26 June: Boreham on Gilbert White

Historian of a Hamlet
On this, the anniversary of his death, we seem to invade a particularly colourful and fragrant pleasance when we recall the crystalline character and fruitful career of Gilbert White, of Selbourne. Gilbert White lived the uneventful life of an obscure country parson, courting neither wealth, popularity, nor fame. In a village he was born; in that selfsame village he was destined to die; and in its drowsy quietude most of his days were spent. But among the daisied fields and primrosed woods of Selbourne—fields and woods in which the bees took him into their confidence and the birds whispered into his ear their subtle secrets—Gilbert White discovered a spacious universe, a universe that ravished his heart and satisfied his soul.

Of explorers there are two kinds—those who explore extensively and those who explore intensively. The one moves among vast continents and scattered archipelagoes, marking the position of each upon a chart. The other contents himself with a piece of land scarcely larger than a pocket handkerchief; but examines each blade of grass and each grain of sand so thoroughly that science is incalculably enriched by his research. James Cook and Gilbert White were boys together. And whilst, a few years later, Capt. Cook was opening up a new hemisphere, Gilbert White was closely examining the copse, the hedgerow, and the winding lanes that converged upon the village green. While the one was pushing his keel into unknown seas, sailing under unfamiliar stars, meeting untutored barbarians who had never previously gazed upon a white face, and surveying landscapes luxuriating in vegetation that was entirely novel, the other was patiently observing the movements of the cuckoo, the habits of the water rat, the ways of the viper, the markings of the whitethroat, the operations of the earthworm, and the eccentricities of the martin, the swallow, the blackcap, and the nightingale. And today the fruits of both enterprises—"Cook's Voyages" and White's "Natural History of Selbourne"—stand side by side among our most treasured classics. And, in his famous list of hundred best books ever written, Sir John Lubbock finds a place for both of them.

The Infinite In The Infinitesimal
To each of those two men the realm that he had chosen to explore was fairyland, a world of wonders, a sphere of glittering enchantment. Cook, among his coral reefs and green atolls and blue lagoons and cannibal islands, would have looked with disdain upon the circumscribed character of the Hampshire parson's puny world; but not for all the wealth of the Indies would White have changed places with the intrepid navigator. His tranquil existence never for a moment palled upon him. One has only to read his letters in order to feel the glow of that fervid enthusiasm which every object in tilth and pasture awoke within him. Capt. Cook can scarcely have felt more excitement over the picturesque paradises that he discovered in the Pacific than Gilbert White felt in investigating the methods of the migratory birds, the different ways in which the squirrel eats his hazel nuts, the booming of the bittern, and in tracing the haunts of the kingfisher.

The letters that he wrote to his friends, Thomas Pennant and Daines Barrington, though the product of his mature years, read at times like the vehement scribblings of an excited schoolboy. He finds a feather under a beech tree; with almost childish glee he sends it post-haste to Mr. Pennant for his opinion; and, so feverish is his impatience for his friend's reply, he can scarcely eat or sleep until it arrives. He pens his descriptions of glow worms and dragonflies with the exactitude and the gravity with which Capt. Cook would chart a continental coastline.

Modesty That Never Suspects Its Own Greatness
Gilbert White was essentially a villager among villagers. It never occurred to him that he was a naturalist. The idea of printing his notes never entered his mind. He was 70 when his friends suggested the startling idea. He laughed it to scorn. Nothing could convince him that the game was worth the candle. What had he done? He had simply pottered about the fields, poked his way through the bracken, and, listening to the call of the birds and the sough of the wind, had waited with quick ears for the faintest breathing of some shy woodland dweller. And, if a hare came bounding along the furrow, or a weasel popped out of its hole at the elm tree bole, or a mottled thrush came hopping across the open green sward, or a rook flew, cawing, to its nest, the delighted observer had simply made a careful note of the romantic adventure and described it ecstatically to his friends.

Although of singularly sweet and gracious personality, he never married; but the fondness with which he dotes on the beauty of the beeches that compose his favourite retreat—their shapely forms; their smooth bark; their glossy foliage and their lissome and pendulous boughs—is reminiscent of the ardent and lingering affection with which a lover speaks of the beauty of his lady's face and the ripe loveliness of her figure. The art of Gilbert White was, first and foremost, the art of a villager. He was utterly destitute of self-consciousness. Had he, in his woodland walks, recognised in himself an eminent naturalist; or had he, for a single moment, suspected that those free and easy notes of his would crystallise into an English classic, everything would have been spoiled. One wonders what the shy little cleric would have thought if he could have foreseen that, a century and a half after his death, people in all parts of the world would be reading the book that he so diffidently published. As it is, he captivates us by his perfect innocence, his exquisite restfulness, and his unaffected simplicity. We listen to his voice with the delight with which we feast our eyes upon the village green or watch the movements of the fallow deer in the woodland glade. There is not much wrong with a world that keeps a place in its heart for Gilbert White.

F W Boreham

Image: Gilbert White