been given a Wall Street “tip,” and who have become capitalists in a
day, are astonishingly like the stories which went their round when
the South-Sea Bubble hung iridescent over London. Mankind has never
wearied of such tales since Aladdin (one of Fortune’s fools) won his
easy way to wealth. Even the old dime novel with “Dare-Devil Dick,” or
“Jasper, the Boy Detective,” for a hero, has been transmogrified into
a “Fame and Fortune,” series, with “Boys That Make Money,” figuring
vaingloriously on the title-page. Gone is the Indian brave, the
dauntless young seaman who saved the American navy, the calm-eyed lad
who held up a dozen masked ruffians with one small pistol. In their
place we have the boy in the broker’s office who finds out that “A.
and C.” stock will double its value within ten days; or the exploits
of a group of juvenile speculators, who form a “secret syndicate,”
and outwit the wisest heads on Wall Street. The supremacy of youth--a
vital feature of such fiction--is indicated when the inspired messenger
boy gives a “pointer” to an old and influential firm of brokers, who
receive it with glistening eyes and respectful gratitude. “I did not
tip you in expectation of any compensation,” observes the magnanimous
and up-to-date young hero. “I simply felt it was my duty to prevent
you from losing the profit that was bound to come your way if you held
on a few days longer.”
Our newspapers have told us (we should like to know who told the
newspapers) that high prices are popular prices. It is fitting and
proper that people who own the wealth of the world should pay a great
deal for everything they buy. Shoppers with their purses full of money
are affronted by any hint of cheapness or economy. This may be true,
though it reminds me a little of a smiling Neapolitan who once assured
me that his donkey liked to be beaten. One cannot, without entering
into the mind of a donkey or of a rich American, deny the tastes
imputed to them; but one may cherish doubts. It is true that “record
prices” have been paid for every luxury, that the sales of furriers
and jewellers have been unprecedented in the annals of our commerce,
that the eager buying of rare books, pictures, and curios, flung on
the markets by the destitution of Europe, has never been surpassed. One
might wish that destitution anywhere (Vienna is not so far from New
York that no cry of pain can reach us) would dim our pleasure in such
purchases. This does not seem to be the case. “’Tis man’s perdition to
be safe,” and ’tis his deepest and deadliest perdition to profit by the
misfortunes of others.
An American rhapsodist, singing the pæan of money in the pages of the
“Bankers’ Magazine,” says in its mighty name: “I am the minister of war
and the messenger of peace. No army can march without my command. Until
I speak, no ship of trade can sail from any port.”
“Until I speak”! Always the emphasis upon that powerful voice which
is so mute and inglorious without the compelling mind of man. When
President Cleveland said that if it took every dollar in the Treasury,
and every soldier in the United States army, to deliver a postal card
in Chicago, that postal card should be delivered, he was perhaps glad
to think that the nation’s wealth, like the nation’s force, could be
used to fulfil the nation’s obligations. But back of wealth, and back
of force, was purpose. When man lays hand upon the “hilt of action,”
money stops talking and obeys.
Mr. Shane Leslie, shrinking sensitively from that oppressive word,
“efficiency,” and seeking what solace he can find in the survival
of unpractical ideals, ventures to say that every university man
“carries away among the husks of knowledge the certainty that there
are less things saleable in heaven and earth than the advocates of
sound commercial education would suppose.” This truth, more simply
phrased by the Breton peasant woman who said “_Le bon Dieu ne vend pas
ses biens_,” has other teachers besides religion and the classics.
History, whether we read it or live in it, makes nothing clearer. Mr.
Henry Ford is credited with saying that he would not give a nickel for
all the history in the world; but though he can, and does, forbear
to read it, he has to live in it with the rest of us, and learn its
lessons first-hand. No one desired the welfare--or what he conceived
to be the welfare--of mankind more sincerely than he did; and he was
prepared to buy it at a handsome figure. Yet Heaven refused to sell,
and earth, inasmuch as the souls of men are not _her_ possessions, had
nothing worth his purchase.
