Before beginning to expound the virtues of Beauty, let me, however,
insist that these all depend upon the simple and mysterious fact
that--well, that the Beautiful _is_ the Beautiful. In our discussion of
what the Bay Laurel symbolises, let us keep clear in our memory the
lovely shape of the sacred tree, and the noble places in which we have
seen it.
There are bay twigs, gathered together in bronze sheaves, in the great
garland surrounding Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise. There are two
interlaced branches of bay, crisp-edged and slender, carved in fine
low relief inside the marble chariot in the Vatican. There is a
fan-shaped growth of Apollo's Laurel behind that Venetian portrait of
a poet, which was formerly called Ariosto by Titian. And, most
suggestive of all, there are the Mycenaean bay leaves of beaten gold,
so incredibly thin one might imagine them to be the withered crown of
a nameless singer in a forgotten tongue, grown brittle through three
thousand years and more.
Each of such presentments, embodying with loving skill some feature of
the plant, enhances by association the charm of its reality,
accompanying the delight of real bay-trees and bay leaves with
inextricable harmonics, vague recollections of the delight of bronze,
of delicately cut marble, of marvellously beaten gold, of deep
Venetian crimson and black and auburn.
But best of all, most satisfying and significant, is the remembrance
of the bay-trees themselves. They greatly affect the troughs of
watercourses, among whose rocks and embanked masonry they love to
strike their roots. In such a stream trough, on a spur of the Hill of
Fiesole, grow the most beautiful poet's laurels I can think of. The
place is one of those hollowings out of a hillside which, revealing
how high they lie only by the sky-lines of distant hills, always feel
so pleasantly remote. And the peace and austerity of this little
valley are heightened by the dove-cot of a farm invisible in the
olive-yards, and looking like a hermitage's belfry. The olives are
scant and wan in the fields all round, with here and there the blossom
of an almond; the oak woods, of faint wintry copper-rose, encroach
above; and in the grassy space lying open to the sky, the mountain
brook is dyked into a weir, whence the crystalline white water leaps
into a chain of shady pools. And there, on the brink of that weir, and
all along that stream's shallow upper course among grass and brakes of
reeds, are the bay-trees I speak of: groups of three or four at
intervals, each a sheaf of smooth tapering boles, tufted high up with
evergreen leaves, sparse bunches whose outermost leaves are sharply
printed like lance-heads against the sky. Most modest little trees,
with their scant berries and rare pale buds; not trees at all, I fancy
some people saying. Yet of more consequence, somehow, in their calm
disregard of wind, their cheerful, resolute soaring, than any other
trees for miles; masters of that little valley, of its rocks, pools,
and overhanging foliage; sovereign brothers and rustic demi-gods for
whom the violets scent the air among the withered grass in March, and,
in May, the nightingales sing through the quivering star night.
Of all southern trees, most simple and aspiring; and certainly most
perfect among evergreens, with their straight, faintly carmined
shoots, their pliable strong leaves so subtly rippled at the edge, and
their clean, dry fragrance; delicate, austere, alert, serene; such are
the bay-trees of Apollo.