Year after year, so long as the splendid creatures are cheapened "to make a Roman holiday," they move not so much under protest as with black sullen fatalism. We have all seen them rise to the lash in the hands of a spangled circus female, who must end, forsooth, by inserting her pomatumed head in their too-enduring jaws; and it is not unusual for them to spring at the just-closed door, with the fell strength of that soft and terrible left fore-paw. Their action is, of course, perfunctory; and since they are notoriously brave, and not to be cowed, obedience in them has a strange pathos. They are trained to sit up, and roll barrels, and fire cannon, and jump hoops; yes, even to scowl and swear, to the terror of "men, women and Herveys," between the scenes of their bitter comedy; yet the clown's circumstance cannot touch a hair of those mournful magnific heads. Their sleep is broken with poked umbrellas, and a patter of foolish nuts and cookies; and, from a dream of the fragrant jungles and the torrents of home, they come anew upon the cyclorama of human faces, and the babble of foreign tongues. They live no longer from hand to mouth, as they do in their native haunts; their needs, nay, their whims, are studied and gratified; they serve painters, naturalists, schoolboys; they give employment; they call forth thought, love, courage. And many sympathizers and well-wishers are shortsighted enough to congratulate caged animals, and think them happily circumstanced. Your point of view depends, perhaps, on how much passion for out-of-doors, for solitude, is in your own blood; and on your sense of the lengths to which human interference may go with the works of God. We give these lives subjected to our laudable curiosity, strange exchanges: for moss knee-deep, and the dews and aroma of the woody ground, a raised sawdust floor; and for an outlook through craggy glens,
"Chamber from chamber parted with wavering arras of leaves,"
a whitewashed wall nine feet high, a stucco sky which has not the look of Nubia, nor Barbary, nor Arabia, any more.
Our father Adam is said to have dwelt in peace with all the beasts in his Garden. And there is no evidence in the Mosaic annals that it was they who became perverted, and broke faith with man! Marry, man himself, in the birth of his moral ugliness, set up the hateful division, estranged these inestimable friends, and then, unto everlasting, pursues, maligns, subjugates, and kills the beings braver, shrewder, and more innocent than he. He has wrested from its beautiful meaning his "dominion over them." Power made him tyrannous, and tyranny bred in its victims hate and revenge and fear, and from the footfall of man all creation flees away, unless, indeed, as in Swift's most telling allegory, where the cultured Houyhnhnms may succeed in subjecting the Yahoos. For man alone is the fallen angel of the lower order:
"The King, from height of all his painted glory,"
has sunk into vulgar dreams of coercion, breathing dual impiety against his Maker and his mates. Save him, there is no other perverted animal; not one clad otherwise, or minded otherwise, than his archetype. Men in sealskins; women in swansdown, with heron-aigrettes; children in cocoon-spun silk, their hands and feet in strange sheathings torn from the young of the goat and the cow;—what are these but ludicrous violators of the decencies of the universe? If there be beasts in Heaven "with eye down-dropt" upon the temperate and polar zones, they cannot lack diversion. It is, moreover, part of our plot to deny them immortality, and to attempt to interpose our jurisdiction, in such abstruse matters, between them and their Author, towards whom they yet bear an unshamed front. For man the animal is but a beggarly lump. He has never shown himself so provident as the ant, so ingenious as the beaver, so faithful as the dove, so forgiving as the hound. His senses are eternally below par; his artistic faculties are befogged. The humblest thrush is an architect and musician by eldest family tradition, while it takes him a thousand years to conceive an ogee arch and a viol d'amore. And having driven from his pestilential company the whole retinue of dear esquires, he began shamefacedly to reclaim them to his service. The horse came back, generously hiding his apprehensions; the pig and the hen mechanically, at the prospect of free bed and board; the dog with his glad conciliation, the cat with her aristocrat reserves. These abide with us, suffer through us, are persuasive and voluble, and endeavor to reconcile us with the great majority of wild livers, from whom we are divorced. In vain do they so press upon us our own lack of logic. We address them individually: "You, O immigrant, are personally pleasing unto me; but your fellows, your blood-relations, your customs in your own country,—ach Himmel!" Our popular speech insults them at every turn: "as silly as a goose," "as vain as a peacock," "as ugly as