THE PARABLE OF JOTHAM.
1. I do not know if my readers were checked, as I wished them to be, at
least for a moment, in the close of the last chapter, by my talking of
thistles and dandelions changing into seaweed, by gradation of which,
doubtless, Mr. Darwin can furnish us with specious and sufficient
instances. But the two groups will not be contemplated in our Oxford system
as in any parental relations whatsoever.
We shall, however, find some very notable relations existing between the
two groups of the wild flowers of dry land, which represent, in the widest
extent, and the distinctest opposition, the two characters of material
serviceableness and unserviceableness; the groups which in our English
classification will be easily remembered as those of the Thyme, and the
Daisy.
The one, scented as with incense--medicinal--and in all gentle and humble
ways, useful. The other, scentless--helpless for ministry to the body;
infinitely dear as the bringer of light, ruby, white and gold; the three
colours of the Day, with no hue of shade in it. Therefore I {118} take it
on the coins of St. George for the symbol of the splendour or light of
heaven, which is dearest where humblest.
2. Now these great two orders--of which the types are the thyme and the
daisy--you are to remember generally as the 'Herbs' and the 'Sunflowers.'
You are not to call them Lipped flowers, nor Composed flowers; because the
first is a vulgar term; for when you once come to be able to draw a lip,
or, in noble duty, to kiss one, you will know that no other flower in earth
is like that: and the second is an indefinite term; for a foxglove is as
much a 'composed' flower as a daisy; but it is composed in the shape of a
spire, instead of the shape of the sun. And again a thistle, which common
botany calls a composed flower, as well as a daisy, is composed in quite
another shape, being on the whole, bossy instead of flat; and of another
temper, or composition of mind, also, being connected in that respect with
butterburs, and a vast company of rough, knotty, half-black or brown, and
generally unluminous--flowers I can scarcely call them--and weeds I will
not,--creatures, at all events, in nowise to be gathered under the general
name 'Composed,' with the stars that crown Chaucer's Alcestis, when she
returns to the day from the dead.
But the wilder and stronger blossoms of the Hawk's-eye--again you see I
refuse for them the word weed;--and the waste-loving Chicory, which the
Venetians call "Sponsa solis," are all to be held in one class with the
{119} Sunflowers; but dedicate,--the daisy to Alcestis alone; others to
Clytia, or the Physician Apollo himself: but I can't follow their mythology
yet awhile.
3. Now in these two families you have typically Use opposed to Beauty in
_wildness_; it is their wildness which is their virtue;--that the thyme is
sweet where it is unthought of, and the daisies red, where the foot
despises them: while, in other orders, wildness is their
crime,--"Wherefore, when I looked that it should bring forth grapes,
brought it forth wild grapes?" But in all of them you must distinguish
between the pure wildness of flowers and their distress. It may not be our
duty to tame them; but it must be, to relieve.
4. It chanced, as I was arranging the course of these two chapters, that I
had examples given me of distressed and happy wildness, in immediate
contrast. The first, I grieve to say, was in a bit of my own brushwood,
left uncared-for evidently many a year before it became mine. I had to cut
my way into it through a mass of thorny ruin; black, birds-nest like,
entanglement of brittle spray round twisted stems of ill-grown birches
strangling each other, and changing half into roots among the rock clefts;
knotted stumps of never-blossoming blackthorn, and choked stragglings of
holly, all laced and twisted and tethered round with an untouchable, almost
unhewable, thatch, a foot thick, of dead bramble and rose, laid over rotten
ground through which the water soaked ceaselessly, undermining it into
merely unctuous {120} clods and clots, knitted together by mossy sponge. It
was all Nature's free doing! she had had her way with it to the uttermost;
and clearly needed human help and interference in her business; and yet
there was not one plant in the whole ruinous and deathful riot of the
place, whose nature was not in itself wholesome and lovely; but all lost
for want of discipline.
