FOOTNOTE:[2]Other subjects of my inquiries gave me less curious, but often analogous results. I visited, for instance, a certain number of palmists. On seeing the sumptuous apartments of several of those prophets of the hand, who revealed to me nothing but nonsense, I was admiring the ingenuousness of their patrons, when a friend pointed out to me, in a lane near the Mont-de-Piété, the abode of a practitioner who, according to him, had most effectively cultivated and developed the great traditions of the science of Desbarolles and d'Arpentigny.On the sixth floor of a hideous rabbit-warren of a house, in a loft that served as both living-room and bed-room, I found an unpretending, gentle and vulgar old man, whose manner of speech suggested the hall-porter rather than the prophet. I did not obtain much from him; but, in the case of some more nervous persons whom I brought to him, particularly two or three women with whose past and character I was fairly well-acquainted, he revealed with rather astonishing precision the essential preoccupations of their minds and hearts, discerned very cleverly the chief curves of their existence, stopped at the cross-roads where their destinies had really swerved or wavered, and discovered certain strikingly exact and almost anecdotical particulars, such as journeys, love-affairs, influences undergone, or accidents. In a word, and taking into consideration the sort of auto-suggestion that causes our imagination, more or less inflamed by the contact of mystery, immediately and precisely to state the most shapeless clue, he traced, on a somewhat conventional and symbolical plan, a clearly-established scheme of their past and present, in which they were obliged, in spite of their distrust, to recognize the special track of their lives. In so far as his predictions are concerned, I must say, in passing, that not one of them was realized.Certainly there was in his intuition something more than a fortunate coincidence. It was, in a lesser degree, a sort of nervous communication between one unconsciousness and another of the same class, as with the clairvoyant. I have met the same phenomenon in the case of a woman who read coffee-grounds, but accompanied by more venturesome and less certain manifestations: I will, therefore, not pause to consider it.
[2]Other subjects of my inquiries gave me less curious, but often analogous results. I visited, for instance, a certain number of palmists. On seeing the sumptuous apartments of several of those prophets of the hand, who revealed to me nothing but nonsense, I was admiring the ingenuousness of their patrons, when a friend pointed out to me, in a lane near the Mont-de-Piété, the abode of a practitioner who, according to him, had most effectively cultivated and developed the great traditions of the science of Desbarolles and d'Arpentigny.On the sixth floor of a hideous rabbit-warren of a house, in a loft that served as both living-room and bed-room, I found an unpretending, gentle and vulgar old man, whose manner of speech suggested the hall-porter rather than the prophet. I did not obtain much from him; but, in the case of some more nervous persons whom I brought to him, particularly two or three women with whose past and character I was fairly well-acquainted, he revealed with rather astonishing precision the essential preoccupations of their minds and hearts, discerned very cleverly the chief curves of their existence, stopped at the cross-roads where their destinies had really swerved or wavered, and discovered certain strikingly exact and almost anecdotical particulars, such as journeys, love-affairs, influences undergone, or accidents. In a word, and taking into consideration the sort of auto-suggestion that causes our imagination, more or less inflamed by the contact of mystery, immediately and precisely to state the most shapeless clue, he traced, on a somewhat conventional and symbolical plan, a clearly-established scheme of their past and present, in which they were obliged, in spite of their distrust, to recognize the special track of their lives. In so far as his predictions are concerned, I must say, in passing, that not one of them was realized.Certainly there was in his intuition something more than a fortunate coincidence. It was, in a lesser degree, a sort of nervous communication between one unconsciousness and another of the same class, as with the clairvoyant. I have met the same phenomenon in the case of a woman who read coffee-grounds, but accompanied by more venturesome and less certain manifestations: I will, therefore, not pause to consider it.
[2]Other subjects of my inquiries gave me less curious, but often analogous results. I visited, for instance, a certain number of palmists. On seeing the sumptuous apartments of several of those prophets of the hand, who revealed to me nothing but nonsense, I was admiring the ingenuousness of their patrons, when a friend pointed out to me, in a lane near the Mont-de-Piété, the abode of a practitioner who, according to him, had most effectively cultivated and developed the great traditions of the science of Desbarolles and d'Arpentigny.
On the sixth floor of a hideous rabbit-warren of a house, in a loft that served as both living-room and bed-room, I found an unpretending, gentle and vulgar old man, whose manner of speech suggested the hall-porter rather than the prophet. I did not obtain much from him; but, in the case of some more nervous persons whom I brought to him, particularly two or three women with whose past and character I was fairly well-acquainted, he revealed with rather astonishing precision the essential preoccupations of their minds and hearts, discerned very cleverly the chief curves of their existence, stopped at the cross-roads where their destinies had really swerved or wavered, and discovered certain strikingly exact and almost anecdotical particulars, such as journeys, love-affairs, influences undergone, or accidents. In a word, and taking into consideration the sort of auto-suggestion that causes our imagination, more or less inflamed by the contact of mystery, immediately and precisely to state the most shapeless clue, he traced, on a somewhat conventional and symbolical plan, a clearly-established scheme of their past and present, in which they were obliged, in spite of their distrust, to recognize the special track of their lives. In so far as his predictions are concerned, I must say, in passing, that not one of them was realized.
Certainly there was in his intuition something more than a fortunate coincidence. It was, in a lesser degree, a sort of nervous communication between one unconsciousness and another of the same class, as with the clairvoyant. I have met the same phenomenon in the case of a woman who read coffee-grounds, but accompanied by more venturesome and less certain manifestations: I will, therefore, not pause to consider it.
IN AN AUTOMOBILE
The first trips—the initiation, with the master's eye upon you—count for but little. One is not in direct communication with the wonderful beast. Its veritable character is hidden, for there is a tiresome intermediary between, a reticent, cunning interpreter—the responsible tamer. With your foot on the brake, even when you hold the levers and handles between your fingers, you are far from possessing the monster. By your side sits the master, whose sovereignty it has too long acknowledged; to him it is as obsequious, as submissively attached, as a faithful dog. For the thing is half human. You feelsomewhat like a lion-tamer's apprentice when he enters the cage with his father, and sees the cowed brutes prostrate themselves humbly before the commanding eye and the lash. One has a great desire to be alone, in Space, with this unknown animal, that dates but from yesterday; we burn to discover what it is in itself, what it demands and withholds, what obedience it will vouchsafe to its unexpected master; as also what new lessons the new horizons will teach us, the new horizons into which we shall be plunged to our very soul by a force that, issuing now, and for the first time, from the inexhaustible reservoir of undisciplined forces, permits us to absorb, in one day, as many sights, as much landscape and sky, as would formerly have been granted to us in a whole life-time.
Yesterday the master drove us from Paris to Rouen. This morning he left me, having first taken me outside the gates of the old, many-steepled city. There I was, alone with the dreadful hippogriff; alone in the open country, the horizon of immaculate blue on the left, on the right still faintly pink; alone on the desolate road that winds between oceans of corn, with islands of trees that turn into blue in the distance.
