LETTER LII.

I must steadily do a little bit more autobiography in every Fors, now, or I shall never bring myself to be of age before I die—or have to stop writing,—for which last turn of temper, or fortune, my friends, without exception, (and I hope—one or two of my enemies,) are, I find, praying with what devotion is in them.

My mother had, as she afterwards told me, solemnly devoted me to God before I was born; in imitation of Hannah.

Very good women are remarkably apt to make away with their children prematurely, in this manner: the real meaning of the pious act being, that, as the sons of Zebedee are not, (or at least they hope not,) to sit on the right and left of Christ, in His kingdom, their own sons may perhaps, they think, in time be advanced to that respectable position in eternal life; especially if they ask Christ very humbly for it every day;—and they always forget in the most naïve way that the position is not His to give! [90]

‘Devoting me to God’ meant, as far as my mother knew herself what she meant, that she would try to send me to college, and make a clergyman of me: and I was accordingly bred for ‘the Church.’ My father, who—rest be to his soul—had the exceedingly bad habit of yielding to my mother in large things and taking his own way in little ones, allowed me, without saying a word, to be thus withdrawn from the sherry trade as an unclean thing; not without some pardonable participation in my mother’s ultimate views for me. For, many and many a year afterwards, I remember while he was speaking to one of our artist friends, who admired Raphael, and greatly regretted my endeavours to interfere with that popular taste,—while my father and he were condoling with each other on my having been impudent enough to think I could tell the public about Turner and Raphael,—instead of contenting myself, as I ought, with explaining the way of their souls’ salvation to them—and what an amiable clergyman was lost in me,—“Yes,” said my father, with tears in his eyes—(true and tender tears—as ever father shed,) “he would have been a Bishop.”

Luckily for me, my mother, under these distinct impressions of her own duty, and with such latent hopes of my future eminence, took me very early to church;—where, in spite of my quiet habits, and my mother’s golden vinaigrette, always indulged to me there, and there only, with its lid unclasped that I [91]might see the wreathed open pattern above the sponge, I found the bottom of the pew so extremely dull a place to keep quiet in, (my best story-books being also taken away from me in the morning,) that—as I have somewhere said before—the horror of Sunday used even to cast its prescient gloom as far back in the week as Friday—and all the glory of Monday, with church seven days removed again, was no equivalent for it.

Notwithstanding, I arrived at some abstract in my own mind of the Rev. Mr. Howell’s sermons; and occasionally—in imitation of him—preached a sermon at home over the red sofa cushions;—this performance being always called for by my mother’s dearest friends, as the great accomplishment of my childhood. The sermon was—I believe—some eleven words long;—very exemplary, it seems to me, in that respect—and I still think must have been the purest gospel, for I know it began with ‘People, be good.’

We seldom had company, even on week days; and I was never allowed to come down to dessert, until much later in life—when I was able to crack nuts neatly. I was then permitted to come down to crack other people’s nuts for them; (I hope they liked the ministration)—but never to have any myself; nor anything else of dainty kind, either then or at other times. Once, at Hunter Street, I recollect my mother’s giving me three raisins, in the forenoon—out of the store cabinet; and I remember perfectly [92]the first time I tasted custard, in our lodgings in Norfolk Street—where we had gone while the house was being painted, or cleaned, or something. My father was dining in the front room, and did not finish his custard; and my mother brought me the bottom of it into the back room.

I’ve no more space for garrulity in this letter, having several past bits of note to bring together.

Bolton Bridge, 24th January, 1875.

I have been driving by the old road1 from Coniston here, through Kirby Lonsdale, and have seen more ghastly signs of modern temper than I yet had believed possible.

The valley of the Lune at Kirby is one of the loveliest scenes in England—therefore, in the world. Whatever moorland hill, and sweet river, and English forest foliage can be at their best, is gathered there; and chiefly seen from the steep bank which falls to the stream side from the upper part of the town itself. There, a path leads from the churchyard, out of which [93]Turner made his drawing of the valley, along the brow of the wooded bank, to open downs beyond; a little bye footpath on the right descending steeply through the woods to a spring among the rocks of the shore. I do not know in all my own country, still less in France or Italy, a place more naturally divine, or a more priceless possession of true “Holy Land.”

