Chapter Five

Green Retreats

 

The year 1758 had been a very bad one for Gilbert. His father had died, he had failed in an attempt to return full-time to Oxford, and come close to losing his Fellowship and being publicly humiliated. This was the last occasion on which he was to make a serious and determined attempt to find a life away from Selborne. That autumn, as the Fellowship squabble was nearing its height, he had looked out towards the Hanger and seen something that moved him to make the first written indication of what was to become a lifelong fascination with the mysteries of territorial attachment:

Nov 2. Saw a very unusual sight; a large flock of House-Martens playing about between our fields, & the Hanger. I never saw any of the swallow-kind later than the old 10: Octobr: The Hanger being quite naked of leaves made the sight the more extraordinary.¹

From 1759 the garden again becomes the chief focus of his life. The first real day of spring was 13 April, and Gilbert was bursting with activity and hope for the coming season:

Made an Annual-bed for the biggest one-light frame with 6 barrows of hot dung, & one of weeds: laid on the mould six inches deep. Finished-off, & raked very smooth the bastion, & sowed it very thick with rye-grass, & white clover. Sowed ye bare places in the fields, & orchard with the same. Planted two rows of slips of a very fine sort of double-bloody-wall-flower from my Dame Scot’s of Harting. Made the ground very mellow with lime-rubbish. Sowed a plot of Holy-oak [Hollyhock] seed, & leek-seed. Planted some rose-campions, & Columbines in the new Garden.

A perfect summer’s day, that fetched ye beds finely to their heat after such gluts of rain.

Saw seven swallows, the first this year, playing about James Knight’s House.²

In the middle of November 1759 he left Selborne for six months, and vanished from view more completely than at any time during his adult life. Later he mentions that he had been in London and at his married sister Anne’s house at Lyndon, and it’s fair to assume that he had taken a long break, in part to think about his own future. But there are no more solid clues as to how he filled his normally busy days. The garden was temporarily abandoned, the journals closed down, and Mulso, who had just become a father for the second time and was on the point of decamping to a new parish in Yorkshire, was left to ponder sadly how he would manage to see his nomadic friend again.

Gilbert returned to Selborne in mid-May 1760, to find the asparagus in season and his cucumbers and melons well cared for in his absence. The journal, which he always saw partly as a refuge, was able to continue its meandering progress. The day after his return, 18 May, it records ‘a fierce storm of hail, which batter’d the vine shoots at the end of the Dining-room’ – but was still preferable, no doubt, to last year’s upheavals in the Senior Common Room.

Gilbert’s sabbatical seemed to confirm his commitment to Selborne. Yet he was no nearer any practical solutions to his problems. He had no job and no prospect of any immediate increase in his small income. He was also still single, and Mulso would not let him forget it. In January 1761, his friend wrote with news of two weddings: Thomas Mulso, his brother, had married a Miss Prescott, and Hecky, Gilbert’s old companion, had become Mrs Chapone. ‘To these Brides & Bridegrooms,’ Mulso wrote, ‘I know You will give your good wishes that, that as they have long waited for this happy State (I don’t know whether I speak to be understood by you who continue an old Batchelor) they may long continue happy in it.’³ Later in the year Gilbert’s sister Rebecca became engaged, and he was faced with the imminent prospect of being alone in the Wakes. He had almost certainly, in his heart, begun to abandon any serious thoughts of marriage. But the constant ebb and flow around him of weddings and births (and deaths: Hecky was widowed after just ten months) could hardly fail to highlight his own solitude.

But the garden, at least, was something for which he could make long-term plans. During 1761 he planted large numbers of fruit trees, and made a fruit wall for his espaliers. This was the second piece of considerable stonework to be added to the garden that year:

Jan 24: Long the mason finish’d the dry wall of the Haha in the new garden, which is built of blue rags, so massy, that it is supposed to contain double the Quantity of stone usual in such walls. Several stones reach into the bank 20 inches. The wall was intended to be 4 feet & an half high: but the labourers in sinking the ditch on inclining ground mistook the level, especially at the angls: so that at that part to bring it to a level it is 5 feet 8 inch: high, & 4 feet 6 inch: at the ends: an excellent fence against the mead, & so well fast’ned into the clay bank, that it looks likely to stand a long while.⁴

The Ha-ha was an ingenious and effective device consisting simply of a deep ditch between the garden and the park, pasture or farmland beyond. It was designed to provide a boundary and keep cattle out of the flower-beds without interrupting the view. Ideally it provided a way of visually merging the garden with the countryside beyond.

The Ha-ha at the Wakes was one of the earliest to be built in a small private garden here. In France they had been in vogue since the mid-seventeenth century, and began to form part of English landscapes in the 1720s. Horace Walpole, writing in 1770, thought them the cornerstone, as well as one of the most telling symbols, of the new gardening:

But the capital stroke, the leading step to all that has followed, was … the destruction of walls for boundaries, and the invention of fosses – an attempt then deemed so astonishing, that the common people called them Ha! Ha’s! to express their surprise at finding a sudden and unperceived check to their walk … I call a sunk fence the leading step for these reasons. No sooner was this simple enchantment made, than levelling, mowing, rolling followed. The contiguous ground of the park without the sunk fence was to be harmonised with the lawn within; and the garden in its turn was to be set free from its prim regularity, that it might assort with the wilder country without.⁵

