II.
What was the view taken of animals by the Jewish people, apart from the fundamental ideas implied by a primordial Peace in Nature?
It was the habit of Hebrew writers to leave a good deal to the imagination; in general, they only cared to throw as much light on hidden subjects as was needful to regulate conduct. They gave precepts rather than speculations. There remain obscure points in their conception of animals, but we know how they did not conceive them: they did not look upon them as “things”; they did not feel towards them as towards automata.
After the Deluge, there was established “the everlasting covenant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth.” Evidently, you cannot make a covenant with “things.”
N. Consoni.
GENESIS VIII.
(Loggie di Raffaello.)
That the Jews supposed the intelligence of animals to be not extremely different from the intelligence of man is to be deduced from the story of Balaam, for it is said that God opened the mouth—not the mind—of the ass. The same story illustrates the ancient belief that animals see apparitions which are concealed from the eyes of man. The great interest to us, however, of the Scriptural narrative is its significance as a lesson in humanity. When the Lord opened the mouth of the ass, what did the ass say? She asks her master why he had smitten her three times? Balaam answers, with a frankness which, at least, does him credit, because he was enraged with the ass for turning aside and not minding him, and he adds (still enraged, and, strange to say, nowise surprised at the animal’s power of speech) that he only wishes he had a sword in his hand, as he would then kill her outright. How like this is to the voice of modern brutality! The ass, continuing the conversation, rejoins in words which it would be a shame to disfigure by putting them into the idiom of the twentieth century: “Am I not thine ass upon which thou hast ridden ever since I was thine unto this day? Was I ever wont to do so unto thee?” Balaam, who has the merit, as I have noticed, of being candid, replies, “No, you never were.” Then, for the first time, the Prophet sees the angel standing in the path with a drawn sword in his hand—an awe-inspiring vision! And what are the angel’s first words to the terrified prophet who lies prostrate on his face? They are a reproof for his inhumanity. “Wherefore hast thou smitten thine ass these three times?” Then the angel tells how the poor beast he has used thus has saved her master from certain death, for had she not turned from him, he would have slain Balaam and saved her alive. “And Balaam said unto the angel of the Lord, I have sinned.”
Balaam was not a Jew; but the nationality of the personages in the Bible and the origin or authorship of its several parts are not questions which affect the present inquiry. The point of importance is, that the Jews believed these Scriptures to contain Divine truth.
With regard to animals having the gift of language, it appears from a remark made by Josephus that the Jews thought that all animals spoke before the Fall. In Christian folk-lore there is a superstition that animals can speak during the Christmas night: an obvious reference to their return to an unfallen state.
Solomon declares that the righteous man “regardeth the life of his beast”; a saying which is often misquoted, “merciful” being substituted for “righteous,” by which the proverb loses half its force. The Hebrew Scriptures contain two definite injunctions of humanity to animals. One is the command not to plough with the ox and the ass yoked together—in Palestine I have seen even the ass and the camel yoked together; their unequal steps cause inconvenience to both yoke-fellows and especially to the weakest. The other is the prohibition to muzzle the ox which treads out the corn: a simple humanitarian rule which it is truly surprising how any one, even after an early education in casuistry, could have interpreted as a metaphor. There are three other commands of great interest because they show how important it was thought to preserve even the mind of man from growing callous. One is the order not to kill a cow or she-goat or ewe and her young both on the same day. The second is the analogous order not to seethe the kid in its mother’s milk. The third refers to bird-nesting: if by chance you find a bird’s nest on a tree or on the ground and the mother bird is sitting on the eggs or on the fledglings, you are on no account to capture her when you take the eggs or the young birds (one would like bird-nesting to have been forbidden altogether, but I fear that the human boy in Syria had too much of the old Adam in him for any such law to have proved effectual!). Let the mother go, says the sacred writer, and if you must take something, take only the young ones. This command concludes in a very solemn way, for it ends with the promise (for what may seem a little act of unimportant sentiment) of the blessing promised to man for honouring his own father and mother—that it will be well with him and that his days will be long in the land.
In the law relative to the observance of the Seventh Day, not only is no point insisted on more strongly than the repose of the animals of labour, but in one of the oldest versions of the fourth commandment the repose of animals is spoken of as if it were the chief object of the Sabbath: “Six days shalt thou do thy work, and on the seventh day thou shalt rest: that thine ox and thine ass may rest” (Exodus xxiii. 12). Moreover, it is expressly stated of the Sabbath of the Lord, the seventh year when no work was to be done, that all which the land produces of itself is to be left to the enjoyment of the beasts that are in the land. The dominant idea was to give animals a chance—to leave something for them—to afford them some shelter, as in the creation of bird-sanctuaries in the temples.
In promises of love and protection to man, to the Chosen People, animals are almost always included. “The heavens shall tremble: the sun and moon shall be dark, and the stars shall withdraw their shining” (Joel ii. 10). “Be not afraid, ye beasts of the field: for the pastures of the wilderness do spring, for the tree beareth her fruit, the fig-tree and the vine do yield their strength. Be glad, ye children of Zion, and rejoice in the Lord your God” (Joel ii. 22, 23).
The wisdom of animals is continually praised. “Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise: which having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.” So said the wisest of the Jews. I am tempted to quote here a passage from the writings of Giordano Bruno: “With what understanding the ant gnaws her grain of wheat lest it should sprout in her underground habitation. The fool says this is instinct, but we say it is a species of understanding.” If Solomon did not make the same reflection, it was only because that wonderful word “instinct” had not yet been invented.
Photo: Alinari.
DANIEL AND THE LIONS.
(Early Christian Sarcophagus at Ravenna.)
We have seen that the Jews supposed animals to be given to men for use not for abuse, and the whole of Scripture tends to the conclusion that the Creator—who had called good all the creatures of His hand—regarded none as unworthy of His providence. This view is plainly endorsed by the saying of Christ that not a sparrow falls to the ground without the will of the Father (or “not one of them is forgotten in the sight of God”), and by the saying of Mohammed, who likewise believed himself the continuer of Jewish tradition: “There is no beast that walks upon the earth but its provision is from God.”
But there is something more. Every one knows that the Jews were allowed to kill and eat animals. The Jewish religion makes studiously few demands on human nature. “The ways of the Lord were pleasant ways.” Since men craved for meat or, in Biblical language, since they lusted after flesh, they were at liberty to eat those animals which, in an Eastern climate, could be eaten without danger to health. But on one condition: the body they might devour—what was the body? It was earth. The soul they might not touch. The mysterious thing called life must be rendered up to the Giver of it—to God. The man who did not do this, when he killed a lamb, was a murderer. “The blood shall be imputed to him; he hath shed blood, and that man shall be cut off from among his people.”
The inclination must be resisted to dispose of this mysterious ordinance as a mere sanitary measure. It was a sanitary measure, but it was much besides. The Jews believed that every animal had a soul, a spirit, which was beyond human jurisdiction, with which they had no right to tamper. When we ask, however, what this soul, this spirit, was, we find ourselves groping in the dark. Was it material, as the soul was thought to be by the Egyptians and by the earliest doctors of the Christian Church? Was it an immaterial, impersonal, Divine essence? Was its identity permanent, or temporary? We can give no decisive answer; but we may assume with considerable certainty that life, spirit, whatever it was, appeared at least to the majority of the Jews to possess one nature, whether in men or in animals. When a Jew denied the immortality of the soul, he denied it both for man and for beast. “I said in my heart,” wrote the author of Ecclesiastes, “concerning the estate of the sons of men that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts. For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth so the other dieth; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast.”
The mist which surrounds the Hebrew idea of the soul may proceed from the fact that they did not know themselves what they meant by it, or from the fact that they once knew what they meant by it so well as to render elucidation superfluous. If the teraphim represented the Lares or family dead, then the archaic Jewish idea of the soul was simple and definite. It is possible that in all later times two diametrically opposed opinions existed contemporaneously, as was the case with the Pharisees and Sadducees. The Jewish people did not feel the pressing need to dogmatise about the soul that other peoples have felt; they had one living soul which was immortal, and its name was Israel!
Still, through all ages, from the earliest times till now, the Jews have continued to hold sacred “the blood which is the life.”
In Hindu religious books, where similar ordinances are enforced, there are hints of a suspicion which, as I have said elsewhere, could not have been absent from the minds of Hebrew legislators—the haunting suspicion of a possible mixing-up of personality. Here we tread on the skirts of magic: a subject which belongs to starless nights.
We come back into the light of day when we glance at the relations which, according to Jewish tradition, existed between animals and their Creator. We see a beautiful interchange of gratitude on the one side and watchful care on the other. As the ass of Balaam recognised the angel, so do all animals—except man—at all times recognise their God. “But ask now the beasts and they shall teach thee; and the fowls of the air, and they shall tell thee.... Who knoweth not of all these that the hand of the Lord hath wrought this? In whose hand is the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind.”
I will only add to these words of Job a few verses taken here and there from the Psalms, which form a true anthem of our fellow-creatures of the earth and air:—
“Beasts and all cattle, creeping things and flying fowl, let them praise the name of the Lord.
He giveth to the beast his food and to the young ravens which cry.
He sendeth the springs into the valleys which run among the hills;
They give drink to every beast of the field, the wild asses quench their thirst.
By them shall the fowls of heaven have their habitation which sing among the branches:
The trees of the Lord are full of sap, the cedars of Lebanon which He hath planted,
Where the birds make their nests; as for the stork, the fir-trees are her house.
The great hills are a refuge for the wild goats and the rocks for the conies.
Thou makest darkness, and it is night, wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth;
The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their meat from God;
The sun ariseth, they gather themselves together and lay them down in their dens.
... Yea, the sparrow hath found an house, and the swallow a nest for herself where she may lay her young.
Even thine altars, O Lord of Hosts, my King and my God!”
XI
“A PEOPLE LIKE UNTO YOU”
A FRIEND who was spending the winter at Tunis asked me if it were true that there was any teaching of kindness to animals in the religion of Islam? She had seen with pain the little humanity practised by the lower class of Arabs, and she had difficulty in believing that such conduct was contrary to the law of the Prophet. I replied, that if men are sometimes better than their creeds, at other times they are very much worse. At the head of every chapter of the Koran, it is written: “In the name of the most merciful God.” If God be merciful, shall man be unmerciful? Alas, that the answer should have been so often “yes”!
Inhumanity to animals is against the whole spirit of the Koran, and also against that of Moslem tradition. In the “Words of Mohammed,” of which one thousand four hundred and sixty-five collections exist, and which are looked upon as “the Moslem’s dictionary of morals and manners,” the Apostle is described as saying: “Fear God in these dumb animals, and ride them when they are fit to be rode, and get off them when they are tired.” Mohammed was asked by his disciples: “Verily, are there rewards for our doing good to quadrupeds and giving them water to drink? “He said: “There are rewards for benefiting every animal having a moist liver” (every sentient creature). He said again: “There is no Moslem who planteth a tree or soweth a field, and man, birds or beasts eat from them, but it is a charity for him.” Like all other religious teachers, he was made by legend the central figure of a Nature Peace. He had miraculous authority over beasts as well as over man, and beasts, more directly than man, knew him to be from God. Once he was standing in the midst of a crowd when a camel came and prostrated itself before him. His companions exclaimed, “O Apostle of God! Beasts and trees worship thee, then it is meet for us to worship thee.” Mohammed replied, “Worship God, and you may honour your brother—that is, me.”
Those who know nothing else about Mohammed know the story of how he cut away his sleeve rather than awaken his cat, which was sleeping upon it. He is reported to have told how a woman was once punished for a cat: she tied it till it died of hunger—she gave that cat nothing to eat, nor did she allow it to go free, so that it might have eaten “the reptiles of the ground.” (Cats do eat lizards and snakes too, even when they have plenty of food—very bad for them it is.) Mohammed’s fondness of cats has been suggested as the reason why two or three of them usually go with the Caravan which takes the Sacred Carpet from Cairo to Mecca, but perhaps the origin of that custom is far more remote.
“AN INDIAN ORPHEUS.”
Royal Palace at Delhi.
(Imitated from a painting by Raphael.)
In the words of Mohammed there is this beautiful version of the “Sultan Murad” cycle: an adulteress was passing by a well when she saw a dog which was holding out its tongue from the thirst which was killing him. The woman drew off her shoe and tied it to the end of her garment; then she drew up water and gave the dog to drink. The dog fawned on her and licked her hands. Now the Sultan was passing that way, and he saw the woman and the dog and inquired into the matter. When he had heard all, he told the guards to undo her chain and give her back her veil and lead her to her own home.
On one occasion the Prophet met a man who had a nest of young doves, and the mother fluttered after and even down about the head of him that held it. The Prophet told him to put the nest back where he found it, for this wondrous love comes from God.
The verse which gives the keynote to Moslem ideas about animals occurs in the sixth chapter of the Koran, and runs thus: “There is no beast on earth nor bird which flieth with its wings but the same is a people like unto you, we have not omitted anything in the Book of our decrees; then unto their Lord shall they return.” In other texts where the word “creatures” is used there is a strong presumption that animals, as well as men, genii and angels, are included; as, for instance, “unto Him do all creatures which are in heaven and earth make petition,” and again, “all God’s creatures are His family, and he is the most beloved of God who trieth to do the most good to God’s creatures”—which is almost word for word—
“He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.”
The common grace after eating is “Praise be to the Lord of all creatures!” Moslem hunters and butchers have the custom, called the Hallal, of pronouncing a formula of excuse (Bi’sm-illah!) before slaying any animal. The author of “Malay Magic” mentions, that if a Malay takes a tiger in a pitfall, the Pawang, or medicine-man, has to explain to the quarry that it was not he that laid the snare but the Prophet Mohammed.
By orthodox Moslem law hunting was allowed, provided it was for some definite end or necessity. It was legitimate to hunt for food, or for clothing, as when the skin was the object. Dangerous wild beasts, the incompatible neighbours of all but saints, might be hunted to protect the more precious lives of men. Beyond this, from an orthodox point of view, hunting was regarded as indefensible. Such was the rule, and there is no greater mistake than to undervalue the moral standard because every one does not attain to it. Perhaps few Moslems keep this rule rigidly, but it is true now as it was when Lane wrote on the subject, that a good Moslem who hunts for amusement does not seek to prolong the chase: he tries to take the game as quickly as he can, and if it is not dead when taken, it is instantly killed by having its throat cut. Such amusements as shooting pigeons, or the unspeakable abomination of firing at wild birds from ships, which makes certain tourist steamers a curse in the Arctic regions, would inspire even the not too orthodox Moslem with profound disgust.
There were some Moslems who went far beyond the law—for whom taking life, when the fact of doing so came rudely before them, was a thing revolting in itself. Such sensibility was manifest in the Persian poets, and it has been attributed to their inherited Zoroastrian tendencies; but to think this is to misunderstand the groundwork of Mazdean humane teaching, which was not based on sensitiveness about taking life. Such sensitiveness is rarely found, except among Aryan races, and Zoroastrianism, though it spread among an Aryan people, was not an Aryan religion. It is more likely to be true that the Persian peculiar tenderness for animals was an atavistic revival of the old Aryan temperament. Renan said that Sufism was a racial Aryan reaction against l’effroyable simplicité de l’esprit sémitique. Sensitiveness about animals was a necessary ingredient, so to speak, of Sufism. Sadi, the Sufic poet par excellence, poured blessings on the departed spirit of Firdusi for the couplet which Sir William Jones translated so well and loved so much:—
“Ah, spare yon emmet, rich in hoarded grain;
He lives with pleasure, and he dies with pain.”
That birds and many, if not all, animals have a language by which they can interchange their thoughts is a belief shared by Moslems, both learned and ignorant. The Koran says that the language of birds was understood by Solomon, and folk-lore gives many other persons credit for the same accomplishment. A person believed to have such powers could turn the belief, if not the powers, to uses both good and bad. An Arabian tale relates how a pleasure-loving Persian king summoned a Maubadz, a head Magian, to tell him what two owls were chattering about. The Maubadz told with considerable detail the plan which the female owl was unfolding to the male owl, of how each of their future numerous offspring might be set up in life as sole possessor of a forsaken village, if only the present “fortunate king” lived long enough. The monarch understood the rebuke, and resolved to mend his ways, and to encourage tillage and agriculture, instead of devoting himself to idle pastimes.
MOSLEM BEGGAR FEEDING DOGS AT CONSTANTINOPLE.
Bird-trills mean sentences or words, chiefly religious. The pigeon cries continually, “Alláh! Alláh!” The common dove executes this long sentence: “Assert the unity of your Lord who created you, so will He forgive you your sin.” There was a parrot who could repeat the whole Koran by heart and could never be put out so as to make mistakes. I knew of an old priest who repeated the Divina Commedia from the first line to the last, and the knowledge of the whole of the Iliad was common in ancient Athens, where people were laughed at who gave themselves the airs of scholars on the ground of such feats of memory. But in the bird-world the Moslem parrot surely stands alone, though we hear of a pious raven who could say correctly the thirty-second chapter and who always made the proper prostration when it came to the words: “My body prostrateth itself before Thee, and my heart confideth in Thee.”
The chapter of the Koran entitled “the Ant” is full of charming zoology. God bestowed knowledge on David and Solomon, and Solomon, who was “David’s heir,” said to the people: “O men, we have been taught the speech of birds, and have had all things bestowed on us: this is manifest excellence.” The armies of Solomon consisted of men and genii and birds: they were arrayed in proper order on an immense carpet of green silk: the men were placed to the right, the genii to the left, and the birds flew overhead, making a canopy of shade from the burning rays of the sun. Solomon sat in the middle on his throne, and when it was desired to move, the wind transported the carpet with all on it from one place to another. This account, however, is not in the Koran, and need not be believed. But that the armies were of the three species of beings we have the highest authority for asserting. They arrived, one day, in the Valley of Ants. A sentinel ant beheld the approaching host and called to her companions to hasten into their habitations for fear that Solomon and his armies should crush them underfoot without perceiving it. This made Solomon smile, but while he laughed at her words, he yet remembered to thank the Lord for the favour wherewith He had favoured him: the privilege of knowing the language of beasts. After blessing God, and praying that in the end He would take him into paradise among His righteous servants, the king looked around at his feathered army and lo! he missed the lapwing. Some say that the reason why he noticed her absence was because in that place water was lacking for the ablution, and, as every one knows, the lapwing is the water-finder. Be that as it may (it is not stated in the Koran), he cried in displeasure: “What is the reason I do not see the lapwing? Is she absent? Verily I will chastise her with a severe punishment, or I will put her to death unless she bring me a just excuse.” Not long did he have to wait before the lapwing appeared, nor was the just excuse wanting. She had seen a country which the king had not seen, and she brought hence a remarkable piece of news. In the land of Saba (Sheba) a woman reigned who received all the honour due to a great prince. She had a magnificent throne of gold and silver; she and her people worshipped the Sun besides God. Satan, added the lapwing, becoming controversial, had turned them away from the truth lest they should worship the true God, from whom nothing is hid. And then this little bird of a story like a fairy-tale ends her discourse with one of those sharp, sudden, antithetical organ-blasts which again and again lift the mind of the reader of the Koran into the highest regions of poetry and religion: “God! there is no God but He; the Lord of the Magnificent Throne!” What wonderful art there is in the repetition of the words which had been applied just before to earthly splendour! The effect is the same as that of the words in Arabic which we see carved at every turn in the splendid halls of the Alhambra: “God only is conqueror.” What is the splendour or the power of earthly kings?
The story resumes its course. Solomon tells the lapwing that they will see, by and by, if she has told the truth or is a liar. He writes a letter (which tradition says was perfumed with musk and sealed with the king’s signet), and he commands the bird to take it to the land of Saba. Some say that the lapwing delivered the letter by throwing it into the queen’s bosom as she sat surrounded by her army; others that she brought it to her through an open window when she was sitting in her chamber: at any rate, it reached its destination, and the lapwing’s character was completely rehabilitated. With regard to Queen Balkis, the Bible, the Koran, and the Emperor Menelek may be consulted.
One of the beasts most esteemed by Moslems, one of those who, with Balaam’s ass, Jonah’s whale, Abraham’s ram, Solomon’s ant, and several other favourite animals, are known to have been admitted into the highest heaven, is the dog in the Moslem version of the “Seven Sleepers of Ephesus,” the legend of the seven young men who hid in a cave and slept safely through a long period of persecution. The dog has a Divine command to say to the young men, “I love those who are dear to God, and I will guard you.” He lay stretched across the mouth of the cave during the whole time that the persecution lasted. Moslems say of a very avaricious man, “He would not give a bone to the dog of the Seven Sleepers.” The dog’s name was Katmîr (though some said it was Al Rakîm), and people wrote it as a talisman on important letters sent to a distance or oversea, to make sure of their arriving safely: it was like registration without the fee. He appears to have slept, as did his masters, while he guarded the entrance to the cave: the protection which he afforded must be attributed to his supernatural gifts as a devil-scarer rather than to the watch he kept. Dogs were believed to see “things invisible to us”—i.e., demons. If a dog barks in the night the Faithful ask God’s aid against Satan. The cock is also a devil-scarer and sees angels as well as demons: when he crows it is a sign that he has just seen one.
Sometimes genii take the form of certain animals such as cats, dogs, and serpents (animals which are not eaten). If a man would kill one of the animals in which genii often appear, he must first warn the genii to vacate its form. This means that there is a greater prejudice against taking the life of such animals than in the case of animals slaughtered for food, when it is sufficient (though necessary) to say “If it pleases God.” While non-mystical Moslems did not respect life as such, nevertheless they realised the great scientific truth that life is the supreme mystery. “The idols ye invoke besides God,” says the Koran, “can never create a single fly although they were all assembled for that purpose, and if the fly snatch anything from them” (such as offerings of honey) “they cannot recover the same from it.” Moslems are fond of the legend from the Gospel of the Infancy of how the Child Jesus, when He and other children were playing at making clay sparrows, breathed on the birds made by Him and they flew away or hopped on His hands. The parents of the other children forbade them to play any more with the Holy Child, whom they thought to be a sorcerer. That the Jews really imagined the unusual things done by Christ to be magic-working, and that this belief entered more into their wish to compass His death than is commonly supposed, a knowledge of Eastern ideas on magic inclines one to think. Moslems readily admit the truth of the miracle of the sparrows as of the other miracles of Jesus; they add, however, that life came into the clay figures “by permission of God.”
Towards the end of the world, animals will speak with human language. Before this happens will have come to pass the reign of the “Rooh Allah,” the Spirit of God, as all Moslems call Christ. It is told that He will descend near the White Tower east of Damascus and will remain on earth for forty (or for twenty-four) years, during which period malice and hatred will be laid aside and peace and plenty will rejoice the hearts of men. While Jesus reigns, lions and camels and bears and sheep will live in amity and a child will play with serpents unhurt.
