LETTER LI.

Herne Hill, 9th Feb., 1875.

I have been so much angered, distressed, and defeated, by many things, during these last autumn and winter months, that I can only keep steadily to my business by insisting to myself on my own extreme value and importance to the world; and quoting, in self-application, the most flattering texts I can find, such as, “Simon, Simon, Satan hath desired to have you,” and so on; hoping that at least a little more of my foolishness is being pounded out of me at every blow; and that the dough I knead for Fors may be daily of purer wheat.

I wish I could raise it with less leaven of malice; but I dislike some things and some people so much, that, having been always an impetuous, inconsiderate, and weakly communicative person, I find it impossible to hold my tongue in this time of advanced years and petulance. I am thankful, to-day, to have one most [54]pleasant thing first to refer to;—the notable speech, namely, of Mr. Johnson, the President of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce, on the immorality of cheapness; the first living words respecting commerce which I have ever known to be spoken in England, in my time;—on which, nevertheless, I can in no wise dilate to-day, but most thankfully treasure them for study in a future letter; having already prepared for this one, during my course of self-applause taken medicinally, another passage or two of my own biography, putting some of the reasons for my carelessness about Agnes’ proficiency in reading or writing, more definitely before the reader.

Until I was more than four years old, we lived in Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, the greater part of the year; for a few weeks in the summer breathing country air by taking lodgings in small cottages (real cottages, not villas, so-called) either about Hampstead, or at Dulwich, at ‘Mrs. Ridley’s,’ the last of a row in a lane which led out into the Dulwich fields on one side, and was itself full of buttercups in spring, and blackberries in autumn. But my chief remaining impressions of those days are attached to Hunter Street. My mother’s general principles of first treatment were, to guard me with steady watchfulness from all avoidable pain or danger; and, for the rest, to let me amuse myself as I liked, provided I was neither fretful nor troublesome. But the law was, that I should find my own amusement. No toys of any kind were at first [55]allowed;—and the pity of my Croydon aunt for my monastic poverty in this respect was boundless. On one of my birthdays, thinking to overcome my mother’s resolution by splendour of temptation, she bought the most radiant Punch and Judy she could find in all the Soho bazaar—as big as a real Punch and Judy, all dressed in scarlet and gold, and that would dance, tied to the leg of a chair. I must have been greatly impressed, for I remember well the look of the two figures, as my aunt herself exhibited their virtues. My mother was obliged to accept them; but afterwards quietly told me it was not right that I should have them; and I never saw them again.

Nor did I painfully wish, what I was never permitted for an instant to hope, or even imagine, the possession of such things as one saw in toyshops. I had a bunch of keys to play with, as long as I was capable only of pleasure in what glittered and jingled; as I grew older, I had a cart, and a ball; and when I was five or six years old, two boxes of well-cut wooden bricks. With these modest, but, I still think, entirely sufficient possessions, and being always summarily whipped if I cried, did not do as I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs, I soon attained serene and secure methods of life and motion; and could pass my days contentedly in tracing the squares and comparing the colours of my carpet;—examining the knots in the wood of the floor, or counting the bricks in the opposite houses; with [56]rapturous intervals of excitement during the filling of the water-cart, through its leathern pipe, from the dripping iron post at the pavement edge; or the still more admirable proceedings of the turncock, when he turned and turned till a fountain sprang up in the middle of the street. But the carpet, and what patterns I could find in bed covers, dresses, or wall-papers to be examined, were my chief resources, and my attention to the particulars in these was soon so accurate, that when at three and a half I was taken to have my portrait painted by Mr. Northcote, I had not been ten minutes alone with him before I asked him why there were holes in his carpet. The portrait in question represents a very pretty child with yellow hair, dressed in a white frock like a girl, with a broad light-blue sash and blue shoes to match; the feet of the child wholesomely large in proportion to its body; and the shoes still more wholesomely large in proportion to the feet.

These articles of my daily dress were all sent to the old painter for perfect realization; but they appear in the picture more remarkable than they were in my nursery, because I am represented as running in a field at the edge of a wood with the trunks of its trees striped across in the manner of Sir Joshua Reynolds; while two rounded hills, as blue as my shoes, appear in the distance, which were put in by the painter at my own request; for I had already been once, if not [57]twice, taken to Scotland; and my Scottish nurse having always sung to me as we approached the Tweed or Esk,—

“For Scotland, my darling, lies full in my view,

With her barefooted lassies, and mountains so blue,”

I had already generally connected the idea of distant hills with approach to the extreme felicities of life, in my (Scottish) aunt’s garden of gooseberry bushes, sloping to the Tay.

