Chapter VII: Part 7

Pushkin’s activities were phenomenal. That in the thirty-seven years of his tragically short life he should have wrought what he did, and that he should have been so uniformly good, invests him with a glamour which is all his own. He was a meteor, and, like a meteor, he appeared as it were for a moment in the sky, and then vanished into space. And yet half a century ago, among the men who were the leaders of thought in Petersburg, there was far less talk of Pushkin than there was of Dante, Shakespeare, or Voltaire—not to speak of many other foreign authors.

It has taken many years to create the revival of the interest of Russians in Russian work. It has come at last, and now the only danger is lest, under much flattery and patting on the back from abroad, the true advance of public taste should not be rather hindered than furthered. Pushkin, be it remembered, was highly cultivated, a man of wide reading. He recognized the fact that in order to write well a man must read well, and study the best models. Some of his criticisms of Shakespeare and of Byron, under whose influence he was until Shakespeare dethroned his idol, are masterpieces.

It seems to me that the State encouragement of Russian studies will be of high value as promoting facility of intercourse—especially in the case of the Services, naval, military and civil. A far higher, even world-wide importance attaches to the establishment of schools of modern languages all over Russia. It is of less moment that the literature of Russia, in its present condition, should travel westward than that the literature of the West should gradually influence the mind of the Slav. Just as in music the wild barbaric outbursts of his gayer moods, the tender sadness of his dirges, have been enshrined in the harmonies of his own classic masters without losing one spark of their fire, one sob of their pathos, so the untutored writer of to-day, chastened by study, will be able to give us the freshness and zest of a life which is not ours, shorn of all its crudities, not to give them a worse name. Let me not be misunderstood. What I think is of consequence is that the startling audacity, the rough ore of the Slav mind, should be passed through the purifying furnace of the higher education it was in Pushkin’s case—all honour to him—and then you will have something worthy of the praise which is being rained upon the shameless translations by ladies, themselves ill-equipped by classic culture, of the cubism of literary art.

VERBA COMPOSITA

In the first volume of my “Memories” there is a print of a drawing by William Evans, of the inglenook in the picturesque dining-hall of his house at Eton. Above the stone screen in which it was held was a legend in Gothic letters: “Favus mellis verba composita.” The words had disappeared for many years when I went to place my son with Miss Evans—so long that she had even forgotten their existence when I asked the reason why. To us old boys it seemed a pity, for the inscription had derived a certain sanctity from the scholastic storm which raged round it. The learned would not accept the legend. No one could say whence the quotation or proverb came. Dr. Hawtrey, to whom the pure well of Latin undefiled was almost a religion with which to tamper was little short of sacrilege, declared that it was a barbarism, a piece of dog, or, what was perhaps to him as bad, monkish Latin. He maintained that it was untranslatable; but we, audacious monkeys, rushing in where scholars feared to tread, declared that if the words were obscure, the meaning was clear as crystal: “Sweet as the honeycomb is the talk of friends in council.” Here I would fain break off for a moment to pay a slight tribute to the memory of that most generous of men, William Evans, drawing-master and, though one of the most masculine of mortals, technically a “dame.” He was a big, burly man, of a jovial and rubicund aspect, a combination which earned for him the nickname of Beeves. He was a vigorous painter in water-colours, a member of the old water-colour society, and one of the best of good fellows.

A sportsman, too, for he was the friend of the late Duke of Atholl, spending most of his summer holiday at Blair, where he was always welcome as an enthusiastic stalker. Indeed, “Scrope’s Deerstalking” was the only book that I remember ever to have seen him read. I went to see him once as he lay in bed, very feeble, at the beginning of his last long illness. On the wall, at his right hand, was hanging his dearly-loved rifle, his powder-flask, and the other paraphernalia of those pre-breechloader days. In his youth he had been a great oarsman, and, indeed, the river was his joy till quite late in life.

He took the greatest interest in all that concerned boating and swimming, and it was owing to his influence, in conjunction with that of the noble Bishop Selwyn, of whom Eton is still so proud, that the law was passed by the authorities forbidding boys to enter a boat until they should have “passed” in swimming. Of the good bishop a story is told of the time when he was a private tutor at Eton which is worth preserving. He was sculling in a wherry amid a crowd of boats, when he was run into by some unskilled oarsman. Seeing that shipwreck was inevitable, he stood up, and, quoting Ovid’s description of the discreet death of Lucretia, exclaimed:

“Tunc quoque, jam moriens, ne non procumbat honeste
Respicit, hoc etiam cura cadenti erat.”

Fasti II., 831.

And so, with a header as graceful as the quotation was apt, the amphibious bishop that was to be, dived into the Thames amid the plaudits of the multitude, who already recognized in him the heroism of which he was to give proof in New Zealand and elsewhere.

Evans’ was a very happy house, and the good old man spared nothing for the comfort of his boys. The table which he kept was excellent, the Sunday dinner quite a little feast, with a glass of sherry for each boy at plum-pudding time—not altogether wise we should perhaps think nowadays, but so kind and so hospitable. Rarely, too, would be fail to invite one or two boys to stay for dessert. The traditions of the house were nobly carried on by Miss Jennie Evans after her father’s death in 1877. And now she, too, has disappeared, the last of the dames, the last of one of those dear old institutions which were part of the mystery of Eton.

