THOUGHTS IN A SENTRY-BOX
That wren was an interlude, and the puffins another. When he of the
bottle-nose returned, I at first used the shelter which I had constructed
during his absence, but soon left it for another great precipice of a
rock that also overhung the pool, and in which a huge fracture, half-way
up, made a splendid natural concealment. Afterwards, however, I came to
the conclusion that as long as one behaved with any sense of propriety,
avoiding loud or startling noises, and not putting oneself shamelessly
_en évidence_, these seals would never take alarm, for indeed they seemed
to have lived all their lives in a happy unfamiliarity with man, upon
which terms I devoutly hope they may continue.
Well, like the world, one does go forward, though slowly. Not so many
years ago the sight of these seals would have made me want to shoot
them. God alone knows why--or, rather, I know why, perfectly well:
the inherited instinct of the savage, which is not in itself, as some
humanitarians think, a bad thing, or at any rate in the savage it was
not, only it is now out of place, and reason and morality together ought
to insist upon crushing it. It is because the wish, or rather passion, to
kill wild animals is so natural, that it seems so right to those who have
it, for the strong desire to do almost anything makes almost anything
seem right, or rather the impelling force in such cases _is_ a force,
whereas that which seeks to restrain it is weak, cold, frigid, like the
voice of reason in love.
Moreover, I believe that to sin out the evil in one is nature's true way
of progress--in which I join issue with the spiritualistic doctrine of
repression--and therefore were it not for the many ill consequences, the
worst of which is specific extinction, I should not think a man did wrong
to prey upon the animal world as long as to do so _was_ his nature--that
is to say, the stronger part of his nature; nor can it be denied that he
who does so is acting in accordance with the scheme of the universe, as
far as it is possible to make it out, whereas the humanitarian seems for
ever to be flying in the very face of the deity, who, "with no uncertain
voice," has said, through all time, to all His creatures:--"Kill one
another." Whether one would be right to obey such a deity after one's
nature has begun to rebel against His methods is another question,
though, as plants must be included amongst the creatures, it would be
rather difficult not to; but that, at any rate, is what He, or nature,
or whatever we may choose to call it, has most clearly said, and I think
that humanitarians, though they may be very right, ought to consider the
difficulty here involved. My impression is that they shirk it.
But in regard to sport, I wish that every civilised representative of
the savage in this particular respect would arrive at the point where I
now stand, by the same natural process which has brought me there. One
cannot long watch any creature without insensibly beginning to sympathise
with it, to enter into its state, to imagine oneself it--which is to
be it--and then, how can one shoot oneself? Why, it would be suicide.
As for me, I watch wild animals, when I get the chance, not only with
sympathy, but with envy. I am eternally wishing myself them--strange
as it may appear to some who, I suppose, rate themselves highly. That
was Iago's case. "Ere I would," says he, etc., etc. (something very
preposterous), "I would exchange my humanity with a baboon." Well, and
why not? With a guarantee against getting into the Zoological Gardens,
most of us would be gainers by the bargain. I, at any rate--I say it
merely as an expression of my conviction; let my enemies make the worst
of it--I, at any rate, would. As to the advantages which would have
accrued from the arrangement in Iago's case--not only to himself, but to
almost all the _dramatis personæ_ of the play--they are too obvious to
need pointing out. Baboons, however, stand so high in the scale that the
change for many of us would, except in regard to surroundings, be hardly
perceptible, so that the desire to bring it about may offer too little
proof of that force of sympathy which I pretend to. But I do not stop
there, and even at this very moment I would gladly exchange myself with
this bottle-nosed seal I am watching, could I bring myself to cheat the
poor fool so. Oh that fine sensuous roll in the water! made with such
sense of enjoyment--so slow, so lazy, eking it out--the whole of the
animal seeming to smack its lips.
We "human mortals," I believe, quite underestimate the sensuous pleasures
of animals. Their mere ways of moving must often be infinite joys to
them, seeing that besides the motion itself--as with this seal, the
gnu, or the springbok, the half-flying arboreal monkey, or the soaring
bird--there is the ecstasy of perfect health and strength and the freedom
of perfect nudity--absolute disencumbrance. The first of these may be
felt almost, perhaps, in as great a degree by some savages, but if I may
judge by my own experience it never is and never can be by a civilised
man leading a civilised life. With us, speaking generally, health is
more a negative than an affirmative proposition. To be well is not to be
ill. But in the veldt, where one walks all day and eats one hearty meal
by the camp-fire at the end of it, it is like a strong wine that one
has drunk. It is a mighty, stirring, active, compelling force--ending,
however, in fever, which the animals don't get. No doubt the pleasures
of the intellect are of a higher order than those which spring from mere
corporeal ecstasy; but is the civilised man, writing a treatise, happier
than the savage in his war-dance, or the capercailzie going through
his love antics? "_That_ is the question"; or, in other words, does
civilisation make for happiness?
