SOURCE: Branch, Michael. “Indexing American Possibilities: The Natural History Writing of Bartram, Wilson, and Audubon.” In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, pp. 282‐97. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

[In the following essay, Branch surveys the evolution of ideas about nature before the nineteenth century and goes on to discuss the contributions by three important nineteenth‐century American naturalists whose thematic concerns became central to subsequent environmental literature.]

During the half‐century between the publication of Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) and Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature (1836), American natural history was a flourishing discipline that helped nurture the emergence of a culture distinctively contingent upon the land.¹ This period, which I identify as “early romantic,” has received little attention from ecocritics, who more often focus upon Henry Thoreau and his literary descendants—a distinguished lineage that includes figures such as John Muir, John Burroughs, Aldo Leopold, and Edward Abbey. We too often forget that Thoreau is the descendant of a literary tradition as certainly as he is the progenitor of one, and that nature writing from Walden on is prefigured and indirectly influenced by a rich tradition of late‐eighteenth‐ and early‐nineteenth‐century natural history writing.²

In this essay I wish to survey briefly early romantic ideas about nature in the New World, and raise some questions about the status and function of American natural history studies around the turn of the century. How is the early romantic enthusiasm for natural history a product of the changing intellectual climate of period? If, as I would argue, natural history writing should be viewed as both science and as belles lettres, what is the larger relationship between American natural history studies and the rise of a distinctively American culture during the early romantic period?³ How do naturalists' representations of the relationship between human and nonhuman nature contribute to the ecological awareness that has inspired and sustained the American nature‐writing tradition? Using the work of botanist William Bartram, ornithologist Alexander Wilson, and painter John James Audubon, I wish to suggest that early romantic natural history introduced a number of ideas that are essential to the post‐Thoreauvian literature of nature. Before we turn to Bartram, Wilson, and Audubon, however, let us make a broad sketch of how changing perceptions of nonhuman nature made their writing possible.

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During the eighteenth century the confluence of several currents of European thought helped to mitigate the American aversion to wild nature expressed by the Puritan icon of “the howling wilderness.” Of primary importance was the influence of deism, the rationalist “natural religion” that held that the creator's hand was evident in the intricate perfection of the natural world. Behind the deist association of God and nature were the century's vast accomplishments in natural science, which continued to reveal the complex precision of geological and astronomical systems. Indeed, natural theologians including John Ray and William Paley had already begun to accord nature a kind of scriptural status, as is apparent from the title of Ray's influential book, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691). According to deism, the “wilderness pleases” because it is the landscape least encumbered by humans, and therefore most directly illustrative of the creator. In America, where Puritan orthodoxy had been a primary source of enmity toward wilderness, deist theology precipitated a radical revision of the human relationship to nonhuman nature.⁴

Once deism had introduced the maxim that nature was an expression of divinity, a rescission of the seventeenth‐century notion of “howling wilderness” was inevitable. A primary catalyst for change in this perception of nature came in 1756, with the publication of Edmund Burke's treatise upon the sublime and beautiful. Reviving Longinus's concept of the sublime from antiquity, Burke's influential distinction reshaped conventional aesthetic categories to include as ennobling the feelings of awe and terror. In one sense, the reintroduction of the sublime was simply a backlash against the excessive rigidity of conventional eighteenth‐century aesthetics; like the vogue for literary and architectural Gothic and the popular interest in primitivism as espoused by Rousseau and Defoe, the rise of the sublime was a reaction to the rationalist sensibility of the age. In addition to challenging the severity of neoclassical aesthetics, Burke's thesis also legitimized the feelings so often induced by the vast, untamed wilderness of the New World. Significantly, the concept of the sublime also shifted emphasis from the qualities of the landscape toward the feelings the landscape engendered in the observer. As the fear produced by Niagara's cataract came to seem more worthy of experience than the repose occasioned by an impeccably ordered courtly garden, the aesthetic of the sublime established a dynamic, emotional connection between the human spirit and the grandeur of wild nature.⁵

The early romantic connection between human and nonhuman nature also helped nurture the rise of natural history studies in America. If the national faith was to be based upon the vast, uncorrupted wilderness of the new continent, it became imperative to explore, survey, and describe that wilderness as a means both of appraising and expressing American prospects. Just as Thomas Jefferson had suggested that the diversity and size of American animals was emblematic of the republic's rising glory, turn‐of‐the‐century America looked increasingly to natural history as an index of American possibilities. The call for a national literature—which was ubiquitous in the early nineteenth century—was consistently expressed in terms of American nature. In an impulse we might call the “topographical imperative,” Americans demanded a culture that would be commensurate with the greatness of the land: as expansive as its prairies, as lofty as its mountains, as prolific as its forests. In short, natural history functioned as an expression of America's need to discover the means by which its national destiny would be enacted.⁶

Of course, there were other important reasons for the growth and influence of American natural history studies. The work of establishing America's independence had been finished, and citizens could devote more attention to the arts and sciences. This consequent leisure was also manifest in the vogue for “scenic tours,” and for amateur naturalism such as the casual bird‐watching which was so popular during the period. Before the end of the eighteenth century, a gentleman or lady could not have considered natural history to be within the domain of their proper affairs, but deism and enlightenment science had widely disseminated the idea that nature could be learned from as well as about. From every corner of Western culture, the nexus of natural history and literature was receiving the blessing of romanticism. Coleridge in England, Goethe in Germany, and Rousseau in France were exemplars of just how provocative and productive the blend could be. Thanks largely to the influence of Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne (1789) in England and William Bartram's Travels (1791) in America, the nature essay began to develop toward the turn of the century into a genre of its own—an informative and stylistically accomplished convergence of science and romanticism.

