Proserpina Volume I Part 6

2. Now these great two orders--of which the types are the thyme and the daisy--you are to remember generally as the 'Herbs' and the 'Sunflowers.'

You are not to call them Lipped flowers, nor Composed flowers; because the first is a vulgar term; for when you once come to be able to draw a lip, or, in n.o.ble duty, to kiss one, you will know that no other flower in earth is like that: and the second is an indefinite term; for a foxglove is as much a 'composed' flower as a daisy; but it is composed in the shape of a spire, instead of the shape of the sun. And again a thistle, which common botany calls a composed flower, as well as a daisy, is composed in quite another shape, being on the whole, bossy instead of flat; and of another temper, or composition of mind, also, being connected in that respect with b.u.t.terburs, and a vast company of rough, knotty, half-black or brown, and generally unluminous--flowers I can scarcely call them--and weeds I will not,--creatures, at all events, in nowise to be gathered under the general name 'Composed,' with the stars that crown Chaucer's Alcestis, when she returns to the day from the dead.

But the wilder and stronger blossoms of the Hawk's-eye--again you see I refuse for them the word weed;--and the waste-loving Chicory, which the Venetians call "Sponsa solis," are all to be held in one cla.s.s with the {119} Sunflowers; but dedicate,--the daisy to Alcestis alone; others to Clytia, or the Physician Apollo himself: but I can't follow their mythology yet awhile.

3. Now in these two families you have typically Use opposed to Beauty in _wildness_; it is their wildness which is their virtue;--that the thyme is sweet where it is unthought of, and the daisies red, where the foot despises them: while, in other orders, wildness is their crime,--"Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes, brought it forth wild grapes?" But in all of them you must distinguish between the pure wildness of flowers and their distress. It may not be our duty to tame them; but it must be, to relieve.

4. It chanced, as I was arranging the course of these two chapters, that I had examples given me of distressed and happy wildness, in immediate contrast. The first, I grieve to say, was in a bit of my own brushwood, left uncared-for evidently many a year before it became mine. I had to cut my way into it through a ma.s.s of th.o.r.n.y ruin; black, birds-nest like, entanglement of brittle spray round twisted stems of ill-grown birches strangling each other, and changing half into roots among the rock clefts; knotted stumps of never-blossoming blackthorn, and choked stragglings of holly, all laced and twisted and tethered round with an untouchable, almost unhewable, thatch, a foot thick, of dead bramble and rose, laid over rotten ground through which the water soaked ceaselessly, undermining it into merely unctuous {120} clods and clots, knitted together by mossy sponge. It was all Nature's free doing! she had had her way with it to the uttermost; and clearly needed human help and interference in her business; and yet there was not one plant in the whole ruinous and deathful riot of the place, whose nature was not in itself wholesome and lovely; but all lost for want of discipline.

5. The other piece of wild growth was among the fallen blocks of limestone under Malham Cove. Sheltered by the cliff above from stress of wind, the ash and hazel wood spring there in a fair and perfect freedom, without a diseased bough, or an unwholesome shade. I do not know why mine is all enc.u.mbered with overgrowth, and this so lovely that scarce a branch could be gathered but with injury;--while underneath, the oxalis, and the two smallest geraniums (Lucidum and Herb-Robert) and the mossy saxifrage, and the cross-leaved bed-straw, and the white pansy, wrought themselves into wreaths among the fallen crags, in which every leaf rejoiced, and was at rest.

6. Now between these two states of equally natural growth, the point of difference that forced itself on me (and practically enough, in the work I had in my own wood), was not so much the withering and waste of the one, and the life of the other, as the thorniness and cruelty of the one, and the softness of the other. In Malham Cove, the stones of the brook were softer with moss than any silken pillow--the crowded oxalis leaves yielded to the pressure of the hand, and were not felt--the cloven {121} leaves of the Herb-Robert and orbed cl.u.s.ters of its companion overflowed every rent in the rude crags with living balm; there was scarcely a place left by the tenderness of the happy things, where one might not lay down one's forehead on their warm softness, and sleep. But in the waste and distressed ground, the distress had changed itself to cruelty. The leaves had all perished, and the bending saplings, and the wood of trust;--but the thorns were there, immortal, and the gnarled and sapless roots, and the dusty treacheries of decay.

