the species the albino is noted, and any replacement of stamens by
petals, as in the wild buttercup, is the rare exception. But the
cultivated plants have led a charmed life, and we scarcely wonder that
the plants in the bed of sweet peas or gladiolus, canna or dahlia, are
as diverse in form and color as the pieces in a crazy-bedquilt. Man,
with all his ingenuity and skill, has been at work molding the plant
clay made plastic by generations of special culture.
In one sense the greenhouse, the garden, orchard, and even the
cultivated field are all dealing with monstrosities. The well-filled
horticultural hall at a State or county fair is a vast collection of
unnatural curiosities--that is, they do not occur in Nature, but are
truly the creations of the mind of man as worked out along lines of
vegetable physiology and stimulated plant production. For dinner this
very day the writer ate a slice of a modern watermelon. What a triumph
of horticultural art was exhibited in that giant fruit, each seed of
which was filled with the accumulated tendencies of a generation of
high breeding! There was represented the influence of soil and
selection, of crossing and of culture, until the wild melon, which
none of us sees or cares to see, is gone and a special creation takes
its place, with its great demands upon any one who would attempt to
grow it to perfection.
[Illustration: FIG. 3.--A TWIN-FLOWERED CYPRIPEDIUM ACAULE (AIT.).]
The art of breeding might possibly have deprived it of seeds had there
been some other convenient method for propagation, as is true of many
of our tree fruits, the navel orange being a striking example. Along
with the absence of seeds and the presence of fine flavor there is
truly a monstrous form, in that one orange is within and at the
"navel" end of the other.
Should we glance at some of our garden vegetables, as, for example,
the cabbages in their various races, every one will be struck with the
strangeness, to say the least, of the forms produced. In contrast with
the head of the true cabbage, where leaf is folded upon leaf until a
mass of metamorphosed foliage as large as a half bushel is produced,
there is the cauliflower, with the edible substance stored in a fleshy
inflorescence that has lost its normal function and become truly
monstrous. Were it not so tender and delicate a food we might be
disposed to smile at the absurdity of the whole thing, or at the
kohl-rabi, with its turniplike bulb in the stem just above the surface
of the ground. It is certainly a plastic species that will give such
diverse and fantastic forms--so far from the wild state, and for that
reason so useful to man.
In the same manner a comparison of our orchard fruits with the forms
from which they came would lead to the thought that man has made them
to his liking, and not for service to the plant species. They are
abnormal, judged by all standards in Nature; monstrous in size and in
many cases have lost their essential structure as seed-producing
organs.
Coming to the ornamental grounds, the disguises are largely swept
away, and there is but little hope of judging what the original plants
may have been from which have descended the favorites of the flower
bed and the conservatory. Species have been split into a thousand and
one varieties, each with its peculiarities and each with the potency
for greater deviation. Where shall we cast the line and land an
example? The rose show of June is only surpassed by the chrysanthemum
exhibition in autumn. There must be the new sorts brought out each
year, whether the fancy be for a special shade or color or a striking
new shape of bud or form of bloom. Would you realize what a novelty
means to those in the craft who watch a group of carnation growers as
they hang over the exhibit of a "new" rival, and consider all the
merits and defects of the candidate for a certificate?
All the beauties of the flower garden are so familiar to us that it is
not expected that they will be considered unnatural. If the hydrangea
makes a panicle larger than it can bear, man helps it out with a
string or stake, for by overdoing it is not undone any more than is
the coddled peach tree held up at fruiting time by a dozen poles, or
the forced lily with a weak back supported upright by an artificial
green stem at church on Easter morning.
But even here there are monstrosities in the true sense. The asparagus
or sweet potato stem occasionally broadens out into a ribbon, and it
passes as an abnormity. The same thing takes place in the flower
cluster of cockscomb (_Celosia cristata_), and if it failed to produce
a strange fan-shaped and highly colored and crested top the owner
would complain that her seed had given her only an inferior pigweed,
and therefore not come true to name. The attractiveness of the
cockscomb resides in the strange habit the plant has of broadening the
upper end of the flower stalk out into a form that is truly monstrous.
And this brings me to speak of a form that attracted my attention
during the present season, samples of which are shown in Fig. 4.