To some extent, the early nineteenth century turn to the land functioned as an apology for a lack of American culture, and to some degree the vogue for natural history expressed a need to compensate for a dearth of cultural history. But the anxiety of European influence had begun to wane, and there grew in Americans a very real sense that—however unlikely the concept—wilderness would itself inspire culture. The American continent had perpetually been viewed as regenerative, and just as seventeenth‐century Americans believed that an oppressed Protestant might begin anew in Massachusetts, or an impoverished laborer might begin anew in Virginia, nineteenth‐century Americans believed that culture itself could begin anew, that its seed would germinate and flourish in the rich soil of the New World.

In order to prosper, however, American natural history would have to liberate itself from the colonial impulse to defer to British authority in the field. Until the late eighteenth century, most Americans assumed that British museums were the proper repository for specimens gathered on either side of the Atlantic, and the idea of maintaining permanent natural history collections in America was entertained by only a few. By the early nineteenth century, however, Americans were demanding of their science—just as they were demanding of their art and literature—a purging of European influence and a turning to the uncorrupted cultural resources of the American land. One critic urged naturalists to “study and examine for themselves, instead of blindly using the eyes of foreign naturalists, or bowing implicitly to a foreign bar of criticism.” Just as the topographical imperative enjoined a literature commensurate with the greatness of the land, American naturalists were urged to construct monuments to science that would “rise beautifully as our hills, imperishable, and lofty as their summits, which tower sublimely above the clouds.”⁷

As a kind of artistic and scientific correlative to the idea of manifest destiny, the topographical imperative decisively associated prospects for American culture with the land itself. By the early nineteenth century, Americans had concluded that indigenous species should be studied and housed in America, and that funding for conducting surveys, creating permanent collections, and publishing natural history at home was essential to nurturing the emergence of American culture. Efforts to establish American natural history were successfully carried forward on the wave of romantic nationalism which swept early‐nineteenth‐century America, and the opinion that wilderness was both a natural and a cultural resource finally struck roots in the scientific and literary imagination of the young republic.

The work of William Bartram, Alexander Wilson, and John James Audubon illustrates the important contributions made by natural history writers during the early romantic period. Indeed, many of their characteristic thematic concerns became essential to both nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century environmental literature. First, their brand of natural history helped to define a uniquely American subject and style; these writers turned west in an attempt to define the “distinctively American” in terms of the impressive natural resources of the young nation. Second, the romantic natural historians helped to relocate divinity in wilderness; elaborating upon the deistic presupposition that the creator is manifest in nature, they affirmed America's moral advantage over domesticated Europe by emphasizing God's sublime presence in the New World landscape. Third, these naturalists were partially motivated by an impulse to document the natural history of an evanescent frontier and its nonhuman inhabitants; early romantic naturalists attempted to delineate a wilderness and to mourn its irrevocable loss before the march of westward expansion. Finally, Bartram, Wilson, and Audubon helped introduce a pattern of ecological thinking in American culture; through emphasis upon a feeling of membership in a natural community and upon the morally regenerative qualities of nature, these writers offered an alternative to the dominant and dominating expansionary ethos of the age, and thereby helped initiate a minority tradition of environmental concern into American intellectual history.

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In considering the cultural value of natural history studies, we should begin with William Bartram, whose Travels (1791) is widely recognized as both a scientific and a literary classic of the period.⁸ His father was John Bartram of Philadelphia, whom Linnaeus called “the greatest natural botanist in the world” (Elman 26), and whose famous botanical garden at Kingsessing (just outside Philadelphia) was the finest in the colonies. William grew under his father's tutelage to become the greatest American naturalist of his age. As a boy William had learned to identify and sketch plants with prodigious skill and had accompanied his father on several arduous botanical excursions into the wilderness. Using these experiences as his guide, William set out alone in March 1773 on the four years of wanderings that inspired Travels. From a natural historical standpoint, the record of Bartram's journey provided an encyclopedic catalogue of the flora and fauna of the American wilderness, and he returned with specimens and drawings that were invaluable to scientists both in America and abroad.

