Word: seton
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Dates: during 1940-1940
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February 22: Seton Hall, at South Orange...
...Seton's fellow beings, wolves and beavers and blue jays, have rewarded him well. Last week, with Trail of an Artist-Naturalist, nature lovers could follow Seton's pattering spoor across 80 years, through the wilds of Canada, the studios of Paris, the publishing business of Manhattan. Young Seton grew up in Ontario. He wanted to be a naturalist, but his father ("the most selfish person I ever heard of or read of in history or in fiction") wanted him to be an artist. So Seton straddled both careers, became rich & famous. Studying art at London...
Rudyard Kipling acknowledged Seton's influence on his Jungle Books. Seton's Wild Animals I Have Known became a lucrative best-seller in 1898, the model for scores of animal stories. Seton claimed that his stories, unlike such tales as Reynard the Fox, gave "in fiction form the actual facts of an animal's life and modes of thought." Many doubted this, and a great controversy over "the Nature Fakers" began in 1904 when John Burroughs, in The Atlantic Monthly, abused Seton and his disciples as frauds and phony naturalists. Ornithologist Chapman, Novelist Hamlin Garland, Sportsman Teddy...
Said Roosevelt: "Burroughs and the people at large don't know how many facts you have back of your stories. You must publish your facts." Result: Seton's Life Histories of Northern Animals and Lives of Game Animals (six volumes). He now murmurs: "Every scientific library in America today points to Seton's Lives as the last word and best authority on the subject." Seton also organized a woodcraft movement for lads under the petticoats of bird-loving Edward Bok's Ladies' Home Journal...
Writes Biologist-Rhetorician Donald Culross Peattie: "What science calls for today are life histories and ecological studies. . . ." So, while Seton's woodlore was never taken overseriously as science, science is moving his way. Meanwhile, bird feeders and fireside gun polishers can en joy Seton's accounts of moose hunts under golden moons, blue jays protecting their young by imitating hawk screams. And insomniacs may heed his observation, "a sheep's ears must point forward as he leaps...