MDMD2: The Learned English Dog

[Dave Monroe]

"All at once, out of the Murk, a dozen mirror'd Lanthorns have leapt
alight together, as into their Glare now strolls a somewhat dishevel'd 
Norfolk Terrier, with a raffish Gleam in its eye,-- whilst from some where 
less illuminate comes a sprightly Overture upon Horn, Clarinet, and Cello, 
in  time to which the Dog steps back and forth in his bright Ambit." (M&D, 
Ch. 3, p. 18)

>From Ronald Paulson, Popular and Public Art in the Age of Hogarth and 
Fielding (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame UP, 1979), Ch. 5, "The English Dog," 
pp. 49-63 ...

   "Any study of 'The English Dog' must begin with William Empson's essay of 
the same name in The Structure of Complex Words [1951], where he argued that 
a conventional formula word like 'dog,' denoting mean or low, picks up a 
second, more 'hearty' sense as 'a half-conscious protest against the 
formulas, a means of keeping them at bay.'  He shows the word changing from 
the derogatory to the 'hearty' sense in the course of the eighteenth 
century.  I wish to explore the way in which the word 'dog' is different 
from, a repression or domestication of, the visual image.  I will not go 
back over the ground Empson has covered (e.g., the sound and orthography of 
'dog' as the converse of 'God') but would draw attention to the fact that 
'dog' originally denoted a large native English breed, as opposed to a hound 
or hund or  chien.
   "I begin with word as defined in 1736 in Nathan Bailey's Dictionary: 'a 
Mongrel or Mastife, a Creature well known: Also an Andiron.'  The creature 
(so 'well known') is eminently metaphorical.  'Dog' as an andiron implies a 
transference of such canine qualities as strength and fidelity....  But if 
an andiron can be dsecribed favorably in terms of 'dog,' a man cannot: 
Bailey's list of derivatives makes 'dog' the vehicle for metaphors about 
man, who is dogged ('sullen, surly, crabbed') or the writer of doggrel 
('pitiful Poetry; paultry Verses').
   "The derivatives in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary (1755) are more extensive 
....
   "Johnson's definition of 'dog' ...
   "His fifth sense is an important one: 'for the male of several species; 
as, teh dog fox, the dog otter'; 'dog' always refers to male and 'bitch' to 
female ....  Only in the twentieth century has 'dog' come to refer to an 
unprepossessing female, a complete turnabout of the older usage.  But this 
is probably explained by Johnson's sixthe sense of 'dog' ... as 'a particle 
added to anything to mark meanness, or degeneracy, or worthlessness; as dog 
rose'--rather as the Houyhnhnmns added the epithet Yahoo to a word 'to 
express anything that is eveil.'  In short, as an epithet 'dog' signifies 
either maleness or meanness, somtimes both.
   "Johnson's dog is simply a part of man, his baser and less fortunate, 
less conscious, largely male aspect.  Empson referes to teh difference 
between Johnson's dictionary definition of dogged as 'sullen; sour; morose; 
ill-humoured; gloomy' and his use of it in conversation ... a 'dogged 
veracity.'  Nonetheless, a 'dogged veracity' is not only the strength of an 
andiron but an animal stolidity....
   "The two animals that most often serve in eighteenth-century England as 
vehicles for the tenor 'man' are the ape and the dog, and they cover the two 
aspects of man he is least happy about: to ape is to mimic one's betters; 
and to dog is to stubbornly and stupidly follow one's instinct ....  Johnson 
is one who finds it harder to forgive the dog; but moralists in general were 
more uneasy about the ape, who so physically resembles man.  The dog is, 
happily, an animal.  Indeed, the ape is an image which can be corrected by 
the dog, who, quite the opposite, does not hide or disguise but flaunts his 
lower nature; as Empson puts it, 'the dog blows the gaff on human nature,' 
exposing what we would like to conceal.
   "The dog, we should not be surprised to learn, is a device of the 
satirist in the eighteenth century.  Pope's sense of dog, both more 
conventional and less personal than Johnson's ...  This cheeky dog shows 
some of the cynic's self-awareness, for part of the literature of the dog 
... was Diogenes' answer to the question why he was called a dog [kynikos]: 
'I am called dog because I fawn on those who give me anything, I yelp at 
those who refuse, and I set my teeth in rascals.'  The central poem for Pope 
is his heroic epistle 'Bounce to Fop,' in which his own dog Bounce, the 
rough country dog, a large and masterfulo Great Dane (in fact a bitch), 
addresses herself to the courtly spaniel Fop, who belongs to the king's 
mistress ...
   "Pope, in short, employs two dogs....  There is the lapdog or sniveling 
spaniel ....  Then there is its polar opposite, the Great Dane, who is 
derived from the rough, mongrel cynic-dog, 'doggedness,' and the 
dog-as-andiron, often a watchdog.
  "There was at least one sense, Pope saw, in which the dog could serve as a 
foil to man--an idela to which man failed to live up....  But also, of 
course, in the context of British worthies, the dog is a vanitas emblem, a 
reminder of even the greatest man's animal component.
  "The great anthology of proverbial canine lore and repertoire of dog turns 
in the first half of the century was Francis Coventry's Pompey the 
Little(1751)...." (pp. 49-52)