5. The other piece of wild growth was among the fallen blocks of limestone
under Malham Cove. Sheltered by the cliff above from stress of wind, the
ash and hazel wood spring there in a fair and perfect freedom, without a
diseased bough, or an unwholesome shade. I do not know why mine is all
encumbered with overgrowth, and this so lovely that scarce a branch could
be gathered but with injury;--while underneath, the oxalis, and the two
smallest geraniums (Lucidum and Herb-Robert) and the mossy saxifrage, and
the cross-leaved bed-straw, and the white pansy, wrought themselves into
wreaths among the fallen crags, in which every leaf rejoiced, and was at
rest.
6. Now between these two states of equally natural growth, the point of
difference that forced itself on me (and practically enough, in the work I
had in my own wood), was not so much the withering and waste of the one,
and the life of the other, as the thorniness and cruelty of the one, and
the softness of the other. In Malham Cove, the stones of the brook were
softer with moss than any silken pillow--the crowded oxalis leaves yielded
to the pressure of the hand, and were not felt--the cloven {121} leaves of
the Herb-Robert and orbed clusters of its companion overflowed every rent
in the rude crags with living balm; there was scarcely a place left by the
tenderness of the happy things, where one might not lay down one's forehead
on their warm softness, and sleep. But in the waste and distressed ground,
the distress had changed itself to cruelty. The leaves had all perished,
and the bending saplings, and the wood of trust;--but the thorns were
there, immortal, and the gnarled and sapless roots, and the dusty
treacheries of decay.
7. Of which things you will find it good to consider also otherwise than
botanically. For all these lower organisms suffer and perish, or are
gladdened and flourish, under conditions which are in utter precision
symbolical, and in utter fidelity representative, of the conditions which
induce adversity and prosperity in the kingdoms of men: and the Eternal
Demeter,--Mother, and Judge,--brings forth, as the herb yielding seed, so
also the thorn and the thistle, not to herself, but _to thee_.
8. You have read the words of the great Law often enough;--have you ever
thought enough of them to know the difference between these two appointed
means of Distress? The first, the Thorn, is the type of distress _caused by
crime_, changing the soft and breathing leaf into inflexible and wounding
stubbornness. The second is the distress appointed to be the means and
herald of good,--Thou shalt see the stubborn thistle bursting, into glossy
purple, which outredden, all voluptuous garden roses. {122}
9. It is strange that, after much hunting, I cannot find authentic note of
the day when Scotland took the thistle for her emblem; and I have no space
(in this chapter at least) for tradition; but, with whatever lightness of
construing we may receive the symbol, it is actually the truest that could
have been found, for some conditions of the Scottish mind. There is no
flower which the Proserpina of our Northern Sicily cherishes more dearly:
and scarcely any of us recognize enough the beautiful power of its
close-set stars, and rooted radiance of ground leaves; yet the stubbornness
and ungraceful rectitude of its stem, and the besetting of its wholesome
substance with that fringe of offence, and the forwardness of it, and
dominance,--I fear to lacess some of my dearest friends if I went on:--let
them rather, with Bailie Jarvie's true conscience,[33] take their Scott
from the inner shelf in their heart's library which all true Scotsmen give
him, and trace, with the swift reading of memory, the characters of Fergus
M'Ivor, Hector M'Intyre, Mause Headrigg, Alison Wilson, Richie {123}
Moniplies, and Andrew Fairservice; and then say, if the faults of all
these, drawn as they are with a precision of touch like a Corinthian
sculptor's of the acanthus leaf, can be found in anything like the same
strength in other races, or if so stubbornly folded and starched moni-plies
of irritating kindliness, selfish friendliness, lowly conceit, and
intolerable fidelity, are native to any other spot of the wild earth of the
habitable globe.
