The beast's cry

Holloway, Bath (painting by Valérie Pirlot)

[Image source: http://valeriepirlot.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/painting-in-bear-flat-bath.html]

1. A MAN OF KINDNESS...

A day in Bath, for Laura and me, often ends with a galloping ascent (or sometimes a trudge) up Beechen Cliff via the steep lane known as Holloway, eventually to emerge on the surprising half-way plateau of Bear Flat.  Many years ago this lane was the main road into Bath from the south, but now it's just a local access road with minimal traffic and is good for striding out.

The Horse-trough, Holloway, Bath

[Image source: https://widcombewest.uk/arch/local-history/]


A renovated horse-trough, half-way along the lane, bears the following rhyme, commemorating a man's vicious treatment of his horse upon this spot. Perhaps it was a pack-horse carrying coal or other heavy goods into the city.

I learned the epigram by heart after repeated walks, but have corrected my memory from the image here. 


A man of kindness to his beast is kind,
But brutal actions show a brutal mind.
Remember! He who made thee, made the brute,
Who gave thee speech and reason, formed him mute.
He can't complain, but God's all-seeing eye
Beholds thy cruelty and hears his cry.
He was designed thy Servant, not thy Drudge.
Remember! his Creator is thy Judge.


The author is unknown. [.. or maybe not! keep reading...]

According to the Preface of the Third Edition of the veterinarian James White's Compendium of Cattle Medicine, the poem appeared in the Bath Herald on March 31, 1821. I don't know the date of White's third edition, but I've read that the fifth edition was 1828, so this must be a fairly contemporary witness.

White quotes the poem, with interesting differences from the above text, and with a Biblical epitaph:


A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast. -- Prov. xii. 10

A man of kindness to his beast is kind,
But brutal actions show a brutal mind.
Remember He who made thee made the brute,
Who gave thee speech and reason form'd him mute.
He can't complain, but God's omniscient eye
Beholds thy cruelty -- HE hears his cry.
He was design'd thy servant and thy drudge ;
But know that his Creator is thy Judge.


White's version of the penultimate line convinced me; Servants in 1821 were usually drudges; pack-horses definitely were. "Not thy drudge", I thought, must belong to a later age of sentiment.

All wrong, as it turns out.  And the poem didn't originate in Bath, after all.


*


The Atheneum Vol II includes this notice (I think, though it isn't clear, from around Nov 1817, but certainly no later than April 1818) :

CRUELTY TO ANIMALS

A master butcher, of Ipswich, named Beard, for a wager of 10l, undertook to ride his hackney mare, 14 hands high, from Ipswich to London and back again, a distance of 133 miles, in 19 hours! The barbarous owner, who weighed 10 stone, started from Ipswich at six o'clock in the the evening; he reached London at two in the morning, rested about two hours, and arrived in sight of Ipswich, and within half a mile of his own house, twenty five minutes within the time allowed, when the poor animal fell exhausted and soon expired. The following lines were printed and stuck up in various parts of the town of Ipswich the same evening :-

[Text  similar to White, except for "He was designed thy servant, not thy drudge ;". ]

So it's clear that the "not thy drudge" variant was already available in 1817, if the beast in question was a horse for riding rather than a pack-horse. And this became the more popular version, for instance in equestrian circles (see below).


A longer account of the Ipswich story, also under the heading "Cruelty to Animals" occurs in The Sportsman Magazine, from which it appears that Beard's attempt (which would no doubt have been treated as a sporting triumph if it had come off), occurred in Summer 1817. (His letter of grovelling apology was dated July 17th, 1817.)

Extract:

A concourse of people -- horse-jockies, etc, who lined the road, to witness her arrival, attempted to cheer and stimulate the poor dying creature with their cries. One of them bled her. Still anxious for the completion of their sport, they, after that useless operation had been performed, placed her on her feet, and endeavoured to shoulder her forward. As they pulled the bridle, in this effort, the shrieks and groans of the agonized animal were distressing beyond all description. In this last act of barbarity, however, Beard did not participate. Death, at length, terminated the misery of this poor victim of human brutality. On examination, it was found, that the fore shoes were worn quite bare; that one of her hind shoes was broken in two; that the other was broken, and one half gone; and that her hind hoofs were stumped up to the nail-holes. 

