His intention seems plain enough — it was to impart certain observations upon the fauna and flora of his native village to his friends Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington. But it was not for the benefit of those gentlemen that he composed the sober yet stately description of Selborne with which the book opens. There it is before us, the village of Selborne, lying in the extreme eastern corner of the county of Hampshire, with its hanger and its sheep walks and those deep lanes “that affright the ladies and make timid horsemen shudder”. The soil is part clay, part malm; the cottages are of stone or brick; the men work in the hop gardens and in the spring and summer the women weed the corn. No novelist could have opened better. Selborne is set solidly in the foreground. But something is lacking; and so before the scene fills with birds, mice, voles, crickets, and the Duke of Richmond’s moose, before the page is loud with the chirpings, bleatings, lowings, and gruntings of their familiar intercourse, we have Queen Anne lying on the bank to watch the deer driven past. It was an anecdote, he casually remarks, that he had from an old keeper, Adams, whose great-grandfather, father and self were all keepers in the forest. And thus the single straggling street is allied with history, and shaded by tradition. No novelist could have given us more briefly and completely all that we need to know before the story begins.
The story of Selborne is a vegetable, an animal story. The gossip is about the habits of vipers and the love interest is supplied chiefly by frogs. Compared with Gilbert White the most realistic of novelists is a rash romantic. The crop of the cuckoo is examined; the viper is dissected; the grasshopper is sought with a pliant grass blade in its hole; the mouse is measured and found to weigh one copper halfpenny. Nothing can exceed the minuteness of these observations, or the scrupulous care with which they are conducted. The chief question in dispute — it is indeed the theme of the book — is the migration of swallows. Barrington believed that the swallow sleeps out the winter; White, who has a nephew in Andalusia to inform him, now inclines to migration; then draws back. Every grain of evidence is sifted; none is obscured. With all his faculties bent on this great question, the image of science at her most innocent and most sincere, he loses that self-consciousness which so often separates us from our fellow-creatures and becomes like a bird seen through a field-glass busy in a distant hedge. This is the moment then, when his eyes are fixed upon the swallow, to watch Gilbert White himself.
We observe in the first place the creature’s charming simplicity. He is quite indifferent to public opinion. He will transplant a colony of crickets to his lawn; imprison one in a paper cage on his table; bawl through a speaking trumpet at his bees — they remain indifferent; and arrive at Selborne with Aunt Snookes aged tortoise seated beside him in the post chaise. And while thus engaged he emits those little chuckles of delight, those half-conscious burblings and comments which make him as “amusive” as one of his own birds. “... But their inequality of height,” he muses, pondering the abortive match between the moose and the red deer, “must always have been a bar to any commerce of an amorous kind.”
“The copulation of frogs,” he observes, “is notorious to everybody... and yet I never saw, or read, of toads being observed in the same situation.”
“Pitiable seems the condition of this poor embarrassed reptile,” he laments over the tortoise, yet “there is a season (usually the beginning of June) when the tortoise walks on tip-toe” along the garden path in search of love.
And just as the vicarage garden seemed to Aunt Snookes tortoise a whole world, so, as we look through the eyes of Gilbert White, England becomes immense. The South Downs, across which he rides year after year, turn to “a vast range of mountains”. The country is very empty. He is more solitary at Selborne than a peasant to-day in the remotest Hebrides. It is true that he has — he is proud of the fact — a nephew in Andalusia; but he has no acquaintance at present among the gentlemen of the Navy; and though London and Bath exist, of course — London indeed boasts a very fine collection of horns — rumours from those capitals come very slowly across wild moors and roads which the snow has made impassable. In this quiet air sounds are magnified. We hear the whisper of the grasshopper lark; the caw of rooks is like a pack of hounds “in hollow, echoing woods”; and on a still summer evening the Portsmouth gun booms out just as the goat-sucker begins its song. His mind, like the bird’s crop that the farmer’s wife found stuffed with vegetables and cooked for her dinner, has nothing but insects in it and tender green shoots. This innocent, this unconscious happiness is conveyed, not by assertion, but much more effectively by those unsought memories that come of their own accord. They are all of hot summer evenings — at Oxford in Christ Church quadrangle; riding from Richmond to Sunbury with the swallows skimming the river. Even the strident voice of the cricket, so discordant to some, fills his mind “with a train of summer ideas, of everything that is rural, verdurous and joyful”. There is a continuity in his happiness; the same thoughts recur on the same occasions. “I made the same remark in former years as I came the same way annually.” Year after year he was thinking of the swallows.
