say anxiously tended, surrounded by infinite love, enfolded in the
warmth of the maternal magnetism.
Even in the egg, where you see it protected by a calcareous shell, it
feels so keenly the access of air, that every chilled point in the
egg is a member the less for the future bird. Hence the prolonged and
disquieted labour of incubation, the self-inflicted captivity, the
motionlessness of the most mobile of beings. And all this so very
pitiful! A stone pressed so long to the heart, to the flesh--often the
live flesh!
It is born, but born naked. While the baby-quadruped, even from his
first day of life, is clothed, and crawls, and already walks, the
young bird (especially in the higher species) lies motionless upon its
back, without the protection of any feathers. It is not only while
hatching it, but in anxiously rubbing it, that the mother maintains
and stimulates warmth. The colt can readily suckle and nourish itself;
the young bird must wait while the mother seeks, selects, and prepares
its food. She cannot leave it; the father must here supply her place;
behold the real, veritable family, faithfulness in love, and the first
moral enlightenment.
I will say nothing here of a protracted, very peculiar, and very
hazardous education--that of flight. And nothing here of that of song,
so refined among the feathered artists. The quadruped soon knows all
that he will ever know: he gallops when born; and if he experiences an
occasional fall, is it the same thing, tell me, to slide without danger
among the herbage, as to drop headlong from the skies?
[Illustration]
Let us take the egg in our hands. This elliptical form, at once the
most easy of comprehension, the most beautiful, and presenting the
fewest salient points to external attack, gives one the idea of a
complete miniature world, of a perfect harmony, from which nothing
can be taken away, and to which nothing can be added. No inorganic
matter adopts this perfect form. I conceive that, under its apparent
inertness, it holds a high mystery of life and some accomplished work
of God.
What is it, and what should issue from it? I know not. But _she_ knows
well--yonder trembling creature who, with outstretched wings, embraces
it and matures it with her warmth; she who, until now the free queen
of the air, lived at her own wild will, but, suddenly fettered, sits
motionless on that mute object which one would call a stone, and which
as yet gives no revelation.
Do not speak of blind instinct. Facts demonstrate how that
clear-sighted instinct modifies itself according to surrounding
conditions; in other words, how that rudimentary reason differs in its
nature from the lofty human reason.
Yes; that mother knows and sees distinctly by means of the penetration
and clairvoyance of love. Through the thick calcareous shell, where
your rude hand perceives nothing, she feels by a delicate tact the
mysterious being which she nourishes and forms. It is this feeling
which sustains her during the arduous labour of incubation, during her
protracted captivity. She sees it delicate and charming in its soft
down of infancy, and she predicts with the vision of hope that it will
be vigorous and bold, when, with outspread wings, it shall eye the sun
and breast the storm.
Let us profit by these days. Let us hasten nothing. Let us contemplate
at our leisure this delightful image of the maternal reverie--of that
second childbirth by which she completes the invisible object of her
love--the unknown offspring of desire.
A delightful spectacle, but even more sublime than delightful. Let
us be modest here. With us the mother loves that which stirs in her
bosom--that which she touches, clasps, enfolds in assured possession;
she loves the reality, certain, agitated and moving, which responds to
her own movements. But this one loves the future and unknown; her heart
beats alone, and nothing as yet responds to it. Yet is not her love the
less intense; she devotes herself and suffers; she will suffer unto
death for her dream and her faith.
[Illustration]
A faith powerful and efficacious! It produces a world, and one of the
most wonderful of worlds. Speak not to me of suns, of the elementary
chemistry of globes. The marvel of a humming-bird's egg transcends the
Milky Way.
Understand that this little point which to you seems imperceptible,
is an entire ocean--the sea of milk where floats in embryo the
well-beloved of heaven. It floats; fears no shipwreck; it is held
suspended by the most delicate ligaments; it is saved from jar and
shock. It swims all gently in the warm element, as it will swim
hereafter in the atmosphere. A profound serenity, a perfect state in
the bosom of a nourishing habitation! And how superior to all suckling
(_allaitement_)!
