ILLUSTRATIVE: STREAMS AND SEA.
27. Of all inorganic substances, acting in their own proper nature,
and without assistance and combination, water is the most wonderful.
If we think of it as the source of all the changefulness and beauty
which we have seen in clouds,--then, as the instrument by which the
earth we have contemplated was modelled into symmetry, and its crags
chiselled into grace;--then, as in the form of snow, it robes the
mountains it has made with that transcendent light which we could not
have conceived if we had not seen;--then, as it exists in the foam of
the torrent, in the iris which spans it, in the morning mist which
rises from it, in the deep crystalline pools which mirror its hanging
shore, in the broad lake and glancing river;--finally, in that which
is to all human minds the best emblem of unwearied, unconquerable
power the wild, various, fantastic, tameless unity of the sea;--what
shall we compare to this mighty, this universal element, for glory and
beauty? or how shall we follow its eternal changefulness of feeling?
It is like trying to paint a soul!
28. The great angel of the sea--rain; the angel, observe,--the
messenger sent to a special place on a special errand. Not the
diffused, perpetual presence of the burden of mist, but the going and
returning of the intermittent cloud. All turns upon that
intermittence. Soft moss on stone and rock; cave fern of tangled glen;
wayside well--perennial, patient, silent, clear, stealing through its
square font of rough-hewn stone; ever thus deep, no more;--which the
winter wreck sullies not, the summer thirst wastes not, incapable of
stain as of decline;--where the fallen leaf floats undecayed, and the
insect darts undefiling: cressed brook and ever-eddying river, lifted
even in flood scarcely over its stepping stones,--but through all
sweet summer keeping tremulous music with harp-strings of dark water
among the silver fingering of the pebbles. Far away in the south the
strong river gods have all hasted, and gone down to the sea. Wasted
and burning, white furnaces of blasting sand, their broad beds lie
ghastly and bare; but here in the moss lands, the soft wings of the
sea angel droop still with dew, and the shadows of their plumes falter
on the hills; strange laughings and glitterings of silver streamlets,
born suddenly, and twined about the mossy heights in trickling tinsel,
answering to them as they wave.
29. Stand for half an hour beside the fall of Schaffhausen, on the
north side, where the rapids are long, and watch how the vault of
water first bends unbroken, in pure polished velocity, over the
arching rocks at the brow of the cataract, covering them with a dome
of crystal twenty feet thick, so swift that its motion is unseen
except when a foam globe from above darts over it like a falling star;
and how the trees are lighted above it under all their leaves,[19] at
the instant that it breaks into foam; and how all the hollows of that
foam burn with green fire like so much shattering chrysoprase; and
how, ever and anon startling you with its white flash, a jet of spray
leaps hissing out of the fall, like a rocket, bursting in the wind and
driven away in dust, filling the air with light; and how through the
curdling wreaths of the restless crashing abyss below, the blue of the
water, paled by the foam in its body, shows purer than the sky through
white rain-cloud, while the shuddering iris stoops in tremulous
stillness over all, fading and flushing alternately through the
choking spray and shattered sunshine, hiding itself at last among the
thick golden leaves which toss to and fro in sympathy with the wild
water,--their dripping masses lifted at intervals, like sheaves of
loaded corn, by some stronger gush from the cataract, and bowed again
upon the mossy rocks as its roar dies away,--the dew gushing from
their thick branches through drooping clusters of emerald herbage, and
sparkling in white threads along the dark rocks of the shore, feeding
the lichens, which chase and chequer them with purple and silver.
[19] Well noticed. The drawing of the fall of Schaffhausen, which I made
at the time of writing this study, was one of the very few, either by
other draughtsmen or myself, which I have seen Turner pause at with
serious attention.
