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Title: The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century
Two Lectures delivered at the London Institution February
4th and 11th, 1884
Author: John Ruskin
Release Date: December 28, 2006 [EBook #20204]
Language: English
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Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Suzan Flanagan and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
THE COMPLETE WORKS
OF
JOHN RUSKIN
VOLUME XXIV
OUR FATHERS HAVE TOLD US
STORM-CLOUD OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
HORTUS INCLUSUS
----------------------------------------------------------------------
THE STORM-CLOUD OF THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY.
TWO LECTURES
DELIVERED AT THE LONDON INSTITUTION
FEBRUARY 4TH AND 11TH, 1884.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS.
PAGE
PREFACE iii
LECTURE I. (FEBRUARY 4) 1
LECTURE II. (FEBRUARY 11) 31
----------------------------------------------------------------------
PREFACE.
The following lectures, drawn up under the pressure of more
imperative and quite otherwise directed work, contain many passages
which stand in need of support, and some, I do not doubt, more or
less of correction, which I always prefer to receive openly from
the better knowledge of friends, after setting down my own
impressions of the matter in clearness as far as they reach, than
to guard myself against by submitting my manuscript, before
publication, to annotators whose stricture or suggestion I might
often feel pain in refusing, yet hesitation in admitting.
But though thus hastily, and to some extent incautiously, thrown
into form, the statements in the text are founded on patient and,
in all essential particulars, accurately recorded observations of
the sky, during fifty years of a life of solitude and leisure; and
in all they contain of what may seem to the reader questionable, or
astonishing, are guardedly and absolutely true.
In many of the reports given by the daily press, my assertion of
radical change, during recent years, in weather aspect was scouted
as imaginary, or insane. I am indeed, every day of my yet spared
life, more and more grateful that my mind is capable of imaginative
vision, and liable to the noble dangers of delusion which separate
the speculative intellect of humanity from the dreamless instinct
of brutes: but I have been able, during all active work, to use or
refuse my power of contemplative imagination, with as easy command
of it as a physicist's of his telescope: the times of morbid are
just as easily distinguished by me from those of healthy vision, as
by men of ordinary faculty, dream from waking; nor is there a
single fact stated in the following pages which I have not
verified with a chemist's analysis, and a geometer's precision.
The first lecture is printed, with only addition here and there of
an elucidatory word or phrase, precisely as it was given on the 4th
February. In repeating it on the 11th, I amplified several
passages, and substituted for the concluding one, which had been
printed with accuracy in most of the leading journals, some
observations which I thought calculated to be of more general
interest. To these, with the additions in the first text, I have
now prefixed a few explanatory notes, to which numeral references
are given in the pages they explain, and have arranged the
fragments in connection clear enough to allow of their being read
with ease as a second Lecture.
HERNE HILL, _12th March, 1884_.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
THE STORM-CLOUD OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
THE STORM-CLOUD OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Let me first assure my audience that I have no _arrière pensée_ in
the title chosen for this lecture. I might, indeed, have meant, and
it would have been only too like me to mean, any number of things
by such a title;--but, to-night, I mean simply what I have said,
and propose to bring to your notice a series of cloud phenomena,
which, so far as I can weigh existing evidence, are peculiar to our
own times; yet which have not hitherto received any special notice
or description from meteorologists.
So far as the existing evidence, I say, of former literature can be
interpreted, the storm-cloud--or more accurately plague-cloud, for
it is not always stormy--which I am about to describe to you, never
was seen but by now living, or _lately_ living eyes. It is not yet
twenty years that this--I may well call it, wonderful, cloud has
been, in its essence, recognizable. There is no description of it,
so far as I have read, by any ancient observer. Neither Homer nor
Virgil, neither Aristophanes nor Horace, acknowledge any such
clouds among those compelled by Jove. Chaucer has no word of them,
nor Dante;[1] Milton none, nor Thomson. In modern times, Scott,
Wordsworth and Byron are alike unconscious of them; and the most
observant and descriptive of scientific men, De Saussure, is
utterly silent concerning them. Taking up the traditions of air
from the year before Scott's death, I am able, by my own constant
and close observation, to certify you that in the forty following
years (1831 to 1871 approximately--for the phenomena in question
came on gradually)--no such clouds as these are, and are now often
for months without intermission, were ever seen in the skies of
England, France, or Italy.
In those old days, when weather was fine, it was luxuriously fine;
when it was bad--it was often abominably bad, but it had its fit of
temper and was done with it--it didn't sulk for three months
without letting you see the sun,--nor send you one cyclone inside
out, every Saturday afternoon, and another outside in, every Monday
morning.
In fine weather the sky was either blue or clear in its light; the
clouds, either white or golden, adding to, not abating, the luster
of the sky. In wet weather, there were two different species of
clouds,--those of beneficent rain, which for distinction's sake I
will call the non-electric rain-cloud, and those of storm, usually
charged highly with electricity. The beneficent rain-cloud was
indeed often extremely dull and gray for days together, but
gracious nevertheless, felt to be doing good, and often to be
delightful after drought; capable also of the most exquisite
coloring, under certain conditions;[2] and continually traversed in
clearing by the rainbow:--and, secondly, the storm-cloud, always
majestic, often dazzlingly beautiful, and felt also to be
beneficent in its own way, affecting the mass of the air with vital
agitation, and purging it from the impurity of all morbific
elements.
In the entire system of the Firmament, thus seen and understood,
there appeared to be, to all the thinkers of those ages, the
incontrovertible and unmistakable evidence of a Divine Power in
creation, which had fitted, as the air for human breath, so the
clouds for human sight and nourishment;--the Father who was in
heaven feeding day by day the souls of His children with marvels,
and satisfying them with bread, and so filling their hearts with
food and gladness.
Their _hearts_, you will observe, it is said, not merely their
bellies,--or indeed not at all, in this sense, their bellies--but
the heart itself, with its blood for this life, and its faith for
the next. The opposition between this idea and the notions of our
own time may be more accurately expressed by modification of the
Greek than of the English sentence. The old Greek is--
[Greek: empiplôn trophês kai euphrosynês
tas kardias hêmôn.]
filling with meat, and cheerfulness, our hearts. The modern Greek
should be--
[Greek: empiplôn anemou kai aphrosynês
tas gasteras hêmôn.]
filling with wind, and foolishness, our stomachs.
You will not think I waste your time in giving you two cardinal
examples of the sort of evidence which the higher forms of
literature furnish respecting the cloud-phenomena of former times.
When, in the close of my lecture on landscape last year at Oxford,
I spoke of stationary clouds as distinguished from passing ones,
some blockheads wrote to the papers to say that clouds never were
stationary. Those foolish letters were so far useful in causing a
friend to write me the pretty one I am about to read to you,
quoting a passage about clouds in Homer which I had myself never
noticed, though perhaps the most beautiful of its kind in the
Iliad. In the fifth book, after the truce is broken, and the
aggressor Trojans are rushing to the onset in a tumult of clamor
and charge, Homer says that the Greeks, abiding them "stood like
clouds." My correspondent, giving the passage, writes as follows:--
"SIR,--Last winter when I was at Ajaccio, I was one day reading
Homer by the open window, and came upon the lines--
[Greek: All' emenon, nephelêsin eoikotes has te Kroniôn
Nênemiês estêsen ep' akropoloisin oressin,
Atremas, ophr' heudêsi menos Boreao kai allôn
Zachreiôn anemôn, hoite nephea skioenta
Pnoiêsin lygyrêsi diaskidnasin aentes;
Hôs Danaoi Trôas menon empedon, oud' ephebonto.]
'But they stood, like the clouds which the Son of Kronos stablishes
in calm upon the mountains, motionless, when the rage of the North
and of all the fiery winds is asleep.' As I finished these lines, I
raised my eyes, and looking across the gulf, saw a long line of
clouds resting on the top of its hills. The day was windless, and
there they stayed, hour after hour, without any stir or motion. I
remember how I was delighted at the time, and have often since that
day thought on the beauty and the truthfulness of Homer's simile.
"Perhaps this little fact may interest you, at a time when you are
attacked for your description of clouds.
"I am, sir, yours faithfully,
G. B. HILL."
With this bit of noonday from Homer, I will read you a sunset and a
sunrise from Byron. That will enough express to you the scope and
sweep of all glorious literature, from the orient of Greece herself
to the death of the last Englishman who loved her.[3] I will read
you from 'Sardanapalus' the address of the Chaldean priest Beleses
to the sunset, and of the Greek slave, Myrrha, to the morning.
"The sun goes down: methinks he sets more slowly,
Taking his last look of Assyria's empire.
How red he glares amongst those deepening clouds,[4]
Like the blood he predicts.[5] If not in vain,
Thou sun that sinkest, and ye stars which rise,
I have outwatch'd ye, reading ray by ray
The edicts of your orbs, which make Time tremble
For what he brings the nations, 't is the furthest
Hour of Assyria's years. And yet how calm!
An earthquake should announce so great a fall--
A summer's sun discloses it. Yon disk
To the star-read Chaldean, bears upon
Its everlasting page the end of what
Seem'd everlasting; but oh! thou TRUE sun!
_The burning oracle of all that live_,
_As fountain of all life_, and _symbol of
Him who bestows it_, wherefore dost thou limit
Thy lore unto calamity?[6] Why not
Unfold the rise of days more worthy thine
All-glorious burst from ocean? why not dart
A beam of hope athwart the future years,
As of wrath to its days? Hear me! oh, hear me!
I am thy worshiper, thy priest, thy servant--
I have gazed on thee at thy rise and fall,
And bow'd my head beneath thy mid-day beams,
When my eye dared not meet thee. I have watch'd
For thee, and after thee, and pray'd to thee,
And sacrificed to thee, and read, and fear'd thee,
And ask'd of thee, and thou hast answer'd--but
Only to thus much. While I speak, he sinks--
Is gone--and leaves his beauty, not his knowledge,
To the delighted west, which revels in
Its hues of dying glory. Yet what is
Death, so it be but glorious? 'T is a sunset;
And mortals may be happy to resemble
The gods but in decay."
Thus the Chaldean priest, to the brightness of the setting sun.
Hear now the Greek girl, Myrrha, of his rising.
"The day at last has broken. What a night
Hath usher'd it! How beautiful in heaven!
Though varied with a transitory storm,
More beautiful in that variety:[7]
How hideous upon earth! where peace, and hope,
And love, and revel, in an hour were trampled
By human passions to a human chaos,
Not yet resolved to separate elements:--
'T is warring still! And can the sun so rise,
So bright, so rolling back the clouds into
_Vapors more lovely than the unclouded sky_,
With golden pinnacles, and snowy mountains,
And billows purpler than the ocean's, making
In heaven a glorious mockery of the earth,
So like,--we almost deem it permanent;
So fleeting,--we can scarcely call it aught
Beyond a vision, 't is so transiently
Scatter'd along the eternal vault: and yet
It dwells upon the soul, and soothes the soul,
And blends itself into the soul, until
Sunrise and sunset form the haunted epoch
Of sorrow and of love."
How often _now_--young maids of London,--do you make _sunrise_ the
'haunted epoch' of either?
Thus much, then, of the skies that used to be, and clouds "more
lovely than the unclouded sky," and of the temper of their
observers. I pass to the account of clouds that _are_, and--I say
it with sorrow--of the _dis_temper of _their_ observers.
But the general division which I have instituted between
bad-weather and fair-weather clouds must be more carefully carried
out in the sub-species, before we can reason of it farther: and
before we begin talk either of the sub-genera and sub-species, or
super-genera and super-species of cloud, perhaps we had better
define what _every_ cloud is, and must be, to begin with.
Every cloud that can be, is thus primarily definable: "Visible
vapor of water floating at a certain height in the air." The second
clause of this definition, you see, at once implies that there is
such a thing as visible vapor of water which does _not_ float at a
certain height in the air. You are all familiar with one extremely
cognizable variety of that sort of vapor--London Particular; but
that especial blessing of metropolitan society is only a
strongly-developed and highly-seasoned condition of a form of
watery vapor which exists just as generally and widely at the
bottom of the air, as the clouds do--on what, for convenience'
sake, we may call the top of it;--only as yet, thanks to the
sagacity of scientific men, we have got no general name for the
bottom cloud, though the whole question of cloud nature begins in
this broad fact, that you have one kind of vapor that lies to a
certain depth on the ground, and another that floats at a certain
height in the sky. Perfectly definite, in both cases, the surface
level of the earthly vapor, and the roof level of the heavenly
vapor, are each of them drawn within the depth of a fathom. Under
_their_ line, drawn for the day and for the hour, the clouds will
not stoop, and above _theirs,_ the mists will not rise. Each in
their own region, high or deep, may expatiate at their pleasure;
within that, they climb, or decline,--within that they congeal or
melt away; but below their assigned horizon the surges of the cloud
sea may not sink, and the floods of the mist lagoon may not be
swollen.
That is the first idea you have to get well into your minds
concerning the abodes of this visible vapor; next, you have to
consider the manner of its visibility. Is it, you have to ask, with
cloud vapor, as with most other things, that they are seen when
they are there, and not seen when they are not there? or has cloud
vapor so much of the ghost in it, that it can be visible or
invisible as it likes, and may perhaps be all unpleasantly and
malignantly there, just as much when we don't see it, as when we
do? To which I answer, comfortably and generally, that, on the
whole, a cloud is where you see it, and isn't where you don't;
that, when there's an evident and honest thundercloud in the
northeast, you needn't suppose there's a surreptitious and slinking
one in the northwest;--when there's a visible fog at Bermondsey, it
doesn't follow there's a spiritual one, more than usual, at the
West End: and when you get up to the clouds, and can walk into them
or out of them, as you like, you find when you're in them they wet
your whiskers, or take out your curls, and when you're out of them,
they don't; and therefore you may with probability assume--not with
certainty, observe, but with probability--that there's more water
in the air where it damps your curls than where it doesn't. If it
gets much denser than that, it will begin to rain; and then you
may assert, certainly with safety, that there is a shower in one
place, and not in another; and not allow the scientific people to
tell you that the rain is everywhere, but palpable in Tooley
Street, and impalpable in Grosvenor Square.
That, I say, is broadly and comfortably so on the whole,--and yet
with this kind of qualification and farther condition in the
matter. If you watch the steam coming strongly out of an
engine-funnel,[8]--at the top of the funnel it is transparent,--you
can't see it, though it is more densely and intensely there
than anywhere else. Six inches out of the funnel it becomes
snow-white,--you see it, and you see it, observe, exactly where it
is,--it is then a real and proper cloud. Twenty yards off the
funnel it scatters and melts away; a little of it sprinkles you
with rain if you are underneath it, but the rest disappears; yet it
is still there;--the surrounding air does not absorb it all into
space in a moment; there is a gradually diffusing current of
invisible moisture at the end of the visible stream--an invisible,
yet quite substantial, vapor; but not, according to our definition,
a cloud, for a cloud is vapor _visible_.
Then the next bit of the question, of course, is, What makes the
vapor visible, when it is so? Why is the compressed steam
transparent, the loose steam white, the dissolved steam transparent
again?
