Littell's Living Age/Volume 137/Issue 1767/The Domestic Sphinx

From The Spectator.

THE DOMESTIC SPHINX

Compared to a cat, a dog is a very simple and transparent creature. Sometimes, indeed, he is guilty of acts of deception and hypocrisy, but they are crude and ingenuous compared to the unfathomable wiles of a cat. Mr. North's dog, for instance, who ate the pigeon out of the pie and stuffed up the hole with Mr. North’s ink-sponge, was not an adept in the art of theft; and a fox-terrier with whom the present writer enjoys the intimacy of a common household has disgraced herself this last week by what was, to all intents and purposes, a lie, when a little more astuteness would have shown her the futility of falsehood, in the face of an alibi. She had been tearing up paper and strewing it about the floor, with fine literary freedom, when the servant whose duty it was to clean the carpet asked her, with magisterial severity, "Who tore those letters? " The culprit looked at first terribly abashed, and hung her head and tail in expectation of chastisement, till her mistress, as a trial, observed, "I wonder did Gyp do it?" (Gyp being the offender's usual companion and fellow-sinner, but as it chanced, two hundred miles off at the moment.) Instantly the perfidious little wretch perceived a way of escape from the penalty of her own misdeeds, by throwing the blame on her friend, and looking up briskly, shook her tail frantically, and almost nodded, "You are right. It was that wicked Gyp! As for me, I am quite incapable of touching a piece of paper."

It is as useless for a dog to attempt these deceptions as for a good honest Englishman to profit by the counsels of Macchiavelli. But the case is quite different with a cat. She is a domestic sphinx, — whose countenance is solemn as that of her stony prototype who has gazed for sixty centuries over the field of death at Ghiza, and whose tail is not, as George Eliot describes the tail of a dog, a "vehicle for the emotions," and never betrays her, except in the case of leonine rage. No philosopher, we are persuaded, ever yet got to the bottom of a cat's mind. She is a bête incomprise, for good and for evil. No one fathoms her implacable resentments, her deep, unspoken suspicions of her enemies, or her unalterable confidence and gratitude towards her friends. Few people attempt to study her; she is rarely even given a name (unless it be the banale and meaningless everlasting "Minnie"), but is spoken of, like a poor workhouse orphan by her surname, as "the cat," — or in the vocative, "Puss," — and treated a little better by one, a little worse by another, but rarely watched with any attention or sympathy, such as many of us bestow on our dogs. Yet there must be something really profound in a cat's feelings, since there are numberless instances on record where they have perished and died for grief at the loss of their masters or mistresses; and the following, which occurred last week, affords touching proof of a sentiment still more rare in any animal, — pure friendship. A correspondent writes to us:

Colonel C———'s little black-and-tan pet dog "Flo" died last Monday morning about three o'clock. He had had her many years, and she had long had an internal complaint. She was a dear, little, affectionate, intelligent creature, and had always been treated as kindly as a child. He buried her in his garden, and over her little grave his housekeeper's children shed many tears. Yesterday I heard from him as follows: "Another of my domestic pets was an old black cat, which came to me a kitten years ago, a few weeks before I brought 'Flo' from Oxford. They grew up together, and were very fond of each other, eating from the same plate and drinking from the same glass. I have often seen them stand side by side before my fire, and occasionally put their mouths together, as though they were absolutely kissing. Well, the poor old cat seemed very miserable all day yesterday (that is, Monday, the day on which 'Flo' had died early in the morning), and we could not induce her to eat. She could not be found last night when the house was closed, but as this occasionally happened, not much was thought of it. This morning she was found stiff and cold, stretched out by the side of 'Flo's' grave! I could not have believed it, if I had not seen it with my own eyes. Whether it is only a coincidence, I will not pretend to say, but I would rather believe that the poor animal died from grief at the loss of her old friend. But if so, how did she know that 'Flo' was dead? Such a fact as this leads to strange thoughts, or what would be called strange, by those who can see in these creatures 'only a dog' or 'only a cat.'"

When we reflect on the amount of thought and tenderness of sentiment which this story reveals, does it not seem as if, in our usual treatment of cats, we must be stupidly ignoring something very wonderful and beautiful, close beside us all day long? A more painful impression is the remembrance that on creatures like this have been heaped for ages back every sort of cruel treatment by thoughtless people, — by brutal boys, or wretches like the one convicted last week of skinning a cat alive; and, last and worst of all, by vivisectors, of whom one in London avowed to the Royal Commission that he had destroyed ninety poor animals in one series of painful experiments. Mere carelessness causes annually at the end of every London season the misery of multitudes of cats, left to starve when the owners of their homes go out of town. As a cat has proverbially "nine lives," and survives the most terrible hardships, the sufferings of many of them from this cause must be shockingly prolonged. A friend has described to us the case of a poor puss, which, in its starvation, poked its head through the bars of a cellar window, and being unable to withdraw it, remained in the trap for many days and nights, of course without food or water. At last somebody took heed of its moans, and a blacksmith was sent for to loosen the bars. The cat obviously comprehended perfectly what was being done for her release, and when at last set free, literally leaped on the neck of a friendly cook, and expressed her gratitude and joy by such demonstrations as fairly drew tears from the witnesses of the little scene.

A century or two ago, the destiny of cats — especially of black ones, or of such as belonged to poor lonely old women who could possibly be suspected of witchcraft — was wretched and perilous indeed. No notion of mercy towards them seems to have occurred to anybody, even to men exercising judicial functions. We read that a woman was burnt alive in France for murdering some babies, and the mode of the execution was that she was put in a cage with fourteen cats over a fire, so that the animals in their agony should tear her while burning. Another story equally horrible appears, without a word of comment or reprobation, in a familiar letter of just two hundred years ago, in the Hatton correspondence. The writer describes a pageant of the period, performed in London in commemoration of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth. "There were," he says, "mighty bonfires, and the burning of a most costly pope, carried by four persons, and the effigies of two 'divells.'" The interior of the "pope" was filled with live cats, who "squalled most hideously as soon as they felt the fire," the people making the joke that it was the language of the pope and the devils!

Such were the amusements of that age to which a great living man of science looks back with sighs of regret, because people were not so "softly nurtured" then as we are now; and Queen Victoria only sends for artists to paint her animals,—unlike her predecessor, James I., who sent for physiologists to cut them up alive.