so soft--for a glacier, though it acts slowly by friction, can act
vigorously by dead-weight on a soft rock, and (with fall previously
provided for it) can clear masses of that out of the way, to some
purpose. There is a notable instance of this in the rock of which your
correspondent speaks, under the Glacier des Bois. His idea, that the
glacier is deep above and thins out below, is a curious instance of the
misconception of glacier nature, from which all that Forbes has done
cannot yet quite clear the public mind, nor even the geological mind. A
glacier never, in a large sense, thins out at all as it expires. It
flows level everywhere for its own part, and never slopes but down a
slope, as a rapid in water. Pour out a pot of the thickest old white
candied, but still fluent, honey you can buy, over a heap of stones,
arranged as you like, to imitate rocks.[165] Whatever the honey does on
a small scale, the glacier does on a large; and you may thus steady the
glacier phenomena of current--though, of course, not those of structure
or fissure--at your ease. But note this specially: When the honey is at
last at rest, in whatever form it has taken, you will see it terminates
in tongues with low rounded edges. The possible height of these edges,
in any fluid, varies as its viscosity; it is some quarter of an inch or
so in water on dry ground; the most fluent ice wall stand at about a
hundred feet. Next, from this outer edge of the stagnant honey,
delicately skim or thin off a little at the top, and see what it will
do. It will not stand in an inclined plane, but fill itself up again to
a level from behind. Glacier ice does exactly the same thing; and this
filling in from behind is done so subtly and delicately, that, every
winter, the whole glacier surface rises to replace the summer’s waste,
not with progressive wave, as “twice a day the Severn fills;” but with
silent, level insurrection, as of ocean-tide, the gray sea-crystal
passes by. And all the structural phenomena of the ice are modified by
this mysterious action.
Your correspondent is also not aware that the Glacier des Bois gives a
very practical and outspoken proof of its shallowness opposite the
Montanvert. Very often its torrent, under wilful touch of
Lucina-sceptre, leaps to the light at the top of the rocks instead of
their base.[166] That fiery Arveron, sometimes, hearing from
reconnoitring streamlets of a nearer way down to the valley than the
rounded ice-curve under the Chapeau, fairly takes bit in teeth, and
flings itself out over the brow of the rocks, and down a ravine in them,
in the wildest cataract of white thunder-clouds (endless in thunder, and
with quiet fragments of rainbow for lightning), that I have ever blinded
myself in the skirts of.
These bare rocks, over which the main river sometimes falls (and
outlying streamlets always) are of firm-grained, massively rounded
gneiss. Above them, I have no doubt, once extended the upper covering of
fibrous and amianthoidal schist, which forms the greater part of the
south-eastern flank of the valley of Chamouni. The schistose gneiss is
continuous in direction of bed, with the harder gneiss below. But the
outer portion is soft, the inner hard, and more granitic. This outer
portion the descending glaciers have always stripped right off down to
the hard gneiss below, and in places, as immediately above the
Montanvert (and elsewhere at the brows of the valley), the beds of
schistose gneiss are crushed and bent outwards in a mass (I believe) by
the weight of the old glacier, for some fifty feet within their surface.
This looks like work; and work of this sort, when it had to be done, the
glaciers were well up to, bearing down such soft masses as a strong man
bends a poplar sapling; but by steady push far more than by friction.
You may bend or break your sapling with bare hands, but try to rub its
bark off with your bare hands!
When once the ice, _with strength always dependent on pre-existent
precipice_, has cleared such obstacles out of its way, and made its bed
to its liking, there is an end to its manifest and effectively
sculptural power. I do not believe the Glacier des Bois has done more
against some of the granite surfaces beneath it, for these four thousand
years, than the drifts of desert sand have done on Sinai. Be that as it
may, its power of excavation on a level is proved, as I showed in my
last letter, to be zero. Your correspondent thinks the glacier power
vanishes towards the extremity; but as long as the ice exists, it has
the same progressive energy, and, indeed, sometimes, with the quite
terminal nose of it, will plough a piece of ground scientifically
enough; but it never digs a hole: the stream always comes from under it
full speed downhill. Now, whatever the dimensions of a glacier, if it
dug a big hole, like the Lake of Geneva, when it was big, it would dig a
little hole when it was little--(not that this is _always_ safe logic,
for a little stone will dig in a glacier, and a large one build; but it
is safe within general limits)--which it never does, nor can, but
subsides gladly into any hole prepared for it in a quite placid manner,
for all its fierce looks.
