The Pleasures of Ignorance | Page 9

the human being--who, after all, is master on
this partially civilised planet. It had certainly no right to sting the dog
or the turkey, which had as little to do with stealing the honey as the
Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University. Yet in spite of such things, and
of the fact that some breeds of bees are notorious for their crossness,
especially when there is thunder in the air, the bee is morally far higher
in the scale than the mosquito. Not only does it give you honey instead
of malaria, and help your apples and strawberries to multiply, but it
aims at living a quiet, inoffensive life, at peace with everybody, except
when it is annoyed. The mosquito does what it does in cold blood. That
is why it is so unwelcome a bedroom visitor.
But even a bee or a wasp, I fancy, would seem tedious company at two
in the morning, especially if it came and buzzed near the pillow. It is
not so much that you would be frightened: if the wasp alighted on your
cheek, you could always lie still and hold your breath till it had finished
trying to sting--that is an infallible preventive. But there is a limit to the
amount of your night's rest that you are willing to sacrifice in this way.
You cannot hold your breath while you are asleep, and yet you dare not
cease holding your breath while a wasp is walking over your face.
Besides, it might crawl into your ear, and what would you do then?
Luckily, the question does not often arise in practice owing to the fact
that the wasp and the bee are more like human beings than mosquitoes
and have more or less the same habits of nocturnal rest. As we sit in the
garden, however, the mind is bound to speculate, and to revolve such
questions as whether this hum of insects that delights us is in itself
delightful, whether its delightfulness depends on its surroundings, or
whether it depends on its associations with past springs.

Certainly in a garden the noise of insects seems as essentially beautiful
a thing as the noise of birds or the noise of the sea. Even these have
been criticised, especially by persons who suffer from sleeplessness,
but their beauty is affirmed by the general voice of mankind. These
three noises appear to have an infinite capacity for giving us pleasure--a
capacity, probably, beyond that of any music of instruments. It may be
that on hearing them we become a part of some universal music, and
that the rhythm of wave, bird and insect echoes in some way the
rhythm of our own breath and blood. Man is in love with life and these
are the millionfold chorus of life--the magnified echo of his own
pleasure in being alive. At the same time, our pleasure in the hum of
insects is also, I think, a pleasure of reminiscence. It reminds us of
other springs and summers in other gardens. It reminds us of the
infinite peace of childhood when on a fine day the world hardly existed
beyond the garden-gate. We can smell moss-roses--how we loved them
as children!--as a bee swings by. Insect after insect dances through the
air, each dying away like a note of music, and we see again the border
of pinks and the strawberries, and the garden paths edged with box, and
the old dilapidated wooden seat under the tree, and an apple-tree in the
long grass, and a stream beyond the apple-tree, and all those things that
made us infinitely happy as children when we were in the
country--happier than we were ever made by toys, for we do not
remember any toys so intensely as we remember the garden and the
farm. We had the illusion in those days that it was going to last for ever.
There was no past or future. There was nothing real except the present
in which we lived--a present in which all the human beings were kind,
in which a dim-sighted grandfather sang songs (especially a song in
which the chorus began "Free and easy"), in which aunts brought us
animal biscuits out of town, in which there was neither man-servant nor
maid-servant, neither ox nor ass, that did not seem to go about with a
bright face. It was a present that overflowed with kindness, though
everybody except the ox and the ass believed that it was only by the
skin of our teeth that any of us would escape being burnt alive for
eternity. Perhaps we thought little enough about it except on Sundays
or at prayers. Certainly no one was gloomy about it before children.
William John McNabb, the huge labourer who looked after the horses,
greeted us all as cheerfully