The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr

by E. T. A. Hoffmann

  Julia held the guitar out to the stranger.

  ‘This,’ said he, ‘is a very rare melodious instrument, dating from the good old days, and only in my clumsy hands – my hands? What do I mean, my hands? The wonderful spirit of melody that has struck up friendship with this little oddity dwells in my breast too, but as a chrysalis, incapable of free movement; from within you, however, my dear young lady, it soars to the bright regions of Heaven in a thousand shimmering hues, like the lustrous eye of a peacock’s feather. Ah, dear young lady, when you sang all the yearning pain of love, all the delight of sweet dreams, hope and longing surged through the forest and fell like reviving dew on the fragrant flower-cups, on the breasts of listening nightingales! Keep the instrument; you alone command the magic locked within it!’

  ‘You threw the instrument away,’ replied Julia, blushing deeply.

  ‘True,’ said the stranger, forcefully taking the guitar and pressing it to his breast, ‘true, I threw it away and I receive it back sanctified; it shall never leave my hands again!’

  Then the stranger’s countenance suddenly changed, resuming its farcical mask, and he spoke in high, cutting tones: ‘Really, Fate or my cacodemon45 has played a very nasty trick on me, most honoured ladies, obliging me to appear here before you so entirely ex abrupto,46 as the Romans and other good folk say! Dear God! Most gracious Princess, pray risk looking me up and down, from head to foot. You will then be pleased to conclude, from my attire, that I am on a grand tour of visits. Why, I was just thinking of passing through Sieghartsweiler and presenting that good town if not with my own person, then at least with a visiting card. Dear God! Do I lack connections, most gracious Princess? Wasn’t the Lord Marshal of his Highness your father once my close friend? If he saw me here, I know he would clasp me to his satin-clad breast and say, much moved, while offering me a pinch of snuff: “We are in private here, my dear fellow; I can give free rein to my heart and to the most pleasing of sentiments.” I’d have had an audience of his most gracious Highness Prince Irenaeus, and I would have been introduced to you too, Princess, introduced in such a manner that I’ll wager my best team of chords in sevenths to a box of the ears that I’d have won your favour! But now – to my eternal misfortune I must introduce myself here in the park, at this most inappropriate place, in between a duck-pond and a ditch full of frogs. Dear God, if I could only work a little witchcraft, if I could but change this handsome box of toothpicks subito –’ and he produced such a box from his waistcoat pocket – ‘into the finest Chamberlain of the court of Prince Irenaeus, a Chamberlain who would take me under his wing and say: “Gracious Princess, let me introduce such and such a man!” But now – che far, che dir?47 Mercy, mercy, Princess – have mercy, ladies and gentlemen!’

  So saying, the stranger flung himself down in front of the Princess and sang, in a hoarse voice: ‘Ah pietà, pietà, Signora!’48

  The Princess seized Julia, and crying aloud, ‘This is a lunatic, a lunatic escaped from the madhouse!’ she ran off with her as fast as she could.

  Madame Benzon came to meet the girls just outside the castle. Breathless, they almost collapsed at her feet. ‘What has happened, for Heaven’s sake?’ she asked. ‘What’s happened to you; why this headlong flight?’

  The Princess, distressed and beside herself as she was, could only stammer a few broken words about a madman who had attacked them. Julia told her mother everything that had happened in a calm, collected manner, and concluded by saying that she did not think the stranger mad at all, merely an ironic wag whom she took for a kind of Jaques, well suited to the comedy of the Forest of Arden.

  Madame Benzon made Julia go over it all again, inquired after the smallest details, and then asked for a description of the stranger’s gait, bearing, gestures, manner of speech, and so forth. ‘Oh yes,’ she said then, ‘yes, it is only too certain: it is he, he himself, it cannot – cannot possibly be anyone else.’

  ‘Who – who is he?’ asked the Princess impatiently.

  ‘Be calm, dear Hedwiga,’ replied Madame Benzon. ‘You have made yourself out of breath to no purpose; this stranger who seemed such a threat to you is no madman. Whatever bitter, unseemly pleasantries he permitted himself, in keeping with his eccentric manner, I believe you will be reconciled with him.’

