The Whale1 and the Elephant:2 A Fable3

To the learned and ingenious Dr. Morley4

The Elephant at forty-nine5

Cannot be caught with hook and line,6

Especially when it leads into

The Precincts of the Hamburg Zoo.7

The Whale,8 at nearly thirty-eight,

Has less grey matter in his pate.

The Elephant, of beasts alive,

Is quite the most Conservative;9

(Of beasts Conservative, the most

Have perish’d, like the Morning Post10).

While other creatures change and roam,

He lingers in his jungle home,

In vegetarian flatulence.

Slow in attack, strong in defence,

The Whale, of more Mercurial mind,

Is driven about by tide and wind:

A mammal with no nobler wish

Than live like fish among the fish:

A Monster who escap’d the Flood,

With watery diluted Blood,11

And, sacrificing hoof to fin,

Perpetuates pre-diluvial Sin.

Yet ah! might Whales perhaps repent?

And leave their fluid Element?

Prepare the higher life to meet,

And stand at last on legs and feet?

With fatted calves12 we’d welcome ’em

Into the New Jerusalem.13

[T. S. Eliot]

Notes
  1. 1.

    FVM to Helen Gardner (who had coyly surmised that FVM was ‘Whale’ because he was overweight), 23 June 1978:

    I carried and happily still carry a reasonable physical bulk; the primary reason, though, was that I had been on whaling voyages, and written a book about Whaling [F. V. Morley and J. S. Hodgson, Whaling North and South (1926)], and was made famous for giving certain items to the Natural History Museum – there was for a time a glass case exhibiting ‘SPECIMENS OF THE WHALE-LOUSE’, the card ambiguously continuing ‘FROM F. V. MORLEY ESQ.’ But such is Fame – it gets forgotten – and the book on Whaling, though reviewed in The Criterion, not even that is a memory – such, I repeat, is Fame.

    Gardner, in a letter to Morley of 29 June 1978, conceded that she had indeed presumptuously supposed that the sobriquet ‘Whale’ was owed to the fact of ‘your being rather larger than other members of the Bina Gardens circle’.

    FVM to Gardner, 2 July 1978:

    Whaling is a cruel, sordid dirty business … Fair enough to attribute nicknames to physical (or other) characteristics. I happened to turn up an old engagement diary for 1934. When lunching at the O & C we sometimes weighed ourselves before and after. Here are two entries

    Friday June 29 1934

    BeforeAfter
    H.R. (Read).11stone311stone6
    T.S.E.12"412stone4
    F.V.M.16"1½16"3

    Monday July 2 1934

    BeforeAfter
    F-S (Force-Stead)10stone510stone7
    T.S.E.11"1312stone2¼
    F.V.M.15"1316""

    Wm. Force Stead seemed to have considerable effect in filling up Tom’s weight.

  2. 2.

    See TSE’s letter to Samuel Eliot (Boston, MA), 31 Mar. 1951 (concerning Samuel Eliot’s great uncle):

    It was also welcome to have a copy of his bookplate. I notice that the motto is different from ours (Tace et fac, I believe a variant made by my grandfather on the Tace aut Fac which was used in the sixteenth century); but that you also turn the elephant’s nose up, whereas the Eliots in Cornwall turn it down, as if about to eat a peanut (Houghton bMS Am 1692.3).

    TSE to Bonamy Dobrée, 29 July 1927, teasingly: ‘My family tradition is that we are descended from the White Elephant; not the Siamese but the Indian White Elephant. “Eliot” is merely a corruption of “Elephant”.’

  3. 3.

    Sent by TSE to GCF with the title: ‘AN EPISTLE To the Learned and Ingenious Dr Morley’; and an undated (?1 Oct. 1937) TS covering note, on Criterion paper:

    There is some question whether the enclosed Poem, the manuscript of which has just been discovered in the British Museum, is correctly attributed to the late Mr. GAY; and it is therefore sent to the chief living authority on that Author, for the benefit of his opinion. One reason why the attribution has been doubted, is that the identity of the Gentleman to whom the Poem is addressed, is completely obscure. Had there been such a Person among the Poet’s acquaintance, we might expect to have heard of him before.

    TSE to GCF, 2 Oct. (1937) – Eliot Estate; copy in King’s HB/L/12/1/8:

    I am writing in haste to prevent you from spending any more time over the problem which, as it now appears, I presented prematurely. I hope that you have not begun to write your full report, questioning, if not wholly disproving, the ascription to Mr. GAY. Because meanwhile a new copy of the Poem has turned up in the British Museum, this time entitled simply ‘A Fable’. It was found by a research student from Nigeria, between the leaves of Vol. III of The Complete Works of Harold J. Laski. It is identical in dedication and in every other respect, including paper and ink, except that after the lines

    The Elephant, of beasts alive,

    Is quite the most Conservative.

    we have a couplet which does not occur in the first version, viz.:

    (Of beasts conservative, the most

    Have perish’d, like The Morning Post):

    Which appears to give us an approximate date for the Poem. Doesn’t it? or does it not?

    In haste (as I said before) and apologetically,

    TP

  4. 4.

    The phrase ‘learned and ingenious’ is an inveteration, as in A Meditation of Life and Death: Translated with some alterations out of the works of the learned and ingenious Eusebius Nierembergius (Oxford, 1682).

  5. 5.

    JDH note: ‘Mr E., at this time, aged 49.’

  6. 6.

    Job 41: 1: ‘Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?’ (cited in Poems II, 219).

  7. 7.

    The Tierpark Hagenbeck is a zoo in Stellingen, Hamburg, Germany, first opened in 1874 by Carl Hagenbeck Sr. (1810–87), a fishmonger and amateur animal collector. It was the first zoo (which for a while even exhibited certain human ‘animals’ including Nubians and Inuit) to use enclosures surrounded with moats rather than fenced pens.

  8. 8.

    JDH note: ‘Mr M[orley].’

  9. 9.

    See Private Willis’s Song (‘When all Night Long a Chap Remains’), in Iolanthe, Act II:

    I often think it’s comical – Fal, lal, la!

    How Nature always does contrive – Fal, lal, la!

    That every boy and every gal,

    That’s born into the world alive

    Is either a little Liberal

    or else a little Conservative!

    Fal, lal, la!

    (cited in Poems II, 219)

  10. 10.

    JDH note: ‘A famous newsheet [sic] later incorporated with ye “Daily Telegraph”.’

    The Morning Post was a conservative daily newspaper published in London from 1772 to 1937, when it was acquired by The Daily Telegraph.

  11. 11.

    TSE’s doctor announced to him one day: ‘Mr Eliot, you have the thinnest blood I’ve ever seen!’ Also, there is a family legend, which TSE long believed, that he was remotely – dilutedly? – descended from the Bloods – bad Colonel Blood, &c.

  12. 12.

    Luke 15: 23: ‘And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry’ (cited in Poems II, 219).

  13. 13.

    Revelation 21:

    And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.

    And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.