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PROSERPINA.
STUDIES OF WAYSIDE FLOWERS,
WHILE THE AIR WAS YET PURE
_AMONG THE ALPS, AND IN THE SCOTLAND AND
ENGLAND WHICH MY FATHER KNEW_.
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BY
JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D.,
HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRISTCHURCH, AND HONORARY FELLOW OF CORPUS
CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD.
VOL. II.
1888.
* * * * *
CHAPTER I.
VIOLA.
1. Although I have not been able in the preceding volume to complete, in
any wise as I desired, the account of the several parts and actions of
plants in general, I will not delay any longer our entrance on the
examination of particular kinds, though here and there I must interrupt
such special study by recurring to general principles, or points of wider
interest. But the scope of such larger inquiry will be best seen, and the
use of it best felt, by entering now on specific study.
I begin with the Violet, because the arrangement of the group to which it
belongs--Cytherides--is more arbitrary than that of the rest, and calls for
some immediate explanation.
2. I fear that my readers may expect me to write something very pretty for
them about violets: but my time for writing prettily is long past; and it
requires some watching over myself, I find, to keep me even from writing
querulously. For while, the older I grow, very thankfully I recognize more
and more the number of pleasures granted to human eyes in this fair world,
I recognize also an increasing sensitiveness in my temper to anything that
interferes with them; and a grievous readiness to find fault--always of
course submissively, but very articulately--with whatever Nature seems to
me not to have managed to the best of her power;--as, for extreme instance,
her late arrangements of frost this spring, destroying all the beauty of
the wood sorrels; nor am I less inclined, looking to her as the greatest of
sculptors and painters, to ask, every time I see a narcissus, why it should
be wrapped up in brown paper; and every time I see a violet, what it wants
with a spur?
3. What _any_ flower wants with a spur, is indeed the simplest and hitherto
to me unanswerablest form of the question; nevertheless, when blossoms grow
in spires, and are crowded together, and have to grow partly downwards, in
order to win their share of light and breeze, one can see some reason for
the effort of the petals to expand upwards and backwards also. But that a
violet, who has her little stalk to herself, and might grow straight up, if
she pleased, should be pleased to do nothing of the sort, but quite
gratuitously bend her stalk down at the top, and fasten herself to it by
her waist, as it were,--this is so much more like a girl of the period's
fancy than a violet's, that I never gather one separately but with renewed
astonishment at it.
4. One reason indeed there is, which I never thought of until this moment!
a piece of stupidity which I can only pardon myself in, because, as it has
chanced, I have studied violets most in gardens, not in their wild
haunts,--partly thinking their Athenian honour was as a garden flower; and
partly being always fed away from them, among the hills, by flowers which I
could see nowhere else. With all excuse I can furbish up, however, it is
shameful that the truth of the matter never struck me before, or at least
this bit of the truth--as follows.
5. The Greeks, and Milton, alike speak of violets as growing in meadows (or
dales). But the Greeks did so because they could not fancy any delight
except in meadows; and Milton, because he wanted a rhyme to
nightingale--and, after all, was London bred. But Viola's beloved knew
where violets grew in Illyria,--and grow everywhere else also, when they
can,--on a _bank_, facing the south.
Just as distinctly as the daisy and buttercup are _meadow_ flowers, the
violet is a _bank_ flower, and would fain grow always on a steep slope,
towards the sun. And it is so poised on its stem that it shows, when
growing on a slope, the full space and opening of its flower,--not at all,
in any strain of modesty, hiding _itself_, though it may easily be, by
grass or mossy stone, 'half hidden,'--but, to the full, showing itself, and
intending to be lovely and luminous, as fragrant, to the uttermost of its
soft power.
Nor merely in its oblique setting on the stalk, but in the reversion of its
two upper petals, the flower shows this purpose of being fully seen. (For a
flower that _does_ hide itself, take a lily of the valley, or the bell of a
grape hyacinth, or a cyclamen.) But respecting this matter of
petal-reversion, we must now farther state two or three general principles.
6. A perfect or pure flower, as a rose, oxalis, or campanula, is always
composed of an unbroken whorl, or corolla, in the form of a disk, cup,
bell, or, if it draw together again at the lips, a narrow-necked vase. This
cup, bell, or vase, is divided into similar petals, (or segments, which are
petals carefully joined,) varying in number from three to eight, and
enclosed by a calyx whose sepals are symmetrical also.
An imperfect, or, as I am inclined rather to call it, an 'injured' flower,
is one in which some of the petals have inferior office and position, and
are either degraded, for the benefit of others, or expanded and honoured at
the cost of others.
Of this process, the first and simplest condition is the reversal of the
upper petals and elongation of the lower ones, in blossoms set on the side
of a clustered stalk. When the change is simply and directly dependent on
their position in the cluster, as in Aurora Regina,[1] modifying every bell
just in proportion as it declines from the perfected central one, some of
the loveliest groups of form are produced which can be seen in any inferior
organism: but when the irregularity becomes fixed, and the flower is always
to the same extent distorted, whatever its position in the cluster, the
plant is to be rightly thought of as reduced to a lower rank in creation.
7. It is to be observed, also, that these inferior forms of flower have
always the appearance of being produced by some kind of mischief--blight,
bite, or ill-breeding; they never suggest the idea of improving themselves,
now, into anything better; one is only afraid of their tearing or puffing
themselves into something worse. Nay, even the quite natural and simple
conditions of inferior vegetable do not in the least suggest, to the
unbitten or unblighted human intellect, the notion of development into
anything other than their like: one does not expect a mushroom to translate
itself into a pineapple, nor a betony to moralize itself into a lily, nor a
snapdragon to soften himself into a lilac.
8. It is very possible, indeed, that the recent phrenzy for the
investigation of digestive and reproductive operations in plants may by
this time have furnished the microscopic malice of botanists with
providentially disgusting reasons, or demoniacally nasty necessities, for
every possible spur, spike, jag, sting, rent, blotch, flaw, freckle, filth,
or venom, which can be detected in the construction, or distilled from the
dissolution, of vegetable organism. But with these obscene processes and
prurient apparitions the gentle and happy scholar of flowers has nothing
whatever to do. I am amazed and saddened, more than I can care to say, by
finding how much that is abominable may be discovered by an ill-taught
curiosity, in the purest things that earth is allowed to produce for
us;--perhaps if we were less reprobate in our own ways, the grass which is
our type might conduct itself better, even though _it_ has no hope but of
being cast into the oven; in the meantime, healthy human eyes and thoughts
are to be set on the lovely laws of its growth and habitation, and not on
the mean mysteries of its birth.
9. I relieve, therefore, our presently inquiring souls from any farther
care as to the reason for a violet's spur,--or for the extremely ugly
arrangements of its stamens and style, invisible unless by vexatious and
vicious peeping. You are to think of a violet only in its green leaves, and
purple or golden petals;--you are to know the varieties of form in both,
proper to common species; and in what kind of places they all most fondly
live, and most deeply glow.
"And the recreation of the minde which is taken heereby cannot be but verie
good and honest, for they admonish and stir up a man to that which is
comely and honest. For flowers, through their beautie, varietie of colour,
and exquisite forme, do bring to a liberall and gentle manly minde the
remembrance of honestie, comeliness, and all kinds of vertues. For it would
be an unseemely and filthie thing, as a certain wise man saith, for him
that doth looke upon and handle faire and beautiful things, and who
frequenteth and is conversant in faire and beautiful places, to have his
mind not faire, but filthie and deformed."
10. Thus Gerarde, in the close of his introductory notice of the
violet,--speaking of things, (honesty, comeliness, and the like,) scarcely
now recognized as desirable in the realm of England; but having previously
observed that violets are useful for the making of garlands for the head,
and posies to smell to;--in which last function I observe they are still
pleasing to the British public: and I found the children here, only the
other day, munching a confection of candied violet leaves. What pleasure
the flower can still give us, uncandied, and unbound, but in its own place
and life, I will try to trace through some of its constant laws.
11. And first, let us be clear that the native colour of the violet _is_
violet; and that the white and yellow kinds, though pretty in their place
and way, are not to be thought of in generally meditating the flower's
quality or power. A white violet is to black ones what a black man is to
white ones; and the yellow varieties are, I believe, properly pansies, and
belong also to wild districts for the most part; but the true violet, which
I have just now called 'black,' with Gerarde, "the blacke or purple violet,
hath a great prerogative above others," and all the nobler species of the
pansy itself are of full purple, inclining, however, in the ordinary wild
violet to blue. In the 'Laws of Fesole,' chap, vii., Sec.Sec. 20, 21, I have made
this dark pansy the representative of purple pure; the viola odorata, of
the link between that full purple and blue; and the heath-blossom of the
link between that full purple and red. The reader will do well, as much as
may be possible to him, to associate his study of botany, as indeed all
other studies of visible things, with that of painting: but he must
remember that he cannot know what violet colour really is, unless he watch
the flower in its _early_ growth. It becomes dim in age, and dark when it
is gathered--at least, when it is tied in bunches;--but I am under the
impression that the colour actually deadens also,--at all events, no other
single flower of the same quiet colour lights up the ground near it as a
violet will. The bright hounds-tongue looks merely like a spot of bright
paint; but a young violet glows like painted glass.
12. Which, when you have once well noticed, the two lines of Milton and
Shakspeare which seem opposed, will both become clear to you. The said
lines are dragged from hand to hand along their pages of pilfered
quotations by the hack botanists,--who probably never saw _them_, nor
anything else, _in_ Shakspeare or Milton in their lives,--till even in
reading them where they rightly come, you can scarcely recover their fresh
meaning: but none of the botanists ever think of asking why Perdita calls
the violet 'dim,' and Milton 'glowing.'
