Part 14

Perhaps the most laughable thing about the poor spavined Fallacies was the entire confidence with which they were trotted out. They were very old and very silly; they had again and again been refuted; yet they were always advanced in a manner which seemed to say: “Surely _this_ is an argument you have never heard before? Surely you will give up your humanitarian sentiment _now_?” As the frequent oral exposure of such inveterate sophisms was a tedious task, we found it convenient to print them, tabulated and numbered, each with its proper refutation, under some such title as “Familiar Fallacies,” or, borrowing from Sydney Smith, “The Noodle’s Oration”; and then, when some opponent came along exultingly with one or other of them, all we had to do was to send him the list, with a mark against his own delusion. Trust one who has tried the plan: it is more effective than any amount of personal talk. The man who will bore you to death with his pertinacious twaddle, in the belief that he is saying something new, will soon tire of it when he finds the whole story already in print, with a “See number--” written large in blue pencil against his most original argument.

But the League did not stop at that point: we felt ourselves competent, after years of experience, to carry the war into the enemies’ camp--to hoist them with their own petard by means of the _reductio ad absurdum_, a pretended defence of the very practices which we were attacking. The publication of the first and only number of _The Brutalitarian, a Journal for the Sane and Strong_, went far towards achieving our aims. The printers were inundated with requests for copies, and the editor (as I happen to know) received many letters of warm congratulation on his efforts “to combat the sickly sentiments of modern times.” The press, as a whole, regarded the new paper with amusement tempered with caution: some suspecting in it the hand of Mr. G. K. Chesterton, some of Mr. Bernard Shaw, while one venturesome editor hinted that the humanitarians themselves might have been concerned in it, but prudently added that “perhaps that would be attributing too much cleverness to the Humanitarian League.” So the authorship of the _Brutalitarian_, like that of the letters of Junius, remained a secret; but the laughter caused by its preposterous eulogies of Flogging put a stop for the time to the cry that had been raised in _Blackwood_ by Mr. G. W. Steevens and others, that “we have let Brutality die out too much.” They did not relish their own panacea, when it was served to them in an undiluted form, and with imbecility no less than brutality as its principal ingredient.

The Eton Beagles, of course, offered a tempting mark for satire, as it was easy to hit upon a strain of balderdash, in mock defence of hare-hunting, the absurdity of which would be apparent to the ordinary reader, yet would escape the limited intelligence of schoolboys and sporting papers. Accordingly, there appeared in 1907, two numbers of _The Beagler Boy_, conducted by two Old Etonians with the professed purpose of “saving a gallant school sport from extinction,” and with the ulterior design of showing that there is nothing too fatuous to be seriously accepted as argument by the upholders of blood-sports.

The success of the _Beagler Boy_ in this adventure was not for a moment in doubt. The Etonians were enthusiastic over it. The _Sportsman_ found it “a publication after our own heart,” and “far more interesting and invigorating than anything we are capable of”; and the hoax was welcomed in like manner by _Sporting Life_, _Horse and Hound_, and the _Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News_, a periodical described (by itself) as “bright, entertaining, and original.” One of the most solemnly comic notices was that in _Countryside_, Mr. E. Kay Robinson’s paper, which found the _Beagler Boy_ “clever and strenuous, but of course _ex parte_”; but the gem of the collection was a long and serious dissertation on “Boys and Beagles” in the _British Medical Journal_, which thought that its readers would be glad to have their attention directed to the new sporting organ. There was a _sauve qui peut_ among these worthy people when, from the general laughter in the press, they learnt that they had been imposed upon; but the shock was borne most good-humouredly. “Even the beagler boys,” as was remarked by the _Evening Standard_, “those of them, at least, who know how rare and precious an instrument satire is, may forgive, after they have read: perhaps some will even be converted.” Their disillusionment must certainly have been rather keenly felt at the time; like that of the lion who, as related in _The Man-Eaters of Tsavo_, had carried off what he thought was a coolie from the tent, only to find, when he had gone some distance, that it was a sack of sawdust.

The _Beagler Boy_ was added, by request, to Lord Harcourt’s collection of books, pamphlets, and other matter relating to Eton, which at a later date he presented to the School. It must, I feel sure, be gratifying to Sir George Greenwood, and to the other Old Etonian who collaborated with him in the editorship, to know that the fruits of their toil are thus enshrined in the archives of Eton College.

