A Selborne Pilgrimage

A BLOWING September day of sunshine and high-piled white clouds greeted us as we stepped out on the platform of Alton Station. We were just escaped from a week of London fog and London mud, and the country air smelt sweet, freshened as it was by the wind driving in from the sea, twenty miles of lowland and down away. The hunt for an inn, lunch, and the hiring of a team detained us but a short hour, and it was hardly more than midday when we drove down the high street of the little town, famed in White’s day for its manufactures by “the people called Quakers,” on our way to Selborne. It had rained steadily for six days, mossing the roofs of farm-buildings with a green as deep as that of the lush pastures. In the hollow lanes pools of water still lay, rippled and glittering with wind and sun. From the high hedges, blown dry hours since, chiff-chaffs said their simple say persistently, white-throats lifted themselves in dizzy spirals, singing excitedly, and from all sides came indiscriminate snatches of song, surprising at the time of year, but confirmatory of old Gilbert’s testimony that in Hampshire bird-song is not over by midsummer.

We were soon among the hopfields, in which scores of men and women and children were busy harvesting, — Londoners drawn all the fifty miles by promise of the high pay, villagers from far and near, and gypsies from everywhere. The gayly painted vans of the wanderers stood in sheltered roadsides that offered a stretch of grass for their horses, but all were now deserted by everybody but the oldest women and the children too young to harvest. A very respectable lot nowadays, the gypsies, our driver told us, not given to pilfering and drink as the Londoners.

Hills had been before us to the southeast almost from our start, but it was not until our guide told us that Selborne was only a mile away, and I knew the farm we were passing must be Norton Farm, that I felt sure that these hills must be the Hanger and Nore Hill. It is downhill from Norton Farm to “the small rivulet” at the northwest end of the village, the one that, even in this rainy spot, frequently fails, as I know from the Natural History of Selborne. A sharp climb and we are in the quaint old village of thatched and timbered cottages. This open space to the left is, for sure, the Plestor, — from the point of view at which our dog-cart stops, hardly changed from the print of it in the quarto of 1813. From this old cut and many readings in the Natural History, I had for years pictured to myself Selborne; now the reality was before me, to prove very like the picture, but far better. The village, as White says in his accurate eighteenth-century way, “consists of one single straggling street, three quarters of a mile in length, in a sheltered vale, and running parallel to the Hanger.” It is hardly larger now than it was when he wrote, and, while changed, in essentials is the Selborne he knew. We had scarcely stopped when our driver pointed out, to the right and farther down the street, the Wakes, the naturalist’s home for so many years and the birthplace of the Natural History. I should not have recognized it, for the old prints I was familiar with represented it from its own lawn, and, indeed, even from that point of view it is hardly now recognizable, so much has it been added to since his day.

We were not granted admission to the house, for it was then in the hands of those who, humanly enough, wished it entirely to themselves and discouraged all pilgrimages. A little later it was for sale, and the lovers of the Natural His-tory trying to raise by public subscription the amount necessary to purchase it for the world, as Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage had been purchased. But the effort failed, and it passed again into private ownership. We were admitted to its “outlet,” as Gilbert White, somewhat provincially, perhaps, for a Fellow of Oriel, called the lawns that lie between his house and the fields under the Hanger, lawns that he was always dividing anew with paths, or breaking with hahas, or clearing of shrubberies to open up new vistas of the Hanger, or of Baker’s Hill. It was the day of the triumphs of William Kent, and White was an interested experimenter with the new landscape art. Here in his “outlet” we saw an oak that it is said he planted, though in its size and dilapidated age it looks older; his veritable sundial; the circle of trees grown up about the site of his summer-house. As we looked out over the fields — “stiff clay (good wheat land)” — that lie between the Wakes and the Hanger, admiring the beechen covert of the hill and the quiet of this typical English country home, it was not difficult to restore in imagination what it all was like in his day. That is the same wood of beeches hanging on the steep chalk hill; these the same fields, although they are now not plough land, but pastures; this was just such a September sun as ripened his grapes; these cumulus clouds above us were just such as rolled up from the Channel over the Hampshire downs, his “vast mountains” three hundred feet high, in the first autumn of his permanent establishment in the Wakes, one hundred and fifty-seven years ago [1902]. We can well imagine his content when, in 1763, the Wakes came into his own hands, the comfortable house with its little fat acreage behind, and the flutter his inheritance must have caused among the ladies of the neighborhood; for this is Jane Austen’s as well as Gilbert White’s country.

