Man and Beast

“I ALWAYS had a reverence for the cruelty-to-animals people,” one was saying, “until the other day, when I heard of some humane old women who caught a frog and reset its hind leg. Since then my reverence has been quenched by mirth.”

This extreme case, showing how in our time humaneness has become a distinct emotion, will serve as a text for the following notes on the relations between man and beast. Nowadays we are prone to treat all animals as melancholy Jaques treated the stricken deer, or as the boarding-house spinster treats the leashed poodle. It is a high and legitimate love, we are told, — this love for animals. Nay, more, from the brute’s point of view it is a love of animals. You and your dog are exchangers of affection; a man’s saddle horse, as well as his mother, is his best friend. Now, in order to prove the fallacy of believing in friendship between man and other creatures in the order vertebrata, we must first point out certain limitations of the brute creation, and then note the limitlessness of that special creation known as friendship. If it is possible to show that friendship requires what animals cannot give, because they have it not, then all this sentimentalism about our loving animals must go by the board. The so-called love-bird, bereft of its mate, pines away, we shall contend because its left side has lost a warm, feathery support. We shall see that the miracle of St. Francis having converted to Christianity the very fierce wolf of Gubbio was the most impossible of feats. Possibly, then, we shall be persuaded to redirect our misplaced affections, and save them for the genus man.

It is doubtless true that a man’s preferences and loves have in the last ten years shifted their ground. In the old days, when one found himself possessed of a benevolence larger than the demands made by his wife and children, if he thus had a residuum of love, he became a philanthropist. Other human beings less closely allied to him seemed the legitimate repositories for his overflow of affection, — it was in all cases a giving or a swapping of love between individuals of one genus. But we must coin another word from the Greek, antithetical to philanthropy, to show the new channel for our loving. It is no longer a philanthropy, but a philtherisy; we have changed from lovers of men to lovers of beasts. The last decade has been signalized by a propaganda in favor of beasts. We have been persuaded to refine our constant notion of humaneness into one of love. We have felt the cogency of Coleridge’s conclusion, that “he prayeth well who loveth well both man and bird and beast.”

In truth, the animal world, that vast realm of struggle and sacrifice, needs no apologies. It is hardly the sensible thing for a man, himself included in that animal order, to pick flaws therein, or to limit the scope of a circle in which he is but a segment. The includer rightly may have a serene contempt for the peevishness of its parts. But in the face of this truth, though not in opposition to it, we contend that, however great is the similarity between the human and the brute order, they can never develop anything higher than interdependence and interest. Your human being and the animal are forever separated from mutual friendship and love by two great gulfs which presently we shall note.

To deny that the lion and the lamb, the ichthiosaur and the chipmunk, the hornet and the bee and the beaver, all show marked intelligence, would be both vain and uncharitable. Oftentimes the human being must blush to compare his inventiveness and dexterity with that of those lives over which Scripture gives him dominion. The intelligence of animals is a threadbare topic; the books of natural history which have submerged the public have conclusively proved that there are more things in wood and field than are dreamed of in our technologies. Facing nature, man’s attitude has come to be one of permanent reverent surprise, so prodigally has Omniscience spent itself on the world minus man. And other faculties besides the purely inventive are at hand. There is hardly a phase of the civilization we prize not directly exhibited by bird or beast. Most of man’s splendid abstractions become concrete in the woods. Shall we not witness courage sacrifice, clannishness, affection, beauty, self-defense, utility, simplicity ? The simple life! Go to the sheep, thou epicure; consider her ways, and be — simple. For utility see the rosy rafters of the mollusk’s shell; for affection note the cuddling love-bird or the jealous snarl of the she-wolf; for a true commonwealth, visit the Carolina forests draped in sable by congresses of crows; for courage, hear the intrepid roar of the lion, or watch the trapped and beclubbed mink spring at the trapper’s throat; for sacrifice, learn the tender lesson of the pelican; for beauty — any random glance supplies it.

Impressed by the resources of the animal world, I am about to concede that a gospel of Philtherisy is timely, and that the world minus man would show a merely numerical and physical change. But just here I note that, in all the austere and high gamut of accomplishments that the brute contributes, we have failed to find two important buttresses in life’s building. If, then, this is not a careless oversight, and if man is their sole possessor, the world minus man would be so much the poorer.

The lonely, humming seamstress in the sunny window claims that her canary is a real companion. Novelists never fail to tell how the lovesick hero, before leaving home in the dead of night, has a heart-toheart talk with his terrier. And the shipwrecked mariner gets on comfortably, the only man on the island. But tell me, then, why it is that the most throbbing chapter is where Crusoe meets Friday; or where Mowgli sees the Hindoo maid; — and tell me why, if the proud lady capitulated, the above-mentioned hero might kick the terrier; or if callers arrived, the seamstress would silence the canary to hear the human voice ? It is because the world minus man has in it no ingredients of real friendship, — and what those ingredients are is becoming obvious.

