The civilisation, the manners, and the morals of dog-kind are to a great
extent subordinated to those of his ancestral master, man. This animal,
in many ways so superior, has accepted a position of inferiority, shares
the domestic life, and humours the caprices of the tyrant. But the
potentate, like the British in India, pays small regard to the character
of his willing client, judges him with listless glances, and condemns him
in a byword. Listless have been the looks of his admirers, who have
exhausted idle terms of praise, and buried the poor soul below
exaggerations. And yet more idle and, if possible, more unintelligent
has been the attitude of his express detractors; those who are very fond
of dogs “but in their proper place”; who say “poo’ fellow, poo’ fellow,”
and are themselves far poorer; who whet the knife of the vivisectionist
or heat his oven; who are not ashamed to admire “the creature’s
instinct”; and flying far beyond folly, have dared to resuscitate the
theory of animal machines. The “dog’s instinct” and the “automaton-dog,”
in this age of psychology and science, sound like strange anachronisms.
An automaton he certainly is; a machine working independently of his
control, the heart, like the mill-wheel, keeping all in motion, and the
consciousness, like a person shut in the mill garret, enjoying the view
out of the window and shaken by the thunder of the stones; an automaton
in one corner of which a living spirit is confined: an automaton like
man. Instinct again he certainly possesses. Inherited aptitudes are
his, inherited frailties. Some things he at once views and understands,
as though he were awakened from a sleep, as though he came “trailing
clouds of glory.” But with him, as with man, the field of instinct is
limited; its utterances are obscure and occasional; and about the far
larger part of life both the dog and his master must conduct their steps
by deduction and observation.
The leading distinction between dog and man, after and perhaps before the
different duration of their lives, is that the one can speak and that the
other cannot. The absence of the power of speech confines the dog in the
development of his intellect. It hinders him from many speculations, for
words are the beginning of meta-physic. At the same blow it saves him
from many superstitions, and his silence has won for him a higher name
for virtue than his conduct justifies. The faults of the dog are many.
He is vainer than man, singularly greedy of notice, singularly intolerant
of ridicule, suspicious like the deaf, jealous to the degree of frenzy,
and radically devoid of truth. The day of an intelligent small dog is
passed in the manufacture and the laborious communication of falsehood;
he lies with his tail, he lies with his eye, he lies with his protesting
paw; and when he rattles his dish or scratches at the door his purpose is
other than appears. But he has some apology to offer for the vice. Many
of the signs which form his dialect have come to bear an arbitrary
meaning, clearly understood both by his master and himself; yet when a
new want arises he must either invent a new vehicle of meaning or wrest
an old one to a different purpose; and this necessity frequently
recurring must tend to lessen his idea of the sanctity of symbols.
Meanwhile the dog is clear in his own conscience, and draws, with a human
nicety, the distinction between formal and essential truth. Of his
punning perversions, his legitimate dexterity with symbols, he is even
vain; but when he has told and been detected in a lie, there is not a
hair upon his body but confesses guilt. To a dog of gentlemanly feeling
theft and falsehood are disgraceful vices. The canine, like the human,
gentleman demands in his misdemeanours Montaigne’s “_je ne sais quoi de
généreux_.” He is never more than half ashamed of having barked or
bitten; and for those faults into which he has been led by the desire to
shine before a lady of his race, he retains, even under physical
correction, a share of pride. But to be caught lying, if he understands
it, instantly uncurls his fleece.
Just as among dull observers he preserves a name for truth, the dog has
been credited with modesty. It is amazing how the use of language blunts
the faculties of man—that because vain glory finds no vent in words,
creatures supplied with eyes have been unable to detect a fault so gross
and obvious. If a small spoiled dog were suddenly to be endowed with
speech, he would prate interminably, and still about himself; when we had
friends, we should be forced to lock him in a garret; and what with his
whining jealousies and his foible for falsehood, in a year’s time he
would have gone far to weary out our love. I was about to compare him to
Sir Willoughby Patterne, but the Patternes have a manlier sense of their
own merits; and the parallel, besides, is ready. Hans Christian
Andersen, as we behold him in his startling memoirs, thrilling from top
to toe with an excruciating vanity, and scouting even along the street
for shadows of offence—here was the talking dog.