Perdita, indeed, calls it dim, at that moment, in thinking of her own love,
and the hidden passion of it, unspeakable; nor is Milton without some
purpose of using it as an emblem of love, mourning,--but, in both cases,
the subdued and quiet hue of the flower as an actual tint of colour, and
the strange force and life of it as a part of light, are felt to their
uttermost.
And observe, also, that both, of the poets contrast the violet, in its
softness, with the intense marking of the pansy. Milton makes the
opposition directly---
"the pansy, freaked with jet,
The glowing violet."
Shakspeare shows yet stronger sense of the difference, in the "purple with
Love's wound" of the pansy, while the violet is sweet with Love's hidden
life, and sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes.
Whereupon, we may perhaps consider with ourselves a little, what the
difference _is_ between a violet and a pansy?
13. Is, I say, and was, and is to come,--in spite of florists, who try to
make pansies round, instead of pentagonal; and of the wise classifying
people, who say that violets and pansies are the same thing--and that
neither of them are of much interest! As, for instance, Dr. Lindley in his
'Ladies' Botany.'
"Violets--sweet Violets, and Pansies, or Heartsease, represent a small
family, with the structure of which you should be familiar; more, however,
for the sake of its singularity than for its extent or importance, for the
family is a very small one, and there are but few species belonging to it
in which much interest is taken. As the parts of the Heartsease are larger
than those of the Violet, let us select the former in preference for the
subject of our study." Whereupon we plunge instantly into the usual account
of things with horns and tails. "The stamens are five in number--two of
them, which are in front of the others, are hidden within the horn of the
front petal," etc., etc., etc. (Note in passing, by the '_horn of the
front_' petal he means the '_spur of the bottom_' one, which indeed does
stand in front of the rest,--but if therefore _it_ is to be called the
_front_ petal--which is the back one?) You may find in the next paragraph
description of a "singular conformation," and the interesting conclusion
that "no one has yet discovered for what purpose this singular conformation
was provided." But you will not, in the entire article, find the least
attempt to tell you the difference between a violet and a pansy!--except in
one statement--and _that_ false! "The sweet violet will have no rival among
flowers, if we merely seek for delicate fragrance; but her sister, the
heartsease, who is destitute of all sweetness, far surpasses her in rich
dresses and _gaudy_!!! colours." The heartsease is not without sweetness.
There are sweet pansies scented, and dog pansies unscented--as there are
sweet violets scented, and dog violets unscented. What is the real
difference?
14. I turn to another scientific gentleman--_more_ scientific in form
indeed, Mr. Grindon,--and find, for another interesting phenomenon in the
violet, that it sometimes produces flowers without any petals! and in the
pansy, that "the flowers turn towards the sun, and when many are open at
once, present a droll appearance, looking like a number of faces all on the
'qui vive.'" But nothing of the difference between them, except something
about 'stipules,' of which "it is important to observe that the leaves
should be taken from the middle of the stem--those above and below being
variable."
I observe, however, that Mr. Grindon _has_ arranged his violets under the
letter A, and his pansies under the letter B, and that something may be
really made out of him, with an hour or two's work. I am content, however,
at present, with his simplifying assurance that of violet and pansy
together, "six species grow wild in Britain--or, as some believe, only
four--while the analysts run the number up to fifteen."
15. Next I try Loudon's Cyclopaedia, which, through all its 700 pages, is
equally silent on the business; and next, Mr. Baxter's 'British Flowering
Plants,' in the index of which I find neither Pansy nor Heartsease, and
only the 'Calathian' Violet, (where on earth is Calathia?) which proves, on
turning it up, to be a Gentian.
16. At last, I take my Figuier, (but what should I do if I only knew
English?) and find this much of clue to the matter:--
"Qu'est ce que c'est que la Pensee? Cette jolie plante appartient aussi ou
genre Viola, mais a un section de ce genre. En effet, dans les Pensees, les
petales superieurs et lateraux sont diriges en haut, l'inferieur seul est
dirige en bas: et de plus, le stigmate est urceole, globuleux."
And farther, this general description of the whole violet tribe, which I
translate, that we may have its full value:--
"The violet is a plant without a stem (tige),--(see vol. i., p.
154,)--whose height does not surpass one or two decimetres. Its leaves,
radical, or carried on stolons, (vol. i., p. 158,) are sharp, or oval,
crenulate, or heart-shape. Its stipules are oval-acuminate, or lanceolate.
Its flowers, of sweet scent, of a dark violet or a reddish blue, are
carried each on a slender peduncle, which bends down at the summit. Such
is, for the botanist, the Violet, of which the poets would give assuredly
another description."
17. Perhaps; or even the painters! or even an ordinary unbotanical human
creature! I must set about my business, at any rate, in my own way, now, as
I best can, looking first at things themselves, and then putting this and
that together, out of these botanical persons, which they can't put
together out of themselves. And first, I go down into my kitchen garden,
where the path to the lake has a border of pansies on both sides all the
way down, with clusters of narcissus behind them. And pulling up a handful
of pansies by the roots, I find them "without stems," indeed, if a stem
means a wooden thing; but I should say, for a low-growing flower, quiet
lankily and disagreeably stalky! And, thinking over what I remember about
wild pansies, I find an impression on my mind of their being rather more
stalky, always, than is quite graceful; and, for all their fine flowers,
having rather a weedy and littery look, and getting into places where they
have no business. See, again, vol. i., chap. vi., Sec. 5.
18. And now, going up into my flower and fruit garden, I find (June 2nd,
1881, half-past six, morning.) among the wild saxifrages, which are allowed
to grow wherever they like, and the rock strawberries, and Francescas,
which are coaxed to grow wherever there is a bit of rough ground for them,
a bunch or two of pale pansies, or violets, I don't know well which, by the
flower; but the entire company of them has a ragged, jagged, unpurpose-like
look; extremely,--I should say,--demoralizing to all the little plants in
their neighbourhood: and on gathering a flower, I find it is a nasty big
thing, all of a feeble blue, and with two things like horns, or thorns,
sticking out where its ears would be, if the pansy's frequently monkey face
were underneath them. Which I find to be two of the leaves of its calyx
'out of place,' and, at all events, for their part, therefore, weedy, and
insolent.
19. I perceive, farther, that this disorderly flower is lifted on a lanky,
awkward, springless, and yet stiff flower-stalk; which is not round, as a
flower-stalk ought to be, (vol. i., p. 155,) but obstinately square, and
fluted, with projecting edges, like a pillar run thin out of an
iron-foundry for a cheap railway station. I perceive also that it has set
on it, just before turning down to carry the flower, two little jaggy and
indefinable leaves,--their colour a little more violet than the blossom.
These, and such undeveloping leaves, wherever they occur, are called
'bracts' by botanists, a good word, from the Latin 'bractea,' meaning a
piece of metal plate, so thin as to crackle. They seem always a little
stiff, like bad parchment,--born to come to nothing--a sort of
infinitesimal fairy-lawyer's deed. They ought to have been in my index at
p. 255, under the head of leaves, and are frequent in flower
structure,--never, as far as one can see, of the smallest use. They are
constant, however, in the flower-stalk of the whole violet tribe.
20. I perceive, farther, that this lanky flower-stalk, bending a little in
a crabbed, broken way, like an obstinate person tired, pushes itself up out
of a still more stubborn, nondescript, hollow angular, dogseared gas-pipe
of a stalk, with a section something like this,
[Illustration]
but no bigger than
[Illustration]
with a quantity of ill-made and ill-hemmed leaves on it, of no describable
leaf-cloth or texture,--not cressic, (though the thing does altogether look
a good deal like a quite uneatable old watercress); not salvian, for
there's no look of warmth or comfort in them; not cauline, for there's no
juice in them; not dryad, for there's no strength in them, nor apparent
use: they seem only there, as far as I can make out, to spoil the flower,
and take the good out of my garden bed. Nobody in the world could draw
them, they are so mixed up together, and crumpled and hacked about, as if
some ill-natured child had snipped them with blunt scissors, and an
ill-natured cow chewed them a little afterwards and left them, proved for
too tough or too bitter.
21. Having now sufficiently observed, it seems to me, this incongruous
plant, I proceed to ask myself, over it, M. Figuier's question, 'Qu'est-ce
c'est qu'un Pensee?' Is this a violet--or a pansy--or a bad imitation of
both?
Whereupon I try if it has any scent: and to my much surprise, find it has a
full and soft one--which I suppose is what my gardener keeps it for!
According to Dr. Lindley, then, it must be a violet! But according to M.
Figuier,--let me see, do its middle petals bend up, or down?
I think I'll go and ask the gardener what _he_ calls it.
22. My gardener, on appeal to him, tells me it is the 'Viola Cornuta,' but
that he does not know himself if it is violet or pansy. I take my Loudon
again, and find there were fifty-three species of violets, known in his
days, of which, as it chances, Cornuta is exactly the last.
'Horned violet': I said the green things were _like_ horns!--but what is
one to say of, or to do to, scientific people, who first call the spur of
the violet's petal, horn, and then its calyx points, horns, and never
define a 'horn' all the while!
Viola Cornuta, however, let it be; for the name does mean _some_thing, and
is not false Latin. But whether violet or pansy, I must look farther to
find out.
23. I take the Flora Danica, in which I at least am sure of finding
whatever is done at all, done as well as honesty and care can; and look
what species of violets it gives.