The scientific people tell you that the vapor becomes visible, and
chilled, as it expands. Many thanks to them; but can they show us
any reason why particles of water should be more opaque when they
are separated than when they are close together, or give us any
idea of the difference of the state of a particle of water, which
won't _sink_ in the air, from that of one that won't _rise_ in
it?[9]
And here I must parenthetically give you a little word of, I will
venture to say, extremely useful, advice about scientific people in
general. Their first business is, of course, to tell you things
that are so, and do happen,--as that, if you warm water, it will
boil; if you cool it, it will freeze; and if you put a candle to a
cask of gunpowder, it will blow you up. Their second, and far more
important business, is to tell you what you had best do under the
circumstances,--put the kettle on in time for tea; powder your ice
and salt, if you have a mind for ices; and obviate the chance of
explosion by not making the gunpowder. But if, beyond this safe and
beneficial business, they ever try to _explain_ anything to you,
you may be confident of one of two things,--either that they know
nothing (to speak of) about it, or that they have only seen one
side of it--and not only haven't seen, but usually have no mind to
see, the other. When, for instance, Professor Tyndall explains the
twisted beds of the Jungfrau to you by intimating that the
Matterhorn is growing flat;[10] or the clouds on the lee side of
the Matterhorn by the wind's rubbing against the windward side of
it,[11]--you may be pretty sure the scientific people don't know
much (to speak of) yet, either about rock-beds, or cloud-beds. And
even if the explanation, so to call it, be sound on one side,
windward or lee, you may, as I said, be nearly certain it won't do
on the other. Take the very top and center of scientific
interpretation by the greatest of its masters: Newton explained to
you--or at least was once supposed to have explained--why an apple
fell; but he never thought of explaining the exactly correlative,
but infinitely more difficult question, how the apple got up there!
You will not, therefore, so please you, expect me to explain
anything to you,--I have come solely and simply to put before you a
few facts, which you can't see by candlelight, or in railroad
tunnels, but which are making themselves now so very distinctly
felt as well as seen, that you may perhaps have to roof, if not
wall, half London afresh before we are many years older.
I go back to my point--the way in which clouds, as a matter of
fact, become visible. I have defined the floating or sky cloud, and
defined the falling, or earth cloud. But there's a sort of thing
between the two, which needs a third definition: namely, Mist. In
the 22d page of his 'Glaciers of the Alps,' Professor Tyndall says
that "the marvelous blueness of the sky in the earlier part of the
day indicated that the air was charged, almost to saturation, with
transparent aqueous vapor." Well, in certain weather that is true.
You all know the peculiar clearness which precedes rain,--when the
distant hills are looking nigh. I take it on trust from the
scientific people that there is then a quantity--almost to
saturation--of aqueous vapor in the air, but it is aqueous vapor in
a state which makes the air more transparent than it would be
without it. What state of aqueous molecule is that, absolutely
unreflective[12] of light--perfectly transmissive of light, and
showing at once the color of blue water and blue air on the distant
hills?
I put the question--and pass round to the other side. Such a
clearness, though a certain forerunner of rain, is not always its
forerunner. Far the contrary. Thick air is a much more frequent
forerunner of rain than clear air. In cool weather, you will often
get the transparent prophecy: but in hot weather, or in certain not
hitherto defined states of atmosphere, the forerunner of rain is
mist. In a general way, after you have had two or three days of
rain, the air and sky are healthily clear, and the sun bright. If
it is hot also, the next day is a little mistier--the next misty
and sultry,--and the next and the next, getting thicker and
thicker--end in another storm, or period of rain.
I suppose the thick air, as well as the transparent, is in both
cases saturated with aqueous vapor;--but also in both, observe,
vapor that floats everywhere, as if you mixed mud with the sea; and
it takes no shape anywhere: you may have it with calm, or with
wind, it makes no difference to it. You have a nasty haze with a
bitter east wind, or a nasty haze with not a leaf stirring, and you
may have the clear blue vapor with a fresh rainy breeze, or the
clear blue vapor as still as the sky above. What difference is
there between _these_ aqueous molecules that are clear, and those
that are muddy, _these_ that must sink or rise, and those that must
stay where they are, _these_ that have form and stature, that are
bellied like whales and backed like weasels, and those that have
neither backs nor fronts, nor feet nor faces, but are a mist--and
no more--over two or three thousand square miles?
I again leave the questions with you, and pass on.
Hitherto I have spoken of all aqueous vapor as if it were either
transparent or white--visible by becoming opaque like snow, but not
by any accession of color. But even those of us who are least
observant of skies, know that, irrespective of all supervening
colors from the sun, there are white clouds, brown clouds, gray
clouds, and black clouds. Are these indeed--what they appear to
be--entirely distinct monastic disciplines of cloud: Black Friars,
and White Friars, and Friars of Orders Gray? Or is it only their
various nearness to us, their denseness, and the failing of the
light upon them, that makes some clouds look black[13] and others
snowy?
I can only give you qualified and cautious answer. There are, by
differences in their own character, Dominican clouds, and there are
Franciscan;--there are the Black Hussars of the Bandiera della
Morte, and there are the Scots Grays whose horses can run upon the
rock. But if you ask me, as I would have you ask me, why argent and
why sable, how baptized in white like a bride or a novice, and how
hooded with blackness like a Judge of the Vehmgericht Tribunal,--I
leave these questions with you, and pass on.
Admitting degrees of darkness, we have next to ask what color, from
sunshine can the white cloud receive, and what the black?
You won't expect me to tell you all that, or even the little that
is accurately known about that, in a quarter of an hour; yet note
these main facts on the matter.
On any pure white, and practically opaque, cloud, or thing like a
cloud, as an Alp, or Milan Cathedral, you can have cast by rising
or setting sunlight, any tints of amber, orange, or moderately deep
rose--you can't have lemon yellows, or any kind of green except in
negative hue by opposition; and though by stormlight you may
sometimes get the reds cast very deep, beyond a certain limit you
cannot go,--the Alps are never vermilion color, nor flamingo
color, nor canary color; nor did you ever see a full scarlet
cumulus of thundercloud.
On opaque white vapor, then, remember, you can get a glow or a
blush of color, never a flame of it.
But when the cloud is transparent as well as pure, and can be
filled with light through all the body of it, you then can have by
the light reflected[14] from its atoms any force conceivable by
human mind of the entire group of the golden and ruby colors, from
intensely burnished gold color, through a scarlet for whose
brightness there are no words, into any depth and any hue of Tyrian
crimson and Byzantine purple. These with full blue breathed between
them at the zenith, and green blue nearer the horizon, form the
scales and chords of color possible to the morning and evening sky
in pure and fine weather; the keynote of the opposition being
vermilion against green blue, both of equal tone, and at such a
height and acme of brilliancy that you cannot see the line where
their edges pass into each other.
No colors that can be fixed in earth can ever represent to you the
luster of these cloudy ones. But the actual tints may be shown you
in a lower key, and to a certain extent their power and relation to
each other.
I have painted the diagram here shown you with colors prepared for
me lately by Messrs. Newman, which I find brilliant to the height
that pigments can be; and the ready kindness of Mr. Wilson Barrett
enables me to show you their effect by a white light as pure as
that of the day. The diagram is enlarged from my careful sketch of
the sunset of 1st October, 1868, at Abbeville, which was a
beautiful example of what, in fine weather about to pass into
storm, a sunset could then be, in the districts of Kent and Picardy
unaffected by smoke. In reality, the ruby and vermilion clouds
were, by myriads, more numerous than I have had time to paint: but
the general character of their grouping is well enough expressed.
All the illumined clouds are high in the air, and nearly
motionless; beneath them, electric storm-cloud rises in a
threatening cumulus on the right, and drifts in dark flakes across
the horizon, casting from its broken masses radiating shadows on
the upper clouds. These shadows are traced, in the first place by
making the misty blue of the open sky more transparent, and
therefore darker; and secondly, by entirely intercepting the
sunbeams on the bars of cloud, which, within the shadowed spaces,
show dark on the blue instead of light.
But, mind, all that is done by reflected light--and in that light
you never get a _green_ ray from the reflecting cloud; there is no
such thing in nature as a green lighted cloud relieved from a red
sky,--the cloud is always red, and the sky green, and green,
observe, by transmitted, not reflected light.
But now note, there is another kind of cloud, pure white, and
exquisitely delicate; which acts not by reflecting, nor by
refracting, but, as it is now called, _dif_fracting, the sun's
rays. The particles of this cloud are said--with what truth I know
not[15]--to send the sunbeams round them instead of through them;
somehow or other, at any rate, they resolve them into their
prismatic elements; and then you have literally a kaleidoscope in
the sky, with every color of the prism in absolute purity; but
above all in force, now, the ruby red and the _green_,--with
purple, and violet-blue, in a virtual equality, more definite than
that of the rainbow. The red in the rainbow is mostly brick red,
the violet, though beautiful, often lost at the edge; but in the
prismatic cloud the violet, the green, and the ruby are all more
lovely than in any precious stones, and they are varied as in a
bird's breast, changing their places, depths, and extent at every
instant.
The main cause of this change being, that the prismatic cloud
itself is always in rapid, and generally in fluctuating motion. "A
light veil of clouds had drawn itself," says Professor Tyndall, in
describing his solitary ascent of Monte Rosa, "between me and the
sun, and this was flooded with the most brilliant dyes. Orange,
red, green, blue--all the hues produced by diffraction--were
exhibited in the utmost splendor.
"Three times during my ascent (the short ascent of the last peak)
similar veils drew themselves across the sun, and at each passage
the splendid phenomena were renewed. There seemed a tendency to
form circular zones of color round the sun; but the clouds were not
sufficiently uniform to permit of this, and they were consequently
broken into spaces, each steeped with the color due to the
condition of the cloud at the place."
Three times, you observe, the veil passed, and three times another
came, or the first faded and another formed; and so it is always,
as far as I have registered prismatic cloud: and the most beautiful
colors I ever saw were on those that flew fastest.
This second diagram is enlarged admirably by Mr. Arthur Severn from
my sketch of the sky in the afternoon of the 6th of August, 1880,
at Brantwood, two hours before sunset. You are looking west by
north, straight towards the sun, and nearly straight towards the
wind. From the west the wind blows fiercely towards you out of the
blue sky. Under the blue space is a flattened dome of earth-cloud
clinging to, and altogether masking the form of, the mountain,
known as the Old Man of Coniston.
The top of that dome of cloud is two thousand eight hundred feet
above the sea, the mountain two thousand six hundred, the cloud
lying two hundred feet deep on it. Behind it, westward and seaward,
all's clear; but when the wind out of that blue clearness comes
over the ridge of the earth-cloud, at that moment and that line, its
own moisture congeals into these white--I believe, _ice_-clouds;
threads, and meshes, and tresses, and tapestries, flying, failing,
melting, reappearing; spinning and unspinning themselves, coiling and
uncoiling, winding and unwinding, faster than eye or thought can
follow: and through all their dazzling maze of frosty filaments shines
a painted window in palpitation; its pulses of color interwoven in
motion, intermittent in fire,--emerald and ruby and pale purple and
violet melting into a blue that is not of the sky, but of the
sunbeam;--purer than the crystal, softer than the rainbow, and
brighter than the snow.
But you must please here observe that while my first diagram did
with some adequateness represent to you the color facts there
spoken of, the present diagram can only _explain_, not reproduce
them. The bright reflected colors of clouds _can_ be represented in
painting, because they are relieved against darker colors, or, in
many cases, _are_ dark colors, the vermilion and ruby clouds being
often much darker than the green or blue sky beyond them. But in
the case of the phenomena now under your attention, the colors are
all _brighter than pure white_,--the entire body of the cloud in
which they show themselves being white by transmitted light, so
that I can only show you what the colors are, and where they
are,--but leaving them dark on the white ground. Only artificial,
and very high illumination would give the real effect of
them,--painting cannot.
Enough, however, is here done to fix in your minds the distinction
between those two species of cloud,--one, either stationary,[16] or
slow in motion, _reflecting unresolved_ light; the other,
fast-flying, and _transmitting resolved_ light. What difference is
there in the nature of the atoms, between those two kinds of
clouds? I leave the question with you for to-day, merely hinting to
you my suspicion that the prismatic cloud is of finely-comminuted
water, or ice,[17] instead of aqueous vapor; but the only clue I
have to this idea is in the purity of the rainbow formed in frost
mist, lying close to water surfaces. Such mist, however, only
becomes prismatic as common rain does, when the sun is behind the
spectator, while prismatic clouds are, on the contrary, always
between the spectator and the sun.
The main reason, however, why I can tell you nothing yet about
these colors of diffraction or interference, is that, whenever I
try to find anything firm for you to depend on, I am stopped by the
quite frightful inaccuracy of the scientific people's terms, which
is the consequence of their always trying to write mixed Latin and
English, so losing the grace of the one and the sense of the other.
And, in this point of the diffraction of light I am stopped dead by
their confusion of idea also, in using the words undulation and
vibration as synonyms. "When," says Professor Tyndall, "you are
told that the atoms of the sun _vibrate_ at different rates, and
produce _waves_ of different sizes,--your experience of water-waves
will enable you to form a tolerably clear notion of what is meant."
'Tolerably clear'!--your toleration must be considerable, then. Do
you suppose a water-wave is like a harp-string? Vibration is the
movement of a body in a state of tension,--undulation, that of a
body absolutely lax. In vibration, not an atom of the body changes
its place in relation to another,--in undulation, not an atom of
the body remains in the same place with regard to another. In
vibration, every particle of the body ignores gravitation, or
defies it,--in undulation, every particle of the body is slavishly
submitted to it. In undulation, not one wave is like another; in
vibration, every pulse is alike. And of undulation itself, there
are all manner of visible conditions, which are not true
conditions. A flag ripples in the wind, but it does not undulate as
the sea does,--for in the sea, the water is taken from the trough
to put on to the ridge, but in the flag, though the motion is
progressive, the bits of bunting keep their place. You see a field
of corn undulating as if it was water,--it is different from the
flag, for the ears of corn bow out of their places and return to
them,--and yet, it is no more like the undulation of the sea, than
the shaking of an aspen leaf in a storm, or the lowering of the
lances in a battle.
And the best of the jest is, that after mixing up these two notions
in their heads inextricably, the scientific people apply both when
neither will fit; and when all undulation known to us presumes
weight, and all vibration, impact,--the undulating theory of light
is proposed to you concerning a medium which you can neither weigh
nor touch!
All _communicable_ vibration--of course I mean--and in dead matter:
_You_ may fall a shivering on your own account, if you like, but
you can't get a billiard-ball to fall a shivering on _its_ own
account.[18]
Yet observe that in thus signalizing the inaccuracy of the terms in
which they are taught, I neither accept, nor assail, the
conclusions respecting the oscillatory states of light, heat, and
sound, which have resulted from the postulate of an elastic, though
impalpable and imponderable ether, possessing the elasticity of
air. This only I desire you to mark with attention,--that both
light and sound are _sensations_ of the animal frame, which remain,
and must remain, wholly inexplicable, whatever manner of force,
pulse, or palpitation may be instrumental in producing them: nor
does any such force _become_ light or sound, except in its
rencontre with an animal. The leaf hears no murmur in the wind to
which it wavers on the branches, nor can the clay discern the
vibration by which it is thrilled into a ruby. The Eye and the Ear
are the creators alike of the ray and the tone; and the conclusion
follows logically from the right conception of their living
power,--"He that planted the Ear, shall He not hear? He that formed
the Eye, shall not He see?"
