GIULIETTA.
1. Supposing that, in early life, one had the power of living to one's
fancy,--and why should we not, if the said fancy were restrained by the
knowledge of the two great laws concerning our nature, that happiness is
increased, not by the enlargement of the possessions, but of the heart; and
days lengthened, not by the crowding of emotions, but the economy of
them?--if thus taught, we had, I repeat, the ordering of our house and
estate in our own hands, I believe no manner of temperance in pleasure
would be better rewarded than that of making our gardens gay only with
common flowers; and leaving those which needed care for their transplanted
life to be found in their native places when we travelled. So long as I had
crocus and daisy in the spring, roses in the summer, and hollyhocks and
pinks in the autumn, I used to be myself independent of farther
horticulture,--and it is only now that I am old, and since pleasant
travelling has become impossible to me, that I am thankful to have the
white narcissus in my borders, instead of waiting to walk through the
fragrance of the meadows of Clarens; and pleased to see the milkwort blue
on my scythe-mown banks, since I cannot gather it any more on the rocks of
the Vosges, or in the divine glens of Jura.
2. Among the losses, all the more fatal in being unfelt, brought upon us by
the fury and vulgarity of modern life, I count for one of the saddest, the
loss of the wish to gather a flower in travelling. The other day,--whether
indeed a sign of some dawning of doubt and remorse in the public mind, as
to the perfect jubilee of railroad journey, or merely a piece of the common
daily flattery on which the power of the British press first depends, I
cannot judge;--but, for one or other of such motives, I saw lately in some
illustrated paper, a pictorial comparison of old-fashioned and modern
travel, representing, as the type of things passed away, the outside
passengers of the mail shrinking into huddled and silent distress from the
swirl of a winter snowstorm; and for type of the present Elysian
dispensation, the inside of a first-class saloon carriage, with a beautiful
young lady in the last pattern of Parisian travelling dress, conversing,
Daily news in hand, with a young officer--her fortunate vis-à-vis--on the
subject of our military successes in Afghanistan and Zululand.[24]
3. I will not, in presenting--it must not be called the other side, but the
supplementary, and wilfully omitted, facts, of this ideal,--oppose, as I
fairly might, the discomforts of a modern cheap excursion train, to the
chariot-and-four, with outriders and courier, of ancient noblesse. I will
compare only the actual facts, in the former and in latter years, of my own
journey from Paris to Geneva. As matters are now arranged, I find myself,
at half past eight in the evening, waiting in a confused crowd with which I
am presently to contend for a seat, in the dim light and cigar-stench of
the great station of the Lyons line. Making slow way through the
hostilities of the platform, in partly real, partly weak politeness, as may
be, I find the corner seats of course already full of prohibitory cloaks
and umbrellas; but manage to get a middle back one; the net overhead is
already surcharged with a bulging extra portmanteau, so that I squeeze my
desk as well as I can between my legs, and arrange what wraps I have about
my knees and shoulders. Follow a couple of hours of simple patience, with
nothing to entertain one's thoughts but the steady roar of the line under
the wheels, the blinking and dripping of the oil lantern, and the more or
less ungainly wretchedness, and variously sullen compromises and
encroachments of posture, among the five other passengers preparing
themselves for sleep: the last arrangement for the night being to shut up
both windows, in order to effect, with our six breaths, a salutary
modification of the night air.
4. The banging and bumping of the carriages over the turn-tables wakes me
up as I am beginning to doze, at Fontainebleau, and again at Sens; and the
trilling and thrilling of the little telegraph bell establishes itself in
my ears, and stays there, trilling me at last into a shivering, suspicious
sort of sleep, which, with a few vaguely fretful shrugs and fidgets,
carries me as far as Tonnerre, where the 'quinze minutes d'arret'
revolutionize everything; and I get a turn or two on the platform, and
perhaps a glimpse of the stars, with promise of a clear morning; and so
generally keep awake past Mont Bard, remembering the happy walks one used
to have on the terrace under Buffon's tower, and thence watching, if
perchance, from the mouth of the high tunnel, any film of moonlight may
show the far undulating masses of the hills of Citeaux. But most likely one
knows the place where the great old view used to be only by the sensible
quickening of the pace as the train turns down the incline, and crashes
through the trenched cliffs into the confusion and high clattering vault of
the station at Dijon.
