THE FLOWER.
ROME, _Whit Monday, 1874_.
1. On the quiet road leading from under the Palatine to the little church
of St. Nereo and Achilleo, I met, yesterday morning, group after group of
happy peasants heaped in pyramids on their triumphal carts, in Whit-Sunday
dress, stout and clean, and gay in colour; and the women all with bright
artificial roses in their hair, set with true natural taste, and well
becoming them. This power of arranging wreath or crown of flowers for the
head, remains to the people from classic times. And the thing that struck
me most in the look of it was not so much the cheerfulness, as the
dignity;--in a true sense, the _becomingness_ and decorousness of the
ornament. Among the ruins of the dead city, and the worse desolation of the
work of its modern rebuilders, here was one element at least of honour, and
order;--and, in these, of delight.
And these are the real significances of the flower itself. It is the utmost
purification of the plant, and the utmost discipline. Where its tissue is
blanched fairest, dyed purest, set in strictest rank, appointed to most
chosen office, {65} there--and created by the fact of this purity and
function--is the flower.
2. But created, observe, by the purity and order, more than by the
function. The flower exists for its own sake,--not for the fruit's sake.
The production of the fruit is an added honour to it--is a granted
consolation to us for its death. But the flower is the end of the
seed,--not the seed of the flower. You are fond of cherries, perhaps; and
think that the use of cherry blossom is to produce cherries. Not at all.
The use of cherries is to produce cherry blossoms; just as the use of bulbs
is to produce hyacinths,--not of hyacinths to produce bulbs. Nay, that the
flower can multiply by bulb, or root, or slip, as well as by seed, may show
you at once how immaterial the seed-forming function is to the flower's
existence. A flower is to the vegetable substance what a crystal is to the
mineral. "Dust of sapphire," writes my friend Dr. John Brown to me, of the
wood hyacinths of Scotland in the spring. Yes, that is so,--each bud more
beautiful, itself, than perfectest jewel--_this_, indeed, jewel "of purest
ray serene;" but, observe you, the glory is in the purity, the serenity,
the radiance,--not in the mere continuance of the creature.
3. It is because of its beauty that its continuance is worth Heaven's
while. The glory of it is in being,--not in begetting; and in the spirit
and substance,--not the change. For the earth also has its flesh and
spirit. Every day of spring is the earth's Whit Sunday--Fire {66} Sunday.
The falling fire of the rainbow, with the order of its zones, and the
gladness of its covenant,--you may eat of it, like Esdras; but you feed
upon it only that you may see it. Do you think that flowers were born to
nourish the blind?
Fasten well in your mind, then, the conception of order, and purity, as the
essence of the flower's being, no less than of the crystal's. A ruby is not
made bright to scatter round it child-rubies; nor a flower, but in
collateral and added honour, to give birth to other flowers.
Two main facts, then, you have to study in every flower: the symmetry or
order of it, and the perfection of its substance; first, the manner in
which the leaves are placed for beauty of form; then the spinning and
weaving and blanching of their tissue, for the reception of purest colour,
or refining to richest surface.
4. First, the order: the proportion, and answering to each other, of the
parts; for the study of which it becomes necessary to know what its parts
are; and that a flower consists essentially of--Well, I really don't know
what it consists essentially of. For some flowers have bracts, and stalks,
and toruses, and calices, and corollas, and discs, and stamens, and
pistils, and ever so many odds and ends of things besides, of no use at
all, seemingly; and others have no bracts, and no stalks, and no toruses,
and no calices, and no corollas, and nothing recognizable for stamens or
pistils,--only, when they come to be reduced to this kind of poverty, one
doesn't call {67} them flowers; they get together in knots, and one calls
them catkins, or the like, or forgets their existence altogether;--I
haven't the least idea, for instance, myself, what an oak blossom is like;
only I know its bracts get together and make a cup of themselves
afterwards, which the Italians call, as they do the dome of St. Peter's,
'cupola'; and that it is a great pity, for their own sake as well as the
world's, that they were not content with their ilex cupolas, which were
made to hold something, but took to building these big ones upside-down,
which hold nothing--_less_ than nothing,--large extinguishers of the flame
of Catholic religion. And for farther embarrassment, a flower not only is
without essential consistence of a given number of parts, but it rarely
consists, alone, of _itself_. One talks of a hyacinth as of a flower; but a
hyacinth is any number of flowers. One does not talk of 'a heather'; when
one says 'heath,' one means the whole plant, not the blossom,--because
heath-bells, though they grow together for company's sake, do so in a
voluntary sort of way, and are not fixed in their places; and yet, they
depend on each other for effect, as much as a bunch of grapes.
