Tuscany is full of nightingales, and in spring and summer they sing all the time, save in the middle of the night and the middle of the day. In the little, leafy woods that hang on the steep of the hill towards the streamlet, as maidenhair hangs on a rock, you hear them piping up again in the wanness of dawn, about four o’clock in the morning: “Hello! Hello! Hello!” It is the brightest sound in the world, a nightingale piping up. Every time you hear it, you feel wonder and, it must be said, a thrill, because the sound is so bright, so glittering, it has so much power behind it.
“There goes the nightingale,” you say to yourself. It sounds in the half-dawn as if the stars were darting up from the little thicket and leaping away into the vast vagueness of the sky, to be hidden and gone. But the song rings on after sunrise, and each time you listen again, startled, you wonder: “Now why do they say he is a sad bird?”
He is the noisiest, most inconsiderate, most obstreperous and jaunty bird in the whole kingdom of birds. How John Keats managed to begin his “Ode to a Nightingale” with: “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my senses,” is a mystery to anybody acquainted with the actual song. You hear the nightingale silverily shouting: “What? What? What, John? Heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains? Tra-la-la! Tri-li-lilylilylilylily!”
And why the Greeks said he, or she, was sobbing in a bush for a lost lover, again I don’t know. “Jug-jug-jug!” say the medieval writers, to represent the rolling of the little balls of lightning in the nightingale’s throat. A wild, rich sound, richer than the eyes in a peacock’s tail:
And the bright brown nightingale, amorous, Is half assuaged for Itylus.
They say, with that “Jug! jug! jug!,” that she is sobbing. How they hear it is a mystery. How anyone who didn’t have his ears on upside down ever heard the nightingale “sobbing,” I don’t know.
Anyhow it’s a male sound, a most intensely and undilutedly male sound. A pure assertion. There is not a hint nor a shadow of echo and hollow recall. Nothing at all like a hollow low bell! Nothing in the world so unforlorn.
Perhaps that is what made Keats straightway feel forlorn.
Nightingale, from a 1790 edition of Buffon’s Natural History in the British Museum Forlorn! the very word is like a bell To toll me back from thee to my sole self!
Perhaps that is the reason of it; why they all hear sobs in the bush, when the nightingale sings, while any honest-to-God listening person hears the ringing shouts of small cherubim. Perhaps because of the discrepancy.
Because, in sober fact, the nightingale sings with a ringing, pinching vividness and a pristine assertiveness that makes a mere man stand still. A kind of brilliant calling and interweaving of glittering exclamation such as must have been heard on the first day of creation, when the angels suddenly found themselves created, and shouting aloud before they knew it. Then there must have been a to-do of angels in the thickets of heaven: “Hello! Hello! Behold! Behold! Behold! It is I! It is I! What a mar-mar-marvellous occurrence! What!”
For the pure splendidness of vocal assertion: “Lo! It is I!” you have to listen to the nightingale. Perhaps for the visual perfection of the same assertion, you have a look at a peacock shaking all his eyes. Among all the creatures created in final splendor, these two are perhaps the most finally perfect; the one is invisible, triumphing sound, the other is voiceless visibility. The nightingale is a quite undistinguished grey-brown bird, if you do see him, although he’s got that tender, hopping mystery about him, of a thing that is rich alive inside. Just as the peacock, when he does make himself heard, is awful, but still impressive: such a fearful shout from out of the menacing jungle. You can actually see him, in Ceylon, yell from a high bough, then stream away past the monkeys, into the impenetrable jungle that seethes and is dark.
And perhaps for this reason — the reason, that is, of pure, angel-keen or demon-keen assertion of true self — the nightingale makes a man feel sad, and the peacock often makes him angry. It is a sadness that is half envy. The birds are so triumphantly positive in their created selves, eternally new from the hand of the rich, bright God, and perfect. The nightingale ripples with his own perfection. And the peacock arches all his bronze and purple eyes with assuredness.
This — this rippling assertion of a perfect bit of creation — this green shimmer of a perfect beauty in a bird — makes men angry or melancholy, according as it assails the eye or the ear.
The ear is much less cunning than the eye. You can say to somebody: “I like you awfully, you look so beautiful this morning,” and she will believe it utterly, though your voice may really be vibrating with mortal hatred. The ear is so stupid, it will accept any amount of false money in words. But let one tiny gleam of the mortal hatred come into your eye, or across your face, and it is detected immediately. The eye is so shrewd and rapid.
