garden, are introduced, as far as I can judge, nearly at random, and
with no precision of imagination like that of Aristophanes; but with a
sweet childish delight in crowding as many birds as possible into the
smallest space. The popinjay is always prominent; and I want some of
you to help me (for I have not time at present for the chase) in
hunting the parrot down on his first appearance in Europe. Just at this
particular time he contested favor even with the falcon; and I think it
a piece of good fortune that I chanced to draw for you, thinking only
of its brilliant color, the popinjay, which Carpaccio allows to be
present on the grave occasion of St. George's baptizing the princess
and her father.
38. And, indeed, as soon as the Christian poets begin to speak of the
singing of the birds, they show themselves in quite a different mood
from any that ever occurs to a Greek. Aristophanes, with infinitely
more skill, describes, and partly imitates, the singing of the
nightingale; but simply as beautiful sound. It "fills the thickets
with honey;" and if in the often-quoted--just because it is _not_
characteristic of Greek literature--passage of the Coloneus, a deeper
sentiment is shown, that feeling is dependent on association of the
bird-voices with deeply pathetic circumstances. But this troubadour
finds his heart in heaven by the power of the singing only:--
Trop parfoisaient beau servise
Ciz oiselles que je vous devise.
Il chantaient un chant ytel
Com fussent angle esperitel.
We want a moment more of word-chasing to enjoy this. "Oiseau," as you
know, comes from "avis;" but it had at this time got "oisel" for its
singular number, of which the terminating "sel" confused itself with
the "selle," from "ancilla" in domisella and demoiselle; and the
feminine form "oiselle" thus snatched for itself some of the
delightfulness belonging to the title of a young lady. Then note that
"esperitel" does not here mean merely spiritual, (because all angels
are spiritual) but an "angle esperitel" is an angel of the air. So
that, in English, we could only express the meaning in some such
fashion as this:--
They perfected all their service of love,
These maiden birds that I tell you of.
They sang such a song, so finished-fair,
As if they were angels, born of the air.
39. Such were the fancies, then, and the scenes, in which Englishmen
took delight in Chaucer's time. England was then a simple country; we
boasted, for the best kind of riches, our birds and trees, and our
wives and children. We had now grown to be a rich one; and our first
pleasure is in shooting our birds; but it has become too expensive for
us to keep our trees. Lord Derby, whose crest is the eagle and
child--you will find the northern name for it, the bird and bantling,
made classical by Scott--is the first to propose that wood-birds should
have no more nests. We must cut down all our trees, he says, that we
may effectively use the steam-plow; and the effect of the steam-plow, I
find by a recent article in the _Cornhill Magazine_, is that an English
laborer must not any more have a nest, nor bantlings, neither; but may
only expect to get on prosperously in life, if he be perfectly
skillful, sober, and honest, and dispenses, at least until he is
forty-five, with the "luxury of marriage."
40. Gentlemen, you may perhaps have heard me blamed for making no
effort here to teach in the artisans' schools. But I can only say that,
since the future life of the English laborer or artisan (summing the
benefits to him of recent philosophy and economy) is to be passed in a
country without angels and without birds, without prayers and without
songs, without trees and without flowers, in a state of exemplary
sobriety, and (extending the Catholic celibacy of the clergy into
celibacy of the laity) in a state of dispensation with the luxury of
marriage, I do not believe he will derive either profit or
entertainment from lectures on the Fine Arts.
LECTURE II.[8]
THE SWALLOW.
41. We are to-day to take note of the form of a creature which gives us
a singular example of the unity of what artists call beauty, with the
fineness of mechanical structure, often mistaken for it. You cannot but
have noticed how little, during the years of my past professorship, I
have introduced any questions as to the nature of beauty. I avoided
them, partly because they are treated of at length in my books; and
partly because they are, in the last degree, unpractical. We are born
to like or dislike certain aspects of things; nor could I, by any
arguments, alter the defined tastes which you received at your birth,
and which the surrounding circumstances of life have enforced, without
any possibility of your voluntary resistance to them. And the result of
those surrounding circumstances, to-day, is that most English youths
would have more pleasure in looking at a locomotive than at a swallow;
and that many English philosophers would suppose the pleasure so
received to be through a new sense of beauty. But the meaning of the
word "beauty" in the fine arts, and in classical literature, is
properly restricted to those very qualities in which the locomotion of
a swallow differs from that of an engine.