Although Bartram discovered and described a variety of species that were new to science, his book's greater contribution is the narrative itself—the thoughtful and enthusiastic account of a person fully immersed in the experience of American wilderness. Indeed, Bartram's descriptions are so spontaneous and sincere, so precise in their depictions, so reflective of nature's wonders and of a sensibility capable of appreciating them, so free of the influence of European literary models, that Travels stands as a landmark accomplishment in American literature. A vernacular relative of the decorous eighteenth‐century “ramble,” Bartram's book also helped establish the American genre of the nature essay that, from Thoreau to Barry Lopez, has been an important vehicle for American literary aspirations. And like his friend Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, Bartram's Travels had considerable influence upon the literary as well as the scientific minds of Europe. As an exception to the rule that literary capital moved westward across the Atlantic, Bartram's influence appears in the work of Coleridge and Wordsworth and, to a lesser extent, Shelley, Carlyle, and Blake as well. Coleridge described Bartram's Travels as “a work of high merit every way,” and even wrote to Emerson that “all American libraries ought to provide themselves with that kind of book; and keep them as a future biblical article.”⁹

Coleridge's farsighted recognition of Travels as a seminal American text is rendered even more prescient by his allusion to the book as a kind of Holy Writ. Indeed, it was Bartram's devout faith in the divinity of nature that distinguished his work from most scientific tracts and consequently helped open the way for American literature to explore the spiritual resources of the wilderness. Like his fellow Quaker John Woolman, Bartram was sensitive to signs of divinity in his surroundings; as a naturalist, and as the son of an ardently anticlerical naturalist, he believed divinity to be immanent in that wilderness which so constantly awakened his sense of wonder.¹⁰ Bartram's philosophy was a natural extension of the Quaker “doctrine of light”: he insisted that plants and animals, as well as slaves and Indians, had been touched by God with the “dignity, propriety, and beauty of virtue.” As Ernest Earnest has observed, Bartram's doctrine of love for nature “is not merely the tender‐hearted benevolence of the sensibility school; it is part of his radical view of the nature of animal creation” (151, 144). In the “Introduction” to his Travels, which is itself an early example of the nature essay in America, Bartram observed:

We admire the mechanism of a watch, and the fabric of a piece of brocade, as being the production of art; these merit our admiration, and must excite our esteem for the ingenious artist or modifier; but nature is the work of God omnipotent; and an elephant, nay even this world, is comparatively but a very minute part of his works. If then the visible, the mechanical part of the animal creation, the mere material part, is so admirably beautiful, harmonious, and incomprehensible, what must be the intellectual system? that inexpressibly more essential principle, which secretly operates within? that which animates the inimitable machines, which gives them motion, empowers them to act, speak, and perform, this must be divine and immortal?

(21)

Bartram's appreciation for the wonderful intricacy of natural systems and his belief that every living thing manifests “the divine and inimitable workmanship” (17) combined to produce a sensibility that may be described as proto‐ecological. Throughout the Travels Bartram's incisive observations reveal and celebrate the fabric of interrelationships that he recognized in the wilderness. Most refreshing is Bartram's awareness of his own membership in the natural community. His pantheistic diction constantly suggests a sense of familial relationship with the flora and fauna whom he considered his “ingenious … & esteemed Associates” (Seavey 32). Whether describing conversations with his pet crow or relating narrow escapes from hungry alligators in the swamps of Florida, he was always attuned to the effects his presence had upon the balance of the natural community. As Bartram's introduction to his Travels reveals, he was a man who not only delighted in watching spiders, but who was sensitive enough to know when the spiders were watching him.¹¹

Beyond this sensitivity to interconnectedness, there is in Bartram a strain of radical nonanthropocentrism which clearly distinguishes him from his contemporaries. The ecophilosophical metaphysic that informs the Travels is made even more explicit in one of Bartram's unpublished manuscripts:

I cannot be so impious; nay my soul revolts, is destroyed by such conjectures as to desire or imagine that man who is guilty of more mischief and wickedness than all the other animals together in this world, should be exclusively endowed with the knowledge of the Creator. … There is something so aristocratic if a philosopher use the expression or the epithet of the Dignity of Human Nature. Because a man as viewed in the chain of animal beings according to the common notions of philosophers, acts the part of an absolute tyrant. His actions and movements must, I think, impress such an idea on the minds of all animals, or intelligent beings.¹²

Philosophically closer to the late‐twentieth‐ than the late‐eighteenth‐century view of the human place in the cosmos, Bartram's advocacy of nature and his criticism of anthropocentric pretensions to superiority clearly prefigure the “ecocentric egalitarianism” of much contemporary ecophilosophy; his criticism of the traditional hierarchical paradigm of the chain of being suggests a respect for the dignity of all nature, and powerfully expresses the romantic belief that divinity is diffused throughout nature. By uniting natural history with literature, science with spirit, Bartram exemplified the “enlightened naturalist” whom Emerson and Thoreau—as well as Coleridge and Goethe—held in such high esteem.

Although Bartram was an invaluable mentor to naturalists such as Barton, Nuttall, and Michaux, his most accomplished protégé was the ornithologist Alexander Wilson. In 1794, at the age of twenty‐eight, Wilson emigrated from Scotland, where he had been a weaver, reformer, poet, painter, and peddler in the mill town of Paisley. In 1802 he had the good fortune to secure employment as a teacher at the Union School in Kingsessing, close to Bartram's botanical garden. Wilson quickly became friends with Bartram, from whom he received encouragement and instruction in drawing and in the study of natural history. Immediately inspired by the beauty and diversity of American birds, Wilson soon devoted his life to their study, and began traveling many thousands of miles on foot in search of undiscovered species. By the time of his death only eleven years after meeting Bartram, Alexander Wilson was the nation's foremost authority on birds, and had completed nearly all nine volumes of his monumental American Ornithology (1808‐29).¹³

Given his Scottish heritage, it is interesting that Wilson's prodigious accomplishment was motivated largely by his desire to help ground American culture upon the land. Like Jefferson and Bartram before him—both of whom he acknowledged as ornithological predecessors in the introduction to his American Ornithology—Wilson assumed very deliberately that his natural history was a contribution not only to science, but to the cultural identity of the nation. According to historian Robert Elman, Wilson expressed

a somewhat mystical belief … that the living riches of America's wilderness formed a common heritage—a kind of unifying fabric—linking all the peoples of diverse ancestry and background to a single destiny in a young, vigorous nation.

