“You need not look at me like that,” he said. “A woman goes into a shop.
She knows that real ‘aigrettes’ mean killing mother-birds and starving
all their nestlings. Therefore, if she’s a real gentlewoman she doesn’t
ask for a real ‘aigrette.’ But still less does she ask to be supplied
with an imitation article so good that people will take her for the
wearer of the real thing. I put it to you, would she want to be known as
an encourager of such a practice? You can never have seen a _lady_
wearing an ‘aigrette.’”
“What!” I said. “What?”
“So much for the woman who knows about ‘aigrettes,’” he went on. “Now
for the woman who doesn’t. Either, when she is told these facts about,
‘aigrettes’ she sets them down as ‘hysterical stuff,’ or she is simply
too ‘out of it’ to know anything. Well, she goes in and asks for an
‘aigrette.’ Do you think they sell her the real thing—I mean, of
course, in England—knowing that it involves the shooting of
mother-birds at breeding time? I put it to you: Would they?”
His inability to grasp the real issues astonished me, and I said:
“You and I happen to have read the evidence about ‘aigrettes’ and the
opinion of the House of Lords’ Committee that the feathers of egrets
imported into Great Britain are obtained by killing the birds during the
breeding season; but you don’t suppose, do you, that people whose
commercial interests are bound up with the selling of ‘aigrettes’ are
going to read it, or believe it if they do read it?”
“That,” he answered, “is cynical, if you like. I feel sure that, in
England, people do not sell suspected articles about which there has
been so much talk and inquiry as there has been about ‘aigrettes’
without examining in good faith into the facts of their origin. No,
believe me, none of the ‘aigrettes’ sold in England can have grown on
birds.”
“This is fantastic,” I said. “Why! if what you’re saying is true,
then—then real ‘aigrettes’ are all artificial; but that—that would be
cheating!”
“Oh, no!” he said. “You see, ‘aigrettes’ are in fashion. The word ‘real’
has therefore become parliamentary. People don’t want to be cruel, but
they must have ‘real aigrettes.’ So, all these ‘aigrettes’ are ‘real,’
unless the customer has a qualm, and then they are ‘real imitation
aigrettes.’ We are a highly-civilized people!”
“That is very clever,” I said, “but how about the statistics of real
egret plumes imported into this country?”
He answered like a flash: “Oh, those, of course, are only brought here
to be exported again at once to countries where they do not mind
confessing to cruelty; yes, all exported, except—well, _those that
aren’t_!”
“Oh!” I said: “I see! You have been speaking ironically all this time.”
“Have you grasped that?” he answered. “Capital!”
After that we walked in silence.
“The fact is,” I said, presently, “ordinary people, shopmen and
customers alike, never bother their heads about such things at all.”
“Yes,” he replied sadly, “they take the line of least resistance. It is
just that which gives Fashion its chance to make such fools of them.”
“You have yet to prove that it does make fools of them.”
“I thought I had; but no matter. Take horses’ tails—what’s left of
them—do you defend that fashion?”
“Well,” I said, “I——”
“Would you if you were a horse?”
“If you mean that I am a donkey——?”
“Oh, no! Not at all!”
“It’s going too far,” I said, “to call docking cruel.”
“Personally,” he answered, “I don’t think it is going too far. It’s
painful in itself, and Heaven alone knows what irritation horses have to
suffer from flies through being tailless. I admit that it saves a little
brushing, and that some people are under the delusion that it averts
carriage accidents. But put cruelty and utility aside, and look at it
from the point of view of fashion. Can anybody say it doesn’t spoil a
horse’s looks?”
“You know perfectly well,” I said, “that many people think it smartens
him up tremendously. They regard a certain kind of horse as nothing with
a tail; just as some men are nothing with beards.”
“The parallel with man does not hold, my friend. We are not shaved—with
or against our wills—by demi-gods!”
“Exactly! And isn’t that in itself an admission that we are superior to
beasts, and have a right to some say in their appearance?”
“I will not,” he answered, “for one moment allow that men are superior
to horses in point of looks. Take yourself, or any other personable man,
and stand him up against a thoroughbred and ask your friends to come and
look. How much of their admiration do you think you will get?”
It was not the sort of question I could answer.
“I am not speaking at random,” he went on; “I have seen the average lord
walking beside the average winner of the Derby.” He cackled
disagreeably.
“But it’s just on this point of looks that people defend docking,” I
said. “They breed the horses, and have a right to their own taste. Many
people dislike long swishy appendages.”
“And bull-terriers, or Yorkshires, or Great Danes, with natural ears;
and fox-terriers and spaniels with uncut tails; and women with merely
the middles so small as Nature gave them?”
“If you’re simply going to joke——”
“I never was more serious. The whole thing is of a piece, and summed up
in the word ‘smart,’ which you used just now. That word, sir, is the
guardian angel of all fashions, and if you don’t mind my saying so,
fashions are the guardian angels of vulgarity. Now, a horse is not a
vulgar animal, and I can never get away from the thought that to dock
his tail must hurt his feelings of refinement.”