The price of war can be computed in figures; the price of peace calls
for another accountant. The tanker, Gold Shell, which first crossed
the “forbidden” zone did more than a score of peace ships could have
done to secure the civilization of the world. Its plain sailors who
put something (I don’t know what they called it) above personal
safety, and their plain captain who expressed in the regrettable
language of the sea his scorn of German pirates, were prepared to
pay a higher price than any millionaire could offer for their own
and their country’s freedom. We know what these men risked because
we know what agonizing deaths the sailors on the tanker, Healdton,
suffered at Germany’s hands. The Gold Shell seamen knew it too, and met
frightfulness with fearlessness. The world is never so bad but that
men’s souls can rise above its badness, and restore our fainting faith.
Mohammed prayed that he might be found among the poor on the Judgment
Day,--a prayer echoed by Saint Bernard, who took some pains to insure
its being answered. Yet, as a mere abstraction, of what worth is
poverty? The jewel in the toad’s head is as glittering as adversity
is sweet. One has been well likened to the other. Bishop Lawrence,
undismayed by the most humiliating page of our country’s history,
seized a crucial moment in which to say very simply and gallantly that
Americans are not wedded to ease, or enthralled by wealth. The time
has come to prove him in the right. God will not sell us safety. We
learned this much in the winter of 1917, when we dug our mail out of
an American steamer, and asked Britain--Britain burdened with debt and
bleeding at every pore--to carry it over the sea. For our own sake, no
less than for the world’s sake, we must show that we coin money in no
base spirit, that we cherish it with no base passion. The angel who
looked too long at heaven’s golden pavement was flung, into hell.
Cruelty and Humour
The unhallowed alliance between the cruelty that we hate and the humour
that we prize is a psychological problem which frets the candid mind.
Hazlitt analyzed it pitilessly, but without concern, because humanity
was not his playing card. No writer of the nineteenth century dared to
be so clearly and consciously inhumane as was Hazlitt. Shakespeare and
Scott recognized this alliance, and were equally unconcerned, because
they accepted life on its own terms, and were neither the sport of
illusions nor the prey of realities. It took the public--always more or
less kind-hearted--two hundred years to sympathize with the wrongs of
Shylock, and three hundred years to wince at the misery of Malvolio.
It was with something akin to regret that Andrew Lang watched the
shrivelling of that “full-blown comic sense” which accompanied
the cruel sports of an earlier generation, the bull-baiting and
badger-drawing and cock-fights and prize-fights which Englishmen loved,
and which taught them to value courage and look unmoved on pain.
In 1699 the old East India Company lost its claim against the New
Company by two parliamentary votes; and this measure was passed in the
absence of friendly members who had been seduced from their posts by
the unwonted spectacle of a tiger-baiting. In 1818 Christopher North
(black be his memory!) described graphically and with smothered glee
the ignoble game of cat-worrying, which ran counter to British sporting
instincts, to the roughly interpreted fair play which severed brutality
from baseness. There was never a time when some English voice was not
raised to protest against that combination of cruelty and cowardice
which pitted strength against weakness, or overwhelming odds against
pure gallantry of spirit. The first Englishman to assert that animals
had a right to legal protection was John Evelyn. He grasped this novel
point of view through sheer horror and disgust because a stallion had
been baited with dogs in London, and had fought so bravely that the
dogs could not fasten on him until the men in charge ran him through
with their swords. Evelyn asked, and asked in vain, that the law should
intervene to punish such barbarity.
A century later we hear the same cry of indignation, the same appeal
for pity and redress. This time it comes from Horace Walpole, who is
beside himself with fury because some scoundrels at Dover had roasted
a fox alive, to mark--with apt symbolism--their disapproval of Charles
Fox. Walpole, whom Lord Minto characterized as “a prim, precise,
pretending, conceited savage, but a most un-English one,” demonstrated
on this occasion the alien nature of his sympathies by an outbreak
of rage against the cruelty which he was powerless to punish. It is
interesting to note that he denounced the deed as “a savage meanness
which an Iroquois would have scorned”; showing that he and Lord Minto
regarded savagery from different angles. So, it will be remembered, did
Lord Byron and Izaak Walton. When the former dared to call the latter
“a sentimental savage,” he brought down upon his own head, “bloody
but unbowed,” the wrath of British sportsmen, of British churchmen,
of British sensibility. Even in far-off America an outraged editor
protested shrilly against this _monde bestorné_, this sudden onslaught
of vice upon virtue, this reversal of outlawry and order.
