Part 3

So the house which Mrs. Carlyle’s friends used jestingly to call “a refuge for stray dogs and cats,” still offered them some slight shelter--although master and mistress, and little Nero, all were gone!

_III._

_PETS IN LITERARY LIFE._

III.

PETS IN LITERARY LIFE.

The pets and authors of the past may be briefly glanced at on our way to those of to-day. We may begin with the learned Justus Lipsius, erstwhile professor at Louvain. This worthy went daily to his lecture-room with a retinue of dogs, whose portraits, each with a commemorative description, adorned the walls of his study. Three have been individualized for posterity as Mopsikins, Mopsy and Sapphire.

Tarot, Franza, Balassa, Ciccone, Musa, Mademoiselle and Monsieur, were, in their long-vanished life-time, companions to Agrippa, the astrologer and scholar. The knowing little Monsieur was permitted, as special favorite, to sleep upon his master’s bed, eat from his plate, and lie upon the table beside his papers, while he wrote. He may even have suggested to Goethe the black poodle in Faust, since, like Rupert’s hound Boy, and Claver’s battle-horse, he was commonly supposed to be a fiend.

The creator of Faust’s demon-poodle could not endure dogs in real life, and was always scolding about their “_ungeheure Ton_.” As to their character, he even committed himself in this very unpleasant epigram:

“Wundern kannes mich nicht dass Menschen die Hunde so lieben; Denn ein erbärmlicher Schuffist, wie Der Mensch, so der Hund,”

which has been rendered:

“It cannot surprise me that men love dogs so much, For dog, like man, is a pitiful, sneaking rogue.”

Such a disagreeable sentiment as this--one so unworthy both of man and author--requires an antidote. We find one in these lines of Herrick to his spaniel Tracy:

“Now thou art dead, no eye shall ever see For shape and service spaniel like to thee. This shall my love doe, give thy sad fate one Teare, that deserves of me a million.”

This is all we know of Tracy, but it suffices enough. A faithful dog, a fond master--in these words his story is told.

Bounce--named most suggestive--belonged to Alexander Pope; Bean, to the gentler poet, Cowper. Goldsmith had a dog, of course, and equally of course it was a poodle. No creature less comic would serve his turn. Sir Joshua Reynolds tells a story of the pair which reads like a fragment from the Vicar of Wakefield: how one morning he called on the improvident author, rather expecting to find him in low spirits, and found him, instead, at his table, alternately writing a few words, and looking over at the poodle which he had made stand on its hind legs in a corner of the room.

In this fashion the impecunious one was amusing himself; and the great artist looked on, no less amused in truth, and pleasantly sympathetic. If only he had painted the scene, one wishes.

Very different in temperament was Lord Byron. Practically, he agreed with Mme. de Staël in liking dogs the better, the more he knew of men. He seems to have had as friendly a feeling for the animal world as his contemporary, Scott, although showing it in a more whimsical fashion. Scott would never have traveled with a private menagerie, but Byron carried with him from England to Italy, “ten horses, eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow and a falcon.”

Dogs were his favorites; they were friends whose affection could be trusted, and whose criticism he had not to fear. Boatswain is almost as widely known as his master. No one visits Newstead without seeing his picture in the dining-room, and in the grounds his grave, with the famous epitaph:

NEAR THIS SPOT ARE DEPOSITED THE REMAINS OF ONE WHO POSSESSED BEAUTY WITHOUT VANITY, STRENGTH WITHOUT INSOLENCE, COURAGE WITHOUT FEROCITY, AND ALL THE VIRTUES OF MAN WITHOUT HIS VICES. THIS PRAISE, WHICH WOULD BE UNMEANING FLATTERY IF INSCRIBED OVER HUMAN ASHES, IS BUT A JUST TRIBUTE TO THE MEMORY OF BOATSWAIN, A DOG, WHO WAS BORN AT NEWFOUNDLAND, MAY, 1803, AND DIED AT NEWSTEAD ABBEY, NOV. 18, 1808.

As this dog was the friend of his youth, so Lion was the companion of his later days in Greece. Major Parry says that “riding, or walking, or sitting, or standing,” they were never apart. “His most usual phrase was, ‘Lyon, you are no rogue, Lyon,’ or ‘Lyon,’ his lordship would say, ‘thou art an honest fellow, Lyon.’ The dog’s eyes sparkled, and his tail swept the floor as he sat with his haunches on the ground. ‘Thou art more faithful than men, Lyon; I trust thee more.’ Lyon sprang up and barked, and bounded round his master, as much as to say, ‘You may trust me.’”

