Cats versus people
Sowing dragon’s teeth
…through my own experience I knew that the most excruciating thing is to implant in an individual a doubt as to his or her being a reality—a three-dimensional reality rather than some other sort.
—Yevgeny Zamyatin, We
Always the gentleman … a merciful man is merciful also to his beast … But I wouldn’t leave my little wooden ’ut, nor miss my breakfast, for no beast … Some do and some … do not.
—Ford Madox Ford, Some Do Not (Parade’s End)
My children like watching an old Disney cartoon called The Aristocats; I probably watched it myself when I was a boy. I hate it less than any Disney I’ve seen in a while and unexpectedly it touches on human nature more closely than many of these sorts of things, much more than recent ones, which for me exist in a sort of weird, artificial un-universe, like Candy Corn, vivid and empty. The cat characters are more rounded, more human than Pixar people.
If you’ve forgotten or are not familiar with the plot of The Aristocats, an elderly Parisian lady, Madame Adelaide Bonfamille, keeps a family of absurdly pampered but amiable cats. She also has a loyal servant, Edgar, who discovers that he will be passed over in his employer’s will in favour of the cats until they die. He then dumps them out in the country far away so he can inherit when the time comes without waiting for them to lose their nine lives. Because he’s an unprepossessing middle-aged man, balding with a big nose, a little comical without being likeable, and the cats are charming, Edgar gets no sympathy. The cats win out. The story is supposedly based in a small way on something that actually happened in 1910, i.e. some cats inheriting a fortune.
Hearing the film playing again in another room this morning as I cooked eggs, I thought of something in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson:1
I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat: for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters, lest the servants having that trouble should take a dislike to the poor creature.2
Johnson’s reading of human nature is so obviously true but how many people take such care?3 Not, so much the worse for the aristocats, Madame Bonfamille. Charming, elegant and unaware, she sowed dragon’s teeth.
There’s another true cat story from Paris that happened in Johnson’s time—the Great Cat Massacre of the rue Saint-Séverin in the first half of the 18th century. Disney probably won’t make a film of this one.
For context, print workers in France at that time were particularly miserable and oppressed. At Jacque Vincent’s printing shop on rue Saint-Séverin:
Apprentices slept in a filthy, freezing room, rose before dawn, ran errands all day while dodging insults from the journeymen and abuse from the master, and received nothing but slops to eat.4
Cats were treated better.5
A passion for cats seemed to have swept through the printing trade, at least at the level of the masters, or bourgeois as the workers called them. One bourgeois kept twenty-five cats. He had their portraits painted and fed them on roast fowl.
Mme Vincent at rue Saint-Séverin was a particular cat fancier whose special favourite was la grise (the grey). When grievances among the apprentices came to a head, there followed “a riotous massacre of cats”, in which la grise was killed. Some cats were given mock trials and hanged. Journeymen printers helped the apprentices.
Like Mme Bonfamille, the Vincents might have avoided catastrophe for their pets by showing some of what G K Chesterton called Samuel Johnson’s “gigantic realism”.6 Instead, they too had been sowing dragon’s teeth.
Writing about the Great Cat Massacre, Robert Darnton observed of the cat killers:
They certainly felt debased and had accumulated enough resentment to explode in an orgy of killing. A half-century later, the artisans of Paris would run riot in a similar manner, combining indiscriminate slaughter with improvised popular tribunals. It would be absurd to view the cat massacre as a dress rehearsal for the September massacres of the French Revolution, but the earlier outburst of violence did suggest a popular rebellion, though it remained restricted to the level of symbolism.
If you have caused people to feel humiliated, even inadvertently, by accident, by omission, by not considering they are worth thinking of at all, then watch out.7
For Samuel Johnson there were no NPCs, no non-player characters; everyone existed in three dimensions, everyone had motives and interests and feelings, and they were not alien from his own—
We are all prompted by the same motives, all deceived by the same fallacies, all animated by hope, obstructed by danger, entangled by desire, and seduced by pleasure.8
Ignoring these was not only immoral but unwise (“Want of tenderness is want of parts, and is no less a proof of stupidity than depravity”).9
Alongside Johnson’s intelligence and sympathetic imagination was unusual simplicity: he wanted to know what is true and what is not; what will in fact really happen if I do this or that, setting aside what I would like to happen and what I think ought to happen; he lived in a world of solid objects and solid thoughts, not wishes and abstractions.10
The revolution in France a few years after his death was in every way unJohnsonian, marrying the rage of the humiliated with a passion for abstractions (Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité) and an ambition to remake human nature, not work with the grain of it—which in practice always means oppression and death.11 This would be repeated again and again in the 20th century and in the 21st century we again have the sinister promise of technological rebirth.12
Johnson was far too pessimistic about human nature, including his own, to kill people for not being good. His clear understanding of what we are fed his charity, not impatience to change us into something else, which can only in any case mutilate, never transform.13 His realism and his kindness were at one; and his gigantic realism was also at times a gigantic sadness, for the ineradicable pain of being human.14
Although they are separated by distances of time and space and circumstance, Solzhenitsyn’s reading of human nature sometimes makes me think of Johnson:
If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?15
It was around the time I was quoting this loudly to my children, aged 2 and 4, that I thought perhaps I’d forgotten my audience and wasn’t working with the grain of their natures.
