The Spirit of Spring is abroad. There is no one of our island coasts
so lone and forlorn that the cries of the winged newcomers have not
lamented down the wind. There is not an inland valley where small brown
birds from the South have not penetrated, some from Mediterranean
sunlands, some from the Desert, some from the hidden homes on unknown
isles, some from beyond the foam of unfamiliar shores. Not a backwater
surely but has heard the flute of the ouzel, or the loud call of the
mallard. The wren, that sweet forerunner of ‘the little clan of the
bushes’ as we say in Gaelic, _clann bheag’ nam preas_, the robin, the
mavis, the merle, have been heard in every coppice and wildgrowth from
the red combes of the winding Dart to the granite-ledges by the rushing
Spey. From the last Cornish upland to the last brown moor on the Ord
of Sutherland the curlew and the lapwing have wheeled with wailing cry
or long melancholy flutelike whistle. The gorse, whose golden fires
have been lit, has everywhere heard the prolonged sweet plaintive note
of the yellow-hammer. From the greening boughs the woodpeckers call.
The tides of Blossom have begun to flow. The land soon will be
inundated. Already a far and wide forethrow of foam is flung along
the blackthorn hedges. Listen ... that chaffinch’s blithe song comes
from the flowering almond!... that pipit’s brief lay fell past yonder
wild-pear! In the meadows the titlarks are running about looking in
the faces of the daisies, as children love to be told. On the fenlands
and mosses the windy whimper of the redshank is heard like the cry of
a phantom: and like a ‘bogle,’ too, is the perturbing drumming of the
snipe falling swiftly on sloping wings back to the marsh.
The shores, the meadows, the uplands, on each there is a continual
rumour. It is the sound of Spring. Listen ... put your ear to the
throbbing earth that is so soon to become the green world: you will
hear a voice like the voice which miraculously evades in the hollow
curves of a shell. Faint, mysterious, yet ever present, a continual
rhythm. Already rhythm is become a cadence: the birds chant the
strophes, flower and blossom and green leaf yield their subtler
antiphones, the ancient yet ever young protagonist is the heart of man.
Soon the cadence will be a song, a pæan. The hour of the rose and the
honeysuckle will come, the hour of the swallow hawking the grey gnat
above the lilied stream, the hour when the voice of the cuckoo floats
through ancient woods rejoicing in their green youth, that voice which
has in it the magic of all springs, the eternal cry of the renewal of
delight.
True, one may as yet more universally see the feet of Spring, or the
blossom-touch of her hands, in the meadows and by the shores, than
in the woods. She passes by the hedgerows or along the pastures, and
her trail has the sheen of gold. Do not the celandine and the flaming
dandelion, the pale cowslip and delicate crowsfoot, the jonquil and
daffodil, the yellow of the broom and the bee-loved gorse, everywhere
show it? She goes by the upland meadows, and touches the boughs of the
wild-apple or leaning pear, stoops by the quince or the wild-cherry,
and the white foam of the miraculous wind that is in the hollow of
her hand is left upon the branches. The slim gean at the edge of the
woodland catches the spray, the twisted crab is an old woman suddenly
become a lovely girl cream-white and rose-flusht. Or she goes down the
island-shores, or by the brackened coasts of inland lochs, or along
the overhanging brows of streams, or where brooks glide between grassy
banks; or, facing northward, she wanders where the hill-burn falls
from ledge to ledge, or leaps past the outswung roots of mountain-ash
or birch, or steals between peaty grasses where the wren has her nest
in the pendent bramble and the greenfinch calls across the fern. And
wherever she goes the yellow iris is left by her feet, the yellow-white
willow-catkins have become musical with a myriad bees, dust of gold
has fallen into the milk-white snow of the countless clans of the
daisy, tides of an invisible flood have foamed along the hawthorns,
the wild crocus has shone like the spear of Pisarr, the buttercup is
brimmed with golden wine, and even the kingcup-ingots are melted in
the waters--for whence else can come that flowing gold which is blent
with yonder moving emerald that is as the breath of the grass, yonder
floating azure as of drowned speedwells, yonder wandering violet, child
of shadow and the wind, yonder mysterious phantom of pale mauve which
tells that a becalmed cloud-ship drifts on the deeps of heaven.