But that, when old Mr. Northcote asked me (little thinking, I fancy, to get any answer so explicit) what I would like to have in the distance of my picture, I should have said “blue hills” instead of “gooseberry bushes,” appears to me—and I think without any morbid tendency to think overmuch of myself—a fact sufficiently curious, and not without promise, in a child of that age.

I think it should be related also that having, as aforesaid, been steadily whipped if I was troublesome, my formed habit of serenity was greatly pleasing to the old painter; for I sat contentedly motionless, counting the holes in his carpet, or watching him squeeze his paint out of its bladders,—a beautiful operation, indeed, it seemed to me; but I do not remember taking any interest in Mr. Northcote’s applications of the pigments to the canvas; my ideas of delightful art, in that respect, involving indispensably the possession of a large pot, filled with paint of the [58]brightest green, and of a brush which would come out of it soppy. But my quietude was so pleasing to the old man that he begged my father and mother to let me sit to him for the face of a child which he was painting in a classical subject; where I was accordingly represented as reclining on a leopard skin, and having a thorn taken out of my foot by a wild man of the woods.

In all these particulars, I think the treatment, or accidental conditions, of my childhood, entirely right, for a child of my temperament; but the mode of my introduction to literature appears to me questionable, and I am not prepared to carry it out in St. George’s schools, without much modification. I absolutely declined to learn to read by syllables; but would get an entire sentence by heart with great facility, and point with accuracy to every word in the page as I repeated it. As, however, when the words were once displaced, I had no more to say, my mother gave up, for the time, the endeavour to teach me to read, hoping only that I might consent, in process of years, to adopt the popular system of syllabic study. But I went on, to amuse myself, in my own way, learnt whole words at a time, as I did patterns;—and at five years old was sending for my ‘second volumes’ to the circulating library.

This effort to learn the words in their collective aspect, was assisted by my real admiration of the look [59]of printed type, which I began to copy for my pleasure, as other children draw dogs and horses. The following inscription, facsimile’d from the fly leaf of my ‘Seven Champions of Christendom,’ I believe, (judging from the independent views taken in it of the character of the letter L, and the relative elevation of G,) to be an extremely early art study of this class; and as, by the will of Fors, the first lines of the note written the other day underneath my copy of it, in direction to Mr. Burgess, presented some notable points of correspondence with it, I thought it well he should engrave them together, as they stood.

The noble knight like a bold and daring hero then entered the valley where the dragon had his abode who no sooner had sight of him but his leathern throat sent forth a sound more

Bolton Abbey

24th Jan. 75

Dear Arthur

Will you kindly facsimile with moderate care, the above piece of ancient manuscript in Fors.

It would be difficult to give more distinct evidence than is furnished by these pieces of manuscript, of the incurably desultory character which has brought on me [60]the curse of Reuben, “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.” But I reflect, hereupon, with resolute self-complacency, that water, when good, is a good thing, though it be not stable; and that it may be better sometimes to irrigate than excel. And of the advantage, in many respects, of learning to write and read, if at all, in the above pictorial manner, I have much to say on some other occasion; but, having to-day discoursed enough about myself, will assume that Agnes, wholly at her own sweet will, has made shift to attain the skill and temper necessary for the use of any kind of good book, or bible. It is, then, for the St. George’s Company to see that all the bibles she has, whether for delight or instruction, shall be indeed holy bibles; written by persons, that is to say, in whom the word of God dwelt, and who spoke or wrote according to the will of God; and, therefore, with faithful purpose of speaking the truth touching what they had to tell, or of singing, rhyming, or what not else, for the amusement whether of children or grown-up persons, in a natural, modest, and honest manner, doing their best for the love of God and men, or children, or of the natural world; and not for money, (though for the time necessary to learn the arts of singing or writing, such honest minstrels and authors, manifestly possessing talent for their business, should be allowed to claim daily moderate maintenance, and for their actual toil, in performance of their arts, modest reward, and daily bread). [61]

