Part 8

The bindweed is descended from some earlier ancestors which had five separate petals, instead of a single fused and circular cup. But in the convolvulus family, as in many others, these five petals have joined into a continuous rim or bowl, and the marks on the blossom where it was folded in the bud still answer to the five petals. In many plants you can see the pointed edges of the former distinct flower-rays as five projections, though their lower parts have coalesced into a bell-shaped or tubular blossom, as in the common harebell. How this comes to pass we can easily understand if we watch an unopened fuchsia; for there the four bright-coloured sepals remain joined together till the bud is ready to open, and then split along a line marked out from the very first. In the plastic bud condition it is very easy for parts usually separate so to grow out in union with one another. I do not mean that separate pieces actually grow together, but that pieces which usually grow distinct sometimes grow united from the very first. Now, four or five petals, radially arranged, in themselves produce that kind of symmetry which man, with his intellectual love for order and definite patterns, always finds beautiful. But the symmetry in the flower simply results from the fact that a single whorl of leaves has grown into this particular shape, while the outer and inner whorls have grown into other shapes; and every such whorl always and necessarily presents us with an example of the kind of symmetry which we so much admire. Again, when the petals forming a whorl coalesce, they must, of course, produce a more or less regular circle. If the points of the petals remain as projections, then we get a circle with vandyked edges, as in the lily of the valley; if they do not project, then we get a simple circular rim, as in the bindweed. All the lovely shapes of bell-blossoms are simply due to the natural coalescence of four, five, or six petals; and this coalescence is again due to an increased certainty of fertilisation secured for the plant by the better adaptation to insect visits. Similarly, we know that the colours of the corolla have been acquired as a means of rendering the flower conspicuous to the eyes of bees or butterflies; and the hues which so prove attractive to insects are of the same sort which arouse pleasurable stimulation in our own nerves. Thus the whole loveliness of flowers is in the last resort dependent upon all kinds of accidental causes--causes, that is to say, into which the deliberate design of the production of beautiful effects did not enter as a distinct factor. Those parts of nature which are of such a sort as to arouse in us certain feelings we call beautiful; and those parts which are of such a sort as to arouse in us the opposite feelings we call ugly. But the beauty and the ugliness are not parts of the things; they are merely human modes of regarding some among their attributes. Wherever in nature we find pure colour, symmetrical form, and intricate variety of pattern, we imagine to ourselves that nature designs the object to be beautiful. When we trace these peculiarities to their origin, however, we find that each of them owes its occurrence to some special fact in the history of the object; and we are forced to conclude that the notion of intentional design has been read into it by human analogies. All nature is beautiful, and most beautiful for those in whom the sense of beauty is most highly developed; but it is not beautiful at all except to those whose own eyes and emotions are fitted to perceive its beauty.

XXII.

ON CORNISH CLIFFS.

I am lying on my back in the sunshine, close to the edge of a great broken precipice, beside a clambering Cornish fishing village. In front of me is the sea, bluer than I have seen it since last I lay in like fashion a few months ago on the schistose slopes of the Maurettes at Hyères, and looked away across the plain to the unrippled Mediterranean and the Stoechades of the old Phocæan merchant-men. On either hand rise dark cliffs of hornblende and serpentine, weathered above by wind and rain, and smoothed below by the ceaseless dashing of the winter waves. Up to the limit of the breakers the hard rock is polished like Egyptian syenite; but beyond that point it is fissured by disintegration and richly covered with a dappled coat of grey and yellow lichen. The slow action of the water, always beating against the solid wall of crystalline rock, has eaten out a thousand such little bays all along this coast, each bounded by long headlands, whose points have been worn into fantastic pinnacles, or severed from the main mass as precipitous islets, the favourite resting-place of gulls and cormorants. No grander coast scenery can be found anywhere in the southern half of Great Britain.

