BOOKS ON BIG GAME
The nineteenth century was, beyond all others, the century of big game
hunters, and of books about big game. From the days of Nimrod to our own
there have been mighty hunters before the Lord, and most warlike and
masterful races have taken kindly to the chase, as chief among those
rough pastimes which appeal naturally to men with plenty of red blood in
their veins. But until the nineteenth century the difficulties of travel
were so great that men of our race with a taste for sport could rarely
gratify this taste except in their own neighborhood. The earlier among
the great conquering kings of Egypt and Assyria, when they made their
forays into Syria and the region of the Upper Euphrates, hunted the
elephant and the wild bull, as well as the lions with which the country
swarmed; and Tiglath-Pileser the First, as overlord of Phœnicia,
embarked on the Mediterranean, and there killed a “sea-monster,”
presumably a whale—a feat which has been paralleled by no sport-loving
sovereign of modern times, save by that stout hunter, the German Kaiser;
though I believe the present English King, like several members of his
family, has slain both elephants and tigers before he came to the
throne. But the elephant disappeared from Eastern Asia a thousand years
before our era; and the lion had become rare or unknown in lands where
the dwellers were of European stock, long before the days of written
records.
There was good hunting in Macedonia in the days of Alexander the Great;
there was good hunting in the Hercynian Forest when Frank and Bergund
were turning Gaul into France; there was good hunting in Lithuania and
Poland as late as the days of Sobiéski; but the most famous kings and
nobles of Europe, within historic times, though they might kill the
aurochs and the bison, the bear and the boar, had no chance to test
their prowess against the mightier and more terrible beasts of the
tropics.
No modern man could be more devoted to the chase than were the
territorial lords of the Middle Ages. Two of the most famous books of
the chase ever written were the _Livre de Chasse_ of Count Gaston de
Foix—Gaston Phœbus, well known to all readers of Froissart—and the
translation or adaptation and continuation of the same, the “Master of
Game,” by that Duke of York who “died victorious” at Agincourt. Mr.
Baillie-Grohman, himself a hunter and mountaineer of wide experience, a
trained writer and observer, and a close student of the hunting lore of
the past, has edited and reproduced the “Master of Game,” in form which
makes it a delight to every true lover of books no less than to every
true lover of sport. A very interesting little book is Clamorgan’s
_Chasse du Loup_, dedicated to Charles the Ninth of France; my copy is
of the edition of 1566. The text and the illustrations are almost
equally attractive.
As the centuries passed it became more and more difficult to obtain
sport in the thickly settled parts of Europe save in the vast game
preserves of the Kings and great lords. These magnates of Continental
Europe, down to the beginning of the last century, followed the chase
with all the ardor of Gaston Phœbus; indeed, they erred generally on the
side of fantastic extravagance and exaggeration in their favorite
pursuit, turning it into a solemn and rather ridiculous business instead
of a healthy and vigorous pastime; but they could hunt only the beasts
of their own forests. The men who went on long voyages usually had quite
enough to do simply as travellers; the occupation of getting into
unknown lands, and of keeping alive when once in them, was in itself
sufficiently absorbing and hazardous to exclude any chance of combining
with it the role of sportsman.
