Volume I Part 3 (1/2)

1. On the quiet road leading from under the Palatine to the little church of St. Nereo and Achilleo, I met, yesterday morning, group after group of happy peasants heaped in pyramids on their triumphal carts, in Whit-Sunday dress, stout and clean, and gay in colour; and the women all with bright artificial roses in their hair, set with true natural taste, and well becoming them. This power of arranging wreath or crown of flowers for the head, remains to the people from cla.s.sic times. And the thing that struck me most in the look of it was not so much the cheerfulness, as the dignity;--in a true sense, the _becomingness_ and decorousness of the ornament. Among the ruins of the dead city, and the worse desolation of the work of its modern rebuilders, here was one element at least of honour, and order;--and, in these, of delight.

And these are the real significances of the flower itself. It is the utmost purification of the plant, and the utmost discipline. Where its tissue is blanched fairest, dyed purest, set in strictest rank, appointed to most chosen office, {65} there--and created by the fact of this purity and function--is the flower.

2. But created, observe, by the purity and order, more than by the function. The flower exists for its own sake,--not for the fruit's sake.

The production of the fruit is an added honour to it--is a granted consolation to us for its death. But the flower is the end of the seed,--not the seed of the flower. You are fond of cherries, perhaps; and think that the use of cherry blossom is to produce cherries. Not at all.

The use of cherries is to produce cherry blossoms; just as the use of bulbs is to produce hyacinths,--not of hyacinths to produce bulbs. Nay, that the flower can multiply by bulb, or root, or slip, as well as by seed, may show you at once how immaterial the seed-forming function is to the flower's existence. A flower is to the vegetable substance what a crystal is to the mineral. ”Dust of sapphire,” writes my friend Dr. John Brown to me, of the wood hyacinths of Scotland in the spring. Yes, that is so,--each bud more beautiful, itself, than perfectest jewel--_this_, indeed, jewel ”of purest ray serene;” but, observe you, the glory is in the purity, the serenity, the radiance,--not in the mere continuance of the creature.

3. It is because of its beauty that its continuance is worth Heaven's while. The glory of it is in being,--not in begetting; and in the spirit and substance,--not the change. For the earth also has its flesh and spirit. Every day of spring is the earth's Whit Sunday--Fire {66} Sunday.

The falling fire of the rainbow, with the order of its zones, and the gladness of its covenant,--you may eat of it, like Esdras; but you feed upon it only that you may see it. Do you think that flowers were born to nourish the blind?

Fasten well in your mind, then, the conception of order, and purity, as the essence of the flower's being, no less than of the crystal's. A ruby is not made bright to scatter round it child-rubies; nor a flower, but in collateral and added honour, to give birth to other flowers.

Two main facts, then, you have to study in every flower: the symmetry or order of it, and the perfection of its substance; first, the manner in which the leaves are placed for beauty of form; then the spinning and weaving and blanching of their tissue, for the reception of purest colour, or refining to richest surface.

4. First, the order: the proportion, and answering to each other, of the parts; for the study of which it becomes necessary to know what its parts are; and that a flower consists essentially of--Well, I really don't know what it consists essentially of. For some flowers have bracts, and stalks, and toruses, and calices, and corollas, and discs, and stamens, and pistils, and ever so many odds and ends of things besides, of no use at all, seemingly; and others have no bracts, and no stalks, and no toruses, and no calices, and no corollas, and nothing recognizable for stamens or pistils,--only, when they come to be reduced to this kind of poverty, one doesn't call {67} them flowers; they get together in knots, and one calls them catkins, or the like, or forgets their existence altogether;--I haven't the least idea, for instance, myself, what an oak blossom is like; only I know its bracts get together and make a cup of themselves afterwards, which the Italians call, as they do the dome of St. Peter's, 'cupola'; and that it is a great pity, for their own sake as well as the world's, that they were not content with their ilex cupolas, which were made to hold something, but took to building these big ones upside-down, which hold nothing--_less_ than nothing,--large extinguishers of the flame of Catholic religion. And for farther embarra.s.sment, a flower not only is without essential consistence of a given number of parts, but it rarely consists, alone, of _itself_. One talks of a hyacinth as of a flower; but a hyacinth is any number of flowers. One does not talk of 'a heather'; when one says 'heath,' one means the whole plant, not the blossom,--because heath-bells, though they grow together for company's sake, do so in a voluntary sort of way, and are not fixed in their places; and yet, they depend on each other for effect, as much as a bunch of grapes.

