_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.