Being told of the cat-and-dog fight about to occur in the Blue Pencil Club—a
new thing for your circle, perhaps, though not unfamiliar to amateurdom as a whole—I cannot
resist contributing a few Thomasic yowls and sibilants upon my side of the dispute, though conscious
that the word of a venerable ex-member can scarcely have much weight against the brilliancy
of such still active adherents as may bark upon the other side. Aware of my ineptitude at argument,
my valued correspondent Curator James Ferdinand Morton of Paterson has sent me the records of
a similar controversy in the
New York Tribune, in which Mr. Carl Van Doren is on my side
and Mr. Albert Payson Terhune on that of the canine tribe. From this I would be glad to plagiarise
such data as I need; but Mr. Morton, with genuinely Machiavellian subtlety, has furnished me
with only a part of the feline section whilst submitting the doggish brief in full. No doubt
he imagines that this arrangement, in view of my own emphatic bias, makes for something like
ultimate fairness; but for me it is exceedingly inconvenient, since it will force me to be more
or less original in several parts of the ensuing remarks.

Between dogs and cats my degree of choice is so great that it would never occur
to me to compare the two. I have no active dislike for dogs, any more than I have for monkeys,
human beings, negroes, cows, sheep, or pterodactyls; but for the cat I have entertained a particular
respect and affection ever since the earliest days of my infancy. In its flawless grace and
superior self-sufficiency I have seen a symbol of the perfect beauty and bland impersonality
of the universe itself, objectively considered; and in its air of silent mystery there resides
for me all the wonder and fascination of the unknown. The dog appeals to cheap and facile emotions;
the cat to the deepest founts of imagination and cosmic perception in the human mind. It is
no accident that the contemplative Egyptians, together with such later poetic spirits as Poe,
Gautier, Baudelaire, and Swinburne, were all sincere worshippers of the supple grimalkin.

Naturally, one’s preference in the matter of cats and dogs depends wholly
upon one’s temperament and point of view. The dog would appear to me to be the favourite
of superficial, sentimental, emotional, and democratic people—people who feel rather than
think, who attach importance to mankind and the popular conventional emotions of the simple,
and who find their greatest consolation in the fawning and dependent attachments of a gregarious
society. Such people live in a limited world of imagination; accepting uncritically the values
of common folklore, and always preferring to have their naive beliefs, feelings, and prejudices
tickled, rather than to enjoy a purely aesthetic and philosophic pleasure arising from discrimination,
contemplation, and the recognition of austere absolute beauty. This is not to say that the cheaper
emotions do not also reside in the average cat-lover’s love of cats, but merely to point
out that in ailurophily there exists a basis of true aestheticism which kynophily does not possess.
The real lover of cats is one who demands a clearer adjustment to the universe than ordinary
household platitudes provide; one who refuses to swallow the sentimental notion that all good
people love dogs, children, and horses while all bad people dislike and are disliked by such.
He is unwilling to set up himself and his cruder feelings as a measure of universal values,
or to allow shallow ethical notions to warp his judgment. In a word, he had rather admire and
respect than effuse and dote; and does not fall into the fallacy that pointless sociability
and friendliness, or slavering devotion and obedience, constitute anything intrinsically admirable
or exalted. Dog-lovers base their whole case on these commonplace, servile, and plebeian qualities,
and amusingly judge the intelligence of a pet by its degree of conformity to their own wishes.
Catlovers escape this delusion, repudiate the idea that cringing subservience and sidling companionship
to man are supreme merits, and stand free to worship aristocratic independence, self-respect,
and individual personality joined to extreme grace and beauty as typified by the cool, lithe,
cynical, and unconquered lord of the housetops.

Persons of commonplace ideas—unimaginative worthy burghers who are satisfied
with the daily round of things and who subscribe to the popular credo of sentimental values—will
always be dog-lovers. To them nothing will ever be more important than themselves and their
own more primitive feelings, and they will never cease to esteem and glorify the fellow-animal
who best typifies these. Such persons are submerged in the vortex of Oriental idealism and abasement
which ruined classic civilisation in the Dark Ages, and live in a bleak world of abstract sentimental
values wherein the mawkish illusions of meekness, devotion, gentleness, brotherhood, and whining
humility are magnified into supreme virtues, and a whole false ethic and philosophy erected
on the timid reactions of the flexor system of muscles. This heritage, ironically foisted on
us when Roman politics raised the faith of a whipped and broken people to supremacy in the later
empire, has naturally kept a strong hold over the weak and the sentimentally thoughtless; and
perhaps reached its culmination in the insipid nineteenth century, when people were wont to
praise dogs “because they are so human” (as if humanity were any valid standard
of merit!), and honest Edwin Landseer painted hundreds of smug Fidoes and Carlos and Rovers
with all the anthropoid triviality, pettiness, and “cuteness” of eminent Victorians.