5. And this grouping of flowers, more or less waywardly, is the most subtle
part of their order, and the most difficult to represent. Take that cluster
of bog-heather bells, for instance, Line-study 1. You might think at first
there were no lines in it worth study; but look at it more carefully. There
are twelve bells in the {68} cluster. There may be fewer, or more; but the
bog-heath is apt to run into something near that number. They all grow
together as close as they can, and on one side of the supporting branch
only. The natural effect would be to bend the branch down; but the branch
won't have that, and so leans back to carry them. Now you see the use of
drawing the profile in the middle figure: it shows you the exactly balanced
setting of the group,--not drooping, nor erect; but with a disposition to
droop, tossed up by the leaning back of the stem. Then, growing as near as
they can to each other, those in the middle get squeezed. Here is another
quite special character. Some flowers don't like being squeezed at all
(fancy a squeezed convolvulus!); but these heather bells like it, and look
all the prettier for it,--not the squeezed ones exactly, by themselves, but
the cluster altogether, by their patience.
Then also the outside ones get pushed into a sort of star-shape, and in
front show the colour of all their sides, and at the back the rich green
cluster of sharp leaves that hold them; all this order being as essential
to the plant as any of the more formal structures of the bell itself.
6. But the bog-heath has usually only one cluster of flowers to arrange on
each branch. Take a spray of ling (Frontispiece), and you will find that
the richest piece of Gothic spire-sculpture would be dull and graceless
beside the grouping of the floral masses in their various life. But it is
difficult to give the accuracy of attention {69} necessary to see their
beauty without drawing them; and still more difficult to draw them in any
approximation to the truth before they change. This is indeed the fatallest
obstacle to all good botanical work. Flowers, or leaves,--and especially
the last,--can only be rightly drawn as they grow. And even then, in their
loveliest spring action, they grow as you draw them, and will not stay
quite the same creatures for half an hour.
7. I said in my inaugural lectures at Oxford, § 107, that real botany is
not so much the description of plants as their biography. Without entering
at all into the history of its fruitage, the life and death of the blossom
_itself_ is always an eventful romance, which must be completely told, if
well. The grouping given to the various states of form between bud and
flower is always the most important part of the design of the plant; and in
the modes of its death are some of the most touching lessons, or
symbolisms, connected with its existence. The utter loss and far-scattered
ruin of the cistus and wild rose,--the dishonoured and dark contortion of
the convolvulus,--the pale wasting of the crimson heath of Apennine, are
strangely opposed by the quiet closing of the brown bells of the ling, each
making of themselves a little cross as they die; and so enduring into the
days of winter. I have drawn the faded beside the full branch, and know not
which is the more beautiful.
8. This grouping, then, and way of treating each other in their gathered
company, is the first and most subtle {70} condition of form in flowers;
and, observe, I don't mean, just now, the appointed and disciplined
grouping, but the wayward and accidental. Don't confuse the beautiful
consent of the cluster in these sprays of heath with the legal strictness
of a foxglove,--though that also has its divinity; but of another kind.
That legal order of blossoming--for which we may wisely keep the accepted
name, 'inflorescence,'--is itself quite a separate subject of study, which
we cannot take up until we know the still more strict laws which are set
over the flower itself.
9. I have in my hand a small red poppy which I gathered on Whit Sunday on
the palace of the Cæsars. It is an intensely simple, intensely floral,
flower. All silk and flame: a scarlet cup, perfect-edged all round, seen
among the wild grass far away, like a burning coal fallen from Heaven's
altars. You cannot have a more complete, a more stainless, type of flower
absolute; inside and outside, _all_ flower. No sparing of colour
anywhere--no outside coarsenesses--no interior secrecies; open as the
sunshine that creates it; fine-finished on both sides, down to the
extremest point of insertion on its narrow stalk; and robed in the purple
of the Cæsars.
