THE PARABLE OF JOASH.
1. Some ten or twelve years ago, I bought--three times twelve are
thirty-six--of a delightful little book by Mrs. Gatty, called 'Aunt Judy's
Tales'--whereof to make presents to my little lady friends. I had, at that
happy time, perhaps from four-and-twenty to six-and-thirty--I forget
exactly how many--very particular little lady friends; and greatly wished
Aunt Judy to be the thirty-seventh,--the kindest, wittiest, prettiest girl
one had ever read of, at least in so entirely proper and orthodox
literature.
2. Not but that it is a suspicious sign of infirmity of faith in our modern
moralists to make their exemplary young people always pretty; and dress
them always in the height of the fashion. One may read Miss Edgeworth's
'Harry and Lucy,' 'Frank and Mary,' 'Fashionable Tales,' or 'Parents'
Assistant,' through, from end to end, with extremest care; and never find
out whether Lucy was tall or short, nor whether Mary was dark or fair, nor
how Miss Annaly was dressed, nor--which was my own chief point of
interest--what was the colour of {107} Rosamond's eyes. Whereas Aunt Judy,
in charming position after position, is shown to have expressed all her
pure evangelical principles with the prettiest of lips; and to have had her
gown, though puritanically plain, made by one of the best modistes in
London.
3. Nevertheless, the book is wholesome and useful; and the nicest story in
it, as far as I recollect, is an inquiry into the subject which is our
present business, 'What is a weed?'--in which, by many pleasant devices,
Aunt Judy leads her little brothers and sisters to discern that a weed is
'a plant in the wrong place.'
'Vegetable' in the wrong place, by the way, I think Aunt Judy says, being a
precisely scientific little aunt. But I can't keep it out of my own less
scientific head that 'vegetable' means only something going to be boiled. I
like 'plant' better for general sense, besides that it's shorter.
Whatever we call them, Aunt Judy is perfectly right about them as far as
she has gone; but, as happens often even to the best of evangelical
instructresses, she has stopped just short of the gist of the whole matter.
It is entirely true that a weed is a plant that has got into a wrong place;
but it never seems to have occurred to Aunt Judy that some plants never
_do_!
Who ever saw a wood anemone or a heath blossom in the wrong place? Who ever
saw nettle or hemlock in a right one? And yet, the difference between
flower and weed, (I use, for convenience sake, these words in their {108}
familiar opposition,) certainly does not consist merely in the flowers
being innocent, and the weed stinging and venomous. We do not call the
nightshade a weed in our hedges, nor the scarlet agaric in our woods. But
we do the corncockle in our fields.
4. Had the thoughtful little tutoress gone but one thought farther, and
instead of "a vegetable in a wrong place," (which it may happen to the
innocentest vegetable sometimes to be, without turning into a weed,
therefore,) said, "A vegetable which has an innate disposition to _get_
into the wrong place," she would have greatly furthered the matter for us;
but then she perhaps would have felt herself to be uncharitably dividing
with vegetables her own little evangelical property of original sin.
5. This, you will find, nevertheless, to be the very essence of weed
character--in plants, as in men. If you glance through your botanical
books, you will see often added certain names--'a troublesome weed.' It is
not its being venomous, or ugly, but its being impertinent--thrusting
itself where it has no business, and hinders other people's business--that
makes a weed of it. The most accursed of all vegetables, the one that has
destroyed for the present even the possibility of European civilization, is
only called a weed in the slang of its votaries;[32] but in the finest and
truest English we call so the plant which {109} has come to us by chance
from the same country, the type of mere senseless prolific activity, the
American water-plant, choking our streams till the very fish that leap out
of them cannot fall back, but die on the clogged surface; and indeed, for
this unrestrainable, unconquerable insolence of uselessness, what name can
be enough dishonourable?
6. I pass to vegetation of nobler rank.
You remember, I was obliged in the last chapter to leave my poppy, for the
present, without an English specific name, because I don't like Gerarde's
'Corn-rose,' and can't yet think of another. Nevertheless, I would have
used Gerarde's name, if the corn-rose were as much a rose as the corn-flag
is a flag. But it isn't. The rose and lily have quite different relations
to the corn. The lily is grass in loveliness, as the corn is grass in use;
and both grow together in peace--gladiolus in the wheat, and narcissus in
the pasture. But the rose is of another and higher order than the corn, and
you never saw a cornfield overrun with sweetbriar or apple-blossom.
