Animals provide a marvelous basis for comparison to human appearances and other traits. They occasionally are used in other ways as well, but these applications are sufficiently important to merit a chapter to themselves. The reasons may be stated briefly.
a. Animals frequently can be viewed as caricatures of people. They usually have the same physical structure but in different proportions – eyes and ears and arms and legs, but arranged in ways that would seem freakish on a human. And the same might be said for many of their other qualities: like people, animals may be fat or loud or fearsome, but the fattest animal is fatter than a fat man, and so on with most traits, making animals a natural source of comparison when one wants to exaggerate a human quality or suggest its extreme form.
b. Humans generally wish to view themselves as higher or better than (other) animals, and go to much trouble in their habits and manners and laws to reinforce the difference. Thus comparison to an animal tends predictably to make its human subject ridiculous or contemptible, and is a mighty device for the achievement of insult and abuse.
c. The appearances and behaviors of most animals are familiar, and this makes them efficient helps to description. They can be invoked in very few words to produce a strong connotation or image.
Few of the comparisons to follow require the reader to know any of the relevant facts about the animals named. They include enough explanation, or are vivid enough in themselves, to permit enjoyment by anyone. But they do require the author to know some animal facts, which is one reason why comparisons of the kind displayed in this chapter have become less common. Literate people, readers and writers both, live at a farther remove from animal life than they once did, or read less about it, and so know less of it.
Readers of the predecessor volume to this one will recall that most rhetorical schemes – that is, patterns for the arrangement of words – can be named with old terms from Greek or Latin. We have not inherited similar terms for the various families or uses of metaphor. I have mostly decided not to burden the reader with new nominees, but the aficionado of classical languages may find it diverting to devise them. This chapter, for example, might be regarded as presenting a technique called theriosis – literally, beastification. (The word theriomorphosis already exists and conveys the same idea, but is too cumbersome to put forward with a straight face.) The Greek word for nature is physis, so comparisons to nature would be cases of physiosis, etc.
1. Physical resemblances. The faces of most animals roughly resemble the faces of humans, but with features that are arranged and proportioned differently. They are like faces seen in a curved mirror at a carnival; the eyes are larger, or farther apart. They make fine sources of caricature.
| Another of Master Simon’s counselors is the apothecary, a short and rather fat man, with a pair of prominent eyes, that diverge like those of a lobster. | Irving, Bracebridge Hall (1822) |
| The old lady with the red face and the black eyebrows looked at us for a moment with something of the apoplectic stare of a parrot. | Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades (1905) |
| For the first time in our long connection I observed Jeeves almost smile. The corner of his mouth curved quite a quarter of an inch, and for a moment his eye ceased to look like a meditative fish’s. | Wodehouse, My Man, Jeeves (1919) |
The mouths of animals have more range than ours do in size and elasticity, and so likewise provide fodder for caricature.
| Presently there were nods and winks in the direction of the bell-rope; and, as these produced no effect, uncouth visages were made, like those of monkeys when enraged; teeth were gnashed, tongues thrust out, and even fists were bent at me. | Borrow, Lavengro (1851) |
| These regions passed, we came to savage islands, where the glittering coral seemed bones imbedded, bleaching in the sun. Savage men stood naked on the strand, and brandished uncouth clubs, and gnashed their teeth like boars. | Melville, Mardi (1849) |
| The old man gaped helplessly like some monstrous fish. | Chesterton, The Club of Queer Trades (1905) |
Or motion: a tendency merely suggested or half-visible in human movement is invariably presented in more exaggerated form by some member of the animal kingdom.
| To complete the whole, he had a stateliness in his gait, when he walked, not unlike that of a goose, only he stalked slower. | Fielding, Joseph Andrews (1742) |
| Be smooth-tongued, and the Englishman will withdraw from you as quickly as may be, walking sideways like a crab, and looking askance at you with panic in his eyes. But stammer and blurt to him, and he will fall straight under the spell of your transparent honesty. | Beerbohm, The House of Commons Manner (1909) |
| Sometimes he would tickle the nose of his eldest child (he had two children); sometimes he would hook the rake on to the branch of a tree, and hoist himself up with horrible gymnastic jerks, like those of a giant frog in its final agony. | Chesterton, Manalive (1912) |
These comparisons tend to be unflattering to their subjects. They force the reader to create a mental picture of a hybrid, and sometimes to attribute more of the animal to the human subject than the author explicitly invited. The theater of the mind has rules of its own.
