98 The Poets Beasts. 



on its back, are all considered as fair subjects for ridicule 

 as the soaped pig hunted at the fair — 



" Painful regale 

 To hunt the pig with slippery tail," 



says Green ; and Clare — 



" And monstrous fun it makes to hunt the pig, 

 As soaped and larded through the crowd he flies ; 

 Thus turn'd adrift he plays them many a rig, 

 A pig for catching is a wondrous prize, 

 And every lout to do his utmost tries ; 

 Some snap the ear, and some the curly tail, 

 But still his slippery hide all hold denies." 



Now the hog, if regarded aright, is by no means a con- 

 temptible creature. It is a purely modern fancy (and one 

 that the poets are, to a very great extent, responsible for) 

 that swine are things to laugh ill-naturedly at. For, as a 

 matter of fact, the vast majority of contemporary mankind, 

 and all antiquity, invest the hog with a very strongly marked 

 intelligence and strength of character. Whatever else it 

 may be, they never call it ridiculous. 



In one aspect, the pig is positively terrific. The Vedic 

 pig is a thunderbolt, red,^ bristling, terrible. In the solar 

 myth the deities and powers of the elements frequently 

 assume the swine form when in troublous, threatening 

 moods, and the sun himself when malignant is a hog. It 

 is then, in fact, a demoniacal symbol. At other times it is 

 simply potent without malignity, as when Freya's chariot, 

 in Scandinavian myth, is drawn by a hog with a luminous 

 head, or when the Hindoo Indra appears to the earth in 

 his boar avatar, or Vishnu is " the tusked one." 



^ Chaucer's pigs, by the way, are red, " rede as the bristles of a sowe's 

 eres ; " and again, " his beard as any sowes or fox was rede." So too 

 in all ballads the " rede " swine. 



