to those among us who under no circumstances can tolerate the crowing of
the cock. It is true that I have not been altogether unmindful of their
prepossessions, and have freely acknowledged in divers places that
Chanticleer does not always please, and that there is abundant room for
improvement; but if they go further than that, if for them there exists
not on this round globe a cock whose voice would fail to irritate, then
I have not shown consideration enough, and something is still owing to
their feelings, which are very acute. It is possible that one of these
sensitive persons may take up my book, and, attracted by its title, dip
into this paper, hoping to find in it a practical suggestion for the
effectual muzzling of the obnoxious bird. The only improvement which
would fall in with such a one's ideas on the subject of cock-crowing
would be to improve this kind of natural music out of existence.
Naturally the paper would disappoint him; he would be grieved at the
writer's erroneous views. I hope that his feelings would take no acuter
form. I have listened to a person, usually mild-mannered, denouncing a
neighbour in the most unmeasured terms for the crime of keeping a
crowing cock. If the cock had been a non-crower, a silent member, it
would have been different: he would hardly have known that he had a
neighbour. There is a very serious, even a sad, side to this question.
Mr. Sully maintains that as civilization progresses, and as we grow more
intellectual, all noise, which is pleasing to children and savages, and
only exhilarates their coarse and juvenile brains, becomes increasingly
intolerable to us. What unfortunate creatures we then are! We have got
our pretty rattle and are now afraid that the noise it makes is going to
be the death of us. But what is noise? Will any two highly intellectual
beings agree as to the particular sound which produces the effect of
rusty nails thrust in among the convolutions of the brain? Physicians
are continually discovering new forms of nervous maladies, caused by the
perpetual hurry and worry and excitement of our modern life; and perhaps
there is one form in which natural sounds, which being natural should be
agreeable, or at any rate innocent, become more and more abhorrent. This
is a question which concerns the medical journals; also, to some extent,
those who labour to forecast the future. Happily, all our maladies are
thrown off, sooner or later, if they do not kill us; and we can
cheerfully look forward to a time when the delicate chords in us shall
no longer be made to vibrate "like sweet bells jangled out of tune and
harsh" to any sound in nature, and when the peaceful crowing of the cock
shall cease to madden the early waker. For, whatever may be the fate
awaiting our city civilization, brave Chanticleer, improved as to his
voice or not, will undoubtedly still be with us.
IN AN OLD GARDEN
A sunny morning in June--a golden day among days that have mostly a
neutral tint; a large garden, with no visible houses beyond, but green
fields and unkept hedges and great silent trees, oak and ash and
elm--could I wish, just now, for a more congenial resting-place, or even
imagine one that comes nearer to my conception of an earthly paradise?
It is true that once I could not drink deeply enough from the sweet and
bitter cup of wild nature, and loved nature best, and sought it gladly
where it was most savage and solitary. But that was long ago. Now, after
years of London life, during which I have laboured like many another "to
get a wan pale face," with perhaps a wan pale mind to match, that past
wildness would prove too potent and sharp a tonic; unadulterated nature
would startle and oppress me with its rude desolate aspect, no longer
familiar. This softness of a well-cultivated earth, and unbroken verdure
of foliage in many shades, and harmonious grouping and blending of
floral hues, best suit my present enervated condition. I had, I imagine,
a swarter skin and firmer flesh when I could ride all day over great
summer-parched plains, where there was not a bush that would have
afforded shelter to a mannikin, and think that I was having a pleasant
journey. The cloudless sky and vertical sun--how intolerable they would
now seem, and scorch my brain and fill my shut eyes with dancing flames!
At present even this mild June sun is strong enough to make the old
mulberry tree on the lawn appear grateful. It is an ancient,
rough-barked tree, with wide branches, that droop downwards all round,
and rest their terminal leaves on the sward; underneath it is a natural
tent, or pavilion, with plenty of space to move about and sling a
hammock in. Here, then, I have elected to spend the hottest hours of my
one golden day, reading, dreaming, listening at intervals to the fine
bird-sounds that have a medicinal and restorative effect on the jarred
and wounded sense.
From the elms hard by comes a subdued, airy prattle of a few sparrows.
