that of late neither the look of the sky nor the character of the
weather has been, as we should say, what it used to be; and those
whose eyes were strong enough to look now and then toward the sun
have noticed a very marked increase of what some would call a
watery look about him, which might perhaps be better expressed as a
white sheen or glare, at times developing into solar halo or mock
suns, as noted in your paper of the 2d of October last year. A
fisherman would describe it as "white and davery-like." So far as
my observation goes, this appearance was only absent here for a
limited period during the present summer, when we had a week or two
of nearly normal weather; the summer before it was seldom absent.
'Again, those whose business or pleasure has depended on the use of
wind-power have all remarked the strange persistence of hard
westerly and easterly winds, the westerly ones at times partaking
of an almost trade-wind-like force and character. The summer of
1882 was especially remarkable for these winds, while each stormy
November has been followed by a period about mid-winter of mild
calm weather with dense fog. During these strong winds in summer
and early autumn the weather would remain bright and sunny, and to
a landsman would be not remarkable in any way, while the barometer
has been little affected by them; but it has been often observed by
those employed on the water that when it ceased blowing half a gale
the sky at once became overcast, with damp weather or rain. This
may all seem common enough to most people; but to those accustomed
to gauge the wind by the number of reefs wanted in a mainsail or
foresail it was not so; and the number of consecutive days when two
or more reefs have been kept tied down during the last few summers
has been remarkable--alternating at times with equally persistent
spells of calm and fog such as we are now passing through. Again,
we have had an unusually early appearance of ice in the Atlantic,
and most abnormal weather over Central Europe; while in a letter I
have just received from an old hand on board a large Australian
clipper, he speaks of heavy gales and big seas off that coast in
almost the height of their summer.
'Now, upon all this, in our season of long twilights, we have
bursting upon us some clear weather; with a display of cloud-forms
or vapor at such an elevation that, looking at them one day through
an opening in the nearer clouds, they seemed so distant as to
resemble nothing but the delicate grain of ivory upon a
billiard-ball. And yet with the fact that two-thirds of this earth
is covered with water, and bearing in mind the effect which a very
small increase of sun-power would have in producing cloud and
lifting it above its normal level for a time, we are asked to
believe that this sheen is all dust of some kind or other, in order
to explain what are now known as the "recent sunsets": though I
venture to think that we shall see more of them yet when the sun
comes our way again.
'At first sight, increased sun-power would seem to mean more
sunshine; but a little reflection would show us that this would not
be for long, while any considerable addition to the sun's power
would be followed by such a vast increase of vapor that we should
only see him, in our latitudes, at very short intervals. I am aware
that all this is most unscientific; but I have read column after
column of explanation written by those who are supposed to know all
about such things, and find myself not a jot the wiser for it. Do
you know anybody who is?--I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
'AN UNSCIENTIFIC OBSERVER. (R. LESLIE.)
_January 1_.']
[Footnote B: "I have been often at great heights on the Alps in
rough weather, and have seen strong gusts of storm in the plains of
the south. But, to get full expression of the very heart and
meaning of wind, there is no place like a Yorkshire moor. I think
Scottish breezes are thinner, very bleak and piercing, but not
substantial. If you lean on them they will let you fall, but one
may rest against a Yorkshire breeze as one would on a quickset
hedge. I shall not soon forget,--having had the good fortune to
meet a vigorous one on an April morning, between Hawes and Settle,
just on the flat under Wharnside,--the vague sense of wonder _with
which I watched Ingleborough stand without rocking_."]
[Footnote C: Compare Wordsworth's
"Oh beauteous birds, methinks ye measure
Your movements to some heavenly tune."
And again--
"While the mists,
Flying and rainy vapors, call out shapes,
And phantoms from the crags and solid earth,
As fast as a musician scatters sounds
Out of an instrument."
And again--
"The Knight had ridden down from Wensley moor,
With the slow motion of a summer cloud."]]
[Footnote 20: 'Blasphemy.'--If the reader can refer to my papers on
Fiction in the 'Nineteenth Century,' he will find this word
carefully defined in its Scriptural, and evermore necessary,
meaning,--'Harmful speaking'--not against God only, but against
man, and against all the good works and purposes of Nature. The
word is accurately opposed to 'Euphemy,' the right or well-speaking
of God and His world; and the two modes of speech are those which
going out of the mouth sanctify or defile the man.
Going out of the mouth, that is to say, deliberately and of
purpose. A French postilion's 'Sacr-r-ré'--loud, with the low 'Nom
de Dieu' following between his teeth, is not blasphemy, unless
against his horse;--but Mr. Thackeray's close of his Waterloo
chapter in 'Vanity Fair,' "And all the night long Amelia was
praying for George, who was lying on his face dead with a bullet
through his heart," is blasphemy of the most fatal and subtle kind.