[8] Delivered at Oxford, May 2d, 1873.
42. Not only from that of an engine; but also from that of animals in
whose members the mechanism is so complex as to give them a resemblance
to engines. The dart of the common house-fly, for instance, in full
strength, is a more wonderful movement than that of a swallow. The
mechanism of it is not only more minute, but the swiftness of the
action so much greater, that the vibration of the wing is invisible.
But though a school-boy might prefer the locomotive to the swallow, he
would not carry his admiration of finely mechanical velocity into
unqualified sympathy with the workmanship of the God of Ekron; and
would generally suppose that flies were made only to be food for the
more graceful fly-catcher,--whose finer grace you will discover, upon
reflection, to be owing to the very moderation and simplicity of its
structure, and to the subduing of that infinitude of joints, claws,
tissues, veins, and fibers which inconceivably vibrate in the
microscopic[9] creature's motion, to a quite intelligible and simple
balance of rounded body upon edged plume, maintained not without
visible, and sometimes fatigued, exertion, and raising the lower
creature into fellowship with the volition and the virtue of humanity.
[9] I call it so because the members and action of it cannot be
seen with the unaided eye.
43. With the virtue, I say, in an exceedingly qualified sense; meaning
rather the strength and art displayed in overcoming difficulties, than
any distinct morality of disposition. The bird has kindly and homely
qualities; but its principal "virtue" for _us_, is its being an
incarnate voracity, and that it moves as a consuming and cleansing
power. You sometimes hear it said of a humane person that they would
not kill a fly: from 700 to 1,000 flies a day are a moderate allowance
for a baby swallow.
44. Perhaps, as I say this, it may occur to some of you to think, for
the first time, of the reason of the bird's name. For it is very
interesting, as a piece of language study, to consider the different
power on our minds,--nay, the different sweetness to the ear,--which,
from association, these same two syllables receive, when we read them
as a noun, or as a verb. Also, the word is a curious instance of the
traps which are continually open for rash etymologists. At first,
nothing would appear more natural than that the name should have been
given to the bird from its reckless function of devouring. But if you
look to your Johnson, you will find, to your better satisfaction, that
the name means "bird of porticos," or porches, from the Gothic "swale;"
"subdivale,"--so that he goes back in thought as far as Virgil's, "Et
nunc porticibus vacuis, nunc humida circum, stagna sonat." Notice, in
passing, how a simile of Virgil's, or any other great master's, will
probably tell in two or more ways at once. Juturna is compared to the
swallow, not merely as winding and turning swiftly in her chariot, but
as being a water-nymph by birth,--"Stagnis quae, fluminibusque sonoris,
praesidet." How many different creatures in one the swallow is by
birth, as a Virgilian simile is many thoughts in one, it would take
many more lectures than one to show you clearly; but I will indicate
them with such rough sketch as is possible.
45. It belongs, as most of you know, to a family of birds called
Fissirostres, or, literally, split-beaks. Split heads would be a better
term, for it is the enormous width of mouth and power of gaping which
the epithet is meant to express. A dull sermon, for instance, makes
half the congregation "fissirostres." The bird, however, is most
vigilant when its mouth is widest, for it opens as a net to catch
whatever comes in its way,--hence the French, giving the whole family
the more literal name, "Gobble-fly"--Gobe-mouche, extend the term to
the open-mouthed and too acceptant appearance of a simpleton.
46. Partly in order to provide for this width of mouth, but more for
the advantage in flight, the head of the swallow is rounded into a
bullet shape, and sunk down on the shoulders, with no neck whatever
between, so as to give nearly the aspect of a conical rifle bullet to
the entire front of the body; and, indeed, the bird moves more like a
bullet than an arrow--dependent on a certain impetus of weight rather
than on sharp penetration of the air. I say dependent on, but I have
not yet been able to trace distinct relation between the shapes of
birds and their powers of flight. I suppose the form of the body is
first determined by the general habits and food, and that nature can
make any form she chooses volatile; only one point I think is always
notable, that a complete master of the art of flight must be
short-necked, so that he turns altogether, if he turns at all. You
don't expect a swallow to look round a corner before he goes round it;
he must take his chance. The main point is that he may be able to stop
himself, and turn, in a moment.
