It was said by Gibbon, that it was the privilege of the medieval church “to defend nonsense by cruelties.” Nowadays we see the patrons of sport, vivisection, butchery, and other time-honoured institutions, adopting the contrary process, and defending cruelties by nonsense. And by what nonsense! I do not know where else one can find such grotesque absurdities, such utter topsy-turvydom of argument, as in the quibbling modern brutality which gives sophisticated reasons for perpetuating savage customs.
Of some of the fallacies of the cannibalistic conscience I have already spoken: a volume could easily be filled with not less diverting utterances culled from kindred fields of thought. The apologists of the Royal Buckhounds, for instance, were comedians of the first rank, a troupe of entertainers who long ago anticipated “The Follies.” Did they not themselves assure us that, in hunting the carted stag, they “rode to save the deer for another day”? Such devotion needed another Lovelace:
Did’st wonder, since my love was such,
I hunted thee so sore?
I could not love thee, Deer, so much,
Loved I not Hunting more.
The stag, so a noble lord pointed out at a meeting of the Sporting League, was “a most pampered animal.” “When he was going to be hunted, he was carried to the meet in a comfortable cart. When set down, the first thing he did was to crop the grass. When the hounds got too near, they were stopped. By and by he lay down, and was wheeled back to his comfortable home. It was a life many would like to live.” Thus it was shown to be a deprivation, to humans and non-humans alike, not to be hunted by a pack of staghounds over a country of barbed wire and broken bottles. Life seemed poor and mean without it.
Fox-hunting, too, has always been refreshingly rich in sophistries. The farmer is adjured to be grateful to the Hunt, because the fox is killed, and the fox because his species (not himself) is “preserved”$1 thus the sportsman takes credit either way—on the one hand, for the destruction of a pest; on the other, for saving similar pests from extermination. It is a scene for a Gilbertian opera or a “Bab Ballad”; it makes one feel that this British blood-sport must be deleterious not only to the victims of the chase, but to the mental capacity of the gentlemen who indulge in it.
The climax of absurdity was reached, perhaps, in the dedication by the Archbishop of York (Dr. Cosmo Lang) of a stained window—a very stained window, as was remarked at the time—in the church of Moor Monkton, to the memory of the Rev. Charles Slingsby, an aged blood-sportsman who broke his neck in the hunting-field. That a minister should have been “launched into eternity,” as the phrase is, while chasing a fox, might have been expected to cause a sense of deep pain, if not shame, to his co-religionists: what happened was that an Archbishop was found willing to eulogize, in a consecrated place of worship, not only the old gentleman whose life was thus thrown away, but the sport of fox-hunting itself: Dr. Lang pronounced, in fact, what may be called the Foxology. Of the stained window, with its representation, on one part, of St. Hubert and the stag, and on the other of St. Francis—yes, St. Francis—giving his blessing to the birds, one can only think with a smile. A few months later, an Izaak Walton memorial window was placed in Winchester Cathedral in honour of “the quaint old cruel coxcomb” whom Byron satirized. Whether, in this work of religious art, the pious angler is portrayed in the act of impaling the live frog on the hook “as if he loved him,” the newspapers did not state.
Many instances might be quoted of the deep godliness, at times even religious rapture, felt by the votaries of blood-sports; perhaps one from the German Crown Prince’s Leaves from my Hunting Diary is most impressive: “To speak of religious feelings is a difficult matter. I only know one thing—I have never felt so near my God as when I, with my rifle on my knee, sat in the golden loneliness of high mountains, or in the moving silence of the evening forest.” This sort of sentiment is by no means exclusively of German make. Listen to the piety of a big game-hunter, Mr. H. W. Seton-Karr: “Why did Almighty God create lions to prey on harmless animals? And should we not, even at the expense of a donkey as bait, be justified in reducing their number?” Here, again, is what the Rev. Walter Crick had to say in defence of the fur-trade: “If it is wrong to carry a sealskin muff, the camel’s-hair raiment of St. John Baptist, to say nothing of the garments worn by our first parents in the Garden of Eden, stands equally condemned.”
Strictly ecclesiastical was the tone of a pamphlet which hailed from New York State, entitled “The Dog Question, discussed in the Interest of Humanity,” and concluded in these terms: “Now, my boy or girl, whichever you are, drop this nonsense about dogs. They are demanding valuable time that should be employed in teaching such as you. A dog cannot love you. You cannot love a dog. Naught beside a divine soul can love or be loved. Chloroform your dog, and take to reading your Testament.”
I once overheard a clergyman, who had taken his seat at a tea-table in a Surrey garden, sharply call to order some boys of his party who were striking wildly at wasps and mashing them with any instrument that was handy. I listened, thinking that at last I was going to hear some wise words on that silly and disgusting practice in which many excitable persons indulge; but it turned out that the cause of the reverend gentleman’s displeasure was merely that he had not yet “said grace”: that done, the wasp-mashing was resumed without interruption.
Space would fail me, were I to attempt to cite one-hundredth part of the amazing Book of Fallacies written in defence of Brutality. “Methinks,” said Sir Herbert Maxwell, “were it possible to apply the referendum to our flocks and herds, the reply would come in a fashion on which vegetarians scarcely calculate.” There would be a universal roar of remonstrance, it seems, from oxen, sheep, and swine, at the proposal to sever their grateful association with the drover and the slaughterman. Even more delightful was Mr. W. T. Stead, when he received from the spirit world a message to the effect that vegetarianism was good for some persons but not good for him. That message, I think, smacked less of the starry spheres than of the Review of Reviews office: if it was not pure spirit, it was pure Stead.