The Catholic World Volume Iii Part 93

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From Chambers's Journal

THE CUCKOO AND THE NIGHTINGALE.

Our oldest poet, and almost our best, unites in one sweet song the cuckoo and the nightingale--the former to be chidden, and spoken of despitefully; the latter to be made the theme of fervent praise, as the singer and harbinger of love. Taken altogether, the cuckoo, in fact, is far from being an attractive bird. Somehow, it has in all countries been regarded as a symbol of matrimonial infidelity, probably because it introduces itself into and defiles the nests of other, birds. Shakespeare, who loved to make eternal the fancies and prejudices of mankind, exclaims:

"Cuckoo! cuckoo! O word of fear!

Unpleasing to a married ear!"

Loved or hated, however, it is a creature about which we know less than any other winged animal. It comes and goes in mystery, no one being able to decide what is its original country, how far it extends its travels, to what peculiarity in its structure or const.i.tution it owes its restless propensity, or why, almost as soon as born, it becomes a sort of feathered Cain, murdering its foster-brethren, and, according to some, devouring the very dam that fed it. Wide, indeed, are its wanderings. It is heard on the banks of the Niger and the Senegal in the heart of Africa; it is familiar to the dwellers on the Obi and the Irtish; it flies screaming forth its harsh dissyllables over the Baltic surge; it repeats them untiringly in the perfumed air of Andalusia and Granada, among the ruins of the Alhambra and the Generaliffe; it startles the woodman in the forests of France; it amuses the school-boy in the green vales of Kent, of Gloucestershire, and of Devonshire.

Our a.s.sociations with the cuckoo are, in some cases, pleasant; it comes to us with the first of those peregrinating birds that usher in the summer; its cry is redolent of sunshine, of the scent of primroses, of lindens, of oaks, and elms, of solitary pathways, of the lilied banks of streams. Occasionally, we know not why, it flies early in the morning over the skirts of great cities, as if to invite their inmates to shake off drowsiness, and look forth upon the loveliness of the young day. Not many weeks ago, we heard it in London, just as the clouds were parting in the east to make way for the first beams of dawn. Many summers back, we heard the self-same notes echoing among the pinnacles of the Alps, before the morning-star had faded from behind the Jungfrau. The cuckoo is a sort of familiar chronicler, that gathers up the events of our lives, and brings them to our memory by his well-known voice. As he shouts over our heads, we call to mind the many summers the sweet scents of which we have inhaled, the rambles we have taken in the woods, our idolatry of nature, our innocent pleasures.

The cuckoo and the nightingale const.i.tute the opposite poles of the ornithological world; one the representative of eternal monotony, the other of infinite variety. Among men, there are cuckoos and nightingales--individuals whose ideas are few, who think invariably after the same pattern, who repeat day after day the formulas of the nursery and the school-room, who, from their swaddling-bands to their shrouds, never break away from the social catechism dinned into them at the outset; while there are others who seem, at least in their range of thought, to know no limit but that of creation, to generate fresh swarms of ideas every moment, now to hover among the nebulas on the extreme verge of the {544} universe, and now to nestle in the chalice of the violet, where even Ariel could scarcely find room for the tip of his pinion. Naturalists may be fanciful, like poets; and if this liberty be ever allowable, it is surely so when they speak of the nightingale. The organization of this winged miracle, whose whole weight does not exceed an ounce, may in truth be looked upon as one of the most remarkable in the whole scale of animal life. The roar of the gorilla can, it is said, be heard a full mile. But the gorilla is a colossus, equalling in stature one of the sons of Anak; while Philomela, not exceeding in bulk the forejoint of the monster's thumb, is able at night, when all the woods are still, to cause the liquid melody of her notes to be heard at an equal distance. Consider the organ, measure the length of country, and the ecstacy of the listening ear, and you will perhaps acknowledge that there are few phenomena familiar to our experience more astonishing than this. We have stood at midnight on a mountain in the south of France, and at a distance quite as great, we think, as that mentioned above, have heard the notes of the songstress of darkness borne up to us, on the breeze from the depths of an unwooded valley. Faintly and gently they came through the hushed air, but there could be no mistake about their ident.i.ty; no other mortal mixture of earth's mould than her throat could have given forth such sounds, crisp, clear, long-drawn, melancholy, as if she were still lamenting the sad hap that overtook her amid die solitudes of h.e.l.las. The French, down even to the peasants, love the nightingale; and wild country girls, who in their whole lives never read a page of poetry, will sit out half the night on a hillside to listen to their favorite bird. A priest once invited us to pa.s.s a week with him in his village _presbytere_, and in enumerating the inducements, mentioned first that there were nightingales in the neighborhood. His home was in the valley of Mortagne, in the Bocages of Normandy, where these birds are in fact as plentiful as sparrows.

