CLOUD

During a part of the year London does not see the clouds. Not to see the

clear sky might seem her chief loss, but that is shared by the rest of

England, and is, besides, but a slight privation. Not to see the clear

sky is, elsewhere, to see the cloud. But not so in London. You may go

for a week or two at a time, even though you hold your head up as you

walk, and even though you have windows that really open, and yet you

shall see no cloud, or but a single edge, the fragment of a form.

Guillotine windows never wholly open, but are filled with a doubled glass

towards the sky when you open them towards the street. They are,

therefore, a sure sign that for all the years when no other windows were

used in London, nobody there cared much for the sky, or even knew so much

as whether there were a sky.

But the privation of cloud is indeed a graver loss than the world knows.

Terrestrial scenery is much, but it is not all. Men go in search of it;

but the celestial scenery journeys to them. It goes its way round the

world. It has no nation, it costs no weariness, it knows no bonds. The

terrestrial scenery--the tourist's--is a prisoner compared with this. The

tourist's scenery moves indeed, but only like Wordsworth's maiden, with

earth's diurnal course; it is made as fast as its own graves. And for

its changes it depends upon the mobility of the skies. The mere green

flushing of its own sap makes only the least of its varieties; for the

greater it must wait upon the visits of the light. Spring and autumn are

inconsiderable events in a landscape compared with the shadows of a

cloud.

The cloud controls the light, and the mountains on earth appear or fade

according to its passage; they wear so simply, from head to foot, the

luminous grey or the emphatic purple, as the cloud permits, that their

own local colour and their own local season are lost and cease, effaced

before the all-important mood of the cloud.

The sea has no mood except that of the sky and of its winds. It is the

cloud that, holding the sun's rays in a sheaf as a giant holds a handful

of spears, strikes the horizon, touches the extreme edge with a delicate

revelation of light, or suddenly puts it out and makes the foreground

shine.

Every one knows the manifest work of the cloud when it descends and

partakes in the landscape obviously, lies half-way across the mountain

slope, stoops to rain heavily upon the lake, and blots out part of the

view by the rough method of standing in front of it. But its greatest

things are done from its own place, aloft. Thence does it distribute the

sun.

Thence does it lock away between the hills and valleys more mysteries

than a poet conceals, but, like him, not by interception. Thence it

writes out and cancels all the tracery of Monte Rosa, or lets the pencils

of the sun renew them. Thence, hiding nothing, and yet making dark, it

sheds deep colour upon the forest land of Sussex, so that, seen from the

hills, all the country is divided between grave blue and graver sunlight.

And all this is but its influence, its secondary work upon the world. Its

own beauty is unaltered when it has no earthly beauty to improve. It is

always great: above the street, above the suburbs, above the gas-works

and the stucco, above the faces of painted white houses--the painted

surfaces that have been devised as the only things able to vulgarise

light, as they catch it and reflect it grotesquely from their importunate

gloss. This is to be well seen on a sunny evening in Regent Street.

Even here the cloud is not so victorious as when it towers above some

little landscape of rather paltry interest--a conventional river heavy

with water, gardens with their little evergreens, walks, and shrubberies;

and thick trees impervious to the light, touched, as the novelists always

have it, with "autumn tints." High over these rises, in the enormous

scale of the scenery of clouds, what no man expected--an heroic sky. Few

of the things that were ever done upon earth are great enough to be done

under such a heaven. It was surely designed for other days. It is for

an epic world. Your eyes sweep a thousand miles of cloud. What are the

distances of earth to these, and what are the distances of the clear and

cloudless sky? The very horizons of the landscape are near, for the

round world dips so soon; and the distances of the mere clear sky are

unmeasured--you rest upon nothing until you come to a star, and the star

itself is immeasurable.

But in the sky of "sunny Alps" of clouds the sight goes farther, with

conscious flight, than it could ever have journeyed otherwise. Man would

not have known distance veritably without the clouds. There are

mountains indeed, precipices and deeps, to which those of the earth are

pigmy. Yet the sky-heights, being so far off, are not overpowering by

disproportion, like some futile building fatuously made too big for the

human measure. The cloud in its majestic place composes with a little

Perugino tree. For you stand or stray in the futile building, while the

cloud is no mansion for man, and out of reach of his limitations.

The cloud, moreover, controls the sun, not merely by keeping the custody

of his rays, but by becoming the counsellor of his temper. The cloud

veils an angry sun, or, more terribly, lets fly an angry ray, suddenly

bright upon tree and tower, with iron-grey storm for a background. Or

when anger had but threatened, the cloud reveals him, gentle beyond hope.

It makes peace, constantly, just before sunset.

It is in the confidence of the winds, and wears their colours. There is

a heavenly game, on south-west wind days, when the clouds are bowled by a

breeze from behind the evening. They are round and brilliant, and come

leaping up from the horizon for hours. This is a frolic and haphazard

sky.

All unlike this is the sky that has a centre, and stands composed about

it. As the clouds marshalled the earthly mountains, so the clouds in

turn are now ranged. The tops of all the celestial Andes aloft are swept

at once by a single ray, warmed with a single colour. Promontory after

league-long promontory of a stiller Mediterranean in the sky is called

out of mist and grey by the same finger. The cloudland is very great,

but a sunbeam makes all its nations and continents sudden with light.

All this is for the untravelled. All the winds bring him this scenery.

It is only in London, for part of the autumn and part of the winter, that

the unnatural smoke-fog comes between. And for many and many a day no

London eye can see the horizon, or the first threat of the cloud like a

man's hand. There never was a great painter who had not exquisite

horizons, and if Corot and Crome were right, the Londoner loses a great

thing.

He loses the coming of the cloud, and when it is high in air he loses its

shape. A cloud-lover is not content to see a snowy and rosy head piling

into the top of the heavens; he wants to see the base and the altitude.

The perspective of a cloud is a great part of its design--whether it lies

so that you can look along the immense horizontal distances of its floor,

or whether it rears so upright a pillar that you look up its mountain

steeps in the sky as you look at the rising heights of a mountain that

stands, with you, on the earth.

The cloud has a name suggesting darkness; nevertheless, it is not merely

the guardian of the sun's rays and their director. It is the sun's

treasurer; it holds the light that the world has lost. We talk of

sunshine and moonshine, but not of cloud-shine, which is yet one of the

illuminations of our skies. A shining cloud is one of the most majestic

of all secondary lights. If the reflecting moon is the bride, this is

the friend of the bridegroom.

Needless to say, the cloud of a thunderous summer is the most beautiful

of all. It has spaces of a grey for which there is no name, and no other

cloud looks over at a vanishing sun from such heights of blue air. The

shower-cloud, too, with its thin edges, comes across the sky with so

influential a flight that no ship going out to sea can be better worth

watching. The dullest thing perhaps in the London streets is that people

take their rain there without knowing anything of the cloud that drops

it. It is merely rain, and means wetness. The shower-cloud there has

limits of time, but no limits of form, and no history whatever. It has

not come from the clear edge of the plain to the south, and will not

shoulder anon the hill to the north. The rain, for this city, hardly

comes or goes; it does but begin and stop. No one looks after it on the

path of its retreat.