Proserpina, Volume 2

3. Portia. The maidenly passion now becoming great, and chiefly divine in its humility, is still held absolutely subordinate to duty; no thought of disobedience to her dead father's intention is entertained for an instant, though the temptation is marked as passing, for that instant, before her crystal strength. Instantly, in her own peace, she thinks chiefly of her lover's;—she is a perfect Christian wife in a moment, coming to her husband with the gift of perfect Peace,—

"Never shall you lie by Portia's side
With an unquiet soul."

She is highest in intellect of all Shakspeare's women, and this is the root of her modesty; her 'unlettered girl' is like Newton's simile of the child on the sea-shore. Her perfect wit and stern judgment are never disturbed for an instant by her happiness: and the final key to her character is given in her silent and slow return from Venice, where she stops at every wayside shrine to pray.

4. Hermione. Fortitude and Justice personified, with unwearying affection. She is Penelope, tried by her husband's fault as well as error.

5. Virgilia. Perfect type of wife and mother, but without definiteness of character, nor quite strength of intellect enough entirely to hold her husband's heart. Else, she had saved him: he would have left Rome in his wrath—but not her. Therefore, it is his mother only who bends him: but she cannot save.

6. Imogen. The ideal of grace and gentleness; but weak; enduring too mildly, and forgiving too easily. But the piece is rather a pantomime than play, and it is impossible to judge of the feelings of St. Columba, when she must leave the stage in half a minute after mistaking the headless clown for headless Arlecchino.

7. Desdemona, Ophelia, Rosalind. They are under different conditions from all the rest, in having entirely heroic and faultless persons to love. I can't class them, therefore,—fate is too strong, and leaves them no free will.

8. Perdita, Miranda. Rather mythic visions of maiden beauty than mere girls.

9. Viola and Juliet. Love the ruling power in the entire character: wholly virginal and pure, but quite earthly, and recognizing no other life than his own. Viola is, however, far the noblest. Juliet will die unless Romeo loves her: "If he be wed, the grave is like to be my wedding bed;" but Viola is ready to die for the happiness of the man who does not love her; faithfully doing his messages to her rival, whom she examines strictly for his sake. It is not in envy that she says, "Excellently done,—if God did all." The key to her character is given in the least selfish of all lover's songs, the one to which the Duke bids her listen:

"Mark it, Cesario,—it is old and plain,
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,
And the free maids, that weave their thread with bones,
Do use to chaunt it."

(They, the unconscious Fates, weaving the fair vanity of life with death); and the burden of it is—

"My part of Death, no one so true
Did share it."

Therefore she says, in the great first scene, "Was not this love indeed?" and in the less heeded closing one, her heart then happy with the knitters in the sun,

"And all those sayings will I over-swear,
And all those swearings keep as true in soul
As doth that orbed continent the Fire
That severs day from night."

Or, at least, did once sever day from night,—and perhaps does still in Illyria. Old England must seek new images for her loves from gas and electric sparks,—not to say furnace fire.

I am obliged, by press of other work, to set down these notes in cruel shortness: and many a reader may be disposed to question utterly the standard by which the measurement is made. It will not be found, on reference to my other books, that they encourage young ladies to go into convents; or undervalue the dignity of wives and mothers. But, as surely as the sun does sever day from night, it will be found always that the noblest and loveliest women are dutiful and religious by continual nature; and their passions are trained to obey them; like their dogs. Homer, indeed, loves Helen with all his heart, and restores her, after all her naughtiness, to the queenship of her household; but he never thinks of her as Penelope's equal, or Iphigenia's. Practically, in daily life, one often sees married women as good as saints; but rarely, I think, unless they have a good deal to bear from their husbands. Sometimes also, no doubt, the husbands have some trouble in managing St. Cecilia or St. Elizabeth; of which questions I shall be obliged to speak more seriously in another place: content, at present, if English maids know better, by Proserpina's help, what Shakspeare meant by the dim, and Milton by the glowing, violet.

CHAPTER II

PINGUICULA

(Written in early June, 1881.)

1. On the rocks of my little stream, where it runs, or leaps, through the moorland, the common Pinguicula is now in its perfectest beauty; and it is one of the offshoots of the violet tribe which I have to place in the minor collateral groups of Viola very soon, and must not put off looking at it till next year.

