Elle enfante la joie et luit comme un flambeau.”
Henry Correvon.
Do you ask what the Alps would be without the Edelweiss? Ask, rather, what they would be without the little Vernal Gentian! Ask what would be the slopes and fields of Alpine Switzerland without this flower of heaven-reflected blue, rather than what the rocks and screes and uncouth places would be without Leontopodium alpinum of bloated and untruthful reputation. Ask what Alpland’s springtide welcome and autumnal salutation would be if shorn of this little plant’s bright azure spontaneity; ask where would be spring’s eager joyfulness, and where the ready hopefulness of autumn. Ask yourself this, and then the Edelweiss at once falls back into a more becoming perspective with the landscape, into a less faulty pose among the other mountain flowers.
Perhaps it is not very venturesome to think that if the Edelweiss had become extinct, and were now to be found only amid the fastnesses of legend, it would live quite as securely in the hearts of men as it does at present; for its repute rests mostly upon the fabulous. But how different is the case of the earliest of the Gentians! Here is a plant which, despite the romance-breeding nature of its habit, form, and colour, draws little or nothing from legendary sources. Fable has small command where merit is so marked; imagination is outstripped by reality, and there is scarcely room for invention where truth is so arresting, so pronounced.
Gentiana verna flies no false colours. Its flower is a flower, and not for the greater part an assemblage of hoary-haired leaves. It inspires in men no performance of mad gymnastics on the precipice’s brink and brow; it wears, therefore, no halo of unnecessary human sacrifice. It is not a tender token of attachment among lovers. It does not live in myth, nor has it an important place in folk-lore. In short, it is just its own bright, fascinating self; there is nothing of blatant notoriety about its renown, no suspicion of a succès de scandale such as the Edelweiss can so justly claim.
We may laud the Edelweiss as a symbol of advanced endeavour, but the Gentian is more useful, if not, indeed, worthier, in this respect; for it marks no great extreme and therefore its condition is symbolic of less that is incompatible with consistent human effort. Ruskin has somewhere said that the most glorious repose is that of the chamois panting on its bed of granite, rather than that of the ox chewing the cud in its stall; but, however transcendentally true this may be, the actually glorious position lies midway betwixt the two—the position of the Gentian in relation with, for instance, the positions of the Edelweiss and the Primrose. We are likely to derive inspiration of more abundant practical value from the Gentian than from the Edelweiss, because there is comparatively little about it that is extreme. Though advanced in circumstance it is reasonably situated; it leads, therefore, to no such flagrant inconsistency with facts, no such beating of the drum of romance as, apparently, we find so necessary in the case of Leontopodium. The Edelweiss is not all it seems; the Gentian is. “Il ne suffit pas d’être, il faut paraître”; and this, certainly, the little Vernal Gentian does. In not one single trait does it belie the high colour of its blossom.
With what curiously different craft do each of these flowers play upon the emotions! With what contrary art does each make its appeal to our regard and adulation! To each we may address Swinburne’s stately lines: to each we may, and do exclaim:
“... with my lips I kneel, and with my heart
I fall about thy feet and worship thee ...”
Yet this act of adoration, when it affects the Edelweiss, seems far more an act of idolatry than it does when it affects the Gentian. For on the one hand we have the Edelweiss stirring the imagination to wild, foolhardy flights amid the awesome summer haunts of the eagle and the chamois, when, in simple reality, we could if we would be reposing amongst hundreds of its woolly stars upon some gentle pasture-slope away from the least hint of danger and of scandale; while on the other hand we have the Vernal Gentian calling us at once in all frankness to accept it as it is—one of the truest and loveliest marvels of the Alps,