Well, the population of Kirby cannot, it appears, in consequence of their recent civilization, any more walk, in summer afternoons, along the brow of this bank, without a fence. I at first fancied this was because they were usually unable to take care of themselves at that period of the day: but saw presently I must be mistaken in that conjecture, because the fence they have put up requires far more sober minds for safe dealing with it than ever the bank did; being of thin, strong, and finely sharpened skewers, on which if a drunken man rolled heavily, he would assuredly be impaled at the armpit. They have carried this lovely decoration down on both sides of the wood-path to the spring, with warning notice on ticket,—“This path leads only to the Ladies’2 well—all trespassers will be prosecuted”—and the iron rails leave so narrow footing that I myself scarcely ventured to go down,—the morning being frosty, and the path slippery,—lest I should fall on the spikes. The well at the bottom was choked up and defaced, though ironed all [94]round, so as to look like the ‘pound’ of old days for strayed cattle: they had been felling the trees too; and the old wood had protested against the fence in its own way, with its last root and branch,—for the falling trunks had crashed through the iron grating in all directions, and left it in already rusty and unseemly rags, like the last refuse of a railroad accident, beaten down among the dead leaves.

Heraldic snake.

Just at the dividing of the two paths, the improving mob3 of Kirby had got two seats put for themselves—to admire the prospect from, forsooth. And these seats were to be artistic, if Minerva were propitious,—in the style of Kensington. So they are supported on iron legs, representing each, as far as any rational conjecture can extend—the Devil’s tail pulled off, with a goose’s head stuck on the wrong end of it. Thus: and what is more—two of the geese-heads are without eyes (I stooped down under the seat and rubbed the frost off them to make sure,) and the whole symbol is perfect, therefore,—as typical of our English populace, fashionable and other, [95]which seats itself to admire prospects, in the present day.

Now, not a hundred paces from these seats there is a fine old church, with Norman door, and lancet east windows, and so on; and this, of course, has been duly patched, botched, plastered, and primmed up; and is kept as tidy as a new pin. For your English clergyman keeps his own stage properties, nowadays, as carefully as a poor actress her silk stockings. Well, all that, of course, is very fine; but, actually, the people go through the churchyard to the path on the hill-brow, making the new iron railing an excuse to pitch their dust-heaps, and whatever of worse they have to get rid of, crockery and the rest,—down over the fence among the primroses and violets to the river,—and the whole blessed shore underneath, rough sandstone rock throwing the deep water off into eddies among shingle, is one waste of filth, town-drainage, broken saucepans, tannin, and mill-refuse.

The same morning I had to water my horses at the little village of Clapham, between Kirby and Settle. There is another exquisite rocky brook there; and an old bridge over it. I went down to the brook-side to see the bridge; and found myself instantly, of course, stopped by a dunghill,—and that of the vilest human sort; while, just on the other side of the road,—not twenty yards off,—were the new schools, with their orthodox Gothic belfry—all spick and span—and the [96]children playing fashionably at hoop, round them, in a narrow paved yard—like debtor children in the Fleet, in imitation of the manners and customs of the West End. High over all, the Squire’s house, resplendent on the hillside, within sound alike of belfry, and brook.

I got on here, to Bolton Bridge, the same day; and walked down to the Abbey in the evening, to look again at Turner’s subject of the Wharfe shore. If there is one spot in England, where human creatures pass or live, which one would expect to find, in spite of their foul existence, still clean—it is Bolton Park. But to my final and utter amazement, I had not taken two steps by the waterside at the loveliest bend of the river below the stepping-stones, before I found myself again among broken crockery, cinders, cockle-shells, and tinkers’ refuse;—a large old gridiron forming the principal point of effect and interest among the pebbles. The filth must be regularly carried past the Abbey, and across the Park, to the place.

But doubtless, in Bolton Priory, amiable school teachers tell their little Agneses the story of the white doe;—and duly make them sing, in psalm tune, “As the hart panteth after the waterbrooks.”

Very certainly, nevertheless, the young ladies of Luneside and Wharfedale don’t pant in the least after their waterbrooks; and this is the saddest part of the business to me. Pollution of rivers!—yes, that is to be considered also;—but pollution of young ladies’ minds [97]to the point of never caring to scramble by a riverside, so long as they can have their church-curate and his altar-cloths to their fancy—this is the horrible thing, in my own wild way of thinking. That shingle of the Lune, under Kirby, reminded me, as if it had been yesterday, of a summer evening by a sweeter shore still: the edge of the North Inch of Perth, where the Tay is wide, just below Scone; and the snowy quartz pebbles decline in long banks under the ripples of the dark clear stream.

