MISS COBBE'S DOG HAJJIN.
MISS COBBE has written down a very touching autobiogra- phy of her dog Hajjiu, whose pathetic narrative* of her own loss in London and her recovery through the Holloway Home for Lost Dogs will overwhelm, we hope, even the unfeeling writer in the Pall Mall, whom we exposed last week to the indig- nation of the world, with feelings akin to remorse. Autobio- graphical confessions, however, are a form of literature which,
instructive as they are in the lights they throw on the character of individuals, are incomplete in themselves, and which need the help of external friendly observation to give the reader any ade- quate conception of the character they delineate. Hajjin tells her tale with great simplicity and the story of her sufferings while she was "lost in London" with considerable pathos. But Miss Cobbe should have prefixed some pages of biographical criticism on her flog to complete the delineation. There is much of Hajjin's character concerning which we feel that we are still in ignor- ance. When Gibbon in his autobiography says on his father's warning him to break off his engagement with Mademoiselle Curchocl, "I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son," we feel,
no doubt, that we have a gleam of insight into his character. But the light would be more than twice as brilliant if we knew 'from one of Gibbon's personal intimates at the time how he actually comported himself in the act of filial obedience. So when Miss Cobbe's dog tells us of her. puppies, "One day returning after a brief grubbing in the garden to the box which contained my nursery, I found I was bereft of both my offspring. They had been carried away, and I saw them no more. I suffered for some days the pangs of outraged maternity, and then turned my -attention to other things,"—we feel some suspicion that Hajjin is affecting a Gibbonian cynicism, and almost a Mohammedan fatal- ism of tone, which we seem to see slightly put on also in the strik- ing photograph,—in short, that she is almost trying to live up to her name, which Miss Cobbe rashly and ambitiously conferred npon her, in the place of the more simple and domestic name of Muff, by which she had been known in her early youth. It is not agreeable to find Hajjin emulating the literary brilliance of her mistress ; her affected indifference and apathy of phrase is cer- tainly not quite canine, however cynical. It would be almost as natural if she had described her bereaved feelings in Shelley's heated lyric of despair, and in place of her Gibbonian pomp of indifference had told us that there remained to her "Nor sobs nor groans, The passionate tumult of a clinging hope,
But pale despair and cold tranquillity, Nature's vast frame—the web of human things, Birth and the grave, which are not as they were."
Miss Cobbe's record of Hajjin's wounded maternity must surely contain mythical elements. In fact, with so doubtfully trustworthy an amanuensis as Miss Cobbe to record Raffia's experience, an amanuensis so likely to colour Hajjin's opinions and views with her own, every true student of canine character would attach almost more value to a direct account of Hajjin written in her mistress's -own person, than to the autobiographical form which she has given it. There are few dogs whose characters are not of that simpler type which are better delineated objectively than sub- jectively, to use the favourite phrase of modern biographers. And certainly, after reading the life of Hajjin we feel that there are many features of her character which we understand but im- perfectly, and which the direct description of so faithful an observer as her mistress could not have failed to have given.
For example, even now that we have read this entertaining life, we do not feel that we quite know Hajjin in "her habit as she lives." Is she on the whole a grave, magnanimous dog ? or a con-
• The Confessions of a Lost Dog. Reported by her Mistress, Frances Power Cobb.. London: Griffith and Farran.
stitutional dog, who insists much on the checks and balances of the monarchical system under which she lives on the one hand and her ownpetitionof right on the other hand? or le she, as Carlyle says, a "beautiful spirit pulsing Auroras," whose life is in the flashes of humour she strikes out of the buoyant social life of the moment? What does she do in the first instance, for example, with a bone on a fine summer's day? Will she toes it into the air and play with it on the lawn for a quarter of an hour before she devotes herself to the more serious duty of gnawing it ? Or if not pressed by the claims of hunger, will she immediately bury it and sit over or near it to guard it jealously from all chance-comers? Again, Miss Cobbe has scarcely allowed her to glance at all at her social relations to her friend and companion Nip, or to Nip's mistress. She says, in the most tantalizing way :—
" My mistress had her friend, a lady with whom she lived, and of whom I was a little jealous—a person very devoted to dogs, but with sterner views of discipline than I quite approved. She and my mistress together had a practice I found very trying at the time, but for which I can now bless them—the habit of bringing home lost dogs out of the street, feeding and cleansing them, and then, after a few days, finding for them homes with dog-loving people. It was an affront to me and Nip (a well-born lady, the dog of my mistress's friend) to find wretched curs out of the gutter, miserable, demoralized animals, brought in as 800II as they were washed, to the very sanctuary of the dining-room, and allowed to jump beside us as candidates for refreshments. The cat we could bear; he was a fine creature, fond of lying up against me on cold evenings on the rug, bat parvenu dogs taken from the street I despised. Alas ! my uncharitable sentiments met their punishment I approach the great grief of my life—the event which has made me a Lost Dog!"
