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.'