Views and Opinions

by Ouida

I fear it.

For thrice a thousand years, to our knowledge, that divine music, the sweetest of any music upon earth, has been eloquent in the woods and the gardens of every springtime, renewing its song as the earth her youth. The nightingale has ever been the poet’s darling; is indeed poetry incarnated; love, vocal and spiritual, made manifest. Nothing surely can show the deadness, dulness, coarseness, coldness of the human multitude so plainly as their indifference to this exquisite creature. Do even people who call themselves cultured care for the nightingale? How do they care? They rise from their dinner-table and stroll out on to a terrace or down an avenue, and there in the moonlight listen for a few moments, and say ‘How charming!’ then return to their flirtations, their theatricals, their baccarat or their bézique within doors. Bulbul may sing all night amongst the roses and the white heads of the lilies; they will not go out again. They prefer the cushioned lounge, the electric light, the tumbler of iced drink, the playing cards, the spiced double entendre. Here and there a woman may sit at her open casement half the night, or a poet walk entranced through the leafy lanes till dawn, but these listeners are few and far between.

When Nature gave this gift to the world she might well have looked for some slight gratitude. But save when Sappho has listened, or Meleager, or Shakespeare, or Ford, or Musset, or Shelley, or Lytton, who has cared? Not one.

Possibly, if the nightingale had been born once in a century, rarity might have secured for it attention, protection, appreciation. But singing everywhere, as it has done, wherever the climate was fit for it, through so many hundreds and hundreds of years, it has been almost wholly neglected by the soulless and dull ears of man.

A slender, bright and agile bird, the nightingale is neither shy nor useless, as it is said that most poets and musicians are. It eats grubs, worms, lice, small insects of all kinds, and hunts amongst the decaying leaves and grass for many a garden pest, with active energy and industry, qualities too often lacking to the human artist. It builds a loose, roomy nest, often absolutely on the ground, and always placed with entire confidence in man’s good faith. It is a very happy bird, and its song is the most ecstatic hymn of joy. I never can imagine how it came to be associated with sorrow and tragedy, and the ghastly story of Procne and Itys. For rapturous happiness there is nothing to be compared to the full love-song of the nightingale. All other music is harsh, cold, dissonant, beside it. But, alas! the full perfection of the song is not always heard. For it to sing its fullest, its richest, its longest, it must have been in peace and security, it must have been left untroubled and unalarmed, it must have its little heart at rest in its leafy home. Where the nightingale is harassed, and affrighted, and disturbed, its song is quite different to what it is when in happiness and tranquillity; where it feels alarmed and insecure it never acquires its full song, the note is shorter and weaker, and the magnificent, seemingly unending, trills are never heard, for the bird sings as though it were afraid of being heard and hunted—which, indeed, no doubt it is.

When entirely secure from any interference, year after year in the same spot (for, if not interfered with, it returns unerringly to the same haunts), many families will come to the same place together, and the males call and shout to each other in the most joyous emulation day and night. Under these conditions alone does the marvellous music of the nightingale reach its full height and eloquence. No one who has not heard the song under these conditions can judge of it as it is in its perfection: the strength of it, the rapture of it, the long-sustained, breathless tremulo, the wondrous roulades and arpeggios, the exquisite liquid sweetness, surpassing in beauty every other sound on earth.

In one spot, dearer to me than any upon earth, where the old stones once felt the tread of the armoured guards and the cuirassed priests of the great Countess Matilda, the nightingales have nested and sung by dozens in the bay and arbutus of the undergrowth of the woods, and under the wild roses and pomegranates fringing the meadows. On one nook of grass land alone I have seen seven close together at daybreak, hunting for their breakfasts amongst the dewy blades, in amicable rivalry. Here they have come with the wild winds of March ever since Matilda’s reign, and for many ages before that, when all which is now the vale of Arno was forest and marsh. Here, because long protected and beloved, they sing in the most marvellous concert, challenging and answering each other in a riot of melody more exquisite than any orchestra created by man can produce; the long ecstasy pouring through the ardours of full noonday, or across the silver radiance of the moon; saluting the dawn with joyous Io triomphe! or praising the starry glories of the night with a rapturous Salve Regina!

The hawks sweep through the sun rays, the owls flash through the shadows, but the nightingales sing on, fearless and unharmed; it is only man they dread, and man cannot hurt them here.

Naturalists state that the nightingale does not attain to the uttermost splendour of its voice until the eighth or ninth year of its life, and that the songsters of that age give lessons to the younger ones. To the truth of this latter fact I can vouch from personal observation, but I doubt so many years being required to develop the song to perfection. I think its perfection is dependent, as I have said, on the peace and security which the singer enjoys; on its familiarity with its nesting haunts, and on the sense of safety which it enjoys. This may be said, in a measure, of the song of all birds; but it is especially true of the nightingale, which is one of the most sensitive and highly organised of sentient beings, and one, moreover, with intense affections, devoted to its mate, its offspring and its chosen home.

It will be objected to me that nightingales sing in captivity. They do so; but the song of the caged nightingale is intolerable to the ear which is used to the song of the free bird in wood and field and garden. It is not the same song; it has changed its character: it sounds like one long agonised note of appeal, and this indeed we may be certain that it is.