The splendid fidelity and devotion of the dog to his master have certainly been in part repaid by men of letters in all stages of the world's history. A valuable essay might be written on the dog's contributions to literature; in the poetry of the East, hundreds of years before Christ, the poor Indian insisted that his four-footed friend should accompany him into eternity. We know that this bit of Oriental pathos impressed Pope:—
"But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company."
One of the most profoundly affecting incidents in the Odyssey is the recognition of the ragged Ulysses by the noble old dog, who dies of joy. During the last half-century, since the publication of Dr. John Brown's Rab and his Friends (1858), the dog has approached an apotheosis. Among innumerable sketches and stories with canine heroes may be mentioned Bret Harte's brilliant portrait of Boonder; Maeterlinck's essay on dogs; Richard Harding Davis's The Bar Sinister; Stevenson's whimsical comments on The Character of Dogs; Kipling's Garm; and Jack London's initial success, The Call of the Wild.[13] But all these latter-day pamphlets, good as they are, fail to reach the excellence of Bob, Son of Battle. It is the best dog story ever written, and it inspires regret that dogs cannot read.
No one who knows Mr. Ollivant's tale can by any possibility forget the Grey Dog of Kenmuir—the perfect, gentle knight—or the thrilling excitement of his successful struggles for the cup. He is indeed a noble and beautiful character, with the Christian combination of serpent and dove. But Owd Bob in a slight degree shares the fate of all beings who approach moral perfection. He reminds us at times of Tennyson's Arthur in the Idylls of the King, though he fortunately delivers no lectures. Lancelot was wicked, and Arthur was good; but Lancelot has the touch of earth that makes him interesting, and Arthur has more than a touch of boredom. In Paradise Lost the spotless Raphael does not compare in charm with the picturesque Foe of God and Man. The real hero in Milton, as I suspect the poet very well knew, is the Devil; and if Mr. Ollivant had ignored both English and American godfathers, and called his novel The Tailless Tyke, no reader could have objected. Red Wull is the Satan of this canine epic; he has for us a fascination at once horrible and irresistible. The author seems to have felt that the Grey Dog was overshadowed; and he has saved our active sympathy for him by the clever device of making him at one time dangerously ill, when we realise how much we love him; and finally by throwing him under awful suspicion, that we may experience—as we certainly do—the enormous relief of beholding him guiltless. But in spite of our best instincts, Red Wull is the protagonist. Dog and master have never been matched in a more sinister manner than Adam McAdam and the Tailless Tyke. Bill Sikes and his companion are nothing to it, and we cannot help remembering that to the eternal disgrace of dogs, Bill Sikes's last friend forsook him. Compared with Red Wull, the Hound of the Baskervilles is a pet lapdog. When Adam and Wullie appear upon the scene, we look alive, even as their virtuous enemies were forced to do, for we know something is bound to happen. When the little man is greeted with a concert of hoots and jeers, we cannot repress some sympathy for him, akin to our feeling toward the would-be murderer Shylock, silent and solitary under the noisy taunts of the feather-headed Gratiano. This bitter and lonely wretch is a real character, and his strange personality is presented with extraordinary skill. There is not a single false touch from first to last; and the little man with the big dog abides in our memory. Red Wull is the hero of a hundred fights; his tremendous and terrible exploits are the very essence of piratical romance. After he has slain the two huge beasts of the showman, McAdam exclaims with a sob of paternal pride, "Ye play so rough, Wullie!"
And the death of the Tailless Tyke is positively Homeric. The other dogs, all his ruthless enemies, whisper to each other and silently steal from the room. They know that the hour has struck, and that this will be the last fight. The whole pack set upon him, each one goaded by the remembrance of some murdered relative, or by some humiliating scar. Red Wull asks nothing better than meeting them all; and the unequal combat becomes a frightful carnage. At the very end, as much exhausted by the labour of killing as by his own wounds, the great dog—now red indeed—hears his master's familiar cry, "Wullie, to me!" and with a super-canine effort he raises his dying form from the bottom of the writhing mass, shakes off the surviving foes, and slowly staggers to McAdam's feet. Like Samson, the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life.
