The AUTUMN CROCUS in the fields near the village of Trient, with the Aiguille du Tour in the background, September.
My own experience among the flowers biases me in favour of this sympathetic rule and causes me to believe there is some means by which our several beings can communicate. On many occasions I have been led, with seeming intention, to some rare white form that I was wishing to find. Apparent purposelessness and lack of decision have filled my mind, and yet, time after time, have I taken the very path, or have scrambled up the precise trackless slope which has brought me to the whereabouts of the rarity I have been seeking. On other occasions I have been arrested in my walk and in the midst of quite other thoughts of my own or of some conversation with a companion by an impelling impression that a floral rarity was in my immediate neighbourhood. I have noticed, too, that this seeming guidance has invariably happened in connection with white flowers—the white form of Rhododendron ferrugineum, for instance, or of Gentiana excisa, or of Soldanella alpina, or of Viola calcarata, or of Aster alpinus. It may sound preposterously mystical, but I do really suspect that I have found these uncommon or rare flowers—perhaps there was only one specimen within the district for miles round—by something in their nature being in tune with something in mine. I do not imagine success would attend upon conscious effort, my own experience being that the promptings have come without any striving on my part. I have had most mixed and unconvincing results and many total failures when experiment has been conducted upon such lines as one might follow with a water-finder. I am aware that however much in earnest one may be in speaking of this class of phenomena, it is difficult to appear reasonable; for the matter is so wrapped in haze. I can only repeat that the thing has happened to me when I have been least expecting it.
I remember one case in particular, when I was rambling with a friend upon the rapid slopes of Dent de Bonnavaux, near Champéry. I was longing to find the white form of Gentiana asclepiadea, the Willow Gentian, about which I had been reading. We had arrived where this Gentian was growing in profusion in a semi-shade afforded by giant cliffs, and had proceeded nearly to the foot of the Pas d’Encel, when, feeling suddenly persuaded that the plant I wanted was near by, I called a halt. My friend said, “Oh, let’s get on; there’s nothing here!” But I begged for indulgence. “I feel,” said I, “that the white form of the blue Gentian is growing hereabouts, and I’m going to hunt it up.” For some time I scrambled about without the required result, and I was beginning to suspect that I was being prompted more by a fussy imagination than an intuitive sympathy; and yet I felt unable to abandon the search, and determined not to do so until I had gone all over the ground twice. And then, at last—Eureka! there amongst the grasses behind a big boulder were two lovely sprays of purest white! Now, it was not as if this were the first time that I had been amongst this Gentian; many times before, and in many districts, had I passed through quantities of it; but never had I seen any variation except in the depth and brightness of the blue, and never before had I experienced the sensation of the near presence of its white form. Nor can I recall any occasion when this sensation has played me false. Over and over again have I felt it, and with whatever plant it has been associated it has invariably proved truthfully prophetic. Will coincidence or luck satisfactorily account for this? I am unable to think so, though I confess I must exclaim as Faust does:
“Lo! here I sit no wiser than before”!
But now that we are thus far, let us grope a little further within the dim-lit domain of subconsciousness; I would fain touch upon a matter closely allied to the foregoing—that of the significance of the colour of flowers, and the part played by colour in the sympathy existing between the flowers and ourselves. Let us first of all speculate briefly upon the significance of floral colouring. Speaking vaguely—and who can speak with any very great distinctness?—colour is one of many manifestations of one and the same fundamental condition. Sound is another; odour another. Our five senses, in fact, appear to deal with the self-same set of fundamental truths and to translate them differently: possibly upon the principle that variety is charming and is much more likely to arouse our complete inquisitiveness, ending ultimately in our thorough appreciation, than would these vital truths if brought to our notice in just a single form. There are people to whom odours represent colours; there are others to whom Wagnerian music is largely coloured by scarlet and all other reds, and to whom the note of the blackbird is magenta and purple, and that of the greenfinch yellow. There is, too, a case recorded by the late Professor Lombroso, where a girl could see things with the tip of her nose; Miss Helen Keller, blind, deaf, and dumb, can feel if a person is dark or fair; and it is said that recently in Germany there was a man who, having undergone an operation upon his head, was, after recovery, obliged to seek the peace and comfort of a dark cellar on fine days, because he could hear the sun shining. Without staking the soundness of my argument upon this last quotation, there would seem enough evidence in the world to assure us that our senses deal with one and the same set of realities, and that colour, sound, and odour have birth in a self-same cause. What, then, are these realities; what, then, is this cause in relation with ourselves and the flowers; and what part does colour play therein?
