“The dog, to gain his private ends,
Went mad, and bit the man,”
[202] ]there has been nothing to equal the humour of this imputed wickedness. A simple person might suppose that the lion paused to spit in poison, or at least deliberately poisoned his teeth and claws; whereas, of course, he merely does not clean them properly. Having to live in the backwoods of Africa, and support himself somehow, he cannot command the toilet requisites of Belgravia. Is not that wicked? And his cowardice, in not standing to be shot at, is uncommonly like that of the Boers. Why should he not avoid the enemy’s fire?
In truth, it is plain that the author, as indeed he tells us, was not describing what he saw, but repeating what he was told. His words are not a “living picture,” but, if he will allow me to say it, a bloody blur, which no more gives an idea of the real fight than the hospital beds give an idea of a battle. In the supreme hour of conflict, both sides “see red,” but not in that way. Neither thinks of wounds. There seems to be no time for that. The only thought is how to kill; and in the glad excitement the manifold details of life and all its conventions, which seem so real in cold blood, are crumpled up like stage properties in a conflagration; and all seems fair in war, and all is fair; and the issue lies with the God of battles, [203] ]and not with the elderly lawyers at The Hague or anywhere else.
So much the worse is it then for the lions, and so much the worse for any man or nation found unready, unprepared. Ah, if we could only regulate battles like law-courts, how different the world would be! But God knows best. It somehow must be better as it is.
If this Englishman or any other man would meet the lion on equal terms, as knight met knight in the Middle Ages, I am sure there is not a lion, young or old, in Africa, there is not a tiger in India or Burma, that would not accept the challenge with pleasure. As the challenged party would have the choice of weapons, and a sportsman could not object to fair-play, we may be sure that “Nature’s weapons” would be the lion’s choice, and the victory swift and certain for the lion, even if it rained Englishmen, to say nothing of other people.
This is an old, old story. Hercules himself had to use a club and poisoned arrows. It is by tools and co-operation that we master the other beasts. The cats are a particularly easy conquest, as they are bigoted individualists. But let us not add insult to injury, and call them cowardly because they dodge us. When next our author is at [204] ]Lucerne, let him step aside into the garden there and look at Thorwaldsen’s lion, cut in the living rock, and see whether it does not lift his thoughts above the shambles. The wounded lion he described, according to the reviewer, was “trying to slink off.” Thorwaldsen shows what it was seeking to die in peace. Why chase and torture him more? To get his hide? The lion-hunter, whoever he was, although he risked his life gratuitously, was like a silly child pulling a cat’s tail and a thoughtlessly cruel child, for this big cat was in mortal agony.
Machinery-murder, for beasts of every kind, including men, is now a fact inevitable, and, like everything inevitable, it bears a blessing in it, if only we submit to the will of the Almighty, and recognise what He has brought to pass. The blessing latent in this apparent affliction, perhaps, is that we may cease to admire the business of slaughter; and if so, what a stream of blessings may flow from that one.
“For ever since historian writ,
And ever since a bard could sing,