5. And this grouping of flowers, more or less waywardly, is the most subtle part of their order, and the most difficult to represent. Take that cl.u.s.ter of bog-heather bells, for instance, Line-study 1. You might think at first there were no lines in it worth study; but look at it more carefully. There are twelve bells in the {68} cl.u.s.ter. There may be fewer, or more; but the bog-heath is apt to run into something near that number. They all grow together as close as they can, and on one side of the supporting branch only. The natural effect would be to bend the branch down; but the branch won't have that, and so leans back to carry them. Now you see the use of drawing the profile in the middle figure: it shows you the exactly balanced setting of the group,--not drooping, nor erect; but with a disposition to droop, tossed up by the leaning back of the stem. Then, growing as near as they can to each other, those in the middle get squeezed. Here is another quite special character. Some flowers don't like being squeezed at all (fancy a squeezed convolvulus!); but these heather bells like it, and look all the prettier for it,--not the squeezed ones exactly, by themselves, but the cl.u.s.ter altogether, by their patience.

Then also the outside ones get pushed into a sort of star-shape, and in front show the colour of all their sides, and at the back the rich green cl.u.s.ter of sharp leaves that hold them; all this order being as essential to the plant as any of the more formal structures of the bell itself.

6. But the bog-heath has usually only one cl.u.s.ter of flowers to arrange on each branch. Take a spray of ling (Frontispiece), and you will find that the richest piece of Gothic spire-sculpture would be dull and graceless beside the grouping of the floral ma.s.ses in their various life. But it is difficult to give the accuracy of attention {69} necessary to see their beauty without drawing them; and still more difficult to draw them in any approximation to the truth before they change. This is indeed the fatallest obstacle to all good botanical work. Flowers, or leaves,--and especially the last,--can only be rightly drawn as they grow. And even then, in their loveliest spring action, they grow as you draw them, and will not stay quite the same creatures for half an hour.

7. I said in my inaugural lectures at Oxford, -- 107, that real botany is not so much the description of plants as their biography. Without entering at all into the history of its fruitage, the life and death of the blossom _itself_ is always an eventful romance, which must be completely told, if well. The grouping given to the various states of form between bud and flower is always the most important part of the design of the plant; and in the modes of its death are some of the most touching lessons, or symbolisms, connected with its existence. The utter loss and far-scattered ruin of the cistus and wild rose,--the dishonoured and dark contortion of the convolvulus,--the pale wasting of the crimson heath of Apennine, are strangely opposed by the quiet closing of the brown bells of the ling, each making of themselves a little cross as they die; and so enduring into the days of winter. I have drawn the faded beside the full branch, and know not which is the more beautiful.

8. This grouping, then, and way of treating each other in their gathered company, is the first and most subtle {70} condition of form in flowers; and, observe, I don't mean, just now, the appointed and disciplined grouping, but the wayward and accidental. Don't confuse the beautiful consent of the cl.u.s.ter in these sprays of heath with the legal strictness of a foxglove,--though that also has its divinity; but of another kind.

That legal order of blossoming--for which we may wisely keep the accepted name, 'inflorescence,'--is itself quite a separate subject of study, which we cannot take up until we know the still more strict laws which are set over the flower itself.

9. I have in my hand a small red poppy which I gathered on Whit Sunday on the palace of the Caesars. It is an intensely simple, intensely floral, flower. All silk and flame: a scarlet cup, perfect-edged all round, seen among the wild gra.s.s far away, like a burning coal fallen from Heaven's altars. You cannot have a more complete, a more stainless, type of flower absolute; inside and outside, _all_ flower. No sparing of colour anywhere--no outside coa.r.s.enesses--no interior secrecies; open as the suns.h.i.+ne that creates it; fine-finished on both sides, down to the extremest point of insertion on its narrow stalk; and robed in the purple of the Caesars.

