Proserpina, Volume 2 by John Ruskin

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PROSERPINA.

STUDIES OF WAYSIDE FLOWERS,

WHILE THE AIR WAS YET PURE

_AMONG THE ALPS, AND IN THE SCOTLAND AND
ENGLAND WHICH MY FATHER KNEW_.

BY

JOHN RUSKIN, LL.D.,

HONORARY STUDENT OF CHRISTCHURCH, AND HONORARY FELLOW OF CORPUS
CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD.

VOL. II.

1888.

* * * * *

CHAPTER I.

VIOLA.

1. Although I have not been able in the preceding volume to complete, in
any wise as I desired, the account of the several parts and actions of
plants in general, I will not delay any longer our entrance on the
examination of particular kinds, though here and there I must interrupt
such special study by recurring to general principles, or points of wider
interest. But the scope of such larger inquiry will be best seen, and the
use of it best felt, by entering now on specific study.

I begin with the Violet, because the arrangement of the group to which it
belongs--Cytherides--is more arbitrary than that of the rest, and calls for
some immediate explanation.

2. I fear that my readers may expect me to write something very pretty for
them about violets: but my time for writing prettily is long past; and it
requires some watching over myself, I find, to keep me even from writing
querulously. For while, the older I grow, very thankfully I recognize more
and more the number of pleasures granted to human eyes in this fair world,
I recognize also an increasing sensitiveness in my temper to anything that
interferes with them; and a grievous readiness to find fault--always of
course submissively, but very articulately--with whatever Nature seems to
me not to have managed to the best of her power;--as, for extreme instance,
her late arrangements of frost this spring, destroying all the beauty of
the wood sorrels; nor am I less inclined, looking to her as the greatest of
sculptors and painters, to ask, every time I see a narcissus, why it should
be wrapped up in brown paper; and every time I see a violet, what it wants
with a spur?

3. What _any_ flower wants with a spur, is indeed the simplest and hitherto
to me unanswerablest form of the question; nevertheless, when blossoms grow
in spires, and are crowded together, and have to grow partly downwards, in
order to win their share of light and breeze, one can see some reason for
the effort of the petals to expand upwards and backwards also. But that a
violet, who has her little stalk to herself, and might grow straight up, if
she pleased, should be pleased to do nothing of the sort, but quite
gratuitously bend her stalk down at the top, and fasten herself to it by
her waist, as it were,--this is so much more like a girl of the period's
fancy than a violet's, that I never gather one separately but with renewed
astonishment at it.

4. One reason indeed there is, which I never thought of until this moment!
a piece of stupidity which I can only pardon myself in, because, as it has
chanced, I have studied violets most in gardens, not in their wild
haunts,--partly thinking their Athenian honour was as a garden flower; and
partly being always fed away from them, among the hills, by flowers which I
could see nowhere else. With all excuse I can furbish up, however, it is
shameful that the truth of the matter never struck me before, or at least
this bit of the truth--as follows.

5. The Greeks, and Milton, alike speak of violets as growing in meadows (or
dales). But the Greeks did so because they could not fancy any delight
except in meadows; and Milton, because he wanted a rhyme to
nightingale--and, after all, was London bred. But Viola's beloved knew
where violets grew in Illyria,--and grow everywhere else also, when they
can,--on a _bank_, facing the south.

Just as distinctly as the daisy and buttercup are _meadow_ flowers, the
violet is a _bank_ flower, and would fain grow always on a steep slope,
towards the sun. And it is so poised on its stem that it shows, when
growing on a slope, the full space and opening of its flower,--not at all,
in any strain of modesty, hiding _itself_, though it may easily be, by
grass or mossy stone, 'half hidden,'--but, to the full, showing itself, and
intending to be lovely and luminous, as fragrant, to the uttermost of its
soft power.

Nor merely in its oblique setting on the stalk, but in the reversion of its
two upper petals, the flower shows this purpose of being fully seen. (For a
flower that _does_ hide itself, take a lily of the valley, or the bell of a
grape hyacinth, or a cyclamen.) But respecting this matter of
petal-reversion, we must now farther state two or three general principles.

6. A perfect or pure flower, as a rose, oxalis, or campanula, is always
composed of an unbroken whorl, or corolla, in the form of a disk, cup,
bell, or, if it draw together again at the lips, a narrow-necked vase. This
cup, bell, or vase, is divided into similar petals, (or segments, which are
petals carefully joined,) varying in number from three to eight, and
enclosed by a calyx whose sepals are symmetrical also.

