Why should flowers possess this emotional force? It is a force which is largely independent of association and quite abstracted from direct vital use. Flowers are purely impersonal, they subserve neither of the great primary ends of life. They concern us even less than the sunset. And yet we are irresistibly impelled to "consider the lilies."
Surely it is as symbols, manifoldly complex symbols, that flowers appeal to us so deeply. They are, after all, the organs of sex, and for some creatures they are also the sources of food. So that if we only look at life largely enough flowers are in the main stream of vital necessity. They are useless to man, but man cannot cut himself off from the common trunk of life. He is related to the insects and even in the end to the trees. So that it may not be so surprising that while flowers are vitally useless to man they are yet the very loveliest symbols to him of all the things that are vitally useful. There is nothing so vitally intimate to himself that man has not seen it, and rightly seen it, symbolically embodied in flowers. Study the folk-nomenclature of plants in any country, or glance through Aigremont's _Volkserotik und Pflanzenwelt_. And the symbolisation is not the less fascinating because it is so obscure, so elusive, usually so unconscious, developed by sudden happy inspirations of peasant genius, and because I am altogether ignorant why the morbid and nameless tones of these curved and wrinkled wall-flowers delight me as they once delighted my mother, and so, it may be, backwards, through ancient generations who dwelt in parsonages whence their gaze caught the flowers which the seventeenth-century herbalist said in his _Paradisus Terrestris_ are "often found growing on the old walls of Churches."
_May_ 8.--It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his own nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced Man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution! "Monkey" and "Worm" have been the bywords of reproach among the more supercilious of human beings, whether schoolboys or theologians. And it was precisely through the Anthropoid Apes, and more remotely the Annelids, that Darwin sought to trace the ancestry of Man. The Annelids have been rejected, but the Arachnids have taken their place.