In Italy, especially in Tuscany and the Venetian states, the nightingale trills her notes with more than ordinary beauty. The great Roman naturalist who perished amid the lava-floods of Vesuvius, often, we may be sure, enjoyed her song from his nephew's garden in this part of the peninsula. No description of the wonders she achieves can approach the one he has left us for truth or eloquence, and it was written in all likelihood by the light of some antique lamp between the prolonged gushes of her music. Unhappily, it is true, as he says, that the nightingale's song can only be heard in perfection during fifteen out of the three hundred and sixty-five days of the year. The female bird is then sitting in her nest, imparting vital heat to the musicians of future years; and her lover, fully impressed with the importance of her duty, intoxicates her with his voice, to dispel the tedium of confinement. In spite of natural history, however, poetry transfers to the mute female the singing powers of her lord:

"Nightly she sings from yon, pomegranate-tree."

Pliny, too, after stating the fact, that it is the male that sings, immediately avails himself of the aid supplied by metonymy, and changes the s.e.x of the musician. Let us take his description, as honest Philemon Holland supplies it in the language of Elizabeth's time: "Is it not a wonder," he says, "that so loud and clear a voice should come from so little a body? Is it not as strange that she should hold her breath so long, and continue with it as she doth?

Moreover, she alone in her song keepeth time and measure truly; she riseth and falleth in her note just with the rules of music and perfect harmonic: for one while in one entire breath she draweth out her tune at length treatable; another while she quavereth, and goeth away as fast in her running points; sometimes she maketh stops and short cuts in her notes, another time she gathereth in {545} her breath and singeth descant between the plain song; she fetcheth her breath again, and then you shall have her in her catches and divisions; anon, all on a sudden, before a man would think it, she drowneth her voice, that one can scarce hear her; now and then she seemeth to record to herself; and then she breaketh out to sing voluntarie. In some she varieth and altereth her voice to all keys; one while full of her larges, longs, briefs, semibriefs, and minims; another while in her crotchets, quavers, semiquavers, and double semiquavers, for at one time you shall hear her voice full and loud, another time as low; and anon shrill and on high: thick and short when she list; drawn out at leisure again when she is disposed; and then (if she be so pleased) she riseth and mounteth up aloft, as it were with a wind-organ. Thus she altereth from one to another, and singeth all parts, the treble, the meane, and the base. To conclude; there is not a pipe or instrument again in the world (devised with all the art and cunning of man so exquisitely as possibly might be) that can afford more music than this pretty bird doth out of that little throat of hers."

We have persons here in England who earn their livelihood by catching nightingales. It is the same in most other countries. Near Cairo, there is, or used to be, a pretty grove of mingled mimosas, palms, and sycamores, where the netters of nightingales station themselves at night, in the proper season, to take the bird when in full song.

According to their report, which there is no reason to discredit, the male bird becomes so intoxicated by the scented air, by love, and by his own music, that the cap-net, fixed at at the summit of a long reed, may be raised and closed about him before he is sensible of his danger. From the free woods he is then transferred to a cage, where in nine cases out of ten, he dies of nostalgia. Nor is this all. The female bird, accustomed not only to be cheered by his song, but likewise fed by his industry, pines and perishes with all her brood.

The wren, the swallow, the t.i.tlark intermit the business of incubation, and leave their nests for a minute or a minute and a half to help themselves while they are sitting, or to a.s.sist the male in feeding the young after the eggs are hatched: but the female nightingale used, like an eastern sultana, to be provided for entirely by her lord, feels her utter helplessness when she is deserted, and leaning her little head and neck over the edge of the nest, with her eyes fixed in the direction in which he used to come, dies in that att.i.tude of expectancy. The reason is, that the instinct of pairing, which is strong in many other birds, reaches its culminating point in the nightingale--the same males and females keeping together for years without ever seeking other mates.

The cuckoo, as we have said, offers the most striking contrast in the development of its instincts. It does not pair at all, and as there are more males than females, we may often see two or three of the former s.e.x following one of the latter, and fighting for her favors.

