Part 15

Wonderful gatherings, indeed, have been held throughout the ages in groves and gardens. Imagine the Baghavat, the Blessed One, surrounded by his Bikshus, as poor as the first followers of St. Francis, preaching the doctrines of truth and humility in those parables that are dear to the Eastern, seated in one or other of his beloved gardens. Think of the sages of ancient Athens gathered together in the groves of the Akademia discussing the deep problems of existence. How much more instinct with the poetry of life must such grave and reverend companies have been than the boisterous though delightful tavern symposia in which Christopher North, Tickler, the Ettrick Shepherd and their friends slung Doric wit and wisdom over the toddy glasses! We can easily conceive how the interchange of thought between the great trio, Wagner, Frau Cosima and Nietzsche, in a lovely Swiss garden, surrounded by the majesty of the Alps, must have been enshrined in such memories as those over which the philosopher mourned so long as the lamp of life burned in him.

When the other day I was reading Dr. Mügge’s account of the trio at Triebschen, Wagner, Frau Cosima and Nietzsche, and of their deep interest in one another’s ideals, the old motto, “Sweet as the honeycomb is the talk of friends in council,” of which I had not thought for many a decade, came back to me, and I understood how Nietzsche, long years after he had quarrelled with Wagner—indeed, shortly before his death—declared that “he would resign all human intercourse, but at no price would he give up the pleasant memories of those days spent in Triebschen.” The honey of those Verba Composita was still sweet in the comb.

For the quarrel between the two men there may be explanations and excuses; such changes are not without precedent. The first link between them was, as I have said, devotion to Schopenhauer. “Nietzsche called his connection with Wagner his practical course in Schopenhauer’s philosophy.” When Nietzsche began to dream of a philosophy of his own, the tie between him and the poet-composer was weakened; there was also perhaps some feeling that he was being made use of, that he was being patronized and made to play second fiddle to a man whom he was beginning to look down upon as a mere play-actor—a mummer—a child of the theatre.

Mügge throws out a hint that in breaking with Wagner, Nietzsche was possibly fleeing from himself, and he quotes a note from him to Frau Cosima: “Ariadne, I love you! Dionysus.” Whatever may have been the cause, or the many causes, of the rupture, its violence was, at any rate on Nietzsche’s side, maniacal. His venom was not less poisonous than that which Devadatta poured out upon the Buddha. Not content with having hurled his Jupiter, as he called him, from his throne on high Olympus, he must needs pursue him into the depths, trampling on him, and covering with mud the man whom he had once beslavered with the most fulsome adulation. Strange litanies for the high priest of the goddess of Friendship to intone!

Far less intelligible is the change of front in regard to Wagner’s music. That the man who, for the apotheosis of Wagner’s art, wrote “The Birth of Tragedy in Music,” should so completely eat his words as to the worth of the music because he had ceased to love the musician is almost unthinkable.

In the first period he tells us that: “From a novice trying his strength, Wagner became a thorough master of music and of the theatre.... No one will any longer deny him the glory of having given us the supreme model for lofty artistic execution. The renewer of the simple drama, the discoverer of the position due to art in true German society, the poetic interpreter of old views of life, the philosopher, the historian, the æsthete and critic, the master of languages, the mythologist and the myth poet, who for the first time included all these wonderful and beautiful products of a primitive imagination in a single Ring, upon which he engraved the runic characters of his thoughts—what an abundance of knowledge Wagner must have had in order to have become all that!”

Again: “Over the coming of Wagner there hovers a necessity which both justifies it and makes it glorious.” “Wagner, in his capacity as supreme master of form, points out the way, like Aeschylus, to a future art.” “In the life of this great man, the period over which as a golden reflection there is stretched the splendour of a supreme perfection.... He produces _Tristan and Isolde_, this _opus metaphysicum_ of all art; the _Meistersinger of Nürnberg_; the _Ring of the Nibelungs_; his work of Bayreuth.”[17]

There is much more in the same strain, but when we come to the second period it is another Nietzsche who speaks. He now attacks his former idol with the most ferocious rancour, for which only insanity could account; and yet that he was not then mad is proved by other utterances of his in regard to that same art of music. For instance: “Mendelssohn was the beautiful interlude of German music, quickly admired and then quickly forgotten. Schumann was the last who founded a school. Though incessantly glowing with happiness or throbbing with impersonal suffering, he was a purely German event, and not, as Beethoven and Mozart had been, a European phenomenon.”

