68 BIRDS OF THE COUNTRYSIDE 



purple flies. Then, obeying some secret message (thought 

 transference seems the only explanation), they would 

 rise in a body and scatter all over the irregular contour 

 of the grey stone, like butterflies about the flowers. 



It was fine to wander round the buildings grouped 

 into that subtle proportion of line, space and mass 

 which gives the cathedral its supremacy above all 

 others — a supremacy which even the restorer's ugly, thin, 

 bluish shafts adorning the west front Uke gutter pipes 

 can hardly mar — ^and watch the wild, giddy flights of 

 the swallows, the daws, the wagtails and the starlings 

 about them. Impressions are both contrasted and 

 harmonious — volume and delicacy, intensity and repose, 

 solemnity and dashing speed side by side, art and 

 nature united in religion. 



Art and nature are indeed but parts of the same 

 objective reality ; they achieve the same results, they 

 employ the same methods and work to the same 

 glorious end — ^the survival of the soul, since in the 

 crowded multiplicity of life it alone in all its appearances 

 is the best fitted to survive. Therefore, when I saw 

 a woman in the nave with a pair of tern's wings in 

 her hat, I was right to see in her a blasphemer, and 

 one in spirit with the vandals who cast down the 

 statues in the first tier of the west front. What did 

 she there, with her plunder of the rich genius of God, 

 to display the foulness of mankind in the place of its 

 splendour ? Truly, man is the incomparable monarch 

 of the world, both in the height of his greatness and 

 the abyss of his vileness. Nevertheless, the natural 

 historian of animal life — mammal (including man, of 

 course), bird and insect — must tread warily in his 

 judgments. Civilizations have their seasons, their green, 

 brown and yellow leaf, and ours, its labours accomplished, 

 now hangs like a rotten plum on the tree of life. But 

 another civilization overlaps it and will catch up the 

 sifted value of its heritage, and in its turn will give 

 place before another, the civilization perhaps of some 

 humble race unconscious yet of its birthright, until we 

 are brought safely home at last. The word of God, 

 or, as we call it nowadays, evolution, is at the back 