An imperfect, or, as I am inclined rather to call it, an 'injured' flower,
is one in which some of the petals have inferior office and position, and
are either degraded, for the benefit of others, or expanded and honoured at
the cost of others.

Of this process, the first and simplest condition is the reversal of the
upper petals and elongation of the lower ones, in blossoms set on the side
of a clustered stalk. When the change is simply and directly dependent on
their position in the cluster, as in Aurora Regina,[1] modifying every bell
just in proportion as it declines from the perfected central one, some of
the loveliest groups of form are produced which can be seen in any inferior
organism: but when the irregularity becomes fixed, and the flower is always
to the same extent distorted, whatever its position in the cluster, the
plant is to be rightly thought of as reduced to a lower rank in creation.

7. It is to be observed, also, that these inferior forms of flower have
always the appearance of being produced by some kind of mischief--blight,
bite, or ill-breeding; they never suggest the idea of improving themselves,
now, into anything better; one is only afraid of their tearing or puffing
themselves into something worse. Nay, even the quite natural and simple
conditions of inferior vegetable do not in the least suggest, to the
unbitten or unblighted human intellect, the notion of development into
anything other than their like: one does not expect a mushroom to translate
itself into a pineapple, nor a betony to moralize itself into a lily, nor a
snapdragon to soften himself into a lilac.

8. It is very possible, indeed, that the recent phrenzy for the
investigation of digestive and reproductive operations in plants may by
this time have furnished the microscopic malice of botanists with
providentially disgusting reasons, or demoniacally nasty necessities, for
every possible spur, spike, jag, sting, rent, blotch, flaw, freckle, filth,
or venom, which can be detected in the construction, or distilled from the
dissolution, of vegetable organism. But with these obscene processes and
prurient apparitions the gentle and happy scholar of flowers has nothing
whatever to do. I am amazed and saddened, more than I can care to say, by
finding how much that is abominable may be discovered by an ill-taught
curiosity, in the purest things that earth is allowed to produce for
us;--perhaps if we were less reprobate in our own ways, the grass which is
our type might conduct itself better, even though _it_ has no hope but of
being cast into the oven; in the meantime, healthy human eyes and thoughts
are to be set on the lovely laws of its growth and habitation, and not on
the mean mysteries of its birth.

9. I relieve, therefore, our presently inquiring souls from any farther
care as to the reason for a violet's spur,--or for the extremely ugly
arrangements of its stamens and style, invisible unless by vexatious and
vicious peeping. You are to think of a violet only in its green leaves, and
purple or golden petals;--you are to know the varieties of form in both,
proper to common species; and in what kind of places they all most fondly
live, and most deeply glow.

"And the recreation of the minde which is taken heereby cannot be but verie
good and honest, for they admonish and stir up a man to that which is
comely and honest. For flowers, through their beautie, varietie of colour,
and exquisite forme, do bring to a liberall and gentle manly minde the
remembrance of honestie, comeliness, and all kinds of vertues. For it would
be an unseemely and filthie thing, as a certain wise man saith, for him
that doth looke upon and handle faire and beautiful things, and who
frequenteth and is conversant in faire and beautiful places, to have his
mind not faire, but filthie and deformed."

10. Thus Gerarde, in the close of his introductory notice of the
violet,--speaking of things, (honesty, comeliness, and the like,) scarcely
now recognized as desirable in the realm of England; but having previously
observed that violets are useful for the making of garlands for the head,
and posies to smell to;--in which last function I observe they are still
pleasing to the British public: and I found the children here, only the
other day, munching a confection of candied violet leaves. What pleasure
the flower can still give us, uncandied, and unbound, but in its own place
and life, I will try to trace through some of its constant laws.