I am many miles from a station, far from garage or repairers. And at first I am conscious of a vague uneasiness, that is not without its charm. I am at the mercy of this mysterious force, that is yet more logical than I. A caprice of its hidden life—one of those caprices that, mysterious as they may seem to us, are yet never wrong, and put our arrogant reason to shame—and I should be solitary in this illimitablevastness of green, chained to the enigmatic mass that my arms cannot move. But the monster, I say to myself, has no secrets that I have not learned. Before placing myself in its power, I took it to pieces, and examined its organs. And, now that it snorts at my feet, I can recall its physiology. I know its infallible wheelwork, its delicate points; I have studied its infantile maladies, and learned what diseases are fatal. I have had its heart and soul laid bare, I have looked into the profound circulation of its life. Its soul is the electric spark, which, seven or eight hundred times to the minute, sends fiery breath through the veins. And the terrible, complex heart is composed, first of all, of the carburetter, with its strange double face: the carburetter, which prepares, proportions and volatilizes the petrol—subtle fairy that has slumbered ever since the world began, and is now recalled to power, and united to the air that has tornher from sleep. This redoubtable mixture is eagerly swallowed by the mighty viscera close by, which contain the explosion chamber, the piston, all the live force of the motor. And around these, which form one mass of flame, pure water circulates always, restraining the passionate ardour that else would devour them and turn them into a flow of lava, calming with its long and icy caress the mortal frenzy of toil—vigilant, untiring water, that the radiator posted in front of the car keeps cool, and freshens with all the sweetness of valley and plain. Next comes the trembler-blade which governs the spark, and is in its turn controlled by the movement of the motor. The soul obeys what is properly the body, and the body, in most ingenious harmony, obeys the soul. But so strangely elastic is this preordained harmony that it is open to a more independent or more intelligent will—that of the driver, which stands here for the willof the gods—to improve still further this admirable equilibrium of two alien forces; and by means of the "advance ignition" lever, to precipitate the spark at the moment that the accidental aid or resistance of the road may render most favourable.
Let us pause for an instant to admire this strange terminology, so spontaneous and withal so sensible, which is, in a measure, the language of a new force. "Advance ignition," for instance, is a most adequate term, and we should find it vastly difficult to express more tersely and clearly what it was needful to say. The ignition is the inflammation of the explosive gases by the electric spark. And this explosion can be hastened or retarded in accordance with the requirements of the motor. When the "advance ignition" valve is opened, thespark springs forth some thousandth part of a second before the moment when it would logically produce itself; in other words, before the piston, attaining the end of its journey, shall have completely compressed the gas and utilized all the energy of the previous explosion. One would think, at first, that this premature explosion would counteract the ascending movement. Far from it; experience proves that one benefits by the infinitesimal time that the inflamed gases take to dilate themselves; as also probably by other causes no less obscure. In any event, we find that the pace of the machine is curiously accelerated. It is a device, like the glass of wine to the labourer, to procure a spell of abnormal strength. But whence does the term come, and who is its father? Whence do these words spring forth, at the given moment, to fix in life creatures of whose existence we were yesterday unaware? They escapefrom the factory, foundry or warehouse; they are the last echoes of that anonymous, universal voice that has given a name to trees and flowers, to bread and wine, to life and death; and fortunately it usually happens that by the time the pedant has begun to regard and question, it has become too late to make any change.
Over and above such matters as compression, carburation, oiling, circulation of the water, etc., the trembler-blade and the sparking-plug are the driver's especial cares. Should the regulating screw of the one displace itself by the breadth of a hair, should the two opposed wires of the other be touched by a drop of oil or a trace of oxide, the miraculous horse will die on the spot. And around these are still many organs whereof I dare scarcely permitmyself to think. Yonder, concealed in its case, like a furious genie confined in a narrow cell, is the mysterious apparatus for the change of speed; and this, if you give a turn to the lever when you come to the foot of a hill, will produce repeated explosions, urging the piston to movement so frantic, that every vertebra of the creature will tremble and give to the slackening wheels a quadruple force before which each mountain will bend its back, and carry the conqueror humbly to its very crown. Further there is the enigmatic mechanism of the live axle which, dispensing with chains and straps, transmits directly to the two back wheels all the extraordinary power generated in its delirious heart. And still lower, beneath the brake, there rests, in its almost inviolable box, the transcendent secret of thedifferentiator, which, by means of a recent miracle, permits two wheels of the same dimensions, revolving on the sameaxle and moved by the same motor, to perform an unequal number of turns!
But at present I have no concern with these mighty mysteries. Beneath my tremulous hand the monster is alert and docile; and on either side of the road the cornfields flow peacefully onward, true rivers of green. The time has now come to try the power of esoteric action. I touch the magical handles. The fairy horse obeys. It stops abruptly. One short moan, and its life has all ebbed away. It is now nothing more than a vast, inert mass of metal. How to resuscitate it? I descend, and eagerly inspect the corpse. The plains, whose submissive immensity I have been braving, begin to contemplate revenge. Now that I have ceased to move, they fling themselves further and wider around me. The bluedistance seems to recede, the sky to recoil. I am lost among the impassable cornfields, whose myriad heads press forward, whispering softly, craning to see what I am proposing to do; while the poppies, in the midst of that undulating crowd, nod their red caps and burst into thousandfold laughter. But no matter. My recent science is sure of itself. The hippogriff revives, gives its first snort of life, and then departs once more, singing its song. I reconquer the plains, which again bow down before me. I give a slow turn to the mysterious "advance ignition" lever, and regulate carefully the admission of the petrol. The pace grows faster and faster, the delirious wheels cry aloud in their gladness. And at first the road comes moving towards me, like a bride waving palms, rhythmically keeping time to some joyous melody. But soon it grows frantic, springs forward, and throws itself madly upon me,rushing under the car like a furious torrent, whose foam lashes my face; it drowns me beneath its waves, it blinds me with its breath. Oh, that wonderful breath! It is as though wings, as though myriad wings no eye can see, transparent wings of great supernatural birds that have their homes on invisible mountains swept by eternal snow, have come to refresh my eyes and my brow with their overwhelming fragrance! Now the road drops sheer into the abyss, and the magical carriage rushes ahead of it. The trees, that for so many slow-moving years have serenely dwelt on its borders, shrink back in dread of disaster. They seem to be hastening one to the other, to approach their green heads, and in startled groups to debate how to bar the way of the strange apparition. But as this rushes onward, they take panic, and scatter and fly, each one quickly seeking its own habitual place; and as I pass they bend tumultuouslyforward, and their myriad leaves, quick to the mad joy of the force that is chanting its hymn, murmur in my ears the voluble psalm of Space, acclaiming and greeting the enemy that hitherto has always been conquered but now at last triumphs: Speed.