The effrontery of the attack startled a decorous world. Lord Byron
had so flaunted his immoralities that he had become the scapegoat of
society. He had been driven forth from a pure, or at least respectable,
island, to dally with sin under less austere skies. The household
virtues shuddered at his name. Izaak Walton, on the contrary, had been
recognized in his day as a model of domestic sobriety. He had lived
happily with two wives (one at a time), and had spent much of his life
“in the families of the eminent clergymen of England, of whom he was
greatly beloved.” He was buried in Winchester Cathedral, where English
fishermen erected a statue to commemorate his pastime. His bust adorns
the church of Saint Mary, Stafford, where he was baptized. His second
wife sleeps under a monument in Worcester Cathedral. Dr. Johnson and
Wordsworth--great sponsors of morality--united in his praise. Mr. Lang
(an enthusiastic angler) pronounced him to be “a kind, humorous, and
pious soul.” Charles Lamb, who thought angling a cruel sport, wrote to
Wordsworth, “Izaak Walton hallows any page in which his reverend name
appears.”
This admirable Crichton, this honoured guest of “eminent clergymen,”
was the man whom Byron--who had never so much as supped with a
curate--selected to attack in his most scandalously indecent poem. His
lilting lines,
“The quaint, old, cruel coxcomb in his gullet
Should have a hook, and a small trout to pull it,”
were ribald enough in all conscience; but, by way of superdefiance, he
added a perfectly serious note in which he pointed out the deliberate
character of Walton’s inhumanity. The famous passage in “The Compleat
Angler,” which counsels fishermen to use the impaled frog as though
they loved him,--“that is, harm him as little as you may possibly,
that he may live the longer,”--and the less famous, but equally
explicit, passages which deal with the tender treatment of dace and
snails, sickened Byron’s soul, especially when topped off by the most
famous passage of all: “God never did make a more calm, quiet, innocent
recreation than fishing.” The picture of the Almighty smiling down
on the pangs of his irrational creatures, in sportsmanlike sympathy
with his rational creature (who could recite poetry and quote the
Scriptures) was more than Byron could bear. He was keenly aware that he
offered no shining example to the world; but he had never conceived of
God as a genial spectator of cruelty or of vice.
Therefore this open-eyed sinner called the devout and decent Walton
a sentimental savage. Therefore he wrote disrespectful words about
the “cruel, cold, and stupid sport of angling.” Therefore he said,
“No angler can be a good man”; which comprehensive remark caused the
public to ask tartly--and not unreasonably--who appointed Lord Byron
to be its monitor? The fantastic love of animals, which was one of the
poet’s most engaging traits, may have been deepened by his resentment
against men. Nevertheless, we recognize it as a genuine and generous
sentiment, ennobling and also amusing, as most genuine and generous
sentiments are apt to be. The eaglet that he shot on the shore of
Lepanto, and whose life he vainly tried to save, was the last bird to
die by his hand. He had an embarrassing habit of becoming attached to
wild animals and to barnyard fowls. An ungrateful civet-cat, having
bitten a footman, escaped from bondage. A goose, bought to be fattened
for Michaelmas, never achieved its destiny; but was raised to the
dignity and emoluments of a household pet, and carried about in a
basket, swung securely under the poet’s travelling carriage. These
amiable eccentricities won neither respect nor esteem. Byron could not
in cold blood have hurt anything that breathed; but there was a general
impression that a man who was living with another man’s wife had no
business to be so kind to animals, and certainly no business to censure
respectable and church-going citizens who were cruel to them.
Nevertheless, the battle so inauspiciously begun has been waged ever
since, and has found more impeccable champions. It was possible for
Charles Lamb to sigh with one breath over the “intolerable pangs”
inflicted by “meek” anglers, and to rejoice with the next over the
page hallowed by the angler’s reverend name. Happily for himself
and for his readers, he had that kind of a mind. But Huxley, whose
mind was singularly inflexible and unaccommodating, refused such
graceful concessions. All forms of cruelty were hateful to him. Of one
distinguished and callous vivisector he said plainly that he would
like to send him to the treadmill. But he would hear no word against
vivisection from gentlemen who angled with live bait, and he expressed
this unsportsmanlike view in his “Elementary Lessons in Physiology.”
Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson’s piteous lines on a little dace, whose
hard fate it is to furnish an hour’s “innocent recreation” for an
angler, had not then been written; but Huxley needed no such incentive
to pity. No man in England reverenced the gospel of amusement less than
he did. No man was less swayed by sentiment, or daunted by ridicule.