As the parents care not for one another, neither do they care for their young. It was long supposed that the cuckoo laid only one egg in the season; but this has been found to be an error, for though they leave no more than one egg in one nest--we mean generally--they have been observed to make deposits in various nests, and then fly away to a distant part of the country, or even to other lands. In the female cuckoo, therefore, the maternal instinct is entirely wanting, which, though it acts in obedience to an imperious law of nature, makes it a hateful bird. As soon as it quits the sh.e.l.l, it begins to exhibit its odious qualities. When the cuckoo's egg is placed in the nest of the hedge-sparrow, for example, the deluded mother perceives no difference between the alien production and her own. She sits, therefore, on what she finds, and having no idea of numbers, of course never thinks of counting the eggs. {546} When hatching-time arrives, however, she is made the witness of an extraordinary scene. The villainous young cuckoo, which often escapes from the sh.e.l.l a whole day before the others, immediately begins to clear the nest by pitching out the unhatched eggs; or if the young ones have made their appearance, forth they are thrown in like manner. Nature has fabricated the little monster with a view to this ungrateful proceeding, for in its back there is a hollow depression, in which egg or chick may be placed while he is rising to shunt it over the battlements. The process is extremely curious: the young a.s.sa.s.sin, putting shoulder and elbow to the work, keeps continually thrusting against his victim till he gets it on his back; he then rises, and placing his back aslant, tumbles it out into empty s.p.a.ce. This done, and finding that he has all the dwelling to himself, he subsides quietly into his place, and waits with ever-open bill for the dole which the foolish sparrow wears itself almost to death in providing for the faithless wretch. When the nest happens to be situated in a high hedge, you may often see the young sparrows spiked alive on the thorns, or the eggs still palpitating with living birds lying unbroken on the soft gra.s.s below.

This inspires naturalists with no pity; they observe that neither the eggs nor the young birds are thrown away, since various reptiles that feed on such substances make a comfortable meal of what is thus placed within their reach.

As the cuckoo does nothing in life but eat, scream, and lay eggs for other birds to hatch, it needs no education, and receives none. On the other hand, the nightingale, having to perform the highest functions allotted to the cla.s.s _aves_, requires much training and discipline, study and preparation. The young nightingale does not sing by mere instinct. If taken from the nest soon after it is hatched, and brought up among inferior creatures, it is incapable of performing its lofty mission, and deals in vulgar twittering like them; just as a baby, if removed from the society of speech-gifted mortals, and entrusted to the care of dumb persons, will lack that divine quality of expressing ideas which distinguishes man from the brute. The nightingale needs and receives a cla.s.sical education. When the gra.s.s is dewy--when the leaves are green and fresh--when the soft breath of the morning steals over the woods like incense, the old bird takes forth the young ones, before it is quite light, and placing them on some bough, with strict injunctions to listen, goes a little way off, and begins his song. In this he commences with the easier notes, and is careful to keep the whole in a comparatively narrow compa.s.s. He then pauses to watch the result of his first instructions. After a brief delay, during which they are turning over the notes in their minds, the young ones take up the lay one by one, and go through it, as our neighbors say, _tant bien que mal_. The teacher watches their efforts with attention; applauds them when right; chides them when they have done amiss; and goes on day by day reterating his lessons till he considers his pupils quite equal to the high duties they have to perform. Mankind, of course, imagine that those duties consist in soothing their ears, and driving away melancholy. But _apropos_ of the performances of another bird, our philosophic poet inquires:

"Is it for thee the lark ascends and sings?"

And replies:

"Joy tunes his voice, joy animates his wings."

So with the nightingale--

"Loves of his own and raptures swell the note."

Some one speaking of our own species, says:

"We think, we toil, we war, we rove.

And all we ask is--woman's love."

It is to win the love of Philomela that the male nightingale studies, watches, and pours forth his soul in song. He had much rather that men did not listen; he is a shy, solitary, and timid bird, and takes his love away into {547} the forests, where, undisturbed by the sounds of vulgar life, he ravishes her ears with music. It is a question much discussed by poets and naturalists, whether the nightingale's song be joyous or melancholy. It probably derives its character from the frame of mind in which the listener happens to be--to the joyous it is mirthful, to the sorrowful it is sad--but in its real nature it is what Milton suggests--

"She all night long her amorous descant sung."

Still it must be owned that they who discover melancholy in her long, low, meltingly sweet notes, seem to approach nearer the truth than they who describe her as a merry bird. It is superst.i.tion, perhaps, that attributes to her the strange philosophy which makes anguish the well-spring of pleasure. When desirous, it is said, of reaching the sublimest heights of song, she leans her breast against a thorn, in order that the sense of pain may tone down her impetuous rapture into sympathy with human sorrow.