5. And as my journey is almost always in the springtime, the twisted spire
of the cathedral usually shows itself against the first grey of dawn, as we
run out again southwards: and resolving to watch the sunrise, I fall more
complacently asleep,--and the sun is really up by the time one has to
change carriages, and get morning coffee at Macon. And from Amberieux,
through the Jura valley, one is more or less feverishly happy and thankful,
not so much for being in sight of Mont Blanc again, as in having got
through the nasty and gloomy night journey; and then the sight of the Rhone
and the Salève seems only like a dream, presently to end in nothingness;
till, covered with dust, and feeling as if one never should be fit for
anything any more, one staggers down the hill to the Hotel des Bergues, and
sees the dirtied Rhone, with its new iron bridge, and the smoke of a new
factory exactly dividing the line of the aiguilles of Chamouni.
6. That is the journey as it is now,--and as, for me, it must be; except on
foot, since there is now no other way of making it. But this _was_ the way
we used to manage it in old days:--
Very early in Continental transits we had found out that the family
travelling carriage, taking much time and ingenuity to load, needing at the
least three, usually four--horses, and on Alpine passes six, not only
jolted and lagged painfully on bad roads, but was liable in every way to
more awkward discomfitures than lighter vehicles; getting itself jammed in
archways, wrenched with damage out of ruts, and involved in volleys of
justifiable reprobation among market stalls. So when we knew better, my
father and mother always had their own old-fashioned light two-horse
carriage to themselves, and I had one made with any quantity of front and
side pockets for books and picked up stones; and hung very low, with a
fixed side-step, which I could get off or on with the horses at the trot;
and at any rise or fall of the road, relieve them, and get my own walk,
without troubling the driver to think of me.
7. Thus, leaving Paris in the bright spring morning, when the Seine
glittered gaily at Charenton, and the arbres de Judée were mere pyramids of
purple bloom round Villeneuve-St.-Georges, one had an afternoon walk among
the rocks of Fontainebleau, and next day we got early into Sens, for new
lessons in its cathedral aisles, and the first saunter among the budding
vines of the coteaux. I finished my plate of the Tower of Giotto, for the
'Seven Lamps,' in the old inn at Sens, which Dickens has described in his
wholly matchless way in the last chapter of 'Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings'. The
next day brought us to the oolite limestones at Mont Bard, and we always
spent the Sunday at the Bell in Dijon. Monday, the drive of drives, through
the village of Genlis, the fortress of Auxonne, and up the hill to the
vine-surrounded town of Dole; whence, behold at last the limitless ranges
of Jura, south and north, beyond the woody plain, and above them the
'Derniers Kochers' and the white square-set summit, worshipped ever anew.
Then at Poligny, the same afternoon, we gathered the first milkwort for
that year; and on Tuesday, at St. Laurent, the wild lily of the valley; and
on Wednesday, at Morez, gentians.
And on Thursday, the _eighth or ninth_ day from Paris, days all spent
patiently and well, one saw from the gained height of Jura, the great Alps
unfold themselves in their chains and wreaths of incredible crest and
cloud.
8. Unhappily, during all the earliest and usefullest years of such
travelling, I had no thought of ever taking up botany as a study; feeling
well that even geology, which was antecedent to painting with me, could not
be followed out in connection with art but under strict limits, and with
sore shortcomings. It has only been the later discovery of the uselessness
of old scientific botany, and the abominableness of new, as an element of
education for youth;--and my certainty that a true knowledge of their
native Flora was meant by Heaven to be one of the first heart-possessions
of every happy boy and girl in flower-bearing lands, that have compelled me
to gather into system my fading memories, and wandering thoughts.[25] And
of course in the diaries written at places of which I now want chiefly the
details of the Flora, I find none; and in this instance of the milkwort,
whose name I was first told by the Chamouni guide, Joseph Couttet, then
walking with me on the unperilous turf of the first rise of the Vosges,
west of Strasburg, and rebuking me indignantly for my complaint that, being
then thirty-seven years old, and not yet able to draw the great plain and
distant spire, it was of no use trying in the poor remainder of life to do
anything serious,--then, and there, I say, for the first time examining the
strange little flower, and always associating it, since, with the limestone
crags of Alsace and Burgundy, I don't find a single note of its preferences
or antipathies in other districts, and cannot say a word about the soil it
chooses, or the height it ventures, or the familiarities to which it
condescends, on the Alps or Apennines.