Gilbert did not follow up his own entrenchment with such an elaborate manicure. But the extent to which, in more general terms, he saw no clear dividing line between the business of gardening and the life of the ‘wilder country without’ is shown by a remarkable entry in the Garden Kalendar for mid-May 1761. Quite out of the blue, after a run of short routine notes on disbudding vines and sowing broccoli, he launches into a long and vivid account of the lives of the local crickets. It was 20 May, a warm day in the middle of a wet spell, and Gilbert and his brother Thomas had wandered down to the pasture just north of the church known as the Short Lythe. It was at that time a steep, rock-strewn field, studded with furze and full of flowers and insects, and the two men planned to examine ‘the nature of those animals that make a chearful shrill cry all the summer months in many parts of the south of England’. They had taken a spade to dig the creatures up, but it proved ‘difficult not to squeeze them to death in breaking the Ground’, and more gentle methods had to be worked out. In the rapt descriptions that follow, Gilbert’s fondness for the crickets is as evident as his curiosity about them: ‘they have long legs behind with large brawny thighs, like Grasshoppers, for leaping’. The female was ‘dusky’, with ‘a long terebra’ … The male was ‘ a black shining Colour, with a golden stripe across it’s shoulder like that of the Humble bee’. He would, he felt, ‘be glad to have them encrease on account of their pleasing summer sound.’ The sketch carries on in this affectionate, discursive way. Yet behind it we can glimpse the emergence of what was to become the classic model for field studies: the patient, inquisitive watching, the changes of focus as questions multiply; then answers dawning, from flashes of intuition or plain hard reasoning, and these forming a framework to test against yet more watching. And all these processes not rigidly ordered but advancing together in a kind of continuous feedback:

It is very likely that the males only make that shrilling noise; which they may do out of rivalry, & emulation during their breeding time; as is the Case with many animals. They are solitary Insects living singly in Holes by themselves; & will fight fiercely when they meet as I found by some which I put into an hole in a dry wall … For tho’ they had express’d distress by being taken out of their knowledge; yet the first that had got possession of the chink seized an other with a vast pair of serrated fangs so as to make it cry-out. With these strong, toothed Malae (like the sheers of lobster’s claws) they must terebrate their curious regular Holes; as they have no feet suited for digging like the mole-cricket. I could but wonder, that when taken in hand, They never offer’d to bite, tho’ furnish’d with such formidable weapons. They are remarkably shy, & cautious, never stirring but a few inches from the mouth of their holes, & retiring backward nimbly into them, & stopping short in their song by that time you come within several yards of their caverns: from whence I conclude they may be a very desirable food to some animals, perhaps several kinds of birds.⁶

Nothing remotely approaching the vivid, sensuous, attentiveness of this piece exists in eighteenth-century prose on the natural world, and it is hard to explain its sudden appearance in the midst of the normally restrained pages of the Kalendar. Perhaps it was not as novel for Gilbert as it now seems, and represented a style he had evolved in, say, his early travel letters to Mulso, and which had momentarily strayed into the journals. Or perhaps it was a premonitory experiment, a try-out of an idea still only half-formed. If so, Gilbert was plainly not ready to follow it up (though he eventually used the note as a basis for the much longer account of crickets in the Natural History).⁷ It is written up, with no covering explanation and the minimum of correction, as if it were a piece of outdoor work like any other. Later that same day he is back sowing French beans.

Yet all the characteristics that were to make White’s writing stand so distinctively and originally apart are already there, simply waiting to be developed: the painstaking thoroughness; the eye for sharp and intimate detail; the mixture of animal sympathy and inquisitive science; the willingness to consider that animals had an ‘inner’ existence, independent of humans. Gilbert’s vocabulary, which freely mixed scientific jargon and rural commonplace, followed naturally from these attitudes. The crickets might be able to ‘terebrate’, but they could also slip ‘out of their knowledge’; be, as it were, both technologists and peasants. These sudden pitches into the vernacular were sometimes used by Gilbert for deliberate comic effect. Here they also make the crickets seem rather endearing, and heighten our sense of their distress without ever falling into sentimentality.

The most significant aspect of the essay is the way that Gilbert’s affection for the crickets as fellow creatures is inseparable from his attitude towards them as objects of scientific study. On a later occasion, he worked out a way of encouraging the insects out of their holes without causing them harm: ‘a pliant stalk of grass, gently insinuated into the caverns, will probe their windings to the bottom, and quickly bring out the inhabitant; and thus the humane enquirer may gratify his curiosity without injuring the object of it’.⁸

This is about as far as Gilbert went in the direction of experimenting on living creatures. He neither approved of, nor had much scientific faith in, the wilful distorting of animals’ lives purely for the sake of gaining knowledge. He saw them as beings endowed with sensation and feelings, and as members of immensely complex and intricate living systems. Their secrets could not be forced from them without – philosophically just as much as physically – ‘injuring the object’ of the study.

Yet it’s well known that Gilbert enjoyed hunting and shooting in his younger years, and until his late middle-age showed little compunction about killing all kinds of animals in order to identify or dissect them. His affection for them did not extend as far as an absolute respect for their existence as individuals. In this respect he was no different from most of his contemporaries, and it is perhaps only by modern standards that his outlook appears paradoxical. Yet it would be glib – and insulting to Gilbert’s intelligence – to explain away his attitude as being purely customary. The eighteenth century saw an immense upswing of concern about the rights and welfare of animals among writers, philosophers and clerics. Some of these were known to White personally, and if he chose not to follow their arguments all the way, this must be seen as a conscious decision. Although he did not write directly about this issue until the last years of his life, his views on it underpin his attitudes towards scientific method and towards the nature of the relationships of humans with other creatures, and it is important to try and understand where, he stood.

