The Catholic World Volume Ii Part 33

... Do not all enjoy it equally--rich and poor? ... . . Yea, rather, if I must speak somewhat marvellously, we poor enjoy it more than they... . . The poor more than any enjoy the luxury of the elements." [Footnote 35]

[Footnote 31: "Homilies on the Statues." The Oxford Translation.]

[Footnote 32: "Homilies on 1 Thessalonians iv. 12." ]

[Footnote 33: "Homilles on St. Matthew." Part II. ]

[Footnote 34: "Homilles on St. John." Part II.]

[Footnote 35: "Homilles on 2 Corinthians." ]

The pa.s.sage is full of the deepest interest. Mr. Ruskin has shown us with what mixed feelings the Greeks loved the clouds, and how the mediaevalist feared them. It would be well to know how they have been and are still viewed in England by the lower cla.s.ses. For, as we before said, the upper cla.s.ses care little about the clouds. The [Greek text] (changeful days) of England pa.s.s by unnoticed, except to fill up a gap in a conversation. St. Swithin is our national saint, but we are not enthusiastic devotees. Only when a picnic or a cricket match is involved do we trouble ourselves about the clouds. Then the barometer is studied, and the weatherc.o.c.k becomes an object of interest. In short, only when our pleasures are at stake do we care whether the day is wet or fine. On the other hand, life with the poor, man depends on the weather. Three continuous wet days in London throw no less than twenty thousand people out of employment. Fine weather is the poor man's bread-winner, his comforter, his physician. He may therefore be pardoned if, with Ulysses, he in the first place regards it from an economical point of view. Thus the laborers in the north midland counties speak of showery weather as "rich weather,"--that is, not only enriching the crops, but themselves. On the contrary, as producing a different effect on their calling, the sailors on the north-east {215} coast speak of such weather as "shabby weather," and call rain--useless to them--"dirt." This indeed must be the case. In the lowest as in the earliest stages of society, this utilitarian spirit--not necessarily base, but co-existent with even a pa.s.sionate love of beauty--must prevail. The laborer whose day's wage depends on the clouds, and the fisherman whose meal rests with the winds, will naturally first think of them as subservient to the needs of life.

Badly clothed, and ill-fed, they cannot possibly appreciate Mr.

Kingsley's admiration of the east wind. The fisherman only knows it as producing a dearth of fish. To the midland peasant it is his "red wind,"--just as Virgil spoke of _nigerrimus Auster_, and as the Greeks called the north wind "the black wind," still the _bise_ of the Mediterranean. In the east of England the nightingale is not the bird of song, not Ben Jonson's "dear good angel of the spring," but the "barley-bird," because it arrives when the barley is sown. For, on the whole, barley is more important to the peasant than song, and therefore the bird is thus called. Nevertheless the song may be highly prized, but it is still secondary. Thus we stumble upon a curious explanation of the utilitarian spirit observed in Homer and the earliest painters. And the terms of our country-people throw a plain light upon the Homeric epithets "fruitful" ([Greek text]), and "loamy"

([Greek text]), applied to the earth; and the phrases of our fishermen curiously ill.u.s.trate the terms "barren" ([Greek text]), and "teeming with fish" ([Greek text]), as applied to the sea. Society in the same or parallel stage ever gives the same utterance.

The reality, too, of the elements, as Lear and Jacques would say, touches the poor to the quick. Hence in the north they simply call rain "waters," just in the same way as the Greeks used [Greek text]

whilst in the midland counties they nearly as often say "it is wetting" as "it is raining." Their proverbs, too, smack of the fierceness of men who have struggled with the storm. So the Anglian countryman sings of the first three days of March,

"First comes David, then comes Chad.

Then comes Winnol blowing like mad."

Their vocabulary, too, teems with words expressive of every shade and variety of weather. Our skies and clouds have entered far more into the composition of popular phrases than we are commonly aware. Such trivial expressions as "being under a cloud," "laying up for a rainy day," unconsciously reflect the character of our weather. Its power overshadows even the altar and the grave in the common rhyme:

"Happy the bride whom the sun s.h.i.+nes on.

Happy the dead whom the rain rains on."

And the rhyme at one time really exercised a spell. You find it used by lovers amongst our Elizabethan dramatists, who so faithfully reflected the spirit of the day. Thus, in Webster's _d.u.c.h.ess of Malfy_, Ferdinand cries to the d.u.c.h.ess about her lover:

"Let not the sun s.h.i.+ne on him till he's dead."

_Act iii. Sc._ 2

But the poor possess an abundance of such expressions. And as life is real to them, so their sayings are quickened with reality. Thus, "to be born in a frost" is in Yorks.h.i.+re an euphemism for being foolish. In the same county, "to obtain anything under the wind" means to obtain it secretly. In Norfolk the ploughman says "there is a good steward when the wind-frost blows." Just consider, too, the richness of their vocabulary of weather-terms, and the observation which it implies.

Take Yorks.h.i.+re alone, and there we shall find "dag," "douk," "pell,"

"pelse," "rouk," "rag," "sops," all standing for different kinds and degrees of rain and showers. There the white winter-mist is the "hag"

the h.o.a.r-frost the "rind," the snow-flakes "clarts of snow," and the summer heat-mist the "gossamer," as Wedgwood {216} notices, the _Marien faden_ of Germany. Go into the eastern counties, and the dialect is as rich. The sea-mist is the "sea-fret" and the "sea-roke."

The heavy rain, which soaks into the earth, is the "ground-rain." The light rain is the "smur" in Suffolk, the "brange" in Ess.e.x, and the "dag" in Norfolk, from which last word the various corruptions "water-dogs" and "sun-dogs" are formed.

Pa.s.sing, however, from words, let us note a few of the weather-rhymes and weather-proverbs which show what accurate observers necessity has made our peasants. There is not a village where the local phenomena of mists and clouds are not preserved in some rhyme. From c.u.mberland to Devons.h.i.+re the land echoes with these weather-saws. In the former county we have--

"If Skiddaw hath a cap, Criffel wots full well of that."

In the latter, the rhyme--this time really a rhyme--runs:

"When Haldon wears a hat, Let Kenton beware of a skat."

The Warwicks.h.i.+re and Worcesters.h.i.+re peasants in the Vale of Evesham repeat a similar couplet about their own Bredon, and the Leicesters.h.i.+re and Lincolns.h.i.+re churls about their Belvoir.

Weather-rhymes lie treasured up throughout the midland counties about

"The green-blue mackerel sky, Never holds three days dry;"

in the northern counties about "mony haws, mony snaws," and in the eastern of the "near bur, rain fur."' In England we, too, can rhyme about _la journee du pelerin_. For centuries the village poet has sung of "mare's tails" and "hen-scrattins," and the great "Noah's Ark cloud," and the "weather-head," of the changes of the moon, how

"Sat.u.r.day change, and Sunday full, Never did good, nor never wull."

For the peasant in his rude fas.h.i.+on is a meteorologist and has studied the ways of the clouds, "water wagons," as in some counties he calls them. From him Aratus might have filled another _Diosemeia_, and Virgil improved his first Greorgic. Our Elizabethan dramatists have borrowed some of their most life-like touches from the peasant's weather-lore. Thus Cunningham, in Beaumont and Fletcher's _Wit at Several Weapons_, says of wrangling:

"It never comes but, like a storm of hail, 'Tis sure to bring fine weather in the tail on't."

_Act. iii., Sc._ 1.

And Webster, borrowing from the sailor, makes Silvio say of the cardinal that he

"Lifts up hit nose like a fool porpoise before storm."

_d.u.c.h.ess of Malfy, Act, iii., Sc. 3._

Shakespeare borrows from both peasant and sailor. His finest descriptions of cloud scenery, as we shall show, are based upon popular phrases. Two of his most beautiful similes ill.u.s.trate the villager's weather lore. Thus Lucrece is described:

"And round about her tear-distrained eye.

Blue circles streamed like rainbows in the sky.

Those water-galls in her dim element, Foretell new storms to those already spent."

And again, in _All's Well that Ends Well_, the countess says to Helena:

"What's the matter That this distempered messenger of wet, The many-colored Iris, rounds thine eye?"

_Act. i., Sc. 3._

And the peasant's rhymes and sayings undoubtedly contain some germs of truth, or they could never have so long held their ground. Admiral Fitzroy, in his "Weather Book," has rightly given a collection of such saws, though it might with advantage be greatly enlarged. Science has before now been forestalled by some bold guess of the vulgar. And often has some happy intuition outstripped the slow labor of the inductive process.

But with the English peasant a sense of the beautiful accompanies that of the useful. Living ever out of doors, he names his clouds after natural objects. He thus gives a {217} reality to them which is unknown to scientific nomenclature. The "lamb storms" of Derbys.h.i.+re, and the "pewit storms" in Yorkskire, significantly mark the time of year when the lambs are yeaned in the cloughs, and the pewits return to the moors to breed. His symbolism is always true. The peasant in the eastern counties talks of "bulfinch skies" to express the lovely warm vermilion tints of sunset clouds. Tennyson's "daffodil sky" is not truer, nor Homer's [Greek text] more poetical. In Devons.h.i.+re the peasan has his "lamb's-wool sky" the _tenuia lanae vellera_ of Virgil.

In parts of the midland counties he has his "sheep clouds" the _schaffchen am himmel_ of the German, the same clouds which the Norfolk peasant boy has described with so perfect a touch:

"Detached in ranges through the air, Spotless as snow, and countless as they're fair.

Scattered immensely wide from east to west, The beauteous semblance of a flock at rest."

The Derbys.h.i.+re countryman knows the hard stratified ma.s.ses of cloud (_c.u.mulo-strati_) by the happy name of "rock clouds" and the great white rolling avalanches (_c.u.muli_) as "snow packs" and "wool packs"

the former being rounder than the latter, which lie in folds pressed and packed upon one another. Further living amongst hills and mountains, watching them, as Wordsworth says, "grow" at night, enlarging with the darkness, he finely calls the great hill at the entrance to Dovedale, Thorpe Cloud. He had seen it apparently s.h.i.+ft and move with the changes of light and atmosphere, and he could only liken it to a cloud. Perhaps, even at times, some faint glimmering might flit across his mind of the instability of the hills, and the rack to him thus became a symbol of the world's unsubstantial pageant.

The midland counties peasant, too, employs such old-world phrases as the sun is "wading" when it is straggling through a heavy scud, and the sun is "sitting" when her dark side is turned toward the earth.

The poets themselves may be in vain searched for a finer expression than the first. The beginning of Sidney's sonnet, which Wordsworth has adopted,

"With how sad steps, O moon, thou climb'st the sky,"

and Milton's description,

"As if her head she bow'd Stooping through a fleecy cloud,"

are somewhat parallel. But the peasant's expression is equally fine.

Most readers of "Modern Painters" will remember Mr. Ruskin's vivid description of what he so well calls the "helmet cloud," which rests on the peaks of mountains. But long before Mr. Ruskin wrote, the Westmoreland and c.u.mberland dalesman named the cloud that at times floats round the tor of Cross Fell by the still better names "helm cloud" and "helm bar."