The Rhythm of Life and other Essays | Page 8

in the melancholy night.

THE FLOWER

There is a form of oppression that has not until now been confessed by
those who suffer from it or who are participants, as mere witnesses, in
its tyranny. It is the obsession of man by the flower. In the shape of the
flower his own paltriness revisits him- -his triviality, his sloth, his
cheapness, his wholesale habitualness, his slatternly ostentation. These
return to him and wreak upon him their dull revenges. What the
tyranny really had grown to can be gauged nowhere so well as in
country lodgings, where the most ordinary things of design and
decoration have sifted down and gathered together, so that foolish
ornament gains a cumulative force and achieves a conspicuous
commonness. Stem and petal and leaf--the fluent forms that a man has
not by heart but certainly by rote--are woven, printed, cast, and
stamped wherever restlessness and insimplicity have feared to leave
plain spaces. The most ugly of all imaginable rooms, which is probably
the parlour of a farm- house arrayed for those whom Americans call
summer-boarders, is beset with flowers. It blooms, a dry, woollen,
papery, cast-iron garden. The floor flourishes with blossoms adust,
poorly conventionalised into a kind of order; the table-cover is ablaze

with a more realistic florescence; the wall-paper is set with bunches;
the rigid machine-lace curtain is all of roses and lilies in its very
construction, over the muslin blinds an impotent sprig is scattered. In
the worsted rosettes of the bell-ropes, in the plaster picture-frames, in
the painted tea-tray and on the cups, in the pediment of the sideboard,
in the ornament that crowns the barometer, in the finials of sofa and
arm-chair, in the finger- plates of the 'grained' door, is to be seen the
ineffectual portrait or to be traced the stale inspiration of the flower.
And what is this bossiness around the grate but some blunt,
black-leaded garland? The recital is wearisome, but the retribution of
the flower is precisely weariness. It is the persecution of man, the
haunting of his trivial visions, and the oppression of his inconsiderable
brain.
The man so possessed suffers the lot of the weakling--subjection to the
smallest of the things he has abused. The designer of cheap patterns is
no more inevitably ridden by the flower than is the vain and transitory
author by the phrase. But I had rather learn my decoration of the
Japanese, and place against the blank wall one pot plain from the wheel,
holding one singular branch in blossom, in the attitude and accident of
growth. And I could wish abstention to exist, and even to be evident, in
my words. In literature as in all else man merits his subjection to
trivialities by a kind of economical greed. A condition for using justly
and gaily any decoration would seem to be a certain reluctance.
Ornament--strange as the doctrine sounds in a world decivilised--was in
the beginning intended to be something jocund; and jocundity was
never to be achieved but by postponement, deference, and modesty.
Nor can the prodigality of the meadows in May be quoted in dispute.
For Nature has something even more severe than moderation: she has
an innumerable singleness. Her butter-cup meadows are not prodigal;
they show multitude, but not multiplicity, and multiplicity is exactly the
disgrace of decoration. Who has ever multiplied or repeated his delights?
or who has ever gained the granting of the most foolish of his
wishes--the prayer for reiteration? It is a curious slight to generous Fate
that man should, like a child, ask for one thing many times. Her answer
every time is a resembling but new and single gift; until the day when
she shall make the one tremendous difference among her gifts--and

make it perhaps in secret--by naming one of them the ultimate. What,
for novelty, what, for singleness, what, for separateness, can equal the
last? Of many thousand kisses the poor last--but even the kisses of your
mouth are all numbered.

UNSTABLE EQUILIBRIUM

It is principally for the sake of the leg that a change in the dress of man
is so much to be desired. The leg, completing as it does the form of
man, should make a great part of that human scenery which is at least
as important as the scenery of geological structure, or the scenery of
architecture, or the scenery of vegetation, but which the lovers of
mountains and the preservers of ancient buildings have consented to
ignore. The leg is the best part of the figure, inasmuch as it has the
finest lines and therewith those slender, diminishing forms which,
coming at the base of the human structure, show it to be a thing of life
by its unstable equilibrium. A lifeless structure is in stable equilibrium;
the