William Bartram

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The Art of Bartram

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SOURCE: Fagin, N. Bryllion. “The Art of Bartram.” In William Bartram: Interpreter of the American Landscape, pp. 101-123. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1933.

[In the following excerpt, Fagin provides an important reassessment of Bartram's Travels, noting unique stylistic techniques and describing underpinnings of his philosophy. Fagin also briefly notes the influences on Bartram as well as the effect he had on later writers.]

Throughout this study Bartram's “style” has received incidental mention. This has been inevitable because of the amount of attention it has attracted from both literary and scientific commentators. English reviewers noted his “luxuriant and poetical” language; Carlyle enjoyed his “wondrous kind of floundering eloquence”; Zimmermann, in translating the Travels, corrected his “poetischen Floskeln”;1 Squier insisted on retaining “the antiquated and somewhat quaint phraseology and style of the author”2 of the “Observations”; Miss Dondore was impressed by his “luxuriant detail”;3 a modern American reviewer has been pleased by his “lush descriptions”;4 and Tracy has found his language “rhetorical,” not, however, without at the same time being aware of the prime virtue of Bartram's art, his “genuine sensitiveness” to all the aspects of nature.5

It is this sensitiveness that nourishes Bartram's art and stamps his reactions to nature with originality. His style may derive partly from the conventional nature notations of his time, but his senses are acute and his sensations genuine. His love of nature transcends the occasionally stilted diction in which it is expressed and infuses his writings with an infectious enthusiasm. Imperceptibly, what begins by sounding as bombast, soon establishes itself as native exuberance. Alexander Wilson acknowledged that he had caught this enthusiasm from Bartram, when he wrote:

I confess that I was always an enthusiast in my admiration of the rural scenery of nature; but since your example and encouragement have set me to attempt to imitate her productions, I see new beauties in every bird, plant, or flower I contemplate.6

And we today must acknowledge that it is Bartram's enthusiasm, exuberance, or gusto which vitalizes his landscape and compels us to sense it is an immediate experience. The record of his sense impressions is not only genuine, accurate, and varied, but it is shot through with poetic coloring, which, while it never distorts, adds a touch of the glamorous to his descriptions.

One form of the glamorous, imparted by his enthusiasm, is a frequent lapse into sheer rhapsody. As a consequence, his visual impressions, which are for the most part carefully and temperately expressed, occasionally become fervent and exclamatory. A sunrise inspires him to such a passage as the following:

Behold how gracious and beneficent smiles the roseate morn! now the sun arises and fills the plains with light, his glories appear on the forests, encompassing the meadows, and gild the top of the terebinthine Pine and exalted Palms, now gently rustling by the pressure of the waking breezes: the music of the seraphic crane resounds in the skies, in separate squadrons they sail, encircling their precincts, slowly descend beating the dense air, and alight on the green dewy verge of the expansive lake; its surface yet smoaking with the grey ascending mists, which, condensed aloft in clouds of vapour, are born away by the morning breezes and at last gradually vanish on the distant horizon.

(pp. 245-246)

A forest scene makes him exclaim:

Behold yon promontory, projecting far into the great river, beyond the still lagoon, half a mile distance from me, what a magnificent grove arises, on its banks! how glorious the Palm! how majestically stands the Laurel, its head forming a perfect cone! its dark green foliage, seems silvered over with milkwhite flowers. They are so large, as to be distinctly visible at the distance of a mile or more.

(p. 85)

The rhapsodist is, of course, never entirely separated from the scientist, and frequently his style is a combination of botany and poetry:

What sylvan scene is here! the pompous Magnolia, reigns sovereign of the forests; how sweet the aromatic Illisium groves? how gaily flutters the radiated wings of the Magnolia auriculata? each branch supporting an expanded umbrella superbly crested with a sliver plume, fragrant blossom, or crimson studded strobile and fruits! I recline on the verdant bank, and view the beauties of the groves, Aesculus pavia, Prunus memoralis, floribus racemosis, ….

(pp. 407-408)

Nor are his reactions to sound, on occasion, less ecstatic. This is his notation of evening sounds:

How harmonious and soothing is this native sylvan music now at still evening! inexpressibly tender are the responsive cooings of the innocent dove, in the fragrant Zanthoxilon groves, and the variable and tuneful warblings of the nonpareil; with the more sprightly and elevated strains of the blue linnet and golden icterus; this is indeed harmony even amidst the incessant croaking of the frogs; the shades of silent night are made more chearful, with the shrill voice of the whip-poor-will and active mock-bird. …

(p. 154)

And this of running water:

How harmonious and sweetly murmur the purling rills and fleeting brooks, roving along the shadowy vales, passing through the dark, subterranean caverns, or dashing over steep rocky precipices, ….

(p. 322)

But Bartram's descriptions of sound need special emphasis. They are set down with such skill that their impression upon the Romantic poets of his time is not surprising. They are varied enough to include the gentle cooing of doves and the violent roaring of tempests. He hears the lapping of the surf; “the heavy tread of some animal” at night, “the dry limbs of trees upon the ground” cracking “under his feet” (p. 158); the “social prattling coot” and “the squeeling water-hen” (p. 159); the “languishing softness and melancholy air in the Indian convivial songs” (p. 245); “the whooping of owls, screaming bitterns … the wood-rats running amongst the leaves” (p. 124); the “various languages, cries, and fluttering” of birds. He hears the different noises of frogs: that of “the largest frog known in Florida,” which resembles “the grunting of a swine”; that of the bell frog, which “seems clamorous and disgusting”; that of the green frog, which “exactly resembles the barking of little dogs, or the yelping of puppies,” that of “a less green frog,” whose notes are remarkably like that of young chickens”; and that of the shad frog, from whose noise “at some distance one would be almost persuaded that there were assemblies of men in serious debate” (pp. 276-78). And, of course, there is the noise of the alligators. He hears them “plunging and roaring” (p. 88); he hears “the horrid noise of their closing jaws” (p. 123), a “surprising” noise, “like that which is made by forcing a heavy plank with violence upon the ground” (p. 129). It is not at all surprising to find that Coleridge copied into his Note Book the climax of Bartram's description of “the incredible loud and terrifying roar,” which

resembles very heavy distant thunder, not only shaking the air and waters, but causing the earth to tremble; and when hundreds and thousands are roaring at the same time, you can scarcely be persuaded, but that the whole globe is violently and dangerously agitated.

