T
THAT wren was an interlude, and the puffins another. When he of the bottle-nose returned, I at first used the shelter which I had constructed during his absence, but soon left it for another great precipice of a rock that also overhung the pool, and in which a huge fracture, half-way up, made a splendid natural concealment. Afterwards, however, I came to the conclusion that as long as one behaved with any sense of propriety, avoiding loud or startling noises, and not putting oneself shamelessly en évidence, these seals would never take alarm, for indeed they seemed to have lived all their lives in a happy unfamiliarity with man, upon which terms I devoutly hope they may continue.
Well, like the world, one does go forward, though slowly. Not so many years ago the sight of these seals would have made me want to shoot them. God alone knows why—or, rather, I know why, perfectly well: the inherited instinct of the savage, which is not in itself, as some humanitarians think, a bad thing, or at any rate in the savage it was not, only it is now out of place, and reason and morality together ought to insist upon crushing it. It is because the wish, or rather passion, to kill wild animals is so natural, that it seems so right to those who have it, for the strong desire to do almost anything makes almost anything seem right, or rather the impelling force in such cases is a force, whereas that which seeks to restrain it is weak, cold, frigid, like the voice of reason in love.
Moreover, I believe that to sin out the evil in one is nature's true way of progress—in which I join issue with the spiritualistic doctrine of repression—and therefore were it not for the many ill consequences, the worst of which is specific extinction, I should not think a man did wrong to prey upon the animal world as long as to do so was his nature—that is to say, the stronger part of his nature; nor can it be denied that he who does so is acting in accordance with the scheme of the universe, as far as it is possible to make it out, whereas the humanitarian seems for ever to be flying in the very face of the deity, who, "with no uncertain voice," has said, through all time, to all His creatures:—"Kill one another." Whether one would be right to obey such a deity after one's nature has begun to rebel against His methods is another question, though, as plants must be included amongst the creatures, it would be rather difficult not to; but that, at any rate, is what He, or nature, or whatever we may choose to call it, has most clearly said, and I think that humanitarians, though they may be very right, ought to consider the difficulty here involved. My impression is that they shirk it.
But in regard to sport, I wish that every civilised representative of the savage in this particular respect would arrive at the point where I now stand, by the same natural process which has brought me there. One cannot long watch any creature without insensibly beginning to sympathise with it, to enter into its state, to imagine oneself it—which is to be it—and then, how can one shoot oneself? Why, it would be suicide. As for me, I watch wild animals, when I get the chance, not only with sympathy, but with envy. I am eternally wishing myself them—strange as it may appear to some who, I suppose, rate themselves highly. That was Iago's case. "Ere I would," says he, etc., etc. (something very preposterous), "I would exchange my humanity with a baboon." Well, and why not? With a guarantee against getting into the Zoological Gardens, most of us would be gainers by the bargain. I, at any rate—I say it merely as an expression of my conviction; let my enemies make the worst of it—I, at any rate, would. As to the advantages which would have accrued from the arrangement in Iago's case—not only to himself, but to almost all the dramatis personæ of the play—they are too obvious to need pointing out. Baboons, however, stand so high in the scale that the change for many of us would, except in regard to surroundings, be hardly perceptible, so that the desire to bring it about may offer too little proof of that force of sympathy which I pretend to. But I do not stop there, and even at this very moment I would gladly exchange myself with this bottle-nosed seal I am watching, could I bring myself to cheat the poor fool so. Oh that fine sensuous roll in the water! made with such sense of enjoyment—so slow, so lazy, eking it out—the whole of the animal seeming to smack its lips.
We "human mortals," I believe, quite underestimate the sensuous pleasures of animals. Their mere ways of moving must often be infinite joys to them, seeing that besides the motion itself—as with this seal, the gnu, or the springbok, the half-flying arboreal monkey, or the soaring bird—there is the ecstasy of perfect health and strength and the freedom of perfect nudity—absolute disencumbrance. The first of these may be felt almost, perhaps, in as great a degree by some savages, but if I may judge by my own experience it never is and never can be by a civilised man leading a civilised life. With us, speaking generally, health is more a negative than an affirmative proposition. To be well is not to be ill. But in the veldt, where one walks all day and eats one hearty meal by the camp-fire at the end of it, it is like a strong wine that one has drunk. It is a mighty, stirring, active, compelling force—ending, however, in fever, which the animals don't get. No doubt the pleasures of the intellect are of a higher order than those which spring from mere corporeal ecstasy; but is the civilised man, writing a treatise, happier than the savage in his war-dance, or the capercailzie going through his love antics? "That is the question"; or, in other words, does civilisation make for happiness?
Who, in spite of much laboured reasoning to the contrary, can doubt that more happiness enters into the life of most savages than into that of most civilised men? Not I, who have seen the Kaffirs, unblessed by our rule, and read Wallace's account of the Papuans in The Malay Archipelago, which, to show that I am not talking nonsense, I will here quote: "These forty black, naked, mop-headed savages seemed intoxicated with joy and excitement. Not one of them could remain still for a moment.... A few presents of tobacco made their eyes glisten; they would express their satisfaction by grins and shouts, by rolling on deck, or by a headlong leap overboard. Schoolboys on an unexpected holiday, Irishmen at a fair, or midshipmen on shore, would give but faint idea of the exuberant animal enjoyment of these people." The grown Papuan, therefore, is happier—so it struck Wallace—than the civilised schoolboy. It is a well-chosen point of comparison. We are not ashamed, most of us, to look back to our boyhood as to a state of high-tide happiness that, upon the whole, with a fluctuation or two not quite in favour of the intellect, has been receding ever since; but we kick at thinking savages happier than ourselves. Kick as we may, the Arab on his horse or his swift dromedary, the Lap on his snow-shoes, the Esquimaux in his canoe, the Indian chasing the buffalo—as he used to do—or the Pacific Islander surf-riding, carry it, I believe, as far as sheer happiness is concerned, high over the civilised man with all his greater powers of mind and his advanced morality.
"But witchcraft, with its terrors," says some one. True; but I have lain in a Kaffir village on the banks of the Zambesi, within the murmur of its Falls, and watched the young men and maidens dancing together in the full moon—there seemed little of terror there. And I have seen my own boys talking and smoking dacha round the camp fires. Where was the brooding terror, or the dark cloud? Savages do not anticipate, as we do. They feel no uncertain evils, not, at least, till they are very near indeed, till the wizard is actually "smelling" them out; they live, like the animal, in the joy or pain of the moment, and their moments have more of joy and less of pain in them than ours.
But if witchcraft were the "dark cloud that hangs for ever over savage life," that Lord Avebury (Sir John Lubbock) tells us it is, have we no dark clouds, and have we less or more capacity for feeling them? What is an engagement to dine then, or an enforced call? and consider the dark cloud of having to go every year, en famille, to the seaside, that hangs over the civilised married wretch! Surely the certainty of things like these is worse than only the risk of a witchcraft exposure, a thing which, when it occurs amongst savages (and it was the same with ourselves) is often, if not generally, deserved—for evidence of which I would refer to Miss Kingsley.[12]