[Illustration: FIG. 4.--MONSTROUS BLOSSOMS OF FOXGLOVE.]
The striking feature of the specimens of foxglove (_Digitalis
purpurea_) under consideration is the production of an enormous
somewhat bell-shaped flower at the extremity of the long racemose
inflorescence, and at a time when only a few of the lowermost blossoms
upon the stem have opened. The normal digitalis flower has a large
pendant purple corolla much spotted upon the middle lobe of the larger
and lower lip. On the other hand, the truly monstrous flowers, two to
three inches across, are borne terminally and are quite uniformly
bell-shaped, with the lobes from twelve to fourteen and spotted evenly
over all the surface. The four stamens of the normal flower have
increased to twelve in three examined and to thirteen in another.
These stamens are normal in size and situated upon the corolla tube,
except that there is no indication of their being in long and short
pairs.
The single pistil is many times enlarged in the monstrous blossom--in
one instance two thirds of an inch in diameter for the ovary. Within
the outer ovarian wall there was a circle of five petaloid pistils,
some showing the placentæ and ovules intermixed with the pink and
purplish petaloid expansions.
Within the circle above mentioned there was a second pistil, tipped
like the original with petal-like lobes instead of a stigma. The
column was found so closely built up that the parts would not
separate, and a cross-section was made through it, which showed that
the pistil had a greenish central stalk around which the ovarian
cavities were scattered quite irregularly, all bearing numerous
ovules. In the flowers with twelve stamens there were four tips to the
stigma, and the eight cavities were to be distinguished in the ovary,
although they were not arranged in any regular order and not uniform
in size. In short, the transections of these resembled the seed
cavities seen in a slice of a large tomato of the "trophy" or
"ponderosa" type.
The florists' catalogues advertise in a few instances this "_Digitalis
monstrosa_," and it is presumed that the specimens from which the
engraving was made were from a packet of this "strain" of seed. As but
a small percentage of the plants in the bed examined were monstrous,
letters were addressed to some German growers of the seed, with
questions as to this commercial monstrosity. One reply contained the
statement that the form known as "monstrosa" had been in the market
about ten years, and that about fifty per cent of the plants produce
the strange terminal flowers. Another correspondent recalls the form
in question as having been catalogued for more than forty years, and
that it is described in a work upon gardening published in 1859, in
which it states that the seed of this variety must only be gathered
from the capsules of the monstrous flowers in order to preserve the
abnormity. Concerning this last my correspondent said that it is all
the same whether the seed is taken from the capsules of monstrous
flowers or from the whole spike. Seed taken in this way will give from
twenty-five to thirty-five per cent of the monstrous flowers, but the
ratio varies from year to year.
There are some advantages to the floriculturist in the monstrous form
as the first bloom in it is uppermost and very conspicuous, while in
the normal form the blooms appear from below upward, and the drooping
tip of the spike is the last to produce flowers. The case in hand is a
remarkable deviation from the type in many ways, but most interesting
of all is the fact that floriculturists have by selection developed a
variety that, in a packet of a hundred seeds, is quite certain to give
some plants of the type "monstrosa," which it bears as its trade name.
MALAY LITERATURE.
BY R. CLYDE FORD.
The Malay has a literature peculiarly his own, and in it comes to
light all that subtle appreciation of Nature which marks him as a
_Naturmensch_, but not a savage. This lore of his race he carries
mostly in his memory, for to reduce it to writing has been, until
recently, a task at once laborious and scholarly, and the ordinary
Malay, living in the ease of perpetual summer, is neither. Still,
there are dog-eared old manuscripts which circulate from one village
or _campong_ to another, and these are often read aloud in the
evenings to eager companies. And it makes a scene never to be
forgotten, to see a dozen people seated in the shadows around some old
man and to listen to the mellow cadences of his voice as he reads to
them a tale of the olden time, of the great days of his race, before
the foreigner's ships had scared the fish from the bays or turned them
into noisy harbors; the sparkling stars peep through the ragged,
whispering fronds of the palm trees, the yellow light of the _damar_
torch shines on eager faces, crickets chirp in the grass, and from
afar comes the booming of the sea borne on the soft breath of the
night wind.
