The White Birch

THE white birch of our northern woods seems to hold within its veins more of the elixir of ancient Pagandom than any other of our impulsive, untended wood-growths. Its waving elegance, its white smoothness of limb, the misty inefficiency of its veil of green, even its shy preference for untrodden earth and unappropriated hillsides give it a half-fleeting suggestion of the fabled days when nymph and faun danced with the shadows of the song-haunted forest.

Coleridge calls the white birch “the lady of the woods,” but beyond the poetical suggestion of sex and award of beauty given by such a phrase from such a source, there is a hint in the young white birch tree of something far apart from the present of simple perfect tree-life. One is haunted by visions of slender nymphhood always young and always beautiful, dancing joyously through rainbow-colored days and sleeping lightly through mists of star-threaded darkness, waiting for the golden call of the sunbeams to begin again the rhythmic waltz of motion. One has only to sit long enough with a birch tree in the bewilderment of summer hours, to hear and see and feel its relation to the dreams which long-ago peoples have dreamed. Its relation to a life without self-made law, lived as the birds live, with their only code written within their natures by the hand which made them.

The exceeding beauty of the birch tree is apparent at all times, but there are places, and enrichments of circumstance, which bring it to a point where the enjoyment of it is lifted to a plane which covers all our faculties of feeling. There are days in my memory which I call my “ white-birch days,” as full of sensation as they could possibly have been if filled with the finest human companionship.

One misplaced windy day in late May I went walking over the hill-pastures of New Hampshire looking for arbutus, sometimes stumbling through a scum of dried leaves blown from neighboring woods or breaking through a knee-high crust of low-growing oak twigs, buffeting the wind as I climbed, and turning every now and then to see where slopes of the hill waved their breadths of long ochrecolored last-year’s grasses against the inspiring blue of the sky; enjoying all the yellows and browns and ash-colors and faint greens of earth spread out expectantly under the blue promise of a May heaven. Suddenly I came upon a long line of tumbled stones, and then an angle of still-standing old stone wall, where a sudden dip in the ground made an inconvenient corner long forgotten of plough or scythe; and there grew a young birch forest.

How intent they were upon growing! The small unfolding leaves were quivering with effort, and I noticed for the first time, how the gradual darkening of the bark at the ends of the twigs made them invisible, so that for a space of the innumerable small branchings, the young green leaves seemed unattached to the tree and were like a swarm of leaves fluttering around it in a mist of green. They were transparent with early spring — the sap in them had not hardened into the green enamel of summer, so that it was a cloud of gauzy wings which fluttered between and around and above the white branchings. They were not separate trees, but an intermingling of wonderful tracery, a space in air filled with a silvery net of crossing and branching and inter laced and beautifully ordered lines of living growth, a tangle of ethereal and material beauty which I knew would not melt like frostwork under a breath, but go on living and growing, higher and constantly higher, toward the sky from which came the command of their being.

When I walked down among them, fingering their white young bodies as I passed, I came to a slice of lichen-covered primeval rock in the midst of them, and then into the heart of a cloud of heavenly fragrance, and there hiding almost under the rock, ran the arbutus which had called me from home.

“ Oh how dear of you to be here! just here! ” I said as I parted the thick rounded leaves and came upon the perfection of spring blossoming; then I sat me down and listened to and answered the silent utterances which swarmed up from the ground, and swam level from the branches, and fell in small celestial drops from the tree-tops. It was a transubstantiation of me into the something which filled the air, the very life of life of the natural world. What mortal voice could have drawn me to the height where my heart sang with the trees and rose with them to higher levels. All the blessed morning I stayed with them, and all the seasons and years since then I have remembered that birch-day as one of the special joys of my life.