It is rather pleasant, something like a low accompaniment to the notes
of the more tuneful birds; the murmurous music of a many-stringed
instrument, forming the indistinct ground over which runs the bright
embroidery of clear melodious singing.
This morning, while lying awake from four to five o'clock, I almost
hated the sparrows, they were there in such multitudes, and so loud and
persistent sounded their jangling through the open window. It set me
thinking of the England of the future--of a time a hundred years hence,
let us say--when there will remain with us only two representatives of
feral life--the sparrow and the house-fly. Doubtless it will come,
unless something happens; but, doubtless, it will not continue. It will
still be necessary for a man to kill something in order to be happy; and
the sportsmen of that time, like great Gambetta, in the past, will sit
in the balconies, popping with pea-rifles at the sparrows until not one
is left to twitter. Then will come the turn of the untamed and untamable
fly; and he will afford good sport if hunted a la Domitain, with fine,
needle-tipped paper javelins, thrown to impale him on the wall.
One of our savants has lately prophesied that the time will come when
only the microscopic organisms will exist to satisfy the hunting
instinct in man. How these small creatures will be taken he does not
tell us. Perhaps the hunters will station themselves round a table with
a drop of preserved water on its centre, made large and luminous by
means of a ray of magnifying light. When that time comes the
amoeba--that "wandering Jew," as an irreverent Quarterly Reviewer has
called it--will lose its immortality, and the spry rotifer will fall a
victim to the infinitesimal fine bright arrows of the chase. A strange
quarry for men whose paeliolithic progenitors hunted the woolly mastodon
and many-horned rhinoceros and sabre-toothed tiger!
That sad day of very small things for the sportsman is, however, not
near, nor within measurable distance; or, so it seemed to me when, an
hour ago, I strolled round the garden, curiously peering into every
shrub, to find the visible and comparatively noble insect-life in great
abundance. Beetles were there--hard, round, polished, and of various
colours, like sea-worn pebbles on the beach; and some, called lady-birds
in the vernacular, were bound like the books that Chaucer loved in black
and red. And the small gilded fly, not less an insect light-headed, a
votary of vain delights, than in the prehistoric days when a
white-headed old king, discrowned and crazed, railed against sweet
Nature's liberty. And ever waiting to welcome this inconstant lover
(with falces) there sits the solitary geometric spider, an image and
embodiment of patience, not on a monument, but a suspended wheel of
which he is himself the hub; and so delicately fashioned are the silver
spokes thereof, radiating from his round and gem-like body, and the
rings, concentric tire within tire, that its exceeding fineness, like
swift revolving motion, renders it almost invisible. Caterpillars, too,
in great plenty--miniature porcupines with fretful quills on end, and
some naked even as they came into the world. This one, called the
earth-measurer, has drunk himself green with chlorophyll so as to escape
detection. Vain precaution! since eccentric motion betrays him to keen
avian eyes, when, like the traveller's snake, he erects himself on the
tip of his tail and sways about in empty space, vaguely feeling for
something, he knows not what. And the mechanical tortrix that rolls up a
leaf for garment and food, and preys on his own case and shelter until
he has literally eaten himself stark naked; after which he rolls up a
second leaf, and so on progressively. Thus in his larval life does he
symbolize some restless nation that makes itself many successive
constitutions and forms of government, in none of which it abides long;
but afterwards some higher thing, when he rests motionless, in form like
a sarcophagus, whence the infolded life emerges to haunt the twilight--a
grey ghost moth. There is no end to rolled-up leaves, and to the variety
of creatures that are housed in them; for, just as the "insect tribes of
human kind" in all places and in all ages, while seeking to improve
their condition, independently hit on the same means and inventions, so
it is with these small six-legged people; and many species in many
places have found out the comfort and security of the green cylinder.