*

This, then, was the ugly reality behind William Harrison Ainsworth's fantasy (in his 1834 romance Rookwood) of Dick Turpin riding Black Bess from London to York in a single night, the noble animal's heart bursting at the last.

But was this Ipswich story the origin of our poem? No!

The poem had already appeared in The American Magazine (August 1815 - vol I, p. 127) *

[ * For more about this publication, see my follow-up post:
http://michaelpeverett.blogspot.co.uk/2016/11/charlotte-carpenter.html ]

This is not only the earliest but the most persuasive text I've seen. (The poem is beginning to make me think of George Crabbe now.)



ON CRUELTY TO BEASTS

"The righteous man regardeth the life of his beast."**

The man of kindness to his beast is kind,
But brutal actions show a brutal mind.
Remember, he who made thee, made the brute,
Who gave thee speech and reason, form'd him mute ;
He can't complain -- but GOD'S all-seeing eye
Beholds thy cruelty and hears his cry ;
He was designed thy servant and thy drudge,
But know that his Creator is thy JUDGE!


[** Proverbs 12:10]

I was happy to rediscover, in this earliest text encountered so far, an aspect of the horse-trough text that had appealed to me: the assertion that God's eye can hear.

Can an eye hear? Not really: the only thing an eye can hear is silence.

And as we saw in Ipswich, the mute beast is certainly not a silent beast, only a wordless one. Even we, even the cruel jockeys, can hear the cry, if it comes to that. But God hears in the Psalmist's sense: the sense in which a judge hears an appeal. The eye of God is no friend of the masters of this earth.

*

2. WILLIAM COWPER?

The poem in its various versions continued to circulate both in Britain and in America.

The poem appears in J. Barker's The Christian Investigator and Evangelical Reformer (1841),  the text more or less the same as in White. It also appears in The Mother's Friend (New York, 1843); on the wall of a Shaker barn, belonging to the ex-Quaker Robert White,  in 1846; and in The Lady's Equestrian Guide (1857).

Merch ei mam's comment on this post started me off in a new direction. Merch had seen the poem in a hand-written book on horse management belonging to the family. The original book dates from 1848, but maybe the poem was inserted by the village schoolmaster when he transcribed the book in 1864. Anyway, in this copy the poem is attributed to William Cowper.

The poem doesn't appear in Cowper's Works so far as I can tell (I checked Stebbing's 1869 edition) but a cursory search did turn up an earlier attribution of the poem to Cowper, in the 1824 American Sunday-School Teachers' Magazine and Journal of Education. The article notes the recent establishment in England of a society for the suppression of cruelty to animals (this was the SPCA, which became the RSPCA), and recommends Sunday-school teachers to set up similar societies in America. They would be "productive of much good", the author says, quoting the following anecdote (though without naming a source):

"It is customary in Huntingdonshire, (Eng.) sometimes to practice the following very cruel sport, called 'Cock running.' The wings of a fowl are clipped, and it is then set at liberty, while a number of persons, with their hands tied behind them, having entered as runners, at so much a head, chase, and endeavour to catch it with their mouths, the successful one being entitled  to the bird. An attempt was made to have one of these runnings on Shrove Tuesday, 1822; but a sufficient number of runners did not offer : this was attributed to a general distribution of the following beautiful lines from the poet Cowper:

A man of kindness to his beast is kind ;
But brutal actions show a brutal mind ...   "  etc

The poem was also attributed to Cowper in The World's Advance Thought (Portland, Oregon. Vol XXVI No. 2 (August 1913)). Most of the articles were written by Lucy A. Rose Mallory and "Poisoned Blood the Cause" is no exception. [It's a pro-vegetarianism article. The poisoned blood in question is the blood of those who eat meat.]

*

William Cowper would certainly be a good candidate, as far as the sentiments go.


