sounds, of imperial privacy, is always open to the explorer: "London
small and white and clean," walled and moated, fairer than she ever
was at any one time, warless, religious, pastoral, where hares may
course along the friendly highway, and swans breast the unpolluted
Fleet. Like the gods, you may, if you will, apprehend all that has
ever been, at a glance, and out of that all, seize the little which
is perfect and durable, and live in it: "in the central calm at the
heart of agitation." By so much as London and her draggled outer
precincts are bulging and vile, and her mood stupid, cruel, and
senseless, victory is the larger for having found here a spiritual
parterre of perpetual green. And it is, perhaps, owing to respect
towards those who yet believe in her, whose presence imposes upon
her, in romantic tyranny, the remembrance of what she has been to her
saints, that she does, in reality, walk softly, speak low, as if her
life-long orgies were fabulous, and wear, to her faithful lover, the
happy innocent look becoming the young Republic of Selected Peace.
Donne's subtly beautiful cry is ever in his ear:
"O stay heere! for to thee
England is only a worthy gallerie
To walk in Expectation: till from thence
Our greatest King call thee to His presènce."
O stay here! Who would not be such a city's citizen?
1890.
THE CAPTIVES
THE lions at the Zoo "bring sad thoughts to the mind": they chiefly,
for they are the most impressive figures among our poor hostages. The
pretty moons of color, cream or bronze, pulsating along their tawny
sides, seem but so many outer ripples of a heart-ache subtle enough
to move your own. Couchant, with a droop of the bearded chest, or
erect, with an eternal restless four steps and back again, they drag
through, in public, their defeated days. It is inconceivable that we
should attach the idea of depravity to a lion. Surely, it is no count
against him that he can kill those of us who are adjacent, and juicy!
In the roomy name of reciprocity, why not? Yet what he can do, he
leaves undone. A second glance at him corrects inherited opinion:
"I trow that countenance cannot lie."
Benignity sits there, and forbearance; else we know not what such
things mean. Those golden eyes, pools of sunlit water, make one
remember no blood-curdling hap; but rather the gracious legendry
of long ago: how a lion buried the Christian penitent in the lone
Egyptian sands, and another gambolled in the thronged Coliseum,
kissing the feet of the Christian youth, when the task laid upon him,
in his hunger, was to rend his body in twain. Something about the
lion reminds one of certain sculptured Egyptian faces. This great
intellectual mildness, when blended with enormous power (power which
in him must be expressed physically, or we were too dull to feel
it), appears to some merely sly and sinister. Incredible goodness we
label as hypocrisy. For the ultimate quality in the expression of the
lion is its sweetness. He may be, as one hears him called, the king
of brutes, but the gentleman among brutes he is, beyond a doubt. He
has tolerance, dignity, and an oak-leaf cleanliness. With passing
accuracy, Landor or William Morris, is often described as "leonine";
but the real lion-men of England are the thin and mild dynamos:
Pitt, Newman, Nelson. In these are the long austere lines of the
cheek, the remote significant gaze, the look of inscrutable purpose
and patience. As Theseus says, smiling upon his Hippolyta, of the
lion in the masque of the _Midsummer Night's Dream_: "A very gentle
beast, and of a good conscience."
Year after year, so long as the splendid creatures are cheapened
"to make a Roman holiday," they move not so much under protest as
with black sullen fatalism. We have all seen them rise to the lash
in the hands of a spangled circus female, who must end, forsooth,
by inserting her pomatumed head in their too-enduring jaws; and it
is not unusual for them to spring at the just-closed door, with the
fell strength of that soft and terrible left fore-paw. Their action
is, of course, perfunctory; and since they are notoriously brave,
and not to be cowed, obedience in them has a strange pathos. They
are trained to sit up, and roll barrels, and fire cannon, and jump
hoops; yes, even to scowl and swear, to the terror of "men, women
and Herveys," between the scenes of their bitter comedy; yet the
clown's circumstance cannot touch a hair of those mournful magnific
heads. Their sleep is broken with poked umbrellas, and a patter of
foolish nuts and cookies; and, from a dream of the fragrant jungles
and the torrents of home, they come anew upon the cyclorama of
human faces, and the babble of foreign tongues. They live no longer
from hand to mouth, as they do in their native haunts; their needs,
nay, their whims, are studied and gratified; they serve painters,
naturalists, schoolboys; they give employment; they call forth
thought, love, courage. And many sympathizers and well-wishers are
shortsighted enough to congratulate caged animals, and think them
happily circumstanced. Your point of view depends, perhaps, on how
much passion for out-of-doors, for solitude, is in your own blood;
and on your sense of the lengths to which human interference may go
with the works of God. We give these lives subjected to our laudable
curiosity, strange exchanges: for moss knee-deep, and the dews and
aroma of the woody ground, a raised sawdust floor; and for an outlook
through craggy glens,
"Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of leaves,"
a whitewashed wall nine feet high, a stucco sky which has not the
look of Nubia, nor Barbary, nor Arabia, any more.
