With the spread of freedom and the broadening out of all intellectual interests which characterise these modern days, the lower kindreds began to regain their old place in the concern of man. Hence it came that, in spite of the gentle understanding of such sweet saints as Francis of Assisi, Anthony of Padua, and Colomb of the Bees, the inarticulate kindred for a long time reaped small comfort from the Dispensation of Love. Of what concern could be the joy or pain of creatures of no soul, to-morrow returning to the dust? To strenuous spirits, their eyes fixed upon the fear of hell for themselves, and the certainty of it for their neighbours, it smacked of sin to take thought of the feelings of such evanescent products of corruption. Man was the only thing of consequence on earth, and of man, not his body, but his soul. While it was militant, fighting for its life against the forces of paganism, its effort was to set man at odds with the natural world, and fill his eyes with the wonders of the spiritual. The advent of Christianity, strange as it may seem at first glance, did not make for a closer understanding between man and the lower animals. Reynard, Isegrim, Bruin, and Greybeard have little resemblance to the fox, the wolf, the bear, and the badger, as patience, sympathy, and the camera reveal them to us to-day. The characters in that great beast-epic of the middle ages, “Reynard the Fox,” though far more elaborately limned than those which play their succinct rôles in the fables of Æsop, are at the same time in their elaboration far more alien to the truths of wild nature.
And so, as advancing civilisation drew an ever widening line between man and the animals, and men became more and more engrossed in the interests of their own kind, the personalities of the wild creatures which they had once known so well became obscured to them, and the creatures themselves came to be regarded, for the purposes of literature, as types or symbols merely, – except in those cases, equally obstructive to exact observation, where they were revered as temporary tenements of the spirits of departed kinsfolk. It was simple to remember that the tiger was cruel, the fox cunning, the wolf rapacious. But it was only the most salient characteristics of each species that concerned the practical observer. Pitting their wits against those of their four-foot rivals, they had to know their antagonists, and respect them, in order to overcome them. These earliest observers of animal life were compelled by the necessities of the case to observe truly, if not deeply. In this way, as soon as composition became a métier, was born the fable and in this way the ingenuity of the first author enabled him to avoid a perilous unpopularity among those whose weaknesses and defects his art held up to the scorn of all the caves. The beasts, not being in a position to resent the ignoble office thrust upon them, were compelled to do duty as concrete types of those obvious virtues and vices of which alone the unsophisticated ethical sense was ready to take cognisance. Somewhat later, when men had begun to harass their souls, and their neighbours, with problems of life and conduct, then these same animals, hourly and in every aspect thrust beneath the eyes of their observation, served to point the moral of their tales. The first critic, however supercilious, would be little likely to cavil at their verisimilitude. Such first animal stories had at least one merit of prime literary importance. We may not unreasonably infer that the first animal story – the remote but authentic ancestor of “Mowgli” and “Lobo” and “Krag” – was a story of some successful hunt, when success meant life to the starving family or of some desperate escape, when the truth of the narrative was attested, to the hearers squatted trembling about their fire, by the sniffings of the baffled bear or tiger at the rock-barred mouth of the cave.
When he acquired the kindred art of telling a story, they supplied his earliest themes and they suggested the hieroglyphs by means of which, on carved bone or painted rock, he first gave his narrative a form to outlast the spoken breath. They furnished both material and impulse for his first gropings toward pictorial art. They pressed incessantly upon his perceptions. Perhaps the most engrossing part in the life-drama of primitive man was that played by the beasts which he hunted, and by those which hunted him. The animal story, of course, in one form or another, is as old as the beginnings of literature. Alike in matter and in method, the animal story, as we have it to-day, may be regarded as a culmination.
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