Rustic Sounds, and Other Studies in Literature and Natural History. Sir Francis Darwin
have been written by one perfectly familiar with the art of whistle-making. But it seems to have been misunderstood by the reviewer, who says that he “once came upon one of these small Æolian harps in a wooded isle in the ‘Land of Afternoon,’ ” … and decided “that it was a work of superstition by Indian hands.” As an Æolian harp is a stringed instrument sounded by the wind, and a whistle belongs to the very distinct class of musical things sounded by human breath, I can only suppose that the reviewer has misunderstood the poem.
I cannot leave the Canadian poet without a reference to the beautiful line, (“A robin piping in the dark alone.”) A Canadian robin must surely make a song like ours, who seems also to sing in parenthesis.
The other form of rustic pipe that pleased me was a sort of oboe made from a dandelion stalk by squeezing it at one end. It had a rough nasal note, which could be controlled by holes cut in the stalk and stopped with the fingers. This again was but brief satisfaction, for the two halves of the reed soon curled outwards and ceased to speak. In later life this curling outwards was made use of in my work in the physiology of plants. I like to remember that my primeval oboe gave me the idea.
The village boys made ‘musics’ by fixing strips of laurel leaf into a split stick, and blowing violently into them, which set the leaf vibrating and made a coarse scream, but this instrument we despised, and I think rightly, for it had none of the pleasant tone of the whistle, nor was there any art in the making of it.
A primeval musical instrument called the ‘Whit horn’ I have seen in the possession of the late Mr. Taphouse, of Oxford. It is a conical tube of bark held together with thorns and sounded by means of a rough oboe-reed made of bark; there were no finger-holes, and is said to have yielded a harsh shriek on one note. It was, I think, played on May 1st, or else at Whitsuntide. It is to Mr. Taphouse that I owe my introduction to the pipe and tabor which form the subject of a paper in this volume. The pipe is shrill in its upper register, but this is no great fault in an instrument meant to be played out of doors: the same fault is to be found with the flageolet, and the penny whistle. But the last named instrument is reminiscent of a man playing outside a London public-house, and we know from the story of the perfidious Sergeant in The Wrong Box to what lengths it may lead us. [5]
The most truly rustic instrument (and here I mean an instrument of polite life—an orchestral instrument) is undoubtedly the oboe. The bassoon runs it hard, but has a touch of comedy and a stronger flavour of necromancy, while the oboe is quite good and simple in nature and is excessively in earnest; it seems to have in it the ghost of a sunburnt boy playing to himself under a tree, in a ragged shirt unbuttoned at the throat, a boy created by Velasquez. To hear an oboe actually played as a rustic instrument one must go to Brittany, where it accompanies the national bagpipe or ‘biniou.’ To a reed-instrument player it was painful to see the oboist bite a bit off his reed when the tone was not to his liking!
From this digression, originating in the whistle cut from a horse-chestnut bough, I return to some less artificial sounds. I must say a word about the song of birds, but my knowledge of the subject is but small. The most obvious of spring-time sounds is the voice of the cuckoo. I confess to liking the muttering chuckle which, in an unscientific mood, I have supposed to mean that an egg has successfully been laid in a hedge-sparrow’s nest. But the cuckoo’s “word in a minor third” is always delightful. The bird is neither more nor less of a foreigner than a willow-wren, yet he has, in comparison to the wren’s subdued chromatic warble, a song so self-assertive, and a tone so unlike our other birds, that one feels him an obvious exotic, a foreigner of so glorious and dashing a nature that one is grateful to him for singing among flat ploughed lands and monotonous hedges. I fancy the Welsh proverb, “Who would have thought the cuckoo would sing on the turf-heaps of the mountains,” is a poetic reflexion of this thought.
Of the nightingale I have nothing to say, except to put on record a true remark of Sir Charles Stanford’s, viz., that he sings in a syncopated rhythm. But, though I lived in a nightingale land, it is another bird that most clearly brings back to me the country of my boyhood, I mean the night-jar. He has something of antique mystery which I do not find in the nightingale, as he purrs on his only note through the warm night. There is something unknown and primæval and vaguely threatening in his relentless simplicity. Can it be that I inherit from a stone-age ancestor both the fear and love of the bull-roarer?
Another bird that moves one in a very different way is the robin, of whom it is hard to say whether he has more of tears or smiles in his recitative. In comparison to the night-jar he seems like a civilised human soul who has quite modern sorrows, and has half forgotten them in quiet contentment with the autumn sunshine. The blackbird has a tinge of the robin’s sentiment, but it is over-borne by the glory of his song as a whole, which is pure gold, like his beak.
The chaffinch is not an interesting person, and he is so numerous that one soon becomes weary of him and his song. Let us hope that he expresses his real nature in the building of his pretty nest rather than in song. This must, I think, often happen, and to take an example from human builders, it is not inconceivable that the architect of St. John’s College Chapel, Cambridge, may have sung delightfully. But there are limits to one’s faith, and personally I cannot imagine the desecrator of Pembroke College in the same injured town of Cambridge practising any art in a way that would please me.
To return to birds—the greenfinch is a pleasant singer, or perhaps a conversationalist. I am never tired of hearing him repeat the word “Squeese” as he sits hidden in the heavy shade of the summer elms. His twinkling bell-note with its contented simplicity is also attractive. His cousin, the bunting, makes remarks not unlike those of the greenfinch; and he appears to address them by preference to the travellers on dusty high roads, where he passes much of his time sitting on telegraph wires. The anchorite yellow-hammer persistently declining cheese with his bread is always pleasant. Professor Newton used to say that the spring begins with the yellow-hammer’s song. According to Blomefield’s Calendar [8] the average date in Cambridgeshire is February 16, but he has been known to sing on January 30—rather a wintry beginning for spring. I have never made up my mind as to what the kitty-wren says or sings. He is always in a desperate hurry to get through his piece, as if he were afraid of lagging behind the beat of some invisible conductor. In consequence of this there is a want of restraint, and a style that suggests a shy child gabbling a show bit of poetry. But I repent these words for I love the kitty-wren.
There are a multitude of other bird-sounds which are pleasant to hear as their turn comes round, for instance, the complaint of the wryneck, the “cuckoo’s mate,” who seems to me to be querulously expressing his dislike to my garden, which he tries year after year and deserts after a day or two.
I have never heard that contented bird the quail, who should be a wholesome lesson to all wrynecks. I should like to hear him as Schubert has him:
“Sitzend im Grünen
Mit Halmen umhüllt,”
and singing “Lobe Gott” all day in the rhythm with which the oboe praises God in the Pastoral Symphony.
Another bird, whom I take for a contented fellow, is the green woodpecker, for he goes through life laughing, but I am not quite sure that I should like his taste in jokes. He is always associated in my mind with a passage in a letter of my father’s: “At last I fell fast asleep on the grass, and awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me; and squirrels running up the trees, and some woodpeckers laughing, and it was as pleasant and rural a scene as ever I saw, and I did not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had been formed.” [9]
There are many noises rather than notes which are most pleasant to hear. The invisible industrious corncrake, whose persistent cry comes from nowhere and everywhere at once. The harsh warning of the jay who seems to say “Man! man!” as he skulks off when his wood is invaded. The rough noise of the ox-eye sharpening his little saw, and many others.
Then I must not forget the noise of birds in flocks, ranging from the familiar wrangle of sparrows noisily going to roost, to the mysterious sound of great flights of birds migrating at night, one of the most romantic of sounds, but to me untranslatable, since I do not know the language