Proserpina, Volume 2. Ruskin John

bloated. (I begin actually to be a little awed at it, as I should be by a green snake—only the snake would be prettier.) The flowers also, I perceive, have not their two horns regularly set in, but the five spiky calyx-ends stick out between the petals—sometimes three, sometimes four, it may be all five up and down—and produce variously fanged or forked effects, feebly ophidian or diabolic. On the whole, a plant entirely mismanaging itself,—reprehensible and awkward, with taints of worse than awkwardness; and clearly, no true 'species,' but only a link.2 And it really is, as you will find presently, a link in two directions; it is half violet, half pansy, a 'cur' among the Dogs, and a thoughtless thing among the thoughtful. And being so, it is also a link between the entire violet tribe and the Runners—pease, strawberries, and the like, whose glory is in their speed; but a violet has no business whatever to run anywhere, being appointed to stay where it was born, in extremely contented (if not secluded) places. "Half-hidden from the eye?"—no; but desiring attention, or extension, or corpulence, or connection with anybody else's family, still less.

      FIG. II.

      26. And if, at the time you read this, you can run out and gather a true violet, and its leaf, you will find that the flower grows from the very ground, out of a cluster of heart-shaped leaves, becoming here a little rounder, there a little sharper, but on the whole heart-shaped, and that is the proper and essential form of the violet leaf. You will find also that the flower has five petals; and being held down by the bent stalk, two of them bend back and up, as if resisting it; two expand at the sides; and one, the principal, grows downwards, with its attached spur behind. So that the front view of the flower must be some modification of this typical arrangement, Fig. M, (for middle form). Now the statement above quoted from Figuier, § 16, means, if he had been able to express himself, that the two lateral petals in the violet are directed downwards, Fig. II. A, and in the pansy upwards, Fig. II. C. And that, in the main, is true, and to be fixed well and clearly in your mind. But in the real orders, one flower passes into the other through all kinds of intermediate positions of petal, and the plurality of species are of the middle type. Fig. II. B.3

      27. Next, if you will gather a real pansy leaf, you will find it—not heart-shape in the least, but sharp oval or spear-shape, with two deep cloven lateral flakes at its springing from the stalk, which, in ordinary aspect, give the plant the haggled and draggled look I have been vilifying it for. These, and such as these, "leaflets at the base of other leaves" (Balfour's Glossary), are called by botanists 'stipules.' I have not allowed the word yet, and am doubtful of allowing it, because it entirely confuses the student's sense of the Latin 'stipula' (see above, vol. i., chap. viii., § 27) doubly and trebly important in its connection with 'stipulor,' not noticed in that paragraph, but readable in your large Johnson; we shall have more to say of it when we come to 'straw' itself.

      28. In the meantime, one may think of these things as stipulations for leaves, not fulfilled, or 'stumps' or 'sumphs' of leaves! But I think I can do better for them. We have already got the idea of crested leaves, (see vol. i., plate); now, on each side of a knight's crest, from earliest Etruscan times down to those of the Scalas, the fashion of armour held, among the nations who wished to make themselves terrible in aspect, of putting cut plates or 'bracts' of metal, like dragons' wings, on each side of the crest. I believe the custom never became Norman or English; it is essentially Greek, Etruscan, or Italian,—the Norman and Dane always wearing a practical cone (see the coins of Canute), and the Frank or English knights the severely plain beavered helmet; the Black Prince's at Canterbury, and Henry V.'s at Westminster, are kept hitherto by the great fates for us to see. But the Southern knights constantly wore these lateral dragon's wings; and if I can find their special name, it may perhaps be substituted with advantage for 'stipule'; but I have not wit enough by me just now to invent a term.

      29. Whatever we call them, the things themselves are, throughout all the species of violets, developed in the running and weedy varieties, and much subdued in the beautiful ones; and generally the pansies have them, large, with spear-shaped central leaves; and the violets small, with heart-shaped leaves, for more effective decoration of the ground. I now note the characters of each species in their above given order.