Another strange notion is, that the nightingale fixes her eyes--

"Her bright, bright eyes; her eyes both bright and full"--

on some particular star, from which she never withdraws them till her song is concluded, unless she be alarmed by the approach of some footstep, or other sound indicative of danger. We remember once, in Kent, going forth to spend a night in the fields to enjoy the strange delight imparted by the nightingale's notes. We placed ourselves on a little eminence overlooking a valley, covered at intervals by scattered woods. It was the dead watch and middle of the night; silence the most absolute brooded over the earth. We stood still in high expectation. Presently, one lordly nightingale flung forth at no great distance from the summit of a lofty tree his music on the night.

The lay was not protracted, but a rich, short, defiant burst of melody; he then, like the Roman orator, paused for a reply. The reply came, not close at hand, but, as it seemed, from some copse or thicket far down in the valley. If one might presume to judge on the spur of the moment, the second songster did really outdo the first. The notes came forth bubbling, gushing, quivering, palpitating, as it were, with soul, for nothing material ever resembled it. He went over a broad area of song, with a sort of wilderness of melody; his notes followed each other so rapidly, high, low, linked, broken--now sweeping away like a torrent, now sinking till it sounded like the scarcely audible murmur of a distant bee. He then stopped abruptly, confident that he had given his rival something to reflect upon. We now waited to hear that rival's answer, but he appeared to consider himself defeated, and remained silent. Another champion now stepped forward, and took up the challenge. He must surely have been the prince of his race. From a tree on the slope of a height, not far to the right of our position, he gave us a new specimen of the poetry of his race. The former two, evidently younger and more inexperienced, had been in a hurry. He took up his parable at leisure, beginning with a few light flourishes by way of preface, after which he plunged into his epic, seeming to carry on the subject from the epoch of Deucalion and Pyrrha, down to that moment, displaying all the resources of art, and presenting us with every form into which music could be moulded. What he might have achieved at last, or to what pitch he might have raised our ecstasy, must remain a mystery, for before he had concluded his song, a thundering railway train, belching forth fire and smoke as it advanced, seemed to be on the very point of annihilating the songsters; so they all took to flight, or at least remained obstinately silent. We waited hour after hour, now pacing in one direction, now in another; stopping short, pausing in our talk, listening till the streaky dawn, climbing slowly up the eastern hills, revealed to us the inutility of further hope.

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The first time we heard the nightingale was from the deck of a vessel in the Avon, near Lee Woods. It was a starlight night; we were leaning on the bulwarks, speculating on the reception we were to meet with in England--in which we had that day arrived for the first time. As we were chewing the cud of sweet and bitter fancy, from an indenture in the woods, called, as we have since learned, Nightingale Valley, there burst forth at once a flood of sound, the strangest, the sweetest, the most intoxicating we had ever heard--it must be, it was the voice of the nightingale---

To the land of my fathers that welcomed me back.

Years not a few have rolled by since then, but we remember as distinctly as if it were yesternight the pleasure of that exquisite surprise. We heard the nightingale in England before the cuckoo--a circ.u.mstance which, according to Chaucer, should portend good-luck; and so it did--good-luck and happy days.

Perhaps much of the pleasure tasted in such cases is derived from the time of year--for both the cuckoo and the nightingale belong to the spring--when the air is full of balm, when the foliage is thick, when the gra.s.s is green and young--and when, especially in the morning, delicate odors ascend from the earth, which produce a wonderful effect upon the animal spirits. Through these scents, the cry of one bird and the song of the other invariably come to us: the one flitting at early dawn over the summits of woods, the other in loneliest covert hid, making night lovely, and smoothing the raven down of darkness till it smiles.

[ORIGINAL.]

HYMN.

Spirit of G.o.d, thyself the Lord, Out of the depths I call on thee.

Above, I view thy gleaming sword.

Around, thy works of love I see.

Spirit of G.o.d, that hovering high Didst watch the primal waters roll, Brood o'er my heart, and verify The turbid chaos of my soul!

Spirit of G.o.d, oh! bid me fear, That blessed fear thy love can calm; Transfix me with thy shining spear And heal me with thy holy balm!

Spirit of G.o.d, oh! fill my breast, And sear me with the sign of heaven.

The glorious brand of sin confessed, The glorious seal of sin forgiven.

F.A.R.

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From the Irish Industrial Magazine