Delphi Collected Works of Ouida, page 881
Not long ago there was a somewhat silly discussion in the English press on the effect of perfumes on desert animals in captivity, of the excitement and pleasure produced on them by such odours. It occurred to no one of the sapient correspondents that such perfumes did, no doubt, recall to the poor imprisoned animals the intense fragrance of the flowers in their own jungles and tropical forests. All animals are intensely sensitive to odours, because their olfactory nerves telegraph to their brains in a way of which our own dull nostrils are utterly unconscious.
With what pretension can a world call itself humane when in its codes all ‘wild’ animals are unprotected by laws, and may be treated with whatever brutality is desired? When it is a question for the dweller in a jungle to kill a wild beast or be killed himself, one can understand that he chooses the first of the two alternatives. But this is no excuse for the man in cities to drag a captured lion to make the sport of fools, and to perish wretchedly of diseased joints, thwarted longings, and the anguish of nostalgia.
It is idle to speak of the civilisation of a world in which such things are possible. From a hygienic point of view alone, these poor tormented creatures, cooped up in filthy cages, breathing fetid air night and day, hearing each other’s piteous cries, having no single want or instinct gratified, ill-fed, diseased, miserable, and ravaged by parasites, must be one of the most unwholesome centres of contagion conceivable. A polar bear is at this moment being taken through Europe for exhibition in a caravan; he is kept in a cage in which he cannot turn; he has a pan of water two inches deep, and a few ounces of bread as his only food!
There is no animal which is not to be attached by kindness and justice shown to him. The lion of Rosa Bonheur fell into decline from grief at being sent from her keeping to that of the Jardin des Plantes when she was absent on a distant voyage. She returned to find him dying; he recognised her voice and opened his eyes with a feeble roar of pleasure, then laid his great head down upon her knees and died. No one who knows human nature by long experience can assert for a moment that its fidelity can be secured by benefits, or its sincerity insured by affection; but when kindness and regard are shown to ‘the beasts which perish,’ these never fail to give them back tenfold.
Let me here tell a true history, which I should have told to Matthew Arnold had he been living then, with entire certainty of his sympathy.
A little dog of Maltese breed, who belonged to my mother, was inconsolable at her death. For three weeks he refused all food, and was kept alive by nourishment artificially administered. He sat up, and begged, day after day, before her bed and before her favourite chair, until he dropped from sheer exhaustion. He wanted for nothing that I could give him; and no habit of his daily life was changed; but he was unhappy. Whenever the door opened he thought she entered. He ran and looked into every stranger’s face. He knew everything which had belonged to her. His sorrow injured his health; his heart became weak, and he died of cardiac paralysis at six years old.
What could human affection offer superior in fidelity and feeling?
‘That loving heart, that patient soul, Had they indeed no longer span To run their course, and reach their goal, And read their homily to man?’
I think that not only is their affection undervalued, but that the intelligence of animals is greatly underrated. Man having but one conception of intelligence, his own, does not endeavour to comprehend another which is different, and differently exhibited and expressed. I have before now said in print that if our mind exceeds the mind of animals and birds in much, theirs exceeds ours at least in some things, as their sight, scent, and hearing far surpass ours.
When we remember also that these other races are absolutely alone, are never aided by man, are only, on the contrary, hindered by him, opposed, thwarted, and persecuted by him, their achievements are, relatively to their opportunities, much more wonderful than any of his. The elements which are his great foes are likewise theirs; they have to encounter and suffer all the woes of tempest, hurricane, flood, the width of barren seas, the hunger on solitary shores; and they have also in his ruthless and unceasing spite an enemy more cruel than any with which he himself has to contend. If we meditate on this unquestionable fact, we shall be forced to admit that Cristoforo Colombo was not a greater hero than many a little swallow.
But scarcely anyone does meditate on these marvels; one in a million, one in a generation, at the most. To nearly the whole of humanity the wonderful and beautiful races with which the world teems, which are for ever living side by side with the human, do not exist except in so far as they contribute to the pleasure of slaughter, or the greed of commerce, or of gambling. For to the majority of men and women all organisms except their own are as though they were not.
There is no sympathy with these interesting and mysterious lives led side by side with man, but ignored by him entirely, except when by him persecuted. The nest of the weaver bird is to the full as ingenious and as marvellous as the dome of St Peter’s or St Paul’s. The beaver State, and the bee State, are as intricate in organisation as the Constitution of the French Republic, and the British Monarchy, and are distinctly superior in many parts of their organisation to either of these. The passage of the white ants through a jungle and across a continent is quite as admirable in unison and skill and order as the human march to Chitral; and the annual flights of the storks, of the Solan geese, of the wild ducks, exhibit qualities of obedience to a chosen commander, of endurance, of observation, and of wisdom, not exceeded by any human Arctic or Australian exploring party.
The vain-glorious assumption that we have a monopoly of what is called reason cannot be allowed by those who bring a reason of their own, unbiassed, to the study of animals, not under the unnatural conditions of the laboratory, but in natural freedom and peace.
