Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 235, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 October 1910 — IN PRAISE OF CATS. [ARTICLE]

IN PRAISE OF CATS.

Th* Moat Individual and Belf-Con tained of Animals, It is th* final proof of the civili**tlon of the French that they have learned to understand the cat In no country, since th* dog-loving Greeks overthrew the maturer culture oi Egypt, has she been a popular idol 01 extorted the reverence of crowds. But in France, at least, there is literary testimony in her favor, and the French intellect has bestowed upon the task of comprehending her talent and a devotion which we "have squandered or the horse and dog. Balzac described the passion of one of Napoleon’s veterans in Egypt for a leopardess, with a sureness of insight and a depth bf feeling that proclaim him a devotee of the cat tribe. Gautier has been eloquent and fantastic about the cat. Loti has been tender and graceful, and his essay on the death of an aged cat has a sincerity and truth which are wanting in his sugared writing about Oriental women. A woman must put self aside who loves a .cat; there is in all the range of sentiment no emotion so entirely disinterested. We have before us a small volume of minor verse which carries this distinguished tradition yet a little farther. It Is a eulogy, relieved by humor and marked by what Is rarer still, a nice and accurate study of cats. M. Alfred Ruffin not only loves cats; he loves them for the true reasons. He loves them for their grace and their elegance, reverences their self-sufficiency and their sublimity, accepts their egotism and feels a becoming awe at the concentration of diabolic vigor which can reveal itself, under the stress of passion, in the limbs of a fireside Tom. He sings the mistress whom no praise can corrupt, the friend whose intimacy flatters no human vanity. He paints her amid rare vases and works or art, admiring herself more than any masterpiece. He delights to tell her of ravages among his precious china, and exclaims as he contemplates the sublimity of her indifference. “One might as well accuse the pyramids.” He tells of the mingled prudence and courage with which she meets the perils of a, street where every journey is an anabasis through barbarian lands. He dwells with a sane and restrained tenderness on the rare movements in her relations with her human servants when her tolerance warms into an almost maternal affection. To respect the cat is the beginning of the esthetic sense. At a stage of culture when utility governs all its judgments, mankind prefers the dog. Let it advance to a level at which It can admire an object of beauty with a disinterested passion, and it will venerate this egoist among animals, who suffices for himself. Only in the mouth of the egoist is egoism in others a matter of reproach. To the cultivated mind the cat has the charm of completeness, the satisfaction which makes a sonnet more than an epic, a fugue more than a rhapsody. The ancients figured eternity as a snake biting its own tail. There will yet "arise a philosopher who will conceive the Absolute as a gigantic and self-satisfied cat, purring as it clasps in a comfortable round its own perfections, and uttering as it purrs that line of Edmund Spenser’s about the Cosmos—“lt loved itself, because itself was fair.” There . is, however, deeper reason, why the cat is, in the domestic heirarchy, a relatively unpopular animal. It Is not content to stand afoot from all human activities; it views them with a disquieting disdain. It is the anchorite who makes our luxuries foolish, the anarchist who rebukes our organizations and our polities. The dog, within the limits of his understanding, must share In all we do, scratch when we dig and retriev* when we hunt. When his understanding fails him, he looks at us with a mute appeal for enlightenment, like some Galatea waiting for the breath of life. The (at in the same circumstances stares severely, winks one eye, and goes to sleep. More than the liltes of the field she rebukes us for our care for the morrow. The student Faust in the old engravings had always a human skull among the vain instruments and the barren alembics in his study. A cat blinking at midnight among your papers and books declares with more eloquence than any skull the vanity of knowledge and uselessness of striving. Mohammed, nursing a cat one day, was minded to rise upon some great errand of revelation and conquest. But, man of action though he was, he was oriental enough to value her passivity. He cut off the sleeve of his robe, and left her seated on it There comes to those who love a cat a further questioning, which is the paralysis of all morality. Why, after all, should one rise at all, and what is worth the sacrifice of a sleeve? The cat enjoys the march of seasons, spins through space with the Oars, and shares # in her quietism the inevitable life of the universe. In all our hurrying, can we do more? She sits among creative work, the indolent spectator of our progress, finking at our questions the malicious eyes of a sphinx. And the real secret of the sphinx, one suspects, was that she alone knew that was no riddl* to answer.—London NatloiL

The increase in the value of farm property of $8,000,000,000 between 1900 and 1907 is nearly nine times as great as the aggregate national banking capital of the United States.