Our father Adam is said to have dwelt in peace with all the beasts
in his Garden. And there is no evidence in the Mosaic annals that
it was they who became perverted, and broke faith with man! Marry,
man himself, in the birth of his moral ugliness, set up the hateful
division, estranged these inestimable friends, and then, unto
everlasting, pursues, maligns, subjugates, and kills the beings
braver, shrewder, and more innocent than he. He has wrested from its
beautiful meaning his "dominion over them." Power made him tyrannous,
and tyranny bred in its victims hate and revenge and fear, and from
the footfall of man all creation flees away, unless, indeed, as in
Swift's most telling allegory, where the cultured Houyhnhnms may
succeed in subjecting the Yahoos. For man alone is the fallen angel
of the lower order:
"The King, from height of all his painted glory,"
has sunk into vulgar dreams of coercion, breathing dual impiety
against his Maker and his mates. Save him, there is no other
perverted animal; not one clad otherwise, or minded otherwise,
than his archetype. Men in sealskins; women in swansdown, with
heron-aigrettes; children in cocoon-spun silk, their hands and
feet in strange sheathings torn from the young of the goat and the
cow;--what are these but ludicrous violators of the decencies of the
universe? If there be beasts in Heaven "with eye down-dropt" upon
the temperate and polar zones, they cannot lack diversion. It is,
moreover, part of our plot to deny them immortality, and to attempt
to interpose our jurisdiction, in such abstruse matters, between them
and their Author, towards whom they yet bear an unshamed front. For
man the animal is but a beggarly lump. He has never shown himself
so provident as the ant, so ingenious as the beaver, so faithful as
the dove, so forgiving as the hound. His senses are eternally below
par; his artistic faculties are befogged. The humblest thrush is an
architect and musician by eldest family tradition, while it takes
him a thousand years to conceive an ogee arch and a viol d'amore.
And having driven from his pestilential company the whole retinue of
dear esquires, he began shamefacedly to reclaim them to his service.
The horse came back, generously hiding his apprehensions; the pig and
the hen mechanically, at the prospect of free bed and board; the dog
with his glad conciliation, the cat with her aristocrat reserves.
These abide with us, suffer through us, are persuasive and voluble,
and endeavor to reconcile us with the great majority of wild livers,
from whom we are divorced. In vain do they so press upon us our own
lack of logic. We address them individually: "You, O immigrant, are
personally pleasing unto me; but your fellows, your blood-relations,
your customs in your own country,--_ach Himmel_!" Our popular speech
insults them at every turn: "as silly as a goose," "as vain as a
peacock," "as ugly as a rat," "as obstinate as a mule," "as cross
as a bear," "as dirty as a dog," "as sick as a dog," "to be hanged
like a dog," "a dog's life," "Cur!" "Puppy!" Surely, no class of
creatures, unless Jews in the twelfth century, have ever undergone
such groundless contumely. Every word of Shylock's famous plea stands
good for them, as also its close. "If you prick us, do we not bleed?
if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die?
and, if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in
the rest, we will resemble you in that." When we hear of a writer
who advises the practice of "courtesy" towards animals, and of a
little girl who hoarded up wisdom from the speech of a turtle, our
memories couple them as Alice--and Sir Arthur Helps--in Wonderland.
