The Bird
by Jules Michelet · English · Gutenberg #43341 · 437,247 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: The Bird
Author: Jules Michelet
Illustrator: Hector Giacomelli
Release date: July 28, 2013 [eBook #43341]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024
Language: English
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Transcriber's note:
Some presumed printer's errors were corrected. The following is a list
of changes made from the original. The first line shows the original
text; the second line is the corrected text as it appears in this
e-book.
A. E (p. viii)
A. E.
and. thou (p. 105)
and, thou
resemblance (p. 126)
resemblance.
Page 14 (p. 315)
Page 74
Don Jean (Footnote 29)
Don Juan
Italics are surrounded with _ _ and Greek words are transliterated and
marked with # #. The oe ligature has been replaced in this version by
the letters oe.
[Illustration: THE BIRD.]
THE BIRD
BY
JULES MICHELET.
WITH 210 ILLUSTRATIONS BY GIACOMELLI.
[Illustration]
LONDON:
T. NELSON AND SONS, PATERNOSTER ROW;
EDINBURGH; AND NEW YORK.
1868.
[Illustration]
To Madame Michelet.
_I dedicate to thee what is really thine own: three books of the
fireside, sprung from our sweet evening talk_,--
THE BIRD--THE INSECT--THE SEA.
_Thou alone didst inspire them. Without thee I should have pursued,
ever in my own track, the rude path of human history._
_Thou alone didst prepare them. I received from thy hands the rich
harvest of Nature._
_And thou alone didst crown them, placing on the accomplished work the
sacred flower which blesses them._
_J. MICHELET._
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Translator's Preface.
"L'Oiseau," or "The Bird," was first published in 1856. It has since
been followed by "L'Insecte" and "La Mer;" the three works forming a
trilogy which few writers have surpassed in grace of style, beauty of
description, and suggestiveness of sentiment. "L'Oiseau" may be briefly
described as an eloquent defence of the Bird in its relation to man,
and a poetical exposition of the attractiveness of Natural History. It
is animated by a fine and tender spirit, and written with an inimitable
charm of language.
In submitting the following translation to the English public, I
am conscious of an urgent need that I should apologize for its
shortcomings. It is no easy matter to do justice to Michelet in
English; yet, if I have failed to convey a just idea of his beauties
of expression, if I have suffered most of the undefinable _aroma_ of
his style to escape, I believe I have rendered his meaning faithfully,
without exaggeration or diminution. I have endeavoured to preserve,
as far as possible, his more characteristic peculiarities, and even
mannerisms, carrying the _literalness_ of my version to an extent which
some critics, perhaps, will be disposed to censure. But in copying the
masterpiece of a great artist, what we ask of the copyist is, that
he will reproduce every effect of light and shade with the severest
accuracy; and, in the translation of a noble work from one language to
another, the public have a right to demand the same exact adherence to
the original. They want to see as much of the author as they can, and
as little as may be of the translator.
The present version is from the eighth edition of "L'Oiseau," and is
adorned with all the original Illustrations.
A. E.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Contents.
INTRODUCTION.
Page
HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO THE STUDY OF NATURE, 13
PART FIRST.
THE EGG, 63
THE POLE--AQUATIC BIRDS, 71
THE WING, 81
THE FIRST FLUTTERINGS OF THE WING, 91
TRIUMPH OF THE WING--THE FRIGATE BIRD, 101
THE SHORES--DECAY OF CERTAIN SPECIES, 111
THE HERONRIES OF AMERICA--WILSON, THE ORNITHOLOGIST, 121
THE COMBAT--THE TROPICAL REGIONS, 131
PURIFICATION, 143
DEATH--BIRDS OF PREY (THE RAPTORES), 153
PART SECOND.
THE LIGHT--THE NIGHT, 171
STORM AND WINTER--MIGRATIONS, 181
MIGRATIONS, _Continued_--THE SWALLOW, 193
HARMONIES OF THE TEMPERATE ZONE, 205
THE BIRD AS THE LABOURER OF MAN, 213
LABOUR--THE WOODPECKER, 223
THE SONG, 235
THE NEST--ARCHITECTURE OF BIRDS, 247
THE COMMUNITIES OF BIRDS--ESSAYS AT A REPUBLIC, 257
EDUCATION, 265
THE NIGHTINGALE--ART AND THE INFINITE, 277
THE NIGHTINGALE, _Continued_, 287
CONCLUSION, 297
ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES, 311
[Illustration]
[Illustration: HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED
TO
THE STUDY OF NATURE.]
[Illustration]
THE BIRD.
How the Author was led to the Study of Nature.
To my faithful friend, the Public, who has listened to me for so
long a period without disfavour, I owe a confession of the peculiar
circumstances which, while not leading me altogether astray from
history, have induced me to devote myself to the natural sciences.
The book which I now publish may be described as the offspring of the
domestic circle and the home fireside. It is from our hours of rest,
our afternoon conversations, our winter readings, our summer gossips,
that this book, if it be a book, has been gradually evolved.
Two studious persons, naturally reunited after a day's toil, put
together their gleanings, and refreshed their hearts by this closing
evening feast.
Am I saying that we have had no other assistance? To make such a
statement would be unjust, ungrateful. The domesticated swallows which
lodged under our roof mingled in our conversation. The homely robin,
fluttering around me, interjected his tender notes, and sometimes the
nightingale suspended it by her solemn music.
[Illustration]
The burden of the time, life, labour, the violent fluctuations of our
era, the dispersion of a world of intelligence in which we lived, and
to which nothing has succeeded, weighed heavily upon me. The arduous
toils of history found occasional relaxation in friendly instruction.
These pauses, however, are only periods of silence. Where shall we seek
repose or moral invigoration, if not of nature?
The mighty eighteenth century, which included a thousand years of
struggle, rested at its setting on the amiable and consoling, though
scientifically feeble book of Bernardin de St. Pierre.[1] It ended with
that pathetic speech of Ramond's: "So many irreparable losses lamented
in the bosom of nature!"
We, whatever we had lost, asked of solitude something more than tears,
something more than the dittany[2] which softens wounded hearts.
We sought in it a panacea for continual progress, a draught from
inexhaustible fountains, a new strength, and--wings.
This work, whatever its character, possesses at least the distinction
of having entered upon life under the usual conditions of existence. It
results from the intimate communion of two souls; and is in all things
itself uniform and harmonious because the offspring of two different
principles.
[Illustration]
Of the two souls to which it owes its existence, one was the more
powerfully attracted to natural studies by the fact that, in a
certain sense, it had been born among them, and had ever preserved
their fragrance and sweet savour. The other was so much the more
strongly impelled towards them because it had always been separated by
circumstances, and detained in the rugged ways of human history.
History never releases its slave. He who has once drunk of its sharp
strong wine will drink thereof till his death. I could not wrench
myself from it even in days of suffering. When the sorrows of the
past blended with those of the present, and when on the ruins of our
fortunes I inscribed "ninety-three," my health might fail, but not
my soul, my will. All day I applied myself to this last duty, and
pressed forward among the thorns. In the evening I listened--at first
not without effort--to the peaceful narrative of some naturalist or
traveller. I listened and I admired, unable as yet to console myself,
or to escape from my thoughts, but, at all events, keeping them under
control, and preventing any anxieties and any mental storms from
disturbing this innocent tranquillity.
Not that I was insensible to the sublime legends of those heroic men
whose labours and enterprise have so largely benefited humanity. The
great national patriots whose history I was relating were the nearest
of kindred to these cosmopolitan patriots, these citizens of the world.
[Illustration]
For myself, I had long hailed, with all my heart, the great French
Revolution which had occurred in the Natural Sciences--the era of
Lamarck and of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire,[3] so fertile in method, the
mighty restorers of all science. With what happiness I traced their
features in their legitimate sons--those ingenious children who have
inherited their intellect!
[Illustration]
At their head let me name the amiable and original author of the "Monde
des Oiseaux,"[4] whom the world has long recognized as one of the most
solid, if not also the most amusing, of naturalists. I shall refer to
him more than once; but I hasten, on the threshold of my book, to pay
this preliminary homage to a truly great observer, who, in all that
concerns his own observations, is as weighty, as _special_, as Wilson
or Audubon.
He has wronged himself by saying that, in his noble work, "he has only
sought a pretext for a discourse on man." On the contrary, numerous
pages demonstrate that, apart from all analogy, he has loved and
studied the Bird for its own sake. And it is for this reason that he
has surrounded it with so many legends, with such vivid and profound
personifications. Each bird which Toussenel treats of is now, and will
for ever remain, a person.
[Illustration]
Nevertheless, the book now before the reader starts from a point of
view which differs in all things from that of our illustrious master.
A point of view by no means contrary, yet symmetrically opposed, to his.
For I, as much as possible, seeking only the bird _in_ the bird, avoid
the human analogy. With the exception of two chapters, I have written
as if only the bird existed, as if man had never been.
Man! we have already met with him sufficiently often in other places.
Here, on the contrary, we have sought an _alibi_ from the human world,
from the profound solitude and desolation of ancient days.
Man could not have lived without the bird, which alone could save him
from the insect and the reptile; but the bird had lived without man.
Man or no man, the eagle had reigned on his Alpine throne. The swallow
would not the less have performed her yearly migration. The frigate
bird,[5] unseen by human eyes, had still hovered over the lonely
ocean-waters. Without waiting for human listeners, and with all the
greater security, the nightingale had still chanted in the forest his
sublime hymn. And for whom? For her whom he loves, for his offspring,
for the woodlands, and, finally, for himself, his most fastidious
auditor.
[Illustration]
Another difference between this book and that of Toussenel's is, that,
harmonious as he is, and a disciple of the gentle Fourier, he is not
the less a _sportsman_. In every page the military calling of the
Lorraine is clearly visible.
My book, on the contrary, is a book of peace, written specifically in
hatred of sport.
Hunt the eagle and the lion, if you will; but do not hunt the weak.
The devout faith which we cherish at heart, and which we teach in
these pages, is, that man will peaceably subdue the whole earth, when
he shall gradually perceive that every adopted animal, accustomed
to a domesticated life, or at least to that degree of friendship or
neighbourliness of which its nature is capable, will be a hundred times
more useful to him than if he had simply cut its throat.
Man will not be truly man--we return to this topic at the close of our
volume--until he shall labour seriously to accomplish the mission which
the earth expects of him:
The pacification and harmonious communion of all living nature.
"A woman's dreams!" you exclaim. What matters that?
Since a woman's heart breathes in this book, I see no reason to reject
the reproach. We accept it as an eulogy. Patience and gentleness,
tenderness and pity, and maternal warmth--these are the things which
beget, preserve, develop a living creation.
May this, in due time, become not a book, but a reality! Then, haply,
it shall prove suggestive, and others derive from it their inspiration.
The reader, _au reste_, will better understand the character of the
work, if he will take the trouble to read the few pages which follow,
and which I transcribe word for word. [The succeeding section, as the
reader will perceive, is written by Madame Michelet.]
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
"I was born in the country, where I have passed two-thirds of my
life-time. I feel myself constantly recalled to it, both by the charm
of early habits, by natural sensibilities, and also, undoubtedly, by
the dear memories of my father, who bred me among its shades, and was
the object of my life's worship.
"Owing to my mother's illness, I was nursed for a considerable period
by some honest peasants, who loved me as their own child. I was, in
truth, their daughter; and my brothers, struck by my rustic ways,
called me _the Shepherdess_.
"My father resided at no great distance from the town, in a very
pleasant mansion, which he had purchased, built, and surrounded by
plantations, in the hope that the charms of the spot might console his
young wife for the sublime American nature she had recently quitted.
The house, well exposed on the east and south, saw the morning sun rise
on a vine-clad slope, and turn, before its meridian heats, towards the
remote summits of the Pyrenees, which were visible in clear weather.
The young elm-trees of our own France, mingled with American acacias,
rose-laurels, and young cypresses, interrupted its full flood of light,
and transmitted to us a softened radiance.
"On our right, a thicket of oaks, inclosed with a dense hedge,
sheltered us from the north, and from the keen wind of the Cantal. Far
away, on the left, swept the green meadows and the corn-fields. Through
the broom, and in the shade of some tall trees, flowed a brooklet--a
thin thread of limpid water, defined against the evening horizon by a
small belt of haze which ran along its border.
"The climate is intermediate. In the valley, which is that of the
Tarn, and which shares the mildness of the Garonne and the severity of
Auvergne, we find none of those southern products common everywhere
around Bordeaux. But the mulberry, and the melting perfumed peach, the
juicy grape, the sugared fig, and the melon, growing in the open air,
testify that we are in the south. Fruits superabounded with us; one
portion of the estate was an immense vineyard.
"Memory vividly recalls to me all the charms of this locality, and its
varied character. It was never otherwise than grave and melancholy in
itself, and it impressed these feelings on all about it. My father,
though lively and agreeable, was a man already aged, and of uncertain
health. My mother, young, beautiful, austere, had the queenly bearing
of the North American, with a prudence and an active economy very
rare in Creoles. The estate which we occupied formerly belonged to a
Protestant family, and after passing through many hands before it fell
into ours, still retained the graves of its ancient owners--simple
hillocks of turf, where the proscribed had enshrined their dead under
a thick grove of oaks. I need hardly say, that these trees and these
tombs, consecrated by their very oblivion, were religiously respected
by my father. Each grave was marked out by rose-bushes, which his own
hands had planted. These sweet odours, these bright blossoms, concealed
the gloom of death, while suffering, nevertheless, something of its
melancholy to remain. Thither, then, we were drawn, and as it were in
spite of ourselves, at evening time. Overcome by emotion, we often
mourned over the departed; and, at each falling star, exclaimed, 'It is
a soul which passes!'[6]
"In this living country-side, among alternate joys and pains, I lived
for ten years--from four to fourteen. I had no comrades. My sister,
five years older than myself, was the companion of my mother when I was
still but a little girl. My brothers, numerous enough to play among
themselves without my help, often left me all alone in the hours of
recreation. If they ran off to the fields, I could only follow them
with my eyes. I passed, then, many solitary hours in wandering near the
house, and in the long garden alleys. There I acquired, in spite of a
natural vivacity, habits of contemplation. At the bottom of my dreams
I began to feel the Infinite: I had glimpses of God, of the paternal
divinity of nature, which regards with equal tenderness the blade of
grass and the star. In this I found the chief source of consolation;
nay, more, let me say, of happiness.
"Our abode would have offered to an observant mind a very agreeable
field of study. All creatures under its benevolent protection seemed
to find an asylum. We had a fine fish-pond near the house, but no
dove-cot; for my parents could not endure the idea of dooming creatures
to slavery whose life is all movement and freedom. Dogs, cats, rabbits,
guinea-pigs, lived together in concord. The tame chickens, the pigeons,
followed my mother everywhere, and fed from her hand. The sparrows
built their nests among us; the swallows even brooded under our barns;
they flew into our very chambers, and returned with each succeeding
spring to the shelter of our roof.
"How often, too, have I found, in the goldfinches' nests torn from our
cypress-trees by rude autumnal winds, fragments of my summer-robes
buried in the sand! Beloved birds, which I then sheltered all
unwittingly in a fold of my vestment, ye have to-day a surer shelter in
my heart, but ye know it not!
"Our nightingales, less domesticated, wove their nests in the lonely
hedge-rows; but, confident of a generous welcome, they came to our
threshold a hundred times a-day, and besought from my mother, for
themselves and their family, the silk-worms which had perished.
"In the depths of the wood the woodpecker laboured obstinately at the
venerable trunks; one might hear him at his task when all other sounds
had ceased. We listened in trembling silence to the mysterious blows of
that indefatigable workman mingling with the owl's slow and lamentable
voice.
