The Soul of a Cat, and Other Stories

by Margaret Benson

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.”