Charles Waterton: Naturalist
OUR ENGLISH LITERATURE, as we all know, has passed through its best growing years during an overwhelming Protestant ascendency. For several centuries there were so few Catholic writers that Englishmen might almost be excused for thinking that not only the iron and coal and wealth of old England, but its strong and beautiful language also, were the fitting rewards granted by a bountiful and appreciative Providence to approved national types of Christianity. When Lingard appeared, employing, strange to say, a remarkably pure and idiomatic English, his excellence seemed to be resented, as if he had no right to be as good as he was; and the less said about him, the better. There was an audible gasp of astonishment, accompanied by something like indignation, when Newman arose on a larger stage than Lingard’s and proceeded to use the English language as a garment for Catholic thought. The fit was perfect. That the speech of Englishmen should be heard in a Catholic galley was bad enough; that it should seem to be at home there, as if nothing at all had happened in the interval between Sir Thomas More and the Duke of Cumberland, was a mystery and an outrage requiring time and patience to digest.
It is sometimes alleged that Catholics exaggerate the literary excellence of their own writers. The suspicion has been entertained that Patmore and Francis Thompson and Joyce Kilmer, for instances, are the pets of Catholic coteries and have been nursed into a largely factitious prominence. If this be so, the years will tell. But the suspicion seems unwarranted. The Catholic reading public has neither the numbers nor the influence to initiate popular literary estimates. If it tosses its cap in the air for a coreligionist, it is only after the cheers have been started elsewhere.
Nay, sometimes the cheering finds few or no echoes. Take Charles Waterton. His famous book, Wanderings in South America, appeared in 1825. It leaped into immediate popularity. Sydney Smith wrote a long review of it in his best manner for the Edinburgh. It was assailed by the stay-at-home naturalists—the “closet-naturalists” as Waterton ironically styled them—and provoked a controversy like that which raged during the consulship of Roosevelt around the so-called nature fakers. And since its appearance a century ago, it has never been allowed to gather dust in the limbo of the top shelf. The original publisher—not a Catholic publisher—issued a sixth edition about the time Waterton died. In 1878, the Rev. J. G. Wood, an Anglican clergyman and distinguished naturalist—he delivered the Lowell lectures in Boston in 1883—edited an edition of the Wanderings with a biographical introduction. This useful edition has been reprinted six times. At least two American editions have appeared. In 1909, a New York publishing house (Sturgis and Walton) printed a handsome edition, with an introduction and illustrations by Charles Livingston Bull, and a memoir by Norman Moore, Waterton’s biographer in the Dictionary of National Biography. The Wanderings is one of the latest additions in the “Everyman’s Library” series of classics. It is curious to note that Newman and Waterton are the only two Catholic names in that series among the writers of the past hundred years. Not long ago the London Times devoted a large part of the leading article of its Literary Supplement to a consideration of Waterton, as the possessor of a permanent place in English literature. And about the same time, an English magazine of the popular kind printed some reminiscences, in which Sir Austen Chamberlain stated that the Wanderings was the favorite book of his boyhood. These are straws; but they would indicate that Waterton’s work is still raising a little wind.
The element of strangeness about all this is the apparently resolute way in which Catholics have held aloof from all demonstrations in favor of Waterton. He published, besides the Wanderings, three volumes of natural-history essays, four volumes in all. Seldom can any one of the four be found in a Catholic library. No Catholic' publisher’s list contains a Waterton title. Two histories of English literature which have been consulted, both written by Catholics, omit all mention of Waterton. Whenever a reference is made to Waterton in a Catholic periodical, it is done in the manner of one airing his erudition, and is generally inaccurate.
There is so little conceivable reason for the neglect that it actually takes on the lineaments of a mystery. It cannot be because Waterton is a naturalist, and therefore writing outside the circle of common human interest. While he is a naturalist of eminence, he always had impatience, amounting to contempt, for the learned and cumbersome paraphernalia of scientific pedantry. Much to the dismay of the naturalists who recognize his high worth, he never attached the accepted Greek and Latin labels to the objects of his study. He used the popular names, and discussed nature in the large and easy way of a man of the world who knew a thing or two besides the matter in hand. He has far more of the human and the personal in his studies than Gilbert White. These are, after all, superfluous arguments on the side of a book like the Wanderings, which, as a matter of fact, is regarded even in the Cambridge History of English Literature, as a literary classic. If the book is interesting to the world at large, it ought to be sufficiently interesting to Catholic readers.
