Part 6

One animal is missing from Plutarch’s portrait gallery—the cat, to which he only concedes the ungracious allusion “that man had not the excuse of hunger for eating flesh, like the weasel or cat.” Can we make good the omission from other sources?

There is a general notion that cats “were almost unknown to Greek and Roman antiquity”—these are the words of so well-informed a writer as M. S. Reinach. Yet instances exist of paintings of cats on Greek vases of the fifth century, and I was interested to see in the Museum at Athens a well-carved cat on a stele. Aristotle, who, like Plutarch, mentions cats in connexion with weasels (both, he says, catch birds), reckons the time they live at six years, less than half the life of an average modern cat; this may indicate that though known, they were not then acclimatised in Europe. Æsop has four fables of cats: 1. A cat dressed as a physician offers his services to an aviary of birds; they are declined. 2. A cat seeks an excuse for eating a cock; he fails to find the excuse, but eats the cock all the same. 3. A cat pretends to be dead so that mice may come near her. 4. A cat falls in love with a handsome young man and induces Venus to change her into a lovely maiden. But on a mouse coming into the room, she scampers after it. Venus, being displeased, changes her back into a cat. This belongs to a large circle of folk-tales, and probably all these fables came from the East.

Herodotus tells as a “very marvellous thing” that cats are apt to rush back into a burning house, and that the Egyptians try to save them, even at the risk of their lives, but rarely succeed: hence great lamentation. Also, that if a cat die in a house all the dwellers in it shave their eyebrows; “the cats, when they are dead, they carry for burial to the city of Bubastis.” The Egyptian name for light (and for cat) is _Mau_, and the inference is irresistible, that the Egyptians supposed the cat to be constantly apostrophizing the sacred light of which she was the symbol. Nothing shows the strength of tradition better than the existence of an endowment at Cairo for the feeding and housing of homeless cats.

If the cat in Europe had been a rarity so great as most people think, it would have been more highly prized. It seems nearer the truth to say that it was not admired. Its incomplete domestication which attracts us, did not attract the ancient world. Tame only so far as it suits their own purposes, cats patronize man, looking down upon him from a higher plane, which, if only the house-top, they make a golden bar.

“Chat mystérieux, Chat séraphique, chat étrange ... Peut-être est-il fée, est-il dieu?”

Greeks and Romans preferred a plain animal to this half-elf, half-god.

The Greek comic writer, Anaxandrides, said to the Egyptians: “You weep if you see a cat ailing, but I like to kill and skin it.” The fear lest cats should be profanely treated in Europe led the Egyptians to do all they could to prevent their exportation; they even sent missions to the Mediterranean to ransom the cats borne into slavery and carry them back to Egypt. But these missions could not have reached the cats that had been taken inland, and as the animal increases rapidly, it may have been fairly common from early times. There is no doubt, however, that the number went up with a bound when Egypt became Christian, and every monk who came to Europe brought shoals of cats, the date corresponding with that of the first invasion of the rat in the trail of the Huns.

Antiquity regarded the cat, before all things, as a little beast of prey. Nearly every reference to it gives it this character. In the stele at Athens the cat is supposed to be looking at a bird-cage to which the man is pointing; the man holds a bird in his left hand, presumably the pet of the child who stands by him. It seems as if the cat meditated if it had not performed some fell deed. Seneca observed that young chickens feel an instinctive fear of the cat but not of the dog. The fine mosaic at Pompeii shows a tabby kitten in the act of catching a quail.

Only one ancient poet, by a slight magician-like touch, calls up a different vision: Theorcitus makes the voluble Praxinœ say to her maid: “Eunœ, pick up your work, and take care, lazy girl, how you leave it lying about again; the cats find it just the bed they like.” There—at last—is the cat we know! But after all, it is an Egyptian cat: a cat sure of her privileges, a cat who relies on her goddess prototype, and has but a modicum of respect for the chattering little Syracusan woman in whose house she condescends to reside. Such were not cats of ancient Greece and Rome, who, from being un-appreciated, fell back to the morals of the simple ravager.

V

MAN AND HIS BROTHER

TRADITIONAL beliefs are like the _coco de mer_ which was found floating, here and there, on the sea, or washed up on the shore, and which gave birth to the strangest conjectures; it was supposed to tell of undiscovered continents or to have dropped from heaven itself. Then, one day, some one saw this peculiar cocoanut quietly growing on a tall palm-tree in an obscure islet of the Indian Ocean. All we gather of primitive traditions is the fruit. Yet the fruit did not grow in the air, it grew on branches and the branches grew on a trunk and the trunk had a root. To get to the root of even the slightest of our own prejudices—let alone those of the savage—we should have to travel back far into times when history was not.

