No doubt the sparrow is the most abundant species in Bath—I have got into a habit of not noticing that bird, and it is as if I did not see him; but after him the starling is undoubtedly the most numerous. He is, we know, increasing everywhere, but in no other town in England have I found him in such numbers. He is seen in flocks of a dozen to half a hundred, busily searching for grubs on every lawn and green place in and round the town, and if you go up to some elevated spot so as to look down upon Bath, you will see flocks of starlings arriving and departing at all points. As you walk the streets their metallic clink-clink-clink sounds from all quarters—small noises which to most men are lost among the louder noises of a populous town. It is as if every house had a peal of minute bells hidden beneath the tiles or slates of the roof, or among the chimney-pots, that they were constantly being rung, and that every bell was cracked.
The ordinary or unobservant person sees and hears far more of the jackdaw than of any other bird in Bath. Daws are seen and heard all over the town, but are most common about the Abbey, where they soar and gambol and quarrel all day long, and when they think that nobody is looking, drop down to the streets to snatch up and carry off any eatable-looking object that catches their eye.
It was here at this central spot, while I stood one day idly watching the birds disporting themselves about the Abbey and listened to their clamour, that certain words of Ruskin came into my mind, and I began to think of them not merely with admiration, as when I first read them long ago, but critically.
Ruskin, one of our greatest prose writers, is usually at his best in the transposition of pictures into words, his descriptions of what he has seen, in nature and art, being the most perfect examples of "word painting" in the language. Here his writing is that of one whose vision is not merely, as in the majority of men, the most important and intellectual of the senses, but so infinitely more important than all the others, and developed and trained to so extraordinary a degree, as to make him appear like a person of a single sense. We may say that this predominant sense has caused, or fed upon, the decay of the others. This is to me a defect in the author I most admire; for though he makes me see, and delight in seeing, that which was previously hidden, and all things gain in beauty and splendour, I yet miss something from the picture, just as I should miss light and colour from a description of nature, however beautifully written, by a man whose sense of sight was nothing or next to nothing to him, but whose other senses were all developed to the highest state of perfection.
No doubt Ruskin is, before everything, an artist: in other words, he looks at nature and all visible things with a purpose, which I am happily without: and the reflex effect of his purpose is to make nature to him what it can never appear to me—a painted canvas. But this subject, which I have touched on in a single sentence, demands a volume.
Ruskin wrote of the cathedral daws, "That drift of eddying black points, now closing, now scattering, now settling suddenly into invisible places among the bosses and flowers, the crowd of restless birds that fill the whole square with that strange clangour of theirs, so harsh and yet so soothing." For it seemed to me that he had seen the birds but had not properly heard them; or else that to his mind the sound they made was of such small consequence in the effect of the whole scene—so insignificant an element compared with the sight of them—that it was really not worth attending to and describing accurately.
Possibly, in this particular case, when in speaking of the daws he finished his description by throwing in a few words about their voices, he was thinking less of the impression on his own mind, presumably always vague about natural sounds, than of what the poet Cowper had said in the best passage in his best work about "sounds harsh and inharmonious in themselves," which are yet able to produce a soothing effect on us on account of the peaceful scenes amid which they are heard.
Cowper's notion of the daw's voice, by the way, was just as false as that expressed by Ruskin, as we may find in his paraphrase of Vincent Bourne's lines to that bird:—
There is a bird that by his coat,
And by the hoarseness of his note
Might be supposed a crow.
Now the daw is capable at times of emitting both hoarse and harsh notes, and the same may perhaps be said of a majority of birds; but his usual note—the cry or caw varied and inflected a hundred ways, which we hear every day and all day long where daws abound—is neither harsh like the crow's, nor hoarse like the rook's. It is, in fact, as unlike the harsh, grating caw of the former species as the clarion call of the cock is unlike the grunting of swine. It may not be described as bell-like nor metallic, but it is loud and clear, with an engaging wildness in it, and, like metallic sounds, far-reaching; and of so good a quality that very little more would make it ring musically.