:

We must descend from our mountain cabins, from our towers of ivory; we must come out of our gardens and up from our slums, forgetting our beautiful enjoyments, or our precarious jobs which carry no attendant enjoyments, and remembering only the ideal of beauty in our hearts, the ideal of beauty which means, too, the ideal of justice and mercy and peace and happiness for each and all, demand of what rulers we shall find that they give over to us the machinery which controls our destinies, and the destinies of all our fellows. The world to-day is fighting for democracy. I see my crime to have been that I considered democracy a condition wherein I was let alone, not wherein I was an active participant three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, fighting to write my best personal ideals into the whole. That, I believe, has been the crime of the entire world, and in this sense it was not the Kaiser who made the war, but Goethe and Schumann and Beethoven. It was not “‘secret diplomacy,” trade jealousy, and all the rest, that kept the nations apart, straining at one another’s throats; it was the selfish complaisance of all the people who had the love of right and beauty in their hearts—and locked it there for their private enjoyment. The fight for democracy is only just beginning, for only now are we beginning to comprehend what democracy means, to glimpse the depths of its sacrifices, the glory of its creative spirit, the beauty of opportunity that it may be made to hold for common men. Had I the eloquence, I would write a new manifesto, and its slogan would not be, ‘‘ Workers of the world, unite!’ but, ‘‘Lovers of beauty in the world, unite! and capture the machinery by which we have been ruled in ugliness and cruelty.”” There would be no need of a union of the workers, then, for we should all be workers for the common weal. …

Making his way back down the mountain slope to home, Eaton loses much of his fervor, observing that “It is hard to come down from a mountain cabin, from an ivory tower, to give up a solitary possession or resign a comfortable privilege! If I owned a factory would I consent without a bitter struggle to industrial democracy? I ask myself as I pass the foxglove plant and touch its trumpet with my fingers. No—probably not. Undoubtedly not, I decide as I reach the clearing. Having determined what would be necessary to prevent future wars, Eaton realizes with bitter honesty just how difficult such a path would be. I am at once smitten with his integrity and disappointed with his lack of commitment. It is as if he glimpsed the entrance gate to Utopia, only to turn away.

Throughout the book, Eaton evidences appreciation for most wildlife, and particularly songbirds. However, in keeping with the time, he tends to emphasize the benefits of animals for humans, rather than advocating that other living beings ought to be protected for their own sake. Porcupines, for instance, “appear to serve no useful purpose”, while certain hawk species are “cruel” because they hunt farmers’ chickens. Ultimately, though, Eaton recognizes that calling for the outright extinction of certain species would likely be most unwise:

“…we are slowly learning that the balance of nature is something which should not be too rudely disturbed without careful investigation. We have learned the lesson—a costly one— with regard to our slaughtered forests and shrunken water-powers. We are learning it with regard to our birds. And it is certainly not beyond the range of possibility that the varmints—the flesh-eating animals like foxes, weasels, ’coons, and skunks—perform their useful functions, too, in their ceaseless preying upon rodents, rabbits, and the like, more ‘ than atoning for their occasional predatory visits to the chicken-roost. At any rate, who that loves the woods and streams does not love them the more when the patient wait or the silent approach is rewarded by the sight of some wild inhabitant about his secret business, or when the telltale snows of winter reveal the story of last night’s hunt, or when the still, cold air of the winter evenings is startled by the cry of a fox, as he sits, perhaps, on a knoll above the dry weed-tops in the field and bays the moon? To me, at least, the woods untenanted by their natural inhabitants are as melancholy as a deserted village, an abandoned farm, and I would readily sacrifice twenty chickens a year to know that I maintained thereby a family of foxes under my wall, living their sly, shrewd life in frisky happiness, against all the odds of man.

