Let us take the great cats. They are free from this talent for
slave-hood. Stately beasts like the lion have more independence
of mind than the ants,--and a self-respect, we may note, unknown
to primates. Or consider the leopards, with hearts that no tyrant
could master. What fearless and resolute leopard-men they could
have fathered! How magnificently such a civilization would have
made its force tell!
A race of civilized beings descended from these great cats would
have been rich in hermits and solitary thinkers. The recluse would
not have been stigmatized as peculiar, as he is by us simians. They
would not have been a credulous people, or easily religious. False
prophets and swindlers would have found few dupes. And what generals
they would have made! what consummate politicians!
Don't imagine them as a collection of tigers walking around on their
hind-legs. They would have only been like tigers in the sense that
we men are like monkeys. Their development in appearance and
character would have been quite transforming.
Instead of the small flat head of the tiger, they would have had
clear smooth brows; and those who were not bald would have had
neatly parted hair--perhaps striped.
Their mouths would have been smaller and more sensitive: their
faces most dignified. Where now they express chiefly savageness,
they would have expressed fire and grace.
They would have been courteous and suave. No vulgar crowding
would have occurred on the streets of their cities. No mobs.
No ignominious subway-jams.
Imagine a cultivated coterie of such men and women, at a ball,
dancing. How few of us humans are graceful. They would have
all been Pavlowas.
Like ants and bees, the cat race is nervous. Their temperaments are
high-strung. They would never have become as poised or as placid
as--say--super-cows. Yet they would have had less insanity, probably,
than we. Monkeys' (and elephants') minds seem precariously balanced,
unstable. The great cats are saner. They are intense, they would
have needed sanitariums: but fewer asylums. And their asylums would
have been not for weak-minded souls, but for furies.
They would have been strong at slander. They would have been far
more violent than we, in their hates, and they would have had fewer
friendships. Yet they might not have been any poorer in real
friendships than we. The real friendships among men are so rare
than when they occur they are famous. Friends as loyal as Damon
and Pythias were, are exceptions. Good fellowship is common, but
unchanging affection is not. We like those who like us, as a rule,
and dislike those who don't. Most of our ties have no better footing
than that; and those who have many such ties are called warm-hearted.
The super-cat-men would have rated cleanliness higher. Some of
us primates have learned to keep ourselves clean, but it's no
large proportion; and even the cleanest of us see no grandeur in
soap-manufacturing, and we don't look to manicures and plumbers for
social prestige. A feline race would have honored such occupations.
J. de Courcy Tiger would have felt that nothing _but_ making soap, or
being a plumber, was compatible with a high social position; and the
rich Vera Pantherbilt would have deigned to dine only with manicures.
None but the lowest dregs of such a race would have been lawyers
spending their span of life on this mysterious earth studying the
long dusty records of dead and gone quarrels. We simians naturally
admire a profession full of wrangle and chatter. But that is a
monkeyish way of deciding disputes, not feline.
We fight best in armies, gregariously, where the risk is reduced;
but we disapprove usually of murderers, and of almost all private
combat. With the great cats, it would have been just the other way
round. (Lions and leopards fight each other singly, not in bands,
as do monkeys.)
As a matter of fact, few of us delight in really serious fighting.
We do love to bicker; and we box and knock each other around, to
exhibit our strength; but few normal simians are keen about bloodshed
and killing; we do it in war only because of patriotism, revenge,
duty, glory. A feline civilization would have cared nothing for duty
or glory, but they would have taken a far higher pleasure in gore.
If a planet of super-cat-men could look down upon ours, they would
not know which to think was the most amazing: the way we tamely live,
five million or so in a city, with only a few police to keep us
quiet, while we commit only one or two murders a day, and hardly
have a respectable number of brawls; or the way great armies of us
are trained to fight,--not liking it much, and yet doing more killing
in wartime and shedding more blood than even the fiercest lion on his
cruelest days. Which would perplex a gentlemanly super-cat spectator
the more, our habits of wholesale slaughter in the field, or our
spiritless making a fetish of "order," at home?
It is fair to judge peoples by the rights they will sacrifice most
for. Super-cat-men would have been outraged, had their right of
personal combat been questioned. The simian submits with odd
readiness to the loss of this privilege. What outrages him is
to make him stop wagging his tongue. He becomes most excited and
passionate about the right of free speech, even going so far in his
emotion as to declare it is sacred.
He looks upon other creatures pityingly because they are dumb.
If one of his own children is born dumb, he counts it a tragedy.
Even that mere hesitation in speech, known as stammering, he deems
a misfortune.
So precious to a simian is the privilege of making sounds with his
tongue, that when he wishes to punish severely those men he calls
criminals, he forbids them to chatter, and forces them by threats
to be silent. It is felt that his punishment is entirely too cruel
however and even the worst offenders should be allowed to talk part
of each day.
Whatever a simian does, there must always be some talking about it.
He can't even make peace without a kind of chatter called a peace
conference. Super-cats would not have had to "make" peace: they
would have just walked off and stopped fighting.
In a world of super-cat-men, I suppose there would have been fewer
sailors; and people would have cared less for seaside resorts, or
for swimming. Cats hate getting wet, so men descended from them
might have hated it. They would have felt that even going in
wading was sign of great hardihood, and only the most daring young
fellows, showing off, would have done it.
Among them there would have been no antivivisection societies:
No Young Cat Christian Associations or Red Cross work:
No Vegetarians:
No early closing laws:
Much more hunting and trapping:
No riding to hounds; that's pure simian. Just think how it would
have entranced the old-time monkeys to foresee such a game! A game
where they'd all prance off on captured horses, tearing pell-mell
through the woods in gay red coats, attended by yelping packs of
servant-dogs. It is excellent sport--but how cats would scorn to
hunt in that way!
