III
“But when she came back the dog was laughing.”
Counterbalancing the rudimentary powers of æsthetic pleasure in the cat, we find in the dog a more facile intelligence, and a far more adaptable nature. Some boast that they have taught tricks to a cat; but the fact shows not so much that the cat was intelligent and docile as that its owners were; for their ability has been usually to seize on some natural movement of the cat, in jumping or in sitting up, and gradually to induce the animal to exaggerate it. But the tricks we teach a dog are against his nature, and it needs not only intelligence but docility to take a savoury bite and abstain from swallowing until the precisely right word is pronounced.
A cat walks about with a great purpose dimly imagined in its brain, but a dog plans; he is “the low man adding one to one,” but his sums are the most correct, for he is of a practical nature. He does not have to pretend that a stick is alive before he can glean pleasure from playing with it.
How far a dog, or indeed how far any animal is capable of using an instrument for effecting its purposes is an undecided question; but I have heard on near authority of a dog scraping a mat up against a swing door through which he had to pass so that the door was kept open. To use an instrument involves a complicated mental process, in which not only association but reflection on the nature of the thing is required. Taffy associated his muzzle with his walk, and fetched it with pleasure when the association was established; but reflection did not sufficiently come into the process to prevent him from fetching a clothes brush or a Bible instead if convenient.
One clear point of superiority in the dog is his rudimentary sense of humour. Almost any good-tempered dog, when well treated, will try from time to time to laugh off a scolding. If he is encouraged, the fooling is repeated again and again with growing exaggeration as he rolls over with wide mouth and absurd contortions, or flies at one’s face to lick it. He appreciates humour in others at his own expense, a thing which not every human being is capable of doing; if he is teased laughingly, he too will play the fool; if he is teased cruelly he is cross or wretched. No dog likes one to blow in his face or ear, but Taffy, though not wholly good-tempered, will allow the bellows to be placed even in his mouth if he is assured that it is a game. When the puff of air comes he darts up, jumps at and licks the person who is teasing him, and barks with a wagging tail. If he is really bored or tired he licks the nozzle of the bellows, or the hand that holds them, deprecatingly; he declines the game, but in perfect good humour.
Now a cat has no sense of humour at all. Its very comedies are serious; and to tease it is to outrage its dignity. The better bred a cat is the more easily it takes offence. But after all the “sense of the ridiculous” is a gross quality, and the humour of one age or of one class seems vulgarity to another a little in advance. A cat is never vulgar.