At one extreme in the eighteenth-century debate was Steven Hales, a noted physiologist, philanthropist, and one-time neighbour of the Whites, who is often assumed to have been partially responsible for Gilbert’s scientific inclinations.⁹

Hales had been the non-resident vicar of Farringdon, a village three miles north-west of Selborne, between 1722 and 1741. He lived in Teddington, but during this period he spent a couple of months each summer at the Farringdon vicarage, and had been a good friend of both Gilbert’s grandfather and father. Gilbert had met him when he was a boy, and seemed to have kept in touch in later years, perhaps when he was visiting his brothers, who then lived close by in south London. The autumn following the cricket-watch he became curate to Hales’s successor at Farringdon.

Hales was probably best known as an inventor, and when Gilbert wrote a note about him to their mutual friend Robert Marsham years later, he appears as an ingenious, somewhat eccentric social benefactor.¹⁰ His discoveries, Gilbert remembered, included ways of making wells safe, of preventing pies boiling over, destroying insects in fruit trees by the use of injected quicksilver, dissolving kidney stones with onion juice and, more seriously, ventilating the lower decks of ships. Most of these contrivances had come out of a lifelong study of the circulation of fluids, especially in the bodies of plants and animals. Gilbert refers to his important book Vegetable Staticks (1727) on several occasions and made practical use of some of its findings in designing a ventilation system for his hot-beds. ‘His whole mind seemed replete with experiment,’ he recalled, ‘which of course gave tincture & turn to his conversation, often somewhat peculiar, but always interesting.’ Hales’s attitude to experiment had been developed while he was at Cambridge, where he studied in an atmosphere still showing the inquisitive, methodical influence of Newton. He was a painstaking investigator, but it has to be said that his experiments on living creatures were horrific by modern standards. Much of his early work on blood pressure, for example, was done on live horses. He strapped them (unanaesthetized) to farm gates laid flat in a field, opened one or more of their major arteries, and measured how high the blood spurted by placing tall glass tubes over the incisions. It’s easy to understand why he was one of the first to notice that blood pressure increases with anxiety.

Hales did not see any of this as inconsistent with his Christian beliefs. On the contrary, the Judaeo-Christian tradition, with its belief in the dominance of man over other creatures, was a mandate for such investigations, which were looked on as acts of scientific devotion. ‘The farther researches we make into the admirable scene of things,’ wrote Hales, ‘the more beauty and harmony we see in them: and the stronger and clearer conviction they give us, of the being, power and wisdom of the divine Architect.’ But Alexander Pope, a London neighbour of Hales and a good friend, was not convinced, and did not believe that any ends, whether they were theological revelation or human utility, justified the extreme cruelty of Hales’s means: ‘He is a very good man, only I am sorry he has his hands imbued with so much blood … he commits most of these barbarities with the thought of being of use to man. But how do we know that we have a right to kill creatures we are so little above, as dogs, for our curiosity?’¹¹

Sentiments like this were increasingly voiced during the eighteenth century. Carrying on the tradition of Sir Philip Sidney, Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Tryon, poets and philosophers such as William Cowper, Christopher Smart, William Blake, Pope and Jeremy Bentham argued that creatures had an existence valuable in their own right, and not purely as adjuncts to man. In some cases this was a radical extension of the Christian idea of man’s stewardship of nature, but increasingly it was attacking the presumptuousness of the very idea of stewardship. The attitudes that united all these strands of protest were spelled out by Cowper in ‘The Task’ in 1784.

The sum is this if man’s convenience, health,

Or safety interfere, his rights and claims

Are paramount, and must extinguish theirs.

Else they are all – the meanest things that are –

As free to live and enjoy that life,

As God was free to form them at first.

What was never included in these lists of justifications for the killing or ill-treatment of animals, was the pursuit of knowledge, pure and simple.

In his later years Gilbert inclined more and more towards Cowper’s position, but for most of his life he took a highly pragmatic view of the lives of individual animals. He never countenanced cruelty, but had no hesitation about killing when he felt it was necessary. He had his own unwritten rules about when this was ethical. Any birds, for example, which took liberties with his vegetables or fruit crop, must expect to take the consequences. So, perhaps, should a few innocent ones, to prove they did no harm. Birds were shot either by Gilbert, or more often on his behalf, because they were unusual (green sandpiper, honey buzzard), because their anatomy seemed to be a puzzle (cuckoos), because their songs were unfamiliar, and therefore their identities uncertain (various warblers), and because their physical condition might give some clue about the vexed question of hibernation (house-martins). On occasions migrants killed for dissection – e.g.ring ouzels – were subsequently served up at the dinner-table!

But from his middle years Gilbert ceased shooting for sport. He also speaks out many times against those who ‘wantonly and cruelly’ killed birds with young, though he did not seem to have the same compassion for parent harvest mice and adders. Only exceptionally did he injure in any way particular families or colonies that he was observing ‘minutely’. In short his position was close to that of many modern scientific ecologists. He was concerned about species and communities but rather less about individuals. Yet he knew that these were inextricably connected with the larger systems of nature, and that their ‘lives and conversation’ could only be understood by being viewed in action, with respect for their independence, if not, ultimately, their lives. Much as he admired Derham, Gilbert’s cricket essay has little in common with the style of the man who urged in Physico-theology (1711):

Let us ransack all the globe, let us with the greatest accuracy inspect every part thereof, search out the innermost secrets of any of the creatures, let us examine them with all our gauges … pry into them with all our microscopes and most exquisite instruments, till we find them to bear testimony to their infinite workman.

