No More Learning

' Copyright 1896,
by D. Appleton & Co.
T*
HE history of myths, of their growth under the earlier phases
of human thought and of their decline under modern think-
ing, is one of the most interesting and suggestive of human
studies; but since to treat it as a whole would require volumes,
I shall select only one small group, and out of this mainly a
single myth, - one about which there can no longer be any
dispute, - the group of myths and legends which grew up on the
shore of the Dead Sea, and especially that one which grew up to
account for the successive salt columns washed out by the rains
at its southwestern extremity.
The Dead Sea is about fifty miles in length and ten miles in
width; it lies in a very deep fissure extending north and south,
and its surface is about thirteen hundred feet below that of the
Mediterranean. It has therefore no outlet, and is the receptacle
for the waters of the whole system to which it belongs, including
those collected by the Sea of Galilee and brought down thence
by the river Jordan.
It certainly — or at least the larger part of it — ranks geologi- .
cally among the oldest lakes on earth. In a broad sense the
region is volcanic: on its shore are evidences of volcanic action,
which must from the earliest period have aroused wonder and
fear, and stimulated the myth-making tendency to account for
them.
On the eastern side are impressive mountain masses,
which have been strewn up from old volcanic vents; mineral and
hot springs abound, some of them spreading sulphurous odors;
earthquakes have been frequent, and from time to time these
have cast up bitumen; concretions of sulphur and large forma-
tions of salt constantly appear.
The water which comes from the springs or oozes through
the salt layers upon its shores constantly brings in various salts
in solution; and being rapidly evaporated under the hot sun and


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ANDREW DICKSON WHITE
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)
dry wind, there has been left, in the bed of the lake, a strong
brine heavily charged with the usual chlorides and bromides, -a
sort of bitter mother liquor. ” This fluid has become so dense
as to have a remarkable power of supporting the human body; it
is of an acrid and nauseating bitterness; and by ordinary eyes
no evidence of life is seen in it.
Thus it was that in the lake itself, and in its surrounding
shores, there was enough to make the generation of explanatory
myths on a large scale inevitable.
The main northern part of the lake is very deep, the plum-
met having shown an abyss of thirteen hundred feet; but the
southern end is shallow and in places marshy.
The system of which it forms a part shows a likeness to that
in South America of which the mountain lake Titicaca is the
main feature; as a receptacle for surplus waters, only rendering
them by evaporation, it resembles the Caspian and many other
seas; as a sort of evaporating dish for the leachings of salt rock,
and consequently holding a body of water unfit to support
the higher forms of animal life, it resembles among others the
Median lake of Urumiah; as a deposit of bitumen, it resembles
the pitch lakes of Trinidad.
In all this there is nothing presenting any special difficulty to
the modern geologist or geographer; but with the early dweller
in Palestine the case was very different. The rocky, barren des-
olation of the Dead Sea region impressed him deeply; he nat-
urally reasoned upon it: and this impression and reasoning we find
stamped into the pages of his sacred literature, rendering them
all the more precious as a revelation of the earlier thought of
mankind. The long circumstantial account given in Genesis;
its application in Deuteronomy; its use by Amos, by Isaiah, by
Jeremiah, by Zephaniah, and by Ezekiel; the references to it in
the writings attributed to St. Paul, St. Peter, and St. Jude, in the
Apocalypse, and above all, in more than one utterance of the
Master himself, -all show how deeply these geographical feat-
uires impressed the Jewish mind.
At a very early period, myths and legends, many and circum-
stantial, grew up to explain features then so incomprehensible.
As the myth and legend grew up among the Greeks of a
refusal of hospitality to Zeus and Hermes by the village in
Phrygia, and the consequent sinking of that beautiful region with
its inhabitants beneath a lake and morass, so there came belief in
XXVII-992


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15858
ANDREW DICKSON WHITE
a similar offense by the people of the beautiful valley of Siddim,
and the consequent sinking of that valley with its inhabitants be-
neath the waters of the Dead Sea. Very similar to the accounts
of the saving of Philemon and Baucis are those of the saving
of Lot and his family.
But the myth-making and miracle-mongering by no means
ceased in ancient times; they continued to grow through the
mediæval and modern period, until they have quietly withered
away in the light of modern scientific investigation, leaving to us
the religious and moral truths they inclose.
It would be interesting to trace this whole group of myths:
their origin in times prehistoric, their development in Greece
and Rome, their culmination during the ages of faith, and their
disappearance in the age of science. It would be especially in-
structive to note the conscientious efforts to prolong their life by
making futile compromises between science and theology regard-
ing them; but I shall mention this main group only incidentally,
confining myself almost entirely to the one above named, - the
most remarkable of all, — the myth which grew about the salt
pillars of Usdum.
I select this mainly because it involves only elementary prin-
ciples, requires no abstruse reasoning, and because all controversy
regarding it is ended. There is certainly now no theologian with
a reputation to lose who will venture to revive the idea regard-
ing it which was sanctioned for hundreds, nay, thousands, of years
by theology, was based on Scripture, and was held by the uni.
versal Church until our own century.
The main feature of the salt region of Usdum is a low range
of hills near the southwest corner of the Dead Sea, extending in a
southeasterly direction for about five miles, and made up mainly
of salt rock. This rock is soft and friable; and under the influ-
ence of the heavy winter rains, it has been without doubt, from
a period long before human history, as it is now, cut ever in
new shapes, and especially into pillars or columns, which some-
times bear a semblance to the human form.
An eminent clergyman who visited this spot recently, speaks
of the appearance of this salt range as follows:
« Fretted by fitful showers and storms, its ridge is exceed-
ingly uneven, its sides carved out and constantly changing;
and each traveler might have a new pillar of salt to
wonder over at intervals of a few years. ”
.


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C
>
or
(
Few things could be more certain than that, in the indolent
dream-life of the East, myths and legends would grow up to
account for this as for other strange appearances in all that
region. The question which a religious Oriental put to himself
in ancient times at Usdum was substantially that which his
descendant to-day puts to himself at Kosseir: “Why is this
region thus blasted ? » “Whence these pillars of salt ? »
«Whence these blocks of granite ? ” «What aroused the venge-
ance of Jehovah or of Allah to work these miracles of deso-
lation ? »
And just as Maxime Du Camp recorded the answer of the
modern Shemite at Kosseir, so the compilers of the Jewish
sacred books recorded the answer of the ancient Shemite at the
Dead Sea; just as Allah at Kosseir blasted the land and trans-
formed the melons into bowlders which are seen to this day, so
Jehovah at Usdum blasted the land and transformed Lot's wife
into a pillar of salt, which is seen to this day.
No more difficulty was encountered in the formation of the
Lot legend, to account for that rock resembling the human form,
than in the formation of the Niobe legend, which accounted for
a supposed resemblance in the rock at Sipylos: it grew up just
as we have seen thousands of similar myths and legends grow
up about striking natural appearances in every early home of
the human race. Being thus consonant with the universal view
regarding the relation of physical geography to the Divine gov-
ernment, it became a treasure of the Jewish nation and of the
Christian Church, - a treasure not only to be guarded against all
hostile intrusion, but to be increased, as we shall see, by the
myth-making powers of the Jews, Christians, and Mohammedans
for thousands of years.
The spot where the myth originated was carefully kept in
mind; indeed, it could not escape, for in that place alone were
constantly seen the phenomena which gave rise to it. We have
a steady chain of testimony through the ages, all pointing to the
salt pillar as the irrefragable evidence of Divine judgment. That
great theological test of truth - the dictum of St. Vincent of
Lerins — would certainly prove that the pillar was Lot’s wife;
for it was believed so to be by Jews, Christians, and Mohamme-
dans from the earliest period down to a time almost within pres-
ent memory — “always, everywhere, and by all. ” It would stand
perfectly the ancient test insisted upon by Cardinal Newman,
«Securus judicat orbis terrarum ” [The world judges infallibly].
>