A kind of perpetual local Nature Peace prevails at Mecca; no animals are allowed to be slaughtered within a certain distance of the sacred precinct. It should be noted also that pilgrims are severely prohibited from hunting; the wording of the verse in the Koran which establishes this rule seems to imply the possibility that wild animals themselves are doing the pilgrimage; hence they must be held sacred.
The law forbidding Moslems to eat the flesh of swine was copied from the Jewish ordinance, without doubt from the conviction that it was unwholesome. Those who were driven by extreme hunger to eat of it were not branded as unclean. There is a curious Indian folk-tale which gives an account of why swine-flesh was forbidden. At the beginning Allah restrained man from eating any animals but those which died a natural death. As they did not die as quickly as they wished, men began to hasten their deaths by striking them and throwing stones at them. The animals complained to Allah, who sent Gabriel to order all the men and all the animals to assemble so that He might decide the case. But the obstinate pig did not come. So Allah said: “The pigs, the lowest of animals, are disobedient; let no one eat them or touch them.” There is no record whatever of the pigs having signed a protest.
It is by no means clear when the prejudice against dogs took hold of the Moslem mind. At first their presence was even tolerated inside the Mosque, and the report that the Prophet ordered all the dogs at Medina to be killed, especially those of a dark colour, is certainly a fable. The Caliph Abu Djafar al Mausur asked a learned man this very question: why dogs were treated with scorn? The learned man was so worthy of that description that he had the courage to say he did not know. “Tradition said so.” The Caliph suggested that it might be because dogs bark at guests and at beggars. There is a modern saying that angels never go into a house where there is a dog or an image. Still, the ordinary kindness of the Turks to the pariah dogs at Constantinople, where the beggar shares his last crust with them, shows that the feeling belongs more to philology than to nature. The pariah dog is the type of the despised outcast, but when a European throws poisoned bread to him the act is not admired by the Moslem more than it deserves to be.
Several savants have thought that the dog is scorned by Moslems because he was revered by Mazdeans; that he suffered indignity at the hands of the new believers as a protest against the excess of honour he had received from the old. This theory, though ingenious, does not seem to be borne out by facts. The comparisons of the qualities of the good dervish and the dog, which is a sort of vade mecum of dervishes everywhere, was almost certainly suggested by the “Eight Characteristics” of the dog in the Avesta. It is singular that the dog gets far better treatment in the Moslem comparisons than in the Mazdean. “The dog is always hungry: so is it with the faithful; he sleeps but little by night: so is it with those plunged in divine Love; if he die, he leaves no heritage: so is it with ascetics; he forsakes not his master even if driven away: so is it with adepts; he is content with few temporal goods: so is it with the pursuers of temperance; if he is expelled from one place he seeks another: so is it with the humble; if he is chastised and dismissed and then called back he obeys: so is it with the modest; if he sees food he remains standing afar: so is it with those who are consecrated to poverty; if he go on a journey he carries no refreshment for the way: so is it with those who have renounced the world.” Some of these “Characteristics” are flung back in irony at the dervishes by those who bitterly deride them, as the friars in the ages of Faith were derided in Europe—without its making the least difference to their popularity—but the homily itself is quite serious and meant for edification. Hasan Basri, who died in 728 A.D., was the author or adapter. Its wide diffusion is due to the accuracy with which it depicts the wandering mystic, whether he be called a dervish or a Fakeer, or, in the Western translation of Fakeer, a “Poverello” of St. Francis.
A certain rich man apologised to a Dervish because his servants, without his knowledge, had often driven him away: the holy man showed, he said, great patience and humility in coming back after such ill-treatment. The dervish replied that it was no merit but only one of the “traits of the dog,” which returns however often it is driven off. The worst enemies to the dervish have ever been the Ulemas, for whom he is a kind of dangerous lunatic strongly tinged with heresy. Among his unconventional ideas was sure to penetrate, more or less, the neoplatonist or Sufic view of animals. Wherever transcendental meditations on the union of the created with the Creator begin to prevail, men’s minds take the direction of admitting a more intimate relation of all living things with God. We might be sure that the dervishes would follow this psychological law even if we could not prove it. To prove it, however, we need go no further than the great prayer, one of the noblest of human prayers, which is used by many of the Dervish orders. There we read: “Thy science is everlasting and knows even the numbers of the breaths of Thy creatures: Thou seest and hearest the movements of all Thy creatures; thou hearest even the footsteps of the ant when in the dark night she walks on black stones; even the birds of the air praise Thee in their nests; the wild beasts of the desert adore Thee; the most secret as well as the most exposed thoughts of Thy servants Thou knowest....”
In the same way, it was natural that the Dervishes should be supposed to have the power attributed to all holy (or harmless) men over the kings of the desert and forest. It could not be otherwise. Bishop Heber heard of two Indian Yogis who lived in different parts of a jungle infested by tigers in perfect safety; indeed, it was reported that one of these ascetics had a nightly visit from a tiger, who licked his hands and was fondled by him. This is a Hindu jungle story, but it would be just as credible if it were told of a Dervish. Of the credibility of the first part of it, and probably of the last also, there is not a single wandering ascetic of any sort who would entertain a doubt. Some years ago a Moslem recluse deliberately put his arm into the cage of Moti, the tiger in the Lahore Zoological Gardens. The tiger lacerated the arm, and the poor man died in the hospital after some days’ suffering, during which he showed perfect serenity. He had made a mistake; the tiger, brought up as a cub by British officers and deprived of his liberty, was not endowed with the power of discrimination possessed by a king of the wild. This, I hope, the Fakeer reflected, but it is more likely that he deemed that cruel clutch a sign of his own unworthiness and accepted death meekly, hoping not for reward but for pardon.
One would like to know more of a book which Mr. Charles M. Doughty found a certain reputed saint “poring and half weeping over,” the argument of which was “God’s creatures the beasts,” while its purpose was to show that every beast yields life-worship unto God. Even if this Damascus saint was not very saintly (as the author of “Arabia Deserta” hints), yet it is interesting to note that this subject should have appeared to a would-be new Messiah the most important he could choose for his Gospel.
A Persian poet, Azz’ Eddin Elmocadessi, advises man to learn from the birds,
“Virtues that may gild thy name;
And their faults if thou wouldst scan,
Know thy failings are the same.”
The recognition in animals of most human qualities in a distinct though it may be a limited form underlies all Eastern animal-lore and gives it a force and a reality even when it deals with extravagant fancies. There is a broad difference between the power of feeling for animals and the power of feeling with them. The same difference moulds the sentiments of man to man: nine men in ten can feel for their fellow-humans, but scarcely one man in ten can feel with them. They even know it, and they say ungrammatically, “I feel the greatest sympathy for so and so.” An instance of true mitempfindung, of insight into the very soul of a creature, exists in an Arabian poem by Lebid, who was one of the most interesting figures of the period in which the destinies of the Arab race were cast. He was the glory of the Arabs, not only on account of his faultless verse, but also because of his noble character. It is told of him that whenever an east wind blew, he provided a feast for the poor. Himself a pre-Islamic theist, he hailed the Prophet as the inspired enunciator of the creed he had held imperfectly and in private. All his poems were composed in the “Ignorance”; on being asked for a poem after his conversion at ninety years of age, he copied out a chapter of the Koran, and said, “God has given me this in exchange for poesy.” I do not think this meant that he despised the poet’s art, but that now, when he could no longer exercise it, he had what was still more precious.
The passage in question is one of several which show Lebid’s surprisingly close acquaintance with the ways and thoughts of wild animals. It is one of those elaborate similes which were the pride of Arabian poets, who often preferred to take comparisons already in use than to invent new ones. Wherever literature became a living entertainment, something of this kind happened: witness the borrowings from the Classics by the poets of the Renaissance; people liked to recognise familiar ideas in a new dress. Lebid’s similes have been turned and re-turned by other poets, but none approached the art and truth he infused into them. I am indebted to Sir Charles Lyall for the following version, which is not included in his volume of splendid translations of early Arabian poetry. The subject of the passage is the grief of a wild cow that has lost her calf:—
“Flat-nosed is she—she has lost her calf and ceases not to roam
About the marge of the sand meadows and cry
For her youngling, just weaned, white, whose limbs have been torn
By the ash-grey hunting wolves who lack not for food.
They came upon it while she knew not, and dealt her a deadly woe:
—Verily, Death, when it shoots, misses not the mark!
The night came upon her, as the dripping rain of the steady shower
Poured on and its continuous flow soaked the leafage through and through.
She took refuge in the hollow trunk of a tree with lofty branches standing apart
On the skirts of the sandhills where the fine sand sloped her way.
The steady rain poured down, and the flood reached the ridge of her back,
In a night when thick darkness hid away all the stars;
And she shone in the face of the mirk with a white, glimmering light
Like a pearl born in a sea-shell, that has dropped from its string.
Until, when the darkness was folded away and morning dawned,
She stood, her legs slipping in the muddy earth.
She wandered distracted about all the pools of So’âid
For seven nights twinned with seven whole long days,
Until she lost all hope, and her udders shrunk—
The udders that had not failed in all the days of the suckling and weaning,
Then she heard the sound of men and it filled her heart with fear,
Of men from a hidden place; and men, she knew, were her bane.
She rushed blindly along, now thinking the chase before,
And now behind her: each was a place of dread.
Until, when the archers lost hope, they let loose on her
Trained hounds with hanging ears, each with a stiff leather collar on its neck;
They beset her and she turned to meet them with her horns
Like to spears of Semhar in their sharpness and their length.
To thrust them away: for she knew well, if she drove them not off,
That the fated day of her death among the fates of beasts had come;
And among them, Kesâb was thrust through and slain and rolled in blood lay there,
And Sukhâm was left in the place where he made his onset.”
There the description breaks off. In spite of the haunting cry of the cow of Lucretius, in spite of the immortal tears of Shakespeare’s “poor sequester’d stag”—no vision of a desperate animal in all literature seems to me so charged with every element of pathos and dramatic intensity as this cow of Lebid. How fine is the altogether unforeseen close, which leaves us wondering, breathless: Will she escape? Will no revengeful arrow reach her? Will the archers do as Om Piet did to the wildebeest?—
“A wildebeest cow and calf were pursued by Om Piet with three hunting-dogs. The Boer hunter tells the tale: ‘The old cow laid the first dog low; the calf is now tired. The second dog comes up to seize it; the cow strikes him down. Now the third dog tries to bite the little one, who can run no more, but the cow treats him so that there’s nothing to be done but to shoot him. Then Om Piet stands face to face with the wildebeest, who snorts but does not fly. Now though I come to shoot a wildebeest yet can I not kill a beast that has so bravely fought and will not run away; so Om Piet takes off his hat, and says, “Good-day to you, old wildebeest. You are a good and strong old wildebeest.” And we dine off springbuck that night at the farm.’”[[7]]
[7]. “A Breath from the Veldt,” by Guille Millais, 2nd edition, 1899.
I ought to explain that, like the “cow” of Om Piet, Lebid’s “cow” is an antelope—the Antilope defassa—of which a good specimen may be seen in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington. The old Boer’s hunting yarn brings an unexpected confirmation of the Arabian poet’s testimony to its courage and maternal love.
Since the chase began, down to the blind brutality of the battue (which wiped it out) chivalry has been a trait of the genuine sportsman. In the golden legend of hunter’s generosity should be inscribed for ever the tale—the true tale as I believe it to be—of the Moslem prince Sebectighin, who rose from slave-birth to the greatest of Persian thrones—and more honour to him, notwithstanding the slur which Firdusi, stung by Mahmoud’s want of appreciation, cast, in a foolish moment, on his father’s origin. Sebectighin was a horseman in the service of the Sultan and as a preparation for greater things he found a vent for his pent-up energies in the chase. One day he remarked a deer with her little fawn peacefully grazing in a glade of the forest. He galloped to the spot, and in less than a second he had seized the fawn, which, after binding its legs, he placed across his saddle-bows. Thus he started to go home, but looking back, he saw the mother following, with every mark of grief. Sebectighin’s heart was touched; he loosened the fawn and restored it to its dam. And in the night he had a vision in his dreams of One who said to him, “The kindness and compassion which thou hast this day shown to a distressed animal has been approved of in the presence of God; therefore in the records of Providence the kingdom of Ghusni is marked as a reward against thy name. Let not greatness destroy thy virtue, but continue thy benevolence to man.”
Among the Afghan ballads collected by James Darmesteter, of which it has been aptly said that they give an admirable idea of Homer in a state of becoming, there is one composed in a gentler mood than the songs of war and carnage which has a gazelle for heroine and the Prophet as Deus ex machina. As there is no translation of it into English I have attempted the following version:—
“The Son of Abu Jail he set a snare for a gazelle,
Without a thought along she sped, and in the snare she fell.
‘O woe is me!’ she weeping cried, ‘that I to look forgot!
Fain would I live for my dear babes, but hope, alas! is not.’
Then to the Merciful she made this short and fervent prayer:
‘I left two little fawns at home; Lord, keep them in Thy care!’
The son of Abu Jail he came, in haste and glee he ran,
‘Ah, now I’ve got you in my net, and who to save you can?’
He grasped her by her tender throat, his fearsome sword did draw,
When lo! the Lord held back his hand! The Prophet’s self he saw!
‘The world was saved for love of thee, save for thy pity’s sake!’
So breathed the trembling doe, and then the holy Prophet spake:
‘Abu, my friend, this doe let go, and hark to my appeal;
She has two tender fawns at home who pangs of hunger feel,
‘Let her go back one hour to them, no longer will she stay,
And when she comes, O heartless man, then mayest thou have thy way!
But if, by chance, she should not come, then by my faith will I
Be unto thee a bonded slave until the day I die.’
Then Abu the gazelle let go; to her dear young she went,
‘Quick, children, take my breast,’ she said, ‘my life is almost spent;
‘The Master of the Universe for me a pledge I gave,
But I must swift return and then no man my life can save.’
Then said the little ones to her, ‘Mother, we dare not eat;
Go swiftly back, redeem the pledge, fast as can fly thy feet.’
One hour had scarce run fully out when, panting, she was there;
Now, Abu, son of Abu, thou mayest take her life or spare!
Said Abu, ‘In the Prophet’s name, depart, I set you free ...
But thou, our Helper, at God’s throne, do thou remember me!’
So have I told, as long ago my father used to tell,
How Pagan Abu Moslem turned and saved his soul from hell.”
This brief sketch will suffice to show that if the Moslem is not humane to animals it is his own fault, as I think it is his own fault if he is not humane to man. Teaching humanity to animals must always imply the teaching of humanity to men. This was perfectly understood well by all these Oriental tellers of beast-stories: they would all have endorsed the saying of one of my Lombard peasant-women (dear, good soul!), “Chi non è buono per le bestie, non è buono per i Cristiani”; Cristiano meaning, in Italian popular speech, a human being. Under the most varied forms, in fiction which while the world lasts, can never lose its freshness, the law of kindness is brought home. Perhaps the most beautiful of all humane legends is one preserved in a poem by Abu Mohammed ben Yusuf, Sheikh Nizan-eddin, known to Europeans as Nizami. This Persian poet, who died sixty-three years before Dante was born, may have taken the legend from some collection of Christ-lore, some uncanonical book impossible now to trace; it is unlikely that he invented it. As Jesus walks with His disciples through the market-place at evening, He comes upon a crowd which is giving vent to every expression of abhorrence at the sight of a poor dead dog lying in the gutter. When they have all had their say, and have pointed in disgust to his blear eyes, foul ears, bare ribs, torn hide, “which will not even yield a decent shoe-string,” Jesus says, “How beautifully white his teeth are!” No story of the Saviour outside the Gospels is so worthy to have been in them.
XII
THE FRIEND OF THE CREATURE
IN Hindu mythology Gunádhya attracts a whole forestful of beasts by reciting his poems to them. The power of Apollo and of Orpheus in taming beasts depended on a far less surprising modus operandi; like the greater part of myths, this one was not spun from the thin air of imagination. Music has a real influence on animals; in spite of theories to the contrary, it is probable that the sweet flute-playing of the snake-charmer—his “sweet charming” in Biblical phrase—is no mere piece of theatrical business, but a veritable aid in obtaining the desired results. I myself could once attract fieldmice by playing on the violin, and only lately, on the road near our house at Salò, I noticed that a goat manifested signs of wishing to stop before a grind-organ; its master pulled the string by which it was led, but it tugged at it so persistently that, at last, he stopped, and the goat, turning round its head, listened with evident attention. Independently of the pleasure music may give to animals, it excites their curiosity, a faculty which is extremely alive in them, as may be seen by the way in which small birds are attracted by the pretty antics of the little Italian owl; they cannot resist going near to have a better view, and so they rush to their doom upon the limed sticks.
Legends have an inner and an outer meaning; the allegory of Apollo, Lord of Harmony, would have been incomplete had it lacked the beautiful incident of a Nature Peace—partial indeed, but still a fairer triumph to the god than his Olympian honours. For nine years he watched the sheep of Admetus, as Euripides described:—
“Pythean Apollo, master of the lyre,
Who deigned to be a herdsman and among
Thy flocks on hills his hymns celestial sung;
And his delightful melodies to hear
Would spotted lynx and lions fierce draw near;
They came from Othry’s immemorial shade,
By charm of music tame and harmless made;
And the swift, dappled fawns would there resort,
From the tall pine-woods and about him sport.”
When Apollo gave Orpheus his lyre, he gave him his gift “to soothe the savage breast.” In the splendid Pompeian fresco showing a Nature Peace, the bay-crowned, central figure is said to be Orpheus, though its god-like proportions suggest the divinity himself. At any rate, nothing can be finer as the conception of an inspired musician: the whole body sings, not only the mouth. A lion and a tiger sit on either side; below, a stag and a wild boar listen attentively, and a little hare capers near the stream. In the upper section there are other wild beasts sporting round an elephant, while oxen play with a tiger; an anticipation of the ox and tiger in Rubens’ “Garden of Eden.”
The power of Orpheus to subdue wild beasts was the reason why the early Christians took him as a type of Christ. Of all the prophecies which were believed to refer to the Messiah none so captivated the popular mind as those which could be interpreted as referring to His recognition by animals. The four Gospels which became the canon of the Church threw no light on the subject, but the gap was filled up by the uncanonical books; one might think that they were written principally for the purpose of dwelling on this theme, so frequently do they return to it. In the first place, they bring upon the scene those dear objects of our childhood’s affection, the ass and the ox of the stable of Bethlehem. Surely many of us cherish the impression that ass and ox rest on most orthodox testimony: an idea which is certainly general in Catholic countries, though, the other day, I heard of a French priest who was heartless enough to declare that they were purely imaginary. “Alas,” as Voltaire said, “people run after truth!” As a matter of fact, it appears evident that the ass and the ox were introduced to fulfil the prophecy of Isaiah: “The ox knoweth his owner and the ass his master’s manger, but Israel knoweth Me not.” But there arose what was thought a difficulty: the apocryphal Gospels, in harmony with the earliest traditions, place the birth of Christ, not in a stable, but in the grotto which is still shown to travellers. To reconcile this with the legend of the ass and ox and also with the narrative of St. Luke, it was supposed that the Holy Family moved from the grotto to a stable a few days after the Child was born. This is a curious case of finding a difficulty where there was none, for it is very likely that the caves near the great Khan of Bethlehem were used as stables. In every primitive country shepherds shelter themselves and their flocks in holes in rocks; I remember the “uncanny” effect of a light flickering in the depths of a Phœnician tomb near Cagliari; it was almost disappointing to hear that it was only a shepherd’s fire.
Thomas, “the Israelite philosopher,” as he called himself, author of the Pseudo-Thomas which is said to date from the second century, appears to have been a Jewish convert belonging to one of the innumerable “heretical” sects of the earliest times. It may be guessed, therefore, that the Pseudo-Thomas was first written in Syriac, though the text we possess is in Greek. It is considered the model on which all the other Gospels of the Infancy were founded, but the Arabic variant contains so much divergent matter as to make it probable that the writer drew on some other early source which has not been preserved. Mohammed was acquainted with this Arabian Gospel, and Mohammedans did not cease to venerate the sycamore-tree at Matarea under which the Arabian evangelist states that the Virgin and Child rested, till it died about a year ago. The Pseudo-Thomas contains some vindictive stories, which were modified or omitted in the other versions: probably they are all to be traced to Elisha and his she-bears: a theory which I offer to those who cannot imagine how they arose. A curious feature in these writings is the scarcity of anything actually original; the most original story to be found in them is that of the clay sparrows, which captivated the East and penetrated into the folk-lore even of remote Iceland. Notwithstanding the fulminations of Councils, the apocryphal Gospels were never suppressed; they enjoyed an enormous popularity during the Middle Ages, and many details derived solely from these condemned books crept into the Legenda Aurea and other strictly orthodox works.
The “Little Child” of Isaiah’s prophecy was the cause of troops of wild beasts being convoked to attend the Infant Christ. Lions acted as guides for the flight into Egypt, and it is mentioned that not only did they respect the Holy Family, but also the asses and oxen which carried their baggage. Besides, the lions, leopards, and other creatures “wagged their tails with great reverence” (though all these animals are not of the dog species, but of the cat, in which wagging the tail signifies the reverse of content).
This is the subject of an old English ballad:—
“And when they came to Egypt’s land,
Amongst those fierce wild beasts,
Mary, she being weary,
Must needs sit down to rest.
‘Come, sit thee down,’ said Jesus,
‘Come, sit thee down by Me,
And thou shall see how these wild beasts
Do come and worship Me.’”
First to come was the “lovely lion,” king of all wild beasts, and for our instruction the moral is added: “We’ll choose our virtuous princes of birth and high degree.” Sad rhymes they are, nor, it will be said, is the sense much better; yet, hundreds of years ago in English villages, where, perhaps, only one man knew how to read, this doggerel served the end of the highest poetry: it transported the mind into an ideal region; it threw into the English landscape deserts, lions, a Heavenly Child; it stirred the heart with the romance of the unknown; it whispered to the soul—
“The Now is an atom of sand,
And the Near is a perishing clod;
But Afar is a Faëry Land,
And Beyond is the bosom of God.”
The pseudo-gospel of Matthew relates an incident which refers to a later period in the Holy Childhood. According to this narrative, when Jesus was eight years old He went into the den of a lioness which frightened travellers on the road by the Jordan. The little cubs played round His feet, while the older lions bowed their heads and fawned on Him. The Jews, who saw it from a distance, said that Jesus or His parents must have committed mortal sin for Him to go into the lion’s den. But coming forth, He told them that these lions were better behaved than they; and then He led the wild beasts across the Jordan and commanded them to go their way, hurting no one, neither should any one hurt them till they had returned to their own country. So they bade Him farewell with gentle roars and gestures of respect.