Now, nothing defines a dog's character better than social rela- tions of this kind so hastily passed over. What are Hajjin's feelings for Nip? Is she unhappy if Nip is left at home when she takes a walk ? If Nip is tied up will she,—like a dog we know,—solicit Nip's emancipation with constant and disin- terested eagerness, and look forward to it as the one immediate aim of true affection to bring about? What is Hajjin's gene- ral conception in fact of the duties of canine friendship ? Is she of the reverential and hero-worshipping, or of the pro- tecting, patronizing type of dog? or is she neither one nor the other, but a light social nature, that forms no strong individual attachments to her own species ? All this Mies Cobbe leaves us nearly untold, though she seems to hint at the latter hypothesis. We have one anecdote of Hajjin which, if we could strictly credit it, and did not believe that the imagination of the amanuensis had more to do with it than actual fact, would not be on the whole creditable to Hajjin's moral strength, and would indicate, we think, a generally morbid self-consciousness such as is the canker of the present age in human rather than canine affairs. We refer to Hajjin's conduct in relation to a certain dog-reproving friend of Miss Cobbe's, one of those many human beings who, like our stony-hearted friend in the Pall Mall, always seem to fear the encroachments of the animal world on the human, to look forward, with the same sort of horror with which political alarmists antici- pate democracy, to cynocracy, or something worse. These persons are always to be found amongst the connections of every one who keeps a dog. They frown, with steady moral pertinacity, on all attempts to make the dog a real companion of daily life. They shake their heads if they find a dog on the hearth-rug, and look as if they had heard of a son's dishonourable bankruptcy if they dis- cern traces of a dog on a sofa. They are a prey to all aorta of dark visions if a dog is fed at dinner, and look unutterable things if he puts his paw on your arm to remind you gently of a dog's rights. Now, a healthy-minded dog always treats these persons with a firm disregard and even a vivacity of impertinence which is very wholesome for them, and a very great source of gratification to the dog itself. We know one such lady who professes and feels great regard for a dog "in its proper place," and who is kindness itself to a dog in that place, but who is very great indeed on the con- stitutional restraints to which dogs should be subject. Now, the most encroaching of all the dogs of this social circle always treats this lady with every proof of real attachment and exaggerated reverence. The little terrier in question prostrates himself with Oriental passion before this grave lady whenever she goes to bed, insists on following her into the very arcane of her bedroom, gives a short hark of ironic deference, rolls three times at her feet before he will leave the room, and then dances down stairs in an ecstasy of triumphant mockery. That is the true mode of treating this constitutional formalism towards dogs. But Hajjin, if we may trust Mies Cobbe, behaved very much less wisely :— "There was, however, a lady who lived in the house with us, who WU different from my mistress. She was kind to everything living, but she did not love dogs. I came to feel I could not ingratiate myself with her at all, so I kept out of her way ; for her grave looks of dis- approval when I had done nothing wrong put me constantly into a state which, in a lady, would be called blushing. One night I was tired, and was lying in my mistress's room before the fire. I had a trick of stretching myself on my back (which I before remarked was very broad), and lying down like a fat baby, stretching my limbs. The lady I spoke of came into the room while I was lying thus, and looked at me solemnly for a few minutes, till I was quite out of countenance. At last she spoke aloud tho result of her reflections in these extra- ordinary words, You are a self-indulgent dog !' I was horribly frightened, and rolled over at once, and crept under my mistress's chair, who went into a St of laughing, and said, My dear friend, did you ever hear of a self-denying dog ?' What it all meant I didn't know. I only knew I would give up my last bone to my mistress, or die to protect her, if she wanted it ; but why I should lie in a cold corner instead of on the rug, or sit up on my hind legs when I could toast myself so comfortably on my baok, I am sure I didn't understand."
A very morbid and weak-minded dog indeed !—if Miss Cobbe may be trusted, which we hope she may not. That dog is not, as Miss Cobbe says of Hajjin's brother, Leo, "going to the dogs, i.e., the curs" (and less respectable of the species), but "going to the men," which is perhaps as bad a fate for a dog as going to the dogs is for a man. Healthy dogs mock at conventionalism, and if Hajjin's story is true, we fear Miss Cobbe must have inspired her with some of her own deference for this lady ; for we actually read that she was all but parting with Hajjin from the excess of her deference for this lady's injured constitutional feel- ings. Self-denial, indeed ! That would have been denying your dog out of man-service (or woman-service), which is a very differ- ent thing.
Miss Cobbe tells us, too, rather too little of her dog's intellec- tual nature. What are her little arts ? Has she made much pro- gress in canine civilization ? Can she ring a bell, or fetch slippers, or fetch the ball at cricket ? All these are trivial things, but indicate a dog's desire to learn and its capacity for higher life. On the whole, while heartily thanking Miss Cobbe for this little autobiography, we must press her to add chapters to the next edition of a biographical, and not autobiographical kind. We confess we slightly distrust the autobiographical sincerity of some of Hajjin's reflections.
Previous page
