Her owner could not account for the anger she showed to the two strangers who received such startling marks of her disfavour. She must often have been in the society of other people who were not to be counted among dog-lovers, and she never, except in these two instances, swerved from the usual dignified indifference she extended to all who were not admitted to the circle of her friends.
“_To snarl, and bite, and play the dog._”
These words are typical of our master poet’s attitude towards the dog. Treachery, cunning, and quarrelsomeness are the traits he dwells on when he mentions dogs, and we search his plays in vain for any trace of his appreciation of the noble gifts and heroic virtues that bind the dog so closely to those who love him. At most we find such guarded praise as that given by Shallow in “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” where he says of Master Page’s greyhound, “Sir, he’s a good dog and a faire dog, can there be more said? He is good and faire.” Or again, when one of the sporting dogs, who always receive the kindliest treatment at his hands, is made the means of a sarcastic thrust of comparison with one of a higher species. This occurs in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” when Launce declares in praise of his mistress, “She hath more qualities than a water-spaniel, which is much in a bare Christian.”
We can but feel that a poet who could paint the most delicate shades of moral feeling, with the same master hand that plumbs the darkest depths of the human heart, might have done what no other writer of any time could do for us in the delineation of the dog’s mind, if only he had brought his sympathetic interest to bear on it. But a dog for Shakespeare was only one of the lower animals, whose evil qualities outweighed his better gifts, and who was at most an uncertain, if not a questionable companion.
The story of the bet made between Lord Nugent and Sir Henry Holland[7] shows how difficult it has always been to believe in the limitations of the poet in this respect. Lord Nugent, who was recognised as the greatest Shakespearean scholar of his day, declared that throughout Shakespeare’s writings no passage could be found “commending directly or indirectly the moral qualities of the dog.” Sir Henry Holland demurred to the statement, but after a year’s search was fain to acknowledge its truth, and to pay the bet of a guinea which he had been confident of winning. In all our reverence for and delight in Shakespeare, we feel that his want of appreciation of the dog is one of those weak spots in the armour of genius that shows its possessors to be, after all, but of the same clay as ourselves.