not the least beautiful among our native wild flowers are many of those which grow, too often unheeded, along the wayside of every country road. the hedge-bordered highway on which i am walking to-day, to take my letters to the village post, is bordered on either side with such a profusion of colour as one may never see equalled during many years' experience of tropical or sub-tropical lands. jamaica and ceylon could produce nothing so brilliant as this tangled mass of gorse, and thistle, and st. john's-wort, and centaury, intermingled with the lithe and whitening sprays of half-opened clematis. and here, on the very edge of the road, half-smothered in its grey dust, i have picked a pretty little convolvulus blossom, with a fly buried head-foremost in its pink bell; and i am carrying them both along with me as i go, for contemplation and study. for this little flower, the lesser bindweed, is rich in hints as to the strange ways in which nature decks herself with so much waste loveliness, whose meaning can only be fully read by the eyes of man, the latest comer among her children. the old school of thinkers imagined that beauty was given to flowers and insects for the sake of man alone: it would not, perhaps, be too much to say that, if the new school be right, the beauty is not in the flowers and insects themselves at all, but is read into them by the fancy of the human race. to the butterfly the world is a little beautiful; to the farm-labourer it is only a trifle more beautiful: but to the cultivated man or the artist it is lovely in every cloud and shadow, in every tiny blossom and passing bird.
the outer face of the bindweed, the exterior of the cup, so to speak, is prettily marked with five dark russet-red bands, between which the remainder of the corolla is a pale pinky-white in hue. nothing could be simpler and prettier than this alternation of dark and light belts; but how is it produced? merely thus. the convolvulus blossom in the bud is twisted or contorted round and round, part of the cup being folded inside, while the five joints of the corolla are folded outside, much after the fashion of an umbrella when rolled up. and just as the bits of the umbrella which are exposed when it is folded become faded in colour, so the bits of the bindweed blossom which are outermost in the bud become more deeply oxidised than the other parts, and acquire a russet-red hue. the belted appearance which thus results is really as accidental, if i may use that unphilosophical expression, as the belted appearance of the old umbrella, or the wrinkles caused by the waves on the sea-sands. the flower happened to be folded so, and got coloured, or discoloured, accordingly. but when a man comes to look at it, he recognises in the alternation of colours and the symmetrical arrangement one of those elements of beauty with which he is familiar in the handicraft of his own kind. he reads an intention into this result of natural causes, and personifies nature as though she worked with an ?sthetic design in view, just as a decorative artist works when he similarly alternates colours or arranges symmetrical and radial figures on a cup or other piece of human pottery. the beauty is not in the flower itself; it is in the eye which sees and the brain which recognises the intellectual order and perfection of the work.
i turn the bindweed blossom mouth upward, and there i see that these russet marks, though paler on the inner surface, still show faintly through the pinky-white corolla. this produces an effect not unlike that of a delicate shell cameo, with its dainty gradations of semi-transparent white and interfusing pink. but the inner effect can be no more designed with an eye to beauty than the outer one was; and the very terms in which i think of it clearly show that my sense of its loveliness is largely derived from comparison with human handicraft. a farmer would see in the convolvulus nothing but a useless weed; a cultivated eye sees in it just as much as its nature permits it to see. i look closer, and observe that there are also thin lines running from the circumference to the centre, midway between the dark belts. these lines, which add greatly to the beauty of the flower, by marking it out into zones, are also due to the folding in the bud; they are the inner angles of the folds, just as the dark belts are the overlapping edges of the outer angles. but, in addition to the minor beauty of these little details, there is the general beauty of the cup as a whole, which also calls for explanation. its shape is as graceful as that of any greek or etruscan vase, as swelling and as simply beautiful as any beaker. can i account for these peculiarities on mere natural grounds as well as for the others? i somehow fancy i can.
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.
