Part 16
Everything which tends to obliterate the contrast of the sexes, like the mixture of boys and girls in American common schools, tends also to destroy the charm of intercourse, the savour and sweetness of life. Seclusion lends an infinite seduction to the girl, whilst the rude and bustling publicity of modern life robs woman of her grace. Packed like herrings in a railway carriage, sleeping in odious vicinity to strangers on a shelf, going days and nights without a bath, exchanging decency and privacy for publicity and observation, the women who travel, save those rich enough to still purchase seclusion, are forced to cast aside all refinement and delicacy.
It is said that travel enlarges the mind. There are many minds which can no more be enlarged, by any means whatever, than a nut or a stone. What have their journeys round the world and their incessant gyrations done for the innumerable princes of Europe? The fool remains a fool, though you carry him or her about over the whole surface of the globe, and it is certain that the promiscuous contact and incessant publicity of travel, which may not hurt the man, do injure the woman.
Neither men nor women of genius are, I repeat, any criterion for the rest of their sex; nay, they belong, as Plato placed them, to a third sex which is above the laws of the multitude. But even whilst they do so they are always the foremost to recognise that it is the difference, not the likeness, of sex which makes the charm of human life. Barry Cornwall wrote long ago,—
As the man beholds the woman, As the woman sees the man; Curiously they note each other, As each other only can.
Never can the man divest her Of that mystic charm of sex; Ever must she, gazing on him, That same mystic charm annex.
That mystic charm will long endure, despite the efforts to destroy it of orators, in tight stays and balloon sleeves, who scream from platforms, and the beings so justly abhorred of Mrs Lynn Lynton who smoke in public carriages and from the waist upward are indistinguishable from the men they profess to despise.
But every word, whether written or spoken, which urges the woman to antagonism against the man, every word which is written or spoken to try and make of her a hybrid, self-contained opponent of men, makes a rift in the lute to which the world looks for its sweetest music.
The New Woman reminds me of an agriculturist who, discarding a fine farm of his own, and leaving it to nettles, stones, thistles and wire-worms, should spend his whole time in demanding neighbouring fields which are not his. The New Woman will not even look at the extent of ground indisputably her own, which she leaves unweeded and untilled.
Not to speak of the entire guidance of childhood, which is certainly already chiefly in the hands of woman (and of which her use does not do her much honour), so long as she goes to see one of her own sex dancing in a lion’s den, the lions being meanwhile terrorised by a male brute; so long as she wears dead birds as millinery and dead seals as coats, so long as she goes to races, steeplechases, coursing and pigeon matches; so long as she ‘walks with the guns’; so long as she goes to see an American lashing horses to death in idiotic contest with velocipedes, so long as she curtsies before princes and emperors who reward the winners of distance-rides; so long as she receives physiologists in her drawing-rooms, and trusts to them in her maladies; so long as she invades literature without culture, and art without talent; so long as she orders her court-dress in a hurry, regardless of the strain thus placed on the poor seamstresses; so long as she makes no attempt to interest herself in her servants, in her animals, in the poor slaves of her tradespeople; so long as she shows herself, as she does at present, without scruple at every brutal and debasing spectacle which is considered fashionable; so long as she understands nothing of the beauty of meditation, of solitude, of Nature; so long as she is utterly incapable of keeping her sons out of the shambles of modern sport, and lifting her daughters above the pestilent miasma of modern society; so long as she is what she is in the worlds subject to her, she has no possible title or capacity to demand the place or the privilege of man, for she shows herself incapable of turning to profit her own place and her own privilege.
DEATH AND PITY
_Le livre de la Pitié et de la Mort_ is the latest and, in my estimation, in some respects, the most touching and the most precious of the works of Loti, and I wish that this little volume, so small in bulk, so pregnant with thought and value, could be translated into every language spoken upon earth, and sped like an electric wave over the dull, deaf, cruel multitudes of men. It is not that Loti himself needs a larger public than he possesses. All who have any affinity with him know every line he writes.
Despite the singular absence of all scholarship in his works—for, indeed, he might be living before the birth of Cadmus for any allusion which he ever makes to the art of letters—a perfect instinct of style, like the child Mozart’s instinct for harmony, has led him to the most exquisite grace and precision of expression, the most accurate, as well as the most ideal realisations in words alike of scenery and of sentiment.
