Primitive Experiences of Loss Working with the

Paranoid Schizoid Patient 1st Edition Robert T.

Waska pdf download

https://ebookname.com/product/primitive-experiences-of-loss-
working-with-the-paranoid-schizoid-patient-1st-edition-robert-t-
waska/

Get Instant Ebook Downloads – Browse at https://ebookname.com

Instant digital products (PDF, ePub, MOBI) available
Download now and explore formats that suit you...

Projective Identification A Contemporary Introduction

1st Edition Robert Waska

https://ebookname.com/product/projective-identification-a-
contemporary-introduction-1st-edition-robert-waska/

Working With Families Guidelines and Techniques Second

Edition John T. Edwards

https://ebookname.com/product/working-with-families-guidelines-
and-techniques-second-edition-john-t-edwards/

The Masks of God Primitive Mythology Joseph Campbell

https://ebookname.com/product/the-masks-of-god-primitive-
mythology-joseph-campbell/

The suppression of the Atlantic slave trade British

policies practices and representations of naval
coercion 1st Edition Robert Burroughs■Richard
Huzzey■Eds.)
https://ebookname.com/product/the-suppression-of-the-atlantic-
slave-trade-british-policies-practices-and-representations-of-
naval-coercion-1st-edition-robert-burroughs%ef%bc%8crichard-
The Miracle Morning for Real Estate Agents It s Your
Time to Rise and Shine First Edition Elrod

https://ebookname.com/product/the-miracle-morning-for-real-
estate-agents-it-s-your-time-to-rise-and-shine-first-edition-
elrod/

Matter Matters 1st Edition Kurt Smith

https://ebookname.com/product/matter-matters-1st-edition-kurt-
smith/

Vulnerable Populations in the United States Leiyu Shi

https://ebookname.com/product/vulnerable-populations-in-the-
united-states-leiyu-shi/

Fundamentals of Forensic Science 3rd Edition Max M.

Houck

https://ebookname.com/product/fundamentals-of-forensic-
science-3rd-edition-max-m-houck/

The Horsemen of Athens Glenn Richard Bugh

https://ebookname.com/product/the-horsemen-of-athens-glenn-
richard-bugh/
Sexing War Policing Gender Motherhood myth and women s
political violence 1st Edition Linda Åhäll

https://ebookname.com/product/sexing-war-policing-gender-
motherhood-myth-and-women-s-political-violence-1st-edition-linda-
ahall/
PREFACE vii

Introduction 1

PART I
The contributions of
projective identification and symbolization

1 Theoretical issues 15

2 Greed, self-starvation, and the quest for safety 37

3 Idealization, devaluation, and the narcissistic stance 43

4 Vulnerability, union, and the return of the bad object 52

5 Love, hate, and the dread of impending annihilation 57

6 Loss and primitive methods of relating:
difficulties in the analytic encounter 63

7 Maintenance of hope: the working-through process 82

PART II
Primitive loss and the masochistic defence

8 Theoretical issues 97

9 Working with the concrete thinking of narcissism 119

10 Transference and countertransference 144

11 Grievance and the paranoid–schizoid experience 151

Summary and conclusions 189

REFERENCES 193
INDEX 197
I
have gradually become aware, when working from a psycho-
analytic perspective, of the impact and primacy of loss in
many patients’ life histories. While these patients have usually
suffered external trauma, neglect, and loss in their childhoods, my
clinical focus is on the deeply imbedded and self-perpetuating
nature of intrapsychic loss.
The patients who most exhibit these problems are diagnosti-
cally within what Melanie Klein has termed the paranoid–schizoid
position. In this developmental position, projective identification is
a psychological cornerstone in how the ego relates to and organ-
izes internal experience. This dynamic is explained in detail in the
Introduction, in which I review Klein’s concept of the paranoid–
schizoid stance and its associated defences.
Part one of the book looks at the contributions of the symbol
function and projective identification. Symbolism is an integral
part of psychic growth and integration. It fosters trust in sustain-
able and resilient object relations. Primitive, paranoid–schizoid
experiences of loss tend to prevent or destroy symbolic functioning
and its associated whole-object potentials. Chapter one describes
these concepts from a theoretical standpoint.
 Chapter two illustrates through detailed clinical material the
theoretical idea of a primitive internal state of loss. The desperate
and overwhelming phantasies and anxieties so common with these
patients are brought to life with moment-to-moment clinical data.
Chapter three uses further case reports to show the particular
moments in which the patient’s object shifts from a more idealized,
nourishing helper to a demonized foe. Narcissistic defences and
projective identification are over-utilized to shore up the paranoid
ego; however, this strategy actually leaves the ego more vulnerable
to these phantasies of loss and persecution.
Chapters four and five show how dreams, and the patient’s
unique way of sharing dreams with the analyst, lead to a better
understanding of the paranoid–schizoid experience of loss.
Dreams can be remarkably clear in demonstrating the pivotal
point at which the ego feels betrayed, attacked, and annihilated.
Chapter five describes several patients who tried their best to
escape the persecution and isolation of loss by disconnecting from
the analyst and other important objects. By sabotaging their own
thinking processes and denying difference in favour of manic
union and sameness, they try to reassure themselves magically.
This idealized union is brittle and proves difficult to maintain.
Ultimately, this defence promotes an increased sense of potential
loss, rejection, and persecution.
Chapters six and seven follow in depth the cases of two
patients. In the exploration of the here-and-now transference
dynamic, several points emerge. Paranoid–schizoid patients who
are struggling with more catastrophic versions of loss often fall
into two camps. The first involves an aggressive, narcissistic trans-
ference in which envy and splitting are prominent. In the other, the
transference state is much more masochistic and quietly demand-
ing. While at first glance the latter can appear to be indicative of a
higher functioning, depressive patient, the clinical material reveals
the same underlying sense of fragmentation and hopeless, anxious
dread of annihilation.
Part two is an in-depth study of the more masochistic profile
mentioned previously. Melanie Klein’s developmental views are
described in chapter eight, along with examination of the concept
of paranoid–schizoid guilt. These theoretical points are given form
with the extensive case material presented in chapter nine.
 Chapter ten addresses the specific transference and counter-
transference situations that tend to arise with masochistic patients
who are fending off primitive loss. One particular transference
problem—grievance—is described in chapter eleven. Grievance
toward the object can become the primary vehicle for the feelings
and defences concerning loss. The patient’s feelings regarding re-
jection, attack, and complete breakdown of safety or emotional
nourishment are also examined, as they are funnelled through the
phantasy and transference of grievance.
In the final chapter, I gather together all these ideas and convey
the essence of what loss is within the paranoid–schizoid experi-
ence. The lack of forgiveness, repair, restitution, or understanding
in this dark internal world leaves the ego in a state of perpetual
danger and despair. Throughout the book the clinical material
shows how psychotic, borderline, and masochistic patients can be
entombed in a paranoid–schizoid phantasy of primitive loss, in
which desperately sought-after idealized good objects turn into
abandoning, attacking, bad objects. Loss of the good object brings
with it annihilation of the self. Pathological reliance on projective
identification, splitting, masochism, and manic defences rigidifies
a cycle of idealization, greed, envy, loss, and persecution. If the
analyst can focus on these elements in the transference as well as
on the ongoing phantasies of idealization–oral aggression–loss–
persecution, then these pathological cycles can gradually change.
T
he focus of this book is on the paranoid–schizoid patient’s
experience of loss, abandonment, and persecution. These
primitive patients show up regularly in our consulting
offices and offer difficult clinical challenges. Stormy and confus-
ing treatment situations unfold, with transferences involving loss,
annihilation anxiety, and persecution. Many of these paranoid–
schizoid patients cope with these fears and feelings of envy by
erecting masochistic defences. Masochistic submission and para-
noid struggles for control and recognition mask hostility and loss.
Melanie Klein wrote extensively on the roles of loss, phantasy,
and anxiety. However, Klein and her followers place most of their
emphasis on loss within the depressive position. I explore the ego’s
experience of loss in the paranoid–schizoid position and the way
projective identification is then used to cope with overwhelming
anxieties of annihilation and separation. I also explore the role of
early precursors to symbolic function and the impact of symboliza-
tion on intrapsychic loss, both within the paranoid–schizoid posi-
tion.
Projective identification (PI) is a primary defence in the para-
noid–schizoid position and it figures prominently in how the ego
copes with primitive experiences of loss. Symbolism seems to play
a role in the dynamics between the paranoid–schizoid position,
phantasies of loss, and the mechanism of PI.
I feel that it is critical in all analytic treatments to show and
explain to patients, through interpretation, how they are experi-
encing loss in the transference relationship. In a similar manner, I
illustrate my work here with abundant case material.