With the last century all this had changed. Even in the eighteenth
century it began to change. The Dutch settlers at the Cape of Good Hope,
and the English settlers on the Atlantic coast of North America, found
themselves thrown back into a stage of life where hunting was one of the
main means of livelihood, as well as the most exciting and adventurous
of pastimes. These men knew the chase as men of their race had not known
it since the days before history dawned; and until the closing decades
of the last century the Americans and the Afrikanders of the frontier
largely led the lives of professional hunters. Oom Paul and Buffalo Bill
led very different careers after they reached middle age; but in their
youth warfare against wild beasts and wild men was the most serious part
of the life-work of both. They and their fellows did the rough pioneer
work of civilization, under conditions which have now vanished for ever,
and their type will perish with the passing of the forces that called it
into being. But the big game hunter, whose campaigns against big game
are not simply incidents in his career as a pioneer settler, will remain
with us for some time longer; and it is of him and his writings that we
wish to treat.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century this big game hunter had
already appeared, although, like all early types, he was not yet
thoroughly specialized. Le Vaillant hunted in South Africa, and his
volumes are excellent reading now. A still better book is that of Bruce,
the Abyssinian explorer, who was a kind of Burton of his days, with a
marvellous faculty for getting into quarrels, but an even more
marvellous faculty for doing work which no other man could do. He really
opened a new world to European men of letters and science; who thereupon
promptly united in disbelieving all he said, though they were credulous
enough toward people who really should have been distrusted. But his
tales have been proved true by many an explorer since then, and his book
will always possess interest for big game hunters, because of his
experiences in the chase. Sometimes he shot merely in self-defense or
for food, but he also made regular hunting trips in company with the
wild lords of the shifting frontier between dusky Christian and dusky
infidel. He feasted in their cane palaces, where the walls were hung
with the trophies of giant game, and in their company, with horse and
spear, he attacked and overcame the buffalo and the rhinoceros.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century the hunting book proper
became differentiated, as it were, from the book of the explorer. One of
the earliest was Williamson’s “Oriental Field Sports.” This is to the
present day a most satisfactory book, especially to sporting parents
with large families of small children. The pictures are all in colors,
and the foliage is so very green, and the tigers are so very red, and
the boars so very black, and the tragedies so uncommonly vivid and
startling, that for the youthful mind the book really has no formidable
rival outside of the charmed circle where Slovenly Peter stands first.
Since then multitudes of books have been written about big game hunting.
Most of them are bad, of course, just as most novels and most poems are
bad; but some of them are very good indeed, while a few are entitled to
rank high in literature—though it cannot be said that as yet big game
hunters as a whole have produced such writers as those who dwell on the
homelier and less grandiose side of nature. They have not produced a
White or Burroughs, for instance. What could not Burroughs have done if
only he had cared for adventure and for the rifle, and had roamed across
the Great Plains and the Rockies, and through the dim forests, as he has
wandered along the banks of the Hudson and the Potomac! Thoreau, it is
true, did go to the Maine Woods; but then Thoreau was a
transcendentalist and slightly anæmic. A man must feel the beat of hardy
life in his veins before he can be a good big game hunter. Fortunately,
Richard Jeffries has written an altogether charming little volume on the
Red Deer, so that there is at least one game animal which has been fully
described by a man of letters, who was also both a naturalist and a
sportsman; but it is irritating to think that no one has done as much
for the lordlier game of the wilderness. Not only should the hunter be
able to describe vividly the chase, and the life habits of the quarry,
but he should also draw the wilderness itself, and the life of those who
dwell or sojourn therein. We wish to see before us the cautious stalk
and the headlong gallop; the great beasts as they feed or rest or run or
make love or fight; the wild hunting camps; the endless plains
shimmering in the sunlight; the vast, solemn forests; the desert and the
marsh and the mountain chain; and all that lies hidden in the lonely
lands through which the wilderness wanderer roams and hunts game.
But there remain a goodly number of books which are not merely filled
with truthful information of importance, but which are also absorbingly
interesting; and if a book is both truthful and interesting it is surely
entitled to a place somewhere in general literature. Unfortunately, the
first requisite bars out a great many hunting-books. There are not a few
mighty hunters who have left long records of their achievements, and who
undoubtedly did achieve a great deal, but who contrive to leave in the
mind of the reader the uncomfortable suspicion, that besides their
prowess with the rifle they were skilled in the use of that more archaic
weapon, the long bow. “The Old Shekarry,” who wrote of Indian and
African sport, was one of these. Gerard was a great lion-killer, but
some of his accounts of the lives, deaths, and especially the
courtships, of lions, bear much less relation to actual facts than do
the novels of Dumas. Not a few of the productions of hunters of this
type should be grouped under the head-lines used by the newspapers of
our native land in describing something which they are perfectly sure
hasn’t happened—“Important, if True.” The exactly opposite type is
presented in another Frenchman, M. Foa, a really great hunter who also
knows how to observe and to put down what he has observed. His two books
on big game hunting in Africa have permanent value.