But amidst this chaos of intellectual and emotional grovelling a few free souls
have always stood out for the old civilised realities which mediaevalism eclipsed—the
stern classic loyalty to truth, strength, and beauty given by a clear mind and uncowed spirit
to the full-living Western Aryan confronted by Nature’s majesty, loveliness, and aloofness.
This is the virile aesthetic and ethic of the extensor muscles—the bold, buoyant, assertive
beliefs and preferences of proud, dominant, unbroken, and unterrified conquerors, hunters, and
warriors—and it has small use for the shams and whimperings of the brotherly, affection-slobbering
peacemaker and cringer and sentimentalist. Beauty and sufficiency—twin qualities of the
cosmos itself—are the gods of this aristocratic and pagan type; to the worshipper of such
eternal things the supreme virtue will not be found in lowliness, attachment, obedience, and
emotional messiness. This sort of worshipper will look for that which best embodies the loveliness
of the stars and the worlds and the forests and the seas and the sunsets, and which best acts
out the blandness, lordliness, accuracy, self-sufficiency, cruelty, independence, and contemptuous
and capricious impersonality of all-governing Nature. Beauty—coolness—aloofness—philosophic
repose—self-sufficiency—untamed mastery—where else can we find these things
incarnated with even half the perfection and completeness that mark their incarnation in the
peerless and softly gliding cat, which performs its mysterious orbit with the relentless and
unobtrusive certainty of a planet in infinity?

That dogs are dear to the unimaginative peasant-burgher whilst cats appeal
to the sensitive poet-aristocrat-philosopher will be clear in a moment when we reflect on the
matter of biological association. Practical plebeian folk judge a thing only by its immediate
touch, taste, and smell; while more delicate types form their estimates from the linked images
and ideas which the object calls up in their minds. Now when dogs and cats are considered, the
stolid churl sees only the two animals before him, and bases his favour on their relative capacity
to pander to his sloppy, unformed ideas of ethics and friendship and flattering subservience.
On the other hand the gentleman and thinker sees each in all its natural affiliations, and cannot
fail to notice that in the great symmetries of organic life dogs fall in with slovenly wolves
and foxes and jackals and coyotes and dingoes and painted hyaenas, whilst cats walk proudly
with the jungle’s lords, and own the haughty lion, the sinuous leopard, the regal tiger,
and the shapely panther and jaguar as their kin. Dogs are the hieroglyphs of blind emotion,
inferiority, servile attachment, and gregariousness—the attributes of commonplace, stupidly
passionate, and intellectually and imaginatively undeveloped men. Cats are the runes of beauty,
invincibility, wonder, pride, freedom, coldness, self-sufficiency, and dainty individuality—the
qualities of sensitive, enlightened, mentally developed, pagan, cynical, poetic, philosophic,
dispassionate, reserved, independent, Nietzschean, unbroken, civilised, master-class men. The
dog is a peasant and the cat is a gentleman.