*

Throughout 1762 Gilbert continued to serve as curate at Farringdon. It was an undemanding post, and he spent most of his time in Selborne, continuing to develop his garden. Mulso, as usual, poked fun at all this frenetic activity:

You tell me of an Alcove at ye End of your Terrace. Which is your Terrace? for you had no Walk of that Denomination when I saw Selbourne. Is it the North Side of Baker’s Hill? or is it near ye other Bench, where the opening & new Bastion was, facing the Cynic Tub? Clear me up: for I am lost in ye Grandeur of your Outlets, & ye Multiplicity of your Improvements.¹²

In March 1763, on the death of his uncle Charles White, vicar of Bradley, who had died without an heir, Gilbert came belatedly into full possession of the Wakes. He had been head of the household for all practical purposes since his father’s death in 1758. But, out of custom or courtesy, Elizabeth’s husband Charles had assumed titular ownership (see page 75), and Gilbert had paid him rent ever since.

Gilbert’s new status had little impact on his way of life, and did little to solve his central domestic problem. How could he afford to remain at Selborne when there was no reasonable living to be had in the area? A position at Bradley, only ten miles away, would have been ideal, and with almost indecent haste after his uncle’s death Gilbert applied for the now vacant living to the Lord Chancellor Henley, in whose private patronage it lay. He was turned down, and Mulso (always well up in church politics) later discovered that this was because Gilbert had not been quite effusive enough in his support of Henley’s favourite, the Bishop of Durham, for the Chancellorship of Oxford University thirteen years before.

The weather that spring had been unsettled, with ‘violent thunder … & gluts of rain’. Then, in the middle of May, a dry spell began, and by 4 June there had been no rain for three weeks. ‘The fields and gardens begin to suffer’, Gilbert complained. And he was about to have his own resilience tested, for that day there arrived at the vicarage the three young cousins of Mrs Etty, the vicar’s wife, anc daughters of Dr Battie, President of the Royal College of Physicians. Anne, Catharine and Philadelphia Battie were in their late teens and early twenties, and were rich, flighty and attractive. They fizzed about the village for two months, and left a perceptible dent in the composure of the new owner of the Wakes, then approaching middle age and not at the most serene moment of his life.

The summer advanced, and turned into a long-running fête. At times there were more than a score of mostly young people riding, singing round the harpsichord, or strolling about Selborne Common. As well as the Batties at the vicarage there was a swelling contingent of White family friends and relations at the Wakes. By the middle of July Gilbert’s house-guests included Rebecca Snooke, his aunt from Sussex; his recently-married sister, Rebecca Woods; his nieces Jenny White and Harriot Baker; Mr and Mrs Thomas Mulso; and three young bachelor clerics, Mulso’s brother Edward (Ned), Basil Cane (Gilbert’s cousin), and Harry White, his brother, now very nearly 30, who had recently taken over the living of Fyfield, about thirty miles west of Selborne.

Gilbert was more or less master of ceremonies, and he put at his guests’ disposal the tent-like pavilion which was regularly erected in the Wakes’ grounds during summer (see Plate 1). Sadly, he makes almost no mention of the events of that summer. But one of the sisters, Catharine (usually known as Kitty), kept a diary during her holiday, which she entitled ‘A little Journal of some of the Happiest days I have had in the happy Valley in the year 1763’. It is a breathless, naïve record, but so perfectly suggests the boundless energies and evanescent enthusiasms of these young girls – and the impact they had on the assembled bachelors – that it is worth quoting from at some length:¹³

22 of June in the afternoon Mr. White Mr. Harry White Mrs. Snooke & Mrs. Woods drank tea here; Mr H. White & Nancy sung & play’d at nine o’clock … Went to bed between twelve & one o clock was very merry after supper the next day being Mr. and Mrs. Ettys’ wedding day we kept it with mirth & jollity. The morn was spent at the Harpsicord a Ball at night began minuets at half an hour after seven then danced country dances till near eleven went to supper after supper sat some time sung laugh’t talk’d & then went to dancing again danced till 3 in the morn; at half an hour after four the company all went away we danced 30, danced, never had I such a dance in my life before not ever shall I have such a one again I believe.

Gilbert was the only solitary male at this ball, and he always sounds something of an outsider among the young revellers. The vivacious Miss Kitty was paired with Harry, and to judge from the number of times his name appears, they made quite an impression on each other. The following day they all climbed the Zig-zag and had tea in the Hermitage. In the middle of the party Harry appeared, dressed up as a Hermit, and gave Kitty a delicious shock. They wandered round the High Wood till it was dusk, then went back once more to the Hermitage to admire its romantic prospects by lamplight. ‘Never shall I forget the happiness of this day,’ sighed Kitty, ‘which exceeded any I ever had in all my life.’ The next day, 25 June, was Harry’s thirtieth birthday, and also a Saturday, when he needed to get back to Fyfield to prepare for the next morning’s services. But Kitty and her sisters had other plans for this important anniversary: ‘After breakfast … Harry White came in to take his leave of us being in a great hurry to go but the 3 sorceresses … so bewitched him that he did not go till four in the afternoon.’ ‘Poor Harry Tinderbox,’ wrote Mulso, ‘I pity his liver,’ though it was his clerical decorum that seemed to be in greater danger. A few Saturdays later temptation got the better of him again: ‘Sat 16 … Mr. Cane & Mr. Henry White came on Horseback to the Door to take leave of us determined not to come in but he soon broke thro’ his resolution & dismounted came in sang 3 songs & then took his leave.’

