The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

  Nature also challenges man aesthetically, so it is not difficult to understand that a certain monotony of the Dutch landscape gave rise to dreams of multifarious, colorful, and unusual flora. Possibly the nostalgia for a lost paradise lurked behind it, which medieval painters represented in the form of a rosarium, an orchard, or a flower bed. Eternal greenness speaks to the imagination better than eternal light.

  In comparison with the pompous splendor of the gardens of French or English lords, the equivalents in Holland were of course modest. Most often they occupied the space of barely several score square feet. But what a wealth of plants, what conscious composition of colors. A lawn with islands of moss and patches of multicolored flowers, lilac bushes and an apple tree, a pattern imposed on all of it and a network of lilliputian paths strewn with white sand.

  Everyone, even a simple artisan, wished to own a flower bed at the back of his house and cultivate roses, irises, lilies, and hyacinths that are more beautiful, more unusual than those in his neighbor’s garden. This adoration of nature, like an echo of the most remote vegetative cults, had all the attributes of enlightened love. Eminent connoisseurs of the world of plants lectured in Leyden and other universities—for instance the Frenchman Lecluse2, called Clusius (more about him later on), who founded the first botanical garden in 1587. Scholars set out with colonists on distant, dangerous expeditions to learn the secrets of exotic nature. The public at large avidly read books devoted to the classification, anatomy, and cultivation of plants. The summa of this rich literature is a fat, three-volume work by Jan van der Meurs3 with the telling title Arboretum Sacrum.

  In the Mauritshuis in The Hague there is a canvas, “Bouquet against a Vaulted Window,” by an excellent painter of flowers, Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder4. This painting always fills me with a kind of anxiety, although I realize its cause is not the subject chosen by the painter. For what is more soothing, more idyllic than an arrangement of roses, dahlias, irises, and orchids presented with sophisticated simplicity against a background of sky and a distant mountainous landscape fading into the blue?

  Yet the treatment of the subject is striking and somewhat eerie. The flowers in this painting—quiet servants of nature, and helpless givers of delight—flaunt themselves; they are exclusive sovereigns who domineer with an intensity and force never encountered until then. It seems that an important and decisive act of liberation has occurred here. The “quiet servants of nature” abandon their role of ornament: they do not try to be graceful; they don’t languish, but attack the spectator with their proud, one wants to say their self-conscious, individuality. They seem overnatural, insistently present. All of this happens not because they are an expression of violent, internal states of the artist (like Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers”), but quite the opposite. The shape, color, and character of the flowers have been reproduced scrupulously, in detail, with the cold impartiality of a botanist and anatomist. The light of the painting, clear and “objective,” means that the artist has abandoned all the charms of chiaroscuro and the painterly hierarchy that plunges some objects in shadow and accentuates others by lighting. The “Bouquet against a Vaulted Window” can be compared to Frans Hals’s collective portraits in which there is no division into persons who are more important or less.

  Bosschaert’s painting was made around 1620, shortly before the artist’s death. The events we are about to relate took place several years later. But already in this painting it is possible to notice omens of an approaching storm. For aren’t these emancipated, dominating, rapacious flowers, loudly demanding admiration and praise, a symptom of a peculiar cult? The composition of the painting indicates this. The bouquet is placed on a high window as if on an altar, elevated above the rest of nature. A pagan monstrance of flowers.

  In Bosschaert’s painting—auguring nothing good—are a few tulips.

  2

  It is not at all unlikely that illnesses have their history, and every epoch has its own definite sickness which did not occur in such guise before, and will never again return in the same form.

  —TROELS-LUND5

  THE TULIP IS A gift from the East, like so many other blessed and ominous gifts: religions and superstitions, medicinal and intoxicating herbs, holy books and invasions, epidemics and fruit. Its name comes from Persian and designates a turban. For centuries it was a favorite and honored flower in the gardens of Armenia, Turkey, and Persia. At the sultan’s courts a tulip holiday was celebrated every year. The poets Omar Khayyam and Hafiz sang its praises, it is mentioned in the tales of The Thousand and One Nights; before it traveled to Europe it had a long Oriental career of many years behind it.