"It was my highest ambition to have a bird all to myself--a
turtle-dove. Those of my mother's--so familiar, so plaintive, so
tenderly resigned at breeding-time--attracted me strongly towards them.
If a young girl feels like a mother for the doll which she dresses, how
much more so for a living creature which responds to her caresses! I
would have given everything for this treasure. But it was not to be so;
and the dove was not my first love.
"The first was a flower, whose name I do not know.
"I had a small garden, situated under an enormous fig-tree, whose humid
shades rendered useless all my cultivation. Feeling very sad and sorely
discouraged, I descried one morning, on a pale-green stem, a beautiful
little golden blossom. Very little, trembling at the lightest breath,
its feeble stalk issued from a small basin excavated by the rains.
Seeing it there, and always trembling, I supposed it was cold, and
provided it with a canopy of leaves. How shall I express the transports
which this discovery awakened? I alone knew of its existence; I alone
possessed it. All day we could do nothing but gaze at each other. In
the evening I glided to its side, my heart full of emotion. We spoke
little, for fear of betraying ourselves. But ah! what tender kisses
before the last adieu! These joys endured but three days. One afternoon
my flower folded itself up slowly, never again to re-open. There was an
end to its love.
"I kept to myself my keen regret, as I had kept my happiness. No other
flower could have consoled me; a life more full of life was needed to
restore the freedom of my soul.
"Every year my good nurse came to see me, invariably bringing some
little present. On one occasion, with a mysterious air, she said to me,
'Put thy hand in my basket.' I did so, expecting to find some fruit,
but felt a silken fur, and something trembling. Ah! it is a rabbit!
Seizing it, I ran in all directions to announce the news. I hugged the
poor animal with a convulsive joy, which nearly proved fatal to it.
My head was troubled with giddiness. I could not eat. My sleep was
disturbed by painful dreams. I saw my rabbit dying; I was unable to
move a single step to succour it. Oh! how beautiful it was, my rabbit,
with its pink nose, and its fur as polished as a mirror! Its large
pearled ears, which were constantly in motion, its fantastic gambols,
had, I confess, a share of my admiration. As soon as the morning
dawned, I escaped from my mother's bed to visit my favourite, and carry
it a green leaf or two. There it sat, and gravely ate the leaves,
casting upon me protracted glances, which I thought full of affection;
then, erecting itself on its hind paws, it turned to the sun its
little snow-white belly, and sleeked its fine whiskers with marvellous
dexterity.
"Nevertheless, slander was busy in its detraction; its face was too
small, said its enemies, and it was very gluttonous. To-day, I might
subscribe to these assertions; but at seven years of age I fought
for the honour of my rabbit! Alas! there was no need to make it the
subject of dispute, it lived so short a time. One Sunday, my mother
having set out for the town with my sister and eldest brother, we were
wandering--we, the little ones--in the enclosure, when a sudden report
broke over our heads. A strange cry, like an infant's first moan,
followed it close at hand. My rabbit had been wounded by a flash of
fire. The unfortunate beast had transgressed beyond the vineyard-hedge,
and a neighbour, having nothing better to do, had amused himself with
shooting at it.
"I was in time to see it rise up, bleeding. So great was my grief that
I almost choked, utterly unable to sob out a single word. But for my
father, who received me in his arms, and by gentle words gave my full
heart relief, I should have fainted. My limbs yielded under me. Pardon
the tears which this recollection still calls forth.
"For the first time, and in early youth, I had a revelation of death,
abandonment, desolation. The house, the garden, appeared to me empty
and bare. Do not laugh: my grief was bitter, and all the deeper because
concentrated in myself.
"Thenceforth, having learned the meaning of death, I began to watch my
father with wistful eyes. I saw, not without terror, that his face was
very pale and his hair white. He would quit us; he would go 'whither
the village-bell summoned him,' to use his oft-repeated phrase. I had
not the strength to conceal my thoughts. Sometimes I flung my arms
around his neck, exclaiming: 'Papa, do not die! oh, never die!' He
embraced me, without replying; but his fine large black eyes were
troubled as they gazed on me.
"I was attached to him by a thousand ties, by a thousand intimate
relations. I was the daughter of his mature age, of his shattered
health, of his affections. I had not that happy equilibrium which his
other children derived from my mother. My father was transmitted in
me (_passé en moi_). He said so himself: 'How I feel that thou art my
daughter!'
"Years and life's trials had deprived him of nothing; to his last hour
he retained the vivacity, the aspirations, and even the charm of youth.
Every one felt it without being able to account for it, and all flocked
around him of their own accord--women, children, men. I still see him
in his little study, seated before his small black table, relating his
Odyssey, his long journeys in America, his life in the colonies; one
never grew weary of his stories. A maiden of twenty years, in the last
stage of a pulmonary disease, heard him shortly before her end: she
would fain have listened to him always; implored him to visit her, for
while he was discoursing she forgot her sufferings and her decay, even
the approach of death.
"This charm I speak of was not that of a clever talker only; it was due
to the great goodness so plainly visible in him. The trials, the life
of adventure and misfortune, which harden so many hearts, had, on the
contrary, but softened his. No man in this generation--a generation
so much agitated, tossed to and fro by so many waves--had undergone
such painful experiences. His father, an Auvergnat, the principal of a
college, then _juge consulaire_ in our most southern city, and finally
summoned to the Assembly of Notables in '88, had all the hard austerity
of his country and his functions, of the school and the tribunals. The
education of that era was cruel, a perpetual chastisement; the more
wit, the more character, the more strength, the more did this education
tend to shatter them, to break them down. My father, of a delicate
and tender nature, could never have survived it, and only escaped by
flying to America, where one of his brothers had previously established
himself. A change of linen was his only fortune, except his youth,
his confidence, his golden dreams of freedom. Thenceforth he always
cherished a peculiar tenderness for that land of liberty; he often
revisited it, and earnestly wished to die there.
"Called by the needs of business to St. Domingo, he was present in that
island at the great crisis of the reign of Toussaint L'Ouverture. This
truly extraordinary man, who up to his fiftieth year had been a slave,
who comprehended and foresaw everything, did not know how to write, or
to give expression to his ideas. His genius succeeded better in great
actions than in fine speeches. He lacked a hand, a pen, and more--the
young bold heart which shall teach the hero the heroic language, the
words in harmony with the moment and the situation. Toussaint, at his
age, could only utter this noble appeal: 'The First of the Blacks to
the First of the Whites!'[7] Permit me to doubt if it were his. At
least, if he conceived it, it was my father who gave expression to the
idea.
"He loved my father warmly; he perceived his frankness, and he trusted
him--he, so profoundly mistrustful, dumb with his long slavery, and
secret as the tomb! But who can die without having one day unlocked his
heart? It was my father's misfortune that at certain moments Toussaint
broke his silence, and made him the confidant of dangerous mysteries.
Thenceforth, all was over; he became afraid of the young man, and felt
himself dependent upon him--a new servitude, which could only end with
my father's death. Toussaint threw him into prison, and then, with
a fresh access of fear, would have sacrificed him. Fortunately, the
prisoner was guarded by gratitude; he had been bountiful to many of the
blacks; a negress whom he had protected, warned him of his peril, and
assisted him to escape from it. All his life long he sought that woman,
to show his gratitude towards her; he did not discover her until some
fourteen years afterwards, on his last voyage; she was then living in
the United States.
"To return: though out of prison, he was not saved. Wandering astray
in the forest, at night, without a guide, he had cause to dread the
Maroons, those implacable enemies of the whites, who would have
killed him, in ignorance that they were murdering the best friend of
their race. Fortune is the boon of youth; he escaped every danger.
Having discovered a good horse, whenever the blacks issued from
their hiding-places, one touch of the spear, a wave of the hat, a
cry: 'Advanced guard of General Toussaint!' and this was enough. At
that formidable name all took to flight, and disappeared as if by
enchantment.
"Such was the tenderness of my father's soul, that he did not withdraw
his regard from the great man who had misunderstood him. When, at
a later period, he saw him in France, abandoned by everybody, a
wretched prisoner in a fort of the Jura, where he perished of cold and
misery,[8] he alone was faithful to him. Despite his errors, despite
the deeds of violence inseparable from the grand and terrible part
which that man had played, he revered in him the daring pioneer of a
race, the creator of a world. He corresponded with him until his death,
and afterwards with his family.
"A singular chance ordained that my father should be engaged in the
isle of Elba when the First of the Whites, dethroned in his turn,
arrived to take possession of his miniature kingdom. Heart and
imagination, my father fell captive to this wonderful romance. An
American, and imbued with Republican ideas, he became on this occasion,
and for the second time, the courtier of misfortune. He was the most
intimate of the servants of the Emperor, of his children, of that
accomplished and adored lady who was the charm and happiness of his
exile. He undertook to convey her back to France in the perilous return
of March 1815. This attraction, had there been no obstacle, would
have led him even to St. Helena. As it was, he could not endure the
restoration of the Bourbons, and returned to his beloved America.
"The New World was not ungrateful, and made the happiness of his
life. He had resigned every official capacity in order to abandon
himself wholly to the more independent career of tuition. He taught
in Louisiana. That colonial France, isolated, sundered by the events
of her mother-land's history, and mingling so many diverse elements
of population, breathes ever the breath of France. Among my father's
pupils was an orphan, of English and German extraction. She came to
him when very young, to learn the first elements of knowledge; she
grew under his hands, and loved him more and more; she found a second
family, a second father; she sympathized with the paternal heart, with
a charm of youthful vivacity which our French of the south preserve in
their mature age. She had but three faults: wealth, beauty, extreme
youth--for she was at least thirty years younger than my father; but
neither of them perceived it, and they never reminded themselves of it.
My mother has been inconsolable for my father's death, and has ever
since worn mourning.
"My mother longed to see France, and my father, in his pride of her,
was delighted to show to the Old World the brilliant flower he had
gathered in the New. But anxious as he was to maintain this young
Creole lady in the position and with the fortune which she had always
enjoyed, he would not embark until he had accomplished, with her
consent, a religious and holy act. This was the manumission of his
slaves--of those, at least, above the age of twenty-one; the young,
whom he was prevented by the American law from setting free, received
from him their future liberty, and, on attaining their majority, were
to rejoin their parents. He never lost sight of them. They were always
before his eyes; he knew their names, their ages, and their appointed
hour of liberty. In his French home, he took note of these epochs, and
would say, with a glow of happiness, 'To-day, such an one becomes free!'
"See my father now in his native country, happy in a residence near
his birth-place--building, planting, bringing up his family, the
centre of a young world in which everything sprung from him: the
house, the garden, were his creation; even his wife, whom he had
reared and trained, and whom everybody thought to be his daughter. My
mother was so young that her eldest daughter seemed to be her sister.
Five other children followed, almost in as many successive years,
promptly enwreathing my father with a living garland, which was his
special pride. Few families exhibited a greater variety of tastes and
temperaments; the two worlds were distinctly represented in ours: the
French of the south with the sparkling vivacity of Languedoc--the grave
colonists of Louisiana marked from their birth with the phlegmatic
idiosyncrasies of the American character.
"It was ordered, however, that, with the exception of the eldest, who
was already my mother's companion and shared with her the management
of the household, the five youngest should receive their education
in common from one master--my father. Notwithstanding his age, he
undertook the duties of preceptor and schoolmaster. He gave up to us
his whole day, from six in the morning until six in the evening. He
reserved for his correspondence, his favourite studies, only the first
hours of morning, or, more truly speaking, the last hours of night.
Retiring to rest very early, he rose every day at three o'clock,
without taking any heed of his pulmonary weakness. First of all, he
threw wide his door, and there, before the stars or the dawn, according
to the season, he blessed God; and God also blessed that venerable
head, silvered by the experiences of life, not by the passions of
humanity. In summer time, after his devotions, he took a short walk in
the garden, and watched the insects and the plants awake. His knowledge
of them was wonderful; and very often, after breakfast, taking me by
the hand, he would describe the nature of each flower, would point out
where each little animal that he had surprised at dawn took refuge. One
of these was a snake, which the sight of my father did not in the least
disconcert; each time that he seated himself near its domicile, it
never failed to put forth its head and peer at him curiously. He alone
knew that it was there, and he told none but me of its retirement; it
remained a secret between us.
"In those morning-hours everything he met with became a fertile text
for his religious effusions. Without formal phrases, and inspired by
true feeling, he spoke to me of the goodness of God, for whom there is
neither great nor small, but all are brothers in His eyes, and all are
equals.
"Associated with my brothers in their labours, I also took a part in
those of my mother and my sister. When I put aside my grammar and
arithmetic, it was to take up the needle.
"Happily for me, our life, naturally blending with that of the fields,
was, whether we willed it or not, frequently varied by charming
incidents which broke the chains of habit. Study has commenced; we
apply ourselves with eagerness to our books; but what now? See, a
storm is coming! the hay will be spoiled. Quick, we must gather it in!
Everybody sets to work; the very children hasten thither; study is
adjourned; we toil courageously, and the day goes by. It is a pity, for
the rain does not fall; the storm has lingered on the Bordeaux side; it
will come to-morrow.
"At harvest-time we frequently diverted ourselves with gleaning. In
those grand moments of fruition, at once a labour and a festival, all
sedentary application is impossible; one's thoughts are in the fields.
We were constantly escaping out-of-doors, with the lark's swiftness;
we disappeared among the furrows--we little ones concealed by the tall
corn, hidden among the forest of ripe ears.
"It was well understood that during the vintage there was no time to
think of study: much needed labourers, we lived among the vines; it
was our right. But before the grape ripened, we had numerous other
vintages, those of the fruit-trees--cherries, apricots, peaches.
Even at a later period, the apples and the pears imposed upon us new
and severe labours, in which it was a matter of conscience that our
hands should be employed. And thus, even in winter, these necessities
returned--to act, to laugh, and to do nothing. The last tasks,
occurring in mid-November, were perhaps the most delightful; a light
mist then enfolded everything; I have seen nothing like it elsewhere;
it was a dream, an enchantment. All objects were transfigured under the
wavy folds of the vast pearl-gray canopy which, at the breath of the
warm autumn, lovingly alighted hither and thither, like a farewell kiss.
"The dignified hospitality of my mother, my father's charm of manner
and piquant conversation, drew upon us also the unforeseen distractions
of visitors from the town, constraining suspensions of our studies,
at which we did not weep. But the great and unceasing visit was from
the poor, who well knew the house and the hand inexhaustibly opened
by charity. All participated in its benefits, even the very animals;
and it was a curious and diverting thing to see the dogs of the
neighbourhood, patiently, silently seated on their hind legs, waiting
until my father should raise his eyes from his book: they felt assured
that he would not resist the mute eloquence of their prayer. My mother,
more reasonable, was inclined to drive away these indiscreet guests who
came at their own invitation. My father felt that he was wrong, and yet
he never failed to throw them stealthily some fragments, which sent
them away satisfied.
"This they knew perfectly well. One day, a new guest, lean, bristling,
unprepossessing, something between a dog and a wolf, arrived; he was,
in fact, a half-breed of the two species, born in the forests of the
Gresigne. He was very ferocious, very irascible, and bore much too
close a resemblance to his wolfish mother. But, besides this, he was
intelligent, and gifted with a very keen instinct. From the first he
gave himself wholly up to my father, and neither words nor rough usage
could induce him to quit his side. For us he had but little love; and
we repaid him in kind, seizing every opportunity of playing him a
hundred tricks. He ground and gnashed his teeth, though, out of regard
for my father, he abstained from devouring us. To the poor he was
furious, implacable, very dangerous; which decided us on suffering him
to be lost. But there was no such chance. He always came back again.