Gilbert observed these goings-on from the wings with a brave face and an avuncular smile. And he gallantly (or wishfully) made a bet with Miss Kitty that she couldn’t persuade Harry to linger on. It was, needless to say, a hopeless gamble, but it may have been some comfort to Gilbert to know that Kitty preserved his settlement note, with its discreet hints and winks, inside her journal:

MADAM – I make a point of paying my debts of Honour as soon as possible; but at the same time can’t help remarking that it was not a fair wager. For it is plain, by some art magic best known to yourself, you have not only a power of detaining men that ought to be going; but also of keeping those away that ought to come. In the whole it is best that I have been the loser, as it would not be safe in all appearance to receive even so much as a pin from your Hands, – I am, with many a ††††††††††††††† and many a Pater noster and Ave Maria,¹⁴ GIL. WHITE

And while the younger men danced and sang and acted out the roles of lovesick swains, Gilbert, too reserved for such antics, entertained the girls with more philosophical diversions – all thoroughly respectable, though they did seem to focus attention rather pointedly on the girls’ physical attributes. They had their shadows taken, were measured, and as a special treat on 27 July were ‘electrified’, a newly popular parlour trick which involved standing on a stool whose legs were insulated by rubber, and having your hair brushed until it stood on end.

Tuesday 19 [July] after breakfast Mr. W [Gilbert] came in to ask us to go out a Riding we drest and went over to his house but the weather grew so bad that it prevented our going We spent the morn together with much mirth & cheerfullness we were all weigh’d to see how much we were worth. I weigh 1341b oh monstrous afterwards we were all measured came home to dinner in the afternoon Mr. White the Mulsos etc. etc. came here with work singing & Playing we spent a very agreeable evening.

Wed 20 … Mr. T Mulso gave us a discourse upon Natural Phylosophy & Astronomy we work’d he read some of Thomsons Seasons we walk’d in the Woods & then came home to dinner I hope I edify’d by his sensible discourse Mr. E.M. & Mr. White drank tea here afterwards we went out a Riding I rode double for the first time rode upon the sweet Commons & in the High Wood call’d at Newton, it was a most delightful evening I hope we are going to have fine weather.

Thursday 21. after Breakfast went into the Hay field toss’d the hay about a little then went to Mr. White’s sat in the Alcove spent the morn most delightfully Mr. T. Mulso read Thomson & at Two came home to dinner at 6 we met again to walk went up to the sweet Hermitage sat viewing its various beauteous [views?] some time then walk round the wood back to the Hermitage, Mr. White read us an acrostick made upon Nanny. Miss Baker & I found a stone upon the Common which we carried to the Hermitage & placed it there as a memorial of our fondness for that place.

Reading Thomson, tossing the hay a little, viewing the prospect from a Hermitage … what delightful, poetical treats! For these fashionable London girls, the Selborne interlude had become an opportunity to act out a rustic idyll in a setting as near to a classical Arcadia as they were ever likely to experience. As their holiday drew to a close, they were so taken with the fancy that they began calling each other after characters from pastoral drama and, occasionally, dressing up like them. Kitty was Daphne, and Harry, Ned and Basil were Strephon, Corydon and Collin, respectively. On the 28 July the whole company had a picnic on top of the Hanger. Gilbert, for once, was sufficiently moved to record the occasion in the Garden Kalendar:

Drank tea 20 of us at the Hermitage: the Miss Batties, & the Mulso family contributed much to our pleasures by their singing, & being dress’d as shepherds, shepherdesses. It was a most elegant evening; and all parties appear’d highly satisfy’d. The Hermit appear’d to great advantage.¹⁵

Gilbert’s dispassionate journal may have been more than usually evasive this time. He had apparently stage-managed the whole show, including the fancy dress, and a little while later wrote an ambivalent verse to Kitty, which she also kept carefully in her journal:

Gilbert, a meddling, Luckless swain

Must alter lady’s dresses

To dapper Hats, & tuck’d up train

And flower-enwoven tresses.

But now the Lout with loss of heart

Must for his rashness pay;

He rues for tamp’ring with a dart

Too prompt before to slay!¹⁶

On 3 August the Battie sisters departed for London, taking with them one of Gilbert’s best canteloup melons as a gift for their father. ‘Adieu happy Vale enchanting Hermitage much loved stump beauteous Hanger sweet Lythe,’ wrote Kitty in the final entry in her journal, ‘here the scene closes the play is done the pleasing dream is oer & tomorrow I must awake & find myself in London.’ She also carried off a more personal tribute, a fulsome elegy from Harry (which he signed as ‘Strephon’) entitled ‘Daphne’s Departure’. One of its many stanzas ran:-

Ah! wretched Selbourn! what avail thy Shades

Thy lofty Hills with waving Beeches crown’d;

Their boasted Glory now for ever fades,

And endless Winter shall thy Vales surround.¹⁷

Gilbert too was moved to mournful – or at least mock mournful – verse by the girls’ departure, but not into a direct admission of his own feelings: poetry for him played the role of a discreet escape valve rather than an open confessional. In this instance he recounts not his own sadness but ‘Kitty’s Farewell to the Stump beneath the Hermitage’. The poem generously includes Harry amongst the lamented views of Selborne – though more as ‘The hoary Hermit’ than as gilded Strephon – and it is that ‘delightful stump’, on which Kitty no doubt loitered in studied moonstruck poses, that Gilbert raises to the poetic centre of her affections.

Kitty may well have been momentarily infatuated with Harry, but she was sensible enough, even at 19, to understand about holiday romances, especially when so much of the summer idyll had been played out as a deliberate fantasy. The young men’s ardour was slower to cool. Ned, his father reported in early October, felt ‘cut to ye Brain’, but it would do no lasting harm, ‘especially as it purges off in Poetry: when Passion is fancifull it is not dangerous. Ned requires these Brushings; being apt to have torpid & viscous Blood, if a Love Fit now & then did not quicken his Pulses.’¹⁸ But Mulso sensed, either intuitively or from a confidence in one of Gilbert’s letters, that it wasn’t just the younger men who had been ‘brushed’.