  Its appearance in the West was the contribution of a diplomat. He was Augier Ghislain de Busbecq6, envoy of the Austrian Hapsburgs at the court of Suleiman the Magnificent in Constantinople. An educated man and curious about the world (his interesting travel descriptions have been preserved), he dutifully wrote comprehensive diplomatic reports. But it seems he had far greater enthusiasm for collecting Greek manuscripts, ancient inscriptions, and naturalia. In 1554 he sent a transport of tulip bulbs to the Viennese court of the Emperor Francis I. Such was the innocent beginning of the evil.

  From this time on the flower’s popularity spread in Europe with surprising speed. Konrad Gesner7, called the German Pliny, gave the first scientific description of the plant in his work De Hortis Germaniae (1561). In the same year guests of the banker family Fugger admired patches of this still rare flower at their gardens in Augsburg. A little later it appears in France, the Netherlands, and England, where John Tradescant8, gardener of Charles I, boasted of cultivating fifty varieties of tulip. For a short period gastronomers tried to make a delicacy out of it for elegant tables: in Germany it was eaten with sugar. In England, on the other hand, it was spiced with oil and vinegar. The infamous conspiracy of pharmacists to make a medicine against flatulence from this plant also luckily came to nothing. The tulip remained itself, the poetry of Nature to which vulgar utilitarianism is foreign.

  Thus in the beginning it was a flower of monarchs, of the well-born, the wealthy—very precious, carefully kept in gardens, and inaccessible. Contemporaries invented a soul for it; they said it expressed elegance and refined meditation. Even its infirmity—its lack of smell—was interpreted as the virtue of moderation. One could indeed say that cold beauty has an introverted character. The tulip allows us to admire it but does not awaken violent emotions, desire, jealousy, or erotic fervors. It is a peacock among flowers; at any rate, this is what the courtly “philosophers of gardens” wrote. History proved that they erred.

  It is well known that court fashions are contagious; also they are often imitated by the lower classes, and for this they meet a well-deserved divine punishment. In the beginning of the seventeenth century, chroniclers in France observed the first symptoms—let us put it this way—of acute tulip fever. In 1608 a miller parted with his mill for a single bulb of a rarely encountered variety called “Mère brune.” A young groom was supposedly enchanted when his father-in-law gave him a single precious plant as his entire dowry, appropriately called for the occasion “Mariage de ma fille.” Another enthusiast did not hesitate to exchange his flourishing brewery for a bulb, which since that time carries the not very elegant name “Tulipe brasserie.”

  One could multiply examples without difficulty to prove that wherever the tulip appeared cases of tulipomania were registered, sometimes more, sometimes less. But only in Holland did it reach the intensity and dimensions of an epidemic.

  Its beginnings are unclear and difficult to establish precisely, both in terms of time and of space. With the plague the matter is much simpler: One day a ship from the East puts in at a harbor. Part of the crew has a high fever; some are delirious, and tumors can be seen on their bodies. They go ashore and are put in hospitals, houses, and inns; the first deaths occur, and the number of fatal illnesses rapidly grows. The entire city, the entire region, the entire country is swept by plague. Princes and beggars, s
aints and freethinkers, criminals and innocent children all die. Since the time of Thucydides this pandemonium of death has been described many times and in detail.

  On the other hand, tulipomania is a mental phenomenon, and here the troubles begin. In other words, it is a social psychosis like other psychoses, whether associated with religion, war, revolution, or the economy—for instance, gold fever or the crash of the American stock market in 1929. Despite numerous, striking analogies, it cannot of course be explained in terms of infectious diseases (but what a pity!). We lack instruments that would allow us to measure quantitatively the range of the epidemic, its degree of “infectiousness,” the number with an acute or mild sickness, “the temperature curve” of affected individuals. The only method left is to enter into the spirit of the events, a cautious description that notes both the extreme and characteristic cases.