My Scotch cousin Jessie, eight years old, and I, ten years old, and my Croydon cousin, Bridget, a slim girl of fourteen, were all wading together, here and there; and of course getting into deep water as far as we could,—my father and mother and aunt watching us,—till at last, Bridget, having the longest legs, and, taking after her mother, the shortest conscience,—got in so far, and with her petticoats so high, that the old people were obliged to call to her, though hardly able to call, for laughing; and I recollect staring at them, and wondering what they were laughing at. But alas, by Lune shore, now, there are no pretty girls to be seen holding their petticoats up. Nothing but old saucepans and tannin—or worse—as signs of modern civilization.

‘But how fine it is to have iron skewers for our fences; and no trespassing, (except by lords of the manor on poor men’s ground,) and pretty legs exhibited where they can be so without impropriety, [98]and with due advertisement to the public beforehand; and iron legs to our chairs, also, in the style of Kensington!’ Doubtless; but considering that Kensington is a school of natural Science as well as Art, it seems to me that these Kirby representations of the Ophidia are slightly vague. Perhaps, however, in conveying that tenderly sagacious expression into his serpent’s head, and burnishing so acutely the brandished sting in his tail, the Kirby artist has been under the theological instructions of the careful Minister who has had his church restored so prettily;—only then the Minister himself must have been, without knowing it, under the directions of another person, who had an intimate interest in the matter. For there is more than failure of natural history in this clumsy hardware. It is indeed a matter of course that it should be clumsy, for the English have always been a dull nation in decorative art: and I find, on looking at things here afresh after long work in Italy, that our most elaborate English sepulchral work, as the Cockayne tombs at Ashbourne and the Dudley tombs at Warwick, (not to speak of Queen Elizabeth’s in Westminster!) are yet, compared to Italian sculpture of the same date, no less barbarous than these goose heads of Kirby would appear beside an asp head of Milan. But the tombs of Ashbourne or Warwick are honest, though blundering, efforts to imitate what was really felt to be beautiful; whereas the serpents of Kirby are ordered and shaped by the [99]“least erected spirit that fell,” in the very likeness of himself!

For observe the method and circumstance of their manufacture. You dig a pit for ironstone, and heap a mass of refuse on fruitful land; you blacken your God-given sky, and consume your God-given fuel, to melt the iron; you bind your labourer to the Egyptian toil of its castings and forgings; then, to refine his mind you send him to study Raphael at Kensington; and with all this cost, filth, time, and misery, you at last produce—the devil’s tail for your sustenance, instead of an honest three-legged stool.

You do all this that men may live—think you? Alas—no; the real motive of it all is that the fashionable manufacturer may live in a palace, getting his fifty per cent. commission on the work which he has taken out of the hands of the old village carpenter, who would have cut two stumps of oak in two minutes out of the copse, which would have carried your bench and you triumphantly,—to the end of both your times.

However, I must get back to my bees’ heads and tails, to-day;—what a serpent’s are like in their true type of Earthly Injustice, it may be worth our while to see also, if we can understand the “sad-eyed justice” first.

Sad-eyed! Little did Shakespeare think, I fancy, how many eyes the sad-eyed Justice had! or how ill she saw with them. I continually notice the bees at [100]Brantwood flying rapturously up to the flowers on my wall paper, and knocking themselves against them, again and again, unconvinceable of their fallacy; and it is no compliment to the wall paper or its artist, neither—for the flowers are only conventional ones, copied from a radiant Bishop’s cloak of the fifteenth century.

It is curious too, that although before coming to the leaf-cutting bee, Bingley expatiates on the Poppy bees’ luxurious tapestry, cut from the scarlet poppy, he never considers whether she could see it, or not, underground—(unless by help of the fiery glowworms’ eyes)—and still less, how long the cut leaves would remain scarlet. Then I am told wonderful things of the clasping of the curtains of her little tabernacle;—but when the curtains dry, and shrink, what then?

Let us hear what he tells us of the Rose bee, however—in full.

