“_Imperfect qualities throughout creation,
Suggesting some one creature yet to make._”
[Illustration: Kitten by Madame Ronner]
I
It is time that the old question of the superiority of cat or dog
should be discussed on some other ground than that of British feeling
or human egotism.
The case of the cat is prejudged if we are to weigh his merits on
practical grounds, for the cat is a dreamer and a dramatist; or if
we are to estimate his character from the point of view of Western
civilisation, for the cat, as William Watson says, is the type of the
Orient; or, finally, if we are to consider the moral qualities of the
cat solely in relation to the desires of the human being. If these are
our premisses then the vulgar estimate of the cat is the true one.
According to this estimate the cat is a domestic comfortable
creature, usually found curled up like the ammonite, and in a state of
semi-torpor; it is essentially selfish and essentially cruel, but apart
from these two drawbacks, essentially feminine. “The cat is selfish,
and the dog is faithful.” This sums up a judgment founded on wilful
ignorance and gross egotism.
In respect to what is the dog faithful and the cat selfish? Simply in
this regard, that the dog takes the vainest man on something better
than his own estimate, while of the cat’s life and world the human
being forms but a little part.
Here plainly Greek meets Greek, and we had better let the accusation
of egotism alone. But apart from this point, the above summary of
the cat’s nature is about as true as the following summary of the
sportsman’s nature from the cat’s point of view.
“The sportsman is a quiet, domestic creature, fond of his comforts
and his meals; he is generally found smoking in an armchair before
the fire. The only thing which interferes with his domesticity is
his tendency to absent himself from the house for hours together;
this appears to be the result of a curious mania quite foreign to his
nature; and it will cause him even to miss his meals. If you come
upon him at such times he is engaged in a prosaic kind of wholesale
slaughter; he has no exciting chases after his prey, no display of
ability, no well-planned ambushes; but he kills at a distance through
an unpleasantly noisy instrument. The sportsman, too, is absolutely
dangerous to life at such time, and I have known cats fall victims
to his rage; whereas, if you meet him in his normal condition, he is
usually quite tame; you can safely leave kittens in the room with him,
and I have never known him kill a caged bird. The keeper is a very
dangerous sort of sportsman, and must be regarded as radically unsafe.
The difference between sportsmen and keepers is much the same as that
between capricious bulls and mad bulls.”
The fact is, that the usual judgment of cats rests on a total
misapprehension of the scope of a cat’s life; and the root of the
misunderstanding goes wider and deeper than this. The average human
being takes account only of those qualities of animals which have
some practical bearing on human life; even the animal lover is wont
to take account only of animal qualities, physical, mental, and, at
a stretch, moral; whereas that which is the pivot of human life and
human relations; that which, rudimentary as it is in animals, is still
the pivot of animal qualities--namely, the force of personality--is
altogether left out of account.
No judgment of animals can be adequate, or in any sense true, which
does not take account of personality, more or less developed, and of
the scope of the creature’s life as determined by it.
The more intimately one knows animals, the more one is struck by their
individuality, and the varying force of their personality.
Persis had the most intense personality of any animal I have ever
known. Mentu’s, less vivid, was still as individual and distinct;
Ra had a little narrow nature, Alexander was undeveloped, and the
tabby is frankly common; but all are as distinct from one another, as
essentially personal, as five human beings.
And it is greatly through this personality that the scope of an
animal’s life, as of the life of the human being, is determined; we
are all more or less at the mercy of what we, in our blindness, call
“blind forces;” but in all of us there is something which out of the
“manifold” of the world seeks and selects a consistent experience, some
principle which determines the scope of life.
Out of the many chemicals of the soil each plant draws those which are
appropriate to its own life, each plant transforms them into a living
thing, a definite beauty of leaf and bud.
And the alchemy of the higher creature does not only transform the
material particles of the world, now into the ashen silky hair and
yellow eyes of Mentu, now into the curly grizzled coat of Taffy; but
through the intelligence and sensibilities, through the desire for
approbation and of admiration, through the protective love of the
offspring, and the pure straining after the affection of the human
being, dimly understood, these dawning consciousnesses gather from the
world of sensation, of intelligence, of emotion, such material as they
can assimilate and transform, defining it into a life and world of
their own.
If we cannot from the point of more developed moral consciousness, and
higher intelligence, even seek to understand the dawnings in the lower
creatures of that which makes us what we are, then to us animals are
mere playthings or mere slaves, and we can have no least perception
of what is meant by that earnest, if unrealised, “expectation of the
creature.”