We may, indeed, judge the tone and bias of a civilisation by its relative attitude
toward dogs and cats. The proud Egypt wherein Pharaoh was Pharaoh and pyramids rose in beauty
at the wish of him who dreamed them bowed down to the cat, and temples were builded to its goddess
at Bubastis. In imperial Rome the graceful leopard adorned most homes of quality, lounging in
insolent beauty in the atrium with golden collar and chain; while after the age of the Antonines
the actual cat was imported from Egypt and cherished as a rare and costly luxury. So much for
dominant and enlightened peoples. When, however, we come to the grovelling Middle Ages with
their superstitions and ecstasies and monasticisms and maunderings over saints and their relics,
we find the cool and impersonal loveliness of the felidae in very low esteem; and behold a sorry
spectacle of hatred and cruelty shewn toward the beautiful little creature whose mousing virtues
alone gained it sufferance amongst the ignorant churls who resented its self-respecting coolness
and feared its cryptical and elusive independence as something akin to the dark powers of witchcraft.
These boorish slaves of eastern darkness could not tolerate what did not serve their own cheap
emotions and flimsy purposes. They wished a dog to fawn and hunt and fetch and carry, and had
no use for the cat’s gift of eternal and disinterested beauty to feed the spirit. One
can imagine how they must have resented Pussy’s magnificent reposefulness, unhurriedness,
relaxation, and scorn for trivial human aims and concernments. Throw a stick, and the servile
dog wheezes and pants and shambles to bring it to you. Do the same before a cat, and he will
eye you with coolly polite and somewhat bored amusement. And just as inferior people prefer
the inferior animal which scampers excitedly because somebody else wants something, so do superior
people respect the superior animal which lives its own life and knows that the puerile stick-throwings
of alien bipeds are none of its business and beneath its notice. The dog barks and begs and
tumbles to amuse you when you crack the whip. That pleases a meekness-loving peasant who relishes
a stimulus to his sense of importance. The cat, on the other hand, charms you into playing for
its benefit when it wishes to be amused; making you rush about the room with a paper on a string
when it feels like exercise, but refusing all your attempts to make it play when it is not in
the humour. That is personality and individuality and self-respect—the calm mastery of
a being whose life is its own and not yours—and the superior person recognises and appreciates
this because he too is a free soul whose position is assured, and whose only law is his own
heritage and aesthetic sense. Altogether, we may see that the dog appeals to those primitive
emotional souls whose chief demands on the universe are for meaningless affection, aimless companionship,
and flattering attention and subservience; whilst the cat reigns among those more contemplative
and imaginative spirits who ask of the universe only the objective sight of poignant, ethereal
beauty and the animate symbolisation of Nature’s bland, relentless, reposeful, unhurried,
and impersonal order and sufficiency. The dog
gives, but the cat
is.

Simple folk always overstress the ethical element in life, and it is quite
natural that they should extend it to the realm of their pets. Accordingly we hear many inane
dicta in favour of dogs on the ground that they are
faithful, whilst cats are
treacherous.
Now just what does this really mean? Where are the points of reference? Certainly, the dog has
so little imagination and individuality that it knows no motives but its master’s; but
what sophisticated mind can descry a positive virtue in this stupid abnegation of a birthright?
Discrimination must surely award the palm to the superior cat, which has too much natural dignity
to accept any scheme of things but its own, and which consequently cares not one whit what any
clumsy human thinks or wishes or expects of it. It is not
treacherous, because it has
never acknowledged any allegiance to anything outside its own leisurely wishes; and
treachery
basically implies a departure from some covenant explicitly recognised. The cat is a realist,
and no hypocrite. He takes what pleases him when he wants it, and makes no promises. He never
leads you to expect more from him than he gives, and if you choose to be stupidly Victorian
enough to mistake his purrs and rubbings of self-satisfaction for marks of transient affection
toward you, that is no fault of his. He would not for a moment have you believe that he wants
more of you than food and warmth and shelter and amusement—and he is certainly justified
in criticising your aesthetic and imaginative development if you fail to find his grace, beauty,
and cheerful decorative influence an aboundingly sufficient repayment for all that you give
him. The cat-lover need not be amazed at another’s love for dogs—indeed, he may
also possess this quality himself; for dogs are often very comely, and as lovable in a condescending
way as a faithful old servant or tenant in the eyes of a master—but he cannot help feeling
astonishment at those who do not share his love for cats. The cat is such a perfect symbol of
beauty and superiority that it seems scarcely possible for any true aesthete and civilised cynic
to do other than worship it. We call ourselves a dog’s “master”—but
who ever dared to call himself the “master” of a cat? We
own a dog—he
is with us as a slave and inferior because we wish him to be. But we
entertain a cat—he
adorns our hearth as a guest, fellow-lodger, and equal because
he wishes to be there.
It is no compliment to be the stupidly idolised master of a dog whose instinct it is to idolise,
but it is a very distinct tribute to be chosen as the friend and confidant of a philosophic
cat who is wholly his own master and could easily choose another companion if he found such
an one more agreeable and interesting. A trace, I think, of this great truth regarding the higher
dignity of the cat has crept into folklore in the use of the names “cat” and “dog”
as terms of opprobrium. Whilst “cat” has never been applied to any sort of offender
more serious than the mildly spiteful and innocuously sly female gossip and commentator, the
words “dog” and “cur” have always been linked with vileness, dishonour,
and degradation of the gravest type. In the crystallisation of this nomenclature there has undoubtedly
been present in the popular mind some dim, half-unconscious realisation that there are depths
of slinking, whining, fawning, and servile ignobility which no kith of the lion and the leopard
could ever attain. The cat may fall low, but he is always unbroken. He is, like the Nordic among
men, one of those who govern their own lives or die.

