To me,unfortunately perhaps (for I speak merely of individual taste),a cat is a wild animal.A cat is Nature personified.Like Nature,it is so mysterious that one cannot quite repose even in its beauty.But like Nature again,it is so beautiful that one cannot believe that it is really cruel.Perhaps it isn't;and there again it is like Nature.Men of old time worshipped cats as they worshipped crocodiles;and those magnificent old mystics knew what they were about.The moment in which one really loves cats is the same as that in which one (moderately and within reason)loves crocodiles.It is that divine instant when a man feels himself--no,not absorbed into the unity of all things (a loathsome fancy)--but delighting in the difference of all things.At the moment when a man really knows he is a man he will feel,however faintly,a kind of fairy-tale pleasure in the fact that a crocodile is a crocodile.All the more will he exult in the things that are more evidently beautiful than crocodiles,such as flowers and birds and eats--which are more beautiful than either.But it does not follow that he will wish to pick all the flowers or to cage all the birds or to own all the cats.
No one who still believes in democracy and the rights of man will admit that any division between men and men can be anything but a fanciful analogy to the division between men and animals.But in the sphere of such fanciful analogy there are even human beings whom I feel to be like eats in this respect:that I can love them without liking them.I feel it about certain quaint and alien societies,especially about the Japanese.The exquisite old Japanese draughtsmanship (of which we shall see no more,now Japan has gone in for Progress and Imperialism)had a quality that was infinitely attractive and intangible.Japanese pictures were really rather like pictures made by cats.They were full of feathery softness and of sudden and spirited scratches.If any one will wander in some gallery fortunate enough to have a fine collection of those slight water-colour sketches on rice paper which come from the remote East,he will observe many elements in them which a fanciful person might consider feline.There is,for instance,that odd enjoyment of the tops of trees;those airy traceries of forks and fading twigs,up to which certainly no artist,but only a cat could climb.There is that elvish love of the full moon,as large and lucid as a Chinese lantern,hung in these tenuous branches.That moon is so large and luminous that one can imagine a hundred cats howling under it.Then there is the exhaustive treatment of the anatomy of birds and fish;subjects in which cats are said to be interested.Then there is the slanting cat-like eye of all these Eastern gods and men--but this is getting altogether too coincident.We shall have another racial theory in no time (beginning "Are the Japs Cats?"),and though I shall not believe in my theory,somebody else might.There are people among my esteemed correspondents who might believe anything.It is enough for me to say here that in this small respect Japs affect me like cats.I mean that I love them.I love their quaint and native poetry,their instinct of easy civilisation,their unique unreplaceable art,the testimony they bear to the bustling,irrepressible activities of nature and man.If I were a real mystic looking down on them from a real mountain,I am sure I should love them more even than the strongwinged and unwearied birds or the fruitful,ever-multiplying fish.But,as for liking them,as one likes a dog--that is quite another matter.That would mean trusting them.
In the old English and Scotch ballads the fairies are regarded very much in the way that I feel inclined to regard Japs and cats.They are not specially spoken of as evil;they are enjoyed as witching and wonderful;but they are not trusted as good.You do not say the wrong words or give the wrong gifts to them;and there is a curious silence about what would happen to you if you did.Now to me,Japan,the Japan of Art,was always a fairyland.What trees as gay as flowers and peaks as white as wedding cakes;what lanterns as large as houses and houses as frail as lanterns!
...but...but...the missionary explained (I read in the paper)that the assertion and denial about the Japanese use of torture was a mere matter of verbal translation."The Japanese would not call twisting the thumbs back 'torture.'"