To explore the issues of primitive loss within the paranoid–schiz-

oid position, I start by summarizing Melanie Klein’s discovery of
the paranoid–schizoid concept and how it is defined in Kleinian
circles. In addition, reviewing Klein’s views of the ego, the object,
and PI is helpful.
Melanie Klein introduced the concept of the paranoid–schizoid
position in 1946. She had certainly discovered much of her theory
before, but it really crystallized in her paper, “Notes on Some
Schizoid Mechanisms”. After this paper she refined her ideas, and
Kleinians have found it a crucial tool in their day-to-day clinical
work with regressed and disturbed patients.
Klein (1946) summarized her findings by stating that
In the first few months of life anxiety is predominantly experi-
enced as fear of persecution and that this contributes to certain
mechanisms and defences which characterize the paranoid
and schizoid positions. . . . These mechanisms and defences are
part of normal development and at the same time form the
basis for later schizophrenic illness. [p. 22]

She then stated more fully:

I have often expressed my view that object relations exist from
the beginning of life, the first object being the mother’s breast
which is split into a good (gratifying) and bad (frustrating)
breast; this splitting results in a division between love and
hate. I have further suggested that the relation to the first ob-
ject implies its introjection and projection, and thus from the
beginning object relations are moulded by an interaction be-
 tween introjection and projection, between internal and exter-
nal objects and situations. These processes participate in the
building up of the ego and super-ego and prepare the ground
for the onset of the Oedipus complex in the second half of the
first year.
From the beginning the destructive impulse is turned
against the object and is first expressed in phantasied oral-
sadistic attacks on the mother’s breast which soon develop into
onslaughts on her body by all sadistic means. The persecutory
fears arising from the infant’s oral-sadistic impulses to rob
the mother’s body of its good contents, and the anal-sadistic
impulses to put his excrements into her (including the desire
to enter her body in order to control her from within), are of
great importance for the development of paranoia and schizo-
phrenia. . . . This early period I described as the “persecutory
phase” or rather “paranoid position” as I termed it later. I thus
held that preceding the depressive position there is a paranoid
position. If persecutory fears are very strong, and for this rea-
son as well as others the infant cannot work through the para-
noid position, then the working through of the depressive
position is in turn impeded.
. . . Some fluctuations between the schizoid and the
depressive position always occur and are part of normal de-
velopment. No clear division between the two stages of
development can therefore be drawn, because modification is
a gradual process and the phenomena of the two positions
remain for some time to some extent intermingled and inter-
acting. In abnormal development this interaction influences, I
think, the clinical picture both of some forms of schizophrenia
and of manic-depressive illness. [p. 22]

Hanna Segal (1974) has been a primary developer of Klein’s

thinking. Regarding the paranoid–schizoid position, she states:
quite early, the ego has a relationship to two objects; the pri-
mary object, the breast, being at this stage split into two parts,
the ideal breast and the persecutory one. The phantasy of the
ideal object merges with, and is confirmed by, gratifying expe-
riences of love and feeding by the real external mother, while
the phantasy of persecution similarly merges with real experi-
ences of deprivation and pain, which are attributed by the
infant to the persecutory objects. Gratification, therefore, not
only fulfils the need for comfort, love and nourishment, but is
 also needed to keep terrifying persecution at bay; and depriva-
tion becomes not merely a lack of gratification, but a threat of
annihilation by persecutors. The infant’s aim is to try to ac-
quire, to keep inside and to identify with the ideal object, seen
as life-giving and protective, and to keep out the bad object
and those parts of the self which contain the death instinct. The
leading anxiety in the paranoid–schizoid position is that the
persecutory object or objects will get inside the ego and over-
whelm and annihilate both the ideal object and the self. These
features of the anxiety and object-relationships experienced
during this phase of development led Melanie Klein to call it
the paranoid–schizoid position, since the leading anxiety is
paranoid, and the state of the ego and its objects is character-
ized by the splitting, which is schizoid. [p. 26]

Segal (1974) goes on to clarify:

It has to be remembered that a normal infant does not spend
most of his time in a state of anxiety. On the contrary, in fa-
vourable circumstances, he spends most of his time sleeping,
feeding, experiencing real or hallucinatory pleasures and thus
gradually assimilating his ideal object and integrating his ego.
But all infants have periods of anxiety, and the anxieties and
defences which are the nucleus of the paranoid–schizoid posi-
tion are a normal part of human development. [p. 35]

Finally, Schafer (1997) has summarized some of these ideas:

In the paranoid–schizoid position the focus is very much on ag-
gression or self and other directed destructiveness, much of it
in the form of envy and fear of envy, and on grandiosity, while
in the depressive position the focus is on love, understanding,
concern, reparation, desire, and various other forms of regard
for the object as well as on destructiveness and guilt. The para-
noid–schizoid position is also characterized by typical defenses
such as splitting and projective identification; the depressive
position, by regression (to the paranoid–schizoid position),
flight to a manic position featuring denial and idealization of
self and other, or bondage to a reparative position relative to
the imagined damaged objects. Mature functioning rests on
one’s having attained an advanced phase of the depressive
position in which object love and sublimatory activity are rela-
tively stable; however, regressive pulls are never absent. [p. 4]
Regarding the ego, Melanie Klein embraced Freudian thoughts.
However, she developed a distinct emphasis of her own. She felt
that the ego existed from birth and was built up in complexity by
introjecting the good object: the mother’s breast. The good breast
becomes the focal point for ego maturation. The good aspects of
the mother fill the infant’s inner world and become material for
identification. These introjected objects and part-objects organize
and fortify the ego and are constantly modified by other objects
(St. Clair, 1986). Therefore, the ego is object-related from the begin-
ning and is populated by multiple object relationships that con-
stantly modify not only the ego but each other.
Klein (1959) wrote:
The ego, according to Freud, is the organized part of the self,
constantly influenced by instinctual impulses but keeping
them under control by repression; furthermore it directs all
activities and establishes and maintains the relation to the ex-
ternal world. . . . My work has led me to assume that the ego
exists and operates from birth onwards and that in addition to
the functions mentioned above it has the important task of
defending itself against anxiety stirred up by the struggle
within and by influences from without. Furthermore it initiates
a number of processes from which I shall first of all select
introjection and projection. To the no less important process of
splitting, that is to say dividing, impulses and objects I shall
turn later. [p. 250]

Regarding the development and maturation of the ego, Klein

(1948) wrote:
during the period from three to six months considerable pro-
gress in the integration of the ego comes about. Important
changes take place in the nature of the infant’s object relations
and of his introjective-processes. The infant perceives and
introjects the mother increasingly as a complete person. . . .
Although these processes are still primarily focused on the
mother, the infant’s relation to the father (and other people in
the environment) undergoes similar changes and the father too
becomes established in his mind as a whole person. [p. 35]
In 1952, Klein wrote about the functions of the ego. She stated:
among its first activities are the defence against anxiety and
the use of processes of introjection and projection. . . . More
recently I defined the drive toward integration as another of
the ego’s primal functions . . . its derivation from the life in-
stinct. [1952a, p. 57]

In 1957, Klein elaborated these ideas when she wrote:

it is likely that the primordial anxiety, engendered by the
threat of the death instinct within, might be the explanation
why the ego is brought into activity from birth onwards. The
ego is constantly protecting itself against the pain and tension
to which anxiety gives rise, and therefore makes use of de-
fences from the beginning of post-natal life. [p. 216]

Klein (1963) pointed out how the early ego is dominated by

splitting mechanisms designed to protect itself from the dangers of
the death instinct. At the same time, the drive towards integration
increases as the ego introjects more of the good object. She felt
(Klein, 1957) that the ego’s primary function was to deal with the
primordial anxiety engendered by the death instinct. However,
certain other ego functions emerge as a result of the struggle
between the life and death instincts: “one of these functions is
gradual integration which stems from the life instinct and ex-
presses itself in the capacity for love” (p. 191).
Klein felt that the infant projects both the death instinct and the
life instinct outwards to the external object, the frustrating or grati-
fying breast. A fluctuation of introjection and projection, based on
self-protection, creates the mix of ego and object at the core of the
developing ego. The infant splits the destructive feelings, retaining
one part and projecting the other part outward. Simultaneously,
the infant splits the libido, with part of the libido projected out-
ward and the rest retained within. The fragment of good feelings,
which is kept in the ego, establishes a relationship with the ideal
good object. During these stages of ego development, partial ob-
jects operate within a disorganized inner world. As these dis-
jointed phantasies become integrated, the infant has less need
for omnipotent control over the object. Accurate ego perception
results from a decrease in projective and introjective mechanisms.
 Hinshelwood (1991) reviewed and summarized Klein’s princi-
ple ideas on the ego:
For Klein the ego exists at birth, has a boundary and identifies
objects. It has certain functions of an exceedingly primitive
kind—(i) separating “me” from “not-me”; (ii) discriminating
good (pleasant sensations) from bad; (iii) phantasies of in-
corporating and expelling (introjection and projection); and
(iv) the phantasy of the mating of pre-conceptions and realiza-
tions. . . .
The ego, at first, alternates between states of integration and
disintegration . . . [The ego includes] phantasies it has of strug-
gling with anxieties experienced in the course of its relations
with objects, which, although they are perceived in the colours
of the instincts, create a world of experiences, anxieties, loves,
hates, and fears rather than states of discharge. The ego’s
struggle is to maintain its own integrity in the face of its pain-
ful experiences of objects that threaten annihilation.
At first, however, the ego is very unstable, and its earliest
functions are desperate efforts to establish stability. Klein con-
ceived of the ego’s first act differently at different stages in her
theoretical development:
(i) in 1932 the primary function of the ego was the deflec-
tion of the death instinct outwards towards an external object
that is then feared as a persecutor, the mechanism of pro-
jection.
(ii) in 1935 Klein began to view the introjection of the good
object as the founding of the ego; finally,
(iii) in 1957 she described the first ego-function as a form of
splitting, the basis of the capacity for judgement, though ini-
tially of a very narcissistic kind. [pp. 284–286]

