There is a form of oppression that has not until now been confessed by
those who suffer from it or who are participants, as mere witnesses, in
its tyranny. It is the obsession of man by the flower. In the shape of
the flower his own paltriness revisits him--his triviality, his sloth,
his cheapness, his wholesale habitualness, his slatternly ostentation.
These return to him and wreak upon him their dull revenges. What the
tyranny really had grown to can be gauged nowhere so well as in country
lodgings, where the most ordinary things of design and decoration have
sifted down and gathered together, so that foolish ornament gains a
cumulative force and achieves a conspicuous commonness. Stem and petal
and leaf--the fluent forms that a man has not by heart but certainly by
rote--are woven, printed, cast, and stamped wherever restlessness and
insimplicity have feared to leave plain spaces. The most ugly of all
imaginable rooms, which is probably the parlour of a farm-house arrayed
for those whom Americans call summer-boarders, is beset with flowers. It
blooms, a dry, woollen, papery, cast-iron garden. The floor flourishes
with blossoms adust, poorly conventionalised into a kind of order; the
table-cover is ablaze with a more realistic florescence; the wall-paper
is set with bunches; the rigid machine-lace curtain is all of roses and
lilies in its very construction, over the muslin blinds an impotent sprig
is scattered. In the worsted rosettes of the bell-ropes, in the plaster
picture-frames, in the painted tea-tray and on the cups, in the pediment
of the sideboard, in the ornament that crowns the barometer, in the
finials of sofa and arm-chair, in the finger-plates of the 'grained'
door, is to be seen the ineffectual portrait or to be traced the stale
inspiration of the flower. And what is this bossiness around the grate
but some blunt, black-leaded garland? The recital is wearisome, but the
retribution of the flower is precisely weariness. It is the persecution
of man, the haunting of his trivial visions, and the oppression of his
inconsiderable brain.
The man so possessed suffers the lot of the weakling--subjection to the
smallest of the things he has abused. The designer of cheap patterns is
no more inevitably ridden by the flower than is the vain and transitory
author by the phrase. But I had rather learn my decoration of the
Japanese, and place against the blank wall one pot plain from the wheel,
holding one singular branch in blossom, in the attitude and accident of
growth. And I could wish abstention to exist, and even to be evident, in
my words. In literature as in all else man merits his subjection to
trivialities by a kind of economical greed. A condition for using justly
and gaily any decoration would seem to be a certain reluctance.
Ornament--strange as the doctrine sounds in a world decivilised--was in
the beginning intended to be something jocund; and jocundity was never to
be achieved but by postponement, deference, and modesty. Nor can the
prodigality of the meadows in May be quoted in dispute. For Nature has
something even more severe than moderation: she has an innumerable
singleness. Her butter-cup meadows are not prodigal; they show
multitude, but not multiplicity, and multiplicity is exactly the disgrace
of decoration. Who has ever multiplied or repeated his delights? or who
has ever gained the granting of the most foolish of his wishes--the
prayer for reiteration? It is a curious slight to generous Fate that man
should, like a child, ask for one thing many times. Her answer every
time is a resembling but new and single gift; until the day when she
shall make the one tremendous difference among her gifts--and make it
perhaps in secret--by naming one of them the ultimate. What, for
novelty, what, for singleness, what, for separateness, can equal the
last? Of many thousand kisses the poor last--but even the kisses of your
mouth are all numbered.