An Angler at Large/Chapter 10
These mornings I fish to slow music, for the wind sits ever in the N.W. As I near the island the breeze takes on a new kind of voice. Its sigh becomes melodious; faint breaths of harmony intermingle with its whisper; its very lulls are tuneful. Where, hitherto, the cuckoos and the larks, the sheep and the cattle, the reeds and the poplars alone have raised their untutored voices, the meadows are vocal with arpeggios. The Spring Song of Mendelssohn is distinguishable, sometimes above, sometimes below that of the valley.
It is at this time of the day that my wife practises.
Is there something in the harp which makes it more akin to Nature than any other instrument? In solitudes such as these one rarely hears any human music. A piano may tinkle in a cottage (for we are so excessively educated nowadays), a travelling gramophone may stutter and wheeze from the high road, a mouth-organ may go by at the march, a hurdy-gurdy clatter out with impartial gusto a waltz or a hymn. These are the instruments of the countryside. Or a Flower Show may provide a brass band all the afternoon. And I have endured fiddling. This surely exhausts the list. Until I heard the harp thus, I denied the right of human beings to make music in chalk valleys. Let them keep to those rivers where men in starched collars punt girls under Japanese umbrellas. It does not matter to me that on such waters—more streets than streams—the banjo and the concertina, the mandolin, the cornet thump, wheeze, twang, and blare. I am not there. In this valley, however, I have always resented the intrusions of music—until now.
Whether the harp is really wilder than other instruments I cannot say. That it is this alleged savagery which renders it pleasing to my ear in this place I do not think. It may be so, but I have a suspicion that a 'cello or a flute, or a sackbut for that matter, under the same conditions, would be to me similarly agreeable. For when the harp sounds it sings to me of matters which lie entirely outside the scope of æsthetics. It is a new voice in the valley, and it carries messages to me which the old never reported. Perhaps to the wooing strains of Gounod's Serenade I seek to lure that four-pound trout which persists within the Island glide. Or, again, when I have risen and lost him, it is Consolation which celebrates the event. But whatever the music and whatever the fortune, I am assured, by the harp, that everything that was once good is now a thousandfold better, and that there is nothing bad anywhere at all.