“Well, if that’s all, I dare say he’ll get over it.”
“But will the man who does it?”
“You must come with me to the Horse Show,” I said, “and look at the men
who have to do with horses; then you’ll know if such a thing as docking
the tails of these creatures can do them harm or not. And, by the way,
you talk of refinement and vulgarity. What is your test? Where is the
standard? It’s all a matter of taste.”
“You want me to define these things?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Very well! Do you believe in what we call the instincts of a
gentleman?”
“Of course.”
“Such as—the instinct to be self-controlled; not to be rude or
intolerant; not to ‘slop-over’; not to fuss, nor to cry out; to hold
your head up, so that people refrain from taking liberties; to be ready
to do things for others, to be chary of asking others to do things for
you, and grateful when they do them?”
“Yes,” I said, “all these I believe in.”
“What central truth do you imagine that these instincts come from?”
“Well, they’re all such a matter of course—I don’t think I ever
considered.”
“If by any chance,” he replied, “you ever do, you will find they come
from an innate worship of balance, of the just mean; an inborn reverence
for due proportion, a natural sense of harmony and rhythm, and a
consequent mistrust of extravagance. What is a bounder? Just a man
without sufficient sense of proportion to know that he is not so
important in the scheme of things as he thinks he is!”
“You are right there!”
“Very well. Refinement is a quality of the individual who has—and
conforms to—a true (not a conventional) sense of proportion; and
vulgarity is either the natural conduct of people without that sense of
proportion, or of people who imitate and reproduce the tricks of
refinement wholesale, without any real feeling for proportion; or again,
it is mere conscious departure from the sense of proportion for the sake
of cutting a dash.”
“Ah!” I said; “and to which of these kinds of vulgarity is the fashion
of docking horses’ tails a guardian angel?”
“Imagine,” he answered gravely, “that you dock your horse’s tail. You
are either horribly deficient in feeling for a perfectly proportioned
horse, or you imitate what you believe—goodness knows why—to be the
refined custom of docking horses’ tails, without considering the
question of proportion at all.”
“Yes,” I said; “but what makes so many people do it, if there isn’t
something in it, either useful or ornamental?”
“Because people as a rule do not love proportion; they love the
grotesque. You have only to look at their faces, which are very good
indications of their souls.”
“You have begged the question,” I said. “Who are you to say that the
perfect horse is not the horse——?”
“With the imperfect tail?”
“Imperfect? Again, you’re begging.”
“As Nature made it, then. Oh!” he went on with vehemence, “think of the
luxury of having your own tail. Think of the cool swish of it. Think of
the real beauty of it! Think of the sheer hideousness of all that great
front balanced behind by a few scrub hairs and a wriggle! It became
‘smart’ to dock horses’ tails; and smart to wear ‘aigrettes.’
‘Smart’—‘neat’—‘efficient’—for all except the horse and the poor
egrets.”
“Your argument,” I said, “is practically nothing but æsthetics.”
He fixed his eyes upon my hat.
“Well,” he said slowly, “I admit that neither on horse nor on man would
long tails go at all well with that bowler hat of yours. Odd how all of
a piece taste is! From a man’s hat, or a horse’s tail, we can
reconstruct the age we live in, like that scientist, you remember, who
reconstructed a mastodon from its funny-bone.”
The thought went sharply through my head: Is his next tirade to be on
mastodons? Till I remembered with relief that the animal was extinct, at
all events in England.
§ 4.
With but little further talk we had nearly reached my rooms, when he
said abruptly:
“A lark! Can’t you hear it? Over there, in that wretched little
gold-fish shop again.”
But I could only hear the sounds of traffic.
“It’s your imagination,” I said. “It really is too lively on the subject
of birds and beasts.”
“I tell you,” he persisted, “there’s a caged lark there. Very likely,
half-a-dozen.”
“My dear fellow,” I said, “suppose there are! We could go and buy them
and set them free, but it would only encourage the demand. Or we could
assault the shopmen. Do you recommend that?”
“I don’t joke on this subject,” he answered shortly.
“But surely,” I said, “if we can’t do anything to help the poor things
we had better keep our ears from hearing.”
“And our eyes shut? Suppose we all did that, what sort of world should
we be living in?”
“Very much the same as now, I expect.”
“Blasphemy! Rank, hopeless blasphemy!”
“Please don’t exaggerate!”
“I am not. There is only one possible defence of that attitude, and it’s
this: The world is—and was deliberately meant to be—divided into two
halves: the half that suffers and the half that benefits by that
suffering.”
“Well?”
“Is it so?”
“Perhaps.”
“You acquiesce in that definition of the world’s nature? Very well, if
you belong to the first half you are a poor-spirited creature,
consciously acquiescing in your own misery. If to the second, you are a
brute, consciously acquiescing in your own happiness, at the expense of
others. Well, which are you?”
“I have not said that I belong to either.”
