Proserpina Volume II Part 4

"And all those sayings will I over-swear, And all those swearings keep as true in soul As doth that orbed continent the Fire That severs day from night."

Or, at least, did once sever day from night,--and perhaps does still in Illyria. Old England must seek new images for her loves from gas and electric sparks,--not to say furnace fire.

I am obliged, by press of other work, to set down these notes in cruel shortness: and many a reader may be disposed to question utterly the standard by which the measurement is made. It will not be found, on reference to my other books, that they encourage young ladies to go into convents; or undervalue the dignity of wives and mothers. But, as surely as the sun _does_ sever day from night, it will be found always that the n.o.blest and loveliest women are dutiful and religious by continual nature; and their pa.s.sions are trained to obey them; like their dogs. Homer, indeed, loves Helen with all his heart, and restores her, after all her naughtiness, to the queenship of her household; but he never thinks of her as Penelope's equal, or Iphigenia's. Practically, in daily life, one often sees married women as good as saints; but rarely, I think, unless they have a good deal to bear from their husbands. Sometimes also, no doubt, the husbands have some trouble in managing St. Cecilia or St. Elizabeth; of which questions I shall be obliged to speak more seriously in another place: content, at present, if English maids know better, by Proserpina's help, what Shakspeare meant by the dim, and Milton by the glowing, violet.

CHAPTER II.

PINGUICULA.

(Written in early June, 1881.)

1. On the rocks of my little stream, where it runs, or leaps, through the moorland, the common Pinguicula is now in its perfectest beauty; and it is one of the offshoots of the violet tribe which I have to place in the minor collateral groups of Viola very soon, and must not put off looking at it till next year.

There are three varieties given in Sowerby: 1. Vulgaris, 2.

Greater-flowered, and 3. Lusitanica, white, for the most part, pink, or 'carnea,' sometimes: but the proper colour of the family is violet, and the perfect form of the plant is the 'vulgar' one. The larger-flowered variety is feebler in colour, and ruder in form: the white Spanish one, however, is very lovely, as far as I can judge from Sowerby's (_old_ Sowerby's) pretty drawing.

The 'frequent' one (I shall usually thus translate 'vulgaris'), is not by any means so 'frequent' as the Queen violet, being a true wild-country, and mostly Alpine, plant; and there is also a real 'Pinguicula Alpina,' which we have not in England, who might be the Regina, if the group were large enough to be reigned over: but it is better not to affect Royalty among these confused, intermediate, or dependent families.

2. In all the varieties of Pinguicula, each blossom has one stalk only, growing from the _ground_ and you may pull all the leaves away from the base of it, and keep the flower only, with its bunch of short fibrous roots, half an inch long; looking as if bitten at the ends. Two flowers, characteristically,--three and four very often,--spring from the same root, in places where it grows luxuriantly; and luxuriant growth means that cl.u.s.ters of some twenty or thirty stars may be seen on the surface of a square yard of boggy ground, quite to its mind; but its real glory is in harder life, in the crannies of well-wetted rock.

3. What I have called 'stars' are irregular cl.u.s.ters of approximately, or tentatively, five aloeine ground leaves, of very pale green,--they may be six or seven, or more, but always run into a rudely pentagonal arrangement, essentially first trine, with two succeeding above. Taken as a whole the _plant_ is really a main link between violets and Droseras; but the _flower_ has much more violet than Drosera in the make of it,--spurred, and _five-petaled_,[11] and held down by the top of its bending stalk as a violet is; only its upper two petals are not reverted--the calyx, of a dark soppy green, holding them down, with its three front sepals set exactly like a strong trident, its two backward sepals clasping the spur. There are often six sepals, four to the front, but the normal number is five. Tearing away the calyx, I find the flower to have been held by it as a lion might hold his prey by the loins if he missed its throat; the blue petals being really campanulate, and the flower best described as a dark bluebell, seized and crushed almost flat by its own calyx in a rage. Pulling away now also the upper petals, I find that what are in the violet the lateral and well-ordered fringes, are here thrown mainly on the lower (largest) petal near its origin, and opposite the point of the seizure by the calyx, spreading from this centre over the surface of the lower petals, partly like an irregular shower of fine Venetian gla.s.s broken, partly like the wild-flung Medusa like embroidery of the white Lucia.[12]

4. The calyx is of a dark _soppy_ green, I said; like that of sugary preserved citron; the root leaves are of green just as soppy, but pale and yellowish, as if they were half decayed; the edges curled up and, as it were, water-shrivelled, as one's fingers shrivel if kept too long in water.

