Culpepper's Herbal, heavily bound in leather and curiously illustrated.
It was so deliciously wicked to read about the poisons; and I thought
perhaps it was a book like that, only in papyrus rolls, that was used by
the sorceress who got ready the poisoned mushrooms in old Rome. Youth's
ideas are so imaginative, and bring together things that are so widely
separated. Conscience told me I had no business to read about poisons;
but there was a fearful fascination in hemlock, and I recollect tasting a
little bit--it was very nasty. At this day, nevertheless, if any one
wishes to begin a pleasant, interesting, unscientific acquaintance with
English plants, he would do very well indeed to get a good copy of
Culpepper. Grey hairs had insisted in showing themselves in my beard
when, all those weary years afterwards, I thought I would like to buy the
still older Englishman, Gerard, who had no Linnaeus to guide him, who
walked about our English lanes centuries ago. What wonderful scenes he
must have viewed when they were all a tangle of wild flowers, and plants
that are now scarce were common, and the old ploughs, and the curious
customs, and the wild red-deer--it would make a good picture, it really
would, Gerard studying English orchids! Such a volume!--hundreds of
pages, yellow of course, close type, and marvellously well printed. The
minute care they must have taken in those early days of printing to get
up such a book--a wonderful volume both in bodily shape and contents.
Just then the only copy I could hear of was much damaged. The cunning old
bookseller said he could make it up; but I have no fancy for patched
books, they are not genuine; I would rather have them deficient; and the
price was rather long, and so I went Gerardless. Of folk-lore and
medicinal use and history and associations here you have hints. The
bottom of the sack is not yet; there are the monographs, years of study
expended upon one species of plant growing in one locality, perhaps; some
made up into thick books and some into broad quarto pamphlets, with most
beautiful plates, that, if you were to see them, would tempt you to cut
them out and steal them, all sunk and lost like dead ships under the
sand: piles of monographs. There are warehouses in London that are choked
to the beams of the roof with them, and every fresh exploration furnishes
another shelf-load. The source of the Nile was unknown a very few years
ago, and now, I have no doubt, there are dozens of monographs on the
flowers that flourish there. Indeed, there is not a thing that grows that
may not furnish a monograph. The author spends perhaps twenty years in
collecting his material, during which time he must of course come across
a great variety of amusing information, and then he spends another ten
years writing out a fair copy of his labours. Then he thinks it does not
quite do in that form, so he snips a paragraph out of the beginning and
puts it at the end; next he shifts some more matter from the middle to
the preface; then he thinks it over. It seems to him that it is too big,
it wants condensation. The scientific world will say he has made too much
of it; it ought to read very slight, and present the facts while
concealing the labour. So he sets about removing the superfluous--leaves
out all the personal observations, and all the little adventures he has
met with in his investigations; and so, having got it down to the dry
bones and stones thereof and omitted all the mortar that stuck them
together, he sends for the engraver, and the next three years are
occupied in working up the illustrations. About this time some new
discovery is made by a foreign observer, which necessitates a complete
revision of the subject; and so having shifted the contents of the book
about hither and thither till he does not know which is the end and which
is the beginning, he pitches the much-mutilated copy into a drawer and
turns the key. Farewell, no more of this; his declining days shall be
spent in peace. A few months afterwards a work is announced in Leipsic
which 'really trenches on my favourite subject, and really after spending
a lifetime I can't stand it.' By this time his handwriting has become so
shaky he can hardly read it himself, so he sends in despair for a lady
who works a type-writer, and with infinite patience she makes a clean
manuscript of the muddled mass. To the press at last, and the proofs come
rapidly. Such a relief! How joyfully easy a thing is when you set about
it! but by-and-by this won't do. Sub-section A ought to be in a
foot-note, family B is doubtful; and so the corrections grow and run over
the margin in a thin treble hand, till they approach the bulk of the
original book--a good profit for the printer; and so after about forty
years the monograph is published--the work of a life is accomplished.
Fifty copies are sent round to as many public libraries and learned
societies, and the rest of the impression lies on the shelves till dust
and time and spiders' webs have buried it. Splendid work in it too.