9. But one thing I have ascertained of it, lately at Brantwood, that it is
capricious and fastidious beyond any other little blossom I know of. In
laying out the rock garden, most of the terrace sides were trusted to
remnants of the natural slope, propped by fragments of stone, among which
nearly every other wild flower that likes sun and air, is glad sometimes to
root itself. But at the top of all, one terrace was brought to
mathematically true level of surface, and slope of side, and turfed with
delicately chosen and adjusted sods, meant to be kept duly trim by the
scythe. And _only_ on this terrace does the Giulietta choose to show
herself,--and even there, not in any consistent places, but gleaming out
here in one year, there in another, like little bits of unexpected sky
through cloud; and entirely refusing to allow either bank or terrace to be
mown the least trim during _her_ time of disport there. So spared and
indulged, there are no more wayward things in all the woods or wilds; no
more delicate and perfect things to be brought up by watch through day and
night, than her recumbent clusters, trickling, sometimes almost gushing
through the grass, and meeting in tiny pools of flawless blue.
10. I will not attempt at present to arrange the varieties of the
Giulietta, for I find that all the larger and presumably characteristic
forms belong to the Cape; and only since Mr. Froude came back from his
African explorings have I been able to get any clear idea of the brilliancy
and associated infinitude of the Cape flowers. If I could but write down
the substance of what he has told me, in the course of a chat or two, which
have been among the best privileges of my recent stay in London, (prolonged
as it has been by recurrence of illness,) it would be a better summary of
what should be generally known in the natural history of southern plants
than I could glean from fifty volumes of horticultural botany. In the
meantime, everything being again thrown out of gear by the aforesaid
illness, I must let this piece of 'Proserpina' break off, as most of my
work does--and as perhaps all of it may soon do--leaving only suggestion
for the happier research of the students who trust me thus far.
11. Some essential points respecting the flower I shall note, however,
before ending. There is one large and frequent species of it of which the
flowers are delicately yellow, touched with tawny red, forming one of the
chief elements of wild foreground vegetation in the healthy districts of
hard Alpine limestone.[26] This is, I believe, the only European type of
the large Cape varieties, in all of which, judging from such plates as have
been accessible to me, the crests or fringes of the lower petal are less
conspicuous than in the smaller species; and the flower almost takes the
aspect of a broom-blossom or pease-blossom. In the smaller European
varieties, the white fringes of the lower petal are the most important and
characteristic part of the flower, and they are, among European wild
flowers, absolutely without any likeness of associated structure. The
fringes or crests which, towards the origin of petals, so often give a
frosted or gemmed appearance to the centres of flowers, are here thrown to
the extremity of the petal, and suggest an almost coralline structure of
blossom, which in no other instance whatever has been imitated, still less
carried out into its conceivable varieties of form. How many such varieties
might have been produced if these fringes of the Giulietta, or those
already alluded to of Lucia nivea, had been repeated and enlarged; as the
type, once adopted for complex bloom in the thistle-head, is multiplied in
the innumerable gradations of thistle, teasel, hawkweed, and aster! We
might have had flowers edged with lace finer than was ever woven by mortal
fingers, or tasselled and braided with fretwork of silver, never
tarnished--or hoarfrost that grew brighter in the sun. But it was not to
be, and after a few hints of what might be done in this kind, the Fate, or
Folly, or, on recent theories, the extreme fitness--and consequent
survival, of the Thistles and Dandelions, entirely drives the fringed
Lucias and blue-flushing milkworts out of common human neighbourhood, to
live recluse lives with the memories of the abbots of Cluny, and pastors of
Piedmont.
12. I have called the Giulietta 'blue-_flushing_' because it is one of the
group of exquisite flowers which at the time of their own blossoming,
breathe their colour into the surrounding leaves and supporting stem. Very
notably the Grape hyacinth and Jura hyacinth, and some of the Vestals,
empurpling all their green leaves even to the ground: a quite distinct
nature in the flower, observe, this possession of a power to kindle the
leaf and stem with its own passion, from that of the heaths, roses, or
lilies, where the determined bracts or calicos assert themselves in
opposition to the blossom, as little pine-leaves, or mosses, or brown paper
packages, and the like.
13. The Giulietta, however, is again entirely separate from the other
leaf-flushing blossoms, in that, after the two green leaves next the flower
have glowed with its blue, while it lived, they do not fade or waste with
it, but return to their own former green simplicity, and close over it to
protect the seed. I only know this to be the case with the Giulietta
Regina; but suppose it to be (with variety of course in the colours) a
condition in other species,--though of course nothing is ever said of it in
the botanical accounts of them. I gather, however, from Curtis's careful
drawings that the prevailing colour of the Cape species is purple, thus
justifying still further my placing them among the Cytherides; and I am
content to take the descriptive epithets at present given them, for the
following five of this southern group, hoping that they may be explained
for me afterwards by helpful friends.
