IX
GILBERT WHITE AGAIN
ONE of the few books which I can return to and re-read every six or seven years is Gilbert White’s Selborne. It has a perennial charm. It is much like country things themselves. One does not read it with excitement or eager avidity; it is in a low key; it touches only upon minor matters; it is not eloquent, or witty, or profound; it has only now and then a twinkle of humor or a glint of fancy, and yet it has lived an hundred years and promises to live many hundreds of years more. So many learned and elaborate treatises have sunk beneath the waves upon which this cockle-shell of a book rides so safely and buoyantly! What is the secret of its longevity? One can do little more than name its qualities without tracing them to their sources. It is simple and wholesome, like bread, or meat, or milk. Perhaps it is just this same unstrained quality that keeps the book alive. Books that are piquant and exciting like condiments, or cloying like confectionery or pastry, it seems, have much less chance of survival. The secret of longevity of a man—what is it? Sanity, moderation, regularity, and that plus vitality, which is a gift. Thebook that lives has these things, and it has that same plus vitality, the secret of which cannot be explored. The sensational, intemperate books set the world on fire for a day, and then end in ashes and forgetfulness.
White’s book diffuses a sort of rural England atmosphere through the mind. It is not the work of a city man who went down into the country to write it up, but of a born countryman,—one who had in the very texture of his mind the flavor of rural things. Then it is the growth of a particular locality. Let a man stick his staff into the ground anywhere and say, “This is home,” and describe things from that point of view, or as they stand related to that spot,—the weather, the fauna, the flora,—and his account shall have an interest to us it could not have if not thus located and defined. This is one secret of White’s charm. His work has a home air, a certain privacy and particularity. The great world is afar off; Selborne is as snug and secluded as a chimney corner; we get an authentic glimpse into the real life of one man there; we see him going about intent, lovingly intent, upon every phase of nature about him. We get glimpses into humble cottages and into the ways and doings of the people; we see the bacon drying in the chimneys; we see the poor gathering in Wolmer Forest the sticks and twigs dropped by the rooks in building their nests; we see them claiming the “lop and top” when the big trees are cut. Indeed, the human touches, the human figures here and there in White’s pages, addmuch to the interest. The glimpses we get of his own goings and comings—we wish there were more of them. We should like to know what took him to London during that great snowstorm of January, 1776, and how he got there, inasmuch as the roads were so blocked by the snow that the carriages from Bath with their fine ladies on their way to attend the Queen’s birthday, were unable to get through. “The ladies fretted, and offered large rewards to labourers if they would shovel them a track to London, but the relentless heaps of snow were too bulky to be removed.” The parson found the city bedded deep in snow, and so noiseless by reason of it that “it seemed to convey an uncomfortable idea of desolation.”
When one reads the writers of our own day upon rural England and the wild life there, he finds that they have not the charm of the Selborne naturalist; mainly, I think, because they go out with deliberate intent to write up nature. They choose their theme; the theme does not choose them. They love the birds and flowers for the literary effects they can produce out of them. It requires no great talent to go out in the fields or woods and describe in graceful sentences what one sees there,—birds, trees, flowers, clouds, streams; but to give the atmosphere of these things, to seize the significant and interesting features and to put the reader into sympathetic communication with them, that is another matter.
Hence back of all, the one thing that has told most in keeping White’s book alive is undoubtedlyits sound style—sentences actually filled with the living breath of a man. We are everywhere face to face with something genuine and real; objects, ideas, stand out on the page; the articulation is easy and distinct. White had no literary ambitions. His style is that of a scholar, but of a scholar devoted to natural knowledge. There was evidently something winsome and charming about the man personally, and these qualities reappear in his pages.
He was probably a parson who made as many calls afield as in the village, if not more. An old nurse in his family said of him, fifty years after his death, “He was a still, quiet body, and that there was not a bit of harm in him.”
White was a type of the true observer, the man with the detective eye. He did not seek to read his own thoughts and theories into Nature, but submitted his mind to her with absolute frankness and ingenuousness. He had infinite curiosity, and delighted in nothing so much as a new fact about the birds and the wild life around him. To see the thing as it was in itself and in its relations, that was his ambition. He could resist the tendency of his own mind to believe without sufficient evidence. Apparently he wanted to fall in with the notion current during the last century, that swallows hibernated in the mud in the bottoms of streams and ponds, but he could not gather convincing proof. It was not enough that a few belated specimens were seen in the fall lingering about such localities, or again hovering over them early in spring; or thatsome old grandfather had seen a man who had taken live swallows out of the mud. Produce the man and let us cross-question him,—that was White’s attitude. Dr. Johnson said confidently that swallows did thus pass the winter in the mud “conglobulated into a ball,” but Johnson had that literary cast of mind that prefers a picturesque statement to the exact fact. White was led astray by no literary ambition. His interest in the life of nature was truly a scientific one; he must know the fact first, and then give it to the humanities. How true it is in science, in literature, in life, that any secondary motive vitiates the result! Seek ye the kingdom of truth first, and all things shall be added.
