Various
Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 442
THE NIGHTINGALE:
A MUSICAL QUESTION
Is the song of the nightingale mirthful or melancholy? is a question that has been discussed so often, that anything new on the subject might be considered superfluous, were it not that the very fact of the discussion is in itself a curiosity worthy of attention. The note in dispute was heard with equal distinctness by Homer and Wordsworth; and indeed there are few poets of any age or country who have not, at one time or other in their lives, had the testimony of their own ears as to its character. Whence, then, this difference of opinion? Listen to Thomson's unqualified assertion, given with the seriousness of an affidavit:
——'all abandoned to despair, she sings
Her sorrows through the night, and on the bough
Sole sitting still at every dying fall
Takes up again her lamentable strain
Of winding wo; till wide around the woods
Sigh to her song and with her wail resound.'
Then Homer in the Odyssey, through Pope's paraphrase:
'Sad Philomel, in bowery shades unseen,
To vernal airs attunes her varied strains.'
Virgil, as rendered by Dryden:
——'she supplies the night with mournful strains
And melancholy music fills the plains.'
Milton, too:
——'Philomel will deign a song
In her sweetest, saddest plight,
Smoothing the rugged brow of night,
While Cynthia checks her dragon yoke
Gently o'er the accustom'd oak:
Sweet bird, that shun'st the noise of folly—
Most musical, most melancholy.'
And again in Comus:
——'the love-lorn nightingale
Nightly to thee her sad song mourneth well.'
And Shakspeare makes his poor banished Valentine congratulate himself, that in the forest he can
——'to the nightingale's complaining note
Tune his distresses and record his wo.
We might go on much longer in this strain. We might give, likewise, the mythological cause assigned for the imputed melancholy, and add that some, not content with this, represent the bird as leaning its breast against a thorn—
'To aggravate the inward grief,
Which makes its music so forlorn.'
But we would rather pause to admit candidly, that two of the above witnesses might be challenged—Virgil and Thomson; who indeed should be counted but as one, for the author of the Seasons, in the lines quoted, has translated, though not so closely as Dryden, from the Georgics of the Latin poet. If you will read the passage—it matters not whether in Virgil, Dryden, or Thomson—you will perceive that it is a special occurrence that is spoken of: no statement whatever is made as to the character of the nightingale's ordinary song. Thomson, in the course of his humane and touching protest against the barbarous art: 'through which birds are
—– by tyrant man
Inhuman caught, and in the narrow cage
From liberty confined, and boundless air,'
represents the nightingale's misery when thus bereaved. This portion of the lines shall stand entire; none, we are sure, would wish us further to mangle the passage:
'But chief, let not the nightingale lament
Her ruined care, too delicately framed
To brook the harsh confinement of the cage.
Oft, when returning with her loaded bill,
The astonished mother finds a vacant nest,
By the rude hands of unrelenting clowns
Robbed: to the ground the vain provision falls.
Her pinions ruffle, and low drooping, scarce
Can bear the mourner to the poplar shade;
Where all abandoned to despair, she sings
Her sorrows through the night.'
It will at once be seen that this description relates to an exceptional condition, and we have yet to seek what character Virgil and Thomson would give to the ordinary song of this paradoxical musician. For the Roman, we do not know that any passage exists in his works which can help us to a conclusion; but Thomson's testimony must undoubtedly be ranged on the contra side, as appears from the following lines in his Agamemnon:
'Ah, far unlike the nightingale! she sings
Unceasing through the balmy nights of May—
She sings from love and joy.'
In the passage from his Spring, which we have given, we cannot but fancy that the poet endeavoured—if we may so say—to effect a compromise between the opinion which, through the influence of classical poetry, generally prevailed as to the character of the bird's music, and the opposing convictions which his own senses had forced upon him. It was desirable to describe its strains according to the popular fancy, and therefore he borrowed from Virgil such a description of the bird's sorrow as under the assumed circumstances did no violence to his own judgment.
Thomson is not the only poet in whom we fancy we detect some such attempt at compromise. It appears to us that Villega, the Anacreon of Spain, in the following little poem, which we give in Mr Wiffen's translation, adopted, with a similar object, this idea of the nightingale robbed of her young. The truthful and somewhat minute description in the song, however, represents the bird's ordinary performance, and but ill suits the circumstances under which it is supposed to be uttered. The failure on the part of the poet may be ascribed to his secret conviction, that the nightingale's was a cheerful melody; and his labouring against that conviction to the necessity he felt himself under of following his classical masters.