These stories are innocent, and they are even pretty, for all stories of great, strong animals and little children are pretty. But they fail to reveal the slightest apprehension of the deeper significance of a peace between all creatures. Turn from them to the wonderful lines of William Blake:—
“And there the lion’s ruddy eyes
Shall flow with tears of gold,
And pitying the tender cries
And walking round the fold
Saying: Wrath by His meekness,
And by His health sickness,
Are driven away
From our mortal day.
And now beside thee, bleating lamb,
I can lie down and sleep,
Or think on Him who bore thy name,
Graze after thee, and weep;
For, washed in life’s river,
My bright mane for ever
Shall shine like the gold
As I guard o’er the fold.”
No one but Blake would have written this, and few things that he wrote are so characteristic of his genius. The eye of the painter seizes what the mind of the mystic conceives, and the poet surcharges with emotion words which, like the Vedic hymns, infuse thought rather than express it.
A single passage in the New Testament connects Christ with wild animals; in St. Mark’s Gospel we are told that after His baptism in the Jordan Jesus was driven by the Spirit into the wilderness, where “He was with the wild beasts, and the angels ministered unto Him.” In the East the idea of the anchorite who leaves the haunts of men for the haunts of beasts was already fabulously old. In the Western world of the Roman Empire it was a new idea, and perhaps on that account, while it excited the horror of those who were faithful to the former order of things, it awoke an extraordinary enthusiasm among the more ardent votaries of the new faith. It led to the discovery of the inebriation of solitude, the powerful stimulus of a life with wild nature. Many tired brain-workers have recourse to mountain ascents as a restorative, but these can rarely be performed alone, and high mountains with their immense horizons tend to overwhelm rather than to collect the mind. But to wander alone in a forest, day after day, without particular aim, drinking in the pungent odours of growing things, fording the ice-cold streams, meeting no one but a bird or a hare—this will leave a memory as of another existence in some enchanted sphere. We have tasted an ecstasy that cities cannot give. We have tasted it, and we have come back into the crowded places, and it may be well for us that we have come back, for not to all is it given to walk in safety alone with their souls.
Photo: Anderson.
ST. JEROME EXTRACTING A THORN FROM THE PAW OF A LION.
(By Hubert van Eyck.)
Naples Museum.
Of one of the earliest Christian anchorites in Egypt it is related that for fifty years he spoke to no one; he roamed in a state of nature, flying from the monks who attempted to approach him. At last he consented to answer some questions put by a recluse whose extreme piety caused him to be better received than the others. To the question of why he avoided mankind, he replied that those who dwelt with men could not be visited by angels. After saying this, he vanished again into the desert. I have observed that the idea of renouncing the world was not a Western idea, yet, at the point where it touches madness, it had already penetrated into the West—we know where to find its tragic record:—
“Ego vitam agam sub altis Phrygiae columinibus,
Ubi cerva silvicultrix, ubi aper nemorivagus?”
The point of madness would have been reached more often but for the charity of the stag and the wild boar and the lion and the buffalo, who felt a sort of compassion for the harmless, weak human creatures that came among them, and who were ready to give that response which is the sustaining ichor of life.
The same causes produce the same effects—man may offer surprises but never men. Wherever there are solitaries there are friendships between the recluse and the wild beast. All sorts of stories of lions and other animals that were on friendly terms with the monks of the desert have come down to us in the legends of the Saints. The well-known legend of how St. Jerome relieved a lion of a thorn which was giving him great pain, and how the lion became tame, was really told of another saint, but Jerome, if he did not figure in a lion story, is the authority for one: in his life of Paul the Hermit he relates that when that holy man died, two lions came out of the desert to dig his grave; they uttered a loud wail over his body and knelt down to crave a blessing from his surviving companion—none other than the great St. Anthony. He also says that Paul had subsisted for many years on food brought to him by birds, and when he had a visitor the birds brought double rations.
As soon as the hermit appears in Europe his four-footed friends appear with him. For instance, there was the holy Karileff who tamed a buffalo. Karileff was a man of noble lineage who took up his abode with two companions in a clearing in the woods on the Marne, where he was soon surrounded by all sorts of wild things. Amongst these was a buffalo, one of the most intractable of beasts in its wild state, but this buffalo became perfectly tame, and it was a charming sight to see the aged saint stroking it softly between its horns. Now it happened that the king, who was Childebert, son of Clovis, came to know that there was a buffalo in the neighbourhood, and forthwith he ordered a grand hunt. The buffalo, seeing itself lost, fled to the hut of its holy protector, and when the huntsmen approached they found the monk standing in front of the animal. The king was furious, and swore that Karileff and his brethren should leave the place for ever; then he turned to go, but his horse would not move one step. This filled him with what was more likely panic fear than compunction; he lost no time in asking the saint for his blessing, and he presented him with the whole domain, in which an abbey was built and ultimately a town, the present Saint-Calais. On another occasion the same Childebert was hunting a hare, which took refuge under the habit of St. Marculphe; the king’s huntsman rudely expostulated, and the monk surrendered the hare, but, lo and behold! the dogs would not continue the pursuit and the huntsman fell off his horse!
A vein of more subtle sensibility runs through the story of St. Columba, who, not long before his death, ordered a stork to be picked up and tended when it dropped exhausted on the Western shore of Iona. After three days, he said, the stork would depart, “for she comes from the land where I was born and thither would she return.” In fact, on the third day, the stork, rested and refreshed, spread out its wings and sailed away straight towards the saint’s beloved Ireland. When Columba was really dying the old white horse of the convent came and laid its head on his shoulder with an air of such profound melancholy that it seemed nigh to weeping. A brother wished to drive it away, but the saint said No; God had revealed to the horse what was hidden from man, and it was come to bid him goodbye.
Evidently there is only a slight element of the marvellous in these legends and none at all in others, such as the story of Walaric, who fed little birds and told the monks not to approach or frighten his “little friends” while they picked up the crumbs. To the same order belong several well-authenticated stories of the Venerable Joseph of Anchieta, apostle of Brazil. He protected the parrots that alighted on a ship by which he was travelling from the merciless sailors who would have caught and killed them. Whilst descending a river he would have saved a monkey which some fishermen shot at with their arrows, but he was not in time; the other monkeys gathered round their slain comrade with signs of mourning: “Come near,” said the holy man, “and weep in peace for that one of you who is no more.” Presently, fearing not to be able longer to restrain the cruelty of the men, he bade them depart with God’s blessing.
Here is no marvel; only sympathy which is sometimes the greatest of marvels. It needed the mind of a Shakespeare to probe just this secret recess of feeling for animals:—
“—— What dost thou strike at, Marcus, with thy knife?
—— At that I have killed, my Lord, a fly.
—— Out on thee, murderer, thou killest my heart;
Mine eyes are cloyed with view of tyranny;
A deed of death done on the innocent,
Becomes not Titus’ brother; get thee gone,
I see thou art not for my company.
—— Alas! my Lord, I have but killed a fly.
—— But how if that fly had a father and mother?
How would he hang his slender gilded wings
And buz lamented doings in the air?
Poor harmless fly!
That with his pretty buzzing melody
Came here to make us merry, and thou hast killed him.”
If St. Bernard saw a hare pursued by dogs or birds threatened by a hawk he could not resist making the sign of the cross, and his benediction always brought safety. It is to this saint that we owe the exquisite saying, “If mercy were a sin I think I could not keep myself from committing it.”
Photo: Hanfslängl.
ST. EUSTACE AND THE STAG.
(By Vittore Pisano.)
National Gallery.
Apart from the rest, stands one saint who brought the wild to the neighbourhood of a bustling, trafficking little Italian town of the thirteenth century and peopled it with creatures which, whether of fancy or of fact, will live for ever. How St. Francis tamed the “wolf of Agobio” is the most famous if not altogether the most credible of the animal stories related of him. That wolf was a quadruped without morals; not only had he eaten kids but also men. All attempts to kill him failed, and the townsfolk were afraid of venturing outside the walls even in broad daylight. One day St. Francis, against the advice of all, went out to have a serious talk with the wolf. He soon found him and, “Brother Wolf,” he said, “you have eaten not only animals but men made in the image of God, and certainly you deserve the gallows; nevertheless, I wish to make peace between you and these people, brother Wolf, so that you may offend them no more, and neither they nor their dogs shall attack you.” The wolf seemed to agree, but the saint wished to have a distinct proof of his solemn engagement to fulfil his part in the peace, whereupon the wolf stood up on his hind legs and laid his paw on the saint’s hand. Francis then promised that the wolf should be properly fed for the rest of his days, “for well I know,” he said kindly, “that all your evil deeds were caused by hunger”—upon which text several sermons might be preached, for truly many a sinner may be reformed by a good dinner and by nothing else. The contract was kept on both sides, and the wolf lived happily for some years—“notricato cortesemente dalla gente”—at the end of which he died of old age, sincerely mourned by all the inhabitants.
If any one decline to believe in the wolf of Gubbio, why, he must be left to his invincible ignorance. But there are other tales in the Fioretti and in the Legenda Aurea which are nowise hard to believe. What more likely than that Francis, on meeting a youth who had wood-doves to sell, looked at the birds “con l’occhio pietoso,” and begged the youth not to give them into the cruel hands that would kill them? The young man, “inspired by God,” gave the doves to the saint, who held them against his breast, saying, “Oh, my sisters, innocent doves, why did you let yourselves be caught? Now will I save you from death and make nests for you, so that you may increase and multiply according to the commandment of our Creator.” Schopenhauer mentions, with emphatic approval, the Indian merchant at the fair of Astrachan who, when he has a turn of good luck, goes to the market-place and buys birds, which he sets at liberty. The holy Francis not only set his doves free, but thought about their future, a refinement of benevolence which might “almost have persuaded” the humane though crusty old philosopher to put on the Franciscan habit.
(At this point I chance to see from my window a kitten in the act of annoying a rather large snake. It is a coiled-up snake; probably an Itongo. It requires a good five minutes to induce the kitten to abandon its quarry and to convey the snake to a safe place under the myrtles. This being done, I resume my pen.)
I have remarked that in some respects the Saint of Assisi stands apart from the other saints who took notice of animals. It was a common thing, for instance, for saints to preach to creatures, but there is an individual note in the sermon of Francis to the birds which is not found elsewhere. The reason why St. Anthony preached to the fishes at Rimini was that the “heretics” would not listen to him, and St. Martin addressed the water-fowl who were diving after fish in the Loire because, having compared them to the devil, seeking whom he may devour, he thought it necessary to order them to depart from those waters—which they immediately did, no doubt frightened to death by the apparition of a gesticulating saint and the wild-looking multitude. The motive of Francis was neither pique at not being listened to nor the temptation to show miraculous skill as a bird-scarer; he was moved solely by an effusion of tender sentiment. Birds in great quantities had alighted in a neighbouring field: a beautiful sight which every dweller in the country must have sometimes seen and asked himself, was it a parliament, a garden party, a halt in a journey? “Wait a little for me here upon the road,” said the saint to his companions; “I am going to preach to my sisters the birds.” And so, “having greeted them as creatures endowed with reason,” he went on to say: “Birds, my sisters, you ought to give great praise to your Creator, who dressed you with feathers, who gave you wings to fly with, who granted you all the domains of the air, whose solicitude watches over you.” The birds stretched out their necks, fluttered their wings, opened their beaks, and looked at the preacher with attention. When he had done, he passed in the midst of them and touched them with his habit, and not one of them stirred till he gave them leave to fly away.
The saint lifted worms out of the path lest they should be crushed, and during the winter frosts, for fear that the bees should die in the hive, he brought honey to them and the best wines that he could find. Near his cell at Portionuculo there was a fig-tree, and on the fig-tree lived a cicada. One day the Servant of God stretched out his hand and said, “Come to me, my sister Cicada”; and at once the insect flew upon his hand. And he said to it, “Sing, my sister Cicada, and praise thy Lord.” And having received his permission she sang her song. The biographies that were written without the inquisition into facts which we demand, gave a living idea of the man, not a photograph of his skeleton. What mattered if romance were mixed with truth when the total was true? We know St. Francis of Assisi as if he had been our next-door neighbour. It would have needed unbounded genius to invent such a character, and there was nothing to be gained by inventing it. The legends which represent him as one who consistently treated animals as creatures endowed with reason are in discord with orthodox teaching; they skirt dangerously near to heresy. Giordano Bruno was accused of having said that men and animals had the same origin; to hold such an opinion qualified you for the stake. But the Church that canonised Buddha under the name of St. Josephat has had accesses of toleration which must have made angels rejoice.
Some think that Francis was at one time a troubadour, and troubadours had many links with those Manichæan heretics whom Catholics charged with believing in the transmigration of souls. This may interest the curious, but the doctrine of metempsychosis has little to do with the vocation of the Asiatic recluse as a beast-tamer, and St. Francis of Assisi was true brother to that recluse. He was the Fakeer or Dervish of the West. When the inherent mysticism in man’s nature brought the Dervishes into existence soon after Mohammed’s death, in spite of the Prophet’s well-known dislike for religious orders, they justified themselves by quoting the text from the Koran, “Poverty is my pride.” It would serve the Franciscan equally well. The begging friar was an anachronism in the religion of Islam as he is an anachronism in modern society, but what did that matter to him? He thought and he thinks that he will outlive both.
The Abdâl or pre-eminently holy Dervish who lived in the desert with friendly beasts over whom he exercised an extraordinary power, became the centre of a legend, almost of a cult, like his Christian counterpart. There were several Abdâls of high repute during the reigns of the early Ottoman Sultans. Perhaps there was more confidence in their sanctity than in their sanity, for while the Catholic historian finds it inconvenient to admit the hypothesis of madness as accounting for even the strangest conduct of the saints of the desert or their mediæval descendants, a devout Oriental sees no irreverence in recognising the possible affinity between sainthood and mental alienation. In India the holy recluse who tames wild beasts is as much alive to-day as in any former time. Whatever is very old is still a part of the everyday life of the Indian people. Accordingly the native newspapers frequently report that some prince was attacked by a savage beast while out hunting, when, at the nick of time, a venerable saint appeared at whose first word the beast politely relaxed his hold. Those who know India best by no means think that all such stories are invented. Why should they be? Cardinal Massaia (who wore, by the by, the habit of Francis) stated that the lions he met in the desert had very good manners. A few years ago an old lady met a large, well-grown lioness in the streets of Chatres; mistaking it for a large dog, she patted it on the head and it followed her for some time until it was observed by others, when the whole town was seized with panic and barred doors and windows. Even with the provocation of such mistrust the lioness behaved well, and allowed itself to be reconducted to the menagerie from which it had escaped.
Those who try to divest themselves of human nature rarely succeed, and the reason nearest to the surface why, over all the world, the lonely recluse made friends with animals was doubtless his loneliness. On their side, animals have only to be persuaded that men are harmless for them to meet their advances half-way. If this is not always true of wild beasts, it is because (as St. Francis apprehended) unfortunately they are sometimes hungry; but man is not the favourite prey of any wild beast who is in his right mind. Prisoners who tamed mice or sparrows followed the same impulse as saints who tamed lions or buffaloes. How many a prisoner who returned to the fellowship of men must have regretted his mouse or his sparrow! Animals can be such good company. Still, it follows that if their society was sought as a substitute, they were, in a certain sense, vicarious objects of affection. We forget that even in inter-human affections much is vicarious. The sister of charity gives mankind the love which she would have given to her children. The ascetic who will never hear the pattering feet of his boy upon the stairs loves the gazelle, the bird fallen from its nest, the lion cub whose mother has been slain by the hunter. And love, far more than charity (in the modern sense), blesses him that gives as well as him that takes.
But human phenomena are complex, and this explanation of the sympathy between saint and beast does not cover the whole ground. Who can doubt that these men, whose faculties were concentrated on drawing nearer to the Eternal, vaguely surmised that wild living creatures had unperceived channels of communication with spirit, hidden rapports with the Fountain of Life which man has lost or has never possessed? Who can doubt that in the vast cathedral of Nature they were awed by “the mystery which is in the face of brutes”?
Beside the need to love and the need to wonder, some of them knew the need to pity. Here the ground widens, for the heart that feels the pang of the meanest thing that lives does not beat only in the hermit’s cell or under the sackcloth of a saint.
XIII
VERSIPELLES
THE snake and the tiger are grim realities of Indian life. They mean a great deal—they mean India with its horror and its splendour; above all, with its primary attention given to things which for most Europeans are nil or are kept for Sunday. And Sunday, the day most calm, most bright, has only a little portion of them, only the light not the darkness of the Unknown.
To the despair of the English official, the Hindu, like his forefathers in remotest antiquity, respects the life of tiger and snake. In doing so he is not governed simply by the feeling that makes him look on serenely whilst all sorts of winged and fleet-footed creatures eat up his growing crops—another tolerance which exasperates the Western beholder: in that instance it is, in the main, the rule of live and let live which dictates his forbearance, the persuasion that it is wrong to monopolise the increase of the earth to the uttermost farthing’s-worth. His sentiment towards tiger and snake is of a more profound nature.
The Hindu will not kill a cobra if he can help it, and if one is killed he tries to expiate the offence by honouring it with proper funeral rites. The tiger, like the snake, gives birth to those ancient twins, fear and admiration. The perception of the beautiful is one of the oldest as it is one of the most mysterious of psychological phenomena in man and beast. Why should the sheen of the peacock’s tail attract the peahen? Why should the bower-bird and the lyre-bird construct a lovely pleasance where they may dance? Man perceived the beautiful in fire and wind, in the swift air, the circle of stars, the violent water, the lights of heaven: “being delighted with the beauty of these things, he took them to be gods”—as was said by the writer of the Wisdom of Solomon about two hundred years before Christ. He also perceived the beautiful in the lithe movements of the snake and in the tiger’s symmetry.
As to the sense of fear, how is it that this fear is unaccompanied by repulsion? To this question the more general answer would seem to be that Nature, if regarded as divine, cannot repel. But the snake and tiger are in some special way divine, so that they become still further removed from the range of human criticism. They are manifestations of divinity—a safer description of even the lowest forms of zoolatry than the commoner one which asserts that they are “gods.” Deity, if omnipresent, “must be able to occupy the same space as another body at the same time,” which was said in a different connexion, but it is the true base of all beliefs involving the union of spirit and matter from the lowest to the highest.
The animal which is a divine agent, ought to behave like one. If it causes destruction, such destruction should have the fortuitous appearance of havoc wrought by natural causes. The snake or tiger should not wound with malice prepense, but only in a fine, casual way. This is just what, as a rule, they are observed to do. I have seen many snakes, but I never saw one run after a man, though I have seen men run after snakes. Now and then the Italian peasant is bitten by vipers because he walks in the long grass with naked feet. He treads on the snake or pushes against it, and it bites him. So it is with the Indian peasant. It is much the same in the case of the normal tiger; unless he is disturbed or wounded, he most rarely attacks. But there are abnormal tigers, abnormal beasts of every sort—there is the criminal class of beast. What of him? It might be supposed that primitive man would take such a beast to be an angry or vindictive spirit. By no means. He detects in him a fellow-human. The Indian forestalled Lombroso; the man-eating tiger is a degenerate, really not responsible for his actions, and still less is the god behind him responsible for them.
Little need be said of the natural history of the man-eating tiger; yet a few words may not be out of place. To his abnormality every one who has studied wild beasts bears witness. All agree that the loss of life from tigers is almost exclusively traceable to individuals of tiger-kind which prey chiefly or only on man. The seven or eight hundred persons killed annually by tigers in British India are victims of comparatively few animals. Not many years ago a single man-eating tigress was certified to have killed forty-eight persons. While the ordinary tiger has to be sought out with difficulty for the sport of those who wish to hunt him, the man-eater night after night waylays the rural postman or comes boldly into the villages in search of his unnatural food. During great scarcity caused by the destruction or disappearance of small game in the forests, the carnivora are forced out of their habits as the wolves in the Vosges are induced to come down to the plains in periods of intense cold. Such special causes do not affect the question of the man-eater, which eats man’s flesh from choice, not from necessity. Why he does so Europeans have tried to explain in various ways. One is, that the unfamiliar taste of human flesh creates an irresistible craving. In South America they say that a jaguar after tasting man’s flesh once becomes an incorrigible man-eater for ever after. Others think man-eating is a form of madness, a disease, and they point to the fact that the man-eater is always in bad condition; his skin is useless. But it is not sure if this be cause or effect, since man’s flesh is said to be unwholesome. A third and plausible theory would attribute man-eating to the easy capture of the prey: a tiger that has caught one man will hunt no other fleeter game. Especially in old age, a creature that has neither horns nor tusks nor yet swift feet must appear an attractive prey. This coincides with an observation made by Apollonius of Tyana: he says that lions caught and ate monkeys for medicine when they were sick, but that when they were old and unable to hunt the stag and the wild boar, they caught them for food. Aristotle said that lions were more disposed to enter towns and attack man when they grew old, as old age made their teeth defective, which was a hindrance to them in hunting.
Another possible clue may be deduced from a belief which exists in Abyssinia about the man-eating lion. In that country the people dislike to have Europeans hunt the lion, not only because they revere him as the king of beasts (though this is one reason, and it shows how natural to man is the friendly feeling towards beasts, and how it flourishes along with any sort of religion, provided the religion has been left Oriental and not Westernised), but also because they are convinced that a lion whose mate has been killed becomes ferocious and thirsts for human blood. This belief is founded on accurate observation of the capacity of wild beasts for affection. The love of the lion for his mate is no popular error. That noble hunter, Major Leveson, told a pathetic story of how he witnessed in South Africa a fight between two lions, while the lioness, palm and prize, stood looking on. A bullet laid her low, but the combatants were so hotly engaged that neither of them perceived what had happened. Then another bullet killed one of them: the survivor, after the first moment of surprise as to why his foe surrendered, turned round and for the first time saw the hunters who were quite near. He seemed about to spring on them, when he caught sight of the dead lioness: “With a peculiar whine of recognition, utterly regardless of our presence, he strode towards her, licked her face and neck with his great rough tongue and patted her gently with his huge paw, as if to awaken her. Finding that she did not respond to his caresses, he sat upon his haunches like a dog and howled most piteously....” Finally the mourning lion fled at the cries of the Kaffirs and the yelping of the dogs close at hand. He had understood the great, intolerable fact of death. Would any one blame him if he became an avenger of blood?
Supposing that this line of defence could be transferred to the tiger, instead of being branded as lazy, decrepit, mad, or bad, he might hope to appear before the public with a largely rehabilitated character.
The natives of the jungle resort to none of these hypotheses to account for the man-eater: a different bank of ideas can be drawn on by them to help them out of puzzling problems. The free force of imagination is far preferable, if admitted, as a solver of difficulties, to all our patient and plodding researches. The jungle natives tell many stories of the man-eater, of which the following is a typical example. It was told to a British officer, from whom I had it.