11. And first, let us be clear that the native colour of the violet _is_
violet; and that the white and yellow kinds, though pretty in their place
and way, are not to be thought of in generally meditating the flower's
quality or power. A white violet is to black ones what a black man is to
white ones; and the yellow varieties are, I believe, properly pansies, and
belong also to wild districts for the most part; but the true violet, which
I have just now called 'black,' with Gerarde, "the blacke or purple violet,
hath a great prerogative above others," and all the nobler species of the
pansy itself are of full purple, inclining, however, in the ordinary wild
violet to blue. In the 'Laws of Fesole,' chap, vii., Sec.Sec. 20, 21, I have made
this dark pansy the representative of purple pure; the viola odorata, of
the link between that full purple and blue; and the heath-blossom of the
link between that full purple and red. The reader will do well, as much as
may be possible to him, to associate his study of botany, as indeed all
other studies of visible things, with that of painting: but he must
remember that he cannot know what violet colour really is, unless he watch
the flower in its _early_ growth. It becomes dim in age, and dark when it
is gathered--at least, when it is tied in bunches;--but I am under the
impression that the colour actually deadens also,--at all events, no other
single flower of the same quiet colour lights up the ground near it as a
violet will. The bright hounds-tongue looks merely like a spot of bright
paint; but a young violet glows like painted glass.

12. Which, when you have once well noticed, the two lines of Milton and
Shakspeare which seem opposed, will both become clear to you. The said
lines are dragged from hand to hand along their pages of pilfered
quotations by the hack botanists,--who probably never saw _them_, nor
anything else, _in_ Shakspeare or Milton in their lives,--till even in
reading them where they rightly come, you can scarcely recover their fresh
meaning: but none of the botanists ever think of asking why Perdita calls
the violet 'dim,' and Milton 'glowing.'

Perdita, indeed, calls it dim, at that moment, in thinking of her own love,
and the hidden passion of it, unspeakable; nor is Milton without some
purpose of using it as an emblem of love, mourning,--but, in both cases,
the subdued and quiet hue of the flower as an actual tint of colour, and
the strange force and life of it as a part of light, are felt to their
uttermost.

And observe, also, that both, of the poets contrast the violet, in its
softness, with the intense marking of the pansy. Milton makes the
opposition directly---

"the pansy, freaked with jet,
The glowing violet."

Shakspeare shows yet stronger sense of the difference, in the "purple with
Love's wound" of the pansy, while the violet is sweet with Love's hidden
life, and sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes.

Whereupon, we may perhaps consider with ourselves a little, what the
difference _is_ between a violet and a pansy?

13. Is, I say, and was, and is to come,--in spite of florists, who try to
make pansies round, instead of pentagonal; and of the wise classifying
people, who say that violets and pansies are the same thing--and that
neither of them are of much interest! As, for instance, Dr. Lindley in his
'Ladies' Botany.'

"Violets--sweet Violets, and Pansies, or Heartsease, represent a small
family, with the structure of which you should be familiar; more, however,
for the sake of its singularity than for its extent or importance, for the
family is a very small one, and there are but few species belonging to it
in which much interest is taken. As the parts of the Heartsease are larger
than those of the Violet, let us select the former in preference for the
subject of our study." Whereupon we plunge instantly into the usual account
of things with horns and tails. "The stamens are five in number--two of
them, which are in front of the others, are hidden within the horn of the
front petal," etc., etc., etc. (Note in passing, by the '_horn of the
front_' petal he means the '_spur of the bottom_' one, which indeed does
stand in front of the rest,--but if therefore _it_ is to be called the
_front_ petal--which is the back one?) You may find in the next paragraph
description of a "singular conformation," and the interesting conclusion
that "no one has yet discovered for what purpose this singular conformation
was provided." But you will not, in the entire article, find the least
attempt to tell you the difference between a violet and a pansy!--except in
one statement--and _that_ false! "The sweet violet will have no rival among
flowers, if we merely seek for delicate fragrance; but her sister, the
heartsease, who is destitute of all sweetness, far surpasses her in rich
dresses and _gaudy_!!! colours." The heartsease is not without sweetness.
There are sweet pansies scented, and dog pansies unscented--as there are
sweet violets scented, and dog violets unscented. What is the real
difference?

14. I turn to another scientific gentleman--_more_ scientific in form
indeed, Mr. Grindon,--and find, for another interesting phenomenon in the
violet, that it sometimes produces flowers without any petals! and in the
pansy, that "the flowers turn towards the sun, and when many are open at
once, present a droll appearance, looking like a number of faces all on the
'qui vive.'" But nothing of the difference between them, except something
about 'stipules,' of which "it is important to observe that the leaves
should be taken from the middle of the stem--those above and below being
variable."