  ‘Never,’ cried the Princess. ‘I will never set eyes on that – that irksome fool again!’

  ‘Oh, Hedwiga,’ said Madame Benzon, laughing, ‘whatever put the word irksome into your head? Judging by what took place earlier, it’s a word much apter than you may perhaps think or guess yourself!’

  ‘I don’t know why you’re so angry with the stranger either, dear Hedwiga,’ Julia began. ‘Even in his foolish conduct and confused speech, there was something that moved my heart strangely and not at all disagreeably.’

  ‘It’s lucky for you,’ replied the Princess, tears starting to her eyes, ‘lucky for you that you can be so calm and composed, but that dreadful man’s mockery pierces my heart! Benzon, who is he? Who is the madman?’

  ‘I can tell you the whole story in a few words,’ replied Madame Benzon. ‘Five years ago, when I was in –

  M. cont. – convinced me that innocent virtue and sympathy with the afflictions of a comrade can also dwell in a sincere, profound poetic nature.

  A certain melancholy, such as often affects young Romantic artists as they suffer the experience of feeling great and elevated ideas struggle to develop in their minds, drove me to seek solitude. For some time roof, cellar and attic remained unvisited. With that poet,49 I was sensible of the sweet idyllic joys of life in a little cottage on the banks of a babbling brook, shaded by the sombre foliage of drooping birches and weeping willows, and giving myself up to my dreams, I remained under the stove. It so happened that I never again saw Mina, my sweet mother with her beautifully mottled coat. I found comfort and relief in the sciences. Ah, there is something wonderful about the sciences! My thanks, my ardent thanks, to the noble man who invented them. How much more wonderful and useful is his invention than that of the horrid monk who first took it upon himself to make gunpowder, a thing the nature and effect of which I cannot abide! And posterity, sitting in judgement, has punished that barbarous man, the infernal Barthold,50 with scornful contempt, for even now it is proverbial to say, in giving high praise to a quick-witted scholar, a discerning student of political science, in short, any man of exquisite education, ‘Well, he won’t set the world on fire!’

  For the edification of hopeful young tomcats, I cannot neglect to remark that if I wanted to study I would leap at my master’s library with my eyes closed, then tug out the book to which I was clinging and peruse it whatever its contents. Through this mode of studying, my mind acquired that wide-ranging flexibility, that diverse and brilliant wealth of knowledge, which posterity will admire in me. I will not mention here the books I read one after another during that period of poetic melancholy, partly because a more suitable opportunity to do so may occur, partly because I’ve forgotten their titles, and that in turn will to some degree be because I didn’t read most of the titles, so I never knew them. This explanation will satisfy everyone, and no one will accuse me of biographical levity.

  New experiences lay ahead of me.

  One day, when my master happened to be immersed in a great folio lying open before him, while I, reclining close to him under the desk on a sheet of the finest royal paper,51 was trying my paw at Greek script, in which it seemed very adept, a young man walked in. I had seen him in Master Abraham’s lodgings several times before, and he treated me with friendly respect, indeed with the gratifying regard due to outstanding talent and marked genius. For having greeted my master, not only did he always salute me with a ‘Good morning, cat!’, he would always scratch me gently behind the ears and stroke my back softly, conduct in which I detected genuine encouragement for me to let my intellectual gifts shine before the world.

  Today, everything was to be different!

  For today, as had never o
ccurred before, a shaggy black monster with burning eyes jumped in through the doorway behind the young man, and on catching sight of me made straight for me. I was overcome by indescribable fear. With one bound, I leaped up on my master’s desk, and I uttered sounds of horror and desperation when the monster jumped up at the desk, making an appalling racket. My kind master, fearing for me, picked me up and put me under his dressing-gown.

  However, the young man said, ‘Don’t worry, my dear Master Abraham, my poodle never hurts cats. He only wants to play. Just put your tomcat down, and it will amuse you to watch the little fellows getting acquainted – my poodle and your cat.’