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15860
ANDREW DICKSON WHITE
For ever since the earliest days of Christianity, the identity
of the salt pillar with Lot's wife has been universally held, and
supported by passages in Genesis, in St. Luke's Gospel, and in
the Second Epistle of St. Peter,-- coupled with a passage in the
book of the Wisdom of Solomon, which to this day, by a major-
ity in the Christian Church, is believed to be inspired, and from
which are specially cited the words, "A standing pillar of salt is
a monument of an unbelieving soul. ”
Never was chain of belief more continuous. In the first cen.
tury of the Christian era Josephus refers to the miracle, and
declares regarding the statue, "I have seen it, and it remains
at this day"; and Clement, Bishop of Rome,- one of the most
revered fathers of the Church, noted for the moderation of his
statements,-- expresses a similar certainty, declaring the miracu-
lous statue to be still standing.
In the second century that great father of the Church, bishop
and martyr, Irenæus, not only vouched for it, but gave his ap-
proval to the belief that the soul of Lot's wife still lingered in
the statue, giving it a sort of organic life: thus virtually began
in the Church that amazing development of the legend which
we shall see taking various forms through the Middle Ages,-
the story that the salt statue exercised certain physical functions
which in these more delicate days cannot be alluded to save
under cover of a dead language.
This addition to the legend, - which in these signs of life, as in
other things, is developed almost exactly on the same lines with
the legend of the Niobe statue in the rock of Mount Sipylos, and
with the legends of human beings transformed into bowlders in
various mythologies, was for centuries regarded as an additional
confirmation of revealed truth.
In the third century the myth burst into still richer bloom in
a poem long ascribed to Tertullian. In this poem more miracu-
lous characteristics of the statue are revealed. It could not be
washed away by rains; it could not be overthrown by winds; any
wound made upon it was miraculously healed; and the earlier
statements as to its physical functions were amplified in sonorous
Latin verse.
With this appeared a new legend regarding the Dead Sea: it
became universally believed, and we find it repeated throughout
the whole mediaval period, that the bitumen could only be dis-
solved by such fluids as in the process of animated nature came
from the statue.


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ANDREW DICKSON WHITE
15861
(
The legend thus amplified we shall find dwelt upon by pious
travelers and monkish chroniclers for hundreds of years: so it
came to be more and more treasured by the universal Church, and
held more and more firmly,- always, everywhere, and by all. ”
In the two following centuries we have an overwhelming
mass of additional authority for the belief that the very statue of
salt into which Lot's wife was transformed was still existing. In
the fourth, the continuance of the statue was vouched for by
St. Silvia, who visited the place: though she could not see it, she
was told by the Bishop of Segor that it had been there some
time before, and she concluded that it had been temporarily cov-
ered by the sea. In both the fourth and fifth centuries, such
great doctors in the Church as St. Jerome, St. John Chrysostom,
and St. Cyril of Jerusalem, agreed in this belief and statement:
hence it was, doubtless, that the Hebrew word which is trans-
lated in the authorized English version pillar,” was translated
in the Vulgate, which the majority of Christians believe virtually
inspired, by the word “statue”; we shall find this fact insisted
upon by theologians arguing in behalf of the statue, as a result
and monument of the miracle, for over fourteen hundred years
afterward
About the middle of the sixth century, Antoninus Martyr
visited the Dead Sea region and described it; but curiously re-
versed a simple truth in these words: “Nor do sticks or straws
float there, nor can a man swim; but whatever is cast into it
sinks to the bottom. ” As to the statue of Lot's wife, he threw
doubt upon its miraculous renewal, but testified that it was still
standing
In the seventh century the Targum of Jerusalem not only
testified that the salt pillar at Usdum was once Lot's wife, but
declared she must retain that form until the general resurrection.
In the seventh century, too, Bishop Arculf traveled to the Dead
Sea, and his work was added to the treasures of the Church. He
greatly develops the legend, and especially that part of it given
by Josephus. The bitumen that floats upon the sea “resembles
gold and the form of a bull or camel”; “birds cannot live near
it”; and “the very beautiful apples” which grow there, when
;
plucked, “burn and are reduced to ashes, and smoke as if they
were still burning. ”
In the eighth century the Venerable Bede takes these state-
ments of Arculf and his predecessors, binds them together in his


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15862
ANDREW DICKSON WHITE
work on 'The Holy Places,' and gives the whole mass of myths
and legends an enormous impulse.
In the tenth century new force is given to it by the pious
Moslem Mukadassi. Speaking of the town of Segor, near the
salt region, he says that the proper translation of its name is
“Hell”; and of the lake he says, “Its waters are hot, even as
though the place stood over hell-fire. ”
In the crusading period, immediately following, all the legends
burst forth more brilliantly than ever.
The first of these new travelers who makes careful statements
is Fulk of Chartres, who in 1100 accompanied King Baldwin to
the Dead Sea, and saw many wonders; but though he visited the
salt region at Usdum, he makes no mention of the salt pillar:
evidently he had fallen on evil times; the older statues had
probably been washed away, and no new one had happened to
be washed out of the rocks just at that period.
But his misfortune was more than made up by the triumph-
ant experience of a far more famous traveler, half a century
later, - Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela.
Rabbi Benjamin finds new evidences of miracle in the Dead
Sea, and develops to a still higher point the legend of the salt
statue of Lot's wife, enriching the world with the statement that
it was steadily and miraculously renewed; that though the cattle
of the region licked its surface, it never grew smaller. Again a
thrill of joy went through the monasteries and pulpits of Christ-
endom at this increasing evidence of the truth of Scripture. ”
Toward the end of the thirteenth century there appeared in
Palestine a traveler superior to most before or since, - Count
Burchard, monk of Mount Sion. He had the advantage of know-
ing something of Arabic, and his writings show him to have
been observant and thoughtful. No statue of Lot's wife appears
to have been washed clean of the salt rock at his visit, but he
takes it for granted that the Dead Sea is the mouth of hell,”
and that the vapor rising from it is the smoke from Satan's fur-
naces.
These ideas seem to have become part of the common stock;
for Ernoul, who traveled in the Dead Sea during the same cen-
tury, always speaks of it as the Sea of Devils.
Near the beginning of the fourteenth century appeared the
book, of far wider influence, which bears the name of Sir John
Mandeville; and in the various editions, its myths and legends of
>


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ANDREW DICKSON WHITE
15863
the Dead Sea and of the pillar of salt burst forth into wonderful
luxuriance.
This book tells us that masses of fiery matter are every day
thrown up from the water as large as a horse"; that though it
contains no living thing, it has been shown that men thrown
into it cannot die; and finally, as if to prove the worthlessness
of devout testimony to the miraculous, he says: "And whoever
throws a piece of iron therein, it floats; and whoever throws a
feather therein, it sinks to the bottom: and because that is con-
trary to nature, I was not willing to believe it until I saw it. ”
The book, of course, mentions Lot's wife; and says that
the pillar of salt “stands there to-day,” and “has a right salty
taste. ”
Injustice has perhaps been done to the compilers of this
famous work in holding them liars of the first magnitude: they
simply abhorred skepticism, and thought it meritorious to believe
all pious legends. The ideal Mandeville was a man of over-
mastering faith, and resembled Tertullian in believing some
things because they are impossible”; he was doubtless entirely
conscientious; the solemn ending of the book shows that he
listened, observed, and wrote under the deepest conviction, and
those who re-edited his book were probably just as honest in
adding the later stories of pious travelers.
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville,' thus appealing to
the popular heart, were most widely read in the monasteries and
repeated among the people. Innumerable copies were made in
manuscript, and finally in print; and so the old myths received
a new life.
In the fifteenth century wonders increased. In 1418 we
have the Lord of Caumont, who makes a pilgrimage and gives
us a statement which is the result of the theological reasoning
of centuries, and especially interesting as a typical example of
the theological method in contrast with the scientific. He could
not understand how the blessed waters of the Jordan could be
allowed to mingle with the accursed waters of the Dead Sea.
In spite, then, of the eye of sense, he beheld the water with the
eye of faith, and calmly announced that the Jordan water passes
through the Sea, but that the two masses of water are not mingled.
As to the salt statue of Lot's wife, he declares it to be still exist-
ing; and copying a table of indulgences granted to the Church
by pious pilgrims, he puts down the visit to the salt statue as
giving an indulgence of seven years.


