My sister Emmeline and I
Together visited.
She looked at it as if she feared it,—
Still wishing, dreading to be near it,
Such heart was in her.
But the reverend naturalist will none of this. Sparrows indeed! [[81]]are not five sold for two farthings? Shall any note be taken of them in our modern enlightened science? No; nor yet of the dainty little Bramble Finch, couched in her knotty hollow of birch trunk; though England, and mainland Europe, and Asia Minor, Persia, China, and Japan, all know the little Brambling;—and though in the desolate region of the Dovrefeldt,[7] too high for the Chaffinch, she decorates the outer walls of her nest with flat pieces of lichen and other materials,—though she is attractive in her winter dress; and in her summer costume, “no pencil can do her justice,” clerical taste and propriety will none of her;—no, nor even of the dear little fellow who looks so much like the properest of clergymen himself, in the sprucest of white ties—the Stone-Chat,—preaching, or chattering, or chatting, from the highest twig of his furze-bush;—no, nor of the Fire-crested Wren, poised on long spray of larch with purple buds; nor even, though she, at least might, one would have thought, have provided some ‘fun’ for the ecclesiastical family, the long-tailed Tit, or Bottle-tit, with her own impatient family of six Bottle tits, every one with a black eye, as if to illustrate the sympathy of their nature with bottle-tits of the human species, and every one with its mouth open; and the nest, of their mother’s exquisite building, with the pale sides of the lichens always turned to the light, and 2,000 feathers used in its lining, and these, nothing to the amount of “invisible cobwebs” taken to attach the decorative pieces of lichen to the outside. All this is contemptible to my religious author; but he hunts Mr. Gould’s whole book through, to find the horriblest creature in it—the Butcher-bird! transfixing mice on the spines of the blackthorn, and tearing their flesh from them as they hang, ‘invariably breaking the skull,’ with farther parental direction of the youthful mind. “Do you see that great [[82]]tit on a branch of this poplar? He is actually at work doing a bit of butchering on a small warbler. See how he is beating the poor little fellow about the head; he wants to get at his brains.” This—for one of his two plates, besides the frontispiece, of the back of his own head and its hat; with his two children ‘wanting to get at’—something in his hand—and his only remaining plate is of the heron, merely because it is big; for his miserable copyist has taken care to change every curve of the bird’s neck and body, so as to destroy every gracious character it has in Mr. Gould’s plate, to an extent so wonderful that I mean to impale the two together—on the stem of a blackthorn—in my Oxford schools.
I have much to say, eventually, about this extraordinary instinct for the horrible, developing itself at present in the English mind. The deep root of it is cruelty, indulged habitually by the upper classes in their sports, till it has got into the blood of the whole nation; then, the destruction of beautiful things, taking place ever since the sixteenth century, and of late ending in utter blackness of catastrophe, and ruin of all grace and glory in the land; so that sensation must be got out of death, or darkness, or frightfulness; else it cannot be had at all—while it is daily more and more demanded by the impatient cretinism of national dotage.
And the culmination of the black business is, that the visible misery drags and beguiles, to its help, all the enthusiastic simplicity of the religious young, and the honest strength of the really noble type of English clergymen; and swallows them as Charybdis would lifeboats. Courageous and impulsive men, with just sense enough to make them soundly practical, and therefore complacent in immediate business; but not enough to enable them to see what the whole business comes to, when done, are sure to throw themselves desperately into the dirty work, and die like lively moths in candle-grease. Here is one of them at [[83]]this instant—“dangerously ill of scarlet fever,”—alas! his whole generous life having been but one fit of scarlet fever;—and all aglow in vain.
The London correspondent of the Brighton Daily News writes:—“On Sunday morning Mr. Moncure Conway, preaching his usual sermon in his chapel in Finsbury, made a strong attack upon the National Church, but subsequently modified it so far as to admit that it was possible for some clergymen of the Church to be of use in their day and generation; and he referred especially to the rector of a neighbouring parish, whom he did not name, but who was evidently Mr. Septimus Hansard, rector of Bethnal-green, who is now lying dangerously ill of scarlet fever. This is the third perilous illness he has had since he has been in this parish; each time it was caught while visiting the sick poor. On one occasion he fell down suddenly ill in his pulpit. It was found that he was suffering from smallpox, and he at once said that he would go to an hospital. A cab was brought to take him there, but he refused to enter it, lest he should be the means of infecting other persons; and, a hearse happening to pass, he declared that he would go in that, and in it he went to the hospital—a rare instance this of pluck and self-devotion. His next illness was typhus fever; and now, as I have said, he is suffering from a disease more terrible still. Five hundred a year (and two curates to pay out of it) is scarcely excessive payment for such a life as that.”
For such a life—perhaps not. But such a death, or even perpetual risk of it, it appears to me, is dear at the money.