(65)

Wilson had promised that if “the generous hand of patriotism be stretched forth to assist and cherish the rising arts and literature of our country … [they will] increase and flourish with a vigor, a splendor and usefulness inferior to no other on earth.” Thomas Paine and (then President) Thomas Jefferson, both of whom were early subscribers to Wilson's unprecedented volumes, would have agreed that the “unifying fabric” of nature was a crucial determinant of America's evolving national character.¹⁴

As with Bartram, Wilson's considerable scientific acumen was always entwined with an engaged literary sensibility. If he was a weaver by trade and a peddler by necessity, he was a poet by inclination, and had published his verse long before he began his study of the birds. Wilson's ornithological opus is itself a literary accomplishment, for in addition to eloquent prose describing the appearance and habits of the birds, it also interpolates lyrics of his own composition. Like earlier naturalists including Linnaeus, Wilson understood the study of nature to be an ennobling pursuit that spontaneously engendered a poetic response.

This promising unification of literature and science—an impulse we might call the “poetics of natural history”—is most evident in “The Foresters,” Wilson's romantic narrative poem about his twelve hundred mile foot‐journey to the falls of Niagara. Although it was over twenty‐two hundred lines long, the poem was published serially from July 1809 through March 1810 in the Philadelphia Port Folio, and was well received.¹⁵ Although literary history does not remember Wilson as a poet, “The Foresters” is an excellent example of how thoroughly enmeshed were his literary and natural historical sensibilities. The poem's exordium invites readers to “explore / Scenes new to song, and paths untrod before”:

To Europe's shores, renowned in deathless song,
Must all the honors of the bard belong?
While bare black heaths, and brooks of half a mile
Can rouse the thousand bards of Britain's isle,
Our western world, with all its matchless floods,
Our vast transparent lakes and boundless woods,
Spread their wild grandeur to the unconscious sky,
In sweetest seasons pass unheeded by;
While scarce one Muse returns the songs they gave,
Or seeks to snatch their glories from the grave.

(Poems 147‐48, st. 2)

The poem finally reaches its crescendo at Niagara, where the travelers gaze with “holy awe” upon the sublime falls that recall the walls of Mecca. Both as ornithologist and as romantic poet, Wilson responded to the unsung beauty of the American wilderness by leading readers on a pilgrimage into the heart of their own country.

Wilson's writing was often informed by an environmentalist critique of human pretensions to control over the natural world. For example, in “Verses, occasioned by seeing two men sawing timber in an open field, in defiance of a furious storm,” Wilson criticized the seemingly indefatigable human urge to destroy nature regardless of the consequences. The speaker of this poem tries in vain to save two sawyers who, bent upon their work and the harvest they have come to reap, refuse to desist from their work during a mounting gale. Heedless of the speaker's warnings and of the power of the natural forces they believe they can dominate, the men are crushed beneath the falling tree:

Now see, ye misbelieving sinners,
Your bloody shins—your saw in flinners,
And roun' about your lugs the ruin,
That your demented foly drew on.

(Poems 67, st. 2)

Although Wilson's verse here is mediocre, his objection to the sawyers' self‐destructive folly is patent: rather than walking with humility in the natural world, these men have been literally crippled by the “sin” of their arrogant determination to destroy that world.

Wilson's literary brand of natural history also displayed an incipient ecological sensibility, especially in its emphasis upon the crucial role that each species plays in “the economy of nature.” For example, in his treatment of the bluebird in American Ornithology, Wilson includes a poem explaining to readers that the bird “drags the vile grub from the corn he devours,” and should therefore be suffered to visit their crops unmolested (2:161). As an early conservationist, he made pioneering studies of wildlife populations and fatefully projected the devastating impact human settlement would have upon native habitat. Because Wilson could identify and extol the singing of individual birds in his neighboring woods, he was uniquely qualified to remark and lament the extirpation of species that inevitably followed the westward movement of the American frontier.

Wilson was even capable of activism on behalf of the birds. When in 1807 good sense would not prevail with merchants who were killing thousands of robins to satisfy the genteel palates of Philadelphia, he wrote an anonymous article to city newspapers explaining that robin flesh was unhealthy because of the birds' heavy diet of pokeberries; though Wilson knew the claim to be entirely false, it effectively curtailed the slaughter of robins for the Philadelphia market.¹⁶ Because Wilson, like his mentor Bartram, understood natural history to be “the contemplation and worship of the Great First Cause,” ornithology was a devout mission and protection of fellow creatures an article of faith. Believing that what he studied would inspire American culture because it was inspired by God, Wilson combined his scientific and literary talents in order to record the national treasure of America's birds (American Ornithology 2).

