I
This morning, when I went to look at my flowers, surrounded by their
white fence, which protects them against the good cattle grazing in the
field beyond, I saw again in my mind all that blossoms in the woods, the
fields, the gardens, the orangeries and the green-houses and I thought
of all that we owe to the world of marvels which the bees visit.
Can we conceive what humanity would be if it did not know the flowers?
If these did not exist, if they had all been hidden from our gaze, as
are probably a thousand no less fairy sights that are all around us, but
invisible to our eyes, would our character, our faculties, our sense of
the beautiful, our aptitude for happiness be quite the same? We should,
it is true, in nature have other splendid manifestations of luxury,
exuberance and grace; other dazzling efforts of the superfluous forces:
the sun, the stars, the varied lights of the moon, the azure and the
ocean, the dawns and twilights, the mountain, the plain, the forest and
the rivers, the light and the trees and, lastly, nearer to us, birds,
precious stones and woman. These are the ornaments of our planet. Yet,
but for the last three, which belong to the same smile of nature, how
grave, austere, almost sad would be the education of our eye, without
the softness which the flowers give! Suppose for a moment that our globe
knew them not: a great region, the most enchanted in the joys of our
psychology, would be destroyed, or rather would not be discovered. All
of a delightful sense would sleep for ever at the bottom of our harder
and more desert hearts and in our imagination stripped of worshipful
images. The infinite world of colours and shades would have been but
incompletely revealed to us by a few rents in the sky. The miraculous
harmonies of light at play, ceaselessly inventing new gaieties,
revelling in itself, would be unknown to us; for the flowers first broke
up the prism and made the most subtle portion of our sight. And the
magic garden of perfumes: who would have opened its gate to us? A few
grasses, a few gums, a few fruits, the breath of the dawn, the smell of
the night and the sea would have told us that beyond our eyes and ears
there existed a shut paradise where the air which we breathe changes
into delights for which we could have found no name. Consider also all
that the voice of human happiness would lack! One of the blessed heights
of our soul would be almost dumb, if the flowers had not, since
centuries, fed with their beauty the language which we speak and the
thoughts that endeavour to crystallize the most precious hours of life.
The whole vocabulary, all the impressions of love, are impregnate with
their breath, nourished with their smile. When we love, all the flowers
that we have seen and smelt seem to hasten within us to people with
their known charms the consciousness of a sentiment whose happiness, but
for them, would have no more form than the horizons of the sea or sky.
They have accumulated within us, since our childhood, and even before
it, in the soul of our fathers, an immense treasure, the nearest to our
joys, upon which we draw each time that we wish to make more real the
clement minutes of our life. They have created and spread in our world
of sentiment the fragrant atmosphere in which love delights.