His new masters would chain him to a post; chains and post, he carried
them all off, and brought them into our house. It was too much for my
father; he would never forsake him.
"But the cats enjoyed even more of his good graces than the dogs.
This was due to his early education, to the cruel years spent at
college; his brother and himself, beaten and repulsed, between the
harshness of their home and the severities of their school, had found a
consolation in a couple of cats. This predilection was transmitted to
his family--each of us, in childhood, possessed our cat. The gathering
at the fireside was a beautiful spectacle; all the grimalkins, in
furred dignity, sitting majestically under the chairs of their young
masters. One alone was missing from the circle--a poor wretch, too
ugly to figure among the others; he knew his unworthiness, and held
himself aloof, in a wild timidity which nothing was able to conquer.
As in every assembly (such is the piteous malignity of our nature!)
there must be a butt, a scapegoat, who receives all the blows, he, in
ours, filled this unthankful rôle. If there were no blows, at least
there were abundant mockeries: we named him Moquo. Weak, and scantily
provided with fur, he stood in more need than the others of the genial
hearth; but we children filled him with fear: even his comrades, better
clothed in their warm ermine, appeared to esteem him but lightly,
and to look at him askant. Of course, therefore, my father turned to
him, and fondled him; the grateful animal lay down under that beloved
hand, and gained confidence. Wrapped up in his coat, and revived by
its warmth, he would frequently be brought, unseen, to the fireside.
We quickly caught sight of him; and if he showed a hair, or the tip of
an ear, our laughter and our glances threatened him, in spite of my
father. I can still see that shadow gathering itself up--_melting_,
so to speak--in its protector's bosom, closing its eyes, annihilating
itself, well content to see nothing.
"All that I have read of the Hindus, and their tenderness for nature,
reminds me of my father. He was a Brahmin. More even than the Brahmins
did he love every living thing. He had lived in a time of blood and
war--he had been an eye-witness of the most terrible slaughters of men
that had ever disgraced history; and it seemed as if that frightful
lavishness of the irrecoverable good, which is life, had given him a
respect for _all_ life, an insurmountable aversion to all destruction.
"This had in time arrived at such an extreme, that he would have
willingly lived upon vegetable food alone. He would have no viands of
blood; they excited his horror. A morsel of chicken, or, more often, an
egg or two, served for his dinner. And frequently he dined standing.
"Such a regimen, however, could not strengthen him. Nor did he
economize his strength, expending it largely in lessons, in
conversations, and in the habitual overflow of a too benevolent heart,
which lived in all things, interested itself in all. Age came, and
with it anxieties: family anxieties? no, but from jealous neighbours
or unfaithful debtors. The crisis of the American banks dealt a severe
blow to his fortune. He came to the extreme resolution, in spite of his
ill health and his years, of once more visiting America, in the belief
that his personal activity and his industry might re-establish affairs,
and secure the fortune of his wife and children.
"This departure was terrible. It was preceded for me by another
blow. I had quitted the mansion and the country; I had entered a
boarding-school in the town. Cruel servitude, which deprived me of
all that made my life--of air and respiration! Everywhere, walls! I
should have died, but for the frequent visits of my mother, and the
rarer visits of my father, to which I looked forward with a delirious
impatience that perhaps love has never known. But now that my father
himself was leaving us--heaven, earth, everything seemed undone. With
whatever hope of reunion he might endeavour to cheer me, an internal
voice, distinct and terrible, such as one hears in great trials, told
me that he would return no more.
"The house was sold, and the plantations laid out by our hands, the
trees which belonged to the family, were abandoned. Our animals were
plainly inconsolable at my father's departure. The dog--I forget for
how many successive days--seated himself on the road which he had
taken at his departure, howled, and returned. The most disinherited of
all, the cat Moquo, no longer confided in any person, though he still
came to regard with furtive glances the empty place. Then he took his
resolution, and fled to the woods, from which we could never call him
back; he resumed his early life, miserable and savage.
"And I, too, I quitted the paternal roof, the hearth of my young years,
with a heart for ever wounded. My mother, my sister, my brothers, the
sweet friendships of infancy, disappeared behind me. I entered upon
a life of trial and isolation. At Bayonne, however, where I first
resided, the sea of Biarritz spoke to me of my father; the waves which
break on its shore, from America to Europe, repeated the story of his
death; the snow-white ocean birds seemed to say, 'We have seen him.'
"What remained to me? My climate, my birth-land, my language. But
even these I lost. I was compelled to go to the North, to an unknown
tongue and a hostile sky, where the earth for half a year wears
mourning weeds. During these long seasons of frost, my failing health
extinguishing imagination, I could scarcely re-create for myself my
ideal South. A dog might have somewhat consoled me: in default, I made
two little friends, who resembled, I fancied, my mother's turtle-doves.
They knew me, loved me, sported by my fireside; I gave to them the
summer which my heart had not.
"Seriously affected, I fell very ill, and thought I should soon touch
the other shore. However studious and tender towards me might be the
hospitality of the stranger, it was needful I should return to France.
It was long before carefulness of affection, and a marriage in which I
found again a father's heart and arms, could restore my health. I had
seen death from so near a view-point--let us rather say, I had entered
so far upon it--that nature herself, living nature, that first love and
rapture of my young years, had for a long time little hold upon me, and
she alone had any. Nothing had supplied her place. History, and the
recital of the pathetic stirring human drama, moved me but lightly;
nothing seized firmly on my mind but the unchangeable, God and Nature.
"Nature is immovable and yet mobile; that is her eternal charm. Her
unwearied activity, her ever-shifting phantasmagoria, do not weary, do
not disturb; this harmonious motion bears in itself a profound repose.
"I was recalled to her by the flowers--by the cares which they demand,
and the species of maternity which they solicit. My imperceptible
garden of twelve trees and three beds did not fail to remind me of the
great fertile vineyard where I was born; and I found, too, some degree
of happiness, by the side of an ardent intellect, which toiled athirst
in the dreary ways and wastes of human history, in cherishing for him
these living waters and the charm of a few flowers."
[Illustration]
I resume.
See me now torn from the city by this loving inquietude, by my fears
for an invalid whom it was essential to restore to the conditions of
her early life and the free air of the country. I quitted Paris, my
city, which I had never left before; that city which comprises the
three worlds; that cradle of Art and Thought.
I returned there daily for my duties and occupations; but I hastened
to get quit of it. Its noise, its distant hum, the ebb and flow of
abortive revolutions, impelled me to wander afar. It was with much
pleasure that, in the spring of 1852, I broke through all the ties of
old habits; I closed my library with a bitter joy, I put under lock and
key my books, the companions of my life, which had assuredly thought to
hold me bound for ever. I travelled so long as earth supported me, and
only halted at Nantes, close to the sea, on a hill which overlooks the
yellow streams of Brittany as they flow onward to mingle, in the Loire,
with the gray waters of La Vendée.
We established ourselves in a large country mansion, completely
isolated, in the midst of the constant rains with which our western
fields are inundated at this season. At such a distance from the ocean,
one does not feel its briny influence; the rains are tempests of fresh
water. The house, in the Louis Quinze style, had been uninhabited for
a considerable period, and at first sight seemed a little gloomy.
Situated on elevated ground, it was rendered not the less sombre by
thick hedges on the one side, on the other by tall trees and by an
untold number of unpruned cherry-trees. The whole, on a greensward,
which the undrained waters preserved, even in summer, in a beautifully
fresh condition.
I adore neglected gardens, and this one reminded me of the great
abandoned vineyards of the Italian villas; but it possessed, what these
villas lack, a charming medley of vegetables and plants of a thousand
different species--all the herbs of the St. John, and each herb tall
and vigorous. The forest of cherry-trees, bending under their burden of
scarlet fruit, gave also the idea of inexhaustible abundance.
It was not the sweet austerity (_soave austero_) of Italy; it was a
soft and overflowing profusion, under a warm, mild, and moist sky.
[Illustration]
Nothing appeared in sight, though a large town was close at hand,
and a little river, the Erdre, wound under the hill, and from thence
dragged itself towards the Loire. But this vegetable prodigality,
this virgin forest of fruit trees, completely shut in the view. For a
prospect, one must mount into a species of turret, whence the landscape
began to reveal itself in a certain grandeur, with its woods and its
meadows, its distant monuments, its towers. Even from this observatory
the view was still limited, the city only appearing imperfectly, and
not allowing you to catch sight of its mighty river, its island, its
stir of commerce and navigation. A few paces from its great harbour,
of whose existence there was no sign, one might believe oneself in a
desert, in the _landes_ of Brittany, or the clearings of La Vendée.
Two things were of a lofty character, and detached themselves
from this sombre orchard. Penetrating the ancient hedges and
chestnut-alleys, you found yourself in a nook of barren argillaceous
soil, where, among thyme-laurels and other strong, rude trees, rose an
enormous cedar, a veritable leafy cathedral, of such stature that a
cypress already grown very tall was choked by it, and lost. This cedar,
bare and stripped below, was living and vigorous where it received
the light; its immense arms, at thirty feet from the ground, clothed
themselves with strange and pointed leaves; then the canopy thickened;
the trunk attained an elevation of eighty feet. You saw, about three
leagues distant, the fields opposite the banks of the Sèvre and the
woods of La Vendée. Our home, low and sheltered on the side of this
giant, was not less distinguished by it throughout an immense circuit,
and perhaps owed to it its name, the High Forest.
[Illustration]
At the other end of the enclosure, from a deep sheet of water, rose
a small ascent, crowned with a garland of pines. These fine trees,
incessantly beaten by the sea-breezes, and shaken by the adverse winds
which follow the currents of the great river and its two tributaries,
groaned in the struggle, and day and night filled the profound silence
of the place with a melancholy harmony. At times, you might have
thought yourself by the sea; they so imitated the noise of the waves,
of the ebbing and flowing tide.
By degrees, as the season became a little drier, this sojourn exhibited
itself to me in its real character; serious, indeed, but more varied
than one would have supposed at the first glance, and beautiful with
a touching beauty which went home to the soul. Austere, as became the
gate of Brittany, it had all the luxuriant verdure of the Vendean coast.
I could have thought, when I saw the pomegranates blooming in the
open air, robust and loaded with flowers, that I was in the south.
The magnolia, no dwarf, as we see it elsewhere, but splendid and
magnificent, and full-grown, like a great tree, perfumed all my garden
with its huge white blossoms, which contain in their thick chalices an
abundance of I know not what kind of oil, an oil sweet and penetrating,
whose odour follows you everywhere; you are enveloped in it.
We found ourselves this time in possession of a true garden, a large
establishment, a thousand domestic occupations with which we had
previously dispensed. A wild Breton girl rendered help only in the
coarser tasks. Save one weekly journey to the town, we were very
lonely, but in an extremely busy solitude; rising very early in the
morning, at the first awakening of the birds, and even before the day.
It is true that we retired to rest at a good hour, and almost at the
same time as the birds.
This profusion of fruits, vegetables, and plants of every kind, enabled
us to keep numerous domestic animals: only the difficulty was, that
nourishing them, knowing each of them, and well-known by them, we
could not make up our minds to eat them. We planted, and here we met
with quite a distinct kind of inconvenience--our plantations were
nearly always devoured beforehand.
This earth, fertile in vegetables, was equally or more prolific of
destructive animals; enormous capacious snails, devouring insects.
In the morning we collected a great tubful of snails. The next day
you would never have thought so. There still seemed to be the full
complement.
[Illustration]
Our hens did their best. But how much more effective would have been
the skilful and prudent stork, the admirable scavenger of Holland and
all marshy districts, which some Western lands ought at all costs to
adopt. Everybody knows the affectionate respect in which this excellent
bird is held by the Dutch. In their markets you may see him standing
peacefully on one foot, dreaming in the midst of the crowd, and feeling
as safe as in the heart of the deepest deserts. It is a fantastic but
well-assured fact, that the Dutch peasant who has had the misfortune to
wound his stork and to break his leg, provides him with one of wood.
To return: our residence near Nantes would have possessed an infinite
charm for a less absorbed mind. This beautiful spot, this great
liberty of work, this solitude, so sweet in such society, formed a
rare harmony, such as one but seldom meets with in life. Its sweetness
contrasted strongly with the thoughts of the present, with the gloomy
past which then occupied my pen. I was writing of '93. Its heroic
primeval history enveloped, possessed, shall I say consumed, me. All
the elements of happiness which surrounded me, which I sacrificed to
work, adjourning them for a time that, according to all appearances,
might never be mine, I regretted daily, and incessantly cast back upon
them a look of sorrow. It was a daily battle of affection and nature,
against the sombre thoughts of the human world.
[Illustration]
That battle for me will be always a powerful _souvenir_. The scene has
remained sacred in my thought. Elsewhere it no longer exists. The house
is destroyed--another built on its site. And it is for this reason
that I have dallied here a little. My cedar, however, has survived; a
notable thing, for architects now-a-days hate trees.
When, however, I drew near the end of my task, some glimpses of light
enlivened the wild darkness. My sorrows were less keen, when I felt
sure that I should thenceforth enjoy this memorial of a cruel but
fertile experience. Once more I began to hear the voices of solitude,
and more plainly I believe than at any other age, but slowly and with
unaccustomed ear, like one who shall have been some time dead, and have
returned from the other world.
In my youth, before I was taken captive by this implacable History, I
had sympathized with nature, but with a blind warmth, with a heart less
tender than ardent. At a later period, when residing in the suburb of
Paris, I had again felt that emotion of love. I watched with interest
my sickly flowers in that arid soil, so sensible every evening of the
joy of refreshing waterings, so plainly grateful. How much more at
Nantes, surrounded by a nature ever powerful and prolific, seeing the
herbage shoot upward hour after hour, and all animal life multiplying
around me, ought I not, I too, to expand and revive with this new
sentiment!
If there were aught that could have re-inspired my mind and broken
the sombre spell that lay upon it, it would have been a book which we
frequently read in the evening, the "Birds of France," by Toussenel, a
charming and felicitous transition from the thought of country to that
of nature.
[Illustration]
So long as France exists, his Lark and his Redbreast, his Bullfinch,
his Swallow, will be incessantly read, re-read, re-told. And if there
were no longer a France, in its ingenious pages we should re-discover
all which it owned of good, the true breath of that country, the Gallic
sense, the French _esprit_, the very soul of our fatherland.
The formulæ of a system which it bears, however, very lightly, its
forced comparisons (which sometimes make us think of those too
_spirituel_ animals of Granville), do not prevent the French genius,
gay, good, serene, and courageous, young as an April sun, from
illuminating the entire book. It possesses numerous passages enlivened
with the joyousness, the elasticity, the gushing song of the lark in
the first day of spring.
Add a thing of great beauty, which does not spring from youth. The
author, a child of the Meuse and of a land of hunters, himself in
his early years an ardent and impassioned sportsman, appears altered
in character by his book. He wavers visibly between the first habits
of slaughterous youth, and his new sentiment, his tenderness for
those pathetic lives which he unveils--for these souls, these beings
recognized by his soul. I dare to say that thenceforth he will no more
hunt without remorse. Father and second creator of this world of love
and innocence, he will find interposed between them and him a barrier
of compassion. And what barrier? His own work, the book in which he
gives them life.
I had scarcely begun my book, when it became necessary for me to
leave Nantes. I, too, was ill. The dampness of the climate, the hard
continuous labour, and still more keenly, without doubt, the conflict
of my thoughts, seemed to have struck home to that vital nerve of which
nothing had ever before taken hold. The road which our swallows tracked
for us, we followed; we proceeded southward. We fixed our transitory
nest in a fold of the Apennines, two leagues from Genoa.
