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.
THE ITALY OF TO-DAY
Cavallotti[[C]] has written, in his letter of protest against the arrest of the Sicilian deputy, De Felice, a sentence which deserves to be repeated all over the land: one of those sentences, multum in parvo, which resume a whole situation in a phrase: he has written: ‘Invece che del pane si da il piombo.’ Instead of bread to the suffering and famished multitudes there is offered lead, the lead of rifle bullets and of cannon-balls. That is the only response which has as yet been given to demands which are in the main essentially just. Is the English public aware that the Italian city of Caltanissetta has been, the first week of the year, bombarded by Italian artillery, and that in that town alone six hundred arrests have been made in one day? If this were taking place in Poland the English public and its press would be convulsed with rage.