forgotten—appears to me to be, as regards Schumann, a fine piece of
criticism. Apparently it was only when thinking of Wagner that he was up
to that time insane. Then he could lash himself into a fury! Witness:
“I call the Wagnerian orchestration the Sirocco; Bizet’s” (of whose
success Wagner was supremely jealous) “orchestral music is almost the
sole orchestration that I can still endure.... Schopenhauer was the
philosopher of decadence. His art is morbid.... Wagner has been ruinous
to music. Was Wagner a musician at all? He was at least something else
in a higher degree—that is to say, an unsurpassable _actor_. Wagner was,
above all, a stage-player, and he excels in ubiquity and nullibiety....
Parsifal is a candidate for divinity with a public-school education.
We are so far pure fools already ... a typical telegram from Bayreuth:
_Bereits bereut_ (rued already)! Ah! this old _thief_! This old
_magician_! This _Cagliostro_ of modernity!... Wagner is a Romanist, and
he made the poor devil, the country lad Parsifal, a Roman Catholic. I
despise every one who does not regard Parsifal as an outrage on morals.”
[Illustration: RICHARD WAGNER.
_From a photograph._
[_To face p. 218._]
Perhaps Wagner’s faithful disciples were right when they ascribed all
outpouring of the vials of wrath to _jalousie de métier_; for Nietzsche,
too, was not only poet and philosopher, but composer, and when he
submitted an opera of his own to Wagner, the great man, as the Eastern
saying is, made sour noses at it.
It is dangerous to carry a book with you into a garden; it will make
your mind wander much further than your feet. Here have I been rambling
on, carried away not so much by any feeling for Nietzsche, who is, after
all, not much more than a name to me, as by the interest which attaches
to all that concerns Wagner. For, let his enemies say what they will, he
was a man of genius, of most compelling genius, and who that ever had
speech of Frau Cosima could avoid being bewitched. To me it has only been
given to know her in her old age, but I fell at once under the spell of
that most sweet and dainty personality. Very feeble in health, and unable
to speak for long, she had retained all the serene charm which, in the
heyday of her youth and beauty, earned for her the name of “the unique
woman.” I felt how bright a part she must have played in the brilliant
trio at Triebschen, and how sad it is that there should be no record of
the symposia of the sunny days of that happy friendship before it was
disturbed by mad envy and malice.
Of Nietzsche and his tragic end, of the influence which his restless
brain exercised upon men and upon letters, this is not the place to
speak. Is it he, as his disciples maintain, who has taught Germany
and, through Germany, the world to think? The great anti-moralist, as
he has been called, is dead. Let him rest in peace. We can leave this
Batrachomyomachia, this battle of the frogs and mice, the squabbles of
German professors and philosophers, coming back with some relief to the
sweeter fragrance of our flowers. It was the thought of Triebschen and
its Verba Composita which led us to Nietzsche, and his clever saying that
seemed to give value to the thought of friendship in a garden.
Days of happy talk are delightful—never more so than in a garden; and
yet it is when we are alone, when our plants are the companions of
our solitude, that we really enter into sympathy with them. Then it
is that we hold true communion with them, and, giving the reins to
our imagination, try to read the hidden secrets of their being—hidden
secrets, not those scientific arcana which your professor loves to clothe
in slipshod Latin and shabby Greek, but those inmost idiosyncrasies in
which our fancy, wildly playful, seems to detect vestiges of the same
characteristics and emotions which rule as tyrants in our own nature. Nor
when we note the movements of plants, so strangely purposeful, does it
involve any inordinate strain upon our conceptive power to see in them
something more than chance, something which resembles the exercise of a
dominant will. These may be thoughts at which science laughs, and which
the inexorable demon Commonsense hounds out of court—thoughts that are no
more than poor little waifs and strays, coming to us from Fancyland, and
yet not without their humble value if they do but make us watch and seek
for things undreamt of in our philosophy.
