Part 12

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.

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 Haemi Sistat, et ingenti ramorum protegat umbra!’”

But even the Virgilian quotation does not give it the flavor of White’s pages.

X

LUCID LITERATURE

Nothing can make up in a writer for the want of lucidity. It is one of the cardinal literary virtues. If the page is not clear, if we see through it as through a glass darkly, if there is the least blur or opacity, the work to that extent is condemned. It is a false notion that some thoughts or ideas are necessarily obscure, or complex, or involved. Ideas are what we make them. If we think obscurely, our ideas are obscure; if one’s mental activity is complex, his ideas are complex. Always is the mind of the writer the medium through which we see his matter. Such a poet as George Meredith thinks obscurely. There is a large blind spot in his mind, so that at times an almost total eclipse passes over his page. Strain one’s vision as one may, one cannot make out just what he is trying to say. Then there are lucid intervals--strong, telling lines; then the shadow falls again and the reader is groping in the dark. The difficulty is never innate in his subject, but is in the poet’s use of language, as if at times he caught at words blindly and used them without reference to their accepted meanings, as when be says of the skylark, “He _drinks_ his hurried flight and drops.” How can one adjust his mind to the notion of a bird drinking its own flight?

Or take this puzzle:--

“Vermilion wings, by distance held To pause aflight while fleeting swift, And high aloft the pearl inshelled Her lucid glow in glow will lift.”

Does not the reading of such lines set one’s head in a whirl?

The impression of novelty can never be made by a trick in the use of language, nor can the sense of mystery be given by obscurity of expression. Veils and screens and dim lights may do it in the world of sense, but not in the world of ideas. The reader feels all the time that there is something in the way, and that he would see clearly if the writer thought clearly. Freshness and novelty are the gifts of the writer whose mind is fresh and who has lively and novel emotions in the presence of everyday things and events.

There is a sense of mystery in much of the poetry of Wordsworth and Tennyson, and in our own Emerson and Whitman, but little or none of the Meredithian blur and opacity. One may not at once catch the full meaning of Wordsworth’s “Ode to Immortality,” or Tennyson’s “Tiresias” or “Ancient Sage,” or Emerson’s “Brahma,” or Whitman’s “Sleep Chasings,” but how transparent the language, how unequivocal the emotion, how direct and solid the expression! There is a vast difference between the impression or want of impression made by a commonplace thought veiled and hidden by ambiguity of phrase, and that made by “something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.” Great poets give us a sense of depth and height, of the far and the rare. Meredith does at times, but oftener he gives us only a sense of the dense and the foggy.

There are two reasons why we may not understand a man. In one case the fault is in him,--in his clouded and ambiguous way of thinking, such as I have already spoken of. In the other case the fault, or rather the difficulty, is in us. The man may live and move upon a different spiritual plane, he may have an atmosphere and cherish ideals that belong to another world than ours. Thus the solid men of Boston did not understand Emerson, but said their daughters did. The daughters were habitually more familiar with Emerson’s ideal values than the fathers were. Thus Scott said he did not understand Wordsworth, could not follow his “abstruse ideas;” Campbell suited him better. Scott belonged to another type of mind than that of Wordsworth’s, lived in another world. There was no sense of mystery in his mind,--of that haunting, elusive something which Wordsworth felt in all outward nature. There was no religion in Scott’s love of nature, and it is this probably that baffled him in Wordsworth. Both were born countrymen and equal lovers of common, rural things, but Wordsworth associated them with his spiritual and ideal joys and experiences, while Scott found in them an appeal to his copious animal spirits, and his love of sensuous beauty. Wordsworth would understand Scott much better than Scott would understand Wordsworth. The ancient poets probably would not understand the moderns nearly as well as the moderns understand the ancients. We are further along on the road of human experience.

