The Life and Opinions of the Tomcat Murr

by E. T. A. Hoffmann

  Next day I did not confine myself to sitting outside the door, but strolled off down the street. I caught sight of Baron Alcibiades von Wipp in the distance, with my merry friend Ponto running along behind him. This could not be more convenient for me; I summoned up as much gravity and dignity as possible and approached my friend with that inimitable grace which, being a priceless gift of kindly Nature, no art can teach. But – oh, horrible! What happened next? As soon as the Baron saw me he stopped, and inspected me very closely through his lorgnette. Then he cried, ‘Allons, Ponto! Cat, cat! After it!’ And my false friend Ponto chased full tilt after me!

  Horrified, my composure wholly destroyed by this shameful treachery, I was incapable of resistance, but cowered as low as I could to escape Ponto’s sharp teeth, which he was baring as he growled. However, Ponto jumped over me several times without touching me, and whispered in my ear, ‘Murr, don’t be such a fool! You’re not frightened, are you? Surely you can see this isn’t serious. I’m only doing it to please my master!’

  Ponto went on jumping round me, and even pretended to be snapping at my ears, but without hurting me in the least. ‘Now, off you go, friend Murr!’ he whispered at last. ‘Down into that cellar!’

  I didn’t wait to be told twice, but shot away like lightning. Despite Ponto’s assurance that he would do me no harm, I was not a little alarmed, since in such a delicate case you can never know for certain whether friendship will be strong enough to overcome a person’s natural disposition.

  Once I had scuttled into the cellar Ponto continued staging his performance for his master’s benefit. That is, he growled and barked outside the cellar window, stuck his nose through the grating, and pretended to be furious that I had escaped him and he couldn’t follow me. ‘There,’ Ponto said to me as I sat in the cellar, ‘there, now do you see the profitable consequences of higher refinement? I’ve just shown my master what a good, obedient dog I am, and without making an enemy of you, my dear Murr. Such is the conduct of a true man of the world fated to be the tool in the hand of someone stronger. He must attack when urged to do so, but show skill enough to bite only when biting will really serve his own purposes.’

  I rapidly disclosed to my young friend Ponto how I was minded to profit a little by his higher refinement, and asked whether and how he might undertake my instruction.

  Ponto thought about it for a few minutes, and then said the best thing would be for me to start by getting a clear, vivid picture of the polite world in which he now had the pleasure of living, and this couldn’t be done better than by my going with him that evening to visit the lovely Badine, who received company during the hours of theatrical performances. Badine, he told me, was a greyhound in the service of the wife of the Controller of the princely household.

  I groomed myself as well as I could, read a little more Knigge,14 skimmed through a couple of brand-new comedies by Picard,15 so that I could show off my knowledge of French if necessary, and then went down to the doorway. Ponto did not keep me waiting long. We strolled companionably down the street, and soon reached Badine’s brightly lit room, where I found a motley assembly of poodles, Poms, pugs, Maltese terriers and greyhounds, some sitting in a circle, some in groups in the corners of the room.

  My heart was beating rather fast in the company of these creatures, who were of another kind than mine, and a hostile one. Many of the poodles scanned me with a certain contemptuous surprise, as if to say: ‘What’s a common tomcat doing in our elevated society?’ And now and then an elegant Pom bared his teeth, showing me how happily he would have attacked me had not decorum, dignity and the good breeding of those present not prohibited all brawling as unseemly.

  Ponto saved me from embarrassment by introducing me to our lovely hostess, who assured me, with charming condescension, that she was very glad to have a cat of my renown at her party. Only now that Badine had said a few words to me did some of the other guests, fawning like the dogs they were, pay me more attention, speaking kindly to me and mentioning my written works, which they said they had enjoyed a great deal from time to time. This flattered my vanity, and I scarcely noticed that they were asking questions without paying any attention to my answers, extolling my talent without knowing anything about it, and praising my works without understanding them. A natural instinct taught me to reply in the same spirit: that is, making brief remarks without reference to the question, in such general terms as could be taken to relate to anything at all, expressing no opinions whatsoever, and never trying to take the conversation down into the depths beneath its smooth surface. Ponto told me, in passing, that an old Pom had said I was amusing enough, as cats went, and showed some talent for good conversation. Such a remark will please even one who is out of temper!

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, when he comes to the story of the ribbon in his Confessions,16 admits that he committed theft and saw a poor innocent girl punished for it without confessing the truth, telling us how hard it was for him to become reconciled to this shallowness of mind in himself. I am now in the same situation as that revered autobiographer. Though I have no crime to confess, yet if I am to be truthful I must not conceal the great folly I committed that same evening, which distressed me for a long time, even endangering my reason. But is it not just as hard to admit to a folly as a crime, and often even harder?

  Before long I was overcome by such a sense of discomfort and uneasiness that I wished myself far away, under my master’s stove. The most terrible boredom crushed my spirits, and in the end made me forget all caution. I stole very quietly into a secluded corner to indulge in the slumber the conversation around me had brought on. For that conversation, which at first, in my ill humour, I might have erroneously taken for the dullest, most insipid chatter, now seemed to me like the monotonous clapping of a mill, very easily inducing a pleasant, mindless sensation of brooding, the kind soon followed by real sleep. I was in this mindless brooding condition, this gentle delirium, when I felt as if a bright light were suddenly shining before my closed eyes. I looked up. There in front of me stood a charming snow-white greyhound bitch, Badine’s pretty niece, whose name, as I later learnt, was Minona.