I find it difficult to stop, for your correspondent, little as he thinks
it, has put me on my own ground. I was _forced_ to write upon Art by an
accident (the public abuse of Turner) when I was two-and-twenty; but I
had written a “Mineralogical Dictionary” as far as C, and invented a
shorthand symbolism for crystalline forms, before I was fourteen: and
have been at stony work ever since, as I could find time, silently, not
caring to speak much till the chemists had given me more help.[167] For,
indeed, I strive, as far as may be, not to speak of anything till I know
it; and in that matter of Political Economy also (though forced in like
manner to write of that by unendurable circumfluent fallacy), I know my
ground; and if your present correspondent, or any other, will meet me
fairly, I will give them uttermost satisfaction upon any point they
doubt. There is free challenge: and in the knight of Snowdoun’s vows
(looking first carefully to see that the rock be not a glacier boulder),
“This rock shall fly
From its firm base, as soon as I.”
J. RUSKIN.[168]
[From “The Reader,” December 3, 1864.]
_ENGLISH_ VERSUS _ALPINE GEOLOGY._
DENMARK HILL, 29_th Nov._
I scarcely know what reply to make, or whether it is necessary to reply
at all, to the letter of Mr. Jukes in your last number. There is no
antagonism between his views and mine, though he seems heartily to
desire that there should be, and with no conceivable motive but to
obtain some appearance of it suppresses the latter half of the sentence
he quotes from my letter.[169] It is true that he writes in willing
ignorance of the Alps, and I in unwilling ignorance of the Wicklow
hills; but the only consequent discrepancy of thought or of impression
between us is, that Mr. Jukes, examining (by his own account) very old
hills, which have been all but washed away to nothing, naturally, and
rightly, attributes their present form, or want of form, to their
prolonged ablutions, while I, examining new and lofty hills, of which,
though much has been carried away, much is still left, as naturally and
rightly ascribe a great part of their aspect to the modes of their
elevation. The Alp-bred geologist has, however, this advantage, that
(especially if he happen at spare times to have been interested in
manual arts) he can hardly overlook the effects of denudation on a
mountain-chain which sustains Venice on the delta of one of its
torrents, and Antwerp on that of another; but the English geologist,
however practised in the detection and measurement of faults filled in
by cubes of fluor, may be pardoned for dimly appreciating the structure
of a district in which a people strong enough to lay the foundation of
the liberties of Europe in a single battle,[170] was educated in a
fissure of the Lower Chalk.
I think, however, that, if Mr. Jukes can succeed in allaying his
feverish thirst for battle, he will wish to withdraw the fourth
paragraph of his letter,[171] and, as a general formula, even the scheme
which it introduces. That scheme, sufficiently accurate as an expression
of one cycle of geological action, contains little more than was known
to all leading geologists five-and-twenty years ago, when I was working
hard under Dr. Buckland at Oxford;[172] and it is so curiously unworthy
of the present state of geological science, that I believe its author,
in his calmer moments, will not wish to attach his name to an attempt at
generalization at once so narrow, and so audacious. My experience of
mountain-form is probably as much more extended than his, as my
disposition to generalize respecting; it is less;[173] and, although
indeed the apparent limitation of the statement which he half quotes
(probably owing to his general love of denudation) from my last letter,
to the chain of the Alps, was intended only to attach to the words
“quite visibly,” yet, had I myself expanded that statement, I should not
have assumed the existence of a sea, to relieve me from the difficulty
of accounting for the existence of a lake; I should not have assumed
that all mountain-formations of investiture were marine; nor claimed the
possession of a great series of stratified rocks without inquiring where
they were to come from. I should not have thought “even more than one”
an adequate expression for the possible number of elevations and
depressions which may have taken place since the beginning of time on
the mountain-chains of the world; nor thought myself capable of
compressing into Ten Articles, or even into Thirty-nine, my conceptions
of the working of the Power which led forth the little hills like lambs,
while it rent or established the foundations of the earth; and set their
birth-seal on the forehead of each in the infinitudes of aspect and of
function which range between the violet-dyed banks of Thames and Seine,
and the vexed Fury-Tower of Cotopaxi.
