Transcribed from the 1882 Macmillan and Co. edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
[Picture: Eversley Rectory]
PROSE IDYLLS,
NEW AND OLD.
* * * * *
BY
REV. CHARLES KINGSLEY,
CANON OF WESTMINSTER.
[Picture: Drawing of bird on branch, singing]
_NEW EDITION_.
* * * * *
London:
MACMILLAN AND CO.
1882.
_The Right of Translation and Reproduction is Reserved_.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
I.
‘A Charm of Birds’ 1
II.
Chalk-Stream Studies 27
III.
The Fens 93
IV.
My Winter-Garden 133
V.
From Ocean to Sea 175
VI.
North Devon 223
I.
‘_A CHARM OF BIRDS_.’ {1}
IS it merely a fancy that we English, the educated people among us at
least, are losing that love for spring which among our old forefathers
rose almost to worship? That the perpetual miracle of the budding leaves
and the returning song-birds awakes no longer in us the astonishment
which it awoke yearly among the dwellers in the old world, when the sun
was a god who was sick to death each winter, and returned in spring to
life and health, and glory; when the death of Adonis, at the autumnal
equinox, was wept over by the Syrian women, and the death of Baldur, in
the colder north, by all living things, even to the dripping trees, and
the rocks furrowed by the autumn rains; when Freya, the goddess of youth
and love, went forth over the earth each spring, while the flowers broke
forth under her tread over the brown moors, and the birds welcomed her
with song; when, according to Olaus Magnus, the Goths and South Swedes
had, on the return of spring, a mock battle between summer and winter,
and welcomed the returning splendour of the sun with dancing and mutual
feasting, rejoicing that a better season for fishing and hunting was
approaching? To those simpler children of a simpler age, in more direct
contact with the daily and yearly facts of Nature, and more dependent on
them for their bodily food and life, winter and spring were the two great
facts of existence; the symbols, the one of death, the other of life; and
the battle between the two—the battle of the sun with darkness, of winter
with spring, of death with life, of bereavement with love—lay at the root
of all their myths and all their creeds. Surely a change has come over
our fancies. The seasons are little to us now. We are nearly as
comfortable in winter as in summer, or in spring. Nay, we have begun, of
late, to grumble at the two latter as much as at the former, and talk
(and not without excuse at times) of ‘the treacherous month of May,’ and
of ‘summer having set in with its usual severity.’ We work for the most
part in cities and towns, and the seasons pass by us unheeded. May and
June are spent by most educated people anywhere rather than among birds
and flowers. They do not escape into the country till the elm hedges are
growing black, and the song-birds silent, and the hay cut, and all the
virgin bloom of the country has passed into a sober and matronly
ripeness—if not into the sere and yellow leaf. Our very landscape
painters, till Creswick arose and recalled to their minds the fact that
trees were sometimes green, were wont to paint few but brown autumnal
scenes. As for the song of birds, of which in the middle age no poet
could say enough, our modern poets seem to be forgetting that birds ever
sing.
It was not so of old. The climate, perhaps, was more severe than now;
the transition from winter to spring more sudden, like that of
Scandinavia now. Clearage of forests and drainage of land have equalized
our seasons, or rather made them more uncertain. More broken winters are
followed by more broken springs; and May-day is no longer a marked point
to be kept as a festival by all childlike hearts. The merry month of May
is merry only in stage songs. The May garlands and dances are all but
gone: the borrowed plate, and the milkmaids who borrowed it, gone
utterly. No more does Mrs. Pepys go to ‘lie at Woolwich, in order to a
little ayre and to gather May-dew’ for her complexion, by Mrs. Turner’s
advice. The Maypole is gone likewise; and never more shall the puritan
soul of a Stubbs be aroused in indignation at seeing ‘against Maie, every
parish, towne, and village assemble themselves together, both men, women,
and children, olde and young, all indifferently, and goe into the woodes
and groves, hilles and mountaines, where they spend the night in pastyme,
and in the morning they returne, bringing with them birch bowes and
braunches of trees to deck their assembly withal. . . . They have twentie
or fourtie yoke of oxen, every oxe having a sweete nosegay of flowers
tyed on the tippe of his hornes, and these draw home this Maypole (this
stincking idol rather) which is covered all over with flowers and
hearbes, with two or three hundred men, women, and children following it
with great devotion. . . And then they fall to banquet and feast, daunce
and leap about it, as the heathen people did at the dedication of their
idolles, whereof this is a perfect pattern, or the thing itself.’
