The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century

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,

["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"]

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.

[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."]

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."

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 [With all who died in Faith, not having received the Promises, nor—according to your modern teachers—ever to receive]—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' [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] 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.