That certain flowers and plants are, as it were, types of various
qualities is an idea as old as the hills upon which they grow. The
strength of the oak, the grace of the willow, the flaunting pride of
poppies, the virginal purity of lilies, the stateliness of hollyhocks
like courtiers drawn up in a row at the levée of a mighty king, the
modesty of the violet—all these and a hundred others are images from the
wallets of poets of all lands and of all time. It is not of these that
I speak, but rather of the behaviour of plants, often very various and
capricious, according to circumstances, yet in which we seem to see a
kinship with reasonable motive, a suggestion that in similar conditions
we might have done the same.
See yonder crimson water-lily queening it in all the majesty of her
amazing beauty among the humbler reeds and rushes and sedges and the
rest of her water-loving subjects. To-day she is in the zenith of her
state, like the king’s daughter all glorious within. Does she rejoice in
the stateliness of her queenship? It would almost seem so, for to-morrow
she will feel that her reign is over. She will bow her lovely neck,
and, coyly folding her petals together round the golden aureole of her
stamens, will disappear under the flood, too proud to let herself be seen
when her regal beauty is on the wane. Is not that something like the
pride of which we read in the life of the peerless Countess Castiglione,
who hid herself from the gaze of men before her charms had faded, as she
knew they soon must? Having reigned supreme among the fair women of the
world, she would not consent to be degraded into a has-been—a thing of
the past. I have told in my “Memories” of the first time that I saw her
on the terrace at Holland House, a miracle of loveliness, when all London
was crowding on tiptoe to catch a sight of the haughty queen of beauty
and do homage to her majesty. My nymphæa tempts me to repeat myself.
The last time was a few years later. I was sitting with Mario and Grisi
in their garden at Fulham when she was announced. She came in robed
in deepest black, her face hidden by a thick veil of sable crêpe. She
remained a little while and talked gaily enough, but her face remained
hidden all the time; not for one moment did she lift that funereal veil.
She had forsaken the world—abdicated—like my coy crimson water-lily, and
in the waters of Lethe she hid her beauteous head.
Have plants their friendships, their affinities? Certain it is that there
are some plants which seem to thrive best when familiarly associated
with certain others. I have heard some gardeners say, for instance, that
lilies of the valley and Solomon’s seal are never so happy as when they
are planted together. That may be true, but it probably means no more
than that both need the same soil and surroundings, and so make the
bravest show when they are side by side. I much doubt whether a weak
clump of lilies of the valley would be strengthened by adding to it a
cluster of plants of its friend, or vice versa.
On the other hand, it is a scientific fact capable of demonstration,
that there are trees which press into their service certain humbler
non-flowering plants, compelling them to furnish their roots with water
and such mineral salts and foods as are needful for their well-being.
These become slaves, like the hewers of wood and drawers of water working
for the lords of creation.
Many years ago I received a consignment of _Pinus cembra_, the Arolla
pine, which is the common growth of the Alps. The trees arrived late in
the afternoon, and we unpacked them at once, for the days were at their
shortest, and I was eager to get them all planted—there were a dozen
or more—before nightfall. To my dismay I found that the roots were all
covered with a network of grey film, the mycelium, as the learned would
call it, of some fungus. My gardener and I were not a little indignant
with the nurseryman who sent out the plants in so filthy a condition. We
sent for a bucket of water and washed clean as many of the trees as we
could; mercifully there was not daylight enough left to purge them all
of their dirt. To our amazement, the trees which we washed soon began
to show signs of sickness; they dwindled for three or four years and
looked as if they must die; slowly, very slowly, the invalids recovered.
Their unwashed mates never flinched for a moment, made roots gaily, and
took quite rapidly to their new home. The puzzle was great, until a
few years later I received Kerner’s great book, “The Natural History of
Plants,” and then the mystery was cleared up. The sorrows of the washed
trees were those of the planters of the West Indian Islands. Like Mr.
Wilberforce, we had deprived them of their slaves. Luckily, the humus of
the plantation in which they were placed must have contained the spores
necessary to the formation of the fungoid growth, otherwise they would
doubtless have died.
