The Noble Elephant

Pulter features the elephant in The Elephant (Emblem 19)84 because of its treatment as a unique and important animal in a long history of diverse kinds of texts. Classical and early modern sources credit the elephant with being the largest land animal, but one also endowed with a range of admirable traits, especially superior intellect and even the ability to reason.

Pliny’s natural history is often cited or echoed by Renaissance writers who discuss the elephant:

Pass we now to treat of other living creatures, and first of land beasts: among which, the Elephant is the greatest, and commeth nearest in wit and capacity to men: for they understand the language of that country wherein they are bred, they do whatsoever they are commanded, they remember what duties they be taught, and withall take a pleasure and delight both in love and also in glory: nay more than all this, they embrace goodness, honesty, prudence, and equity, (rare qualities I may tell you to be found in men) and withall have in religious reverence (with a kind of devotion) not only the stars and planets, but the sun and moon they also worship.

C. Plinius Secundus, The Historie of the World, transl. Philemon Holland (London, 1601, Book VIII, p. 192.) (Early English Books Online, italics and initial capitals regularized.)

Pliny here grants elephants knowledge of human language, despite the fact that language was closely associated with reason, frequently proposed as the defining distinction between humans and other animals. Equally significant to the tradition of elephant nobility is Pliny’s assertion that elephants are more virtuous than most humans.

Essayist Michel de Montaigne goes equally far in comparing elephants to humans:

But this animal, in several other effects, comes so near to human capacity that, should I particularly relate all that experience hath delivered to us, I should easily have what I usually maintain granted: namely, that there is more difference betwixt such and such a man than betwixt such a beast and such a man.

Essays, transl. Charles Cotton, 1877 (original pub. date 1580–88).

For English author Edward Topsell, the elephant is an example of God’s blessings, not only because the elephant is a gloriously huge creature, but because even this massive beast can be trained by humans to serve them, thus demonstrating human sovereignty—and justifying Topsell’s own project of using natural study to instruct humans about God’s role in creation:

There is no creature among all the beasts of the world, which hath so great and ample demonstration of the power and wisdom of Almighty God as the elephant: both for proportion of body and disposition of spirit; and it is admirable to behold the industry of our ancient fore-fathers and noble desire to benefit us their posterity, by searching into the qualities of every beast, to discover what benefits or harms may come by them to mankind: having never been afraid either of the wildest, but they tamed them; the fiercest, but they ruled them; and the greatest, but they also set upon them. Witness for this part the elephant, being like a living mountain in quantity and outward appearance, yet by them so handled, as no dog became more serviceable and tractable.

History of Four-Footed Beasts (London, 1658, p. 149). (Early English Books Online, italics and initial capitals regularized).

Indeed, while many Renaissance authors treat the lion as the king of beasts, others are clear that it is the elephant that merits that title: Flemish philosopher Justus Lipsius named the elephant the king of other animals, as did his countryman the painter Karel van Mander.1

The reason for elephants’ good reputation depended in part on its reported mercy toward those less powerful than itself, along with its clear moral uprightness. Attributes like these aligned with humanist and religious ideals of self-control, altruism, and discernment. While Topsell celebrates elephants’ usefulness in battle, admires them for their ability to move huge objects, and discusses the ivory derived from their tusks, he also notes that once tamed, these animals have a strong sense of duty and commitment to their tasks, even studying in private in order to perform well:

Their industrious care to perform the things they are taught appeareth herein, because when they are secret and alone by themselves they will practice leaping, dancing, and other strange feats which they could not learn suddenly in the presence of the Master: as Pliny affirmeth for certain truth of an elephant which was dull and hard of understanding, his keeper found him in the night practicing those things which he had taught him with many stripes the day before.

History of Four-Footed Beasts (London, 1658, p. 162). (Early English Books Online, italics and initial capitals regularized).

John Donne also noted the elephant’s size and “harmlessness,” although his description of the soul transmigrating through various animal incarnations ends up deeply ambivalent: this elephant sleeps peacefully while a mouse travels up his trunk to his brain and kills him—and upon his fall, the mouse is also killed.

Metempsycosis XXXIX

Natures great master-piece, an Elephant,
The only harmless great thing; the giant
Of beasts; who thought, no more had gone, to make one wise
But to be just, and thankful, loth to offend,
(Yet nature hath given him no knees to bend)
Himself he up-props, on himself relies,
And foe to none, suspects no enemies,
Still sleeping stood; vex’t not his fantasy
Black dreams, like an unbent bow, carelessly
His sinewy Proboscis did remisly lie.

The Works of J. D., London, 1633. (Early English Books Online).

Donne relies on a familiar Aesopian fable that revolves around an elephant killed by such a mouse, which recounts the episode to a lion that has captured it to prove that small things can be powerful.2 When the lion is in turn captured, the mouse frees it from human snares. Though Donne’s poem and the fable end differently, both emphasize the hubris of those deemed superior, a satirical poke at prideful humans.

Donne also references the elephant’s proverbial lack of joints that would allow it to kneel. Shakespeare uses this (much-debunked) tidbit of folklore in Troilus and Cressida when Ulysses says of Achilles “The elephant hath joints, but none for courtesy; / His legs are for necessity, not for flexure” (2.3.103–4).

Seneca thus uses the elephant to illustrate the necessary superiority of a ruler:

For either the greatest or the most vigorous bodies do indeed rule over the dumb flocks. A base bull goeth not before, but he who hath overcome other males in greatness, and in strength of limbs: the highest of elephants leadeth the flock: amongst men for chiefest is he accounted who is the best. Therefore a governor was chosen by the mind: and so it was the chiefest happiness of the nations; amongst whom one could not be more mighty, except he were better.

Works of Seneca, transl. Thomas Lodge, 1614, p.314. (Early English Books Online, italics and initial capitals regularized.)

In other words, like the elephant, human rulers must be greater than those they rule over, albeit in intellect not sheer size and strength.

Footnotes

1. Justus Lipsius, Historie Van den Elephant (1604), fol.5v; Karel van Mander, Uit beeldinge der figuren, in Het schilder-boeck (Haerlem: Paschier van Wesbvsch, 1604), fol. 128r, cited in Laura Orsi, “The Emblematic Elephant: A Preliminary Approach to the Elephant in Renaissance Thought and Art,” Anthropozoologica 20 (1994), pp. 69–86.

2. See John Obilby’s The fables of Aesop paraphras’d in verse, (London: 1651), p. 23–28.