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15864
ANDREW DICKSON WHITE
Toward the end of the century we have another traveler yet
more influential: Bernard of Breydenbach, Dean of Mainz. His
book of travels was published in 1486, at the famous press of
Schoeffer, and in various translations it was spread through Eu-
rope, exercising an influence wide and deep. His first important
notice of the Dead Sea is as follows: "In this, Tirus the serpent
is found, and from him the Tiriac medicine is made. He is
blind; and so full of venom that there is no remedy for his bite
excepting cutting off the bitten part. He can only be taken by
striking him and making him angry; then his venom flies into
his head and tail. ” Breyden bach calls the Dead Sea "the chim-
ney of hell,” and repeats the old story as to the miraculous solv-
ent for its bitumen. He too makes the statement that the holy
water of the Jordan does not mingle with the accursed water of
the infernal Sea; but increases the miracle which Caumont had
announced by saying that although the waters appear to come
together, the Jordan is really absorbed in the earth before it
reaches the Sea.
As to Lot's wife, various travelers at that time had various
fortunes. Some, like Caumont and Breydenbach, took her con-
tinued existence for granted; some, like Count John of Solms,
saw her and were greatly edified; some, like Hans Werli, tried
to find her and could not, but like St. Silvia a thousand years
before, were none the less edified by the idea that for some
inscrutable purpose, the Sea had been allowed to hide her from
them: some found her larger than they expected, - even forty
feet high, as was the salt pillar which happened to be standing at
the visit of Commander Lynch in 1848,— but this only added
a new proof to the miracle; for the text was remembered,
« There were giants in those days. "
:
Out of the mass of works of pilgrims during the fifteenth
century, I select just one more as typical of the theological view
then dominant; and this is the noted book of Felix Fabri, a
preaching friar of Ulm. I select him, because even so eminent
an authority in our own time as Dr. Edward Robinson declares
him to have been the most thorough, thoughtful, and enlightened
traveler of that century.
Fabri is greatly impressed by the wonders of the Dead Sea,
and typical of his honesty influenced by faith is his account of
the Dead Sea fruit: he describes it with almost perfect accuracy,
but adds the statement that when mature it is filled with ashes
and cinders. ”
a


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ANDREW DICKSON WHITE
15865
(
As to the salt statue, he says: “We saw the place between
the sea and Mount Segor, but could not see the statue itself
because we were too far distant to see anything of human size:
but we saw it with firm faith, because we believed Scripture,
which speaks of it; and we were filled with wonder. ”
To sustain absolute faith in the statue, he reminds his read-
ers that God is able even of these stones to raise up seed to
Abraham," and goes into a long argument, discussing such trans-
formations as those of King Atlas and Pygmalion's statue, with
a multitude of others, - winding up with the case given in the
miracles of St. Jerome, of a heretic who was changed into a log
of wood, which was then burned.
He gives a statement of the Hebrews that Lot's wife received
her peculiar punishment because she had refused to add salt to
the food of the angels when they visited her; and he preaches
a short sermon, in which he says that as salt is the condiment
of food, so the salt statue of Lot's wife "gives us a condiment
of wisdom. ”
There were indeed many discrepancies in the testimony of
travelers regarding the salt pillar,— so many, in fact, that at a
later period the learned Dom Calmet acknowledged that they
shook his belief in the whole matter; but during this earlier
time, under the complete sway of the theological spirit, these
difficulties only gave new and more glorious opportunities for
faith.
For if a considerable interval occurred between the washing
of one salt pillar out of existence and the washing of another
into existence, the idea arose that the statue, by virtue of the
soul which still remained in it, had departed on some mysterious
excursion. Did it happen that one statue was washed out one year
in one place and another statue another year in another place, this
difficulty was surmounted by believing that Lot's wife still walked
about. Did it happen that a salt column was undermined by
the rains and fell, this was believed to be but another sign of
life. Did a pillar happen to be covered in part by the sea, this
was enough to arouse the belief that the statue from time to
time descended into the Dead Sea depths, - possibly to satisfy
that old fatal curiosity regarding her former neighbors. Did some
smaller block of salt happen to be washed out near the statue,
it was believed that a household dog, also transformed into salt,
had followed her back from beneath the deep. Did more statues


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15866
ANDREW DICKSON WHITE
»
than one appear at one time, that simply made the mystery more
impressive.
In facts now so easy of scientific explanation, the theologians
found wonderful matter for argument.
One great question among them was whether the soul of Lot's
wife did really remain in the statue. On one side it was insisted
that as Holy Scripture declares that Lot's wife was changed into
a pillar of salt, and as she was necessarily made up of a soul
and a body, the soul must have become part of the statue. This
argument was clinched by citing that passage in the Book of
Wisdom in which the salt pillar is declared to be still standing
as “the monument of an unbelieving soul. ” On the other hand,
it was insisted that the soul of the woman must have been incor-
poreal and immortal, and hence could not have been changed into
a substance corporeal and mortal. Naturally, to this it would
be answered that the salt pillar was no more corporeal than the
ordinary materials of the human body, and that it had been made
miraculously immortal, and with God all things are possible. ”
Thus were opened long vistas of theological discussion.
As we enter the sixteenth century, the Dead Sea myths, and
especially the legends of Lot's wife, are still growing.
Father Anselm of the Minorites declares that the sea sometimes
covers the feet of the statue, sometimes the legs, sometimes the
whole body.
In 1555, Gabriel Giraudet, priest at Puy, journeyed through
Palestine. His faith was robust, and his attitude toward the
myths of the Dead Sea is seen by his declaration that its waters
are so foul that one can smell them at a distance of three leagues;
that straw, hay, or feathers thrown into them will sink, but that
iron and other metals will float; that criminals have been kept in
them three or four days and could not drown. As to Lot's wife,
he says that he found her “ lying there, her back toward heaven,
converted into salt stone; for I touched her, and put a piece of
her into my mouth, and she tasted salt. ”
At the centre of these legends we see, then, the idea that
though there were no living beasts in the Dead Sea, the people
of the overwhelmed cities were still living beneath its waters,
probably in hell; that there was life in the salt statue, and that
it was still curious regarding its old neighbors.
In 1507