While a book of travels is always sure of a certain measure of welcome, it is perhaps right to surmise that it stands a better chance in a country like England than in a self-supporting country like our own. Every second person in England either has a relation beyond the seas, or looks forward to a colonial career. Although the government is alarmed over the declining interest in the colonial civil service among the undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge, the names of Clive, Hastings, and Rhodes are still potent to stir youthful imaginations. We can understand why Waterton’s book of travel should be more popular in England than in America. But we do not understand why it should be more popular among non-Catholic Englishmen than among Catholic Englishmen.
There are three kinds of Catholic writers. Those who find it impossible, from some limitation in their art or personality, to make literary material out of their religious experience; those who learn to play a discreet Catholic accompaniment in their literary entertainments; and finally those who are boisterously Catholic before any and every audience. If Waterton belonged to the first, or even the second of these three classes, Catholics might be excused for not paying him special attention. But this, in the language of the penny thriller, is just where the mystery deepens. Waterton is uproariously Catholic. He scorned concealments. In his clear and simple view of the matter, it was the other fellow, the child of the Reformation, who ought to practice concealments. He always blessed himself in public, figuratively speaking and probably literally speaking also, with the biggest and most deliberate sign of the cross that he could make. He waved the papal colors with a joyous delight in the face of early Victorian England, which was a very Protestant England indeed. How England came to swallow him, remains as great a mystery as how Catholics came to forget him.
The first of these two mysteries becomes less insoluble on a further acquaintance with Charles Waterton. He was a man of so much transparent honesty and goodness that his most objectionable enthusiasms wore a convincing air of unselfish idealism and chivalry. He was a friend of Thackeray, met him in Rome, and tried to convert him. We nearly all like Thackeray; but just think of anyone trying to make a Catholic out of that lovable worldling, with all his inherited insular prepossessions strong upon him! The attempt is described in the Newcomes, where the hero is writing home from Rome: that the ludicrous side of the incident is not played up as much as it might be, is evidence of goodness of heart in both men.
A friend, who belongs to the old religion, took me, last week, into a church where the Virgin lately appeared in person to a Jewish gentleman, flashed down upon him from heaven in light and splendor celestial, and of course, straightway converted him. My friend bade me look at the picture, and, kneeling down beside me, I know prayed with all his honest heart that the truth might shine down upon me too; but I saw no glimpse of heaven at all; all I saw was a poor picture, an altar with blinking candles, a church hung with tawdry strips of red and white calico. The good kind W. went away humbly saying “that such might have happened again if heaven so willed it.” I could not but feel a kindness and admiration for the good man. I know his works are made to square with his faith, that he dines on a crust, lives as chastely as a hermit, and gives his all to the poor.
Alas, the spiritual dispositions of Thackeray were not precisely those of the Abbé Alphonse Ratisbon. If the simple and sanguine temper of Waterton were doomed to disappointment on this occasion, we can still regard the incident as one of the rarest and most touching things in history. It might have won mention in Hazlitt's “Of Persons One Would Wish To Have Seen,” if that fine essay had been written some fifty years later.
When Waterton liked a man, he wanted to be sure of liking him for all eternity. Doctor Hobson—Richard Hobson, M. D. Cantab.—was his family physician and close friend. In the year following Waterton’s death, Dr. Hobson published a garrulous book entitled: Charles Waterton: His Home, Habits, and Handiwork. Reminiscences of an Intimate and Most Confiding Personal Association of Nearly Thirty Years. It testifies to the popularity of Waterton, rather than to the skill of the memoirist, that the book ran into a second edition within five months of its first appearance. The doctor’s affection and reverence for his friend are the most noticeable features of the large acreage of verbiage; but the reader’s patience is sometimes rewarded. The doctor writes, referring to the apparition of our Lady and her shrine at La Salette, which Waterton had been visiting.
