FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. 3

frank, unsophisticated natures, described by him, behave to that of the lower orders of creation on a desert island:

"Greeting mankind, as I've heard say

That wild things do, where beasts of prey
Were never known, nor any men

Have met their fearless eyes till then."

Gilliatt, in Les Travailleurs de la Mer, alone on his barren rock, finds the sea-birds fearless of his presence. The very change in his face, says the author, with a touch of suggestive malice, "gave them confidence; he had lost resemblance to men, and taken the form of the wild beast." So with Robert Penfold, in Mr. Charles Reade's Foul Play: "The sea-birds walked quietly about him, and minded him not." He comes upon a roan-coloured pigeon, with a purplish neck, perched on his sick comrade's foot; the bird, shining like a rainbow, "cocked a saucy eye at Hazel, and flew up into the air a few yards; but it soon appeared that fear had little to do with this movement, for after an airy circle or toss, he fanned Hazel's cheeks with his fast-flapping wings, and lighted on the edge of the baler, and was for sipping." Enoch Arden, stranded on an isle, the loneliest in a lonely sea, was not so badly off for sustenance: soft fruitage there was, nuts of the very biggest, and nourishing roots;

"Nor, save for pity, was it hard to take

The helpless life, so wild that it was tame."

It is for a Robert Burns, at the plough-tail, not on a desert island, to make his amende honorable to the field mouse he has disturbed, "wee, sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous beastie," in such terms as these:

"I'm truly sorry man's dominion

Has broken Nature's social union,

And justifies that ill opinion

Which makes thee startle

At me, thy poor earth-born companion,

And fellow-mortal."

The fellow-creatureship is here, at least, frankly and hu

manely recognised.

The sight of a redbreast chasing a butterfly moved Wordsworth to the rather far-going reflection, that,—

"Could Father Adam open his eyes,

And see this sight beneath the skies,
He'd wish to close them again."

This is in allusion to the penultimate book of Paradise Lost, where Adam points out to Eve the ominous sign of the eagle chasing "two birds of gayest plume," and the gentle hart and hind pursued by their enemy. Wesley maintained that the very foundations of the nature of animals were turned upside down at the fall of man; whatever evils inferior creatures endure or inflict upon each other being assigned as a consequence to that catastrophe. He argued, that, as man is deprived of his perfection-his loving obedience to God, so brutes are deprived of their perfection—their loving obedience to man, the far greater part fleeing from his hated presence, others setting him at defiance and destroying him when they can, while a few only retain more or less of their original disposition, and still love and obey him. Nor only death, according to Wesley (præ-scientific, not prescient, in matters geological), came upon the whole creation in consequence of the first transgression, but all death's train of preparatory evils, pain, and ten thousand sufferings; and not only these, but all the irregular passions, all the "unlovely tempers," which in man are sins, and in brutes are sources of misery. "Inferior creatures torment, persecute, and devour each other, and all are tormented and persecuted by man." Byron's Lucifer reminds his Cain that

Cain.

And death to all things, and disease to most things,
And pangs, and bitterness, these were the fruits
Of the forbidden tree.

But animals,

Did they too eat of it, that they must die?

Lucifer. Your Maker told ye, they were made for you,

As you for Him.

You would not have their doom

Superior to your own? Had Adam not
Fallen, all had stood.

FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. 5

Cain.

Alas, the hopeless wretches!

They too must share my sire's fate, like his sons;
Like them, too, without having shared the apple;

Like them, too, without the so dear-bought knowledge."

An æsthetical critic objects to Sir Edwin Landseer's painting of Van Amburgh and his Beasts, as a bad subject in itself,— the shrinking, retreating, cowed animals forming an unpleasant study; for one would wish to see them in their wilder or nobler natures; and so poor a figure is made of the tamer, that one feels angry with the lions and tigers for being afraid of him. A happier subject is suggested for a picture of this kind in the hymn to Aphrodite, where the goddess descends ‚on Ida, and all the savage beasts come fawning about her, when, with a motion of her hand, she dismisses them to pair in the forests. Such noble animals, crouching in obeisance and willing servitude to a divinity, to beauty, and to innocence, are materials for a picture of a finer sentiment; for this taming, the objector urges with some force, reduces the dignity of the brute, without raising the man.