His earlier works were not unjustly reproached with being _trop décousu_, too impressionist; but in his later books this imperfection is no longer traceable, they are delicately and beautifully harmonious. A sympathetic critic has said, perhaps rightly, that the long night-watches on the sea, the long isolation of ocean voyages, and the removal from the common-place conventional pressure of society in cities and provinces have kept his mind singularly free, original and poetic. But no other sailor has ever produced anything beautiful, either in prose or in verse; and the influence of the Armorican coast and the Breton temperament have probably had more to do with making him what he is than voyages which leave sterile those who with sterile minds and souls go down to the deep in ships, and come back with their minds and their hands empty. He would have been just what he is had he never been rocked on any other waves than the long grey breakers of the iron coast of Morbihan, and, to those whom from the first have known and loved his poetic and pregnant thoughts, even the palm leaves of the first intellectual Academy of the world can add nothing to his merit, nay, they seem scarcely to accord with his soul, free as the seagull’s motion, and his sympathy wide as that ocean which has cradled and nursed him.
But it is not of himself that I wish to speak here. It is of this last little book of his which, so small in compass, is yet vast as the universe in what it touches and suggests. All the cultured world has, doubtless, read it; but how little and narrow is that world compared to the immeasurable multitudes to which the volume will for ever remain unknown, and also to that, alas! equally great world to which it would be, even when read, a dead letter: for to those who have no ear for harmony the music of Beethoven is but as the crackling of thorns under a pot. He knows this, and in his preface counsels such as these to leave it alone, for it can only weary them.
Indeed, the book is in absolute and uncompromising opposition to the modern tone of his own times, and to the bare, dry, hard temperament of his generation. It is in direct antagonism with what is called the scientific spirit and its narrow classifications. It is full of altruism of the widest, purest and highest kind, stretching out its comprehension and affection to those innumerable races which the human race has disinherited, driven into bondage, and sacrificed to its own appetites and desires. To its author the ox in the shambles, the cat in the gutter is as truly a fellow creature as the mariner on his deck, or the mother by his hearth; the nest of the bird is as sacred as the rush hut of the peasant, and the cry of the wounded animal reaches his heart as quickly as the wail of the fisherman’s widow. No one can reproach him, as they reproach me (a reproach I am quite willing to accept), with thinking more of animals than of men and women. His charities to his own kind are unceasing and boundless; he is ever foremost in the relief of sorrow and want. It cannot be said either that he is what is scornfully called a ‘mere sentimentalist.’ He is well known as a daring and brilliant officer in his service, and he has shown that he possesses moral as well as physical courage, and that he is careless of censure and indifferent to his own interests and prospects when he is moved to indignation against the tyrannies of the strong over the weak. Here is no woman who has dreamed by her fireside or in her rose garden until her sentiment has overshadowed her reason, but a _brave des braves_, a man whose life is spent by choice in the most perilous contest with the forces of nature, a man who has been often under fire, who has seen war in all its sickly horror, who has felt the lightnings of death playing round him in a thousand shapes. His noble and rashly-expressed indignation at the barbarities shown in the taking of Tonquin led to his temporary banishment from the French navy. He does prove, and has ever proved, in his conduct as in his writings, that to him nothing human can be alien. But he is not hemmed in behind the narrow pale of humanitarianism: he has the vision to see, and the courage to show, that the uncounted, sentient, suffering children of creation for whom humanity has no mercy, but merely servitude and slaughter, are as dear to him as his own kind.
In a century which in its decrepitude has fallen prone and helpless under the fiat of the physiologist and bacteriologist, this attitude needs no common courage. Browning had this courage, Renan had it not. In an age when the idolatry of man is carried to a height which would be ludicrous in its inflated conceit were it not in its results so tragic, it requires no common force and boldness to speak as Loti speaks of the many other races of the earth as equally deserving with their tyrants of tenderness and comprehension; to admit, as he admits, that in the suppliant eyes of his little four-footed companions he can see, as in a woman’s or a child’s, the soul within speaking and calling to his own.
‘She’ (she is a little Chinese cat which had taken refuge on board his frigate) ‘came out of the shadow, stretching herself slowly, as if to give herself time for reflection. She came towards me with several pauses, sometimes with a Mongolian grace; she lifted one paw in the air before deciding to put it down and take a further step; and all the while she gazed at me fixedly, questioningly. I wondered what she could want with me. I had had her well fed by my servant. When she was quite near, very near, she sat down, brought her tail round her legs, and made a very soft little noise. And she continued to look at me, to look at me _in the eyes_, which indicated that intelligent ideas were thronging through her small head. It was evident that she understood, as all animals do, that I was not a thing, but a thinking being, capable of pity, and accessible to the mute entreaty of a look. Besides, it was plain that my eyes were really eyes to her, that is, they were mirrors in which her little soul sought anxiously to seize some reflection from my own.