As we looked at the Wakes from the lawn we could pick out the gables of the house that White fell heir to among the many gables of the present structure; these timbered cottages to the right were his neighbors’; that church tower to the left rose over the church he ministered to so faithfully the last nine years of his life, — the very church tower where he observed so closely the breeding habits of the swifts. It comes to me to think of his ministry before his observation of natural history as my eyes fall on the tower, for I have always held it proven that, although he was an absentee from Moreton-Pinkney, as curate of Faringdon and afterwards of Selborne he thought of himself as pastor and then as naturalist. How any one who knows his letters can believe him slipshod in his clerical duties I am at a loss to understand, so intimate is he with the affairs of all in his neighborhood, peasant to gentry, and so solicitous is he for their welfare. He doubtless did preach the same sermon thirty-six times, but he never preached it in the same place more than once a year, and generally only once in two. Let the guiltless among the clergymen, his critics, cast the first stone. He buried the dead to the satisfaction of their relatives, not a little feat in a small country village, and he married couples when they asked him to, and sometimes when they did not, if he thought them better wed.

It is an Old-World, leisured life that he led, this country clergyman, — a very happy life, for all that he grew deaf in his last years; and the secret of the popularity of his book, that has gone through almost as many editions as there are years since it was published in 1789, seems to me to rest more on the leisure and content and happiness it wins the reader to share, than on any other of its many attracting qualities. But it was not this quality that, almost a century after its publication, so interested a boy of ten far off in America, that he laid out on the garret floor a plan of Selborne. The Hanger at its back was a horsehide trunk, its flanking streams were formed each of two sides of a quilting frame, and Dorton Priory below their junction was a ruined Noah’s Ark. He played hunting for churn-owl eggs on the Hanger slopes, and made excursions far out of the charmed triangle to play dredging for Roman coins in Woolmer Pond, or digging old Timothy the Tortoise out of his sleeping - place in the Ringmer garden. Churn-owl eggs he had first chosen for play-hunting because there was something he liked in the word “churn-owl;” it was of impressive sound and mysterious; then he looked up churn-owl in the encyclopædia, and found it was a bird like his well-known nighthawk and often-sought whippoorwill, and he played the game with renewed zest. The boy had once picked up an Indian arrowhead along the Delaware. Treasuretrove was treasure-trove, whether of Marcus Aurelius or of the Lenni-Lenapes, and there was — he never troubled to follow it out exactly — some sort of connection between these differing mementos of vanished races. He had always a box tortoise in his own Germantown garden, and he liked to “play Timothy, for there was something mysterious in the creature’s going under ground and staying there all winter. His own tortoises generally escaped before it was time for them to hibernate, so he had to content himself with just playing they were burying or unburying themselves. In short, the boy liked to read the Natural History because in it were records of little things, incidents, experiences, similar to those in which he himself had a share, but which he had not found elsewhere in a book, and because it was about animals, and all boys and all men like animal stories. As the boy grew older and read White’s account of the different ways in which a field mouse, a squirrel, and a nuthatch eat hazel nuts, he followed the next red squirrel with nut in mouth that he met on the Wissahickon Hills, and found it took the squirrel just twenty-three minutes to completely clean out the nut. It was a butternut, perhaps a particularly hard one, or perhaps the squirrel was a trifle nervous in his presence, for since then he has noted red squirrels make much better time with the same kind of nut. White taught him to observe minutely.