For security, therefore, and simplicity of definition of light, you
will find no possibility of advancing beyond Plato's "the power
that through the eye manifests color," but on that definition, you
will find, alike by Plato and all great subsequent thinkers, a
_moral_ Science of Light founded, far and away more important to
you than all the physical laws ever learned by vitreous revelation.
Concerning which I will refer you to the sixth lecture which I gave
at Oxford in 1872, on the relation of Art to the Science of Light
('The Eagle's Nest'), reading now only the sentence introducing its
subject:--"The 'Fiat lux' of creation is therefore, in the deep
sense, 'fiat anima,' and is as much, when you understand it, the
ordering of Intelligence as the ordering of Vision. It is the
appointment of change of what had been else only a mechanical
effluence from things unseen to things unseeing,--from Stars, that
did not shine, to Earth, that did not perceive,--the change, I say,
of that blind vibration into the glory of the Sun and Moon for
human eyes: so making possible the communication out of the
unfathomable truth of that portion of truth which is good for us,
and animating to us, and is set to rule over the day and over the
night of our joy and our sorrow."
Returning now to our subject at the point from which I permitted
myself, I trust not without your pardon, to diverge; you may
incidentally, but carefully, observe, that the effect of such a sky
as that represented in the second diagram, so far as it can be
abstracted or conveyed by painting at all, implies the total
absence of any pervading warmth of tint, such as artists usually
call 'tone.' Every tint must be the purest possible, and above all
the white. Partly, lest you should think, from my treatment of
these two phases of effect, that I am insensible to the quality of
tone,--and partly to complete the representation of states of
weather undefiled by plague-cloud, yet capable of the most solemn
dignity in saddening color, I show you, Diagram 3, the record of an
autumn twilight of the year 1845,--sketched while I was changing
horses between Verona and Brescia. The distant sky in this drawing
is in the glowing calm which is always taken by the great Italian
painters for the background of their sacred pictures; a broad field
of cloud is advancing upon it overhead, and meeting others
enlarging in the distance; these are rain-clouds, which will
certainly close over the clear sky, and bring on rain before
midnight: but there is no power in them to pollute the sky beyond
and above them: they do not darken the air, nor defile it, nor in
any way mingle with it; their edges are burnished by the sun like
the edges of golden shields, and their advancing march is as
deliberate and majestic as the fading of the twilight itself into a
darkness full of stars.
These three instances are all I have time to give of the former
conditions of serene weather, and of non-electric rain-cloud. But I
must yet, to complete the sequence of my subject, show you one
example of a good, old-fashioned, healthy, and mighty, storm.
In Diagram 4, Mr. Severn has beautifully enlarged my sketch of a
July thundercloud of the year 1858, on the Alps of the Val
d'Aosta, seen from Turin, that is to say, some twenty-five or
thirty miles distant. You see that no mistake is possible here
about what is good weather and what bad, or which is cloud and
which is sky; but I show you this sketch especially to give you the
scale of heights for such clouds in the atmosphere. These thunder
cumuli entirely _hide_ the higher Alps. It does not, however,
follow that they have buried them, for most of their own aspect of
height is owing to the approach of their nearer masses; but at all
events, you have cumulus there rising from its base, at about three
thousand feet above the plain, to a good ten thousand in the air.
White cirri, in reality parallel, but by perspective radiating,
catch the sunshine above, at a height of from fifteen to twenty
thousand feet; but the storm on the mountains gathers itself into a
full mile's depth of massy cloud, every fold of it involved with
thunder, but every form of it, every action, every color,
magnificent:--doing its mighty work in its own hour and its own
dominion, nor snatching from you for an instant, nor defiling with
a stain, the abiding blue of the transcendent sky, or the fretted
silver of its passionless clouds.
We so rarely now see cumulus cloud of this grand kind, that I will
yet delay you by reading the description of its nearer aspect, in
the 'Eagle's Nest.'
"The rain which flooded our fields the Sunday before last, was
followed, as you will remember, by bright days, of which Tuesday
the 20th (February, 1872) was, in London, notable for the splendor,
towards the afternoon, of its white cumulus clouds. There has been
so much black east wind lately, and so much fog and artificial
gloom, besides, that I find it is actually some two years since I
last saw a noble cumulus cloud under full light. I chanced to be
standing under the Victoria Tower at Westminster, when the largest
mass of them floated past, that day, from the northwest; and I was
more impressed than ever yet by the awfulness of the cloud-form,
and its unaccountableness, in the present state of our knowledge.
The Victoria Tower, seen against it, had no magnitude: it was like
looking at Mont Blanc over a lamp-post. The domes of cloud-snow
were heaped as definitely: their broken flanks were as gray and
firm as rocks, and the whole mountain, of a compass and height in
heaven which only became more and more inconceivable as the eye
strove to ascend it, was passing behind the tower with a steady
march, whose swiftness must in reality have been that of a tempest:
yet, along all the ravines of vapor, precipice kept pace with
precipice, and not one thrust another.
"What is it that hews them out? Why is the blue sky pure
there,--the cloud solid here; and edged like marble: and why does
the state of the blue sky pass into the state of cloud, in that
calm advance?
"It is true that you can more or less imitate the forms of cloud
with explosive vapor or steam; but the steam melts instantly, and
the explosive vapor dissipates itself. The cloud, of perfect form,
proceeds unchanged. It is not an explosion, but an enduring and
advancing presence. The more you think of it, the less explicable
it will become to you."
Thus far then of clouds that were once familiar; now at last,
entering on my immediate subject, I shall best introduce it to you
by reading an entry in my diary which gives progressive description
of the most gentle aspect of the modern plague-cloud.
"_Bolton Abbey, 4th July, 1875._
Half-past eight, morning; the first bright morning for the last
fortnight.
At half-past five it was entirely clear, and entirely calm; the
moorlands glowing, and the Wharfe glittering in sacred light, and
even the thin-stemmed field-flowers quiet as stars, in the peace in
which--
'All trees and simples, great and small,
That balmy leaf do bear,
Than they were painted on a wall,
No more do move, nor steir.'
But, an hour ago, the leaves at my window first shook slightly.
They are now trembling _continuously_, as those of all the trees,
under a gradually rising wind, of which the tremulous action
scarcely permits the direction to be defined,--but which falls and
returns in fits of varying force, like those which precede a
thunderstorm--never wholly ceasing: the direction of its upper
current is shown by a few ragged white clouds, moving fast from the
north, which rose, at the time of the first leaf-shaking, behind
the edge of the moors in the east.
This wind is the plague-wind of the eighth decade of years in the
nineteenth century; a period which will assuredly be recognized in
future meteorological history as one of phenomena hitherto unrecorded
in the courses of nature, and characterized pre-eminently by the
almost ceaseless action of this calamitous wind. While I have been
writing these sentences, the white clouds above specified have
increased to twice the size they had when I began to write; and in
about two hours from this time--say by eleven o'clock, if the wind
continue,--the whole sky will be dark with them, as it was yesterday,
and has been through prolonged periods during the last five years. I
first noticed the definite character of this wind, and of the clouds
it brings with it, in the year 1871, describing it then in the July
number of 'Fors Clavigera'; but little, at that time, apprehending
either its universality, or any probability of its annual continuance.
I am able now to state positively that its range of power extends from
the North of England to Sicily; and that it blows more or less during
the whole of the year, except the early autumn. This autumnal
abdication is, I hope, beginning: it blew but feebly yesterday, though
without intermission, from the north, making every shady place cold,
while the sun was burning; its effect on the sky being only to dim the
blue of it between masses of ragged cumulus. To-day it has entirely
fallen; and there seems hope of bright weather, the first for me since
the end of May, when I had two fine days at Aylesbury; the third,
May 28th, being black again from morning to evening. There seems to be
some reference to the blackness caused by the prevalence of this wind
in the old French name of Bise, '_gray_ wind'; and, indeed, one of the
darkest and bitterest days of it I ever saw was at Vevay in 1872."
* * * * *
The first time I recognized the clouds brought by the plague-wind
as distinct in character was in walking back from Oxford, after a
hard day's work, to Abingdon, in the early spring of 1871: it would
take too long to give you any account this evening of the
particulars which drew my attention to them; but during the
following months I had too frequent opportunities of verifying my
first thoughts of them, and on the first of July in that year wrote
the description of them which begins the 'Fors Clavigera' of
August, thus:--
"It is the first of July, and I sit down to write by the dismalest
light that ever yet I wrote by; namely, the light of this midsummer
morning, in mid-England, (Matlock, Derbyshire), in the year 1871.
"For the sky is covered with gray cloud;--not rain-cloud, but a dry
black veil, which no ray of sunshine can pierce; partly diffused in
mist, feeble mist, enough to make distant objects unintelligible,
yet without any substance, or wreathing, or color of its own. And
everywhere the leaves of the trees are shaking fitfully, as they do
before a thunder-storm; only not violently, but enough to show the
passing to and fro of a strange, bitter, blighting wind. Dismal
enough, had it been the first morning of its kind that summer had
sent. But during all this spring, in London, and at Oxford, through
meager March, through changelessly sullen April, through
despondent May, and darkened June, morning after morning has
come gray-shrouded thus.
"And it is a new thing to me, and a very dreadful one. I am fifty
years old, and more; and since I was five, have gleaned the best
hours of my life in the sun of spring and summer mornings; and I
never saw such as these, till now.
"And the scientific men are busy as ants, examining the sun, and
the moon, and the seven stars, and can tell me all about _them_, I
believe, by this time; and how they move, and what they are made
of.
"And I do not care, for my part, two copper spangles how they move,
nor what they are made of. I can't move them any other way than
they go, nor make them of anything else, better than they are made.
But I would care much and give much, if I could be told where this
bitter wind comes from, and what _it_ is made of.
"For, perhaps, with forethought, and fine laboratory science, one
might make it of something else.
"It looks partly as if it were made of poisonous smoke; very
possibly it may be: there are at least two hundred furnace chimneys
in a square of two miles on every side of me. But mere smoke would
not blow to and fro in that wild way. It looks more to me as if it
were made of dead men's souls--such of them as are not gone yet
where they have to go, and may be flitting hither and thither,
doubting, themselves, of the fittest place for them.
"You know, if there _are_ such things as souls, and if ever any of
them haunt places where they have been hurt, there must be many
about us, just now, displeased enough!"
The last sentence refers of course to the battles of the
Franco-German campaign, which was especially horrible to me, in its
digging, as the Germans should have known, a moat flooded with
waters of death between the two nations for a century to come.
Since that Midsummer day, my attention, however otherwise occupied,
has never relaxed in its record of the phenomena characteristic of
the plague-wind; and I now define for you, as briefly as possible,
the essential signs of it.
1. It is a wind of darkness,--all the former conditions of
tormenting winds, whether from the north or east were more or less
capable of co-existing with sunlight, and often with steady and
bright sunlight; but whenever, and wherever the plague-wind blows,
be it but for ten minutes, the sky is darkened instantly.
2. It is a malignant _quality_ of wind, unconnected with any one
quarter of the compass; it blows indifferently from all, attaching
its own bitterness and malice to the worst characters of the proper
winds of each quarter. It will blow either with drenching rain, or
dry rage, from the south,--with ruinous blasts from the west,--with
bitterest chills from the north,--and with venomous blight from the
east.
Its own favorite quarter, however, is the southwest, so that it is
distinguished in its malignity equally from the Bise of Provence,
which is a north wind always, and from our own old friend, the
east.
3. It always blows _tremulously_, making the leaves of the trees
shudder as if they were all aspens, but with a peculiar fitfulness
which gives them--and I watch them this moment as I write--an
expression of anger as well as of fear and distress. You may see
the kind of quivering, and hear the ominous whimpering, in the
gusts that precede a great thunderstorm; but plague-wind is more
panic-struck, and feverish; and its sound is a hiss instead of a
wail.
When I was last at Avallon, in South France, I went to see 'Faust'
played at the little country theater: it was done with scarcely any
means of pictorial effect, except a few old curtains, and a blue
light or two. But the night on the Brocken was nevertheless
extremely appalling to me,--a strange ghastliness being obtained in
some of the witch scenes merely by fine management of gesture and
drapery; and in the phantom scenes, by the half-palsied,
half-furious, faltering or fluttering past of phantoms stumbling as
into graves; as if of not only soulless, but senseless, Dead,
moving with the very action, the rage, the decrepitude, and the
trembling of the plague-wind.
4. Not only tremulous at every moment, it is also _intermittent_
with a rapidity quite unexampled in former weather. There are,
indeed, days--and weeks, on which it blows without cessation, and
is as inevitable as the Gulf Stream; but also there are days when
it is contending with healthy weather, and on such days it will
remit for half an hour, and the sun will begin to show itself, and
then the wind will come back and cover the whole sky with clouds
in ten minutes; and so on, every half-hour, through the whole day;
so that it is often impossible to go on with any kind of drawing in
color, the light being never for two seconds the same from morning
till evening.
5. It degrades, while it intensifies, ordinary storm; but before I
read you any description of its efforts in this kind, I must
correct an impression which has got abroad through the papers, that
I speak as if the plague-wind blew now always, and there were no
more any natural weather. On the contrary, the winter of 1878-9 was
one of the most healthy and lovely I ever saw ice in;--Coniston
lake shone under the calm clear frost in one marble field, as
strong as the floor of Milan Cathedral, half a mile across and four
miles down; and the first entries in my diary which I read you
shall be from the 22d to 26th June, 1876, of perfectly lovely and
natural weather.
"_Sunday, 25th June, 1876._
Yesterday, an entirely glorious sunset, unmatched in beauty since
that at Abbeville,--deep scarlet, and purest rose, on purple gray,
in bars; and stationary, plumy, sweeping filaments above in upper
sky, like '_using up the brush_,' said Joanie; remaining in glory,
every moment best, changing from one good into another, (but only
in color or light--_form steady_,) for half an hour full, and the
clouds afterwards fading into the gray against amber twilight,
_stationary in the same form for about two hours_, at least. The
darkening rose tint remained till half-past ten, the grand time
being at nine.
The day had been fine,--exquisite green light on afternoon hills.
_Monday, 26th June, 1876._
Yesterday an entirely perfect summer light on the Old Man;
Lancaster Bay all clear; Ingleborough and the great Pennine fault
as on a map. Divine beauty of western color on thyme and
rose,--then twilight of clearest _warm_ amber far into night, of
_pale_ amber all night long; hills dark-clear against it.
And so it continued, only growing more intense in blue and
sunlight, all day. After breakfast, I came in from the well under
strawberry bed, to say I had never seen anything like it, so pure
or intense, in Italy; and so it went glowing on, cloudless, with
soft north wind, all day.
