The Project Gutenberg EBook of Frondes Agrestes, by John Ruskin
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Title: Frondes Agrestes
Readings in 'Modern Painters'
Author: John Ruskin
Release Date: January 22, 2010 [EBook #31045]
Last Updated: February 12, 2019
Language: English
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"Awake his warlike spirit,
And your great uncle's, Edward the Black Prince,
Who on the French ground played a tragedy,
Making defeat on the full power of France,
While his most mighty father on a hill
Stood smiling, to behold his lion's whelp
Forage in blood of French nobility."
16. Although in all lovely nature there is, first, an excellent degree of
simple beauty, addressed to the eye alone, yet often what impresses us
most will form but a very small portion of that visible beauty. That
beauty may, for instance, be composed of lovely flowers, and glittering
streams, and blue sky and white clouds; and yet the thing that impresses
us most, and which we should be sorriest to lose, may be a thin grey film
on the extreme horizon, not so large, in the space of the scene it
occupies, as a piece of gossamer on a near-at-hand bush, nor in any wise
prettier to the eye than the gossamer; but because the gossamer is known
by us for a little bit of spider's work, and the other grey film is known
to mean a mountain ten thousand feet high, inhabited by a race of noble
mountaineers, we are solemnly impressed by the aspect of it, and yet all
the while the thoughts and knowledge which cause us to receive this
impression are so obscure that we are not conscious of them.
17. Examine the nature of your own emotion, (if you feel it,) at the sight
of the Alps; and you find all the brightness of that emotion hanging, like
dew on a gossamer, on a curious web of subtle fancy and imperfect
knowledge. First you have a vague idea of its size, coupled with wonder at
the work of the great Builder of its walls and foundations; then an
apprehension of its eternity, a pathetic sense of its perpetualness, and
your own transientness, as of the grass upon its side;—then, and in
very sadness, a sense of strange companionship with past generations, in
seeing what they saw. They did not see the clouds that are floating over
your head, nor the cottage wall on the other side of the field, nor the
road by which you are travelling. But they saw that. The wall of
granite in the heavens was the same to them as to you. They have ceased to
look upon it; you will soon cease to look also, and the granite wall will
be for others. Then, mingled with these more solemn imaginations, come the
understandings of the gifts and glories of the Alp;—the fancying
forth of all the fountains that well from its rocky walls, and strong
rivers that are born out of its ice, and of all the pleasant valleys that
wind between its cliffs, and all the châlets that gleam among its clouds,
and happy farmsteads couched upon its pastures; while, together with the
thoughts of these, rise strange sympathies with all the unknown of human
life, and happiness, and death, signified by that narrow white flame of
the everlasting snow, seen so far in the morning sky. These images, and
far more than these, lie at the root of the emotion which you feel at the
sight of the Alps. You may not trace them in your heart, for there is a
great deal more in your heart, both of evil and good, than you can ever
trace; but they stir you and quicken you for all that. Assuredly, so far
as you feel more at beholding the snowy mountain than any other object of
the same sweet silvery grey, these are the kind of images which cause you
to do so; and observe, these are nothing more than a greater apprehension
of the facts of the thing. We call the power 'Imagination,' because
it imagines or conceives; but it is only noble imagination, if it imagines
or conceives the truth. And according to the degree of knowledge
possessed, and of sensibility to the pathetic or impressive character of
the things known, will be the degree of this imaginative delight.
18. So natural is it to the human heart to fix itself in hope rather than
in present possession, and so subtle is the charm which the imagination
casts over what is distant or denied, that there is often a more touching
power in the scenes which contain far-away promises of something greater
than themselves, than in those which exhaust the treasures and powers of
nature in an unconquerable and excellent glory, leaving nothing more to be
by fancy pictured or pursued. I do not know that there is a district in
the world more calculated to illustrate this power of the expectant
imagination than that which surrounds the city of Fribourg in Switzerland,
extending from it towards Berne. It is of grey sandstone, considerably
elevated, but presenting no object of striking interest to the passing
traveller; so that as it is generally seen in the course of a hasty
journey from the Bernese Alps to those of Savoy, it is rarely regarded
with any other sensation than that of weariness, all the more painful
because accompanied with reaction from the high excitement caused by the
splendour of the Bernese Oberland. The traveller—foot-sore,
feverish, and satiated with glacier and precipice,—lies back in the
corner of the diligence, perceiving little more than that the road is
winding and hilly, and the country through which it passes, cultivated and
tame. Let him, however, only do this tame country the justice of staying
in it a few days, until his mind has recovered its tone, and take one or
two long walks through its fields, and he will have other thoughts of it.