And, passing by for the present the extremely difficult and debateable question, by what kind of entertaining and simple bibles Agnes shall be first encouraged in the pursuits of literature, I wish to describe to-day more particularly the kind of book I want to be able to give her about her bees, when she is old enough to take real charge of them. For I don’t in the least want a book to tell her how many species of bees there are; nor what grounds there may be for suspecting that one species is another species; nor why Mr. B—— is convinced that what Mr. A—— considered two species are indeed one species; nor how conclusively Mr. C—— has proved that what Mr. B—— described as a new species is an old species. Neither do I want a book to tell her what a bee’s inside is like, nor whether it has its brains in the small of its back, or nowhere in particular, like a modern political economist; nor whether the morphological nature of the sternal portion of the thorax should induce us, strictly, to call it the prosternum, or may ultimately be found to present no serious inducement of that nature. But I want a book to tell her, for instance, how a bee buzzes; and how, and by what instrumental touch, its angry buzz differs from its pleased or simply busy buzz.1 Nor have I any objection to the [62]child’s learning, for good and all, such a dreadful word as ‘proboscis’ though I don’t, myself, understand why in the case of a big animal, like an elephant, one should be allowed, in short English, to say that it takes a bun with its trunk; and yet be required to state always, with severe accuracy, that a bee gathers honey with its proboscis. Whatever we were allowed to call it, however, our bee-book must assuredly tell Agnes and me, what at present I believe neither of us know,—certainly, I don’t, myself,—how the bee’s feeding instrument differs from its building one, and what either may be like.

I pause, here, to think over and put together the little I do know; and consider how it should be told Agnes. For to my own mind, it occurs in a somewhat grotesque series of imagery, with which I would not, if possible, infect hers. The difference, for instance, in the way of proboscis, between the eminent nose of an elephant, and the not easily traceable nose of a bird: the humorous, and, it seems to me, even slightly mocking and cruel contrivance of the Forming Spirit, that we shall always, unless we very carefully mind what we are about, think that a bird’s beak is its nose:—the, to me, as an epicure, greatly disturbing, question, how much, when I see that [63]a bird likes anything, it likes it at the tip of its bill, or somewhere inside. Then I wonder why elephants don’t build houses with their noses, as birds build nests with their faces;—then, I wonder what elephants’ and mares’ nests are like, when they haven’t got stables, or dens in menageries; finally, I think I had better stop thinking and find out a fact or two, if I can, from any books in my possession, about the working tools of the bee.

And I will look first whether there is any available account of these matters in a book which I once all but knew by heart, ‘Bingley’s Animal Biography,’ which, though it taught me little, made me desire to know more, and neither fatigued my mind nor polluted it, whereas most modern books on natural history only cease to be tiresome by becoming loathsome.

Yes,—I thought I had read it, and known it, once. “They” (the worker bees) “are so eager to afford mutual assistance” (bestial, as distinct from human competition, you observe), “and for this, purpose so many of them crowd together, that their individual operations can scarcely be distinctly observed.” (If I re-write this for Agnes, that last sentence shall stand thus: ‘that it is difficult to see what any one is doing.’) “It has, however, been discovered that their two jaws are the only instruments they employ in modelling and polishing the wax. With a little patience we perceive cells just begun, we likewise remark the quickness with which a bee moves its teeth against a small portion of the cell; this portion [64]the animal, by repeated strokes on each side, smooths, renders compact, and reduces to a proper thinness.”

Here I pause again,—ever so many questions occurring to me at once,—and of which, if Agnes is a thoughtful child, and not frightened from asking what she wants to know, by teachers who have been afraid they wouldn’t be able to answer, she may, it is probable, put one or two herself. What are a bee’s teeth like? are they white, or black? do they ever ache? can it bite hard with them? has it got anything to bite? Not only do I find no satisfaction in Mr. Bingley as to these matters, but in a grand, close-printed epitome of entomology2 lately published simultaneously in London, Paris, and New York, and which has made me sick with disgust by its descriptions, at every other leaf I opened, of all that is horrible in insect life, I find, out of five hundred and seventy-nine figures, not one of a bee’s teeth, the chief architectural instruments of the insect world. And I am the more provoked and plagued by this, because, my brains being, as all the rest of me, desultory and ill under control, I get into another fit of thinking what a bee’s lips can be like, and of wondering why whole meadows-full of flowers are called “cows’ lips” and none called “bees’ lips.” And finding presently, in Cassell, Petter, and Galpin, something really interesting about bees’ tongues, and that they don’t suck, but lick up honey, I go on wondering [65]how soon we shall have a scientific Shakespeare printed for the use of schools, with Ariel’s song altered into

‘Where the bee licks, there lurk I,’

and “the singing masons building roofs of gold,” explained to be merely automatic arrangements of lively viscera.

Shaking myself at last together again, I refer to a really valuable book—Dr. Latham Ormerod’s ‘History of Wasps’:—of which, if I could cancel all the parts that interest the Doctor himself, and keep only those which interest Agnes and me, and the pictures of wasps at the end,—I would make it a standard book in St. George’s Library, even placing it in some proper subordinate relation to the Fourth Georgic: but as it is, I open in every other page on something about ‘organs,’ a word with which I do not care for Agnes’s associating any ideas, at present, but those of a Savoyard and his monkey.

