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 ..."
they will learn--
How doth the jolly little spider
Wind up such miles of silk inside her,
When it is clear that spiders' tummies
Are not so big as mine or Mummy's?
The explanation seems to be,
They do not eat so much as me.
That will point the moral of moderation in eating, you see. There will
be a lot more verses, I expect; I can see _cram_ and _diaphragm_ and
possibly _jam_ coming very soon. But we must get on.
The spider is like the bee in this respect, that the male seems to
have a most rotten time. For one thing he is nearly always about
two sizes smaller than the female. Owing to that and to what _The
Encyclopædia Britannica_ humorously describes as "the greater
voracity" of the female (there is a lot of quiet fun in _The
Encyclopædia Britannica_), he is a very brave spider who makes a
proposal of marriage. "He makes his advances to his mate at the risk
of his life and is not infrequently killed and eaten by her before or
after" they are engaged ("before or after" is good). "Fully aware of
the danger he pays his addresses with extreme caution, frequently
waiting for hours in her vicinity before venturing to come to close
quarters. Males of the _Argyopidæ_ hang on the outskirts of the webs
of the females and signal their presence to her by jerking the radial
threads in a peculiar manner." This is, of course, the origin of the
quaint modern custom by which the young man rings the bell before
attempting to enter the web of his beloved in Grosvenor Square.
Contemporary novelists have even placed on record cases in which the
male has "waited for hours in her vicinity before venturing to come
to close quarters;" but too much attention must not be paid to these
imaginative accounts. If I have said enough to secure that in future a
little more kindliness and respect will be shown to the spider in the
nurseries of this great Empire, and a little less of it wasted on the
bee, I have not misspent my time.
But I shall not be content. Can we not go further? Can we not get a
little more of the simplicity of spider life into this hectic world of
ours? In these latitudes the spider lives only for a single season.
"The young emerge from the cocoon in the early spring, grow through
the summer and reach maturity in the early autumn. _The sexes then
pair and perish_ soon after the female has constructed her cocoon."
How delicious! No winter; no bother about coal; no worry about the
children's education; just one glorious summer of sport, one wild
summer of fly-catching and midge-eating, a romantic, not to say
dangerous wooing, a quiet wedding in the autumn, dump the family in
some nice unfurnished cocoon--and perish. Is there nothing to be said
for that? How different from the miserable bee, which just goes on and
on, worrying about posterity, working and working, fussing about....
Yet all our lives are modelled on the bee's.