BEAUTIFUL HAWK-MOTHS

In the late summer I often walk by flowery places of an evening, or at some late hour by moonlight, in the hope of seeing that rare night-wanderer, the death’s-head moth; but the hope is now an old one, so worn and faded that it is hardly more than the memory of a hope. Why, I have asked myself times without number, am I so luckless in my quest of an insect which is not only a large object to catch the eye but has a voice, or sound, as well to attract a seeker’s attention? On consulting others on this point, some of them lepidopterists and diligent collectors, they have assured me that they have never once had a glimpse of the living free _Acherontia atropas_ going about on his flowery business.

A few years ago, while on a ramble in a southern county, I heard of a gentleman in the neighbourhood who had a taste for adders and death’s-head moths and was accustomed to collect and keep them in considerable numbers in his house. My own partiality for adders induced me to call on him, and we exchanged experiences and had some pleasant talk about these shy, beautiful and (to us) harmless creatures. I am speaking of adders now; I had not yet heard of his predilection for the great moth; when he spoke of this second favourite I begged him to show me a specimen or two. Turning to his wife, who was present and shared his queer tastes, he told her to go and get me some. She left the room, and returned by and by with a large cardboard box, such as milliners and dressmakers use; removing the lid, she raised it above my head and emptied the contents over me--a shower of living, shivering, fluttering, squeaking or creaking death’s-head moths! In a moment they were all over me, from my head right down to my feet, not attempting to fly, but running, quivering, and shaking their wings, so that I had a bath and feast of them.

At that moment it mattered not that I was a stranger there, in the library or study of a country house, with those two looking on and laughing at my plight. It is what we feel that matters: I might have been standing in some wilderness never trodden by human foot, myself an unhuman solitary, and merely by willing it I had drawn those beautiful beings of the dark to me, charming them as with a flowery fragrance from their secret hiding-places in a dim world of leaves to gather upon and cover me over with their downy, trembling, mottled grey and rich yellow velvet wings.

Even this fascinating experience did not wholly satisfy me: nothing, I said, would satisfy me short of seeing the undomesticated moth living his proper life in the open air. He smiled and shook his head. Useless to look for such a thing! _He_ had never seen it and didn’t believe that I ever would; he couldn’t say why. He got his moths by paying sixpence apiece for the chrysalids to workmen in the potato fields and rearing them himself; in this way he obtained as many as he wanted--sixty or seventy or eighty every year.

I can only hope that time will prove him wrong, and I go on as before haunting the flowery places in the last light of day and when the moon shines.

Another surprisingly beautiful moth which, they say, is as rarely seen as the _Acherontia_ is the crimson underwing. Once only have I been able to observe this lovely moth flying about--and it was in a room! I was staying with friends at the Anglers’ Inn at Bransbury on the Test when one evening after the lamps were lit the moth appeared in our sitting-room and remained two days and nights with us in spite of our kind persecutions and artful plans for his expulsion. It was early September, with mild sunny days and misty or wet nights, and in the evening, when the room was very warm, we would throw the windows and doors open, thinking of the delicious relief it would be for our prisoner to pass out of that superheated atmosphere, that painful brightness, into his own wide, wet world, its darkness and silence and fragrance, and a mysterious signal wafted to him from a distance out of clouds of whispering leaves, from one there waiting for him. Then with fans and hats and folded newspapers we would try to fan him out, but it only made him wild--wild as a newly caught linnet in a cage; he would dart hither and thither about the room, now among us, now over our heads, still refusing to go out. We didn’t want him to go, so that after religiously doing our best for him we were pleased to have him stay. We even tried to make him happy as our guest by offering him honey and golden-syrup and placing flowers in vases all about the room, but he would accept nothing from us.

At rest on a wall or curtain he appeared as a grey triangular patch, ornamented, when viewed closely, with mottlings of a dusky hue; but on lifting his fore-wings, the lovely crimson colour of the underwings was displayed. No crimson flower, no sea-shell, no sunset cloud, can show a hue to compare in loveliness with it. Another hidden beauty was revealed when the lamps were lighted to start him flying up and down the room over our heads, always keeping close to the low ceiling. He then had a surprisingly bird-like appearance, and the under-surface of the bird-shaped body being pure white and downy he was like a miniature martin with crimson on the wings. He was then at his best, our “elf-darling”; no one dared touch him even with a finger-tip lest that exquisitely delicate down should be injured. I have frequently had humming-birds blunder into a room where I sat and fly round seeking an exit, but never one of these, for all the glittering scale-like feathers, seemed so perfectly beautiful as our dark crimson underwing.