Nine, in the first ten volumes of it; four in their modern sequel (that I
know of,--I have had no time to examine the last issues). Namely, in
alphabetical order, with their present Latin, or tentative Latin, names;
and in plain English, the senses intended by the hapless scientific people,
in such their tentative Latin:--
(1) Viola Arvensis. Field (Violet) No. 1748
(2) " Biflora. Two-flowered 46
(3) " Canina. Dog 1453
(3b) " Canina. Var. Multicaulus 2646
(many-stemmed), a very
singular sort of violet--if it
were so! Its real difference
from our dog-violet is in
being pale blue, and having a
golden centre
(4) " Hirta. Hairy 618
(5) " Mirabilis. Marvellous 1045
(6) " Montana. Mountain 1329
(7) " Odorata. Odorous 309
(8) " Palustris. Marshy 83
(9) " Tricolor. Three-coloured 623
(9B) " Tricolor. Var. Arenaria, Sandy 2647
Three-coloured
(10) " Elatior. Taller 68
(11) " Epipsila. (Heaven knows what: it is 2405
Greek, not Latin, and looks as
if it meant something between
a bishop and a short letter e)
I next run down this list, noting what names we can keep, and what we
can't; and what aren't worth keeping, if we could: passing over the
varieties, however, for the present, wholly.
(1) Arvensis. Field-violet. Good.
(2) Biflora. A good epithet, but in false Latin. It is to be our Viola
aurea, golden pansy.
(3) Canina. Dog. Not pretty, but intelligible, and by common use now
classical. Must stay.
(4) Hirta. Late Latin slang for hirsuta, and always used of nasty places or
nasty people; it shall not stay. The species shall be our Viola
Seclusa,--Monk's violet--meaning the kind of monk who leads a rough life
like Elijah's, or the Baptist's, or Esau's--in another kind. This violet is
one of the loveliest that grows.
(5) Mirabilis. Stays so; marvellous enough, truly: not more so than all
violets; but I am very glad to hear of scientific people capable of
admiring anything.
(6) Montana. Stays so.
(7) Odorata. Not distinctive;--nearly classical, however. It is to be our
Viola Regina, else I should not have altered it.
(8) Palustris. Stays so.
(9) Tricolor. True, but intolerable. The flower is the queen of the true
pansies: to be our Viola Psyche.
(10) Elatior. Only a variety of our already accepted Cornuta.
(11) The last is, I believe, also only a variety of Palustris. Its leaves,
I am informed in the text, are either "pubescent-reticulate-venose-
subreniform," or "lato-cordate-repando-crenate;" and its stipules are
"ovate-acuminate-fimbrio-denticulate." I do not wish to pursue the inquiry
farther.
24. These ten species will include, noting here and there a local variety,
all the forms which are familiar to us in Northern Europe, except only
two;--these, as it singularly chances, being the Viola Alpium, noblest of
all the wild pansies in the world, so far as I have seen or heard of
them,--of which, consequently, I find no picture, nor notice, in any
botanical work whatsoever; and the other, the rock-violet of our own
Yorkshire hills.
We have therefore, ourselves, finally then, twelve following species to
study. I give them now all in their accepted names and proper order,--the
reasons for occasional difference between the Latin and English name will
be presently given.
(1) Viola Regina. Queen violet.
(2) " Psyche. Ophelia's pansy.
(3) " Alpium. Freneli's pansy.
(4) " Aurea. Golden violet.
(5) " Montana. Mountain Violet.
(6) " Mirabilis. Marvellous violet.
(7) " Arvensis. Field violet.
(8) " Palustris. Marsh violet.
(9) " Seclusa. Monk's violet.
(10) " Canina. Dog violet.
(11) " Cornuta. Cow violet.
(12) " Rupestris. Crag violet.
25. We will try, presently, what is to be found out of useful, or pretty,
concerning all these twelve violets; but must first find out how we are to
know which are violets indeed, and which, pansies.
Yesterday, after finishing my list, I went out again to examine Viola
Cornuta a little closer, and pulled up a full grip of it by the roots, and
put it in water in a wash-hand basin, which it filled like a truss of green
hay.
Pulling out two or three separate plants, I find each to consist mainly of
a jointed stalk of a kind I have not yet described,--roughly, some two feet
long altogether; (accurately, one 1 ft. 101/2 in.; another, 1 ft. 10 in.;
another, 1 ft. 9 in.--but all these measures taken without straightening,
and therefore about an inch short of the truth), and divided into seven or
eight lengths by clumsy joints where the mangled leafage is knotted on it;
but broken a little out of the way at each joint, like a rheumatic elbow
that won't come straight, or bend farther; and--which is the most curious
point of all in it--it is thickest in the middle, like a viper, and gets
quite thin to the root and thin towards the flower; also the lengths
between the joints are longest in the middle: here I give them in inches,
from the root upwards, in a stalk taken at random.
1st (nearest root) 03/4
2nd 03/4
3rd 11/2
4th 13/4
5th 3
6th 4
7th 31/4
8th 3
9th 21/4
10th 11/2
1 ft. 93/4 in.
But the thickness of the joints and length of terminal flower stalk bring
the total to two feet and about an inch over. I dare not pull it straight,
or should break it, but it overlaps my two-foot rule considerably, and
there are two inches besides of root, which are merely underground stem,
very thin and wretched, as the rest of it is merely root above ground, very
thick and bloated. (I begin actually to be a little awed at it, as I should
be by a green snake--only the snake would be prettier.) The flowers also, I
perceive, have not their two horns regularly set _in_, but the five spiky
calyx-ends stick out between the petals--sometimes three, sometimes four,
it may be all five up and down--and produce variously fanged or forked
effects, feebly ophidian or diabolic. On the whole, a plant entirely
mismanaging itself,--reprehensible and awkward, with taints of worse than
awkwardness; and clearly, no true 'species,' but only a link.[2] And it
really is, as you will find presently, a link in two directions; it is half
violet, half pansy, a 'cur' among the Dogs, and a thoughtless thing among
the thoughtful. And being so, it is also a link between the entire violet
tribe and the Runners--pease, strawberries, and the like, whose glory is in
their speed; but a violet has no business whatever to run anywhere, being
appointed to stay where it was born, in extremely contented (if not
secluded) places. "Half-hidden from the eye?"--no; but desiring attention,
or extension, or corpulence, or connection with anybody else's family,
still less.
[Illustration: FIG. II.]
26. And if, at the time you read this, you can run out and gather a _true_
violet, and its leaf, you will find that the flower grows from the very
ground, out of a cluster of heart-shaped leaves, becoming here a little
rounder, there a little sharper, but on the whole heart-shaped, and that is
the proper and essential form of the violet leaf. You will find also that
the flower has five petals; and being held down by the bent stalk, two of
them bend back and up, as if resisting it; two expand at the sides; and
one, the principal, grows downwards, with its attached spur behind. So that
the front view of the flower must be _some_ modification of this typical
arrangement, Fig. M, (for middle form). Now the statement above quoted from
Figuier, Sec. 16, means, if he had been able to express himself, that the two
lateral petals in the violet are directed downwards, Fig. II. A, and in the
pansy upwards, Fig. II. C. And that, in the main, is true, and to be fixed
well and clearly in your mind. But in the real orders, one flower passes
into the other through all kinds of intermediate positions of petal, and
the plurality of species are of the middle type. Fig. II. B.[3]
27. Next, if you will gather a real pansy _leaf_, you will find it--not
heart-shape in the least, but sharp oval or spear-shape, with two deep
cloven lateral flakes at its springing from the stalk, which, in ordinary
aspect, give the plant the haggled and draggled look I have been vilifying
it for. These, and such as these, "leaflets at the base of other leaves"
(Balfour's Glossary), are called by botanists 'stipules.' I have not
allowed the word yet, and am doubtful of allowing it, because it entirely
confuses the student's sense of the Latin 'stipula' (see above, vol. i.,
chap. viii., Sec. 27) doubly and trebly important in its connection with
'stipulor,' not noticed in that paragraph, but readable in your large
Johnson; we shall have more to say of it when we come to 'straw' itself.
28. In the meantime, one _may_ think of these things as stipulations for
leaves, not fulfilled, or 'stumps' or 'sumphs' of leaves! But I think I can
do better for them. We have already got the idea of _crested_ leaves, (see
vol. i., plate); now, on each side of a knight's crest, from earliest
Etruscan times down to those of the Scalas, the fashion of armour held,
among the nations who wished to make themselves terrible in aspect, of
putting cut plates or 'bracts' of metal, like dragons' wings, on each side
of the crest. I believe the custom never became Norman or English; it is
essentially Greek, Etruscan, or Italian,--the Norman and Dane always
wearing a practical cone (see the coins of Canute), and the Frank or
English knights the severely plain beavered helmet; the Black Prince's at
Canterbury, and Henry V.'s at Westminster, are kept hitherto by the great
fates for us to see. But the Southern knights constantly wore these lateral
dragon's wings; and if I can find their special name, it may perhaps be
substituted with advantage for 'stipule'; but I have not wit enough by me
just now to invent a term.
29. Whatever we call them, the things themselves are, throughout all the
species of violets, developed in the running and weedy varieties, and much
subdued in the beautiful ones; and generally the pansies have them, large,
with spear-shaped central leaves; and the violets small, with heart-shaped
leaves, for more effective decoration of the ground. I now note the
characters of each species in their above given order.
30. I. VIOLA REGINA. Queen Violet. Sweet Violet. 'Viola Odorata,' L., Flora
Danica, and Sowerby. The latter draws it with golden centre and white base
of lower petal; the Flora Danica, all purple. It is sometimes altogether
white. It is seen most perfectly for setting off its colour, in group with
primrose,--and most luxuriantly, so far as I know, in hollows of the Savoy
limestones, associated with the pervenche, which embroiders and illumines
them all over. I believe it is the earliest of its race, sometimes called
'Martia,' March violet. In Greece and South Italy even a flower of the
winter.
"The Spring is come, the violet's _gone_,
The first-born child of the early sun.