30. Close beside the path by which travellers ascend the Montanvert
from the valley of Chamouni, on the right hand, where it first begins
to rise among the pines, there descends a small stream from the foot
of the granite peak known to the guides as the Aiguille Charmoz. It is
concealed from the traveller by a thicket of alder, and its murmur is
hardly heard, for it is one of the weakest streams of the valley. But
it is a constant stream, fed by a permanent, though small, glacier;
and continuing to flow even to the close of summer, when more copious
torrents, depending only on the melting of the lower snows, have left
their beds,--"stony channels in the sun." The long drought which took
place in the autumn of 1854, sealing every source of waters except
these perpetual ones, left the torrent of which I am speaking, and
such others, in a state peculiarly favourable to observance of their
_least_ action on the mountains from which they descend. They were
entirely limited to their own ice fountains, and the quantity of
powdered rock which they brought down was, of course, at its minimum,
being nearly unmingled with any earth derived from the dissolution of
softer soil, or vegetable mould, by rains. At three in the afternoon,
on a warm day in September, when the torrent had reached its average
maximum strength for the day, I filled an ordinary Bordeaux wine flask
with the water where it was least turbid. From this quart of water I
obtained twenty-four grains of sand and sediment more or less fine. I
cannot estimate the quantity of water in the stream; but the runlet of
it at which I filled the flask was giving about two hundred bottles a
minute, or rather more, carrying down, therefore, about three quarters
of a pound of powdered granite every minute. This would be forty-five
pounds an hour; but allowing for the inferior power of the stream in
the cooler periods of the day, and taking into consideration, on the
other side, its increased power in rain, we may, I think, estimate its
average hour's work at twenty-eight or thirty pounds, or a
hundredweight every four hours. By this insignificant runlet,
therefore, rather more than two tons of the substance of the Mont
Blanc are displaced and carried down a certain distance every week;
and as it is only for three or four months that the flow of the stream
is checked by frost, we may certainly allow eighty tons for the mass
which it annually moves. It is not worth while to enter into any
calculation of the relation borne by this runlet to the great torrents
which descend from the chain of Mont Blanc into the valley of
Chamouni.[20] I but take this quantity, eighty tons, as the result of
the labour of a scarcely noticeable runlet at the side of one of them,
utterly irrespective of all sudden falls of stones and of masses of
mountain (a single thunderbolt will sometimes leave a scar on the
flank of a soft rock looking like a trench for a railroad), and we
shall then begin to apprehend something of the operation of the great
laws of change which are the conditions of all material existence,
however apparently enduring. The hills, which, as compared with living
beings, seem "everlasting," are in truth as perishing as they; its
veins of flowing fountain weary the mountain heart, as the crimson
pulse does ours; the natural force of the iron crag is abated in its
appointed time, like the strength of the sinews in a human old age;
and it is but the lapse of the longer years of decay which, in the
sight of its Creator, distinguishes the mountain range from the moth
and the worm.
[20] I have slightly modified and abridged what follows, being impatient
of its prolixity, as well as ashamed of what is truly called the
ludicrous under-estimate of the mass of the larger streams.
31. Few people, comparatively, have ever seen the effect on the sea of
a powerful gale continued without intermission for three or four days
and nights; and to those who have not, I believe it must be
unimaginable, not from the mere force or size of surge, but from the
complete annihilation of the limit between sea and air. The water,
from its prolonged agitation, is beaten, not into mere creamy foam,
but into masses of accumulated yeast, which hang in ropes and wreaths
from wave to wave; and where one curls over to break, form a festoon
like a drapery from its edge; these are taken up by the wind, not in
dissipating dust, but bodily, in writhing, hanging, coiling masses,
which make the air white, and thick as with snow, only the flakes are
a foot or two long each; the surges themselves are full of foam in
their very bodies, underneath, making them white all through, as the
water is under a great cataract,--and their masses, being thus half
water and half air, are torn to pieces by the wind whenever they rise,
and carried away in roaring smoke, which chokes and strangles like
actual water. Add to this, that when the air has been exhausted of its
moisture by long rain, the spray of the sea is caught by it as
described above, and covers its surface not merely with the smoke of
finely divided water, but with boiling mist: imagine also the low
rain-clouds brought down to the very level of the sea, as I have often
seen them, whirling and flying in rags and fragments from wave to
wave; and finally conceive the surges themselves in their utmost pitch
of power, velocity, vastness, and madness, lifting themselves in
precipices and peaks furrowed with their whirl of ascent, through all
this chaos; and you will understand that there is indeed no
distinction left between the sea and air; that no object, nor horizon,
nor any landmark, or natural evidence of position is left; that the
heaven is all spray, and the ocean all cloud, and that you can see no
farther in any direction than you could see through a cataract.[21]
[21] The whole of this was written merely to show the meaning of
Turner's picture of the steamer in distress, throwing up signals. It is
a good study of wild weather; but, separate from its aim, utterly feeble
in comparison to the few words by which any of the great poets will
describe sea, when they have got to do it. I am rather proud of the
short sentence in the 'Harbours of England,' describing a great breaker
against rock:--"One moment, a flint cave,--the next, a marble
pillar,--the next, a fading cloud." But there is nothing in
sea-description, detailed, like Dickens' storm at the death of Ham, in
'David Copperfield.'