WILSON’S INNER CONFLICT

Forest and Bird, Issue 53, 1 August 1939, Page 4

WILSON’S INNER CONFLICT

By “Korimako.”

COLLECTOR, ARTIST, BEAUTY LOVER

WHEN an egg-collector is also a Naturelover (using the word “lover” in its true sense) what shall he do to save his soul? Can he worship the egg-collecting god and the true God of Nature-love, at one and the same time? Can he serve both the Mammon of collectorship and the God of Natural Beauty? Dr. Edward Wilson, who, at the age of 39, died with the Captain Scott South Pole party in 1911, was from earliest youth an egg-collector, but as he grew older he revolted from it, though the scientific portion of his many-sided personality compelled him to continue some forms of collecting. In “Edward Wilson, Nature-Lover,” his latest biographer, George Seaver, quotes from Wilson’s diary:— “Much as the egg-collection means to me as a collection of reminiscences, it is a permanent record of a cruelty I have come to hate in myself as well as in others. lam more inclined every year to leave a nest exactly as I found it.” The False God of Game-Protection. The war within Wilson between the Naturelover and the scientific ornithologist plus zoologist plus biologist went on for years. Wilson was between two fires, burning within himself. He was also between two fires with regard to his friends and hosts, who expected him to kill preying birds and beasts in order to protect (as they thought!) game birds and fish. In 1899, when 27 years of age, he visited Norway as the guest of a Mr. and Mrs. Rice, who proved to be the kindest of hosts, and he wrote on July 2 of that year: “I shot a merganser and took seven eggs. All this is against my principles, but Rice is so very keen to kill down these beasts for the shooting and fishing.” Mr. Rice saw the question only from the angle of the grouse and the black-game, but Wilson saw it also from the angle of the fox, and from the angle of a conception-of-God in which the fox as well as its bird victims figure as God’s handiwork. Can it be said that predatory birds are less part of God’s purpose than are other birds? Writing in the same year from Norway to his betrothed in England, Wilson declares: “I do love the hawk and the owls more than any other birds, except perhaps the migrant warb-

lers. I always hope and believe we shall be allowed to see all these things afterwards, and things we never can see now; we shall see all God's works and shall know how they all fit in; I can’t think that any interest in them now can only be for these days; some day we shall see it all, and understand it all, you and I both of us, and everybody else who has felt what it is to love anything into which God has put life. . . ” The italics are the writer’s, not Wilson’s. Who among men shall be presumptuous enough to say that predatory birds do not “fit in”? Divided Sympathies. But Wilson continued to be divided between the God of Nature-love and the god of shooting and fishing—between his duties to wild life and his duties to zoology. On his Norwegian trip he joined in shooting a family of stoats engaged in hunting a grouse family, hen and chickens. He was much moved by the hen grouse’s terror, but he felt he could not deny the stoat’s right to live. He shot, but with misgivings. On June 27, 1899, he records: “In such a case one’s sympathies were divided, for those stoats would not leave the place till they had hunted down every single grouse-chick and the hen-bird, too, for she would not leave her chicks.” The same incident, and others, are referred to by Wilson under date July 4, 1899: “I think more and more that sport is a vile and beastly form of amusement, not only because it means killing the game birds, but also because it means such wholesale slaughter of such a number of beasts and birds that are so much more interesting than the birds preserved. I like stoats, hawks, and foxes better than grouse, in much the same way as I like Esau better than Jacob. I am puzzled to know what to do, whether anyone has any right to kill birds and beasts for such reasons. If the place were mine, I should kill nothing except for painting and helping others and myself to get to know things better. I think that is right. But to shoot a duck and take all its eggs as I did the other day I am pretty sure is wrong, when the only reason was that it lives on young salmon. I felt a beast. . . . Now that I have got a merganser and

painted it, I don’t think I could kill another even for Rice. But when you see six or eight stoats hunting down a family of little fluffy yellow-brown grouse chicks, and the mother grouse in such a state because she cannot help them, you feel you ought to shoot the stoats. But, if you like stoats as I do, it goes against the grain.” Science is a More Exacting God. While Wilson thus denounces the god of shooting and fishing, he feels that he cannot renounce the scientific god of biology and zoology. But even on the altar of the scientific god he will not place any unnecessary victims. He will be sparing of life where he can be. And, as his references to “painting” in the above quotation show, he will be artist first and zoologist second—he will interpret birds and beasts to the public through his painted pictures, rather than through stuffed birds and trophies of slaughter. And now comes a most interesting and symbolic conclusiona conclusion that makes us think. Wilson served science to the last, and the Polar dash in which he and his comrades perished yielded, among other things, three Emperor penguin eggs which Wilson collected with the hope that, through the science of embryology, they would throw light on penguin ancestry. If this had been his only achievement, he would have died in vain scientifically, for the post mortem scientific verdict was that “nothing decisive could be expected from the collection of the three Emperor embryos so close to one another in development as those which Dr. Wilson and his comrades obtained at such cost.” In the words of the biographer Seaver, the dissection of these three eggs “has added nothing to our knowledge.” But Wilson’s paintings of birds and wild life have added much. They are the greatest heritage he has bequeathed to the Nature-lovers of the future; and these invaluable pictures stand out because they are that portion of his work which made least claim upon the blood of wild creatures, and which therefore did least damage to his principles of Nature-love. As the world grows more truly civilised, it will appreciate more and more the conflict between Wilson the artist and Wilson the collector, and the truly spiritual character of the ordeal which he underwent and which he has left so plainly and so poignantly on record.