There are three varieties given in Sowerby: 1. Vulgaris, 2. Greater-flowered, and 3. Lusitanica, white, for the most part, pink, or 'carnea,' sometimes: but the proper colour of the family is violet, and the perfect form of the plant is the 'vulgar' one. The larger-flowered variety is feebler in colour, and ruder in form: the white Spanish one, however, is very lovely, as far as I can judge from Sowerby's (old Sowerby's) pretty drawing.

The 'frequent' one (I shall usually thus translate 'vulgaris'), is not by any means so 'frequent' as the Queen violet, being a true wild-country, and mostly Alpine, plant; and there is also a real 'Pinguicula Alpina,' which we have not in England, who might be the Regina, if the group were large enough to be reigned over: but it is better not to affect Royalty among these confused, intermediate, or dependent families.

2. In all the varieties of Pinguicula, each blossom has one stalk only, growing from the ground and you may pull all the leaves away from the base of it, and keep the flower only, with its bunch of short fibrous roots, half an inch long; looking as if bitten at the ends. Two flowers, characteristically,—three and four very often,—spring from the same root, in places where it grows luxuriantly; and luxuriant growth means that clusters of some twenty or thirty stars may be seen on the surface of a square yard of boggy ground, quite to its mind; but its real glory is in harder life, in the crannies of well-wetted rock.

3. What I have called 'stars' are irregular clusters of approximately, or tentatively, five aloeine ground leaves, of very pale green,—they may be six or seven, or more, but always run into a rudely pentagonal arrangement, essentially first trine, with two succeeding above. Taken as a whole the plant is really a main link between violets and Droseras; but the flower has much more violet than Drosera in the make of it,—spurred, and five-petaled,[11 - When I have the chance, and the time, to submit the proofs of 'Proserpina' to friends who know more of Botany than I, or have kindness enough to ascertain debateable things for me, I mean in future to do so,—using the letter A to signify Amicus, generally; with acknowledgment by name, when it is permitted, of especial help or correction. Note first of this kind: I find here on this word, 'five-petaled,' as applied to Pinguicula, "Qy. two-lipped? it is monopetalous, and monosepalous, the calyx and corolla being each all in one piece."] and held down by the top of its bending stalk as a violet is; only its upper two petals are not reverted—the calyx, of a dark soppy green, holding them down, with its three front sepals set exactly like a strong trident, its two backward sepals clasping the spur. There are often six sepals, four to the front, but the normal number is five. Tearing away the calyx, I find the flower to have been held by it as a lion might hold his prey by the loins if he missed its throat; the blue petals being really campanulate, and the flower best described as a dark bluebell, seized and crushed almost flat by its own calyx in a rage. Pulling away now also the upper petals, I find that what are in the violet the lateral and well-ordered fringes, are here thrown mainly on the lower (largest) petal near its origin, and opposite the point of the seizure by the calyx, spreading from this centre over the surface of the lower petals, partly like an irregular shower of fine Venetian glass broken, partly like the wild-flung Medusa like embroidery of the white Lucia.[12 - Our 'Lucia Nivea,' 'Blanche Lucy;' in present botany, Bog bean! having no connection whatever with any manner of bean, but only a slight resemblance to bean-leaves in its own lower ones. Compare Ch. IV. § 11 (#x3_x_3_i37).]

4. The calyx is of a dark soppy green, I said; like that of sugary preserved citron; the root leaves are of green just as soppy, but pale and yellowish, as if they were half decayed; the edges curled up and, as it were, water-shrivelled, as one's fingers shrivel if kept too long in water. And the whole plant looks as if it had been a violet unjustly banished to a bog, and obliged to live there—not for its own sins, but for some Emperor Pansy's, far away in the garden,—in a partly boggish, partly hoggish manner, drenched and desolate; and with something of demoniac temper got into its calyx, so that it quarrels with, and bites the corolla;—something of gluttonous and greasy habit got into its leaves; a discomfortable sensuality, even in its desolation. Perhaps a penguin-ish life would be truer of it than a piggish, the nest of it being indeed on the rock, or morassy rock-investiture, like a sea-bird's on her rock ledge.

5. I have hunted through seven treatises on Botany, namely, Loudon's Encyclopædia, Balfour, Grindon, Oliver, Baxter of Oxford, Lindley ('Ladies' Botany'), and Figuer, without being able to find the meaning of 'Lentibulariaceæ,' to which tribe the Pinguicula is said by them all (except Figuier) to belong. It may perhaps be in Sowerby:[13 - It is not. (Resolute negative from A., unsparing of time for me; and what a state of things it all signifies!)] but these above-named treatises are precisely of the kind with which the ordinary scholar must be content: and in all of them he has to learn this long, worse than useless, word, under which he is betrayed into classing together two orders naturally quite distinct, the Butterworts and the Bladderworts.