Malay literature, like most literatures, has had an ancient and a
modern period. In the former we behold a primitive people dominated by
Sanskrit life and civilization, and naturally enough the literature of
this time is mostly translations of Sanskrit poems and romances, or at
least productions inspired by such, and full of allusions to Hindu
mythology. Probably to this early time may be traced such works as
_Sri Rama_, a free translation of the _Ramayana_; the _Hikayat Pancha
Tantra_, an adaptation of the _Hitaspodêsa_; _Radin Mantri_, a history
of the love affairs of a Javan royal prince; the _Shaïr Bidasari_, an
epic; and several other such epics and romances.
One must not think that the language of these works is old-fashioned
or obsolete, as Beowulf and Chaucer are to us, or the Niebelungen Lied
in German. On the contrary, they are full of Arabic words and many
other marks of recent composition; but it is the matter, the
conditions of life described, the evident antiquity of the very
feeling of the productions, that lead one to refer them to the early
period.
There are also some works that are genuinely Malay in origin and
inspiration, and probably of a date that would put them between the
ancient and modern periods. Of such is _Hong Tuah_, a story of a
prince of Malacca who was a kind of King Arthur of his day. This work
exists in several manuscripts, some of which are in England, one in
Leyden, and one or two in the East Indies, and the date of the oldest
is not before 1172 of the Hegira. Considering the fact that the year
1317 of the Mohammedan era does not commence till May 12, 1899, we
thus see that many of the manuscripts of Malay literature are of no
great antiquity. Another of these intermediate works is the _Sejarat
Malayu_, or Malay Annals, which narrates the history of the Malays of
Malacca, and their heroic defense against the Portuguese in the year
1511. It is divided into chapters, and is about the only notable
historical composition in the language.
The modern period is that period which marks the domination of Islam
in the far East, the period in which the Malay mind has adjusted
itself to a new faith and a new education. It is hard to tell when
Mohammedanism first obtained a real foothold among the Malays, but
probably not much before the fourteenth century. However, the conquest
when once effected was complete, and to-day the people of Tanah Malayu
are among the strictest followers of the Prophet.
In a certain sense this period of the literature has been fruitful,
but not so fruitful as the former one. Originality has been checked
and imagination deadened, and the result is seen in a loss of
sprightliness and vivacity. Works of morals and philosophy and
compilations of Mohammedan law, have flourished. Still, we find some
prose works of this period which are commendable; they even have some
of the spirit of the earlier writings by which, no doubt, they were
inspired; among these may be mentioned the _Tadju Elsalathin_, or
Crown of Kings, by a mendicant monk, and the _Hikayat Sultan Ibrahim_,
a religious romance of some beauty and pathos.
Within the last seventy-five years the prose literature has received
some notable additions through the writings of Abdulla bin Abdulkadir,
a famous _moonshi_ of Singapore, who attained to some distinction
under the Straits Government, being sent once or twice on missions to
native states. He was born in Malacca toward the close of the last
century, of Arab-Malay parentage, and received the ordinary education
of a Malay lad of good family. After Singapore was founded, in 1819,
he moved thither, where he thenceforth spent most of his life. His
most important works are the _Hikayat Abdulla_, an autobiography, the
_Pelayaran Abdulla_, an account of his trip for the government to
Kelantan, and a narrative of his pilgrimage to Mecca made in the year
1854.
Without a doubt Abdulla was the most cultured Malay who ever wrote. In
his capacity as teacher he was often called upon to help missionaries
with their translations of the Bible into Malay; though a devout
Mohammedan, he was more than ordinarily liberal in belief, and quite
willing to see the contest between Christianity and Islam go on fairly
and on its merits. He once assisted a Mr. Thompsen, of Malacca, in
translating portions of the Scriptures, but it was a thankless task,
for the missionary was obstinate, and thought he knew more about the
language than the _moonshi_ himself. As a result, such wretched Malay
got into the work that Abdulla felt called upon in his autobiography
to set himself right before the world. This is what he says:
"... But let it be known to all gentlemen who read my autobiography
that where there are wrong expressions or absurd Malay phrases in Mr.