2. Sounds. Humans are notable for their ability to speak words. When they make other sounds they more closely resemble animals, and so lend themselves to comparison.
| Two of the enemy’s men entered the boat just where this fellow stood in the foresheets; he immediately saluted them with a ladle full of the stuff, boiling hot which so burned and scalded them, being half-naked that they roared out like bulls, and, enraged with the fire, leaped both into the sea. | Defoe, Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719) |
| “Certainly not!” shouted Mr. Pickwick. “Hurrah!” And then there was another roaring, like that of a whole menagerie when the elephant has rung the bell for the cold meat. | Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (1837) |
| His phrase was greeted by a strange laugh from a student who lounged against the wall, his peaked cap down on his eyes. The laugh, pitched in a high key and coming from a so muscular frame, seemed like the whinny of an elephant. | Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) |
By the same token, human speech, when it does take the form of words, can be compared to the noises of animals to put the speaker into a bestial light.
| “Where’s the girl?” says he, with a voice as loud as the braying of a jackass. | Kipling, The Man Who Would Be King (1888) |
| Women with hoarse voices and harsh laughter had called after him. Drunkards had reeled by, cursing and chattering to themselves like monstrous apes. | Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) |
| Quivering with rage, I returned to my bedroom. “Intolerable,” I heard myself repeating like a parrot that knew no other word. | Beerbohm, Hilary Maltby and Stephen Braxton (1919) |
The tone of a voice:
| Her voice sounded to him like that of a broken-throated lamb, so painful and weak it was, with the plaintive stop in the utterance. | Meredith, The Ordeal of Richard Feverel (1859) |
| His voice was thin like the buzzing of a mosquito. | Conrad, Chance (1913) |
3. Resemblances in character and ability. Many human traits can be found in purer form in animals. Strength and tenacity are common examples; and these sometimes are cases where a comparison to an animal will elevate its subject rather than reducing it in stature.
| Harry, champion, by acclamation, of the college heavy-weights, broad-shouldered, bull-necked, square-jawed, six feet and trimmings, a little science, lots of pluck, good-natured as a steer in peace, formidable as a red-eyed bison in the crack of hand-to-hand battle! | Holmes, The Professor at the Breakfast Table (1859) |
| And she had found a will like that of a crab or a boa-constrictor, which goes on pinching or crushing without alarm at thunder. | Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876) |
Ignorance, insensitivity, and other brute traits likewise find their epitome in animals, which can make less flattering reference points for human versions of the same.
| . . . the Duke of Albemarle, who takes the part of the Guards against us in our supplies of money, which is an odd consideration for a dull, heavy blockhead as he is, understanding no more of either than a goose. . . . | The Diary of Samuel Pepys (1667) |
| To talk to those imps about justice and mercy, would have been as absurd as to reason with bears and tigers. Lead and steel are the only arguments that they understand. | Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855) |
| Ready in gibes, quick-answer’d, saucy, and As quarrelous as the weasel. | Cymbeline, 3, 4 |
With the possible exception of the last, those examples involved general references to animals not distinguished for their wit. The comparison can be made more specific by putting the creature into a particular circumstance.
| Empire has happened to them and civilization has happened to them as fresh lettuces come to tame rabbits. They do not understand how they got, and they will not understand how to keep. | Wells, An Englishman Looks at the World (1914) |
| They may even be suffering quite terribly by it. But they are no more mastering its causes, reasons, conditions, and the possibility of its future prevention than a monkey that has been rescued in a scorching condition from the burning of a house will have mastered the problem of a fire. It is just happening to and about them. | Wells, War and the Future (1917) |
| He went home as a horse goes back to his stable, because he knew nowhere else to go. | The Education of Henry Adams (1918) |
A human behavior or quality of character may be diminished precisely because it is shared by animals.