He, of course, on his return, largely expatiated on it, and insisted on my chiming in with him to the full extent of his own self-conviction. He was amazed how I could be so obtuse and bigoted as not to be at once proselytized, expressing the greatest surprise that I was so perverse and hoodwinked as not to go along with him even in his “tolerant belief.” After earnestly expostulating with me, “I have,” he observed, “often heard it said that none are so deaf as those who won’t hear, but I can bear testimony that none are so blind as those who won't see.” Although we were both emphatic in our disputation, yet our controversy was invariably maintained with such a thorough conviction of the sincerity of a sacred veneration for the cause we espoused that a word of anger never escaped the lips of either of us. I entertain not the shadow of a doubt but that the squire indulged to the fullest extent in the firm belief of the appearance of the apparition of the Blessed Virgin to the two shepherd children: and that no argument, however sound or lucidly expressed and convincing to Protestants, nor any amount of persuasive powers, however bewitchingly used, could have created an atom of doubt or disbelief in his mind.
The good doctor was a patient and cheerful Boswell. His stanch Protestant ears had to submit to eulogies of the “Romish Church,” constantly pledged as the caput mundi against the Protestant caput mortuum. Nor was the squire without his patience, too. If the doctor obstinately refused to be saved, the zealous apostle, on the other hand, never allowed his temper to be affected. And this is a gentle courtesy not always achievable by zealous apostles.
Waterton, it must be admitted, had certain advantages in his public and private bullying of English prejudices. Much can be forgiven a man whose ancestors fought at Cressy and Agincourt and Marston Moor, and are mentioned by Shakespeare in his Richard II. Moreover, he was a landed proprietor and unquestionably belonged to the gentry. Such a man is sure of being allowed considerable leeway on the score of amiable eccentricities. It is extremely doubtful, however, whether the honest and fearless squire was aware of the indulgence his social position could command; but, whether or no, he never appeared nervous about overstraining it. He seized every opportunity of praising the Catholic Church and, in particular, the Jesuits. He always referred to the Reformers of the sixteenth century in terms of gross and most appalling disrespect. The only living thing he did not love and cherish was the rat, and he paid his respects to the reigning royal house by always calling a rat a “Hanoverian rat,” because it “always contrives to thrust its nose into every man’s house when there is anything to be got.”
The Rev. J. G. Wood thinks there were extenuating circumstances for the rudeness.
The Watertons fared but badly in the stormy times of the Reformation, and, preferring conscience to property, they retained their ancient faith, but lost heavily in this world’s goods. The many coercive acts against Roman Catholics naturally had their effect, not only on those who actually lived in the time of the Reformation, but upon their successors. A Roman Catholic could not sit in Parliament, he could not hold a commission in the army, he could not be a justice of the peace, he had to pay double land tax, and to think himself fortunate if he had any land left on which taxes could be demanded. He was not allowed to keep a horse worth more than five pounds, and more irritating than all, he had either to attend the parish church or to pay twenty pounds for every month of absence. In fact, a Roman Catholic was looked upon and treated as a wholly inferior being and held much the same relative position to his persecutors as Jews held toward the Normans and Saxons in the times of the Crusades.... Waterton was, during some of his best years, a personal sufferer from these acts, and they rankled too deeply in his mind to be forgotten. Hence the repeated and most irrelevant allusions in his writings to Martin Luther, Henry VIII, Queen Bess, Archbishop Cranmer, Oliver Cromwell, Charles Stuart, “Dutch William” (mostly associated with the “Hanoverian rat” and the national debt), and other personages celebrated in history.... On principle he refused to qualify as Deputy-Lieutenant and magistrate, because he had been debarred from doing so previously to the Emancipation Act.
Charles Waterton was born on the ancestral domain of Walton in 1782. He was the twenty-seventh Lord of Walton; and, through his father’s mother, ninth in descent from Blessed Thomas More, the martyred Chancellor of Henry VIII. The estate, no longer in the possession of the Watertons, is some three miles outside the village of Wakefield and not far from Leeds. When he was ten, he was sent to Tudhoe, a village near Durham, to a private school conducted by a Catholic priest. This little school had a remote and very slight connection with Ushaw College, on the strength of which Waterton is sometimes erroneously described as having belonged to that college. The article on Ushaw in the Catholic Encyclopedia does not include him among its distinguished sons. At the age of fourteen, he entered Stonyhurst where he remained for four years and completed his formal education. The Watertons had given several members to the Society of Jesus: they lie under ancient tombstones in the shadow of the chapel at Stonyhurst. The traditional affection of the Watertons toward the Jesuits was deepened in Charles as a result of his four years with them. Through a long life he eagerly sought every opportunity of testifying in public and private to his affectionate reverence for them. One of his instructors, Father Clifford, a first cousin of Lord Clifford, noting the young naturalist’s tendency to range abroad—sometimes beyond bounds—questing for field knowledge in his little private pursuit, thought he saw in him a budding Englishman whose adventurous spirit would probably lead him out of his snug island home into trackless places at the ends of the earth. As a safeguard in such a contingency, he asked young Waterton to promise that he would never touch wine or intoxicating liquor. This promise Charles made and kept to the end of his life.
