



Produced by Chuck Greif & The Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was
produced from images generously made available by The
Internet Archive)








                            [Illustration]

                            [Illustration]




                                  OLD
                               FASHIONED
                                FLOWERS

                               AND OTHER
                              OUT-OF-DOOR
                                STUDIES

                                  BY

                                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.


II

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.

They are driven from the borders and the proud baskets by arrogant
strangers from Peru, the Cape of Good Hope, China, Japan. They have two
pitiless enemies in particular. The first of these is the encumbering
and prolific Begonia Tuberosa, that swarms in the beds like a tribe of
turbulent fighting-cocks, with innumerous combs. It is pretty, but
insolent and a little artificial; and, whatever the silence and
meditation of the hour, under the sun and under the moon, in the
intoxication of the day and the solemn peace of the night, it sounds its
clarion cry and celebrates its victory, monotonous, shrill and
scentless. The other is the Double Geranium, not quite so indiscreet,
but indefatigable also and extraordinarily courageous. It would appear
desirable were it less lavished. These two,--with the help of a few more
cunning strangers and of the plants with  leaves that close up
those turgid mosaics which at present debase the beautiful lines of most
of our lawns,--these two have gradually ousted their native sisters from
the spots which these had so long brightened with their familiar
smiles. They no longer have the right to receive the guest with artless
little cries of welcome at the gilded gates of the mansion. They are
forbidden to prattle near the steps, to twitter in the marble vases, to
hum their tune beside the lakes, to lisp their dialect along the
borders. A few of them have been relegated to the kitchen-garden, in the
neglected and, for that matter, delightful corner occupied by the
medicinal or merely aromatic plants, the Sage, the Tarragon, the Fennel
and the Thyme,--old servants, too, dismissed and nourished through a
sort of pity or mechanical tradition. Others have taken refuge by the
stables, near the low door of the kitchen or the cellar, where they
crowd humbly like importunate beggars, hiding their bright dresses among
the weeds and holding their frightened perfumes as best they may, so as
not to attract attention.

But, even there, the Pelargonium, red with indignation, and the Begonia,
crimson with rage, came to surprise and hustle the unoffending little
band; and they fled to the farms, the cemeteries, the little gardens of
the rectories, the old maid’s houses and the country convents. And now
hardly anywhere, save in the oblivion of the oldest villages, around
tottering dwellings, far from the railways and the nursery-gardener’s
overbearing hot-houses, do we find them again with their natural smile;
not wearing a driven, panting and hunted look, but peaceful, calm,
restful, plentiful, careless and at home. And, even as in former times,
in the coaching-days, from the top of the stone wall that surrounds the
house, through the rails of the white fence, or from the sill of the
windows enlivened by a caged bird, on the motionless road where none
passes, save the eternal forces of life, they see spring come and
autumn, the rain and the sun, the butterflies and the bees, the silence
and the night followed by the light of the moon.


III

Brave old flowers! Wall-flowers, Gillyflowers, Stocks! For, even as the
field-flowers, from which a trifle, a ray of beauty, a drop of perfume,
divides them, they have charming names, the softest in the language; and
each of them, like tiny, artless ex-votos, or like medals bestowed by
the gratitude of men, proudly bears three or four. You Stocks, who sing
among the ruined walls and cover with light the grieving stones; you
Garden Primroses, Primulas or Cowslips