The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr

by E. T. A. Hoffmann

  So saying, my friend Muzius embraced me again and said that as he was thinking of introducing me into the fraternity the following night, I had better be up on the roof at twelve midnight. He would come there to fetch me and take me to a party being held by the President or Senior of the fraternity, a tomcat called Puff.

  My master came into the room. I ran to meet him as usual, rubbed myself against him and rolled on the floor to show him my pleasure. Muzius too stared at him with satisfaction. After my master had scratched my head and neck a little, he looked round the room and said he saw all was as it should be. ‘Well, that’s all right! The two of you have had a quiet, peaceful conversation, as good, well-bred folk should. That deserves a reward.’

  My master went through the door leading to the kitchen, and Muzius and I, guessing his kind intentions, walked along behind him with a happy ‘Miaow, miaow, miaow!’. Sure enough, my master opened the kitchen dresser and took out the bones and carcasses of a couple of young fowls whose meat he had eaten yesterday. Everyone knows that folk of my kind regard chicken carcasses as the greatest delicacies in the world, and so it was that Muzius’s eyes beamed with bright fire, he waved his tail in the most graceful of ripples and purred aloud as my master put the dish down on the floor in front of us. Mindful of the sluggard Philistine, I pushed the best bits in the direction of my friend Muzius – the necks, the bellies, the parsons’ noses – and contented myself with the coarser thigh and wing-bones. When we had finished the fowls, I was about to ask friend Muzius if he would care to take a cup of fresh milk, but with the sluggard Philistine ever before my mind’s eye I refrained from words and instead fished out the cup itself, which I knew was standing under the dresser, issuing Muzius with a friendly invitation to a drink just by showing it to him. Muzius drank all the milk in the cup, then pressed my paw and said, the tears gleaming in his eyes, ‘Friend Murr, you live in Lucullan style9 here, but you have shown me your faithful, honest, noble heart, and the vain pleasures of the world won’t entice you into base Philistinism! My thanks, my hearty thanks!’

  We said farewell with an honest German pawshake in the good old style. Muzius, no doubt to hide the deep emotion which drew tears from him, had jumped swiftly out of the open window with a breakneck leap and landed on the adjacent roof. Even I, gifted by Nature with excellent buoyancy, was amazed by his daring leap, and once again I saw it as an occasion to praise my own kind, all of us born gymnasts10 who need no vaulting or climbing pole.

  Moreover, my friend Muzius showed me how frequently a rough, forbidding exterior hides a tender, deeply feeling mind.

  I went back to my master’s room and lay down under the stove. Alone here, reflecting on the form my existence had taken so far and assessing my latest mood, indeed my whole way of life, I was alarmed to see how close I had come to the abyss, and despite his shaggy fur, my friend Muzius appeared to me a beautiful angel of salvation. I was about to enter a new world, the emptiness within me would be filled, I would be a new tomcat! My heart beat fast with anxious, happy expectation.

  It was still well before midnight when I asked my master to let me out with my usual request of ‘Meee-ow!’.

  ‘By all means,’ said he, opening the door, ‘by all means, Murr. Nothing at all will come of all that lying asleep under the stove. Off you go, out into the world with other tomcats. Perhaps you’ll find young feline kindred spirits who’ll amuse themselves in jest and earnest with you.’

  Ah, the Master must have guessed that a new life stood before me! At last, when I had waited until midnight, my friend Muzius arrived and led me over various roof-tops until finally, on a roof that was almost flat in the Italian style, ten young tomcats, sturdy fellows although attired as carelessly and curiously as Muzius himself, welcomed us with loud cries of glee. Muzius introduced me to his friends, extolled my good qualities and true, honest mind, laying particular emphasis on my hospitable entertainment of him with fried fish, chicken bones and fresh milk, and concluded by saying that I would like to be accepted as a true member of their fraternity. They all agreed.

  There now followed certain ceremonies which, however, I will not describe, since gentle readers of my own kind might suspect I had joined a prohibited society11 and want me to give information about it. I assure you on my conscience, though, that there was no mention at all of such a society and its appurtenances, such as statutes, secret signs and the like, but that our association depended solely on sympathy of mind, for it soon turned out that every one of us preferred fresh milk to water and roast meat to bread.