After leaving Stonyhurst, with accomplishments that included facility in writing Latin verse and a love of English and Latin literature, he spent two years at home with his father, during which time he acquired the reputation of being the most daring rider with the Lord Darlington foxhounds. In 1802, he went to Spain and had a wild year of cholera and earthquakes, ending in a mad dash for home on a sailing vessel. A bold skipper had been found, who was willing to defy a cordon of brigs-of-war, maintaining a strict embargo on the shipping of Malaga. The weakened condition of Waterton’s health called for a gentler climate than that of Yorkshire, and in 1804 he voyaged to Demerara, British Guiana, on the sloping forehead of South America. It is close to the equator, and came into American notice prominently some years ago in the famous Venezuela boundary dispute. Here the young naturalist took charge of two estates belonging to his father and uncle. The death of his father two years later required his presence in England, but the new squire returned almost immediately to the tropics, where he continued in the administration of the estates for six years till the death of his uncle, when he was relieved of his double charge and felt free to indulge at leisure his pet hobby.
Then began the series of four journeys which are described in his famous book. Its full title indicates broadly the extent of the journeys and the years in which they were made: Wanderings in South America, the Northwest of the United States, and the Antilles in the Years 1812, 1816, 1820, and 1824. The writer in the London Times to whom reference has been made, says that Waterton’s style is baroque and the least modern part of him, calling attention especially, as Sydney Smith has done already, to the elaborate apostrophes and the classical allusions and quotations. Yet, he is forced to admit that they are oddly in keeping with the general structure, like the statues on the facade or roof of a building. With these outworn little tricks of rhetoric, the style is curiously moldproof and modern. “Many years ago,” Mr. Charles Livingston Bull tells us, “when reading this book for the first time, my boyish imagination was so fired that I determined the first opportunity should find me on my way to Waterton’s beloved Demerara, and in March of the year 1908, I sailed from New York on a journey in which I covered most of the country which he describes so well and so thoroughly.” A dead or superannuated style is not so wonder-working.
While Waterton in his kindly and simple-hearted fashion, and probably under the influence of Sterne, makes expansive and flourishing gestures, he could be terse enough on occasion, and he possessed no mean mastery of the “difficult art of omission,” by means of which, if we believe Stevenson, it is possible to make an Iliad out of the ordinary issue of a daily newspaper. The Times critic admits that in one respect Waterton was thoroughly modern in having a journalist’s eye for good “copy,”’ and he cites the well-known adventure with a cayman. A cayman, or caiman, is a word one seldom hears now, and is the name of the larger species of alligator.
It would be an easy task to write the headlines with which reporters would diversify the stories they got from him. Indeed, many of them would have been cabled from Para or Georgetown to New York or London, and would have flared through the press of the world. One of his stories survives in its pristine sensationalism. Overnight a caiman had taken a hooked bait attached to a rope, and Waterton wished to catch it alive. His people had the end of the rope and were ordered to pull the reptile toward the shore. Waterton’s first idea was to thrust a mast into its mouth, thus making it harmless; but as the creature drew near, lashing the water in rage, he made a sudden plunge, leaped on its back, pulled up its forelegs to “serve as a bridle,” and in this heroic posture the pair were dragged out of the water and some forty yards over the sand. There is no reasonable doubt that the story was true, although it lost nothing in the telling.
The writer goes on to give other instances of Waterton's instinctive feeling for whatever would be of lively interest to readers. Among them he quotes the classic description of the sloth, the first accurate description of that strange beast in literature. This was the description which moved Sydney Smith to make a memorable comparison: “The sloth moves suspended, rests suspended, sleeps suspended, and passes his whole life in suspense, like a young clergyman distantly related to a bishop.”
