The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century Part 2

"And the scientific men are busy as ants, examining the sun, and the moon, and the seven stars, and can tell me all about _them_, I believe, by this time; and how they move, and what they are made of.

"And I do not care, for my part, two copper spangles how they move, nor what they are made of. I can't move them any other way than they go, nor make them of anything else, better than they are made.

But I would care much and give much, if I could be told where this bitter wind comes from, and what _it_ is made of.

"For, perhaps, with forethought, and fine laboratory science, one might make it of something else.

"It looks partly as if it were made of poisonous smoke; very possibly it may be: there are at least two hundred furnace chimneys in a square of two miles on every side of me. But mere smoke would not blow to and fro in that wild way. It looks more to me as if it were made of dead men's souls--such of them as are not gone yet where they have to go, and may be flitting hither and thither, doubting, themselves, of the fittest place for them.

"You know, if there _are_ such things as souls, and if ever any of them haunt places where they have been hurt, there must be many about us, just now, displeased enough!"

The last sentence refers of course to the battles of the Franco-German campaign, which was especially horrible to me, in its digging, as the Germans should have known, a moat flooded with waters of death between the two nations for a century to come.

Since that Midsummer day, my attention, however otherwise occupied, has never relaxed in its record of the phenomena characteristic of the plague-wind; and I now define for you, as briefly as possible, the essential signs of it.

1. It is a wind of darkness,--all the former conditions of tormenting winds, whether from the north or east were more or less capable of co-existing with sunlight, and often with steady and bright sunlight; but whenever, and wherever the plague-wind blows, be it but for ten minutes, the sky is darkened instantly.

2. It is a malignant _quality_ of wind, unconnected with any one quarter of the compa.s.s; it blows indifferently from all, attaching its own bitterness and malice to the worst characters of the proper winds of each quarter. It will blow either with drenching rain, or dry rage, from the south,--with ruinous blasts from the west,--with bitterest chills from the north,--and with venomous blight from the east.

Its own favorite quarter, however, is the southwest, so that it is distinguished in its malignity equally from the Bise of Provence, which is a north wind always, and from our own old friend, the east.

3. It always blows _tremulously_, making the leaves of the trees shudder as if they were all aspens, but with a peculiar fitfulness which gives them--and I watch them this moment as I write--an expression of anger as well as of fear and distress. You may see the kind of quivering, and hear the ominous whimpering, in the gusts that precede a great thunderstorm; but plague-wind is more panic-struck, and feverish; and its sound is a hiss instead of a wail.

When I was last at Avallon, in South France, I went to see 'Faust'

played at the little country theater: it was done with scarcely any means of pictorial effect, except a few old curtains, and a blue light or two. But the night on the Brocken was nevertheless extremely appalling to me,--a strange ghastliness being obtained in some of the witch scenes merely by fine management of gesture and drapery; and in the phantom scenes, by the half-palsied, half-furious, faltering or fluttering past of phantoms stumbling as into graves; as if of not only soulless, but senseless, Dead, moving with the very action, the rage, the decrepitude, and the trembling of the plague-wind.

4. Not only tremulous at every moment, it is also _intermittent_ with a rapidity quite unexampled in former weather. There are, indeed, days--and weeks, on which it blows without cessation, and is as inevitable as the Gulf Stream; but also there are days when it is contending with healthy weather, and on such days it will remit for half an hour, and the sun will begin to show itself, and then the wind will come back and cover the whole sky with clouds in ten minutes; and so on, every half-hour, through the whole day; so that it is often impossible to go on with any kind of drawing in color, the light being never for two seconds the same from morning till evening.

5. It degrades, while it intensifies, ordinary storm; but before I read you any description of its efforts in this kind, I must correct an impression which has got abroad through the papers, that I speak as if the plague-wind blew now always, and there were no more any natural weather. On the contrary, the winter of 1878-9 was one of the most healthy and lovely I ever saw ice in;--Coniston lake shone under the calm clear frost in one marble field, as strong as the floor of Milan Cathedral, half a mile across and four miles down; and the first entries in my diary which I read you shall be from the 22d to 26th June, 1876, of perfectly lovely and natural weather.

"_Sunday, 25th June, 1876._

Yesterday, an entirely glorious sunset, unmatched in beauty since that at Abbeville,--deep scarlet, and purest rose, on purple gray, in bars; and stationary, plumy, sweeping filaments above in upper sky, like '_using up the brush_,' said Joanie; remaining in glory, every moment best, changing from one good into another, (but only in color or light--_form steady_,) for half an hour full, and the clouds afterwards fading into the gray against amber twilight, _stationary in the same form for about two hours_, at least. The darkening rose tint remained till half-past ten, the grand time being at nine.

