THE STEAM-WHISTLE.
While Mr. Ruskin was lately bewailing the bell-ringing propensity of mankind, the English Parliament and several American legislatures, city or State, were assaulting the greater nuisance of the steam-whistle, and trying to substitute bell-ringing for it. Mr. Ruskin's particular grievance was, that his own nerves were crispé by the incessant ding-dong of the church-bells of Florence summoning the devout to prayer, but he generalized his wrath. Possibly, he would have been less sensitive and fastidious regarding the musical carillons of the Italian city were he wont to dwell within ear-shot of an American factory or railroad-station. Not that Mr. Ruskin fails to appreciate—or, rather, to depreciate—railways in their connection with Italian landscapes; for, besides his series of complaints regarding the Florence bells, he denounces the railway from Rome to Naples, and the railway-tunnels under Monts Cenis and St. Gothard, and the railway-bridge leading into Venice, as enemies of the beautiful and picturesque in Nature. But it is the locomotive, independent of the shriek, that is his abomination; whereas a man less sensitive to sights, and (if possible) more sensitive to sounds, might pardon the cutting up of the landscape were his ear-drum spared from splitting.
Emerson asks, "What is so odious as noise?" But a Saturday Reviewer once devoted an elaborate essay to the eulogy of unmitigated noise, or rather to the keen enjoyment of it by children. People with enviable nerves and unenviable tastes often enjoy sounds in the ratio of their lack of melody—say, such everyday thoroughfare music as the slap and bang of coach-wheels on the cobble-stones; the creaking of street-cars round a sharp curve, like Milton's infernal doors "grating harsh thunder;" the squeaking falsettos of the cries by old-clothes' men, itinerant glaziers, fishmongers, fruiterers, tinkers and what not; the yells of rival coachmen at the railway-stations, giving one an idea of Bedlam; the street-fiddlers and violinists with horribly untuned instruments; the Italian open-air singers hoarsely shouting, "Shoo Fly" or "Viva Garibaldi! viva l'Italia!" the gongs beaten on steamboats and by hotel-runners at stations on the arrival of trains; the unearthly squeals and shrieks of new "musical instruments" sold cheap by street-peddlers; the horrible noise-producers which boys invent for the torture of nervous people—such, for example, as this present season's, which is happily styled "the devil's fiddle," or "the chicken-box," whose simplest form is an emptied tomato-can, with a string passed through the end and pulled with the rosined fingers. Now, that a man may be pleased with a rattle, even if it be only a car-rattle, is conceivable, but it is hard to understand how he can retain a relish for the squeal of a locomotive-whistle. The practice of summoning workmen to factories by this shrill monitor, of using it to announce the dinner-hour, the hour of resuming work after the nooning, and the hour of quitting work for the night, ought to be abolished everywhere. There is not the faintest excuse for it, because clocks and bells will do the same work exactly as well. On the other hand, the whistle causes perpetual irritation to the nervous, feeble and sick, and frequent cases of horses running away with fright at the sudden shriek, smashing property or destroying life.
Let us give moral aid and comfort to the campaign, Cisatlantic and Transatlantic, against the steam-whistle. In the local councils of Philadelphia, Camden and other cities it has been well opened in our country; in the House of Commons has been introduced a bill providing that "no person shall use or employ in any manufactory or any other place any steam-whistle or steam-trumpet for the purpose of summoning or dismissing workmen or persons employed, without the sanction of the sanitary authorities." They call this whistle, by the way, it would seem, the "American devil," for the Manchester Examiner congratulates its readers that the "American devil" has been taken by the throat, and ere long his yells will be heard no more.
John Leech, it is said, was actually driven from house to house in a vain effort to escape the nuisance of organ-grinders, whom he has immortalized in Punch by many exquisite sketches, showing that they know "the vally of peace and quietness." Some of his friends declare that this nuisance so worked on his nerves that he may be said to have died of organ-grinders. Holmes has immortalized the same guild of wandering minstrels as a sort of "crusaders sent from infernal clime to dock the ears of melody and break the legs of time." And yet the hand-organ, so often the subject of municipal legislation, is dulcet music compared with the steam-whistle, even when the latter instrument takes its most ambitiously artistic form of the "Calliope."