Lovecraft, H P - Cats And Dogs

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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

Cats And Dogs

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

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摘要：

CatsAndDogsCatsAndDogsbyH.P.LovecraftWrittenNovember23,1926PublishedinSomethingAboutCatsandOtherPieces,ArkhamHouse,1949Beingtoldofthecat-and-dogfightabouttooccurinyourliteraryclub,IcannotresistcontributingafewThomasticyowlsandsibilantsuponmysideofthedispute,thoughconsciousthatthewordofavenerableex-m...

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