Little rays of moonshine

by A. P. Herbert

Nevertheless I have always felt that there was something fishy about the grasshopper’s back legs. I mean, why should he wave his legs about when he is stridulating? My own theory is that it is purely due to the nervous excitement produced by the act of singing. The same phenomena can be observed in many singers and public speakers. I do not think myself that we need seek for a more elaborate hypothesis. The Encyclopædia Britannica, of course, says that “the stridulation or song in the Acridiidæ is produced by friction of the hind legs against portions of the wings or wing-covers,” but that is just the sort of statement which the scientific man thinks he can pass off on the public with impunity. Considering that stridulation takes place about every ten seconds, I calculate that the grasshopper must require a new set of wings every ten days. It would be more in keeping with the traditions of our public life if the scientific man simply confessed that he was baffled by this problem of the grasshopper’s back legs. Yet, as I have said, if a public speaker may fidget with his back legs while he is stridulating, why not a public grasshopper? The more I see of science the more it strikes me as one large mystification.

But I ought to have mentioned that “the Acridiidæ have the auditory organs on the first abdominal segment,” while “the Locustidæ have the auditory organ on the tibia of the first leg.” In other words, one kind of grasshopper hears with its stomach and the other kind listens with its leg. When a scientific man has committed himself to that kind of statement he would hardly have qualms about a little invention like the back-legs legend.

With this scientific preliminary we now come to the really intriguing part of our subject, and that is the place of the grasshopper in modern politics. And the first question is, Why did Mr. Lloyd George call Lord Northcliffe a grasshopper? I think it was in a speech about Russia that Mr. Lloyd George said, in terms, that Lord Northcliffe was a grasshopper. And he didn’t leave it at that. He said that Lord Northcliffe was not only a grasshopper but a something something grasshopper, grasshopping here and grasshopping there—you know the sort of thing. There was nothing much in the accusation, of course, and Lord Northcliffe made no reply at the time; in fact, so far as I know, he has never publicly stated that he is not a grasshopper; for all we know it may be true. But I know a man whose wife’s sister was in service at a place where there was a kitchen-maid whose young man was once a gardener at Lord Northcliffe’s, and this man told me—the first man, I mean—that Lord Northcliffe took it to heart terribly. No grasshoppers were allowed in the garden from that day forth; no green that was at all like grasshopper-green was tolerated in the house, and the gardener used to come upon his Lordship muttering in the West Walk: “A grasshopper! He called me a grasshopper—ME—A GRASSHOPPER!” The gardener said that his Lordship used to finish up with, “I’ll teach him”; but that is hardly the kind of thing a lord would say, and I don’t believe it. In fact, I don’t believe any of it. It is a stupid story.

But this crisis we keep having with France owing to Mr. Lloyd George’s infamous conduct does make the story interesting. The suggestion is, you see, that Lord Northcliffe lay low for a long time, till everybody had forgotten about the grasshopper and Mr. Lloyd George thought that Lord Northcliffe had forgotten about the grasshopper, and then, when Mr. Lloyd George was in a hole, Lord Northcliffe said, “Now we’ll see if I am a grasshopper or not,” and started stridulating at high speed about Mr. Lloyd George. A crude suggestion. But if it were true it would mean that the grasshopper had become a figure of national and international importance. It is wonderful to think that we might stop being friends with France just because of a grasshopper; and, if Lord Northcliffe arranged for a new Government to come in, it might very well be called “The Grasshopper Government.” That would look fine in the margins of the history books.

Yes, it is all very “dramatic.” It is exciting to think of an English lord nursing a grievance about a grasshopper for months and months, seeing grasshoppers in every corner, dreaming about grasshoppers.... But we must not waste time over the fantastic tale. We have not yet solved our principal problem. Why did Mr. Lloyd George call him a grasshopper—a modest, friendly little grasshopper? Did he mean to suggest that Lord Northcliffe hears with his stomach or stridulates with his back legs?

Why not an earwig, or a black-beetle, or a wood-louse, or a centipede? There are lots of insects more offensive than the grasshopper, and personally I would much rather be called a grasshopper than an earwig, which gets into people’s sponges and frightens them to death.

Perhaps he had been reading that nice passage in the Prophet Nahum: “Thy captains are as the great grasshoppers, which camp in the hedges in the cold day, but when the sun ariseth they flee away, and their place is not known where they are,” or the one in Ecclesiastes: “And the grasshopper shall be a burden.” I do not know. On the other hand, the Encyclopædia has a suggestive sentence: “All grasshoppers are vegetable feeders and have an incomplete metamorphosis, so that their destructive powers are continuous from the moment of emergence from the egg until death.”

Little Bits of London

I

THE SUPREME COURT