With us, she is but a winter's flower;
The snow on the hills cannot blast her bower,
And she lifts up her dewy eye of blue
To the youngest sky of the selfsame hue.
And when the Spring comes, with her host
Of flowers, that flower beloved the most
Shrinks from the crowd that may confuse
Her heavenly odour, and virgin hues.
Pluck the others, but still remember
Their herald out of dim December,--
_The morning star_ of all the flowers,
The pledge of daylight's lengthened hours,
Nor, midst the roses, e'er forget
The virgin, virgin violet."[4]
3. It is the queen, not only of the violet tribe, but of all low-growing
flowers, in sweetness of scent--variously applicable and serviceable in
domestic economy:--the scent of the lily of the valley seems less capable
of preservation or use.
But, respecting these perpetual beneficences and benignities of the sacred,
as opposed to the malignant, herbs, whose poisonous power is for the most
part restrained in them, during their life, to their juices or dust, and
not allowed sensibly to pollute the air, I should like the scholar to
re-read pp. 251, 252 of vol. i., and then to consider with himself what a
grotesquely warped and gnarled thing the modern scientific mind is, which
fiercely busies itself in venomous chemistries that blast every leaf from
the forests ten miles round; and yet cannot tell us, nor even think of
telling us, nor does even one of its pupils think of asking it all the
while, how a violet throws off her perfume!--far less, whether it might not
be more wholesome to 'treat' the air which men are to breathe in masses, by
administration of vale-lilies and violets, instead of charcoal and sulphur!
The closing sentence of the first volume just now referred
to--p.254--should also be re-read; it was the sum of a chapter I had in
hand at that time on the Substances and Essences of Plants--which never got
finished;--and in trying to put it into small space, it has become obscure:
the terms "logically inexplicable" meaning that no words or process of
comparison will define scents, nor do any traceable modes of sequence or
relation connect them; each is an independent power, and gives a separate
impression to the senses. Above all, there is no logic of pleasure, nor any
assignable reason for the difference, between loathsome and delightful
scent, which makes the fungus foul and the vervain sacred: but one
practical conclusion I (who am in all final ways the most prosaic and
practical of human creatures) do very solemnly beg my readers to meditate;
namely, that although not recognized by actual offensiveness of scent,
there is no space of neglected land which is not in some way modifying the
atmosphere of _all the world_,--it may be, beneficently, as heath and
pine,--it may be, malignantly, as Pontine marsh or Brazilian jungle; but,
in one way or another, for good and evil constantly, by day and night, the
various powers of life and death in the plants of the desert are poured
into the air, as vials of continual angels: and that no words, no thoughts
can measure, nor imagination follow, the possible change for good which
energetic and tender care of the wild herbs of the field and trees of the
wood might bring, in time, to the bodily pleasure and mental power of Man.
32. II. VIOLA PSYCHE. Ophelia's Pansy.
The wild heart's-ease of Europe; its proper colour an exquisitely clear
purple in the upper petals, gradated into deep blue in the lower ones; the
centre, gold. Not larger than a violet, but perfectly formed, and firmly
set in all its petals. Able to live in the driest ground; beautiful in the
coast sand-hills of Cumberland, following the wild geranium and burnet
rose: and distinguished thus by its power of life, in waste and dry places,
from the violet, which needs kindly earth and shelter.
Quite one of the most lovely things that Heaven has made, and only degraded
and distorted by any human interference; the swollen varieties of it
produced by cultivation being all gross in outline and coarse in colour by
comparison.
It is badly drawn even in the 'Flora Danica,' No. 623, considered there
apparently as a species escaped from gardens; the description of it being
as follows:--
"Viola tricolor hortensis repens, flore purpureo et coeruleo, C.B.P., 199."
(I don't know what C.B.P. means.) "Passim, juxta villas."
"Viola tricolor, caule triquetro diffuso, foliis oblongis incisis, stipulis
pinnatifidis," Linn. Systema Naturae, 185.
33. "Near the country farms"--does the Danish botanist mean?--the more
luxuriant weedy character probably acquired by it only in such
neighbourhood; and, I suppose, various confusion and degeneration possible
to it beyond other plants when once it leaves its wild home. It is given by
Sibthorpe from the Trojan Olympus, with an exquisitely delicate leaf; the
flower described as "triste et pallide violaceus," but coloured in his
plate full purple; and as he does not say whether he went up Olympus to
gather it himself, or only saw it brought down by the assistant whose
lovely drawings are yet at Oxford, I take leave to doubt his epithets. That
this should be the only Violet described in a 'Flora Graeca' extending to
ten folio volumes, is a fact in modern scientific history which I must
leave the Professor of Botany and the Dean of Christ Church to explain.
34. The English varieties seem often to be yellow in the lower petals, (see
Sowerby's plate, 1287 of the old edition), crossed, I imagine, with Viola
Aurea, (but see under Viola Rupestris, No. 12); the names, also, varying
between tricolor and bicolor--with no note anywhere of the three colours,
or two colours, intended!
The old English names are many.--'Love in idleness,'--making Lysander, as
Titania, much wandering in mind, and for a time mere 'Kits run the street'
(or run the wood?)--"Call me to you" (Gerarde, ch. 299, Sowerby, No. 178),
with 'Herb Trinity,' from its three colours, blue, purple, and gold,
variously blended in different countries? 'Three faces under a hood'
describes the English variety only. Said to be the ancestress of all the
florists' pansies, but this I much doubt, the next following species being
far nearer the forms most chiefly sought for.
35. III. VIOLA ALPINA. 'Freneli's Pansy'--my own name for it, from
Gotthelf's Freneli, in 'Ulric the Farmer'; the entirely pure and noble type
of the Bernese maid, wife, and mother.
The pansy of the Wengern Alp in specialty, and of the higher, but still
rich, Alpine pastures. Full dark-purple; at least an inch across the
expanded petals; I believe, the 'Mater Violarum' of Gerarde; and true black
violet of Virgil, remaining in Italian 'Viola Mammola' (Gerarde, ch. 298).
36. IV. VIOLA AUREA. Golden Violet. Biflora usually; but its brilliant
yellow is a much more definite characteristic; and needs insisting on,
because there is a 'Viola lutea' which is not yellow at all; named so by
the garden florists. My Viola aurea is the Rock-violet of the Alps; one of
the bravest, brightest, and dearest of little flowers. The following notes
upon it, with its summer companions, a little corrected from my diary of
1877, will enough characterize it.
"_June 7th._--The cultivated meadows now grow only dandelions--in frightful
quantity too; but, for wild ones, primula, bell gentian, golden pansy, and
anemone,--Primula farinosa in mass, the pansy pointing and vivifying in a
petulant sweet way, and the bell gentian here and there deepening all,--as
if indeed the sound of a deep bell among lighter music.
"Counted in order, I find the effectively constant flowers are eight;[5]
namely,
"1. The golden anemone, with richly cut large leaf; primrose colour, and in
masses like primrose, studded through them with bell gentian, and dark
purple orchis.
"2. The dark purple orchis, with bell gentian in equal quantity, say six of
each in square yard, broken by sparklings of the white orchis and the white
grass-flower; the richest piece of colour I ever saw, touched with gold by
the geum.
"3 and 4. These will be white orchis and the grass flower.[6]
"5. Geum--everywhere, in deep, but pure, gold, like pieces of Greek mosaic.
"6. Soldanella, in the lower meadows, delicate, but not here in masses.
"7. Primula Alpina, divine in the rock clefts, and on the ledges changing
the grey to purple,--set in the dripping caves with
"8. Viola (pertinax--pert); I want a Latin word for various
studies--failures all--to express its saucy little stuck-up way, and
exquisitely trim peltate leaf. I never saw such a lovely perspective line
as the pure front leaf profile. Impossible also to get the least of the
spirit of its lovely dark brown fibre markings. Intensely golden these dark
fibres, just browning the petal a little between them."
And again in the defile of Gondo, I find "Viola (saxatilis?) name yet
wanted;--in the most delicate studding of its round leaves, like a small
fern more than violet, and bright sparkle of small flowers in the dark
dripping hollows. Assuredly delights in shade and distilling moisture of
rocks."
I found afterwards a much larger yellow pansy on the Yorkshire high
limestones; with vigorously black crowfoot marking on the lateral petals.
37. V. VIOLA MONTANA. Mountain Violet.
Flora Danica, 1329. Linnaeus, No. 13, "Caulibus erectis, foliis
cordato-lanceolatis, floribus serioribus apetalis," _i.e._, on erect stems,
with leaves long heart-shape, and its later flowers without petals--not a
word said of its earlier flowers which have got those unimportant
appendages! In the plate of the Flora it is a very perfect transitional
form between violet and pansy, with beautifully firm and well-curved
leaves, but the colour of blossom very pale. "In subalpinis Norvegiae
passim," all that we are told of it, means I suppose, in the lower Alpine
pastures of Norway; in the Flora Suecica, p. 306, habitat in Lapponica,
juxta Alpes.
38. VI. VIOLA MIRABILIS. Flora Danica, 1045. A small and exquisitely formed
flower in the balanced cinquefoil intermediate between violet and pansy,
but with large and superbly curved and pointed leaves. It is a mountain
violet, but belonging rather to the mountain woods than meadows. "In
sylvaticis in Toten, Norvegiae."
Loudon, 3056, "Broad-leaved: Germany."
Linnaeus, Flora Suecica, 789, says that the flowers of it which have perfect
corolla and full scent often bear no seed, but that the later 'cauline'
blossoms, without petals, are fertile. "Caulini vero apetali fertiles sunt,
et seriores. Habitat passim Upsaliae."
I find this, and a plurality of other species, indicated by Linnaeus as
having triangular stalks, "caule triquetro," meaning, I suppose, the kind
sketched in Figure 1 above.
