“And close beside me the cat sits purring,
Warming her paws at the cheery gleam;
The flames keep flitting, and flicking, and whirring;
My mind is wrapped in a realm of dream,”—
find their English echo in the letter Shelley writes to Peacock,
describing, half wistfully, the shrines of the Penates, “whose hymns are
the purring of kittens, the hissing of kettles, the long talks over the
past and dead, the laugh of children, the warm wind of summer filling
the quiet house, and the pelting storm of winter struggling in vain for
entrance.” How incomplete would these pictures be, how incomplete is any
fireside sketch, without the purring kitten or drowsy cat!
“The queen I am o’ that cozy place;
As wi’ ilka paw I dicht my face,
I sing an’ purr wi’ mickle grace.”
This is the sphinx of the hearthstone, the little god of domesticity,
whose presence turns a house into a home. Even the chilly desolation of
a hotel may be rendered endurable by these affable and discriminating
creatures; for one of them, as we know, once welcomed Sir Walter Scott,
and softened for him the unfamiliar and unloved surroundings. “There are
no dogs in the hotel where I lodge,” he writes to Abbotsford from
London, “but a tolerably conversable cat _who_ eats a mess of cream with
me in the morning.” Of course it did, the wise and lynx-eyed beast! I
make no doubt that, day after day and week after week, that cat had
wandered superbly amid the common throng of lodgers, showing favor to
none, and growing cynical and disillusioned by constant contact with a
crowd. Then, one morning, it spied the noble, rugged face which neither
man nor beast could look upon without loving, and forthwith tendered its
allegiance on the spot. Only “tolerably conversable” it was, this
reserved and town-bred animal; less urbane because less happy than the
much-respected retainer at Abbotsford, Master Hinse of Hinsefeld, whom
Sir Walter called his friend. “Ah, mon grand ami, vous avez tué mon
autre grand ami!” he sighed, when the huge hound Nimrod ended poor
Hinse’s placid career. And if Scott sometimes seems to disparage cats,
as when he unkindly compares Oliver-le-Dain to one, in “Quentin
Durward,” he atones for such indignity by the use of the little pronoun
“who” when writing of the London puss. My own habit is to say “who” on
similar occasions, and I am glad to have so excellent an authority.
It were an endless though a pleasant task to recount all that has been
said, and well said, in praise of the cat by those who have rightly
valued her companionship. M. Loti’s Moumoutte Blanche and Moumoutte
Chinoise are well known and widely beloved, and M. Théophile Gautier’s
charming pages are too familiar for comment. Who has not read with
delight of the Black and White Dynasties that for so long ruled with
gentle sway over his hearth and heart; of Madame Théophile, who thought
the parrot was a green chicken; of Don Pierrot de Navarre, who deeply
resented his master’s staying out late at night; of the graceful and
fastidious Séraphita; the gluttonous Enjolras; the acute Bohemian,
Gavroche; the courteous and well-mannered Eponine, who received M.
Gautier’s guests in the drawing-room and dined at his table, taking each
course as it was served, and restraining any rude distaste for food not
to her fancy. “Her place was laid without a knife and fork, indeed, but
with a glass, and she went regularly through dinner, from soup to
dessert, awaiting her turn to be helped, and behaving with a quiet
propriety which most children might imitate with advantage. At the first
stroke of the bell she would appear, and when I came into the
dining-room she would be at her post, upright on her chair, her forepaws
on the edge of the tablecloth; and she would present her smooth forehead
to be kissed, like a well-bred little girl who was affectionately polite
to relatives and old people.”
I have read this pretty description several times to Agrippina, who is
extremely wayward and capricious about her food, rejecting plaintively
one day the viands which she has eaten with apparent enjoyment the day
before. In fact, the difficulty of catering to her is so well understood
by tradesmen that recently, when the housemaid carried her on an errand
to the grocery,—Agrippina is very fond of these jaunts and of the
admiration she excites,—the grocer, a fatherly man, with cats of his
own, said briskly, “Is this the little lady who eats the biscuits?” and
presented her on the spot with several choice varieties from which to
choose. She is fastidious, too, about the way in which her meals are
served; disliking any other dishes than her own, which are of
blue-and-white china; requiring that her meat should be cut up fine and
all the fat removed, and that her morning oatmeal should be well sugared
and creamed. Milk she holds in scorn. My friends tell me sometimes that
it is not the common custom of cats to receive so much attention at
table, and that it is my fault Agrippina is so exacting; but such
grumblers fail to take into consideration the marked individuality that
is the charm of every kindly treated puss. She differs from her sisters
as widely as one woman differs from another, and reveals varying
characteristics of good and evil, varying powers of intelligence and
adaptation. She scales splendid heights of virtue, and, unlike Sir
Thomas Browne, is “singular in offenses.” Even those primitive instincts
which we believe all animals hold in common are lost in acquired ethics
and depravity. No heroism could surpass that of the London cat who
crawled back five times under the stage of the burning theatre to rescue
her litter of kittens, and, having carried four of them to safety,
perished devotedly with the fifth. On the other hand, I know of a cat
who drowned her three kittens in a water-butt, for no reason,
apparently, save to be rid of them, and that she might lie in peace on
the hearth rug,—a murder well planned, deliberate, and cruel.
“So Tiberius might have sat,
Had Tiberius been a cat.”
Only in her grace and beauty, her love of comfort, her dignity of
bearing, her courteous reserve, and her independence of character does
puss remain immutable and unchanged. These are the traits which win for
her the warmest corner by the fire, and the unshaken regard of those who
value her friendship and aspire to her affection. These are the traits
so subtly suggested by Mrs. Tomson in a sonnet which every true lover of
cats feels in his heart _must_ have been addressed to his own particular
pet:—
“Half gentle kindliness, and half disdain,
Thou comest to my call, serenely suave,
With humming speech and gracious gestures grave,
In salutation courtly and urbane;
Yet must I humble me thy grace to gain,
For wiles may win thee, but no arts enslave;
And nowhere gladly thou abidest, save
Where naught disturbs the concord of thy reign.
“Sphinx of my quiet hearth! who deign’st to dwell
Friend of my toil, companion of mine ease,
Thine is the lore of Ra and Rameses;
That men forget dost thou remember well,
Beholden still in blinking reveries,
With sombre sea-green gaze inscrutable.”
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