But see how, in this divine sleep, it has perceived its mother and her
magnetic warmth. And it, too, begins to dream. Its dream is of motion;
it imitates, it conforms to its mother; its first act, the act of an
obscure love, is to resemble her.
"Knowest thou not that love transforms
Into itself whate'er it loves?"
And as soon as it resembles her, it will seek to join her. It inclines,
it presses more closely against the shell, which thenceforth is the
sole barrier between it and its mother. Then, then she listens!
Sometimes she is blessed by hearing already its first tender piping.
It will remain a prisoner no longer. Grown daring, it will take its
own part. It has a beak, and makes use of it. It strikes, it cracks,
it cleaves its prison wall. It has feet, and brings them to its
assistance. See now the work begun! Its reward is deliverance; it
enters into liberty.
To tell the rapture, the agitation, the prodigious inquietude, the
mother's many cares, is beyond our province here; of the difficulties
of its education we have already spoken.
It is only through time and tenderness that the bird receives its
initiation. Superior by its powers of flight, it is so much the more so
through this, that it has had a home and has gained life through its
mother; fed by her, and by its father emancipated, the freest of beings
is the favourite of love.
If one wishes to admire the fertility of nature, the vigour of
invention, the charming, and in a certain sense, the terrifying
richness, which from one identical creation draws a million of opposite
miracles, one should regard this egg, so exactly like another, and yet
the source whence shall issue the innumerable tribes born to a life of
wings on earth.
From the obscure unity it pours out, it expands, in countless and
prodigiously divergent rays, those winged flames which you name birds,
glowing with ardour and life, with colour and song. From the burning
hand of God escapes continuously that vast fan of astounding diversity,
where everything shines, where everything sings, where everything
floods me with harmony and light. Dazzled, I lower my eyes.
[Illustration]
Melodious sparks of celestial fire, whither do ye not attain? For ye
exists nor height nor distance; the heaven, the abyss, it is all one.
What cloud, what watery deep is inaccessible to ye? Earth, in all its
vast circuit, great as it is with its mountains, its seas, and its
valleys, is wholly yours. I hear ye under the Equator, ardent as the
arrows of the sun. I hear ye at the Pole, in the eternal lifeless
silence, where the last tuft of moss has faded; the very bear sees
ye afar, and slinks away growling. Ye, ye still remain; ye live, ye
love, ye bear witness to God, ye reanimate death. In those terrestrial
deserts your touching loves invest with an atmosphere of innocence what
man has designated the barbarism of nature.
[Illustration: THE POLE--AQUATIC BIRDS.]
[Illustration]
THE POLE.
AQUATIC BIRDS.
That powerful fairy which endows man with most of his blessings and
misfortunes, Imagination, sets herself to work to travestie nature for
him in a hundred ways. In all which exceeds his energies or wounds his
sensations, in all the necessities which overrule the harmony of the
world, he is tempted to see and to curse a maleficent will. One writer
has made a book against the Alps; a poet has foolishly placed the
throne of evil among those beneficent glaciers which are the reservoir
of the waters of Europe, which pour forth its rivers and make its
fertility. Others, still more absurdly, have vented their wrath upon
the ices of the Pole, misunderstanding the magnificent economy of the
globe, the majestic balance of those alternative currents which are the
life of Ocean. They have seen war and hate, and the malice of nature,
in those regular and profoundly pacific movements of the universal
Mother.
Such are the dreams of man. Animals, however, do not share in these
antipathies, these terrors; a twofold attraction, on the contrary,
impels them yearly towards the Poles in innumerable legions.
Every year birds, fishes, gigantic cetaceans, hasten to people the
seas and islands which surround the southern Pole. Wonderful seas,
fertile, full to overflowing of rudimentary life (in the stage of the
zoophytes), of living fermentation, of viscous waters, of spawn, of
superabundant embryos.