Lucretius placed at the beginning of the ages of mankind a berry-eating race, innocent of blood. The second age belonged to the hunter who killed animals, at first, and possibly for a long time, for their skins, before he used their flesh as food. In the third age animals were domesticated; first the sheep, because that was gentle and easily tamed (which one may see by the moufflons at Monte Carlo), then, by degrees, the others.

This classification was worthy of the most far-seeing mind of antiquity. Had not human originally meant humane we should not have been here to tell the tale. The greater traditions of a bloodless age are enshrined in sacred books; minor traditions of it abound in the folk-lore of the world. Man was home-sick of innocence; his conscience, which has gone on getting more blunted, not more sensitive, revolted at the “daily murder.” So mankind called upon heaven to provide an excuse for slaughter.

The Kirghis of Mongolia say that in the beginning only four men and four animals were made: the camel, the ox, the sheep, and the horse, and all were told to live on grass. The animals grazed, but the men pulled up the grass by the roots and stored it. The animals complained to God that the men were pulling up all the grass, and that soon there would be none left. God said: “If I forbid men to eat grass, will you allow them to eat you?” Fearing starvation, the animals consented.

From the first chapter of Genesis to the last of the “Origin of Species” there is one long testimony to our vegetarian ancestor, but beyond the fact that he existed, what do we know about him? We may well believe that he lived in a good climate and on a plenteous earth. Adam and Eve or their representatives could not have subsisted in Greenland. I think that the killing of wild animals, and especially the eating of them, began when man found himself confronted by extremes of cold and length of winter nights. The skins of animals gave him the only possibility of keeping warm or even of living at all, if he was to brave the outer air, while their flesh may have been often the only food he could find. He was obliged to eat them to keep alive, as Arctic explorers have been obliged to eat their sledge-dogs. Not preference, but hard necessity, made him carnivorous.

These speculations are confirmed by the doings of the earliest man of whom we have any sure knowledge; _not_ the proto-man who must have developed, as I have said, under very different climatic conditions. Perhaps he sat under the palm-trees growing on the banks of the Thames, but though the palm-trees have left us their fruit, man, if he was there, left nothing to speak of his harmless sojourn. By tens of thousands of years the earliest man with whom we can claim acquaintance is the reindeer hunter of Quartenary times. He hunted and fed upon the reindeer, but he had not tamed them. He wore reindeer skins, but he could not profit by reindeer milk; no children were brought up by hand, possibly to the advantage of the children. It is likely, by the by, that the period of human lactation was very long. The horse also was killed for food at a time infinitely removed from the date of his first service to man.

The reindeer hunter was a most intelligent observer of animals. He was an artist and a very good one. The best of his scratchings on reindeer horn and bone of horses and reindeer in different attitudes are admirable for freedom, life, and that intuition of character which makes the true animal painter. For a time which makes one dizzy to look down upon, no such draughtsman appeared as the pre-historic cave dweller. The men of the age of Polished Stone and of the early ages of metals produced nothing similar in the way of design. They understood beauty of form and ornament or, rather, perhaps, they still shared in that Nature’s own unerring touch; it took millenniums of civilisation for man to make one ugly pot or pan. But these men had not the gift or even the idea of sitting down to copy a grazing or running animal.

We need not go far, however, to find a man who, living under nearly the same conditions as the reindeer hunter of Southern France, has developed the same artistic aptitude. I shall always recall with pleasure my visit to a Laplander’s hut; it was in the broad daylight of Arctic midnight—no one slept in the hut, except an extraordinarily small baby in a canoe-shaped cradle. The floor was spread with handsome furs, and its aspect was neither untidy nor comfortless. I reflected that this was how the cave dweller arranged his safe retreat. Much more strongly was he brought to my mind by the domestic objects of every sort made of reindeer horn and adorned with drawings. As I write I have one of them before me, a large horn knife, the sheath of which ends with the branching points. It is beautifully decorated with _graffiti_, showing the good and graceful creature without whom the Laplander cannot live. The school of art is distinctly Troglodite.

A theory has been started that the man of the Quartenary age drew his horses and his reindeer solely as a magical decoy from the idea that the pictures “called” the game as whistling (_i.e._, imitating the sound of the wind) “calls” the wind. I do not know that the Lapps, though practised in magic, have any such purpose in view. It is said that it would be absurd to attribute a motive of mere artistic pleasure to the Troglodite. Why? Some races have as natural a tendency to artistic effort as the bower-bird has to decorate its nest. Conditions of climate may have given the hunter periods of enforced idleness, and art, in its earliest form, was, perhaps, always an escape from _ennui_, a mode of passing the time. That the early hunter dealt in magic is likely enough; he is supposed, though not on altogether conclusive grounds, to have been a fetich-worshipper, and fetich-worship is akin to some kinds of magic. But it does not follow that _all_ his art had this connexion. How animals appeared to his eyes we know; what he thought about them he has not told us. The Eskimo, the modern pre-historic man who is believed to be a better-preserved type than even the Lapp, may be asked to speak for him.

