For thrice a thousand years, to our knowledge, that divine music, the
sweetest of any music upon earth, has been eloquent in the woods and the
gardens of every springtime, renewing its song as the earth her youth.
The nightingale has ever been the poet’s darling; is indeed poetry
incarnated; love, vocal and spiritual, made manifest. Nothing surely can
show the deadness, dulness, coarseness, coldness of the human multitude
so plainly as their indifference to this exquisite creature. Do even
people who call themselves cultured care for the nightingale? How do
they care? They rise from their dinner-table and stroll out on to a
terrace or down an avenue, and there in the moonlight listen for a few
moments, and say ‘How charming!’ then return to their flirtations, their
theatricals, their baccarat or their bézique within doors. Bulbul may
sing all night amongst the roses and the white heads of the lilies; they
will not go out again. They prefer the cushioned lounge, the electric
light, the tumbler of iced drink, the playing cards, the spiced _double
entendre_. Here and there a woman may sit at her open casement half the
night, or a poet walk entranced through the leafy lanes till dawn, but
these listeners are few and far between.
When Nature gave this gift to the world she might well have looked for
some slight gratitude. But save when Sappho has listened, or Meleager,
or Shakespeare, or Ford, or Musset, or Shelley, or Lytton, who has
cared? Not one.
Possibly, if the nightingale had been born once in a century, rarity
might have secured for it attention, protection, appreciation. But
singing everywhere, as it has done, wherever the climate was fit for it,
through so many hundreds and hundreds of years, it has been almost
wholly neglected by the soulless and dull ears of man.
A slender, bright and agile bird, the nightingale is neither shy nor
useless, as it is said that most poets and musicians are. It eats grubs,
worms, lice, small insects of all kinds, and hunts amongst the decaying
leaves and grass for many a garden pest, with active energy and
industry, qualities too often lacking to the human artist. It builds a
loose, roomy nest, often absolutely on the ground, and always placed
with entire confidence in man’s good faith. It is a very happy bird, and
its song is the most ecstatic hymn of joy. I never can imagine how it
came to be associated with sorrow and tragedy, and the ghastly story of
Procne and Itys. For rapturous happiness there is nothing to be compared
to the full love-song of the nightingale. All other music is harsh,
cold, dissonant, beside it. But, alas! the full perfection of the song
is not always heard. For it to sing its fullest, its richest, its
longest, it must have been in peace and security, it must have been left
untroubled and unalarmed, it must have its little heart at rest in its
leafy home. Where the nightingale is harassed, and affrighted, and
disturbed, its song is quite different to what it is when in happiness
and tranquillity; where it feels alarmed and insecure it never acquires
its full song, the note is shorter and weaker, and the magnificent,
seemingly unending, trills are never heard, for the bird sings as though
it were afraid of being heard and hunted—which, indeed, no doubt it is.
When entirely secure from any interference, year after year in the same
spot (for, if not interfered with, it returns unerringly to the same
haunts), many families will come to the same place together, and the
males call and shout to each other in the most joyous emulation day and
night. Under these conditions alone does the marvellous music of the
nightingale reach its full height and eloquence. No one who has not
heard the song under these conditions can judge of it as it is in its
perfection: the strength of it, the rapture of it, the long-sustained,
breathless tremulo, the wondrous roulades and arpeggios, the exquisite
liquid sweetness, surpassing in beauty every other sound on earth.
In one spot, dearer to me than any upon earth, where the old stones once
felt the tread of the armoured guards and the cuirassed priests of the
great Countess Matilda, the nightingales have nested and sung by dozens
in the bay and arbutus of the undergrowth of the woods, and under the
wild roses and pomegranates fringing the meadows. On one nook of grass
land alone I have seen seven close together at daybreak, hunting for
their breakfasts amongst the dewy blades, in amicable rivalry. Here they
have come with the wild winds of March ever since Matilda’s reign, and
for many ages before that, when all which is now the vale of Arno was
forest and marsh. Here, because long protected and beloved, they sing in
the most marvellous concert, challenging and answering each other in a
riot of melody more exquisite than any orchestra created by man can
produce; the long ecstasy pouring through the ardours of full noonday,
or across the silver radiance of the moon; saluting the dawn with joyous
_Io triomphe!_ or praising the starry glories of the night with a
rapturous _Salve Regina!_
The hawks sweep through the sun rays, the owls flash through the
shadows, but the nightingales sing on, fearless and unharmed; it is only
man they dread, and man cannot hurt them here.
