SIDE LIGHTS ON BIRDS 



In saying that the songs of birds may be more 

 justly compared with the human voice when 

 speaking rather than when singing we think that 

 Mr. Warde Fowler made an important distinction. 

 For the human singer is not really expressing 

 himself : he may be merely repeating words 

 that have no part or lot in his actual experience. 

 But song is the way a bird converses about its 

 ordinary every-day affairs : the actual things in 

 its mind, rising from the squabbling twitters 

 of the sparrows in the gutter, suggesting angry 

 fish-wives, to the loftiest ideas of the nightingale 

 in the gloaming or the lark in the sky, to which 

 a Keats or a Shelley humbly tries to fit words. 



It is a little difficult to understand Dr. CoUinge's 

 position for he, himself, quotes the late Mr. Rees 

 with approval. Rees wrote : — ' ' It were vain to 

 attempt an interpretation of the skylark's carol 

 for it cannot be compared with the outcome of 

 any emotion felt in the human heart. But it 

 is nevertheless akin to something that strives 

 within us for existence." 



Surely there must be something strangely human 

 in a message that touches a secret spring deeply 

 hidden within us, but that we ourselves have not 

 the capacity to formulate and express. Is not 

 this precisely what the great composers of music 

 have done ? And although the exalted strains 

 of lark and nightingale may elude us, we can 

 nevertheless listen to the birds in their less ele- 

 vated moods, and know exactly what they are 

 thinking about. 



The actual tones of a bird's voice may differ 

 from our own because the mechanism of sound 

 production differs, but allowing for this difference 

 and taking sound merely as a method of ex- 

 pressing ideas and emotions, we can think of 

 nothing that comes nearer to the human voice 



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