Bitter the persecution and the pain
That man inflicts on all inferior kinds
Regardless of their plaints. To make him sport,
To gratify the frenzy of his wrath,
Or his base gluttony, are causes good
And just in his account, why bird and beast
Should suffer torture...

(from The Task, Book 3)

I would not enter on my list of friends,
Though graced with polished manners and fine sense,
Yet wanting sensibility, the man
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm.
An inadvertent step 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. ...

 (from The Task, Book 6)

Then there's "The Cock-Fighter's Garland". The poem is a bit too long to quote in full (it's on PoemHunter), but I'll give a couple of stanzas here, along with Cowper's accompanying note:

That such a man once was, may seem
Worthy of record, (if the theme
Perchance may credit win,)
For proof to man, what man may prove,
If grace depart, and demons move
The source of guilt within.

This man (for since the howling wild
Disclaims him, man he must be styled)
Wanted no good below;
Gentle he was, if gentle birth
Could make him such; and he had worth,
If wealth can worth bestow.

(St 2-3)

[Note] Written on reading the following, in the obituary of the "Gentleman's Magazine" for April, 1789 :-- "At Tottenham John Ardesoif, Esq, a young man of large fortune, and, in the splendor of his carriages and horses, rivalled by few country gentlemen. His table was that of hospitality, where, it may be said, he sacrificed too much to conviviality : but, if he had his foibles, he had his merits also, that far outweighed them. Mr. A. was very fond of cock-fighting, and had a favourite cock, upon which he had won many profitable matches. The last bet he laid upon this cock he lost ; which so enraged him that he had the bird tied to a spit and roasted alive before a large fire. The screams of the miserable animal were so affecting, that some gentlemen who were present attempted to interfere, which so enraged Mr. A., that he seized a poker, and with the most furious vehemence declared, that he would kill the first man who interposed ; but, in the midst of his passionate asseverations, he fell down dead upon the spot. Such, we are assured, were the circumstances which attended the death of this great pillar of humanity."

Despite all this evidence of common interests, I feel that our poem isn't by Cowper: the firm Augustan style seems unlike him. Animal cruelty was a hot topic of the later eighteenth century, and many progressive folk felt strongly about it: these debates, with their glimmering perception that man's responsibilities go beyond the benefit of his own kind, are the distant ancestors of today's anguish about a planet we seem intent on destroying. (And how much more, its proponents argued, should cruelty to our fellow man be condemned! The emergent animal welfare movement was closely linked to the anti-slavery movement.)

*

3. THE MERCIFUL MAN

At the end of the second chapter of Dickens' Barnaby Rudge (1841), Gabriel Varden, after an unpleasant incident on the dark road, and with a broken lantern, decides to drop in at the Maypole:

*

He tried to look stoically at the tavern, but his features would relax into a look of fondness. He turned his head the other way, and the cold black country seemed to frown him off, and drive him for a refuge into its hospitable arms.

'The merciful man, Joe,' said the locksmith, 'is merciful to his beast. I'll get out for a little while.'

And how natural it was to get out! And how unnatural it seemed for a sober man to be plodding wearily along through miry roads, encountering the rude buffets of the wind and pelting of the rain, when there was a clean floor covered with crisp white sand, a well swept hearth, a blazing fire, ...

*

Gabriel is evidently quoting a well-known saying to Joe (though resting his horse is really just an excuse for extending his own stay a little longer than replacing a broken lantern strictly requires...).

And so he is.  Like our "man of kindness" poem in Bath, The merciful man is merciful to his beast was often carved on horse-troughs and other drinking troughs (e.g. in Hampstead High Street (c. 1875), Lyndhurst (1902), Philadelphia (1913)), and is ultimately based on Proverbs 12:10 (KJV: "A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel"). But its origins seem to go back further than the poem: for example, it appears in a sermon of 1718 by the Quaker preacher Thomas Chalkley.

Scott was reputedly fond of the saying, and he used it in St Ronan's Well (1823), Chapter XXXVI.

