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Chapter VII

The Nightingale in Berkeley Square

Life consists of two hemispheres, the internal and the external. It is commonly assumed that if the outer hemisphere is brightly lit, the inner purrs with contentment and felicity. The song that everybody seems to be lilting just now is evidently designed to show that, in reality, it is the other way about. It is the outer realm that depends for its illumination on the inner. Our happiness depends, not on something in our circumstances but on something in ourselves. 

I may be right; I may be wrong,
  But I’m perfectly willing to swear
That when you turned and smiled at me
  A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square. 

‘I may be right; I may be wrong!’ Was he right or was he wrong? He was both. He was wrong; for there are no nightingales in Berkeley Square. Yet, in a deeper sense, he was right; for when his inmost emotions thrilled with such ecstasy as her smile brought him, the birds were singing everywhere, even in Berkeley Square. It is not the nightingales that bring the smile; it is the smile that brings the nightingales.

I

Now, where have I met something very like this? Why, to be sure! In one of the most rapturous passages that Isaiah’s wild, seraphic fire ever gave us, the prophet depicts the delirious excitement of the emancipated people when, their long captivity ended, they are free to return to their own land. Cripples, he says, shall forget their infirmity; the darkness of the blind shall be dispelled by their vision of freedom; and the deaf shall seem to hear the joyous songs with which the happy pilgrims set out for home. And when, for a moment, their transports are held in check by thoughts of the cruel desert that they must cross, he assures them that it shall be to them a place of rushing streams and gushing fountains. And, as for the taunting mirages of which they have heard their fathers speak, the mirage, he declares, shall become a lake and the thirsty lad springs of water. 

Nightingales singing where no nightingales are! says the song. Refreshing streams where no streams exist! says the prophet.

The mirage shall become a lake, Isaiah sings. The setting of the promise is intensely significant. In going into exile, and in returning, Israel had to cross the desert. But, in going into captivity, the desert was ten thousand times a desert, by reason of three awful facts: (i) Jerusalem was in flames behind them; (2) Babylonian chains and slavery were before them; and (3) an angry and insulted Deity was above them. But, in coming out of exile, the same dreadful desert was no desert at all. It was like a land of lilies, a garden of fruit and flowers. They crossed it with laughter and singing. And for three reasons: (1) Jerusalem, their glorious home, was before them; (2) the days of their captivity were behind them; and (3) a reconciled and pardoning God was above and about them. The unutterable joy of forgiveness lends a new loveliness to every leaf and landscape; it turns pleasure into perfect paradise; it converts dreary deserts of dust into fragrant valleys of roses; and, best of all, it transforms tantalizing mirages into lovely lakes. There parched lips can slake their thirst, and tired feet may bathe. 

II

But this golden word about the mirage and the lake is the articulation of a much deeper truth. For, after all, the desert that the people crossed on their return journey was the same desert that they had crossed on being carried into captivity, Why, on this second journey, should all the mirages crystallize into gleaming lakes when, on their first, all the lakes had proved to be but taunting mirages? 

Yet life is like that. Its joy depends, not on something in our circumstances, but on something in ourselves. This young couple have started the day under a cloud. Something went wrong; breakfast-time. She let him hurry off to his train without a kiss, without even a smile. All through the day, though the weather be perfect and everything goes well, those two unhappy people will find all their lakes turning into mirages; whereas to-morrow, after a happy though tearful making-up, all the mirages will become the loveliest lakes. 

Paul Dombey wondered whether the bells that he heard when funeral was in progress were different bells from those that pealed so blithely for a wedding, or were they the same bells sounding differently in differing circumstances? In all this Paul was probing to the heart of a profound psychological problem. For the fact is that the bells take us as they find us, and set us to music; that is all. Paul Dombey, who died young, half suspected it; an Trotty Veck, of The Chimes, who lived to be old, proved it from experience and proved it to the hilt. When things were going badly with Trotty, and the magistrate said that he and those like him ought to be ‘put down’ with the utmost rigour of the law, the chimes, when they pealed out suddenly, made the air ring with the refrain: ‘Put ’im down! Put ’im down! Facts and figures! Fact and figures! Put ’im down! Put ’im down!’ ‘If,’ Dickens says, ‘the chimes said anything, they said this, and they said it until Trotty’s brain fairly reeled.’