Kerner’s chapter on the _Symbiosis_, or social union of plants, is
curiously interesting. He gives a list of flowering trees and plants
which are absolutely dependent upon what he called the mycelial mantle
with which fungi cover their roots for the absorption of their daily
food. Limes, roses, ivy, pinks may be propagated by cuttings which will
root in pure sand. No such method is possible in the case of the oak, the
beech, firs, broom, rhododendron, and a host of others, which demand an
admixture of soil containing a proportion of mycelia, without which they
are unable to feed themselves; and so, like babies, with neither breast
nor bottle they perish.
Kerner’s opening words on this _symbiosis_ are worth quoting: “In
describing the vegetation of a limited area, botanical writers are apt
to designate the various species of plants as ‘denizens’ of the country
in question. The conditions under which the plants live are likened to
political institutions, and the relations existing amongst the plants
themselves are compared to the life and strife of human society.” He
goes on to speak of the interdependence upon one another of these
plants living in the same community; he shows how necessary they are
to one another; how they sometimes fight for food, light and air; how
some are preyed upon and oppressed by others, “and how not infrequently
quite different species join together in order to attain some mutual
advantage.” And so he comes to the curious history of the lichens.
Some forty or fifty years ago there arose a furious battle around the
lichens, humble little creatures enough, plastered on almost every rock
and stone and tree in creation. During the ’sixties of the last century
Schwendener, a Swiss botanist—professor successively at Basle, Tübingen
and Berlin—wrote a number of papers in scientific publications, in
which he proved to his own satisfaction that lichens are not individual
plants, but compound existences consisting of an alga and a fungus. His
investigations were followed up by one Bornet, and he had a numerous
following largely attracted by the charm of novelty and the ingenuity
of invention. Kerner went so far as to say that “the continued study of
lichens has tended only to secure for the Schwendenerian theory a more
wide and universal recognition.” Dr. Cook, however, the great authority
on cryptogamic botany, laughs at this mystic union as a “fairy tale.” He
treats it with the same contempt that St. Paul, in his letter to Titus,
expressed for “Jewish fables.” He says: “The high priest Schwendener
thus expressed his dream: ‘As the result of my researches, all these
growths (lichens) are not simple plants, not individuals in the ordinary
sense of the word; they are rather colonies, which consist of hundreds
and thousands of individuals, of which, however, one alone plays the
master, whilst the rest, in perpetual captivity, prepare the nutriment
for themselves and their master. This master is a fungus of the class
ascomyceter, a parasite which is accustomed to live upon others’ work;
its slaves are green algæ, which it has sought out, or, indeed, caught
hold of, and compelled into its service. It surrounds them, as a spider
its prey, with a fibrous net of narrow meshes, which is gradually
converted into an impenetrable covering; but whilst the spider sucks its
prey and leaves it dead, the fungus incites the algæ found in its net to
more rapid activity—nay, to more vigorous increase.’”
Dr. Cook goes on to say: “This may be all very poetical, but it is not
very explicit, and needs a commentary;” and then he proceeds to demolish
the whole theory based upon the supposition that the gonidia, green
spherical cells, which are found in the thallus of lichens are algæ.
Lichens, Dr. Cook tells us, consist normally of a thallus, or vegetative
system, which is in many species a tough, bark-like expansion, horizontal
or vertical, attached to rocks, stones, wood and other substances,
but not deriving nourishment from the object to which it is attached.
Inside this thallus are the minute green gonidia, and, in addition,
there is the reproductive system, consisting of discs borne upon the
thallus, containing the reproductive organs (asci and sporidia). The
Schwendenerians contend that the thallus and reproductive system are not
only fungoid, but actual fungi, while the green gonidia are algæ upon
which those fungi are parasitic.
One of the proofs which Dr. Cook brings forward in support of his
contradiction of the theorists is the permanence of lichens, whereas the
fungi are, as we all know, very short-lived, many of them little more
than ephemeral—here to-day and gone to-morrow. To the lichens we must pay
the respect due to the most venerable antiquity. Dr. Cook, speaking with
all the authority with which he is endowed, tells us that “some species,
growing on primitive rocks of the highest mountains of the world, are
estimated to have attained an age of at least a thousand years. Is it not
marvellous to think of these mean little vegetable scabs feeding upon
air, outliving the monarch oaks and almost all the trees of Creation?”
