TRAITS OF CHARACTER. FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. GENESIS ii. 19. THE HE term Fellow-creatures is by prescriptive usage limited to those of human race. Our Fellow-lodgers, or some such patronising phrase, is the sort of term we apply to the brute creation. But at least the brute race are our fellowcreatures in having been created. And once upon a time the fellowship was closer than now. It is delicate ground, that of the Garden of Eden; and thankfully to be foreborne in these pages is all question of how far the sacred narrative is literal, and that, again, of the participation of animals in the result of man's fall. Enough, here and now, that we read of every beast of the field and every fowl of the air being brought to Adam, and of Adam giving to each a definite and abiding name. So far, at least, the narrative suggests conditions of intercourse hardly to be realised now. There is no hint of shrinking or mistrust on either side; none of any let or hindrance to frank and loyal intercommunication. We see his fellow-creatures with the first man, in fellowship amicable enough at any rate for him, presumably, to have so far studied the nature of each, as to give it an appropriate because characteristic name. That in them he did find society of some sort, fellowship to some extent, is seemingly implied in the statement that of all to whom Adam had given names, there was not found an help-meet for him. Made a little lower than the angels himself, these, his other and humbler fellow-creatures, were made a little too low for him. Eve must be made to be on his Nevertheless, with these, his browsing, grazing, flying, fellow-creatures, he had fellowship of a sort. B He could not, for instance, have appreciated the point of Cowper's line about Alexander Selkirk finding their tameness a something shocking: "The beasts that roam over the plain My form with indifference see; Their tameness is shocking* to me." Whether the original instinct of brutes was to be afraid of man or familiar with him, Archbishop Whately would not undertake to say; though he avowed his belief that the fear of man is the implanted instinct; it being plain, at any rate, that either the one or the other-wildness or tameness-must be an implanted, and not an original instinct. He cited as universal the agreement of travellers, that when they have gone into a country hitherto apparently unvisited by man, neither bird nor beast exhibited fear, the birds perching familiarly on their guns, or standing still to be knocked on the head. "After the country has been for some time frequented, not only individual animals become afraid of man, but their offspring inherit that fear by instinct." Mr. Coventry Patmore's epistolary dame compares the way in which certain * In Hood's poem of The Haunted House, we see the rabbits frisking about, leisurely and bold, as if they knew their enemy was banished; while— "The wary crow, the pheasant from the woods, As if arrested by a charm, the eyes of Arthur Philipson, lost among the Swiss mountains, in Scott's Anne of Geierstein, remain bent on the lammergeier, or Alpine vulture, which sits and gazes at him from the pinnacle of a crag not four yards from the tree in which the young man holds his precarious station. The near approach of a creature not more loathsome to the human race than averse to come within their reach, may well seem ominous to him. Was it, he speculated, a native vulture of the rocks, whose sagacity foresaw that the rash traveller was soon destined to become its victim? And was he doomed to feel its beak and talons before his heart's blood ceased its course? Had he already lost the dignity of humanity, the awe which the being formed in the image of his Maker inspires into all inferior creatures? For there the obscene bird sat and gazed at him, without displaying any of the apprehension which the fiercest animals usually entertain from the vicinity of man. |