| Boswell. “But will you not allow him a nobleness of resolution, in penetrating into distant regions?” Johnson. “That, Sir, is not to the present purpose: we are talking of sense. A fighting cock has a nobleness of resolution.” | Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791) |
| ’Tis no great valor to perish sword in hand, and bravado on lip; cased all in panoply complete. For even the alligator dies in his mail, and the swordfish never surrenders. | Melville, Mardi (1849) |
| No doubt behind these legal rights is the fighting will of the subject to maintain them, and the spread of his emotions to the general rules by which they are maintained; but that does not seem to me the same thing as the supposed a priori discernment of a duty or the assertion of a preexisting right. A dog will fight for his bone. | Holmes, Jr., Natural Law (1918) |
4. Prospects for improvement. Humans may have dispositions that are hard to change; such immutability is clearer in the case of animals, and may be illustrated accordingly.
| I confess, that practically speaking, when I have learned a man’s real disposition, I have no hopes of changing it for the better or worse in this state of existence. As the Orientals say, “A cur’s tail may be warmed, and pressed, and bound round with ligatures, and after a twelve years’ labor bestowed upon it, still it will retain its natural form.” | Thoreau, Walden (1854) |
| If the typical criminal is a degenerate, bound to swindle or to murder by as deep seated an organic necessity as that which makes the rattlesnake bite, it is idle to talk of deterring him by the classical method of imprisonment. He must be got rid of; he cannot be improved, or frightened out of his structural reaction. | Holmes, Jr., The Path of the Law (1897) |
A related application is the analogy to what is inevitable in animals to describe what is inevitable in humans, or some particular type of them.
| [T]he cosmopolitan is basing his whole case upon the idea that man should, if he can, become as God, with equal sympathies and no prejudices, while the nationalist denies any such duty at the very start, and regards man as an animal who has preferences, as a bird has feathers. | Chesterton, Thomas Carlyle (1903) |
| But what is the anarchistic ex-professor’s own theory? – for a professor must have a theory, as a dog must have fleas. | Mencken, Criticism of Criticism of Criticism (1919) |
Animals capable of training are brought along by methods cruder than education, the lore of which can provide matter for and effective and humiliating comparisons.
| Foolish fellows! (said Dr. Johnson), don’t they see that they are as much dependent upon the Peers one way as the other. The Peers have but to oppose a candidate to ensure him success. It is said the only way to make a pig go forward, is to pull him back by the tail. These people must be treated like pigs. | Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791) |
| Indeed, one day when Adams was pleading with a Cabinet officer for patience and tact in dealing with Representatives, the Secretary impatiently broke out: “You can’t use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!” | The Education of Henry Adams (1918) |
| In short, all experience shows that almost all men require at times both the spur of hope and the bridle of fear, and that religious hope and fear are an effective spur and bridle, though some people are too hard-mouthed and thick-skinned to care much for either, and though others will now and then take the bit in their teeth and rush where passion carries them, notwithstanding both. | James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873) |
5. Instinctive life. We have seen that humans may be compared to animals on the basis of traits that we imagine they share – courage, ignorance, etc. We turn now to a more specific set of comparisons: those involving instinctive behavior. Sometimes such comparisons are made to humans generally.
| [L]et them have what instructions you will, and ever so learned lectures of breeding daily inculcated into them, that which will most influence their carriage, will be the company they converse with, and the fashion of those about them. Children (nay, and men too) do most by example. We are all a sort of chameleons, that still take a tincture from things near us. . . . | Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693) |
| If we were reasoning, farsighted people, four fifths of us would go straight to the Guardians for relief, and knock the whole social system to pieces with most beneficial reconstructive results. The reason we do not do this is because we work like bees or ants, by instinct or habit, not reasoning about the matter at all. | Shaw, Man and Superman (1903) |
| In fact, men think in packs as jackals hunt. | St. John, note on Locke’s Conduct of the Understanding (1854) |
Or the point may be more particular – a claim not about humans in general, but about certain of them, or a distinct pattern of human behavior; and these subjects may in turn be compared not to animals generally, but to animals in certain circumstances and the instincts they display.
