Are we to be told to be ready to exchange Itylus for a celluloid tab with a date on It? or Keats's Ode for a corrected notation of the nightingale's trills? At the same time might not a poet now and again take to heart the final lines—the summing up of the next most beautiful Ode in the language—
“Beauty is Truth, Truth beauty?
Every fact in Nature seems to me to lead in the direction of poetry, and to increase the wonder of that of which man is but an insignificant part. We are only beginning to know a little about the part we were designed to play in Nature, but the more we know the more surprised, and, indeed, alarmed, we must be when by a revelation its exact position is made known to us. We have not yet learned to live. We have been fools enough to cultivate the forgetting of how to do things that we were able to do thousands of years ago. The half of our senses have been atrophied. It is many years since we first began to take leave of our senses and we have been at it ever since. It is about time that we started recognising that an acquaintance with the facts of Nature is the beginning of wisdom. We crystallised our ignorance in phrases that have been passed on from father to son, and quoted at every opportunity. We refer to people being “blind as a bat,” and to others being—as “bold as a lion,” or “harmless as a dove.” Did it never strike the inventor of any of these similes that it would be well before scattering them abroad to find out if they were founded on fact? The eyesight of the bat is a miracle. How such a creature can get a living for the whole year during the summer months is amazing. The lion is a cowardly brute that runs away yelling at the sight of a rhinoceros and submits without complaint to the insults of the elephant. A troop of doves will do more harm to a wheat-field in an hour than does a thunderstorm.
And the curious thing is that in those quarters where one would expect to find wisdom respecting such incidents of Nature one finds foolishness. Ten centuries of gamekeepers advertise their ignorance in documentary evidence nailed to the barn doors; they have been slaughtering their best friends all these years and they continue doing so.
After formulating this indictment I opened my Country Life, and found in its pages a confirmation of my evidence by my friend F. C. G., who is proving himself in his maturity as accomplished a Naturalist as, in his adolescence, he was a caricaturist in the Westminster Gazette. These are his lines:—
THE GAMEKEEPER'S GIBBET
Two stoats, a weasel, and a jay,
In varied stages of decay,
Are hanging on the gibbet-tree
For all the woodland folk to see,
And tattered rags swing to and fro
Remains of what was once a crow.
What were their crimes that when they died
The Earth was not allowed to hide
Their mangled corpses out of sight,
Instead of dangling in the light?
They didn't sin against the Law
Of “Naturered in tooth and claw,”
But 'gainst the edicts of the keeper
Who plays the part of Death the Reaper,
And doth with deadly gun determine
What creatures shall be classed as vermin.
Whether we gibbets find, or grace,
Depends on accident of place,
For what is vice in Turkestan
May be a virtue in Japan.
F. C. G.
And what about gardeners? Why, quite recently I was solemnly assured by one of the profession that I should “kill without mercy”—those were his words—every frog or toad I found in a greenhouse!
But for that matter, don't we remember the harsh decrees of our pastors and masters when as children we yielded to an instinct that had not yet been atrophied, and slaughtered all the flies that approached us. I remember that, after a perceptor's reasoning with me through the medium of a superannuated razor-strop, I was told that to kill a bluebottle was a sin. Now science has come to the rescue of the new generation from the consequences of the ignorance of the old, and the boy who kills most flies in the course of a season is handsomely rewarded. What is pronounced a sin in one generation is looked on as a virtue in the next.
I recollect seeing it stated in a Zoology for the Use of Schools, compiled by an F.R.S., with long quotations from Milton at the head of every chapter, that the reason why some fishes of the Tropics were so gorgeously coloured was to enable them to be more easily seen by the voracious enemy that was pursuing them. That was why God had endowed the glowworm with his glow—to give him a better chance of attracting the attention of the nightingale or any other bird that did not go to roost before dark! And God had also given the firefly its spark that it might display its hospitality to the same birds that had been entertained by the glow-worm! My Informant had not mastered the alphabet of Nature.
Long after I had tried to see things through Darwin's eyes I was perplexed by watching a cat trying to get the better of a sparrow in the garden. I noticed that every time it had crouched to make its pounce the cat waved its tail. Why on earth it should try to make itself conspicuous in this way when it was flattening itself into the earth that was nearest to it in colour, and writhing towards its prey, seemed to me remarkable. Once, however, I was able to watch the cat approach when I was seated beyond where the sparrow was digging up worms, and the cat had slipped among the lower boughs of an ash covered with trembling leaves.
There among the trembling leaves I saw another trembling leaf—the soothing, swaying end of my cat's tail; but if I had not known that it was there I should not have noticed it apart from the moving leaves. The bird with all its vigilance was deceived, and it was in the cat's jaws in another moment.
And I had been calling that cat—and, incidentally, Darwin—a fool for several years! I do not know what my Zoologist “for the Use of Schools” would have made of the transaction. Would he have said that a cat abhorred the sin of lying, and scorned to take advantage of the bird, but gave that graceful swing to its tail to make the bird aware of its menacing proximity?
I lived for eleven years in a house in Kensington with quite a spacious garden behind it, and was blest for several years by the company of a pair of blackbirds that made their nest among the converging twigs of a high lilac. No cat could climb that tree in spring, as I perceived when I had watched the frustrated attempts of the splendid blue Persian who was my constant companion. Of course I lived in that garden for hours every day during the months of April, May, June, and July, and we guarded the nest very closely, even going so far as to disturb the balance of Nature by sending the cat away on a visit when the young birds were being fledged. But one month of May arrived, and though I noticed the parent blackbirds occasionally among the trees and shrubs, I never once saw them approaching the old nest, which, as in previous seasons, was smothered out of sight in the foliage about it, for a poplar towered above the lilac, and was well furnished.
I remarked to my man that I was afraid our blackbirds had deserted us this year, and he agreed with me. But one day early in June I saw the cat look wistfully up the lilac.
“He hasn't forgotten the nest that was there,” I said. “But I'm sure he'll find out in which of the neighbouring gardens the new one has been built.”
But every day he came out and gazed up as if into the depths of the foliage above our heads.
“Ornithology is his hobby,”