THE PASSING OF PHILOMEL
Will there ever be a world in which the voice of Sappho’s bird will be no longer heard?
I fear it.
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 outagain. They prefer the cushioned lounge, the electric light, the tumbler of iced drink, the playing cards, the spiceddouble 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 andpomegranates 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 joyousIo triomphe!or praising the starry glories of the night with a rapturousSalve 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 mostsensitive 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, canmeasure 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 andpeach 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 agricultureand 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 theground, 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 greenpersiennesin 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 happyso 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 toit. 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 andwoods. 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 templeswere 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.