Part 14

This education is more or less arduous, according to the medium and the circumstances in which each species is placed. That of fishing, for instance, is simple enough for the penguin, which, in her clumsiness, finds it difficult to conduct her brood to the sea; its great nurse attends the little one, and offers it the food all ready; it has but to open its bill. With the duck, this education or training is more complex. I observed one summer, on a lake in Normandy, a duck, followed by her brood, giving them their first lesson. The nurslings, riotous and greedy, asked but for food. The mother, yielding to their cries, plunged to the bottom of the water, reappearing with some small worm or little fish, which she distributed impartially, never giving twice in succession to the same duckling!

In this picture the most touching figure was the mother, whose stomach undoubtedly was also craving, but who retained nothing for herself, and seemed happy in the sacrifice. Her visible desire was to accustom her family to do as she did, to dive under the water intrepidly to seize their prey. With a voice almost gentle, she implored this action of courageous confidence. I had the happiness of seeing the little ones plunge in, one after another, to the depth of the black abyss. Their education was just on the eve of completion.

This is but a simple training, and for one of the inferior vocations. There remains to speak of that of the arts: of the art of flight, the art of song, the art of architecture. Nothing is more complex than the education of certain singing birds. The perseverance of the father, the docility of the young, are worthy of all admiration.

And this education extends beyond the family-circle. The nightingales, the chaffinches, while still young or unskilful, know how to listen to, and profit by, the superior bird which has been allotted to them as their instructor. In those Russian palaces where flourishes the noble Oriental partiality for the bulbul's song, you see everywhere these singing-schools. The master nightingale, in his cage suspended in the centre of a saloon, has his scholars ranged around him in their respective cages. A certain sum per hour is paid for each bird brought here to learn his lesson. Before the master sings they chatter and gossip among themselves, salute and recognize one another. But as soon as the mighty teacher, with one imperious note, like that of a sonorous steel bell, has imposed silence, you see them listen with a sensible deference, then timidly repeat the strain. The master complacently returns to the principal passages, corrects, and gently sets them right. A few then grow bolder, and, by some felicitous chords, essay to supply the harmony to the dominant melody.

An education so delicate, so varied, so complex, is it that of a machine, of a brute reduced to instinct? Who can refuse in this to acknowledge a soul?

Open your eyes to the evidence. Throw aside your prejudices, your traditional and derived opinions. Preconceived ideas and dogmatic theories apart, you cannot offend Heaven by restoring a soul to the beast.[26] How much grander the Creator's work if he has created persons, souls, and wills, than if he has constructed machines!

Dismiss your pride, and acknowledge a kindred in which there is nothing to make a devout mind ashamed. What are these? They are your brothers.

What are they? embryo souls, souls especially set apart for certain functions of existence, candidates for the more general and more widely harmonic life to which the human soul has attained.

When will they arrive thither? and how? God has reserved to himself these mysteries.

All that we know is this: that he summons them--them also--to mount higher and yet higher.

They are, without metaphor, the little children of Nature, the nurslings of Providence, aspiring towards the light in order to act and think; stumbling now, they by Degrees shall advance much further.

"O pauvre enfantelet! du fil de tes pensées L'échevelet n'est encore débrouillé."

Poor feeble child! not yet of thy thought's thread Is the entangled skein unravellèd.

Souls of children, in truth, but far gentler, more resigned, more patient than those of human children. See with what silent good humour most of them (like the horse) support blows, and wounds, and ill-treatment! They all know how to endure disease and suffer death. They retire apart, surround themselves with silence, and lie down in concealment; this gentle patience often supplies them with the most efficacious remedies. If not, they accept their destiny, and pass away as if they slept.

Can they love as deeply as we love? How shall we doubt it, when we see the most timid suddenly become heroic in defence of their young and their family? The devotedness of the man who braves death for his children you will see exemplified every day in the martin, which not only resists the eagle, but pursues him with heroical ardour.

Would you wish to observe two things wonderfully analogous? Watch on the one side the woman's delight at the first step of her infant, and on the other the swallow at the first flight of her little nursling.

You see in both the same anxiety, the same encouragements, examples, and counsels, the same pretended security and lurking fear, the trembling "Take courage, nothing is more easy;"--in truth, the two mothers are inwardly shivering.

The lessons are curious. The mother raises herself on her wings; the fledgling regards her intently, and also raises himself a little; then you see her hovering--he looks, he stirs his wings. All this goes well, for it takes place in the nest--the difficulty begins when he essays to quit it. She calls him, she shows him some little dainty tit-bit, she promises him a reward, she attempts to draw him forth with the bait of a fly.

