120 CRUELTY TO ANIMALS. and eat one. "When I want such a thing, I go into the woods till I find one to my liking, and then I shoot him off the branches without touching a feather of another, though there might be a hundred on the same tree." Wordsworth's doctrine is comprehensive— "Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels." Cowper would not enter on his list of friends the man, "though graced with polished manners and fine sense, yet wanting sensibility," who needlessly sets foot upon a worm. An inadvertent step, he reminds us, may crush the snail that crawls at evening in the public path, but he that has humanity, forewarned, will tread aside, and let the reptile live. The crawler in a private path Cowper's casuistry otherwise disposes of. The gentle influence of the Angel in the House upon her loyal laureate, in boyhood, involves this among other beneficent issues: "For me, hence weak towards the weak, Was no more trapp'd with his own flower, And for his honey slain." Such a boy might La Fontaine accept as a bright particular exception to prove the rule of his verse, Mais un fripon d'enfant (cet âge est sans pitié). Jean the fabulist was the very man of men to say ditto (in metre) to Bentham's averment, that it is as much a moral duty to regard the pleasures and pains of other animals as those of human beings. Morally speaking, cruelty to animals is by a later philosopher, equally free from sentimentalism, regarded as an indication of character almost worse than cruelty to men; for there CONDEMNED ON UTILITARIAN GROUNDS. 121 is a brutal hardness of disposition displayed in bullying defenceless creatures which is a qualification for the worst crimes: "A boy who begins by torturing a cat is in as fair a road to the gallows as he can very well strike out, and it is long odds that a costermonger who will maltreat his donkey will also beat his wife." Cruelty to a cat was the occasion of an indignant letter from Robert Southey to certain "young gentlemen," a reading party from one of the Universities, who were spending "the long" of 1834 at Keswick, -misspending it by a systematic purchase of cats for worrying purposes. Their sport, the laureate told them, was as blackguard as it was brutal. And his son tells how he has seen his cheek glow, and his eye darken and almost flash fire, when he chanced to witness anything of the kind, and heard him administer a rebuke which made the offender tremble. Mr. Lecky's suggestion of a doubt whether cruelty to animals can be condemned on utilitarian grounds is met by the obvious answer that a utilitarian may rationally inIclude in his definition of the greatest number whose happiness is to be the aim of human beings, not only human beings themselves, but all animals capable of being happy or the reverse; besides which it is urged. that, even if we limit our view to the good of our own species, the argument is as strong as can be desired. "If the criminality of an action were to be measured simply by its direct effect on human happiness, we might probably hold that the murderer of a grown-up man was worse than the murderer of a child, and far worse than the torturer of a dumb animal. Yet, as a matter of fact, we should probably feel a greater loathing for a man who could deliberately torment a beast for his pleasure than for one who should ill-use one of his equals." For such cruelty is held 122 'STUPENDOUS BRUTALITY? possibly even The tormentor callousness of to indicate, as a rule, a baser nature: a murderer, though generally speaking a man of bad character, and at all events guilty of an unamiable weakness, is not of necessity cowardly or mean; he may not improbably show some courage, and some sensibility to the nobler emotions. of animals, on the other hand, shows nature, a pleasure in giving pain for the sake of giving pain, which has about it something only to be described as devilish. "The character which has become so debased as to be utterly insensible to the sight of pain in a helpless creature, or even to take pleasure in it, is certainly among the lowest conceivable types of humanity." An English reviewer of Burns has recently observed, that the "stupendous brutality which marks the very poor English people "-of course not universally, but as a class-in dealings with dumb animals, would not be what it is if the spirit of that poet had much of a grip upon them. "The cruelty of the majority of carters, cab-drivers, dog-trainers, and the like makes a sensitive man shudder to think of, as Hogarth's pictures of Cruelty make him sicken in looking at them." Not but that civilization is telling upon all classes as well as nations. It is some years ago that Mr. Théophile Gautier complimented England upon having for a long time past taken precedence of France in this good way; but it gladdened him to be able at least to add that Englishmen were no longer laughed at by the French for their love of dogs and horses, "thème ordinaire des caricatures de 1815." And he found encouragement in reporting progress from the dark ages, "le moyen âge, dans ses ténèbres," when dumb animals were so often an object of fear, and their speaking eyes supposed to be lighted up with demoniacal malice. An eloquent essay-writer on 'UNREFLECTING DEVILISHNESS' 123 sympathy with Nature welcomes the change from loathing and terror, in the presence of hideous and monstrous shapes, to a cherished sense of gentle pity. John Foster declared it to be a great sin against moral taste to mention ludicrously, or for ludicrous comparison, circumstances in the animal world which are painful or distressing to the animals that are in them; the simile, for instance, "Like a toad under a harrow." It is increasingly seen and felt that these dumb and helpless things have a capacity for something which at least passes with them for pleasure. Who, it is asked, can forget, that has read it, the French poet's picture of the black venomous toad squatting meekly on the edge of its stagnant ditch on a summer evening, and relishing in its own humble way the calm of the surrounding scene? If there are plenty of people still to be found, as the essay asserts, who would scarcely feel that they were doing anything very wrong if they gave the poor monster a poke with a stick, or set a dog on to plague him, there are confessedly fewer people now of this "involuntary unreflecting devilishness" than there were a quarter of a century since, and the whole tendency of the modern spirit is to make such people fewer still, whatever may be the tendency of the modern spirit as regards the doctrine of Coleridge, that he prayeth well who loveth well both man and bird and beast. "He prayeth best who loveth best HOPE DEFERRED. PROVERBS xiii. 12. HE fulfilled desire when it cometh may be a tree of THE life, but, meanwhile, "hope deferred maketh the heart sick." It may verily have its reward, its exceeding great reward, "When Hope, long doubtful, soars at length sublime," as Scott phrases it in the Lord of the Isles; but none the less the prolonged doubtfulness is a dispiriting influence. In his analysis of "the immediate emotions," Dr. Thomas Brown adverts to that weariness of mind which one would so gladly exchange for weariness of body, and which he takes to be perhaps more difficult to bear with good humour than many profound griefs, because it involves the uneasiness of hope, that is renewed every moment, to be every moment disappointed. He supposes a day's journey along one continuous avenue, where the uniformity of similar trees at similar distances is of itself most wearisome; but what we should feel with far more fretfulness would be the constant disappointment of our expectation, that the last tree which we beheld in the distance, would be the last that was to rise upon us; when, "tree after tree, as if in mockery of our very patience itself, would still continue to present the same dismal continuity of line." Lord Bolingbroke, a professed expert in its power to weary and wear out, called suspense the only insupportable misfortune of life. A Latin adage declares such as feed on hope, to exist in suspense, not live: Qui spe aluntur, pendent, non vivunt. What creature, exclaims Bosola, in Webster's Duchess of |