They have no mind, they, to get into the wrong place.
What is it, then, this temper in some plants--malicious as it
seems--intrusive, at all events, or erring,--which brings them out of their
places--thrusts them where they thwart us and offend?
7. Primarily, it is mere hardihood and coarseness of make. A plant that can
live anywhere, will often live where it is not wanted. But the delicate and
tender ones {110} keep at home. You have no trouble in 'keeping down' the
spring gentian. It rejoices in its own Alpine home, and makes the earth as
like heaven as it can, but yields as softly as the air, if you want it to
give place. Here in England, it will only grow on the loneliest moors,
above the high force of Tees; its Latin name, for _us_ (I may as well tell
you at once) is to be 'Lucia verna;' and its English one, Lucy of Teesdale.
8. But a plant may be hardy, and coarse of make, and able to live anywhere,
and yet be no weed. The coltsfoot, so far as I know, is the first of
large-leaved plants to grow afresh on ground that has been disturbed: fall
of Alpine débris, ruin of railroad embankment, waste of drifted slime by
flood, it seeks to heal and redeem; but it does not offend us in our
gardens, nor impoverish us in our fields.
Nevertheless, mere coarseness of structure, indiscriminate hardihood, is at
least a point of some unworthiness in a plant. That it should have no
choice of home, no love of native land, is ungentle; much more if such
discrimination as it has, be immodest, and incline it, seemingly, to open
and much-traversed places, where it may be continually seen of strangers.
The tormentilla gleams in showers along the mountain turf; her delicate
crosslets are separate, though constellate, as the rubied daisy. But the
king-cup--(blessing be upon it always no less)--crowds itself sometimes
into too burnished flame of inevitable gold. I don't know if there was
anything in the {111} darkness of this last spring to make it brighter in
resistance; but I never saw any spaces of full warm yellow, in natural
colour, so intense as the meadows between Reading and the Thames; nor did I
know perfectly what purple and gold meant, till I saw a field of park land
embroidered a foot deep with king-cup and clover--while I was correcting my
last notes on the spring colours of the Royal Academy--at Aylesbury.
9. And there are two other questions of extreme subtlety connected with
this main one. What shall we say of the plants whose entire destiny is
parasitic--which are not only sometimes, and _im_pertinently, but always,
and pertinently, out of place; not only out of the right place, but out of
any place of their own? When is mistletoe, for instance, in the right
place, young ladies, think you? On an apple tree, or on a ceiling? When is
ivy in the right place?--when wallflower? The ivy has been torn down from
the towers of Kenilworth; the weeds from the arches of the Coliseum, and
from the steps of the Araceli, irreverently, vilely, and in vain; but how
are we to separate the creatures whose office it is to abate the grief of
ruin by their gentleness,
"wafting wallflower scents
From out the crumbling ruins of fallen pride,
And chambers of transgression, now forlorn,"
from those which truly resist the toil of men, and conspire against their
fame; which are cunning to consume, and {112} prolific to encumber; and of
whose perverse and unwelcome sowing we know, and can say assuredly, "An
enemy hath done this."
10. Again. The character of strength which gives prevalence over others to
any common plant, is more or less consistently dependent on woody fibre in
the leaves; giving them strong ribs and great expanding extent; or spinous
edges, and wrinkled or gathered extent.
Get clearly into your mind the nature of those two conditions. When a leaf
is to be spread wide, like the Burdock, it is supported by a framework of
extending ribs like a Gothic roof. The supporting function of these is
geometrical; every one is constructed like the girders of a bridge, or
beams of a floor, with all manner of science in the distribution of their
substance in the section, for narrow and deep strength; and the shafts are
mostly hollow. But when the extending space of a leaf is to be enriched
with fulness of folds, and become beautiful in wrinkles, this may be done
either by pure undulation as of a liquid current along the leaf edge, or by
sharp 'drawing'--or 'gathering' I believe ladies would call it--and
stitching of the edges together. And this stitching together, if to be done
very strongly, is done round a bit of stick, as a sail is reefed round a
mast; and this bit of stick needs to be compactly, not geometrically
strong; its function is essentially that of starch,--not to hold the leaf
up off the ground against gravity; but to stick the edges out, stiffly, in
a crimped frill. And in beautiful work of {113} this kind, which we are
meant to study, the stays of the leaf--or stay-bones--are finished off very
sharply and exquisitely at the points; and indeed so much so, that they
prick our fingers when we touch them; for they are not at all meant to be
touched, but admired.
