Part 5 (1/2)
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 s.h.i.+p 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 flouris.h.i.+ng, 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 s.h.i.+p. 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 s.h.i.+p, 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 Yorks.h.i.+re and Derbys.h.i.+re 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 s.h.i.+nings; 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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.