Naturalists state that the nightingale does not attain to the uttermost
splendour of its voice until the eighth or ninth year of its life, and
that the songsters of that age give lessons to the younger ones. To the
truth of this latter fact I can vouch from personal observation, but I
doubt so many years being required to develop the song to perfection. I
think its perfection is dependent, as I have said, on the peace and
security which the singer enjoys; on its familiarity with its nesting
haunts, and on the sense of safety which it enjoys. This may be said, in
a measure, of the song of all birds; but it is especially true of the
nightingale, which is one of the most sensitive and highly organised of
sentient beings, and one, moreover, with intense affections, devoted to
its mate, its offspring and its chosen home.
It will be objected to me that nightingales sing in captivity. They do
so; but the song of the caged nightingale is intolerable to the ear
which is used to the song of the free bird in wood and field and garden.
It is not the same song; it has changed its character: it sounds like
one long agonised note of appeal, and this indeed we may be certain that
it is.
I confess that I hold many crimes which are punishable by the felon’s
dock less infamous than the caging of nightingales, or indeed the caging
of any winged creatures. Migratory birds, caged, suffer yet more than
any, because, in addition to the loss of liberty, they suffer from the
repression of those natural instincts of flight at certain periods of
the year, which denial must torture them to an extent quite immeasurable
by us. The force of the migratory instinct may be imagined by the fact
that it is intense and dominant enough to impel a creature so small, so
timid, and so defenceless as a song-bird to incur the greatest perils,
and wing its unprotected way across seas and continents, mountains and
deserts, from Europe to Asia or Africa, in a flight which is certainly
one of the most marvellous of the many marvels of Nature to which men
are so dully and so vain-gloriously indifferent. The intensity of the
impelling power may be gauged by the miracle of its results; and the
bird in whom this instinct is repressed and denied must suffer
incredible agonies of longing and vain effort, as from unfit climate and
from unchanged food. No one, I am sure, can measure the torture endured
by migratory birds from these causes when in captivity. Russian women of
the world are very fond of taking back to Russia with them nightingales
of Southern Europe, for which they pay a high price: these birds
invariably die after a week or two in Russia, but the abominable
practice continues unchecked. Nightingales are captured or killed
indiscriminately with other birds in all the countries where they nest,
and no one seems alive to the shameless barbarity of such a sacrifice.
With every year their chosen haunts are more and more invaded by the
builder, the cultivator, the trapper, the netter. Nightingales will nest
contentedly in gardens where they are unmolested, but their preference
is for wild ground, or at least for leafy shrubberies and thickets: the
dense hedges of clipped bay or arbutus common to Italy are much favoured
by them. Therefore the nudity characteristic of high farming is fatal to
them: to Philomel and her brood shadow and shelter are a necessity.
Where I dwell, much is still unaltered since the days of Horace and
Virgil. The ‘silvery circle’ of the reaping-hook still flashes amongst
the bending wheat. The oxen still slowly draw the wooden plough up and
down the uneven fields. The osiers still turn to gold above the
flag-filled streamlets; the barefooted peasants run through the
flower-filled grass; the cherries and plums tumble uncounted amongst the
daisies; the soft, soundless wings of swallow and owl and kestrel fan
the air, as they sweep down from the old red-brown tiles of the roofs
where they make their homes; the corn is threshed by flails in the old
way on the broad stone courts; the vine and ash and peach and maple grow
together, graceful and careless; the patient ass turns in the circular
path of the stone olive-press; the huge, round-bellied jars, the amphoræ
of old, stand beside the horse-block at the doors; the pigeons flash
above the bean-fields and feast as they will; the great walnut trees
throw their shade over the pumpkins and the maize; men and women and
children still work and laugh, and lounge at noon amongst the sheaves,
thank the gods, much as they did when Theocritus ate honey by the
fountain’s brink. But how long will this be so? How long will the Italy
of Virgil and Horace be left to us?
Under the brutality of chemical agriculture the whole face of the world
is changing. The England of Gilbert White and Thomas Bewick is going as
the England of the Tudors went before it; and the France of the Bourbons
is being effaced like the France of the Valois. The old hedgerow timber
is felled. The cowslip meadows are turned into great grazing grounds.
The high flowering hedges are cut to the root, or often stubbed up
entirely, and their place filled by galvanised wire fencing. The
wildflowers cannot blossom on the naked earth; so disappear. The drained
soil has no longer any place for the worts and the rushes and the
fennels and the water spurges. Instead of the beautiful old lichen-grown
orchard trees, bending to the ground under the weight of their golden or
russet balls, there are rows of grafts two feet high, bearing ponderous,
flavourless prize fruits, or monotonous espaliers grimly trimmed and
trained, with shot bullfinches or poisoned blackbirds lying along their
ugly length.