If we were limited to the choice of one big game writer, who was merely
such, and not in addition a scientific observer, we should have to
choose Sir Samuel Baker, for his experiences are very wide, and we can
accept without question all that he says in his books. He hunted in
India, in Africa, and in North America; he killed all the chief kinds of
heavy and dangerous game; and he followed them on foot and on horseback,
with the rifle and the knife, and with hounds. For the same reason, if
we could choose but one work, it would have to be the volumes of “Big
Game Shooting,” in the Badminton Library, edited by Mr. Phillipps
Wolley—himself a man who has written well of big game hunting in
out-of-the-way places, from the Caucasus to the Cascades. These volumes
contain pieces by many different authors; but they differ from most
volumes of the kind in that all the writers are trustworthy and
interesting; though the palm must be given to Oswell’s delightful
account of his South African hunting. The book on the game beasts of
Africa edited by Mr. Bryden is admirable in every way.
[Illustration:
THE NORTH ROOM AT SAGAMORE HILL
]
In all these books the one point to be insisted on is that a big game
hunter has nothing in common with so many of the men who delight to call
themselves sportsmen. Sir Samuel Baker has left a very amusing record of
the horror he felt for the Ceylon sportsmen who, by the term “sport,”
meant horse-racing instead of elephant shooting. Half a century ago,
Gordon-Cumming wrote of “the life of the wild hunter, so far preferable
to that of the mere sportsman”; and his justification for this somewhat
sneering reference to the man who takes his sport in too artificial a
manner, may be found in the pages of a then noted authority on such
sports as horse-racing and fox-hunting; for in Apperly’s “Nimrod
Abroad,” in the course of an article on the game of the American
wilderness, there occurs this delicious sentence: “A damper, however, is
thrown over all systems of deer-stalking in Canada by the necessity,
which is said to be unavoidable, of bivouacking in the woods instead of
in well-aired sheets!” Verily, there was a great gulf between the two
men.
In the present century the world has known three great hunting-grounds:
Africa, from the equator to the southernmost point; India, both farther
and hither; and North America west of the Mississippi, from the Rio
Grande to the Arctic Circle. The latter never approached either of the
former in the wealth and variety of the species, or in the size and
terror of the chief beasts of the chase; but it surpassed India in the
countless numbers of the individual animals, and in the wild and unknown
nature of the hunting-grounds, while the climate and surroundings made
the conditions under which the hunter worked pleasanter and healthier
than those in any other land.
South Africa was the true hunter’s paradise. If the happy
hunting-grounds were to be found anywhere in this world, they lay
between the Orange and the Zambesi, and extended northward here and
there to the Nile countries and Somaliland. Nowhere else were there such
multitudes of game, representing so many and such widely different kinds
of animals, of such size, such beauty, such infinite variety. We should
have to go back to the fauna of the Pleistocene to find its equal. Never
before did men enjoy such hunting as fell to the lot of those roving
adventurers, who first penetrated its hidden fastnesses, camped by its
shrunken rivers, and galloped over its sun-scorched wastes; and, alas
that it should be written, no man will ever see the like again.
Fortunately, its memory will forever be kept alive in some of the books
that the great hunters have written about it, such as Cornwallis Harris’
“Wild Sports of South Africa,” Gordon-Cumming’s “Hunter’s Life in South
Africa,” Baldwin’s “African Hunting,” Drummond’s “Large Game and Natural
History of South Africa,” and, best of all, Selous’ two books, “A
Hunter’s Wanderings in South Africa” and “Travel and Adventure in
Southeast Africa.” Selous was the last of the great hunters of South
Africa, and no other has left books of such value as his. In central
Africa the game has lasted to our own time; the hunting described by
Alfred Neumann and Vaughn Kirby in the closing years of the nineteenth
century was almost as good as any enjoyed by their brothers who fifty
years before steered their ox-drawn wagons across the “high veldt” of
the south land.