To remember is to wander, and when I begin to think of Eton—the Eton of seventy years ago—it is easier to ramble on than prudently to stop. But to-day I have only to deal with “Verba Composita.” It is of them that I was thinking this morning as I sat in my Veluvana, and, indeed, there could hardly be a more pregnant thought than that of the talk of friends in council.

How perfect is the feeling with which, in the company of a familiar friend of our own choice—we wander through the shaded paths and sweet groves of our sanctuary. Nor is it necessary that the chosen comrade should be himself a botanist or a gardener. Sympathy is all that is asked of him, and that he will not deny. Indeed, there is something in the worship of the great god Pan, and in the living, growing temples which are raised in his honour, which makes for all that is best in the intercourse between man and man.

A beautiful view, a discreet arrangement of flowers and graceful foliage, will rouse congenial memories of books, of poetry, of pictures, and sometimes even of melody. The sight of a plant recognized even by the unskilled as an old friend of some distant clime, seen again after many years, will excite a whole train of recollections fragrant with the perfume of half-forgotten travels and adventures. So may two greybeards sit happily in some remote nook, the home of fairies and dryads, where the trees whisper old thoughts and call up sympathetic talk, broken and yet stimulated afresh by “brilliant flashes of silence.”

_From a photograph._

[_To face p. 212._]

All the better is this _solitude à deux_ if there should be the tinkling music of a tiny stream, with the electric gleam of a kingfisher darting across some idle sunlit pool. All these wield that magic power which, for the nonce charming away the wrinkles of time, transports us across the long years back to the days when the world and we were young and life meant hope. Rare, indeed, and very precious are such dreamy talks and silences. We can hardly rate their value too highly. The crazy poet-philosopher Nietzsche was not far wrong when, in a letter to Erwin Rohde, he wrote: “Eternally we need midwives in order to be delivered of our thoughts. Most people go to a public-house, or to a colleague whose mind is solely occupied with the interests of their calling, and there, like so many small cats, they tumble about all their thoughts and tiny schemes. But woe to us who lack the sunlight of a friend’s presence!”

It was a fine thought of his to elevate friendship to the rank of a goddess. But, alas for the inconsistencies of genius! Few of Nietzsche’s hot friendships had any lasting power. Rohde himself, Rée and others faded out of his life. But no change was so violent as that which occurred in the relations between the philosopher and the tone-poet Wagner. The historic friendship—born of an admiration for Schopenhauer shared by both, and of an adoration by Nietzsche of Wagner’s music—ripened so quickly and was so beautiful, that it ought to have lived with their lives; but this alliance between a budding youth and an older, already famous man came to the saddest end.

Suddenly the fruit grew mouldy and fell from the tree, and the love, which had seemed to be built upon a rock, the worship which was so full of pious conviction, were changed into a hatred which was nothing short of venomous, and which not even the death of Wagner could compel to silence. They had first met at Leipsic, at the house of Professor Brockhaus, and Wagner, touched by the boy’s enthusiasm, took to him at once, petted him, and encouraged him to go and visit him, which he did a few years later at Triebschen, Wagner’s retreat under the shadow of Mount Pilatus.

Wonderful gatherings, indeed, have been held throughout the ages in groves and gardens. Imagine the Baghavat, the Blessed One, surrounded by his Bikshus, as poor as the first followers of St. Francis, preaching the doctrines of truth and humility in those parables that are dear to the Eastern, seated in one or other of his beloved gardens. Think of the sages of ancient Athens gathered together in the groves of the Akademia discussing the deep problems of existence. How much more instinct with the poetry of life must such grave and reverend companies have been than the boisterous though delightful tavern symposia in which Christopher North, Tickler, the Ettrick Shepherd and their friends slung Doric wit and wisdom over the toddy glasses! We can easily conceive how the interchange of thought between the great trio, Wagner, Frau Cosima and Nietzsche, in a lovely Swiss garden, surrounded by the majesty of the Alps, must have been enshrined in such memories as those over which the philosopher mourned so long as the lamp of life burned in him.

When the other day I was reading Dr. Mügge’s account of the trio at Triebschen, Wagner, Frau Cosima and Nietzsche, and of their deep interest in one another’s ideals, the old motto, “Sweet as the honeycomb is the talk of friends in council,” of which I had not thought for many a decade, came back to me, and I understood how Nietzsche, long years after he had quarrelled with Wagner—indeed, shortly before his death—declared that “he would resign all human intercourse, but at no price would he give up the pleasant memories of those days spent in Triebschen.” The honey of those Verba Composita was still sweet in the comb.

For the quarrel between the two men there may be explanations and excuses; such changes are not without precedent. The first link between them was, as I have said, devotion to Schopenhauer. “Nietzsche called his connection with Wagner his practical course in Schopenhauer’s philosophy.” When Nietzsche began to dream of a philosophy of his own, the tie between him and the poet-composer was weakened; there was also perhaps some feeling that he was being made use of, that he was being patronized and made to play second fiddle to a man whom he was beginning to look down upon as a mere play-actor—a mummer—a child of the theatre.

