A Gathering of Birds

by Donald Culross Peattie

  VII

  THE COUNT DE BUFFON

  BUFFON was one of the few truly magnificent personalities in science. He was the court zoögrapher to Louis XV, nobly born, personally handsome, proud, imperious, a complete man of the world, unable to endure criticism—everything that a zoölogist is almost never. Yet there is no denying his talents as a scientist, talents that rose at times, through the boldness and originality of his speculations, to those of some pioneering genius. Add to this a superhuman industry, the most superb facilities for carrying out his project of writing what was practically the Book of Everything, and great polish and charm as a stylist, and it is no wonder that he was recognized as the foremost writer on natural history in his century.

  His contemporaries and some of his later countrymen have acknowledged him as something more. Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire believed Buffon an immortal genius, Rousseau threw himself down and kissed the threshold of Buffon’s door, Mirabeau thought him the greatest man of many centuries, Cuvier modeled himself on Buffon (though he was a much better scientist than his model) and Saint-Beuve, of all aloof critics, praised Buffon’s description of the swan as one of the finest specimens of French prose (though it is almost certain that de Montbeliard ghost-wrote the swan).

  And, withal, Buffon is today more often mentioned than read. His encyclopedic Natural History is owned by almost every museum and great library, and yet it is seldom consulted as an authority, and cited chiefly as of historical interest only.

  Behind such a downfall lies a story.

  George Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, was born in 1707 in the family château at Montbard, in Burgundy. He early showed a marked talent for physics and mathematics, and it is quite likely that the exact sciences, and not zoölogy, were his true calling. But owing to his winning personality, his high birth, and the many-faceted genius he so obviously possessed, he attained at the age of thirty-seven to the appointment of Intendant of the Jardin Du Roi and the Royal Museum. This placed him in possession of a magnificent collection of specimens, living and otherwise, of a great library, and at the head of a corps of naturalists. He improved these opportunities by beginning his Histoire Naturelle, intended to embrace the whole kingdom of Nature, from a glow-worm to a star, though botany was omitted or never reached owing to Buffon’s distaste for the subject.

  Buffon had complained, with justice, of his rival Linnaeus that the Linnaean system, though it clapped two Latin names on everything, adequately described nothing, was dull and repellent, and barren of any implication of the inter-relationships of life and the universe it inhabits. This deficiency Buffon proposed to correct by discoursing as fully, not as concisely, as possible, the length of the treatment to be proportional to the subject’s importance to man. To his service Buffon could summon the best anatomists, artists, and printers, and he devoted his own life and all his sumptuous style to the undertaking. The first volume appeared in 1749 and the work continued for fifty years—beyond Buffon’s lifetime, indeed, up to forty-four volumes.

  Thus the conception of the Histoire Naturelle was magnificent, and would have been enough to make its editor renowned in any case. But the task was Herculean; we see as we read how weary Buffon grew of it.

  At first he set about his labors with great zeal. As his anatomist to do dissections and draw up scientific descriptions, he had the gifted ornithologist Daubenton. Buffon supplied the library research, the synthesis of all the facts, the life histories, comment, and style. As long as he was treating of the nobler beasts or of the birds of Europe for which he had evident feeling, Buffon got off splendidly.

  But only hearsay and derivation from others’ writings could supply him with materials for foreign species, and small fry in all phyla he disdained as trivial vermin. Consequently, all the showier and easier parts of the work having come first (for he did not always take them up in a systematist’s order, but in order of their importance in his judgment) he was put to it to sustain, unflagging, a sky-high reputation for saying fascinating things in the most resounding manner. By forcing his voice he wearied it beyond endurance, and came to lean upon one set of collaborators after another. Some mastered completely the trick of imitating the editor’s style; others did purely mechanical work. By quarreling with Daubenton, Buffon lost a valuable scientific ally. Gradually the repute of the volumes fell off, to be refreshed from time to time as new talent was imported, or as the old master would revive for a while and suddenly do brilliant work again.

