Part 13

Of all writers who have sung the praises of the dog, and who have justified our love for him, Maeterlinck has given the fullest expression to the profound and absorbing egotism which underlies this love. Never for a moment does he consider his dog save as a worshipper. Never does he think of himself save as a being worshipped. Never does he feel that this relationship can be otherwise than just, reasonable, and satisfying to both parties. “The dog,” he says, “reveres us as though we had drawn him out of nothing. He has a morality which surpasses all that he is able to discover in himself, and which he can practise without scruple and without fear. He possesses truth in its fullness. He has a certain and infinite ideal.”

And what is this ideal? “He” (the dog) “is the only living being that has found, and recognizes, an indubitable, unexceptionable and definite god.”

And who is this god? M. Maeterlinck, you, I, anybody who has bought and reared a puppy. Yet we are told that the dog is intelligent. What is there about men which can warrant the worship of a wise beast? What sort of “truth in its fullness” is compatible with such a blunder? Yet it is for the sake of being idolized that we prize and cherish the idolater. Our fellow mortals will not love us unless we are lovable. They will not admire us unless we are admirable. Our cats will probably neither love nor admire us, being self-engrossed animals, free from encumbering sensibilities. But our dogs will love and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their uncritical homage. M. Maeterlinck recognizes our dependence on the dog for the deification we crave, and is unreasonably angry with the cat for her aloofness. In her eyes, he complains, we are parasites in our own homes. “She curses us from the depths of her mysterious heart.”

She does not. She tolerates us with a wise tolerance, recognizing our usefulness, and indulgent of our foibles. Domesticity has not cost her the heavy price it has cost the dog. She has merely exchanged the asylum of cave or tree for the superior accommodation of the house. Her habits remain unaltered, her freedom unviolated. Cream-fed and pampered, she still loves the pleasures of the chase; nor will she pick and choose her prey at the recommendation of prejudiced humanity. M. Maeterlinck, who has striven to enter into the consciousness of the dog, describes it as congested with duties and inhibitions. There are chairs he must not sit on, rooms he must not enter, food he must not steal, babies he must not upset, cats he must not chase, visitors he must not bark at, beggars and tramps he must not permit to enter the gates. He lives under as many, and as strict, compulsions as though he were a citizen of the United States. By comparison with this perverted intelligence, this artificial morality, the mind of the cat appears like a cool and spacious chamber, with only her own spirit to fill it, and only her own tastes and distastes to be consulted and obeyed.

Perhaps it is because the dog is so hedged in by rules and regulations that he has lost his initiative. Descended from animals that lived in packs, and that enjoyed the advantages of communal intelligence, he could never have possessed this quality as it was possessed by an animal that lived alone, and had only his own acuteness and experience to rely on. But having surrendered his will to the will of man, and his conscience to the keeping of man, the dog has by now grown dependent for his simplest pleasures upon man’s caprice. He loves to roam; but whereas the cat does roam at will, rightly rejecting all interference with her liberty, the dog craves permission to accompany his master on a stroll, and, being refused, slinks sadly back to confinement and inaction. I have great respect for those exceptional dogs that take their exercise when they need or desire it in self-sufficing solitude. I once knew an Irish terrier that had this independent turn of mind. He invited himself to daily constitutionals, and might have been seen any morning trotting along the road, miles away from home, with the air of an animal walking to keep his flesh down. In the end he was run over by a speeding motor, but what of that? Die we must, and, while he lived, he was free.

A lordliness of sentiment mars much of the admirable poetry written about dogs. The poet thrones himself before addressing his devoted and credulous ally. Even Matthew Arnold’s lines to “Kaiser Dead”--among the best of their kind--are heavy with patronage:

“But all those virtues which commend The humbler sort who serve and tend, Were thine in store, thou faithful friend.”

To be sure, Kaiser was a mongrel; but why emphasize his low estate? As a matter of fact, mongrels, like self-made men, are apt to have a peculiar complacency of demeanour. They do not rank themselves among “the humbler sort”; but “serve and tend” on the same conditions as their betters.

