and wishes for no happiness which it cannot share with the animals,
its benefactors. It does not desire to be saved alone. It endeavours
to associate them in its immortality. It wills that the sacred bird
accompany it to the sombre realm, as if to bear it on its wings.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: DEATH.]
[Illustration]
DEATH.
BIRDS OF PREY.--(THE RAPTORES).
It was one of my saddest hours when, seeking in nature a refuge from
the thoughts of the age, I for the first time encountered the head of
the viper. This occurred in a valuable museum of anatomical imitations.
The head, marvellously imitated and enormously enlarged, so as to
remind one of the tiger's and the jaguar's, exposed in its horrible
form a something still more horrible. You seized at once the delicate,
infinite, fearfully prescient precautions by which the deadly machine
is so potently armed. Not only is it provided with numerous keen-edged
teeth; not only are these teeth supplied with an ingenious reservoir
of poison which slays immediately; but their extreme fineness, which
renders them liable to fracture, is compensated by an advantage that
perhaps no other animal possesses; namely, a magazine of supernumerary
teeth, to supply at need the place of any accidentally broken. Oh,
what provision for killing! What precautions that the victim shall
not escape! What love for this horrible creature! I stood by it
_scandalized_, if I may so speak, and with a sick soul. Nature, the
great mother, by whose side I had taken refuge, shocked me with a
maternity so cruelly impartial.
Gloomily I walked away, bearing on my heart a darker shadow than rested
on the day itself, one of the sternest in winter. I had come forth
like a child; I returned home like an orphan, feeling the notion of a
Providence dying away within me.
[Illustration]
Our impressions are not less painful when we see in our galleries
the endless series of birds of prey, prowlers by day and night,
frightful masks of birds, phantoms which terrify the day itself. One is
powerfully affected by observing their cruel weapons; I do not refer to
those terrible beaks which kill with a blow, but those talons, those
sharpened saws, those instruments of torture which fix the shuddering
prey, protract the last keen pangs and the agony of suffering.
Ah! our globe is a barbarous world, though still in its youth; a world
of attempts and rude beginnings, given over to cruel slaveries--to
night, hunger, death, fear! Death? We can accept it; there is in the
soul enough of hope and faith to look upon it as a passage, a stage of
initiation, a gate to better worlds. But, alas, was pain so useful as
to render it necessary to prodigalize it? I feel it, I see it, I hear
it everywhere. Not to hear it, to preserve the thread of my thoughts,
I am forced to stop up my ears. All the activity of my soul would be
suspended, my nerves shattered by it; I should effect nothing more, I
should no longer move forward; my life and powers of production would
remain barren, annihilated by pity!
"And yet is not pain the warning which teaches us to foresee and
to anticipate, and by every means in our power to ward off our
dissolution? This cruel school is the stimulant and spur of prudence
for all living things--a powerful drawing back of the soul upon itself,
which otherwise would be enfeebled by happiness, by soft and weakening
impressions.
"May it not be said that happiness has a centrifugal attraction which
diffuses us wholly without, detains us, dissipates us, would evaporate
and restore us to the elements, if we wholly abandoned ourselves to it?
Pain, on the contrary, if experienced at one point, brings back all to
the centre, knits closer, prolongs, ensures and fortifies existence.
"Pain is in some wise the artist of the world which creates us,
fashions us, sculptures us with the fine edge of a pitiless chisel. It
limits the overflowing life. And that which remains, stronger and more
exquisite, enriched by its very loss, draws thence the gift of a higher
being."
These thoughts of resignation were awakened by one who was herself a
sufferer, and whose clear eye discerned, even before I myself did, my
troubles and my doubts.
As the individual, said she again, so is the world. Earth itself has
been benefited by Pain. Nature begot her through the violent action
of these ministers of death. Their species, rapidly growing rarer and
rarer, are the memorials, the evidences of an anterior stage of the
globe in which the inferior life swarmed, while nature laboured to
purge the excessive fecundity.
We can retrace in thought the scale of the successive necessities of
destruction which the earth was thus constrained to undergo.