Whatever the name may mean—it is bad Latin. There is such a word as Lenticularis—there is no Lentibularis; and it must positively trouble us no longer.[14 - With the following three notes, 'A' must become a definitely and gratefully interpreted letter. I am indebted for the first, conclusive in itself, but variously supported and confirmed by the two following, to R.J. Mann, Esq., M.D., long ago a pupil of Dr. Lindley's, and now on the council of Whitelands College, Chelsea:—for the second, to Mr. Thomas Moore, F.L.S., the kind Keeper of the Botanic Garden at Chelsea; for the third, which will be farther on useful to us, to Miss Kemm, the botanical lecturer at Whitelands.]

The Butterworts are a perfectly distinct group—whether small or large, always recognizable at a glance. Their proper Latin name will be Pinguicula, (plural Pinguiculæ,)—their English, Bog-Violet, or, more familiarly, Butterwort; and their French, as at present, Grassette.

The families to be remembered will be only five, namely,

1. Pinguicula Major, the largest of the group. As bog plants, Ireland may rightly claim the noblest of them, which certainly grow there luxuriantly, and not (I believe) with us. Their colour is, however, more broken and less characteristic than that of the following species.

2. Pinguicula Violacea: Violet-coloured Butterwort, (instead of 'vulgaris,') the common English and Swiss kind above noticed.

3. Pinguicula Alpina: Alpine Butterwort, white and much smaller than either of the first two families; the spur especially small, according to D. 453. Much rarer, as well as smaller, than the other varieties in Southern Europe. "In Britain, known only upon the moors of Rosehaugh, Ross-shire, where the progress of cultivation seems likely soon to efface it." (Grindon.)

4. Pinguicula Pallida: Pale Butterwort. From Sowerby's drawing, (135, vol. iii,) it would appear to be the most delicate and lovely of all the group. The leaves, "like those of other species, but rather more delicate and pellucid, reticulated with red veins, and much involute in the margin. Tube of the corolla, yellow, streaked with red, (the streaks like those of a pansy); the petals, pale violet. It much resembles Villosa, (our Minima, No. 5,) in many particulars, the stem being hairy, and in the lower part the hairs tipped with a viscid fluid, like a sundew. But the Villosa has a slender sharp spur; and in this the spur is blunt and thick at the end." (Since the hairy stem is not peculiar to Villosa, I take for her, instead, the epithet Minima, which is really definitive.)

The pale one is commonly called 'Lusitanica,' but I find no direct notice of its Portuguese habitation. Sowerby's plant came from Blandford, Dorsetshire; and Grindon says it is frequent in Ireland, abundant in Arran, and extends on the western side of the British island from Cornwall to Cape Wrath. My epithet, Pallida, is secure, and simple, wherever the plant is found.

FIG. III.

5. Pinguicula Minima: Least Butterwort; in D. 1021 called Villosa, the scape of it being hairy. I have not yet got rid of this absurd word 'scape,' meaning, in botanist's Latin, the flower-stalk of a flower growing out of a cluster of leaves on the ground. It is a bad corruption of 'sceptre,' and especially false and absurd, because a true sceptre is necessarily branched.[15 - More accurately, shows the pruned roots of branches,—επειδη προτα τομην εν ‛ορεσσι λελοτπεν. The pruning is the mythic expression of the subduing of passion by rectorial law.] In 'Proserpina,' when it is spoken of distinctively, it is called 'virgula' (see vol. i., pp. 146, 147, 151, 152). The hairs on the virgula are in this instance so minute, that even with a lens I cannot see them in the Danish plate: of which Fig. 3 is a rough translation into woodcut, to show the grace and mien of the little thing. The trine leaf cluster is characteristic, and the folding up of the leaf edges. The flower, in the Danish plate, full purple. Abundant in east of Finmark (Finland?), but always growing in marsh moss, (Sphagnum palustre).

6. I call it 'Minima' only, as the least of the five here named; without putting forward any claim for it to be the smallest pinguicula that ever was or will be. In such sense only, the epithets minima or maxima are to be understood when used in 'Proserpina': and so also, every statement and every principle is only to be understood as true or tenable, respecting the plants which the writer has seen, and which he is sure that the reader can easily see: liable to modification to any extent by wider experience; but better first learned securely within a narrow fence, and afterwards trained or fructified, along more complex trellises.