Moreover, the pencil has done its part as well as the pen. Harris, who
was the pioneer of all the hunters, published an admirable illustrated
folio entitled “The Game and Wild Animals of South Africa.” It is
perhaps of more value than any other single work of the kind. J. G.
Millais, in “A Breath from the Veldt,” has rendered a unique service,
not only by his charming descriptions, but by his really extraordinary
sketches of the South African antelopes, both at rest, and in every
imaginable form of motion. Nearly at the other end of the continent
there is an admirable book on lion-hunting in Somaliland, by Captain C.
J. Melliss. Much information about big game can be taken from the books
of various missionaries and explorers; Livingstone and Du Chaillu doing
for Africa in this respect what Catlin did for North America.
As we have said before, one great merit of these books is that they are
interesting. Quite a number of men who are good sportsmen, as well as
men of means, have written books about their experiences in Africa; but
the trouble with too many of these short and simple annals of the rich
is, that they are very dull. They are not literature, any more than
treatises on farriery and cooking are literature. To read a mere
itinerary is like reading a guide-book. No great enthusiasm in the
reader can be roused by such a statement as “this day walked
twenty-three miles, shot one giraffe and two zebras; porter deserted
with the load containing the spare boots”; and the most exciting events,
if chronicled simply as “shot three rhinos and two buffalo; the first
rhino and both buffalo charged,” become about as thrilling as a
paragraph in Baedeker. There is no need of additional literature of the
guide-book and cookery-book kind. “Fine writing” is, of course,
abhorrent in a way that is not possible for mere baldness of statement,
and would-be “funny” writing is even worse, as it almost invariably
denotes an underbred quality of mind; but there is need of a certain
amount of detail, and of vivid and graphic, though simple, description.
In other words, the writer on big game should avoid equally Carlyle’s
theory and Carlyle’s practice in the matter of verbosity. Really good
game books are sure to contain descriptions which linger in the mind
just like one’s pet passages in any other good book. One example is
Selous’ account of his night watch close to the wagon, when in the
pitchy darkness he killed three of the five lions which had attacked his
oxen; or his extraordinary experience while hunting elephants on a
stallion which turned sulky, and declined to gallop out of danger. The
same is true of Drummond’s descriptions of the camps of native hunting
parties, of tracking wounded buffalo through the reeds, and of waiting
for rhinos by a desert pool under the brilliancy of the South African
moon; descriptions, by the way, which show that the power of writing
interestingly is not dependent upon even approximate correctness in
style, for some of Mr. Drummond’s sentences, in point of length and
involution, would compare not unfavorably with those of a Populist
Senator discussing bimetallism. Drummond is not as trustworthy an
observer as Selous.
The experiences of a hunter in Africa, with its teeming wealth of
strange and uncouth beasts, must have been, and in places must still be,
about what one’s experience would be if one could suddenly go back a few
hundred thousand years for a hunting trip in the Pliocene or
Pleistocene. In Mr. Astor Chanler’s book, “Through Jungle and Desert,”
the record of his trip through the melancholy reed beds of the Guaso
Nyiro, and of his return journey, carrying his wounded companion,
through regions where the caravan was perpetually charged by rhinoceros,
reads like a bit out of the unreckoned ages of the past, before the huge
and fierce monsters of old had vanished from the earth, or acknowledged
man as their master. An excellent book of mixed hunting and scientific
exploration is Mr. Donaldson Smith’s “Through Unknown African
Countries.” If anything, the hunting part is unduly sacrificed to some
of the minor scientific work. Full knowledge of a new breed of
rhinoceros, or a full description of the life history and chase of
almost any kind of big game, is worth more than any quantity of matter
about new spiders and scorpions. Small birds and insects remain in the
land, and can always be described by the shoal of scientific
investigators who follow the first adventurous explorers; but it is only
the pioneer hunter who can tell us all about the far more interesting
and important beasts of the chase, the different kinds of big game, and
especially dangerous big game; and it is a mistake in any way to
subordinate the greater work to the lesser.
