Volume I Part 5 (1/2)
Next, Pope:--
”He missed the mark; but pierced Gorgythio's heart, And drenched in royal blood the thirsty dart: (Fair Castianeira, nymph of form divine, This offspring added to King Priam's line).
As full-blown poppies, overcharged with rain, Decline the head, and drooping kiss the plain, So sinks the youth: his beauteous head, depressed Beneath his helmet, drops upon his breast.”
13. I give you the two pa.s.sages in full, trusting that you may so feel the becomingness of the one, and the gracelessness of the other. But note farther, in the Homeric pa.s.sage, one subtlety which cannot enough be marked even in Chapman's English, that his second word, [Greek: emuse], is employed by him both of the stooping of ears of corn, under wind, and of Troy stooping to its ruin;[30] and otherwise, in good Greek writers, the word is marked as having such specific sense of men's drooping under weight; or towards death, under the burden of fortune which they have no more strength to sustain;[31] compare the pa.s.sage {101} I quoted from Plato, ('Crown of Wild Olive,' p. 95): ”And bore lightly the burden of gold and of possessions.” {102} And thus you will begin to understand how the poppy became in the heathen mind the type at once of power, or pride, and of its loss; and therefore, both why Virgil represents the white nymph Nais, ”pallentes violas, et summa papavera carpens,”--gathering the pale flags, and the highest poppies,--and the reason for the choice of this rather than any other flower, in the story of Tarquin's message to his son.
14. But you are next to remember the word Rhoeas in another sense. Whether originally intended or afterwards caught at, the resemblance of the word to 'Rhoea,' a pomegranate, mentally connects itself with the resemblance of the poppy head to the pomegranate fruit.
And if I allow this flower to be the first we take up for careful study in Proserpina, on account of its simplicity of form and splendour of colour, I wish you also to remember, in connection with it, the cause of Proserpine's eternal captivity--her having tasted a pomegranate seed,--the pomegranate being in Greek mythology what the apple is in the Mosaic legend; and, in the whole {103} wors.h.i.+p of Demeter, a.s.sociated with the poppy by a mult.i.tude of ideas which are not definitely expressed, but can only be gathered out of Greek art and literature, as we learn their symbolism. The chief character on which these thoughts are founded is the fulness of seed in the poppy and pomegranate, as an image of life: then the forms of both became adopted for beads or bosses in ornamental art; the pomegranate remains more distinctly a Jewish and Christian type, from its use in the border of Aaron's robe, down to the fruit in the hand of Angelico's and Botticelli's Infant Christs; while the poppy is gradually confused by the Byzantine Greeks with grapes; and both of these with palm fruit. The palm, in the shorthand of their art, gradually becomes a symmetrical branched ornament with two pendent bosses; this is again confused with the Greek iris, (Homer's blue iris, and Pindar's water-flag,)--and the Florentines, in adopting Byzantine ornament, read it into their own Fleur-de-lys; but insert two poppyheads on each side of the entire foil, in their finest heraldry.
15. Meantime the definitely intended poppy, in late Christian Greek art of the twelfth century, modifies the form of the Acanthus leaf with its own, until the northern twelfth century workman takes the thistle-head for the poppy, and the thistle-leaf for acanthus. The true poppy-head remains in the south, but gets more and more confused with grapes, till the Renaissance carvers are content with any kind of boss full of seed, but insist on such boss {104} or bursting globe as some essential part of their ornament;--the bean-pod for the same reason (not without Pythagorean notions, and some of republican election) is used by Brunelleschi for main decoration of the lantern of Florence duomo; and, finally, the ornamentation gets so shapeless, that M. Violet-le-Duc, in his 'Dictionary of Ornament,' loses trace of its origin altogether, and fancies the later forms were derived from the spadix of the arum.
16. I have no time to enter into farther details; but through all this vast range of art, note this singular fact, that the wheat-ear, the vine, the fleur-de-lys, the poppy, and the jagged leaf of the acanthus-weed, or thistle, occupy the entire thoughts of the decorative workmen trained in cla.s.sic schools, to the exclusion of the rose, true lily, and the other flowers of luxury. And that the deeply underlying reason of this is in the relation of weeds to corn, or of the adverse powers of nature to the beneficent ones, expressed for us readers of the Jewish scriptures, centrally in the verse, ”thorns also, and thistles, shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field” ([Greek: chortos], gra.s.s or corn), and exquisitely symbolized throughout the fields of Europe by the presence of the purple 'corn-flag,' or gladiolus, and 'corn-rose'
(Gerarde's name for Papaver Rhoeas), in the midst of carelessly tended corn; and in the traditions of the art of Europe by the springing of the acanthus round the basket of the canephora, strictly the basket _for bread_, the idea of bread {105} including all sacred things carried at the feasts of Demeter, Bacchus, and the Queen of the Air. And this springing of the th.o.r.n.y weeds round the basket of reed, distinctly taken up by the Byzantine Italians in the basketwork capital of the twelfth century, (which I have already ill.u.s.trated at length in the 'Stones of Venice,') becomes the germ of all capitals whatsoever, in the great schools of Gothic, to the end of Gothic time, and also of all the capitals of the pure and n.o.ble Renaissance architecture of Angelico and Perugino, and all that was learned from them in the north, while the introduction of the rose, as a primal element of decoration, only takes place when the luxury of English decorated Gothic, the result of that licentious spirit in the lords which brought on the Wars of the Roses, indicates the approach of destruction to the feudal, artistic, and moral power of the northern nations.