However, I find here, indeed, a diagram of a wasp’s mouth; but as it only looks like what remains of a spider after being trodden on, and, as I find that this “mandibulate form of mouth” consists of

“a, the labium, with the two labial palpi; b, the maxilla, whose basilar portions bear at one end the cardo, at the other the hairy galea and the maxillary palpas; c, the labrum, and d, the mandible,”

[66]

Agnes and I perceive that for the present there is an end of the matter for us; and retreat to our Bingley, there to console ourselves with hearing how Mr. Wildman, whose remarks on the management of bees are well known, possessed a secret by which “he could at any time cause a hive of bees to swarm upon his head, shoulders, or body, in a most surprising manner. He has been seen to drink a glass of wine, having at the same time the bees all over his head and face more than an inch deep: several fell into the glass, but they did not sting him. He could even act the part of a general with them, by marshalling them in battle array upon a large table. There he divided them into regiments, battalions, and companies, according to military discipline, waiting only for his word of command. The moment he uttered the word ‘march!’ they began to march in a regular manner, like soldiers. To these insects he also taught so much politeness, that they never attempted to sting any of the numerous company.”

Agnes, on reading this, is sure to ask me ‘how he taught them?’ Which is just what, as a student of new methods of education, I should like to know myself; and not a word is said on the matter: and we are presently pushed on into the history of the larger animal which I call a humble, but Agnes, a bumble, bee. Not, however, clearly knowing myself either what the ways of this kind are, or why they should be called humble, when I always find them at the top of a thistle rather [67]than the bottom, I spend half my morning in hunting through my scientific books for information on this matter, and find whole pages of discussion whether the orange-tailed bee is the same as the white-tailed bee, but nothing about why either should be called humble or bumble:—at last I bethink me of the great despiser of natural history; and find that stout Samuel, with his good editor Mr. Todd, have given me all I want; but there is far more and better authority for ‘bumble’ than I thought. However;—this first guess of Johnson’s own assuredly touches one popular, though it appears mistaken, reason for the Shakespearian form. “The humble bee is known to have no sting. The Scotch call a cow without horns a ‘humble cow.’ ” But truly, I have never myself yet had clear faith enough in that absence of sting to catch a humble bee in my fingers;3 only I suppose Bottom would have warned Cobweb against that danger, if there had been such, as well as against being overflown with the honey bag.4 Red-hipped, Bottom calls them; and yet I find nothing about their red hips anywhere in my books. [68]

We have not done with the name yet, however. It is from the Teutonic ‘hommolen,’ bombum edere: (in good time, some years hence, Agnes shall know what Teutons are,—what bombs are,—shall read my great passage in ‘Unto this Last’ about bombshells and peaches; and shall know how distinct the Latin root of Edition and Editor is from that of Edification).

Next,—Chaucer, however, uses ‘humbling’ in the sense of humming or muttering: “like to the humblinge after the clap of a thunderinge.” So that one might classically say—a busy bee hums and a lazy bee humbles; only we can’t quite rest even in this; for under Bumble-bee in Johnson, I find a quantity of other quotations and branched words, going off into silk and bombazine;—of which I shall only ask Agnes to remember—

“The Bittern, with his bump,

The crane, with his trump,”

and Chaucer’s single line,

“And as a bytorne bumblith in the mire.”

This, however, she should write out carefully, letter by letter, as soon as she had learned to write; and know at least that the image was used of a wife telling her husband’s faults—and, in good time, the whole story of Midas. Meanwhile, we remain satisfied to teach her to call her large brown friends, humble bees, because Shakespeare does, which is reason enough: and then the next thing I want to know, and tell her, is, why they [69]are so fond of thistles. Before she can know this, I must be able to draw a thistle-blossom rightly for her; and as my botany has stood fast for some years at the point where I broke down in trying to draw the separate tubes of thistle-blossom, I can’t say any more on that point to-day: but, going on with my Bingley, I find four more species of bees named, which I should like to tell Agnes all I could about: namely, the Mason Bee; the Wood-piercing Bee; and the one which Bingley calls the Garden Bee; but which, as most bees are to be found in gardens, I shall myself call the Wool-gathering Bee; the Leaf-cutting Bee.