(p. 129)

Bartram, as will soon be shown, saw nature principally as a painter, and his writings are consequently rich in visual descriptions. Yet his sensitiveness to sound—which has just been indicated—was only slightly less remarkable, and any extensive study of his art cannot ignore his notation of gustatory, tactile, and olfactory sensations. He notes the “aromatic flavour” and bitter taste of the palmetto royal tree (p. 72); the “sweet and agreeable” taste of the live oak acorn, from which “the Indians obtain … a sweet oil, which they use in the cooking of hommony, rice, & c. …” (p. 85); the “most disagreeable taste … brassy and vitriolic” of a hot spring (p. 145); the “gratifying” taste of oranges (p. 200); the “sweet and pleasant eating … like chesnuts” of the Nymphaea Nelumbo (p. 409). To be sure, some of these taste descriptions are the observations of a scientist, exact statements of the properties of plants such as one finds in a botanical dictionary. Yet such adjectives as “agreeable,” “gratifying,” and “pleasant” are purely subjective and add an emotional coloring to Bartram's scientific notations. Tactile sensations are suggested by the “silky hair” of a spider (p. xxix); the “fine … downy pubescence of a rhododendron (p. 336); the “hard … couch” on which he reclined at night (p. 50); the “tepid” water of a spring (p. 145); the “sandy beach, hard and firm by the beating surf” (p. 157); “humid rocks” and “smooth pebbles”; the sting of burning flies, “no less ocute than a prick from a red-hot needle, or a spark of fire on the skin” (p. 385). He records the smell of “sweet scented flowers” (p. xxviii); of vegetation “breathing fragrance every where” (p. 34); the breeze “perfumed by the fragrant breath of the superb … White Lily” (p. 59); the “offensive smell” of a geyser (p. 145); “odoriferous Illisium [Illicium?] groves” (p. 160); the “fragrant red strawberry” (p. 344). Sometimes he notes several sensations at the same time: thus the orange groves are “loaded with both green and ripe fruit and embellished with their fragrant bloom, gratifying the taste, the sight, and the smell at the same instant” (p. 200), and “the pericarpium and berries [of the laurel magnolia] possess an agreeable spicy scent, and an aromatic bitter taste. The wood when seasoned is of straw colour, compact, and harder and firmer, than that of the Poplar …” (p. 86).

To Bartram's notations of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch reactions, must be added his perception of mass and motion. For Bartram's descriptions are seldom static. He is constantly on the move, hence the woods and fields and promontories are perceived as passing by. He speaks of the “alternate appearance and recess of the coast, whilst the far distant blue hills slowly retreat and disappear; or, as we approach the coast, the capes and promontories first strike our sight, emerging from the water expanse, and like mighty giants, elevating their crests towards the skies …” (p. 3). He speaks of “squadrons” of birds and “nations” of birds and “tribes” of birds, of “flocks” of turkeys and “communities” of cranes, of “squadrons” and “troops” and “parties” of horses, of “droves” of cattle, of “herds” of deer, of “bands” and “armies” of fish, of “companies” of traders and “companies of young innocent Cherokee virgins,” of “masses” and “groups” of rocks, of “extensive” forests and “extensive” savannas. And these masses are usually dynamic, in motion: the birds are in flight, the horses frolick in the fields or are being driven to market, the cattle graze, the deer take fright and scamper away into the woods, the fish swim, the traders go to town, the Cherokee virgins prick strawberries, and even the rocks and the forests approach or recede as Bartram travels from or toward them. His rivulets “glide in serpentine mazes,” his creeks are “brisk-flowing” and his rivers run “with foaming rapidity.” There is perpetual change and flux in his landscape. The flowers are in the very act of “painting the coves with a rich and cheerful scenery, continually unfolding new prospects as I traverse the shores; the towering mountains seem continually in motion as I pass along, pompously rising their superb crests towards the lofty skies, traversing the far distant horizon” (p. 346).

The rhapsodic element which Bartram's record of his sense impressions often contains is mingled with an emotion deeper than mere aesthetic enthusiasm, a sensation of awe and sublimity. The vastness of the landscape evokes a feeling of grandeur, of magnitude, of majesty, so that the air of exuberance which pervades his descriptions is not merely a physical quality but is a more subtle and spiritual emotion. He discerns “few objects out at sea … but what are sublime, awful, and majestic …” (p. 2). Standing on the shore he notes “how awfully great and sublime is the majestic scene … !” (p. 61). A forest of pine trees continuing for five or six miles is “sublime.” A tempest exhibits “a very awful scene.” In high, projecting promontories he sees “grandeur and sublimity.” He approaches a vale and observes that it is situated “amidst sublimely high forests” and “awful shades!” (p. 343). He is struck “with a kind of awe, at beholding the stateliness of the trunk” of the Cupressus disticha tree (p. 96).

