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A Conceptual
Metaphor Account
of Word Composition
A Conceptual
Metaphor Account
of Word Composition:

Potentiality of "Light"
in English and Chinese

By

Meihua Zheng
A Conceptual Metaphor Account of Word Composition:
Potentiality of "Light" in English and Chinese

By Meihua Zheng

This book first published 2017

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Copyright © 2017 by Meihua Zheng

All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.

ISBN (10): 1-4438-9141-X

ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9141-7
 CONTENTS

List of Figures and Tables.......................................................................... vii

Acknowledgements .................................................................................... ix

Abstract ...................................................................................................... xi

Foreword ................................................................................................... xv
by Serafín M. Coronel-Molina

Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1

Introduction
1.1 Problems and Background ............................................................... 1
1.2 Purpose and Significance ................................................................. 2
1.3 Methodology and Data Collection ................................................... 3

Chapter Two ................................................................................................ 5

Literature Review
2.1 Development of Metaphor Research ................................................ 5
2.1.1 Traditional Approach to Metaphor .......................................... 5
2.1.2 Cognitive Approach to Metaphor ............................................ 8
2.2 Word Composition and Conceptual Metaphor ................................. 9
2.2.1 Word Composition in English and Chinese ........................... 10
2.2.2 Construction Motivation of Word Composition .....................11
2.3 Summary ........................................................................................ 14

Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 15

Working Mechanism of Conceptual Metaphor and Generative
Mechanism Underlying Light Compositions
3.1 General Introduction to Conceptual Metaphor............................... 15
3.1.1 Definition of Conceptual Metaphor....................................... 15
3.1.2 Classification of Conceptual Metaphor ................................. 18
3.2 Generative Mechanism Underlying Light Compositions............... 20
3.2.1 Construction of Reality and Language .................................. 20
3.2.2 Generative Mechanism Underlying Light Compositions ...... 22
3.3 Summary ........................................................................................ 23
vi Contents

Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 25

A Case Study of the Concept LIGHT
4.1 An Overall Introduction of the Case Study .................................... 25
4.1.1 Choice of Words .................................................................... 25
4.1.2 Instruments: Corpus approach and the Dictionary ................ 25
4.1.3 Procedures of the Research ................................................... 27
4.2 Mapping Entity Light onto the Concrete Domain .......................... 28
4.2.1 The Inanimate Objects Domain ............................................. 28
4.2.2 The Animate Objects Domain ............................................... 31
4.3 Mapping the Entity of Light onto the Abstract Domain ................. 33
4.3.1 Light Co-occurring with Other Concepts .............................. 34
4.3.2 Light as a Sole Concept ......................................................... 63
4.4 Summary ........................................................................................ 66

Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 71

Metaphor in Cross-cultural Context
5.1 Culture and Cultural Models .......................................................... 71
5.2 Cultural Models Being Structured by Metaphor ............................ 72
5.3 Cross-cultural Variations ................................................................ 74
5.3.1 Types of Cross-Cultural Variation ......................................... 74
5.3.2 Evidence of Cross-cultural Metaphorical Concepts
and Expressions ........................................................................ 75

Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 93

Conclusion
6.1 Summary of Major Findings .......................................................... 93
6.2 Practical Implications of the Study ................................................ 94
6.3 Limitations of the Study and Prospects for Future Research ......... 94

Bibliography .............................................................................................. 97

Appendix 1 .............................................................................................. 101

Appendix 2 .............................................................................................. 107

 LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES

Figure 2.1 The process of conceptualization in language .......................... 13

Table 4.2.1 (1): List of the Frequency and Z-score of Light Compositions
in Domains of Instruments and Goods ................................................. 29

Table 4.2.1 (2): List of the Frequency and Z-score of Light Compositions
in the Domain of Natural Phenomena .................................................. 31

Table 4.2.2 (1): List of the Frequency and Z-score of Light Compositions
in Human Body Domain ...................................................................... 32

Table 4.3.1.1 (1) List of the Frequency and Z-scores of Light

Compositions in the Public State Domain ........................................... 37

Table 4.3.1.1 (2) List of the Frequency and Z-scores of Light

Compositions in the Nothing State Domain......................................... 40

Table 4.3.1.1 (3) List of the Frequency and Z-scores of Light

Compositions in the Sole State Domain............................................... 42

Table 4.3.1.2 (1) List of the Frequency and Z-score of Light Compositions
in the Honor Domain ........................................................................... 45

Table 4.3.1.2 (2) List of the Frequency and Z-scores of Light

Compositions in the Active Domain .................................................... 50
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book was completed in 2016. In writing this book I have been
supported by a large number of people to whom I would like to express
my thanks, as well as to many friends who have gone out of their way to
help in its preparation. Professionally, I am definitely the product of the
unique academic environment at the College of Foreign Languages, Qufu
Normal University.
First and foremost, I am especially grateful to my academic supervisor,
Professor Qin Hongwu, for generously providing me with the bilingual
corpora and information at the very beginning of my study to finish the
project. For his patience and generosity in spending time discussing
questions concerned with my study, as well as for his encouragement,
which makes me believe I am onto something worth pursuing. Without his
constant support, insightful instruction and constructive criticism, the
completion of my study would have been impossible. His influence on me
and on my work is enormous.
In particular, my heartfelt thanks should also go to the conscientious
Professor Loo Weizhong who fueled my interest in cognitive linguistics
from the very beginning at Qufu Normal University: his thought-
provoking teaching and his continued support and inspiration have
propelled me to complete this book after graduation. I am also extremely
grateful to my schoolmate, Professor Xia Yun, who introduced me to ways
of contacting the publisher, and provided detailed comments on a number
of chapters; and also to the respected professors, Serafin Coronel-Molina
and Professor Curtis Jay Bonk, who assisted with various kinds of
intellectual and personal issues whenever I need their help, as well as
writing forewords for me during my time as a visiting scholar at the
School of Education, Indiana University.
My thanks also go to the anonymous appraisers of this book for their
encouragement and criticisms, and to the authors from whom the citations
are derived and whose works I have consulted. I also extend my deepest
thanks to Victoria Carruthers and Amanda Millar for email correspondence
and helpful advice regarding publication. Needless to say, I am solely
responsible for the contents and any remaining errors and shortcomings.
My greatest debt is to my family. My parents have given me the
greatest encouragement and support all through my school studies and
x Acknowledgements

research work. My husband, Su Pinggui, and my son, Su Jiadong, have

tolerated my absence from home for three years of postgraduate study and
half a year as a visiting scholar at Indiana University in America. Their
love and understanding are so essential to me. I am most grateful to my
husband for having carried the weight of extra family responsibility.

Meihua Zheng
May 2016
 ABSTRACT

This study is intended to provide a description of the motivation for the

emergence of new meanings in two different languages: English and
Chinese. Drawing on a corpus methodology, this book adopts metaphors to
be a basic instrument of thinking and cognition studies from a conceptual
metaphor perspective. By probing into the compositional potentiality of
LIGHT in English and Chinese, I aim to highlight the generative
mechanism for word composition by metaphorization.
Metaphors are not only ornamental devices of expressing ideas by
means of language, but are a language phenomenon and a basic instrument
of thinking, cognition and conceptualization. Linguistic metaphor is a
representation of conceptual metaphor: many concepts, especially abstract
ones, are partly structured via the metaphorical mapping of information
from a familiar source domain onto a less familiar target domain, and the
sense transference in the process of metaphorization offers a grounding for
word-sense extension. Metaphoric thought plays some role in the historical
evolution of what words and expressions mean (Sweetser 1990) and
metaphoric thought motivates an individual speaker’s use and
understanding of why various words and expressions mean what they do
(Gibbs 1994).
In short, metaphor is the main motivation for the emergence of new
meanings. This study takes this idea as its starting point and probes into
the compositional potentiality of LIGHT in English and Chinese. The
present study focuses on analyzing the cognitive motivation of light-word
compounds, aiming at disclosing their experiential grounding and
realizations. It is demonstrated that metaphorization is also a generative
mechanism for word composition.
The opening chapter situates the work as a contribution to the study of
metaphor and formulates a set of aims and objectives for the research.
Additionally, the data and methodology for the study are stated.
Chapter Two is a review of the literature about the development of
metaphor research at home and abroad as well as a brief introduction to
the study of word composition.
Chapter Three establishes the theoretical foundation for the contrastive
study of the metaphors in English and Chinese. It explores the conceptual
nature, the internal structure, the characteristics and cultural factors of
cognitive metaphor in English and Chinese. The chapter also has a section
xii Abstract

on the primacy of conceptual metaphors and formation of word

composition of light and ‫( ݹ‬guang) in English and Chinese respectively.
Chapter Four gives a detailed study on some major metaphors of light
in English and in Chinese, outlining the research methodology and
research plan. It presents the cognitive motivations for the metaphorical
extensions of the LIGHT concept and the realization of cross-domain
mappings by qualitative and quantitative analyses of the corpora, revealing
similarities and differences in cross-cultural metaphor in this respect.
Chapter Five discusses the role of metaphor in cross-cultural context
and presents evidence of variations in some concepts in different cultures
from scholars who have done various kinds of studies pointing to culture
specific metaphorical mappings.
Finally, Chapter Six draws conclusions from the preceding findings,
presents a summary of the functions of metaphor in the process of forming
the new senses and points out some problems with the case study and
possible directions future research can pursue.
Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, this study has made the
following major findings: 1) the metaphorization of the entity of light
reflects a basic way for mankind to recognize and perceive the outside
world. People take the attributes of the entity of light as cognitive
categories, which have influence on the formation of metaphorical
meanings of the concept LIGHT. 2) The metaphorical scope of light
consists of two major parts. These are mapping the entity of light onto
other concrete domains (include animate and inanimate domains
respectively) and mapping the entity of light onto abstract domains (state,
emotion, social relationship, time and mentality). 3) It is cross-
linguistically true that meaning is equal to conceptualization. 4)
Metaphorical mapping, in fact, does not always proceed from the concrete
domain to the abstract domain. Rather, it can sometimes be transferred
between two concrete domains. 5) Metaphorical mappings are also
culturally specific. The composition conveying some metaphorical
meanings in one language is absent in another language, for example, ‫ݹ‬
in Chinese can compose with the verb.
In short, though English and Chinese are usually believed to differ
tremendously from each other, the two languages are found to have many
concordances in the compositional potentiality of LIGHT. Cognitively, the
principles are universal, therefore, both English and Chinese do not
naturally differ in the basic ways by which they form words; however,
different people have different concepts. The different geographical and
cultural environments that different people live in adds to the discrepancy
in the detailed form of composition in different languages. Therefore, the
 A Conceptual Metaphor Account of Word Composition xiii

investigation into the formation process of compositions with LIGHT from

the perspective of cognition gives insight as to the nature and discrepancy
of human language.
 FOREWORD

