People speak of the charm in unlikeness and the attraction in reverses; but there must be a more profound underlying harmony for such a charm and attraction to exist. The fact is, we can only appreciate what we understand in a degree at least, and there is no understanding without some points of union. If I may venture reverently to employ such an analogy, though man was made in the image of his Maker, when he had done all he could to deface that image, he became so incapable of having God in all his thoughts, that God, in His divine mercy, had compassion upon man’s miserable incapacity, and, taking upon Him the form of a man, restored the lost link in the chain which binds the whole universe to the throne of God.
Children have no difficulty in mentally putting themselves in the place of animals, or in putting animals in their place. Some of my readers may be inclined to say this is because the child is itself a little animal, with its higher faculties undeveloped; but none will refuse to admit that the moral and intellectual faculties are there, however much in abeyance. For my part, I believe that it is rather from the essential gifts of a child, its immense power of believing beyond what it sees, its ready sympathy and boundless trust, than from its defects of ignorance, that it has the happy capacity of identifying itself with its pets, and even its toys, either by transferring to them its own possessions, or by appropriating their experience. Curious instances of such application occur to me. A little child was heard gravely rebuking her dog. “If you are so naughty, Floss, your Uncle Tom and your Aunt Anne” (bestowing in all simplicity of heart her own relations on the dog) “will be vexed; you know they will.”
The second instance is given by an accomplished writer in a recent story, but I am persuaded it is from real life. I quote from memory.
“Why are you crying, Emily? What is the matter?” a mother asked her little daughter in tears.
“Oh, mamma! I am not Emily just now,” the child explained through her sobs; “I am the parrot the cat has been after, and I cannot get over the loss of my best tail feathers.”
A little child lisping its evening prayers startled its human hearers by adding an impromptu petition:—“God bless Ducky-daidles;” referring to an ugly little wooden duck which the child had received into the inmost circle of its affections.
It is a well-known fact that there is sometimes developed in men and women from childhood an extraordinary relation to animals, a capability of communicating with them, and exerting influence over them which does not commonly exist. With this abnormal alliance is doubtless connected the old myth of Orpheus gathering a brute audience to listen to the music of his lyre, and the more modern stories of bird and snake charmers and horse-tamers. I imagine this is only an extreme and abiding manifestation of an ordinary characteristic of childhood; and I believe it to be the inheritance, more or less, of all great animal painters.
But Sir Edwin Landseer possessed his animals in another sense from that in which the expression is used of other eminent animal painters, and especially with regard to the animal painters of the French and Belgian schools. He possessed them not merely as an artist, but as a man—I had almost said a brother—certainly in the light in which Robert Burns employed, with perfect manly tenderness, the term “fellow-mortal” to the field-mouse whose nest his ploughshare had turned up; and in the meaning which Sir Walter Scott intended to convey, when, on the day of the death of his dog, he wrote an apology to a host who expected Sir Walter’s company at dinner, on the plea of “the loss of an old friend.” Sir Edwin Landseer possessed animals—not simply in an accurate knowledge of their bodily traits, their hoofs, horns, and tails, the red fire or the luminous brown discs of their eyes, the symmetry of their loins, the glassy texture of their coats, or the soft sheen of their feathers—but in the chivalrous insight into those instincts in animals which in their sagacity and devotion sometimes put to shame the boasted wisdom and constancy of man.
I cannot help thinking that the wide-spread popularity of Sir Edwin Landseer in England is not only a credit to that manliness of national character which expresses itself in a love of out-of-door sports, and of the animals which share in these sports, but is also honourable as an evidence of the kindly satisfaction with which a matter of fact and plain-spoken race recognise in their four-footed allies attributes which constitute them far more than useful dependants—privileged and cherished comrades.
I should like to say a word on the other side of the question—I mean with regard to the sense in which Sir Edwin Landseer’s lively interpretation of the characters of animals—dogs in particular—has been an element of weakness in his power.