14. Bracteolata, C. 345. Oppositifolia, C. 492. Speciosa, C. 1790. These
three all purple, and scarcely distinguishable from sweet pease-blossom,
only smaller.
Stipulacea, C. 1715. Small, and very beautiful, lilac and purple, with a
leaf and mode of growth like rosemary. The "Foxtail" milkwort, whose name I
don't accept, C. 1006, is intermediate between this and the next species.
15. Mixta, C. 1714. I don't see what mingling is meant, except that it is
just like Erica tetralix in the leaf, only, apparently, having little
four-petalled pinks for blossoms. This appearance is thus botanically
explained. I do not myself understand the description, but copy it,
thinking it may be of use to somebody. "The apex of the carina is expanded
into a two-lobed plain petal, the lobes of which are emarginate. This
appendix is of a bright rose colour, and forms the principal part of the
flower." The describer relaxes, or relapses, into common language so far as
to add that 'this appendix' "dispersed among the green foliage in every
part of the shrub, gives it a pretty lively appearance."
Perhaps this may also be worth extracting.
"Carina, deeply channeled, _of a saturated purple_ within, sides folded
together, so as to include and firmly embrace the style and stamens, which,
when arrived at maturity, upon being moved, escape elastically from their
confinement, and strike against the two erect petals or alæ--by which the
pollen is dispersed.
"Stem shrubby, with long flexile branches." (Length or height not told. I
imagine like an ordinary heath's.)
The term 'carina,' occurring twice in the above description, is peculiar to
the structure of the pease and milk-worts; we will examine it afterwards.
The European varieties of the milkwort, except the chamæbuxus, are all
minute,--and, their ordinary epithets being at least inoffensive, I give
them for reference till we find prettier ones; altering only the Calcarea,
because we could not have a 'Chalk Juliet,' and two varieties of the
Regina, changed for reason good--her name, according to the last modern
refinements of grace and ease in pronunciation, being Eu-vularis, var.
genuina! My readers may more happily remember her and her sister as
follows:--
16. (I.) Giulietta Regina. Pure blue. The same in colour, form, and size,
throughout Europe.
(II.) Giulietta Soror-Reginæ. Pale, reddish-blue or white in the flower,
and smaller in the leaf, otherwise like the Regina.
(III.) Giulietta Depressa. The smallest of those I can find drawings of.
Flowers, blue; lilac in the fringe, and no bigger than pins' heads; the
leaves quite gem-like in minuteness and order.
(IV.) Giulietta Cisterciana. Its present name, 'Calcarea,' is meant, in
botanic Latin, to express its growth on limestone or chalk mountains. But
we might as well call the South Down sheep, Calcareous mutton. My epithet
will rightly associate it with the Burgundian hills round Cluny and
Citeaux. Its ground leaves are much larger than those of the Depressa; the
flower a little larger, but very pale.
(V.) Giulietta Austriaca. Pink, and very lovely, with bold cluster of
ground leaves, but itself minute--almost dwarf. Called 'small bitter
milkwort' by S. How far distinct from the next following one, Norwegian, is
not told.
The above five kinds are given by Sowerby as British, but I have never
found the Austriaca myself.
(VI.) Giulietta Amara. Norwegian. Very quaint in blossom outline, like a
little blue rabbit with long ears. D. 1169.
17. Nobody tells me why either this last or No. 5 have been called bitter;
and Gerarde's five kinds are distinguished only by colour--blue, red,
white, purple, and "the dark, of an overworn ill-favoured colour, which
maketh it to differ from all others of his kind." I find no account of this
ill-favoured one elsewhere. The white is my Soror Reginæ; the red must be
the Austriaca; but the purple and overworn ones are perhaps now overworn
indeed. All of them must have been more common in Gerarde's time than now,
for he goes on to say "Milk-woort is called _Ambarualis flos_. so called
because it doth specially flourish in the Crosse or Gang-weeke, or
Rogation-weeke, of which flowers, the maidens which use in the countries to
walk the procession do make themselves garlands and nosegaies, in English
we may call it Crosse flower, Gang flower, Rogation flower, and
Milk-woort."