While the 1920 volume is rich with splendid artwork and lavish with thick paper and a decorated cover, the other two volumes of Eaton that I recently read are far more plain in appearance. The paper is browned and of much poorer quality, and the covers are undecorated apart from labels identifying the title and the author (albeit embossed in gold). There are no illustrations apart from a lovely pair of frontispieces by Walter King Stone and photographer Edwin Hale Lincoln, respectively (see below), and the books are about 130 pages each. New England Vista dates to 1930, and On Yankee Hilltops to 1933. Both works contain more essays about the landscape of the Berkshire hills and its wildlife, along with rambles in search of the cellar holes of long-abandoned settlers’ homes and reflections on home gardening. Published in the early days of the Great Depression, New England Vista is most noteworthy for its essay about leaf raking. “Burning Wealth” argues that fallen leaves ought either to be left where they lie or else gathered for composting and reuse. “Every leaf that falls represents nourishment taken out of the ground,” Eaton patiently explains to the reader. “Left to rot, it puts this nourishment back into the soil. Burned up, the nourishment is forever lost, and if it is not supplied artificially, the soil is gradually impoverished and dried up. Every pile of leaves that is composted is rescued wealth. Every pile of leaves burned up is wealth destroyed.” I suspect this recommendation aligned well with the concerns of thrifty readers struggling to keep afloat financially in the aftermath of Black Tuesday.

Speaking of Black Tuesday, the Depression itself (with a small “d”, though) puts in an appearance in On Yankee Hilltops. In “Sweets for Squirrels”, he mentions how “Two of my friends, appararently unaffected by the depression, are in Bermuda playing golf.” While working on building a new garden path along a limestone ledge, Eaton observes how his mind keeps trying to argue that he is better off for not having joined them (a decision that does not appear to reflect any financial hardship on his own account). Ultimately, Eaton concludes that “…I was better employed than if I had been playing golf.” Fortunately, he does not end his musing there. He shares about a visit from a struggling poet, living “up in the hills” in a shack on a small strip of ground, who walked ten miles just to call on Eaton.

When he sits in my study, and we talk of night sounds, and winter colors, and the long tramps the pheasants take, or discuss poetry, I am always a little ashamed of the litter of possessions which surround me–books, prints, tobacco jars, Dresden figures, overstuffed chairs, telephones, golf clubs, mirrors, goodness knows what all, accumulated to minister to the supposed needs of one unimportant human being who can hardly be considered an individual unless he can stand alone, free of such truck, and find his happiness in the creative power of his spirit, or, at the very least, of his own two hands.

Eaton then lists some of the “material comforts” of the Industrial Revolution and the Gilded Age — motorcars, radios, tiled bathrooms, macadam highways, and the like. “We organized ourselves into a vast society to produce them, entirely based for its stability on our desire and ability to consume them. Then something went wrong.” After the stock market crashed, people lost the ability to pay for all these things. Once there is an economic upturn, though, Eaton predicts that the seemingly endless whirl of production and consumption will automatically resume. Under those conditions, most people work hard, but to no avail — living empty lives creating nothing truly meaningful. The better path, he suggests, would be to find contentment with simple things:

To rediscover the world of simplicities, the joys of creating with one’s own hands, the profound satisfactions of expressing an inner sense of beauty through the manipulation of visible forms,–trees, plants, paints, notes of music, or what not,–the relief of a slackened quest for Things, is to rediscover, perhaps, one’s self.

If only we could, collectively, make a better choice. Again, Eaton maps out the way for humanity to follow, only to stumble against the realities of the human condition. “I’m not overly hopeful,” he confesses.

For Those Who Have But Just Begun to Observe: “Nature Studies in Berkshire” by John Coleman Adams (1899)

 book review, Books, Environmental conservation, Native Plants, Natural History  No Responses »
Jul 262022
 

John Coleman Adams (1849-1922) graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1872 and went on to serve as pastor at five Universalist churches during his lifetime. He wrote several books on religion, philosophy, and other topics. Nature Studies in Berkshire was his only book in the nature genre unless one counts a biography of William Hamilton Gibson, another nature author of the time.