An admirable situation, a secure and well-defended shelter, which, in
the variable climate of that coast, enjoys the astonishing boon of an
equable temperature. Although one could not entirely dispense with
fires, the winter sun, warm in January, encouraged the lizard and the
invalid to think it was spring. Shall I confess it, however? These
oranges, these citrons, harmonizing in their changeless foliage with
the changeless blue of heaven were not without monotony. Animated life
was very rare. There were few or no small birds; no sea birds. The
fish, limited in numbers, did not fill with life those translucent
waters. My glance pierced them to a great depth, and saw nothing but
solitude, and the white and black rocks which form the bed of that gulf
of marble.
The littoral, exceedingly narrow, is nothing but a small cornice, an
extremely confined border, a mere eyebrow (_sourcil_) of the mountains,
as the Latins would have said. To ascend the ladder and overlook the
gulf is, even for the most robust, a violent gymnastic effort. My sole
promenade was a little quay, or rather a rugged circular road, which
wound, with a breadth of about three feet, between ancient garden
walls, rocks, and precipices.
[Illustration]
Deep was the silence, sparkling the sea, but all lonesome and
monotonous, except for the passage of a few distant barks. Work was
prohibited to me; for the first time for thirty years, I was separated
from my pen, and had escaped from that paper and ink existence in
which I had previously lived. This pause, which I thought so barren,
in reality proved to me very fertile. I watched, I observed. Unknown
voices awoke within me.
At some distance from Genoa, and the excellent friends whom we knew
there, our only society was the small people of the lizards, which run
over the rocks, played, and slumbered in the sun. Charming, innocent
animals, which every noon, when we dined, and the quay was absolutely
deserted, amused me with their vivacious and graceful evolutions. At
the outset my presence had appeared to disquiet them; but a week had
not passed before all, even the youngest, knew me, and knew they had
nothing to fear from the peaceful dreamer.
Such the animal, and such the man. The abstemious life of my lizards,
for which a fly was an ample banquet, differed in nothing from that of
the _povera gente_ of the coast. Many lived wholly on herbs. But herbs
were not abundant in the barren and gaunt mountain. The destitution of
the country exceeded all belief. I was not grieved at daring it, at
finding myself sympathizing with the woes of Italy, my glorious nurse,
who has nourished France, and me more than any Frenchman.
A nurse? That was she ever, so far as was possible in her poverty of
resources, in the poverty of nature to which my health reduced me.
Incapable of food, I still received from her the only nourishment
which I could support, the vivifying air and the light--the sun, which
frequently permitted us, in one of the severest winters of the century,
to keep the windows open in January.
In the lazy, lizard-like life which I lived upon that shore, I wholly
occupied myself with the surrounding country, with the apparent
antiquity of the Apennines and the mountains which girdle the
Mediterranean. Is there then no remedy? Or rather, in their leafless
declivities shall we not discover the fountains which may renew their
life? Such was the idea which absorbed me. I no longer thought of
my illness; I troubled myself no more about recovering. I had made
what is truly great progress for an invalid: I had forgotten myself.
My business henceforward was to resuscitate that mighty patient,
the Apennines. And as by degrees I became aware that the case was
not hopeless--that the waters were hidden, not lost--that by their
discovery we might restore vegetable life, and eventually animal
life,--I felt myself much stronger, refreshed, renewed. For each spring
that revealed itself, I grew less athirst; I felt its waters rise
within my soul.
Ever fertile is Italy. She proved so to me through her very barrenness
and poverty. The ruggedness of the bald Apennines, the lean Ligurian
coast, did but the more awaken, by contrast, the recollection of that
genial nature which cherishes the luxuriant richness of our western
France. I missed the animal life; I felt its absence. From the mute
foliage of sombre orange-gardens I demanded the woodland birds. For
the first time I perceived the seriousness of human existence when it
is no longer surrounded by the grand society of innocent beings whose
movements, voices, and sports are, so to speak, the smile of creation.
A revolution took place in me which I shall, perhaps, some day relate.
I returned, with all the strength of my ailing existence, to the
thoughts which I had uttered, in 1846, in my book of "The People," to
that City of God where the humble and simple, peasants and artisans,
the ignorant and unlettered, barbarians and savages, children, and
those other children, too, which we call animals, are all citizens
under different titles, have all their privileges and their laws, their
places at the great civic banquet. "I protest, for my part, that if
any one remains in the rear whom the City still rejects and does not
shelter with her rights, I myself will not enter in, but will halt upon
her threshold."
Thus, all natural history I had begun to regard as a branch of the
political. Every living species came, each in its humble right,
striking at the gate and demanding admittance to the bosom of
Democracy. Why should their elder brothers repulse them beyond the pale
of those laws which the universal Father harmonizes with the law of the
world?
Such, then, was my renovation, this tardy new life (_vita nuova_),
which led me, step by step, to the natural sciences. Italy, whose
influence over my destiny has always been great, was its scene, its
occasion, just as, thirty years before, it had lit for me, through
Vico, the first spark of the historic fire.
Beloved and beneficent nurse! Because I had for one moment shared her
sorrows, suffered, dreamed with her, she bestowed on me a priceless
gift, worth more than all the diamonds of Golconda. What gift? A
profound sympathy of spirit, a fruitful interchange of the most
intimate ideas, a perfect home-harmony in the thought of Nature.
We arrived at this goal by two paths: I, by my love of the City, by the
effort of completing it through an association of self with all other
beings; my wife, by religious feeling and by her filial reverence for
the fatherhood of God.
Henceforth we were able, every evening, to enjoy a mutual feast.
I have already explained how this work, unknown to ourselves, grew
rich, was rendered fruitful, was impelled forward, by our modest
auxiliaries. They have almost always dictated it.
Our Parisian flowers prepared what our birds of Nantes accomplished. A
certain nightingale of which I speak at the close of the book crowned
the work.
These divers impressions blended and melted together, on our return
to France, and especially here, in the presence of the ocean. At the
promontory of La Hève, under the venerable elms which overshadow it,
this revelation completed itself. The gulls, gannets, and guillemots of
the coast, the small birds of the groves, could say nothing which was
not understood. All things found an echo in our hearts, like so many
internal voices.
The Pharos, the huge cliff, from three to four hundred feet in
height,[9] which from so lofty an elevation overlooks the vast
embouchure of the Seine, the Calvados, and the ocean, was the customary
goal of our promenades, and our resting-point. We usually climbed
to it by a deep covered road, full of freshness and shadow, which
suddenly opened upon this immense lighthouse. Sometimes we ascended
the colossal staircase which, without surprises, in the full sunlight,
and always facing the mighty sea, leads by three flights to the summit,
each flight covering upwards of a hundred feet. You cannot accomplish
this ascent at one breath; at the second stage, you breathe, you seat
yourself for a few moments by the monument which the widow of one of
France's greatest soldiers has raised to his memory, in the hope that
its pyramid might prove a beacon to the mariner, and guard him from
shipwreck.
[Illustration]
This cliff, of a very sandy soil, loses a little every winter.[10] It
is not, however, the sea which gnaws at it; the heavy rains wash it
away, carrying off the débris, which, at first bare and shapeless, bear
eloquent witness to their downfall. But tender and gracious Nature does
not long suffer this. She speedily attires them, bestows upon them
greensward, herbs, shrubs, briers, which in due time become miniature
oases on the declivity, Liliput landscapes suspended on the vast cliff,
consoling its gloomy barrenness with their sweet youth.
Thus the Beautiful and the Sublime here embrace, a thing of rarity.
The storm-beaten mountain relates to you the _epopea_ of earth, its
rude dramatic history, and shows its bones in evidence of its truth.
But these young children of chance, who spring up on its arid flank,
prove that she is still fertile, that her débris contain the elements
of a new organization, that all death is a life begun.
So these ruins have never caused us any sadness. We have conversed
among them freely of destiny, providence, death, the life to come.
I, whom age and toil have given a right to die--she, whose brow is
already bent by the trials of infancy and a wisdom beyond her years,
we have not lived the less for a grand inspiration of soul, for the
rejuvenescent breath of that much-loved mother, Nature.[11]
Sprung from her at so great a distance from one another, so united in
her to-day, we would fain have rendered eternal this rare moment of
existence, "have cast anchor on the island of time." And how could we
better realize our idea than by this work of tenderness, of universal
brotherhood, of adoption of all life!
My wife incessantly recalled me to it, enlarging my sentiments of
individual tenderness by her facile, bright, emotional interpretation
of the spirit of the country and the voices of solitude.
It was then, among other things, that I learned to understand birds
which, like the swallows, sing little, but talk much--prattling of
the fine weather, of the chase, of scanty or abundant food, of their
approaching departure; in fact, of all their affairs. I had listened
to them at Nantes in October, at Turin in June. Their September
_causeries_ were more intelligible at La Hève. We translated them
easily in all their fond vivacity, all their joyousness of youth and
good-humour, free from ostentation or satire, in accord with the
happy moderation of a bird so free and so wise, which appears not
ungratefully to recognize that he has received from God a lot of such
signal felicity.
Alas! even the swallow is not spared in that senseless warfare which
we wage against nature. We destroy the very birds that protect our
crops--our guardians, our honest labourers--which, following close upon
the plough, seize the future pest, which the heedless peasant disturbs
only to replace in the earth.
[Illustration]
Whole races, valuable and interesting, perish. Those lords of ocean,
those wild and sagacious creatures which Nature has endowed with blood
and milk--I speak of the cetacea--to what number are they reduced!
Many great quadrupeds have vanished from the globe. Many animals of
every kind, without utterly disappearing, have recoiled before man;
brutalized (_ensauvagés_) they fly, they lose their natural arts, and
relapse into barbarism. The heron, whose prudence and address were
remarked by Aristotle, is now, at least in Europe, a misanthropical,
narrow-minded, half-foolish animal. The beaver, which, in America, in
its peaceful solitudes, had become a great architect and engineer, has
grown discouraged;[12] to-day it has scarcely the heart to excavate a
burrow in the earth. The hare, so gentle, so handsome, distinguished by
its fur, its swiftness, its wonderful delicacy of ear, will soon have
disappeared; the few of its kind which remain are positively embruted.
And yet the poor animal is still docile and teachable: in careful
hands it might be taught the things most antagonistic to its nature,
even those which need a display of courage.[13]
These thoughts, which others have expressed in far better language,
we cherished at heart. They had been our aliment, our habitual dream,
over which we had brooded for two years, in Brittany, in Italy; it is
here that they have developed into--what shall I say--a book? a living
fruit? At La Hève it appeared to us in its genial idea, that of the
primitive alliance which God has ordained for all his creatures, of the
love-bond which the universal mother has sealed between her children.
The winged order--the loftiest, the tenderest, the most sympathetic
with man--is that which man now-a-days pursues most cruelly.
What is required for its protection? To reveal the bird as soul, to
show that it is a person.
_The_ bird, then, _a single bird_--that is all my book; but the bird
in all the variations of its destiny, as it accommodates itself to the
thousand conditions of earth, to the thousand vocations of the winged
life. Without any knowledge of the more or less ingenious systems of
transformations, the heart gives oneness to its object; it neither
allows itself to be arrested by the external differences of species,
nor by that death which seems to sever the thread. Death, rude and
cruel, intervenes in this book, in the full current of life, but as a
passing accident only; life does not the less continue.
The agents of death, the murdering species, so glorified by man,
who recognizes in them his image, are here replaced very low in
the hierarchy, remitted to the rank which is rightly theirs. They
are the most deficient in the two special qualifications of the
bird--nest-making and song. Sad instruments of the fatal passage, they
appear in the midst of this book as the blind ministers of nature's
hardest necessity.
But the lofty light of life--art in its earliest dawn--shines only
in the smallest. With the small birds, unostentatious as they are,
modestly and seriously clad, art begins, and, on certain points, rises
higher than the sphere of man. Far from equalling the nightingale, we
have been unable to express or to render an account of his sublime song.
The eagle, then, is in these pages dethroned; the nightingale reigns
in his stead. In that moral _crescendo_, where the bird continuously
advances in self-culture, the apex and the supreme point are naturally
discovered, not in brutal strength, so easily overpassed by man, but
in a puissance of art, of soul, and of aspiration which man has not
attained, and which, beyond this world, transports him in a moment to
the further spheres.
High justice and true, because it is clear-visioned and tender! Feeble
on too many points, I doubt not, this book is strong in tenderness and
faith. It is one, constant and faithful. Nothing makes it divaricate.
Above death and its false divorce, through life and the masks which
disguise its unity, it flies, it loves to hover, from nest to nest,
from egg to egg, from love to the love of God.
LA HÈVE, NEAR HAVRE, _September 21, 1855_.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Part First.
[Illustration: THE EGG.]
[Illustration]
THE EGG.
The wise ignorance, the clear-seeing instinct of our forefathers gave
utterance to this oracle: "Everything springs from the egg; it is the
world's cradle."
Even our original, but especially the diversity of our destiny, is due
to the mother. She acts and she foresees, she loves with a stronger or
a weaker love, she is more or less the mother. The more she is so, the
higher mounts her offspring; each degree in existence depends on the
degree of her love.
What can the mother effect in the mobile existence of the fish?
Nothing, but trust her birth to the ocean. What in the insect world,
where she generally dies as soon as she has produced the egg? To obtain
for it before dying a secure asylum, where it may come to light, and
live.
In the case of the superior animal, the quadruped, where the warm
blood should surely stir up love, where the mother's womb is so long
the rest and home of her young, the cares of maternity are also of
minor import. The offspring is born fully formed, clothed in all things
like its mother; and its food awaits it. And in many species its
education is accomplished without any further care on the part of the
mother than she bestowed when it grew in her bosom.
Far otherwise is the destiny of the bird. It would die if it were not
loved.
Loved! Every mother loves, from the ocean to the stars. I should rather
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]
But even if our poor imitators had exactly imitated the wing, nothing
would have been accomplished. They, then, had copied the form, but
not the internal structure. They thought that the bird's power of
ascension lay in its flight alone, forgetting the secret auxiliary
which nature conceals in the plumage and the bones. The mystery, the
true marvel lies in the faculty with which she endows the bird, of
rendering itself light or heavy at its will, of admitting more or less
of air into its expressly constructed reservoirs. Would it grow light,
it inflates its dimension, while diminishing its relative weight; by
this means it spontaneously ascends in a medium heavier than itself.
To descend or drop, it contracts itself, grows thin and small; cutting
through the air which supported and raised it in its former heavy
condition. Here lay the error, the cause of man's fatal ignorance. He
assumed that the bird was a ship, not a balloon. He imitated the wing
only; but the wing, however skilfully imitated, if not conjoined with
this internal force, is but a certain means of destruction.
[Illustration]
But this faculty, this rapid inhalation or expulsion of air, of
swimming with a ballast variable at pleasure, whence does it proceed?
From an unique, unheard-of power of respiration. The man who should
inhale a similar quantity of air at once would be suffocated. The
bird's lung, elastic and powerful, quaffs it, grows full of it, grows
intoxicated with vigour and delight, pours it abundantly into its
bones, into its aerial cells. Each aspiration is renewed second after
second with tremendous rapidity. The blood, ceaselessly vivified with
fresh air, supplies each muscle with that inexhaustible energy which
no other being possesses, and which belongs only to the elements.
The clumsy image of Antæus regaining strength each time he touched
the earth, his mother, does but rudely and weakly render an idea of
this reality. The bird does not need to seek the air that he may be
reinvigorated by touching it; the air seeks and flows into him--it
incessantly kindles within him the burning fires of life.