Bartram was no theorist in aesthetics, yet in regarding sublimity as a vital element in landscape he shows his kinship with the aestheticians of his time. “The Sublime,” Hussey tells us, had been noted by Shaftesbury as “the highest order of scenery,” but it was Edmund Burke who was “the first to recognize it as a category co-ordinate with the Beautiful.”7 Hussey could, of course, have gone back all the way to Longinus but it is true nevertheless that the eighteenth century saw the development of the idea of the Sublime as an element of beauty to a degree which previous centuries had not dreamed of. “Vastness,” Hussey continues, “became on of the sublime qualities” in Burke's categories.8 And vastness, it will be noted, is one of the qualities that strikes Bartram as “sublime,” “awful,” or “majestic.” Thus he finds that an “ancient sublime forest … intersected with extensive savannas and far distant Rice plantations, captivates” his “senses by scenes of magnificence and grandeur” (Travels, p. 309). In fact, he is capable of losing himself in vastness, to the neglect of his business as a scientific observer, which requires minute and close attention to specific objects. Once, he confesses, standing on the top of a mountain whence he enjoyed “a view inexpressible magnificent and comprehensive,” he became “wholly engaged in the contemplation of this magnificent landscape, infinitely varied, and without bound,” until he realized that he was “insensible or regardless of the charming objects more within … reach: a new species of …” (pp. 335-6).

It has already been stated that aesthetically William Bartram saw nature with the eyes of a painter. It is important to note to what extent this is true and how this quality influenced his descriptions. He had an accurate eye for line and color; he copied nature: turtles, vines, flowers, birds. It was therefore logical enough that when he came to describe nature, using words instead of paints as his medium, the methods and habits of the painter should still persist. Always he sees his landscape with the painter's eye, and always he translates his visual impressions in terms of color, of lights and shades, using the concentrated impressionism and the economy of means of an artist painting a canvas. Moreover, it is quite clear that he knew paintings, had observed them not only with pleasure, but with a retentive memory. Speaking of the Snake Birds which he saw in the waters of Florida, he remarks, “I think I have seen paintings of them on the Chinese screens and other India pictures” (p. 132). Or, again, watching fish and crocodiles in a fountain he comments: “This amazing and delightful scene, though real, appears at first but as a piece of excellent painting; there seems no medium.” Besides the language of the painter in this description, there is apparent his knowledge of perspective in the finishing touches of this scene: “You imagine the picture to be within a few inches of your eyes, and that you may without the least difficulty touch any one of the fish, or put your fingers upon the crocodile's eye, when it really is twenty or thirty feet under water” (p. 167).

Even more definite is his knowledge of painting and his use of painter's terms as disclosed by his writings on the Indians. An answer to one of the Queries about Indians contains the following remarks:

Like Egyptian mystical hieroglyphics—extremely caricature & picturesque. No chiaro scuro, yet bold outlines, natural. Most beautiful painting on bodies.9

A fuller answer to this or a similar query appears in the “Observations,” in which, among other things, he says:

I am sensible that these specimens of their paintings will, to us, who have made such incomparable progress and refinement in the arts and sciences, appear trifling and ludicrous. … Most beautiful painting now to be found among the Muscogulges is on the bodies of their ancient chiefs or micos, breast, trunk, arms, thighs. … Commonly the sun, moon, and planets occupy the breast; zones or belts, or beautiful fanciful scrolls, wind round the trunk of the body, thighs, arms, and legs, dividing the body into many fields or tablets, which are ornamented of filled up with innumerable figures, as representations of animals of the chase,—a sketch of a landscape. … These paintings are admirably well executed and seem like mezzotinto.10

To these comments must be added a passage from the Travels:

The pillars and walls of the houses of the square are decorated with various paintings and sculptures; which I suppose to be hieroglyphic, and as an historic legendary of political and sacerdotal affairs: but they are extremely picturesque or caricature, as men in variety of attitudes, some ludicrous enough, others having the head of some kind of animal, as those of a duck, turkey, bear, fox, wolf, buck, &c. and again those kind of creatures are represented having the human head. These designs were not ill executed; the outlines bold, free, and well proportioned.

(Travels, 455)

Seeing nature, then as Bartram often did, from the point of view of a painter, his style has the linear and colorful flow of pictorial art. He has the ability to vivify a scene by means of a stroke here and a touch there. His descriptions abound in complete pictures—brilliant flashes, crisp miniatures, and, once in a while, a sprawling canvas:

The little gold-fish instantly fled from every side, darting through the transparent waters like streams of lightning ….

(pp. 43-44)

The ultimate angle of the branchiostega [of the red-belly fish] extends backwards with a long spatula, ending with a round, or oval particoloured spot, representing the eye in the long feathers of a peacock's train, verged round with a thin flame-coloured membrane, and appears like a brilliant ruby fixed on the side of the fish. …

(p. 12)

They [the Snake Birds] delight to sit in little peaceable communities, on the dry limbs of trees, hanging over the still waters, with their wings and tails expanded, I suppose to cool and air themselves, when at the same time they behold their images in the watery mirror: at such times, when we approach them, they drop off the limbs into the water as if dead, and for a minute or two are not to be seen; when on a sudden at a vast distance, their long slender head and neck only appear, and have very much the appearance of a snake, and no other part of them is to be seen when swimming in the water, except sometimes the tip end of their tail. In the heat of the day they are seen in great numbers, sailing very high in the air, over lakes and rivers.

(p. 133)

The last passage is really a group of pictures, unmistakably of the type one is accustomed to call Japanese and Chinese, and those Bartram, by his own admission, saw “on the Chinese screens and other Indian pictures.” An even more representative example of Bartram's Chinese-screen pictorial ability is his description of the wood pelican. He devotes two paragraphs to this bird, and, among other things, paints this sketch:

he stands alone on the topmost limb of tall dead Cypress trees, his neck contracted or drawn in upon his shoulders, and beak resting like a long scythe upon his breast: in this pensive posture and solitary situation, they look extremely grave, sorrowful and melancholy, as if in the deepest thought.11

(p. 150)

But the vividness of his art is not confined to descriptions of birds, fishes, or flowers. Phenomena of nature receive the same bold treatment. Little of the grandeur and power of the subtropical gales he observed fails to be translated, as in the following description:

now the earth trembles under the peals of incessant distant thunder, the hurricane comes on roaring,12 and I am shocked again to life: I raise my head and rub open my eyes, painted with gleams and flashes of lightning; when just attempting to wake my afflicted brethren and companions, almost overwhelmed with floods of rain, the dark cloud opens over my head, developing a vast river of the etherial fire;12 I am instantly struck dumb, inactive and benumbed; ….