Two years ago Mr. Galsworthy, who stands in the foremost rank of dog-lovers, and who has drawn for us some of the most lifelike and attractive dogs in fiction, pleaded strongly and emotionally for the exemption of this animal from any form of experimental research. He had the popular sentiment of England back of him, because popular sentiment always _is_ emotional. The question of vivisection is one of abstract morality. None but the supremely ignorant can deny its usefulness. There remain certain questions which call for clean-cut answers. Does our absolute power over beasts carry with it an absolute right? May we justifiably sacrifice them for the good of humanity? What degree of pain are we morally justified in inflicting on them to save men from disease and death? If we faced the issue squarely, we should feel no more concern for the kind of animal which is used for experimentation than for the kind of human being who may possibly benefit by the experiment. Right and wrong admit of no sentimental distinctions. Yet the vivisectionist pleads, “Is not the life of a young mother worth more than the life of a beast?” The anti-vivisectionist asks: “How can man deliberately torture the creature that loves and trusts him?” And Mr. Galsworthy admitted that he had nothing to say about vivisection in general. Cats and rabbits might take their chances. He asked only that the dog should be spared.

It has been hinted more than once that if we develop the dog’s intelligence too far, we may end by robbing him of his illusions. He has absorbed so many human characteristics--vanity, sociability, snobbishness, a sense of humour and a conscience--that there is danger of his also acquiring the critical faculty. He will not then content himself with flying at the throats of villains--the out-and-out villain is rare in the common walks of life--he will doubt the godlike qualities of his master. The warmth of his affection will chill, its steadfastness will be subject to decay.

Of this regrettable possibility there is as yet no sign. The hound, Argus, beating the ground with his feeble tail in an expiring effort to welcome the disguised Odysseus, is a prototype of his successor to-day. Scattered here and there in the pages of history are instances of unfaithfulness; but their rarity gives point to their picturesqueness. Froissart tells us that the greyhound, Math, deserted his master, King Richard the Second, to fawn on the Duke of Lancaster who was to depose and succeed him; and that a greyhound belonging to Charles of Blois fled on the eve of battle to the camp of John de Montfort, seeking protection from the stronger man. These anecdotes indicate a grasp of political situations which is no part of the dog’s ordinary make-up. Who can imagine the fortunate, faithful little spaniel that attended Mary Stuart in her last sad months, and in her last heroic hours, fawning upon Queen Elizabeth? Who can imagine Sir Walter Scott’s dogs slinking away from him when the rabble of Jedburgh heaped insults on his bowed grey head?

The most beautiful words ever written about a dog have no reference to his affectionate qualities. Simonides, celebrating the memory of a Thessalian hound, knows only that he was fleet and brave. “Surely, even as thou liest in this tomb, I deem the wild beasts yet fear thy white bones, Lycas; and thy valour great Pelion knows, and the lonely peaks of Cithæron.” This is heroic praise, and so, in a fashion, is Byron’s epitaph on Boatswain. But Byron, being of the moderns, can find no better way of honouring dogs than by defaming men; a stupidity, pardonable in the poet only because he was the most sincere lover of animals the world has ever known. His tastes were catholic, his outlook was whimsical. He was not in the least discomposed when his forgetful wolf-hound bit him, or when his bulldog bit him without the excuse of forgetfulness. Moore tells us that the first thing he saw on entering Byron’s palace in Venice was a notice, “Keep clear of the dog!” and the first thing he heard was the voice of his host calling out anxiously, “Take care, or that monkey will fly at you.”

It is a pleasant relief, after floundering through seas of sentiment, to read about dogs that were every whit as imperfect as their masters; about Cowper’s “Beau” who has been immortalized for his disobedience; or Sir Isaac Newton’s “Diamond” who has been immortalized for the mischief he wrought; or Prince Rupert’s “Boy” who was shot while loyally pulling down a rebel on Marston Moor; or the Church of England spaniel, mentioned by Addison, who proved his allegiance to the Establishment by worrying a dissenter. It is also a pleasure of a different sort to read about the wise little dog who ran away from Mrs. Welsh (Carlyle’s mother-in-law) on the streets of Edinburgh, to follow Sir Walter Scott; and about the London dog of sound literary tastes who tried for many nights to hear Dickens read. It is always possible that if men would exact a less unalterable devotion from their dogs, they might find these animals to be possessed of individual and companionable traits.

But not of human sagacity. It is their privilege to remain beasts, bound by admirable limitations, thrice happy in the things they do not have to know, and feel, and be. “The Spectator” in a hospitable mood once invited its readers to send it anecdotes of their dogs. The invitation was, as might be imagined, cordially and widely accepted. Mr. Strachey subsequently published a collection of these stories in a volume which had all the vraisemblance of Hans Andersen and “The Arabian Nights.” Reading it, one could but wonder and regret that the tribe of man had risen to unmerited supremacy. The “Spectator” dogs could have run the world, the war and the Versailles Conference without our lumbering interference.

THE END