11. To be admired,--with qualification, indeed, always, but with extreme
respect for their endurance and orderliness. Among flowers that pass away,
and leaves that shake as with ague, or shrink like bad cloth,--these, in
their sturdy growth and enduring life, we are bound to honour; and, under
the green holly, remember how much softer friendship was failing, and how
much of other loving, folly. And yet--you are not to confuse the thistle
with the cedar that is in Lebanon; nor to forget--if the spinous nature of
it become too cruel to provoke and offend--the parable of Joash to Amaziah,
and its fulfilment: "There passed by a wild beast that was in Lebanon, and
trode down the thistle."
12. Then, lastly, if this rudeness and insensitiveness of nature be gifted
with no redeeming beauty; if the boss of the thistle lose its purple, and
the star of the Lion's tooth, its light; and, much more, if service be
perverted as beauty is lost, and the honied tube, and medicinal leaf,
change into mere swollen emptiness, and salt brown membrane, swayed in
nerveless languor by the idle sea,--at last the separation between the two
natures is as great as between the fruitful earth and fruitless ocean; and
between the living hands that tend the Garden of Herbs where {114} Love is,
and those unclasped, that toss with tangle and with shells.
* * * * *
13. I had a long bit in my head, that I wanted to write, about St. George
of the Seaweed, but I've no time to do it; and those few words of
Tennyson's are enough, if one thinks of them: only I see, in correcting
press, that I've partly misapplied the idea of 'gathering' in the leaf
edge. It would be more accurate to say it was gathered at the central rib;
but there is nothing in needlework that will represent the actual excess by
lateral growth at the edge, giving three or four inches of edge for one of
centre. But the stiffening of the fold by the thorn which holds it out is
very like the action of a ship's spars on its sails; and absolutely in many
cases like that of the spines in a fish's fin, passing into the various
conditions of serpentine and dracontic crest, connected with all the
terrors and adversities of nature; not to be dealt with in a chapter on
weeds.
14. Here is a sketch of a crested leaf of less adverse temper, which may as
well be given, together with Plate III., in this number, these two
engravings being meant for examples of two different methods of drawing,
both useful according to character of subject. Plate III. is sketched first
with a finely-pointed pen, and common ink, on white paper; then washed
rapidly with colour, and retouched with the pen to give sharpness and
completion. {115} This method is used because the thistle leaves are full
of complex and sharp sinuosities, and set with intensely sharp spines
passing into hairs, which require many kinds of execution with the fine
point to imitate at all. In the drawing there was more look of the bloom or
woolliness on the stems, but it was useless to try for this in the
mezzotint, and I desired Mr. Allen to leave his work at the stage where it
expressed as much form as I wanted. The leaves are of the common marsh
thistle, of which more anon; and the two long lateral ones are only two
different views of the same leaf, while the central figure is a young leaf
just opening. It beat me, in its delicate bossing, and I had to leave it,
discontentedly enough.
Plate IV. is much better work, being of an easier subject, adequately
enough rendered by perfectly simple means. Here I had only a succulent and
membranous surface to represent, with definite outlines, and merely
undulating folds; and this is sufficiently done by a careful and firm pen
outline on grey paper, with a slight wash of colour afterwards, reinforced
in the darks; then marking the lights with white. This method is classic
and authoritative, being used by many of the greatest masters, (by Holbein
continually;) and it is much the best which the general student can adopt
for expression of the action and muscular power of plants.
The goodness or badness of such work depends absolutely on the truth of the
single line. You will find a thousand botanical drawings which will give
you a {116} delicate and deceptive resemblance of the leaf, for one that
will give you the right convexity in its backbone, the right perspective of
its peaks when they foreshorten, or the right relation of depth in the
shading of its dimples. On which, in leaves as in faces, no little
expression of temper depends.
Meantime we have yet to consider somewhat more touching that temper itself,
in next chapter.
* * * * *
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