| Like the tiger, that seldom desists from pursuing man after having once preyed upon human flesh, the reader who has once gratified his appetite with calumny makes ever after the most agreeable feast upon murdered reputations! | Goldsmith, The Traveler (dedication) (1764) |
| That the number of authors is disproportionate to the maintenance, which the public seems willing to assign them; that there is neither praise nor meat for all who write, is apparent from this, that, like wolves in long winters, they are forced to prey on one another. | Johnson, A Project for the Employment of Authors (1756) |
| In the House of Commons his credit was low and my reputation very high. You know the nature of that assembly: they grow, like hounds, fond of the man who shews them game, and by whose halloo they are used to be encouraged. | Bolingbroke, letter to William Windham (1717) |
| Mrs. Tulliver had lived thirteen years with her husband, yet she retained in all the freshness of her early married life a facility of saying things which drove him in the opposite direction to the one she desired. Some minds are wonderful for keeping their bloom in this way, as a patriarchal goldfish apparently retains to the last its youthful illusion that it can swim in a straight line beyond the encircling glass. | Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860) |
Cf.:
| I’m capable of a great jerk, an effort, and then a relaxation – but steady every-day goodness is beyond me. I must be a moral kangaroo! | Gaskell, Wives and Daughters (1866) |
The instinct for vengeance and self-protection is a common subject for comparisons of this kind.
| They hold together like bees; offend one, and all will revenge his quarrel. | Kingsley, Westward Ho! (1855) |
| Vengeance imports a feeling of blame, and an opinion, however distorted by passion, that a wrong has been done. It can hardly go very far beyond the case of a harm intentionally inflicted: even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked. | Holmes, Jr., The Common Law (1888) |
| Ants are as completely Socialistic as any community can possibly be, yet they put to death any ant which strays among them by mistake from a neighboring ant-heap. Men do not differ much from ants, as regards their instincts in this respect, wherever there is a great divergence of race, as between white men and yellow men. | Russell, Proposed Roads to Freedom (1920) |
The human instinct for mating and ritual is another often compared to animal life.
| That some repent no one can doubt; but I am inclined to believe that most men and women take their lots as they find them, marrying as the birds do by force of nature, and going on with their mates with a general, though not perhaps an undisturbed satisfaction. . . . | Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? (1864) |
| Boys, like dogs, have a sort of romantic ritual which is not always their real selves. And this romantic ritual is generally the ritual of not being romantic; the pretence of being much more masculine and materialistic than they are. | Chesterton, Simmons and the Social Tie (1910) |
War elephants and their instincts have been pressed into laudable rhetorical service. They have a minor but irreplaceable role in the lexicon of metaphor.
| The generals made use of him for his talent of railing, which, kept within government, proved frequently of great service to their cause, but, at other times, did more mischief than good; for, at the least touch of offence, and often without any at all, he would, like a wounded elephant, convert it against his leaders. | Swift, The Battle of the Books (1697) |
| What the condition of this country will be, when its standing army is composed of dwarfs, with here and there a wild man to throw its ranks into confusion, like the elephants employed in war in former times, I leave you to imagine, sir. | Dickens, Threatening Letter to Thomas Hood from An Ancient Gentleman (1844) |
| He perhaps thought, and not unreasonably, that, like the elephant in the battle, he was quite as likely to trample down his friends as his foes. | Lord Stowell, in Boswell’s Life of Johnson (1791) (on why Lord North did not want Johnson as an ally in Parliament) |
More flattering results are possible when the instincts of a creature are productive.