(p. 386)

A quality in Bartram's artistry which deserves special mention is his happy faculty of seizing upon the dominant trait of a particular scene or object and making it impressive and memorable. This descriptive method can best be designated by the French word “raccourci.” By means of it Bartram often reduces a long, diffuse passage into a single unforgettable sentence or phrase and even when he begins his description with secondary aspects he can sum up its dominant impression, its distinctive character, in a “raccourci.” The selective quality which such a method involves is of the highest artistic order, as only essentials must be seized upon. The frequency and ease with which Bartram employs this method are ample proof that he was never at a loss to detect the essence of a scene. Thus after describing an old champion alligator and his attitude toward the other alligators in the lake, Bartram writes: “He acts his part like an Indian chief when rehearsing his feats of war” (p. 130). Again, he compresses a long paragraph describing the sun fish into this vivid phrase: “a warrior in a gilded coat of mail” (p. 154). Or he finishes a description of the noise of frogs “uttered in chorus” with the striking comparison to “the rushing noise made by a vast quantity of gravel and pebbles together, at one precipitated from a height” (p. 278).

The diction of Bartram presents an interesting problem. It is a peculiar mixture. At times it is simple and straightforward, at other times it is stilted and florid. In the same paragraph, even in the same sentence, it may vary from austere clearness to overlush vagueness, from bare exposition to imagistic rhapsody. So that both the commentators who, like Carlyle have praised his style and those who, like Zimmermann, have condemned it can be said to have been justified according to their respective points of view; Carlyle liked Bartram's “eloquence,” which he found in abundance, and Zimmermann, being a scientist, would have preferred Bartram's accurate observations without his rhapsodic overtones. The key to an understanding of Bartram's diction is, however, simple; it lies in a knowledge of his education, his reading, his Quaker upbringing, his scientific absorption, and his own personality, for, if ever style adequately expressed the man, Bartram's style surely and completely expressed Bartram. It is this complete self-expression of an interesting personality, of a man who could be “by turn enthusiastic, sober; dramatic, Idyllic; reflective, naive; diffusive, firm; redundant, precise,”13 and, above all, natural, to which the vitality of his writings is due.

Bartram, as has been shown, was not highly educated. There is evidence that he attended the old college in Philadelphia and that for time Charles Thomson was his tutor. The value of this education of whether he received any other is not known. It may reasonably be assumed that most of what real knowledge Bartram possessed came to him through his own efforts, picked up in a desultory way. At any rate, he never quite mastered the English language for literary purposes. His grammar is often shaky and his construction sometimes beyond his abilities, defect which account for the numerous minor “improvements” made in the London and subsequent editions of the Travels. And even in the editions where his English has been corrected such sentences as the following are still to be found:

indeed the musquitoes alone would have been abundantly sufficient to keep any creature awake that possessed their perfect senses.14


his eyes red as burning coals, and his brandishing forked tongue of the colour of the hottest flame, continually menaces death and destruction, yet never strikes unless sure of his mark.15


the sooty songs of Afric forgetting their bondage, in chorus sung. …16

Nor was Bartram's reading without its influence on his literary style. The poetic diction of his purple passages is the same as that commonly found in eighteenth-century English poetry. Echoes of Pope have already been noted; it is reasonable to suppose that Bartram read other eighteenth-century English poets and that they left their impress upon his mind. At any rate, his diction frequently is reminiscent of the worst of Thomson, Gray, Collins, Akenside. It has what Professor Havens has called the “elegant pseudo-classic” note and the “vicious ‘poetic diction’ which blighted English poetry for a century, worming its way into the work even of the best and most natural poets of the time, and giving to many excellent productions an affected and artificial tone.”17 Bartram speaks of “cool eve's approach,” of “feathered songsters,” and “of leafy coverts” (Travels, pp. 81-2); of “solitary groves and peaceful shades” (p. 140); of resuming his “sylvan pilgrimage” (p. 153); of “the glorious sovereign of day, calling in his bright emanations” and leaving “in his absence … the milder government … of the silver queen of night, attended by millions of brilliant luminaries” (p. 190); of “winged emigrants” celebrating their nuptials (p. 287); of “those moral virtues which grace and ornament the most approved and admired characters in civil society” (p. 310). His tendency towards periphrases is obvious. Zimmermann, who was interested in Bartram's scientific facts and not his style, found this tendency irksome and in his translation trimmed down many passages to simple statements. “Schade,” he wrote of Bartram, “das er mit allen diesen Vorzügen nicht auch einen guten Style verbinded. … Das Publikum wird mir daher hoffentlich Dank wissen, dass ich ihm in der Uebersetzung lesbarer zu machen gesucht, und won dem Ueberflüssigen vieles weggestrichen, oder es doch sehr zusammen gezogen habe.”18 As an example of Zimmermann's attempt to make Bartram “lesbarer,” a comparison of the following passage from the Travels with Zimmermann's translation of it is instructive:

The glorious sovereign of day, cloathed in light refulgent, rolling on his gilded chariot, speeds to revisit the western realms. Grey pensive eve now admonishes us of gloomy night's hasty approach: I am roused by care to seek a place of secure repose, ere darkness comes on.

(Travels, 50)

Itzt kam der Abend heran, und erinnerte mich, einen sicheren Ruheort zu suchen.

