forlorn sense of a vanished heritage. Willing
enough are we to ``let the ape and tiger die’’;
but the pleasant cousins dissembled in hide and fur
and feather are not all tigers and apes: which
last vile folk, indeed, exist for us only in picture-books,
and chiefly offend by always carrying the Sunday School
ensign of a Moral at their tails. Others —
happily of less didactic dispositions —
there be; and it is to these unaffected, careless
companions that the sensible child is wont to devote
himself; leaving severely alone the stiff, tame creatures
claiming to be of closer kin. And yet these playmates,
while cheerfully admitting him of their fellowship,
make him feel his inferiority at every point.
Vainly, his snub nose projected earthwards, he essays
to sniff it with the terrier who (as becomes the nobler
animal) is leading in the chase; and he is ready to
weep as he realises his loss. And the rest of
the Free Company, — the pony, the cows,
the great cart-horses, — are ever shaming
him by their unboastful exercise of some enviable
and unattainable attribute. Even the friendly
pig, who (did but parents permit) should eat of his
bread and drink of his cup, and be unto him as a brother,
— which among all these unhappy bifurcations,
so cheery, so unambitious, so purely contented, so
apt to be the guide, philosopher, and friend of boyhood
as he? What wonder that at times, when the neophyte
in life begins to realise that all these desirable
accomplishments have had to be surrendered one by
one in the process of developing a Mind, the course
of fitting out a Lord of Creation, he is wont —
not knowing the extent of the kingdom to which he
is heir — to feel a little discontented?
Ere now this ill-humour, taking root in a nature wherein
the animal is already ascendant, has led by downward
paths to the Goat-Foot, in whom the submerged human
system peeps out but fitfully, at exalted moments.
He, the peevish and irascible, shy of trodden ways
and pretty domesticities, is linked to us by little
but his love of melody; but for which saving grace,
the hair would soon creep up from thigh to horn of
him. At times he will still do us a friendly turn:
will lend a helping hand to poor little Psyche, wilfully
seeking her own salvation; will stand shoulder to
shoulder with us on Marathon plain. But in the
main his sympathies are first for the beast: to
which his horns are never horrific, but, with his
hairy pelt, ever natural and familiar, and his voice
(with its talk of help and healing) not harsh nor
dissonant, but voice of very brother as well as very
god.
And this declension — for declension it
is, though we achieve all the confidences of Melampus,
and even master with him the pleasant argot of the
woods — may still be ours if we suffer what
lives in us of our primal cousins to draw us down.
On the other hand, let soul inform and irradiate body
as it may, the threads are utterly shorn asunder never:
nor is man, the complete, the self-contained, permitted