A Conceptual Metaphor Account of Word Composition: Potentiality of

"Light" in English and Chinese is a singular book for readers interested in
the study of cognitive metaphors, which stimulate human communication
through word formation. Obviously, there is a strong relationship between
language and cognition, and metaphors play a significant role in the
construction of new meanings in language through thoughts. In other
words, cognitive metaphors can provide a breeding ground for words and
meanings (lexicon and semantics) from multiple perspectives. This book
contributes to a deeper understanding of the functions of cognitive
metaphors by focusing on the differences and similarities in the processing
of word composition and meaning in English and Chinese from a
cognitive metaphor framework. It also offers a careful analysis of the
cognitive motivation of light-word compounds by showing how
metaphorization constitutes a generative mechanism for word formation.
Both the content and the structure of the volume are solid and well
organized. The first chapter contextualizes the research on metaphor, as
well as describing the data collection process and the chosen methodology.
Chapter two contains the literature review on metaphors, while chapter
three covers the theoretical framework of the study. Chapter four provides
a study on metaphors of light in English and Chinese and offers cross-
domain mappings and analysis of the data. Chapter five explores the
intricacies of metaphors in cross-cultural context and offers evidence of
variations in concepts of metaphorical mappings in different cultures
found in the literature. The final chapter presents the author’s conclusions,
a summary of the major findings, practical implications, limitations, and
further directions for research.
Definitely, this book sheds new light on the formation of metaphorical
meanings, while challenging traditional views about metaphors and
offering thoughts from cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspectives.
Further, it provides evidence for the “possible existence of a universal
ontological metaphorical system” by trying “to discover the metaphorical
pathways along which light (‘guang’)” is developed in relation to
everyday life.”
xvi Foreword

Through a careful examination of major sources such as electronic

corpora and dictionaries, this mixed method (quantitative and qualitative)
research demonstrates that metaphor is the main generative motivation of
‫( ݹ‬guang) compositions in Chinese and light in English and that their
operations, models and manners are different in the two languages. The
major findings consist of a recognition that metaphors for the concept light
reflect a means of perceiving the world around us; that metaphors for light
are mapped onto both concrete and abstract domains, or from concrete
domains to either abstract ones or other concrete ones; that meaning is
equal to conceptualization across languages; and finally, unsurprisingly,
that metaphorical mappings are culturally specific. That is, a word in one
language may have metaphorical meanings that do not carry over to its
translation in another language.
In a nutshell, it is believed that word and metaphor formation in
English and Chinese differ significantly. However, according to the
findings of this study, both languages possess similarities in the
“compositional potentiality of light.” From the cognitive perspective,
languages share universal principles, so both English and Chinese do not
vary significantly in word formation processes. From the sociocultural
perspective, cultures and contexts can cause some discrepancies or
variations in the form of word composition across a wide range of
languages.
This volume is an extraordinary addition to the thousands of
bibliographical references on metaphor available in bookstores and
libraries around the world.

Serafín M. Coronel-Molina
Associate Professor, Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana
March 2017
 CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Problems and Background

Words are considered “central to the language” (Coady & Huckin 1997:
5) and the embodiment of creativity and productivity of language (Stein
1973: 29). This means that the study of word formation is an important
phenomenon in language evolution and an integral part of language study.
It deals with how words find their way into a language and involves
multiple understandings of the meaning of words, such as the change of
lexical meaning, and polysemous phenomena in various kinds of language
reality. The study of contemporary cognitive metaphor returns the study of
words to the forefront of linguistic research and, to a great extent,
promotes human beings’ understanding and cognition of the nature of
word formation.
However, researchers have long been influenced by traditional
linguistics, and a view of language drawn from Saussure, which holds that
the connection between word form and meaning is arbitrary, has generally
been accepted. There is an arbitrary, rather than a natural, i.e. iconical,
relationship between the signifier and the signified (Bussman 1996: 32).
As regards to how meanings are related to one another, and how new
meanings are formed, studies have been carried out from different
perspectives, giving different interpretations and even disagreeing with
each other, making this one of the most controversial topics in linguistic
study. Therefore, a more scientific theory is needed to solve this classic
semantic puzzle. Cognitive linguistics, initiated by the American linguists
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, seeks to show how language is
systematically grounded in human cognition, especially how thinking
mechanisms function in the forming of the new meanings in language use.
Namely, the analysis of cognitive metaphors can answer the above
questions.
This cognitive metaphor theory holds that metaphor is not a linguistic
matter but a way of thinking and cognition which is prevalent in our life;
and metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms
2 Chapter One

of another (Lakoff & Johnson 1980: 5). Metaphor comes out of our clearly
delineated and concrete experience and allows us to construct highly
abstract and elaborate concepts. Summarizing their own experiences,
people tend to describe and comprehend unfamiliar things with familiar
concepts so as to know about themselves and the things around them.
Metaphors are not only an ornamental device for expressing ideas by means
of language, but also a way of thinking, cognition and conceptualization
(Ungerer and Schmid 1996: 118-122). Linguistic metaphor is a
representation of conceptual metaphor and the sense-transference in the
process of metaphorization offers a grounding for word-sense extension.
As such, Ullmann (1962) argues that metaphor is the main motivation for
the emergence of new meanings. In this sense, cognitive metaphor has
opened up a new perspective on the study of words and meaning.
In brief, word composition is vocabulary in context, often driven by
the power of conceptual metaphor.

1.2 Purpose and Significance

This study attempts to probe the phenomenon of word composition
under the framework of cognitive metaphor from a cross-linguistic and
cross-cultural perspective with the intention of providing evidence for the
metaphorical nature of conceptualization and for the possible existence of
a universal ontological metaphorical system. This research has the
following objectives: to discover the metaphorical pathways along which
light (guang) develops; to explain the experiential basis of the
metaphorical extensions uncovered on the one hand and the realizations of
those metaphorical extensions in everyday life on the other, which,
according to Lakoff (1993: 244), are two sides of the same coin; and then
to make clear the path and manner by which word compositions are
formed, aiming to find out the rules governing word composition and to
prove the flexibility and validity of metaphor as a generative mechanism
of word composition. A minor purpose of the author is to see whether the
construction process of word composition is of the same order in both
English and Chinese and whether their meanings follow the same ways or
diverge further to show that ontological metaphors play an indispensable
role in our abstract thinking.
In addition, studies have shown that conceptual metaphors can be
exploited to unpack the method of word composition. A most fruitful area
has been the study of structural and orientation metaphorical phenomena
while research investigating conceptual metaphors to analyze content
words is rarely seen in the literature. For instance, Yu (1995) compares the
 Introduction 3

metaphorical expressions of anger in English and Chinese; and Lan (2003)

examines the metaphorical extensions of up and down, shang (к) and xia
(л) in English and Chinese respectively. In fact, cognitive meanings of
content words play an important role in the cognitive domain. Therefore
the present research probes into the possibilities of this question so as to
establish the relationship between the linguistic forms of word composition
and their cognitive reality. According to Stein (1973: 29), generally
speaking, the study of word formation will give us a better understanding
of the nature of human language; this is because creativity in word
formation is more easily observed and significant than in any other aspect
of language. So the study of word composition will, I believe, contribute
to the understanding of the nature of human language, enhance our
understanding of conceptual metaphors and their characteristics and
encourage further research in the cognitive linguistic field. The
methodological significance of the present study lies in that it shows that,
handled properly, the traditional dictionary-based approach combined with
the modern corpus-based approach to data collection and analysis can be
fruitfully exploited in the field of cognitive linguistics; a field which has
sometimes been criticized for relying on too narrow a range of data (Stibbe
1996; Goatly 1997). It also demonstrates how two typologically different
languages can be brought together for comparative purposes within a
cognitive linguistic framework (Lan 2003).

1.3 Methodology and Data Collection

Since qualitative analysis of the lexicographical data of the two
languages does not present substantial differences in terms of the
metaphorical extensions generated by light, we adopt both qualitative and
quantitative approaches. Statistical analysis is carried out in order to
examine whether a common metaphorical extension enjoys the same or
different degrees of popularity in real-world Chinese and English. The
qualitative approach is applied to categorize the processes of various
English and Chinese word compositions of ‫( ݹ‬guang) and light as well
as to explain their cognitive grounding (motivation). Furthermore, a
quantitative approach is adopted to elucidate the frequencies and Z-scores
of the formation types which are counted for each word composition both
in English and Chinese based on the corpus data, so as to reveal the degree
of reliability of word composition.
The development and extension of the meanings of a basic word can be
found in its actual use in natural language through the prism of cognitive
semantics. As such, regularities of sense in word composition should also
4 Chapter One

be found in its actual use. Therefore, the data collection for the present
research uses two resources: English and Chinese dictionaries and online
corpora. Dictionaries are used so that the conventional metaphorical
extensions of the concept of light under concern, as reflected in the lexicon,
can be discovered. Corpora are used in order to provide evidence from
real-world language for the metaphorical extensions of light and so that
comparison between the distributions of the metaphorical extensions in
English and Chinese can be made. This study represents an attempt to
apply the analysis of cognitive metaphors to a broader range of data to test
its reliability and its explanatory power.
 CHAPTER TWO

LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Development of Metaphor Research

Research on metaphor can be traced back to the time of ancient Greece.
More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle wrote down the first
definition of metaphor in his works opening formal study in this field. He
believed that the primary function of metaphor was decorative and
ornamental. In this traditional view, metaphor is a special form of
language known as a figure of speech, especially in poetry. As a result, for
hundreds of years, most studies on metaphor focused on the rhetorical
perspective. However, the 20th century has witnessed a great boom in the
study of metaphor: the view of metaphor has changed from seeing it
purely as a figurative device to one of a matter of thought itself. Lakoff
(1986) points out that metaphor is not just a way of naming, but also a way
of thinking and that it is a figure of thought. That is the latest perspective
on cognitive metaphor considers that it should be seen as thought or action
rather than a characteristic of language alone. Nowadays, interest and
study in metaphor has expanded to cover a broad range of areas.
Conceptual metaphor participates in and reflects the cognitive processes of
mankind. It is an important and a powerful cognitive instrument for
expressing new concepts. Its study, including metaphor’s structure,
mechanism, function, effect and cognitive nature, is important to the fields
of linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, education, sciences,
as well as literary criticism and rhetoric. Based on this view, this book
takes the conceptual metaphor theory as its principal theoretical basis. In
the following we will briefly review these different approaches.

