Chapter V: Front Matter (5)

Perhaps (I say to myself, being ever disposed to make the best of a bad bargain), perhaps the scantiness of my acquaintance with birds, the difficulty about seeing them (for there is none about hearing them in Tuscany, and I shall be kept awake by vociferous nightingales in a month's time), gives to my feeling about them a pleasant, half-painful eagerness. Certainly it raises the sight of birds, when I get out of this country, into something of the nature of a performance. Even in Rome, the larks, going up tiny brown rockets, into the pale blue sky above the pale green endless undulations of grass, and the rooks and magpies flocking round the ruins. And how much in Germany? Indeed, one of Germany's charms is the condition, or, rather, the position, the civic status, of birds and small creatures. One is constantly reminded of the Minnesinger Walther's legacy to the birds of Wurzburg, and of Luther's hiding the hare in the sleeve of his tunic. One of my first impressions after crossing the Alps last year was of just such a hare, only perfectly at his ease, running in front of my bicycle for ever so long during a great thunderstorm which overtook us in the cornfields between Donaustauff and Ratisbon. And as to birds! They are not merely left in liberty, but assiduously courted by these kindly, and, in their prosaic way, poetical Teutons. Already in the village shop on the top of the Tyrolese pass there was a nest of swallows deep down in a passage. And in the Lorenz Kirche at Nuremberg, while the electric trams go clanking outside, the swallows whirr cheerfully along the aisles, among the coats-of-arms, the wonderfully crested helmets suspended on high. There was a swallow's nest in the big entrance room (where the peasants sit and drink among the little dry birch-trees and fir garlands from the Whitsuntide festivities) of the inn at Rothenburg; a nest above the rows of pewter and stoneware, with baby swallows looking unconcernedly out at the guests. But the great joy at Rothenburg was the family of storks which still inhabit one of the high, pointed gatehouses. I used to go and see them every morning: the great cartwheel on the funnel-shaped roof, wisps of comfortable hay hanging over it; one of the parent storks standing sentinel on one leg, the little ones raising themselves occasionally into sight, the other stork hovering around on outspread wings like tattered banners. To think that there were once storks also in Italy, storks' homes, the old Lombard name _Cicognara_ meaning that; and cranes also, whom the people in Boccaccio, and even Lorenzo di Medici, went out to hunt! The last of them were certainly netted and eaten, as they used to eat porcupines in Rome in my childish days.

Speaking of cranes reminds me of the pleasure I have had also in watching herons, particularly among the ponds of my mother's old home.

"Would you like to see one near? I'll go and shoot it you at once," said my very kind cousin.

How odd it is, when one thinks of it, that mere contemplation seems so insufficient for us poor restless human beings! We cannot see a flower without an impulse to pick it, a character without an impulse to, let us say, analyse; a bird without an impulse to shoot. And in this way we certainly lose most of the good which any of these things could be to us: just to be looked at, thought about, enjoyed, and let alone.

* * * * *

ARIADNE IN MANTUA

TO

ETHEL SMYTH

THANKING, AND BEGGING, HER FOR MUSIC