It is in this volume that Waterton enters an eloquent defense of the Jesuits against the stereotyped Protestant representations of Southey in his History of Brazil. He also showed himself rather careless of a certain phase of English temper by speaking kindly and sympathetically of Irish endurance under English misrule; and almost equally careless of the same temper by liking and praising Americans. Of all the famous English visitors to the United States, he is perhaps the only writer among them who met us and liked us and did not regard us from a lofty and superior eminence when telling his countrymen about us. Wilson's Ornithology of the United States was the book which induced Waterton to go by way of New York on his fourth and last trip to Demerara. He saw the Hudson up to Albany, went across the state to Buffalo, visited Montreal and Quebec, and on his return to New York stopped at Lake George and Saratoga, “a gay and fashionable place,” where he enjoyed the hotels, the waters, and the company.
There is a pleasing frankness, and ease and becoming dignity, in the American ladies; and the good humor, and absence of all haughtiness and puppyism in the gentlemen, must, no doubt, impress the traveler with elevated notions of the company who visit this celebrated spa.
Of course he went to Philadelphia, where: Wilson’s Ornithology had been printed. His comment on the city is interesting.
Travelers hesitate whether to give the preference to Philadelphia or to New York. Philadelphia is certainly a noble city, and its environs beautiful; but there is a degree of quiet and sedateness in it, which, though no doubt very agreeable to the man of calm and domestic habits, is not so attractive to one of speedy movements.
Waterton studied men more than birds while he was here. We must have been a rather crude nation in 1824, and yet Waterton has nothing but hearty approval of us, excepting for our habit of smoking. We still have the habit, but it is no longer especially characteristic. Waterton's portrait of us may be flattering beyond our deserts; still it bears a more convincing air of being related to some sort of reality than do the caricatures and provincial burlesque of Moore and Dickens and the loose impressionisms of their successors. It took at least courage, not to mention other virtues, to write and publish the following observation about the American:
He has certainly hit upon the way (but I could not make out by what means) of speaking a much purer English language than that which is in general spoken on the parent soil. This astonished me much but it is really the case.
He bids us farewell in a kindly and generous spirit:
Politicians of other countries imagine that intestine feuds will cause a division in this commonwealth; at present there appears to be no reason for such a conjecture. Heaven forbid that it should happen! The world at large would suffer by it. For ages yet to come, may this great commonwealth continue to be the United States of North America.
It is good to know that, if there are Englishmen like Mr. Kipling and the editor of the National Review, there are also Englishmen like Charles Waterton.
After the publication of the Wanderings, Waterton settled down and married. His wife died a year after marriage. Her two maiden sisters thereupon yielded to the bereaved husband’s wishes and took over the care of his household, which now included an infant son. This arrangement continued in force till Waterton’s death forty years later. We see henceforth the country squire instead of the intrepid explorer; though the naturalist still remains uppermost. He is said to have been the first to create a bird sanctuary by building a stone wall three miles in circumference and some eight or nine feet high around his park, besides making other elaborate provisions for protecting animal life and studying its habits. The results of his studies were published in a series of three volumes, interspersed with quaint bits of informal biography. His house stood on an island, approached by a single bridge, where the water birds could be watched from a window. The park was a paradise for all living things except the unfortunate Hanoverian rat. There were frequent excursions to the Continent in the company of the two sisters, and Stonyhurst was regularly a port of call, especially during the Christmas season.
It would be hard to imagine a happier life. But it was not the life of an epicure. The hardy habits of the wilderness persisted. Norman Moore, who lived with him toward the end, gives the squire’s morning order: it is substantially the same as that given by Dr. Hobson:
He went to bed early, and slept upon the bare floor, with a block of wood for his pillow. He rose for the day at half-past three, and spent the hour from four to five at prayer in his chapel. He then read every morning a chapter in a Spanish life of St. Francis Xavier, followed by a chapter of Don Quixote in the original, after which he used to stuff birds or write letters till breakfast.