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The idyllic vision of America as a regenerative wilderness had a remarkable incarnation in the career of Jean Jacques Rabin Fougere Audubon, the dandified, aristocratic Frenchman who was reborn in the New World as John James Audubon, the self‐styled “American Woodsman.” Like Wilson, who had come to America to avoid the Scottish mill masters determined to silence his socialist poetry, Audubon came to the land of the second chance as a wayward youth, leaving behind the history of his illegitimate birth to a French slave trader and his Creole mistress. Audubon arrived in America in 1803, where he weathered business misfortunes and poverty for a quarter century while painting the birds of his adopted homeland. Like Bartram and Wilson before him, Audubon traveled thousands of wilderness miles in order to discover, study, and document native species. Finally, in 1826, he made his startlingly successful debut before the artistic community; the next ten years saw the momentous publication of the 435 plates of the mammoth, double elephant folio edition of The Birds of America.¹⁷

Although his considerable fame has rested upon his outstanding accomplishments as an artist, Audubon was also a talented writer whose colorful descriptions of life on the frontier deserve a permanent place in our literature.¹⁸ His “Episodes,” or “Delineations of American Scenery and Character,” sixty short essays that cover travel adventures from 1808 to 1834, provide remarkable glimpses of the evanescent phenomenon of the frontier and clearly demonstrate why this renowned “naturalist” should be seen in the context of American romantic literature. For example, “Kentucky Sports” tells of a competition between candle‐snuffing, nail‐driving masters of the long rifle, and is similar to the marksmanship scenes in Cooper's The Pioneers. “The Turtlers” is a detailed account of the mysterious beast that Melville was to record in “The Encantadas.” In “Niagara” we read of Audubon's adventures to the cataract so celebrated by William Cullen Bryant and other romantic poets.¹⁹ The rough justice administered to an apprehended confidence man in “The Regulators” recalls the misadventures of the King and the Duke from Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In “Scipio and the Bear,” the exciting details of the hunt prefigure the mature treatment Faulkner would give the subject in “The Bear.” Throughout the Episodes, Audubon blends natural and social history into narrative tales designed to provide representative vignettes of life in the American wilderness.²⁰

Like Bartram and Wilson, Audubon understood the role of natural historian to be complementary with that of romantic author.²¹ In “The Ohio,” the very first of his Episodes, Audubon makes explicit his vision of the link between American literary accomplishments and the need for documenting a disappearing wilderness condition:

I feel with regret that there are on record no satisfactory accounts of the state of that portion of the country, from the time when our people first settled in it. This has not been because no one in America is able to accomplish such an undertaking. Our Irvings and our Coopers have proved themselves fully competent for the task. It has more probably been because the changes have succeeded each other with such rapidity, as almost to rival the movements of their pen. However, it is not too late yet. … I hope … [t]hey will analyze, as it were, into each component part, the country as it once existed, and will render the picture, as it ought to be, immortal.

(Delineations 5)

Audubon's own painting and prose were dedicated to just such a project, and in recognition of his talents and objectives, Washington Irving sought government patronage for his work in 1836. Like the work of Bryant, Cooper, and Irving, Audubon's writing is unmistakably characterized by elements of early romanticism in America: a fondness for the picturesque in natural scenery; a powerful attraction to “the American sublime”; a propensity for melodramatic sentimentality; an enduring interest in Native Americans and in the quotidian existence of settlers, trappers, and woodsmen; an incipient impulse to distinguish nature as a source of moral authority; a stylistic tendency to romanticize characters; and a dramatic inclination to set the scene of his stories upon the threshold of wilderness and civilization.

Also interesting is the peculiar way in which Audubon connects romantic literature and natural history by casting the naturalist in the role of romantic hero. Like Bartram, whose Travels influenced Coleridge, and like Wilson, who was probably the model for Wordsworth's peddler in “The Excursion,” Audubon was the romantic type of the solitary wanderer—the lonely figure who carried a higher vision of nature on his pilgrimage into the wilderness.²² In fact, distinctions between the period's romanticized folk heroes and its itinerant naturalists sometimes seem arbitrary. William Bartram's woodsmanship and belief in the divinity of wilderness also distinguish the character of Cooper's Natty Bumppo. Wilson's extensive and perilous explorations are reminiscent of Meriwether Lewis, whose mysterious death he investigated in 1810.²³ The tireless Audubon, forever in search of adventure, resembles the mythicized figure of Daniel Boone, with whom the naturalist claimed to have hunted in Kentucky.

Audubon provides the most fascinating study of the naturalist as romantic hero because he so self‐consciously cultivated the identity. Like his own hero, Benjamin Franklin, who played the noble American rustic to great effect in the French court, Audubon depended for his success upon his mastery of the role of American Woodsman. Although taught to excel at the aristocratic arts of dancing, fencing, and sporting finery, he visited European drawing rooms clothed in fringed buckskins, carrying a walking stick, and wearing his hair long and dressed with bear grease.²⁴ An enthusiastic reader of Byron and Scott, as well as Cooper and Irving, Audubon knew—in his various roles as a writer, naturalist, painter, and public figure—how to satisfy his audience's romantic appetite for wilderness. In many of the Episodes, Audubon simply writes himself into the leading role in narratives he heard while traveling the riverboats, wagon paths, and Indian trails of the old Southwest. It is not surprising, therefore, that he has been received into American culture according to the romantic American Woodsman persona he projected. Eudora Welty's short story “A Still Moment” (1943), Jessamyn West's play A Mirror for the Sky (1948), Robert Penn Warren's poem series Audubon: A Vision (1969), and Scott Russell Sanders's novel Wonders Hidden (1984) all commemorate and perpetuate the image of Audubon the romantic.