Yet when I turn inland I see that all this beauty has been produced by the mere interaction of the sea and the barren moors of the interior. Nothing could be flatter or more desolate than the country whose seaward escarpment gives rise to these romantic coves and pyramidal rocky islets. It stretches away for miles in a level upland waste, only redeemed from complete barrenness by the low straggling bushes of the dwarf furze, whose golden blossom is now interspersed with purple patches of ling or the paler pink flowers of the Cornish heath. Here, then, I can see beauty in nature actually beginning to be. I can trace the origin of all these little bays from small rills which have worn themselves gorge-like valleys through the hard igneous rock, or else from fissures finally giving rise to sea-caves, like the one into which I rowed this morning for my early swim. The waves penetrate for a couple of hundred yards into the bowels of the rock, hemmed in by walls and roof of dark serpentine, with its interlacing veins of green and red bearing witness still to its once molten condition; and at length in most cases they produce a blow-hole at the top, communicating with the open air above, either because the fissure there crops up to the surface, or else through the agency of percolation. At last, the roof falls in; the boulders are carried away by the waves; and we get a long and narrow cove, still bounded on either side by tall cliffs, whose summits the air and rainfall slowly wear away into jagged and exquisite shapes. Yet in all this we see nothing but the natural play of cause and effect; we attribute the beauty of the scene merely to the accidental result of inevitable laws; we feel no necessity for calling in the aid of any underlying æsthetic intention on the part of the sea, or the rock, or the creeping lichen, in order to account for the loveliness which we find in the finished picture. The winds and the waves carved the coast into these varied shapes by force of blind currents working on hidden veins of harder or softer crystal: and we happen to find the result beautiful, just as we happen to find the inland level dull and ugly. The endless variety of the one charms us, while the unbroken monotony of the other wearies and repels us.

Here on the cliff I pick up a pretty fern and a blossoming head of the autumn squill--though so sweet a flower deserves a better name. This fern, too, is lovely in its way, with its branching leaflets and its rich glossy-green hue. Yet it owes its shape just as truly to the balance of external and internal forces acting upon it as does the Cornish coast-line. How comes it then that in the one case we instinctively regard the beauty as accidental, while in the other we set it down to a deliberate æsthetic intent? I think because, in the first case, we can actually see the forces at work, while in the second they are so minute and so gradual in their action as to escape the notice of all but trained observers. This fern grows in the shape that I see, because its ancestors have been slowly moulded into such a form by the whole group of circumstances directly or indirectly affecting them in all their past life; and the germ of the complex form thus produced was impressed by the parent plant upon the spore from which this individual fern took its birth. Over yonder I see a great dock-leaf; it grows tall and rank above all other plants, and is able to spread itself boldly to the light on every side. It has abundance of sunshine as a motive-power of growth, and abundance of air from which to extract the carbon that it needs. Hence it and all its ancestors have spread their leaves equally on every side, and formed large flat undivided blades. Leaves such as these are common enough; but nobody thinks of calling them pretty. Their want of minute subdivision, their monotonous outline, their dull surface, all make them ugly in our eyes, just as the flatness of the Cornish plain makes it also ugly to us. Where symmetry is slightly marked and variety wanting, as in the cabbage leaf, the mullein, and the burdock, we see little or nothing to admire. On the other hand, ferns generally grow in hedge-rows or thickets, where sunlight is much interrupted by other plants, and where air is scanty, most of its carbon being extracted by neighbouring plants which leave but little for one another's needs. Hence you may notice that most plants growing under such circumstances have leaves minutely sub-divided, so as to catch such stray gleams of sunlight and such floating particles of carbonic acid as happen to pass their way. Look into the next tangled and overgrown hedge-row which you happen to pass, and you will see that almost all its leaves are of this character; and when they are otherwise the anomaly usually admits of an easy explanation. Of course the shapes of plants are mostly due to their normal and usual circumstances, and are comparatively little influenced by the accidental surroundings of individuals; and so, when a fern of such a sort happens to grow like this one on the open, it still retains the form impressed upon it by the life of its ancestors. Now, it is the striking combination of symmetry and variety in the fern, together with vivid green colouring, which makes us admire it so much. Not only is the frond as a whole symmetrical, but each frondlet and each division of the frondlet is separately symmetrical as well. This delicate minuteness of workmanship, as we call it, reminds us of similar human products--of fine lace, of delicate tracery, of skilful filagree or engraving. Almost all the green leaves which we admire are noticeable, more or less, for the same effects, as in the case of maple, parsley, horse-chestnut, and vine. It is true, mere glossy greenness may, and often does, make up for the want of variety, as we see in the arum, holly, laurel, and hart's-tongue fern; but the leaves which we admire most of all are those which, like maidenhair, are both exquisitely green and delicately designed in shape. So that, in the last resort, the beauty of leaves, like the beauty of coast scenery, is really due to the constant interaction of a vast number of natural laws, not to any distinct aesthetic intention on the part of Nature.

On the other hand, the pretty pink squill reminds me that semi-conscious aesthetic design in animals has something to do with the production of beauty in nature--at least, in a few cases. Just as a flower garden has been intentionally produced by man, so flowers have been unconsciously produced by insects. As a rule, all bright red, blue, or orange in nature (except in the rare case of gems) is due to animal selection, either of flowers, fruits, or mates. Thus we may say that beauty in the inorganic world is always accidental; but in the organic world it is sometimes accidental and sometimes designed. A waterfall is a mere result of geological and geographical causes, but a bluebell or a butterfly is partly the result of a more or less deliberate æsthetic choice.

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