It is, as I said, an undulating district of grey sandstone, never
attaining any considerable height, but having enough of the mountain
spirit to throw itself into continual succession of bold slope and dale;
elevated, also, just far enough above the sea to render the pine a
frequent forest tree along its irregular ridges. Through this elevated
tract the river cuts its way in a ravine some five or six hundred feet in
depth, which winds for leagues between the gentle hills, unthought of
until its edge is approached; and then, suddenly, through the boughs of
the firs, the eye perceives, beneath, the green and gliding stream, and
the broad walls of sandstone cliff that form its banks; hollowed out where
the river leans against them, at its turns, into perilous over-hanging;
and, on the other shore, at the same spots, leaving little breadths of
meadow between them and the water, half overgrown with thicket, deserted
in their sweetness, inaccessible from above, and rarely visited by any
curious wanderers along the hardly traceable footpath which struggles for
existence beneath the rocks. And there the river ripples and eddies and
murmurs in an outer solitude. It is passing through a thickly peopled
country; but never was a stream so lonely. The feeblest and most far-away
torrent among the high hills has its companions; the goats browse beside
it; and the traveller drinks from it, and passes over it with his staff;
and the peasant traces a new channel for it down to his mill-wheel. But
this stream has no companions; it flows on in an infinite seclusion, not
secret, nor threatening, but a quietness of sweet daylight and open air—a
broad space of tender and deep desolateness, drooped into repose out of
the midst of human labour and life; the waves plashing lowly, with none to
hear them; and the wild birds building in the boughs, with none to fray
them away; and the soft, fragrant herbs rising and breathing and fading,
with no hand to gather them;—and yet all bright and bare to the
clouds above, and to the fresh fall of the passing sunshine and pure rain.
But above the brows of these scarped cliffs, all is in an instant changed.
A few steps only beyond the firs that stretch their branches, angular, and
wild, and white, like forks of lightning, into the air of the ravine,—and
we are in an arable country of the most perfect richness; the swathes of
its corn glowing and burning from field to field: its pretty hamlets all
vivid with fruitful orchards, and flowery garden, and goodly with
steep-roofed storehouse and barn; its well-kept, hard, park-like roads
rising and falling from hillside to hillside, or disappearing among brown
banks of moss, and thickets of the wild raspberry and rose, or gleaming
through lines of tall trees, half glade, half avenue, where the gate
opens, or the gateless path turns trustedly aside, unhindered, into the
garden of some statelier house, surrounded in rural pride with its golden
hives, and carved granaries, and irregular domain of latticed and
espaliered cottages, gladdening to look upon in their delicate homeliness—delicate,
yet in some sort, rude; not like our English homes—trim, laborious,
formal, irreproachable in comfort—but with a peculiar carelessness
and largeness in all their detail, harmonizing with the outlawed
loveliness of their country. For there is an untamed strength even in all
that soft and habitable land. It is indeed gilded with corn, and fragrant
with deep grass, but it is not subdued to the plough or to the scythe. It
gives at its own free will; it seems to have nothing wrested from it, nor
conquered in it. It is not redeemed from desertness, but unrestrained in
fruitfulness,—a generous land, bright with capricious plenty, and
laughing from vale to vale in fitful fulness, kind and wild. Nor this
without some sterner element mingled in the heart of it. For, along all
its ridges stand the dark masses of innumerable pines,{11} taking no part
in its gladness; asserting themselves for ever as fixed shadows, not to be
pierced or banished even in the intensest sunlight; fallen flakes and
fragments of the night, stayed in their solemn squares in the midst of all
the rosy bendings of the orchard boughs and yellow effulgence of the
harvest, and tracing themselves in black network and motionless fringes
against the blanched blue of the horizon in its saintly clearness. And yet
they do not sadden the landscape, but seem to have been set there chiefly
to show how bright everything else is round them; and all the clouds look
of pure silver, and all the air seems filled with a whiter and more living
sunshine, where they are pierced by the sable points of the pines; and all
the pastures look of more glowing green where they run up between the
purple trunks; and the sweet field footpaths skirt the edges of the forest
for the sake of its shade, sloping up and down about the slippery roots,
and losing themselves every now and then hopelessly among the violets and
ground-ivy and brown sheddings of the fibrous leaves, and at last plunging
into some open aisle, where the light through the distant stems shows that
there is a chance of coming out again on the other side; and coming out
indeed in a little while from the scented darkness into the dazzling air
and marvellous landscape, which stretches still farther and farther in new
wilfulness of grove and garden, until at last the craggy mountains of the
Simmenthal rise out of it, sharp into the rolling of the southern clouds.
{11} Almost the only pleasure I have, myself, in rereading my old books,
is my sense of having at least done justice to the pine. Compare the
passage in this book, No. 47.
