Love's Meinie Part 1

Love's Meinie.

by John Ruskin.

PREFACE.

BRANTWOOD, 9_th June_, 1881.

_Quarter past five, morning._

The birds chirping feebly,--mostly chaffinches answering each other, the rest discomposed, I fancy, by the June snow;[1] the lake neither smooth nor rippled, but like a surface of perfectly bright gla.s.s, ill cast; the lines of wave few and irregular, like flaws in the planes of a fine crystal.

[1] The summits of the Old Man, of Wetherlam, and Helvellyn, were all white, on the morning when this was written.

I see this book was begun eight years ago;--then intended to contain only four Oxford lectures: but the said lectures also 'intended' to contain the cream of forty volumes of scientific ornithology. Which intentions, all and sundry, having gone, Carlyle would have said, to water, and more piously-minded persons, to fire, I am obliged now to cast my materials into another form: and here, at all events, is a bundle of what is readiest under my hand. The nature and name of which I must try to make a little more intelligible than my books have lately been, either in text or t.i.tle.

'Meinie' is the old English word for 'Many,' in the sense of 'a many'

persons attending one, as bridesmaids, when in sixes or tens or dozens;--courtiers, footmen, and the like. It pa.s.ses gradually into 'Menial,' and unites the senses of Mult.i.tude and Servitude.

In the pa.s.sages quoted from, or referred to in, Chaucer's translation of the Romance of the Rose, at the end of the first lecture, any reader who cares for a clue to the farther significances of the t.i.tle, may find one to lead him safely through richer labyrinths of thought than mine: and ladder enough also,--if there be either any heavenly, or pure earthly, Love, in his own breast,--to guide him to a pretty bird's nest; both in the Romances of the Rose and of Juliet, and in the Sermons of St. Francis and St. Bernard.

The term 'Lecture' is retained, for though I lecture no more, I still write habitually in a manner suited for oral delivery, and imagine myself speaking to my pupils, if ever I am happily thinking in myself.

But it will be also seen that by the help of this very familiarity of style, I am endeavoring, in these and my other writings on Natural History, to compel in the student a clearness of thought and precision of language which have not hitherto been in any wise the virtues, or skills, of scientific persons. Thoughtless readers, who imagine that my own style (such as it is, the one thing which the British public concedes to me as a real power) has been formed without pains, may smile at the confidence with which I speak of altering accepted, and even long-established, nomenclature. But the use which I now have of language has taken me forty years to attain; and those forty years spent, mostly, in walking through the wilderness of this world's vain words, seeking how they might be pruned into some better strength. And I think it likely that at last I may put in my pruning-hook with effect; for indeed a time must come when English fathers and mothers will wish their children to learn English again, and to speak it for all scholarly purposes; and, if they use, instead, Greek or Latin, to use them only that they may be understood by Greeks or Latins;[2] and not that they may mystify the illiterate many of their own land. Dead languages, so called, may at least be left at rest, if not honored; and must not be torn in mutilation out of their tumuli, that the skins and bones of them may help to hold our living nonsense together; while languages called living, but which live only to slack themselves into slang, or bloat themselves into bombast, must one day have new grammars written for their license, and new laws for their insolence.

[2] Greek is now a living nation's language, from Messina to Delos--and Latin still lives for the well-trained churchmen and gentlemen of Italy.

Observe, however, that the recast methods of cla.s.sification adopted in this book, and in 'Proserpina,' must be carefully distinguished from their recastings of nomenclature. I am perfectly sure that it is wiser to use plain short words than obscure long ones; but not in the least sure that I am doing the best that can be done for my pupils, in cla.s.sing swallows with owls, or milkworts with violets. The cla.s.sification is always given as tentative; and, at its utmost, elementary: but the nomenclature, as in all probability conclusive.

For the rest, the success and the service of all depend on the more or less thorough accomplishment of plans long since laid, and which would have been good for little if their coping could at once have been conjectured or foretold in their foundations. It has been throughout my trust, that if Death should write on these, "What this man began to build, he was not able to finish," G.o.d may also write on them, not in anger, but in aid,

"A stronger than he, cometh."

LOVE'S MEINIE.

