always carries a magnifying glass
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.