That—although I should not agree as to Mendelssohn being forgotten—appears to me to be, as regards Schumann, a fine piece of criticism. Apparently it was only when thinking of Wagner that he was up to that time insane. Then he could lash himself into a fury! Witness: “I call the Wagnerian orchestration the Sirocco; Bizet’s” (of whose success Wagner was supremely jealous) “orchestral music is almost the sole orchestration that I can still endure.... Schopenhauer was the philosopher of decadence. His art is morbid.... Wagner has been ruinous to music. Was Wagner a musician at all? He was at least something else in a higher degree—that is to say, an unsurpassable _actor_. Wagner was, above all, a stage-player, and he excels in ubiquity and nullibiety.... Parsifal is a candidate for divinity with a public-school education. We are so far pure fools already ... a typical telegram from Bayreuth: _Bereits bereut_ (rued already)! Ah! this old _thief_! This old _magician_! This _Cagliostro_ of modernity!... Wagner is a Romanist, and he made the poor devil, the country lad Parsifal, a Roman Catholic. I despise every one who does not regard Parsifal as an outrage on morals.”

[Illustration: RICHARD WAGNER.

_From a photograph._

[_To face p. 218._]

Perhaps Wagner’s faithful disciples were right when they ascribed all outpouring of the vials of wrath to _jalousie de métier_; for Nietzsche, too, was not only poet and philosopher, but composer, and when he submitted an opera of his own to Wagner, the great man, as the Eastern saying is, made sour noses at it.

It is dangerous to carry a book with you into a garden; it will make your mind wander much further than your feet. Here have I been rambling on, carried away not so much by any feeling for Nietzsche, who is, after all, not much more than a name to me, as by the interest which attaches to all that concerns Wagner. For, let his enemies say what they will, he was a man of genius, of most compelling genius, and who that ever had speech of Frau Cosima could avoid being bewitched. To me it has only been given to know her in her old age, but I fell at once under the spell of that most sweet and dainty personality. Very feeble in health, and unable to speak for long, she had retained all the serene charm which, in the heyday of her youth and beauty, earned for her the name of “the unique woman.” I felt how bright a part she must have played in the brilliant trio at Triebschen, and how sad it is that there should be no record of the symposia of the sunny days of that happy friendship before it was disturbed by mad envy and malice.

Of Nietzsche and his tragic end, of the influence which his restless brain exercised upon men and upon letters, this is not the place to speak. Is it he, as his disciples maintain, who has taught Germany and, through Germany, the world to think? The great anti-moralist, as he has been called, is dead. Let him rest in peace. We can leave this Batrachomyomachia, this battle of the frogs and mice, the squabbles of German professors and philosophers, coming back with some relief to the sweeter fragrance of our flowers. It was the thought of Triebschen and its Verba Composita which led us to Nietzsche, and his clever saying that seemed to give value to the thought of friendship in a garden.

Days of happy talk are delightful—never more so than in a garden; and yet it is when we are alone, when our plants are the companions of our solitude, that we really enter into sympathy with them. Then it is that we hold true communion with them, and, giving the reins to our imagination, try to read the hidden secrets of their being—hidden secrets, not those scientific arcana which your professor loves to clothe in slipshod Latin and shabby Greek, but those inmost idiosyncrasies in which our fancy, wildly playful, seems to detect vestiges of the same characteristics and emotions which rule as tyrants in our own nature. Nor when we note the movements of plants, so strangely purposeful, does it involve any inordinate strain upon our conceptive power to see in them something more than chance, something which resembles the exercise of a dominant will. These may be thoughts at which science laughs, and which the inexorable demon Commonsense hounds out of court—thoughts that are no more than poor little waifs and strays, coming to us from Fancyland, and yet not without their humble value if they do but make us watch and seek for things undreamt of in our philosophy.

That certain flowers and plants are, as it were, types of various qualities is an idea as old as the hills upon which they grow. The strength of the oak, the grace of the willow, the flaunting pride of poppies, the virginal purity of lilies, the stateliness of hollyhocks like courtiers drawn up in a row at the levée of a mighty king, the modesty of the violet—all these and a hundred others are images from the wallets of poets of all lands and of all time. It is not of these that I speak, but rather of the behaviour of plants, often very various and capricious, according to circumstances, yet in which we seem to see a kinship with reasonable motive, a suggestion that in similar conditions we might have done the same.