(Reisen, 53)

Along with the echoes of eighteenth-century poetic diction Bartram's style carries a coloring of biblical expression. He was brought up in an atmosphere of simple piety and reverence for God, in a home where the Bible was read regularly and religiously. To the very end of his life John Bartram exhorted his children to “Love God & one another; extend charity to the necessitous and mercy to the distressed.”19 William Bartram's writings echo these sentiments in almost identical terms. In his letter to his nephew, Dr. James Bartram, he urges him to “Fear and adore the Divinity” and to “be charitable … to the poor and distressed.” In his petition on Negro slavery he admonishes his fellow citizens to “do justice,” to show “mercy” and to “fear God.” And throughout his Travels he speaks of the “glorious display of the Almighty hand,” “the most acceptable incense we offer to the Almighty,” “… our God, who in due time will shine forth in brightness,” “universal Father … with an eye of pity and compassion,” “the wisdom and power of the Supreme Creator,” “thanksgiving to the Supreme Creator and preserver,” “celestial endowments,” “great altars and temples similar to the high places and sacred groves anciently amongst the Canaanites and other nations of Palestine and Judea.” Some of his rhapsodic passages read like the spontaneous evocation of Quaker prayer, such, for instance, as the following:

How glorious the powerful sun, minister of the Most High, in the rule and government of this earth, leaves our hemisphere, retiring from our sight beyond the western forests! I behold with gratitude his departing smiles, tinging the fleecy roseate clouds, now riding far away on the Eastern horizon; behold they vanish from sight in the azure skies!

(Travels, 158)

It is in Bartram's scientific diction that the greatest measure of his originality is to be found. Tracy's statement that “The nature men have not given us new word-sets” but have only “used words in a new way”20 is eminently true of Bartram. He has the faculty of welding together the most commonplace scientific nomenclature with the most gorgeous poetic imagery, so that ordinary vegetables and weeds and birds and snakes become glamorous objects of nature. Analyzed coldly this mixture of botany, ornithology, zoology, and poetry sometimes strikes one as somewhat ludicrous, even pathetic, as when he writes that “the vegetables smile in their blooming decorations and sparkling crystalline dew-drop” (Travels, 387), but read without any intent to dismember, Bartram's style soon begins to exert an effect which is far from unpleasant. Scientific term and poetic image merge perfectly, support and mellow each other, and create a mode of expression characteristic of the author-naturalist. Other botanical observers may have catalogued the following trees in the forest: “Fraxinus, Ulmus, Acer rubrum, Laurus Barbonia, Quercu dentata, Ilex aquafolium, Olea Americana, Morus, Gleditsia traicanthus, and … a species of Sapindus,” but it is only Bartram who could add that the last species mentioned “spreads his brawny arms” and that the Live Oaks “strive while young to be upon an equality with their neighbors … but the others at last prevail, and their proud heads are seen at a great distance …” (p. 84). The touch of imagination changes a dull catalogue into a vivid reality. Sometimes the artistic transformation is accomplished by the phrase which introduces the catalogue, as when he states that “At this rural retirement were assembled a charming circle of mountain vegetable beauties, Magnolia auriculata, Rhododendron ferruginium, Kalmia latifolia, …” (p. 342). The effect of this style upon the non-scientific reader can perhaps best be studied in the following comment of a modern reviewer of his Travels:

To a common reader like myself who am a lover of plants and flowers rather than a botanist, the recurring scientific nomenclature of the volume proves at first disconcerting, forbidding. I am shocked and chagrined to find how few of my familiar friends I am able to recognize in this guise. I stumble over such technical terms as “cordated appendage” and “incarnate lobes” and wonder whether to continue. However, I can and do appreciate “sportive vegetables” and am encouraged to go on. For there is much that I would see in this long-desired book.


Others have enjoyed it in spite of the obtruding nomenclature and so shall I. There is, I find, less of the technical than at first appears; or it may be that I become accustomed to it and learn that it does not matter. Names neither make nor mar the beauty of such a passage as. …


… Did none of the volume's treasures escape the indefatigable Coleridge and Wordsworth? I seek in vain for such an omission—unless it be the “splendid fields of golden Oenothera” which I recognize as my friend the primrose.21

That Bartram's style is a perfect expression of his personality has already been suggested. Nature to Bartram was not cold and impersonal, but an object of love and reverence. All its manifestations partook of the miraculous. Nature was a vast unknown region for him to explore, but he did not stop with the accumulation of impersonal knowledge. His imagination played upon what he observed and drew personal meanings; it found beneath the surfaces a confirmation of the immanence of God and it delighted in the beauty of God's world. His exaltation carried him to rhapsodic exclamations and hyperbolic diction, but it also animated nature-description and imparted to it an imaginative glow. He abounds in such subjective epithets as “beautiful,” “hideous,” “disagreeable,” “pleasant,” “excellent,” and in such superlatives as “incredible,” “prodigious,” “amazing,” “magnificent,” “intolerable,” “extraordinary,” “unparalleled,” “exceedingly,” and “irresistibly.” The effect he is thus able to transmit is precisely what the effect of his travels was upon himself. It makes a reader in 1928 exclaim that “To be young was heaven for a naturalist in eighteenth-century America” and that “This is what the New World was like to a loving spirit, thrilled by nature, and conscious of beauty.”22 His “poetic diction,” objectionable as it may be in the Classicist poets he read, is tolerable and at times not ineffectual in him, for it is not, in his case, “due to lack of imagination” or “to a lack of close observation of nature.”23 Bartram added both imagination and careful observation to nature description, and, above all, he is emotionally genuine and sincere. The fact is that while he was born and reared in the neo-classic period he came to maturity and did his writing in the period when Romantic tendencies were beginning to dominate. “Reason” and “rational” frequently appear in his pages, but also “imagination,” “sublime,” “sensibility.” His very enthusiasm, his unrestrained enjoyment of nature, is what has come to be termed Romantic. Even his periphrases are not always the objectionable neo-classic circumlocution, “vague, unnatural, and mechanical … attempts to be elegant and poetical in an artificial way.”24 On the contrary, they are often imaginative and original attempts to convey an emotional response to the scene he describes. They are figurative evocations which transcribe not only the objects he saw but the mood which they engendered within him. Thus, to take a representative example, he translates his vision of the beating surf into a personification: “the dashing of yon liquid mountains, like mighty giants, in vain assail the skies; they are beaten back, and fall prostrate upon the shores of the trembling island” (Travels, 61). This is periphrastic description, to be sure, but it is founded upon accurate observation and effectively conveys the dramatic quality of the scene. Incidentally, the quotation at the same time indicates Bartram's sense of prose rhythm and his use of onomatopaeia and even alliteration—stylistic devices that come naturally to one whose sight is clear and whose emotion is genuine and spontaneous.

