CHAPTER IV

THE VERNAL GENTIAN

“Divin être d’azur au cœur pur qui scintille,Vis tranquille et joyeux sur le riant coteau,Car partout, fleur du ciel, où ta couronne brilleElle enfante la joie et luit comme un flambeau.”Henry Correvon.

“Divin être d’azur au cœur pur qui scintille,

Vis tranquille et joyeux sur le riant coteau,

Car partout, fleur du ciel, où ta couronne brille

Elle enfante la joie et luit comme un flambeau.”

Henry Correvon.

Doyou ask what the Alps would be without the Edelweiss? Ask, rather, what they would be without the little Vernal Gentian! Ask what would be the slopes and fields of Alpine Switzerland without this flower of heaven-reflected blue, rather than what the rocks and screes and uncouth places would be withoutLeontopodium alpinumof bloated and untruthful reputation. Ask what Alpland’s springtide welcome and autumnal salutation would be if shorn of this little plant’s bright azure spontaneity; ask where would be spring’s eager joyfulness, and where the ready hopefulness of autumn. Ask yourself this,and then the Edelweiss at once falls back into a more becoming perspective with the landscape, into a less faulty pose among the other mountain flowers.

Perhaps it is not very venturesome to think that if the Edelweiss had become extinct, and were now to be found only amid the fastnesses of legend, it would live quite as securely in the hearts of men as it does at present; for its repute rests mostly upon the fabulous. But how different is the case of the earliest of the Gentians! Here is a plant which, despite the romance-breeding nature of its habit, form, and colour, draws little or nothing from legendary sources. Fable has small command where merit is so marked; imagination is outstripped by reality, and there is scarcely room for invention where truth is so arresting, so pronounced.

Gentiana vernaflies no false colours. Its flowerisa flower, and not for the greater part an assemblage of hoary-haired leaves. It inspires in men no performance of mad gymnastics on the precipice’s brink and brow; it wears, therefore, no halo of unnecessary human sacrifice. It is not a tender token of attachment among lovers. It does not live in myth, nor has it an importantplace in folk-lore. In short, it is just its own bright, fascinating self; there is nothing of blatant notoriety about its renown, no suspicion of asuccès de scandalesuch as the Edelweiss can so justly claim.

We may laud the Edelweiss as a symbol of advanced endeavour, but the Gentian is more useful, if not, indeed, worthier, in this respect; for it marks no great extreme and therefore its condition is symbolic of less that is incompatible with consistent human effort. Ruskin has somewhere said that the most glorious repose is that of the chamois panting on its bed of granite, rather than that of the ox chewing the cud in its stall; but, however transcendentally true this may be, the actually glorious position lies midway betwixt the two—the position of the Gentian in relation with, for instance, the positions of the Edelweiss and the Primrose. We are likely to derive inspiration of more abundant practical value from the Gentian than from the Edelweiss, because there is comparatively little about it that is extreme. Though advanced in circumstance it is reasonably situated; it leads, therefore, to no such flagrant inconsistency with facts, no such beating of the drum of romance as, apparently, we findso necessary in the case of Leontopodium. The Edelweiss is not all it seems; the Gentian is. “Il ne suffit pas d’être, il faut paraître”; and this, certainly, the little Vernal Gentian does. In not one single trait does it belie the high colour of its blossom.

With what curiously different craft do each of these flowers play upon the emotions! With what contrary art does each make its appeal to our regard and adulation! To each we may address Swinburne’s stately lines: to each we may, and do exclaim:

“... with my lips I kneel, and with my heartI fall about thy feet and worship thee ...”

“... with my lips I kneel, and with my heart

I fall about thy feet and worship thee ...”

Yet this act of adoration, when it affects the Edelweiss, seems far more an act of idolatry than it does when it affects the Gentian. For on the one hand we have the Edelweiss stirring the imagination to wild, foolhardy flights amid the awesome summer haunts of the eagle and the chamois, when, in simple reality, we could if we would be reposing amongst hundreds of its woolly stars upon some gentle pasture-slope away from the least hint of danger and ofscandale; while on the other hand we have the Vernal Gentian calling usat once in all frankness to accept it as it is—one of the truest and loveliest marvels of the Alps,

“... the fair earth’s fond expressionOf tenderness for heaven above ...”!

“... the fair earth’s fond expression

Of tenderness for heaven above ...”!

To each do we accord, as Mr. Augustine Birrell would say, “a mass of greedy utterances”; to each do we lose our hearts; but only to one do we lose our heads. And that one is the Edelweiss: the plant of leaves which ape a flower; the plant whose flower is as inconspicuous as that of our common Sun Spurge; the plant that would have us forget its abundance on many a pasture, and think of it only as clinging perilously to high-flung cliffs where browse the chamois and where nest the choughs.

