ON BUTTERFLIES.

Otago Witness, Issue 1764, 12 September 1885, Page 26

ON BUTTERFLIES.

By San Dolores. Wo. I.— The Female Butterfly. If once we begin to institute comparisons between nature and human nature, it is easy enough to find individual types and prototypes, let alone the still greater ease with which one can compare one class of persons to a corresponding order of creatures, and find in each the counterpart of the habits and peculiarities of the other.

The/particular instance which just now mayoccupy our half hour's leisure is the very large class of persons who hold in society the place which in nature is filled by butterflies. Not that our social insects do by any means fill so exquisitely and perfectly their particular niche in the social temple as their prototypes do in nature's wide scheme ; still, allowing for some natural disadvantages, they succeed fairly well — fairly well.

" Male and female created He them " ; so with our biped butterflies, too, male and female, in about equal proportions, society has created them. Not so radiantly apparelled these Colonial butterflies, not so beautifully and perfectly useless as their fellows in older countries, nor so highly trained in the arts of butterflydora, since in the Colony it is perforce the lot sometimes of even the daintiest butterfly to be for a portion of their lives engaged in labour — light as he or she can make it, be sure, but still labour.

He must take his turn of station life, or spend some hours of yawning in his pigeonhole of the Government Buildings, or labour

in some fashion during certain periods of hi* existence.

She must perform a greater or lesser number of household or domestic ta'jks, which, however reluctantly discharge!.!, must lend a small element of usefulness to her life, and debar her from absolutely becoming that thing created by society which her sister in older countries is.

Unlike their natural representatives, our social butterflies do most thrive and reach their greatest perfection in towns and cities ; country air does not agree with them. Simple delights of sunshine, fresh breezes, and fair landscape fail long to pleasure them. Even daylight sometimes bores them almost unendurably. Night is the time when they are seen in their glory, when they flit and flutter with every sweet sound and every beguiling grace of voice and motion ; then the females appear in garments as delicately radiant as the rainbow, or as gorgeous as the sunset.

This same fair raiment, however, though with an art that conceals art it seems only the natural attribute of its butterfly wearer, is nevertheless a source of endless anxiety to her. It keeps her awake o' nights, compels her to gravely brood upon it and anxiously discuss it in the sacred precincts of her chamber, as well as in the family conclave ; and at the soothing hour of " afternoon tea" a vision of that tennisgown that must be altered, and the ball-dress that cannot be worn again, comes before her, and virtually drops bitter almonds in the innocent dissipation of her tea-cup. How terrible to butterfly's poor mother becomes the ever-recurring question, " What shall I wear?" How little by little that mother's dainty hoards of finery are monopolised to create costumes for butterfly — -."something stylish, you know; different to anyone else." If unhappily mother has any natural talent for dressmaking or millinery, her life bids fair to become a living nightmare, in which fashion journals, "ladies' columns," the ghosts of gowns that want " doing up," together with disjointed plans of " how to do them up," constitute the kaleidoscopic panorama.

If the Colonial butterfly is less useless than her European sister, so also is she more profoundly selfish, since her defection from the eternal round of household work naturally means in the ordinary Colonial household an increase in the duties and cares of each other member. Her career also is usually shorter, since most Colonial girls marry eai'ly, and the married butterfly is at present a rare specimen among us, being the outcome of a higher point of civilisation than we can yet aspire to.

Sometimes the failings of the butterfly simply number among them idleness, vanity, and love of pleasure ; oftener there is a stronger element than those embodied in her relations with the opposite sex. She is usually a flirt, more or less finished. Certainly it is rarely flirting of a dangerous kind, and seldom leads to more than a passing heartache or fit of indigestion in the recipient of these too fleeting tendernesses. This is doubtless due to the charming naivete and perfect openness with which the flirtations of Colonial butterflies are generally conducted. There is no alluring veil of innocent shyness, no shimmer of maiden coyness, no ignorance of charms which would gain their highest grace in unconsciousness ; but, on the other hand, neither is there the dangerous fascination of concealment, the only too attractive charm of intrigue. The Colonial butterfly has been accustomed to flirt since she wrote love letters on her slate at school and bartered kisses for toffee' and cocoanut ice, and in this and,all other respects she is only a fair match for her male companions of the butterfly world.