As men grow older White’s Natural History takes them back to boyhood, and they love it for that; they love it for reasons that make them love Izaak Walton, because it takes them out of doors in good company; they love it for the reason they love Elia, because it reveals a lovable, a winsome personality; they love it for its precise old English; they love it because it recalls a state of village society that has to them the charm of old china and Chippendale furniture; they love it because its material is in part familiar from their own experience, and because they learn more of things only partly known, things, therefore, of tantalizing interest; — very, very many love it for this reason, perhaps as many as love it because it wins for them some part, of its maker’s delightful leisure,— a leisure with enough of necessary routine to prevent it palling, a leisure of happiness and content! Time moved so slowly in Selborne that White could sow beechnuts on the downs in expectation of seeing a wood there, and could busy himself so carefully with his book that it was eighteen years in the making after he, at fifty, determined upon publishing.

The Natural History cannot appeal with the qualities that charm most in many latter-day nature books. It expresses none of the romance of nature, as does Thoreau’s writing so often, and Jefferies’s. Much of Thoreau is interesting because of the inherent interest of observed fact, as is all Jefferies’s early work, but both these men are at their best when writing of the romance of nature. Yet the Natural History, without this romance, has appealed scarcely less to the poets than to the naturalists. Some of the latter smile indulgently when it is mentioned, because it is unsystematic and confident of theories now proved untenable. Yet accepted scientific facts of yesterday, arrived at after the most systematic research, and tested by workers whose devotion to truth is unquestioned, are already crumbling. Let the scientists not forget that they change creeds as readily as other folk. And let it be remembered, too, that although for some unexplained reason, when such evidence as White possessed tended to disprove the theory, he believed in the hibernation of swallows, yet he never said they did hibernate, for he had never found them hibernating. He never forgot the distinction between presumption and proof. Darwin read the Natural History with fascination as boy, with deep interest as man, and, naturalists themselves tell us, learnt much about earthworms from White’s observations, who, before Darwin advanced his theory of their functions, had put on record about them more that was suggestive than any other observer. Of actual scientific accomplishment was White’s description — the first in England — of the harvest mouse, the least of British mammals, and his distinction, which Linnæus borrowed, between the two sorts of tortoises, — the box tortoise, of which our common American tortoise is representative, and the tortoise that cannot shut itself up tightly, like White’s own beloved Timothy, whom he thought, but who was not, an American.

That was White’s closest association with America, I think, that Timothy was born here. He does speculate about the lost Atlantis, wonder much at our moose, a specimen of which he saw at Goodwood, note Benedict Arnold’s flight and the fall of Saratoga, and mention Franklin, in whose experiments concerning the conveyance of sound under water he was much interested. His brother, in a letter to Gilbert at the outset of the Revolutionary War, questions and ponders: “Is not the ridicule some of our wise governors would have thrown on America applicable to Cicero’s on Britain ? and may not America be to England erelong what England is now to Rome ? I cannot allow that the Romans acquired their riches by virtuous industry; the infamous oppression these people exercised over mankind has been handled too tenderly.” But Gilbert held to the old order in most things, and the French Revolution appalled him to intense horror of republican doctrines. To the naturalist Marsham he writes on January 2, 1793: “You cannot abhor the dangerous doctrines of levellers and republicans more than I do! I was born and bred a gentleman, and I hope I shall be allowed to die such.” Such he did die, on June 26, 1793, A gentleman, Lord Chesterfield would have called him; a gentleman, we of today. He lived a life of eighteenth-century leisure, his duties as clergyman and naturalist aiding and abetting each other with exceptional hap. His journeys to Faringdon to preach, and his calls to illness and deathbed, taking him out on horseback in all sorts of weather at all seasons and at all times of day, brought to his notice natural occurrences that might otherwise have escaped him, and each wonder of nature he witnessed was to him a fresh text from which to preach of the power and goodness of God.