a rat," "as obstinate as a mule," "as cross as a bear," "as dirty as a dog," "as sick as a dog," "to be hanged like a dog," "a dog's life," "Cur!" "Puppy!" Surely, no class of creatures, unless Jews in the twelfth century, have ever undergone such groundless contumely. Every word of Shylock's famous plea stands good for them, as also its close. "If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and, if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that." When we hear of a writer who advises the practice of "courtesy" towards animals, and of a little girl who hoarded up wisdom from the speech of a turtle, our memories couple them as Alice—and Sir Arthur Helps—in Wonderland. If it be in Utopia alone that murderous "sport" is impossible, and that only there it breeds rational pity when after a day's run, "a harmless and fearfull Hare should be devour'd by strong, fierce, and cruell Dogges," how far are we not from the time when modern conscientiousness shall make us just even to the exiles pent in a menagerie? Our laws deal with these in a spirit of the most flagrant injustice. While every jury allows for reprisals, when dealing with human crime, no biped else, and no quadruped, with however blameless a record, under whatever provocation, can be allowed an instant's hearing, when so much as suspected of a transgression. A leopard here at the Zoo revolts, perhaps for no specific cause. He is tired of being enslaved, and would resume sincerity. He offends; he is executed, leaving ineradicable influences among the cages, as if their Danton had gone by, audible again: "Que mon nom soit flétri; que la France soit libre!" Or the keeper abominably abuses a certain elephant, a very saint for patience, a genius for cleverness, a hero for humor; and six years after, the same elephant, in another duchy, spies his old tormentor, winds his lithe proboscis about his waist, and neatly cracks him against a wall. A dozen influential persons plead, as defence for the assassin, his unparalleled nobleness of character; but the public blood is up: he has to die. To some reforms we shall never come, for thought about them is deadened in us by the operation of our accursed generic pride. Our codes approximate too painfully to the largeness of the universal plan. We have, indeed, conceived of other suns, other systems, than ours; but the hope is slight that we can ever admit beasts, not to certain terms of equality with our own esteemed species, but even to the personal pronoun, and a place in the divine economy. Arrogance is bad for us, and bad for them. The very bliss of power is to protect and forbear; could we learn it, we might, perhaps, inspire it in the shark, the jackal, and the butcher-bird. Meanwhile, in the maintenance of penal laws against our Ishmaels, it can at least be urged that, as yet, we know no better. As we are drowned in ignorance, it is inconceivable that we shall be hanged for sacrilege! Could we analyze the impressions of uncultivated persons, received from the centaurs in the Parthenon frieze, or the Sphinx of elder Egypt, we should probably discover that these are looked upon as mere monsters: a compound of man and horse, or of woman and lioness, the conception of which is abhorrent and distressing to the mind. (It is to be hoped that there are "stuck-up" horses and lionesses to adopt the corresponsive view). But the artists of the race, from the world's beginning, souls of a benign fancy, have gone on creating these mythic "monsters." Long-eared fauns abound, and mermaids with silver and vermilion scales, and angels borne on vast white gull-like wings: dear non-anatomical shapes, for the most part, full of odd charm, and of a spiritual application which will last out until we are humble and humorous enough to read it. Nor, on second thought, can we fail to see gravest changes adumbrating the subject. The Latin nations lag behind in conciliations, and England leads. There were not many, long ago, who passed the fraternal word to beasts: those who did so, Sidney, More, Vaughan, were the flower of their kind, and not without suspicion of "queerness." Lord Erskine, less than three generations back, suffered great obloquy for his championship of what we are almost ready to concede as the "rights" of animals. Coleridge was well laughed at for saluting the ass's little foal as his brother. But Burns was not laughed at for his field-mouse, nor Blake for his fly. And there is no single characteristic of modern life so novel, so significant, as the yearning affectionateness with which our youngest poets allude to fauna, and so adorn a moral. The habit has grown with them, until every Pan's pipe breathes sweet pieties to the less articulate world. A line of Celia Thaxter, addressed to a mussel on the stormy Maine strand, has been their unconscious key-note.
"Thou thought of God! ... what more than thou am I!"
For Darwin has come and gone, and cut our boast from under us.