2.1.1 Traditional Approach to Metaphor

In science, metaphor is used to explain, test or visualize one (novel)
reality in terms of another (less novel) one. A well-known example is the
Bohr-Rutherford model of the atom in terms of the solar system: electrons
orbit the nucleus as planets orbit the sun. The metaphor superimposes one
6 Chapter Two

reality upon another and then asks a lot of questions to find out how well
the superimposition actually works. If sufficient answers are negative, then
a new model, a new metaphor, will be needed.
Metaphor in literature is very different. It describes one reality—a
woman, say, or a landscape—in terms of something different. Underlying
the difference must be a relationship of similarity, however exotic, or the
metaphor will not work. The comparison must de-familiarize a known
perception to some degree or it will merely appear trite. The metaphor
becomes exhausted in literature, unlike science, not when it yields too
many inaccuracies, but when it has become so predictable that the original
de-familiarization has vanished. Scholars in the west have viewed
metaphor in different ways, among which the comparison theory, the
substitution theory and the interaction theory are the most influential ones.
The comparison theory, also called the Aristotelian approach, holds that
metaphor conveys the same meaning and that there is a comparison
between the two words. Aristotle defines metaphor, at the level of the
words used, such that it consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to
something else. He thinks that the use of metaphor is close to the use of
strange, ornamental or coined terms. That is, metaphor is a figure of
speech in which one thing is compared to another by saying that one is the
other, as in he is a lion. Or, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it:
“metaphor [is a] figure of speech that implies comparison between two
unlike entities, as distinguished from simile, an explicit comparison signaled
by the words ‘like’ or ‘as’” [emphasis in the original]. For example, we
would consider the word lion to be a metaphor in the sentence Achilles was
a lion in the fight. We would probably also say that the word is used
metaphorically in order to achieve some artistic and rhetorical effect, since
we speak and write metaphorically to communicate eloquently, to impress
others with beautiful, aesthetically pleasing words or to express some deep
emotion. Perhaps we would also add that what makes the metaphorical
identification of Achilles with a lion possible is that Achilles and lions have
something in common, namely, their bravery and strength. His theory of
metaphors as words influenced researchers for centuries. The substitution
theory, as developed by the Roman rhetorician Quintillian, holds that a
metaphor is where a metaphoric expression is used in place of some
equivalent literal expression. So the substitution view treats the function of
metaphors as a rhetorical device at the lexical level. The interaction theory
has its basis in Richards' seminal work The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936).
Richards argues that not only is a metaphor not a divergence from the
ordinary operation of language but that it is “the omnipresent principle of
all its free action” (1936: 90); the meaning of metaphor can be described as
 Literature Review 7

the generation of new meaning through the interaction between the tenor and
the vehicle. The thing being spoken of is sometimes called the tenor; the
thing in terms of which it's being spoken is then called the vehicle. This
is the first time scholars viewed metaphor as a kind of relationship between
a word and its context. This theory was influential in transferring metaphor
from the lexical level to the level of concepts. Later Black (1993 [1962])
developed and improved the interaction theory.
Next, I shall describe the most common conception of metaphor, both
in scholarly circles and in the popular mind (which is not to say that this is
the only view of metaphor). This traditional concept can be briefly
characterized by pointing out its five most commonly accepted features.
First, metaphor is a linguistic phenomenon and thus is centered on the use
of words. The metaphorical use of lion is a characteristic of a linguistic
expression (that of the word lion). Second, metaphor is used for artistic
and rhetorical purposes, such as when Shakespeare1 writes all the world’s
a stage. Third, metaphor is based on a resemblance between the two
entities that are compared and identified. Achilles must share some
features with lions in order for us to be able to use the lion as a metaphor
for Achilles. Fourth, metaphor is a conscious and deliberate use of words,
and you must have a special talent to be able to do it and do it well. Only
great poets or eloquent speakers, such as, say, Shakespeare and Churchill,
can master it. For instance, Aristotle proposes that the greatest thing by far
is to have command of metaphor. This alone cannot be imparted by
another; it is the mark of genius. Fifth, it is also commonly held that
metaphor is a figure of speech that we can do without; we use it for special
effects, and it is not an integral part of everyday human communication,
let alone everyday human thought and reasoning.
Metaphor studies in China can be dated back to as early as the Pre-Qin
era (before 221 BCE). However, the study of metaphor still remained a
form of comparative research into figures of speech before 1992 (Ye 2004).
Not until recent times, especially before the importation and study of fresh
western theories, has the study of metaphor in the Chinese context been
expanded from its traditional rhetorical limitation. Some scholars began to
accept the cognitive function of metaphor and study metaphor from a new
perspective.
To sum up, traditional views all treat metaphor as a deviant phenomenon
in language with only the interactionist approach first noticing the
cognitive nature of metaphor. This eventually led to the development of
the cognitive metaphor theory, to which we shall now turn.

1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_world%27s_a_stage
8 Chapter Two

2.1.2 Cognitive Approach to Metaphor

Along with the development of metaphor, an important idea in
contemporary cognitive science is that metaphor is not just an aspect of
language but constitutes a signicant part of human cognition (Gibbs 1994;
Sweetser 1990; Johnson 1987; Lakoff 1987; Lakoff & Johnson 1980).
Many concepts, especially abstract ones, are partly structured via the
metaphorical mapping of information from a familiar source domain onto
a less familiar target domain. For example, we often talk about love in
terms of journey (LOVE IS A JOURNEY). Our metaphorical
conceptualization of love partly motivates the creation and use of linguistic
expressions found in everyday speech and literature that refer to love and
relationships of love (e.g. our marriage is off to a great start; their
relationship is at a cross-roads; her marriage is on the rocks; after seven
years of marriage, we’re spinning our wheels; we’re back on track again).
The traditional theory of metaphor was first properly challenged by Lakoff
& Johnson (1980) in their book Metaphors We Live By, which claims that
“Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in
thought and action and our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which
we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” (3) and
“The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of
thing in terms of another” (5). Metaphoric thought, then, plays a role in the
historical evolution of what words and expressions mean, motivates the
linguistic meanings that have currency within linguistic communities or is
presumed to have a role in people’s understanding of language (Sweetser
1990; Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1987). Gibbs (1994) suggests that
metaphoric thought motivates an individual speaker’s use and understanding
of why various words and expressions mean what they and functions in
people’s immediate on-line use and understanding of linguistic meaning.
These writers all propose metaphor as having a natural cognitive function
as a way of conceptualization; metaphor partially structures many abstract
concepts through mapping them onto concrete objects, and conceptual
metaphor has in everyday discourse and reasoning at least three cognitive
functions: structuring the conceptual system, conceptualizing abstract
concepts in terms of the apprehensible and giving a new understanding of
our experience (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Lakoff & Turner 1989; Lakoff
1993). Over the past decade and a half, this approach has been developed
by George Lakoff and his colleagues through a considerable body of
research (Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1987, 1990, 1993, 1994; Johnson
1987, 1991; Lakoff & Turner 1989; Turner 1991, 1993; Yu 1995, 1996;
Kovecses 1986, 1990). Several kinds of empirical evidence from cognitive
linguistics and psycholinguistics support a number of these ideas.
 Literature Review 9

Linguistic studies also shows that metaphoric thought plays an important

role in semantic change, while other research on the systematicity of
different linguistic expressions demonstrates a close link between conceptual
metaphors and speakers’ presumed understanding of various verbal
expressions. Many psycholinguistic experiments also support the idea that
metaphoric thought underpins the meaning of many words and expressions
to contemporary speakers and also inuences people’s learning of different
linguistic meanings. Consider Gibbs et al. (1997) used a priming method to
examine the role of conceptual metaphors in immediate idiom comprehension.
Experiments showed that people access conceptual metaphors when
understanding idioms, but signicantly less so when processing literal
paraphrases of idioms. Additionally, people access the appropriate
conceptual metaphors while processing some idioms, but not when they
read idioms which have similar gurative meanings that are motivated by
different conceptual metaphors. These ndings provide important evidence
on the constraining role that common patterns of metaphoric thought have
in understanding gurative language as well as the way metaphoric
thought is accessed in people’s immediate production and understanding
of linguistic meaning.
All the studies detailed above illustrate the main themes of research
into cognitive metaphors, i.e. metaphors mediate human understanding
and worldview (Sweetser 1990, 1992; Turner 1991, 1995). In terms of
current Chinese research about cognitive metaphor, it seems that at the
present stage, Chinese researchers spend more time introducing the
cognitive approach than applying it to the investigation of the Chinese
language, for example: Lu (2006, 2009); Lin (1997); Shu (1996); Shi
(1995); Zhao (1995). On the basis of these introductory works and this
research background, some Chinese scholars are also beginning to
investigate metaphorical phenomena in Chinese. For example, Yu (1995)
compares the metaphorical expressions of anger (nu /ᙂ) English and
Chinese; Lan (2003) examines the metaphorical extensions of up and
down, shang (к) and xia (л) in English and Chinese; and Lu (2009)
examines the metaphorical extensions of head (tou/ཤ).
In short, all of them have made great contributions to the study of
words by providing new perspectives, those of cognition and psychology,
in understanding the development and extension of word meanings.

2.2 Word Composition and Conceptual Metaphor

As we can see from the preceding analysis, the most important studies
on metaphor in lexicology and lexical semantics are mainly concentrated
10 Chapter Two

on “the force of metaphor” (Zhang Yunfei 1987: 287) in semantic extension

and the formation of lexical items. This view has received support from
other linguists such as Lu Guoqiang (1983), Lyons (1995) and Saeed
(1997) who all hold the opinion that metaphor is one of the principal
factors operating in the semantic change of words. Lyons goes on to argue
that metaphor is a kind of creative ability that can produce new meanings
of words. In general, meanings are elements of the conceptual structure in
the heads of language users and they exist only through reference to a
conceptualization of the world (Lakoff 1987).

