CULTURE WATCH : Hearing the Horse

Caroline Thompson’s new film “Black Beauty,” whatever the final critical consensus about it, is virtually certain to enjoy a warm reception as “family entertainment” or, in plain language, a children’s movie. But the publication in 1877 of Anna Sewell’s novel, “Black Beauty: The Autobiography of a Horse,” on which the film is based, was in its way an important moment in Western intellectual history.

There are new, self-interested reasons why the members of our species should seek to defend other species--from whales at the upper end to Amazonian ants at the lower--or at least preserve them from extinction. But true kindness to animals, a late-developing but now distinctive feature of Western culture, arises ultimately not from rational self-interest but from imaginative sympathy.

Because animals cannot speak, their feelings can only enter human consciousness by an effort of the imagination. Anna Sewell’s only novel made that effort. She was not the first to speak on behalf of kindness to animals. She offered no new arguments. What she did was imagine everything afresh. Her novel affected the anti-cruelty movement as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” affected abolitionism: by bringing the tenderness of a woman’s heart into what had been a cold philosophical and commercial debate.

Her novel is narrated by a horse--a literary device that at book length should have become ridiculous. But she made it work so well that she virtually created the talking-animal novel and, along the way, changed the public mind forever--and for good.