19.{12} Although there are few districts of Northern Europe, however
apparently dull or tame, in which I cannot find pleasure; though the whole
of Northern France (except Champagne), dull as it seems to most
travellers, is to me a perpetual paradise; and, putting Lincolnshire,
Leicestershire, and one or two such other perfectly flat districts aside,
there is not an English county which I should not find entertainment in
exploring the cross-roads of, foot by foot,—yet all my best
enjoyment would be owing to the imagination of the hills, colouring with
their far-away memories every lowland stone and herb. The pleasant French
coteau, green in the sunshine, delights me either by what real mountain
character it has in itself, (for in extent and succession of promontory,
the flanks of the French valleys have quite the sublimity of true mountain
distances,) or by its broken ground and rugged steps among the vines, and
rise of the leafage above against the blue sky, as it might rise at Vevay
or Como. There is not a wave of the Seine, but is associated in my mind
with the first rise of the sandstones and forest pines of Fontainebleau;
and with the hope of the Alps, as one leaves Paris, with the horses' heads
to the southwest, the morning sun flashing on the bright waves at
Charenton. If there be no hope or association of this kind, and if I
cannot deceive myself into fancying that perhaps at the next rise of the
road there may be the film of a blue hill in the gleam of sky at the
horizon, the landscape, however beautiful, produces in me even a kind of
sickness and pain; and the whole view from Richmond Hill or Windsor
Terrace,—nay, the gardens of Alcinous, with their perpetual summer—or
of the Hesperides, (if they were flat, and not close to Atlas,) golden
apples and all, I would give away in an instant, for one mossy granite
stone a foot broad, and two leaves of lady fern.
{12} This, and the following passage, have nothing to do with the general
statements in the book. They occur with reference only to my own
idiosyncrasy. I was much surprised when I found first how individual it
was, by a Pre-Raphaelite painter's declaring a piece of unwholesome reedy
fen to be more beautiful than Benvenue.
20. I cannot find words to express the intense pleasure I have always in
first finding myself, after some prolonged stay in England, at the foot of
the old tower of Calais Church. The large neglect, the noble unsightliness
of it; the record of its years written so visibly, yet without sign of
weakness or decay; its stern wasteness and gloom, eaten away by the
Channel winds, and overgrown with the bitter sea grasses; its slates and
tiles all shaken and rent, and yet not falling; its desert of brickwork,
full of bolts, and holes, and ugly fissures, and yet strong, like a bare
brown rock; its carelessness of what any one thinks or feels about it,
putting forth no claim, having no beauty, nor desirableness, pride, nor
grace; yet neither asking for pity; not, as ruins are, useless and
piteous, feebly or fondly garrulous of better days; but, useful still,
going through its own daily work,—as some old fisherman, beaten grey
by storm, yet drawing his daily nets: so it stands, with no complaint
about its past youth, in blanched and meagre massiveness and
serviceableness, gathering human souls together underneath it; the sound
of its bells for prayer still rolling through its rents; and the grey peak
of it seen far across the sea, principal of the three that rise above the
waste of surfy sand and hillocked shore,—the lighthouse for life,
and the belfry for labour, and this—for patience and praise.
I cannot tell the half of the strange pleasures and thoughts that come
about me at the sight of that old tower; for, in some sort, it is the
epitome of all that makes the continent of Europe interesting, as opposed
to new countries; and, above all, it completely expresses that agedness in
the midst of active life which binds the old and the new into harmony. We
in England have our new streets, our new inn, our green shaven lawn, and
our piece of ruin emergent from it—a mere specimen of the
Middle Ages put on a bit of velvet carpet, to be shown; and which, but for
its size, might as well be on a museum shelf at once, under cover;—but,
on the Continent, the links are unbroken between the past and present;
and, in such use as they can serve for, the grey-headed wrecks are
suffered to stay with men; while, in unbroken line, the generations of
spared buildings are seen succeeding, each in its place. And thus, in its
largeness, in its permitted evidence of slow decline, in its poverty, in
its absence of all pretence, of all show and care for outside aspect, that
Calais tower has an infinite of symbolism in it, all the more striking
because usually seen in contrast with English scenes expressive of
feelings the exact reverse of these.{13}
{13} My friend won't write out the reverse! Our book is to be all jelly,
and no powder, it seems. Well, I'm very thankful she likes the jelly,—at
any rate, it makes me sure that itis well made.
"too bright nor good
For human nature's daily food;"
it is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and exalting
of the heart,—for soothing it, and purifying it from its dross and
dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful—never
the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost
spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, its appeal to
what is immortal in us is as distinct as its ministry of chastisement or
of blessing to what is mortal is essential. And yet we never attend to it,
we never make it a subject of thought, but as it has to do with our animal
sensations; we look upon all by which it speaks to us more clearly than to
brutes, upon all which bears witness to the intentions of the Supreme that
we are to receive more from the covering vault than the light and the dew
which we share with the weed and the worm, as only a succession of
meaningless and monotonous accident, too common and too vain to be worthy
of a moment of watchfulness, or a glance of admiration. If in our moments
of utter idleness and insipidity, we turn to the sky as a last resource,
which of its phenomena do we speak of? One says, it has been wet; and
another, it has been windy; and another, it has been warm. Who among the
whole chattering crowd can tell one of the forms and the precipices of the
chain of tall white mountains that girded the horizon at noon yesterday?
Who saw the narrow sunbeam that came out of the south, and smote upon
their summits until they melted and mouldered away in a dust of blue rain?
