by Ouida
A very beautiful dog little known outside his country is the Siberian greyhound: of great size, with all the greyhound’s elegance and swiftness, but with long silky hair, usually of a silvery whiteness or of a silvery grey, and a plumed tail like a large ostrich feather, this most graceful of all dogs is of incomparable beauty and deserves to be known on this side of the Caucasus.
The Siberian and the Persian greyhounds are one and the same breed; called sleughi in Persia and Arabia, and famous for being sent out to the chase alone. In speed this dog can outstrip the antelope and in tenacity he out-tires the tiger. Yet when brought into domesticity as a house-dog he is gentle and interesting, and forms a most picturesque ornament lying on a bearskin in a hall or salon. He has the black, melting, soft eye of the eastern, and the finest tapering muzzle, with small cocked, pendent ears. He is much larger than the European greyhound or deerhound. An exhibition of these dogs in Petersburg is a most picturesque sight, accompanied as they are by their Circassian or Persian huntsmen, and usually lying on scarlet carpet laid down to set off their contours and the silvery hue of their hair: a very different spectacle from the painful exhibitions of dog-shows in other countries.
As the German workman is everywhere in both hemispheres elbowing out the Englishman and Frenchman and American, so the Ulmhound and the dachshund are displacing the Maltese, the King Charles, the Blenheim, the water-spaniel, the Italian greyhound, and others. The Blenheim spaniel is a beautiful little dog, greatly neglected, whilst squab, unlovely Japanese, and bandy-legged basset hounds hold public favor, merely because they are something new and grotesque. All the handsome old breeds of spaniels grow rarer every day, and the ugly, short-haired German breeds, large and small, are pushed into public favor. The popularity of the dachshund, which would be inexplicable except that fashion can make fools of its followers as Puck of Bottom, has a disastrous effect on other breeds which better merit such honor, not only by the exclusion of these from happy homes, but by the influence which their deformity exercises on female dogs. The female is easily influenced through her eyes; without any contact with her, a dog which takes her fancy will influence the appearance of the puppies with which she is already pregnant, and the bandy legs of the dachshund are becoming terribly traceable in breeds with which he has nothing to do. Let us hope that the caprices of society will soon send him back to the earth-stopping and badger-drawing which are his natural occupations, and restore the beautiful, aristocratic, long-haired races to their proper place in hall and palace. The liking for short-haired dogs grows out of laziness; the long-haired breeds take more time to wash and comb and keep clean, and so they fall out of public favor. Yet what is more delightful in all dogdom than a Skye terrier, with his shining eyes in a mop of hair, or what more admirable in dignity and grandeur than a Newfoundland, with the snow or the sea foam on his curls?
I once owned the grandest and biggest Newfoundland in Europe. He was bigger than the Prince of Wales’s then famous Cabot; he was truly a monument of beauty and of strength; and when for dinner-parties he wore a broad blue garter ribbon, h e looked indeed a very king of dogs. Withal gentle as a dove, playful as a child, using his immense strength as lightly as his own seas will toy with a summer breeze; good-natured and generous to other dogs; kind to women and children; to man good-humoredly indifferent; a tireless swimmer in any seas, swimming so matchlessly that it was beautiful to watch him fighting his way through angry breakers. All that for a dawg!” said a London rough who saw his body being laid in its coffin; and the dead dog was a grander creature than the living brute who jeered at him.
Many memories of dogs that I have loved come to me as I write — dear, kind, forgiving, and too short-lived friends! We are not grateful enough to dogs; not patient enough or generous enough; and when they give us their whole souls, we cast them grudgingly a crumb of thought.