Mr. Ollivant's next book, Danny, also a dog story, was not nearly so effective. The human characters command the most attention, though the old man with the weeping eye becomes a bit wearisome. The passages of pure nature description are often exquisitely written, and prove that at heart the author is a poet. But in the narrative portions there is an unfortunate attempt to conceal the slightness of the story by preciosity and affectation in the style. For the simple truth is that in Danny there is no story worth the telling. We recall distinctly the lovely young wife and her grim ironclad of a husband, but just what happened between the covers of the book escapes us. Although Mr. Ollivant believes in Danny, in spite of or because of its lack of popularity, he was so dissatisfied with the American edition that he suppressed it. Such an act is an indication of the high artistic standard that he has set for himself; ambitious as he is, he would rather merit fame than have it.
While the readers of Bob and of Danny were guessing what kind of a dog the young author would select for his next novel, he surprised us all by writing an uncaninical work. This story, adorned with happy illustrations, and printed in big type, as though for the eyes of children, was called Red-Coat Captain, and was enigmatically located in "That Country." Every American publisher to whom the manuscript was offered, rejected it, saying emphatically that it was nonsense; and if there had not been a strain of idealism in the Head of the firm that reconsidered and finally printed it, the book would probably never have felt the press. Mr. Ollivant was sure that the story would appeal at first only to a very few, and he requested the publisher not only to refrain from issuing any advertisement, but to make the entire first edition consist of only three copies—one for the archives of the House, one for the author, and one for a believing friend. The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light; and the shrewd man of business did not take the petition very seriously. The verdict Nonsense has been loudly ratified by many reviewers and readers; to the few it has been wisdom, to the many foolishness. For, as was said years ago of a certain poem, "The capacity to understand such a work must be spiritual." It matters not how clever one may be, how well read, how sensitive to artistic beauties and defects; qualities of a totally different nature must be present, and even then the time and place must be right, if one is to seize the inner meaning of Red-Coat Captain. I was about to say, the inner meaning of a story like Red-Coat Captain, but I was stopped by the thought that no story like it has ever been published, and perhaps never will be. Both conception and expression are profoundly original, and, in spite of some failure of articulation, the work is strongly marked with genius. It is an allegory based on the eleventh and twelfth commandments, which we have good authority for believing are worth all the ten put together. From one point of view it is a book for children; the mysterious setting of the tale is sure to appeal to certain imaginative boys and girls. But the early chapters, dealing with the pretty courtship and the honeymoon, will be fully appreciated only by those who have some years to their credit or otherwise. There is in this story the ineffable charm and fragrance of purity. It is the lily in its author's garden.
Mr. Ollivant's latest novel is the most conventional of the four, and wholly unlike any of its predecessors. It is a rattling, riotous romance, placed in the troublous times of the Napoleonic wars. The mighty shadow of Nelson falls darkly across the narrative, but the author has not committed the sin—so common in historical romances—of making a historical character the chief of the dramatis personæ. The title rôle is played by The Gentleman, and he is a hero worthy of Cooper or of Stevenson. Marked by reckless audacity, brilliant in swordplay and in horsemanship, clever in turn of speech, gifted with the manner of a pre-Revolution Duke—what more in the heroic line can a reader desire? The architecture of the novel and the staccato paragraphs infallibly remind one of Victor Hugo, whom, however, Mr. Ollivant does not know. Nor, outside of the works of Stevenson, have we ever seen a story minus love so steadily interesting. It is an amphibious book, and those who like fighting on land and sea may have their fill. The percentage of mortality is high; soldiers and sailors die numerously, and the hideous details of death are worthy of La Débâcle; there is a welter of gore. If this were all that could be said, if the fascination of this romance depended wholly on the crowded action, it would simply be one more exciting tale added to the hundreds published every year; good to read on train and turbine, but not worth serious attention or criticism. But the incidents, while frequent and thrilling, are not, at least to the discriminating reader, the main thing, as the Germans say. Nor is the construction, clever enough, nor the characters, real as they are; the main thing is the style, which, quite different from that in his former books, is yet all his own. The style, in the best sense of the word, is pictorial; it transforms the past into the present. The succession of events rolls off like a glowing panorama. It is perhaps natural that many reviewers should have praised The Gentleman more highly than all the rest of Mr. Ollivant's work put together; but, notwithstanding its wider appeal, it lacks the permanent qualities of Bob, and (I believe) of Red-Coat Captain, for they are original.
That Mr. Ollivant is now on the road to physical health will be good news. He has already done work that no one else can do, and we cannot spare him. His four novels indicate versatility as well as much greater gifts; and he should be watched by all who take an interest in contemporary literature and who believe that the future is as rich as the past. Bob looks like the best English novel that has appeared between Tess of the D'Urbervilles in 1891, and Joseph Vance in 1906. Nothing but bodily obstacles can prevent its author from going far.