2.2.1 Word Composition in English and Chinese

Scholars both at home and abroad have done research on word
formation types in English and Chinese (Bauer 1983; Jackson 2000; Wang
1997; Liu 1990). They generally suggest that there are seven word
formation types in English and Chinese, namely, creating, onomatopoeia,
borrowing, combination, clipping, conversion and blending (Zhou 2007).
Of these, combination is the most significant and productive method of the
seven, because it involves the process of word creation by combining two
or more words or morphemes, drawing on existing elements from the
native language and remodeling them into a new form. It is the most
effective way to conceptualize and lexicalize our knowledge of the world,
and the most productive source for new words in human languages.
Compounds, or word composition, are believed to be a major type of
combination, which is natural conceptual composition.
It should be noted that, owing to the unique characteristics of Chinese,
it stands out as a much more challenging problem to identify a word in it
than in English. The modern study of Chinese word formation originated
with Ma Jianzhong (1898), who considered the basic meaningful language
unit in Chinese to be the character or zi (ᆇ), and that there is no such
grammatical unit of word in Chinese. But the linguist Fu Huaiqing (1985)
has suggested a different view. He divides Chinese words into basic words
and general words. Basic words are the core words inherited from ancient
Chinese; general words are those words derived from basic words and
widely used in daily life. Basic words were invented by the ancestors of
the modern Chinese and express basic concepts and have the capacity to
create new words and generate new meanings. Most basic words are single
characters of one syllable, like ‫( ݹ‬guang or light), a basic word standing
for a physical entity, and compound words (word composition) are created
from these bases. For instance, some are a straightforward combination of
constituent morphemes, like ‫ݹ‬㦓 (guangrong). Comprised of two elements,
 Literature Review 11

it is a functioning linguistic unit, one whole word capable of being used

independently. It stands for a widespread metaphor: HONOR IS LIGHT.
Another kind is formed by compounding, namely by combining two words,
like ਲ਼ ‫( ݹ‬chiguang), which stands for the widespread metaphor:
NOTHING IS LIGHT. In light of the theory of semantic integrity, that
deals with the semantic relationship between an expression and its parts: if
the meaning of an expression is not compositional from its parts, then it is
usually a word; otherwise it is a phrase. Therefore, the word composition
here, ‫ݹ‬㦓, is a word; it stands for a kind of honor because its meaning is
not the simple sum of ‫ ݹ‬plus 㦓.
Though compounding is primarily a process of meaningful combination,
most compounds are semantically obscured, though to some extent
compositional (Ungerer & Schmid 1996). Generally it is not easy to guess
the meaning of a compound from its parts unless you know the word in
advance. How then are the meanings of word compositions constructed?
That is, what is the generative motivation of word composition? What
mechanism makes the form and meaning of a word composition combine?
This is a problem that the present study will investigate.

2.2.2 Construction Motivation of Word Composition

Motivation refers to the connection between word-symbol and its sense.
Some scholars propose that the meaning of word formation appears to be
motivated rather than arbitrary in that there are cognitive mechanisms,
such as metaphor, metonymy and conventional knowledge, which link
literal meaning to figurative meaning. Shu (2000) claims that there are
many types of meaning change, such as extension and transfer, and that
metaphor is the most important origin of meaning change: metaphor is the
motivation for the emerging of new meanings (Lakoff 1987; Johnson 1987;
Sweeter 1990; Yu 1998).

2.2.2.1 Traditional Views on Word Composition

Traditionally, word composition is regarded as a special set of the

larger category of words. They are assumed to be a matter of language
alone, that is, they are taken to be items of the lexicon that are independent
of any conceptual system. According to this traditional view, the meanings
and form of word composition are arbitrary. This originates from the
referential theory that offers an elementary model of studying meaning by
considering the relationship between words and the physical world.
12 Chapter Two

C. K. Ogden and L. A. Richards (1923) proposed the famous Semantic

Triangle (Semiotic Triangle or Triangle of Significance). Meaning in this
theory is the relationship between word and referent. To establish such a
relationship, a concept established by usage has to exist in the mind of the
speaker and the hearer. However, they consider that there is no intrinsic
relation between the sound-symbol and its sense, and the logical concept
functions as the link between words and objects. Thus words are still
non-motivated, conventional and arbitrary symbols. There is no way to
explain why this or that sound-symbol has this or that meaning beyond the
fact that the people of a given community have agreed to use one to
designate the other. So there are some limitations in this theory. The
modern study of Chinese word formation originates with Ma Janzhong
(1898). In the first half of the 20th century the majority of linguistic
scholars surveyed the structure of Chinese words from the point of view of
meaning. The formation of complex words is a process of combination
based on the semantic relationship between the elements (Liu 1990). In
effect, some Chinese scholars have discussed the structure of Chinese
word composition from the point of view of meaning, but it cannot
interpret scientifically the nature of the construction of word composition.
In general, the traditional view of word composition centers on simply
seeking their origins and the structures are explained from their syntactic
and semantic aspects, not deeply explored in terms of inner motivation.

