Lastly, and chiefly.—Your garden is to enable you to obtain such knowledge of plants as you may best use in the country in which you live, by communicating it to others; and teaching them to take pleasure in the green herb, given for meat, and the coloured flower, given for joy. And your business is not to make the greenhouse or hothouse rejoice and blossom like the rose, but the wilderness and solitary place. And it is, therefore, (look back to Letter 26th, p. 15,) not at all of camellias and air-plants that the devil is afraid; on the contrary, the Dame aux Camellias is a very especial servant of his; and the Fly-God of Ekron himself superintends—as you may gather from Mr. Darwin’s recent investigations—the birth and parentage of the orchidaceæ. But he is mortally afraid of roses and crocuses.
Of roses, that is to say, growing wild;—(what lovely hedges of them there were, in the lane leading from Dulwich College up to Windmill (or Gipsy) Hill, in my aunt’s time!)—but of the massy horticultural-prize rose,—fifty pounds weight of it on a propped bush—he stands in no awe whatever; not even when they are cut afterwards and made familiar to the poor in the form of bouquets, so that poor Peggy may hawk them from street to street—and hate the smell of them, as his own imps do. For Mephistopheles knows there are poorer Margarets yet than Peggy.
Hear this, you fine ladies of the houses of York and [[237]]Lancaster, and you, new-gilded Miss Kilmanseggs, with your gardens of Gul,—you, also, evangelical expounders of the beauty of the Rose of Sharon;—it is a bit of a letter just come to me from a girl of good position in the manufacturing districts:—
“The other day I was coming through a nasty part of the road, carrying a big bunch of flowers, and met two dirty, ragged girls, who looked eagerly at my flowers. Then one of them said, ‘Give us a flower!’ I hesitated, for she looked and spoke rudely; but when she ran after me, I stopped; and pulled out a large rose, and asked the other girl which she would like. ‘A red one, the same as hers,’ she answered. They actually did not know its name. Poor girls! they promised to take care of them, and went away looking rather softened and pleased, I thought; but perhaps they would pull them to pieces, and laugh at the success of their boldness. At all events, they made me very sad and thoughtful for the rest of my walk.”
And, I hope, a little so, even when you got home again, young lady. Meantime, are you quite sure of your fact; and that there was no white rose in your bouquet, from which the “red one” might be distinguished, without naming? In any case, my readers have enough to think of, for this time, I believe. [[238]]
NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE.
I. Together with the Spectator’s telescopic and daring views of the Land question, given in last Fors, I may as well preserve its immediate and microscopic approval of our poor little practice upon it at Hincksey:—
“Adam and Jehu.—It is very vexatious, but one never gets fairly the better of Mr. Ruskin. Sometimes he lets his intellect work, and fires off pamphlet after pamphlet on political economy, each new one more ridiculous than the last, till it ceases to be possible even to read his brochures without condemning them as the utterances of a man who cannot lose a certain eloquence of expression, BUT WHO CANNOT THINK AT ALL; and then, again, he lets his genius work, and produces something which raises the admiration of the reader till every folly which preceded it is forgotten. There never was a more absurd paper published than his on the duty of the State towards unmarried couples, and never perhaps one wiser than his lecture on ‘Ambition,’ reviewed in our columns on the 18th of October, 1873. Just recently he has been pushing some plans for an agricultural Utopia, free of steam-engines and noises and everything modern, in which the inconsequence of his mind is as evident as its radical benevolence; and now he has, we believe, done the whole youth of Oxford a substantial service. He has turned, or rather tried to turn, the rage for athletics into a worthy channel.”—Spectator, May 30, 1874. [[239]]
The above paragraph may, I think, also be, some day, interesting as a summary of the opinions of the British press on Fors Clavigera; and if my last month’s letter should have the fortune to displease, or discomfort, any British landlord, my alarmed or offended reader may be relieved and pacified by receiving the Spectatorial warrant at once for the inconsequence of my mind, and for its radical benevolence.
II. The following paragraphs from a leading journal in our greatest commercial city, surpass, in folly and impudence, anything I have yet seen of the kind, and are well worth preserving:—