Part 18
Even the marvellous sagacity, docility and kindness of the elephant do not protect him from being slain in tens of thousands, either for the mere value of his tusks, or for the mere pleasure and pride taken by men in his slaughter. Even so inoffensive a creature as the wild sheep of the hills of Asia is mercilessly hunted down and shot by European sportsmen, although his carcass is absolutely of no use or value whatever when found, and it is usually lost by the shot creature falling down a precipice or into some inaccessible nullah. Nearer at home the chamois and ibex have been so treated that they will ere long be extinct on the European continent. To wild creatures there is no kind of compassion or of justice ever shown. I have known an officer relate without shame how, when he was once sleeping in a tent on the plains of India, a leopard entered between the folds of the canvas, and as he awoke stood still and looked at him, then quietly turned round and went out again; he stretched out his arm for his revolver, and shot, as it passed out into the air, the creature which had spared him. There is no decency, no common ordinary feeling or conscientiousness, in men in their dealings with animals. They publish their advertisements without compunction of ‘geldings’ and ‘bullocks,’ and inflict castration wholesale whenever they deem it to their profit or convenience to do so, whether their prey be a bull or a cock, a colt or a puppy. When the gourmand feels his ‘belly with fat capon lined,’ the atrocious suffering by which the capon has been swollen to unnatural obesity never troubles him for a moment, nor when he eats his pâté de Strasbourg has he any feelings or remembrance for the geese with their webbed feet nailed down to the boards before the sweltering fires.
England has lately lamented the loss of a young man of royal birth, and of gentle and kindly disposition, who died under circumstances which touched the national sentiment. Yet the Duke of Clarence, of whom it was said that he would not have willingly wronged a living being, passed his last days on earth, the days in which he already felt the chills and languor of impending sickness, in the slaughter of tame birds. There is something shocking in the thought that, during the last hours in which an amiable youth enjoyed the gladness of the air and the freedom of the woods, he should have been solely occupied in taking the life of innocent and happy creatures, reared merely to offer this miserable diversion to him and his. This degraded sport, the curse, the shame and the peril of England, has never had passed on it a commentary more severe, a sarcasm more scathing than the words, ‘_There will be no shooting until after the royal funeral_,’ which were announced at, and of, innumerable country-house parties; the sacrifice of the idolised amusement being emphasised as the most complete expression of woe and regret possible to the nation. It would be ridiculous, were it not sickening, that in a land where men prate from morning till night of public duty, and make boast of their many virtues, public and private, no shame is attached to the shameful fact that all its gentlemen of high degree, all its males who have leisure and large means, find no other pursuit or pleasure possible in autumn and winter than the innocent slaughter or maiming of winged creatures, reared merely to furnish them with such diversion.
It is inconceivable that reasonable beings, who claim to exercise preponderance in the influence and direction of public affairs, should not perceive how injurious and debasing as an example is this foolish and cruel pursuit which they have allowed to obtain over them all the force of habit, and all the sanctity of a religion. Common rights are sacrificed, harmless privileges abolished, old paths blocked, pleasant time-consecrated rights of way are forbidden through copse and furze and covert, all wild natural woodland life is destroyed by the traps, poisons and guns of the keepers and their myrmidons, and incessant torture of woodland animals, and incessant irritation of rural populations go on without pause or check, in order that princes, gentlemen and _rastaquouères_ may pass week after week, month after month, year after year, in this kind of carnage which is delightful to them, and at which their women unashamed are encouraged to assist. ‘Walking with the guns’ has now become a favourite and fashionable feminine amusement. In the middle of the day both sexes indulge in those rich dishes and stimulating drinks, which are their daily fare, and carry typhoid fever into their veins; and after luncheon, replete and content, they all return to the organised slaughter in the leafless woodlands, or the heather-covered moors, or the ‘happy autumn fields.’ The gladiatorial shows of Rome might be more brutal, but were at least more manly than this ‘sport,’ which is the only active religion of the so-called ‘God-serving classes.’ It is hereditary, like scrofula; the devouring ambition of the baby-heir of a great house is to be old enough to go out with the keepers; and instinct against such slaughter, if it existed in his childish soul, would be killed by ridicule; example, precept and education are all bent to one end, to render him a slayer of creatures wild and tame. If he make later on the tour of the world, his path over its continents will be littered by dead game, large and small, from the noble elephant to the simple wild sheep, from the peaceful and graminivorous elk to the hand-fed pheasant. There is no escape for him; even if he have little natural taste for it, he will affect to have such taste, knowing that he will otherwise be despised by his comrades, and be esteemed a _lusus naturæ_ in his generation. He will not dare to be ‘odd’; the gun is the weapon of the gentleman, as in other days was the rapier or the sword; the gunroom is his _Academe_; he is learned in the choice of explosive bullets, and can explain precisely to any fair companion the manner in which they rend and tear the tender flesh of the forest animals.