And the whole plant looks as if it had been a violet unjustly banished to a bog, and obliged to live there--not for its own sins, but for some Emperor Pansy's, far away in the garden,--in a partly boggish, partly hoggish manner, drenched and desolate; and with something of demoniac temper got into its calyx, so that it quarrels with, and bites the corolla;--something of gluttonous and greasy habit got into its leaves; a discomfortable sensuality, even in its desolation. Perhaps a penguin-ish life would be truer of it than a piggish, the _nest_ of it being indeed on the rock, or mora.s.sy rock-invest.i.ture, like a sea-bird's on her rock ledge.

5. I have hunted through seven treatises on Botany, namely, Loudon's Encyclopaedia, Balfour, Grindon, Oliver, Baxter of Oxford, Lindley ('Ladies'

Botany'), and Figuer, without being able to find the meaning of 'Lentibulariaceae,' to which tribe the Pinguicula is said by them all (except Figuier) to belong. It may perhaps be in Sowerby:[13] but these above-named treatises are precisely of the kind with which the ordinary scholar must be content: and in all of them he has to learn this long, worse than useless, word, under which he is betrayed into cla.s.sing together two orders naturally quite distinct, the b.u.t.terworts and the Bladderworts.

Whatever the name may mean--it is bad Latin. There is such a word as Lenticularis--there is no Lentibularis; and it must positively trouble us no longer.[14]

The b.u.t.terworts are a perfectly distinct group--whether small or large, always recognizable at a glance. Their proper Latin name will be Pinguicula, (plural Pinguiculae,)--their English, Bog-Violet, or, more familiarly, b.u.t.terwort; and their French, as at present, _Gra.s.sette_.

The families to be remembered will be only five, namely,

1. Pinguicula Major, the largest of the group. As bog plants, Ireland may rightly claim the n.o.blest of them, which certainly grow there luxuriantly, and not (I believe) with us. Their colour is, however, more broken and less characteristic than that of the following species.

2. Pinguicula Violacea: Violet-coloured b.u.t.terwort, (instead of 'vulgaris,') the common English and Swiss kind above noticed.

3. Pinguicula Alpina: Alpine b.u.t.terwort, white and much smaller than either of the first two families; the spur especially small, according to D. 453.

Much rarer, as well as smaller, than the other varieties in Southern Europe. "In Britain, known only upon the moors of Rosehaugh, Ross-shire, where the progress of cultivation seems likely soon to efface it."

(Grindon.)

4. Pinguicula Pallida: Pale b.u.t.terwort. From Sowerby's drawing, (135, vol.

iii,) it would appear to be the most delicate and lovely of all the group.

The leaves, "like those of other species, but rather more delicate and pellucid, reticulated with red veins, and much involute in the margin. Tube of the corolla, yellow, streaked with red, (the streaks like those of a pansy); the petals, pale violet. It much resembles Villosa, (our Minima, No. 5,) in many particulars, the stem being hairy, and in the lower part the hairs tipped with a viscid fluid, like a sundew. But the Villosa has a slender sharp spur; and in this the spur is blunt and thick at the end."

(Since the hairy stem is not peculiar to Villosa, I take for her, instead, the epithet Minima, which is really definitive.)

The pale one is commonly called 'Lusitanica,' but I find no direct notice of its Portuguese habitation. Sowerby's plant came from Blandford, Dorsetshire; and Grindon says it is frequent in Ireland, abundant in Arran, and extends on the western side of the British island from Cornwall to Cape Wrath. My epithet, Pallida, is secure, and simple, wherever the plant is found.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. III.]

