Cats And Dogs.doc

Cats And Dogs

by H. P. Lovecraft

Written November 23, 1926

Published in Something About Cats and Other Pieces, Arkham House, 1949

Being told of the cat-and-dog fight about to occur in your literary club, I

cannot resist contributing a few Thomastic 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, a valued

correspondent has supplied me with the records of a similar controversy in the

New York Tribune, in which Mr. Carl van Doran 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 my friend, 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, tradesmen, 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

favorite of superficial, sentimental, and emotional 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 elements 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.

Cat-lovers 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 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,

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

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 groveling 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 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 unshackled 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 the 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 obtrusive 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, uniformed 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

underdeveloped 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 built 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 the dominant and enlightened peoples. When, however, we come

to the groveling 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 shown 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 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 stumbles

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 someone 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 self 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 its 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 gives

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 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

astonished 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 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 a 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 than the mildly spiteful and innocuously

sly female gossip and commentator, the words "dog" and "cur" have always been

linked with vileness, dishonor, 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 preeminent. Mr. Carl Van Vechten, in

"Peter Whiffle," holds up the timeless restfulness of the cat as a model for

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 this with the

inept panting, wheezing, fumbling, drooling, scratching, and general clumsiness

of the average dog with his false and wasted motions. And in the details 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 whimsical on the table

where you are writing to play with your pen in modulated, seriocomic 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 favorites

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 of "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 Tibet

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 "Billikin" or "Krazy Kat" order found in the "dens" and "cosy

corners" of the would-be-sophisticated 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 the 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

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