The wind had dropped, and on the hillside one seemed to be in a vast and
soundless universe. Far down in the valley a few lights glimmered in the
general darkness, but apart from these one might have fancied oneself alone
in all the world. Then from some remote farmstead there came the sound of a
dog barking. It rang through the night like the distant shout of a friend.
It seemed to fill the whole arch of heaven with its reverberations and to
flood the valley with the sense of companionship. It brought me news from
the farm. The day's tasks were over, the cattle were settled for the night,
the household were at their evening meal, and the watch-dog had resumed his
nocturnal charge. His bark seemed to have in it the music of immemorial
things--of labour and rest, and all the cheerful routine and comradeship of
the fields.
It is only in the country that one enjoys the poetry of natural sounds. A
dog barking in a suburban street is merely a disturber of the peace, and I
know of nothing more forlorn than the singing of a caged bird in, let us
say, Tottenham Court Road. Wordsworth's Poor Susan found a note of
enchantment in the song of the thrush that sang at the corner of Wood
Street, off Cheapside. But it was only an enchantment that passed into
deeper sadness as the vision of the green pastures which it summoned up
faded into the drab reality:
... they fade,
The mist and the river, the hill and the shade:
The stream will not flow and the hill will not rise,
And the colours have passed away from her eyes.
There is something in the life of towns which seems to make the voices of
the country alien and sorrowful. They are lost in the tumult, and, if
heard, sound only like a reproach against a fretful world, an echo from
some Eden from which we have been exiled.
In the large silence of the countryside sounds have a significance and
intimacy that they cannot have where life is crowded with activities and
interests. In a certain sense life here is richer because of its
poverty--because of its freedom from the thousand distractions that exhaust
its emotion and scatter its energies. Because we have little we discover
much in that little.
Take the sound of church bells. In the city it is hardly more pleasing than
the song of the bird in Tottenham Court Road. It does not raise my spirits,
it only depresses them. But when I heard the sound of the bells come up
from the valley last evening, it seemed like the bringer of a personal
message of good tidings. It had in it the rapture of a thousand
memories--memories of summer eves and snowy landscapes, of vanished faces
and forgotten scenes. It was at once stimulating and calming, and spoke
somehow the language of enduring and incommunicable things.
It is, I suppose, the associations of sounds rather than their actual
quality which make them pleasant or unpleasant. The twitter of sparrows is,
in itself, as prosaic a sound as there is in nature, but I never hear it on
waking without a feeling of inward peace. It seems to link me with some
incredibly remote and golden morning, and with a child in a cradle waking
for the first time to light and sound and consciousness.
And so with that engaging ruffian of the feathered world, the rook. It has
no more music in its voice than a tin kettle; but what jollier sound is
there on a late February morning than the splendid hubbub of a rookery when
the slovenly nests are being built in the naked and swaying branches of the
elms? Betsy Trotwood was angry with David Copperfield's father because he
called his house Blunderstone Rookery. "Rookery, indeed!" she said. It is
almost the only point of disagreement I have with that admirable woman. Not
to love a rookery is _prima facie_ evidence against you. I have heard of
men who have bought estates because of the rookery, and I have loved them
for their beautiful extravagance. I am sure I should have liked David
Copperfield's father from that solitary incident recorded of him. He was
not a very practical or business-like man, I fear; but people who love
rookeries rarely are. You cannot expect both the prose and the poetry of
life for your endowment.
How much the feeling created by sound depends upon the setting may be
illustrated by the bagpipes. The bagpipes in a London street is a thing for
ribald laughter, but the bagpipes in a Highland glen is a thing to stir the
blood, and make the mind thrill to memories of
Old, unhappy, far off things.
And battles long ago.
It is so even with the humble concertina. That instrument is to me the last
expression of musical depravity. It is the torture which Dante would
provide for me in the last circle of Hell. But the sound of a concertina on
a country road on a dark night is as cheerful a noise as I want to hear.
But just as Omar loved the sound of a _distant_ drum, so distance is an
essential part of the enchantment of my concertina.
And of all pleasant sounds what is there to excel the music of the hammer
and the anvil in the smithy at the entrance to the village? No wonder the
children love to stand at the open door and see the burning sparks that fly
and hear the bellows roar. I would stand at the open door myself if I had
the pluck, for I am as much a child as any one when the hammer and the
anvil are playing their primeval music. It is the oldest song of humanity
played with the most ancient instruments. Here we are at the very beginning
of our story--here we stand in the very dawn of things. What lineage so
noble as that of the smith? What task so ancient and so honourable? With
such tools the first smith smote music out of labour, and began the
conquest of things to the accompaniment of joyous sounds. In those sounds I
seem to hear the whole burden of the ages.
I think I will take another stroll down to the village. It will take me
past the smithy.