Both the Poles are for these innocent myriads, everywhere pursued by
foes, the great, the happy rendezvous of love and peace. The whale,
that unfortunate fish, which has, however, like ourselves, sweet milk
and hot blood, that poor proscribed unfortunate which will soon have
disappeared--it is there that it again finds a refuge, a halt for
the sacred moments of maternity. No races are of purer or gentler
disposition, none more fraternal towards their kin, more tender towards
their offspring. Cruel ignorance of man! How can he have slain without
horror the walrus and the seal, which in so many points are like
himself?
The giant man of the old ocean, the whale--a being as gentle as man the
dwarf is brutal--enjoys this advantage over him: sure of species whose
fecundity is alarming, it can accomplish the mission of destruction
which nature has ordained, without inflicting upon them any pain. It
has neither teeth nor saw; none of those means of punishment with
which the destroyers of the world are so abundantly provided. Suddenly
absorbed in the depths of this moving crucible, they lose themselves,
they swoon away, they undergo instantaneously the transformations of
its grand chemistry. Most of the living matter on which the inhabitants
of the Polar Seas support themselves--cetaceans, fishes, birds--have
neither organism nor the means of suffering. Hence these tribes
possess a character of innocence which moves us infinitely, fills us
with sympathy, and also, we must confess, with envy. Thrice blessed,
thrice fortunate that world where life renews and repairs itself
without the cost of death--that world which is generally free from
pain, which ever finds in its nourishing waters the sea of milk, has no
need of cruelty, and still clings to Nature's kindly breast!
Before man's appearance, profound was the peace of these solitudes and
their amphibious races. From the bear and the blue fox, the two tyrants
of that region, they found an easy shelter in the ever-open bosom of
the sea, their bountiful nurse.
[Illustration]
When our mariners first landed there, their only difficulty was to
pierce through the mass of curious and kindly-natured phocæ which came
to gaze upon them. The penguins of Australian lands, the auks and
razor-bills of the Arctic shores, peaceable and more active, made no
movement. The wild geese, whose fine down, of incomparable softness,
furnishes the much-prized eider, readily permitted the spoilers to
approach and seize them with their hands.
The attitude of these novel creatures was the cause of pleasant
mistakes on the part of our navigators. Those who from afar first saw
the islands thronged with penguins, standing upright, in their costume
of white and black, imagined them to be bands of children in white
aprons! The stiffness of their small arms--one can scarcely call them
wings in these rudimentary birds--their awkwardness on land, their
difficulty of movement, prove that they belong to the ocean, where they
swim with wonderful ease, and which is their natural and legitimate
element. One might speak of them as its emancipated eldest sons,
as ambitious fishes, candidates for the characters of birds, which
had already progressed so far as to transform their fins into scaly
pinions. The metamorphosis was not attended with complete success; as
birds powerless and clumsy, they remain skilful fishes.
[Illustration]
Or again, with their large feet attached so near to the body, with
their neck short or poised on a great cylindrical trunk, with their
flattened head, one might judge them to be near relations of their
neighbours the seals, whose kindly nature they possess, but not their
intelligence.
These eldest sons of nature, eye-witnesses of the ancient ages of
transformation, appeared like so many strange hieroglyphics to those
who first beheld them. With eyes mild, but sad and pale as the face of
ocean, they seemed to regard man, the last-born of the planet, from the
depths of their antiquity.
Levaillant, not far from the Cape of Good Hope, found them in great
numbers on a desert isle where rose the tomb of a poor Danish mariner,
a child of the Arctic Pole, whom Fate had led thither to die among the
Austral wastes, and between whom and his fatherland the density of
the globe intervened. Seals and penguins supplied him with a numerous
society; the former prostrate and lying down; the latter standing
erect, and mounting guard with dignity around the lonely grave: all
melancholy, and responding to the moans of Ocean, which one might have
imagined to be the wail of the dead.
Their winter station is the Cape. In that warm African exile they
invest themselves with a good and solid coat of fat, which will be very
useful defences for them against cold and hunger. When spring returns,
a secret voice admonishes them that the tempestuous thaw has broken
and rent the sharp crystalline ice; that the blissful Polar Seas,
their country and their cradle, their sweet love-Eden, are open and
calling upon them. Impatiently they set forth; with rapid wings they
oar their way across five or six hundred leagues of sea, without other
resting-place than occasional pieces of floating ice may, for a few
moments, offer them. They arrive, and all is ready. A summer of thirty
days' duration makes them happy.