The day had been fine,--exquisite green light on afternoon hills.

_Monday, 26th June, 1876._

Yesterday an entirely perfect summer light on the Old Man; Lancaster Bay all clear; Ingleborough and the great Pennine fault as on a map. Divine beauty of western color on thyme and rose,--then twilight of clearest _warm_ amber far into night, of _pale_ amber all night long; hills dark-clear against it.

And so it continued, only growing more intense in blue and sunlight, all day. After breakfast, I came in from the well under strawberry bed, to say I had never seen anything like it, so pure or intense, in Italy; and so it went glowing on, cloudless, with soft north wind, all day.

_16th July._

The sunset almost too bright _through the blinds_ for me to read Humboldt at tea by,--finally, new moon like a lime-light, reflected on breeze-struck water; traces, across dark calm, of reflected hills."

These extracts are, I hope, enough to guard you against the absurdity of supposing that it all only means that I am myself soured, or doting, in my old age, and always in an ill humor.

Depend upon it, when old men are worth anything, they are better humored than young ones; and have learned to see what good there is, and pleasantness, in the world they are likely so soon to have orders to quit.

Now then--take the following sequences of accurate description of thunderstorm, _with_ plague-wind.

_"22d June, 1876._

Thunderstorm; pitch dark, with no _blackness_,--but deep, high, _filthiness_ of lurid, yet not sublimely lurid, smoke-cloud; dense manufacturing mist; fearful squalls of s.h.i.+very wind, making Mr.

Severn's sail quiver like a man in a fever fit--all about four, afternoon--but only two or three claps of thunder, and feeble, though near, flashes. I never saw such a dirty, weak, foul storm.

It cleared suddenly, after raining all afternoon, at half-past eight to nine, into pure, natural weather,--low rain-clouds on quite clear, green, wet hills.

_Brantwood, 13th August, 1879._

The most terrific and horrible thunderstorm, this morning, I ever remember. It waked me at six, or a little before--then rolling incessantly, like railway luggage trains, quite ghastly in its mockery of them--the air one loathsome ma.s.s of sultry and foul fog, like smoke; scarcely raining at all, but increasing to heavier rollings, with flashes quivering vaguely through all the air, and at last terrific double streams of reddish-violet fire, not forked or zigzag, but rippled rivulets--two at the same instant some twenty to thirty degrees apart, and lasting on the eye at least half a second, with grand artillery-peals following; not rattling crashes, or irregular cracklings, but delivered volleys. It lasted an hour, then pa.s.sed off, clearing a little, without rain to speak of,--not a glimpse of blue,--and now, half-past seven, seems settling down again into Manchester devil's darkness.

Quarter to eight, morning.--Thunder returned, all the air collapsed into one black fog, the hills invisible, and scarcely visible the opposite sh.o.r.e; heavy rain in short fits, and frequent, though less formidable, flashes, and shorter thunder. While I have written this sentence the cloud has again dissolved itself, like a nasty solution in a bottle, with miraculous and unnatural rapidity, and the hills are in sight again; a double-forked flash--rippled, I mean, like the others--starts into its frightful ladder of light between me and Wetherlam, as I raise my eyes. All black above, a rugged spray cloud on the Eaglet. (The 'Eaglet' is my own name for the bold and elevated crag to the west of the little lake above Coniston mines. It had no name among the country people, and is one of the most conspicuous features of the mountain chain, as seen from Brantwood.)

Half-past eight.--Three times light and three times dark since last I wrote, and the darkness seeming each time as it settles more loathsome, at last stopping my reading in mere blindness. One lurid gleam of white c.u.mulus in upper lead-blue sky, seen for half a minute through the sulphurous chimney-pot vomit of blackguardly cloud beneath, where its rags were thinnest.

_Thursday, 22d Feb. 1883._

Yesterday a fearfully dark mist all afternoon, with steady, south plague-wind of the bitterest, nastiest, poisonous blight, and fretful flutter. I could scarcely stay in the wood for the horror of it. To-day, really rather bright blue, and bright semi-c.u.muli, with the frantic Old Man blowing sheaves of lancets and chisels across the lake--not in strength enough, or whirl enough, to raise it in spray, but tracing every squall's outline in black on the silver gray waves, and whistling meanly, and as if on a flute made of a file.

_Sunday, 17th August, 1879._

Raining in foul drizzle, slow and steady; sky pitch-dark, and I just get a little light by sitting in the bow-window; diabolic clouds over everything: and looking over my kitchen garden yesterday, I found it one miserable ma.s.s of weeds gone to seed, the roses in the higher garden putrefied into brown sponges, feeling like dead snails; and the half-ripe strawberries all rotten at the stalks."