'I have seen a nightingale
On a sprig of thyme bewail,
Seeing the dear nest that was
Hers alone, borne off, alas!
By a labourer: I heard,
For this outrage, the poor bird
Say a thousand mournful things
To the wind, which on its wings
From her to the guardian sky
Bore her melancholy cry—
Bore her tender tears. She spake
As if her fond heart would break.
One while in a sad, sweet note,
Gurgled from her straining throat,
She enforced her piteous tale,
Mournful prayer and plaintive wail;
One while with the shrill dispute,
Quite o'er-wearied, she was mute;
Then afresh, for her dear brood,
Her harmonious shrieks renewed;
Now she winged it round and round,
Now she skimmed along the ground;
Now from bough to bough in haste
The delighted robber chased;
And alighting in his path,
Seemed to say, 'twixt grief and wrath:
"Give me back, fierce rustic rude!
Give me back my pretty brood!"
And I saw the rustic still
Answer: "That I never will!"'
Independently of the untruthfulness of which a naturalist would complain in this description—for no birds under such circumstances of distress sing, but merely repeat each its own peculiar piercing cry, never at any other time heard, and which cannot be mistaken—there is a palpable effort of ingenuity discoverable in the representation, which seems to tell us that the writer was making up a story, rather than uttering his own belief. It may even be doubted whether Virgil himself, who seems first to have invented this fancy, and behind whose broad mantle later poets have sheltered themselves, may not have felt an inclination to depart from the Greek opinion of Philomel's ditty. Why otherwise did he not simply and at once—as his masters Homer and Theocritus had done before him—describe her notes as mournful, instead of casting about for some cause that might excuse him for giving them that character? But however this may be, we cannot conceal from ourselves, that some stubborn passages still remain in the poets, proclaiming that there are men, and those among the greatest and most tasteful, to whose fancy the voice of the nightingale has sounded full of wo.
Homer must be counted of this number—unless we think with Fox, in the preface to his History of Lord Holland, that it is only as to her wakefulness Penelope is compared to the night singing-bird; and so must Milton (for although Coleridge has satisfactorily dealt with the passage in Il Penseroso, the line of the Lady's song in Comus remains still); and Shakspeare himself, who could scarcely be influenced, as Milton might very possibly be, by the opinions of the Grecian poets.
It is a strange contest we are here considering. Which of us would for a moment doubt our ability to decide in a dispute as to the liveliness or sadness of any given melody?—yet here we see the greatest poets, the favoured children of nature, utterly at variance on a point concerning which we should have expected to find even the most ordinary minds able to decide.
The question becomes more involved from the fact, that some writers take both sides; for instance, Chiobrera in Aleippo: the nightingale
'Unwearied still reiterates her lays,
Jocund or sad, delightful to the ear;'
and Hartley Coleridge, in the following beautiful song, which we transcribe the more readily because it has not long been published, and may be new to many of our readers:
''Tis sweet to hear the merry lark,
That bids a blithe good-morrow;
But sweeter to hark in the twinkling dark
To the soothing song of sorrow.
Oh, nightingale! what doth she ail?
And is she sad or jolly?
For ne'er on earth was sound of mirth
So like to melancholy.
The merry lark he soars on high,
No worldly thought o'ertakes him;
He sings aloud to the clear blue sky,
And the daylight that awakes him.
As sweet a lay, as loud, as gay,
The nightingale is trilling;
With feeling bliss, no less than his
Her little heart is thrilling.
Yet ever and anon a sigh
Peers through her lavish mirth;
For the lark's bold song is of the sky,
And hers is of the earth.
By night and day she tunes her lay,
To drive away all sorrow;
For bliss, alas! to-night may pass,
And wo may come to-morrow.'
We must now cite one or two of the many passages which represent the nightingale's as an absolutely cheerful song. We fear we cannot insist so much as Fox is disposed to do, on the evidence of Chaucer, who continually styles the nightingale's a merry note, because it is evident that in his day the word had a somewhat different meaning from that which it at present conveys. For example, the poet calls the organ 'merry.' Nor dare we lay stress upon the instance which Cary cites—in a note to his Purgatory—of a 'neglected poet,' Vallans, who in his Tale of Two Swannes ranks the 'merrie nightingale among the cheerful birds,' because we do not know whether, even at the time when Vallans wrote—the book was published, it seems, in 1590—'merrie' had come to bear its present signification.