The Gentian Family as a whole is possessed of very striking individuality, and for the most part its members arrest more than usual attention. Its name is said to be derived from Gentius, King of Illyria, who is reputed to have first made known its medicinial properties—tonic, emetic, and narcotic. Although it ranges from Behring’s Straits to the Equator and on to the Antipodes, its residence is mainly northern. In New Zealand its chief colour is red; in Europe blue; and of allits blue European representatives none can eclipse perennialverna’sradiant star.

The Vernal Gentian is no stranger to England, though, as an indigenous plant, it is a stranger to most Englishmen. It is still to be found on wet limestone rocks in Northern England (Teesdale) and also in the north-west of Ireland. LikeGentiana nivalisof the small band of Alpine annuals and tiniest of the blue-starred Gentians, it lingers in the British Isles, a rare, pathetic remnant of past salubrity of climate and condition; and to its homes in England and Ireland, rather than in Switzerland, we should perhaps go to study how to grow it in our gardens more successfully than we do at present. But it is to the Alps that we must turn to find it revelling wealthily in a setting for which it is pre-eminently suited; it is there that its

“... living flowersOf loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet.”

“... living flowers

Of loveliest blue, spread garlands at your feet.”

For, in the Alps, it is an abundant denizen of the pastures in general: both the grazing pastures or “Alps,” and “the artificial modifications of the pastures,” as Mr. Newell Arber calls the meadows.

The PARADISE LILY (Paradisia Liliastrum) near the Glacier de Trient about the middle of June.

If we wanted to give this Gentian an English name (and far be it from me to suggest that weshould do any such thing) we should probably have to call it Spring-Felwort; Felwort being an old-time title forGentiana amarella, an annual herb common to dry pastures and chalk downs in England, and possibly at one time employed by tanners. In the Jura Mountainsvernagoes by the name ofŒil-de-chat, and among the peasants inhabiting the northern side of the Dent du Midi, in the Canton de Valais, I have heard it referred to asLe Bas du Bon Dieu; but, considering the remarkably suggestive character of the plant, the domain of folk-lore seems curiously empty of its presence. This, possibly, is in part due to its amazing abundance, and to the fact that it is to be found from about 1,200 feet to about 10,000 feet, thus causing it to meet with the proverbial fate of things familiar. But, at any rate, its dried flowers, mixed with those of the Rhododendron and the purple Viola, are used in the form of “tea” by the montagnards as an antidote for chills and rheumatism.

The appearance ofvernaupon the pastures is not confined solely to the early springtime; though this is the season of its greatest wealth, it may be met with quite commonly in the late autumn. Indeed it affects the days which circle round thewhole of winter; and I have found it several times even at Christmas near Arveyes, above Gryon (Vaud), upon steep southward-facing banks where sun and wind combined to chase away the snow. If, then, for no other reason than this, it seems curious that romance has not gathered this Gentian under its wing as it has the Edelweiss.

As for the radiant purity of its five-pointed azure stars, it is perhaps only outshone by that of the Myosotis-like flowers ofEritrichium nanum, King of the Alps; but even this rivalry is doubtful whenvernais growing upon a limestone soil, where its blossoms are more brilliant than those produced upon granitic ground.

Blue, however, although it is the superabundant type-colour, is not the invariable hue of its blossoms; indeed, it shows more variety than even many a botanist suspects, and I have found it in all tints from deep French to pale Cambridge blue, from rich red-purple to the palest lilac, and from the faintest yellow-white, through blush-white, to the purest blue-white. I have, too, found it party-coloured, blue-and-white.

These many variations from the type give occasion for suggestive questions that I fain would indicate, because I believe with Mr. Arber thatsuch variations can only “arise from deep-seated tendencies, which find their expression in the existence of the individual, and the evolution of the race.” For instance, are the mauve and plum-coloured flowers a break-back to the ancestral type; that is to say, was the more primitivevernared? Blue flowers are more highly organised than those of other colours; are, then, all flowers striving to be blue—like Emerson’s grass, “striving to be man?” The French-blue Gentians are of warmer tint than those of Cambridge hue; are they, therefore, the first decided step into this highest of the primary colours: are they the first strikingly victorious effort of the plant to shake off all trammel of red? And white; what of white? I have seen whitevernatinged with rose, and whitevernaof a white altogether free from any tint of grossness—a white so positive as to suggest the utmost frailty arising from degeneracy, if it were not known to be the natural consequence of persistent advance through blue. These are nice points for speculation.

