Part 4 (1/2)

73. But with the early serpent-wors.h.i.+p there was a.s.sociated another, that of the groves, of which you will also find the evidence exhaustively collected in Mr. Fergussen's work. This tree-wors.h.i.+p may have taken a dark form when a.s.sociated with the Draconian one; or opposed, as in Judea, to a purer faith; but in itself, I believe, it was always healthy, and though it retains little definite hieroglyphic power in subsequent religion, it becomes, instead of symbolic, real; the flowers and trees are themselves beheld and beloved with a half-wors.h.i.+pping delight, which is always n.o.ble and healthful.

And it is among the most notable indications of the volition of the animating power that we find the ethical signs of good and evil set on these also, as well as upon animals; the venom of the serpent, and in some respects its image also, being a.s.sociated even with the pa.s.sionless growth of the leaf out of the ground; while the distinctions of species seem appointed with more definite ethical address to the intelligence of man as their material products become more useful to him.

74. I can easily show this, and, at the same time, make clear the relation to other plants of the flowers which especially belong to Athena, by examining the natural myths in the groups of the plants which would be used at any country dinner, over which Athena would, in her simplest household authority, cheerfully rule here in England. Suppose Horace's favorite dish of beans, with the bacon; potatoes; some savory stuffing of onions and herbs, with the meat; celery, and a radish or two, with the cheese; nuts and apples for desert, and brown bread.

75. The beans are, from earliest time, the most important and interesting of the seeds of the great tribe of plants from which came the Latin and French name for all kitchen vegetables,--things that are gathered with the hand--podded seeds that cannot be reaped, or beaten, or shaken down, but must be gathered green. ”Leguminous” plants, all of them having flowers like b.u.t.terflies, seeds in (frequently pendent) pods, --”laetum siliqua qua.s.sante legumen”--smooth and tender leaves, divided into many minor ones; strange adjuncts of tendril, for climbing (and sometimes of thorn); exquisitely sweet, yet pure scents of blossom, and almost always harmless, if not serviceable seeds. It is of all tribes of plants the most definite, its blossoms being entirely limited in their parts, and not pa.s.sing into other forms. It is also the most usefully extended in range and scale; familiar in the height of the forest-- acacia, laburnum, Judas-tree; familiar in the sown field--bean and vetch and pea; familiar in the pasture--in every form of cl.u.s.tered clover and sweet trefoil tracery; the most entirely serviceable and human of all orders of plants.

76. Next, in the potato, we have the scarcely innocent underground stem of one of a tribe set aside for evil; having the deadly nightshade for its queen, and including the henbane, the witch's mandrake, and the worst natural curse of modern civilization--tobacco.* And the strange thing about this tribe is, that though thus set aside for evil, they are not a group distinctly separate from those that are happier in function. There is nothing in other tribes of plants like the form of the bean blossom; but there is another family of forms and structure closely connected with this venomous one. Examine the purple and yellow bloom of the common hedge nightshade; you will find it constructed exactly like some of the forms of the cyclamen; and, getting this clue, you will find at last the whole poisonous and terrible group to be--sisters of the primulas!

* It is not easy to estimate the demoralizing effect on the youth of Europe of the cigar, in enabling them to pa.s.s their time happily in idleness.

The nightshades are, in fact, primroses with a curse upon them; and a sign set in their petals, by which the deadly and condemned flowers may always be known from the innocent ones,--that the stamens of the nightshades are between the lobes, and of the primulas, opposite the lobes, of the corolla.

77. Next, side by side, in the celery and radish, you have the two great groups of unbelled and cruciferous plants; alike in conditions of rank among herbs: both flowering in cl.u.s.ters; but the unbelled group, flat, the crucifers, in spires: both of them mean and poor in the blossom, and losing what beauty they have by too close crowding; both of them having the most curious influence on human character in the temperate zones of the earth, from the days of the parsley crown, and hemlock drink, and mocked Euripidean chervil, until now; but chiefly among the northern nations, being especially plants that are of some humble beauty, and (the crucifers) of endless use, when they are chosen and cultivated; but that run to wild waste, and are the signs of neglected ground, in their rank or ragged leaves and meagre stalks, and pursed or podded seed cl.u.s.ters.

Capable, even under cultivation, of no perfect beauty, thought reaching some subdued delightfulness in the lady's smock and the wallflower; for the most part they have every floral quality meanly, and in vain,--they are white without purity; golden, without preciousness; redundant, without richness; divided, without fineness; ma.s.sive, without strength; and slender, without grace. Yet think over that useful vulgarity of theirs; and of the relations of German and English peasant character to its food of kraut and cabbage (as of Arab character to its food of palm-fruit), and you will begin to feel what purposes of the forming spirit are in these distinctions of species.