And the universal instinct of blasphemy in the modern vulgar
scientific mind is above all manifested in its love of what is
ugly, and natural inthrallment by the abominable;--so that it is
ten to one if, in the description of a new bird, you learn much
more of it than the enumerated species of vermin that stick to its
feathers; and in the natural history museum of Oxford, humanity has
been hitherto taught, not by portraits of great men, but by the
skulls of cretins.
But the _deliberate_ blasphemy of science, the assertion of its own
virtue and dignity against the always implied, and often asserted,
vileness of all men and--Gods,--heretofore, is the most wonderful
phenomenon, so far as I can read or perceive, that hitherto has
arisen in the always marvelous course of the world's mental
history.
Take, for brief general type, the following 92d paragraph of the
'Forms of Water':--
"But while we thus acknowledge our limits, there is also reason for
wonder at the extent to which Science has mastered the system of
nature. From age to age and from generation to generation, fact has
been added to fact and law to law, the true method and order of the
Universe being thereby more and more revealed. In doing this,
Science has encountered and overthrown various forms of
superstition and deceit, of credulity and imposture. But the world
continually produces weak persons and wicked persons, and as long
as they continue to exist side by side, as they do in this our day,
very debasing beliefs will also continue to infest the world."
The debasing beliefs meant being simply those of Homer, David, and
St. John[A]--as against a modern French gamin's. And what the
results of the intended education of English gamins of every degree
in that new higher theology will be, England is I suppose by this
time beginning to discern.
In the last 'Fors'[B] which I have written, on education of a safer
kind, still possible, one practical point is insisted on
chiefly,--that learning by heart, and repetition with perfect
accent and cultivated voice, should be made quite principal
branches of school discipline up to the time of going to the
university.
And of writings to be learned by heart, among other passages of
indisputable philosophy and perfect poetry, I include certain
chapters of the--now for the most part forgotten--wisdom of
Solomon; and of these, there is one selected portion which I
should recommend not only school-boys and girls, but persons of
every age, if they don't know it, to learn forthwith, as the
shortest summary of Solomon's wisdom;--namely, the seventeenth
chapter of Proverbs, which being only twenty-eight verses long, may
be fastened in the dullest memory at the rate of a verse a day in
the shortest month of the year. Out of the twenty-eight verses, I
will read you seven, for example of their tenor,--the last of the
seven I will with your good leave dwell somewhat upon. You have
heard the verses often before, but probably without remembering
that they are all in this concentrated chapter.
1. Verse 1.--Better is a dry morsel, and quietness therewith, than
a house full of good eating, with strife.
(Remember, in reading this verse, that though England has chosen
the strife, and set every man's hand against his neighbor, her
house is not yet so full of good eating as she expected, even
though she gets half of her victuals from America.)
2. Verse 3.--The fining pot is for silver, the furnace for gold,
but the Lord tries the heart.
(Notice the increasing strength of trial for the more precious
thing: only the melting-pot for the silver--the fierce furnace for
the gold--but the Fire of the Lord for the heart.)
3. Verse 4.--A wicked doer giveth heed to false lips.
(That means, for _you_, that, intending to live by usury and
swindling, you read Mr. Adam Smith and Mr. Stuart Mill, and other
such political economists.)
4. Verse 5.--Whoso mocketh the poor, reproacheth his Maker.
(Mocketh,--by saying that his poverty is his fault, no less than
his misfortune,--England's favorite theory now-a-days.)
5. Verse 12.--Let a bear robbed of her whelps meet a man, rather
than a fool in his folly.
(Carlyle is often now accused of false scorn in his calling the
passengers over London Bridge, "mostly fools,"--on the ground that
men are only to be justly held foolish if their intellect is under,
as only wise when it is above, the average. But the reader will
please observe that the essential function of modern education is
to develop what capacity of mistake a man has. Leave him at his
forge and plow,--and those tutors teach him his true value, indulge
him in no error, and provoke him to no vice. But take him up to
London,--give him her papers to read, and her talk to hear,--and it
is fifty to one you send him presently on a fool's errand over
London Bridge.)
6. Now listen, for this verse is the question you have mainly to
ask yourselves about your beautiful all-over-England system of
competitive examination:--
Verse 16. Wherefore is there a price in the hand of a fool to get
wisdom, seeing he hath no heart to it?
(You know perfectly well it isn't the wisdom you want, but the
"station in life,"--and the money!)
7. Lastly, Verse 7.--Wisdom is before him that hath understanding,
but the eyes of a fool are in the ends of the earth.
"And in the beginnings of it"! Solomon would have written, had he
lived in our day; but we will be content with the ends at present.