When Hazlitt wrote, “One rich source of the ludicrous is distress with
which we cannot sympathize from its absurdity or insignificance,” he
touched the keynote of unconcern. Insignificant distress makes merry a
humane world. “La malignité naturelle aux hommes est le principe de la
comédie.” Distress which could be forced to appear absurd made merry a
world which had not been taught the elements of humanity. The elaborate
jests which enlivened the Roman games were designed to show that terror
and pain might, under rightly conceived circumstances, be infinitely
amusing. When the criminal appointed to play the part of Icarus lost
his wings at the critical moment which precipitated him into a cage of
hungry bears, the audience appreciated the humour of the situation. It
was a good practical joke, and the possible distaste of Icarus for his
rôle lent pungency to the cleverly contrived performance. “By making
suffering ridiculous,” said Mr. Pater, “you enlist against the sufferer
much real and all would-be manliness, and do much to stifle any false
sentiment of compassion.”
Scott, who had a clear perception of emotions he did not share, gives
us in “Quentin Durward” an apt illustration of human suffering
rendered absurd by its circumstances, and made serviceable by the
pleasure which it gives. Louis the Eleventh and Charles of Burgundy are
fairly healed of rancorous fear and hatred by their mutual enjoyment
of a man-hunt. The sight of the mock herald, doubling and turning in
mad terror with the great boar-hounds at his heels, so delights the
royal spectators that the king, reeling with laughter, catches hold
of the duke’s ermine mantle for support; the duke flings his arm
over the king’s shoulder; and these mortal enemies are converted,
through sympathy with each other’s amusement, into something akin to
friendship. When Charles, wiping his streaming eyes, says poignantly,
“Ah, Louis, Louis, would to God thou wert as faithful a monarch as thou
art a merry companion!” we recognize the touch of nature--of fallen
nature--which makes the whole world kin. Ambroise Paré tells us that
at the siege of Metz, in 1552, the French soldiers fastened live cats
to their pikes, and hung them over the walls, crying, “Miaut, Miaut”;
while the Spanish soldiers shot at the animals as though they had been
popinjays, and both besiegers and besieged enjoyed the sport in a
spirit of frank derision.
This simple, undisguised barbarity lacks one element, intensely
displeasing to the modern mind,--the element of bad taste. Imperial
Rome had no conception of a slave or a criminal as a being whose
sensations counted, save as they affected others, save as they
afforded, or failed to afford, a pleasurable experience to Romans.
Human rights were as remote from its cognizance as animal rights were
remote from the cognizance of the Middle Ages. The survival of savagery
in man’s heart is terrifying rather than repellent; it humiliates more
than it affronts. Whatever is natural is likely to be bad; but it is
also likely to come within the scope, if not of our sympathy, at least
of our understanding. Where there is no introspection there is no
incongruity, nothing innately and sickeningly inhuman and ill-bred.
The most unpleasant record which has been preserved for us is the long
Latin poem written by Robert Grove, afterwards Bishop of Chichester,
and printed in 1685. It is dedicated to the memory of William Harvey,
and describes with unshrinking serenity the vivisection of a dog to
demonstrate Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood. Such
experiments, made before the day of anæsthetics, involved the prolonged
agony of the animal used for experimentation. Harvey appears to have
been a man as remote from pity as from ferocity. He desired to reach
and to prove a supremely valuable scientific truth. He succeeded, and
there are few who question his methods. But that a man should write
in detail--and in verse--about such dreadful work, that he should
dwell composedly upon the dog’s excruciating pain, and compliment the
poor beast on the useful part he plays, goes beyond endurance. Grove,
who had that pretty taste for classicism so prevalent among English
clerics, calls on Apollo and Minerva to lend Harvey their assistance,
and promises the dog that (if Apollo and Minerva play their parts) he
will become a second Lycisca, and will join Procyon and Sirius in the
heavens.
Here is an instance in which a rudimentary sense of propriety would
have saved a gentleman and a scholar from insulting the principles
of good taste. It is more agreeable to contemplate the brutal crowd
surrounding a baited bear than to contemplate this clergyman writing
in the seclusion of his library. Religion and scholarship have their
responsibilities. The German soldiers who ravaged Belgium outraged the
sentiments of humanity; but the German professors who sat at their
desks, alternately defending and denying these ravages, outraged, not
merely humanity, but the taste and intelligence of the world. Theirs
was the unpardonable sin.