[Illustration]
With a grave happiness. The happiness of discovering a profound
tranquillity separates them from the sea where their sole element lies.
The season of love and incubation is, therefore, a time of fasting and
inquietude. The blue fox, their enemy, chases them into the desert. But
union is strength. The mothers all incubate at one and the same time,
and the legion of fathers watches around them, prepared to sacrifice
themselves in their behalf. Let but the little one be hatched, and the
serried ranks conduct it to the sea; it leaps into the waters, and is
saved!
Stern, sad climates! Yet who would not love them, when he sees there
the vast tenderness of nature, which impartially orders the home of man
and the bird, the central source of love and devotion? From nature the
Northern home receives a moral grace which that of the South rarely
possesses; a sun shines there which is not the sun of the Equator, but
far more gentle--that of the soul. There every creature is exalted,
either by the very austerity of the climate or the urgency of peril.
The supreme effort in this world of the North, which is nowhere that
of beauty, is to have discovered the Beautiful. This miracle springs
from the mother's soul. Lapland has but one art, one solitary object of
art--the cradle. "It is a charming object," says a lady who has visited
those regions; "elegant and graceful, like a pretty little shoe lined
with the soft fur of the white hare, more delicate than the feathers
of the swan. Around the hood, where the infant's head is completely
protected, warmly and softly sheltered, are hung festoons of coloured
pearls, and tiny chains of copper or silver which clink incessantly,
and whose jingling makes the young Laplander laugh."
O wonder of maternity! Through its influence the rudest woman becomes
artistic, tenderly heedful. But the female is always heroic. It is one
of the most affecting spectacles to see the bird of the eider--the
eider-duck--plucking its down from its breast for a couch and a
covering for its young. And if man steals the nest, the mother still
continues upon herself the cruel operation. When she has stripped off
every feather, when there is nothing more to despoil but the flesh
and the blood, the father takes his turn; so that the little one is
clothed of themselves and their substance, by their devotion and their
suffering. Montaigne, speaking of a cloak which had served his father,
and which he loved to wear in remembrance of him, makes use of a tender
phrase, which this poor nest recalls to my mind--"I wrapped myself up
in my father."
[Illustration]
[Illustration: THE WING.]
[Illustration]
THE WING.
"Wings! wings! to sweep
O'er mountain high and valley deep.
Wings! that my heart may rest
In the radiant morning's breast.
"Wings! to hover free
O'er the dawn-empurpled sea.
Wings! 'bove life to soar,
And beyond death for evermore."
RUCKERT.
It is the cry of the whole earth, of the world, of all life; it is that
which every species of animals or plants utters in a hundred diverse
tongues--the voice which issues from the very rock and the inorganic
creation: "Wings! we seek for wings, and the power of flight and
motion!"
Yea; the most inert bodies rush greedily into the chemical
transformations which will make them part and parcel of the current of
the universal life, and bestow upon them the organs of movement and
fermentation.
Yea; the vegetables, fettered by their immovable roots, expand their
secret loves towards a winged existence, and commend themselves to the
winds, the waters, the insects, in quest of a life beyond their narrow
limits--of that gift of flight which nature has refused to them.
We contemplate pityingly those rudimentary animals, the unau and the
aï, sad and suffering images of man, which cannot advance a step
without a groan--sloths or _tardigrades_. The names by which we
identify them we might justly reserve for ourselves. If slowness be
relative to the desire of movement, to the constantly futile effort
to progress, to advance, to act, the true _tardigrade_ is man. His
faculty of dragging himself from one point of the earth to another, the
ingenious instruments which he has recently invented in aid of that
faculty--all this does not lessen his adhesion to the earth; he is not
the less firmly chained to it by the tyranny of gravitation.
