Critical Studies Part 16

A little dog of Maltese breed, who belonged to my mother, was inconsolable at her death. For three weeks he refused all food, and was kept alive by nourishment artificially administered. He sat up, and begged, day after day, before her bed and before her favourite chair, until he dropped from sheer exhaustion. He wanted for nothing that I could give him; and no habit of his daily life was changed; but he was unhappy. Whenever the door opened he thought she entered. He ran and looked into every stranger's face. He knew everything which had belonged to her. His sorrow injured his health; his heart became weak, and he died of cardiac paralysis at six years old.

What could human affection offer superior in fidelity and feeling?

'That loving heart, that patient soul, Had they indeed no longer span To run their course, and reach their goal, And read their homily to man?'

I think that not only is their affection undervalued, but that the intelligence of animals is greatly underrated. Man having but one conception of intelligence, his own, does not endeavour to comprehend another which is different, and differently exhibited and expressed. I have before now said in print that if our mind exceeds the mind of animals and birds in much, theirs exceeds ours at least in some things, as their sight, scent, and hearing far surpa.s.s ours.

When we remember also that these other races are absolutely alone, are never aided by man, are only, on the contrary, hindered by him, opposed, thwarted, and persecuted by him, their achievements are, relatively to their opportunities, much more wonderful than any of his.

The elements which are his great foes are likewise theirs; they have to encounter and suffer all the woes of tempest, hurricane, flood, the width of barren seas, the hunger on solitary sh.o.r.es; and they have also in his ruthless and unceasing spite an enemy more cruel than any with which he himself has to contend. If we meditate on this unquestionable fact, we shall be forced to admit that Cristoforo Colombo was not a greater hero than many a little swallow.

But scarcely anyone does meditate on these marvels; one in a million, one in a generation, at the most. To nearly the whole of humanity the wonderful and beautiful races with which the world teems, which are for ever living side by side with the human, do not exist except in so far as they contribute to the pleasure of slaughter, or the greed of commerce, or of gambling. For to the majority of men and women all organisms except their own are as though they were not.

There is no sympathy with these interesting and mysterious lives led side by side with man, but ignored by him entirely, except when by him persecuted. The nest of the weaver bird is to the full as ingenious and as marvellous as the dome of St Peter's or St Paul's. The beaver State, and the bee State, are as intricate in organisation as the Const.i.tution of the French Republic, and the British Monarchy, and are distinctly superior in many parts of their organisation to either of these. The pa.s.sage of the white ants through a jungle and across a continent is quite as admirable in unison and skill and order as the human march to Chitral; and the annual flights of the storks, of the Solan geese, of the wild ducks, exhibit qualities of obedience to a chosen commander, of endurance, of observation, and of wisdom, not exceeded by any human Arctic or Australian exploring party.

The vain-glorious a.s.sumption that we have a monopoly of what is called reason cannot be allowed by those who bring a reason of their own, unbia.s.sed, to the study of animals, not under the unnatural conditions of the laboratory, but in natural freedom and peace.

No skill of a Stanley or a Nansen ever exceeded that of the hound Maida in tracing Sir Walter Scott, and no journey of a Burton or a Speke was ever so wonderful as the migratory voyage of a martin or a nightingale.

I have said this ere now; and it can never be repeated too often, for nothing is so cruel as the vanity of man, and nothing so opposed to his own true progress as his blind and dogged contempt for all races not shaped exactly like his own.

The correspondence which has been general in the English press regarding the muzzling of dogs, has been conspicuous for its silliness, ignorance, and cruelty, but above all by its disgusting selfishness; and an editor of a very popular organ was not ashamed to print that if only one human life could be saved, etc., etc., disregarding the fact that men were at the time being slaughtered by dysentery and fever, by the scores, for no better object than to go and cut down cotton trees at Cooma.s.sie; whilst deaths by starvation, a perfectly preventible cause, are so common in English cities that the reports of them scarcely awaken a pa.s.sing regret or compa.s.sion. The veneration for human life which is developed by journalists when a lion kills his gaoler, or when a dog is supposed to have been the cause of his tormentor's death, is comical in these gentlemen of the press, who, to help a speculation, open out a new mart, or influence the share lists, will ravenously demand a military expedition, or a naval demonstration, to sabre, sh.e.l.l, burn, and ravage upon distant strands.