Looked back upon from to-day with the key of modern thought, these
monographs often contain a whole chest of treasure. And still there are
the periodicals, a century of magazines and journals and reviews and
notices that have been coming out these hundred years and dropping to the
ground like dead leaves unnoticed. And then there are the art
works--books about shape and colour and ornament, and a naturalist lately
has been trying to see how the leaves of one tree look fitted on the
boughs of another. Boundless is the wealth of Flora's lap; the ingenuity
of man has been weaving wreaths out of it for ages, and still the bottom
of the sack is not yet. Nor have we got much news of the dandelion. For I
sit on the thrown timber under the trees and meditate, and I want
something more: I want the soul of the flowers.
The bee and the butterfly take their pollen and their honey, and the
strange moths so curiously coloured, like the curious colouring of the
owls, come to them by night, and they turn towards the sun and live their
little day, and their petals fall, and where is the soul when the body
decays? I want the inner meaning and the understanding of the wild
flowers in the meadow. Why are they? What end? What purpose? The plant
knows, and sees, and feels; where is its mind when the petal falls?
Absorbed in the universal dynamic force, or what? They make no shadow of
pretence, these beautiful flowers, of being beautiful for my sake, of
bearing honey for me; in short, there does not seem to be any kind of
relationship between us, and yet--as I said just now--language does not
express the dumb feelings of the mind any more than the flower can speak.
I want to know the soul of the flowers, but the word soul does not in the
smallest degree convey the meaning of my wish. It is quite inadequate; I
must hope that you will grasp the drift of my meaning. All these
life-laboured monographs, these classifications, works of Linnaeus, and
our own classic Darwin, microscope, physiology, and the flower has not
given us its message yet. There are a million books; there are no books:
all the books have to be written. What a field! A whole million of books
have got to be written. In this sense there are hardly a dozen of them
done, and these mere primers. The thoughts of man are like the
foraminifera, those minute shells which build up the solid chalk hills
and lay the level plain of endless sand; so minute that, save with a
powerful lens, you would never imagine the dust on your fingers to be
more than dust. The thoughts of man are like these: each to him seems
great in his day, but the ages roll, and they shrink till they become
triturated dust, and you might, as it were, put a thousand on your
thumb-nail. They are not shapeless dust for all that; they are organic,
and they build and weld and grow together, till in the passage of time
they will make a new earth and a new life. So I think I may say there are
no books; the books are yet to be written.
Let us get a little alchemy out of the dandelions. They were not precise,
the Arabian sages, with their flowing robes and handwriting; there was a
large margin to their manuscripts, much imagination. Therein they failed,
judged by the monograph standard, but gave a subtle food for the mind.
Some of this I would fain see now inspiring the works and words of our
great men of science and thought--a little alchemy. A great change is
slowly going forward all over the printing-press world, I mean wherever
men print books and papers. The Chinese are perhaps outside that world at
present, and the other Asian races; the myriads, too, of the great
southern islands and of Africa. The change is steadily, however,
proceeding wherever the printing-press is used. Nor Pope, nor Kaiser, nor
Czar, nor Sultan, nor fanatic monk, nor muezzin, shouting in vain from
his minaret, nor, most fanatic of all, the fanatic shouting in vain in
London, can keep it out--all powerless against a bit of printed paper.
Bits of printed paper that listen to no command, to which none can say,
'Stand back; thou shalt not enter.' They rise on the summer whirlwinds
from the very dust of the road, and float over the highest walls; they
fall on the well-kept lawns--monastery, prison, palace--there is no
fortress against a bit of printed paper. They penetrate where even
Danae's gold cannot go. Our Darwins, our Lyalls, Herschels, Faradays--all
the immense army of those that go down to nature with considering
eye--are steadfastly undermining and obliterating the superstitious past,
literally burying it under endless loads of accumulated facts; and the
printing-presses, like so many Argos, take these facts on their voyage
round the world. Over go temples, and minarets, and churches, or rather
there they stay, the hollow shells, like the snail shells which thrushes
have picked clean; there they stay like Karnac, where there is no more
incense, like the stone circles on our own hills, where there are no more
human sacrifices. Thus men's minds all over the printing-press world are
unlearning the falsehoods that have bound them down so long; they are
unlearning, the first step to learn. They are going down to nature and
taking up the clods with their own hands, and so coming to have touch of
that which is real. As yet we are in the fact stage; by-and-by we shall
come to the alchemy, and get the honey for the inner mind and soul. I
found, therefore, from the dandelion that there were no books, and it
came upon me, believe me, as a great surprise, for I had lived quite
certain that I was surrounded with them. It is nothing but unlearning, I
find now; five thousand books to unlearn.
