Lovecraft On Cats
I’ve been rereading H. P. Lovecraft’s stories recently, because they’re entertainingly detached from reality, and also because I discovered that he is now freely available in .txt format so I can read him on my phone, in the dark, for added spookiness. Whilst digging for background I found his essay on Cats and Dogs, which is new to me, and made me giggle. He comes down firmly on the side of the peerless and softly gliding cat, which performs its mysterious orbit with the relentless and obtrusive certainty of a planet in infinity,
as you would expect from someone who created a Gothic fantasy centered on avenging the killing of a kitten, and who wrote his own mog into one of his best stories. Like most ailurophiles, he doesn’t limit himself to disparaging dogs, but gleefully lays into their masters at the earliest opportunity:
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.
This sort of thing is, of course, very entertaining to all right-thinking, cat-loving types, but it’s not why this essay really jumped out at me; I was far more intrigued to see Lovecraft having a bit of an uncharacteristic laugh. Loads of other people have used his style for a gag, but it’s a revelation to see old Howard Phillips himself using his own brand of overwrought hyperbole for comic effect. I never suspected that the poker-faced creator of all those pandimensional horrors actually had a sense of humour.
…in the great symmetries of organic life dogs fall in with slovenly wolves and foxes and jackals and coyotes and dingoes and painted hyaenas, whilst cats walk proudly with the jungle’s lords, and own the haughty lion, the sinuous leopard, the regal tiger, and the shapely panther and jaguar as their kin. Dogs are the hieroglyphs of blind emotion, inferiority, servile attachment, and gregariousness — the attributes of commonplace, stupidly passionate, and intellectually and imaginatively underdeveloped men. Cats are the runes of beauty, invincibility, wonder, pride, freedom, coldness, self-sufficiency, and dainty individuality…
He subsequently wanders off into unfortunate ramblings about Nietzsche and supermen, which aren’t so funny to people reading any time after 1945 or so. You have to bear in mind that this was written before all those dreadful Nazis came along and acted on the sort of unpleasant nonsense that habitual racists like Lovecraft believed in a sort of inert, abstract way, with no thought for logical consequences. It makes one pause when reading his concluding remarks:
Beauty, sufficiency, ease, and good manners — what more can civilisation require?
Indeed. Eighty-one years on, civilisation still has very little of each of the cat’s four virtues to offer to most people.