The att.i.tude of the Brahmin, to whom all forms of life are sacred, is intelligible, estimable, and consistent; the att.i.tude of the savage conqueror, to whom thousands of dead men and thousands of dead beasts are alike so much carrion, is intelligible and reasonable, whilst brutal. The att.i.tude of the journalist and county councilman is not either; it possesses neither logic nor common sense, and is not estimable or reasonable, but only contemptible.

If there be one thing more loathsome than the carnage of war, it is the Red Cross societies following in its train. But the modern world, being conscious that the butchery of war ill accords with its aesthetic and religious pretensions, gives a sop to its conscience by sending the ambulance side by side with the gun carriage. A more robust and more honest temper did not evade the truth that the least brutal war is the one most immediately and conclusively destructive; the slaughter of wounded men was more truly merciful than the modern system of surgery and nursing, which saves shattered const.i.tutions and ruined health to drag out a miserable and artificially prolonged existence.

There is, however, something which the ordinary human mind finds soothing and delightful in this formula of 'the sanct.i.ty of human life,'

when combined with a corresponding disregard for human and for all other life. The good Christian likes to be raised aloft, in his own eyes, from all those other races which he imagines were given to him for his use and abuse by a gracious Deity. He loves to think that both G.o.d and the neighbouring policeman are watching over him; and taking care alike of his soul and of his greatcoat. In the enormous vanity of the Christian who believes all the laws of the universe altered for him, or in the equally enormous vanity of the scientist who arrogates to himself the right to dogmatise on the mysteries of creation, this att.i.tude is not surprising. But in either the philosophic mind; or the poetic temperament, it is so because to the philosopher the difference between the human and the other races cannot appear very great, whilst to the poet the solidarity of all sentient life must always seem unquestionable. That friend, and scholar, and poet for whom I mourn as freshly as though he had died but yesterday did not disdain to greet a brother's spirit in

'That liquid, melancholy eye From whose pathetic, soul-fed springs Seem'd surging the Virgilian cry, The sense of tears in mortal things,'

for these lines were written by Matthew Arnold to 'only a dog.'

It is not in foolishly endeavouring to make animals our prisoners and puppets, in trying to force them to count, to caper, or to play cards, that we reach insight into their natures and their minds. It is in loving them and respecting them as he loved and respected Geist and Kai.

I use the latter word advisedly, for whoever does not in a fair degree, as with a human friend, respect the freedom, the preference, and the idiosyncrasy of an animal will never reach true comprehension of him.

A writer wrote the other day, 'People speak of the law of nature; but who feels it? There is no such emotion known in the ordinary life of the world.' The persons who will let their dinner wait whilst they watch a sunset fade over sea or moor, or who will leave the share list unread to see the morning dew make silver globes of the gossamer in the gra.s.s, are so few that they may almost be said not to exist, if we except a poet here, an artist there; and the sense of kinship with races not human can only come to those whose own kinship with earth and air and sky is strong enough to resist the dulling and debasing influences of artificial life, of life amongst men and their trivialities, frauds, and vanities.

'The sun is G.o.d,' said Turner, when he lay dying, and, alas! saw that sun only through the mists of London. But how many see the sun at all, even when they live where it is most radiant? How many think of the sun during the long day it illumines? The light is taken as a matter of course, as our breath is drawn through our lungs. There is no grat.i.tude for it.

In similar manner there is no sense of kinship with the winged children of the air, with the four-footed dwellers beside us on the earth. Almost the only recognition we give them is maltreatment. At other times the indifference of our unspeakable fatuity rises in a dust cloud between us and them. Of grat.i.tude for their companionship, their aid, their patience, their many virtues, there is not a trace in those who use them and abuse them, no more than there is grat.i.tude for the beauty of the rose or the fragrance of the violet.

As 'the winds of March take the world with beauty,' every pasture and coppice is full of blossom, pa.s.sed unnoticed by thousands in every daily country walk; so in the same manner do the mult.i.tudes trample down, and pa.s.s by, the ineffable charm and fragrance of disregarded affections, and unappreciated qualities, in the other races of earth.

