8o • The Poets' Beasts. 



While through the stillness scatters wild dismay, 

 Her babe's small cry that leacls him to his prey." 



But surely Thomson unjustly aggravates the wolf's obli- 

 quities when he makes it loitering on sea-shores "there 

 awaiting wrecks ; " ^ as Shelley when he says — 



• " They knew his cause their own, and swore 

 Like wolves and serpents to their mutual wars 

 Strange truce, with many a rite which earth and heaven abhors." 



But inasmuch as the poets sometimes need to use the 

 wolf, their symbol of ruthless cruelty, as comparing favour- 

 ably with men whom they consider worse than wolves, they 

 have to absolve the animal from its supreme crime of 

 cannibalism in order to have this one extra point in infamy 

 to reproach human beings with. So men are wolves and 

 "cannibals" in addition, though it is a fact that of all 

 animals in the world the wolf is itself the most egregious 

 cannibal. Most wild beasts will eat their own species on 

 occasion, but the wolf habitually does so. No other 

 explanation of this, of course, is needed than the hunger 

 of the hour aggravating a natural bloodthirstiness ; but if 

 it were, it would doubtless be found in the instinct that 

 tells these brutes that they, of all wild beasts, cannot afford 

 to have lagging comrades, and that it is better therefore 

 for the commonwealth to eat them up as soon as they are 

 crippled. In the same way savages on the war-path mas- 

 sacre their sick (and sometimes eat them), for they cannot 

 afford to drag about with them in time of war a burden of 

 invalids. 



While, on the one hand, therefore, the wolf escapes a 

 reproach that he is fairly liable to, man, on the other, is 

 libelled by the unjust comparison — 



* Phillips has "the starving wolves along the main sea prowl." 

 Neither poet is referring to the Arctic wolf. 