If it be in _Utopia_ alone that murderous "sport" is impossible,
and that only there it breeds rational pity when after a day's run,
"a harmless and fearfull Hare should be devour'd by strong, fierce,
and cruell Dogges," how far are we not from the time when modern
conscientiousness shall make us just even to the exiles pent in a
menagerie? Our laws deal with these in a spirit of the most flagrant
injustice. While every jury allows for reprisals, when dealing with
human crime, no biped else, and no quadruped, with however blameless
a record, under whatever provocation, can be allowed an instant's
hearing, when so much as suspected of a transgression. A leopard
here at the Zoo revolts, perhaps for no specific cause. He is tired
of being enslaved, and would resume sincerity. He offends; he is
executed, leaving ineradicable influences among the cages, as if
their Danton had gone by, audible again: "_Que mon nom soit flétri;
que la France soit libre!_" Or the keeper abominably abuses a certain
elephant, a very saint for patience, a genius for cleverness, a hero
for humor; and six years after, the same elephant, in another duchy,
spies his old tormentor, winds his lithe proboscis about his waist,
and neatly cracks him against a wall. A dozen influential persons
plead, as defence for the assassin, his unparalleled nobleness of
character; but the public blood is up: he has to die. To some reforms
we shall never come, for thought about them is deadened in us by the
operation of our accursed generic pride. Our codes approximate too
painfully to the largeness of the universal plan. We have, indeed,
conceived of other suns, other systems, than ours; but the hope
is slight that we can ever admit beasts, not to certain terms of
equality with our own esteemed species, but even to the personal
pronoun, and a place in the divine economy. Arrogance is bad for us,
and bad for them. The very bliss of power is to protect and forbear;
could we learn it, we might, perhaps, inspire it in the shark, the
jackal, and the butcher-bird. Meanwhile, in the maintenance of
penal laws against our Ishmaels, it can at least be urged that,
as yet, we know no better. As we are drowned in ignorance, it is
inconceivable that we shall be hanged for sacrilege! Could we analyze
the impressions of uncultivated persons, received from the centaurs
in the Parthenon frieze, or the Sphinx of elder Egypt, we should
probably discover that these are looked upon as mere monsters: a
compound of man and horse, or of woman and lioness, the conception
of which is abhorrent and distressing to the mind. (It is to be
hoped that there are "stuck-up" horses and lionesses to adopt the
corresponsive view). But the artists of the race, from the world's
beginning, souls of a benign fancy, have gone on creating these
mythic "monsters." Long-eared fauns abound, and mermaids with silver
and vermilion scales, and angels borne on vast white gull-like wings:
dear non-anatomical shapes, for the most part, full of odd charm, and
of a spiritual application which will last out until we are humble
and humorous enough to read it. Nor, on second thought, can we fail
to see gravest changes adumbrating the subject. The Latin nations
lag behind in conciliations, and England leads. There were not many,
long ago, who passed the fraternal word to beasts: those who did so,
Sidney, More, Vaughan, were the flower of their kind, and not without
suspicion of "queerness." Lord Erskine, less than three generations
back, suffered great obloquy for his championship of what we are
almost ready to concede as the "rights" of animals. Coleridge was
well laughed at for saluting the ass's little foal as his brother.
But Burns was not laughed at for his field-mouse, nor Blake for his
fly. And there is no single characteristic of modern life so novel,
so significant, as the yearning affectionateness with which our
youngest poets allude to fauna, and so adorn a moral. The habit has
grown with them, until every Pan's pipe breathes sweet pieties to the
less articulate world. A line of Celia Thaxter, addressed to a mussel
on the stormy Maine strand, has been their unconscious key-note.
"Thou thought of God! ... what more than thou am I!"
For Darwin has come and gone, and cut our boast from under us.