7. Of which things you will find it good to consider also otherwise than botanically. For all these lower organisms suffer and perish, or are gladdened and flourish, under conditions which are in utter precision symbolical, and in utter fidelity representative, of the conditions which induce adversity and prosperity in the kingdoms of men: and the Eternal Demeter,--Mother, and Judge,--brings forth, as the herb yielding seed, so also the thorn and the thistle, not to herself, but _to thee_.

8. You have read the words of the great Law often enough;--have you ever thought enough of them to know the difference between these two appointed means of Distress? The first, the Thorn, is the type of distress _caused by crime_, changing the soft and breathing leaf into inflexible and wounding stubbornness. The second is the distress appointed to be the means and herald of good,--Thou shalt see the stubborn thistle bursting, into glossy purple, which outredden, all voluptuous garden roses. {122}

9. It is strange that, after much hunting, I cannot find authentic note of the day when Scotland took the thistle for her emblem; and I have no s.p.a.ce (in this chapter at least) for tradition; but, with whatever lightness of construing we may receive the symbol, it is actually the truest that could have been found, for some conditions of the Scottish mind. There is no flower which the Proserpina of our Northern Sicily cherishes more dearly: and scarcely any of us recognize enough the beautiful power of its close-set stars, and rooted radiance of ground leaves; yet the stubbornness and ungraceful rect.i.tude of its stem, and the besetting of its wholesome substance with that fringe of offence, and the forwardness of it, and dominance,--I fear to lacess some of my dearest friends if I went on:--let them rather, with Bailie Jarvie's true conscience,[33] take their Scott from the inner shelf in their heart's library which all true Scotsmen give him, and trace, with the swift reading of memory, the characters of Fergus M'Ivor, Hector M'Intyre, Mause Headrigg, Alison Wilson, Richie {123} Moniplies, and Andrew Fairservice; and then say, if the faults of all these, drawn as they are with a precision of touch like a Corinthian sculptor's of the acanthus leaf, can be found in anything like the same strength in other races, or if so stubbornly folded and starched moni-plies of irritating kindliness, selfish friendliness, lowly conceit, and intolerable fidelity, are native to any other spot of the wild earth of the habitable globe.

10. Will you note also--for this is of extreme interest--that these essential faults are all mean faults;--what we may call ground-growing faults; conditions of semi-education, of hardly-treated homelife, or of coa.r.s.ely-minded and wandering prosperity. How literally may we go back from the living soul symbolized, to the strangely accurate earthly symbol, in the p.r.i.c.kly weed. For if, with its bravery of endurance, and carelessness in choice of home, we find also definite faculty and habit of migration, volant mechanism for choiceless journey, not divinely directed in pilgrimage to known shrines; but carried at the wind's will by a Spirit which listeth _not_--it will go hard but that the plant shall become, if not dreaded, at least despised; and, in its wandering and reckless splendour, disgrace the garden of the sluggard, and possess the inheritance of the prodigal: until even its own nature seems contrary to good, and the invocation of the just man be made to it as the executor of Judgment, "Let thistles grow instead of wheat, and c.o.c.kle instead of barley."

11. Yet to be despised--either for men or flowers--may {124} be no ill-fortune; the real ill-fortune is only to be despicable. These faults of human character, wherever found, observe, belong to it as ill-trained--incomplete; confirm themselves only in the vulgar. There is no base pertinacity, no overweening conceit, in the Black Douglas, or Claverhouse, or Montrose; in these we find the pure Scottish temper, of heroic endurance and royal pride; but, when, in the pay, and not deceived, but purchased, idolatry of Mammon, the Scottish persistence and pride become knit and vested in the spleuchan, and your stiff Covenanter makes his covenant with Death, and your Old Mortality deciphers only the senseless legends of the eternal gravestone,--you get your weed, earth-grown, in bitter verity, and earth-devastating, in bitter strength.

12. I have told you, elsewhere, we are always first to study national character in the highest and purest examples. But if our knowledge is to be complete, we have to study also the special diseases of national character.

