BEES.
THE BEAUTIFUL NEVER TO BE THANKED TOO MUCH, OR TO BE SUFFICIENTLY
EXPRESSED.--BEES AND THEIR ELEGANCE.--THEIR ADVICE TO AN ITALIAN
POET.--WAXEN TAPERS.--A BEE DRAMA.--MASSACRES OF DRONES.--HUMAN
PROGRESSION.
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It would be ungrateful and impossible, in the course of so sweet and
generous a theme as our Jar of Honey has furnished us with, not to devote
a portion of it to the cause of all its sweetness--the Bee. We are not
going, however, to repeat more common-place in its eulogy than we can
help. The grounds of the admiration of nature are without end; and as to
those matters of fact or science which appear to be settled--nay, even
most settled--some new theory is coming up every day, in these
extraordinary times, to compel us to think the points over again, and
doubt whether we are quite so knowing as we supposed. Not only are
bee-masters disputing the discoveries of Huber respecting the operations
of the hive, but searchers into nature seem almost prepared to re-open the
old question respecting the equivocal generation of the bee, and set the
electrical experiments of Mr. Cross at issue with the conclusions of Redi.
How this may turn out, we know not; but sure we are, that it will be a
long time indeed before the praise and glory of the bee can have exhausted
its vocabulary--before people cry out to authors, “Say no more; you have
said too much already of its wonderfulness--too much of the sweetness and
beauty of its productions.” Too much, we are of opinion, cannot be said of
any marvel in nature, unless it be trivial or false. The old prosaical
charge against hyperbolical praises of the beautiful, we hold to be
naught. Ask a lover, and he will say, and say truly, that no human terms
can do justice to the sweetness in his mistress’s eyes--to the virgin
bloom on her cheek. If words could equal them, Nature would hardly be our
superior. Hear what is said on the point by Marlowe:--
If all the pens that ever poets held
Had fed the feelings of their masters’ thoughts,
And every sweetness that inspired their hearts,
Their minds, and muses on admired themes;
If all the heavenly quintessence they ’stil
From their immortal flowers of poesy,
Wherein, as in a mirror, we perceive
The highest reaches of a human wit:
If these had made one poem’s period,
And all combined in beauty’s worthiness,
Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,
Which into words no virtue can digest.
Did any one ever sufficiently admire the _entire elegance_ of the habits
and pursuits of bees? their extraction of nothing but the quintessence of
the flowers; their preference of those that have the finest and least
adulterated odour; their avoidance of everything squalid (so unlike
flies); their eager ejection or exclusion of it from the hive, as in the
instance of carcases of intruders, which, if they cannot drag away, they
cover up and entomb; their love of clean, quiet, and delicate
neighbourhoods, thymy places with brooks; their singularly clean
management of so liquid and adhesive a thing as honey, from which they
issue forth to their work as if they had had nothing to do with it; their
combination with honey-making of the elegant manufacture of wax, of which
they make their apartments, and which is used by mankind for none but
patrician or other choice purposes; their orderly policy; their delight in
sunshine; their attention to one another; their apparent indifference to
everything purely regarding themselves, apart from the common good? A
writer of elegant Italian verse, who recast the book of Virgil on Bees,
has taken occasion of their supposed dislike of places abounding in
_echoes_, to begin his poem with a pretty conceit. He was one of the first
of his countrymen who ventured to dispense with rhyme; and he makes the
bees themselves send him a deputation, on purpose to admonish him not to
use it:--
Mentre era per cantare i vostri doni
Con alte rime, o verginette caste,
Vaghe angelette de le erbose rive,
Preso dal sonno in sul spuntar de l’ alba,
M’ apparve un coro de la vostra gente,
E da la lingua onde s’ accoglie il mele,
Sciolsono in chiara voce este parole:--
“O spirto amico, che dopo mill’ anni
E cinquecento rinnovar ti piace
E le nostre fatiche e i nostri studi,
Fuggi le rime e ’l rimbombar sonoro.
“Tu sai pur che l’ immagin de la voce,
Che risponde dai sassi ov’ Eco alberga,
Sempre nimica fù del nostro regno:
Non sai tu ch’ ella fù conversa in pietra,
E fù inventrice de le prime rime?
E dei saper, ch’ ove abita costei,
Null’ ape abitar può per l’ importuno
Ed imperfetto suo parlar loquace.”
Cosi diss’ egli: poi tra labbro e labbro
Mi pose un favo di soave mele,
E lieto se n’ andò volando al cielo.
Ond’ io, da tal divinità spirato,
Non temerò cantare i vostri onori
Con verso Etrusco da le rime sciolto.