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15867
GILBERT WHITE
(1720-1793)
T
CHE Natural History of Selborne,' written by Gilbert White,
an English clergyman of the eighteenth century, belongs
to literature rather than to science, because of its poetical
spirit of intimacy with the living world, making knowledge as much
the fruit of intuition as of intellectual research. Like Thoreau's
works, it springs from the heart of its author; lacking all the sever-
ity of a scientific treatise, warm instead with the humanity that feels
itself close to all happy living things.
White of Selborne was, however, a naturalist of no mean rank;
although his field of research was limited, including only the parishes
in the South of England to which he ministered, and of which Sel-
borne furnished him the greater part of the material for his famous
book. In a letter to Thomas Pennant, he thus describes the geogra-
phy of this parish, every inch of whose ground he knew and loved :-
The parish of Selborne lies in the extreme eastern corner of the county
of Hampshire, bordering on the county of Sussex, and not far from the county
of Surrey; it is about fifty miles southwest of London, in latitude 51°, and
near midway between the towns of Alton and Petersfield. Being very large
and extensive, it abuts on twelve parishes, two of which are in Sussex,- viz. ,
Trotton and Rogate. If you begin from the south, and proceed westward, the
adjacent parishes are Emshot, Newton Valence, Faringdon, Harteley-Mandent,
Great Wardlebam, Kingsley, Hedleigh, Bramshot, Trotton, Rogate, Lysse, and
Greatham. The soils of this district are almost as various and diversified as
the views and aspects. The high part to the southwest consists of a vast bill
of chalk, rising three hundred feet above the village; and is divided into a
sheep-down, the high wood, and a long hanging wood called the Hanger. The
covert of this eminence is altogether beech; the most lovely of all forest trees,
whether we consider its smooth rind or bark, its glossy foliage, or graceful
pendulous boughs. The down or sheep-walk is a pleasant park-like spot of
about one mile by half that space, jutting out on the verge of the hill country,
where it begins to break down into the plains, and commanding a very enga-
ging view; being an assemblage of hill, dale, woodlands, heath, and water. )
In this parish of Selborne, Gilbert White was born in 1720; was
educated at Basingstoke, under Warton the father of the poet, and at
Oriel College, Oxford, where he obtained a fellowship in 1744. He
removed to a country curacy in 1753, but returned to Selborne again
In 1758 he obtained a sinecure living from his college;
in 1755.


## p. 15868 (#200) ##########################################

15868
GILBERT WHITE
1
----
became curate of Faringdon, remaining there until 1784; when he
again assumed the charge of Selborne Church, and ministered there
until his death in 1793.
From his youth he had shown the strongest love for natural his-
tory,- a passion shared by his brothers: one of whom, Benjamin,
retired from trade to devote himself to natural and physical science,
and besides contributing papers to the Royal Society, became a pub-
lisher of works of natural history; another brother, John, vicar of
Gibraltar, wrote a natural history of the rock and its neighborhood.
Their fame, however, is overshadowed by that of the author of the
Natural History of Selborne. The scientific value of this book is
not inconsiderable. It is a storehouse of the knowledge patiently
acquired by a man who was watchful of each phenomenon of nature;
whose methods of gaining information were essentially modern, be-
cause they aimed at complete accuracy attained by personal research.
But the charm of this record, not only of days but of hours in Sel-
borne, lies not in its merits as a circumstantial history of the natural
phenomena of an English parish, but in its spirit of loving intimacy
with the out-of-door world. The book is fragrant with the wandering
airs of the fields and woods. Each chapter is a ramble in rural Eng-
land. It is a home-like work, because it tells of things that keen
eyes might see from the cottage window, or perhaps no farther than
the garden dial, or the graves in the ancient church-yard. White
noted many curious things of birds and field-mice, of bats and frogs
and insects, on his strolls through the village lanes. His humble
neighbors must have caught some of his enthusiasm for natural
knowledge; for mention is often made of their bringing to him curi-
ous scraps of information, the results of their observations in his
behalf.
“A shepherd saw, as he thought, some white larks on a down
above my house this winter: were not these the Emberiza nivalis, the
snowflake of the Brit. Zool. ? No doubt they were. ”
“As a neighbor was lately plowing in a dry chalky field, far re-
moved from any water, he turned out a water-rat, that was curiously
laid up in an hybernaculum artificially formed of grass and leaves.
At one end of the burrow lay about a gallon of potatoes, regularly
stowed, on which it was to have supported itself for the winter. ”
It was upon the birds of his district that the attention of White
seems to have been chiefly centred. He knew the times of their
appearance in spring and summer so accurately, that he is able to
make out chronological lists which tell the day and almost the hour
of their coming. He heads the list of the summer birds of pass-
age with the wryneck, which comes in the middle of March, and
has a harsh note; with the smallest willow wren, which appears on
the 23d of the same month, and “chirps till September”; some have
1
1


## p. 15869 (#201) ##########################################

GILBERT WHITE
15869
names.
(C
a sweet wild note,” some «a sweet plaintive note); last of all is
the fly-catcher, who arrives on May 12th, and is a very mute bird. ”
He also makes a list of those birds who continue in full song until
after midsummer, and of those who have ceased to sing before mid-
summer. To these he gives their Latin as well as their English
His quaint scholarship shows itself in scattered Latin quota-
tions bearing upon his subject; sometimes in happy lines from the
old English poets; sometimes in a verse from the Bible, as when he
uses the words of Job, in speaking of the cuckoo's cruelty to its
young: -
“She is hardened against her young ones, as though they were
not hers:
« Because God hath deprived her of wisdom, neither hath he im-
parted to her understanding. "
The Natural History of Selborne) is chiefly embodied in White's
letters to Thomas Pennant. He corresponded also with Barrington,
with Lightfoot, with Sir Joseph Banks, and other noted naturalists.
The style of the book is simple, scholarly, and not without a homely
beauty of its own. One of the most restful figures in the restless
and artificial eighteenth century is this of Gilbert White: living his
serene life near to the heart of nature, writing of what he saw to
sympathetic friends, accumulating for himself a long and quiet fame.
His grave is in Selborne church-yard, amid the scenes with which he
was associated in so loving an intimacy.
HABITS OF THE TORTOISE
Letter to Hon. Daines Barrington: from "The Natural History of Selborne)
T"
he old Sussex tortoise that I have mentioned to you so often
is become my property. I dug it out of its winter dor-
mitory in March last, when it was enough awakened to
express its resentments by hissing; and packing it in a box with
earth, carried it eighty miles in post-chaises. The rattle and
hurry of the journey so perfectly roused it, that when I turned
it out on a border, it walked twice down to the bottom of my
garden; however, in the evening, the weather being cold, it bur-
ied itself in the loose mold, and continues still concealed.
As it will be under my eye, I shall now have an opportunity
of enlarging my observations on its mode of life and propensi-
ties: and perceive already that towards the time of coming forth,
it opens a breathing-place in the ground near its head; requiring,


## p. 15870 (#202) ##########################################

15870
GILBERT WHITE
I conclude, a freer respiration as it becomes more alive. This
creature not only goes under the earth from the middle of No-
vember to the middle of April, but sleeps great part of summer;
for it goes to bed in the longest days at four in the afternoon,
and often does not stir in the morning till late. Besides, it re-
tires to rest for every shower, and does not move at all on wet
days. When one reflects on the state of this strange being, it is
a matter of wonder to find that Providence should bestow such a
profusion of days, such a seeming waste of longevity, on a reptile
that appears to relish it so little as to squander more than two-
thirds of its existence in a joyless stupor, and to be lost to all
sensation for months together in the profoundest of slumbers.
When I was writing this letter, a moist and warm afternoon,
with the thermometer at fifty, brought forth troops of shell-snails,
and at the same juncture the tortoise heaved up the mold and
put out his head: and the next morning came forth, as if raised
from the dead; and walked about until four in the afternoon.
This was a curious coincidence a very amusing occurrence! — to
see such a similarity of feelings between the two qe peoíxot: for so
the Greeks call both the shell-snail and the tortoise.
Because we call “the old family tortoise” an abject reptile, we
are too apt to undervalue his abilities, and depreciate his powers
of instinct. Yet he is, as Mr.
Pope says of his lord, -
1
«
much too wise to walk into a well ;)
(
»
and has so much discernment as not to fall down a ha-ha: but
to stop and withdraw from the brink with the readiest precau-
tion.
Though he loves warm weather, he avoids the hot sun; be-
cause his thick shell when once heated would, as the poet says
of solid armor, "scald with safety. ” He therefore spends the
more sultry hours under the umbrella of a large cabbage-leaf, or
amidst the waving forests of an asparagus-bed.
But as he avoids heat in the summer, so in the decline of the
year he improves the faint autumnal beams by getting within
the reflection of a fruit-wall; and though he never has read that
planes inclining to the horizon receive a greater share of warmth,
he inclines his shell, by tilting it against the wall, to collect and
admit every feeble ray.
Pitiable seems the condition of this poor embarrassed reptile:
to be cased in a suit of ponderous armor which he cannot lay