Birch trees do not love to grow alone, although they do not care greatly for the companionship of other trees. Two will grow together, contented with a dual life, but more often they grow in groups of sixes and sevens. They are much more often spoken of as “ a clump of birches ” than as “ a birch tree.” If by chance one starts to grow alone, it will stand straight as a hickory, cleaving the air in perfect perpendicular until it has reached manheight, and then it begins to waver — looking to east or west or north or south for companionship ; and failing that — grows into a permanent lean. This semicrookedness seems to add character to the tree, instead of taking from it; what it lacks in uprightness it gains in a certain confidingness, an innocence of spirit emphasized by its attitude.

The primitive races of North America established a closer relation with the shy birch tree than we have been able to do, and it served for them many important and friendly purposes.

First and foremost it carried them along rivers and over lake-crossings with a security which we should never have imagined, or experienced. A man with shoes on his feet could never have trusted the frail bottoms of Indian canoes to hold him safely; in fact, only the stealthy certainty of an Indian foot can tread them without fear or care. The Indian strips the bark from the wood, and fashions it to his mind, or the mind of some forefather of his race, and straightway the birch tree has entered upon an enlargement of its existence, a period of the life of motion; not as in the days of its nymphhood, — a dance in Elysian fields, —but a blissful floating over shining surfaces — where blue of sky, and white of clouds, and green of trees, and brown of water-depths are mingled and fused in sun rays, and the canoe casts the record of its woodland life upon the water and becomes a part of the poetry of the woods.

The birch tree connects itself at many points with what we call savage life, meaning that which finds its satisfactions in nature instead of civilization; its unmanufactured parchment has borne pictured messages of war and warriors, love and lovers, and has been a partner in the mysterious incantations of primitive healers. It has served as material and background for curious embroideries of Indian women, done in color with dyed quills of the porcupine. It has been fashioned into vessels which carried food and water to sick or starving men, and has lit the fires and cooked the meals of the human creatures of the wilderness. First and last, wild creature as the white birch continues to be, it ministers well to body and soul of man with its beauty and its uses.

The baby white birch wears a bark of yellow or brown, covering its slender, branchy twigs; but the moment youth approaches, the tree dons the white livery of the nymphs and joins the ranks of its fellows in silvery uniform.

In a middle aged birch tree the bark is written all over with hieroglyphics of its experiences, — whether the black marks record inner or outer history we know not, since no man has found the key to that sign language; but as the days go on, and seasons succeed one another, and happenings arrive, the hieroglyphics grow, until some day perhaps the birch tree becomes a roll of history hidden in secret places of the deep woods, covered with signs as inscrutable as those of ancient papyrus in Egyptian tombs.

One of my white-birch-tree days I shall always remember as having been curiously influenced by a present and past of world-thought which seemed to infest it. It was in that part of the forest of Fontainebleau which lies neighboring Barbizon. The forest itself was purely a forest; instinct with tree-life, and bird-life, and animal-life; although the latter had a smack of conventionality, or even artificiality, which was not a natural condition. One had a feeling that the animals had been wound up, to walk through prescribed deer-paths, and cheat the sight with a semblance of wild life, like a forest glade in a theatre. Yet in large quiet, and amid rocks and springing tufts of wood-growths and patches of undisturbed mosses and ferns, there stood a group of white birches, beautiful to behold. The shadow of the gray rock against which it braced itself, smelled softly damp, like the shadows of rocks I knew in far-off mountains; and small vermilion-colored umbrella-shaped toadstools grew in it, and over it was a sky as ethereal, as deeply blue, as unstained, as the sky which bent over the great mountains of other birch-tree haunts of the wide, wide world. These trees had reached middle age, and were old enough to remember the forest pageants of the latest Napoleonic period. They might have seen the beautiful Eugénie as she sat in Winterhalter’s portrait, with a forest setting for herself and her favorite ladies.