18. Above, at page 197, vol. i., in first arranging the Cytherides, I too
hastily concluded that the ascription to this plant of helpfulness to
nursing mothers was 'more than ordinarily false'; thinking that its rarity
could never have allowed it to be fairly tried. If indeed true, or in any
degree true, the flower has the best right of all to be classed with the
Cytherides, and we might have as much of it for beauty and for service as
we choose, if we only took half the pains to garnish our summer gardens
with living and life-giving blossom, that we do to garnish our winter
gluttonies with dying and useless ones.
19. I have said nothing of root, or fruit, or seed, having never had the
hardness of heart to pull up a milkwort cluster--nor the chance of watching
one in seed:--The pretty thing vanishes as it comes, like the blue sky of
April, and leaves no sign of itself--that _I_ ever found. The botanists
tell me that its fruit "dehisces loculicidally," which I suppose is botanic
for "splits like boxes," (but boxes shouldn't split, and didn't, as we used
to make and handle them before railways). Out of the split boxes fall
seeds--too few; and, as aforesaid, the plant never seems to grow again in
the same spot. I should thankfully receive any notes from friends happy
enough to live near milkwort banks, on the manner of its nativity.
20. Meanwhile, the Thistle, and the Nettle, and the Dock, and the Dandelion
are cared for in their generations by the finest arts of--Providence, shall
we say? or of the spirits appointed to punish our own want of Providence?
May I ask the reader to look back to the seventh chapter of the first
volume, for it contains suggestions of thoughts which came to me at a time
of very earnest and faithful inquiry, set down, I now see too shortly,
under the press of reading they involved, but intelligible enough if they
are read as slowly as they were written, and especially note the paragraph
of summary of p. 121 on the power of the Earth Mother, as Mother, and as
_judge;_ watching and rewarding the conditions which induce adversity and
prosperity in the kingdoms of men: comparing with it carefully the close of
the fourth chapter, p. 85,[27] which contains, for the now recklessly
multiplying classes of artists and colonists, truths essential to their
skill, and inexorable upon their labour.
21. The pen-drawing facsimiled by Mr. Allen with more than his usual care
in the frontispiece to this number of 'Proserpina,' was one of many
executed during the investigation of the schools of Gothic (German, and
later French), which founded their minor ornamentation on the serration of
the thistle leaf, as the Greeks on that of the Acanthus, but with a
consequent, and often morbid, love of thorny points, and insistance upon
jagged or knotted intricacies of stubborn vegetation, which is connected in
a deeply mysterious way with the gloomier forms of Catholic asceticism.[28]
22. But also, in beginning 'Proserpina,' I intended to give many
illustrations of the light and shade of foreground leaves belonging to the
nobler groups of thistles, because I thought they had been neglected by
ordinary botanical draughtsmen; not knowing at that time either the
original drawings at Oxford for the 'Flora Græca,' or the nobly engraved
plates executed in the close of the last century for the 'Flora Danica' and
'Flora Londinensis.' The latter is in the most difficult portraiture of the
larger plants, even the more wonderful of the two; and had I seen the
miracles of skill, patience, and faithful study which are collected in the
first and second volumes, published in 1777 and 1798, I believe my own work
would never have been undertaken.[29] Such as it is, however, I may still,
health being granted me, persevere in it; for my own leaf and branch
studies express conditions of shade which even these most exquisite
botanical plates ignore; and exemplify uses of the pen and pencil which
cannot be learned from the inimitable fineness of line engraving. The
frontispiece to this number, for instance, (a seeding head of the commonest
field-thistle of our London suburbs,) copied with a steel pen on smooth
grey paper, and the drawing softly touched with white on the nearer thorns,
may well surpass the effect of the plate.
23. In the following number of 'Proserpina' I have been tempted to follow,
with more minute notice than usual, the 'conditions of adversity' which, as
they fret the thistle tribe into jagged malice, have humbled the beauty of
the great domestic group of the Vestals into confused likenesses of the
Dragonweed and Nettle: but I feel every hour more and more the necessity of
separating the treatment of subjects in 'Proserpina' from the microscopic
curiosities of recent botanic illustration, nor shall this work close, if
my strength hold, without fulfilling in some sort, the effort begun long
ago in 'Modern Painters,' to interpret the grace of the larger blossoming
trees, and the mysteries of leafy form which clothe the Swiss precipice
with gentleness, and colour with softest azure the rich horizons of England
and Italy.
* * * * *