## p. 15871 (#203) ##########################################

GILBERT WHITE
15871
aside,-to be imprisoned, as it were, within his own shell,-
must preclude, we should suppose, all activity and disposition for
enterprise. Yet there is a season of the year (usually the begin-
ning of June) when his exertions are remarkable. He then walks
on tiptoe, and is stirring by five in the morning, and traversing
the garden, examines every wicket and interstice in the fences,
through which he will escape if possible; and often has eluded
the care of the gardener, and wandered to some distant field.
THE HOUSE-SWALLOW
Letter to the Hon. Daines Barrington: from «The Natural History of Selborne)
T"
as
HE house-swallow, or chimney-swallow, is undoubtedly the first
comer of all the British hirundines, and appears in gen-
eral on or about the 13th of April, as I have remarked from
many years' observation. Not but now and then a straggler
is seen much earlier: and in particular, when I was a boy I
observed a swallow for a whole day together on a sunny warm
Shrove Tuesday; which day could not fall out later than the
middle of March, and often happened early in February.
It is worth remarking that these birds are seen first about
lakes and mill-ponds; and it is also very particular, that if these
early visitors happen to find frost and snow, was the case
in the two dreadful springs of 1770 and 1771, they immediately
withdraw for a time. A circumstance this, much more in favor
of hiding than migration; since it is much more probable that a
bird should retire to its hybernaculum just at hand, than return
for a week or two to warmer latitudes.
The swallow, though called the chimney-swallow, by no means
builds altogether in chimneys, but often within barns and out-
houses against the rafters; and so she did in Virgil's time:-
"Garrula quam tignis nidos suspendat hirundo” (The twittering
swallow hangs its nest from the beams).
In Sweden she builds in barns, and is called Ladu swala, the
barn-swallow. Besides, in the warmer parts of Europe, there are
no chimneys to houses, except they are English built: in these
countries she constructs her nest in porches, and gateways, and
galleries, and open halls.
Here and there a bird may affect some odd peculiar place;
as we have known a swallow build down a shaft of an old well


## p. 15872 (#204) ##########################################

15872
GILBERT WHITE
through which chalk had been formerly drawn up for the pur-
pose of manure: but in general with us this hirundo breeds in
chimneys, and loves to haunt those stacks where there is a con-
stant fire,— no doubt for the sake of warmth. Not that it can
subsist in the immediate shaft where there is a fire; but prefers
one adjoining to that of the kitchen, and disregards the perpetual
smoke of the funnel, as I have often observed with some degree
of wonder.
Five or six feet more down the chimney does this little bird
begin to form her nest, about the middle of May: which consists,
like that of the house-martin, of a crust or shell composed of
dirt or mud, mixed with short pieces of straw to render it tough
and permanent; with this difference, that whereas the shell of the
martin is nearly hemispheric, that of the swallow is open at the
top, and like half a deep ditch; this nest is lined with fine
grasses, and feathers which are often collected as they float in
the air.
Wonderful is the address which this adroit bird shows all day
long, in ascending and descending with security through so nar-
row a pass.
When hovering over the mouth of the funnel, the
vibration of her wings, acting on the confined air, occasions a
rumbling like thunder. It is not improbable that the dam sub-
mits to this inconvenient situation so low in the shaft, in order
to secure her broods from rapacious birds; and particularly from
owls, which frequently fall down chimneys, perhaps in attempting
to get at these nestlings.
The swallow lays from four to six white eggs, dotted with red
specks; and brings out her first brood about the last week in
June, or the first week in July. The progressive method by
which the young are introduced into life is very amusing: first
they emerge from the shaft with difficulty enough, and often fall
down into the rooms below; for a day or so they are fed on the
chimney-top, and then are conducted to the dead leafless bough
of some tree, where, sitting in a row, they are attended with
great assiduity, and may then be called perchers. In a day or
two more they become flyers, but are still unable to take their
own food; therefore they play about near the place where the
dams are hawking for flies: and when a mouthful is collected,
at a certain signal given, the dam and the nestling advance, ris-
ing towards each other, and meeting at an angle; the young one
all the while uttering such a little quick note of gratitude and


## p. 15873 (#205) ##########################################

GILBERT WHITE
15873
complacency, that a person must have paid very little regard for
the wonders of nature that has not often remarked this feat.
The dam betakes herself immediately to the business of a
second brood as soon as she is disengaged from her first, which
at once associates with the first broods of house-martins, and
with them congregates, clustering on sunny roofs, towers, and
trees. This hirundo brings out her second brood towards the
middle and end of August.
All summer long, the swallow is a most instructive pattern of
unwearied industry and affection: for from morning to night,
while there is a family to be supported, she spends the whole
day in skimming close to the ground, and exerting the most sud-
den turns and quick evolutions. Avenues, and long walks under
the hedges, and pasture-fields, and mown meadows where cattle
graze, are her delight, especially if there are trees interspersed;
because in such spots insects most abound. When a fly is taken,
a smart snap from her bill is heard, resembling the noise at the
shutting of a watch-case; but the motion of the mandibles is too
quick for the eye.
The swallow, probably the male bird, is the excubitor to house-
martins and other little birds; announcing the approach of birds
For as
as a hawk appears, with a shrill alarm-
ing note he calls all the swallows and martins about him; who
pursue in a body, and buffet and strike their enemy till they
have driven him from the village; darting down from above on
his back, and rising in a perpendicular line in perfect security.
This bird will also sound the alarm, and strike at cats when
they climb on the roofs of houses, or otherwise approach the
nest. Each species of hirundo drinks as it flies along, sipping
the surface of the water; but the swallow alone in general
washes on the wing, by dropping into a pool for many times
together: in very hot weather house-martins and bank-martins
also dip and wash a little.
The swallow is a delicate songster, and in soft sunny weather
sings both perching and flying; on trees in a kind of concert,
and on chimney-tops: it is also a bold flyer, ranging to distant
downs and commons even in windy weather, which the other
species seems much to dislike; nay, even frequenting exposed
seaport towns, and making little excursions over the salt water.
Horsemen on the wide downs are often closely attended by a
little party of swallows for miles together, which plays before
XXVII—993
of prey.
soon


## p. 15874 (#206) ##########################################

15874
GILBERT WHITE
and behind them, sweeping around and collecting all the skulk-
ing insects that are roused by the trampling of the horses' feet:
when the wind blows hard, without this expedient, they are often
forced to settle to pick up their lurking prey.
A certain swallow built for two years together on the handles
of a pair of garden shears that were stuck up against the boards
in an out-house, and therefore must have her nest spoiled when-
ever that implement was wanted; and what is stranger still,
another bird of the same species built its nest on the wings and
body of an owl that happened by accident to hang dead and dry
from the rafter of a barn. This owl, with the nest on its wings,
and with eggs in the nest, was brought as a curiosity worthy of
the most elegant private museum in Great Britain. The owner,
struck with the oddity of the sight, furnished the bringer with a
large shell or conch, desiring him to fix it just where the owl
hung: the person did as he was ordered, and the following year,
a pair, probably the same pair, built their nest in the conch and
laid their eggs.
THE HOUSE-CRICKET
Letter to the Hon. Daines Barrington: from "The Natural History of
Selborne)
W*
itself upon
room
HILE many other insects must be sought, after in fields,
and woods, and waters, the Gryllus domesticus, or house-
cricket, resides altogether within our dwellings; intruding
our notice whether we will or no. This species
delights in new-built houses: being, like the spider, pleased with
the moisture of the walls; and besides, the softness of the mortar
enables them to burrow and mine between the joints of the
bricks or stones, and to open communications from one
to another. They are particularly fond of kitchens and bakers'
ovens, on account of their perpetual warmth.
Tender insects that live abroad either enjoy only the short
period of one summer, or else doze away the cold, uncomfortable
months in profound slumbers; but these, residing as it were in a
torrid zone, are always alert and merry: a good Christmas fire is
to them like the heats of the dog-days. Though they are fre-
quently heard by day, yet is their natural time of motion only
in the night. As soon as it grows dusk, the chirping increases,