Space and Time, its invisible brother, are perhaps the two great enemies of mankind. Could we conquer these, we should be as the gods. Time seems invincible, having neither body nor form, no organs by which we can seize it. It passes, leaving traces that nearly always are sad, like the baleful shadow of some inevitable being we never have seen face to face. In itself doubtless it has no existence, but is only in relation to us; nor shall we ever succeed in bending to our will this necessary phantom of our organically false imagination. But Space, its magnificent brother, Space that decksitself with the green robe of the plains, the yellow veil of the desert, the blue mantle of the sea, and spreads over all the azure of the ether and the gold of the stars—Space, it may be, has already known many defeats; but never as yet has man seized it, as it were, round the body, grappled with it, alone, face to face. The monsters he has hitherto launched against its gigantic mass might conquer, but only to be conquered again in their turn.
On the sea great steamers subdue it day after day; but the sea is so vast that the extreme speed our frail lungs were able to endure could achieve no more than a kind of motionless triumph. And again, as we travel by rail, and Space flies submissive before us, it is still far away—we do not touch it, we do not enjoy it—it is like a captive adorning the triumph of a foreign king, and we ourselves the feeble prisoners of the power that has dethroned it. Buthere, in this little chariot of fire, that is so light and so docile, so gloriously untiring; here, beneath the unfolded wings of this bird of flame that flies low down over the earth in the midst of the flowers, greeting cornfields and rivulets, inviting the shade of the trees; passing village on village, glancing in at the open doors and watching the tables spread for the meal, counting the harvesters at work in the meadows, skirting the church, half hidden by lime-trees, and taking its rest at the inn on the stroke of noon—then setting forth once more, singing its song, to see at one bound what is happening among men at three days' march from the last place of halt, and surprising the very same hour in quite a new world—here Space does indeed become human, in the line of our eye, in accordance with the needs of our insatiable, exacting soul, that craves at once for the small and the mighty, the quick and the slow; here it is of us atlast, it is ours, and offers at every turn glimpses of beauty that, in former days, we could only enjoy when the tedious journey was ended.
Now, however, it is not the arrival alone that causes our eyes to open, that revives the eagerness so precious to life, and invites admiration; now the entire road is one long succession of arrivals. The joys of the journey's end are multiplied, for all things adopt the admirable form of the end; the eyes are idle no longer, no longer indifferent; and memory, simplest of all the fairies whose touch of the wand brings happiness—memory, pondering silently on the less happy days that await every man, treasures the beauties of good mother earth; and fixes for ever, among those possessions of which none can deprive us, the unexpected gifts that have been so abundantly offered by the glad hours and the enfranchised roads.
FOOTNOTE:[3]Translated by Alfred Sutro.
[3]Translated by Alfred Sutro.
[3]Translated by Alfred Sutro.
NEWS OF SPRING
I have seen the manner in which Spring stores up sunshine, leaves and flowers and makes ready, long beforehand, to invade the North. Here, on the ever-balmy shores of the Mediterranean—that motionless sea which looks as though it were under glass—where, while the months are dark in the rest of Europe, Spring has taken shelter from the wind and the snows in a palace of peace and light and love, it is interesting to detect its preparations for travelling in the fields of undying green. I can see clearly that it is afraid, that it hesitates once more to face the great frost-traps which February and March lay for it annually beyond the mountains. It waits,it dallies, it tries its strength before resuming the harsh and cruel way which the hypocrite Winter seems to yield to it. It stops, sets out again, revisits a thousand times, like a child running round the garden of its holidays, the fragrant valleys, the tender hills which the frost has never brushed with its wings. It has nothing to do here, nothing to revive, since nothing has perished and nothing suffered, since all the flowers of every season bathe here in the blue air of an eternal summer. But it seeks pretexts, it lingers, it loiters, it goes to and fro like an unoccupied gardener. It pushes aside the branches, fondles with its breath the olive-tree that quivers with a silver smile, polishes the glossy grass, rouses the corollas that were not asleep, recalls the birds that had never fled, encourages the bees that were workers without ceasing; and then, seeing, like God, that all is well in the spotless Eden, it rests for amoment on the ledge of a terrace which the orange-tree crowns with regular flowers and with fruits of light and, before leaving, casts a last look over its labour of joy and entrusts it to the sun.
I have followed it, these past few days, on the banks of the Borigo, from the torrent of Careï to the Val de Gorbio, in those little rustic towns, Ventimiglia, Tende, Sospello, in those curious villages, perched upon rocks, Sant' Agnese, Castellar, Castillon, in that adorable and already quite Italian country which surrounds Mentone. You go through a few streets quickened with the cosmopolitan and somewhat hateful life of the Riviera, you leave behind you the band-stand, with its everlasting town music, around which gather the consumptive rank and fashion of Mentone, andbehold, at two steps from the crowd that dreads it as it would a scourge from Heaven, you find the admirable silence of the trees, all the goodly Virgilian realities of sunk roads, clear springs, shady pools that sleep on the mountain-sides, where they seem to await a goddess's reflection. You climb a path between two stone walls brightened by violets and crowned with the strange brown cowls of the arisarum, with its leaves of so deep a green that one might believe them to be created to symbolize the coolness of the well, and the amphitheatre of a valley opens like a moist and splendid flower. Through the blue veil of the giant olive-trees that cover the horizon with a transparent curtain of scintillating pearls, gleams the discreet and harmonious brilliancy of all that men imagine in their dreams and paint upon scenes that are thought unreal and unrealizable, when they wish to define the ideal gladness of animmortal hour, of some enchanted island, of a lost paradise, or the dwelling of the gods.
All along the valleys of the coast are hundreds of these amphitheatres which are as stages whereon, by moonlight or amid the peace of the mornings and afternoons, are acted the dumb fairy-plays of the world's contentment. They are all alike, and yet each of them reveals a different happiness. Each of them, as though they were the faces of a bevy of equally happy and equally beautiful sisters, wears its distinguishing smile. A cluster of cypresses, with its pure outline, a mimosa that resembles a bubbling spring of sulphur, a grove of orange-trees with dark and heavy tops symmetrically charged with golden fruits that suddenly proclaim the royal affluence of the soil that feeds them, a slope coveredwith lemon-trees, where the night seems to have heaped up on a mountain-side, to await a new twilight, the stars gathered by the dawn, a leafy portico which opens over the sea like a deep glance that suddenly discloses an infinite thought, a brook hidden like a tear of joy, a trellis awaiting the purple of the grapes, a great stone basin drinking in the water that trickles from the tip of a green reed: all and yet none modify the expression of the restfulness, the tranquillity, the azure silence, the blissfulness that is its own delight.