It is just this rage for consideration that has betrayed the dog into his
satellite position as the friend of man. The cat, an animal of franker
appetites, preserves his independence. But the dog, with one eye ever on
the audience, has been wheedled into slavery, and praised and patted into
the renunciation of his nature. Once he ceased hunting and became man’s
plate-licker, the Rubicon was crossed. Thenceforth he was a gentleman of
leisure; and except the few whom we keep working, the whole race grew
more and more self-conscious, mannered and affected. The number of
things that a small dog does naturally is strangely small. Enjoying
better spirits and not crushed under material cares, he is far more
theatrical than average man. His whole life, if he be a dog of any
pretension to gallantry, is spent in a vain show, and in the hot pursuit
of admiration. Take out your puppy for a walk, and you will find the
little ball of fur clumsy, stupid, bewildered, but natural. Let but a
few months pass, and when you repeat the process you will find nature
buried in convention. He will do nothing plainly; but the simplest
processes of our material life will all be bent into the forms of an
elaborate and mysterious etiquette. Instinct, says the fool, has
awakened. But it is not so. Some dogs—some, at the very least—if they
be kept separate from others, remain quite natural; and these, when at
length they meet with a companion of experience, and have the game
explained to them, distinguish themselves by the severity of their
devotion to its rules. I wish I were allowed to tell a story which would
radiantly illuminate the point; but men, like dogs, have an elaborate and
mysterious etiquette. It is their bond of sympathy that both are the
children of convention.
The person, man or dog, who has a conscience is eternally condemned to
some degree of humbug; the sense of the law in their members fatally
precipitates either towards a frozen and affected bearing. And the
converse is true; and in the elaborate and conscious manners of the dog,
moral opinions and the love of the ideal stand confessed. To follow for
ten minutes in the street some swaggering, canine cavalier, is to receive
a lesson in dramatic art and the cultured conduct of the body; in every
act and gesture you see him true to a refined conception; and the dullest
cur, beholding him, pricks up his ear and proceeds to imitate and parody
that charming ease. For to be a high-mannered and high-minded gentleman,
careless, affable, and gay, is the inborn pretension of the dog. The
large dog, so much lazier, so much more weighed upon with matter, so
majestic in repose, so beautiful in effort, is born with the dramatic
means to wholly represent the part. And it is more pathetic and perhaps
more instructive to consider the small dog in his conscientious and
imperfect efforts to outdo Sir Philip Sidney. For the ideal of the dog
is feudal and religious; the ever-present polytheism, the whip-bearing
Olympus of mankind, rules them on the one hand; on the other, their
singular difference of size and strength among themselves effectually
prevents the appearance of the democratic notion. Or we might more
exactly compare their society to the curious spectacle presented by a
school—ushers, monitors, and big and little boys—qualified by one
circumstance, the introduction of the other sex. In each, we should
observe a somewhat similar tension of manner, and somewhat similar points
of honour. In each the larger animal keeps a contemptuous good humour;
in each the smaller annoys him with wasp-like impudence, certain of
practical immunity; in each we shall find a double life producing double
characters, and an excursive and noisy heroism combined with a fair
amount of practical timidity. I have known dogs, and I have known school
heroes that, set aside the fur, could hardly have been told apart; and if
we desire to understand the chivalry of old, we must turn to the school
playfields or the dungheap where the dogs are trooping.
Woman, with the dog, has been long enfranchised. Incessant massacre of
female innocents has changed the proportions of the sexes and perverted
their relations. Thus, when we regard the manners of the dog, we see a
romantic and monogamous animal, once perhaps as delicate as the cat, at
war with impossible conditions. Man has much to answer for; and the part
he plays is yet more damnable and parlous than Corin’s in the eyes of
Touchstone. But his intervention has at least created an imperial
situation for the rare surviving ladies. In that society they reign
without a rival: conscious queens; and in the only instance of a canine
wife-beater that has ever fallen under my notice, the criminal was
somewhat excused by the circumstances of his story. He is a little, very
alert, well-bred, intelligent Skye, as black as a hat, with a wet bramble
for a nose and two cairngorms for eyes. To the human observer, he is
decidedly well-looking; but to the ladies of his race he seems abhorrent.