Once upon a time there was a man who had the power of changing himself into a tiger whenever he liked. But for him to change back into the shape of a man it was necessary that some human being should pronounce a certain formula. He had a friend who knew the formula, and to him he went when he wished to resume human shape. But the friend died.
The man was obliged, therefore, to find some one else to pronounce the formula. At last he decided to confide the secret to his wife; so, one day, he said to her that he should be absent for a short time and that when he came back it would be in the form of a tiger; he charged her to pronounce the proper formula when she should see him appear in tiger-shape, and he assured her that he would then, forthwith, become a man again.
In a few days, after he had amused himself by catching a few antelopes, he trotted up to his wife, hoping all would be well. But the woman, in spite of all that he had told her, was so dreadfully frightened when she saw a large tiger running towards her, that she began to scream. The tiger jumped about and tried to make her understand by dumb-show what she was to do, but the more he jumped the more she screamed, and at last he thought in his mind, “This is the most stupid woman I ever knew,” and he was so angry that he killed her. Directly afterwards he recollected that no other human being knew the right formula—hence he must remain for ever a tiger. This so affected his spirits that he acquired a hatred for the whole human race, and killed men whenever he saw them.
This diverting folk-tale shows a root-belief in the stage of becoming a branch-belief. In the present case the root is the ease with which men are thought to be able to transform themselves (or be transformed by others) into animals. The branch is the presumption that a very wicked animal must be human. The corresponding inference that a very virtuous animal must be human, throws its reflection upon innumerable fairy-tales. I think it was the more primitive of the two. Even the tiger is not everywhere supposed to be the worse for human influence. In the Sangor and Nerbrudda territories people say that if a tiger has killed one man he will never kill another, because the dead man’s spirit rides on his head and guides him to more lawful prey. Entirely primitive people do not take an evil view of human nature—which is proved by their confidence in strangers: the first white man who arrives among them is well received. Misanthropy is soon learnt, but it is not the earliest sentiment. The bad view of the man-tiger prevails in the Niger delta, where the negroes think that “some souls which turn into wild beasts give people a great deal of trouble.” Other African tribes hold that tailless tigers are men—tigers which have lost their tails in fighting or by disease or accident. I do not know if these are credited with good or bad qualities.
By the rigid Totemist all this is ascribed to Totemism. Men called other tribesmen by the names of their totems; then the totem was forgotten and they mistook the tiger-totem-man for a man-tiger et sic de ceteris. My Syrian guide on Mount Carmel told me that the ravens which fed Elijah were a tribe of Bedouins called “the Ravens,” which still existed. If this essay in the Higher Criticism was original it said much for his intelligence. But because such confusions may happen, and no doubt do happen, are they to be taken as the final explanation of the whole vast range of man and animal mutations? What have they to do with such a belief as that vouched for by St. Augustine—to wit, that certain witch innkeepers gave their guests drugs in cheese which turned them into animals? These witches had a sharp eye to business, for they utilised the oxen, asses, and horses thus procured, for draught or burden, or let them out to their customers, nor were they quite without a conscience, as when they had done using them they turned them back into men. Magic, the old rival of religion, lies at the bottom of all this order of ideas. Magic may be defined as the natural supernatural, since by it man unaided commands the occult forces of nature. The theory of demoniacal assistance is of later growth.
A story rather different from the rest is told by Pausanias, who records that, at the sacrifice of Zeus on Mount Lycæus, a man was always turned into a wolf, but if for nine years in wolf-shape he abstained from eating human flesh, he would regain his human form. This suggests a Buddhist source. The infiltration of Buddhist folk-lore into Europe is a subject on which we should like to know more. Buddhism was the only missionary religion before Christianity, and there is every probability that it sent missionaries West as well as East.
The early Irish took so favourable a view of wolves that they were accustomed to pray for their salvation, and chose them as godfathers for their children. In Druidical times the wolf and other animals were divine manifestations, and the Celts were so attached to their beast-gods that they did not maledict what they had worshipped, but found it a refuge somewhere. In the earliest Gallic sculpture the dispossessed animals are introduced as companions of the new Saints.
It will be noticed that in the Indian folk-tale, though the identification of the man with the man-eater is clear, a very lenient view is taken of him: he was not always so; even his excursions in tiger-skin were, at first, purely innocent; he was a good husband and a respectable citizen till his wife’s nerves made him lose his temper.
In early Christian times, the man-wolf might be not only innocent but a victim. He might be a particularly good man turned by a sorcerer into a wolf, and in such cases he preserves his good tendencies. In the seventh century such a man-wolf defended the head of St. Edward the Martyr from other wild beasts.
On the other hand, there are stories of Christian saints who turned evil-disposed persons into beasts by means of the magical powers which, at first, all baptized persons were thought to possess potentially if not actively. St. Thomas Aquinas believed in the possibility of doing this. In a Russian folk-tale the apostles Peter and Paul turned a bad husband and wife into bears.
In Europe by degrees the harmless were-wolf entirely disappeared but the evil one survived. The superstition of lycanthropy concentrated round one point (as superstitions often do): the self-transformation of a perverse man or sorcerer into an animal for nefarious purposes. The object of the transformation might be the opportunity for giving free range to sanguinary appetites; but there was another object lurking in the background, and this was the acquirement of second sight, which some animals (if not all) are supposed to be endowed with. Just as Varro and Virgil believed in lycanthropy, so the most highly educated Europeans in the time of Louis XIV. and after, believed in were-wolves. The choice of the animal was immaterial, but it fell naturally on the most prominent and feared wild animal which was locally extant. A fancy or exotic animal would not do, which illustrates the link there is between popular beliefs and facts; distorted facts, it may be, but real and not imaginary things. If a bear of bad morals appears in Norway, people declare that it can be “no Christian bear”—it must be a Lapp or a Finn, both these peoples, who are much addicted to magic, being supposed to have the power of changing into bears when they choose. Instead of seeking the wild beast in man, people sought the man in the wild beast.
As in Asia so in Europe, it was noticed and pondered that the normal wild beast is dangerous, perhaps, but not from a human point of view perverse. The normal wolf like the normal tiger does not attack or destroy for the love of destruction. Wolves attack in packs, but the instinct of the single individual is to keep out of man’s way. He does not kill even animals indiscriminately. In the last times when there were wolves in the Italian valleys of the Alps, the news spread that a wolf had killed a number of sheep. What had really happened was this, which an old hunter told at Edolo to a relative of mine. The wolf jumped down into a sheepfold sunk in the ground. He killed a sheep and ate some of it and then found, to his dismay, that he could not get up the wall of the sheepfold. Nothing daunted, however, he killed a sufficient number of sheep to form a mound, up which he climbed and so effected his escape. No one thought such a clever wolf as this a lupo manaro. But some wolves, like some dogs, are subject to fits of mental alienation, in which they slay without rhyme or reason. Sheep are found killed all over the countryside, and men or children may be among the victims. The question arises of who did it—a wolf, a man, or both in one? The material fact is there, and it is a fact calculated to excite terror, surprise, curiosity. That the fact may remain always a mystery recent experience shows. When the were-wolf mania was rampant in France, honestly conducted judicial inquiry succeeded in a few cases, in tracing the outrages to a real wolf or to a real man. At last, in 1603, a French court of law pronounced the belief in were-wolves to be an insane delusion, and from that date it slowly declined. Heretics were suspected of being were-wolves. As late as fifty years ago, a reminiscence of the loup garou existed in most parts of France, in the shape of the meneux des loups, who were supposed to charm or tame whole packs of wolves which they led across the waste lands on nights when the moon shone fitfully through rifts in hurrying clouds. The village recluse, the poacher, the man who simply “knew more than he should,” fell under the suspicion of being a “wolf-leader,” and, of course, the usual “eye-witness” was forthcoming to declare that he had seen the suspected individual out upon his midnight rambles with his wolves trotting after him. In some provinces all the fiddlers or bag-pipers were thought to be “wolf-leaders.”
Maurice Sand.
“LE MENEUR DES LOUPS.”
If the wolf turnskin died out sooner in England than in France, it was because there were no wolves to fasten it upon. Throughout the horrible witch-mania British sorcerers were supposed to turn into cats, weasels, or innocent hares! Italian witches still turn into cats. I remember how graphically C. G. Leland described to me a visit he had paid to a Tuscan witch; her cottage contained three stools, on one of which sat the witch, on the second her familiar jet-black cat, and on the third my old friend, who, I feel sure, had come to believe a good deal in the “old religion,” and who, in his last years, might have sat for a perfect portrait of a magician! The connexion of the witch and the cat is a form of turnskin-belief in which the feature of the acquirement of second sight is prominent. No witch without a cat! The essential fact in the superstition is the fondness of poor, old friendless women for cats—their last friends. A contributing fact lay in the mysterious disappearances and reappearances of cats and in their half-wild nature. The cat in Indian folk-lore is the tiger’s aunt.
The mode of effecting transformation into animals is various, but always connected with fixed magical procedure. A root or food, or still oftener an ointment, is resorted to: ointments played a great part in superstition; it was by ointments that the unlucky persons accused of being wizards were held to have spread the plague of Milan. But the surest method of transformation was a girdle made of the skin of the animal whose form it was desired to take. This is regarded as a makeshift for not being able to put on the whole skin. An old French record tells of a man who buried a black cat in a box where four roads met, with enough bread soaked in holy water and holy oil to keep it alive for three days. The man intended to dig the cat up and, after killing it, to make a girdle of its skin by which means he expected to obtain the gift of second sight; but the burial-place of the cat was discovered by some dogs that were scratching the earth, before the three days had elapsed. The man, put to the torture, confessed all. In this case, it will be noticed that the spiritual powers of the cat were to be obtained without assuming its outward form. The turnskin who wishes to go back into his human shape, has also to follow fixed rules: a formula must be pronounced by some one else, as in the jungle tiger story, or the man-beast must eat some stated food as in Lucian’s skit (if Lucian wrote it) of the man who, by using the wrong salve, turned himself into a donkey instead of into a bird as he had wished, and who could only resume his own form by eating roses, which he did not accomplish until he had undergone all sorts of adventures.
The belief that beasts were inhabited by depraved men has a certain affinity with the belief that depraved men were inhabited by demons. Dante maintains that some persons have actually gone to their account while their bodies are still above-ground, the lodgings of evil spirits.
The history of the turnskin leads up to several conclusions, of which the most important is, that superstitions often grow uglier as they grow older. They descend, they rarely ascend. This experience should make us pause before we pronounce hideous beliefs to be, in a true sense, primitive. The idea of transformation is one of the oldest of human ideas, much older than transmigration, but at the outset, far from lending itself to such repulsive applications as man-tigers and demon-men, it gave birth to some of the fairest passages in the poetry of mankind which he calls his religion. It is impossible to imagine a more beautiful myth than the Vedic belief in the swan-maidens, the Apsarases who, by putting on skirts of swan feathers, could become swans. Their swan-skirts stretch from the hot East to the cold North, for they are the same that are worn by the Valkyries. All these early legends of swans bring into particularly clear light the moral identity of the impressions received from things seen by man at the bottom and at the top of the ladder of intellectual progress. Natural objects, lovely or terrible, raise archetypal images of things lovely or terrible which in our minds remain shapeless but to which the primitive man gives a local habitation and a name. Swans, sailing on still waters or circling above our heads, inspire us with indefinite longings which took form in the myth of the Apsarases and appear again in the Vedic story of the sage who, by deep knowledge and holiness, became a golden swan and flew away to the sun. To this day, if the Hindu sees a flight of swans wending its mysterious way across the sky, he repeats the saying almost mechanically (as a Catholic crosses himself if he pass a shrine): “The soul flies away, and none can go with it.”
XIV
THE HORSE AS HERO
FIFTY years ago the knell of the horse was rung, with due solemnity, by the American statesman, Charles Sumner. The age of chivalry, he said, was gone—an age of humanity had come; “the horse, whose importance more than human, gave the name to that period of gallantry and war, now yields his foremost place to man.” As a matter of fact, the horse is yielding his foremost place to the motor-car, to the machine; and this is the topsy-turvy way in which most of the millennial hopes of the mid-nineteenth century are being fulfilled by the twentieth; the big dream of a diviner day ends in a reality out of which all that is ideal is fading. But the reason why I quote the passage is the service which it renders as a reminder of the often forgotten meaning of the word “chivalry.” The horse was connected with the ideals no less than with the realities of the phase in human history that was called after him; the mental consequences of the partnership between man and that noble beast were not less far reaching than the physical. There are a hundred types of human character, some of them of the highest, in the making of which the horse counts for nothing; but this type, this figure of the very perfect gentle knight, cannot be imagined in a horseless world. We hear of what man taught animals, but less of what animals taught man. In the unity of emotion between horse and rider something is exchanged. Even the epithets which it is natural to apply to the knightly hero, one and all fit his steed: defiant and gentle, daring and devoted, trusty and tireless, a scorner of obstacles, of a gay, brave spirit—the list could be lengthened at will. And the qualities and even the defects they had in common were not so much the result of accident as the true fruit of their mutual interdependence.
In the aftermath of chivalry which produced the song-writers and the splendid adventurers of the Elizabethan age, horsemanship came again to the fore as a passion rather than as a mere necessary pursuit. We know that, not satisfied with what England could provide, the fashionable young men frequented the schools of skilled Italians, generally of noble birth, such as Corte da Pavia, who was Queen Elizabeth’s riding-master. The prevailing taste is reflected in Shakespeare, who, though he was for all time, was yet, essentially of his own; his innumerable allusions to horses show, in the first place, that he knew all about them, as he did about most things, and in the second, that he knew that these allusions would please his audience, which no born dramatist ever treated as a negligible quantity, and the least of all Shakespeare. Even the performing or “thinking” horse does not escape his notice; “the dancing horse will tell you,” in “Love’s Labour Lost,” refers to the “Hans” or “Trixie” of the period who also attracted the attention of Ben Jonson, Downe, Sir Kenelm Digby, Sir Walter Raleigh, Hall, and John Taylor, the water-poet. This animal’s name was “Morocco” but he was often called “Bankes’ horse,” from his master who taught him to tell the number of pence in silver coins and the number of points in throws of dice, and on one occasion made him walk to the top of St. Paul’s. Alas, for the fate of “Morocco” and his master, “Being beyond the sea burnt for one witch,” as chronicled by Ben Jonson! Like Esmeralda and her goat, they were accused of magic, and the charge, first started at Orleans, was followed by condemnation and death in Rome. Greater tragedies of superstition hardly come with such a shock as this stupid slaughter of a poor showman and his clever beast.
In Elizabethan society interest in horses was directed chiefly to the turnings and windings, the “shapes and tricks” of the riding-school, and this lighter way of looking on them as affording man his most splendid diversion is, in the main, Shakespeare’s way—though he does not forget that, at times, a horse may be worth a kingdom. Not to him, however, or to any modern poet, do we go for the unique, incomparable description of the truly heroic horse, the uncowed charger of the East, created to awe rather than to be awed by man, whom no image of servility would fit. Here is this specimen of the world’s greatest poetry, in case any one be so unfortunate as not to know it by heart:—
“He paweth in the valley and rejoiceth in his strength; he goeth on to meet the armed men. He mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turneth he back from the sword. The quiver rattleth against him, the glittering spear and the shield. He swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage: neither believeth he that it is the sound of the trumpet. He saith among the trumpets, Ha! ha! He smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains and the shouting.”
How the portrait leaps out of the page into life as Velasquez’s horse in the Prado leaps out of his frame! We feel the pulse of a passion which throbs through every vein from head to hoof. This Triumph of the War-horse is one of the points of affinity in the Book of Job with Arab rather than with Hebrew civilisation. The text itself is nearer Arabic than any other Biblical book, and the life of the protagonist is very like the life of an ancient Arabian chieftain. The Jews proper cared little for horses; when they fell into their hands they knew no better than to destroy them. They were a pastoral people, at no time fond of sport, which was hardly recognised as lawful by their religious ordinances. They do not seem to have ridden on horseback. Zechariah, indeed, speaks of the war-horse, but only to represent him as the beautiful image of peace, no more mixing in the fray, but bearing on his bell (which was meant to affright the foe) the inscription: “Holiness unto the Lord.”
Photo: Mansell.
THE ASSYRIAN HORSE.
British Museum.
On the other hand, the Arab, and, most of all, the Nomadic Arab, has a dual existence with his horse. He could not live without it; it is a part of himself—of all that makes him himself and not another. The same is true of the Todas and their buffaloes, the Lapps and their reindeer. In summer when the reindeer are in the hills, to save them from what is there called the heat, a Lapp seems only half a Lapp; but his thoughts are still of reindeer and his fingers are busy with scratching its likeness on his spoons, his milk-bowls, his implements of all sorts, all of which are made of reindeer-horn. His songs are still of reindeer: “While the reindeer lasts, the Lapp will last; when the reindeer fails, the Lapp will fail,” as ran the infinitely pathetic ditty I heard sung by a Lapp woman who was shown to me as the best singer of the tribe.
With all these people the flesh of the beloved animal is esteemed the greatest delicacy; a fact in which there seems to lie suggestions of cannibalism in its real psychological aspect—the eating of the hero in order to acquire his attributes. Sometimes, however, the reason may be simply that they were for long periods in the impossibility of obtaining other meat; since the natural man prefers food to which he has grown familiar.
In what is probably the oldest version of Boccaccio’s Falcon story, the Emperor of Constantinople sends to ask a very generous præ-Islamic Arab Chief, by name Hatem Tai (celebrated as the type of chivalry over all the Moslem world), to give him a horse which Hatem is known to value beyond all his possessions. The object of the demand was to put his reputation for generosity to the test. The officer, who is the bearer of the Emperor’s request, is regaled sumptuously on the evening of his arrival; and, according to the laws of Oriental courtesy, he puts off speaking of the business in hand till next day. When he delivers his message Hatem replies that he would have complied gladly, but that the officer had eaten the horse last night for supper! The horse was the most costly and coveted food which the chief could offer his guest, and the story becomes thus more intelligible than when the victim is an uneatable bird like a hawk.
In Oriental poetry the camel “who asks but a thorn from the bed of roses of the world” takes a well-merited share of attention, but the animal which is before all others the Eastern poets’ beast is, of course, the horse: he might himself be called the poet as well as the prince among beasts, for if any living thing incarnates the poetry “of form, of motion, of glad devotion,” it is surely the high-bred Arab steed. Innumerable tributes credit him with three parts human qualities:—
“The courser looks his love as plainly as if he could speak,
He waves his mane, his paws, he curls his nostrils and his lips;
He makes half-vocal sounds, uprears or droops his neck and hips,
His deep and pensive eyes light up with lambent flame, then seem
As if they swam in the desires of some mysterious dream.”[[8]]
[8]. Translated by W. R. Alger.
Of the true Arab horse it is said that his foot is so light that he could dance on a woman’s breast without leaving a bruise. Some of the Arabian ballads of horses are among the very few Oriental poems which have acquired universal fame, as that which tells of how the peerless Lahla picked up his captured and bound master and carried him with his teeth back to the tribe, on reaching which he sinks dead, amidst the tears and lamentations of all. Horses, the Koran expressly says, were created for man’s use, but also “to be an ornament unto him”: all the romance, the valour, the deep-seated aristocratic instinct of the Arab, proudest of mankind, is bound up with his horse. The splendid Arab chief who stands aside motionless to let go by an automobile carrying a party of tourists across the Sahara reflects, as he draws his burnoose closer over his mouth, “This is the ‘ornament’ of Western man!” And, looking at his horse, which stands motionless as he (for the Arab steed fears nothing when his master is near), he adds to himself: “These pass—we remain.” False it may be as a prophecy, but he believes it because convinced of his superiority.
Still by the camp-fires in the desert they tell the old story of a great chief who, in præ-Gallic times, was taken prisoner by the Emir’s horsemen. He escaped, but hardly had he reached his tent when in the desert air, in which sounds are heard afar off, a clattering of hoofs could be distinguished—the Sultan’s men were coming! The chief sprang on his mare and fled. When the men came up they knew that only one horse could overtake the mare, her beautiful sister, not less swift than she. A soldier leapt from his own horse intending to mount her, but the chiefs son, yet a child, instantly shot her dead with a pistol. And so the chief was saved.
The Ulemas of Algeria say that when God wished to create the mare He spoke to the wind: “I will cause thee to bring forth a creature that shall bear all My worshippers, that shall be loved by My slaves, and that will cause the despair of all who will not follow My laws.” And when He had created her He said: “I have made thee without an equal: the goods of this world shall be placed between thy eyes; everywhere I will make thee happy and preferred above all the beasts of the field, for tenderness shall everywhere be in the heart of thy master; good alike for the chase and retreat, thou shalt fly though wingless, and I will only place on thy back the men who know me, who will offer ME prayers and thanksgivings; men who shall be My worshippers from one generation to another.”
For the Arab the horse was not only the means of performing great enterprises but the very object of life, the thing in itself most precious, the care, the preoccupation, and the prize. The Arab’s horse is his kingdom.
ARABIAN HORSE OF THE SAHARA.
I suppose that there is no doubt that the knightly type was a flower transported from the East, though, like many other Eastern flowers, it grew to its best in European gardens. The Crusaders learnt more than they taught. Coming down later, the national hero of Spain, for all his pure Gothic blood, is an Eastern not a Western hero. He will be understood far better when he is tried by this standard. If we weigh him in Eastern rather than in Western scales, a more lenient and above all a juster judgment will be the result, and we shall see how the fine qualities with which legend credits him were not disproved by some acts which the modern Western conscience condemns. On the whole it may be taken for granted, in spite of all that has been said to the contrary, that tradition which easily errs about facts, is rarely wrong about character.
Ruy Diaz de Bivar was a hero after the Arab’s own heart:—
“Noble y leal, soldado y Caballero,
Señor te apellido la gente Mora,”
as the lines run on his coffin in the town-hall at Burgos. Nothing being sacred to a critic, it has been contested that he was first called “Myo Cid,” or “My Lord,” by the Moors, but tradition and etymology agree too well for this to be reasonably doubted. It is certain that both Moors and Christians called him by his other title of Campeador in Spanish and Al-kambeyator in the form the Arabic writers gave it. It was derived from his gallantry in single combats and did not mean, as some have thought, “Champion of the Christians.”
It is entirely in keeping with the Cid’s Arab affinities that his horse should have attained a fame almost as great as his own. From Bucephalus to Copenhagen never was there a European horse equal in renown to Bavieca. His glory, is it not writ in nearly every one of the hundred ballads of the Cid? The choosing of Bavieca is one of the most striking events in the Cid’s youth. The boy asked his godfather, a fat, good-natured old priest, to give him a colt. The priest took him to a field where the mares and their colts were being exercised and told him to take the best. They were driven past him and he let all the handsomest go by; then a mare came up with an ugly and miserable-looking colt—“This,” he cried, “is the one for me!” His godfather was angry and called him a simpleton, but the lad only answered that the horse would turn out well and that “Simpleton” (“Bavieca”) should be his name.