_16th July._
The sunset almost too bright _through the blinds_ for me to read
Humboldt at tea by,--finally, new moon like a lime-light, reflected
on breeze-struck water; traces, across dark calm, of reflected
hills."
These extracts are, I hope, enough to guard you against the
absurdity of supposing that it all only means that I am myself
soured, or doting, in my old age, and always in an ill humor.
Depend upon it, when old men are worth anything, they are better
humored than young ones; and have learned to see what good there
is, and pleasantness, in the world they are likely so soon to have
orders to quit.
Now then--take the following sequences of accurate description of
thunderstorm, _with_ plague-wind.
_"22d June, 1876._
Thunderstorm; pitch dark, with no _blackness_,--but deep, high,
_filthiness_ of lurid, yet not sublimely lurid, smoke-cloud; dense
manufacturing mist; fearful squalls of shivery wind, making Mr.
Severn's sail quiver like a man in a fever fit--all about four,
afternoon--but only two or three claps of thunder, and feeble,
though near, flashes. I never saw such a dirty, weak, foul storm.
It cleared suddenly, after raining all afternoon, at half-past
eight to nine, into pure, natural weather,--low rain-clouds on
quite clear, green, wet hills.
_Brantwood, 13th August, 1879._
The most terrific and horrible thunderstorm, this morning, I ever
remember. It waked me at six, or a little before--then rolling
incessantly, like railway luggage trains, quite ghastly in its
mockery of them--the air one loathsome mass of sultry and foul fog,
like smoke; scarcely raining at all, but increasing to heavier
rollings, with flashes quivering vaguely through all the air, and
at last terrific double streams of reddish-violet fire, not forked
or zigzag, but rippled rivulets--two at the same instant some
twenty to thirty degrees apart, and lasting on the eye at least
half a second, with grand artillery-peals following; not rattling
crashes, or irregular cracklings, but delivered volleys. It lasted
an hour, then passed off, clearing a little, without rain to speak
of,--not a glimpse of blue,--and now, half-past seven, seems
settling down again into Manchester devil's darkness.
Quarter to eight, morning.--Thunder returned, all the air collapsed
into one black fog, the hills invisible, and scarcely visible the
opposite shore; heavy rain in short fits, and frequent, though less
formidable, flashes, and shorter thunder. While I have written this
sentence the cloud has again dissolved itself, like a nasty
solution in a bottle, with miraculous and unnatural rapidity, and
the hills are in sight again; a double-forked flash--rippled, I
mean, like the others--starts into its frightful ladder of light
between me and Wetherlam, as I raise my eyes. All black above, a
rugged spray cloud on the Eaglet. (The 'Eaglet' is my own name for
the bold and elevated crag to the west of the little lake above
Coniston mines. It had no name among the country people, and is one
of the most conspicuous features of the mountain chain, as seen
from Brantwood.)
Half-past eight.--Three times light and three times dark since last
I wrote, and the darkness seeming each time as it settles more
loathsome, at last stopping my reading in mere blindness. One lurid
gleam of white cumulus in upper lead-blue sky, seen for half a
minute through the sulphurous chimney-pot vomit of blackguardly
cloud beneath, where its rags were thinnest.
_Thursday, 22d Feb. 1883._
Yesterday a fearfully dark mist all afternoon, with steady, south
plague-wind of the bitterest, nastiest, poisonous blight, and
fretful flutter. I could scarcely stay in the wood for the horror
of it. To-day, really rather bright blue, and bright semi-cumuli,
with the frantic Old Man blowing sheaves of lancets and chisels
across the lake--not in strength enough, or whirl enough, to raise
it in spray, but tracing every squall's outline in black on the
silver gray waves, and whistling meanly, and as if on a flute made
of a file.
_Sunday, 17th August, 1879._
Raining in foul drizzle, slow and steady; sky pitch-dark, and I
just get a little light by sitting in the bow-window; diabolic
clouds over everything: and looking over my kitchen garden
yesterday, I found it one miserable mass of weeds gone to seed, the
roses in the higher garden putrefied into brown sponges, feeling
like dead snails; and the half-ripe strawberries all rotten at the
stalks."
6. And now I come to the most important sign of the plague-wind and
the plague-cloud: that in bringing on their peculiar darkness, they
_blanch_ the sun instead of reddening it. And here I must note
briefly to you the uselessness of observation by instruments, or
machines, instead of eyes. In the first year when I had begun to
notice the specialty of the plague-wind, I went of course to the
Oxford observatory to consult its registrars. They have their
anemometer always on the twirl, and can tell you the force, or at
least the pace, of a gale,[19] by day or night. But the anemometer
can only record for you how often it has been driven round, not at
all whether it went round _steadily_, or went round _trembling_.
And on that point depends the entire question whether it is a
plague breeze or a healthy one: and what's the use of telling you
whether the wind's strong or not, when it can't tell you whether
it's a strong medicine, or a strong poison?
But again--you have your _sun_-measure, and can tell exactly at any
moment how strong, or how weak, or how wanting, the sun is. But the
sun-measurer can't tell you whether the rays are stopped by a dense
_shallow_ cloud, or a thin _deep_ one. In healthy weather, the sun
is hidden behind a cloud, as it is behind a tree; and, when the
cloud is past, it comes out again, as bright as before. But in
plague-wind, the sun is choked out of the whole heaven, all day
long, by a cloud which may be a thousand miles square and five
miles deep.
And yet observe: that thin, scraggy, filthy, mangy, miserable
cloud, for all the depth of it, can't turn the sun red, as a good,
business-like fog does with a hundred feet or so of itself. By the
plague-wind every breath of air you draw is polluted, half round
the world; in a London fog the air itself is pure, though you
choose to mix up dirt with it, and choke yourself with your own
nastiness.
Now I'm going to show you a diagram of a sunset in entirely pure
weather, above London smoke. I saw it and sketched it from my old
post of observation--the top garret of my father's house at Herne
Hill. There, when the wind is south, we are outside of the smoke
and above it; and this diagram, admirably enlarged from my own
drawing by my, now in all things best aide-de-camp, Mr.
Collingwood, shows you an old-fashioned sunset--the sort of thing
Turner and I used to have to look at,--(nobody else ever would)
constantly. Every sunset and every dawn, in fine weather, had
something of the sort to show us. This is one of the last pure
sunsets I ever saw, about the year 1876,--and the point I want you
to note in it is, that the air being pure, the smoke on the
horizon, though at last it hides the sun, yet hides it through gold
and vermilion. Now, don't go away fancying there's any exaggeration
in that study. The _prismatic_ colors, I told you, were simply
impossible to paint; these, which are transmitted colors, can
indeed be suggested, but no more. The brightest pigment we have
would look dim beside the truth.
I should have liked to have blotted down for you a bit of
plague-cloud to put beside this; but Heaven knows, you can see
enough of it now-a-days without any trouble of mine; and if you
want, in a hurry, to see what the sun looks like through it, you've
only to throw a bad half-crown into a basin of soap and water.
Blanched Sun,--blighted grass,--blinded man.--If, in conclusion,
you ask me for any conceivable cause or meaning of these things--I
can tell you none, according to your modern beliefs; but I can tell
you what meaning it would have borne to the men of old time.
Remember, for the last twenty years, England, and all foreign
nations, either tempting her, or following her, have blasphemed[20]
the name of God deliberately and openly; and have done iniquity by
proclamation, every man doing as much injustice to his brother as
it is in his power to do. Of states in such moral gloom every seer
of old predicted the physical gloom, saying, "The light shall be
darkened in the heavens thereof, and the stars shall withdraw their
shining." All Greek, all Christian, all Jewish prophecy insists on
the same truth through a thousand myths; but of all the chief, to
former thought, was the fable of the Jewish warrior and prophet,
for whom the sun hasted not to go down, with which I leave you to
compare at leisure the physical result of your own wars and
prophecies, as declared by your own elect journal not fourteen days
ago,--that the Empire of England, on which formerly the sun never
set, has become one on which he never rises.
What is best to be done, do you ask me? The answer is plain.
Whether you can affect the signs of the sky or not, you _can_ the
signs of the times. Whether you can bring the _sun_ back or not,
you can assuredly bring back your own cheerfulness, and your own
honesty. You may not be able to say to the winds, "Peace; be
still," but you can cease from the insolence of your own lips, and
the troubling of your own passions. And all _that_ it would be
extremely well to do, even though the day _were_ coming when the
sun should be as darkness, and the moon as blood. But, the paths of
rectitude and piety once regained, who shall say that the promise
of old time would not be found to hold for us also?--"Bring ye all
the tithes into my storehouse, and prove me now herewith, saith the
Lord God, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour
you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive
it."
LECTURE II.
_March 11th, 1884._
It was impossible for me, this spring, to prepare, as I wished to
have done, two lectures for the London Institution: but finding its
members more interested in the subject chosen than I had
anticipated, I enlarged my lecture at its second reading by some
explanations and parentheses, partly represented, and partly
farther developed, in the following notes; which led me on,
however, as I arranged them, into branches of the subject untouched
in the former lecture, and it seems to me of no inferior interest.
[Footnote 1: The vapor over the pool of Anger in the 'Inferno,' the
clogging stench which rises from Caina, and the fog of the circle
of Anger in the 'Purgatorio' resemble, indeed, the cloud of the
Plague-wind very closely,--but are conceived only as supernatural.
The reader will no doubt observe, throughout the following lecture,
my own habit of speaking of beautiful things as 'natural,' and of
ugly ones as 'unnatural.' In the conception of recent philosophy,
the world is one Kosmos in which diphtheria is held to be as
natural as song, and cholera as digestion. To my own mind, and the
more distinctly the more I see, know, and feel, the Earth, as
prepared for the abode of man, appears distinctly ruled by agencies
of health and disease, of which the first may be aided by his
industry, prudence, and piety; while the destroying laws are
allowed to prevail against him, in the degree in which he allows
himself in idleness, folly, and vice. Had the point been distinctly
indicated where the degrees of adversity necessary for his
discipline pass into those intended for his punishment, the world
would have been put under a manifest theocracy; but the declaration
of the principle is at least distinct enough to have convinced all
sensitive and earnest persons, from the beginning of speculation in
the eyes and mind of Man: and it has been put in my power by one
of the singular chances which have always helped me in my work when
it was in the right direction, to present to the University
of Oxford the most distinct expression of this first principle
of mediæval Theology which, so far as I know, exists in
fifteenth-century art. It is one of the drawings of the Florentine
book which I bought for a thousand pounds, against the British
Museum, some ten or twelve years since; being a compendium of
classic and mediæval religious symbolism. In the two pages of it,
forming one picture, given to Oxford, the delivery of the Law on
Sinai is represented on the left hand, (_contrary to the Scriptural
narrative_, but in deeper expression of the benediction of the
Sacred Law to all nations,) as in the midst of bright and calm
light, the figure of the Deity being supported by luminous and
level clouds, and attended by happy angels: while opposite, on the
right hand, the worship of the Golden Calf is symbolized by a
single decorated pillar, with the calf on its summit, surrounded by
the clouds and darkness of a furious storm, issuing from the mouths
of fiends;--uprooting the trees, and throwing down the rocks, above
the broken tables of the Law, of which the fragments lie in the
foreground.]
[Footnote 2: These conditions are mainly in the arrangement of the
lower rain-clouds in flakes thin and detached enough to be
illuminated by early or late sunbeams: their textures are then more
softly blended than those of the upper cirri, and have the
qualities of painted, instead of burnished or inflamed, color.
They were thus described in the 4th chapter of the 7th part of
'Modern Painters':--
"Often in our English mornings, the rain-clouds in the dawn form
soft level fields, which melt imperceptibly into the blue; or when
of less extent, gather into apparent bars, crossing the sheets of
broader cloud above; and all these bathed throughout in an
unspeakable light of pure rose-color, and purple, and amber, and
blue, not shining, but misty-soft, the barred masses, when seen
nearer, found to be woven in tresses of cloud, like floss silk,
looking as if each knot were a little swathe or sheaf of lighted
rain.
"No clouds form such skies, none are so tender, various,
inimitable; Turner himself never caught them. Correggio, putting
out his whole strength, could have painted them,--no other man."]
[Footnote 3: I did not, in writing this sentence, forget Mr.
Gladstone's finely scholastic enthusiasm for Homer; nor Mr.
Newton's for Athenian--(I wish it had not been also for
Halicarnassian) sculpture. But Byron loved Greece herself--through
her death--and _to_ his own; while the subsequent refusal of
England to give Greece one of our own princes for a king, has
always been held by me the most ignoble, cowardly, and lamentable,
of all our base commercial _im_policies.]
[Footnote 4: 'Deepening' clouds.--Byron never uses an epithet
vainly,--he is the most accurate, and therefore the most powerful,
of all modern describers. The deepening of the cloud is essentially
necessary to the redness of the orb. Ordinary observers are
continually unaware of this fact, and imagine that a red sun can be
darker than the sky round it! Thus Mr. Gould, though a professed
naturalist, and passing most of his life in the open air, over and
over again, in his 'British Birds,' draws the setting sun dark on
the sky!]
[Footnote 5: 'Like the blood he predicts.'--The astrological power
of the planet Mars was of course ascribed to it in the same
connection with its red color. The reader may be interested to see
the notice, in 'Modern Painters,' of Turner's constant use of the
same symbol; partly an expression of his own personal feeling,
partly, the employment of a symbolic language known to all careful
readers of solar and stellar tradition.
"He was very definitely in the habit of indicating the association
of any subject with circumstances of death, especially the death of
multitudes, by placing it under one of his most deeply _crimsoned_
sunset skies.
"The color of blood is thus plainly taken for the leading tone in
the storm-clouds above the 'Slave-ship.' It occurs with similar
distinctness in the much earlier picture of 'Ulysses and
Polypheme,' in that of 'Napoleon at St. Helena,' and, subdued by
softer hues, in the 'Old Téméraire.'
"The sky of this Goldau is, in its scarlet and crimson, the deepest
in tone of all that I know in Turner's drawings.
"Another feeling, traceable in several of his former works, is an
acute sense of the contrast between the careless interests and idle
pleasures of daily life, and the state of those whose time for
labor, or knowledge, or delight, is passed forever. There is
evidence of this feeling in the introduction of the boys at play in
the churchyard of Kirkby Lonsdale, and the boy climbing for his
kite among the thickets above the little mountain churchyard of
Brignal-bank; it is in the same tone of thought that he has placed
here the two figures fishing, leaning against these shattered
flanks of rock,--the sepulchral stones of the great mountain Field
of Death."]
