It may be seen often enough in South France and Italy. The last (or last but one?) known of in England came thirty years ago, and this was its reception, as related by the present happy possessor of its feathers and bones:—
“The little Egret in my possession is a most beautiful specimen: it was killed by a labourer with a stick, in Ake Carr, near Beverley, about 1840, and was brought to me, tied up in a pocket-handkerchief, covered with black wet mud and blood, in which state it was sent to Mr. Reed, of Doncaster, and restored by him in a most marvellous manner.”
175. Now, you will feel at once that, while the peasant was beating this bird into a piece of bloody flesh with his stick, he could not, in any true sense, see the bird; that he had no pleasure either in the sight of that, or of anything near it.
You feel that he would become capable of seeing it in exact proportion to his desire not to kill it; but to watch it in its life.
Well, that is a quite general law: in the degree in which you delight in the life of any creature, you can see it; no otherwise.
And you would feel, would you not, that if you could enable the peasant rightly to see the bird, you had in great part educated him?
176. You would certainly have gone, at least, the third of the way towards educating him. Then the next thing to be contrived would be that he should be able to see a man rightly, as well as a bird; to understand and love what was good in a man, so that supposing his master was a good man, the sight of his master should be a joy to him. You would say that he was therein better educated than if he wanted to put a gun through a hedge and shoot his master.
Then the last part of education will be—whatever is meant by that beatitude of the pure in heart—seeing God rightly, of which I shall not speak to-day.
177. And in all these phases of education, the main point, you observe, is that it should be a beatitude: and that a man should learn “χαίρειν ὀρθῶς:” and this rejoicing is above all things to be in actual sight; you have the truth exactly in the saying of Dante when he is brought before Beatrice, in heaven, that his eyes “satisfied themselves for their ten years’ thirst.”
This, then, I repeat, is the sum of education. All literature, art, and science are vain, and worse, if they do not enable you to be glad; and glad justly.