  ‘Oh, sir,’ said Minona, in that sweet lisping tone which arouses only too strong a response in the susceptible breast of an ardent youth, ‘oh, sir, you are sitting all alone! You seem to be bored! I am so sorry! But to be sure, sir, a great, profound poet like yourself, dwelling in higher spheres, must find the concerns of ordinary social life shallow and superficial.’

  I rose, somewhat surprised, and was displeased to find that my nature, being stronger than any theories of well-bred decorum, made me involuntarily arch my back, which seemed to make Minona smile.

  Pulling myself together at once, however, and behaving more politely, I took Minona’s paw, pressed it softly to my lips, and discoursed on those moments of inspiration to which a poet is often prone. Minona listened to me with such clear tokens of the most heartfelt sympathy, with such attention, that my flights rose higher and higher, until they were uncommonly poetic, and in the end I could hardly understand myself. Perhaps Minona understood me no better, but she fell into the greatest raptures, assuring me it had often been her fervent wish to meet the brilliant Murr, and that the present moment was one of the best and happiest of her life. What shall I say? It soon transpired that Minona had read my works, my most sublime poems – and had not just read them, but comprehended their highest meaning. She knew several of them by heart, and recited them with an enthusiasm and charm that transported me to a whole heaven full of poetry, particularly since it was my verses that the loveliest of her kind was reciting to me.

  ‘My dear, most excellent young lady,’ I cried, quite enraptured, ‘you have understood this mind of mine! You have learnt my poetry by heart! O Heaven! Can there be any higher happiness for an aspiring poet?’

  ‘Murr,’ lisped Minona, ‘Murr, tomcat of genius, can you believe that a feeling heart, a disposition which is minded to love poetry can remain indifferent to you?�
�� Having spoken these words, Minona sighed from the depths of her heart, and that sigh told me all the rest. What could I do but fall so madly in love with the beautiful greyhound that, dazzled and frenzied, I failed to notice that she suddenly broke off in mid-rapture to indulge in wholly insipid chit-chat with a pretty little boy of a pug, and then avoided me all evening, treating me in a way that should have told me clearly her praise and enthusiasm were meant for no one but herself. Suffice it to say I was a dazzled fool, and so I remained; I sought out the lovely Minona however and whenever I could, I hymned her in the finest of verses, made her the heroine of many a charming, whimsical story, thrust myself into company where I had no business to be, and was rewarded with much surly anger, scorn and hurtful injury.

  In my cooler hours, the folly of my actions came before my own eyes, but then I again thought, foolishly, of Tasso17 and many more recent poets of a chivalrous turn of mind who love a high-born mistress, singing her praises and adoring her from afar, just as the man of La Mancha adored his Dulcinea,18 and then I determined to be no worse and no less poetic than such a man, and swore unswerving constancy and knightly service unto death to the deceptive object of my dreams of love, that charming white greyhound bitch. Once in the grip of this strange madness, I passed from folly to folly, and even my friend Ponto, having warned me gravely of the dreadful delusions in which they sought to entangle me at every turn, thought it necessary to avoid my company. Who knows what would have become of me, had not a lucky star been watching over me? This lucky star so contrived it that I went to visit the fair Badine late one evening, merely to set eyes on my beloved Minona. However, I found all the doors closed, and all my waiting and hoping for a chance to slip in was quite in vain. My heart full of love and longing, I wished at least to announce my proximity to the lovely fair, and struck up one of the most tender Spanish tunes ever devised and set to words underneath the window. It must have been a lamentable sound!

  I heard Badine barking, and Minona’s sweet voice growled something too. Before I knew it, the window was swiftly opened and a bucket full of icy water was emptied over me. You may imagine with what speed I ran home! However, the flames within me consorted so ill with cold water on my fur that no good could come of it – at the very least a fever. And so it turned out. Back in my master’s lodgings, I was shaken by a feverish chill. My master could tell I was ill from the pallor of my countenance, the dullness of my eyes, the burning temperature of my brow and the irregularity of my pulse. He gave me warm milk, which I lapped eagerly, for my tongue was sticking to my gums with thirst; then I wrapped myself in the blanket on my bed and gave way entirely to the illness which had taken hold of me. First I fell into all kinds of delirious fancies about polite society, greyhounds, and so forth. After that my sleep became easier, and at last it was so deep that I believe I may say without exaggeration I slept for three days and nights on end.

  When at last I woke I felt free and light at heart. I was entirely cured of my fever and – wonderful to relate! – of my foolish love too! The folly into which Ponto the poodle had enticed me became perfectly clear to me. I saw how silly it was for a tomcat born and bred to mingle with dogs, dogs who scorned me because they couldn’t appreciate my intellect, who must stand upon formalities because of their naturally trivial disposition, and who could thus offer me nothing but a nutshell lacking a kernel. The love of art and science revived in me with new strength, and I felt the attractions of my master’s fireside more strongly than ever before. My months of greater maturity had come, and being now no longer a feline fraternity member or a refined cat of fashion, I felt very forcefully that one need be neither in order to become such a cat as the deeper, better claims of life require.

