and a sentence in a volume and tell you it is wrong. . . . Littleness is their element, and they give a character of meanness to whatever they touch. They creep, buzz, and fly-blow. It is much easier to crush than to catch these troublesome insects; and when they are in your power your self-respect spares them.
Hazlitt, On Criticism (1821)
To armies:
The Eastern armies were indeed like insects; in their blind, busy destructiveness, in their black nihilism of personal outlook, in their hateful indifference to individual life and love, in their base belief in mere numbers, in their pessimistic courage and their atheistic patriotism, the riders and raiders of the East are indeed like all the creeping things of the earth.
Chesterton, The Empire of the Insect (1910)
I see advancing upon all this, in hideous onslaught, the Nazi war machine, with its clanking, heel-clicking, dandified Prussian officers, its crafty expert agents, fresh from the cowing and tying down of a dozen countries. I see also the dull, drilled, docile brutish masses of the Hun soldiery, plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts.
Churchill, London radio broadcast (1941)
Reptiles and amphibians also provide first-rate source material for invective.
But when he came home the next week, alive, renowned, and appeared in church all battered up and bandaged, a shining hero, stared at and wondered over by everybody, it seemed to us that the partiality of Providence for an undeserving reptile had reached a point where it was open to criticism.
Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1888)
“I consider you, sir,” said Mr. Pott, moved by this sarcasm, “I consider you a viper. I look upon you, sir, as a man who has placed himself beyond the pale of society, by his most audacious, disgraceful, and abominable public conduct. I view you, sir, personally and politically, in no other light than as a most unparalleled and unmitigated viper.”
Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (1837)
I sent for Bowles’s Works while at Oxford. How was I shocked! Every omission and every alteration disgusted taste, and mangled sensibility. Surely some Oxford toad had been squatting at the poet’s ear, and spitting into it the cold venom of dullness.
Coleridge, letter to Henry Martin (1794)
A few examples will suggest the range of other animals widely used for damning description.
Were they worthy the dignity of being damned, I would damn them; but they are not. Critics? – Asses! rather mules! – so emasculated, from vanity, they can not father a true thought. Like mules, too, from dunghills, they trample down gardens of roses: and deem that crushed fragrance their own.
Melville, Mardi (1849)
[T]hat genuine lick-spittle of royalty, Sir Benjamin Bloomfield, who like the jackal, had preceded his royal master and patron to cater to his love of pomp and show, was designated as the distinguished stranger, and on his health being drank, the band struck up ‘Welcome here again.’
Memoirs of Daniel O’Connell (1836)
Adieu! thou excellent woman! thou reverse of that hyena in petticoats, Mrs. Wolstoncroft, who to this day discharges her ink and gall on Marie Antoinette, whose unparalleled sufferings have not yet stanched that Alecto’s blazing ferocity.
Walpole, letter to Hannah More (1795)
A related tradition employs creatures not precisely to injure their subjects but to suggest the reaction they provoke. People and animals both can inspire revulsion, but unpleasant animals do it more easily and in a manner familiar to every reader. Insects and reptiles again are standard sources.
[Y]ou don’t love me, then? It was only my station, and the rank of my wife, that you valued? Now that you think me disqualified to become your husband, you recoil from my touch as if I were some toad or ape.
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)
. . . men of ideas instead of legs, a sort of intellectual centipede that made you crawl all over.
Thoreau, Walden (1854)
“I want every boy to be keen.”
“We are, sir,” said Psmith, with fervor.
“Excellent.”
“On archaeology.”
Mr. Downing – for it was no less a celebrity – started, as one who perceives a loathly caterpillar in his salad.
Wodehouse, Mike and Psmith (1909)
8. Status. So far we have examined comparisons between people and one type of creature or another. But the relations between different animals can also help illuminate the status of a subject or the relations between two of them. Thus uses of the grand or domineering animal, some of which do not bring out the best in their authors but reflect their times:
But Dr. Johnson has much of the nil admirari in smaller concerns. That survey of life which gave birth to his Vanity of Human Wishes early sobered his mind. Besides, so great a mind as his cannot be moved by inferior objects: an elephant does not run and skip like lesser animals.
Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785)
Johnson defended the oriental regulation of different castes of men, which was objected to as totally destructive of the hopes of rising in society by personal merit. He shewed that there was a principle in it sufficiently plausible by analogy. “We see (said he) in metals that there are different species; and so likewise in animals, though one species may not differ very widely from another, as in the species of dogs, – the cur, the spaniel, the mastiff. The Bramins are the mastiffs of mankind.”
Boswell, Life of Johnson (1791)
With your belief in some apriorities like equality you may have difficulties. I who believe in force (mitigated by politeness) have no trouble – and if I were sincere and were asked certain whys by a woman should reply, “Because Ma’am I am the bull.”
Holmes, Jr., letter to Harold Laski (1928)
These examples serve as exceptions to the typical pattern in which comparisons to animals reduce the stature of a human subject. With adjustment, though, even an animal of high status can, if impaired, put the subject of a comparison into a diminished light.
“Make all men equal so far as laws can make them equal, and what does that mean but that each unit is to be rendered hopelessly feeble in presence of an overwhelming majority?” The existence of such a state of society reduces individuals to impotence, and to tell them to be powerful, original, and independent is to mock them. It is like plucking a bird’s feathers in order to put it on a level with beasts, and then telling it to fly.
James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873)
The orator almost always spoke without notes. On the few occasions when he used them they were an evident embarrassment: it was like an eagle walking.
Martin, Wendell Phillips (1890)
Hastings. Besides, the King hath wasted all his rods
On late offenders, that he now doth lack
The very instruments of chastisement;
So that his power, like to a fangless lion,
May offer, but not hold.
2 Henry IV, 4, 1
Good effects can be had by introducing two animals and identifying the subject of the comparison with one of them rather than the other: like this animal, not that one.
And I will shoot Mr. Wood and his deputies through the head, like highwaymen or housebreakers, if they