The Eskimo can say that he had a friendly feeling towards all living things, notwithstanding that he fed on flesh, and that wild beasts sometimes fed on him. Not that he had ever talked of wild beasts, for he had no tame ones. He had not a vocabulary of rude terms about animals. He was inclined to credit every species with many potential merits. The Eskimo is afraid—very much afraid—of bears. Yet he is the first to admit that the bear is capable of acting like the finest of fine gentlemen. A woman was in a fright at seeing a bear and so gave him a partridge; that bear never forgot the trifling service, but brought her newly killed seals ever after. Another bear saved the life of three men who wished to reward him. He politely declined their offer, but if, in winter time, they should see a bald-headed bear, will they induce their companions to spare him? After so saying, he plunged into the sea. Next winter a bear was sighted and they were going to hunt him, when these men, remembering what had happened, begged the hunters to wait till they had had a look at him. Sure enough it was “their own bear”! They told the others to prepare a feast for him, and when he had refreshed himself, he lay down to sleep and _the children played around him_. Presently he awoke and ate a little more, after which he went down to the sea, leapt in, and was never seen again.

Even such lovely imaginings, we may believe, without an excessive stretch of fancy, gilded the mental horizon of the Troglodite. He had long left behind the stage of primal innocence, but no supernatural chasm gaped between him and his little brothers.

The reindeer hunters were submerged by what is more inexorable than man—Nature. The reindeer vanished, and with him the hunter, doomed by the changed conditions of climate. He vanished as the Lapp is vanishing; the poignantly tragic scene which was chronicled by two lines in the newspapers during the early summer of 1906—the suicide of a whole clan of Lapps whose reindeer were dead and who had nothing to do but to follow them—may have happened in what we call fair Provence. Thousands of men paid with their lives for its becoming a rose garden.

The successors of the reindeer hunters, Turanian like them, but far more progressive, were the lake dwellers, the dolmen-builders, with their weaving and spinning, their sowing and reaping, their pottery and their baskets, their polished flints and their domestic animals. Man’s greatest achievement, the domestication of animals, had been reached in the unrecorded ages that divide the rough and the polished stone. Man, “excellent in art,” had mastered the beast whose lair is in the wilds; “he tames the horse of shaggy mane, he puts the yoke upon its neck; he tames the tireless mountain bull.” The great mind of Sophocles saw and saw truly that these were the mighty works of man; the works which made man, man. We know that when the Neolithic meat-eater of what is now Denmark threw away the bones after he had done his meal, these bones were gnawed by house-dogs. A simple thing, but it tells a wondrous tale. Did these dogs come with their masters from Asia, or had they been tamed in their Northern home? The answer depends on whether the dog is descended from jackal or wolf. In either case it is unlikely that the most tremendous task of domestication was the first.

Not everywhere has man domesticated animals, though we may be sure that he took them everywhere with him after he had domesticated them. If man walked on dry land across the Atlantic as some enthusiastic students of sub-oceanic geography now believe that he did, he led no sheep, no horses, no dogs. In America, when it was discovered, there was only one domestic animal, and in Australia there was none. Of native animals, the American buffalo could have been easily tamed. It may be said that in Australia there was no suitable animal, but the dog’s ancestor could not have seemed a suitable animal for a household protector; a jackal is not a promising pupil, still less a wolf, unless there was some more gentle kind of wolf than any which now survives. Might not a good deal have been made out of the kangaroo? Possibly the whole task of domestication was the work of one patient, intelligent and widely-spread race, kindred of the Japanese, who in making forest trees into dwarfs show the sort of qualities that would be needed to make a wild animal not only unafraid (that is nothing), but also a willing servant.

The Neolithic man’s eschatology of animals and of himself was identical. He contemplated for both a future life which reproduced this one. “The belief in the deathlessness of souls,” said Canon Isaac Taylor, “was the great contribution of the Turanian race to the religious thought of the world.” This appears to claim almost too much. Would any race have had the courage to start upon its way had it conceived death as real?

“It is a modest creed and yet Pleasant if one considers it, To own that death itself must be Like all the rest, a mockery.”

It is a creed which springs from the very instinct of life. Two pelicans returning to their nest found their two young ones dead from sunstroke. The careful observer who was watching them has recorded that they _did not seem to recognise_ the inert, fluffy heap as what _was_ their fledglings; they hunted for them for a long while, moving the twigs of the nest, and at last threw one of the dead birds out of it. So the primitive man in presence of the dead knows that this is not _he_ and he begins to ask: where is he?