Books on big game hunting in India are as plentiful, and as good, as
those about Africa. Forsyth’s “Highlands of Central India,” Sanderson’s
“Thirteen Years Among the Wild Beasts of India,” Shakespeare’s “Wild
Sports of India,” and Kinloch’s “Large Game Shooting,” are perhaps the
best; but there are many other writers, like Markham, Baldwin, Rice,
Macintyre, and Stone, who are also very good. Indeed, to give even a
mere list of the titles of the good books on Indian shooting would read
too much like the Homeric catalogue of ships, or the biblical
generations of the Jewish patriarchs. The four books singled out for
special reference are interesting reading for anyone; particularly the
accounts of the deaths of man-eating tigers at the hands of Forsyth,
Shakespeare, and Sanderson, and some of Kinloch’s Himalayan stalks. It
is indeed royal sport which the hunter has among the stupendous mountain
masses of the Himalayas, and in the rank jungles and steamy tropical
forests of India.
Hunting should go hand in hand with the love of natural history, as well
as with descriptive and narrative power. Hornaday’s “Two Years in the
Jungle” is especially interesting to the naturalist; but he adds not a
little to our knowledge of big game. It is earnestly to be wished that
some hunter will do for the gorilla what Hornaday has done for the great
East Indian ape, the mias or orang.
There are many good books on American big game, but, rather curiously,
they are for the most part modern. Until within the present generation
Americans only hunted big game if they were frontier settlers,
professional trappers, Southern planters, army officers, or explorers.
The people of the cities of the old States were bred in the pleasing
faith that anything unconcerned with business was both a waste of time
and presumably immoral. Those who travelled went to Europe instead of to
the Rocky Mountains.
Throughout the pioneer stages of American history, big game hunting was
not merely a pleasure, but a business, and often a very important and in
fact vital business. At different times many of the men who rose to
great distinction in our after history took part in it as such: men like
Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston, for instance. Moreover, aside from these
pioneers who afterward won distinction purely as statesmen or soldiers,
there were other members of the class of professional hunters—men who
never became eminent in the complex life of the old civilized regions,
who always remained hunters, and gloried in the title—who, nevertheless,
through and because of their life in the wilderness, rose to national
fame and left their mark on our history. The three most famous men of
this class were Daniel Boone, David Crockett, and Kit Carson, who were
renowned in every quarter of the Union for their skill as game-killers,
Indian-fighters, and wilderness explorers, and whose deeds are still
stock themes in the floating legendary lore of the border. They stand
for all time as types of the pioneer settlers who won our land; the
bridge-builders, the road-makers the forest-fellers, the explorers, the
land-tillers, the mighty men of their hands, who laid the foundations of
this great commonwealth.
There are good descriptions of big game hunting in the books of writers
like Catlin, but they come in incidentally. Elliott’s “South Carolina
Field Sports” is a very interesting and entirely trustworthy record of
the sporting side of existence on the old Southern plantations, and not
only commemorates how the planters hunted bear, deer, fox, and wildcat
on the uplands and in the canebrakes, but also gives a unique
description of harpooning the great devil-fish in the warm Southern
waters. John Palliser, an Englishman, in his “Solitary Hunter,” has
given us the best descriptions of hunting in the far West, when it was
still an untrodden wilderness. Another Englishman, Ruxton, in two
volumes, has left us a most vivid picture of the old hunters and
trappers themselves. Unfortunately, these old hunters and trappers, the
men who had most experience in the life of the wilderness, were utterly
unable to write about it; they could not tell what they had seen or
done. Occasional attempts have been made to get noted hunters to write
books, either personally or by proxy, but these attempts have not as a
rule been successful. Perhaps the best of the books thus produced is
Hittell’s “Adventures of James Capen Adams, Mountaineer and Grizzly Bear
Hunter.”