This, and much more, says poor Stubbs, in his ‘Anatomie of Abuses,’ and
had, no doubt, good reason enough for his virtuous indignation at May-day
scandals. But people may be made dull without being made good; and the
direct and only effect of putting down May games and such like was to cut
off the dwellers in towns from all healthy communion with Nature, and
leave them to mere sottishness and brutality.
Yet perhaps the May games died out, partly because the feelings which had
given rise to them died out before improved personal comforts. Of old,
men and women fared hardly, and slept cold; and were thankful to Almighty
God for every beam of sunshine which roused them out of their long
hybernation; thankful for every flower and every bird which reminded them
that joy was stronger than sorrow, and life than death. With the spring
came not only labour, but enjoyment:
‘In the spring, the young man’s fancy lightly turned to thoughts of
love,’
as lads and lasses, who had been pining for each other by their winter
firesides, met again, like Daphnis and Chloe, by shaugh and lea; and
learnt to sing from the songs of birds, and to be faithful from their
faithfulness.
Then went out troops of fair damsels to seek spring garlands in the
forest, as Scheffel has lately sung once more in his ‘Frau Aventiure;’
and, while the dead leaves rattled beneath their feet, hymned ‘La Regine
Avrillouse’ to the music of some Minnesinger, whose song was as the song
of birds; to whom the birds were friends, fellow-lovers, teachers,
mirrors of all which he felt within himself of joyful and tender, true
and pure; friends to be fed hereafter (as Walther von der Vogelweide had
them fed) with crumbs upon his grave.
True melody, it must be remembered, is unknown, at least at present, in
the tropics, and peculiar to the races of those temperate climes, into
which the song-birds come in spring. It is hard to say why. Exquisite
songsters, and those, strangely, of an European type, may be heard
anywhere in tropical American forests: but native races whose hearts
their song can touch, are either extinct or yet to come. Some of the old
German Minnelieder, on the other hand, seem actually copied from the
songs of birds. ‘Tanderadei’ does not merely ask the nightingale to tell
no tales; it repeats, in its cadences, the nightingale’s song, as the old
Minnesinger heard it when he nestled beneath the lime-tree with his love.
They are often almost as inarticulate, these old singers, as the birds
from whom they copied their notes; the thinnest chain of thought links
together some bird-like refrain: but they make up for their want of logic
and reflection by the depth of their passion, the perfectness of their
harmony with nature. The inspired Swabian, wandering in the pine-forest,
listens to the blackbird’s voice till it becomes his own voice; and he
breaks out, with the very carol of the blackbird
‘Vogele im Tannenwald pfeifet so hell.
Pfeifet de Wald aus und ein, wo wird mein Schätze sein?
Vogele im Tannenwald pfeitet so hell.’
And he has nothing more to say. That is his whole soul for the time
being; and, like a bird, he sings it over and over again, and never
tires.
Another, a Nieder-Rheinischer, watches the moon rise over the Löwenburg,
and thinks upon his love within the castle hall, till he breaks out in a
strange, sad, tender melody—not without stateliness and manly confidence
in himself and in his beloved—in the true strain of the nightingale:
‘Verstohlen geht der Mond auf,
Blau, blau, Blümelein,
Durch Silberwölkchen führt sein Lauf.
Rosen im Thal, Mädel im Saal, O schönste Rosa!
* * *
Und siehst du mich,
Und siehst du sie,
Blau, blau, Blümelein,
Zwei treu’re Herzen sah’st du nie;
Rosen im Thal u. s. w.’
There is little sense in the words, doubtless, according to our modern
notions of poetry; but they are like enough to the long, plaintive notes
of the nightingale to say all that the poet has to say, again and again
through all his stanzas.
Thus the birds were, to the mediæval singers, their orchestra, or rather
their chorus; from the birds they caught their melodies; the sounds which
the birds gave them they rendered into words.
And the same bird keynote surely is to be traced in the early English and
Scotch songs and ballads, with their often meaningless refrains, sung for
the mere pleasure of singing:
‘Binnorie, O Binnorie.