Not but that large generalizations are, indeed, possible with respect to
the diluvial phenomena, among which my antagonist has pursued
his--(scarcely amphibious?)--investigations. The effects of denudation
and deposition are unvarying everywhere, and have been watched with
terror and gratitude in all ages. In physical mythology they gave tusk
to the Grææ, claw to the Gorgons, bull’s frontlet to the floods of
Aufidus and Po. They gave weapons to the wars of Titans against Gods,
and lifeless seed of life into the hand of Deucalion. Herodotus “rightly
spelled” of them, where the lotus rose from the dust of Nile and leaned
upon its dew; Plato rightly dreamed of them in his great vision of the
disrobing of the Acropolis to its naked marble; the keen eye of Horace,
half poet’s, half farmer’s (albeit unaided by theodolite), recognized
them alike where the risen brooks of Vallombrosa, amidst the
mountain-clamors, tossed their champed shingle to the Etrurian sea, and
in the uncoveted wealth of the pastures,
“Quæ Liris quietâ;
_Mordet_ aquâ, taciturnus amnis.”[174]
But the inner structure of the mountain-chains is as varied as their
substance; and to this day, in some of its mightier developments, so
little understood, that my Neptunian opponent himself, in his address
delivered at Cambridge in 1862, speaks of an arrangement of strata which
it is difficult to traverse ten miles of Alpine limestone without
finding an example of, as beyond the limits of theoretical
imagination.[175]
I feel tempted to say more; but I have at present little time even for
useful, and none for wanton, controversy. Whatever information Mr. Jukes
can afford me on these subjects (and I do not doubt he can afford me
much), I am ready to receive, not only without need of his entreaty, but
with sincere thanks. If he likes to try his powers of sight, “as
corrected by the laborious use of the protractor,” against mine, I will
in humility abide the issue. But at present the question before the
house is, as I understand it, simply whether glaciers excavate
lake-basins or not. That, in spite of measurement and survey, here or
elsewhere, seems to remain a question. May we answer the first, if
answerable? That determined, I think I might furnish some other grounds
of debate in this notable cause of Peebles against Plainstanes, provided
that Mr. Jukes will not in future think his seniority gives him the
right to answer me with disparagement instead of instruction, and will
bear with the English “student’s” weakness, which induces me, usually,
to wish rather to begin by shooting my elephant than end by describing
it out of my moral consciousness.[176]
J. RUSKIN.
[From “The Reader,” December 10, 1864.]
_CONCERNING HYDROSTATICS._
NORWICH, 5_th December._
Your pages are not, I presume, intended for the dissemination of the
elements of physical science. Your correspondent “M. A. C.” has a good
wit, and, by purchasing any common treatise on the barometer, may
discover the propriety of exercising it on subjects with which he is
acquainted. “G. M.” deserves more attention, the confusion in his mind
between increase of pressure and increase of density being a very common
one.[177] It may be enough to note for him, and for those of your
readers whom his letter may have embarrassed, that in any incompressible
liquid a body of greater specific gravity than the liquid will sink to
any depth, because the column which it forms, together with the vertical
column of the liquid above it, always exceeds in total weight the column
formed by the equal bulk of the liquid at its side, and the vertical
column of liquid above that. Deep-sea soundings would be otherwise
impossible. “G. M.” may find the explanation of the other phenomena to
which he alludes in any elementary work on hydrostatics, and will
discover on a little reflection that the statement in my last
letter[178] is simply true. Expanded, it is merely that, when we throw a
stone into water, we substitute pressure of stone-surface for pressure
of water-surface throughout the area of horizontal contact of the stone
with the ground, and add the excess of the stone’s weight over that of
an equal bulk of water.
It is, however, very difficult for me to understand how any person so
totally ignorant of every circumstance of glacial locality and action,
as “G. M.” shows himself to be in the paragraph beginning “It is very
evident,” could have had the courage to write a syllable on the subject.
I will waste no time in reply, but will only assure him (with reference
to his assertion that I “get rid of the rocks,” etc.), that I never
desire to get rid of anything but error, and that I should be the last
person to desire to get rid of the glacial agency by friction, as I was,
I believe, the first to reduce to a diagram the probable stages of its
operation on the bases of the higher Alpine aiguilles.[179]
Permit me to add, in conclusion, that in future I can take no notice of
any letters to which the writers do not think fit to attach their names.