But if every race in turn has asked that question, it was asked with more insistence by some peoples than by others, and above all, it was answered by some with more assurance. The Neolithic Turanians had nothing misty in their vision of another world. It was full of movement and variety: the chase, the battle, the feast, sleep and awakening, night and day—these were there as well as here. Animals were essential to the picture, and it never struck the Neolithic man that there was any more difficulty about their living again than about his living again. If he philosophised at all, it was probably after the fashion of the Eskimo who holds the soul to be the “owner” of the body: the body, the flesh, dies and may be devoured, but he who kills the body does not kill its “owner.”

Vast numbers of bones have been found near the dolmens in Southern France. The steed of the dead man galloped with him into the Beyond. The faithful dog trotted by the little child, comrade and guardian. In the exquisite Hebrew idyll Tobias has his dog as well as the angel to accompany him on his adventurous earthly journey. The little Neolithic boy had only the dog and his journey was longer; but to some grieving fathers would it not be a rare comfort to imagine their lost darlings guarded by loving four-footed friends along the Path of Souls?

The Celtic conquerors of the dolmen-builders took most of their religious ideas. When successful aid in mundane matters was what was chiefly sought in religion, a little thing might determine conversion _en masse_. If the divinities of one set of people seemed on some occasion powerless, it was natural to try the divinities of somebody else. When success crowned the experiment, the new worship was formally adopted. This is exactly what happened in the historic case of Clovis and “Clothilde’s God,” and it doubtless happened frequently before the dawn of history. Druidism is believed to have arisen in this way in a grafting of the new on the old. The Celts had the same views about the next world as the dolmen-builders. They are thought to have taken them from the conquered with the rest of their religious system, but to me it seems unlikely that they had not already similar views when they arrived from Asia. In the early Vedas goats and horses were sacrificed to go before and announce the coming of the dead; Vedic animals kept their forms, the renewed body was perfect and incorruptible, but it was the real body. A celebrated racehorse was deified after death. Such beliefs have a strong affinity to the theory that animals (or slaves) killed at the man’s funeral will be useful to him in the after-life. However derived, our European ancestors embraced that theory to the full.

Only a few years ago a second Viking ship was found at Oseberg, in Norway, in which were the remains of ten horses, four dogs, a young ox, and the head of an old ox. Three more horses were found outside. The dogs had on their own collars with long chains. There were also sledges with elaborately carved animals’ heads. It was a queen’s grave; her distaff and spinning-wheel told of simple womanly tasks amidst so much sepulchral splendour. In those late times the law by which religious forms grow more sumptuous as the faith behind them grows less, may have come into operation. Lavish but meaningless tributes may have taken the place of a provision full of meaning for real wants.

So the sacrifices to the gods may have been once intended to stock the pastures of heaven. It cannot be doubted that the victim was never _killed_ in the mind of the original sacrificer, it was merely transferred to another sphere. The worser barbarity comes in when the true significance of the act is lost and when it is repeated from habit.

After animals were domesticated they were not killed at all for a long time—still less were they eaten. Of this there can be no shadow of doubt. The first domestic animals were far too valuable possessions for any one to think of killing them. As soon would a showman kill a performing bull which had cost him a great deal of trouble to train. Besides this, and more than this, the natural man, who is much better than he is painted, has a natural horror of slaying the creature that eats out of his hand and gives him milk and wool and willing service.

There are pastoral tribes now in South Africa which live on the milk, cheese and butter of their sheep, but only kill them as the last necessity. In East Africa the cow is never killed, and if one falls ill, it is put into a sort of infirmary and carefully tended. We all know the divinity which hedges round the Hindu cow. The same compunction once saved the labouring ox. When I was at Athens for the Archæological Congress of 1905, Dr. R. C. Bosanquet, at that time head of the British school, told me that he had observed among the peasants in Crete the most intense reluctance to kill the ox of labour. In several places in Ancient Greece all sorts of devices were resorted to in order that the sacrificial knife might seem to kill the young bull accidentally, and the knife—the guilty thing—was afterwards thrown into the sea. This last custom is important; it marks the moment when the slaughter of domestic animals, _even_ for sacrificial purposes, still caused a scruple. The case stands thus: at first they were not killed at all; then, for a long time, they were killed only for sacrifice. Then they were killed for food, but far and wide relics of the original scruple may be detected as in the common invocation of divine permission which every Moslem butcher utters before killing an animal.

Animal and human sacrifices are one phenomenon of early manners, not two. The people who sacrificed domestic animals to accompany their dead generally, if not always, also sacrificed slaves for the same purpose, and the sacrifice of fair maidens at the funerals of heroes was to give them these as companions in another world.