Part 1

OLD FASHIONED FLOWERS

AND OTHER OUT-OF-DOOR STUDIES

MAURICE MAETERLINCK

TRANSLATED BY ALEXANDER TEIXEIRA DE MATTOS

ILLUSTRATED

NEW YORK DODD, MEAD & CO. 1905

COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY THE OUTLOOK COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1904, BY THE CENTURY CO.

COPYRIGHT, 1905, BY DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

PUBLISHED OCTOBER, 1905

COMPOSITION AND ELECTROTYPE PLATES BY D. B. UPDIKE, THE MERRYMOUNT PRESS, BOSTON

CONTENTS

OLD-FASHIONED FLOWERS 3

NEWS OF SPRING 43

FIELD FLOWERS 65

CHRYSANTHEMUMS 85

ILLUSTRATIONS

“I HAVE SEEN THEM ... IN THE GARDEN OF AN OLD SAGE” Frontispiece

“THE HOLLYHOCK ... FLAUNTS HER COCKADES” Facing page 20

“A CLUSTER OF CYPRESSES, WITH ITS PURE OUTLINE” 50

“THAT SORT OF CRY AND CREST OF LIGHT AND JOY” 70

“HERE IS THE SAD COLUMBINE” 74

THE CHRYSANTHEMUMS 92

OLD-FASHIONED FLOWERS [Illustration] OLD-FASHIONED FLOWERS

This morning, when I went to look at my flowers, surrounded by their white fence, which protects them against the good cattle grazing in the field beyond, I saw again in my mind all that blossoms in the woods, the fields, the gardens, the orangeries and the green-houses, and I thought of all that we owe to the world of marvels which the bees visit.

Can we conceive what humanity would be if it did not know the flowers? If these did not exist, if they had all been hidden from our gaze, as are probably a thousand no less fairy sights that are all around us, but invisible to our eyes, would our character, our faculties, our sense of the beautiful, our aptitude for happiness, be quite the same? We should, it is true, in nature have other splendid manifestations of luxury, exuberance and grace; other dazzling efforts of the superfluous forces: the sun, the stars, the varied lights of the moon, the azure and the ocean, the dawns and twilights, the mountain, the plain, the forest and the rivers, the light and the trees, and lastly, nearer to us, birds, precious stones and woman. These are the ornaments of our planet. Yet but for the last three, which belong to the same smile of nature, how grave, austere, almost sad, would be the education of our eye without the softness which the flowers give! Suppose for a moment that our globe knew them not: a great region, the most enchanted in the joys of our psychology, would be destroyed, or rather would not be discovered. All of a delightful sense would sleep for ever at the bottom of our harder and more desert hearts and in our imagination stripped of worshipful images. The infinite world of colours and shades would have been but incompletely revealed to us by a few rents in the sky. The miraculous harmonies of light at play, ceaselessly inventing new gaieties, revelling in itself, would be unknown to us; for the flowers first broke up the prism and made the most subtle portion of our sight. And the magic garden of perfumes--who would have opened its gate to us? A few grasses, a few gums, a few fruits, the breath of the dawn, the smell of the night and the sea, would have told us that beyond our eyes and ears there existed a shut paradise where the air which we breathe changes into delights for which we could have found no name. Consider also all that the voice of human happiness would lack! One of the blessed heights of our soul would be almost dumb, if the flowers had not, since centuries, fed with their beauty the language which we speak and the thoughts that endeavour to crystallize the most precious hours of life. The whole vocabulary, all the impressions of love, are impregnate with their breath, nourished with their smile. When we love, all the flowers that we have seen and smelt seem to hasten within us to people with their known charms the consciousness of a sentiment whose happiness, but for them, would have no more form than the horizons of the sea or sky. They have accumulated within us, since our childhood, and even before it, in the soul of our fathers, an immense treasure, the nearest to our joys, upon which we draw each time that we wish to make more real the clement minutes of our life. They have created and spread in our world of sentiment the fragrant atmosphere in which love delights.

That is why I love above all the simplest, the commonest, the oldest and the most antiquated; those which have a long human past behind them, a large array of kind and consoling actions; those which have lived with us for hundreds of years and which form part of ourselves, since they reflect something of their grace and their joy of life in the soul of our ancestors.

But where do they hide themselves? They are becoming rarer than those which we call rare flowers to-day. Their life is secret and precarious. It seems as though we were on the point of losing them, and perhaps there are some which, discouraged at last, have lately disappeared, of which the seeds have died under the ruins, which will no more know the dew of the gardens and which we shall find only in very old books, amid the bright grass of the Illuminators or along the yellow flower-beds of the Primitives.