During the late 1920s, Klein elaborated on her ideas about the
infantile phantasies that the child develops about being full of
body parts, people, and things. For Klein, these phantasies of in-
ternal presences began at birth. All experiences and relationships
with significant others were taken into the ego for protection.
Mitchell (1981) writes: “phantasies and anxieties concerning the
state of one’s internal object world become the underlying basis,
Klein was later to claim, for one’s behavior, moods, and sense of
self” (p. 376).
The question of where the object originates is important to
Klein’s thinking. She believed that objects are inherent in and cre-
ated out of the drives, independent of real people in the external
world. For Klein, the drives contain a priori images of the outside
world, which the ego searches out, motivated by both love and
hate. These inherent phantasies and innate knowledge of the
world include both part-object and whole-object encoded informa-
tion at an unconscious level.
Perlow (1995) writes:
undoubtedly, it was the work of Melanie Klein that put the
concept of internal objects into the center of the conceptual
map of psychoanalysis . . . we have seen the development of a
number of aspects of Melanie Klein’s concept of internal ob-
jects. The main ones have been: (1) Internal objects as body-
phantasies. This refers both to the phantasy of another person
(or part of a person) physically inside the individual’s body
and to the bodily sensations which are experienced as objects.
(2) Internal objects as referring to all contents of the mind-
phantasies, memories, and perceptions of objects. The higher-
level cognitive contents are considered to be rooted in the deep
unconscious levels at which internal objects are experienced
concretely (as in #1). (3) Internal objects as deeply influenced
by the instincts. This is especially important in relation to the
death instinct, which gives rise to experiences of dangerous
and annihilating internal objects. [p. 55]

Perlow continues:

the concept of internal objects has played an interesting role on

the border between self and object in Melanie Klein’s theory—
that self-object differentiation is a complex process and not a
one-time, clear cut achievement. Internal objects combine as-
pects of self and object—both by combining qualities of self
with qualities of the object (loving, hating, angry, reposing,
and so on) and by combining the basic feeling of “me-ness”
with “not-me-ness”. Melanie Klein considered there to be a
 developmental process in which the confusion of self with ob-
ject was gradually sorted out, in the progress from the para-
noid–schizoid to the depressive position. [p. 56]

Klein felt drives to be intrinsically paired with objects. St. Clair

(1986) notes that, for Klein, “every urge and instinct is bound up
with an object” (p. 39).
Finally, Hinshelwood (1991) summarizes Klein’s ideas:

In Klein’s framework, the object is a component in the mental

representation of an instinct.
What is represented in unconscious phantasy is a relation-
ship between the self and an object in which the object is moti-
vated with certain impulses, good or bad, related to the
instinctual drives—oral, anal, genital, etc.—of the subject. . . .
At the outset, Klein believed, the infant exists in relation to
objects that are primitively distinguished from the ego—there
are object-relations from birth. [pp. 362–363]

Klein presents the term projective identification for the first time in
her 1946 paper, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms”. As it is the
birth of the term and a summing up of her thinking about it at the
time, it is quoted here at length,
In hallucinatory gratification, two interrelated processes take
place: the omnipotent conjuring up of the ideal object and
situation, and the equally omnipotent annihilation of the bad
persecutory object and the painful situation. These processes
are based on splitting both the object and the ego. . . . So far,
in dealing with the persecutory fear, I have singled out the oral
element. However, while the oral libido still has the lead, libid-
inal and aggressive impulses and phantasies from other
sources come to the fore and lead to a confluence of oral, ure-
thral and anal desires, both libidinal and aggressive. Also the
attacks on the mother’s breast develop into attacks of a similar
nature on her body, which comes to be felt as it was as an
extension of the breast, even before the mother is conceived
 of as a complete person. The phantasied onslaughts on the
mother follow two main lines: one is the predominately oral
impulse to suck dry, bite up, scoop out and rob the mother’s
body of its good contents. . . . The other line of attack derives
from the anal and urethral impulses and implies expelling
dangerous substances (excrements) out of the self and into the
mother. Together with these harmful excrements, expelled in
hatred, split-off parts of the ego are also projected on to the
mother or, as I would rather call it, into the mother. These
excrements and bad parts of the self are meant not only to
injure but also to control and to take possession of the object. In
so far as the mother comes to contain the bad parts of the self,
she is not felt to be a separate individual but is felt to be the bad
self.
Much of the hatred against parts of the self is now directed
toward the mother. This leads to a particular form of aggres-
sive object-relation. I suggest of these processes the term “pro-
jective identification”. When projection is mainly derived from
the infant’s impulse to harm or to control the mother, he feels
her to be a persecutor. . . . It is, however, not only the bad parts
of the self which are expelled and projected, but also good
parts of the self. Excrements then have the significance of
gifts; and parts of the ego which, together with excrements, are
expelled and projected into the other person represent the
good, i.e. the loving parts of the self. The identification based
on this type of projection again vitally influences object-rela-
tions. The projection of good feelings and good parts of the self
into the mother is essential for the infant’s ability to develop
good object-relations and to integrate his ego. However, if this
projective process is carried out excessively, good parts of the
personality are felt to be lost, and in this way the mother be-
comes the ego-ideal; this process too results in weakening and
impoverishing the ego. Very soon such processes extend to
other people, and the result may be an over-strong depend-
ence on these external representatives of one’s own good parts.
. . . The processes of splitting off parts of the self and projecting
them into objects are thus of vital importance for normal de-
velopment as well as for abnormal object-relations. [pp. 7–9]

The process of PI involves a phantasy of splitting off unaccept-

able parts of the self and sending them into another object as a
protective and/or aggressive manoeuvre. Inner anxiety and dan-
ger are externalized and then managed in the outer world before
reinternalizing them. Along with danger and hostility, loving feel-
ings are also projected into the object as expressions of caring.
Therefore, PI can produce cyclical anxieties as well as a sense of
soothing, safety, and support.
So, for Klein, PI had different meanings and various clinical
consequences. Locating aspects of the self in the object results in
ego depletion and a weakened sense of identity. This is clinically
significant and would require particular interpretations to restore
the integrity of the ego. In 1957, Klein suggested that envy was
often a factor in projective identification, representing the forced
entry into another person in order to destroy that person’s best
qualities. This envy would push the person to use excessive PI,
leading to a chronic depletion in the ego.
In 1952, Klein wrote:

it seems that the processes underlying projective identification

operate already in the earliest relation to the breast. . . . Accord-
ingly, projective identification would start simultaneously
with the greedy oral-sadistic introjection of the breast. This
hypothesis is in keeping with the view often expressed by the
writer that introjection and projection interact from the begin-
ning of life. [1952c, p. 69]

Again in 1955, in a paper entitled “On Identification,” Klein

discussed the persecutory anxieties and splitting mechanisms that
make up the intrapsychic context out of which PI arises (p. 143).
Later in 1957, she points out that
when things go wrong, excessive projective identification, by
which split-off parts of the self are projected into the object,
leads to a strong confusion between the self and the object,
which also comes to stand for the self. Bound up with this is a
weakening of the ego and a grave disturbance in object rela-
tions. [p. 192]
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
 I have returned to the woods and ... spent the
hours of midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight,
serenaded by owls and foxes, and hearing, from time
to time, the creaking note of some unknown bird close
at hand. These experiences were very memorable and
valuable to me—anchored in forty feet of water, and
twenty or thirty rods from the shore ... communicating
by a long flaxen line with mysterious nocturnal fishes
which had their dwelling forty feet below, or
sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about the pond
as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and then
feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some life
prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain
blundering purpose there.... It was very queer,
especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had
wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other
spheres, to feel this faint jerk which came ... to link
you to Nature again.

Burroughs, like most scientists, slept at night. His observations

were made by day: there is hardly a night scene in all his works; but
Thoreau abounds in night scenes as much even as Novalis or
Longfellow. He was at heart a mystic and he viewed Nature always
from mystic standpoints. In "Night and Moonlight" he writes:

Is not the midnight like Central Africa to most of

us? Are we not tempted to explore it—to penetrate to
the shores of its lake Tchad, and discover the sources
of the Nile, perchance the Mountains of the Moon?
Who knows what fertility and beauty, moral and
natural, are there to be found? In the Mountains of the
Moon, in the Central Africa of the night, there is where
all Niles have their hidden heads.