For this reason we get the peacock at once, in all his showy, male self-assertion; and we say, rather sneeringly: “Fine feathers make fine birds!” But when we hear the nightingale, we don’t know what we hear, we only know we feel sad, forlorn. And so we say it is the nightingale that is sad.
The nightingale, let us repeat, is the most unsad thing in the world; even more unsad than the peacock full of gleam. He has nothing to be sad about. He feels perfect with life. It isn’t conceit. He just feels life-perfect, and he trills it out — shouts, jugs, gurgles, trills, gives long, mock-plaintiff calls, makes declarations, assertions, and triumphs; but he never reflects. It is pure music, in so far as you could never put words to it. But there are words for the feelings aroused in us by the song. No, even that is not true. There are no words to tell what one really feels, hearing the nightingale. It is something so much purer than words, which are all tainted. Yet we can say, it is some sort of feeling of triumph in one’s own life-perfection.
’Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness, —
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of becchen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
Poor Keats, he has to be “too happy” in the nightingale’s happiness, not being very happy in himself at all. So he wants to drink the blushful Hippocrene, and fade away with the nightingale into the forest dim.
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret. . . .
It is such sad, beautiful poetry of the human male. Yet the next line strikes me as a bit ridiculous.
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs. . . .
This is Keats, not at all the nightingale. But the sad human male still tries to break away, and get over into the nightingale world. Wine will not take him across. Yet he will go.
Away! away! for I will fly lo thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy. . . .
He doesn’t succeed, however. The viewless wings of Poesy carry him only into the bushes, not into the nightingale world. He is still outside.
Darkling I listen: and for many a time
I have been half in love with easeful Death. . . .
The nightingale never made any man in love with easeful death, except by contrast. The contrast between the bright flame of positive pure self-aliveness, in the bird, and the uneasy flickering of yearning selflessness, for ever yearning for something outside himself, which is Keats:
To cease upon the midnight with no pain,
While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad
In such an ecstasy!
Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain, —
To thy high requiem become a sod.
How astonished the nightingale would be if he could be made to realize what sort of answer the poet was answering to his song. He would fall off the bough with amazement.
Because a nightingale, when you answer him back, only shouts and sings louder. Suppose a few other nightingales pipe up in neighbouring bushes — as they always do. Then the blue-white sparks of sound go dazzling up to heaven. And suppose you, mere mortal, happen to be sitting on the shady bank having an altercation with the mistress of your heart, hammer and tongs, then the chief nightingale swells and goes at it like Caruso in the Third Act — simply a brilliant, bursting frenzy of music, singing you down, till you simply can’t hear yourself speak to quarrel.
There was, in fact, something very like a nightingale in Caruso — that bird-like, bursting, miraculous energy of song, and fullness of himself, and self-luxuriance.
Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
No hungry generations tread thee down.
Not yet in Tuscany, anyhow. They are twenty to the dozen. Whereas the cuckoo seems remote and low-voiced, calling his low, half secretive call as he flies past. Perhaps it really is different in England.
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn.
And why in tears? Always tears. Did Diocletian, I wonder, among the emperors, burst into tears when he heard the nightingale, and Aesop among the clowns? And Ruth, really? Myself, I strongly suspect that young lady of setting the nightingale singing, like the nice damsel in Boccaccio’s story, who went to sleep with the lively bird in her hand, “ — tua figliuola e slata si vaga dell’usignuolo, ch’ella I’ha preso e tienlosi in mano!”
And what does the hen nightingale think of it all, as she mildly sits upon the eggs and hears milord giving himself forth? Probably she likes it, for she goes on breeding him as jaunty as ever. Probably she prefers his high cockalorum to the poet’s humble moan:
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain. . . .
That wouldn’t be much use to the hen nightingale. And one sympathizes with Keats’s Fanny, and understands why she wasn’t having any. Much good such a midnight would have been to her!
Perhaps, when all’s said and done, the female of the species gets more out of life when the male isn’t wanting to cease upon the midnight, with or without pain. There are better uses for midnights. And a bird that sings because he’s full of his own bright life, and leaves her to keep the eggs cozy, is perhaps preferable to one who moans, even with love of her.
Of course, the nightingale is utterly unconscious of the little dim hen, while he sings. And he never mentions her name. But she knows well enough that the song is half her; just as she knows the eggs are half him. And just as she doesn’t want him coming in and putting a heavy foot down on her little bunch of eggs, he doesn’t want her poking into his song, and fussing over it, and mussing it up. Every man to his trade, and every woman to hers:
Adieu! adieu! thy plaintive anthem fades. . . .
It never was a plaintive anthem — it was Caruso at his jauntiest. But don’t try to argue with a poet.