The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century Part 5

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 bra.s.s or gla.s.s."

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 d.a.m.ning 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 pa.s.sage 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 s.p.a.ce with its strength,[B] the sun-gleams fly like golden vultures; they are flashes rather than shinings; the dark s.p.a.ces 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 alt.i.tude. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 Biona.s.say; 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 Saleve, 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 sh.o.r.e of the lake of Geneva; but we could not see the Saleve; nor even the north sh.o.r.e, 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 pa.s.sing 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 lat.i.tudes, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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-re'--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 a.s.sertion of its own virtue and dignity against the always implied, and often a.s.serted, vileness of all men and--G.o.ds,--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 superst.i.tion 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 repet.i.tion with perfect accent and cultivated voice, should be made quite princ.i.p.al branches of school discipline up to the time of going to the university.

And of writings to be learned by heart, among other pa.s.sages 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.)