We were neither of us fox-hunting ourselves, but chanced both to be out
on our morning walk and to be crossing a breezy Surrey common at the
same moment, when the huntsmen and huntresses of the Slumberfold Hunt
were blithely congregating for a day's run. A meet is always an
attractive sight, and we had both come to a halt within a yard or two of
each other, and stood watching the gallant company of fine ladies and
gentlemen on their beautiful, impatient mounts, keeping up a prancing
conversation, till the exciting moment should arrive when the cry would
go up that the fox had been started, and the whole field would sweep
away, a cataract of hounds, red-coats, riding habits, and dog-carts.
The moment came. The fox had been found in a spinney running down to
Withy Brook, and his race for life had begun. With a happy shout, the
hunt was up and off in a twinkling, and the stranger and I were left
alone on the broad common.
I had scanned him furtively as he stood near me; a tall, slightly build
man of about fifty, with perfectly white hair, and strangely gentle
blue eyes. There was a curious, sad distinction over him, and he had
watched the scene with a smile of blended humour and pity.
Turning to me, as we were left alone, and speaking almost as though to
himself: "It is a strange sight," he said with a sigh. "I wonder if it
seems as strange to you? Think of all those grown-up, so-called
civilized people being so ferociously intent on chasing one poor little
animal for its life--and feeling, when at last the huntsman holds up his
poor brush, with absurd pride (if indeed the fox is not too sly for
them), that they have really done something clever, in that with so many
horses and dogs and so much noise, they have actually contrived to catch
and kill one fox!"
"It is strange!" I said, for I had been thinking just that very thing.
"Of course, they always tell you," he continued, as we took the road
together, "that the fox really enjoys being hunted, and that he feels
his occupation gone if there are no hounds to track him, and finally to
tear him to pieces. What wonderful stories human nature will tell itself
in its own justification! Can one imagine any created thing _enjoying_
being pursued for its life, with all that loud terror of men and horses
and savage dogs at its heels? No doubt--if we can imagine even a fox so
self-conscious--it would take a certain pride in its own cunning and
skill, if the whole thing were a game; but a race with death is too
deadly in earnest for a fox even to relish his own stratagems. Happily
for the fox, it is probable that he does not feel so much for himself as
some of us feel for him; but any one who knows the wild things knows too
what terror they are capable of feeling, and how the fear of death is
always with them. No! you may be sure that a fox prefers a cosy
hen-roost to the finest run with the hounds ever made."
"But even if he should enjoy being hunted," I added, "the even stranger
thing to me is that civilized men and women should enjoy hunting him."
"Isn't it strange?" answered my companion eagerly, his face lighting up
at finding a sympathizer. "When will people realize that there is so
much more fun in studying wild things than in killing them!..."
He stopped suddenly in his walk, to gather a small weed which had
caught his quick eye by the roadside, and which he examined for a
moment through a little pocket microscope which I noticed, hanging
like an eyeglass round his neck, and which I learned afterward quite
affectionately to associate with him. Then, as we walked on, he
remarked:
"But, of course, we are yet very imperfectly civilized. Humanity is a
lesson learned very slowly by the human race. Yet we are learning it by
degrees, yes! we are learning it," and he threw out his long stride more
emphatically--the stride of one accustomed to long daily tramps on the
hills.
"Strange, that principle of cruelty in the universe!" he resumed, after
a pause in which he had walked on in silence. "Very strange. To me it is
the most mysterious of all things--though, I suppose, after all, it is
no more mysterious than pity. When, I wonder, did pity begin? Who was
the first human being to pity another? How strange he must have seemed
to the others, how incomprehensible and ridiculous--not to say
dangerous! There can be little doubt that he was promptly dispatched
with stone axes as an enemy of a respectable murderous society."
"I expect," said I "that our friends the fox-hunters would take a
similar view of our remarks on their sport."
"No doubt--and perhaps turn their hounds on us! A man hunt! 'Give me the
hunting of man!' as a brutal young poet we know of recently sang."
"How different was the spirit of Emerson's old verse," I said:
"Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk?...
O be my friend, and teach me to be thine!"
"That is one of my mottoes!" cried my companion with evident pleasure.
"Let us go and quote it to our fox-hunters!"
"I wonder how the fox is getting on," I said.
"If he is any sort of fox, he is safe enough as yet, we may be sure.
They are wonderful creatures. It is not surprising that mankind has
always looked upon Reynard as almost a human being--if not more--for
there is something quite uncanny in his instincts, and the cool,
calculating way in which he uses them. He is come and gone like a ghost.
