BLOOD-FLOWER.
At the heart of the globe, in the warm waters of the Line, and upon
their volcanic bottoms, the sea so superabounds in life that it seems
impossible for it to balance its multitudinous creations. Overpassing
purely vegetable life, its earliest products are organized, sensitive,
living.
But these animals adorn themselves with a singular splendor of botanic
beauty, the splendid liveries of an eccentric and most luxuriant
Flora. Far as the eye can reach, you see what, judging from the forms
and colors, you take for flowers, and shrubs, and plants. But those
plants have their movements, those shrubs are irritable, those flowers
shrink and shudder with an incipient sensitiveness which promises,
perception and _will_.
Charming oscillation, fascinating motion, most graceful equivoque! On
the confines of the two kingdoms of animal and vegetable life, Mind,
under those faëry oscillations gives token of its first awakening, its
dawn, its morning twilight, to be followed by a glorious and glowing
noon. Those brilliant colors, those pearly and enamelled flashings,
tell at once of the past night and the thought of the dawning day.
Thought! may we venture to call it so? No, it is still a Dream, which
by degrees will clear up into Thought.
Already, in the north of Africa, over the other side of the Cape, the
vegetable kingdom, which reigns alone in the temperate zone, sees
itself rivalled, surpassed. The great enchantment progresses,
increases, as we near the Equator. On the land,--tree, shrub, flower,
weed, are proud and gorgeous, flaming in every bright color, delicate
in every soft shade, and beneath the waters' slime and the ruddy
corals. Beside parterres, that display rainbow beauties of every color
and every tint, commence the stone plants; the madrepores, whose
branches (should we not rather say their hands and fingers?) flourish
in a rose-tinted snow; like peach or apple blossoms. Seven hundred
leagues on either side of the Equator, you sail through this faëry
land of magical illusion and wondrous beauty.
There are doubtful creatures, the Corallines, for instance, that are
claimed by all the three kingdoms. They tend towards the animal, they
tend towards the mineral, and, finally, are assigned to the vegetable.
Perchance they form the real point at which Life obscurely and
mysteriously rises from the slumber of the stone, without utterly
quitting that rude starting-point, as if to remind us, so high placed
and so haughty, of the right of even the humble mineral to rise into
animation, and of the deep and eternal aspiration that lies buried,
but busy, in the bosom of Nature.
"The fields and forests of our dry land," says Darwin, "appear sterile
and empty, if we compare them with those of the sea." And, in fact,
all who traverse the marvellous transparent Indian seas are thrilled,
stirred, startled, by the phantasmagoria that flashes up from their
far clear depths. Especially surprising is the interchange between
animal and vegetable life of their especial and characteristic
appearances. The soft impressible gelatinous plants, with rounded
organs, that are neither precisely leaves nor precisely stalks, the
delicacy of their animal curves--those Hogarthian "lines of beauty,"
seem to ask us to believe that they are veritable animals, while the
real animals, on the other hand, in form, in color, in all, seem to do
their utmost to be mistaken for vegetables. Each kingdom skilfully
imitates the other. These have the solidity, the quasi permanence, of
the tree; the others alternately expand and fade like the evanescent
flower. Thus the sea Anemone opens as a roseate and pearly flower, or
as a granite star with deep blue eyes; but when her corollæ have given
forth an Anemone daughter, you see the fair mother droop, fade, die.
Far otherwise variable, that Proteus of the waters, the Halcyon, takes
every form and every color. Now plant, now flower, it spreads itself
out into a fanlike beauty, becomes a bushy hedge, or rounds itself
into a graceful bouquet. But all this is so ephemeral, so fugitive, so
timid, so shrinking, that at the slightest touch of the softest breath
it disappears, and returns on the instant into the womb of the common
mother. In these slight and fugitive forms you at once recognize the
twin sisters of the sensitive plants of our earth; closing up, as they
close at the first breath of evening.
When you gaze down upon a coral reef, you see the depths carpeted,
many colored flowers with fungi, masses of snowy brilliancy; every
hill, every valley, of the great deep, is variegated with a thousand
forms, and a thousand colors, from the ruddy and outstretched branches
of the coral, to the deep, rich, velvety green of the Cariophylles or
violets, which seek their food by the gentle motion of the richly
golden stamens. Above this lower world, as if to shade them from the
too glowing kiss of the ardent sun, waves a whole forest of giant and
dwarf trees and shrubs, and from tree to tree feathery spirals stretch
and interlace like the loving and embracing tendrils of the vine, but
finer in tendril and infinitely more splendid in their variegated and
contrasting, yet singularly harmonizing colors.
This glorious sight inspires, yet agitates us; it is a dream, a
vertigo; that Fay of the shifting mirage, the Sea, adding to these
colors her own prismatic tints, fading, reappearing, now here, now
gone, a capricious and fitful inconstancy, a hesitation, a doubt. Have
we really seen it, this lovely scene? No, it was not so. Was it an
entity, or a delusion? Yes, yes, it must be real, there are certainly
very real beings there, for I see whole hosts of them lodged there and
sporting there. The molluscs confide in that reality, for there you
can see their pearly shells reflecting lights, now flashing and
brilliant, and anon of a most tender delicacy; and the crab, too,
believes in it, for see how he hastens on his sidelong path. Strange
fish, vast and curious monsters of the deep, move hither and thither
in their many colored vesture of purple and gold, and deep azure and
delicate pink; and that delicate star, the Ophiure agitates his
delicate and elegant arms.
In this phantasmagoria the arborescent Madrepore more gravely displays
his less brilliant colors. His beauty is chiefly that of form.