[Footnote 6: 'Thy lore unto calamity.'--It is, I believe,
recognized by all who have in any degree become interested in the
traditions of Chaldean astrology, that its warnings were
distinct,--its promises deceitful. Horace thus warns Leuconoe
against reading the Babylonian numbers to learn the time of her
death,--he does not imply their promise of previous happiness; and
the continually deceptive character of the Delphic oracle itself,
tempted always rather to fatal than to fortunate conduct, unless
the inquirer were more than wise in his reading. Byron gathers into
the bitter question all the sorrow of former superstition, while in
the lines italicized, just above, he sums in the briefest and
plainest English, all that we yet know, or may wisely think, about
the Sun. It is the '_Burning_ oracle' (other oracles there are by
sound, or feeling, but this by fire) of all that lives; the only
means of our accurate knowledge of the things round us, and that
affect our lives: it is the _fountain_ of all life,--Byron does not
say the _origin_;--the origin of life would be the origin of the
sun itself; but it is the visible _source_ of vital energy, as the
spring is of a stream, though the origin is the sea. "And symbol of
Him who bestows it."--This the sun has always been, to every one
who believes there is a bestower; and a symbol so perfect and
beautiful that it may also be thought of as partly an apocalypse.]
[Footnote 7: 'More beautiful in that variety.'--This line, with the
one italicized beneath, expresses in Myrrha's mind, the feeling
which I said, in the outset, every thoughtful watcher of heaven
necessarily had in those old days; whereas now, the variety is for
the most part, only in modes of disagreeableness; and the vapor,
instead of adding light to the unclouded sky, takes away the aspect
and destroys the functions of sky altogether.]
[Footnote 8: 'Steam out of an engine funnel.'--Compare the sixth
paragraph of Professor Tyndall's 'Forms of Water,' and the
following seventh one, in which the phenomenon of transparent steam
becoming opaque is thus explained. "Every bit of steam shrinks,
when chilled, to a much more minute particle of water. The liquid
particles thus produced form a kind of water dust of exceeding
fineness, which floats in the air, and is called a cloud."
But the author does not tell us, in the first place, what is the
shape or nature of a 'bit of steam,' nor, in the second place, how
the contraction of the individual bits of steam is effected without
any diminution of the whole mass of them, but on the contrary,
during its steady _expansion_; in the third place he assumes that
the particles of water dust are solid, not vesicular, which is not
yet ascertained; in the fourth place, he does not tell us how their
number and size are related to the quantity of invisible moisture
in the air; in the fifth place, he does not tell us how cool
invisible moisture differs from hot invisible moisture; and in the
sixth, he does not tell us why the cool visible moisture stays
while the hot visible moisture melts away. So much for the present
state of 'scientific' information, or at least communicativeness,
on the first and simplest conditions of the problem before us!
In its wider range that problem embraces the total mystery of
volatile power in substance; and of the visible states consequent
on sudden--and presumably, therefore, imperfect--vaporization; as
the smoke of frankincense, or the sacred fume of modern devotion
which now fills the inhabited world, as that of the rose and violet
its deserts. What,--it would be useful to know, is the actual bulk
of an atom of orange perfume?--what of one of vaporized tobacco, or
gunpowder?--and where do _these_ artificial vapors fall back in
beneficent rain? or through what areas of atmosphere exist, as
invisible, though perhaps not innocuous, cloud?
All these questions were put, closely and precisely,
four-and-twenty years ago, in the 1st chapter of the 7th part of
'Modern Painters,' paragraphs 4 to 9, of which I can here allow
space only for the last, which expresses the final difficulties of
the matter better than anything said in this lecture:--
"But farther: these questions of volatility, and visibility, and
hue, are all complicated with those of shape. How is a cloud
outlined? Granted whatever you choose to ask, concerning its
material, or its aspect, its loftiness and luminousness,--how of
its limitation? What hews it into a heap, or spins it into a web?
Cold is usually shapeless, I suppose, extending over large spaces
equally, or with gradual diminution. You cannot have in the open
air, angles, and wedges, and coils, and cliffs, of cold. Yet the
vapor stops suddenly, sharp and steep as a rock, or thrusts itself
across the gates of heaven in likeness of a brazen bar; or braids
itself in and out, and across and across, like a tissue of
tapestry; or falls into ripples, like sand; or into waving shreds
and tongues, as fire. On what anvils and wheels is the vapor
pointed, twisted, hammered, whirled, as the potter's clay? By what
hands is the incense of the sea built up into domes of marble?"]
[Footnote 9: The opposed conditions of the higher and lower orders
of cloud, with the balanced intermediate one, are beautifully seen
on mountain summits of rock or earth. On snowy ones they are far
more complex: but on rock summits there are three distinct forms of
attached cloud in serene weather; the first that of cloud veil
laid over them, and _falling_ in folds through their ravines,
(the obliquely descending clouds of the entering chorus in
Aristophanes); secondly, the ascending cloud, which develops itself
loosely and independently as it rises, and does not attach itself
to the hill-side, while the falling veil cloud clings to it close
all the way down;--and lastly the throned cloud, which rests indeed
on the mountain summit, with its base, but rises high above into
the sky, continually changing its outlines, but holding its seat
perhaps all day long.
These three forms of cloud belong exclusively to calm weather;
attached drift cloud, (see Note 11) can only be formed in the
wind.]
[Footnote 10: 'Glaciers of the Alps,' page 10.--"Let a pound weight
be placed upon a cube of granite" (size of supposed cube not
mentioned), "the cube is flattened, though in an infinitesimal
degree. Let the weight be removed, the cube remains a little
flattened. Let us call the cube thus flattened No. 1. Starting with
No. 1 as a new mass, let the pound weight be laid upon it. We have
a more flattened mass, No. 2.... Apply this to squeezed rocks, to
those, for example, which form the base of an obelisk like the
Matterhorn,--the conclusion seems inevitable _that the mountain is
sinking by its own weight_," etc., etc. Similarly the Nelson statue
must be gradually flattening the Nelson column, and in time
Cleopatra's needle will be as flat as her pincushion?]
[Footnote 11: 'Glaciers of the Alps,' page 146.--"The sun was near
the western horizon, and I remained alone upon the Grat to see his
last beams illuminate the mountains, which, with one exception,
were without a trace of cloud.
"This exception was the Matterhorn, the appearance of which was
extremely instructive. The obelisk appeared to be divided in two
halves by a vertical line, drawn from its summit half-way down, to
the windward of which we had the bare cliffs of the mountain; and
to the left of it a cloud which appeared to cling tenaciously to
the rocks.
"In reality, however, there was no clinging; the condensed vapor
incessantly got away, but it was ever renewed, and thus a river of
cloud had been sent from the mountain over the valley of Aosta. The
wind, in fact, blew lightly up the valley of St. Nicholas, charged
with moisture, and when the air that held it _rubbed against the
cold cone_ of the Matterhorn, the vapor was chilled and
precipitated in his lee."
It is not explained, why the wind was not chilled by rubbing
against any of the neighboring mountains, nor why the cone of the
Matterhorn, mostly of rock, should be colder than cones of snow.
The phenomenon was first described by De Saussure, who gives the
same explanation as Tyndall; and from whom, in the first volume of
'Modern Painters,' I adopted it without sufficient examination.
Afterwards I re-examined it, and showed its fallacy, with respect
to the cap or helmet cloud, in the fifth volume of 'Modern
Painters,' page 124, in the terms given in the subjoined note,[A]
but I still retained the explanation of Saussure for the lee-side
cloud, engraving in plate 69 the modes of its occurrence on the
Aiguille Dru, of which the most ordinary one was afterwards
represented by Tyndall in his 'Glaciers of the Alps,' under the
title of 'Banner-cloud.' Its less imaginative title, in 'Modern
Painters,' of 'Lee-side cloud,' is more comprehensive, for this
cloud forms often under the brows of far-terraced precipices, where
it has no resemblance to a banner. No true explanation of it has
ever yet been given; for the first condition of the problem has
hitherto been unobserved,--namely, that such cloud is constant in
certain states of weather, under precipitous rocks;--but never
developed with distinctness by domes of snow.
[Illustration]
But my former expansion of Saussure's theory is at least closer to
the facts than Professor Tyndall's "rubbing against the rocks," and
I therefore allow room for it here, with its illustrative wood-cut.
"When a moist wind blows in clear weather over a cold summit, it
has not time to get chilled as it approaches the rock, and
therefore the air remains clear, and the sky bright on the windward
side; but under the lee of the peak, there is partly a back eddy,
and partly still air; and in that lull and eddy the wind gets time
to be chilled by the rock, and the cloud appears, as a boiling mass
of white vapor, rising continually with the return current to the
upper edge of the mountain, where it is caught by the straight wind
and partly torn, partly melted away in broken fragments.
"In the accompanying figure, the dark mass represents the mountain
peak, the arrow the main direction of the wind, the curved lines
show the directions of such current and its concentration, and the
dotted line encloses the space in which cloud forms densely,
floating away beyond and above in irregular tongues and flakes."
[Footnote A: "But both Saussure and I ought to have known,--we did
know, but did not think of it,--that the covering or cap-cloud
forms on hot summits as well as cold ones;--that the red and bare
rocks of Mont Pilate, hotter, certainly, after a day's sunshine
than the cold storm-wind which sweeps to them from the Alps,
nevertheless have been renowned for their helmet of cloud, ever
since the Romans watched the cloven summit, gray against the south,
from the ramparts of Vindonissa, giving it the name from which the
good Catholics of Lucerne have warped out their favorite piece of
terrific sacred biography. And both my master and I should also
have reflected that if our theory about its formation had been
generally true, the helmet cloud ought to form on every cold
summit, at the approach of rain, in approximating proportions to
the bulk of the glaciers; which is so far from being the case that
not only (A) the cap-cloud may often be seen on lower summits of
grass or rock, while the higher ones are splendidly clear (which
may be accounted for by supposing the wind containing the moisture
not to have risen so high); but (B) the cap-cloud always shows a
preference for hills of a conical form, such as the Mole or Niesen,
which can have very little power in chilling the air, even
supposing they were cold themselves; while it will entirely refuse
to form huge masses of mountain, which, supposing them of chilly
temperament, must have discomforted the atmosphere in their
neighborhood for leagues."]]
[Footnote 12: See below, on the different uses of the word
'reflection,' note 14, and note that throughout this lecture I use
the words 'aqueous molecules,' alike of water liquid or vaporized,
not knowing under what conditions or at what temperatures
water-dust becomes water-gas; and still less, supposing pure
water-gas blue, and pure air blue, what are the changes in either
which make them what sailors call "dirty "; but it is one of the
worst omissions of the previous lecture, that I have not stated
among the characters of the plague-cloud that it is _always_
dirty,[A] and _never blue under any conditions_, neither when deep
in the distance, nor when in the electric states which produce
sulphurous blues in natural cloud. But see the next note.
[Footnote A: In my final collation of the lectures given at Oxford
last year on the Art of England, I shall have occasion to take
notice of the effect of this character of plague-cloud on our
younger painters, who have perhaps never in their lives seen a
_clean_ sky!]]
[Footnote 13: Black clouds.--For the sudden and extreme local
blackness of thundercloud, see Turner's drawing of Winchelsea,
(England series), and compare Homer, of the Ajaces, in the 4th book
of the Iliad,--(I came on the passage in verifying Mr. Hill's
quotation from the 5th.)
"[Greek: hama de nephos eipeto pezôn.
Hôs d' hot' apo skopiês eiden nephos aipolos anêr
Erchomenon kata ponton hypo Zephyroio iôês,
Tô de t', aneuthen eonti, melanteron, êute pissa
Phainet', ion kata ponton, agei de te lailapa pollên;
Rhigêsen te idôn, hypo te speos êlase mêla;
Toiai ham Aiantessin arêithoôn aizêôn
Dêion es polemon pykinai kinynto phalanges
Kyaneai,]"
I give Chapman's version--noting only that his _breath_ of
Zephyrus, ought to have been 'cry' or 'roar' of Zephyrus, the
blackness of the cloud being as much connected with the wildness of
the wind as, in the formerly quoted passage, its brightness with
calm of air.
"Behind them hid the ground
A cloud of foot, that seemed to smoke. And as a Goatherd spies
On some hill top, out of the sea a rainy vapor rise,
Driven by the breath of Zephyrus, which though far off he rests,
Comes on as black as pitch, and brings a tempest in his breast
Whereat he, frighted, drives his herds apace into a den;
So, darkening earth, with swords and shields, showed these with
all their men."
I add here Chapman's version of the other passage, which is
extremely beautiful and close to the text, while Pope's is
hopelessly erroneous.
"Their ground they still made good,
And in their silence and set powers, like fair still clouds they stood,
With which Jove crowns the tops of hills in any quiet day
When Boreas, and the ruder winds that use to drive away
Air's _dusky vapors_, being _loose_, in many a whistling gale,
Are pleasingly bound up and calm, and not a breath exhale."]
[Footnote 14: 'Reflected.'--The reader must be warned in this place
of the difference implied by my use of the word 'cast' in page 11,
and 'reflected' here: that is to say, between light or color which
an object possesses, whatever the angle it is seen at, and the
light which it reverberates at one angle only. The Alps, under the
rose[A] of sunset, are exactly of the same color whether you see
them from Berne or Schaffhausen. But the gilding to our eyes of a
burnished cloud depends, I believe, at least for a measure of its
luster, upon the angle at which the rays incident upon it are
reflected to the eye, just as much as the glittering of the sea
beneath it--or the sparkling of the windows of the houses on the
shore.
Previously, at page 10, in calling the molecules of transparent
atmospheric 'absolutely' unreflective of light, I mean, in like
manner, unreflective from their _surfaces_. Their blue color seen
against a dark ground is indeed a kind of reflection, but one of
which I do not understand the nature. It is seen most simply in
wood smoke, blue against trees, brown against clear light; but in
both cases the color is communicated to (or left in) the
_transmitted_ rays.
So also the green of the sky (p. 13) is said to be given by
transmitted light, yellow rays passing through blue air: much yet
remains to be known respecting translucent colors of this kind;
only let them always be clearly distinguished in our minds from the
firmly possessed color of opaque substances, like grass or
malachite.
[Footnote A: In speaking, at p. 11 of the first lecture, of the
limits of depth in the rose-color cast on snow, I ought to have
noted the greater strength of the tint possible under the light of
the tropics. The following passage, in Mr. Cunningham's 'Natural
History of the Strait of Magellan,' is to me of the greatest
interest, because of the beautiful effect described as seen on the
occasion of his visit to "the small town of Santa Rosa," (near
Valparaiso.) "The day, though clear, had not been sunny, so that,
although the snowy heights of the Andes had been distinctly visible
throughout the greater part of our journey, they had not been
illuminated by the rays of the sun. But now, as we turned the
corner of a street, the chain of the Cordillera suddenly burst on
our gaze in such a blaze of splendor that it almost seemed as if
the windows of heaven had been opened for a moment, permitting a
flood of _crimson_ light to stream forth upon the snow. The sight
was so unexpected, and so transcendently magnificent, that a
breathless silence fell upon us for a few moments, while even the
driver stopped his horses. This deep red glow lasted for three or
four minutes, and then rapidly faded into that lovely rosy hue so
characteristic of snow at sunset among the Alps."]]