One moment you were sure you saw him clearly close by and the next he is
gone--who knows where? He can run almost as swiftly as light, and as
softly as a shadow; and in his wildest dash, what a sure judgment he has
for the lie of the ground, how unerringly--and at a moment when a
mistake is death--he selects his cover! How learned, too, he is in
his knowledge of the countryside! There is not a dry ditch, or a
water-course, or an old drain, or a hole in a bank for miles around that
is not mysteriously set down in the map he carries in his graceful,
clever head; and one need hardly say that all the suitable hiding-places
in and around farm-yards are equally well known to him. Then withal he
is so brave. How splendidly, when wearied out, and hopelessly tracked
down, with the game quite up, he will turn on his pursuers, and die with
his teeth fast in his enemy's throat!"
"I believe you are a fox-hunter in disguise," I laughed.
"Well, I have hunted as a boy," he said, "and I know something of what
those red-coated gentlemen are feeling. But soon I got more interested
in studying nature than killing it, and when I became a naturalist I
ceased to be a hunter. You get to love the things so that it seems like
killing little children. They come so close to you, are so beautiful and
so clever; and sometimes there seems such a curious pathos about them.
How any one can kill a deer with that woman's look in its eyes, I don't
know. I should always expect the deer to change into a fairy princess,
and die in my arms with the red blood running from her white breast. And
pigeons, too, with their soft sunny coo all the summer afternoon, or the
sudden lapping of sleepy wings round the chimneys--how can any one trap
or shoot them with blood-curdling rapidity, and not expect to see
ghosts!"
"Of course, there is this difference about the fox," I said, "that it is
really in a sense born to be hunted. For not only is it a fierce hunter
itself, but it would not be allowed to exist at all, so to say, unless
it consented to being hunted. Like a gladiator it accepts a comfortable
living for a certain time, on condition of its providing at last a
spirited exhibition of dying. In other words, it is preserved entirely
for the purpose of being hunted. It must accept life on that condition
or be extirpated as destructive vermin by the plundered farmer. Life is
sweet, after all, and to be a kind of protected highwayman of the
poultry-yard, for a few sweet toothsome years, taking one's chances of
being surely brought to book at last, may perhaps seem worth while."
"Yes! but how does your image of the protected gladiator reflect on
those who protect him? There, of course, is the point. The gladiator, as
you say, is willing to take his chances in exchange for fat living and
idleness, as long as he lives. You may even say that his profession is
good for him, develops fine qualities of mind even as well as body--but
what of the people who crowd with blood-thirsty eagerness to watch those
qualities exhibited in so tragic a fashion for their amusement? Do they
gain any of his qualities of skill and courage, and strength and
fearlessness in the face of death? No, they are merely brutalized by
cruel excitement--and while they applaud his skill and admire his
courage, they long most to watch him die. So--is it not?--with our
friend the fox. The huntsman invariably compliments him on his spirit
and his cunning, but what he wants is--the brush. He wants the
excitement of hunting the living thing to its death; and, let huntsmen
say what they will about the exhilaration of the horse exercise across
country as being the main thing, they know better--and, if it be true,
why don't they take it without the fox?"
"They do in America, as, of course, you know. There a man walks across
country trailing a stick, at the end of which is a piece of cloth
impregnated with some pungent scent which hounds love and mistake for
the real thing."
"Hard on the poor hounds!" smiled my friend. "Even worse than a red
herring. You could hardly blame the dogs if they mistook the man for
Actaeon and tore him to pieces."
"And I suspect that the huntsmen are no better satisfied."
"Yet, as we were saying, if the secret spring of their sport is not the
cruel delight of pursuing a living thing to its death, that American
plan should serve all the purposes, and give all the satisfaction for
which they claim to follow the hounds: the keen pleasure of a gallop
across country, the excitement of its danger, the pluck and pride of
taking a bad fence, and equally, too, the pleasure of watching the
hounds cleverly at work with their mysterious gift of scent. All the
same, I suspect there are few sportsmen who would not vote it a tame
substitute. Without something being killed, the zest, the 'snap,' is
gone. It is as depressing as a sham fight."
"Yes, that mysterious shedding of blood! what a part it has played in
human history! Even religion countenances it, and war glorifies it. Men
are never in higher spirits than when they are going to kill, or be
killed themselves, or see something else killed. Tennyson's 'ape and
tiger' die very hard in the tamest of us."
