Dogs and Charm

THERE are a great many dogs in our community. They are a part of our life. They roam the streets, leashed or free; they accompany their owners in shops, banks, restaurants, and hang out of car windows. They stand on the edges of swimming pools and tennis courts, wait outside of schools, and congress at public gatherings. Every June, at the final match of the tennis tournament, seven or eight of these neighborhood pets attempt to tear each other’s throats out tinder the grandstand, to a hideous accompaniment of shrieks and howls. The players stop, the gallery rises en masse; a few courageous onlookers, sustaining bites and lacerations, extract from the bottom of a pile of frantic animals a damaged Sealyham and a mutilated wirehaired, bleeding freely but still hysterically exchanging insults. The quarrel, temporarily interrupted, will be kept alive by the owners of the combatants, and old friendships will be sundered. But at the next outdoor gathering this scene of bloodshed and carnage will be repeated; no one would think of keeping his dog at home. We are not unaccustomed to being bitten by dogs. We occasionally submit to the prolonged discomforts of the Pasteur treatment, with bad grace, but without surprise. We are resigned to certain minor inconveniences, as I suppose the Irish were, who also kept their pigs in the parlor.

When we have our dinner on the terrace, a wistful semicircle of dogs from the Negro houses on the back street stand at a respectful distance, drooling a little, watching the progress of the food from our plates to our mouths. It is impossible to avoid their solicitous eyes. Talented beggars, they simulate starvation so effectively that our enjoyment of the meal is deterred by sensations of guilt, shame, selfishness, and greed. When we say, ‘Go home, Harry,’ or ‘Dixie,’ or ‘Baby,’ our own watchdog makes a perfunctory sally at the intruders, who withdraw a few paces in polite acknowledgment of his gesture, only to sidle back again, elaborately inconspicuous. They no doubt know that a path through private property, kept open to trespassers over a period of years, becomes in time a public right of way. They have established their right of way in our garden. All day long they trail through the shrubbery and flower beds. The ravages of the cutworm and the aphid are insignificant compared to the depredations of these abject, semihomeless, and ingratiating animals. At night we share the sorrows of the mother who has been deprived of her young, and the puppies who find their pen uncongenial.

All this we endure, continually, from alien dogs; meanwhile our own pets breathe down our necks in motor cars, destroy our household effects, and embroil us with our friends. I suppose there are well-mannered dogs; one reads about them, but I never happened to meet one. The dogs I have known sleep on the furniture, bark to the point of inducing madness in nervous subjects, make a nuisance of themselves in the dining room, roll in bone meal and other valuable fertilizers, and have personal habits too unattractive to mention. I suppose there are intelligent dogs, especially among the working breeds, but again I must take it on faith; my canine acquaintances are unanimously lack-wits. Is it intelligent to lie with your chin on the fender, panting and whimpering with the heat? Is it intelligent to mistake the kind and indulgent laundress for a burglar, twice a week the year round? Is it intelligent to eat so much and so fast that you make yourself sick? To jump into culverts you can’t get out of? To chase automobiles? To sleep at the foot of a dark staircase and utter indignant screams as each member of the household falls over you? My dogs are not the kind that save babies from burning buildings; they save the plumber’s tools from the plumber when he is packing up to go home. They are not the kind to set out on a cold day to rescue travelers from snowdrifts; rather, they are extremely likely to wind themselves around your legs as you come downstairs, and break your neck for you.

Why, then, do we harbor these creatures, parasitic, aggregate of bad habits, and subject to a thousand diseases? Why are we so besotted with love that we attribute to them all the virtues and humanities?

Because they have charm, in an exaggerated degree. A great deal of nonsense has been talked about charm, as if it were some mysterious, esoteric quality possessed only by grand and elevated personages. It is really a very simple quality, possessed in abundance by simple people; the average Negro has more of it than the average member of a privileged class, and a stray dog has more of it than many animals who walk on two legs. Richard Hughes included an apt definition of it in a sentence describing one of the characters of The Innocent Voyage: ‘A child who can show her affection for you in the very way she plants her feet on the ground has a liberal gift of that bodily genius called charm.’ That bodily genius called charm, the ability to express affection in pantomime, the mime of devotion — this is their special gift, their infallible passport. They know how to look love out of their eyes, to express it in muscular convulsions and sharp ugly sounds. When I ask my dog to go for a walk, he has hysterics and bounds high in the air, uttering frantic glad cries — and which of my friends is so appreciative of my invitations? When I pack my trunk to go away, he hides under the bed, carries his head and tail low, cries out of mournful eyes. When I return, my friends say, ‘It is nice to see you again, we hope you had a pleasant trip’; but my dog goes completely to pieces and has running fits — which is very winning, and the essence of charm. A dog is capable, even, if he is old enough and tired enough, of dying of grief when his master flies, a flattery against which no one is proof, and the ultimate manifestation of that bodily genius. Montaigne, who was not generally an admirer of women, wrote an essay in praise of three good women whose virtue consisted in destroying themselves when their husbands died. He was not so much won by their virtue as seduced by their utterly charming behavior.

The charm of dogs is not a subtle charm, but if I were permitted to choose between being endowed with the rare, subtle, and generally indescribable charm of ladies in novels, and the uncouth charm of a dog, I should unquestionably choose the latter (modified to my requirements), and it would serve me well enough. I should not need to practise any grace, virtue, or industry, and everyone in the world would want to adopt me. I do not believe in the subtle variety of charm; it is a quality no more subtle than the brass lungs of a hog caller or the left hook of a prize fighter. It is a rich, strong, obvious, undiluted flattery, flattery laid on with a trowel, but springing honestly from the heart.

It has the power of commandeering our benevolence toward the most unworthy objects. I take my shoes to be repaired by Nicolatti, an Italian of shady character, who looks like, and probably is, a murderer, instead of to the clean and efficient Elite Shoe Hospital, owned and managed by my countrymen. I know a great deal to Nicolatti’s discredit. But when I go to his dark and peculiar-smelling establishment his face lights up as if the sun had come out after an Arctic winter. He short-changes me with a golden smile, and when I call the error to his attention he apologizes fluently and gracefully, congratulates me on my mathematical talent, and supplies the deficit. No hard feelings. Once I lost a glove on the street near his shop, and stopped to ask him if he had seen it. He tossed his arms to the sky, expressing grief and consternation, sent out a great many little Italian boys to hunt for it, and when one of them returned it to me he behaved as if he had received a signal promotion. If I had lost a glove outside the Elite, or whatever its horrid name is, the proprietor would have said, ‘Sorry we ain’t seen it, lady’ — which would have ended the incident. Nicolatti’s business flourishes in the face of superior competition because he supplies this basic and indispensable nourishment to the ego without which few of us can live.

And this is precisely why we complicate our lives with dogs, so that we may have, on tap, this constant nourishing flattery. We are so dazzled and confused by it that we have made a cult of the dog. We write books about dogs and make etchings of them and manufacture little effigies as ornaments, and make use of their appeal in advertisements and on magazine covers. People of singularly independent character who are not susceptible to their charm we suspect of sinister traits. Strong men are moved to tears by a story of an abused dog, but they are not moved to anything at all by a story of millions of starving but unappealing Chinese. So what wonder, when we see how charm has the power to confuse our judgment and unbalance our sense of values, to a point where we seem to be bewitched, that we speak of it as if it were an obscure magic, instead of recognizing it for what it is — a simple, if unteachable, bag of tricks?