Against the irrespirable air which at first enveloped it, vegetables
were its saviours. Against the suffocating and terrific density of
these lower vegetable forms, the rough coating which encrusted it,
the nibbling, gnawing insect, which we have since execrated, was the
sanitary agent. Against the insect, the frog, and the reptile mass,
the venomous reptile proved an useful expurgator. Finally, when the
higher life, the winged life, took its flight, earth found a barrier
against the too rapid transports of her young fecundity in the powerful
voracious birds, eagles, falcons, or vultures.
[Illustration]
But these useful destroyers have diminished in numbers as they have
become less necessary. The swarms of small creeping animals on which
the viper principally whetted his teeth having wonderfully thinned,
the viper also grows rare. The world of winged game being cleared in
its turn, either by man's depredations or by the disappearance of
certain insects on which the small birds lived, you see that the odious
tyrants of the air are also decreasing; the eagle is seldom met with,
even among the Alps, and the exaggerated and enormous prices which
the falcon fetches, seems to prove that the former, the noblest of the
raptores, has now-a-days nearly disappeared.
Thus nature gravitates towards a less violent order. Does this mean
that death will ever diminish? Death! no; but pain surely.
The world little by little falls under the power of the Being who alone
understands the useful equilibrium of life and death, who can regulate
it in such wise as to maintain the scale even between the living
species, to encourage them according to their merit or innocence--to
simplify, to soften, and (if I may hazard the word) to moralize death,
by rending it swift, and freeing it from anguish.
Death was never our serious objection. Is it more than a simple mask
of life's transformations? But pain is an objection, grave, cruel,
terrible. Therefore, little by little, it will disappear from the
earth. Its agents, the fierce executioners of the life which they
plucked out by torture, are already very rare.
Assuredly, when I survey, in the Museum, the sinister assemblage
of nocturnal and diurnal birds of prey, I do not much regret the
destruction of these species. Whatever pleasure our personal instincts
of violence, our admiration of strength, may cause us to take in
these winged robbers, it is impossible to misread in their deathlike
masks the baseness of their nature. Their pitifully flattened skulls
are sufficient evidence that, though greatly favoured with wing, and
crooked beak, and talons, they have not the least need to make use of
their intelligence. Their constitution, which has made them swiftest
of the swift, strongest of the strong, has enabled them to dispense
with address, stratagem, and tactic. As for the courage with which one
is tempted to endow them, what occasion have they to display it, since
they encounter none but inferior enemies? Enemies? no; victims! When
the rigour of the season, or hunger, drives their young to emigrate, it
leads to the beak of these dull tyrants countless numbers of innocents,
very superior in every sense to their murderers; it prodigalizes the
birds which are artists, and singers, and architects, as a prey to
these vulgar assassins; and for the eagle and the buzzard provides a
banquet of nightingales.
[Illustration]
The flattened skull is the degrading sign of these murderers. I trace
it in the most extolled, in those whom man has the most flattered, and
even in the noble falcon; noble, it is true, and I the less dispute the
justice of the title, because, unlike the eagle and other executioners,
it knows how to kill its prey at a blow, and scorns to torture it.
These birds of prey, with their small brains, offer a striking contrast
to the numerous amiable and plainly intelligent species which we find
among the smaller birds. The head of the former is only a beak; that
of the latter has a face. What comparison can be made between these
brute giants and the intelligent, all-human bird, the robin redbreast,
which at this very moment hovers about me, perches on my shoulder or my
paper, examines my writing, warms himself at the fire, or curiously
peers through the window to see if the spring-time will not soon return.
If there be any choice among the raptores, I should certainly
prefer--dare I say it?--the vulture to the eagle. Among the bird-world
I have seen nothing so grand, so imposing, as our five Algerian
vultures (in the Jardin des Plantes), posted together like so many
Turkish pachas, adorned with superb cravats of the most delicate white
down, and draped in noble mantles of gray. A solemn divan of exiles,
who seem to discuss among themselves the vicissitudes of things and the
political events which have driven them from their native country.
