To Say That Our English Zoophilomania - Our Cult Of Lap-Dogs - Smacks Of
Degeneracy Does Not Mean That I Sympathize With The Ill-Treatment Of
Beasts Which Annoys Many Visitors To These Parts And Has Been Attributed
To "Saracenic" Influences.
Wrongly, of course; one might as well
attribute it to the old Greeks.
[Footnote: Whose attitude towards
animals, by the way, was as far removed from callousness as from
sentimentalism. We know how those Hellenic oxen fared who had laboured
to draw up heavy blocks for the building of a temple - how, on the
completion of their task, they were led into green fields, there to
pasture unmolested for the rest of their lives. We know that the Greeks
were appreciative of the graces and virtues of canine nature - is not the
Homeric Argo still the finest dog-type in literature? Yet to them the
dog, even he of the tender Anthology, remained what he is: a tamed
beast. The Greeks, sitting at dinner, resented the insolence of a
creature that, watching every morsel as it disappeared into the mouth of
its master, plainly discovered by its physiognomy the desire, the
presumed right, to devour what he considered fit only for himself.
Whence that profound word [Greek: kunopes] - dog-eyed, shameless. In
contrast to this sanity, observe what an Englishman can read into a
dog's eye:
That liquid, melancholy eye,
From whose pathetic, soul-fed springs
Seemed surging the Virgilian cry -
The sense of tears in mortal things. . . .
[That is how Matthew Arnold interprets the feelings of Fido, watching his
master at work upon a tender beefsteak.
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