  My master actually was about to put me down, but I clung tightly to him and began to wail piteously, which at least persuaded him to let me stay close to him in his chair when he sat down.

  Emboldened by my master’s protection, I sat up on my hind legs, my tail coiled around me, assuming a position of such dignity and noble pride as was bound to impress my putative black adversary. The poodle sat down on the floor in front of me, looked me intently in the eye, and said something to me, in broken Cattish, which I could not understand. My fear gradually ebbed away entirely, and once I had calmed down I could see nothing in the poodle’s gaze but good nature and an ingenuous disposition. I involuntarily began to show that I was inclined to feel confident, by gently moving my tail back and forth, and the poodle immediately began wagging his own short little tail in the most delightful manner.

  Ah, my heart had gone out to him! There could be no doubt of the harmony of our minds! ‘How,’ said I to myself, ‘how could this stranger’s unfamiliar conduct so alarm and terrify you? What did all that jumping, yapping, gambolling, racing about and barking mean but the vigorous high spirits of a youth animated by love and pleasure, by the joyful liberty of life? Ah, virtue, true poodlishness resides in that hairy black breast!’ Fortified by these thoughts, I determined to take the first step towards a closer, more intimate union of our souls, and to get down from my master’s chair.

  As I rose and stretched, the poodle jumped up and dashed round the room, barking loudly! The utterances of a wonderful and vigorous mind! There was nothing more to fear; I immediately climbed down and cautiously, treading softly, approached my new friend. We began performing that act which expresses, with significant symbolism, the closer recognition of kindred spirits, the forging of that alliance contingent upon the inmost heart, an act which base and myopic mankind describes by the low, common expression of ‘sniffing each other’. My black friend expressed a desire to eat some of the chicken bones in my dish. I gave him to understand as best I could that it was appropriate for a cat of my cosmopolitan education and polite manners to entertain him as my guest. He ate with remarkably good appetite, while I watched from a distance. It was lucky I’d already set my fried fish aside and hidden it under my bed. After dinner, we began playing the most delightful of games until finally, united heart and soul, we embraced. Clinging firmly to each other and tumbling head over heels again and again, we swore vows of tender faith and friendship.

  I don’t know how there could be anything ridiculous in this meeting of fine souls, this mutual recognition of affectionate youthful minds, but one thing is certain: both my master and the young stranger kept laughing heartily, not a little to my vexation.

  My new friendship had made a deep impression on me, so that as I sat in sun or shade, on the roof or under the stove, I thought of nothing, reflected on nothing, dreamed of nothing, was aware of nothing but poodle, poodle, poodle! I thereby gained great insight into the innermost essence of poodlishness which dawned upon me in brilliant colours, and the profound work mentioned above, to wit, Thought and Intuition, or Cat and Dog, was born of this perception. In it, I set out the way in which the manners, customs and language of both species are profoundly dependent upon their characteristic natures, showing both to be merely different rays cast out by the same prism. I paid particular attention to the character of their language, proving that as language is really just symbolic representation of the natural principle in audible form, and consequently there can be but one language, Cattish and Doggish (in the specialized dialect of Poodlish) were branches of the same tree, so that tomcat and poodle, when inspired by a higher spirit, understood each other. To make my point perfectly clear, I adduced several examples from the two languages, drawing the reader’s attention to the identical roots of bow-wow– miaow-miaow– yap-yap – snap – grrr – purr – huff-huff – hissss, and so forth.

  Once my book was finished, I felt an irresistible desire to learn Poodlish properly, an endeavour in which I succeeded with the help of my new friend Ponto the poodle, though not without some difficulty, since Poodlish is a really hard language for us cats. However, persons of genius can do anything, and that same quality of genius is underrated by a famous human writer52 when he claims that to speak a foreign language properly, exactly as a native speaker does, one must be something of a fool. In fact my master was of this opinion, and really approved only of the scholarly understanding of a foreign language, contrasting that understanding with the ability to speak it, by which he meant chattering on in the foreign tongue about this or that matter of no importance. He went so far as to consider the speaking of French53 by our ladies and gentlemen at court a kind of illness which, like cataleptic fits, begins with alarming symptoms, and I heard him make this absurd claim to the Prince’s Lord Marshal himself.