[Illustration]
What real difference exists between the eagle and the vulture? The
eagle passionately loves blood, and prefers living flesh, very rarely
eating the dead. The vulture seldom kills, and directly benefits
life by restoring to its service and to the grand current of vital
circulation the disorganized objects which would associate with others
to their disorganization. The eagle lives upon murder only, and may
justly be entitled the minister of Death. On the contrary, the vulture
is the servant of Life.
Owing to his strength and beauty, the eagle has been adopted as an
emblem by more than one warrior race which lived, like himself, by
rapine. The Persians and the Romans chose him. We now associate him
with the lofty ideas which these great empires originate. Grave
people--even an Aristotle--have accredited the absurd fable that he
daringly eyed the sun, and put his offspring to the test, by making
them also gaze upon it. Once started on this glorious road, the
philosophers halted no more. Buffon went the furthest. He eulogizes
the eagle for his _temperance_. He does not eat at all, says he. The
truth is, that when his prey is large, he feasts himself on the spot,
and carries but a small portion to his family. The king of the air,
says he again, _disdains small animals_. But observation points to a
directly opposite conclusion. The ordinary eagle attacks with eagerness
the most timid of beings, the hare; the spotted eagle assails the duck.
The booted eagle has a preference for field mice and house mice, and
eats them so greedily that he swallows them without killing them. The
bald-headed eagle, or pygargo, will frequently slay his own young, and
often drives them from the nest before they can support themselves.
[Illustration]
Near Havre I have observed one instance of truly royal nobility, and,
above all, of sobriety, in an eagle. A bird, captured at sea, but which
has fallen into far too kindly hands in a butcher's house, is so gorged
with an abundance of food obtained without fighting, that he appears
to regret nothing. A Falstaff of an eagle, he grows fat, and cares no
longer for the chase, or the plains of heaven. If he no longer fixedly
eyes the sun, he watches the kitchen, and for a titbit allows the
children to drag him by the tail.
If rank is to be decided by strength, the first place must not be
given to the eagle, but to the bird which figures in the "Thousand and
One Nights" under the name of _Roc_, the condor, the giant of gigantic
mountains, the Cordilleras. It is the largest of the vultures--is,
fortunately, the rarest--and the most destructive, as it feeds only on
live prey. When it meets with a large animal, it so gorges itself with
meat that it is unable to stir, and may then be killed with a few blows
of a stick.
To judge these species truly we must examine the eyrie of the eagle,
the rude, ill-constructed platform which serves for its nest;
compare this rough and clumsy work--I do not say with the delicate
_chef-d'oeuvre_ of a chaffinch's nest--but with the constructions of
insects, the excavations of ants, where the industrious workman varies
his art to infinity, and displays a genius so singular in its foresight
and resources.
The traditional esteem which man cherishes for the courage of the great
Raptores is much diminished when we read, in Wilson, that a tiny bird,
a fly-catcher, such as the purple martin, will hunt the great black
eagle, pursue it, harass it, banish it from its district, give it not
a moment's repose. It is a truly extraordinary spectacle to see this
little hero, adding all his weight to his strength, that he may make
the greater impression, rise and let himself drop from the clouds on
the back of the large robber, mount without letting go, and prick him
forward with his beak in lieu of a spur.
Without going so far as America, you may see, in the Jardin des
Plantes, the ascendancy of the little over the great, of mind over
matter, in the singular tête-à-tête of the gypaetus and the crow. The
latter, a very feeble animal, and the feeblest of birds of prey, which
in his black garb has the air of a pedagogue, labours hard to civilize
his brutal fellow-prisoner, the gypaetus. It is amusing to observe
how he teaches him to play--humanizes him, so to speak--by a hundred
tricks of his own invention, and refines his rude nature. This comedy
is performed with special distinction when the crow has a reasonable
number of spectators. It has appeared to me that he disdains to exhibit
his _savoir-faire_ before a single eye-witness. He calculates upon
their assistance, earns their respect in case of need. I have seen
him dart back with his beak the little pebbles which a child had
flung at him. The most remarkable pastime which he teaches to his big
friend is, to make him hold by one end a stick which he himself draws
by the other. This show of a struggle between strength and weakness,
this simulated equality, is well adapted to soften the barbarian, and
though at first he gives but little heed to it, he afterwards yields to
continued urgency, and ends by throwing himself into the sport with a
savage good temper.
