The Bloodless Revolution

by Tristram Stuart

  In the wake of Rousseau and Saint-Pierre’s vegetarian educational reforms, a generation of children were raised by parents hoping to preserve the innate sympathy that would flourish into natural virtue. The Napoleonic poet Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) was one of them, brought up by his mother according to the philosophy of ‘les philosophes du sentiment’, Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and the laws of Pythagoras and Émile:

  My mother was convinced, as I myself am, that killing animals for the sake of nourishment … is one of those curses imposed upon man either by his fall, or by the obduracy of his own perversity. She believed, as I do still, that the habit of hardening the heart towards the most gentle animals … brutalise[s] and harden[s] the instincts of the heart. She believed, as I do still, that such nourishment, much more succulent and much more energised in appearance, contains in itself irritating and putrid principles which embitter the blood and shorten the days of men. She cited, to support these ideas of abstinence, the numberless gentle, pious populations of India who forbid themselves everything that has had life.

  Lamartine said that, despite his convictions, in adulthood he conformed to society by eating meat. But contemporaries recall that later in life Lamartine reconverted to vegetarianism after travelling through India, and lived in Paris like a Hindu vegetarian, giving all the best food to his pets.65

  Rousseau championed the natural feeling of sympathy, and this provided a serious challenge to the long-held complacency about man’s natural right to kill animals. Exactly how many people relinquished flesh or changed their behaviour towards animals can never be known, but if literature and art are anything to go by, Rousseau changed the face of European culture forever.

  SIXTEEN

  The Counter-Vegetarian Mascot: Pope’s Happy Lamb

  The poet and wit Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was laughed at by contemporaries for his Horatian frugality. His weak digestive system buckled when exposed to the arduous carnivorous feasts occasionally imposed upon it by social conformity, and as a friend of Cheyne he knew that the remedy was to try to restrict himself to dinners of spinach and eggs.1 Lines in the poetic Essay on Man (1733–4) might lead one to suppose that Pope himself endorsed vegetarianism – and that is certainly how he has been read by later scholars and vegetarians.2 But Pope, and many other writers like him, was in fact using sympathy for animals as a deliberate subterfuge against the moral case for vegetarianism.

  The purpose of this chapter is to dispel the claim, pervasive not least among scholars, that ‘James Thomson’s The Seasons argues in favor of vegetarianism and against hunting, as does Cowper’s The Task’, when exactly the opposite is the case.3 These poems – and innumerable other literary works including Pope’s – expressed sympathy for animals and horror at their death, and they gave enormous currency to vegetarian ideas. But they invariably overrode these expressions of sympathy by appealing to man’s God-given right to kill animals, or by resorting to notions of the ‘painless death’ and the ‘happy lamb’ by which meat could be procured without causing suffering. The mistaken belief that this reactionary literature was pro-vegetarian originates with the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century vegetarian anthologists John Oswald, George Nicholson, Joseph Ritson and Howard Williams – all of whom quote sentimental poetry as if it supported their case. They could only do so, however, by selecting the lines that encouraged sympathy for animals, and deliberately excising those that overrode that sympathy in favour of the right to eat meat.

  The real aim of this literature was to shore up the right to eat meat against the claims of vegetarianism. Such works drew a distinct line between an acceptable degree of sympathy for animals, and the unacceptable, irrational and blasphemous challenge to man’s right to kill them for food. They were designed to navigate readers along the ‘true path’ of sympathy, avoiding on the one side the Scylla of vegetarianism and on the other the Charybdis of insensibility. The poems of Thomson, Pope and Cowper are, in this sense, not ‘vegetarian’, but counter-vegetarian, and they represent the fiercely fought battle lines entrenched in European culture between dominant norms and marginal fanaticism.