It would not do you so much good, unless it was once to ye Purpose; for we, my Friend, begin to grow into a more serious Age, & to mean a little more what we profess. I beg you to get as much this Winter as possible into ye gay World; for it will be of Prejudice to your Health & Spirits to employ a Winter in putting on Wood in a Country Village.¹⁹

The ‘Purpose’, or ‘certain Scheme’, as it was variously called, was Mulso’s plan to marry Gilbert off, and he needed only the slightest excuse to remind his friend that it was making little headway. But this time the reference seems more serious, and, as the autumn of 1763 gave way to a wet and early winter, it became increasingly plain that all was not well with Gilbert. His Garden Kalendar entries drop to about half their usual frequency, and his letters to Mulso become more urgent, to the extent that Mulso finds ‘ye tables are somewhat turned, & that you are like to be ye Complainant, & I ye person complained of as a bad Correspondent.’ One note, which brought news of the death of Mrs Thomas White and more evidence of Gilbert’s melancholy, made Mrs Mulso weep. In November Gilbert took his friend’s advice and went for a holiday in London, staying at the Mulso family’s town house in Rathbone Place. Mulso thought it a wise move: ‘a little of ye Bustle, and Talk, & Variety of London is absolutely necessary for you, and if you should have any further Knowledge of ye Miss B’s: it might have rather a salutary than a dangerous Effect; for it is my Notion that they may be very safely taken either full or fasting.’²⁰ Can Gilbert really have gone to town with the intention of searching out the Batties? It was hardly the best prescription for someone in his state of mind. The company of these tireless heiresses, half his age and obviously marked out for superior matches, was likely to drive him even deeper into depression.

By the end of the year he was back in Selborne. He’d seen little of the sisters and done nothing to improve his mood, and in the unaccustomed quiet of the Wakes, with only the company of his recently widowed aunt, Rebecca Snooke, he began to sink into self-pity. He confessed as much to Mulso, and made what was probably a morbid comparison between his own circumstances and Mulso’s proliferating (albeit sickly) household. But his friend would have none of it, and for once his gentle, teasing banter seems exactly the right response:

I have but little Hope of your thinking much of any particular absent Female, because when you say – “while I, doing no good in my Generation, am still single!” – you did not insert the Lover-like word Alass! after I. There is a Sort of sentimental Sorrow in ye whole Sentence, but there is not Feeling enough for a Man in Earnest without the word alass.²¹

Behind the mockery Mulso’s assessment was almost certainly right, and Gilbert’s despondency probably had more to do with his age and a nostalgia for a last taste of youthful high spirits than any particular romantic longings. But the feelings were strong ones none the less, and when Gilbert came to express them in writing – to ‘purge them off in Poetry’ as his brother had done – he composed what is unquestionably the most effective of all his verses. ‘SELBORNE HANGER A Winter Piece. To the Miss Batties’ is dated ‘Nov 1, 1763’,²² just a couple of days after the Kalendar had noted the first autumn gales sweeping through the beechwoods. It starts off in anguished, heroic tones reminiscent both of Harry’s elegy and Thomas Gray’s (‘How fall’n the glories of these fading scenes!/The dusky beech resigns his vernal greens;’) and ends with a stanza that sounds like a declamation for the end of a masque:

Return, blithe maidens; with you bring along

Free, native humour, all the charms of song;

The feeling heart, and unaffected ease,

Each nameless grace, and ev’ry power to please.

But the heart of the poem is a powerful evocation of the storm-torn Hanger:

The rushing woods with deaf’ning clamour roar,

Like the sea tumbling on the pebbly shore.

When spouting rains descend in torrent tides,

See the torn zigzag weeps its channel’d sides:

Winter exerts its rage; heavy, and slow,

From the keen east rolls on the treasur’d snow;

Sunk with its weight the bending boughs are seen,

And one bright deluge whelms the works of men.

Amidst this savage landscape, bleak and bare,

Hangs the chill hermitage in middle air;

Its haunts forsaken, and its feasts forgot,

A leaf-strown, lonely, desolated cot!

This is strong, physical writing, full of the rhythms of weather; but it hardly needs stressing that the loneliness and desolation are as much the author’s as the landscape’s. This projection of human feeling onto the external world of nature was to become a conventional and often greatly abused device of Romantic poetry. What is unusual – and, in a way, advanced – about this piece is that White does not turn the Hanger into an abstraction or an arena for fantastical Arcadian scenes. The beech groves, the hermitage, the feasts (and, stretching a point, the nymphs) are all real. So is their visible decline into winter. The Zig-zag breaking up in the rainwash, the whole hill and valley scene vanishing under ‘clustering fogs’ aren’t just symbolic reminders of the transience of experience; they are actually part of the physical break-up of Selborne’s summer playground. This glimpse that the links between the human and natural world were real as well as metaphorical was to become one of the key features of White’s prose.

*

The winter of 1763/4 continued wet and stormy, but, by the middle of March, the cucumbers were in leaf, and the crocuses putting on a spectacular show, and Gilbert’s spirits started to rise a little. He was soon back in energetic form in the garden, raking out the asparagus beds and planting rows of potatoes. There was not a great deal else to do during the week. He had still found no suitable living to replace his light duties as curate at Farringdon, and at times it is hard to believe he really wanted to. Oriel College livings at Tortworth in Gloucestershire and Cholderton in Wiltshire became vacant, were given a cursory glance, and passed over.