Breakfast was at eight. The Spartan quality of this régime cannot be fully appreciated unless one has experienced the chill of an English winter morning in an unheated house, and has been informed that Waterton’s early life in the tropics had made him delicately sensitive to cold. He hardly ever ate meat; his wildest indulgence was a cup of tea; he used to vex the good Doctor Hobson by rigorously observing all the fast days of the Church long after he had passed the age limit set for fasting. He had another habit which appalled the doctor. When Waterton was a young man and about to penetrate alone wild forests far from the medical resources of civilization, he induced a surgeon to teach him how to open and close a vein so that he could bleed himself in an emergency; bleeding, by venesection, or by the application of leeches, was still the universal remedy for nearly every sort of ailment in the early days of the past century. Blood-letting became Waterton’s panacea. Even in his eighties he would not hesitate to “take away from twenty to twenty-four ounces of blood, with not merely temporary freedom from all suffering, but with all the permanent benefit that could be desired.” So writes Doctor Hobson in amazement. He could open and close a vein with either hand. Sometimes the knife was too much dulled by casual use about the house, and had to be sharpened after a futile attempt (in Waterton’s phrase) ‘‘to tap the claret.” Let modern science shake its incredulous head!
The athlete’s joy in overcoming difficulties, which started him on early adventure, was something he never lost. When he was over forty, he climbed to the top of the cross on St. Peter’s in Rome, and left his glove on the point of the lightning rod. Pope Pius VII thought the glove impaired the usefulness of the lightning rod and ordered its removal. As no one was eager to assume the task, Waterton had to repeat his feat “to the amusement of his friends and the delight of the populace.” He also climbed to the top of the castle of St. Angelo and stood with one foot on the head of the angel. When he was over eighty, he could clamber to the top of the highest oaks in his park. After this, the feats of the young men, who are the “human flies’’ of the “movies,” must appear tame. These well-authenticated accounts lend color to a Stonyhurst legend of Waterton’s school days. Once, in that juvenile mood which is the terror of fond parents, he proceeded to prove to some of his schoolboy friends that he could climb the face of the tower at the entrance of the college. The tower, built in the days of James I, rises in four courses of pillars one above another. Waterton had reached the fourth and highest course, and was preparing to negotiate a selected pillar when Father Rector appeared on the scene far below, and, to the disgust of everybody, peremptorily ordered the lad to descend at once. That night a storm blew down the very pillar Waterton was preparing to leg up when the Rector interfered. An examination of the fallen pillar disclosed the fact that there was an old crack straight through it, and it had been in such perilous condition that a slight jar would have overthrown it. The mended pillar has been restored to its place and serves to point a moral for succeeding generations.
Modern science would probably like to know the secret of Waterton’s pliability of limb in old age. The years forgot to harden his arteries. “When Mr. Waterton was seventy-seven years of age,” says Dr. Hobson, “I was witness to his scratching the back part of his head with the big toe of his right foot.” And, again the doctor’s words must be given, “in the summer of 1861, when in his seventy-ninth year, Mr. Waterton, in one of his jocose moods, by a run of fifteen yards, bounded over a stout wire fence, without touching it hand or foot, and this I carefully measure to three feet six inches in height.” A Stonyhurst tradition—not a loud, boastful tradition: rather a shocked and somewhat politely modulated tradition—tells how the old naturalist would be as likely as not to enter a room full of company during the holidays, walking on his hands. What a terrible old man! Still, with all his informal ways, no one, we are told, felt like taking liberties with the squire.
Stonyhurst is a rich field for the lover of Waterton. In its museum he can see the identical cayman which Waterton rode, together with the wooden hook and rope used on the famous occasion. Here, too, is a finely preserved sloth; and indeed, a large collection of specimens preserved by the naturalist’s own hands and according to a formula of his own, which he claimed to be superior to every known process of taxidermic art practiced in his day. Latin inscriptions in pentameter verse, of Waterton’s composition, often take the place of the usual learned labels. One semicircular case is said by Dr. Hobson to have been the main ornament of the Waterton home. The general inscription of the exhibit in this case is: “England’s Reformation Zoologically Illustrated.” A beautifully crested bird rests on a perch above a small fragment of granite inscribed, “The Catholic Church Triumphant: Tu es Petrus, etc.” In front and below is a repulsive-looking crab, marked “Mother Law Church,” with eight villainous beetles, denominated “her dissenting fry.” On the right is a big, bloated, and hideous horned-toad, with a crested tail, which we are informed is Henry VIII. To the left, another fat toad, not charming by any means, stands for “Dutch William III.” Bishop Burnet, “The Rev.” John Knox, Old Nick, Archbishop Cranmer, Titus Oates, and Queen Bess are represented by loathsome subterraneous specimens of crawling animal life. There is a rumor that a temporary coolness sprang up between Waterton and Stonyhurst when the Rector of the college hesitated to manifest enthusiastic appreciation at the offer of this particular exhibit.
