Selborne is set solidly in the foreground. But something is lacking; and so before the scene fills with birds, mice, voles, crickets, and the Duke of Richmond’s moose, before the page is loud with the chirpings, bleatings, lowings, and gruntings of their familiar intercourse, we have Queen Anne lying on the bank to watch the deer driven past. It was an anecdote, he casually remarks, that he had from an old keeper, Adams, whose greatgrandfather, father and self were all keepers in the forest. And thus the single straggling street is allied with history, and shaded by tradition. No novelist could have given us more briefly and completely all that we need to know before the story begins.
The story of Selborne is a vegetable, an animal story. The gossip is about the habits of vipers and the love interest is supplied chiefly by frogs. Compared with Gilbert White the most realistic of novelists is a rash romantic. The crop of the cuckoo is examined; the viper is dissected; the grasshopper is sought with a pliant grass blade in its hole; the mouse is measured and found to weigh one copper halfpenny. Nothing can exceed the minuteness of these observations, or the scrupulous care with which they are conducted. The chief question in dispute—it is indeed the theme of the book—is the migration of swallows. Barrington believed that the swallow sleeps out the winter; White, who has a nephew in Andalusia to inform him, now inclines to migration; then draws back. Every grain of evidence is sifted; none is obscured. With all his faculties bent on this great question, the image of science at her most innocent and most sincere, he loses that self-consciousness which so often separates us from our fellow-creatures and becomes like a bird seen through a field-glass busy in a distant hedge. This is the moment then, when his eyes are fixed upon the swallow, to watch Gilbert White himself.
We observe in the first place the creature’s charming simplicity. He is quite indifferent to public opinion. He will transplant a colony of crickets to his lawn; imprison one in a paper cage on his table; bawl through a speaking trumpet at his bees—they remain indifferent; and arrive at Selborne with Aunt Snookes aged tortoise seated beside him in the post chaise. And while thus engaged he emits those little chuckles of delight, those half-conscious burblings and comments which make him as “amusive” as one of his own birds. “… But their inequality of height,” he muses, pondering the abortive match between the moose and the red deer, “must always have been a bar to any commerce of an amorous kind.”
“The copulation of frogs,” he observes, “is notorious to everybody … and yet I never saw, or read, of toads being observed in the same situation.”
“Pitiable seems the condition of this poor embarrassed reptile,” he laments over the tortoise, yet “there is a season (usually the beginning of June) when the tortoise walks on tip-toe” along the garden path in search of love.
And just as the vicarage garden seemed to Aunt Snookes tortoise a whole world, so, as we look through the eyes of Gilbert White, England becomes immense. The South Downs, across which he rides year after year, turn to “a vast range of mountains”. The country is very empty. He is more solitary at Selborne than a peasant to-day in the remotest Hebrides. It is true that he has—he is proud of the fact—a nephew in Andalusia; but he has no acquaintance at present among the gentlemen of the Navy; and though London and Bath exist, of course—London indeed boasts a very fine collection of horns—rumours from those capitals come very slowly across wild moors and roads which the snow has made impassable. In this quiet air sounds are magnified. We hear the whisper of the grasshopper lark; the caw of rooks is like a pack of hounds “in hollow, echoing woods”; and on a still summer evening the Portsmouth gun booms out just as the goat-sucker begins its song. His mind, like the bird’s crop that the farmer’s wife found stuffed with vegetables and cooked for her dinner, has nothing but insects in it and tender green shoots. This innocent, this unconscious happiness is conveyed, not by assertion, but much more effectively by those unsought memories that come of their own accord. They are all of hot summer evenings—at Oxford in Christ Church quadrangle; riding from Richmond to Sunbury with the swallows skimming the river. Even the strident voice of the cricket, so discordant to some, fills his mind “with a train of summer ideas, of everything that is rural, verdurous and joyful”. There is a continuity in his happiness; the same thoughts recur on the same occasions. “I made the same remark in former years as I came the same way annually.” Year after year he was thinking of the swallows.
But the landscape in which this bird roams so freely has its hedges. They shut in, but they protect. There is what he calls, so aptly, Providence. Church spires, he remarks, “are very necessary ingredients in the landscape.” Providence dwells there—inscrutable, for why does it allot so many years to Aunt Snookes tortoise? But all-wise—consider the legs of the frog—“How wonderful is the economy of Providence with regards to the limbs of so vile an animal!” In another fifty years Providence would have been neither so inscrutable nor as wise—it would have lost its shade. But Providence about 1760 was in its prime; it sets all doubts at rest, and so leaves the mind free to question practically everything. Besides Providence there are the castles and seats of the nobility. He respects them almost equally. The old families—the Howes, the Mordaunts—know their places and keep the poor in theirs. Gilbert White is far less tender to the poor—“We abound with poor,” he writes, as if the vermin were beneath his notice—than to the grasshopper whom he lifts out of its hole so carefully and once inadvertently squeezed to death. Finally, shading the landscape with its august laurel, is literature—Latin literature, naturally. His mind is haunted by the classics. He sounds a Latin phrase now and then as if to tune his English. The echo that was so famous a feature of Selborne seems of its own accord to boom out Tityre, tu patulae recubans … It was with Virgil in his mind that Gilbert White described the women making rush candles at Selborne.
So we observe through our field-glasses this very fine specimen of the eighteenth-century clerical naturalist. But just as we think to have got him named he moves. He sounds a note that is not the characteristic note of the common English clergyman. “When I hear fine music I am haunted with passages therefrom night and day; and especially at first waking, which by their importunity, give me more uneasiness than pleasure.” Why does music, he asks, “so strangely affect some men, as it were by recollection, for days after a concert is over?”
It is a question that sends us baffled to his biography. But we learn only what we knew already—that his affection for Kitty Mulso was not passionate; that he was born at Selborne in 1720 and died there in 1793; and that his “days passed with scarcely any other vicissitudes than those of the seasons.” But one fact is added—a negative, but a revealing fact; there is no portrait of him in existence. He has no face. That is why perhaps he escapes identification. His observation of the insect in the grass is minute; but he also raises his eyes to the horizon and looks and listens. In that moment of abstraction he hears sounds that make him uneasy in the early morning; he escapes from Selborne, from his own age, and comes winging his way to us in the dusk along the hedgerows. A clerical owl? A parson with the wings of a bird? A hybrid? But his own description fits him best. “The kestrel or wind-hover,” he says, “has a peculiar mode of hanging in the air in one place, his wings all the time being briskly agitated.”
[New Statesman and Nation, Sep 30, 1939]
Life Itself.
One could wish that the psycho-analysts would go into the question of diary keeping. For often it is the one mysterious fact in a life otherwise as clear as the sky and as candid as the dawn. Parson Woodforde is a case in point—his diary is the only mystery about him. For forty-three years he sat down almost daily to record what he did on Monday and what he had for dinner on Tuesday; but for whom he wrote or why he wrote it is impossible to say. He does not unburden his soul in his diary; yet it is no mere record of engagements and expenses. As for literary fame, there is no sign that he ever thought of it, and finally, though the man himself is peaceable above all things, there are little indiscretions and criticisms which would have got him into trouble and
