Birds in Town and Village (eBook)

 THE EAGLE AND THE CANARY

 One week-day morning, following a crowd of well-dressed people, I presently found myself in a large church or chapel, where I spent an hour very pleasantly, listening to a great man's pulpit eloquence. He preached about genius. The subject was not suggested by the text, nor did it have any close relation with the other parts, of his discourse; it was simply a digression, and, to my mind, a very delightful one. He began about the restrictions to which we are all more or less subject, the aspirations that are never destined to be fulfilled, but are mocked by life's brevity. And it was at this point that--probably thinking of his own case--he branched off into the subject of genius; and proceeded to show that a man possessing that divine quality finds existence a much sadder affair than the ordinary man; the reason being that his aspirations are so much loftier than those of other minds, the difference between his ideal and reality must be correspondingly greater in his case. This was obvious--almost a truism; but the illustration by means of which he brought it home to his hearers was certainly born of poetic imagination. The life of the ordinary person he likened to that of the canary in its cage. And here, dropping his lofty didactic manner, and--if I may coin a word--smalling his deep, sonorous voice, to a thin reedy treble, in imitation of the tenuous fringilline pipe, he went on with lively language, rapid utterance, and suitable brisk movements and gestures, to describe the little lemon-coloured housekeeper in her gilded cage. Oh, he cried, what a bright, busy bustling life is hers, with so many things to occupy her time! how briskly she hops from perch to perch, then to the floor, and back from floor to perch again! how often she drops down to taste the seed in her box, or scatter it about her in a little shower! how curiously, and turning her bright eyes critically this way and that, she listens to every new sound and regards every object of sight! She must chirp and sing, and hop from place to place, and eat and drink, and preen her wings, and do at least a dozen different things every minute; and her time is so fully taken up that the narrow limits confining her are almost forgotten--the wires that separate her from the great world of wind-tossed woods, and of blue fields of air, and the free, buoyant life for which her instincts and faculties fit her, and which, alas! can never more be hers.

All this sounded very pretty, as well as true, and there was a pleased smile on every face in the audience.

Then the rapid movements and gestures ceased, and the speaker was silent. A cloud came over his rough-hewn majestic visage; he drew himself up, and swayed his body from side to side, and shook his black gown, and lifted his arms, as their plumed homologues are lifted by some great bird, and let them fall again two or three times; and then said, in deep measured tones, which seemed to express rage and despair, "But did you ever see the eagle in his cage?"

The effect of the contrast was grand. He shook himself again, and lifted and dropped his arms again, assuming, for the nonce, the peculiar aquiline slouch; and there before us stood the mighty bird of Jove, as we are accustomed to see it in the Zoological Gardens; its deep-set, desolate eyes looking through and beyond us; ruffling its dark plumage, and lifting its heavy wings as if about to scorn the earth, only to drop them again, and to utter one of those long dreary cries which seem to protest so eloquently against a barbarous destiny. Then he proceeded to tell us of the great raptor in its life of hopeless captivity; his stern, rugged countenance, deep bass voice, and grand mouth-filling polysllables suiting his subject well, and making his description seem to our minds a sombre magnificent picture never to be forgotten--at all events, never by an ornithologist.

Doubtless this part of his discourse proved eminently pleasing to the majority of his hearers, who, looking downwards into the depths of their own natures, would be able to discern there a glimmer, or possibly more than a glimmer of that divine quality he had spoken of, and which was, unhappily for them, not recognized by the world at large; so that, for the moment, he was addressing a congregation of captive eagles, all mentally ruffling their plumage and flapping their pinions, and uttering indignant screams of protest against the injustice of their lot.

The illustration pleased me for a different reason, namely, because, being a student of bird-life, his contrasted picture of the two widely different kinds, when deprived of liberty, struck me as being singularly true to nature, and certainly it could not have been more forcibly and picturesquely put. For it is unquestionably the fact that the misery we inflict by tyrannously using the power we possess over God's creatures, is great in proportion to the violence of the changes of condition to which we subject our prisoners; and while canary and eagle are both more or less aerial in their mode of life, and possessed of boundless energy, the divorce from nature is immeasurably greater in one case than in the other. The small bird, in relation to its free natural life, is less confined in its cage than the large one. Its smallness, perching structure, and restless habits, fit it for continual activity, and its flitting, active life within the bars bears some resemblance except in the great matter of flight, to its life in a state of nature. Again, its lively, curious, and extremely impressible character, is in many ways an advantage in captivity; every new sound and sight, and every motion, however slight, in any object or body near it, affording it, so to speak, something to think about. It has the further advantage of a varied and highly musical language; the frequent exercise of the faculty of singing, in birds, with largely developed vocal organs, no doubt reacts on the system, and contributes not a little to keep the prisoner healthy and cheerful.

On the other hand, the eagle, on account of its structure and large size, is a prisoner indeed, and must languish with all its splendid faculties and importunate impulses unexercised. You may gorge it with gobbets of flesh until its stomach cries, "Enough"; but what of all the other organs fed by the stomach, and their correlated faculties? Every bone and muscle and fibre, every feather and scale, is instinct with an energy which you cannot satisfy, and which is like an eternal hunger. Chain it by the feet, or place it in a cage fifty feet wide--in either case it is just as miserable. The illimitable fields of thin cold air, where it outrides the winds and soars exulting beyond the clouds, alone can give free space for the display of its powers and scope to its boundless energies. Nor to the power of flight alone, but also to a vision formed for sweeping wide horizons, and perceiving objects at distances which to short-sighted man seem almost miraculous.  Doubtless, eagles, like men, possess some adaptiveness, else they would perish in their enforced inactivity, swallowing without hunger and assimilating without pleasure the cold coarse flesh we give them. A human being can exist, and even be tolerably cheerful, with limbs paralyzed and hearing gone; and that, to my mind, would be a parallel case to that of the eagle deprived of its liberty and of the power to exercise its flight, vision, and predatory instincts.

As I sit writing these thoughts, with a cage containing four canaries on the table before me, I cannot help congratulating these little prisoners on their comparatively happy fate in having been born, or hatched, finches and not eagles. And yet albeit I am not responsible for the restraint which has been put upon them, and am not their owner, being only a visitor in the house, I am troubled with some uncomfortable feelings concerning their condition--feelings which have an admixture of something like a sense of shame or guilt, as if an injustice had been done, and I had stood by consenting. I did not do it, but we did it. I remember Matthew Arnold's feeling lines on his dead canary, "Poor Matthias," and quote:

    Yet, poor bird, thy tiny corse     Moves me, somehow, to remorse;     Something haunts my conscience, brings     Sad, compunctious visitings.     Other favourites, dwelling here,     Open lived with us, and near;     Well we knew when they were glad     Plain we saw if they were sad;     Sympathy could feel and show     Both in weal of theirs and woe.

    Birds, companions more unknown,     Live beside us, but alone;     Finding not, do all they can,     Passage from their souls to man.     Kindness we bestow and praise,     Laud their plumage, greet their lays;     Still, beneath their feathered breast     Stirs a history unexpressed.     Wishes there, and feeling strong,     Incommunicably throng;     What they want we cannot guess.

 This, as poetry, is good, but it does not precisely fit my case; my "compunctious visitings" being distinctly different in origin and character from the poet's. He--Matthew Arnold--is a poet, and the author of much good verse, which I appreciate and hold dear. But he was not a naturalist--all men cannot...