not sympathise with the admirable conduct of Launce, who sat in the stocks to save his dog from execution for theft.
Scott was a genuine dog lover. It is on record that he excused himself for not keeping an engagement on the score of the death of an old friend, that friend being his bulldog Camp. His deerhounds Bran and Maida are, like the Duke of Wellington’s horse Copenhagen, known to all the world. I am glad to think that Scott’s dogs are preserved in several of his portraits. In his books there are two types of dogs, Dandie Dinmonts’ Pepper and Mustard who have given their master’s name to a breed and are real dogs of flesh and blood. Or again, Harry Bertram’s Wasp, who helps to save Dandie from the thieves. But there is also the theatrical dog, Roswal, in The Talisman, who springs at the throat of Conrad of Montserrat and saves his master’s honour. Between these come Gurth’s dog, Fangs, slightly tinged by the “tushery” of Ivanhoe, but still striking and pathetic. I keep still my sympathy with Gurth, who swears “by S. Edmund, S. Dunstan, S. Withold and S. Edward,” that he will never forgive Cedric for having attempted to kill his dog, “the only living creature that ever showed me kindness.”
But apart from his love of dogs Scott shows that he can use them with splendid dramatic effect; for instance, when Dugald Dalgetty and the Child of the Mist are escaping from the Duke of Argyll’s prison, how we thrill as the distant baying of those deadly trackers, the bloodhounds, strikes on the ear of the fugitives.
I am not clear as to what was Dickens’ personal attitude towards dogs, but he certainly understood the passion of the dog lover.
The man who ousted David Copperfield from the box-seat in the London Coach [229a] remarked, “‘Orses and dorgs is some men’s fancy. They’re wittles and drink to me—lodging, wife and children, reading, writing, and ’rithmetic—snuff, tobacker, and sleep.” Probably we should have felt, as Mr. Pickwick did on a similar occasion, [229b] that it would have been well if horses and dogs had been ‘washing’ also. I doubt, in fact, whether we should have enjoyed his company, or even whether we should have felt him a dog lover of our own sort—but we should not be too nice, and must allow some merit to his form of the passion.
Another of Dickens’s characters, Mr. Sleary, [229c] of “the Horse Riding,” has a much more attractive way of caring for animals. His theory of how a dog he has lost found him again always pleases me. The dog is believed to set on foot inquiries among his friends. “You don’t happen to know a person of the name of Sleary, do you? Person of the name of Sleary in the Horse-Riding way—stout man—game eye?” The inquiries were successful; and I like, too, the frankly sentimental account of the appearance of the clown’s dog after his master’s death, and the dog’s search for the clown’s little girl:—
“We was getting up our Children in the Wood one morning, when there comes into our Ring by the stage door a dog. He had travelled a long way, he was in very bad condition, he was lame, and pretty well blind. He went round to our children, one after another, as if he was a-seeking for a child he knowd; and then he come to me, and throwed himself up behind, and stood on his two forelegs, weak as he was, and then wagged his tail and died.”
I might doubtless give other instances of well-known men who were lovers of dogs, [230a] but I shall refrain from further quotation. The instincts of man are being purged of the brutality by which they are too often characterised, and what are clumsily called dumb animals have benefited side by side with human beings. It is not yet true that even a merciful man is merciful to his beast, but in England, at any rate, it is recognised that actual cruelty to animals is wrong, but even this is not always the case among other nations. My father used to tell us how, when his horse was exhausted, he lagged behind his S. American companion who shouted, “Spur him! Don Carlos, spur him! he is my horse,” and simply could not understand my father’s motive. But I am glad to remember that even among rough people, in uncivilised ages, a sense of humanity to animals was not unknown. Busbecquius [230b] records that in Constantinople an angry crowd assembled before a shop in which
was exhibited a living bird with its mouth forcibly opened to show its huge gape.
Cruelty is often said to be the outcome of ignorance and stupidity rather than of innate brutality. I wish I could believe this: in any case it is an evil which must be not merely held in check but rooted out. All lovers of animals owe a debt of gratitude to the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, not only for their great organisation for the prevention and punishment of brutalities, but also, and perhaps especially, for their guidance of public opinion.