Thompsen's translation they must consider well the restraint put upon
me, wherein I could neither add nor subtract a word without the
concurrence of Mr. Thompsen. Now, because of all the circumstances
mentioned here, let no gentleman rail at my character, for I was
merely Mr. Thompsen's _moonshi_ or instructor. I acknowledge I am not
destitute of faults, but truly by God's grace I am able to distinguish
between right and wrong in all that relates to the idiom of the Malay
language, for I have made it my study. I did not attain it by hearing,
nor by the way, nor in the bustle of the crowd."
But it is in poetry that we must look for whatever of originality and
beauty there is in Malay literature, a fact not to be wondered at if
we consider the softness and mellifluence of the language, which lends
itself easily to the requirements of rhyme and rhythm. Two chief forms
of poetry are recognized--the _pantun_ and the _shaïr_.
THE PANTUN.--The _pantun_ in Malay literature corresponds to the lyric
verse of Western lands. It consists of one or many quatrains, as the
case may be, the lines usually from ten to twelve syllables in
length. However, if worse comes to worst, the Malay poet with true
poetic license suits himself in preference to others, and frequently
employs as few as six or as many as thirteen syllables in a line. The
length of a syllable is determined by tonic accent, but penult
syllables not ending in a consonant are long, those ending in silent
_i_ are short. But here, too, the Malay often departs from theory, and
his rhymes, instead of being always exact, are constructed for the eye
and not for the ear; and as for the short lines, they have to be
drawled out into a legitimate scansion. The lines are not written one
below another as with us, but the second opposite the first, the third
under the second and opposite the fourth, and so on.
The _pantun_ is much employed in improvisation, the stanzas being
recited alternately by the two taking part. To the Malayan mind the
beauty of this kind of verse lies in the artistic perfection of each
quatrain by which it is made to veil some charming metaphor, which in
turn serves in the last two lines to point a moral or express some
sentiment of love or friendship, depending on the allegory of the
preceding. To illustrate:
_Tinggih tinggih pokok lamburi
Sayang puchok-nia meniapa awan
Habis teloh puwas kuchari
Bagei punei menchari kawan._
_Bulan trang bintang berchaya
Burong gagah bermakan padi
Teka tuan tiada perchaya
Bela dada, melihat hati._
The lamburi tree is tall, tall,
Its branches sweep the sky;
My search is vain, and o'er is all,
Like a mate-lorn dove am I.
Clear is the moon, with stars agleam,
The raven wastes in the padi field;
O my beloved, when false I seem,
Open my breast, my heart is revealed.
* * * * *
The waves are white on the Kataun shore,
And day and night they beat;
The garden has white blossoms o'er,
But only one do I think sweet.
Deeper yet the water grows,
Nor the mountain rain is stilled;
My heart more longing knows,
And its hope is unfulfilled.
In poetry of more pretentious style, and in improvisations also, each
stanza contains a key-word or line which becomes the text, so to
speak, of the next. As artificial and unnatural as this may seem, it
is, nevertheless, an ingenious way of keeping the thread of one's
discourse when other inspiration fails. The best results of Malay
verse come from it. A beautiful example may be cited from the Asiatic
Journal of 1825:
Cold is the wind, the rain falls fast;
I linger, though the hour is past.
Why come you not? Whence this delay?
Have I offended, say?
My heart is sad and sinking too;
O break it not--it loves but you!
Come, then, and end this long delay;
Why keep you thus away?
The wind is cold, fast falls the rain,
Yet weeping, chiding, I remain.
You come not still, you still delay--
O wherefore can you stay?
Adelbert von Chamisso, the German poet, who has another claim to fame,
however--his scientific career was charmingly described in the Popular
Science Monthly for December, 1890--includes in his published poems
three songs, In Malay Form, for which he doubtless obtained
inspiration during his voyage to the far East in 1815 to 1818. They
are so faithful in spirit and style to their source that we can not
forbear quoting one in translation. It is called The Basketmaker, and
is in the form of a dialogue, each stanza having the usual "key" line:
The shower's gone by, the sun shines bright,
The weather vanes now gayly swing;
We maidens here in merry plight
Quick beg of you a song to sing.
The weather vanes now gayly swing,
Through fire-red clouds the sun shines fair;
Right gay and quick to you I'll sing
A song that's full of dread despair.
Through fire-red clouds the sun shines fair,
A bird sings sweet and lures the bride;
Pray what concerns your dread despair
To maidens fair and dear beside?