A thorough elaborate gentleman, of the plume and sword-knot order, he was
born with a nice sense of gallantry to women. He took at their hands the
most outrageous treatment; I have heard him bleating like a sheep, I have
seen him streaming blood, and his ear tattered like a regimental banner;
and yet he would scorn to make reprisals. Nay more, when a human lady
upraised the contumelious whip against the very dame who had been so
cruelly misusing him, my little great-heart gave but one hoarse cry and
fell upon the tyrant tooth and nail. This is the tale of a soul’s
tragedy. After three years of unavailing chivalry, he suddenly, in one
hour, threw off the yoke of obligation; had he been Shakespeare he would
then have written _Troilus and Cressida_ to brand the offending sex; but
being only a little dog, he began to bite them. The surprise of the
ladies whom he attacked indicated the monstrosity of his offence; but he
had fairly beaten off his better angel, fairly committed moral suicide;
for almost in the same hour, throwing aside the last rags of decency, he
proceeded to attack the aged also. The fact is worth remark, showing, as
it does, that ethical laws are common both to dogs and men; and that with
both a single deliberate violation of the conscience loosens all. “But
while the lamp holds on to burn,” says the paraphrase, “the greatest
sinner may return.” I have been cheered to see symptoms of effectual
penitence in my sweet ruffian; and by the handling that he accepted
uncomplainingly the other day from an indignant fair one, I begin to hope
the period of _Sturm und Drang_ is closed.
All these little gentlemen are subtle casuists. The duty to the female
dog is plain; but where competing duties rise, down they will sit and
study them out, like Jesuit confessors. I knew another little Skye,
somewhat plain in manner and appearance, but a creature compact of
amiability and solid wisdom. His family going abroad for a winter, he
was received for that period by an uncle in the same city. The winter
over, his own family home again, and his own house (of which he was very
proud) reopened, he found himself in a dilemma between two conflicting
duties of loyalty and gratitude. His old friends were not to be
neglected, but it seemed hardly decent to desert the new. This was how
he solved the problem. Every morning, as soon as the door was opened,
off posted Coolin to his uncle’s, visited the children in the nursery,
saluted the whole family, and was back at home in time for breakfast and
his bit of fish. Nor was this done without a sacrifice on his part,
sharply felt; for he had to forego the particular honour and jewel of his
day—his morning’s walk with my father. And, perhaps from this cause, he
gradually wearied of and relaxed the practice, and at length returned
entirely to his ancient habits. But the same decision served him in
another and more distressing case of divided duty, which happened not
long after. He was not at all a kitchen dog, but the cook had nursed him
with unusual kindness during the distemper; and though he did not adore
her as he adored my father—although (born snob) he was critically
conscious of her position as “only a servant”—he still cherished for her
a special gratitude. Well, the cook left, and retired some streets away
to lodgings of her own; and there was Coolin in precisely the same
situation with any young gentleman who has had the inestimable benefit of
a faithful nurse. The canine conscience did not solve the problem with a
pound of tea at Christmas. No longer content to pay a flying visit, it
was the whole forenoon that he dedicated to his solitary friend. And so,
day by day, he continued to comfort her solitude until (for some reason
which I could never understand and cannot approve) he was kept locked up
to break him of the graceful habit. Here, it is not the similarity, it
is the difference, that is worthy of remark; the clearly marked degrees
of gratitude and the proportional duration of his visits. Anything
further removed from instinct it were hard to fancy; and one is even
stirred to a certain impatience with a character so destitute of
spontaneity, so passionless in justice, and so priggishly obedient to the
voice of reason.
There are not many dogs like this good Coolin, and not many people. But
the type is one well marked, both in the human and the canine family.
Gallantry was not his aim, but a solid and somewhat oppressive
respectability. He was a sworn foe to the unusual and the conspicuous, a
praiser of the golden mean, a kind of city uncle modified by Cheeryble.
And as he was precise and conscientious in all the steps of his own
blameless course, he looked for the same precision and an even greater
gravity in the bearing of his deity, my father. It was no sinecure to be
Coolin’s idol: he was exacting like a rigid parent; and at every sign of
levity in the man whom he respected, he announced loudly the death of
virtue and the proximate fall of the pillars of the earth.
I have called him a snob; but all dogs are so, though in varying degrees.
It is hard to follow their snobbery among themselves; for though I think
we can perceive distinctions of rank, we cannot grasp what is the
criterion. Thus in Edinburgh, in a good part of the town, there were
several distinct societies or clubs that met in the morning to—the phrase
is technical—to “rake the backets” in a troop. A friend of mine, the
master of three dogs, was one day surprised to observe that they had left
one club and joined another; but whether it was a rise or a fall, and the
result of an invitation or an expulsion, was more than he could guess.