We have but to glance analytically at the two animals to see the points pile
up in favour of the cat. Beauty, which is probably the only thing of any basic significance
in all the cosmos, ought to be our chief criterion; and here the cat excels so brilliantly that
all comparisons collapse. Some dogs, it is true, have beauty in a very ample degree; but even
the highest level of canine beauty falls far below the feline average. The cat is classic whilst
the dog is Gothic—nowhere in the animal world can we discover such really Hellenic perfection
of form, with anatomy adapted to function, as in the felidae. Puss is a Doric temple—an
Ionic colonnade—in the utter classicism of its structural and decorative harmonies. And
this is just as true kinetically as statically, for art has no parallel for the bewitching grace
of the cat’s slightest motion. The sheer, perfect aestheticism of kitty’s lazy stretchings,
industrious face-washings, playful rollings, and little involuntary shiftings in sleep is something
as keen and vital as the best pastoral poetry or genre painting; whilst the unerring accuracy
of his leaping and springing, running and hunting, has an art-value just as high in a more spirited
way. But it is his capacity for leisure and repose which makes the cat preëminent. Mr.
Carl Van Vechten, in “Peter Whiffle”, holds up the timeless restfulness of the cat
as a model for a life’s philosophy, and Prof. William Lyon Phelps has very effectively
captured the secret of felinity when he says that the cat does not merely
lie down, but
“pours his body out on the floor like a glass of water”. What other creature
has thus merged the aestheticism of mechanics and hydraulics? Contrast with this the inept panting,
wheezing, fumbling, drooling, scratching, and general clumsiness of the average dog with his
myriad false and wasted motions. And in the detail of neatness the fastidious cat is of course
immeasurably ahead. We always love to touch a cat, but only the insensitive can uniformly welcome
the frantic and humid nuzzlings and pawings of a dusty and perhaps not inodorous canine which
leaps and fusses and writhes about in awkward feverishness for no particular reason save that
blind nerve-centres have been spurred by certain meaningless stimuli. There is a wearying excess
of bad manners in all this doggish fury—well-bred people don’t paw and maul one,
and surely enough we invariably find the cat gentle and reserved in his advances, and delicate
even when he glides gracefully into your lap with cultivated purrs, or leaps whimsically on
the table where you are writing to play with your pen in modulated, serio-comic pats. I do not
wonder that Mahomet, that sheik of perfect manners, loved cats for their urbanity and disliked
dogs for their boorishness; or that cats are the favourites in the polite Latin countries whilst
dogs take the lead in heavy, practical, and beer-drinking Central Europe. Watch a cat eat, and
then watch a dog. The one is held in check by an inherent and inescapable daintiness, and lends
a kind of grace to one of the most ungraceful of all processes. The dog, on the other hand,
is wholly repulsive in his bestial and insatiate greediness; living up to his forest kinship
by “wolfing” most openly and unashamedly. Returning to beauty of line—is it
not significant that while many normal breeds of dogs are conspicuously and admittedly ugly,
no healthy and well-developed feline of any species whatsoever is other than beautiful?
There are, of course, many ugly cats; but these are always individual cases of mongrelism, malnutrition,
deformity, or injury. No breed of cats in its proper condition can by any stretch of the imagination
be thought of as even slightly ungraceful—a record against which must be pitted the depressing
spectacle of impossibly flattened bulldogs, grotesquely elongated dachshunds, hideously shapeless
and shaggy Airedales, and the like. Of course, it may be said that no aesthetic standard is
other than relative—but we always work with such standards as we empirically have, and
in comparing cats and dogs under the Western European aesthetic we cannot be unfair to either.
If any undiscovered tribe in Thibet finds Airedales beautiful and Persian cats ugly, we will
not dispute them on their own territory—but just now we are dealing with ourselves and
our territory, and here the verdict would not admit of much doubt even from the most ardent
kynophile. Such an one usually passes the problem off in an epigrammatic paradox, and says ‘that
Snookums is so homely, he’s pretty!’ This is the childish penchant for the grotesque
and tawdrily ‘cute’, which we see likewise embodied in popular cartoons, freak dolls,
and all the malformed decorative trumpery of the “Billiken” or “Krazy Kat”
order found in the “dens” and “cosy corners” of the would-be sophisticated
cultural yokelry.

