an implication of ugliness. We think of spiders, of which many people
are more afraid than of Germans. We think of bugs and fleas, which
seem so indecent in their lives that they are made a jest by the
vulgar and the nice people do their best to avoid mentioning them. We
think of blackbeetles scurrying into safety as the kitchen light is
suddenly turned on--blackbeetles which (so we are told) in the first
place are not beetles, and in the second place are not black. There
are some women who will make a face at the mere name of any of these
creatures. Those of us who have never felt this repulsion--at least,
against spiders and blackbeetles--cannot but wonder how far it is
natural. Is it born in certain people, or is it acquired like the
old-fashioned habit of swooning and the fear of mice? The nearest I
have come to it is a feeling of disgust when I have seen a cat
retrieving a blackbeetle just about to escape under a wall and making
a dish of it. There are also certain crawling creatures which are so
notoriously the children of filth and so threatening in their touch
that we naturally shrink from them. Burns may make merry over a louse
crawling in a lady's hair, but few of us can regard its kind with
equanimity even on the backs of swine. Men of science deny that the
louse is actually engendered by dirt, but it undoubtedly thrives on
it. Our anger against the flea also arises from the fact that we
associate it with dirt. Donne once wrote a poem to a lady who had been
bitten by the same flea as himself, arguing that this was a good
reason why she should allow him to make love to her. It is, and was
bound to be, a dirty poem. Love, even of the wandering and polygynous
kind, does not express itself in such images. Only while under the
dominion of the youthful heresy of ugliness could a poet pretend that
it did. The flea, according to the authorities, is "remarkable for its
powers of leaping, and nearly cosmopolitan." Even so, it has found no
place in the heart or fancy of man. There have been men who were