“There are only two halves to a whole. No, my friend, disabuse yourself
once for all of that cheap and comfortable philosophy of shutting your
eyes to what you think you can’t remedy, unless you are willing to be
labelled ‘brute.’ ‘He who is not with me is against me,’ you know.”
“Well,” I said, “after that, perhaps you’ll be good enough to tell me
what I can do by making myself miserable over things I can’t help?”
“I will,” he answered. “In the first place, kindly consider that you are
not living in a private world of your own. Everything you say and do and
think has its effect on everybody around you. For example, if you feel,
and say loudly enough, that it is an infernal shame to keep larks and
other wild song-birds in cages, you will infallibly infect a number of
other people with that sentiment, and in course of time those people who
feel as you do will become so numerous that larks, thrushes, blackbirds,
and linnets will no longer be caught and kept in cages. Whereas, if you
merely think: ‘Oh! this is dreadful, quite too dreadful, but, you see, I
can do nothing; therefore consideration for myself and others demands
that I shall stop my ears and hold my tongue,’ then, indeed, nothing
will ever be done, and larks, blackbirds, etc., will continue to be
caught and prisoned. How do you imagine it ever came about that bears
and bulls and badgers are no longer baited; cocks no longer openly
encouraged to tear each other in pieces; donkeys no longer beaten to a
pulp? Only by people going about and shouting out that these things made
them uncomfortable. How did it come about that more than half the
population of this country are not still classed as ‘serfs’ under the
law? Simply because a few of our ancestors were made unhappy by seeing
their fellow-creatures owned and treated like dogs, and roundly said
so—in fact, were not ashamed to be sentimental humanitarians like me.”
“That is all obvious. But my point is that there is moderation in all
things, and a time for everything.”
“By your leave,” he said, “there is little moderation desirable when we
are face to face with real suffering, and, as a general rule, no time
like the present.”
“But there is, as you were saying just now, such a thing as a sense of
proportion. I cannot see that it’s my business to excite myself about
the caging of larks when there are so many much greater evils.”
“Forgive my saying so,” he answered, “but if, when a caged lark comes
under your nose, excitement does not take hold of you, with or against
your will, there is mighty little chance of your getting excited about
anything. For, consider what it means to be a caged lark—what pining
and misery for that little creature, which only lives for its life up in
the blue. Consider what blasphemy against Nature, and what an insult to
all that is high and poetic in man, it is to cage such an exquisite
thing of freedom!”
“You forget that it is done out of love for the song—to bring it into
towns where people can’t otherwise hear it.”
“It is done for a living—and that people without imagination may
squeeze out of unhappy creatures a little gratification!”
“It is not a crime to have no imagination.”
“No, sir; but neither is the lack of it a thing to pride oneself on, or
pass by in silence, when it inflicts suffering.”
“I am not defending the custom of caging larks.”
“No; but you are responsible for its continuance.”
“I?”
“You! and all those other people who believe in minding their own
business.”
“Really,” I said; “you must not attack people on that ground. We cannot
all be busybodies!”
“The saints forbid!” he answered. “But when a thing exists which you
really abhor—as you do this—I do wish you would consider a little
whether, in letting it strictly alone, you are minding your own business
on principle, or because it is so jolly comfortable to do so.”
“Speaking for myself——”
“Yes,” he broke in; “quite! But let me ask you one thing: Have you, as a
member of the human race, any feeling that you share in the advancement
of its gentleness, of its sense of beauty and justice—that, in
proportion as the human race becomes more lovable and lovely, you too
become more lovable and lovely?”
“Naturally.”
“Then is it not your business to support all that you feel makes for
that advancing perfection?”
“I don’t say that it isn’t.”
“In that case it is _not_ your business to stop your ears, and shut your
eyes, and hold your tongue, when you come across wild song-birds caged.”
But we had reached my rooms.
“Before I go in,” I said, “there is just one little thing I’ve got to
say to you: Don’t you think that, for a man with your ‘sense of
proportion,’ you exaggerate the importance of beasts and their
happiness?”
He looked at me for a long time without speaking, and when he did speak
it was in a queer, abstracted voice:
“I have often thought over that,” he said, “and honestly I don’t believe
I do. For I have observed that before men can be gentle and broad-minded
with each other, they are always gentle and broad-minded about beasts.
These dumb things, so beautiful—even the plain ones—in their different
ways, and so touching in their dumbness, do draw us to magnanimity, and
help the wings of our hearts to grow. No; I don’t think I exaggerate, my
friend. Most surely I don’t want to; for there is no disservice one can
do to all these helpless things so great as to ride past the hounds, to
fly so far in front of public feeling as to cause nausea and reaction.
But I feel that most of us, deep down, really love these furred and
feathered creatures that cannot save themselves from us—that are like
our own children, because they are helpless; that are in a way sacred,
because in them we watch, and through them we understand, those greatest
blessings of the earth—Beauty and Freedom. They give us so much, they
ask nothing from us. What can we do in return but spare them all the
suffering we can? No, my friend; I do not think—whether for their sakes
or our own—that I exaggerate.”
When he had said those words he turned away, and left me standing there.