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 conventionalized 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. In literature as in all else man merits his
subjection to trivialities by his economical greed. A condition for
using justly and gaily any decoration would seem to be a measure of
reluctance. Ornament--strange as the doctrine sounds in a world
decivilized--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 modertion: she
has an innumerable singleness. Her buttercup 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.