Each spring he went to Oxford, and frequently he made other trips there, serving one year as proctor, and once standing for provost of Oriel, fortunately to meet with defeat. Though nothing could tempt him to leave Selborne for long, not even offers of fat college livings, he was, until he grew deaf in his later years, and his lifelong proneness to coach-sickness became constant sickness on every trip, by no means a stay-athome. He would rather entertain his relatives and his friends at the Wakes than visit them, but he did like little junketing tours, if his destination were within the powers of Mouse or whatever horse he happened to possess at the time. But none of his horses were too good, so he never saw Wales or the Lake country. Derby was as far north as he traveled, Devon as far west; his most frequent journeys were to London, where, of course, he had business as well as his brother; to Rutland, where his sister lived; to Ringmer in Sussex, where were his aunt Snooke and Timothy; to Fyfield and the other little Hampshire villages where his brothers were settled. With many of his family, not only with his brothers and sisters and their children, but with nieces and nephews brought into the family by marriage — he was pleased that there were sixty-three nephews and nieces — he corresponded, and with the naturalists of the time, — first chiefly with Pennant, and then chiefly with Barrington. It is the series of letters to these latter, begun without thought of eventual publication, that, revised, make the text of the Natural History. The series to Pennant, beginning in 1767 and ending in 1780, is of forty-four letters, that to Barrington, beginning in 1769 and ending in 1787, is of sixty-six. The subject material of these letters is White’s observations of natural history in Selborne and elsewhere: chiefly of birds, for birds he loved best, but of mammals, fishes, insects, trees, as well. There are even records of folk-lore. Facts in his letters are taken from his notebooks and lists, which he kept with great care for years. As I have said, he had no thought of printing at first, but with his correspondents printing and his brother a publisher, it was inevitable that he should print some day, if death did not overtake him. In 1788, five years before he died, he finished his book, the part concerned with the Antiquities of Selborne having detained him long after the Natural History was completed. His old friend Mulso, as apt as critic as he was sprightly as correspondent, feared that the Antiquities would weighten the Natural History ; but the latter was so fresh and taking, that the majority, who did not care for the Antiquities, so delighted in it that they were never a matter of concern. The success of his book was a great delight to him, of course, but he nowhere exults over that success, or even felicitates himself upon it, as does Mulso, who was afraid he would die before he saw the book out. In the study of White’s life there is nothing more heartening than his friendship with Mulso, who, himself nothing of a naturalist, is always attempting to spur White on to a realization of the alien powers of which he knew his friend the possessor. His letters to White should be read by all who care for bright correspondence. They rank well up with the best of the letter-writing century. White’s to him are lost, but they could scarcely be so valuable as his, which reflect a side of White’s personality that without them we would lack.

White had lived his life in happiness, with no thought of being a literary personage, although many of his friends were writers. He went to school to the father of the Wartons, and the poet Collins was his friend. He wrote some verses himself, typical mid - eighteenth - century verses, but of interest to all to whom White is of interest, because he wrote them, and because they add to his picture of Selborne. At last he put his happy life into a book. Some have held that there was a romance that saddened his life, that he was once in love with Hester Mulso, his friend’s sister, who, as Mrs. Chapone, is remembered as one of Richardson’s adoring circle, as a protégée of Dr. Johnson, and as the author of Letters to a Young Lady on the Improvement of her Mind. It may be that White was in love with her; it is certain that she flirted with him. There is no proof, however, in any of her letters or of his that either was sorry that she was not Mrs. White. That Jack Mulso would have been pleased with the match his letters show, and I used to maintain that the letter of Timothy the Tortoise to Hecky Mulso was suggestive of romance. Hecky Mulso wrote in 1784 some verses to Timothy, which brought forth a playful reply that is White’s chief indulgence in humor. Reading this letter I dwelt fondly on the situation. It was pleasing to think of the old gentleman, dating Timothy’s reply “From the border under the fruit-wall,” and signing it “Your sorrowful reptile, Timothy.” Was the oldish lady, I would speculate, fond of Gilbert, or only “in spirits” when she wrote the verses to Timothy ? It may be that in describing Timothy’s loneliness White was hinting at his own, and something in Hecky’s verses may have prompted this vein. It is strange, I thought, that he should address his reply to “Miss Hecky Mulso” when Hecky was the Widow Chapone; but I dismissed this as a forgetful lapse into her maiden name on his brooding over old times. Now Gilbert’s greatgrand-nephew, Mr. Rashleigh HoltWhite, comes along with the suggestion that it is Jack’s daughter Hecky whom Gilbert is writing to. It may be that it is, but the situation is still pleasant to dwell on, — the young girl’s rhyming letter to Timothy, and the old gentleman’s facetious answer.

