Chambers's Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, fifth series, no. 129, vol. III, June 19, 1886

No. 129.—Vol. III.
Price 1½ d.
SATURDAY, JUNE 19, 1886.
When Anne was queen and ‘Mrs Freeman’ was her mistress, two ladies known to fame as Arachne and Melissa came one day before the reading public. Those who are up in the literature of the time will remember their portraits, which expressed two well-defined and persistent types of humanity—those who get good from everything like Melissa, and those who draw only evil like Arachne. Now, each of these ladies has left behind her a long train of descendants—a wide-spreading gens , as the old Romans would have said—in the people who prefer to drink vinegar out of a leaden cup or wine out of a golden; who are to their surroundings as frost or as dew; who see the trodden backward path and the unsurmounted hills in front through spectacles tinted in black or in rose-colour; and who sing their Psalm of Life in the minor key, discordantly, or in the major, with full harmonies. These are the descendants of the Arachne (spider-born) and Melissa (honey-maker) who, in Queen Anne’s time, sucked poison or gathered honey; and we meet them at all four corners of our way.
The Arachnides are for the most part characterised by a strange and chilling silence, when a few words would remove a painful impression or enlighten a dangerous ignorance. When they do speak, their words fall like vocal icicles which freeze and cut at the same time; and they contrive to make their good advice more painful than other people’s rebukes, and to give their information the form of a sarcastic reproach in that you did not know it all before. Their presence in society reminds one of the winter whose ‘Breath was a chain which without a sound, The earth and the air and the water bound.’ Where they are, freedom flags and gaiety declines; and only the most robust of those moral pachyderms who oppose their thick insensitiveness to all outside influences whatsoever, can withstand the lethal effect of the Arachnides. Their small pale eyes wither; their pinched lips paralyse; their very smiles are the fracture of a crystal more than the visible sign of a living, friendly heart; and they are the veritable ‘freezing mixtures’ of life. They take strong and unreasoning dislikes to quite innocent strangers and harmless acquaintances, and will not be convinced that they have no occasion to do so; they quarrel for a mere nothing with those who are so unfortunate as to be their friends and relations, and cannot be induced to make nor to receive an explanation. No one knows what has offended them, but all at once they become like anthropomorphous polar bears to those to whom they had been moderately human a little while before; and more intolerable than ever to those to whom they had been intolerable enough when things were at their best. Then they retreat into their own spiritual den to hammer away at that leaden cup from which they drink the deadly acid that vitiates all their life and destroys all their happiness. They make the worst of things in every direction. If a cloud has come across the sky of others’ friendships, they do what they can to increase the trouble and to make that permanent which, by the nature of things and without their evil offices, would have been evanescent. They kill all the tender little sprouts of growing affection between two young people or two likely comrades; and what they cannot do by straightforward means, they do by crooked ones—which comes to the same thing in the end.