Mr. White's theme [in The Goshawk] is as old as Babylon but his allusiveness is of the twentieth century. He has the gift of words, which calls for as much effort to control as he who has it not expends in striving after expression. The book is about the training of a hawk, a very ancient art: there is still a freemasonry of falconers -- austringers -- scattered about the world. Yet, on putting the book down one feels that the goshawk, though central to it, has been secondary to one's enjoyment -- that the tension that has held throughout the 200 pages is, one may almost say, the moral aura of this difficultly achieved rapport between civilized man and slaying bird. That Mr. White should devote himself completely to a hawk, going sleepless, losing count of time, exacting his ultimate of patience, would seem freakish in a world of other tensions were he not able to hold the reader to a belief that this is something nearer to the heart of reality. One rubs one's eyes at last and says, "All this for a bird," and tries to shake things back into their proper proportions; but they refuse to be shaken back; things are not quite as they were: somewhere beyond the welfare state a hawk stoops to his kill, and a man has by infinite pains entered the realm of the bird and shared the vision of that blazing eye. Here, perhaps, in a world of tourism, is the one realm that is left for adventure.

Mr. White can turn on himself suddenly, waiting on the bird, and reflect on an education costing up to $3,000 leading to a gamekeeper's cottage and a hawk. The clue is his love of learning: "I had learned always, insatiably, looking for something which I wanted to know." A love of creation and mastery has kept his personal life stripped to essentials. "To divest oneself of unnecessary possessions: that was the business of life." At moments he seems a sort of western Omar, with a handful of philosophy and a headful of words.

He recited Shakespeare through the night watches. Certainly to understand falconry enriches the text of the plays. A people who had flown the hawk must have felt the force of the metaphors in their marrow which we feel only in our heads. Mr. White could recapture something physical thus through his $3,000 education and the hawk. The means to it were a monastic seclusion and self-government, its attendant virtue was a purgation of civilized sentiment: maggots at their work on a dead sheep are seen as "clean, vital, symbolical of an essential life-force perfectly persisting." And "Gos" the hawk, whose heart and breathing are faster than the human, is the heightened vibration at the centre. Mr. White communicates this also to the countryside of the bird's range, meadows at dawn or under the moon. The sun, the rain, the harvest faces, all seem to share the quickened heartbeat of the hawk. Actually Mr. White is pitting "the hurly-burly of present-day lunacy" against "the savage decency of ages long overpowered." That is why The Goshawk is a Morality.