Literally so. That poppy scarlet, so far as it could be painted by mortal
hand, for mortal King, stays yet, against the sun, and wind, and rain, on
the walls of the house of Augustus, a hundred yards from the spot where I
gathered the weed of its desolation.
10. A pure _cup_, you remember it is; that much at least {71} you cannot
but remember, of poppy-form among the cornfields; and it is best, in
beginning, to think of every flower as essentially a cup. There are flat
ones, but you will find that most of these are really groups of flowers,
not single blossoms; and there are out-of-the-way and quaint ones, very
difficult to define as of any shape; but even these have a cup to begin
with, deep down in them. You had better take the idea of a cup or vase, as
the first, simplest, and most general form of true flower.
The botanists call it a corolla, which means a garland, or a kind of crown;
and the word is a very good one, because it indicates that the flower-cup
is made, as our clay cups are, on a potter's wheel; that it is essentially
a _revolute_ form--a whirl or (botanically) 'whorl' of leaves; in reality
successive round the base of the urn they form.
11. Perhaps, however, you think poppies in general are not much like cups.
But the flower in my hand is a--poverty-_stricken_ poppy, I was going to
write,--poverty-_strengthened_ poppy, I mean. On richer ground, it would
have gushed into flaunting breadth of untenable purple--flapped its
inconsistent scarlet vaguely to the wind--dropped the pride of its petals
over my hand in an hour after I gathered it. But this little rough-bred
thing, a Campagna pony of a poppy, is as bright and strong to-day as
yesterday. So that I can see exactly where the leaves join or lap over each
other; and when I look down into the cup, find it to be composed of four
leaves altogether,--two smaller, set within two larger. {72}
[Illustration: FIG. 4.]
12. Thus far (and somewhat farther) I had written in Rome; but now, putting
my work together in Oxford, a sudden doubt troubles me, whether all poppies
have two petals smaller than the other two. Whereupon I take down an
excellent little school-book on botany--the best I've yet found, thinking
to be told quickly; and I find a great deal about opium; and, apropos of
opium, that the juice of common celandine is of a bright orange colour; and
I pause for a bewildered five minutes, wondering if a celandine is a poppy,
and how many petals _it_ has: going on again--because I must, without
making up my mind, on either question--I am told to "observe the floral
receptacle of the Californian genus Eschscholtzia." Now I can't observe
anything of the sort, and I don't want to; and I wish California and all
that's in it were at the deepest bottom of the Pacific. Next I am told to
compare the poppy and waterlily; and I can't do that, neither--though I
should like to; and there's the end of the article; and it never tells me
whether one pair of petals is always smaller than the other, or not. Only I
see it says the corolla has four petals. Perhaps a celandine may be a
double poppy, and have eight, I know they're tiresome irregular things, and
I mustn't be stopped by them;[23]--at {73} any rate, my Roman poppy knew
what it was about, and had its two couples of leaves in clear
subordination, of which at the time I went on to inquire farther, as
follows.
13. The next point is, what shape are the petals of? And that is easier
asked than answered; for when you pull them off, you find they won't lie
flat, by any means, but are each of them cups, or rather shells,
themselves; and that it requires as much conchology as would describe a
cockle, before you can properly give account of a single poppy leaf. Or of
a single _any_ leaf--for all leaves are either shells, or boats, (or solid,
if not hollow, masses,) and cannot be represented in flat outline. But,
laying these as flat as they will lie on a sheet of paper, you will find
the piece they hide of the paper they lie on can be drawn; giving
approximately the shape of the outer leaf as at A, that of the inner as at
B, Fig. 4; which you will find very difficult lines to draw, for they are
each composed of two curves, joined, as in Fig. 5; all above the line _a b_
being the outer edge of the leaf, but joined so subtly to the side that the
least break in drawing the line spoils the form.
14. Now every flower petal consists essentially of these two parts,
variously proportioned and outlined. It {74} expands from C to _a b_; and
closes in the external line, and for this reason.
[Illustration: FIG. 5.]
Considering every flower under the type of a cup, the first part of the
petal is that in which it expands from the bottom to the rim; the second
part, that in which it terminates itself on reaching the rim. Thus let the
three circles, A B C, Fig 6., represent the undivided cups of the three
great geometrical orders of flowers--trefoil, quatrefoil and cinquefoil.