But I am in danger of rushing in where the angels of science hardly dare
tread. Let me go back to my beloved nonsense. Beloved? Yes, for, after
all, what is more lovable than nonsense? What a joy their nonsense must
have been to Dean Swift, to Lear, or to the little dry chip of a man
who was our Cocker, our mathematical tutor, at Christ Church. I wonder
whether, when Dodgson, that double personality, always associated in my
memory with a blackboard, a piece of chalk and _x y z_, was writing up
his mystic algebraical puzzles, his mind did not sometimes wander, and he
himself become transformed for a minute into Lewis Carroll seeing visions
of Alice, the Carpenter, the Mad Hatter, the Walrus, and all the crazy
_dramatis personæ_ of his delicious phantasy. He is dead now, and many
years ago the lovely child, for whose delectation the wonder book was
invented, was laid in an early grave in the Christ Church cloisters. Only
Alice lives, and will live as long as the English language remains.
If your garden be upon the slope of a hill, there is one human instinct
which you will surely, if you watch them carefully, recognize in your
plants. They are so ambitious. Those among them which have creeping roots
or rhizomes will almost invariably travel uphill. They are as fain to
climb as Sir Walter Raleigh himself. Take the rhizomatous bamboos, such
species among the arundonarias as Somoni, Japonica Layœkerd, Spathiflora
and others, Phyllostachys fastuosa, Bambusa Palmata. Rarely, indeed,
will you find a new culm below the parent plant; all the growth is
upwards. And so it is with many other genera. I think the reason of it
is pretty plain. You need but to mark the trees above a railway cutting
or on the high banks of a deep lane, to see how shallow in proportion
to their height are the roots even of the greatest of them. There are
exceptions—the vine and the laburnum, to wit—but the oak itself loses
its so-called tap-root, which withers and rots away as soon as it has
fulfilled its duty of tying the tree in its place. The roots seem to
remain as near as possible to the plane of the bottom of the main stem.
The same rule applies to plants of lesser stature. Now if the roots of a
hillside plant were to move down-hill in the same plane as the axis of
the stem, it is manifest that they must very soon peer out into the open
and be deprived of all those foods which are necessary to plant life. So
they choose the wise course of journeying upwards, where they are sure,
on the contrary, of an increasingly richer diet. If on its travels the
growing point of a bamboo rhizome encounters a stone or other obstacle,
it will not dive down to avoid it, but will take a direction upwards
and then down again into the earth, forming one of those hoops, like
croquet hoops, which are such a snare to trip up wayfarers in bamboo
forests. Sometimes the ambitions of plants, like those of men, are fatal.
The root-stock, originally set in the best conditions, must needs climb
higher and higher, until it may perhaps reach some uncongenial place in
which it is starved or choked. Then farewell, a long farewell, to all its
greatness! By degrees the parent plant becomes exhausted and dwindles
away, while the scions which should have carried on the dynasty are hoped
for in vain, and so some precious treasure is lost for ever.
