Was the puffin dead when the gull flew up with it? If it was, then had it found it so, or killed it itself? Did it drop it on purpose, to kill it, or let it fall by accident? These questions I am unable to answer; but in regard to the two last, gulls are credited here with letting crabs fall on the rocks, in order to break their shells. Even if the puffin were dead before, such a fall, by bursting or bruising the body, might make it easier to tear open—an operation which the gull, I believe, had not yet had time to perform.
The whole ground where this gull went up with its victim—for I have little doubt myself as to what had taken place—was honeycombed with puffin-burrows, and troops of puffins stood everywhere about. I sat down where I had halted, and before long two other herring-gulls came and stood in the same locality, close to several of these poor little birds, who, I thought, seemed embarrassed by their presence, but powerless to resent it, and perhaps not sufficiently intelligent to divine its true purport.
The gulls, I thought, had a sort of unpleasant, evil-boding look; a sullen, brazen, criminal appearance, like the two murderers in that scene with Clarence, just before the duke awakes—but this may have been partly due to imagination, after what I had just seen, with a late reading of Richard III. I love that play; almost more than ambition, perhaps, the keynote to its hero-villain's character is to be sought in his tremendous energy and intellectual activity. These are so great that they, to a large extent, guard him against the intolerable anguish of remorse—that constant attendant on the undiseased evil-doer—so that he fares better than Macbeth, who is inferior to Richard in both these respects, and whose more poetic and sensitive nature is much against him. Not that Macbeth is not an energetic and able man, but he is only normally so, while Richard's working qualities are abnormal. His energy, especially, is more like that of a Napoleon or Julius Cæsar. It is such a mighty and rapidly-moving stream, that, hurried along by it, he has no leisure to repine. It floats his crimes easily, one may say, making little dancing boats of them, whereas those of Macbeth are like huge vessels in a stream that has hardly volume enough to bear them. Is it not, in fact, almost impossible to feel mental depression, so long as the brain is very actively employed? It is in the calms and lulls of this activity that disagreeable reflections force themselves upon us, just as rain that has been kept from falling by a violent wind, falls as soon as it subsides. Accordingly, though Richard's robuster nature goes almost scot free by day—at least, for a considerable time—it becomes the prey of conscience by night, when the huge energy of his disposition is in abeyance; when, in Tennyson's language, "to sleep he gives his powers away." This we learn first through his wife Anne, who has been constantly "wakèd by his timorous dreams"—how strangely sounds the word "timorous" used of such a character!—and later—almost at the end—from himself, in that one terrifying outburst which gives the first and only clear view into the mental torments which this strong villain has to suffer, as soon as that daytime energy, which is to him as an armour, is laid aside. Is it not very striking—is it not the character-touch of this scene, how—when Richard is once fairly awake again, when the things of waking life have returned, with Ratcliff at the tent-door—how quickly this great load of suffering is shifted off?
A fortiori Macbeth suffers at night, too, but his life is all suffering. We never get the idea of his enjoying life, which, with Richard, we really do; for he is humorous—jocular even—in fact, in tiptop spirits often, but all by day, during the bustle and action of an energetic career. Later, the wound of guilt begins to show itself, and here, too, we may make an instructive comparison between these two practitioners in crime, so alike in their motive and careers, so different in their fibre and temperament, and yet yielding to the same law. Macbeth, indeed, suffers so much that his mind becomes, at last, almost unhinged, and, in the very end, conscience, perhaps, ceases to afflict him. The machine, too delicate for such rough work, has been broken by repeated blows—the nerve has throbbed itself out. Shakespearean parallels are, I think, very interesting and instructive, but they are seldom dwelt upon.
Thus far out of the path of what I am pledged to deal in, a fanciful comparison has led me; but I will go no further. Ne ultra crepidam sutor, etc., though, to be sure, I am no more altogether naturalist than King Lear's fool was "altogether fool." So as, from king or emperor downwards, I have no respect for titles, it is not much wonder if I forget now and again to be subservient to that of my own book.[16] Yet to do so is fiddle-de-dee, for books and people both, in this world, are judged of as they are labelled—often getting labelled by accident—and though, in this little excursion into other realms, I have talked no more nonsense than any literary critic may, without at all committing himself—except to nonsense, which doesn't at all matter—yet I talk it where it will not be thought sense. To return then—for your reviewer bites the thumb at a digression—I noticed many other herring-gulls hovering over these puffin-haunted slopes, and that they live largely upon the young of these birds, as well as on young kittiwakes, I do not now doubt. I can see no reason why they should not lie in wait, and drag the former from their holes. I must watch for this. This reminds me of how often I have found the newly-picked remains of puffins on the cliffs and shore; but these were all of full-grown birds. What bird, in especial, is responsible for this? Surely not gulls! And never having seen a peregrine falcon here, I have got to not much believe in him. I have seen no sign of such a thing on the part of the great skuas. The others, I think, are only robbers, or at least could hardly kill a puffin, whose beak should be more powerful than their own. It is somewhat of a mystery to me.
[16] But I needn't have forgotten my own afterthought "—and Digressions." Hurrah! That frees me.
One more word upon the puffin. He is strongly ritualistic, if not actually a papist. I find it, as is so often the case, difficult to be sure which. See the whole series of pretty little genuflexions that he makes after coming down upon a rock, and then consider his vestments, his surplice—if that is the proper thing—"his rich dalmatic and maniple fine," his "rochet and pall," and so on—they are all there, I feel certain, for not otherwise could he look so extraordinary. His beak, too, if he only open it the least little bit in the world, is a bishop's mitre, and, for the ring, he wears it round his eye. "Pope," indeed, is one of his local names, but, on the whole, I class him as a ritualist, for he "out-herods Herod." Whether he secedes to Rome ever, or as near there as the mouth of the Tiber, I don't quite know; but if he does 'tis no matter, for he is sure to come back again.