But I am looking for Winter and the print of its footsteps. Where is it hiding? It should be here; and how dares this feast of roses and anemones, of soft air and dew, of bees and birds display itself with such assurance during the most pitiless month ofWinter's reign? And what will Spring do, what will Spring say, since all seems done, since all seems said? Is it superfluous, then, and does nothing await it? No; search carefully: you shall find amid this life of unwearying youth the work of its hand, the perfume of its breath which is younger than life. Thus, there are foreign trees yonder, taciturn guests, like poor relations in ragged clothes. They come from very far, from the land of fog and frost and wind. They are aliens, sullen and distrustful. They have not yet learned the limpid speed, not adopted the delightful customs of the azure. They refused to believe in the promises of the sky and suspected the caresses of the sun which, from early dawn, covers them with a mantle of silkier and warmer rays than that with which July loaded their shoulders in the precarious summers of their native land. It made no difference: at the given hour, when snowwas falling a thousand miles away, their trunks shivered, and, despite the bold averment of the grass and a hundred thousand flowers, despite the impertinence of the roses that climb up to them to bear witness to life, they stripped themselves for their winter sleep. Sombre and grim and bare as the dead, they await the Spring that bursts forth around them; and, by a strange and excessive reaction, they wait for it longer than under the harsh, gloomy sky of Paris, for it is said that in Paris the buds are already beginning to shoot. One catches glimpses of them here and there amid the holiday throng whose motionless dances enchant the hills. They are not many and they conceal themselves: they are gnarled oaks, beeches, planes; and even the vine, which one would have thought better-mannered, more docile and well-informed, remains incredulous. There they stand, black and gaunt, like sick people on anEaster Sunday in the church-porch made transparent by the splendour of the sun. They have been there for years and some of them, perhaps, for two or three centuries; but they have the terror of winter in their marrow. They will never lose the habit of death. They have too much experience, they are too old to forget and too old to learn. Their hardened reason refuses to admit the light when it does not come at the accustomed time. They are rugged old men, too wise to enjoy unforeseen pleasures. They are wrong. For here, around the old, around the grudging ancestors, is a whole world of plants that know nothing of the future, but give themselves to it. They live but for a season; they have no past and no traditions and they know nothing, except that the hour is fair and that they must enjoy it. While their elders, their masters and their gods, sulk and waste their time, they burst intoflower; they love and they beget. They are the humble flowers of dear solitude: the Easter daisy that covers the sward with its frank and methodical neatness; the borage bluer than the bluest sky; the anemone, scarlet or dyed in aniline; the virgin primrose; the arborescent mallow; the bell-flower, shaking its bells that no one hears; the rosemary that looks like a little country maid; and the heavy thyme that thrusts its grey head between the broken stones.
But, above all, this is the incomparable hour, the diaphanous and liquid hour of the wood-violet. Its proverbial humility becomes usurping and almost intolerant. It no longer cowers timidly among the leaves: it hustles the grass, overtowers it, blots it out, forces its colours upon it, fills it with its breath. Its unnumbered smiles cover the terraces of olives and vines, the tracks of the ravines, the bend of the valleys witha net of sweet and innocent gaiety; its perfume, fresh and pure as the soul of the mountain spring, makes the air more translucent, the silence more limpid and is, in very deed, as a forgotten legend tells us, the breath of Earth, all bathed in dew, when, a virgin yet, she wakes in the sun and yields herself wholly in the first kiss of early dawn.
Again, in the little gardens that surround the cottages, the bright little houses with their Italian roofs, the good vegetables, unprejudiced and unpretentious, have known no fear. While the old peasant, who has come to resemble the trees he cultivates, digs the earth around the olives, the spinach assumes a lofty bearing, hastens to grow green nor takes the smallest precaution; the garden bean opens its eyes of jetin its pale leaves and sees the night fall unmoved; the fickle peas shoot and lengthen out, covered with motionless and tenacious butterflies, as though June had entered the farm-gate; the carrot blushes as it faces the light; the ingenuous strawberry-plants inhale the flavours which noontide lavishes upon them as it bends towards earth its sapphire urns; the lettuce exerts itself to achieve a heart of gold wherein to lock the dews of morning and night.
The fruit-trees alone have long reflected: the example of the vegetables among which they live urged them to join in the general rejoicing, but the rigid attitude of their elders from the North, of the grandparents born in the great dark forests, preached prudence to them. But now they awaken: they too can resist no longer and at last make up their minds to join the dance of perfumes and of love. The peach-trees are now no more than a rosy miracle, like thesoftness of a child's skin turned into azure vapour by the breath of dawn. The pear and plum and apple and almond-trees make dazzling efforts in drunken rivalry; and the pale hazel-trees, like Venetian chandeliers, resplendent with a cascade of gems, stand here and there to light the feast. As for the luxurious flowers that seem to possess no other object than themselves, they have long abandoned the endeavour to solve the mystery of this boundless summer. They no longer score the seasons, no longer count the days, and, knowing not what to do in the glowing disarray of hours that have no shadow, dreading lest they should be deceived and lose a single second that might be fair, they have resolved to bloom without respite from January to December. Nature approves them and, to reward their trust in happiness, their generous beauty and amorous excesses, grants them a force, a brilliancyand perfumes which she never gives to those which hang back and show a fear of life.
All this, among other truths, was proclaimed by the little house that I saw to-day on the side of a hill all deluged in roses, carnations, wall-flowers, heliotrope and mignonette, so as to suggest the source, choked and overflowing with flowers, whence Spring was preparing to pour down upon us; while, upon the stone threshold of the closed door, pumpkins, lemons, oranges, limes and Turkey figs slumbered in the majestic, deserted, monotonous silence of a perfect day.
THE WRATH OF THE BEE
Since the publication of "The Life of the Bee," I have often been asked to throw light upon one of the most dreaded mysteries of the hive, namely, the psychology of its inexplicable, sudden and sometimes mortal wrath. A crowd of cruel and unjust legends, in fact, hovers around the abode of the yellow fairies of the honey. The bravest among the guests who visit the garden slacken their pace and lapse into involuntary silence as they approach the enclosure, blooming with clover and mignonette, where buzz the daughters of the light. Doting mothers keep their children away from it, as they would keep them away from a smouldering fire or a nest ofadders; nor does the bee-keeping novice, gloved in leather, veiled in gauze, surrounded by clouds of smoke, face the mystic citadel without that little unavowed shiver which men feel before a great battle.
How much reason is there at the bottom of these traditional fears? Is the bee really dangerous? Does she allow herself to be tamed? Is there a risk in approaching the hives? Ought we to flee or to face their wrath? Has the bee-keeper some secret or some talisman that preserves him from being stung? These are the questions that are anxiously put by all those who have started a timid hive and who are beginning their apprenticeship.