[Illustration: FIG. 6.]
Draw in the first an equilateral triangle, in the second a square, in the
third a pentagon; draw the dark lines from centres to angles; (D E F): then
(_a_) the third part of D; (_b_) the fourth part of E, (_c_) the fifth part
of F, are the normal outline forms of the petals of the three {75}
families; the relations between the developing angle and limiting curve
being varied according to the depth of cup, and the degree of connection
between the petals. Thus a rose folds them over one another, in the bud; a
convolvulus twists them,--the one expanding into a flat cinquefoil of
separate petals, and the other into a deep-welled cinquefoil of connected
ones.
I find an excellent illustration in Veronica Polita, one of the most
perfectly graceful of field plants because of the light alternate flower
stalks, each with its leaf at the base; the flower itself a quatrefoil, of
which the largest and least petals are uppermost. Pull one off its calyx
(draw, if you can, the outline of the striped blue upper petal with the
jagged edge of pale gold below), and then examine the relative shapes of
the lateral, and least upper {76} petal. Their under surface is very
curious, as if covered with white paint; the blue stripes above, in the
direction of their growth, deepening the more delicate colour with
exquisite insistence.
A lilac blossom will give you a pretty example of the expansion of the
petals of a quatrefoil above the edge of the cup or tube; but I must get
back to our poppy at present.
15. What outline its petals really have, however, is little shown in their
crumpled fluttering; but that very crumpling arises from a fine floral
character which we do not enough value in them. We usually think of the
poppy as a coarse flower; but it is the most transparent and delicate of
all the blossoms of the field. The rest--nearly all of them--depend on the
_texture_ of their surfaces for colour. But the poppy is painted _glass_;
it never glows so brightly as when the sun shines through it. Wherever it
is seen--against the light or with the light--always, it is a flame, and
warms the wind like a blown ruby.
In these two qualities, the accurately balanced form, and the perfectly
infused colour of the petals, you have, as I said, the central being of the
flower. All the other parts of it are necessary, but we must follow them
out in order.
16. Looking down into the cup, you see the green boss divided by a black
star,--of six rays only,--and surrounded by a few black spots. My
rough-nurtured poppy contents itself with these for its centre; a rich one
would have had the green boss divided by a dozen of rays, and surrounded by
a dark crowd of crested threads. {77}
This green boss is called by botanists the pistil, which word consists of
the two first syllables of the Latin pistillum, otherwise more familiarly
Englished into 'pestle.' The meaning of the botanical word is of course,
also, that the central part of a flower-cup has to it something of the
relations that a pestle has to a mortar! Practically, however, as this
pestle has no pounding functions, I think the word is misleading as well as
ungraceful; and that we may find a better one after looking a little closer
into the matter. For this pestle is divided generally into three very
distinct parts: there is a storehouse at the bottom of it for the seeds of
the plant; above this, a shaft, often of considerable length in deep cups,
rising to the level of their upper edge, or above it; and at the top of
these shafts an expanded crest. This shaft the botanists call 'style,' from
the Greek word for a pillar; and the crest of it--I do not know
why--stigma, from the Greek word for 'spot.' The storehouse for the seeds
they call the 'ovary,' from the Latin ovum, an egg. So you have two-thirds
of a Latin word, (pistil)--awkwardly and disagreeably edged in between
pestle and pistol--for the whole thing; you have an English-Latin word
(ovary) for the bottom of it; an English-Greek word (style) for the middle;
and a pure Greek word (stigma) for the top.
17. This is a great mess of language, and all the worse that the words
style and stigma have both of them quite different senses in ordinary and
scholarly English from this forced botanical one. And I will venture
therefore, {78} for my own pupils, to put the four names altogether into
English. Instead of calling the whole thing a pistil, I shall simply call
it the pillar. Instead of 'ovary,' I shall say 'Treasury' (for a seed isn't
an egg, but it _is_ a treasure). The style I shall call the 'Shaft,' and
the stigma the 'Volute.' So you will have your entire pillar divided into
the treasury, at its base, the shaft, and the volute; and I think you will
find these divisions easily remembered, and not unfitted to the sense of
the words in their ordinary use.