But White seems finally to have persuaded himself that at least a few swallows passed the winter in England in a torpid state—if not in the bottom of streams or ponds, then in holes in their banks. He reasoned from analogy, though he had expressed his distrust of that mode of reasoning. If bats, insects, toads, turtles, and other creatures can thus pass the winter, why not swallows? On many different occasions, during mild days late in the fall and early in the spring, he saw house-martins flying about; the weather suddenly changing to colder, they quickly disappeared. Bats and turtles came forth, then vanished in the same way. White finally concluded that the mystery was the same in both cases,—that the creatures were brought from their winter retreats by the warmth, only to retire to them again when it changed to cold. If he had adheredto his usual caution he would have waited for actual proof of this fact,—the finding of a torpid swallow. He made frequent search for such, but never found any.
This notion so long current about the swallows probably had its origin in two things: first, their partiality for mud as nesting material; and secondly, the habit of these birds, after they have begun to collect into flocks in midsummer, preparatory to their migrations, of passing the night in vast numbers along the margins of streams and ponds. White knew of their habits in this respect, and wanted to see in the fact presumptive evidence of the truth of the notion that, though they may not retire into the water itself, yet that they “may conceal themselves in the banks of pools and rivers during the uncomfortable months of the year.” One midsummer twilight in northern Vermont I came upon hundreds of swallows—barn and cliff—settled for the night upon some low alders that grew upon the margin of a deep, still pool in the river. The bushes bent down with them as with an over-load of fruit. This attraction for the water on the part of the swallow family is certainly a curious one, and is not easily explained.
Our sharp-eyed parson had observed that the nesting habits of birds afford a clue to their roosting habits,—that they usually pass the night in or near those places where they build their nests. Thus, the tree-builders roost in trees; the ground-builders upon the ground. I have seen our chickadee andwoodpecker enter, late in the day, the cavities in decaying limbs of trees. I have seen the oriole dispose of herself for the night on the end of a maple branch where her “pendent bed and procreant cradle” was begun a few days later. In walking through the summer fields in the twilight, the vesper sparrow or the song sparrow will often start up from almost beneath one’s feet. It is said that the snow-bunting will plunge beneath the snow and pass the night there. The ruffled grouse often does this, but the swallows seem to be an exception to this rule. I have seen a vast cloud of swifts take up their lodging for the night in a tall, unused chimney; but the barn swallows and the cliff and the white-bellied swallows, at least after the young have flown, appear to pass the night in the vicinity of streams. White noticed also—and here the true observer again crops out—that the fieldfare, a kind of thrush, though a tree-builder, always appears, to pass the night on the ground. “The larkers, in dragging their nets by night, frequently catch them in the wheat stubbles.” He learned, as every observer sooner or later learns, to be careful of sweeping statements,—that the truth of nature is not always caught by the biggest generalizations. After speaking of the birds that dust themselves, earth their plumage—pulveratrices, as he calls them—he says, “As far as I can observe, many birds that dust themselves never wash, and I once thought that those birds that wash themselves would never dust; but here I find myself mistaken,” and he instances thehouse sparrow as doing both. White seems to have been about the first writer upon natural history who observed things minutely; he saw through all those sort of sleight-o’-hand movements and ways of the birds and beasts. He held his eye firmly to the point. He saw the swallows feed their young on the wing; he saw the fern-owl, while hawking about a large oak, “put out its short leg while on the wing, and by a bend of the head deliver something into its mouth.” This explained to him the use of its middle toe, “which is curiously furnished with a serrated claw.” He timed the white owls feeding their young under the eaves of his church, with watch in hand. He saw them transfer the mouse they brought, from the foot to the beak, that they might have the free use of the former in ascending to the nest.
In his walks and drives about the country he was all attention to the life about him, simply from his delight in any fresh bit of natural knowledge. His curiosity never flagged. He had naturally an alert mind. His style reflects this alertness and sensitiveness. In his earlier days he was an enthusiastic sportsman, and he carried the sportsman’s trained sense and love of the chase into his natural history studies. He complained that faunists were too apt to content themselves with general terms and bare descriptions; the reason, he says, is plain,—“because all that may be done at home in a man’s study; but the investigation of the life and conversation of animals is a concern of much more trouble and difficulty, and is not to be attained but by theactive and inquisitive, and by those that reside much in the country.” He himself had the true inquisitiveness and activity, and the loving, discriminating eye. He saw the specific marks and differences at a glance. Then, his love of these things was so well known in the neighborhood, that this kind of knowledge flowed to him from all sides. He was a magnet that attracted all the fresh natural lore about him. People brought him birds and eggs and nests, and animals or any natural curiosity, and reported to him any unusual occurrence. They loaned him the use of their eyes and ears. One day a countryman told him he had found a young fern-owl in the nest of a small bird on the ground, and that it was fed by the little bird. “I went to see this extraordinary phenomenon, and found that it was a young cuckoo hatched in the nest of a titlark; it was become vastly too big for its nest, appearing to have its large wings extended beyond the nest,
‘in tenui reMajores pennas nido extendisse,’
‘in tenui reMajores pennas nido extendisse,’
‘in tenui reMajores pennas nido extendisse,’
‘in tenui re
Majores pennas nido extendisse,’
and was very fierce and pugnacious, pursuing my finger, as I teased it, for many feet from the nest, and sparring, and buffeting with its wings like a gamecock. The dupe of a dam appeared at a distance, hovering about with meat in its mouth, and expressing the greatest solicitude.”
