Theological Essays and Other Papers — Volume 2

by Thomas De Quincey

As to dogs, the case is not so easily settled; and before the reader is in a condition to judge of our remedy, he ought to know the evil in its whole extent. After all allowances for vermin that waken you before your time, or assassins that send you to sleep before your time, no single Greek nuisance can be placed on the same scale with the dogs attached to every menage, whether household or pastoral. Surely as a stranger approaches to any inhospitable door of the peasantry, often before he knows of such a door as in rerum natura, out bounds upon him by huge careering leaps a horrid infuriated ruffian of a dog—oftentimes a huge moloss, big as an English cow—active as a leopard, fierce as a hyena but more powerful by much, and quite as little disposed to hear reason. So situated—seeing an enemy in motion with whom it would be as idle to negotiate as with an earthquake—what is the bravest man to do? Shoot him? Ay; that was pretty much the course taken by a young man who lived before Troy: and see what came of it. This man, in fact a boy of seventeen, had walked out to see the city of Mycenae, leaving his elder cousin at the hotel sipping his wine. Out sprang a huge dog from the principal house in what you might call the High street of Mycenae; the young man's heart began to palpitate; he was in that state of excitement which affects most people when fear mingles with excessive anger. What was he to do? Pistols he had none. And, as nobody came out to his aid, he put his hand to the ground; seized a chermadion, (or paving-stone), smashed the skull of the odious brute, and with quite as much merit as Count Robert of Paris was entitled to have claimed from his lucky hit in the dungeon, then walked off to report his little exploit to his cousin at the hotel. But what followed? The wretches in the house, who never cared to show themselves so long as it might only be the dog killing a boy, all came tumbling out by crowds when it became clear that a boy had killed the dog. 'A la lanterne!' they yelled out; valiantly charged en masse: and among them they managed to kill the boy. But there was a reckoning to pay for this. Had they known who it was that sat drinking at the hotel, they would have thought twice before they backed their brute. That cousin, whom the poor boy had left at his wine, happened to be an ugly customer—Hercules incog. It is needless to specify the result. The child unborn had reason to rue the murder of the boy. For his cousin proved quite as deaf to all argument or submission as their own foul thief of a dog or themselves. Suffice it—that the royal house of Mycenae, in the language of Napoleon's edicts, ceased to reign. But here is the evil; few men leave a Hercules at their hotel; and all will have to stand the vindictive fury of the natives for their canine friends, if you should pistol them. Be it in deliverance of your own life, or even of a lady's by your side, no apology would be listened to. In fact, besides the disproportionate annoyance to a traveller's nerves, that he shall be kept uneasy at every turn of the road in mere anxiety as to the next recurrence of struggles so desperate, it arms the indignation of a bold Briton beforehand—that a horrid brute shall be thought entitled to kill him; and if he does, it is pronounced an accident: but if he, a son of the mighty island, kills the brute, instantly a little hybrid Greek peasant shall treat it as murder.

