NOVELS.
'1 LIE CALL OF THE WILD,
ANIMALS have long played an important and honoured part in the region of the fairy-tale, while in poetic narrative they have figured prominently from the days of Homer downward. But the substitution of animals for men and women in the dramatis personae of novels is an essentially modern development, and it is still a somewhat strange experience to find the usual order so far inverted that the chief roles are assigned to inarticulate and four-legged characters. Up to a certain point the innovation is deserving of a welcome. With the advance of realistic methods in literature it has become so increasingly fashionable to select for delineation characters of a disagreeable or degraded type that the substitution of an animal cannot make much difference. As an alternative to the sophisticated vulgarities of the "smart set," the squalor of the submerged classes, or the unscrupulous individualism of filibustering financiers, the portrait of a faithful dog, a high-spirited horse, or even a patient donkey may be quite refreshing. But as the tendency develops, and the conscientious novelist begins to apply the same methods to animals as to men, we are by no means sure that the result in the long run will prove any more delectable. Canine fiction already shows symptoms of differentiation into the romantic and the realistic schools, and once the main principle of cleavage is established we may expect to see a variety of subdivisions appearing on either hand, according as show dogs, pet dogs, sporting dogs, fighting dogs, or mongrels are selected for treatment. Nor is the movement likely to confine itself within the boundaries of dog-land. The Kai], yard school of the future may be expected to devote its energies to the composition of idylls of the poultry-run or the pig-stye, while the taste for full-blooded adventure will be catered for by romances of big game. It requires only a little effort of imagination to forecast the time when the columns of literary gossip will contain such entries as the following:— " Mr. Blank has started for Colorado in order to accumulate local colour for his new beetle story." Or: "Mrs. Jones, the serpentine novelist, is spending the winter in India in order to study the manners and customs of the Thanatophidia on the spot. We Understand that she has finally determined on the title of The Cobra's Bride for her next noveL" Or, once more : "Mr. James Henry, the celebrated simian psychologist, has completed his arrangements for a prolonged tour in the Abyssinianitighlands in order to obtain first-hand confirma- tion for some of the incidents in his forthcoming romance, The Tragedy of a Sacred Baboon. The heroine of the story, a hamadryad of great beauty and accomplishments, falls a victim to the drink habit and dies of spontaneous combustion."
Admirers of the spirited dog novels of Mr. 011ivant may protest against the exaggeration and burlesque of the fore- going remarks; but we are prepared to rest a plea of extenua- tion on the remarkable story which Mr. Jack London has given us under the title of The Call of the Wild. We do not deny its vivid and engrossing quality, due chiefly to the author's intimate acquaintance with the Wild West and the Yukon teuitory. But we contend that a great many of its incidents andi its dimoueraent will not appeal to the dog-lover in the truest sense of the word, in that they emphasise the qualities which,distinguish our four-footed friends from ourselves rather than those which endear them to us. Buck,' the dog-hero of the story, is a splendid half-breed, son of a St. Bernard father and Scotch sheep-dog mother, living at the opening of the tale on a luxuriously appointed country estate in the Santa Clara Valley. A rascally under-gardener kidnaps and sells him to a dog-dealer at the time of the Klondyke boom, and 'Buck' is ignominiously, deported to Seattle, clubbed into submission by a brutal dog-breaker, sold to the Canadian Government, shipped off to Dyes., and embodied in the mixed team—mostly "huskies" —employed to carry despatches on the Kloudyke trail under the charge of Perrault, a French-Canadian, and Francois, a French-Canadian half-breed. The succeeding chapters deal with 'Buck's' experiences under his new masters and amongst his new companions. They describe with a wealth of circum- stantial and realistic detail how he adapts himself to his new environment in regard to climate and food ; how he learns his • The Call of U. Wild. By Jack London. London : W. Heinemann. [Gs.]
place and duties as one of the team; how he simultaneously is trained to the habitual exercise of a high degree of intelli- gence and cunning, and decivilised by contact and conflict with his savage companions and rivals. He fights his way to the leadership of the team, in which he is finally installed after a battle to the death with his relentless enemy Spitz,' and justifies his promotion by his endurance, his strength, and his sagacity. But after a long bout of hard work the team is disbanded and sold ; 'Buck' falls on evil days, but is rescued from a cruel and inexperienced master by a prospector named John Thornton, repaying his rescuer by prodigies of devotion and courage. All the time, however, and this seems to us the weak point in the story, though his affection for Thornton exceeds that felt by him for any of his previous masters, "the call of the wild "—the desire, that is, to hark back to the untrammelled life of his primitive ancestors—appeals to him with greater insistence, and when Thornton and his comrades are surprised and annihilated by a party of Indians, Buck,' after avenging his master's death in a truly Homeric on- slaught on the Indians, feels that man has no longer any claim upon him, and joins his cousins the wolves as their accepted leader and lord.
The book, as we have already noted, has that compelling quality which attaches to the work of a man who writes of that which he has seen and known, and has the power to describe. But as from first to last it is a story of the survival of the fittest under conditions which give free play to primordial instincts, it is seldom pleasant, and often positively gruesome, reading. That, it may be urged, is inherent in the nature of the theme, but the fact none the less remains. Again, though the successive incidents are each handled in a way that carries conviction, we find it difficult to reconcile ourselves to the suddenness with which 'Buck' completes his decivilisation immediately after a period in which his friend- ship for man had reached its culminating point. There is, however, considerable imaginative power in the conception of the dog's dim consciousness of his remote ancestry, and the final scenes in which his metamorphosis is consummated are treated with a good deal of rude poetic power.
We must not conclude this notice without a word of high praise for the illustrations and designs for the inner cover by Messrs. Goodwin and Bull, which, whether dealing with dogs, men, or landscape, are extremely picturesque and im- pressive, and reproduced, alike in colour or monochrome, by the Norwood (Massachusetts) Press with an artistic finish far in advance of that to which we are accustomed in works of fiction produced in this country.
Previous page
