But the real region of æsthetic pleasure for a cat is the region of smell. The dog uses smell as a medium of information; the cat revels in it. The dog smells the ground to trace friend or foe, food or prey, but the cat will linger near a tree-trunk, smelling each separate aromatic leaf. If the window of a close room is opened the cat goes to it, and puts her head out to sniff the air; she will smell the dress of a friend, partly for recognition no doubt, but apparently partly for pleasure also. An aromatic smell is pleasant; a strong spirituous smell not only disagreeable but absolutely painful. Lavender water or eau-de-cologne may please a tiger but will put a cat to flight.
The cat’s drama is a drama of the twilight, when the earth refreshed gives up her secret, subtle scents. It is not to be played in broad daylight; it is a mystery play of things half revealed, subtly transformed, hardly understood, secretly suggestive.
“_But when she came back the dog was laughing._”
Counterbalancing the rudimentary powers of æsthetic pleasure in the cat, we find in the dog a more facile intelligence, and a far more adaptable nature. Some boast that they have taught tricks to a cat; but the fact shows not so much that the cat was intelligent and docile as that its owners were; for their ability has been usually to seize on some natural movement of the cat, in jumping or in sitting up, and gradually to induce the animal to exaggerate it. But the tricks we teach a dog are against his nature, and it needs not only intelligence but docility to take a savoury bite and abstain from swallowing until the precisely right word is pronounced.
A cat walks about with a great purpose dimly imagined in its brain, but a dog plans; he is “the low man adding one to one,” but his sums are the most correct, for he is of a practical nature. He does not have to pretend that a stick is alive before he can glean pleasure from playing with it.
How far a dog, or indeed how far any animal is capable of using an instrument for effecting its purposes is an undecided question; but I have heard on near authority of a dog scraping a mat up against a swing door through which he had to pass so that the door was kept open. To use an instrument involves a complicated mental process, in which not only association but reflection on the nature of the thing is required. Taffy associated his muzzle with his walk, and fetched it with pleasure when the association was established; but reflection did not sufficiently come into the process to prevent him from fetching a clothes brush or a Bible instead if convenient.