On their own part, how benevolent are the estranged allies far away!
how ready to resume "the league of heart to heart" with some soul a
little primal! Any one, indeed, may tame a wild thing by no deeper
necromancy than a succession of suppers and of kind words. Animals
are disinterested also, and ready to serve without rewards. Ravens
are gentle marketers for Elijah; the lions purr about the prophet
Daniel; the shyest fish swim into Thoreau's hand; S. Francis, in the
tenderest of folk-tales, goes out to the hills, and reasons with
the wicked wolf who sacks the Umbrian villages. He offers him free
and ample maintenance, promises him immunity from the hunters, and
brings him down among the women and children, to pledge himself to
better behavior on his apologetic paw. S. Francis was not a very
great fool: he was only Adam sane again, and interharmonized with
the physical universe. The majority of infants still show pleasure
at the sight of a beetle, or a toad. Of course, their grasp kills
it; but that is not voluntary, as the pleasure is. The fatuous
parents, however, are certain to change all that: toads, be it
known, produce warts, and beetles sting. A lizard on a tree-trunk,
a mink in the creek, a delicate gray squirrel on the stone wall,
(charming persons exclusively minding their own business,) are at
all times providentially provided for our sweet little boys to
kill. Strange that, whereas, by Tigris and Euphrates, we creatures
had our communications with creatures in one kindly language, we
should now roam over the face of the earth, everywhere accosting
our demonstrable superiors with a gun! Mr. Bryan, candidate for the
Presidency of the United States, went into the forest, the other
day, for rest and recreation, and had a stroke of luck: he shot
something. It was a beautiful doe. We learn from the newspapers
that she had "stood looking at him, without any fear." Here is your
typical high treason in these nice matters. Who will say but that the
doe was about to give some sign? _Ça donne furieusement à penser._
Blind bullies, sodden usurpers that we are! It is our dense policy
to rebuff the touching advances of our old allies and kindred. Not
Rhoecus only instinctively bruises the ambassador bee, and stifles
the immortal message.
If the Oriental religions have any mission to discharge in our
behalf, let them teach us speedily, through any gracious superstition
whatsoever, their grave respect for animal life. When we are
thoroughly converted, we shall not only cease to vivisect, but
manumit our slaves of the exhibition-hall and the Zoo: we shall
hear no longer from the lion-house the fell foreboding sound, as of
Vercingetorix, Jugurtha, Zenobia, all together, imploring the gods
for vengeance upon Rome. The captives have borne their fate, yet not
quite dispassionately. They lose, behind bars, day by day, something
of themselves hard to part with; and they know it: but they are no
atheists. Outside is the hateful city, but the sun also, bringing
strange fancies to them as it crosses the threshold. So much lies
back of them, in that cell of humiliation, where they were not born!
What if there should be freedom again for them, beyond death? Some
thought as profound surges this morning in a vast antiphonal cry
among the tanks and cages, and shakes, in passing, the soul of man.
"O socii, neque enim ignari sumus ante malorum,
O passi graviora! dabit deus his quoque finem."
1896.
ON TEACHING ONE'S GRANDMOTHER HOW TO SUCK EGGS
IN the days of the Schoolmen, when no vexed question went without
its fair showing, it seems incredible that the important thesis
hereto affixed as a title went a-begging among those hair-splitting
philosophers. Since Aristotle himself overlooked it, Duns Scotus
and the noted Paracelsus, Aureolus Philip Theophrastus Bombast de
Hohenheim himself, were content to repeat his sin of omission. Even
Sir Thomas Browne, "the horizon of whose understanding was much
larger than the hemisphere of this world," neither unearthed the
origin of this singular implied practice, nor attempted in any way
to uphold or depreciate it. The phrase hath scarce the grace of an
Oriental precept, and scarce the dignity of Rome. It might sooner
appertain to Sparta, where the old were held in reverence, and where
their education, in a burst of filial anxiety, might be prolonged
beyond the usual term of mental receptivity.
It is reserved therefore, for some modern inquirer to establish,
whether the strange accomplishment in mind was at any time, in any
nation, barbarous or enlightened, in universal repute among venerable
females; or else especially imparted, under the rose, as a sort of
witch-trick, to conjurers, fortune-tellers, pythonesses, sibyls, and
such secretive and oracular folk; whether the initiatory lessons were
theoretical merely; and at what age the grandams (for the condition
of hypermaternity was at least imperative) were allowed to begin
operations.
