[12] West African Studies, pp. 157-68.
Then take travelling. It is referred to by Lord Avebury as one great source of pleasure which civilised people enjoy, but which savages do not. He should have restricted the proposition to civilised women. No word more terrible in the ears of a husband than "Paris" on the lips of a wife. What worry, what anxiety, fear of adventurers, horror of waiters, hatred of hotels—what misery, in short, of almost every degree and kind, do not men go through who have to travel with their families! How they would all stay at home if they only could, and how glad they are—but this is a set-off—when they get back! As a real fact—and every one must really know it—a very great number of so-called civilised pleasures are much more in the nature of pains—and acute ones—to those who are most truly civilised. The joys of the savage, however, are real joys.
But comparisons of this sort are of little value, since they can only be drawn by those who belong to one of the two states, and not to both of them, and who, therefore, besides their prejudices, and that their wish is generally father to their thought, are of necessity unable to feel, or even to imagine, much of what is felt by members of the opposite one. Practically, of course, it is always the civilised man who passes judgment, and in doing so he often adds cant and insincerity to the disabilities under which he labours. For whilst insisting to the utmost on all the pleasures—many of them empty and artificial—which belong to and represent the civilised state, he says little or nothing about certain elementary, and, therefore, very real ones, which savages enjoy much more unrestrainedly than do we. Very fair, very impartial, truly, when the question is not which is the more advanced man, but which is the happier man. We have much the same sort of thing in the case of comparisons made by Christian divines and historians as between paganism and Christianity—their relative degree of truth, merit, influence in a right direction, etc.; judgment, of course, being always given in favour—generally immensely in favour—of the latter. Seeing that the pagans are all dead and cannot answer any point made against them, I wonder these complacent bestowers of unqualified approval on themselves are not ashamed to bluster so, where they have it all their own way. When I read one of these prejudiced panegyrics, affecting the form and manner of impartiality, I always seem to see a picture of some reverend old learned priest of Jupiter or Apollo, who, in similar pompous periods, and with the very same tones and gestures which one can imagine in the Christian author, goes over the same ground, and, with the same show of absolute fairness, settles everything precisely the opposite way.
As I have slidden out of a consideration of the relative happiness enjoyed by man and the lower animals into a similar appraisement as between the civilised man and the savage, I will just express my opinion (at this moment) that wherever the latter has the advantage over the former, the animal a fortiori has it still more. Amongst animals, moreover, there is not the same inequality of pleasure, as between the sexes, that there is, or is thought to be, amongst savages. But this is enough of la haute philosophie.
How snug it is, now, whilst I write this by the red fire in the little sentry-box, on the great lonely ness that the wind howls over, whose head-gear are the wreathing mists, and whose skirtings the sea and the sea-birds! There is no one within near three miles, and I myself am alone. On the "great lonely veldt," as city journalists like to call it, you have your boys, the fires, and the oxen sitting by the waggon-chain, and chewing the cud—a picturesque, a romantic and interesting scene, but not a lonely one. Here it is real aloneness—yet I wish I had not to say, with Scipio, that "I am never less alone than when alone." True solitude should imply no fleas.
During the time that this large bottle-nosed seal was away, a small common one—the same that lies on the rock in this sea-pool every day from before it is uncovered to the flowing in of the tide—came and disported himself—as usual I had said, but it was not quite the same. He first began to dive and reappear, at regular intervals, as does the great one, and I soon found that he was behaving like him in all things, even to the standing on end in the water, like a peg-top, with his nose straight up in the air. As his body, however, is not so bladdery, and his nose not so extraordinary, he did not present so strange an aspect. He differed, moreover, in the length of his immersions, which was not more than five or six minutes, whilst those of the other one—the great, portly bottle-nose—were as under, viz., from 12.6 to 12.15; from 12.16½ to 12.26; from 12.27 to 12.36½; from 12.37½ to 12.48; from 4.26 to 4.39; from 4.40 to 4.54½; from 4.55½ to 5.7¾; from 5.9½ to 5.23; from 5.24½ to 5.37½; from 5.38½ to 5.51; from 5.52½ to 6.4¼; from 6.5½ to 6.18¾. Thus only three out of a dozen of his subaqueous excursions was for less than ten minutes, the shortest one being for nine minutes and the longest for fourteen minutes and a half. His stays above water were of even more uniform duration, varying between a minute and a minute and a half, except in one instance where he stayed a minute and three quarters. An animal of regular habits, by my fay! No doubt the great bottle-nose can stay down longer on occasions if he wishes it, but as this is his usual period, it must, I suppose, be what he finds most comfortable; and the same should apply to every other kind of seal. The nostrils of this larger one have the appearance of being more highly developed than in the common species, and this may have something to do with his more prolonged submersions, if I may take what I have seen in these two individuals as typical of their respective communities.
Returning now to the common seal, what distinguished him this afternoon from the bottle-nosed one was that, after he had come up and gone down again several times, he at last remained floating for half an hour or more in this perpendicular fashion, his head for the most part straight up in the air, whilst at intervals he would open his mouth widely, and keep it so for some seconds at a time, then shutting and again opening it, as though he had some special object in so doing, though I can form no conjecture as to what it was. The inside of his mouth being—especially the parts farthest down—of a deep and bright red, contrasted most vividly with the cold grey of the water and the general colourlessness of this northern scene. The grass must be excepted from this picture; but though bright enough if looked at by itself, it is unable to overpower the general effect imparted by sky, by sea, by naked rock and precipice. After a considerable time spent in this curious performance, the seal at last desists and swims to his rock, now but thinly covered by the waves. He circumnavigates it, hangs about it affectionately, lies upon it in the wash of the waves, swims away again, returns, and now, it being just possible to do so, reclines in earnest, adjusting himself to his greater satisfaction as the tide recedes.
But it is not only on the rocks that seals lie sleeping. They do so also—as one is doing now—in the sea itself, rising and sinking with the heave and subsidence of the wave, advancing and retiring with its flux and reflux without exhibiting any kind of independent motion—less, indeed, than they indulged in, in basking on the rocks; for they do not, whilst thus floating, seem so inclined to scratch or kick or stretch the legs, or go through any other of their various quaint, uncouth actions. The eyes are shut, but they open at long, lazy intervals. They float, or rather drift, thus, mostly belly downwards, but will roll to either side or even round on to the back, not lying horizontally, however, but aslant, with all except their head, or rather face, sunk down in the water, just like a sack of something, quite enough asleep to seem dead; in fact, as much as possible they make the sea a rock. Delicious they look, thus idly swayed about with the play of the waves—drawn this way and that, sucked down and then back again; mixed up with a tangle of seaweed. An amateur watcher of seals feels inclined to wonder what they ever do except sleep, or try to sleep. Great sleepers they certainly seem to be, and this is the daytime. Are they, then, nocturnal? The carnivorous land animals from whom they are descended probably were so.