But the chief attraction of the aspect of this vast community is in
its entirety; the individual is humble, but the republic is imposing.
Here you have the strong assemblage of aloes and cactus; there you
have the superbly branching antlers of the Deer; and anon, you see the
vast stretch of the vigorous branches of the giant cedar stretching at
first horizontally, but tending to advance upward and upward still.
Those forms at present despoiled of the thousands and tens of
thousands of living flowers, which should cover and enliven them have,
perhaps, in that stern nudity an additional attraction for the mind. I
love to look upon the trees in winter, when their bared boughs tell us
and show us what they really are. And thus it is with the Madrepores.
In their present nudity, when from pictures they have become statues,
it seems as though they were about to reveal to us the whole secret of
the minute populations of which they are at once the creation and the
monument. Many of them seem to write to us in strange characters, to
speak to us in strange tones. Their interlacings evidently have a
something to tell us, could we but understand them. But who shall be
their interpreter; who shall give us the keynote to their harmony,
mysterious harmony--but Harmony doubtless?
How much less significant is the Bee architecture in its cold, severe,
geometry! That is the produce of life, but here we look upon life
itself. The stone was not simply the base and shelter of this people;
it was itself a previous people, an anterior generation, which,
gradually overtopped by the younger, assumed its present consistence.
And all the movements of that first community are still strikingly
visible, as details of another Herculaneum, or Pompeii. But here
everything is accomplished without catastrophe, without violence, by
orderly and natural progress; all testifies to serenity and peace.
Every sculptor will here admire the forms of a marvellous art which
has achieved such infinite variety of forms, improving upon all arts
of ornamentation. But we have to reflect upon something far beyond
mere form. The arborescent variety on which the activity of these
laborious tribes has been so wonderfully employed, is the effort of a
thought, of a captive liberty, seeking the guiding thread in the deep
and mazy labyrinth, and timidly feeling its way upward towards the
light, and gently and gracefully working out its emancipation from
communist life.
I have in my possession two of these little trees differing from each
other, but of like species. No vegetable is comparable to them. One,
purely white as the most immaculate alabaster, has an inexhaustible
wealth of buds, and blossoms and flowers, on every one of its many
spreading branches. The other, less white and less spreading, has also
its whole world upon its branches. Exquisitely beautiful are they
both; alike yet unlike, twins of innocence and fraternity. Oh who
shall explain to us the mystery of the infant soul that created these
faëry things! We feel that it must be at work, captive and yet free;
captive in a captivity so beloved that though still tending upward
towards freedom, it yet cares not fully to achieve it.
The arts have not yet seized upon those wonders from which the world
has derived so much benefit. The beautiful statue of Nature (at the
entrance of the Jardin des Plantes) should have been surrounded by
them; Nature should only be exhibited as she ever lives, amidst faëry
triumphs, enthroning her on a mountain of her own beauties. Her first
born, the Madrepores, would have furnished the lower strata with their
meanders, their stars and their alabaster branches; while above, their
sisters, with their bodies and their fine hair would have made a
living bed, softly to embrace with caressing love the divine Mother in
her dream of eternal maternity.
Painting has succeeded in these things no better than sculpture. Her
animated flowers have neither the expression nor the true, pure,
delicate coloring of the animated flowers, of the nature of which our
colored engravings give but a poor and mechanical idea, altogether
destitute of the unctuous softness, suppleness, and warm emotion of
the flowers of the fields, the woods, the gardens, or animated flowers
of the seas. Enamels, even attempted as by Palissy, are too hard and
cold; admirable for reptiles and the scales of fish, they are too
glaring to resemble these tender and soft creatures that have not even
a skin. The little exterior lungs of the annelides, the slight net
work in which certain of the Polypes float, the sensitive and
ever-moving hairs which support the Medusæ, are objects not merely
delicate to sight, but affecting to imagination. They are of every
shade, fine and vague, yet warm; as though a balmy breath had become
visible. You see an ever-varying, ever-moving rainbow that delights
your eye; but for them it is a very serious matter, the creating of
that marvellous rainbow, of various forms and colors; it is their
blood and their weak life converted into changing hues and tints, and
lights and shades. Take care! Do not stifle that little floating soul,
which mutely, but oh how eloquently, tells you its secret in those
varying and palpitating colors.
The colors do not long survive, and their creators, the Madrepores,
themselves survive only in their base, which has been called
inorganic, but which in reality is condensed and solidified life.
Women, who have a more delicate and penetrating sense of the beautiful
than we have, do not thus mistake; they have, at the least, confusedly
divined that one of these trees, the coral, is a living thing, and
thence the just favor in which they hold it. Vainly did science tell
them that coral was mere stone, and then that it was a plant, they
knew quite differently.
"Madame, why is it that you prefer this tree of a dubious red, to all
the precious stones?"
"Monsieur, it suits my complexion. Rubies are too vivid, they make me
look pale, while this, somewhat duller, rather more favorably
contrasts fairness."
The lady is quite right; the coral and the lady are related. In the
coral, as in the lip and the cheek of the lady, it is iron, according
to Voyel, which makes the one red and the others roseate.
"But, Madame, these brilliant stones have an incomparable polish, and
dazzling lustre."
"Yes, but the coral has something of the softness and even the warmth
of the skin. As soon as I put it on, it seems to become a part of
myself."
"But Madame, there are much finer reds than that of your coral
necklace."
"Doctor, leave me this, I love it. Why? That I know not; or if there
is a reason, that which will do as well as any, is that its Eastern
and true name is 'the Blood-Flower.'"