It was to discover these Mountains of the Moon, these

mysterious sources of the Nile, forever so far away and yet forever
so near, that Thoreau went to Nature. He went not to gather and to
classify facts; he went to satisfy his soul. Burroughs is inclined to
wonder and even laugh because of the many times he speaks of
hearing the voice of unknown birds. To Burroughs the forest
contained no unknown birds; to Thoreau the forest was valuable
only because it did contain unknown birds. His straining for hidden
melodies, his striving for deeper meanings, his dreaming of
Mountains of the Moon that might become visible at any moment
just beyond the horizon—it is in these things that he differs from all
other nature writers. He was not a reporter; he was a prophet. "My
profession is always to be on the alert, to find God in nature, to
know His lurking places, to attend all the oratorios, the operas in
nature. Shall I not have words as fresh as my thought? Shall I use
any other man's word?"
To him Nature was of value only as it furnished message for
humanity. "A fact," he declared, "must be the vehicle of some
humanity in order to interest us." He went to Nature for tonic, not
for fact; he sought only truth and freedom and spontaneousness of
soul. He had no desire to write a botany, or an ornithology; rather
would he learn of Nature the fundamentals of human living. "I went
into the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only
the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to
teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
Burroughs went into the woods to know and to make others to
know, Thoreau went in to think and to feel; Burroughs was a
naturalist, Thoreau a supernaturalist.
Thoreau belongs completely to the later period: he is as
thoroughly of American soil as even Mark Twain or Lincoln or
Whitman. While Longfellow and Lowell, Taylor and Aldrich, and the
rest of their school were looking eagerly to Europe, Thoreau was
completely engrossed with his own land. "No truer American ever
existed than Thoreau," wrote Emerson in his essay. "His preference
of his country and condition was genuine, and his aversion from
English and European manners and tastes almost reached
contempt.... He wished to go to Oregon, not to London." It was this
new-worldness, this freshness, this originality that made him the
man of the new era. He went always to the sources; his work is
redolent at every point of American soil. His images, his illustrations,
his subject matter, all are American. His style, after he had outgrown
an early fondness for Carlyle, is peculiarly his own, wonderfully
simple and limpid and individual. Often it flows like poetry:

The sun is near setting away beyond Fair Haven. A

bewitching stillness reigns through all the woodland,
and over all the snowclad landscape. Indeed, the
winter day in the woods or fields has commonly the
stillness of twilight. The pond is perfectly smooth and
full of light. I hear only the strokes of a lingering
woodchopper at a distance and the melodious hooting
of an owl.—December 9, 1856.

And what is this but poetry?

On the morning when the wild geese go over, I,

too, feel the migratory instinct strong within me, and
anticipate the breaking up of winter. If I yielded to this
impulse, it would surely guide me to summer haunts.
This indefinite restlessness and fluttering on the perch
no doubt prophesy the final migration of souls out of
nature to a serener summer, in long harrows and
waving lines, in the spring weather, over that fair
uplands and fertile Elysian meadows, winging their
way at evening, and seeking a resting place with loud
cackling and uproar.—January 29, 1859.

Thoreau was one of the most tonic forces of the later period. His
inspiration and his spirit filled all the later school of Nature writers.
One cannot read him long, especially in his later and more
unconscious work, and find oneself unmoved. He inspires to action,
to restlessness of soul. Take an entry like that of January 7, 1857,
made during one of the most tumultuous of New England winter
storms: "It is bitter cold, with a cutting N.W. wind.... All animate
things are reduced to their lowest terms. This is the fifth day of cold,
blowing weather," and so on and on till one fairly hears the roaring
of the storm. Yet, despite the blast and the piercing cold, Thoreau
goes out for his walk as usual and battles with the elements through
miles of snow-smothered wilderness. "There is nothing so sanative,
so poetic, as a walk in the woods and fields even now, when I meet
none abroad for pleasure. Nothing so inspires me, and excites such
serene and profitable thought." His battle with the wind and the cold
and the wilderness grips us as we read. We too would rush into the
storm and breast it and exult in it; we too would walk with Nature
under the open skies, in the broad, wholesome places, and view the
problems of life with serene soul. It is this dynamic element of
Thoreau that has given him his following. He is sincere, he is
working from the impulses of his soul, he is genuine. He is not a
scientist: he is a poet and a seer. When we walk with Burroughs, we
see as with new eyes; when with Thoreau, we feel. With Burroughs
we learn of signs and seasons and traits; with Thoreau we find
ourselves straining ears to catch the deeper harmonies, the
mysterious soul of Nature, that somehow we feel to be intertwined
eternally with the soul of man.

II
The transition from Thoreau to John Burroughs was through
Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Wilson Flagg (1805–1884) had
contributed to the early volumes of the Atlantic a series of bird
studies Irving-like in atmosphere and sentiment, but he had made
little impression. He was too literary, too much the child of the mid
century. In his study of the owl, for instance, he could write: "I will
not enter into a speculation concerning the nature and origin of
those agreeable emotions which are so generally produced by the
sight of objects that suggest the ideas of decay and desolation. It is
happy for us, that, by the alchemy of poetry, we are able to turn
some of our misfortunes into sources of melancholy pleasure, after
the poignancy of grief has been assuaged by time," and so on and
on till he got to midnight and the owl. It is a literary effort. There is
lack of sincerity in it: the author is thinking too exclusively of his
reader. The difference between it and a passage from Thoreau is the
difference between a reverie in the study and a battle in the woods.
Higginson, who followed in the Atlantic with "April Days," "The Life
of Birds," and the other studies which he issued as Out-Door Papers
in 1863, avoided the over-literary element on one hand and the
over-scientific on the other and so became the first of what may be
called the modern school of nature writers.
As we read Higginson's book to-day we find style and method
curiously familiar. For the first time in American literature we have
that chatty, anecdotal, half-scientific, half-sentimental treatment of
out-door things that soon was to become so common. It is difficult
to persuade oneself that a paper like "The Life of Birds," for
instance, was not written by the Burroughs of the earlier period.
Out-Door Papers and Wake-Robin are pitched in the same key. Who
could be positive of the authorship of a fragment like this, were not
Higginson's name appended:

To a great extent, birds follow the opening foliage

northward, and flee from its fading, south; they must
keep near the food on which they live, and secure due
shelter for their eggs. Our earliest visitors shrink from
trusting the bare trees with their nests; the song-
sparrow seeks the ground; the blue-bird finds a box or
hole somewhere; the red-wing haunts the marshy
thickets, safer in the spring than at any other season;
and even the sociable robin prefers a pine-tree to an
apple-tree, if resolved to begin housekeeping
prematurely. The movements of birds are chiefly timed
by the advance of vegetation; and the thing most
thoroughly surprising about them is not the general
fact of the change of latitude, but their accuracy in
 hitting the precise locality. That the same cat-bird
should find its way back, every spring, to almost the
same branch of yonder larch-tree—that is the thing
astonishing to me.

The most notable thing, however, about Higginson's out-door

papers was their ringing call for a return to reality. It was he who
more than any one else created interest in Thoreau; and it was he
who first gained attention with the cry, "Back to nature." "The
American temperament," he declared, "needs at this moment
nothing so much as that wholesome training of semi-rural life which
reared Hampden and Cromwell to assume at one grasp the
sovereignty of England.... The little I have gained from colleges and
libraries has certainly not worn so well as the little I learned in
childhood of the habits of plant, bird, and insect.... Our American life
still needs, beyond all things else, the more habitual cultivation of
out-door habits.... The more bent any man is on action, the more
profoundly he needs the calm lessons of Nature to preserve his
equilibrium." To the new generation of writers he flung a challenge:
"Thoreau camps down by Walden Pond and shows us that absolutely
nothing in Nature has ever yet been described—not a bird or a berry
of the woods, not a drop of water, not a spicula of ice, nor winter,
nor summer, nor sun, nor star." And again, "What do we know, for
instance, of the local distribution of our birds? I remember that in
my latest conversation with Thoreau last December, he mentioned
most remarkable facts in this department, which had fallen under his
unerring eyes."
This was published in the Atlantic, September, 1862. In May,
1865, as if in answer to the challenge, there appeared in the same
magazine John Burroughs's "With the Birds," a paper which he had
written two years before. The army life of Higginson and later his
humanitarian work in many fields put an end to his out-door
writings, but not to his influence.
 III
John Burroughs was born on a farm in Roxbury, New York, just
below the Otsego County made famous by Cooper and the Leather-
stocking Tales. His boyhood until he was seventeen "was mainly
occupied," to quote his own words, "with farm work in the summer,
and with a little study, offset by much hunting and trapping of wild
animals in winter." One must study this boyhood if one is to
understand the man's work:

From childhood I was familiar with the homely

facts of the barn, and of cattle and horses; the sugar-
making in the maple woods in early spring; the work
of the corn-field, hay-field, potato-field; the delicious
fall months with their pigeon and squirrel shootings;
threshing of buckwheat, gathering of apples, and
burning of fallows; in short, everything that smacked
of, and led to, the open air and its exhilarations. I
belonged, as I may say, to them; and my substance
and taste, as they grew, assimilated them as truly as
my body did its food. I loved a few books much; but I
loved Nature, in all those material examples and subtle
expressions, with a love passing all the books of the
world.[81]

Of schooling he had little. "I was born," he once wrote, "of and
among people who neither read books nor cared for them, and my
closest associations since have been alien to literature and art." The
usual winter term in his native district, a year or two in academy
courses after he was seventeen—that was the extent of his formal
education. At twenty he was married, at twenty-seven, after having
drifted about as a school teacher, he settled at Washington in a
position in the Treasury Department that held him closely for nine
years.
 It was a period of self-discipline. His intellectual life had been
awakened by Emerson, and he had followed him into wide fields. He
read enormously, he studied languages, he trained himself with
models of English style. His love of the country, legacy of the
boyhood which he never outgrew, impelled him to a systematic
study of ornithology. Birds were his avocation, his enthusiasm; by
and by they were to become his vocation.
In 1861, when he was twenty-four, he came for the first time in
contact with Leaves of Grass, and it aroused him like a vision.