The extreme greed which characterises agriculture and horticulture, as
it characterises all other pursuits in modern times, will inevitably
cause the gradual extermination of all living things which it is
considered possible may interfere with the maximum of profit. In the
guano-dressed, phosphate-dosed, chemically-treated fields and gardens of
the future, with their vegetables and fruits ripened by electric light,
and their colouring and flavouring obtained by the artificial aids of
the laboratory, there will be no place for piping linnet, rose-throated
robin, gay chaffinch, tiny tit, or blue warbler; and none amidst the
frames, the acids, the manures, the machines, the hydraulic engines, for
Philomel. The object of the gardener and the farmer is to produce: the
garden and the farm will soon be mere factories of produce, ugly and
sordid, like all other factories.
The vast expanses of unbroken corn lands and grazing lands, to be seen
in modern England, have no leafy nooks, as the fields of Herrick, of
Wordsworth, of Tennyson’s earlier time had for them. In Italy and in
France the acids, phosphates, sublimates, and other chemicals, poured
over vineyards and farm lands drive away the nightingale, which used to
nest so happily under the low-growing vine leaves, or amongst the endive
and parsley. ‘The lands are never left at peace,’ said a peasant to me
not long ago; and the peace of the birds is gone with that of the
fields: the fates of both are intimately interwoven and mutually
dependent. Where the orchard and the vineyard are still what they were
of old—green, fragrant, dusky, happy places, full of sweet scents and of
sweet sounds—there the birds still are happy. But in the newfangled
fields, acid-drenched, sulphur-powdered, sulphate-poisoned, stripped
bare and jealously denuded of all alien life, winged and wild animals,
hunted and harassed, can have no place. Scientific husbandry has
sacrificed the simple joys of rural life, and with them the lives of the
birds. ‘What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose
his own soul?’ has been asked by the wisdom of old. The song of the
birds is the voice of the soul of Nature, and men stifle it for sake of
avarice and greed.
Three or four years ago the village of San Domenico, on the highway to
Fiesole, was a green nest which in spring was filled with the music of
nightingales; the fields, with the wild-rose hedges, were one paradise
of song in springtime and early summer. The old villa, which stands with
its big trees between the little streams of Africa and Mensola, where
Walter Savage Landor lived and where he wished to be allowed to die, was
hidden away under its deep cedar shadows, and the nightingales day and
night sang amongst its narcissi and its jonquils. An American came,
bought and ruined. He could let nothing alone. He had no sentiment or
perception. He built a new glaring wing, spoiling all the symmetry of
the old tenement, daubed over with new stucco and colour the beautiful
old hues of the ancient walls, cut down trees by the old shady gateway,
and built a porter’s lodge after the manner beloved of Hampstead and of
Clapham. He considers himself a man of taste; he is (I am ashamed to
say) a scholar! It would have been less affront to the memory of Landor,
and to the spirits haunting this poetic, historic, legendary place, to
have razed the house to the ground, and have let the grass grow over it
as over grave.
Higher up, but quite near, on the same hillside as the villa of Landor,
there stood a stone house, old, solid, coloured with the beautiful greys
and browns of age; it had at one side a stone staircase leading up to a
sculptured and painted shrine, before it were grass terraces with some
bamboos, some roses, some laurels and beneath these a lower garden which
joined the fields and blended with them. It was quite perfect in its own
simple, ancient way. A year ago the dreadful hand of the improver seized
on it, daubed it over with staring stucco, painted and varnished its
woodwork, stuck vulgar green _persiennes_ in its old casements, and, in
a word, made it as nearly as possible resemble the pert, paltry,
staring, gimcrack structure of a modern villa. It is now a blot on the
hillside, an eyesore to the wayfarer, an offence to the sight and to the
landscape; and the nightingales, which were so eloquent on its grass
terraces, go to its rosebushes and bamboos no more.
Such treatment as this of secluded places scares away the little brown
lover of the moon: where there are brought all the pother and dust of
masons’, carpenters’ and painters’ work, the voice of Philomel cannot be
heard; the sweet solitude of the rose thicket is invaded by uncouth din
and vulgar uproar; the cedar shadows lie no more unbroken on the
untrodden sward; the small scops owl flits no more at evening through
the perfumed air, the big white owl can nest no more beneath the
moss-grown tiles and timbers of the roof; all the soft, silent, shy
creatures of fur and feather, which have been happy so long, are
startled, terrified, driven away for ever, and the nightingale dare nest
no more. It is impossible to measure the injury done to the half-wild,
half-tame denizens of the woods and gardens by the mania for restoration
and innovation which characterises the purchasers and the tenants of the
present day.