‘And whilst she thus gazed at me, I let my hand droop on to her quaint little head, and stroked her fur as my first caress. What she felt at my touch was certainly something more than a mere impression of physical pleasure; she had some sentiment, some comprehension of protection and sympathy in her forsaken misery. This was why she had ventured out of her hiding-place in the dark; this was what she had resolved to ask me for with diffidence and hesitation. She did not want either to eat or drink, she only wanted a little companionship in this lonely world, a little friendship.
‘How had she learned that such things were, this stray, hunted creature, never touched by a kind hand, never loved by anyone, unless, perhaps, on board some junk, by some poor little Chinese child who had neither caresses nor playthings, sprung up by chance like a sickly plant, one too many in the grovelling yellow crowd, as unhappy and as hungry as herself, and of whom the incomplete soul will at its disappearance from earth leave no more trace than hers? Then one frail paw was timidly laid on my lap, with such infinite delicacy, such exceeding discretion! and, after having lingeringly consulted and implored me through the eyes, she sprang upon my lap, thinking the moment come when she might establish intimate relations with me. She installed herself there in a ball, with a tact, a reserve, a lightness incredible, and always gazing up in my face ... and her eyes becoming still more expressive, still more winning, said plainly to mine,—
‘“In this sad autumn day, since we are both alone in this floating prison, rocked and lost in the midst of I know not what endless perils, why should we not give to one another a little of that sweet exchange of feeling which soothes so many sorrows, which has a semblance of some immaterial eternal thing not subjected to death, which calls itself affection, and finds its expression in a touch, a look?″’
In the dying hours of another cat, the charming Moumoutte Blanche, whose frolics we follow, and whose snowy beauty we know so well, the same thought comes to him.
‘She tried to rise to greet us, her expression grateful and touched, her eyes showing, as much as human eyes could, the internal presence and the pain of that which we call the soul.
‘One morning I found her stiff and cold, with glassy orbs, a dead beast, a thing men cast out on to the dust heap. Then I bade Sylvester dig a little grave in a corner of the courtyard, at the foot of a shrub.... Where was gone that which I had seen shine in her dying eyes, the little, flickering, anxious flame from within: where was it gone?’
And he carries her little lifeless body himself down into the open air.
‘Never had there been a more radiant day of June, never a softer silence and warmth crossed by the gay buzzing of summer flies; the courtyard was all blossom, the rose boughs covered with roses; a sweet country calm rested on all the gardens around; the swallows and martins slumbered; only the old tortoise, Suleima, more widely awake the warmer it became, travelled merrily without aim or goal over the old sun-bathed stones. There was everywhere that melancholy of skies too fair, of weather too fine, in the exhaustion of a hot noon-day. All the plants, all the things, seemed to cruelly shout there the triumph over their own perpetual new birth, without pity for the fragile human creatures who heard that song of summer, weighed themselves with the consciousness of their own impending, unavoidable end.
‘This garden was and is to me the oldest and most familiar of all the places of the earth, in which all the smallest details have been known to me from the earliest hours of the vague and surprised impressions of infancy. So much so that I am attached to it with all my soul; that I love with a singular force and regard almost as my fetish the venerable plants which grow there, its trellised branches, its climbing jessamines, and a certain rose-coloured diclytra which every month of March displays on the same spot its early-burgeoning leaves, sends out its flowers in April, grows yellow in the suns of June, and at last, burnt up by August, seems to give up the ghost and perish.... And with an infinite melancholy, in this place so gay with the fresh sunlight of a young year, I watched the two beloved figures with white hair and mourning gowns, my mother and Aunt Claire, going and coming, leaning down over a flower border as they had done so many years to see what blossoms were already opening, or raising their heads to look at the buds of the creepers and the roses. And when the two black robes went onward and became farther away in the far perspective of a long green avenue, I saw how much slower was their step, how bent were their forms. Alas for that time too close at hand when in the green avenue which would be ever the same, I should behold their shadows no more! Is it possible that a time will ever come when they shall have left this life? I feel as if they will not entirely depart so long as I myself shall be here, to invoke their benevolent presence, and that in the summer evenings I shall still see their blessed shades pass under the old jessamines and vines, and that something of their spirit will remain to me in the plants which they cherished, in the drooping boughs of the honeysuckle and in the rosy petals of the old diclytra!’