## p. 15875 (#207) ##########################################

GILBERT WHITE
15875
-
over
and they come running forth, ranging from the size of a flea
to that of their full stature. As one should suppose from the
burning atmosphere which they inhabit, they are a thirsty race,
and show a great propensity for liquids; being found frequently
drowned in pans of water, milk, broth, or the like. Whatever is
moist they affect; and therefore often gnaw holes in wet woolen
stockings and aprons that are hung to the fire. They are the
housewife's barometer, foretelling her when it will rain; and
they prognosticate sometimes, she thinks, good or ill luck, — the
death of near relatives or the approach of an absent lover. By
being the constant companions of her solitary hours, they natur-
ally become the objects of her superstition. These crickets are
not only very thirsty but very voracious, for they will eat the
scummings of pots, and yeast, salt and crumbs of bread, and any
kitchen offalor sweepings. In the summer we have observed
them to fly out of the windows when it became dusk, and
the neighboring roofs. This feat of activity accounts for the sud-
den manner in which they often leave their haunts, as it does for
the method by which they come to houses where they were not
known before. It is remarkable that many sorts of insects seem
never to use their wings but when they have a mind to shift
their quarters and settle new colonies. When in the air they
move volatu undoso, in waves and curves, like woodpeckers;
opening and shutting their wings at every stroke: and so are
always rising or sinking.
When they increase to a great degree, as they did once in
the house where I am now writing, they become noisome pests,
flying into the candles and dashing into people's faces; but may
be blasted and destroyed by gunpowder discharged into their
crevices and crannies.
In families at such times, they are like Pharaoh's plague of
frogs, – in their bedchambers, and upon their beds, and in their
ovens, and in their kneading-troughs. Their shrilling noise is
occasioned by a brisk attrition of their wings. Cats catch hearth
crickets, and play with them as they do with mice, and then
devour them. Crickets may be destroyed, like wasps, by phials
half filled with beer, or any other liquid, and set in their haunts;
for being always eager to drink, they will crowd in till the bot-
tles are full.


## p. 15876 (#208) ##########################################

15876
RICHARD GRANT WHITE
(1821–1885)
ICHARD GRANT White was an essayist who combined scholar-
ship with a strong individuality and popular qualities of
style, — the latter due in part to a varied activity as jour-
nalist and magazine writer. A keen-eyed observer of affairs, some-
thing of a satirist, and cultured especially in music, philology, and
literature, his most lasting work is that which he did for Shake-
speare study, as expositor and editor. He was a healthful influence
in the United States in fostering Shakespeare study, and his authority
was considerable. In his criticism, common-
sense is a marked characteristic: he is most
vigorous and enjoyable when letting in the
daylight upon pedantry, or ridiculing the
thin-spun theories of extremists. His gift of
expression was decided; and his command
of the critical apparatus ample.
Richard Grant White was born in New
York city, May 22d, 1821; and was grad-
uated at the University of New York in
1839. He studied both medicine and law,
chose the latter profession, and was admitted
to the bar in 1845. But he soon turned to
R. G. WHITE journalism and literature. From 1851 to 1858
he was associate editor of the New York
Courier and Enquirer, and during the years 1860-61 had an editorial
connection with the New York World. He wrote for the papers on
many topics; and much of his work partook of the fleeting character
of journalism. For several years (1863–67) his Yankee Letters) in
the London Spectator were enjoyed as a lively chronicle of contem-
porary events. The book entitled England Without and Within
(1881) was regarded in that country as an estimate of unusual judg-
ment and insight. His literary excursions also included a novel, The
Fate of Mansfield Humphreys? (1884), an amusing but overdrawn
study of Yankee character in a European environment. Mr. White's
philological studies are best exemplified by the volume Words and
Their Uses, one of the most readable discussions of the subject
given forth by an American: it is at times dangerously dogmatic and

(


## p. 15877 (#209) ##########################################

RICHARD GRANT WHITE
15877
hasty in generalization, but as a whole both sound and stimulating.
'Studies in Shakespeare,' made up of papers collected by his wife
after his death (1885), gives in an attractive way his views on the
English master-poet. For twenty-five years Mr. White worked at
Shakespearean criticism; and his final Riverside Edition of Shake-
speare, which appeared in 1884, proved one of the most popular pre-
pared by an American.
Mr. White was for many years the chief clerk of the United States
Revenue Marine Bureau for the District of New York,- a post he
resigned in 1878. His life was a busy one, calling on his time and
strength in many ways. Looking at his work as a whole, and dis-
regarding what was necessarily temporary in it, a residue of valuable
and enjoyable literary work remains to give him his place among
American essayists and scholars. He died on April 8th, 1885, at his
birthplace, New York city.
THE BACON-SHAKESPEARE CRAZE
Re-
From (Studies in Shakespeare. Copyright 1885, by Alexina B. White.
printed by permission of Houghton, Mifflin & Co. , publishers
ND now we to
A inherent absurdity (as distinguished from evidence and ex-
ternal conditions) of this fantastical notion,- the unlikeness
of Bacon's mind and of his style to those of the writer of the
plays. Among all the men of that brilliant period who stand
forth in all the blaze of its light with sufficient distinction for us
at this time to know anything of them, no two were so element-
ally unlike in their mental and moral traits and in their literary
habits as Francis Bacon and William Shakespeare; and each of
them stamped his individuality unmistakably upon his work.
Both were thinkers of the highest order; both, what we some-
what loosely call philosophers: but how different their philosophy,
how divergent their ways of thought, and how notably unlike
their modes of expression! Bacon, a cautious observer and inves-
tigator, ever looking at men and things through the dry light of
cool reason; Shakespeare, glowing with instant inspiration, seeing
by intuition the thing before him, outside and inside, body and
spirit, as it was, yet molding it as it was to his immediate need,
– finding in it merely an occasion of present thought, and re-
gardless of it except as a stimulus to his fancy and his imagina-
tion: Bacon, a logician; Shakespeare, one who set logic at naught,


## p. 15878 (#210) ##########################################

15878
RICHARD GRANT WHITE
and soared upon wings compared with which syllogisms are
crutches: Bacon, who sought, in the phrase of Saul of Tarsus, –
that Shakespeare of Christianity,- to prove all things, and to hold
fast that which is good; Shakespeare, one who, like Saul, loosed
upon the world winged phrases, but who recked not his own
rede, proved nothing, and held fast both to good and evil, de-
lighting in his Falstaff as much as he delighted in his Imogen:
Bacon, in his writing the most self-asserting of men; Shake-
speare, one who when he wrote his plays did not seem to have a
self: Bacon, the most cautious and painstaking, the most consist-
ent and exact, of writers; Shakespeare, the most heedless, the
most inconsistent, the most inexact, of all writers who have risen
to fame: Bacon, sweet sometimes, sound always, but dry, stiff,
and formal; Shakespeare, unsavory sometimes, but oftenest breath-
ing perfume from Paradise, -grand, large, free, flowing, flexi- .
ble, unconscious, and incapable of formality: Bacon, precise and
reserved in expression; Shakespeare, a player and quibbler with
words, often swept away by his own verbal conceits into intel-
lectual paradox, and almost into moral obliquity: Bacon, without
humor; Shakespeare's smiling lips the mouthpiece of humor for
all human kind: Bacon, looking at the world before him, and at
the teaching of past ages, with a single eye to his theories and
his individual purposes; Shakespeare, finding in the wisdom and
the folly, the woes and the pleasures of the past and the present,
merely the means of giving pleasure to others and getting money
for himself, and rising to his height as a poet and a moral
teacher only by his sensitive intellectual sympathy with all the
needs and joys and sorrows of humanity: Bacon, shrinking from
a generalization even in morals; Shakespeare, ever moralizing,
and dealing even with individual men and particular things in
their general relations: both worldly-wise, both men of the world,
— for both these master intellects of the Christian era
worldly-minded men in the thorough Bunyan sense of the term,
but the one using his knowledge of men and things critically
in philosophy and in affairs; the other, his synthetically, as a cre-
ative artist: Bacon, a highly trained mind, and showing his train-
ing at every step of his cautious, steady march; Shakespeare,
wholly untrained, and showing his want of training even in the
highest reach of his soaring flight: Bacon, utterly without the
poetic even in a secondary degree, as is most apparent when he
desires to show the contrary; Shakespeare, rising with unconscious
were