Some twelve months after the meteoric career of the _Beagler Boy_ it happened that there was a good deal of talk about an Eton Mission to China, which was to give the Chinese “an opportunity of the best education and of learning Christianity.” Then a very curious thing happened. A Chinese gentleman, Mr. Ching Ping, who was in England at the time, wrote to Dr. Lyttelton, the headmaster, and offered to conduct a Chinese Mission to Eton, in order to bring “a message of humanity and civilization to your young barbarians of the West.” The proposal was not accepted, and it was even hinted in the press that Mr. Ching Ping came from this side of Suez; but however that may have been, his letter to Dr. Lyttelton had a wide circulation, both in England and in the Far East.

Such were some of a faddist’s diversions; others too we had, of a different kind, for the every-day work that goes on behind the scenes in an office is by no means devoid of entertainment to one who is interested in the eccentricities of human nature, and is prepared to risk some wasted hours in studying them. There was a time when I went to the headquarters of the Humanitarian League in Chancery Lane almost daily for some years, and there had experience of many strange visitors and correspondents of every complexion--voluble cranks and genial impostors; swindlers begging for the cost of a railway-ticket to their distant and long-lamented homes; ex-convicts proposing to write their prison-story at the League’s expense; needy journalists anxious to pick up a paragraph; litigants who wanted gratuitous legal advice; and, worst of all, the confidential Bores who were determined to talk to one for hours together about what Mr. Stead used to call “the progress of the world.”

Nor did the post often fail to bring me some queer tidings--a letter perhaps, from some zealot who sent his latest pamphlet about “God’s Dumb Animals” (himself, alas! not one of them), with a request that it should be at once forwarded to the Pope; a voluminous work in manuscript, propounding, as its author assured me, “opinions of an extraordinary and undreamt of kind”; an anthology of Bible-texts in praise of some disputed practice; a suggestion that a notorious murderer should be flogged before being hanged; a grave remonstrance from a friend who feared that public abattoirs “would pave the way for Socialism”; a request from a very troublesome correspondent that the League would award a medal to a man who had saved her from drowning; two twenty-page epistles from an American lady, who, in the first, complimented me on my “markedly intelligent view of the universe,” and in the second told me frankly that I was a fool; a note inviting me to call at a certain address, to fetch a cat whom the writer wished me to destroy; and an urgent inquiry whether sea-sand was a healthy bedding for pigs. Such communications were the daily reward of those who sat in offices to promote humanitarian principles. It was remarkable how few persons volunteered for the work.

Even arbitration, of a most delicate and thankless sort, was thrust upon us. My opinion was once asked on a point of manners, by a young man who was a member of the Humanitarian League. He had never been in the habit of doffing his hat to ladies; he hardly knew how to do so; yet having come to London from Arcadia he found himself upbraided for not making the customary obeisance to the wife of his employer. What was he to do? I gave him what I thought was the tactful advice, that he should so far make compromise as to raise his hat slightly, eschewing flourishes. A fortnight later he returned in reproachful mood, with the news that my too slender regard for principle had had a disastrous result. He had met the lady on the steps of some underground station, and in his attempt to bow to her, had dropped his hat in the stream of outgoing passengers, where it had been trampled underfoot.

All this was well enough for an amateur like myself who could withdraw when it became unbearable; but it made me understand why the official secretaries of propagandist societies often acquire a sort of defensive astuteness which is wrongly ascribed to some inborn cunning in their character. To do reform work in an office open at certain hours, is like being exposed as a live-bait where one may be nibbled at by every prowling denizen of the deep, or, to speak more accurately, of the shallows; and it is no exaggeration to say that the secretarial work of a cause is hindered much less by its avowed enemies than by its professed friends. Among zoophilists, especially, there are a number of good people, ladies, who go about talking of their “mercy-work,” yet show a merciless indifference to the value of other persons’ time. Here, incidentally, I may say that one of the most considerate visitors whom I ever saw at the office of the Humanitarian League was Mr. G. K. Chesterton, who repeatedly expressed his fears that, if he occupied much of my time, our friends the animals might be the sufferers. “Can you assure me,” he said, “that, if I stay a few minutes longer, no elephant will be the worse for it?”