The first effort to get men of means and cultivation in the Northern and
Eastern States of the Union to look at field sports in the right light
was made by an Englishman who wrote over the signature of Frank
Forrester. He did much for the shotgun men; but, unfortunately, he was a
true cockney, who cared little for really wild sports, and he was
afflicted with that dreadful pedantry which pays more heed to ceremonial
and terminology than to the thing itself. He was sincerely distressed
because the male of the ordinary American deer was called a buck instead
of a stag; and it seemed to him to be a matter of moment whether one
spoke of a “gang” or a “herd” of elk.
There are plenty of excellent books nowadays, however. The best book
upon the old plains country was Colonel Richard Irving Dodge’s
“Hunting-Grounds of the Great West,” which dealt with the chase of most
kinds of plains game proper. Judge Caton, in his “Antelope and Deer of
America,” gave a full account of not only the habits and appearance, but
the methods of chase and life histories of the prongbuck, and of all the
different kinds of deer found in the United States. Dr. Allen, in his
memoir on the bisons of America, and Hornaday, in his book upon their
extermination, have rendered similar service for the vast herds of
shaggy-maned wild cattle which have vanished with such melancholy
rapidity during the lifetime of the present generation. Mr. Van Dyke’s
“Still-Hunter” is a noteworthy book, which, for the first time,
approaches the still-hunter and his favorite game, the deer, from what
may be called the standpoint of the scientific sportsman. It is one of
the few hunting-books which should really be studied by the beginner
because of what he can learn therefrom in reference to the hunter’s
craft. The Century Co.’s volume “Sport With Gun and Rod” contains
accounts of the chase of most of the kinds of American big game,
although there are two or three notable omissions, such as the elk, the
grizzly bear, and the white goat. Warburton Pike, Caspar Whitney, and
Frederick Schwatka have given fairly full and very interesting accounts
of boreal sport; and Pendarves Vivian and Baillie-Grohman of hunting
trips in the Rockies. A new and most important departure, that of
photographing wild animals in their homes, was marked by Mr. Wallihan’s
“Camera Shots at Big Game.” This is a noteworthy volume. Mr. Wallihan
was the pioneer in a work which is of the utmost importance to the
naturalist, the man of science; and what he accomplished was far more
creditable to himself, and of far more importance to others, than any
amount of game-killing. Finally, in Parkman’s “Oregon Trail” and
Irving’s “Trip on the Prairie,” two great writers have left us a lasting
record of the free life of the rifle-bearing wanderers who first hunted
in the wild Western lands.
Though not hunting-books, John Burroughs’ writings and John Muir’s
volumes on the Sierras should be in the hands of every lover of outdoor
life, and therefore in the hands of every hunter who is a nature lover,
and not a mere game-butcher.
Of course, there are plenty of books on European game. Scrope’s “Art of
Deerstalking,” Bromley Davenport’s “Sport,” and all the books of Charles
St. John, are classic. The chase of the wolf and boar is excellently
described by an unnamed writer in “Wolf-Hunting and Wild Sports of
Brittany.” Baillie-Grohman’s “Sport in the Alps” is devoted to the
mountain game of Central Europe, and is, moreover, a mine of curious
hunting lore, most of which is entirely new to men unacquainted with the
history of the chase in Continental Europe during the last few
centuries. An entirely novel type of adventure was set forth in Lamont’s
“Seasons with the Sea Horses,” wherein he described his hunting in
arctic waters with rifle and harpoon. Lloyd’s “Scandinavian Adventures”
and “Northern Field Sports,” and Whishaw’s “Out of Doors in Tsar Land,”
tell of the life and game of the snowy northern forests. Chapman has
done excellent work for both Norway and Spain. It would be impossible
even to allude to the German and French books on the chase, such as the
admirable but rather technical treatises of Le Couteulx de Canteleu.
Moreover, these books for the most part belong rather in the category
which includes English fox-hunting literature, not in that which deals
with big game and the life of the wilderness. This is merely to state a
difference—not to draw a comparison; for the artificial sports of highly
civilized countries are strongly to be commended for their effect on
national character in making good the loss of certain of the rougher
virtues which tend to disappear with the rougher conditions.
