By ROBERT PALFREY UTTER
(1875—). Associate Professor of English in the University of California. He taught for a time at Harvard and also at Amherst. He is a delightful essayist, and contributes frequently to various magazines.
The writer of a familiar essay selects any subject in which he is interested. Sometimes the more trifling the subject seems to be, the more delightful is the essay. Trifles, in fact, make up life, and around them center many of our deepest interests. The very charm of the familiar essay lies in its ability to call attention to the value of trifles,—to the little things in life, to little events, and to all the odds and ends of human interests.
The familiar essay is nothing more than happy talk that gives us, as it were, a walk or a chat with one who has a keen mind, a ready wit, and a pleasant spirit.
The Pup-Dog is an unusually excellent illustration of the familiar essay. We all love him,—the pup-dog,—the good friend about whom Mr. Utter has written so amusingly, so understandingly, and so sympathetically. As we read we can see the dog jumping and hear him barking; we laugh at his antics; we are, in fact, taking a walk with Mr. Utter while he talks to us about his dog,—or our dog.
Any dog is a pup-dog so long as he prefers a rat, dead or alive, to chocolate fudge, a moldy bone to sponge cake, a fight with a woodchuck to hanging round the tea-table for sweet biscuit. Of course he will show traits of age as years advance, but usually they are physical traits, not emotional. For the most part dogs’ affections burn warmly, and their love of life and experience brightly, while life lasts. They remain young, as poets do. Every dog is a pup-dog, but some are more so than others.
Most so of all is the Irish terrier. To me he stands as the archetype of the dog, and the doggier a dog is, the better I like him. I love the collie; none better. I have lived with him, and ranged the hills with him in every kind of weather, and you can hardly tell me a story of his loyalty and intelligence that I cannot go you one better. But the collie is a gentleman. He has risen from the ranks, to be sure, but he is every inch the gentleman, and just now I am speaking of dogs. The terrier is every inch a dog, and the Irish is the terrier par excellence.
The man who mistakes him for an Airedale, as many do, is one who does not know an Irishman from a Scot. The Airedale has a touch of the national dourness; I believe that he is a Calvinist at heart, with a severe sense of personal responsibility. The Irish terrier can atone vicariously or not at all for his light-hearted sins. The Airedale takes his romance and his fighting as seriously as an Alan Breck. The Irish terrier has all the imagination and humor of his race; he has a rollicking air; he is whimsical, warm-hearted, jaunty, and has the gift of blarney. He loves a scrimmage better than his dinner, but he bears no malice.
His fellest earthly foes,
Cats, he does but affect to hate.
The terrier family is primarily a jolly, good-natured crowd whose business it is to dig into the lairs of burrowing creatures and fight them at narrow quarters. The signal for the fight is the attack on the intrusive nose. You can read this family history in the pup-dog's treatment of the cat. The cat of his own household with whom he is brought up he rallies with good-humored banter, but he is less likely to hurt her than she him. He will take her with him on his morning round of neighborhood garbage-pails, and even warm her kittens on his back as he lies in the square of sunshine on the kitchen floor, till they begin to knead their tiny claws into him in a futile search for nourishment; then he shakes them patiently off and seeks rest elsewhere. He will chase any cat as long as she will run; if she refuses to run, he will dance round her and bark, trying to get up a game. “Be a sport!” he taunts her. “Take a chance!” But if she claws his nose, she treads on the tail of his coat, and no Irish gentleman will stand for that.