It has often been mooted as a vexed question why all men of genius or greatness are so fond of dogs. The reason is not far to seek. Those who are great or eminent in any way find the world full of parasites, toadies, liars, fawners, hypocrites: the incorruptible candor, loyalty, and honor of the dog are to such like water in a barren place to the thirsty traveller. The sympathy of your dog is unfailing and unobtrusive. If you are sad, so is he; and if you are merry, none is so willing to leap and laugh with you as he. For your dog you are never poor; for your dog you are never old; whether you are in a palace or a cottage he does not care; and fall you as low as you may, you are his providence and his idol still. The attachment of the dog to man outweighs and almost obliterates attachment in him to his own race. There is something shocking to our high opinion of him in the callousness with which he will sniff at the stiff body of a brother-dog: he will follow his master to the grave, and sometimes die on it; but the loss of his own kind leaves him unmoved.
I never knew more than one exception to this: it was, however, a noteworthy one. I had two puppies of the Molussus, commonly called the Maremma, breed; large, white, very beautiful dogs, with long hair; varying in size between a Newfoundland and a collie; the old Greek race of watch-dogs to which, quite certainly, Argos belonged. These puppies, named Pan and Paris, lived together, fed, played, and slept together, and were never separated for a moment for seven months. In the seventh month Paris fell ill of distemper and died. Now, by my own observation I can declare that Pan nursed his brother as assiduously as any boy could have nursed another; licked him, cleaned him, brought him tempting bits to eat; did all that he could think of, and when his brother at last lay there cold and unresponsive to his efforts, his grief and astonishment were painful to see. From that time he ceased to play; from being a very lively dog he grew grave and sad; he had a wistful, wondering inquiry in his eyes which it was pathetic to behold; and although he lived for many years after, and was as happy as a dog can be, he never recovered his spirits: he had buried his mirth in the grave of Paris. Something was lost for him with his brother which he never regained. This is the only instance I have known of a dog’s love for another dog.
It is by his attachment to man that the dog has become the victim of man’s (and women’s) capricious fancies. The cat, distinctly inferior to the dog, has yet by sheer force of character kept for herself an extraordinary amount of personal liberty. No power of man has been able to restrain her from making night hideous with her amorous serenades; from vagabondizing and brawling and hunting as she pleases. She is in civilization, but she is not of it; at least, is so no more than she thinks it worth her while to be; she will accept its satin coverlid and its saucer of milk, but with the distinct reservation that she does not surrender the fair freedom of the housetop and the barbaric joy of the mouse’s nest in the hedgerow. The egotism and philosophy of her character have preserved this charter for her; and the genorous, impulsive, romantic, and devoted temper of the dog has, on the contrary, hurried and harried him into captivity. The cat is capable of attachment, too; but first and foremost is that determination to have her own way which procures for every egotist so much immunity and enjoyment, and is to the temperament in which it prevails as are his horn and armor to the rhinoceros. Who thinks of muzzling the cat? of chaining her? of taxing her? Heaven forbid that any one should, poor soul! but the fact remains that it is the pliability and docility of the dog’s idiosyncrasy which have made him the subject of these persecutions. Man knows that his dog will forgive him anything; and he takes advantage of that long-suffering devotion. The dog suffers frightfully from being chained; but the moment he is loosed, instead of tearing to pieces those who chained him, he is solely occupied with expressing joy and gratitude at his release.
‘That it ever entered into the mind of man to chain a creature so vivacious, so mercurial, and so born for freedom as the dog, can only be explained by the facility with which human sophism reconciles itself to any brutality which it considers saves it trouble. The same diabolical selfishness which sets little children to work in factories and machine-rooms chains up the dog and leaves him to fret ou
t his life in confinement. If legislation must meddle with dogs at all, would that it would make all muzzles and chains unlawful!
The veterinarian, Bênion, who is by no means tender to the dog, yet in his work on the “Races Canines” insists again and again on the hygienic necessity of absolute liberty for all dogs; averring that, unless they can take what exercise they like, it is impossible for them to satisfy their natural desires and wants. He speaks of the troops of dogs in Norway, in Newfoundland, and throughout the East, amongst which rabies is unknown, because, although subject to great privations, they are never deprived of their freedom, and males and females live together at their will. The muzzle, he properly declares, in preventing the dog from opening his jaws, hanging out his tongue, biting fleas, and from all other natural movement of his jaws, is so pernicious that no other device of human cruelty is so imbecile and so ingenious.