We shall, however, find a witness among the writers of his period in Gawain Douglas, who died Bishop of Dunkeld in 1522. He, in a prologue to one of his Æneids, applies not only the word 'merry' to our bird, but one of less questionable signification—'mirthful.' If we come down to more modern times, we shall find Wordsworth, who seems above all others, except Burns, to have had a catholic ear for the whole multitude of natural sounds, not only refusing the character of melancholy to the nightingale's song, but placing it below the stock-dove's, because it is deficient in the pensiveness and seriousness which mark the note of the latter.
However, of all testimonies which can be brought on this side of the question, the strongest is that of Coleridge. No other has so accurately described the song itself; moreover, he alone has entered the lists avowedly as an antagonist, and confessing in so many words to the existence of an opinion opposite to his own.
'And hark! the nightingale begins its song,
"Most musical, most melancholy" bird.
A melancholy bird? oh, idle thought!2
In nature there is nothing melancholy.
But some night-wandering man, whose heart was pierced
With the resemblance of a grievous wrong,
Or slow distemper, or neglected love,
First named these notes a melancholy strain:
And youths and maidens most poetical,
Who lose the deepening twilight of the spring
In ball-rooms and hot theatres, they still,
Full of meek sympathy, must heave their sighs
O'er Philomela's pity-pleading strains.
My friend, and thou, our sister! we have learnt
A different love: we may not thus profane
Nature's sweet voices, always full of love
And joyance! 'Tis the merry nightingale
That crowds and hurries and precipitates
With fast-thick warble his delicious notes,
As he were fearful that an April night
Would be too short for him to utter forth
His love-chant and disburden his full soul
Of all its music!'
Little now remains to be said. We have laid before the reader specimens of the two contending opinions, as well as of that which is set up as a golden mean between them; and he has but to put down our pages, and to walk forth—provided he does not live too far north, or in some smoke-poisoned town—to judge for himself as to the true character of the strains. Small risk, we think, would there be in pronouncing on which side his verdict would be given! Well do we remember the night when we first heard this sweet bird: how we listened and refused to believe—for we were young, and our idea had of course been that his song was a melancholy one—that those madly hilarious sounds could come from the mournful nightingale. Wordsworth attempts thus to account for the delusion under which the older poets laboured on this subject:
'Fancy, who leads the pastimes of the glad,
Full oft is pleased a wayward dart to throw,
Sending sad shadows after things not sad,
Peopling the harmless fields with sighs of wo.
Beneath her sway, a simple forest cry
Becomes an echo of man's misery.
What wonder? at her bidding ancient lays
Steeped in dire grief the voice of Philomel,
And that blithe messenger of summer days,
The swallow, twittered, subject to like spell.'
It is curious that the people who first fixed the stigma of melancholy upon our bird—the Greeks, or at least the Athenians, and it is of them we speak—were perhaps the very gayest people that ever danced upon the earth—absolute Frenchmen. The very sprightliness of their temper, however, by the universally prevailing law of contrast, may have induced in them a fondness for sad and doleful legends; and we confess, for our own part, that while we from our hearts admire the poetical beauty and elegance of their various fables, we do not a little disrelish the constant vein of melancholy which pervades them all. Not the least sad of their fictions is that which relates to the nightingale; a story that has found its way—and even more universally the opinion of the bird's music which it implied—amongst all the nations whom Greece has instructed and civilised.
But we have yet another reply to the question, 'Why do most people call the nightingale's a melancholy song?' It is heard by night, 'whilst our spirits are attentive,' and the solemn gloom of the hour influences the judgment of the ear; for another false impression, which like the monster Error of Spenser, has bred a thousand young ones as ill-favoured as herself, ascribes melancholy to night. There is no good reason why we should think thus of the night, still less that the impression should influence our judgment in other matters; and we owe no small thanks to those who have endeavoured to reclaim to their proper uses these misdirected associations, and to teach, that
'In nature there is nothing melancholy;'
but on the contrary,
'Healing her wandering and distempered child,
She pours around her softest influences,
Her sunny hues, fair forms, and breathing sweets,
Her melodies of woods, and winds, and waters,
Till he relent, and can no more endure
To be a jarring and a dissonant thing
Amid the general dance and harmony;
But, bursting into tears, wins back his way,
His angry spirit healed and harmonised
By the benignant touch of love and beauty.'