would have had few comedies on their stage; no farces. Cats care
little for fun. In the circus, superlative acrobats. No clowns.

[Illustration: One of their poets]

In drama and singing they would have surpassed us probably. Even in the
stage 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 is
a cat's delight: craft they never can have too much of. So it would
have been from one triumph of cunning to another that they would have
marched. That would have been the greatest driving force of their
civilization.

This would have meant great progress in invention and science--or in
some fields of science, the economic for instance. But it would have
retarded them in others. Craft studies the world calculatingly, from
without, instead of understandingly from within. Especially would it
have cheapened t