It is this, and not the wing, which is so marvellous. Take the pinions
of the condor, and follow in its track, when, from the summit of the
Andes and their Siberian glaciers, it swoops down upon the glowing
shore of Peru, traversing in a minute all the temperatures and all
the climates of the globe, breathing at one breath the frightful mass
of air--scorched, frozen, it matters not. You would reach the earth
stricken as by thunder.
The smallest bird in this matter shames the strongest quadruped. Place
me, says Toussenel, a chained lion in a balloon, and his harsh roaring
will be lost in space. Far more powerful in voice and respiration, the
little lark mounts upward, trilling its song, and makes itself heard
when it can be seen no longer. Its light and joyous strain, uttered
without fatigue, and costing nothing, seems the bliss of an invisible
spirit which would fain console the earth.
Strength makes joy. The happiest of beings is the bird, because it
feels itself strong beyond the limits of its action; because, cradled,
sustained by the breath of heaven, it floats, it rises without effort,
like a dream. The boundless strength, the exalted faculty, obscure
among inferior beings, in the bird clear and vital, of deriving at will
its vigour from the maternal source, of drinking in life at full flood,
is a divine intoxication.
The tendency of every human being--a tendency wholly rational, not
arrogant, not impious--is to liken itself to Nature, the great Mother,
to fashion itself after her image, to crave a share of the unwearied
wings with which Eternal Love broods over the world.
Human tradition is fixed in this direction. Man does not wish to be
a man, but an angel, a winged deity. The winged genii of Persia
suggest the cherubim of Judea. Greece endows her Psyche with wings,
and discovers the true name of the soul, #asthma#, _aspiration_. The
soul has preserved her pinions; has passed at one flight through the
shadowy Middle Age, and constantly increases in heavenly longings. More
spotless and more glowing, she gives utterance to a prayer, breathed
in the very depths of her nature and her prophetic ardour: "Oh, that I
were a bird!" saith man.
Woman never doubts but that her offspring will become an angel. She has
seen it so in her dreams.
Dreams or realities? Winged visions, raptures of the night, which we
shall weep so bitterly in the morning! If ye really _were_! If, indeed,
ye lived! If we had lost some of the causes of our regret! If, from
stars to stars, re-united, and launched on an eternal flight, we all
performed in companionship a happy pilgrimage through the illimitable
goodness!
At times one is apt to believe it. Something whispers us that these
dreams are not all dreams, but glimpses of a world of truth, momentary
flashes revealed through these lower clouds, certain promises to be
hereafter fulfilled, while the pretended reality it is that should be
stigmatized as a foul delusion.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: THE FIRST FLUTTERINGS OF THE WING.]
[Illustration]
THE FIRST FLUTTERINGS OF THE WING.
There is never a man, unlettered, ignorant, exhausted, insensible,
who can deny himself a sentiment of reverence, I might almost say of
terror, on entering the halls of our Museum of Natural History.
No foreign collection, as far as my knowledge extends, produces this
impression.
Others, undoubtedly, as the superb museum of Leyden, are richer in
particular branches; but none are more complete, none more harmonious.
This sublime harmony is felt instinctively; it imposes and seizes
on the mind. The inattentive traveller, the chance visitor, is
unwillingly affected; he pauses, and he dreams. In the presence of
this vast enigma, of this immense hieroglyph which for the first time
is displayed before him, he may consider himself fortunate if he can
read a character or spell a letter. How often have different classes
of persons, surprised and tormented by such fantastic forms, inquired
of us their meaning! A word has set them in the right path, a simple
indication charmed them; they have gone away contented, and promising
themselves to return. On the other hand, they who traversed this ocean
of unknown objects without comprehending them, have departed fatigued
and melancholy.
Let us express our wish that an administration so enlightened, so high
in the ranks of science, may return to the original constitution of the
museum, which appointed _gardiens démonstrateurs_--attendants who were
also cicerones--and will only admit as guardians of this treasure men
who can understand it, and, on occasion, become its interpreters.
Another wish we dare to form is, that by the side of our renowned
naturalists they will place those courageous navigators, those
persevering travellers who, by their labours, their fruits, by a
hundred times hazarding their lives, have procured for us these costly
spoils. Whatever their intrinsic value, it is, perhaps, increased by
the heroism and grandeur of heart of these adventurers. This charming
colibris,[14] madam, a winged sapphire in which you could see only a
useless object of personal decoration, do you know that an Azara[15] or
a Lesson[16] has brought it from murderous forests where one breathes
nothing but death? This magnificent tiger, whose skin you admire, are
you aware that before it could be planted here, there was a necessity
that it should be sought after in the jungles, encountered face to
face, fired at, struck in the forehead by the intrepid Levaillant?[17]
These illustrious travellers, ardent lovers of nature, often without
means, often without assistance, have followed it into the deserts,
watched and surprised it in its mysterious retreats, voluntarily
enduring thirst and hunger and incredible fatigues; never complaining,
thinking themselves too well recompensed, full of devotion, of
gratitude at each fresh discovery; regretting nothing in such an event,
not even the death of La Perouse[18] or Mungo Park,[19] death by
shipwreck, or death among the savages.
[Illustration]
Bid them live again here in our midst! If their lonely life flowed
free from Europe for Europe's benefit, let their images be placed in
the centre of the grateful crowd, with a brief exposition of their
fortunate discoveries, their sufferings, and their sublime courage.
More than one young man shall be moved by the sight of these heroes,
and depart to dream enthusiastically of following in their footsteps.
Herein lies the twofold grandeur of the place. Its treasures were sent
by heroic men, and they were collected, classified, and harmonized by
illustrious physicists, to whom all things flowed as to a legitimate
centre, and whom their position, no less than their intellect, induced
to accomplish here the centralization of nature.
In the last century, the great movement of the sciences revolved around
a man of genius, influential by his rank, his social relations, his
fortune--M. the Count de Buffon. All the donations of men of science,
travellers, and kings, came to him, and by him were classified in this
museum. In our own days a grander spectacle has fixed upon this spot
the eager eyes of all the nations of the world, when two mighty men (or
rather two systems), Cuvier and Geoffroy, made this their battle-field.
All the world enrolled itself on the one side or the other; all took
part in the strife, and despatched to the Museum, either in support of
or opposition to the experiments, books, animals, or facts previously
unknown. Hence these collections, which one might suppose to be dead,
are really living; they still throb with the recollections of the fray,
are still animated by the lofty minds which invoked all these beings to
be the witnesses of their prolific struggle.
It is no fortuitous gathering yonder. It consists of closely connected
series, formed and systematically arranged by profound thinkers. Those
species which form the most curious transitions between the genera are
richly represented. There you may see, far more fully than elsewhere,
what Linné and Lamarck have said, that just as our museums gradually
grew richer, became more complete, exhibited fewer _lacunæ_, we should
be constrained to acknowledge that nature does nothing abruptly, in
all things proceeds by gentle and insensible transitions. Wherever we
seem to see in her works a bound, a chasm, a sudden and inharmonious
interval, let us ascribe the fault to ourselves; that blank is our own
ignorance.
[Illustration]
Let us pause for a few moments at the solemn passages where life
uncertain seems still to oscillate, where Nature appears to question
herself, to examine her own volition. "Shall I be fish or mammal?"
says the creature. It falters, and remains a fish, but warm-blooded;
belongs to the mild race of lamentins and seals. "Shall I be bird or
quadruped?" A great question; a perplexed hesitancy--a prolonged and
changeful combat. All its various phases are discussed; the diverse
solutions of the problems naïvely suggested and realized by fantastic
beings like the ornithorhynchus, which has nothing of the bird but
the beak; like the poor bat, a tender and innocent animal in its
family-circle, but whose undefined form makes it grim-looking and
unfortunate. You perceive that nature has sought in it _the wing_, and
found only a hideous membranous skin, which nevertheless performs a
wing's function:
"I am a bird; see you my wings?"
Yes; but even the wing does not make the bird.
[Illustration]
Place yourself towards the centre of the museum, and close to the
clock. There you perceive, on your left, the first rudiment of the wing
in the penguin of the southern pole, and its brother, the Arctic auk,
one degree more developed; scaly winglets, whose glittering feathers
rather recall the fish than the bird. On land the creature is feeble;
but while earth is difficult for it, air is impossible. Do not complain
too warmly. Its prescient mother destines it for the Polar Seas, where
it will only need to paddle. She clothes it carefully in a fine coat
of fat and an impenetrable covering. She will have it warm among the
icebergs. Which is the better means? It seems as if she had hesitated,
had wavered. By the side of the booby we see with surprise an essay
at quite another genus, yet one not less remarkable as a maternal
precaution. I refer to a very rare gorfou--which I have seen in no
other museum--attired in the rough skin of a quadruped, resembling a
goat's fleece, but more shining, perhaps, in the living animal, and
certainly impermeable to water.
To link together the birds which do not fly, we must find the
connecting point in the navigator of the desert--the bird-camel, the
ostrich, resembling the camel itself in its internal structure. At
least, if its imperfect wings cannot raise it above the earth, they
assist it powerfully in walking, and endow it with extraordinary
swiftness: it is the sail with which it skims its arid African ocean.
Let us return to the penguin, the true starting-point of the series--to
the penguin, whose rudimentary pinion cannot be employed as a sail,
does not aid it in walking, is only an indication, like a memorial of
nature.
[Illustration]
She loosens her bonds, she rises with difficulty in a first attempt
at flight by means of two strange figures, which appear to us both
grotesque and pretentious. The penguin is not of these; a simple, silly
creature, you see that it never had the ambition to fly. But here are
they who emancipate themselves, who seem in quest of the adornment or
the grace of motion. The gorfou may be taken for a penguin which has
decided to quit its condition. It assumes a coquettish tuft of plumes,
that throws into high relief its ugliness. The shapeless puffin, which
seems the very caricature of a caricature, the paroquet, resembles
it in its great beak, rudely chipped, but without edge or strength.
Tail-less and ill-balanced, it may always be upset by the weight of its
large head. It ventures, nevertheless, to flutter about, at the hazard
of toppling over. It swoops nobly close to the surface of earth, and
is, perhaps, the envy of the penguins and the seals. Sometimes it even
risks itself at sea--ill-fated ship, which the lightest breeze will
wreck!
It is, however, impossible to deny that the first flight is taken.
Birds of various kinds carry on the enterprise more successfully. The
rich genus of _divers_ (Brachypteræ), in its species widely different,
connects the sailor-birds with the natatores, or swimmers: those, with
wings perfected, with a bold and secure flight, accomplish the longest
voyages; these, still clothed with the glittering feathers of the
penguin, frisk and sport at the bottom of the seas. They want but fins
and respiratory organs to become actual fishes. They are alternately
masters of both elements, air and water.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: TRIUMPH OF THE WING.]
[Illustration]
TRIUMPH OF THE WING.
THE FRIGATE BIRD.
Let us not attempt to particularize all the intermediate gradations.
Let us proceed to yonder snow-white bird, which I perceive floating
on high among the clouds; the bird which one sees everywhere--on the
water, on land, on rocks alternately concealed and exposed by the
waves; the bird which one loves to watch, familiar as it is, and
greedy, and which might well be named "the little vulture of the seas."
I speak of those myriads of petrels, or gulls, with whose hoarse cries
every waste resounds. Find me, if you can, creatures endowed with
fuller liberty. Day and night, south or north, sea or shore, dead prey
or living, all is one to them. Using everything, at home everywhere,
they indifferently display their white sails from the waves to the
heaven; the fresh breeze, ever shifting and changing, is the bounteous
wind which always blows in the direction they most desire.
What are they but air, sea, the elements, which have taken wing and
fly? I know nothing of it. To see their gray eye, stern and cold (never
successfully imitated in our museums), is to see the gray, indifferent
sea of the north in all its icy impassiveness. What do I say? That sea
exhibits more emotion. At times phosphorescent and electrical, it will
rise into strong animation. Old Father Ocean, saturnine and passionate,
often revolves, under his pale countenance, a host of thoughts. His
sons, the goëlands, have less of animal life than he has. They fly,
with their dead eyes seeking some dead prey; and in congregated flocks
they expedite the destruction of the great carcasses which float upon
the sea for their behoof. Not ferocious in aspect, amusing the voyager
by their sports, by frequent glimpses of their snowy pinions, they
speak to him of remote lands, of the shores which he leaves behind or
is about to visit, of absent or hoped-for friends. And they are useful
to him, also, by announcing and predicting the coming storm. Ofttimes
their sail expanded warns him to furl his own.
[Illustration]
For do not suppose that when the tempest breaks they deign to fold
their wings. Far from this: it is then that they set forth. The storm
is their harvest time; the more terrible the sea, so much the less
easily can the fish escape from these daring fishers. In the Bay of
Biscay, where the ocean-swell, driven from the north-west, after
traversing the Atlantic, arrives in mighty billows, swollen to enormous
heights, with a terrific clash and shock, the tranquil petrels labour
imperturbably. "I saw them," says M. de Quatrefages, "describe in the
air a thousand curves, plunge between two waves, reappear with a fish.
Swiftest when they followed the wind, slowest when they confronted it,
they nevertheless poised always with the same ease, and never appeared
to give a stroke of the wing the more than in the calmest weather. And
yet the billows mounted up the slopes, like cataracts reversed, as high
as the platform of Nôtre Dame, and their spray higher than Montmartre.
They did not appear more moved by it."
[Illustration]
Man has not their philosophy. The seaman is powerfully affected when,
at the decline of day, a sudden night darkening over the sea, he
descries, hovering about his barque, an ominous little pigeon, a bird
of funereal black. _Black_ is not the fitting word; black would be
less gloomy: the true tint is that of a smoky-brown, which cannot be
defined. It is a shadow of hell, an evil vision, which strides along
the waters, breasts the billows, crushes under its feet the tempest.
The stormy petrel (or "St. Peter") is the horror of the seaman, who
sees in it, according to his belief, a living curse. Whence does it
come? How is it able to rise at such enormous distances from all land?
What wills it? What does it come in quest of, if not of a wreck? It
sweeps to and fro impatiently, and already selects the corpses which
its accomplice, the atrocious and iniquitous sea, will soon deliver up
to its mercies.
Such are the fables of fear. Less panic-stricken minds would see in
the poor bird another ship in distress, an imprudent navigator, which
has also been surprised far from shore and without an asylum. Our
vessel is for him an island, where he would fain repose. The track of
the barque, which rides through both wind and wave, is in itself a
refuge, a succour against fatigue. Incessantly, with nimble flight,
he places the rampart of the vessel between himself and the tempest.
Timid and short-sighted, you see it only when it brings the night.
Like ourselves, it dreads the storm--it trembles with fear--it would
fain escape--and like you, O seaman, it sighs, "What will become of my
little ones?"
But the black hour passes, day reappears, and I see a small blue point
in the heaven. Happy and serene region, which has rested in peace far
above the hurricane! In that blue point, and at an elevation of ten
thousand feet, royally floats a little bird with enormous pens. A gull?
No; its wings are black. An eagle? No; the bird is too small.
It is the little ocean-eagle, first and chief of the winged race, the
daring navigator who never furls his sails, the lord of the tempest,
the scorner of all peril--the man-of-war or frigate-bird.
We have reached the culminating point of the series commenced by the
wingless bird. Here we have a bird which is virtually nothing more
than wings: scarcely any body--barely as large as that of the domestic
cock--while his prodigious pinions are fifteen feet in span. The great
problem of flight is solved and overpassed, for the power of flight
seems useless. Such a bird, naturally sustained by such supports,
need but allow himself to be borne along. The storm bursts; he mounts
to lofty heights, where he finds tranquillity. The poetic metaphor,
untrue when applied to any other bird, is no exaggeration when applied
to him: literally, he sleeps upon the storm.
When he chooses to oar his way seriously, all distance vanishes: he
breakfasts at the Senegal; he dines in America.