78. Next we take the nuts and apples,--the nuts representing one of the groups of catkined trees, whose blossoms are only tufts and dust; and the other, the rose tribe, in which fruit and flower alike have been the types to the highest races of men, of all pa.s.sionate temptation, or pure delight, from the coveting of Eve to the crowing of the Madonna, above the

”Rosa sempiterna, Che si dilata, rigrada, e ridole Odor di lode al Sol.”

We have no time now for these, we must go on to the humblest group of all, yet the most wonderful, that of the gra.s.s which has given us our bread; and from that we will go back to the herbs.

79. The vast family of plants which, under rain, make the earth green for man, and, under suns.h.i.+ne, give him bread, and, in their springing in the early year, mixed with their native flowers, have given us (far more than the new leaves of trees) the thought and word of ”spring,” divide themselves broadly into three great groups--the gra.s.ses, sedges, and rushes. The gra.s.ses are essentially a clothing for healthy and pure ground, watered by occasional rain, but in itself dry, and fit for all cultivated pasture and corn. They are distinctively plants with round and jointed stems, which have long green flexible leaves, and heads of seed, independently emerging from them. The sedges are essentially the clothing of waste and more or less poor or uncultivated soils, coa.r.s.e in their structure, frequently triangular in stem--hence called ”acute” by Virgil--and with their heads of seed not extricated from their leaves.

Now, in both the sedges and gra.s.ses, the blossom has a common structure, though undeveloped in the sedges, but composed always of groups of double husks, which have mostly a spinous process in the centre, sometimes projecting into a long awn or beard; this central process being characteristic also of the ordinary leaves of mosses, as if a moss were a kind of ear of corn made permanently green on the ground, and with a new and distinct fructification. But the rushes differ wholly from the sedge and gra.s.s in their blossom structure. It is not a dual cl.u.s.ter, but a twice threefold one, so far separate from the gra.s.ses, and so closely connected with a higher order of plants, that I think you will find it convenient to group the rushes at once with that higher order, to which, if you will for the present let me give the general name of Drosidae, or dew-plants, it will enable me to say what I have to say of them much more shortly and clearly.

80. These Drosidae, then, are plants delighting in interrupted moisture-- or at certain seasons--into dry ground. They are not among water-plants, but the signs of water resting among dry places. Many of the true water-plants have triple blossoms, with a small triple calyx holding them; in the Drosidae the floral spirit pa.s.ses into the calyx also, and the entire flower becomes a six-rayed star, bursting out of the stem laterally, as if it were the first of flowers and had made its way to the light by force through the unwilling green. They are often required to retain moisture or nourishment for the future blossom through long times of drought; and this they do in bulbs under ground, of which some become a rude and simple, but most wholesome, food for man.

81. So, now, observe, you are to divide the whole family of the herbs of the field into three great groups,--Drosidae, Carices,* Gramineae,-- dew-plants, sedges, and gra.s.ses. Then the Drosidae are divided into five great orders: lilies, asphodels, amaryllids, irids, and rushes. No tribes of flowers have had so great, so varied, or so healthy an influence on man as this great group of Drosidae, depending, not so much on the whiteness of some of their blossoms, or the radiance of others, as on the strength and delicacy of the substance of their petals; enabling them to take forms of faultless elastic curvature, either in cups, as the crocus, or expanding bells, as the true lily, or heath-like bells, as the hyacinth, or bright and perfect stars, like the star of Bethlehem, or, when they are affected by the strange reflex of the serpent nature which forms the l.a.b.i.ate group of all flowers, closing into forms of exquisitely fantastic symmetry in the gladiolus. Put by their side their Nereid sisters, the water-lilies, and you have them in the origin of the loveliest forms of ornamental design, and the most powerful floral myths yet recognized among human spirits, born by the streams of Ganges, Nile, Arno, and Avon.

* I think Carex will be found ultimately better than Cyperus for the generic name, being the Vergilian word, and representing a larger sub-species.

82. For consider a little what each of those five tribes* has been to the spirit of man. First, in their n.o.bleness, the lilies gave the lily of the Annunciation; the asphodels, the flower of the Elysian fields; the irids, the fleur-de-lys of chivalry; and the amaryllids, Christ's lily of the field; while the rush, trodden always under foot, became the emblem of humility. Then take each of the tribes, and consider the extent of their lower influence. Perdita's ”The crown imperial, lilies of all kinds,” are the first tribe, which, giving the type of perfect purity in the Madonna's lily, have, by their lovely form, influenced the entire decorative design of Italian sacred art; while ornament design of war was continually enriched by the curves of the triple petals of the Florentine ”giglio,” and French fleur-de-lys; so that it is impossible to count their influence for good in the middle ages, partly as a symbol of womanly character, and partly of the utmost brightness and refinement of chivalry in the city which was the flower of cities.

