What a roll of words and what a mighty and mysterious business is here made of a very simple little matter! It is a charming example of the strange helplessness, not to say imbecility, which affects most of those who have been trained in our mind-killing schools; trained not to think, but taught to go for anything and everything they desire to know to the books. If the books in the British Museum fail to say why our ancestors hundreds of years ago named a flower None-so-pretty or Love-in-a-mist, why then we must be satisfied to sit in thick darkness with regard to this matter until some heaven-born genius descends to illuminate us! Yet I daresay there is not a country child who does not occasionally invent a name for some plant or creature which has attracted his attention; and in many cases the child's new name is suggested by some human association in the object—some resemblance to be seen in form or colour or sound. Not books but the light of nature, the experience of our own early years, the look which no person not blinded by reading can fail to see in a flower, is sufficient to reveal all this hidden wonderful knowledge about the first openings of the heart towards nature, during the remote infancy of the human race.
From this it will be seen that I am not claiming a discovery; that what I have called a secret of the charm of flowers is a secret known to every man, woman, and child, even to those of my own friends who stoutly deny that they have any such knowledge. But I think it is best known to children. What I am here doing is merely to bring together and put in form certain more or less vague thoughts and feelings which I (and therefore all of us) have about flowers; and it is a small matter, but it happens to be one which no person has hitherto attempted.
It may be that in some of my readers' minds—those who, like the sceptical friends I have mentioned, are not distinctly conscious of the cause or secret of the expression of a flower—some doubt may still remain after what has been said of the blue and purple-blue blossom. Such a doubt ought to disappear when the reds are considered, and when it is found that the expression peculiar to red flowers varies infinitely in degree, and is always greatest in those shades of the colour which come nearest to the most beautiful flesh-tints.
When I say "beautiful flesh-tints" I am thinking of the æsthetic pleasure which we receive from the expression, the associations, of the red flower. The expression which delights is in the soft and delicate shades; and in the texture which is sometimes like the beautiful soft skin; but the expression would exist still in the case of floral tints resembling the unpleasant reds, or the reds which disgust us, in the human face. And we most of us know that these distressing hues are to be seen in some flowers. I remember that I once went into a florist's shop, and seeing a great mass of hard purple-red cinerarias on a shelf I made some remark about them. "Yes, are they not beautiful?" said the woman in the shop. "No, I loathe the sight of them," I returned. "So do I!" she said very quickly, and then added that she called them beautiful because she had to sell them. She, too, had no doubt seen that same purple-red colour in the evil flower called "grog-blossom," and in the faces of many middle-aged lovers of the bottle, male and female, who would perish before their time, to the great relief of their kindred, and whose actions after they were gone would not smell sweet and blossom in the dust.
The reds we like best in flowers are the delicate roseate and pinky shades; they are more to us than the purest and most luminous tints. And here, as with bird notes which delight us on account of their resemblance to fresh, young, highly musical human voices, flowers please us best when they exhibit the loveliest human tints—the apple blossom and the bindweed, musk mallow and almond and wild rose, for example. After these we are most taken with the deeper but soft and not too luminous reds—the red which we admire in the red horse-chestnut blossom, and many other flowers, down to the minute pimpernel. Next come the intense rosy reds seen in the herb-robert and other wild geraniums, valerian, red campion and ragged robin; and this shade of red, intensified but still soft, is seen in the willow-herb and foxglove, and, still more intensified, in the bell- and small-leafed heath. Some if not all of these pleasing reds have purple in them, and there are very many distinctly purple flowers that appeal to us in the same way that red flowers do, receiving their expression from the same cause. There is some purple colour in most skins, and even some blue.
The azured harebell, like thy veins,
is a familiar verse from Cymbeline; any one can see the resemblance to the pale blue of that admired and loved blossom in the blue veins of any person with a delicate skin. Purples and purplish reds in masses are mostly seen in young persons of delicate skins and high colour in frosty weather in winter, when the eyes sparkle and the face glows with the happy sensations natural to the young and healthy during and after outdoor exercise. The skin purples and purple-reds here described are beautiful, and may be matched to a nicety in many flowers; the human purple may be seen (to name a very common wild flower) in purple loosestrife and the large marsh mallow, and in dozens and scores of other familiar purple flowers; and the purple-red hue in many richly coloured skins has its exact shade in common hounds' tongue, and in other dark and purple-red flowers. But we always find, I fancy, that the expression due to human association in a purple flower is greatest when this colour (as in the human face) is placed side by side or fades into some shade of red or pink. I think we may see this even in a small flower like the fumitory, in which one portion is deep purple and all the rest of the blossoms a delicate pink. Even when the red is very intense, as in the common field poppy, the pleasing expression of purple on red is very evident.
To return to pure reds. We may say that just as purples in flowers look best, or have a greater degree of expression, when appearing in or with reds, so do the most delicate rose and pink shades appeal most to us when they appear as a tinge or blush on white flowers. Probably the flower that gives the most pleasure on account of its beautiful flesh-tints of different shades is the Gloire de Dîjon rose, so common with us and so universal a favourite. Roses, being mostly of the garden, are out of my line, but they are certainly glorious to look at—glorious because of their associations, their expression, whether we know it or not. One can forgive Thomas Carew the conceit in his lines—
Ask me no more where Jove bestows
When June is past, the fading rose,
For in your beauty's orient deep
These flowers as in their causes sleep.