Nevertheless it is in the woods that the miracle may be more intimately
seen. The Presence perchance is not universally abroad so much as
immediately evident. A hand touched that larch yonder: for why is it
so suddenly green, with a greenness as of a sea-wave, or as the wet
emerald crystal one finds on the sands of Iona, or, rather, with the
softer, moister, the indescribable greenness of the rainbow’s breast?
A foot leaned upon the moss beneath that vast oak, on whose southern
slopes the russet leaves still hang like a multitude of bats along dark
ragged cliffs: for why has the cyclamen suddenly burned in a faint
flame, there; why has the sky suddenly come up through the moss, in
that maze of speedwells? Who rose, yonder, and passed like a phantom
westward? Some one, surely, of the divine race, for the tips of the
sycamore-boughs have suddenly burned with a bronze-hued fire. Who went
suddenly down that mysterious alley of dim columnar pines, stirring the
untrodden silent ways? For, look, the air is full of delicate golden
dust. The wind-wooer has whispered, and the pine tree has loved, and
the seed of the forests to come floats like summer-dust along the
aerial highways.
But what of the Forest-Awakener? Who is he? Her name, is it known of
men? Who can it be but the Wind of the South, that first-born of the
wooing Year and sweetheart Spring? But what if the name be only that
of a bird? Then, surely, it must be the wood-thrush, or perchance
the cushat, or, no, that wandering Summer-herald, the Cuckoo! Not
the skylark, for he is in the sunlight, lost above the pastures: not
the merle, for he is flooding the wayside elms with ancient music of
ever-young love: not the blithe clans of the Finch, for one and all
are gypsies of the open. Perchance, then, the Nightingale? No, he is
a moon-worshipper, the chorister of the stars, the incense-swinger
before the altars of the dawn: and though he is a child of the woods,
he loves the thickets also. Besides, he will not come far north. Are
there not deep woods of silence and dream beyond the banks of the
Tyne? Are there no forest sanctuaries north of the green ramparts
which divide Northumbria from the glens of Tweed and the solitudes of
the shadowy Urr? Are there no inland valleys buried in sea-sounding
woods beyond the green vale of Quair? Alas, the sweet Songmaker from
the South does not think so, does not so dream. In moon-reveries in
the woods of Surrey, in starry serenades along the lanes of Devon, in
lonely nocturnes in the shadowy groves of the New Forest, he has no
thought of more vast, more secret and impenetrable woods through which
move mountain-airs from Schiehallion, chanting winds from the brows of
the Grampians: he has no ancestral memory of the countless battalions
of the red pine which throng the wilds of Argyll or look on the grey
shoreless seas of the west, these green pillars which once covered the
barren braes of Balquhidder, the desolate hill-lands of the Gregara,
and, when the world was young, were wet with the spray of the unquiet
wastes wherein are set the treeless Hebrides.
No, in the north at least, we cannot call the nightingale the
Forest-Awakener. In truth, nowhere in our land. For he comes late when
he comes at all. The great awakening has already happened. Already
in the south the song-thrush, the dandelion, the blackthorn-snow
are old tales: far in Ultima Thule to the north-west the gillebride
has whistled the tidings to Gaelic ears, far in Ultima Thule to the
north-east the Shetlander has rejoiced in that blithest thicket-signal
of spring, the tossed lilt of the wren.
It is of the green woodpecker I speak. We do not know him well, most
of us: but then most of us are alien to the woods. Town-dwellers and
homestayers know little or nothing of the secret signals. It is only
the obvious that they note, and seldom read in the great Script of
Nature anything more than the conventional signature of certain loved
and familiar names and tokens.
It was in the Forest of Fontainebleau I first heard the green
woodpecker called by this delightful name, the Awakener of the Woods,
_le Réveilleur de la Forêt_. My French friend told me it was not a
literary name, as I fancied, but one given by the foresters. And how
apt it is. In the first weeks of March--in the first week of April,
it may be, as the scene moves northward--there is no more delightful,
and certainly no more welcome, sound than the blithe bugle-call of
the green woodpecker calling through the woods for love, and, after
long expectant pauses, hearing love call back in thrilling response,
now a flute-note of gladness, now a challenging clarion-cry. True,
whether in the vast forest of Fontainebleau or in our northern woods,
the woodpecker is not so readily to be heard in the inward solitudes.