18. Round this central, but, in the poppy, very stumpy, pillar, you find a
cluster of dark threads, with dusty pendants or cups at their ends. For
these the botanists' name 'stamens,' may be conveniently retained, each
consisting of a 'filament,' or thread, and an 'anther,' or blossoming part.
And in this rich corolla, and pillar, or pillars, with their treasuries,
and surrounding crowd of stamens, the essential flower consists. Fewer than
these several parts, it cannot have, to be a flower at all; of these, the
corolla leads, and is the object of final purpose. The stamens and the
treasuries are only there in order to produce future corollas, though often
themselves decorative in the highest degree.
These, I repeat, are all the essential parts of a flower. But it would have
been difficult, with any other than the poppy, to have shown you them
alone; for nearly all other flowers keep with them, all their lives, their
nurse {79} or tutor leaves,--the group which, in stronger and humbler
temper, protected them in their first weakness, and formed them to the
first laws of their being. But the poppy casts these tutorial leaves away.
It is the finished picture of impatient and luxury-loving youth,--at first
too severely restrained, then casting all restraint away,--yet retaining to
the end of life unseemly and illiberal signs of its once compelled
submission to laws which were only pain,--not instruction.
19. Gather a green poppy bud, just when it shows the scarlet line at its
side; break it open and unpack the poppy. The whole flower is there
complete in size and colour,--its stamens full-grown, but all packed so
closely that the fine silk of the petals is crushed into a million of
shapeless wrinkles. When the flower opens, it seems a deliverance from
torture: the two imprisoning green leaves are shaken to the ground; the
aggrieved corolla smooths itself in the sun, and comforts itself as it can;
but remains visibly crushed and hurt to the end of its days.
[Illustration: FIG. 7.]
20. Not so flowers of gracious breeding. Look at these four stages in the
young life of a primrose, Fig. 7. First confined, as strictly as the poppy
within five pinching green leaves, whose points close over it, the little
thing is content to remain a child, and finds its nursery large enough. The
green leaves unclose their points,--the little yellow ones peep out, like
ducklings. They find the light delicious, and open wide to it; and grow,
and grow, {80} and throw themselves wider at last into their perfect rose.
But they never leave their old nursery for all that; it and they live on
together; and the nursery seems a part of the flower.
21. Which is so, indeed, in all the loveliest flowers; and, in usual
botanical parlance, a flower is said to consist of its calyx, (or _hiding_
part--Calypso having rule over it,) and corolla, or garland part,
Proserpina having rule over it. But it is better to think of them always as
separate; for this calyx, very justly so named from its main function of
concealing the flower, in its youth is usually green, not coloured, and
shows its separate nature by pausing, or at least greatly lingering, in its
growth, and modifying itself very slightly, while the corolla is forming
{81} itself through active change. Look at the two, for instance, through
the youth of a pease blossom, Fig. 8.
[Illustration: FIG. 8.]
The entire cluster at first appears pendent in this manner, the stalk
bending round on purpose to put it into that position. On which all the
little buds, thinking themselves ill-treated, determine not to submit to
anything of the sort, turn their points upward persistently, and determine
that--at any cost of trouble--they will get nearer the sun. Then they begin
to open, and let out their corollas. I give the process of one only (Fig.
9).[24] It chances to be engraved the reverse way from the bud; but that is
of no consequence.
[Illustration: FIG. 9.]
At first, you see the long lower point of the calyx thought that _it_ was
going to be the head of the family, and curls upwards eagerly. Then the
little corolla steals out; and soon does away with that impression on the
mind of the calyx. The corolla soars up with widening wings, the abashed
calyx retreats beneath; and finally the great upper leaf of corolla--not
pleased at having its back still {82} turned to the light, and its face
down--throws itself entirely back, to look at the sky, and nothing
else;--and your blossom is complete.
Keeping, therefore, the ideas of calyx and corolla entirely distinct, this
one general point you may note of both: that, as a calyx is originally
folded tight over the flower, and has to open deeply to let it out, it is
nearly always composed of sharp pointed leaves like the segments of a
balloon; while corollas, having to open out as wide as possible to show
themselves, are typically like cups or plates, only cut into their edges
here and there, for ornamentation's sake.
