Now, obviously, this is an invention. Perverse as Baudelaire undoubtedly was, he loved cats too much to torture them. Without knowing it, the late director of the Théâtre Français has described, “avant la lettre,” as the etchers say, the music of the future: Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Ornstein, and Prokofieff. But calico cats! Not a spoor of them in all this, so we are forced to fall back upon symbolism, which seems to be the art of saying the reverse of what you think. (I nearly meant this.) In his Hunting of the Snark Lewis Carroll finds that it is a Boojum. Perhaps our calico cat is not a cat at all, but a critic. But then a cat may look at a critic, as a critic is privileged to stare a composer out of countenance. A calico cat may, for all we know, house the soul of a real cat. Therefore, children, do not treat it rudely! It may be watching you with its malignant, beady eyes, ready to spring, ready to scratch when you least expect it! And we should not forget Baudelaire, who would lower his voice when showing his friends some Polynesian idol of wood, bidding them not mock, because once upon a time a deity may have inhabited the rude carving. The remote ancestor of a calico doll may have been that scourge of a vanished geological epoch, the sabre-toothed tiger, just as the iridescent dragon-fly that flashes winged sunshine as it skims is the pitiful reduction of the dread Pterodactyl, the flying saurian, which also reappears as the Jabberwock (furnished with a monocle by Sir John Tenniel, ever a stickler for etiquette). The calico cat might be a prowling version of the Frumious Bandersnatch, with the claws that scratch. But a truce to paleontology! Let us of the nonce assume that the cat in question stands for the tutelar totem of criticism. A mere figure of speech, “Hypocrite lecteur--mon semblable--mon frère!” I can see my surprised colleagues: He has called us musical lounge lizards, now we are calico cats! What the next recrudescence? In Hindu-land what Avatar? I remember the sage advice of Vance Thompson: When all trumps fail, write about your liver! He was speaking of criticism. Musical trumps are, as a rule, mesugah, in the classic parlance of pinochle; hence I fall back on a hypothetical hepatic condition, i. e., calico cats and criticism; criticism of music, art, literature, or mixed. Swinburne’s theory that “I have never been able to see what should attract a man to the profession of criticism but the noble art of praising” was vitiated in practice by the poet himself, who wrote scurrilously of any one who disagreed with him. “After all, what are critics?” asked Balzac, and later Disraeli-Beaconsfield. “Men who have failed in literature and art.” Mascagni, the Single-Speech Hamilton of Italian composers, cried aloud in resentment that a critic was only a “compositore mancato.” (Probably some fellow musician had wounded him with a pen.)