Theodore Roosevelt: an Autobiography — Ch 09-Outdoors and Indoors, pt 2

Ten days later, at Sagamore Hill, I was among my own birds, and was much interested as I listened to and looked at them in remembering the notes and actions of the birds I had seen in England.

On the evening of the first day I sat in my rocking-chair on the broad veranda, looking across the Sound towards the glory of the sunset.

The thickly grassed hillside sloped down in front of me to a belt of forest from which rose the golden, leisurely chiming of the wood thrushes, chanting their vespers;

through the still air came the warble of vireo and tanager; and after nightfall we heard the flight song of an ovenbird from the same belt of timber.

Overhead an oriole sang in the weeping elm, now and then breaking his song to scold like an overgrown wren.

Song-sparrows and catbirds sang in the shrubbery; one robin had built its nest over the front and one over the back door, and there was a chippy's nest in the wistaria vine by the stoop.

During the next twenty-four hours I saw and heard, either right around the house or while walking down to bathe, through the woods, the following forty-two birds: Little green heron, night heron, red-tailed hawk, yellow-billed cuckoo, kingfisher, flicker, humming-bird, swift, meadow-lark, red-winged blackbird, sharp-tailed finch, song sparrow, chipping sparrow, bush sparrow, purple finch, Baltimore oriole, cowbunting, robin, wood thrush, thrasher, catbird, scarlet tanager, red-eyed vireo, yellow warbler, black-throated green warbler, kingbird, wood peewee, crow, blue jay, cedar-bird, Maryland yellowthroat, chickadee, black and white creeper, barn swallow, white-breasted swallow, ovenbird, thistlefinch, vesperfinch, indigo bunting, towhee, grasshopper-sparrow, and screech owl.

The birds were still in full song, for on Long Island there is little abatement in the chorus until about the second week of July, when the blossoming of the chestnut trees patches the woodland with frothy greenish-yellow.

[*] [*] Alas!

the blight has now destroyed the chestnut trees, and robbed our woods of one of their distinctive beauties.

Our most beautiful singers are the wood thrushes; they sing not only in the early morning but throughout the long hot June afternoons.

Sometimes they sing in the trees immediately around the house, and if the air is still we can always hear them from among the tall trees at the foot of the hill.

The thrashers sing in the hedgerows beyond the garden, the catbirds everywhere.

The catbirds have such an attractive song that it is extremely irritating to know that at any moment they may interrupt it to mew and squeal.

The bold, cheery music of the robins always seems typical of the bold, cheery birds themselves.

The Baltimore orioles nest in the young elms around the house, and the orchard orioles in the apple trees near the garden and outbuildings.

Among the earliest sounds of spring is the cheerful, simple, homely song of the song-sparrow; and in March we also hear the piercing cadence of the meadow-lark--to us one of the most attractive of all bird calls.

Of late years now and then we hear the rollicking, bubbling melody of the bobolink in the pastures back of the barn; and when the full chorus of these and of many other of the singers of spring is dying down, there are some true hot-weather songsters, such as the brightly hued indigo buntings and thistlefinches.

Among the finches one of the most musical and plaintive songs is that of the bush-sparrow--I do not know why the books call it field-sparrow, for it does not dwell in the open fields like the vesperfinch, the savannah-sparrow, and grasshopper-sparrow, but among the cedars and bayberry bushes and young locusts in the same places where the prairie warbler is found.

Nor is it only the true songs that delight us.

We love to hear the flickers call, and we readily pardon any one of their number which, as occasionally happens, is bold enough to wake us in the early morning by drumming on the shingles of the roof.

In our ears the red-winged blackbirds have a very attractive note.

We love the screaming of the red-tailed hawks as they soar high overhead, and even the calls of the night heron that nest in the tall water maples by one of the wood ponds on our place, and the little green herons that nest beside the salt marsh.

It is hard to tell just how much of the attraction in any bird-note lies in the music itself and how much in the associations.

This is what makes it so useless to try to compare the bird songs of one country with those of another.

A man who is worth anything can no more be entirely impartial in speaking of the bird songs with which from his earliest childhood he has been familiar than he can be entirely impartial in speaking of his own family.

At Sagamore Hill we love a great many things--birds and trees and books, and all things beautiful, and horses and rifles and children and hard work and the joy of life.

We have great fireplaces, and in them the logs roar and crackle during the long winter evenings.

The big piazza is for the hot, still afternoons of summer.

