A PORTION of Sir Edwin Landseer’s strength and of his weakness lay in the human element which he introduced into his pictures of animals. Each of his pictures tells a story—not only of animal characteristics, but of those characteristics as they approach most closely to men’s qualities, and as they are blended most inseparably with men’s lives.

The dog is the humble friend of man, and man has been called the god of the dog; a sorry god at the best—often a perverse and cruel divinity. In very many of Landseer’s pictures it is impossible to dissolve the relationship. You cannot look at the animal without thinking of the absent master and mistress. The hero or the heroine of the scene is strongly influenced by the man or the woman in the background. It is a little drama of blended human and animal life, as well as the spirited and faithful likeness of an animal which you gaze upon.

A good deal of what is unique in Landseer belongs to this peculiarity, and much of his great popularity is due to it. Men are charmed not only by contemplating the representations of their four-footed favourites, but by having a genius to interpret to them the beautiful and gracious ties which bind together God’s higher and humbler creatures. After all, God put man at the head of His creatures in this world, and perhaps man is not so far wrong as he has sometimes been said to show himself, in seeing in the lower animals a reflection of his own hopes, aims, and destiny.

The selfish and sympathetic instincts are strong in us; and neither grown man nor child will, unless in very exceptional cases, feel either long or deep concern in a kingdom from which he himself is banished. Our familiarity, our fellow-feeling, is to a large extent the measure of our interest in any subject. If we cannot put ourselves in the place of our neighbour, let him have two feet or four, we will not continue long to care for him; and, vice versa, if we have not imagination enough to endow our neighbour with some of our own attributes, so that he may stand, in a way, in our place, our regard for him will be but partial and fleeting.

People speak of the charm in unlikeness and the attraction in reverses; but there must be a more profound underlying harmony for such a charm and attraction to exist. The fact is, we can only appreciate what we understand in a degree at least, and there is no understanding without some points of union. If I may venture reverently to employ such an analogy, though man was made in the image of his Maker, when he had done all he could to deface that image, he became so incapable of having God in all his thoughts, that God, in His divine mercy, had compassion upon man’s miserable incapacity, and, taking upon Him the form of a man, restored the lost link in the chain which binds the whole universe to the throne of God.

Children have no difficulty in mentally putting themselves in the place of animals, or in putting animals in their place. Some of my readers may be inclined to say this is because the child is itself a little animal, with its higher faculties undeveloped; but none will refuse to admit that the moral and intellectual faculties are there, however much in abeyance. For my part, I believe that it is rather from the essential gifts of a child, its immense power of believing beyond what it sees, its ready sympathy and boundless trust, than from its defects of ignorance, that it has the happy capacity of identifying itself with its pets, and even its toys, either by transferring to them its own possessions, or by appropriating their experience. Curious instances of such application occur to me. A little child was heard gravely rebuking her dog. “If you are so naughty, Floss, your Uncle Tom and your Aunt Anne” (bestowing in all simplicity of heart her own relations on the dog) “will be vexed; you know they will.”

The second instance is given by an accomplished writer in a recent story, but I am persuaded it is from real life. I quote from memory.

“Why are you crying, Emily? What is the matter?” a mother asked her little daughter in tears.

“Oh, mamma! I am not Emily just now,” the child explained through her sobs; “I am the parrot the cat has been after, and I cannot get over the loss of my best tail feathers.”

A little child lisping its evening prayers startled its human hearers by adding an impromptu petition:—“God bless Ducky-daidles;” referring to an ugly little wooden duck which the child had received into the inmost circle of its affections.

It is a well-known fact that there is sometimes developed in men and women from childhood an extraordinary relation to animals, a capability of communicating with them, and exerting influence over them which does not commonly exist. With this abnormal alliance is doubtless connected the old myth of Orpheus gathering a brute audience to listen to the music of his lyre, and the more modern stories of bird and snake charmers and horse-tamers. I imagine this is only an extreme and abiding manifestation of an ordinary characteristic of childhood; and I believe it to be the inheritance, more or less, of all great animal painters.

But Sir Edwin Landseer possessed his animals in another sense from that in which the expression is used of other eminent animal painters, and especially with regard to the animal painters of the French and Belgian schools. He possessed them not merely as an artist, but as a man—I had almost said a brother—certainly in the light in which Robert Burns employed, with perfect manly tenderness, the term “fellow-mortal” to the field-mouse whose nest his ploughshare had turned up; and in the meaning which Sir Walter Scott intended to convey, when, on the day of the death of his dog, he wrote an apology to a host who expected Sir Walter’s company at dinner, on the plea of “the loss of an old friend.” Sir Edwin Landseer possessed animals—not simply in an accurate knowledge of their bodily traits, their hoofs, horns, and tails, the red fire or the luminous brown discs of their eyes, the symmetry of their loins, the glassy texture of their coats, or the soft sheen of their feathers—but in the chivalrous insight into those instincts in animals which in their sagacity and devotion sometimes put to shame the boasted wisdom and constancy of man.

I cannot help thinking that the wide-spread popularity of Sir Edwin Landseer in England is not only a credit to that manliness of national character which expresses itself in a love of out-of-door sports, and of the animals which share in these sports, but is also honourable as an evidence of the kindly satisfaction with which a matter of fact and plain-spoken race recognise in their four-footed allies attributes which constitute them far more than useful dependants—privileged and cherished comrades.

I should like to say a word on the other side of the question—I mean with regard to the sense in which Sir Edwin Landseer’s lively interpretation of the characters of animals—dogs in particular—has been an element of weakness in his power.

It has been alleged by those critics least affected by his second sight into the motives of animals, and most enamoured of the painters of brutes in their entirety—brutes as apart from men, while each specimen is distinct and individual in itself, and while it has a relation to the nature, if not the human nature, around it—that Sir Edwin sacrificed truth to sentiment till it became fantastic, and that in the pursuit he lost, not any grain of his popularity among his multitude of admirers, but something of his technical skill. It would be presumption in me to defend Sir Edwin; neither, in truth, am I inclined to write that he was never guilty of an exaggeration or fantasticalness—that he never failed in effect. But I am quite clear in the statement that it was the truth of his interpretation—not subtle, but transparent—of the dumb speech of animals which caused it to be accepted with unqualified delight by their masters, high and low; and that nothing short of the most exquisite perception of propriety on Sir Edwin’s part could have enabled him to give innumerable versions of the inner life of animals, with so little of the exaggeration and fantasticalness which would have easily become repugnant to the common sense of Englishmen.

The great English animal painter was a marvellous poet in his own department, and it ought to be simply a source of thankfulness to us that he painted poetry which those who run can read.

Yet I am about to attempt to tell again the stories which some of his animals tell me, since it may well be they have other tales for other admirers, and that, therefore, my experience may not be quite uncalled for and too much. But if in any respect I cumber with words or mar by false rendering the suggestive text which I am seeking to illustrate lovingly, I can only hope that my blunder may be forgiven.