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 compass; 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 shivery 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 mass 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 passed 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 shore; 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 cumulus 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-cumuli,
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 mass 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-fashioned sunset--the sort of thing
Turner and I used to have to look at,--(nobody 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 grass,--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 God 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
shining." 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 assuredly 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 passions. 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
rectitude 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 tithes into my storehouse, and prove me now herewith, saith the
Lord God, 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._
It was impossible for me, this spring, to prepare, as I wished to
have done, two lectures for the London Institution: but finding its
members more interested in the subject chosen than I had
anticipated, I enlarged my lecture at its second reading by some
explanations and parentheses, partly represented, and partly
farther developed, in the following notes; which led me on,
however, as I arranged them, into branches of the subject untouched
in the former lecture, and it seems to me of no inferior interest.
[Footnote 1: The vapor over the pool of Anger in the 'Inferno,' the
clogging stench which rises from Caina, and the fog of the circle
of Anger in the 'Purgatorio' resemble, indeed, the cloud of the
Plague-wind very closely,--but are conceived only as supernatural.
The reader will no doubt observe, throughout the following lecture,
my own habit of speaking of beautiful things as 'natural,' and of
ugly ones as 'unnatural.' In the conception of recent philosophy,
the world is one Kosmos in which diphtheria is held to be as
natural as song, and cholera as digestion. To my own mind, and the
more distinctly the more I see, know, and feel, the Earth, as
prepared for the abode of man, appears distinctly ruled by agencies
of health and disease, of which the first may be aided by his
industry, prudence, and piety; while the destroying laws are
allowed to prevail against him, in the degree in which he allows
himself in idleness, folly, and vice. Had the point been distinctly
indicated where the degrees of adversity necessary for his
discipline pass into those intended for his punishment, the world
would have been put under a manifest theocracy; but the declaration
of the principle is at least distinct enough to have convinced all
sensitive and earnest persons, from the beginning of speculation in
the eyes and mind of Man: and it has been put in my power by one
of the singular chances which have always helped me in my work when
it was in the right direction, to present to the University
of Oxford the most distinct expression of this first principle
of mediæval Theology which, so far as I know, exists in
fifteenth-century art. It is one of the drawings of the Florentine
book which I bought for a thousand pounds, against the British
Museum, some ten or twelve years since; being a compendium of
classic and mediæval religious symbolism. In the two pages of it,
forming one picture, given to Oxford, the delivery of the Law on
Sinai is represented on the left hand, (_contrary to the Scriptural
narrative_, but in deeper expression of the benediction of the
Sacred Law to all nations,) as in the midst of bright and calm
light, the figure of the Deity being supported by luminous and
level clouds, and attended by happy angels: while opposite, on the
right hand, the worship of the Golden Calf is symbolized by a
single decorated pillar, with the calf on its summit, surrounded by
the clouds and darkness of a furious storm, issuing from the mouths
of fiends;--uprooting the trees, and throwing down the rocks, above
the broken tables of the Law, of which the fragments lie in the
foreground.]
[Footnote 2: These conditions are mainly in the arrangement of the
lower rain-clouds in flakes thin and detached enough to be
illuminated by early or late sunbeams: their textures are then more
softly blended than those of the upper cirri, and have the
qualities of painted, instead of burnished or inflamed, color.
They were thus described in the 4th chapter of the 7th part of
'Modern Painters':--
"Often in our English mornings, the rain-clouds in the dawn form
soft level fields, which melt imperceptibly into the blue; or when
of less extent, gather into apparent bars, crossing the sheets of
broader cloud above; and all these bathed throughout in an
unspeakable light of pure rose-color, and purple, and amber, and
blue, not shining, but misty-soft, the barred masses, when seen
nearer, found to be woven in tresses of cloud, like floss silk,
looking as if each knot were a little swathe or sheaf of lighted
rain.
"No clouds form such skies, none are so tender, various,
inimitable; Turner himself never caught them. Correggio, putting
out his whole strength, could have painted them,--no other man."]
[Footnote 3: I did not, in writing this sentence, forget Mr.
Gladstone's finely scholastic enthusiasm for Homer; nor Mr.
Newton's for Athenian--(I wish it had not been also for
Halicarnassian) sculpture. But Byron loved Greece herself--through
her death--and _to_ his own; while the subsequent refusal of
England to give Greece one of our own princes for a king, has
always been held by me the most ignoble, cowardly, and lamentable,
of all our base commercial _im_policies.]
[Footnote 4: 'Deepening' clouds.--Byron never uses an epithet
vainly,--he is the most accurate, and therefore the most powerful,
of all modern describers. The deepening of the cloud is essentially
necessary to the redness of the orb. Ordinary observers are
continually unaware of this fact, and imagine that a red sun can be
darker than the sky round it! Thus Mr. Gould, though a professed
naturalist, and passing most of his life in the open air, over and
over again, in his 'British Birds,' draws the setting sun dark on
the sky!]
[Footnote 5: 'Like the blood he predicts.'--The astrological power
of the planet Mars was of course ascribed to it in the same
connection with its red color. The reader may be interested to see
the notice, in 'Modern Painters,' of Turner's constant use of the
same symbol; partly an expression of his own personal feeling,
partly, the employment of a symbolic language known to all careful
readers of solar and stellar tradition.
"He was very definitely in the habit of indicating the association
of any subject with circumstances of death, especially the death of
multitudes, by placing it under one of his most deeply _crimsoned_
sunset skies.
"The color of blood is thus plainly taken for the leading tone in
the storm-clouds above the 'Slave-ship.' It occurs with similar
distinctness in the much earlier picture of 'Ulysses and
Polypheme,' in that of 'Napoleon at St. Helena,' and, subdued by
softer hues, in the 'Old Téméraire.'
"The sky of this Goldau is, in its scarlet and crimson, the deepest
in tone of all that I know in Turner's drawings.
"Another feeling, traceable in several of his former works, is an
acute sense of the contrast between the careless interests and idle
pleasures of daily life, and the state of those whose time for
labor, or knowledge, or delight, is passed forever. There is
evidence of this feeling in the introduction of the boys at play in
the churchyard of Kirkby Lonsdale, and the boy climbing for his
kite among the thickets above the little mountain churchyard of
Brignal-bank; it is in the same tone of thought that he has placed
here the two figures fishing, leaning against these shattered
flanks of rock,--the sepulchral stones of the great mountain Field
of Death."]
[Footnote 6: 'Thy lore unto calamity.'--It is, I believe,
recognized by all who have in any degree become interested in the
traditions of Chaldean astrology, that its warnings were
distinct,--its promises deceitful. Horace thus warns Leuconoe
against reading the Babylonian numbers to learn the time of her
death,--he does not imply their promise of previous happiness; and
the continually deceptive character of the Delphic oracle itself,
tempted always rather to fatal than to fortunate conduct, unless
the inquirer were more than wise in his reading. Byron gathers into
the bitter question all the sorrow of former superstition, while in
the lines italicized, just above, he sums in the briefest and
plainest English, all that we yet know, or may wisely think, about
the Sun. It is the '_Burning_ oracle' (other oracles there are by
sound, or feeling, but this by fire) of all that lives; the only
means of our accurate knowledge of the things round us, and that
affect our lives: it is the _fountain_ of all life,--Byron does not
say the _origin_;--the origin of life would be the origin of the
sun itself; but it is the visible _source_ of vital energy, as the
spring is of a stream, though the origin is the sea. "And symbol of
Him who bestows it."--This the sun has always been, to every one
who believes there is a bestower; and a symbol so perfect and
beautiful that it may also be thought of as partly an apocalypse.]
[Footnote 7: 'More beautiful in that variety.'--This line, with the
one italicized beneath, expresses in Myrrha's mind, the feeling
which I said, in the outset, every thoughtful watcher of heaven
necessarily had in those old days; whereas now, the variety is for
the most part, only in modes of disagreeableness; and the vapor,
instead of adding light to the unclouded sky, takes away the aspect
and destroys the functions of sky altogether.]