Rustic Sounds, and Other Studies in Literature and Natural History

by Sir Francis Darwin

The other form of rustic pipe that pleased me was a sort of oboe made from a dandelion stalk by squeezing it at one end. It had a rough nasal note, which could be controlled by holes cut in the stalk and stopped with the fingers. This again was but brief satisfaction, for the two halves of the reed soon curled outwards and ceased to speak. In later life this curling outwards was made use of in my work in the physiology of plants. I like to remember that my primeval oboe gave me the idea.

The village boys made ‘musics’ by fixing strips of laurel leaf into a split stick, and blowing violently into them, which set the leaf vibrating and made a coarse scream, but this instrument we despised, and I think rightly, for it had none of the

pleasant tone of the whistle, nor was there any art in the making of it.

A primeval musical instrument called the ‘Whit horn’ I have seen in the possession of the late Mr. Taphouse, of Oxford. It is a conical tube of bark held together with thorns and sounded by means of a rough oboe-reed made of bark; there were no finger-holes, and is said to have yielded a harsh shriek on one note. It was, I think, played on May 1st, or else at Whitsuntide. It is to Mr. Taphouse that I owe my introduction to the pipe and tabor which form the subject of a paper in this volume. The pipe is shrill in its upper register, but this is no great fault in an instrument meant to be played out of doors: the same fault is to be found with the flageolet, and the penny whistle. But the last named instrument is reminiscent of a man playing outside a London public-house, and we know from the story of the perfidious Sergeant in The Wrong Box to what lengths it may lead us. [5]

The most truly rustic instrument (and here I mean an instrument of polite life—an orchestral instrument) is undoubtedly the oboe. The bassoon runs it hard, but has a touch of comedy and a stronger flavour of necromancy, while the oboe is quite good and simple in nature and is excessively in earnest; it seems to have in it the ghost of a sunburnt boy playing to himself under a tree, in a ragged shirt unbuttoned at the throat, a boy created by Velasquez. To

hear an oboe actually played as a rustic instrument one must go to Brittany, where it accompanies the national bagpipe or ‘biniou.’ To a reed-instrument player it was painful to see the oboist bite a bit off his reed when the tone was not to his liking!

From this digression, originating in the whistle cut from a horse-chestnut bough, I return to some less artificial sounds. I must say a word about the song of birds, but my knowledge of the subject is but small. The most obvious of spring-time sounds is the voice of the cuckoo. I confess to liking the muttering chuckle which, in an unscientific mood, I have supposed to mean that an egg has successfully been laid in a hedge-sparrow’s nest. But the cuckoo’s “word in a minor third” is always delightful. The bird is neither more nor less of a foreigner than a willow-wren, yet he has, in comparison to the wren’s subdued chromatic warble, a song so self-assertive, and a tone so unlike our other birds, that one feels him an obvious exotic, a foreigner of so glorious and dashing a nature that one is grateful to him for singing among flat ploughed lands and monotonous hedges. I fancy the Welsh proverb, “Who would have thought the cuckoo would sing on the turf-heaps of the mountains,” is a poetic reflexion of this thought.

Of the nightingale I have nothing to say, except to put on record a true remark of Sir Charles Stanford’s, viz., that he sings in a syncopated rhythm. But, though I lived in a nightingale land, it is another bird that most clearly brings back to me the country of my boyhood, I mean the

night-jar. He has something of antique mystery which I do not find in the nightingale, as he purrs on his only note through the warm night. There is something unknown and primæval and vaguely threatening in his relentless simplicity. Can it be that I inherit from a stone-age ancestor both the fear and love of the bull-roarer?

Another bird that moves one in a very different way is the robin, of whom it is hard to say whether he has more of tears or smiles in his recitative. In comparison to the night-jar he seems like a civilised human soul who has quite modern sorrows, and has half forgotten them in quiet contentment with the autumn sunshine. The blackbird has a tinge of the robin’s sentiment, but it is over-borne by the glory of his song as a whole, which is pure gold, like his beak.