So many did I open that I at last grew tired of the process, like a man
to whom the post has brought too many letters; but there was one--the
last I opened--the living active contents of which served to remind me
that some insects are unable to make a cylinder for themselves, having
neither gum nor web to fasten it with, and yet they will always find one
made by others to shelter themselves in. Here were no fewer than six
unbeautiful creatures, brothers and sisters, hatched from eggs on which
their parent earwig sat incubating just like an eagle or dove or
swallow, or, better still, like a pelican; for in the end did she not
give of her own life-fluid to nourish her children? Unbeautiful, yet not
without a glory superior to that of the Purple Emperor, and the angelic
blue Morpho, and the broad-winged Ornithoptera, that caused an
illustrious traveller to swoon with joy at the sight of its supreme
loveliness. Du Maurier has a drawing of a little girl in a garden gazing
at two earwigs racing along a stem. "I suppose," she remarks
interrogatively to her mamma, "that these are Mr. and Mrs. Earwig?" and
on being answered affirmatively, exclaims, "What could they have seen in
each other?" What they saw was blue blood, or something in insectology
corresponding to it. The earwig's lustre is that of antiquity. He
existed on earth before colour came in; and colour is old, although not
so old as Nature's unconscious aestheticism which, in the organic world,
is first expressed in beauty of form. It is long since the great May
flies, large as swifts, had their aerial cloudy dances over the vast
everglades and ancient forests of ferns; and when, on some dark night, a
brilliant Will-o'-the-wisp rose and floated above the feathery foliage,
drawn in myriads to its light, they revolved about it in an immense
mystical wheel, misty-white, glistening, and touched with prismatic
colour. Floating fire and wheel were visible only to the stars, and the
wakeful eyes of giant scaly monsters lying quiescent in the black waters
below; but they were very beautiful nevertheless. The modest earwig was
old on the earth even then; he dates back to the time, immeasurably
remote, when scorpions possessed the earth, and taught him to frighten
his enemies with a stingless tail--that curious antique little tail
which has not yet forgot its cunning.
Greater than all these inhabitants of the garden, ancient or modern by
reason of their numbers, which is the sign of predominance, are the
small wingless people that have colonies on every green stem and under
every green leaf.
These are the true generators of that heavenly sweat, or saliva of the
stars, concerning which Pliny the Younger wrote so learnedly. And they
are many tribes--green, purple, brown, isabel-line; but all are one
nation, and sacred to that fair god whom the Carian water-nymph loved
not wisely but too well. For, albeit the children of an ancient union,
they marry not, nor are given in marriage, yet withal multiply
exceedingly, so that one (not two) may in a single season produce a
billion. And at last when autumn comes, won back from the cold god to
his hot mother, they know love and wedlock, and die like all married
things. These are the Aphides--sometimes unprettily called plant-lice,
and vaguely spoken of by the uninformed as "blight"--and they nourish
themselves on vegetable juices, that thin green blood which is the
plant's life.
This, then, is the fruit which the birds have, come to gather. In June
is their richest harvest; it is more bountiful than September, when
apples redden, and grapes in distant southern lands are gathered for the
wine-press. In yon grey wall at the end of the lawn, just above the
climbing rose-bush, there are now seven hungry infants in one small
cradle, each one, some one says, able to consume its own weight of
insect food every day. I am inclined to believe that it must be so,
while trying to count the visits paid to the nest in one hour by the
parent tits--those small tits that do the gardener so much harm! We
know, on good authority, that the spider has a "nutty flavour"; and most
insects in the larval stage afford succulent and toothsome, or at all
events beaksome, morsels. These are, just now, the crimson cherries,
purple and yellow plums, currants, red, white, and black--and
sun-painted peaches, asking in their luscious ripeness for a mouth to
melt in, that fascinate finch and flycatcher alike, and make the
starlings smack their horny lips with a sound like a loving kiss.