White had known Timothy for forty years in Mrs. Snooke’s Sussex garden. She bequeathed Timothy to her nephew on her death in 1780, and the “sorrowful reptile” dwelt with him until his death, but did not long survive him. Timothy’s shell was preserved by White’s niece because his master loved him, and it may now be seen in the British Museum. Watching Timothy fondly and curiously, White noted that the tortoise could not shut tight his shell; another kind of tortoise White knew had this power; he called his brother John’s attention to the fact, his brother brought it to the attention of Linnæus, and a new classification was on record. But though White made scientific discoveries by watching everyday affairs of animals, these discoveries were few, and would not give him any considerable rank among naturalists. It is his curiosity about the ways of little living things, about their personalities, that makes his descriptions of worth. Just as he can picture to us Timothy a-tiptoe at five o’clock of a June morning, about venturing forth on a love quest, so he can give us the black-cap’s song in words that catch the song’s tone, and that hold it in memory: “The black-cap has in common a full, sweet, deep, loud and wild pipe; yet that strain is of short continuance, and his motions are desultory; but when that bird sits calmly and engages in song in earnest, he pours forth very sweet, but inward melody, and expresses great variety of soft and gentle modulations, superior perhaps to those of any of our warblers, the nightingale excepted.” Well put, all may see, but how accurately and how true in quality, only those who know the bird may say; how hard to do, only those who have attempted to give in words the quality of bird-song. April morning after April morning, for spring upon spring, Gilbert White listened to that song in Selborne lanes. It recurred and recurred, unforgettable in his ears; and so, on a September day, after the song was stilled, he could put it down truly. That is another secret of White’s charm. The happy moments of years are pressed into small measure. It is no wonder they brim over between the lines. Of all the little living things that he loved, it is of the swallows that he has written most carefully and most lovingly. His monographs on the Hirundines were read to the Royal Society by the Hon. Daines Barrington. The chimney-swallow is to White “a delicate songster; ... in soft sunny weather [it] sings both perching and flying, on trees in a kind of concert and on chimney tops; ” martlets “are no songsters; but twitter in a pretty inward soft manner in their nests; ” and he finds a good word to say even of the note of the swift, which he must admit is harsh and screaming, “yet there are ears to which it is not displeasing, from an agreeable association of ideas, since that note never occurs but in the most lovely summer weather.”

The man that could so write must of necessity have believed “a little turn for English poetry ... a pretty accomplishment for a young gentleman,” that would “not only enable him the better to read and relish our best poets,” but would be “ a happy influence even upon his prose composition.” White mentions many English poets, — Chaucer, who attracted him by a keen eye for things out of doors; Langland; Gawain Douglas; Shakespeare; Chapman; Taylor, the Water Poet; Milton, many times; Dryden, whom he wrote down “to me much the greatest master of numbers of any of our English bards;” Pope; Thomson, “the naturalist poet;” Somerville, and John Phillips of “Cyder” fame. His letters give us contemporary opinion of Lord Chesterfield, Gibbon, and Dr. Johnson. How the Doctor would have snorted had he heard of White’s opinion that the Tour to the Western Islands of Scotland was “a sentimental journey;” and how he would have sneered at the Natural History, had he lived to see its vogue! White, of course, had made Latin verses under Dr. Warton, and we find him citing Homer and Plato and Horace and Ovid, as we should expect an eighteenthcentury gentleman to cite them; but Virgil among the ancients gave him most pleasure. It was, of course, the Georgics that, read and re-read with never-failing gusto, caused him to forget his characteristic caution and fall into superlatives, — the Georgics, “that most beautiful of all human compositions.”

