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and his final triumph over the most dreaded powers of the wilderness: “He was a Killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survived. Because of all this he became possessed of a great pride in himself, which communicated itself like a contagion to his physical being.... But for the stray brown on his muzzle and above his eyes, and for the splash of white hair that ran midmost down his chest, he might well have been mistaken for a gigantic wolf, larger than the largest of the breed.... His cunning was wolf cunning and wild cunning; his intelligence, shepherd intelligence and St. Bernard intelligence; and all this, plus an experience gained in the fiercest of schools, made him as formidable a creature as any that roamed the wild. A carnivorous animal, living on a straight meat diet, he was in full flower, at the high tide of his life, overspilling with vigor and virility.... Every part, brain and body, nerve tissue and fibre, was keyed to the most exquisite pitch; and between all the parts there was a perfect equilibrium or adjustment. To sights and sounds and events which required action, he responded with lightning-like rapidity. He saw the movement, or heard the sound, and responded in less time than another dog required to compass the mere seeing or hearing. He perceived and determined and responded in the same instant. His muscles were surcharged with vitality, and snapped into play sharply, like steel springs. Life streamed through him in splendid flood, glad and rampant, until it seemed that it would burst him asunder in sheer ecstasy, and pour forth generously over the world.” The making and the achievement of such a hero constitute, not a pretty story at all, but a very powerful one.

—November 1903

Comments on White Fang

THE NATION

This is the kind of thing Jack London does best. In this atmosphere he wears neither his street swagger nor his more distressing company manners. As a biographer of wild animals he has hardly an equal. A generation ago this remark would have meant little, but what with Mr. Kipling, Mr. Roberts, Mr. Thompson-Seton, the Rev. Mr. Long, and the rest, the field of natural letters, as it might be called, has become conspicuous. It is the “pathetic” consideration which gives such books their hold upon us; we like to speculate as to the relations or analogies between beast-kind and mankind. Perhaps we do not believe that a stag is capable of soulful love, or a moose of consecutive thought, or a cuckoo of deliberately teaching its offspring to suck eggs; at least we take our disbelief seriously.

Mr. London has not, so far as we know, entered into any controversy, but he has written several books which present feral nature as something distinctly apart from human nature. “White Fang” complements “The Call of the Wild” in showing how readily wild animals may submit themselves to human rule, and how naturally domestic animals may revert to freedom. These dogs and wolves do not talk or think humanly. Instinct impels them and the discipline of experience teaches them what to avoid and what to seek. “Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomized life as a voracious appetite. But the cub did not think in man-fashion. He did not look at things with wide vision. He was single-purposed and had but one thought or desire at a time.” Three-parts wolf, the cub grows up to become in the end the willing slave of a man who has bestowed upon it such love as a human being may allow an inferior. Being a brute, its experience is brutal, a continuous performance of dog-fights, with no sparing of bloody detail. But, indeed, squeamishness would be out of place here, for if the writer dwells on the savagery of the creature’s experience, it is that he may emphasize its fitness. He believes that wild beasts get quite as much pleasure as pain out of the life which they are intended to live. It is under the white man’s brutality that White Fang is nearly driven