The Avian Superstition

IT is the thankless duty of middle age to bear witness to pricked bubbles. I was, all through my youth, conventionally sentimental about birds. I never had a canary in a cage, but that was because I was so sorry for caged canaries. I was ever melancholy in an aviary. I am so still; but now, I confess, for different reasons. I can no longer romance even about the lark at Heaven’s gate. The fact is simply, I suppose, that birds have, since those days, entered into my actual experience. I was silent about my first disillusion, but I have been enough agreed with, now, to feel justified in speaking. All my intimate friends, I find, except the few who still write sonnets, are ready to admit that birds are for the most part detestable. They do very well in allegories; but they are best left there. I quite agree with the Audubon Society that birds should be kept off of hats. Yet if one has ever looked into the evil face of an ostrich, one is, forever after, at a loss to know what he is good for except millinery. My own idea is that most birds would be comparatively unobjectionable if they could be seen and not heard. But I must begin to explain myself, or I shall have all conventional metaphor arrayed against me. And I really need that on my own side.

It would be a platitude, at the moment, to say that the human imagination is immensely taken by the notion of flying; for at the moment the human imagination seems to be taken by nothing else. To be sure, the notion has usually been considered, hitherto, material for the imagination alone. Saint Paul to the contrary notwithstanding, I doubt if any Athenian would have consented to attend an aviation meet — unless, perhaps, Aristophanes. The people who invented Icarus would obviously have been shocked by a Wright biplane. It has taken the present generation to materialize that symbolic disaster. We have been taken in by the possibility of living in another element than the one proper to us. We fancy that there will be something supraterrestrial, ever after, in our point of view. We rejoice in the fact that we have ‘bird-men.’ But this, I am persuaded, is an over-poetic attitude. The only new impressions that successful aviators have reported to us, so far as I know, are that the earth looks hollow, and that it is extraordinary to lose all sense of direction. And those impressions, I feel sure, the birds themselves do not share.

I think that my first suspicion of bird-nature was gained, humbly, from the ‘tame villatic fowl’ of my country neighbor. A lover of larks may protest that a hen is not, in the finest sense of the word, a bird at all. Anything is a bird that has wings and feathers and can fly. That definition I insist on. There are, of course, people who like hens. Yet hens are awkward; their beauty is not even wing-deep; they have dreadful voices; they are utterly without reticence; and their personal habits are those of the traditional slum. I am quite sure that most people who defend them merely do so to try to pay a debt of gratitude. No one could be fonder of eggs than I. I am willing to give any price that is asked for them, even in midwinter. I am not sure that, if hard-pushed, I would not barter a first edition for a really perfect egg. But I cannot believe that it is my duty to associate with the hen that laid it. Heaven often chooses strange ministers. It may even be (one recalls the threat of Kim’s lama, attacked on the high Himalayan spur) that a hen is expiating in this vile incarnation her previous existence as a daughter of the Borgias. I am not fitted to discuss these spiritual economics. But whatever past misdemeanors the hen may be expiating, it is certain that the rooster is even now committing his sins. I have not seen M. Rostand’s Chantecler. I share Charlotte Brontë’s hatred of the basse cour, and my most pedantic friend would not expect me even to read it. It is bad enough to see women one likes wearing hats shaped, and veils woven, after the likeness of the hero. I said, I think, that birds were not amiss in allegories. But in real life, a lusty cock positively lessens one’s respect for the sun.

Yet, after all, there is no poetic convention in favor of the barnyard. It is the melting song or the brilliant plumage that has, in most cases, made the bird’s reputation. There is no species, to be sure, that a catholic person ought utterly to condemn. And, as for the nightingale, I must confess that, at home and abroad, Philomela shuns me. I have never heard a nightingale. Apparently no lyric poet has ever shared my deprivation. Indeed, I have always liked to realize that it was the author of ‘Dream-Pedlary’ and ‘DialThoughts’ who cried: —

There is testimony from an English garden! How much that is raucous, on the other hand, I have heard! I have lain through convalescent weeks in late spring, listening in vain for the note of a thrush, but waked every morning — and kept awake — by a woodpecker’s maddening simulation of an electric bell. One of my friends told me that she gave up the attempt to sleep on her loggia, not so much because she minded waking early as because, in the early morning hours, she got such a painful revelation of the real temper of birds. I have verified her comments, since then. To sleep outdoors in the country is rather like seeing Kalich act Thérèse Raquin. There are scenes at which, even across footlights, one does not like to assist; and there are vituperations which, even though they are inarticulate, it is positively embarrassing to hear. Better catbirds than cats — but is this praise? And the same unsatisfactoriness exists, to my mind, in the matter of plumage. For one glimpse of the oriole or the indigo-bird, one has a thousand of the English sparrow or the robin — who looks (I beg to say it) like a successful grocer turned into a ‘sporting gent.’ You cannot count even on the peacock’s vanity. I nearly missed a train, a year or two since, at Chinon, because I stopped in my descent from the château to beg a dingy peacock to spread his tail for me. The peacock, however, on his historic rampart, would do nothing but sing. And he had the impudence to face me, as he did it, with the solemnity of a basso profundo.