“That is what makes of these birch trees ladies instead of nymphs,” I said to myself, as I unfolded my camp-chair and spread the legs of a folding easel, and opened my color-box. “ They look like New England trees, but they remember sophisticated people; the air is full of thoughts and motions of courts and kings and of to-day motives and strivings. Some painter with a mind full of thoughts of technique, and flitting foredreams of personal success, has painted them. His mind has wrestled with advanced painters for admission to the Salon, while his eyes were noting the transparencies of June drapery, and the wonderful symmetry of limb of these ladies of the woods. The air is still instinct with his flying thoughts and glittering with little snapshots of his bodily presence. I may get a portrait to-day, but I shall not have a vision.” And all the while the blues were deepening on my canvas, and the grays and greens and golds coming forward into sunshine or going back into shadow, and the long white stems growing into birch trees.

By and by I began to feel their own reserved life; I absorbed a subtle understanding of its individual and personal reality. Of course the trees were not living in lower air; they were rising above it into the pure ether which is attainable by all earthly things. I was conscious that the tree-sense lived and dominated the little ambitions and vagaries of human life both past and present. I recognized the God-thought, planted and growing upward, and unconscious of lower things in its pure instinct of beauty, simplicity, and truth. All the insect trivialities which multiply in the imagination of man, and fly forth and become an almost imperishable environment, were scattered. While I painted and pondered, a deer walked out into the open on delicate feet, and withdrew again silently into the misty obscurity of the forest; but he was no longer to me a suggestion of man’s contrivance; he was a real, heavenly-conceived creature, made to consort with and enjoy other wild things of his creation. In the stillness rabbits chased one another across my very foreground, and a woodpecker walked upside down along the arm of an old oak which projected across my sky line.

There were no more fashion plates or wrangles of methods or ambitions in the air — nothing but the group of birch trees with its beautiful, silent, upward reach into heaven, and the blue and gold and silver of a June day in the great historical forest.

But at night, when I had set my birchtree portrait up to dry on the stone shelf above the cottage fireplace, and stretched myself upon the smooth hardness of a cottage bed, and darkness filled the small one-windowed room, I lay and wondered in the deep of my heart, how much remained of the uttered thought and completed acts of our precedent fellowmortals? Had they only a fleeting and perishable existence ? or was the air filled with the active and transparent ghosts of them as I had felt them in the forest ? There all the space around me had seemed thick with foregone life, only the serene spirit of the trees was unconscious of it.

Even the branches which reached within touch of humanity seemed to make their own atmosphere, and stand in beautiful and perfect harmony both with solitude and society, loving the one and accepting the other. It reminded me of some dear misplaced souls I have known, planted, and fast-grown amidst unworthy things, — who have kept themselves unspotted from the world, and by some alchemy of spirit brought out hidden gold from life’s unworthiness.

And after all, if it is our instinct and mission to seek for, and enjoy, and profit by beauty — we must realize that it lives everywhere, that it pervades the earth. It is easy to understand that our eyes, trained to recognize only material form and color, and the wonderful combinations of them in God’s material world, may fail at times to recognize beauty in colorless miracles of spiritual growth, while in the sight of wide-eyed angels they may be the perfection of which the beautiful things in nature are but a type.

The spirit of a heavenly-minded man may outgrow the height of the tallest elm — and the love and brooding of a man-loving man may spread its arms beyond the breadth of the broadest oak.

Is it not our true privilege in life, not only to love the highest beauty, both in nature and man, but to grow within ourselves the most perfect form and shape according to our kind, and to love with all our hearts the spiritual growth of other mortals, according to their kind ? They may be like baby firs, beautiful and enticing in youth, growing ragged and unsightly with stress of years; or slender half-naked elm bodies, growing finally into power and strength; or helpless human saplings, choked by the world — but they have been planted in the world of spirits, and may be helped by wakeful love, or hindered by the want of it.

All these suggestions came to me from a group of captive and tamed birch trees in the forest of Fontainebleau. Still in my mind its sisters remain forever and always nymphs of the woods and mountain; the sap of the forest coursing through their veins , vital with conscious life, and their graceful feet dancing the nymph-dance, in flecks of shadow, or gilding of sun. Sometimes on a windy day I have seen a group of them bending as if they longed to join the chase of the winds; and remembered my group of birches in the historical forest and was glad at heart to have known them both.