No scientific people, as I told you at first, have taken any notice
of the more or less temporary phenomena of which I have to-night
given you register. But, from the constant arrangements of the
universe, the same respecting which the thinkers of former time
came to the conclusion that they were essentially good, and to end
in good, the modern speculator arrives at the quite opposite and
extremely uncomfortable conclusion that they are essentially evil,
and to end--in nothing.
And I have here a volume,[C] before quoted, by a very foolish and
very lugubrious author, who in his concluding chapter gives
us,--founded, you will observe, on a series of 'ifs,'--the latest
scientific views concerning the order of creation. "We have spoken
already about a medium pervading space"--this is the Scientific
God, you observe, differing from the unscientific one, in that the
purest in heart cannot see--nor the softest in heart feel--this
spacious Deity--a _Medium_, pervading space--"the office of which"
(italics all mine) "appears to be to _degrade_ and ultimately
_extinguish_, all differential motion. It has been well pointed out
by Thomson, that, looked at _in this light_, the universe is a
system that had a beginning and must have an end, for a process of
degradation cannot be eternal. If we could view the Universe as a
candle not lit, then it is perhaps conceivable to regard it as
having been always in existence; but if we regard it rather as a
candle that has been lit, we become absolutely certain that it
cannot have been burning from eternity, and that a time will come
when it will cease to burn. We are led to look to a beginning in
which the particles of matter were in a diffuse chaotic state, but
endowed with the power of gravitation; and we are led to look to an
end in which the whole Universe will be one equally heated inert
mass, _and from which everything like life, or motion, or beauty,
will have utterly gone away_."
Do you wish me to congratulate you on this extremely cheerful
result of telescopic and microscopic observation, and so at once
close my lecture? or may I venture yet to trespass on your time by
stating to you any of the more comfortable views held by persons
who did not regard the universe in what my author humorously calls
"this _light_"?
In the peculiarly characteristic notice with which the 'Daily News'
honored my last week's lecture, that courteous journal charged me,
in the metaphorical term now classical on Exchange, with "hedging,"
to conceal my own opinions. The charge was not prudently chosen,
since, of all men now obtaining any portion of popular regard, I am
pretty well known to be precisely the one who cares least either
for hedge or ditch, when he chooses to go across country. It is
certainly true that I have not the least mind to pin my heart on my
sleeve, for the daily daw, or nightly owl, to peck at; but the
essential reason for my not telling you my own opinions on this
matter is--that I do not consider them of material consequence to
you.
It _might_ possibly be of some advantage for you to know what--were
he now living, Orpheus would have thought, or Æschylus, or a Daniel
come to judgment, or John the Baptist, or John the Son of Thunder;
but what either you, or I, or any other Jack or Tom of us all,
think,--even if we knew what to think,--is of extremely small
moment either to the Gods, the clouds, or ourselves.
Of myself, however, if you care to hear it, I will tell you thus
much: that had the weather when I was young been such as it is now,
no book such as 'Modern Painters' ever would or _could_ have been
written; for every argument, and every sentiment in that book, was
founded on the personal experience of the beauty and blessing of
nature, all spring and summer long; and on the then demonstrable
fact that over a great portion of the world's surface the air and
the earth were fitted to the education of the spirit of man as
closely as a school-boy's primer is to his labor, and as gloriously
as a lover's mistress is to his eyes.
That harmony is now broken, and broken the world round: fragments,
indeed, of what existed still exist, and hours of what is past
still return; but month by month the darkness gains upon the day,
and the ashes of the Antipodes glare through the night.[D]
What consolation, or what courage, through plague, danger, or
darkness, you can find in the conviction that you are nothing more
than brute beasts driven by brute forces, your other tutors can
tell you--not I: but _this_ I can tell you--and with the authority
of all the masters of thought since time was time,--that, while by
no manner of vivisection you can learn what a _Beast_ is, by only
looking into your own hearts you may know what a _Man_ is,--and
know that his only true happiness is to live in Hope of something
to be won by him, in Reverence of something to be worshiped by him,
and in Love of something to be cherished by him, and cherished--forever.
Having these instincts, his only rational conclusion is that the
objects which can fulfill them may be by his effort gained, and by
his faith discerned; and his only earthly wisdom is to accept the
united testimony of the men who have sought these things in the way
they were commanded. Of whom no single one has ever said that his
obedience or his faith had been vain, or found himself cast out
from the choir of the living souls, whether here, or departed, for
whom the song was written:--
God be merciful unto us, and bless us, and cause His face to shine
upon us;
That Thy way may be known upon earth, Thy saving health among all
nations.
Oh let the nations rejoice and sing for joy, for Thou shalt judge
the people righteously and govern the nations upon earth.
_Then_ shall the earth yield her increase, and God, even our own God,
shall bless us.