On the third evening, to our regret, we succeeded in getting him to fly out.

Now, we asked, what had the books-about-moths-makers to tell us concerning this particular elf-darling? I proceeded to get out my work on Butterflies and Moths--one recently published. It gave a description of the insect--colour and measurements; then, under the heading of “general remarks,” came the following: “This moth will never be seen, but by judicious sugaring as many as half-a-dozen specimens may be obtained in a single night.” That was all! It was a shock to us, and we wondered whether any of our naturalists had tried the plan of “judicious sugaring” to obtain a few specimens of that rarer, more elusive creature, the fairy, before its final extinction in Britain.

The memory of those two evenings with a crimson underwing brings to mind just now yet another enchanting evening I spent in the valley of the Wiltshire Avon. It was June, just before hay-cutting, and for most of the time, until the last faint underglow had faded and the stars were out, I was standing motionless, knee-deep in the plumy seeded grasses, watching the ghost-moths, as I had never seen them before, in scores and in hundreds, dimly visible in their whiteness all over the dusky meadow, engaged in their quaint, beautiful, rhythmic love-dance. It was the wide silent night and the moths’ strange motions and whiteness in the dark that gave it a magic on that occasion. Seen by daylight or lamplight it is Lord de Tabley’s “owl-white moth with mealy wings,” or one of them, and nothing more.

Moths are mostly haunters of the twilight and the dark, but we have one of the larger and highly distinguished species, the humming-bird hawk-moth, which flies abroad by day, even during the hottest seasons, and visits our gardens in the full blaze of noon. It has no glory of colour like the crimson underwing and death’s-head moth, nor ghostly white, yet it outshines all the others in beauty and in the sense of wonder and delight its appearance produces. Here I will quote part of a letter written to me some years ago by a lady who wanted to know if I could identify an insect she was particularly interested in, from her description. She had seen it when a child in the garden at her early home in Wiltshire, and never since, nor had she ever discovered what it was.

“When I was a child,” the letter says, “I had a great fancy for a rare, strange, fascinating insect called by the children of my day the Merrylee-dance-a-pole. Only on the hottest and longest of summer days did the radiant being delight our eyes; to have seen it conferred high honour and distinction on the fortunate beholder. We regarded it with mingled awe and joy, and followed its erratic and rapid flight with ecstasy. It was soft and warm and brown, fluffy and golden, too, and created in our infantile minds an indescribable impression of glory, brilliance, aloofness, elusiveness. We thought it a being from some other world, and during each of its frequent sudden disappearances among the flowering bushes we held our breath, fearing it would return no more, but had flown right through the blossoming screen and back to the sun and stars. To me it was an apparition of inexpressible delight, and I longed to be a Merrylee-dance-a-pole myself to fly to unheard-of, unthought-of, undreamed-of beautiful flowery lands.”

A descriptive passage this by one who is not a literary person, a student of expression anxiously seeking after the “explicit word,” yet an expression rare and beautiful as the thing described: one reads it with a quickened pulse. Who should dream of finding its like anywhere in the thousand books of British Butterflies and Moths which our exceedingly industrious lepidopterists have produced during the last six or seven decades? Yet these same thousand volumes were written less for the scientific student of entomology than for the general reader, or for every person who on seeing a white admiral or a privet moth wants to know what it is and goes to a book to find out all about it. These writers all fail in the very thing which one would imagine to be most important in books intended for such a purpose--the power to convey to the reader’s mind a vivid image of the thing described. One would like to know what the professional entomologist or writer of books about moths would say of the passage I have quoted from a letter asking for information about an insect. Probably he would say that the lady wrote more from the heart than the head, that writing so she is rhapsodical and as inaccurate as one would expect her to be, although one is able to identify her Merrylee-dance-a-pole as the _Macroglossa stellatarum_.

It would be perfectly true--she is inaccurate, yet succeeds in producing the effect aimed at while the accurate writers fail. She succeeds because she saw the object as a child, emotionally, and after thirty years was still able to recover the precise feeling experienced then and to convey to another the image in her mind. We may say that impressions are vivid and live vividly in the mind, even to the end of life, in those alone in whom something that is of the child survives in the adult--the measureless delight in all this visible world, experienced every day by the millions of children happily born outside the city’s gates, but so rarely expressed in literature, as Traherne, let us say, expressed it; and, with the delight, the sense of wonder in all life, which is akin to, if not one with, the mythical faculty, and if experienced in a high degree is a sense of the supernatural in all natural things. We may say, in fact, that unless the soul goes out to meet what we see we do not see it; nothing do we see, not a beetle, not a blade of grass.