15 
‘to deny that it causes at least some unnecessary pain, and it 
was a good sportsman and a tender-hearted man who said 
*“ Ves, sport is cruel.’” Yet he had no idea of giving it up. 
And perhaps he acted on a true impulse. At any rate it 
may be commonly observed that good sportsmen are often 
careful to avoid and check a great deal of cruelty to animals 
which the more sentimental lovers of animals condone, and 
it is the sportsmen, keepers, and poachers, with whom 
animals appear so often to have an instinctive sympathy. 
Such considerations do not solve the problem, but this is 
not the place to pursue it. There is no hint in anything 
Kingsley wrote that he felt so much as the existence of the 
problem. He enjoyed sport with a perfectly clear conscience. 
But some hint of what might possibly have been his 
explanation may be gathered from his poetry. Consider the 
hares at the beginning and end of ‘‘ The Bad Squire.’’ The 
poem is an outcry of terrible human passion. But the hares 
know nothing of this. They are actually bound up with 
it as cause and effect. The poacher and his widow and the 
hares live very close together, the hares almost touching 
civilisation as preserved game, and the others almost outlaws 
and nearer to the life of fields and woods than to the squire. 
And yet the hares and the outlaws are miles apart, and this 
unconsciousness of one another adds to the poignancy of 
the tragedy. As Cardinal Newman once said, ‘‘ Man lives 
with a mystery on either side, the angels and the brutes.”’ 
So perhaps Kingsley would have considered that sport was 
tight because we cannot credit animals with man’s mental 
feelings, and the moral principles by which man’s conduct 
towards men is regulated do not apply to his conduct towards 
animals. He might have said something like that, though 
it does not really remove the difficulty. However, the 
bearing of all this on our present study of his poems is that 
it points us to a line of thought which often appears in 
them, the way in which man, though himself a part of 
nature, yet dwells as a stranger among his natural 
surroundings—‘‘I cannot tell what you say, brown streams.”’ 
This is shadowed forth in the myth of the ‘‘ sea-maids ”’ in 
“« Andromeda.’’ Andromeda, the Phoenician princess was 
chained to a rock and left to be the prey of a sea-monster that 
was devastating the country. The poem describes how she 
dis left alone with her dreadful expectation ; our pity and 
horror are stirred within us as we read. And then in the 
night before the frightened eyes of the victim in her terrible 
home-sickness the pageant of the sea-maids passes in its 
beauty, which is not the beauty of human beings : 
Onward they passed in their joy ; on their brows 
neither sorrow nor anger ; 
Self-sufficing, as gods, never heeding the woe of the 
maiden. 
