ARACHNE AND MELISSA.
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.
If any one is so ill advised as to take one of these Arachnides into his confidence, he is sure to smart for it. Has he complained of a common friend?—the grim confidant rasps the little abrasion till it becomes a gangrened sore, and never lets it alone till it has lost all power of healing. He does the same by the other—the one complained of—till what was a mere nothing in the beginning becomes a cancer which eats into the whole substance of their mutual love, and reduces it to something worse than death. At no time is one of these Arachnides a safe confidant; for so surely as the night follows on the day, so surely will your secret be divulged in one of these moments of pique and ill-temper for which the Spider-born are famous. Women of the Spider-born gens are great in this kind of small treachery. Have you a false tooth?—a well-concealed twist of the poor weak spine?—a tress of hair that never grew on your own head?—a blemish on your shoulder beyond the line of the most décolleté dress, and to the world therefore as though it were not?—and has Arachne found out, or been told in an impulse of misdirected confidence, one or all these things? It is only a question of time. In time the whole of society will know the fact; and that perfect bit of porcelain which the Generals and the Colonels, the Bishops and the Archdeacons, admired so much, will ring cracked for ever after. You might just as well have advertised your secret in the Times; and so you find out when too late.
Egotist to their finger-tips, the Arachnides make their own small annoyances the one great thought of their lives. They do not make much account of their blessings, only of their misfortunes; and nothing is so large as a microscopic speck on one of their most luscious fruits. The fate of empires and the fall of nations are not so important as the change of a servant or the ill arrangement of a dinner. The loss of a hundred men in a battle does not touch them so much as the loss of a row of cabbages in their garden; and a burnt duster out of a set is a more serious affair in their eyes than a passenger-ship wrecked on the Cornish coast or a merchant-steamer burnt to the water’s edge. On one thing only can they be made loquacious—on their own small sufferings. On these they will descant an hour by the clock, and more to come after. But speak to them of the heart-anguish of others, and they are unsympathetic, dumb, indifferent. Their fire burns for themselves alone; to all the world beyond they have only slag and ice to give.
As a physiognomical sign, the Arachnides do not often look you in the face. They glance rather than gaze with straight and level eyes; and they prefer the corners of their eyes to the centres.
How different it is with those others—those Melissides who drink their wine of life in deep draughts from golden cups; those singers of glad melodies; those lovers of their kind and rejoicers in the sunshine; those whose own jocund nature tints the whole outlook with roseate hues, eloquent of the fresh morning and the young day’s hope! Wherever they are, things go more easily. They do not suffer troubles to arise, but put their broad backs to the work when strength is required—handle the difficulty with their delicate fingers where tact is needed—and by the marvellous power of their genial tempers, smooth all ruffled feathers and still all angry seas. Seeing life as a mixed web, where rare silks are shot through with the coarse fibres of roughened hemp or common cotton, they prefer not to linger on the hemp nor to fret over the cotton. They think the good is as true as the bad; and where they cannot cure they do not contemplate. When two friends fall apart, they do their level best to bring them together again; and when the skin of the over-sensitive shows signs of abrasion and inflammation, they treat it with an anodyne, not an irritant. They are too frank to be untruthful; but they are too genial to be parsimonious of praise or pinched in the matter of verbal accuracy. If a little embroidery can hide the poverty of the original stuff, well, they do embroider; and they think it no sin to expound a text already given. Thus they make a grudging admission on the part of A. that B. is not quite such a ruffian after all as Mr A. imagined, do as much good work as a positive statement that B. is a very fine fellow indeed, and A. has no fault to find with him anyhow. By which they knit up that weak bit of the rope, and the two friends, who had strayed so far apart, are hauled up into line as before.