By far the most deadly consumer of humanitarian energies is the benevolent Bore. There was a very good and worthy old gentleman who used to pay me frequent visits, the reason of which I did not discover till many years later; on several occasions he brought with him a written list of questions to be put to me, twelve or more perhaps in number, the only one of which I still remember was the not very thrilling inquiry: “Now, Sir, do you read the _Echo_?” In particular he pressed on my attention, as demanding most earnest study, a book called _The Alpha_, written by a friend of his, and differing, as he explained to me, from all other printed works in this--that whereas _they_ expressed merely the opinions of their respective writers, _The Alpha_ conveyed the actual and absolute truth. In my liking and respect for a sincere friend of our cause, I not only replied as well as I could to his string of questions, but even made an attempt to read _The Alpha_ itself: here, however (as with _The Works of Henry Heavisides_ mentioned in a previous chapter), I failed so utterly that all I could do was to agree with the donor of the book that it was certainly unique. This was too ambiguous to satisfy him; he was disappointed in me, and from that time his visits were fewer, till they altogether ceased: thus _The Alpha_ became in a manner the Omega or the end of our intercourse. After his death I learnt that he had left money to found a Society; and then only did I comprehend why he had “sampled” the Humanitarian League with such assiduous care. Without knowing it, we had been weighed in the balance and found wanting: we were not capable of so great and sacred a trust.

Sometimes the visitation came from oversea; in one case we unwittingly brought it on ourselves, by sending to the Madrid papers an account of a scandalous scene that had taken place with the Royal Buckhounds, our object being to show that British deer-hunting and Spanish bull-baiting came of the same stock. We did not know with what zest the Spanish papers had taken to the subject, till one day there arrived in Chancery Lane an infuriated American, who told us that his work in the Canary Islands had been blasted and ruined by our action. For years, he said, he had preached kindness to animals, making England his exemplar, and now at one fell swoop all his labours had been demolished, for the story of the British stag-bait had gone like wild-fire through the Spanish papers, and thence to the Canaries. We expressed our sincere regret to him for this mishap, but tried to make him see that it was no fault of ours if he had based his propaganda on a false principle, viz. the superiority of Anglo-Saxon ethics, instead of on the universal obligation of humaneness. It was useless. He consumed much time in excited talk, and went away unappeased. This incident should be classed, I feel, not with our diversions, but with our tribulations; but having no chapter on the latter theme, I must let it remain where it stands.

But here some of my readers may be wondering why the office of the Humanitarian League should have been so open to attack: they imagine it perhaps as a luxurious suite of apartments, one within the other, with a hall-porter in the outer premises, skilled in the art of the sending the undesirable visitor into space. In reality, the circumstances of the League were very humble, and its housing was in accord with its income; some of our friends, in fact, used to be pleased to chaff us by quoting that well-known verse in Lowell’s stanzas to Lloyd Garrison:

In a small chamber, friendless and unseen, Toiled o’er his types one poor unlearn’d young man; The place was dark, unfurnitured and mean; Yet there the freedom of a race began.

Thus it was that, with an ante-room of very diminutive size, we were almost at the mercy of any one who opened the outer door; for though the secretary of the League, Miss Whitaker, would rush forward most devotedly to bear the brunt of the charge, not a few of our assailants were through the front lines, and well in our midst, before we were aware of it. To this I owe my not inconsiderable knowledge of the time-devouring Bore.

Among the ex-prisoners who visited us were occasionally some very good fellows, with a real wish to do something to improve the penal system, which they all described as thoroughly bad; but as a rule they lacked the power of expressing what they knew, or were hampered by some personal ailment. There was one, a quiet civil man, who was anxious to give a lecture before the League, and assured us that, though he was prone to drink, he would take care that none of his lapses should coincide with the date of his appearance on our platform. That was a risk which we were not disposed to take; but strange to say, the very disaster which we shunned in this case actually befell us, a year or two afterwards, at a most respectable meeting which we organized jointly with another Society. On the very stroke of the clock, when the audience was all seated in expectation, and the chairman was ready to ascend the platform, supported by the members of our Committee, the news reached us that the lecturer himself could not be present: it was _he_ in fact, who was having to be “supported,” in another and more literal sense.

Ex-warders did not often favour us with a visit; but one there was who had been employed in Reading Gaol at the time when Oscar Wilde was imprisoned there: such was his story, and I had no reason to disbelieve it. He told me several edifying anecdotes, among them the following: It used to be a great hardship to Wilde that the glazed window of his cell allowed him no skyward view (one recalls his allusion, in _The Ballad of Reading Gaol_, to “that little tent of blue, which prisoners call the sky”); and once, when the prison chaplain was visiting him, he spoke sorrowfully of this grievance. But the chaplain only offered him spiritual comfort, and urged him to lift up his thoughts “to Him who is above the sky”; whereat Wilde, suddenly losing his patience, exclaimed, “Get out, you d----d fool!” and pushed him to the door. For this he was reported to the Governor.

