The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century Part 3

It was impossible for me, this spring, to prepare, as I wished to have done, two lectures for the London Inst.i.tution: but finding its members more interested in the subject chosen than I had antic.i.p.ated, 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 pa.s.s 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 mediaeval 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 cla.s.sic and mediaeval 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 ma.s.ses, 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 Halicarna.s.sian) 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 ign.o.ble, 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 pa.s.sing 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 a.s.sociation of any subject with circ.u.mstances of death, especially the death of mult.i.tudes, 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 Temeraire.'

"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 pa.s.sed 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 superst.i.tion, 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 ma.s.s of them, but on the contrary, during its steady _expansion_; in the third place he a.s.sumes 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 quant.i.ty 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ces 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 ma.s.s, let the pound weight be laid upon it. We have a more flattened ma.s.s, 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 t.i.tle of 'Banner-cloud.' Its less imaginative t.i.tle, 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. .h.i.therto been un.o.bserved,--namely, that such cloud is constant in certain states of weather, under precipitous rocks;--but never developed with distinctness by domes of snow.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

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 ill.u.s.trative 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 ma.s.s 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 ma.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 gra.s.s 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 ma.s.ses 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 pa.s.sage in verifying Mr. Hill's quotation from the 5th.)

"[Greek: hama de nephos eipeto pezon.

Hos d' hot' apo skopies eiden nephos aipolos aner Erchomenon kata ponton hypo Zephyroio ioes, To de t', aneuthen eonti, melanteron, eute p.i.s.sa Phainet', ion kata ponton, agei de te lailapa pollen; Rhigesen te idon, hypo te speos elase mela; Toiai ham Aiantessin areithoon aizeon Deion 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 pa.s.sage, 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 pa.s.sage, 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 l.u.s.ter, 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 sh.o.r.e.

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 pa.s.sing 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 gra.s.s 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 pa.s.sage, 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 pa.s.sages 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 gla.s.s, 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.)