As I stood on the lawn of the Wakes, I wondered which window of the old house opened into the room where he and nephew Jack had their quarrels over Latin quantities, the severest quarrels which his gentle courtesy permitted. Here from his lawn he loved to look at the Hanger; we would go to the Hanger and from its top know his favorite view of the village with his home in its midst; and there was still to be seen the church, and his grave, and the Lithes, and the Priory Farm, — but we could not hope to see half of the places associated with him here. We passed out of the Wakes garden into the narrow street, and crossed the Plestor to the church, still shadowed by the great yew whose measurements he recorded. The grave lies close to the north wall of the church, marked by a low stone at head, and a lower stone at foot. On the headstone are the letters “G. W.,” so faint now that they look as if they had not been cut, but only scratched there. The date line is undecipherable. A few steps from the grave you may look into the Lithes and Dorton Vale. His house is but a hundred yards away. This is the church where he ministered; here, among his family and close to his most familiar scenes, he lies, as he should. It is as fitting a resting-place for Gilbert White as Grasmere Churchyard for Wordsworth.

The Hanger rose, unvisited, to our front as we came out of the churchyard, and by the sunken lane to the right we made our way toward it, turning in through a cart-way a foot deep with heavy black mud. We climbed up the little Zigzag. It led us to the site of the “Hermitage,” the cut of which in the first edition of the Natural History so troubled Jack Mulso, since it gave no idea of the height at which the hut clung to the hillside. Here the hermit, in the person of nephew Harry, discoursed gravely and prophetically to the ladies whom Gilbert would escort thither on evenings of sweet weather. To the Hermitage ran the Bostal, or sloping path, that White had constructed at an easy grade up the Hanger, to suit the heavier steps of his later years. He then depreciated the Zigzag, and, as he carefully records, stirred up feuds among the supporters of the rival paths. The Bostal seems finally to have won the day, though the heifers and colts of the village, and some of the ladies, still remained “ Zigzagians.” Here at the Hermitage he would picnic or take tea with the young people he gathered about him, his own guests, or the guests of the vicarage, returning to the Wakes in the long summer twilight, to make the girls pay for their outing by singing for him. Of these little impromptu concerts he writes to his niece Mary: “I retain still a smattering of many passages in my memory, which I sing over to myself when I am in spirits.” His book proves to us that there were many moments in his seventy-three long and happy years that he was “in spirits.” The prospect from this Hermitage site, at the Hanger top, is praised by all his guests when, returned home, they write him in acknowledgment of his hospitality. Even in letters of years later they recur to the prospect, and, indeed, it is as lovely a picture of quiet English landscape, set in its frame of pendulous beech boughs, as the south counties afford, — Selborne Village, and Dorton Vale below, the cluster of houses, the woods, the tilled land, the downs far beyond.

The sun was now low in the west, so we went down again to the village, where wood smoke from one cottage chimney, upcurling over the thatched roofs and timbered and plastered walls of the old houses, carried us back, with an ease no other of Selborne’s many symbols of the past afforded, to White’s own day of simple leisure. Great high-piled clouds, their white now warming to gold, rode buoyantly before the southwest wind, as we trotted slowly back to Alton by way of deep lanes that took us by Chawton, where Jane Austen worked at her miniatures only twenty years after White had finished his. After leaving these haunts of old-time peace, it was a jar to take train. But this night, at least, we did not have to spend in any “great factious manufacturing town” such as White hated, but in the old cathedral and college city of Winchester, where we found a quiet inn with walled garden, and old gables across the way. I can ask nothing happier than another such blowing day in old Hampshire.