ON WHISTLING.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4571, 13 November 1875, Page 2 (Supplement)

ON WHISTLING.

(i Overland Athcnceum and Daily News, Madras.) The human voice is said to be the most perfect of all instruments. If it is I lay no further claim to musical taste. I abhor music in its highest forms at any rate, and prefer the abused barrel organ and kettle-drum, or the Hebrew lyre. I would rather have revived the instrument which was loudly sounded over Egypt’s dark sea-ee-ees, the sackbufc and other obsolete instruments, than have to listen to the occasional vocal efforts of desultory musicians. How long the efforts of a Philharmonic concert are in dying out ! They are continually bursting up out of throats whence they are least expected. Oh give me really classical music at a concert ? I love it less while lam listening to it than for the satisfaction I feel that my friends will not be continually warbling it out of their seraphico-comic countenances, while, peradventure, they move their arms as if in a state of levitation. Popular songs may be nice, so is champagne, so is flirting, but the consequences ! Of the first we can speak feelingly and strangely, of the second we have heard a groat deal, of the third we may have read in the Madras Times. How I have wished my friends would go bounding through upland and woodland and vale, and pitied any one who accepted the invitation to live with me [not me] and he my love. A precious lot of pleasures they would have to prove. I could wish that some of Annie Laurie’s admirers would lay down and dee. After all, there is an end to these echoes. The dabblers themselves get tired of being among the barley, or repeating confessions of inability to sing the old song. But some of them never can surmount the habit of whistling. It amounts to a disease, which has not obtained sufficient attention from the medical faculty. Whistlers differ as stars differ from one another, but we never heard one who could whistle equal to three pie worth of bamboo, or a pennyworth of perforated tin. It is said that people whose habitat has been elevated, often scratch their when the necessity for doing so no longer exists, and so we presume that men whistle inadvertently long after they know that whistling, except during the period of tubbing, is not in accordance with one’s duty to one’s neighbor. We have heard of men who considered whistling a fine art, and would accompany their labio-pneumatic efforts on a piano. Generally speaking, we should have preferred their being accompanied out of the room. During the once popular mess chorus to “There was an old farmer in Sussex did dwell,” wo have in our haste wished the whistlers where the farmer wished his wife. These bauds playing in an evening are responsible for any amount of whistling which we should be afraid to estimate. They put snatches of melody into the hollows of the heads of wellmeaning men, who not only persist in blowing them through their lips, but asking you what it was they blew. They blow and they blow until the phrase is distorted out of all pretension to melody or scale. Considering tho vast annoyance caused to men and women by tho prevalent vice of whistling, we may well ponder on the question, why do men whistle ? Women do not, although wo could well tolerate anything from their lips, but determined refusals. What impulse leads a mau to enclose a circular space with his Ups, then by sheer pneumatic force make the noise called whistling ? If the lips looked more elegant in this form there would bo a plea for whistling. But this is very rarely the case. Granted a moderate-sized mouth with the upper lip rather small, the personal appearance of the whistler may be tolerated. But granted a big mouth and a pent-roof upper lip and the whistler presents to you a facsimile of the extremity of an elephant’s trunk. Strange to say, tho latter class of whistlers are by far the more prevalent, and if whistling be a fine art, and not one of the ills that flesh is heir to, the big-mouthed are the most inefficient though the most persevering performers. We could read with greater comfort and interest between two large saws that were being sharpened than near an inveterate whistler. Unless the power of whistling were given for the same purpose as some suppose tongues are, for enabling the human species the more effectually to annoy each other, the proverb “ practice makes perfect” is the opposite of true. It is those who have the most practice who whistle the most excruciatingly. We once knew a man, given to boasting of the performances of his feet and hands, and it must be said, as it has been said of other great men, that he will leave many marks behind him, and perhaps carry some behind him also. His hands and feet, however, got somehow entangled in the law, and he accordingly wreaked his wrath on his fellow-creatures by whistling. We do not say that he ever meant to do more than experiment with his hands and feet, nor do we mean to insinuate that whistling was the result of more than constitutional vice. Lips were made to be used and so were lungs, and the simple combination is, we imagine, had recourse to when no more rational combination of the human functions occur to the whistler, just as men rattle their finger ends on a table, crack their joints, or exhibit other symptoms of at least temporary intellectual imbecility. Yet the whistler is not altogether irreclaimable. We never recollect hearing anyone whistle in church or at a funeral, and yet many whistlers are pious men. We often hear them humming the Old Hundredth, St. Ann’s, Rockingham, and others more lively. If the most experienced whistlers can thus restrain themselves, the spirit of restraint might be carried further. It is too true, however, that the dread solemnity of Cutcherry is insufficient to impose uniform restraint on whistlers. We have known some whistling at, in an attitude suggestive that they were talking to, ladies. It is impossible to lay down any salutary rule which whistlers could be expected to follow. They would whistle at it. We would recommend their medical advisers to prescribe brainial diet as a last resource.