39. VII. VIOLA ARVENSIS. Field Violet. Flora Danica, 1748. A coarse running
weed; nearly like Viola Cornuta, but feebly lilac and yellow in colour. In
dry fields, and with corn.
Flora Suecica, 791; under titles of Viola 'tricolor' and 'bicolor
arvensis,' and Herba Trinitatis. Habitat ubique in _sterilibus_ arvis:
"Planta vix datur in qua evidentius perspicitur generationis opus, quam in
hujus cavo apertoque stigmate."
It is quite undeterminable, among present botanical instructors, how far
this plant is only a rampant and over-indulged condition of the true pansy
(Viola Psyche); but my own scholars are to remember that the true pansy is
full purple and blue with golden centre; and that the disorderly field
varieties of it, if indeed not scientifically distinguishable, are entirely
separate from the wild flower by their scattered form and faded or altered
colour. I follow the Flora Danica in giving them as a distinct species.
40. VIII. VIOLA PALUSTRIS. Marsh Violet. Flora Danica, 83. As there drawn,
the most finished and delicate in form of all the violet tribe; warm white,
streaked with red; and as pure in outline as an oxalis, both in flower and
leaf: it is like a violet imitating oxalis and anagallis.
In the Flora Suecica, the petal-markings are said to be black; in 'Viola
lactea' a connected species, (Sowerby, 45,) purple. Sowerby's plate of it
under the name 'palustris' is pale purple veined with darker; and the spur
is said to be 'honey-bearing,' which is the first mention I find of honey
in the violet. The habitat given, sandy and turfy heaths. It is said to
grow plentifully near Croydon.
Probably, therefore, a violet belonging to the chalk, on which nearly all
herbs that grow wild--from the grass to the bluebell--are singularly sweet
and pure. I hope some of my botanical scholars will take up this question
of the effect of different rocks on vegetation, not so much in bearing
different species of plants, as different characters of each species.[7]
41. IX. VIOLA SECLUSA. Monk's Violet. "Hirta," Flora Danica, 618, "In
fruticetis raro." A true wood violet, full but dim in purple. Sowerby, 894,
makes it paler. The leaves very pure and severe in the Danish one;--longer
in the English. "Clothed on both sides with short, dense, hoary hairs."
Also belongs to chalk or limestone only (Sowerby).
X. VIOLA CANINA. Dog Violet. I have taken it for analysis in my two plates,
because its grace of form is too much despised, and we owe much more of the
beauty of spring to it, in English mountain ground, than to the Regina.
XI. VIOLA CORNUTA. Cow Violet. Enough described already.
XII. VIOLA RUPESTRIS. Crag Violet. On the high limestone moors of
Yorkshire, perhaps only an English form of Viola Aurea, but so much larger,
and so different in habit--growing on dry breezy downs, instead of in
dripping caves--that I allow it, for the present, separate name and
number.[8]
42. 'For the present,' I say all this work in 'Proserpina' being merely
tentative, much to be modified by future students, and therefore quite
different from that of 'Deucalion,' which is authoritative as far as it
reaches, and will stand out like a quartz dyke, as the sandy speculations
of modern gossiping geologists get washed away.
But in the meantime, I must again solemnly warn my girl-readers against all
study of floral genesis and digestion. How far flowers invite, or require,
flies to interfere in their family affairs--which of them are
carnivorous--and what forms of pestilence or infection are most favourable
to some vegetable and animal growths,--let them leave the people to settle
who like, as Toinette says of the Doctor in the 'Malade Imaginaire'--"y
mettre le nez." I observe a paper in the last 'Contemporary Review,'
announcing for a discovery patent to all mankind that the colours of
flowers were made "to attract insects"![9] They will next hear that the
rose was made for the canker, and the body of man for the worm.
43. What the colours of flowers, or of birds, or of precious stones, or of
the sea and air, and the blue mountains, and the evening and the morning,
and the clouds of Heaven, were given for--they only know who can see them
and can feel, and who pray that the sight and the love of them may be
prolonged, where cheeks will not fade, nor sunsets die.
44. And now, to close, let me give you some fuller account of the reasons
for the naming of the order to which the violet belongs, 'Cytherides.'
You see that the Uranides, are, as far as I could so gather them, of the
pure blue of the sky; but the Cytherides of altered blue;--the first,
Viola, typically purple; the second, Veronica, pale blue with a peculiar
light; the third, Giulietta, deep blue, passing strangely into a subdued
green before and after the full life of the flower.
All these three flowers have great strangenesses in them, and weaknesses;
the Veronica most wonderful in its connection with the poisonous tribe of
the foxgloves; the Giulietta, alone among flowers in the action of the
shielding leaves; and the Viola, grotesque and inexplicable in its hidden
structure, but the most sacred of all flowers to earthly and daily Love,
both in its scent and glow.
Now, therefore, let us look completely for the meaning of the two leading
lines,--
"Sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes,
Or Cytherea's breath."
45. Since, in my present writings, I hope to bring into one focus the
pieces of study fragmentarily given during past life, I may refer my
readers to the first chapter of the 'Queen of the Air' for the explanation
of the way in which all great myths are founded, partly on physical, partly
on moral fact,--so that it is not possible for persons who neither know the
aspect of nature, nor the constitution of the human soul, to understand a
word of them. Naming the Greek gods, therefore, you have first to think of
the physical power they represent. When Horace calls Vulcan 'Avidus,' he
thinks of him as the power of Fire; when he speaks of Jupiter's red right
hand, he thinks of him as the power of rain with lightning; and when Homer
speaks of Juno's dark eyes, you have to remember that she is the softer
form of the rain power, and to think of the fringes of the rain-cloud
across the light of the horizon. Gradually the idea becomes personal and
human in the "Dove's eyes within thy locks,"[10] and "Dove's eyes by the
river of waters" of the Song of Solomon.
46. "Or Cytherea's breath,"--the two thoughts of softest glance, and
softest kiss, being thus together associated with the flower: but note
especially that the Island of Cythera was dedicated to Venus because it was
the chief, if not the only Greek island, in which the purple fishery of
Tyre was established; and in our own minds should be marked not only as the
most southern fragment of true Greece, but the virtual continuation of the
chain of mountains which separate the Spartan from the Argive territories,
and are the natural home of the brightest Spartan and Argive beauty which
is symbolized in Helen.
47. And, lastly, in accepting for the order this name of Cytherides, you
are to remember the names of Viola and Giulietta, its two limiting
families, as those of Shakspeare's two most loving maids--the two who love
simply, and to the death: as distinguished from the greater natures in whom
earthly Love has its due part, and no more; and farther still from the
greatest, in whom the earthly love is quiescent, or subdued, beneath the
thoughts of duty and immortality.
It may be well quickly to mark for you the levels of loving temper in
Shakspeare's maids and wives, from the greatest to the least.
48. 1. Isabel. All earthly love, and the possibilities of it, held in
absolute subjection to the laws of God, and the judgments of His will. She
is Shakspeare's only 'Saint.' Queen Catherine, whom you might next think
of, is only an ordinary woman of trained religious temper:--her maid of
honour gives Wolsey a more Christian epitaph.
2. Cordelia. The earthly love consisting in diffused compassion of the
universal spirit; not in any conquering, personally fixed, feeling.
"Mine enemy's dog,
Though he had bit me, should have stood that night
Against my fire."
These lines are spoken in her hour of openest direct expression; and are
_all_ Cordelia.
Shakspeare clearly does not mean her to have been supremely beautiful in
person; it is only her true lover who calls her 'fair' and 'fairest'--and
even that, I believe, partly in courtesy, after having the instant before
offered her to his subordinate duke; and it is only _his_ scorn of her
which makes France fully care for her.
"Gods, Gods, 'tis strange that from their cold neglect
My love should kindle to inflamed respect!"
Had she been entirely beautiful, he would have honoured her as a lover
should, even before he saw her despised; nor would she ever have been so
despised--or by her father, misunderstood. Shakspeare himself does not
pretend to know where her girl-heart was,--but I should like to hear how a
great actress would say the "Peace be with Burgundy!"
3. Portia. The maidenly passion now becoming great, and chiefly divine in
its humility, is still held absolutely subordinate to duty; no thought of
disobedience to her dead father's intention is entertained for an instant,
though the temptation is marked as passing, for that instant, before her
crystal strength. Instantly, in her own peace, she thinks chiefly of her
lover's;--she is a perfect Christian wife in a moment, coming to her
husband with the gift of perfect Peace,--
"Never shall you lie by Portia's side
With an unquiet soul."
She is highest in intellect of all Shakspeare's women, and this is the root
of her modesty; her 'unlettered girl' is like Newton's simile of the child
on the sea-shore. Her perfect wit and stern judgment are never disturbed
for an instant by her happiness: and the final key to her character is
given in her silent and slow return from Venice, where she stops at every
wayside shrine to pray.
4. Hermione. Fortitude and Justice personified, with unwearying affection.
She is Penelope, tried by her husband's fault as well as error.
5. Virgilia. Perfect type of wife and mother, but without definiteness of
character, nor quite strength of intellect enough entirely to hold her
husband's heart. Else, she had saved him: he would have left Rome in his
wrath--but not her. Therefore, it is his mother only who bends him: but she
cannot save.
6. Imogen. The ideal of grace and gentleness; but weak; enduring too
mildly, and forgiving too easily. But the piece is rather a pantomime than
play, and it is impossible to judge of the feelings of St. Columba, when
she must leave the stage in half a minute after mistaking the headless
clown for headless Arlecchino.
7. Desdemona, Ophelia, Rosalind. They are under different conditions from
all the rest, in having entirely heroic and faultless persons to love. I
can't class them, therefore,--fate is too strong, and leaves them no free
will.
