At evening upon the lake of Lugano thousands of feet
below, and then lets the eye wander upward again and rest upon the
ghastly pallor of Monte Rosa, or whether one takes the path to the
Colma and saunters over green slopes carpeted with wild-flowers,
and studded with the gentlest cattle, all is equally delightful.
What a sense of vastness and freedom is there on the broad heaving
slopes of these subalpine spurs. They are just high enough without
being too high. The South Downs are very good, and by making
believe very much I have sometimes been half able to fancy when
upon them that I might be on the Monte Generoso, but they are only
good as a quartet is good if one cannot get a symphony.
I think there are more wild-flowers upon the Monte Generoso than
upon any other that I know, and among them numbers of beautiful
wild narcissuses, as on the Monte Cenere. At the top of the Monte
Generoso, among the rocks that jut out from the herbage, there
grows - unless it has been all uprooted - the large yellow auricula,
and this I own to being my favourite mountain wild-flower. It is
the only flower which, I think, fairly beats cowslips. Here too I
heard, or thought I heard, the song of that most beautiful of all
bird songsters, the passero solitario, or solitary sparrow-if it is
a sparrow, which I should doubt.
Nobody knows what a bird can do in the way of song until he has
heard a passero solitario. I think they still have one at the
Hotel Mendrisio, but am not sure. I heard one there once, and can
only say that I shall ever remember it as the most beautiful
warbling that I ever heard come out of the throat of bird. All
other bird singing is loud, vulgar, and unsympathetic in
comparison. The bird itself is about as big as a starling, and is
of a dull blue colour. It is easily tamed, and becomes very much
attached to its master and mistress, but it is apt to die in
confinement before very long. It fights all others of its own
species; it is now a rare bird, and is doomed, I fear, ere long to
extinction, to the regret of all who have had the pleasure of its
acquaintance. The Italians are very fond of them, and Professor
Vela told me they will even act like a house dog and set up a cry
if any strangers come. The one I saw flew instantly at my finger
when I put it near its cage, but I was not sure whether it did so
in anger or play. I thought it liked being listened to, and as
long as it chose to sing I was delighted to stay, whereas as a
general rule I want singing birds to leave off. {32}
People say the nightingale's song is so beautiful; I am ashamed to
own it, but I do not like it. It does not use the diatonic scale.
A bird should either make no attempt to sing in tune, or it should
succeed in doing so. Larks are Wordsworth, and as for canaries, I
would almost sooner hear a pig having its nose ringed, or the
grinding of an axe. Cuckoos are all right; they sing in tune.
Rooks are lovely; they do not pretend to tune. Seagulls again, and
the plaintive creatures that pity themselves on moorlands, as the
plover and the curlew, or the birds that lift up their voices and
cry at eventide when there is an eager air blowing upon the
mountains and the last yellow in the sky is fading - I have no words
with which to praise the music of these people. Or listen to the
chuckling of a string of soft young ducks, as they glide single-
file beside a ditch under a hedgerow, so close together that they
look like some long brown serpent, and say what sound can be more
seductive.
Many years ago I remember thinking that the birds in New Zealand
approached the diatonic scale more nearly than European birds do.
There was one bird, I think it was the New Zealand thrush, but am
not sure, which used to sing thus:-
[At this point in the book a music score is given]
I was always wanting it to go on:-
[At this point in the book a music score is given]
But it never got beyond the first four bars. Then there was
another which I noticed the first day I landed, more than twenty
years since, and whose song descended by very nearly perfect
semitones as follows:-
[At this point in the book a music score is given]
but the semitones are here and there in this bird's song a trifle
out of tune, whereas in that of the other there was no departure
from the diatonic scale. Be this, however, as it may, none of
these please me so much as the passero solitario.
The only mammals that I can call to mind at this moment as showing
any even apparent approach to an appreciation of the diatonic scale
are the elephant and the rhinoceros. The braying (or whatever is
the technical term for it) of an elephant comprises a pretty
accurate third, and is of a rich mellow tone with a good deal of
brass in it. The rhinoceros grunts a good fourth, beginning, we
will say, on C, and dropping correctly on to the G below.
The Monte Generoso, then, is a good place to stay a few days at,
but one soon comes to an end of it.
