Part 28 (1/2)

I regret that it should have been deemed necessary to make stupid pedants of Hindu malees by providing them with a cla.s.sical nomenclature for plants. Hindostanee names would have answered the purpose just as well. The natives make a sad mess of our simplest English names, but their Greek must be Greek indeed! A _Quarterly Reviewer_ observes that Miss Mitford has found it difficult to make the maurandias and alstraemerias and eschxholtzias--the commonest flowers of our modern garden--look pa.s.sable even in prose. But what are these, he asks, to the pollopostemonopetalae and eleutheroromacrostemones of Wachendorf, with such daily additions as the native name of iztactepotzacuxochitl icohueyo, or the more cla.s.sical ponderosity of Erisymum Peroffskyanum.

--like the verb.u.m Graec.u.m Spermagoraiolekitholakanopolides, Words that should only be said upon holidays, When one has nothing else to do.

If these names are unp.r.o.nounceable even by Europeans, what would the poor Hindu malee make of them? The pedantry of some of our scientific Botanists is something marvellous. One would think that a love of flowers must produce or imply a taste for simplicity and nature in all things.[127]

As by way of encouragement to the native gardeners--to enable them to dispose of the floral produce of their gardens at a fair price--the Horticultural Society has withdrawn from the public the indulgence of gratuitous supplies of plants, it would be as well if some men of taste were to instruct these native nursery-men how to lay out their grounds, (as their fellow-traders do at home,) with some regard to neatness, cleanliness and order. These flower-merchants, and even the common _malees_, should also be instructed, I think, how to make up a decent bouquet, for if it be possible to render the most elegant things in the creation offensive to the eye of taste, that object is a.s.suredly very completely effected by these swarthy artists when they arrange, with such worse than Dutch precision and formality, the ill-selected, ill-arranged, and tightly bound treasures of the parterre for the cla.s.sical vases of their British masters. I am often vexed to observe the idleness or apathy which suffers such atrocities as these specimens of Indian taste to disgrace the drawing-rooms of the City of Palaces. This is quite inexcusable in a family where there are feminine hands for the truly graceful and congenial task of selecting and arranging the daily supply of garden decorations. A young lady--”herself a fairer flower”--is rarely exhibited to a loving eye in a more delightful point of view than when her delicate and dainty fingers are so employed.

If a lovely woman arranging the nosegays and flower-vases, in her parlour, is a sweet living picture, a still sweeter sight does she present to us when she is in the garden itself. Milton thus represents the fair mother of the fair in the first garden:--

Eve separate he spies.

Veil'd in a cloud of fragrance, where she stood, Half spied, so thick the roses blus.h.i.+ng round About her glow'd, oft stooping to support Each flower of slender stalk, whose head, though gay, Carnation, purple, azure, or speck'd with gold, Hung drooping unsustain'd; them she upstays Gently with myrtle band, mindless the while Herself, though fairest unsupported flower, From her best prop so far, and storm so nigh.

Nearer he drew, and many a walk traversed Of stateliest covert, cedar, pine, or palm; Then voluble and bold, now hid, now seen, Among thick woven arborets, and flowers Imborder'd on each bank, the hand of Eve[128]

_Paradise Lost. Book IX_.

Chaucer (in ”The Knight's Tale,”) describes Emily in her garden as fairer to be seen

Than is the lily on his stalkie green;

And Dryden, in his modernized version of the old poet, says,

At every turn she made a little stand, And thrust among the thorns her lily hand To draw the rose.

Eve's roses were without thorns--

”And without thorn the rose,”[129]

It is pleasant to see flowers plucked by the fairest fingers for some elegant or worthy purpose, but it is not pleasant to see them _wasted_.

Some people pluck them wantonly, and then fling them away and litter the garden walks with them. Some idle c.o.xcombs, vain

Of the nice conduct of a clouded cane,

amuse themselves with switching off their lovely heads. ”That's villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.”

Lander says

And 'tis my wish, and over was my way, To let all flowers live freely, and so die.

Here is a poetical pet.i.tioner against a needless destruction of the little tenants of the parterre.

Oh, spare my flower, my gentle flower, The slender creature of a day, Let it bloom out its little hour, And pa.s.s away.

So soon its fleeting charms must lie Decayed, unnoticed and o'erthrown, Oh, hasten not its destiny, Too like thine own.

_Lyte_.