Then to unlearn the first ideas of history, of science, of social
institutions, to unlearn one's own life and purpose; to unlearn the old
mode of thought and way of arriving at things; to take off peel after
peel, and so get by degrees slowly towards the truth--thus writing, as it
were, a sort of floating book in the mind, almost remaking the soul. It
seems as if the chief value of books is to give us something to unlearn.
Sometimes I feel indignant at the false views that were instilled into me
in early days, and then again I see that that very indignation gives me a
moral life. I hope in the days to come future thinkers will unlearn us,
and find ideas infinitely better. How marvellous it seems that there
should be found communities furnished with the printing-press and fully
convinced they are more intelligent than ants, and yet deliberately
refusing by a solid 'popular' vote to accept free libraries! They look
with scorn on the mediaeval times, when volumes were chained in the
college library or to the desk at church. Ignorant times those! A good
thing it would be if only three books were chained to a desk, open and
free in every parish throughout the kingdom now. So might the wish to
unlearn be at last started in the inert mind of the mass. Almost the only
books left to me to read, and not to unlearn very much, are my first
books--the graven classics of Greece and Rome, cut with a stylus so
deeply into the tablet they cannot be erased. Little of the monograph or
of classification, no bushel baskets full of facts, no minute dissection
of nature, no attempt to find the soul under the scalpel. Thoughts which
do not exactly deal with nature direct in a mechanical way, as the
chemist labels all his gums and spices and earths in small boxes--I
wonder if anybody at Athens ever made a collection of the coleoptera? Yet
in some way they had got the spirit of the earth and sea, the soul of the
sun. This never dies; this I wish not to unlearn; this is ever fresh and
beautiful as a summer morning:--
Such the golden crocus,
Fair flower of early spring; the gopher white,
And fragrant thyme, and all the unsown beauty
Which in moist grounds the verdant meadows bear;
The ox-eye, the sweet-smelling flower of love,
The chalca, and the much-sung hyacinth,
And the low-growing violet, to which
Dark Proserpine a darker hue has given.
They come nearest to our own violets and cowslips--the unsown beauty of
our meadows--to the hawthorn leaf and the high pinewood. I can forget all
else that I have read, but it is difficult to forget these even when I
will. I read them in English. I had the usual Latin and Greek
instruction, but I read them in English deliberately. For the inflexion
of the vowel I care nothing; I prize the idea. Scholars may regard me
with scorn. I reply with equal scorn. I say that a great classic thought
is greater to an English mind in English words than in any other form,
and therein fits best to this our life and day. I read them in English
first, and intend to do so to the end. I do not know what set me on these
books, but I began them when about eighteen. The first of all was
Diogenes Laertius's 'Lives of the Philosophers.' It was a happy choice;
my good genius, I suppose, for you see I was already fairly well read in
modern science, and these old Greek philosophies set me thinking
backwards, unwinding and unlearning, and getting at that eidolon which is
not to be found in the mechanical heavens of this age. I still read him.
