Douglas Dewar

“With that I saw two swannes of goodly hewe

Come softly swimming downe the lee;

Two fairer birds I yet did never see;

The snow, which does the top of Pindus strew,

Did never whiter shew.”

When I speak of “the swan,” I mean the bird called by ornithologists the mute swan (Cygnus olor), the swan of the poets that warbles sublime and enchanting music when it is about to shuffle off its mortal coil, the tame swan of Europe, the swan that used to take Siegfried for cheap trips down the river, the swan that “graces the brook,” the swan of the “stately homes of England,” the swan I used to feed as a youngster on the Serpentine, not the black fellow in St. James’s Park, the swan that hovers expectantly in the offing while you are having tea in a boat on the Thames. This is, of course, by no means the only species of swan. There are plenty of others—white ones, black ones, black-and-white ones—for the family enjoys a wide distribution. Nevertheless, I propose to confine myself to this particular swan. I have excellent reasons for doing so. As it is the only swan with which I have had much to do, I can, like the Cambridge Don who declared that the Kaiser was quite the pleasantest Emperor he had ever met, say that Cygnus olor is the most agreeable of my swan acquaintances. This may sound like flattery, like the fulsome praise of the penny-a-line puffer. It is nothing of the kind. It is barely complimentary. Among the blind the one-eyed is king, unless, of course, he lives in a republic. “You are the best of a very bad lot,” were the encouraging words with which a prize for arithmetic was once handed to me. The mute swan is the most agreeable of a bad-tempered clan.

Swans are overrated birds. They cannot hold a candle to their despised cousins, the geese. I am sorry to have to say this, to thus shatter another idol of the poets, to expose yet another of what the Babu would call their “bull cock” stories. I am the more sorry as I am fully aware that this will bring down upon me the thunderous wrath of the literary critic, whose devotion to the British bards is truly affecting. Let me, therefore, by way of trimming, say that there is some justification for idolising the swan. The bird is as beautiful as the heroine in a three-volume novel. He is dignified and stately, full of “placid beauty.” “Proudly and slow he swims through the lake in the evening stillness. No leaf, no wave, is moving: the swan alone goes on his solitary course, floating silently like a bright water spirit. How dazzlingly his snowy whiteness shines! How majestically the undulating neck rises and bends! With what lightness and freedom he glides buoyantly away, the pinions unfurled like sails! Each outline melts into the other; every attitude is full of feeling, in every movement is nobility: an ever-changing play of graceful lines, as though he knew that the very stream tarried to contemplate his beauty.”

But his splendour is not without alloy. It is marred by the tiny, black, beady eye, which gives the bird an evil-tempered, sinister expression. This expression is in keeping with the character of the swan. Cygnus is a bully. He delights to tyrannise over the ducks who so often keep him company in captivity. The domineering behaviour of an old swan that used to live in the Zoological Gardens at Lahore was amusing to watch. The water-fowl are fed twice daily, the food being placed in a series of dishes so that all can eat at once. The swan used to appropriate the first dish to be filled, and no duck or goose durst approach that dish. Having taken the edge off his appetite, the swan would waddle to the next plate, and drive away the ducks that were eating out of it. He would then pass on to dish number three, and so on all along the line, his idea being, apparently, to cause the maximum of annoyance to his neighbours with the minimum of trouble to himself. There were great rejoicings among the ducks when that old swan died.

An angry swan is capable of inflicting a nasty blow with its powerful wings. It is said to be able to use these with such force as to break a man’s arm. Mr. Kay Robinson denies this, and declares that the wing of a swan is not a formidable weapon. Personally, I always give the wing the benefit of the doubt and an angry swan a wide berth.