  My master had to go away, and during his absence thought it good to send me to board with his friend, Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler. Since a new chapter of my life begins with this change of residence, I will close the present one, from which you, O youthful tomcat, will have derived so much useful instruction for your future.

  W.P. – as if hollow, distant music reached his ear, and he heard the monks walking along the corridors. When Kreisler roused himself fully from sleep, he saw from his window that the church was lit up, and heard the murmuring singing of the choir. The time for the midnight office was past, so something unusual must have happened, and Kreisler could reasonably suppose that one of the old monks might have been snatched away by a swift, unexpected death, and was now being carried to the church in accordance with the Abbey’s custom. The Kapellmeister quickly flung on his clothes and went to the church. In the corridor he met Father Hilarius, who was yawning aloud and tottering on his feet, dazed with sleep, unable to take a firm step and holding his lighted candle not upright but pointing to the ground, so that the wax dripped off it, sizzling, and threatened to extinguish the flame at any moment.

  ‘Most reverend sir,’ faltered Hilarius as Kreisler called out to him, ‘most reverend Father Abbot, this is against all our usual arrangements. A funeral by night! At this hour! And just because Brother Cyprian insists on it! Domine – libera nos de hoc monacho!’19

  The Kapellmeister finally succeeded in convincing the half-dreaming Hilarius that he was not the Abbot but Kreisler, and then drew from him, with some difficulty, the information that the corpse of a stranger had been brought to the Abbey by night, Hilarius knew not whence. Only Brother Cyprian seemed to know the stranger, who could have been no common man, since at Cyprian’s urgent request the Abbot had agreed to hold his exequies there and then, so that the burial could take place after the first office next day.

  Kreisler followed Father Hilarius into the church, which was dimly lit and presented a strange, uncanny spectacle.

  The only candles lit were those of the great metal candelabrum hanging from the lofty roof before the high altar, so that the flickering light scarcely illuminated the nave of the church fully, while casting into the aisles only mysterious rays of light in which the statues of saints seemed to be moving and walking, roused to ghostly life. Under the candelabrum, in the brightest of the light, stood the open coffin where the corpse lay, and the monks surrounding it, pale and motionless, seemed like dead men themselves, risen from their graves at this witching hour. They sang the monotonous verses of the Requiem in hoarse, muted voices, and when from time to time they fell silent, all that could be heard outside was the ominous roaring of the night wind, while the tall windows of the church creaked strangely, as if the ghosts of the dead were knocking at the building where they heard the pious dirge. Kreisler approached the ranks of the monks, and recognized the dead man as Prince Hector’s adjutant.

  Then the dark spirits which so often had power over him stirred, sinking their sharp talons mercilessly into his wounded breast.

  ‘Tormenting apparition,’ said Kreisler to himself, ‘do you drive me here to make that dead youth bleed, as they say a corpse will bleed when its murderer comes near? Ah, but don’t I know that all his blood must have drained away in the sad days when he was expiating his sins on his sickbed? He has no evil drop left to poison his murderer, should that murderer come near him, least of all to poison Johannes Kreisler, who has no business with the adder he crushed to the ground when its forked tongue was already outstretched to deal a mortal wound! Open your eyes, dead man, so that I may look you straight in the face and you may see the sin has nothing to do with me! But you can’t! Who told you to set life against life? Why did you play a deceitful game of murder when you weren’t prepared to lose it? Yet your features are good and gentle, O pale and quiet youth; the agony of death has driven every trace of odious sin from your fair countenance, and if it were seemly to do so now I could say Heaven had opened its merciful gate to you, because there was love in your breast. But then, suppose I’m mistaken in you? Suppose you are no wicked demon, suppose my lucky star raised your arm against me to save me from the dreadful doom lying in wait for me in the dark? You may open your eyes now, pale youth, you may disclose everything now, everything,
with a glance of reconciliation, even should I perish of mourning for you, or of a terrible dread fear that the black shadow prowling behind me will instantly seize upon me. Aye, look at me – but no, you might look at me like Leonhard Ettlinger, I might think you were the man himself, and then you must go down into the depths with me, those depths from which I often hear his hollow, ghostly voice. What’s this – do you smile? Does colour come to your cheeks, your lips? Does not Death’s weapon strike home? No, I will not wrestle with you again, but –’

  During this soliloquy Kreisler had fallen unawares on one knee, both his elbows propped on the other, his hands beneath his chin. He now started up hastily, and would surely have done something strange and wild had not the monks and choirboys at that moment intoned the Salve regina, to the soft accompaniment of the organ. The coffin was closed, and the monks paced solemnly away. Then the dark spirits left poor Johannes alone, and he followed the monks, his head bowed, entirely dissolved in pain and melancholy. He was just on his way out through the door when a figure rose in a dark corner and strode rapidly towards him.