As my illness progresses – though I continue to hope that this is just a bad spell, and things will get better – my birding has, of necessity, become book-based, with frequent on-line forays.
Two weeks ago, I bought a copy of the much-acclaimed “A Bird in the Bush – a social history of birdwatching” – by Stephen Moss. Acclaimed or not, 50-odd pages in, and I’m finding it rather dull, not helped by Moss’s writing style, which I find rather wooden. It is, notwithstanding its subject matter, way too formal.
The book boasts two pages of quotes from reviews and, reading them, I have real difficulty imagining how the conclusions are reached, as it seems that they’re not reading the same book I have in front of me. Ah well, we all have different standards, I suppose. (If you want to see exactly what I mean, compare Moss with Gerald Durrell, who combines a love of language with a love of wildlife, to great effect.)
One good thing has come of it, though – it moved me to buy a copy of Gilbert White’s book, highly acclaimed both as a work of natural history and of English literature, The Natural History of Selborne.
Now that’s the book I expected to have trouble with, written, as it was, in the 18th century (it was published in 1789), as I didn’t get along at all well with James Fennimore Cooper’s books, and he was a contemporary of White’s, albeit an American. Still, no-one’s perfect.
I had no problems at all, though – White, arguably the first proper birdwatcher, is a joy to read because not only does he know about nature (he was a clergyman in Selborne, in rural Hampshire), he clearly understands language, too, and how to make it come alive. A knack, I’m sorry to say, Moss hasn’t acquired to any perceptible degree – his prose is that of the text-book. His use of English, I readily admit, is impeccable, but he’s just dull. Where White clearly loves words, Moss, I think, just sees them as tools – and the difference is huge.
White’s English of over 200 years ago needs a little work, as the language has changed somewhat over the years, the usage of certain words being the most obvious difference (the misuse of words in modern English is illustrated quite clearly – we have, in effect, screwed-up the language pretty badly in some ways). White, I’m happy to see, uses the same system of punctuation that I was taught and still use, which allows the construction of quite complex sentences without them becoming confusing or hard to read – a dying art, as is punctuation as a whole. To see what I mean, read a modern American novel, where you’ll see entire sentences totally unpunctuated, save by a lone comma, often in the wrong place – colons and semi-colons, not to mention apostrophes, are frequently entirely absent. They’d give Lynne Truss nightmares. In fact, given that she wrote the book Eats shoots and leaves (four words whose meaning can be changed utterly by the insertion of commas), about the misuse of punctuation, they probably already have.
While doing a little research for this, I came across a book entitled, “Modern business punctuation, accompanied with exercises for punctuation,” as if business English was a different language – it’s not (legal English is different – a misplaced comma can change meaning completely, so legal documents tend to omit all punctuation except the full stop and the occasional colon). It probably goes without saying that it’s an American publication…
I buy almost all my books from Green Metropolis, which I’ve covered in my book posts previously, and I was lucky enough to be able to buy an illustrated copy of Selborne, which is punctuated by colour illustrations by White’s contemporary’s – which add a valuable further dimension to what is already a superb book. The illustrations, sadly, aren’t indexed, which to be honest, is pretty unforgivable, and makes it very hard to look up a specific item without leafing through the entire book, unless you can recall its chapter. There’s a list of who painted what at the back of the book, but it’s no substitute for a proper index. By the way, Green Metropolis still has several copies on the un-illustrated book in stock, if you fancy one.
On thing that struck me on seeing the pictures, as it has when viewing certain paintings in art galleries, is that perception seemed to be different in the past. That is, that people, and animals, were apparently shaped differently (who hasn’t seen paintings of cows the shape of a large oak wardrobe, with legs, for instance?). OK, over the years domesticated animals have changed dramatically (q.v. the long-tailed pigs in Selborne), but were cattle ever box-shaped? It seems unlikely.
It’s worth mentioning, here, a Hereford bull of my acquaintance in the seventies. He was a vast beast (yet apparently amiable, gazing benignly, from beneath a mop of tightly-curled white hair and a pair of short, but lethal-looking, horns, on the endless stream of ramblers tramping through his farmyard on a summer Sunday), certainly built on a scale with those depicted so angularly, yet there was barely an angle on him at all. Go figure.
Some of the illustrations in Selborne differ rather more subtly. A fallow deer looks rather gay, for example, and some birds are slightly disproportioned, and a roosting swift looks more like some savage raptor (a swift in flight is remarkably angular, and pale grey instead of black). Kestrels are depicted as colourfully as tropical birds and, while they actually are quite colourful, they’re not that colourful.
Given, then, that the intention was to depict animals, birds and insects, plus the odd spider, as accurately as possible, can it be that perceptions actually have changed over the centuries, and we really do see the world somewhat differently to our forebears?
I honestly don’t know. What I do know is that I heartily recommend The Natural History of Selborne, illustrated or not, to anyone with the slightest interest in natural history in general, and birds in particular – you won’t be disappointed. True, some theories prevalent 200+ years ago – that swallows hibernated in the mud of ponds, for example – have long since been disproved, but this makes the book no less valuable or enjoyable.