The pig-sticking episode in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure was, somewhat unexpectedly, reprinted by the Victorian Society for the Protection of Animals in their journal The Animal's Friend (Dec. 1895) under the heading "A Merciful Man", showing that the proverb was well-known enough to be glancingly alluded to. Hardy himself had quoted the saying, in rather memorable circumstances, in the story "A Few Crusted Characters" in Life's Little Ironies (1894). [This information comes from Adrian Tait's interesting paper on Hardy's thinking about inhumanity to animals: https://journals.openedition.org/fathom/619 .]

Rose the Red and White Lily

How much refrain can you tolerate, has always been a question for me. As a child I was annoyed by the way that “I Saw Three Ships” kept harping on about Christmas day in the morning, and it was a trial I could never endure to submit to a rendering of the interminable later verses of “The Twelve Days of Christmas”: once one had the five gold rings firmly in hand, the rest was just a knees-up. Even such songs as "One man went to mow" and the great "Old MacDonald had a farm" were, I am sorry now to confess, only half-tolerated by me. And in my teens I despised any pop song that descended into chorus-repeats half-way through: Mott the Hoople's Honaloochie Boogie was my paradigm case, if you want to know. I just always wanted more invention, I wanted to be kept busy and entertained. I needed stories.

I didn't guess at a different way of listening until I heard this:

     repetition-
     in-the-music-
     &-you’re-never-
     gonna-lose-it



It took Salford to sneer at me what ought to have been obvious and in fact ought to have been instinctive in my dancing feet if I'd had any, that neither music nor verse are fundamentally about serving up content in that bedtime-story kind of manner. But never mind that for the moment.

In "Flower of the Holy Ghost", a poem from the anonymous collection Carmina Agnetae (London, late 19th c.), the slender narrative of Lady Eglantine and Sir Eynyon is manacled to an especially punitive refrain. There are 34 stanzas in all but I think you will find stanzas 5-9 an adequate sample:

     And crowned queen of beauty there,
          (Flower of the Holy Ghost,)
     Sat Eglantine that maid so fair.
          (Earthly flowers will fade away,
          But the lilies of heaven bloom for aye
          To pleasure the angel host.)

     Upon a dais, enthroned on high,
          (Flower of the Holy Ghost,)
     Beneath a gold wrought canopy.
          (Earthly flowers will fade away,
          But the lilies of heaven bloom for aye,
          To pleasure the angel host,)

     Clad in white samite, fair to see,
          (Flower of the Holy Ghost,)
     With surcoat of silken broidery.
          (Earthly flowers will fade away,
          But the lilies of heaven bloom for aye,
          To pleasure the angel host.)

     And kneeling lowly at her knee,
          (Flower of the Holy Ghost,)
     To take the prize of chivalry,
          (Earthly flowers will fade away,
          But the lilies of heaven bloom for aye,
          To pleasure the angel host.)

     He came, Sir Eynyon the Fair,
          (Flower of the Holy Ghost,)
     The victor of the tourney there.
          (Earthly flowers will fade away,
          But the lilies of heaven bloom for aye,
          To pleasure the angel host.)

I had to use cut-and-paste to avoid the unspeakable boredom of all that retyping. The printers at New Temple Press, Fleet Street, had no such recourse. They had to set up the lines of type 34 times. Once they missed the full stop after “host”, and once they made it a comma – in stanza 6, above. They couldn’t make up their minds if the fifth line deserved any kind of end-stop. On 16 occasions they gave it a comma, on 18 occasions they didn’t bother.

But whether anyone, even the author, even the hapless typesetter, has ever “read” the poem sequentially from beginning to end, this I find hard to credit. I certainly haven’t. After a couple of stanzas I just skimmed through the narrative lines and skipped all the rest, the same way I handle any other poem with a stupid refrain.

But I think this is quite a good poem, all the same. There are a lot more things to do with a poem apart from reading it.

The “Flower of the Holy Ghost” (which is also the poem’s title) is columbine (Aquilegia vulgaris) – poetically to be conceived in its white form, where the resemblance to communing doves is more striking.



The Lady Eglantine makes a chaplet out of columbine at the beginning of the poem: something few people today would know how to do: you need a base, e.g. dried woodbine.