Horses which begin as ugly ducklings and end as swans are an extensive breed. Count de Gubernatis, in his valuable work on “Zoological Mythology,” mentions Hatos, the magical horse of the Hungarians, as belonging to this class. If as old as the oldest legend, they are, in a sense, as new as the “outsider” which carries off one of the greatest prizes of the Turf. The choosing of Bavieca was in the mind of Cervantes when he described in his inimitable way the choosing of Rozinante (“ex-jade”), who never became anything but a rozin in the most present tense, except in the imagination of his master, but who will live for ever in his company, to bear witness to the indivisible oneness of the knight and his horse.
Completely Oriental in sentiment is the splendid ballad which relates how the Cid offered Bavieca to his king because it was not meet that a subject should have a horse so far more precious than any possessed by his lord. There is in this not only the act of homage but also the absorbing pride which made the Arab who was overtaking a horse-stealer, shout to him the secret sign at which his stolen mare would go her best, preferring to lose her than to vanquish her.
“O king, the thing is shameful that any man beside
The liege lord of Castile himself should Bavieca ride.
For neither Spain nor Araby could another charger bring
So good as he, and certes, the best befits the king.”
The gorgeous simplicity of the original is missed by Lockhart in the succeeding verses, in which the Cid, before giving up the horse, mounts him to show his worth, his ermine mantle hanging from his shoulders. He will do, he says, in the presence of the king what he has not done for long except in battle with the Moor: he will touch Bavieca with his spurs. Then comes the maddest, wildest, yet most accomplished display of noble horsemanship that ever witched the world. One rein breaks and the beholders tremble for his life, but with ease and grace he guides the foaming and panting horse before the king and prepares to yield him up. Then Alfonso cries, God forbid that he should take him: he shall be accounted, indeed, as his, but shameful would it be
“That peerless Bavieca should ever be bestrid
By any mortal but Bivar—‘Mount, mount again, my Cid!’”
There is a spot in Spain where we still seem to breathe the very air of chivalrous romance: the royal armoury at Madrid, in which the mail-clad knights with their plumes, their housings, their lances, their trophies, sit their fine horses as gallantly as if they were riding straight into the lists. There, and there alone, we can invoke the proper mise en scène for the gestes and jousts described in the Spanish ballads.
Historically, it seems certain that the Cid died at Valencia in July, 1099, an access of grief that his captains—who, owing to his ill-health, were obliged to replace him—had failed to hold the Moors in check. King Alfonso came to the assistance of his noble widow, Jimena, but finally Valencia had to be abandoned; all the Christians left the town and the Cid’s body was borne to his distant Northern home. Such is the historical outline, sufficiently pathetic in itself but adorned with additions, not all of them, perhaps, invented in the sublime legend of the Last Ride. It is said that the Cid, knowing that his last hour was near, refrained from any food except certain draughts of rose-water in which were dissolved the myrrh and balsam sent to him by the great Sultan of Persia. He gave particular instructions as to how his body was to be anointed with the myrrh and balsam which remained in the golden caskets, and how it was to be set upright on Bavieca, fully saddled and armed, to be still a terror to the Moors, who were to be kept in complete ignorance of his death. All this was done and a great victory was won over the Moors, who thought they saw their dreaded enemy once more commanding in person. Then the victors started on the long journey to San Pedro de Cardeña, near Burgos, the Cid riding his horse by day, supported by an artful contrivance, and by night placed on a dummy horse wrought by Gil Diaz, his devoted servitor. Jimena, with all the Cid’s men, followed in his train. On the way the procession is joined by the Cid’s two daughters and by a great mass of people who mourned in their hearts for Spain’s greatest hero, but they wore rich and gay apparel, for the Cid had forbidden the wearing of mourning. So Cardeña was reached, and tenderly and lovingly Ruy Diaz lifted the Cid’s body for the last time from Bavieca’s back—never more to bear a man. The glorious war-horse lived for two years, led to water each day by Gil Diaz. On his death, at more than forty years of age and leaving not unworthy descendants behind him, he was buried, according to the Cid’s express desire, in a deep and ample grave, “so that no dog might disturb his bones,” near the gate of the Convent, and two elms were planted to mark the spot. When Gil Diaz died, full of years and richly provided for by the Cid’s daughters, he was laid to rest beside the horse he had loved and tended so faithfully.
In this narrative, condensed from the Chronicles, the curious particular will have been noticed of the gift by the “Great Sultan of Persia” to the Christian warrior of those precious spices and aromatic gums which seem to have been the secret treasure of old Persia, forming a priceless offering reserved for the very greatest personages. The strangeness of bringing in the Sultan of Persia almost suggests that there was truth in the assertion that he had sent presents to the Cid. Over the sea and over the fruitful fields the radiance of noble deeds travels, as Pinder said of old. A little after the march of the Thousand, the Arabs of the desert were heard discussing round their camp-fires the exploits of Garibaldi. If the fame of the Cid reached Persia, as it is very likely that it did, he would have found fervent admirers among a people which was still electrified by the epic poem of Firdusi, who died within a year or two of the Cid’s birth. In that epic is told the story of the Persian Campeador—the Champion Rustem, who not only in his title but in all we know of his general bearings has so great a resemblance to the Cid that it is a wonder if no historical “discoverer” has derived one from the other, the more so since there have not been wanting writers who denied the Cid’s existence. And if Ruy Diaz de Bivar has his analogue in Rustem, has not Bavieca a perfect counterpart in Rakush?
It is the horse not his master that leads me into the mazes of the Shah Nameh, but something of Rustem must be told to make Rakush’s story intelligible. Like Siegfried, Rustem was of extraordinary size and strength: he looked a year old on the day of his birth. When he was still a child a white elephant broke loose and began trampling the people to death: Rustem ran to the rescue and slew it. A little time after this his father, whose name was Zal, called the boy and showed him all his horses, desiring him to choose that which pleased him best, but not one was powerful enough or spirited enough to satisfy him. Unlike the Cid, Rustem wanted a horse that looked as perfect as he really was. After examining them all and trying many, he noticed at a little distance a mare followed by a marvellously beautiful foal. Rustem got ready his noose to throw about the foal’s neck, and while he did so, a stable-man whispered to him that this foal was, indeed, worth anything to secure; the dam, named Abresh, was famous, while the sire had been no mortal creature but a djinn. The foal’s name was Rakush (“Lightning”), a name given to a dappled or piebald horse, and his coat, that was as soft as silk, looked like rose-leaves strewn on a saffron ground. Several persons who had tried already to capture the foal had been killed by the mare, who allowed no one to go near it.
In fact, no sooner has Rustem lassoed the foal than its mother rushes towards him ready to seize him with her white teeth, which glisten in the sun. Rustem utters a loud cry which so startles the mare that she pauses for an instant: then, with clenched fist, he rains blow on blow on her head and neck till she drops down to die. It was done in self-defence: still, it is a barbaric prelude.
Rustem continued to hold Rakush with his free hand while he conquered the mare, but now the colt drags him hither and thither like an inanimate object: the dauntless youth has to strive long for the mastery, but he does not rest till the end is achieved. The horse is broken in at one breath, after the fashion of American cow-boys. It should be noticed that legendary heroes always break in their own horses—no other influence has been ever brought to bear on the horse but their own. Rakush has found a master indeed, but a master worthy of him. He has recognised that there is one—only one—fit to rule him. Like all true heroes’ horses, he will suffer no other mortal to mount him: if Barbary really allowed Bolingbroke to ride him it was a sure sign that his poor royal master was no hero. This same characteristic belonged also to Julius Cæsar’s horse, which was a remarkable animal in more ways than one, as he was reported to have feet like a human being. I have no doubt that Soloman’s white mare, Koureen, followed the same rule as well as the angel Gabriel’s reputed steed, Haziûm, though I have not found record of the fact.
When the colt is broken in, he stands before his master perfect and without flaw. “Now I and my horse are ready to join the fighting-men in the field,” says Rustem as he places the saddle on his back, to the boundless joy of Zal, whose old, withered heart becomes as green as springtide with the thrill of fatherly pride.
So Rakush is richly caparisoned and Rustem rides away on him, beardless youth though he is, to command great armies, slay fearsome dragons, defeat the wiles of sorcerers, and do all the other feats with which the fresh fancy of a young nation embroidered the story of its favourite hero—for, it must be remembered, Firdusi did not invent Rustem any more than Tennyson invented Lancelot. I think there is every reason to believe that there was a real Rustem just as there was a real Cid; and that the first, like the second, was a combination of the guerrillero, the condottiere, the magnificent free-booter, with the knight-errant or paladin—a stamp which was impressed upon the other rôle by the personal quality of noble-mindedness possessed by the individual in each case. For years unnumbered the exploits of Rustem have entertained the Persian listener from prince to peasant, but the story will ever remain young because it is of those which reflect that which holds mankind spell-bound: the magnetic power of human personality.
One hears the clear, crisp clatter of the horse’s hoofs as they gallop through the epic. Docile as Rakush has become, his spirit is unbent; he is eager to fight his own battles and his master’s too. Like Baiardo, the horse in Ariosto, he uses his hoofs with deadly effect, and on one occasion there is a regular duel between him and another horse while Rustem is fighting its rider. His rashness inspires Rustem with much anxiety in their earlier journeys together. Quite at the beginning, when Rustem is on his way to liberate his captive king—his first “labour”—he lies down to sleep in a forest, leaving Rakush free to graze, and what is not his surprise when he wakes to find a large lion extended dead on the grass close by. Rakush killed the savage beast with teeth and heels while his master slept tranquilly. Rustem remonstrates with his too venturesome steed: Why did he fight the lion all alone? Why did he not neigh loudly and call for assistance? Had he reflected how terribly unfortunate it would be for Rustem if anything were to happen to him? Who would carry his heavy battle-axe and all his other accoutrements? He conjures Rakush to fight no more lions single-handed. Then and at other times Rustem talks to Rakush, but Rakush does not answer like the horse of Achilles. The Persians of the eleventh century had reached the stage of people who take their marvels with discrimination; they accepted Simurghs, white demons, phantom elks, giants, dragons, but they might have hesitated about a talking horse. Another of Rustem’s addresses to his horse was spoken after one of his first victories when the enemy was in full retreat: “My valued friend,” he said, “put forth thine utmost speed and bear me after the foe.” The noble animal certainly understood, for he bounded over the plain snorting as he flew along and tossing up his mane, and great was the booty which fell into his master’s hands. Rustem once said that with his arms and his trusty steed he would not mind fighting thirty thousand men. As a matter of fact, he never lacked followers, for he was of those captains who have only to stamp on the ground for there to spring up soldiers.
In the nineteenth century a “legendary hero” wandered with his horse over the plains of Uruguay much as Rustem wandered with Rakush. “In my nomad life in America,” writes Garibaldi, “after a long march or a day’s fighting, I unsaddled my poor tired horse and smoothed and dried his coat ... rarely could I offer him a handful of oats since those illimitable fields provide so little grain that oats are not often given to horses. Then, after leading him to water, I settled him for the night near my own resting-place. Well, when all this was done, which was no more than a duty to my faithful companion of toil and peril, I felt content, and if by chance he neighed, refreshed, or rolled on the green turf—oh, then I tasted la gentil voluttà d’esser pio!” Marvels are out of date, but feeling remains unchanged, and the “sweets of kindness” were known, surely, even to the earliest hero who made a friend of his horse and found him, in the solitude of the wild, no bad substitute for human friends.
In the story of Sohrab, one of the finest episodes in epic poetry, Rakush is introduced as the primary cause of it all. Tired with hunting in the forest, and perhaps inclined to sleep by a meal of roasted wild ass, which seems to have been his favourite game, Rustem lay down to rest under a tree, turning Rakush free to graze as was his wont. When he awoke the horse was nowhere to be seen! Rustem looked for his prints, a way of recovering stolen animals still practised with astonishing success in India. He found the prints and guessed that his favourite had been carried off by robbers, which was what had actually happened: a band of Tartar marauders lassoed the horse with their kamunds and dragged him home. Rustem followed the track over the border of the little state of Samengan, the king of which, warned of the approach of the hero of the age, went out to meet him on foot with great deference. The hero, however, was in no mood for compliments; full of wrath, he told the king that his horse had been stolen and that he had traced his footprints to Samengan. The king kept his presence of mind better than might have been expected; he made profuse excuses and declared that no effort should be spared to recover the horse—meanwhile he prayed Rustem to become his honoured guest.
Emissaries were sent in all directions in search of Rakush and a grand entertainment was prepared for his master. Pleased and placated, Rustem, who had spared little time for luxury in his adventurous life, finally lay down on a delightful and beautifully adorned bed. How poetic was sleep when it was associated, not with an erection on four legs, but with a low couch spread with costly furs and rich Eastern stuffs! So Rustem reposed, when his eyes opened on a living dream, a maiden standing by his side, her lovely features illuminated by a lamp which a slave girl held. “I am the daughter of the king,” says the fair vision; “no one man has ever seen my face or even heard my voice. I have heard of thy wondrous valour....” Rustem, still wondering if he slept or woke, asked her what was her will? She answered that she loved him for his fame and glory, and that she had vowed to God she would wed no other man. Behold, God has brought him to her! She desires him to ask her hand to-morrow of her father and so departs, lighted on her way by the little slave.
Was ever anything more chaste in its self-abandonment than the avowal of this love, holy as Desdemona’s and irresistible as Senta’s? Nowhere in fiction can be found a more convincing illustration of the truth that the essential spring of woman’s love for man is hero-worship. On which truth, in spite of the illusions it covers, what is best in human evolution is largely built.
The king gave glad assent to the marriage, which was celebrated according to the rites of that country. Rustem tarried but one night with his bride: in the morning with weeping eyes she watched him galloping away on the recovered Rakush. Long she grieved, and only when a son was born was her sad heart comforted. The grandfather gave the boy the name of Sohrab. Rustem had left an amulet to be placed in the hair if God gave her a daughter but bound round the arm if a son were born.
In due course Rustem sent a gift of costly jewels to his wife Tahmineh, with inquiries whether the birth of a child had blessed the marriage? And now the mother of Sohrab made the fatal mistake of a deception which led to all the evil that followed; she sent word that a girl had been born because she was afraid that if Rustem knew that he had a son, he would take him from her. Rustem, disappointed in his hopes, thought no more about Samengan.
There is no hint that Tahmineh’s fibbing, which, like very many other “white lies,” ended in dire disaster, was in the slightest degree the moral as well as the actual cause of the fatality. Herodotus said that every Persian child was taught to ride and to speak the truth; by Firdusi’s time the second part of the instruction seems to have been neglected, for in the Shah Nameh he makes everybody give full rein to his powers of invention without the slightest scruple. The bad consequences are attributed to blind fate, not to seeing Nemesis.
What is so agonising in the doom of Sohrab is precisely the lack of moral cause such as exists in the Greek tragedies. Though we do not accept as a reality the Greek theory of retribution, we do accept it as a point of view, and it helps us, as it helped them, to endure the unspeakable horror of the Ædipus story.
Sohrab goes forth, with a boy’s enthusiasm, to conquer Persia as a present to his unknown father. The two meet, and are incited to engage in single combat, each not knowing the other. After a Titanic contest, Sohrab falls fatally wounded, and only then does Rustem discover his identity. Matthew Arnold’s poem has familiarised English readers with this wonderful scene, and though the “atmosphere” with which he surrounded it, is rather classical than Eastern, his “Sohrab and Rustum” remains the finest rendering of an Eastern story in English poetry. Some blind guide blamed him for “plagiarising” Firdusi: in a few points he might have done wisely to follow his original still more closely; at least, it is a pity that he did not enshrine in his own beautiful poem Sohrab’s touching words of comfort to his distracted father: “None is immortal—why this grief?” Brave, spotless, kind, Firdusi’s hero-victim who “came as the lightning and went as the wind” will always rank with the highest in the House of the Youthful Dead.
Sohrab had a horse as well as Rustem. This sort of repetition or variation which is often met with in Eastern literature pleases children, who like an incident much the better if they are already acquainted with it, but to the mature sense of the West it seems a fault in art. No doubt for this reason Matthew Arnold does not mention Sohrab’s horse, while doing full justice to Rakush. But connected with the young man’s charger there is a scene of the deepest human interest and pathos, when it is led back to his mourning, sonless mother who had watched him ride forth on it, rejoicing in its strength and in his own. It was chosen by him and saddled by him for the first time in his glad boyhood; now it is led back alone, with his arms and trappings hanging from the saddle-bows. In an agony of grief Tahmineh presses its hoofs to her breast and kisses head and face, covering them with her tears.
The mother dies after a year of ceaseless heartbreak; the father and slayer grieves with a strong man’s mighty grief, but he lives to struggle and fight. He and his Rakush have many more wondrous adventures, passing through enchantments and disenchantments and undergoing wounds and marvellous cures both of men and beast, till their hour too comes. Rustem had a base-born half-brother, named Shughad, who was carefully brought up and wedded to a king’s daughter, though the astrologers had foretold that he would bring ruin to his house. This evil genius invites his invincible kinsman to a day’s hunting, having secretly prepared hidden pits bristling with swords. The wise Rakush stops short at the brink of the first pit, refusing to advance; Rustem is stirred to anger and strikes his favourite, who, urged thus, falls into the pit, but with superhuman energy, though cruelly cut about, emerges from it with his rider safely on his back. It is in vain, for another and another pit awaits them—seven times they come up, hacked about with wounds, but on rising out of the seventh pit they both sink dying at the edge. Faintness clouds Rustem’s brain; then, for a little space, it grows clear and cool and he utters the accusing cry, “Thou, my brother!” The wretch’s answer is no defence of him—there can exist none—but strangely, unexpectedly, in spite of the impure lips that speak it, it gives the justification of God’s ways. “God has willed Rustem’s end for all the blood he has shed.” From his own stern faith with its Semitic roots, Firdusi took this great, solemn conception of blood-guiltiness which allowed no compromise. “Thou hast shed blood abundantly and hast made great wars.” One thinks, too, of the wail of one who was of modern men, the most like the old Hebrew type: “All I have done,” said Bismarck in his old age, “is to cause many tears to flow.”
The king, who is the father-in-law of Shughad, offers to send for a magic balm to cure Rustem’s wounds, but the hero will have none of it. He is now quite collected, though his life-blood is ebbing away. In a quiet voice he asks Shughad to do him the kindness of stringing his bow and placing it in his hands, so that when dead he may be a scarecrow to keep away wolves and wild beasts from devouring his body. With a hateful smile of triumph Shughad complies; Rustem grasps the bow, and taking unerring aim lets go the arrow, which nails the traitor to the tree, whither he rushed to hide himself. So Rustem dies, thanking the Almighty for giving him the power to avenge his murder.
There are few better instances of the long survival of a traditional sentiment than the fact of the king’s (or the chief’s) stable being regarded in modern Persia as an inviolable sanctuary. This must have originated in the veneration once felt for the horse. The misfortunes which befell the grandson of Nadir Shah were attributed to his having put to death a man who took refuge in his stable. No horse will carry to victory a master who profanes his stable with bloodshed. Even political offenders or pretenders to the throne were safe if they could reach the stable for as long as they remained in it.
XV
ANIMALS IN EASTERN FICTION
I WAS looking idly at the motley Damascus crowd behind whose outward strangeness to my eyes I knew there lay a deeper strangeness of ideas, when in the middle of a clearing I saw a monkey in a red fez which began to go through its familiar tricks. I thought to myself, “How very near that monkey seems to me!” It was like the well-known figure of an old friend. So it is with the animal-lore of Eastern fiction; it seems very near to us; its heroes are our familiar friends. Perhaps we would lose everything in the treasure-house of Oriental tales sooner than the stories of beasts. If those stories had a hidden meaning which escapes us we are not troubled by their hidden meaning. In their obvious sense they appeal to us directly, without any effort to call up conditions of life and mind far removed from our own. We take them to our hearts and keep them there.
Indeed, the West liked the Eastern stories of beasts so well that it borrowed not a few without any acknowledgment. We all know that the Welsh dog, Gellert, whose grave is shown to this day, had a near relative in the mungoose of a Chinese Buddhist story which exists in a collection dating from the fifth century. The same motive reappears in the Panchatantra, a Sanscrit collection to which is assigned a slightly later date. These are the earliest traces of it that have come to light, but its subsequent wanderings are endless. The theme does not vary much; a faithful animal saves a child from imminent peril: it is seen with marks of blood or signs of a struggle upon it, and on the supposition that it has killed or hurt the child, it is killed before the truth is discovered. The animal varies according to the locality, and amongst the other points of interest in this world-legend is that of reminding us of the universal diffusion of pet animals. We learn, too, which was the characteristically household animal with the people who re-tell the story: in Syria, Greece, Spain, as in Wales, and also (rather to our surprise) among the Jews, we hear of a dog. The weasel tribe prevails in India and China, the cat in Persia. Probably in India and in China dogs were not often admitted inside the houses; in a Chinese analogous tale, of which I shall speak presently, there is a dog, but the incidents take place on the highway. The mungoose was the traditional pet of India because its enmity to snakes must have gained for it admittance into dwelling-places from very early times, and wherever man lives in domesticity with any animal that he does not look upon as food, he cannot save himself from becoming attached to it only a little less than he is attached to the human members of his household. To this rule there are no exceptions.
In the matter of folk-tales, even when we seem to have a clue to their origin, it is rash to be dogmatic. It has been remarked that the origin of this story was probably Buddhist, because it is unquestionable that Buddhist monks purposely taught humanity to animals. Supposing that the story was diffused with a fixed purpose over the vast area covered at one time or another by Buddhism, it would have started with a wide base whence to spread. Moreover, as I mentioned, we find it first in a Buddhist collection of stories. But I am far from sure that the story did not exist—nay, that the fact may not have happened—long before Gautama preached his humane morality. Why should not the fact have happened over and over again? It is one of those stories that are more true than truth. I can tell a perfectly true tale which, though not quite the same as “Gellert’s hound,” deserves no less to go round the world. A few years ago a man went out in a boat on a French river to drown his dog. In mid stream he threw the dog into the water and began to row away. The dog followed and tried to clamber up into the boat. The man gave it some severe blows about the head with the oar, but the dog still followed the boat. Then the man lost his temper and lost his balance: just as he aimed what he thought would be the final blow he tumbled into the water, and as he did not know how to swim he was on the point of being drowned. Then the dog played his part: he grasped the man’s clothes with his teeth and held him up till assistance came. That dog was never drowned!
Things are soon forgotten now, but if this had only happened on a Chinese canal three thousand years ago we might still have been hearing about it. More folk-tales arose in such a way than an unbelieving world suspects.