Who, in spite of much laboured reasoning to the contrary, can doubt
that more happiness enters into the life of most savages than into that
of most civilised men? Not I, who have seen the Kaffirs, unblessed
by our rule, and read Wallace's account of the Papuans in _The Malay
Archipelago_, which, to show that I am not talking nonsense, I will here
quote: "These forty black, naked, mop-headed savages seemed intoxicated
with joy and excitement. Not one of them could remain still for a
moment.... A few presents of tobacco made their eyes glisten; they would
express their satisfaction by grins and shouts, by rolling on deck, or by
a headlong leap overboard. Schoolboys on an unexpected holiday, Irishmen
at a fair, or midshipmen on shore, would give but faint idea of the
exuberant animal enjoyment of these people." The grown Papuan, therefore,
is happier--so it struck Wallace--than the civilised schoolboy. It is a
well-chosen point of comparison. We are not ashamed, most of us, to look
back to our boyhood as to a state of high-tide happiness that, upon the
whole, with a fluctuation or two not quite in favour of the intellect,
has been receding ever since; but we _kick_ at thinking savages happier
than ourselves. Kick as we may, the Arab on his horse or his swift
dromedary, the Lap on his snow-shoes, the Esquimaux in his canoe, the
Indian chasing the buffalo--as he used to do--or the Pacific Islander
surf-riding, carry it, I believe, as far as sheer happiness is concerned,
high over the civilised man with all his greater powers of mind and his
advanced morality.
"But witchcraft, with its terrors," says some one. True; but I have lain
in a Kaffir village on the banks of the Zambesi, within the murmur of its
Falls, and watched the young men and maidens dancing together in the full
moon--there seemed little of terror there. And I have seen my own boys
talking and smoking _dacha_ round the camp fires. Where was the brooding
terror, or the dark cloud? Savages do not anticipate, as we do. They feel
no uncertain evils, not, at least, till they are very near indeed, till
the wizard is actually "smelling" them out; they live, like the animal,
in the joy or pain of the moment, and their moments have more of joy and
less of pain in them than ours.
But if witchcraft _were_ the "dark cloud that hangs for ever over savage
life," that Lord Avebury (Sir John Lubbock) tells us it is, have _we_ no
dark clouds, and have we less or more capacity for feeling them? What
is an engagement to dine then, or an enforced call? and consider the
dark cloud of having to go every year, _en famille_, to the seaside,
that hangs over the civilised married wretch! Surely the certainty of
things like these is worse than only the risk of a witchcraft exposure,
a thing which, when it occurs amongst savages (and it was the same with
ourselves) is often, if not generally, deserved--for evidence of which I
would refer to Miss Kingsley.[12]
[Footnote 12: _West African Studies_, pp. 157-68.]
Then take travelling. It is referred to by Lord Avebury as one great
source of pleasure which civilised people enjoy, but which savages do
not. He should have restricted the proposition to civilised women. No
word more terrible in the ears of a husband than "Paris" on the lips of a
wife. What worry, what anxiety, fear of adventurers, horror of waiters,
hatred of hotels--what misery, in short, of almost every degree and kind,
do not men go through who have to travel with their families! How they
would all stay at home if they only could, and how glad they are--but
this is a set-off--when they get back! As a real fact--and every one must
really know it--a very great number of so-called civilised pleasures are
much more in the nature of pains--and acute ones--to those who are most
truly civilised. The joys of the savage, however, are real joys.
But comparisons of this sort are of little value, since they can only
be drawn by those who belong to one of the two states, and not to both
of them, and who, therefore, besides their prejudices, and that their
wish is generally father to their thought, are of necessity unable to
feel, or even to imagine, much of what is felt by members of the opposite
one. Practically, of course, it is always the civilised man who passes
judgment, and in doing so he often adds cant and insincerity to the
disabilities under which he labours. For whilst insisting to the utmost
on all the pleasures--many of them empty and artificial--which belong
to and represent the civilised state, he says little or nothing about
certain elementary, and, therefore, very real ones, which savages enjoy
much more unrestrainedly than do we. Very fair, very impartial, truly,
when the question is not which is the more advanced man, but which is
the happier man. We have much the same sort of thing in the case of
comparisons made by Christian divines and historians as between paganism
and Christianity--their relative degree of truth, merit, influence in
a right direction, etc.; judgment, of course, being always given in
favour--generally immensely in favour--of the latter. Seeing that the
pagans are all dead and cannot answer any point made against them, I
wonder these complacent bestowers of unqualified approval on themselves
are not ashamed to bluster so, where they have it all their own way.
When I read one of these prejudiced panegyrics, affecting the form and
manner of impartiality, I always seem to see a picture of some reverend
old learned priest of Jupiter or Apollo, who, in similar pompous periods,
and with the very same tones and gestures which one can imagine in the
Christian author, goes over the same ground, and, with the same show of
absolute fairness, settles everything precisely the opposite way.