Who saw the dance of the dead clouds when the sunlight left them last
night, and the west wind blew them before it like withered leaves? All has
passed unregretted as unseen; or, if the apathy be ever shaken off even
for an instant, it is only by what is gross, or what is extraordinary. And
yet it is not in the broad and fierce manifestations of the elemental
energies, not in the clash of the hail, nor the drift of the whirlwind,
that the highest characters of the sublime are developed. God is not in
the earthquake, nor in the fire, but in the still, small voice. They are
but the blunt and the low faculties of our nature, which can only be
addressed through lamp-black and lightning. It is in quiet and subdued
passages of unobtrusive majesty, the deep and the calm, and the perpetual;
that which must be sought ere it is seen, and loved ere it is understood;
things which the angels work out for us daily, and yet vary eternally;
which are never wanting, and never repeated; which are to be found always,
yet each found but once;—it is through these that the lesson of
devotion is chiefly taught, and the blessing of beauty given.
{14} At least, I thought so, when I was four-and-twenty. At
five-and-fifty, I fancy that it is just possible there may be other
creatures in the universe to be pleased, or,—it may be,—displeased,
by the weather.
22. We habitually think of the rain-cloud only as dark and grey; not
knowing that we owe to it perhaps the fairest, though not the most
dazzling, of the hues of heaven. 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-colour, and purple, and
amber, and blue; not shining, but misty-soft; the barred masses, when seen
nearer, composed of clusters or tresses of cloud, like floss silk; looking
as if each knot were a little swathe or sheaf of lighted rain.
23. Aqueous vapour or mist, suspended in the atmosphere, becomes visible
exactly as dust does in the air of a room. In the shadows, you not only
cannot see the dust itself, because unillumined, but you can see other
objects through the dust, without obscurity; the air being thus actually
rendered more transparent by a deprivation of light. Where a sunbeam
enters, every particle of dust becomes visible, and a palpable
interruption to the sight; so that a transverse sunbeam is a real obstacle
to the vision—you cannot see things clearly through it. In the same
way, wherever vapour is illuminated by transverse rays, there it becomes
visible as a whiteness more or less affecting the purity of the blue, and
destroying it exactly in proportion to the degree of illumination. But
where vapour is in shade, it has very little effect on the sky, perhaps
making it a little deeper and greyer than it otherwise would be, but not,
itself, unless very dense, distinguishable or felt as mist.
24. Has the reader any distinct idea of what clouds are?
{15}That mist which lies in the morning so softly in the valley, level and
white, through which the tops of the trees rise as if through an
inundation—why is itso heavy, and why does it lie so low,
being yet so thin and frail that it will melt away utterly into splendour
of morning when the sun has shone on it but a few moments more? Those
colossal pyramids, huge and firm, with outlines as of rocks, and strength
to bear the beating of the high sun full on their fiery flanks,—why
are they so light, their bases high over our heads, high over the
heads of Alps? Why will these melt away, not as the sun rises, but
as he descends, and leave the stars of twilight clear; while the
valley vapour gains again upon the earth, like a shroud? Or that ghost of
a cloud, which steals by yonder clump of pines; nay, which does not
steal by them, but haunts them, wreathing yet round them, and yet,—and
yet,—slowly; now falling in a fair waved line like a woman's veil;
now fading, now gone; we look away for an instant, and look back, and it
is again there. What has it to do with that clump of pines, that it broods
by them, and weaves itself among their branches, to and fro? Has it hidden
a cloudy treasure among the moss at their roots, which it watches thus? Or
has some strong enchanter charmed it into fond returning, or bound it fast
within those bars of bough? And yonder filmy crescent, bent like an
archer's bow above the snowy summit, the highest of all the hills—that
white arch which never forms but over the supreme crest,—how is it
stayed there, repelled apparently from the snow,—nowhere touching
it, the clear sky seen between it and the mountain edge, yet never leaving
it—poised as a white bird hovers over its nest? Or those war clouds
that gather on the horizon, dragon-crested, tongued with fire,—how
is their barbed strength bridled? What bits are those they are champing
with their vapourous lips, flinging off flakes of black foam? Leagued
leviathans of the Sea of Heaven,—out of their nostrils goeth smoke,
and their eyes are like the eyelids of the morning; the sword of him that
layeth at them cannot hold the spear, the dart, nor the habergeon. Where
ride the captains of their armies? Where are set the measures of their
march? Fierce murmurers, answering each other from morning until evening—what
rebuke is this which has awed them into peace;—what hand has reined
them back by the way in which they came?
{15} This is a fifth volume bit, and worth more attention.
I know not if the reader will think at first that questions like these are
easily answered. So far from it, I rather believe that some of the
mysteries of the clouds never will be understood by us at all.﹃Knowest
thou the balancings of the clouds?﹄Is the answer ever to be one of pride?
The wondrous works of Him, who is perfect in knowledge? Is our
knowledge ever to be so?...
For my own part, I enjoy the mystery, and perhaps the reader may. I think
he ought. He should not be less grateful for summer rain, or see less
beauty in the clouds of morning, because they come to prove him with hard
questions; to which perhaps, if we look close at the heavenly scroll, we
may find also a syllable or two of answer, illuminated here and there.{16}
{16} Compare, in 'Sartor Resartus,' the boy's watching from the garden
wall.