In the matter of intelligence we find the caninites making amusing claims—amusing
because they so naively measure what they conceive to be an animal’s intelligence by its
degree of subservience to the human will. A dog will retrieve, a cat will not;
therefore
(sic!) the dog is the more intelligent. Dogs can be more elaborately trained for circus and
vaudeville acts than cats,
therefore (O Zeus, O Royal Mount!) they are cerebrally superior.
Now of course this is all the sheerest nonsense. We would not call a weak-spirited man more
intelligent than an independent citizen because we can make him vote as we wish whereas we can’t
influence the independent citizen, yet countless persons apply an exactly parallel argument
in appraising the grey matter of dogs and cats. Competition in servility is something to which
no self-respecting Thomas or Tabitha ever stooped, and it is plain that any really effective
estimate of canine and feline intelligence must proceed from a careful observation of dogs and
cats in a detached state—uninfluenced by human beings—as they formulate certain
objectives of their own and use their own mental equipment in achieving them. When we do this,
we arrive at a very wholesome respect for our purring hearthside friend who makes so little
display and ado about his wishes and business methods; for in every conception and calculation
he shews a steel-cold and deliberate union of intellect, will, and sense of proportion which
puts utterly to shame the emotional sloppings-over and docilely acquired artificial tricks of
the “clever” and “faithful” pointer or sheep-dog. Watch a cat decide
to move through a door, and see how patiently he waits for his opportunity, never losing sight
of his purpose even when he finds it expedient to feign other interests in the interim. Watch
him in the thick of the chase, and compare his calculating patience and quiet study of his terrain
with the noisy floundering and pawing of his canine rival. It is not often that he returns empty-handed.
He knows what he wants, and means to get it in the most effective way, even at the sacrifice
of time—which he philosophically recognises as unimportant in the aimless cosmos. There
is no turning him aside or distracting his attention—and we know that among humans this
very quality of mental tenacity, this ability to carry a single thread through complex distractions,
is considered a pretty good sign of intellectual vigour and maturity. Children, old crones,
peasants, and dogs ramble; cats and philosophers stick to their point. In resourcefulness, too,
the cat attests his superiority. Dogs can be well trained to do a single thing, but psychologists
tell us that these responses to an automatic memory instilled from outside are of little worth
as indices of real intelligence. To judge the abstract development of a brain, confront it with
new and unfamiliar conditions and see how well its own strength enables it to achieve its object
by sheer reasoning without blazed trails. Here the cat can silently devise a dozen mysterious
and successful alternatives whilst poor Fido is barking in bewilderment and wondering what it
is all about. Granted that Rover the retriever may make a greater bid for popular sentimental
regard by going into the burning house and saving the baby in traditional cinema fashion, it
remains a fact that whiskered and purring Nig is a higher-grade biological organism—something
physiologically and psychologically nearer a man because of his very freedom from man’s
orders, and as such entitled to a higher respect from those who judge by purely philosophic
and aesthetic standards. We can respect a cat as we cannot respect a dog, no matter which personally
appeals the more to our mere doting fancy; and if we be aesthetes and analysts rather than
commonplace-lovers and emotionalists, the scales must inevitably turn completely in kitty’s
favour. It may be added, moreover, that even the aloof and sufficient cat is by no means devoid of
sentimental appeal. Once we get rid of the uncivilised ethical bias—the ‘treacherous’
and ‘horrid bird-catcher’ prejudice—we find in the ‘harmless, necessary
cat’ the very apex of happy domestic symbolism; whilst small kittens become objects to
adore, idealise, and celebrate in the most rhapsodic of dactyls and anapaests, iambics and trochaics.
I, in my own senescent mellowness, confess to an inordinate and wholly unphilosophic predilection
for tiny coal-black kitties with large yellow eyes, and could no more pass one without petting
him than Dr. Johnson could pass a sidewalk post without striking it. There is, likewise, in
many cats something quite analogous to the reciprocal fondness so loudly extolled in dogs, human
beings, horses, and the like. Cats come to associate certain persons with acts continuously
contributing to their pleasure, and acquire for them a recognition and attachment which manifests
itself in pleasant excitement at their approach—whether or not bearing food and drink—and
a certain pensiveness at their protracted absence. The late “Tat” of Allston and
Malden, grey companion of our fellow-amateur Mrs. Miniter, reached the point of accepting food
from no other hand but hers, and would actually go hungry rather than touch the least morsel
from a kindly Parker source. He also had distinct affections amongst the other cats of that
idyllic household; voluntarily offering food to one of his whiskered friends, whilst disputing
most savagely the least glance which his coal-black rival “Snowball” would bestow
upon his plate. If it be argued that these feline fondnesses are essentially ‘selfish’
and ‘practical’ in their ultimate composition, let us inquire in return how many
human fondnesses, apart from those springing directly upon primitive brute instinct, have any
other basis. After the returning board has brought in the grand total of zero we shall be better
able to refrain from ingenuous censure of the ‘selfish’ cat.

