Pleiades
On Yellow in Nature
Timm is a passage in Mr. George Moore's Abelard and Heloise which remains in the mind of the reader as a,permanent joy. The two star-crossed lovers, in the spring-time of their passion and the spring-time of the year, are journeying together from Parts into Brittany ; and their maid, the shrewd Madelon, with her pithy and homely wit, is riding by their side. The talk falls on the colours of the spring ; and Madelon jeers at her poet-master, and at all poets, for imagining that spring is green. It is yellow, she says : look at yonder growing buds, and you will see that they arc yellow : look at yonder meadow, and you will see that it is carpeted with dainty yellow llowers. It is the yellow of the spring that makes its beauty : it is the yellow things of the spring (Madelon is a cook, and her thoughts run to salads and vegetables) that are really good to cat. Green is a misty sort of colour ; it has no clear edge of beauty : it is an unsatisfying thing, alike to the eye and the palate.
There is a good deal of wisdom in Madelon's paradox, as there generally is in paradoxes. Green can be an unsatisfying colour ; indeed, there are times when it even seems to be menacing. Sometimes, in certain lights and at certain hours, as you sit in your garden and watch its colours and fall into its mood, you begin to suspect that you are hedged about by a lowering conspiracy of green. There are the green trees looking down curiously at you ; there are the green hedges standing sentinel around you ; and even your herbaceous border, where you would like to see some clear blues and shining yellows, seems to have hidden itself in a sort of sinister green gloom. You murmur to yourself, to keep your spirits up, something about "England's green and pleasant land " ; you recall to your memory the vivid green you once saw on the shores of the Solent, when you were returning to England after some months of wandering in partibus transmarinis, and you try to recapture the thrill with which you looked once more on the deep lush English meadows. But your consola- tions miss lire : you know in your heart that there is something wrong with green : you admit to your reasoning soul that green is a rainy colour, the child of cloudy skies and steadily dropping rain ; and you long for something that has a warmer glow and a more golden and cordial comfort.
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The comfort and the cordiality of yellow salute the traveller in midsummer with a warm and glad surprise as he wakens in his carriage somewhere north of Perth, soon after six o'clock in the morning, and begins to look upon the valley landscape through which he is being carried in the bright and early sun- shine. There is a yellow laburnum on the hill-sides, still drooping its fresh glory of yellow blossom (the laburnums in the south are all faded and gone, but the Highlands keep their yellow) ; and here, and again there, and indeed everywhere, there is the shining of the golden broom. (Yellow or gold, what does it matter ? Gold is yellow, and yellow is gold ; and you cannot insert the point of a knife between the two.) The broom is a wonderful plant ; it is like a profusion of newly minted sovereigns ; but it is better than all the sovereigns that ever were minted, for it is never withdrawn from circu- lation (as all the lovely shining sovereigns were, sixteen sad years ago), and anyhow it is a joy "in widest commonalty, spread," and you could never say that of sovereigns, even in the palmiest of pre-War days. Nor do sovereigns draw after them crowds of tiny sympathetic sister golden things ; and Ike broom has that gift. It is a sort of Orpheus ; where it makes its inaudible golden music, it somehow attracts into its company other golden little plants—the mimulus, with its stalks set in the water ; yellow flags, standing upright in the grass ; yellow lichens, touching with gold the rocks to which they cling ; and all sorts of nodding little golden bells and heads, swaying and curtseying as the breeze passes—miniature living glories of yellow, prodigally scattered all over the valleys. There is no rival to the broom and the goodly com- pany that follows wherever he leads. The gorse may seem a rival ; but the gorse is a lonely sort of fellow. He loves the bare heath; and he stands alone there. Besides, he is a heady sort of plant, fully of a rich nutty scent which runs into an excess. Nor is his colour the clean and austere yellow of the
broom. It plunges into a sort of ruddiness : it deserts the perfect simplicity of the broom : it runs over the boundary of exact good taste.
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One thinks of trees as in their nature green ; but perhaps it is their nature and end to be yellow. Even when they scent to be nothing but green, they may receive a transfiguration from the setting sun which tums them into yellow : and then. as you look up through the leaves of the chestnut in your garden, even in full midsummer, you will realize that the final " nature " towards which the chestnut is striving is yellow. Trees begin their young life in yellow ; and the glory of their old age in autumn is once mom yellow. It is only in the hard middle age of midsummer that they are green ; and trees are least interesting, and least Menisci. es, in their middle age. Perhaps the beech is the most perfectly beaut HUI of all trees, if you take him all in all ; and the glory of the beech is his October livery. When one thinks of trees. and of their colour, in this way, there is a passage in Browning',. " By the Fire- side " which collies unbidden to the memory. You will remember how it begins, with the poet-lover meditating by his wife's side on the past that brought them together. As he retraces the past, lie begins with an avenue of' green hazel ; but as he passes down it he conies to the yellow autumn tree, and the yellow lichen fretting the rock by its side, and it was there (he remembers), under the consecration of that colour, that he found his perfect wife, and his life realized its purpose. * * * * * *
The desert is yellow ; and any man who has travelled through the desert will remember its beauty the wonderful yellow carpet that drinks the yellow sunshine ; the yellow soil which, arid as it looks, has a hidden feet ility, and will send up, when once it is touched by the light showers of the spring, the marvels of its vegetation, its cactus will, purple or white flowers, its delicate plants of blue, its glowing plants or crimson. So too are the noblest wines that slake the thirst and cheer the heart of man. Some may sing the ruby that dwells in the heart of red wine ; but the wise will sing t topaz that glows in the centre of the yellow wines of Burgundy and the Moselle country. Si, too with the jewels which match their colour. Your emerald has a very deep beauty ; your sapphire may be a melting blue ; but some Of the loveliest of sapphires have a sort of yellow heart, and what stone can rival a topaz for packing into a little space the very essence of all gold and yellow beauty ?
* * * * * * * But we are running away from our theme ; we must hark back from wine and jewels to the free yellow of the lit-his.
'Twos that delightful season when the broom, Full-flowered and visible for many a mile, Across the uplands runs in veins of gold.
So one of us quoted Meredith, from memory, and Laughingly said that the quotation was incorrect. But the broom was not only visible " across the uplands " : there was also one memorable patch, just where a foot-bridge crossed a little stream, which wavered " in veins of gold " in the moving Waters, as the yellow on the bank answered and nodded in the breeze to the yellow reflected below. Beyond, as we looked down to a sea-loch, we saw the yellow kelp sl l i ll ing on its margin ; and over it were flitting the gray-wi ll ged gulls with primrose-yellow beaks. But the most wonderful yellow of all was that of a globe-flower, which one of us detected, with quick eyes of insight, on the other side of a burn. It was an unfolded hollow globe of yellow petals, delicately curved over one another like the feathers of a wing, springing from a long stalk adorned at intervals with little green frills. Trunk's was its scientific name, the finder said : she had seen it last at Castorina ; but it also grew, she had been told, with only one other flower as its companion, at the North Cape. We could only think that Nature is prodigal with yellow loveliness, when she scatters it in Italy and the West highlands and the North of Norway ; and so, as we looked on this most lovely of all its manifestations, we ended our talk of yellow in Nature.
ORION.
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