  When the solemnities were concluded I received a fraternal kiss and pawshake from all the fraternity members, and they addressed me by the familiar pronoun! We then sat down to a simple but cheerful meal followed by a hearty drinking session. Muzius had made some excellent cat-punch. Should any greedy young tom feel curious about the recipe for this delicious beverage, I fear I cannot give him sufficient details, but this much is certain: its extremely pleasant flavour and the powerful kick in it result chiefly from a sizeable amount of soused herring.

  In a voice that echoed over many roof-tops and far away, Puff the Senior now struck up that fine song ‘Gaudeamus igitur’! I was delighted to feel myself an outstanding juvenis, both internally and externally, and I would not think of the tumulus12 in the peaceful, quiet earth, a last resting place seldom allotted to our kind by dismal Fate. Various other fine songs were sung, such as ‘Oh Let the Politicians Talk’,13 etc., until the Senior Puff smote the table with a mighty paw and announced that the true, genuine song of initiation, to wit, ‘Ecce quam bonum’,14 must now be sung, and immediately struck up the chorus Ecce, etc., etc.

  I had never before heard this song, whose composition, as profoundly conceived as it is harmonious and melodious, may be described as wonderful and mysterious. As far as I am aware, the master who wrote it is not known, but many ascribe this song to the great Handel, while others claim that it existed long, long before Handel’s time, for according to the Wittenberg Chronicle15 it was already being sung when Prince Hamlet was a freshman there. But whoever wrote it, it is a great, immortal work, much to be admired for the way the solos, alternating with the chorus, allow the singers freedom for the most delightful, inexhaustible variations. I have faithfully preserved in my memory some of the variations I heard that night.

  When the first chorus was over a black and white young tom struck up:

  All too sharply barks the Pom,

  Far too loud the poodle.

  See the bold and valiant tom,

  Silencing that noodle!

  Chorus: Ecce quam etc., etc.

  Next a grey tomcat sang:

  See the Philistine go by!

  Doff your cap politely.

  Such a fool, his head held high,

  We don’t suffer lightly.

  Chorus: Ecce quam etc., etc.

  Then a ginger cat came in:

  Merrily the fish must swim,

  Birds fly in fair weather.

  Fin and feather let us hymn,

  Though we catch them never!

  Chorus: Ecce quam etc., etc.

  And after him it was the turn of a white tom:

  Mew and growl and growl and mew

  but do not scratch; pray pause!

  Show yourselves in rosy hue

  and spare your nice sharp claws.

  Chorus: Ecce quam etc., etc.

  Then my friend Muzius sang:

  Master Coxcomb thinks he can

  Judge us by his standard.

  Looks haughty, acts the gentleman,

  But we’re more even-handed.

  Chorus: Ecce quam etc., etc.

  I was sitting next to Muzius, so it was my turn to sing on my own next. All the solos hitherto performed were so different from the kind of verses I had previously composed that I became anxious, fearing I would fail to hit the tone and mood of the whole thing. I remained silent when the chorus had ended. Some cats were already raising their glasses and calling Pro poena,16
for a forfeit, when I pulled myself together by main force and immediately sang:

  Each of us beside the others

  Paw in paw we sang:

  ‘We’re a merry bunch of brothers!

  Philistines go hang!’

  Chorus: Ecce quam etc., etc.

  My variation met with the loudest, the most unheard-of applause! The generous young toms surrounded me with cries of delight, flung their paws round me, pressed me to their throbbing breasts. So here too the exalted genius of my mind was recognized! It was one of the finest moments of my life. Then we drank an ardent toast to many great and famous tomcats, particularly such as, despite their greatness and fame, remained aloof from each and every kind of Philistinism, as they had proved in word and deed. And then we parted.

  The punch must have gone to my head just a little; I felt as if the roof-tops were going round and round, and I could scarcely keep upright by means of my tail, which I used as a balancing pole. The faithful Muzius, noticing my condition, took charge of me and brought me safe home through the skylight.

  With my head in such a devastated condition as I had never known before, it was some time before I could –

  W.P. – knew it as well as did the perspicacious Madame Benzon, but my heart never guessed that I was to have news of you today of all days, true soul.’ So said Master Abraham, and he took the letter which he had received, and in whose address he had, with joyful surprise, recognized Kreisler’s hand, put it unopened in his desk drawer and went out into the park.

