In my life with dogs I have felt much more clearly their desire to speak, and to speak truth,
than the wish to deceive. I had an old Scotch terrier, who in his youth, before I knew him, had been called Nigel, no doubt because he was black and small, but as he grew up he somehow acquired the uncouth name of Scrubbins. At one stage of his career he was condemned to death for eczema. I begged him off, and he lived some five years with me, and was cured of his eczema by the devoted care of a servant. He was a dog of large heart, who, while he cared for others, was especially devoted to me. In his old age his eyes became dim and his limbs stiff. He had a pathetic way of standing staring into my eyes, or with difficulty getting his paws on to my knees to ask to have his head rubbed, an attention of which he never wearied. No one could doubt that this was his expression of the mutual love that bound us to each other. This was the indestructible impression produced, and it is useless to tell me that he may have been striving to conceal some crime, or at least some base and worldly point of view. When sentiment is applied to facts, rational conclusions are apt to be rare—but without a share of sentiment there might have been no facts to record.
There are innumerable cases proving the devotion of dogs—a passion surviving the master’s death, and prolonged until the dog himself dies. Such is the story of the heroic dog seen to watch his master’s dead body in South America, keeping the vultures off it, and only allowing himself an occasional rush to the river for water, until he too died. What is there here but a passion of love?
We may call it instinct, but what is the love of a human mother?
A dog differs from his master in not taking offence; you may tread on his tail and he will only apologise for being in your way. But I have known a dog bite his mistress when she interfered with him in a fight, while he was beside himself with anger. In the same way an unhappy dog caught in a trap may be so maddened with pain as to attempt to bite those who seek to free him, but these are extreme cases. It is again part of this same lovable quality of dogs that they are not given to moods. They are always ready to welcome us and to wag tails when we notice them.
M. Anatole France shows in some ways a sympathy with dogs, and a sensitiveness to their mental attitudes, finer and more true than anything in Stevenson’s essay. The misery of Riquet [226] over the démenagement of his master, M. Bergeret, is admirably drawn. Riquet begins by barking fiercely when “des hommes inconnus, mal vêtus, injurieux et farouches” invade his beloved house, and ends in being lifted in silent misery and shut up in a portmanteau. Riquet soon becomes too human, but he does at least show his adoration of M. Bergeret, in mourning over the desecration and removal of “ton fauteuil profond—le fauteuil où nous reposions tous les soirs, et bien souvent le matin, à côté l’un de l’autre.”
No. XII. of the Pensées de Riquet does not bear on the love that subsists between dog and man;
it goes deeper however, for it shows that men as well as dogs are dominated by instinctive night fears which unite them by a most ancient and enduring bond. Riquet says: “À la tombée de la nuit des puissances malfaisantes rôdent autour de la maison,” a fact obvious to all children. There is (No. XII.)an admirable comic prayer to his master beginning, “O mon maître Bergeret, dieu de carnage, je t’adore.” But it seems to me to miss the true flavour of doggishness.
Professor A. C. Bradley [227] strives to show that Shakespeare “did not care for dogs.” His opinion is worthy of respect, and all the more that he seems to be a dog lover himself. At least, so I interpret what he says of Shakespeare: “To all that he loved most in men he was blind in dogs, and then we call him universal!” “What is significant,” he says, “is the absence of sympathic allusion to the characteristic virtues of dogs, and the abundance of allusions of an insulting kind.”
I had always imagined that the description of the hounds in “A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream” was written by one who liked dogs as individuals, not merely as a picturesque piece of hunting apparatus. But Professor Bradley’s contrary opinion is probably the sounder. In the same way I think that the passage in “Lear,” “Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart,” etc., could only have been written by one who understood the shock which the little dogs’ behaviour gave the King. On the other hand, I agree that Shakespeare does