"To dress it and to keep it."[22]
That, then, was to be our work. Alas! what work have we set ourselves
upon instead! How have we ravaged the garden instead of kept
it--feeding our war-horses with its flowers, and splintering its trees
into spear-shafts!
"And at the East a flaming sword."[22]
Is its flame quenchless? and are those gates that keep the way indeed
passable no more? or is it not rather that we no more desire to enter?
For what can we conceive of that first Eden which we might not yet win
back, if we chose? It was a place full of flowers, we say. Well: the
flowers are always striving to grow wherever we suffer them; and the
fairer, the closer. There may, indeed, have been a Fall of Flowers, as
a Fall of Man; but assuredly creatures such as we are can now fancy
nothing lovelier than roses and lilies, which would grow for us side
by side, leaf overlapping leaf, till the Earth was white and red with
them, if we cared to have it so. And Paradise was full of pleasant
shades and fruitful avenues. Well: what hinders us from covering as
much of the world as we like with pleasant shade, and pure blossom,
and goodly fruit? Who forbids its valleys to be covered over with corn
till they laugh and sing? Who prevents its dark forests, ghostly and
uninhabitable, from being changed into infinite orchards, wreathing
the hills with frail-floreted snow, far away to the half-lighted
horizon of April, and flushing the face of all the autumnal earth with
glow of clustered food? But Paradise was a place of peace, we say, and
all the animals were gentle servants to us. Well: the world would yet
be a place of peace if we were all peacemakers, and gentle service
should we have of its creatures if we gave them gentle mastery. But so
long as we make sport of slaying bird and beast, so long as we choose
to contend rather with our fellows than with our faults, and make
battlefield of our meadows instead of pasture--so long, truly, the
Flaming Sword will still turn every way, and the gates of Eden remain
barred close enough, till we have sheathed the sharper flame of our
own passions, and broken down the closer gates of our own hearts.
I have been led to see and feel this more and more, as I consider the
service which the flowers and trees, which man was at first appointed
to keep, were intended to render to him in return for his care; and
the services they still render to him, as far as he allows their
influence, or fulfils his own task towards them. For what infinite
wonderfulness there is in this vegetation, considered, as indeed it
is, as the means by which the earth becomes the companion of man--his
friend and his teacher! In the conditions which we have traced in its
rocks, there could only be seen preparation for his existence;--the
characters which enable him to live on it safely, and to work with it
easily--in all these it has been inanimate and passive; but vegetation
is to it as an imperfect soul, given to meet the soul of man. The
earth in its depths must remain dead and cold, incapable except of
slow crystalline change; but at its surface, which human beings look
upon and deal with, it ministers to them through a veil of strange
intermediate being: which breathes, but has no voice; moves, but
cannot leave its appointed place; passes through life without
consciousness, to death without bitterness; wears the beauty of youth,
without its passion; and declines to the weakness of age, without its
regret.
And in this mystery of intermediate being, entirely subordinate to us,
with which we can deal as we choose, having just the greater power as
we have the less responsibility for our treatment of the unsuffering
creature, most of the pleasures which we need from the external world
are gathered, and most of the lessons we need are written, all kinds
of precious grace and teaching being united in this link between the
Earth and Man; wonderful in universal adaptation to his need, desire,
and discipline; God's daily preparation of the earth for him, with
beautiful means of life. First, a carpet to make it soft for him;
then, a coloured fantasy of embroidery thereon; then, tall spreading
of foliage to shade him from sun heat, and shade also the fallen rain;
that it may not dry quickly back into the clouds, but stay to nourish
the springs among the moss. Stout wood to bear this leafage: easily to
be cut, yet tough and light, to make houses for him, or instruments
(lance-shaft, or plough-handle, according to his temper); useless, it
had been, if harder; useless, if less fibrous; useless, if less
elastic. Winter comes, and the shade of leafage falls away, to let the
sun warm the earth; the strong boughs remain, breaking the strength of
winter winds. The seeds which are to prolong the race, innumerable
according to the need, are made beautiful and palatable, varied into
infinitude of appeal to the fancy of man, or provision for his
service: cold juice, or glowing spice, or balm, or incense, softening
oil, preserving resin, medicine of styptic, febrifuge, or lulling
charm: and all these presented in forms of endless change. Fragility
or force, softness and strength, in all degrees and aspects; unerring
uprightness, as of temple pillars, or unguided wandering of feeble
tendrils on the ground; mighty resistances of rigid arm and limb to
the storms of ages, or wavings to and fro with faintest pulse of
summer streamlet. Roots cleaving the strength of rock, or binding the
transience of the sand; crests basking in sunshine of the desert, or
hiding by dripping spring and lightless cave; foliage far tossing in
entangled fields beneath every wave of ocean--clothing, with
variegated, everlasting films, the peaks of the trackless mountains,
or ministering at cottage doors to every gentlest passion and simplest
joy of humanity.
