CATS AND CIVILIZATION. D R. ROLLESTON, of Oxford, one of the
most eminent physiologists of the day, tells us in the first number of the new series of the Journal of Anatomy and Physiology that the Cat, though domesticated in Egypt, was never tamed by the Romans, who used the white-breasted marten (mustela foina) for the same sort of purposes, mousing and rat-devouring, for which we use the cat. Egypt, indeed, had made the cat her own, and something more, for she mingled mysticism with her regard, and gave it altars as well as milk. But Rome, who extended her rule so far and wide over barbarians of Scythia and barbarians of Britain, who civilized so many races with her grave and patient justice, never civilized the cat. The cat remained to the Romans, says Dr. Rolleston, the thief of the poultry yard, but never became the humble dependent of the house. In the ancient world it needed the more feline nature of Orientals to appreciate fully its grace and its repose, its strictly limited ferocity of nature developed. only towards inferiors, the complete union of its capacities for. domestic quiet and useful carnivorous energy, its art of sleepily ignoring man and yet utterly depending on him, its utter want of restless anxiety concerning human affairs, its lazy vigilance for meals, and finally, its Buddhist thirst for Nigban (or Nirvana) —absorption in absolute vacuity of mind—when not under the dominion of any appetite. This was not the kind of creature over whom Romans were likely to exercise sway. They could not rule the cat by any sense of justice. Indeed, it is something of a surprise to us to find that even the white-breasted marten or weasel was sufficiently open to the sense of law to have been in any degree domesticated by that national genius for military and judicial government. Perhaps it was the invading spirit of the white-breasted marten which succumbed to the Roman genius of conquest. Dr. Rolleston tells us that the marten, which, like a recent parliamentary party, was strictly troglodyte, destroyed its enemies by following them into their holes, not by catching them when outside. This must have been the quality which endeared to it the Roman rule, and made the martens submit to the domestic yoke of a people so successful in pierc- ing in similar operations the wildest retreats of its mountain enemies. The cat, though aggressive on its peculiar prey, does not possess the genius for territorial invasion, and would no therefore have been likely to have been drawn towards the Romans, like the weasel, by this peculiar genius of his. The cat lurks in ambush, where the weasel invades, and the former was never a favourite Roman manoeuvre. It is not perhaps, then, so surprising that the cat had to wait its time for being taken up into the essence of European civilization, till the European genius became modified to some extent by the more subtle spirit of the East. It was in Constantinople,—the very nearest point to Asia,—if we understand Dr. Rolleston aright, that the cat first made her appearance as a domestic animal. She seems to have passed into the domestic life of Europe soon after the first General Council, and from Con- stantinople to have moved westward. Her approach was every- where welcome, for, as she had gained apotheosis in Egypt by protecting the grain harvests of the Nile from the marauding rats and mice, so in Europe she has been able to keep down these hungry creatures quite as successfully as the weasel, and to adapt herself more completely to human habits and to local attachments as well. Dr. Rolleston points out that cats, besides being gentler, and cleaner, are less " plastic " in their habits than weasels,—less disposed, that is, to run wild, and in many climates even incapable of supporting themselves by their own wits in the wilderness in the absence of man ;—in other words, while the presence of man is not necessary to the weasel, but only the weasel (in the absence of the cat) to man, the tie between the cat and man is a double one, he being as important to her as she to him.
And this it is which. determines the relation of cats to our domestic life. They are not allies and companions, like dogs. They make no attempt to take a part in human affairs, as dogs do. They undertake no responsibilities of guarding the houses, or pro- tecting the persons, or joining in the sports of man. They will not disturb themselves if burglars break into the dwelling, or if violence assaults their protectors. They are not conservatives, like dogs, curious of suspicious characters, furious against un- invited strangers. Nor are they liberals like dogs, in the welcome they give to change, and the joy with which they transfer them- selves to fresh fields and pastures new. Like Gallio, they care for none of these things. These things they regard as concerning men, and as being " matters of their law," into which they have not even the curiosity to inquire. They are bound to men only as birds are bound to the forest, as affording the conditions under which they can most conveniently live, not as having sympathies with them, but as providing the warm nooks, the scraps of food, and the moral influence by which they are saved from want and protected from their natural enemies. They probably have no idea that they are valued for their propensity to slay and scatter mice, and imagine that they are only superfluously indulging the bent of a native genius for " natural selection," when they are really performing the one function for which they are treasured by thrifty housekeepers, and for which they receive the " grant-in- aid " of a milky " payment by results." They are as unconscious as Mr. Carlyle could wish men to be of their one genius and merit as attendants on our domestic civilization. You will see dogs full of pride at the accomplishment of their little tasks, and looking up to men for recognition. But there is nothing of this about the cat. She is as innocent of merit as if she had been brought up a Calvinist. If she catches a mouse she is excited, but not proud. She looks for no praise, her carnivorous instinct is its own reward. She will, indeed, often attach herself to individuals, and in that case greatly enjoys being fondled, but this is rather due to the keen appreciation of protec- tion and patronage, and the tokens thereof, than to purely personal preferences. This only specimen of a domestic beast of prey (or at least the only one domesticated exactly because it is a beast of prey), and yet always accounted more domestic, and indeed more closely associated locally with home than the dog which is not a beast of prey, seems entirely unaware of what Dr. Rolleston calls her "functional" relation to man. She may dimly know that she needs him, but has no idea that he needs her, and hence, no doubt, the complete abandon and restfulness of her domestic character. The dog is always straining upwards. He feels the electric power of human influence. His duties to manward are duties of moral selection, of true loyalty, and of fierce antagonism. But the cat is a pure creature of natural selection. She is selected by man for encouragement, because the mice are selected by her for destruction.