"Alas, indeed they do!" said my friend with a sigh. "But I do believe
that they are dying none the less. Just of late there has been a
reaction in favour of brute force, and people like you and me have been
ridiculed as old-fashioned sentimentalists. But reaction is one of the
laws of advance. Human progress always takes a step backwards after it
has taken two forward. And so it must be here too. In the end, it is the
highest type among men and nations that count, and the highest types
among both today are those which show most humanity, shrink most from
the infliction of pain. When one thinks of the horrible cruelties that
were the legal punishment of criminals, even within the last two hundred
years, and not merely brutal criminals, but also political offenders or
so-called heretics--how every one thought it the natural and proper
thing to break a man on the wheel for a difference of opinion, or
torture him with hideous ingenuity into a better frame of mind, and
how the pettiest larcenies were punished by death; it seems as if we
of today, even the least sensitive of us, cannot belong to the same
race--and it is impossible to deny that the heart of the world has grown
softer and that pity is becoming more and more a natural instinct in
human nature. I believe that some day it will have thrust out cruelty
altogether, and that the voluntary infliction of pain upon another will
be unknown. The idea of any one killing for pleasure will seem too
preposterous to be believed, and soldiers and fox-hunters and
pigeon-shooters will be spoken of as nowadays we speak of cannibals.
But, of course, I am a dreamer," he concluded, his face shining with his
gentle dream, as though he had been a veritable saint of the calendar.
"Yes, a dream," he added presently, "and yet--" In that "and yet"
there was a world of invincible faith that made it impossible not to
share his dream, even see it building before one's eyes--such is the
magnetic power of a passionate personal conviction.
"Of course," he went on again, "we all know that 'nature is one with
rapine, a harm no preacher can heal.' But because the fox runs off with
the goose, or the hawk swoops down on the chicken, and 'yon whole little
wood is a world of plunder and prey'--is that any reason why we should
be content to plunder and prey too? And after all, the cruelty of Nature
is only one-sided. There is lots of pity in Nature too. These strange
little wild lives around us are not entirely bent on killing and eating
each other. They know the tenderness of motherhood, the sweetness of
building a home together, and I believe there is far more comradeship
and mutual help amongst them than we know of. Yes, even in wild Nature
there is a principle of love working no less than a principle of hate.
Nature is not all-devouring and destroying. She is loving and building
too. Nature is more constructive than destructive, and she is ever at
work evolving and evolving a higher dream. Surely it is not for man, to
whom, so far as we know, Nature has entrusted the working out of her
finest impulses, and whom she has endowed with all the fairy apparatus
of the soul; it is not for him, whose eyes--of all her children--Nature
has opened, the one child she has taken into her confidence and to whom
she has whispered her secret hopes and purposes; surely it is not for
man voluntarily to deny his higher lot, and, because the wolf and he
have come from the same great mother, say: 'I am no better than the
wolf. Why should I not live the life of a wolf--and kill and devour like
my brother?' Surely it is not for the cruel things in Nature to teach
man cruelty--rather, if it were possible," and the saint smiled at his
fancy, "would it be the mission of man to teach them kindness: rather
should he preach pity to the hawk and peace between the panther and the
bear. It is not the bad lessons of Nature, but the good, that are meant
for man--though, as you must have noticed, man seldom appeals to the
precedents of Nature except to excuse that in him which is Nature at her
worst. When we say, 'it is only natural,' we almost invariably refer to
that in Nature of which Nature herself has entrusted the refinement or
the elimination to man. It is Nature's bad we copy, not Nature's good;
and always we forget that we ourselves are a part of Nature--Nature's
vicegerent, so to say, upon the earth--"
As we talked, we had been approaching a house built high among the
heather, with windows looking over all the surrounding country.
Presently, the saint stopped in front of it.
"This is my house," he said. "Won't you come in and see me some
time?--and, by the way, I am going to talk to some of the village
children about the wild things, bird's nesting, and so forth, up at the
schoolhouse on Thursday. I wish you'd come and help me. One's only hope
is with the children. The grown-up are too far gone. Mind you come."
So we parted, and, as I walked across the hill homeward, haunted by that
gentle face, I thought of Melampus, that old philosopher who loved the
wild things so and had made such friends with them, that they had taught
him their language and told him all their secrets:
With love exceeding a simple love of the things
That glide in grasses and rubble of woody wreck;
Or change their perch on a beat of quivering wings
From branch to branch, only restful to pipe and peck;
Or, bridled, curl at a touch their snouts in a ball;
Or cast their web between bramble and thorny hook;
The good physician, Melampus, loving them all,
Among them walked, as a scholar who reads a book.
As I dipped into the little thick-set wood that surrounds my house,
something stood for a second in one of the openings, then was gone like
a shadow. I was glad to think how full of bracken and hollows, and
mysterious holes and corners of mossed and lichened safety was our old
wood--for the shadow was a fox. I like to think it was the very fox we
had been talking about come to find shelter with me--and, if he stole a
meal out of our hen-roost, I gave it him before he asked it, with all
the will in the world. I hope he chose a good fat hen, and not one of
your tough old capons that sometimes come to table.