At first glance, I was fearful that the book was going to be, well, vacuous. The opening chapter on “Our Berkshire” is a work overwrought with boosterism that includes this cliché-riddled passage:

To know Berkshire is to love it. To love it is to feel a sort of proprietorship in it, a pride in its glories, a joy in its beauties, such as owners have in their estates, and patriots in their native land. He who was born here, clings to the soil if he stays, or reverts to it if he moves from it, with a New England stead- fastness, as intense and deep as a moral principle. He who visits Berkshire is almost certain to visit again and yet once more. He would fain revel in the old delight of air and scene and influence. He believes he has not exhausted the possible experiencesto be found in this spot. And so the charm grows, and the sense of belonging to the soil, and the belief that there is nowhere the like of this blend of tonic and restful scenery, of wild nature and cultivated land, of hill-country and broad plains.

I am grateful to report that the book gets much better. As a dominie (the term for a pastor that Adams preferred to apply to himself), he includes some religious sentiment; but it is muted for the most part, and not overly didactic. I found it strangely endearing to read, early on, Adams’ declaration that “I am a stranger in bird-land”; so many other writers of the time, such as Olive Thorne Miller and Brandford Torrey, reveled in descriptions of the feathered folk. Birds still appear here — robins, thrushes, and a few others — but only briefly, and mostly concerning their songs or behaviors, not their plumage or nesting habits. His botanical knowledge is much stronger; unlike early Burroughs, Adams identifies the wake-robin trillium as being deep purple. In his 1901 biography of William Hamilton Gibson, Adams identifies Thoreau, Burroughs, and Gibson as the greatest nature writers of the time. In this slightly earlier book, Adams mentions John Burroughs, Grant Allen (stay tuned for a future blog post or two on this Canadian writer who wrote popular pieces about plant evolution), and Bradford Torrey, along with the poetry of Wordsworth and Emerson.

I found the simple, straightforward nature of Adams’ prose to be quite refreshing after Field-Farings. I lifted the title of this blog post from the book because I think it describes Adams’ audience well — novices at nature study, those seeking inspiration in charming accounts of the out-of-doors. Nearly all of the chapters are set in the summer because that is when Adams would stay in the Berkshires; the rest of the year, he was a parson at All Souls’ Universalist Church in Brooklyn. The chapters are accounts of excursions he took in the area, or reflections upon various landscape features — trees, brooks, lakes, and clouds. While his prose rarely waxes eloquent, I admit to enjoying this passage about a delightful afternoon visit to a stream near his home:

…sweetest of all our memories will be that bright morning when we wandered to the brookside, with a little child for company, and lay stretched on a greensward shaded by the meeting boughs of a maple and a butternut, while she played like a baby naiad in the stream, and the brook sang, and the trees whispered, and the birds hopped on branches close beside us, and the kingfisher from downstream dropped in to call, and the tenant frog stared at us from his pool, and the oxen in the next lot sent looks of fellowship across the stone wall, and we seemed to blend our lives with that of the brook, and for each of us, child, man, and woman, the poet’s word was true: ” Beauty through my senses stole; I yielded myself to the perfect whole.”

Like many nature authors of his time (particularly of the religious persuasion), Adams believed that connecting with nature was ultimately a religious experience. He explained the connection between religion and nature thus:

I have grown to feel that the love of nature and its beauty and inner life have much to do with the enrichment of the religious life. Religion has been the gainer both from science and art, for these interpreters of nature have broadened our vision, lifted our ideals, and expanded all our conceptions of the universe and of its Creator.

I am confident that Hamilton Wright Mabie, among others, would have agreed with him.