I still find new things, quite new, because they are so very, very old,
and quite true; and with his help I seem in a measure to look back upon
our thoughts now as if I had projected myself a thousand years forward in
space. An imperfect book, say the critics. I do not know about that; his
short paragraphs and chapters in their imperfect state convey more
freshness to the mind than the thick, laboured volumes in which modern
scholarship professes to describe ancient philosophy. I prefer the
imperfect original records. Neither can I read the ponderous volumes of
modern history, which are nothing but words. I prefer the incomplete and
shattered chronicles themselves, where the swords shine and the armour
rings, and all is life though but a broken frieze. Next came Plato (it
took me a long time to read Plato, and I have had to unlearn much of him)
and Xenophon. Socrates' dialectic method taught me how to write, or
rather how to put ideas in sequence. Sophocles, too; and last, that
wonderful encyclopaedia of curious things, Athenaeus. So that I found,
when the idea of the hundred best books came out, that between seventy
and eighty of them had been my companions almost from boyhood, those
lacking to complete the number being chiefly ecclesiastical or
Continental. Indeed, some years before the hundred books were talked of,
the idea had occurred to me of making up a catalogue of books that could
be bought for ten pounds. In an article in the 'Pall Mall Gazette' on
'The Pigeons at the British Museum' I said,' It seems as if all the books
in the world--really books--can be bought for 10_l_. Man's whole thought
is purchasable at that small price--for the value of a watch, of a good
dog.' The idea of making a 10_l_. catalogue was in my mind--I did make a
rough pencil one--and I still think that a 10_l_. library is worth the
notice of the publishing world. My rough list did not contain a hundred.
These old books of nature and nature's mind ought to be chained up, free
for every man to read in every parish. These are the only books I do not
wish to unlearn, one item only excepted, which I shall not here discuss.
It is curious, too, that the Greek philosophers, in the more rigid sense
of science, anticipated most of the drift of modern thought. Two chapters
in Aristotle might almost be printed without change as summaries of our
present natural science. For the facts of nature, of course, neither one
hundred books nor a 10_l_. library would be worth mentioning; say five
thousand, and having read those, then go to Kew, and spend a year
studying the specimens of wood only stored there, such a little slice
after all of the whole. You will then believe what I have advanced, that
there are no books as yet; they have got to be written; and if we pursue
the idea a little further, and consider that these are all about the
crude clods of life--for I often feel what a very crude and clumsy clod I
am--only of the earth, a minute speck among one hundred millions of
stars, how shall we write what is _there_? It is only to be written by
the mind or soul, and that is why I strive so much to find what I have
called the alchemy of nature. Let us not be too entirely mechanical,
Baconian, and experimental only; let us let the soul hope and dream and
float on these oceans of accumulated facts, and feel still greater
aspiration than it has ever known since first a flint was chipped before
the glaciers. Man's mind is the most important fact with which we are yet
acquainted. Let us not turn then against it and deny its existence with
too many brazen instruments, but remember these are but a means, and that
the vast lens of the Californian refractor is but glass--it is the
infinite speck upon which the ray of light will fall that is the one
great fact of the universe. By the mind, without instruments, the Greeks
anticipated almost all our thoughts; by-and-by, having raised ourselves
up upon these huge mounds of facts, we shall begin to see still greater
things; to do so we must look not at the mound under foot, but at the
starry horizon.
THE JULY GRASS.
A July fly went sideways over the long grass. His wings made a burr about
him like a net, beating so fast they wrapped him round with a cloud.
Every now and then, as he flew over the trees of grass, a taller one than
common stopped him, and there he clung, and then the eye had time to see
the scarlet spots--the loveliest colour--on his wings. The wind swung the
bennet and loosened his hold, and away he went again over the grasses,
and not one jot did he care if they were _Poa_ or _Festuca_, or _Bromus_
or _Hordeum_, or any other name. Names were nothing to him; all he had to
do was to whirl his scarlet spots about in the brilliant sun, rest when
he liked, and go on again. I wonder whether it is a joy to have bright
scarlet spots, and to be clad in the purple and gold of life; is the
colour felt by the creature that wears it? The rose, restful of a dewy
morn before the sunbeams have topped the garden wall, must feel a joy in
its own fragrance, and know the exquisite hue of its stained petals. The
rose sleeps in its beauty.
The fly whirls his scarlet-spotted wings about and splashes himself with
sunlight, like the children on the sands. He thinks not of the grass and
sun; he does not heed them at all--and that is why he is so happy-any
more than the barefoot children ask why the sea is there, or why it does
not quite dry up when it ebbs. He is unconscious; he lives without
thinking about living; and if the sunshine were a hundred hours long,
still it would not be long enough. No, never enough of sun and sliding
shadows that come like a hand over the table to lovingly reach our
shoulder, never enough of the grass that smells sweet as a flower, not if
we could live years and years equal in number to the tides that have
ebbed and flowed counting backwards four years to every day and night,
backward still till we found out which came first, the night or the day.