But the landscape in which this bird roams so freely has its hedges. They shut in, but they protect. There is what he calls, so aptly, Providence. Church spires, he remarks, “are very necessary ingredients in the landscape.” Providence dwells there — inscrutable, for why does it allot so many years to Aunt Snookes tortoise? But all-wise — consider the legs of the frog— “How wonderful is the economy of Providence with regards to the limbs of so vile an animal!” In another fifty years Providence would have been neither so inscrutable nor as wise — it would have lost its shade. But Providence about 1760 was in its prime; it sets all doubts at rest, and so leaves the mind free to question practically everything. Besides Providence there are the castles and seats of the nobility. He respects them almost equally. The old families — the Howes, the Mordaunts — know their places and keep the poor in theirs. Gilbert White is far less tender to the poor— “We abound with poor,” he writes, as if the vermin were beneath his notice — than to the grasshopper whom he lifts out of its hole so carefully and once inadvertently squeezed to death. Finally, shading the landscape with its august laurel, is literature — Latin literature, naturally. His mind is haunted by the classics. He sounds a Latin phrase now and then as if to tune his English. The echo that was so famous a feature of Selborne seems of its own accord to boom out Tityre, tu patulae recubans... It was with Virgil in his mind that Gilbert White described the women making rush candles at Selborne.
So we observe through our field-glasses this very fine specimen of the eighteenth-century clerical naturalist. But just as we think to have got him named he moves. He sounds a note that is not the characteristic note of the common English clergyman. “When I hear fine music I am haunted with passages therefrom night and day; and especially at first waking, which by their importunity, give me more uneasiness than pleasure.” Why does music, he asks, “so strangely affect some men, as it were by recollection, for days after a concert is over?”
It is a question that sends us baffled to his biography. But we learn only what we knew already — that his affection for Kitty Mulso was not passionate; that he was born at Selborne in 1720 and died there in 1793; and that his “days passed with scarcely any other vicissitudes than those of the seasons.” But one fact is added — a negative, but a revealing fact; there is no portrait of him in existence. He has no face. That is why perhaps he escapes identification. His observation of the insect in the grass is minute; but he also raises his eyes to the horizon and looks and listens. In that moment of abstraction he hears sounds that make him uneasy in the early morning; he escapes from Selborne, from his own age, and comes winging his way to us in the dusk along the hedgerows. A clerical owl? A parson with the wings of a bird? A hybrid? But his own description fits him best. “The kestrel or wind-hover,” he says, “has a peculiar mode of hanging in the air in one place, his wings all the time being briskly agitated.”