One such ghastly renovation as this, which has vulgarised and ruined the
Landor villa and its neighbour, causes an amount of havoc to the
creatures of the brake and bush which can never be repaired. Once
frightened and driven out, they never come back again. They are the
youth of the world; and, like all youth, once gone, they are gone for
ever.
The builder who desecrated these places, the people who live in them, do
not perceive the abomination which they have wrought; and if they were
called to account, would stare at their accuser, understanding nothing
of their sin. Are there not an admirably grained and varnished hall
door, and window shutters of the brightest pistachio green? What matter
if Philomel nest no more under the cuckoopint and burdock? Is there not
the scream of the tramway whistle? What matter if the Madonna’s herb
grow no longer on the old stone steps and the swallow build no more
under the hanging eaves? Are there not the painted boards declaring, in
letters a foot long, that the adjacent land is to be let or sold for
building purposes?
By the increase of bricks and mortar, and the sterility and nudity which
accompany scientific agriculture, the nightingale is everywhere being
driven higher into the hills, where it may still hope to nest
unmolested, but where the temperature is unsuited to it. Its breeding
grounds become, with every season, fewer and more difficult to find. It
is sociable, and would willingly be at home in the gardens even of
cities; but men will not leave it in peace there. Its nests are taken
and its feeding grounds are destroyed by the over-sweeping and
over-weeding of the modern gardener. The insensate modern practice of
clearing away all leaves as they fall from the soil of shrubberies and
avenues starves the nightingales, as it starves the roots of the trees.
When the leaves are left to lie through the winter the trees rejoice in
their warmth and nourishment, and the returning birds find a rich larder
in the spring. A carpet of golden leaves is a lovely and useful thing;
but the modern gardener does not think so, and his intolerable birch
broom, and yet more intolerable mechanical sweeper, tears away the
precious veil which Nature’s care would spread in preservation over the
chilly earth.
Starved, hunted, robbed of its nest, and harassed in its song, the
nightingale must therefore inevitably grow rarer and rarer every year.
The vile tramways, which have unrolled their hideous length over so many
thousands of miles all over Europe, bring the noise, the glare, and the
dirt of cities into the once peaceful solitude of hill and valley. They
are at this moment being made through the beautiful forest roads of the
Jura!
The curse of the town is being spread broadcast over the face of the
country, as the filth of urban cesspools is being carried out over
rustic fields. The sticks, the guns, the nets, the traps, the birdlime
of the accursed bird destroyer, are carried by train and tram into the
green heart of once tranquil wolds and woods. The golden gorse serves to
shelter the grinning excursionist, the wild hyacinths are crushed under
the wine flasks and the beer bottles. The lowest forms of human life
leave the slums and ravage the virgin country; ten thousand jarring
wheels carry twenty thousand clumsy, greedy hands to tear down the wild
honeysuckle and pull to pieces the bird’s nest, to tear up the
meadow-sweet and strangle the green lizard. The curse of the town mounts
higher and higher and higher every year, and clings like a vampire to
the country, and sucks out of it all its beauty, and stifles in it all
its song.
Soon the hiss of the engine and the bray of the cad will be the only
sounds heard throughout Europe. It is very probable that the conditions
of human life in the future will be incompatible with the existence of
the nightingale at all. It is almost certain that all natural beauty,
all woodland solitude, all sylvan quiet, will be year by year more and
more attacked, diminished, and disturbed, until the lives of all
creatures which depend on these will come altogether to an end.
Let us imagine what the world was like when Sappho heard the
nightingales of Greece, and we can then measure by our own present loss
what will be the probable loss of future generations; the atmosphere was
then of a perfect purity; no coal smoke soiled the air or blurred the
sea; no engine hissed, no cogwheel whirred, no piston throbbed; the
sweet wild country ran to the very gates of the small cities; there was
no tread noisier than the footfall of the ox upon the turf; there was no
artificial light harsher than the pale soft gleam of the olive oil, the
temples were white as the snow on Ida, and the brooks and the fountains
were clear as the sparkling smile of the undimmed day. In such a world
every tuft of thyme and every bough of laurel had its nest, and under
the radiant skies the song of the nightingales must have been eloquent
over all the plains and hills in one unbroken flood of joy.
Let us picture the fairness of the world as it was then, with undimmed
skies, unpolluted waters, untouched forests, and untainted air; and we
must realise that what is called civilisation has given us nothing worth
that which it has taken, and will continue to take away from us,
forever.