It produced the impression upon me in my moral

consciousness that actual Nature did in her material
forms and shows; ... I shall never forget the strange
delight I had from the following passage, as we sat
there on the sunlit border of an autumn forest:
I lie abstracted, and hear beautiful tales of things, and
the reasons of things;
They are so beautiful, I nudge myself to listen.
I cannot say to any person what I hear—I cannot say
it to myself—it is very wonderful;
It is no small matter, this round and delicious globe,
moving so exactly in its orbit forever and ever,
without one jolt, or the untruth of a single second;
I do not think it was made in six days, nor in ten
thousand years, nor in ten billions of years;
Nor planned and built one thing after another, as an
architect plans and builds a house.

It was the touch that he needed. There was in him a strain of

wildness even as in Thoreau, an almost feminine shrinking from the
crowd, a thinking of Nature as something apart from man, a retreat
and an antidote; Whitman added the human element, the
sympathetic touch, the sense of the value of man.
 Burroughs's first work appeared that same year in the New York
Leader, a series of papers under the heading "From the Back
Country"—crude things compared with Higginson's polished work,
yet filled with a genuineness and a freshness that were notable. All
of his earlier sketches were the work of a careful observer who
wrote from sheer love of Nature. Moreover, they were the work of a
dreamer and a poet. As the years took him farther from that
marvelous boyhood, the light upon it grew softer and more golden.
He dreamed of it in the spring when the bluebird called and the
high-hole; he dreamed of it on his walks in the city suburbs when
the swallows greeted him and the warblers. His Atlantic paper "With
the Birds," now the first chapter of his published works, begins with
the sentence, now suppressed, "Not in the spirit of exact science,
but rather with the freedom of love and old acquaintance, would I
celebrate some of the minstrels of the field and forest." And years
later, when he wrote the general introduction to his works, he could
say:

My first book, Wake-Robin, was written while I was

a government clerk in Washington. It enabled me to
live over again the days I had passed with the birds
and in the scenes of my youth. I wrote the book sitting
at a desk in front of an iron wall. I was keeper of a
vault in which many millions of bank notes were
stored. During my long periods of leisure I took refuge
in my pen. How my mind reacted from the iron wall in
front of me and sought solace in memories of the birds
and of summer fields and woods! Most of the chapters
of Winter Sunshine were written at the same desk. The
sunshine there referred to is of a richer quality than is
found in New York and New England.

That was the secret of the early work of John Burroughs: to him
Nature was a part of his boyhood, with boyhood's light upon it. He
dreamed of her when the city homesickness was upon him and
when he wrote of her he wrote from a full heart. He felt every line of
it; the light that plays over it is indeed of "richer quality" than is
found over any actual hills. A part of his early popularity came
undoubtedly from the sentiment which he freely mingled with his
studies of field and woodland.

There is something almost pathetic in the fact that

the birds remain forever the same. You grow old, your
friends die or remove to distant lands, events sweep
on and all things are changed. Yet there in your
garden or orchard are the birds of your boyhood, the
same notes, the same calls, and, to all intents and
purposes, the identical birds endowed with perennial
youth. The swallows, that built so far out of your reach
beneath the eaves of your father's barn, the same
ones now squeak and chatter beneath the eaves of
your barn. The warblers and shy wood birds you
pursued with such glee ever so many summers ago,
and whose names you taught to some beloved youth
who now, perchance, sleeps amid his native hills, no
marks of time or change cling to them; and when you
walk out to the strange woods, there they are,
mocking you with their ever renewed and joyous
youth. The call of the high-holes, the whistle of the
quail, the strong piercing note of the meadow lark, the
drumming of the grouse—how these sounds ignore the
years, and strike on the ear with the melody of that
springtime when the world was young, and life was all
holiday and romance.[82]

The twenty years following his first Atlantic paper were the years
of his professional life. He left his clerkship at Washington in 1873 to
become a national bank inspector, and until 1884, when he finally
retired to rural life, he was busy with his duties as receiver of broken
banks, examiner of accounts, and financial expert. During the two
decades he published his most distinctive nature volumes: Wake-
Robin, Winter Sunshine, Birds and Poets, Locusts and Wild Honey,
and Pepacton, a small output for a man between the years of
twenty-six and forty-six, yet one that is significant. Not a page of it
had been written in haste, not a page that his later hand had found
it necessary to revise. The primal freshness of youth is upon the
books; they are as full of vitality and sweetness as a spring morning.
Doubtless they are all the better for being the enthusiasms of hours
stolen from a dry profession. It is tonic to read them. They are never
at fault either in fact or in influence; they are the work of a trained
observer, a scientist indeed, yet one who has gone to Nature like a
priest to the holy of holies with the glow in his heart and the light on
his face.
During the following decade, or, more exactly, the period
between 1884 and 1894, he added four more books, three of them,
Fresh Fields, Signs and Seasons, and Riverby, devoted to Nature,
though with more and more of the coldly scientific spirit. These with
the five earlier volumes stand alone as Burroughs's contribution to
the field that he has made peculiarly his own. They contain his
freshest and most spontaneous work.
To read these volumes is like going out ourselves into the forest
with an expert guide who sees everything and who has at his
command an unlimited store of anecdote and chatty reminiscence of
birds and animals and even plants. To Burroughs, Nature was
sufficient in herself. He loved her for the feelings she could arouse
within him, for the recollections she could stir of the springtime of
his life, for the beauty and the harmony that everywhere he found,
and for the elemental laws that he saw on all sides at work and that
stirred his curiosity. He had no desire to study Nature to secure
evidences of a governing personality. He would draw no moral and
offer no solutions of the problem of good and evil. Of the fortunes of
the spirit of man he cared but little; as for himself, serene, he would
fold his hands and wait. He was no mystic like Thoreau, listening for
higher harmonies and peering eagerly beyond every headland to
discover perchance the sources of the Nile. Upon him there was no
necessity save to observe, to record, to discover new phenomena, to
enlarge the store of facts, to walk flat-footed upon the material earth
and observe the working of the physical mechanics about him and to
teach others to observe them and to enjoy them. To appreciate the
difference between Burroughs and Thoreau one has but to read
them side by side. For instance, on March 21, 1853, Thoreau makes
this entry:

As I was rising this crowning road, just beyond the

old lime kiln, there leaked into my open ear the first
peep of a hyla from some far pool ... a note or two
which scarcely rends the air, does no violence to the
zephyr, but yet leaks through all obstacles and far over
the downs to the ear of the listening naturalist, as it
were the first faint cry of the new-born year,
notwithstanding the notes of birds. Where so long I
have heard the prattling and moaning of the wind,
what means this tenser, far-piercing sound?

Burroughs writes of the same subject in this way:

From what fact or event shall we really date the

beginning of spring? The little piping frogs usually
furnish a good starting point. One spring I heard the
first note on the 6th of April; the next on the 27th of
February; but in reality the latter season was only
about two weeks earlier than the former.... The little
piper will sometimes climb a bullrush to which he
clings like a sailor to a mast, and send forth his shrill
call. There is a Southern species, heard when you have
reached the Potomac, whose note is far more harsh
and crackling. To stand on the verge of a swamp vocal
with these, pains and stuns the ear.

Then in a foot-note:

The Southern species is called the green hyla. I

have since heard them in my neighborhood on the
 Hudson.