One great interest of the Cat considered in relation to the philo- sophy of civilization, is the entire failure of Mr. Buckle's law to ac- count for her semi-civilization. Mr. Buckle held, we know, that the accumulation of new knowledge was the one sole' cause of civi- lization,—that civilization goes on pani passu with the accumulation of knowledge. And this theory might fairly be supposed to apply to the civilization of the dog, the lorse, and even, perhaps, the parrot. There is no doubt that what these creatures learn from man is, in some measure, at least, the cause of their milder nature. A dog is always high or low in the scale of moral affections in some pro- portion—we will not say in exact proportion—to its intelligent curiosity and interest in affairs. But none of the three species are beasts of prey, as the cat in its wild state is. And she, we may fairly say, has intellectually learned absolutely nothing from man. She is a far keener and more acute being when out on the trail of a bird than when most domestic in her mood. She changes her whole mental attitude, when on an expedition, to one of superior alert- ness, as much as the wild Indian who was sunk in plethoric sleep for days previous does when he puts on his war paint, and stealthily returns to the trail of his enemy. The cat which you see with ears erect stealing through the shrubbery is quite a different being from the one attaining "Nigban " in her mistress's lap, or on the hearthrug before the fire. And yet civilization does graft something upon her which is worth more than her savage acute- ness, though it is not new knowledge. It is the need of a higher companionship of some sort, though she spends most of her time no more aware of that companionship than she can be in a dreamless sleep :—for the cat never dreams as the dog does. However indigestible she may find her food, you never hear her growl, or start, or cry in her sleep, as the dog does when his dreams present imaginary enemies. And yet she is sensible of the pleasure of companionship even in sleep, and a civilized cat,—a cat of any high breed,—will usually prefer to slumber in the room with her personal friends to slumbering in loneliness. We know a cat which, confined for functional' purposes to the stable and the loft over it, always comes to sleep on the back of the pony, which the pony evidently approves of, as giving him also a sense -of the sublime feeling of protection, indeed, as directly inverting the feeling which he has with a rider on his back, and substituting for it one of positive patronage. There is no doubt that what civilizes the cat is not in the least any intellectual influence exercised over her by man, for, on the contrary, his presence half extinguishes the little intellect she has, but is, on the contrary, a dumb, pleasurable sense of companionship with a creature who is her superior. The place of her half extinguished instincts as a beast of prey, is supplied by a graft of an almost equally instinctive and entirely torpid pleasure in the protection of superiors. And yet it is not to the species man, but to the individuals that she feels thus. ' There is no creature which less likes strangers than the cat. She objects, perhaps, to the disturb- ing magnetic influences they introduce with them. While the dog first barks at and then welcomes them, stretching out quite cordially the right hand of fellowship, as clearly understanding that his master approves,—and while the parrot falls into a silent fit, and studies, in order to reproduce them,—the cat simply absents herself, if she be a cat of the less intensely sopo- rific and apoplectic sort. She regards strangers, as Turks and other Orientals are said to regard Englishmen, and as scientific men regard miracles, as disturbances of the order of Nature, who should be jealously distrusted. The civilization of the cat is purely customary and habitual; the dog's in many respects one of activity, and even sharpened by competition. In their dependent relation to man they differ as much as the Conservative idea of what the masses ought to be, differs from the Radical idea. Mr. Disraeli says he is for ' popular privileges' as against ' democratic rights.' That expresses very well the relation of the cat to those who feed her, as contrasted with that of the dog. At the accustomed meal time she will rush in with a cry almost of nervous agony lest the proper moment be gone by. She is importunate to the last degree till her customary claim has been satisfied, but then she never encroaches. She has claimed her tribute of popular privi- leges ; she never goes on to exaggerate them into democratic rights. The dog, on the other hand, who is more radical and active, never fails to espy a new corner for possible encroachment, and unless morally taught to restrain himself, never loses sight of an oppos- tuuity where he can practise upon the observed weakness of his protectors. Mr. Mill says that wages are determined by competi- tion and by custom. This is true of the wages of the dog as well as of the man, but the cat's are determined solely by custom. She never competes.
The interest of the cat's civilization is, then, the curiously pillowy inertness of her higher and engrafted nature. It is like her fur and velvet paws in relation to the carnivorous cravings and sharp claws which these conceal,—like the purr with which she announces her satisfaction in relation to the mew with which she proclaims her wants. The higher element in her is a mere recep- tivity for higher companionship,—an unconscious, inarticulate pleasure in the presence and protection of a higher creature, which, so far from 'educating' her, only blunts the edge of her carnivorous acuteness. Civilization with her is not the eliciting of new ideas, but a certain sedative administered to old ones by the partial paci- fication of her savage characteristics, and the growth of a new and higher class of composing associations. Civilization is almost to the cat what wealth and reputation are to the brutal side of English nature,—a soft stuffing outside the sharp, sangninaiypassions, which, instead of increasing, rather deadens the keenness of the intellec- tual nature. Only, being a personal influence, and not an ignoble one, it is, perhaps, better in its kind than the soft, stuffy influence of mere opulence. It is enough, however, if the cat teaches us, as she certainly does, that civilization is by no means a process aris- ing in the growth of knowledge and the accumulation of intellec- tual laws,—that it may be subserved up to • a certain point, at least, by influences which operate chiefly as smothering and blunting the raw material of the original passions, rather than as educating and enlightening the nature which owns them.
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