The scarlet-dotted fly knows nothing of the names of the grasses that
grow here where the sward nears the sea, and thinking of him I have
decided not to wilfully seek to learn any more of their names either. My
big grass book I have left at home, and the dust is settling on the gold
of the binding. I have picked a handful this morning of which I know
nothing. I will sit here on the turf and the scarlet-dotted flies shall
pass over me, as if I too were but a grass. I will not think, I will be
unconscious, I will live.
Listen! that was the low sound of a summer wavelet striking the uncovered
rock over there beneath in the green sea. All things that are beautiful
are found by chance, like everything that is good. Here by me is a
praying-rug, just wide enough to kneel on, of the richest gold inwoven
with crimson. All the Sultans of the East never had such beauty as that
to kneel on. It is, indeed, too beautiful to kneel on, for the life in
these golden flowers must not be broken down even for that purpose. They
must not be defaced, not a stem bent; it is more reverent not to kneel on
them, for this carpet prays itself I will sit by it and let it pray for
me. It is so common, the bird's-foot lotus, it grows everywhere; yet if I
purposely searched for days I should not have found a plot like this, so
rich, so golden, so glowing with sunshine. You might pass by it in one
stride, yet it is worthy to be thought of for a week and remembered for a
year. Slender grasses, branched round about with slenderer boughs, each
tipped with pollen and rising in tiers cone-shaped--too delicate to grow
tall--cluster at the base of the mound. They dare not grow tall or the
wind would snap them. A great grass, stout and thick, rises three feet by
the hedge, with a head another foot nearly, very green and strong and
bold, lifting itself right up to you; you must say, 'What a fine grass!'
Grasses whose awns succeed each other alternately; grasses whose tops
seem flattened; others drooping over the shorter blades beneath; some
that you can only find by parting the heavier growth around them;
hundreds and hundreds, thousands and thousands. The kingly poppies on the
dry summit of the mound take no heed of these, the populace, their
subjects so numerous they cannot be numbered. A barren race they are, the
proud poppies, lords of the July field, taking no deep root, but raising
up a brilliant blazon of scarlet heraldry out of nothing. They are
useless, they are bitter, they are allied to sleep and poison and
everlasting night; yet they are forgiven because they are not
commonplace. Nothing, no abundance of them, can ever make the poppies
commonplace. There is genius in them, the genius of colour, and they are
saved. Even when they take the room of the corn we must admire them. The
mighty multitude of nations, the millions and millions of the grass
stretching away in intertangled ranks, through pasture and mead from
shore to shore, have no kinship with these their lords. The ruler is
always a foreigner. From England to China the native born is no king; the
poppies are the Normans of the field. One of these on the mound is very
beautiful, a width of petal, a clear silkiness of colour three shades
higher than the rest--it is almost dark with scarlet. I wish I could do
something more than gaze at all this scarlet and gold and crimson and
green, something more than see it, not exactly to drink it or inhale it,
but in some way to make it part of me that I might live it.
The July grasses must be looked for in corners and out-of-the-way places,
and not in the broad acres--the scythe has taken them there. By the
wayside on the banks of the lane, near the gateway--look, too, in
uninteresting places behind incomplete buildings on the mounds cast up
from abandoned foundations where speculation has been and gone. There
weeds that would not have found resting-place elsewhere grow unchecked,
and uncommon species and unusually large growths appear. Like everything
else that is looked for, they are found under unlikely conditions. At the
back of ponds, just inside the enclosure of woods, angles of corn-fields,
old quarries, that is where to find grasses, or by the sea in the
brackish marsh. Some of the finest of them grow by the mere road-side;
you may look for others up the lanes in the deep ruts, look too inside
the hollow trees by the stream. In a morning you may easily garner
together a great sheaf of this harvest. Cut the larger stems aslant, like
the reeds imitated deep in old green glass. You must consider as you
gather them the height and slenderness of the stems, the droop and degree
of curve, the shape and colour of the panicle, the dusting of the pollen,
the motion and sway in the wind. The sheaf you may take home with you,
but the wind that was among it stays without.
WINDS OF HEAVEN.