[Illustration]
In the presence of this repulsively ferocious figure, armed with
invincible talons and a beak tipped with iron, which would kill at
the first blow, the crow has not the least fear. With the security of
a superior mind, before this heavy mass he goes, he comes, he wheels
about, he snatches its prey before its eyes; the other growls, but too
late; his tutor, far more nimble, with his black eye, metallic and
lustrous as steel, has seen the forward movement; he leaps away; if
need be, he climbs a branch or two higher; he growls in his turn--he
admonishes his companion.
This facetious personage has in his pleasantry the advantage due to the
seriousness, gravity, and sadness of his demeanour. I saw one daily,
in the streets of Nantes, on the threshold of an alley, which, in his
demi-captivity, could only console himself for his clipped wings by
playing tricks with the dogs. He suffered the curs to pass unmolested;
but when his malicious eye espied a dog of handsome figure, worthy
indeed of his courage, he hopped behind him, and, by a skilful and
unperceived manoeuvre, leapt upon his back, gave him, hot and dry,
two stabs with his strong black beak: the dog fled, howling. Satisfied,
tranquil, and serious, the crow returned to his post, and one could
never have supposed that so grim-looking a fellow had just indulged in
such an escapade.
[Illustration]
It is said that in a state of freedom, strong in their spirit of
association, and in their numbers, they hazard the most audacious
games, even to watching the absence of the eagle, stealing into his
redoubtable nest, and robbing it of the eggs. And, what is more
difficult to believe, naturalists pretend to have seen great troops
of them, which, when the eagle is at home, and defending his family,
deafen him with their cries, defy him, entice him forth, and contrive,
though not without a battle, to carry off an eaglet.
Such exertions and such danger for this miserable prey! If the thing be
true, we must suppose that the prudent republic, frequently troubled or
harassed by the tyrant of the country, decrees the extinction of his
race, and believes itself bound by a great act of devotion, cost what
it may, to execute the decree.
[Illustration]
Their sagacity is shown in a thousand ways, especially in the judicious
and well-weighed choice of their abode. Those which I observed at
Nantes, on one of the hills of the Erdre, passed over my head every
morning, and returned every evening. Evidently they had their town and
country houses. By day they perched on the cathedral towers to make
their observations, ferreting out (_éventant_) what good things the
city might have to offer. At close of day, they regained the woods, and
the well-sheltered rocks where they love to pass the night. These are
domiciliated people, and no mere birds of passage. Attached to their
family, especially to their mates, to whom they are scrupulously loyal,
their peculiar dwelling-place should be the nest. But the dread of the
great birds of night decides them to sleep together in twenties or
thirties--a sufficient number for a combat, if such should arise. Their
special object of hate and horror is the owl; when day breaks, they
take their revenge for his nocturnal misdeeds: they hoot him; they
give him chase; profiting by his embarrassment, they persecute him to
death.
There is no form of association by which they do not know how to
profit. That which is sweetest--the family--does not induce them to
forget, as you may see, the confederacy for defence or the league
for attack. On the contrary, they associate themselves even with
their superior rivals, the vultures, and call, precede, or follow
them, to feed at their expense. They unite--and this is a stronger
illustration--with their enemy the eagle; at least, they surround him
to profit by his combats, by the fray in which he triumphs over some
great animal. These shrewd spectators wait at a little distance until
the eagle has feasted to his satisfaction, and gorged himself with
blood; when this takes place, he flies away, and the remainder falls to
the crows.
Their evident superiority over so great a number of birds is due to
their longevity and to the experience which their excellent memory
enables them to acquire and profit by. Very different to the majority
of animals, whose duration of life is proportionable to the duration of
their infancy, they reach maturity at the end of a year, and live, it
is said, a century.