Hang a poor woodland bird in a cage, if you can bear to look on such a captive, above a blossoming honeysuckle or hawthorn, and note his anguish of remembrance, his ecstasy of hope, his frantic effort to be free. But the accursed wires are between him and the familiar blossoms, between him and the blue sky; in a little while he realises that he is a prisoner; the fluttering joy goes out of his heart and his wings; his feathers grow ruffled and dull, his eyes are veiled, he sits motionless and heartbroken, and the breeze of the springtime blows past him, and never more will bear him on its buoyant way.

Living wild song-birds are sold at a halfpenny each by thousands in the London slums, and as many more die--nay, thrice as many more--before they reach the streets, packed close and jammed together in hampers and crates.

Yet the English Home Secretary, on being asked by a deputation to put an end to this abominable traffic, answered that it was desirable to do as little as possible in the way of legislation!

For legislators, always eager to make cruel and coercive laws, prefer to let humane ones be subst.i.tuted by what they call 'the gradual education of the people.' But this gradual education is so extremely gradual that its progress is imperceptible; it may even be justly suspected that it is chiefly a backward movement; and such education, as far as education by example goes, is hindered, not helped, by what are called the cultured cla.s.ses.

In this, our own present day, bull fights become at once popular wherever they are allowed, and with women as much so as with men, and I am certain that if the gladiatorial shows of Imperial Rome were introduced at Olympia the London crowds would in the main be delighted with them, and the London women would eagerly turn down their thumbs.

Why not? They go to see the tight-rope walking and the trapeze jump at the Crystal Palace and the Aquarium; and the only possible attraction in these is the probability that in each case the performers will be killed one day; apart from this chance there is no interest whatever in the spectacle. If the authorities were induced to permit them, gladiatorial shows would become so popular with the women of Belgravia and Mayfair that no one would care for anything less exciting, and the Oxford and Cambridge sports would be deserted with contempt as offering no attraction.

The desire for excitement is the most conspicuous feature, and the most dangerous disease of the age; anything which provides it is welcome; people are bored despite their incessant search of distraction, and anything which will exorcise the spectre of boredom is eagerly received; and after all it would be absurd if persons who go to see steeplechases pretended to be too squeamish to cry the 'Habet'! Let the managers of Olympia obtain permission for gladiatorial games (death being guaranteed), and I will promise them that "all London" in the most fashionable sense of those words will crowd from April to August to see the sport. If the ladies could be allowed to descend into the arena, to touch the dying bodies, as Nero used to like to do, to see the faint life still lingering shrink and writhe, this success would be still greater; and Nero was but a primitive creature, he had but a heated iron wand, whereas my ladies could be provided by their favourite scientist with the much more excruciating torment of electricity. Imagine what exquisite little jewelled instruments of torture, made to fasten on to a bracelet, or hide within a ring, would fill the shops in Bond Street and Piccadilly. 'We are going electrolysing!' would be heard from all the pretty lips of the leaders of society; and they would cease to care for their bicycles, and auto-cars, and even for the discussion of actresses'

new gowns. 'How many dead 'uns did you knock off last night?' their most intimate friend would ask, as he would lean over the rails in Rotten Row, sucking the crook of his cane.

Does this appear exaggerated and libellous?[11] Well, let us look at the example given by a London leader of fashion and politics as she goes down at election time to shed sweetness and light around her in Poplar or Sh.o.r.editch.

[Footnote 11: To know how possible this is, look at the women of fashion at the Cape in this springtime of 1900, with their admirable toilettes, their lovely false hair, their bird-adorned hats, their picnics and their dinners and their cheery t.i.tter: 'Let us go and see the wounded!'

_vide_ the testimony of Mr Treves, the eminent surgeon.]