2.2.2.2 Cognitive Views on Word Composition

Cognitive linguistics attempts to deal with the above dilemma of inner

motivation, and has provided a new perspective on the study of language.
It argues that lexical meaning is conceptual, and that the meaning of a
lexeme is not referent to the entity or relation in the real world that the
lexeme refers to, but to a concept in the mind based on experiences with
that entity or relation (Talmy 2000; Lakoff 1980, 1987). Furthermore, the
cognitive linguistic approach to semantics suggests that the objective
world is not directly accessible, rather it is constructed on the basis of the
constraining influences of human knowledge and language, and human
language is based on the concept (Wangren 2007; Zhao 2000). Namely,
reality is constructed by metaphorical thinking through language: “in the
relationship between language and the physical or objective world there
exists an intermediate level ‘cognition’ ” (Svorou 1994: 4). In this model
the formulation is: reality—cognition—language. Cognition, as the result
of mental construction, is the basis of language. Knowledge of reality,
whether it is occasioned by perception, language, memory or anything else,
Another random document with
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which they granted us leave to send from it, proved them more
ignorant than kittens of America’s liveliest idiosyncrasies.
In the United States an impression prevails that the annals of Asia
and of Europe are too long and too complicated for our
consideration. Every now and then some educator, or some politician
who controls educators, makes the “practical” suggestion that no
history prior to the American Revolution shall be taught in the public
schools. Every now and then some able financier affirms that he
would not give a fig for any history, and marshals the figures of his
income to prove its uselessness.
Yet our vast heterogeneous population is forever providing
problems which call for an historical solution; and our foreign
relations would be clarified by a greater accuracy of knowledge. To
the ignorance of the average Congressman and of the average
Senator must be traced their most conspicuous blunders. Back of
every man lies the story of his race. The Negro is more than a voter.
He has a history which may be ascertained without undue effort.
Haiti, San Domingo, Liberia, all have their tales to tell. The Irishman
is more than a voter. He has a long, interesting and instructive
history. It pays us to be well informed about these things. “The
passionate cry of ignorance for power” rises in our ears like the
death-knell of civilization. Down through the ages it has sounded,
now covetous and threatening, now irrepressible and triumphant. We
know what every one of its conquests has cost the human race; yet
we are content to rest our security upon oratorical platitudes and
generalities, upon the dim chance of a man being reborn in the
sacrament of citizenship.
In addition to the things that it is useful to know, there are things
that it is pleasant to know, and pleasure is a very important by-
product of education. It has been too long the fashion to deny, or at
least to decry, this species of enjoyment. “He that increaseth
knowledge increaseth sorrow,” says Ecclesiastes; and Sir Thomas
Browne musically bewails the dark realities with which “the
unhappiness of our knowledge too nearly acquainteth us.” But it was
probably the things he did, rather than the things he knew, which
soured the taste of life in the Hebrew’s mouth; and as for Sir Thomas
Browne, no man ever derived a more lasting satisfaction from
scholarship. His erudition, like his religion, was pure profit. His
temperament saved him from the loudness of controversy. His life
was rich within.
This mental ease is not so much an essential of education as the
reward of education. It makes smooth the reader’s path; it involves
the capacity to think, and to take delight in thinking; it is the keynote
of subtle and animated talk. It presupposes a somewhat varied list of
acquirements; but it has no official catalogue, and no market value. It
emphatically does not consist in knowing inventories of things, useful
or otherwise; still less in imparting this knowledge to the world.
Macaulay, Croker, and Lord Brougham were men who knew things
on a somewhat grand scale, and imparted them with impressive
accuracy; yet they were the blight rather than the spur of
conversation. Even the “more cultivated portion of the ignorant,” to
borrow a phrase of Stevenson’s, is hostile to lectures, unless the
lecturer has the guarantee of a platform, and his audience sits before
him in serried and somnolent rows.
The decline and fall of the classics has not been unattended by
controversy. No other educational system was ever so valiantly and
nobly defended. For no other have so many masterly arguments
been marshalled in vain. There was a pride and a splendour in the
long years’ study of Greek. It indicated in England that the nation
had reached a height which permitted her this costly inutility, this
supreme intellectual indulgence. Greek was an adornment to the
minds of her men, as jewels were an adornment to the bodies of her
women. No practical purpose was involved. Sir Walter Scott put the
case with his usual simplicity and directness in a letter to his second
son, Charles, who had little aptitude for study: “A knowledge of the
classical languages has been fixed upon, not without good reason,
as the mark of a well-educated young man; and though people may
scramble into distinction without it, it is always with difficulty, just like
climbing over a wall instead of giving your ticket at the door.”
In the United States we have never been kindly disposed towards
extravagance of this order. During the years of our comparative
poverty, when few citizens aspired to more than a competence, there
was still money enough for Latin, and now and then for Greek. There
was still a race of men with slender incomes and wide acquirements,
to whom scholarship was a dearly bought but indestructible delight.
Now that we have all the money there is, it is universally understood
that Americans cannot afford to spend any of it on the study of “the
best that has been known and thought in the world.”
Against this practical decision no argument avails. Burke’s plea for
the severity of the foundation upon which rest the principles of taste
carries little weight, because our standard of taste is genial rather
than severe. The influence of Latinity upon English literature
concerns us even less, because prose and verse are emancipated
from the splendid shackles they wore with such composure. But the
mere reader, who is not an educational economist, asks himself now
and then in what fashion Milton and Dryden would have written, if
vocational training had supplanted the classics in their day. And to
come nearer to our time, and closer to our modern and moderate
appreciations, how would the “Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard,” and the lines “On the Death of a Favourite Cat” have
been composed, had Gray not spent all his life in the serene
company of the Latins?
It was easy to define the requirements of an educated man in the
year 1738, when Gray, a bad mathematician and an admirable
classicist, left Cambridge. It is uncommonly difficult to define them
to-day. Dr. Goodnow, speaking a few years ago to the graduating
class of Johns Hopkins University, summed up collegiate as well as
professional education as the acquisition of the capacity to do work
of a specific character. “Knowledge can come only as the result of
experience. What is learned in any other way seldom has such
reality as to make it an actual part of our lives.”
A doctor cannot afford to depend too freely on experience,
valuable though it may be, because the high prices it asks are paid
by his patients. But so far as professional training goes, Dr.
Goodnow stood on firm ground. All it undertakes to do is to enable
students to work along chosen lines—to turn them into doctors,
lawyers, priests, mining engineers, analytical chemists, expert
accountants. They may or may not be educated men in the liberal
sense of the word. They may or may not understand allusions which
are current in the conversation of educated people. Such
conversation is far from encyclopædic; but it is interwoven with
knowledge, and rich in agreeable disclosures. An adroit participant
can avoid obvious pitfalls; but it is not in dodging issues and
concealing deficits that the pleasures of companionship lie. I once
heard a sparkling and animated lady ask Mr. Henry James (who
abhorred being questioned) if he did not think American women
talked better than English women. “Yes,” said the great novelist
gently, “they are more ready and much more brilliant. They rise to
every suggestion. But”—as if moved by some strain of recollection
—“English women so often know what they are talking about.”
Vocational training and vocational guidance are a little like
intensive farming. They are obvious measures for obvious results;
they economize effort; they keep their goal in view. If they “pander to
cabbages,” they produce as many and as fine cabbages as the soil
they till can yield. Their exponents are most convincing when they
are least imaginative. The Dean of Harvard’s Graduate School of
Business Administration says bluntly that it is hard for a young man
to see any good in a college education, when he finds he has
nothing to offer which business men want.
This is an intelligible point of view. It shows, as I have said, that
the country does not feel itself rich enough for intellectual luxuries.
But when I see it asserted that vocational training is necessary for
the safety of Democracy (the lusty nursling which we persist in
feeding from the bottle), I feel that I am asked to credit an absurdity.
When the reason given for this dependence is the altruism of labour,
—“In a democracy the activity of the people is directed towards the
good of the whole number,”—I know that common sense has been
violated by an assertion which no one is expected to take seriously.
A life-career course may be established in every college in the land,
and students carefully guarded from the inroads of distracting and
unremunerative knowledge; but this praiseworthy thrift will not be
practised in the interests of the public. The mechanical education,
against which Mr. Lowell has protested sharply, is preëminently
selfish. Its impelling motive is not “going over,” but getting on.
 “It takes a much better quality of mind for self-education than for
education in the ordinary sense,” says Mrs. Gerould; and no one will
dispute this truth. Franklin had two years of schooling, and they were
over and done with before he was twelve. His “cultural opportunities”
were richer than those enjoyed by Mr. Gompers, and he had a
consuming passion for knowledge. Vocational training was a simple
thing in his day; but he glimpsed its possibilities, and fitted it into
place. He would have made an admirable “vocational counsellor” in
the college he founded, had his counsels not been needed on
weightier matters, and in wider spheres. As for industrial education,
those vast efficiency courses given by leading manufacturers to their
employees, which embrace an astonishing variety of marketable
attainments, they would have seemed to him like the realization of a
dream—a dream of diffused light and general intelligence.
We stand to-day on an educational no man’s land, exposed to
double fires, and uncertain which way to turn for safety. The
elimination of Greek from the college curriculum blurred the high
light, the supreme distinction, of scholarship. The elimination of Latin
as an essential study leaves us without any educational standard
save a correct knowledge of English, a partial knowledge of modern
languages, and some acquaintance, never clearly defined, with
precise academic studies. The scientist discards many of these
studies as not being germane to his subject. The professional
student deals with them as charily as possible. The future financier
fears to embarrass his mind with things he does not need to know.
Yet back of every field of labour lies the story of the labourer, and
back of every chapter in the history of civilization lie the chapters that
elucidate it. “Wisdom,” says Santayana, “is the funded experience
which mankind has gathered by living.” Education gives to a student
that fraction of knowledge which sometimes leads to understanding
and a clean-cut basis of opinions. The process is engrossing, and, to
certain minds, agreeable and consolatory. Man contemplates his
fellow man with varied emotions, but never with unconcern. “The
world,” observed Bagehot tersely, “has a vested interest in itself.”
 The American Laughs
It was the opinion of Thomas Love Peacock—who knew whereof
he spoke—that “no man should ask another why he laughs, or at
what, seeing that he does not always know, and that, if he does, he
is not a responsible agent.... Reason is in no way essential to mirth.”
This being so, why should human beings, individually and
collectively, be so contemptuous of one another’s humour? To be
puzzled by it is natural enough. There is nothing in the world so
incomprehensible as the joke we do not see. But to be scornful or
angry, to say with Steele that we can judge a man’s temper by the
things he laughs at, is, in a measure, unreasonable. A man laughs
as he loves, moved by secret springs that do not affect his
neighbour. Yet no sooner did America begin to breed humorists of
her own than the first thing these gentlemen did was to cast doubts
upon British humour. Even a cultivated laugher like Mr. Charles
Dudley Warner suffered himself to become acrimonious on this
subject; whereupon an English critic retaliated by saying that if Mr.
Warner considered Knickerbocker’s “New York” to be the equal of
“Gulliver’s Travels,” and that if Mr. Lowell really thought Mr. N. P.
Willis “witty,” then there was no international standard of satire or of
wit. The chances are that Mr. Lowell did not think Mr. Willis witty at
all. He used the word in a friendly and unreflecting moment, not
expecting a derisive echo from the other side of the sea.
And now Mr. Chesterton has protested in the “Illustrated London
News” against the vogue of the American joke in England. He says it
does not convey its point because the conditions which give it birth
are not understood, and the side-light it throws fails to illuminate a
continent. One must be familiar with the intimacies of American life
to enjoy their humorous aspect.
Precisely the same criticism was offered when Artemus Ward
lectured in London more than a half-century ago. The humour of this
once famous joker has become a disputable point. It is safe to say
that anything less amusing than the passage read by Lincoln to his
Cabinet in Mr. Drinkwater’s play could not be found in the literature
of any land. It cast a needless gloom over the scene, and aroused
our sympathy for the officials who had to listen to it. But the
American jest, like the Greek epic, should be spoken, not read; and it
is claimed that when Artemus Ward drawled out his absurdities,
which, like the Greek epic, were always subject to change, these
absurdities were funny. Mr. Leacock has politely assured us that
London was “puzzled and enraptured with the very mystery of the
humour”; but Mr. Leacock, being at that time three years old, was not
there to discern this for himself. Dr. S. Weir Mitchell was there on the
opening night, November 13, 1866, and found the puzzle and the
mystery to be far in advance of the rapture. The description he was
wont to give of this unique entertainment (a “Panorama,” and a
lecture on the Mormons), of the depressing, unventilated Egyptian
Hall in which it was given, of the wild extravagances of the speaker,
which grew wilder and wilder as the audience grew more and more
bewildered, was funny enough, Heaven knows, but the essence of
the fun lay in failure.
Americans, sixty years ago, were brought up on polygamous jests.
The Mormons were our neighbours, and could be always relied upon
to furnish a scandal, a thrill, or a joke. When they mended their
ways, and ceased to be reprehensible or amusing, the comic papers
were compelled to fall back on Solomon, with whose marital
experiences they have regaled us ever since. But to British eyes,
Brigham Young was an unfamiliar figure; and to British minds,
Solomon has always been distinguished for other things than wives.
Therefore Artemus Ward’s casual drolleries presupposed a
humorous background which did not exist. A chance allusion to a
young friend in Salt Lake City who had run away with a boarding
school was received in stupefied silence. Then suddenly a woman’s
smothered giggle showed that light had dawned on one receptive
brain. Then a few belated laughs broke out in various parts of the
hall, as the idea travelled slowly along the thought currents of the
audience, and the speaker went languidly on to the next
unrecognizable pleasantry.
 The criticism passed upon Americans to-day is that they laugh
often and without discrimination. This is what the English say of us,
and this is what some Americans have said of the English. Henry
James complained bitterly that London play-goers laughed
unseasonably at serious plays. I wonder if they received Ervine’s
“John Ferguson” in this fashion, as did American play-goers. That a
tragedy harsh and unrelenting, that human pain, unbearable
because unmerited, should furnish food for mirth may be
comprehensible to the psychologist who claims to have a clue to
every emotion; but to the ordinary mortal it is simply dumbfounding.
People laughed at Molnar’s “Liliom” out of sheer nervousness,
because they could not understand it. And “Liliom” had its comedy
side. But nobody could have helped understanding “John Ferguson,”
and there was no relief from its horror, its pitifulness, its sombre
surrender to the irony of fate. Yet ripples of laughter ran through the