As in every house, there are things that appeal to the householder because of their associations, but which would not mean much to others.

Naturally, any man who has been President, and filled other positions, accumulates such things, with scant regard to his own personal merits.

Perhaps our most cherished possessions are a Remington bronze, "The Bronco Buster," given me by my men when the regiment was mustered out, and a big Tiffany silver vase given to Mrs. Roosevelt by the enlisted men of the battleship Louisiana after we returned from a cruise on her to Panama.

It was a real surprise gift, presented to her in the White House, on behalf of the whole crew, by four as strapping man-of-war's-men as ever swung a turret or pointed a twelve-inch gun.

The enlisted men of the army I already knew well--of course I knew well the officers of both army and navy.

But the enlisted men of the navy I only grew to know well when I was President.

On the Louisiana Mrs. Roosevelt and I once dined at the chief petty officers' mess, and on another battleship, the Missouri (when I was in company with Admiral Evans and Captain Cowles), and again on the Sylph and on the Mayflower, we also dined as guests of the crew.

When we finished our trip on the Louisiana I made a short speech to the assembled crew, and at its close one of the petty officers, the very picture of what a man-of-war's-man should look like, proposed three cheers for me in terms that struck me as curiously illustrative of America at her best; he said, "Now then, men, three cheers for Theodore Roosevelt, the typical American citizen!"

That was the way in which they thought of the American President--and a very good way, too.

It was an expression that would have come naturally only to men in whom the American principles of government and life were ingrained, just as they were ingrained in the men of my regiment.

I need scarcely add, but I will add for the benefit of those who do not know, that this attitude of self-respecting identification of interest and purpose is not only compatible with but can only exist when there is fine and real discipline, as thorough and genuine as the discipline that has always obtained in the most formidable fighting fleets and armies.

The discipline and the mutual respect are complementary, not antagonistic.

During the Presidency all of us, but especially the children, became close friends with many of the sailor men.

The four bearers of the vase to Mrs. Roosevelt were promptly hailed as delightful big brothers by our two smallest boys, who at once took them to see the sights of Washington in the landau--"the President's land-ho!"

as, with seafaring humor, our guests immediately styled it.

Once, after we were in private life again, Mrs. Roosevelt was in a railway station and had some difficulty with her ticket.

A

fine-looking, quiet man stepped up and asked if he could be of help; he remarked that he had been one of the Mayflower's crew, and knew us well;

and in answer to a question explained that he had left the navy in order to study dentistry, and added--a delicious touch--that while thus preparing himself to be a dentist he was earning the necessary money to go on with his studies by practicing the profession of a prize-fighter, being a good man in the ring.

There are various bronzes in the house: Saint-Gaudens's "Puritan," a token from my staff officers when I was Governor; Proctor's cougar, the gift of the Tennis Cabinet--who also gave us a beautiful silver bowl, which is always lovingly pronounced to rhyme with "owl" because that was the pronunciation used at the time of the giving by the valued friend who acted as spokesman for his fellow-members, and who was himself the only non-American member of the said Cabinet.

There is a horseman by Macmonnies, and a big bronze vase by Kemys, an adaptation or development of the pottery vases of the Southwestern Indians.

Mixed with all of these are gifts from varied sources, ranging from a brazen Buddha sent me by the Dalai Lama and a wonderful psalter from the Emperor Menelik to a priceless ancient Samurai sword, coming from Japan in remembrance of the peace of Portsmouth, and a beautifully inlaid miniature suit of Japanese armor, given me by a favorite hero of mine, Admiral Togo, when he visited Sagamore Hill.

There are things from European friends; a mosaic picture of Pope Leo XIII in his garden; a huge, very handsome edition of the Nibelungenlied; a striking miniature of John Hampden from Windsor Castle; editions of Dante, and the campaigns of "Eugenio von Savoy" (another of my heroes, a dead hero this time); a Viking cup; the state sword of a Uganda king; the gold box in which the "freedom of the city of London" was given me; a beautiful head of Abraham Lincoln given me by the French authorities after my speech at the Sorbonne; and many other things from sources as diverse as the Sultan of Turkey and the Dowager Empress of China.

Then there are things from home friends: a Polar bear skin from Peary; a Sioux buffalo robe with, on it, painted by some long-dead Sioux artist, the picture story of Custer's fight; a bronze portrait plaque of Joel Chandler Harris; the candlestick used in sealing the Treaty of Portsmouth, sent me by Captain Cameron Winslow;

a shoe worn by Dan Patch when he paced a mile in 1:59, sent me by his owner.