The League had not often the honour of finding itself in agreement with the Prison Commissioners; but we did think that they were wise to decline the too generous offer of a body calling itself the Poetry Recital Society to read poetry to prisoners. The words, “I was in prison, and ye came unto me,” would receive a new and fearful significance, if a number of versifiers and reciters were to be let loose on the helpless inmates of our gaols. It seemed barbarous on the part of these minstrels to try to secure an audience which had no choice in the matter, and which had not got even an open window to jump through if the strain should have become too acute.

Of beggars and swindlers we had no lack in Chancery Lane; it suited their purpose to regard a Humanitarian League as primarily designed for the relief of the impecunious; its very name, they felt, could imply nothing less. They were mostly young men who seemed to act in concert; for they usually came, as if on circuit, at certain times of the year. Their mentality was of a low order (or they thought that ours was), for though they showed a certain ingenuity in collecting previous information about the parties on whom they tried to impose, they often presented their case so badly as to make it palpably absurd. Sometimes, however, a really clever and humorous rogue would make his appearance. There was one such who began a wordy statement that if I would but grant him twenty minutes, he could convince me that he was deserving of half a crown; but when I hinted that if the interview was going to cost me half a crown, I would rather be spared the twenty minutes, his solemnity fell from him like a cloud, and with a twinkling eye he said that he would be only too pleased to cut his story as short as I liked.

When I was a master at Eton I used to subscribe to the Charity Organization Society, and I was presented by that austere body with a number of tickets, one of which was to be given to every beggar who called; but the trouble was that the tramps declined to regard the “scrap of paper” seriously, and informed us, in effect, that when they asked for bread we were offering them a stone. It certainly did not seem quite a human way of treating a fellow-being; unless one could hold the comfortable belief, confidently expressed to me by one of my Eton colleagues, a very religious man, that every mendicant one meets has had a good chance in life, and has deliberately thrown it away. The logic of that view was to say “no” to everybody.

I once had an opportunity of seeing the exactly opposite theory put into practice. When I was living in Surrey, I had a visit from Prince Kropotkin, who was looking for a house in the district, and we spent a day in walking about on that quest. We met a troop of beggars whose appearance was decidedly professional; and I noticed that Kropotkin at once responded to their appeal. Later in the day we fell in with the same party, and again, when they told their tale of woe, Kropotkin put his hand in his pocket. At this I ventured to ask him whether he had observed that they were the same lot; to which he replied: “Oh, yes. I know they are probably impostors and will drink the money at the public house; but _we_ are going back to our comfortable tea, and I cannot run the risk of refusing help where it may possibly be needed.” If in this matter one sympathizes with Kropotkin rather than with the Charity Organization folk, I suppose it is on Shelley’s principle--that he would “rather be damned with Plato and Lord Bacon than be saved with Paley and Malthus.”

I will conclude this chapter on our diversions with a rather diverting passage from Mr. George Moore’s _Confessions_:

“Self, and after self, a friend; the rest may go to the devil; and be sure that when any man is more stupidly vain and outrageously egotistic than his fellows, he will hide his hideousness in humanitarianism.... Humanitarianism is a pigsty where liars, hypocrites, and the obscene in spirit congregate; it has been so since the great Jew conceived it, and it will be so till the end. Far better the blithe modern pagan in his white tie and evening clothes, and his facile philosophy. He says: ‘I don’t care how the poor live; my only regret is that they live at all’; and he gives the beggar a shilling.”

Many years ago, at a meeting of the Shelley Society, I had the pleasure of a talk with Mr. George Moore; and I remember that when he asked me what work I was doing, and I said it was mostly humanitarian, there came over his expressive face a look of half-incredulous surprise and disgust--the sort of look a bishop might give to one who coolly remarked that he had just committed the sin against the Holy Ghost. I was rather puzzled at the moment; and it was not till long after, when I read Mr. Moore’s _Confessions_, that I realized of what crimes I had convicted myself in his eyes by my too careless avowal. But as for “the blithe modern pagan,” I suspect he would be a little less blithe if his wish were fulfilled, and the poor did not live at all; for how then would he obtain his evening clothes and his white tie? He would have to live entirely, one fears, upon his “facile philosophy,” as snails were once reputed to subsist on their own succulence.

XIII

HOOF-MARKS OF THE VANDAL

The barbarian gives to the earth he lives on an aspect of rough brutality.--ELISÉE RECLUS.

Humanitarianism is not merely an expression of sympathy with pain: it is a protest against all tyranny and desecration, whether such wrong be done by the infliction of suffering on sentient beings, or by the Vandalism which can ruthlessly destroy the natural grace of the earth. It is in man’s dealings with the mountains, where, owing to the untameable wildness of the scenery, any injury is certain to be irreparable, that the marks of the modern Vandal are most clearly seen.