Kindred Brutes: Animals in Romantic-Period Writing

Christine Kenyon-Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351923989
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Exploring the significance of animals in Romantic-period writing, this new study shows how in this period they were seen as both newly different from humankind (subjects in their own right, rather than simply humanity's tools or adjuncts) and also as newly similar, with the ability to feel and perhaps to think like human beings. Approaches to animals are reviewed in a wide range of the period's literary work (in particular, that of Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Southey, Clare and Blake). Poetry and other literary work are discussed in relation to discourses about animals in various contemporary cultural contexts, including children's books, parliamentary debates, vegetarian theses, encyclopaedias and early theories about evolution. The study introduces animals to the discussions about ecocriticism and environmentalism in Romantic-period writing by complicating the concept of 'Nature', and it also contributes to the debates about politics and the body in this period. It demonstrates the rich variety of thinking about animals in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, and it challenges the exclusion of literary writing from some recent multi-disciplinary debates about animals, by exploring the literary roots of many metaphors about and attitudes to animals in our current thinking. Kindred Brutes constitutes a genuinely original and substantial contribution both to Romantic-period writing and to general debates about animals and the body.

Chapter 1

Animals Dead and Alive: Pets, Politics and Poetry in the Romantic Period

When some proud Son of man returns to Earth,

Unknown to Glory, but upheld by Birth,

The sculptor’s art exhausts the pomp of woe,

And storied urns record who rests below;

When all is done upon the Tomb is seen,

Not what he was, but what he should have been:

But the poor Dog, in life the firmest friend,

The first to welcome, foremost to defend,

Whose honest heart is still his Masters own,

Who labours, fights, lives, breathes for him alone,

Unhonour’d falls, unnotic’d all his worth,

Deny’d in heaven the Soul he held on earth:

While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven,

And claims himself a sole exclusive heaven.

Oh man! thou feeble tenant of an hour,

Debas’d by slavery, or corrupt by power,

Who knows thee well must quit thee with disgust,

Degraded mass of animated dust!

Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat,

Thy smiles hypocrisy, thy words deceit,

By nature vile, ennobled but by name,

Each kindred brute might bid thee blush for shame.

Ye! who behold perchance this simple urn

Pass on, it honours none you wish to mourn:

To mark a friend’s remains these stones arise,

I never knew but one – and here he lies.

(Lord Byron: ‘Inscription on the Monument of a Newfoundland Dog’)¹

Byron’s lines, written to commemorate the death of a favourite dog, Boatswain [see Figure 1], who died of rabies in autumn 1808, are a parody of the form they seem to emulate: that of the epitaph. The ‘Inscription’ subverts the epitaphic function of praising the dead by discoursing instead on the degraded nature of Man, and undermines the traditional consolation of epitaphs by questioning the immortality of the soul. It uses a composition in the form of an epitaph to protest about the role of epitaphs and the way they are composed. Written by a twenty-year-old nobleman who is himself ‘Unknown to glory, but upheld by birth’, the poem sets itself at odds with the epitaphic convention of family loyalty by having the poet denigrate his own kind.

While, however, the poem’s parodic stance owes much to Popean or Swiftian ‘Saeva Indignatio’, the ‘Inscription’ is not wholly consistent in its parody and does not conform throughout to Augustan methods.² In contrast to the cultivated distance and universalizing tone of his models, Byron uses the ‘I’ of his last line to make a point of revealing the poem’s personal relevance to the author, and ‘real’, individual, feelings of loss, loneliness and bitterness seem to break through the misanthropic surface. Equally disconcerting to Byron’s original readers was the poem’s coupling of a serious and apparently personally embittered tone with the fact that it is about an animal: what the ‘Inscription’ does not do is to mock its own feelings for an apparently inappropriate object, nor – given that its predominant vein is ironical and its subject is an animal – ironize enough. The poem has in abundance the antithetical quality which was taken to be the predominant characteristic of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin in the 1960s; the questioning of its own frame of reference which Jerome McGann identified as a key issue of the movement in the 1980s, and the preoccupation with oppositional polarity which Anne Mellor identified in 1993 as the obsession of ‘masculine’ Romanticism.³

Besides its reworking of Augustan models, the poem adds to its deliberate incongruousness by making use of two specific works from other very different traditions of writing. It unpacks Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard’ (1751) by means of the Earl of Rochester’s ‘Satyr against Reason and Mankind’ (1674–75), and so brings to bear upon a founding example of eighteenth-century elegiac sensibility the seventeenth-century English culmination of the long classical and Renaissance tradition of theriophily: a philosophical stance which satirizes human pretensions by reminding us of our kinship with animals, and contrasts overweening human folly with animals’ instinctive wisdom.

This chapter explores the theriophilic tradition as a way not only of grounding Byron’s poem but also of delineating some of the literary and philosophical ‘animal’ precedents available to other writers in the Romantic period. This approach to the ‘Inscription’ is one of three readings of the poem which relate to its three forms of publication in Byron’s lifetime, each of which markedly varied its reception: first as a monumental inscription; second as a contribution to a friend’s miscellany of verses, and third as part of a deliberately-provocative, politically-motivated addendum to one of Byron’s best-selling poems. Each of these readings also offers a means of exploring a wider background to Romantic-period animals in general. The first, as noted, serves to introduce a history of thought about animals, around the theme of theriophily and animal epitaphs; the second discusses issues of friendship, relationship and pet-keeping, and the third explores some of the political deployments of animals in the Romantic period, as a prelude to a fuller consideration of this topic in Chapter Three.

