Child and Country: A Book of the Younger Generation

by Will Levington Comfort

"Roses—how strangely they have had their part in the loves of men and women. Do you think that our Clovelly roses have come to be of themselves? Do you think that the actual hurt of their beauty—the restless, nameless quest that comes spurring to our hearts from their silent leaning over the rim of a vase—is nothing more than a product of soil and sun? Has their great giving to human romances been dead as moonlight? Have roses taken nothing in return?... I would not insist before the world that the form and fragrance and texture of the rose has come to be from the magnetisms of lovers, but we of the Chapel may think as we will. That liberty is our first law. We may believe, if we like, that the swans of Bruges have taken something in return for their mystic influence upon the Belgian lovers at evening—something that makes a flock of flying swans one of the most thrilling spectacles in Nature.

" ... I was speaking of how curious it is that so many people who have reached roses—have ended their quest on the borders, at least that they linger so long. They raise red roses; they bring forth spicy June roses. In truth, the quest never ends. We do not stop at the Clovelly, which has so strangely gladdened our past summer. We pass from the red to the white to the pink roses—and then enter the garden of yellow roses, the search ever more passionate—until we begin to discover that which our hearts are searching for—not upon any plant but in ideal.

"The instant that we conceive the picture, earth and sun have set about producing the flower—as action invariably follows to fill the matrix of the thought. At least we think so—as the universe is evolving to fulfil at last the full thought of God....

"The quest never ends. From one plant to another the orchid-lover goes, until he hears at last of the queen of all orchids, named of the Holy Spirit, which has the image of a white dove set in a corolla as chaste as the morning star. An old Spanish priest of saintly piety tells him, and he sets out for the farthest continent to search. It was his listening, his search for the lesser beauty that brought him to the news of the higher. It is always so. We find our greater task in the performance of the lesser ones.... But roses—so many by-paths, because roses are the last and highest words in flowers, and the story they tell is so significant with meanings vital to ourselves and all Nature.

"First I want to divulge a theory of colour, beginning with the greens which are at the bottom. There are good greens—the green of young elms and birches and beeches. Green may be evil too, as the lower shades of yellow may be—and certain blends of green and yellow are baleful. The greens are first to appear. They are Nature's nearest emerging—the water-colours—the green of the water-courses and the lowlands. Nature brings forth first the green and then the sun does his part. Between the rose-gold and the green of a lichen, there seems to be something like ninety degrees of evolution—the full quarter of the circle that is similarly expressed between the prone spine of the serpent and the erect spine of man.

"Reds are complementary to the greens and appear next, refining more or less in accord with the refinement of the texture upon which they are laid; a third refinement taking place, too, that of form. These improvements of value are not exactly concurrent. There are roses, for instance, to represent all stages—roses that are specialising in their present growth, one might say, in form or colour or texture; but in the longer line of growth, the refinement is general. We look from our window at the Other Shore and a similar analogy is there. From this distance it seems but one grand sweep to the point of the breakers, but when we walk along the beach, we are often lost to the main curve in little indentations, which correspond to the minor specialisations of evolving things. It is the same in man's case. We first build a body, then a mind, then a soul—and growth in the dimension of soul unifies and beautifies the entire fabric. All Nature reveals to those who see—that the plan is one....

"The first roses were doubtless of a watery red. Their colour evolved according to association of the particular plants, some into the deeper reds, others paling to the white. It was the latter that fell into the path of truer progress. Reaching white, with a greatly refined texture, the sun began to paint a new beauty upon them—not the pink that is a diluted red, but the colouring of sunlight upon the lustre of a pearl. The first reds were built upon the greens; this new pink was laid upon a white base.

"The story is the same through all evolving things. Growth is a spiral. We return to the same point but upon a higher level. Our ascent is steadily upward—always over hills and valleys, so to speak, but our valleys always higher above the level of the sea. So that the white is a transition—an erasure of the old to prepare for the finer colouring.

"And now comes the blend of the maiden pink and the sunlight gold. The greens and the reds are gone entirely. Mother Earth brings up the rose with its virgin purity of tint, and the sun plays its gold upon it. There are pink and yellow roses to show all the processes of this particular scope of progress; some still too much pink, other roses have fallen by the way into lemon and ochre and sienna; there are roses that have reverted to the reds again; roses that have been caught in a sort of fleshly lust and have piled on petals upon petals as the Holland maidens pile on petticoats, losing themselves to form and texture and colour, for the gross illusion of size. We see whole races of men lost in the same illusion....

"There are roses that have accomplished all but perfection, save for a few spots of red on the outer petals—like the persistent adhering taint of ancient sins.... But you have seen the Clovellys—they are the best we have found. They have made us deeper and wiser for their beauty. Like some saintly lives—they seem to have come all but the last of the ninety degrees between the green of the level water-courses and the flashing gold of the meridian sun.... The Mother has borne them, and in due time (as men must do, or revert to the ground again) they have turned to the light of the Father.... The fragrance of these golden teas is the sublimate of all Nature. Man, in the same way, is inclusive of all beneath. He contains earth, air, water, fire and all their products. In the tea-rose is embodied all the forces of plant-nature, since they are the highest manifestation.... The June roses have lost the way in their own spice; so many flowers are sunk in the stupors from their own heavy sweetness. The mignonette has sacrificed all for perfume, and the Old Mother has given her something not elsewhere to be found; the nasturtium has progressed so purely as to have touched the cork of the inner vial, but the golden teas have brought the fragrance itself to our nostrils. Those who are ready can sense the whole story. It is the fragrance of the Old Mother's being. You can sense it without the rose, on the wings of a South Wind that crosses water or meadows after a rain."