For which reason, and many others, I must yet delay the following out of our main subject, till I have answered the other question, which brought me to pause in the middle of this chapter, namely, 'What is a weed?'
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CHAPTER VI.
THE PARABLE OF JOASH.
1. Some ten or twelve years ago, I bought--three times twelve are thirty-six--of a delightful little book by Mrs. Gatty, called 'Aunt Judy's Tales'--whereof to make presents to my little lady friends. I had, at that happy time, perhaps from four-and-twenty to six-and-thirty--I forget exactly how many--very particular little lady friends; and greatly wished Aunt Judy to be the thirty-seventh,--the kindest, wittiest, prettiest girl one had ever read of, at least in so entirely proper and orthodox literature.
2. Not but that it is a suspicious sign of infirmity of faith in our modern moralists to make their exemplary young people always pretty; and dress them always in the height of the fas.h.i.+on. One may read Miss Edgeworth's 'Harry and Lucy,' 'Frank and Mary,' 'Fas.h.i.+onable Tales,' or 'Parents'
a.s.sistant,' through, from end to end, with extremest care; and never find out whether Lucy was tall or short, nor whether Mary was dark or fair, nor how Miss Annaly was dressed, nor--which was my own chief point of interest--what was the colour of {107} Rosamond's eyes. Whereas Aunt Judy, in charming position after position, is shown to have expressed all her pure evangelical principles with the prettiest of lips; and to have had her gown, though puritanically plain, made by one of the best modistes in London.
3. Nevertheless, the book is wholesome and useful; and the nicest story in it, as far as I recollect, is an inquiry into the subject which is our present business, 'What is a weed?'--in which, by many pleasant devices, Aunt Judy leads her little brothers and sisters to discern that a weed is 'a plant in the wrong place.'
'Vegetable' in the wrong place, by the way, I think Aunt Judy says, being a precisely scientific little aunt. But I can't keep it out of my own less scientific head that 'vegetable' means only something going to be boiled. I like 'plant' better for general sense, besides that it's shorter.
Whatever we call them, Aunt Judy is perfectly right about them as far as she has gone; but, as happens often even to the best of evangelical instructresses, she has stopped just short of the gist of the whole matter.
It is entirely true that a weed is a plant that has got into a wrong place; but it never seems to have occurred to Aunt Judy that some plants never _do_!
Who ever saw a wood anemone or a heath blossom in the wrong place? Who ever saw nettle or hemlock in a right one? And yet, the difference between flower and weed, (I use, for convenience sake, these words in their {108} familiar opposition,) certainly does not consist merely in the flowers being innocent, and the weed stinging and venomous. We do not call the nightshade a weed in our hedges, nor the scarlet agaric in our woods. But we do the cornc.o.c.kle in our fields.
4. Had the thoughtful little tutoress gone but one thought farther, and instead of ”a vegetable in a wrong place,” (which it may happen to the innocentest vegetable sometimes to be, without turning into a weed, therefore,) said, ”A vegetable which has an innate disposition to _get_ into the wrong place,” she would have greatly furthered the matter for us; but then she perhaps would have felt herself to be uncharitably dividing with vegetables her own little evangelical property of original sin.
5. This, you will find, nevertheless, to be the very essence of weed character--in plants, as in men. If you glance through your botanical books, you will see often added certain names--'a troublesome weed.' It is not its being venomous, or ugly, but its being impertinent--thrusting itself where it has no business, and hinders other people's business--that makes a weed of it. The most accursed of all vegetables, the one that has destroyed for the present even the possibility of European civilization, is only called a weed in the slang of its votaries;[32] but in the finest and truest English we call so the plant which {109} has come to us by chance from the same country, the type of mere senseless prolific activity, the American water-plant, choking our streams till the very fish that leap out of them cannot fall back, but die on the clogged surface; and indeed, for this unrestrainable, unconquerable insolence of uselessness, what name can be enough dishonourable?
6. I pa.s.s to vegetation of n.o.bler rank.
You remember, I was obliged in the last chapter to leave my poppy, for the present, without an English specific name, because I don't like Gerarde's 'Corn-rose,' and can't yet think of another. Nevertheless, I would have used Gerarde's name, if the corn-rose were as much a rose as the corn-flag is a flag. But it isn't. The rose and lily have quite different relations to the corn. The lily is gra.s.s in loveliness, as the corn is gra.s.s in use; and both grow together in peace--gladiolus in the wheat, and narcissus in the pasture. But the rose is of another and higher order than the corn, and you never saw a cornfield overrun with sweetbriar or apple-blossom.