When these workers in gold are, what common parlance calls friends, with the workers in lead, the former have a hard time of it. They are always at the point where the Arachnides are backing and the Melissides are pulling—where the one are trying to break and the other doing their best to hold. The Arachnite takes offence at a word, a look, a gesture, a thing done or not done; and the Melissite will not have it. ‘Come, old fellow, what’s up now?’ he says in that round cheery voice of his which suggests honey and sunshine, or a strong west wind, or anything else you like both sweet and wholesome. Probably the Arachnite pinches his lips and says ‘Nothing;’ but ‘nothing’ does not answer the purpose, and an explanation is forced—if indeed that poor chilled soul can be forced into anything frank and human. If he cannot, then the other does his best to laugh away the cloud and to go on as before; but it all depends on the mood of the Spider-born whether this frankness will be an offence or a clearance—whether it will win the day or lose it for ever. Unlike the Arachnite, whose analogue is that liquid which, when it is struck or stirred ever so lightly, breaks at once into crystals, the Melissite is almost impossible to freeze. Even his anger has a touch of generous pity in it, in that a man should be such a fool or so wrong-headed; and where the one will not forgive the smallest mistake, the other will forget the gravest wrong and trust to better things in the future. Tender of heart, he nourishes all good impulses in himself, and recognises them with gladness in others; and essentially peace-loving, as the really strong ever are, he is slow to ‘wash his spears,’ and only when forced by self-respect, goes out to fight his foes. Generous as a master and genial as an administrator, he puts up with the worries and disappointments inevitable to his business, whatever it may be; not troubling the gods with his complaints because men are made of clay, and every now and then break in the handling and fly in the firing. On the contrary, he makes the best of things even when they are bad; and looks to the perfected work rather than to the abortive, which cannot now be mended. He believes in the doctrine of encouragement rather than in the theory of repression, and thinks when men know that they are trusted to do well, they do better than when they know that they are expected to do ill—with the handcuffs to follow. He has no great faith in gags and bearing-reins, whips and spurs, for any kind of team that he may have to manage. He trusts rather to the cheering voice and the guiding hand; and his choice of method is justified by its results. In all troublous times, the Melissite—he who looks at a man’s circumstances from that man’s own standpoint, and not from one external, unintelligent and unsympathetic—escapes the doom accorded to the Arachnides, and lives in peaceful security where these others are not safe, however well protected. If such as he did not form what Matthew Arnold calls the remnant, society would stand still like the clogged wheels of a watch, and men would perish in the moral desert as they perish in the material. The righteous men who save cities are they who do good to their brother-men as well as they who pray to God; and ‘he prayeth best who loveth best’ is a phrase we all know by head, and some of us by heart and head as well.
In hours of doubt and danger, the Arachnite despairs; but the Melissite buckles to for the work of decision and deliverances, hoping while a ray of light remains, or a plank whole out of the wreck. The one cannot spell success; the other will not learn to say defeat; the one does not hold on, the other cannot be beaten off. Hence we seldom find the working Arachnides successful in life; and the bread which they have to bake for themselves is apt to be both scant in quantity and sour in quality. The others, on the contrary, for the most part succeed. They have not only a larger volume of life to bear them on, but they have also the art of making friends, such as those poor starved prison-pinched souls do not know. They are thus backed by their own strength, and given a helping hand by the strength of others; where the Arachnides get no extraneous aid, and soon come to the end of their own power. Then they complain of their ill-luck, or speak of secret enemies who work in the dark against them; and, if women, they go into the sunless labyrinth of ‘nerves,’ by which they excuse their jealousy and ill-temper, their sourness and crossness. They say severely that no one knows what they suffer, save those who are in like manner afflicted, and that they alone can measure the pain they endure. Perhaps the good-tempered interlocutor thinks to himself: ‘A little honey mixed in with all thy vinegar, O Arachnite, would soften much of thy misery and reduce thy misfortunes to zero; and the milk of human kindness set to make cream is a better spiritual drink than the poison thou distillest and the vinegar which makes thee thin; and the poor thin whey, which is but serum with all the cream and cheese and butter taken out, is bad nourishment for men or babes.’