hem surely is this innocence
of all boredom; perhaps such simplicity is the absence of sin.
I have some sense myself of the sacred duty of surprise;
and the need of seeing the old road as a new road. But I cannot
claim that whenever I go out for a walk with my family and friends,
I rush in front of them volleying vociferous shouts of happiness;
or even leap up round them attempting to lick their faces. It is in this
power of beginning again with energy upon familiar and homely things
that the dog is really the eternal type of the Western civilisation.
And the donkey is really as different as is the Eastern civilisation.
His very anarchy is a sort of secrecy; his very revolt is a secret.
He does not leap up because he wishes to share my walk,
but to follow his own way, as lonely as the wild ass of Scripture.
My own beast of burden supports the authority of Scripture
by being a very wild ass. I have given him the name of Trotsky,
because he seldom trots, but either scampers or stands still.
He scampers all over the field when it is necessary to catch him,
and stands still when it is really urgent to drive him.
He also breaks fences, eats vegetables, and fulfills other functions;
between delays and destructions he could ruin a really poor man
in a day. I wish this fact were more often remembered, in judging
whether really poor men have really been cruel to donkeys.
But I assure the reader that I am not cruel to my donkey; the cruelty
is all the other way. He kicks the people who try to catch him;
and again I am haunted by a dim human parallel. For it seems to me
that many of us, in just detestation of the dirty trick of cruelty
to animals, have really a great deal of patience with animals;
more patience, I fear, than many of us have with human beings.
Suppose I had to go out and catch my secretary in a field
every morning; and suppose my secretary always kicked me by way
of beginning the day's work; I wonder whether that day's work
would resume its normal course as if nothing had happened.
Nothing graver than these grotesque images and groping speculations
would come into my conscious mind just then, though at the back
of it there was an indescribable sense of regret and parting.
All through my wanderings the dog remained in my memory as a
Dickensian and domestic emblem of England; and if it is difficult
to take a donkey seriously, it ought to be easiest, at least,
for a man who is going to Jerusalem.

There was a