| For the empirical, like the ant, only collects and uses; the rational, like the spider, spins from itself. But the practice of the bee is midway, which draws materials from the flowers of both garden and field, but transmutes and digests them by a faculty of its own. Nor is the work of true philosophy different. . . . | Bacon, Thoughts and Observations Concerning the Interpretation of Nature (1620) |
Or consider Henry Adams’ discussion of grisaille – painting in shades of gray:
| Grisaille is a separate branch of colour-decoration which belongs with the whole system of lighting and fenetrage, and will have to remain a closed book because the feeling and experience which explained it once are lost, and we cannot recover either. Such things must have been always felt rather than reasoned, like the irregularities in plan of the builders; the best work of the best times shows the same subtlety of sense as the dog shows in retrieving, or the bee in flying, but which tourists have lost. | Adams, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres (1904) |
Where a human trait or behavior is ambiguous (it might be the expression of something high or low), comparison to an animal can distinguish the possibilities.
| The few odd minutes I have had to spare I have given to Plato, recurring to his Symposium after fifty years; with a translation alongside I find the Greek easy. My successive reflections have been these: How natural the talk. But it is the “first intention” common to the classics. They have not a looking glass at each end of their room, and their simplicity is the bark of a dog, not the simplicity of art. | Holmes, Jr., letter to Frederick Pollock (1911) |
6. Hybrid cases. Because animals and humans are superficially similar, it is easy to impute human qualities and feelings to animals – and then to turn the resulting picture around, with a person compared to an animal said to have certain of its (human) traits. In effect the animal is anthropomorphized, then compared back to the human to make the latter more vivid. Some cases of this kind involve human attributes assigned broadly to certain types of creatures.
| His countenance had a strongly masculine cast; not properly human, but such as we see in the bull, the goat, or the domestic boar; something equivocal and wheedling, something greedy, brutal, and dangerous. | Stevenson, The Sire de Maletroit’s Door (1882) |
| Mr. Lush felt a triumph that was mingled with much distrust; for Grandcourt had said no word to him about her, and looked as neutral as an alligator; there was no telling what might turn up in the slowly-churning chances of his mind. | Eliot, Daniel Deronda (1876) |
| He had a round face, too, like a walrus; and with about the same expression, half human and half indescribable. | Melville, Redburn (1849) |
Human qualities also may be associated not just with a whole species but with a particular animal in a comparison – to invoke not the lowliness of the dog generally, but the more particular disposition of the dog that has been kicked. The conduct or inner state of the animal is described with words that normally apply to people, making the result partly human and causing the comparison to feel closer.
| I told him, he was not sensible of the danger, having lain under cover in the boat during the storm: he was like the chicken, that hides its head under its wing, and then thinks itself safe. | Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785) |
| Don’t get the expression of a vicious cur that appears to know the kicks it gets are its desert, and yet hates all the world, as well as the kicker, for what it suffers. | Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847) |
| [T]he house of Smallweed, always early to go out and late to marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has discarded all amusements, discountenanced all storybooks, fairy tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact that it has had no child born to it and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds. | Dickens, Bleak House (1853) |
More extreme cases – not necessarily metaphorical, but in place here – enjoyably hypothesize what an animal would think or say if it could.
| Somebody quoted to him with admiration the soliloquy of an officer who had lived in the wilds of America: “Here am I, free and unrestrained, amidst the rude magnificence of nature, with the Indian woman by my side, and this gun, with which I can procure food when I want it! What more can be desired for human happiness?” “Do not allow yourself, sir,” replied Johnson, “to be imposed upon by such gross absurdity. It is sad stuff; it is brutish. If a bull could speak, he might as well exclaim, ‘Here am I with this cow and this grass; what being can enjoy greater felicity?” | Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791) |
| In the two new volumes Johnson says, and very probably did, or is made to say, that Gray’s poetry is dull, and that he was a dull man! The same oracle dislikes Prior, Swift, and Fielding. If an elephant could write a book, perhaps one that had read a great deal would say, that an Arabian horse is a very clumsy ungraceful animal. | Walpole, letter to Miss Berry (1791) |
| It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides. | Mill, Utilitarianism (1863) |
7. Insults; loathsomeness. Many of the examples already seen have diminished their human subjects, depicting them as slow-witted or incorrigible. But we nevertheless should give further consideration to comparisons made more directly for the sake of insult and disparagement. Most insults are metaphors, as when the person made the subject of them is compared to an orifice or appendage. There is an old tradition, however, of abuse accomplished by comparisons to animal life; these devices allow the speaker to retain more dignity and use more imagination, and they have a distinct potency of their own. Insects are a natural source for the purpose, as they tend to be puny as well as odious.
