Untitled Book Review

ONCE, from the isolated post of ‘The Outermost House,’ Henry Beston gave us a look at the innermost man. He was a solitary figure then; walking the lonely beach, hearing the sound of the sea, holding unshadowed his place in the sun; a talker of the night, remarker of birds, a full-time sharer of the ritual of the seasons. He was more than that. He was a mystic, the indwelling outdweller, fool of the zodiac, a man in man’s place; and, because for once so very natural, to most of us so very strange. It was this fair glimpse into him more than the idle circumstance of his year on the forearm of Cape Cod that has made his best book persist already as Thoreau’s books and those of a few other solitaries have persisted from one civilization to another. He said something, and (better) he lived something, so very old that it turned out to be new.

The outermost readers of Mr. Beston, therefore, will not be Surprised to find that he has lately written a small volume called Herbs and the Earth (Doubleday, Doran, $2.00). ‘It is this earth which is the true inheritance of man, his link with his human past, the source of his religion, ritual and song, the kingdom without whose splendor he lapses from his mysterious estate of man to a baser world which is without the other virtue and the other integrity of the animal.’ His earth has a garden; but it is not a garden ‘painted with flowers as with oils.’ It is a bed of herbs — of the civil flowers — ‘beautiful and ancient presences of green, dear to man and the human spirit.’ I have used these quotations with reference to reverence; for this small treatise, which one or two reviewers have listed as a garden book, is, in fact, a paganly beautiful religious utterance. The author s herbs have roots and leaves and flowers and souls: Sweet Woodruff for tisane (or ptisan, I like better); Comfrey and Woundwort for shade; Lovage for perennial; Basil for salad; Coriander for the Bible; Spike Vervain for magic; Dittany for name; and ‘their larger confraternity’ for mystery and life.

It does not require a knowledge of herbs to expose the almost anxious sincerity of this book. It was written out of love, not out of need or notion. It is simple, and it will bore the trivial mind. Unpoetic botanists may quarrel with the author’s scholarship, but that is of interest solely to scholars. I only know that his chapters arc full of the right seeds, the right smells, the right words of ‘honorable inheritance,’ with the rhythm of the seasons in the prose. The text is further civilized by the excellent woodcuts of John Howard Benson.

DAVID MCCORD