He feels, and feels intensely, the similarity of sentiment between himself and all other forms of sentient life. He is not ashamed to perceive and acknowledge that the emotions of the animal are absolutely the same in substance as our own, and differ from ours only in degree. Could this knowledge become universal it would go far to make cruelty impossible in man, but as yet it has only been realised and admitted by the higher minds of a very few, such as his own, as Tennyson’s, as Wordsworth’s, as Browning’s, as Lecomte de Lisle’s, as Sully Prudhomme’s; it requires humility and sympathy in the human breast of no common kind; it is the absolute antithesis of the vanity and egotism of what is called the scientific mind, although more truly scientific, that is, more logical, than the bombast and self-worship of the biologist and physiologist.
Loti sees and feels that the little African cat from Senegal, which he brought to his own Breton home, is moved by the same feelings as himself, and in a more pathetic because a more helpless way, and he has remorse for a momentary unkindness to her as though she were living still.
‘It was one day when, with the obstinacy of her race, she had jumped where she had been twenty times forbidden to go, and had broken a vase to which I was much attached. I gave her a slap at first; then, my anger not satiated, I pursued her and kicked her with my foot. The slap had only surprised her, but the kick told her that it was war between us; and then she fled as fast as four legs would take her, her tail like a feather in the wind. When safe under a piece of furniture she turned round and cast at me a look of reproach and distress, believing herself lost, betrayed, and assassinated by one beloved, into whose hands she had entrusted her fate; and as my look at her remained hostile and unkind, she gave vent to the great cry of a creature at bay. Then all my wrath ceased in one instant: I called her, I caressed her, I soothed her, taking her on my knees all breathless and terrified. Oh, that last cry of despair from an animal, whether from the poor ox tied to the slaughter-place, or of the miserable rat held in the teeth of a bull-dog—that last cry which hopes nothing, which appeals to no one, which is like a supreme protestation thrown in the face of Nature, an appeal to some unknown pity floating in the air. Now all which remains of my little cat, whom I remember so living and so droll, are a few bones in a hole at the foot of a tree. And her flesh, her little person, her affection for me, her infinite terror that day she was scolded, her great joy, her anguish and reproach—all, in a word, which moved and lived, and had their being around these bones—all have become but a little dust!’
‘What a spiritual mystery, a mystery of the soul, that constant affection of an animal, and its long gratitude!’ he says in another place; and when, meaning to act mercifully, he gives chloroform to a poor, sick, stray cat, he is haunted by the fear that he has done wrong to end for it that poor little atom of joyless, friendless life, which was all that it could call its own.
This is its story,—
‘An old, mange-eaten cat, driven away from its home, no doubt by its owner, for its age and infirmities, had established itself in the street on the doorstep of our house, where a little warmth from a November sun came to comfort it. It is a habit of certain people who call their selfishness sensibility to send out to be purposely lost, the creatures which they will not take care of any longer, and do not desire to see suffer. All the day he had sat there, piteously huddled in a corner of a window, looking so unhappy and so humble! An object of disgust to all the passers-by, threatened by children, by dogs, by continual dangers, every hour more ill and feeble, eating Heaven knows what rubbish, got with difficulty out of the gutter, he dragged out his existence, prolonging it as best he might, trying to retard the moment of his death. His poor head was covered with scabs and sores, and had scarcely any fur left on it, but his eyes remained pretty, and seemed full of thought. He had certainly felt, in all the frightful bitterness of his lot, that last degradation of all, the inability to make his toilette, to polish his coat, to wash and comb himself as all cats love to do so carefully. It hurt me so to see this poor lost animal that, after having sent him food into the street, I approached him and spoke to him gently. (Animals soon understand kind words, and are consoled by them.) Having been so often hunted and driven away, he was at first frightened at seeing me near him; his first look was timid, suspicious, at once a reproach and a prayer! Then soon comprehending that I was there from sympathy, and astonished at so much happiness, he addressed me in his own way: ‘Trr! Trr! Trr!’ getting up out of politeness, trying, despite his mangy state, to arch his back in the hope that I should stroke him. But the pity I felt for him, though great, could not go as far as that. The joy of being caressed he was never to know again. But in compensation it occurred to me that it would be kind to end his life of pain by giving him a gentle, dreamful death. An hour later, Sylvester, my servant, who had bought some chloroform, drew him gently into our stable, and induced him to lie down on some warm hay in an osier basket which was destined to be his mortuary chamber. Our preparations did not disturb him: we had rolled a card into a cone-shaped form, as we had seen the ambulance surgeon do; he had looked at us with a contented look, thinking he had at last found a lodging and people who had pity on him, new owners who would shelter him.