In the Chinese Buddhist version of Gellert we are told that a very poor Brahman who had to beg his bread possessed a pet mungoose, which, as he had no children, became as fondly loved as if it had been his son. How true is this touch which shows the love of animals as the katharsis of the heart-ache or heartbreak of the childless! But, by and by, to the great joy of the Brahman, his wife bore him a son; after this happy event he cherished the mungoose even more than ever, for he said to himself that it was the fact of his having treated it as if it had been his child which had brought him the unhoped-for good luck of having a real child of his own. One day the Brahman went out to beg, but before he went out he told his wife to be sure and take good care of the child and carry it with her if she left the house even for a minute. The woman fed the child with cream and then remembered that she had to grind some rice; she went into the garden to grind it and forgot to take the little boy with her. After she was gone, a snake, attracted by the smell of the cream, crept quite close to where the child lay and was going to bite it, when the mungoose perceived what was going on and reflected: “My father has gone out and my mother too and now this poisonous snake wishes to kill my little brother.” So the mungoose attacked the poisonous snake and tore it into seven pieces. Then it thought that, since it had killed the snake and saved the child, it ought to acquaint its father and mother of what had happened and rejoice their hearts. Therefore it went to the door and waited for them to return, its mouth still covered with blood. Just then the Brahman came home and he was not pleased to see his wife without the child in the out-house, where the mill was. Thus, though this is left for the hearer to infer, he was already vexed and anxious, when he met the mungoose waiting by the door with blood on its mouth. The thought rushed into his mind, “This creature, being hungry, has slain and eaten the child! “He took up a stick and beat the mungoose to death. (Such a little thing, it is so easily killed!) After that he went into the house, where he found the baby sitting up in his cradle playing merrily with his fingers, while the seven pieces of the dead snake lay beside him! Sorrow filled the Brahman now; alas, for his folly! The faithful creature had saved his child and he, thoughtless wretch that he was, had killed it!
Only in this version are we informed of just what the devoted animal thought; which may be a sign of its Buddhist origin. In the modern Indian variant, the mungoose, tied by a string, does not succeed in getting free till after the child has been bitten by the snake with which he had been playing, thinking it a new toy. The cobra took the play in good part till the child accidentally hurt it; then, angry with the pain, it bit him in the neck. When the mungoose got loose the deed was done and the cobra had slunk back into its hole. Off ran the mungoose into the jungle to find the antidote which the Indian natives believe that this creature always uses when it is itself bitten by snakes. The mother comes in at the moment when the mungoose is returning with the antidote: she sees the child lying motionless, and thinking that the mungoose has killed it she seizes it and dashes it to the ground. It quivers for a few seconds, then it dies. Only when it is dead, does the mother notice the snake-root which it still holds tightly in its mouth. She guesses the whole truth and quickly administers the antidote to the child, who recovers consciousness. The mungoose “had been a great pet with all the children and was greatly mourned for.”
In the Sanscrit version preserved in the Panchatantra collection the mother has brought up an ichneumon with her only child, as if it had been his brother; nevertheless, a sort of fear has always haunted her that the animal might hurt the child sooner or later. I must interrupt the story to remark how often the inglorious Shakespeare of these poor little folk-tales traces with no mean art the psychological process which leads up to the tragic crisis. What more true to life than the observation of the two opposing feelings balancing each other in the same mind till some accident causes one of them to gain uncontrollable mastery?
When the woman has killed her innocent little favourite she is bitterly unhappy, but instead of blaming her own hastiness, she says it was all her husband’s fault: what business had he to go out begging, “through a greedy desire of profit,” instead of minding the baby as she had told him to do, while she went to the well to fetch water? And now the reprobate has caused the death of the ichneumon, the darling of the house!
The touching trait of the creature, which runs to its master or mistress after saving the child, with the charming confidence and pride which any animal shows when it knows that it deserves praise, appears in nearly all the versions. Prince Llewellyn’s greyhound goes out to meet him “all bloody and wagging his tail.” The ichneumon ran joyously to meet its mistress, and the cat, in the Persian version, came up to its master “rubbing against his legs.” In the Persian tale the child’s mother dies at its birth, and it is stated that she was very fond of the cat, which made the man even more grieved that he had killed it.
In German folk-lore the story of the dog “Sultan” sounds as if it were invented by some happy-souled humorist who had the Llewellyn motive in his mind, but who wanted to tell a merry tale instead of a sad one. “Sultan” is so old that his master wishes to kill him, though much against the advice of his wife. So “Sultan” consults a wolf of his acquaintance, who proposes the stratagem of pretending that he is going to eat the good people’s child, while “Sultan” pretends to come up just at the nick of time to save it. The plan is carried out with complete success, and “Sultan” lives out his days surrounded by respect and gratitude.
There are several Eastern tales which are of the same family as Llewellyn’s hound, but in which the animal, instead of saving a child, confers some other benefit on its possessor. In a Persian fable a king kills his falcon because it spilled a cup of water which he is about to drink: of course, the water was really poisoned. A current folk-tale of Bengal makes a horse the victim of its devotion in preventing its master from drinking poisonous water.
Rather different is the following Chinese tale, which is to be found, told at more length, in Dr. Herbert H. Giles’s delightful book, “Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio”:—
There was a man of Lu-ngan who had scraped together enough money to release his father from prison, where he was like to die of all the untold miseries of Chinese durance. He got on a mule and set out for the town where his father was languishing, taking the silver with him. When he was well on his way, he was much annoyed to see that a black dog which belonged to the family was following him; he tried in vain to make it go back. After riding on for some time, he got off the mule to rest and he took the opportunity for throwing a large stone at the dog, which ran away, but as soon as he was on the road again the dog trotted up and took hold of the mule’s tail, as if trying to stop it. The man beat it off with the whip, but it only ran round in front of the mule, and barked frantically so as to impede its progress. The man now reflected, “This is a very bad omen,” and he got fairly into a rage and beat the dog off with such violence that it did not come back. So he continued his journey without further incidents, but when he reached the city in the dark of the evening, what was not his despair on finding about half his money gone! He did not doubt that he must have dropped it on the way, and after passing a night of terrible distress he remembered, towards dawn, the strange way in which the dog behaved, and he began to think that there might be some connexion between this and the loss of his money. Directly the gates were open he retraced his steps along the road, though he hardly hoped to find any clue to his loss, as the route was traversed by many travellers. But at the spot where, on the previous day he dismounted from his mule to rest, he saw the dog stretched dead on the ground, its hair still moist with perspiration, and when he lifted up the body by one of its ears, he found his lost silver safely concealed underneath it! His gratitude was great, and he bought a coffin, in which he placed the dog and then buried it. The place is known as “the Grave of the Faithful Dog.”
It is not true that every one in China eats dogs, but some do, and the trade in such animals is a recognised business. There are several cat and dog restaurants at Canton. This unenviable habit gives rise to the story of a merchant who had made a good stroke of business at Wu-hu and was going home in a canal boat, when he noticed on the bank a butcher who was tying up a dog previous to killing it. It is not stated if the merchant had always a tender heart or if his good fortune in the town made him wish to do a good turn to some living thing; anyhow, he proposed to buy the dog. The butcher was no fool; he guessed that the trader would never leave the dog to its fate after thinking about rescuing it—what dreadful sleepless nights such a proceeding would cost any of us! So he boldly asked a great deal more than the dog was worth, which was paid down, and the animal was untied and put on the boat with his new master. Now it so happened that the boatman had been a brigand, and, though partially reformed, the feeling that he had on board a traveller with a large sum of money was too strong a temptation for him. So he stopped the boat by running it among the rushes and drew out a long knife, with which he prepared to murder his passenger. The merchant begged the brigand not to mutilate him or cut off his head, because such treatment causes the victim to appear in the next world as no one would like to. Brigands are generally religious, and this one was no exception; he was willing to oblige the merchant and tied him up, quite whole, in a carpet, which he threw into the river. The dog, which had been looking on, was in the water in a moment, hugging and tugging at the bundle till he got it to a shallow place. Then he barked and barked till people came to see what was the matter, and they undid the carpet and found the trader still alive. The first thought of the rescued man was to track the thief, for which purpose he started at once to go back to Wu-hu. At the time of starting, much to his distress, he missed the dog. On arriving at Wu-hu he hunted among the endless boats and shipping for the boat by which he had travelled, but unfortunately he could see nothing of it, and at last he gave up the search and was going home with a friend when what should he see but his lost dog, which barked in a curious way as if to invite him to follow it. The merchant did so, and the dog led him to a boat that was lying close to the quay. Into this boat the dog jumped and seized hold of one of the boatmen by the leg. In spite of blows the animal would not let go, and then the merchant, on looking hard at the boatman, recognised him as the very man who tried to murder him, though he had a nice new suit of clothes and a new boat. The thief was arrested and the money found at the bottom of the boat. “To think,” says the story-teller, “that a dog could show gratitude like that!” To which Dr. Giles adds that dogs in China are usually “ill-fed, barking curs” which, if valued as guardians of house and chattels, are still despised. But beautiful moral qualities have the power to conquer loathing, and even in those countries where the dog is regarded generally with aversion it is still the chosen type of sublime fidelity and love.
I can never think of Chinese dogs without remembering a story told by my cousin, Lord Napier of Magdala, of an incident which, he said, gave him more pain than anything that had ever happened to him in his life. When he was in China he chanced to admire a dog, which was immediately offered to him as a gift. He could not accept the offer, and next day he heard that the owner of the dog with all his family, five persons, had drowned himself in a well. Probably they imagined that he was offended by their offering him a mere dog.
In India, to return to that home of legend, the two most sublime Beast Stories are to be found in the Great Epic of the Hindu race, the Mahabharata. They are both stories of the faithfulness of man to beast, and they afford consolation for the sorry figure presented by the human actor in the martyred mungoose tale. The first of these stories is the legend of the Hawk and the Pigeon. A pigeon pursued by a hawk flies for protection to the precinct of sacrifice, where a very pious king is about to make his offering. It clings to the king’s breast, motionless with fright. Then up comes the hawk, which, perching on a near vantage-ground, begins to argue the case. All the princes of the earth declare the king to be a magnanimous chief; why, therefore, should he fly in the face of natural laws? Why keep its destined food from the hawk, which feels very hungry? The king answers that the pigeon came flying to him, overcome by fear and seeking to save its life. How can he possibly give it up? A trembling bird which enters his presence begging for its life? How ignoble it would be to abandon it! Surely it would be a mortal sin! In fact, that is exactly what the Law calls it!
The hawk retorts that all creatures must eat to live. You can sustain life on very little, but how are you going to live on nothing at all? If the hawk has nothing to eat, his vital breath will depart this very day “on the road where nothing more affrights.” If he dies, his wife and children will die too for want of their protector. Such an eventuality cannot be contemplated by the Law: a law which contradicts itself is a very bad law and cannot be in accordance with eternal truth. In theological difficulties one has to consider what seems just and reasonable and interpret the point in that sense.
“There is a great deal to be said for what you say, best of fowls,” replies the king, who is impressed by the hawk’s forensic skill and begins to think him a person not to be trifled with; “you are very well informed; in fact, I am inclined to think that you know everything. How can you suppose, then, that it would be a decent thing to give up a creature that seeks refuge? Of course, I understand that with you it is a question of a dinner, but something much more substantial than this pigeon can be prepared for you immediately; for instance, a wild boar, or a gazelle or a buffalo—anything that you like.”
The hawk answers that he never, by any chance, touches meat of that sort: why does the king talk to him about such unsuitable diet? By an immutable rule hawks feed on pigeons, and this pigeon is the very thing he wants and to which he has a perfect right. In a delicate metaphor he hints that the king had better leave off talking nonsense.
The king, who sees that arguments are no good, now declares that anything and everything he will give the hawk by way of compensation, but that as to the pigeon, he will not give it up, so it is no good going on discussing the matter.
The hawk says, in return, that if the king is so tenderly solicitous on the pigeon’s account, the best thing he can do is to cut out a piece of his own flesh and weigh it in the scales with the pigeon—when the balance is equal, then and then only will the hawk be satisfied. “As you ask that as a favour,” says the king, “you shall have what you wish”—a consent which seems to contain a polite hint that the hawk might have been a little less arrogant, for in the hawk’s demand there was no mention of favours.
The king himself cuts out the piece of his flesh (no one else would have dared do it). But, alas! when it is weighed with the pigeon, the pigeon weighs the most! The king went on cutting pieces of his flesh and throwing them into the scales, but the pigeon was still the heaviest. At last, all lacerated as he was, he threw himself into the scales. Then, with a blast of revelation, the esoteric sense of the story is made plain. There is something grand in the sudden antithesis.
The hawk said: “I am Indra, O prince, thou that knowest the Law! And this pigeon is Agni! Since thou hast torn thy flesh from thy limbs, O thou Prince of Men, thy glory shall shine throughout all worlds. As long as there be men on earth they will remember thee, O king. As long as the eternal realms endure thy fame shall not grow dim.”
So the gods returned to heaven, to which the pious Wusinara likewise ascended with his renovated body, luminously bright. He needs not to complete his sacrifice—himself has he offered up.
The listeners (Eastern stories are for listeners, not for readers) are exhorted to raise their eyes and behold with the mind’s vision that pure and holy abode where the righteous dwell with the gods in glory ineffable.
This beautiful fable belongs to the general class of the ancient stories of Divine visitants, but it has a more direct affinity with the lovely legends of the Middle Ages, in which pious people who give their beds to lepers or others suffering from loathsome disease find that it was Christ they harboured. Though the story of the Hawk and the Pigeon may be used simply as a fairy tale, the moral of it is what forms the essential kernel of other-worldly religions. Through the mazes of Indian thought emerges the constant conviction—like a Divine sign-post—that martyrdom is redemption. The gods themselves are less than the man who resigns everything for what his conscience tells him to be right. Indra bows before Wusinara and seeks to learn the Law from him. India’s gods are Nature-gods, and Nature teaches no such lesson:—
“There is no effort on my brow—
I do not strive, I do not weep,
I rush with the swift spheres and glow
For joy, and when I will, I sleep.”
Higher religions are a criticism of Nature: they “occupy the sphere that rational interpretation seeks to occupy and fails, and fails the more the more it seeks,” and if they change with the change of moral aspirations they are still the passionate endeavour of the soul to satisfy them.
The Buddhists took the story of the Hawk and the Pigeon and adapted it to their own teaching. Indra, chief of the gods, feels that his god-life is waning—for the gods of India labour, too, under the sense of that mysterious fatality of doom which haunted Olympus and Walhalla. Indra, knowing his twilight to be near, desired to consult a Buddha, but there was not one at that time upon the earth. There was, however, a virtuous king of the name of Sivi, and Indra decides to put him to the ordeal, which forms the subject of the other story, because, if he comes out scathless, he will be qualified to become a full Buddha. King Sivi had a severe struggle with himself, but he conquered his weakness, and when he feels the scale sink under him he is filled with indescribable joy and heaven and earth shake, which always happens when a Buddha is coming into existence. A crowd of gods descended and rested on the air: the sight of Sivi’s endurance caused them to weep tears that fell like rain mingled with divine flowers, which the gods threw down on the voluntary victim.
Indra puts off the form of a dove and resumes his god-like shape. What, he asks, does the king desire? Would he be universal monarch? Would he be king of the Genii? Would he be Indra? There is a fine touch in this offer from the god of his godship to the heroic man, and, like most Buddhist amplifications of older legends, it might be justified from Brahmanical sources, as by incredible self-denial it was always held to be possible to dethrone a god and put oneself in his place. But Sivi replies that the only state he craves is that of a Buddha. Indra inquires if no shade of regret crosses the king’s mind when he feels the anguish reaching to his bones? The king replies, “I regret nothing.” “How can I believe it,” says Indra, “when thy body trembles and shivers so that thou canst hardly speak?” Sivi repeats that from beginning to end he has felt no shadow of regret; all has happened as he wished. In proof that he speaks truth, may his body be as whole as before! He had scarcely spoken when the miracle was effected, and in the same instant King Sivi became a Buddha.
There is a Russian folk-tale which seems to belong to this cycle. A horse which was ill-treated and half-starved saves the child of one of his masters from a bear. He has a friend, a cat, who is also half-starved. After he has saved the child he is better fed and he gives the cat part of his food. The masters notice this and again ill-treat him. He resolves to kill himself so that the cat may eat him, but the cat will not eat her friend and resolves to die likewise.
The second great story of man and beast contained in the Mahabharata is that of Yudishtira and his dog. Accompanied by his wife and by his brethren, the saintly king started upon a pilgrimage of unheard-of difficulty which he alone was able to complete, as, on account of some slight imperfections that rendered them insufficiently meritorious to reach the goal, the others died upon the way. Only a dog, which followed Yudishtira from his house, remains with him still. At the final stage he is met by Indra, who invites him to mount his car and ascend to heaven in the flesh. The king asks if his brethren and the “tender king’s daughter,” his wife, are to be left lying miserably upon the road? Indra points out that the souls of these have already left their mortal coil and are even now in heaven, where Yudishtira will find them when he reaches it in his corporeal form. Then the king says, “And the dog, O lord of what Is and Is to be—the dog which has been faithful to the end, may I bring him? It is not my nature to be hard.” Indra says that since the king has this day obtained the rank of a god together with immortality and unbounded happiness, he had better not waste thoughts on a dog. Yudishtira answers that it would be an abominably unworthy act to forsake a faithful servant in order to obtain felicity and fortune. Indra objects that no dogs are allowed in heaven; what is a dog? A rough, ill-mannered brute which often runs away with the sacrifices offered in the temples. Let Yudishtira only reflect what wretched creatures dogs are, and he will give up all idea of taking his dog to heaven. Yudishtira still asserts that the abandonment of a servant is an enormous sin; it is as bad as murdering a Brahman. He is not going to forsake his dog whatever the god may say. Besides, it is not violent at all, but a gentle and devoted creature, and now that it is so weak and thin from all it has undergone on the journey and yet so eager to live, he would not leave it, even if it cost him his life. That is his final resolve.
Arguing in rather a feminine way, Indra returns to the charge that dogs are rough, rude brutes and quite ignores the good personal character given to this dog by its master. He goes on to twit Yudishtira with having abandoned his beloved Draupadi and his brothers on the road down there, while he makes all this stand about a dog. He winds up with saying, “You must be quite mad to-day.”
Repelling the disingenuous charge of abandoning his wife and brethren, Yudishtira remarks with dignity that he left not them but their dead bodies on the road: he could not bring them to life again. He might have said that Indra himself had pointed out to him this very fact. The refusal of asylum, the murder of a woman, the act of kidnapping a sleeping Brahman, the act of deceiving a friend—there is nothing, says Yudishtira, to choose between these four things and the abandonment of a faithful servant.
The trial is over and the god admits his defeat. “Since thou hast refused the divine chariot with the words, ‘This dog is devoted,’ it is clear, O Prince of Men, that there is no one in heaven equal to thee.” Yudishtira, alone among mortals, ascends to bliss in his own body. And the dog—what of the dog? One is sorry to hear that the dog vanished and in his place stood Yama, King of Death.
To us, far away from the glamour of Eastern skies, the god-out-of-the-machine or out of the beast-skin is not always a welcome apparition. We cannot help being glad when, sometimes, the animals just remain what they are, as in the charming Indian fable of the Lion and the Vulture. A lion who lived in a forest became great friends with a monkey. One day the monkey asked the lion to look after its two little ones while it was away. But the lion happened to go to sleep and a vulture that was hovering overhead seized both the young monkeys and took them up into a tree. When the lion awoke he saw that his charges were gone, and gazing about he perceived the vulture holding them tight on the top branches of the nearest tree. In great distress of mind the lion said, “The monkey placed its two children under my care, but I was not watchful enough and now you have carried them off. In this way I have missed keeping my word. I do beg you to give them back; I am the king of beasts, you are the chief of birds: our nobility and our power are equal. It would be only fair to let me have them.” Alas! compliments, though they will go very far, do little to persuade an empty stomach. “You are totally unacquainted with the circumstances of the case,” replied the vulture; “I am simply dying of hunger: what is the equality or difference of rank to me?” Then the lion with his claws tore out some of his own flesh to satisfy the vulture’s appetite and so ransomed the little monkeys.
In this fable we have the Hawk and the Pigeon motive with the miraculous kept in but the mythological left out.
Like a great part of the Buddhist stories of which the Lion and the Vulture is one, we owe its preservation to the industrious Chinese translator. In the same work that contains it, the Tatchi-lou-lun, we are told how, when a bird laid her eggs on the head of the first Buddha which she mistook for the branch of a tree, he plunged himself into a trance so as not to move till the eggs were hatched and the young birds had flown. The Buddha’s humanity is yet again shown by the story of how he saved the forest animals that were fleeing from a conflagration. The jungle caught fire and the flames spread to the forest, which burnt fiercely on three sides; one side was safe, but it was bounded by a great river. The Buddha saw the animals huddling in terror by the water’s edge. Full of pity, he took the form of a gigantic stag and placing his fore-feet on the further bank and his hind-feet on the other, he made a bridge over which the creatures could pass. His skin and flesh were cruelly wounded by their feet, but love helped him to bear the pain. When all the other animals had passed over, and when the stag’s powers were all but gone, up came a panting hare. The stag made one more supreme effort; the hare was saved, but hardly had it crossed, when the stag’s backbone broke and it fell into the water and died. The author of the fable may not have known that hares swim very well, so that the sacrifice was not necessary, unless, indeed, this hare was too exhausted to take to the water.
We can picture the first Buddhist missionaries telling such stories over the vast Chinese empire to a race which had not instinctively that tender feeling for animals which existed from the most remote times in the Indian peninsula. A good authority attributes the present Chinese sensitiveness about animals wholly to those early teachers.
A Sanscrit story akin to the preceding ones tells how a saint in the first stage of Buddhahood was walking in the mountains with his disciple when he saw in a cavern in the rock a tigress and her newly-born little ones. She was thin and starving and exhausted by suffering, and she cast unnatural glances on her children as they pressed close to her, confident in her love and heedless of her cruel growls. Notwithstanding his usual self-control, the saint trembled with emotion at the sight. Turning to his disciple, he cried, “My son, my son, here is a tigress, which, in spite of maternal instinct, is being driven by hunger to devour her little ones. Oh! dreadful cruelty of self-love, which makes a mother feed upon her children!”
He bids the young man fly in search of food, but while he is gone he reflects that it may be too late when he returns, and to save the mother from the dreadful crime of killing her children, and the little ones from the teeth of their famished mother, he flings himself down the precipice. Hearing the noise, and curious as to what it might mean, the tigress is turned from the thought of killing her young ones, and on looking round she sees the body of the saint and devours it.
