Angels and Insects

by A. S. Byatt

  Is not this watchful care another way of describing the providences through God’s grace in which we have traditionally been taught to believe? Might we not indeed argue that Mr Darwin’s new understanding of the means by which these providential changes are brought about is in itself a new providence contributing both to human advance and development, and to our capacity to wonder at, to know, to further and repair those forces which God has set in motion, and which Mr Richard Owen has described as the ‘continuous operation of ordained becoming’. Our God is not a Deus Absconditus, who has left us darkling in a barren waste, nor is He an indifferent Watchmaker, who wound up a spring and looks on without passion as it slowly unwinds itself towards a final inertia. He is a loving craftsman, who constantly devises new possibilities from the abundant graves and raw materials he gave to them.

  We do not have to be Pangloss to believe in beauty and virtue and truth and happiness and above all in fellow-feeling and in love, human and divine. Clearly all is not for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and it is the height of folly, of wishful thinking, to attempt to deduce God from the joyful skipping of spring lambs, or the brightness of buttercups, or even the promise of the rainbow in a thunderous sky, though the writer of Genesis does offer all men the image of the bow set in the cloud as a promise that while the earth remaineth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. The Bible tells us that the earth is accursed, since the Fall of Man, the Bible tells us that the curse is lifted, in part, after the Flood, the Bible tells us that our own destructive natures may be redeemed, are redeemed by the ransom paid by our Lord, Jesus Christ. The face of the earth does not always laugh, even if it speaks God to us through the mouths of stones and flowers, tempests and whirlwinds, or even the lowly diligence of ants and bees. And we may discuss, if we wish, an amelioration of our own cursed natures, working itself out in our daily lives, with many a setback, many a struggle, since the day when Our Lord bade us ‘Love our neighbours as ourselves’ and revealed Himself as God of Love as well as of Power and of special Providence.

  Let us, like Him, speak in parables. His parables are drawn from the mysteries of that Nature, of which, if we are to believe His Gospel, He is Maker and Sustainer. He speaks to us of the fall of sparrows and the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin. He speaks to us—even He—of that wastefulness of Nature which so appals the Laureate, in His parable of the seeds which fell among weeds or on stony ground. If we consider the humble lives of the social insects I think we may discern truths which are riddling paradigms for our own understandings. We have been accustomed to think of altruism and self-sacrifice as human virtues, essentially human, but this is not apparently so. These little creatures exercise both, in their ways.

  It has long been known that amongst the nations both of the bees and of the ants, there is only one true female, the Queen, and that the work of the community is carried on by barren females, or nuns, who attend to the feeding, building, and nurturing of the whole society and its city. It has also long been known that the insects themselves seem able to determine the sex of the embryo, or larva, according to the attention they pay to it. Chambers tells us that the preparatory states of the Queen Bee occupy 16 days; those of the neuters 20; and those of the males 24. The bees appear to enlarge the cell of the female larva, make a pyramidal hollow to allow of its assuming a vertical instead of a horizontal position, keep it warmer than other larvae are kept, and feed it with a peculiar kind of food. This care, including the shortening of the embryonic condition, produces a true female, a Queen who is destined, in the noteworthy words of Kirby and Spence ‘to enjoy love, to burn with jealousy and anger, to be incited to vengeance, and to pass her time without labour’. Mr Darwin has confessed to his distress at the savagery with which the jealous Queens watch over, and murder, their emerging sisters in the beehive. He questioned whether this murder of the new-born, this veritable slaughter of the innocents, did not argue that Nature herself was cruel and wasteful. It could conversely be supposed that a special providence lay in the survival of the Queen best fitted to provide the hive with new generations, or the swarm with a new commander. Be that as it may, it is certain that the longer development of the worker produces a very different creature, one, again in Kirby and Spence’s words ‘zealous for the good of the community, a defender of the public rights, enjoying an immunity from the stimulus of sexual appetite and the pains of parturition; laborious, industrious, patient, ingenious, skilful; incessantly engaged in the nurture of the young, in collecting honey and pollen, in elaborating wax, in constructing cells and the like!—paying the most respectful and assiduous attention to objects which, had its ovaries been developed, it would have hated and pursued with the most vindictive fury till it had destroyed them!’

