X. REGENT’S PARK
It is not so amusing as it used to be to watch lions and tigers in cages. We are beginning to feel that it is an unlucky plight for a respectable tiger to be pent within boards and iron bars while kind ladies throw biscuits and the gentleman with them smiles; for we know what would happen to the smile and the biscuits if the tiger were in the woods and coughed slightly not far away. There would be less beauty in the entertainment, it is true, if the Zoölogical Gardens maintained choice examples in cages of vitriol-throwers, child-beaters, market riggers, war-makers, spies, agents-provocateurs, and so on. Regent’s Park would have to be extended to hold so large and varied an exhibition of wild beasts. The most beautiful of murderers could never be compared for shape and grace with a good lion or jaguar. It may be said, therefore, that there is a subtle flattery in our caging of the finer and more dignified creatures.
We should find no pleasure in looking upon a caged sneak-thief, though certainly we keep them in cages, when we catch them; but the lion, I have been assured, is almost invariably a perfect gentleman who prefers not to quarrel and fight, and will leave the presence of the other animal with a gun if he can do so with delicacy and honour. Perhaps it is excusable in us that we should enjoy looking upon so noble a creature in safety. I have heard him, when he was in a cage, quietly swearing while gazing into the distance and a Bank Holiday crowd was staring at him; and even the most uncharitable of Christians could forgive him his bad language in such circumstances. And I have heard the tiger, when he was not in a cage, cough in the place where there was no Bank Holiday crowd, and at night; and I learned then that the mind of man does not feel so proud as it does at other times.
The lion, of course, knows nothing of the quantum theory; but perhaps most of our Privy Councillors are as innocent. If the test were made of most of us; if we were removed from the benefit of the accumulated knowledge of humanity, our knowledge which is kept growing, for love usually, by a few superior minds, we should not know how to make a fire without the matches of which we had been deprived. On the whole, probably we flatter the depth of that abyss between ourselves and the lower animals; and for the wolf who runs up and down his cage sullenly ignoring our overtures, and behaving as though we do not exist, we are beginning to feel there is something to be said.
I suppose it is too soon to say that for the dogfish and the conger eel. The darkened corridors and the silence of the New Aquarium at the Zoölogical Gardens, and the eerie light there of an existence beyond us in which undulating forms suggest that life may have meanings outside our understanding, are so salutary that you hear hardly a sound from the visitors. They move about, speaking in whispers, as though in the presence of the awful. I heard a boy laugh there, but even that was subdued; and we may expect, of course, to hear the chuckle of a boy on the Judgment Day. The boy laughed while he was watching a crab with claws like grappling irons walk on the sea floor of the Aquarium. It went craftily, on its toes, and not straightforwardly, but sideways, as though its aim were evil. A turbot was flat on the sand, pretending to be the floor, but the crab put a hook on him. The turbot started; but the crab went straight on to the back of the fish. The boy laughed at the obvious surprise of both of them, which showed in a frantic eruption. But even the laugh was uncanny, for it broke out unexpectedly in an inhuman privacy which might have been the antechamber to the unspeakable.
Only an irreverent boy would find anything funny in such a place. There is no comic element, that we know of, under water. It is not surprising that visitors to the Aquarium are subdued, or that they feel pity for the few sea-birds which happen to be exiled there from the day. That pity shows the difference. Pity for birds in a great aviary is rare, and maybe it is unnecessary. That is a matter in which we should consult the birds, if ever we doubt our own generous hearts. But sorrow for birds confined to a dungeon in the dim light and silence where eels and octopuses are at home is instant and right. In a reverse way that sorrow proves that the theatrical effect of the new Aquarium is good. It is good. It is marred only by the presence of those birds, which is forced and unnatural.
The recesses of the tanks, where antennæ are seen vibrating or exploring in the shadows, when the eye is accustomed to the hyaline indistinction, where sinuous figures are seen in apparition, or a pair of jaws that picture soulless destiny itself gulp spasmodically and incessantly, somehow challenge the soul in a way impossible to the most terrible lion. With what respect one stares at that inert and leathery length, the lungfish, for he is the link between the sea-bottom dark from which came all life, and those hill-tops which life now regards as suitable for select villas. It was fortunate for our speculative builders that somehow, when it was left stranded in drying mud, the ancestor of the lungfish was able to fashion his swimming bladder into an organ which made him independent of gills, and equipped him for a life in the sun, though it was only a suspended life. See what has come of it!
It is not only the silence and the twilight of the Aquarium which are impressive, but the sense that no more than plate glass separates us from a frightful gulf of time. And consider the fascination of the octopus! Could there be anything more sinister than the cold stare of the eyes surmounting that bulging stomach? Yet watch it shoot through the water and alight upon a rock, tentacles and all, with a flowing grace never equalled by a young lady practising a courtesy for the Court. That, however, only adds to its attraction, curiously enough; because attractive it is, for a reason so natural in mankind, and yet so obscure and difficult to define, that to look for it might take us into the Antarctic of philosophy. I found the largest audience of the Aquarium at the tank of the octopus, patiently waiting for what satisfaction, joy, terror, horror, consternation, or what not, it could bestow. It is useless for the ladies to protest that they love the Angel fish better, or any of the banded and prismatic tropical forms of the Amazon or the coral reefs. I saw very few people at the tanks where those opalescent or enamelled creatures were proving that our finest artists in the fantasies of decoration are bunglers. No. The superior audiences were for the octopus, for the grotesque and carnivorous spinosities, and for the conger eel.