Gray and Rochester

Byron’s many verse and prose references to Gray’s Elegy show his close knowledge of and respect for the poem:

Had Gray written nothing but his Elegy – high as he stands – I am not sure that he would not stand higher – – it is the Corner-stone of his Glory – without it his Odes would be insufficient for his fame.⁴

Byron’s ‘Inscription’ demonstrates its expectation that the reader will be familiar with the ‘Elegy’ by allusions to key phrases in Gray’s work: Gray’s ‘storied urn’ (line 41) is used unchanged, while his ‘pomp of power’ (33) becomes Byron’s ‘pomp of woe’, and the ‘unhonour’d dead’ of Gray’s poem (57) are recalled in Byron’s by the dog who ‘unhonour’d falls’. Byron’s punning transformation of Gray’s ‘animated bust’ (41) into the ‘animated dust’ of line 18 introduces a reference of a type frequent in Byron to the way in which God, having formed Adam out of earth, breathed life or soul (anima) into him. The entire concept of the worthlessness of monuments to the proud but undistinguished is drawn by Byron from Gray’s contrast between the ‘trophies’, the ‘pealing anthem’ which ‘swells the note of praise’, the soothing ‘Flattery’ (43), and the ‘useful toil, / homely joys, and destiny obscure’ (28–29) of the country poor. Byron’s nobleman, ‘Unknown to glory but upheld by birth’, is the obverse of Gray’s ‘village-Hampden’, ‘mute inglorious Milton’ and ‘Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood’ (57, 59 and 60) whose achievement of ‘glory’ was prevented by their humble birth; and Byron’s dog as a ‘kindred brute’ parodies Gray’s appeal to a ‘kindred spirit’ in the reader/friend (96). Finally, the apparently personal tone of the last couplet of the ‘Inscription’ gains meaning if it is read in the light of the closing Epitaph of the ‘Elegy’, so that Byron’s lines are seen to play only half-ironically upon the implications of Gray’s passionate use of the word ‘friend’: placing Byron’s dog, as his sole ‘friend’, in the same relation to the poet that Gray claims for himself to the ‘Youth, to Fortune and to Fame unknown’, who ‘gain’d from Heaven, ’twas all he wish’d, a friend’ (124).

Although he seems to have expected his readers to pick up his allusions to Gray’s ‘Elegy’, it is unlikely that Byron also assumed them to be familiar with his other major source for the ‘Inscription’. Don Juan VIII. 252 alludes to Rochester’s ‘Satyr against Reason and Mankind’, and there are other references to ‘Wilmot’s’ verse in an 1806 poem and in Byron’s letters and journals, but a taste for Rochester seems to have been very much a minority one in this period.⁵ These references place the ‘Inscription’ within a theriophilic tradition which – despite the work of Boas – has not been much noticed or studied in English culture, although it was common in classical discourse, was revived in Renaissance and seventeenth-century French writing, and came into Restoration English literature from this source.

The ‘Inscription’ is the most compact and complete of Byron’s expressions in this theriophilic tradition which he shares with Rochester.⁶ Here, for comparison, is Rochester’s opening:

Were I not (who to my cost already am

One of those strange, prodigious Creatures, Man)

A Spirit free, to choose for my own share,

What Case of Flesh and Blood I pleas’d to weare,

I’d be a Dog, a Monkey, or a Bear,

Or anything but that vain Animal

Who is so proud of being rational.⁷

Byron’s poem shows this part of its ancestry not only through the contrast it shares with Rochester between noble beast and debased Man (‘Beasts are in their degree, / As wise at least, and better far than he,’ Rochester 115–6), and the way it echoes Rochester’s emphasis on the misplaced pride and ‘vanity’ of humankind (Byron’s ‘man, vain insect’ and Rochester’s ‘vain animal’), but also through their common emphasis on the uniquely human evil trait of betraying one’s own kind.⁸ So Byron’s ‘Thy love is lust, thy friendship all a cheat, / Thy smiles hypocrisy, thy words deceit!’ compresses Rochester’s lines 135–8:

But man with Smiles, Embraces, Friendship, Praise,

Most humanly his Fellow’s Life betraies,

With voluntary Pains his Works distress,

Not through Necessity but Wantonness.⁹

Byron’s allusion to slavery echoes Rochester’s reference (176–8) to humans who tyrannize over animals while having the same status as slaves:

Who swolne with selfish vanity, devise,

False freedomes, holy Cheats, and formal Lyes

Over their fellow Slaves to tyrannize,

and the two works share a preoccupation with the immortality of the human and animal soul which, as I show below, is characteristic of theriophilic traditions going back more than two thousand years. Byron’s bitterness about the denial to the dog of ‘the soul he held on earth’, and about the claims for Man’s ‘sole exclusive heaven’, take their cue from the theological justifications of Rochester’s satirized churchman – the ‘formal Band and Beard’ (46) – who takes the poet to task in lines 60–65:

‘Blest, glorious Man! to whom alone kind Heav’n,

An everlastin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• General Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘Animals are good to think with’
• 1 Animals Dead and Alive: Pets, Politics and Poetry in the Romantic Period
• 2 Children’s Animals: Locke, Rousseau, Coleridge and the Instruction/Imagination Debate
• 3 Political Animals: Bull-fighting, Bull-baiting and Childe Harold I
• 4 Animals as Food: Shelley, Byron and the Ideology of Eating
• 5 Animals and Nature: Beasts, Birds and Wordsworth’s Ecological Credentials
• 6 Evolutionary Animals: Science and Imagination Between the Darwins
• 7 In Conclusion: Animals Then and Now
• Bibliography
• Index