Mügge throws out a hint that in breaking with Wagner, Nietzsche was possibly fleeing from himself, and he quotes a note from him to Frau Cosima: “Ariadne, I love you! Dionysus.” Whatever may have been the cause, or the many causes, of the rupture, its violence was, at any rate on Nietzsche’s side, maniacal. His venom was not less poisonous than that which Devadatta poured out upon the Buddha. Not content with having hurled his Jupiter, as he called him, from his throne on high Olympus, he must needs pursue him into the depths, trampling on him, and covering with mud the man whom he had once beslavered with the most fulsome adulation. Strange litanies for the high priest of the goddess of Friendship to intone!

Far less intelligible is the change of front in regard to Wagner’s music. That the man who, for the apotheosis of Wagner’s art, wrote “The Birth of Tragedy in Music,” should so completely eat his words as to the worth of the music because he had ceased to love the musician is almost unthinkable.

In the first period he tells us that: “From a novice trying his strength, Wagner became a thorough master of music and of the theatre.... No one will any longer deny him the glory of having given us the supreme model for lofty artistic execution. The renewer of the simple drama, the discoverer of the position due to art in true German society, the poetic interpreter of old views of life, the philosopher, the historian, the æsthete and critic, the master of languages, the mythologist and the myth poet, who for the first time included all these wonderful and beautiful products of a primitive imagination in a single Ring, upon which he engraved the runic characters of his thoughts—what an abundance of knowledge Wagner must have had in order to have become all that!”

Again: “Over the coming of Wagner there hovers a necessity which both justifies it and makes it glorious.” “Wagner, in his capacity as supreme master of form, points out the way, like Aeschylus, to a future art.” “In the life of this great man, the period over which as a golden reflection there is stretched the splendour of a supreme perfection.... He produces _Tristan and Isolde_, this _opus metaphysicum_ of all art; the _Meistersinger of Nürnberg_; the _Ring of the Nibelungs_; his work of Bayreuth.”[17]

There is much more in the same strain, but when we come to the second period it is another Nietzsche who speaks. He now attacks his former idol with the most ferocious rancour, for which only insanity could account; and yet that he was not then mad is proved by other utterances of his in regard to that same art of music. For instance: “Mendelssohn was the beautiful interlude of German music, quickly admired and then quickly forgotten. Schumann was the last who founded a school. Though incessantly glowing with happiness or throbbing with impersonal suffering, he was a purely German event, and not, as Beethoven and Mozart had been, a European phenomenon.”

That—although I should not agree as to Mendelssohn being forgotten—appears to me to be, as regards Schumann, a fine piece of criticism. Apparently it was only when thinking of Wagner that he was up to that time insane. Then he could lash himself into a fury! Witness: “I call the Wagnerian orchestration the Sirocco; Bizet’s” (of whose success Wagner was supremely jealous) “orchestral music is almost the sole orchestration that I can still endure.... Schopenhauer was the philosopher of decadence. His art is morbid.... Wagner has been ruinous to music. Was Wagner a musician at all? He was at least something else in a higher degree—that is to say, an unsurpassable _actor_. Wagner was, above all, a stage-player, and he excels in ubiquity and nullibiety.... Parsifal is a candidate for divinity with a public-school education. We are so far pure fools already ... a typical telegram from Bayreuth: _Bereits bereut_ (rued already)! Ah! this old _thief_! This old _magician_! This _Cagliostro_ of modernity!... Wagner is a Romanist, and he made the poor devil, the country lad Parsifal, a Roman Catholic. I despise every one who does not regard Parsifal as an outrage on morals.”

_From a photograph._

[_To face p. 218._]

Perhaps Wagner’s faithful disciples were right when they ascribed all outpouring of the vials of wrath to _jalousie de métier_; for Nietzsche, too, was not only poet and philosopher, but composer, and when he submitted an opera of his own to Wagner, the great man, as the Eastern saying is, made sour noses at it.

It is dangerous to carry a book with you into a garden; it will make your mind wander much further than your feet. Here have I been rambling on, carried away not so much by any feeling for Nietzsche, who is, after all, not much more than a name to me, as by the interest which attaches to all that concerns Wagner. For, let his enemies say what they will, he was a man of genius, of most compelling genius, and who that ever had speech of Frau Cosima could avoid being bewitched. To me it has only been given to know her in her old age, but I fell at once under the spell of that most sweet and dainty personality. Very feeble in health, and unable to speak for long, she had retained all the serene charm which, in the heyday of her youth and beauty, earned for her the name of “the unique woman.” I felt how bright a part she must have played in the brilliant trio at Triebschen, and how sad it is that there should be no record of the symposia of the sunny days of that happy friendship before it was disturbed by mad envy and malice.

Of Nietzsche and his tragic end, of the influence which his restless brain exercised upon men and upon letters, this is not the place to speak. Is it he, as his disciples maintain, who has taught Germany and, through Germany, the world to think? The great anti-moralist, as he has been called, is dead. Let him rest in peace. We can leave this Batrachomyomachia, this battle of the frogs and mice, the squabbles of German professors and philosophers, coming back with some relief to the sweeter fragrance of our flowers. It was the thought of Triebschen and its Verba Composita which led us to Nietzsche, and his clever saying that seemed to give value to the thought of friendship in a garden.