In her bonnet is, of course, an osprey aigrette; she knows it was torn from a living creature, but then that was done far away in some Asiatic or American creek or forest, and so really does not matter. Her Suede gloves fit like her skin; they were the skin of a kid, and were probably stripped from its living body as this lends suppleness to the skin. The jacket she carries on her arm is lined with Astrakhan fur, which was taken from an unborn lamb to give to the fur that curl and kink which please her; it has been cut from its mother's ripped-up womb. Her horses, as they wait for her at the corner of the street, have their heads fixed in air, and the muscles of their necks cramped by immovable bearing-reins. Her j.a.panese pug runs after her, shaking his muzzle-tortured nose. She has a telegram in her pocket which has momentarily vexed her. She sent her sable collie to the dog-exhibition at Brussels, and the excitement, or the crush, or the want of water, or something, has brought on heat apoplexy, and they wire that he is dead, poor old nervous Ossian! She really has no luck, for her Java sparrows died too at the bird show in Edinburgh, because the footman, sent with them, forgot to fill their water-gla.s.s when it got dry on the journey; a great many people send birds to shows with n.o.body at all to take care of them, so she feels that she was not to blame in the very least.

'Why will you show?' says her husband, who is vexed about Ossian; 'you don't want to win and you don't want to sell.'

'Oh, everybody does it,' she answers.

He goes into his study to console himself with a new model of a pole trap; and she, her canva.s.sing done, runs upstairs to see her gown for the May Drawing-Room. The train is of quite a new design, embroidered with orchids in natural colours, and fringed with the feathers of the small green parrakeet, a beautiful little bird which has been poisoned by hundreds in the jungles of New Guiana to make the border to this _manteau de cour_.

If she were told that she is a more barbaric creature than the squaw of the poor Indian trapper who poisoned the parrakeets, she would be equally astonished and offended.

Let us now look at her next-door neighbour; he is a very wealthy person and seldom refuses a subscription, thinks private charity pernicious and pauperising, attends his church regularly, and votes in the House of Commons in favour of pigeon-shooting and spurious sports. If anyone asks him if he 'likes animals' he answers cheerily, 'Oh, dear me, yes. Poor creatures, why not?' But it does not disturb him that the horse in the hansom cab, which he has called to take him to the City, has weals all over its loins, and a bit that fills its mouth with blood and foam; nor does he notice the over-driven and half-starved condition of a herd of cattle being taken from Cannon Street to Smithfield, but only curses them heartily for blocking the traffic.

He eats a capon, drives behind a gelding, warms himself at a hearth of which the coal has been procured by untold sufferings of man and beast, has his fish crimped, and his lobsters scalded to death, in his kitchens, relishes the green fat cut from a living turtle, reads with approbation his head keeper's account of the last pair of owls on his estate having been successfully trapped, writes to that worthy to turn down two thousand more young pheasants for the autumn shooting, orders his agent to have his young cattle on his home-farm dishorned, and buys as a present for his daughters a card case made from the sh.e.l.l of a tortoise which was roasted alive, turned on its back on the fire to give the ruddy glow to its sh.e.l.l. Why not? His favourite preacher and his popular scientist alike a.s.sure him that all the subject races are properly sacrificed to man. It is obviously wholly impossible to convince such a person that he is cruel: he merely studies his own convenience, and he has divine and scientific authority for considering that he is perfectly right in doing so. He is quite comfortable, both for time and for eternity. It were easier to change the burglar of the slums, the brigand of the hills, than to change this self-complacent and pachydermatous householder who represents nine-tenths of the ruling cla.s.ses.

Let us not mistake; he is not personally a cruel man; he would not himself hurt anything, except in sport which he thinks is legitimate, and in science which he is told is praiseworthy; he is amiable, good-natured, perhaps benevolent, but he is wrapped up in habits, customs, facts, egotisms, tyrannies which all seem to him to be good, indeed to be essential. His horse is a thing to him like his mail phaeton; his dog is a dummy, like his umbrella stand; his cattle are wealth-producing stores, like his timber or wheat; he uses them all as he requires, as he uses his hats and gloves. He sees no more unkindness in doing away with any of them than in discarding his old boots, and he pa.s.ses the most atrocious laws and by-laws for animal torment as cheerfully as he signs a cheque payable to self.

His ears are wadded by prejudice, his eyes are blinded by formula, his character is steeped in egotism; you might as well try, I repeat, to touch the heart of the Sicilian brigand or the London crib-cracker as to alter his views and opinions; you would speak to him in a language which is as unintelligible to his world as Etruscan to the philologist.