They would not have knighted explorers--they would have all been
explorers.
Imagine that you are strolling through a super-cat city at night.
Over yonder is the business quarter, its evening shops blazing
with jewels. The great stock-yards lie to the east where you hear
those sad sounds: that twittering as of innumerable birds, waiting
slaughter. Beyond lie the silent aquariums and the crates of fresh
mice. (They raise mice instead of hens in the country, in Super-cat
Land.) To the west is a beautiful but weirdly bacchanalian park,
with long groves of catnip, where young super-cats have their fling,
and where a few crazed catnip addicts live on till they die, unable
to break off their strangely undignified orgies. And here where you
stand is the sumptuous residence district. Houses with spacious
grounds everywhere: no densely-packed buildings. The streets have
been swept up--or lapped up--until they are spotless. Not a scrap
of paper is lying around anywhere: no rubbish, no dust. Few of the
pavements are left bare, as ours are, and those few are polished:
the rest have deep soft velvet carpets. No footfalls are heard.
There are no lights in these streets, though these people are
abroad much at night. All you see are stars overhead and the
glowing eyes of cat ladies, of lithe silken ladies who pass you,
or of stiff-whiskered men. Beware of those men and the gleam
of the split-pupiled stare. They are haughty, punctilious,
inflammable: self-absorbed too, however. They will probably not
even notice you; but if they do, you are lost. They take offense
in a flash, abhor strangers, despise hospitality, and would think
nothing of killing you or me on their way home to dinner.
Follow one of them. Enter this house. Ah what splendor! No
servants, though a few abject monkeys wait at the back-doors, and
submissively run little errands. But of course they are never let
inside: they would seem out of place. Gorgeous couches, rich colors,
silken walls, an oriental magnificence. In here is the ballroom.
But wait: what is this in the corner? A large triumphal statue--of
a cat overcoming a dog. And look at this dining-room, its exquisite
appointments, its--daintiness: faucets for hot and cold milk in the
pantry, and a gold bowl of cream.
Some one is entering. Hush! If I could but describe her!
Languorous, slender and passionate. Sleepy eyes that see everything.
An indolent purposeful step. An unimaginable grace. If you were _her_
lover, my boy, you would learn how fierce love can be, how capricious
and sudden, how hostile, how ecstatic, how violent!
Think what the state of the arts would have been in such cities.
They would have had few comedies on their stage; no farces. Cats
care little for fun. In the circus, superlative acrobats. No clowns.
In drama and singing they would have surpassed us probably. Even
in the state of arrested development as mere animals, in which we
see cats, they wail with a passionate intensity at night in our
yards. Imagine how a Caruso descended from such beings would sing.
In literature they would not have begged for happy endings.
They would have been personally more self-assured than we, far
freer of cheap imitativeness of each other in manners and art, and
hence more original in art; more clearly aware of what they really
desired; not cringingly watchful of what was expected of them; less
widely observant perhaps, more deeply thoughtful.
Their artists would have produced less however, even though they
felt more. A super-cat artist would have valued the pictures he
drew for their effects on himself; he wouldn't have cared a rap
whether anyone else saw them or not. He would not have bothered,
usually, to give any form to his conceptions. Simply to have had
the sensation would have for him been enough. But since simians
love to be noticed, it does not content them to have a conception;
they must wrestle with it until it takes a form in which others
can see it. They doom the artistic impulse to toil with its nose
to the grindstone, until their idea is expressed in a book or a
statue. Are they right? I have doubts. The artistic impulse
seems not to wish to produce finished work. It certainly deserts
us half-way, after the idea is born; and if we go on, art is labor.
With the cats, art is joy.
But the dominant characteristic of this fine race is cunning. And
hence I think it would have been through their craftiness, chiefly,
that they would have felt the impulse to study, and the wish to
advance. Craft is a cat's delight: craft they never can have too
much of. So it would have been from one triumph of cunning to
another that they would have marched. That would have been the
greatest driving force of their civilization.
This would have meant great progress in invention and science--or
in some fields of science, the economic for instance. But it would
have retarded them in others. Craft studies the world calculatingly,
from without, instead of understandingly from within. Especially
would it have cheapened the feline philosophies; for not simply how
to know but how to circumvent the universe would have been their
desire. Mankind's curiosity is disinterested; it seems purer by
contrast. That is to say, made as we are, it seems purer to us.
What we call disinterested, however, super-cats might call aimless.
(Aimlessness is one of the regular simian traits.)
I don't mean to be prejudiced in favor of the simian side.
Curiosity may be as debasing, I grant you, as craft. And craft
might turn into artifices of a kind which would be noble and fine.
Just as the ignorant and fitful curiosity of some little monkey
is hardly to be compared to the astronomer's magnificent search,
so the craft and cunning we see in our pussies would bear small
relation to the high-minded planning of some ruler of the race
we are imagining.
And yet--craft _is_ self-defeating in the end. Transmute it into
its finest possible form, let it be as subtle and civilized as
you please, as yearning and noble, as enlightened, it still sets
itself over against the wholeness of things; its role is that of
the part at war with the whole. Milton's Lucifer had the mind of
a fine super-cat.
That craft may defeat itself in the end, however, is not the real
point. That doesn't explain why the lions aren't ruling the planet.
The trouble is, it would defeat itself in the beginning. It would
have too bitterly stressed the struggle for existence. Conflict and
struggle make civilizations virile, but they do not by themselves
make civilizations. Mutual aid and support are needed for that.
There the felines are lacking. They do not co-operate well;
they have small group-devotion. Their lordliness, their strong
self-regard, and their coolness of heart, have somehow thwarted
the chance of their racial progress.