A bird sings sweet and lures the bride,
A net for fishes there is spread;
A maiden fair and dear beside,
A sprightly maiden would I wed.
A net for fishes there is spread,
The moth's wings burn in bright flame hot;
A sprightly maiden wouldst thou wed,
But thee the maiden chooseth not.
THE SHAÏR.--The _shaïr_ is very different from the _pantun_; the
latter is lyric, the former epic in its nature; the _shaïr_ may be
heroic or romantic, the _pantun_ never. However, it employs the same
measure as the _pantun_, but all the lines of each stanza rhyme,
instead of by pairs, as in the quatrains of the lyric verse. It is to
the _shaïr_ that we must look for the really great works of Malay
poetry, where some are bold enough to declare we may find passages of
Homeric beauty. The most famous works of this nature are _Radin
Mantri_, _Kin Tambouhan_, and _Bidasari_. The first two of these tell
the story of the love of a prince of the royal house of Nigara for a
maiden of his mother's court. It is a beautiful tale, abounding in
parts of striking eloquence and pathos, and the characters are strong
and well portrayed.
The _Bidasari_ is the longest poem in the language, and typically
Malayan. Its author is unknown, likewise the time and place of its
composition. The only hint as to the writer is in the opening lines:
"... Listen to this story of the history of a king in a province of
Kambayat. A fakir has turned the narrative into a poem."
And again at the conclusion, where it says:
"This poem is weak and faulty because my knowledge is imperfect. My
heart was troubled--for that reason have I written it. I have not made
it long, because I was sad; but I have finished it and thereby
obtained many blessings."
Internal evidence, however, indicates that the poem is old, of a time
long before the Europeans first came to the East, possibly before the
Mohammedan conquest. It shows plainly the influence of Hindu theology,
yet in the customs and scenes described, and the mode of life and the
manner of thinking, it is essentially Malay, and so worthy, perhaps,
of a somewhat extended notice.
"There was once a king, a sultan, handsome, learned, perfect; he was
of the race of noble kings; he caused the land of merchants and
strangers to be swallowed up. From what people of his time say of him
he was a valorous prince who had never yet been thwarted. But
to-morrow and the day after to-morrow are uncertain." Such is the
beginning of Canto I, as given in the French translation by Louis de
Backer. The king marries, but just as joy and happiness are to be his,
a griffinlike _garuda_ sweeps down upon his land and ravages it.
Terrified, the monarch deserts his throne, takes his royal consort and
flees for his life. On the flight the queen gives birth to a child,
which, however, must be deserted, much to the mother's grief.
In Canto II a rich merchant is introduced--a man whose goods and
treasures are immense, whose slaves numerous, prosperity constant, but
who, alas! is childless. One morning as he and his wife are walking by
the side of a stream they discover a boat drifting near them, and in
it a child of such radiant beauty that they are moved to adopt it.
The lord of the region is Sultan Mengindra, whose queen is beautiful,
but unhappy, through constant looking forward to the day when she
shall be displaced by some woman more beautiful than she. At last she
has a costly fan made, and sends out spies to offer it for sale in
every village and town, but not to tell its price. If they discover a
woman of rare beauty they are to return and notify her.
In course of time the spies come to the old merchant's home, and see
Bidasari, the handsome adopted child. After some delay she is brought
to court, where she has to undergo much studied ill treatment from the
jealous queen. By a subterfuge the girl escapes and is then removed by
the merchant to a secret place in the desert.
Canto III tells how Sultan Mengindra goes to hunt in the desert, and
there finds a sleeping beauty whom he awakens and consoles with the
music of a _pantun_.
In Canto IV the story returns to the King of Kambayat. He and his
queen have succeeded in reaching a distant part of their kingdom, but
the fate of the young princess whom they so shamefully deserted
oppresses them. Finally, the king's son, stirred by his mother's
tears, sets out to search for this sister whom he has never seen. In
his search he meets with Bidasari's adopted brother, who detects the
resemblance between the young prince and his sister. Together they go
to obtain audience of the sultan and Bidasari, who is now queen.
Canto V. Convinced that the story of the prince is true, Sultan
Mengindra dissuades him from returning, but bids his minister write a
missive in letters of gold and dispatch it at once, with presents and
jewels, to the King of Kambayat.