I observe, however, that Mr. Grindon _has_ arranged his violets under the
letter A, and his pansies under the letter B, and that something may be
really made out of him, with an hour or two's work. I am content, however,
at present, with his simplifying assurance that of violet and pansy
together, "six species grow wild in Britain--or, as some believe, only
four--while the analysts run the number up to fifteen."

15. Next I try Loudon's Cyclopaedia, which, through all its 700 pages, is
equally silent on the business; and next, Mr. Baxter's 'British Flowering
Plants,' in the index of which I find neither Pansy nor Heartsease, and
only the 'Calathian' Violet, (where on earth is Calathia?) which proves, on
turning it up, to be a Gentian.

16. At last, I take my Figuier, (but what should I do if I only knew
English?) and find this much of clue to the matter:--

"Qu'est ce que c'est que la Pensee? Cette jolie plante appartient aussi ou
genre Viola, mais a un section de ce genre. En effet, dans les Pensees, les
petales superieurs et lateraux sont diriges en haut, l'inferieur seul est
dirige en bas: et de plus, le stigmate est urceole, globuleux."

And farther, this general description of the whole violet tribe, which I
translate, that we may have its full value:--

"The violet is a plant without a stem (tige),--(see vol. i., p.
154,)--whose height does not surpass one or two decimetres. Its leaves,
radical, or carried on stolons, (vol. i., p. 158,) are sharp, or oval,
crenulate, or heart-shape. Its stipules are oval-acuminate, or lanceolate.
Its flowers, of sweet scent, of a dark violet or a reddish blue, are
carried each on a slender peduncle, which bends down at the summit. Such
is, for the botanist, the Violet, of which the poets would give assuredly
another description."

17. Perhaps; or even the painters! or even an ordinary unbotanical human
creature! I must set about my business, at any rate, in my own way, now, as
I best can, looking first at things themselves, and then putting this and
that together, out of these botanical persons, which they can't put
together out of themselves. And first, I go down into my kitchen garden,
where the path to the lake has a border of pansies on both sides all the
way down, with clusters of narcissus behind them. And pulling up a handful
of pansies by the roots, I find them "without stems," indeed, if a stem
means a wooden thing; but I should say, for a low-growing flower, quiet
lankily and disagreeably stalky! And, thinking over what I remember about
wild pansies, I find an impression on my mind of their being rather more
stalky, always, than is quite graceful; and, for all their fine flowers,
having rather a weedy and littery look, and getting into places where they
have no business. See, again, vol. i., chap. vi., Sec. 5.

18. And now, going up into my flower and fruit garden, I find (June 2nd,
1881, half-past six, morning.) among the wild saxifrages, which are allowed
to grow wherever they like, and the rock strawberries, and Francescas,
which are coaxed to grow wherever there is a bit of rough ground for them,
a bunch or two of pale pansies, or violets, I don't know well which, by the
flower; but the entire company of them has a ragged, jagged, unpurpose-like
look; extremely,--I should say,--demoralizing to all the little plants in
their neighbourhood: and on gathering a flower, I find it is a nasty big
thing, all of a feeble blue, and with two things like horns, or thorns,
sticking out where its ears would be, if the pansy's frequently monkey face
were underneath them. Which I find to be two of the leaves of its calyx
'out of place,' and, at all events, for their part, therefore, weedy, and
insolent.

19. I perceive, farther, that this disorderly flower is lifted on a lanky,
awkward, springless, and yet stiff flower-stalk; which is not round, as a
flower-stalk ought to be, (vol. i., p. 155,) but obstinately square, and
fluted, with projecting edges, like a pillar run thin out of an
iron-foundry for a cheap railway station. I perceive also that it has set
on it, just before turning down to carry the flower, two little jaggy and
indefinable leaves,--their colour a little more violet than the blossom.

These, and such undeveloping leaves, wherever they occur, are called
'bracts' by botanists, a good word, from the Latin 'bractea,' meaning a
piece of metal plate, so thin as to crackle. They seem always a little
stiff, like bad parchment,--born to come to nothing--a sort of
infinitesimal fairy-lawyer's deed. They ought to have been in my index at
p. 255, under the head of leaves, and are frequent in flower
structure,--never, as far as one can see, of the smallest use. They are
constant, however, in the flower-stalk of the whole violet tribe.