Literally so. That poppy scarlet, so far as it could be painted by mortal hand, for mortal King, stays yet, against the sun, and wind, and rain, on the walls of the house of Augustus, a hundred yards from the spot where I gathered the weed of its desolation.

10. A pure _cup_, you remember it is; that much at least {71} you cannot but remember, of poppy-form among the cornfields; and it is best, in beginning, to think of every flower as essentially a cup. There are flat ones, but you will find that most of these are really groups of flowers, not single blossoms; and there are out-of-the-way and quaint ones, very difficult to define as of any shape; but even these have a cup to begin with, deep down in them. You had better take the idea of a cup or vase, as the first, simplest, and most general form of true flower.

The botanists call it a corolla, which means a garland, or a kind of crown; and the word is a very good one, because it indicates that the flower-cup is made, as our clay cups are, on a potter's wheel; that it is essentially a _revolute_ form--a whirl or (botanically) 'whorl' of leaves; in reality successive round the base of the urn they form.

11. Perhaps, however, you think poppies in general are not much like cups.

But the flower in my hand is a--poverty-_stricken_ poppy, I was going to write,--poverty-_strengthened_ poppy, I mean. On richer ground, it would have gushed into flaunting breadth of untenable purple--flapped its inconsistent scarlet vaguely to the wind--dropped the pride of its petals over my hand in an hour after I gathered it. But this little rough-bred thing, a Campagna pony of a poppy, is as bright and strong to-day as yesterday. So that I can see exactly where the leaves join or lap over each other; and when I look down into the cup, find it to be composed of four leaves altogether,--two smaller, set within two larger. {72}

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 4.]

12. Thus far (and somewhat farther) I had written in Rome; but now, putting my work together in Oxford, a sudden doubt troubles me, whether all poppies have two petals smaller than the other two. Whereupon I take down an excellent little school-book on botany--the best I've yet found, thinking to be told quickly; and I find a great deal about opium; and, apropos of opium, that the juice of common celandine is of a bright orange colour; and I pause for a bewildered five minutes, wondering if a celandine is a poppy, and how many petals _it_ has: going on again--because I must, without making up my mind, on either question--I am told to ”observe the floral receptacle of the Californian genus Eschscholtzia.” Now I can't observe anything of the sort, and I don't want to; and I wish California and all that's in it were at the deepest bottom of the Pacific. Next I am told to compare the poppy and waterlily; and I can't do that, neither--though I should like to; and there's the end of the article; and it never tells me whether one pair of petals is always smaller than the other, or not. Only I see it says the corolla has four petals. Perhaps a celandine may be a double poppy, and have eight, I know they're tiresome irregular things, and I mustn't be stopped by them;[23]--at {73} any rate, my Roman poppy knew what it was about, and had its two couples of leaves in clear subordination, of which at the time I went on to inquire farther, as follows.

13. The next point is, what shape are the petals of? And that is easier asked than answered; for when you pull them off, you find they won't lie flat, by any means, but are each of them cups, or rather sh.e.l.ls, themselves; and that it requires as much conchology as would describe a c.o.c.kle, before you can properly give account of a single poppy leaf. Or of a single _any_ leaf--for all leaves are either sh.e.l.ls, or boats, (or solid, if not hollow, ma.s.ses,) and cannot be represented in flat outline. But, laying these as flat as they will lie on a sheet of paper, you will find the piece they hide of the paper they lie on can be drawn; giving approximately the shape of the outer leaf as at A, that of the inner as at B, Fig. 4; which you will find very difficult lines to draw, for they are each composed of two curves, joined, as in Fig. 5; all above the line _a b_ being the outer edge of the leaf, but joined so subtly to the side that the least break in drawing the line spoils the form.

14. Now every flower petal consists essentially of these two parts, variously proportioned and outlined. It {74} expands from C to _a b_; and closes in the external line, and for this reason.

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 5.]

Considering every flower under the type of a cup, the first part of the petal is that in which it expands from the bottom to the rim; the second part, that in which it terminates itself on reaching the rim. Thus let the three circles, A B C, Fig 6., represent the undivided cups of the three great geometrical orders of flowers--trefoil, quatrefoil and cinquefoil.