The famous veterinarian, Mayhew, wrote again and again in a similar sense against chains and muzzles; but prejudices die hard, and the prejudices of municipalities are tenacious and pernicious as thistles all over the world. The muzzle for dogs and the bearing-rein for horses commend themselves to men because they imagine their own safety is consulted in imposing them on the poor victims of their tyranny. Common-sense and humanity beat in vain against the closed doors of ignorance and cowardice.
The muzzle is the most ingenious, complete, and odious invention that can be conceived for obtaining the minimum of utility to the public with the maximum of torture to dogs. It torments and fevers the animal, and deprives those who own him of all pleasure in and use of him. The other day in a London police court a poor woman was arraigned for trying to drown herself; she was a victim of the “sweating system,” which had made her weary of her life; a dog, passing by and seeing her drowning, had jumped in and brought her, still alive, to land. If a policeman had thus rescued her, the newspapers would have had innumerable paragraphs about his courage and humanity: the hero, being only “a passing dog,” obtained no word of commendation from either journals or magistrate. Now, had this dog been impeded by a muzzle, he could not have saved the woman.
Not long ago, also in London, a retriever saved the lives of two little boys asleep in a burning house and lost his own life in going back for a third child; the newspapers did say a little in admiration of this act, but only a line or two; whereas they poured out columns of hysterical emotion over the sad fate of a nursemaid who in a London fire did as much as this dog, but no more.
I believe that the quality of a dog’s affection for his human friends is but little understood or appreciated by the people who are the objects of it: sincerity and constancy, so often absent from human attachments, are its invariable characteristics. It has the profundity and the hysterio passio of intense emotions. When the dog is treated like a mere chattel, sold from one buyer to another, hustled from place to place, and tortured by continual severance from those he cares for, he suffers intensely, and his whole morale undergoes deterioration. The best managed of the so-called dogs’ homes can only be a dogs’ purgatory — the transition place from happiness to hell. Strange sights, strange voices, strange beds, strange associates, are a torture to the dog to an extent which the lighter and more capricious temperament of humanity cannot comprehend. A child, if he be well fed, indulged, and caressed, is consoled with great celerity for separation from those he loves. Not so the dog. He literally prefers a dinner of herbs where love is to the stalled ox where his affections are starved.
I have a little Pomeranian who is, from age, quite blind and quite deaf; yet he is instantly aware of my presence, and follows me about with unerring accuracy; to be happy he wants nothing more than to know that I am within his reach. This great love which survives the extinction of the senses, and which sheds a radiance on him through his darkness, has certainly in it all the highest attributes of spiritual affection. It is an error to suppose that dogs love those who feed them. I never feed this little dog; and to the person who does feed him he is quite indifferent. His love is a purely spiritual and disinterested sentiment. When I stretch my hand out to him in a new glove, he is for a moment uncertain; then remembering, evidently, that gloves go to the elbow, he sniffs at the top of my arm and satisfies himself thus of my identity. His antipathies are as strong as his attachments, and when any one whom he dislikes enters his presence, he is instantly aware of it, and “goes for” his enemy with unerring accuracy. He is both deaf and blind certainly; but in virtue of that marvellous power of scent and intensity of emotion he is as active and animated as if his beautiful black eyes had light in them and his delicate pointed ears had sound. Poor little doggie, weighted with the ills that smote Milton and Beethoven! Those great men could scarcely have had a greater soul than his.
And it is this greatness of soul which makes the dog so interesting, so mysterious, and so pathetic a personality to me, associated, as it is, with the frank animation of their bodies and the sad servitude in which they are generally kept by the human beings whom they adore. About the dog there is to me something of the faun, of the forest-god, of the mingling of divinity and brutality such as met in the shape of Pan, of an earlier, fresher, wilder world than ours; and from the eyes of the dog, in their candid worship, in their wistful appeal, in their inscrutable profundity, there is an eternal and unanswerable reproach.