Never was there writer who kept his feet more firmly on solid
earth. He takes nothing for granted; he is satisfied only with the
testimony of the senses, and his own senses. Everything—example,
allusion, figure of speech, subject and predicate—comes from him in
the concrete. Everything is specific, localized, dated. He was in
accord with his era that demanded only reality. It is the task of the
writer, he declared, "to pierce through our callousness and
indifference and give us fresh impressions of things as they really
are."
How permanent is such work? How valuable is it? Is Nature then
a thing simply to be observed and classified and reduced to
formulæ? To determine the average day on which the bluebird
comes, or the wild geese fly, or the hyla calls, is there virtue in that?
To Burroughs, Nature was a thing to be observed accurately for new
facts to add to the known. Of Thoreau he wrote: "Ten years of
persistent spying and inspecting of Nature and no new thing found
out." Do we ask of the poet and the seer simply for mere new
material phenomena found out to add to our science? The supreme
test that must come at last to all literature is the question: How
much of human life is there in it? How much "Thus saith the Lord"?
Who seeks for material things with eyes, however keen, and dreams
of no sources of the Nile, no vision that may come perchance from
supernatural power latent in bird and leaf and tendril, is a scientist,
however charming he make his subject or however sympathetic be
his attitude. Judged by such a standard, Burroughs falls short, far
short of a place with the highest. He must decrease, while Thoreau
increases. He must be placed at last among the scientists who have
added facts and laws, while Thoreau is seated with the poets and
the prophets.
But though he be thus without vision and without message, save
as an invitation to come to material Nature and learn to observe is a
message, Burroughs has a charm of manner and a picturesqueness
of material that are to be found in few other writers of the period.
His power lies in his simplicity and his sincerity. He is more familiar
with his reader than Thoreau. He is never literary, never affected; he
talks in the most natural way in the world; he tells story after story
in the most artless way of homely little happenings that have passed
under his own eye, and so charming is his talk that we surrender
ourselves like children to listen as long as he will. When we read
Thoreau we are always conscious of Thoreau. His epithets, his
distinction of phrase, his sudden glimpses, his unexpected turns and
climaxes, his humor, for in spite of Lowell's dictum, he is full of
humor, keep us constantly in the presence of literature; but with
Burroughs we are conscious of nothing save the birds and the
season and the fields. We are walking with a delightful companion
who knows everything and who points out new wonders at every
step.
The poetry of Burroughs faded more and more from his work
with every book, and the spirit of the scientist, of the trained
observer impatient of everything not demonstrable by the senses,
grew upon him, until at length it took full control and expressed
itself as criticism, as scientific controversy, and as philosophical
discussion. Riverby, 1894, with its prefatory note stating that the
volume was "probably my last collection of out-of-door papers,"
marks the point of division between the two periods. If we follow the
Riverside edition, at present [1914] the definitive canon, eight books
preceded Riverby and eight followed it. The groups are not
homogeneous; it is not to be gathered that on a certain date
Burroughs abandoned one form of essay and devoted himself
exclusively to another, but it is true that the work of his last period is
prevailingly scientific and critical. His Indoor Studies, 1889,
Whitman, a Study, and Literary Values are as distinctively works of
literary criticism as Arnold's Essays in Criticism; his Light of Day
discusses religion from the standpoint of the scientist; his Ways of
Nature is scientific controversy; and his Time and Change and The
Summit of the Years are philosophy.
It is in this second period that Burroughs has done his most
distinctive work, though not perhaps his most spontaneous and
delightful. By temperament and training he is a critic, a scientific
critic, an analyzer and comparer. Only men of positive character,
original forces, attract him: Emerson and Whitman, and later
Wordsworth, Carlyle, and Arnold, men who molded the intellectual
life of their age. His first published book had been a critical study,
Notes on Walt Whitman, 1867, a work the most wonderful in many
ways of his whole output. It came at a critical moment, in those
pregnant closing years of the sixties, and it struck clear and full the
note of the new period. Burroughs's later studies of Whitman are
more finished and more mature than this never-republished volume,
but they lack its clarion quality. It is more than a defense and an
explanation of Whitman: it is a call to higher levels in literature and
art, a call for a new definition of poetry, a condemnation of that
softness and honey sweetness of song that had lured to weakness
poets like Taylor and Stoddard. Poetry henceforth must be more
than mere beauty for beauty's sake: it must have a message; it must
come burning from a man's soul; it must thrill with human life.
And it is here that Burroughs stands as a dominating figure. He
was the first of American critics to insist without compromise that
poetry is poetry only when it is the voice of life—genuine,
spontaneous, inevitable. "How rare," he complained in later years,
"are real poems—poems that spring from real feeling, a real throb of
emotion, and not from a mere surface itching for expression." This
has been the key to all his criticism: literature is life, the voicing of a
man's soul. Moreover, it is a voicing of the national life, the
expression of a nation's soul:

All the great imaginative writers of our century

have felt, more or less, the stir and fever of the
century, and have been its priests and prophets. The
lesser poets have not felt these things. Had Poe been
greater or broader he would have felt them, so would
Longfellow. Neither went deep enough to touch the
formative currents of our social or religious or national
life. In the past the great artist has always been at
 ease in Zion; in our own day only the lesser artists are
at ease, unless we except Whitman, a man of
unshaken faith, who is absolutely optimistic, and
whose joy and serenity come from the breadth of his
vision and the depth and universality of his
sympathies.[83]

The literary criticism of Burroughs—four volumes of it in the final

edition, or nearly one-fourth of his whole output—may be classed
with the sanest and most illuminating critical work in American
literature. Lowell's criticism, brilliant as it is at times, is overloaded
with learning. He belongs to the school of the early reviewers,
ponderous and discursive. He makes use of one-third of his space in
his essay on Thoreau before he even alludes to Thoreau. He is self-
conscious, and self-satisfied; he poses before his reader and enjoys
the sensation caused by his brilliant hit after hit. Stedman, too, is
often more literary than scientific. Often he uses epithet and phrase
that have nothing to commend them save their prettiness, their
affectation of the odd or the antique. He is an appreciator of
literature rather than critic in the modern sense. Burroughs,
however, is always simple and direct. He is a scientific critic who
compares and classifies and seeks causes and effects. He works not
on the surface but always in the deeper currents and always with
the positive forces, those writers who have turned the direction of
the literature and the thinking of their generation. In marked
contrast with Stedman, he can place Longfellow and Landor among
the minor singers: "Their sympathies were mainly outside their
country and their times." He demands that the poet have a message
for his age. He says of Emerson: "Emerson is a power because he
partakes of a great spiritual and intellectual movement of his times;
he is unequivocally of to-day and New England."
Burroughs's nature essays, charming as they are and full as they
are of a delightful personality, will be superseded by others as
careful and as charming; Burroughs's criticism was the voice of an
era, and it will stand with the era. It was in his later years that he
put forth his real message.

IV
John Burroughs is the historian of a small area; he has the home
instinct, the hereditary farmer's love for his own fields and woods,
and the haunts of his childhood. He is contemplative, tranquil,
unassertive. John Muir was restless, fervid, Scotch by temperament
as by birth, the very opposite of Burroughs. He was telescopic, not
microscopic; his units were glaciers and Yosemites, Sierras and
Gardens of the Gods.
The childhood of Muir was broken at eleven by the migration of
his family from their native Scotland to the wilderness of Wisconsin,
near the Fox River. After a boyhood in what literally was a new world
to him, he started on his wanderings. By accident he found himself
in the University of Wisconsin, where he studied for four years, the
first author of note to be connected with the new state college
movement, the democratizing of education. He pursued no regular
course, but devoted himself to chemistry, botany, and other natural
sciences that interested him, and then, to quote his own words,
"wandered away on a glorious botanical and geological excursion,
which has lasted nearly fifty years and is not yet completed, always
happy and free, poor and rich, without thought of a diploma, of
making a name, urged on and on through endless, inspiring, Godful
beauty."
First he went to Florida, walking all the way, and sleeping on the
ground wherever night overtook him; then he crossed to Cuba, with
visions of South America and the Amazon beyond; but malarial fever,
caused by sleeping on swampy ground, turned him away from the
tropics toward California, where he arrived in 1868. The tremendous
scenery of this west coast, those American Alps edging a continent
from the Sierras to the Alaskan glaciers, so gripped his imagination
and held him that he forgot everything save to look and wonder and
worship. For years he explored the region, living months at a time in
the forests of the Yosemite, in the wild Alpine gardens and glacial
meadows of the Sierra, in passes and cañons, moving as far north as
Alaska, where he was the first to see the great glacier now called by
his name, sleeping where night overtook him, disdaining blanket or
shelter, and returning to civilization only when driven by necessity.
After years of such wandering he became as familiar with the mighty
region, the tremendous western wall of a continent, as Thoreau was
with Concord or Burroughs was with the banks of the Pepacton.
Unlike Burroughs, Muir sent down no roots during his earlier
formative period; he was a man without a country, anchored to no
past, a soul unsatisfied, restless, bursting eagerly into untrodden
areas, as hungry of heart as Thoreau, but with none of Thoreau's
provincialism and transcendental theories. In 1869 in the Big
Tuolumne Meadows he was told of a marvelous, but dangerous,
region beyond, and his account of the episode illumines him as with
a flash-light:

Recognizing the unsatisfiable longings of my

Scotch Highland instincts, he threw out some hints
concerning Bloody Cañon, and advised me to explore
it. "I have never seen it myself," he said, "for I never
was so unfortunate as to pass that way. But I have
heard many a strange story about it, and I warrant you
will at least find it wild enough." Next day I made up a
bundle of bread, tied my note-book to my belt, and
strode away in the bracing air, full of eager, indefinite
hope.