[Illustration]
I see upon earth but one order of created beings which enjoy the power
of ignoring or beguiling, by their freedom and swiftness of motion,
this universal sadness of impotent aspiration; I mean those beings
which belong to earth, so to speak, only by the tips of their wings;
which the air itself cradles and supports, most frequently without
being otherwise connected with them than by guiding them at their need
and their caprice.
A life of ease, yet sublime! With what a glance of scorn may the
weakest bird regard the strongest, the swiftest of quadrupeds--a tiger,
a lion! How it may smile to see them in their utter powerlessness
bound, fastened to the earth, which they terrify with vain and useless
roaring--with the nocturnal wailings that bear witness to the bondage
of the so-called king of animals, fettered, as we are all, in that
inferior existence which hunger and gravitation equally prepare for us!
Oh, the fatality of the appetites! the fatality of motion which compels
us to drag our unwilling limbs along the earth! Implacable heaviness
which binds each of our feet to the dull, rude element wherein death
will hereafter resolve us, and says, "Son of the earth, to the earth
thou belongest! A moment released from its bosom, thou shalt lie there
henceforth for ages."
Do not let us inveigh against nature; it is assuredly the sign that
we inhabit a world still in its first youth, still in a state of
barbarism--a world of essay and apprenticeship, in the grand series
of stars, one of the elementary stages of the sublime initiation.
This planet is the world of a child. And thou, a child thou art. From
this lower school thou shalt be emancipated also; thy wings shall be
majestic and powerful. Thou shalt win and deserve, while here, by the
sweat of thy brow, a step forward in liberty.
Let us make an experiment. Ask of the bird while still in the egg what
he would wish to be; give him the option. Wilt thou be a man, and share
in that royalty of the globe which men have won by art and toil?
No, he will immediately reply. Without calculating the immense
exertion, the labour, the sweat, the care, the life of slavery by which
we purchase sovereignty, he will have but one word to say: "A king
myself, by birth, of space and light, why should I abdicate when man,
in his loftiest ambition, in his highest aspirations after happiness
and freedom, dreams of becoming a bird, and taking unto himself wings?"
It is in his sunniest time, his first and richest existence, in his
day-dreams of youth, that man has sometimes the good fortune to forget
that he is a man, a slave to hard fate, and chained to earth. Behold,
yonder, him who flies abroad, who hovers, who dominates over the world,
who swims in the sunbeam; he enjoys the ineffable felicity of embracing
at a glance an infinity of things which yesterday he could only see one
by one. Obscure enigma of detail, suddenly made luminous to him who
perceives its unity! To see the world beneath one's self, to embrace,
to love it! How divine, how lofty a dream! Do not wake me, I pray
you, never wake me! But what is this? Here again are day, uproar, and
labour; the harsh iron hammer, the ear-piercing bell with its voice of
steel, dethrone and dash me headlong; my wings are rent. Dull earth, I
fall to earth; bruised and bent, I return to the plough.
When, at the close of the last century, man formed the daring idea of
giving himself up to the winds, of mounting in the air without rudder,
or oar, or means of guidance, he proclaimed aloud that at length he
had secured his pinions, had eluded nature, and conquered gravitation.
Cruel and tragical catastrophes gave the lie to this ambition. He
studied the economy of the bird's wing, he undertook to imitate it;
rudely enough he counterfeited its inimitable mechanism. We saw with
terror, from a column of a hundred feet high, a poor human bird, armed
with huge wings, dart into air, wrestle with it, and dash headlong into
atoms.
The gloomy and fatal machine, in its laborious complexity, was a sorry
imitation of that admirable arm (far superior to the human arm), that
system of muscles, which co-operate among themselves in so vigorous
and lively a movement. Disjointed and relaxed, the human wing lacked
especially that all-powerful muscle which connects the shoulder to the
chest (the _humerus_ to the _sternum_), and communicates its impetus to
the thunderous flight of the falcon. The instrument acts so directly
on the mover, the oar on the rower, and unites with him so perfectly
that the martinet, the frigate-bird, sweeps along at the rate of eighty
leagues an hour, five or six times swifter than our most rapid railway
trains, outstripping the hurricane, and with no rival but the lightning.
[Illustration]