Blazings

TRAIL OF AN ARTIST-NATURALIST--Ernest Thompson Seton-Scrlbner ($3.75).

When Ernest Thompson Seton was a wee bairn in the North of England, his sympathies were not with Little Red Ridinghood but with the wolf. "I felt that his case was not properly presented; he acted strictly within the law, and on each occasion he got a very raw deal." When he was 31, his painting of a wolf crunching a human skull was tossed out of the Grand Salon in Paris with cries of "Horrible! In sympathy with the beast ! " Following year, in New Mexico, he resolved to stop poisoning cattle-slaying wolves. "What right. I asked, has man to inflict such horrible agony on fellow beings. . . ?"

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's Royal Academy School, he planned a book on the birds of Canada, years later had his method of classification adopted by master Ornithologist Frank M. Chapman. He illustrated Chapman's and Thomas Nuttail's bird handbooks, began writing and illustrating stories of his own.

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 Roosevelt defended Seton.

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."

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