  I do not think it is folly to argue that the society of the bees has developed in the patient nuns who do the work a primitive form of altruism, self-sacrifice, or loving-kindness. The same is even more strikingly true of the sisterhood of ant-workers, who greet each other with great shows of affection and gentle caresses, always offering sips from their chalices of gathered nectar, which they are hurrying to carry to the helpless and dependent inhabitants of their nurseries. The ants too are able to determine, how is not known, the sex of the inhabitants of their nurseries, so that the community is replenished by desirable numbers of workers, males or fertile Queens at various epochs. Their care of their fellows might itself be thought to be a special Providence, if it were thought to be conscious, or a true moral choice. Much labour has been expended on attempts to distinguish the voice of authority in these communities—is it the Queen, or the workers, or some more pervasive Spirit of the City, located everywhere and nowhere, that determines these matters? What dictates the coherent movement of all the cells in my body? I do not, though I have Will, and Intelligence, and Reason. I grow, I decay, according to laws which I obey and cannot alter. So do the lesser creatures on the earth. How shall we name the Force that directs them? Blind Chance, or loving Providence? We churchmen have always in the past given one answer. Shall we now be daunted? Scientists attempting to ‘explain’ phenomena such as the growth of the ants’ embryos have resorted to the idea of a ‘forma formativa’, a Vital Force, residing perhaps in infinitely numerous gemmules. May we not reasonably ask, what lies behind the forming power, the Vital Force, the physics? Some physicists have come to speak of an unknown x or y. Is it not possible that this x or y is the Mystery which orders the doings of ants and men, which moves the sun and the other stars, as Dante recorded, across the Heavens—the Spirit, the Breath of God, Love Himself.

  What is it that leads Mankind to yearn for the Divine Reassurance, the certainty of the Divine Care and the organising hand of the Divine Creator and Perpetuator? How should we have had the wit to devise such an aweful concept did not our own small minds correspond to some true Presence in the Universe, did we not dimly perceive and even more crucially NEED such a Being? When we see the love of the creatures for their offspring, or the tender gaze of a human mother bent on her helpless infant, which without her loving watchfulness would be quite unable to survive a day of hunger and thirst, do we not sense that love is the order of things, of which we are a wonderful part? The Laureate puts the terrible negative questions squarely in his great poem. He allows us to glimpse the new face of a world driven aimlessly by Chance and blind Fate. He presents, with plaintive singing, the possibility that God may be nothing more than our own invention, and Heaven a pious fiction. He gives the devil-born Doubt its full due, and makes his readers tremble with the impotent anxiety which is part of the Spirit of our Age.

  Oh yet we trust that somehow good

  Will be the final goal of ill,

  To pangs of nature, sins of will,

  Defects of doubt, and taints of blood;

  That nothing walks with aimless feet;

  That not one life shall be destroyed,

  Or cast as ru
bbish to the void,

  When God hath made the pile complete;

  That not a worm is cloven in vain;

  That not a moth with vain desire

  Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire,

  Or but subserves another’s gain.

  Behold, we know not anything;

  I can but trust that good shall fall

  At last—far off—at last, to all,

  And every winter change to spring.

  So runs my dream: but what am I?

  An infant crying in the night:

  An infant crying for the light:

  And with no language but a cry.

  In the next poem, Mr Tennyson writes even more strongly of Nature’s cruelty and carelessness, she who cries, ‘I care for nothing, all shall go,’ and of Poor Man:

  Who trusted God was love indeed

  And love Creation’s final law—

  Though Nature, red in tooth and claw

  With ravine, shrieked against his creed—

  And how does he answer this terrible indictment? He answers with the truth of feeling to which we must not be impervious, though it may seem childishly simple, naive, almost impotent. Can we accept this truth of feeling from the depths of our natures, when our intellects have been stunned and blunted by difficult questions?