8. Perdita, Miranda. Rather mythic visions of maiden beauty than mere
girls.
9. Viola and Juliet. Love the ruling power in the entire character: wholly
virginal and pure, but quite earthly, and recognizing no other life than
his own. Viola is, however, far the noblest. Juliet will die unless Romeo
loves _her_: "If he be wed, the grave is like to be my wedding bed;" but
Viola is ready to die for the happiness of the man who does _not_ love her;
faithfully doing his messages to her rival, whom she examines strictly for
his sake. It is not in envy that she says, "Excellently done,--if God did
all." The key to her character is given in the least selfish of all lover's
songs, the one to which the Duke bids her listen:
"Mark it, Cesario,--it is old and plain,
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,
And the free maids, that _weave their thread with bones_,
Do use to chaunt it."
(They, the unconscious Fates, weaving the fair vanity of life with death);
and the burden of it is--
"My part of Death, no one so true
Did share it."
Therefore she says, in the great first scene, "Was not _this_ love indeed?"
and in the less heeded closing one, her heart then happy with the knitters
in the _sun_,
"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
noblest and loveliest women are dutiful and religious by continual nature;
and their passions 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
clusters 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 clusters 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 glass 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
morassy rock-investiture, 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 classing together
two orders naturally quite distinct, the Butterworts 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 Butterworts 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, Butterwort; and their French, as at present, _Grassette_.
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 noblest 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 Butterwort, (instead of
'vulgaris,') the common English and Swiss kind above noticed.
3. Pinguicula Alpina: Alpine Butterwort, 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 Butterwort. 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.
[Illustration: FIG. III.]
5. Pinguicula Minima: Least Butterwort; 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 cluster 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 cluster 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
palustre).
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 smuts black. Not themselves assuming to be pious, they yet assure 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
assure 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 repetitions 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 constitution,'
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
Cockney, 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
Butterwort; 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 masses 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 Butterwoort, 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
'Butterwort' as true Yorkshire, the more enigmatic form of 'Pigwilly'
preserving the tradition of the flowers once abounding, with softened Latin
name, in Pigwilly bottom, close to Force bridge, by Kendal. Gerarde draws
the English variety as "Pinguicula sive Sanicula Eboracensis,--Butterwoort,
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 Butterwort 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 Taetgrass,
and the leaves are used by the inhabitants to make their 'taet 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 passing 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 quantity 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 associated 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 quantity 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 shell,--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 knobs, 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.
4. She shall gather: first, the Euphrasy, which makes the turf on the brow
of the hill glitter as if with new-fallen manna; then, from one of the blue
clusters on the top of the garden wall, the common bright blue Speedwell;
and, from the garden bed beneath, a dark blue spire of Veronica spicata;
then, at the nearest opening into the wood, a little foxglove in its first
delight of shaking out its bells; then--what next does the Doctor say?--a
snapdragon? we must go back into the garden for that--here is a goodly
crimson one, but what the little speedwell will think of him for a relative
_I_ can't think!--a mullein?--that we must do without for the moment; a
monkey flower?--that we will do without, altogether; a lady's slipper?--say
rather a goblin's with the gout! but, such as the flower-cobbler has made
it, here is one of the kind that people praise, out of the greenhouse,--and
yet a figwort we must have, too; which I see on referring to Loudon, may be
balm-leaved, hemp-leaved, tansy-leaved, nettle-leaved, wing-leaved,
heart-leaved, ear-leaved, spear-leaved, or lyre-leaved. I think I can find
a balm-leaved one, though I don't know what to make of it when I've got it,
but it's called a 'Scorodonia' in Sowerby, and something very ugly
besides;--I'll put a bit of Teucrium Scorodonia in, to finish: and now--how
will my young Proserpina arrange her bouquet, and rank the family relations
to their contentment?
5. She has only one kind of flowers--in her hand, as botanical
classification stands at present; and whether the system be more rational,
or in any human sense more scientific, which puts calceolaria and speedwell
together,--and foxglove and euphrasy; and runs them on one side into the
mints, and on the other into the nightshades;--naming them, meanwhile, some
from diseases, some from vermin, some from blockheads, and the rest
anyhow:--or the method I am pleading for, which teaches us, watchful of
their seasonable return and chosen abiding places, to associate in our
memory the flowers which truly resemble, or fondly companion, or, in time
kept by the signs of Heaven, succeed, each other; and to name them in some
historical connection with the loveliest fancies and most helpful faiths of
the ancestral world--Proserpina be judge; with every maid that sets flowers
on brow or breast--from Thule to Sicily.
6. We will unbind our bouquet, then, and putting all the rest of its
flowers aside, examine the range and nature of the little blue cluster
only.
And first--we have to note of it, that the plan of the blossom in all the
kinds is the same; an irregular quatre-foil: and irregular quatrefoils are
of extreme rarity in flower form. I don't myself know _one_, except the
Veronica. The cruciform vegetables--the heaths, the olives, the lilacs, the
little Tormentillas, and the poppies, are all perfectly symmetrical. Two of
the petals, indeed, as a rule, are different from the other two, except in
the heaths; and thus a distinctly crosslet form obtained, but always an
equally balanced one: while in the Veronica, as in the Violet, the blossom
always refers itself to a supposed place on the stalk with respect to the
ground; and the upper petal is always the largest.
The supposed place is often very suppositious indeed--for clusters of the
common veronicas, if luxuriant, throw their blossoms about anywhere. But
the idea of an upper and lower petal is always kept in the flower's little
mind.
7. In the second place, it is a quite open and flat quatrefoil--so
separating itself from the belled quadrature of the heath, and the tubed
and primrose-like quadrature of the cruciferae; and, both as a quatrefoil,
and as an open one, it is separated from the foxgloves and snapdragons,
which are neither quatrefoils, nor open; but are cinqfoils shut up!
8. In the third place, open and flat though the flower be, it is
monopetalous; all the four arms of the cross strictly becoming one in the
centre; so that, though the blue foils _look_ no less sharply separate than
those of a buttercup or a cistus; and are so delicate that one expects them
to fall from their stalk if we breathe too near,--do but lay hold of
one,--and, at the touch, the entire blossom is lifted from its stalk, and
may be laid, in perfect shape, on our paper before us, as easily as if it
had been a nicely made-up blue bonnet, lifted off its stand by the
milliner.
I pause here, to consider a little; because I find myself mixing up two
characteristics which have nothing necessary in their relation;--namely,
the unity of the blossom, and its coming easily off the stalk. The separate
petals of the cistus and cherry fall as easily as the foxglove drops its
bells;--on the other hand, there are monopetalous things that don't drop,
but hold on like the convoluta,[19] and make the rest of the tree sad for
their dying. I do not see my way to any systematic noting of decadent or
persistent corolla; but, in passing, we may thank the veronica for never
allowing us to see how it fades,[20] and being always cheerful and lovely,
while it is with us.
9. And for a farther specialty, I think we should take note of the purity
and simplicity of its _floral_ blue, not sprinkling itself with unwholesome
sugar like a larkspur, nor varying into coppery or turquoise-like hue as
the forget-me-not; but keeping itself as modest as a blue print, pale, in
the most frequent kinds; but pure exceedingly; and rejoicing in fellowship
with the grey of its native rocks. The palest of all I think it will be
well to remember as Veronica Clara, the "Poor Clare" of Veronicas. I find
this note on it in my diary,--
'The flower of an exquisite grey-white, like lichen, or shaded hoar-frost,
or dead silver; making the long-weathered stones it grew upon perfect with
a finished modesty of paleness, as if the flower _could_ be blue, and would
not, for their sake. Laying its fine small leaves along in embroidery, like
Anagallis tenella,--indescribable in the tender feebleness of
it--afterwards as it grew, dropping the little blossoms from the base of
the spire, before the buds at the top had blown. Gathered, it was happy
beside me, with a little water under a stone, and put out one pale blossom
after another, day by day.'
10. Lastly, and for a high worthiness, in my estimate, note that it is
_wild_, of the wildest, and proud in pure descent of race; submitting
itself to no follies of the cur-breeding florist. Its species, though many
resembling each other, are severally constant in aspect, and easily
recognizable; and I have never seen it provoked to glare into any gigantic
impudence at a flower show. Fortunately, perhaps, it is scentless, and so
despised.
11. Before I attempt arranging its families, we must note that while the
corolla itself is one of the most constant in form, and so distinct from
all other blossoms that it may be always known at a glance; the leaves and
habit of growth vary so greatly in families of different climates, and
those born for special situations, moist or dry, and the like, that it is
quite impossible to characterize Veronic, or Veronique, vegetation in
general terms. One can say, comfortably, of a strawberry, that it is a
creeper, without expecting at the next moment to see a steeple of
strawberry blossoms rise to contradict us;--we can venture to say of a
foxglove that it grows in a spire, without any danger of finding, farther
on, a carpet of prostrate and entangling digitalis; and we may pronounce of
a buttercup that it grows mostly in meadows, without fear of finding
ourselves, at the edge of the next thicket, under the shadow of a
buttercup-bush growing into valuable timber. But the Veronica reclines with
the lowly,[21] upon occasion, and aspires, with the proud; is here the
pleased companion of the ground-ivies, and there the unrebuked rival of the
larkspurs: on the rocks of Coniston it effaces itself almost into the film
of a lichen; it pierces the snows of Iceland with the gentian: and in the
Falkland Islands is a white-blossomed evergreen, of which botanists are in
dispute whether it be Veronica or Olive.