Friendship is a fine frenzy composed of extremes. Like a lofty mountain, it is green-based and snow-capped. We can best define friendship by parting it from what is often given its name, — acquaintanceship. Now, acquaintanceship is the impersonal relation between persons. Brown and I are acquaintances. We have met three times, — once at a tea, once on the street car, and now at dinner. Brown is a nice, clean-cut, moral man; his uncle is a bishop and his father owns a bank. He is a college man, — so am I. Of course we are expected to have many things in common (yea, verily, in common!). We set about the pleasant, harmless task of exchanging facts. He tells me about Stevenson’s prose, and I tell him how the Japanese paint birds: he explains the mechanism of an engine, and I narrate a story about my grandmother. We meet; we part. But I know nothing about Brown. He has contributed no coin stamped with his superscription to my alms-box; he has dropped in buttons. That his contribution is valueless is sure, for I own a set of Stevenson, and the engine is diagrammed in my dictionary. And contrariwise, what does Brown care about my grandmother? Presumably, poor lady, nothing. As acquaintances, Brown and I have been neither helped nor hurt; we have both taken pains to be as little persons as possible. Acquaintances are always on their mediocre dignity. I would not for the world make a fool of myself before Brown, any more than he would tell me about himself at his best. It is the barren intercourse of buried lives.

But between friends, how different it all is! — this middle ground of information and twaddle and anecdote is by tacit consent debarred. Folly and philosophy are the two flowers of friendship. Thus we see that the receipt for turning an acquaintanceship into a friendship would vary. If the time were long, continual intercourse might breed knowledge of the soul and its darker musings. For an immediate change, some catastrophe, some hideous, staring crisis, confronting the two acquaintances, might weld them into being friends. They would have touched bottom together. The two distinguishingly human gifts are the capacities for the ridiculous and the religious emotions; they are also our most prized ranges of thought. They are the universal accomplishments of the genus homo. And friendship concerns itself with these universals. With my friend I shall be, if the mood takes me, an abandoned ass, I shall ape and gambol. And as often, when the contrary mood takes me, we shall delve into earth’s secrets, and mourn and weep. We shall take upon ourselves the mysteries of things as though we were God’s spies; or haply the room will burst with the pressure of our absurdities. The rarity of this complete uncovering of our true naïveté, this noble conquest of selfconsciousness, is the reason that each person has but few friends, it may be no more than one. Friendship requires a total eclipse of commonplaces, of subterfuges. And it is worth noting here, as by-products of our main idea, how impossible it is to prearrange or to predict a friendship. There is no reason in heaven or earth why my brother and I should be friends; heredity does not extend to the transmission of the point of view. And again, it is interesting to see how limited is man’s choice of activities, should he care to touch masses of people. To link himself with the universal human thought, he must have for his business the promulgation of a universal human preference, — he must be either a priest ora joke-monger. The finest man I know touches both poles, — now he is Yorick. now Hamlet. His is that violin-like power to move to tears or mirth. And the best of women are those whose eyes are deepened, not dimmed, by pain; who, as only women can, crush from all experience the wine of a fermenting joy.

Since love is merely an intensified and specialized form of friendship, therefore equally dependent on the swapping of the sublime and the ridiculous, we cannot speak of the “love of nature ” or the “ love of progress.” You might worship the wild tulip (as it “ blows out its great red bell like a thin clear bubble of blood”); you might rave over the mechanism of its construction; but it has no voice, it cannot answer you, you cannot love it. And who ever had a heart-throbbing at the thought of the spinning jenny or of the printing press ? Who ever thanked God for the invention of the cotton gin ? The only thing that ever sent a man skyward with pleasure or kneeward with gratitude is the fact that there are human voices and human hearts. It is evident in the whole range of natural history that there is no real sense of humor, or no real religious emotion, save in our own kind. Did you ever see a zebra laugh, or a flamingo pray ? The talk, then, about mutual friendship with our brute brothers is like suggesting a one-battery circuit, — there is no answering spark. Analyze the verdant world, this cageless zoo, as closely as you please, — you will find no mirth, you will find no gravity. Ridiculousness and religion live not in the woods. The monkey’s grin is a facial contraction; the crocodile’s tears are but optical sweat. The ingredients of friendship were not breathed in till creation’s last day, and into her last achievement, — for it we are forced back on one another.