  Cheyne (and later Rousseau) were the most obvious enemies, but the counter-vegetarians were also marshalling themselves against the battalions of Hindus whose ethics seemed dangerously allied to the cult of sensibility. Much energy also went into undermining Ovid’s ‘Pythagorean Philosophy’, greatly popularised by John Dryden’s 1700 translation, into which he had sneaked an extra argument possibly recruited from the Indian travelogues: ‘Take not away the Life you cannot give:/ For all Things have an equal right to live.’4

  In his epoch-making nature poem, The Seasons (1726–30), James Thomson – patriotic author of ‘Rule, Britannia’ – appears to make the case for vegetarianism. Emulating Ovid, he appeals to the state of innocence when man, ‘unfleshed in blood’, was ‘The Lord, and not the Tyrant of the World’.5 Carnivorous beasts do not have the capacity for sympathy, he says:

  But Man, whom Nature form’d of milder Clay,

  With every kind Emotion in his Heart,

  And taught alone to weep; while from her Lap

  She pours ten thousand Delicacies, Herbs,

  And Fruits as numerous as the Drops of Rain

  Or Beams that give them Birth: shall he, fair Form!

  Who wears sweet Smiles, and looks erect on Heaven,

  E’er stoop to mingle with the prowling Herd,

  And dip his Tongue in Gore? The Beast of Prey,

  Blood-stain’d deserves to bleed: but you, ye Flocks,

  What have ye done; ye peaceful People, What,

  To merit Death? You, who have given us Milk

  In luscious Streams, and lent us your own Coat

  Against the Winter’s Cold? And the plain Ox,

  That harmless, honest, guileless Animal,

  In What has he offended? He, whose Toil,

  Patient and ever-ready clothes the Land

  With all the Pomp of Harvest; shall he bleed,

  And struggling groan beneath the cruel Hands,

  Even of the Clowns he feeds?6

  Thomson gave Ovid’s objections to meat-eating a contemporary resonance by highlighting man’s sympathetic anatomy, which could be taken – as Thomson’s friend Cheyne took it – as evidence that eating meat was unnatural. But Thomson’s sentimental verses were a ruse.7 It turns out that all these appeals against eating animals are just what a typical, sentimental ‘feeling Heart/ Would tenderly suggest’. This is a natural and worthy instinct if taken lightly, says Thomson patronisingly, ‘but’, he emphatically interjects, God has ‘fix’d us’ in the state of being carnivorous and thus tacitly ‘forbids’ such ‘presumptuous’ objections: we ‘must not’ try to subvert the decree of heaven. The ‘Perfection’ aimed at by the prelapsarian vegetarians, says Thomson, is blasphemously audacious.8 Vegetarianism was not an unachievable ideal: it was an undesirable extreme.

  In his later poem Liberty (1735–6), Thomson used a similar ploy by professing admiration for Pythagoras’ ‘tender System’ which valued ‘Whatever shares the Brotherhood of Life’. But just as in The Seasons, Thomson subsumes this sentimental egalitarianism into the Christian hierarchy of the Chain of Being and – apparently alluding to Cheyne’s theory of reincarnation – quips that killing animals might actually send them to a ‘higher Life’.9

  In one of the first editions of The Guardian (1713), Alexander Pope wrote an essay in imitation of Seneca and Plutarch, which argued that ‘Humanity may be extended thro’ the whole Order of Creatures, even to the meanest.’10 But Pope deliberately diluted the arguments that Plutarch used against eating flesh per se into a mere critique of overindulgence and excessively cruel methods of slaughter: ‘Lobsters roasted alive, Pigs whipt to Death, Fowls sowed up,* are Testimonies to our outrageous Luxury.’ Pope showed that pitying and killing could indeed be harmonious bed-fellows by adopting Plutarch’s fall-back position: ‘If we kill an Animal for our Provision, let us do it with
the Meltings of Compassion, and without tormenting it.’11 The idea of cruel slaughter became a straw man which diverted sentimental arguments against killing animals: society felt itself acting justly, while doing nothing to curtail its culinary demands.

  This means of self-righteously assuaging guilt became standard fare in British periodicals like the Tatler and the Gentleman’s Magazine, those newly fledged mouthpieces of civil society.12 In 1731 the Universal Spectator ran an article just like Pope’s, which concluded that although humans were anatomically herbivorous, abstinence from meat was off the cards: ‘Let us eat it then;’ but just try not to ‘imbitter Death itself by the most excruciating Torments’. Meat-eaters were absolved from guilt by transposing the crime of cruelty onto the producers (butchers and farmers) rather than the consumers.13

  Pope came up with the perfect solution. In An Essay on Man he celebrated the Indians’ reverence for animals and the vegetarian harmony of the Golden Age when ‘Man walk’d with beast, joint tenant of the shade … No murder cloath’d him, and no murder fed.’14 He gave voice to the Cheynian (and Senecan) idea of providential distempers avenging the victims of the dinner plate, and pointed out that by becoming a predator man had made himself a murderer of his own species too:

