MINUTE

Press, Volume LXXXII, Issue 24914, 29 June 1946, Page 5

MINUTE

OUT, DAMNED SPOT! Shakespeare did not care for dogs, as Homer did; he even disliked them, as Goethe did. Of course he can write eloquently about the points of hounds and the music of their voices in the chase, and humorously about Launce’s love for his cur and even about the cur himself; but this is no more significant on the one.- side than is his conventional use of “dog” as a term of abuse on the other* What is significant is the absence of allusion, or (to be perfectly accurate) of sympathetic allusion, to the characteristic virtues of dogs, and the abundance of allusions of an insulting kind. Shakespeare has observed and recorded, in some instances profusely, every vice that I can think of in an ill-condi-tioned dog. He fawns and cringes and flatters, and then bites the hand that caressed him; he is a. co ward who attacks you from behind, and barks at you the more the farther off you go; he knows neither charity, humanity, nor gratitude; as he flatters power and wealth, so he takes ptirt against the poor and unfashionable, and if fortune turns against you so does he. The plays swarm with these charges. Whately’s exclamation —uttered after a College meeting or a meeting of Chapter, I forget which —‘‘The more I see of men, the more I like dogs, would never have been echoed by Shakespeare. The things he most loathed in men he found in dogs too. And yet all this might go for nothing if we could set anything of weight against it. But what can we set? Nothing whatever, so far as I remember, except a recognition of courage in bear-baiting, bull -baiting mastiffs. . . . To all that he loved most in men he was blind in dogs. And then we call him universal! „ J —A. C. BRADLEY: “Oxford Lectures on Poetry/’