The great variety of their food, which includes every kind of animal
or vegetable nutriment, every dead or living prey, gives them a wide
acquaintance with things and seasons, harvests and hunts. They interest
themselves in everything, and observe everything. The ancients, who
lived far more completely than ourselves in and with nature, found it
no small profit to follow, in a hundred obscure things where human
experience as yet affords no light, the directions of so prudent and
sage a bird.
With due submission to the noble Raptores, the crow, which frequently
guides them, despite his "inky suit" and uncouth visage, despite the
coarseness of appetite imputed to him, is not the less the superior
genius of the great species of which he is, in size, already a
diminution.
But the crow, after all, represents only utilitarian prudence, the
wisdom of self-interest. To arrive at the higher orders, the heroes of
the winged race, the sublime and impassioned artists, we must reduce
the bird in size, and lower the material to exalt the mental and moral
development. Nature, like so many mothers, has shown a weakness for her
smallest offspring.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Part Second.
[Illustration: THE LIGHT--THE NIGHT.]
[Illustration]
THE LIGHT.
THE NIGHT.
"Light! more light!" Such were the last words of Goethe. This utterance
of expiring genius is the general cry of Nature, and re-echoes from
world to world. What was said by that man of power--one of the eldest
sons of God--is said by His humblest children, the least advanced in
the scale of animal life, the molluscs in the depths of ocean; they
will not dwell where the light never penetrates. The flower seeks the
light, turns towards it; without it, sickens. Our fellow-workers, the
animals, rejoice like us, or mourn like us, according as it comes or
goes. My grandson, but two months old, bursts into tears when the day
declines.
"This summer, when walking in my garden, I heard and I saw on a branch
a bird singing to the setting sun; he inclined himself towards the
light, and was plainly enchanted by it. I was equally charmed to see
him; our pitiful caged birds had never inspired me with the idea of
that intelligent and powerful creature, so little, so full of passion.
I trembled at his song. He bent his head behind him, his swollen bosom;
never singer or poet enjoyed so simple an ecstasy. It was not love,
however (the season was past), it was clearly the glory of the day
which raptured him--the charm of the gentle sun!
"Barbarous is the science, the hard pride, which disparages to such an
extent animated nature, and raises so impassable a barrier between man
and his inferior brothers!
"With tears I said to him: 'Poor child of light, which thou reflectest
in thy song, truly thou hast good cause to hymn it! Night, replete
with snares and dangers for thee, too closely resembles death. Would
that thou mightst see the light of the morrow!' Then, passing in
spirit from _his_ destiny to that of all living beings which, since
the dim profundities of creation, have so slowly risen to the day, I
said, like Goethe and the little bird: 'Light, light, O Lord, more
light!'"--(MICHELET, _The People_, p. 62, edit. 1846.)
[Illustration]
The world of fishes is the world of silence. Men say, "Dumb as a fish."
The world of insects is the world of night. They are all
light-shunners. Even those, which, like the bee, labour during the
day-time, prefer the shades of obscurity.
The world of birds is the world of light--of song.
All of them live in the sun, fill themselves with it, or are inspired
by it. Those of the South carry its reflected radiance on their wings;
those of our colder climates in their songs; many of them follow it
from land to land.
"See," says St. John, "how at morning time they hail the rising
sun, and at evening faithfully congregate to watch it setting on our
Scottish shores. Towards evening, the heath-cock, that he may see it
longer, stands on tiptoe and balances himself on the branch of the
tallest willow."
[Illustration]
Light, love, and song, have for them but one meaning. If you would
have the captive nightingale sing when it is not the season of his
loves, cover up his cage, then suddenly let in the light upon him,
and he recovers his voice. The unfortunate chaffinch, blinded by
barbarous hands, sings with a despairing and sickly animation, creating
for himself the light of harmony with his voice, becoming a sun unto
himself in his internal fire.
I would willingly believe that this is the chief inspiration of the
bird's song in our gloomy climates, where the sun appears only in vivid
flashes. In comparison with those brilliant zones where he never quits
the horizon, our countries, veiled in mist and cloud, but glowing at
intervals, have exactly the effect of the cage, first covered, and then
exposed, of the imprisoned nightingale. They provoke the strain, and,
like light, awaken bursts of harmony.