Norman Moore’s account of Waterton’s last days deserves reproduction.
After breakfast we went with a carpenter to finish some bridges at the far end of the park. The work was completed, and we were proceeding homewards when, in crossing a small bridge, a bramble caught the squire’s foot, and he fell heavily upon a log. He was greatly shaken, and said he thought he was dying. He walked, notwithstanding, a little way, and was then compelled to lie down. He would not permit his sufferings to distract his mind, and he pointed out to the carpenter some trees that were to be felled. He presently continued his route, and managed to reach the spot where the boat was moored. Hitherto he had refused all assistance, but he could not step from the bank into the boat and he said, “I am afraid I must ask you to help me in.” He walked from the landing place into the house, changed his clothes, and came and sat in the large room below. The pain increasing, he rose from his seat after he had seen his doctor, and though he had been bent double with anguish, he persisted in walking upstairs without help, and would have gone to his room in the top story, if, for the sake of saving trouble to others, he had not been induced to stop halfway in the sitting room of his sister-in-law.... The pain abated, and the next day he seemed better. In the afternoon he talked to me a good deal, chiefly about natural history. But he was well aware of his perilous condition, for he remarked to me, “This is a bad business,” and later on he felt his pulse often, and said, “It is a bad case.” He was more than self-possessed. A benignant cheerfulness beamed from his mind, and in spite of fits of pain he frequently looked up with a gentle smile, and made some little joke. Toward midnight he grew worse. The priest was summoned, and Waterton got ready to die. He pulled himself upright without help, sat in the middle of the sofa, and gave his blessing in turn to his grandson, Charles, to his granddaughter, Mary, to each of his sisters-in-law, to his niece, and to myself, and left a message for his son who was hastening back from Rome. He then received the last Sacraments, repeated all the responses, Saint Bernard’s hymn in English, and the first two verses of Dies Irae. The end was now at hand, and he died at twenty-seven minutes past two in the morning of May 27, 1865.
The death of the squire was a calamity to his tenants and all the countryside, to Protestants and Catholics alike; for he was bountiful in his charity irrespective of creed. He disliked Protestantism thoroughly, but he could love those who practiced it in good faith. Englishmen who differed with him in religion, and suffered from his irony, were willing to accept Thackeray's judgment as final, that “he was a good man; his works were made to square with his faith, he dined on a crust, lived as chastely as a hermit, and gave his all to the poor.”
The Thackeray episode in Rome, a touching evidence of Waterton’s strong faith and his affection for his friends, ought to be coupled with another illustrating his love of dumb animals. It was his custom before going out on his afternoon walk to provide himself with a crust against chance meetings with some of his animal friends. One goose, especially, used to wait for him hopefully every evening at the end of the bridge over the moat. Norman Moore was with Waterton one day when the usual crust had been forgotten. On approaching the bridge, the squire hung back. He looked troubled. “How shall we ever get past that goose?” and there was worry in his voice. The lord of the manor thereupon adopted the Fabian strategy of skulking among distant trees on various pretexts, with much reconnoitering of the bridge, till Mariana at the most got tired waiting and waddled off. He could not bear, says Moore, “to give it nothing when it raised its bill.”
Eminence in art and science does not often surpass itself in the most difficult art of all, that of life. And that is Charles Waterton's chief distinction. The sturdy Yorkshire squire was of a different type from that of the Oxford-bred Newman. But both men meet on a high plane of personal holiness, and in the grace of a Faith superior to all the challenges of the world, the flesh, and the devil. Excepting always the easy masters of fame, the student of literature is often at a loss to explain the survival of the chosen few in the deluge of oblivion which blots out the writers of every generation. If a guess be allowed on the survival of Waterton, it would be concerned more with his personality than with his literary qualities: though it cannot be a commonplace style which lets an interesting man shine through. In these pelagian days, so busy upon the old futility of making conduct keep an upright position without supernatural supports, the wholesome personality of Charles Waterton can raise the average of sanity and cheerfulness on the favorite bookshelf.
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