house; and the actress who played Hannah Ferguson confessed that
this laughter had in the beginning completely unnerved her, but that
she had steeled herself to meet and to ignore it.
It was said that British audiences were guilty of laughing at “Hedda
Gabler,” perhaps in sheer desperate impatience at the
unreasonableness of human nature as unfolded in that despairing
drama. They should have been forgiven and congratulated, and so
should the American audiences who were reproached for laughing at
“Mary Rose.” The charm, the delicacy, the tragic sense of an
unknown and arbitrary power with which Barrie invested his play
were lost in the hands of incapable players, while its native dullness
gained force and substance from their presentation. A lengthy
dialogue on a pitch-black stage between an invisible soldier and an
inarticulate ghost was neither enlivening nor terrifying. It would have
been as hard to laugh as to shudder in the face of such tedious
loquacity.
We see it often asserted that Continental play-goers are incapable
of the gross stupidities ascribed to English and Americans, that they
dilate with correct emotions at correct moments, that they laugh,
weep, tremble, and even faint in perfect accord with the situations of
the drama they are witnessing. When Maeterlinck’s “Intruder” was
played in Paris, women fainted; when it was played in Philadelphia,
they tittered. Perhaps the quality of the acting may account for these
varying receptions. A tense situation, imperfectly presented,
degenerates swiftly into farce—into very bad farce, too, as Swift said
of the vulgar malignities of fate.
The Dublin players brought to this country a brand of humour and
pathos with which we were unfamiliar. Irish comedy, as we knew it,
was of the Dion Boucicault type, a pure product of stageland, and
unrelated to any practical experiences of life. Here, on the contrary,
was something indigenous to Ireland, and therefore strange to us.
My first experience was at the opening night of Ervine’s “Mixed
Marriage,” in New York. An audience, exclusively Semitic (so far as I
could judge by looking at it), listened in patient bewilderment to the
theological bickerings of Catholics and Protestants in Belfast. I sat in
a box with Lady Gregory who was visibly disturbed by the slowness
of the house at the uptake, and unaware that what was so familiar
and vital to her was a matter of the purest unconcern to that
particular group of Americans. The only thing that roused them from
their apathy was the sudden rage with which, in the third act, Tom
Rainey shouted at his father: “Ye’re an ould fool, that’s what ye are; a
damned ould fool!” At these reprehensible words a gust of laughter
swept the theatre, destroying the situation on the stage, but shaking
the audience back to life and animation. It was seemingly—though I
should be sorry to think it—the touch of nature which makes the
whole world kin.
When that mad medley of fun and fancy, of grossness and
delicacy, “The Playboy of the Western World,” was put on the
American stage, men laughed—generally at the wrong time—out of
the hopeless confusion of their minds. The “Playboy” was admittedly
an enigma. The night I saw it, the audience, under the impression
that it was anti-Irish, or anti-Catholic, or anti-moral, or anti-
something, they were not sure what, hurled denunciations and one
missile—which looked strangely like a piece of pie—at the actors. It
was a disgraceful scene, but not without its humorous side; for when
the riotous interruptions had subsided, an elderly man arose, and,
with the manner of an invited speaker at a public dinner, began,
“From time immemorial”—But the house had grown tired of
disturbances, and howled him down. He waited for silence, and then
in the same composed and leisurely manner began again, “From
time immemorial”—At this point one of the policemen who had been
restoring order led him gently but forcibly out of the theatre; the play
was resumed; and what it was that had happened from time
immemorial we were destined never to know.
A source of superlative merriment in the United States is the two-
reel comic of our motion-picture halls. Countless thousands of
Americans look at it, and presumably laugh at it, every twenty-four
hours. It is not unlike an amplified and diversified Punch and Judy
show, depending on incessant action and plenty of hard knocks.
Hazlitt says that bangs and blows which we know do not hurt
provoke legitimate laughter; and, until we see a funny film, we have
no conception of the amount of business which can be constructed
out of anything so simple as men hitting one another. Producers of
these comics have taken the public into their confidence, and have
assured us that their work is the hardest in the motion-picture
industry; that the slugging policeman is trained for weary weeks to
slug divertingly, and that every tumble has to be practised with
sickening monotony before it acquires its purely accidental character.
As for accessories—well, it takes more time and trouble to make a
mouse run up a woman’s skirt at the right moment, or a greyhound
carry off a dozen crullers on its tail, than it does to turn out a whole
sentimental scenario, grey-haired mother, high-minded, pure-hearted
convict son, lumber-camp virtue, town vice, and innocent childhood
complete. Whether or not the time and trouble are well spent
depends on the amount of money which that mouse and those
crullers eventually wring from an appreciative and laughter-loving
public.
The dearth of humorous situations—at no time inexhaustible—has
compelled the two-reel comic to depend on such substitutes as
speed, violence, and a succession of well-nigh inconceivable
mishaps. A man acting in one cannot open a door, cross a street, or
sit down to dinner without coming to grief. Even the animals—dogs,
donkeys and pigs—are subject to catastrophes that must wreck their
confidence in life. Fatness, besides being funny, is, under these
circumstances, a great protection. The human body, swathed in rolls
of cotton-wadding, is safe from contusions and broken bones. When
an immensely stout lady sinks into an armchair, only to be
precipitated through a trap-door, and shot down a slide into a pond,
we feel she has earned her pay. But after she has been dropped
from a speeding motor, caught and lifted high in air by a balloon
anchor, let down to earth with a parachute, picked up by an elephant,
and carried through the streets at the head of a circus parade, we
begin to understand the arduousness of art. Only the producers of
comic “movies” know what “One crowded hour of glorious life” can
be made to hold.
Laughter has been over-praised and over-analyzed, as well as
unreasonably denounced. We do not think much about its
determining causes—why should we?—until the contradictory
definitions of philosophers, psychologists and men of letters compel
us to recognize its inscrutable quality. Plato laid down the principle
that our pleasure in the ludicrous originates in the sight of another’s
misfortune. Its motive power is malice. Hobbes stoutly affirmed that
laughter is not primarily malicious, but vainglorious. It is the rough,
spontaneous assertion of our own eminence. “We laugh from
strength, and we laugh at weakness.” Hazlitt saw a lurking cruelty in
the amusement of civilized men who have gaged the folly and
frivolity of their kind. Bergson, who evidently does not frequent
motion-picture halls, says that the comic makes its appeal to “the
intelligence pure and simple.” He raises laughter to the dignity of a
“social gesture” and a corrective. We put our affections out of court,
and impose silence upon our pity before we laugh; but this is only
because the corrective would fail to correct if it bore the stamp of
sympathy and kindness. Leacock, who deals in comics, is sure of but
one thing, that all humour is anti-social; and Stevenson ascribes our
indestructible spirit of mirth to “the unplumbed childishness of man’s
imagination.”
The illustrations given us by these eminent specialists are as
unconvincing as the definitions they vouchsafe, and the rules they
lay down for our guidance. Whenever we are told that a situation or a
jest offers legitimate food for laughter, we cease to have any
disposition to laugh. Just as we are often moved to merriment for no
other reason than that the occasion calls for seriousness, so we are
correspondingly serious when invited too freely to be amused. An
entertainment which promises to be funny is handicapped from the
start. It has to plough deep into men’s risibilities before it can raise its
crop of laughter. I have been told that when Forepaugh first fired a
man out of a cannon, the audience laughed convulsively; not
because it found anything ludicrous in the performance, but because
it had been startled out of its composure, and relieved from a
gasping sense of fear.
Sidney Smith insisted that the overturning of a dinner-table which
had been set for dinner was a laughable incident. Yet he was a
married man, and must have known that such a catastrophe (which
seems to us to belong strictly to the motion-picture field) could not
have been regarded by Mrs. Smith, or by any other hostess, as
amusing. Boswell tells us that Dr. Johnson was so infinitely diverted
by hearing that an English gentleman had left his estate to his three
sisters that he laughed until he was exhausted, and had to hold on to
a post (he was walking home through the London streets) to keep
himself from falling to the ground. Yet no reader of Boswell ever saw
anything ludicrous in such a last will and testament. Sophocles
makes Electra describe Clytemnestra as “laughing triumphantly”
over the murder of Agamemnon; but Electra was a prejudiced
witness. Killing an undesired husband is no laughing matter, though
triumph over its accomplishment—when failure means death—is a
legitimate emotion. Clytemnestra was a singularly august and
composed sinner. Not from her did Orestes and Electra inherit their
nervous systems; and not on their testimony should we credit her
with an excess of humour alike ill-timed and unbecoming.
In our efforts to discover what can never be discovered—the
secret sources of laughter—we have experimented with American
children; testing their appreciation of the ludicrous by giving them
blocks which, when fitted into place, display absurd and incongruous
pictures. Their reactions to this artificial stimulus are of value, only
when they are old enough for perception, and young enough for
candour. The merriment of children, of little girls especially, is often
unreal and affected. They will toss their heads and stimulate one
another to peals of laughter which are a pure make-believe. When
they are really absorbed in their play, and astir with delicious
excitation, they do not laugh; they give vent to piercing shrieks which
sound as if they were being cut into little pieces. These shrieks are
the spontaneous expression of delight; but their sense of absurdity,
which implies a sense of humour, is hard to capture before it has
become tainted with pretence.
There are American newspapers which print every day a sheet or
a half-sheet of comic pictures, and there are American newspapers
which print every Sunday a coloured comic supplement. These
sincere attempts to divert the public are well received. Their vulgarity
does not offend. “What,” asks the wise Santayana, “can we relish if
we recoil at vulgarity?” Their dullness is condoned. Life, for all its
antics, is confessedly dull. Our absurdities may amuse the angels
(Walpole had a cheerful vision of their laughter); but they cannot be
relied on to amuse our fellow men. Nevertheless the coloured
supplement passes from hand to hand—from parents to children,
from children to servants. Even the smudgy black and whites of the
daily press are soberly and conscientiously scrutinized. A man,
reading his paper in the train, seldom skips that page. He examines
every little smudge with attention, not seemingly entertained, or
seeking entertainment, but without visible depression at its
incompetence.
I once had the pleasure of hearing a distinguished etcher lecture
on the art of illustrating. He said some harsh words about these
American comics, and threw on the screen a reproduction of one of
their most familiar series. The audience looked at it sadly. “I am
glad,” commented the lecturer, “that you did not laugh. Those
pictures are, as you perceive, as stupid as they are vulgar. Now I will
show you some clever English work”: and there appeared before us
the once famous Ally Sloper recreating himself and his family at the
seashore. The audience looked at him sadly. A solemn stillness held
the hall. “Why don’t you laugh?” asked the lecturer irritably. “I assure
you that picture is funny.” Whereupon everybody laughed; not
because we saw the fun—which was not there to see—but because
we were jolted into risibility by the unwarranted despotism of the
demand.
The prohibition jest which stands preeminent in the United States,
and has afforded French and English humorists a field which they
have promptly and ably filled, draws its vitality from the inexhaustible
springs of human nature. Readers and play-goers profess
themselves tired of it; moralists deprecate its undermining qualities;
but the conflict between a normal desire and an interdict is too
unadjustable, too rich in circumstance, and too far-reaching in
results, to be accepted in sober silence. The complications incidental
to prohibition, the battle of wits, the turns of the game, the
adventures—often sorry enough—of the players, all present the
essential elements of comedy. Mrs. Gerould has likened the situation
to an obstacle race. It is that, and it is something more. In earlier,
easier days, robbery was made justifiably droll. The master thief was
equally at home in northern Europe and in the far East. England
smiled at Robin Hood. France evolved that amazing epithet,
“chevalier d’industrie.” But arrayed against robbery were a moral law
and a commandment. Arrayed against wine are a legal ordinance
and the modern cult of efficiency. It will be long before these become
so sacrosanct as to disallow a laugh.
The worst that has been said of legitimate American humour is
that it responds to every beck and call. Even Mr. Ewan S. Agnew,
whose business it is to divert the British public, considers that the
American public is too easily diverted. We laugh, either from light-
hearted insensitiveness, or from the superabundant vitality, the half-
conscious sense of power, which bubbles up forever in the callous
gaiety of the world. Certainly Emerson is the only known American
who despised jocularity, and who said early and often that he did not
wish to be amused. The most striking passage in the letters of Mr.
Walter Page is the one which describes his distaste for the “jocular”
Washington luncheons at which he was a guest in the summer of
1916. He had come fresh from the rending anxiety, the heroic stress
and strain of London; and the cloudless atmosphere of our capital
wounded his spirit. England jested too. “Punch” had never been so
brilliant as in the torturing years of war. But England had earned the
right to jest. There was a tonic quality in her laughter. Page feared
from the bottom of his soul lest the great peaceful nation, safe, rich
and debonair, had suffered her “mental neutrality” to blot out from
her vision the agony of Europe, and the outstanding facts which
were responsible for the disaster.
This unconcern, which is the balance wheel of comedy, has
tempered the American mind to an easy acceptance of chance. Its
enthusiasms are modified, its censures are softened by a restraining
humour which is rooted deeply in indifference. We recognize the
sanity of our mental attitude, but not its incompleteness.
Understanding and sympathy are products of civilized life, as
clarifying in their way as tolerance and a quick perception of the
ludicrous. An American newspaper printed recently a photograph
entitled “Smilin’ Through,” which showed two American girls peering
through two holes in a shell-torn wall of Verdun, and laughing
broadly at their sport. The names and addresses of these frolicsome
young women were given, and their enjoyment of their own drollery
was emphasized for the diversion of other young women at home.
Now granted that every nation, like every man, bears the burden
of its own grief. Granted also that every woman, like every man, has
her own conception of the humorous, and that we cannot reasonably
take umbrage because we fail to see the fun. Nevertheless the
memories of Verdun do not make for laughter. There is that in its
story which sobers the world it has ennobled. Four hundred
thousand French soldiers gave their lives for that battered fortress
which saved Paris and France. Mr. Brownell reminds us that there is
such a thing as rectitude outside the sphere of morals, and that it is
precisely this austere element in taste which assures our self-
respect. We cannot analyze, and therefore cannot criticize, that
frothy fun which Bergson has likened to the foam which the receding
waves leave on the ocean sands; but we know, as he knows, that
the substance is scanty, and the after-taste is bitter in our mouths.
We are tethered to our kind, and it is the sureness of our reaction to
the great and appealing facts of history which makes us inheritors of
a hard-won civilization, and qualified citizens of the world.
 The Idolatrous Dog
We shall never know why a feeling of shame attends certain
harmless sensations, certain profoundly innocent tastes and
distastes. Why, for example, are we abashed when we are cold, and
boastful when we are not? There is no merit or distinction in being
insensitive to cold, or in wearing thinner clothing than one’s
neighbour. And what strange impulse is it which induces otherwise
truthful people to say they like music when they do not, and thus
expose themselves to hours of boredom? We are not necessarily
morons or moral lepers because we have no ear for harmony. It is a
significant circumstance that Shakespeare puts his intolerant lines,