And in exact opposition to the most solemn virtue of Scotland, the domestic truth and tenderness breathed in all Scottish song, you have this special disease and mortal cancer, this woody-fibriness, literally, of temper and thought: the consummation of which into pure lignite, or rather black Devil's charcoal--the sap of the birks of Aberfeldy become cinder, and the blessed juices of them, deadly gas,--you may know in its pure blackness best in the work of the greatest of these ground-growing Scotchmen, Adam Smith. {125}

13. No man of like capacity, I believe, born of any other nation, could have deliberately, and with no momentary shadow of suspicion or question, formalized the spinous and monstrous fallacy that human commerce and policy are _naturally_ founded on the desire of every man to possess his neighbour's goods.

_This_ is the 'release unto us Barabbas,' with a witness; and the deliberate systematization of that cry, and choice, for perpetual repet.i.tion and fulfilment in Christian statesmanship, has been, with the strange precision of natural symbolism and retribution, signed, (as of old, by strewing of ashes on Kidron,) by strewing of ashes on the brooks of Scotland; waters once of life, health, music, and divine tradition; but to whose festering sc.u.m you may now set fire with a candle; and of which, round the once excelling palace of Scotland, modern sanitary science is now helplessly contending with the poisonous exhalations.

14. I gave this chapter its heading, because I had it in my mind to work out the meaning of the fable in the ninth chapter of Judges, from what I had seen on that th.o.r.n.y ground of mine, where the bramble was king over all the trees of the wood. But the thoughts are gone from me now; and as I re-read the chapter of Judges,--now, except in my memory, unread, as it chances, for many a year,--the sadness of that story of Gideon fastens on me, and silences me. _This_ the end of his angel visions, and dream-led victories, the slaughter of all his {126} sons but this youngest,[34]--and he never again heard of in Israel!

You Scottish children of the Rock, taught through all your once pastoral and n.o.ble lives by many a sweet miracle of dew on fleece and ground,--once servants of mighty kings, and keepers of sacred covenant; have you indeed dealt truly with your warrior kings, and prophet saints, or are these ruins of their homes, and shrines, dark with the fire that fell from the curse of Jerubbael?

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CHAPTER VIII.

THE STEM.

1. As I read over again, with a fresh mind, the last chapter, I am struck by the opposition of states which seem best to fit a weed for a weed's work,--stubbornness, namely, and flaccidity. On the one hand, a sternness and a coa.r.s.eness of structure which changes its stem into a stake, and its leaf into a spine; on the other, an utter flaccidity and ventosity of structure, which changes its stem into a riband, and its leaf into a bubble. And before we go farther--for we are not yet at the end of our study of these obnoxious things--we had better complete an examination of the parts of a plant in general, by ascertaining what a Stem proper is; and what makes it stiffer, or hollower, than we like it;--how, to wit, the gracious and generous strength of ash differs from the spinous obstinacy of blackthorn,--and how the geometric and enduring hollowness of a stalk of wheat differs from the soft fulness of that of a mushroom. To which end, I will take up a piece of study, not of black, but white, thorn, written last spring. {128}

2. I suppose there is no question but that all nice people like hawthorn blossom.

I want, if I can, to find out to-day, 25th May, 1875, what it is we like it so much for: holding these two branches of it in my hand--one full out, the other in youth. This full one is a mere ma.s.s of symmetrically balanced--snow, one was going vaguely to write, in the first impulse. But it is nothing of the sort. White,--yes, in a high degree; and pure, totally; but not at all dazzling in the white, nor pure in an insultingly rivalless manner, as snow would be; yet pure somehow, certainly; and white, absolutely, in spite of what might be thought failure,--imperfection--nay, even distress and loss in it. For every little rose of it has a green darkness in the centre--not even a pretty green, but a faded, yellowish, glutinous, unaccomplished green; and round that, all over the surface of the blossom, whose sh.e.l.l-like petals are themselves deep sunk, with grey shadows in the hollows of them--all above this already subdued brightness, are strewn the dark points of the dead stamens--manifest more and more, the longer one looks, as a kind of grey sand, sprinkled without sparing over what looked at first unspotted light. And in all the ways of it the lovely thing is more like the spring frock of some prudent little maid of fourteen, than a flower;--frock with some little spotty pattern on it to keep it from showing an unintended and inadvertent spot,--if Fate should ever inflict such a thing! Undeveloped, thinks Mr. Darwin,--the poor {129} short-coming, ill-blanched thorn blossom--going to be a Rose, some day soon; and, what next?--who knows?--perhaps a Paeony!