It is a partial argument against the antiquity of the custom, and
against the supposition of its having prevailed among old Europe's
nomadic tribes, that several of these are accused by historians of
having destroyed their progenitors so soon as the latter became idle
and enfeebled: whereas it is reasonably to be inferred that the
gentle process of ovisugescence, had such then been invented, would
have kept the savage fireside peopled with happy and industrious
centenarians. After the arduous labor of their long lives, this
new, leisurely, mild, and genteel trade could be acquired with
imperceptible trouble. Cato mastering Greek at eighty, Dandolo
leading hosts when past his October, are kittenish and irreverend
figures beside that of a toothless Goth grandmother, learning, with
melancholy energy, to suck eggs.
We know not why the privilege of education, if granted to them
without question, should have been withheld from their gray spouses,
who certainly would have preferred so sociable an industry to
whetting the knives of the hunters, or tending watch-fires by night.
But no one of us ever heard of a grandfather sucking eggs. The gentle
art was apparently sacred to the gentle sex, and withheld from the
shaggy lords of creation, by whom the innutritious properties of the
shell were happily unsuspected.
By what means was the race of hens, for instance, preserved?
Statistics might be proffered concerning the ante-natal consumption
of fledglings, which would edify students of natural history.
One bitterly-disputed point, the noble adage under consideration
permanently settles; a quibble which ought to have
"staggered that stout Stagyrite,"
and which has come even to the notice of grave inductive theologians:
_videlicet_, that the bird, and not the egg, may claim the priority
of existence. For had it been otherwise, one's grandmother would
been early acquainted with the very article which her posterity
recommended to her as a novelty, and which, with respectful care,
they taught her to utilize, after a fashion best adapted to her time
of life.
Fallen into desuetude is this judicious and salutary custom. There
must have been a time when a yellowish stain about the mouth denoted
an age, a vocation, a limitation, effectually as did the bulla of the
lad, the maiden's girdle, "the marshal's truncheon, or the judge's
robe," or any of the picturesque distinctions now crushed out of
the social code. But the orthodox sucking of eggs, the innocent,
austere, meditative pastime, is no more, and the glory of grandams is
extinguished forever.
The dreadful civility of our western woodsmen, the popular
dissentient voice alike of the theatre and of the political
meeting,--the casting of eggs wherefrom the element of youth is
wholly eliminated, affords a speculation on heredity, and appears to
be a faint echo of some traditional squabble in the morning of the
world, among disagreeing kinswomen; the very primordial battle, where
reloading was superfluous, where every shell told, whose blackest
spite was spent in a golden rain and hail. What havoc over the face
of young creation; what coloring of pools, and of errant butterflies!
What distress amid the cleanly pixies and dryads, whose shady haunts
trickled unwelcome moisture: a terror not unshared in the recesses of
the coast:--
"_Intus aquæ dulces, vivoque sedilia saxo,
Nympharum domus._"
One can fancy the younglings of the vast human family, the success
of whose lesson to their elders was thus over-well demonstrated,
marking the ebb and flow of hostilities, like the superb spirits
of Richelieu and the fourteenth Louis, eyeing the great Revolution.
What marvel, if, struck with remorse at the senile strife of the
"she-citizens," they vowed never, never to teach another grandmother
to suck eggs! So it was, maybe, that the abused custom was lost from
the earth.
Nay, more; its remembrance is perverted into a taunt more scorching
than lightning, more silencing than the bolt of Jove. _Sus
Minervam_ is Cicero's elegant equivalent; and Partridge says to Tom
Jones, quoting his old schoolmaster: "Polly Matete cry town is my
daskalon": the English whereof runneth: Teach your grandmother how
to suck eggs! Is not the phrase the cream of scorn, the catchword
of insubordination, the blazing defiance of tongues unbroken as a
one-year's colt? It grated strangely on our ear. We grieved over the
transformation of a favorite saw, innocuous once, and conveying a
meek educational suggestion. We came to admit that the Academe where
the old sat at the feet of their descendants, to be ingratiated into
the most amiable of professions, was nothing better, in memory, than
an impertinence. And we sadly avowed, in the underground chamber of
our private heart, that, as for worldly prospects, it would be fairly
suicidal, all things considered, to aspire now to the chair of that
professorship.