Of course, I am supposing that colour is really in the flowers and not in us or in the bee, as was suggested a few years ago by an American savant. I am unable to think that either myself or a bee can determine the white form of some blue Gentian, some rose-pink Ononis (Rest-Harrow), or some yellow Primrose. If colour is not in the flower, then neither is it in a lady’s dress, nor in a nation’s flag, nor in a picture. What reason should the world and his wife have for unanimously declaring a dress to be brown and purple if, in reality, it is no colour at all—if, that is to say, it is black, or the highest refinement of black, which is white? How comes it that a whole nation with one accord looks upon its flag as a combination of red, white, and blue when, in reality, it is simply a design in black and white? What are we doing by painting our hives a variety of bright colours in order to lead the bees safely home, if paint is no colour and bees can colour the hives as they will? It is beyond me; I imagine it is beyond my readers; and I suspect that if the truth were known it was even beyond the American savant in his less imaginative moments. Maybe things are not what they seem, but can this be possible to the extent implied by our Western cousin? I know, of course, that we do largely befool ourselves; I know that in part measure we are “All valiant dust that builds on dust”; but I cannot believe we befool ourselves to the extent of painting pictures every imaginable tint when, really and truly, all this colour is in ourselves. I, personally, am old-fashioned enough to think that when I squeeze gamboge out upon my palette I undoubtedly have there a yellow, not a colourless pigment. And I imagine that a bee thinks the same when he flies, as frequently he will, head-foremost into it, believing it to be a buttercup or a marigold.
Yes, I am presuming that we human beings, endowed though we are with abundant powers of which we are greatly unconscious, have little enough to do with a flower’s being mauve or orange; and it is upon this possibly antiquated and false understanding that I ask myself, What tale has the colour of flowers to tell us? In the first place, I am not sure that I am content to see white appearing solely between yellow and pink in Dr. Percy Groom’s scale of floral colour; the scale does not look quite true, running in the following order: yellow, white, pink, red, crimson, violet, blue. I should be more content if the order ran like this: white, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, violet, blue, white; for scales such as these, if continued, form a circle, a complete and continuous whole. They cannot rightly be cut up into abrupt sections of straight lines if they are to tell the whole truth. The green flowers appear to stand as proof of this, for they draw their tint from both extremities of the scale—from blue, the highest of primal colours, and from yellow, the lowest; they link up the extremities and complete the circle; they have no definite qualities, but are at once high and lowly.
If we start with the lowliest of flowers of clean-cut individuality, it must be with the yellow ones; and yellow stands for the dawn of definite life. After that, for flowers of distinct position, we must go to the red ones, those of orange tints being intermediary; and with red we reach the fulfilment of animal or worldly vigour. From this point onwards, through magenta, lilac, mauve, violet, purple, refinement is increasingly marked until blue is reached. Then blue, starting darkly, advances to “Cambridge” tints, and so into white.
Now white is the “colour” of which we know the least—and talk the most. Really, it indicates nothing—that which is as “a bunghole without a barrel round it”—and of this, naturally, we can have but a very inaccurate appreciation. We speak glibly about white, and we soar with it to giddy, dreamy heights, but we speak and mostly dream of colour not of white. For—
“Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,