One other element in Bartram's art needs consideration, his narrative ability. The dynamic nature of his description has already been indicated, its movement and animation, but Bartram's gifts as a story-teller are largely responsible for this liveliness of his landscape. His Travels is primarily a narrative and Bartram never permits it to drag. His description is woven, in comparatively small increments, into the account of his movements and experiences. The very first three pages of his book take us from Philadelphia to South Carolina, and the rest of his account bristles with incidents, strange encounters, dramatic episodes, Indian legends, and complete short stories. His landscape ceases to be merely a colorful canvas spread before the eyes of a painter and becomes the background against which the heated spectacle of life is enacted. In spite of the apparent discursiveness of his narrative, Bartram has a directness of communication which springs from an instinctive perception of the dramatic elements of a situation. He selects his materials skillfully, knowing what to exclude, when to linger and when to move on.

In the course of his travels into the Indian territory he met many planters and traders. Their life is depicted not by long descriptions and speculations, but by sketching these men as he came in contact with them. He does not give a complete list of all his experiences and observations, but singles out a few of the numerous white people he has met and recounts a few episodes of their lives. Thus he tells us of the hospitality of the planters by recounting his reception at the plantation of Mr. McIntosh, who greeted him with the words: “Welcome, stranger; come in, and rest; the air is now very sultry; it is a very hot day,” and of Mr. Bailey, who treated him “very civilly” (pp. 13, 15). Or he tells us of a friendly planter who housed him for three days while a storm raged outside, working “almost irreparable damages” everywhere in the neighborhood (p. 143). The life of the white traders among the Indians is pictured in a number of short stories. One of these tells of an unhappy trader “who had for a companion a very handsome Siminole young woman” who “dishonestly distributes amongst her savage relations … all his possessions,” so that “he now endeavors to drown and forget his sorrows in deep draughts of brandy” (pp. 111-2). There is the incident of Mr. M'Latche who presumed to refuse credit to the proud Long Warrior, who thereupon threatened to command “the terrible thunder now rolling in the skies above, to descend upon your head, in rapid fiery shafts, and lay you prostrate at my feet” (pp. 258-59). And there is the story, already referred to, of the trader who had had an affair with the wife of an Indian chief and was threatened with having his ears cut off (pp. 447-8).

There are numerous incidents of encounters with Indians and in telling of these Bartram is able to arouse and maintain a suspense which indicates no mean narrative skill. His first description of meeting with an Indian alone in the forest is an apt illustration of his instinctive mastery of the narrative technique. Deftly he sketches in the setting: “It was drawing on towards the close of day, the skies serene and calm, the air temperately cool … the prospect around enchantingly varied and beautiful. …” Then comes the directness of his vision: “… on a sudden, an Indian appeared … armed with a rifle.” Bartram's reaction to this threatening apparition, his endeavor to elude the Indian's sight by stopping and “keeping large trees between” them, at once sets the stage for a looming conflict. The antagonists take each other's measure, then the Indian “sat spurs to his horse, and came up on full gallop.” The sentences that follow heighten the suspense, so that there is a genuine relief at the dénouement,

I never before this was afraid at the sight of an Indian, but at this time I must own that my spirits were very much agitated: I saw at once, that being unarmed, I was in his power, and having now but a few moments to prepare, I resigned myself entirely to the will of the Almighty. … The intrepid Siminole stopped suddenly, three or four yards before me, and silently viewed me, his countenance angry and fierce, shifting his rifle from shoulder to shoulder and looking about instantly on all sides. I advanced towards him, and with an air of confidence offered him my hand, hailing him, brother; at this he hastily jerked back his arm, with a look of malice, rage, and disdain, seeming every way disconcerted;25 when again looking at me more attentively, he instantly spurred up to me, and, with dignity in his look and action, gave me his hand.

The tenseness and compression of this incident is not diminished by the construction Bartram places upon the Indian's action in the unspoken words and Romantic sentiments he ascribes to him:

Possibly the silent language of his soul, during the moment of suspense (for I believe his design was to kill me when he first came up) was after this manner: “White man, thou art my enemy, and thou and thy brethren may have killed mine; yet it may not be so, and even were that the case, thou art now alone; and in my power. Live; the Great Spirit forbids me to touch thy life; go to thy brethren, tell them thou sawest an Indian in the forests, who knew how to be humane and compassionate.

(pp. 20-21)

Not all of his Indian encounters are of this threatening nature, but they are interesting none the less. Trifling as they may turn out to be they are presented in a way which, for the moment, quickens the pulse with anticipations.

I had not left sight of my encampment, following a winding path through a grove of Live Oak, Laurel (Magn. grandiflora) and Sapindus, before an Indian stepped out of a thicket, and crossed the path just before me, having a large turkey cock, slung across his shoulders, he saw me stepping up and smiling, spoke to me in English, bidding me good morning. I saluted him with “It's well brother,” led him to my camp, and treated him with a dram.

(p. 75)

One other illustration will serve to emphasize the directness with which Bartram relates these encounters:

I took out of my wallet some biscuit and cheese, and a piece of neat's tongue, composing myself to ease and refreshment; when suddenly appeared within a few yards, advancing towards me from behind the point, a stout likely Indian fellow, armed with a rifle gun, and two dogs attending, upon sight of me stood, and seemed a little surprised, as I was very much; but instantly recollecting himself and assuming a countenance of benignity and cheerfulness, he came briskly to me and shook hands heartily; and smiling enquired from whence I came, and whither going, but speaking only in the Cherokee tongue, our conversation was not continued for a great length.