And this illustrates pointedly our ignorance of the real life of dogs,
their social ambitions and their social hierarchies. At least, in their
dealings with men they are not only conscious of sex, but of the
difference of station. And that in the most snobbish manner; for the
poor man’s dog is not offended by the notice of the rich, and keeps all
his ugly feeling for those poorer or more ragged than his master. And
again, for every station they have an ideal of behaviour, to which the
master, under pain of derogation, will do wisely to conform. How often
has not a cold glance of an eye informed me that my dog was disappointed;
and how much more gladly would he not have taken a beating than to be
thus wounded in the seat of piety!
I knew one disrespectable dog. He was far liker a cat; cared little or
nothing for men, with whom he merely coexisted as we do with cattle, and
was entirely devoted to the art of poaching. A house would not hold him,
and to live in a town was what he refused. He led, I believe, a life of
troubled but genuine pleasure, and perished beyond all question in a
trap. But this was an exception, a marked reversion to the ancestral
type; like the hairy human infant. The true dog of the nineteenth
century, to judge by the remainder of my fairly large acquaintance, is in
love with respectability. A street-dog was once adopted by a lady.
While still an Arab, he had done as Arabs do, gambolling in the mud,
charging into butchers’ stalls, a cat-hunter, a sturdy beggar, a common
rogue and vagabond; but with his rise into society he laid aside these
inconsistent pleasures. He stole no more, he hunted no more cats; and
conscious of his collar, he ignored his old companions. Yet the canine
upper class was never brought to recognise the upstart, and from that
hour, except for human countenance, he was alone. Friendless, shorn of
his sports and the habits of a lifetime, he still lived in a glory of
happiness, content with his acquired respectability, and with no care but
to support it solemnly. Are we to condemn or praise this self-made dog?
We praise his human brother. And thus to conquer vicious habits is as
rare with dogs as with men. With the more part, for all their
scruple-mongering and moral thought, the vices that are born with them
remain invincible throughout; and they live all their years, glorying in
their virtues, but still the slaves of their defects. Thus the sage
Coolin was a thief to the last; among a thousand peccadilloes, a whole
goose and a whole cold leg of mutton lay upon his conscience; but Woggs,
{128} whose soul’s shipwreck in the matter of gallantry I have recounted
above, has only twice been known to steal, and has often nobly conquered
the temptation. The eighth is his favourite commandment. There is
something painfully human in these unequal virtues and mortal frailties
of the best. Still more painful is the bearing of those “stammering
professors” in the house of sickness and under the terror of death. It
is beyond a doubt to me that, somehow or other, the dog connects
together, or confounds, the uneasiness of sickness and the consciousness
of guilt. To the pains of the body he often adds the tortures of the
conscience; and at these times his haggard protestations form, in regard
to the human deathbed, a dreadful parody or parallel.
I once supposed that I had found an inverse relation between the double
etiquette which dogs obey; and that those who were most addicted to the
showy street life among other dogs were less careful in the practice of
home virtues for the tyrant man. But the female dog, that mass of
carneying affectations, shines equally in either sphere; rules her rough
posse of attendant swains with unwearying tact and gusto; and with her
master and mistress pushes the arts of insinuation to their crowning
point. The attention of man and the regard of other dogs flatter (it
would thus appear) the same sensibility; but perhaps, if we could read
the canine heart, they would be found to flatter it in very different
degrees. Dogs live with man as courtiers round a monarch, steeped in the
flattery of his notice and enriched with sinecures. To push their favour
in this world of pickings and caresses is, perhaps, the business of their
lives; and their joys may lie outside. I am in despair at our persistent
ignorance. I read in the lives of our companions the same processes of
reason, the same antique and fatal conflicts of the right against the
wrong, and of unbitted nature with too rigid custom; I see them with our
weaknesses, vain, false, inconstant against appetite, and with our one
stalk of virtue, devoted to the dream of an ideal; and yet, as they hurry
by me on the street with tail in air, or come singly to solicit my
regard, I must own the secret purport of their lives is still inscrutable
to man. Is man the friend, or is he the patron only? Have they indeed
forgotten nature’s voice? or are those moments snatched from courtiership
when they touch noses with the tinker’s mongrel, the brief reward and
pleasure of their artificial lives? Doubtless, when man shares with his
dog the toils of a profession and the pleasures of an art, as with the
shepherd or the poacher, the affection warms and strengthens till it
fills the soul. But doubtless, also, the masters are, in many cases, the
object of a merely interested cultus, sitting aloft like Louis Quatorze,
giving and receiving flattery and favour; and the dogs, like the majority
of men, have but foregone their true existence and become the dupes of
their ambition.