There Are Great Woods Without A Lily Of The Valley; The
Nightingale Does Not Sing Everywhere.
Nature has no arrangement, no plan,
nothing judicious even; the walnut trees bring forth their tender buds,
and the
Frost burns them - they have no mosaic of time to fit in, like a
Roman tesselated pavement; nature is like a child, who will sing and
shout though you may be never so deeply pondering in the study, and does
not wait for the hour that suits your mind. You do not know what you may
find each day; perhaps you may only pick up a fallen feather, but it is
beautiful, every filament. Always beautiful! everything beautiful! And
are these things new - the ploughman and his team, the lark's song the
green leaf? Can they be new? Surely they have been of old time! They are,
indeed, new - the only things that are so; the rest is old and grey, and a
weariness.
NATURE AND BOOKS.
What is the colour of the dandelion? There are many dandelions: that
which I mean flowers in May, when the meadow-grass has started and the
hares are busy by daylight. That which flowers very early in the year has
a thickness of hue, and is not interesting; in autumn the dandelions
quite change their colour and are pale. The right dandelion for this
question is the one that comes about May with a very broad disc, and in
such quantities as often to cover a whole meadow. I used to admire them
very much in the fields by Surbiton (strong clay soil), and also on the
towing-path of the Thames where the sward is very broad, opposite Long
Ditton; indeed, I have often walked up that towing-path on a beautiful
sunny morning, when all was quiet except the nightingales in the Palace
hedge, on purpose to admire them. I dare say they are all gone now for
evermore; still, it is a pleasure to look back on anything beautiful.
What colour is this dandelion? It is not yellow, nor orange, nor gold;
put a sovereign on it and see the difference. They say the gipsies call
it the Queen's great hairy dog-flower - a number of words to one stalk;
and so, to get a colour to it, you may call it the yellow-gold-orange
plant. In the winter, on the black mud under a dark, dripping tree, I
found a piece of orange peel, lately dropped - a bright red orange speck
in the middle of the blackness. It looked very beautiful, and instantly
recalled to my mind the great dandelion discs in the sunshine of summer.
Yet certainly they are not red-orange. Perhaps, if ten people answered
this question, they would each give different answers. Again, a bright
day or a cloudy, the presence of a slight haze, or the juxtaposition of
other colours, alters it very much; for the dandelion is not a glazed
colour, like the buttercup, but sensitive. It is like a sponge, and adds
to its own hue that which is passing, sucking it up.
The shadows of the trees in the wood, why are they blue? Ought they not
to be dark? Is it really blue, or an illusion? And what is their colour
when you see the shadow of a tall trunk aslant in the air like a leaning
pillar? The fallen brown leaves wet with dew have a different brown from
those that are dry, and the upper surface of the green growing leaf is
different from the under surface. The yellow butterfly, if you meet one
in October, has so toned down his spring yellow that you might fancy him
a pale green leaf floating along the road. There is a shining, quivering,
gleaming; there is a changing, fluttering, shifting; there is a mixing,
weaving - varnished wings, translucent wings, wings with dots and veins,
all playing over the purple heath; a very tangle of many-toned lights and
hues. Then come the apples: if you look upon them from an upper window,
so as to glance along the level plane of the fruit, delicate streaks of
scarlet, like those that lie parallel to the eastern horizon before
sunrise; golden tints under bronze, and apple-green, and some that the
wasps have hollowed, more glowingly beautiful than the rest; sober leaves
and black and white swallows: to see it you must be high up, as if the
apples were strewn on a sward of foliage. So have I gone in three steps
from May dandelion to September apple; an immense space measured by
things beautiful, so filled that ten folio volumes could not hold the
description of them, and I have left out the meadows, the brooks, and
hills. Often in writing about these things I have felt very earnestly my
own incompetence to give the least idea of their brilliancy and
many-sided colours. My gamut was so very limited in its terms, and would
not give a note to one in a thousand of those I saw. At last I said, I
will have more words; I will have more terms; I will have a book on
colour, and I will find and use the right technical name for each one of
these lovely tints. I was told that the very best book was by Chevreul,
which had tinted illustrations, chromatic scales, and all that could be
desired.
Quite true, all of it; but for me it contained nothing. There was a good
deal about assorted wools, but nothing about leaves; nothing by which I
could tell you the difference between the light scarlet of one poppy and
the deep purple-scarlet of another species. The dandelion remained
unexplained; as for the innumerable other flowers, and wings, and
sky-colours, they were not even approached. The book, in short, dealt
with the artificial and not with nature. Next I went to science - works on
optics, such a mass of them. Some I had read in old time, and turned to
again; some I read for the first time, some translated from the German,
and so on.
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