Before I consign this book to my rapidly expanding “finished books” shelf, I will share excerpts from three chapters in the volume that particularly caught my attention. The first is a passage singing the praises of the music of the thrush in the forest:

The breeze lulls for a moment ; the far sounds from the farms come to our ears softened and sweet. But best and dearest of all sounds, across the glen, from out those woody coverts, there floats the tender, liquid trill of the thrush. It is the harbinger of the evening, the first notice the birds serve that the day is waning, and that the shadows are gathering in the forests on the eastern slopes. There is no other woodland note like this. It is perpetual music. It touches the emotions like profoundest poetry. It calls on the religious nature and stirs the deepest soul to joyous praise. There is no bird, among the many which have found their way into song, in other lands or other times, whose note deserves so much of poet and lover of nature as the wood-thrush. The very spirit of the forest thrills in this vesper-song. It is the trembling note of solitude, rich with the emotions born of silence and of shadow, rising like the sighing of the evergreens, to fill the soul at once with joy over its sweetness, and with sadness because that sweetness must be so evanescent. When one has heard the song of the thrush there is no richer draught of joy in store for him in any sound of the woods. There is nothing to surpass it, save the ineffable ecstasy of the silence which reigns in their deepest shades.

The second excerpt presages Edwin Way Teale’s North With the Spring, published half a century later:

Now if I had the means and the time, I should every year in this same fashion run ahead of the vernal advance, the procession of leaves and blossoms and birds and butterflies, as it moves northward from the Carolinas to the Canadas. There is such an exquisite pleasure in watching the burst of life, the outbreak of colour and fragrance, the clothing of field and forest with verdure, that one would be glad to prolong the sensation. In these days it would be an easy matter to keep just ahead of summer for a good two months. And then one might halt on the banks of the St. Lawrence and let the pageant pass by; for when it has gone as far north as that, the line of march is nearly done.

Finally, I was surprised to find in Adams a kindred spirit with Enos Mills. Indeed, one might imagine the two meeting for conversation — the New England parson extolling the rural delights of the Berkshires with their “gracious air of culture and refinement”, and a John Muir wannabe backwoodsman with endless tales to tell of adventures in the rugged Rockies. Both men, however, clearly recognized the importance of trees to civilization and the environment. Indeed, many points Mills offers about the value of forests to humans and ecosystems in “The Wealth of the Woods” from The Spell of the Rockies (1911) also appear in Adams’ 1899 essay, “Fruitful Trees”. I suspect that both writers were in turn influenced, at least in part, by George Perkins Marsh’s much earlier work, Man and Nature (1864). “Nature has made the tree one of the great conservators of the soil,” Adams declares. He goes on to explore how trees moderate the local hydrology (diminishing the severity of floods and droughts) and play a key role in preventing soil erosion.

…cut down the trees, clear the hillsides, and see what happens. The thin soil, no longer protected by the trees, no longer held in place by their netted roots, no longer shaded by their leafy branches, grows dry, and crumbles, and loosens. The heavy rains wash it bodily into the valleys. The bare ledges appear. The vegetation dwindles. The hill or mountain becomes a barren crag. Its brooks and springs dry up as soon as they are filled. The drench of the hillsides is hurried in bulk down into the valleys; and every rain-storm becomes a swift freshet, destroying the crops and threatening house, barn, and factory, at the same time that it washes down the sand and gravel from the heights to deaden and impoverish the lowland meadows. But as soon as the rain stops, the streams stop too. They dry up and shrink in their beds. They disappear under the scorch of the sun. The same fields which were inundated in the springtime are parched and dusty in the heats of midsummer. That is the way we are enriching ourselves. We are paying dividends at the sawmill, and putting mortgages on the farms. We are burying our fields at the same time that we are destroying our forests.

On the whole, I found Adams a worthy nature writer. And any lightness in his prose was more than counteracted by the weight of his book: 2.4 pounds, with pages made of some of the heaviest paper I have seen — approaching cardstock. The photographs are lovely, each one shielded by vellum with a brief text excerpt printed in red ink. It was a charming read. Alas, no previous owner left their mark, so I cannot tell anything about the history of this volume itself, beyond the fact that it was a slightly later edition of the work, published in 1901.