GILBERT WHITE AND SELBORNE 79 



the one moving towards modern " humanitarianism," 

 the other to the admirably precise field natural history, 

 which, almost overthrown by laboratory and museum 

 specialization, shows signs of emerging the stronger and 

 more useful science — not to mention its graciousness. 



What, then, was White's achievement ? First of all, 

 one is inclined to think, a triumph over the eighteenth 

 century. In style, manner and attitude White was 

 eighteenth century to the bone — the best of it in 

 maturity, elegance, fastidiousness and easy, cultured 

 grace. He was " an admirer of prospects," and church 

 spires he regarded " as very necessary ingredients in 

 an elegant landscape." Of a gentleman much taken 

 with echoes : — 



From a seat at the centrum phonicum, he and his friends might 

 amuse themselves sometimes of an evening with the prattle of 

 this loquacious nymph, of whose complacency and decent reserve 

 more may be said than can with truth of every individual of 

 her sex. 



There is nothing amphibian here : the perfect urbanity 

 of White's rusticity would have passed the most exacting 

 coffee-house standards. But when it comes to his 

 method, he is as much a stranger to his age as Blake 

 was, whom he could as little have understood as the 

 polite circles of metropolitan culture could have under- 

 stood him riding forty miles to see a heronry, or creep- 

 ing about on hands and knees, revealing the domestic 

 secrets of the field cricket. Precision of statement, 

 exactness of knowledge and observation, an absorbed 

 interest and curiosity for the problems of natural life 

 hitherto imtouched (Willughby's Ornithology is more a 

 legacy of the bestiaries than a prophecy of White) — ^this 

 was bucolic savagery to the eighteenth century, which 

 could be discreetly rhapsodical about the nymphs of 

 fancy who lived in trees, but turned up its poetic nose 

 when the nymph of fancy was metamorphosed into the 

 nuthatch of reality. It cannot be too often insisted 

 that the eighteenth century abhorred facts and particu- 

 larities : that it had a passion for the vague, the abstract 

 and the remote, which ultimately destroyed all its 