Or, if he thinks fit to take more time, and amuse himself _en
route_, he can do so. He may continue his progress through the night
indefinitely, certain of reposing himself. Upon what? On his huge
motionless wing, which takes upon itself all the weariness of the
voyage; or on the wind, his slave, which eagerly hastens to cradle him.
Observe, moreover, that this strange being is gifted with the proud
prerogative of fearing nothing in this world. Little, but strong and
intrepid, he braves all the tyrants of the air. He can despise, if need
be, the pygargue and the condor: those huge unwieldy creatures will
with great difficulty have put themselves in motion when he shall have
already achieved a distance of ten leagues.
Oh, it is then that envy seizes us, when, amid the glowing azure of
the Tropics, at incredible altitudes, almost imperceptible in the dim
remoteness, we see him triumphantly sweeping past us--this black,
solitary bird, alone in the waste of heaven: or, at the most, at a
lower elevation, the snow-white sea-swallow crosses his flights in easy
grace!
Why dost not thou take me upon thy pens, O king of the air, thou
fearless and unwearied master of space, whose wondrously swift
flight annihilates time? Who more than thou is raised above the mean
fatalities of existence?
One thing, however, has astonished me: that, when contemplated from
near at hand, the first of the winged kingdom should have nothing of
that serenity which a free life promises. His eye is cruelly hard,
severe, mobile, unquiet. His vexed attitude is that of some unhappy
sentinel doomed, under pain of death, to keep watch over the infinity
of ocean. He visibly exerts himself to see afar. And if his vision does
not avail him, the doom is on his dark countenance; nature condemns
him, he dies.
On looking at him closely, you perceive that he has no feet. Or at all
events, feet which being palmate and exceedingly short, can neither
walk nor perch. With a formidable beak, he has not the talons of a
true eagle of the sea. A pseudo-eagle, and superior to the true in his
daring as in his powers of flight, he has not, however, his strength,
his invincible grasp. He strikes and slays: can he seize?
Thence arises his life of uncertainty and hazard--the life of a corsair
and a pirate rather than of a mariner--and the fixed inquiry ever
legible on his countenance: "Shall I feed? Shall I have wherewithal to
nourish my little ones this evening?"
[Illustration]
The immense and superb apparatus of his wings becomes on land a danger
and an embarrassment. To raise himself he needs a strong wind and a
lofty station, a promontory, a rock. Surprised on a sandy level, on
the banks, the low reefs where he sometimes halts, the frigate-bird is
defenceless; in vain he threatens, he strikes, for a blow from a stick
will overcome him.
At sea, those vast wings, of such admirable utility in ascent, are
ill-fitted for skimming the surface of the water. When wetted, they may
over-weight and sink him. And thereupon, woe to the bird! He belongs to
the fishes, he nourishes the mean tribes on which he had relied for his
own behoof; the game eats the hunter, the ensnarer is ensnared.
And yet, what shall he do? His food lies in the waters. He is ever
compelled to draw near them, to return to them, to skim incessantly the
hateful and prolific sea which threatens to engulf him.
Thus, then, this being so well-armed, winged, superior to all others
in power of flight and vision as in daring, leads but a trembling and
precarious life. He would die of hunger had he not the industry to
create for himself a purveyor, whom he cheats of his food. His ignoble
resource, alas, is to attack a dull and timorous bird, the noddy,
famous as a fisher. The frigate-bird, which is of no larger dimensions,
pursues him, strikes him on the neck with his beak, and constrains him
to yield up his prey. All these incidents transpire in the air; before
the fish can fall, he catches it on its passage.
If this resource fail, he does not shrink from attacking man. "On
landing at Ascension Island," says a traveller, "we were assailed by
some frigate-birds. One tried to snatch a fish out of my very hand.
Others alighted on the copper where the meat was being cooked to carry
it off, without taking any notice of the sailors who were around it."
Dampier saw some of these birds, sick, aged, or crippled, perched upon
the rocks which seemed their sanatorium, levying contributions upon the
young noddies, their vassals, and nourishing themselves on the results
of their fishing. But in the vigour of their prime they do not rest
on earth; living like the clouds, constantly floating on their vast
wings from one world to the other, patiently awaiting their fortune,
and piercing the infinite heaven--the infinite waters--with implacable
glance.
The lord of the winged race is he who does not rest. The chief of
navigators is he who never reaches his _bourne_. Earth and sea are
almost equally prohibited to him. He is for ever banished.
[Illustration]
Let us envy nothing. No existence is really free here below, no career
is sufficiently extensive, no power of flight sufficiently great, no
wing can satisfy. The most powerful is but a temporary substitute. The
soul waits, demands, and hopes for others:--
"Wings to soar above life:
Wings to soar beyond death!"
[NOTE.--_The Frigate-Bird._ This interesting bird (_Tachypetes_)
is allied to the cormorants, but differs from them in the
possession of a forked tail, short feet, a curved beak, and
extraordinary spread of wing. Its plumage is coloured of a rich
purple black, but the beak is varied with vermilion red, and
the throat with patches of white. It is an inhabitant of the
Tropics, where it lives a predatory life, forcing the gannet and
the gull to disgorge their prey, and retiring to breed in lonely
uninhabited islands.
Of its voracity, Dr. Chamberlaine gives a curious illustration.
When the fishermen are pursuing their vocation on the sand-banks
in Kingston Harbour, Jamaica, the gulls, pelicans, and other
sea-birds gather round in swarms, and as the loaded net is hauled
ashore, pounce upon their struggling prey. But no sooner does this
take place, than the frigate-birds attack them with such furious
violence that they are glad to surrender their hard-earned booty
to antagonists so formidable.
The lightness of his body, his short tarsi, his enormous spread
of wing, together with his long, slender, and forked tail,
all combine to give this bird a superiority over his tribe,
not only in length and swiftness of flight, but also in the
capability of maintaining himself on extended pinions in his
aerial realm, where, at times, he will soar so high that his
figure can scarce be discerned by the spectator in this nether
world.--_Translator._]
[Illustration: THE SHORES.]
[Illustration]
THE SHORES.
DECAY OF CERTAIN SPECIES.
I have frequently observed, in my days of sadness, a being sadder
still, which Melancholy might have chosen for its symbol: I mean, the
Dreamer of the Marshes, the meditative bird that, in all seasons,
standing solitarily before the dull waters, seems, along with his
image, to plunge in their mirror his monotonous thought.
His noble ebon-black crest, his pearl-gray mantle--this semi-royal
mourning contrasts with his puny body and transparent leanness. When
flying, the poor heron displays but a couple of wings; low as is the
elevation to which he rises, there is no longer any question of his
body--he becomes invisible. An animal truly aerial, to bear so light
a frame, the heron has enough, nay, he has a foot too many; he folds
under his wing the other; and nearly always his lame figure is thus
defined against the sky in a fantastical hieroglyph.
[Illustration]
Whoever has lived in history, in the study of fallen races and empires,
is tempted to see herein an image of decay. Yonder bird is a great
ruined lord, a dethroned king, or I am much mistaken. No creature
issues from Nature's hands in so miserable a condition. Therefore
I ventured to interrogate this dreamer, and I said to him from a
distance the following words, which his most delicate hearing caught
exactly:--"My fisher-friend, wouldst thou oblige me by explaining
(without abandoning thy present position), why, always so melancholy,
thou seemest doubly melancholy to-day? Hath thy prey failed thee? Have
the too subtle fish deceived thine eyes? Does the mocking frog defy
thee from the bottom of the waters?"
"No; neither fish nor frogs have made sport of the heron. But the heron
laughs at himself, despises himself, when he remembers the glory of his
noble race, and the bird of the olden times.
"Thou wouldst know wherefore I dream? Ask the Indian chief of the
Cherokees, or the Iowas, why for long days he leans his head upon his
hand, marking on the tree before him an object which was never there?
"The earth was our empire, the realm of the aquatic birds in the
Transitional age when, young and fresh, she emerged from the waters.
An era of strife, of battle, but of abundant subsistence. Not a heron
then but earned his life. There was need neither to attack nor pursue;
the prey hunted the hunter; it whistled, or it croaked on every
side. Millions of creatures of undefined natures, bird-frogs, winged
fish, infested the uncertain limits of the two elements. What would
ye have done, ye feeble mortals, the latest-born of the world? The
Bird prepared earth for ye. Colossal encounters were waged against
the enormous monster-births of the ooze; the son of air, the bird,
attaining the dimensions of an Anak, shrunk not from battle with the
giant. If your ungrateful histories have not traced these events,
God's grand record narrates them in the depths of the earth, where she
deposits the conquered and the conquerors, the monsters exterminated by
us, and we who have exterminated them.
"Your lying myths make us contemporaries of a human Hercules. What had
his club availed against the plesiosaurus? Who would have met, face to
face, the horrible leviathan? The capacity of flight was absolutely
needed, the strong intrepid wing which from the loftiest height bore
downwards the Herculean bird, the epiornis, an eagle twenty feet in
stature, and fifty feet from wing-tip to wing-tip, the implacable
hunter, who, lord of three elements, in the air, in the water, and in
the deep slime, pursued the dragon with ceaseless hostility.
"Man had perished a hundred times. Through our agency man became
possible on a pacified earth. But who will be astonished that these
awful wars, which lasted for myriads of years, spent the conquerors,
wearied the winged Hercules, transformed him into a feeble Perseus, a
pale and lustreless memory of our heroic times?
"Lowered in strength and stature, but not in heart, famished by our
very victory, by the disappearance of evil races, by the division of
the elements which held our prey concealed at the bottom of the waters,
we in our turn were hunted upon the earth, in the forests and the
marsh, by those new-comers who, without our help, had never been. The
malice and dexterity of the woodman were fatal to our nests. Like a
coward, in the thick of the branches which impede flight and shackle
combat, he laid his hand on our young ones. A new war, and a less
fortunate one, this, which Homer calls the War of the Pigmies and the
Cranes. The lofty intelligence of the cranes, their truly military
tactics, have not prevented man their enemy from gaining the advantage
by a thousand execrable arts. Time was on his side, and earth, and
nature: she moves forward, drying up the earth, exhausting the marshes,
narrowing the undefined region where we reigned. It will be with us,
in the end, as with the beaver. Many species perish: another century,
perhaps, and the heron _will have_ lived."
The story is too true. Except those species which have taken their
side, have abandoned earth, have given themselves up frankly and
unreservedly to the liquid element; except the divers, the cormorant,
the wise pelican, and a few others, the aquatic tribes seem in a state
of decay. Restlessness and sobriety maintain them still. It is this
persistent anxiety which has gifted the pelican with a peculiar organ,
hollowing for her under her distended beak a movable reservoir, a
living sign of economy and of attentive foresight.
Others, skilful voyagers, like the swan, live by constantly changing
their abode. But the swan herself, which, though uneatable, is trained
by man on account of her beauty and her grace--the swan, formerly so
common in Italy, and to which Virgil so constantly refers, is now very
rare there. In vain the traveller would seek for those snow-white
flotillas which covered with their sails the waters of the Mincio, the
marshes of Mantua; which mourned for Phaëton in despite of his sisters,
or in their sublime flight, pursuing the stars with harmonious song,
repeated to them the name of Varus.[20]
That song, of which all antiquity speaks, is it a fable? These organs
of singing, which are so largely developed in the swan, were they
always useless? Did they never disport themselves in happy freedom when
enjoying a more genial atmosphere, and spending the greater portion of
the year in the mild climates of Greece and Italy? One might be tempted
to believe it. The swan, driven back to the north, where his amours
secure mystery and repose, has sacrificed his song, has gained the
accent of barbarism, or become voiceless. The muse is dead; the bird
has survived.
[Illustration]
Gregarious, disciplined, full of tactic and resources, the crane, the
superior type of intelligence among these species, might contrive, one
would fancy, to prosper, and to maintain herself everywhere in her
ancient royalty. She has lost two kingdoms, however: France, where
she now only appears as a bird of passage; England, where she rarely
ventures to deposit her eggs.
The heron, in the days of Aristotle, was full of industry and
sagacity. The ancients consulted him in reference to fine weather
or tempest, as one of the gravest of augurs. Fallen in the mediæval
days, but preserving his beauty, his heavenward flight, he was still
a prince, a feudal bird; kings esteemed it kingly sport to hunt him,
and considered him a meet quarry for the noble falcon. And so keenly
was he hunted, that already, in the reign of Francis I., he had grown
rare: that monarch lodged him near his own palace at Fontainebleau,
and established there some heronries. Two or three centuries pass,
and Buffon can still believe that there are no provinces in France
where heronries could not be found. In our own days, Toussenel knows
of but one in all the country--at least in its northern districts, in
Champagne: a wood between Rheims and Epernay conceals the last asylum
where the poor lonely bird still dares to hide his loves.
[Illustration]
Lonely! In that lies his condemnation. Less gregarious than the crane,
less domesticated than the stork, he seems to have grown harsh towards
his progeny, towards the mate whom he loves. His brief rare fits of
desire scarcely beguile him for a day from his melancholy. He cares
little for life. In captivity he often refuses nourishment, and pines
away without complaint and without regret.
The aquatic birds, creatures of great experience, for the most part
reflective and learned in two elements, were, at their palmiest epoch,
more advanced than many others. They well deserved the care of man. All
of them possessed merits of diverse originality. The social instinct of
the cranes, and their various imitative talent, rendered them amusing
and agreeable. The joviality of the pelican, and his joyous humour;
the tenderness of the goose, and his strong faculty of attachment;
and, finally, the good disposition of the storks, their piety towards
their aged parents, confirmed by so many witnesses, formed between this
world and our own firm ties of sympathy, which human levity ought not
barbarously to have rent asunder.
[Illustration]
[NOTE.--_Heronries in England._ The heron, though rare in England,
is certainly not so scarce as he seems to be in France, perhaps
because it is against the laws of sport to hunt him. In some
districts the man who shot a heron would be regarded with as much
scorn as if he had killed a fox. He is a very rapacious bird, and
it is asserted that, on an average, he will destroy daily half a
hundred small roach and dace.
There is a fine heronry at Cobham, near Gravesend, in Kent, the
seat of the Earl of Darnley. Another, in Great Sowdens Wood, on
the Rye road, one mile from Udimere, in Sussex, contains fully
four hundred nests. That at Parham, the Hon. R. Curzon's beautiful
seat has quite a history.
The original birds were brought from Wales to Penshurst, by the
Earl of Leicester's steward, in the reign of James I. Thence, some
two centuries later, they migrated to Michel Grove, at Angmering.
It may be about twenty years since that the Duke of Norfolk
caused two or three trees to be felled near their retreat, and
the offended birds immediately commenced their migrations, and,
in the course of three seasons, all assembled in Parham Woods.
Here, in the thick shelter of pine and spruce-fir, are now about
fifty-seven nests. (See Knox's "Ornithological Rambles in Kent and
Sussex.")--_Translator._]
[Illustration]
[Illustration: THE HERONRIES OF AMERICA.]
[Illustration]
THE HERONRIES OF AMERICA.
WILSON, THE ORNITHOLOGIST.