I called on Dr Johnson one morning, when Mrs. Williams, the blind lady, was conversing with him. She was telling him where she had dined the day before. “There were several gentlemen there,” said she, “and when some of them came to the tea-table, I found that there had been a good deal of hard drinking.” She closed this observation with a common and trite moral reflection; which, indeed, is very ill-founded, and does great injustice to animals—“I wonder what pleasure men can take in making beasts of themselves.” “I wonder, Madam,” replied the Doctor, “that you have not penetration to see the strong inducement to this excess; for he who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”
—G B Hill (ed) Johnsonian Miscellanies (originally published in Anecdotes of the Revd Percival Stockdale)
You can read a recent Substack piece on Johnson by Henry Oliver here.
Paul Fishman (Skelsmergh, May 2026)
James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson.
Boswell.
There’s a minor echo of this in James Herriot’s stories, where Mrs Pumphrey spoils her pet Pekingese, Tricki Woo, and her long-serving (-suffering) servant, Hodgkin, resents him.
This was at a time when “the large printing houses, backed by the government” had “eliminated most of the smaller shops” and an “oligarchy of masters” had “seized control of the industry”. The result was greater distance between masters (bourgeois) and workers, among other things.
Historians have tended to treat the era of artisanal manufacturing as an idyllic period before the onset of industrialisation. Some even portray the workshop as a kind of extended family in which master and journeymen laboured at the same tasks, ate at the same table, and sometimes slept under the same roof.
Prospects were also worse and those in the trade faced being undercut by cheap outside labour.
Cats also already had an established place in folklore and occupied an ambiguous place in French culture at best.
(All quotes from Darnton.)
It is this gigantic realism in Johnson’s kindness, the directness of his emotionalism, when he is emotional, that gives him his hold upon generations of living men. There is nothing elaborate about his ethics; he wants to know whether a man, as a fact, is happy or unhappy, is lying or telling the truth. He may seem to be hammering at the brain through long nights of noise and thunder, but he can walk into the heart without knocking.
—G K Chesterton, The Real Dr Johnson
See also the Malay phenomenon of running amok. Johnson himself famously could not abide being treated with disdain or even condescending kindness.
Samuel Johnson, The Rambler (no. 60).
Johnson’s own words, recorded in Boswell. Or C’est pire qu’un crime, c’est une faute; It is worse than a crime, it is a blunder (various (mis)attributions).
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute it THUS.”
—Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson
His morality was immediate and he didn’t delegate it to others or consider whether perhaps, really, he would only be masking systemic injustices if he helped someone, he should wait until society was reformed.
His generous humanity to the miserable was almost beyond example. The following instance is well attested:—Coming home late one night, he found a poor woman lying in the street, so much exhausted that she could not walk; he took her upon his back, and carried her to his house, where he discovered that she was one of those wretched females who had fallen into the lowest state of vice, poverty, and disease. Instead of harshly upbraiding her, he had her taken care of with all tenderness for a long time, at considerable expence, till she was restored to health, and endeavoured to put her into a virtuous way of living.
—Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson
Like Procrustes in Greek myth who would offer travellers a bed for the night and then either stretch or trim them to fit it perfectly. (Also, my apologies for a crude one line summary of some aspects of the French Revolution. For a great insight into complexity, contingency, etc, an antidote to clean (simplistic) thematic historical thinking, see Colin Jones, The Fall of Robespierre. It’s exciting and fascinating and full of great details.
From this mistaken notion of human greatness it proceeds, that many who pretend to have made great advances in wisdom so loudly declare that they despise themselves. If I had ever found any of the self-contemners much irritated or pained by the consciousness of their meanness, I should have given them consolation by observing, that a little more than nothing is as much as can be expected from a being, who, with respect to the multitudes about him, is himself little more than nothing. Every man is obliged by the Supreme Master of the universe to improve all the opportunities of good which are afforded him, and to keep in continual activity such abilities as are bestowed upon him. But he has no reason to repine, though his abilities are small and his opportunities few. He that has improved the virtue, or advanced the happiness of one fellow-creature, he that has ascertained a single moral proposition, or added one useful experiment to natural knowledge, may be contented with his own performance, and, with respect to mortals like himself, may demand, like Augustus, to be dismissed at his departure with applause.
The troubles of our proud and angry dust Are from eternity, and shall not fail. —A E Housman, Last Poems IX
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago (translated Thomas P Whitney).