See yonder crimson water-lily queening it in all the majesty of her amazing beauty among the humbler reeds and rushes and sedges and the rest of her water-loving subjects. To-day she is in the zenith of her state, like the king’s daughter all glorious within. Does she rejoice in the stateliness of her queenship? It would almost seem so, for to-morrow she will feel that her reign is over. She will bow her lovely neck, and, coyly folding her petals together round the golden aureole of her stamens, will disappear under the flood, too proud to let herself be seen when her regal beauty is on the wane. Is not that something like the pride of which we read in the life of the peerless Countess Castiglione, who hid herself from the gaze of men before her charms had faded, as she knew they soon must? Having reigned supreme among the fair women of the world, she would not consent to be degraded into a has-been—a thing of the past. I have told in my “Memories” of the first time that I saw her on the terrace at Holland House, a miracle of loveliness, when all London was crowding on tiptoe to catch a sight of the haughty queen of beauty and do homage to her majesty. My nymphæa tempts me to repeat myself. The last time was a few years later. I was sitting with Mario and Grisi in their garden at Fulham when she was announced. She came in robed in deepest black, her face hidden by a thick veil of sable crêpe. She remained a little while and talked gaily enough, but her face remained hidden all the time; not for one moment did she lift that funereal veil. She had forsaken the world—abdicated—like my coy crimson water-lily, and in the waters of Lethe she hid her beauteous head.

Have plants their friendships, their affinities? Certain it is that there are some plants which seem to thrive best when familiarly associated with certain others. I have heard some gardeners say, for instance, that lilies of the valley and Solomon’s seal are never so happy as when they are planted together. That may be true, but it probably means no more than that both need the same soil and surroundings, and so make the bravest show when they are side by side. I much doubt whether a weak clump of lilies of the valley would be strengthened by adding to it a cluster of plants of its friend, or vice versa.

On the other hand, it is a scientific fact capable of demonstration, that there are trees which press into their service certain humbler non-flowering plants, compelling them to furnish their roots with water and such mineral salts and foods as are needful for their well-being. These become slaves, like the hewers of wood and drawers of water working for the lords of creation.

Many years ago I received a consignment of _Pinus cembra_, the Arolla pine, which is the common growth of the Alps. The trees arrived late in the afternoon, and we unpacked them at once, for the days were at their shortest, and I was eager to get them all planted—there were a dozen or more—before nightfall. To my dismay I found that the roots were all covered with a network of grey film, the mycelium, as the learned would call it, of some fungus. My gardener and I were not a little indignant with the nurseryman who sent out the plants in so filthy a condition. We sent for a bucket of water and washed clean as many of the trees as we could; mercifully there was not daylight enough left to purge them all of their dirt. To our amazement, the trees which we washed soon began to show signs of sickness; they dwindled for three or four years and looked as if they must die; slowly, very slowly, the invalids recovered. Their unwashed mates never flinched for a moment, made roots gaily, and took quite rapidly to their new home. The puzzle was great, until a few years later I received Kerner’s great book, “The Natural History of Plants,” and then the mystery was cleared up. The sorrows of the washed trees were those of the planters of the West Indian Islands. Like Mr. Wilberforce, we had deprived them of their slaves. Luckily, the humus of the plantation in which they were placed must have contained the spores necessary to the formation of the fungoid growth, otherwise they would doubtless have died.

Kerner’s chapter on the _Symbiosis_, or social union of plants, is curiously interesting. He gives a list of flowering trees and plants which are absolutely dependent upon what he called the mycelial mantle with which fungi cover their roots for the absorption of their daily food. Limes, roses, ivy, pinks may be propagated by cuttings which will root in pure sand. No such method is possible in the case of the oak, the beech, firs, broom, rhododendron, and a host of others, which demand an admixture of soil containing a proportion of mycelia, without which they are unable to feed themselves; and so, like babies, with neither breast nor bottle they perish.