1. The mason bee, it appears, builds her nest of sand, which she chooses carefully grain by grain; then sticks, with bee-glue, as many grains together as she can carry, (like the blocks of brick we see our builders prepare for circular drains)—and builds her nest like a swallow’s, in any angle on the south side of a wall; only with a number of cells inside, like—a monastery, shall we say?—each cell being about the size of a thimble. But these cells are not, like hive bees’, regularly placed, but anyhow—the holes between filled up with solid block building;—and this disorder in the architecture of mason bees seems to be connected with moral disorder in their life; for, instead of being ‘so eager to afford mutual assistance’ that one can’t see what each is doing, these mason bees, if they can, steal each other’s nests, just like human beings, and [70]fight, positively, like Christians. “Sometimes the two bees fly with such rapidity and force against each other that both fall to the ground”; and the way their cells are built—back of one to side of the other, and so on, is just like what a friend was telling me only the day before yesterday of the new cottages built by a speculative builder, who failed just afterwards, on some lots of land which a Lord of the Manor, near my friend, had just stolen from the public common and sold.

2. The wood-piercing bee cuts out her nest in decayed wood; the nest being a hollow pipe like a chimney, or a group of such pipes, each divided by regular floors, into cells for the children; one egg is put in each cell, and the cell filled with a paste made of the farina of flowers mixed with honey, for the young bee to eat when it is hatched. Now this carpentering work, I find, is done wholly by the wood-piercing bee’s strong jaws; but here again is no picture of her jaws, or the teeth in them; though the little heaps of sawdust outside where she is working “are of grains nearly as large as those produced by a handsaw”; and she has to make her floors of these grains, by gluing them in successive rings from the outside of her cell to the centre. Yes; that’s all very well; but then I want to know if she cuts the bits of any particular shape, as, suppose, in flattish pieces like tiles, and if then she glues these sideways or edgeways in their successive rings. [71]

But here is the prettiest thing of all in her work. It takes, of course, a certain time to collect the farina with which each cell is filled, and to build the floor between it and the nest; so that the baby in the room at the bottom of the pipe will be born a day or two before the baby next above, and be ready to come out first; and if it made its way upwards, would disturb the next baby too soon. So the mother puts them all upside down, with their feet—their tails, I should say—uppermost; and then when she has finished her whole nest, to the last cell at the top, she goes and cuts a way at the bottom of it, for the oldest of the family to make her way out, as she naturally will, head-foremost, and so cause the others no discomfort by right of primogeniture.

3. The wool-gathering bee is described by White of Selborne, as “frequenting the Garden Campion, for the sake of its Tomentum.” I lose half an hour in trying to find out the Garden Campion among the thirty-two volumes of old Sowerby: I find nothing but the sort of white catchfly things that grow out of hollow globes, (which Mary of the Giessbach, by the way, spoken of in a former letter, first taught me to make pops with). I vainly try to find out what “Campion” means. Johnson fails me this time. “Campion, the name of a plant.” I conjecture it must be simple for champion, “keeper of the field,”—and let that pass; but lose myself again presently in the derivation of Tomentum, and its relation [72]to Tome, in the sense of a volume. Getting back out of all that, rather tired, I find at last in Bingley that the Garden Campion is Agrostemma Coronaria of Linnæus; and I look in my Linnæus, and find it described as Tomentosum; and then I try my two Sowerbys, ancient and modern, where I find nothing under Agrostemma but the corn-cockle, and so have to give in at last; but I can tell Agnes, at least, that there’s some sort of pink which has a downy stem, and there’s some sort of bee which strips off the down from the stalk of this pink, “running from the top to the bottom of a branch, and shaving it bare with all the dexterity of a hoop-shaver.”

Hoop-shaver? but I never saw so much as a hoop-shaver! Must see one on the first chance, only I suppose they make hoops by steam now.

“When it has got a bundle almost as large as itself it flies away, holding it secure between its chin and forelegs.”

Chin?—what is a bee’s chin like?

Then comes a story about a knight’s finding the key wouldn’t turn in the lock of his garden gate; and there being a wool-gathering bee’s nest inside: and it seems she makes her cells or thimbles of this wool, but does not fill them with honey inside; so that I am in doubt whether the early life of the young bees who live in wood, and have plenty to eat, be not more enviable than the lot of those who live in wool and have no larders. I can’t find any more about [73]the wool-gatherer; and the fourth kind of bee, most interesting of all, must wait till next Fors’ time, for there’s a great deal to be learnt about her.

‘And what of the St. George’s Company meanwhile’?

Well, if I cannot show it some better method of teaching natural history than has been fallen upon by our recent Doctors, we need not begin our work at all. We cannot live in the country without hunting animals, or shooting them, unless we learn how to look at them. [75]