Maeterlinck has declared that the dog is the only conscious being in the world who knows and is sure of his god; in The Blue Bird he exalted the moral character of the dog, though I find it hard to forgive him for his slander of the cat. Richard Harding Davis’s masterpiece—among all his brilliant short stories—is The Bar Sinister, an imaginative study of dogs. Rudyard Kipling has celebrated the virtues of dogs both in prose and verse.
Vivisection and dogs have called out many poems, of which two of the most notable are Robert Browning’s Tray and Percy MacKaye’s The Heart of a Dog.
Jack London’s masterpiece is The Call of the Wild, where the great dog reverted to primitive impulses and habits. This is an imperishable work of literature, and although cast in the form of prose fiction, has much of the elevation and majesty of poetry. Among contemporary writers, Albert Payson Terhune has specialised in dogs, and done admirable work in canine psychoanalysis. The late Senator Vest, when a young man, made a speech in court on dogs which will outlast his political orations.
But of all the works in prose or verse, ancient or modern that celebrates the virtues of the dog, the most admirable is the novel, Bob, Son of Battle, by the late Alfred Ollivant. It was published in 1898, and was his first book, written under peculiar circumstances. Mr. Ollivant was a young Englishman who had injured his spine in football; then, having apparently recovered, he received a commission in the artillery at the age of nineteen. A fall from his horse permanently injured him, so that he was an invalid for the rest of his life—he died in 1927. For the first few years he was not able to leave his bed, and at the age of twenty, in horizontal pain and weakness, began to write Bob. It took him three years to finish the book. In England it was published under the poor title, Owd Bob, and attracted no attention; but in America the publishers wisely changed the name to the alliterative Bob, Son of Battle, and the book sold by the hundred thousand. (Those who are interested in the first editions should know that the first English edition differs in style from the first American edition; the London publishers delayed publication, and the author revised the story without injuring it.)
It is a curious fact that this book, written by an Englishman for Englishmen, and dealing exclusively with English scenes and customs, should have attracted no attention in the land of its birth, while selling like the proverbial hot cakes in every city and village in America. In public lectures in Texas, California, and all over the middle West and the East, I had only to mention the name of this novel and a wave of delighted recognition swept over the audience. But even ten years after its appearance it was practically unheard of in England. I asked William De Morgan, Henry Arthur Jones, and William Archer if they had read it; they had never heard of it.
Some years after that, however, a cheap edition was published in Great Britain, and the book slowly made its way, and is now over there as here an acknowledged classic. Its popularity was increased by its being made into a motion picture, and Mr. Ollivant was elected to the Athenæum.
The two most remarkable dogs I ever met in fiction are both in Bob, Son of Battle—the hero, Bob, the Grey Dog of Kenmuir, and the villain Red Wull. Their continued rivalry has an epic force and fervour. It is the eternal strife between the Power of Light and the Power of Darkness.
XXXVI
GOING TO HONOLULU
Remember to pronounce the first syllable to rhyme with “bone,” not with “on.” But, above all, remember, when you are there, never to speak of coming from the United States or from America—you are in the United States. Call your home “the mainland.” I was once giving a lecture in California and I thoughtlessly began a sentence this way: “When I get back to America”—I never finished that sentence. It was owing only to the sense of humour possessed by the audience that I was able to finish the lecture.
People who have travelled all over the world say there are only two places that may accurately be called paradise; they are the Hawaiian Islands and Ceylon. If the wind is right, you get the spicy perfume from Ceylon before the island is visible, as it is written in the missionary hymn. I have never seen Ceylon, but Hawaii will do very well as an earthly paradise. The most vivid and alluring description of it came from the pen of Mark Twain and is to be found at the end of that work of genius, Roughing It. In a certain sense, Mark was always homesick for these islands. He saw them in his youth and he remembered them in his old age.