The majority of his friends, like himself, lead their short, bustling, b.u.mptious, and frequently wholly useless lives, purblind always and entirely deaf where anything except their own interests is concerned.

They think but very rarely of anything except themselves, and the compet.i.tions, ambitions, or jealousies which occupy them. But in their pastimes cruelty is to them acceptable; it is an outlet for the barbarian who sleeps in them, heavily drugged but not dead; the sight of blood t.i.tillates agreeably their own slow circulation.

Between them, and the cad who breaks the back of the bagged rabbit, there is no difference except in the degree of power to indulge the slaughter-l.u.s.t.

Alas! it were easier 'to quarry the granite rock with razors' than to touch the feelings of such as this man, or this woman, where their vanities, or their mere sheep-like love of doing as others do, are in question. Princesses wear osprey tufts and lophophorus wings, and so society wears them too, and cares not a straw by what violence and wickedness they are procured; as the ladies, who attend their State concerts, sleep none the worse when in their country houses because the rabbit screams in the steel gins, and the hawk struggles in the pole trap, in the woods about their ancestral houses, and have no less appet.i.te for luncheon amongst the bracken or the heather because shot and bleeding creatures lie half dead in the game bags around, or because the stag often is stretched in his dead majesty before their eyes. Why, then, should they care because in far distant lands little feathered creatures, lovely as flowers, innocent as the dew and the honey they feed on, are killed by the thousands and tens of thousands because a vulgar and depraved taste demands their tender bodies?

What does it matter to them that, through their demands, the bird of paradise has become so rare that, unless stringent measures be taken at once, it will be soon totally extinct, and the golden glory of its plumes will gleam no more in tropical sunlight? What does it matter to them that the herons in all their various kinds, the osprey, the egret, the crane, the ibis, are scarcely seen now in the southern and middle States of America, and, when seen, are no longer together in confident colonies, as of yore, but nesting singly and in fear? 'Practically all our heronries are deserted. The birds have been slaughtered for their plumes,' writes a physician[12] dwelling in the Delaware valley. 'What were common birds in their season half a century ago are now rarely seen. The struggle for existence has been a violent one and the herons have been worsted. Scarcely a word of protest has been heard, and none that has been effectual.' Women of the world know this, or at least have been told it fifty times; but it makes no impression on them. They will wear osprey-aigrettes as long as any are left in commerce, and they think a humming-bird looks so pretty in their hair. What else matters?

[Footnote 12: Charles Conrad Abbott, M.D.]

That their example is copied by the women of the middle cla.s.ses with swallows and warblers, and by the servant girl and factory girl with dyed sparrows and finches, makes no impression on them; if the fact be noticed to them they say that the common people always will be ridiculous, and stop their carriage in Bond Street to buy fire-screens made of owls, or an electric lamp hung in the beak of a stuffed flamingo.

Why should they care, indeed!--they who walk with the guns, even if they do not do more and secure a warm corner for their own shot; they who bring up their young sons to regard the cowardly and brutal sport of battue-shooting as the supreme pleasure and privilege of youth, and see unmoved their beautiful autumnal woods turned into slaughter-places?

One cannot but reflect how different might the world have been if women had been different in mind and temper; if, instead of their smiling, self-complacent t.i.ttering approbation of brutality, they had shown scorn for and abhorrence of brutality. They clamour for electoral rights and leave all this vast field of influence unoccupied and untilled! They do little or nothing to soften the hearts or refine the feelings of the men who love them, or to bring up their children in any sympathy with animal life. Sport has become fashionable with them in the last twenty years, and the crack shot in the coverts of Chantilly this winter was a woman. Sporting clothes, breeches and gaiters, are now a recognised part of the fashionable woman's toilet.

I would not affirm (anomaly as it appears) that the pursuit of sport cannot co-exist with a love of animals, for I have known many sporting men and hunting men who were in a sense sincerely devoted to some animals. But sport inevitably creates deadness of feeling. No one could take pleasure in it who was sensitive to suffering; and therefore its pursuit by women is much more to be regretted than its pursuit by men, because women pursue much more violently and recklessly what they pursue at all; and it is impossible for the sportswoman logically and effectively to exercise any influence on her young children which could incline them to mercy--such an influence as Lamartine's mother had on him to the day of his death.