E canterò, come il soave mele,
Celeste don, sopra i fioretti e l’ erba
L’ aere distilla liquido e sereno;
E come l’ api industriose e caste
L’ adunino, e con studio e con ingegno
Dappoi compongan le odorate cere,
Per onorar l’ immagine di Dio;--
Spettacoli ed effetti vaghi e rari,
Di maraviglie pieni e di bellezze.
--_Le Api_ del RUCELLAI.
While bent on singing your delightful gifts
In lofty rhyme, O little virgins chaste,
Sweet little angels of the flowery brooks,
Sleep seized me on the golden point of morn,
And I beheld a choir of your small people,
Who, with the tongue with which they take the honey,
Buzz’d forth in the clear air these earnest words:--
“O friendly soul, that after the long lapse
Of thrice five hundred years, dost please thee sing
Our toils and art, shun--shun, we pray thee, rhyme:
Shun rhyme, and its rebounding noise. Full well
Thou know’st, that the invisible voice which sits
Answering to calls in rocks, Echo by name,
Was hostile to us ever; and thou know’st--
Or dost thou not?--that she, who was herself
Turn’d to a hollow rock, first found out rhyme.
Learn further then, that wheresoe’er she dwells,
No bee can dwell, for very hate and dread
Of her importunate and idle babble.”
Such were the words that issued from that choir;
Then ’twixt my lips they put some honey drops,
And so in gladness took their flight aloft.
Whence I, with such divinity made strong,
Doubt not, O bees, to sing your race renown’d
In Tuscan verse, freed from the clangs of rhyme.
Yea, I will sing how the celestial boon,
Honey, by some sweet mystery of the dew,
Is born of air in bosoms of the flowers,
Liquid, serene; and how the diligent bees
Collect it, working further with such art,
That odorous tapers thence deck holy shrines.
O sights, and O effects, lovely and strange!
Full of the marvellous and the beautiful!
--_The Bees_ of RUCELLAI.
The reader need not be told, that the tapers here alluded to are those
which adorn Catholic altars. Rucellai was a kinsman of Pope Leo the Tenth
and his successor Clement; and his first mode of bespeaking favour for his
bees was by associating them with the offices of the church. Beautiful are
those tapers, without doubt; and well might the poet express his
admiration at their being the result of the work of the little unconscious
insect, who compounded the material. So, in every wealthy house in
England, every evening, where lamps do not take its place, the same
beautiful substance is lit up for the inmates to sit by, at their
occupations of reading, or music, or discourse. The bee is there, with her
odorous ministry. In the morning, she has probably been at the
breakfast-table. In the morning, she is honey; in the evening, the waxen
taper; in the summer noon, a voice in the garden, or the window; in the
winter, and at all other times, a meeter of us in books. She talks Greek
to us in Sophocles and Theocritus; Virgil’s very best Latin, in his
_Georgics_; we have just heard her in Italian; and besides all her
charming associations with the poets in general, one of the Elizabethan
men has made a whole play out of her,--a play in which the whole _dramatis
personæ_ are bees! And a very sweet performance it is according to Charles
Lamb, who was not lavish of his praise. It was written by Thomas Day, one
of the fellows of Massinger and Decker, and is called the _Parliament of
Bees_. Lamb has given extracts from it in his _Specimens of the Dramatic
Poets_, and says in a note:--
“The doings,
The births, the wars, the wooings
of these pretty winged creatures are, with continued liveliness,
portrayed, throughout the whole of this curious old drama, in words which
bees would talk with, could they talk; the very air seems replete with
humming and buzzing melodies while we read them. Surely bees were never so
be-rhymed before.” (Vol. ii., Moxon’s latest edition, p. 130.) Would to
heaven that a horrid, heavy-headed monster called Hepatitis--who has been
hindering us from having our way of late in the most unseasonable manner,
and is at this minute clawing our side and shoulder for our disrespect of
him--would have allowed us to go to the British Museum, and read the whole
play for ourselves. We might have been able to give the reader some
pleasant tastes of it, besides those to be met with in Mr. Lamb’s book.
The following is a specimen. Klania, a female bee, is talking of her
lovers:--
Philon, a Bee
Well skill’d in verse and amorous poetry,
As we have sate at work, _both on one rose_,[16]
Has humm’d sweet canzons, both in verse and prose,
Which I ne’er minded. Astrophel, a Bee
(Although not so poetical as he),
Yet in his full invention quick and ripe,
In summer evenings on his well-tuned pipe,
_Upon a woodbine blossom in the sun_,
(Our hive being clean swept and our day’s work done--)
Would play us twenty several tunes; yet I
Nor minded Astrophel, nor his melody.
Then there’s Amniter, for whose love fair Leade
(That pretty Bee) flies up and down the mead
_With rivers in her eyes_--without deserving,
Sent me trim acorn bowls of his own carving,
To drink May-dews and mead in. Yet none of these,
My hive-born playfellows and fellow Bees,
Could I affect, until this strange Bee came.