The brevity of nature's butterfly career is not emulated by the human product ; on the contrary, the charms of irresponsible enjoyment and the incessant pursuit of pleasure, the flitting with brilliant wings from one excitement to another, become so absorbing a pursuit to the human species that it is rarely indeed they can tear themselves from it. The found of pleasure may cease indeed to be pleasure, but it has become habit — a far more enthralling thing. The routine of domestic employments or the labour of light household tasks loom scarcely less terrible than a treadmill- before a girl after a few years of the selfish delights of butterfly life.

Sometimes, indeed, when she marries she surprises alike her friends and foes by developing into a clever managing wife and mother, passionately devoted to her children, in their infancy constituting herself a i^erfect slave to their well-being, and as they grow up devoting herself with curious (considering her butterfly youth) earnestness to the object of making them clever, highly-educated boys and girls.

At this stage of her life she candidly and constantly regrets her own imperfect education — the music which she has " never practised " until she is ashamed to attempt to play; the singing that is also only a reminiscence of her butterfly days ; the French and German in which she now vainly tries to frame a few con.ventional phrases ; or the painting, Avhich, like all her other accomplishments, is a lost art. Sadly enough now our ddevant butterfly regrets the months and years that she gave up so undividenly to pleasure. .

Do not mistake : she does not regret any single one of nil the past pleasures that have left her a wealth of bright memories. She remembers now, and always will, with a tender if sometimes sad pleasure, this and that set of tennis parties, dances, or picnics ; recalls with a half-amused smile this and that flirtation. Her only regret — if she bo genuinely the steadfast woman she has set herself to be — is that she gave up all her time to pleasure, and laid by her no golden stores of information or culture which now she might use to gladden her children's lesson hours with, and change their dull studies to absorbing intellectual treats. Sometimes poor butterfly's career ends more briefly, less happily. Her chest, perhaps, is a trifle weak ; the heated air in crowded rooms, the chill of late evening aad early morning atmosphere as she returns from concerts, dances, or musical evenings does its natural work, and butterfly perforce gives up evening outings at last. Then by-and-bye she must be in ere the sun sets, and again, after long months of hectic hopes and chilling relapses, a fair broken lily, snupt on its stem, is carved by the stonemason to mark the spot where poor* butterfly has found her long rest in the breast of gentle Mother Earth. ? There are so many different endings to butterflies' glories. Sometimes we see her, after years have dimmed the fair brilliance of her first youth, still fluttering on, wearily but bravely, trying to hide her disappointment that of all the men who flirted with her not one has sought to marry ther ; laughed at, not too kindly, by the young fresh butterflies who have supplanted her ; eyed despairingly, yet tenderly, by the mother who sighs at her failure, yet robs herself in the vain effort to hit upon some wonderful and unique " get-up " which shall, by one final burst of victorious splendour, change clef eat into triumph, and enslave some not too critical bachelor.

Sometimes we laugh — let us hope not unkindly—at the parties which are given by

mamma, the good wines and good dinners which are lavished by ' papa — all with the laudable object of getting rid of butterfly ; laugh, too, as we nudge one another in mutual enjoyment of the dead set which they make at auy new arrival, and we see butterfly's best points all made much of and her accomplishments trotted out. Hope lends the old brightness to her eyes, and excitement paints her cheek with pretty fleeting blushes ; while there is in her flattering deference to his opinion, her interest in his every object, in the suspicion of tenderness which softens her every movement to him such a suggestion of all those charms being for him alone — nay more, having been always reserved for him — that the chances are he falls a victim ■ at whose immolation ceremonial we laugh, drink, and are merry exceedingly. Still less satisfactory are some other studies of butterfly — notably a too common one in which we find her married indeed, but being unable to rise from the plane of butterfly existence has changed only into a poor bedraggled creature, as pitiable to look upon as her natural prototype when numbed with cold and besmirched with the first storms of autumn. Her household duties are mismanaged ; her children alternate between finery aud untidiness ; she herself, a restless, discontented woman, laments her inability to please her husband, and rails at a cruel fate for all the shortcomings of her life, her only solace being in the pages of a novel or the delights of gossiping. Probably the happiest times in her existence are those periods when the household is given over to the sway of the monthly nurse, and in the precedence which the new-made mother enjoys over every other creature in the house the instincts of her selfish household pre-eminence of butterfly days finds legitimate vent.