47. The stopping, on any terms, is difficult enough to understand; nor
less so, the original gaining of the pace. We always think of flight as
if the main difficulty of it were only in keeping up in the air;--but
the buoyancy is conceivable enough, the far more wonderful matter is
the getting along. You find it hard work to row yourself at anything
like speed, though your impulse-stroke is given in a heavy element, and
your return-stroke in a light one. But both in birds and fishes, the
impelling stroke and its return are in the same element; and if, for
the bird, that medium yields easily to its impulses, it secedes as
easily from the blow that gives it. And if you think what an effort you
make to leap six feet, with the earth for a fulcrum, the dart either of
a trout or a swallow, with no fulcrum but the water and air they
penetrate, will seem to you, I think, greatly marvelous. Yet of the
mode in which it is accomplished you will as yet find no undisputed
account in any book on natural history, and scarcely, as far as I know,
definite notice even of the rate of flight. What do you suppose it is?
We are apt to think of the migration of a swallow, as we should
ourselves of a serious journey. How long, do you think, it would take
him, if he flew uninterruptedly, to get from here to Africa?
48. Michelet gives the rate of his flight (at full speed, of course,)
as eighty leagues an hour. I find no more sound authority; but do not
doubt his approximate accuracy;[10] still how curious and how
provoking it is that neither White of Selborne, Bewick, Yarrell, nor
Gould, says a word about this, one should have thought the most
interesting, power of the bird.[11]
[10] I wrote this some time ago, and the endeavors I have since
made to verify statements on points of natural history which I
had taken on trust have given me reason to doubt everybody's
accuracy. The ordinary flight of the swallow does not, assuredly,
even in the dashes, reach anything like this speed.
[11] Incidentally suggestive sentences occur in the history of
Selborne, but its author never comes to the point, in this case.
Taking Michelet's estimate--eighty French leagues, roughly two hundred
and fifty miles, an hour--we have a thousand miles in four hours. That
is to say, leaving Devonshire after an early breakfast, he could be in
Africa to lunch.
49. He could, I say, if his flight were constant; but though there is
much inconsistency in the accounts, the sum of testimony seems definite
that the swallow is among the most fatiguable of birds. "When the
weather is hazy," (I quote Yarrell) "they will alight on fishing-boats
a league or two from land, so tired that when any one tries to catch
them, they can scarcely fly from one end of the boat to the other."
I have no time to read to you the interesting evidence on this point
given by Yarrell, but only that of the brother of White of Selborne, at
Gibraltar. "My brother has always found," he himself writes, "that some
of his birds, and particularly the swallow kind, are very sparing of
their pains in crossing the Mediterranean; for when arrived at
Gibraltar, they do not 'set forth their airy caravan, high over seas,'
but scout and hurry along in little detached parties of six or seven in
a company; and sweeping low, just over the surface of the land and
water, direct their course to the opposite continent at the narrowest
passage they can find."
50. You will observe, however, that it remains an open question whether
this fear of sea may not be, in the swallow, like ours of the desert.
The commissariat department is a serious one for birds that eat a
thousand flies a day when just out of the egg; and it is possible that
the weariness of swallows at sea may depend much more on fasting than
flying. Captain (or Admiral?) Sir Charles Wager says that "one
spring-time, as he came into soundings in the English Channel, a great
flock of swallows came and settled on all his rigging; every rope was
covered; they hung on one another like a swarm of bees; even the decks
were filled with them. They seemed almost famished and spent, and were
only feathers and bone; but, being recruited with a night's rest, took
their flight in the morning."
