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wont to occupy the pages of dog stories, but if the truth were told those dogs generally bore about the same relation to real dogs that the children in what have come to be called “Sunday school books” bear to real children. Every dog lover is thoroughly convinced that a good dog possesses more real concentrated goodness than any other animal on earth, including his masters, but that goodness never exhibits itself in any except attractive forms. A dog was never known to be “painfully good,” or tiresomely good, for the beautifully simple reason that whenever the accustomed discipline is relaxed he immediately shows signs of those unregenerate impulses which are undoubtedly the spice of all character, and which no amount of civilizing influences can ever entirely eradicate from either man or beast.

Mr. London knows this, and, among all his dogs, there is not one that has any martyrlike propensities, still less one that could make any claim to perfection. Yet all, except a villain of a Spitz, win the reader’s affection, for one reason or another, as no angel of a lapdog ever did. Mr. London is not writing about highly civilized dogs, but about the half wild creatures that were used, when the gold digging began in the Klondike, to carry mails and merchandize from the seacoast into the interior. On the Pacific Slope in the Fall of 1897 dogs strong of build and thick of fur were much desired, scarce and high in price, and that was how Buck, who had been living a life of luxurious ease at Judge Miller’s ranch in the Santa Clara Valley, happened suddenly to find himself on the way to Dyea, treacherously sold by his friend, Manuel, the under-gardener, to a dog agent, and later one of a train of sledge dogs, carrying mail to Dawson.

The story is really the record of the uncivilizing of Buck, the process by which the latent wild impulses of his nature, evoked by the life of hardship to which he was subjected, gradually gained the ascendancy, and finally called him back for good and all to the life of the forest and the leadership of a pack of wolves. It may be imagined that in the case of a St. Bernard weighing 140 pounds this revolution was not accomplished without signs of struggle along the course of progress, and the surmise is more than bourne out by a perusal of the book. If nothing else makes Mr. London’s book popular it ought to be rendered so by the complete way in which it will satisfy the love of dog fights apparently inherent in every man. Very nearly every dog’s paw was against Buck, and he won his way not only to eminence, but even to just plain ordinary permission to exist, by proving himself times out of number the best all-around dog in the train. It is the rule there that no civilized dog can stand up against the “huskies,” or native dogs, but Buck accomplished even that remarkable feat because he had intelligence enough to adapt himself to new conditions.

—July 25, 1903

ATLANTIC MONTHLY

The Call of the Wild is a story altogether untouched by bookishness. A bookish writer might, beginning with the title, have called it An Instance of Atavism, or A Reversion to Type. A bookish reader might conceivably read it as a sort of allegory with a broad human application ; but its face value as a single-minded study of animal nature really seems to be sufficiently considerable. The author, too, must be allowed to stand upon his own feet, though one understands why he should have been called the American Kipling. His work has dealt hitherto with primitive human nature; this is a study of primitive dog nature. No modern writer of fiction, unless it be Kipling, has preserved so clearly the distinction between animal virtue and human virtue. The farther Buck reverts from the artificial status of a man-bounded domestic creature to the natural condition of the “dominant primordial beast,” the more strongly (if unwillingly) we admire him. There is something magnificent in the spectacle of his gradual detachment from the tame, beaten-in virtues of uncounted forefathers, his increasing ability to hold his own among unwonted conditions,