In Mr. Edward North Buxton’s two volumes of “Short Stalks” we find the
books of a man who is a hardy lover of nature, a skilled hunter, but not
a game-butcher; a man who has too much serious work on hand ever to let
himself become a mere globe-trotting rifleman. His volumes teach us just
what a big game hunter, a true sportsman, should be. But the best recent
book on the wilderness is Herr C. G. Schilling’s “Mit Blitzlicht und
Büchse,” giving the writer’s hunting adventures, and above all his acute
scientific observations and his extraordinary photographic work among
the teeming wild creatures of German East Africa. Mr. Schilling is a
great field naturalist, a trained scientific observer, as well as a
mighty hunter; and no mere hunter can ever do work even remotely
approaching in value that which he has done. His book should be
translated into English at once. Every effort should be made to turn the
modern big game hunter into the Schilling type of adventure-loving field
naturalist and observer.
I am not disposed to undervalue manly outdoor sports, or to fail to
appreciate the advantage to a nation, as well as to an individual, of
such pastimes; but they must be pastimes, and not business, and they
must not be carried to excess. There is much to be said for the life of
a professional hunter in lonely lands; but the man able to be something
more, should be that something more—an explorer, a naturalist, or else a
man who makes his hunting trips merely delightful interludes in his life
work. As for excessive game-butchery, it amounts to a repulsive debauch.
The man whose chief title to glory is that, during an industrious career
of destruction, he has slaughtered 200,000 head of deer and partridges,
stands unpleasantly near those continental kings and nobles who, during
the centuries before the French Revolution, deified the chase of the
stag, and made it into a highly artificial cult, which they followed to
the exclusion of State-craft and war-craft and everything else. James,
the founder of the ignoble English branch of the Stuart kings, as
unkingly a man as ever sat on a throne, was fanatical in his devotion to
the artificial kind of chase which then absorbed the souls of the
magnates of continental Europe.
There is no need to exercise much patience with men who protest against
field sports, unless, indeed, they are logical vegetarians of the
flabbiest Hindoo type. If no deer or rabbits were killed, no crops could
be cultivated. If it is morally right to kill an animal to eat its body,
then it is morally right to kill it to preserve its head. A good
sportsman will not hesitate as to the relative value he puts upon the
two, and to get the one he will go a long time without eating the other.
No nation facing the unhealthy softening and relaxation of fibre which
tend to accompany civilization can afford to neglect anything that will
develop hardihood, resolution, and the scorn of discomfort and danger.
But if sport is made an end instead of a means, it is better to avoid it
altogether. The greatest stag-hunter of the seventeenth century was the
Elector of Saxony. During the Thirty Years’ War he killed some 80,000
deer and boar. Now, if there ever was a time when a ruler needed to
apply himself to serious matters, it was during the Thirty Years’ War in
Germany, and if the Elector in question had eschewed hunting he might
have compared more favorably with Gustavus Adolphus in his own
generation, or the Great Elector of Brandenburg in the next generation.
The kings of the House of Savoy have shown that the love of hardy field
sports in no way interferes with the exercise of the highest kind of
governmental ability.
Wellington was fond of fox-hunting, but he did very little of it during
the period of the Peninsular War. Grant cared much for fine horses, but
he devoted his attention to other matters when facing Lee before
Richmond. Perhaps as good an illustration as could be wished of the
effects of the opposite course is furnished by poor Louis XVI. He took
his sport more seriously than he did his position as ruler of his
people. On the day when the revolutionary mob came to Versailles, he
merely recorded in his diary that he had “gone out shooting, and had
killed eighty-one head when he was interrupted by events.” The
particular event to which this “interruption” led up was the guillotine.
Not many sportsmen have to face such a possibility; but they do run the
risk of becoming a curse to themselves and to everyone else, if they
once get into the frame of mind which can look on the business of life
as merely an interruption to sport.