[Footnote 15: Diffraction.--Since these passages were written, I
have been led, in conversation with a scientific friend, to doubt
my statement that the colored portions of the lighted clouds were
brighter than the white ones. He was convinced that the resolution
of the rays would diminish their power, and in _thinking_ over the
matter, I am disposed to agree with him, although my impression at
the time has been always that the diffracted colors rose out of the
white, as a rainbow does out of the gray. But whatever the facts
may be, in this respect the statement in the text of the
impossibility of representing diffracted color in painting is
equally true. It may be that the resolved hues are darker than the
white, as colored panes in a window are darker than the colorless
glass, but all are alike in a key which no artifice of painting can
approach.
For the rest, the phenomena of diffraction are not yet arranged
systematically enough to be usefully discussed; some of them
involving the resolution of the light, and others merely its
intensification. My attention was first drawn to them near St.
Laurent, on the Jura mountains, by the vivid reflection, (so it
seemed), of the image of the sun from a particular point of a cloud
in the west, after the sun itself was beneath the horizon: but in
this image there were no prismatic colors, neither is the
constantly seen metamorphosis of pine forests into silver filigree
on ridges behind which the sun is rising or setting, accompanied
with any prismatic hue; the trees become luminous, but not
iridescent: on the other hand, in his great account of his ascent
of Mont Blanc with Mr. Huxley, Professor Tyndall thus describes the
sun's remarkable behavior on that occasion:--"As we attained the
brow which forms the entrance to the Grand Plateau, he _hung his
disk upon a spike of rock_ to our left, and, surrounded by a glory
of interference spectra of the most gorgeous colors, blazed down
upon us." ('Glaciers of the Alps,' p. 76.)
Nothing irritates me more, myself, than having the color of my own
descriptions of phenomena in anywise attributed by the reader to
accidental states either of my mind or body;--but I cannot, for
once, forbear at least the innocent question to Professor Tyndall,
whether the extreme beauty of these 'interference spectra' may not
have been partly owing to the extreme _sobriety_ of the observer?
no refreshment, it appears, having been attainable the night before
at the Grands Mulets, except the beverage diluted with dirty snow,
of which I have elsewhere quoted the Professor's pensive
report,--"my memory of that tea is not pleasant."]
[Footnote 16: 'Either stationary or slow in motion, reflecting
unresolved light.'
The rate of motion is of course not essentially connected with the
method of illumination; their connection, in this instance, needs
explanation of some points which could not be dealt with in the
time of a single lecture.
It is before said, with reserve only, that "a cloud is where it is
seen, and is not where it is not seen." But thirty years ago, in
'Modern Painters,' I pointed out (see the paragraph quoted in note
8th), the extreme difficulty of arriving at the cause of cloud
outline, or explaining how, if we admitted at any given moment the
atmospheric moisture to be generally diffused, it could be chilled
by formal _chills_ into formal clouds. How, for instance, in the
upper cirri, a thousand little chills, alternating with a thousand
little warmths, could stand still as a thousand little feathers.
But the first step to any elucidation of the matter is in the
firmly fixing in our minds the difference between windless clouds,
unaffected by any conceivable local accident, and windy clouds,
affected by some change in their circumstances as they move.
In the sunset at Abbeville, represented in my first diagram, the
air is absolutely calm at the ground surface, and the motion of its
upper currents extremely slow. There is no local reason assignable
for the presence of the cirri above, or of the thundercloud below.
There is no conceivable cause either in the geology, or the moral
character, of the two sides of the town of Abbeville, to explain
why there should be decorative fresco on the sky over the southern
suburb, and a muttering heap of gloom and danger over the northern.
The electric cloud is as calm in motion as the harmless one; it
changes its forms, indeed; but imperceptibly; and, so far as can
be discerned, only at its own will is exalted, and with its own
consent abased.
But in my second diagram are shown forms of vapor sustaining at
every instant all kinds of varying local influences; beneath,
fastened down by mountain attraction, above, flung afar by
distracting winds; here, spread abroad into blanched sheets beneath
the sunshine, and presently gathered into strands of coiled cordage
in the shade. Their total existence is in metamorphosis, and their
every aspect a surprise, or a deceit.]
[Footnote 17: 'Finely comminuted water or _ice_.'
My impression that these clouds were glacial was at once confirmed
by a member of my audience, Dr. John Rae, in conversation after the
lecture, in which he communicated to me the perfectly definite
observations which he has had the kindness to set down with their
dates for me, in the following letter:--
"4, ADDISON GARDENS, KENSINGTON, _4th Feb., 1884._
DEAR SIR,--I have looked up my old journal of thirty years ago,
written in pencil because it was impossible to keep ink unfrozen in
the snow-hut in which I passed the winter of 1853-4, at Repulse
Bay, on the Arctic Circle.[A]
On the 1st of February, 1854, I find the following:--
'A beautiful appearance of some cirrus clouds near the sun, the
central part of the cloud being of a fine pink or red, then green,
and pink fringe. This continued for about a quarter of an hour. The
same was observed on the 27th of the month, but not so bright.
Distance of clouds from sun, from 3° to 6°.'
On the 1st February the temperature was 38° below zero, and on the
27th February 26° below.
'On the 23d and 30th (of March) the same splendid appearance of
clouds as mentioned in last month's journal was observed. On the
first of these days, about 10.30 a.m., it was extremely beautiful.
The clouds were about 8° or 10° from the sun, below him and
slightly to the eastward,--having a green fringe all round, then
pink; the center part at first green, and then pink or red.'
The temperature was 21° below zero, Fahrenheit.
There may have been other colors--blue, perhaps--but I merely noted
the most prominent; and what I call green may have been bluish,
although I do not mention this last color in my notes.
From the lowness of the temperature at the time, the clouds _must_
have been frozen moisture.
The phenomenon is by no means common, even in the Arctic zone.
The second beautiful cloud-picture shown this afternoon brought so
visibly to my memory the appearance seen by me as above described,
that I could not avoid remarking upon it.
Believe me very truly yours,
JOHN RAE." (M.D., F.R.S.)
Now this letter enables me to leave the elements of your problem
for you in very clear terms.
Your sky--altogether--may be composed of one or more of four
things:--
Molecules of water in warm weather.
Molecules of ice in cold weather.
Molecules of water-vapor in warm weather.
Molecules of ice-vapor in cold weather.
But of the size, distances, or modes of attraction between these
different kinds of particles, I find no definite information
anywhere, except the somewhat vague statement by Sir William
Thomson, that "if a drop of water could be magnified so as to be as
large as the earth, and have a diameter of eight thousand miles,
then a molecule of this water in it would appear _somewhat larger
than a shot_." (What kind of shot?) "_and somewhat smaller than a
cricket-ball_"!
And as I finally review the common accounts given of cloud
formation, I find it quite hopeless for the general reader to deal
with the quantity of points which have to be kept in mind and
severally valued, before he can account for any given phenomena. I
have myself, in many of the passages of 'Modern Painters' before
referred to, conceived of cloud too narrowly as always produced by
_cold_, whereas the temperature of a cloud must continually, like
that of our visible breath in frosty weather, or of the visible
current of steam, or the smoking of a warm lake surface under
sudden frost, be above that of the surrounding atmosphere; and yet
I never remember entering a cloud without being chilled by it, and
the darkness of the plague-wind, unless in electric states of the
air, is always accompanied by deadly chill.
Nor, so far as I can read, has any proper account yet been given of
the balance, in serene air, of the warm air under the cold, in
which the warm air is at once compressed by weight, and expanded by
heat, and the cold air is thinned by its elevation, yet contracted
by its cold. There is indeed no possibility of embracing the
conditions in a single sentence, any more than in a single thought.
But the practical balance is effected in calm air, so that its
lower strata have no tendency to rise, like the air in a fire
balloon, nor its higher strata to fall, unless they congeal into
rain or snow.
I believe it will be an extreme benefit to my younger readers if I
write for them a little 'Grammar of Ice and Air,' collecting the
known facts on all these matters, and I am much minded to put by my
ecclesiastical history for a while, in order to relate what is
legible of the history of the visible Heaven.
[Footnote A: I trust that Dr. Rae will forgive my making the reader
better aware of the real value of this communication by allowing
him to see also the following passage from the kind private letter
by which it was supplemented:--
"Many years in the Hudson's Bay Company's service, I and my men
became educated for Arctic work, in which I was five different
times employed, in two of which expeditions we lived wholly by our
own hunting and fishing for twelve months, once in a stone house
(very disagreeable), and another winter in a snow hut (better),
_without fire of any kind to warm us_. On the first of these
expeditions, 1846-7, my little party, there being no officer but
myself, surveyed seven hundred miles of coast of Arctic America by
a sledge journey, which Parry, Ross, Bach, and Lyon had failed to
accomplish, costing the country about £70,000 or £80,000 at the
lowest computation. The total expense of my little party, including
my own pay, was under fourteen hundred pounds sterling.
"My Arctic work has been recognized by the award of the founder's
gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society (before the completion
of the whole of it)."]]
[Footnote 18: 'You can't get a billiard ball to fall a shivering on
its own account.'--I am under correction in this statement by the
Lucasian professor of Cambridge, with respect to the molecules of
bodies capable of 'epipolizing' light. "Nothing seems more natural
than to suppose that the incident vibrations of the luminiferous
ether produce vibratory movements among the ultimate molecules of
sensitive substances, and that the molecules in return, _swinging
on their own account_, produce vibrations in the luminous ether,
and thus cause the sensation of light. The periodic times of these
vibrations depend upon the periods in which the molecules are
_disposed to swing_." ('On the Changes of Refrangibility of Light,'
p. 549.)
It seems to me a pleasant conclusion, this, of recent science, and
suggestive of a perfectly regenerate theology. The 'Let there be
light' of the former Creation is first expanded into 'Let there be
a disposition of the molecules to swing,' and the destinies of
mankind, no less than the vitality of the universe, depend
thereafter upon this amiable, but perhaps capricious, and at all
events not easily influenced or anticipated, disposition!
Is it not also strange that in a treatise entering into so high
mathematical analysis as that from which I quote, the false word
'swing,' expressing the action of a body liable to continuous
arrest by gravitation, should be employed to signify the
oscillation, wholly unaffected by gravity, of substance in which
the motion once originated, may cease only with the essence of the
body?
It is true that in men of high scientific caliber, such as the
writer in this instance, carelessness in expression does not affect
the security of their conclusions. But in men of lower rank, mental
defects in language indicate fatal flaws in thought. And although
the constant habit to which I owe my (often foolishly praised)
"command of language"--of never allowing a sentence to pass proof
in which I have not considered whether, for the vital word in it, a
better could be found in the dictionary, makes me somewhat morbidly
intolerant of careless diction, it may be taken for an extremely
useful and practical rule, that if a man can think clearly he will
write well, and that no good science was ever written in bad
English. So that, before you consider whether a scientific author
says a true or a false thing, you had better first look if he is
able properly to say _any_thing,--and secondly, whether his conceit
permits him to say anything properly.
Thus, when Professor Tyndall, endeavoring to write poetically of
the sun, tells you that "The Lilies of the field are his
workmanship," you may observe, first, that since the sun is not a
man, nothing that he does is workmanship; while even the figurative
statement that he rejoices _as_ a strong man to run his course, is
one which Professor Tyndall has no intention whatever of admitting.
And you may then observe, in the second place, that, if even in
that figurative sense, the lilies of the field are the sun's
workmanship, in the same sense the lilies of the hothouse are the
stove's workmanship,--and in perfectly logical parallel, you, who
are alive here to listen to me, because you have been warmed and
fed through the winter, are the workmanship of your own
coal-scuttles.
Again, when Mr. Balfour Stewart begins a treatise on the
'Conservation of Energy,' which is to conclude, as we shall see
presently, with the prophecy of its total extinction as far as the
present world is concerned,--by clothing in a "properly scientific
garb," our innocent impression that there is some difference
between the blow of a rifle stock and a rifle ball; he prepares for
the scientific toilet by telling us in italics that "the something
which the rifle ball possesses in contradistinction to the rifle
stock is clearly the power of overcoming resistance," since "it can
penetrate through oak-wood or through water--or (alas! that it
should be so often tried) through the human body; and _this power
of penetration_" (italics now mine) "_is the distinguishing
characteristic of a substance moving with very great velocity_. Let
us define by the term 'Energy,' this power which the rifle ball
possesses of overcoming obstacles, or of doing work."
Now, had Mr. Stewart been a better scholar, he would have felt,
even if he had not known, that the Greek word 'energy' could only
be applied to the living--and of living, with perfect propriety
only to the _mental_, action of animals, and that it could no more
be applied as a 'scientific garb,' to the flight of a rifle ball,
than to the fall of a dead body. And, if he had attained thus much,
even of the science of language, it is just possible that the small
forte and faculty of thought he himself possesses might have been
energized so far as to perceive that the force of all inertly
moving bodies, whether rifle stock, rifle ball, or rolling world,
is under precisely one and the same relation to their weights and
velocities; that the effect of their impact depends--not merely on
their pace, but their constitution; and on the relative forms and
stability of the substances they encounter, and that there is no
more quality of Energy, though much less quality of Art, in the
swiftly penetrating shot, or crushing ball, than in the
deliberately contemplative and administrative puncture by a gnat's
proboscis, or a seamstress' needle.
Mistakes of this kind, beginning with affectations of diction, do
not always invalidate general statements or conclusions,--for a bad
writer often equivocates out of a blunder as he equivocates into
one,--but I have been strict in pointing out the confusions of idea
admitted in scientific books between the movement of a swing, that
of a sounding violin chord, and that of an agitated liquid, because
these confusions have actually enabled Professor Tyndall to keep
the scientific world in darkness as to the real nature of glacier
motion for the last twenty years; and to induce a resultant
quantity of aberration in the scientific mind concerning glacial
erosion, of which another twenty years will scarcely undo the
damage.]
[Footnote 19: 'Force and pace.'--Among the nearer questions which
the careless terminology on which I have dwelt in the above note
has left unsettled, I believe the reader will be surprised, as much
as I am myself, to find that of the mode of impulse in a common
gust of wind! Whence is its strength communicated to it, and how
gathered in it? and what is the difference of manner in the impulse
between compressible gas and incompressible fluid? For instance:
The water at the head of a weir is passing every instant from
slower into quicker motion; but (until broken in the air) the fast
flowing water is just as dense as the slowly flowing water. But a
fan alternately compresses and rarefies the air between it and the
cheek, and the violence of a destructive gust in a gale of wind
means a momentary increase in velocity and density of which I
cannot myself in the least explain,--and find in no book on
dynamics explained,--the mechanical causation.
The following letter, from a friend whose observations on natural
history for the last seven or eight years have been consistently
valuable and instructive to me, will be found, with that subjoined
in the note, in various ways interesting; but especially in its
notice of the inefficiency of ordinary instrumental registry in
such matters:--
"6, MOIRA PLACE, SOUTHAMPTON, _Feb. 8th, 1884_.