6. And now I come to the most important sign of the plague-wind and the plague-cloud: that in bringing on their peculiar darkness, they _blanch_ the sun instead of reddening it. And here I must note briefly to you the uselessness of observation by instruments, or machines, instead of eyes. In the first year when I had begun to notice the specialty of the plague-wind, I went of course to the Oxford observatory to consult its registrars. They have their anemometer always on the twirl, and can tell you the force, or at least the pace, of a gale,[19] by day or night. But the anemometer can only record for you how often it has been driven round, not at all whether it went round _steadily_, or went round _trembling_.

And on that point depends the entire question whether it is a plague breeze or a healthy one: and what's the use of telling you whether the wind's strong or not, when it can't tell you whether it's a strong medicine, or a strong poison?

But again--you have your _sun_-measure, and can tell exactly at any moment how strong, or how weak, or how wanting, the sun is. But the sun-measurer can't tell you whether the rays are stopped by a dense _shallow_ cloud, or a thin _deep_ one. In healthy weather, the sun is hidden behind a cloud, as it is behind a tree; and, when the cloud is past, it comes out again, as bright as before. But in plague-wind, the sun is choked out of the whole heaven, all day long, by a cloud which may be a thousand miles square and five miles deep.

And yet observe: that thin, scraggy, filthy, mangy, miserable cloud, for all the depth of it, can't turn the sun red, as a good, business-like fog does with a hundred feet or so of itself. By the plague-wind every breath of air you draw is polluted, half round the world; in a London fog the air itself is pure, though you choose to mix up dirt with it, and choke yourself with your own nastiness.

Now I'm going to show you a diagram of a sunset in entirely pure weather, above London smoke. I saw it and sketched it from my old post of observation--the top garret of my father's house at Herne Hill. There, when the wind is south, we are outside of the smoke and above it; and this diagram, admirably enlarged from my own drawing by my, now in all things best aide-de-camp, Mr.

Collingwood, shows you an old-fas.h.i.+oned sunset--the sort of thing Turner and I used to have to look at,--(n.o.body else ever would) constantly. Every sunset and every dawn, in fine weather, had something of the sort to show us. This is one of the last pure sunsets I ever saw, about the year 1876,--and the point I want you to note in it is, that the air being pure, the smoke on the horizon, though at last it hides the sun, yet hides it through gold and vermilion. Now, don't go away fancying there's any exaggeration in that study. The _prismatic_ colors, I told you, were simply impossible to paint; these, which are transmitted colors, can indeed be suggested, but no more. The brightest pigment we have would look dim beside the truth.

I should have liked to have blotted down for you a bit of plague-cloud to put beside this; but Heaven knows, you can see enough of it now-a-days without any trouble of mine; and if you want, in a hurry, to see what the sun looks like through it, you've only to throw a bad half-crown into a basin of soap and water.

Blanched Sun,--blighted gra.s.s,--blinded man.--If, in conclusion, you ask me for any conceivable cause or meaning of these things--I can tell you none, according to your modern beliefs; but I can tell you what meaning it would have borne to the men of old time.

Remember, for the last twenty years, England, and all foreign nations, either tempting her, or following her, have blasphemed[20]

the name of G.o.d deliberately and openly; and have done iniquity by proclamation, every man doing as much injustice to his brother as it is in his power to do. Of states in such moral gloom every seer of old predicted the physical gloom, saying, "The light shall be darkened in the heavens thereof, and the stars shall withdraw their s.h.i.+ning." All Greek, all Christian, all Jewish prophecy insists on the same truth through a thousand myths; but of all the chief, to former thought, was the fable of the Jewish warrior and prophet, for whom the sun hasted not to go down, with which I leave you to compare at leisure the physical result of your own wars and prophecies, as declared by your own elect journal not fourteen days ago,--that the Empire of England, on which formerly the sun never set, has become one on which he never rises.

What is best to be done, do you ask me? The answer is plain.

Whether you can affect the signs of the sky or not, you _can_ the signs of the times. Whether you can bring the _sun_ back or not, you can a.s.suredly bring back your own cheerfulness, and your own honesty. You may not be able to say to the winds, "Peace; be still," but you can cease from the insolence of your own lips, and the troubling of your own pa.s.sions. And all _that_ it would be extremely well to do, even though the day _were_ coming when the sun should be as darkness, and the moon as blood. But, the paths of rect.i.tude and piety once regained, who shall say that the promise of old time would not be found to hold for us also?--"Bring ye all the t.i.thes into my storehouse, and prove me now herewith, saith the Lord G.o.d, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it."

LECTURE II.

_March 11th, 1884._