12. Of these many and various forms, I find the manners and customs alike
inconstant; and this of especially singular in them--that the Alpine and
northern species bloom hardily in contest with the retiring snows, while
with us they wait till the spring is past, and offer themselves to us only
in consolation for the vanished violet and primrose. As we farther examine
the ways of plants, I suppose we shall find some that determine upon a
fixed season, and will bloom methodically in June or July, whether in
Abyssinia or Greenland; and others, like the violet and crocus, which are
flowers of the spring, at whatever time of the favouring or frowning year
the spring returns to their country. I suppose also that botanists and
gardeners know all these matters thoroughly: but they don't put them into
their books, and the clear notions of them only come to me now, as I think
and watch.
13. Broadly, however, the families of the Veronica fall into three main
divisions,--those which have round leaves lobed at the edge, like ground
ivy; those which have small thyme-like leaves; and those which have long
leaves like a foxglove's, only smaller--never more than two or two and a
half inches long. I therefore take them in these connections, though
without any bar between the groups; only separating the Regina from the
other thyme-leaved ones, to give her due precedence; and the rest will then
arrange themselves into twenty families, easily distinguishable and
memorable.
[Illustration: FIG. IV.]
I have chosen for Veronica Regina, the brave Icelandic one, which pierces
the snow in first spring, with lovely small shoots of perfectly set leaves,
no larger than a grain of wheat; the flowers in a lifted cluster of five or
six together, not crowded, yet not loose; large, for veronica--about the
size of a silver penny, or say half an inch across--deep blue, with ruby
centre.
My woodcut, Fig. 4, is outlined[22] from the beautiful engraving D.
342,[23]--there called 'fruticulosa,' from the number of the young shoots.
14. Beneath the Regina, come the twenty easily distinguished families,
namely:--
1. Chamaedrys. 'Ground-oak.' I cannot tell why so called--its small and
rounded leaves having nothing like oak leaves about them, except the
serration, which is common to half, at least, of all leaves that grow. But
the idea is all over Europe, apparently. Fr. 'petit chene:' German and
English 'Germander,' a merely corrupt form of Chamaedrys.
The representative English veronica "Germander Speedwell"--very prettily
drawn in S. 986; too tall and weed-like in D. 448.
2. Hederifolia. Ivy-leaved: but more properly, cymbalaria-leaved. It is the
English field representative, though blue-flowered, of the Byzantine white
veronica, V. Cymbalaria, very beautifully drawn in G. 9. Hederifolia well
in D. 428.
3. Agrestis. Fr. 'Rustique.' We ought however clearly to understand whether
'agrestis,' used by English botanists, is meant to imply a literally field
flower, or only a 'rustic' one, which might as properly grow in a wood. I
shall always myself use 'agrestis' in the literal sense, and 'rustica' for
'rustique.' I see no reason, in the present case, for separating the Polite
from the Rustic flower: the agrestis, D. 449 and S. 971, seems to me not
more meekly recumbent, nor more frankly cultureless, than the so-called
Polita, S. 972: there seems also no French acknowledgment of its
politeness, and the Greek family, G. 8, seem the rudest and wildest of all.
Quite a _field_ flower it is, I believe, lying always low on the ground;
recumbent, but not creeping. Note this difference: no fastening roots are
thrown out by the reposing stems of this Veronica; a creeping or accurately
'rampant' plant roots itself in advancing. Conf. Nos. 5, 6.
4. Arvensis. We have yet to note a still finer distinction in epithet.
'Agrestis' will properly mean a flower of the open ground--yet not caring
whether the piece of earth be cultivated or not, so long as it is under
clear sky. But when _agri_-culture has turned the unfruitful acres into
'arva beata,'--if then the plant thrust itself between the furrows of the
plough, it is properly called 'Arvensis.'
I don't quite see my way to the same distinction in English,--perhaps I may
get into the habit, as time goes on, of calling the Arvenses consistently
furrow-flowers, and the Agrestes field-flowers. Furrow-veronica is a
tiresomely long name, but must do for the present, as the best
interpretation of its Latin character, "vulgatissima in cultis et arvis."
D. 515. The blossom itself is exquisitely delicate; and we may be thankful,
both here and in Denmark, for such a lovely 'vulgate.'
5. Montana. D. 1201. The first really creeping plant we have had to notice.
It throws out roots from the recumbent stems. Otherwise like agrestis, it
has leaves like ground-ivy. Called a wood species in the text of D.
6. Persica. An eastern form, but now perfectly naturalized here--D. 1982;
S. 973. The flowers very large, and extremely beautiful, but only one
springing from each leaf-axil.
Leaves and stem like Montana; and also creeping with new-roots at
intervals.
7. Triphylla, (not triphyll_os_,--see Flora Suecica, 22). Meaning
trifid-leaved; but the leaf is really divided into five lobes, not
three--see S. 974, and G. 10. The palmate form of the leaf seems a mere
caprice, and indicates no transitional form in the plant: it may be
accepted as only a momentary compliment of mimicry to the geraniums. The
Siberian variety, 'multifida,' C. 1679, divides itself almost as the
submerged leaves of the water-ranunculus.
The triphylla itself is widely diffused, growing alike on the sandy fields
of Kent, and of Troy. In D. 627 is given an extremely delicate and minute
northern type, the flowers springing as in Persica, one from each
leaf-axil, and at distant intervals.
8. Officinalis. D. 248, S. 294. Fr. 'Veronique officinale'; (Germ.
Gebrauchlicher Ehrenpreis,) our commonest English and Welsh speedwell;
richest in cluster and frankest in roadside growth, whether on bank or
rock; but assuredly liking _either_ a bank _or_ a rock, and the top of a
wall better than the shelter of one. Uncountable 'myriads,' I am tempted to
write, but, cautiously and literally, 'hundreds' of blossoms--if one
_could_ count,--ranging certainly towards the thousand in some groups, all
bright at once, make our Westmoreland lanes look as if they were decked for
weddings, in early summer. In the Danish Flora it is drawn small and poor;
its southern type being the true one: but it is difficult to explain the
difference between the look of a flower which really _suffers_, as in this
instance, by a colder climate, and becomes mean and weak, as well as
dwarfed; and one which is braced and brightened by the cold, though
diminished, as if under the charge and charm of an affectionate fairy, and
becomes a joyfully patriotic inheritor of wilder scenes and skies.
Medicinal, to soul and body alike, this gracious and domestic flower;
though astringent and bitter in the juice. It is the Welsh deeply honoured
'Fluellen.'--See final note on the myth of Veronica, see Sec. 18.
9. Thymifolia. Thyme-leaved, G. 6. Of course the longest possible
word--serpyllifolia--is used in S. 978. It is a high mountain plant,
growing on the top of Crete as the snow retires; and the Veronica minor of
Gerarde; "the roote is small and threddie, taking hold of the _upper
surface_ of the earth, where it spreadeth." So also it is drawn as a
creeper in F. 492, where the flower appears to be oppressed and concealed
by the leafage.
10. Minuta, called 'hirsuta' in S. 985: an ugly characteristic to name the
lovely little thing by. The distinct blue lines in the petals might perhaps
justify 'picta' or 'lineata,' rather than an epithet of size; but I suppose
it is Gerarde's Minima, and so leave it, more safely named as 'minute' than
'least.' For I think the next variety may dispute the leastness.
[Illustration: FIG. V.]
11. Verna. D. 252. Mountains, in dry places in early spring. Upright, and
confused in the leafage, which is sharp-pointed and close set, much hiding
the blossom, but of extreme elegance, fit for a sacred foreground; as any
gentle student will feel, who copies this outline from the Flora Danica,
Fig. 5.
12. Peregrina. Another extremely small variety, nearly pink in colour,
passing into bluish lilac and white. American; but called, I do not see
why, 'Veronique _voyageuse_,' by the French, and Fremder Ehrenpreis in
Germany. Given as a frequent English weed in S. 927.
13. Alpina. Veronique des Alpes. Gebirgs Ehrenpreis. Still minute; its
scarcely distinct flowers forming a close head among the leaves;
round-petalled in D. 16, but sharp, as usual, in S. 980. On the Norway Alps
in grassy places; and in Scotland by the side of mountain rills; but rare.
On Ben Nevis and Lachin y Gair (S.)
14. Scutellata. From the shield-like shape of its seed-vessels. Veronique a
Ecusson; Schildfruchtiger Ehrenpreis. But the seed-vessels are more heart
shape than shield. Marsh Speedwell. S. 988, D. 209,--in the one pink, in
the other blue; but again in D. 1561, pink.
"In flooded meadows, common." (D.) A spoiled and scattered form; the seeds
too conspicuous, but the flowers very delicate, hence 'Gratiola minima' in
Gesner. The confused ramification of the clusters worth noting, in relation
to the equally straggling fibres of root.
15. Spicata. S. 982: very prettily done, representing the inside of the
flower as deep blue, the outside pale. The top of the spire, all calices,
the calyx being indeed, through all the veronicas, an important and
persistent member.
The tendency to arrange itself in spikes is to be noted as a degradation of
the veronic character; connecting it on one side with the snapdragons, on
the other with the ophryds. In Veronica Ophrydea, (C. 2210,) this
resemblance to the contorted tribe is carried so far that "the corolla of
the veronica becomes irregular, the tube gibbous, the faux (throat) hairy,
and three of the laciniae (lobes of petals) variously twisted." The spire of
blossom, violet-coloured, is then close set, and exactly resembles an
ophryd, except in being sharper at the top. The engraved outline of the
blossom is good, and very curious.
16. Gentianoides. This is the most directly and curiously imitative among
the--shall we call them--'histrionic' types of Veronica. It grows exactly
like a clustered upright gentian; has the same kind of leaves at its root,
and springs with the same bright vitality among the retiring snows of the
Bithynian Olympus. (G. 5.) If, however, the Caucasian flower, C. 1002, be
the same, it has lost its perfect grace in luxuriance, growing as large as
an asphodel, and with root-leaves half a foot long.