And though the climates of the south and east may be comparatively
clear, they are no more absolutely clear than our own northern air.
Intense clearness, whether, in the north, after or before rain, or in some
moments of twilight in the south, is always, as far as I am acquainted
with natural phenomena, a notable thing. Mist of some sort, or
mirage, or confusion of light or of cloud, are the general facts; the
distance may vary in different climates at which the effects of mist
begin, but they are always present; and therefore, in all probability, it
is meant that we should enjoy them.... We surely need not wonder that mist
and all its phenomena have been made delightful to us, since our happiness
as thinking beings must depend on our being content to accept only partial
knowledge even in those matters which chiefly concern us. If we insist
upon perfect intelligibility and complete declaration in every moral
subject, we shall instantly fall into misery of unbelief. Our whole
happiness and power of energetic action depend upon our being able to
breathe and live in the cloud; content to see it opening here, and closing
there; rejoicing to catch through the thinnest films of it, glimpses of
stable and substantial things; but yet perceiving a nobleness even in the
concealment, and rejoicing that the kindly veil is spread where the
untempered light might have scorched us, or the infinite clearness
wearied. And I believe that the resentment of this interference of the
mist is one of the forms of proud error which are too easily mistaken for
virtues. To be content in utter darkness and ignorance is indeed unmanly,
and therefore we think that to love light and find knowledge must always
be right. Yet (as in all matters before observed,) wherever pride
has any share in the work, even knowledge and light may be ill pursued.
Knowledge is good, and light is good: yet man perished in seeking
knowledge, and moths perish in seeking light; and if we, who are crushed
before the moth, will not accept such mystery as is needful to us, we
shall perish in like manner. But, accepted in humbleness, it instantly
becomes an element of pleasure; and I think that every rightly constituted
mind ought to rejoice, not so much in knowing anything clearly, as in
feeling that there is infinitely more which it cannot know. None but proud
or weak men would mourn over this, for we may always know more, if we
choose, by working on; but the pleasure is, I think, to humble people, in
knowing that the journey is endless, the treasure inexhaustible,—watching
the cloud still march before them with its summitless pillar, and being
sure that, to the end of time, and to the length of eternity, the
mysteries of its infinity will still open farther and farther, their
dimness being the sign and necessary adjunct of their inexhaustibleness. I
know there are an evil mystery, and a deathful dimness,—the mystery
of the great Babylon—the dimness of the sealed eye and soul; but do
not let us confuse these with the glorious mystery of the things which the
"angels desire to look into," or with the dimness which, even before the
clear eye and open soul, still rests on sealed pages of the eternal
volume.
25. On some isolated mountain at day-break,{17} when the night mists first
rise from off the plain, watch their white and lakelike fields, as they
float in level bays, and winding gulfs, about the islanded summits of the
lower hills, untouched yet by more than dawn, colder and more quiet than a
windless sea under the moon of midnight; watch when the first sunbeam is
sent upon the silver channels, how the foam of their undulating surface
parts, and passes away, and down under their depths the glittering city
and green pastures lie like Atlantis, between the white paths of winding
rivers; the flakes of light falling every moment faster and broader among
the starry spires, as the wreathed surges break and vanish above them, and
the confused crests and ridges of the dark hills shorten their grey
shadows upon the plain. Wait a little longer, and you shall see those
scattered mists rallying in the ravines, and floating up towards you,
along the winding valleys, till they crouch in quiet masses, iridescent
with the morning light, upon the broad breasts of the higher hills, whose
leagues of massy undulation will melt back, back into that robe of
material light, until they fade away, lost in its lustre, to appear again
above in the serene heaven like a wild, bright, impossible dream,
foundationless, and inaccessible, their very bases vanishing in the
unsubstantial and mocking blue of the deep lake below. Wait yet a little
longer, and you shall see those mists gather themselves into white towers,
and stand like fortresses along the promontories, massy and motionless,
only piled, with every instant, higher and higher into the sky, and
casting longer shadows athwart the rocks; and out of the pale blue of the
horizon you will see forming and advancing a troop of narrow, dark,
pointed vapours, which will cover the sky, inch by inch, with their grey
network, and take the light off the landscape with an eclipse which will
stop the singing of the birds, and the motion of the leaves, together;—and
then you will see horizontal bars of black shadow forming under them, and
lurid wreaths create themselves, you know not how, among the shoulders of
the hills; you never see them form, but when you look back to a place
which was clear an instant ago, there is a cloud on it, hanging by the
precipice, as a hawk pauses over his prey;—and then you will hear
the sudden rush of the awakened wind, and you will see those watch-towers
of vapour swept away from their foundations, and waving curtains of opaque
rain, let down to the valley, swinging from the burdened clouds in black
bending fringes, or, pacing in pale columns along the lake level, grazing
its surface into foam as they go. And then, as the sun sinks, you shall
see the storm drift for an instant from off the hills, leaving their broad
sides smoking and loaded yet with snow-white, torn, steam-like rags of
capricious vapour, now gone, now gathered again,—while the
smouldering sun, seeming not far away, but burning like a red-hot ball
beside you, and as if you could reach it, plunges through the rushing wind
and rolling cloud with headlong fall, as if it meant to rise no more,
dyeing all the air about it with blood;—and then you shall hear the
