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sake, and therefore love man's noblest and most faithful friend, the perennial dog. I suppose Mr. Terhune loves horses and babies also, for the three go conventionally together in the great hundred-per-center's credo as highly essential likings for every good and lovable he-man of the Arrow Collar and Harold Bell Wright hero school, even though the automobile and Margaret Sanger have done much to reduce the last two items. Dogs, then, are peasants and the pets of peasants, cats are gentlemen and the pets of gentlemen. The dog is for him who places crude feeling and outgrown ethic and humanocentricity above austere and disinterested beauty; who just loves "folks and folksiness" and doesn't mind sloppy clumsiness if only something will truly care for him. (Tableau of dog across master's grave -- cf. Lanseer, "The Old Shepherd's Chief Mourner.") The guy who isn't much for highbrow stuff, but is always on the square and don't (sic) often find the Saddypost or the N.Y. World too deep for him; who hadn't much use for Valentino, but thinks Doug Fairbanks is just about right for an evening's entertainment. Wholesome -- constructive -- non-morbid -- civic-minded -- domestic -- (I forgot to mention the radio) normal -- that's the sort of go-getter that ought to go in for dogs. The cat is for the aristocrat -- whether by birth or inclinations or both - who admires his fellow-aristocrats. He is for the man who appreciates beauty as the one living force in a blind and purposeless universe, and who worships that beauty in all its forms without regard for the sentimental and ethical illusions of the moment. For the man who knows the hollowness of feeling and the emptiness of human objects and aspirations, and who therefore clings solely to what is real -- as beauty is real because it pretends to a file:///C|/WINDOWS/Desktop/Cats%20And%20Dogs%20by%20H_%20P_%20Lovecraft.htm (8 of 9) [12-4-02 16:43:41] Cats And Dogs by H. P. Lovecraft significance beyond the emotion which it excites and is. For the man who feels sufficient in the cosmos, and asks no scruples of conventional prejudice, but loves repose and strength and freedom and luxury and sufficiency and contemplation; who as a strong fearless soul wishes something to respect instead of something to lick his face and accept his alternate blows and strokings; who seeks a proud and beautiful equal in the peerage of individualism rather than a cowed and cringing satellite in the hierarchy of fear, subservience, and devolution. The cat is not for the brisk, self-important little worker with a mission, but for the enlightened dreaming poet who knows that the world contains nothing really worth doing. The dilettante -- the connoisseur -- the decadent, if you will, though in a healthier age than this there were things for such men to do, so that they were the planners and leader of those glorious pagan times. The cat is for him who does things not for empty duty but for power, pleasure, splendour, romance, and glamour -- for the harpist who sings alone in the night of old battles, or the warrior who goes out to fight such battles for beauty, glory, fame and the splendour of a land athwart which no shadow of weakness falls. For him who will be lulled by no sops of prose and usefulness, but demands for his comfort the ease and beauty and ascendancy and cultivation which make effort worth while. For the man who knows that play, not work, and leisure, not bustle, are the great things of life; and that the round of striving merely in order to strive some more is a bitter irony of which the civilised soul accepts as little as it can. Beauty, sufficiency, ease, and good manners -- what more can civilisation require? We have them all in the divine monarch who lounges gloriously on his silken cushion before the hearth. Loveliness and joy for their own sake -- pride and harmony and coordination -- spirit, restfulness and completeness -- all here are present, and need but a sympathetic disillusionment for worship in full measure. What fully civilised soul but would eagerly serve as high priest of Bast? The star of the cat, I think, is just now in the ascendant, as we emerge little by little from the dreams of ethics and conformity which clouded the nineteenth century and raised the grubbing and unlovely dog to the pinnacle of sentimental regard. Whether a renaissance of power and beauty will restore our Western civilisation, or whether the forces of disintegration are already too powerful for any hand to check, none may yet say, but in the present moment of cynical world- unmasking between the pretence of the eighteen-hundreds and the ominous mystery of the decades ahead we have at least a flash of the old pagan perspective and the old pagan clearness and honesty. And one idol lit up by that flash, seen fair and lovely on a dream-throne of silk and gold under a chryselephantine dome, is a shape of deathless grace not always given its due among groping mortals -- the haughty, the unconquered, the mysterious, the luxurious, the Babylonian, the impersonal, the eternal companion of superiority and art -- the type of perfect beauty and the brother of poetry -- the bland, grave, compliant, and patrician cat. file:///C|/WINDOWS/Desktop/Cats%20And%20Dogs%20by%20H_%20P_%20Lovecraft.htm (9 of 9) [12-4-02 16:43:41] [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |