The same oracle dislikes Prior, Swift, and Fielding. If an elephant could write a book, perhaps one that had read a great deal would say, that an Arabian horse is a very clumsy ungraceful animal.
Walpole, letter to Miss Berry (1791)
It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.
Mill, Utilitarianism (1863)
7. Insults; loathsomeness. Many of the examples already seen have diminished their human subjects, depicting them as slow-witted or incorrigible. But we nevertheless should give further consideration to comparisons made more directly for the sake of insult and disparagement. Most insults are metaphors, as when the person made the subject of them is compared to an orifice or appendage. There is an old tradition, however, of abuse accomplished by comparisons to animal life; these devices allow the speaker to retain more dignity and use more imagination, and they have a distinct potency of their own. Insects are a natural source for the purpose, as they tend to be puny as well as odious.
You diversivolent lawyer, marke him; knaves turn informers, as maggots turn to flies; you may catch gudgeons with either.
Webster, The White Devil (1612)
If I am instructed rightly, he is one of those vain and vapid coxcombs, . . . one of those fashionable insects, that folly has painted, and fortune plumed, for the annoyance of our atmosphere; dangerous alike in their torpidity and their animation; infesting where they fly and poisoning where they repose.
Phillips, argument in Guthrie v. Sterne (1815)
If the Frenchman saw our aristocracy and liked it, if he saw our snobbishness and liked it, if he set himself to imitate it, we all know what we should feel. We all know that we should feel that that particular Frenchman was a repulsive little gnat.
Chesterton, French and English (1909)
Instructive applications to critics:
He will soon flit to other prey, when you disregard him. It is my way: I never publish a sheet, but buzz! out fly a swarm of hornets, insects that never settle upon you, if you don’t strike at them and whose venom is diverted to the next object that presents itself.
Walpole, letter to the Earl of Hertford (1764)
The last sort I shall mention are verbal critics – mere word-catchers, fellows that pick out a word in a sentence 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:
The same oracle dislikes Prior, Swift, and Fielding. If an elephant could write a book, perhaps one that had read a great deal would say, that an Arabian horse is a very clumsy ungraceful animal.
