The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century
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6 THE COMPLETE WORKS
OF
JOHN RUSKIN
VOLUME XXIV
OUR FATHERS HAVE TOLD US
STORM-CLOUD OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
HORTUS INCLUSUS
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THE STORM-CLOUD OF THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY.
TWO LECTURES
DELIVERED AT THE LONDON INSTITUTION
FEBRUARY 4TH AND 11TH, 1884.
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CONTENTS.
PAGE
PREFACE iii
LECTURE I. (FEBRUARY 4) 1
LECTURE II. (FEBRUARY 11) 31
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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_.
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THE STORM-CLOUD OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
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THE STORM-CLOUD OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
Let me first assure my audience that I have no _arriere pensee_ 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: empiplon trophes kai euphrosynes
tas kardias hemon.]
filling with meat, and cheerfulness, our hearts. The modern Greek
should be--
[Greek: empiplon anemou kai aphrosynes
tas gasteras hemon.]
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, nephelesin eoikotes has te Kronion
Nenemies estesen ep' akropoloisin oressin,
Atremas, ophr' heudesi menos Boreao kai allon
Zachreion anemon, hoite nephea skioenta
Pnoiesin lygyresi diaskidnasin aentes;
Hos Danaoi Troas 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.
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