  I found Him not in world or sun,

  Or eagle’s wing, or insect’s eye;

  Nor through the questions men may try,

  The petty cobwebs we have spun:

  If e’er, when faith had fallen asleep,

  I heard a voice ‘believe no more’

  And heard an ever-breaking shore

  That tumbled in the Godless deep;

  A warmth within the breast would melt

  The freezing reason’s colder part,

  And like a man in wrath the heart

  Stood up and answered ‘I have felt.’

  No, like a child in doubt and fear:

  But that blind clamour made me wise;

  Then was I as a child that cries,

  But, crying, knows his father near;

  And what I am beheld again

  What is, and no man understands;

  And out of darkness came the hands

  That reach through nature, moulding men.

  Was it not a true leading that enabled Mr Tennyson to become again as a little child, and feel the Fatherhood of the Lord of Hosts? Was it not significant that the warm organised cells of his heart and his circulating blood rose up against the ‘freezing reason’? The infant crying in the night receives not enlightenment, but the warm touch of a fatherly hand, and thus believes, thus lives his belief. We are fearfully and wonderfully made, in His Image, father and son, son and father, from generation to generation, in mystery and ordained order.

  Harald had put up the cowl of his gown against the cold. His long face, on its scrawny neck, peered at William as he read, assessing the flicker of the other’s eyes, the compressions of his lips, the odd nod or shake of the head. When William had finished, Harald said, ‘You are not convinced. You do not believe—’

  ‘I do not know how I can believe or not believe. It is, as you most eloquently say, a matter of feeling. And I cannot feel these things to be so.’

  ‘And my argument from love—from paternal love?’

  ‘It is resonant. But I would answer as Feuerbach answers, “Homo homini deus est”, our God is ourselves, we worship ourselves. We have made our God by a specious analogy, Sir—I do not mean to give offence, but I have been thinking about this for some years—we make perfect images of ourselves, of our lives and fates, as the painters do of the Man of Sorrows, or the scene in the Stable, or as you once said, of a grave-faced winged Creature speaking to a young girl. And we worship these, as primitive peoples worship masks of terror, the alligator, the eagle, the anaconda. You may argue anything at all by analogy, Sir, and so consequently nothing. This is my view. Feuerbach understood something fundamental about our minds. We need loving kindness in reality; and often we do not find it—so we invent a divine Parent for the infant crying in the night, and convince ourselves all is well. In reality, many cries remain unheard in perpetuity.’

  ‘That is not a refutation.’

  ‘In the nature of the case, it cannot be. It leaves the matter exactly where it first stood. We desire things to be so, and so we create a tale, or a picture, that says, we are so and so. You might as well say, we are like ants, as that ants may develop to be like us.’

  ‘Indeed I might. We are all one life, I believe, shot through with His love. I believe, I hope.’

  He took back his papers with careful hands, in which the papers shivered. The hands were ivory-coloured, the skin finely wrinkled everywhere, like the crust on a pool of wax, and under it appeared livid bruises, arthritic nodes, irregular tea-brown stains. William watched the hands fold the wavering papers and was fined with pity for them, as for sick and dying creatures. The flesh under the horny nails was candlewax-coloured, and bloodless.

  ‘It may be an emotional deficiency in myself, Sir, that I cannot feel the strength of the argument. I have been much changed by the pattern of my life, of my work. My own father was very much in the image of a terrible Judge, who preached rivers of blood and destruction, and whose own profession was bloody too. And then the vast disorder—the indifference to human scale and preoccupations—in the Amazon—I have not been left with a propensity to find kindness in the face of things.’

  ‘But I hope you have found it here. For you must know that we must count your coming as a special Providence—to make a new life for dear Eugenia, and now for your little ones—’

  ‘I am most grateful—’

  ‘And happy, I hope, contented, I hope,’ the tired old voice insisted in the sharp air, hanging there in a question.