Later on in the story we have the same chimes, and the same people listening to them. But this time all is going well; Meg and Richard are to be married on the morrow, and Trotty is at the height of his felicity, ‘Just then the bells, the old familiar bells his own dear, constant, steady friends, the chimes, began to ring. When had they ever rung like that before? They chimed out so lustily, so merrily, so happily, so gaily, that he leapt to his feet and broke the spell that bound him.’ And, in a few minutes, Trott and Richard and Meg were dancing with delight to the gay, glad music of the bells. When they themselves were sad, the chimes seemed mournful; when they were happy, the chimes seemed blithe. 

III

Let me submit the matter to a practical test. I am writing in Australia. Now what kind of a country is Australia? Is it, for example, beautiful or horrible? In his Links in My Life, Commander J. W. Gambier dismisses the question as beyond dispute. Australia is an abominable country! In the course of a remarkable life of travel and adventure, the gallant Commander at least twice visited these lands; and, in his book, he tells us what he thinks of us. ‘Mature experience,’ he says, ‘confirms my view that no country is uglier or more uninteresting than Australia. For the most part, it is an unending monotony of barren, undulating land, with trees growing at considerable distances apart, their dull grey bark peeling off and hanging in ribbons over their whitening stems.’ Commander Gambier surveys our plains and our forests, our mountains and our valleys, our fauna and our flora; but he sees nothing for commendation anywhere. 

As against this, we have a description of Australia by Mr. W. B. Griffin, the American architect who won the coveted prize for the best design for our Federal capital. In Mr. Griffin’s eyes, Australia is a land of majesty and loveliness. And, as for the gum-trees of which Commander Gambier writes so severely, Mr. Griffin maintains that the gum is a wonderful tree, a poet’s tree, a decorator’s tree. No tree, he avers, equals the eucalypt for embellishing a landscape. To Mr. Griffin the entire country is a thing of beauty and a joy for ever. 

Now how are we to account for this amazing discrepancy? It is not difficult. In Australia, everything went wrong with Commander Gambier: he was utterly miserable. In Australia Mr. Griffin found every circumstance favourable. Mr. Griffin lay back in his car and admired country in which Commander Gambier had wandered day and night, hopelessly lost, and at the point of starvation, country in which he was more than once the victim of brigands and bushrangers. Mr. Griffin looked out upon the bush through the eyes of a proud prize-winner; Commander Gambier looked back upon Australia as a land in which he had been overwhelmed with misfortune and from which he had only just contrived to escape with his life. To the one, a gum-tree was as pretty as a poem; to the other it was as grim as a gallows. To the one, the lakes were all mirages; to the other, the mirages were all lakes. 

When Wordsworth was criticized for singing of dancing daffodils, he was forced to confess that daffodils do not dance. But, he pleaded, they set something dancing in him, and, in his poem, he had transferred the joyous reaction of his soul from that inner realm to the flower to which that exquisite experience was the response. 

And this brings us back to our song:
  I may be right; I may be wrong:
But I’m perfectly willing to swear
  That when you turned and smiled at me
A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square. 

Was he right or was he wrong? A naturalist would shake his head very dubiously when told of that nightingale in Berkeley Square. Yet, beyond the shadow of a doubt, the singer was right; for, when love smiles into the eyes of love, there are larks and linnets and nightingales carolling from every branch. 

When she smiled, nightingales sang where no nightingales were, And, when He smiles, all life’s rockiest roads become leafy and fragrant lanes, the darkest night becomes bespangled with stars, the wilderness rejoices and blossoms as the rose, and all the mirages of life crystallize into shimmering and satisfying lakes. Wherefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God did beseech you by us, we pray you in Christ’s stead, be ye reconciled to God! 

-F.W. Boreham