fainting tempest die in the hollow of the night, and you shall see a green
halo kindling on the summit of the eastern hills, brighter, brighter yet,
till the large white circle of the slow moon is lifted up among the barred
clouds, step by step, line by line; star after star she quenches with her
kindling light, setting in their stead an army of pale, penetrable, fleecy
wreaths in the heaven, to give light upon the earth, which move together
hand in hand, company by company, troop by troop, so measured in their
unity of motion that the whole heaven seems to roll with them, and the
earth to reel under them. And then wait yet for one hour, until the east
again becomes purple, and the heaving mountains, rolling against it in
darkness, like waves of a wild sea, are drowned one by one in the glory of
its burning; watch the white glaciers blaze in their winding paths about
the mountains, like mighty serpents with scales of fire; watch the
columnar peaks of solitary snow, kindling downwards chasm by chasm, each
in itself a new morning—their long avalanches cast down in keen
streams brighter than the lightning, sending each his tribute of driven
snow, like altar-smoke, up to heaven; the rose-light of their silent domes
flushing that heaven about them, and above them, piercing with purer light
through its purple lines of lifted cloud, casting a new glory on every
wreath, as it passes by, until the whole heaven, one scarlet canopy, is
interwoven with a roof of waving flame, and tossing vault beyond vault, as
with the drifted wings of many companies of angels; and then, when you can
look no more for gladness, and when you are bowed down with fear and love
of the Maker and Doer of this, tell me who has best delivered this His
message unto men!
{17} I forget now what all this is about. It seems to be a recollection of
the Rigi, with assumption that the enthusiastic spectator is to stand for
a day and night in observation; to suffer the effects of a severe
thunder-storm, and to get neither breakfast nor dinner. I have seen such a
storm on the Rigi, however, and more than one such sunrise; and I much
doubt if its present visitors by rail will see more.
26.{18} The account given of the stages of creation in the first chapter
of Genesis is in every respect clear and intelligible to the simplest
reader, except in the statement of the work of the second day. I suppose
that this statement is passed over by careless readers without any
endeavour to understand it, and contemplated by simple and faithful
readers as a sublime mystery which was not intended to be understood. But
there is no mystery in any other part of the chapter, and it seems to me
unjust to conclude that any was intended here. And the passage ought to be
peculiarly interesting to us, as being the first in the Bible in which the
heavens are named, and the only one in which the word "Heaven,"
all-important as that word is to our understanding of the most precious
promises of Scripture, receives a definite explanation. Let us therefore
see whether, by a little careful comparison of the verse with other
passages in which the word occurs, we may not be able to arrive at as
clear an understanding of this portion of the chapter as of the rest. In
the first place the English word, "Firmament," itself is obscure and
useless; because we never employ it but as a synonym of heaven, it conveys
no other distinct idea to us; and the verse, though from our familiarity
with it we imagine that it possesses meaning, has in reality no more point
nor value than if it were written,﹃God said, Let there be a something in
the midst of the waters, and God called the something, Heaven.﹄But the
marginal reading, "Expansion," has definite value; and the statement that
﹃God said, Let there be an expansion in the midst of the waters, and God
called the expansion, Heaven,﹄has an apprehensible meaning. Accepting
this expression as the one intended, we have next to ask what expansion
there is, between two waters, describable by the term "heaven." Milton
adopts the term "expanse," but he understands it of the whole volume of
the air which surrounds the earth. Whereas, so far as we can tell, there
is no water beyond the air, in the fields of space; and the whole
expression of division of waters from waters is thus rendered valueless.
Now with respect to this whole chapter, we must remember always that it is
intended for the instruction of all mankind, not for the learned reader
only; and that therefore the most simple and natural interpretation is the
likeliest in general to be the true one. An unscientific reader knows
little about the manner in which the volume of the atmosphere surrounds
the earth; but I imagine that he could hardly glance at the sky when rain
was falling in the distance, and see the level line of the bases of the
clouds from which the shower descended, without being able to attach an
instant and easy meaning to the words,﹃expansion in the midst of the
waters;﹄and if, having once seized this idea, he proceeded to examine it
more accurately, he would perceive at once, if he had ever noticed anything
of the nature of clouds, that the level line of their bases did indeed
most severely and stringently divide "waters from waters"—that is to
say, divide water in its collective and tangible state, from water in its
aërial state; or the waters which fall, and flow, from those
which rise, and float. Next, if we try this interpretation
in the theological sense of the word heaven, and examine whether
the clouds are spoken of as God's dwelling-place, we find God going before
the Israelites in a pillar of cloud; revealing Himself in a cloud on
Sinai; appearing in a cloud on the mercy-seat; filling the Temple of
Solomon with the cloud when its dedication is accepted; appearing in a
great cloud to Ezekiel; ascending into a cloud before the eyes of the
disciples on Mount Olivet; and in like manner returning to judgment:
"Behold He cometh with clouds, and every eye shall see Him."﹃Then shall
they see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven, with power and
great glory.﹄While, further, the "clouds" and "heavens" are used as
interchangeable words in those psalms which most distinctly set forth the
power of God: "He bowed the heavens also, and came down; He made darkness
pavilions round about Him, dark waters, and thick clouds of the skies."