The bee, in general, is neither ill-disposed nor aggressive, but appears somewhat capricious. She has an unconquerable antipathy to certain people; she also hasdays of enervation—for instance, when a storm is at hand—on which she shows herself extremely irritable. She has a most subtle and susceptible sense of smell; she tolerates no perfume and detests, above all, the scent of human sweat and of alcohol. She is not to be tamed, in the proper sense of the word; but, whereas the hives which we seldom visit become crabbed and distrustful, those which we surround with our daily cares soon grow accustomed to the discreet and prudent presence of man. Lastly, to enable us to handle the bees almost without impunity, there exist a certain number of little expedients which vary according to circumstances and which can be learnt by practice alone. But it is time to reveal the great secret of their wrath.
The bee, essentially so pacific, so long-suffering, the bee, which never stings(unless you crush her) when looting among the flowers, once she has returned to her kingdom with the waxen monuments, retains her mild and tolerant character, or grows violent and deadly dangerous, according as her maternal city be opulent or poor. Here again, as often happens when we study the manners of this spirited and mysterious little people, the provisions of human logic are utterly at fault. It would be natural that the bees should defend desperately treasures so laboriously amassed, a city such as we find in good apiaries, where the nectar, overflowing the numberless cells that represent thousands of casks piled from cellar to garret, streams in golden stalactites along the rustling walls and sends far afield, in glad response to the ephemeral perfumes of calyces that are opening, the more lasting perfume of the honey that keeps alive the memory of calyces which time has closed. Now this isnot the case. The richer their abode, the less eagerness they display to fight around it. Open or turn over a wealthy hive; if you take care to drive the sentries from the entrance with a puff of smoke, it will be extremely rare for the other bees to contend with you for the liquid booty conquered from the smiles, from all the charms of the beautiful azure months. Try the experiment; I promise you impunity, if you touch only the heavier hives. You can turn them over and empty them; those throbbing flagons are perfectly harmless. What does it mean? Have the fierce amazons lost courage? Has abundance unnerved them, and have they, after the manner of the too fortunate inhabitants of luxurious towns, delegated the dangerous duties to the unhappy mercenaries who keep watch at the gates? No, it has never been observed that the greatest good fortune relaxes the valour of the bee. On the contrary, the more therepublic prospers, the more harshly and severely are its laws applied, and the worker in a hive where superfluity accumulates labours much more zealously than her sister in an indigent hive. There are other reasons which we cannot wholly fathom, but which are likely reasons, if only we take into account the wild interpretation which the poor bee must needs place upon our monstrous doings. Seeing suddenly her huge dwelling-place upheaved, overturned, half-opened, she probably imagines that an inevitable, a natural catastrophe is occurring against which it were madness to struggle. She no longer resists, but neither does she flee. Admitting the ruin, it looks as though already, in her instinct, she saw the future dwelling which she hopes to build with the materials taken from the gutted town. She leaves the present defenceless in order to save the hereafter. Or else, perhaps, does she, like the dog in the fable,"the dog that carried his master's dinner round his neck," knowing that all is irreparably lost, prefer to die taking her share of the pillage and to pass from life to death in one prodigious orgy? We do not know for certain. How should we penetrate the motives of the bee, when those of the simplest actions of our brothers are beyond our ken?
Still, the fact is that, at each great proof to which the city is put, at each trouble that appears to the bees to possess an inevitable character, no sooner has the infatuation spread from one to the other among the densely quivering people than the bees fling themselves upon their combs, violently tear the sacred lids from the provisions for the winter, topple head foremost and plunge their whole bodies into the sweet-smelling vats, imbibe with long draughts the chastewine of the flowers, gorge themselves with it, intoxicate themselves with it, till their bronze-ringed forms lengthen and distend like compressed leather bottles. Now the bee, when swollen with honey, can no longer curve her abdomen at the angle required to draw her sting. She becomes, so to speak, mechanically harmless from that moment. It is generally imagined that the beekeeper employs the fumigator to stun, to half-asphyxiate the warriors that gather their treasure in the blue and thus to effect an entrance by favour of a defenceless slumber into the palace of the innumerous sleeping amazons. This is a mistake: the smoke serves first to drive back the guardians of the threshold, who are ever on the alert and extremely quarrelsome; then, two or three puffs come to spread panic among the workers: the panic provokes the mysterious orgy, and the orgy helplessness. Thus is the fact explainedthat, with bare arms and unprotected face, one can open the most populous hives, examine their combs, shake off the bees, spread them at one's feet, heap them up, pour them out like grains of corn and quietly gather the honey, in the midst of the deafening cloud of ousted workers, without having to suffer a single sting.
But woe to whoso touches the poor hives! Keep away from the abodes of want! Here, smoke has lost its spell, and you shall scarce have emitted the first puffs before twenty thousand acrid and enraged demons will dart from within the walls, overwhelm your hands, blind your eyes and blacken your face. No living being, except, they say, the bear and the Sphinx Atropos, can resist the rage of the mailed legions. Above all, do not struggle: the fury wouldovertake the neighbouring colonies; and the smell of the spilt venom would enrage all the republics around. There is no means of safety other than instant flight through the bushes. The bee is less rancorous, less implacable than the wasp and rarely pursues her enemy. If flight be impossible, absolute immobility alone might calm her or put her off the scent. She fears and attacks any too sudden movement, but at once forgives that which no longer stirs.
The poor hives live, or rather die from day to day, and it is because they have no honey in their cellars that smoke makes no impression on them. They cannot gorge themselves like their sisters that belong to happier tribes; the possibilities of a future city are not there to divert their ardour. Their only thought is to perish on the outraged threshold, and, lean, shrunk, nimble, unrestrained, they defend it with unheard-of heroism and desperation. Therefore, thecautious beekeeper never displaces the indigent hives without making a preliminary sacrifice to the hungry Furies. His offering is a honey-comb. They come hastening up and then, the smoke assisting, they distend and intoxicate themselves: behold them reduced to helplessness like the rich burgesses of the plentiful cells.
One could find much more to tell of the wrath of the bees and their singular antipathies. These antipathies are often so strange that they were for long attributed, that they are still attributed, by the peasants, to moral causes, to profound and mystic intuitions. There is the conviction, for instance, that the vestal vintagers cannot endure the approach of the unchaste, above all of the adulterous. It would be surprising if the most rational beings that livewith us on this incomprehensible globe were to attach so much importance to a trespass that is often very harmless. In reality, they give it no thought; but they, whose whole life sways to the nuptial and sumptuous breath of the flowers, abhor the perfumes which we steal from them. Are we to believe that chastity exhales fewer odours than love? Is this the origin of the rancour of the jealous bees and of the legend that avenges virtues as jealous as they? Be this as it may, the legend must be classed with the many others that pretend to do great honour to the phenomena of nature by ascribing human feelings to them. It would be better, on the contrary, to mix our petty human psychology as little as possible with all that we do not easily understand, to seek our explanations only without, on this side of man or on that side; for it is probably there that lie the positive revelations which we are still awaiting.