“The man that hath no music in himself,

Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

Let no such man be trusted”—

in the mouth of Lorenzo who disdained neither stratagems nor

spoils, and who carried off the Jew’s ducats as well as the Jew’s
daughter. And Jessica, who sits by his side in the moonlight, and
responds with delicate grace

“I am never merry when I hear sweet music,”

is the girl who “gilded” herself with stolen gold, and gave her dead
mother’s ring for a monkey.
It is a convenience not to feel cold when the thermometer falls,
and it is a pleasure to listen appreciatively to a symphony concert. It
is also a convenience to relish the proximity of dogs, inasmuch as
we live surrounded by these animals, and it is a pleasure to respond
to their charm. But there is no virtue in liking them, any more than
there is virtue in liking wintry weather or stringed instruments. An
affection for dogs is not, as we have been given to understand, a test
of an open and generous disposition. Still less is their affection for us
to be accepted as a guarantee of our integrity. The assumption that a
dog knows a good from a bad human being when he sees one is
unwarranted. It is part of that engulfing wave of sentiment which
swept the world in the wake of popular fiction. Dickens is its most
unflinching exponent. Henry Gowan’s dog, Lion, springs at the throat
of Blandois, alias Lagnier, alias Rigaud, for no other reason than that
he recognizes him as a villain, without whom the world would be a
safer and better place to live in. Florence Dombey’s dog, Diogenes,
looks out of an upper window, observes Mr. Carker peacefully
walking the London streets, and tries to jump down and bite him then
and there. He sees at once what Mr. Dombey has not found out in
years—that Carker is a base wretch, unworthy of the confidence
reposed in him.
A few animals of this kind might, in real life, close the courts of
justice. The Dickens dog is detective, prosecuting attorney, judge,
jury and executioner, all in one. He stands responsible for a whole
school of fictitious canines who combine the qualities of Vidocq,
Sherlock Holmes, and the Count of Monte Cristo. I read recently a
story in which the villain was introduced as “that anomalous being,
the man who doesn’t like dogs.” After that, no intelligent reader could
have been unprepared to find him murdering his friend and partner.
So much was inevitable. And no experienced reader could have
been unprepared for the behaviour of the friend and partner’s dog,
which recognizes the anomaly as a person likely to commit murder,
and, without wasting time on circumstantial evidence, tracks him
down, and, unaided, brings him to his death. A simple, clean-cut
retribution, contrasting favourably with the cumbersome processes of
law.
A year ago the Governor of Maine had the misfortune to lose his
dog. He signified his sense of loss, and his appreciation of the
animal’s good qualities, by lowering the American flag on the
Augusta State House to half-mast. He was able to do this because
he was Governor, and there was no one to say him nay.
Nevertheless, certain sticklers for formality protested against an
innovation which opened up strange possibilities for the future; and
one logical lady observed that a dog was no more a citizen than was
a strawberry patch, a statement not open to contradiction. The
country at large, however, supported the Governor’s action.
Newspaper men wrote editorials lauding the “homespun” virtues of
an official who set a true value on an honest dog’s affection. Poets
wrote verses about “Old Glory” and “Garry” (the dog’s name); and
described Saint Peter as promptly investing this worthy quadruped
with the citizenship of Heaven. The propriety or impropriety of
lowering the national flag for an animal—which was the question
under dispute—was buried beneath the avalanche of sentiment
which is always ready to fall at the sound of a dog’s name.
A somewhat similar gust of criticism swept Pennsylvania when a
resident of that State spent five hundred dollars on the obsequies of
his dog. The Great War, though drawing to a close, was not yet over,
and perhaps the thought of men unburied on the battle-field, and
refugees starving for bread, intensified public feeling. There was the
usual outcry, as old as Christianity—“this might have been given to
the poor.” There was the usual irrelevant laudation of the
Pennsylvania dog, and of dogs in general. People whose own affairs
failed to occupy their attention (there are many such) wrote
vehement letters to the daily press. At last a caustic reader chilled
the agitation by announcing that he was prepared to give five
hundred dollars any day for the privilege of burying his next-door
neighbour’s dog. Whether or not this offer was accepted, the public
never knew; but what troubled days and sleepless nights must have
prompted its prodigality!
 The honour accorded to the dog is no new thing. It has for
centuries rewarded his valour and fidelity. Responsibilities, duties,
compensations—these have always been his portion. Sirius shines
in the heavens, and Cerberus guards in hell. The dog, Katmir, who
watched over the Seven Sleepers for three hundred and nine years,
gained Paradise for his pains, as well he might. Even the ill-fated
hounds of Actæon, condemned to kill their more ill-fated master, are
in some sort immortal, inasmuch as we may know, if we choose, the
names of every one of them. Through the long pages of legend and
romance the figure of the dog is clearly outlined; and when history
begins with man’s struggle for existence, the dog may be found his
ally and confederate. It was a strange fatality which impelled this
animal to abandon communal life and the companionship of his kind
for the restraints, the safety, the infinite weariness of domesticity. It
was an amazing tractableness which caused him to accept a set of
principles foreign to his nature—the integrity of work, the
honourableness of servitude, the artificial values of civilization.
As a consequence of this extraordinary change of base, we have
grown accustomed to judge the dog by human standards. In fact,
there are no other standards which apply to him. The good dog, like
the good man, is the dog which has duties to perform, and which
performs them faithfully. The bad dog, like the bad man, is the dog
which is idle, ill-tempered and over-indulged by women. Women are
responsible for most of the dog-failures, as well as for many of the
man-failures of the world. So long as they content themselves with
toy beasts, this does not much matter; but a real dog, beloved and
therefore pampered by his mistress, is a lamentable spectacle. He
suffers from fatty degeneration of his moral being.
What if the shepherd dog fares hardly, and if exposure stiffens his
limbs! He has at least lived, and played his part in life. Nothing more
beautiful or more poignant has ever been written about any animal
than James Hogg’s description of his old collie which could no longer
gather in the sheep, and with which he was compelled to part,
because—poor Ettrick shepherd—he could not afford to pay the tax
on two dogs. The decrepit beast refused to be separated from the
flocks which had been his care and pride. Day after day he hobbled
along, watching the new collie bustling about his work, and—too
wise to interfere—looking with reproachful eyes at the master who
had so reluctantly discarded him.
The literature of the dog is limitless. A single shelf would hold all
that has been written about the cat. A library would hardly suffice for
the prose and verse dedicated to the dog. From “Gêlert” to “Rab”
and “Bob, Son of Battle,” he has dominated ballad and fiction. Few
are the poets and few the men of letters who have not paid some
measure of tribute to him. Goethe, indeed, and Alfred de Musset
detested all dogs, and said so composedly. Their detestation was
temperamental, and not the result of an unfortunate encounter, such
as hardened the heart of Dr. Isaac Barrow, mathematician, and
Master of Trinity College. Sidney Smith tells us with something akin
to glee that this eminent scholar, when taking an early stroll in the
grounds of a friend and host, was attacked by a huge and
unwarrantably suspicious mastiff. Barrow, a fighter all his life (a man
who would fight Algerine pirates was not to be easily daunted),
hurled the dog to the ground, and fell on top of him. The mastiff
could not get up, but neither could Barrow, who called loudly for
assistance. It came, and the combatants were separated; but a
distaste for morning strolls and an aversion for dogs lingered in the
Master’s mind. There was one less enthusiast in the world.
We are apt to think that the exuberance of sentiment entertained
by Americans for dogs is a distinctively British trait, that we have
inherited it along with our language, our literature, our manliness, our
love of sport, our admirable outdoor qualities. But it may be found
blooming luxuriously in other and less favoured lands. That
interesting study of Danish childhood by Carl Ewald, called “My Little
Boy,” contains a chapter devoted to the lamentable death of a dog
named Jean, “the biggest dog in Denmark.” This animal, though at
times condescending to kindness, knew how to maintain his just
authority. “He once bit a boy so hard that the boy still walks lame. He
once bit his own master.” The simple pride with which these
incidents are narrated would charm a dog-lover’s soul. And the lame
boy’s point of view is not permitted to intrude.
 Of all writers who have sung the praises of the dog, and who have
justified our love for him, Maeterlinck has given the fullest expression
to the profound and absorbing egotism which underlies this love.
Never for a moment does he consider his dog save as a worshipper.
Never does he think of himself save as a being worshipped. Never
does he feel that this relationship can be otherwise than just,
reasonable, and satisfying to both parties. “The dog,” he says,
“reveres us as though we had drawn him out of nothing. He has a
morality which surpasses all that he is able to discover in himself,
and which he can practise without scruple and without fear. He
possesses truth in its fullness. He has a certain and infinite ideal.”
And what is this ideal? “He” (the dog) “is the only living being that
has found, and recognizes, an indubitable, unexceptionable and
definite god.”
And who is this god? M. Maeterlinck, you, I, anybody who has
bought and reared a puppy. Yet we are told that the dog is intelligent.
What is there about men which can warrant the worship of a wise
beast? What sort of “truth in its fullness” is compatible with such a
blunder? Yet it is for the sake of being idolized that we prize and
cherish the idolater. Our fellow mortals will not love us unless we are
lovable. They will not admire us unless we are admirable. Our cats
will probably neither love nor admire us, being self-engrossed
animals, free from encumbering sensibilities. But our dogs will love
and admire the meanest of us, and feed our colossal vanity with their
uncritical homage. M. Maeterlinck recognizes our dependence on
the dog for the deification we crave, and is unreasonably angry with
the cat for her aloofness. In her eyes, he complains, we are
parasites in our own homes. “She curses us from the depths of her
mysterious heart.”
She does not. She tolerates us with a wise tolerance, recognizing
our usefulness, and indulgent of our foibles. Domesticity has not cost
her the heavy price it has cost the dog. She has merely exchanged
the asylum of cave or tree for the superior accommodation of the
house. Her habits remain unaltered, her freedom unviolated. Cream-
fed and pampered, she still loves the pleasures of the chase; nor will
she pick and choose her prey at the recommendation of prejudiced
humanity. M. Maeterlinck, who has striven to enter into the
consciousness of the dog, describes it as congested with duties and
inhibitions. There are chairs he must not sit on, rooms he must not
enter, food he must not steal, babies he must not upset, cats he
must not chase, visitors he must not bark at, beggars and tramps he
must not permit to enter the gates. He lives under as many, and as
strict, compulsions as though he were a citizen of the United States.
By comparison with this perverted intelligence, this artificial morality,
the mind of the cat appears like a cool and spacious chamber, with
only her own spirit to fill it, and only her own tastes and distastes to
be consulted and obeyed.
Perhaps it is because the dog is so hedged in by rules and
regulations that he has lost his initiative. Descended from animals
that lived in packs, and that enjoyed the advantages of communal
intelligence, he could never have possessed this quality as it was
possessed by an animal that lived alone, and had only his own
acuteness and experience to rely on. But having surrendered his will
to the will of man, and his conscience to the keeping of man, the dog
has by now grown dependent for his simplest pleasures upon man’s
caprice. He loves to roam; but whereas the cat does roam at will,
rightly rejecting all interference with her liberty, the dog craves
permission to accompany his master on a stroll, and, being refused,
slinks sadly back to confinement and inaction. I have great respect
for those exceptional dogs that take their exercise when they need or
desire it in self-sufficing solitude. I once knew an Irish terrier that had
this independent turn of mind. He invited himself to daily
constitutionals, and might have been seen any morning trotting along
the road, miles away from home, with the air of an animal walking to
keep his flesh down. In the end he was run over by a speeding
motor, but what of that? Die we must, and, while he lived, he was
free.
A lordliness of sentiment mars much of the admirable poetry
written about dogs. The poet thrones himself before addressing his
devoted and credulous ally. Even Matthew Arnold’s lines to “Kaiser
Dead”—among the best of their kind—are heavy with patronage:
 “But all those virtues which commend
The humbler sort who serve and tend,
Were thine in store, thou faithful friend.”