  It is not possible to define exactly when the tulip appeared for the first time in the Netherlands. Most likely it was quite early. We know, for example, that in 1562 a shipment of tulip bulbs was received in the port of Antwerp. But the intensive interest in the flower occurred many years later, most likely reflecting the fashion reigning at the royal courts, especially the French. At the end of the sixteenth century something happened that on the surface seems an unimportant case from police chronicles but in fact was one of the first symptoms of tulipomania on Dutch soil. We have already mentioned Carolus Clusius, professor of botany at the famous university in Leyden (he previously held the rank of Director of the Imperial Gardens in Vienna). This scholar was widely known, at the same time talkative and possibly somewhat vain. At every occasion he talked about the plants he was cultivating, not only to university colleagues but also to chance listeners. Usually he spoke with enthusiasm and unconcealed pride about the tulips, which, he claimed, he would not exchange for any of the world’s treasures. It was an open provocation, which the scholar probably did not realize. One night—let us say moonless—unknown persons forced their way into the university gardens and stole Clusius’s tulips. The thieves must have had considerable scientific qualifications, because their loot was exclusively the precious and truly rare tulip varieties. The embittered botanist stopped studying this plant till the end of his life.

  The story recalls the ballad about the sorcerer’s apprentice. A sudden transmutation occurs: the object of patient, scholarly, and therefore disinterested studies is transformed into an object of insane financial transactions. An important question comes to mind here: Why precisely was it the tulip, and not another flower, that liberated the madness?

  There were several reasons. We already noted that the tulip was an aristocratic, almost worshipped flower. What a pleasure to possess something that was the pride of monarchs! Aside from snobbish considerations, there were also reasons that might be called purely biological, for the cultivation of a tulip did not involve any large problems or troubles. It was a grateful flower, easy to tame. Everyone who owned even the smallest patch of earth could give himself up to the passion.

  In Dutch gardens a certain kind of virus was rife that often caused the petals of the tulip’s crown to take on fantastic shapes with ruffled or pleated edges. It was quickly learned how to draw a profit from this pathology.

  Finally, and this is particularly important for our thoughts on the scientific basis of tulipomania, no other flower possessed such a quantity of varieties. People were convinced that this plant had a peculiar property: sooner or later it would produce spontaneously—that is, without man’s participation—new mutations, and new multicolored forms. It was said nature particularly cherished this flower, and endlessly played with it. To speak in a less ornate way, it meant that the buyer of a tulip bulb was in a situation like a man playing a lottery: blind chance could bestow a large fortune on him.

  In the first half of the seventeenth century, the Dutch took pride in three things: a powerful and invincible navy, “the sweets of freedom greater than anywhere else,” and—if one may combine important and unimportant matters in a single sentence—at least several hundred varieties of tulips. It seems the dictionary could not keep pace with this wealth of nature. We have simultaneously five kinds of “Miracle,” four “Emeralds,” as many as thirty “Paragons of Perfection” (a semantic abuse of the word). Those endowed with fantasy invented names full of poetry—“Royal Agate,” “Diana,” and “Harlequin”—while those deprived of imagination called their specimens simply “Gaudy,” “Virgin,” or “Yellow-Red.” To cope with the growing task, military ranks were introduced and even history was harnessed, so we have “Admiral van Enckhuysen,” “General van Eyck,” and many others. A certain clever cultivator boldly decided to bid higher, calling his variety “General of Generals.” There is, of course, “King,” “Vice-King,” and “Prince,” as if someone wanted to introduce military and aristocratic order into this multifariousness bordering on chaos.

  The huge quantity of tulip varieties that Holland managed to cultivate stirs our admiration and bewilderment, but it contained the seeds of catastrophe as well. If a game uses a small number of cards as a rule it is simple, banal, and quickly ends. However, when the players dispose of let’s say several decks of cards, the field is open to complex combinations, intelligent strategy, a balanced risk, and shrewd methods. The same happened with tulips; one had only to agree which varieties would have the value of an “ace” and which would be counted among “minnows.”