Many years ago, we experienced the selfsame annoyance in the north of England. Let no man talk of courage in such cases. Most justly did Marechal Saxe ask an officer sneeringly, who protested that he had never known the sensation of fear, and could not well imagine what it was like, had he never snuffed a candle with his fingers? 'because in that case,' said the veteran, 'I fancy you must have felt afraid of burning your thumb.' A brave man, on a service of known danger, braces up his mind by a distinct effort to the necessities of his duty. The great sentiment that it is his duty, the sentiments of honor and of country, reconcile him to the service while it lasts. No use, besides, in ducking before shot, or dodging, or skulking; he that faces the storm most cheerfully, has after all the best chance of escaping—were that the object of consideration. But, as soon as this trial is over, and the energy called forth by a high tension of duty has relaxed, the very same man often shrinks from ordinary trials of his prowess. Having, perhaps, little reason for confidence in his own bodily strength, seeing no honor in the struggle, and sure that no duty would be hallowed by any result, he shrinks from it in a way which surprises those who have heard of his martial character. Brave men in extremities are many times the most nervous, and the shyest under perils of a mean order. We, without claiming the benefit of these particular distinctions, happened to be specially 'soft' on this one danger from dogs. Not from the mere terror of a bite, but from the shocking doubt besieging such a case for four or five months that hydrophobia may supervene. Think, excellent reader, if we should suddenly prove hydrophobous in the middle of this paper, how would you distinguish the hydrophobous from the non-hydrophobous parts? You would say, as Voltaire of Rousseau, 'sa plume apparemment brulera le papier.' Such being the horror ever before our mind, images of eyeballs starting from their sockets, spasms suffocating the throat—we could not see a dog starting off into a yell of sudden discovery bound for the foot of our legs, but that undoubtedly a mixed sensation of panic and fury overshadowed us; a [Greek: Chermadion] was not always at hand; and without practice we could have little confidence in our power of sending it home, else many is the head we should have crushed. Sometimes, where more than one dog happened to be accomplices in the outrage, we were not altogether out of danger. 'Euripides,' we said, 'was really torn to pieces by the dogs of a sovereign prince; in Hounslow, but a month since, a little girl was all but worried by the buck-hounds of a greater sovereign than Archelaus; and why not we by the dogs of a farmer?' The scene lay in Westmorland and Cumberland. Oftentimes it would happen that in summer we had turned aside from the road, or perhaps the road itself forced us to pass a farm-house from which the family might be absent in the hayfield. Unhappily the dogs in such a case are often left behind. And many have been the fierce contests in which we have embarked; for, as to retreating, be it known that there (as in Greece) the murderous savages will pursue you—sometimes far into the high road. That result it was which uniformly brought us back to a sense of our own wrong, and finally of our rights. 'Come,' we used to say, 'this is too much; here at least is the king's highway, and things are come to a pretty pass indeed, if we, who partake of a common nature with the king, and write good Latin, whereas all the world knows what sort of Latin is found among dogs, may not have as good a right to standing-room as a low-bred quadruped with a tail like you.' Non usque adeo summis permiscuit ima longa dies, &c. We remember no instance which ever so powerfully illustrated the courage given by the consciousness of rectitude. So long as we felt that we were trespassing on the grounds of a stranger, we certainly sneaked, we seek not to deny it. But once landed on the high-road, where we knew our own title to be as good as the dog's, not all the world should have persuaded us to budge one foot.

Our reason for going back to these old Cumbrian remembrances will be found in what follows. Deeply incensed at the insults we had been obliged to put up with for years, brooding oftentimes over

'Wrongs unredress'd, and insults unaveng'd,'

we asked ourselves—Is vengeance hopeless? And at length we hit upon the following scheme of retribution. This it is which we propose as applicable to Greece. Well acquainted with the indomitable spirit of the bull-dog, and the fidelity of the mastiff, we determined to obtain two such companions; to re-traverse our old ground; to make a point of visiting every house where we had been grossly insulted by dogs; and to commit our cause to the management of these new allies. 'Let us see,' said we, 'if they will speak in the same bullying tone this time.' 'But with what ulterior views?' the dispassionate reader asks. The same, we answer, which Mr. Pitt professed as the objects of the Revolutionary war—'Indemnity for the past, and security for the future.' Years, however, passed on; Charles X. fell from his throne; the Reform Bill passed; other things occurred, and as last this change struck us—that the dogs, on whom our vengeance would alight, generally speaking, must belong to a second generation, or even a third, in descent from our personal enemies. Now, this vengeance 'by procuration' seemed no vengeance at all. But a plan which failed, as regarded our own past wrongs, may yet apply admirably to a wrong current and in progress. If we Englishmen may not pistol Greek canine ruffians, at any rate we suppose an English bulldog has a right to make a tour in Greece, A mastiff, if he pays for his food and lodgings, possesses as good a title, to see Athens and the Peloponnesus as a Bavarian, and a better than a Turk; and, if he cannot be suffered to pass quietly along the roads on his own private affairs, the more is the pity. But assuredly the consequences will not fall on him; we know enough of the sublime courage bestowed on that heroic animal, to be satisfied that he will shake the life out of any enemy that Greece can show. The embassy sent by Napoleon to the Schah of Persia about the year 1810, complained much and often of the huge dogs scattered over all parts of Western Asia, whether Turkish or Persian; and, by later travels amongst the Himalayas, it seems that the same gigantic ruffians prevail in Central Asia. But the noble English bull-dogs, who, being but three in number, did not hesitate for one instant to rush upon the enormous lion at Warwick, will face any enemy in the world, and will come off victors, unless hyperbolically overweighted; a peril which need not be apprehended, except perhaps in Laconia or Messenia.