The most remarkable of all the many Buddhist animal stories is that of the Banyan Deer, which is in the rich collection of old-world lore known as the Jātaka Book. The collection is not so much an original Buddhist work as the Buddhist redaction of much older tales. It was made in about the third century B.C. The Banyan Deer story had the additional interest that illustrations of it were discovered among the bas-reliefs of the stupa of Bharhut. I condense the story from the version of it given in Professor T. W. Rhys Davids’ “Buddhist India.”
In the king’s park there were two herds of deer, and every day either the king or his cook hunted them for venison. So every day a great many were harassed and wounded for one that was killed. Then the golden-hued Banyan Deer, who was the monarch of one herd, went to the Branch Deer, who was king of the other herd, and proposed an arrangement by which lots were to be cast daily, and one deer on whom the lot fell should go and offer himself to the cook, voluntarily laying his head on the block. In this way there would be no unnecessary suffering and slaughter.
Photo: Griggs.
THE BANYAN DEER.
(From “Stûpa of Bharhut,” by General Cunningham.)
The somewhat lugubrious proposition met with assent, and all seems to have gone well till one day the lot fell to a doe of the Branch king’s herd, who was expecting soon to become a mother. She begged her king to relieve her of the duty, as it would mean that two at once should suffer, which could never have been intended. But with harsh words the Branch king bade her be off to the block. Then the little doe went piteously to the Banyan king as a last hope. No sooner had he heard her tale than he said he would look to the matter, and what he did was to go straight to the block himself and lay his royal head upon it. But as the king of the country had ordered that the monarchs of both herds should be spared, the cook was astonished to see King Banyan with his head on the block, and went off in a hurry to tell his lord. Mounted in a chariot with all his men around him, the sovereign rode straight to the place. Then he asked his friend, the king of the deer, why had he come there? Had he not granted him his life? The Banyan Deer told him all. The heart of the king of men was touched, and he commanded the deer to rise up and go on his way, for he gave him his life and hers also to the doe. But the Banyan Deer asked how it would be with all the others: were two to be saved and the rest left to their peril? The king of men said that they too should be respected. Even then the Banyan Deer had more to ask: he pleaded for the safety of all living, feeling things, and the king of men granted his prayer. (What will not a man grant when his heart is touched by some act of pure abnegation?)
There is a curious epilogue to the story. The doe gave birth to a most beautiful fawn, which went playing with the herd of the Branch Deer. To it the mother said:—
“Follow rather the Banyan Deer,
Cultivate not the Branch!
Death with the Banyan were better far
Than with the Branch long life.”
The verse is haunting in its vagueness, as a music which reaches us from far away. “Follow rather the Banyan Deer!” ... follow the ideal, follow the merciful, he who loses his life shall find it.
The Indian hermit of whatsoever sect has always been, and is still, good friends with animals, and when he can, he gives asylum to as many as he is able, around his hermitage. This fact, which is familiar to all, becomes the groundwork of many stories. One of the best is the elaborate Chinese Buddhist tale of Sama, an incarnation of Buddha, who chose to be born as a son to two old, blind, childless folks, in order to take care of their forlornness. When the child was ten years old he begged his parents respectfully to go with him into the solitary mountains where they might practise the life of religious persons who have forsaken the world. His parents agreed; they had been thinking about becoming hermits before his birth, but that happy event made them put the thought away. Now they were quite willing to go with him. So they gave their worldly goods to the poor and followed where he led.
Photo: Mansell.
EGYPTIAN FOWLING SCENE.
British Museum.
(Mural painting.)
There is a beautiful description of the life in the mountains. Sama made a shelter of leaves and branches, and brought his old parents sweet fruits and cool water—all that they needed. The birds and beasts of the forest, showing no fear, delighted the blind couple with their song and friendship, and all the creatures came at Sama’s call and followed him about. Herds of deer and feathered fowl drank by the river’s bank while he drew water. Unhappily one day the king of Kasi was out hunting in those wilds and he saw the birds and the deer, but Sama he did not see and an arrow he aimed at the herd pierced the boy’s body. The wounded boy said to the king, “They kill an elephant for its ivory teeth, a rhinoceros for its horn, a kingfisher for its feathers, a deer for its skin, but why should I be killed?”
The king dismounted, and asked him who he was—consorting with the wild herds of the forest. Sama told him that he was only a hermit boy, living an innocent life with his blind parents. No tiger or wolf had harmed them, and now the arrow of his king laid him low.
The forest wailed; the wild beasts and birds, the lions, tigers, and wolves uttered dismal cries. “Hark, how the beasts of the forest cry!” Said the old couple to one another, “Never before have we heard it so. How long our son has been gone!”
Meanwhile, the king, overcome by sorrow and remorse, tried in vain to draw the arrow from the boy’s breast. The birds flew round and round screaming wildly; the king trembled with fear. Sama said, “Your Majesty is not to blame; I must have done ill in a former life, and now suffer justly for it: I do not grieve for myself but for my blind parents ... what will they do? May heavenly guardians protect them!”
Then the king said, “May I undergo the torments of hell for a hundred æons, but O! may this youth live!” It was not to be; Sama expired, while all the wood birds flocking together tried tenderly to staunch the blood flowing from his breast.
I cannot tell the whole story, which has a strong suggestion of some poetic fancy of Maeterlinck. In the end Sama is brought back to life, and the eyes of his parents are opened. The king is admonished to return to his dominions and no longer take life in the chase.
In a Jaina hermit story a king goes hunting with a great attendance of horses, elephants, chariots, and men on foot. He pursues the deer on horseback, and, keen on his sport, he does not notice, as he aims the arrow, that the frightened creature is fleeing to a holy ascetic who is wise in the study of sacred things. Of a sudden, he beholds the dead deer and the holy man standing by it. A dreadful fear seizes the king: he might have killed the monk! He gets off his horse, bows low, and prays to be forgiven. The venerable saint was plunged in thought and made no answer; the king grew more and more alarmed at his silence. “Answer me, I pray, Reverend Sir,” he said. “Be without fear, O king,” replied the monk, “but grant safety to others also. In this transient world of living things, why are you prone to cruelty?” Why should the king cling to kingly power, since one day he must part with everything? Life and beauty pass, wife and children, friends and kindred—they will follow no man in death: what do follow him are his deeds, good or evil. When he heard that, the king renounced his kingdom and became an ascetic. “A certain nobleman who had turned monk said to him, ‘As you look so happy, you must have peace of mind.’”
It may be a wrong conception of life that makes men seek rest on this side of the grave, but one can well believe that the finding of it brings a happiness beyond our common ken. For one thing, he who lives with Nature surely never knows ennui. The most marvellous of dramatic poems unfolds its pages before his eyes. Nor does he know loneliness; even one little creature in a prisoner’s cell gives a sense of companionship, and the recluse in the wild has the society of all the furred and feathered hosts. The greatest poet of the later literature of India, Kálidása, draws an exquisite picture of the surroundings of an Indian heritage:—
“See under yon trees the hallowed grains which have been scattered on the ground, while the tender female parrots were feeding their unfledged young ones in their pendant nests.... Look at the young fawns, which, having acquired confidence in man, and accustomed themselves to the sound of his voice, frisk at pleasure, without varying their course. See, too, where the young roes graze, without apprehension from our approach, on the lawn before yonder garden, where the tops of the sacrificial grass, cut for some religious rite, are sprinkled round.”[[9]]
[9]. Sir William Jones’s translation.
In the play of Sacontala—which filled Goethe with a delight crystallised in his immortal quatrain—no scene is so impressed by genuine feeling and none so artistic in its admirable simplicity as that in which the heroine takes leave of her childhood’s pet.
The hermit, who has been the foster-father of Sacontala, is dismissing her upon her journey to the exalted bridegroom who awaits her. At the last moment she says to him: “My father, see you there my pet deer, grazing close to the hermitage? She expects soon to fawn, and even now the weight of the little ones she carries hinders her movements. Do not forget to send me word when she becomes a mother.”
The hermit, Canna, promises that it shall be done; then as Sacontala moves away, she feels herself drawn back, and turning round, she says, “What can this be fastened to my dress?”
Canna answers:—
“My daughter,
It is the little fawn, thy foster child.
Poor helpless orphan! It remembers well
How with a mother’s tenderness and love
Thou didst protect it, and with grains of rice
From thine own hand didst daily nourish it,
And ever and anon when some sharp thorn
Had pierced its mouth, how gently thou didst tend
The bleeding wound and pour in healing balm.
The grateful nursling clings to its protectress,
Mutely imploring leave to follow her.”
Sacontala replies, weeping, “My poor little fawn, dost thou ask to follow an unhappy wretch who hesitates not to desert her companions? When thy mother died, soon after thy birth, I supplied her place and reared thee with my own hands, and now that thy second mother is about to leave thee, who will care for thee? My father, be thou a mother to her. My child, go back and be a daughter to my father!”
It is the fatality of the dramatist that he cannot stamp with truth sentiments which are not sure of a response from his audience: he must strike the keyboard of his race. We can imagine how thoroughly an Indian audience would enter into the sentiment of this charming scene. To the little Indian girl, who was still only a child of thirteen or fourteen, the favourite animal did not appear as a toy, or even as a simple playmate. It was the object of grave and thoughtful care, and it received the first outpouring of what would one day be maternal love.
XVI
THE GROWTH OF MODERN IDEAS ON ANIMALS
THE last age of antiquity was an age of yeast. Ideas were in fermentation; religious questions came to be regarded as “interesting”—just as they are now. The spirit of inquiry took the place of placid acceptance on the one hand, and placid indifference on the other. It was natural that there should be a rebound from the effort of Augustus to re-order religion on an Imperial, conventional, and unemotional basis. Then, too, Rome, which had never been really Italian except in the sublime previsions of Virgil, grew every day more cosmopolitan: the denizens of the discovered world found their way thither on business, for pleasure, as slaves—the influence of these last not being the least important factor, though its extent and character are not easy to define. Everything tended to foment a religious unrest which took the form of one of those “returns to the East” that are ever destined to recur: the spiritual sense of the Western world became Orientalised. The worship of Isis and Serapis and much more of Mithra proved to be more exciting than the worship of the Greek and Roman gods which represented Nature and law, while the new cults proposed to raise the veil on what transcends natural perception. No doubt the atmosphere of the East itself favoured their rapid development; the traveller in North Africa must be struck by the extraordinary frequency with which the symbols of Mithraism recur in the sculpture and mosaics of that once great Roman dependency. Evidently the birthland of St. Augustine bred in the matter-of-fact Roman colonist the same nostalgia for the Unknowable which even now a lonely night under the stars of the Sahara awakes in the dullest European soul. Personal immortality as a paramount doctrine; a further life more real than this one; ritual purification, redemption by sacrifice, mystical union with deity; these were among the un-Roman and even anti-Roman conceptions which lay behind the new, strange propaganda, and prepared the way for the diffusion of Christianity. With the Italian peasants who clung to the unmixed older faith no progress was made till persecution could be called in as an auxiliary.
Photo: Mansell.
ASSYRIAN LION AND LIONESS IN PARADISE PARK.
British Museum.
In such a time it was a psychological certainty that among the other Eastern ideas which were coming to the fore, would be those ideas about animals which are roughly classed under the head of Pythagoreanism. The apostles of Christ in their journeys East or West might have met a singular individual who was carrying on an apostolate of his own, the one clear and unyielding point of which was the abolition of animal sacrifices. This was Apollonius, of Tyana, our knowledge of whom is derived from the biography, in part perhaps fanciful, written by Philostratus in the third century to please the Empress Julia Domna, who was interested in occult matters. Apollonius worked wonders as well attested as those, for instance, of the Russian Father John, but he seems to have considered his power the naturally produced result of an austere life and abstinence from flesh and wine which is a thoroughly Buddhist or Jaina theory. He was a theosophist who refrained from attacking the outward forms and observances of established religion when they did not seem to him either to be cruel or else incongruous to the degree of preventing a reverential spirit. He did not entirely understand that this degree is movable, any more than do those persons who want to substitute Gregorian chants for opera airs in rural Italian churches. He did not mind the Greek statues which appealed to the imagination by suggestions of beauty, but he blamed the Egyptians for representing deity as a dog or an ibis; if they disliked images of stone why not have a temple where there were no images of any kind—where all was left to the inner vision of the worshipper? In which question, almost accidentally, Apollonius throws out a hint of the highest form of spiritual worship.
Photo: Alinari.
LAMBS.
(Relief on fifth century tomb at Ravenna.)
The keenly intellectual thinkers whom we call the Fathers of the Church saw that the majority of the ideas then agitating men’s minds might find a quietus in Christian dogma which suited them a great deal better than the vague and often grotesque shape they had worn hitherto. But there was a residuum of which they felt an instinctive fear, and peculiar notions about animals had the ill-luck of being placed at the head of these. It could not have been a fortunate coincidence that two of the most prominent men who held them in the early centuries were declared foes of the new faith—Celsus and Porphyry.
When the Church triumphed, the treatise written by Celsus would have been no doubt entirely destroyed like other works of the same sort, had not Origen made a great number of quotations from it for the purpose of confutation. Celsus was no borné disputant after the fashion of the Octavius of Minucius, but a man of almost encyclopædic learning; if he was a less fair critic than he held himself to be, it was less from want of information than from want of that sympathy which is needful for true comprehension. The inner feeling of such a man towards the Christian Sectaries was not near so much that of a Torquemada in regard to heretics as that of an old-fashioned Tory upholder of throne and altar towards dissent fifty years ago. It was a feeling of social aloofness.
Yet Celsus wished to be fair, and he had studied religions to enough purpose not to condemn as delusion or untruth everything that a superficial adversary would have rejected at once; for instance, he was ready to allow that the appearances of Christ to His disciples after the Crucifixion might be explained as psychical phenomena. Possibly he believed that truth, not falsehood, was the ultimate basis of all religions as was the belief of Apollonius before him. In some respects Celsus was more unprejudiced than Apollonius; this can be observed in his remarks on Egyptian zoomorphism; it causes surprise, he says, when you go inside one of the splendid Egyptian temples to find for divinity a cat, a monkey or a crocodile, but to the initiated they are symbols which under an allegorical veil turn people to honour imperishable ideas, not perishable animals as the vulgar suppose.
It may have been his recondite researches which led Celsus to take up the question of the intelligence of animals and the conclusions to be drawn from it. He only touches lightly on the subject of their origin; he seems to lean towards the theory that the soul, life, mind, only, is made by God, the corruptible and passing body being a natural growth or perhaps the handiwork of inferior spirits. He denied that reason belonged to man alone, and still more strongly that God created the universe for man rather than for the other animals. Only absurd pride, he says, can engender such a thought. He knew very well that this, far from being a new idea, was the normal view of the ancient world from Aristotle to Cicero; the distinguished men who disagreed with it had never won more than a small minority over to their opinion. Celsus takes Euripides to task for saying—
“The sun and moon are made to serve mankind.”
Why mankind? he asks; why not ants and flies? Night serves them also for rest and day for seeing and working. If it be said that we are the king of animals because we hunt and catch them or because we eat them, why not say that we are made for them because they hunt and catch us? Indeed, they are better provided than we, for while we need arms and nets to take them and the help of several men and dogs, Nature furnishes them with the arms they require, and we are, as it were, made dependent on them. You want to make out that God gave you the power to take and kill wild animals, but at the time when there were no towns or civilisation or society or arms or nets, animals probably caught and devoured men while men never caught animals. In this way, it looks more as if God subjected man to animals than vice versâ. If men seem different from animals because they build cities, make laws, obey magistrates and rulers, you ought to note that this amounts to nothing at all, since ants and bees do just the same. Bees have their “kings”; some command, others obey; they make war, win battles, take prisoner the vanquished; they have their towns and quarters; their work is regulated by fixed periods, they punish the lazy and cowardly—at least they expel the drones. As to ants, they practise the science of social economy just as well as we do; they have granaries which they fill with provisions for the winter; they help their comrades if they see them bending under the weight of a burden; they carry their dead to places which become family tombs; they address each other when they meet: whence it follows that they never lose their way. We must conclude, therefore, that they have complete reasoning powers and common notions of certain general truths, and that they have a language and know how to express fortuitous events. If some one, then, looked down from the height of heaven on to the earth, what difference would he see between our actions and those of ants and bees? If man is proud of knowing magical secrets, serpents and eagles know a great deal more, for they use many preservatives against poisons and diseases, and are acquainted with the virtues of certain stones with which they cure the ailments of their young ones, while if men find out such a cure they think they have hit on the greatest wonder in the world. Finally, if man imagines that he is superior to animals because he possesses notion of God, let him know that it is the same with many of them; what is there more divine, in fact, than to foresee and to foretell the future? Now for that purpose men have recourse to animals, especially to birds, and all our soothsayers do is to understand the indications given by these. If, therefore, birds and other prophetic animals show us by signs the future as it is revealed to them by God, it proves that they have closer relations with the deity than we; that they are wiser and more loved by God. Very enlightened men have thought that they understood the language of certain animals, and in proof of this they have been known to predict that birds would do something or go somewhere, and this was observed to come true. No one keeps an oath more religiously or is more faithful to God than the elephant, which shows that he knows Him.
Hence, concludes Celsus, the universe has not been made for man any more than for the eagle or the dolphin. Everything was created not in the interest of something else, but to contribute to the harmony of the whole in order that the world might be absolutely perfect. God takes care of the universe; it is that which His providence never forsakes, that which never falls into disorder. God no more gets angry with men than with rats or monkeys: everything keeps its appointed place.
In this passage Celsus rises to a higher level than in any other of the excerpts preserved for us by Origen. The tone of irony which usually characterises him disappears in this dignified affirmation of supreme wisdom justified of itself not by the little standards of men—or ants. It must be recognised as a lofty conception, commanding the respect of those who differ from it, and reconciling all apparent difficulties and contradictions forced upon us by the contemplation of men and Nature. But it brings no water from the cool spring to souls dying of thirst; it expounds in the clearest way and even in the noblest way the very thought which drove men into the Christian fold far more surely than the learned apologies of controversialists like Origen; the thought of the crushing unimportance of the individual.
The least attentive reader must be struck by the real knowledge of natural history shown by Celsus: his ants are nearly as conscientiously observed as Lord Avebury’s. Yet a certain suspicion of conscious exaggeration detracts from the seriousness of his arguments; he strikes one as more sincere in disbelieving than in believing. A modern writer has remarked that Celsus in the second half of the second century forestalled Darwin in the second half of the nineteenth by denying human ascendancy and contending that man may be a little lower than the brute. But it scarcely seems certain whether he was convinced by his own reasoning or was not rather replying by paradoxes to what he considered the still greater paradoxes of Christian theology.
The shadow of no such doubt falls on the pages of the neoplatonists Plotinus and Porphyry. To them the destiny of animals was not an academic problem but an obsession. The questions which Heine’s young man asked of the waves: “What signifies man? Whence does he come? Whither does he go?” were asked by them with passionate earnestness in their application to all sentient things. Plotinus reasoned, with great force, that intelligent beast-souls must be like the soul of man since in itself the essence of the soul could not be different. Porphyry (born at Tyre, A.D. 233), accepting this postulate that animals possess an intelligent soul like ours, went on to declare that it was therefore unlawful to kill or feed on them under any circumstances. If justice is due to rational beings, how is it possible to evade the conclusion that we are also bound to act justly towards the races below us? He who loves all animated nature will not single out one tribe of innocent beings for hatred; if he loves the whole he will love every part, and, above all, that part which is most closely allied to ourselves. Porphyry was quite ready to admit that animals in their own way made use of words, and he mentions Melampus and Apollonius as among the philosophers who understood their language. He quoted with approval the laws supposed to have been framed by Triptolemus in the reign of Pandion, fifth king of Athens: “Honour your parents; make oblations of your fruits to the gods; hurt not any living creature.”
Neoplatonism penetrated into the early Church, but divested of its views on animal destiny; even the Catholic neoplatonist Boëthius, though he was sensitively fond of animals (witness his lines about caged birds), yet took the extreme view of the hard-and-fast line of separation, as may be seen by his poem on the “downward head,” which he interpreted to indicate the earth-bound nature of all flesh save man. Birds, by the by, and even fishes, not to speak of camel-leopards, can hardly be said to have a “downward head.” Meanwhile, the other manner of feeling, if not of thinking, reasserted its power as it always will, for it belongs to the primal things. Excluded from the broad road, it came in by the narrow way—the way that leads to heaven. In the wake of the Christian Guru came a whole troop of charming beasts, little less saintly and miraculous than their holy protectors, and thus preachers of the religion of love were spared the reproach of showing an all-unloving face towards creatures that could return love for love as well as most and better than many of the human kind. The saint saved the situation, and the Church wisely left him alone to discourse to his brother fishes or his sister turtle-doves, without inquiring about the strict orthodoxy of the proceeding.
Unhappily the more direct inheritors of neoplatonist dreams were not left alone. A trend of tendency towards Pythagoreanism runs through their different developments from Philo to the Gnostics, from the Gnostics, through the Paulicians to the Albigenses. It passes out of our sight when these were suppressed in the thirteenth century by the most sanguinary persecution that the world has seen, but before long it was to reappear in one shape or another, and we may be sure that the thread was never wholly lost.
“IL BUON PASTORE.”
(Mosaic at Ravenna.)
An effort has been made to prove that the official as well as the unofficial Church always favoured humanity to animals. The result of this effort has been wholly good; not only has it produced a delightful volume,[[10]] but, indirectly, it was the cause of Pope Pius X. pronouncing a blessing on every one who is working for the prevention of cruelty to animals throughout the world. Roma locuta est. To me this appears to be a landmark in ethics of first-class importance. Nevertheless, historically speaking, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that the diametrically opposite view expressed by Father Rickaby in a manual intended for use in the Jesuit College at Stonyhurst,[[11]] more correctly gives the measure of what had been the practical teaching of the Church in all these ages. Even now, authoritative Catholics, when enjoining humanity to animals, are careful to add that man has “no duties” towards them, though they may modify this by saying with Cardinal Manning (the most kind-hearted of men) that he owes “a sevenfold obligation” to their Creator to treat them well. Was it surprising that the Neapolitan peasant who heard from his priest that he had no duties to his ass went home, not to excogitate the sevenfold obligation but to belabour the poor beast soundly? Though the distinction is capable of philosophical defence, granted the premises, to plain people it looks like a juggling with words. When St. Philip Neri said to a monk who put his foot on a lizard, “What has the poor creature done to you?” he implied a duty to the animal, the duty of reciprocity. He spoke with the voice of Nature and forgot, for the moment, that animals were not “moral persons” nor “endowed with reason,” and that hence they could have “no rights.”
[10]. “L’Église et la Pitié envers les animaux,” Paris, 1903. An English edition has been published by Messrs. Burns and Oates.
[11]. “Moral Philosophy,” p. 250.
