It is not so amusing as it used to be to watch lions and tigers in
cages. We are beginning to feel that it is an unlucky plight for a
respectable tiger to be pent within boards and iron bars while kind
ladies throw biscuits and the gentleman with them smiles; for we know
what would happen to the smile and the biscuits if the tiger were
in the woods and coughed slightly not far away. There would be less
beauty in the entertainment, it is true, if the Zoölogical Gardens
maintained choice examples in cages of vitriol-throwers, child-beaters,
market riggers, war-makers, spies, _agents-provocateurs_, and so on.
Regent’s Park would have to be extended to hold so large and varied an
exhibition of wild beasts. The most beautiful of murderers could never
be compared for shape and grace with a good lion or jaguar. It may be
said, therefore, that there is a subtle flattery in our caging of the
finer and more dignified creatures.
We should find no pleasure in looking upon a caged sneak-thief, though
certainly we keep them in cages, when we catch them; but the lion,
I have been assured, is almost invariably a perfect gentleman who
prefers not to quarrel and fight, and will leave the presence of the
other animal with a gun if he can do so with delicacy and honour.
Perhaps it is excusable in us that we should enjoy looking upon so
noble a creature in safety. I have heard him, when he was in a cage,
quietly swearing while gazing into the distance and a Bank Holiday
crowd was staring at him; and even the most uncharitable of Christians
could forgive him his bad language in such circumstances. And I have
heard the tiger, when he was not in a cage, cough in the place where
there was no Bank Holiday crowd, and at night; and I learned then that
the mind of man does not feel so proud as it does at other times.
The lion, of course, knows nothing of the quantum theory; but perhaps
most of our Privy Councillors are as innocent. If the test were made
of most of us; if we were removed from the benefit of the accumulated
knowledge of humanity, our knowledge which is kept growing, for love
usually, by a few superior minds, we should not know how to make a
fire without the matches of which we had been deprived. On the whole,
probably we flatter the depth of that abyss between ourselves and the
lower animals; and for the wolf who runs up and down his cage sullenly
ignoring our overtures, and behaving as though we do not exist, we are
beginning to feel there is something to be said.
I suppose it is too soon to say that for the dogfish and the conger
eel. The darkened corridors and the silence of the New Aquarium at the
Zoölogical Gardens, and the eerie light there of an existence beyond us
in which undulating forms suggest that life may have meanings outside
our understanding, are so salutary that you hear hardly a sound from
the visitors. They move about, speaking in whispers, as though in the
presence of the awful. I heard a boy laugh there, but even that was
subdued; and we may expect, of course, to hear the chuckle of a boy on
the Judgment Day. The boy laughed while he was watching a crab with
claws like grappling irons walk on the sea floor of the Aquarium. It
went craftily, on its toes, and not straightforwardly, but sideways,
as though its aim were evil. A turbot was flat on the sand, pretending
to be the floor, but the crab put a hook on him. The turbot started;
but the crab went straight on to the back of the fish. The boy laughed
at the obvious surprise of both of them, which showed in a frantic
eruption. But even the laugh was uncanny, for it broke out unexpectedly
in an inhuman privacy which might have been the antechamber to the
unspeakable.
Only an irreverent boy would find anything funny in such a place. There
is no comic element, that we know of, under water. It is not surprising
that visitors to the Aquarium are subdued, or that they feel pity
for the few sea-birds which happen to be exiled there from the day.
That pity shows the difference. Pity for birds in a great aviary is
rare, and maybe it is unnecessary. That is a matter in which we should
consult the birds, if ever we doubt our own generous hearts. But sorrow
for birds confined to a dungeon in the dim light and silence where eels
and octopuses are at home is instant and right. In a reverse way that
sorrow proves that the theatrical effect of the new Aquarium is good.
It is good. It is marred only by the presence of those birds, which is
forced and unnatural.
The recesses of the tanks, where antennæ are seen vibrating or
exploring in the shadows, when the eye is accustomed to the hyaline
indistinction, where sinuous figures are seen in apparition, or a pair
of jaws that picture soulless destiny itself gulp spasmodically and
incessantly, somehow challenge the soul in a way impossible to the most
terrible lion. With what respect one stares at that inert and leathery
length, the lungfish, for he is the link between the sea-bottom dark
from which came all life, and those hill-tops which life now regards
as suitable for select villas. It was fortunate for our speculative
builders that somehow, when it was left stranded in drying mud, the
ancestor of the lungfish was able to fashion his swimming bladder into
an organ which made him independent of gills, and equipped him for a
life in the sun, though it was only a suspended life. See what has come
of it!
It is not only the silence and the twilight of the Aquarium which are
impressive, but the sense that no more than plate glass separates us
from a frightful gulf of time. And consider the fascination of the
octopus! Could there be anything more sinister than the cold stare of
the eyes surmounting that bulging stomach? Yet watch it shoot through
the water and alight upon a rock, tentacles and all, with a flowing
grace never equalled by a young lady practising a courtesy for the
Court. That, however, only adds to its attraction, curiously enough;
because attractive it is, for a reason so natural in mankind, and yet
so obscure and difficult to define, that to look for it might take
us into the Antarctic of philosophy. I found the largest audience of
the Aquarium at the tank of the octopus, patiently waiting for what
satisfaction, joy, terror, horror, consternation, or what not, it
could bestow. It is useless for the ladies to protest that they love
the Angel fish better, or any of the banded and prismatic tropical
forms of the Amazon or the coral reefs. I saw very few people at the
tanks where those opalescent or enamelled creatures were proving that
our finest artists in the fantasies of decoration are bunglers. No.
The superior audiences were for the octopus, for the grotesque and
carnivorous spinosities, and for the conger eel.