FIELD FLOWERS
They welcome our steps without the city gates, on a gay and eager carpet of many colours, which they wave madly in the sunlight. It is evident that they were expecting us. When the first bright rays of March appeared, the Snowdrop, or Amaryllis, the heroic daughter of the hoar-frost, sounded the reveille. Next sprang from the earth efforts, as yet shapeless, of a slumbering memory: vague ghosts of flowers; pale flowers that are scarcely flowers at all: the three-fingered Saxifrage, or Samphire; the almost invisible Shepherd's Pouch; the two-leaved Squill; the Stinking Hellebore, or Christmas Rose; the Colt's Foot; the gloomy and poisonous Spurge Laurel: all plants of frail anddoubtful health, pale-blue, pale-pink, undecided attempts, the first fever of life in which nature expels her ill humours, anæmic captives set free by winter, convalescent patients from the underground prisons, timid and unskilful endeavours of the still buried light.
But soon this light ventures forth into space; the nuptial thoughts of the earth become clearer and purer; the rough attempts disappear; the half-dreams of the night lift like a fog dispelled by the dawn; and the good rustic flowers begin their unseen revels under the blue, all around the cities where man knows them not. No matter, they are there, making honey, while their proud and barren sisters, who alone receive our care, are still trembling in the depths of the hot-houses. They will still be there, in the flooded fields, in the broken paths, and adorning the roads with their simplicity, when the first snows shallhave covered the country-side. No one sows them and no one gathers them. They survive their glory, and man treads them under foot. Formerly, however, and not so long ago, they alone represented Nature's gladness. Formerly, however, a few hundred years ago, before their dazzling and chilly kinswomen had come from the Antilles, from India, from Japan, or before their own daughters, ungrateful and unrecognizable, had usurped their place, they alone enlivened the stricken gaze, they alone brightened the cottage porch, the castle precincts, and followed the lovers' footsteps in the woods. But those times are no more; and they are dethroned. They have retained of their past happiness only the names which they received when they were loved.
And these names show all that they were to man: all his gratitude, his studious fondness, all that he owed them, all that theygave him are there contained, like a secular aroma in hollow pearls. And so they bear names of queens, shepherdesses, virgins, princesses, sylphs and fairies, which flow from the lips like a caress, a lightning-flash, a kiss, a murmur of love. Our language, I think, contains nothing that is better, more daintily, more affectionately named than these homely flowers. Here the word clothes the idea almost always with care, with light precision, with admirable happiness. It is like an ornate and transparent stuff that moulds the form which it embraces and has the proper shade, perfume and sound. Call to mind the Easter Daisy, the Violet, the Bluebell, the Poppy, or, rather, Coquelicot: the name is the flower itself. How wonderful, for instance, that sort of cry and crest of light and joy: "Coquelicot!" to designate the scarlet flower which the scientists crush under this barbarous title:Papaver rhœas!See the Primrose, or, rather, the Cowslip, the Periwinkle, the Anemone, the Wild Hyacinth, the blue Speedwell, the Forget-me-not, the Wild Bindweed, the Iris, the Harebell: their name depicts them by equivalents and analogies which the greatest poets but rarely light upon. It represents all their ingenuous and visible soul. It hides itself, it bends over, it rises to the ear even as those who bear it lie concealed, stoop forward, or stand erect in the corn and in the grass.
These are the few names that are known to all of us; we do not know the others, though their music describes with the same gentleness, the same happy genius, flowers which we see by every wayside and upon all the paths. Thus, at this moment, that is to say, at the end of the month in which the ripe corn falls beneath the reaper's sickle, the banks of the roads are a pale violet: it is the Sweet Scabious, who has blossomed atlast, discreet, aristocratically poor and modestly beautiful, as her title, that of a mist-veiled precious stone, proclaims. Around her, a treasure lies scattered: it is the Ranunculus, or Buttercup, who has two names, even as he has two lives; for he is at once the innocent virgin that covers the grass with sun-drops, and the redoubtable and venomous wizard that deals out death to heedless animals. Again we have the Milfoil and the St. John's Wort, little flowers, once useful, that march along the roads, like silent school-girls, clad in a dull uniform; the vulgar and innumerous Bird's Groundsel; her big brother, the Hare's Lettuce of the fields; then the dangerous black Nightshade; the Bitter-sweet, who hides herself; the creeping Knotweed, with the patient leaves: all the families without show, with the resigned smile, wearing the practical grey livery of autumn, which already is felt to be at hand.
But, among those of March, April, May, June, July, remember the glad and festive names, the springtime syllables, the vocables of azure and dawn, of moonlight and sunshine! Here is the Snowdrop, or Amaryllis, who proclaims the thaw; the Stitchwort, or Lady's Collar, who greets the first-communicants along the hedges, whose leaves are as yet indeterminate and uncertain, like a diaphanous green lye. Here are the sad Columbine and the Field Sage, the Jasione, the Angelica, the Field Fennel, the Wallflower, dressed like a servant of a village-priest; the Osmond, who is a king fern; the Luzula, the Parmelia, the Venus' Looking-glass; the Esula or Wood Spurge, mysterious and full of sombre fire; the Physalidis, whose fruit ripens in a lantern; the Henbane, the Belladonna, the Digitalis, poisonous queens, veiled Cleopatras of the untilledplaces and the cool woods. And then, again, the Camomile, the good-capped Sister with a thousand smiles, bringing the health-giving brew in an earthenware bowl; the Pimpernel and the Coronilla, the pale Mint and the pink Thyme, the Sainfoin and the Euphrasy, the Ox-eye Daisy, the mauve Gentian and the blue Verbena, the Anthemis, the lance-shaped Horse-Thistle, the Cinquefoil or Potentilla, the Dyer's Weed ... to tell their names is to recite a poem of grace and light. We have reserved for them the most charming, the purest, the clearest sounds and all the musical gladness of the language. One would think that they were the persons of a play, dancers and choristers of an immense fairy-scene, more beautiful, more startling and more supernatural than the scenes that unfold themselves on Prospero's Island, at the Court of Theseus, or in the Forest of Arden. Andthe comely actresses of this silent, never-ending comedy—goddesses, angels, she-devils, princesses and witches, virgins and courtezans, queens and shepherd-girls—carry in the folds of their names the magic sheens of innumerous dawns, of innumerous springtimes contemplated by forgotten men, even as they also carry the memory of thousands of deep or fleeting emotions which were felt before them by generations that have disappeared, leaving no other trace.