The superior imaginative inner life of the cat, resulting in superior self-possession,
is well known. A dog is a pitiful thing, depending wholly on companionship, and utterly lost
except in packs or by the side of his master. Leave him alone and he does not know what to do
except bark and howl and trot about till sheer exhaustion forces him to sleep. A cat, however,
is never without the potentialities of contentment. Like a superior man, he knows how to be
alone and happy. Once he looks about and finds no one to amuse him, he settles down to the task
of amusing himself; and no one really knows cats without having occasionally peeked stealthily
at some lively and well-balanced kitten which believes itself to be alone. Only after such a
glimpse of unaffected tail-chasing grace and unstudied purring can one fully understand the
charm of those lines which Coleridge wrote with reference to the human rather than the feline
young
“. . . a limber elf, Singing, dancing to
itself.” |
But whole volumes could be written on the playing of cats, since the varieties and aesthetic
aspects of such sportiveness are infinite. Be it sufficient to say that in such pastimes many
cats have exhibited traits and actions which psychologists authentically declare to be motivated
by genuine humour and whimsicality in its purest sense; so that the task of ‘making a
cat laugh’ may not be so impossible a thing even outside the borders of Cheshire. In short,
a dog is an incomplete thing. Like an inferior man, he needs emotional stimuli from outside,
and must set something artificial up as a god and motive. The cat, however, is perfect in himself.
Like the human philosopher, he is a self-sufficient entity and microcosm. He is a real and integrated
being because he thinks and feels himself to be such, whereas the dog can conceive of himself
only in relation to something else. Whip a dog and he licks your hand—faugh! The beast
has no idea of himself except as an inferior part of an organism whereof you are a superior
part—he would no more think of striking back at you than you would think of pounding your
own head when it punishes you with a headache. But whip a cat and watch it glare and move backward
hissing in outraged dignity and self-respect! One more blow, and it strikes you in return; for
it is a gentleman and your equal, and will accept no infringement on its personality and body
of privileges. It is only in your house anyway because it wishes to be, or perhaps even as a
condescending favour to yourself. It is the house, not you, it likes; for philosophers realise
that human beings are at best only minor adjuncts to scenery. Go one step too far, and it leaves
you altogether. You have mistaken your relationship to it and imagined you are its master, and
no real cat can tolerate that breach of good manners. Henceforward it will seek companions of
greater discrimination and clearer perspective. Let anaemic persons who believe in ‘turning
the other cheek’ console themselves with cringing dogs—for the robust pagan with
the blood of Nordic twilights in his veins there is no beast like the cat; intrepid steed of
Freya, who can boldly look even Thor and Odin full in the face and stare contemplatively with
great round eyes of undimmed yellow or green.

And so, Sir (I employ the singular since I cannot imagine that you, O Jacobe
Ferdinande, would have the truly feline cruelty to spring all these ten-plus pages on a deserving
club which has never done you any harm), I believe I have outlined for you with some fulness
the divers reasons why, in my opinion and in the smartly timed title-phrase of Mr. Van Doren,
“gentlemen prefer cats”. The reply of Mr. Terhune in a subsequent issue of the
Tribune appears to me beside the point; insomuch as it is less a refutation of facts than
a mere personal affirmation of the author’s membership in that conventional “very
human” majority who take affection and companionship seriously, enjoy being important
to something alive, measure merit by devotion to human purposes, hate a “parasite”
on mere ethical grounds without consulting the right of beauty to exist for its own sake, and
therefore love man’s noblest and most faithful friend, the perennial dog. I suppose Mr.
Terhune loves horses and babies also, for they go conventionally together in the great hundred-per-center’s
credo as highly essential likings for every good and lovable heman of the Arrow Collar and Harold
Bell Wright hero school, even though the motor car and dear Mrs. Sanger have done much to reduce
the last two items.