Alton Lindsey has coined the term ornitheology to denote bird study as the “popular faith” of which “John James Audubon [was] the original prophet” (137). Although Audubon was an accomplished scientific naturalist who pioneered bird‐banding experiments and contributed to our knowledge of the nesting, mating, feeding, and migration habits of birds, he is perhaps best remembered as a purveyor of “ornitheology.” Through his paintings and his prose, Audubon effectively brought the vanishing wilderness before a popular audience. Although many critics fault him for his zealousness as a hunter, his message from the wilderness remains one of devout enthusiasm and concern—a genuine love of nature tempered by a scrupulous fear for its destruction. Indeed, Audubon's ecological anxieties often result in what Leo Marx would call “the episode of the interrupted idyll”—a narrative moment in which the pastoral enjoyment of nature is invaded, in this case by a disconcerting awareness of its inevitable disappearance.²⁵

This elegiac “interrupted idyll” is illustrated in the Episode “Scipio and the Bear,” which energetically relates the story of a bear hunt, but ends abruptly by lamenting the needless cruelty of man toward his fellow creatures. After hunting and hounding a family of bears that sometimes visited a farmer's field, the hunting party ends by “smoking” two of the bears in the tree where the animals had retreated for safety:

At length the tree assumed the appearance of a pillar of flame. The Bears mounted to the top branches. When they had reached the uppermost, they were seen to totter, and soon after, the branch cracking and snapping across, they came to the ground, bringing with them a mass of broken twigs. They were cubs, and the dogs soon worried them to death. The [hunting] party returned to the house in triumph. … But before we had left the field, the horses, dogs [… and] fires, had destroyed more corn within a few hours, than the poor bear and her cubs had, during the whole of their visits.

(Delineations 109‐10)

Audubon leaves little doubt that the crop damage done by the bears in no way warrants the cruel treatment the animals receive. Indeed, the fact that the hunters are more destructive to their fields than are the bears suggests that the hunt is motivated primarily by an excessive desire to harry and control nonhuman nature. In response to the very real loss of wildlife that is represented in such tales, Audubon became an early advocate of government intervention as a means of halting the “war of extermination” upon native species; in spite of such efforts, he often despaired that “Nature herself seems perishing.”²⁶

Much of Audubon's writing laments the swiftness with which wilderness was being lost. Consider this poignant passage in which he reflects upon his early rambles along the Ohio River:

When I think of these times, and call back to my mind the grandeur and beauty of those almost uninhabited shores; when I picture to myself the dense and lofty summits of the forest, that everywhere spread along the hills, and overhung the margins of the stream, unmolested by the axe of the settler … when I see that no longer any Aborigines are to be found there, and that the vast herds of elks, deer and buffaloes which once pastured on these hills and in these valleys, making for themselves great roads to the several salt‐springs, have ceased to exist; when I reflect that the grand portion of our Union, instead of being in a state of nature, is now more or less covered with villages, farms, and towns, where the din of hammers and machinery is constantly heard; that the woods are fast disappearing under the axe by day, and the fire by night … when I remember that these extraordinary changes have taken place in the short period of twenty years, I pause, wonder, and, although I know all to be fact, can scarcely believe its reality.

(Delineations 4)

As Audubon correctly recognized, the impulse toward domination and extermination of wild nature was fast becoming the ecological legacy of the American frontier.

Although the environmental ethic of these early romantic naturalists would not be considered ecocentric by the standards of contemporary ecophilosophy, it is important to recognize that their sensitivity to the natural world and their concern for its preservation is an essential precursor to the ethics of modern American environmental concern. Like Bartram and Wilson before him, Audubon was inspired by the divine beauty of nature, and his study of natural history resulted in contributions to romantic literature and environmental awareness, as well as to science. Audubon's fear for nature's preservation was the combined product of his romantic sensibility, his naturalistic vocation, and the historical moment in which he pursued his studies. His life in America (1803‐51) spanned the most active years of frontier expansion, a time when wilderness and the settlement of it were fiercely competing interpretations of a single landscape. By the time Henry Thoreau—who wrote that he read Audubon “with a thrill of delight”—had removed himself to Walden Pond, the American Woodsman had already asked in his journal: “Where can I go now, and visit nature undisturbed?”²⁷

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Although ecocriticism has often been slow to recognize the value and influence of the pre‐Thoreauvian literature of nature, the work of William Bartram, Alexander Wilson, and John James Audubon makes clear that early romantic natural history literature is an essential source of the American nature‐writing tradition. In addition to indexing the possibilities for American culture in the fecund wilderness of the New World, these writers also helped relocate divinity from ecclesiastical institutions to the natural landscape and its nonhuman inhabitants. Sharing a poignant sense of the impending loss of biodiversity that attended settlement of the frontier, each was motivated by a desire to represent the beauty of American wilderness on the eve of its inexorable destruction. Most important, Bartram, Wilson, and Audubon celebrated their kinship with nonhuman nature, thereby introducing into American letters the proto‐ecological sensibility upon which further developments in the genre of natural history writing would depend. Their artistic blending of natural history and belles lettres prefigured—and to a great extent engendered—the justly famous accomplishments of such literary descendants as Henry Thoreau, John Muir, Mary Austin, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez.

