Upon my tomb it may be written:
"He was the very last who played
Upon the Humstrum in Great Britain."
THE SPIDER.
Lately we had occasion to consider the place of the grasshopper in modern politics. Now let us consider the place of the spider in our social life.
It seems to me that the spider is the most accomplished and in some ways the most sensible insect we have in these parts. In my opinion a great deal too much fuss has been made about the bee. She is a knowing little thing, but the spider is her superior in many ways. Yet no one seems to write books or educational rhymes about the spider. It is really a striking example of the well-known hypocrisy and materialism of the British race. The bee is held up to the young as a model of industry and domestic virtue—and why? Simply because she manufactures food which we happen to like. The spider is held up to the young as the type of rapacity, malice and cruelty, on the sole ground that he catches flies, though we do not pretend that we are fond of flies, and conveniently ignore the fact that, if the spider did not swat that fly, we should probably swat it ourselves.
The real charge against the spider is that he doesn't make any food for us. As for the virtue and nobility of the bee, I don't see it. The only way in which she is able to accumulate all that honey at all is by massacring the unfortunate males by the thousand as soon as she conveniently can, a piece of Prussianism which may be justified on purely material grounds, but is scarcely consistent with her high reputation for morality and lovingkindness. If it could be shown that the bee consciously collected all that honey with the idea that we should annex it there might be something to be said for her on moral grounds; but nobody pretends that. Now look at the spider. We are told that as a commercial product spider-silk has been found to be equal if not superior to the best silk spun by the Lepidopterous larvæ, with whom, of course, you are familiar. "But the cannibalistic propensities of spiders, making it impossible to keep more than one in a single receptacle ... have hitherto prevented the silk being used ... for textile fabrics." So that it comes to this: if spiders are useless because they eat each other, the bees do much the same thing (only wholesale), but it makes them commercially useful. The bee therefore we place upon a pinnacle of respectability, but the spider we despise. Faugh! the hypocrisy of it makes me sick. My children will be taught to venerate the spider and despise the bee.
For, putting aside the question of moral values, look what the spider can do. What is there in the clammy, not to say messy, honey-comb to be compared with the delicate fabric of the spider's web? Indeed, should we ever have given a single thought to the honey-comb if it had had no honey in it? Do we become lyrical about the wasp's comb? We do not. It is a case where greed and materialism have warped our artistic perceptions. The spider can lower itself from the drawing-room ceiling to the floor by a silken thread produced out of itself. Still more marvellous, he can climb up the same thread to the ceiling when he is bored, winding up the thread inside him as he goes, and so making pursuit impossible. What can the bee do to equal that? And how is it done? We don't even know. The Encyclopædia Britannica doesn't know; or if it does it doesn't let on. But the whole tedious routine of the bee's domestic pottering day is an open book to us. Ask yourself, which would you rather do, be able to collect honey and put it in a suitable receptacle, or be able to let yourself down from the top floor to the basement by a silken rope produced out of your tummy, and then climb up it again when you want to go upstairs, just winding up the rope inside you? I think you will agree that the spider has it. It is hard enough, goodness knows, to wind up an ordinary ball of string so that it will go into the string-box properly. What one would do if one had to put it in one's bread-box I can't think. When my children grow up, instead of learning
"How doth the little busy bee ..."