Read this exploit of sport, printed by a Mr Guillemard, apparently without the slightest sense of shame. He is in the pursuit of ‘bighorn’ (_ovis nivicola_), animals, perfectly innocent and harmless, living in the wilds of Kamschatka.
‘One, which appeared to carry the best horns, was more or less hidden by some rocks, but the other stood broadside on upon a little knoll, throwing up his head from time to time.... Resting my rifle on the ground, I took the easier shot. There was no excuse for missing, and as the bullet _made the well-known sound dear to the heart of the sportsman, I saw that it had broken the shoulder_, and the animal, staggering a yard or two, fell over seawards and was lost to view.’
It is lost irrevocably. The joy of having slaughtered him is not, however, the less.
A little farther on the sportsman suddenly comes upon ‘a very much astonished bighorn; a fine old ram of the fifth or sixth year.’
‘I fired almost before I was conscious of it, but not a moment too soon, for the beast was in the act of turning as I touched the trigger. It was his last voluntary movement, and the next instant he was rolling down the precipice.... _The fun was not yet over_, for, perched upon a bare pinnacle, stood another of our quarry. The animal had been driven into a corner by some of our party on the cliff above. The next instant, after a vain but desperate effort to save himself, he was whirling through four hundred feet of space.... On going up to him I found one of the massive horns broken short off, and the whole of the hind quarters shattered into a mass of bleeding pulp.... Our decks were like a butcher’s shop on Boxing Day.’
And the scene seems so beautiful to him that he photographs it.
This is the tone which is general and which is considered becoming when speaking or writing of the brutal slaughter of harmless creatures. No perception of its disgusting callousness, its foul unseemliness, ever visits writer or reader, speaker or hearer.
When men kill in self-defence it is natural; when they kill for food it is excusable; but to kill for pleasure and for paltry pride is vile. How long will such pleasure and such pride be the rule of the world? They give the strongest justification that Anarchists can claim. If the heart of Tourguenieff could be put into every human breast, the quail would be a dear little feathered friend to all; but as the world is now made, the story of Tourguenieff’s quail would be read in vain to deaf ears, or, if heard, would be drowned in peals of inane laughter. Could that sense of solidarity of community between animals and ourselves, which is so strongly realised by Pierre Loti, be communicated to the multitude of men, cruelty would not entirely cease, because men and women are frequently horribly cruel to each other, and to dependents, and to children, and to inferior and subject human races, but cruelty to animals would then be placed on the same plane as cruelty to human beings, would be regarded by society with loathing, and punished by the severity of law, as cruelty in many forms to human creatures is now punished. Whereas, now not only are all punishments of cruelty, other than to man, so slight as to mean hardly anything at all, in fact, totally inefficient and wholly inadequate,[J] but the vast mass of cruelty to animals, the daily continual brutal offences against them of their owners and employers, is placed, perforce, entirely out of reach of any punishment whatsoever.