Nor could he be tempted out of the security of Hampshire by Mulso, despite a new openness and warmth in his old friend’s letters from the north. Mulso was being mellowed by the joys of family life, and, perhaps, by his share of the tragedies. In the space of one month in 1764, he had lost his son George and gained a daughter. His wife Jenny was almost continuously ill, a prey to nervous debility and exhausted by three difficult confinements in the space of two years. But the pleasure of her company and of his surviving children more than made up for these disappointments for Mulso, and, throughout 1764 and ’65, he sends Gilbert touching accounts of domestic life at Thornhill. He describes the rambling architecture, his eccentric fiddle-playing footman, the melons that had been planted in homage to Gilbert (‘I had hope to have seen You, peeping at & pinching them, & laying your Head with my Gardener’), and himself and Jenny, valiantly trying to make the best of advancing middle age in the grip of a Yorkshire winter. They had been pinned down by the fireside together, these two near invalids, and had ‘alternately taken up the Spectacles to read to one another’.

Mulso repeatedly pleads with Gilbert to come and share these homely pleasures with them. During the spring of 1764, and again in ’65 and ’66, he draws up elaborate plans for the journey north, discusses the sleeping arrangements (‘We have one Room below Stairs where a Friend might lie, but he must be a Friend indeed’ – or at a pinch, there was always the Melon frame) and dreams of the expeditions they will make together. His generosity and sense of excited anticipation are infectious, and as the years pass, Gilbert’s failure to respond – and it was a failure, not a refusal – begins to seem a little miserly. Even the prospect of a carriage north with the now widowed Hecky Chapone failed to move him. Gilbert’s evasiveness was hardly a momentous shortcoming, and it did not seem to strain the two men’s friendship too seriously (though Mulso ends one of his invitations with the words ‘I think you have used me ill, yet I am, as usual, Dear Gil, Unalterably & afftely Your’s’; and Gilbert begins one of his procrastinating replies ‘Dear Sir’).

But the reasons behind Gilbert’s apparent inability to make a visit to the man who was his oldest and closest friend may reveal something about the way he was beginning to perceive his own future. He had, as it happens, plenty of excuses for not making the journey. He may have been discomfited by the prospect of ‘the many Species of Satisfaction that attend Paternity’ being pressed so closely upon him. He certainly felt some trepidation at the immensity of the journey – it involved at least four days on the road – and the inevitable bouts of coach-sickness that would accompany it. But he never suggested these as reasons for staying at home. The excuses he does offer seem, by contrast, rather thin. He has unavoidable clerical duties. He must supervise some ‘musical Affair’. There are building projects unfinished at the Wakes. The image of Gilbert that is reflected in Mulso’s letters at this time is that of a man who, from habit or choice, was beginning to see the life he already had as his one safe and reliable refuge and was digging in his heels.

And in June 1765, Mulso, now with a shrewd eye for the way Gilbert revealed his feelings in his prose style, concluded that even the possibility of marriage was receding fast, though he continued to urge Gilbert towards it for another couple of years. What persuaded him was Gilbert’s reaction to a tragic accident in Selborne, in which a young boy had been killed:

It seems however to have settled you in your Debates upon Matrimony, & confirmed you in your State of Celibacy: for you observe wth a Formality of Stile, which you drop in the next Sentence, that wedlock hath also numbers of Cares, &c: as if you had excerped the Observation fm a Treatise upon the Expediency of dying an old Batchelor.²³

*

Later that year Gilbert began to take a serious interest in botany. He was in the mood for a new, absorbing, optimistic pastime, and it’s clear from the Kalendar that he was becoming increasingly intrigued by how plants coped with the rigours of English weather: 1765 had been marked by extreme conditions of all kinds. February had brought severe frosts, and on the 28th a great snowstorm, the worst in the village’s memory: ‘The wind was so strong, & the snow so searching, that the Hotbeds were not uncovered above two Hours all day.’ Then there was a brief respite, producing in the Kalendar one of those gems of terseness and clarity that could capture the feel of a whole day in a single sentence. ‘March 4. A smart frost, & very strong sunshine all day. The bees work very briskly on the Crocuss amidst the banks of snow.’ But the rest of March brought gales, floods and heavy rain. So did April. The succade melons were sickly, and the nectarines running to twigs. During May and June an unrelenting drought set in. By mid-July there had been no rain to speak of for ten weeks. ‘The weeds are all kill’d,’ noted Gilbert, looking out over James Knight’s baked plough-lands, and the soil was ‘as rough as the sea in an hard Gale’. On 6 July he was riding back from his brother’s house in Fyfield across the open hills between Andover and Alresford, and was struck at how, despite the privations of the drought, these downlands were still green, often because of just one plant, the little salad burnet. The poorer and chalkier the soil, the commoner it became. And the more the sheep (which were very partial to it) grazed it, the more thickly it sprouted back.