There is a picture of a bull moose by Carl Rungius, which seems to me as spirited an animal painting as I have ever seen.

In the north room, with its tables and mantelpiece and desks and chests made of woods sent from the Philippines by army friends, or by other friends for other reasons; with its bison and wapiti heads; there are three paintings by Marcus Symonds--"Where Light and Shadow Meet," "The Porcelain Towers," and "The Seats of the Mighty"; he is dead now, and he had scant recognition while he lived, yet surely he was a great imaginative artist, a wonderful colorist, and a man with a vision more wonderful still.

There is one of Lungren's pictures of the Western plains; and a picture of the Grand Canyon; and one by a Scandinavian artist who could see the fierce picturesqueness of workaday Pittsburgh; and sketches of the White House by Sargent and by Hopkinson Smith.

The books are everywhere.

There are as many in the north room and in the parlor--is drawing-room a more appropriate name than parlor?

--as in the library; the gun-room at the top of the house, which incidentally has the loveliest view of all, contains more books than any of the other rooms; and they are particularly delightful books to browse among, just because they have not much relevance to one another, this being one of the reasons why they are relegated to their present abode.

But the books have overflowed into all the other rooms too.

I could not name any principle upon which the books have been gathered.

Books are almost as individual as friends.

There is no earthly use in laying down general laws about them.

Some meet the needs of one person, and some of another; and each person should beware of the booklover's besetting sin, of what Mr. Edgar Allan Poe calls "the mad pride of intellectuality," taking the shape of arrogant pity for the man who does not like the same kind of books.

Of course there are books which a man or woman uses as instruments of a profession--law books, medical books, cookery books, and the like.

I am not speaking of these, for they are not properly "books" at all; they come in the category of time-tables, telephone directories, and other useful agencies of civilized life.

I

am speaking of books that are meant to be read.

Personally, granted that these books are decent and healthy, the one test to which I demand that they all submit is that of being interesting.

If the book is not interesting to the reader, then in all but an infinitesimal number of cases it gives scant benefit to the reader.

Of course any reader ought to cultivate his or her taste so that good books will appeal to it, and that trash won't. But after this point has once been reached, the needs of each reader must be met in a fashion that will appeal to those needs.

Personally the books by which I have profited infinitely more than by any others have been those in which profit was a by-product of the pleasure; that is, I read them because I enjoyed them, because I liked reading them, and the profit came in as part of the enjoyment.

Of course each individual is apt to have some special tastes in which he cannot expect that any but a few friends will share.

Now, I am very proud of my big-game library.

I suppose there must be many big-game libraries in Continental Europe, and possibly in England, more extensive than mine, but I have not happened to come across any such library in this country.

Some of the originals go back to the sixteenth century, and there are copies or reproductions of the two or three most famous hunting books of the Middle Ages, such as the Duke of York's translation of Gaston Phoebus, and the queer book of the Emperor Maximilian.

It is only very occasionally that I meet any one who cares for any of these books.

On the other hand, I expect to find many friends who will turn naturally to some of the old or the new books of poetry or romance or history to which we of the household habitually turn.

Let me add that ours is in no sense a collector's library.

Each book was procured because some one of the family wished to read it.

We could never afford to take overmuch thought for the outsides of books; we were too much interested in their insides.

Now and then I am asked as to "what books a statesman should read," and my answer is, poetry and novels--including short stories under the head of novels.

I don't mean that he should read only novels and modern poetry.

If he cannot also enjoy the Hebrew prophets and the Greek dramatists, he should be sorry.

He ought to read interesting books on history and government, and books of science and philosophy; and really good books on these subjects are as enthralling as any fiction ever written in prose or verse.

Gibbon and Macaulay, Herodotus, Thucydides and Tacitus, the Heimskringla, Froissart, Joinville and Villehardouin, Parkman and Mahan, Mommsen and Ranke--why!

there are scores and scores of solid histories, the best in the world, which are as absorbing as the best of all the novels, and of as permanent value.

The same thing is true of Darwin and Huxley and Carlyle and Emerson, and parts of Kant, and of volumes like Sutherland's "Growth of the Moral Instinct," or Acton's Essays and Lounsbury's studies--here again I am not trying to class books together, or measure one by another, or enumerate one in a thousand of those worth reading, but just to indicate that any man or woman of some intelligence and some cultivation can in some line or other of serious thought, scientific or historical or philosophical or economic or governmental, find any number of books which are charming to read, and which in addition give that for which his or her soul hungers.