  For many years Master Abraham had been in the habit of leaving letters he received unopened for hours, often for days. ‘Never mind what’s in them,’ he said, ‘the delay doesn’t matter. If the letter brings bad news, then I gain a few more happy or at least untroubled hours; if the news is good, a man of settled habits can wait to indulge his pleasure.’ This was a reprehensible habit of the Master’s, since first, a person who leaves his letters unopened will never amount to anything in business or in political or literary journalism, and furthermore, the mischief it may cause among those who are neither businessmen nor journalists is obvious. As for the present biographer, he does not believe in Master Abraham’s stoic indifference, but rather regards his habit as a certain anxious reluctance to disclose the mystery of a sealed letter. Getting letters is a special pleasure, so as a witty writer has said somewhere, we are particularly apt to like those who bring us that pleasure in the first place, to wit, postmen.

  This may be called a pleasant form of self-delusion. The biographer remembers how once, at university, he waited a long time in the most painful anxiety for a letter from someone he loved, begging the postman with tears in his eyes to bring him a letter from his native city very soon, and he should get a good tip. With a shrewd look, the fellow promised to do as he was asked, triumphantly delivered the letter when it actually did arrive a few days later, as if it had been solely up to him to keep his word, and pocketed the promised tip. Yet the biographer, who perhaps gives too much room to certain self-delusions himself, does not know whether you, gentle reader, are of his mind: do you feel that pleasure mingled with a curious anxiety which causes your heart to thud when you are going to open a letter you have received, even if it is hardly likely that the letter contains anything of vital importance to you? It may be that we sense here, too, that oppressive feeling with which we peer into the night of the future, and just because a little pressure of the fingers is sufficient to reveal what is hidden, the moment constitutes a climax that disquiets us. And ah! how many fine hopes have been shattered with the fateful seal, while the lovely dreams which, formed in our hearts, seemed to represent our ardent yearning itself, have trickled away into nothing! The little sheet of paper was the evil magic spell drying up the flower garden where we thought to stroll, and life lay before us a bleak, inhospitable desert. If it seems a good idea to collect one’s thoughts before that light pressure of the fingers reveals what is concealed, perhaps it may excuse Master Abraham’s otherwise reprehensible habit, one which, incidentally, the present biographer cannot shake off, having acquired it in a certain calamitous period when almost every letter he received was like Pandora’s box, from which a thousand ills and evils escaped into the world as soon as it was opened.

  However, though Master Abraham may have put the Kapellmeister’s letter unopened in his desk or the drawer of his writing table, and gone out walking in the park, the gentle reader shall learn its contents immediately, word for word. Johannes Kreisler had written as follows:

  My very dear Master!

  I might have cried, ‘La fin couronne les oeuvres!’17 as Lord Clifford does in Shakespeare’s Henry VI when the most noble Duke of York has dealt him his death-blow. For by God, my hat fell into the bushes severely wounded, and I toppled backwards after it, like a man of whom it is said that he falls or has fallen in battle. Such men, however, seldom rise again, but your Johannes did so, dear Master, and that on the spot. I could pay no heed to my badly wounded comrade,18 who had fallen not so much at my side as over or off my head, since I had my work cut out for me in executing a movement19 (a term I use here in neither the musical nor the doctrinal but solely the gymnastic sense) to avoid the mouth of a pistol being aimed at me by someone standing about three feet away. However, I did yet more: I passed suddenly from the defensive to the offensive, jumped at the man with the pistol, and without more ado thrust the dagger from my walking stick into him. You have always taken me to task, Master, for being incapable of the narrative style, unable to tell a story without unnecessary flourishes and digressions. What do you say to this succinct description of my Italian adventure in the park at Sieghartshof, a court ruled so mildly by a high-minded prince that he will even tolerate bandits for the sake of pleasant diversion?

  Take what I have said so far, dear Master, merely as a provisional summary of the contents of that chapter of history which, if my impatience and his Reverence the Prior permit, I will write you instead of an ordinary letter.