3. Then this next branch, in dawn and delight of youth, set with opening cl.u.s.ters of yet numerable blossom, four, and five, and seven, edged, and islanded, and ended, by the sharp leaves of freshest green, deepened under the flowers, and studded round with bosses, better than pearl beads of St.

Agnes' rosary,--folded, over and over, with the edges of their little leaves pouting, as the very softest waves do on flat sand where one meets another; then opening just enough to show the violet colour within--which yet isn't violet colour, nor even "meno che le rose," but a different colour from every other lilac that one ever saw;--faint and faded even before it sees light, as the filmy cup opens over the depth of it, then broken into purple motes of tired bloom, fading into darkness, as the cup extends into the perfect rose.

This, with all its sweet change that one would so fain stay, and soft effulgence of bud into softly falling flower, one has watched--how often; but always with the feeling that the blossoms are thrown over the green depth like white clouds--never with any idea of so much as asking what holds the cloud there. Have each of the innumerable blossoms a separate stalk? and, if so, how is it that one never thinks of the stalk, as one does with currants?

4. Turn the side of the branch to you;--Nature never meant you to see it so; but now it is all stalk below, and {130} stamens above,--the petals nothing, the stalks all tiny trees, always dividing their branches mainly into three--one in the centre short, and the two lateral, long, with an intermediate extremely long one, if needed, to fill a gap, so contriving that the flowers shall all be nearly at the same level, or at least surface of ball, like a guelder rose. But the cunning with which the tree conceals its structure till the blossom is fallen, and then--for a little while, we had best look no more at it, for it is all like grape-stalks with no grapes.

These, whether carrying hawthorn blossom and haw, or grape blossom and grape, or peach blossom and peach, you will simply call the 'stalk,'

whether of flower or fruit. A 'stalk' is essentially round, like a pillar; and has, for the most part, the power of first developing, and then shaking off, flower and fruit from its extremities. You can pull the peach from its stalk, the cherry, the grape. Always at some time of its existence, the flower-stalk lets fall something of what it sustained, petal or seed.

In late Latin it is called 'petiolus,' the little foot; because the expanding piece that holds the grape, or olive, is a little like an animal's foot. Modern botanists have misapplied the word to the _leaf_-stalk, which has no resemblance to a foot at all. We must keep the word to its proper meaning, and, when we want to write Latin, call it 'petiolus;' when we want to write English, call it 'stalk,' meaning always fruit or flower stalk. {131}

I cannot find when the word 'stalk' first appears in English:--its derivation will be given presently.

5. Gather next a hawthorn leaf. That also has a stalk; but you can't shake the leaf off it. It, and the leaf, are essentially one; for the sustaining fibre runs up into every ripple or jag of the leaf's edge: and its section is different from that of the flower-stalk; it is no more round, but has an upper and under surface, quite different from each other. It will be better, however, to take a larger leaf to examine this structure in.

Cabbage, cauliflower, or rhubarb, would any of them be good, but don't grow wild in the luxuriance I want. So, if you please, we will take a leaf of burdock, (Arctium Lappa,) the princ.i.p.al business of that plant being clearly to grow leaves wherewith to adorn fore-grounds.[35]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 13.]

6. The outline of it in Sowerby is not an intelligent one, and I have not time to draw it but in the rudest way myself; Fig. 13, _a_; with perspectives of the elementary form below, _b_, _c_, and d. By help of which, if you will construct a burdock leaf in paper, my rude outline (_a_) may tell the rest of what I want you to see.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 14.]

Take a sheet of stout note paper, Fig. 14, A, double it sharply down the centre, by the dotted line, then give it the two cuts at _a_ and _b_, and double those pieces sharply back, as at B; then, opening them again, cut the whole {132} into the form C; and then, pulling up the corners _c d_, st.i.tch them together with a loose thread so that the points _c_ and _d_ shall be within half an inch of each other; and you will have a kind of triangular scoop, or shovel, with a stem, by which you can sufficiently hold it, D.

7. And from this easily constructed and tenable model, you may learn at once these following main facts about all leaves. {133}

[I.] That they are not flat, but, however slightly, always hollowed into craters, or raised into hills, in one or another direction; so that any drawable outline of them does not in the least represent the real extent of their surfaces; and until you know how to draw a cup, or a mountain, rightly, you have no chance of drawing a leaf. My simple artist readers of long ago, when I told them to draw leaves, thought they could do them by the boughfull, whenever they liked. Alas, except by old William Hunt, and Burne Jones, I've not seen a leaf painted, since those burdocks of Turner's; far less sculptured--though one would think at first that was easier! Of which we shall have talk elsewhere; here I must go on to note fact number two, concerning leaves.