Still the little one hesitates. And put yourself in his place. You have but to move a step in the nursery, between your nurse and your mother, where, if you fell, you would fall upon cushions. This bird of the church, which gives her first lesson in flying from the summit of the spire, can scarcely embolden her son, perhaps can scarcely embolden herself at the decisive moment. Both, I am sure of it, measure more than once with their glances the abyss beneath, and eye the ground. I, for one, declare to you, the spectacle is moving and sublime. It is an urgent need that he should _trust_ his mother, that _she_ should have confidence in the wing of the little one who is still a novice. From both does Heaven require an act of faith, of courage. A noble and a sublime starting-point! But he _has_ trusted, he has made the leap, he will not fall. Trembling, he floats in air, supported by the paternal breath of heaven, by the reassuring voice of his mother. All is finished. Thenceforth he will fly regardless of the wind and the storm, strong in that first great trial wherein he flew in faith.

[NOTE.--_The Swallow's Flight._ According to Wilson, the swallow's ordinary flight averages one mile per minute. He is engaged in flying for ten hours daily. Now, as his life is usually extended to a space of ten years, he flies, in that period, 2,190,000 miles, or nearly eighty-eight times the circumference of the globe.

The swallow, as Sir Humphrey Davy observes, cheers the sense of sight as much as the nightingale does the sense of hearing. He is the glad prophet of the year, the harbinger of its brightest season, and lives a life of free enjoyment amongst the loveliest forms of nature.

There is something peculiarly beautiful in his rapid, steady, well-balanced flight,--

"Which, ere a double pulse can beat, Is here and there with motion fleet, As Ariel's wing could scarce exceed; And, full of vigour as of speed, Forestalls the dayspring's earliest gleam, Nor fails with evening's latest beam."

To all nations he is welcome, and by all the poets has been celebrated with fond eulogium.--_Translator._]

THE NIGHTINGALE.

ART AND THE INFINITE.

The celebrated Pré-aux-Clercs, now known as the Marché Saint Germain, is, as everybody knows, on Sundays, the Bird Market of Paris. The place has more than one claim on our curiosity. It is a vast menagerie, frequently renewed--a shifting, strange museum of French ornithology.

On the other hand, such an auction of living beings, of captives many of whom feel their captivity, of slaves whom the auctioneer exposes, sells, and values more or less adroitly, indirectly reminds one, after all, of the markets of the East, the auctions of human slaves. The winged slaves, without understanding our languages, do not the less vividly express the thought of servitude; some, born in this condition, are resigned to it; others, sombre and silent, dream ever of freedom. Not a few appear to address themselves to you, seem desirous of arresting the passer-by's attention, and ask only for a good master. How often have we seen an intelligent goldfinch, an amiable robin, regarding us with a mournful gaze, but a gaze by no means doubtful in its meaning, for it said: "Buy me!"

One Sunday in summer we paid a visit to this mart, which we shall never forget. It was not well stocked, still less harmonious; the season of moulting and of silence had begun. We were not the less keenly attracted by and interested in the naïve attitude of a few individuals. Ordinarily their song and their plumage, the bird's two principal attributes, preoccupy us, and prevent us from observing their lively and original pantomime. One bird, the American mocking-bird, has a comedian's genius, distinguishing all his songs by a mimicry strictly appropriate to their character, and often very ironical. Our birds do not possess this singular art; but, without skill, and unknown to themselves, they express, by significant and frequently pathetic movements, the thoughts which traverse their brain.

On this particular day, the queen of the market was a black-capped warbler, an artist-bird of great value, set apart in the display from the other birds, like a peerless jewel. She fluttered, _svelte_ and charming all in her was grace. Accustomed to captivity by a long training, she seemed to regret nothing, and could only communicate to the soul happy and gentle impressions. She was plainly a being of perfect geniality, and of such harmony of song and movement, that in seeing her move I thought I heard her sing.

Lower, very much lower, in a narrow cage, a bird somewhat larger in size, very inhumanly confined, gave me a curious and quite opposite impression. This was a chaffinch, and the first which I had seen blind. No spectacle could be more painful. The man who would purchase by such a deed of cruelty this victim's song, must have a nature alien to all harmony, a barbarous soul. His attitude of labour and torture rendered his song very painful to me. The worst of it is that it was human; it reminded one of the turns of the head and the ungracious motions of the shoulders which short-sighted persons, or men become blind, indulge in. Such is never the case with those born blind. With a violent but continual effort, grown habitual, the head inclined to the right, with empty eyes he sought the light. The neck was outstretched, to sink again between the shoulders, and swelled out to gain new strength--the neck short, the shoulders bent. This unhappy virtuoso, whose song, like himself, was dissembled and deformed, had been a mean image of the ugliness of the slave-artist, if not ennobled by that indomitable effort to pursue the light, seeking it always on high, and ever centering his song in the invisible sun which he had treasured up in his soul.