Then, we may understand a work and not appreciate it, not respond to its appeal. Appreciation is based upon kinship. We are more in sympathy with some types of mind than with others of equal parts. The most impersonal and judicious of critics cannot escape the law of elective affinities. Some books _find_ us more than others of similar merit. See how people differ, and are bound to differ, about Whitman, and it is because his aim is not merely to give the reader poetic truth disassociated from all personal qualities and traits, but to give him himself. We cannot separate the poet from the man, and if we do not respond to the man, to his type, to his quality, to his wholesale and radical democracy, we shall not respond to the poet. If we all read authors only through our taste in _belles lettres_, through our love of literary truth, we should agree in our estimate of them according as our tastes agreed. But the feeling we bring to them is very complex. Character, predisposition, natural affinities, race traits, all play a part. We are very apt to agree about such a poet as Milton, because the personal element plays so small a part in his poetry. If we do not get poetic truth in him we do not get anything. His style is the main thing, as it is with the Greek poets. In other words, there is nothing in Milton that makes a personal appeal. One cannot conceive of any reader taking him to his heart, appropriating him, and finding his life colored and changed by him, as by some later poets. Wordsworth was a revelation to Mill; Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, Whitman have in the same way been revelations to many readers, and for the same reason,--their intense individual point of view. Their appeal is a personal and a religious one as well as a poetic. No one who has not something of the modern pantheistic feeling toward nature will be deeply touched by Wordsworth. No one who has not felt the burden of modern problems, the decay of the old faiths, will be moved by Arnold’s poetry. His “sad lucidity of soul” belongs to our age. No one who has not broken away from the old traditions in art and religion and in politics, and possessed himself emotionally of the point of view afforded by modern science, will make much of Whitman. Without a certain mental and spiritual experience and a certain stamp of mind Emerson will not be much to you. In Poe one’s sense of artistic forms and verbal melody are alone appealed to. He is more to a Frenchman than to an American. If you are ahungered for the bread of life do not go to Poe, do not go to Landor or to Milton, do not go to the current French poets. Go sooner to Goethe, to Tennyson, to Browning, to Arnold, to Whitman,--the great personal poets, the men who have spiritual and religious values as well as poetic. All the great imaginative writers of our century have felt, more or less, the stir and fever of the century, and have been its priests and prophets. The lesser poets have not felt these things. Had Poe been greater or broader he would have felt them, so would Longfellow. Neither went deep enough to touch the formative currents of our social or religious or national life. In the past the great artist has always been at ease in Zion; in our day only the lesser artists are at ease, unless we except Whitman, man of unshaken faith, who is absolutely optimistic, and whose joy and serenity come from the breadth of his vision and the depth and universality of his sympathies.

XI

“MERE LITERATURE”

Is there any justification for the phrase “mere literature” which one often hears nowadays? There is no doubt a serious sneer in it, as Professor Woodrow Wilson, in a recent “Atlantic” essay, avers; but I think the sneer is not aimed so much at literature in itself as at certain phases of literature. Lowell has been quoted as saying that “mere scholarship is as useless as the collecting of old postage stamps;” yet at vital scholarship--scholarship that is wielded as a weapon, and that results in power--Lowell would be the last man to sneer. In all times of high literary culture and criticism, a great deal is produced that may well be called mere literature,--the result of assiduous training and stimulation of the literary faculties,--just as a great deal of art is produced that may be called mere art. Literature that is the result of the friction upon the mind of other literatures, might, with some justice, be called mere literature. That which is the result of the contact of the mind with reality is, or ought to be, of another order.

Or we may say “mere literature” as we say “mere gentleman.” Now gentlemanly qualities--refinement, good breeding, etc.--are not to be sneered at, unless they stand alone, with no man behind them; and literary qualities--style, learning, fancy, etc.--are not to be sneered at unless _they_ stand alone, which is not infrequently the case. We should not apply the phrase “mere gentleman” to Washington, or Lincoln, or Wellington, though these men may have been the most thorough of gentlemen; neither should we apply the phrase “mere literature” to the works of Bacon, or Shakespeare, or Carlyle, or Dante, or Plato. The Bible is literature, but it is not mere literature. We apply the latter term to writings that have little to recommend them save their technical and artistic excellence, like the mass of current poetry and fiction. The men who have nothing to say and say it extremely well produce mere literature.