"Il etoit tout convert d'oisiaulx."

_Romance of the Rose._

LECTURE I.[3]

THE ROBIN.

1. Among the more splendid pictures in the Exhibition of the Old Masters, this year, you cannot but remember the Vand.y.k.e portraits of the two sons of the Duke of Lennox. I think you cannot but remember it, because it would be difficult to find, even among the works of Vand.y.k.e, a more striking representation of the youth of our English n.o.blesse; nor one in which the painter had more exerted himself, or with better success, in rendering the decorous pride and natural grace of honorable aristocracy.

[3] Delivered at Oxford, March 15th, 1873.

Vand.y.k.e is, however, inferior to t.i.tian and Velasquez, in that his effort to show this n.o.blesse of air and persons may always be detected; also the aristocracy of Vand.y.k.e's day were already so far fearful of their own position as to feel anxiety that it should be immediately recognized. And the effect of the painter's conscious deference, and of the equally conscious pride of the boys, as they stood to be painted, has been somewhat to shorten the power of the one, and to abase the dignity of the other. And thus, in the midst of my admiration of the youths' beautiful faces, and natural quality of majesty, set off by all splendors of dress and courtesies of art, I could not forbear questioning with myself what the true value was, in the scales of creation, of these fair human beings who set so high a value on themselves; and,--as if the only answer,--the words kept repeating themselves in my ear, "Ye are of more value than many sparrows."

2. Pa.s.seres, [Greek: strouthos]--the things that open their wings, and are not otherwise noticeable; small birds of the land and wood; the food of the serpent, of man, or of the stronger creatures of their own kind,--that even these, though among the simplest and obscurest of beings, have yet price in the eyes of their Maker, and that the death of one of them cannot take place but by His permission, has long been the subject of declamation in our pulpits, and the ground of much sentiment in nursery education. But the declamation is so aimless, and the sentiment so hollow, that, practically, the chief interest of the leisure of mankind has been found in the destruction of the creatures which they professed to believe even the Most High would not see perish without pity; and, in recent days, it is fast becoming the only definition of aristocracy, that the princ.i.p.al business of its life is the killing of sparrows.

Sparrows, or pigeons, or partridges, what does it matter? "Centum mille perdrices plumbo confecit;"[4] that is, indeed, too often the sum of the life of an English lord; much questionable now, if _indeed_ of more value than that of many sparrows.

[4] The epitaph on Count Zachdarm, in "Sartor Resartus."

3. Is it not a strange fact, that, interested in nothing so much for the last two hundred years, as in his horses, he yet left it to the farmers of Scotland to relieve draught horses from the bearing-rein?[5]

Is it not one equally strange that, master of the forests of England for a thousand years, and of its libraries for three hundred, he left the natural history of birds to be written by a card-printer's lad of Newcastle?[6] Written, and not written, for indeed we have no natural history of birds written yet. It cannot be written but by a scholar and a gentleman; and no English gentleman in recent times has ever thought of birds except as flying targets, or flavorous dishes. The only piece of natural history worth the name in the English language, that I know of, is in the few lines of Milton on the Creation. The only example of a proper manner of contribution to natural history is in White's Letters from Selborne. You know I have always spoken of Bewick as pre-eminently a vulgar or boorish person, though of splendid honor and genius; his vulgarity shows in nothing so much as in the poverty of the details he has collected, with the best intentions, and the shrewdest sense, for English ornithology. His imagination is not cultivated enough to enable him to choose, or arrange.

[5] Sir Arthur Helps. "Animals and their Masters," p. 67.

[6] Ariadne Florentina, vi. 45.

4. Nor can much more be said for the observations of modern science. It is vulgar in a far worse way, by its arrogance and materialism. In general, the scientific natural history of a bird consists of four articles,--first, the name and estate of the gentleman whose gamekeeper shot the last that was seen in England; secondly, two or three stories of doubtful origin, printed in every book on the subject of birds for the last fifty years; thirdly, an account of the feathers, from the comb to the rump, with enumeration of the colors which are never more to be seen on the living bird by English eyes; and, lastly, a discussion of the reasons why none of the twelve names which former naturalists have given to the bird are of any further use, and why the present author has given it a thirteenth, which is to be universally, and to the end of time, accepted.

