Literary Style and Principle of Balance

The earliest readers of Bartram’s Travels reacted strongly to its prose style, which seemed too luxuriant and florid. One reviewer complained that the language was “incorrect and disgustingly pompous, “full of rhapsodic effusions” that should well have been omitted.(120) Several of the European editions, reacting to these complaints, liberally revised Bartram’s prose. The British text recast entire sentences and paragraphs, usually correcting grammatical oddities and taming down enthusiastic passages. The German edition simply abridged Bartram’s text wherever possible, cutting down on his verbose and florid descriptions.(121)

These reactions partly express the tastes of his age, which preferred a “correct” style of writing, in keeping with Enlightenment values and the metronomic rhythms of a disciplined, rational mind. But the complaints are also justifiable by any age’s standards, for Bartram’s writing is often wildly uncontrolled. Only five pages into the Introduction, we encounter his description of the Venus Fly Trap:

Taken in small doses, the effect of this prose is lively and vigorous, but too much of it rapidly palls, and Bartram does not always know when he has crossed that line. Thomas Carlyle possibly had this aspect of Bartram’s style in mind when he wrote to Emerson about a “wondrous kind of floundering eloquence” in the Travels.(123)

Later readers complained less severely about Bartram’s style, a fact which probably reflects his transitional position between 18th and 19th century aesthetics. A reviewer of the French translation of Travels (1799) thought its descriptions were neither too dry nor too exaggerated; the style was correct, even elegant.(124) The English Romantics obviously did not find the style offensive, and Carlyle’s remark to Emerson suggests qualified admiration. American critics of this period were even more generous. In their important Cyclopaedia of American Literature (1855) the Duyckinck brothers praised Bartram for the vivacity and liveliness of his writing; while Allibone’s Critical Dictionary (1858) admired his enthusiastic qualities.(125) These more generous estimates reflect gradual changes in taste during the Romantic era and growing acceptance of emotional expression in prose.

In point of fact, Bartram’s descriptive prose is not unceasingly rhapsodic; often it has distinct elements of homeliness and simplicity. His portraits of plant or animal species are both appreciative and enumerative, linking factual details with aesthetic evaluation, as in this early description of butterflies:

Moreover, the artistic sensibility in these passages is constantly balanced against the shrewd pragmatism of a biological accountant, whose main purpose is to provide a catalogue of soil, flora, fauna, and their practical uses. In another writer these catalogues could have been dry assemblages of facts; Bartram has a genius for adding suggestive poetic touches:

The image “soapy” is richly associative, for it complements this description of earth yet also suggests strongly contradictory elements: the mixing of black and white, soil and cleansing, all paradoxes that convey Bartram’s synthesized vision of nature.

At its best, Bartram’s style works through a balancing of exact observations against images that seem almost instinctively appropriate. When he reaches for a literary figure, his choice is often correct. Describing the cataracts near Augusta, he personifies the Savannah River “as if [it were] impatient to repose on the extensive plain before it invades the ocean.”(128) To describe a wood pelican vividly, he renders the bird as a human type: “In this pensive posture and solitary situation, it looks extremely grave, sorrowful, and melancholy, as if in the deepest thought.”(129) Frequently Bartram describes the wilderness with civilized analogies, drawing upon experiences that are familiar to his readers. The roots of a cypress tree become “prodigious buttresses, or pilasters, which, in full grown trees, project out on every side, to such a distance that several men might easily hide themselves in the hollows between.”(130) The leaves of a laurel magnolia “make a graceful sweep or flourish like the long S [s curve], or the branches of a sconce candle-stick.”(131) These comparisons bring into balance the separate worlds of wilderness and civilization, bridging the distance between Bartram’s readers and himself.

In his best passages, he composes balanced and contiguous clauses, evoking in their symmetrical order his personal vision of Nature’s processes. His marvelous description of the flight of the Savannah cranes admirably demonstrates this technique, and deserves to be quoted in full:

“They spread their light elastic sail: at first they move from the earth heavy and slow; they labour and beat the dense air; they form the line with wide extended wings, tip to tip; they all rise and fall together as one bird; now they mount aloft, gradually wheeling about; each squadron performs its evolution, encircling the expansive plains, observing each one its own orbit; then lowering sail, descend on the verge of some glittering lake; whilst other squadrons, ascending aloft in spiral circles, bound on interesting discoveries, wheel round and double the promontory, in the silver regions of the clouded skies, where, far from the scope of eye, they carefully observe the verdant meadows on the borders of the East Lake; then contract their plumes and descend to the earth, where, after resting a while on some verdant eminence, near the flowery border of the lake, they, with dignified, yet slow, respectful steps, approach the kindred band, confer, and treat for habitation; the bounds and precincts being settled, they confederate and take possession.”(132)