Being thus prepared for us in all ways, and made beautiful, and good
for food, and for building, and for instruments in our hands, this
race of plants, deserving boundless affection and admiration from us,
becomes, in proportion to their obtaining it, a nearly perfect test of
our being in right temper of mind and way of life; so that no one can
be far wrong in either who loves the trees enough, and every one is
assuredly wrong in both who does not love them, if his life has
brought them in his way. It is clearly possible to do without them,
for the great companionship of the sea and sky are all that sailors
need; and many a noble heart has been taught the best it had to learn
between dark stone walls. Still if human life be cast among trees at
all, the love borne to them is a sure test of its purity. And it is a
sorrowful proof of the mistaken ways of the world that the "country,"
in the simple sense of a place of fields and trees, has hitherto been
the source of reproach to its inhabitants, and that the words
"countryman, rustic, clown, paysan, villager," still signify a rude
and untaught person, as opposed to the words "townsman" and "citizen".
We accept this usage of words, or the evil which it signifies,
somewhat too quietly; as if it were quite necessary and natural that
country-people should be rude, and townspeople gentle. Whereas I
believe that the result of each mode of life may, in some stages of
the world's progress, be the exact reverse; and that another use of
words may be forced upon us by a new aspect of facts, so that we may
find ourselves saying: "Such and such a person is very gentle and
kind--he is quite rustic; and such and such another person is very
rude and ill-taught--he is quite urbane."
At all events, cities have hitherto gained the better part of their
good report through our evil ways of going on in the world generally;
chiefly and eminently through our bad habit of fighting with each
other. No field, in the Middle Ages, being safe from devastation, and
every country lane yielding easier passage to the marauders,
peacefully-minded men necessarily congregated in cities, and walled
themselves in, making as few cross-country roads as possible: while
the men who sowed and reaped the harvests of Europe were only the
servants or slaves of the barons. The disdain of all agricultural
pursuits by the nobility, and of all plain facts by the monks, kept
educated Europe in a state of mind over which natural phenomena could
have no power; body and intellect being lost in the practice of war
without purpose, and the meditation of words without meaning. Men
learned the dexterity with sword and syllogism, which they mistook for
education, within cloister and tilt-yard; and looked on all the broad
space of the world of God mainly as a place for exercise of horses, or
for growth of food.
There is a beautiful type of this neglect of the perfectness of the
Earth's beauty, by reason of the passions of men, in that picture of
Paul Uccello's of the battle of Sant' Egidio,[23] in which the armies
meet on a country road beside a hedge of wild roses; the tender red
flowers tossing above the helmets, and glowing beneath the lowered
lances. For in like manner the whole of Nature only shone hitherto for
man between the tossing of helmet-crests; and sometimes I cannot but
think of the trees of the earth as capable of a kind of sorrow, in
that imperfect life of theirs, as they opened their innocent leaves in
the warm springtime, in vain for men; and all along the dells of
England her beeches cast their dappled shade only where the outlaw
drew his bow, and the king rode his careless chase; and by the sweet
French rivers their long ranks of poplar waved in the twilight, only
to show the flames of burning cities on the horizon, through the
tracery of their stems; amidst the fair defiles of the Apennines, the
twisted olive-trunks hid the ambushes of treachery; and on their
valley meadows, day by day, the lilies which were white at the dawn
were washed with crimson at sunset.
And indeed I had once purposed, in this work, to show what kind of
evidence existed respecting the possible influence of country life on
men; it seeming to me, then, likely that here and there a reader would
perceive this to be a grave question, more than most which we contend
about, political or social, and might care to follow it out with me
earnestly.
The day will assuredly come when men will see that it _is_ a
grave question; at which period, also, I doubt not, there will arise
persons able to investigate it. For the present, the movements of the
world seem little likely to be influenced by botanical law; or by any
other considerations respecting trees, than the probable price of
timber. I shall limit myself, therefore, to my own simple woodman's
work, and try to hew this book into its final shape, with the limited
and humble aim that I had in beginning it, namely, to prove how far
the idle and peaceable persons, who have hitherto cared about leaves
and clouds, have rightly seen, or faithfully reported of them.
[22] _Genesis_ ii, 15; iii 24.
[23] "In our own National Gallery. It is quaint and imperfect, but
of great interest." [Ruskin.] Paolo Uccello (c. 1397-1475), a
Florentine painter of the Renaissance, the first of the naturalists.
His real name was Paolo di Dono, but he was called Uccello from his
fondness for birds.