The contrast between earthly and heavenly blooms is in several respects confused: one must suppose, deliberately. Is it sensible to choose, as your instance of an earthly bloom, one with such transcendent associations as the "flower of the Holy Ghost"? Is it sensible, in this already blurry context, to name your earthly heroine after the fragrant Rosa rubiginosa or sweetbriar?



Perhaps it’s also Eglantine, despite being a model of chastity and submissiveness, who is set in contrast to the lilies of heaven?

Red roses and white lilies have gone together in literature for a very long time. There were not many other flower names that literate Europe would commonly understand: they were principally interested in useful plants. For the decorative, "roses and lilies" was a sufficient shorthand, like "gold and silver" for wealth. The historian Athenaeus (fl. 200CE) on the accession of a Ptolemy:

As for the whole floor, it was strewed with every kind of flower; for Egypt, thanks to its mild climate, and the fondness of its people for gardening, produces abundantly, and all the year round, those flowers which are scarce in other lands, and then come only at special seasons. Roses, white lilies, and many another flower never lack in that country.

From this skeletal alphabet of only two letters, a vast symbolism effloresced. From classical literacy the trope of roses and lilies filtered down into European folk culture. These immemorial pairings in European lyrics and ballads are founded more on earlier symbolism than on real flowers; more on the debris of imported literacy than on native wisdom. As with folk-art generally, the bit that matters is the transmutation.

But what plants were the authors speaking about, originally?

The original white lily is the “Madonna Lily”, Lilium candidum (formerly known as Lilium album), native to the Balkans and west Asia, iconographically connected with the Virgin Mary (for centuries there were usually lilies in paintings of the Annunciation)



The original cultivated red rose (in Europe) is Rosa gallica – thought to have been introduced in Roman times to southern Europe (including of course Gaul) from western Asia.



By the middle ages (as e.g. the red rose of Lancaster), the cultivated rose was already usually semi-double, as in the ancient variety known as the “Apothecary’s Rose”, Rosa gallica officinalis (below) . As you can see the colour is light crimson rather than scarlet, the golden stamens still well out in the open.



It is obvious that looking at these 21st century digital photographs does not give you, cannot give you, an accurate idea of what was seen or imagined by a 2nd Century historian. Our interpreting eye is quite different from his: consider for example that it was unknown until the 18th century CE that flowers had a sexual function! We also see the colours differently; if you have no word for magenta then this flower is red, as in all paintings and illuminations. Besides, when you look at the photo and you are morally certain that this picture is only a year or two old, you make all sorts of inferences about where we are and what is outside the frame: a modern garden with machine-mown lawns - for example.

Thus in a sense more than merely literal, these are modern blooms...

103B.5 The knights they harped i their bower,
         The ladies sewd and sang;
         There was mair mirth in that chamer
         Than a’ their father’s lan.
103B.6 Then out it spak their step-mither,
         At the stair-foot stood she:
         I’m plagued wi your troublesome noise!
         What makes your melodie?
103B.7 O Rose the Red, ye sing too loud,
         White Lillie, your voice is strang;
         But gin I live and brook my life,
         I’se gar you change your sang.

I talked about a common understanding, but what was commonly understood was a decorum about appropriate usage. The exact images with which one imbued the words "rose" and "lily" was a more personal matter. The singer of the Child Ballad 103 about the two sisters, Rose the Red and White Lily would most likely have no personal acquaintance with the flowers pictured above, and would imagine local equivalents: in Scotland, dog-rose and lily-of-the-valley, perhaps. When we read the poems ourselves, we conceive not the living instances at which the digital camera is pointing, but legendary red and white flowers of dream-like size and simplicity.

Carmina Agnetae has masses of poems but only one theme, the early loss of love through bereavement. And the lilies of the afterlife. Its characters, its Eglantines and Eynyons come to grief so quickly that there is no chance of individualizing them. Only when gone for ever or mourning for ever are they faintly aglow with erotic life - as if having only now understood their purpose. Only among the lilies of the afterlife is there a glimmering of pleasure.