DEAR MR. RUSKIN,--Some time since I troubled you with a note or two
about sea-birds, etc.... but perhaps I should never have ventured
to trouble you again, had not your lecture on the 'Storm Clouds'
touched a subject which has deeply interested me for years past. I
had, of course, no idea that you had noticed this thing, though I
might have known that, living the life you do, you must have done
so. As for me, it has been a source of perplexity for years: so
much so, that I began to wonder at times whether I was not under
some mental delusion about it, until the strange theatrical
displays, of the last few months, for which I was more or less
prepared, led so many to use their eyes, unmuzzled by brass or
glass, for a time. I know you do not bother, or care much to read
newspapers, but I have taken the liberty of cutting out and
sending a letter of mine, sent on the 1st January to an evening
paper,[A] upon this subject, thinking you might like to know that
one person, at any rate, has seen that strange, bleared look about
the sun, shining so seldom except through a ghastly glare of pale,
persistent haze. May it be that the singular coloring of the
sunsets marks an end of this long period of plague-cloud, and that
in them we have promise of steadier weather? (No: those sunsets
were entirely distinct phenomena, and promised, if anything, only
evil.--R.)
I was glad to see that in your lecture you gave the dependants upon
the instrument-makers a warning. On the 26th I had a heavy
sailing-boat lifted and blown, from where she lay hauled up, a
distance of four feet, which, as the boat has four hundred-weight
of iron upon her keel, gives a wind-gust, or force, not easily
measured by instruments.
Believe me, dear Mr. Ruskin,
Yours sincerely,
ROBT. C. LESLIE."
I am especially delighted, in this letter, by my friend's
vigorously accurate expression, eyes "unmuzzled by brass or glass."
I have had occasion continually, in my art-lectures, to dwell on
the great law of human perception and power, that the beauty which
is good for us is prepared for the natural focus of the sight, and
the sounds which are delightful to us for the natural power of the
nerves of the ear; and the art which is admirable in us, is the
exercise of our own bodily powers, and not carving by sand-blast,
nor oratorizing through a speaking trumpet, nor dancing with spring
heels. But more recently, I have become convinced that even in
matters of science, although every added mechanical power has its
proper use and sphere, yet the things which are vital to our
happiness and prosperity can only be known by the rational use and
subtle skill of our natural powers. We may trust the instrument
with the prophecy of storm, or registry of rainfall; but the
conditions of atmospheric change, on which depend the health of
animals and fruitfulness of seeds, can only be discerned by the eye
and the bodily sense.
Take, for simplest and nearest example, this question of the stress
of wind. It is not the actual _power_ that is immeasurable, if only
it would stand to be measured! Instruments could easily now be
invented which would register not only a blast that could lift a
sailing boat, but one that would sink a ship of the line. But,
lucklessly--the blast won't pose to the instrument! nor can the
instrument be adjusted to the blast. In the gale of which my friend
speaks in his next letter, 26th January, a gust came down the hill
above Coniston village upon two old oaks, which were well rooted in
the slate rock, and some fifty or sixty feet high--the one, some
twenty yards below the other. The blast tore the highest out of the
ground, peeling its roots from the rock as one peels an
orange--swept the head of the lower tree away with it in one ruin,
and snapped the two leader branches of the upper one over the
other's stump, as one would break one's cane over some people's
heads, if one got the chance. In wind action of this kind the
amount of actual force used is the least part of the business;--it
is the suddenness of its concentration, and the lifting and
twisting strength, as of a wrestler, which make the blast fatal;
none of which elements of storm-power can be recognized by
mechanical tests. In my friend's next letter, however, he gives us
some evidence of the _consistent_ strength of this same gale, and
of the electric conditions which attended it:--the prefatory notice
of his pet bird I had meant for 'Love's Meinie,' but it will help
us through the grimness of our studies here.
"_March 3d, 1884._
My small blackheaded gull Jack is still flourishing, and the time
is coming when I look for that singularly sudden change in the
plumage of his head which took place last March. I have asked all
my ocean-going friends to note whether these little birds are not
the gulls _par excellence_ of the sea; and so far all I have heard
from them confirms this. It seems almost incredible; but my son, a
sailor, who met that hurricane of the 26th of January, writes to me
to say that out in the Bay of Biscay on the morning after the gale,
'though it was blowing like blazes, I observed some little gulls of
Jacky's species, and they followed us half way across the Bay,
seeming to find shelter under the lee of our ship. Some alighted
now and then, and rested upon the water as if tired.' When one
considers that these birds must have been at sea all that night
somewhere, it gives one a great idea of their strength and
endurance. My son's ship, though a powerful ocean steamer, was for
two whole hours battling head to sea off the Eddystone that night,
and for that time the lead gave no increase of soundings, so that
she could have made no headway during those two hours; while all
the time her yards had the St. Elmo's fire at their ends, looking
as though a blue light was burning at each yard-arm, and this was
about all they could see.
Yours sincerely,
ROBT. C. LESLIE."
The next letter, from a correspondent with whom I have the most
complete sympathy in some expressions of his postscript which are
yet, I consider, more for my own private ear than for the public
eye, describes one of the more malignant phases of the plague-wind,
which I forgot to notice in my lecture.
"BURNHAM, SOMERSET, _February 7th, 1884_.
DEAR SIR,--I read with great interest your first lecture at Oxford
on cloud and wind (very indifferently reported in 'The Times'). You
have given a name to a wind I've known for years. You call it the
plague--I call it the devil-wind: _e. g._, on April 29th, 1882,
morning warmer, then rain storms from east; afternoon, rain
squalls; wind, west by south, rough; barometer falling awfully;
4.30 p.m., tremendous wind.--April 30th, all the leaves of the
trees, all plants black and dead, as if a fiery blast had swept
over them. _All the hedges on windward side black as black tea._
Another devil-wind came towards the end of last summer. The next
day, all the leaves were falling sere and yellow, as if it were
late autumn.
I am, dear sir,
Yours faithfully,
A. H. BIRKETT."
I remember both these blights well; they were entirely terrific;
but only sudden maxima of the constant morbific power of this
wind;--which, if Mr. Birkett saw my _personal_ notices of,
intercalated among the scientific ones, he would find alluded to in
terms quite as vigorously damning as he could desire: and the
actual effect of it upon my thoughts and work has been precisely
that which would have resulted from the visible phantom of an evil
spirit, the absolute opponent of the Queen of the Air,--Typhon
against Athena,--in a sense of which I had neither the experience
nor the conception when I wrote the illustrations of the myth of
Perseus in 'Modern Painters.' Not a word of all those explanations
of Homer and Pindar could have been written in weather like that
of the last twelve years; and I am most thankful to have got them
written, before the shadow came, and I could still see what Homer
and Pindar saw. I quote one passage only--Vol. v., p. 141--for the
sake of a similitude which reminds me of one more thing I have to
say here--and a bit of its note--which I think is a precious little
piece, not of word-painting, but of simply told feeling--(_that_,
if people knew it, is my real power).
"On the Yorkshire and Derbyshire hills, when the rain-cloud is low
and much broken, and the steady west wind fills all space with its
strength,[B] the sun-gleams fly like golden vultures; they are
flashes rather than shinings; the dark spaces and the dazzling race
and skim along the acclivities, and dart and _dip from crag to
dell, swallow-like_."
The dipping of the shadows here described of course is caused only
by that of the dingles they cross; but I have not in any of my
books yet dwelt enough on the difference of character between the
dipping and the mounting winds. Our wildest phase of the west wind
here at Coniston is 'swallow-like' with a vengeance, coming down on
the lake in swirls which spurn the spray under them as a fiery
horse does the dust. On the other hand, the softly ascending winds
express themselves in the grace of their cloud motion, as if set to
the continuous music of a distant song.[C]
The reader will please note also that whenever, either in 'Modern
Painters' or elsewhere, I speak of rate of flight in clouds, I am
thinking of it as measured by the horizontal distance overpast in
given time, and not as apparent only, owing to the nearness of the
spectator. All low clouds appear to move faster than high ones, the
pace being supposed equal in both: but when I speak of quick or
slow cloud, it is always with respect to a given altitude. In a
fine summer morning, a cloud will wait for you among the pines,
folded to and fro among their stems, with a branch or two coming
out here, and a spire or two there: you walk through it, and look
back to it. At another time, on the same spot, the fury of
cloud-flood drifts past you like the Rhine at Schaffhausen.
The space even of the doubled lecture does not admit of my entering
into any general statement of the action of the plague-cloud in
Switzerland and Italy; but I must not omit the following notes of
its aspect in the high Alps.
"SALLENCHES, _11th September, 1882_.
This morning, at half-past five, the Mont Blanc summit was clear,
and the greater part of the Aiguilles du Plan and Midi clear
dark--all, against pure cirri, lighted beneath by sunrise; the sun
of course not visible yet from the valley.
By seven o'clock, the plague-clouds had formed in _brown_ flakes,
down to the base of the Aiguille de Bionassay; entirely covering
the snowy ranges; the sun, as it rose to us here, shone only for
about ten minutes--gilding in its old glory the range of the
Dorons,--before one had time to look from peak to peak of it, the
plague-cloud formed from the west, hid Mont Joli, and steadily
choked the valley with advancing streaks of dun-colored mist.
Now--twenty minutes to nine--there is not _one ray_ of sunshine on
the whole valley, or on its mountains, from the Forclaz down to
Cluse.
These phenomena are only the sequel of a series of still more
strange and sad conditions of the air, which have continued among
the Savoy Alps for the last eight days, (themselves the sequel of
others yet more general, prolonged, and harmful). But the weather
was perfectly fine at Dijon, and I doubt not at Chamouni, on the
1st of this month. On the 2d, in the evening, I saw, from the Jura,
heavy thunderclouds in the west; on the 3d, the weather broke at
Morez, in hot thunder-showers, with intervals of scorching sun; on
the 4th, 5th, and 6th there was nearly continuous rain at St.
Cergues, the Alps being totally invisible all the time. The sky
cleared on the night of the 6th, and on the 7th I saw from the top
of the Dole all the western plateaux of Jura quite clearly; but
_the entire range of the Alps_, from the Moleson to the Salève, and
all beyond,--snow, crag and hill-side,--were wrapped and buried in
one unbroken gray-brown winding-sheet, of such cloud _as I had
never seen till that day touch an Alpine summit_.
The wind, from the east, (so that it blew _up_ over the edge of the
Dole cliff, and admitted of perfect shelter on the slope to the
west,) was bitter cold, and extremely violent: the sun overhead,
bright enough, and remained so during the afternoon; the
plague-cloud reaching from the Alps only about as far as the
southern shore of the lake of Geneva; but we could not see the
Salève; nor even the north shore, farther than to Morges! I reached
the Col de la Faucille at sunset, when, for a few minutes, the Mont
Blanc and Aiguille Verte showed themselves in dull red light, but
were buried again, before the sun was quite down, in the rising
deluge of cloud-poison. I saw no farther than the Voirons and
Brezon--and scarcely those, during the electric heat of the 9th at
Geneva; and last Saturday and Sunday have been mere whirls and
drifts of indecisive, but always sullen, storm. This morning I saw
the snows clear for the first time, having been, during the whole
past week, on steady watch for them.
I have written that the clouds of the 7th were such as I never
before saw on the Alps. Often, during the past ten years, I have
seen them on my own hills, and in Italy in 1874; but it has always
chanced to be fine weather, or common rain and cold, when I have
been among the snowy chains; and now from the Dole for the first
time I saw the plague-cloud on _them_."
[Footnote A: 'THE LOOK OF THE SKY.
'_To the_ EDITOR _of the_ ST. JAMES'S GAZETTE.
'SIR,--I have been a very constant though not a scientific observer
of the sky for a period of forty years; and I confess to a certain
feeling of astonishment at the way in which the "recent celestial
phenomena" seem to have taken the whole body of scientific
observers by surprise. It would even appear that something like
these extraordinary sunsets was necessary to call the attention of
such observers to what has long been a source of perplexity to a
variety of common folk, like sailors, farmers, and fishermen. But
to such people the look of the weather, and what comes of that
look, is of far more consequence than the exact amount of ozone or
the depth or width of a band of the spectrum.
'Now, to all such observers, including myself, it has been plain
that of late neither the look of the sky nor the character of the
weather has been, as we should say, what it used to be; and those
whose eyes were strong enough to look now and then toward the sun
have noticed a very marked increase of what some would call a
watery look about him, which might perhaps be better expressed as a
white sheen or glare, at times developing into solar halo or mock
suns, as noted in your paper of the 2d of October last year. A
fisherman would describe it as "white and davery-like." So far as
my observation goes, this appearance was only absent here for a
limited period during the present summer, when we had a week or two
of nearly normal weather; the summer before it was seldom absent.
'Again, those whose business or pleasure has depended on the use of
wind-power have all remarked the strange persistence of hard
westerly and easterly winds, the westerly ones at times partaking
of an almost trade-wind-like force and character. The summer of
1882 was especially remarkable for these winds, while each stormy
November has been followed by a period about mid-winter of mild
calm weather with dense fog. During these strong winds in summer
and early autumn the weather would remain bright and sunny, and to
a landsman would be not remarkable in any way, while the barometer
has been little affected by them; but it has been often observed by
those employed on the water that when it ceased blowing half a gale
the sky at once became overcast, with damp weather or rain. This
may all seem common enough to most people; but to those accustomed
to gauge the wind by the number of reefs wanted in a mainsail or
foresail it was not so; and the number of consecutive days when two
or more reefs have been kept tied down during the last few summers
has been remarkable--alternating at times with equally persistent
spells of calm and fog such as we are now passing through. Again,
we have had an unusually early appearance of ice in the Atlantic,
and most abnormal weather over Central Europe; while in a letter I
have just received from an old hand on board a large Australian
clipper, he speaks of heavy gales and big seas off that coast in
almost the height of their summer.
'Now, upon all this, in our season of long twilights, we have
bursting upon us some clear weather; with a display of cloud-forms
or vapor at such an elevation that, looking at them one day through
an opening in the nearer clouds, they seemed so distant as to
resemble nothing but the delicate grain of ivory upon a
billiard-ball. And yet with the fact that two-thirds of this earth
is covered with water, and bearing in mind the effect which a very
small increase of sun-power would have in producing cloud and
lifting it above its normal level for a time, we are asked to
believe that this sheen is all dust of some kind or other, in order
to explain what are now known as the "recent sunsets": though I
venture to think that we shall see more of them yet when the sun
comes our way again.
'At first sight, increased sun-power would seem to mean more
sunshine; but a little reflection would show us that this would not
be for long, while any considerable addition to the sun's power
would be followed by such a vast increase of vapor that we should
only see him, in our latitudes, at very short intervals. I am aware
that all this is most unscientific; but I have read column after
column of explanation written by those who are supposed to know all
about such things, and find myself not a jot the wiser for it. Do
you know anybody who is?--I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
'AN UNSCIENTIFIC OBSERVER. (R. LESLIE.)
_January 1_.']
[Footnote B: "I have been often at great heights on the Alps in
rough weather, and have seen strong gusts of storm in the plains of
the south. But, to get full expression of the very heart and
meaning of wind, there is no place like a Yorkshire moor. I think
Scottish breezes are thinner, very bleak and piercing, but not
substantial. If you lean on them they will let you fall, but one
may rest against a Yorkshire breeze as one would on a quickset
hedge. I shall not soon forget,--having had the good fortune to
meet a vigorous one on an April morning, between Hawes and Settle,
just on the flat under Wharnside,--the vague sense of wonder _with
which I watched Ingleborough stand without rocking_."]