Notes

1. Notes was published privately in 1785 and publicly in 1789.

2. Early natural history writing is often included in anthologies of nature writing (for example, see Robert Finch and John Elder, The Norton Book of Nature Writing [New York: Norton, 1990]), but is much less often the subject of critical study. For an analysis that has not forgotten the importance of early natural history writing, see Thomas J. Lyon, ed., This Incomperable Lande (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989).

3. For a good, recent study of eighteenth‐century natural history writing which offers a view very different from my own, see Pamela Regis, Describing Early America (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992). In short, Regis argues that the work of a writer such as William Bartram should be considered science rather than belles lettres (xi).

4. The new perspective on nature was carried to America in the writings of such deists as Shaftesbury and Pope, who were widely read in the colonies. It was Shaftesbury whose passion for wild nature prompted him to reject the “feigned wilderness” of palace gardens, and Pope who, in his “Essay on Man,” encouraged readers to “look up through nature to Nature's God” (Hans Huth, Nature and the American [Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1957] 10).

5. Burke's sublime enjoyed great currency in America, and was joined shortly by William Gilpin's concept of the “picturesque.” Like the sublime, the idea of the picturesque was widely disseminated in American culture, and Gilpin's work was known to nineteenth‐century authors including Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Poe (Huth 12). While it may be said that the cult of the sublime and picturesque deteriorated rather rapidly into a clichéd response to the landscape, these new aesthetic categories played a vital role in reversing the seventeenth‐century aversion to wilderness. Working in concert with deist assumptions about nature, the sublime and picturesque helped establish as divinely inspiring and aesthetically redeeming the fear and trembling generated by the American land.

6. Naturalists of this period turned away from European cultural standards and toward the scientific and literary possibilities of the American land. An excellent example of the American response to the call for a native natural history is provided by the career of Charles Wilson Peale, whose Philadelphia Museum, established in 1786, had a tremendous influence upon the Americanization of the field.

7. The quotations are Dr. James DeKay and Dr. Daniel Drake, respectively, and are quoted in Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought, 2d ed. (New York: Harper & Bros., 1951) 252‐53.

8. The full title of Bartram's book is Travels Through North & South Carolina, Georgia, East & West Florida, the Cherokee Country, the Extensive Territories of the Muscogulges, or Creek Confederacy, and the Country of the Chactaws; Containing an Account of the Soil and Natural Productions of Those Regions, Together With Observations on the Manners of the Indians. An English edition was published the following year (1792) in London.

9. The first praise is from Coleridge's Table Talk; the passage from the letter to Emerson may be found in the “Editor's Note” (5) of Travels of William Bartram, edited by Mark Van Doren. For a thorough discussion of Bartram's influence upon the English romantics, see N. Bryllion Fagin, William Bartram (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933).

10. William's father John subscribed to a personal brand of deism which caused him to be disowned by the Darby Meeting of the Society of Friends. Although his fellow Quakers left the charge against him deliberately vague, it seems to have been John's defiant claims on behalf of nature that unsettled the Darby Meeting. For instance, John once claimed that animals “possess higher qualifications and more exalted ideas than our traditional mystery mongers [preachers] are willing to allow.” For further discussion of John Bartram's theology, see Robert Elman, First in the Field (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1977) 35‐37; Ernest Earnest, John and William Bartram (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940) 66‐67.

11. The delightful account of Bartram and the spider is an excellent example of Bartram's ecological consciousness. After describing how the spider stalked a bumblebee while “at the same time keeping a sharp eye upon me,” Bartram observes that “perhaps before night [the spider] became himself the delicious evening repast of a bird or lizard” (24‐25).

12. The untitled manuscript, which is collected with Bartram's papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, is cited in Earnest 143, 144.

13. When Wilson died on 23 August 1813, he had published seven volumes, and had completed the eighth and some of the ninth. Wilson's friend George Ord saw volume eight through to publication in 1814 and, with a great deal of help from French ornithologist Charles Lucien Bonaparte, published the final volume in 1829.

14. Indeed, many of Wilson's accomplishments were inspired by his early patriotism. Even before he became an American citizen in 1804 Wilson had delivered an “Oration on the Power and Value of National Liberty” to celebrate Jefferson's election to the Presidency, and had composed a popular song entitled “Jefferson and Liberty.” For information on Wilson's republican orations, see Clark Hunter, The Life and Letters of Alexander Wilson (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1983) 3. For Wilson's acknowledgment of Bartram and Jefferson, see American Ornithology, (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1870) 8. Wilson's call for patriotic support is related by George Ord in his “Biographical Sketch of Alexander Wilson”; see Charlotte M. Porter, The Eagle's Nest (University: University of Alabama Press, 1986) 47.