  But just disease to luxury succeeds,

  And ev’ry death its own avenger breeds;

  The fury-passions from that blood began,

  And turn’d on Man a fiercer savage, Man.15

  At first one might think that Pope yearned to undo the cycle of violence and return man to the peaceful ‘state of nature’. But, like Buffon, he argued that since people bred and fed domestic animals, it was only fair that they should eat them. Challenging meat-eating, he showed, was like trying to stem the flow of nature: ‘Say, will the falcon, stooping from above,/ Smit with her varying plumage, spare the dove?’16

  Humans – as everyone knew – had the sympathetic hearts that falcons lacked; so how did Pope answer that? He did so by masterfully reversing a scene from Ovid into the myth of the Happy Lamb:

  The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,

  Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?

  Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,

  And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.17

  It is easy to construe this passage as an indictment of the treachery of killing domestic animals – and vegetarians have often done so. But Pope coolly undercut the pathos by arguing that nature had benevolently kept the lamb devoid of foresight and therefore ignorant of its death until the fatal blow is struck. This was the ideal ‘painless death’. The lamb is alive one moment and dead the next: the transition from one state to the other occurs without even a twinge of suffering. Since sentimentalists only cared about causing pain, rather than valuing life per se, if they could be convinced that animals felt no pain they could eat guilt-free meat. The legacy remains today: ‘sympathetic’ objections to cruelty are fired against the grotesque practices of the animal industry (battery hens, farrowing crates, stall-reared veal), and people sit down to a Sunday lunch of ‘happy’ chickens/pigs/bullocks et cetera.

  The counter-vegetarian role of Pope’s lamb was illustrated explicitly by Richard Graves (1715–1804) in his sentimental novel The Spiritual Quixote (1773). Graves was part of Cheyne’s social circle and tried his ascetic diet, but in his later novel satirises soppy sentimentality through the character of Mr Graham, a pseudo-Pythagorean who calls for legislation against cruelty to animals and has Cheyne- and Rousseaulike associates.18 ‘My compassion for dumb animals,’ says Graham, ‘is so excessive, that it often makes me quite miserable.’ Graves’ hero, Geoffrey Wildgoose, desperately tries to argue Graham out of his ‘strange effeminacy’ by quoting Pope’s idyllic picture of the unwary lamb. Alluding to Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Wildgoose explains that ‘I can easily reconcile myself to their fate: as the pain of death consists, I believe, chiefly in the apprehension’:

  ‘And when it is instantaneous (as in those cases it is or ought to be) they enjoy themselves, and feel nothing till the stroke arrives; and the moment it does so, the violence of it either deprives them of life, or at least of the sense of pain.’19

  Without pain, animal slaughter no longer needed to excite compassion. Pope’s happy lamb assumed iconic status for the counter-vegetarian tradition. In 1767 John Brückner, one of Buffon’s followers, used the ignorance of Pope’s lamb as the justification for meat-eating, arguing that sympathy only dictated that we should ‘shorten, as much as possible, the pains necessarily inflicted’.20 Some vegetarians, on the other hand, accurately perceived Pope’s insensible lamb as an obstacle to their cause. Both John Wolcot (alias Peter Pindar) and Percy Bysshe Shelley rebuffed Pope’s idea of guiltless killing, and when the vegetarian revolutionary John Oswald – who had read The Spiritual Quixote – rewrote Pope’s scene in his Cry of Nature, he turned from the pathos of the lamb to its mother who suffers agony at its death.21

  These counter-vegetarian sentimental works were literary renditions of arguments made by theologians who tried to dispel qualms about killing animals. The Newtonian John Clarke had pointed out in his Enquiry into the Cause and Origin of Evil (1720) that the principal objections to killing animals were ‘the depriving the Creature of Life, and of all that Pleasure it was capable of enjoying in the right Use of its Faculties and Senses; and also the putting it to all that Pain and Misery; which a violent and unnatural Death is unavoidably attended with.’22 Pope’s ovine response was a poetic illustration of the arguments that his favourite theodicist, the Archbishop of Dublin William King, had spelled out in order to calm the conscience of troubled souls in 1702. With his authority as an Archbishop, he explained that animals

  ought, if they had Sense enough, to praise their Creator … because it is better to enjoy Life and Sense for some Time, than to be always a Lump of Matter, and void of all Perception. Besides, Beasts enjoy present Satisfaction always, without remembering what is past, or disquieting themselves with what is to come; and, after all, they suffer less by being kill’d, than they would if they died of a Disease, or old Age.