51. Now I detain you on this point somewhat, because it is intimately
connected with a more important one. I told you we should learn from
the swallow what a wing was. Few other birds approach him in the beauty
of it, or apparent power. And yet, after all this care taken about it,
he gets tired; and instead of flying, as we should do in his place, all
over the world, and tasting the flavor of the midges in every marsh
which the infinitude of human folly has left to breed gnats instead of
growing corn,--he is of all birds, characteristically, except when he
absolutely can't help it, the stayer at home; and contentedly lodges
himself and his family in an old chimney, when he might be flying all
over the world.
At least you would think, if he built in an English chimney this year,
he would build in a French one next. But no. Michelet prettily says of
him, "He is the bird of return." If you will only treat him kindly,
year after year, he comes back to the same niche, and to the same
hearth, for his nest.
To the same niche; and builds himself an opaque walled house within
that. Think of this a little, as if you heard of it for the first time.
52. Suppose you had never seen a swallow; but that its general habit
of life had been described to you, and you had been asked, how you
thought such a bird would build its nest. A creature, observe, whose
life is to be passed in the air; whose beak and throat are shaped
with the fineness of a net for the catching of gnats; and whose feet,
in the most perfect of the species, are so feeble that it is called
the Footless Swallow, and cannot stand a moment on the ground with
comfort. Of all land birds, the one that has least to do with the
earth; of all, the least disposed, and the least able, to stop to
pick anything up. What will it build with? Gossamer, we should
say,--thistledown,--anything it can catch floating, like flies.
But it builds with stiff clay.
53. And observe its chosen place for building also. You would think, by
its play in the air, that not only of all birds, but of all creatures,
it most delighted in space and freedom. You would fancy its notion of
the place for a nest would be the openest field it could find; that
anything like confinement would be an agony to it; that it would almost
expire of horror at the sight of a black hole.
And its favorite home is down a chimney.
54. Not for your hearth's sake, nor for your company's. Do not think
it. The bird will love you if you treat it kindly; is as frank and
friendly as bird can be; but it does not, more than others, seek your
society. It comes to your house because in no wild wood, nor rough
rock, can it find a cavity close enough to please it. It comes for the
blessedness of imprisonment, and the solemnity of an unbroken and
constant shadow, in the tower, or under the eaves.
Do you suppose that this is part of its necessary economy, and that a
swallow could not catch flies unless it lived in a hole?
Not so. This instinct is part of its brotherhood with another race of
creatures. It is given to complete a mesh in the reticulation of the
orders of life.
55. I have already given you several reasons for my wish that you
should retain, in classifying birds, the now rejected order of Picae. I
am going to read you a passage from Humboldt, which shows you what
difficulties one may get into for want of it.
You will find in the second volume of his personal narrative, an
account of the cave of Caripe in New Andalusia, which is inhabited by
entirely nocturnal birds, having the gaping mouths of the goat-sucker
and the swallow, and yet feeding on fruit.
Unless, which Mr. Humboldt does not tell us, they sit under the trees
outside, in the night time, and hold their mouths open, for the berries
to drop into, there is not the smallest occasion for their having wide
mouths, like swallows. Still less is there any need, since they are
fruit eaters, for their living in a cavern 1,500 feet out of daylight.
They have only, in consequence, the trouble of carrying in the seeds to
feed their young, and the floor of the cave is thus covered, by the
seeds they let fall, with a growth of unfortunate pale plants, which
have never seen day. Nay, they are not even content with the darkness
of their cave; but build their nests in the funnels with which the roof
of the grotto is pierced like a sieve; live actually in the chimney,
not of a house, but of an Egyptian sepulcher! The color of this bird,
of so remarkable taste in lodging, Humboldt tells us, is "of dark
bluish-gray, mixed with streaks and specks of black. Large white spots,
which have the form of a heart, and which are bordered with black, mark
the head, the wings, and the tail. The spread of the wings, which are
composed of seventeen or eighteen quill feathers, is three feet and a
half. Suppressing, with Mr. Cuvier, the order of Picae, we must refer
this extraordinary bird to the _Sparrows_."
56. We can only suppose that it must be, to our popular sparrows, what
the swallow of the cinnamon country is to our subordinate swallow. Do
you recollect the cinnamon swallows of Herodotus, who build their
mud-nests in the faces of the cliffs where Dionusos was brought up, and
where nobody can get near them; and how the cinnamon merchants fetch
them joints of meat, which the unadvised birds, flying up to their
nests with, instead of cinnamon,--nest and all come down together,--the
original of Sindbad's valley-of-diamond story?