  The volumes on birds were not reached for publication in their turn until 1770-1773, thirty-four years after the commencement. This does not mean, however, that the nightingale, which I have chosen for quotation, was not written many years before. The species would have been easily disposed of at the start, and there is every internal evidence from the style that it is Buffon’s own work, and belongs to the height of his powers. Nor is it likely that he would have allowed any one else to touch the diva among birds!

  To modern minds the most promising moment in Buffon’s career was when, in one of his volumes, he startled the world by announcing a theory of evolution. It is stated with the utmost originality and boldness of speculation (though he never had any idea how to assemble facts in proof), and would raise him to a foremost pinnacle in science if he had not succumbed so abjectly to the outraged clergy of the University of Paris. He was under no medieval threat of torture and death; no censure they could have brought to bear could have jeopardized so powerful and wealthy a noble. Yet he published a complete retraction of his theories, and the following year was elected to the Académie Française. It would seem that he purchased this honor at the cost of his scientific honor. As his contemporaries did not believe in evolution, however, they were less critical of his action.

  But in the meantime Buffon was embroiled with other difficulties. He had criticised Linnaeus’ Systema bitterly and not without justice. But it appeared that his animosity was due to want of system in his own mind; in the end he had to come around to binomial nomenclature. Fellow scientists pointed out many errors in the Histoire Naturelle, but Buffon had not learned that a scientist can only save himself from criticism by admitting mistakes frankly and correcting them at once. He would admit nothing and change nothing.

  Finally he went on the rocks over spontaneous generation, in which he superstitiously believed, although the times were getting late for that. Spallanzani, in experiment after experiment, simply demolished Buffon, who should have welcomed any proof of the truth and embraced it gladly.

  So that is why science today does not join in the ecstatics of Buffon’s one-time admirers. He is still reckoned a great man in his age, but not a timeless genius. No one, however, denies to Buffon his position as a stylist of Nature writing. At his best, and the passage of the nightingale is his best on the subject of birds, he was a master. The style is magniloquent, but we must not ask it to be otherwise; the translator must not tone it down, and the modern reader must not be embarrassed for Buffon. As Buffon himself said, “Le style, c’est l’homme.”

  I was the happier to translate Buffon’s nightingale because the bird is one about which people all over the world feel the liveliest curiosity, yet I was unable to find in English any wholly satisfactory description of it—the poets aside. It must be that English ornithologists find that the poets have said it all, or the nightingale has left them speechless or, as I seem to divine, they are tired of hearing it praised while many other interesting fine birds go unpraised. Many writers belittle it, some are even quite hostile.

  Yet in the British colonies, in America, the nightingale is the one European bird, except the skylark, that every descendant of the Mother Country longs to hear. John Burroughs went to England especially to hear it, arrived too late, and caught about five minutes of disjointed song altogether. Our excellent Dr. Frank Chapman, better qualified to find the bird, heard more of its song but gives us no very definite impression.

  If I may be permitted to give my own, I may say, after hearing it for six co
nsecutive years, that the nightingale’s is the most magical, vivid, and varied voice known to me in the world of birds, nor can I conceive any other equal to it. I was never able to sleep when it sang, but would prop myself up on my elbow, though nodding with weariness, drinking in every note, until the song would be “buried deep in the next valley glades.”

  I do not deny the force of association; Keats and Matthew Arnold and Swinburne, the beautiful nightingale passage in the Pastoral Symphony, the Greek legends, the sense of history, of lovers, the spell of moonlit Mediterranean nights, all had their effect. But do we divorce any bird from its associations? When we think of eagles, sea gulls, stormy petrels, albatrosses, condors, ravens, doves, associations cluster thick about them and need not be blown away. Birds about which we have not collected at least some personal associations possess but little charm for us, however much we may be interested in them ornithologically. And I am only discussing here the beauty of the nightingale’s song.