(pp. 361-62)

However, it is in encounters which contain the element of danger that Bartram is at his best. In such cases he builds up, by subtle little touches, an atmosphere of real suspense. The antagonist need not always be an Indian. The limitless savannas and virgin forests are fraught with all sorts of dire possibilities, and one feels in reading Bartram that at any minute something may happen. To cite another example:

Observed a number of persons coming up a head which I soon perceived to be a party of Negroes: I had every reason to dread the consequence; for this being a desolate place, I was by this time several miles from any house or plantation, and had reason to apprehend this to be a predatory band of Negroes: people being frequently attacked, robbed, and sometimes murdered by them at this place; I was unarmed, alone, and my horse tired; thus situated every way in their power, I had no alternative but to be resigned and prepare to meet them, as soon as I saw them distinctly a mile or two off, I immediately alighted to rest, and give breath to my horse, intending to attempt my safety by flight, if upon near approach they should betray hostile designs, thus prepared, when we drew near to each other, I mounted and rode briskly up; and though armed with clubs, axes and hoes, they opened to right and left, and let me pass peaceably ….

(pp. 471-72)

The same ability to portray a situation full of suspense is discernible in Bartram's encounters with animals. The element of conflict, so essential in any narrative, is never absent from his descriptions of these adventurous incidents. His fight with the alligators, a part of his book which has proved most memorable, is actually thrilling. First he describes a battle among the alligators themselves, which he has witnessed, a sort of prelude which causes his “apprehensions” to become “highly alarmed.” To add to the atmosphere of danger, he sets down, with truly Poesque sensitiveness to the shadings of a situation, that “the sun was near setting.” Then the battle begins. His canoe is “attacked on all sides” and his plight becomes “precarious to the last degree.” The realism of the struggle is most meticulous and highly effective. His diction becomes precise and dramatic. Nouns become concrete and specific; verbs spring alive with action. “Two very large ones attacked me closely, at the same instant, rushing up with their heads and part of their bodies above the water, roaring terribly and belching floods of water over me. They struck their jaws together so close to my ears, as almost to stun me, and I expected every moment to be dragged out of the boat and instantly devoured” (pp. 118-19).

Equally thrilling are other scenes, in which Bartram himself was not an antagonist, often not even a participant, but merely a spectator. Such are the numerous hunting episodes or battles between animals which he describes. These are seldom purely objective descriptions but are colored either by pity or by a sense of the dramatic. There is the account, in the Introduction, of the killing of a mother bear and her cub, which “fell to weeping and … cried out like a child” (p. xxvi). There is the description of Indians hunting deer, which moves with the tempo of the genuine story-teller:

The red warrior, whose plumed head flashes lightning, whoops in vain; his proud, ambitious horse strains and pants; the earth glides from under his feet, his flowing mane whistles in the wind, as he comes up full of vain hopes. The bounding roe views his rapid approaches, rises up, lifts aloft his antled head, erects the white flag, and fetching a shrill whistle, says to his fleet and free associates, “follow;” he bounds off, and in a few minutes distances his foe a mile; suddenly he stops, turns about, and laughing says “how vain, go chase meteors in the azure plains above, or hunt butterflies in the fields about your towns.”

(p. 188)

And there is the account of a battle between a hawk and a snake “that had wreathed himself several times round the hawks body.” The two, he tells us, finally “mutually agreed to separate themselves, each one seeking his own safety, probably considering me as their common enemy” (pp. 218-19).

Besides these stories of encounters between man and man, man and animals, and animals and animals, Bartram also relates many Indian stories. He picks up historical episodes and tribal legends and relates them with his usual gusto and charm, with especial care to their dramatic values. To these belong his account of the Indian's disagreement with the Georgians's determination of the land boundaries (pp. 39-40); his account of the origin of the Creek Confederacy (pp. 54-55); and the beautiful legend of the mythical island in Lake Ouaquaphenogaw,

a most blissful spot of the earth … inhabited by a peculiar race of Indians, whose women are incomparably beautiful; … this terrestrial paradise has been seen by some … enterprising hunters, when in pursuit of game, who being lost in inextricable swamps and bogs, and on the point of perishing, were unexpectedly relieved by a company of beautiful women, whom they call daughters of the sun, who kindly gave them such provisions as they had with them, which were chiefly fruit, oranges, dates, &c. and some corn cakes, and then enjoined them to fly for safety to their own country; for that their husbands were fierce men, and cruel to strangers. …

(pp. 24-26)

The importance of Bartram's narrative ability becomes heightened if a comparison is made between his art and that of the other travel writers who preceded him. There is neither vividness nor particularization in Catesby, Lawson, Byrd, or Carver. Lawson, for instance, frequently deals with situations similar to those described by Bartram, but they are neither dramatic nor memorable. He too mentions the hospitality of the planters, but in vague, general, and colorless terms. “About noon,” he says, “we reached another island … ; there lived an honest Scot who gave us the best protection his Dwelling afforded. …26 Not the slightest attempt at individualization of dialogue. He also records encounters with Indians, but his record has no element of possible conflict and hence no suspense. “The next day about noon we accidentally met with a Southward Indian, amongst those that us'd to trade backward and forward, and spoke a little English, whom we hir'd. …”27 One must conclude that it was not a mere accident that Bartram's Travels has remained a memorable book, a work of art in many respects, while the accounts of Lawson and his contemporaries have today but a mild historical interest.

Writing, one feels, was a pleasant art for Bartram. There is an ease about his style, a sense of effortlessness; he was a traveler with creative ability, a combination not often found among earlier travelers and seldom found among later travelers. His father, for example, “seems always to have handled the pen with a certain stiffness … he evidently does not feel at liberty with his inkhorn. It was this fact, doubtless, that tended to lose in the dust of the past a name that otherwise would have held its place with the greatest.”28 William Bartram's name, instead of being lost in the dust, is becoming more widely known. His art is alive. He saw the American landscape clearly, hugely enjoyed what he saw, and had the ability to dramatize it in words. One wonders what Bartram would have done with the Natural Bridge in Virginia. Thomas Jefferson spent a page and a half in his Notes and succeeded in conveying merely a few expository details. He talked about the fissure being 270 feet deep, 45 feet wide, 90 feet at the top; he talked about his looking down from the top and getting a violent headache; and when he became emotional he gave up describing altogether, exclaiming that “the rapture of the spectator is really indescribable.”29 The magnificence, the colors, the lights and shades, that Bartram would have seen and painted for us!

