Arminell: A Social Romance, Vol. 2

by S. Baring-Gould

We are all harnessed from our cradle, with bearing reins, not only to give our necks the proper curve, but also to prevent us from taking the bit in our mouths, kicking out, plunging over the barriers, and deserting the ring, and the saw-dust, the lights, and the crack of the manager’s whip.

Round and round our ring we go, now at an amble, then at a canter, and at last at a gallop, but always under restraint; the only liberty allowed and taken is now and again to make our hoofs sound against the barriers, and to send a little sawdust in the faces of the lookers-on, who clap hands and laugh or scream. We dance in our arena to music, and spin about, and balance ourselves on precarious bases, take a five-barred gate at a leap and go over a score of white poles, dexterously lowered to allow of a leap without accident. Then we fall lame, and lie down, and allow a pistol to be exploded in our ears, and permit ourselves to be carried out as dead. But whatever jump we make has been pre-arranged and laboriously practised, and whatever performance we be put through has been artificially acquired. We never snap our bearing rein, never utter a defiant snort, toss our heads, kick out at those who would detain us, and dash away to pastures green and free moorside.

Possibly our happiness would be greater were we to burst away from the perpetual mill-round, but I know very well what the result would be. We would rapidly degenerate on the moorside into uncouth, shaggy creatures, destitute of gloss and grace, and forget all our circus manners.

That which the grooming and breaking-in are to a horse, that culture is to a man, a sacrifice of freedom. The lower classes of men, the great undisciplined, or imperfectly disciplined bulk of mankind look on at the easy motions and trained grace of the higher classes, with much the same puzzlement as would a cluster of wild ponies stand and watch the passing of a cavalcade of elaborately trained horses. Both would be equally ignorant of the amount of self-abnegation and submission to rule which go to give ease and gloss.

According to a Mussulman legend, the Queen of Sheba had some smack of savagery about her; she had goats’ hair on her ankles. King Solomon heard this by report, and being desirous of ascertaining the truth, he had water poured over the pavement of his court when she came to visit him. As she approached she raised her skirt, and Solomon detected the goats’ hair.

There are a good many men as well as women who appear in the best courts nowadays with hair about their hocks; they have been insufficiently groomed. But in this they differ from the Queen of Sheba, that they persistently show us their hocks, and even thrust them in our faces. Merciful powers! how many half-broken, ill-trimmed cobs I have met with, kicking up their undocked heels, showing us that they can jump over poles and overleap hurdles, that they can balance themselves on chairs, and dance and rear on their hind legs, and paw the air, and whinny for applause. We politely pat our palms, and look all the while, not at their antics, but at their hocks, not at all impressed with their silver and spangled trappings, but very conscious of the hair about their hoofs.

It is the fashion for moralists to hold up their hands, and shake their heads, and declaim against the artificialities, the disguises of social life, and to say that every word spoken and look given should be sincere; that men and women should scorn concealment and hate subterfuge. But—would the world be tolerable were it so constituted? I mean the world of men. Is it so in the world of nature? Is that above screens and disguises? Is that ruthlessly true, and offensively genuine in its operations? Where is there not manifest a desire to draw the veil over what is harsh and unbecoming? The very earth covers her bald places with verdure, obscures her wounds and drapes her ragged edges. So the function of culture is the softening of what is rough, the screening of what is unseemly, the disguising of all that may occasion pain. It is nothing else but charity in its most graceful form, that spares another at the cost of self.

I have been in a volcanic region where there were innumerable craters, great and small. Those on the plain, hardly rising above a few feet out of it, showed all their bare horror, their torn lips, their black throats, their sides bristling with the angular lava that had boiled out of their hot and angry hearts, long ago, but ever showing. They were perfectly genuine, expressing their true nature in ugly nakedness. But there were other volcanoes rising to mountain heights, and these had mantled themselves in snow, had choked and smoothed over their clefts, and hung garlands of silver, and dropped gauzy veils over their vitreous precipices; the very craters, the sources of the fire, were filled to the brim and heaped up to overflow with unsullied snow, rising white, rounded, innocent, as a maiden’s bosom. Which was best? I know which was the pleasantest to see.

So is it with humanity. We are all volcanoes with fire in our hearts. Some have broken forth and torn themselves to pieces, some are in a chronic state of fume, and dribble lava and splutter cinders perpetually, and others are exhausted. Surely it is best to hide our fires, and drape our savagery, and bury our snags and dust the white snow over all that is rugged and gloomy and ungentle.

Or—to revert to our former illustration, if we have hair on our heels, which is best, to expose it, or, like the Queen of Sheba, let down our skirts over it?