And again,﹃Thy mercy, O Lord, is in the heavens, and Thy faithfulness
reacheth unto the clouds.﹄And again,﹃His excellency is over Israel, and
His strength is in the clouds.﹄And again, "The clouds poured out water,
the skies sent out a sound, the voice of Thy thunder was in the heaven."
Again,﹃Clouds and darkness are round about Him, righteousness and
judgment are the habitation of His throne; the heavens declare His
righteousness, and all the people see His glory.﹄In all these passages
the meaning is unmistakable if they possess definite meaning at all. We
are too apt to take them merely for sublime and vague imagery, and
therefore gradually to lose the apprehension of their life and power. The
expression, "He bowed the heavens," for instance, is, I suppose, received
by most readers as a magnificent hyperbole, having reference to some
peculiar and fearful manifestation of God's power to the writer of the
psalm in which the words occur. But the expression either has plain
meaning, or it has nomeaning. Understand by the term "heavens" the
compass of infinite space around the earth, and the expression﹃bowed the
heavens,﹄however sublime, is wholly without meaning: infinite space
cannot be bent or bowed. But understand by the "heavens" the veil of
clouds above the earth, and the expression is neither hyperbolical nor
obscure; it is pure, plain, accurate truth, and it describes God, not as
revealing Himself in any peculiar way to David, but doing what He is still
doing before our own eyes, day by day. By accepting the words in their
simple sense, we are thus led to apprehend the immediate presence of the
Deity, and His purpose of manifesting Himself as near us whenever the
storm-cloud stoops upon its course; while by our vague and inaccurate
acceptance of the words, we remove the idea of His presence far from us,
into a region which we can neither see nor know: and gradually, from the
close realization of a living God, who "maketh the clouds His chariot," we
define and explain ourselves into dim and distant suspicion of an inactive
God inhabiting inconceivable places, and fading into the multitudinous
formalisms of the laws of Nature. All errors of this kind—and in the
present day we are in constant and grievous danger of falling into them—arise
from the originally mistaken idea that man can, "by searching, find out
God—find out the Almighty to perfection"—that is to say, by
help of courses of reasoning and accumulations of science, apprehend the
nature of the Deity, in a more exalted and more accurate manner than in a
state of comparative ignorance; whereas it is clearly necessary, from the
beginning to the end of time, that God's way of revealing Himself to His
creatures should be a simple way, which all those creatures
may understand. Whether taught or untaught, whether of mean capacity or
enlarged, it is necessary that communion with their Creator should be
possible to all; and the admission to such communion must be rested, not
on their having a knowledge of astronomy, but on their having a human
soul. In order to render this communion possible, the Deity has stooped
from His throne, and has, not only in the person of the Son, taken upon
Him the veil of our human flesh, but, in the person of the Father,
taken upon Him the veil of our human thoughts, and permitted us, by
His own spoken authority, to conceive Him simply and clearly as a loving
father and friend; a being to be walked with and reasoned with, to be
moved by our entreaties, angered by our rebellion, alienated by our
coldness, pleased by our love, and glorified by our labour; and, finally,
to be beheld in immediate and active presence in all the powers and
changes of creation. This conception of God, which is the child's, is
evidently the only one which can be universal, and, therefore, the only
one which for us can be true. The moment that, in our pride of
heart, we refuse to accept the condescension of the Almighty, and desire
Him, instead of stooping to hold our hands, to rise up before us into His
glory, we hoping that, by standing on a grain of dust or two of human
knowledge higher than our fellows, we may behold the Creator as He rises,—God
takes us at our word. He rises into His own invisible and inconceivable
majesty; He goes forth upon the ways which are not our ways, and retires
into the thoughts which are not our thoughts; and we are left alone. And
presently we say in our vain hearts, "There is no God."
{18} This passage, to the end of the section, is one of the last, and
best, which I wrote in the temper of my youth; and I can still ratify it,
thus far, that the texts referred to in it must either be received as it
explains them, or neglected altogether.