Footnote J:
A footman of Lord Darnley’s was sentenced to pay £2 by the Rochester magistrates for having killed a dog by heaping burning coals on it! This in the end of the year 1894.
A man can chain up his dog in filth and misery; the rider may cut his horse to pieces at his caprice; the woman may starve and beat her cat; the landowner may have traps set all over his lands for fur and feather; the slaughterer of cattle may bungle and torture at his pleasure; the lady may wear the dead bodies of birds on her head and on her gown; the mother may buy puppies and kittens, squirrels and marmosets, rabbits and guinea-pigs, to be the trembling plaything of her little children, tormented by these in ignorance and in maliciousness till death releases the four-footed slaves; all these and ten thousand other shapes and kinds of cruelty are most of them not punishable by law. Indeed, no law could in many instances find them out and reach them, for the cruelty often goes on behind the closed doors of house and stable, kennel-yard and cattleshed, nursery of the rich and garret of the poor. No law can reach it in its aggregate; law is indeed, as it stands, poor and meagre everywhere, but cruelty could not, by any alteration of it, be really abolished. To be eradicated, it must become a revolting thing in the eyes of men; it must offend their conscience and their love of justice. It would do this in time, could such a sense of unison with animals as is the inspiring motive of the _Book of Pity and of Death_ become general in humanity. There is little hope that it ever will, but the world would be a lovelier dwelling-place if it could be so.
Rome, it is tritely said, had no monument to Pity. Yet it was the Romans by whom the man was stoned who slew the dove which sought refuge in his breast. The multitudes of the present day are, all over the world, below those Romans in sentiment. Their farmers shoot even the swallows which build confidingly beneath the eaves of their roofs. Their gentry cause to be trapped and slain all the innocent birds which shelter and nest in their woods. The down of jays’ breasts flutters on the fans of their drawing-room beauties, and _lophophores_ and _colibri_ sparkle in death upon their hair. If in a mob of Londoners, Parisians, New Yorkers, Berliners, Melbourners, a dove fluttered down to seek a refuge, a hundred dirty hands would be stretched out to seize it, and wring its neck; and if any one with the pity of old Rome tried to save and cherish it, he would be rudely bonneted, and mocked, and hustled amidst the brutal guffaws of roughs, lower and more hideous in aspect and in nature than any animal which lives. There is no true compassion in that crowd of opposed yet mixing races which, for want of a better word, we call the modern world. There is too great a greed, too common a selfishness, for the impersonal and pure feeling to be general in it. Yet, as children are born cruel, but may often be taught, by continual example and perception, kindness and self-sacrifice, so perchance might the multitudes be led to it were there any to teach it as Francis of Assisi taught it in his generation, were there any to cry aloud against its infamy with the force and the fervour of a Bruno, of a Bernard, of a Benedict.
St Francis would have walked with Loti hand in hand, through the olive-trees, with the good wolf between them; and what beautiful things the trio would have said to each other!
But the Churches have never heeded the teaching of Assisi; they have never cared for or inculcated tenderness to the other races of creation in which, whether winged or four-footed, the preacher of Assisi recognised his brethren. They have been puffed up with the paltry pride of human self-admiration; and they are now being outbid and outrun in influence and popularity by the teachers of that still more brutal, more narrow, and more vainglorious creed which calls itself science, in which as many crimes are perpetrated as in the name of liberty.
As all religions reign awhile, then pass and perish, so will the reign of science; but very possibly not before its example and demands will have destroyed on the face of the planet all races except man, who in his turn will become nought on the exhausted surface of a dead earth. Meantime, whilst those whom we call inferior creatures are still with us, while the birds people the air which would be so empty without them, and the beasts live around us with their pathetic eyes, their wise instincts, their long, patient, unrewarded forbearance, we are nearer to the secret mystery of life when we feel, with Francis and with Loti, the common soul which binds ourselves and them, than when we stand aloof from them in a puffed-up and pompous vanity, or regard them as the mere chattels and chores of a bondslave’s service.