15. See Porter 164.

16. This incident is documented by Elman 65‐66.

17. For a fascinating account of how European audiences immediately proclaimed Audubon an “American genius,” see Audubon's own 1826 Journal. The Birds of America was unprecedented in size and expense. The 435 plates were printed on sheets 26[frac12] inches by 39[frac12] inches and depicted over one thousand individual birds; the cost for the set was a thousand dollars (Elman 103). Audubon's artistic fame does not rest entirely upon his paintings of birds, however; his Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America (1845‐48), though less famous, is also a classic of wildlife art.

18. Since 1985, the bicentennial of his birth, a critical reappraisal of Audubon's career has begun to emphasize the importance of his writing. See Alton A. Lindsey, The Bicentennial of John James Audubon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985); and Scott Russell Sanders, Wonders Hidden: Audubon's Early Years (Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1984). Audubon's writing may be roughly organized into three categories. His descriptions of the birds, published in the five‐volume Ornithological Biography (1831‐39), provide a rich account of the American wilderness and its nonhuman inhabitants. His voluminous journals (published in 1897)—although bowdlerized to suit the Victorian pieties of his granddaughter, Maria Audubon—recount with vivid immediacy the story of Audubon's remarkable life and adventures. It is his “Episodes,” however, which have the greatest literary interest and merit. The sixty Episodes were originally interpolated into the first three volumes of the Ornithological Biography, where they were placed so that one followed every five articles on ornithology in order to relieve the tedium of the hundreds of consecutive bird descriptions. They were later collected as Delineations of American Scenery and Character.

19. For example, see Bryant's translation of José María de Heredia's “Niagra,” which he called “the best which has been written about the Great American Cataract” (quoted in Charles H. Brown, William Cullen Bryant [New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1971] 155).

20. As a source of cultural history about the frontier, Audubon provides detailed descriptions of frontier activities such as ox‐plowing contests and Independence Day picnics, as well as frontier skills such as hunting a raccoon, poling a flatboat, navigating a canebreak, or salting a buffalo with gunpowder.

21. In style as well as subject, Audubon's Episodes are an important contribution to the literature of the period. For example, his use of lore, tall tales, boasting, and pranks makes him a relative of the Southwest Humorists, who were writing in the same region at the same time.

22. For speculation about Wilson as model for Wordsworth's peddler, see Porter, 41 and Fagin 128‐62.

23. See Hunter 100‐101.

24. See Sanders 8. In a letter to his wife (from Edinburgh, 22 December 1826), Audubon commented that “My hairs are now as beautifully long and curly as ever and I assure they do as much for me as my talent for painting” (Sanders 206).

25. The best discussion of the breaking of Audubon's pastoral pattern is Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975) 74‐88. Audubon's ecological or conservationist impulses are also discussed in Lindsey, chap. 8; Francis Hobart Herrick, Audubon the Naturalist, 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton, 1917) xii; Sanders (9‐10). Discussion of the “interrupted idyll” will be found in Leo Marx, “Pastoral Ideals and City Troubles,” in Western Man and Environmental Ethics, ed. Ian G. Barbour (Reading: Addison‐Wesley, 1973) 109.

26. Quoted in Lindsey 120.

27. Cited in Sanders 10.

Works Cited

Audubon, John James. Delineations of American Scenery and Character. New York: G. A. Baker & Company, 1926.

———. Ornithological Biography, or An Account of the Habits of the Birds of the United States of America. 5 vols. (This is the text meant to accompany the plates of The Birds of America.) Philadelphia: J. Dobson, 1831 (vol. 1); Boston: Hilliard, Gray & Co., 1835 (vol. 2); Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 1835‐39 (vols. 3‐5).

———. The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, with John Bachman. 2 vols. of plates, New York: 1845‐46. 3 vols. of text, New York: 1846‐54.

Audubon, Maria R. Audubon and His Journals. 2 vols. 1897. Reprint, New York: Dover, 1986.

Bartram, William. Travels. Ed. Mark Van Doren. New York: Dover, 1955.

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Burke, Edmund. Of the Sublime and Beautiful. Works. Bohn edition, 1854. ii.5.

Curti, Merle. The Growth of American Thought. 2d ed. New York: Harper & Bros., 1951.

Earnest, Ernest. John and William Bartram: Botanists and Explorers. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1940.

Elman, Robert. First in the Field: America's Pioneering Naturalists. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1977.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. Boston: J. Munroe, 1836.

Fagin, N. Bryllion. William Bartram: Interpreter of the American Landscape. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1933.

Finch, Robert, and John Elder. The Norton Book of Nature Writing. New York: Norton, 1990.

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Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955.

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Marx, Leo. “Pastoral Ideals and City Troubles.” In Western Man and Environmental Ethics: Attitudes toward Nature and Technology. Ed. Ian G. Barbour. Reading: Addison‐Wesley, 1973. 18‐30.

Porter, Charlotte M. The Eagle's Nest: Natural History and American Ideas, 1812‐1842. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1986.

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———. Wonders Hidden: Audubon's Early Years. Santa Barbara: Capra Press, 1984.

Seavey, Ormond. “William Bartram.” Dictionary of Literary Biography 37:31‐38.

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———. The Poetical Works of Alexander Wilson. Belfast: J. Henderson, 1857.