This Simian World | Page 5

horses, tearing pell-mell through the
woods in gay red coats, attended by yelping packs of servant-dogs. It is
excellent sport--but how cats would scorn to hunt in that way!
They would not have knighted explorers--they would have all been
explorers.
Imagine that you are strolling through a super-cat city at night. Over

yonder is the business quarter, its evening shops blazing with jewels.
The great stock-yards lie to the east where you hear those sad sounds:
that twittering as of innumerable birds, waiting slaughter. Beyond lie
the silent aquariums and the crates of fresh mice. (They raise mice
instead of hens in the country, in Super-cat Land.) To the west is a
beautiful but weirdly bacchanalian park, with long groves of catnip,
where young super-cats have their fling, and where a few crazed catnip
addicts live on till they die, unable to break off their strangely
undignified orgies. And here where you stand is the sumptuous
residence district. Houses with spacious grounds everywhere: no
densely-packed buildings. The streets have been swept up--or lapped
up--until they are spotless. Not a scrap of paper is lying around
anywhere: no rubbish, no dust. Few of the pavements are left bare, as
ours are, and those few are polished: the rest have deep soft velvet
carpets. No footfalls are heard.
There are no lights in these streets, though these people are abroad
much at night. All you see are stars overhead and the glowing eyes of
cat ladies, of lithe silken ladies who pass you, or of stiff-whiskered men.
Beware of those men and the gleam of the split-pupiled stare. They are
haughty, punctilious, inflammable: self-absorbed too, however. They
will probably not even notice you; but if they do, you are lost. They
take offense in a flash, abhor strangers, despise hospitality, and would
think nothing of killing you or me on their way home to dinner.
Follow one of them. Enter this house. Ah what splendor! No servants,
though a few abject .monkeys wait at the back-doors, and submissively
run little errands. But of course they are never let inside: they would
seem out of place. Gorgeous couches, rich colors, silken walls, an
oriental magnificence. In here is the ballroom. But wait: what is this in
the corner? A large triumphal statue--of a cat overcoming a dog. And
look at this dining-room, its exquisite appointments, its--daintiness:
faucets for hot and cold milk in the pantry, and a gold bowl of cream.
Some one is entering. Hush! If I could but describe her! Languorous,
slender and passionate. Sleepy eyes that see everything. An indolent
purposeful step. An unimaginable grace. If you were /her/ lover, my
boy, you would learn how fierce love can be, how capricious and
sudden, how hostile, how ecstatic, how violent!
Think what the state of the arts would have been in such cities.

They would have had few comedies on their stage; no farces. Cats care
little for fun. In the circus, superlative acrobats. No clowns.
In drama and singing they would have surpassed us probably. Even in
the state of arrested development as mere animals, in which we see cats,
they wail with a passionate intensity at night in our yards. Imagine how
a Caruso descended from such beings would sing.
In literature they would not have begged for happy endings.
They would have been personally more self-assured than we, far freer
of cheap imitativeness of each other in manners and art, and hence
more original in art; more clearly aware of what they really desired; not
cringingly watchful of what was expected of them; less widely
observant perhaps, more deeply thoughtful.
Their artists would have produced less however, even though they felt
more. A super-cat artist would have valued the pictures he drew for
their effects on himself; he wouldn't have cared a rap whether anyone
else saw them or not. He would not have bothered, usually, to give any
form to his conceptions. Simply to have had the sensation would have
for him been enough. But since simians love to be noticed, it does not
content them to have a conception; they must wrestle with it until it
takes a form in which others can see it. They doom the artistic impulse
to toil with its nose to the grindstone, until their idea is expressed in a
book or a statue. Are they right? I have doubts. The artistic impulse
seems not to wish to produce finished work. It certainly deserts us
half-way, after the idea is born; and if we go on, art is labor. With the
cats, art is joy.
But the dominant characteristic of this fine race is cunning. And hence I
think it would have been through their craftiness, chiefly, that they
would have felt the impulse to study, and the wish to advance. Craft