Days of happy talk are delightful—never more so than in a garden; and yet it is when we are alone, when our plants are the companions of our solitude, that we really enter into sympathy with them. Then it is that we hold true communion with them, and, giving the reins to our imagination, try to read the hidden secrets of their being—hidden secrets, not those scientific arcana which your professor loves to clothe in slipshod Latin and shabby Greek, but those inmost idiosyncrasies in which our fancy, wildly playful, seems to detect vestiges of the same characteristics and emotions which rule as tyrants in our own nature. Nor when we note the movements of plants, so strangely purposeful, does it involve any inordinate strain upon our conceptive power to see in them something more than chance, something which resembles the exercise of a dominant will. These may be thoughts at which science laughs, and which the inexorable demon Commonsense hounds out of court—thoughts that are no more than poor little waifs and strays, coming to us from Fancyland, and yet not without their humble value if they do but make us watch and seek for things undreamt of in our philosophy.

That certain flowers and plants are, as it were, types of various qualities is an idea as old as the hills upon which they grow. The strength of the oak, the grace of the willow, the flaunting pride of poppies, the virginal purity of lilies, the stateliness of hollyhocks like courtiers drawn up in a row at the levée of a mighty king, the modesty of the violet—all these and a hundred others are images from the wallets of poets of all lands and of all time. It is not of these that I speak, but rather of the behaviour of plants, often very various and capricious, according to circumstances, yet in which we seem to see a kinship with reasonable motive, a suggestion that in similar conditions we might have done the same.

See yonder crimson water-lily queening it in all the majesty of her amazing beauty among the humbler reeds and rushes and sedges and the rest of her water-loving subjects. To-day she is in the zenith of her state, like the king’s daughter all glorious within. Does she rejoice in the stateliness of her queenship? It would almost seem so, for to-morrow she will feel that her reign is over. She will bow her lovely neck, and, coyly folding her petals together round the golden aureole of her stamens, will disappear under the flood, too proud to let herself be seen when her regal beauty is on the wane. Is not that something like the pride of which we read in the life of the peerless Countess Castiglione, who hid herself from the gaze of men before her charms had faded, as she knew they soon must? Having reigned supreme among the fair women of the world, she would not consent to be degraded into a has-been—a thing of the past. I have told in my “Memories” of the first time that I saw her on the terrace at Holland House, a miracle of loveliness, when all London was crowding on tiptoe to catch a sight of the haughty queen of beauty and do homage to her majesty. My nymphæa tempts me to repeat myself. The last time was a few years later. I was sitting with Mario and Grisi in their garden at Fulham when she was announced. She came in robed in deepest black, her face hidden by a thick veil of sable crêpe. She remained a little while and talked gaily enough, but her face remained hidden all the time; not for one moment did she lift that funereal veil. She had forsaken the world—abdicated—like my coy crimson water-lily, and in the waters of Lethe she hid her beauteous head.

Have plants their friendships, their affinities? Certain it is that there are some plants which seem to thrive best when familiarly associated with certain others. I have heard some gardeners say, for instance, that lilies of the valley and Solomon’s seal are never so happy as when they are planted together. That may be true, but it probably means no more than that both need the same soil and surroundings, and so make the bravest show when they are side by side. I much doubt whether a weak clump of lilies of the valley would be strengthened by adding to it a cluster of plants of its friend, or vice versa.

On the other hand, it is a scientific fact capable of demonstration, that there are trees which press into their service certain humbler non-flowering plants, compelling them to furnish their roots with water and such mineral salts and foods as are needful for their well-being. These become slaves, like the hewers of wood and drawers of water working for the lords of creation.

Many years ago I received a consignment of _Pinus cembra_, the Arolla pine, which is the common growth of the Alps. The trees arrived late in the afternoon, and we unpacked them at once, for the days were at their shortest, and I was eager to get them all planted—there were a dozen or more—before nightfall. To my dismay I found that the roots were all covered with a network of grey film, the mycelium, as the learned would call it, of some fungus. My gardener and I were not a little indignant with the nurseryman who sent out the plants in so filthy a condition. We sent for a bucket of water and washed clean as many of the trees as we could; mercifully there was not daylight enough left to purge them all of their dirt. To our amazement, the trees which we washed soon began to show signs of sickness; they dwindled for three or four years and looked as if they must die; slowly, very slowly, the invalids recovered. Their unwashed mates never flinched for a moment, made roots gaily, and took quite rapidly to their new home. The puzzle was great, until a few years later I received Kerner’s great book, “The Natural History of Plants,” and then the mystery was cleared up. The sorrows of the washed trees were those of the planters of the West Indian Islands. Like Mr. Wilberforce, we had deprived them of their slaves. Luckily, the humus of the plantation in which they were placed must have contained the spores necessary to the formation of the fungoid growth, otherwise they would doubtless have died.

Kerner’s chapter on the _Symbiosis_, or social union of plants, is curiously interesting. He gives a list of flowering trees and plants which are absolutely dependent upon what he called the mycelial mantle with which fungi cover their roots for the absorption of their daily food. Limes, roses, ivy, pinks may be propagated by cuttings which will root in pure sand. No such method is possible in the case of the oak, the beech, firs, broom, rhododendron, and a host of others, which demand an admixture of soil containing a proportion of mycelia, without which they are unable to feed themselves; and so, like babies, with neither breast nor bottle they perish.