Both England and France have at the present time many excellent writers, men who possess every grace of style and charm of expression, who still give us only a momentary pleasure. They do not move us, they do not lay strong hands upon us, their works do not take hold of any great reality; they produce mere literature. Literary seriousness, literary earnestness, cannot atone for a want of manly seriousness and moral earnestness. A sensitive artistic conscience cannot make us content with a dull or obtuse moral conscience. The literary worker is to confront reality in just as serious a mood as does the man of science, if he hopes to produce anything that rises above mere literature. The picnickers, the excursionists, the flower-gatherers of literature do not produce lasting works. The seriousness of Hawthorne was much more than a literary seriousness; the emotion of Whittier at his best is fundamental and human.

There is a passage in Amiel’s “Journal” that well expresses the distinction I am aiming at. “I have been thinking a great deal of Victor Cherbuliez,” he says, under date of December 4, 1876. “Perhaps his novels make up the most disputable part of his work,--they are so much wanting in simplicity, feeling, reality. And yet what knowledge, style, wit, and subtlety,--how much thought everywhere, and what mastery of language! He astonishes one; I cannot but admire him. Cherbuliez’s mind is of immense range, clear-sighted, keen, full of resources; he is an Alexandrian exquisite, substituting for the feeling which makes men earnest the irony which leaves them free. Pascal would say of him, ‘He has never risen from the order of thought to the order of charity.’ But we must not be ungrateful. A Lucian is not worth an Augustine, but still he is a Lucian.... The positive element in Victor Cherbuliez’s work is beauty, not goodness, nor moral or religious life.”

The positive element in the enduring works is always something more than the beautiful; it is the true, the vital, the real, as well. The beautiful is there, but the not-beautiful is there also. The world is held together, life is nourished and made strong, and power begotten, by the neutral or negatively beautiful. Works are everywhere produced that are artistically serious, but morally trifling and insincere; faultless in form, but tame and barren in spirit. We could not say this of the works of Froude or Ruskin, Huxley or Tyndall; we cannot say it of the works of Matthew Arnold, because he had a higher purpose than to produce mere literary effects; but we can say it of most of the productions of the younger British essayists and poets. In some of them there is a mere lust of verbal forms and rhythmic lilt. In reading their poems, I soon find myself fairly gasping for breath; I seem to be trying to breathe in a vacuum,--an effect which one does not experience at all in reading Tennyson, or Browning, or Arnold. One is apt to have serious qualms in reading the prose of Walter Pater, the lust of mere style so pervades his work. Faultless workmanship, one says; and yet the best qualities of style--freshness, naturalness, simplicity--are not here. What in Victor Hugo goes far towards atoning for all his sins against art, against sanity and proportion, are his terrible moral earnestness and his psychic power. Whatever we may think of his work, we are not likely to call it “mere literature.” That masterly ubiquitous sporting and toying with the elements of life which we find in Shakespeare we shall probably never again see in letters. The stress and burden of later times do not favor it. The great soul is now too earnest, too self-conscious; life is too serious. Only light men now essay it. With so much criticism, so much knowledge, so much science, another Shakespeare is impossible. Renan says: “In order to establish those literary authorities called classic, something especially healthy and solid is necessary. Common household bread is of more value here than pastry.” There can be little doubt that our best literary workers are intent upon producing something analogous to pastry, or even confectionery,--something fine, complex, highly seasoned, that tickles the taste. It is always in order to urge a return to the simple and serious, a return to nature, to works that have the wholesome and sustaining qualities of natural products,--grain, fruits, nuts, air, water.

XII

ANOTHER WORD ON EMERSON

In one respect many of us feel toward Emerson as a wife feels toward her husband; we like to find fault with him ourselves, but it hurts us to have others do the same. He was a friend of our youth.