  ‘Be so good,’ said Master Abraham, ‘be so good, Excellency, as to observe yourself. Has not Heaven given you a fine, resonant vocal organ? Yet when you suffer an attack of French you suddenly begin to hiss, to lisp, to growl, your pleasant features becoming dreadfully distorted in the process, and even the fine, firm, grave demeanour usually at your command is marred by all manner of strange convulsions. What can all this mean but the angry activity of some fateful imp of illness inside you?’

  The Lord Marshal laughed heartily, and to be sure, Master Abraham’s hypothesis of the foreign-languages disease was laughable.

  A clever scholar, in some book or other, advises one to try thinking in a foreign language which one wants to learn quickly. This is good advice, but putting it into practice is not without danger, for I very soon managed to think in Poodlish, but I immersed myself so deeply in these poodlish thoughts that my actual knowledge of the language lagged behind, and I myself couldn’t understand what I was thinking. I set most of the ideas I didn’t understand down on paper, and I am amazed at the profundity of these utterances, which I have collected under the title of Acanthus Leaves54 and which I still don’t understand.

  I believe this brief outline of the history of my youthful months should suffice to give the reader a clear picture of my nature, and how I came to be what I am.

  However, I cannot leave the prime of my remarkable, eventful life behind without mentioning one more incident, an incident which marks, as it were, my transition to a period of more mature education. Young tomcats will learn from it that no rose is without thorns, and that many an obstacle lies in the way of the ardently aspiring spirit, many a stone upon which they are bound to hurt their paws. And the pain of such wounds is severe, very severe!

  I am sure, gentle reader, that you have almost been envying me my happy youth and the lucky star that watched over me! Born in poverty to distinguished but indigent parents, on the brink of ignominious death, I suddenly find myself in the lap of luxury, in the Peruvian mine55 of literature! Nothing disturbs my education, nothing opposes my inclinations, I take giant strides towards that state of perfection which raises me high above my time. And then, suddenly, an excise officer halts me, demanding the tribute due from all here below!

  Who would have thought that thorns lay hidden beneath the bonds of the sweetest, most ardent of friendships – thorns sure to scratch me, injure me, wound me severely?

  Everyone who has a feeling heart in his bosom, like me, will readily be able to deduce, from what I have said of my relationship with the poodle Ponto,
how much the good fellow meant to me, yet he it was who first set in motion that catastrophe which might have ruined me entirely, had not the spirit of my great ancestor been watching over me. Yes, reader! I had an ancestor, an ancestor but for whom I would not, so to speak, be anything at all – a great and distinguished ancestor, a man of rank, dignity, fortune and extensive knowledge, endowed with a most excellent kind of virtue, with the finest philanthropy, a man of elegance and taste in the very latest mode – a man who – but all this is just in passing, and I will say more at a later date concerning that worthy cat, who was none other than the world-famous Prime Minister Hinz von Hinzenfeldt, so dear to the world, so greatly valued, by the name of Puss in Boots.56

  As I was saying, more about that most noble of tomcats later!

  How could it be otherwise: once able to express myself with ease and elegance in Poodlish, was I not bound to speak to my friend Ponto of that which I valued most in life, to wit, myself and my works? Thus it was that he became acquainted with my peculiar intellectual gifts, my genius, my talent, and here I perceived, not a little to my sorrow, that an incorrigible frivolity, indeed a certain exuberance, made it impossible for young Ponto to get anywhere in the arts and sciences. Instead of marvelling at my knowledge, he told me he had no idea how I could bother about such things, and for his part, so far as the arts were concerned, he would confine himself to jumping over sticks and retrieving his master’s cap from the water, while as for the sciences, he thought they just upset the stomachs of folk like him and me, ruining the appetite entirely.

  It was in the course of such a conversation, while I was trying to teach my light-minded young friend better, that the disaster happened. For before I knew what he was about –