One’s disillusion, however, has its source, as it should have, in the discovery of moral baseness. No one, I fancy, has ever credited birds with much intelligence. You can see trained seals, trained mice, trained fleas. In what exhibition, pray, do you see trained birds? But, believe me, the ostrich, hiding his head, is more knave than fool. He knows perfectly well that his countenance gives him away. There are degrees of viciousness in the feathered kind, as in others. It ranges from the mere bad manners of the mockingbird, the sordid gluttony of the seagull (who does not remember him, fluttering in the wake of one’s incoming ship, for scraps from the galley?), to the ghoulishness of the carrion crow and the frank brutality of the vulture.

Let us face the truth about birds; nor be duped by the beauty of their flight’s incalculable curves. They are greedy, they are impertinent, they are untrustworthy, they are brainless, they are hopelessly unclean. They have not even the qualities of their defects. The least, for example, that one could expect of such matinal creatures would be punctuality. Myself, I have never depended on my woodpecker to wake me at a given time; but I once had a friend who counted on a cardinal-bird. Six mornings he waked her regularly just three hours before breakfast. This, she considered, constituted a precedent. On the seventh morning, she had an early engagement. The cardinal-bird had, by that time, sought other casements, and my trusting friend missed her appointment. This is the real meaning of ‘flightiness.’

And I insist, too, that even the least objectionable birds have been overrated. I remember the welcome words of another friend when I confessed that during a week-end visit to a common acquaintance I had not slept well. ‘ Was it those damned doves?’ he inquired eagerly. It had been those damned doves. I would almost rather keep a pet alligator in my bathtub (I know some one who does) than two doves in a cage outside my bedroom door. A French Jesuit, preaching recently to an audience of women, adjured them not to repeat themselves in the confessional. He assured them that they did not know how it racked the nerves of the priest. It must be very like listening, for a few hours, to moaning doves. They seem to be confessing the same sin over and over again. Where, among birds, is one to go for virtue, if doves have it not? As for parrots, they belong in Malebolge.

It was the late Professor Child, I believe, who suggested that an aviary would be of assistance to him in elucidating his lectures on the English poets. ‘When we come to Wordsworth, for example,’he is credited with explaining, ‘I need only say, “Johnny, poke up the lark.”’ Back of his plaintive irony we need not go. It is quite true that the English poets talked constantly about birds that American undergraduates have never heard. But we need not live with birds to appreciate poetry written about them. We can read our Shelley and our Keats joyfully without any such terrible intimacies. I shall antagonize the Naturestudy classes by saying it, but take an example. The bittern, I believe, is nearly extinct: not only we, but our parents and grandparents in all probability, never heard it. The dragon, moreover, is a fabulous creature. Will any member of a Nature-study class agree that he misses, for this reason, the sublimity of the major prophecies?

‘ I will also make it a possession for the bittern, and pools of water . . . an habitation of dragons, and a court for owls . . . both the cormorant and the bittern shall lodge in the upper lintels of it; their voice shall sing in the windows.’ On the other hand, does the universal prejudice against the sparrow destroy for any one the AngloSaxon parable? ‘Such do I see this present life of man on earth, oh, king, in comparison with the time which is unknown to us; even as if thou sattest in wintertide at a banquet among thy chiefs and thanes, and the fire were kindled and thy hall were warmed, and it rained and snowed and stormed without; and a sparrow should come and should fly quickly through the hall, coming in by one door and going out at the other. Lo, while he is within, he is not touched by the storm of winter; but it is only for the twinkling of an eye and the briefest space, for he soon comes out of the winter into the winter again.’ No: birds are not amiss in literature. It is in life that they are intolerable.

There is one bird that I have loved. He was lent me, for a time, to beautify a temporary lodgment in a foreign country. Pavo Tibetanus was the legend he bore; and underneath, in parenthesis, Pavone del Regno di Tibet. He was sky-blue, like the poppies that — they tell us— bloom along the road to Lhasa. Him I loved. But he was the archsymbol of the inaccessible.