Lords of the Housetops: Thirteen Cat Tales

Коллектив авторов

Various

Lords of the Housetops: Thirteen Cat Tales

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due to the following authors and publishers for permission to use the stories contained in this book:

Harper and Brothers and Mrs. Mary E. Wilkins Freeman for The Cat, from Understudies (copyright 1901 by Harper and Brothers).

Houghton Mifflin Co., for Zut, from Zut and Other Parisians (copyright 1903 by Guy Wetmore Carryl).

E. P. Dutton and Co., for A Psychical Invasion, from John Silence.

Doubleday, Page and Co., and Booth Tarkington for Gipsy, from Penrod and Sam (copyright 1916 by Doubleday, Page and Co.).

Harper and Brothers and the Mark Twain Estate for Dick Baker's Cat, from Roughing It (copyright 1871-1899 by the American Publishing Co.; copyright 1899 by Samuel L. Clemens; copyright 1913 by Clara Gabrilowitsch).

Harper and Brothers for Madame JolicЕ“ur's Cat, from From the South of France (copyright 1912 by Harper and Brothers).

George H. Doran Co., for A Friendly Rat, from The Book of a Naturalist (copyright 1919 by the George H. Doran Co.).

The Four Seas Co., and Peggy Bacon for The Queen's Cat, from The True Philosopher (copyright 1919 by the Four Seas Co.).

Houghton Mifflin Co., for Calvin, from My Summer in a Garden (copyright 1870 by Fields, Osgood and Co.; copyright 1898 by Charles Dudley Warner; copyright 1912 by Susan Lee Warner).

PREFACE

In the essay and especially in poetry the cat has become a favourite subject, but in fiction it must be admitted that he lags considerably behind the dog. The reasons for this apparently arbitrary preference on the part of authors are perfectly easy to explain. The instinctive acts of the dog, who is a company-loving brute, are very human; his psychology on occasion is almost human. He often behaves as a man would behave. It is therefore a comparatively simple matter to insert a dog into a story about men, for he can often carry it along after the fashion of a human character.

But, as Andrew Lang has so well observed, literature can never take a thing simply for what it is worth. "The plain-dealing dog must be distinctly bored by the ever-growing obligation to live up to the anecdotes of him… These anecdotes are not told for his sake; they are told to save the self-respect of people who want an idol, and who are distorting him into a figure of pure convention for their domestic altars. He is now expected to discriminate between relations and mere friends of the house; to wag his tail at God Save the Queen; to count up to five in chips of fire-wood, and to seven in mutton bones; to howl for all deaths in the family above the degree of second cousin; to post letters, and refuse them when they have been insufficiently stamped; and last, and most intolerable, to show a tender solicitude when tabby is out of sorts." The dog, indeed, for the most part, has become as sentimental and conventional a figure in current fiction as the ghost who haunts the ouija board or the idealistic soldier returned from the wars to reconstruct his own country.

Now the cat, independent, liberty-loving, graceful, strong, resourceful, dignified, and self-respecting, has a psychology essentially feline, which has few points of contact with human psychology. The cat does not rescue babies from drowning or say his prayers in real life; consequently any attempt to make him do so in fiction would be ridiculous. He has, to be sure, his own virtues. To me these are considerably greater than those of any other animal. But the fact remains that the satisfactory treatment of the cat in fiction requires not only a deep knowledge of but also a deep affection for the sphinx of the fireside. Even then the difficulties can only be met in part, for the novelist must devise a situation in which human and feline psychology can be merged. The Egyptians probably could have written good cat stories. Perhaps they did. I sometimes ponder over the possibility of a cat room having been destroyed in the celebrated holocaust of Alexandria. The folk a