Pleiades

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Et;) rt)X6Bev'napirova vdcrlitat. (PINDAR) PERHAPS the time of the spring-call of the curlew to his mate, along the hills of Arran, is already overpast. I do not knoW : I am no naturalist ; but I remember that it was in the middle of April that I last heard the curlews calling to one another down the glens. That April call has become a part of my memory :I can hear it again almost at will, if my mood is running that way ; it is a bubbling elixir of spring and a quintessential joy. I suppose it is a mating call ; but it is also a " divine high-piping i'ehlevi," telling of some Bur- gundian wine Which is unimaginably rich and mellow ; and, again, it is a quiet and 'contained ecstasy, with a little of a falling cadence, echoing over the hills. It is indescribable in itself ; at the best you can describe the feeling it produces in you, or the metaphors it suggests to your mind. Perfect things are like that—ineffable in themselves ; only to be told by their fruits or their analogies ; and therefore hardly to be told at all. But at any rate you have your own picture —the sun shining : the clear wind stirring among the bents and the heather-stalks ; the deer trotting along the hillside, and turning to look back as they reach the skyline ; and over all that high, clear, liquid call. We human beings,

" The brave, the mighty and the wise, We men "

can never sing our love like that. There is only one passage, or perhaps two, in our human music that ever attains that quality—the music of " the farb senza Euridice " in Gluck's Orfeo, and the music of the death of two star-crossed lovers at the end of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. And both of these passages are the music of love that has lost or is losing its love--the music of love that is dying, and yet can never die. They have the quality of human music ; they are crossect by the thought and the shadow of death, which can haunt men only : they are stirred by the hope and the aspira- tion of immortality, which men only can cherish. Birds are beyond our problems and our profundities. They can steep themselves utterly in the self-forgetting joy of fresh direct experience.

* * * * * * * What is it that makes birds sing ? It is a simple; silly question ; but it is a question that I have often asked myself. One of our poets, who compared himself to a linnet (and as I think of his lines I cannot but remember a linnet I saw last year, perched on a heap of stones as I passed, its breast and wings caught in the sun, a miraele)—one of our poets thought that both he and the birds sang simply because they must. But what is the nature of the compulsion of song which lies upon birds ? Is it a matter of vocal exercise, which is somehow a way of physical exercise, and keeps the bird " fit " ? Do birds, when they wake in the morning, begin to take their glorious throat exercises in the sort of way that men (when they remember) swing dumb-bells or Indian clubs ? And are their evening " airs and descants " a sort of evening stroll before turning into bed ? If this be so, it calls to mind a' certain English philosopher; who had a habit somewhat similar to that of the birds. Aubrey tells of Thomas -Hobbes (a- whimsical sort of philosopher, in all his ways) that " he had always -books of prick-song lying on his table, e.g., of H. Lawes, &c. Songs, which at night when he was abed, and the doors made fast, and was sure nobody heard him, he sang aloud (not that he 'had a very good voice) but to-clear his pipes ; .he did believe it did his lungs good, and conduced midi to prolong- his life.". -

*- * * * * * *- It is curious to compare, Hobbes ta a blackbird, and to say of him, as the Manx poet said of the bird, " 0 Hohbes, what a boy you are, How you a° go it ! " But is it really fair tothe blackbird.? There is one which sings every .evening in the heart of all the white blossom of a double cherry-tree next door. He,siogs his heart out from the heart of the thick flakes of the blossom : is he. simply "clearing his pipes " ? I wonder. And is what Lord Grey calls the Dawn Chorus

a set of simultaneous exercises of half-awakened birds seeking " to do their lungs good and to prolong their lives," and perhaps also to acquire an appetite after last night's carouse Again, I wonder. When you hear the morning birds singing together, and shouting for joy like the sons of God, you arc apt to think of something more than physical causes. And yet birds are little physical things ; and I suppose they must be moved by some sort of physical cause.

* * * * * * *

Lord Grey remarks (it is in the fourth chapter of the Charm of Birds) that in the early mornings of May, when the Dawn Chorus is at its fullest and best, we do not hear it, we do not want to hear it, and we are not worthy to hear it. It is astonishing how we miss beauty with a kind of wilful for- getfulness ; how our eyes are shut, and our ears closed; during -dawn and the chorus of dawn ; how we dine and talk and smoke while the birds are singing vespers, and the evening star

" Brings home the sheep, brings home the goats, and brings the child to its mother."

And yet these sights, and still more these sounds, never go utterly and entirely unnoticed. They are in the background of consciousness, but they are there ; and perhaps they mean even more to us because they have the elusive beauty of undertones, or overtones, beneath or above or around 'the sounds we immediately hear. 'There is something of a wisdom in treasuring the Dawn Chorus as a mystery. We hear it— but not too often : we hear it—but not too clearly ; and so it remains for us fresh and faint, new and delicate, at once

a knowledge and a mystery, an unheard melody which is sweeter even than the heard. It is a pity to be dawnhunters day by day. It is a pity to be sunset-seers evening by evening. These are perfections which should round our lives. But

perhaps we possess them most when we treasure them most delicately, on the edge and the fringes of consciousness :-

" Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone."

The poets have fabled that there is a music of the spheres which chimes about our goings—a music unheard, and yet consecrating ; a music only dreamed, and yet encompassing. Above our hearing, Goethe wrote in the beginning of his Faust, is the sound of the going of the sun, according to his ancient way, in a song of emulation with his brother spheres. This was the sound that Shelley heard, and so there is an ideal music running through his verse : his ears are attuned to tones we cannot heir, but we have his report, and we may trust his report. The birds are like the spheres, and yet they are kinder. They make a music in the majesty of the dawn which is like the song of emulation in which the sun joins with the spheres of heaven. But they make a music also in the daily hours, a simple music of a visible choir to which we can always listen, an accompaniment to all our doings, a background of all our feelings. It is the very voice of Nature saying a clear, quiet Benedicite ; and all our human singers have celebrated the natural singers of- woodland and

upland and blue sky—skylark and nightingale, cuckoo and blackbird, the curlew calling among the hilts and the swalIotv twittering Over the pond. How empty would be a world void of the voices of birds, a dumb world of silence.; how eloquent and intimate is a . world in which we can always hear the fowls of the air praising and magnifying the order of creation. What Izaak Walton said of the nightingale is a thing which may be said of many another

bird, and indeed of all bird-music :—

" He that . . . should hear . . . the clear airs, the sweet descants, the natural rising and falling, the doubling and redoubling of her voice, might well be lifted above earth and say, ' Lord, what musick has thou provided_ for the Saints in Heaven, when thou affordest bad men such =rick on earth ! ' "

ORION.