Here, therefore, we should be disposed to leave the subject. But, as it is curious for itself, is confessedly of importance to the traveller, and has thrown light upon a passage in the Odyssey that had previously been unintelligible—we go on to one other suggestion furnished by the author before us. It is really a discovery; and is more worthy of a place in annotations upon Homer than nine in ten of all that we read;—

'Among the numerous points of resemblance with which the classical traveller cannot fail to be struck, between the habits of pastoral and agricultural life as still exemplified in Greece, and those which formerly prevailed in the same country, there is none more calculated to arrest his attention than the correspondence of the shepherds' encampments, scattered on the face of the less cultivated districts, with the settlements of the same kind whose concerns are so frequently brought forward in the imagery of the Iliad and Odyssey. Accordingly, the passage of Homer to which the existing peculiarity above described,' (viz. of pelting off dogs by large jagged stones,) 'affords the-most appropriate commentary, is the scene where Ulysses, disguised as a beggar, in approaching the farm of the swineherd, is fiercely assaulted by the dogs, but delivered by the master of the establishment. Pope's translation, with the exception of one or two expressions,' (amongst which Mr. Mure notices mastiff as "not a good term for a sheep-dog,") 'here conveys with tolerable fidelity the spirit of the original:—

'"Soon as Ulysses near the enclosure drew,
With open mouths the furious mastiffs flew;
Down sate the sage; and, cautious to withstand,
Let fall the offensive truncheon from his hand.
Sudden the master runs—aloud he calls;
And from his hasty hand the leather falls;
With show'rs of stones he drives them far away;
The scatter'd dogs around at distance bay."'
ODYSS. xiv. 29.

First, however, let us state the personal adventure which occasions this reference to Homer, as it illustrates a feature in Greek scenery, and in the composition of Greek society. In the early part of his travels, on a day when Mr. Mure was within a few hours of the immortal Mesolonghi, he (as better mounted) had ridden a-head of his suite. Suddenly he came upon 'an encampment of small, low, reed wigwams,' which in form resembled 'the pastoral capanne of the Roman plain;' but were 'vastly inferior in size and structure.' Women and children were sitting outside: but finally there crawled forth from the little miserable hovels two or three male figures of such gigantic dimensions as seemed beyond the capacity of the entire dwellings. Several others joined them, all remarkable for size and beauty. And one, whose air of authority bespoke his real rank of chief, Mr. Mure pronounces 'a most magnificent-looking barbarian,' This was a nomad tribe of Wallachian shepherds, descended (it is supposed) from the Dacian colonies, Romans intermingled with natives, founded by the later Caesars; the prevalent features of their faces are, it seems, Italian; their language is powerfully veined with Latin; their dress differing from that of all their Albanian neighbors, resembles the dress of Dacian captives sculptured on the triumphal monuments of Rome; and lastly, their peculiar name, Vlack Wallachian, indicates in the Sclavonic language pretty much the same relation to a foreign origin, as in German is indicated by the word Welsh: an affinity of which word is said to exist in our word Walnut, where wall (as the late Mr. Coleridge thinks) means alien, outlandish. The evidence therefore is as direct for their non-Grecian descent as could be desired. But they are interesting to Greece at this time, because annually migrating from Thessaly in the summer, and diffusing themselves in the patriarchal style with their wives, their children, and their flocks, over the sunny vales of Boeotia, of Peloponnesus, and in general of southern Greece. Their men are huge, but they are the mildest of the human race. Their dogs are huge, also; so far the parallel holds. We regret that strict regard to truth forbids us to pursue the comparison.

'I found myself on a sudden,' says Mr. Mure, 'surrounded by a fierce pack of dogs, of size proportioned to that of their masters, and which rushed forth on every side as if bent on devouring both myself and beast: being altogether unprovided with any means of defence but the rope-end of the same halter that supplied my stirrups, I was (I confess) not a little disconcerted by the assault of so unexpected an enemy.' From this he was soon delivered at the moment by some of the gentle giants, who 'pelted off the animals with the large loose stones that lay scattered over the rocky surface of the heath.' But upon the character of the nuisance, and upon the particular remedy employed—both of which are classical, and older than Troy, Mr. Mure makes the following explanations:—