His first out-of-doors article, a paper on the Yosemite glaciers,

was published in the New York Tribune in 1871. Later he contributed
to the Overland Monthly, to Harper's, and Scribner's Monthly articles
that have in them an atmosphere unique in literature. What sweep
and freedom, what vastness of scale, what abysses and gulfs, what
wildernesses of peaks. It is like sweeping over a continent in a
balloon. One is ever in the vast places: one thrills with the author's
own excitement:

How boundless the day seems as we revel in these

storm-beaten sky-gardens amidst so vast a
congregation of onlooking mountains.... From garden
to garden, ridge to ridge, I drifted enchanted, now on
my knees gazing into the face of a daisy, now climbing
again and again among the purple and azure flowers
of the hemlocks, now down among the treasuries of
the snow, or gazing afar over domes and peaks, lakes
and woods, and the billowy glaciated fields of the
upper Tuolumne, and trying to sketch them. In the
midst of such beauty, pierced with its rays, one's body
is all a tingling palate. Who wouldn't be a
mountaineer! Up here all the world's prizes seem
nothing.—July 26, 1869.

I chose a camping ground on the brink of one of

the lakes, where a thicket of hemlock spruce sheltered
me from the night wind. Then after making a tin cupful
of tea, I sat by my campfire reflecting on the grandeur
and significance of the glacial records I had seen. As
the night advanced, the mighty rock-walls of my
mountain mansion seemed to come nearer, while the
starry sky in glorious brightness stretched across like a
ceiling from wall to wall, and fitted closely down into
all the spiky irregularities of the summits. Then, after a
long fireside rest, and a glance at my note-book, I cut
a few leafy branches for a bed, and fell into the clear,
death-like sleep of the mountaineer.

No pain here, no dull empty hours, no fear of the

past, no fear of the future. These blessed mountains
are so compactly filled with God's beauty, no petty
 personal hope or experience has room to be....
Perched like a fly on this Yosemite dome, I gaze and
sketch and bask, oftentimes settling down into dumb
admiration without definite hope of ever learning
much, yet with the longing, unresisting effort that lies
at the door of hope, humbly prostrate before the vast
display of God's power, and eager to offer self-denial
and renunciation with eternal toil to learn any lesson in
the divine manuscript.—July 20, 1869.

To read Muir is to be in the presence not of a tranquil, chatty

companion like Burroughs, who saunters leisurely along the spring
meadows listening for the birds just arrived the night before and
comparing the dates of the hyla's first cry; it is rather to be with a
tempestuous soul whose units are storms and mountain ranges and
mighty glacial moraines, who strides excitedly along the bare tops of
ragged peaks and rejoices in their vastness and awfulness, who
cries, "Come with me along the glaciers and see God making
landscapes!" One gets at the heart of Muir in an episode like this,
the description of a terrific storm in the Yuba region in December,
1874:

The force of the gale was such that the most

steadfast monarch of them all rocked down to its roots
with a motion plainly perceptible when one leaned
against it. Nature was holding high festival, and every
fiber of the most rigid giants thrilled with glad
excitement. I drifted on through the midst of this
passionate music and motion across many a glen, from
ridge to ridge; often falling in the lee of a rock for
shelter, or to gaze and listen. Even when the glad
anthem had swelled to its highest pitch, I could
distinctly hear the varying tones of individual trees—
spruce, and fir, and pine, and leafless oak. ... Toward
midday, after a long, tingling scramble through copses
of hazel and ceanothus, I gained the summit of the
 highest ridge in the neighborhood; and then it
occurred to me that it would be a fine thing to climb
one of the trees to obtain a wider outlook and get my
ear close to the Æolian music of its topmost needles....
Being accustomed to climb trees in making botanical
studies, I experienced no difficulty in reaching the top
of this one, and never before did I enjoy so noble an
exhilaration of motion. The slender tops fairly flapped
and swished in the passionate torrent, bending and
swirling backward and forward, round and round,
tracing indescribable combinations of vertical and
horizontal curves, while I clung with muscles firm
braced, like a bobolink on a reed.

He had more humor than Burroughs, more even than Thoreau, a

sly Scotch drollery that was never boisterous, never cynical. In the
Bloody Cañon he meets the Mono Indians and finds little in them
that is romantic:

The dirt on their faces was fairly stratified and

seemed so ancient in some places and so undisturbed
as almost to possess a geological significance. The
older faces were, moreover, strangely blurred and
divided into sections by furrows that looked like
cleavage joints, suggesting exposure in a castaway
condition on the mountains for ages. Viewed at a little
distance they appeared as mere dirt specks on the
landscape.

Like Thoreau, he was a mystic and a poet. He inherited

mysticism with his Scotch blood as he inherited wildness and the
love of freedom. He was not a mere naturalist, a mere scientist bent
only on facts and laws: he was a searcher after God, even as
Thoreau. As one reads him, one feels one's soul expanding, one's
horizons widening, one's hands reaching out for the infinite. The
message of Muir is compelling and eager:
 Next to the light of the dawn on high mountain-
tops, the alpenglow is the most impressive of all the
terrestrial manifestations of God;... stay on this good
fire mountain and spend the night among the stars.
Watch their glorious bloom until dawn, and get one
more baptism of light. Then, with fresh heart, go down
to your work, and whatever your fate, under whatever
ignorance or knowledge you may afterwards chance to
suffer, you will remember these fine, wild views, and
look back with joy.

And again after his joyous study of the water ouzel, a prose lyric,
rapturous and infectious, he cries:

And so I might go on, writing words, words,

words; but to what purpose? Go see him and love him,
and through him as through a window look into
Nature's warm heart.

The output of Muir, especially of books, has been small. To one

who cares nothing for money and who is indifferent to fame, it is
hard to offer inducements. He wrote only to please himself; he
would not be commanded or bribed or begged, for why should one
write words when the Sierras are in bloom and the winds are calling
in the upper peaks? The public at large knows little of him,
compared with what it knows of Burroughs or even of Thoreau. His
influence, therefore, has been small. Though he had published many
magazine articles, it was not until 1894 that he published The
Mountains of California, his first book. Our National Parks came in
1901, and My First Summer in the Sierra in 1911. The last is Muir's
journal, kept on the spot, full of the thrill and the freshness of the
original day. If it be a sample of the journal which we have reason to
believe that he kept with Thoreau-like thoroughness almost to the
time of his death—he died in December, 1914—the best work of
John Muir may even yet be in store.
 Muir was more gentle than Thoreau or Burroughs, and more
sympathetic with everything alive in the wild places which he loved.
Unlike Burroughs, he has named the birds without a gun, and, unlike
Thoreau, he has refused to kill even fish or rattlesnakes. He could
look on even the repulsive lizards of his region, some of them
veritable monsters in size and hideousness, with real affection:

Small fellow-mortals, gentle and guileless, they are

easily tamed, and have beautiful eyes, expressing the
clearest innocence, so that, in spite of prejudices
brought from cool, lizardless countries, one must soon
learn to like them. Even the horned toad of the plains
and foothills, called horrid, is mild and gentle, with
charming eyes, and so are the snake-like species found
in the underbrush of the lower forests.... You will
surely learn to like them, not only the bright ones,
gorgeous as the rainbow, but the little ones, gray as
lichened granite, and scarcely bigger than
grasshoppers; and they will teach you that scales may
cover as fine a nature as hair or feather or anything
tailored.

And there is no more sympathetic, interpretative study among all the

work of the nature-writers than his characterization of the Douglas
squirrel of the Western mountains:

One never tires of this bright chip of Nature, this

brave little voice crying in the wilderness, observing his
many works and ways, and listening to his curious
language. His musical, piney gossip is savory to the
ear as balsam to the palate; and though he has not
exactly the gift of song, some of his notes are sweet
as those of a linnet—almost flute-like in softness; while
others prick and tingle like thistles. He is the mocking-
bird of squirrels, pouring forth mixed chatter and song
like a perennial fountain, barking like a dog, screaming
 like a hawk, whistling like blackbirds and sparrows;
while in bluff, audacious noisiness he is a jay.