  Using animals for food did not injure them; it actually made them happier: they were bred in prodigious numbers, looked after by assiduous farmers, and then painlessly despatched shortly before becoming too old to enjoy their life in any case.23 In other words, the counter-vegetarian argument was based on the recognition of what would now be called the mutualistic symbiosis between humans and domesticated animals.

  Philosophers continued to develop these arguments throughout the eighteenth century. It is usual to trace an ameliorative ‘progression’ of enlightened moral responsibility towards animals in this period. But the authors who made this ‘progression’ also saw their task as a rearguard action against the vegetarian challenge. They gave ground to the vegetarians, but in many cases their principal concern was fortifying the fundamental bulwark around man’s right to eat meat. Between 1742 and his death in 1746, the moral-sense philosopher Francis Hutcheson moved from condemning unnecessary cruelty as ‘highly blameable’ to actually acknowledging that animals had an absolute ‘right’ to be exempt from ‘useless pain or misery’. But he emphasised – in contrast to Rousseau’s Discourse of Inequality which was published in the same year as Hutcheson’s posthumous papers – that rearing and killing animals for food was necessary and, reiterating William King’s argument, that it actually increased the greater common happiness of both man and beasts. When Hutcheson made his universally lauded demarcation of animal rights, defending animals from abuse seems to have been a secondary consideration: his primary concern was defending man’s right to kill animals against the challenge posed by the ‘many great sects and nations, at this day, [who] deny this right of mankind’, and simultaneously the ‘great names among ourselves’ who alleged that meat-eating could not be defended by natural reason so ‘that without revelation, or an express grant from God, we would have had no such right.’24

  Meanwhil
e, Hutcheson’s pupil, David Hume, had acknowledged in 1739 that the mechanical ‘springs and principles’ of sympathy ‘takes place among animals, no less than among men’.25 Whether rational or not, he said that they should be indulged with ‘compassion and kindness’. But in contrast to Rousseau’s subsequent arguments and Hutcheson’s own conclusion, Hume denied that they could be treated with ‘justice’.26

  The philosopher David Hartley (1705–57) – a friend of Cheyne and tentative believer in animal heaven – took the emerging philosophies a step towards fully-blown Utilitarianism in his seminal Observations on Man (1749). He agreed with Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees that killing animals ‘does great Violence to the Principles of Benevolence and Compassion’. But although he came close, he did not – as has been claimed – provide an intellectual defence of vegetarianism. Hartley observed that no matter what people ate, innumerable microscopic animals would be destroyed, and trying to prevent that would simply mean starving to death. This pragmatism was backed by God’s explicit permission to eat flesh and therefore, he concluded, ‘Abstinence from Flesh-meats seems left to each Person’s Choice, and not necessary, unless in peculiar Circumstances.’27

  Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield (1694–1773), the celebrity of aristocratic literary London life and another of Cheyne’s clients, briefly became a vegetarian as an undergraduate after reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but by 1756 he looked back on this as youthful, misguided folly. Nature, he reflected, ‘has instituted the universal preying upon the weaker as one of her first principles’ and thus we are only ‘under indelible obligations to prevent their suffering any degree of pain more than is absolutely unavoidable’. In a flourish of aristocratic arrogance (and emulating the periodicals), he cynically concluded that since only the educated felt pity and only the lower classes worked as butchers, no animal would benefit from sympathetic morals.28 The theological essayist Soame Jenyns (1704–87), meanwhile, defended middle-class meat-eaters by offloading the guilt of animal cruelty onto the upper-class grouse-hunter and the plebeian butcher who ‘knocks down the stately ox with no more compassion than the black-smith hammers a horse-shoe’. Thus he defended the tastes and sensibilities of the metropolitan bourgeoisie which comprised his readership by dissociating their consumption from the cruelty involved in supplying them with food.29