It is pretty clear, however, from this passage, that Mr. Lamb’s usual
exquisite judgment was seduced by the little loves and graces of these
unexpected _dramatis personæ_; for this is certainly not the way in which
bees would talk. It is all human language, and unbeelike pursuits. “Rivers
in her eyes” is beautifully said, but bees do not shed tears. They are no
carvers of bowls; and we have no reason to believe that they know anything
of music and poetry. The bee
Who, at her flowery work doth sing,
sings like the cicada of Anacreon, with her wings. To talk as bees would
talk we must divest ourselves of flesh and blood, and develop ideas
modified by an untried mode of being, and by unhuman organs. We must talk
as if we had membranaceous wings, a proboscis, and no knowledge of tears
and smiles; and, as to our loves, they would be confined to the queen and
the drones--and very unloving and unpoetical work they would make of it.
The rest of us would know nothing about it. We should love nothing but the
flowers, the brooks, our two elegant manufactures of wax and honey, and
the whole community at large--being very patriotic, but not at all
amorous--more like tasteful Amazons than damsels of Arcadia; ladies with
swords by their sides, and not to be _hummed_ by the beau-ideals of Mr.
Thomas Day.
These same formidable weapons of the bees, their stings, remind us of the
only drawback on the pleasures of thinking about them--their massacres of
the drones. Every year those gentlemen have to pay for their idle and
luxurious lives by one great pang of abolition. They are all stung and
swept away into nothingness! Truly a circumstance to “give us pause,” and
perplex us with our wax and honey. It seems, however, to be the result of
an irresistible impulse--some desperate necessity of state, for want of
better knowledge, or more available powers. We are to suppose them doing
it unwillingly, with a horror of the task proportioned to the very haste
and fury in which they perform it; as though they wished to get it off
their hands as fast as possible, terrified and agonised at the terror and
agony which they inflict. Why they leave this tremendous flaw in their
polity--why they govern for the most part so well, and yet have this ugly
work to do in order to make all right at the year’s end, is a question
which human beings may discuss, when nations have come to years of
discretion; when they have grown wise enough, by the help of railroads and
mutual benefits, to dispense with cuffing one another like a parcel of
schoolboys. Mankind have not yet outlived their own massacres and
revolutions long enough to have a right to be astonished at the massacres
of the bees. What they ought to be astonished at, is their own notion of
the beehive as a pattern of government, with this tremendous flaw in it
staring them in the face. But we believe they have now become sensible of
the awkwardness of the analogy. Assuredly we should find no Archbishop of
Canterbury now-a-days arguing in the style of his predecessor, in the play
of _Henry the Fifth_:--
So work the honey bees;
Creatures, that, by a rule in nature, teach
The art of order to a peopled kingdom.
They have a king, and officers of sorts:
Where some, like magistrates, correct at home;
Others, like merchants, venture trade abroad;
Others, like soldiers, armèd in their stings,
Make boot upon the summer’s velvet buds;
Which pillage they, with merry march, bring home
To the tent-royal of their emperor;
Who, busied in his majesty, surveys
_The singing masons building roofs of gold_;
The civil citizens kneading up the honey;
The poor mechanic porters crowding in
Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate;
The sad-eyed justice, with his surly hum,
Delivering o’er to executors pale
The lazy yawning drone.
Alas! in Beedom, the archbishop himself, inasmuch as he was no
wax-chandler, would have been accounted one of these same lazy, yawning
drones, and delivered over to the secular arm. Bees do not teach men, nor
ought they. We have some higher things among us, even than wax and honey;
and though we have our flaws, too, in the art of government, and do not
yet know exactly what to do with them, we hope we shall find out. Will the
bees ever do that? Do they also hope it? Do they sit pondering, when the
massacre is over, and think it but a bungling way of bringing their
accounts right? Man, in his self-love, laughs at such a fancy. He is of
opinion that no creature can think, or make progression, but himself. What
right he has, from his little experience, to come to such conclusions, we
know not; but he must allow, that we know as little of the conclusions of
the bees. All we feel certain of is, that with bees, as with men, the good
of existence outweighs the evil; that evil itself is but a rough working
towards good; and that if good can ultimately be better without it, there
is a thing called hope, which says it may be possible. We take our planet
to be very young, and our love of progression to be one of the proofs of
it; and when we think of the good, and beauty, and love, and pleasure, and
generosity, and nobleness of mind and imagination, in which this green and
glorious world is abundant, we cannot but conclude that the love of
progression is to make it still more glorious, and add it to the number of
those older stars, which are probably resting from their labours, and have
become heavens.
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