  But I do deny what Shakespeare says, that the nightingale, if it should sing by day, would sound no better a musician than a wren. Nightingales sing constantly by day at the height of the breeding season. And though the effect is jarred by many mechanical sounds, and the performance interrupted by all sorts of birds, the nightingale is still the finest. The effect is altered, however. It is the truer one of cheery rapture and typical bird boldness, the intention to sing down everybody else in hearing.

  If I must make a comparison with the birds of my own country, I would say that the nightingale has all the brilliance, dash, carrying power and versatility of the mockingbird. But the effect is not saucy. The piercing nostalgia of the tones is more like our white-throat sparrow’s. The typical song mounts chromatically up and up into regions where it is obvious that the bird cannot clear a higher note—when, with effortless ease it soars serenely into realms of pitch that bring a gasp of astonishment from the listener. Contrary to Buffon’s statement, it seems to me that the bird has a tremendous range, for the second part of the usual song is a descending cascade to a very deep slow warble, a note lower than any singing bird I know possesses.

  I should add to my comparisons that the song of the nightingale is delivered, like our hermit thrush’s, in separate melodic statements, with long pauses between. It is in these musical “rests” that the mind has time to dwell on the beauty of the foregoing, while, in expectation of the next phrase, no listener but will hold his breath with reverent excitement.

  The true nightingale does not, according to Newton’s Dictionary of Birds, occur in Scotland, Ireland, Wales, northern and western England, or peninsular Brittany, and references to it from those countries must intend some other bird. Nightingales have often been released in America. But it is seldom possible to naturalize a migratory insect-eating bird, and the only success in our country has been the freeing of nightingales in Florida in a vast outdoor aviary.

  THE NIGHTINGALE

  THERE can be no properly constituted man to whom the name of the nightingale does not recall one of those beautiful spring evenings when, the night sky serene and clear, the air tranquil, and all nature silenced and listening, he has harkened, ravished, to the canticle of this woodland songster. One might name many another song bird whose voice rivals in some way the nightingale’s—skylark and canary, chaffinch and warbler, linnet and goldfinch, blackbird and missel thrush, and the mockingbird of America; each is heard with admiration—as long as the nightingale is silent. Some have qualities as rich, others a timbre as pure and sweet, and others still an ear-flattering warble. But there is not one of them which our nightingale cannot shame, for it unites all these divers talents, and the variety of its repertoire is prodigious. So that the whole range of other birds’ gifts is but as a couplet compared to the nightingale’s ode.

  The nightingale charms us, night after night, repeating it-self never, or never in servile fashion, and should it re-state one passage, this is always given fresh brilliance by some delicate change of accent, embellished with new figures. In every mode the nightingale is master, and it can express all moods, it impersonates all rôles, and like a skillful artist knows how to heighten effect by contrast. This leader of spring’s chorus carefully rehearses its part at Nature’s psalmist. With a timid prelude it opens its song, in slender tones that are almost indecisive, as if it would try out its instrument and inveigle its listeners.

  But soon gaining assurance, by degrees the song growing more lively, it warms to its performance and at last deploys the full powers and resources of its incomparable organ. Vibrant, fluting tones; light swift pluckings of the strings; bursts of song, the clarity as astounding as the volubility; muted murmurs, as to itself, that our ears scarce appreciate, yet perfectly attuned to heighten the contrast of the more audible tones; sudden trills, brilliant yet rapid, announced with decision and force and withal the most exquisite taste; plaintive accents gently timed; tones drawn artlessly out yet swelling with the swelling soul of the performers; enchanting, penetrant sounds; the true sighs of love and desire that seem to issue from the very heart and to cause all hearts to throb with it, awakening in every receptive listener the same sweet tenderness, the same beseeching languorousness. It is in these impassioned utterances that we recognize the very language of the bridegroom’s rapture in his possessed beloved, a rapture such as only the beloved mate can inspire. Yet other phrases, even more astounding, seem only designed to amuse or please her passingly, or even merely to dispute, as with a prize song, her judgment amid the rivals jealous of his glory and happiness.