At an early date, in the heart of official Catholicism, an inconsistency appeared which is less easily explained than homilies composed for fishes or hymns for birds; namely, the strange business of animal prosecutions. Without inquiring exactly what an animal is, it is easy to bestow upon it either blessings or curses. The beautiful rite of the blessing of the beasts which is still performed once a year in many places involves no doctrinal crux. In Corsica the priest goes up to the high mountain plateaux where the animals pasture in the summer, and after saying Mass in presence of all the four-footed family, he solemnly blesses them and exhorts them to prosper and multiply. It is a delightful scene, but it does not affect the conception of the moral status of animals, nor would that conception be affected by a right-down malediction or order to quit. What, however, can be thought of a regular trial of inconvenient or offending animals in which great care is taken, to keep up the appearance of fair-play to the defendants? Our first impression is, that it must be an elaborate comedy; but a study of the facts makes it impossible to accept this theory.
The earliest allusions to such trials that seem to exist belong to the ninth century, which does not prove that they were the first of the kind. One trial took place in 824 A.D. The Council of Worms decided in 866 that if a man has been killed by bees they ought to suffer death, “but,” added the judgment, “it will be permissible to eat their honey.” A relic of the same order of ideas lingers in the habit some people have of shooting a horse which has caused a fatal accident, often the direct consequence of bad riding or bad driving. The earlier beast trials of which we have knowledge were conducted by laymen, the latter by ecclesiastics, which suggests their origin in a folk-practice. A good, characteristic instance began on September 5, 1370. The young son of a Burgundian swineherd had been killed by three sows which seemed to have feared an attack on one of their young ones. All members of the herd were arrested as accomplices, which was a serious matter to their owners, the inmates of a neighbouring convent, as the animals, if convicted, would be burnt and their ashes buried. The prior pointed out that three sows alone were guilty; surely the rest of the pigs ought to be acquitted. Justice did not move quickly in those times; it was on September 12, 1379, that the Duke of Burgundy delivered judgment; only the three guilty sows and one young pig (what had it done?) were to be executed; the others were set at liberty “notwithstanding that they had seen the death of the boy without defending him.” Were the original ones all alive after nine years? If so, would so long a respite have been granted them had no legal proceedings been instituted?
An important trial took place in Savoy in the year 1587. The accused was a certain fly. Two suitable advocates were assigned to the insects, who argued on their behalf that these creatures were created before man, and had been blessed by God, who gave them the right to feed on grass, and for all these and other good reasons the flies were in their right when they occupied the vineyards of the Commune; they simply availed themselves of a legitimate privilege conformable to Divine and natural law. The plaintiffs’ advocate retorted that the Bible and common sense showed animals to be created for the utility of man; hence they could not have the right to cause him loss, to which the counsel for the insects replied that man had the right to command animals, no doubt, but not to persecute, excommunicate and interdict them when they were merely conforming to natural law “which is eternal and immutable like the Divine.”
The judges were so deeply impressed by this pleading that to cut the case short, which seemed to be going against him, the Mayor of St. Julien hastened to propose a compromise; he offered a piece of land where the flies might find a safe retreat and live out their days in peace and plenty. The offer was accepted. On June 29, 1587, the citizens of St. Julien were bidden to the market square by ringing the church bells, and after a short discussion they ratified the agreement which handed over a large piece of land to the exclusive use of the insects. Hope was expressed that they would be entirely satisfied with the bargain. A right of way across the land was, indeed, reserved to the public, but no harm whatever was to be done to the flies on their own territory. It was stated in the formal contract that the reservation was ceded to the insects in perpetuity.
All was going well, when it transpired that, in the meantime, the flies’ advocates had paid a visit to that much-vaunted piece of land, and when they returned, they raised the strongest objection to it on the score that it was arid, sterile, and produced nothing. The mayor’s counsel disputed this; the land, he said, produced no end of nice small trees and bushes, the very things for the nutrition of insects. The judges intervened by ordering a survey to find out the real truth, which survey cost three florins. There, alas! the story ends, for the winding up of the affair is not to be found in the archives of St. Julien.
Records of 144 such trials have come to light. Of the two I have described, it will be remarked that one belongs, as it were, to criminal and the other to civil law. The last class is the most curious. No doubt the trial of flies or locusts was resorted to when other means of getting rid of them had failed; it was hoped, somehow, that the elaborate appearance of fair-play would bring about a result not to be obtained by violence. We can hardly resist the inference that they involved some sort of recognition or intuition of animals’ rights and even of animal intelligence.
In the dawn of modern literature animals played a large, though artificial, part which must not be quite ignored on account of its artificiality, because in the Bestiaries as in the Æsopic and Oriental fables from which they were mainly derived, there was an inextricable tangle of observations of the real creature and arbitrary ascription to him of human qualities and adventures. At last they became a mere method for attacking political or ecclesiastical abuses, but their great popularity was as much due to their outer as to their inner sense. There is not any doubt that at the same time floods of Eastern fairy-tales were migrating to Europe, and in these the most highly appreciated hero was always the friendly beast. In a romance of the thirteenth century called “Guillaume de Palerme” all previous marvels of this kind were outdone by the story of a Sicilian prince who was befriended by a were-wolf!
It is not generally remembered that the Indian or Buddhist view of animals must have been pretty well known in Europe at least as early as the fourteenth century. The account of the monastery “where many strange beasts of divers kinds do live upon a hill,” which Fra Odoric, of Pordenone, dictated in 1330, is a description, both accurate and charming, of a Buddhist animal refuge, and in the version given of it in Mandeville’s “Travels,” if not in the original, it must have been read by nearly every one who could read, for no book ever had so vast a diffusion as the “Travels” of the elusive Knight of St. Albans.
With the Italian Renaissance came the full modern æsthetic enjoyment of animals; the admiration of their beauty and perfection which had been appreciated, of course, long before, but not quite in the same spirit. The all-round gifted Leo Battista Alberti in the fifteenth century took the same critical delight in the points of a fine animal that a modern expert would take. He was a splendid rider, but his interest was not confined to horses; his love for his dog is shown by his having pronounced a funeral oration over him. We feel that with such men humanity towards animals was a part of good manners. “We owe justice to men,” said the intensely civilised Montaigne, “and grace and benignity to other creatures that are capable of it; there is a natural commerce and mutual obligation between them and us.” Sir Arthur Helps, speaking of this, called it “using courtesy to animals,” and when one comes to think of it, is not such “courtesy” the particular mark and sign of a man of good breeding in all ages?
The Renaissance brought with it something deeper than a wonderful quickening of the æsthetic sense in all directions; it also brought that spiritual quickening which is the co-efficient of every really upward movement of the human mind. Leonardo da Vinci, greatest of artist-humanists, inveighed against cruelty in words that might have been written by Plutarch or Porphyry. His sympathies were with the vegetarian. Meanwhile, Northern Churchmen who went to Rome were scandalised to hear it said in high ecclesiastical society that there was no difference between the souls of men and beasts. An attempt was made to convert Erasmus to this doctrine by means of certain extracts from Pliny. Roman society, at that time, was so little serious that one cannot believe it to have been serious even in its heterodoxy. But speculations more or less of the same sort were taken up by men of a very different stamp; it was to be foreseen that animals would have their portion of attention in the ponderings of the god-intoxicated musers who have been called the Sceptics of the Renaissance. For the proof that they did receive it we have only to turn to the pages of Giordano Bruno. “Every part of creation has its share in being and cognition.” “There is a difference, not in quality, but in quantity, between the soul of man, the animal and the plant.” “Among horses, elephants and dogs there are single individuals which appear to have almost the understanding of men.”
Bruno’s prophetic guess that instinct is inherited habit might have saved Descartes (who was much indebted to the Nolan) from giving his name an unenviable immortality in connexion with the theory which is nearly all that the ignorant know now of Cartesian philosophy. This was the theory that animals are automata, a sophism that may be said to have swept Europe, though it was not long before it provoked a reaction. Descartes got this idea from the very place where it was likely to originate, from Spain. A certain Gomez Pereira advanced it before Descartes made it his own, which even led to a charge of plagiarism. “Because a clock marks time and a bee makes honey, we are to consider the clock and the bee to be machines. Because they do one thing better than man and no other thing so well as man, we are to conclude that they have no mind, but that Nature acts within them, holding their organs at her disposal.” “Nor are we to think, as the ancients do, that animals speak, though we do not know their language, for, if that were so, they, having several organs related to ours, might as easily communicate with us as with each other.”
About this, Huxley showed that an almost imperceptible imperfection of the vocal chord may prevent articulated sounds. Moreover, the click of the bushmen, which is almost their only language, is exceedingly like the sounds made by monkeys.
Language, as defined by an eminent Italian man of science, Professor Broca, is the faculty of making things known, or expressing them by signs or sounds. Much the same definition was given by Mivart, and if there be a better one, we have still to wait for it. Human language is evolved; at one time man had it not. The babe in the cradle is without it; the deaf mute, in his untaught state, is without it; ergo the babe and the deaf mute cannot feel. Poor babes and poor deaf mutes should the scientific Loyolas of the future adopt this view!
I do not know if any one has remarked that rural and primitive folk can never bring themselves to believe of any foreign tongue that it is real human language like their own. To them it seems a jargon of meaningless and uncouth sounds.
Chanet, a follower of Descartes, said that he would believe that beasts thought when a beast told him so. By what cries of pain, by what looks of love, have not beasts told men that they thought! Man himself does not think in words in moments of profound emotion, whether of grief or joy. He cries out or he acts. Thought in its absolutely elementary form is action. The mother thinks in the kiss she gives her child. The musician thinks in music. Perhaps God thinks in constellations. I asked a man who had saved many lives by jumping into the sea, “What did you think of at the moment of doing it?” He replied: “You do not think, or you might not do it.”
The whole trend of philosophic speculation worthy of the name lies towards unity, but the Cartesian theory would arbitrarily divide even man’s physical and sensational nature from that of the other animals. To remedy this, Descartes admitted that man was just as much an automatic machine as other creatures. By what right, then, does he complain when he happens to have a toothache? Because, says Descartes triumphantly, man has an immortal soul! The child thinks in his mother’s womb, but the dog, which after scenting two roads takes the third without demur, sure that his master must have gone that way, this dog is acting “by springs” and neither thinks nor feels at all.
The misuse of the ill-treated word “Nature” cannot hide the fact that the beginning, middle, and end of Descartes’ argument rests on a perpetually recurrent miracle. Descartes confessed as much when he said that God could make animals as machines, so why should it be impossible that He had made them as machines? Voltaire’s clear reason revolted at this logic; he declared it to be absurd to imagine that God had given animals organs of feeling in order that they might not feel. He would have endorsed Professor Romanes’ saying that “the theory of animal automatism which is usually attributed to Descartes can never be accepted by common sense.”
On the other hand, while Descartes was being persecuted by the Church for opinions which he did not hold, this particular opinion of his was seized upon by Catholic divines as a vindication of creation. Pascal so regarded it. The miraculous element in it did not disturb him. Malebranche said though opposed by reason it was approved by faith.
Descartes said that the idea that animals think and feel is a relic of childhood. The idea that they do not think and feel might be more truly called a relic of that darkest side of perverse childhood, the existence of which we are all fain to forget. Whoever has seen a little child throwing stones at a toad on the highway—and sad because his hands are too small to take up the bigger stones to throw—will understand what I mean. I do not wish to allude more than slightly to a point which is of too much importance to pass over in silence. Descartes was a vivisector: so were the pious people at Port Royal who embraced his teaching with enthusiasm, and liked to hear the howls of the dogs they vivisected. M. Émile Ferrière, in his work “L’âme est la fonction du cerveau,” sees in the “souls” of beasts exactly the same nature as in the “soul” of man; the difference, he maintains, is one of degree; though generally inferior, it is sometimes superior to “souls” of certain human groups. Here is a candid materialist who deserves respect. But there is a school of physiologists nowadays which carries on an unflagging campaign in favour of belief in unconscious animal machines which work by springs, while denying that there is a God to wind up the springs, and in conscious human machines, while denying that there is a soul, independent of matter, which might account for the difference. “The wish is father to the thought.” Non ragionam di lor ma guarda e passa.
The strongest of all reasons for dismissing the machine theory of animals is their variety of idiosyncrasy. It is said that to the shepherd no two sheep look alike; it is certain that no two animals of any kind have the same characters. Some are selfish, some are unselfish, some are gentle, some irretrievably ill-tempered both to each other and to man. Some animals do not show much regret at the loss of their offspring, with others it is manifestly the reverse. Édouard Quinet described how on one occasion, when visiting the lions’ cage in the Jardin des Plantes, he observed the lion gently place his large paw on the forehead of the lioness, and so they remained, grave and still, all the time he was there. He asked Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who was with him, what it meant. “Their lion cub,” was the answer, “died this morning.” “Pity, benevolence, sympathy, could be read on those rugged faces.” That these qualities are often absent in sentient beings what man can doubt? But they are not to be found in the best mechanical animals in all Nuremberg!
Nor do machines commonly act as did the dog in the following true story which relates to something that happened during the earthquake of Ash Wednesday, 1887. At a place called Ceriana on the Italian Riviera a poor man who earned his living as a milk-carrier was supposed to have gone on his ordinary rounds, on which he was used to start at four o’clock in the morning. No one, therefore, thought of inquiring about him, but the fact was, that having taken a glass or two of wine in honour of the last night of the Carnival, he had overslept himself, and was still asleep when his cottage fell down upon him. He had a large dog which drew the little cart bearing the milk up the mountain paths, and the dog by chance was outside and safe. He found out where his master lay and succeeded in clearing the masonry so as to uncover his head, which was bleeding. He then set to work to lick the wounds; but, seeing that they went on bleeding, and also that he could not liberate the rest of the body, he started in search of help, running up and down among the surrounding ruins till he met some one, whom he caught hold of by the clothes. The man, however, thought that the dog was mad and fled for his life. Luckily, another man guessed the truth and allowed himself to be guided to the spot. History repeats itself, at least the history of devoted dogs. The same thing happened after the greater earthquake at Messina, when a man, one of the last to be saved, was discovered through the insistence of his little dog, who approached a group of searchers and whined piteously till he persuaded them to follow him to the ruins which concealed his master.
Nor, again, do machines act like a cockatoo I heard of from a witness of the scene. A lady was visiting the zoological gardens in a German town with her daughter, when the little girl was seized with the wish to possess a pretty moulted feather which was lying on the ground in the parrots’ cage. She made several attempts to reach it, but in vain. Seeing which, an old cockatoo hopped solemnly from the back of the cage and taking up the feather in his beak, handed it to the child with an air of the greatest politeness.
One of the first upholders of the idea of legislative protection of animals was Jeremy Bentham, who asked why the law should refuse its protection to any sensitive being? Most people forget the degree of opposition which was encountered by the earlier combatants of cruel practices and pastimes in England. Cobbett made a furious attack on a clergyman who (to his honour) was agitating for the suppression of bull-baiting, “the poor man’s sport,” as Cobbett called it. That it demoralised the poor man as well as tormented the bull never entered into the head of the inimitable wielder of English prose, pure and undefiled, who took it under his (happily) ineffectual protection. “The common law fully sanctions the baiting of bulls,” he wrote, “and, I believe, that to sell the flesh of a bull which has not been baited is an offence which is punishable by that very law to which you appeal” (“Political Register,” June, 1802).
Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals had, in their day, to undergo almost as much criticism and ridicule in England as they now meet with in some parts of the Continent. Even the establishment of the Dogs’ Home in London raised a storm of disapproval, as may be seen by any one who turns over the files of the Times for October, 1860. If the friends of humanity persevere, the change of sentiment which has become an accomplished fact in England will, in the end, triumph elsewhere.
Unfortunately, humane sentiment and humane practice do not progress on a level line. As long ago as 1782 an English writer named Soame Jenyns protested against the wickedness of shooting a bear on an inaccessible island of ice, or an eagle on the mountain’s top. “We are unable to give life and therefore ought not to take it away from the meanest insect without sufficient reason.” What would he say if he came back to earth to find whole species of beautiful winged creatures being destroyed to afford a barbarous ornament for women’s heads?
The “discovery” of Indian literature brought prominently forward in the West the Indian ideas of animals of which the old travellers had given the earliest news. The effect of familiarity with those ideas may be traced in many writers, but nowhere to such an extent as in the works of Schopenhauer, for whom, as for many more obscure students, they formed the most attractive and interesting part of Oriental lore. Schopenhauer cannot speak about animals without using a tone of passionate vehemence which was, without doubt, genuine. He felt the intense enjoyment in observing them which the lonely soul has ever felt, whether it belonged to saint or sinner. All his pessimism disappears when he leaves the haunts of man for the retreats of beasts. What a pleasure it is, he says, to watch a wild animal going about undisturbed! It shows us our own nature in a simpler and more sincere form. “There is only one mendacious being in the world, and that is man. Every other is true and sincere.” It strikes me that total sincerity did not shine on the face of a dog which I once saw trotting innocently away, after burying a rabbit he had caught in a ploughed field near a tree in the hedge—the only tree there was—which would make it easy for him to identify the spot. But about that I will say no more. The German “Friend of the Creature” was indignant at “the unpardonable forgetfulness in which the lower animals have hitherto been left by the moralists of Europe.” The duty of protecting them, neglected by religion, falls to the police. Mankind are the devils of the earth and animals the souls they torment.
Full of these sentiments, Schopenhauer was prepared to welcome unconditionally the Indian conception of the Wheel of Being and to close his eyes to its defects. Strauss, too, hailed it as a doctrine which “unites the whole of Nature in one sacred and mysterious bond”—a bond in which, he goes on to say, a breach has been made by the Judaism and dualism of Christianity. He might have observed that the Church derived her notions on the subject rather from Aristotle than from Semitic sources.
Schopenhauer came to the conclusion that the ill-treatment of animals arose directly from the denial to them of immortality, while it was ascribed to men. There is and there is not truth in this. When all is said, the well-conditioned man always was and always will be humane; “the righteous man regardeth the life of his beast.” And since people reason to fit their acts rather than act to fit their reasoning, he will even find a motive for his humanity where others find an excuse for the lack of it. Humphry Primatt wrote in 1776: “Cruelty to a brute is an injury irreparable because there is no future life to be a compensation for present afflictions.”
Mr. Lecky, in his “History of European Morals,” tells of a Cardinal who let himself be bitten by gnats because “we have heaven, but these poor creatures only present enjoyment!” Could Jaina do more?
Strauss thought that the rising tide of popular sentiment about animals was the direct result of the abandonment by science of the spiritualistic isolation of man from Nature. I suspect that those who have worked hardest for animals in the last half-century cared little about the origin of species, while it is certain that some professed evolutionists have been their worst foes. The fact remains, however, that by every rule of logic the theory of evolution ought to produce the effect which Strauss thought that it had produced. The discovery which gives its name to the nineteenth century revolutionises the whole philosophic conception of the place of animals in the Universe.
Lamarck, whom Cuvier so cruelly attacked, was the first to discern the principle of evolution. At one time he held the Chair of Zoology at the University of Paris; but the opposition which his ideas met with crushed him in body, though not in soul, and he died blind and in want in 1829, only consoled by the care of an admirable daughter. His last words are said to have been that it is easier to discover a truth than to convince others of it.
An Italian named Carlo Lessona was one of the first to be convinced. He wrote a work containing the phrase, “The intelligence of animals”—which work, by the rule then in force, had to be presented to the ecclesiastical Censor at Turin to receive his permit before publication. The canon who examined the book fell upon the words above mentioned, and remarked: “This expression, ‘intelligence of animals,’ will never do!” “But,” said Lessona, “it is commonly used in natural history books.” “Oh!” replied the canon, “natural history has much need of revision.”[[12]]
[12]. See Dr. F. Franzolini’s interesting monograph on animal psychology from the point of view of science (“Intelligenza delle Bestie,” Udine, 1899).
The great and cautious Darwin said that the senses, intuitions, emotions, and faculties, such as love, memory, attention, curiosity, imitation, reason, of which man boasts, may be found in an incipient, or even, sometimes, in a well-developed condition in the lower animals. “Man, with all his noble qualities, his God-like intellect, still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. Our brethren fly in the air, haunt the bushes, and swim in the sea.” Darwin agreed with Agassiz in recognising in the dog something very like the human conscience.
Dr. Arnold said that the whole subject of the brute creature was such a painful mystery that he dared not approach it. Michelet called animal life a “sombre mystery,” and shuddered at the “daily murder,” hoping that in another globe “these base and cruel fatalities may be spared to us.” It is strange to find how many men of very different types have wandered without a guide in these dark alleys of speculation. A few of them arrived at, or thought they had arrived at, a solution. Lord Chesterfield wrote that “animals preying on each other is a law of Nature which we did not make, and which we cannot undo, for if I do not eat chickens my cat will eat mice.” But the appeal to Nature will not satisfy every one; our whole human conscience is a protest against Nature, while our moral actions are an attempt to effect a compromise. Paley pointed out that the law was not good, since we could live without animal food and wild beasts could not. He offered another justification, the permission of Scripture. This was satisfactory to him, but he must have been aware that it waives the question without answering it.
Some humane people have taken refuge in the automata argument, which is like taking a sleeping-draught to cure a broken leg. Others, again, look for justice to animals in the one and only hope that man possesses of justice to himself; in compensation after death for unmerited suffering in this life. Leibnitz said that Eternal Justice ought to compensate animals for their misfortunes on earth. Bishop Butler would not deny a future life to animals.
Speaking of her approaching death, Mrs. Somerville said: “I shall regret the sky, the sea, with all the changes of their beautiful colouring; the earth with its verdure and flowers: but far more shall I grieve to leave animals who have followed our steps affectionately for years, without knowing for certainty their ultimate fate, though I firmly believe that the living principle is never extinguished. Since the atoms of matter are indestructible, as far as we know, it is difficult to believe that the spark which gives to their union life, memory, affection, intelligence, and fidelity, is evanescent.”
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, seven or eight small works, written in Latin in support of this thesis, were published in Germany and Sweden. Probably in all the world a number, unsuspectedly large, of sensitive minds has endorsed the belief expressed so well in the lines which Southey wrote on coming home to find that a favourite old dog had been “destroyed” during his absence:—
... “Mine is no narrow creed;
And He who gave thee being did not frame
The mystery of life to be the sport
Of merciless man! There is another world
For all that live and move—a better one!
Where the proud bipeds, who would fain confine
Infinite Goodness to the little bounds
Of their own charity, may envy thee!”
The holders of this “no narrow creed” start with all the advantages from the mere point of view of dialectics. They can boast that they have placed the immortality of the soul on a scientific basis. For truly, it is more reasonable to suppose that the soul is natural than supernatural, a word invented to clothe our ignorance; and, if natural, why not universal?
They have the right to say, moreover, that they and they alone have “justified the ways of God.” They alone have admitted all creation that groaneth and travaileth to the ultimate guerdon of the “Love which moves the sun and other stars.”