5. Pinguicula Minima: Least b.u.t.terwort; in D. 1021 called Villosa, the _scape_ of it being hairy. I have not yet got rid of this absurd word 'scape,' meaning, in botanist's Latin, the flower-stalk of a flower growing out of a cl.u.s.ter of leaves on the ground. It is a bad corruption of 'sceptre,' and especially false and absurd, because a true sceptre is necessarily branched.[15] In 'Proserpina,' when it is spoken of distinctively, it is called 'virgula' (see vol. i., pp. 146, 147, 151, 152). The hairs on the virgula are in this instance so minute, that even with a lens I cannot see them in the Danish plate: of which Fig. 3 is a rough translation into woodcut, to show the grace and mien of the little thing. The trine leaf cl.u.s.ter is characteristic, and the folding up of the leaf edges. The flower, in the Danish plate, full purple. Abundant in east of _Finmark_ (Finland?), but _always growing in marsh moss_, (Sphagnum pal.u.s.tre).

6. I call it 'Minima' only, as the least of the five here named; without putting forward any claim for it to be the smallest pinguicula that ever was or will be. In such sense only, the epithets minima or maxima are to be understood when used in 'Proserpina': and so also, every statement and every principle is only to be understood as true or tenable, respecting the plants which the writer has seen, and which he is sure that the reader can easily see: liable to modification to any extent by wider experience; but better first learned securely within a narrow fence, and afterwards trained or fructified, along more complex trellises.

7. And indeed my readers--at least, my newly found readers--must note always that the only power which I claim for any of my books, is that of being right and true as far as they reach. None of them pretend to be Kosmoses;--none to be systems of Positivism or Negativism, on which the earth is in future to swing instead of on its old worn-out poles;--none of them to be works of genius;--none of them to be, more than all true work _must_ be, pious;--and none to be, beyond the power of common people's eyes,[16] ears, and noses, 'aesthetic.' They tell you that the world is _so_ big, and can't be made bigger--that you yourself are also so big, and can't be made bigger, however you puff or bloat yourself; but that, on modern mental nourishment, you may very easily be made smaller. They tell you that two and two are four, that ginger is hot in the mouth, that roses are red, and s.m.u.ts black. Not themselves a.s.suming to be pious, they yet a.s.sure you that there is such a thing as piety in the world, and that it is wiser than impiety; and not themselves pretending to be works of genius, they yet a.s.sure you that there is such a thing as genius in the world, and that it is meant for the light and delight of the world.

8. Into these repet.i.tions of remarks on my work, often made before, I have been led by an unlucky author who has just sent me his book, advising me that it is "neither critical nor sentimental" (he had better have said in plain English "without either judgment or feeling"), and in which nearly the first sentence I read is--"Solomon with all his acuteness was not wise enough to ... etc., etc., etc." ('give the Jews the British const.i.tution,'

I believe the man means.) He is not a whit more conceited than Mr. Herbert Spencer, or Mr. Goldwin Smith, or Professor Tyndall,--or any lively London apprentice out on a Sunday; but this general superciliousness with respect to Solomon, his Proverbs, and his politics, characteristic of the modern c.o.c.kney, Yankee, and Anglicised Scot, is a difficult thing to deal with for us of the old school, who were well whipped when we were young; and have been in the habit of occasionally ascertaining our own levels as we grew older, and of recognizing that, here and there, somebody stood higher, and struck harder.

9. A difficult thing to deal with, I feel more and more, hourly, even to the point of almost ceasing to write; not only every feeling I have, but, of late, even _every word I use_, being alike inconceivable to the insolence, and unintelligible amidst the slang, of the modern London writers. Only in the last magazine I took up, I found an article by Mr.