Moderately capable of profiting by instruction, this bird repeats, with a marvellous metallic _timbre_, the song of his native wood, and preserves the particular accent of the country in which he was born; there being as many dialects of chaffinches as there are different districts. He remains faithful to his own; he sings only his cradle-song, and that with an uniform rate, but with a wild passion and an extraordinary emulation. Set opposite a rival, he will repeat it eight hundred successive times; occasionally he dies of it. I am not astonished that the Belgians enthusiastically celebrate the combats of this hero of the national song, the chorister of their forest of Ardennes, decreeing prizes, crowns, even triumphal arches, to those acts of supreme devotion in which life is yielded for victory.

Still lower down than the chaffinch, and in a very small and wretched cage, peopled pell-mell with half-a-dozen birds of very different sizes, I was shown a prisoner which I had not distinguished, a young nightingale caught that very morning. The fowler, by a skilful Machiavelism, had placed the little captive in a world of very joyous slaves, quite accustomed to their confinement. These were young troglodytes, recently born in a cage; he had rightly calculated that the sight of the sports of innocent infancy sometimes beguiles great grief.

Great evidently, nay, overpowering, was his, and more impressive than any of those sorrows which we express by tears. A dumb agony, pent up within himself, and longing for the darkness. He had withdrawn into the shade as far as might be, to the bottom of the cage, half hidden in a small eating-trough, making himself large and swollen with his slightly-bristling feathers, closing his eyes, never opening them even when he was disturbed, shaken by the frolicsome and careless pastimes of the young turbulents, which frequently drove one another against him. Plainly he would neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor console himself. These self-imposed shadows were, as I clearly saw, an effort, in his cruel suffering, _not to be_, an intentional suicide. With his mind he embraced death, and died, so far as he was able, by the suspension of his senses and of all external activity.

Observe that, in this attitude, there was no indication of malicious, bitter, or choleric feeling, nothing to remind one of his neighbour, the morose chaffinch, with his attitude of violent and torturing exertion. Even the indiscretion of the young birdlings which, without care or respect, occasionally threw themselves upon him, could call forth no mark of impatience. He said, obviously: "What matters it to one who is no more?" Although his eyes were closed, I did not the less easily read him. I perceived an artist's soul, all tenderness and all light, without rancour and without harshness against the barbarity of the world and the ferocity of fate. And it was through this that he lived, through this that he could not die, because he found within himself, in his great sorrow, the all-powerful cordial inherent in his nature: _internal light, song_. In the language of nightingales, these two words convey the same meaning.

I comprehended that he did not die, because even then, despite himself, despite his keen desire of death, he could not do otherwise than sing. His heart chanted a voiceless strain, which I heard perfectly well:--

"_Lascia che io pianga! La Libertà._"

Liberty!-Suffer me to weep!

I had not expected to find here once more that song which, in the old time, and by another mouth (a mouth which shall never again be opened), had already pierced my heart, and left a wound which no time shall efface.

I demanded of his custodian if he were for sale. The shrewd fellow replied that he was too young to be sold, that as yet he did not eat alone; a statement evidently untrue, for he was not that year's bird; but the man wished to keep him for disposal in the winter, when, his voice returning, he would fetch a higher price.

Such a nightingale, born in freedom, which alone is the true nightingale, bears a very different value to one born in a cage: he sings quite differently, having known liberty and nature, and regretting both. The better part of the great artist's genius is suffering.

_Artist!_ I have said the word, and I will not unsay it. This is not an analogy, a comparison of things having a resemblance: no, it is the thing itself.

The nightingale, in my opinion, is not the chief, but the only one, of the winged people to which this name can be justly given.

And why? He alone is a creator; he alone varies, enriches, amplifies his song, and augments it by new strains. He alone is fertile and diverse in himself; other birds are so by instruction and imitation. He alone resumes, contains almost all; each of them, of the most brilliant, suggests a couplet to the nightingale.

Only one other bird, like him, attains sublime results in the bold and simple--I mean the lark, the daughter of the sun. And the nightingale also is inspired by the light; so that, when in captivity, alone, and deprived of love, it suffices to unloose his song. Confined for a while in darkness, then suddenly restored to the day, he runs riot with enthusiasm, he bursts into hymns of joy. This difference, nevertheless, exists between the two birds: the lark never sings in the night; hers is not the nocturnal melody, the hidden meaning of the grand effects of evening, the deep poesy of the shadows, the solemnity of midnight, the aspirations before dawn--in a word, that infinitely varied poem which translates and reveals to us, in all its changes, a great heart brimful of tenderness. The lark's is the lyrical genius; the nightingale's, the epic, the drama, the inner struggle,--from thence, a light apart. In deep darkness, it looks into its soul, into love; soaring at times, it would seem, beyond the individual love into the ocean of love infinite.