Kerner’s opening words on this _symbiosis_ are worth quoting: “In describing the vegetation of a limited area, botanical writers are apt to designate the various species of plants as ‘denizens’ of the country in question. The conditions under which the plants live are likened to political institutions, and the relations existing amongst the plants themselves are compared to the life and strife of human society.” He goes on to speak of the interdependence upon one another of these plants living in the same community; he shows how necessary they are to one another; how they sometimes fight for food, light and air; how some are preyed upon and oppressed by others, “and how not infrequently quite different species join together in order to attain some mutual advantage.” And so he comes to the curious history of the lichens.

Some forty or fifty years ago there arose a furious battle around the lichens, humble little creatures enough, plastered on almost every rock and stone and tree in creation. During the ’sixties of the last century Schwendener, a Swiss botanist—professor successively at Basle, Tübingen and Berlin—wrote a number of papers in scientific publications, in which he proved to his own satisfaction that lichens are not individual plants, but compound existences consisting of an alga and a fungus. His investigations were followed up by one Bornet, and he had a numerous following largely attracted by the charm of novelty and the ingenuity of invention. Kerner went so far as to say that “the continued study of lichens has tended only to secure for the Schwendenerian theory a more wide and universal recognition.” Dr. Cook, however, the great authority on cryptogamic botany, laughs at this mystic union as a “fairy tale.” He treats it with the same contempt that St. Paul, in his letter to Titus, expressed for “Jewish fables.” He says: “The high priest Schwendener thus expressed his dream: ‘As the result of my researches, all these growths (lichens) are not simple plants, not individuals in the ordinary sense of the word; they are rather colonies, which consist of hundreds and thousands of individuals, of which, however, one alone plays the master, whilst the rest, in perpetual captivity, prepare the nutriment for themselves and their master. This master is a fungus of the class ascomyceter, a parasite which is accustomed to live upon others’ work; its slaves are green algæ, which it has sought out, or, indeed, caught hold of, and compelled into its service. It surrounds them, as a spider its prey, with a fibrous net of narrow meshes, which is gradually converted into an impenetrable covering; but whilst the spider sucks its prey and leaves it dead, the fungus incites the algæ found in its net to more rapid activity—nay, to more vigorous increase.’”

Dr. Cook goes on to say: “This may be all very poetical, but it is not very explicit, and needs a commentary;” and then he proceeds to demolish the whole theory based upon the supposition that the gonidia, green spherical cells, which are found in the thallus of lichens are algæ. Lichens, Dr. Cook tells us, consist normally of a thallus, or vegetative system, which is in many species a tough, bark-like expansion, horizontal or vertical, attached to rocks, stones, wood and other substances, but not deriving nourishment from the object to which it is attached. Inside this thallus are the minute green gonidia, and, in addition, there is the reproductive system, consisting of discs borne upon the thallus, containing the reproductive organs (asci and sporidia). The Schwendenerians contend that the thallus and reproductive system are not only fungoid, but actual fungi, while the green gonidia are algæ upon which those fungi are parasitic.

One of the proofs which Dr. Cook brings forward in support of his contradiction of the theorists is the permanence of lichens, whereas the fungi are, as we all know, very short-lived, many of them little more than ephemeral—here to-day and gone to-morrow. To the lichens we must pay the respect due to the most venerable antiquity. Dr. Cook, speaking with all the authority with which he is endowed, tells us that “some species, growing on primitive rocks of the highest mountains of the world, are estimated to have attained an age of at least a thousand years. Is it not marvellous to think of these mean little vegetable scabs feeding upon air, outliving the monarch oaks and almost all the trees of Creation?”

But I am in danger of rushing in where the angels of science hardly dare tread. Let me go back to my beloved nonsense. Beloved? Yes, for, after all, what is more lovable than nonsense? What a joy their nonsense must have been to Dean Swift, to Lear, or to the little dry chip of a man who was our Cocker, our mathematical tutor, at Christ Church. I wonder whether, when Dodgson, that double personality, always associated in my memory with a blackboard, a piece of chalk and _x y z_, was writing up his mystic algebraical puzzles, his mind did not sometimes wander, and he himself become transformed for a minute into Lewis Carroll seeing visions of Alice, the Carpenter, the Mad Hatter, the Walrus, and all the crazy _dramatis personæ_ of his delicious phantasy. He is dead now, and many years ago the lovely child, for whose delectation the wonder book was invented, was laid in an early grave in the Christ Church cloisters. Only Alice lives, and will live as long as the English language remains.