Not that I care, or esteem birds for what they eat or do not eat. With
all these creatures that are at strife among themselves, and that birds
prey upon, I am at peace, even to the smallest that are visible--the red
spider which is no spider; and the minute gossamer spider clinging to
the fine silvery hairs of the flying summer; and the coccus that fall
from the fruit trees to float on their buoyant cottony down--a summer
snow. Fils de la Vierge are these, and sacred. The man who can
needlessly set his foot on a worm is as strange to my soul as De
Quincey's imaginary Malay, or even his "damned crocodile." The worm that
one sees lying bruised and incapable on the gravel walk has fallen among
thieves. These little lives do me good and not harm. I smell the acid
ants to strengthen my memory. I know that if I set an overturned
cockchafer on his legs three sins shall be forgiven me; that if I am
kindly tolerant of the spider that drops accidentally on my hand or
face, my purse shall be mysteriously replenished. At the same time, one
has to remember that such sentiments, as a rule, are not understood by
those who have charge over groves and gardens, whose minds are ignorant
and earthy, or, as they would say, practical. Of the balance of nature
they know and care naught, nor can they regard life as sacred; it is
enough to know that it is or may be injurious to their interests for
them to sweep it away. The small thing that has been flying about and
uttering musical sounds since April may, when July comes, devour a
certain number of cherries. Nor is even this plea needed. If it is
innocent for the lower creatures to prey upon one another, it cannot be
less innocent for man to destroy them indiscriminately, if it gives him
any pleasure to do so. It is idle to go into such subtle questions with
those who have the power to destroy; if their hands are to be restrained
it is not by appealing to feelings which they do not possess, but to
their lower natures--to their greed and their cunning. For the rest of
us, for all who have conquered or outgrown the killing instinct, the
impartiality that pets nothing and persecutes nothing is doubtless man's
proper attitude towards the inferior animals; a godlike benevolent
neutrality; a keen and kindly interest in every form of life, with
indifference as to its ultimate destiny; the softness which does no
wrong with the hardness that sees no wrong done.
To return to the birds. The starlings have kissed like lovers, and
fluttered up vertically on their short wings, trying to stream like
eagles, only to return to the trees once more and sit there chattering
pleasant nothings; at intervals throwing out those soft, round,
modulated whistled notes, just as an idle cigarette-smoker blows rings
of blue smoke from his lips; and now they have flown away to the fields
so that I can listen to the others.
A thrush is making music on a tall tree beyond the garden hedge, and I
am more grateful for the distance that divides us than for the song;
for, just now, he does not sing so well as sometimes of an evening, when
he is most fluent, and a listener, deceived by his sweetness and melody,
writes to the papers to say that he has heard the nightingale. Just now
his song is scrappy, composed of phrases that follow no order and do not
fit or harmonize, and is like a poor imitation of an inferior
mocking-bird's song.
Between the scraps of loud thrush-music I listen to catch the thin,
somewhat reedy sound of a yellow-hammer singing in the middle of the
adjoining grassy field. It comes well from the open expanse of purpling
grass, and reminds me of a favourite grasshopper in a distant sunny
land. O happy grasshopper! singing all day in the trees and tall
herbage, in a country where every village urchin is not sent afield to
"study natural history" with green net and a good store of pins, shall I
ever again hear thy breezy music, and see thee among the green leaves,
beautiful with steel-blue and creamy-white body, and dim purple over and
vivid red underwings?
The bird of the pasture-land is singing still, perhaps, but all at once
I have ceased to hear him, for something has come to lift me above his
low grassy level, something faint and at first only the suspicion of a
sound; then a silvery lisping, far off and aerial, touching the sense as
lightly as the wind-borne down of dandelion.
If any place for any soul there be Disrobed and disentrammelled,
doubtless it is from such a place and such a soul that this sublimated
music falls. The singer, one can imagine, has never known or has
forgotten earth; and if it is visible to him, how small it must seem
from that altitude, "spinning like a fretful midge" beneath him in the
vast void!
It is the lark singing in the blue infinite heaven, at this distance
with something ethereal and heavenly in his voice; but now the wide
circling wings that brought him for a few moments within hearing, have
borne him beyond it again; and missing it, the sunshine looks less
brilliant than before, and all other bird-voices seem by comparison dull
and of the earth.
Certainly there is nothing spiritual in the song of the chaffinch. There
he sits within sight, motionless, a little bird-shaped automaton, made
to go off at intervals of twelve or thirteen seconds; but unfortunately
one hears with the song the whirr and buzz of the internal machinery. It
is not now as in April, when it is sufficient in a song that it shall be
joyous; in the leafy month, when roses are in bloom, one grows critical,
and asks for sweetness and expression, and a better art than this
vigorous garden singer displays in that little double flourish with
which he concludes his little hurry-scurry lyric. He has practised that
same flourish for five thousand years--to be quite within the mark--and
it is still far from perfect, still little better than a kind of musical
sneeze. So long is art!