And will you not call him an artist? He has the artist's temperament, and exalted to a degree which man himself rarely attains. All which belongs to it--all its merits, all its defects--in him are superabundant. He is mild and timid, mistrustful, but not at all cunning. He takes no heed to his safety, and travels alone. He is burningly jealous, equalling the chaffinch in fiery emulation. "He will break his heart to sing," says one of his historians.[27] He listens; he takes up his abode, especially where an echo exists, to listen and reply. Nervous to an excess, one sees him in captivity sometimes sleeping long through the day with perturbing dreams; sometimes struggling, starting up, and wildly battling. He is subject to nervous attacks and epilepsy.

He is kindly--he is ferocious. Let me explain myself. His heart is full of tenderness for the weak and little. Give him orphans to watch over, he will take charge of them, and clasp them to his heart; a male, and aged, he nourishes and tends them as carefully as any mother-bird. On the other hand, he is exceedingly cruel towards his prey, is greedy and voracious; the flame which burns inly, and keeps him almost always thin, makes him constantly feel the need of recruitment, and it is also one of the reasons that he is so easily ensnared. It is enough to set your bait in the morning; especially in April and May, when he exhausts himself by singing throughout the night. In the morning, weakened, frail, avid, he pounces blindly on the snare. Moreover, he is very curious, and, in order to examine a novel object, will expose himself to be caught.

Once captured, if you do not take the precaution to tie his wings, or rather to cover the interior and pad the upper part of the cage, he will kill himself by the frantic fury of his movements.

This violence is on the surface. At bottom, he is gentle and docile: it is these qualities which raise him so high, and make him in truth an artist. He is not only the most inspired, but the most tractable, the most "civilizable," the most laborious of birds.

It is a charming sight to see the fledglings gathered round their father, listening to him attentively, and profiting by his lessons to form the voice, to correct their faults, to soften their novice-like roughness, to render their young organs supple.

But how much more curious it is to see him training himself, judging, perfecting himself, paying especial attention when he ventures on new themes! This steadfast perseverance, which springs from his reverence for his art and from a kind of inward religion, is the morality of the artist, his divine consecration, which seals him as one apart--distinguishes him from the vain improvisatore, whose unconscientious babble is a simple echo of nature.

Thus love and light are undoubtedly his point of departure; but art itself, the love of the beautiful, confusedly seen in glimpses, and very keenly felt, are a second aliment, which sustains his soul, and supplies it with a new inspiration. And this is boundless--a day opened on the infinite.

The true greatness of the artist consists in overshooting his mark, in doing more than he willed; and, moreover, in passing far beyond the goal, in crossing the limits of the possible, and looking beyond--beyond.

Hence arise great sorrows, an inexhaustible source of melancholy; hence the sublime folly of weeping over misfortunes which he has never experienced. Other birds are astonished, and occasionally inquire of him what is the cause of his grief, what does he regret. When free and joyous in his forest-home, he does not the less vouchsafe for his reply the strain which my captive chanted in his silence:

"Lascia che io pianga!"

Suffer me, suffer me to weep!

THE NIGHTINGALE:

CONTINUED.

The hours of silence are not barren for the nightingale. He gathers his ideas and reflects; he broods over the songs which he has heard or has himself attempted; he modifies and improves them with perfect tact and taste. For the false notes of an ignorant master he substitutes ingenious and harmonious variations. The imperfect strain which he has learned, but has not repeated, he then reproduces; but made indeed his own, appropriated by his own genius, and converted into a nightingale's melody.

"Do not be discouraged," says a quaint old writer, "if the young bird be not willing to repeat your lesson, and continue to warble; soon he will show you that he has not forgotten the lessons received in autumn and winter--_a fit season for meditation, owing to the length of the nights_; he will repeat them in the spring-time."

It is very interesting to follow, during the winter, the nightingale's thoughts, in his darkened cage, wrapped round with a green cloth, which partially deceives his gaze, and reminds him of his forest. In December he begins to dream aloud, to descant, to describe in pathetic notes the things passing before his mind--the loved and absent objects. Mayhap he then forgets that migration has been forbidden him, and thinks he has arrived in Africa or in Syria, in lands lighted by a more generous sun. It may be that he sees this sun; sees the rose reblossom, and recommences for her, as say the Persian poets, his hymn of impossible love,--"_O sun! O sea! O rose!_"--(_Rückert._)