If plants have ambition, there is one vice closely allied to it which
they do not possess. Jealousy is confined to animals. Men, dogs, cats
and horses are jealous. There is no evidence to lead us to suppose that
plants are afflicted with that horror of horrors. They may have their
loves and their hatreds; they will, as we have seen, help one another,
and they will strangle and murder one another. They will even rob one
another; but the torture of jealousy seems to be unknown to them. They
will attack their neighbours with the pitiless savagery of the old
Rhineland robber knights. No vampire could with more ruthless cruelty
suck the blood of a fair maiden than certain malignant fungi, which
fasten upon great trees and shrubs, and draw out the sap of their noble
lives in order to nourish their own ignominious bodies. Then there are
the saprophytes, plants as unlovely as their name, vegetable horrors,
which, like the ghouls of the “Arabian Nights,” are found feasting upon
death and decay. _Non ragionam di lor! Ma guarda e passa._
In the part of the world where I live the old thorn trees are, with the
oaks, the glory of the countryside. One year, to my dismay, I saw that
all my thorns in which I took so much pride were apparently dying. In the
middle of summer their leaves withered and wilted, and they presented a
piteous sight. I wrote to Kew for advice. Kew is a never-failing help in
trouble. The answer came back: Have you any savin juniper bushes? If so,
examine them. You will probably find them covered with a yellow slimy
sort of jelly, which is the first stage of a fungus which, in its second
stage, fastens upon the thorn. The letter went on to advise a merciless
destruction and holocaust of the savin bushes, and prophesied that the
fungus on the thorns would die and not renew itself, so that no permanent
harm would ensue. Sure enough, in my ignorance, I had planted a number
of bushes of savin, which I found, as Kew prophesied, to be covered with
an ugly yellow mucilaginous substance. My inquisition was followed by an
_auto da fé_ of the junipers; when their enemies were burnt, the thorns
recovered and I had no more trouble.
How most other plants hate the beech and the ash! How resolutely they
refuse to grow under their shade! And yet even the best hated men have
their friends, who will smile to them and seek their company. Lords of
beech woods wanting covert for their game should try planting Laurus
Colchica and Laurus rotundifolia. The pheasants love their shelter, and
they are quite happy even under old-established beeches.
There are plants of prey just as there are beasts of prey and birds of
prey. These are plants which live upon animal food just as we do, setting
traps and snares for them with all the cunning shown by one of Richard
Jefferies’ phenomenal gamekeepers or poachers. What, by the by, is the
exact dividing line which separates the poacher from the keeper? Does
the one develop into the other as does the chrysalis into the butterfly?
I remember a little old Highland stalker, a veteran of the “hull,” as
brown and rugged as a russet apple; we had been watching deer a long way
off all the morning—the wind wrong for a stalk—and he confided to me
all those secrets of deer life which seemed as familiar to him as if,
like the Buddha, he had been himself a stag in some previous stage of
existence. “How long have you been a stalker, Hughie?” I asked. “Maybe
twenty years,” he answered; but then, looking up, his eyes twinkling with
a craft worthy of Autolycus, he added, “but I was a shepherd for many
years before that.”
There was a whole folio volume of predatory but illicit sport in the
words. Some plants, like the various pitchers of Nepenthe and others,
remain still and are content to rely upon the beauty of their colours
to tempt the game to its doom. Caught in the trap, the victims are held
tight by some glue like birdlime, or kept from finding their way out by
fingers of sharp teeth like the knives of the Iron Virgin of Nürnberg.
Others, innocent, humble little creatures, look “as if they would not
hurt a fly.” But let the fly beware, and keep out of their grip—“foxes
in stealth, wolves in greediness,” they are armed like the butterwort
(_pinguicula_) with glands which become active at the touch, and secure
the prisoner, or as the sundew (_drosera_), equipped with tentacles which
close in upon him like a horror in one of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. How
these creatures feed and how they digest their meat is told in Darwin’s
“Insectivorous Plants” and elsewhere. These are facts, not fancies. But
what gastronome could take offence if he were accused of being as greedy
as sundew!
There is one human quality, the power of enjoyment, which, above all
others, we seem to recognize in our plants. It is impossible to look
upon the daffodils in a field dancing in the sunlight of an early April
day, without feeling that here is the very embodiment of gladness—of
the _joie de vivre_; and as the months speed on and flower after flower
bursts into life, meeting the renewed glories of the sun, we have
before us a roundelay of gaiety and happiness which only quite ceases
when the first grip of winter comes to choke and kill the melancholy
glory of autumn. Then, when the dahlias hang their stricken heads, and
the blue clouds of the Michaelmas daisies fade and shed their seed, we
are conscious of the fact that they, too, have their sorrows, though
the tragedy of so many has passed unnoticed when rivals, each one more
beautiful than the last, have been springing up to take their place. A
greater than I am has noticed the pleasure that plants take in the act of
living. A friend sends me these lines of Wordsworth’s:
“The budding twigs spread out their fan
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.”