22. And, finally, though the corolla is essentially the floral group of
leaves, and usually receives the glory of colour for itself only, this
glory and delight may be given to any other part of the group; and, as if
to show us that there is no really dishonoured or degraded membership, the
stalks and leaves in some plants, near the blossom, flush in sympathy with
it, and become themselves a part of the {83} effectively visible
flower;--Eryngo--Jura hyacinth, (comosus,) and the edges of upper stems and
leaves in many plants; while others, (Geranium lucidum,) are made to
delight us with their leaves rather than their blossoms; only I suppose, in
these, the scarlet leaf colour is a kind of early autumnal glow,--a
beautiful hectic, and foretaste, in sacred youth, of sacred death.
I observe, among the speculations of modern science, several, lately, not
uningenious, and highly industrious, on the subject of the relation of
colour in flowers, to insects--to selective development, etc., etc. There
_are_ such relations, of course. So also, the blush of a girl, when she
first perceives the faltering in her lover's step as he draws near, is
related essentially to the existing state of her stomach; and to the state
of it through all the years of her previous existence. Nevertheless,
neither love, chastity, nor blushing, are merely exponents of digestion.
All these materialisms, in their unclean stupidity, are essentially the
work of human bats; men of semi-faculty or semi-education, who are more or
less incapable of so much as seeing, much less thinking about, colour;
among whom, for one-sided intensity, even Mr. Darwin must be often ranked,
as in his vespertilian treatise on the ocelli of the Argus pheasant, which
he imagines to be artistically gradated, and perfectly imitative of a ball
and socket. If I had him here in Oxford for a week, and could force him to
try to copy a feather by Bewick, or to draw for himself a boy's thumbed
marble, his notions of feathers, and balls, {84} would be changed for all
the rest of his life. But his ignorance of good art is no excuse for the
acutely illogical simplicity of the rest of his talk of colour in the
"Descent of Man." Peacocks' tails, he thinks, are the result of the
admiration of blue tails in the minds of well-bred peahens,--and similarly,
mandrills' noses the result of the admiration of blue noses in well-bred
baboons. But it never occurs to him to ask why the admiration of blue noses
is healthy in baboons, so that it develops their race properly, while
similar maidenly admiration either of blue noses or red noses in men would
be improper, and develop the race improperly. The word itself 'proper'
being one of which he has never asked, or guessed, the meaning. And when he
imagined the gradation of the cloudings in feathers to represent successive
generation, it never occurred to him to look at the much finer cloudy
gradations in the clouds of dawn themselves; and explain the modes of
sexual preference and selective development which had brought _them_ to
their scarlet glory, before the cock could crow thrice. Putting all these
vespertilian speculations out of our way, the human facts concerning colour
are briefly these. Wherever men are noble, they love bright colour; and
wherever they can live healthily, bright colour is given them--in sky, sea,
flowers, and living creatures.
On the other hand, wherever men are ignoble and sensual, they endure
without pain, and at last even come to like (especially if artists,)
mud-colour and black, and to dislike rose-colour and white. And wherever it
is unhealthy for {85} them to live, the poisonousness of the place is
marked by some ghastly colour in air, earth, or flowers.
There are, of course, exceptions to all such widely founded laws; there are
poisonous berries of scarlet, and pestilent skies that are fair. But, if we
once honestly compare a venomous wood-fungus, rotting into black
dissolution of dripped slime at its edges, with a spring gentian; or a puff
adder with a salmon trout, or a fog in Bermondsey with a clear sky at
Berne, we shall get hold of the entire question on its right side; and be
able afterwards to study at our leisure, or accept without doubt or
trouble, facts of apparently contrary meaning. And the practical lesson
which I wish to leave with the reader is, that lovely flowers, and green
trees growing in the open air, are the proper guides of men to the places
which their Maker intended them to inhabit; while the flowerless and
treeless deserts--of reed, or sand, or rock,--are meant to be either
heroically invaded and redeemed, or surrendered to the wild creatures which
are appointed for them; happy and wonderful in their wild abodes.
Nor is the world so small but that we may yet leave in it also unconquered
spaces of beautiful solitude; where the chamois and red deer may wander
fearless,--nor any fire of avarice scorch from the Highlands of Alp, or
Grampian, the rapture of the heath, and the rose.
* * * * *
{86}