As I have slidden out of a consideration of the relative happiness
enjoyed by man and the lower animals into a similar appraisement as
between the civilised man and the savage, I will just express my opinion
(at this moment) that wherever the latter has the advantage over the
former, the animal _a fortiori_ has it still more. Amongst animals,
moreover, there is not the same inequality of pleasure, as between the
sexes, that there is, or is thought to be, amongst savages. But this is
enough of _la haute philosophie_.
How snug it is, now, whilst I write this by the red fire in the little
sentry-box, on the great lonely ness that the wind howls over, whose
head-gear are the wreathing mists, and whose skirtings the sea and the
sea-birds! There is no one within near three miles, and I myself am
alone. On the "great lonely veldt," as city journalists like to call it,
you have your boys, the fires, and the oxen sitting by the waggon-chain,
and chewing the cud--a picturesque, a romantic and interesting scene, but
not a lonely one. Here it is real aloneness--yet I wish I had not to say,
with Scipio, that "I am never less alone than when alone." True solitude
should imply no fleas.
During the time that this large bottle-nosed seal was away, a small
common one--the same that lies on the rock in this sea-pool every day
from before it is uncovered to the flowing in of the tide--came and
disported himself--as usual I had said, but it was not quite the same.
He first began to dive and reappear, at regular intervals, as does the
great one, and I soon found that he was behaving like him in all things,
even to the standing on end in the water, like a peg-top, with his nose
straight up in the air. As his body, however, is not so bladdery, and
his nose not so extraordinary, he did not present so strange an aspect.
He differed, moreover, in the length of his immersions, which was not
more than five or six minutes, whilst those of the other one--the great,
portly bottle-nose--were as under, viz., from 12.6 to 12.15; from 12.16½
to 12.26; from 12.27 to 12.36½; from 12.37½ to 12.48; from 4.26 to 4.39;
from 4.40 to 4.54½; from 4.55½ to 5.7¾; from 5.9½ to 5.23; from 5.24½
to 5.37½; from 5.38½ to 5.51; from 5.52½ to 6.4¼; from 6.5½ to 6.18¾.
Thus only three out of a dozen of his subaqueous excursions was for
less than ten minutes, the shortest one being for nine minutes and the
longest for fourteen minutes and a half. His stays above water were of
even more uniform duration, varying between a minute and a minute and a
half, except in one instance where he stayed a minute and three quarters.
An animal of regular habits, by my fay! No doubt the great bottle-nose
can stay down longer on occasions if he wishes it, but as this is his
usual period, it must, I suppose, be what he finds most comfortable; and
the same should apply to every other kind of seal. The nostrils of this
larger one have the appearance of being more highly developed than in the
common species, and this may have something to do with his more prolonged
submersions, if I may take what I have seen in these two individuals as
typical of their respective communities.
Returning now to the common seal, what distinguished him this afternoon
from the bottle-nosed one was that, after he had come up and gone down
again several times, he at last remained floating for half an hour or
more in this perpendicular fashion, his head for the most part straight
up in the air, whilst at intervals he would open his mouth widely,
and keep it so for some seconds at a time, then shutting and again
opening it, as though he had some special object in so doing, though
I can form no conjecture as to what it was. The inside of his mouth
being--especially the parts farthest down--of a deep and bright red,
contrasted most vividly with the cold grey of the water and the general
colourlessness of this northern scene. The grass must be excepted from
this picture; but though bright enough if looked at by itself, it is
unable to overpower the general effect imparted by sky, by sea, by naked
rock and precipice. After a considerable time spent in this curious
performance, the seal at last desists and swims to his rock, now but
thinly covered by the waves. He circumnavigates it, hangs about it
affectionately, lies upon it in the wash of the waves, swims away again,
returns, and now, it being just possible to do so, reclines in earnest,
adjusting himself to his greater satisfaction as the tide recedes.
But it is not only on the rocks that seals lie sleeping. They do so
also--as one is doing now--in the sea itself, rising and sinking with
the heave and subsidence of the wave, advancing and retiring with its
flux and reflux without exhibiting any kind of independent motion--less,
indeed, than they indulged in, in basking on the rocks; for they do not,
whilst thus floating, seem so inclined to scratch or kick or stretch the
legs, or go through any other of their various quaint, uncouth actions.
The eyes are shut, but they open at long, lazy intervals. They float,
or rather drift, thus, mostly belly downwards, but will roll to either
side or even round on to the back, not lying horizontally, however, but
aslant, with all except their head, or rather face, sunk down in the
water, just like a sack of something, quite enough asleep to seem dead;
in fact, as much as possible they make the sea a rock. Delicious they
look, thus idly swayed about with the play of the waves--drawn this way
and that, sucked down and then back again; mixed up with a tangle of
seaweed. An amateur watcher of seals feels inclined to wonder what they
ever do except sleep, or try to sleep. Great sleepers they certainly
seem to be, and this is the daytime. Are they, then, nocturnal? The
carnivorous land animals from whom they are descended probably were so.