## p. 15879 (#211) ##########################################

RICHARD GRANT WHITE
15879
-
effort to the highest heaven of poetry ever reached by the human
mind. To suppose that one of these men did his own work and
also the work of the other, is to assume two miracles for the
sake of proving one absurdity, and to shrink from accepting in
the untaught son of the Stratford yeoman a miraculous miracle,
one that does not defy or suspend the laws of nature.
Many readers of these pages probably know that this notion
that our Shakespeare - the Shakespeare of As You Like It' and
'
' Hamlet' and 'King Lear' – was Francis Bacon masking in the
guise of a player at the Globe Theatre, is not of very recent
origin. It was first brought before the public by Miss Delia
Bacon (who afterwards deployed her theory in a ponderous vol-
ume, with an introduction by Nathaniel Hawthorne — who did
not advocate it) in an article in Putnam's Magazine for January
1856. Some time before that article was published, and shortly
after the publication of (Shakespeare's Scholar,' it was sent to
me in proof by the late Mr. George P. Putnam, with a letter
calling my attention to its importance, and a request that I
would write an introduction to it. After reading it carefully
and without prejudice (for I knew nothing of the theory or of
its author, and as I have already said, I am perfectly indifferent
as to the name and the personality of the writer of the plays,
and had as lief it should have been Francis Bacon as William
Shakespeare), I returned the article to Mr. Putnam, declining the
proposed honor of introducing it to the public, and adding that
as the writer was plainly neither a fool nor an ignoramus, she
must be insane; not a maniac, but what boys call “loony. ” So
it proved: she died a lunatic, and I believe in a lunatic asylum.
I record this incident for the first time on this occasion, not
at all in the spirit of l-told-you-so, but merely as a fitting pre-
liminary to the declaration that this Bacon-Shakespeare notion is
an infatuation,-a literary bee in the bonnets of certain ladies of
both sexes, which should make them the objects of tender care
and sympathy. It will not be extinguished at once; on the con-
trary, it may become a mental epidemic. For there is no notion,
no fancy or folly, which may not be developed into a move-
ment,” or even into a “school,” by iteration and agitation. I do
I
not despair of seeing a Bacon-Shakespeare Society, with an array
of vice-presidents of both sexes, that may make the New Shake-
speare Society look to its laurels. None the less, however, is it a
lunacy, which should be treated with all the skill and tenderness
((
>


## p. 15880 (#212) ##########################################

15880
RICHARD GRANT WHITE
which modern medical science and humanity have developed.
Proper retreats should be provided, and ambulances kept ready,
with horses harnessed; and when symptoms of the Bacon-Shake-
speare craze manifest themselves, the patient should be imme.
diately carried off to the asylum, furnished with pens, ink, and
paper, a copy of Bacon's works, one of the Shakespeare plays,
and one of Mrs. Cowden-Clarke's Concordance and that good
lady is largely responsible for the development of this harmless
mental disease, and other fads” called Shakespearean); and the
literary results, which would be copious, should be received for
publication with deferential respect, and then — committed to the
flames. In this way the innocent victims of the malady might
be soothed and tranquillized, and the world protected against the
debilitating influence of tomes of tedious twaddle.
As to treating the question seriously, that is not to be done
by men of common-sense and moderate knowledge of the sub-
ject. Even the present not very serious, or I fear, sufficiently
considerate, examination of it (to which I was not very ready,
but much the contrary) provokes me to say almost with Henry
Percy's words, that I could divide myself and go to buffets for
being moved by such a dish of skimmed milk to so honorable an
action. It is as certain that William Shakespeare wrote (after
the theatrical fashion and under the theatrical conditions of his
day) the plays which bear his name, as it is that Francis Bacon
wrote the Novum Organum,' the Advancement of Learning,'
and the “Essays. ' We know this as well as we know any fact
in history. The notion that Bacon also wrote (Titus Androni-
cus,' The Comedy of Errors,' 'Hamlet,' 'King Lear,' and
Othello,' is not worth five minutes' serious consideration by any
reasonable creature.
BIG WORDS FOR SMALL THOUGHTS
S
From Words and Their Uses. Copyright 1870, by Richard Grant White
IMPLE and unpretending ignorance is always respectable, and
sometimes charming; but there is little that more deserves
contempt than the pretense of ignorance to knowledge. The
curse and the peril of language in this day, and particularly in
this country, is, that it is at the mercy of men who, instead of
being content to use it well according to their honest ignorance,


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RICHARD GRANT WHITE
15881
use it ill according to their affected knowledge; who being
vulgar, would seem elegant; who being empty, would seem
full; who make up in pretense what they lack in reality; and
whose little thoughts, let off in enormous phrases, sound like fire-
crackers in an empty barrel.
How I detest the vain parade
Of big-mouthed words of large pretense!
And shall they thus thy soul degrade,
. O tongue so dear to common-sense?
Shouldst thou accept the pompous laws
By which our blustering tyros prate,
Soon Shakespeare's songs and Bunyan's saws
Some tumid trickster must translate.
Our language, like our daily life,
Accords the homely and sublime,
And jars with phrases that are rife
With pedantry of every clime.
For eloquence it clangs like arms,
For love it touches tender chords;
But he to whom the world's heart warms
Must speak in wholesome, home-bred words.
To the reader who is familiar with Béranger's ‘Derniers Chan-
sons, these lines will bring to mind two stanzas in the poet's
"Tambour Major,' in which he compares pretentious phrases to
a big, bedizened drum-major, and simple language to the little
gray-coated Napoleon at Austerlitz,-a comparison which has
been brought to my mind very frequently during the writing of
this book.
It will be well for us to examine some examples of this vice
of language in its various kinds; and for them we must go to
the newspaper press, which reflects so truly the surface of modern
life, although its surface only.
There is, first, the style which has rightly come to be called
" newspaper English ”; and in which we are told, for instance,
of an attack upon a fortified position on the Potomac, that the
thousand-toned artillery duel progresses magnificently at this
hour, the howling shell bursting in wild profusion in camp and
battery, and among the trembling pines. I quote this from
the columns of a first-rate New York newspaper, because the real
thing is so much more characteristic than any imitation could be,
»