  There is little more to be said about my actual adventure in the forest. It certainly struck me at once, when the shot rang out, that I would profit by it, for as I crashed to the ground I felt a burning pain in the left side of my head, which my deputy headmaster in Göniönesmühl used to call, with some justice, stiff-necked. Sure enough, the stiffness of that structure put up stubborn resistance to the ill-intentioned lead, so that the glancing wound was hardly worth noticing. But tell me, dear Master, tell me at once, or this evening, or anyway first thing tomorrow, into whose body did I sink my blade? I would be very glad indeed to know that I had shed no common human blood, but only some princely ichor,20 and I suspect such was the case. If so, Master, chance led me to do the deed announced by that dark spirit when I was with you in the fisherman’s cottage! When I used the little blade from my stick in self-defence against murderers, was it perhaps the terrible sword of Nemesis21 avenging blood-guilt? Write and tell me everything, Master, in particular tell me about the weapon you gave me, that little picture. But no – no, don’t tell me anything about that! Let this Medusa22 picture, whose sight turns the threat of evil to stone, remain an inexplicable mystery even to me. I feel as if the talisman would lose its power once I knew what circumstances give it the virtue of a magic weapon! Would you believe it, Master, I haven’t even looked at your little picture properly yet? When the time comes you’ll tell me all I need to know, and then I will restore the talisman to your hands. So not a word more about it for the moment! And now I will go on with my chapter of history.

  When I ran my blade into the body of the aforesaid person with the pistol, so that he fell to the ground without a sound, I ran away as fleet of foot as any Ajax,23 since I thought I heard voices in the park and believed myself still in danger. I intended to make for Sieghartsweiler, but lost my way in the dark night. I ran on faster and faster, still hoping to find the path again. I waded through ditches, I climbed a steep slope, and finally sank down in some bushes, exhausted. There seemed to be lightning flash
es before my eyes; I felt a stabbing pain in my head, and woke from a sleep as deep as death. My wound had been bleeding profusely. Using my handkerchief, I made a bandage that would have done credit to the best military surgeon on the battlefield, and then looked about me, brisk and merry. Not far away rose the mighty ruins of a castle. You will have realized, Master, that not a little to my surprise I had reached the Geierstein.

  My wound no longer hurt; I felt fresh and light of foot. I stepped out of the bushes that had served me as a bedroom. The sun was rising, casting bright rays of light on forest and field like cheerful morning greetings. The birds woke in the bushes, bathed themselves, twittering, in cool morning dew, and then rose into the air. Sieghartshof lay far below me, still swathed in the mists of night, but soon those veils sank, and there stood trees and bushes blazing with gold. The lake in the park was like a mirror, dazzling bright. I could make out the fisherman’s cottage as a small white dot – I even thought I saw the bridge clearly. The previous day came back into my mind, but as if it were a long time ago, and nothing now remained to me but the sad memory of what I had lost for ever, a memory simultaneously rending the heart and filling it with sweet delight. Master, I hear you asking me: ‘What do you mean by that, you fool? What did you lose for ever in that long-ago yesterday?’ Ah, Master, I set myself once more on the towering peak of the Geierstein – once more I spread my arms like an eagle’s wings to rise up to those regions where a sweet magic reigned, where the love which does not depend on space and time, but is eternal as the world spirit, was revealed to me in those heavenly, prescient notes that are avid longing itself, longing and yearning! I know, I know – there’s an infernally hungry opponent sitting right in front of my nose, arguing with me only for the sake of the barley bread of earthly life, inquiring scornfully whether it’s possible for a musical note to have deep blue eyes? I will cite the most cogent proof, to wit, that the note is really a glance as well, a glance shining down from a world of light through torn veils of cloud; my opponent, however, goes on to ask about brow, hair, mouth and lips, about arms, hands and feet, and with a malicious smile says he very much doubts that a mere, pure note can be endowed with all these. Oh God, I know what the wretch means, which is just that as long as I am a glebae adscriptus,24 like himself and the rest of them, as long as we don’t all feed solely on sunbeams, and must sometimes sit in a chair of an ordinary and not a professorial kind, then the eternal love and longing that wants nothing but itself, and of which every fool can chatter – Master, I wouldn’t like you to range yourself beside my hungry opponent; it would be disagreeable to me. And tell me, could any single reasonable cause drive you to it? Have I ever shown any tendency towards sad boyish folly? Haven’t I reached years of maturity and managed to remain ever sober? Have I ever, for instance, wished to be a glove merely to kiss my Julia’s cheek, like Cousin Romeo?25 Believe me, Master, let folk say what they will, I have nothing but notes in my head, and the sound of them in my heart and mind, for by all the devils, how else could I set such good, fine pieces of church music as the Vespers26 I have just finished, now lying on my desk? Yet there I go away from my story again – I will continue!