10. Will you note also--for this is of extreme interest--that these
essential faults are all mean faults;--what we may call ground-growing
faults; conditions of semi-education, of hardly-treated homelife, or of
coarsely-minded and wandering prosperity. How literally may we go back from
the living soul symbolized, to the strangely accurate earthly symbol, in
the prickly weed. For if, with its bravery of endurance, and carelessness
in choice of home, we find also definite faculty and habit of migration,
volant mechanism for choiceless journey, not divinely directed in
pilgrimage to known shrines; but carried at the wind's will by a Spirit
which listeth _not_--it will go hard but that the plant shall become, if
not dreaded, at least despised; and, in its wandering and reckless
splendour, disgrace the garden of the sluggard, and possess the inheritance
of the prodigal: until even its own nature seems contrary to good, and the
invocation of the just man be made to it as the executor of Judgment, "Let
thistles grow instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley."
11. Yet to be despised--either for men or flowers--may {124} be no
ill-fortune; the real ill-fortune is only to be despicable. These faults of
human character, wherever found, observe, belong to it as
ill-trained--incomplete; confirm themselves only in the vulgar. There is no
base pertinacity, no overweening conceit, in the Black Douglas, or
Claverhouse, or Montrose; in these we find the pure Scottish temper, of
heroic endurance and royal pride; but, when, in the pay, and not deceived,
but purchased, idolatry of Mammon, the Scottish persistence and pride
become knit and vested in the spleuchan, and your stiff Covenanter makes
his covenant with Death, and your Old Mortality deciphers only the
senseless legends of the eternal gravestone,--you get your weed,
earth-grown, in bitter verity, and earth-devastating, in bitter strength.
12. I have told you, elsewhere, we are always first to study national
character in the highest and purest examples. But if our knowledge is to be
complete, we have to study also the special diseases of national character.
And in exact opposition to the most solemn virtue of Scotland, the domestic
truth and tenderness breathed in all Scottish song, you have this special
disease and mortal cancer, this woody-fibriness, literally, of temper and
thought: the consummation of which into pure lignite, or rather black
Devil's charcoal--the sap of the birks of Aberfeldy become cinder, and the
blessed juices of them, deadly gas,--you may know in its pure blackness
best in the work of the greatest of these ground-growing Scotchmen, Adam
Smith. {125}
13. No man of like capacity, I believe, born of any other nation, could
have deliberately, and with no momentary shadow of suspicion or question,
formalized the spinous and monstrous fallacy that human commerce and policy
are _naturally_ founded on the desire of every man to possess his
neighbour's goods.
_This_ is the 'release unto us Barabbas,' with a witness; and the
deliberate systematization of that cry, and choice, for perpetual
repetition and fulfilment in Christian statesmanship, has been, with the
strange precision of natural symbolism and retribution, signed, (as of old,
by strewing of ashes on Kidron,) by strewing of ashes on the brooks of
Scotland; waters once of life, health, music, and divine tradition; but to
whose festering scum you may now set fire with a candle; and of which,
round the once excelling palace of Scotland, modern sanitary science is now
helplessly contending with the poisonous exhalations.
14. I gave this chapter its heading, because I had it in my mind to work
out the meaning of the fable in the ninth chapter of Judges, from what I
had seen on that thorny ground of mine, where the bramble was king over all
the trees of the wood. But the thoughts are gone from me now; and as I
re-read the chapter of Judges,--now, except in my memory, unread, as it
chances, for many a year,--the sadness of that story of Gideon fastens on
me, and silences me. _This_ the end of his angel visions, and dream-led
victories, the slaughter of all his {126} sons but this youngest,[34]--and
he never again heard of in Israel!
You Scottish children of the Rock, taught through all your once pastoral
and noble lives by many a sweet miracle of dew on fleece and ground,--once
servants of mighty kings, and keepers of sacred covenant; have you indeed
dealt truly with your warrior kings, and prophet saints, or are these ruins
of their homes, and shrines, dark with the fire that fell from the curse of
Jerubbael?
* * * * *
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