  Of course this is a greatly simplified scheme, a first, timid approach to the subject. Ludic elements undoubtedly played a role. But in fact tulipomania was a very complex phenomenon. It seems the most decisive and important aspect of the problem was economic; in other words, the order of the stock market was introduced into the order of nature. The tulip began to lose the properties and charms of a flower: it grew pale, lost its colors and shapes, became an abstraction, a name, a symbol interchangeable with a certain amount of money. Complicated tables existed on which individual varieties were arranged according to the changing market prices like valuable papers or money rates. The hour of the great speculation had struck.

  During the entire period of tulipomania, which lasted several years, “Semper Augustus” invariably remained at the top of these price lists, like a sun standing motionless at the zenith. I never personally encountered it. It is vain to look for it in flower shops, which like all our other shops sell standard roses, standard eggs, standard cars. My fault. If I visited botanical gardens as assiduously as museums, the meeting might have occurred. I know this tulip, however, from old, colorful engravings; it is indeed beautiful, thanks to its sophisticated and at the same time simple harmony of colors: petals impeccably white, and with small, fiery, ruby veins running along them, the bottom of the chalice blue like the reflection of a sunny sky. It is an exceptionally nice specimen, but the price reached by “Semper Augustus,” 5,000 florins (the equivalent of a house with a large garden), causes a shiver of anxiety. The dikes of common sense had broken. From now on we will move on the slippery terrain of unhealthy fantasy, feverish desire for profit, insane illusions, and bitter disappointments.

  Transactions were often made in kind. These allow us to measure the dimensions of the madness even better. For a bulb of the tulip “Vice-King” (it was worth half the value of “Semper Augustus”), the following was paid in the form of farm products:

  2 carts of wheat

  4 carts of rye

  4 fat oxen

  8 fat pigs

  12 fat sheep

  2 barrels of wine

  4 barrels of the foremost beer

  1,000 pounds of cheese

  A bed, clothes, and a silver chalice were added to this drink, food, and fatness.

  In the initial phase of tulipomania, prices went constantly up. As stockbrokers would say, the trend on the “flower stock market” was at first “friendly,” then “lively,” all the way to “very lively,” to pass in the end to a state of euphoria completely uncontrolled by common sense.

  A g
reater and greater gap opened between the real value of the plants sold and the price paid for them. It was paid willingly, with joy, as if expecting the smile of fate. Most of those touched by tulipomania counted on a boom; they were convinced the rising trend would continue forever (don’t they resemble the progressives?), and that a bulb bought today would double its value tomorrow or at the latest the day after tomorrow. If one treats these fantastic speculations seriously and without irony (because “seniority” in history does not entitle one to it), we can see something more profound—for instance, the old myth of humanity about miraculous multiplication.

  In earthly categories the matter looked as follows: the sellers took no account at all of the actual possibilities of the buyers, and what is worse the buyers seemed to have entirely lost the instinct of self-preservation. They were no longer aware of their own possibilities. The hectic atmosphere that accompanies large stock operations is universally known, but in the case of tulipomania it was something more serious and more pathological than an “atmosphere.”

  The psychological deviations defined as manias possess certain common features. The persons affected by the disease have a tendency to create imaginary, autonomous worlds governed by their own rules. In our case it was like a gigantic flower lottery, and all those who played expected the first prize. The game, however, did not take place on an island especially leased for the purpose, but in a country where the cardinal virtues were caution, moderation, and accountability. A system based on bourgeois calculation could not coexist with a system of financial phantasmagoria. The collison of the world of desires with everyday reality was inevitable, and as is usual in such cases, painful.

  It is worthwhile now to ponder in what way, in what places, and in what social framework the speculation in tulip bulbs took place. The answer closest to the truth would be: on the margin of normal economic life, in its dark corners, so to say. Several times we have mentioned the stock market, but this should not be taken literally. There never was and there could not be an official tulip stock market, because this institution assumes openness, admits a limited number of those authorized to take part, and the results of transactions are announced to all who are interested.