To be sure, Kaiser was a mongrel; but why emphasize his low

estate? As a matter of fact, mongrels, like self-made men, are apt to
have a peculiar complacency of demeanour. They do not rank
themselves among “the humbler sort”; but “serve and tend” on the
same conditions as their betters.
Two years ago Mr. Galsworthy, who stands in the foremost rank of
dog-lovers, and who has drawn for us some of the most lifelike and
attractive dogs in fiction, pleaded strongly and emotionally for the
exemption of this animal from any form of experimental research. He
had the popular sentiment of England back of him, because popular
sentiment always is emotional. The question of vivisection is one of
abstract morality. None but the supremely ignorant can deny its
usefulness. There remain certain questions which call for clean-cut
answers. Does our absolute power over beasts carry with it an
absolute right? May we justifiably sacrifice them for the good of
humanity? What degree of pain are we morally justified in inflicting
on them to save men from disease and death? If we faced the issue
squarely, we should feel no more concern for the kind of animal
which is used for experimentation than for the kind of human being
who may possibly benefit by the experiment. Right and wrong admit
of no sentimental distinctions. Yet the vivisectionist pleads, “Is not
the life of a young mother worth more than the life of a beast?” The
anti-vivisectionist asks: “How can man deliberately torture the
creature that loves and trusts him?” And Mr. Galsworthy admitted
that he had nothing to say about vivisection in general. Cats and
rabbits might take their chances. He asked only that the dog should
be spared.
It has been hinted more than once that if we develop the dog’s
intelligence too far, we may end by robbing him of his illusions. He
has absorbed so many human characteristics—vanity, sociability,
snobbishness, a sense of humour and a conscience—that there is
danger of his also acquiring the critical faculty. He will not then
content himself with flying at the throats of villains—the out-and-out
villain is rare in the common walks of life—he will doubt the godlike
qualities of his master. The warmth of his affection will chill, its
steadfastness will be subject to decay.
Of this regrettable possibility there is as yet no sign. The hound,
Argus, beating the ground with his feeble tail in an expiring effort to
welcome the disguised Odysseus, is a prototype of his successor to-
day. Scattered here and there in the pages of history are instances
of unfaithfulness; but their rarity gives point to their picturesqueness.
Froissart tells us that the greyhound, Math, deserted his master, King
Richard the Second, to fawn on the Duke of Lancaster who was to
depose and succeed him; and that a greyhound belonging to
Charles of Blois fled on the eve of battle to the camp of John de
Montfort, seeking protection from the stronger man. These
anecdotes indicate a grasp of political situations which is no part of
the dog’s ordinary make-up. Who can imagine the fortunate, faithful
little spaniel that attended Mary Stuart in her last sad months, and in
her last heroic hours, fawning upon Queen Elizabeth? Who can
imagine Sir Walter Scott’s dogs slinking away from him when the
rabble of Jedburgh heaped insults on his bowed grey head?
The most beautiful words ever written about a dog have no
reference to his affectionate qualities. Simonides, celebrating the
memory of a Thessalian hound, knows only that he was fleet and
brave. “Surely, even as thou liest in this tomb, I deem the wild beasts
yet fear thy white bones, Lycas; and thy valour great Pelion knows,
and the lonely peaks of Cithæron.” This is heroic praise, and so, in a
fashion, is Byron’s epitaph on Boatswain. But Byron, being of the
moderns, can find no better way of honouring dogs than by defaming
men; a stupidity, pardonable in the poet only because he was the
most sincere lover of animals the world has ever known. His tastes
were catholic, his outlook was whimsical. He was not in the least
discomposed when his forgetful wolf-hound bit him, or when his
bulldog bit him without the excuse of forgetfulness. Moore tells us
that the first thing he saw on entering Byron’s palace in Venice was a
notice, “Keep clear of the dog!” and the first thing he heard was the
voice of his host calling out anxiously, “Take care, or that monkey will
fly at you.”
It is a pleasant relief, after floundering through seas of sentiment,
to read about dogs that were every whit as imperfect as their
masters; about Cowper’s “Beau” who has been immortalized for his
disobedience; or Sir Isaac Newton’s “Diamond” who has been
immortalized for the mischief he wrought; or Prince Rupert’s “Boy”
who was shot while loyally pulling down a rebel on Marston Moor; or
the Church of England spaniel, mentioned by Addison, who proved
his allegiance to the Establishment by worrying a dissenter. It is also
a pleasure of a different sort to read about the wise little dog who ran
away from Mrs. Welsh (Carlyle’s mother-in-law) on the streets of
Edinburgh, to follow Sir Walter Scott; and about the London dog of
sound literary tastes who tried for many nights to hear Dickens read.
It is always possible that if men would exact a less unalterable
devotion from their dogs, they might find these animals to be
possessed of individual and companionable traits.
But not of human sagacity. It is their privilege to remain beasts,
bound by admirable limitations, thrice happy in the things they do not
have to know, and feel, and be. “The Spectator” in a hospitable
mood once invited its readers to send it anecdotes of their dogs. The
invitation was, as might be imagined, cordially and widely accepted.
Mr. Strachey subsequently published a collection of these stories in
a volume which had all the vraisemblance of Hans Andersen and
“The Arabian Nights.” Reading it, one could but wonder and regret
that the tribe of man had risen to unmerited supremacy. The
“Spectator” dogs could have run the world, the war and the
Versailles Conference without our lumbering interference.

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