7. And indeed my readers—at least, my newly found readers—must note always that the only power which I claim for any of my books, is that of being right and true as far as they reach. None of them pretend to be Kosmoses;—none to be systems of Positivism or Negativism, on which the earth is in future to swing instead of on its old worn-out poles;—none of them to be works of genius;—none of them to be, more than all true work must be, pious;—and none to be, beyond the power of common people's eyes,[16 - The bitter sorrow with which I first recognized the extreme rarity of finely-developed organic sight is expressed enough in the lecture on the Mystery of Life, added in the large edition of 'Sesame and Lilies.'] ears, and noses, 'æsthetic.' They tell you that the world is so big, and can't be made bigger—that you yourself are also so big, and can't be made bigger, however you puff or bloat yourself; but that, on modern mental nourishment, you may very easily be made smaller. They tell you that two and two are four, that ginger is hot in the mouth, that roses are red, and smuts black. Not themselves assuming to be pious, they yet assure you that there is such a thing as piety in the world, and that it is wiser than impiety; and not themselves pretending to be works of genius, they yet assure you that there is such a thing as genius in the world, and that it is meant for the light and delight of the world.

8. Into these repetitions of remarks on my work, often made before, I have been led by an unlucky author who has just sent me his book, advising me that it is "neither critical nor sentimental" (he had better have said in plain English "without either judgment or feeling"), and in which nearly the first sentence I read is—"Solomon with all his acuteness was not wise enough to … etc., etc., etc." ('give the Jews the British constitution,' I believe the man means.) He is not a whit more conceited than Mr. Herbert Spencer, or Mr. Goldwin Smith, or Professor Tyndall,—or any lively London apprentice out on a Sunday; but this general superciliousness with respect to Solomon, his Proverbs, and his politics, characteristic of the modern Cockney, Yankee, and Anglicised Scot, is a difficult thing to deal with for us of the old school, who were well whipped when we were young; and have been in the habit of occasionally ascertaining our own levels as we grew older, and of recognizing that, here and there, somebody stood higher, and struck harder.

9. A difficult thing to deal with, I feel more and more, hourly, even to the point of almost ceasing to write; not only every feeling I have, but, of late, even every word I use, being alike inconceivable to the insolence, and unintelligible amidst the slang, of the modern London writers. Only in the last magazine I took up, I found an article by Mr. Goldwin Smith on the Jews (of which the gist—as far as it had any—was that we had better give up reading the Bible), and in the text of which I found the word 'tribal' repeated about ten times in every page. Now, if 'tribe' makes 'tribal,' tube must make tubal, cube, cubal, and gibe, gibal; and I suppose we shall next hear of tubal music, cubal minerals, and gibal conversation! And observe how all this bad English leads instantly to blunder in thought, prolonged indefinitely. The Jewish Tribes are not separate races, but the descendants of brothers. The Roman Tribes, political divisions; essentially Trine: and the whole force of the word Tribune vanishes, as soon as the ear is wrung into acceptance of his lazy innovation by the modern writer. Similarly, in the last elements of mineralogy I took up, the first order of crystals was called 'tesseral'; the writer being much too fine to call them 'four-al,' and too much bent on distinguishing himself from all previous writers to call them cubic.

10. What simple schoolchildren, and sensible schoolmasters, are to do in this atmosphere of Egyptian marsh, which rains fools upon them like frogs, I can no more with any hope or patience conceive;—but this finally I repeat, concerning my own books, that they are written in honest English, of good Johnsonian lineage, touched here and there with colour of a little finer or Elizabethan quality: and that the things they tell you are comprehensible by any moderately industrious and intelligent person; and accurate, to a degree which the accepted methods of modern science cannot, in my own particular fields, approach.

