MEN WHO WHISTLE.

Waikato Times, Volume XVI, Issue 1335, 20 January 1881, Page 3

MEN WHO WHISTLE.

Of men who whistle, few proceed to extremities of tune. It can hardly be said that they whistle for want of thought, because no habitual whistler wants to think. Whistling, "with the plurality of whistlers, merely serves as a signal which oalls attention to their existence, a fact otherwise at some risk of being overlooked. It is an effect of automatic instinct rather than of conscious intenton ; and its motive might be shared by the lower animals, if the lower animals ever suffered from uneasy self-esteem complicated with a sort of defiant mauvaise honte. There are whistlers who not only do not whistle *at their own eweet witt,' bnt who do evidently whistle against it. If they could rid themselves of the feeling which prompts whistling they would much rathernot whistle. If a sheep could refrain frowi baaing, in circumstances which render it undesirable, in his own interests, that he should baa, he would not baa. If a whistler could refrain from whistling when by whistling he make 3 himself feel as painfully foolish as a man in the aofc of whistling always looks, he would not whistle. Whistling is intensely and peculiarly English, and it has flourished very much of late years ; which fact looks a little awkward for the intellectual character, as well as personal manners, of the nation. Let any elderly person of good observation and memory try to think what would have been the effect upon a room full of people, in his salad days, had a steady continuous whistle been set up by any one in company. There were no railway carriages for people to whistle in ; but fancy if any passenger in a stagecoaoh had ventured to whistle ! Wo all know that a habit spreads very quickly, and that the habits of individuals become the habits of classes, and in time the habits of nations. There is just the connection between au individual and his country, through the classes with which he is most familiar, that there is between the sentiment of egotism and the sentiment of patriotism, through the middle sentiment of parochiality. This particular habit of whistling, theieforo, may have spread from a potboy to a People, passing through many Bteps of class-contagion by the way. But nothing — of habit or of anything else — can go on without conditions favourable to life. The gorm would starve, if all around it were sterile. There must be some congenial receptiveness in the man or boy who catches up a trick, and keeps it alive and going. Unconscious imitation is only a step ; and if not followed up by other steps it will lead nowhere, and end in nothing. Let us ask, then, what is the mental ground, what the nature of a man, in whom this habil ot whistling is taken up as a seed, and nourished into i - ank and rapid growth. Well, you will find as a rule, though of course not invariably, that lie is suspicious of observation, and yet somewhat desirous of being recognised, Probably he would not whistle if he were alone. If you enter the coffee-room of a club or hotel, and find him sitting there with nobody else, you do not find him whistling. But he will whistle before you hays been two minutes in the room. And if, on the other hand, you are first there, and he is the next comer, he will give a glance round, and, seeing somebody with whom he is not well acquainted, will assume an elaborate air of seeing nobody, will take up a book and throw it down again, look out of window or in the glass, ring for bvandy-and-soda-water — the want of something to drink being merely the want of something to do — and whistle till it comes. Few Frenchmen whistle, and Italians never. The French, indeed, have a proverb on the subject, which is not complimentary to their lively neighbours, ourselves. When Germans whistle, and it is not often they do, it is with melody prepense. They cultivate odd gifts of amusement, those convivial Teutons, and whistling is sometimes practised among them as an accomplishment. But is is precisely because a German whistles with skill that he keeps his endowment for service when called upon, and seldom whistles in public, oi'without being asked. The Englishman who cannot whistle does. Do we not all know the stolid fat man of few words, but of one unceasing sound, who is so entirely the creature of habit that he takes up the same position at regular periods, and if he cannot get his accustomed chair pines nervously in another ? But, in his place or out of it, he whistles softly and olcaginously, as if he would never grow thin. His whistle is vot the shrill piping of the plebeian youth, who suffers not the drowsy air to slumber, nor the sharp winter wind to thrill him into silence. It is a fat, round, soft, hard-breathing whistle, as of an elderly grampus overcome by heat. Then there is the restless man who whistles, and who, so far from gravitating to one loved spot, never sits five minutes in any. His whistle is the most irritating of all ; for ho seems to be perpetually suffering from a bad tune in the head, which he is vainly trying to whistle away. He is the unconscious object of many nicknames, bearing, some directly and others with ingenious remoteness, on his constitutional Mfflancy. Picco, Driver, Petrel, Decoy, Joel, Oysters, Riquet, Roarer are some of the obvious and enigmatic pseudonyms with which he ia affpetionately endowed by his acquaintance. The restless whistler is gre.it at the devil's tattoo. He beats that infernal rappel with his finger-nails on the table, on the crown of his hat, on anything responsive to the diabolical drumming. A knife or a poker will serve him in keeping up a steady tap-tap-tap for as bad a quarter of an hour as ever was chimed on a cracked bell. If chance should move him to put his hands in his pocket it is a dead certainty that he will whistle. For he is the bird of ill note ; the prophet of disturbance in the moral atmosphere ; the Mother Careys chick of the vexed life-sea. — World.