The decay of the heron is less perceptible in America. He is not so
frequently hunted. The solitudes are of vaster dimensions. He can
still find, among his beloved marshes, gloomy and almost impenetrable
forests. In these shadowy recesses he is more gregarious: ten or
fifteen "domestic exiles" establish themselves in the same locality, or
at but a short distance from each other. The complete obscurity which
the huge cedars throw over the livid waters re-assures and rejoices
them. Towards the summit of these trees they build with sticks a wide
platform, which they cover with small branches: this is the residence
of the family, and the shelter of their loves; there, the eggs are
laid and hatched in quiet, the young are taught to fly, and all those
paternal lessons are given which will perfect the young fisher. They
have little cause to fear the intrusion of man into their peaceful
retreats: these they find near the sea-shore, especially in North and
South Carolina, in low swampy levels, the haunt of yellow fever. Such
morasses--an ancient arm of the sea or a river, an old swamp left
behind in the gradual recession of the waters--extend sometimes over
a length of five or six miles, and a breadth of one mile. The entry
is not very inviting: a barrier of trees confronts you, their trunks
perfectly upright and stripped of branches, fifty or sixty feet high,
and bare to the very summit, where they mingle and bring together
their leafy arches of sombre green, so as to shed upon the waters an
ominous twilight. What waters! A seething mass of leaves and débris,
where the old stems rise pell-mell one upon another; the whole of a
muddy yellow colour, coated on the surface with a green frothy moss.
Advance, and the seemingly firm expanse is a quicksand, into which you
plunge. A laurel-tree at each step intercepts you; you cannot pass
without a painful struggle with their branches, with wrecks of trees,
with laurels constantly springing up afresh. Rare gleams of light
shoot athwart the darkness, and the silence of death prevails in these
terrible regions. Except the melancholy notes of two or three small
birds, which you catch at intervals, or the hoarse cry of the heron,
all is dumb and desolate; but when the wind rises, from the summit
of the trees comes the heron's moans and sighs. If the storm bursts,
these great naked cedars, these tall "ammiral's masts," waver and clash
together; the forest roars, cries, groans, and imitates with singular
exactness the voices of wolves, and bears, and all the beasts of prey.
It was not then without astonishment that, about 1805, the heron, thus
securely settled, saw a rare face, a man's, roaming under their cedars,
and in the open swamp. One man alone was capable of visiting them in
their haunts, a patient indefatigable traveller, no less courageous
than peaceable--the friend and the admirer of birds, Alexander Wilson.
If these people had been acquainted with their visitor's character, far
from feeling terrified at his appearance, they would undoubtedly have
gone forth to meet him, and, with clapping of wings and loud cries,
have given him an amicable salute, a fraternal ovation.
[Illustration]
In those terrible years when man waged against man the most destructive
war that had ever been known, there lived in Scotland a man of peace.
A poor Paisley weaver,[21] in his damp dull lodging, he dreamed of
nature, of the infinite liberty of the woods, and, above all, of the
winged life. A cripple, and condemned to inactivity, his very bondage
inspired him with an ecstatic love of light and flight. If he did not
take to himself wings, it was because that sublime gift is, upon earth,
only the dream and hope of another world.
At first he attempted to gratify his love of birds by the purchase
of those illustrated works which pretend to represent them. Clumsy
caricatures, which convey but a ridiculous idea of their form, and none
at all of their movement; and what _is_ the bird deprived of grace
and motion? These did not suffice. He took a decisive resolution: to
abandon everything, his trade, his country. A new Robinson Crusoe,
he was willing, by a voluntary shipwreck, to exile himself to the
solitudes of America; where he might see with his own eyes, observe,
describe, and paint. He then remembered one little fact: that he
neither knew how to draw, to paint, or to write. But this strong and
patient man, whom no difficulties could discourage, soon learned to
write, and to write an excellent style. A good writer, a minutely
accurate artist, with a delicate and certain hand, he seemed, under
the guidance of Nature, his mother and mistress, less to learn than to
remember.
Provided with these weapons, he plunges into the desert, the forest,
and the pestiferous savannahs; becomes the friends of buffaloes and the
guest of bears; lives upon wild fruits, under the splendid ceiling of
heaven. Wherever he chances to observe a rare bird, he halts, encamps,
and is "at home." What, indeed, is to there hurry him onward? He has no
house to recall him, and neither wife nor child awaits him. He has a
family, it is true: that great family which he observes and describes.
And friends, he has _them_, too: those which have not yet learned to
mistrust man, and which perch upon his tree, and chatter with him.
And, O birds, you are right; you have there a truly loyal friend, who
will secure you many others, who will teach men to understand you,
being himself as a bird in thought and heart. One day, perhaps, the
traveller, penetrating into your solitudes, and seeing some of you
fluttering and sparkling in the sun, will be tempted with the hope of
spoil, but will bethink himself of Wilson. Why kill the friends of
Wilson? And when this name flashes on his memory, he will lower his
gun.
I do not see, let me add, why we should extend to infinity our massacre
of birds, or, at least, of these species which are represented in our
museums, or in the museums painted by Wilson, and his disciple Audubon,
whose truly royal book, exhibiting both race, and the egg, the nest,
the forest, the very landscape, is a rivalry with nature.
[Illustration]
These great observers have one speciality which separates them from all
others. Their feeling is so delicate, so precise, that no generalities
could satisfy it; they must always examine the individual. God, I
think, knows nothing of our classifications: he created such and such a
creature, and gives but little heed to the imaginary lines with which
we isolate the species. In the same manner, Wilson knew nothing of
birds in the mass; but such an individual, of such an age, with such
plumage, in such circumstances. He knows it, has seen it, has seen it
again, and again, and he will tell you what it does, what it eats,
how it comports itself, and will relate certain adventures, certain
anecdotes of its life. "I knew a woodpecker. I have frequently seen
a Baltimore." When he uses these expressions, you may wholly trust
yourself to him; they mean that he has held close relations with them
in a species of friendly and family intimacy. Would that we knew the
men with whom we transact business as well as Wilson knew the bird
_qua_, or the heron of the Carolinas!
It is easily understood, and not difficult to imagine, that when this
_bird-man_ returned among men, he met with none that could comprehend
him. His peculiarly novel originality, his marvellous exactness, his
unique faculty of _individualization_ (the only means of re-making of
re-creating the living being), were the chief obstacles to his success.
Neither publishers nor public cared for more than noble, lofty, and
vague generalities, in faithful observance of Buffon's precept: To
generalize is to ennoble; therefore, adopt the word "general."
It required time, and, more than all, it required that this fertile
genius should after his death inspire a similar genius, the accurate
and patient Audubon, whose colossal work has astonished and subjugated
the public, by demonstrating that the true and living in representation
of individuality is nobler and more majestic than the forced products
of the generalizing art.
Wilson's sweetness of disposition, so unworthily misunderstood, shines
forth in his beautiful preface. To some it may appear infantine, but no
innocent heart can be otherwise than moved by it.
"On a visit to a friend, I found that his young son, about eight or
nine years of age, who had been brought up in the town, but was then
living in the country, had just collected, while wandering in the
fields, a fine nosegay of wild-flowers of every hue. He presented it to
his mother, with the greatest animation, saying: 'Dear mamma, see what
beautiful flowers I have gathered! Oh, I could pluck a host of others
which grow in our woods, and are still more lovely! Shall I not bring
you some more, mamma?' She took the nosegay with a smile of tenderness,
silently admired the simple and touching beauty of nature, and said to
him, 'Yes, my son.' The child started off on the wings of happiness.
"I saw myself in that child, and was struck with the resemblance. If
my native country receive with gracious indulgence the specimens which
I now humbly offer it, if it express a desire that _I should bring it
some more_, my highest ambition will be satisfied. For, as my little
friend said, our woods are full of them; I can gather numerous others
which are still more beautiful."--(Philadelphia, 1808.)
[Illustration]
[Illustration: THE COMBAT.]
[Illustration]
THE COMBAT.
THE TROPICAL REGIONS.
A lady of our family, who resided in Louisiana, was nursing her young
child. Every night her sleep was troubled by the strange sensation of
a cold gliding object which sought to draw the milk from her breast.
On one occasion she felt the same impression, and it aroused her. She
sprang up, summoned her attendants; a light was brought; they search
every corner, turn over the bed, and at last discover the frightful
nursling--a serpent of great size and of a dangerous species. The
horror which she felt instantly dried up her milk.
Levaillant relates that at the Cape of Good Hope, in a circle of
friends, and during a quiet conversation, the lady of the house turned
pale, and uttered a terrible cry. A serpent had crept up her legs,
one of those whose sting is death in a couple of minutes. With great
difficulty it was killed.
In India, a French soldier, resuming his knapsack which he had placed
on the ground, discovered behind it the dangerous black serpent,
the most venomous of his tribe. He was about to cut it in two when
a merciful Hindu interposed, obtained its pardon, and took up the
serpent. Stung by it, he died immediately.
Such are the terrors of nature in those formidable climates. But
reptiles, now-a-days rare, are not the greatest curse. In all places
and at all times it is now the insect. Insects everywhere, and in
everything; they possess an infinity of means for attacking you; they
walk, swim, glide, fly; they are in the air, and you breathe them.
Invisible, they make known their presence by the most painful wounds.
Recently, in one of our sea-ports, an official of the customs opened
a parcel of papers brought from the colonies a long time previously.
A fly furiously darted out of it; it pursued, it stung him; two days
afterwards he was a corpse.
The hardiest of men, the buccaneers and filibusters, declared that of
all dangers and of all pains they dreaded most the wounds of insects.
Frequently intangible, invisible, irresistible, they are destruction
itself under an unavoidable form. How shall you oppose them when they
make war upon you in legions? Once, at Barbadoes, the inhabitants
observed an immense army of great ants, which, impelled by unknown
causes, advanced in a serried column and in the same direction against
the houses. To kill them was only trouble lost. There were no means
of arresting their progress. At last an ingenious mind fortunately
suggested that trains of gunpowder should be laid across their route,
and set on fire. These volcanoes terrified them, and the torrent of
invasion gradually turned aside.
No mediæval armoury, with all the strange weapons then made use of;
no chirurgical implement factory, with the thousands of dreadful
instruments invented by modern art, can be compared with the monstrous
armour of Tropical insects--their pincers, their nippers, their teeth,
their saws, their horns, their augers, all their tools of combat, of
death, and of dissection, with which they come armed to the battle,
with which they labour, pierce, cut, rend, and finely partition, with
skill and dexterity equal to their furious blood-thirstiness.
Our grandest works may not defy the energetic force of these terrible
legions. Give them a ship of the line--what do I say? a town--to
devour, and they charge at it with eager joy. In course of time
they have excavated under Valentia, near Caraccas, vast abysses and
catacombs; the city is now literally suspended. A few individuals of
this voracious tribe, unfortunately transported to Rochelle, have set
to work to eat up the place, and already more than one edifice trembles
upon timbers which are only externally sound, and at the core are
rotten.
What would be the fate of a man given up to the insects? One dares
not think of it. An unfortunate wretch, while intoxicated, fell down
near a carcass. The insects which were devouring the dead could
not distinguish from it the living; they took possession of his
body, entered at every avenue, filled all the natural cavities. It
was impossible to save him. He expired in the midst of frightful
convulsions.
In those lands of fire, where the rapidity of decomposition renders
every corpse dangerous, where all death threatens life, these terrible
accelerators of the disappearance of animal bodies multiply _ad
infinitum_. A corpse scarcely touches the earth before it is seized,
attacked, disorganized, dissected. Only the bones are left. Nature,
endangered by her own fecundity, invites, stimulates, encourages
them by the heat, by the irritation of a world of spices and acrid
substances. She makes them furious hunters, insatiable gluttons.
The tiger and the lion, compared with the vulture, are mild, sober,
moderate creatures; but what is the vulture in the presence of an
insect which, in four-and-twenty hours, consumes thrice its own weight?
Greece personified nature under the calm and noble image of Cybele
chariot-drawn by lions. India dreams of her god Siva, the divinity of
life and death, who incessantly winks his eye, never gazing fixedly,
because his single glance would reduce all the worlds to dust. How weak
these fancies of men in the presence of the reality! What avail their
fictions before the burning centre where, by atoms or by seconds, life
dies, is born, blazes, scintillates? Who could sustain the thunderous
flash without reeling and without terror?
[Illustration]
Just, indeed, and legitimate, is the traveller's hesitancy at the
entrance of these fearful forests where Tropical Nature, under forms
oftentimes of great beauty, wages her keenest strife. It is the place
to pause when one knows that the most formidable defence of the Spanish
fortresses is found in a simple grove of cactus, which, planted around
them, speedily swarms with serpents. You frequently detect there a
strong odour of musk, a nauseous, a sinister odour. It tells you that
you are treading on the very dust of the dead: the wreck of animals
which possessed that peculiar savour, tiger-cats, and crocodiles,
vultures, vipers, and rattle-snakes.
The peril is greatest, perhaps, in those virgin-forests where
everything is eloquent of life, where nature's seething crucible
eternally boils and bubbles.
Here and there their living shadows thicken with a threefold
canopy--the colossal trees, the entwining and interlacing lianas, and
herbs of thirty feet high with magnificent leaves. At intervals, these
herbs sink into the ancient primeval slime; while, at the height of a
hundred feet, the lofty and puissant flowers break through the deep
night to display themselves in the burning sun.
In the clearances--the narrow alleys where his rays penetrate--there
is a scintillation, an eternal murmuring, of beetles, butterflies,
humming-birds, and fly-catchers--gems animated and mobile, which
incessantly flutter to and fro. At night--a far more astonishing
scene!--begins the fairylike illumination of shining fire-flies, which,
by thousands of millions, weave the most fantastic arabesques, dazzling
fantasias of light, magical scrolls of fire.
With all this splendour there lurks in the lower levels an obscure
race, a hideous and foul world of caymans, of water-serpents. To the
trunks of enormous trees the fanciful orchids, the well-loved daughters
of fever, the children of a miasmatic atmosphere, quaint vegetable
butterflies, suspend themselves in seeming flight. In these murderous
solitudes they take their delight, and bathe in the putrid swamps,
drink of the death which inspires them with vitality, and, by the
caprice of their unheard-of colours, make sport of the intoxication of
nature.
Do not yield--defend yourself--let not the fatal charm bow down your
sinking head. Awake! arouse! under a hundred forms the danger surrounds
you. Yellow fever lurks beneath these flowers, and the black _vomito_;
reptiles trail at your feet. If you gave way to fatigue, a noiseless
army of implacable anatomists would take possession of you, and with
a million lancets convert all your tissues into an admirable bit of
lacework, a gauze veil, a breath, nothingness.
To this all-absorbing abyss of devouring death, of famished life, what
does God oppose to re-assure us? Another abyss, not less famished,
thirsty of life, but less implacable to man. I see the Bird, and I
breathe!
What! is it in you, ye living flowers, ye winged topazes and sapphires,
that I shall find my safety? Your saving vehemence it is, excited to
the purification of this superabundant and furious fecundity, that
alone renders practicable the entrance to this dangerous realm of
faëry. Were you absent, jealous Nature would perform her mysterious
labour of solitary fermentation, and not even the most daring savant
would venture upon observing her. Who am I here? And how shall I defend
myself? What power would be sufficient? The elephant, the ancient
mammoth, would perish defenceless against a million of deadly darts.
Who will brave them? The eagle or the condor? No; a people far more
mighty--the intrepid and the innumerable legion of fly-catchers.
[Illustration]
Humming-birds, colibris, and their brothers of every hue, live with
impunity in these gleaming solitudes where danger lurks on every
side, among the most venomous insects, and upon those mournful plants
whose very shade kills. One of them (crested, green and blue), in the
Antilles, suspends his nest to the most terrible and fatal of trees, to
the spectre whose fatal glance seems to freeze your blood for ever, to
the deadly manchineal.
Wonder of wonders! It is this parroquet which boldly crops the fruits
of the fearful tree, feeds upon them, assumes their livery, and
appears, from its sinister green, to draw the metallic lustre of its
triumphant wings.