11. Of which accuracy, the reader may observe for immediate instance, my extrication for him, from among the uvularias, of these five species of the Butterwort; which, being all that need be distinctly named and remembered, do need to be first carefully distinguished, and then remembered in their companionship. So alike are they, that Gerarde makes no distinction among them; but masses them under the general type of the frequent English one, described as the second kind of his promiscuous group of 'Sanicle,' "which Clusius calleth Pinguicula; not before his time remembered, hath sundry small thick leaves, fat and full of juice, being broad towards the root and sharp towards the point, of a faint green colour, and bitter in taste; out of the middest whereof sprouteth or shooteth up a naked slender stalke nine inches long, every stalke bearing one flower and no more, sometimes white, and sometimes of a bluish purple colour, fashioned like unto the common Monkshoods" (he means Larkspurs) "called Consolida Regalis, having the like spur or Lark's heel attached thereto." Then after describing a third kind of Sanicle—(Cortusa Mathioli, a large-leaved Alpine Primula,) he goes on: "These plants are strangers in England; their natural country is the alpish mountains of Helvetia. They grow in my garden, where they flourish exceedingly, except Butterwoort, which groweth in our English squally wet grounds,"—('Squally,' I believe, here, from squalidus, though Johnson does not give this sense; but one of his quotations from Ben Jonson touches it nearly: "Take heed that their new flowers and sweetness do not as much corrupt as the others' dryness and squalor,"—and note farther that the word 'squal,' in the sense of gust, is not pure English, but the Arabic 'Chuaul' with an s prefixed:—the English word, a form of 'squeal,' meaning a child's cry, from Gothic 'Squæla' and Icelandic 'squilla,' would scarcely have been made an adjective by Gerarde),—"and will not yield to any culturing or transplanting: it groweth especially in a field called Cragge Close, and at Crosbie Ravenswaithe, in Westmerland; (West-mere-land you observe, not mor) upon Ingleborough Fells, twelve miles from Lancaster, and by Harwoode in the same county near to Blackburn: ten miles from Preston, in Anderness, upon the bogs and marish ground, and in the boggie meadows about Bishop's-Hatfield, and also in the fens in the way to Wittles Meare" (Roger Wildrake's Squattlesea Mere?) "from Fendon, in Huntingdonshire." Where doubtless Cromwell ploughed it up, in his young days, pitilessly; and in nowise pausing, as Burns beside his fallen daisy.

12. Finally, however, I believe we may accept its English name of 'Butterwort' as true Yorkshire, the more enigmatic form of 'Pigwilly' preserving the tradition of the flowers once abounding, with softened Latin name, in Pigwilly bottom, close to Force bridge, by Kendal. Gerarde draws the English variety as "Pinguicula sive Sanicula Eboracensis,—Butterwoort, or Yorkshire Sanicle;" and he adds: "The husbandmen's wives of Yorkshire do use to anoint the dugs of their kine with the fat and oilous juice of the herb Butterwort when they be bitten of any venomous worm, or chapped, rifted and hurt by any other means."

13. In Lapland it is put to much more certain use; "it is called Tätgrass, and the leaves are used by the inhabitants to make their 'tät miolk,' a preparation of milk in common use among them. Some fresh leaves are laid upon a filter, and milk, yet warm from the reindeer, is poured over them. After passing quickly through the filter, this is allowed to rest for one or two days until it becomes ascescent,[17 - Lat. acesco, to turn sour.] when it is found not to have separated from the whey, and yet to have attained much greater tenacity and consistence than it would have done otherwise. The Laplanders and Swedes are said to be extremely fond of this milk, which when once made, it is not necessary to renew the use of the leaves, for we are told that a spoonful of it will turn another quantity of warm milk, and make it like the first."[18 - Withering quotes this as from Linnæus, and adds on authority of a Mr. Hawkes, "This did not succeed when tried with cows' milk." He also gives as another name, Yorkshire Sanicle; and says it is called earning grass in Scotland. Linnæus says the juice will curdle reindeer's milk. The name for rennet is earning, in Lincolnshire. Withering also gives this note: "Pinguis, fat, from its effect in CONGEALING milk."—(A.) Withering of course wrong: the name comes, be the reader finally assured, from the fatness of the green leaf, quite peculiar among wild plants, and fastened down for us in the French word 'Grassette.' I have found the flowers also difficult to dry, in the benighted early times when I used to think a dried plant useful! See closing paragraphs of the *4th chapter.—R.] (Baxter, vol. iii., No. 209.)

14. In the same page, I find quoted Dr. Johnston's observation that "when specimens of this plant were somewhat rudely pulled up, the flower-stalk, previously erect, almost immediately began to bend itself backwards, and formed a more or less perfect segment of a circle; and so also, if a specimen is placed in the Botanic box, you will in a short time find that the leaves have curled themselves backwards, and now conceal the root by their revolution."

I have no doubt that this elastic and wiry action is partly connected with the plant's more or less predatory or fly-trap character, in which these curiously degraded plants are associated with Drosera. I separate them therefore entirely from the Bladderworts, and hold them to be a link between the Violets and the Droseraceæ, placing them, however, with the Cytherides, as a sub-family, for their beautiful colour, and because they are indeed a grace and delight in ground which, but for them, would be painfully and rudely desolate.