But “let us not rove; let us sit at home with the cause”! Blue for us is the essential colour for this Gentian: we can dispense with all its efforts to be white. Blue, not white, is the hue of promise.And it is promise we look for at the turn of the year; it is promise we must have after long months of snow. When youthful “chevalier Printemps” hymns us his ancient message; when in penetrating accents of triumph he tells us:

“C’est moi que Dieu sur terre envoieDans un rayon de son soleilPour mettre la terre en joie,Pour faire un monde tout vermeil.Quand l’hiver m’a crié ‘qui vive!’J’ai dit: ‘Fais-moi place, il est temps!Du Paradis tout droit j’arrive:Je suis le chevalier Printemps!’”

“C’est moi que Dieu sur terre envoie

Dans un rayon de son soleil

Pour mettre la terre en joie,

Pour faire un monde tout vermeil.

Quand l’hiver m’a crié ‘qui vive!’

J’ai dit: ‘Fais-moi place, il est temps!

Du Paradis tout droit j’arrive:

Je suis le chevalier Printemps!’”

—when, I say, spring thus speaks to us of the rout of winter and the dawn of a wealthier life, it is blue that we look for most upon the frost-stained fields; blue not white—the blue of the type-flowered Gentian, not the white of the Alpine Crowfoot and Crocus.

Whilst writing these lines on the most fascinating spring flower of the Alps, there comes before my mind one spot in particular where it abounds in May—a certain long and rapid grassy slope at Le Planet, above Argentière (Haute-Savoie). Albeit not in Switzerland, Le Planet is only just across the frontier; and, as every one who knowsthe district will attest, it is difficult to draw a rigid, formal line where flowers and mountains are so knit in common semblance. Other rich scenes of azure I can recall—as on the swelling slopes of the Jura around the Suchet, or on the fields which mount from Naters towards Bel-Alp; but none forces itself to mind with such persistence as does this slope at Le Planet. And it is because the surrounding circumstance illustrates so well all that I have been saying about this Gentian’s presence in the spring.

The slope in question is not five minutes’ stroll from the hotel. On the plateau itselfvernais all but absent, but on this broad and steep incline it congregates in such amazing numbers that, as I think on it, I am sure all I have said of this witching flower is poor and paltry. After all, verbal magniloquence is perhaps out of place, and simplicity is the best translator of such magnificence. All shades of brightest blue are here presented; for, excepting a few pale plum-coloured clusters, the brilliant type-flower is ubiquitous, blending delightfully with the little yellow Violet and with the white, fluffy seedheads of the Coltsfoot.

But what, perhaps, makes this particular slopeso appropriate in point of illustration for this chapter is, that above it towers the mighty Aiguille Verte, decked as in winter with its snows and ice, and in the foreground lies the frozen remains of a great avalanche strewn with fallen rocks and pierced by stricken larch-trees.

Yes; from the lichen,Umbilicaria virginis, the furthest outpost of vegetable life as it clings to the Jungfrau’s awful rocks at an altitude of 13,000 feet, to the yellow Primrose of the woods and meadows of the plains, there is no plant of Alpland that is so precious, so rare in its very abundance asGentiana verna. Nor is there another Alpine that can make so wide and so certain an appeal. Spread broadcast and alone upon the awakening turf of mountain slope and meadow, it captivates the instant attention of even the merest passer-by. And if amongst its abounding azure there happens, as will often be the case, a vigorous admixture of healthy rose and yellow—the rose of the Mealy or Bird’s-eye Primula, the yellow of the Sulphur Anemone and Marsh Marigold—then this were a scene to “make the pomp of emperors ridiculous”; a scene of subtly true magnificence, of perfectly balanced delight.

See the Vernal Gentian as it lies thus bountifully set, a radiant blue carpet of heavenly intensity, backed majestically by winter’s receding snows on mighty glacier and stupendous peak; note its myriad white-eyed, cœrulean blossoms over which hover with tireless wing its faithful, eager friends, the humming-bird and bee hawk-moths—the very picture of security and peace amid a scene of awful, threatening grandeur. Listen—listen, the while, to the thunder coming from “the vexed paths of the avalanches”; listen to the sound of falling rock and pine, and mark the great air-tossed cloud of powdered snow; listen to the alarm-cry of the speckled mountain-jay, and to the shriek-like warning of the marmot; then tell me if there is any other flower that could so well play the part of hope-inspiring herald to a world as harassed as is that of the Alps in the season that surrounds the winter?

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