Cruelty is as old as life, and will cease only when life ceases. It
has passed its candid stage long, long ago. It must now be condoned
for its utility, or laughed at for its fun. Our comic sense, if less
full-blown than of yore, still relishes its measure of brutality. To
write gaily about the infliction of pain is to win for it forgiveness.
Douglas Jerrold found something infinitely amusing in the sensations of
the lobster put into a pot of cold water, and boiled. His description
of the perspiring crustacean, unable to understand the cause of its
rapidly increasing discomfort, was thought so laughable that it was
reprinted, as a happy example of the writer’s humour, in a recently
published volume on Jerrold’s connection with “Punch.” The same genial
spirit animated an American Senator who opposed the sentimental
exclusion of egrets from commerce. It was the opinion of this gallant
gentleman that the Lord created white herons to supply ornaments “for
the hats of our beautiful ladies”; and having expressed his sympathy
with the designs of Providence, he proposed in merry mood that we
should establish foundling asylums for the nestlings deprived of their
overdecorated parents,--as waggish a witticism as one would want to
hear.
When an eminently respectable American newspaper can be convulsively
funny, or at least can try to be convulsively funny, over the sale
of a horse, twenty-seven years old, blind, rheumatic, and misshapen,
to a Chicago huckster for fifteen cents, we have no need to sigh
over our waning sense of humour. The happy thought of calling the
horse Algernon gave a rich twang to this comic episode, and saved the
cheerful reader from any intrusive sentiment of pity. When a pious
periodical, published in the interests of a Christian church, can tell
us in a rollicking Irish story how a farmer, speeding through the
frozen night, empties a bag of kittens into the snow, and whips up
his horse, pretending playfully that the “craitures” are overtaking
him, we make comfortably sure that religion lends itself as deftly as
journalism to the light-hearted drolleries of the cruel.
Novelists, who understand how easy a thing it is to gratify our
humorous susceptibilities, venture upon doubtful jests. Mr. Tarkington
knows very well that the spectacle of a boy dismembering an insect
calls for reprobation; but that if the boy’s experiments can be
described as “infringing upon the domain of Dr. Carrell,” they make a
bid for laughter. “Penrod’s efforts--with the aid of a pin--to effect
a transference of living organism were unsuccessful; but he convinced
himself forever that a spider cannot walk with a beetle’s legs.” It
is funny to those who relish the fun. If it does not, as Mr. Pater
advises, make suffering ridiculous, it makes sympathy ridiculous, as
being a thing more serious than the occasion warrants. The reader who
is not amused tries to forget the incident, and hurries cheerfully on.
A more finished example of callous gaiety, and one which has been more
widely appreciated, may be found in a story called “Crocker’s Hole,”
by Blackmore. It tells how a young man named Pike, whom “Providence”
had created for angling (the author is comfortably sure on this point),
caught an old and wary trout by the help of a new and seductive bait.
The over-wrought, over-coloured beauty of Blackmore’s style is in
accord with his highly sophisticated sense of humour:
“The lover of the rose knows well a gay, voluptuous beetle, whose
pleasure it is to lie embedded in a fount of beauty. Deep among the
incurving petals of the blushing fragrance he loses himself in his joys
till a breezy waft reveals him. And when the sunlight breaks upon his
luscious dissipation, few would have the heart to oust such a gem from
such a setting. All his back is emerald sparkles; all his front, red
Indian gold, and here and there he grows white spots to save the eye
from aching. Pike slipped in his finger, fetched him out, and gave him
a little change of joys by putting a Limerick hook through his thorax,
and bringing it out between his elytra. _Cetonia aurata_ liked it
not, but pawed the air very naturally, fluttered his wings, and trod
prettily upon the water under a lively vibration. He looked quite as
happy, and considerably more active than when he had been cradled in
the anthers of a rose.”
The story is an angling story, and it would be unreasonable to spoil it
by sympathizing with the bait. But there is something in the painting
of the little beetle’s beauty, and in the amused description of its
pain, which would sicken a donkey-beating costermonger, if he were
cultivated enough to know what the author was driving at. It takes
education and an unswerving reverence for sport to save us from the
costermonger’s point of view.