Gilbert was impressed by this plant, so ‘tenacious of life’, and the long entry he makes on it in his journal that day, the first on any wild plant, is a sign of his expanding interest. Just over a month later he changed the title of the Garden Kalendar to A Calendar of Flora, & the Garden, from August 9th 1765, and by the end of the month the garden was very much in second place. With relieved sidelong glances at what had turned into a bumper harvest in sublime late-summer weather, and at the teeming broods of martins and partridges, he was out scouring the woods and hedgerows for new plants. He had nothing comparable to a modern guidebook to help him, though John Hill’s Herbal, which he had purchased in 1765, was at least in English. Mostly he worked with austere Latin taxonomies like John Ray’s Synopsis methodica stirpium Britannicarum and Hudson’s standard Flora Anglica,²⁴ which he had bought that year. But he was eventually able to mark in his copy of Hudson 439 different species found within the parish of Selborne. His finds that first autumn are remarkable, given that he was a novice and prospecting in the tail-end of the flowering season. He discovered deadly nightshade, ‘full of ripe fruit’, on the steep chalk slopes of Wheatham Hill, near Petersfield; hellebores coming into early leaf on the Hanger; and sundew ‘on the bogs of Beans-pond in Wullmere forest’. Plants, unlike more mobile creatures, could be given these exact addresses, and Gilbert’s Calendar for the months that follow gives a vivid picture of the disposition of Selborne’s flora in the eighteenth century – and, incidentally, of just how familiar he was with every corner and cranny of the parish. On 30 October he found sharp-leaved fluellen ‘in my Ewel-close, a wheat-stubble’, and the next day, wall lettuce, male and hart’s-tongue ferns ‘in a most shady part of the hollow lane under the cover of the rock as you first enter the lane in great plenty, on the right hand before you come to nine-acre-lane’. (They can still be found in this exact spot today.)

The hollow lanes were Gilbert’s favourite hunting-ground. Since they were the only thoroughfares through and out of the village he would have used one or more of them almost daily. But one senses a rather special fascination in the many references he makes to them over the years. Perhaps it was their combination of ‘grotesque and wild appearances’ with the feeling of a close, secluded intimacy; of secrecy with village conviviality. Lanes and flowers together formed a kind of enduring geography that was part of the identity of the parish. In the middle of a fierce November frost Gilbert found polypody and gladdon (‘the stinking flag-flower’) ‘in the hollow lane between Norton-yard & French-meer just without the gate’. The gladdon, he remarks, ‘was thrown, in all probability out of the garden which was formerly on the other side of the Hedge’. And as with many of his more interesting finds, he took its seeds back to grow on in the security of his own garden.

But Gilbert’s botanizing wasn’t done purely in the familiar surroundings of his home parish. He was every bit as inquisitive – and confident – when visiting the territories of friends and relatives. Late in September, down by the sea near his aunt’s house at Ringmer, Sussex, he had found burnet rose, and was able to identify it from the leaves alone. On the way to Oxford in October he had walked the five miles between Streatley and Wallingford along the bank of the Thames, and noted comfrey and yellow and purple loosestrifes.

During 1766, Gilbert was sufficiently preoccupied with botanizing to devote a separate journal to it. On the notebook’s flyleaf he inscribed its title and description: ‘Flora Selborniensis: with some co-incidences of the coming and departure of birds of passage, and insects: and the appearing of Reptiles: for the Year 1766.’²⁵ The entries are little more than a bare record of dates and names, but they amount to a vast tally for just twelve months’ browsing, and suggest some diligent work with his reference books. He had become adept at identifying plants when they were not in flower, and only occasionally made an out-and-out mistake like that confessed on 8 March: ‘Discovered, as I suspect, the tuberous moschatel, ranunculus nemorum Moschatella dictus, in its radical leaves.’ Later he adds: ‘This was sanicle.’ There are one or two notable records. On 16 April there was green hellebore flowering in the stony lane to Alton (still one of the only two clumps in the parish); and on 7 July Mulso’s brother Thomas discovered the rare yellow bird’s-nest in bloom near the Zig-zag: ‘There were three or four plants together. It is allowed by all writers to be uncommon.’ But the most engaging entries are those where Gilbert uses, with obvious pleasure, the evocative vernacular names for plants, so many of which have now become obsolete: wild williams (ragged robin); prim (privet); dwale (deadly nightshade); cammock (restharrow); arsmart (persicaria). Stinkhorns are spotted and listed, too, on 1 July, though here his smiles, slightly coy this time, are for the Latin name: ‘Stinkhorns, or stinking morel, fungus phalloides, appear in the Lythe, and smell abominably. Lin: [i.e. Linnaeus] for a certain reason, calls it phallus impudicus.’

Gilbert had apparently already discussed this curiosity with Mulso in not wholly serious terms, for in April it had provoked one of Mulso’s best wisecracks (quite possibly intended as a double entendre):

Vegetation thrives apace now, & I suppose You are quite intent upon your new Study: You will not perhaps relish a Prospect the worse when we force you to look up, as I presume You will go wth your Eyes fixed on ye Ground most Part of the Summer. You will pass wth the Country Folks as a Man always making of Sermons, while you are only considering a weed. I thank you for your learned Dessertation on the Canker or Stink pot. I knew in general that all Flesh was Grass, but I did not know that Grass was Flesh before.²⁶

In the summer of 1767 Mulso returned to the south, and took the living of Witney in Oxfordshire. He was now within riding distance of Selborne, and Gilbert went to stay with him in October. It is one of the very few occasions that John Mulso is mentioned by name in the journals, perhaps because he had the good fortune to share a habitat with one of the choicest local plants in the Midlands, the downy woundwort (now Stachys germanica).

Octobr: 20. Being on a visit at the house of my good friend Mr: John Mulso Rector of Witney, I rode out on purpose to look after the base horehound, the Stachys Fuchsii of Ray, which, that Gent: says, grows near Witney park: I found but one plant under the wall: but farther on near the turnpike that leads to Burford, in an hedge opposite to Minster Lovel, it grows most plentifully. … It was still blowing, & abounded with seed; a good parcel of which I brought away with me to sow in the dry banks round the village of Selborne.²⁷