5. You may fancy this is caricature; but the abyss of confusion produced by modern science in nomenclature, and the utter void of the abyss when you plunge into it after any one useful fact, surpa.s.s all caricature. I have in my hand thirteen plates of thirteen species of eagles; eagles all, or hawks all, or falcons all--whichever name you choose for the great race of the hook-headed birds of prey--some so like that you can't tell the one from the other, at the distance at which I show them to you, all absolutely alike in their eagle or falcon character, having, every one, the falx for its beak, and every one, flesh for its prey. Do you suppose the unhappy student is to be allowed to call them all eagles, or all falcons, to begin with, as would be the first condition of a wise nomenclature, establishing resemblance by specific name, before marking variation by individual name? No such luck. I hold you up the plates of the thirteen birds one by one, and read you their names off the back:--

The first, is an Aquila.

The second, a Haliaetus.

The third, a Milvus.

The fourth, a Pandion.

The fifth, an Astur.

The sixth, a Falco.

The seventh, a Pernis.

The eighth, a Circus.

The ninth, a Buteo.

The tenth, an Archibuteo.

The eleventh, an Accipiter.

The twelfth, an Erythropus.

And the thirteenth, a Tinnunculus.

There's a nice little lesson to entertain a parish school-boy with, beginning his natural history of birds!

6. There are not so many varieties of robin as of hawk, but the scientific cla.s.sifiers are not to be beaten. If they cannot find a number of similar birds to give different names to, they will give two names to the same one. Here are two pictures of your own redbreast, out of the two best modern works on ornithology. In one, it is called "Motacilla rubecula;" in the other, "Rubecula familiaris."

7. It is indeed one of the most serious, as one of the most absurd, weaknesses, of modern naturalists to imagine that _any_ presently invented nomenclature can stand, even were it adopted by the consent of nations, instead of the conceit of individuals. It will take fifty years' digestion before the recently ascertained elements of natural science can permit the arrangement of species in any permanently (even over a limited period) namable order; nor then, unless a great man is born to perceive and exhibit such order. In the meantime, the simplest and most descriptive nomenclature is the best. Every one of these birds, for instance, might be called falco in Latin, hawk in English, some word being added to distinguish the genus, which should describe its princ.i.p.al aspect or habit. Falco montium, Mountain Hawk; Falco silvarum, Wood Hawk; Falco procellarum, Sea Hawk; and the like. Then, one descriptive epithet would mark species. Falco montium, aureus, Golden Eagle; Falco silvarum, apivorus, Honey Buzzard; and so on; and the naturalists of Vienna, Paris, and London should confirm the names of known creatures, in conclave, once every half-century, and let them so stand for the next fifty years.

8. In the meantime, you yourselves, or, to speak more generally, the young rising scholars of England,--all of you who care for life as well as literature, and for spirit,--even the poor souls of birds,--as well as lettering of their cla.s.ses in books,--you, with all care, should cherish the old Saxon-English and Norman-French names of birds, and ascertain them with the most affectionate research--never despising even the rudest or most provincial forms: all of them will, some day or other, give you clue to historical points of interest. Take, for example, the common English name of this low-flying falcon, the most tamable and affectionate of his tribe, and therefore, I suppose, fastest vanishing from field and wood, the buzzard. That name comes from the Latin "buteo," still retained by the ornithologists; but, in its original form, valueless, to you. But when you get it comfortably corrupted into Provencal "Busac," (whence gradually the French busard, and our buzzard,) you get from it the delightful compound "busacador,"

"adorer of buzzards"--meaning, generally, a sporting person; and then you have Dante's Bertrand de Born, the first troubadour of war, bearing witness to you how the love of mere hunting and falconry was already, in his day, degrading the military cla.s.ses, and, so far from being a necessary adjunct of the n.o.ble disposition of lover or soldier, was, even to contempt, showing itself separate from both.

"Le ric home, ca.s.sador, M'enneion, e'l buzacador.

Parlan de volada, d'austor, Ne jamais, d'armas, ni d'amor."