CHAPTER 23
Five Personal Essayists
… it is good to feel that life is not wholly usurped by cares for subsistence and physical gratification, but admits, in measures which may be indefinitely enlarged, sentiments and delights worthy of a higher being.
William Ellery CHANNING.
Five men of Oregon who were not primarily men of letters have left us the happy heritage of one book each. These five books, written out of rich lives spent in the Oregon Country, have the objective and subjective mixed in such appealing harmony, have so much buoyancy and freshness of observation and a response of the mind and spirit so deep and wide in interpretation, and have in such measure spontaneous artistry and the charm of style, that they have become autobiographical classics.
They are the highest reach of pioneer reminiscence. In them the things experienced, the raw materials of literature, did not have to wait, as is usually the case, for literary treatment second-hand, but became literature in the first warm recording by the men who experienced them. No middleman craftsman; nothing vicarious; no ghost authorship; no re-write man with artifice and rhetoric; no collaborator of artificial sensitivity.
Likewise these five books do not consist of observations and feelings, first-hand but forced, by writers whose trade was writing. They are not the result of a conscious eye for copy, of a preconceived purpose of making a book—such a motive as was contemptuously attributed to Astor's "scribbling clerks" by Washing ton Irving, who regularly did that himself and seldom with enough sincerity to lift him above an aloof tone