  ‘Very happy, of course, Sir. I have all I wished for, and more. And when I come to think about my future—’

  ‘That shall be provided for, as you richly deserve, have no fears. There can be no thought of leaving Eugenia as yet—you would not so disappoint her—her happiness is young—but in due course, you will find all your needs can be answered, amply so, have no fears. I regard you as my dear son, and I intend to provide for you. In due course.’

  ‘I thank you, Sir.’

  There was frost on the inside of the windows, and watery tears, involuntary damp, round the red rims of the clouded eyes.

  William was not invited to join in the amusements of Lionel and Edgar, though Eugenia did ride out to the Meets, in a velvet habit, and come back flushed and smiling. There was a tacit conspiracy, he could almost have called it a conspiracy, to assume that, not being a pure gentleman, he would not have the skill or bravery for these gentlemanly pursuits, however resourcefully he had endured the Amazon. He went on long country walks, most frequently alone, sometimes with Matty Crompton and the schoolroom young. He was expected also to join in the evening games, in the drawing-room, where Lady Alabaster liked to play dominoes, or spillikins, or Black Maria, and where charades were occasionally organised, very ambitiously. He caused a great deal of laughter once, by likening these to the village feasts of the Indians, where everyone was fantastically dressed, and he had once met a dancing brown figure in a red-checked shirt and straw hat with a net and a box whom he recognised as a parody of himself. Great gales of laughter were aroused too by a particularly witty enactment of AM A ZON, in which AM was represented by Lionel as Abraham hearing the Voice of God out of the burning bush, a wonderful creation of yew boughs and red silk and tinsel made by Matty Crompton, A was represented by the children and Miss Mead, enacting a schoolroom alphabet lesson, in which apples were plucked from a paper tree, bees flew from a hive, and an animated Crocodile snapped at everyone’s heels. ZON was a love scene in which Edgar, in full evening dress, pinned a beautiful silver girdle (zone) around Eugenia’s waist—she was wearing a new silver and lemon ballgown, and her appearance aroused a huge round of applause. AMAZON was William himself, paddling
a canoe made from an upturned bench behind paper reeds and dangling woollen vines, observed by a tribe of feathered and painted Indian children led by Matty Crompton in an imposing cloak painted with feathers, and a mask painted like a hawk. Tissue-paper butterflies danced in the hothouse plants stacked on the stage, and colourful snakes made of string and paper hissed and wriggled dramatically.

  William congratulated Miss Crompton on the scenery of this tour de force, when he met her next day, winding up the crimson ribbons and folding the tinsel of the Burning Bush.

  ‘It was easy to see whose was the inventive mind behind all these beautiful objects,’ he said.

  ‘I do what comes to hand, as well as I can,’ she said. ‘Such activities stave off boredom.’

  ‘Are you often bored?’

  ‘I try not to be.’

  ‘That is not an answer.’

  ‘I suppose we all feel we have greater capacities than are called for in our daily lives.’

  She gave him her sharp look as she said this, and he had the uncomfortable feeling that she had only answered his intrusively personal question in order to draw him out. He was beginning to be a little afraid of Matty Crompton’s sharpness. She had never treated him other than very benevolently, and had never put herself forward in any way. But he sensed a kind of suppressed, fierceness in her which he was not wholly sure he wanted to know more about. She had herself very much in her own control, and he thought he preferred to leave things that way. However, he answered, because he needed to speak, and he could not speak to Harald or to Eugenia on these matters. It would be wrong. Wrong now, at least, wrong at this juncture.

  ‘I do feel something of the kind myself, from time to time. It is strange that in the Amazons I woke daily from a dream of mild English sunshine, of simple and wonderful things such as bread, and butter, instead of endless cassava. And now I wake from dreams of the forest curtain, of the movement of the river, of my work, Miss Crompton. I do not have my work, my own work here, though my life could not be more pleasant, nor my new family kinder.’