He loves the open glades, and commonly the timbered park-land is his
favourite resort. Still, save in the deepest and darkest woods, that
delightful rejoicing note is now everywhere to be heard fluting along
the sunlit ways of the wind. It awakes the forest. When the voice of
the woodpecker is heard it is the hour for Nature to celebrate her own
Ides of March. Elsewhere the song-thrush and the skylark have been
the first heralds. Even in the woods the missel-thrush may have flung
a sudden storm of song out on the cold tides of the wind swaying the
elm-tops like dusky airweed of the upper ocean. But, in the glades
themselves, in the listening coverts, it is the call of the green
woodpecker that has awakened the dreaming forest.
And what an ancient old-world tale Picus could tell. For, in the long
ago, was he not Picus the antique Italiot god. A forest-god he was,
son of ancient Saturn, and himself the father of that beautiful being
of the woods, Faunus. And how far he wandered from Thracian valley and
Sabine oak-grove ... for in that far northern Finland, which to the
Latins was but an unknown remote waste under the star Septentrion, he
and his son reappear, though now his name is Tapio and Faunus is become
Nyyrikki....
“O Nyyrikki, mountain-hero,
Son of Tapio of forests,
Hero with the scarlet headgear,
Notches make along the pathway,
Landmarks upward on the mountain,
That the hunter may not wander.”
Still does Nyyrikki, or Pikker as he was called by the northmen long
before the _Kalevala_ was wrought into Finnish runes, make notches
along the pathways of the woods, still the huntsman on the hillside
sees his signals on the oak-boles. Perhaps to this day the Esthonian
peasant offers in his heart a prayer to Pikker the woodpecker-god,
god of thunder and storm, so god too of the glades and fields where
these can devastate--a prayer such as that which Johann Gutsloff, a
Finnish author of the seventeenth century, cites as the supplication
of an old Esthonian farmer: ‘... Beloved Pikker, we will sacrifice to
thee an ox with two horns and four hoofs, and want to beg you as to
our ploughing and sowing that our straw shall be red as copper and our
grain as yellow as gold. Send elsewhere all thick black clouds over
great swamps, high woods, and wide wastes. But give to us ploughmen and
sowers a fertile season and sweet rain.’
In Gaelic lands many an old name has been dropped from common use,
because thus associated with some shy and yet never-far divinity, and
so too the Finn and the Esth ceased to call the woodpecker Pikker
(a word so strangely like Picus) and thus it is that now the peasant
knows him only as _Tikka_. With the Romans, Picus the god was figured
with a woodpecker on his head, and all of us who have read Pliny will
remember the great store laid by the auspices of Rome on the flight and
direction and general procedure of this forest-traveller. Recently a
sculptor, I know not of what nationality, exhibited in Paris a statue
of the Unknown Pan, and on his shoulder perched a woodpecker. Was
this a reminiscence, or ancestral memory, or the divining vision of
the imagination? I have some fifty pages or more of MS. notes dealing
with the folklore and legendary names and varying ways and habits of
the fascinating woodlander, from his Greek appearance as Pelekas, the
axe-hewer (Aristophanes calls him the oak-striker)--whence no doubt
‘Picus’ and ‘Pikker’ and ‘Peek’ and the rest--to Latin Tindareas,
mortal father of Leda, to the White Woodpecker, the magic bird of
mediæval legend, to ‘der olle Picker,’ the horrible laughing god of
human sacrifice in ancient Prussia, to Pak-a-Pak, ‘the lost lover of
the woman in the oak,’ in a strange tale I heard once in the woods
of Argyll. But of all this I would recall to-day only that tradition
of the woodpecker which describes her (she is a wise-woman in the
folk-tales) as knowing where the spring-wurzel grows, that mysterious
plant of Pan and the sun with which one may open the faces of cliffs
with a breath, as did the deer-mother of Oisìn of the Songs, with which
too one may find the secret ways of Venusberg and behold incalculable
treasure.
For hark!... _Pak-a-Pak_, and the long cry of love! It is answered from
the listening woods! Here must ‘the spring-wurzel’ grow ... here, for
sure, are the green palaces of Venusberg, here, at very hand, are the
incalculable treasures of the awakened Forest.