If your garden be upon the slope of a hill, there is one human instinct which you will surely, if you watch them carefully, recognize in your plants. They are so ambitious. Those among them which have creeping roots or rhizomes will almost invariably travel uphill. They are as fain to climb as Sir Walter Raleigh himself. Take the rhizomatous bamboos, such species among the arundonarias as Somoni, Japonica Layœkerd, Spathiflora and others, Phyllostachys fastuosa, Bambusa Palmata. Rarely, indeed, will you find a new culm below the parent plant; all the growth is upwards. And so it is with many other genera. I think the reason of it is pretty plain. You need but to mark the trees above a railway cutting or on the high banks of a deep lane, to see how shallow in proportion to their height are the roots even of the greatest of them. There are exceptions—the vine and the laburnum, to wit—but the oak itself loses its so-called tap-root, which withers and rots away as soon as it has fulfilled its duty of tying the tree in its place. The roots seem to remain as near as possible to the plane of the bottom of the main stem. The same rule applies to plants of lesser stature. Now if the roots of a hillside plant were to move down-hill in the same plane as the axis of the stem, it is manifest that they must very soon peer out into the open and be deprived of all those foods which are necessary to plant life. So they choose the wise course of journeying upwards, where they are sure, on the contrary, of an increasingly richer diet. If on its travels the growing point of a bamboo rhizome encounters a stone or other obstacle, it will not dive down to avoid it, but will take a direction upwards and then down again into the earth, forming one of those hoops, like croquet hoops, which are such a snare to trip up wayfarers in bamboo forests. Sometimes the ambitions of plants, like those of men, are fatal. The root-stock, originally set in the best conditions, must needs climb higher and higher, until it may perhaps reach some uncongenial place in which it is starved or choked. Then farewell, a long farewell, to all its greatness! By degrees the parent plant becomes exhausted and dwindles away, while the scions which should have carried on the dynasty are hoped for in vain, and so some precious treasure is lost for ever.

If plants have ambition, there is one vice closely allied to it which they do not possess. Jealousy is confined to animals. Men, dogs, cats and horses are jealous. There is no evidence to lead us to suppose that plants are afflicted with that horror of horrors. They may have their loves and their hatreds; they will, as we have seen, help one another, and they will strangle and murder one another. They will even rob one another; but the torture of jealousy seems to be unknown to them. They will attack their neighbours with the pitiless savagery of the old Rhineland robber knights. No vampire could with more ruthless cruelty suck the blood of a fair maiden than certain malignant fungi, which fasten upon great trees and shrubs, and draw out the sap of their noble lives in order to nourish their own ignominious bodies. Then there are the saprophytes, plants as unlovely as their name, vegetable horrors, which, like the ghouls of the “Arabian Nights,” are found feasting upon death and decay. _Non ragionam di lor! Ma guarda e passa._

In the part of the world where I live the old thorn trees are, with the oaks, the glory of the countryside. One year, to my dismay, I saw that all my thorns in which I took so much pride were apparently dying. In the middle of summer their leaves withered and wilted, and they presented a piteous sight. I wrote to Kew for advice. Kew is a never-failing help in trouble. The answer came back: Have you any savin juniper bushes? If so, examine them. You will probably find them covered with a yellow slimy sort of jelly, which is the first stage of a fungus which, in its second stage, fastens upon the thorn. The letter went on to advise a merciless destruction and holocaust of the savin bushes, and prophesied that the fungus on the thorns would die and not renew itself, so that no permanent harm would ensue. Sure enough, in my ignorance, I had planted a number of bushes of savin, which I found, as Kew prophesied, to be covered with an ugly yellow mucilaginous substance. My inquisition was followed by an _auto da fé_ of the junipers; when their enemies were burnt, the thorns recovered and I had no more trouble.

How most other plants hate the beech and the ash! How resolutely they refuse to grow under their shade! And yet even the best hated men have their friends, who will smile to them and seek their company. Lords of beech woods wanting covert for their game should try planting Laurus Colchica and Laurus rotundifolia. The pheasants love their shelter, and they are quite happy even under old-established beeches.

There are plants of prey just as there are beasts of prey and birds of prey. These are plants which live upon animal food just as we do, setting traps and snares for them with all the cunning shown by one of Richard Jefferies’ phenomenal gamekeepers or poachers. What, by the by, is the exact dividing line which separates the poacher from the keeper? Does the one develop into the other as does the chrysalis into the butterfly? I remember a little old Highland stalker, a veteran of the “hull,” as brown and rugged as a russet apple; we had been watching deer a long way off all the morning—the wind wrong for a stalk—and he confided to me all those secrets of deer life which seemed as familiar to him as if, like the Buddha, he had been himself a stag in some previous stage of existence. “How long have you been a stalker, Hughie?” I asked. “Maybe twenty years,” he answered; but then, looking up, his eyes twinkling with a craft worthy of Autolycus, he added, “but I was a shepherd for many years before that.”

There was a whole folio volume of predatory but illicit sport in the words. Some plants, like the various pitchers of Nepenthe and others, remain still and are content to rely upon the beauty of their colours to tempt the game to its doom. Caught in the trap, the victims are held tight by some glue like birdlime, or kept from finding their way out by fingers of sharp teeth like the knives of the Iron Virgin of Nürnberg. Others, innocent, humble little creatures, look “as if they would not hurt a fly.” But let the fly beware, and keep out of their grip—“foxes in stealth, wolves in greediness,” they are armed like the butterwort (_pinguicula_) with glands which become active at the touch, and secure the prisoner, or as the sundew (_drosera_), equipped with tentacles which close in upon him like a horror in one of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. How these creatures feed and how they digest their meat is told in Darwin’s “Insectivorous Plants” and elsewhere. These are facts, not fancies. But what gastronome could take offence if he were accused of being as greedy as sundew!