Faithful to the last, he watched over Byron’s death-bed, and then went to England, where he lived and died, an honored pensioner, in the house of Mrs. Leigh.

Mrs. Radcliffe, whose novels delighted and terrorized our grandmothers, had two dogs, called Fan and Dash. Fan had been a mangy, poverty-stricken beast, condemned by its rustic owner to be hung. In a lucky hour the novelist happened by, purchased the guiltless criminal for half a crown; and Fan, cured of the mange, grown plump and silky, became so beautiful a dog that Queen Charlotte, when out walking with her brood of young princesses, would stop to notice her. On one of these occasions Fan and one of the royal spaniels caught simultaneously the ends of a long bone; and for some distance this foundling of the people and the pet of royalty pranced on amicably together, holding the bone between them!

Dash was a poor street dog whose leg had been run over and broken. He was taken in a coach to the doctor’s, the leg was set, health and strength returned, and Dash was more than himself again, for now he was “Mrs. Radcliffe’s dog.”

Another Dash lived first with Thomas Hood, then with Charles Lamb; he made such a slave of the latter, that finally Miss Lamb wrote to Mr. Patmore, entreating him to remove the dog, “if only out of charity; for if we keep him much longer, he will be the death of Charles.”

The transfer took place, and the late victim’s spirits rose to high-water mark soon afterwards in this whimsical, charming letter:

DEAR PATMORE:

Excuse my anxiety, but how is Dash?... Goes he muzzled or _apesto ore_? Are his intellects sound, or does he wander a little in his conversation? You cannot be too careful to watch the first symptoms of incoherence. The first illogical snarl he makes, off with him to St. Luke’s.... Try him with hot water: if he won’t lick it up, it is a sign he does not like it. Does his tail wag horizontally or perpendicularly? That has decided the fate of many dogs in Enfield. Is his general deportment cheerful? I mean, when he is pleased--for otherwise there is no judging. You can’t be too careful. Has he bit any of the children yet? If he has, have them shot, and keep him for curiosity, to see if it was the hydrophobia.... You might pull out his teeth (if he would let you), and then you need not mind if he were as mad as Bedlamite.... I send my love in a ---- to Dash.

C. LAMB.

A great contrast to this tyrant was Mouse, the loving, jealous little terrier of Douglas Jerrold. A source of much gentle mirth while her master was well and strong, she did her utmost to comfort his dying hours. Once more, as she nestled beside him, his thin hand rested on her head; once more, and for the last time, he called her faintly by name; then they removed her, and in a few hours Mouse was masterless.

Horace Walpole’s dogs furnished many an amusing item for his letters, and diverted his friends no less than himself. “Sense and fidelity,” said he, “are wonderful recommendations; when one meets with them ... I cannot think the two additional legs are any drawback.”

Tory, Patapan, Rosette, Touton and a host of others, were the living illustrations in his home of this belief.

Tory, the “prettiest, fattest, dearest” King Charles, might have been leaner with advantage to himself, for a wolf snapped him up as he was waddling behind his master’s carriage in the Alps.

Patapan is the little aristocrat whom you see beside Mr. Walpole in the picture. The whims of “His Patapanic Majesty” were all indulged, his tastes consulted; his master idolized, and royalty itself caressed him; finally his vanity, already large, was puffed out like a balloon, by Mr. Chute’s poem in his praise. Thus it sums up his perfections:

“Patá is frolicsome, and smart As Geoffrey once was--(oh! my heart), He’s purer than a turtle’s kiss, And gentler than a little miss; A jewel for a lady’s ear, And Mr. Walpole’s pretty dear.”

When the pretty dear was frisking through Strawberry Hill, he may very likely have brushed in his frolics against a great bowl of blue and white china occupying a place of honor in one of the rooms.

But the label would not have told him, as it does us, that this was the veritable “Tub of Gold Fishes” in which the favorite cat of Thomas Grey was drowned. “Demurest of the tabby kind”--Selima gazed at the fish, and longed; extended “a whisker first and then a claw;” and then--

“The slippery verge her feet beguiled, She tumbled headlong in.”

She may have found some comfort--since drown she must--in the vase being genuine old china; just as Clarence preferred drowning in Malmsey wine to water; but her best comfort--had she known it--was the poem to be written on her fate, the poem which still points her morals and adorns her tale.

No one, in this group of literary people, was so intimate with cats as Southey. He delighted in them, he admired them, he understood them, and he thought no house quite furnished unless it had a baby and a kitten!