I would desire, therefore, to receive God's account of His own creation as
under the ordinary limits of human knowledge and imagination it would be
received by a simple-minded man; and finding that﹃the heavens and the
earth﹄are spoken of always as having something like equal relation to
each other, ("Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the
host of them,") I reject at once all idea of the term "heavens" being
intended to signify the infinity of space inhabited by countless worlds;
for between those infinite heavens and the particle of sand, which not the
earth only, but the sun itself, with all the solar system, is, in relation
to them, no relation of equality or comparison could be inferred. But I
suppose the heavens to mean that part of creation which holds equal
companionship with our globe; I understand the﹃rolling of these heavens
together as a scroll,﹄to be an equal and relative destruction with the
melting of the elements in fervent heat; and I understand the making of
the firmament to signify that, so far as man is concerned, most
magnificent ordinance of the clouds;—the ordinance that, as the
great plain of waters was formed on the face of the earth, so also a plain
of waters should be stretched along the height of air, and the face of the
cloud answer the face of the ocean; and that this upper and heavenly plain
should be of waters, as it were, glorified in their nature, no longer
quenching the fire, but now bearing fire in their own bosoms; no longer
murmuring only when the winds raise them or rocks divide, but answering
each other with their own voices, from pole to pole; no longer restrained
by established shores, and guided through unchanging channels, but going
forth at their pleasure like the armies of the angels, and choosing their
encampments upon the heights of the hills; no longer hurried downwards for
ever, moving but to fall, nor lost in the lightless accumulation of the
abyss, but covering the east and west with the waving of their wings, and
robing the gloom of the farther infinite with a vesture of diverse
colours, of which the threads are purple and scarlet, and the embroideries
flame.
This I believe is the ordinance of the firmament; and it seems to me that
in the midst of the material nearness of these heavens, God means us to
acknowledge His own immediate presence as visiting, judging, and blessing
us: "The earth shook, the heavens also dropped at the presence of God."
"He doth set His bow in the clouds," and thus renews, in the sound of
every drooping swathe of rain, His promises of everlasting love.﹃In them
hath He set a tabernacle for the sun;﹄whose burning ball, which,
without the firmament, would be seen but as an intolerable and scorching
circle in the blackness of vacuity, is by that firmament surrounded with
gorgeous service, and tempered by mediatorial ministries: by the firmament
of clouds the temple is built, for his presence to fill with light at
noon; by the firmament of clouds the purple veil is closed at evening,
round the sanctuary of his rest; by the mists of the firmament his
implacable light is divided, and its separated fierceness appeased into
the soft blue that fills the depth of distance with its bloom, and the
flush with which the mountains burn, as they drink the overflowing of the
dayspring. And in this tabernacling of the unendurable sun with men,
through the shadows of the firmament, God would seem to set forth the
stooping of His own Majesty to men, upon the throne of the firmament. As
the Creator of all the worlds, and the Inhabiter of eternity, we cannot
behold Him; but as the Judge of the earth and the Preserver of men, those
heavens are indeed His dwelling-place:﹃Swear not, neither by heaven, for
it is God's throne; nor by the earth, for it is His footstool!﹄And all
those passings to and fro of fruitful showers and grateful shade, and all
those visions of silver palaces built about the horizon, and voices of
moaning winds and threatening thunders, and glories of coloured robe and
cloven ray, are but to deepen in our hearts the acceptance, and
distinctness, and dearness of the simple words, "Our Father, which art in
heaven."
"Never to blend our pleasure or our pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels,"—and again in the 'White Doe' of Rylstone, with the added teaching, that anguish of our own
"Is tempered and allayed by sympathies Aloft ascending, and descending deep, Even to the inferior kinds;"—so that I know not of anything more destructive of the whole theoretic faculty, not to say of the Christian character and human intellect,{31} than those accursed sports in which man makes of himself cat, tiger, leopard, and alligator in one; and gathers into one continuance of cruelty, for his amusement, all the devices that brutes sparingly and at intervals use against each other for their necessities. {31} I am more and more grieved, as I re-read this and other portions of the most affected and weak of all my books, (written in a moulting time of my life,)—the second volume of 'Modern Painters,'—at its morbid violence of passion and narrowness of thought. Yet, at heart, the book was, like my others, honest; and in substance it is mostly good; but all boiled to rags. 74. He who loves not God, nor his brother, cannot love the grass beneath his feet, nor the creatures which live not for his uses, filling those spaces in the universe which he needs not: while, on the other hand, none can love God, nor his human brother, without loving all things which his Father loves; nor without looking upon them every one as in that respect his brethren also, and perhaps worthier than he, if, in the under concords they have to fill, their part is touched more truly.{32} {32} Morbidly Franciscan, again! and I am really compelled to leave out one little bit my friend liked,—as all kindly and hopeful women would,—about everything turning out right, and being to some good end. For we have no business whatever with the ends of things, but with their beings; and their beings are often entirely bad. 75. Things may always be seen truly by candid people, though never completely. No human capacity ever yet saw the whole of a thing; but we may see more and more of it the longer we look. Every individual temper will see something different in it; but supposing the tempers honest, all the differences are there. Every advance in our acuteness of perception will show us something new; but the old and first-discerned thing will still be there, not falsified, only modified and enriched by the new perceptions, becoming continually more beautiful in its harmony with them, and more approved as a part of the infinite truth.
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