Goldwin Smith on the Jews (of which the gist--as far as it had any--was that we had better give up reading the Bible), and in the text of which I found the word 'tribal' repeated about ten times in every page. Now, if 'tribe' makes 'tribal,' tube must make tubal, cube, cubal, and gibe, gibal; and I suppose we shall next hear of tubal music, cubal minerals, and gibal conversation! And observe how all this bad English leads instantly to blunder in thought, prolonged indefinitely. The Jewish Tribes are not separate races, but the descendants of brothers. The Roman Tribes, political divisions; essentially Trine: and the whole force of the word Tribune vanishes, as soon as the ear is wrung into acceptance of his lazy innovation by the modern writer. Similarly, in the last elements of mineralogy I took up, the first order of crystals was called 'tesseral'; the writer being much too fine to call them 'four-al,' and too much bent on distinguishing himself from all previous writers to call them cubic.

10. What simple schoolchildren, and sensible schoolmasters, are to do in this atmosphere of Egyptian marsh, which rains fools upon them like frogs, I can no more with any hope or patience conceive;--but this finally I repeat, concerning my own books, that they are written in honest English, of good Johnsonian lineage, touched here and there with colour of a little finer or Elizabethan quality: and that the things they tell you are comprehensible by any moderately industrious and intelligent person; and _accurate_, to a degree which the accepted methods of modern science cannot, in my own particular fields, approach.

11. Of which accuracy, the reader may observe for immediate instance, my extrication for him, from among the uvularias, of these five species of the b.u.t.terwort; which, being all that need be distinctly named and remembered, _do_ need to be first carefully distinguished, and then remembered in their companionship. So alike are they, that Gerarde makes no distinction among them; but ma.s.ses them under the general type of the frequent English one, described as the second kind of his promiscuous group of 'Sanicle,' "which Clusius calleth Pinguicula; not before his time remembered, hath sundry small thick leaves, fat and full of juice, being broad towards the root and sharp towards the point, of a faint green colour, and bitter in taste; out of the middest whereof sprouteth or shooteth up a naked slender stalke nine inches long, every stalke bearing one flower and no more, sometimes white, and sometimes of a bluish purple colour, fashioned like unto the common Monkshoods" (he means Larkspurs) "called Consolida Regalis, having the like spur or Lark's heel attached thereto." Then after describing a third kind of Sanicle--(Cortusa Mathioli, a large-leaved Alpine Primula,) he goes on: "These plants are strangers in England; their natural country is the alpish mountains of Helvetia. They grow in my garden, where they flourish exceedingly, except b.u.t.terwoort, which groweth in our English _squally_ wet grounds,"--('Squally,' I believe, here, from squalidus, though Johnson does not give this sense; but one of his quotations from Ben Jonson touches it nearly: "Take heed that their new flowers and sweetness do not as much corrupt as the others' dryness and squalor,"--and note farther that the word 'squal,' in the sense of gust, is not pure English, but the Arabic 'Chuaul' with an s prefixed:--the English word, a form of 'squeal,' meaning a child's cry, from Gothic 'Squaela' and Icelandic 'squilla,' would scarcely have been made an adjective by Gerarde),--"and will not yield to any culturing or transplanting: it groweth especially in a field called Cragge Close, and at Crosbie Ravenswaithe, in Westmerland; (West-_mere_-land you observe, not mor) upon Ingleborough Fells, twelve miles from Lancaster, and by Harwoode in the same county near to Blackburn: ten miles from Preston, in Anderness, upon the bogs and marish ground, and in the boggie meadows about Bishop's-Hatfield, and also in the fens in the way to Wittles Meare"

(Roger Wildrake's Squattlesea Mere?) "from Fendon, in Huntingdonshire."

Where doubtless Cromwell ploughed it up, in his young days, pitilessly; and in nowise pausing, as Burns beside his fallen daisy.

12. Finally, however, I believe we may accept its English name of 'b.u.t.terwort' as true Yorkshire, the more enigmatic form of 'Pigw.i.l.l.y'

preserving the tradition of the flowers once abounding, with softened Latin name, in Pigw.i.l.l.y bottom, close to Force bridge, by Kendal. Gerarde draws the English variety as "Pinguicula sive Sanicula Eboracensis,--b.u.t.terwoort, or Yorkshire Sanicle;" and he adds: "The husbandmen's wives of Yorkshire do use to anoint the dugs of their kine with the fat and oilous juice of the herb b.u.t.terwort when they be bitten of any venomous worm, or chapped, rifted and hurt by any other means."