He observed that the train of the peacock was really not its tail, but an entirely separate appendage. He remarked how extremely fond cats are of fish, and yet of all quadrupeds “are the least disposedtowards the water.” This is a curious fact to him. A neighbor of his, in ploughing late in the fall, turned a water-rat out of his hibernaculum in a field far removed from any water. The rat had laid up more than a gallon of potatoes for its winter food. This was another curious fact that set the writer speculating. His correspondent tells him of a heronry near some manor-house that excites his curiosity much. “Fourscore nests of such a bird on one tree is a rarity which I would ride half as many miles to get a sight of.” Such a lively curiosity had the parson. His thirst for exact knowledge was so great that on one occasion he took measurements of the carcass of a moose when he was probably compelled to hold his nose to finish the task. At one place he heard of a woman who professed to cure cancers by the use of toads; some of his brother clergymen believed the story, but when he came to sift the evidence he made up his mind that the woman was a fraud.
He said truly, “There is such a propensity in mankind towards deceiving and being deceived, that one cannot safely relate anything from common report, especially in print, without expressing some degree of doubt and suspicion.”
The observations of hardly one man in five hundred are of any value for scientific purposes.
White had the true scientific caution, and was, as a rule, very careful to verify his statements.
Of course the science of White’s time was far behind our own. The phenomenon of the weather, forinstance, was not understood then as it is now. The great atmospheric waves that sweep across the continents, and the regular alternations of heat and cold, were unsuspected. White observed that cold descended from above, but he thought that thaws often originated underground, “from warm vapours which arise.” He was greatly puzzled, too, when, during the severe cold of December, 1784, the thermometer fell many degrees lower in the valley bottoms than on the hills. He had not observed that the very cold air on such occasions settles down into the valleys and fills them like water, marking the height to which it rises by a level line upon the trees or foliage. It is a wonder that his sharp eye did not detect the true source of honey dew, but it did not. He thought it proceeded from the effluvia of flowers, which, being drawn up into the sky by the warmth of the sun by day, descended again as dew by night.
When a French anatomist announced that he had discovered why the cuckoo did not hatch its own eggs,—namely, because the crop or craw of the bird was placed back of the sternum, so as to make a protuberance on the belly,—White dissected a cuckoo for himself, and, finding the fact as stated, proceeded to dissect other birds that he knew did incubate, as the fern-owl and a hawk, and finding the craw situated the same as in the cuckoo, justly charged the Frenchman with having reached an unscientific conclusion.
In his seventy-seventh letter White clearly anticipates Darwin as to the beneficial functions of earthworms in the soil, and tells farmers and gardenersthat the little creatures which they look upon as their enemies are really their best friends.
White has had imitators, but no successful rivals. A work much in the spirit and manner of his famous book, called “Jesse’s Gleanings in Natural History,” was published fifty years later. It had some reputation in its own day, but seems to be quite forgotten in our time. A good reader quickly sees that its pages have not the same fresh, distinctive quality as White’s, not the same atmosphere of unconscious curiosity and alert interest. They are stamped with a die far less clear and individual. The field covered is the same, the facts and incidents are the same, but the medium through which we see them all is not the same.
The following extract gives a fair sample of the style:—
“The enjoyments and delights of a country life have been sung by poets in all ages, and it is our own fault if we find the country irksome, or less agreeable than a crowded metropolis. It affords many resources of a most agreeable nature, to those who seek for rational and tranquil enjoyments. A beautiful prospect, a walk by the side of a river in fine weather, in the agreeable shade of a wood or cool valley, have great charms for those who are fond of the country. We may then exclaim with Virgil,—
‘O, qui me gelidis convallibus HaemiSistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra!’”
‘O, qui me gelidis convallibus HaemiSistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra!’”
‘O, qui me gelidis convallibus HaemiSistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra!’”
‘O, qui me gelidis convallibus Haemi
Sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra!’”
But even the Virgilian quotation does not give it the flavor of White’s pages.