God shall bless us, and all the ends of the earth shall fear Him.
[Footnote A: With all who died in Faith, not having received the
Promises, nor--according to your modern teachers--ever to receive.]
[Footnote B: Hence to the end the text is that read in termination
of the lecture on its second delivery, only with an added word or
two of comment on Proverbs xvii.]
[Footnote C: 'The Conservation of Energy.' King and Co., 1873.]
[Footnote D: Written under the impression that the lurid and
prolonged sunsets of last autumn had been proved to be connected
with the flight of volcanic ashes. This has been since, I hear,
disproved again. Whatever their cause, those sunsets were, in the
sense in which I myself use the word, altogether 'unnatural' and
terrific: but they have no connection with the far more fearful,
because protracted and increasing, power of the Plague-wind. The
letter from White's 'History of Selborne,' quoted by the Rev. W. R.
Andrews in his letter to the 'Times,' (dated January 8th) seems to
describe aspects of the sky like these of 1883, just a hundred
years before, in 1783: and also some of the circumstances noted,
especially the variation of the wind to all quarters without
alteration in the air, correspond with the character of the
plague-wind; but the fog of 1783 made the sun dark, with
iron-colored rays--not pale, with blanching rays. I subjoin Mr.
Andrews' letter, extremely valuable in its collation of the records
of simultaneous volcanic phenomena; praying the reader also to
observe the instantaneous acknowledgment, by the true 'Naturalist,'
of horror in the violation of beneficent natural law.
"THE RECENT SUNSETS AND VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS.
"SIR,--It may, perhaps, be interesting at the present time, when so
much attention has been given to the late brilliant sunsets and
sunrises, to be reminded that almost identically the same
appearances were observed just a hundred years ago.
Gilbert White writes in the year 1783, in his 109th letter,
published in his 'Natural History of Selborne':--
'The summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and portentous one, and
full of horrible phenomena; for besides the alarming meteors and
tremendous thunderstorms that affrighted and distressed the
different counties of this kingdom, the peculiar haze or smoky fog
that prevailed for many weeks in this island and in every part of
Europe, and even beyond its limits, was a most extraordinary
appearance, unlike anything known within the memory of man. By my
journal I find that I had noticed this strange occurrence from June
23d to July 20th inclusive, during which period the wind varied to
every quarter without making any alteration in the air. The sun at
noon looked as black as a clouded moon, and shed a ferruginous
light on the ground and floors of rooms, but was particularly lurid
and blood-colored at rising and setting. The country people began
to look with a superstitious awe at the red lowering aspect of the
sun; and, indeed, there was reason for the most enlightened person
to be apprehensive, for all the while Calabria and part of the Isle
of Sicily were torn and convulsed with earthquakes, and about that
juncture a volcano sprang out of the sea on the coast of Norway.'
Other writers also mention volcanic disturbances in this same year,
1783. We are told by Lyell and Geikie, that there were great
volcanic eruptions in and near Iceland. A submarine volcano burst
forth in the sea, thirty miles southwest of Iceland, which ejected
so much pumice that the ocean was covered with this substance, to
the distance of 150 miles, and ships were considerably impeded in
their course; and a new island was formed, from which fire and
smoke and pumice were emitted.
Besides this submarine eruption, the volcano Skaptar-Jökull, on the
mainland, on June 11th, 1783, threw out a torrent of lava, so
immense as to surpass in magnitude the bulk of Mont Blanc, and
ejected so vast an amount of fine dust, that the atmosphere over
Iceland continued loaded with it for months afterwards. It fell in
such quantities over parts of Caithness--a distance of 600
miles--as to destroy the crops, and that year is still spoken of by
the inhabitants as the year of 'the ashie.'
These particulars are gathered from the text-books of Lyell and
Geikie.
I am not aware whether the coincidence in time of the Icelandic
eruptions, and of the peculiar appearance of the sun, described by
Gilbert White, has yet been noticed; but this coincidence may very
well be taken as some little evidence towards explaining the
connection between the recent beautiful sunsets and the tremendous
volcanic explosion of the Isle of Krakatoa in August last.
W. R. ANDREWS, F. G. S.
Teffont Ewyas Rectory, Salisbury, January 8th."]]
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TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
Pages 7 & 18: Standardized spelling of "thundercloud."
Page 20: Standardized quotation marks surrounding poem.
Page 22: Retained inconsistent hyphenation of "thunder-storm" in
quoted material.
Pages 26, 58 & 70: Retained inconsistent hyphenation of "billiard-ball".
Pages 29 & 62: Standardized hyphenation of "now-a-days."
Pages 31-68: Adjusted placement of footnotes.
Pages 37 & 59: Standardized spelling of "hill-side."