| You diversivolent lawyer, marke him; knaves turn informers, as maggots turn to flies; you may catch gudgeons with either. | Webster, The White Devil (1612) |
| If I am instructed rightly, he is one of those vain and vapid coxcombs, . . . one of those fashionable insects, that folly has painted, and fortune plumed, for the annoyance of our atmosphere; dangerous alike in their torpidity and their animation; infesting where they fly and poisoning where they repose. | Phillips, argument in Guthrie v. Sterne (1815) |
| If the Frenchman saw our aristocracy and liked it, if he saw our snobbishness and liked it, if he set himself to imitate it, we all know what we should feel. We all know that we should feel that that particular Frenchman was a repulsive little gnat. | Chesterton, French and English (1909) |
Instructive applications to critics:
| He will soon flit to other prey, when you disregard him. It is my way: I never publish a sheet, but buzz! out fly a swarm of hornets, insects that never settle upon you, if you don’t strike at them and whose venom is diverted to the next object that presents itself. | Walpole, letter to the Earl of Hertford (1764) |
| The last sort I shall mention are verbal critics – mere word-catchers, fellows that pick out a word in a sentence and a sentence in a volume and tell you it is wrong. . . . Littleness is their element, and they give a character of meanness to whatever they touch. They creep, buzz, and fly-blow. It is much easier to crush than to catch these troublesome insects; and when they are in your power your self-respect spares them. | Hazlitt, On Criticism (1821) |
To armies:
| The Eastern armies were indeed like insects; in their blind, busy destructiveness, in their black nihilism of personal outlook, in their hateful indifference to individual life and love, in their base belief in mere numbers, in their pessimistic courage and their atheistic patriotism, the riders and raiders of the East are indeed like all the creeping things of the earth. | Chesterton, The Empire of the Insect (1910) |
| I see advancing upon all this, in hideous onslaught, the Nazi war machine, with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers, its crafty expert agents, fresh from the cowing and tying down of a dozen countries. I see also the dull, drilled, docile brutish masses of the Hun soldiery, plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts. | Churchill, London radio broadcast (1941) |
Reptiles and amphibians also provide first-rate source material for invective.
| But when he came home the next week, alive, renowned, and appeared in church all battered up and bandaged, a shining hero, stared at and wondered over by everybody, it seemed to us that the partiality of Providence for an undeserving reptile had reached a point where it was open to criticism. | Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1888) |
| “I consider you, sir,” said Mr. Pott, moved by this sarcasm, “I consider you a viper. I look upon you, sir, as a man who has placed himself beyond the pale of society, by his most audacious, disgraceful, and abominable public conduct. I view you, sir, personally and politically, in no other light than as a most unparalleled and unmitigated viper.” | Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (1837) |
| I sent for Bowles’s Works while at Oxford. How was I shocked! Every omission and every alteration disgusted taste, and mangled sensibility. Surely some Oxford toad had been squatting at the poet’s ear, and spitting into it the cold venom of dullness. | Coleridge, letter to Henry Martin (1794) |
A few examples will suggest the range of other animals widely used for damning description.