They are interesting and incomprehensible. They are vaguely called the "Weeds." They serve no purpose. Here and there, a few, in very old villages, retain the spell of contested virtues. Here and there, one of them, right at the bottom of the apothecary's or herbalist's jars, still awaits thecoming of the sick man faithful to the infusions of tradition. But sceptic medicine will have none of them. No longer are they gathered according to the olden rites; and the science of "Simples" is dying out in the housewife's memory. A merciless war is waged upon them. The husbandman fears them; the plough pursues them; the gardener hates them and has armed himself against them with clashing weapons: the spade and the rake, the hoe and the scraper, the weeding-hook, the grubbing-axe. Along the high-roads, their last refuge, the passerby crushes them, the waggon bruises them. In spite of all, they are there: permanent, assured, abundant, peaceful; and not one but answers the summons of the sun. They follow the seasons without swerving by an hour. They take no account of man, who exhausts himself in conquering them, and, so soon as he rests, they spring up in his footsteps. They live on, audacious,immortal, untamable. They have peopled our flower-baskets with extravagant and unnatural daughters; but they, the poor mothers, have remained similar to what they were a hundred thousand years ago. They have not added a fold to their petals, reordered a pistil, altered a shade, invented a perfume. They keep the secret of a mysterious mission. They are the indelible primitives. The soil is theirs since its origin. They represent, in short, an essential smile, an invariable thought, an obstinate desire of the Earth.
That is why it is well to question them. They have evidently something to tell us. And, then, let us not forget that they were the first—with the sunrises and sunsets, with the springs and autumns, with the song of the birds, with the hair, the glance and the divine movements of women—to teach our fathers that there are useless and beautiful things upon this globe.
CHRYSANTHEMUMS
Every year, in November, at the season that follows on the hour of the dead, the crowning and majestic hour of autumn, reverently I go to visit the chrysanthemums in the places where chance offers them to my sight. For the rest, it matters little where they are shown to me by the good will of travel or of sojourn. They are, indeed, the most universal, the most diverse of flowers; but their diversity and surprises are, so to speak, concerted, like those of fashion, in I know not what arbitrary Edens. At the same moment, even as with silks, laces, jewels and curls, a mysterious voice gives the pass-word in time and space; and, docile as the mostbeautiful women, simultaneously, in every country, in every latitude, the flowers obey the sacred decree.
It is enough, then, to enter at random one of those crystal museums in which their somewhat funereal riches are displayed under the harmonious veil of the days of November. We at once grasp the dominant idea, the obtrusive beauty, the unexpected effort of the year in this special world, strange and privileged even in the midst of the strange and privileged world of flowers. And we ask ourselves if this new idea is a profound and really necessary idea on the part of the sun, the earth, life, autumn, or man.
Yesterday, then, I went to admire the year's gentle and gorgeous floral feast, the last which the snows of December andJanuary, like a broad belt of peace, sleep, silence and night, separate from the delicious festivals that commence again with the germination (powerful already, though hardly visible) that seeks the light in February.
They are there, under the immense transparent dome, the noble flowers of the month of fogs; they are there, at the royal meeting-place, all the grave little autumn fairies, whose dances and attitudes seem to have been struck motionless with a single word. The eye that recognizes them and has learned to love them perceives, at the first pleased glance, that they have actively and dutifully continued to evolve towards their uncertain ideal. Go back for a moment to their modest origin: look at the poor buttercup of yore, the humble little crimson or damask rose that still smiles sadly, along the roads full of dead leaves, in the scanty garden-patches of our villages;compare with them these enormous masses and fleeces of snow, these disks and globes of red copper, these spheres of old silver, these trophies of alabaster and amethyst, this delirious prodigy of petals which seems to be trying to exhaust to its last riddle the world of autumnal shapes and shades which the winter entrusts to the bosom of the sleeping woods; let the unwonted and unexpected varieties pass before your eyes; admire and appraise them.
Here, for instance, is the marvellous family of the stars: flat stars, bursting stars, diaphanous stars, solid and fleshly stars, milky ways and constellations of the earth that correspond with those of the firmament. Here are the proud plumes that await the diamonds of the dew; here, to put our dreams to shame, the fascinating poem of unreal tresses: wise, precise and meticulous tresses; mad and miraculous tresses; honeyed moonbeams, golden bushesand flaming whirlpools; curls of fair and smiling maidens, of fleeing nymphs, of passionate bacchantes, of swooning sirens, of cold virgins, of frolicsome children, whom angels, mothers, fauns, lovers have caressed with their calm or quivering hands. And then, here, pell-mell, are the monsters that cannot be classed: hedgehogs, spiders, curly endives, pine-apples, pompons, Tudor roses, shells, vapours, breaths, stalactites of ice and falling snow, a throbbing hail of sparks, wings, flashes, fluffy, pulpy, fleshy things, wattles, bristles, funeral piles and sky-rockets, bursts of light, a stream of fire and sulphur.
Now that the shapes have capitulated comes the question of conquering the region of the proscribed colours, of the reserved shades, which the autumn, as we can see,denies to the flowers that represent it. Lavishly it bestows on them all the wealth of the twilight and the night, all the riches of the harvest-time: it gives them all the mud-brown work of the rain in the woods, all the silvery fashionings of the mist in the plains, of the frost and the snow in the gardens. It permits them, above all, to draw at will upon the inexhaustible treasures of the dead leaves and the expiring forest. It allows them to deck themselves with the golden sequins, the bronze medals, the silver buckles, the copper spangles, the elfin plumes, the powdered amber, the burnt topazes, the neglected pearls, the smoked amethysts, the calcined garnets, all the dead but still dazzling jewellery which the North Wind heaps up in the hollows of ravines and foot-paths; but it insists that they shall remain faithful to their old masters and wear the livery of the drab and weary months that give them birth. It doesnot permit them to betray those masters and to don the princely, changing dresses of the spring and the dawn; and, if, sometimes, it suffers a pink, this is only on condition that it be borrowed from the cold lips, the pale brow of the veiled and afflicted virgin praying on a tomb. It forbids most strictly the tints of summer, of too youthful, ardent and serene a life, of a health too joyous and expansive. In no case will it consent to hilarious vermilions, impetuous scarlets, imperious and dazzling purples. As for the blues, from the azure of the dawn to the indigo of the sea and the deep lakes, from the periwinkle to the borage and the corn-flower, they are banished on pain of death.
Nevertheless, thanks to some forgetfulness of nature, the most unusual colour inthe world of flowers and the most severely forbidden—the colour which the corolla of the poisonous euphorbia is almost the only one to wear in the city of the umbels, petals and calyces—green, the colour exclusively reserved for the servile and nutrient leaves, has penetrated within the jealously-guarded precincts. True, it has slipped in only by favour of a lie, as a traitor, a spy, a livid deserter. It is a forsworn yellow, steeped fearfully in the fugitive azure of the moonbeam. It is still of the night and false, like the opal depths of the sea; it reveals itself only in shifting patches at the tips of the petals; it is vague and anxious, frail and elusive, but undeniable. It has made its entrance, it exists, it asserts itself; it will be daily more fixed and more determined; and, through the breach which it has contrived, all the joys and all the splendours of the banished prism will hurl themselves into their virgin domain, there to prepareunaccustomed feasts for our eyes. This is a great tiding and a memorable conquest in the land of flowers.
