The Call of the Wild

“The Call of the Wild” is the story of a dog, reared in comfort in Southern California, but afterwards broken to the sled on the desolate Alaskan trail, where his experiences are related with a candor and ring of genuineness, exciting yet often heartrending in the extreme. The philosophy of the survival of the fittest runs through every page of Mr. London’s book; the call of the wild evidently signifies the appeal (and in Buck’s case, the triumph) of barbarian life over civilized life; in fact, this dog becomes, after a series of bloodcurdling incidents ending at the murder of a beloved master, the eventual leader of a pack of timber wolves, in whom, following a fang fight for individual supremacy, he recognizes the ” wild brother,” and joins the savage horde. The book, very brief, is filled from cover to cover with thrilling scenes; the Northern Territory is brought home to us with convincing vividness; every sentence is pregnant with original life; probably no such sympathetic, yet wholly unsentimental, story of a dog has ever found print before; the achievement may, without exaggeration, be termed “wonderful.”

Yet it is cruel reading-often relentless reading; we feel at times the blood lashing in our faces at what seems the continual maltreatment of a dumb animal; we can scarce endure the naked brutality of the thing; our sense of the creature’s perplexity in suffering is almost absolutely unrelieved; we sicken of the analysis of the separate tortures of this dog’s Arctic Inferno. Not seldom we incline to remonstrate, “Hang it, Jack London, what the deuce do you mean by ‘drawing’ on us so?” But we forgive the writer at last because he is true! He is not sentimental, tricky; he is at harmony with himself and nature. He gives an irresistible groan sometimes-like Gorky; but this is only because he does, after all, feel for humanity-yes, down to the bottom of his big California heart.

It must be patent to all, we think, that the man who can, through the simple story of a dog set us thought-wandering over illimitable ways, is a man of language to be respectfully classed and reckoned with. There is nothing local or narrow about Jack London. Sectionalism is smaller than he. His voice is the voice of a man in the presence of the multitude, and he utters the word that is as bread to him. He has not, to say truly, much humor; the theme of necessary toil and suffering overburdens and drowns the casual note of laughter-he is buoyant rather than bright. Sometimes we are wearied by his too ecstatic hymning of the primitive, the rude, the elemental in spirit and nature-we begin to desire a little more mildness and beauty, a possible mercy and femininity, a hope; but these we must look for in other writers than the stalwart youthful leader of the promising Far West In his own field he is master; and more than this we ought not to exact of any man.