Life in these winged flames, the humming-bird and the colibri, is so
glowing, so intense, that it dares every poison. They beat their wings
with such swiftness that the eye cannot count the pulsations; yet,
meanwhile, the bird seems motionless completely inert and inactive. He
maintains a continual cry of _hour! hour!_ until, with head bent, he
plunges the dagger of his beak to the bottom of the flowers, exhausting
their sweets and the tiny insects among them; all, too, with a motion
so rapid that nothing can be compared to it--a sharp, choleric,
extremely impatient motion, sometimes transported by fury--against
what? against a great bird, which he pursues and hunts to the death;
against an already rifled blossom, which he cannot forgive for not
having waited for him. He rends it, devastates it, and scatters abroad
its petals.
Leaves, as we know, absorb the poisons in the atmosphere; flowers
exhale them. These birds live upon flowers, upon these pungent flowers,
on their sharp and burning juices, in a word, on poisons. From their
acids they seem to derive their sharp cry and the everlasting agitation
of their angry movements. These contribute, and perhaps much more
directly than light, to enrich them with those strange reflects which
set one thinking of steel, gold, precious stones, rather than of
plumage or blossoms.
The contrast between them and man is violent. The latter, throughout
these regions, perishes or decays. Europeans who, on the borders of
these forests, attempt the cultivation of the cacao and other colonial
products, quickly succumb. The natives languish, enfeebled and
attenuated. That part of earth where man sinks nearest the level of the
beast is the scene of triumph of the bird, where his extraordinary pomp
of attire, luxurious and superabundant, has justly won for him the name
of bird of paradise.
It matters not! Whatever their plumage, their hues, their forms, this
great winged populace, the conqueror and devourer of insects, and, in
its stronger species, the eager hunter of reptiles, sweeps over all the
land as man's pioneer, purifying and making ready his abode. They swim
intrepidly on this vast sea of death--this hissing, croaking, crawling
sea--on the terrible, miasmatic vapours, inhaling and defying them.
It is thus that the great sanitary work, the time-old combat of the
bird against the inferior tribes which might long render the world
uninhabitable by man, is continued throughout the earth. Quadrupeds,
and even man, take in it but a feeble part. It is ever the war of the
winged Hercules.
[Illustration]
To him, indeed, inhabited regions owe all their security. In the
furthest Africa, at the Cape, the good serpent-eater defends man
against the reptiles. Peaceable in disposition and gentle in aspect,
he seems to engage without passion in his dangerous encounters. The
gigantic _jabiru_ does not labour less in the deserts of Guiana, where
man as yet ventures not to live. Their perilous savannahs, alternately
inundated and parched, a dubious ocean teeming in the sunshine with
a horrible population of monsters as yet unknown, possess, as their
superior inhabitant, their intrepid scavenger, a noble bird of battle,
retaining some relics of the ancient weapons with which the primeval
birds were very probably provided in their struggle against the dragon.
These are a horn on the head, and a spur on each of the wings. With
the first it stirs up, excites, and rouses out of the mud its enemy.
The others serve as a guard and defence: the reptile which hugs and
folds it in its embrace, at the same time plunges into its own body
these keen darts, and by its constriction, its own actual exertions, is
poniarded.
[Illustration]
This brave and beautiful bird, last-born of the ancient worlds and a
surviving witness to forgotten encounters, which is born, lives, and
dies in the slime, in the primitive cloaca, has no stain nevertheless
of his unclean cradle. I know not what moral instinct raises and
supports him above it. His grand and formidable voice, which sways the
desert, announces from afar the gravity and dignified heroism of the
noble and haughty purifier. The kamichi (_Palamedéa cornuta_), as he is
called, is rare; he forms a genus of himself, a species which is not
divided.
Despising the ignoble promiscuousness of the low world in which he
lives, he lives alone, with but one mate. Undoubtedly, in his career
of war, his mate is also a companion-in-arms. They love, they fight
together; they follow the same destiny. Theirs is that soldierly
marriage of which Tacitus speaks: "_Sic vivendum, sic pereundum_,"--"To
life, to death." When this tender companionship, this consoling
succour, fails the kamichi, he disdains to protract his existence; he
rejoins the loved one which he cannot survive.
[Illustration]
[Illustration: PURIFICATION.]
[Illustration]
PURIFICATION.
In the morning--not at the first blush of dawn, but when the sun
already mounts the horizon--and at the very moment when the cocoa-nut
tree unfolds its leaves, the _urubus_ (or little vultures), perched in
knots of forty or fifty upon its branches, open their brilliant ruby
eyes. The toils of the day demand them. In indolent Africa a hundred
villages invoke them; in drowsy America, south of Panama or Caraccas,
they, swiftest of cleansers, must sweep out and purify the town before
the Spaniard rises, before the potent sun has stirred the carcass and
the mass of rottenness into fermentation. If they failed a single day,
the country would become a desert.
When it is evening-time in America--when the urubu, his day's work
ended, replaces himself on the cocoa-nut tree--the minarets of Asia
sparkle in the morning's rays. Not less punctual than their American
brothers, vultures, crows, storks, ibises, set out from their balconies
on their various missions: some to the fields, to destroy the insect
and the serpent; others, alighting in the streets of Alexandria or
Cairo, hasten to accomplish their task of municipal scavengering. Did
they but take the briefest holiday the plague would soon be the only
inhabitant of the country.
Thus, in the two hemispheres, the great work of public health is
performed with solemn and wonderful regularity. If the sun is punctual
in fertilizing life, these scavengers--sworn in and licensed by
nature--are no less punctual in withdrawing from his rays the shocking
spectacle of death.
[Illustration]
Seemingly they are not ignorant of the importance of their functions.
Approach them, and they will not retreat. When they have received the
signal from their comrades the crows, which often precede them and
point out their prey, you will see the vultures descend in a cloud
from one knows not whence, as if from heaven! Naturally solitary, and
without communication--mostly silent--they flock to the banquet by the
hundred, and nothing disturbs them. They quarrel not among themselves,
they take no heed of the passer-by. They imperturbably accomplish their
functions in a stern kind of gravity; with decency and propriety; the
corpse disappears, the skin remains. In a moment a frightful mass
of putrid fermentation, which man had never dared to draw near, has
vanished--has re-entered the pure and wholesome current of universal
life.
It is strange that the more useful they are to us, the more odious
we find them. We are unwilling to accept them for what they are,
to regard them in their true _rôle_, as the beneficent cressets of
living fire through which nature passes everything that might corrupt
the higher life. For this purpose she has provided them with an
admirable apparatus, which receives, destroys, transforms, without
ever rejecting, wearying, or even satisfying itself. Let them devour a
hippopotamus, and they are still famished. To the gulls (those vultures
of the sea) a whale seems but a reasonable morsel! They will dissect
it and clear it away better than the most skilful whalers. As long as
aught of it remains they remain; fire at them, and they intrepidly
return to it in the mouth of your guns. Nothing dislodges the vulture
on the carcass of a hippopotamus. Levaillant killed one of these birds,
which, though mortally wounded, still plucked away scraps of flesh. Was
he starving? Not he; food was found in his stomach weighing six pounds!
This is automatic gluttony, rather than ferocity. If their aspect is
sad and sombre, nature has favoured them for the most part with a
delicate and feminine ornament, the soft white down about their neck.
Standing before them, you feel yourself in the presence of the
ministers of death; but of death tranquil and natural, and not of
murder. Like the elements, they are serious, grave, inaccusable, at
bottom innocent--rather, let us say, deserving. Though gifted with
a vital force which resumes, subdues, absorbs everything, they are
subject, more than any other beings, to general influences; are
swayed by the conditions of atmosphere and temperature; essentially
hygrometrical, they are living barometers. The morning's humidity
burdens their heavy wings; the weakest prey at that hour might pass
with impunity before them. So great is their subjection to external
nature, that the American species, perched in uniform ranks on the
cocoa-nut branches, follow, as we have said, the exact hour when the
leaves fold up, retire to rest long before evening, and only awake when
the sun, already high above the horizon, re-opens the leaves of the
tree and their white, heavy eyelids.
These admirable agents of that beneficent chemistry which preserves and
balances life here below, labour for us in a thousand places where we
ourselves may never penetrate. We clearly discern their presence and
their services in our towns; but no one can measure the full extent
of their benefits in those deserts where every breath of the winds is
death. In the fathomless forest, in the deep morasses, under the impure
shadow of mangoes and mangroves, where ferment the corpses of two
worlds, dashed to and fro by the sea, the great purifying army seconds
and shortens the action both of the waves and the insects. Woe to the
inhabited world, if their mysterious and unknown toil ceased but for an
instant!
In America these public benefactors are protected by the law.
Egypt does more for them; she reveres, she loves them. If the
ancient worship no longer exists, they receive from men as kindly an
hospitality as in the time of Pharaoh. Ask an Egyptian fellah why
he allows himself to be infested and deafened by birds? why he so
patiently endures the insolence of the crow posted on his buffalo's
horn or his camel's hump, or gathering on the date-palms in flocks and
beating down the fruit?--he will answer nothing. To the bird everything
is lawful. Older than the Pyramids, he is the ancient inhabitant of the
country. Man is there only through his instrumentality; he could not
exist without the persistent toil of the ibis, the stork, the crow, and
the vulture.
Hence arises an universal sympathy for the animal, an instinctive
tenderness for all life, which, more than anything else, makes the
charm of the East. The West has its peculiar splendours--in sun and
climate America is not less dazzling; but the moral attraction of
Asia lies in the sentiment of unity which you feel in a world where
man is not divorced from nature; where the primitive alliance remains
unbroken; where the animals are ignorant that they have cause to dread
the human species. Laugh at it if you will; but there is a gentle
pleasure in observing this confidence--in seeing the birds come at the
Brahmin's call to eat from his very hand--in watching the apes on the
pagoda-roofs sleeping in domestic peace, playing with or suckling their
little ones in as much security as in the bosom of their native forests.
[Illustration]
"At Cairo," remarks a traveller, "the turtle-doves know so well they
are under the protection of the public, that they live in the midst
of the very clamour of the city. Every day I see them cooing on my
window-shutters, in a very narrow street, at the entrance of a noisy
bazaar, and at the busiest moment of the year, a little before the
Ramadan, when the ceremonies of marriage fill the city day and night
with uproar and tumult. The level roofs of the houses, the usual
promenade of the prisoners of the harem and their slaves, are in like
manner haunted by a crowd of birds. The eagles sleep in confidence on
the balconies of the minarets."
Conquerors have never failed to turn into derision this gentleness,
this tenderness for animated nature. The Persians, the Romans in Egypt,
our Europeans in India, the French in Algeria, have often outraged and
stricken these innocent brothers of man, the object of his ancient
reverence. A Cambyses slew the sacred cow; a Roman the ibis or cat
which destroyed unclean reptiles. But what means the cow? The fecundity
of the country. And the ibis? Its salubrity. Destroy these animals,
and the country is no longer habitable. That which has saved India and
Egypt through so many misfortunes, and preserved their fertility, is
neither the Nile nor the Ganges; it is respect for animal life, the
mildness and the gentle heart of man.
Profound in meaning was the speech of the priest of Saïs to the Greek
Herodotus: "You shall be children ever."
We shall always be so--we, men of the West--subtle and graceful
reasoners, so long as we shall not have comprehended, with a simple and
more exhaustive view, the reason of things. To be a child is to seize
life only by partial glimpses. To be a man is to be fully conscious of
all its harmonious unity. The child disports himself, shatters, and
spurns; he finds his happiness in undoing. And science in its childhood
does the same; it cannot study unless it kills; the sole use which it
makes of a living miracle is, in the first place, to dissect it. None
of us carry into our scientific pursuits that tender reverence for life
which nature rewards by unveiling to us her mysteries.
Enter the catacombs, where, to employ our haughty language, the rude
monuments sleep of a barbarous superstition; visit the treasure-stores
of India and Egypt; at each step you meet with naïve but not the less
profound intuitions of the essential mystery of life and death. Do
not let the form deceive you; do not look upon this as an artificial
work, fabricated by a priestly hand. Under the strange complexity
and burdensome tyranny of the sacerdotal form, I see two sentiments
everywhere revealing themselves in a human and pathetic manner:--
_The effort to save the loved soul_ from the shipwreck of death;
_The tender brotherhood of man and nature_, the religious sympathy for
the dumb animal as the divine instrument in the protection of human
life.
The instinct of antiquity perceived what observation and science
declare: that the Bird is the agent of the grand universal transition,
and of purification--the wholesome accelerator of the interchange of
substances. Especially in burning countries, where every delay is a
peril, he is, as Egypt said, the barque of safety which receives the
dead spoil, and causes it to re-enter the domain of life and the world
of purity.
The fond and grateful Egyptian soul has recognized these benefits,
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.
Even the bird's flight is influenced by it. Flight depends on the
eye quite as much as on the wing. Among species gifted with a keen
and delicate vision, like the falcon, which from the loftiest heights
of heaven can espy the worm in a thicket--like the swallow, which
from a distance of one thousand feet can perceive a gnat--flight is
sure, daring, and charming to look at in its infallible certainty. Far
otherwise is it with the myopes, the short-sighted, as you may see
by their gait; they fly with caution, grope about, and are afraid of
falling.
The eye and the wing--sight and flight--that exalted degree of
puissance which enables you incessantly to embrace in a glance, and
to overleap, immense landscapes, vast countries, kingdoms--which
permits you to see in complete detail, and not to contract, as in a
geographical chart, so grand a variety of objects--to possess and to
discern, almost as if you were the equal of God;--oh, what a source of
boundless enjoyment! what a strange and mysterious happiness, scarcely
conceivable by man!
Observe, too, these perceptions are so strong and so vivid that they
grave themselves on the memory, and to such a degree that even an
inferior animal like a pigeon retraces and recognizes every little
_accident_ in a road which he has only traversed once. How, then, will
it be with the sage stork, the shrewd crow, the intelligent swallow?
Let us confess this superiority. Let us regard without envy those
blisses of vision which may, perhaps, one day be ours in a happier
existence. This felicity of seeing so much--of seeing so far--of seeing
so clearly--of piercing the infinite with the eye and the wing, almost
at the same moment,--to what does it belong? To that life which is our
distant ideal. _A life in the fulness of light, and without shadow!_
Already the bird's existence is, as it were, a foretaste of it. It
would here prove to him a divine source of knowledge, if, in its
sublime freedom, it were not burdened by the two fatalities which
chain our globe to a condition of barbarism, and render futile all our
aspirations.
[Illustration]
First, the fatal need of the stomach, which shackles all of us, but
which especially persecutes that living flame, that devouring fire, the
bird, which is forced incessantly to renew itself, to seek, to wander,
to forget, condemned, without hope of relief, to the barren mobility of
its too changeful impressions.
The other fatal necessity is that of night, of slumber, hours of shadow
and ambush, when his wing is broken or captured, or, while defenceless,
he loses the power of flight, strength, and light.
When we speak of light, we mean safety for all creatures.
It is the guarantee of life for man and the animal; it is, as it were,
the serene, calm, and reassuring smile, the privilege of Nature. It
puts an end to the sombre terrors which pursue us in the shadows, to
the not unfounded fears, and to the torment also of cruel dreams--to
the troublous thoughts which agitate and overthrow the soul.
In the security of civil association which has existed for so long a
period, man can scarcely comprehend the agonies of savage life during
these hours that Nature leaves it defenceless, when her terrible
impartiality opens the way to death no less legitimate than life. In
vain you reproach her. She tells the bird that the owl also has a right
to live. She replies to man: "I must feed my lions."
Read in books of travels the panic of unfortunate castaways lost in the
solitudes of Africa, of the miserable fugitive slave who only escapes
the barbarity of man to fall into the hands of a barbarous nature. What
tortures, as soon as at sunset the lion's ill-omen
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