Perhaps in some subtle way, beyond the psychologist's power to trace, he
has become aware of my opinion of his performance--the unspoken
detraction which yet affects its object; and, feeling hurt in his
fringilline _amour propre_, he has all at once taken himself off. Never
mind; a better singer has succeeded him. I have heard and seen the
little wren a dozen times to-day; now he has come to the upper part of
the tree I am lying under, and although so near his voice sounds
scarcely louder than before. This is also a lyric, but of another kind.
It is not plaintive, nor passionate; nor is it so spontaneous as the
warbling of the robin--that most perfect feathered impressionist; nor is
it endeared to me by early associations since I listened in boyhood to
the songs of other wrens. In what, then, does its charm consist? I do
not know. Certainly it is delicate, and may even be described as
brilliant, in its limited way perfect, and to other greater songs like
the small pimpernel to a poppy or a hollyhock. Unambitious, yet
finished, it has the charm of distinction. The wren is the least
self-conscious of our singers. Somewhere among the higher green
translucent leaves the little brown barred thing is quietly sitting,
busy for the nonce about nothing, dreaming his summer dream, and
unknowingly telling it aloud. When shall we have symbols to express as
perfectly our summer-feeling--our dream?
That small song has served to remind me of two small books I brought
into the garden to read--the works of two modern minor poets whose
"wren-like warblings," I imagined, would suit my mood and the genial
morning better than the stirring or subtle thoughts of greater singers.
Possibly in that I was mistaken; for there until now lie the books
neglected on a lawn chair within reach of my hand. The chair was dragged
hither half-an-hour ago by a maiden all in white, who appeared half
inclined to share the mulberry shade with me. She did not continue long
in that mind. In a lively manner, she began speaking of some trivial
thing; but after a very few moments all interest in the subject
evaporated, and she sat humming some idle air, tapping the turf with her
fantastic shoe. Presently she picked up one of my books, opened it at
random and read a line or two, her vermilion under-lip curling slightly;
then threw it down again, and glanced at me out of the corners of her
eyes; then hummed again, and finally became silent, and sat bending
forward a little, her dark lustrous eyes gazing with strange intentness
through the slight screen of foliage into the vacant space beyond. What
to see? The poet has omitted to tell us to what the maiden's fancy
lightly turns in spring. Doubtless it turns to thoughts of something
real. Life is real; so is passion--the quickening of the blood, the wild
pulsation. But the pleasures and pains of the printed book are not real,
and are to reality like Japanese flowers made of coloured bits of tissue
paper to the living fragrant flowers that bloom to-day and perish
to-morrow; they are a simulacrum, a mockery, and present to us a pale
phantasmagoric world, peopled with bloodless men and women that chatter
meaningless things and laugh without joy. The feeling of unreality
affects us all at times, but in very different degrees. And perhaps I
was too long a doer, herding too much with narrow foreheads, drinking
too deeply of the sweet and bitter cup, to experience that pure
unfailing delight in literature which some have. Its charm, I fancy, is
greatest to those in whom the natural man, deprived in early life of his
proper aliment, grows sickly and pale, and perishes at last of
inanition. There is ample room then for the latter higher growth--the
unnatural cultivated man. Lovers of literature are accustomed to say
that they find certain works "helpful" to them; and doubtless, being all
intellect, they are right. But we, the less highly developed, are
compounded of two natures, and while this spiritual pabulum sustains
one, the other and larger nature is starved; for the larger nature is
earthly, and draws its sustenance from the earth. I must look at a leaf,
or smell the sod, or touch a rough pebble, or hear some natural sound,
if only the chirp of a cricket, or feel the sun or wind or rain on my
face. The book itself may spoil the pleasure it was designed to give me,
and instead of satisfying my hunger, increase it until the craving and
sensation of emptiness becomes intolerable. Not any day spent in a
library would I live again, but rather some lurid day of labour and
anxiety, of strife, or peril, or passion.