20. I perceive, farther, that this lanky flower-stalk, bending a little in
a crabbed, broken way, like an obstinate person tired, pushes itself up out
of a still more stubborn, nondescript, hollow angular, dogseared gas-pipe
of a stalk, with a section something like this,

[Illustration]

but no bigger than

[Illustration]

with a quantity of ill-made and ill-hemmed leaves on it, of no describable
leaf-cloth or texture,--not cressic, (though the thing does altogether look
a good deal like a quite uneatable old watercress); not salvian, for
there's no look of warmth or comfort in them; not cauline, for there's no
juice in them; not dryad, for there's no strength in them, nor apparent
use: they seem only there, as far as I can make out, to spoil the flower,
and take the good out of my garden bed. Nobody in the world could draw
them, they are so mixed up together, and crumpled and hacked about, as if
some ill-natured child had snipped them with blunt scissors, and an
ill-natured cow chewed them a little afterwards and left them, proved for
too tough or too bitter.

21. Having now sufficiently observed, it seems to me, this incongruous
plant, I proceed to ask myself, over it, M. Figuier's question, 'Qu'est-ce
c'est qu'un Pensee?' Is this a violet--or a pansy--or a bad imitation of
both?

Whereupon I try if it has any scent: and to my much surprise, find it has a
full and soft one--which I suppose is what my gardener keeps it for!
According to Dr. Lindley, then, it must be a violet! But according to M.
Figuier,--let me see, do its middle petals bend up, or down?

I think I'll go and ask the gardener what _he_ calls it.

22. My gardener, on appeal to him, tells me it is the 'Viola Cornuta,' but
that he does not know himself if it is violet or pansy. I take my Loudon
again, and find there were fifty-three species of violets, known in his
days, of which, as it chances, Cornuta is exactly the last.

'Horned violet': I said the green things were _like_ horns!--but what is
one to say of, or to do to, scientific people, who first call the spur of
the violet's petal, horn, and then its calyx points, horns, and never
define a 'horn' all the while!

Viola Cornuta, however, let it be; for the name does mean _some_thing, and
is not false Latin. But whether violet or pansy, I must look farther to
find out.

23. I take the Flora Danica, in which I at least am sure of finding
whatever is done at all, done as well as honesty and care can; and look
what species of violets it gives.

Nine, in the first ten volumes of it; four in their modern sequel (that I
know of,--I have had no time to examine the last issues). Namely, in
alphabetical order, with their present Latin, or tentative Latin, names;
and in plain English, the senses intended by the hapless scientific people,
in such their tentative Latin:--

(1) Viola Arvensis. Field (Violet) No. 1748

(2) " Biflora. Two-flowered 46

(3) " Canina. Dog 1453

(3b) " Canina. Var. Multicaulus 2646
(many-stemmed), a very
singular sort of violet--if it
were so! Its real difference
from our dog-violet is in
being pale blue, and having a
golden centre

(4) " Hirta. Hairy 618

(5) " Mirabilis. Marvellous 1045

(6) " Montana. Mountain 1329

(7) " Odorata. Odorous 309

(8) " Palustris. Marshy 83

(9) " Tricolor. Three-coloured 623

(9B) " Tricolor. Var. Arenaria, Sandy 2647
Three-coloured

(10) " Elatior. Taller 68

(11) " Epipsila. (Heaven knows what: it is 2405
Greek, not Latin, and looks as
if it meant something between
a bishop and a short letter e)

I next run down this list, noting what names we can keep, and what we
can't; and what aren't worth keeping, if we could: passing over the
varieties, however, for the present, wholly.

(1) Arvensis. Field-violet. Good.

(2) Biflora. A good epithet, but in false Latin. It is to be our Viola
aurea, golden pansy.

(3) Canina. Dog. Not pretty, but intelligible, and by common use now
classical. Must stay.

(4) Hirta. Late Latin slang for hirsuta, and always used of nasty places or
nasty people; it shall not stay. The species shall be our Viola
Seclusa,--Monk's violet--meaning the kind of monk who leads a rough life
like Elijah's, or the Baptist's, or Esau's--in another kind. This violet is
one of the loveliest that grows.

(5) Mirabilis. Stays so; marvellous enough, truly: not more so than all
violets; but I am very glad to hear of scientific people capable of
admiring anything.

(6) Montana. Stays so.

(7) Odorata. Not distinctive;--nearly classical, however. It is to be our
Viola Regina, else I should not have altered it.

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