Una, with her milk-white lamb and all but lamb-like lion, is a symbolical theme upon which we have all sorts of variations. Innocent girlhood, in friendly communion with creatures feræ naturæ, is a standard subject in suggestive literature. Now we have John Wilson, in his Evening in Furness Abbey, describing the ways and means of a darling daughter;

66 -Thou from infancy

Hast loved the timid race; most sweet to thee

To stand and look upon the hind at play

In shady places with her fawns, and soon

They all will learn to look upon thy face
With fearless love, nor shun thy noiseless feet
Along the moss-sward underneath the boughs
So mossy of the over-arching oaks."

Now we have the author of the Earthly Paradise, in his tale of the fostering of Aslang, to the age of sweet seventeen bearing the buffets of a hard mistress in silence, and gladdening all about her as she goes forth goat-tending in the spring-tide :

66

-The red-throat jay

Screamed not for nought, as on her way
She went, light-laughing at some thought;
If the dove moaned, 'twas not for nought,
Since she was gone too soon from him,
And e'en the sight he had was dim
For the thick-budding twigs."

Markworthy in many ways is Wordsworth's Clifford, to

whose

66

side the fallow deer

Came, and rested without fear ;

The eagle, lord of land and sea,

Stooped down to pay him fealty."

The poet indited a sonnet to the address of the sparrow in the woods of Rydal which pecked at his lip, besides perching on his person, as he lay musing there.* Another sonnet he

started from Philoctetes in the Lemnian isle, upon whose form couched like some monumental figure, or upon whose dread bow unbent,

*

"Some wild bird oft might settle, and beguile

The rigid features of a transient smile,

Slackening the pains of ruthless banishment.

*

Yea, veriest reptiles have sufficed to prove

To fettered wretchness, that no Bastile

Is deep enough to exclude the light of love,

Though man for brother man has ceased to feel."

St. Francis is duly commemorated in another of his poems

* In his notes, Wordsworth proposes as doubtful the question, whether the bird in this instance was aware that his attentions were bestowed upon a human, or even a living creature. But a redbreast, he adds, will perch upon the foot of a gardener at work, and alight on the handle of the spade when his hand is half upon it. This he had seen.

↑ Walter Savage Laudor has this passage in one of his letters about that favourite dog of his, and inseparable companion in trudging the streets of Bath, Pomero: "He barks aloud at all-familiarly, not fiercely. He takes equal liberties with his fellow-creatures, if indeed dogs are more his fellow-creatures than I am. I think it was Saint Francis de Sales who called birds and quadrupeds his sisters and brothers. Few saints have been so good-tempered, and not many so wise."-Forster's Life of Landor, ii. 433.

FELLOW-CREATURES WITH THE FIRST MAN. 7

-how with beast and bird (stilled from afar—such marvel story tells-by casual outbreak of his passionate words, and from their own pursuits in field or grove drawn to his side by look or act of love humane, and virtue of his innocent life),

"He wont to hold companionship so free,

So pure, so fraught with knowledge and delight,

As to be likened in his followers' minds

To that which our first parents, ere the fall

From their high state darkened the earth with fear,
Held with all kinds in Eden's blissful bowers."

The white doe of Rylstone will occur to many readers of Wordsworth, stopping in mid career, from among the rushing troop,-drawing softly near to the Lady Emily, laying its head on her knee, and looking up into her face with a look of pure benignity, mindful of other years. Not that the Lady Emily partakes of the fawn-like nature of Hawthorne's Donatello; who, by the way, is described as growing up the playmate of all woodland creatures. Himself says, "You would have laughed to see the friends I had among them; yes, among the wild, nimble things that reckon man their deadliest enemy. How it was first taught me, I cannot tell; but there was a charm-a voice, a murmur, a kind of chaunt-by which I called the woodland inhabitants, the furry people, and the feathered people, in a language that they seemed to understand."* At an earlier period we have a glimpse of him in the

* Of this he gives Kenyon a specimen, uttering a sound that seemed to fill the air, yet with no obtrusive clangour—the sound being of a murmurous character, soft, attractive, persuasive, friendly—a broad dialect, such as might have been the original voice and utterance of the natural man, before the sophistication of the human intellect formed what we now call language; and in which dialect, broad as the sympathies of nature, the human brother might have spoken to his inarticulate brotherhood that prowl the woods or soar upon the wing, and have been intelligible, to such extent as to win their confidence.

How the loss of this faculty is by Donatello himself ascribed to his fall from innocence,—is it not with subtle suggestiveness told in the romance of Monte Beni?

Again, of Dred, in another American book of note, we read, that the amusement of his vacant hours was sometimes to exercise his peculiar gifts