The idea that feeling is a weakness, and that it is well to suppress it in the education of boys, is more in accordance with the opinion of the Red Indians than with that of the ancient Greeks. The best education would respect all natural and healthy sentiment, such as a boy’s love for his mother, without ridiculing it, but would at the same time train the boy in the courage which has always been compatible with tenderness, ay, and even with tears. Amongst the services of an unobtrusive kind which Queen Victoria has rendered to the English, one of the best has been by setting an example of openness in matters of feeling. She has permitted her subjects to see what she felt on many occasions, and has done this simply, plainly, and without the dread of sneering depreciation. The same healthy influence is often exercised by women in narrower spheres. There is more than ever room for this feminine influence in an age like ours, when the positivism of the scientific and industrial temper, and the fierce competition amongst individual men, as well as between nations, are hardening the heart of the world. The due exercise and culture of the feelings are always appreciated at their right value in literature and the fine arts; it is a strange and striking anomaly that we fail to perceive their equal importance in the reality of life itself.
A French Gentleman and his Carriage Horses.
Sport and Gourmandise.
A Horrible Custom at Sens.
There is one department of the culture of feeling in which the English are far superior to the French—that of sympathy with the lower animals. The French are humane enough where human beings are concerned, but their humanity, as a rule, is confined to pity for the sufferings of their own species. There are exceptions, of course. I know several Frenchwomen who are full of sympathy for cats and dogs, and I have known French grooms who were thoughtful and kind and even affectionate in their treatment of horses; nevertheless, as a nation, the French are hard and pitiless in comparison with the English. All sentiments appear ridiculous when we do not share them, so the French laugh at English humanitarianism as the British critic laughs at a Frenchman’s tenderness about his mother. My favourite French newspaper, the Temps, never misses an opportunity for a hit at this English eccentricity. French hardness dates from the time when the influence of the Church was universal; and, whether she taught the doctrine formally or not, her followers believed that animals, being unbaptized, had no rights. A dog or a horse is an infidel, and therefore cruelty to it is blameless. The decline of religious influence might have led one to hope for a broader charity, but there unhappily came the scientific spirit, which, though not cruel for the sake of cruelty, is heedless of animal suffering, and ready to inflict tortures on the lower animals worse than the torments of the Inquisition. So, in fact, the condition of the poor brutes has gone from bad to worse. There is, indeed, a French law for the protection of animals, but it is nearly a dead letter. The great practical difficulty in cultivating the feelings on this subject comes from the general but most unreasonable idea that there is something manly in being indifferent to the sufferings of brutes, and something childish in having pity for them. I remember a French gentleman who considered himself strong-minded because he made his carriage horses work when they had raws. In the lower classes men are proud of overloading and of making their horses go over unreasonable distances.[11] In both countries men are ready to inflict pain on animals whenever they think that they can get pleasure out of it for themselves. The passions for sport and gourmandise are the two which come next after science for pitilessness. The infliction of wounds for amusement, and the boiling alive of lobsters, are common to England and France, but the following is, I believe, peculiarly French:—When we lived at Sens my wife discovered that it was the custom, when selling rabbits on the market-place, to put their eyes out with a skewer, from a belief that this cruelty improved the flavour.[12] I find that cooks are all convinced that boiling alive is necessary to the flavour of a lobster, and there is no reasoning with cooks and gourmands if they believe that cruelty heightens the delicacy of tortured flesh.
The Sentiment of Reverence.
Veneration of the Priests by Catholics.
Absence of Veneration in the Republican Party. Victor Hugo. Ingres.
Chevreul.
Extinction of Royalist Sentiment.