  These various phrases are spaced out with silence, those rests that in every sort of melody underscore so tellingly the grandest musical effects. In them one enjoys the lovely passage one has just heard, which still rings in the ears, and enjoys it the more since the enjoyment is more intimate, more contemplative, and is not troubled by a crowding of fresh impressions upon the senses. This rest makes one more expectant, yearning for the theme to be taken up once more. One hopes that it will be a repetition of the passage that has just flattered the ear. But even if one should be disappointed, the enchantment of the new melodic sentence forbids one to regret the older variation. And still the hope of some repetition captivates the attentive listener.

  More; it is because, as the Englishman Daines Barrington so well points out,* our bird lifts his voice in favoring darkness, that we invariably attend up on it. Then that voice in all its brilliance is no whit obscured by any other. All others it simply effaces by its soft and fluting tones and by the long duration—often twenty seconds—of a single trill. The same observer distinguished in a single breath sixteen different melodic passages, each clearly set off by its opening and closing notes. And these the bird knew how to vary with artless taste by intermediary notes. Finally, he determined that the audible circle of a nightingale’s voice is a mile in diameter, provided that the air be calm. That is at least the equal of the carrying power of the human voice.

  It is astounding that so small a bird, weighing but a halfounce, should have such powerful vocal organs. Mr. Hunter also observes that the muscles of the larynx or windpipe are stronger in proportion in this species than in any other bird, and stronger in the male, who is the singer, than in the silent female.

  The nightingale’s song begins in the normal course in April and is not over until the month of June, about the midsummer solstice. But the season of true song diminishes greatly as soon as the young begin to hatch. For the birds are then preoccupied in caring for and nourishing the offspring, since in the order of instincts Nature gives first place to the preservation of the race.

  But the caged nightingales continue to sing for nine or ten months and their song is not only of longer duration, but is more perfect and well formed. From this Barrington wisely and truly draws the conclusion that in this species, as in so many other cases, the male does not sing to amuse the female or keep her content at incubation. The female, indeed, sits on the eggs out of a passion greater than the passion of love; she ta
kes internal satisfactions in this obedience to instinct of which we can scarcely form a notion; but we can see how keenly she feels them and we can hardly suppose that she is in need of consolation. So as it is neither from any virtue of love or duty that the female sits the eggs, there is no need wherefrom the male should sing to her then. Indeed, during the second nesting he sings not at all. With him it is love, and above all, the first stages of his desire that inspire his song. The need to sing and the hungers of love are vernal affairs. It is the males who have the active part in the passion of love; it is they who sing. They sing the greater part of the year, if one knows how to make a sort of perpetual spring to reign about them such as will constantly renew their ardors without giving them any occasion to quench them. Here is what happens to birds kept in a cage or those taken as adults. Some are known which begin to sing with all their powers but a few hours after capture. So that they must be well-nigh insensible to the loss of their liberty, especially at first; they would let themselves die of hunger in seven or eight days if food were not put in the beak, and they would break their heads against the cage, were their wings not secured; but in the end the passion of song carries them away. The songs of other birds, the sound of a viol, even the tones of the human voice, if ringing and sonorous, instantly excite them. They rush to the sides of the cage, drawn, stirred, listening. Duets seem especially to please them and they are sensible to the effect of harmony. Nor are they silent auditors. They join in and spare no effect to outsing the rival music, as if they would drown out every voice and every other noise. It is even claimed that they have been seen to fall dead at the foot of someone singing. Another bird was observed, every time a canary felt disposed to lift his voice, to swell its throat and twitter with rage. This had the effect in the end of silencing the overawed canary. So true is it that even acknowledged superiority is not above harboring jealousy.