Life Itsel
f
ONE could wish that the psycho-analysts would go into the question of diary keeping. For often it is the one mysterious fact in a life otherwise as clear as the sky and as candid as the dawn. Parson Woodforde is a case in point — his diary is the only mystery about him. For forty-three years he sat down almost daily to record what he did on Monday and what he had for dinner on Tuesday; but for whom he wrote or why he wrote it is impossible to say. He does not unburden his soul in his diary; yet it is no mere record of engagements and expenses. As for literary fame, there is no sign that he ever thought of it, and finally, though the man himself is peaceable above all things, there are little indiscretions and criticisms which would have got him into trouble and hurt the feelings of his friends had they read them. What purpose, then, did the sixty-eight little books fulfil? Perhaps it was the desire for intimacy. When James Woodforde opened one of his neat manuscript books, he entered into conversation with a second James Woodforde, who was not quite the same as the reverend gentleman who visited the poor and preached in the church. These two friends said much that all the world might hear; but they had a few secrets which they shared with each other only. It was a great comfort, for example, that Christmas when Nancy, Betsy, and Mr. Walker seemed to be in conspiracy against him, to exclaim in the diary: “The treatment I meet with for my Civility this Christmas is to me abominable.” The second James Woodforde sympathized and agreed. Again, when a stranger abused his hospitality it was a relief to inform the other self who lived in the little book that he had put him to sleep in the attic story “and I treated him as one that would be too free if treated kindly”. It is easy to understand why in the quiet life of a country parish these two bachelor friends became in time inseparable. An essential part of him would have died had he been forbidden to keep his diary. And as we read — if reading is the word for it — we seem to be listening to someone who is murmuring over the events of the day to himself in the quiet space which precedes sleep. It is not writing, and to speak the truth it is not reading. It is slipping through half a dozen pages and strolling to the window and looking out. It is going on thinking about the Woodfordes while we watch the people in the street below. It is taking a walk and making up the life and character of James Woodforde as we make up our friends’ characters, turning over something they have said, pondering the meaning of something they have done, remembering how they looked one day when they thought themselves unobserved. It is not reading; it is ruminating.
James Woodforde, then, was one of those smooth-cheeked, steady-eyed men, demure to look at, whom we can never imagine except in the prime of life. He was of an equable temper, with only such acerbities and touchinesses as are generally to be found in those who have had a love affair in their youth and remained, as they fancy, unwed because of it. The Parson’s love affair, however, was nothing very tremendous. Once when he was a young man in Somerset he liked to walk over to Shepton and to visit a certain “sweet-tempered” Betsy White who lived there. He had a great mind “to make a bold stroke” and ask her to marry him. He went so far, indeed, as to propose marriage “when opportunity served” and Betsy was willing. But he delayed; time passed; four years passed, indeed, and Betsy went to Devonshire, met a Mr. Webster who had five hundred pounds a year, and married him. When James Woodforde met them in the turnpike road, he could say little, “being shy”, but to his diary he remarked — and this no doubt was his private version of the affair ever after— “she has proved herself to me a mere jilt.”
But he was a young man then, and as time went on we cannot help suspecting that he was glad to consider the question of marriage shelved once and for all, so that he might settle down with his niece Nancy at Weston Longueville and give himself simply and solely, every day and all day, to the great business of living. What else to call it we do not know. It seems to be life itself.
For James Woodforde was nothing in particular. Life had it all her own way with him. He had no special gift; he had no oddity or infirmity. It is idle to pretend that he was a zealous priest. God in Heaven was much the same to him as King George upon the throne — a kindly monarch, that is to say, whose festivals one kept by preaching a sermon on Sunday much as one kept the royal birthday by firing a blunderbuss and drinking a toast at dinner. Should anything untoward happen, like the death of a boy who was dragged and killed by a horse, he would instantly, but rather perfunctorily, exclaim: “I hope to God the Poor Boy is happy,” and add: “We all came home singing;” just as when Justice Creed’s peacock spread its tail— “and most noble it is” — he would exclaim: “How wonderful are Thy Works O God in every Being.” But there was no fanaticism, no enthusiasm, no lyric impulse about James Woodforde. In all these pages, indeed, each so neatly divided into compartments, and each of those again filled, as the days themselves were, so quietly and fully in a hand like