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. The book 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,
add much 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 undoubtedly its 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 that some 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 adhered to 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 and woodpecker 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 the house 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 the active 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 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 disposed towards 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, for instance, 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 gardeners that 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.