| Were they worthy the dignity of being damned, I would damn them; but they are not. Critics? – Asses! rather mules! – so emasculated, from vanity, they can not father a true thought. Like mules, too, from dunghills, they trample down gardens of roses: and deem that crushed fragrance their own. | Melville, Mardi (1849) |
| [T]hat genuine lick-spittle of royalty, Sir Benjamin Bloomfield, who like the jackal, had preceded his royal master and patron to cater to his love of pomp and show, was designated as the distinguished stranger, and on his health being drank, the band struck up ‘Welcome here again.’ | Memoirs of Daniel O’Connell (1836) |
| Adieu! thou excellent woman! thou reverse of that hyena in petticoats, Mrs. Wolstoncroft, who to this day discharges her ink and gall on Marie Antoinette, whose unparalleled sufferings have not yet stanched that Alecto’s blazing ferocity. | Walpole, letter to Hannah More (1795) |
A related tradition employs creatures not precisely to injure their subjects but to suggest the reaction they provoke. People and animals both can inspire revulsion, but unpleasant animals do it more easily and in a manner familiar to every reader. Insects and reptiles again are standard sources.
| [Y]ou don’t love me, then? It was only my station, and the rank of my wife, that you valued? Now that you think me disqualified to become your husband, you recoil from my touch as if I were some toad or ape. | Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847) |
| . . . men of ideas instead of legs, a sort of intellectual centipede that made you crawl all over. | Thoreau, Walden (1854) |
| “I want every boy to be keen.” “We are, sir,” said Psmith, with fervor. “Excellent.” “On archaeology.” Mr. Downing – for it was no less a celebrity – started, as one who perceives a loathly caterpillar in his salad. | Wodehouse, Mike and Psmith (1909) |
8. Status. So far we have examined comparisons between people and one type of creature or another. But the relations between different animals can also help illuminate the status of a subject or the relations between two of them. Thus uses of the grand or domineering animal, some of which do not bring out the best in their authors but reflect their times:
| But Dr. Johnson has much of the nil admirari in smaller concerns. That survey of life which gave birth to his Vanity of Human Wishes early sobered his mind. Besides, so great a mind as his cannot be moved by inferior objects: an elephant does not run and skip like lesser animals. | Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785) |
| Johnson defended the oriental regulation of different castes of men, which was objected to as totally destructive of the hopes of rising in society by personal merit. He shewed that there was a principle in it sufficiently plausible by analogy. “We see (said he) in metals that there are different species; and so likewise in animals, though one species may not differ very widely from another, as in the species of dogs, – the cur, the spaniel, the mastiff. The Bramins are the mastiffs of mankind.” | Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791) |
| With your belief in some apriorities like equality you may have difficulties. I who believe in force (mitigated by politeness) have no trouble – and if I were sincere and were asked certain whys by a woman should reply, “Because Ma’am I am the bull.” | Holmes, Jr., letter to Harold Laski (1928) |
These examples serve as exceptions to the typical pattern in which comparisons to animals reduce the stature of a human subject. With adjustment, though, even an animal of high status can, if impaired, put the subject of a comparison into a diminished light.
| “Make all men equal so far as laws can make them equal, and what does that mean but that each unit is to be rendered hopelessly feeble in presence of an overwhelming majority?” The existence of such a state of society reduces individuals to impotence, and to tell them to be powerful, original, and independent is to mock them. It is like plucking a bird’s feathers in order to put it on a level with beasts, and then telling it to fly. | James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873) |
| The orator almost always spoke without notes. On the few occasions when he used them they were an evident embarrassment: it was like an eagle walking. | Martin, Wendell Phillips (1890) |
| Hastings. Besides, the King hath wasted all his rods On late offenders, that he now doth lack The very instruments of chastisement; So that his power, like to a fangless lion, May offer, but not hold. | 2 Henry IV, 4, 1 |
Good effects can be had by introducing two animals and identifying the subject of the comparison with one of them rather than the other: like this animal, not that one.
| And I will shoot Mr. Wood and his deputies through the head, like highwaymen or housebreakers, if they dare to force one farthing of their coin upon me in the payment of an hundred pounds. It is no loss of honour to submit to the lion, but who, with the figure of a man, can think with patience of being devoured alive by a rat. | Swift, Letter to Mr. Harding the Printer (1724) |
| I know he has endeavoured to show himself master of the art of swift writing, and would persuade the world that what he writes is ex tempore |