We must not think that it is puerile thus to interest one's self in the capricious forms, the unwritten shades of a humble, useless flower, nor must we treat those who seek to make it more beautiful or more strange as La Bruyère once treated the lover of the tulip or the plum. Do you remember the charming page?
"The lover of flowers has a garden in the suburbs, where he spends all his time from sunrise to sunset. You see him standing there and would think that he had taken root in the midst of his tulips before his 'Solitaire;' he opens his eyes wide, rubs his hands, stoops down and looks closer at it; it never before seemed to him so handsome; he is in an ecstasy of joy, and leaves it to go to the 'Orient,' then to the 'Widow,' fromthence to the 'Cloth of Gold,' on to the 'Agatha,' and at last returns to the 'Solitaire,' where he remains, is tired out, sits down, and forgets his dinner; he looks at the tulip and admires its shade, shape, colour, sheen and edges, its beautiful form and calyc; but God and nature are not in his thoughts, for they do not go beyond the bulb of his tulip, which he would not sell for a thousand crowns, though he will give it to you for nothing when tulips are no longer in fashion and carnations are all the rage. This rational being, who has a soul and professes some religion, comes home tired and half starved, but very pleased with his day's work: he has seen some tulips."Talk to another of the healthy look of the crops, of a plentiful harvest, of a good vintage, and you will find that he cares only for fruit and understands not a single word that you say; then turn to figs and melons;tell him that this year the pear-trees are so heavily laden with fruit that the branches almost break, that there are abundance of peaches, and you address him in a language which he completely ignores, and he will not answer you, for his sole hobby is plum-trees. Do not even speak to him of your plum-trees, for he is fond of only a certain kind and laughs and sneers at the mention of any others; he takes you to his tree and cautiously gathers this exquisite plum, divides it, gives you one half, keeps the other himself and exclaims, 'How delicious! Do you like it? Is it not heavenly? You cannot find its equal anywhere;' and then his nostrils dilate, and he can hardly contain his joy and pride under an appearance of modesty. What a wonderful person, never enough praised and admired, whose name will be handed down to future ages! Let me look at his mien and shape, while he is still in the land of the living, that I maystudy the features and the countenance of a man who, alone among mortals, is the happy possessor of such a plum."
"The lover of flowers has a garden in the suburbs, where he spends all his time from sunrise to sunset. You see him standing there and would think that he had taken root in the midst of his tulips before his 'Solitaire;' he opens his eyes wide, rubs his hands, stoops down and looks closer at it; it never before seemed to him so handsome; he is in an ecstasy of joy, and leaves it to go to the 'Orient,' then to the 'Widow,' fromthence to the 'Cloth of Gold,' on to the 'Agatha,' and at last returns to the 'Solitaire,' where he remains, is tired out, sits down, and forgets his dinner; he looks at the tulip and admires its shade, shape, colour, sheen and edges, its beautiful form and calyc; but God and nature are not in his thoughts, for they do not go beyond the bulb of his tulip, which he would not sell for a thousand crowns, though he will give it to you for nothing when tulips are no longer in fashion and carnations are all the rage. This rational being, who has a soul and professes some religion, comes home tired and half starved, but very pleased with his day's work: he has seen some tulips.
"Talk to another of the healthy look of the crops, of a plentiful harvest, of a good vintage, and you will find that he cares only for fruit and understands not a single word that you say; then turn to figs and melons;tell him that this year the pear-trees are so heavily laden with fruit that the branches almost break, that there are abundance of peaches, and you address him in a language which he completely ignores, and he will not answer you, for his sole hobby is plum-trees. Do not even speak to him of your plum-trees, for he is fond of only a certain kind and laughs and sneers at the mention of any others; he takes you to his tree and cautiously gathers this exquisite plum, divides it, gives you one half, keeps the other himself and exclaims, 'How delicious! Do you like it? Is it not heavenly? You cannot find its equal anywhere;' and then his nostrils dilate, and he can hardly contain his joy and pride under an appearance of modesty. What a wonderful person, never enough praised and admired, whose name will be handed down to future ages! Let me look at his mien and shape, while he is still in the land of the living, that I maystudy the features and the countenance of a man who, alone among mortals, is the happy possessor of such a plum."
Well, La Bruyère is wrong. We readily forgive him his mistake, for the sake of the marvellous window, which he, alone among the authors of his time, opens upon the unexpected gardens of the seventeenth century. The fact none the less remains that it is to his somewhat bigoted florist, to his somewhat frenzied horticulturist that we owe our exquisite flower-beds, our more varied, more abundant, more luscious vegetables, our even more delicious fruits. Contemplate, for instance, around the chrysanthemums, the marvels that ripen nowadays in the meanest gardens, among the long branches wisely subdued by the patient and generous espaliers. Less than a century ago, they were unknown; and we owe them to the trifling and innumerable exertions ofa legion of small seekers, all more or less narrow, all more or less ridiculous.
It is thus that man acquires nearly all his riches. There is nothing that is puerile in nature; and he who becomes impassioned of a flower, a blade of grass, a butterfly's wing, a nest, a shell, wraps his passion around a small thing that always contains a great truth. To succeed in modifying the appearance of a flower is insignificant in itself, if you will; but reflect upon it for however short a while, and it becomes gigantic. Do we not violate, or deviate, profound, perhaps essential and, in any case, time-honoured laws? Do we not exceed too easily accepted limits? Do we not directly intrude our ephemeral will on that of the eternal forces? Do we not give the idea of a singular power, a power almost supernatural, since it inverts a natural order of things? And, although it is prudent to guard againstover-ambitious dreams, does not this allow us to hope that we may perhaps learn to elude or to transgress other laws no less time-honoured, nearer to ourselves and important in a very different manner? For, in short, all things touch, all things go hand to hand; all things obey the same invisible principles, the identical exigencies; all things share in the same spirit, in the same substance, in the terrifying and wonderful problem; and the most modest victory gained in the matter of a flower may one day disclose to us an infinity of the untold....
Because of these things I love the chrysanthemum; because of these things I follow its evolution with a brother's interest. It is, among familiar plants, the most submissive, the most docile, the most tractable and the most attentive plant of all that we meet onlife's long way. It bears flowers impregnated through and through with the thought and will of man: flowers already human, so to speak. And, if the vegetable world is some day to reveal to us one of the words that we are awaiting, perhaps it will be through this flower of the tombs that we shall learn the first secret of existence, even as, in another kingdom, it is probably through the dog, the almost thinking guardian of our homes, that we shall discover the mystery of animal life.
OLD-FASHIONED FLOWERS