Critical Studies
CONTENTS
PREFATORY NOTE
I. GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO
II. GEORGES DARIEN
III. THE ITALIAN NOVELS OF MARION CRAWFORD
IV. LE SECRET DU PRÉCEPTEUR
V. L’IMPÉRIEUSE BONTÉ.
VI. WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT
VII. JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN
VIII. UNWRITTEN LITERARY LAWS
IX. AUBERON HERBERT
X. THE UGLINESS OF MODERN LIFE
XI. THE QUALITY OF MERCY
XII. THE DECADENCE OF LATIN RACES
XIII. ALMA VENIESIA
PREFATORY NOTE
With exception of one, that on the poems of Mr Blunt, all these essays have previously appeared in The Fortnightly Review, The Nineteenth Century Review, or the Nuova Antologia. The two published in The Nuova Antologia were written by me in Italian. I have now turned them into English myself. The article on D’Annunzio, in the Fortnightly, was the first ever printed in English on a writer who is now well known to all. I do not think that he has, since it was published, created anything equal to the Trionfo. The character of his genius is not adapted to the theatre, to which he now chiefly devotes himself. It will be interesting to see if it can be adapted to political life, which has lately tempted him. Perhaps he may become a new Rienzi. One is greatly needed in Italy.
OUIDA.
I. GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO
In the world of letters the name of Gabriele d’Annunzio is now famous. There is no cultured society which does not know something at least of the author of the Innocente and the Trionfo, and is not aware that, in him, one of the ablest and most delicate of living critics believes that he has seen the personification of a renascence of Latin genius. Imprisoned as his novels were in the limits of a language which, however great its beauty, is but little known except in its own land, he has been extraordinarily fortunate in finding such sponsors in the outside world as he has obtained in M. Herelle, in René Doumic, and in the Vicomte de Vogüé. Never has any romance been so admirably heralded as the Trionfo in the Révue des Deux Mondes, and never certainly, since lyre was strung or laurels were woven, was any praise ever heard so dulcet and so lavish as that with which he, who has been called the second Chateaubriand, has welcomed and introduced the new Boccaccio.
The grace and beauty of the style of the Vicomte de Vogüé, and the culture of his intelligence, have gained him in literature this name of the second Chateaubriand. They are both incontestable. But they are apt to lead his readers away from the consideration of the value of his literary judgments. He is a critic of exquisite delicacy and fineness, but also of great enthusiasms,
and these enthusiasms are at times much stronger than his judgment and overpower it. What he admires he admires toto corde, and is apt to lose in this generous ardour his power of selection, his accuracy of appraisement.
This fact has been always conspicuous in all his writings on Pasteur, and it has been equally conspicuous in the unmeasured idolatry with which he has dipped his pen in all the honey of Hymettus to sing the praises of the man he loves. But this adoption of D’Annunzio into French literature has, with its incontestable advantages, equal penalties and disadvantages for the author; for one reader outside Italy who will read him in the original text, ten thousand will know him only in the French version, and twenty thousand will accept De Vogüé’s description of his works without attempting to judge those for themselves. In the French version the romances gain in certain points; their excessive detail is abridged, their crudities are softened down, their wearisome analyses and too frequent obscenities are omitted. The translations of M. Herelle are, as all must know, admirable in grace and elegance, but, though as perfect as translations which are guilty of continual excisions can be, they fail to render the genius of D’Annunzio as it is to be seen and felt by those who read the works in the original tongue. In the French version they are much milder, much more tempered, much less unbridled, and much less cynically nude; but they are also much less vigorous, virile, impassioned, and furiously scornful. Many fine passages have been esteemed longueurs, and have been omitted altogether, and entire chapters have been sacrificed to the exigencies of taste or of space.