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8. [II.] The strength of their supporting stem consists not merely in the gathering together of all the fibres, but in gathering them essentially into the profile of the letter V, which you will see your doubled paper stem has; and of which you can feel the strength and use, in your hand, as you hold it. Gather a common plantain leaf, and look at the way it puts its round ribs together at the base, and you will understand the matter at once. The arrangement is modified and disguised in every possible way, according to the leaf's need: in the aspen, the leaf-stalk becomes an absolute vertical plank; and in the large trees is often almost rounded into the likeness of a fruit-stalk;--but, in all,[36] the essential structure is this doubled one; and in all, it opens at the place where the leaf joins the main stem, into a kind of cup, which holds next year's bud in the hollow of it.

9. Now there would be no inconvenience in your simply getting into the habit of calling the round petiol of the fruit the 'stalk,' and the contracted channel of the leaf, 'leaf-stalk.' But this way of naming them would not enforce, nor fasten in your mind, the difference between the two, so well as if you have an entirely different name for the leaf-stalk. Which is the more desirable, because the limiting character of the leaf, botanically, is--(I only learned this from my botanical friend the other day, just {135} in the very moment I wanted it,)--that it holds the bud of the new stem in its own hollow, but cannot itself grow in the hollow of anything else;--or, in botanical language, leaves are never axillary,--don't grow in armpits, but are themselves armpits; hollows, that is to say, where they spring from the main stem.

10. Now there is already a received and useful botanical word, 'cyme'

(which we shall want in a little while.) derived from the Greek [Greek: k.u.ma], a swelling or rising wave, and used to express a swelling cl.u.s.ter of foamy blossom. Connected with that word, but in a sort the reverse of it, you have the Greek '[Greek: k.u.mbe],' the _hollow_ of a cup, or bowl; whence [Greek: k.u.mbalou], a cymbal,--that is to say, a musical instrument owing its tone to its _hollowness_. These words become in Latin, cymba, and cymbalum; and I think you will find it entirely convenient and advantageous to call the leaf-stalk distinctively the 'cymba,' retaining the mingled idea of cup and boat, with respect at least to the part of it that holds the bud; and understanding that it gathers itself into a V-shaped, or even narrowly vertical, section, as a boat narrows to its bow, for strength to sustain the leaf.

With this word you may learn the Virgilian line, that shows the final use of iron--or iron-darkened--ships:

"Et ferruginea subvectat corpora cymba."

The "subvectat corpora" will serve to remind you of the office of the leafy cymba in carrying the bud; and make {136} you thankful that the said leafy vase is not of iron; and is a ship of Life instead of Death.

11. Already, not once, nor twice, I have had to use the word 'stem,' of the main round branch from which both stalk and cymba spring. This word you had better keep for all growing, or advancing, shoots of trees, whether from the ground, or from central trunks and branches. I regret that the words multiply on us; but each that I permit myself to use has its own proper thought or idea to express, as you will presently perceive; so that true knowledge multiplies with true words.

12. The 'stem,' you are to say, then, when you mean the _advancing_ shoot,--which lengthens annually, while a stalk ends every year in a blossom, and a cymba in a leaf. A stem is essentially round,[37] square, or regularly polygonal; though, as a cymba may become exceptionally round, a stem may become exceptionally flat, or even mimic the shape of a leaf.

Indeed I should have liked to write "a stem is essentially round, and constructively, on occasion, square,"--but it would have been too grand.

The fact is, however, that a stem is really a roundly minded thing, throwing off its branches in circles as a trundled mop throws off drops, though it can always order the branches to fly off in what order it likes,--two at a time, opposite to each other; or three, or five, in a spiral coil; or one here and one there, on this side and that; {137} but it is always twisting, in its own inner mind and force; hence it is especially proper to use the word 'stem' of it--[Greek: stemma], a twined wreath; properly, twined round a staff, or sceptre: therefore, learn at once by heart these lines in the opening Iliad:

"[Greek: Stemmat' echon en chersin hekebolou Apollonos,]

[Greek: Chruseoi ana skeptroi;]"