Bartram capture not only the aesthetic surfaces of nature, but the spirit of distance, solitude, and the unknown. Into the romantic remote he traveled and his days and nights pass before our eyes, the succession of morning, noon, and night, of sunrise and sunset and moonlight; we meet strange objects of nature, people, silence and solitude and song, and sunrise again, “the roseate moon.”

Notes

  1. Reisen [Bartram, William], p. 50.

  2. Op. cit., Prefatory Note [Squier, E. G. Prefatory and Supplementary Notes to “Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians. By William Bartram.” Transactions of the American Ethnological Society,], pg. 6.

  3. Dorothy Anne Dondore, The Prairie and the Making of Middle America: Four Centuries of Description. Cedar Rapids, Iowa, p. 133.

  4. “Notes of a Rapid Reader,” The Saturday Review of Literature, April 21, 1928.

  5. Op. cit. [Tracy, Henry C. American Naturalists], pg. 38.

  6. Ibid., p. 38.

  7. Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque. London, 1927, p.55.

  8. Ibid., p. 55.

  9. Answer to Question 7 in John Howard Payne's Commonplace Book.

  10. Transactions of the Am. Ethnological Society, III, Part I, 18-19.

  11. For the use that Wordsworth made of this passage see the next chapter.

  12. For the use which Coleridge made of the last phrase see next chapter.

  13. Review of The Travels in The Nation, CXXVI (1928), 328.

  14. Travels, Van Doren ed., p. 128.

  15. Ibid., p. 222.

  16. Ibid., p. 257.

  17. Raymond Dexter Havens, “The Poetic Diction of the English Classicists,” Anniversary Papers by Colleagues and Pupils of George Lyman Kittredge, Boston, 1913, pp. 437-38.

  18. E. A. W. Zimmermann, Reisen, pp. ix-x.

  19. MS. of eighteen pages in the Bartram Papers, in handwriting of John Bartram, but unsigned and undated.

  20. Henry Chester Tracy, op. cit., p. 8.

  21. “Browsing through Bartram,” by F. H. The Christian Science Monitor.

  22. “Notes of a Rapid Reader,” The Saturday Review of Literature, April 21, 1928.

  23. R. D. Havens, op. cit., p. 440.

  24. Ibid., p. 442.

  25. The Van Doren edition substitutes “discontented” (p. 45), an emendation taken over from the London edition (p. 21).

  26. John Lawson, op. cit., p. 2.

  27. Ibid., p. 20.

  28. Harper's Magazine, LX, 322. Also see Popular Science Monthly, XL, 834: “His observations are minute and sagacious, and his language is simple, but his sentences are loosely strung out, and the record is the barest statement of facts.” However, Middleton has indicated that John Bartram “on occasion displayed an excellent command of English and an almost poetic finish in description” (The Scientific Monthly, XXI, 210), which merely, if granted, proves that William Bartram's descriptive talent is a flowering of a hereditary proclivity.

  29. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, pp. 34-35.

Works Cited

Anonymous. “Notes of a Rapid Reader.” The Saturday Review of Literature, IV (1928).

———. “The Travels of William Bartram.” The Nation, CXXXVI (1928).

Bartram, John. Bartram Papers. The Simon Gratz Collection, Manuscript Division, Pennsylvania Historical Society, Philadelphia.

Bartram, William. “Answers to Queries about Indians.” In John Howard Payne's Commonplace Book. Manuscript Division, Pennsylvania Historical Society, Philadelphia.

———. “Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians, 1789.” Transactions of the American Ethnological Society, III. New York, 1853.

———. The Travels of William Bartram, edited by Mark Van Doren. New York, 1928.

———. Reisen durch Nord- und Sud- Karolina, Georgien, Ost- and West- Florida, das Gebiet der Tskerokesen, Krihks und Tschaktahs. Aus dem Englischen mit Anmerkungen von E. A. W. Zimmermann. Berlin, 1793.

Dondore, Dorothy A. The Prairie and the Making of Middle America: Four Centuries of Description. Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 1926.

H., F. “Browsing through Bartram.” The Christian Science Monitor, May 2, 1929.

Havens, Raymond Dexter. “The Poetic Diction of the English Classicists.” Anniversary Papers by Colleagues and Pupils of George Lyman Kittredge. Boston, 1913.

Hussey, Christopher. The Picturesque. London, 1927.

Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia with Appendix. (A few copies printed in Paris, 1784. Written, 1782.) Second American edition, Philadelphia, 1794.

Lawson, John. The History of Carolina: Containing the Exact Description and Natural History of the Country: Together with the Present State thereof And a Journal of a Thousand Miles, Travel'd thro' Several Nations of Indians. Giving a particular Account of their Customs, Manners, &c. London, 1714. Reprint of copy in the North Carolina State Library at Raleigh. Charlotte, 1903.

Middleton, William S. “John Bartram, Botanist.” The Scientific Monthly, XXI (1925).

Payne, John Howard. Commonplace Book. Manuscript Division, Pennsylvania Historical Society, Philadelphia.

Squier, E. G. Prefatory and Supplementary Notes to “Observations on the Creek and Cherokee Indians. By William Bartram.” Transactions of the American Ethnological Society, III, part I (1853). New York.

Tracy, Henry C. American Naturists. New York, 1930.

Zimmermann, E. A. W. “Vorrede des Ubersetzers.” In Reisen durch Nord- und Sud- Karolina, etc. Berlin, 1793.

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Pastoral Patterns in William Bartram's Travels

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