57. Well, Humboldt is reduced, by necessities of recent classification,
to call a bird three feet and a half across the wings, a sparrow. I
have no right to laugh at him, for I am just going, myself, to call the
cheerfulest and brightest of birds of the air, an owl. All these
architectural and sepulchral habits, these Egyptian manners of the
sand-martin, digging caves in the sand, and border-trooper's habits of
the chimney swallow, living in round towers instead of open air,
belonging to them as connected with the tribe of the falcons through
the owls! and not only so, but with the mammalia through the bats! A
swallow is an emancipated owl, and a glorified bat; but it never
forgets its fellowship with night.
58. Its _ancient_ fellowship, I had nearly written; so natural is it to
think of these similarly-minded creatures, when the feelings that both
show are evidently useless to one of them, as if the inferior had
changed into the higher. The doctrine of development seems at first to
explain all so pleasantly, that the scream of consent with which it has
been accepted by men of science, and the shriller vociferation of the
public's gregarious applause, scarcely permit you the power of
antagonistic reflection. I must justify to-day, in graver tone than
usual, the terms in which I have hitherto spoken,--it may have been
thought with less than the due respect to my audience,--of the popular
theory.
59. Supposing that the octohedrons of galena, of gold, and of oxide of
iron, were endowed with powers of reproduction, and perished at
appointed dates of dissolution or solution, you would without any doubt
have heard it by this time asserted that the octohedric form, which was
common to all, indicated their descent from a common progenitor; and it
would have been ingeniously explained to you how the angular offspring
of this eight-sided ancestor had developed themselves, by force of
circumstances, into their distinct metallic perfections; how the galena
had become gray and brittle under prolonged subterranean heat, and the
gold yellow and ductile, as it was rolled among the pebbles of
amber-colored streams.
60. By the denial to these structures of any individually reproductive
energy, you are forced to accept the inexplicable (and why expect it to
be otherwise than inexplicable?) fact, of the formation of a series of
bodies having very similar aspects, qualities, and chemical relations
to other substances, which yet have no connection whatever with each
other, and are governed, in their relation with their native rocks, by
entirely arbitrary laws. It has been the pride of modern chemistry to
extricate herself from the vanity of the alchemist, and to admit, with
resignation, the independent, though apparently fraternal, natures, of
silver, of lead, of platinum,--aluminium,--potassium. Hence, a rational
philosophy would deduce the probability that when the arborescence of
dead crystallization rose into the radiation of the living tree, and
sentient plume, the splendor of nature in her more exalted power would
not be restricted to a less variety of design; and the beautiful
caprice in which she gave to the silver its frost and to the opal its
fire, would not be subdued under the slow influences of accident and
time, when she wreathed the swan with snow, and bathed the dove in
iridescence. That the infinitely more exalted powers of life must
exercise more intimate influence over matter than the reckless forces
of cohesion;--and that the loves and hatreds of the now conscious
creatures would modify their forms into parallel beauty and
degradation, we might have anticipated by reason, and we ought long
since to have known by observation. But this law of its spirit over the
substance of the creature involves, necessarily, the indistinctness of
its type, and the existence of inferior and of higher conditions, which
whole eras of heroism and affection--whole eras of misery and
misconduct,--confirm into glory, or confuse into shame. Collecting the
causes of changed form, in lower creatures, by distress, or by
adaptation,--by the disturbance or intensifying of the parental
strength, and the native fortune--the wonder is, not that species
should sometimes be confused, but that the greater number of them
remain so splendidly, so manifestly, so eternally distinct; and that
the vile industries and vicious curiosities of modern science, while
they have robbed the fields of England of a thousand living creatures,
have not created in them one.
61. But even in the paltry knowledge we have obtained, what unanimity
have we?--what security? Suppose any man of ordinary sense, knowing the
value of time, and the relative importance of subjects of thought, and
that the whole scientific world was agog concerning the origin of
species, desired to know first of all--what was meant by a species.