SHELLEY
Above my head in the starry July night goes with soft, swift, silent movement through the scented air, above the tall leaves of the aloes, and under the green boughs of the acacias, a little brown owl. Families of them live on the roof of this great house, and at sunset they descend and begin hunting for crickets and moths and water-beetles and mice. These owls are called, in scientific nomenclature, the _scops carniola_; to the peasantry they are known as the _chiu_; by Shelley they were called the aziola. I have never found any Italian who called this owl aziola, but I suppose that Mary Godwin did, since she said, ‘Do you not hear the aziola cry?’ And Shelley made answer, very truly, of this cry, that it was music heard,—
‘By wood and stream, meadow and mountain side, And fields and marshes wide,— Such as nor voice, nor lute, nor wind, nor bird The soul ever stirred.’
The note is very far-reaching, deep and sweet, clear and melodious, one single note sounding at intervals of thirty or forty seconds through the still air of the summer night. It is said to be a love call, but I doubt it, for it may be heard long after the pairing season; the bird gives it forth when he is flying as when he is sitting still, and it is unmistakably a note of contentment. Nor do I think it is sad, as Shelley terms it; it has a sound as of pleased meditation in it, and it has a mellow thrill which, once heard, cannot be forgotten ever. For myself, never do I hear the call of the _chiu_ (which is often heard from May time until autumn, when these birds migrate to the East) without remembering Shelley and wishing that he lived to hear.
He is more truly a son of Italy than any one of her own poets, for he had the sentiment and passion of her natural beauty, which cannot be said of the greatest of them. Neither he nor Byron can be well comprehended by those who are not intimately acquainted with Italian landscape. The exceeding truthfulness of their observation of, and feeling for, it cannot certainly be appreciated except by those who have lived amongst the sights and sounds which took so close a hold upon their imagination and their heart.
Byron must have often ridden over the firm, smooth, yellow shores of the sea beyond Pisa, for he lived some time in the peaceful city dedicated to St Ranier, and probably both he and Shelley spent many hours many a time in a wood I know well, which follows the line of the sea for sixteen miles, and is many miles in depth. On the shore, pines, rooted in drifted sand half a mile broad, stand between the deciduous trees and the sea beach, and protect them from the violence of the westerly winds; when you are half a mile inland, you leave the pines and find ilex, acacia, beech, holly, juniper, and many aspen and other forest trees. Here the wood-dove, the goldfinch, the nuthatch, the woodpecker, the jay and the cuckoo dwell; here the grassy paths lead down dusky green aisles of foliage, fringed with dog-roses, where one may roam at pleasure all the day long, and meet nothing living beside the birds, except sometimes a stoat or a fox; here the flag-lily and the sword-rush grow in the reedy pools, and the song of the nightingale may be heard in perfection; its nests are made in numbers under the bracken, amongst the gorse and in the impenetrable thickets of the marucca and the heather. These woods are still entirely wild and natural, and they are rarely invaded except by the oxen or buffaloes drawing waggons to be filled with cut furze and dead branches by the rough and picturesque families who sit aloft on the giddy heights of these sylvan loads. But these invaders are few and far between, and in spring and summer these forest lands are as still and solitary as they certainly were when the poets wandered through them, listening to the sea-breeze sighing through the trees.
No one, I repeat, can fully appreciate the fineness and accuracy of observation and description of both Byron and Shelley who does not know Italy well; not with the pretended knowledge of the social hordes who come to its cities for court, and embassy, and gallery, and tea party, but such knowledge as can alone be gained by long and familiar intimacy with its remote and solitary places.
Few, perhaps, if any, think of Shelley as often as I do; and to me his whole personality seems the most spiritual and the most sympathetic of the age.