[Footnote C: Compare Wordsworth's
"Oh beauteous birds, methinks ye measure
Your movements to some heavenly tune."
And again--
"While the mists,
Flying and rainy vapors, call out shapes,
And phantoms from the crags and solid earth,
As fast as a musician scatters sounds
Out of an instrument."
And again--
"The Knight had ridden down from Wensley moor,
With the slow motion of a summer cloud."]]
[Footnote 20: 'Blasphemy.'--If the reader can refer to my papers on
Fiction in the 'Nineteenth Century,' he will find this word
carefully defined in its Scriptural, and evermore necessary,
meaning,--'Harmful speaking'--not against God only, but against
man, and against all the good works and purposes of Nature. The
word is accurately opposed to 'Euphemy,' the right or well-speaking
of God and His world; and the two modes of speech are those which
going out of the mouth sanctify or defile the man.
Going out of the mouth, that is to say, deliberately and of
purpose. A French postilion's 'Sacr-r-ré'--loud, with the low 'Nom
de Dieu' following between his teeth, is not blasphemy, unless
against his horse;--but Mr. Thackeray's close of his Waterloo
chapter in 'Vanity Fair,' "And all the night long Amelia was
praying for George, who was lying on his face dead with a bullet
through his heart," is blasphemy of the most fatal and subtle kind.
And the universal instinct of blasphemy in the modern vulgar
scientific mind is above all manifested in its love of what is
ugly, and natural inthrallment by the abominable;--so that it is
ten to one if, in the description of a new bird, you learn much
more of it than the enumerated species of vermin that stick to its
feathers; and in the natural history museum of Oxford, humanity has
been hitherto taught, not by portraits of great men, but by the
skulls of cretins.
But the _deliberate_ blasphemy of science, the assertion of its own
virtue and dignity against the always implied, and often asserted,
vileness of all men and--Gods,--heretofore, is the most wonderful
phenomenon, so far as I can read or perceive, that hitherto has
arisen in the always marvelous course of the world's mental
history.
Take, for brief general type, the following 92d paragraph of the
'Forms of Water':--
"But while we thus acknowledge our limits, there is also reason for
wonder at the extent to which Science has mastered the system of
nature. From age to age and from generation to generation, fact has
been added to fact and law to law, the true method and order of the
Universe being thereby more and more revealed. In doing this,
Science has encountered and overthrown various forms of
superstition and deceit, of credulity and imposture. But the world
continually produces weak persons and wicked persons, and as long
as they continue to exist side by side, as they do in this our day,
very debasing beliefs will also continue to infest the world."
The debasing beliefs meant being simply those of Homer, David, and
St. John[A]--as against a modern French gamin's. And what the
results of the intended education of English gamins of every degree
in that new higher theology will be, England is I suppose by this
time beginning to discern.
In the last 'Fors'[B] which I have written, on education of a safer
kind, still possible, one practical point is insisted on
chiefly,--that learning by heart, and repetition with perfect
accent and cultivated voice, should be made quite principal
branches of school discipline up to the time of going to the
university.
And of writings to be learned by heart, among other passages of
indisputable philosophy and perfect poetry, I include certain
chapters of the--now for the most part forgotten--wisdom of
Solomon; and of these, there is one selected portion which I
should recommend not only school-boys and girls, but persons of
every age, if they don't know it, to learn forthwith, as the
shortest summary of Solomon's wisdom;--namely, the seventeenth
chapter of Proverbs, which being only twenty-eight verses long, may
be fastened in the dullest memory at the rate of a verse a day in
the shortest month of the year. Out of the twenty-eight verses, I
will read you seven, for example of their tenor,--the last of the
seven I will with your good leave dwell somewhat upon. You have
heard the verses often before, but probably without remembering
that they are all in this concentrated chapter.
1. Verse 1.--Better is a dry morsel, and quietness therewith, than
a house full of good eating, with strife.
(Remember, in reading this verse, that though England has chosen
the strife, and set every man's hand against his neighbor, her
house is not yet so full of good eating as she expected, even
though she gets half of her victuals from America.)
2. Verse 3.--The fining pot is for silver, the furnace for gold,
but the Lord tries the heart.
(Notice the increasing strength of trial for the more precious
thing: only the melting-pot for the silver--the fierce furnace for
the gold--but the Fire of the Lord for the heart.)
3. Verse 4.--A wicked doer giveth heed to false lips.
(That means, for _you_, that, intending to live by usury and
swindling, you read Mr. Adam Smith and Mr. Stuart Mill, and other
such political economists.)
4. Verse 5.--Whoso mocketh the poor, reproacheth his Maker.
(Mocketh,--by saying that his poverty is his fault, no less than
his misfortune,--England's favorite theory now-a-days.)
5. Verse 12.--Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man, rather
than a fool in his folly.
(Carlyle is often now accused of false scorn in his calling the
passengers over London Bridge, "mostly fools,"--on the ground that
men are only to be justly held foolish if their intellect is under,
as only wise when it is above, the average. But the reader will
please observe that the essential function of modern education is
to develop what capacity of mistake a man has. Leave him at his
forge and plow,--and those tutors teach him his true value, indulge
him in no error, and provoke him to no vice. But take him up to
London,--give him her papers to read, and her talk to hear,--and it
is fifty to one you send him presently on a fool's errand over
London Bridge.)
6. Now listen, for this verse is the question you have mainly to
ask yourselves about your beautiful all-over-England system of
competitive examination:--
Verse 16. Wherefore is there a price in the hand of a fool to get
wisdom, seeing he hath no heart to it?
(You know perfectly well it isn't the wisdom you want, but the
"station in life,"--and the money!)
7. Lastly, Verse 7.--Wisdom is before him that hath understanding,
but the eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth.
"And in the beginnings of it"! Solomon would have written, had he
lived in our day; but we will be content with the ends at present.
No scientific people, as I told you at first, have taken any notice
of the more or less temporary phenomena of which I have to-night
given you register. But, from the constant arrangements of the
universe, the same respecting which the thinkers of former time
came to the conclusion that they were essentially good, and to end
in good, the modern speculator arrives at the quite opposite and
extremely uncomfortable conclusion that they are essentially evil,
and to end--in nothing.
And I have here a volume,[C] before quoted, by a very foolish and
very lugubrious author, who in his concluding chapter gives
us,--founded, you will observe, on a series of 'ifs,'--the latest
scientific views concerning the order of creation. "We have spoken
already about a medium pervading space"--this is the Scientific
God, you observe, differing from the unscientific one, in that the
purest in heart cannot see--nor the softest in heart feel--this
spacious Deity--a _Medium_, pervading space--"the office of which"
(italics all mine) "appears to be to _degrade_ and ultimately
_extinguish_, all differential motion. It has been well pointed out
by Thomson, that, looked at _in this light_, the universe is a
system that had a beginning and must have an end, for a process of
degradation cannot be eternal. If we could view the Universe as a
candle not lit, then it is perhaps conceivable to regard it as
having been always in existence; but if we regard it rather as a
candle that has been lit, we become absolutely certain that it
cannot have been burning from eternity, and that a time will come
when it will cease to burn. We are led to look to a beginning in
which the particles of matter were in a diffuse chaotic state, but
endowed with the power of gravitation; and we are led to look to an
end in which the whole Universe will be one equally heated inert
mass, _and from which everything like life, or motion, or beauty,
will have utterly gone away_."
Do you wish me to congratulate you on this extremely cheerful
result of telescopic and microscopic observation, and so at once
close my lecture? or may I venture yet to trespass on your time by
stating to you any of the more comfortable views held by persons
who did not regard the universe in what my author humorously calls
"this _light_"?
In the peculiarly characteristic notice with which the 'Daily News'
honored my last week's lecture, that courteous journal charged me,
in the metaphorical term now classical on Exchange, with "hedging,"
to conceal my own opinions. The charge was not prudently chosen,
since, of all men now obtaining any portion of popular regard, I am
pretty well known to be precisely the one who cares least either
for hedge or ditch, when he chooses to go across country. It is
certainly true that I have not the least mind to pin my heart on my
sleeve, for the daily daw, or nightly owl, to peck at; but the
essential reason for my not telling you my own opinions on this
matter is--that I do not consider them of material consequence to
you.
It _might_ possibly be of some advantage for you to know what--were
he now living, Orpheus would have thought, or Æschylus, or a Daniel
come to judgment, or John the Baptist, or John the Son of Thunder;
but what either you, or I, or any other Jack or Tom of us all,
think,--even if we knew what to think,--is of extremely small
moment either to the Gods, the clouds, or ourselves.
Of myself, however, if you care to hear it, I will tell you thus
much: that had the weather when I was young been such as it is now,
no book such as 'Modern Painters' ever would or _could_ have been
written; for every argument, and every sentiment in that book, was
founded on the personal experience of the beauty and blessing of
nature, all spring and summer long; and on the then demonstrable
fact that over a great portion of the world's surface the air and
the earth were fitted to the education of the spirit of man as
closely as a school-boy's primer is to his labor, and as gloriously
as a lover's mistress is to his eyes.
That harmony is now broken, and broken the world round: fragments,
indeed, of what existed still exist, and hours of what is past
still return; but month by month the darkness gains upon the day,
and the ashes of the Antipodes glare through the night.[D]
What consolation, or what courage, through plague, danger, or
darkness, you can find in the conviction that you are nothing more
than brute beasts driven by brute forces, your other tutors can
tell you--not I: but _this_ I can tell you--and with the authority
of all the masters of thought since time was time,--that, while by
no manner of vivisection you can learn what a _Beast_ is, by only
looking into your own hearts you may know what a _Man_ is,--and
know that his only true happiness is to live in Hope of something
to be won by him, in Reverence of something to be worshiped by him,
and in Love of something to be cherished by him, and cherished--forever.
Having these instincts, his only rational conclusion is that the
objects which can fulfill them may be by his effort gained, and by
his faith discerned; and his only earthly wisdom is to accept the
united testimony of the men who have sought these things in the way
they were commanded. Of whom no single one has ever said that his
obedience or his faith had been vain, or found himself cast out
from the choir of the living souls, whether here, or departed, for
whom the song was written:--
God be merciful unto us, and bless us, and cause His face to shine
upon us;
That Thy way may be known upon earth, Thy saving health among all
nations.
Oh let the nations rejoice and sing for joy, for Thou shalt judge
the people righteously and govern the nations upon earth.
_Then_ shall the earth yield her increase, and God, even our own God,
shall bless us.
God shall bless us, and all the ends of the earth shall fear Him.
[Footnote A: With all who died in Faith, not having received the
Promises, nor--according to your modern teachers--ever to receive.]
[Footnote B: Hence to the end the text is that read in termination
of the lecture on its second delivery, only with an added word or
two of comment on Proverbs xvii.]
[Footnote C: 'The Conservation of Energy.' King and Co., 1873.]
[Footnote D: Written under the impression that the lurid and
prolonged sunsets of last autumn had been proved to be connected
with the flight of volcanic ashes. This has been since, I hear,
disproved again. Whatever their cause, those sunsets were, in the
sense in which I myself use the word, altogether 'unnatural' and
terrific: but they have no connection with the far more fearful,
because protracted and increasing, power of the Plague-wind. The
letter from White's 'History of Selborne,' quoted by the Rev. W. R.
Andrews in his letter to the 'Times,' (dated January 8th) seems to
describe aspects of the sky like these of 1883, just a hundred
years before, in 1783: and also some of the circumstances noted,
especially the variation of the wind to all quarters without
alteration in the air, correspond with the character of the
plague-wind; but the fog of 1783 made the sun dark, with
iron-colored rays--not pale, with blanching rays. I subjoin Mr.
Andrews' letter, extremely valuable in its collation of the records
of simultaneous volcanic phenomena; praying the reader also to
observe the instantaneous acknowledgment, by the true 'Naturalist,'
of horror in the violation of beneficent natural law.
"THE RECENT SUNSETS AND VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS.
"SIR,--It may, perhaps, be interesting at the present time, when so
much attention has been given to the late brilliant sunsets and
sunrises, to be reminded that almost identically the same
appearances were observed just a hundred years ago.
Gilbert White writes in the year 1783, in his 109th letter,
published in his 'Natural History of Selborne':--
'The summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and portentous one, and
full of horrible phenomena; for besides the alarming meteors and
tremendous thunderstorms that affrighted and distressed the
different counties of this kingdom, the peculiar haze or smoky fog
that prevailed for many weeks in this island and in every part of
Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary
appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man. By my
journal I find that I had noticed this strange occurrence from June
23d to July 20th inclusive, during which period the wind varied to
every quarter without making any alteration in the air. The sun at
noon looked as black as a clouded moon, and shed a ferruginous
light on the ground and floors of rooms, but was particularly lurid
and blood-colored at rising and setting. The country people began
to look with a superstitious awe at the red lowering aspect of the
sun; and, indeed, there was reason for the most enlightened person
to be apprehensive, for all the while Calabria and part of the Isle
of Sicily were torn and convulsed with earthquakes, and about that
juncture a volcano sprang out of the sea on the coast of Norway.'
Other writers also mention volcanic disturbances in this same year,
1783. We are told by Lyell and Geikie, that there were great
volcanic eruptions in and near Iceland. A submarine volcano burst
forth in the sea, thirty miles southwest of Iceland, which ejected
so much pumice that the ocean was covered with this substance, to
the distance of 150 miles, and ships were considerably impeded in
their course; and a new island was formed, from which fire and
smoke and pumice were emitted.
Besides this submarine eruption, the volcano Skaptar-Jökull, on the
mainland, on June 11th, 1783, threw out a torrent of lava, so
immense as to surpass in magnitude the bulk of Mont Blanc, and
ejected so vast an amount of fine dust, that the atmosphere over
Iceland continued loaded with it for months afterwards. It fell in
such quantities over parts of Caithness--a distance of 600
miles--as to destroy the crops, and that year is still spoken of by
the inhabitants as the year of 'the ashie.'
These particulars are gathered from the text-books of Lyell and
Geikie.
I am not aware whether the coincidence in time of the Icelandic
eruptions, and of the peculiar appearance of the sun, described by
Gilbert White, has yet been noticed; but this coincidence may very
well be taken as some little evidence towards explaining the
connection between the recent beautiful sunsets and the tremendous
volcanic explosion of the Isle of Krakatoa in August last.
W. R. ANDREWS, F. G. S.
Teffont Ewyas Rectory, Salisbury, January 8th."]]
----------------------------------------------------------------------
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
Pages 7 & 18: Standardized spelling of "thundercloud."
Page 20: Standardized quotation marks surrounding poem.
Page 22: Retained inconsistent hyphenation of "thunder-storm" in
quoted material.
Pages 26, 58 & 70: Retained inconsistent hyphenation of "billiard-ball".
Pages 29 & 62: Standardized hyphenation of "now-a-days."
Pages 31-68: Adjusted placement of footnotes.
Pages 37 & 59: Standardized spelling of "hill-side."
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