It was to his little daughter Edith that this author dedicated his history of the cats of Greta Hall, which he intended to supplement by the Memoirs of Cats’ Eden. Unfortunately for us all, the last was never finished. The most delightful of philofelists--to use his own coinage--he tells the story of his cats _con amore_; from the fate untimely of Ovid, Virgil, and Othello, to the merited honors heaped upon Lord Nelson, a great carrot-colored cat promoted by him to the highest rank in the peerage, through all its degrees, under the titles of His Serene Highness, the Archduke Rumpelstilzchen, Marquis Mac-Bum, Earl Tomlemagne, Baron Raticide, Waswlher and Skaratchi. Felicitous titles, are they not?

But how the list lengthens! Only a word can be given to Emily Brontë with her faithful, sullen mastiff Keeper; to Charlotte Brontë, with her black-and-white curly-haired Flossy; to Bulwer, with his Newfoundland Terror, and his better loved Andalusian horse; to Mrs. Bulwer--herself a beautiful spoiled child--with her beautiful spoiled Blenheim, Fairy, described by Disraeli as “no bigger than a bird of paradise, and quite as brilliant”--a Fairy that had its own printed visiting cards, and paid fashionable calls with its mistress; to Charles Reade, of keen wit and large heart, who petted squirrels, hares, and deer, as well as dogs, who wept when the exigencies of Never too Late to Mend required him to kill Carlo, and who humorously advised Ouida to name one of her dogs Tonic, as he was “a mixture of steal and w(h)ine.”

Charles Kingsley’s pets, and those of Charles Dickens, have been so often and so fully described, that any further description seems superfluous. Timber, Turk and Linda, Mrs. Bouncer, Bumble and Sultan, were only a few of his many dogs; while Dick the canary--“best of birds”--a succession of kittens, an eagle, and various ravens, were among the pets that kept matters lively at Gadshill.

Of the ravens, the most famous was Grip, who sat for his portrait in Barnaby Rudge, and whose stuffed body still exists.

There are no brighter letters, no finer poems in literature, than those which “Flush, my Dog,” called out from Mrs. Browning--letters and verse so vivid, so delicately discriminative, that they amply supply the lack of other portraiture, and in them Flush still lives. Listen:

“Like a lady’s ringlets brown, Flow thine silken ears adown Either side demurely Of thy silver-suited breast, Shining out from all the rest Of thy body purely.

“Darkly brown thy body is Till the sunshine striking this, Alchemize its dullness; When the sleek curls manifold Flash all over into gold, With a burnished fullness.

“Leap! thy broad tail waves a light; Leap! thy slender feet are bright, Canopied in fringes. Leap! those tasseled ears of thine Flicker strangely fair and fine Down their golden inches.”

How clearly we see him with that gentlest mistress, bathed in the warm, sweet sunshine of the past! But there were other than sunny days--long, weary days in a sick-room, where--

“This dog only waited on, Knowing that when light is gone, Love remains for shining.

“Other dogs in thymy dew Tracked the hares, and followed through Sunny moor or meadow-- This dog only crept and crept Next a languid cheek that slept, Sharing in the shadow.”

What wonder that she returned his love with--

--“more love again Than dogs often take of men”?

Flush was a gift from Miss Mitford, another authoress devoted to dogs; and the rival claims of these ladies for their pets, may still pleasantly amuse us. “How is your Flushie?” inquires Miss Mitford. “Mine becomes every day more and more beautiful, and more and more endearing. His little daughter Rose is the very moral of him, and another daughter (a puppy four months old, your Flushie’s half-sister) is so much admired in Reading that she has already been stolen four times--a tribute to her merit which might be dispensed with; and her master having offered ten pounds reward, it seems likely enough that she will be stolen four times more. They are a beautiful race, and that is the truth of it.”

Now hear Miss Barrett (as she was at this time) telling Mr. Horne:

“Never in the world was another such dog as my Flush. Just now, because after reading your note, I laid it down thoughtfully without taking anything else up, he threw himself into my arms, as much as to say, ‘Now it’s my turn. You’re not busy at all now.’ He understands every thing I say, and would not disturb me for the world. Do not tell Miss Mitford--but her Flush, (whom she brought to see me) is not to be compared to mine! quite animal and dog--natural, and incapable of my Flush’s hyper-cynical refinement.”

“My Flush,” she writes elsewhere, “my Flush, who is a gentleman.”

Our next glimpse of this well-bred favorite is due to Mr. Westwood, a friend and correspondent of the lady. “On one occasion,” he says, “she had expressed to me her regret at Flush’s growing plumpness, and I suppose I must have been cruel enough to suggest starvation as a remedy, for her next letter opens with an indignant protest:

“Starve Flush! Starve Flush! My dear Mr. Westwood, what are you thinking of?... He is fat, certainly--but he has been fatter ... and he may, therefore, become thinner. And then he does not eat after the manner of dogs. I never saw a dog with such a lady-like appetite. To eat two small biscuits in succession is generally more than he is inclined to do. When he has meat it is only once a day, and it must be so particularly well cut up and offered to him on a fork, and he is so subtly discriminative as to differences between boiled mutton and roast mutton, and roast chicken and boiled chicken, that often he walks away in disdain, and will have none of it....