There is one human quality, the power of enjoyment, which, above all others, we seem to recognize in our plants. It is impossible to look upon the daffodils in a field dancing in the sunlight of an early April day, without feeling that here is the very embodiment of gladness—of the _joie de vivre_; and as the months speed on and flower after flower bursts into life, meeting the renewed glories of the sun, we have before us a roundelay of gaiety and happiness which only quite ceases when the first grip of winter comes to choke and kill the melancholy glory of autumn. Then, when the dahlias hang their stricken heads, and the blue clouds of the Michaelmas daisies fade and shed their seed, we are conscious of the fact that they, too, have their sorrows, though the tragedy of so many has passed unnoticed when rivals, each one more beautiful than the last, have been springing up to take their place. A greater than I am has noticed the pleasure that plants take in the act of living. A friend sends me these lines of Wordsworth’s:

“The budding twigs spread out their fan
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.”

And so we linger on in our Veluvana until the sun is setting in the west. There is an end of light and heat for this day, and the plants, like the birds, must sleep and even dream, if Keats be right.[18] Theirs is perhaps not the sleep which we know, but nothing is more certain than the change which they undergo in darkness. In some plants the leaflets curl downwards, in others upwards; in many the flowers close altogether, and are folded almost as they were when buds. But all green plants show one phenomenon. Whereas under light the leaves take up the air in the little mouths on the underside of their leaves, and after working up the carbonic-acid gas into carbon for the building of their stems and branches, return the rest in the shape of pure oxygen, purifying and sweetening the air; when night comes the process is reversed. Then they retain the oxygen and exhale carbonic-acid gas only, and that is why careful nurses, though they may not know the reason, turn plants out of a sick-room when the night comes on. It has been calculated that of those little stomates on the underside of a beech leaf, little kitchens or laboratories in which the tree prepares its food, there are no fewer than a million. Yes, the plants must sleep—all save certain disreputable night-blooms, which, like owls and bats and witches, hate the light and haunt the darkness. In a few hours the first glimmer of dawn will break; the rosy-fingered goddess will rouse her choir of birds, and they, with their morning hymn, will awaken the trees and the flowers; the blessed dew will fall, distilling the sweet scents of woodland and gardenland, and the joy of the world and of the plants will spring into the birth of a day.

If I were able to accept, as do the pious Buddhists, the doctrine of rebirth and the transmigration of souls, I, noting what I have called the purposeful movements of plant-life, should be inclined to go a step further than they do. If a man may have been in a previous state of existence a stag, a monkey, or a snake, why should he not equally have been a tree, a shrub, or a poisonous creeper? The stately dignity of the oak, the sweet virtues of the rose, the venomous juice of the deadly nightshade, are qualities which might be traced in many a reincarnation. The image, at any rate, is found in Ezekiel: “Behold, the Assyrian was a cedar in Lebanon with fair branches and with a shadowing shroud and of an high stature, and his top was among the thick boughs” (Ezekiel xxxi. 3).

When all is said and done, is it so very foolish, as we sit wool-gathering and drinking in the sweetness of a summer’s evening amid the fragrance of our Veluvana, to let our thoughts run riot among the many-coloured clouds of fancy, tracing some faint signs of kinship between the moods of men and the moods of plants? And if, in the indulgence of these whimsies, treating the search for knowledge, not as we English are supposed to take our pleasures—_moult tristement_—we should chance to strike some tiny spark of truth hitherto hidden from us, may we not call in Horace as counsel for the defence and ask:

“——ridentem dicere verum
Quid vetat?”

Enshrined, as it were, in a temple of secular oaks, and other grave and reverend trees, there stands a small mulberry tree, very humble and inconspicuous, having hardly as yet reached the dignity of a shrub. In the late spring and early summer it is surrounded by flaming azaleas, white and deep purple lilacs, and other flowering Japanese maples, with their coral buds bursting into crimson leaves—all the “embroidery” of the Japanese forests, which look as if they had been planted to do honour to the little waif, the radiance of whose pedigree, indeed, outshines all their glory. It is like the beggar-maid at the African King Cophetua’s court, but, like that humble maiden, worthy of royal favour above all the flaunting beauties who surrounded that “magnanimous and illustrate” monarch’s throne; for that little tree, or tree that, by the grace of Pomona, shall yet be, is an undoubted scion of the tree which Shakespeare planted in the garden of the new home which he built for his prosperous retirement at Stratford-on-Avon. The story is complete in all its details. It has been told by Malone in his life, and recently by Sir Sidney Lee in the admirable new edition of his life of the poet, and is confirmed by what Dr. Johnson told Boswell when they visited Mrs. Gastrell.

In the year 1597 Shakespeare, minded to end his days in his native town, as should become an Armiger of good means, bought New Place, which had been the most considerable house in Stratford; but the buildings were in ruins, and the poet built himself a new house with three gables, the centre of which carried a shield with the spear, which he adopted as his coat-of-arms. “Shakespeare paid for it,” writes Sir Sidney Lee, “with two gardens, the then substantial sum of sixty pounds. A curious incident postponed legal possession. The vendor of the Stratford Manor House, William Underhill, died suddenly of poison at another residence in the county—Fillongley, near Coventry—and the legal transfer to the dramatist was left at the time incomplete. Underhill’s eldest son Fulk died a minor at Warwick next year, and after his death he was proved to have murdered his father. The family estates were thus in danger of forfeiture, but they were suffered to pass to the felon’s next brother Hercules, who, on coming of age in 1602, completed in a new deed the transfer of New Place to Shakespeare.” Sir Sidney goes on to say that the poet does not appear to have permanently settled at New Place until 1611. In the meantime, he had been busy rebuilding the house and planning his garden. And now for the history of the famous mulberry tree.