I do not for a minute mean that the statesman ought not to read a great many different books of this character, just as every one else should read them.

But, in the final event, the statesman, and the publicist, and the reformer, and the agitator for new things, and the upholder of what is good in old things, all need more than anything else to know human nature, to know the needs of the human soul; and they will find this nature and these needs set forth as nowhere else by the great imaginative writers, whether of prose or of poetry.

The room for choice is so limitless that to my mind it seems absurd to try to make catalogues which shall be supposed to appeal to all the best thinkers.

This is why I have no sympathy whatever with writing lists of the One Hundred Best Books, or the Five-Foot Library.

It is all right for a man to amuse himself by composing a list of a hundred very good books; and if he is to go off for a year or so where he cannot get many books, it is an excellent thing to choose a five-foot library of particular books which in that particular year and on that particular trip he would like to read.

But there is no such thing as a hundred books that are best for all men, or for the majority of men, or for one man at all times; and there is no such thing as a five-foot library which will satisfy the needs of even one particular man on different occasions extending over a number of years.

Milton is best for one mood and Pope for another.

Because a man likes Whitman or Browning or Lowell he should not feel himself debarred from Tennyson or Kipling or Korner or Heine or the Bard of the Dimbovitza.

Tolstoy's novels are good at one time and those of Sienkiewicz at another; and he is fortunate who can relish "Salammbo" and "Tom Brown" and the "Two Admirals" and "Quentin Durward" and "Artemus Ward" and the "Ingoldsby Legends" and "Pickwick" and "Vanity Fair."

Why, there are hundreds of books like these, each one of which, if really read, really assimilated, by the person to whom it happens to appeal, will enable that person quite unconsciously to furnish himself with much ammunition which he will find of use in the battle of life.

A book must be interesting to the particular reader at that particular time.

But there are tens of thousands of interesting books, and some of them are sealed to some men and some are sealed to others; and some stir the soul at some given point of a man's life and yet convey no message at other times.

The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be.

He must not hypocritically pretend to like what he does not like.

Yet at the same time he must avoid that most unpleasant of all the indications of puffed-up vanity which consists in treating mere individual, and perhaps unfortunate, idiosyncrasy as a matter of pride.

I happen to be devoted to Macbeth, whereas I very seldom read Hamlet (though I like parts of it).

Now I am humbly and sincerely conscious that this is a demerit in me and not in Hamlet; and yet it would not do me any good to pretend that I like Hamlet as much as Macbeth when, as a matter of fact, I don't. I am very fond of simple epics and of ballad poetry, from the Nibelungenlied and the Roland song through "Chevy Chase" and "Patrick Spens" and "Twa Corbies" to Scott's poems and Longfellow's "Saga of King Olaf" and "Othere."

On the other hand, I don't care to read dramas as a rule; I cannot read them with enjoyment unless they appeal to me very strongly.

They must almost be AEschylus or Euripides, Goethe or Moliere, in order that I may not feel after finishing them a sense of virtuous pride in having achieved a task.

Now I would be the first to deny that even the most delightful old English ballad should be put on a par with any one of scores of dramatic works by authors whom I have not mentioned; I know that each of these dramatists has written what is of more worth than the ballad; only, I enjoy the ballad, and I don't enjoy the drama; and therefore the ballad is better for me, and this fact is not altered by the other fact that my own shortcomings are to blame in the matter.

I still read a number of Scott's novels over and over again, whereas if I finish anything by Miss Austen I have a feeling that duty performed is a rainbow to the soul.

But other booklovers who are very close kin to me, and whose taste I know to be better than mine, read Miss Austen all the time--and, moreover, they are very kind, and never pity me in too offensive a manner for not reading her myself.

Aside from the masters of literature, there are all kinds of books which one person will find delightful, and which he certainly ought not to surrender just because nobody else is able to find as much in the beloved volume.

There is on our book-shelves a little pre-Victorian novel or tale called "The Semi-Attached Couple."

It is told with much humor; it is a story of gentlefolk who are really gentlefolk; and to me it is altogether delightful.

But outside the members of my own family I have never met a human being who had even heard of it, and I don't suppose I ever shall meet one.

I often enjoy a story by some living author so much that I write to tell him so--or to tell her so; and at least half the time I regret my action, because it encourages the writer to believe that the public shares my views, and he then finds that the public doesn't.