“My nearest approach to starving Flush is to give general instructions to the servant who helps him to his dinner, ‘not to press him to eat.’ I know he ought not to be fat--I know it too well--and his father being, according to Miss Mitford’s account, ‘square,’ at this moment, there is an hereditary reason for fear. So he is not to be ‘pressed.’”

Flush left England with his mistress after her marriage, and lived to a good old age in her Italian home. His doggish heart was never torn by seeing younger, more agile pets preferred to himself. Secure in the only affection he valued, he passed quietly out of life; and nothing now remains of his mortality save a lock of hair, which was treasured by Robert Browning.

One word more of Miss Mitford. Her chief favorite was the greyhound Mossy, who died in 1819. She wrote an account of his death which no one ever saw until it was found, after her own death, sealed in an envelope, together with some of his hair. It repeats the well-known burden of the faithful lamenting the faithful: “No human being was ever so faithful, so gentle, so generous, and so fond. I shall never love anything half so well.”

Robert Browning declared himself a partisan of cats and owls--tastes which have suggested different gifts from friends. An owl inkstand on his desk seemed to be brooding over the thoughts whisked out of it by Browning’s pen; an owl paper-weight steadied these same thoughts when transferred to paper. Stuffed owls, pictured owls, looked down upon him as he wrote. With regard to cats, who have much secret affinity with owls, his opinions were equally liberal, and he notes with the eye of an artist their wonderful grace and beauty.

A friend of the Brownings in Florence, Miss Isa Blagden, had many pets of her own, charitably gathered from the ranks of the distressed. She is probably best known to American readers by her poem to Bushie, the favorite dog of Charlotte Cushman.

From sheer force of contrast, both Mouche and Hugo must have enjoyed--had they known him--General Muff, the stately and affable favorite of an American authoress (Miss Mary L. Booth). I called upon this lady one day to request of her an introduction to the General; but he took matters into his own paws, as it were, and introduced himself before she could appear. Exquisitely dignified and urbane, his composure was not ruffled by the very wildest gambols of a Persian kitten, who darted, glanced and flashed hither and thither in the room like flame.

He wore the famous Fayal collar in which he was photographed. He wore it because of artistic preference, I suppose--certainly not because he had nothing else to wear; for I saw in his own particular wardrobe collars of all kinds and colors, from dainty ribbon to Russia leather.

May it be long before Muff’s gracious personality requires an epitaph! but when that time comes, the following lines will apply to him as fitly as to the one for whom they were written--the poet Whittier’s cat, Bathsheba:

“Whereat None said ‘Scat!’ Better cat Never sat On a mat, Or caught a rat, Than this cat. Requiescat!”

All who are familiar with the poem by Matthew Arnold, on Geist’s Grave, or another, on Kaiser, Dead, know the story, told as he alone could tell it, of this great author’s pets.

The dachshund Geist lived four brief years, then “humbly laid” him “down to die.” Dearly loved, remembered always--often and often would his friends recall his “liquid, melancholy eye,” his wistful face at the window, the scuffle of his feet upon the stair, and his “small, black figure on the snow.” But “there is no photograph of poor little Geist,” says Mr. Arnold, “except one taken after his death, which gives pleasure to us, but could give it to no one else. There is, however, an excellent portrait of another dog of mine, Max, in a birthday book from my poems, but it is weighted by a very bad portrait of his master.”

This was the Max of the poem, who “with downcast, reverent head” had looked upon “Kaiser, dead”--“Kaiser,” once the blithest, happiest of dogs, supposed at first to be pure dachshund, until at length with--

“The collie hair, the collie swing, The tail’s indomitable ring, The eye’s unrest-- The case was clear; a mongrel thing ‘Kai’ stood confest.”

All the same--

“Thine eye was bright, thy coat it shone; Thou hadst thine errands off and on; In joy thine last morn flew; anon, A fit! All’s over; And thou art gone where Geist hath gone, And Toss and Rover.”

It is the fashion of mortality to pass away--but that does not alter the sadness of it--of losing what we love. As surely as we have friends or pets, so surely shall we know the pain of loss--fortunate only if there has been between us such true love that the memory thereof abides. Such love there was between Mr. Edmund Yates and Nelly, the story of whose life he told me in the following letter of September, 1887: