Prose Idylls, New and Old. Charles Kingsley

into words.

      And the same bird keynote surely is to be traced in the early English and Scotch songs and ballads, with their often meaningless refrains, sung for the mere pleasure of singing:

      ‘Binnorie, O Binnorie.

      Or—

      ‘With a hey lillelu and a how lo lan,

      And the birk and the broom blooms bonnie.’

      Or—

      ‘She sat down below a thorn,

         Fine flowers in the valley,

      And there has she her sweet babe born,

         And the green leaves they grow rarely.’

      Or even those ‘fal-la-las,’ and other nonsense refrains, which, if they were not meant to imitate bird-notes, for what were they meant?

      In the old ballads, too, one may hear the bird keynote.  He who wrote (and a great rhymer he was)

      ‘As I was walking all alane,

      I heard twa corbies making a mane,’

      had surely the ‘mane’ of the ‘corbies’ in his ears before it shaped itself into words in his mind: and he had listened to many a ‘woodwele’ who first thrummed on harp, or fiddled on crowd, how—

      ‘In summer, when the shawes be shene,

         And leaves be large and long,

      It is full merry in fair forest

         To hear the fowlés’ song.

      ‘The wood-wele sang, and wolde not cease,

         Sitting upon the spray;

      So loud, it wakened Robin Hood

         In the greenwood where he lay.’

      And Shakespeare—are not his scraps of song saturated with these same bird-notes?  ‘Where the bee sucks,’ ‘When daisies pied,’ ‘Under the greenwood tree,’ ‘It was a lover and his lass,’ ‘When daffodils begin to peer,’ ‘Ye spotted snakes,’ have all a ring in them which was caught not in the roar of London, or the babble of the Globe theatre, but in the woods of Charlecote, and along the banks of Avon, from

      ‘The ouzel-cock so black of hue,

         With orange-tawny bill;

      The throstle with his note so true:

         The wren with little quill;

      The finch, the sparrow, and the lark,

         The plain-song cuckoo gray’—

      and all the rest of the birds of the air.

      Why is it, again, that so few of our modern songs are truly songful, and fit to be set to music?  Is it not that the writers of them—persons often of much taste and poetic imagination—have gone for their inspiration to the intellect, rather than to the ear?  That (as Shelley does by the skylark, and Wordsworth by the cuckoo), instead of trying to sing like the birds, they only think and talk about the birds, and therefore, however beautiful and true the thoughts and words may be, they are not song?  Surely they have not, like the mediæval songsters, studied the speech of the birds, the primæval teachers of melody; nor even melodies already extant, round which, as round a framework of pure music, their thoughts and images might crystallize themselves, certain thereby of becoming musical likewise.  The best modern song writers, Burns and Moore, were inspired by their old national airs; and followed them, Moore at least, with a reverent fidelity, which has had its full reward.  They wrote words to music and not, as modern poets are wont, wrote the words first, and left others to set music to the words.  They were right; and we are wrong.  As long as song is to be the expression of pure emotion, so long it must take its key from music,—which is already pure emotion, untranslated into the grosser medium of thought and speech—often (as in the case of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words) not to be translated into it at all.

      And so it may be, that in some simpler age, poets may go back, like the old Minnesingers, to the birds of the forest, and learn of them to sing.

      And little do most of them know how much there is to learn; what variety of character, as well as variety of emotion, may be distinguished by the practised ear, in a ‘charm of birds’ (to use the old southern phrase), from the wild cry of the missel-thrush, ringing from afar in the first bright days of March, a passage of one or two bars repeated three or four times, and then another and another, clear and sweet, and yet defiant—for the great ‘stormcock’ loves to sing when rain and wind is coming on, and faces the elements as boldly as he faces hawk and crow—down to the delicate warble of the wren, who slips out of his hole in the brown bank, where he has huddled through the frost with wife and children, all folded in each other’s arms like human beings, for the sake of warmth,—which, alas! does not always suffice; for many a lump of wrens may be found, frozen and shrivelled, after a severe winter.  Yet even he, sitting at his house-door in the low sunlight, says grace for all mercies (as a little child once worded it) in a song so rapid, so shrill, so loud, and yet so delicately modulated, that you wonder at the amount of soul within that tiny body; and then stops suddenly, as a child who has said its lesson, or got to the end of the sermon, gives a self-satisfied flirt of his tail, and goes in again to sleep.

      Character?  I know not how much variety of character there may be between birds of the same species but between species and species the variety is endless, and is shown—as I fondly believe—in the difference of their notes.  Each has its own speech, inarticulate, expressing not thought but hereditary feeling; save a few birds who, like those little dumb darlings, the spotted flycatchers, seem to have absolutely nothing to say, and accordingly have the wit to hold their tongues; and devote the whole of their small intellect to sitting on the iron rails, flitting off them a yard or two to catch a butterfly in air, and flitting back with it to their nest.

      But listen to the charm of birds in any sequestered woodland, on a bright forenoon in June.  As you try to disentangle the medley of sounds, the first, perhaps, which will strike your ear will be the loud, harsh, monotonous, flippant song of the chaffinch; and the metallic clinking of two or three sorts of titmice.  But above the tree-tops, rising, hovering, sinking, the woodlark is fluting, tender and low.  Above the pastures outside the skylark sings—as he alone can sing; and close by, from the hollies rings out the blackbird’s tenor—rollicking, audacious, humorous, all but articulate.  From the tree above him rises the treble of the thrush, pure as the song of angels: more pure, perhaps, in tone, though neither so varied nor so rich, as the song of the nightingale.  And there, in the next holly, is the nightingale himself: now croaking like a frog; now talking aside to his wife on the nest below; and now bursting out into that song, or cycle of songs, in which if any man finds sorrow, he himself surely finds none.  All the morning he will sing; and again at evening, till the small hours, and the chill before the dawn: but if his voice sounds melancholy at night, heard all alone, or only mocked by the ambitious black-cap, it sounds in the bright morning that which it is, the fulness of joy and love.  Milton’s

      ‘Sweet bird, that shun’st the noise of folly,

      Most musical, most melancholy,’

      is untrue to fact.  So far from shunning the noise of folly, the nightingale sings as boldly as anywhere close to a stage-coach road, or a public path, as anyone will testify who recollects the ‘Wrangler’s Walk’ from Cambridge to Trumpington forty years ago, when the covert, which has now become hollow and shelterless, held, at every twenty yards, an unabashed and jubilant nightingale.

      Coleridge surely was not far wrong when he guessed that—

      ‘Some night-wandering man, whose heart was pierced

      With the remembrance of a grievous wrong,

      Or slow distemper, or neglected love

      (And so, poor wretch, filled all things with himself,

      And made all gentle sounds tell back