Soon after his accession to the throne King James the First appears to have been fascinated by the idea of establishing the cultivation of silk in this country. There was a Frenchman, a native of Picardy, of the name of Forest, who, in the year 1608, “kept greate store of English silk-worms at Greenwich, the which the King, with great pleasure, came often to see them worke; and of their silke he caused a piece of taffeta to be made” (Malone’s “Life of Shakespeare”). This led to the King’s planting many hundred thousand mulberry trees in this country, those destined for the Midland Counties being distributed by a Frenchman named Véron. But the King also planted a number of trees south of Hyde Park, at the western end of what now are Buckingham Palace Gardens. These trees gave the name to the famous “Mulberry Gardens,” of which I shall say a word later.

It seems that on his return from one of his annual excursions to London, Shakespeare brought back with him a young mulberry tree, and with his own hands planted it in his garden, in which tradition says that he loved to work. What more natural than that the courtier-actor, who was as much petted by King James as he had been in the previous reign, should wish to enrich his Eden with a specimen of the latest botanical craze? After passing through various hands, the house passed back to Sir Hugh Clopton, whose family had formerly possessed it. Sir Hugh pulled down Shakespeare’s three-gabled and ugly house, and built one more suitable to his position, where, in May, 1742, Malone tells us that he hospitably entertained Garrick, Macklin and Delane under the poet’s own mulberry tree. In 1790 the father of Mr. Davenport’s clerk, then ninety-five years old, told Malone that as a boy he lived in the next house to New Place, and that he had often eaten of the fruit of the tree, some branches of which overhung his father’s garden; that it was planted by the poet, and the first mulberry tree to be seen in the neighbourhood.

In 1752 Henry Talbot, son-in-law and executor of Sir Hugh Clopton, sold New Place to a clergyman of the name of Gastrell, a man of fortune and Vicar of Frodsham in Cheshire, apparently an ill-conditioned, quarrelsome man, who was soon in hot water with his neighbours. He had a dispute with the town over assessments, in which, by the by, he was utterly in the wrong, and he so resented the desire of sightseers to be admitted to view the famous mulberry tree, that to spite them and the townsfolk he, in 1758, cut down the tree, his wife urging him to the impious act, as Dr. Johnson told Boswell. She, the Lady Macbeth of this “withered murder,” was a daughter of Sir Thomas Aston and sister to Mrs. Walmesley, the wife of Johnson’s first patron, and to the lovely Molly Aston, whose beauty so stirred the inflammable Dr. Johnson that the groves and woods of Staffordshire and Derbyshire rang with its praises sung by an elderly Tityrus in a bush-wig. The grand old amorist never wearied of celebrating the charms of his lovely ladies. Even the Island of Skye was forced to resound with the perfections of his Thralia Dulcis in one of the worst Sapphic odes that ever brought wrath upon a fifth-form boy.

At last the vandal parson, irritated beyond measure by his own bilious spite, declared that the house should pay no more assessments, so he pulled it down and broke it up for sale of the building materials. As Shakespeare’s own house had been long since destroyed by Sir Hugh Clopton, that did not signify so much, but the murder of the sacred tree was another matter. We may be sure that when Macbeth and Lady Macbeth finally turned their backs upon Stratford, their departure was not bemoaned by their neighbours.

Blessed are the enthusiasts. It is true that they are sometimes egregious bores, but they are never so bad as the iconoclasts, and they do much good in the world. Before the murder of the famous mulberry tree Edward Capell, the Shakespearian commentator, whose work rather fell under the cruel lash of Dr. Johnson, had managed to secure a cutting of it, which he carried to Troston Hall, his place in Suffolk, and planted in his garden. There is no easier tree to propagate than the mulberry; in that respect, it is like the willow. Cut a branch of it and stick it in the ground, and when the spring comes it will begin to show signs of life. Lurking in mysterious hiding-places in the bark are myriads of tiny unsuspected buds, full of life and vigour, which in due season will send down little slender fibres till they reach the soil, whence they derive nourishment; in time the buds will burst their prison of bark, and before many years are past a new tree will bear fruit. So Mr. Capell’s cutting throve amazingly and gave birth to a little colony of offshoots. How or when I know not, Troston passed into the possession of Mr. Lofft, and he, when about to let the place and disperse his collection of plants, wrote to Sir William Thiselton Dyer, October 6th, 1896, offering “some scions of Shakespeare’s tree” to Kew. I at once wrote, begging for one of these scions, that it might be planted in Buckingham Palace Gardens—the site of the old mulberry plantation of King James. What more appropriate home could be found for it? There still stands, by the by, in the Palace grounds a venerable mulberry tree which must be the one last relic of King James’s attempt at silk-worm cultivation.