The petals are much veined; and this, of all veronicas, has the lower petal
smallest in proportion to the three above,--"triplo aut quadruplo minori."
(G.)
17. Stagnarum. Marsh-Veronica. The last four families we have been
examining vary from the typical Veronicas not only in their lance-shaped
clusters, but in their lengthened, and often every way much enlarged leaves
also: and the two which we now will take in association, 17 and 18, carry
the change in aspect farthest of any, being both of them true water-plants,
with strong stems and thick leaves. The present name of my Veronica
Stagnarum is however V. anagallis, a mere insult to the little water
primula, which one plant of the Veronica would make fifty of. This is a
rank water-weed, having confused bunches of blossom and seed, like unripe
currants, dangling from the leaf-axils. So that where the little triphylla,
(No. 7, above,) has only one blossom, daintily set, and well seen, this has
a litter of twenty-five or thirty on a long stalk, of which only three or
four are well out as flowers, and the rest are mere knobs of bud or seed.
The stalk is thick (half an inch round at the bottom), the leaves long and
misshapen. "Frequens in fossis," D. 203. French, Mouron d'Eau, but I don't
know the root or exact meaning of Mouron.
An ugly Australian species, 'labiata,' C. 1660, has leaves two inches long,
of the shape of an aloe's, and partly aloeine in texture, "sawed with
unequal, fleshy, pointed teeth."
18. Fontium. Brook-Veronica. Brook-_Lime_, the Anglo-Saxon 'lime' from
Latin limus, meaning the soft mud of streams. German 'Bach-bunge'
(Brook-purse?) ridiculously changed by the botanists into 'Beccabunga,' for
a Latin name! Very beautiful in its crowded green leaves as a
stream-companion; rich and bright more than watercress. See notice of it at
Matlock, in 'Modern Painters,' vol. v.
19. Clara. Veronique des rochers. Saxatilis, I suppose, in Sowerby, but am
not sure of having identified that with my own favourite, for which I
therefore keep the name 'Clara,' (see above, Sec. 9); and the other rock
variety, if indeed another, mast be remembered, together with it.
20. Glauca. G. 7. And this, at all events, with the Clara, is to be
remembered as closing the series of twenty families, acknowledged by
Proserpina. It is a beautiful low-growing ivy-leaved type, with flowers of
subdued lilac blue. On Mount Hymettus: no other locality given in the Flora
Graeca.
15. I am sorry, and shall always be so, when the varieties of any flower
which I have to commend to the student's memory, exceed ten or twelve in
number; but I am content to gratify his pride with lengthier task, if
indeed he will resign himself to the imperative close of the more inclusive
catalogue, and be content to know the twelve, or sixteen, or twenty,
acknowledged families, thoroughly; and only in their illustration to think
of rarer forms. The object of 'Proserpina' is to make him happily cognizant
of the common aspect of Greek and English flowers; under the term
'English,' comprehending the Saxon, Celtic, Norman, and Danish Floras. Of
the evergreen shrub alluded to in Sec. 11 above, the Veronica Decussata of the
Pacific, which is "a bushy evergreen, with beautifully set cross-leaves,
and white blossoms scented like olea fragrans," I should like him only to
read with much surprise, and some incredulity, in Pinkerton's or other
entertaining travellers' voyages.
16. And of the families given, he is to note for the common simple
characteristic, that they are quatrefoils referred to a more or less
elevated position on a central stem, and having, in that relation, the
lowermost petal diminished, contrary to the almost universal habit of other
flowers to develope in such a position the lower petal chiefly, that it may
have its full share of light. You will find nothing but blunder and
embarrassment result from any endeavour to enter into further particulars,
such as "the relation of the dissepiment with respect to the valves of the
capsule," etc., etc., since "in the various species of Veronica almost
every kind of dehiscence may be observed" (C. under V. perfoliata, 1936, an
Australian species). Sibthorpe gives the entire definition of Veronica with
only one epithet added to mine, "Corolla quadrifida, _rotata_, lacinia
infima angustiore," but I do not know what 'rotata' here means, as there is
no appearance of revolved action in the petals, so far as I can see.
17. Of the mythic or poetic significance of the veronica, there is less to
be said than of its natural beauty. I have not been able to discover with
what feeling, or at what time, its sacred name was originally given; and
the legend of S. Veronica herself is, in the substance of it, irrational,
and therefore incredible. The meaning of the term 'rational,' as applied to
a legend or miracle, is, that there has been an intelligible need for the
permission of the miracle at the time when it is recorded; and that the
nature and manner of the act itself should be comprehensible in the scope.
There was thus quite simple need for Christ to feed the multitudes, and to
appear to S. Paul; but no need, so far as human intelligence can reach, for
the reflection of His features upon a piece of linen which could be seen by
not one in a million of the disciples to whom He might more easily, at any
time, manifest Himself personally and perfectly. Nor, I believe, has the
story of S. Veronica ever been asserted to be other than symbolic by the
sincere teachers of the Church; and, even so far as in that merely
explanatory function, it became the seal of an extreme sorrow, it is not
easy to understand how the pensive fable was associated with a flower so
familiar, so bright, and so popularly of good omen, as the Speedwell.
18. Yet, the fact being actually so, and this consecration of the veronica
being certainly far more ancient and earnest than the faintly romantic and
extremely absurd legend of the forget-me-not; the speedwell has assuredly
the higher claim to be given and accepted as a token of pure and faithful
love, and to be trusted as a sweet sign that the innocence of affection is
indeed more frequent, and the appointed destiny of its faith more
fortunate, than our inattentive hearts have hitherto discerned.
19. And this the more, because the recognized virtues and uses of the plant
are real and manifold; and the ideas of a peculiar honourableness and worth
of life connected with it by the German popular name 'Honour-prize'; while
to the heart of the British race, the same thought is brought home by
Shakespeare's adoption of the flower's Welsh name, for the faithfullest
common soldier of his ideal king. As a lover's pledge, therefore, it does
not merely mean memory;--for, indeed, why should love be thought of as such
at all, if it need to promise not to forget?--but the blossom is
significant also of the lover's best virtues, patience in suffering, purity
in thought, gaiety in courage, and serenity in truth: and therefore I make
it, worthily, the clasping and central flower of the Cytherides.
* * * * *
CHAPTER IV.
GIULIETTA.
1. Supposing that, in early life, one had the power of living to one's
fancy,--and why should we not, if the said fancy were restrained by the
knowledge of the two great laws concerning our nature, that happiness is
increased, not by the enlargement of the possessions, but of the heart; and
days lengthened, not by the crowding of emotions, but the economy of
them?--if thus taught, we had, I repeat, the ordering of our house and
estate in our own hands, I believe no manner of temperance in pleasure
would be better rewarded than that of making our gardens gay only with
common flowers; and leaving those which needed care for their transplanted
life to be found in their native places when we travelled. So long as I had
crocus and daisy in the spring, roses in the summer, and hollyhocks and
pinks in the autumn, I used to be myself independent of farther
horticulture,--and it is only now that I am old, and since pleasant
travelling has become impossible to me, that I am thankful to have the
white narcissus in my borders, instead of waiting to walk through the
fragrance of the meadows of Clarens; and pleased to see the milkwort blue
on my scythe-mown banks, since I cannot gather it any more on the rocks of
the Vosges, or in the divine glens of Jura.
2. Among the losses, all the more fatal in being unfelt, brought upon us by
the fury and vulgarity of modern life, I count for one of the saddest, the
loss of the wish to gather a flower in travelling. The other day,--whether
indeed a sign of some dawning of doubt and remorse in the public mind, as
to the perfect jubilee of railroad journey, or merely a piece of the common
daily flattery on which the power of the British press first depends, I
cannot judge;--but, for one or other of such motives, I saw lately in some
illustrated paper, a pictorial comparison of old-fashioned and modern
travel, representing, as the type of things passed away, the outside
passengers of the mail shrinking into huddled and silent distress from the
swirl of a winter snowstorm; and for type of the present Elysian
dispensation, the inside of a first-class saloon carriage, with a beautiful
young lady in the last pattern of Parisian travelling dress, conversing,
Daily news in hand, with a young officer--her fortunate vis-a-vis--on the
subject of our military successes in Afghanistan and Zululand.[24]
3. I will not, in presenting--it must not be called the other side, but the
supplementary, and wilfully omitted, facts, of this ideal,--oppose, as I
fairly might, the discomforts of a modern cheap excursion train, to the
chariot-and-four, with outriders and courier, of ancient noblesse. I will
compare only the actual facts, in the former and in latter years, of my own
journey from Paris to Geneva. As matters are now arranged, I find myself,
at half past eight in the evening, waiting in a confused crowd with which I
am presently to contend for a seat, in the dim light and cigar-stench of
the great station of the Lyons line. Making slow way through the
hostilities of the platform, in partly real, partly weak politeness, as may
be, I find the corner seats of course already full of prohibitory cloaks
and umbrellas; but manage to get a middle back one; the net overhead is
already surcharged with a bulging extra portmanteau, so that I squeeze my
desk as well as I can between my legs, and arrange what wraps I have about
my knees and shoulders. Follow a couple of hours of simple patience, with
nothing to entertain one's thoughts but the steady roar of the line under
the wheels, the blinking and dripping of the oil lantern, and the more or
less ungainly wretchedness, and variously sullen compromises and
encroachments of posture, among the five other passengers preparing
themselves for sleep: the last arrangement for the night being to shut up
both windows, in order to effect, with our six breaths, a salutary
modification of the night air.
4. The banging and bumping of the carriages over the turn-tables wakes me
up as | |