* Take this rough distinction of the four tribes: lilies, superior ovary, white seeds; asphodels, superior ovary, black seeds; irids, inferior ovary, style (typically) rising into central crest; amaryllids, inferior ovary, stamens (typically) joined in central cup. Then the rushes are a dark group, through which they stoop to the gra.s.ses.

Afterwards, the group of the turban-lilies, or tulips, did some mischief (their splendid stains having made them the favorite caprice of florists); but they may be pardoned all such guilt for the pleasure they have given in cottage gardens, and are yet to give, when lowly life may again be possible among us; and the crimson bars of the tulips in their trim beds, with their likeness in crimson bars of morning above them, and its dew glittering heavy, globed in their glossy cups, may be loved better than the gray nettles of the ash heap, under gray sky, unveined by vermilion or by gold.

83. The next great group, of the asphodels, divides itself also into two princ.i.p.al families: one, in which the flowers are like stars, and cl.u.s.tered characteristically in b.a.l.l.s, though opening sometimes into looser heads; and the other, in which the flowers are in long bells, opening suddenly at the lips, and cl.u.s.tered in spires on a long stem, or drooping from it, when bent by their weight.

The star-group, of the squills, garlics, and onions, has always caused me great wonder. I cannot understand why its beauty, and serviceableness, should have been a.s.sociated with the rank scent which has been really among the most powerful means of degrading peasant life, and separating it from that of the higher cla.s.ses.

The belled group, of the hyacinth and convallaria, is as delicate as the other is coa.r.s.e; the unspeakable azure light along the ground of the wood hyacinth in English spring; the grape hyacinth, which is in south France, as if a cl.u.s.ter of grapes and a hive of honey had been distilled and compressed together into one small boss of celled and beaded blue; the lilies of the valley everywhere, in each sweet and wild recess of rocky lands,--count the influences of these on childish and innocent life; then measure the mythic power of the hyacinth and asphodel as connected with Greek thoughts of immortality; finally take their useful and nouris.h.i.+ng power in ancient and modern peasant life, and it will be strange if you do not feel what fixed relation exists between the agency of the creating spirit in these, and in us who live by them.

84. It is impossible to bring into any tenable compa.s.s for our present purpose, even hints of the human influence of the two remaining orders of Amaryllids and Irids; only note this generally, that while these in northern countries share with the Primulas the fields of spring, it seems that in Greece, the primulaceae are not an extended tribe, while the crocus, narcissus, and Amaryllis lutea, the ”lily of the field” (I suspect also that the flower whose name we translate ”violet” was in truth an iris) represented to the Greek the first coming of the breath of life on the renewed herbage; and became in his thoughts the true embroidery of the saffron robe of Athena. Later in the year, the dianthus (which, though belonging to an entirely different race of plants, has yet a strange look of being made out of the gra.s.ses by turning the sheath-membrane at the root of their leaves into a flower) seems to scatter, in mult.i.tudinous families, its crimson stars far and wide. But the golden lily and crocus, together with the asphodel, retain always the old Greek's fondest thoughts,--they are only ”golden” flowers that are to burn on the trees, and float on the streams of paradise.

85. I have but one tribe of plants more to note at our country feast-- the savory herbs; but must go a little out of my way to come at them rightly. All flowers whose petals are fastened together, and most of those whose petals are loose, are best thought of first as a kind of cup or tube opening at the mouth. Sometimes the opening is gradual, as in the convolvulus or campanula; oftener there is a distinct change of direction between the tube and expanding lip, as in the primrose; or even a contraction under the lip, making the tube into a narrow-necked phial or vase, as in the heaths; but the general idea of a tube expanding into a quatrefoil, cinquefoil, or sixfoil, will embrace most of the forms.

86. Now, it is easy to conceive that flowers of this kind, growing in close cl.u.s.ters, may, in process of time, have extended their outside petals rather than the interior ones (as the outer flowers of the cl.u.s.ters of many umbellifers actually do), and thus elongated and variously distorted forms have established themselves; then if the stalk is attached to the side instead of the base of the tube, its base becomes a spur, and thus all the grotesque forms of the mints, violets, and larkspurs, gradually might be composed. But, however this may be, there is one great tribe of plants separate from the rest, and of which the influence seems shed upon the rest, in different degrees; and these would give the impression, not so much of having been developed by change, as of being stamped with a character of their own, more or less serpentine or dragon-like. And I think you will find it convenient to call these generally Draconidae; disregarding their present ugly botanical name which I do not care even to write once--you may take for their princ.i.p.al types the foxglove, snapdragon, and calceolaria; and you will find they all agree in a tendency to decorate themselves by spots, and with bosses or swollen places in their leaves, as if they had been touched by poison.