There can be no need of initials in scientific discussion, except to
shield incompetence or license discourtesy.
J. RUSKIN.
[From “Rendu’s Theory of the Glaciers of Savoy,” Macmillan, 1874.]
_JAMES DAVID FORBES: HIS REAL GREATNESS.[180]_
The incidental passage in “Fors,” hastily written, on a contemptible
issue, does not in the least indicate my sense of the real position of
James Forbes among the men of his day. I have asked his son’s[181]
permission to add a few words expressive of my deeper feelings.
For indeed it seems to me that all these questions as to priority of
ideas or observations are beneath debate among noble persons. What a man
like Forbes first noticed, or demonstrated, is of no real moment to his
memory. What he was, and how he taught, is of consummate moment. The
actuality of his personal power, the sincerity and wisdom of his
constant teaching, need no applause from the love they justly gained,
and can sustain no diminution from hostility; for their proper honor is
in their usefulness. To a man of no essential power, the accident of a
discovery is apotheosis; to _him_, the former knowledge of all the sages
of earth is as though it were not; he calls the ants of his own
generation round him, to observe how he flourishes in his tiny forceps
the grain of sand he has imposed upon Pelion. But from all such
vindication of the claims of Forbes to mere discovery, I, his friend,
would, for my own part, proudly abstain. I do not in the slightest
degree care whether he was the first to see this, or the first to say
that, or how many common persons had seen or said as much before. What I
rejoice in knowing of him is that he had clear eyes and open heart for
all things and deeds appertaining to his life; that whatever he
discerned, was discerned impartially; what he said, was said securely;
and that in all functions of thought, experiment, or communication, he
was sure to be eventually right, and serviceable to mankind, whether out
of the treasury of eternal knowledge he brought forth things new or old.
This is the essential difference between the work of men of true genius
and the agitation of temporary and popular power. The first root of
their usefulness is in subjection of their vanity to their purpose. It
is not in calibre or range of intellect that men vitally differ; every
phase of mental character has honorable office; but the vital difference
between the strong and the weak--or let me say rather, between the
availing and valueless intelligence--is in the relation of the love of
self to the love of the subject or occupation. Many an Alpine traveller,
many a busy man of science, volubly represent to us their pleasure in
the Alps; but I scarcely recognize one who would not willingly see them
all ground down into gravel, on condition of his being the first to
exhibit a pebble of it at the Royal Institution. Whereas it may be felt
in any single page of Forbes’ writing, or De Saussure’s, that they love
crag and glacier for their own sake’s sake; that they question their
secrets in reverent and solemn thirst: not at all that they may
communicate them at breakfast to the readers of the Daily News--and
that, although there were no news, no institutions, no leading articles,
no medals, no money, and no mob, in the world, these men would still
labor, and be glad, though all their knowledge was to rest with them at
last in the silence of the snows, or only to be taught to peasant
children sitting in the shade of pines.
And whatever Forbes did or spoke during his noble life was in this
manner patiently and permanently true. The passage of his lectures in
which he shows the folly of Macaulay’s assertion that “The giants of one
generation are the pigmies of the next,”[182] beautiful in itself, is
more interesting yet in the indication it gives of the general grasp and
melodious tone of Forbes’ _reverent_ intellect, as opposed to the
discordant insolence of modernism. His mind grew and took color like an
Alpine flower, rooted on rock, and perennial in flower; while Macaulay’s
swelled like a puff-ball in an unwholesome pasture, and projected itself
far round in deleterious dust.
I had intended saying a few words more touching the difference in
temper, and probity of heart, between Forbes and Agassiz, as manifested
in the documents now[183] laid before the public. And as far as my own
feelings are concerned, the death of Agassiz[184] would not have caused
my withholding a word. For in all utterance of blame or praise, I have
striven always to be kind to the living--just to the dead. But in
deference to the wish of the son of Forbes, I keep silence: I willingly
leave sentence to be pronounced by time, above their two graves.
JOHN RUSKIN.