      30. I. VIOLA REGINA. Queen Violet. Sweet Violet. 'Viola Odorata,' L., Flora Danica, and Sowerby. The latter draws it with golden centre and white base of lower petal; the Flora Danica, all purple. It is sometimes altogether white. It is seen most perfectly for setting off its colour, in group with primrose,—and most luxuriantly, so far as I know, in hollows of the Savoy limestones, associated with the pervenche, which embroiders and illumines them all over. I believe it is the earliest of its race, sometimes called 'Martia,' March violet. In Greece and South Italy even a flower of the winter.

      "The Spring is come, the violet's gone,

      The first-born child of the early sun.

      With us, she is but a winter's flower;

      The snow on the hills cannot blast her bower,

      And she lifts up her dewy eye of blue

      To the youngest sky of the selfsame hue.

      And when the Spring comes, with her host

      Of flowers, that flower beloved the most

      Shrinks from the crowd that may confuse

      Her heavenly odour, and virgin hues.

      Pluck the others, but still remember

      Their herald out of dim December,—

      The morning star of all the flowers,

      The pledge of daylight's lengthened hours,

      Nor, midst the roses, e'er forget

      The virgin, virgin violet."4

      3. It is the queen, not only of the violet tribe, but of all low-growing flowers, in sweetness of scent—variously applicable and serviceable in domestic economy:—the scent of the lily of the valley seems less capable of preservation or use.

      But, respecting these perpetual beneficences and benignities of the sacred, as opposed to the malignant, herbs, whose poisonous power is for the most part restrained in them, during their life, to their juices or dust, and not allowed sensibly to pollute the air, I should like the scholar to re-read pp. 251, 252 of vol. i., and then to consider with himself what a grotesquely warped and gnarled thing the modern scientific mind is, which fiercely busies itself in venomous chemistries that blast every leaf from the forests ten miles round; and yet cannot tell us, nor even think of telling us, nor does even one of its pupils think of asking it all the while, how a violet throws off her perfume!—far less, whether it might not be more wholesome to 'treat' the air which men are to breathe in masses, by administration of vale-lilies and violets, instead of charcoal and sulphur!

      The closing sentence of the first volume just now referred to—p.254—should also be re-read; it was the sum of a chapter I had in hand at that time on the Substances and Essences of Plants—which never got finished;—and in trying to put it into small space, it has become obscure: the terms "logically inexplicable" meaning that no words or process of comparison will define scents, nor do any traceable modes of sequence or relation connect them; each is an independent power, and gives a separate impression to the senses. Above all, there is no logic of pleasure, nor any assignable reason for the difference, between loathsome and delightful scent, which makes the fungus foul and the vervain sacred: but one practical conclusion I (who am in all final ways the most prosaic and practical of human creatures) do very solemnly beg my readers to meditate; namely, that although not recognized by actual offensiveness of scent, there is no space of neglected land which is not in some way modifying the atmosphere of all the world,—it may be, beneficently, as heath and pine,—it may be, malignantly, as Pontine marsh or Brazilian jungle; but, in one way or another, for good and evil constantly, by day and night, the various powers of life and death in the plants of the desert are poured into the air, as vials of continual angels: and that no words, no thoughts can measure, nor imagination follow, the possible

2

See 'Deucalion,' vol. ii., chap, i., p. 12, § 18.

3

I am ashamed to give so rude outlines; but every moment now is valuable to me: careful outline of a dog-violet is given in Plate X.

4

A careless bit of Byron's, (the last song but one in the 'Deformed Transformed'); but Byron's most careless work is better, by its innate energy, than other people's most laboured. I suppress, in some doubts about my 'digamma,' notes on the Greek violet and the Ion of Euripides;—which the reader will perhaps be good enough to fancy a serious loss to him, and supply for himself.