“These bees construct cylindrical nests of the leaves of the rose and other trees. These nests are sometimes of the depth of six inches, and generally consist of six or seven cells, each shaped like a thimble.4 They are formed with the convex end of one fitting into the open end of another. The portions of the leaf of which they are made are not glued together,5 nor are they any otherwise fastened, than in the nicety of their adjustment [101]to each other; and yet they do not admit the liquid honey to drain through them. The interior surface of each cell consists of three pieces of leaf, of equal size, narrow at one end, but gradually widening to the other, where the width equals half the length. One side of each of these pieces, is the serrated margin of the leaf. In forming the cell, the pieces of leaf are made to lap one over the other, (the serrated side always outermost,) till a tube is thus formed, coated with three or four, or more layers. In coating these tubes, the provident little animal is careful to lay the middle of each piece of leaf over the margins of others, so as, by this means, both to cover and strengthen the junctions. At the closed or narrow end of the cell, the leaves are bent down so as to form a convex termination. When a cell is formed, the next care of the Bee is to fill it with honey and pollen, which, being collected chiefly from the thistles, form a rose-coloured paste. With these the cell is filled to within about half a line of its orifice; and the female then deposits in it an egg, and closes it with three perfectly circular pieces of leaf, which coincide so exactly with the walls of the cylindrical cell, as to be retained in their situation without any gluten.6 After this covering is fitted in, there still remains a hollow, which receives the convex end of the succeeding cell. In this manner the patient [102]and indefatigable animal proceeds, till her whole cylinder of six or seven cells is completed.

“This is generally formed under the surface of the ground,7 in a tubular passage, which it entirely fills, except at the entrance. If the labour of these insects be interrupted, or the edifice be deranged, they exhibit astonishing perseverance in setting it again to rights.

“Their mode of cutting pieces out of the leaves for their work, deserves particular notice. When one of these Bees selects a rose-bush with this view, she flies round or hovers over it for some seconds, as if examining for the leaves best suited to her purpose. When she has chosen one, she alights upon it, sometimes on the upper, and sometimes on the under surface, or not unfrequently on its edge, so that the margin passes between her legs. Her first attack, which is generally made the moment she alights, is usually near the footstalk, with her head turned towards the point. As soon as she begins to cut, she is wholly intent on her labour; nor does she cease until her work is completed. The operation is performed by means of her jaws, with as much expedition as we could exert with a pair of scissors. As she proceeds, she holds the margin of the detached part between her legs, in such a manner that the section keeps giving way to her, and does not interrupt her progress. She makes her incision in a curved line, approaching the [103]midrib of the leaf at first; but when she has reached a certain point, she recedes from this towards the margin, still cutting in a curve. When she has nearly detached from the leaf the portion she has been employed upon, she balances her little wings for flight, lest its weight should carry her to the ground; and the very moment it parts, she flies off in triumph, carrying it in a bent position between her legs, and perpendicularly to her body.”

Now in this account, the first thing I catch at is the clue to the love of bees for thistles. “Their pollen makes a rose-coloured paste with their honey;” (I think some of my Scottish friends might really take measures to get some pure thistle honey made by their bees. I once worked all the working hours I had to spare for a fortnight, to clear a field of thistles by the side of the Tummel under Schehallien: perhaps Nature meant, all the while, its master and me to let it alone, and put a hive or two upon it.)

Secondly. The description of the bee’s tubular house, though sufficiently clear, is only intelligible to me, though I know something of geometry, after some effort;—it would be wholly useless to Agnes, unless she were shown how to be a leaf-cutting bee herself, and invited to construct, or endeavour to construct, the likeness of a bee’s nest with paper and scissors.

What—in school-hours?

Yes, certainly,—in the very best of school-hours: [104]this would be one of her advanced lessons in Geometry.

For little Agnes should assuredly learn the elements of Geometry, but she should at first call it ‘Earth measuring’; and have her early lessons in it, in laying out her own garden.

Her older companions, at any rate, must be far enough advanced in the science to attempt this bee problem; of which you will find the terms have to be carefully examined, and somewhat completed. So much, indeed, do they stand in need of farther definition, that I should have supposed the problem inaccurately given, unless I had seen the bee cut a leaf myself. But I have seen her do it, and can answer for the absolute accuracy of the passage describing her in that operation.

The pieces of leaf, you read, are to be narrow at one end, but gradually widen to the other, where the width equals half the length.

And we have to cut these pieces with curved sides; for one side of them is to be the serrated edge of a rose leaf, and the other side is to be cut in a curved line beginning near the root of the leaf. I especially noticed this curved line as the bee cut it; but like an ass, as often I have been on such occasions, I followed the bee instead of gathering the remnant leaf, so that I can’t draw the curve with certainty.