Emerson visited Muir during his trip to the West Coast, climbed
the precarious ladder that led to his room in the Yosemite sawmill,
and passed a memorable afternoon. "He is more wonderful than
Thoreau," he said, and he tried long to induce him to leave the
mountains for the East, and to live in the midst of men. But to Muir
the leaving of the Yosemite and the Sierra was like leaving God
Himself. To him the city was the place of unnatural burdens, of
money that dulls and kills the finest things of the soul, of separation
from all that is really vital in the life of man.
His style is marked by vividness and fervid power. He makes a
scene stand out with sharpness. He is original; there are in his work
no traces of other writings save those of the Bible, with which he
was saturated, and at rare intervals of Thoreau. Often there is a
rhetorical ring to his page, a resonant fullness of tone that can be
described only by the word eloquent. In passages describing storm
or mountain majesty there is a thrill, an excitement, that are
infectious. The prose of John Muir may be summed up as sincere
and vigorous, without trace of self-consciousness or of straining for
effect. Few writers of any period of American literature have within
their work more elements of promise as they go down to the
generations to come.

V
Beginning with the late sixties, out-of-door themes more and
more took possession of American literature. Burroughs was only
one in an increasing throng of writers; he was the best known and
most stimulating, and soon, therefore, the leader and inspirer. The
mid-nineteenth century had been effeminate in the bulk of its
literary product; it had been a thing of indoors and of books: the
new after-the-war spirit was masculine even at times to coarseness
and brutality. Maurice Thompson (1844–1901), one of the earliest of
the new period, perceived the bent of the age with clearness. "We
are nothing better than refined and enlightened savages," he wrote
in 1878. "The wild side of the prism of humanity still offers its
pleasures to us.... Sport, by which is meant pleasant physical and
mental exercise combined—play in the best sense—is a requirement
of this wild element, this glossed over heathen side of our being,
and the bow is its natural implement."[84] It was the apology of the
old school for the new era of sport. Thompson would direct these
heathen energies toward archery, since it was a sport that appealed
to the imagination and that took its devotees into the forests and the
swamps, but there was no directing of the resurging forces. Baseball
and football sprang up in the seventies and grew swiftly into hitherto
unheard-of proportions. Yachting, camping, mountaineering,
summer tramping in the woods and the borders of civilization swiftly
became popular. The Adirondacks and the Maine forests and the
White Mountains sprang into new prominence. As early as 1869
Stedman had complained that The Blameless Prince lay almost dead
on the shelves while such books as Murray's Adventures in the
Wilderness sold enormously. For a time indeed W. H. H. Murray
—"Adirondack Murray"—did vie even with Bonner's Ledger in
popularity. He threw about the wilderness an alluring, half romantic
atmosphere that appealed to the popular imagination and sent forth,
eager and compelling, what in later days came to be known as "the
call of the wild." His books have not lasted. There is about them a
declamatory, artificial element that sprang too often from the
intellect rather than the heart. Charles Dudley Warner in his In the
Wilderness, 1878, and William H. Gibson in such books as Camp Life
in the Woods, sympathetically illustrated by their author, were far
more sincere and wholesome. Everywhere for a decade or more
there was appeal for a return to the natural and the free, to the
open-air games of the old English days, to hunting and trapping and
camping—a masculine, red-blooded resurgence of the savage, a
return to the wild. The earlier phase of the period may be said to
have culminated in 1882 with the founding of Outing, a magazine
devoted wholly to activities in the open air.
 The later eighties and the nineties are the period of the bird
books. C. C. Abbott's A Naturalist's Rambles About Home, 1884;
Olive Thorne Miller's Bird Ways, 1885; Bradford Torrey's Birds in the
Bush, 1885; and Florence Merriam Bailey's Birds Through an Opera
Glass, 1889, may be taken as representative. Bird life and bird ways
for a period became a fad; enthusiastic observers sprang up
everywhere; scientific treatises and check lists and identification
guides like Chapman's Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America,
began to appear in numbers. What the novelists of locality were
doing for the unusual human types in isolated corners of the land,
the nature writers were doing for the birds.
Of all the later mass of Nature writings, however, very little is
possessed of literary distinction. Very largely it is journalistic in style
and scientific in spirit. Only one out of the later group, Bradford
Torrey, compels attention. Beyond a doubt it is already safe to place
him next in order after Burroughs and Muir. He is more of an artist
than Burroughs, and he is more literary and finished than Muir. In his
attitude toward Nature he is like Thoreau—sensitive, sympathetic,
reverent. It was he who edited the journals of Thoreau in their final
form, and it was he also who after that experience wrote what is
undoubtedly the most discriminating study that has yet been made
of the great mystic naturalist.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
John Burroughs. (1837——.) Notes on Walt Whitman, as Poet and
Person, New York, 1867; Wake-Robin, 1871; Winter Sunshine, 1875;
Birds and Poets, 1877; Locusts and Wild Honey, 1879; Pepacton,
1881; Fresh Fields, 1884; Signs and Seasons, 1886; Indoor Studies,
1889; Riverby, 1894; Whitman, a Study, 1896; The Light of Day,
1900; Literary Values, 1904; Far and Near, 1904; Ways of Nature,
1905; Leaf and Tendril, 1908; Time and Change, 1912; The Summit
of the Years, 1913; Our Friend John Burroughs. By Clara Barrus.
1914.
 John Muir. (1838–1914.) "Studies in the Sierras," a series of
papers in Scribner's Monthly, 1878; The Mountains of California,
1894; Our National Parks, 1901; Stickeen, the Story of a Dog, 1909;
My First Summer in the Sierra, 1911; The Story of My Boyhood and
Youth, 1913; Letters to a Friend, 1915.
William Hamilton Gibson. (1850–1896.) Camp Life in the Woods
and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap-Making, 1876; Pastoral Days, or
Memories of a New England Year, 1882; Highways and Byways, or
Saunterings in New England, 1883; Happy Hunting Grounds, a
Tribute to the Woods and Fields, 1886; Strolls by Starlight and
Sunshine, 1890; Sharp Eyes, 1891; Our Edible Toadstools and
Mushrooms, 1895.
Charles Conrad Abbott. (1843——.) The Stone Age in New Jersey,
1876; Primitive Industry, 1881; A Naturalist's Rambles About Home,
1884; Upland and Meadow, 1886; Wasteland Wanderings, 1887;
Days out of Doors, 1889; Outings at Odd Times, 1890; Recent
Rambles, 1892; Outings in a Tree-Top, 1894; The Birds About Us,
1894; Notes of the Night, 1895; Birdland Echoes, 1896; The
Freedom of the Fields, 1898; Clear Skies and Cloudy, 1899; In
Nature's Realm, 1900.
"Olive Thorne Miller"—Harriet Mann Miller. (1831——.) Little
Folks in Feathers and Fur, 1879; Queer Pets at Marcy's, 1880; Bird
Ways, 1885; In Nesting Time, 1888; Four Handed Folk, 1890; Little
Brothers of the Air, 1890; Bird-Lover in the West, 1894; Upon the
Tree Tops, 1896; The First Book of Birds, 1899; True Bird Stories,
1903; With the Birds in Maine, 1904; and others.
Bradford Torrey. (1843–1912.) Birds in the Bush, 1885; A
Rambler's Lease, 1889; The Foot-Path Way, 1892; A Florida Sketch-
Book, 1894; Spring Notes from Tennessee, 1896; A World of Green
Hills, 1898; Every-Day Birds, 1900; Footing It in Franconia, 1900;
The Clerk of the Woods, 1903; Nature's Invitation, 1904; Friends on
the Shelf, 1906.
 Florence Merriam Bailey. (1863——.) Birds Through an Opera
Glass, 1889; My Summer in a Mormon Village, 1895; A Birding on a
Bronco, 1896; Birds of Village and Field, 1898; Handbook of Birds of
Western United States, 1902.
Frank Bolles. (1856–1894.) Land of the Lingering Snow, 1891; At
the North of Bearcamp Water: Chronicles of a Stroller in New
England from July to December, 1893; From Blomidon to Smoky,
1895.
 CHAPTER IX

WALT WHITMAN

Whitman and Thoreau stand as the two prophets of the mid

century, both of them offspring of the Transcendental movement,
pushing its theories to their logical end, both of them voices in the
wilderness crying to deaf or angry ears, both of them unheeded until
a new generation had arisen to whom they had become but names
and books. Thoreau was born in 1817; Whitman in 1819, the year of
Lowell, Story, Parsons, Herman Melville, J. G. Holland, Julia Ward
Howe, and E. P. Whipple, and of the Victorians, Kingsley, Ruskin,
George Eliot, and Arthur Hugh Clough. Whitman published Leaves of
Grass, his first significant volume, in 1855, the year of Hiawatha, of
Maud, and of Arnold's Poems. He issued it again in 1856 and again
in 1860—a strange nondescript book rendered all the more strange
by the fact, thoroughly advertised in the second edition, that it had
won from Emerson the words: "I find it the most extraordinary piece
of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed.... I greet you at
the beginning of a great career." But even the compelling name of
Emerson could not sell the book; little notice, in fact, was taken of it
save as a few voices expressed horror and anger; and when in 1862
Whitman became lost in the confusion of the war, he had made not
so much impression upon America as had Thoreau at the time of his
death that same year. Until well into the seventies Walt Whitman
seemed only a curious phenomenon in an age grown accustomed to
curious phenomena.
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

ebookname.com