No skill of a Stanley or a Nansen ever exceeded that of the hound Maida in tracing Sir Walter Scott, and no journey of a Burton or a Speke was ever so wonderful as the migratory voyage of a martin or a nightingale. I have said this ere now; and it can never be repeated too often, for nothing is so cruel as the vanity of man, and nothing so opposed to his own true progress as his blind and dogged contempt for all races not shaped exactly like his own.
The correspondence which has been general in the English press regarding the muzzling of dogs, has been conspicuous for its silliness, ignorance, and cruelty, but above all by its disgusting selfishness; and an editor of a very popular organ was not ashamed to print that if only one human life could be saved, etc., etc., disregarding the fact that men were at the time being slaughtered by dysentery and fever, by the scores, for no better object than to go and cut down cotton trees at Coomassie; whilst deaths by starvation, a perfectly preventible cause, are so common in English cities that the reports of them scarcely awaken a passing regret or compassion. The veneration for human life which is developed by journalists when a lion kills his gaoler, or when a dog is supposed to have been the cause of his tormentor’s death, is comical in these gentlemen of the press, who, to help a speculation, open out a new mart, or influence the share lists, will ravenously demand a military expedition, or a naval demonstration, to sabre, shell, burn, and ravage upon distant strands.
The attitude of the Brahmin, to whom all forms of life are sacred, is intelligible, estimable, and consistent; the attitude of the savage conqueror, to whom thousands of dead men and thousands of dead beasts are alike so much carrion, is intelligible and reasonable, whilst brutal. The attitude of the journalist and county councilman is not either; it possesses neither logic nor common sense, and is not estimable or reasonable, but only contemptible.
If there be one thing more loathsome than the carnage of war, it is the Red Cross societies following in its train. But the modern world, being conscious that the butchery of war ill accords with its æsthetic and religious pretensions, gives a sop to its conscience by sending the ambulance side by side with the gun carriage. A more robust and more honest temper did not evade the truth that the least brutal war is the one most immediately and conclusively destructive; the slaughter of wounded men was more truly merciful than the modern system of surgery and nursing, which saves shattered constitutions and ruined health to drag out a miserable and artificially prolonged existence.
There is, however, something which the ordinary human mind finds soothing and delightful in this formula of ‘the sanctity of human life,’ when combined with a corresponding disregard for human and for all other life. The good Christian likes to be raised aloft, in his own eyes, from all those other races which he imagines were given to him for his use and abuse by a gracious Deity. He loves to think that both God and the neighbouring policeman are watching over him; and taking care alike of his soul and of his greatcoat. In the enormous vanity of the Christian who believes all the laws of the universe altered for him, or in the equally enormous vanity of the scientist who arrogates to himself the right to dogmatise on the mysteries of creation, this attitude is not surprising. But in either the philosophic mind; or the poetic temperament, it is so because to the philosopher the difference between the human and the other races cannot appear very great, whilst to the poet the solidarity of all sentient life must always seem unquestionable. That friend, and scholar, and poet for whom I mourn as freshly as though he had died but yesterday did not disdain to greet a brother’s spirit in
‘That liquid, melancholy eye From whose pathetic, soul-fed springs Seem’d surging the Virgilian cry, The sense of tears in mortal things,’
for these lines were written by Matthew Arnold to ‘only a dog.’
It is not in foolishly endeavouring to make animals our prisoners and puppets, in trying to force them to count, to caper, or to play cards, that we reach insight into their natures and their minds. It is in loving them and respecting them as he loved and respected Geist and Kai. I use the latter word advisedly, for whoever does not in a fair degree, as with a human friend, respect the freedom, the preference, and the idiosyncrasy of an animal will never reach true comprehension of him.
A writer wrote the other day, ‘People speak of the law of nature; but who feels it? There is no such emotion known in the ordinary life of the world.’ The persons who will let their dinner wait whilst they watch a sunset fade over sea or moor, or who will leave the share list unread to see the morning dew make silver globes of the gossamer in the grass, are so few that they may almost be said not to exist, if we except a poet here, an artist there; and the sense of kinship with races not human can only come to those whose own kinship with earth and air and sky is strong enough to resist the dulling and debasing influences of artificial life, of life amongst men and their trivialities, frauds, and vanities.
‘The sun is God,’ said Turner, when he lay dying, and, alas! saw that sun only through the mists of London. But how many see the sun at all, even when they live where it is most radiant? How many think of the sun during the long day it illumines? The light is taken as a matter of course, as our breath is drawn through our lungs. There is no gratitude for it.
In similar manner there is no sense of kinship with the winged children of the air, with the four-footed dwellers beside us on the earth. Almost the only recognition we give them is maltreatment. At other times the indifference of our unspeakable fatuity rises in a dust cloud between us and them. Of gratitude for their companionship, their aid, their patience, their many virtues, there is not a trace in those who use them and abuse them, no more than there is gratitude for the beauty of the rose or the fragrance of the violet.
As ‘the winds of March take the world with beauty,’ every pasture and coppice is full of blossom, passed unnoticed by thousands in every daily country walk; so in the same manner do the multitudes trample down, and pass by, the ineffable charm and fragrance of disregarded affections, and unappreciated qualities, in the other races of earth.