Dogs, then, are peasants and the pets of peasants; cats are gentlemen and the
pets of gentlemen. The dog is for him who places crude feeling and outgrown ethics and humanocentricity
above austere and disinterested beauty; who just loves ‘folks and folksiness’ and
doesn’t mind sloppy clumsiness if only something will truly care for him. (Tableau of
dog across master’s grave—cf. Landseer, “The Old Shepherd’s Chief Mourner”.)
The guy who isn’t much for highbrow stuff, but is always on the square and don’t
(sic) often find the Saddypost or the N.Y. World too deep for him; who hadn’t much use
for Valentino, but thinks Doug Fairbanks is just about right for an evening’s entertainment.
Wholesome—constructive—non-morbid—civic-minded—domestic—(I forgot
to mention the radio) normal—that’s the sort of go-getter that had ought to go in
for dogs.

The cat is for the aristocrat—whether by birth or inclinations or both—who
admires his fellow-aristocrats (even if Little Belknap isn’t especially fond of Felis).
He is for the man who appreciates beauty as the one living force in a blind and purposeless
universe, and who worships that beauty in all its forms without regard for the sentimental and
ethical illusions of the moment. For the man who knows the hollowness of feeling and the emptiness
of human objects and aspirations, and who therefore clings solely to what is real—as beauty
is real because it pretends to no significance beyond the emotion which it excites and is. For
the man who feels sufficient in the cosmos, and asks no false perspective of exaltation; who
is moved by no mawkish scruples of conventional prejudice, but loves repose and strength and
freedom and luxury and superiority and sufficiency and contemplation; who as a strong fearless
soul wishes something to respect instead of something to lick his face and accept his alternate
blows and strokings; who seeks a proud and beautiful equal in the peerage of individualism rather
than a cowed and cringing satellite in the hierarchy of fear, subservience, and devotion. The
cat is not for the brisk, self-important little worker with a “mission”, but for
the enlightened dreaming poet who knows that the world contains nothing really worth doing.
The dilettante—the connoisseur—the decadent, if you will, though in a healthier
age than this there were things for such men to do, so that they were the planners and leaders
of those glorious pagan times. The cat is for him who does things not for empty duty but for
power, pleasure, splendour, romance, and glamour—for the harpist who sings alone in the
night of old battles, or the warrior who goes out to fight such battles for beauty, glory, fame,
and the splendour of a kingly court athwart which no shadow of weakness or democracy falls.
For him who will be lulled by no sops of prose and usefulness, but demands for his effort the
ease and beauty and ascendancy and cultivation which alone make effort worth while. For the
man who knows that play, not work, and leisure, not bustle, are the great things of life; and
that the round of striving merely in order to strive some more is a bitter irony of which the
civilised soul accepts as little as it can.

Beauty, sufficiency, ease, and good manners—what more can civilisation
require? We have them all in the divine little monarch who lounges gloriously on his silken
cushion before the hearth. Loveliness and joy for their own sake—pride and harmony and
coördination—spirit, restfulness, and completeness—all here are present, and
need but a sympathetic disillusionment for worship in full measure. What fully civilised soul
but would eagerly serve as high-priest of Bast? The star of the cat, I think, is just now in
the ascendant, as we emerge little by little from the dreams of ethics and democracy which clouded
the nineteenth century and raised the grubbing and unlovely dog to the pinnacle of sentimental
regard. Whether a renaissance of monarchy and beauty will restore our Western civilisation,
or whether the forces of disintegration are already too powerful for even the fascist sentiment
to check, none may yet say; but in the present moment of cynical world-unmasking between the
pretence of the eighteen-hundreds and the ominous mystery of the decades ahead we have at least
a flash of the old pagan perspective and the old pagan clearness and honesty.

And one idol lit up by that flash, seen fair and lovely on a dream-throne of
silk and gold under a chryselephantine dome, is a shape of deathless grace not always given
its due among groping mortals—the haughty, the unconquered, the mysterious, the luxurious,
the Babylonian, the impersonal, the eternal companion of superiority and art—the type
of perfect beauty and the brother of poetry—the bland, grave, competent, and patrician
cat.