flapping birds and down at the crawling insects for a
homely lesson. But we have lived to see a sect that does not look down
at the insects, but looks up at the insects, that asks us essentially to
bow down and worship beetles, like ancient Egyptians.

Maurice Maeterlinck is a man of unmistakable genius, and genius always
carries a magnifying glass. In the terrible crystal of his lens we have
seen the bees not as a little yellow swarm, but rather in golden armies
and hierarchies of warriors and queens. Imagination perpetually peers
and creeps further down the avenues and vistas in the tubes of science,
and one fancies every frantic reversal of proportions; the earwig
striding across the echoing plain like an elephant, or the grasshopper
coming roaring above our roofs like a vast aeroplane, as he leaps from
Hertfordshire to Surrey. One seems to enter in a dream a temple of
enormous entomology, whose architecture is based on something
wilder than arms or backbones; in which the ribbed columns have the
half-crawling look of dim and monstrous caterpillars; or the dome is
a starry spider hung horribly in the void. There is one of the modern
works of engineering that gives one something of this nameless fear
of the exaggerations of an underworld; and that is the curious curved
architecture of the under ground railway, commonly called the Twopenny
Tube. Those squat archways, without any upright line or pillar, look as
if they had been tunneled by huge worms who have never learned to lift
their heads. It is the very underground palace of the Serpent, the spirit
of changing shape and color, that is the enemy of man.

But it is not merely by such strange aesthetic suggestions that writers
like Maeterlinck have influenced us in the matter; there is also an
ethical side to the business. The upshot of M. Maeterlinck's book on
bees is an admiration, one might also say an envy, of their collective
spirituality; of the fact that they live only for something which
he calls the Soul of the Hive. And this admiration for the communal
morality of insects is expressed in many other modern writers in various
quarters and shapes; in Mr. Benjamin Kidd's theory of living only for
the evolutionary future of our race, and in the great interest of some
Socialists in ants, which they generally prefer to bees, I suppose,
because they are not so brightly colored. Not least among the hundred
evidences of this vague insectolatry are the floods of flatte