Now each of my four volumes of Bingley has five [105]or more plates in it. These plates are finished line engravings, with, in most cases, elaborate landscape backgrounds; reeds for the hippopotamus, trees for the monkeys, conical mountains for the chamois, and a magnificent den with plenty of straw for the lioness and cubs, in frontispiece.

Any one of these landscape backgrounds required the severe labour of the engraver’s assistant for at least three days to produce it,—or say two months’ hard work, for the whole twenty and odd plates. And all the result of two months’ elaborate work put together, was not worth to me, nor would be to any man, woman, or child, worth—what an accurate outline of a leaf-cutting bee’s segment of leaf would have been, drawn with truth and precision. And ten minutes would have been enough to draw it; and half an hour to cut it.

But not only I cannot find it in my old book, but I know it is not in the grand modern Cuvier, and I don’t believe it is findable anywhere. I won’t go on with Agnes’s lesson at guess, however, till I get some help from kind Dr. Gray, at the British Museum. To-day, I must content myself with a closing word or two about zoological moralities.

After having, to my best ability, thus busied and informed little Agnes concerning her bees and their operations, am I farther to expatiate on the exemplary character of the bee? Is she to learn “How doth,” etc. (and indeed there never was a country in which more [106]than in her own, it was desirable that shining hours should be taken advantage of when they come)? But, above all, am I to tell her of the Goodness and Wisdom of God in making such amiable and useful insects?

Well, before I proceed to ask her to form her very important opinions upon the moral character of God, I shall ask her to observe that all insects are not equally moral, or useful.

It is possible she may have noticed—beforehand—some, of whose dispositions she may be doubtful; something, hereafter, I shall have to tell her of locust and hornet, no less than of bee; and although in general I shall especially avoid putting disagreeable or ugly things before her eyes, or into her mind, I should certainly require her positively, once for all, to know the sort of life led by creatures of at least alloyed moral nature,—such, for instance, as the ‘Turner Savage’ which, indeed, “lives in the haunts of men, whom it never willingly offends; but is the terror of all smaller insects. It inhabits holes in the earth on the side of hills and cliffs; and recesses that it forms for itself in the mud-walls of cottages and outhouses. The mud-wall of a cottage at Peterborough, in Northamptonshire, was observed to be frequented by these creatures, and on examination it was found to be wrought, by their operations, into the appearance of Honeycomb.”

The appearance only, alas! for although these creatures [107]thus like to live in the neighbourhood of a Bishop, and though “there are none which display more affection for their offspring,”—they by no means live by collection of treasures of sweet dew. “They are excessively fierce, and, without hesitation, attack insects much larger than themselves. Their strength is very great, their jaws are hard and sharp, and their stings are armed with poison, which suddenly proves fatal to most of the creatures with which they engage, The ‘Sphex’ (generic name of the family) seizes, with the greatest boldness, on the creature it attacks, giving a stroke with amazing force, then falling off, to rest from the fatigue of the exertion, and to enjoy the victory. It keeps, however, a steady eye on the object it has struck, until it dies, and then drags it to its nest for the use of its young. The number of insects which this creature destroys, is almost beyond conception, fifty scarcely serving it for a meal. The mangled remains of its prey, scattered round the mouth of its retreat, sufficiently betray the sanguinary inhabitant. The eyes, the filament that serves as a brain, and a small part of the contents of the body, are all that the Sphex devours.”

I cannot, therefore, insist, for the present, upon either pointing a moral, or adorning a tale, for Agnes, with entomological instances; but the name of the insect, at which the (insect) world might grow pale, if it were capable of pallor,—might be made, at least, memorable, and not uninstructive, to the boys in the Latin [108]class, by making them first understand the power of the preposition ‘ex’ in the two pleasant senses of examen, and the one unpleasant sense of ‘examiner’—and then observe, (carefully first distinguishing between play with letters and real derivation,) that if you put R for Right, before ex, you have ‘Rex’; if you put L, for Love, before ex, you have ‘lex’; if you put G, for George, and R, for Rural, before ex, you have ‘grex’; and then if you put S, for Speculation, P, for Peculation, and H, the immortal possessor of Pie, before ex, you have ‘Sphex’; pleasing and accurate type of the modern carnivorous Economist, who especially discerns of his British public, ‘the eyes and small filament that serves as a brain.’ [109]