Bartram’s prose style demonstrates the extent to which he retained the eye of both an artist and a scientist. By the 1860s, critics like Henry Tuckerman were recognizing the curious alternation of poetic and scientific modes in Bartram;(133) and later commentators, grown more familiar with the scientific method, could appreciate the extent to which he tempers his poetry with scientific accuracy. Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), who spent much of his life striving for the same synthesis, admired Bartram’s work and borrowed some choice elements of it for his own writings.(134) The balance of poetry and science is most apparent in Bartram’s descriptions. He describes the laurel magnolia with an artist’s eye for color and shape, remarking on its “neatness of form, and beauty of foliage” and the scientist’s eye for detail and function, “they are polypetalous, consisting of fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five petals: these are of a thick coriaceous texture, and deeply concave…”(135) Although Bartram uses some scientific vocabulary, he is never pedantic; witness his casual admission: “I have made use of the terms alligator and crocodile indiscriminately for this animal, alligator being the country name.”(136) This attitude has distressed his scientific readers and has lost him the credit for many of his scientific discoveries. Yet the balance to which a scientist objects is the very quality that a humanist admires, for Bartram was a pioneer in the poetical use of natural facts. After entering a description of the Snake Bird, or Anhinga, he notes how the animal would be a fit subject for poetry: “I doubt not that if this bird had been an inhabitant of the Tiber in Ovid’s days, it would have furnished him with a subject for some beautiful and entertaining metamorphoses.”(137)

His own metamorphoses modestly transform fact into evocative prose, enhanced by his painter’s sense of important visual detail, as in the picture of a fish, the blue bream:

In this masterful description, we see Bartram’s skills as an artist and scientist beautifully combined. Beginning with “dull” and ending with “fire,” his description is simultaneously methodical and accurate, poetical and artistic. In this and a related passage, Bartram builds from an ichthyological description to a literary tour de force and includes such unexpected metaphors as feathers, sky and sealing wax.

Footnotes

120. Harper, Naturalist’s Edition, op. cit., p. xxiv; see also early reviews listed in Cutting, “Writings about William Bartram,” Reference Guide, op. cit., pp. 37 FF.

121. N. B. Fagin, “Bartram’s Travels,” Modern Language Notes, XLVI, (May 1931), pp. 288–291; and Cutting, “Writings About William Bartram,” Reference Guide, op. cit., p. 38.

122. Bartram’s Travels, op. cit., p. xx, Harper, p. Iiv.

123. The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834–1872, Boston, 1884, Vol. 2, p. 198.

124. Cutting, “Writings About William Bartram,” Reference Guide, op. cit., p. 39.

125. Ibid., pp. 41–42.

126. Bartram’s Travels, op. cit., pp. xxvii–xxix, Harper, p. lviii.

127. Ibid., pp. 29–30, Harper, p. 20.

128. Ibid., p. 33, Harper, p. 22.

129. Ibid., p. 150, Harper, p. 95.

130. Ibid., p. 91, Harper, p. 58.

131. Ibid., p. 132, Harper, p. 84.

132. Ibid., pp. 146–147, Harper, p. 93. For another example, see description of Hydrangia, Travels, op. cit., pp. 382–383, Harper, pp. 241–242, which uses long and complex clauses to emulate the plant’s structure, forming a technical yet affective description.

133. America and Her Commentators: With a Critical Sketch of Travelling in the United States, New York, 1864, pp. 382–385.

134. Thoreau quotes Bartram in Walden (1854), “The Succession of Forest Trees” (1860), and in several of his private notebooks, especially those on Indian customs. William Howarth, Princeton University, is currently preparing an essay on this subject for publication.

135. Bartram’s Travels, op. cit., p. 86, Harper, p. 55.

136. Ibid., p. 90, Harper, p. 58.

137. Ibid., p. 133, Harper, p. 85.

138. Ibid., p. 176, Harper, pp. 111–112. For recent discussions of Bartram’s prose style, see Cutting, “Writings About William Bartram,” Reference Guide, op. cit., pp. 71–72.

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