The following letters,[185] one from Forbes to myself, written ten years
ago, and the other from one of his pupils, received by me a few weeks
since, must, however, take their due place among the other evidence on
which such judgment is to be given.
J. R.
II.
MISCELLANEOUS.
[From “The Artist and Amateur’s Magazine” (edited by E. V. Rippingille), February
1844, pp. 314-319.]
_REFLECTIONS IN WATER.[186]_
_To the Editor of “The Artist and Amateur’s Magazine.”_
SIR: The phenomena of light and shade, rendered to the eye by the
surface or substance of water, are so intricate and so multitudinous,
that had I wished fully to investigate, or even fully to state them, a
volume instead of a page would have been required for the task. In the
paragraphs[187] which I devoted to the subject I expressed, as briefly
as possible, the laws which are of most general application--with which
artists are indeed so universally familiar, that I conceived it
altogether unnecessary to prove or support them: but since I have
expressed them in as few words as possible, I cannot afford to have any
of those words missed or disregarded; and therefore when I say that on
_clear_ water, _near_ the eye, there is no shadow, I must not be
understood to mean that on _muddy_ water, _far_ from the eye, there is
no shadow. As, however, your correspondent appears to deny my position
in toto, and as many persons, on their first glance at the subject,
might be inclined to do the same, you will perhaps excuse me for
occupying a page or two with a more explicit statement, both of facts
and principles, than my limits admitted in the “Modern Painters.”
First, for the experimental proof of my assertion that “on clear water,
near the eye, there is no shadow.” Your correspondent’s trial with the
tub is somewhat cumbrous and inconvenient;[188] a far more simple
experiment will settle the matter. Fill a tumbler with water; throw into
it a narrow strip of white paper; put the tumbler into sunshine; dip
your finger into the water between the paper and the sun, so as to throw
a shadow across the paper and on the water. The shadow will of course be
distinct on the paper, but on the water absolutely and totally
invisible.
This simple trial of the fact, and your explanation of the principle
given in your ninth number,[189] are sufficient proof and explanation of
my assertion; and if your correspondent requires authority as well as
ocular demonstration, he has only to ask Stanfield or Copley Fielding,
or any other good painter of sea; the latter, indeed, was the person who
first pointed out the fact to me when a boy. What then, it remains to be
determined, are those lights and shades on the sea, which, for the sake
of clearness, and because they appear such to the ordinary observer, I
have spoken of as “horizontal lines,” and which have every appearance
of being cast by the clouds like real shadows? I imagined that I had
been sufficiently explicit on this subject both at pages 330 and
363:[190] but your correspondent appears to have confused himself by
inaccurately receiving the term _shadow_ as if it meant darkness of any
kind; whereas my second sentence--“every _darkness_ on water is
reflection, not shadow”--might have shown him that I used it in its
particular sense, as meaning the absence of _positive_ light on a
visible surface. Thus, in endeavoring to support his assertion that the
shadows on the sea are as distinct as on a grass field, he says that
they are so by contrast with the “light _reflected_ from its polished
surface;” thus showing at once that he has been speaking and thinking
all along, not of shadow, but of the absence of reflected light--an
absence which is no more shadow than the absence of the image of a piece
of white paper in a mirror is shadow on the mirror.
The question, therefore, is one of terms rather than of things; and
before proceeding it will be necessary for me to make your correspondent
understand thoroughly what is meant by the term shadow as opposed to
that of reflection.
Let us stand on the sea-shore on a cloudless night, with a full moon
over the sea, and a swell on the water. Of course a long line of
splendor will be seen on the waves under the moon, reaching from the
horizon to our very feet. But are those waves between the moon and us
_actually_ more illuminated than any other part of the sea? Not one
whit. The whole surface of the sea is under the same full light, but the
waves between the moon and us are the only ones which are in a position
to reflect that light to our eyes. The sea on both sides of that path of
light is in perfect darkness--almost black. But is it so from shadow?
Not so, for there is nothing to intercept the moonlight from it: it is
so from position, because it cannot reflect any of the rays which fall
on it to our eyes, but reflects instead the dark vault of the night sky.
Both the darkness and the light on it, therefore--and they are as
violently contrasted as may well be--are nothing but reflections, the
whole surface of the water being under one blaze of moonlight, entirely
unshaded by any intervening object whatsoever.