13. In Lapland it is put to much more certain use; "it is called Tatgra.s.s, and the leaves are used by the inhabitants to make their 'tat miolk,' a preparation of milk in common use among them. Some fresh leaves are laid upon a filter, and milk, yet warm from the reindeer, is poured over them.

After pa.s.sing quickly through the filter, this is allowed to rest for one or two days until it becomes ascescent,[17] when it is found not to have separated from the whey, and yet to have attained much greater tenacity and consistence than it would have done otherwise. The Laplanders and Swedes are said to be extremely fond of this milk, which when once made, it is not necessary to renew the use of the leaves, for we are told that a spoonful of it will turn another quant.i.ty of warm milk, and make it like the first."[18] (Baxter, vol. iii., No. 209.)

14. In the same page, I find quoted Dr. Johnston's observation that "when specimens of this plant were somewhat rudely pulled up, the flower-stalk, previously erect, almost immediately began to bend itself backwards, and formed a more or less perfect segment of a circle; and so also, if a specimen is placed in the Botanic box, you will in a short time find that the leaves have curled themselves backwards, and now conceal the root by their revolution."

I have no doubt that this elastic and wiry action is partly connected with the plant's more or less predatory or fly-trap character, in which these curiously degraded plants are a.s.sociated with Drosera. I separate them therefore entirely from the Bladderworts, and hold them to be a link between the Violets and the Droseraceae, placing them, however, with the Cytherides, as a sub-family, for their beautiful colour, and because they are indeed a grace and delight in ground which, but for them, would be painfully and rudely desolate.

CHAPTER III.

VERONICA.

1. "The Corolla of the Foxglove," says Dr. Lindley, beginning his account of the tribe at page 195 of the first volume of his 'Ladies' Botany,' "is a large inflated body(!), with its throat spotted with rich purple, and its border divided obliquely into five very short lobes, of which the two upper are the smaller; its four stamens are of unequal length, and its style is divided into two lobes at the upper end. A number of long hairs cover the ovary, which contains two cells and a great quant.i.ty of ovules.

"This" (_sc._ information) "will show you what is the usual character of the Foxglove tribe; and you will find that all the other genera referred to it in books agree with it essentially, although they differ in subordinate points. It is chiefly (A) in the form of the corolla, (B) in the number of the stamens, (C) in the consistence of the rind of the fruit, (D) in its form, (E) in the number of the seeds it contains, and (F) in the manner in which the sepals are combined, that these differences consist."

2. The enumerative letters are of my insertion--otherwise the above sentence is, word for word, Dr. Lindley's,--and it seems to me an interesting and memorable one in the history of modern Botanical science.

For it appears from the tenor of it, that in a scientific botanist's mind, six particulars, at least, in the character of a plant, are merely 'subordinate points,'--namely,

1. (F) The combination of its calyx, 2. (A) The shape of its corolla, 3. (B) The number of its stamens, 4. (D) The form of its fruit, 5. (C) The consistence of its sh.e.l.l,--and 6. (E) The number of seeds in it.

Abstracting, then, from the primary description, all the six inessential points, I find the three essential ones left are, that the style is divided into two lobes at the upper end, that a number of glandular hairs cover the ovary, and that this latter contains two cells.

3. None of which particulars concern any reasonable mortal, looking at a Foxglove, in the smallest degree. Whether hairs which he can't see are glandular or bristly,--whether the green k.n.o.bs, which are left when the purple bells are gone, are divided into two lobes or two hundred,--and whether the style is split, like a snake's tongue, into two lobes, or like a rogue's, into any number--are merely matters of vulgar curiosity, which he needs a microscope to discover, and will lose a day of his life in discovering. But if any pretty young Proserpina, escaped from the Plutonic durance of London, and carried by the tubular process, which replaces Charon's boat, over the Lune at Lancaster, cares to come and walk on the Coniston hills in a summer morning, when the eyebright is out on the high fields, she may gather, with a little help from Brantwood garden, a bouquet of the entire Foxglove tribe in flower, as it is at present defined, and may see what they are like, altogether.