The personality of Byron startles, captivates, entrances; he flashes by us like a meteor; lover, noble, man of pleasure and of the world, solitary and soldier by turns, and a great poet always, let the poetasters and sciolists of the moment say what they will in their efforts to decry and to deny him. Shelley’s has nothing of this dazzling and gorgeous romance, as he has nothing in his portraits of that haughty and fiery challenge which speaks in the pose of the head and the glance of the eyes in every picture of Byron. Shelley’s eyes gaze outward with wistful, dreamy tenderness; they are the eyes of contemplative genius, the eyes which behold that which is not seen by the children of men. That sweetness and spirituality which are in his physiognomy characterise the fascination which his memory, like his verse, must exercise over any who can understand his soul. Nothing is more unfitting to him than those wranglings over his remains which are called studies of his life and letters. The solemnity and beauty of his death and burial should surely have secured him repose in his grave.
In no other country than England would it be possible to find writers and readers, so utterly incapable of realising what manner of nature and of mind his was, that they can presume to measure both by their foot-rule of custom and try to press both into their small pint-pot of conventional mortality. Would he not have said of his biographers, as he wrote of critics,—
‘Of your antipathy If I am the Narcissus, you are free To pine into a sound with hating me?’
What can his conduct, within the bonds of marriage or without them, matter to a world which he blessed and enriched? What can his personal sorrows or failings be to people who should only rejoice to hearken to his melodious voice? Who would not give the lives of a hundred thousand ordinary women to make happy for an hour such a singer as he?
The greatest duty of a man of genius is to his own genius, and he is not bound to dwell for a moment in any circumstances or any atmosphere which injures, restrains, or depresses it. The world has very little comprehension of genius. In England there is, more than anywhere else, the most fatal tendency to drag genius down into the heavy shackles of common-place existence, and to make Pegasus plough the common fields of earth. English genius has suffered greatly from the pressure of middle-class English opinion. It made George Eliot a hypocrite; it made Tennyson a chanter of Jubilee Odes; it put in chains even the bold spirit of Browning; and it has kept mute within the soul much noble verse which would have had rapture and passion in its cadences. The taint of hypocrisy, of Puritanism, of conventionality, has deeply entered into the English character, and how much and how great has been the loss it has caused to literature none will ever be able to measure.
Shelley affranchised himself in its despite, and for so doing he suffered in his life and suffers in his memory. He was a Republican in a time when republican doctrines were associated with the horrors of the guillotine and the excesses of the mob, then fresh in the public mind. He would now be called an Altruist where he was then called a Jacobin. His exhortation to the men of England,—
‘Men of England, wherefore plough For the lords who lay ye low? Wherefore weave with toil and care The rich robes your tyrants wear?’—
would, were it published now, be quoted with admiration by all the good Radicals, with John Morley at their head; indeed, it is astonishing that they have never reprinted it in their manuals for the people. It is wonderful also that ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ has escaped quotation by the leaders of the Irish opposition, and that the lines written during the Castlereagh administration have not been exhumed to greet the administration of any Tory Viceroy. Shelley in these forgot, as poets will forget, his own law, that the poet, like the chameleon, should feed from air, not earth. But what then was deemed so terrible a political crime in one of his gentle birth and culture would now be thought most generous and becoming, as the democratic principles of Vernon Harcourt and Lord Rosebery are now considered to be by their political party; the odes and sonnets which then drew down on him execration and persecution would now procure him the gratitude of Gladstone and the honour of the _Nineteenth Century_.
‘A people starved and stabbed in the untillèd field,’
is a line which has been strangely overlooked by orators for Ireland.
Shelley’s political creed—if an impersonal but intense indignation can deserve the name of creed—was born of his hatred of tyranny and a pity for pain which amounted to a passion. But his nature was not one which could long nurture hate; and he says truly that, with him and in all he wrote, ‘Love is celebrated everywhere as the sole law which should govern the moral world.’