   "The dictionary of the graphic tradition is Ceasre Ripa's Iconologia, in 
which the dog appears front-center only as emblematic of the sense of smell 
....  He is peripheral: as an incidental background figure he makes frequent 
brief appearances.  In the elaborate illustrations of the 1758-60 Hertel 
edition ....  he is shown in the background of Impiety, not himself impiuos 
but devouring Jezebel for her impiety....  This is the role of an active 
punisher as agent of nature or divine retribution; but also, ambiguously, 
the creature who is willing to eat unclean things, and (another form of 
impiety) the lowest of subjects devouring his monarch.
   "The earlier visual tradition had made much of the dog's fidelity and 
domesticity....   But if he appeared in domestic situations that empjhasized 
his fidelty, he also made apearances that drew upon his animal nature, his 
insistent maleness, and his biblical associations with unclean things and 
carnal appetite.  Artists included him in brothel and tavern scenes to 
represent unchastity and gluttony ...
   "The dog begins to take on an independent existence in Hogarthh's 
converstaion pictures of 1729-35.   Thes groups of families or friends have 
a dog who ought to be an emblem of the sort he was in Van Eyck's Arnolfini, 
but in fact Hogarth also draws on the second tradition I have mentiones, and 
upon a third, which is emphatically popular and probably best known by 
Rembrandt's dog having a bowel movement in the foreground of his etching of 
The Good Samaritan--as a touch of vulgar realism, a reminder of our common 
humanity ...." (pp. 54-55)

Cf., here ...

"'This seems to be all right.'  The Learned English Dog stops and pisses." 
(M&D, Ch. 3, p. 20)

http://www.victimology.nl/rembrandt.html

http://www.abcgallery.com/R/rembrandt/rembrandt111.html

For Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, see ...

Ripa, Cesare.  Baroque and Roccoco Pictorial Imagery:
   The 1758-60 Hertel Edition of Ripa's Iconologia with
   200 Engraved Illustrations.  Ed. Edward A. Maser.
   New York: Dover, 1971 [1593, 1758-60].

http://emblem.libraries.psu.edu/Ripa/Images/ripatoc.htm

http://www.levity.com/alchemy/iconolog.html

"Finally, there is also the cynic-dog ..." (p. 55)

cyn·ic
'si-nik
noun
Middle French or Latin, Middle French cynique, from Latin cynicus, from 
Greek kynikos, literally, like a dog, from kyn-, kyOn dog -- more at HOUND
1545
1 capitalized : an adherent of an ancient Greek school of philosophers
who held the view that virtue is the only good and that its essence lies in 
self-control and independence
2 : a faultfinding captious critic; especially : one who believes that human 
conduct is motivated wholly by self-interest

http://m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary

There's much more, but I've got to haul out that Empson book now, so ...


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