Hang a poor woodland bird in a cage, if you can bear to look on such a captive, above a blossoming honeysuckle or hawthorn, and note his anguish of remembrance, his ecstasy of hope, his frantic effort to be free. But the accursed wires are between him and the familiar blossoms, between him and the blue sky; in a little while he realises that he is a prisoner; the fluttering joy goes out of his heart and his wings; his feathers grow ruffled and dull, his eyes are veiled, he sits motionless and heartbroken, and the breeze of the springtime blows past him, and never more will bear him on its buoyant way.
Living wild song-birds are sold at a halfpenny each by thousands in the London slums, and as many more die — nay, thrice as many more — before they reach the streets, packed close and jammed together in hampers and crates.
Yet the English Home Secretary, on being asked by a deputation to put an end to this abominable traffic, answered that it was desirable to do as little as possible in the way of legislation!
For legislators, always eager to make cruel and coercive laws, prefer to let humane ones be substituted by what they call ‘the gradual education of the people.’ But this gradual education is so extremely gradual that its progress is imperceptible; it may even be justly suspected that it is chiefly a backward movement; and such education, as far as education by example goes, is hindered, not helped, by what are called the cultured classes.
In this, our own present day, bull fights become at once popular wherever they are allowed, and with women as much so as with men, and I am certain that if the gladiatorial shows of Imperial Rome were introduced at Olympia the London crowds would in the main be delighted with them, and the London women would eagerly turn down their thumbs.
Why not? They go to see the tight-rope walking and the trapeze jump at the Crystal Palace and the Aquarium; and the only possible attraction in these is the probability that in each case the performers will be killed one day; apart from this chance there is no interest whatever in the spectacle. If the authorities were induced to permit them, gladiatorial shows would become so popular with the women of Belgravia and Mayfair that no one would care for anything less exciting, and the Oxford and Cambridge sports would be deserted with contempt as offering no attraction.
The desire for excitement is the most conspicuous feature, and the most dangerous disease of the age; anything which provides it is welcome; people are bored despite their incessant search of distraction, and anything which will exorcise the spectre of boredom is eagerly received; and after all it would be absurd if persons who go to see steeplechases pretended to be too squeamish to cry the ‘Habet’! Let the managers of Olympia obtain permission for gladiatorial games (death being guaranteed), and I will promise them that “all London” in the most fashionable sense of those words will crowd from April to August to see the sport. If the ladies could be allowed to descend into the arena, to touch the dying bodies, as Nero used to like to do, to see the faint life still lingering shrink and writhe, this success would be still greater; and Nero was but a primitive creature, he had but a heated iron wand, whereas my ladies could be provided by their favourite scientist with the much more excruciating torment of electricity. Imagine what exquisite little jewelled instruments of torture, made to fasten on to a bracelet, or hide within a ring, would fill the shops in Bond Street and Piccadilly. ‘We are going electrolysing!’ would be heard from all the pretty lips of the leaders of society; and they would cease to care for their bicycles, and auto-cars, and even for the discussion of actresses’ new gowns. ‘How many dead ‘uns did you knock off last night?’ their most intimate friend would ask, as he would lean over the rails in Rotten Row, sucking the crook of his cane.
Does this appear exaggerated and libellous? Well, let us look at the example given by a London leader of fashion and politics as she goes down at election time to shed sweetness and light around her in Poplar or Shoreditch.
In her bonnet is, of course, an osprey aigrette; she knows it was torn from a living creature, but then that was done far away in some Asiatic or American creek or forest, and so really does not matter. Her Suède gloves fit like her skin; they were the skin of a kid, and were probably stripped from its living body as this lends suppleness to the skin. The jacket she carries on her arm is lined with Astrakhan fur, which was taken from an unborn lamb to give to the fur that curl and kink which please her; it has been cut from its mother’s ripped-up womb. Her horses, as they wait for her at the corner of the street, have their heads fixed in air, and the muscles of their necks cramped by immovable bearing-reins. Her Japanese pug runs after her, shaking his muzzle-tortured nose. She has a telegram in her pocket which has momentarily vexed her. She sent her sable collie to the dog-exhibition at Brussels, and the excitement, or the crush, or the want of water, or something, has brought on heat apoplexy, and they wire that he is dead, poor old nervous Ossian! She really has no luck, for her Java sparrows died too at the bird show in Edinburgh, because the footman, sent with them, forgot to fill their water-glass when it got dry on the journey; a great many people send birds to shows with nobody at all to take care of them, so she feels that she was not to blame in the very least.
‘Why will you show?’ says her husband, who is vexed about Ossian; ‘you don’t want to win and you don’t want to sell.’
‘Oh, everybody does it,’ she answers.
He goes into his study to console himself with a new model of a pole trap; and she, her canvassing done, runs upstairs to see her gown for the May Drawing-Room. The train is of quite a new design, embroidered with orchids in natural colours, and fringed with the feathers of the small green parrakeet, a beautiful little bird which has been poisoned by hundreds in the jungles of New Guiana to make the border to this manteau de cour.