the pacing of a well-tempered nag, one can only call to mind a single poetic phrase about the transit of Venus, how “It appeared as a black patch upon a fair Lady’s face.” The words themselves are mild enough, but they hang over the undulating expanse of the Parson’s prose with the resplendence of the star itself. So in the fen country a barn or a tree appears twice its natural size against the surrounding flats. But what led him to this palpable excess that summer’s night we do not know. It cannot have been that he was drunk. He spoke out too roundly against such failings in his brother Jack to have been guilty himself. Jack was the wild one of the family. Jack drank at the “Catherine Wheel”. Jack came home and had the impudence to defend suicide to his old father. James himself drank his pint of port, but he was a man who liked his meat. When we think of the Woodfordes, uncle and niece, we think of them as often as not waiting with some impatience for their dinner. They gravely watch the joint set upon the table; they swiftly get their knives and forks to work upon the succulent leg or loin, and without much comment, unless a word is passed about the gravy or the stuffing, go on eating. They munch, day after day, year after year, until they have devoured herds of sheep and oxen, flocks of poultry, an odd dozen or so of swans and cygnets, bushels of apples and plums, while the pastries and the jellies crumble and squash beneath their spoons in mountains, in pyramids, in pagodas. Never was there a book so stuffed with food as this one is. To read the bill of fare respectfully and punctually set forth gives one a sense of repletion. It is as if one had lunched at Simpsons daily for a week. Trout and chicken, mutton and peas, pork and apple sauce — so the joints succeed each other at dinner; and there is supper with more joints still to come, all, no doubt, home grown, and of the juiciest and sweetest; all cooked, often by the mistress herself, in the plainest English way, save when the dinner was at Weston Hall and Mrs. Custance surprised them with a London dainty — a pyramid of jelly, that is to say, with a “landscape appearing through it”. Then Mrs. Custance, for whom James Woodforde had a chivalrous devotion, would play the “Sticcardi Pastorale” and make “very soft music indeed”; or would get out her work-box and show them how neatly contrived it was, unless indeed Mrs.
Custance were giving birth to another child upstairs, whom the Parson would baptize and very frequently bury. The Parson had a deep respect for the Custances. They were all that country gentry should be — a little given to the habit of keeping mistresses, perhaps, but that peccadillo could be forgiven them in view of their generosity to the poor, the kindness they showed to Nancy, and their condescension in asking the Parson to dinner when they had great people staying with them. Yet great people were not much to James’s liking. Deeply though he respected the nobility, “one must confess,” he said, “that being with our equals is much more agreeable.”
He was too fond of his ease and too shrewd a judge of the values of things to be much troubled with snobbery; he much preferred the quiet of his own fireside to adventuring after dissipation abroad. If an old man brought a Madagascar monkey to the door, or a Polish dwarf or a balloon was being shown at Norwich, the Parson would go and have a look at them, and be free with his shillings, but he was a
quiet man, a man without ambition, and it is more than likely that his niece found him a little dull. It is the niece Nancy, to speak plainly, who makes us uneasy. There are the seeds of domestic disaster in her character, unless we mistake. It is true that on the afternoon of April 27th, 1780, she expressed a wish to read Aristotle’s philosophy, which Miss Millard had got of a married woman, but she is a stolid girl; she eats too much, she grumbles too much, and she takes too much to heart the loss of her red box. No doubt she was sensible enough; we will not blame her for being pert and saucy, or for losing her temper at cards, or even for hiding the parcel that came by post when her uncle longed to know what was in it, and had never done such a thing by her. But when we compare her with Betsy Davy, we realize that one human being has only to come into the room to raise our spirits, and another sets us on edge merely by the way she blows her nose. Betsy, the daughter of that frivolous wanton Mrs. Davy (who fell downstairs the day Miss Donne swallowed the barleycorn with its stalk), Betsy the shy little girl, Betsy livening up and playing with the Parson’s wig, Betsy falling in love with Mr. Walker, Betsy receiving the present of a fox’s brush from him, Betsy compromising her reputation with a scamp, Betsy bereaved of him — for Mr. Walker died at the age of twenty-three and was buried in a plain coffin — Betsy left, it is to be feared, in a very scandalous condition — Betsy always charms; we forgive Betsy anything. The trouble with Nancy is that she is beginning to find Weston dull. No suitor has yet appeared. It is but too likely that the ten years of Parson Woodforde’s life that still remain will often have to record how Nancy teased him with her grumbling.
Complete Works of Virginia Woolf Page 452