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15882
RICHARD GRANT WHITE
it was.
and is quite as ridiculous. This style has been in use so long,
.
and has, day after day, been impressed upon the minds of so
many persons to whom newspapers are authority, as to language
no less than as to facts, that it is actually coming into vogue in
daily life with some of our people. Not long ago my attention
was attracted by a building which I had not noticed before; and
stepping up to a policeman who stood hard by, I asked him what
He promptly replied (I wrote down his answer within
the minute), “That is an institootion inaugurated under the
auspices of the Sisters of Mercy, for the reformation of them
young females what has deviated from the paths of rectitood. ”
It was in fact an asylum for women of the town; but my in-
formant would surely have regarded such a description of it as
inelegant, and perhaps as indelicate. True, there was a glaring
incongruity between the pompousness of his phraseology and his
use of those simple and common parts of speech, the pronouns;
but I confess that in his dispensation of language, “them” and
what were the only crumbs from which I received any com-
fort. But could I find fault with my civil and obliging inform-
ant, when I knew that every day he might read in the leading
articles of our best newspapers such sentences, for instance, as the
following ? -
(
« There is, without doubt, some subtle essence permeating the ele-
mentary constitution of crime which so operates that men and women
become its involuntary followers by sheer force of attraction, as it
were. »
I am sure, at least, that the policeman knew better what he
meant when he spoke than the journalist did what he meant
when he wrote. Policeman and journalist both wished not merely
to tell what they knew and thought in the simplest, clearest way;
they wished to say something elegant, and to use fine language:
and both made themselves ridiculous. Neither this fault nor this
complaint is new; but the censure seems not to have diminished
the fault, either in frequency or in degree. Our every day writ-
ing is infested with this silly bombast, this stilted nonsense. One
journalist reflecting upon the increase of violence, and wishing to
say that ruffians should not be allowed to go armed, writes, “We
cannot, however, allow the opportunity to pass without expressing
our surprise that the law should allow such abandoned and desper-
ate characters to remain in possession of lethal weapons. ” Lethal
»


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RICHARD GRANT WHITE
15883
(
means deadly, neither more nor less; but it would be very tame
and unsatisfying to use an expression so common and so easily
understood. Another journalist, in the course of an article upon
a murder, says of the murderer that “a policeman went to his
residence, and there secured the clothes that he wore when he
committed the murderous deed”; and that being found in a tub
of water, “they were so smeared by blood as to incarnadine the
water of the tub in which they were deposited. ” To say that “the
policeman went to the house or room of the murderer, and there
found the clothes he wore when he did the murder, which were
so bloody that they reddened the water into which they had been
thrown,” would have been far too homely.
But not only are our journals and our speeches to Buncombe
infested with this big-worded style, — the very preambles to our
acts of legislature, and the official reports upon the dryest and
most matter-of-fact subjects, are bloated with it. It appears in
the full flower of absurdity in the following sentence, which I
find in the report of a committee of the Legislature of New York
on street railways. The committee wished to say that the public
looked upon all plans for the running of fast trains at a height
of fifteen or twenty feet as fraught with needless danger; and
the committeeman who wrote for them made them say it in this
amazing fashion:-
“It is not to be denied that any system which demands the pro-
pulsion of cars at a rapid rate, at an elevation of fifteen or twenty
feet, is not entirely consistent, in public estimation, with the greatest
attainable immunity from the dangers of transportation. ”
Such a use of words as this, only indicates the lack as well
of mental vigor as of good taste and education on the part of the
user. “Oh,” said a charming, highly cultivated, and thorough-bred
woman, speaking in my hearing of one of her own sex of infe-
rior breeding and position, but who was making literary preten-
sions, and with some success as far as notoriety and money were
concerned, - “Oh, save me from talking with that woman! If you
ask her to come and see you, she never says she's sorry she
can't come, but that she regrets that the multiplicity of her en-
gagements precludes her from accepting your polite invitation. ”
The foregoing instances are examples merely of a pretentious
and ridiculous use of words which is now very common. They are
not remarkable for incorrectness. But the freedom with which


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RICHARD GRANT WHITE
((
persons who have neither the knowledge of language which
comes of culture, nor that which springs spontaneously from an
inborn perception and mastery, are allowed to address the public
and to speak for it, produces a class of writers who fill, as it is
unavoidable that they should fill, our newspapers and public
documents with words which are ridiculous, not only from their
pretentiousness, but from their preposterous unfitness for the uses
to which they are put. These persons not only write abominably
in point of style, but they do not say what they mean. When,
for instance, a member of Congress is spoken of in a lead-
ing journal as "a sturdy republican of progressive integrity," no
very great acquaintance with language is necessary to the discov-
ery that the writer is ignorant of the meaning either of progress
or of integrity. When in the same columns another man is
described as being "endowed with an impassionable nature," peo-
ple of common sense and education see that here is a man not
only writing for the public, but actually attempting to coin words,
who, as far as his knowledge of language goes, needs the instruc-
tion to be had in a good common school. So again, when another
journal of position, discoursing upon convent discipline, tells us
that a young woman is not fitted for “the stern amenities of
religious life," and we see it laid down in a report to an import-
ant public body that under certain circumstances, “the criminality
of an act is heightened, and reflects a very turgid morality indeed,”
it is according to our knowledge whether we find in the phrases
stern amenities” and “turgid morality” occasion for study or
food for laughter.
Writing like this is a fruit of a pitiful desire to seem ele-
gant when one is not so, which troubles many people, and which
manifests itself in the use of words as well as in the wearing of
clothes, the buying of furniture, and the giving of entertainments;
and which in language takes form in words which sound large,
and seem to the person who uses them to give him the air of
a cultivated man, because he does not know exactly what they
mean. Such words sometimes become a fashion among
such
people, who are numerous enough to set and keep up a fashion;
and they go on using them to each other, each afraid to admit to
the other that he does not know what the new word means, and
equally afraid to avoid its use, as a British snob is said never to
admit that he is entirely unacquainted with a duke.
(
1
1
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1


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WALT. WHITMAN


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יזו
.
. . !
;
*


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15885
WALT WHITMAN
(1819–1892)
BY JOHN BURROUGHS
-
Ho goes there ? hankering, gross, mystical, nude; » –
hankering like the great elk in the forest in springtime;
gross as unhoused Nature is gross; mystical as Boehme or
Swedenborg; and so far as the concealments and disguises of the
conventional man, and the usual adornments of polite verse, are con-
cerned, as nude as Adam in Paradise. Indeed, it was the nudity of
Walt Whitman's verse, both in respect to its subject-matter and his
mode of treatment of it, that so astonished, when it did not repel,
his readers. He boldly stripped away everything conventional and
artificial from man,- clothes, customs, institutions, etc. ,—and treated
him as he is, primarily, in and of himself and in his relation to the
universe; and with equal boldness he stripped away what were to
him the artificial adjuncts of poetry,— rhyme, measure, and all the
stock language and forms of the schools,- and planted himself upon
a spontaneous rhythm of language and the inherently poetic in the
common and universal.
The result is the most audacious and debatable contribution yet
made to American literature, and one the merits of which will doubt-
less long divide the reading public. It gave a rude shock to most
readers of current poetry; but it was probably a wholesome shock,
like the rude douse of the sea to the victim of the warmed and per-
fumed bath. The suggestion of the sea is not inapt; because there
is, so to speak, a briny, chafing, elemental, or cosmic quality about
Whitman's work that brings up the comparison,-a something in
it bitter and forbidding, that the reader must conquer and become
familiar with before he can appreciate the tonic and stimulating
quality which it really holds. To Whitman may be applied, more
truly than to any other modern poet, Wordsworth's lines -
« You must love him ere to you
He will seem worthy of your love. "
As the new generations are less timid and conforming than their
fathers, and take more and more to the open air and its exhilara-
tions, so they are coming more and more into relation with the spirit


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15886
WALT WHITMAN
1
!
1
of this poet of democracy. If Whitman means anything, he means
the open air, and a life fuller and fuller of the sanity, the poise, and
the health of nature; freer and freer of everything that hampers,
enervates, enslaves, and makes morbid and sickly the body and the
soul of man.
Whitman was the first American poet of any considerable renown
born outside of New England, and the first to show a larger, freer,
bolder spirit than that of the New England poets. He was a native
of Long Island, where at West Hills he was born on the 31st of May,
1819, and where his youth was passed.