Kerner’s opening words on this _symbiosis_ are worth quoting: “In describing the vegetation of a limited area, botanical writers are apt to designate the various species of plants as ‘denizens’ of the country in question. The conditions under which the plants live are likened to political institutions, and the relations existing amongst the plants themselves are compared to the life and strife of human society.” He goes on to speak of the interdependence upon one another of these plants living in the same community; he shows how necessary they are to one another; how they sometimes fight for food, light and air; how some are preyed upon and oppressed by others, “and how not infrequently quite different species join together in order to attain some mutual advantage.” And so he comes to the curious history of the lichens.

Some forty or fifty years ago there arose a furious battle around the lichens, humble little creatures enough, plastered on almost every rock and stone and tree in creation. During the ’sixties of the last century Schwendener, a Swiss botanist—professor successively at Basle, Tübingen and Berlin—wrote a number of papers in scientific publications, in which he proved to his own satisfaction that lichens are not individual plants, but compound existences consisting of an alga and a fungus. His investigations were followed up by one Bornet, and he had a numerous following largely attracted by the charm of novelty and the ingenuity of invention. Kerner went so far as to say that “the continued study of lichens has tended only to secure for the Schwendenerian theory a more wide and universal recognition.” Dr. Cook, however, the great authority on cryptogamic botany, laughs at this mystic union as a “fairy tale.” He treats it with the same contempt that St. Paul, in his letter to Titus, expressed for “Jewish fables.” He says: “The high priest Schwendener thus expressed his dream: ‘As the result of my researches, all these growths (lichens) are not simple plants, not individuals in the ordinary sense of the word; they are rather colonies, which consist of hundreds and thousands of individuals, of which, however, one alone plays the master, whilst the rest, in perpetual captivity, prepare the nutriment for themselves and their master. This master is a fungus of the class ascomyceter, a parasite which is accustomed to live upon others’ work; its slaves are green algæ, which it has sought out, or, indeed, caught hold of, and compelled into its service. It surrounds them, as a spider its prey, with a fibrous net of narrow meshes, which is gradually converted into an impenetrable covering; but whilst the spider sucks its prey and leaves it dead, the fungus incites the algæ found in its net to more rapid activity—nay, to more vigorous increase.’”

Dr. Cook goes on to say: “This may be all very poetical, but it is not very explicit, and needs a commentary;” and then he proceeds to demolish the whole theory based upon the supposition that the gonidia, green spherical cells, which are found in the thallus of lichens are algæ. Lichens, Dr. Cook tells us, consist normally of a thallus, or vegetative system, which is in many species a tough, bark-like expansion, horizontal or vertical, attached to rocks, stones, wood and other substances, but not deriving nourishment from the object to which it is attached. Inside this thallus are the minute green gonidia, and, in addition, there is the reproductive system, consisting of discs borne upon the thallus, containing the reproductive organs (asci and sporidia). The Schwendenerians contend that the thallus and reproductive system are not only fungoid, but actual fungi, while the green gonidia are algæ upon which those fungi are parasitic.

One of the proofs which Dr. Cook brings forward in support of his contradiction of the theorists is the permanence of lichens, whereas the fungi are, as we all know, very short-lived, many of them little more than ephemeral—here to-day and gone to-morrow. To the lichens we must pay the respect due to the most venerable antiquity. Dr. Cook, speaking with all the authority with which he is endowed, tells us that “some species, growing on primitive rocks of the highest mountains of the world, are estimated to have attained an age of at least a thousand years. Is it not marvellous to think of these mean little vegetable scabs feeding upon air, outliving the monarch oaks and almost all the trees of Creation?”

But I am in danger of rushing in where the angels of science hardly dare tread. Let me go back to my beloved nonsense. Beloved? Yes, for, after all, what is more lovable than nonsense? What a joy their nonsense must have been to Dean Swift, to Lear, or to the little dry chip of a man who was our Cocker, our mathematical tutor, at Christ Church. I wonder whether, when Dodgson, that double personality, always associated in my memory with a blackboard, a piece of chalk and _x y z_, was writing up his mystic algebraical puzzles, his mind did not sometimes wander, and he himself become transformed for a minute into Lewis Carroll seeing visions of Alice, the Carpenter, the Mad Hatter, the Walrus, and all the crazy _dramatis personæ_ of his delicious phantasy. He is dead now, and many years ago the lovely child, for whose delectation the wonder book was invented, was laid in an early grave in the Christ Church cloisters. Only Alice lives, and will live as long as the English language remains.